There are probably scads and scads of books like 13. I’ve seen them in libraries and used book stores. They are books that take on one topic and mine it for endless anecdotes and historical curios, but they don’t claim that by looking through the prism of the topic at hand, a reader can discern the entire arc of human history. The books are about what they are about, and all you need to do as a reader is sit back and be entertained and informed. John McPhee, who is very good at this sort of thing, once wrote a book entirely about Oranges, for example. Nathaniel Lachenmeyer does this sort of thing well, too. His book is an impeccably researched look at an old superstition. With every turn of the page the reader is presented with another odd relic that Lachenmeyer has dug up for our perusal: the existence of popular superstition-defying “13 clubs” at the beginning of the 20th century, for example. And onward the book moves through Friday the 13th, the missing 13th floor, and all the rest. Taken as a whole, the book is a nifty piece of well-researched reportage bringing to light the many murky progenitors of this now commonplace superstition.
Review: 13: The Story of the World’s Most Popular Superstition by Nathaniel Lachenmeyer
Brimming with Curiosity: On Philip Pullman’s ‘La Belle Sauvage’
Really Bad People: On Sebastian Junger’s ‘Tribe’
All the Dumb Young Literary Stand-Ins: On Arthur Bradford’s ‘Turtleface and Beyond’
In his other life as a filmmaker, Arthur Bradford made a fantastic documentary about the making of an episode of South Park called 6 Days to Air. The title references how quickly Trey Parker, Matt Stone, and crew are able to produce a half an hour of blistering animation, and in one particularly insightful moment, Parker offers this bit of writing advice:
I sort of always call it the rule of replacing “ands” with either “buts” or “therefores.” And so it’s always like: This happens, and then this happens, and then this happens. Whenever I can go back in the writing and change that to: This happens, therefore this happens, but this happens. Whenever you can replace your “ands” with “buts” and “therefores,” makes for better writing.
What he’s talking about is narrative economy, about figuring out the most efficient way to tell a story, but he’s also tapped into something deeper — namely, that the power of scenes is, in many ways, relational. Stories work best, in other words, when sequential action is causal or obstructive.
One can see why Bradford would make a documentary about these guys. The stories in his new collection Turtleface and Beyond are positively stuffed with “buts” and “therefores.” The stories even function almost like episodes, and, as Parker instructed, each story employs skillful economy. A young man named Georgie is our narrator, and this consistency greatly increases the impact of each story as the collection moves along: Georgie is more and more defined, so we don’t need to be reintroduced to him, leaving Bradford with the chance to move directly into his weird, funny adventures.
In the opener, “Turtleface,” Georgie watches his friend unwisely decide to run down a cliff face into a river. Amazingly the friend makes it into the water. Unfortunately, he smacks his face into a floating turtle. Georgie, tellingly, seems to care as much for the now-broken turtle as he does for his cavalier buddy, even bringing the little guy home until he’s mended. Later, in “Snakebite,” Georgie and a few friends stop to help a hitchhiker who’s been bitten by a cottonmouth. Georgie, of course, ends up being the one to suck the poison out (a doctor asks him later, “Why the hell did you do that?”). And still later, Georgie gets mixed up with a partner at a law firm who’s going through a mid-life crisis. Georgie, with nothing but the best intentions, becomes the lawyer’s middleman for drugs and prostitutes.
The point is: Georgie is a good guy who ends up in some compromising situations. But Georgie’s goodness is more than just a character trait –– it’s a narrative strategy. Through his hapless narrator, Bradford is able to push the stories into some absurd territory, because Georgie means well, and doesn’t always see where his choices will take him. In other words, Georgie grounds the stories for the reader, weighting them so they don’t float off into pure silliness.
