That was the nonplussed hometown reaction to Ivana Bodrožić’s second novel, a literary thriller. I would be crushed; that’s why I started out writing historical fiction and later avoided mining my own life in any recognizable way. Bodrožić is unrepentant:

I did not use anyone’s real names and surnames. However, parts of the plot were inspired by what exists around us...I have said many times: if someone in reality sees nothing wrong with using political office for personal gain, being convicted of a war crime and then running in elections, or offering bribes, why should it be a problem to address these things in fiction?

The English edition was published under the title, We Trade Our Night for Someone Else’s Day. But the Croatian title, Rupa (meaning The Hole), would be instantly recognizable in that country. There, “the hole” has just one meaning: it’s the location of the worst massacre during the Croatian War.

In June 1991, Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia, a communist country that no longer exists. It was attacked by the Yugoslavian army, led by a Serbian commander, and by Serbian militias. Atrocities ensued. There were brutal detention camps. On the 20th November, one of these militias removed some 300 patients, refugees, and staff from the hospital in the town of Vukovar, close to the border with Serbia. They were driven in buses to a farm on the outskirts. There they were shot in groups and thrown into a pit known as “the hole.”

Ivana Bodrožić was born in Vukovar. She was nine when the war broke out and fled with her mother and brother. Her father, presumed killed during the massacre, is still officially missing. The trauma of being a child refugee waiting for a father who will never return is the autobiographical heart of her first novel, titled The Hotel Tito.

In her second novel, Bodrožić revisits war trauma, this time from the perspective of some twenty years on, with a legacy of personal wounds aggravated by widespread corruption. We Trade Our Night for Someone Else’s Day is complex. The plot is intricate, the characters are multilayered, and the issues are both.

So, yes, I would say this book is very much in keeping with the writer’s literary reputation. It kept me riveted. And it’s also made me think about how much easier it is to get mired in corruption than it is to root it out (looking at you, America).

Our protagonist Nora is a Croatian journalist who has reluctantly returned to her home town. Like the author’s father, hers disappeared during the war. She dealt with the lack of closure by walling herself off from emotional closeness to anyone.

She’s here to cover the arrest of Kristina, a teacher who, along with the 17 year old student who was her lover, murdered her husband. Nora tells herself that she’s unhappy with her assignment because she wants to cover important political stories, and her editor always relegates her, as a woman, to domestic drama. Behind that, though, is the pain of returning to the place with her father’s unresolved disappearance. Over the course of the story, she’ll find herself inadvertently embroiled in local scandals, corruption, and additional murders connected to the trauma she’s tried to ignore.

The town is unnamed in the novel, but several key elements in the story, like its location near the Serbian border and the history of the massacre, identify it as Vukovar. It also has an uneasy relationship with its Serbian minority. Memory of atrocities is still fresh. School children are segregated by ethnicity. (In Vukovar, bars are also segregated, albeit unofficially.)

In the novel, people are outraged by Kristina’s crime, seeing it as all the more heinous because her student-lover is Serbian and her husband was a Croatian war veteran. And war veterans, even alcoholic, abusive ones like him, are cherished in Croatia.

At least for political posturing. Not so much in practical terms. According to a veterans association’s press statement, around thirty thousand are unemployed and two thousand have ended their own lives. The press statement is impassioned, contrasting veterans rooting through garbage for cans and bottles to sell with the “mass of thieves, criminals, traitors, deserters and war profiteers...who laugh at us, who openly tell us: well, who forced you to go to war, fools!”

These thieves, traitors, and war profiteers are major players in We Trade Our Night for Someone Else’s Day. What begins as a seemingly simple story of “why did she do it” quickly expands into a web that interconnects characters, both in the days of the war and in the present. Some of these characters are modelled on real people and real incidents. And here we get into the novel’s controversy.

In Vukovar in 2013, city councillor Marija Budimir blew the whistle on the mayor, Željko Sabo, who was attempting to bribe her with cash and a seat on the board of a large state-owned company. He was convicted but remained in office as mayor and also as a member of parliament for two years until the Supreme Court upheld his conviction.1

In the fictional town of the novel, the principal of the high school school is named Brigita. She’s also a city councillor. The mayor offers her cash and a seat on the board of a city-owned facility if she’ll side with him on city council, to ensure that he stays in power. Brigita records the conversation and exposes the mayor, ruining his career. The parallels with the real incident are clear.

But in the novel, Brigita is an opportunist who’s been offered a better bribe by an opponent of the mayor. No one knows (she hopes) that during the war, she gave officers “massages.” And there was a thing with a German Shepherd. Occasionally, she also calls on favours from a sociopathic assassin who got his start during the war. You can see why the real city councillor who exposed Vukovar’s mayor would take umbrage to being identified with Brigita, even though this is fiction.

However, there’s also a journalist who claims her cat was the model for felines in two of Bodrožić’s previous books, which mightily offends her, and worse, was ill-fated in this one. Okay, we love our cats, but this is a novel that happens to have a grey cat, which is part of the unfolding plot. You sure there isn’t something else brewing under the outrage? I wonder.

In the novel, Nora discovers a deep connection with Marko. He’s a Serbian man who loved art and music before the war. Ever since, he’s lived with major depression, managing to keep a roof over his head by driving a taxi. Despite being on opposite sides of the war, they form an intense bond.

The value of crossing ethnic boundaries is a theme that Bodrožić has written about before as a columnist and poet. It’s one she’s lived as a pacifist, married to a Serbian. For her views and her choice of partner, she’s been raked over the coals. After her first novel was published, she was literally called a monster by another columnist. Her reaction wasn’t to back down but to write more, to be more monstrous in her takedown of hypocrisy.

You see, although Croatians and Serbians are pretty much the same people with the same language, they use different alphabets and attend different churches. Sixteen hundred years ago the Roman Empire divided into east and west, and in the Balkans, the border was the Drina River. When the church split, a mere thousand years ago, the west side became Catholic, using the Latin alphabet; the east side became Orthodox, using the Cyrillic. Serbians to the east, Croatians to the west. But boundaries are never clean; people have the habit of mingling. And finding something to fight about, even an alphabet. (Always a reason for why “we” are not like “them.”)

Croatian law requires bilingual signage in a town when a minority reaches 1/3 of the population. In 2013, after the Serbian minority in Vukovar passed the population threshold, public signs were erected in both alphabets. Within hours, war veterans tore them down. Police officers were injured. Protests were led by city councillor Ivan Penava, who exploited ethnic tensions to get control of the city.

His argument: since there are still Serbians walking around who haven’t been adequately prosecuted for war crimes, all of them should be collectively punished by not having signs in their language. As leader of a far-right party (unconcerned about Croatian war crimes that haven’t been prosecuted either), Penava became mayor of Vukovar and a member of parliament. The bilingual signs were scrapped.

In We Trade our Night for Someone Else’s Day, Bodrožić builds on this real episode, but her politicians are fictional. In the story, a right wing Croatian politician secretly joins forces with a Serbian politician. During the war, the Croatian mentored the assassin; the Serbian mentored Marko. Now these politicians, who have a shared history of profiteering during the war, plan to inflame ethnic tensions for their mutual benefit.

This allows Bodrožić to expose the roots of Croatia’s current problems: every aspect of economic and political life is rife with corruption that got its start in the war:

This is true. Because of an arms embargo, the Croatian government turned to criminal networks to obtain weapons for their self-defence in 1991. Some of the gangsters morphed into army officers; some officers morphed into gangsters. Even the reference to diamonds is based on fact. During the war, jewels intended for weapons purchase were embezzled. Years later, in 2008, a former Croatian general was extradited from Austria to stand trial for his involvement. There were several related murders that year, including his lawyer’s daughter and the owner of a weekly magazine, known to be in the pay of prominent underworld figures.

Despite public outcry, just as with war crimes, prosecution for these murders was lackadaisical. Croatia was trying to get into the EU. The attitude of authorities was, Nothing to see here folks. Look away. Croatia is now in the EU and, still, in the 2020s, corruption is pandemic, intertwined with every aspect of public and private life.

People in Bodrožić’s hometown think she’s unpatriotic. But her precondition for writing anything is that it “be honest and carried through to the end, come what may.” I think that’s harder than just going along with flag waving or a shrug of, oh well, that’s just how it is here or abandoning the country for somewhere better. Unlike many who’ve moved to other parts of the EU, she’s remained in Croatia. She doesn’t toe the line, and she stands up to the flack she takes for it (while I just want to be loved).

The book came about because she was invited to write a crime novel as part of the Balkan Noir series. It was a departure for her and at first she wasn’t sure she could write genre fiction. But:

Since we live in a society that offers plenty of inspiration for crime and thriller writing, I decided to pay it back, so to speak, and transform everything from the political and postwar “crime blotter” of reality into fiction.

She succeeded. The fiction is a thriller with multiple murders and unexpected twists. There were many times, reading, that I said “Wait what?” or “Noooo.” It also has the psychological depth and nuance of literary fiction.

Nora softens with Marko, lowering her defences, and he does the same because their trauma is mutually intelligible. As an eighteen year old Serbian reservist, he never fired a shot during the war. But he was witness to the massacre and transported bodies to the hole. This is the moral injury he can’t forgive himself for. Yet Nora takes in all that he is and has done without judgment. He, too, accepts her with all her failings. In this, they find beauty, solace, and a respite from desolation. But it can only be a respite.

Every character in the novel is multi-sided. They’re all human, wounded and wounding, regardless of ethnic identity. Ante, the murdered Croatian husband, is lauded as a veteran, but he informed on his fellow POWs. While in the detention camp, he was sexually humiliated by Olivera, a Serbian woman, the daughter of the camp commander. She enjoyed the sexual power over him; she was also terrified of her abusive father. And during her encounter with Ante, she got pregnant.

Years after the war, Olivera lives in the same building as the man she humiliated. Her son falls in love with Kristina, Ante’s wife, and assists in his murder. Neither the murdered father nor the murdering son knows about their relationship.

In my notes, I wrote, “Oedipus.”

The relationship between Nora and Marko isn’t the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. Ultimately, it’s not hampered because one is Croatian and the other is Serbian. Rather, it’s the pull that the war has on them, as if they’re moons in its orbit. This is a classical Greek tragedy: there are forces larger than themselves at work. Bodrožić says:

the plot of Rupa developed in the direction of the impossibility of escaping one’s own repressed trauma...unresolved war crimes, corruption, manipulation of war victims, the collapse of society’s values...helped the repressed trauma grow wild until it destroyed everything around it.

When Nora discovers the truth about her father’s disappearance, she wishes she could let it go, take another path. But the past impels her take vengeance, and she needs Marko’s help. It’s the end of their idyll. Because he loves her, he agrees, though he knows and she knows it’s going to destroy them both.

Bodrožić says of the English edition title, We Trade Our Night for Someone Else’s Day:

The distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’...is a metaphor for those of us for whom the war brought night, and for those for whom, in a time of lawlessness and violence, dawn broke.

That distinction, I think, is what’s really underneath the outburst of indignation and castigation from her hometown. Some people profited and continue to profit from the war’s marriage of crime and politics. Others live with it and are able to live with it as long as they deny that their society is broken. Challenges to either can be deflected by appealing to patriotism, to nationalism. Failing that, people can be reminded of their suffering, ethnic tensions inflamed to distract from problems like unemployment or demographic changes. {footnote: Unemployment was over 17% in 2013, at the time of the signage controversy. Last year it was down to 5%, and immigration has become the trigger of a surge in the extreme right.}

This isn’t a new strategy; it’s older than Croatia or Yugoslavia or the Roman empire. In the ten years since this novel was first published, divisions in the world have intensified, while the simple shouted story is amplified on social media. A story shouted from both sides. Seeking peace is different. It’s slower, quieter, complicated. Sometimes lonely.

On social media, I find myself self-censoring, not sharing my thoughts so that I can still be loved or at least liked or at minimum not shunned by those on my side of the political spectrum.

After reading We Trade Our Night for Someone Else’s Day, the author’s interviews, and what people said about her work, I think Bodrožić’s honesty is worth the cost. I just don’t know whether I’d pay it.

Born in 1955, she was a child of relative privilege, growing up middle-class and well-educated in a country where most people were illiterate. Her mother was a French painter and sculptor, her Ivorian father the president of the Chamber of Accounts, the body responsible for auditing public finances. She’s lived in Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast), France, Nigeria, Mexico, the UK, Kenya, and South Africa. Like her mother, she paints. She writes poetry, nonfiction and fiction. She teaches. When pressed on her identity, she says she considers herself Pan-African.

I’ve read two of her books: Queen Pokou, the retelling of an Ivorian legend, and In the Company of Men, about the West African Ebola outbreak of 2014-2016. I’ll call them novels because they’re prose fiction and have chapters that compellingly tell a story, but the story is told in a completely unconventional way.

Pokou is a historical figure who lived nearly 300 years ago. She was a princess of the Ashanti Kingdom in present-day Ghana. After the death of her uncle, the king, factions fought over who’d succeed him. When they went to war, her life and her followers’ were in danger, so she decided to lead her people westward. The journey was difficult, but they crossed the Komoé River into what’s now Côte d’Ivoire. There she reigned as queen over the Baoulé people from 1750 to 1760. The Baoulé are the dominant ethnic group among the 60 or so in Côte d’Ivoire. Along with the Ashanti, and the Agni, which is Tadjo’s father’s ethnicity, they’re a subgroup of the Akan. And among the Akan, descent is matrilineal; you belong to your mother’s clan, and the queen mother was an important political actor. Those are the facts.

However, the legend of Queen Pokou adds this: the river was impassable, the water too rough. The gods demanded a great sacrifice, and Queen Pokou threw her only child into the river. The waters parted and the people passed over.1 The legend explains the name of the people--Baoulé--as deriving from “Ba-ou-li: the child is dead.”

This is a devastating origin myth. When I was growing up, I thought the biblical story of Abraham being asked to sacrifice Isaac was bad enough. (What kind of God wants that kind of obedience?) But at least Isaac was reprieved at the last minute. As a parent, I can’t imagine.

But this is a national myth, an oral story passed down, one that everyone knows. Tadjo remembers first hearing it when she was ten, imagining “a sort of Black Madonna.” (Queen Pokou, “Prelude”) When she was in high school, Queen Pokou was presented to her as a courageous historical figure. And still later, during the first civil war in Côte d’Ivoire, she saw the figure differently again, this time as someone sinister, power hungry.

The civil war was preceded, as in Queen Pokou’s time, by a succession crisis. For decades after independence, Côte d’Ivoire enjoyed stability under the rule of one man and his party: Félix Houphouët-Boigny. He was descended from tribal chiefs, and his people were the Baoulé of Queen Pokou lore. His family religion was animism, but as a teenager, he converted to Catholicism, and his first wife was Muslim, combining in his personal life the major religions of his country. He encouraged immigrants to come and farm the land; there was plenty available and the world was eager for the cocoa that could be grown on it. He dealt with opponents and factions by co-opting them into government. He kept the peace. He was loved, called Papa Houphouët or Le Vieux (old man).

Then he died. Cocoa prices had been falling for a while and unemployment was high. It was easy to divert attention from complex economic troubles by scapegoating migrants. (Sound familiar?) Millions of Muslims had come from neighbouring countries under Houphouët’s invitation, and there was anxiety about demographic change. (Also familiar.)

During the turmoil after Houphouët’s death, three successive presidents leaned on the concept of Ivoirité, which defined a “real” Ivorian, an “indigenous” Ivorian, as opposed to migrants and their descendants. Laws were enacted to exclude them. One of these laws was intended to stop Houphouët’s Muslim Prime Minister, Alassane Ouattara, from being able to run in a presidential election because one of his parents was foreign-born. (Like Tadjo’s mother.)

For their part, immigrant communities were anxious about losing the land they’d farmed, sometimes for generations. Based in the north, rebel Muslim factions also fanned anxiety and ethnic conflict. In the west, there were ethnic groups like the Yacouba who formed their own fighting groups. In 2002, the rival factions went to war. There was no shortage of atrocities: north, south, Muslim, Christian, they all perpetrated them.

The first civil war lasted four and a half years. Tadjo was then living in Johannesburg. She was safe from the conflict, able to escape it as a professor who could choose anywhere to live. But she worried about her family and friends back home.

Reminded of the Queen Pokou myth, she saw the young men propelled into the war as sacrificed children. At the heart of the conflict was this concept of Ivoirité, she believed, with the national myth its propaganda: how virtuous to sacrifice the child; how noble of the “indigenous” Ivorians.

I’m the mother of two. I waited a long time to become a mother and, like many mothers, I would unhesitatingly put my body between an oncoming vehicle and my child to save them. Child sacrifice is not my idea of virtue. Tadjo shares those sentiments.

Published in French in 2005, Queen Pokou was her response. In the traditional tale, the queen’s sacrifice gets one line, her voice is never heard. In Tadjo’s hands, the queen’s voice is central.

Part 1, “The Time of Legend,” reads like good historical fiction with a touch of magic: still hewing close to the traditional tale, a baseline for the narrative, albeit through the queen’s perspective. Then in Part II, “The Time of Questioning,” Tadjo interrogates the legend. Each chapter re-imagines Pokou responding to the sacrifice in different ways: refusing it, being cold to it, losing her mind over it, losing her humanity. The writing styles vary, too. In “Abraha Pokou: Fallen Queen,” it’s poetic and visceral:

In this telling, the queen throws herself into the river, searching for her child, and when she finds him, she becomes another creature, because she can’t remain human. This hit me in the gut, and I wept:

In Part III, “The Time of the Bird-Child,” Tadjo revisits the story from the child’s point of view. Here, she makes the connection between legend, sacrifice, and interethnic conflagration. The child is not only the son of legend. He’s also a representative of all the young men, the boys, caught up in the violence. But he can save them by fighting the beast of war and division, which takes the form of a scaly snake. He says to death:

Here I cried again but for a different reason: the little guy’s win. It gets me every time. Even now, re-reading the last lines of the book, I’m holding back tears so I can keep typing. The book is short, only seventy pages. But the power of it!

As a writer, Tadjo is drawn to fragmentary composition and short pieces, to condensed language and images. She’s not interested in linear narrative. Time may give us the illusion of linearity, she thinks, but thoughts are fragmented; we’re always going back and forth between past, present, and future in our minds. She says:

For me, writing is three dimensional, a bit like creating a sculpture. You have to look at it from different angles. Another image would be that of a necklace. Each bead is individual but when you put them together, you have a necklace.

In Queen Pokou, each retelling is a bead in the necklace. And the necklace shows us that, however you tell it, the Baoulé, the paradigm of “originals” according to the Ivoirité myth, were also migrants from elsewhere, fleeing strife and turmoil.2

Like Queen Pokou, the second novel I read, In the Company of Men, is a response to civil war horrors that propelled Tadjo to write. But here those horrors occur in the aftermath of the civil war, which created conditions ripe for an Ebola outbreak. It’s a gory disease: you get weak, you vomit, shit, bleed and then have a good chance to be one of the 63% of people who die.

In Côte d’Ivoire, vast areas of forest were destroyed by people escaping from the battles in the first civil war, and then again in the second, which was shorter but deadlier. This occurred in 2010-2011 when Alassane Ouattara won the election and the previous president, Laurent Gbagbo, refused to step down.

People needed a way to live in the chaos; they needed somewhere to go. So they illegally cut down trees and farmed cocoa in conservation areas.

Population displacement and environmental degradation are just the right conditions for an outbreak of diseases that move from an animal host to a human one. When habitats shrink, animals come closer to humans; when humans have nothing else to eat, they’ll go into the forest for bushmeat. These factors were also at play in neighbouring countries. Interethnic conflicts were exploited, and civil war casualties and population displacement were even greater in Sierra Leone and Liberia. Refugees flooded across the forested border into Guinea. That’s where the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak began.

Tadjo was still living in Johannesburg, teaching at the University of Witwatersrand. Just as during the civil war, she wasn’t at risk herself but feared for her loved ones, and she was heart-broken by images of the epidemic’s toll. When she went home to visit, there were health restrictions. Because of that and also sheer luck, Côte d’Ivoire emerged with no Ebola cases. When the epidemic was over, survivors and witnesses didn’t want to talk about it. Tadjo felt compelled to do so; it was the only way to process the trauma.

In the Company of Men is that story. I found it a tough read, not because it was slow or poorly written, quite the opposite. It’s vivid, all-encompassing, and I could only handle the devastation in chunks:

These boys are ground zero, unknowingly bringing Ebola to their village. Hungry and with no other access to meat, they hunt for it in the beautiful, imposing forest. They’re playful, delighted to kill several bats, which they cook over a fire. Their death from Ebola is as gruesome as the forest is magnificent, and no bird-child is here to save them.

This novel, like Queen Pokou, has short chapters, each one a bead in the necklace. Tadjo takes not one perspective, but fifteen, all of them intimate, some of them nonhuman.

Among the human perspectives are some you’d expect: patients and their relatives, a doctor, a nurse. But there are also those you might not think of or know about: the hunting boys, a volunteer, the researcher who first discovered the virus, a chlorine sprayer. His job is to disinfect every surface: the health carer’s hazmat suits before they disrobe, homes where the infected are picked up, burial sites where they’re laid to rest. This role was one that Tadjo herself only learned about in her research:

There were so many examples of resilience and hope, I wanted to tell that story as well as the story of suffering and hardship and chaos. Something extremely beautiful in the way people rise to the challenge...

I admired the chlorine sprayer, the grave digger, the doctor, the nurse, the volunteer. At the same time, I felt the weight of their misery. They’re working in horrendous conditions with little government help because corruption has syphoned off money that should have gone into hospitals. For me, one of the most hard-hitting parts of the novel is actually a poem by another writer, Nsah Mala, that Tadjo incorporates (with credit) into the nurse’s chapter. On the street, the nurse hears a young man with a guitar singing:

But Tadjo’s boldest literary choice is to inhabit nonhuman perspectives: the Baobab tree (which features prominently in West African folklore as a sacred tree), the bat, and the virus.

Tadjo says she was inspired by oral tradition where human and nonhuman voices mingle. And when she fully inhabits the voices, they’re striking. But unlike in Queen Pokou, she allows herself to lecture readers through these nonhuman characters:

Well, sure, I agree, but these aren’t beads on the necklace; they’re the author’s professorial voice and that weakens the story’s power.

Despite that, this is a book that will stay with me. And it’s timely: there’s another Ebola outbreak happening right now in Central Africa. In western media a couple of months ago, it was front page news. There was anxiety about it spreading to the west. In May 2026, Canada imposed 90 day travel and immigrations restrictions on people from affected countries. The US restrictions were even more severe. Now, any news of Ebola has fallen to the back pages, as if it isn’t our concern, and I don’t see it in my feed, though it’s spreading far faster than any previously.

But Véronique Tadjo says:

I mean, you’re not looking for headlines when you go to literature. You’re looking for a way to understand what’s happening around you in a different light. I think that’s what literature can bring. It can help you more to identify with what is happening, to break the cycle of indifference.

She explains the title of In the Company of Men as a reminder of the nonhuman perspective. But it serves just as well as a reminder that we all exist in each other’s company, too. We’re all migrants from somewhere else.

The outskirts of the city, rows of houses packed in like rotting teeth along small alleys. A two-story house just like its owner: creaking joints, decaying bones, in the process of keeling over. A house left behind by a world that grows more fearless by the day...The only thing over which I can claim control and exercise ownership. (from Concerning My Daughter by Kim Hye-Jin)

These are the thoughts of the unnamed narrator in Concerning My Daughter. It occurs on the first or second page (I’m not sure because I read it on Libby). The narrator is sitting across from her daughter at a restaurant near the South Korean university where her daughter is a lecturer. The daughter’s given name is never disclosed either. What matters is the that she has a gender-neutral nickname, Green, that she’s called by her friends.

Mother is uncomfortable in the restaurant, self-conscious about her age in a hangout full of students and professors. She feels only tension, not pride or interest in her daughter’s work. We already know that Mother has been avoiding her daughter. Soon, we’ll learn that financial desperation has led Green to need a favour. She wants Mother to let her and her partner, Lane, move in for a while. Green is a lesbian. And Mother, who is homophobic, alternately denies it and pities herself for not having a “normal” daughter. She doesn’t want them under her roof.

I’m nearly as old as Mother, and she is no role model of graceful aging. In fact, in the first few pages she’s so off-putting, I might have DNF’d the book and moved on if it weren’t that Han Kang, a writer I totally admire, recommended it.

But while writing this essay, I started thinking about bubbles and how they protect us. Like houses, they keep some people out and let others in. I feel safe in my house and comfortable in my bubble. In mine, there’s no room for homophobia. There’s no dialogue with it. That’s an attack on my nearest and dearest. And Mother is comfortable in hers, with views that are anathema to me.

Mother has no name, perhaps, because she’s representative: a mother, a woman of her time. Her views are common in South Korea. In a recent Pew Research survey, 56% of people in South Korea said that homosexuality was morally unacceptable (compared to, say, 21% in Japan).

It isn’t a crime to have gay sex in South Korea, as it is in some countries (like Iran or Northern Nigeria, where it incurs the death penalty). But South Korea gets an F on LGBTQ rights on the Franklin & Marshall Global Barometer of LGBT Human Rights (2011-2020): there’s no protection against discrimination, no same-sex marriage, no joint adoption by same-sex couples, and consensual sex between soldiers (all male) is a crime. In 2022, a concerted effort to pass an anti-discrimination bill failed.1

This is a socially conservative country with a motivated, politically active Protestant minority of about 20%, who mobilize against lgbtq rights. Like their evangelical counterparts in the USA, they argue that they’re defending the family values of their society as set out in the bible under the authority of God. They apply pressure politically, and they get their people out to lgbtq events in great numbers.

While Mother has plenty of social support for her stance, after she allows her daughter and her partner to move in, their presence challenges her prior beliefs. Initially, she dismisses Lane as “that girl,” reluctant to acknowledge Lane’s artistic gifts or that she’s a considerate person who wants to make Mother’s hard life easier by serving her food. (Come on, Mother. How can you not love a person who cooks for you? That’s how my husband won my heart.) But Mother is someone who is observant, and she’s internally honest enough to note when her observations contradict her views, however reluctantly.

She starts to think differently about Lane with the repetition of small things like the meals Lane keeps making though she gets no thanks. Mother gets glimpses into their lives, seeing what their friends are like, discovering the nicknames they have for each other.

Then, against Mother’s advice, Green gets involved in a situation at the university. The contracts of two gay lecturers aren’t renewed. As a university lecturer herself, Green spear-heads a peaceful rally, where she speaks to the issues while anti-gay activists surround the demonstrators and become menacing.

The genesis for the novel was Kim Hye-Jin’s view of the 2016 annual Queer Culture Festival (what we’d call a Pride March) in Seoul. As usual, there were Christian protestors wearing prominent crosses, holding signs and jeering. Violence and the threat of it continue to be an issue.2

During the rally and its aftermath in Concerning My Daughter, our narrator fearfully observes the two sides: her beloved daughter, her partner, their community; the raging anti-gay protestors endangering them. She’s both anxious about her daughter’s safety and anxious about being present, and while she dithers about what to do, she’s losing the opportunity to do anything. In the aftermath, she can’t help but notice the contrast between supportive families and her own behaviour.

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Mother’s narration is so focused on her feelings and thoughts that Green and Lane are often on the periphery. Why didn’t Kim write from the daughter’s perspective, someone her age, her urban intellectual demographic?

She says it’s because she wanted to understand her own mother, who, like the narrator, is in her 70s. The story isn’t autobiographical; Kim is not a lesbian daughter (to my knowledge) with a homophobic mother. But there is a parallel.

Her mother was vehemently against Kim taking writing seriously.3 She wanted Kim to stay home and get a real job, and she applied pressure by refusing any financial help otherwise.

