Karen Morgan is a fifth-generation Hawaiian, a descendant of Mayflower settlers and once-wealthy sugar plantation owners, and a junkie. Turning her back on her aristocratic heritage, she spent her life struggling with a heroin addiction while raising her daughters in various boyfriends’ houses, at friends’ places, and sometimes in her car. In 2002, Morgan disappeared, and Tara Bray Smith, her second daughter, left her life in New York to look for her. She found her mother living homeless in a park in downtown Honolulu.
“West of Then” is Smith’s memoir of her search for her mother — both literally and metaphorically. The story jumps through time, from 2002, when Smith returned to her childhood home to urge Morgan to get into rehab, back to the 1970s, when she went to live with her father and stepmother, both of whom worked in the hotel industry. (Smith has three sisters, all by different fathers; two grew up with their mother, and one was put up for adoption when Morgan was 18.)
Behind the memoir looms the history of Hawaii, from the first Polynesian settlements, through Captain Cook’s arrival in 1778 (bringing diseases that wiped out 90 percent of the native population within 100 years), to the rise of King Sugar in the mid-19th century, when Smith’s great-great-grandfather “drained a swamp and spun into money a particularly carbohydrate-rich member of the grass family.” By the time Smith is growing up, a sense of white guilt plagues the youth culture of Hawaii, the post-colonial backlash expressed in the schoolyards through a racial hierarchy in which dark skin means you are a local and white skin means you’re not. At the same time, Smith’s grandmother clings to the family’s bourgeois background.
Smith left Hawaii to go to Dartmouth and then Columbia, where she received her MFA, always keeping an eye on her home state from the mainland. Hawaii, or Hah-vy-ee, as Smith pronounces it, comes out in “West of Then” as the most schizophrenic of places. It is paradise, but in it lurks the rot of post-colonialism: endemic drug abuse and homelessness. From her home in Brooklyn, Smith, 34, talked to Salon by phone about her family, her book, and what it’s like to be from the westernmost part of the world.
Now that the book is out, how is your family dealing with it?
It ranges. I just talked to my dad last night, and he’s very proud and very excited and lets me know that it’s big in Hawaii at the moment. There’s a bestseller list they put out for Hawaii only, and many books on it are Hawaii-centric. People there like to read about themselves, because Hawaii doesn’t make the national news very often.
My mom, to her credit, the last time I spoke to her, said, “I’m very proud of you, you’re my daughter, I’m glad you did what you needed to do.” My grandmother is confused and frustrated. I think the person that it’s hardest for is my youngest sister, who’s living there right now. She’s my sister, and she wants to be on my side and wants to be proud of me, but I think it’s difficult to get attention that you didn’t ask for.
How’s your mom doing now?
She’s OK. She checks in here and there.
Is she still in treatment?
No, she’s not. She really struggles. I have a tremendous amount of concern, and probably guilt, because I worry that this [book] will just make things worse. You write a book and you think the truth has the capacity to transform situations. And even now I think maybe this will make things better. I don’t know what else to do.
How is Hawaii intrinsic to the story of your family?
You know, the No. 1 book on the bestseller list in Hawaii is Barack Obama’s “Dreams From My Father,” because he grew up there. And I remember from the last “American Idol” there was a girl from Hawaii named Jasmine. People from Hawaii would call in. They had a representative there — [Hawaii] had broken through the national consciousness. People don’t even think about, or at least, people in culture-making centers don’t think about Hawaii — unless it’s to exoticize it.
The insularity of Hawaii is very interesting to grow up in, and very interesting to leave and look in on. I was trying to look at that insularity and how it worked itself through my family, and also this idea of — it’s very subtle in the book — but this idea of how far you can go, what a personal investigation of Manifest Destiny is. That’s where I went thematically, that’s the largest story in the book, and it has to do with Hawaii explicitly. Because this place where my family had their plantation was the furthest west you could get, other than the Aleutian Islands. So I think the two stories are really inseparable.
You mention the idea of Manifest Destiny in relation to both Hawaii and your family. Can you explain that?
I had heard that term in history class, and I had this sense growing up that our relation to the mainland was so strange. We’re the 50th state, we’re certainly American, we’re patriotic, Pearl Harbor happened there, and there’s a huge military presence in Hawaii. And yet it’s also really very distant, both literally and also in seeing yourself replicated in media. I’d watch “Sesame Street” and wonder, who are those people? It didn’t represent anything in my experience.
My great-grandmother turned 100 about 10 days before the centennial of Hawaii’s annexation, so I started putting a lot of this stuff together. I ran across this guy who coined the term “Manifest Destiny” in the 1840s [New York journalist John O'Sullivan], who said that America’s future [spreading democracy] was not only perfect and unstained and angelic and God-blessed, it was also conceivable that you could actually see it. Not only was it your fate, you could actually grasp it.