Sometimes, Georgie should have seen the shit coming. When he gets “fired from my job for a stupid indiscretion,” (which, we readers assume, refers to the time he slept with a patient at a mental institution where he was an orderly, but could be referencing any number of other fuck-ups) he wants to “leave town.” The person with whom he finds a ride is a man named Paul O’Malley. Here is the ominous (but also very funny) preview of their trip together:
Paul was passing through town on his way to the West Coast and had announced that he would be gone in the morning. I saw him two weeks later though, right after I’d been fired from that job. He was wandering downtown, looking a little dazed and strung out.
“I haven’t slept in three days,” he told me.
“I thought you were going out west,” I said.
“I am.”
“But you said you were leaving two weeks ago.”
“I got hung up. Wait, two weeks? It hasn’t been that long.”
“Yes, it has.”
“Oh.” Paul scratched his head.
Most of us would probably take Paul’s sudden loss of two weeks as a sign to avoid spending hours alone and on the road with this dude, but Georgie, desperate and good-hearted, jumps right in. (Spoiler: the trip doesn’t go well).
Yet this is another part of Georgie’s charm: he’s willing to do stupid, irresponsible things — dangerous, illegal things — but that doesn’t take away from the fact that he’s a decent person. Take, for instance, the funny and poignant story “The LSD and the Baby.” Yes, Georgie agrees to go out into the woods with a guy named Richard to “sample a batch of LSD he recently completed.” And, yes, he doesn’t object when he learns that a woman named Sabrina and her baby are tagging along. But when both Richard and Sabrina disappear into the woods (presumably to have acid-enhanced sex), good ole Georgie takes the baby’s life into his own hands, first to a hospital (the baby eats some possibly poisonous berries) and then to his job, and all while tripping balls. Georgie only gets a quiet yet dignified catharsis at the end of the story, but it’s a lovely moment.
I was reminded of Tom Perrotta’s Bad Haircut and Junot Díaz’s Yunior stories in Drown and This Is How You Lose Her. And then, of course, going back to Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty in On the Road and even further back to Ernest Hemingway’s Nick Adams and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Sad Young Men (and Keith Gessen’s Sad Young Literary Men). Essentially, these are all –– from Bradford to Hemingway, the lot of them –– often just stories about young men doing stupid shit, or young men not doing enough good shit, or young men doing good shit in the wrong way. In many cases, we assume the narrator is a stand-in for the author (or, as in Gessen’s case, he takes all the pretext of guesswork out of it by naming his narrator Keith), and we often interpret each piece as some form of self-reflection. They read easy, almost like reportage, and their authenticity is built into the voice, the rhythm and flow of the prose. Sometimes, though, the shallowness isn’t a disguise for anything more meaningful than the story itself, which places great weight on the likeability, and not to mention the humanity, of the protagonist. Sal Paradise, I can live without. And to me Dean Moriarity seems like a real asshole. Yunior, though, I adore. And Georgie, well, Georgie’s a good dude in my book. As I read, I wanted to follow along with him, so even when a story didn’t exactly work as a whole, I didn’t mind — Georgie had my back.
It’s been 14 years since Bradford’s last story collection Dogwalker. In the meantime, he hasn’t been what anyone would call prolific, but he’s been living quite a life. He worked in New York for a while, he recently wrote, and he “directed a summer camp, made several films, had two children, and currently works at a juvenile detention center in Portland, Ore.” And it’s true: the stories in Turtleface and Beyond do read like the result of someone with a multitude of absurd experiences, real, visceral familiarity with these people, this world depicted within its pages. Good for him.
The Harrowing Translations of Valeria Luiselli
Translation, while often misconstrued as neutral, is an inherently political act. It can amplify a voice, especially when it’s rendered into English, which is almost always the dominant language with the wider reach. While I like to point this out as a literary translator myself, the reality settles in when I speak with a novelist who, for the past year and a half, has been working as a legal interpreter.
Valeria Luiselli had never translated before working at an immigration court with Central American children seeking sanctuary in the U.S. There, she would discover that presenting the stories of these children accurately and convincingly to the court in English is their only chance of escape from violence or insecurity at home. But, unlike the literary translator, she found she had limited control over the narratives she was given. Between the children’s words always lurked a heavy silence, a much longer story that wasn’t being told.