In response, Kim was determined to support herself and went off to Seoul, where she stayed with a friend. One day, her mother showed up there with a new rice cooker to show her acceptance. But she didn’t suddenly do a 180, realizing the value of art rather than the practical hard work that hauled her generation out of the desperate poverty that typified South Korea when she was young. No, regardless of the acclaim Kim received for her literary work, her mother continued to nag her to quit writing and get a real job: “her constant concern is always ‘When do they pay you? Will you share some of the money with your mother?’”.

The basis of the novel is right there: rejection by beloved mother of something integral to the being of a daughter; the ambivalence of an older mother who is operating under conflicting impulses.

Our narrator’s concern extends beyond “what will the neighbours say?” Mother is afraid of lonely, isolated old age, which she’s brought on herself by estranging her daughter. But she’s also terrified that her daughter will end up old and alone because she has no children. Mother can’t conceive of any other way to have children, or forms of family without children, just as she seems to think (or pretends to herself that she thinks) lesbians can’t have sex:

Mother’s fear is a realistic one, not only because she’s pushed away her only child. It’s also an economic reality of South Korea. As a widow in her early 70s, renting out the upper part of her crumbling home for extra income, she still has to work to make ends meet. It’s already physically difficult for her. There will come a time when she can’t keep it up, and then the options are grim. She knows this first hand, working in a nursing home as a caregiver.

Kim chose this setting as a natural place to explore old age: “Is there any place that can show the life of the elderly as honestly and nakedly...?” she says.

Nursing homes are notorious in South Korea. A 2025 study found that the rate of elder abuse within nursing homes, as a percentage of all reported elder abuse, has been increasing. It rose from 10% of elder abuse cases in 2017 to 25.8% in 2021. Stories of nursing home abuse frequently make the news. Here’s one from earlier this year about an elderly man who died of pneumonia due to neglect:

As a result of Mr. A checking the CCTV video of the nursing home, [he saw] that his father, who’d returned to the nursing home after pneumonia treatment, was left on the bare floor with his top taken off. In the video, his father sat on the floor, and the caregiver threw down a pillow and blanket, then pushed his father’s head back and knocked him down to make him lie flat. After that, the caregiver slapped the father’s face twice.

More common than incidents of physical abuse are rough handling and providing subpar care by skimping on food and supplies, as in the nursing home where the narrator of Concerning My Daughter works.

Mother’s exposure to Green and Lane’s world is very recent, beginning when they move in. But she’s been working for some time in the nursing home. Here we see another side of her. She hasn’t formed the kind of hard shell that allows other caregivers to shrug at institutional abuses. It upsets her when they’re ordered to save money on supplies by cutting up diapers, using small sections that leave the patients wet, developing sores. Outwardly, she’s compliant, but inwardly she rails at callous policies that move funds to the director’s pockets.

Mother takes care of Jen, a woman with dementia. They have a bond, Jen trusts Mother. And Mother admires Jen’s former adventurousness while also identifying with her vulnerability as an old woman. She cares for Jen with tenderness, giving dignity to this person who can’t demand it. About Jen, she observes:

Upset by the way that the nursing home exploits Jen’s fame to their advantage and reduces her care when the advantage disappears, Mother finds herself questioning the status quo. What is fair? What is moral?

What’s noteworthy about this book isn’t that Kim Hye-Jin is writing about homophobia and other social issues. That’s common grist for literary fiction. It’s that she chooses as narrator a representative of bigotry, but that’s only the starting point. If the novel was a simple condemnation, if Mother was obnoxious from first page to last, there would be no point to writing a novel. Might as well rant on social media.

But the particular genius of this novel is that Mother is revealed to be much more complex than simply unlikeable. She’s a complex, introspective character caught between the dogma that she was raised with and her love for her daughter. When pushed past avoidance, she’s able to struggle with the paradox. She surprises herself with her capacity for caring beyond what society says she should.

None of this is easy. But as Mother struggles, her struggle is illuminating for the reader and for the author, who, while writing the novel, asked herself “whether the discomfort the novel’s mother carries might not also exist somewhere inside me.”

My discomfort is different--it’s Mother I would have trouble embracing. I’d happily have Green and Lane stay with me. I wouldn’t know how to talk to her; I wouldn’t want to listen to her.

But the act of writing often changes the writer, whether the work is an essay or a novel. In her second draft, as Kim revised, she realized that there were possibilities of defining family she hadn’t considered. And in this draft, Mother becomes daring, brave enough to take action on behalf of those she cares about no matter how it looks to others in her bubble.

When Concerning My Daughter came out, it didn’t make a big splash. For some years, it was only available in Korean. Then the publisher sent a translation to literary agent Marina Penalva in the hopes that she would handle international rights. She took her sweet time in getting around to reading it, but when she did, she said:

It blew my mind. How could a mother be so cold-hearted? How could I hate this character so much in the first half of the novel and then feel so much compassion for her at the end? How did the author accomplish this and create this feeling?

I wouldn’t say the novel blew my mind. That is agent-talk. But it’s been, let’s say, nudging my mind, prodding it. At the time I read it, I was very impressed by the choice of narrator and the skillful way she was brought to life. But in the months since, the story has been percolating under the surface, having an impact I didn’t anticipate.

This book is about a mother trying to understand her daughter, and it’s written by a daughter trying to understand her mother. That fictional Mother can change is hopeful; that she can change at her age even more so. And most of all, as a reader I believed it. That belief compels me to think about how we can meet each other in this era of bubbles and intense divides.

In the novel, real change is initiated in physical spaces. When I said a house is like a bubble, I missed what’s more important: how they’re not alike. Mother’s house is an actual place and so is the nursing home, and through small daily interactions between people in those places, cracks form in Mother’s defences. The square where the rally in the novel takes place is also a physical space, and here, the unfolding crisis drives a widening wedge into the cracks.

Mother’s social bubble is just an image; it conceptualizes social networks. But she changes because of real world interactions, not as a result of an argument or persuasion, but through getting a meal or changing an elderly woman’s diaper.

My neighbourhood is what it is because we have block parties, and people put books and furniture on the curb for others to take. Maybe the answer to crossing the divide isn’t about talking to someone like Mother. Maybe it’s recognizing that bubbles are just concepts. Houses and nursing homes and playgrounds and libraries and streets offer possibilities for encountering each other. That’s where change happens, not through posts and likes but in small, cumulative actions. A book on the curb, a pie at the block party, holding a door open.

That meant a change in racial category. By moving to Argentina, she says in her essay, “From this Place on the Border:

my position in the gradient of skin colours and showcase of ethnicities has changed once more...I’m the darkest. And what does that signify? Many things. To mention just a minor but recurring event: when I go to the playground with my kids, I am always – always – mistaken for their nanny, and treated accordingly.

This is Margarita García Robayo, author of The Delivery, a slim, layered novel about the fluctuating borders of race, the stickiness of family, belonging and dislocation, reality and uncanny valley, the subtlety of violence.

Even though the plot stretches only from Saturday to Saturday, I wanted everything that happens in between to create this sense of visual depth, so that in a single reading you can hardly grasp how many different themes are passing through it.
- Margarita García Robayo

And that’s exactly what I found so exciting, the way she writes is so compressed--the novel is under 200 pages--but contains so much.

Like the author, the unnamed protagonist (I’ll call her MC for main character) is an emigré from the vibrant, diverse Caribbean coast of Colombia to beef-eating white Argentina. MC maintains contact with her unnamed sister 5000 km away, managing to get along through “tenacity, toughness, and torturous toiling.” (The Delivery, Ch 1)

Her conventional, suburban sister puts a great deal of effort into straightening her hair and slathering her skin with sunscreen to prevent her Black heritage showing. MC is darker than her sister, who “is white like meringue, but her hair is fiercely kinky; according to my grandmother, that is the only true sign of blackness” (The Delivery, Ch 1).

Unnamed sister views MC as eccentric for moving away and wanting to be a writer. (My family saw me as eccentric for exactly the same reasons. My mother also wondered if I could be a heroin addict--what other explanation could there be for wanting to leave home?)

Everything about MC’s life is tenuous, as if she hasn’t discovered how to put down roots in this new country. And maybe the difficulty goes deeper, to her childhood and being torn away from her rural home. Or deeper still, to her mother being a frail and unstable anchor.

MC’s small apartment is dingy because she hasn’t bothered to fix it up. She has a boyfriend she’s unsure of. The building is home to a feral cat (named Ágata in Spanish--gata meaning cat--and Catrina in the English translation) who’s sort of chosen MC’s apartment as her base. She has a part-time contract job writing copy for an ad agency (presently about a precious cow) and is desultorily applying for a grant.

Her sister regularly sends care packages containing photos, notes, and bags of pulped fruit that rot on the way, wrecking the other items in the box. (Oh, that wonderful image of the good intention rotting in transition because there’s no thought given to how it moves, where it’s going, or whether the recipient even wants it!)

The package that arrives in the first chapter, however, is different. It’s a large crate with one item. Out of it steps MC’s mother. The mother who felt closed in, weeping and searching for air; the mother whose counters were layered with grease; the mother who sadly looked out the window at the beauty that was outside; the mother letting her children run wild, breaking bones and acquiring concussions in their unrestrained scrambles; the mother letting her children be taken away by a self-righteous aunt. They haven’t spoken in years.

Now, all that MC has tried to leave behind and forget is brought to her door in the form of her mother.

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There’s something not quite real in the figure of the mother, and not only because she arrives in a crate. The strangeness continues in the way she often appears out of nowhere or is absent without explanation. Sometimes she uses uncharacteristic language, surprising MC by saying “sorrowful,” for example, instead of “down in the dumps” (The Delivery, Ch 9).

I worried that the novel would take a predictable turn--that MC would be in a coma or imagining her mother like the protagonist does in Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine. (Sorry if you haven’t read it--I was so disappointed with that though; the complexity of dealing with an abusive parent who undercuts your sense of self at every turn “resolved” by making them vanish with a plot twist!)

There was no turn. García Robayo made a deliberate choice to engage with the uncanny:

The Metamorphosis was the only book I reread while writing this novel because I very consciously wanted to do something Kafkaesque: introduce a strange element that suddenly breaks reality but is almost immediately accepted as normal.

With Mother in her orbit, MC reflects on the clash between her family’s prejudices and those of her new home. She recalls a waiter who flirted with her, writing his number on a napkin. She liked him and kept it for months but never called:

Like the author, MC comes from a middle-class background. In Colombia, the “rich are white and the poor are black, the middle classes are the suspect, brown border between the two,” says García Robayo. They can never aspire to the white upper class but are ever climbing to “avoid falling into the ocean of the poor who howl at us from below.”

However, in Argentina, MC doesn’t signal middle-class by being brown. The janitor of her building

The most common tropes in English Language immigrant stories aren’t relevant here. In the move from one Spanish-speaking Latin American country to another, there’s no intergenerational conflict between tradition and modernity, no big language barriers, for instance.

What’s distinctive in this immigration story is the perception of race in Latin America, which is multifaceted and varies from one country to another. For example, in Brazil mixed-race identity is common and idealized as unifying with the mix mainly being Afro-European. In Mexico, an official state definition of their nation was based on identity as a new European-Indigenous mixed people (excluding the African component). And Colombia’s self-perception included it all: Afro-European-Indigenous heritage.

Even as far back as 1861, writer, lawyer and politician José María Samper referred to the “marvelous work of the mixture of races” that should “produce a wholly democratic society...representatives simultaneously of Europe, Africa and Colombia.” It’s an ideal, not reality on the ground, but even so, it contrasts with the view that Costa Rica and Argentina have of themselves as white nations.

Yet the move from Colombia to Argentina is only part of the story. In Canada, it’s possible to move 5000 km away from your home and still be in the country, but dislocation happens at much shorter distances, too. I moved just 500 km from my childhood home. I remember how strange it felt. My first day, I couldn’t figure out what bus stops looked like. In Montreal, they were round, with a beige background and the bus number on it, stuck on top of a metal pole like a stop sign. I saw nothing like that. Finally, I asked a random person on the street and they pointed at a white and red pole. There were numbers on it, but they were beside the point. Buses are called by street names, the Bathurst bus, the Sheppard bus, because Toronto streets are mostly laid out on a grid. Montreal is an island; if you go far enough in any direction, you hit the river. Streets curve. I was always getting lost in Montreal. Literally as well as psychologically.

Like MC, I discovered that no amount of distance wipes away your place of origin or your people. Old issues are just waiting for a spark to kindle them: “families are ambushes. Flammable places” (The Delivery, ch 8). For MC, the only way to keep that under wraps is to live a grey life of exile, never fully committing to any action, place or person.

In Spanish, the title La Encomienda refers to large care packages full of gifts sent by emigré workers back to their families.1 Only here, it’s reversed: MC is the recipient.

With her mother’s arrival, her feelings about her family are impossible to ignore or step around. Mother does little more than cook and take a ride with MC out to the pampered cow that’s supposed to inspire her ad copy. There’s no big conflict between them. The most dramatic confrontation isn’t with her mother but with neighbours who are upset with MC, thinking that she’s leaving the cat’s kills on the balcony of their tastefully decorated apartment. Yet her mother’s presence pulls at MC, producing memories, questions, conjectures.

Writing is an act of empathy, to imagine yourself in the skin of characters who aren’t yourself. And in The Delivery, empathy is the process by which a character who’s remained aloof from her life, as if her independence and freedom depend on it, starts allowing herself to be drawn in.

She imagines her mother running like a protective panther. She thinks about the reality of her being an anxious woman on her own who wanted her children to have more than she can give them. She hears her mother say, “You send the kids to school so someone else will do a job that is a mystery to you.” (The Delivery, ch 10). And the border between memories, images, conversations imagined and real is blurry.

I like telling stories built on a very simple, very short, very manageable plot, but one that contains many layers of meaning. I want the same text to keep digging deeper and deeper, like a question that never quite arrives at certainty.
- Margarita García Robayo

I was really struck by this literary approach, how images and passages stayed with me and resonated with my own experiences from a different country, culture, and time. It was so different from what I anticipated when I started looking for Colombian writers I could read in English.

Colombia is a country with a decades long history of violence perpetrated by drug cartels, guerrilla factions, and the army fighting them. That’s what I expected to find in its literature. It’s what I thought this essay would be all about. But Colombia is far more than the headlines, and stories choose the writer as much as the writer chooses them.

For García Robayo, stories begin with an irritation, an uncomfortable feeling that needs to be exorcised. It might be an image or scene she witnessed accidentally. The discomfort is channeled into a character, which she feeds by mining what she’s seen or experienced.

The Delivery draws from García Robayo’s estrangement from her family, who have “gone through truly tragic and complicated things, and no one takes responsibility. The attitude is simply to keep moving as though nothing had happened.” My own family was like that too--denial as nearly a religious practice.

There was also a difference in values between García Robayo and her conservative, Catholic mother. (Having children and a partner without benefit of marriage probably left Mother less than delighted. Not to mention that the partner, filmmaker Mariano Cohn, has a Jewish heritage.) And the kicker was that her mother was angered by seeing a character like herself in one of García Robayo’s novels, What I didn’t Learn. After that, her family said, or pretended, they would never read her work.

Then in 2019, there was a literary festival in Colombia. Without announcing it, her mother came to hear García Robayo speak. Afterwards, Mother said to Daughter: “This is the first time I’ve understood you.” Finally, she got why her daughter writes the way she does. García Robayo said, “I’m not someone who cries much—they made me tough—but that night I did.”

My family was never able to understand my life. If they did, I’d cry too. But I can imagine something like it by immersing myself in the life of another character.

Instead of choosing just one or two writers from a country with a population 1/6th of the world’s, I decided to start with a genre. I chose science fiction, then extended it to include fantasy and the grey area between, guessing that fantastical stories might have more literary freedom because they can operate as allegory.

To get a feel for it, I read all the women writers in three anthologies. I also read the 2016 Hugo prize winning novelette, Folding Beijing by Hao Jingfang.1

This is a story that works on every level: prose, character, plot, premise. In it, we have a city with three different surfaces that change places by folding in on themselves and going underground. During each change and while underground, people are in a drugged sleep.

Space One is the high-tech, robot-serviced home of the elite, with the fewest number of people and the most green areas. It’s on the surface for twenty-four hours and below for twenty-four.

Professionals spend their lives in Space Two. It gets only part of a day, but is allotted 16 hours, including all the day light, before it folds in on itself and goes underground. The last shift, eight hours overnight, is left to crowded, impoverished Space Three, the home of our protagonist, Lao Dao (”Lao” isn’t part of his name, it means “Old” and is a sign of familiarity), who’s a waste worker.

This is how Lao Dao remembers his father’s story of constructing the folding city:

Like his father, Lao Dao is a model of the toiling, uncomplaining Chinese worker as idealized by communism and Confucianism. There’s also a nod to Marx’s theory of alienation: in capitalism, workers are separated from what they make, from each other, from their own creativity. As an economist, Hao Jingfang would surely be aware of this. But she’s a fabulous writer and none of her characters are flattened types. Lao Dao is a man of integrity, at times anxious and uncertain, driven to bravery by devotion to his adopted young daughter.

The story’s main character is male and so are most of the people he meets. The exception is the wife of a wealthy man in Space One, who’s there as a love interest. This isn’t an exploration of gender norms.

But the story critiques China’s growing inequality in its dry commentary: “The residents of First Space considered the extra soil a natural emblem of their possession of a richer, deeper heritage” (Folding Beijing, ch 2). And there’s critique in Lao Dao’s suffering. To bypass drugged sleep, he hides inside a waste container for twenty-four hours. On his return journey, when he’s climbing down with the turning surface, the change is halted by a whim of Space One’s leader, and Lao Dao’s leg is painfully trapped in a closing crack.

The possibility of using science fiction this way has only been available to writers for about twenty-five years. The genre was banned during Mao’s Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). It was banned again in the mid 80s as part of the anti-spiritual pollution campaign. But by the late 1990s, during a period of political loosening, the regime started promoting science fiction for kids as a way to interest them in science.

Xia Jia is the pen name of Wang Yao, an SFF (science fiction and fantasy) writer and professor at Xi’an Jiaotong University, where she does research on Chinese science fiction. She remembers that the change (I’m thinking like the topsy-turvy surface exchange in Folding Beijing) occurred when she was in middle-school. Previously, her parents wouldn’t let her read sci-fi or manga. The Communist Party characterized manga as antisocial, sci-fi as bourgeois, and both as foreign. Then, suddenly, sci-fi was grand and her parents were subscribing to a kids’ magazine. Hurray! (But still no manga.)

Banning, permitting, encouraging, banning--these sorts of sharp turns make one-party states nimble (if they’re competent). It’s how, in just one generation, China went from being a third world country to being a great power in the forefront of technology and green energy. And doing so means co-opting anything of value.

For about ten years, scifi was seen as something for kids and flew under the radar. But in 2008, The Three-Body Problem became a hit in China. After it was translated into English and won the Hugo in 2015, it became an international bestseller with thirty million books sold.

That got the regime’s attention. How could it use this genre to further its goals? In the Communist view of art, propaganda isn’t a bad word. It’s the whole purpose of media, to further the good of the people as determined by those on top. Currently, that’s Xi Jinping.

In 2020, the government came out with a document on how it intended to support the science fiction film industry, and what its expectations were: content creators will “thoroughly study and implement Xi Jinping Thought”2 and work toward three goals. These are to stimulate domestic interest in science, to inspire scientists, and to export Chinese culture as soft power. The document goes on to emphasize the need for great scifi scripts and books to be adapted for film and gaming.

Folding Beijing doesn’t advance those goals, but it was first published well before them. Hao posted it online in 2012 while she was a PhD student. It was later published in print in 2014. This was before Xi Jinping moved the country toward a repression not seen since the Mao era.

There are no villains in Folding Beijing. We feel the contrast between Lao Dao’s meagre existence and the conditions in the other spaces, but no one in Space One or Two is cruel or ill-intentioned. They’re fulfilling their roles. The top guy in Space One, for example, refuses the recommendation by another elite to automate waste processing because it would put millions of people out of work in Space Three. And, in fact, this scene is based on a real-life conversation, which Hao observed during a conference on environmental management.

I get the feeling that Hao is flexible in how she presents herself, adapting to changing environments. In an interviewwith Tencent News (Tencent is the biggest media company in China), she’s intellectual and eloquent. In a Chinese interview I watched on YouTube, with a pretty set and a dolled-up female host, Hao appears very feminine, emphasizing her role as a mother and educator.

Hao isn’t working currently as an economist. She went into business as an entrepreneur of supplementary education. She also writes science fiction books for kids and is developing an AI writing assistant “that embeds the basic principles of fiction writing as a scaffold.”

Recently, as in a couple of weeks ago, there was a backlash against her. She’d revealed that the final two books in the children’s series were half-written by AI, and she was so very pleased that readers couldn’t tell which half.

In response to her revelation, comments on social media were irate. A typical comment on Weibo (China’s Twitter) reads: “As creators are gradually being replaced by AI, she’s actually taking pride in readers’ inability to tell the difference.”

Hao backtracked, “clarifying” that, actually, she didn’t use AI to write those chapters. No, it was just for research, plot development, idea generation, and “learning writing techniques.”

This is where I see Hao’s literary impulses now being shaped by the regime. China is heavily invested in AI and has plans to fully integrate it into classrooms in the next few years. Hao’s business is in the field of education. I’m thinking that to her it must have just seemed like a natural next step to incorporate AI into her work. The backlash was clearly a surprise.

I have to wonder, too, if being a woman writer made her more of a target. Because, meanwhile, a male writer, Chen Qiufan (aka Stanley Chan), one of the four scifi “masters” in China (all men) refers to himself as a pioneer in AI-human literary co-creation since 2017, and I’m not aware of any backlash against him.

SFF books, however successful, form a small part of Chinese media consumption compared to film and gaming. But the books matter in China because they draw international attention (soft power) as well as feeding into those industries.

For fear of being penalized, online platforms and print publishers block writers or works when they think the official censors might not like them. This type of self-censorship also extends to non-Chinese organizations. In 2023, the Hugo Awards were held in Chengdu. It came to light that the organization excluded authors like RF Kuang and Xiran Jay Zhao, though they were nominated, because of fear that their work might run afoul of Chinese authorities.

The Chinese book that won in the novella category was The Space-Time Painter by Hai Ya. He was inspired by a documentary series on China’s national treasures produced by the media group under the direction of the Central Propaganda Department. So this choice fit well with the government’s goal of highlighting Chinese culture.

And yet on China’s social media there was extensive criticism of the winning novella as a poorly written and clichéd book that wasn’t even really science fiction. One user even asked: “Could it be that the award was forcibly given because the home turf is in China”?

There are two main streams of SFF in China. The entertainment stream consists of web novels posted online, and its readership is huge3, but the print stream is considered to be literature and carries prestige.

The Space-Time Painter was published in Galaxy’s Edge (the Chinese paperback anthology, not the American), and it failed to meet readers’ literary standards.

The main publisher of science fiction in China is Science Fiction World, which also awards coveted prizes and runs conventions. The route of a successful writer (and they still need day jobs to make a living) is: publish in Science Fiction World, win a prize, get into anthologies, get translated (The Space-Time Painter was never translated), write a novel if your day job permits.

These writers think deeply about the purpose of their work. For example, Hao Jingfang talks about her “love of exploring dilemmas -- disputes between ideas that have no correct answer.” Xia Jia says that she writes SFF because it crosses the boundary of what we think we know. She believes that it’s important to imagine characters who are different from yourself, so that different points of view can coexist and talk to each other.

But these authors also participate in the regime’s agenda. In response to a question at the UCLA conference: shouldn’t science fiction be universal and devoid of any nationalism? Xia Jia states that Chinese sci-fi offers an alternative view of modernity. In line with Xi Jinping thought, she states that it should draw from Chinese myth and tradition and not follow golden age white writers.

Was the question too pointed? Did it put her on the spot? She seems to contradict her answer in a more recent interview, at the 7th EU-China Literary Festival, where she said:

I think science fiction should be ‘cross frontiers’ in essence. No matter in terms of form or content, it should not stick to any type of norms or routines.“

She looks more relaxed in a smaller venue. At a Women In Chinese Science Fiction presentation, she was enthusiastic, full of life and often laughing as she shared the spotlight with Regina Kanyu Wang, one of the editors of the anthology, The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories: A Collection of Chinese Science Fiction and Fantasy in Translation from a Team of Female and Nonbinary Creators.

Here, Xia Jia talked about how, when she was starting out as a writer, she chose a gender neutral pen name and imitated male writers. She wrote “hard” sci-fi because that was their domain, generally perceived as better than women’s supposedly “soft” sci-fi. But noticing how these writers portrayed their male characters as rational and positive, their female characters as emotional and negative, she abandoned imitation. Now she describes her work as “porridge sci-fi,” an ambiguous state between sci-fi and realism, what I’d call speculative fiction.

Picking up on Xia’s point about how male SFF writers portray gender, Regina Kanyu Wang calls attention to Matriarchy Society. It’s a two volume Chinese anthology with the stated goal of imagining matriarchal societies, all written by male authors. Two dozen of the stories didn’t even engage with the topic. When they did engage, male writers just inverted the power structure of patriarchy, with the “same arrogance and violence” simply attributed to women, which she finds funny but insane.

In contrast, women SFF writers come up with all sorts of creative and interdependent gender structures. She gives the example of the story “Insect Nest” by Chi Hui. Here, nest girls take care of tree boys growing in the air. In adolescence, they go through a forest together, where they merge to become a giant insect as their mature form.4

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In the anthologies I read, as well as in Folding Beijing, I noticed that many stories by women writers had male protagonists. This was also true in the early years of Gu Shi’s writing. But in her novelette Introduction to 2181 Overture, Second Edition (shortlisted for the 2024 Hugo), all the characters are women.

At the 2025 Frankfurt Book fair, she was asked if that choice is a feminist message on gender. Her response: it’s an odd question; are men assumed to have a masculinist message when their characters are male? Then she makes an effort to distance herself from “feminism,” as if it means imitating men, by assuring readers that her characters also have children and love in their lives. The reasoning she offers for the all-female cast in her novelette is that it reflects her experience. She’s an urban planner with female colleagues; her mother is an electronics engineer, a nontraditional career for women, with female colleagues. “I feel like I have a responsibility to tell their story,” Gu says.

Just as Xia Jia echoed the party line when directly asked about the national character of science fiction, Gu Shi takes shelter behind gender norms in her interview.

Yet through the experiences of multiple women, her novelette does explore gender and social issues. The conceit is that the story is an introduction to a book about the development of cryosleep, a way of putting people into suspended animation. Initially it was intended for those with terminal illnesses who could be woken at a later time when there’d be treatment or a cure. But its use broadened to include anyone who’s had enough of their own time period and wants to wait for a future they hope will be brighter. There’s a loss in abandoning the people in their lives who continue to inhabit their own era. And there’s an assumed aspiration about the future that may not pan out.

Gu Shi also explores abandonment and aspiration in the short story, “The Last Save,” which appears in the collection Sinopticon, one of the three anthologies I read. The others are Broken Stars and The Way Spring Arrives. If you’re only going to read one, I’d recommend The Way Spring Arrives. It’s remarkable for its care in choosing writers and matching them with translators, including RF Kuang, and the editors’ respect for writers, translators, and their work is fully evident.

The anthology is the brain child of Regina Kanyu Wang. Her PhD was on women writing Chinese SFF, and her day job is in marketing for Storycom. She proposed the anthology as a joint project between Storycom and Tor, the big American publisher of SFF, while she was at an event in New York.

Storycom is in the business of adapting SFF to film and translating it for English readers by, for example, partnering with the American online SFF magazine, Clarkesworld. So we circle back again to the goals of China’s leadership: science-fiction in film and exporting Chinese culture.

I don’t have a simple narrative here. I can’t say that Chinese censorship suffocates creativity. It simply isn’t true. I also can’t say that Chinese writers aren’t co-opted by a totalitarian regime with clear goals of what it wants and what it prohibits. Writers in China--SFF or otherwise--aren’t going to be writing about taboo subjects like the independence of Tibet or Taiwan, the massacre in Tiananmen Square, or the persecution of the Uyghurs minority group.