[That connects to] the way Americans want to always have a new beginning. They don’t want to get to the end of something — they continuously have this bright optimism about the future. With my mom, I wanted to talk about what happens when you get to the end of a certain road and have to deal with what you’ve created and what you’ve wrought in history. And when I was writing the book, I realized that I myself had been sustained by ideas of renewal and promise. Those aren’t bad ideas, but they’re not always possible. Experiencing what it was like to watch my mom fall apart — at a certain point, you have to deal with what’s there. There’s hope, but it’s maybe a more realistic hope.
You write that on an island, “One feels to be at the center of something — all that ocean around, like a frame.” But there’s such a sense of isolation in the book; even current events seem to be happening outside the frame.
There is a sense that we’re separate. On the one hand we were at the center of this very important mission militarily [the ballistic missile defense program, or "Star Wars"], and also the place functions as this paradise for a lot of Americans. You’re both weirdly important and not at all. In that particular statement, “all that ocean around, like a frame,” I was thinking of personal mythmaking and the sense of protection we create for ourselves. From my mom’s family I heard this kind of mythmaking of “we’re very important,” and “back in the old days.” To leave [is to] realize how not important it all is — not only this story and this family, but this whole place.
The subtitle of your book is “A Mother, a Daughter, and a Journey Past Paradise.” If you can pinpoint one moment, when did Hawaii begin moving into post-paradise mode?
The whole point there is to acknowledge that trope of paradise. That’s in everything you read about Hawaii.
But it also suggests that at some point, everything went wrong.
Yeah, and I think that was my idea of it when I started the book. Where did it all go wrong? The first thing that comes to mind is Pearl Harbor, certainly, but it has to be before that too, because to Native Hawaiians, the moment that Captain Cook came over the horizon, that was the beginning of their [population] decline. In the whole formulation of paradise, there’s the question, where did it end? And I think through the writing of the book I began to think, is there such as thing [as paradise]? Is there a place out of time, when you’re going to absolve all your cares? I don’t think that exists.
Although you don’t talk about it in exactly these terms, there’s a sense of karma to your mother’s and Hawaii’s decline.
I definitely think I believe that. You know, to grow up with hippie parents going “oh man, my karma” your whole life, you really start to believe it! There were times when I thought there was a curse on us because of what we did on the sugar plantations [exploiting local labor] and whatnot. But I’ve been questioning my own thinking about that kind of thing. In this world, where for instance the debate over Iraq is placed in nearly religious terms, it’s really tempting to believe that somehow we’re going to get control over [the Middle East] and that it’s our destiny. You know, that all comes from that idea of Manifest Destiny, that we’re the chosen people to lead the world into the next iteration. And I think we’re seeing how devastating the other side of that is, too.
There are some tough moments in the book, like when your mother can’t be admitted to the hospital for treatment because she knows her own name, and so therefore she’s not psychotic enough. The social welfare system seems to be quite bankrupt. Do you feel that the state let down your mother?
It’s so funny, because my father just read me a review [of my book] from this paper in Hawaii called the Maui News, and the writer said, there are 43 million people in America who don’t have health insurance, and yet Karen Morgan is one who does, out of your taxpayer’s money!
My mom is so lucky that Hawaii has state health insurance. I can see how inundated [the state is] with people like my mom, who are a real drain on the resources. But it’s a really tricky situation there. You have [homeless] people literally coming to Hawaii because it’s warm and it’s much more of a humane place to be living on the street.
Do I think she was let down? Sure, I definitely do. I wish I could find her a nice room where she could clean out and get her life back. [But it's only] when you get to the lowest rung where even your family can’t deal with you, that’s when the state steps in, or a private organization, and says, we’ll take you. But she has family who want to know her whereabouts and want to help.
It’s still so recent that it all happened. At the very beginning of these things, you think it can all change. It’s been two years now that she’s been homeless, and the more it goes on, it’s like being chipped away at. I wish I could go to some efficient person behind a steel desk and say, please help me.
You’re pretty restrained in your treatment of tourists in the book, but it must have been strange growing up in a place where most people only come to visit, and where all this stuff with your mom is happening in the background of other people’s vacations.
There was nothing worse than a tourist! And we were kids, so tourists were easy targets because they just looked so… [Laughs.] In the book I say that tourists come and go as they please, they fall off cliffs, and get horrible sunburns and you pay as little attention to them as possible. That’s obviously a total overstatement. The main industry in Hawaii is tourism and that’s specifically geared toward making people have a good experience. And they do. Seven million of them a year have the time of their lives.