Luiselli’s book, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions, out now from Coffee House Press, is an attempt to record, in English, what didn’t get translated. For while she also writes books in Spanish, she had no trouble deciding which language to write the one distilling her experiences in court. The versions of these children’s stories that do already exist in English, in the media primarily, are incomplete and oversimplified, and the ones packaged for the courts are not much better.
It was in 2014 when she first learned that tens of thousands of children were turning themselves in to U.S. Border Patrol after arduous, perilous journeys from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and other places. This would widely become known as an immigration crisis that to this day continues, where unaccompanied children have been fleeing escalating violence across Central America.
The numbers are staggering and the circumstances harrowing. To make these journeys, children travel on the backs of trains and cross deserts with limited water supply, where they also run the risk of being kidnapped and murdered. If you are a girl crossing the border from Mexico, there is an 80 percent chance that you will be raped; many take birth control as a precaution. Too many of these children, some as young as two years old, are sent back. Mexican children don’t stand a chance, as they can be deported immediately under U.S. policy if Border Patrol determines they meet certain conditions.
At the time she realized this, Luiselli, who is Mexican, was in the process of applying for her green card after having lived in the U.S. for six years. Her own burdens in navigating the exceedingly confusing and expensive immigration system (which I, too, am familiar with) seemed trivial in comparison to these children’s. She reached out to her lawyer at the time and asked how she could volunteer in court. It was then that she ended up interpreting at an immigration court in New York City, and found she was badly needed: the federal government faced an overwhelming number of children—80,000 between October 2013 and June 2014—and shortened the time they had to find legal representation: 12 months to 21 days. Luiselli’s job was to interview and translate the children’s answers at an initial screening, which were then reviewed by volunteer organizations to determine whether there were viable claims against deportation. If not, no lawyer was assigned and the child was eventually deported.
Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions is at once a deft exposition on the injustices of immigration law, the long, bullying history of U.S.-Central American relations, and the obstacles and politics of translation. The book is structured around the questions she had to ask each child she interviewed. The first, “Why did you come to the U.S.?”, is already too complex—one not even Luiselli can fully answer for herself. The answers—persecution and abuse at home or the hope to reunite with a family member in the U.S.—come in pieces, not neat, linear narratives. Reticent children are often too embarrassed by their circumstances or worried about betraying their family to give complete answers. And no matter how many times Luiselli asks questions, “[t]he children’s stories are always shuffled, stuttered, always shattered beyond repair of a narrative order. The problem with trying to tell their story is that it has no beginning, no middle, no end.” Their stories, she suggests, are partly broken because their lives are.
But the children don’t always know how to report their hardships. Luiselli notes that she must engage in a double translation: in addition to Spanish, she translates the language of children. In an interview with two young sisters, they evade questions, contradict themselves, and pretend to understand when they don’t. “When did you come to the United States?” she asks. “I don’t know,” they say.
And where did you cross the border?
I don’t know.
Texas? Arizona?
Yes! Texas Arizona.
Following this exchange, Luiselli concludes in near defeat, “For children of that age, telling a story…a round and convincing story that successfully inserts them into legal proceedings working up to their defense, is practically impossible.”
The cruel irony is that while these children’s predicaments are clear, they become less so when trying to fit them within the borders of the questions asked. In one of many imaginative attempts to translate the peculiar language of the courts, Luiselli likens the interview process, officially called a “screening,” to a movie projection: the child becomes “a reel of footage,” and the legal system “a screen, itself too worn out, too filthy and tattered to allow any clarity, any attention to detail.” The translator, then, is nothing more than “an obsolete apparatus used to channel that footage.” The stories become “generalized, distorted, appear out of focus.”