Similarly, when directly questioned about their feminism, women writers distance themselves from being seen as rebellious or challenging. But in fact, their work does challenge conventional gender narratives.

Nothing in what I read was propaganda. It was literature, with all the complexity and nuance that literature has and none of the simplistic flat formulas that propaganda requires. The stories and novelettes are inventive, creative, imaginative, grappling with universal issues and those specific to their place and culture. The authors I’ve talked about in this essay are driven to write for the same reasons as writers in all the countries I’ve covered so far in this project.

In a beautiful, recent essay on having writer’s block when trying to write a story about AI, Xia Jia says:

You must live with your confusion, anxiety, blame, and fury. You must live with your weakness and your unwillingness. And you must write with these as well. This is what we do as humans. Step forward into the gaze of the abyss.

You see, their parents were among the 200,000 people driven into exile. Politicians who supported Allende were persecuted of course. But also artists, journalists, broadcasters, teachers with left-leaning views or suspected of such. In other words, the usual sort of targets: people who have ideas and who might inspire other people to have theirs, and before you know it, the dictator, who’s only in the position they are because they’ve got the big guns, might lose control. (And in fact, every Latin American country with a dictator backed by the US eventually managed to get rid of them.)

Born in 1959, Carla Guelfenbein was a teenager when Pinochet came to power. Her father was an architect, her mother a well-known Marxist philosophy professor. She was arrested and then disappeared.

This is how Guelfenbein describes the experience in the short story, Ana and the Water.

In this story, the father is arrested and never returns. But Guelfenbein’s mother was inexplicably released after several weeks. At the time of the arrest, she had cancer. The family fled to London, and a year or so later, her mother died. Guelfenbein was eighteen.

Her novel, In the Distance With You, is a kind of tribute. After reading a biography of the enigmatic Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, she was intrigued to discover that they shared the same family background. Guelfenbein’s grandparents were also Jewish immigrants who fled pogroms in Eastern Europe. But the details of her family history were lost. As there was no one left to ask, her mother dead, her father suffering from dementia, she could only approach it through her imagination. That was also what drove me to write the novel, The River Midnight. Sometimes only invention and imagination can fill in gaps.

Guelfenbein envisioned a character that was a composite of her mother, her grandmothers, and Lispector. This character is a writer famous for her genius, like Lispector, and was arrested under Pinochet like the author’s mother. She gave this character, Vera Sigall, her great-grandmother’s surname and put one of Lispector’s standard lines in her mouth: “My great mystery is that I have no mystery” (In the Distance with You, ch 6). It isn’t true of either the character or Lispector.

In the Distance With You is framed as a crime novel: “Somewhere on the planet, there was someone responsible for your death,” it begins. But the story isn’t so much about the death of Vera Sigall as it is the mystery of her life and the impact she’s had on the three characters whose voices alternate. There’s a French graduate student with a Chilean mother, who’s working on a thesis about Vera, a neighbour who’s formed an intense intergenerational friendship with her, and a poet who’s a former lover.

Their stories are permeated by a sense of uprootedness and estrangement with the self. Uprootedness runs through all of Guelfenbein’s work because of the trauma of her exile, she says. However, these three characters are propelled by an inner imperative to uncover their true self. This can only be done through connection with others but barriers have to be tackled. The student can’t stand human touch. The neighbour’s friendship with Vera is the only honest thing in his unfaithful life. The poet has been holding secrets about himself and Vera for decades.

The novel won the prestigious Alfaguara Prize (which comes with a hefty monetory award) for the best novel written in Spanish (covering 22 countries with a population of about half a billion). It was submitted under a pseudonym, so the fact that Guelfenbein is a beloved, bestselling author had no part in the decision. The jury’s statement observed:

A literary suspense novel...with great narrative effectiveness...a style that is at once complex and transparent...Three finely woven voices...who, without knowing it, share a poetic secret..

About receiving news of the prize, Guelfenbein said, “This is one of those unforgettable moments that can only be compared to the birth of a child.”

She didn’t plan on being a writer. She started out as a biologist, then went into design and advertising. At forty, she felt she’d met her goals in those fields. (In videos, her energy is palpable--even now in her 60s, she’s a force. I wish I had a fraction of it!)

She’d always loved books and had written stories for her own pleasure since childhood. (Her classmates called her Miss Vocabulary.) As she moved into her forties, she says, reading the luminous prose of Spanish writer Carmen Martín Gaite encouraged her to become serious about literature. Her first book made a splash, and she’s had popular and critical success ever since. I admire her work and respect it. But it’s kissing cousin to Clarice Lispector’s, which would thrill Guelfenbein, and isn’t so much my cup of tea. But I love listening to her talk about her life and about writing--her dynamism, her generosity, her fearlessness.

Guelfenbein believes that the function of literature is to open everything up, to go where it isn’t permitted to go:

Literature is a field of freedom. It’s a field of exploration. And it’s a field in which what matters are the questions…that you ask yourself as an author and pose to the world through your books…always on the verge of falling into the abyss and that has no certainty. Political correctness is pure certainty. This yes this no. This is said this is not said. In other words it’s a lack of freedom.

She’s also keen to raise the profiles of other women writers. In one interview, after describing the days when there might only be a couple at a book festival, she enthuses about younger women writers and urges the interviewer to invite Alia Trabucco as “a great writer, a great woman, very loving” to her show.

And that’s how I came to read the work of Alia Trabucco. She was born in 1983. During the last few years of Pinochet’s rule, she was a pre-schooler, but old enough to remember its end.

Her father had been a prominent filmmaker who’d worked for the state company Chilefilm. Soon after the dictatorship began, he was arrested and tortured. Like Guelfenbeim’s mother, he fled the country after he was released. In Argentina, he met and married another Chilean in exile, the journalist Faride Zerán, who came from a family of Druze Arab immigrants. In the late 1970s, they returned to Chile, managing to keep out of terrible trouble until Pinochet fell.

Alia Trabucco went into law. As a feminist lawyer dealing with cases of political violence, she found herself emotionally overwhelmed. Literature was her refuge, and to get a break from the pain of her day job, she started attending writing workshops. She ended up leaving law to do an MFA in New York and a PhD on Latin American Studies in London, living there with her aunt during the pandemic. But her experiences as a lawyer have informed her writing. In it there’s a controlled rage, channelled into incisive expression.

Her creative concerns are political ones: repression, the legacy of dictatorship, the impact of neoliberalism, systemic inequality, which is significant in all South American countries.

(To my surprise, the US--which I know has a lot of inequality but still--is on a par with Argentina and just a bit lower than Chile on the GINI scale of inequality. For reference, Canada and France are 10 points lower than the US.)

During her years in New York and London, she wrote her first novel, a reckoning with the Pinochet years, and a book of nonfiction about women convicted of murder. These established her career, and her most recent book to be translated into English, Clean, takes on inequality and class.

I loved it.

During the pandemic, Trabucco was concerned about live-in domestic workers trapped in their workplaces (just as there were concerns about the isolation of battered women shut in with their abusers). She was already aware of their financial trap: wages that just enabled them to survive, with nothing to fall back on so they were afraid to leave.

She was also tired of seeing domestic workers in literature and film who were nothing like the people she’d encountered:

I read, with both interest and bewilderment, many portrayals of domestic workers in which submission, gratitude, naivety, and victimhood repeatedly dominated....These were literary representations that...in a lazy and mediocre way, produced merely a type: the maid...

She was inspired by Jean Genet’s play, The Maids, but found his emotional range too limited:

I wanted to incorporate other elements as well. Anger, certainly. Resentment, too. But also loneliness, affection, love, and tenderness. All of those together, treated seriously, allowed me to weave a character like Estela.

Like Guelfenbein does with In the Distance with You, Trabucco uses and subverts the crime novel in Clean. While Guelfenbein’s book offers only a barely appearing detective and circumstantial clues that nobody acts on, there is no visible detective in Clean. Here, too, we begin with a death. And here, too, the reader’s curiosity about it operates simply as a hook to keep us turning pages.

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For both novels, the real story and its emotional force is the trajectory of its narrators, not toward the deaths, but toward clarity, truth about themselves or society. And here in Clean, the voice of Estela, our narrator--OMG, the power in it, her keen observations, her sarcasm, her unrelenting honesty, the complexity of her relationships. (The stray dog! He broke my heart.)

Estela is a live-in nanny and maid for an upper middle-class family. The parents are high-powered professionals, the father a doctor, the mother a corporate lawyer. This is how Estela describes her:

Their daughter is an only child. Her death, at the age of seven, is the mystery to be unravelled. Estela has been detained and is telling her story to listeners hidden behind a one way mirror, but she’s also addressing the reader: “Now stop what you’re doing and listen to me” (Clean, ch 1).

We are forced to wait for her to satisfy our curiosity, and from time to time Estela reminds us that she’s in control of the narrative. If we want to get to the resolution of the mystery, we have to hear out Estela’s story, her childhood in Chiloe (a southern Chilean island where the mix of indigenous heritage is high), her closeness to her mother, her journey to Santiago, the domestic work that grinds her down, the spiritedness that keeps erupting despite it.

Like Guelfenbein, Trabucco thinks that literature should be a space of great freedom. Literature can’t replace justice, she believes, that’s not its role and it shouldn’t be didactic, either, but it can intervene to make the reader feel uncomfortable enough to reflect.

The pain point in Chile is that its current constitution is still the one put into place by Pinochet, yes, the dictator. Under it, the government provides minimal services. Property rights are protected and also the freedom to pursue business as you please. And education, health care, pension? It’s a public/private scheme that favours the rich.1

Most middle-class people rely on credit cards for daily expenses. They’re a paycheque away from poverty. When they retire, if they can afford to, their public pensions will be tiny. And public pensions are key investors in the credit card business, which charges exorbitant interest. So, the public purse is like a loan shark, incentivized to encourage debt.

During the years Trabucco was writing Clean, there were a series of protests, first the feminist demonstrations of 2018 and then the Social Explosion (Estallido Social) of 2019.

This is how Estela describes it:

The protests began with high school students. They organized a fare evasion campaignbecause of a 30 peso hike in subway fares. That led to spontaneous takeovers of Santiago’s main train stations and confrontations with the Carabineros (the national gendarmerie). The high school kids were joined by university students and others whose anger was boiling over. The chant was “not thirty pesos but thirty years!” referring to the Pinochet constitution. Eighty-one subway stations were damaged, seventeen of them burned down.

The conservative president declared a state of emergency and called out the army. He also declared a curfew. This was starting to have the whiff of the 1973 coup. Protests and riots spread to other cities.

Trabucco remembers police intentionally shooting at people’s faces, especially their eyes. She spoke to a seventy year old man on his way to get bread. “You see what’s happening here?” he said. It all reminded him of his own arrest in the Pinochet years, of being beaten in prison. A woman she talked to wondered whether this was the moment when the military would start killing students, the first step in the coup.

It was more than “a mere social explosion,” she says. “It was something else entirely--the kind of social event that wounds time itself, halts it, opens it up, transforms it.”

In the end, there was no coup. Instead, the same president who called out the army held a referendum on whether the Pinochet constitution should be rewritten. The “yes” vote won with 78%.

It was a time of jubilation. The same sort of jubilation that Guelfenbein felt when she returned to Chile after a 10 year exile to participate in the 1988 plebiscite. The question then was whether Pinochet would rule for another 8 years. Under his constitution, this plebiscite was set by military leaders. Presumably, they expected a resounding yes. The no campaign was heavily censored. And, yet, the voting process itself was fair. The counting was fair. The answer was “No.”

There was dancing in the streets.

The Chilean dictator wasn’t removed by force. He stepped down in 1990, remained commander-in-chief of armed forces until 1998, and then senator-for-life. Democracy ensued with freedom of speech and freedom of the press. But Pinochet’s constitution remained. In 2019, the people of Chile demanded more.

Trabucco incorporated the 2019 riots into the story of Clean but not the aftermath. A new, progressive constitution was drafted and put to a referendum in 2022. It failed. I have to conclude that it went a step too far for conservative Chileans. In 2023, a new, conservative constitution was put to a referendum. It also failed. Apparently, it went too far in the other direction. So, the dictator’s constitution stands for the time being.

The Spanish title of Trabucco’s book is Limpia, literally translated as “clean.” But she cheekily points out that “limpia” contains the word “impia,” meaning impious.

For Trabucco and Guelfenbein, literature cannot be pious. Writers must ask the hard questions, explore rather than answer, and follow their creative instincts wherever they lead.

As Estela says, “I can’t hear you over on the other side. I need you to open the door...Can you hear me?”

If you’re Adrienne Yabouza, who barely escaped execution, you use humour, wit, and a light touch to write about the lives of women, their sisterhood and their ingenuity when face to face with the dangers they have to contend with. I love her work.

Co-Wives, Co-Widows tells the story of Ndongo Passy and Grekpoubou, mostly amicable co-wives of a builder who is prosperous enough to have a generator. They’re fortunate. As of 2023, only 17% of people in the Central African Republic (CAR) had access to electricity. Nonetheless, they still work to buy what they need for themselves and their children. It takes three years for Ndongo Passy to save up the money for a new mattress. She sells manioc and Grekpoubou sews.

Historically, polygamy in this region was a means of obtaining enforced female labour by paying a bride price. It was an investment; women’s work provided the return on it. A rich man had more to invest, more wives, more return. This practice and its expectations live on.

Ndongo Passy and Grekpoubou are fortunate that their husband is affectionate and merely bemused by their determination to exercise their right to vote. But this good fortune ends when he dies unexpectedly.

In the CAR, Widows often find themselves on their own and vulnerable: evicted, their possessions and their husband’s property stolen by his family with no recourse. Like them, our fictional widows must contend with their husband’s relatives, who lock them out of their home and attempt to frame them for murder. But Ndongo Passy, the older of the two wives, is not taking it without a fight. She plans to save her co-wife and their combined five children with whatever it takes: her wits, her connections, or an axe.

Yabouza’s language is straightforward; there isn’t anything lyrical in her prose1. But the details are so vivid, the humour so sly. It’s the kind of book I want to put into people’s hands. Plus, the fact that she became a writer, and such a deft one, when all odds were stacked so high against her, is a dot short of a miracle.

Did she go to school? Yes, but not for long. When she was still young, her mother died and she had to take over care of her siblings. Education was out of the question. In the CAR, most people get little of it, especially girls. The literacy rate for women is 26% (for men it’s 49%).

Thinking about it hurts my heart. For even those who can read and write, where do they get materials? I am typing this on a mac; I bought Yabouza’s novel Co-Wives, Co-Widows from one of many bookstores in my city; I could also download it from my library and read it on my iPad. This is what I have. Is there a bookstore in the CAR? Maybe? Yabouza, who lived in Bangui, the capital, only mentions buying a book from a street stall. A search on Google maps brings up nothing but a Christian store that sells saints and pamphlets.

The CAR is in the bottom five of all the countries in the world in every economic and social index I could find: poverty, human development, health, life expectancy, literacy. Conflicts are interethnic (there being 80 different ethnic groups in this country of about 5,000,000) and religious (Muslim vs Christian). Corruption is rampant, violence routine. There have been two civil wars, one that’s still ongoing, and so many coups I can’t keep track of them. Every few years, the next coup totally destroys whatever has been built up since the last one.

The current government, under President Touadéra, has control--to the degree it has any--only over the capital. Elsewhere, opposing militias are still fighting it out, and war lords have created their own fiefdoms to exploit resources for as long as they can hold onto their territory. It’s a beautiful country loaded with natural resources, and it’s entirely dysfunctional.

For most people, work, when it can be had, is rudimentary. I watched a video about a single father who earns a meagre living by diving off a rented canoe to dig up sand from the river bottom. This is how cement is made, using sand brought by canoe. He gets head-aches and pain in his neck from carrying the heavy basket on his head to the landing site. And he’s glad to have it, given that the alternative is no food for his children.

Like Ndongo Passy and Grekpoubou, women sell what they can make, but they’re subject to their husband’s orders. Legally, he’s the head of the house.

As a teenager, Yabouza entered into an arranged marriage. She immediately became pregnant with twins, both girls, and three more daughters followed. They had no running water, no electricity. And when her husband died, she had to raise her children on her own:

To be able to feed them, I became a hairdresser. The work was poorly paid, but it enabled me to send my daughters to school. Besides, working in a hair salon was a breath of fresh air in my life.

It gave her space away from home, where she was surrounded by her husband’s family, offering no help but always scrutinizing her. The salon was a place to make friends and to hear stories that would inspire her writing.

The first time her life was endangered, it was because of interethnic violence, not her work. In 2001, there was an attempted coup attributed to her ethnic group, the Yakoma. Hundreds were killed, tens of thousands displaced. She writes:

A real hunt began for people of my tribe. I was also arrested. I escaped only thanks to a lucky coincidence; a policeman friend of mine let me escape.

I hid with my children in the forest near Bangui, where there was nothing but trees. And snakes! We slept on the ground, with the canopy of trees above us as our only protection. Fortunately, acquaintances provided us with a little food at the time, just enough to survive.“

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A few years later, by chance, she encountered Yves Pinguilly, a prolific French writer who mainly wrote for children. Like her, he had little formal education but developed a passion for literature as well as for Africa, where he travelled as a writer and a librarian.

She’d recognized him from his author picture in a book she’d bought from a used-goods kiosk. They got into a conversation, he found her personal story riveting, and he proposed that they co-write a trilogy based on her life. Published in France, these came out between 2008 and 2010, and gave her the confidence that would allow her to later write books on her own.

At the time, she considered herself fortunate:

Not everyone is as lucky as me. I am a hairdresser who writes short stories in between shifts at the salon, and whose work was discovered unexpectedly by a publishing house. A widow who, out of the blue, was offered a deal for writing a book and who received an advance payment that anywhere else in the world would have been pocket money, but was close to a fortune in Bangui. Publishing my first novel allowed me to have electricity installed in my modest little hut. I even got some electronic devices, a TV and a fridge, because my children begged me to.

Co-Wives, Co-widows draws on the real and all too common plight of widows in the CAR, but unlike the co-written trilogy, it’s not autobiographical. Yabouza says:

It’s true that a writer’s life always slips a little between her words, but this story is completely imagined. I believe that whoever writes must invent... A writer friend...always repeats to me that “the writer is an inventor of truths.” I invent truth in order to speak forcefully of the fate of women...Let’s say that I am the sister of my heroines, that we share much, but not everything.

The name we know her by--Adrienne Yabouza--is a pen name. Perhaps she hoped it would shield her. While she was writing in the CAR, the regime was imprisioning, torturing and killing opponents. Journalists who criticized the regime were convicted for defamation.

This put Yabouza, too, in danger:

I wrote about my everyday life and what it means to be a woman in my country. And I wrote about the incumbent dictator and his clique.

But my honest words were both a curse and a blessing: on the one hand, they helped me discover my passion for writing, and on the other, they soon brought me my first death threats, which were soon followed by action.

My daughters and I were attacked at home by armed men. To this day, I do not know whether the perpetrators were rebels from Chad or militias loyal to the government. The attackers ransacked our house and would certainly have raped us if our neighbours had not rushed to our aid.

She and her children fled to The Republic of Congo. She applied for asylum in France and was able to get a visa, but her children, who were then adults, were turned down. It was very difficult for her to leave them behind, knowing that if she returned to CAR to see them, she’d lose her refugee status.

Yabouza currently lives in France, where she has a 10 year permit for political asylum, writing and keeping herself fed by working as a caregiver for the elderly. She misses her children and grandchildren, the food, the landscape.

Her life is still precarious. The 10 year residency permit was issued in 2016; it’ll be up for review this year, and I can’t find any information on it. Yabouza is elusive. She has no social media presence. I found only one interview with her on YouTube and it’s an old one with Yves Pinguilly. I was able to dig up two first person essays by searching the web archive. Maybe, for security reasons, she has chosen not to be more visible or maybe she doesn’t have the time or energy between work and writing. What we have is the gift of her work.

Yabouza says that “writing and hairdressing have style in common... the words of a novel must be well braided or well straightened!”

Co-wives and Co-widows, translated by Rachael McGill (Dedalus Books 2021), was a delight to read. It’s a powerful little book that has stayed with me, creating a thread that connects me to the author and her countrywomen. There are threads connecting the author to others in this project, too. Like Yabouza, though 100 years ago, Elizabeth Arnim was using humour to write about serious issues. Contemporary with Yabouza, in Botswana, Unity Dow’s novels deal with women’s struggles in the legal system. And Djaïli Amadou Amal, from Cameroon, taught me about the impact of polygamy and about the Fulani people, who also figure in this novel. These threads create a web.

If I was one of the social media influencers who have a million followers, I would tell them to buy this book and it would have a material impact on the author’s life. But in my small web, I can only hope that by shining a light on her work someone will see it, read it, and so extend our web a little bit more.

Right there, that’s the paradox of her life: lovers energized her, they were necessary to her feeling alive; but how much they took from her, too.

She was a popular, critically acclaimed writer: intelligent and talented. Her beauty and charisma attracted aristocrats; she was a countess twice over. Men chased after her and she loved that, but the ones who caught her--oh, they turned beastly once she let them in.

The relationship that most intrigues me began in her mid-fifties. The man, nearly thirty years younger than her, would become an important figure in the publishing world. Their relationship lasted about a decade, and in that decade, she wrote book after book. I’ve read several of them, loving each one more than the last, including the book she’s best remembered for: The Enchanted April.

In it, four women escape their confined lives, their obnoxious men, and the dreary English climate to spend a month in an isolated Italian villa surrounded by sunshine, brilliant skies, and fragrant flowers. When it comes to their relationships, Arnim’s cutting wit is on full display, but then the tone shifts into a poetic rhapsody of beauty and spiritual transformation: fear to love, repression to desire, being used to being cherished. It isn’t meant to be realistic; it’s an enchanted place and moment. The possibility of enchantment is uplifting, like an adult version of The Secret Garden. And it comes, too, out of her spirituality, her sense of the divine as immersion in oneness and beauty.

She wrote this novel two years after leaving an abusive marriage.

Let’s step back a bit, and see where von Arnim was coming from. She was born Mary Annette Beauchamp in 1866 Australia, the youngest of five. Her father was a successful businessman, who decided to move them to England when she was three. He spent months away from his family, sometimes years at a time, traveling around the world, and Arnim wrote in her diary that they were happier when he was gone. We don’t know why; there might have been more in her letters and journals, but a lot of her papers were burnt after she died.2

She was well educated and a gifted musician. At 22, she was still unmarried (oh the horror!). Her mother believed it was because Arnim was sharp-tongued, opinionated, moody and strong-willed. The girl actually intended to have a musical career, imagine that!

Her parents devised the solution: a European tour. New men would be encountered. One of them would have to be to their daughter’s liking. At a musical evening in Italy, she was introduced--ooh-la-la, Mama will faint with pleasure--to a friend of Wagner’s, the Prussian Graf (Count) Henning von Arnim-Schlagenthin.

Yes, that is where the von Arnim comes from. But Mary Beauchamp never used it as a pen name. Her first novel, Elizabeth and her German Garden, was published anonymously, and her subsequent books were published as “the author of Elizabeth and her German Garden.” But all that would start when she was in her thirties and the mother of five.

Henning was fifteen years older than her. He played the piano, was sophisticated, cultured, of a higher social class. He courted not only her but her family, putting them up in expensive hotels, buying them gifts, escorting them to glittering society events. They believed he was wealthy. He was not.

After they married, Elizabeth discovered that he was conservative, controlling, and difficult. In her diary, she wrote that when she accidentally hurt him, he “fell upon me with his fist and much thumping. Much grieved and shocked.”

They fought over the size of their family. She didn’t enjoy getting pregnant and didn’t want to be tied down, but he was determined to keep going until he got a son. After three daughters, she managed to keep him at arm’s length for a while, and in her early 30s she wrote the novel that began her career with a smash bestseller: Elizabeth and Her German Garden. With her writing income, she was now supporting the family while her husband’s attempts to resuscitate his fortunes failed.

But he wanted to keep trying for the boy, and eventually he got his way. To her dismay, two more pregnancies followed. But she kept writing, creating a life that was increasingly separate from her husband’s.

Young men were always falling in love with her, despite the fact that she sometimes bullied them. In 1906, when she was 40, she got a governess job for a few months as research for a novel, and the 20 year old son of her employers fell for her so hard, she fled. One of the tutors she hired for her children, Charles Erskine Stuart, was devoted to her until his death in WW1. The other tutors, EM Forster and Hugh Walpole, who’d become great novelists in their own right, were gay, so no romantic involvement, but they looked up to, were intimidated by, and admired her. Then there was HG Wells, known as a genius with a long-suffering wife and an insatiable appetite for women.

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Their letters hint that they had assignations in the last couple of years of her marriage when she spent extended periods in England. For Arnim, a woman’s sexual desire is fundamental, both as expressed in her work and in her life.

After her husband died in 1910, her relationship with Wells was out in the open. At the time, she rebranded her persona in private life as Elizabeth, asking friends and family to use that name. Fictional Elizabeth was calmer, nicer, perhaps less gifted and certainly less snappish. Changing names did not make Arnim any calmer.

Her relationship with Wells was tumultuous, and it coincided with a dry period in her work, during which she built her dream house in Switzerland. Typically, he pursued her with amorous declarations. Once he had her, he was mean (and carried on with other women, including Rebecca West). Whenever she cut him off, he’d woo her again:

You are the eyes of the whole universe to me. If it wasn’t for you the whole thing would be an eyeless monster, a mask, a hood. You spirit of the inmost...I’d love you if I was being dropped out of a tenth floor window...

Yet when the relationship was over, really over, no more getting back together after a vicious fight, Elizabeth felt desolated.

But not for long! She invited a British earl, Lord Francis Russell (older brother of Bertrand Russell), to her chalet for Christmas, along with some other guests. She knew he liked her. And she was ready to like him. Francis the aristocrat had breeding and manners. He was the opposite of HG Wells, the socialist with a big voice and big appetite.

A new love! How fun! He wrote her adolescent, effusively romantic love letters:

your dear face...your dear little straying hairs...Sweetest and dearest, my well beloved angel and love, delight and idol...I love you, I love you, I love you – it rings in my ears, it throbs in my veins...and wants only a touch to blaze to heaven...to me this is no idle sport, no casual aside, but an upheaval, a bursting, a flow of red hot love. Are you frightened? Do you want to be loved so much?

Oh, she did. Being wanted was always her weak spot. Love letters like his showed just how much he wanted her, a sort of worship, a drug that shut off her brain. She wrote to him that their love was destined, they were twin souls.

And he was ready to agree:

My perfect love, my adorable sweetheart...I knew I could trust you twin soul ...Darling, darling, darling, I am a young man today and my heart is atwitter with the spring...

(Honestly, I want to throttle him and shake her and say, Smell the bullshit! I mean Wells was no saint by any measure, but at least his love letters were a cut above.)

Francis was fifty. She was in her late 40s. Minor detail: he was married. But she assumed that his wife, like HG Wells’, would cooperate with an open marriage. To her surprise, Francis insisted on a divorce; he wanted to get married (for the 3rd time) to Elizabeth. The fact that he expected her to finance the divorce--being another broke aristocrat--did not raise any red flags. He wanted to be with her all the time, away from others. To her, this was proof of affection. She fell into a kind of trance in his company, incomprehensible to those who knew her and even to herself.

I get it. When I was in my early 20s, I felt the same way. There is something almost supernaturally seductive about a man’s all-encompassing devotion. You feel secure at last, no danger of abandonment here. You don’t realize that his devotion is vampiric; he’s latched onto you and is sucking away. When he turns cruel, you’re confused, depleted, unable to take action.

There were four terrible years of marriage. It was WW1. Arnim’s youngest daughter was stuck in Germany, where she’d gone to school, and at the age of sixteen died of pneumonia.

Arnim was devastated by the loss. It took time for her to absorb it. But finally, she extracted herself from the trance and left Francis, retreating to her chalet in bucolic Switzerland. Soon, she was working on Vera.