When I was a kid, I think it actually made me feel better to have all these tourists coming and going, because at least I belonged to a certain extent. At least I was born there. That was a big deal growing up, where you were born, and I was born there in a small hospital in the country, and I felt, well, at least I have that. My mom has that, too. Feeling you’re from a place is very comforting.
Even though you’re haole [white]?
Even though I am haole, yeah. That was part of the journey of my book, too, because you do wonder if you [legitimately] get to be from there when you’re white. And writing the book made me feel at least a tiny bit that I did, because it was a total love letter to the place where I grew up.
I always thought that, in touristy locations, the cultural things offered to tourists as authentic weren’t really part of life in that place — in Barcelona, for example, no one actually drinks sangria. But you write about leis and aloha shirts worn by locals. Are these authentically Hawaiian, or are they things spilling back from the tourist trade into the local culture?
You know, there are whole dissertations written on that subject, the commodification of Native Hawaiian culture and how that affects Native Hawaiians themselves. Hawaii is such a great place because there’s all this layering of cultures. Leis as we know them now, with orchids and plumerias, which didn’t even exist in Hawaii before Europeans arrived — orchids maybe, but not plumerias — that’s part of the amalgam. But stringing flowers together and making leaf arrangements did [exist]. Hawaii has this special feeling about it, that there’s this rich layering of experience. A place like New York is enriched in its own way, but its indigenous past has been almost totally wiped out except for a few pockets here and there.
Does that amalgamation extend to the language as well? You write, for instance, “Many names in Hawaii were made up by real estate developers.”
Language there is a particularly complex issue, because it is something that Hawaiians felt had been taken away from them. They weren’t encouraged to learn Hawaiian, they weren’t encouraged to speak it, up until a certain point. The language was used only by old people and people in Nihau [a private island reserved for Native Hawaiians], for years. But recently it’s had an incredible renaissance. There are Hawaiian immersion schools where some of the first graduates have now graduated, having started in kindergarten, and who speak fluent Hawaiian. It’s so hard, because you don’t want to fetishize nativism, but you also want to protect it. It’s hard to see this diverse, rich, idiosyncratic culture get swallowed by America.
You say Hawaii is a “wing-nut state.” Can you explain that?
Somebody said that to me in a bar once. I think it sort of means eccentric, not indicative of the main. But also being a wing, it defines one side of the debate, or one end of the spectrum. [Hawaii] is very deeply American. It’s tolerant and ethnically mixed and historically minded. With also the insularity we talked about. It’s constantly renewing itself in a certain way, while constantly keeping an eye on the past.
The cover of Kevin Boyle’s “Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age” features a worn black-and-white photograph of what looks like a packed courtroom, with four men in the foreground looking off to the right, as if awaiting a verdict. All of them, three white and one black, wearing suits, have their faces scrubbed out, as if someone had taken an eraser to them while the photograph was still wet. That has been the state of the 80-year-old Ossian Sweet case: pretty much wiped out of American history. But by the time Boyle — an associate professor of history best known for his books on the labor movement — finishes reconstructing it, we have a clear, precise snapshot of an incident that belongs in our collective memory.
The story begins in 1925 Detroit, a teeming city so tight with racial tension it’s ready to explode. In the heyday of the auto industry, cash-flush Detroit was “America’s great boomtown.” It was also the country’s fourth largest city, a beacon for black Americans escaping Jim Crow in the South and immigrants fleeing depressed, postwar Europe. Five thousand seven hundred blacks lived in Detroit in 1910; by 1925, that number had swelled to 81,000. The Great Migration, as the mass movement of blacks from the South to northern cities in the early 20th century is known, made the nativists restless; by 1924, Detroit’s branch of the Klu Klux Klan claimed 35,000 members.
In the middle of all this was Ossian Sweet, a doctor whose most immediate goal was to get his family out of Detroit’s black ghetto. He moved them into a bungalow in a white, working-class neighborhood, and, accurately reading the boldness of this move, he brought along nine friends and a bagful of guns. The neighbors — hundreds of them — rioted, throwing rocks at the Sweets’ house and advancing on the front door. The police officers meant to guard the Sweets against danger made no move to stop the mob. And then suddenly, someone inside the house shot out into the street, wounding one white man and killing another, and the 11 black adults, including Sweet’s wife, were taken to jail and charged with first-degree murder.
Boyle’s portrait of the mob’s rage, and Sweet’s reaction, is gripping. When Sweet opens the door, he sees “the scene he’d dreaded all his life, the moment when he stood facing a sea of white faces made grotesque by unreasoned, unrestrained hate — for his race, for his people, for him.” Sweet was prepared for this moment — in the not-too-distant past, his colleagues had moved into white neighborhoods and had had to face similar, murderous mobs. It’s hard not to ask then, what drove Sweet to do it? Why purposely walk into the eye of the storm?