“In court my dilemma is how to not cheat. That is,” she said impishly when we met, “in favor of the kid.” She had to exercise restraint when those two young sisters, for instance, gave insufficient answers, saying, as a child is told to, that they never got into trouble at home, were never punished, and only played. “What I needed to hear, though I didn’t want to hear it, was that they had been doing hard labor…that they were being exploited, abused,” Luiselli writes, visibly irked and ashamed that these are the realities that would grant the children asylum or special immigrant juvenile (SIJ) status.
As a legal interpreter, she feels “powerless,” “hands and feet tied.” She cannot control the words that flow from the children’s mouths, and she has to listen even when it’s too painful. Her job is exhausting and emotionally demanding. Particularly, she struggles to provide an answer to her curious daughter whose demand, “Tell me how it ends, mamma,” becomes a common refrain throughout the book, because most of the children slip from her reach after the screening.
There is one notable exception, however: the first child Luiselli ever interviewed, 16-year-old Manu, from Honduras, who Luiselli grows fond of and who we follow sporadically. His story enlightens the geopolitical context for these mass migrations; through him we learn more about MS-13 and Barrio 18, two gangs that originated in Los Angeles in the 1980s, and that despite the U.S. administration’s effort to deport the members involved, have only grown in numbers across the country. Manu, exceptionally, brought with him across the border a physical piece of evidence that would earn him the attention of some of the finest pro-bono lawyers in the city: the copy of the police report he filed in Honduras complaining of MS-13 members who lurked outside his high school gates. But when Manu arrives in Long Island, he finds “Hempstead is a shithole full of pandilleros, just like Tegucigalpa.” In other words, his problems followed him. Even though “the media,” as Luiselli remarks with typical sense of humor, “wouldn’t put Hempstead, a city in New York, on the same plane as one in Honduras. What a scandal!”
Through the media we’ve learned of these stories but also failed to understand them. Luiselli, in seeking “to rethink the very language surrounding the problem,” tries to translate the masked language of news sources, including The New York Times, pointing out their propensity to refer to children as “illegal immigrants” rather than “refugees;” of problems to be rid of rather than confronted.
She concludes that “the only thing to do is tell [these stories] over and over again…in many different words,” but she wrote this before Donald Trump was elected president. Circulating these stories, particularly in English-language media, could have adverse consequences. With the so-called “Dreamers,” or undocumented immigrant youth in the U.S., flagged by the current administration, Luiselli wonders what more attention would mean for these Central American kids who have gone relatively unnoticed. “Will this government target them more if they become more visible?” she asked me.
The last impression Luiselli leaves us with is unexpected: three photographs where Manu poses for the camera, hanging by his arms from telephone wires, “practicing the art of flight.” In the image, his body is completely dark and silhouetted, preserving his anonymity, as lawyers had advised—Manu is not his real name, even though he wanted Luiselli to use it. He personally wouldn’t mind being seen; he might prefer it. But the pictures we’re offered of these children, just like their translated words, struggle to gain focus.
The Empire Writes Back
Kenyan writer and political dissident Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s seventh novel, Wizard of the Crow, is unquestionably a work of epic ambition – a quality American readers once found commendable, and perhaps still do. Its achievements are doubly impressive, in that Ngugi first penned this 300,000-word tale of tyranny and freedom in his native Gikuyu, and then translated it himself into English. The translation is supple and swift enough that the novel, at 760 pages, never feels like a slog, and colorful set-pieces abound. Any work that swings this hard for the fences, however, will be judged on runs produced. Readers who admire Wizard of the Crow‘s world-historical reach – and Ngugi’s storytelling gifts – may emerge disappointed that it isn’t quite a homer.Ngugi sets his story in the fictional African country of Aburiria, a republic-in-name-only run by a nameless dictator. Decked out in military garb appliqued with the skins of great cats, “The Ruler” instantly evokes Kenya’s Daniel Arap Moi and Uganda’s Idi Amin… and one imagines the resemblance to actual persons is not “entirely coincidental.” Ngugi very much wants us thinking about the recent political geography of Sub-Saharan Africa. But Wizard of the Crow is no naturalist roman-a-clef. As the novel opens, the Ruler has contracted a Rabelaisian affliction – his body is inflating as rapidly and as wildly as Aburiria’s economy. In a typical feat of dialogic energy, Ngugi treats us to five rumored explanations why – thus grounding his third-person narrative directly in the voices of the Aburirian people.The country’s cabinet, scrambling to heal and appease the Ruler, is a political cartoon come to life. Machokali, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, has had his eyes surgically enlarged “to the size of electric bulbs… so that they would be able to spot the enemies of the Ruler no matter how far their hiding places.” Not to be outdone, the head of the secret police, one Silver Sikiokuu, has had his ears lengthened – the better to eavesdrop on potential conspirators. From the ministers’ jockeying for position emerges the book’s Maguffin, a giant construction project called Marching to Heaven (to be funded by a thinly disguised World Bank). If completed, it will allow the Ruler to talk directly to God, “to say good morning or good evening or simply, how was your day, God?”Ngugi gets great comic mileage from his politicians, and there is something oddly sympathetic about the paranoid machinations of Sikiokuu, in particular – as in the old Dan Ackroyd sketches where Nixon talks to the paintings on the West Wing walls. But here the novel’s refusal to settle for mere satire, its flirtation with psychological depth, opens up an instability; one starts to wonder why the Ruler, in a three-dimensional environment, remains flat, an object for fun.This instability deepens when Kamiti, a penniless college graduate, and Nyawira, a receptionist, begin to lay the groundwork for revolution. Kamiti’s depressive asceticism, Nyawira’s spirited sass, and the chemistry between the two (including some of the hottest foreplay I’ve read recently), move Wizard of the Crow firmly into a textured human reality. Ngugi enlivens their romance with some wonderful magical touches. The plot strand in which Kamiti poses as a powerful “Wizard of the Crow,” and then (to the consternation of the authorities) finds himself mysteriously growing into the role, would be enough to fill a lesser novel. And yet, as this book rolls on, the exploits of the Wizard of the Crow start to feel like a subplot. Dramatic cause and effect give way once more to satirical grandstanding.Satire, in my reading, is Ngugi’s least revelatory mode. Absent the historical specificity an actual location might have provided, we are treated to revolutionary platitudes, to the revelation that power corrupts and the World Bank and the mass media are accessories to the crime. Well, obviously, but…Here I find myself running up against the problem of translation. Gikuyu, as I understand it, is largely an oral language. Since deciding for ethical reasons to stop composing in his adopted English, Ngugi has heroically pioneered the use of Gikuyu for literary purposes. And thinking back to the schematics of Walter J. Ong’s Orality and Literacy (a useful companion text for Wizard of the Crow), I remember that the aims and techniques of the griot may differ greatly from those of the workshop-trained novelist. In particular, the oral poet’s mnemonic didacticism clashes with the “literary” desire for understatement.It seems no more fair to tax Ngugi with preachy dialogue, then, than it does to tax The Illiad with flashy similes. (I feel like John Updike missed the boat on this one in his New Yorker review.) Nonetheless, I can’t deny that the antic quality of the second half of Wizard of the Crow frustrated my desire to dwell with Kamiti and Nyawira – to see diasporic political generalities given flesh, as they are in Patrick Chamoiseau’s magisterial Texaco.Still, as hard as it is to discover such shortcomings in a book its author clearly intends as a masterwork, it’s equally hard to dismiss Wizard of the Crow out of hand. Ngugi is a masterful manipulator of narrative time and narrative voice, and the fleetness and charm of the telling tend to blur over some of the novel’s deficiencies. In a particularly moving bit of analysis near the end, Nyawira laments the way the West, with all of its problems, attempts to stamp the developing world’s heterotopic spaces with its own monolithic image, and it is possible to read this review as symptomatic of the problem, and the book as gesturing toward a solution. Wizard of the Crow clears a space within literary postmodernism for African traditions and African characters, and one can only hope Ngugi will use it as a platform for future works that bring his expansive vision to fruition. Haki ya Mungu!