It’s a short, powerful novel about narcissism, psychological control, and the brutality of emotional abuse. The protagonist, Lucy, is a young woman in deep grief after the loss of her father. Her mother died when she was young, and she has no siblings. This is how Arnim describes her mental state:

Into this emptiness Lucy stared, motionless herself, as if she had been carved in stone. There was not a sail on the sea, nor a line of distant smoke from any steamer, neither was there once the flash of a bird’s wing brushing across the sky. Movement seemed smitten rigid. Sound seemed to have gone to sleep...And she felt nothing.
- Chapter 1, Vera

Into her profound grief steps Everard, a middle-aged man, who has recently lost his wife Vera under mysterious circumstances.3

Arnim’s fiction often depicts relationships with big age gaps between partners, which she had experienced herself. But unlike her, Lucy is simple, sweet, and, honestly, not very bright. Even so, her instincts are sound. Her first reaction to Everard crossing her boundaries is to flinch away, but as soon as she learns that he’s recently lost his wife, she’s overcome by pity. She believes, falsely, that he’s as grief stricken as she is. The author enters Everard’s POV, too, so the reader knows that he is aggrieved, rather than grieved, resentful that there were any doubts at the inquest about how his wife died. He’s eager to move on, and every self-involved reaction is exposed for us to see.

But not for Lucy. Her pity turns into love. All too quickly, she comes to feel as safe in his arms, a world made up of the two of them, as she did when her world consisted of herself and her father. Everard is handsome, and unlike the men in her father’s circle, he doesn’t overwhelm her with intellectual conversation. He has a short answer for everything, and his way is the right way. All she has to do is take it in, which seems easy because Lucy is too naive to see what that’s going to lead to.

The path to misery is subtle, and Arnim writes the trajectory of control and abuse not only from personal knowledge but with the mastery of craft. She is so good at getting into the emotional states and psychology of very different characters.

This is a darker book than her others, and yet, from time to time, I had to laugh out loud. Here is Lucy’s aunt sharing her concerns with a friend:

“After all,’ she said almost entreatingly, ‘what can be better than a devoted husband?’

And the widow, who had had three and knew what she was talking about, replied with the large calm of those who have finished and can in leisure weigh and reckon up: ‘None.’“
-Chapter 10, Vera

Arnim was now in her mid-fifties. Enter a twenty-something Cambridge student.

The illegitimate son of a Colonel Reeves, Alexander Frere-Reeves (later just Frere) grew up in an orphanage. In WW1, after fighting in the trenches, he became a pilot, and when the war ended, he attended Cambridge, where he was editing the student magazine. He was poor and brilliant, and after meeting him at a party, Arnim hired him for the summer to organize her library.

He did much more than that, keeping her company when she wanted it, and when she was working, he ensured that her many guests were happy and out of her way. They liked each other. Really liked each other. But the age difference!

She held back, but she could never hold back very long from a gifted man’s attentions. They became an item, and her next novel has become many people’s comfort read: The Enchanted April.

If Vera comes out of the ominousness of her 2nd marriage, The Enchanted April emerges from her recovery from it in this new relationship. She was ebullient. For the moment.

It was an even exchange. He made her feel young and alive. She helped him financially and introduced him to her considerable connections, ensuring he got his foot in the door of a major publisher. None of her young men were boy-toys. In a few years Alexander would become managing editor at Heinemann, where he’d work with Graham Greene, Sinclair Lewis, Somerset Magham, DH Lawrence, Noel Coward, Georgette Heyer, and John Steinbeck among others.

The novel Love mines this relationship with great humour, verve, and ultimately pathos. It was my next read after The Enchanted April because I was fascinated by the gender reversal. There are endless books about men in midlife crisis and the young women attracted to them. But a deep exploration of an older woman? And this one was written 100 years ago.

This novel, too, however, softens the gnarly edges of Arnim’s reality. The age gap is smaller--twenty years to her nearly thirty. The protagonist, Catherine, is lively, independent, attractive and as petite as Arnim but a respectable widow in her mid-forties. Unlike Arnim, she has no connections or wealth to make her attractive to a young man. She meets him at the theatre, and they’re drawn to each other by chemistry and character; there’s nothing material to be gained on either side. In the more usual course of things, he would be pursuing someone his own age, like her daughter. But Catherine’s daughter has married a clergyman her mother’s age. These parallel relationships elicit very different reactions, making explicit society’s double standards.

The first half of the novel, the courtship, is funny and as delightful as The Enchanted April. I also loved Arnim’s insight into the relationship between parent and adult children:

Oh, these family tangles and tendernesses, these unexpected inflamed places that mustn’t be touched, these complicated emotions, and hurtings, and avoidances and concealments, these loving intentions and these wretched results!
-Chapter 13, Love

In the early phase of the courtship, Catherine is amused by her young man. Once the attachment gets serious, however, she becomes infatuated with him and finds herself, much to her dismay, insecure and jealous.

Arnim was self-conscious about her aging looks and her level of energy. Like his counterpart in the novel, Alexander Frere-Reeves got tired of lounging around reading poetry aloud. He craved more activity and she couldn’t keep up. (I suspect this wasn’t only a matter of her age but the era, too. Young women in the 1920s were flappers playing tennis and dancing the Charleston. At their time of life, in the 1880s, Arnim wore a bustle under a full-length, multilayered gown and waved a fan )

She underwent radiation therapy, which was new at the time and being offered as a cure for everything, including aging. It just made her--like her character Catherine, whom she puts through it, too--tired. At some point, Arnim had a face-lift. Catherine, instead, has magic, expensive makeup treatments that cover her wrinkles and hide the bags under her eyes.

Arnim struggled with how to end Love and was never satisfied with the ambiguous ending she did write. But I think it had to be ambiguous because her relationship with Alexander was still in the midst of push-and-pull. They separated and came back together over and over, neither fully ready to relinquish the other, for several more years. To resolve the fictional relationship would have required her to examine her own more deeply than she was willing to go.

The real ending to Love is provided by a novel that seems to have a completely different story. It came out just as Arnim’s relationship with Alexander was ending. This is the last of her books I read, and it’s my favourite: Expiation.

This book is witty, sly, wise, and sharp; a social critique and a psychological exploration. Imagine Jane Austen with a few loose buttons.

Expiation is the story of Milly Botts, a woman who’s committed adultery. It isn’t about her marriage or the affair, but about how the people in her life react when they find out. Over the course of the novel, family members, not knowing the full story, project their hidden desires and anxieties onto Milly, changing them and changing her:

Milly is an ordinary, middle-class woman. She’s small, quiet, neat, seemingly compliant, a perfect wife in the suburb where her husband and his many siblings are pillars of the community. Up on a hill, overlooking them, the matriarch of the family lives in a modest home.

As the novel begins, Milly’s husband has died, and the affair is discovered after his will is read. Everyone gets in a flap except old Mrs. Botts:

It seemed a pity they didn’t realize, and that nobody could make them realize, that in the end it all wouldn’t have mattered a bit...and that they might just as well have been kind and happy together on this particular afternoon...and together comfortably eaten the nice soup and sandwiches...Pity to waste everything like this, and all just so as to be angry and say unkind things.
- Chapter 2, Expiation

Milly feels that the affair made it possible for her to continue a life with her husband that would otherwise ben unbearable. As old Mrs. Botts believes, “till a woman had been through a husband...she didn’t really know what God could do to her” (chapter 2, Expiation). And the affair, once passionate, had reached such a quiet stage, it could barely be characterized as an affair:

Didn’t time, if there were enough of it, end by transmuting everything? Did not the very slang of one generation—so did her thoughts anxiously wander in search of reassurance—become the polite language of the next?... Arthur [was] just a dear, very intimate friend —really her only one—and the love-making, which had notably quietened during the second and third years, and by the fourth was mere affectionate routine...after which they composed themselves to tea and talk on calm things like excavations, which was what Arthur in his off times was chiefly interested in—the love-making latterly become quite unidentifiable as such.
- Chapter 3, Expiation

And, yet, now that it’s been discovered, she is made to see herself as shameful.

Was she really wicked? Of course she was. The Botts knew all about it by this time. It was their knowing that made her wicked; it was Ernest’s having found out.“
- Chapter 3, Expiation

Though she resists, the pressure of her husband’s family succeeds in putting her to shame, and Milly attempts, in her own distinct way to expiate her sin. To her mind, every attempt is unsuccessful, though she makes life easier for everyone she encounters, including the rigid sister who’s turned the difficulties of her hard-scrabble life into a matter of religious pride.

Throughout the novel, old Mrs. Botts observes the action with wonderful, gentle wisdom, wishing that her family would pay attention to it, not for her own sake, but to save them from anguish. She knows the path to expiation, and it isn’t what anyone expects, least of all Milly. But it does arrive in time, and with it the “great peace and freedom” that Arnim wrote about in her 1933 diary.

In 1941, Arnim passed away painlessly. Her casket was picked out by Alexander Frere’s second wife.

Like other accomplished women writers who were well-loved in their time, Elizabeth was forgotten for decades. In the 1980s, the feminist press Virago, which resurrected the work of many great women writers, embarked on publishing her work. They chose Elizabeth von Arnim as the author’s name, and so it’s been ever since.

I wasn’t surprised to see them. In preparation for the trip, I researched literary women in ancient Rome, and they were the only ones I’d found.

They weren’t transparent, but shimmered around the edges, especially the hair, like the halos I’d soon see in countless churches.

Sulpicia 1 lived in the early part of the reign of August Caesar, about 30 BCE, and she wore her hair in the style that was popularized by his wife and his sister: sides brought back in a bun and front rolled into a loop on the top.

She had a pretty face, symmetrical features, bowed lips, brows surprisingly thick for someone dead. She wore sandals. Her toes were long and elegant.

“So you were married,” I said. Unmarried girls wore their hair loose or in braids, I knew.

Sulpicia 2 snorted. She had a round, expressive face. It radiated scorn. “So she’d like you to think.” Her hair was in curls, the fashion of her time; they both wore stolas, the long robes of married women.

I was relieved to be on my feet again as we walked toward the AirBnB. I have travel anxiety, plus I’d been wearing a mask for over twelve hours, pulling it down just to reveal my confused face at the malfunctioning biometric machine at the airport in Rome. One of the attendants hurrying people along told me to join the line for passport control. I stalked ahead of my family, embarrassed at my failure to get along with the machine. At 69, embarrassment is also anxiety that I messed up because I’m old, and my people will see that I’m old, and I’m supposed to be the one taking care of them. But pass or fail at the machine made no difference. We all had to go through passport control, so what was the point of lining up and being yelled at while the machine repeatedly said try again, exactly?

While I talked to my ghost friends, my husband, daughter and son-in-law were consulting their phones to figure out the way through the streets of Rome. I’d been instructed not to join in because I have no sense of direction, even with a map. But as soon as I caught up with them, my ghosts faded into the landscape.

Rome smelled of orange blossoms. I didn’t see my ghost friends for a couple of days but the layers of history were magical.

I loved seeing people play basketball, paying no attention to the old Roman wall next to the court or the colosseum behind them. And on top of the Theatre of Marcellus, built in the time of Sulpicia 1, apartments were built several centuries ago. People still lived in them. Sometimes homes were built right into old Roman structures, and there were more recent buildings abutting ancient walls.

The city also smelled of urine, but only when standing next to certain walls. Public toilets, even at the train station or in McDonald’s, cost a euro or €1.50. Men have the option of saving a buck and clearly many did as I discovered over the next few days: using modern walls and renaissance marble columns as backsplash, including right outside St Peter’s Square in the Vatican.

My ghosts rejoined me the day we went to the Forum. I was looking at the Temple of Peace, built from the spoils of sacked Jerusalem by enslaved people who’d been conquered. The dark side of Ancient Rome’s glory is that it was, like America, built by the labour of those who’d been enslaved, as battle booty or through banditry. As many as 1 in 3 Italians were enslaved. I felt strange when I thought about it. I ought to be disturbed, rather than impressed, but in fact I was impressed by the scale and grandeur and age, even though my own ancestors had been the enslaved people building this temple. As a woman, I would have given birth to enslaved offspring.

But here I was, free to travel across the ocean in a miraculous sky vehicle, one of the approximately 22 million tourists visiting Rome every year, presumably half of them women.

My friends were bickering.

“Enough with the Forum. I want to see the baths. You’re always going on about how much better yours were than mine. Prove it,” Sulpicia 1 said.

She wrote love poetry:

Love has come at last, such love that to hide it in shame
would be worse than being spoken of for showing it.
Won over by my Muse, Venus of Cythera,
brought him, and placed him here in my arms...
I delight in my sin: I loathe composing my looks
for public opinion: let them declare worth meets worth.

“After the Forum,” Sulpicia 2 said.

“Oh, the Forum, the Forum. My boyfriend was always going on about it. Who cares!”

In her time, the Forum was a seriously male place where serious civic functions occurred. It had the dignity of senators, of the toga. There were also also priestesses, matrons, female attendants, shopkeepers, beggars, and prostitutes, but they were supposed to keep out of the way. Even representations of elite women--portraits, sculptures--were absent.

“What about the Vestal Virgins?” Sulpicia 2 asked.

“You want me to see the temple for women who swear they won’t have sex for 30 years? That’s hilarious.” She turned to me. “She writes erotic poetry about horny women.”

“About my husband,” Sulpicia 2 said. “Why shouldn’t I be horny for him? I liked him. He was good in bed. And I write satire. What do you have against the vestals? They had influence!”

“So they could ride a chariot thing. Who cares!”

“They could pardon you if you were on your way to an execution, just by looking at you. If you weren’t already dead you might think that’s worth caring about.”

As we walked toward it, she told us that the Temple and House of the Vestal Virgins is very old. It was first built about 700 BCE, but was rebuilt a number of times. Inside the temple was an eternal flame in the charge of the Vestals. If they broke their oath of chastity, they were sentenced to death; for minor failures of duty, they could be whipped. But they commanded respect, got a good pension, were equal to elites, guarded emperors’ wills, and could intercede on someone’s behalf. When we were standing in front of it, her face fell.

“That isn’t what it looks like,” she said.

“Because it’s just the ruins now,” I said.

“I know that, you small-witted Barbarian. My brain isn’t in a rectangle I carry around.” I didn’t point out that her brain was 2000 year old worm food. “This isn’t what I remember. Maybe it’s the wrong place.” She glanced around as if trying to get her bearings.

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I surreptitiously checked my phone. “It’s because the temple you remember burnt down,” I said. “This was built 200 CE.”

“What’s CE?” Sulpicia 1 asked.

“Christian era,” I said. “AD? Anno Domine? Year of our Lord?” She looked at me blankly. “Jesus Christ?”

Still blank. I forgot she died before the Christian era.

“Never mind. They used some of the old bits there...See? It was built by Julia Domna, the wife of the emperor Septimius Severus,” I said.

Sulpicia 1 looked skeptical. “Built by a woman? Come on.”

“Why come on? Your Octavia had a portico built,” Sulpicia 2 said. “Not inside the Forum, but still.”

Sulpicia 1 shook her head. “Augustus just named it after her.”

“Not just named,” Sulpicia 2 snapped. “In the empire, women had rights. They counted. You think anyone would remember your poetry at all if the Republic had continued? With their precious senate and their unbeatable army and their adoration of Athens where women were kept indoors and out of sight? In the empire, men bathed. They realized oh, bathing with women, yeah, nice. They aren’t just a pair of legs with an opening for babies to pop out. They even put portraits of women and statues of them in the precious Forum. So, yes, your Octavia was responsible for the portico, the temples in the courtyard, all of it. She decided on both Greek and Latin libraries. It was a whole thing.”

While I was looking up Octavia on my phone, the ghosts disappeared, and my husband and the kids joined me.

It was a long way to the Baths of Caracalla, and it was a warm day in April--what would be lovely summer weather in Toronto, the sky a brilliant blue. The baths of Caracalla were built 100 years or so after Sulpicia 2’s day. They’re immense; they could accommodate 1600 bathers at a time. I craned my neck to see the top of the enormous structures.

After traipsing through the entire complex, I was tired. There was a park outside the ruins of the baths. Hot and tired, I sat in the shade under a tree, reading about Roman baths while clouds gathered and the rest of my family kept going.

Early baths in the republic seem to have been segregated or men only. But as public baths became more and more an integral part of Roman life, this began to change. When Sulpicia 1 was alive, separate facilities were abandoned. As the baths became larger and more prominent, women’s rights were increasing, and elite women were building temples and porticos, first outside the Forum and then inside it, the heart of Rome.

In 65 CE, around the time of Sulpicia 2’s birth, the Baths of Nero were new, and Seneca was complaining that baths nowadays were too fancy:

For why should men elaborately fit out that which costs a penny (quadrans), and was invented for use, not merely for delight?...It is stated by those who have reported to us the old-time ways of Rome that the Romans washed only their arms and legs daily. . . and bathed all over only once a week. Here someone will retort: “Yes; pretty dirty fellows they evidently were! How they must have smelled!” But they smelled of the camp, the farm and heroism.

Whether in small local baths or in huge, lavish ones built by later emperors, admission was cheap. Everyone went, regardless of class. They were communal in the broad sense, and community (unlike in Ancient Athens where women were secluded) was not limited to men. They were gorgeous facilities, the exterior walls clad in marble, the interior furnished with painted marble columns, seating areas, sculptures, mosaics and frescoes.

Sulpicia 1 might have met her lover in a communal bath, I thought. Nudity was not a big deal in Rome; it wasn’t even on anyone’s radar as an issue.

Access to the baths was a big deal. The major baths were complexes with libraries, dining facilities, places to hang out, gyms, saunas, hot and cold baths. They were used for business, socializing and intellectual pursuits as well as hygiene. (You can see an example of a baths complex in this Ancient Rome in 3d video at 16:35.)

The husband of Sulpicia 2 was a patron of the poet Marcus Valerius Martialis, who admired her writing. He had this to say about the baths:

When I compliment your face, when I admire your legs and hands, you are accustomed to say, Galla: “Naked I shall please you more,” and yet you continually avoid taking a bath with me. Surely you are not afraid, Galla, that I shall not please.

(He also objected to enslaved men in the baths wearing a sheath around their genitals, obscuring his view.)

When I looked up from my phone, I saw that my ghosts were sitting on either side of me. They laughed at my exhaustion.

“I though barbarians were tougher,” Sulpicia 2 said.

“Not old barbarians,” I replied.

“Did you hear the story about a man going to the Baths of Nero?”

“Not that one again,” Sulpicia 1 groaned, but I told her friend I hadn’t heard it.

“When he left home, he had one child, but after he left the baths, he would soon find out he was the father of two more.” Sulpicia 2 laughed so hard, her whole body shook and the shimmer around her hair was a blazing gold. “Isn’t this nicer than your baths?” she asked. “Admit it.”

“Bigger isn’t always better,” Sulpicia 1 said. They both laughed. “I would have married, if he hadn’t cheated on me. I miss him. Those hands...”

“That’s what baths are for. The massages...Did you ever have the full massage?” Sulpicia 2 said.

“Maybe.”

“When I had too many guests and needed a break, I’d go to the baths at night. Have a sauna, lift some weights. And then the anointer would pass his hand over my crista. Very skilful he was. I was very refreshed when I went back to my guests. Pink cheeks. I looked five years younger.”

Sulpicia 2’s satire and erotic poetry were popular and critically acclaimed in her lifetime and for several hundred years afterward, but are lost to us now. I would suggest erased; it wouldn’t sit well with Christian ideas of women’s modesty.

The emperor Antonius Pius built a temple in the Forum to his deified wife, Faustina, after her death in 140 CE. Fifty years later, the emperor’s wife, Julia Domna, was herself in charge of rebuilding the temple for the Vestals. By the time the Baths of Caracalla (who reigned from 211-217 CE) were built, elite and free women in Rome had rights they wouldn’t possess again in Europe until the late 19th century, and sexual freedom that would only be exceeded post-pill in the 20th.

But by now, we’re at the beginning of the Christian era in Rome. Christian men debate the appropriateness of communal bathing. We get Didascalia admonishing women not to bathe with men unless they have no other choice and then to do so “with modesty and shame, and with bashfulness and moderation.”

In De Habitu Virginum, Cyrprianus (Bishop of Carthage from 249 to 258 CE) says that virgins who go to communal baths “prostitute to eyes that are curious for pleasure...they disgracefully behold naked men and are seen naked by men.” (My italics.) Even if they are modest and look at no one, “you yourself are gazed upon immodestly.”

And here we have the male gaze defined and made the responsibility of women, while the female gaze is curtained. It plagues us to this day.

By the middle of the 4th century, Christian men are prohibited from bathing with women as it being the greatest “reproach among the gentiles.”

This negativity about baths wasn’t universal among Christians. Jovinianus, a Christian monk, wrote in the late 4th century that he approved mixed bathing and he gained many disciples. The bishop Sisinnius was known to attend public baths twice a day and said he didn’t go a third time only because it wouldn’t be convenient.

Jerome (345-420 CE) was an opponent of Jovinianus, who was controversial mostly for theological reasons (ie believing that childbirth couldn’t have left Mary’s hymen intact). Jerome was adamantly against Christian virgins going to public baths even if they were segregated, even with married women because he thought pregnancy was revolting, and anyway, he insisted, a virgin should blush at the idea of seeing her own naked skin.

Jerome’s attitude prevailed. Facilities moved from collective bathing to individual tubs and segregated baths. The Church continued to denigrate women’s sexual feelings through the middle ages.

As the Roman empire fell apart, marble cladding was stripped off buildings and columns were repurposed. Many old buildings were converted into churches and new ones raised, demonstrating the church’s wealth and power with the awe-inspiring architecture and art of cathedrals. Not baths. Not libraries. Not annointers.

I find it strange at this moment, remembering the streets of Rome, thinking how nudity was once taken for granted there, while now nuns wearing habits and priests in cassocks are all around, their celibacy and sexlessness the ultimate signal of their holiness.

I left my ghost friends wandering through the Baths of Caracalla. They were walking arm in arm, their quarrel made up, heads close together as they laughed over something I couldn’t understand.

Notes:

• The information about Roman baths comes from “Women in Roman Baths” by Roy Bowen Ward, Theological Review, 2011. It’s also available at Jstor. All quotes are from that article.

  • The joke that Sulpicia 2 tells about the man with one child is taken from an epigram of Nicarchus that Ward records in his paper

  • Sulpicia 2’s anecdote about going to the baths when tired of guests is drawn from Juvenal’s Saturae as reported by Ward. Juvenal was a satirist, like Sulpicia 2, but his writing was misogynistic, particularly in relation to married women. I imagine that in Sulpicia 2’s voice, a story like his would have a different slant than he intended.

• The information about women in the Forum comes from “Women and Gender in the Forum Romanum” by Marty T. Boatwright, Transactions of the American Philological Association, 2011. Also available at Jstor.

• Information about the hairstyles comes from The National Roman Museum

I’m going for three and only three reasons. 1) I want my lovely husband to see old stuff because he’s an ancient Roman history nerd. 2) We’ll be travelling with daughter and her partner, and any mom would leap over mountains to spend time with their adult children, especially if said children are like mine. 3) Polishing my marbles. I’ve heard that travel is good for the brain. However, my preferred radius is within walking distance, and I’d willingly let my marbles tarnish if it weren’t for the other reasons.

That being said, you know what’s making me a little excited underneath all this anxiety? I bet you’re thinking food, art, old buildings, canals! No, not that. It’s books.

The joy of reading books by women writers and the satisfaction of scratching my intense curiosity itch is offering me an off-ramp from anxiety. Or at least a much more scenic path through it. I’ve read two contemporary novels by Italian writers, as well as a classic novel by an Australian-British-German author set in Italy.1 And the one that’s given me the most food for thought is Eva Sleeps by Francesca Melandri.

In Italy, Melandri is a well-known writer, having been a successful script-writer (and documentary film-maker) for years. And then, in her early forties, she decided she was mature enough to tackle novels. Eva Sleeps was her first. It’s an ambitious work with multiple points-of-view and a dual timeline. She says that her experience in developing multiple story-lines for numerous characters in TV series prepared her, and it shows in how deftly she handles that in Eva Sleeps.

The protagonist, Eva, is ethnically German. She was born in Alto Adige, as the region is known in Italian, or Südtirol in German. This region at the northern boundary was lopped off mountainous Austria and handed over to Italy after WW1 as punishment for one and reward for the other. Nobody asked the locals what they wanted.

Eva grows up as an insider in her German community but an outsider in her country, Italy. For part of the year she lives with a foster family because her mother, Gerda, who got pregnant as a teenager, works in a resort town. Their relationship is intense, marked by separations while Gerda works and reunions when she’s off.

Gerda is also both insider, as a known member of the community, and outsider as a single mother. Having a child on her own makes her vulnerable while her beauty gives her privilege. She isn’t just pretty, she isn’t just beautiful, she is astoundingly beautiful. Men are awed by it, changed by it.

At least the good ones are. Gerda’s father is not one of the good ones. He is a silent, violent, unforgiving man, whose son--Gerda’s brother, Eva’s uncle--will become a terrorist.

There are two interwoven strands in Eva Sleeps. The present-day timeline is told from adult Eva’s point-of-view as she travels by train across the entire length of Italy, from north to south. We pass through Italy’s different regions--beautifully described--and meet Eva’s fellow passengers while she considers her life: the intensity of her childhood longing to see her mother, the tragic love she had for her gay cousin, the long-term affair with a married man, chosen because he isn’t fully available and so she can remain guarded.

The other narrative strand is historical, taking off from the experiences of three generations: Eva, her parents, her grandparents. But just as the train begins at one end of Italy and travels to the other, history is traced from a particular region’s concerns and conditions to all of Italy’s, culminating in the terrorism of the 1970s. South Tyrol is the match, but the whole country is on fire. How did that happen?

After WW1, fascism got its start in Italy under Mussolini, who provided a model for Hitler to follow and enlarge. It was Mussolini who developed the ideology of a dictator-led totalitarian state where all opposition is violently eliminated. He was a big fan of war, wanting to expand Italy’s territory, and in that, too, he provided an example for Hitler to expand on.

Mussolini came into power a hundred years ago, held it for 20 years, and his party ultimately gave rise to Italy’s current government. So, you could say that he was the father of modern Italy. A narcissistic, macho father who, like Putin, liked to show off his athletic prowess.

(As an aside, Mussolini was originally a socialist. Because he was all for the first world war and the socialist party was against it, he was kicked out. He did not like that.)

Socialism--with its slogan “workers of the world unite” is the natural enemy of fascism with its, “Nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.”

In Eva Sleeps, the impact of fascism’s rise on Hermann, Gerda’s father, is psychologically perceptive. It would have been simple to portray him as a man inherently attracted to violence. Instead, she made me feel his sadness, his loneliness, his vulnerability to being demeaned as a young man. And then she showed how fascism teaches him the pleasure of power, of inducing fear in others. After getting slapped by a party official,

despite the slap and the humiliation, or perhaps for that very reason, the badge, the fasces pin of party members began to gleam on Hermann’s collar. The local party officials looked on this favourably...
- “1925-1961,” Eva Sleeps

In Mussolini’s eyes, nation is understood to mean a particular ethnicity, not geography: Italy for Italians. Hence, under Mussolini, Italian Germans were “encouraged” to leave their homes and farms and make haste to some German nation.

However, despite being ethnically German, Hermann believes that he’s an exception because of his zealous embrace of fascism. He viciously beats up a neighbour who refuses to leave his farms and:

enthusiastically took part in the persecution organized by the regime against the Dableiber. With the blessing of Fascist party officials, he maimed heavy draft horses. He killed guard dogs. He smeared his own excrement on the jambs of the doors of those who weren’t planning on leaving.
- “1925-1961”, Eva Sleeps

During WW2, fascist Italy sided with fascist Germany, but at the end of the war, their fates were quite different. While Germany purged itself of Nazis, Italian fascists continued to run Italian bureaucracies just as they’d done during the war. And the mafia, which had been coopted by the American allies to use their criminal and organizational skills against the Nazis, continued to have many fingers in the political pie.