Boyle devotes the first half of the book to answering this question. By moving back through the life of Ossian Sweet, he gives us a thorough treatment of the postbellum South, racial politics in the North, the formation of the first black universities, and lynchings and race riots throughout the country. Boyle’s Sweet is neither a hero nor a fool; he’s a product of a time in which for many blacks, moving into a white neighborhood, even if it meant facing down a mob of angry whites, was their only chance to live in comparative peace.
Boyle has a keen eye for detail and a laudable aversion to idealizing his subjects. Although his affection for Sweet is clear, he’s also honest — sometimes brutally so — about Sweet’s weaknesses. He portrays Sweet as a man of fierce pride and ambition obsessed with status and material things, the kind of person so awkwardly self-conscious that he comes across as arrogant and cold. Even as the mob rails outside his new house and rocks shatter the windows, Sweet, unsure of what to do, takes to his bed; he “first slid off his shoes so as not to scuff the comforter, and lay down in the darkness, the pistol at his side.” In just this action, we see a man as hemmed in by notions of bourgeois propriety as he is terrified by what he has to do to earn respectability.
Sweet was inspired by the black leader W.E.B. DuBois, in particular by his notion of the “Talented Tenth” — the well-educated, professional black class that DuBois claimed would lead the way to racial equality. (A disembodied DuBois presides over the book’s narrative like a just but angry god, dispensing judgment through the pages of his magazine, the Crisis.) For Sweet, who had escaped the South to earn a medical degree and take his place among the Talented Tenth, the social pressure to fight against the institutionalized racism of Detroit was enormous. “To back down,” writes Boyle, “would be to admit that he wasn’t willing to live up to the principles that had been preached to him ever since Wilberforce [University], that he had no claim to a place among the Talented Tenth.” Boyd’s point is not that Sweet wasn’t strong or idealistic in his own way, but that ideologies and social movements like DuBois’ were essential in galvanizing black individuals into action.
Against this historical background, the Ossian Sweet case became a courtroom drama of national importance. Detroit’s mayor, Johnny Smith, was running a fraught race for reelection against a Klansman (in the previous race, the Klan’s candidate would have won if Smith hadn’t rigged the election). The city’s immigrants, thanks to Smith’s campaign rhetoric, were beginning to see that the Klan’s determination to segregate blacks could quickly extend to them as well. And the fledgling NAACP was trying to start the Legal Defense Fund that would, 30 years later, bring about the victory of Brown vs. Board of Education.
If the first half of Boyle’s book belongs to Sweet, the second half belongs to the NAACP and Clarence Darrow. James Weldon Johnson, then executive secretary of the NAACP, hit upon the Sweets’ murder trial as the perfect public cause to garner support for the Legal Defense Fund he wanted to create. Thanks to him, the case received national attention and the Sweets won as their defense attorney Clarence Darrow, the famous labor lawyer, Scopes “Monkey Trial” defender and the man who would become synonymous with defending civil rights — starting with the Sweet case. Like Johnson, Darrow had his own motives for defending the Sweets, and Boyle, ever vigilant against romanticizing, makes those clear: Love of the spotlight and the avant-garde moved him more than “the plight of the masses,” and “in the glare of a high-profile case he found the perfect opportunity to attack the status quo and proclaim the modernist creed.” In other words, he was a free-loving bohemian rebel.
In the courtroom scenes, Boyle gives Darrow room to thunder — and how he does! He’s a cinematic character, a soaring orator who speaks for six hours at a time and moves the courtroom to tears. If there were only one reason for Boyle to resuscitate this old story, it would be to remind contemporary readers of this Darrow. By the time the unfortunate prosecuting attorney gets to speak, his closing argument, in the words of someone in the courtroom, “reminded one of the clatter of folding chairs after a symphony concert.”
If the book has a weakness, it is that Boyle never questions the defense’s version of events: He dismisses the prosecution’s case — that there was no mob attacking the Sweets and the two men shot were innocent passersby — as based on blatant lies. And in fact, most of Boyle’s narrative of the mob attack relies on defense testimony. But “Arc of Justice” isn’t primarily a book about a murder case; Boyle is far more interested in a larger story, about how the actions of a few individuals collided with local politics, a national civil rights movement and the concerns of a polyglot immigrant class.