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The hot world war became the cold one, with the two great nuclear powers in opposition: America on one side, and, on the other, communist Russia (though it was as much a totalitarian state as fascist Italy had been), their friends lined up behind them. Unaligned countries were up for grabs, and there was rivalry between the great powers to get those countries into their orbit.

This resulted in a lot of spycraft, which made for good movies and novels, but not so-good terrorism. I still remember all the hijacking of airplanes in the 1970s, but as a kid, I wasn’t paying attention to what it was about.

Reading a novel makes it real, and knowing that I’m heading off to Italy, soon, even more so. About a third of the way through the novel, the first few words of the chapter titled “Kilometers 295-715” stopped me:

A year after the 1980 Bologna massacre...

I’m going to Bologna. What massacre?

It turns out that this was one of the last of many terrorist attacks. What’s called the “Years of Lead”2 in Italy began with a bombing in December of 1969 on Piazza Fontanna, a public square. It was supposedly the work of a far left anarchist group, but investigation showed that it was actually a result of infiltration by the far right. Even though Mussolini’s Italy had been defeated, his fascist values were alive and well.

The far-right was driving what they called a strategy of tension. The goal was to create chaos which would destabilize public order, thus leading to a call for greater security at the expense of personal freedom, says Vincenzo Vinciguerro, who should know: he was sentenced to life imprisonment after he confessed to the bombing. He and his associates hoped that the government would declare a state of emergency, and this would result in a coup, as had happened in Greece just a couple of years earlier. And the CIA supported it.

At the end of WW2, a clandestine “stay-behind” force organized by the CIA and NATO under “Operation Gladio” was left in western Europe to be activated if the Soviet Union invaded (as they did in the east: ie Hungary and Czechoslovakia). As Melandri writes in Eva Sleeps:

...Gladio--the secret paramilitary organization formed in Italy in the 1950s by the CIA in order to counter the advance of the Left--proved useful.

-”1963-1964”, Eva Sleeps

In Argentina, Brazil, and Greece (I didn’t know about Greece until I researched this), the CIA--the intelligence service of the “leader” of the free world--provided expertise and funds to would-be dictators. They were the enemy of communism, and “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” even if the friend kills and tortures their own people.

In Italy, the Communist party was pretty popular, and communist Yugoslavia was right across the border. To American intelligence, it didn’t seem a far-fetched idea that the country could move into Russia’s sphere.

During the years of lead, there were thousands of terrorist attacks by the far-right. Terrorists like Gerda’s brother saw themselves as powerful warriors, and even some of the soldiers defending Italy from them “said strange things and showed off too much...nostalgia for the Mussolini era.” (“1964,” Eva Sleeps)

There were also terrorist attacks by the far-left, which had no use for the Italian Communist Party because it wasn’t revolutionary enough. However, the attacks by the far-left were aimed at political targets, not at random public ones.

Bombs. Massacres. Attacks. Terrorists. Roadblocks. Planned coups. Cover-ups. Rumors about the involvement of secret services in dark deeds. And above all, the dead. Too many dead. In the streets, in banks, in police stations from which questioned people emerged dead, in crowded squares. It wasn’t a happy tune.
- “1973”, Eva Sleeps

And where was the Italian government in all this? It was paralyzed. The same party had been in power since the end of WW2, always getting more votes than any other party, but not enough to actually accomplish anything in government. The second most popular party with seats in the Italian parliament was the Communist Party but they were kept out of any actual governing.

There was one figure in this period who tried to end the stalemate and find a dynamic way forward. If Mussolini was the self-aggrandizing, violent father of the country, then Prime Minister Aldo Moro was the protective, steady, caring one.

He was working on bringing the Communist Party into an active coalition in the government, and it was working. The party had let go of any allegiance to the Soviet Union and was keen on the promised positions they’d have in cabinet that would allow them to push the needs of ordinary people.

Italy was on the verge of something new. It was called the historic compromise. But history was cut short because Moro was kidnapped by the Red Brigade, a far-left group that didn’t want the official Communist Party to participate in democratic rule. Its goal was revolution, an armed uprising that would result in Italy leaving NATO.

Moro was held for five weeks; he wrote letters begging the government to negotiate with his kidnappers and obtain his release. The government refused. There is evidence that hints at CIA involvement in this refusal. Certainly American money went to support anti-communist candidates. It’s known that Henry Kissinger, the American Secretary of State, hated Moro. The Italian organization P2, a secret masonic lodge with people in top government, media, military and police positions, was known to have been involved in promoting the far-right. P2 members in the secret service were on the committee looking for Moro.

But these are all hints--there isn’t any proof. What we do know is that the Red Brigade assassinated Moro in 1978, and so the good father of Italy, the one who might have secured a different future was gone.

Eva’s story is driven by the search for the man who was briefly--like Moro was for Italy--the good father in her life. He could have married her mother; he could have been her stepfather; he nearly was; but conservative politics and social norms prevented it.

This man is Vito, a caring, steady, protective honourable soldier who comes from the far south to the far north to serve his nation. With him, Gerda is transformed, softened by his care, able to let down her guard, to trust. But when he returns to the south, she reverts to survival mode, to taking her pleasure as it comes, and she keeps him out of her daughter’s life.

When Eva was 16, he sent her a package that she never received, one that would have made all the difference in her life. It was the year that Moro was assassinated.

About writing, Melandri says that “Great literature is about creating this miracle of empathy between the writer and the reader.”

She succeeds. When I was reading Eva Sleeps, I was deeply struck by the way Melandri made me feel the significance of Moro’s assassination, the tragedy of it, not only for him and his family, but for all of Italy. In that moment, I saw this novel as not only having a dual timeline, but operating on two levels: the story of Gerda and Eva, and the story of a country.

These devastatingly beautiful women are Italy. The father figures in their life--the violent Hermann and the good Vito--are Mussolini and Moro. With its awe-inspiring art, history, colours, light, Italy longs for the good father but can’t hold onto him. Instead of Vito/Moro, they end up with Hermann/Mussolini.

And yet, Italy holds disaster at bay. After Moro’s assassination, the coup never happens.

You wouldn’t think that a novel interwoven with a history of fascism and the cold war would assuage my travel anxiety. And this isn’t ancient history either. But that is what takes me out of my small self: the novel is powerful, it’s a gripping personal story; it brought me into a nation’s story; and those stories are interwoven with the world’s.

Italy’s fascist thread runs right up to the present. The current prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, leads the Brothers of Italy party, which arose from the National Alliance Party, which evolved from Mussolini’s party--the Italian Social (not to be confused with its enemy socialism!) Movement. But she is still operating within a democracy. Recently, a referendum on giving the government more control over the courts, which she promoted, failed.

In Bologna, the clock in the train station stopped when the terrorists’ bomb went off. It’s still stopped at that time. The factors that impacted Italy then--governmental stalemate, involvement by organized crime, the persistence of the far right--still exist. But the coup never happened, either.

The future holds possibilities, not only for Italy, but for a shaken world.

As Vito says to Eva, “It’s not late. It’s just later” (kilometer 1397, Eva Sleeps).

And I will see that clock in Bologna.

I remember being glued to the television, watching the towers burning in the middle of the night and surprising myself with the words that sprang from my mouth: But that’s Gwangju...Gwangju had been reborn only to be butchered again in an endless cycle. It was razed to the ground, and raised up anew in a bloodied rebirth.

Gwangju--the place where thousands of students and supporters were massacred by soldiers. Nearly 30 years later, towers were burning, set afire when over a thousand police beset a couple dozen protestors.

The quote comes from the epilogue of Human Acts by Nobel Prize winner Han Kang, the author of The Vegetarian (which I wrote about in a recent essay), drawing a direct line of state sanctioned violence from the dictatorship in 1980 to the democracy of 2009.

Thirty residents were holding a peaceful sit-in on a rooftop in the capital city, protesting a forced eviction early in 2009. These evictions were usually enforced by thugs in the employ of demolition companies: state tolerated violence but not state enforced. This time was different.

In an unusual move, the demolition company appealed to the authorities, who sent 300 police officers to deal with the protestors. Three hundred against 30. When they still wouldn’t leave, 100 special police and 1400 riot police were mobilized. Protestors threw what they could grab from the roof top: stones, bricks. Police responded with fire canons, so they made molotov cocktails like the students did in 1980.

A fire broke out. Later, the Seoul Central Prosecutors’ Office would blame the protestors for it; the protestors blamed the police. Either way, it quickly engulfed the rooftop. When it was put out, there were six dead and 23 injured.

The violence and the heavy involvement of men in uniform reopened the wounds of 1980, when so many innocent people were slaughtered.

Hwang Jungeun, a Korean writer much admired by Han Kang, was also glued to the TV. The shock of what she saw drove her out into the street to join protests, but she needed to do more.

Most things were beyond my power back when the families of the Yongsan victims felt isolated, those responsible remained silent, and the reality of the incident was nothing but brutal. I decided to write through my feeling of helplessness...I wanted to write something warm, something like a song. The novel, to my own surprise, evolved into a sort of love story. This is one of my most important themes: the resolve to hold on tightly to love, no matter the circumstances.

-One Hundred Shadows, the interview

In preparing to write the novel, she interviewed the families of victims. One of them showed her a memento of their deceased loved one, the only thing received back from the government: a small plastic bag with a scorched glove inside. It shattered Hwang Juneun’s world, just like the photos of the killed students at Gwanju shattered Han Kang’s.

The history behind these forced evictions is triggering because it goes all the way back to the beginning of the dictatorship that caused so much suffering. Back then, rural people were moving to cities so they could find work. But because there was a housing shortage, they built ramshackle huts out of scrounged material on the edge of town. There was no water, no electricity, no sewers. But it was convenient for the regime, which overlooked the shantytowns and enjoyed cheap labour as the country industrialized.

Then, as the country prospered economically, developers got their eyes on that land. Tenants were reluctant to leave; it was hard to find any place to live, never mind one that was affordable. They resisted. But now the shantytowns were inconvenient, so the dictatorship used police to violently kick tenants out. Then, as poor people found shelter in other buildings that were rundown or abandoned, developers followed and the process repeated.

These forced evictions became a flash point of protest, and tenants made common cause with students and workers in the 1980s, leading to the end of the dictatorship.

After it fell, the new government couldn’t send police to beat up recalcitrant tenants who didn’t want to vacate. That would be a bad look for democracy. But developers have money, and human scheming being endlessly inventive, a solution was devised. Thugs for hire formed private security companies, which were incorporated into demolition companies. You want a building taken down so you can build? No problem. Just come to us. We’ll beat the crap out of tenants, oops, I mean enact the eviction order. This isn’t repression, people, it’s capitalism!

What was different about the January 20, 2009 eviction is that the tacit public-private agreement became overt: police were doing the beating up, like in the bad days, the dictatorship years, and that trauma continues to spur people to action.

Until then, Hwang Jungeun had believed that the “world has always been falling apart, has always been this violent,”1 a sardonic streak that had protected her from feeling too deeply since her difficult childhood. But going into the street to protest and interviewing the families of victims changed her. “I could no longer live with my former self,” she says. And that is at the heart of One Hundred Shadows.

Hwang Jungeun wrote during the day and protested by night. One Hundred Shadows was finished that fall. It’s a departure from the realism that has been the hallmark of the Korean literary tradition. In this story, people’s shadows rise up and pull away when despair and desperation become unmanageable. The shadow takes despair away with it, but its independence is also a threat:

That’s what’s scary, you feel light somehow, carefree, if you surrender to the shadow’s pulling at you, so you keep on following it, and that’s when it strikes.

- “A Whorl and a Whorl and What Isn’t a Whorl,” One Hundred Shadows

An independent shadow doesn’t simple leave; it lures its person into danger, or it comes back to weigh the person down, dominating them as they lose their expressiveness and their vitality. However, in the initial stage, when the shadow isn’t fully independent, it can re-unite with the person.

For a while, there’s a choice. Compartmentalizing despair makes a person comfortable; futility gives them permission to stop trying because what’s the point? It’s relaxing. Until it becomes fatal.

Holding the shadow is difficult; it means feeling despair, uncertainty, fear. But there’s also the possibility of of doing something even if it seems small, of integrating pain, of finding hope by connecting with others.

This push-pull--despair versus hope--is at the heart of the narrator’s experience in One Hundred Shadows.

On the economic margins, Eunygo works in an electronics market scheduled for demolition. Her shadow is slipping away and returning when she reconnects with her friend Mujae, a sweet young man about her age who works in the same market.

The fictional market is based on two locations. One is the electronics market where the protestors were met by police in 2009. The other is an electronics market consisting of eight buildings which were constructed during the demolition of shantytowns and then demolished in turn in 2008 to make way for a newer development. But for forty years, Hwang Jungeun’s father repaired audio equipment in one of those buildings.

This novel is not only a response to a public event; it’s rooted in her own life, too. With a slight change of circumstances, the bag with the burnt glove could have been her own.

One Hundred Shadows is a gentler book than Han Kang’s Human Acts. It focuses on the everyday, rather than the extremes. As is standard in South Korea, the Korean edition of One Hundred Shadows includes an author’s note and a critic’s response essay. These are missing from the English edition. It’s too bad because Hwang Jungeun’s note is a sort of epilogue in the form of a poem. She speaks, not to the reader, but to the narrator of the novel, Eungyo, who’s walking hand in hand with Mujae, thinking:

We might be ghosts seeking others of our kind, walking under a pale moon. We walked slowly on, alternately engulfed in darkness and exposed by light.

- “Island,” One Hundred Shadows

I would have missed out on the poem if I hadn’t been able to get Claude AI to find it in Korean and then translate it for me, and so I put it here for you:

In this still-violent world
there are yet a few (things) left to love
and I have long wished
the world would be a little
less violent
toward them -- but this world
has carried on
from the start
as though there’s nothing rough about it at all
only --
it’s not that I hold some ultra-
narcissistic belief
that being beside them is itself a comfort
only --
I wanted to summon a little warmth
for the two who went
down the night road I wish
they meet someone

Along with Hwang Jungeun, another of Han Kang’s favourite writers is Bora Chung. The three of them are gen-x writers who were children during the dictatorship. All of them are sensitive to the suffering it caused and that continues to reverberate, and they’ve turned that sensitivity into art that speaks for the powerless.

I, too, am a fan of Bora Chung’s. I’ve read two books of her short stories, and they’ve stayed with me long after reading them.

Like Hwang Jungeun, she’s an activist, and also a writer, translator and professor of Eastern European literature.2 In Interviews, she comes across as someone who’s not only compassionate, but driven to action because of it. She participates in demonstrations because she wants “to be able to look the future generation in the eye and say, I did something.”

Her activism got its start in 2014 when the Sewol ferry capsized and 304 people died, many of them high school students.

The ferry had been illegally modified to take on more passengers, and it was overloaded with improperly secured cargo. Survivors were rescued by fishing boats because the emergency response was so slow. Mass demonstrations against the government of Park Geun Hye eventually led, a couple of years later, to her impeachment. She was convicted of abuse of power and coercion and sentenced to prison time.

It was all televised, and, like Hwang Jungeun in 2009, Bora Chung took to the streets. She continued to join demonstrations, for example, in 2020 alongside Buddhist monks in favour of an anti-discrimination bill and labour safety legislation.

In the author’s note to Your Utopia, she describes what she calls all-day push-ups: the monks performed ritual prostration, which meant walking three steps, lying flat on the ground, pushing up and repeat around the National Assembly. Bora Chung followed, and at one point when she was lying on the ground, a car whose driver couldn’t see her nearly ran her over. Luckily bystanders stopped the car. But she did contemplate her mortality and the nature of existence, then. Unfortunately the anti-discrimination bill, which would have added sexual orientation to anti-discrimination laws, didn’t pass.

But Bora Chung has another way of taking action, one more suited to her gifts. She writes protest literature, making sense of a world she finds dark and confusing.

Her influences are the Eastern European authors she translates and teaches, who write sci-fi and other forms of literature that depart from the real. And also medieval South Korean folklore. The resulting stories are startling, thought-provoking.

Her most recent book to be translated into English is a slim one: Midnight Timetable: A Novel in Ghost Stories. The idea came to Bora Chung in 2020.

Covid lockdown was partial in South Korea. Masked and armed with hand sanitizer, she attended faculty meetings at the university. However, classes were all online and the empty buildings were spooky, “fraught with fear and anxiety.”

The stories in Midnight Timetable take place in The Institute, a research centre where cursed and haunted objects and animals are kept. They’re seemingly ordinary ones: a handkerchief, a shoe, a sheep. But each has a story, and so do the people who work there, haunted by their own trauma. When objects escape, stories come to light. And it’s the airing of hauntedness that opens the possibility of moving on for both objects and people in the Institute.

The stories are sharp, often funny (funnier if you’re a woman; read it and you’ll see what I mean), sometimes very sad.

In one of my favourite stories, a sheep, now a ghost, was a victim of medical experimentation. It magically comes to the aid of a woman who’s afraid of her ex and eking out a living as a fortune-teller so that her daughter can stay in school. I can’t get that sheep with its bare patches of wool, raw skin, prophetic utterances, and inscrutability out of my mind.

I read Midnight Timetable a couple of months ago, but my introduction to Bora Chung was back in 2024 with Your Utopia, a critique of technology and capitalism, which Bora Chung calls “Demonstration Sci-fi.”

One of the stories, “The End of the Voyage,” harkens back to the horror genre of her previous book, Cursed Bunny. Here, a highly infectious virus that recalls the covid pandemic turns people into cannibals. However, my favourite stories are the ones about sweet robots.

The title story, Your Utopia, is set in an energy-starved world no longer populated by organic life. A slightly disabled self-driving car makes friends with a little robot it rescues from a junk pile as they’re fleeing a Borg-like building that tries to assimilate all things into itself. The friendship between the car and the little robot and the car’s attempts to make sense of life are so moving. This search for meaning continues in “A Song for Sleep,” where a kind and intelligent elevator falls in love with an elderly woman, which leads it to ponder the nature of love and mortality.

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In these stories, the human need for connection and the pain of loneliness are portrayed with so much tenderness and depth.

But the story that meant the most to Bora Chung was written specifically for this collection. Taking place in the near future, “To Meet Her” is about an elderly woman, as if the author was imagining herself in in thirty years or so, on her way to a book signing by her favourite author, who’s a trans woman. This, too, is a story that’s stayed with me, partly because of what inspired it: a woman who I’d never have heard about if not for Bora Chung.

This is not fiction: Staff Sergeant Byun Hui-su was the first openly transgender soldier in South Korea. With the approval of her commanding officer, in 2019 she had gender affirming surgery. After the surgery, again with his written approval and also the go-ahead from her fellow women soldiers, she moved into the women’s barracks. I want to emphasize that she went through all the relevant channels, the people she served with and under were supportive, and she had the right documentation.

This all gave Bora Chung real hope that progress was being made in the fight against homophobia in South Korea, where it’s still a public force, and especially because the military is a conservative institution.

But then the Ministry of Defense got involved, people who’d never known Staff Sergeant Byun Hui-su. She was a tank driver; the country had invested in her; she’d been trained for it and she’d earned the top score in her battalion just the previous year. Yet they discharged her as “disabled.” Bora Chung says, “I don’t understand why...Like you do not drive your tank with a dick.”

She pleaded to continue serving, but a military panel rejected her appeal. She filed a lawsuit, arguing that her dismissal was unconstitutional.

Then covid hit; she was alone and, since she’d gone public, all her job applications were rejected. Ultimately, the court ruled in her favour but it was too late. She ended her life at the end of February 2021 and was found in her apartment a few days later.

News of Byun Hui-su’s death was shattering for Bora Chung, as was the glove for Hwang Jungeun, and the photos for Han Kang.

Your Utopia was published in Korean later that year. She was asked to contribute an extra story to fill out the collection, and she wrote “To Meet Her” in memory of Staff Sergeant Byun Hui-su. In it, she envisions a future in which AI and robots have a dominant role, one in which many of our current problems still persist, but that provides the ending she’d have wished for the soldier who lost her life to political posturing and despair.

In the author’s note to Your Utopia, Bora Chung writes:

all humans are connected through the mourning and trauma of loss...and to remember and mourn loss, one must survive...if I mourn...with my body and soul, if I go out into the streets and act and try with what strength I have to make a difference...that can’t be taken away. I will not be ashamed before the victims and their families, and we will be progressing slowly, very slowly but surely, toward a better world...as we survive, and remember, and mourn.

The body can take us out into the street, and that’s needed. But the soul is the creator of the art, and it’s the art that enables us to hold the shadow, to know all it teaches, and yet, even so, to connect and love.

This morning, “I” was listening to Raffi songs while in the shower. The “I” that enjoys Raffi and scrubbing and a bit of dancing despite the 69 year old body is a child part.

She emerged during a very difficult time. While we were in the grip of post-covid symptoms last year, other parts, even younger than her, were triggered. The physical symptoms had reminded them of trauma, and they were still stuck in those memories. Older parts were working to bring them light and safety but in a DID system, as I’ve written before, there can be internal mistrust created by trauma and by the negative messaging of perpetrators.

Imagine a village. One person is taken out of the village to be tormented and then is thrown back in. That person may resent other villagers who were safe for the moment. And it’s safer for the hurt person to be angry with the other villagers than with the powerful forces that removed her. But she might trust some villagers more than others, one that’s closer to her in age, or lives closer to her in the village.

That’s what it’s like while being abused: one part feels like they’ve been forced into the bad outside while everyone else is behind the fence, inside our internal village. Afterward, who can they trust in the village? The adult parts trying to help them seem too remote. But our part who likes to dance to Raffi is a child part, too. And so, she could mediate.

During the worst of this time, I couldn’t bring myself to shower because of the anxiety that hot water would elevate heart rate. That started to change when our dancing part came forward to shower and comfort our scared little parts with “selves-talk.”

She was able to reassure them in the way that only another little part could. There were other requirements: the music was one; I bought a water-proof speaker for the shower. I was also instructed to acquire wash cloths that were very soft.

Gradually, anxiety diminished. And then as healing occurred, both physically and psychologically, taking a shower turned into a joyous activity accompanied by Raffi’s songs of peace, appreciation for the beauties of the world, and humour.

This is a pattern I’ve seen over and over. People often think of “parts” as damaged pieces of a person because they contain knowledge and feelings about terrible experiences. But every part also contains gifts.

What is strange is that to some extent these gifts are a result of our separateness. The complete pleasure that you see in a child immersed in an activity they enjoy, unbothered by anything else, is what we experience through a child part coming out front.

When we were first experimenting with parts coming out front instead of operating in the shadows at the back of us, I remember being astonished at the difference in energy I felt when a teenage part was out. Even our metabolism was different: we could eat anything and not gain weight.

It seems counterintuitive to logical thought--the body is the body, it hasn’t changed. But we all know about the placebo effect. That’s why there are blind clinical trials, to make sure that a treatment is better than the thought of a treatment. But the benefit of the thought of a treatment is real and significant. The same is true of the nocebo effect--the thought that a treatment won’t work stops it from working as well as it “should,” based purely on physiological reactions.

The mind-body connection is strange and wondrous, and science--though exploring it--has barely scratched the surface.

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During that time, one of our objectives was to have parts whose beliefs were based on childhood helplessness in an abusive family experience the world as it is now. To find engagement with it as themselves, and to find a place in it for themselves.

This led to new activities: ice skating, swimming, inline skating, jewellery-making, sewing, knitting, a course in home repairs, just to name a few. I remember one time being on Toronto Island with my husband and kids. My older daughter was on her bike, and my husband and I had inline skates. A part took over while skating. To this day, I don’t know who it wasaw. All I know is that part felt different and was hyperfocused on the movement and the sound of the skates on the smooth pavement. It felt like the sound was pushing us forward. I am no athlete, but that day, I could skate as fast as my daughter (admittedly only 13!) could ride her bike.

We also explored new music: rock, country, jazz, blues, atonal. At first, these different tastes were discordant enough to enable us to bring out parts we wanted out front by switching music. But gradually, all of us came to appreciate, if not prefer, each other’s tastes, and we also learned to switch more gracefully.

There aren’t enough lifetimes to adequately fulfill the interests that each of us has. Writing took priority for us--and writing was slow because we were still grappling with a lot of anxiety. Anxiety made us distractible; so do our many interests.

Last spring, when I was recovering very slowly and with several setbacks from my long bout of covid and pneumonia (which preceded covid by a few days), we could only walk a block at first. Just one block, when previously, we walked everywhere.

On our walks, we turned our attention to flowers because young parts loved the fragrance, the soft touch of leaves and petals, the colours. Before this, walking had been either a means of getting somewhere or exercise or both. If I walked on my own, I called a friend or listened to a podcast. If I was walking with my husband, I demanded that he entertain me by telling me about what he’d been reading or the latest political and science news.

Now, the illness that had traumatized us emotionally as well as physically was requiring us to slow down and bring our attention into the moment, to learn again what we’d had to learn so many times before: this place we are in, our life with family, our neighbourhood, is a loving one.

In the spring, there was what we called the trifecta at the end of the block: mock orange, beauty bush, and climbing hydrangea. We visited them every day, and they felt like friends, no, like angels gracing us with their scent. They were followed by milkweed, anise hyssop (it smells like black liquorice), and late lilacs. We stopped to feel the texture of furry leaves: milkweed, mullen, woolly hedge-nettle. These were new names to me, some even to my nature-loving husband who spent his childhood rambling in a Toronto ravine.

We started listening to birds, identifying their calls with our husband’s help. It was a pleasure for him, too, not to have to entertain us and to share his interest in nature. He, too, slowed down and paid more attention to flowers and their fragrance. We called our walks, “moseys.” My favourite bird is the cardinal, because of its colour and call, but the favourite bird of younger parts is the pewee, because it announces its name and is so cute. It is these parts that infused these walks with a blithe spirit, that enabled us to literally stop and smell the roses, who made us do it after 30 years of walking those same streets with little attention.

In the summer, we picked fruit from neighbourhood trees and bushes. Stole fruit, my older daughter, now in her mid 20s, told me. The fruit was falling onto lawns, neglected. We picked it and ate it: cherries, then berries, then apples. We frequently picked blackberries from the bushes in front of an empty house slated for development and its next door neighbour, which we also thought was empty. It was not. The owner came out to ask what we were up to, and we ran away, laughing. I felt like I was ten years old. Some of us were. It is their mischievous spirit that I, the overly responsible one, was feeling for the first time.

With their influence, my husband and I made it our mission to discover something new every day. As I got stronger, we walked further afield, to streets I’d never walked before. I saw a yard full of chandeliers glinting in the sunlight.

We hoped to meet our daughter in Europe in the fall. She was travelling for a year, and it would be our only chance to see her. We were planning to go with her and her partner to Edinburgh. They’re hikers and wanted to climb Crow Hill up to Arthur’s Seat, about 250 metres high. We began to practise stairs the same way we’d practised walking, starting very slowly, with just half a block, reassuring scared parts inside that we would stop anytime they wanted.

Just after autumn equinox, we made it to Arthur’s Seat. The view from there was spectacular. My husband took a photo of me--of us. The smile on my face isn’t mine, it’s too big, too free. It must be ours, the whole of ours.

From spring to summer to fall, we were healing physically, but we were re-learning another truth: that when we neglect parts of ourselves, we lose the joy that those parts bring to the whole.

This spring, I think I’m going to keep an album of scents.

Kate Chopin was a white writer, Alice Dunbar-Nelson was a Black writer, and they were both Louisiana Creoles. The word “creole” originally meant someone born in the colony rather than in France or Spain, which colonized it. Whether that implied that they were white or Black or mixed was, and still is, hotly debated. But everyone agrees that Louisiana was unlike any other state in the union, a blend of European and African influences in culture, language, and population.