But there is one more reason why Ossian Sweet’s story remains relevant today, and it’s also what makes Boyle’s book terribly depressing: For all of the efforts of the NAACP and Darrow during and after the Sweet case, Detroit today is the nation’s most segregated city. Boyle blames America’s failure to solve its race problem on the failure of black America’s defenders — including Darrow — to see that racism was a structural problem that needed to be attacked structurally, using the law and societal institutions, not just with goodwill. “They simply shrugged their shoulders and said they didn’t know what could be done about it,” he writes. “Racism was a personal failing, after all, to be solved by understanding, by civility, by a softening of the human heart.”
Darrow’s defense of the Sweets rested on the argument that they shot to save their own lives; no one touched on the unfairness inherent in the real-estate market that affected both whites, who suffered depressed property values when blacks moved into the neighborhood, and blacks, who were confined to the ghetto. But, as Boyle shows throughout the book, the supposedly desegregated North was in reality a land of shadow Jim Crow, abetted by “economic structures that transformed hatred into organized violence,” like the one that allowed whites to write in clauses to their property deeds preventing blacks from ever owning them. For a contemporary America still struggling with the painful legacy of its racist past, it’s a tale worth listening to.
You wouldn’t expect the teetotaling, Muslim virgin to be the funniest person in the room — but if that person were Shazia Mirza, you’d be wrong. Originally from Pakistan but raised in England, Mirza began doing stand-up four years ago, and quickly became famous in the U.K. and Australia for her dry sense of humor and the fact that she challenges cultural expectations of what a Muslim woman is supposed to be. Simultaneously biting and good-natured, her one-liners have a slow burn. Often at a Mirza show the audience is silent for a beat after she delivers a punch line while they figure out the joke. She wryly tackles everything from Muslim traditions (“The women in my family all use the same passport”) to politics (“I said, oh, come on, Germany, join the war, it’s not the same without you”). But Mirza is best known for her takes on post-9/11 tension; her most oft-quoted joke is, “My name is Shazia Mirza — at least that’s what it says on my pilot’s license.”
Her humor is often lost on her family and fellow Muslims, some of whom have sent her death threats because of what they perceive as her disrespect for Islam. In fact, as part of her current show, “The Last Temptation of Shazia,” Mirza performs in front of a bulletin board covered with printouts of the nasty letters she’s received, and at various points in her act, she pulls them down and reads from them.
But “The Last Temptation of Shazia” isn’t just about hate. It’s also about Mirza’s travels through Europe and the United States; being mistaken for everything from a suicide bomber to Dobby, the house elf in “Harry Potter”; and what it’s like to be a 28-year-old virgin.
Mirza, dressed in a simple gray T-shirt and slacks, her hair recently freed from her burqa, brought her show to New York last week. Salon spoke to her the morning after her sold-out opening night at Baruch Performing Arts Center, over a mug of hot chocolate near Gramercy Park.
Are you really the world’s only female Muslim comic?
No, I’m not the only one now, but I think I was when I started out four years ago. After 9/11, Muslims got terrible press and people were like, my God, how can there be a Muslim comedian, they’re all terrorists, aren’t they? There have been Jewish comedians and Catholic comedians but there’s never been a Muslim comedian. We were famous for blowing people up.
Is being a Muslim and being a comic contradictory?
Some people say you can’t be both. I stand up onstage for an hour and a half and make people laugh and tell them mostly the truth — most of the stuff is true, it happened to me — and then I go home and pray. I don’t smoke, I don’t drink, I don’t take drugs, I don’t eat pork, and I’m a good Muslim. I don’t understand why people say I can’t be a comedian. I don’t relate the two at all.
And there are always Muslims in my audience. I was so happy there were women with hijabs on [at my show], having a good time. And that they’re allowed — that there’s somewhere where women with hijabs on can go out for entertainment, to watch comedy. They’ve probably never watched comedy in their life! And maybe it’s opened a door for them, that they’re watching comedy, and they’re enjoying it.
You’ve said before that Muslims, generally, are not your biggest fans.
Right — as you can see by the e-mails I read in the show. But I think a lot of them are hypocrites because they’ve never seen me. They’ll write to me because they’ve heard about me or read about me, but they’ve never seen me perform. And it’s stupid and it’s hypocritical that they write to me. I mean, they should be writing to the people who did 9/11, to the people who blow up people all over the world — those are the people they should be writing to. Not a comedian who is telling jokes, who is making people laugh. They’ve got it all wrong.
Why do you think people feel that you can’t be a Muslim and make fun of yourself?
I think mainly because I’m a woman. I’m a woman and standing in front of an audience that is, most of the time, predominantly men. And, a lot of the times, predominantly drunk. And I think many Muslims feel that women shouldn’t be exposed to that, they shouldn’t be in an environment where there are men, there’s alcohol, there’s temptation. It’s got nothing to do with religion, it’s got to do with culture. A lot of predominantly Muslim cultures — Arabic culture, Middle Eastern culture — they don’t like women to be in the public eye.