In that context, Alice Dunbar-Nelson was, in Louisiana terms, one of the gens de couleur libres, a free person of colour. This was a class of people unique to Louisiana. They were prosperous, well-educated, professionals, property-owners, skilled artisans, and mixed race. Here’s how Alice describes the society of New Orleans, where she grew up in the 1880s and 1890s:

Writers on fire with the romance of this continental city love to speak of the splendors of the French Opera House, the first place in the country where grand opera was heard, and tell of the tiers of beautiful women with their jewels and airs and graces. Above the orchestra circle were four tiers, the first filled with the beautiful dames of the city; the second filled with a second array of beautiful women, attired like those of the first, with no apparent difference; yet these were the octoroons and quadroons, whose beauty and wealth were all the passports needed. The third was for the hoi polloi of the white race, and the fourth for the people of color whose color was more evident. It was a veritable sandwich of races.

- From “People of Color in Louisiana” by Alice Dunbar-Nelson, The Journal of Negro History (1916-17)

But how did this come about, and why only here in Louisiana and not anywhere else in the American south?

In the late 1600s and early 1700s, French men came to Louisiana. Many of them married Indigenous and Black women (who’d been forcibly taken from their countries). By 1724, the king was none too pleased with this, and in the revised Code Noir, the law that regulated the institution of slavery, he made this practice a punishable crime.

The Code Noir is famous for establishing three distinct groups of people: those who were enslaved, white people, and a third caste, often called “free people of colour,” but that term isn’t the one used. The Code Noir of 1724 speaks of the “nègre libre” and article 541 grants them all the rights of any person born free with one exception. They can’t receive any property from a white person, whether as a gift or as an inheritance (article 52). This was intended to stop any white Frenchman, who was ignoring the prohibition against relationships with Black women, from helping her or their kids.

And yet--somehow, there came to be a population of free people with ancestors who were French and ancestors who’d been enslaved. They called themselves les gens de couleur libres.

It seems that, despite prohibitions, people being people, and French culture being more open than British, voila, you have a new class of people shaping Louisiana into a vibrant, unique place (and also producing women writers who defy convention).

When the Spanish took control of Louisiana in 1763, the construction of race was more multifaceted. As in Latin America, appearance and culture, more than ancestry, slotted people into three races: white, Brown, Black.

Under Spanish law, enslaved people could purchase their own freedom in a legal procedure called Coartación that protected their rights and prevented their re-enslavement.

Also, for the first time, enslaved people could earn money on their own time and spend it as they wished. This led to an explosion in the number of people buying their freedom, especially women.

By the early 19th century, 50 years before the end of slavery, there were as many free people of colour in New Orleans as there were white people.2 They participated in every aspect of life: there had been Black officers in Louisiana’s militia for a hundred years, for example. But were they Creoles?

Alice Dunbar-Nelson says:

The Caucasian will shudder with horror at the idea of including a person of color in the definition, and the person of color will retort with his definition that a Creole is a native of Louisiana, in whose blood runs mixed strains of everything un-American, with the African strain slightly apparent. The true Creole is like the famous gumbo of the state, a little bit of everything, making a whole, delightfully flavored, quite distinctive, and wholly unique.

- ”People of Color in Louisiana” by Alice Dunbar-Nelson.

But ten years after after the civil war, the American binary hardened: you were white with full rights or Black with Jim Crow restrictions.

Alice (I’ve spent so long with these writers, we’re on a first-name basis) was born into this binary in 1875, a decade after emancipation. And yet, as many in Louisiana, she still identified as a free person of colour.

Her mother was a formerly enslaved woman, her father’s identity left as a mystery for posterity. (Somehow her single mother was able to put Alice and her sister into the best school available for them, as well as university, which makes me wonder if Papa, presumed white by scholars, was secretly contributing.)

Alice was beautiful and also light-skinned enough to pass. According to her biographer, Tara T. Green, when it occasionally suited Alice to pass, she did, but she chose to belong to the Black community and was devoted to the cause of improving the condition of all Black Americans.

She did so as an educator in several American cities, a speech writer, an activist, a founder of Black Women’s Clubs, through her connections with intellectual circles in the Harlem Renaissance and in Washington DC literary salons, and as a writer of many forms: poetry, essays, plays, film scripts, short stories.

As a young woman, Alice began submitting stories to white-owned and read magazines. Editors told her that readers weren’t interested in hearing about the colour line. The only colour they wanted to know about was local colour: give us exotic customs, bright colours, dialect! That’s popular!

So, her stories don’t specify race. In the collection The Goodness of St. Rocque & Other Stories, no one is white, no one is Black. Instead, race is coded by allusions to black hair, curls, brown hands, streets that people from Louisiana would know were inhabited by free people of colour.

At age 21, she moved to New York, and two years later married Paul Laurence Dunbar, who encouraged her in her writing. Their relationship was fraught. He raped her before they were married and physically abused her afterward. He was a great poet, respected for his art in all sectors of society and by all races, and he was also a raging alcoholic and a womanizer.

Alice was no slouch in the relationship department, herself. She had three marriages and was also in relationships with women--2 or 3 long-term relationships (reports vary)--during and between her marriages. Her bisexuality wasn’t public; the only scandal about her relationships was that her second husband was younger than her. But the violence she experienced in her first marriage continued to appear as a theme in stories and poetry throughout her life.

In the story, “Tony’s Wife” (1899) she writes about the psychology of it:

He hated her in a lusty, roaring fashion, as a healthy beefy boy hates a sick cat and torments it to madness.

Tony is a candy store owner, his wife a “little dry woman” who knits for the children who buy candy. When he’s dying, she comes back to life and hope. But in the end, she’s defeated because they’re living common-law and, just to fuck her up, he refuses to marry her, knowing that a relative of his will inherit his property, and she’ll be out in the cold.

This sympathy for the physical and legal vulnerability of women is something she shares with Kate Chopin, who wrote about domestic violence in the short story, “In Sabine” (1894).

It’s a subtle story, told from the point of view of a passing acquaintance, and much of it is in dialogue. The wife’s fear is portrayed in her quick replies to her husband, her frayed appearance, her startles. But here, the wife is able to rescue herself by coming to the acquaintance with a plan to help her escape.

But while for Alice, the experience of marriage depends on the character of the husband, for Kate, marriage itself is too confining.

A generation older, she was born in St Louis (formerly part of French Louisiana) in 1850, and grew up in a household of widows. Her father was Irish, her mother Creole. She had married at 16 to save her family from poverty, but fortunately her much older husband had the grace to die when Kate was only five.

In her father’s household, there had been half a dozen enslaved people, and shortly before his death, he brought in an enslaved Black woman and mixed-race children. Scholars suspect they were Kate’s half-sisters.

Mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother did very well as widows, now able to own property and retain their earnings, whereas when they were married, it all legally belonged to their husbands.

Kate also married young, moving back to Louisiana with her Creole husband, Oscar. He was familiar with domestic violence: his father was a brute, both as an enslaver and in his family. At 14, Oscar left home and extricated his mother.

By all accounts (primarily biographer Emily Toth who wrote Unveiling Kate Chopin), their marriage was happy. They quickly had six children in succession.

Oscar may not have been the cruel man that his father was, but he opposed reconstruction. He joined the White League and participated in the riots against equality for emancipated Black people, which led to Jim Crow.

As Alice writes in The People of Color in Louisiana,

{I}t was the end of the government by the men of color and their allies in the State. President Hayes, in order to conciliate his constituents in the South, withdrew federal support, and the downfall was complete.

Oscar died when Kate was in her early thirties, leaving her deeply in debt. She ran his business and had an affair with a hot, married man, then moved back to St Louis. Her female relatives provided home and support while she got back on her feet, and she turned to writing as a way to provide an income and an outlet.

She was a popular writer in the genre of “local colour” or regional writing, drawing on her years in Louisiana to create vivid pictures of Creole life that readers lapped up.

I found only a couple of stories in which the protagonist is Black. In both of them (”Beyond the Bayou” and “La Belle Zoraïde”), the portrayal of the character is sympathetic and multidimensional with one exception: these Black women adore their white enslavers, in a cringe-inducing, “mammy” way.

It’s discomfiting for me, as someone who is a fan of her work to read. I also winced at a couple of Alice’s stories, where she makes passing allusions to Indigenous people, using racist stereotypes.

But when it comes to Kate’s main concern--the interior life of women--her work is outstanding.

In the story, Athenaïse, the young protagonist leaves her marriage for a few weeks to regain her selfhood. It’s clear that this has nothing to do with the character of her husband. He’s kind to her, sympathetic, patient, and loving. In the story, Kate draws the analogy between marriage and enslavement through the husband’s distressing memory of being a child witnessing his father--reputed to be a good “master”--retrieving an escaped enslaved person.

There is no physical brutality; it’s the inherent nature of being married that sickens the character, the expectation of subsuming personhood to the roles of wife and mother. Athenaïse says of her loving husband,

“No, I don’t hate him...It’s jus’ being married that I detes’ an’ despise...I can’t stan’ to live with a man; to have him always there; his coats an’ pantaloons hanging in my room; his ugly bare feet—washing them in my tub, befo’ my very eyes, ugh!” She shuddered with recollections...”Mon Dieu, mon Dieu!”

But in this story, Kate pulls back from fully exploring female alienation. The character discovers she’s pregnant and has an epiphany: she’s full of passion for her husband and ready to embrace the expectations of womanhood. An acceptable ending for the magazine that published it.

But in Kate’s late forties, her children grown, she pulled no punches in the novel: The Awakening.

The main character is Edna, a woman who married respectably and young to an older man, like Kate’s parents. In the summer, Edna and her children leave the hot city and go to a Creole resort. Here is a woman-centred summer community, where husbands only come up on weekends, and for the first time, she begins to open up to a new friend.

Away from her husband, Edna is becoming aware of herself, psychologically and sexually. She doesn’t want to be obliged to do anything that isn’t true to her inner thoughts, whether that’s social obligations or sexual ones. She’s attracted romantically to the resort owner’s son (whom Toth thinks is coded as gay) and embraces her feelings.

When she returns to the city, the desire to fully be herself in action as well as in thought intensifies. She has an affair with a man who attracts her physically while also searching for ways to express herself artistically. Remember, this is 1899.

She questions what it means to be a person, to love, to have her own home. I won’t give away the ending--you should read this book yourself. When the novel was published, several women critics loved it. Male critics--the majority and the more powerful--excoriated it. Shameful! Immoral! Disgusting, even!

Kate was demoralized, and after that, magazines thought her too controversial to publish. She wrote a short story titled “The Storm,” which she didn’t even try to publish. It’s a delightful story about a young wife on her own at home one day while her husband and son are in town. An old flame of hers comes by seeking shelter from a violent storm. Their attraction rekindles, they have great sex. Satisfied, they go on their way, each into their own lives; no judgement, no punishment.

Kate’s work went into oblivion. All that remained of it in print was the story “Desirée’s Baby,” about a supposedly white couple who have a mixed race baby. It isn’t her best, and it doesn’t convey her real preoccupations. But in the 1970s, she was rediscovered by Emily Toth, a feminist scholar looking for literary grandmothers, who found her writings about the inner life of women surprisingly relevant.

Kate Chopin was a middle-class white woman who could raise six children on her own. When Alice Dunbar-Nelson was punished for her transgressions, the repercussions were more severe.

As a Black woman, she had limited publishing opportunities. Unlike Kate, she couldn’t make a living at it and depended on teaching. But in her mid-forties, she was fired from her high school in Wilmington, Delaware because she attended an anti-lynching rally in Ohio. At this point, she was married to her third husband, another poet, as well as an editor, who also worked at times as a porter and a clerk. And they struggled financially.

After Alice’s death in 1935, all she was remembered for was her first marriage: as the wife of the great poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. But like Kate, she was rediscovered in the 1970s. The first scholar to uncover her archive was the Black feminist, Akasha (Gloria) Hull. But Alice didn’t fit neatly into the role of a 1970s Black feminist icon.

In one of her essays, Brass Ankles Speaks, she writes about the bullying she experienced within her community as a light-skinned woman. Some people accused her work of colourism. Her activism was respected, but her artistic output--the stories and poetry--were seen as aracial, and not worthy of study.

But the range of her work, her thoughts, her intellect is astounding. In the 21st century, it’s been re-examined appreciatively, with scholars digging into the massive archive of letters, diaries, and unpublished writings that she left.

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Alice believed that literature is an expressive art and shouldn’t be propaganda. In this, she disagreed with her friend W.E.B. Du Bois. But her poem, “Harlem John Henry Views the Airmada” (1932) showcases the power of her expressive art. Using lyricism and lines from Black spirituals, as well as different rhythms, she conveys the experience of being Black in America across centuries,

In the poem, John Henry is looking up at the sky, where planes are practising manoeuvres. War is imminent:

Beauty must be. But is this threat beauty?
Harlem John Henry hears the sinister drone
Of sextuples of planes. Sings jeeringly—

“I’ve got wings,
You’ve got wings,
All God’s chillen got wings!”

The sound of the planes reminds him of the sound of the ocean and the ships that brought enslaved Africans to America. In another verse, he remembers Black soldiers who fought for America’s independence with no recognition.

Surcease of weary strife. An infant land
That marched erect to wealth on lowly backs.
Harlem John Henry’s soul flowed to the past;
Zoom-zoom, resounding from the lowering sky,
Throbs like the bass-viol in the symphony—

“Go down, Moses, way down in Egypt’s land,
Tell ol’ Pharaoh, let my people go!”

The poem continues to trace America’s history; Black people build a nation--“We helped build beauty tall unto the skies;” they fight in the first world war: “Ruthless star-shells are shattering round his feet;/He staggers through the muck of No-Man’s Land.”

When the poem comes back to the present moment, John Henry looking up at the threatening aircraft, it questions whether it was all in vain. “Must beauty die once more/Slain o’er and her in stupid, senseless rage?”

In another poem, “April is on the Way” (1927), Alice again wrestles with the contrast between beauty and hate, but here from the point of view of a woman dealing with both racism and violence against women. I’d love to share the whole poem, but I’ll just give you a few sample verses, and you can read the whole at the link above:

April is on the way!
I met a woman in the lane;
Her burden was heavy as it is always, but today her step was light,
And a smile drenched the tired look away from her eyes.
(Dear God, she had dreams of vengeance for her slain mate,
Perhaps the west wind has blown the mist of hate from her heart,
The dead man was cruel to her, you know that, God.)

April is on the way!
The infinite miracle of unfolding life in the brown February fields.
(Dear God, the hounds are baying!)
Murder and wasted love, lust and weariness, deceit and vainglory—what are they but the spent breath of the runner?
(God, you know he laid hairy red hands on the golden loveliness of her little daffodil body)
Hate may destroy me, but from my brown limbs will bloom the golden buds with which we once spelled love.
(Dear God! How their light eyes glow into black pin points of hate!)

April is on the way!
Wars are made in April, and they sing at Easter time of the Resurrection.
Therefore I laugh in their faces.
(Dear God, give her strength to join me before her golden petals are fouled in the slime!)
April is on the way!

I started out preparing for this essay by reading The Awakening, vaguely remembering it as a fin de siècle classic, but having no idea what it was about or even that the author was American. I was curious, since Kate Chopin was Creole, whether there were any Black Creole writers, and I looked it up. After some digging, I found Alice Dunbar-Nelson. I’d never heard of her before. I won’t forget her.

She was remembered for her essays; but I’ll remember her for her poetry. Especially today, when there is war in the middle-east, I will be thinking of the questions John Henry asks, “Beauty and peace? Beauty and War?” and answer it with “April is on the way!”

I’m deviating from alphabetical order because a book I’d had on hold came in from the library, and it compelled me to write this post.

When Nobel prize winner Han Kang was 12 years old, she stumbled on a book that changed her life. It was hidden on the top shelf of her parent’s bookcase which she was exploring, when her hand fell on a book that had been turned around so that the spine was concealed. She pulled it out and turned the pages. The photographs shocked her: they were portraits of brutally murdered Koreans.

Her family had been living in Seoul for three years, where her father had moved them so he could be a poor, full time writer instead of an employed teacher in Gwangju. The timing of their move was lucky. They escaped the massacre in Gwangju by four months.

Kang didn’t know about the student-led, pro-democracy demonstrations in Gwangju, which began on May 18, 1980, and have been known as 5-18 ever since. A new dictator had replaced the previous one recently in a coup. He responded to the protests by ordering the slaughter of thousands of people, including children.1

Government suppression of any talk of it was efficient and total. The nation-wide silence that ensued was so complete, Kang had never heard of it, even though her family had close ties to the city. She says,

I remember the moment when my gaze fell upon the mutilated face of a young woman, her features slashed through with a bayonet...Silently, and without fuss, some tender thing deep inside me broke. Something that, until then, I hadn’t even realised was there.

She was struck then by the paradoxical nature of humanity: so vicious, yet capable of great love and sacrifice; with bodies that enable us to perceive such beauty, yet are prey to disease and all too crushable, disgustingly leaky with blood, pus, and excrement.2 Kang’s preoccupation with this paradox became the informing power of her writing.

Her first novel to be translated into English was The Vegetarian, and it made a huge splash on Booktok several years later. That’s where I heard of it. This was the year of “sad-girl” fiction on Booktok. These books had complicated, intense female characters who protested through self-destruction or by taking action--like the meat-refusing protagonist in The Vegetarian--that exposes how violence against women is so often close to the surface.

I didn’t read it. For one thing, I’m a contrarian. It’s a struggle for me to read popular books until they stop being popular. For another, I’m a vegetarian and an abuse survivor, so a book about being force-fed meat was not going on my TBR list.

But recently The White Book, which I don’t remember putting on hold, came in from the library. I picked it up, and it was so beautiful, I read two more novels by Han Kang plus three that she recommended by other South Korean writers.

The White Book is a quiet story and the most autobiographical of Kang’s works. In 2014, she was invited to spend a semester at The University of Warsaw. While there, she was inspired to write this novel, a bit every day.

Like Han Kang, the narrator of The White Book had an older sister who’d died a few hours after birth. The narrator, too, is temporarily in Warsaw, observing this city with a tragic past, imagining what her sister would make of it if she’d survived:

This life needed only one of us to live it. If you had lived beyond those first few hours, I would not be living now. My life means yours is impossible. Only in the gap between darkness and light, only in that blue-tinged breach, do we manage to make out each other’s faces.

- The White Book, chapter 3

Her sister’s unlived life haunts her, and I related to the mystery of it. I have an aunt who died in the Warsaw ghetto. I thought a lot about her--often wondered what she’d been like--and even fantasized that she had survived and someday I’d find her by looking her up in a telephone book in some far away city.

The White Book is a small one in scope and length, and yet it’s immensely moving. This is how Kang describes the ghosts of the city:

If a strong wind got up and skimmed off the fog, the ruins of seventy years ago might be startled into revealing themselves, pushing out from behind the present reconstructions. The ghosts that were gathered there, very close to her, might stand up straight against the wall where they were slaughtered, their eyes blazing out.

After The White Book, I was hungry for more Han Kang. So I picked up, Human Acts, her second novel to be translated into English, and the one most often talked about after The Vegetarian. This is the novel about the Gwangju uprising. The 9th novel she’s written.

It was published in South Korea in 2014. By then, Han Kang had been writing for over 20 years. I’m guessing it took that long for her to gain the literary skills and emotional courage to take on the subject. It took courage not only because she was writing about such a traumatic event but because there could have been--and were--professional repercussions. Under the democratically elected, conservative government in power in 2014, she was one of many authors placed on a blacklist.

As Han Kang realized with a shock at age 12, humanity is a bundle of contradictions. In South Korea, literary fiction has long been treasured as a symbol of its culture and sovereignty, but that didn’t stop massive censorship during the years of dictatorship and attempts at censorship through coercion in its democracy.

This is a country that was miserably poor in living memory, but is now an economic power house. For the last 25 years, its economic strategy has been to focus on two main areas: technology and culture. The world export of K-Pop, K-Drama, and now K-Lit is a source of enormous pride. And yet plastic surgery that basically de-Koreanizes faces, making broad chins tiny and pointed, is a rite of passage for many young women.

This is a country still trying to prove itself as good as Japan, which brutally colonized it in the 20th century, impoverishing it, stealing or destroying historical artifacts, and outlawing its language. Still trying to prove that it’s as good as China, another Asian power that dominated it earlier in its history. And certainly as good as the US, which still has 24,000 soldiers stationed in South Korea. As a legacy of the Korean War 75+ years ago, in the event of another war, the South Korean army is under the command of an American general.3

And you know what really got under the skin of South Korean leadership? The Nobel Prize for Literature had been won by all of them, but not South Korea. How much of the American population cares about its literature? Yet South Koreans do. What gives?

Part of our identity is that we are surrounded by strong enemies and we have to compete with them. One way to compete is through art.

-Professor Bo-Seon Shim

Written language has a unique significance for South Korea. Historically, South Korean writing used Chinese characters. In the mid 1400s, it developed an alphabet of its own, Hangǔl, under the direction of King Sejong the Great who was actually pretty great and heavily involved. How many kings decide that an alphabet that will improve literacy rates is necessary and then get it going? None other that I know of.

Hangǔl was resisted by scholars and civil servants who were invested in writing with Chinese characters, which required years of devotion to memorizing thousands of characters, arguably poorly matched to the Korean language, but which their careers were based on. It’s for women! It’s for the uneducated! Not us!

It took several hundred years for the South Korean alphabet to fully catch on and become a source of national pride. When it did, literacy rates shot up higher than many other countries’ and their literary fiction came to be regarded as the luminous fruit of their culture.4

When Kang started writing in the mid 1990s, South Korean democracy was only a few years old. It began its globalization push into culture, which was a a smash success.5

And then the yearning for that elusive Nobel Prize led to two agencies, one private and one under government auspices. By the time The Vegetarian was published, the government agency was using business know-how to create a translation institute that trained foreign translators. The private agency was holding exciting conferences about ideas. Anyone who wanted a career in academia had to get a graduate degree abroad, making connections in the top schools all over the world, leading to collaboration and a fertile intellectual exchange.

And so, Han Kang was invited to come to Poland by the East Asian Studies department at The University of Warsaw. There she wrote The White Book. She describes the writing process as “a very good time.” I can imagine; it must have been a relief to focus on something less incendiary: this was the novel she wrote after Human Acts. To research it, she read accounts by 900 survivors of the massacre.

Human Acts is an amazing novel. It is unremittingly tragic. The violence is graphic. When not depicting the reality of the dictatorship’s cruelty, it’s portraying the aftereffects: loneliness, survivor’s guilt, PTSD. And yet. And yet, my God, Han Kang is a great writer and the Nobel Prize is deservedly hers. Even writing those words, my eyes are welling up because of the power of her writing, the tenderness, love, and beauty that peek out despite everything that people are capable of doing to each other. “Human acts” indeed.

It’s a slim book--just over 200 pages. The story of the uprising for democracy in Gwanju and its aftermath is told from seven points of view that are connected through their encounters with the boy whose voice begins the novel, from the beginning of the protest up to the present.

Here’s the voice of Dong-ho, the middle-school boy, being swept up in the hope of the demonstrators (Human Acts Chapter 1):

A great mass of people, over a hundred thousand strong, surged through those streets with the rippling motion of colossal waves. Their voices joined together for the national anthem, the swelling chorus rising up like a tower, a storey for every voice. The sound of their clapping was like thousands of fireworks being let off in succession.

Here’s another voice: a survivor, one of the university students who tried to protect children like Dong-ho. It’s ten years later, and he’s remembering his sentencing hearing, which followed a summer of being tortured alongside a hundred other students. During the hearing, he realized that the torture and starvation were intended to break their spirits, to make them feel ridiculous for their singing and flag waving during the uprising, to teach them that they’re just filthy bodies, starving animals. But then, while the judge is handing down sentences (Human Acts, Chapter 4):

Someone was singing, though the sound was more like a stifled whimper. It was the opening bars of the national anthem. By the time I realised that the singer was young Yeong-chae, other voices had joined in for the chorus. Almost in spite of myself, my own voice was drawn out of my throat. We who had had our heads bowed as though we were already dead, who had been sitting there as nothing but loose agglomerates of sweat and blood, were for some reason permitted to continue our quiet song unchecked

This theme of hope and solidarity and care crashing against the soul-breaking brutality of soul-less, violent power, rising again to be crushed, and rising again is an embodiment of Han Kang’s paradox of humanity. It runs through every voice, picking up power from the voices before it, down through the years.

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Reading, I was reminded of the Paris students’ revolt in Les Misérables. And Han Kang makes explicit the connection of the Gwanju uprising to other events of mass slaughter in South Korean history, in the history of China, in Bosnia, in the Americas. It’s been happening in Gaza for two years.6

Literary fiction is censored and coopted by authoritarian regimes for a reason: its ability to lay bare the truth that these regimes disguise with false stories meant to keep them in power while lives are being destroyed.

A nation that doesn’t care about its literary fiction is privileged; apathy is a privilege: it means life is going well enough. The danger we face now is that social media has become a strange sedative. It puts users into a kind of trance while encouraging them to vent their outrage. But this venting is defanged by the app’s mechanisms; it just feeds the scroll that creates the trance, circulating like stale air inside its algorithmic bubble. And those with power just keep on.

Han Kang writes:

When literature deals with important emotions, deep questions, and sensations that are hard to bring out but that shake us beneath the surface, readers suddenly rediscover those things within themselves. By becoming the person in the novel they are reading, stepping outside themselves and then returning, they repeatedly experience moments in which cracks open in the self and they see themselves clearly and transparently. In that sense, I think novels are not superfluous—they are something we need, like a thread that connects us.

This connection crosses boundaries, including geographic ones.7 It informs us of our shared humanity. And that’s why translators are so important. It’s impossible to duplicate the effect of one language into another, so how can it be transposed to best represent the work? It’s an art.

And there was controversy around the first translation of Kang’s work in The Vegetarian. The translator, Deborah Smith, was new to Korean and made some mistakes. They were corrected in the next edition, but there were questions about her stylistic choices too.

Han Kang was more involved in the translation of Human Acts, and when it came to The White Book, she and the translator compared every sentence to the original. I can’t compare them to the Korean texts, but in themselves, they’re unforgettable.

Not long ago, the strength of South Korea’s democracy was tested, and it’s a lesson for all democratic countries, especially, but not only, my American neighbours who are teetering on the edge.

In early December, 2024 President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law. He accused the opposition party of anti-state activities and suspended the National Assembly. It was the first time martial law had been declared since the coup that precipitated the protests in Human Acts. Troops were deployed.

Within hours, the National Assembly, which refused to leave, voted to rescind martial law and impeached Yoon for violating the constitution and committing treason. Yoon resisted. He surrounded himself with loyal soldiers. The citizens of South Korea massed in the streets by the millions, calling for Yoon’s arrest.

There were a tense few weeks until mid-January 2025. Would South Korea’s democracy hold? It did. Yoon was arrested, elections were held, and just a month ago, on January 16, 2026, he was sentenced.

May all our democracies hold; may our literature be written and published and read; may our translators flourish.

The painting is In A Roman Osteria, painted by Carl Bloch in Copenhagen in 1866. Take a look—isn’t it striking?

The viewer is in the position of someone entering a restaurant and meeting the gaze of several diners. There’s a story in the man’s anxious glare, the younger woman’s coquettish glance, the married woman’s hospitable one.

But there’s another story in how the painting came about. It was commissioned by a friend of his who often came over for dinner on Thursdays, along with fairy-tale genius Hans Christian Andersen. Bloch’s friend was planning a trip to Italy and thought it would be cool to have an Italian-styled painting like one by another Danish artist: Italian Osteria Scene, Girl welcoming a Person entering by Wilhelm Marstrand from nearly 20 years earlier.

In Marstrand’s painting, you see there are three women; no man is present. The most interesting figure here, I think, is the sleepy old woman. But Bloch got rid of her. Instead he introduces a man, which changes the whole dynamic (and why we need girls’ nights out!).

He replaced the neutral young woman at the back with a mild-mannered married woman who more obviously contrasts with the other young woman. In the earlier painting, the girl in the foreground has a bit of “come hither” in her face. But in Bloch’s painting, she’s moved back, as if to get her further from whoever’s coming through the door, and her expression is heightened, more of a hint at wide open doors, if she pleases. Is that why the man is glaring?