There have never been any Muslim women in positions of power. There was Benazir Bhutto, who was the prime minister of Pakistan, but that was it. I could never tell a man, look, she did this and she did that, why can’t I do it? People question me and criticize me and I’ve got no role models to be able to say, well, you know what, they all did it before me. I have to justify what I’m doing. And you know, I’m not sleeping with the audience, I’m just telling jokes! It makes people laugh and think. And I think people need to see a Muslim woman. We’ve got no power and all people think we do is get beaten by our husbands and we’ve got terrible lives and we’re all oppressed. And I don’t think that will change unless we do something about it.
Do you think through your show you’re changing perceptions about Muslims?
Maybe. Maybe they’ll be able to laugh at something that they normally wouldn’t be able to laugh at. And also now I’m beginning to do material that’s more personal to me — like about my travels, my parents, being a virgin. I want to do more of that than generally speaking for all Muslims — I can’t and I don’t want to speak for all Muslims.
You say in your show, “I’m so happy to be here, especially because my dad let me out for the night.” Did you spend a lot of time locked up in the house, growing up?
Yeah, my dad was very strict. The last thing he expected me to do was this. He wanted me to go to university — which I did — get married, have kids and be a good Muslim woman. And when I say “good Muslim woman” what I mean is, serve my husband and look after the home and the children. And I just knew I was never going to do that. And I thought, Where is this in Islam, that women are treated like that? And it made me angry, and a bit of that anger is in my stand-up.
“The Last Temptation of Shazia” is all about your travels and having to confront offers of sex, drugs and alcohol — all the things you don’t do. I think the most fascinating part of that is the sex.
Americans are obsessed with sex! America uses sex to sell cheese. I think everyone is sex-obsessed, but in England they don’t talk about it as openly as they do here. I think normally when you go see a comedian, they’re talking about their girlfriend, what they did with their girlfriend last night or how many people they’ve slept with. And the last thing people expect is for someone to come onstage and say they’ve never done it. They’re thinking, is she making this up?
Well, to be 28 and a virgin is sort of unbelievable!
I remember when I started that material thinking, they don’t know whether to laugh or not. I wanted to say, yes, this is true.
You also talk about going to Texas and seeing the silver ring movement, where teenagers pledge abstinence until marriage and are given these rings to wear as a reminder of their commitment.
Yeah, had you heard about that?
No, never.
Isn’t it amazing? It’s in every newspaper in Europe and in England, and I talk about it here and people don’t know what I’m talking about. It’s your country, and you don’t know about it?
How were you received in Texas, anyway?
They tried to convert me to Christianity.
Really?
Honestly, I had e-mails every day from Christians saying they wanted to save me, and when I died did I know where I was going to go, and didn’t I want to go to heaven, and, would heaven allow Muslims in?
But a lot of those people are virgins — they wear it on their sleeves. They go to these carnivals and celebrate being a virgin. I met this guy there with his girlfriend, and they said they had been going out for five years and had never had sex and were going to wait until they got married. And they said, oh, we have been so tempted, but that temptation has made our relationship stronger, and we’ve now written a book about it — that is so American. You’ve written a book about it?
Did they get your comedy?
Comedy? (laughs) They were like, why are you here to do comedy? We want to convert you!
In your show, you make a joke that if nuns are all married to God, then God must be a polygamist. I thought that was pretty funny, but it didn’t go over very well with the crowd.
I know. That never goes down well, anywhere. That’s why I do it. When I did that in Edinburgh, people were like, can we laugh? But some people came up to me later and said it really made them think. Nuns wear rings because they’re married to God. So all these women are showing their commitment to God. And how do you know he’s showing that commitment to you? It’s meant to be hilarious. But I know it made people feel uncomfortable.
You used to wear a burqa. Why did you stop?
The reason you’re meant to wear it is because men are meant to be sexually attracted by hair. But I’ve tried, it doesn’t work! (laughs) And I thought, men are the weak ones, yeah? They should be wearing the burqas, they should be locked up in the house, and women should be out. Why is it that those guys who can’t control themselves are let out, and we’re the ones that have to wear the burqas? You can be a perfectly good Muslim without wearing it. You know, it’s not what you wear on your head, it’s what you do with your life.
One of the letters you read onstage was from a Muslim man who first berated you for being a bad Muslim, and then asked you out for coffee. Being Indian myself, I’ve seen that type of behavior — an Indian man, a perfect stranger, once yelled at me on the street for wearing a tank top, and then asked for my phone number.