But Bloch wasn’t the only one to repaint this Italian scene. Another Danish artist, Elizabeth Jerichau Baumann (1819-1881), painted at least three variations of it. Her version isn’t flirty at all, which—given her later paintings—might be because, for her, sensuality had nothing to do with male judgment, preferences, or pleasure.

This is a happy domestic scene. The woman holding the wine glass might be a bit tipsy, but not coquettish. The woman in the foreground is a young mother, holding her toddler on her lap, sleeves rolled up for the labour of parenting. The only man in the scene is innocuous, visible only in profile, his purpose to provide pleasure to the women by playing music at the table.

It took some digging to find this painting—all the returns on my search kept giving me Bloch’s or Marstand’s paintings, as if Google et al know better than I do what I’m looking for, and surely it can’t be an obscure female artist!

But Baumann wasn’t obscure. After studying at one of the most prestigious art academies in Europe,1 she began exhibiting her paintings at the age of 25. And just eight years later, Queen Victoria requested a private presentation of her work and acquired a portrait of Hans Christian Andersen (friend of our first painter, Bloch, who was not of particular interest to the queen of England). Baumann was especially popular in France, where her work was shown at two Paris World Fairs, when she was 48 and 59. By then her career had spanned over three decades. She’d travelled widely and not only in Europe: she was friends with the both the Queen of Denmark and Princess Nazli of Cairo.

Between the two world fairs, Baumann spent several years travelling in the Middle East, first in 1869-70 and again in 1874-5. As a woman, she was able to gain admittance to the harems of the Ottoman Empire. Unlike many male artists of the time, who painted seductive harem women entirely from imagination (and it was a popular genre!), Baumann painted what she saw.

And because she carried with her a letter of introduction from Princess Alexandria of Denmark, now married to the heir to the British throne, she was admitted into the harem of Mustafa Fazil Pasha, an Ottoman prince whose brother was the viceroy of Egypt. Mustafa Fazil Pasha had eleven wives and thirteen children. Princess Nazli was one of them.

She was not the kind of privileged girl, secluded and uneducated, with no access to the world outside her rooms that writers like Rokeya Hossain railed against. Despite his numerous consorts, her father considered himself a liberal man and believed in educating girls. At just fifteen, Princess Nazli spoke several languages as well as holding intellectual soirées for elite women, including foreigners.

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There were long negotiations before Baumann was allowed to paint her. Nazli’s mother was against it: well-protected women were not supposed to be visible outside the home. But eventually, she agreed to the project as long as the portraits were kept private and everything to do with them was conducted inside the harem.

Baumann, 35 years older, was infatuated with the girl. “Yesterday I...fell in love with a beautiful Turkish princess,” she wrote to her husband and children. For her part, Princess Nazli was fascinated by the artistic process and spent hours watching Baumann paint.

Princess Alexandria (who’d provided the introduction to Baumann) was friends with Nazli, who decided to send her one of the portraits as a gift. It depicted Nazli in her usual attire, her fashion sense being a French-Ottoman fusion. Nazli kept a second portrait, but another one, which showed her in a harem costume, was given to Baumann.

None of these portraits have survived. But we do know that Baumann exhibited the harem painting in London against the parents’ wishes. And a few years later, she painted an imagined scene of Princess Nazli languidly lounging in harem costume.

Baumann was a shrewd businesswoman and Orientalist paintings were popular. But this painting isn’t quite right for the genre and it created a scandal. There’s the typical racy costume and the (Black) servant in the background, but the fact that it was painted by a woman who was clearly herself enjoying the harem fantasy didn’t sit well with male critics.

The girl in the painting is too sensual, too much in possession of her own erotic drive. How unfeminine! One reviewer said that Baumann’s portraits of women contained all too much of the “masculine quality” and were just unacceptable.

However, the fact is that Baumann used her entry into the harem and the trust of the family to further her career by playing into the fantasy of the “harem girl.” So, it would be easy here to see Nazli as the subject of an exploitative colonialist. But that would do a disservice to Nazli’s own agency and intelligence.

The exhibition didn’t end contact between her and Baumann. Whatever her mother thought about the exhibition, Nazli remained Baumann’s lifelong friend. And the harem painting became a point of cultural dialogue.

Just as the three Osteria paintings were a conversation with each other, so Baumann’s work and Nazli’s interacted with each other. But this conversation between women crossed continents and challenged stereotypes for both of them.

Nazli became an artist herself. While her portrait was exhibited in Europe, Nazli—about the same age as Baumann at her first exhibition—entered into public prominence with four still-life paintings in a showing at the Artists of the Bosporus and Constantinople Club.

By then, Princess Nazli, still only 25, had been married and widowed. Her husband had been the Turkish ambassador, and she’d travelled with him across Europe. It wasn’t a love match, to say the least, and she was happier as a widow. In the 1880s, she became the first Ottoman woman to open a salon. Unveiled and in her Cairo palace, she mixed with Egyptian and European male intellectuals at the soirées she held.

Around this time, she also expanded her art into photography with a reply to another of Baumann’s paintings, An Egyptian Pottery Seller at Gizeh.

Baumann’s painting is her typical combination of Orientalist tropes and her own vision: the pottery seller is young and scantily clad as customary, but in Baumann’s hands, the subject looks unflinchingly at the viewer.

Princess Nazli responded by staging a parody: two photographs against the same backdrop, combined to make a statement. On the left, Princess Nazli is fashionably dressed in European style. On the right, she is dressed as an Ottoman gentleman and at her feet sits another woman in the same position as Baumann’s pottery girl. But here, there’s no filmy breast-exposing fabric. Nor are there oriental carpets. Everyone is completely covered up. There’s no seduction. The pottery seller’s bare feet are firmly planted on the ground.

But like the “masucline quality” of women in Baumann’s portraits, Nazli’s dyptych shows strong women. With her long hair flowing below the cap, the cross-dressing figure on the right has made no attempt to hide that she’s a woman.

In her forties, Princess Nazil travelled to Tunis, the capital of Tunisia, which was under French rule. While there, she visited several prominent families recommended to her by a Tunisian reformer she knew in Cairo. This made French authorities suspect that she was an Egyptian spy working for the Ottoman Sultan, and French police followed her every move.

I don’t know if she was a spy, but she was well-connected and met with many reformist intellectuals. She also met a man 20 years younger than her—Kehlil Bougheb—and fell for him.2

As a widow, she was able to move about freely and had turned down all marriage proposals, and there were many, but this young man took her fancy. They married, and she moved to Tunis permanently. There, her home again became a cultural hub, fostering connections between reformers in Tunis and Cairo.

But wait—we’ve just about reached the 20^th century if we go right up to Princess Nazil’s death in 1913. What about the writer I promised at the start of this essay?

The harem theme in European art and Princess Nazli’s response to it reminds me of the painting Women of Algiers in Their Apartment by Eugène Delacroix. Just a few years after France took control of Algeria, Delacroix bribed a merchant who let him into his household’s harem. Today, the resulting painting is in the Louvre but at the time critics didn’t like it all that much because even though it was technically excellent, it didn’t have the Orientalist harem features that Europeans loved so much: no boobies showing beneath gauzy attire, wtf!

A decade later, he painted a couple of versions that were more inviting, but the original inspired male painters like van Gogh and Gauguin. Matisse tried his hand at the theme, so did Picasso—fifteen times. But for me, the best response came in 1980 with the publication of a book of short stories titled Women of Algiers in Their Apartment. The 1834 painting was on the cover.

The book was written by Assia Djebar, an Algerian writer. Her country had won its independence from France in a brutal war. But afterward, women, who’d participated in struggle on every level, from combat to nursing to feeding the wounded, were expected to shut up and preferably return to the harem. Djebar felt colonized twice: as an Algerian and as a woman. This vibrant book of stories about women from all parts of her society was her reply, referencing the colonialist art of Delacroix a century and a half earlier.

But our journey doesn’t end even there. I could have begun by saying we’d get all the way to a Canadian writer in the 21^st century.

Last year, I wrote about Assia Djebar in a substack essay. And we’re going to travel even further, because this essay is in reply to a post I read on substack by a Turkish writer in London: Elif Shafak.

For her, the first painting—In A Roman Osteria by Carl Bloch—is interesting because its dramatic tension could be a writing prompt. But being a curious person, I wanted to know more about the painting, and so I looked it up. One thing led to another, the way it does when your curiosity is unquenchable. And as it did, the paintings, the painters, the writers and their intertwining histories excited me more and more. It’s a joy to me that this essay is, at heart, a conversation between writers.

Art—and I mean all art, whether it’s writing a beautiful book or cooking a beautiful meal—is a conversation. Authoritarians co-opt it to control the conversation, but artists tend to resist control. In the Soviet Union, for example, when writers were denied publication because they wouldn’t be a mouthpiece, people secretly copied their work and passed it around hand to hand. We aren’t at that point.

Democracy is still breathing. Here algorithms don’t stop anyone from being published, but they do manipulate who sees what. It takes an effort to resist the algorithm, to focus on who we follow. Apps are structured that way. But substack has been different because of its focus on email, rather than a feed, on readers and writers choosing each other. I hope it stays that way.

I was English. In officially French Quebec, I felt like an outsider, even though I was born in Montreal. I couldn’t wait to leave home and leave a place where I could never truly belong. You see, I didn’t know that I’d regret not keeping up my French, such as it was. That it would limit what I could read. (And unfortunately for my later self, I did my best to skim through high school French with the least amount of effort.)1

So, I can only be grateful to translators and publishers, especially the small presses devoted to putting out out translated work. Thanks to them, I’ve had access to two exciting, recent novels (both translated in 2022) by Cameroonian authors.

Djaïli Amadou Amal and Hemley Boum, both feminist writers, share values and concerns, yet their experiences of being women among women are worlds apart. This is evident not only in what they say but in their approach to writing. Amal’s work is direct: characters are there to say what she wants everyone to get mad about. Boum’s is subtler, creating a web of deeply felt characters who take the reader on a journey.

The Impatient, Amal’s third novel, is an exposé of polygamous marriage among her people, Muslim Fulani. Boum, too, is concerned with polygamy, the subject of her first novel, Le Clan des Femmes. But her context is national and multicultural as people from different ethnic groups intermarry, do business with each other, become friends.

Cameroon’s terrain is a microcosm of Africa, from mountains and dry grassland in Amal’s home region to the sea and forests of Boum’s. It also reflects Africa’s ethnic diversity. Even though Cameroon has an eighth of the population of its neighbour, Nigeria, it has the same number of ethnic groups and languages: about 250.

Amal was born in the largely rural Far North region. At practically the other end of the country, in the south west, Hemley Boum was born in Douala, which is the largest city in the country and the capital of the urbanized Littoral region.

Polygamy is surprisingly common in most parts of Cameroon, among both Muslims and Christians. But Amal has personally experienced it: as a 17 year old, she was married off to a 55 year old politician. She says,

In these forced marriages, physical violence is not used like in bad TV movies. It always goes with emotional blackmail. Your whole environment, the whole family convinces you that you have to accept this, for your own good, but also for their good.

As a teenager, it devastated Amal, and she nearly ended her life. Everything about her life was subject to the whims of her middle-aged husband: clothes, housing, books, sex, food. The only control she had was over how much she put in her mouth, and she developed both anorexia and bulimia.

Still, she was lucky enough to be educated and to have access to books—“I often say that literature saved me.” That was her escape, reading novels that took her away from her place and time into the Middle Ages, Turkey, India, China, allowing her to imagine herself as a heroine. Imagination turned more concrete when she began writing, and this brought relief, self-awareness, and determination to leave, which she eventually did.

The Fulani word for patience is Munyal and it features large in the instructions given by male relatives to a new wife on her wedding day. Amal’s first novel to be translated into English, The Impatient, begins with these instructions:

“Patience, my girls! Munyal! That is the most valuable component of marriage and of life. That is the true value of our religion...our Fulani identity....Inscribe it in your heart...Do not sulk...Do not be talkative...do not demand....Be grateful. Be patient...Respect [your husband’s] family and submit to them...May his nose never smell anything that reeks in your body or in your house, may he breathe in only perfume and incense...[You] belong to your husband and owe him total submission...Without his permission, you do not have the right to leave the house...A woman’s paradise is at her husband’s feet.”

The Impatient is about three women in northern Cameroon. It’s told from each of their points of view in turn: Ramla, a 17 year old in love with a boy her age, who is forcibly married to a much older man; her 17 year old half-sister, Hindou, who is given in marriage to their abusive cousin; and Safira, a thirty-five year old woman who expected to live monogamously but now must contend with her husband’s decision to marry Ramla as his second wife. Each wife has her own quarters, granted by the husband, and whether they’re liveable depends on him.

Sharing a husband is emotionally difficult, but there are also material consequences that affect their survival and that of their children. Even in well-to-do households, like those in the novel, a woman has nothing of her own except at her husband’s discretion. What he gives, he can rescind, whether it’s a bed or being allowed to take a course. He’s the king, his home is his court, and his wives are in competition for his favour.

In The Impatient, Safira initially blames her husband for taking a new, young wife, who gets privileges that used to be hers. But she can’t express any anger toward him. He’s too dangerous a target. Instead, her rage is focused on her co-wife, Ramla, using experience, and knowledge of her husband’s affairs to discredit the younger woman.2

In polygamy, the well-being of a woman’s children depends on her maintaining her husband’s interest, as she provides for them out of what he grants her. If his gifts diminish, her children suffer. She soon sees that her chances are better if less is going to the other wives’ children. Even worse, if she displeases her husband, he can repudiate her and send her back to her parents without her children. They’re left without a protector in the household, as each wife is looking out for her own. In this way, women are pitted against each other, making them weak, isolated and fearful.

In The Impatient, an older woman offers a younger this advice:

“If you give them even a hint of your pain, they will mock you. If you falter for a second, your co-wife will get the upper hand forever. A woman has no worse enemy than another woman! Do not give them the opportunity to speak ill of you. Have self-control, stay strong, do not falter.”

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This is the picture that Amal paints of polygamy based on her experience, and it’s certainly consistent with polygamy in other parts of the world, like among the FLDS3 in Utah and Texas. Married young, with a lack of education and resources, women are very vulnerable, their safety depending on men who’ve been raised to dominate them. But not all polygamous households are unhappy.

A 1989 video–consisting of raw, unedited footage—shows a polygamous Fulani family going about their day. This family was poorer than the ones in the novel. They lived in a simple single home where each wife had a room where she lived with her children. The women cooked together, took care of each other’s children, shared treats and comfort. Their husband, a local official in the village, was affectionate with their children.

Polygamous marriage is legal in Cameroon and predates colonization. Because polygyny (one man-multiple wives) is part of Islamic custom, it made a good fit for groups like the Fulani when Islam moved into Africa. But polygamy is also a long-standing practice among the Bamiléké people, who are mainly Christian.

Polygamy is more common in rural areas, among the less educated and women getting married for the second time. Over the last 30 years, it’s declined quite a bit, but even in 2018, over a quarter of all women who registered their marriages that year were entering into polygamous unions. This is even true in the urbanized Littoral region, where Hemley Boum was born.4

For Boum, polygamy is only one potential part of a woman’s experience. Even in her first novel, Le Clan Des Femmes, she looks back at it as a historical practice, based on her grandmother experience in the early 20^thcentury.

Her fourth novel, Days Come and Go, explores women’s worlds through multiple perspectives and three generations. It begins with a woman nearing the end of her life, remembering the seduction of colonization:

They birthed a cruel conflict in us...Our material reality would be more comfortable, that was the promise. That nature would be devastated, and our souls left shuddering with anxiety from this was secondary...we were all woven into the fabric of the world. They, however, had appropriated it, simplified it to make it intelligible and malleable.

The novel itself is structured to reveal this contradiction between the simple, logical world view she perceives as western and the complexity of an astoundingly multicultural nation of peoples with a “comprehensive intuitive understanding of reality” (Days Come And Go).

The novel first presents us with a familiar narrative: a mother-daughter story and the tension between tradition and modernity. But as it moves back and forth from past to present, its scope broadens and deepens. Ultimately, this is the story of passionate women reaching for freedom despite the pressure of colonization, civil war, corruption, raids by Boko Haram,5 and the threat of radicalization.

Her women are expressive: “joys are loud and our grief demonstrative. Our voices are strong and our laughter thunderous.” But there are limits. “[R]arely do we say a word about our private lives.” (Days Come And Go)

This taboo is broken by Anna, who represents the older generation, when a crisis in her grandson and his friends’ lives threatens to destroy the young people it was her mission to save. Only then does she realize that her silence and her daughter’s secrets have made these young people vulnerable, just as the nation is vulnerable because of its silence about its own secrets.

Breaking silence, both personal and political, is at the heart of Days Come and Go.

The inspiration to write it—or the compulsion—came from Boum’s reaction to the attack on Charlie Hebdo. She was living in France at the time, and it horrified her. Less than a week later there was another attack by Muslim fundamentalists, this time in a northern town in Cameroon where 150 people were killed. Boum noticed that while the world poured out its sympathy for the Hebdo attack, there was silence about Cameroon. This wasn’t surprising. But what did surprise her was the silence about it in her homeland too. Information about the massacre among the Fulani in the north wasn’t communicated to the rest of the country. Why? Were they indifferent, she wondered.

The possibility was extremely painful. She thought she knew Cameroon. But the silence about this attack reminded her of the silence about atrocities committed after the war of independence.

At that time, the new Cameroonian president and his associates came to power because they were willing to go along with France’s terms, which benefited the French and fostered corruption at the expense of the Cameroonians. The Bamiléké people, who’d been very involved in the original independence movement, rebelled. Government forces retaliated by massacring entire villages. After the rebellion was put down, nobody spoke about it for thirty years.

This repetition of silence and interethnic callousness was the genesis of Days Come And Go: a nuanced exploration of individual and national psychology.

Like Amal—who says her life was saved by literature—the fictional character Anna, in Days Come and Go, says, “I would be dead if not for books. All books.” But in Boum’s Cameroon, unlike Amal’s, women’s experience of a sphere separate from men’s leads to strength and solidarity rather than rivalry. Boum says,

I’m often told that my female characters are feminists and that women are given a lot of space in my work. But I think women are in their rightful place in life, and in my life. Men have roles in my books too. It’s just that women have dominant roles in life … what I try to do is to show global and complex women who resemble women we know.

For Amal, activism and advocacy is central to life and to writing. She’s heavily involved in the feminist organization, Femmes du Sahel, which promotes education and access to books. She says, The writer has always been a consciousness raiser...The majority of African writers are also literary activists. … And when you’re a woman, it goes even further...

The Impatient was shortlisted for the prestigious Prix Goncourt in France and won the Prix Goncourt Lycéé, a literary prize voted on by high school students. It’s a fascinating exposé but it doesn’t have the inventiveness, character development, or lyricism that makes for a really good novel. And I also can’t help but feel that it got a lot of attention in part because a polemic about polygamy plays to a western narrative of Africa (poor women, we’re so much better).

Boum’s activism takes the form of working with feminist writers from Francophone Africa in a protective, supportive space for women. For her, the work of writers is to interpret reality and make sense of life: “I don’t write all the time but when I do I go all the way. I know the importance of what I have to say and I know what I want to express.”

As different as they are in some respects, both Amal and Boum are adamant about the need for tradition to change and to recognize all people as part of one humanity.

Amal says, Let’s be clear: any tradition that causes suffering or alienates community members is inappropriate. Humanity and human rights are universal and are built on universal human values...regardless of gender or color...

In a 2011 interview about Le Clan des Femmes: Boum says,

It’s not only Africa that is changing and moving—the entire world is undergoing profound upheavals. Some think that we are abandoning our ancestral traditions and losing ourselves in our quest for modernity. I don’t share that view. For me, we are enriched by our past, in what is beautiful about it and also in its painful aspects. Our roots should not hold us back; on the contrary, they are there to support us and allow us to approach the present in a completely uninhibited and determined way...Literature cannot be limited, period...It is essential that authors express themselves, whatever their message, and it’s up to them to draw us into their universe.

Hemley Boum is a pseudonym. Boum is a common Bassá surname, and Hemley is a Bassá word that refers to courage, hope and pride (according to one interviewer as in fuck you, Colonialists).

I’ll give Boum the last word because she perfectly expresses my feelings:

Books have made me laugh and cry, sometimes both at the same time. They’ve taught me and made me dream. Literature has allowed me to develop my critical sense at the same time as my imagination. It has made life infinitely sweeter for me.

4

By Region: percentage of marriages registered in 2018 that were polygamous

Fairy tales are very old. “Beauty and the Beast” and “Rumplestiltskin” go back 4000 years; Jack and the Beanstalk 5000; The Smith and the Devil back before the pyramids were built. They also cut across cultures: Cinderella shows up in China, Ancient Greece, Iran, Korea.

These stories have persisted for thousands of years because they speak to our deepest fears and longings. They shy away from nothing, depicting cruelty, trickery, rage, beauty, kindness, grief, humility and arrogance, hunger and inexplicable mystery.

In children’s books, the old stories have been toned down, domesticated for what book-buying parents and schools consider appropriate in their time, while the closer you get to the original oral tales, the stranger and wilder the stories get.

I was really struck by this years ago when I read The Sacred Stories of the Sweet Grass Cree, collected in the 1920s and, again later, when I read Russian folk tales gathered from oral storytellers in the mid 19th century. The stories ramble, make inexplicable leaps, include violence and sexual exploits and mystery. Often, there’s no clear clear message or point. Like life itself. You can make a narrative out of a life, as memoir does, by selecting particular events and feelings and leaving others out. You can make your own point out of it, your own meaning, and doing so matters. But the experience of life is pretty much one thing happening after another.

The magic of fairy tales and folk tales aren’t just in the fairies or trolls or magic beans, but in the disruption of the expected order, which is retained even in the censored written versions: the youngest son accomplishes the task while his older brothers fail; the brow-beaten orphaned girl becomes a queen. Sage advice comes from beggars, gowns from a hazel tree or the bones of a fish. It’s the disruption that’s weird. And full of possibility. Therefore of hope.

This wonderful weirdness is retained in the modern Bulgarian fairy tale, Everything Happens As It Does, by Albena Stambolova, who says of it:

This novel is conceived and connected with fairy tales. It is built from many short chapters, telling the love stories of the characters – three generations in one family. I think all stories are love stories, there are no non-love stories. Storytelling is a way of making sense of things that happen without our knowledge.

Not only is it a weird novel, I found it affected me in ways I couldn’t articulate, so I read it twice, which I almost never do, and my challenge here is to find the words to describe its impact.

As well as being a writer, Stambolova is also a psychoanalyst. Born in 1957, she did her masters in French and Bulgarian philosophy, then studied psychoanalysis and semiotics at the Sorbonne in Paris, where she also qualified as a psychologist. She then returned to Bulgaria, and some years later, in her 50s, completed her PhD in literary theory and psychoanalysis. (I admire that she continued, in midlife, to stretch her intellect!)

In Paris, she studied with Julia Kristeva, who was originally from Bulgaria, too, and a famous Lacanian psychoanalyst. So—in order to understand the impact of Everything Happens as It Does—I dove into Lacan. I did not find it illuminated anything for me.

The story is about the people around Maria, a woman whose first husband called a witch. Men are entranced by her: two husbands and her lawyer are spellbound. How does she feel about this pull? What are her motivations? We don’t know. It’s just evident that when the pull becomes too burdensome, she pushes people away.

The book is constructed like a mosaic, a puzzle of small love stories, at the center of which is the love life of the Mother of two generations of heroes. She is the bearer, personifying the greatest enigma, she is something like an incomprehensible and capricious Sphinx, from whose decisions the others cannot emancipate themselves.

- Albena Stambolova

Maria has a son and daughter, twins. The son is a doer, neurotypical, but Maria’s daughter, Margarita, looks like someone with ADHD or AuDHD. Margarita also has a magical aura about her, as if she’s inherited it from her mother, though Margarita seems more fairy than witch.

Margarita’s father, Philip—Maria’s first husband—has a mental illness. And in addition, he can’t accept that his life with her and his children in their family home is long over. He experiences his longing for it as an internal knot he can’t control, as if it possesses him.

Maria’s second husband, Boris, whose childhood begins the book, grows up in a tiny fairy-tale cottage with apple-cheeked, old parents. This is how Stambolova describes his encounter with Maria:

He met her in the street, the only place where there was any possibility of meeting her, as he did not socialize at all. He had stopped short in his stride and turned to follow her. She immediately turned back and he saw her looking at him with her eyes, the color of fog. They were in front of her house, and she invited him to come in.

The rest was of no importance. What happened was simply the stuff of fairy tales…He came in and…he came out.

- Everything Happens As It Does, p 105

With his personal isolation and incomprehension of others’ sociability, Boris is coded as autistic. He admires the intricacy of beehives and the regularity of the steps of people solemnly walking. But his relationship with bees is mystical and so is his attraction to the stillness that surrounds death.

This combination of psychology and magical mysticism made me think of another psychoanalyst, one whose ideas have permeated popular culture: Carl Jung.

His view was that creative, psychic energy comes from the tension between opposing drives: one to strengthen the ego, to be a distinct and separate person, to be active; and letting the ego go, resting, dissolving into union. This energy creates a third thing, something transcendent. Ultimately, when life ends, we enter that union in the stillness that so attracts Boris.

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About death, Jung wrote:

Death is the hardest thing from the outside and as long as we are outside of it. But once inside you taste of such completeness and peace and fulfillment that you don’t want to return...The soul...achieves wholeness.

He spoke from personal experience, having had a near death experience during a heart attack. He never went as far as to say that from this he could definitively claim the existence of an afterlife, but he also said:

What happens after death is so unspeakably glorious that our imagination and our feelings do not suffice to form even an approximate conception of it.

In Everything Happens As It Does, Stambolova grapples with the mystery of death and also with the meaning of life.

Jung believed that to become whole, people must recover the lost parts of themselves, bringing the unconscious into consciousness. It’s only then that they can fulfill their personal calling, which gives their life meaning. Internal division, separation from parts of themselves, he thought, could make people sick. Inner emotional conflict could become a complex unconsciously pulling strings, like Philip’s internal knot.

This small novel deals with these issues deeply but not explicitly. There isn’t, say, an accountant (like I was!) who always wanted to be a writer (like me) and then dumps accounting for writing (my life story). Instead, the journey is more like an old fairy tale with mysterious wanderings.

If not exactly ill (except for the first husband), her characters are unable to find any meaning in their lives as if, as Stambolova says, “making sense of things and their happening are in two parallel worlds.”

In Jungian thought, the parts that are relegated to the unconscious are shadows, kept from surfacing because the person has rejected them as painful or not very nice or simply not allowed. So, Stambolova makes her characters come face to face with their shadows on Christmas Eve, in a

carnival experience [that] turns each of the characters into his opposite. And precisely here is one of the strong points of contact with fairy tales (beyond some external similarities and more direct references); each of the heroes enters into communication with some dark, unknown part of himself, which makes him act in a way unknown until then – as if the unconscious in each is exorcised and disenchanted, ceases to be beyond the reach of consciousness.

- Albena Stambolova

In the second part of Everything Happens As It Does, after experiencing their unknown selves, the characters have to have to deal with the paradox of the Mother who’s been incomprehensible and so necessary to them. With her tiny feet, her childlike fragility, shrouded in dark hair and magical dark cloth, she is embracing and rejecting, powerless and powerful, there and not-there. In facing what’s mysterious and unknowable, they lose their fear. They “know what it is to love and to be free.” (Stambolova)

The novel tells about love, love as a force that exists outside the human being (as it is mythologized in ancient mythologies in the figures of Adonis, Eros, Aphrodite, Psyche). It is presented as something mysterious, incomprehensible, that happens to people as if beyond their will. The plot is built around the characters’ attempts to understand what is happening to them.