[Muslim men] are attracted to [strong women], because normally they would get subservient women who would do what they wanted them to do. But actually, what they’d really like is somebody who is comfortable in their own skin. They criticize you for being yourself because they can’t cope with it. Usually, the balance of power is on the man’s side. It’s OK for men to sleep around, it’s OK for men to have girlfriends before marriage, it’s OK for a man to go out with white women, but if a woman does it, she’s a slut and nobody wants to marry her. That’s terrible! And yet they’re still interested in [strong women] because it’s something different.
Do people really think you look like Dobby?
I was walking down the street once in New York and was wearing my burqa, and somebody said that I looked like Dobby, the elf from “Harry Potter.” And then I went to watch the film, and Dobby was awful! I couldn’t believe someone called me Dobby.
That is a pretty horrible thing for someone to say to you — that, and the comment made by one of the other letter writers you mention in your show, the Jewish lesbian from the Midwest who said, “I can’t imagine what it must be like to be as hated as you are.”
I know! I was like, where are you getting this information from? I’m not that hated!
What makes a short story worth reading? This is the question at the heart of the 29 stories Ben Marcus has collected in “The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories.” And it’s the question that the writers themselves are trying to answer, in 29 different ways. But this isn’t just a textbook for creative writing workshoppers; it is also a collection of entertaining, moving and sometimes shocking fiction, and as such, deserves to be read by everyone.
Marcus, an associate professor of creative writing at Columbia University and the author of the story collection “The Age of Wire and String” (1995) and the novel “Notable American Women” (2002), assembled this anthology with an essentially personal approach. “In each case as I sat down to read,” he writes in the book’s introduction, “I had to be turned from a somewhat dull, unpromising person into one enlivened, antagonized, buttressed, awed, stunned by what he was reading.” It’s an intimate way of putting together a book, the publishing equivalent of a friend saying, “Read this! It’s great!” Lucky for us, Marcus is a friend whose enthusiasm we can share.
What makes these stories “new” isn’t their age or their writers. Most of the authors featured in this collection — George Saunders, Aimee Bender, Mary Gaitskill and David Foster Wallace among them — are well-known and have been writing for a long time. Their stories, too, have all been previously published sometime in the last 16 years.
Calling these stories new, Marcus writes, “is a way of saying that the writers are laboring in an entirely new stylistic moment.” What that moment is he doesn’t elaborate, although it’s clearly related to the bleak climate for short fiction that we’ve been living in since the mid-1980s. With a couple of notable exceptions — Lorrie Moore’s 1998 bestseller, “Birds of America,” and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Interpreter of Maladies” (1999) — short story collections in the last 20 years have rarely found an audience outside academia. Partly this is due to the diminished market — less fiction is published in major magazines — and the circular relationship between obscurity and experimentation: Laboring without hope of a large audience, writers feel freer to experiment; the stories they produce are then too experimental to find a large audience.
Many such stories have no beginning or ending or narrative arc, or are so short that they contain no more than a single line, or are written with so many made-up words that they warrant their own dictionary. Often they feel like they were written for MFA students, the one cohesive audience that short stories have left. And here is where the stories in “The Anchor Book” differentiate themselves: Almost all of them (and more on the rest later) seem to have been written for real readers. Stylistically, they revolt against tradition, but they are also less interested in making formalistic statements than they are in lodging themselves in our imagination. “This is [the authors'] guess,” writes Marcus, “at what literary styles will puncture our inattention and qualify as relevancies.”
The best example of this is Aleksandar Hemon’s “The Life and Work of Alphonse Kauders.” In a series of disjointed, biographical statements, Hemon presents Kauders, a forestry bibliographer and lover of pornography whose life intersects with real-life villains of the 20th century: Hitler, Goebbels, Stalin, Tito. The result is an absurd and darkly funny view of cataclysmic events, as if Kauders was the personified spirit of the two world wars and the Soviet Revolution. One of the fragments reads, in total, “Alphonse Kauders was the owner of the revolver used to assassinate King Alexander.” In another, Kauders effectively starts World War I when he stands behind a trembling Gavrilo Princip and whispers, chillingly, “Shoot, brother, what kind of Serb are you?”
Hemon’s use of fragments works for “Alphonse Kauders”; the structure reflects the story’s blurring of fiction and nonfiction. And the parts add up to more than their sum: We fill in what is not said with our knowledge of history. A few of the stories in this collection, however, don’t say enough. Incoherent and ultimately shallow, they offer little besides quirky observations. In “Short Talks,” Anne Carson presents a series of unrelated paragraphs with titles like “On Disappointments in Music” and “On Trout.” Lydia Davis’ “The Old Dictionary” is a single long paragraph in which the narrator wonders why she treats her dictionary more carefully than her son. And “Letters to Wendy’s,” which Joe Wenderoth conceives as a story in fast-food restaurant comment cards, contains exasperating nuggets of absurdities. In one entry, for example, the narrator flatly declares: “It is rare for a baby to be so bad that it is sentenced to be hanged, and even rarer for the sentence to be carried out, and yet, when a baby is hung, what a pleasant surprise it is for the passersby.” Wenderoth doesnt really expand on this statement, and hanged babies have nothing to do with the rest of the comment-card entries. Its an outrageous image with no context, one that shocks and disturbs but signifies nothing.
At best, “Short Talks,” “The Old Dictionary” and “Letters to Wendy’s” are prose poems, filled with vivid images and smart turns of phrase. But they offer nothing in the way of narrative, no revelation of the human condition. They not only experiment with form but take experimentation to such an extreme that it’s impossible to even call them stories. Which is not to say that shortness or disjointedness can’t produce a great story: Diane Williams’ “All American,” included in this anthology, is shorter than Davis’ contribution, but in its six brief paragraphs we get an entire narrative about a woman tinkering with the boundaries of aggression and love. The three “interviews” that comprise an excerpt from David Foster Wallace’s “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men” are really two monologues and a conversation by unrelated characters. But they work together to portray an entire world of lives that revolve around sexual obsessions.
More common in this collection are stories that experiment with language and genre, and they are the ones that are the most satisfying. In George Saunders’ “Sea Oak,” the narrator, who works at a male strip club called “Joysticks,” and his sister and cousin, young mothers who watch a TV show called “How My Child Died Violently” while halfheartedly studying for their GEDs, fester in a low-rent, ambitionless existence. The story feels like a typical treatise on poverty, until the characters’ aunt comes back from the dead and, while decomposing in the living room, orders them to get their lives together. In “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned,” by Wells Tower, a group of marauding Vikings, who talk like contemporary badasses, set sail on their last kill-and-pillage mission. As with “Sea Oak” and “Alphonse Kauders,” the surreal elements here give a new perspective to terrible events — in this case, the merciless slaughter of an island’s innocent citizens. And it’s oddly hilarious when Djarf, the bloodthirsty captain, loses it when his crew insists on abandoning the mission. “Aaaaah! You motherfuckers are mutinizing me?” he yells in disbelief.
“A writer has to believe, and prove, that there are, if not new stories, then new ways of telling the old ones,” writes Marcus. Anachronisms and touches of science fiction are not the only way that the writers in this collection do this. Others are more subtle and realistic, presenting stories that are, in fact, told and retold, but with a fresh perspective. A.M. Homes’ “Do Not Disturb” and Mary Gaitskill’s “Tiny, Smiling Daddy” quietly reveal a large story behind a protagonist’s narrow point of view. Homes’ narrator is trying to leave a bad marriage, “a situation that has become oxygenless and addictive, a suffocating annihilation,” when his wife develops ovarian cancer. She is, as they both readily admit, a bitch, but we also see him needling her unnecessarily, unaware of his own role in their fights. Similarly, the father in “Tiny, Smiling Daddy” cannot understand why his daughter feels estranged from him, but through his account we see him rejecting her for being gay.
Stories are our most primal way of explaining ourselves to ourselves; they are an instinctual need. Most of the stories here put this need first, and that’s why they work. It doesn’t even really matter that they are structurally experimental, or that they defy classification by genre. What matters is that they contain that kind of story magic that can leave a person, as Marcus describes it, “paralyzed on the outside, but very nearly spasming within.”
Although it comes closer to the end of the book, the spiritual center of the collection is Deborah Eisenberg’s breathtaking story “Someone to Talk To.” In it, Shapiro, a washed-up and somewhat depressed pianist, on a visit to a war-torn Latin American country, is interviewed by an English radio journalist named Beale who can’t stop talking long enough to ask Shapiro any questions. Beale is an accidental prophet, an insufferable person who unknowingly reveals secret answers to Shapiro’s private sufferings. In a sudden, impassioned speech (which purports to be about radio, not literature), he perfectly sums up the transaction between writer and reader that makes stories such a thrilling process of discovery:
“Oh my darling! Someone is talking to you, and you don’t know … what thing they’ve found to tell you on that very day, at that very moment. Maybe someone will talk to you about cookery. Maybe someone will talk to you about a Cabinet Minister. And then that particular thing is yours, do you see what I mean? Who knows whether it’s something worth hearing? Who knows whether there’s someone out there to hear it! It’s a leap of faith, do you see? That both parties are making. Really the most enormous leap of faith.”