- Albena Stambolova

One of my favourite scenes occurs between the middle-aged Mr. V and his wife Madam V. It’s humorous in the gentlest, kindest way. They’ve become distant from each other. Mr. V is outwardly elegant, inwardly insecure while Madam V is robust and controlling.

Their home represents their outward appearances, expensive and tasteful. Through an intense encounter with each other—sexual, passionate, tender, admiring—they’re transformed, their shadows no longer in shadow. This becomes visible in the decor of their home. It becomes comfortable, even kitschy, and they cuddle without inhibition, watching an American sitcom together.

Everything Happens As It Does was published in Bulgarian in 2002 and in English in 2013. Stambolova’s most recent novel was published in 2007. Though she continues to write, she’s unwilling to pay in order to publish, as many Bulgarian authors do because the traditional publishing industry has shrunk so much.

Bulgaria is a small country with only 6.7 million people, about the size of the GTA (greater Toronto area), and it’s plagued by brain drain. Over a million Bulgarians have emigrated, and the most mobile people are the best educated with the most wanted skills.

In this context, what are the concerns that inform Stambolova’s writing?

About five years ago, she said in an interview, “We want to live well, but we do nothing to make it happen.” What holds them back, she thinks, is the stranglehold of tradition, which spurs hypermasculinity and conspiracy theories.

She was especially disturbed by the 2018 rejection of the Istanbul Convention. This was a European treaty adopted to combat domestic violence and violence against women. It’s just a piece of paper, a nice piece of paper (I mean most people would agree that such violence is bad), but the treaty has no legal clout anywhere. It’s a performative intention to do something about the victimization of women and children. But what, when, how, if all depends on an individual country’s government.

Even so, the right wing party of Bulgaria turned rejecting the treaty into a national cause. They fixated on one line in the document, which defined gender as:

socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for women and men.

This seemingly obvious and banal statement provoked the ire of Orthodox Christianity: There’s no such thing as gender! Our constitution defines sex as male or female! Next thing you know schools will be convincing boys to become girls, ewww. The treaty says education should go beyond stereotypes. What, motherhood not the best calling for a girl? Girls wanting to speak up? Ewww!

Feminist groups had little funding and little impact against the forces of the church and right-wing politicians. Strangely, seeing an opportunity to strike at the centrist main party, the left-wing also got behind rejecting the treaty.

Even if it had been ratified, it wouldn’t necessarily have meant any change. But the party in power caved to the hullabaloo and handed the question to the Constitutional Court. It decided that the concept of gender was incompatible with the constitution’s concept of sex, and therefore the treaty couldn’t be ratified. And all of this goes to illustrate the strength of patriarchal institutions in Bulgaria.

For Stambolova, it’s becoming more of a man’s world. She points to Epiphany, which occurs in January, and is a celebration of Christ’s baptism. For her, the day ought to be about Christ’s teachings. Instead, it’s a rowdy spectacle. Men drink around bonfires the night before to get ready.

On the day, priests throw a cross into icy rivers. Men dive into the water, and the one who retrieves the cross has a lucky year, and, in some towns, wins a cash prize. The competition is fierce; it can involve bruising and blood. In the town of Kalofer, the diver is always the youngest boy, but there it’s become a big tourist attraction. They hold a men’s parade with a martial band, flag waving, singing and circle dancing in the river.

All Bulgarians are aware of the country’s problem with corruption. (In the EU, they’re nearly on top of the corruption index; only Hungary ranks higher.)

But the country’s obsession with conspiracy theories gets in the way of dealing with it.

What needs to happen, Stambolova says, is “to stop this distorted way of thinking that nothing depends on us, that everything is decided elsewhere, this conspiratorial mindset, this escape from responsibility—things happen outside me, everything happens outside me. If a step is made in this direction—to calm down that we are valuable, without listing reasons why—we live here in a wonderful place, our country.”

Why then, did Stambolova write a fairy tale instead of a novel about social issues? I find this especially interesting because I’ve just finished reading a novel from Cameroon exposing the abuses of polygamy and one from Korea about homophobia.

Jung thought that we not only have a personal unconscious but also participate in a collective unconscious that contains symbols and images we understand from birth. He calls these images archetypes, and they’re what make fairy tales cross-cultural and persistent across time. The witch, the ogre, the clever animal, the wise beggar, the tricky little man, the sleeper who wakens, the person who is turned into an animal, the hero who encounters the strange, gods and goddesses.

Fairy tales originated as popular culture, retold, adapted and modified by the teller. They criticize authority without directly challenging it; they subvert the status quo without being explicit. Expressing the unconscious symbolically, they can powerfully reach into the hearer’s heart.

I felt that power as a seven year old reading fairy-tales. I didn’t know about Jung or the unconscious, but the stories gave me—a child in an abusive home—a sense of hope, courage, and possibility. And it’s this same power I felt in reading Everything Happens As It Does.

“Flor” is one of my favourite short stories in the wonderful book Amora by the Brazilian writer Natalia Borges Polesso. Her aim, in this collection, was to counter stereotypes of lesbians in literature with stories that encompassed the individuality of her characters in different stages of life and environments. These stories are both particular and universal; they are all beautiful. And because I love this book, I chose a story from it to inaugurate a series where I read aloud stories or excerpts from books to give readers the delicious flavour of authors they might not have come across.

Wishing you a joyful holiday season, and hope, peace, and light in the coming year.

The military dictatorship in Brazil dealt with speaking truth to power in the old fashioned way: arrest, torture, and censorship. This was during what Brazilians call “the years of lead” or “the suffocation period” from 1968 to 1974, when repression was at its peak.

The regime was most concerned with public protests like the march of the one hundred thousand, organized by students in Rio in June 1968. The march began with 50,000 and doubled in size as it proceeded through the streets.

You’d think the police would have violently put it down as they had earlier student protests, but the public backlash to police brutality restrained them. At least on the day. It didn’t stop surveillance, arrests, imprisonment, and torture. And as in every totalitarian regime, artists and intellectuals were targeted.

(Lest you suppose that women were exempt, I’ll just mention Dilma Rousseff, who went on to be president of Brazil in 2011. As a young woman, she was a Marxist guerrilla fighter, who was imprisoned and tortured for three years in the early 1970s.)

Popular media was heavily censored. Journalists ended up in prison or exiled. Paulo Coelho, author of The Alchemist, was then a twenty-something writer of rock’n roll songs. His apartment was raided, he was arrested and tortured using techniques learned from the British to maximize psychological breakdown and minimize visible marks. Vladimir Herzog, professor of journalism and editor-in-chief of an educational TV network, was killed during interrogation.

Writers of literary fiction were slightly less of a concern because their reach was more limited than TV or newspapers. Brazil was, and still is, a smaller book reading market than you’d think based on its population, though it’s produced many great writers. In rural Brazil at the time of the dictatorship, 30% of people were illiterate. Even today, the average number of books read per person per year in Brazil is much smaller than in countries with less inequality and more wealth.

However, even so, under the dictatorship, all books still had to be approved by censors before publication, and authors were arrested and interrogated when they didn’t toe the line. Several went into self-exile to avoid further persecution. But here, I want to focus on Lygia Fagundes Telles, who didn’t flee and found a way to bypass censorship.

Before the leaden years, she was a successful writer with a teenage son from her first marriage to her former law professor. She’d been married over ten years to her second husband, a film critic and writer. This marriage wasn’t legally recognized because divorce was illegal under the constitution.1

That fact alone must have been difficult, and it made her vulnerable. More so, she had a government job. Even as a successful writer, Telles needed a regular pay cheque. She was a lawyer, employed in the pension department of the State of São Paolo—good, steady work.

The dictatorship wasn’t only shutting down political discussion. Work that “offended morality” was also a target for censorship. Since book banning has become popular again in a number of countries, including the USA, I think it’s worth quoting the dictatorship’s law in some detail to demonstrate how far it can go. Decree 1077, issued on January 26, 1970, stated:

that publications and expressions contrary to morality and customs will not be tolerated…that this rule aims to protect the institution of the family, preserve its ethical values and ensure the healthy and dignified formation of youth…; however, some magazines make obscene publications and television channels run programs contrary to morality and good customs;…the dissemination of books that directly offend common morality has become widespread;…[they] encourage licentiousness, insinuate free love and threaten to destroy the moral values of Brazilian society; …these media outlets follow a subversive plan, which puts national security at risk.

DECREES:

Art. 1 Publications and expressions contrary to morality and good customs, whatever the means of communication, will not be tolerated.

Notice how “moral values” slides from family to media to national security.2 The decree goes on to empower the Ministry of Justice to enforce censorship and punishment via the Federal Department of Police.

In 1973, at the peak of the suffocation period, Telles submitted a novel to the censors that had sympathetic portraits of: casual sex, gay sex, guerrilla fighters, abortion, desire. It related drug addiction to sexual violence. It criticized elites and the justice system; it had a graphic description of torture by police. And yet it was published.

How did she do it?

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As a child, Lygia Fagundes Telles listened to stories told by adults and older children. These stories often frightened her. “Afterwards, when I started telling stories, I began to be happier because I no longer trembled. It was other people who trembled. That’s the power. The power. I felt powerful.”3 That power rested not only on her talent, but also on experiences with all classes of society.

On her father’s side, Telles’ family goes back to the earliest colonial days of Brazil. Her grandfather was a colonel in the emperor’s national guard. They were wealthy elites, involved in the military and the law. Her mother’s family was also wealthy. But by the time Telles was growing up, that wealth had been eroded. She describes her father as unstable: “He was a very attractive man, and very intelligent, but very temperamental. He liked to drink, he liked to play, and he liked to smoke cigars.”4 At various times working as an attorney, a public prosecutor, police commissioner and judge, he gambled away his inheritance.

The family lived all over the State of São Paulo, and Telles was often alone with her mother—who tried to maintain a semblance of middle class life, dragging a piano everywhere they moved—and with the girls her mother took in. These were mostly Black and mixed race young women whose families had kicked them out because they’d been sexually active. They took care of Telles and her older siblings while her mother was occupied as a pianist. Her childhood, she said, was “half dishevelled, half unkempt, and rustic.”5 Later, as a teenager living with her mother in a boarding house, Telles was ashamed of being poor. But the lesson she learned from her mother was that, as a woman, it’s necessary to have a reliable means of supporting yourself. Worried that her beauty would prevent men from taking her seriously, she doesn’t seem to have recognized that it also opened doors for her.

In her year in law school, she was one of a handful of women, and while still a student, she held down her first government job to pay for tuition and clothes, and she still managed to write Praia Viva, a book of short stories.6

It was a hit, though, as a female author, she faced bemusement. One critic, in response to the book, said: “How incredible! This girl writes like a man!” As if, Telles says, she’d disillusioned him by not writing about flowers, butterflies and God. “I started talking about things that shocked him.”7

She continued to write and shock people. In 1973, aged fifty-five, she presented the censors with the manuscript of her eighth book.

This was As Meninas, meaning “the girls,” which I think is a better title than the English one: The Girl in the Photograph. The novel is about three girls—young women—trying to become themselves rather than the people their family and society have shaped them to be. They’re brought together through their university accommodation at a boarding house run by nuns. Although they represent different strata of Brazilian society, none of them are stereotypes.

The story is told through the girls’ perspectives, in first person stream of consciousness interspersed with occasional third person, shifting fluidly from one to the other, sometimes in mid-paragraph. It’s such an unusual style, I was baffled at first, but then I came to love it. The boldness and fluidity so beautifully captures these young women, their stage of life, their country.

Lorena, whose narrative voice begins and ends the novel, comes from an elite family that’s in the process of losing their wealth but still have enough to pamper her. She seems to be a pious, delicate recluse, nicknamed “the fainting magnolia” by her classmates. But, despite her preoccupation with a married man and fancy handkerchiefs, she proves herself to be resourceful, generous, and courageous.

Ana Clara (who’s based on a girl who lived with Telles at one point) is trying to outrun an abusive and impoverished childhood. She knows—or believes—that her beauty is her greatest asset and fantasizes about using it to gain a comfortable life with an ugly fiancé, who may or may not exist. But all her calculations are overshadowed by her drug addiction.

Between Ana Clara, lost in fantasy, and Lorena, who’s retreated to the security of her pretty room, is pragmatic action-oriented Lião. Though from a stolidly middle-class family, she’s involved with a Marxist student movement, and her boyfriend is in prison where he’s subjected to torture. Her German father is a former Nazi sympathizer and her mother is Black. She’s the only one with a supportive family, and the one most free to leave it behind to make her own way.

The Portuguese title, As Meninas (“The Girls”), is an ironic nod to an old-fashioned, popular 19th century children’s book titled As Meninas Exemplares, “The Exemplary Girls,” whose characters are described as delicate and old-fashioned by Lorena’s mother. This novel was written by Sophia Rosopchine, an aristocratic Russian, unhappily married to a French count, and mother to a brood. She started writing in her late 50s, and As Meninas Exemplares (the English title was The Good Little Girls) was the middle book of a trilogy.8

Telles’ girls are far from exemplary, though they are examples of both what young women often experience as well as their particular experience under a repressive regime.

Telles has said that an author’s primary role is to be a witness and recorder of her time. She believed that writers needed to articulate reality for those who can’t write, and to speak for those who need to hear what they aren’t able to express. But how did she do so given decree 1077?

The story she tells about how As Meninas got past the censors is that her husband contacted them and found out that the reader got to page twenty, was bored, and never made it to the scene about torture on page 200. This particular account comes from an interview in 2016, when she was 98 years old. And she told the same story many times previously. But is it true?

In fact the first mention of torture comes around page 8, and the full scene is about halfway through, not near the end, but maybe the essence of her story is that the censors didn’t take seriously a literary work that enters deeply into the minds of of young women. The subtlety of style and its engagement with the mental pressure of living under a dictatorship went over the censor’s head. He didn’t read much of it and dismissed its potential impact.

Many critics loved it. Some, in self-protection, didn’t take any position themselves, not directly, attributing any statement about it to Telles: “As Meninas’ is a reality that is part of the reader’s daily life, according to the author’s explanation,” or “Lígia explains that in As Meninas she seeks to show youth in a society that has become oppressive.”

There were also negative reactions. The critic Bruna Becherucci called it dangerous, comparing the author to a child with a loaded gun, irresponsibly dealing with controversial subjects when the focus should be on unity. Yet it was popular with readers, especially students, especially women. Ivan Ângelo, a writer and contemporary of hers, identified it as one of the most important texts of the period: “We were living under constraint imposed by the military regime, and Lygia dared to publish a novel, As Meninas, in which one of the heroines is a political militant.”

For its originality in style and for its relevance (which, for me, persists even fifty years later), As Meninas went on to win the Jabuti, Brazil’s top literary prize, in 1974, bringing it more attention. Apparently, Brazilian Book Chamber, the non-profit group that awards the prize, wasn’t cowed by the views of the regime.

Telles pitted herself against censorship again in 1977, when she spearheaded the “manifesto of the thousand.” It was January 25th, almost the seventh anniversary of decree 1077. Two women and two men—Lygia Fagundes Telles, Nélida Piñon, Hélio Silva, and Jefferson Ribeiro were flying to Brasilia, the capital, to present a letter against censorship signed by a thousand writers, artists, musicians and educators. The flight was difficult; a storm caused severe turbulence.

“A cloud conspiracy,” Telles recounted whispering to Silva.

“If we don’t go down now, we’ll be arrested on arrival,” he replied.

The letter denounced censorship in general and in particular cited works by three writers that censors had recently refused to approve for publication.

Telles and her friends arrived safely, were not arrested, and delivered the letter to the Minster of Justice’s chief of staff. Two days later, authorities incinerated three tons of books, movies, newspapers, magazines and albums as offensive to morality and good customs.

This is the text of the letter, which I’m quoting in full to honour the courage of those who’ve gone before us and as inspiration for a future that may require it again:

We, writers, journalists, teachers, filmmakers, musicians, and Brazilian artists, the undersigned, in view of the series of acts carried out under the inspiration and responsibility of this Ministry, which entail restrictions on freedom of expression and constrain creative capacity, denounce, through this document, a situation that is imposed upon us and which we are frequently forced to confront.

Under the allegation that they contain ‘material contrary to morality and good customs,’ or under other pretexts, or with no justification whatsoever, censorship has been removing from circulation, on an increasing scale, a set of literary, theatrical, musical, and cinematic works.

In the wake of inexplicable acts of arbitrariness, censorship has recently fallen upon the books Aracelli, My Love, by José Louzeiro; Zero, by Ignácio de Loyola Brandão; and Happy New Year, by Rubem Fonseca, once again bringing outrage and perplexity to those who dedicate themselves to intellectual activity in Brazil.

We, for whom freedom of expression is essential, cannot continue to be silenced. Our gagging will amount to the silence of Brazil itself and to its unmistakable transformation into a country that will soon have very little to say.

If the government calls upon the Brazilian people to participate in the greatness of the nation, we declare that this same greatness is also manifested through its cultural independence.

We refuse to abdicate our national identity and our own memory; we reject coexistence with passivity, apathy, and the false recording of our reality. The repeal of acts with punitive effects on intellectual activity is necessary.

We address Your Excellency to defend the censored books and, above all, to challenge an arbitrary instrument, repudiated by Brazilian intellectual life.

The destiny of a country is not determined solely by its rulers. It is necessary to consult the people constantly and to allow artists, in their name, to express themselves.

Otherwise, Mr. Minister, we, writers, journalists, teachers, filmmakers, musicians, and Brazilian artists, the undersigned, await the immediate repeal of the acts that prevent the circulation of books, the staging of plays and films, the dissemination of music, and that repress freedom of thought and creation in the country.

You might think: but what’s the point? So many books were burnt right after they delivered the letter. The deliverers weren’t even considered enough of a threat to imprison. But a year later, the regime started easing censorship, and a few years after that, the dictatorship ended and Brazil became a democratic state.

Lygia Fagundes Telles died in 2022. The NYT reported that she’d died at age 98. The report was incorrect: Lygia Fagundes Telles was actually 103. All her life, she’d claimed to be born in 1923, but a genealogist, who provides receipts, discovered otherwise, and Wikipedia, at least, has made the correction. Those five years taken off her age—perhaps a matter of vanity—just make her vigour and lucidity in her last years the more remarkable.

Her second husband died in 1977 and her son when she was in her mid-80s. Of grief, she said, “Art is the negation of death. You cannot deny death itself, but you can, like a knight, jump over this enormous obstacle and continue.”

Writing saw her through patriarchy, poverty, war, dictatorship, love, divorce, acclaim.

“That’s the power. The power. I felt powerful” - Lygia Fagundes Telles.

I was more logical: emergencies bring out the best in me. I was built for catastrophe. I was trained in it. Before I could read, catastrophe was happening to me on a regular basis. When you can’t rely on your adults because they’re the ones doing the harm (“whacking and fucking,” another part of us wrote, but I deleted it because it wasn’t in keeping with the tone of this paragraph), you do what you can to protect yourself. Observe, anticipate, hide, comply, resist.

As our (because it wasn’t just “me,” the part currently typing on the keyboard) cognitive skills developed, so did the habit of thinking about every possible contingency and how to deal with it. This applied to every aspect of life, from the next moment to a decade hence.

I thought that the pandemic would cause shortages. Random ones because of outbreaks in warehouses or factories and because of breakdowns in supply chains. I wouldn’t be able to know in advance which ones, so non-perishable food was the priority. Beans, lentils, canola and olive oils. Cheese. Medication. Soap. Detergent. Bandaids. Hand sanitizer. I organized the small upstairs kitchen, converting it into what my kids, who were in university and living with us, called the doom room. Three months of supplies. For the most important items, six months. And, sure, when toilet paper was back in stock, that, too, went into the doom room.

But wait—I have to take a step back from praising how adept I was at negotiating the pandemic. In January, 2020, another part of us, the type that chats with neighbours and can look so much like a normal singleton, thought that covid was all hype. That “I” said to a friend: Remember SARS; the world thought Toronto was a danger zone and we just went about our lives and it blew over. This will, too.

I was sitting on my red couch, looking out the window at bare trees. My phone was on the coffee table, speaker on. My friend was also working at home that day, as everyone would be soon. Her couch was green, and she had an antique desk that was at odds with the printer next to it. She’s a professor in public health, a numbers person. I’m looking at the data, she said. The way case numbers are multiplying, it’s going to be a tsunami.

I remember that word—tsunami. I didn’t like the picture it conjured, but others of us inside were nodding because life for us was always an oncoming tsunami.

By early February, 2020, there were cases in Canada. I was travelling to Vancouver for a book festival; my older daughter was with me. In the airport, lined up at the gate, when someone in front of us started coughing, we looked at each other in horror and moved away. Once inside the plane and in our seats, we used wet wipes to clean them. We weren’t wearing masks. There were no masks available.

After we returned home, I watched the numbers climb: cases, hospitalizations, deaths. I started following epidemiologists on Twitter. In Italy, hospitals were overflowing with patients in hallways. There weren’t enough ventilators for people who couldn’t breathe.

Just before March break, I did a workshop for university students. I looked at the number of reported cases, adjusted it for the fact that it would be a week behind, and calculated the risk of getting covid from someone in the class as one in a thousand.

The next day, lockdowns were announced, and everyone got to know what it was like to live in fear 24-7, to have your existence threatened, living in a snow globe turned upside down and shaken around. At last, they were in my world.

There were joys, too—shared moments with family that we, like many, cherished. Lockdown also provided respite from social expectations.

When I talked to a friend of mine with DID, we were a little smug. People were always telling us that we were catastrophizing. But it was because they had their heads up their asses. We knew the truth. Bad shit happens and you’ve got to do your damnedest to survive it. We had to as kids. I’m saying this as a fact; I’m a protector. Just switched because of the topic, but I’ll hand this back to the part that was talking about the workshop.

Yes, and this novel virus just confirmed what we all believed: that disaster is around the corner, ready to attack when you least expect it. Of course, we were afraid of being sick, disabled, dead. But at least the monster was out in the open; at least we were adults with adult rights.

When my children were young, they were sometimes scared at bedtime. So, I looked under the bed and in the closet, too, shining a flashlight at all the dark spaces and pronouncing them free of monsters. My hands—magical to them, then—threw all scary thoughts out the window. Then I’d lay my palms on a child’s forehead to replace them with dreams of fairies and all that she thought beautiful.

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The monsters in my childhood were real, but dissociation gave them otherworldly powers. What I mean is that different parts of us were conscious before, during, and after the abuse, sometimes just for particular moments or aspects of each. It was like this: imagine you’re safe in your bed, and then suddenly you’re in pain, with no memory of what happened to cause it. And also, there’s another part of you that experienced the abuse somewhere else in the house or in another location altogether, but has no memory of how you got there. Yet another only remembers being in a vehicle on the way. But all the feelings are swirling around inside.

That creates an impression of horrible things happening without end, and of horrible things you can’t describe except for the pain and fear that they leave you with. It makes the monsters feel all-powerful, and the monstrous acts always happening.

And then you grow up. You—what you interpret as yourself—are now an adult. You’re the one that has magic hands and banishes monsters, which aren’t real. So when you experience that feeling, this fear you always carry around within you of something awful on its way, you cast your mind around for something to explain it.

And the world is full of awful possibilities that can explain the fear: dread diseases, accidents, war, terrorism, storms, floods, financial catastrophes, loss of love, so many kinds of losses. You’re always looking out for the signs; you’re always worried you’re missing them or that doom will come unannounced as it sometimes does, and you try to plan for every eventuality.

To you, other people—the ones who aren’t worried all the time—are ostriches hiding their heads in the sand. Just look at all the people who prefer denial to facing hard truths. (How long ago were we warned by scientists about climate change?)

But during the pandemic, everyone was coping with the same disaster. The monster had a name; its genome was sequenced. For once, our trauma didn’t make us different. For once, we didn’t have to put on an act all the time, covering it up.

But when omicron proved too contagious to control, and the backlash to disruption got too strong, the pandemic was pronounced over. Vaccines and treatment made covid less deadly. Though it still killed and it still disabled people and it still mutated, people wanted to go back to life as it was before, and they did, leaving us alone, again, in our world.

When we caught covid, five years after the pandemic started, the foundation of that world fractured.

There was a lead up to covid. First, I had an unrelated cough. It came and went and then it stayed, slowly getting worse. As part of my dental checkup, the hygienist checked my blood pressure (normal) and oxygen level: it was low. She shrugged and just said, “that’s odd,” and I shrugged and thought it was a glitch. Those little pulse oximeters, popular early in the pandemic, aren’t consistent.

The cough kept getting worse. I had an X-ray but the results weren’t in when, on a day my doctor wasn’t working, my cough was so bad, I got worried. I’ve had pneumonia before; it was feeling similar. I called Telehealth, and an RN advised me to go to ER.

There I waited. A receptionist, who wore her mask on and off, was coughing worse than I did, and eventually she put her head on her desk. Tests were run. My oxygen level was indeed low. The CT scan indicated atypical (aka walking) pneumonia. I was in ER all night, and in the morning they admitted me into the hospital so they could run more tests. I spent another night there, awake next to a patient with dementia who cried and shouted, pleading with ghosts for hours. I was given antibiotics and steroids, which reduce inflammation but also suppress the immune system.

The doctors wore N95 masks, but regular nurses—the ones bringing meds and checking vitals, not the RNs—only had loose-fitting medical masks, which they wore on and off, like the receptionist. A cleaner came into the room unmasked. Visitors were unmasked.

I caught covid in the hospital.

We were sick for a month. Then, just as we started to get on our feet, we had covid rebound for three weeks; and after that we had symptoms for months.

In the up and down trajectory of healing (there were many days when I was afraid this was it; I’d never get well), we became aware that our childhood trauma was getting triggered in unexpected ways. It turned out that there were young parts—new to me— whose memories and reactions the rest of us were becoming aware of for the first time. Despite years of therapy and despite the many years since ending therapy, there were still undiscovered depths.

We were desperate to heal. And it became evident that there was a feedback loop between the terror of traumatized parts and post-covid symptoms, each reinforcing the other.

We had the skills to work internally with those triggered, young parts. We’d done it before, just not for a long time. It’s much like you’d imagine trying to help a terrified, wounded child. We have to approach the child gently, carefully, on the child’s terms, developing trust. Only then can we, slowly, step by step, learn what is terrorizing the child and help the child come to know that we’re now safe. For us, there’s also a spiritual element, connecting to the light and bringing in healing energy, which also requires trust.1

Even though it’s happening in our mind, it’s entirely real and has a physical impact as well as a psychological one. It takes time. But it isn’t a one-way street; not simply us telling an ignorant kid that, hey, we left the asshole perps an age ago. The kid has memories, has perspectives, shows us things about ourself we didn’t know.

And as a result, we learned that the anxiety of child parts was thoroughly influencing what seemed on the surface to be purely adult thought processes generating worry.

Like, say, to put it briefly: I’ve had a relapse; this means I am not getting any better; my life is fucked.

I described earlier in this essay how childhood feelings are explained by the adult brain with present-day stresses. I’m sure this isn’t unique to us, or to people with severe childhood trauma. In fact, it’s probably why denial is so powerful. If stresses feel overwhelming because they elicit that childhood feeling of helplessness in the face of great power—ie every adult—then sweeping problems under the rug is a way of avoiding them.

There’s a new disease in the world. It creates additional risks. It reduces life expectancy. That is scary. It’s upsetting. So instead of dealing with it and making decisions about what might be reasonable changes, like mask wearing in public places becoming a new norm, for example, everyone pretends it’s over. Unless you get sick and don’t get better.

The reason I said that my foundation fractured when it happened to me for a good chunk of 2025, is that the assumption that I am clear-eyed while everyone else is wearing shades proved to be incorrect. What I mean is that I’ve got shades on, too, mine coloured by trauma, theirs by denial.

To be clear eyed, we can’t just accept the collective norms. Some might be based on truth; but others are based on fear just as much as our catastrophizing. Instead, we have to go back to the beginning, and question everything we believe.

Would you do that?

Wait—there is one thing we don’t question. Love and light are what matters.