A Geography of Reading

"It is by reading novels, stories, and myths that we come to understand the world in which we live." -Orhan Pamuk

What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About

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Mother’s Day is nearly here and whether you’re of the group that posts adorable tributes to their mothers or the one that cringes (or openly shames those posters) because their reality doesn’t reflect yours (or you live somewhere in between), this might be a good year to read What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About. It was for me. While I especially loved that the experiences represented in the essays therein were diverse enough to reflect mine and also to challenge my thinking, I was also grateful to get new angles on my relationship with my mother and with myself as a mother.

“There is a gaping hole perhaps for all of us, where our mother does not match up with ‘mother’ as we believe it’s meant to mean and all it’s meant to give us.” – Lynn Steger Strong

Maybe “motherhood” is such a loaded concept because so much of who we are and who we believe ourselves to be is tied up in our relationship with the woman of whom we are borne. For too many of us that concept becomes something we have to work on for the rest of our lives as we grow from infants to children to adults and maybe even parents. It is for me. I think it has been for my mom, too. This complexity made me appreciate the ways in which the writers in this collection worked to understand both themselves and their mothers as separate beings in addition to examining the deeply close relationship between individuals.

“Our mothers are our first homes, and that’s why we’re always trying to return to them.” – Michele Filgate

Individuation is a Bitch (and So Was I)

It took a therapist to teach me the word “individuation” and it took my son to really teach me what the word means. At three and a half he’s stretching that individuality in all the ways he’s meant to. I can see how it hurts him to rip himself from me and how much he needs to know he’s welcome back. I can see how deeply he needs to have that space to become and how much he has no idea that his own actions can hurt, too. It reminds me of both the teen years to come and of my own teen years. I don’t think it’s fair to call myself a bitch (beyond even the patriarchal implications of that word) but not only was my own becoming hard on me, it was hard on my parents. I was hard on my mom. Our relationship now is not what I think either one of us wants it to be but I don’t think either one of us knows yet how to bridge the hurts.

“In their company I find myself turning mute, surly, rude. I become a different person than I know myself to be, a different person than my close ones know me to be. The burden of the unsaid turns my heart into a balled fist.” – Nayomi Munaweera

Nayomi Munaweera’s essay “Her Body / My Body” about her mother’s inability to separate her idea of herself from her daughter hit close to home for me. The conflict is neatly summed up as “she saw no difference between her body and my body,” except if you’ve been in this kind of relationship you know how much that “neat” sentence conceals. While my mom did not wipe my ass until I was 12 (thank God!), I’ve struggled at times to feel like my mom sees me as a separate being. The push-pull of individuation is so necessary and yet it can be so painful for everyone, it’s no wonder that so many relationships break down along these lines. I hope I can do better with my son. Most days I am not doing better with my son.

Mothers are Humans

News flash! The fact that our mothers are human should not be surprising and yet the idea sort of rubs. When we are infants mothers seem purpose-built to meet our needs. As we grow up we grow into meeting our own needs many of us (guilty!) never really turn around and fully look at our mothers as people too.

“I felt so much like her and I wanted to tell her how. But I have made that phone call and it has failed me too many times.” – Lynn Steger Strong

Although Leslie Jamison’s relationship with her mom is wonderfully close—so much so that she writes how her friends never want to hear about the joy of that relationship, even in closeness there are things to learn. Jamison’s essay is about connecting with her mother’s former husband so that she can be even closer to the idea of her mother. When Jamison writes “How many times has my mom picked up the phone to hear my voice cracked with tears, only letting it crack once I knew she was there?” she is realizing new depths to her mother and that even the advice her mother has to offer isn’t something she’s fully inhabited herself. Instead that “wisdom” can be “a kind of muscle memory—something she might have wanted to tell that version of herself.”

This is tricky, because if our mothers, the women who represent the pinnacle of humanity, aren’t perfect, than how can we ever hope to be?

Brandon Taylor’s essay, “All About My Mother” left me with excellent homework. The essay is filled with a gorgeous back and forth about the ways his mother loved him and the ways she hurt him. He’s clearly grappling with understanding how both could co-exist, but in the final page of the essay he writes a slew of declarative sentences to describe his mother. I’d say they’re simple but they aren’t—the ideas are complex and the sentences contradict each other, but they are free of judgment and bring us closer to seeing her as a full human. I know that I can get closer to my mother by trying to see her in the same way. Maybe I’ll discover something as remarkable as André Aciman’s observance that his deaf mother could understand his masked conversation simply by following the movement of his eyebrows.

I was once my mother’s confidante in ways that I did not want to be. In this I related to “Nothing Left Unsaid” by Julianna Baggott which gave me a new lens to view that experience through… Baggott’s own examination and growth took me from feeling victimized by TMI to seeing my mother as a woman who might not have had anyone else to talk to.

“It’s the fear that I’ve learned less from my childhood than I should have, that I am more like her than I want to be.” – Carmen Maria Machado

The Strength to Mother Ourselves

I first heard of this book during a panel at AWP entitled “Writing the Mother Wound” where a couple of these essays were read. I learned a lot from that panel, not just about writing about motherhood but also about living with my own mother wound. One of the lessons that hit home was from Vanessa Martir who said, “I may be unmothered, but I will always want my mother’s love.” I realized then that I needed to look into this experience and not run anymore from what isn’t working. Because I do love my mom and I want her to love me. I think she does, but there are still voids between the love she gives and the love I want to receive… voids I have to learn to fill myself.

“To grasp that which has hurt you, you must trust it not to hurt you when you let it inhabit you.” – Brandon Taylor

In some ways I dream of having Alexander Chee’s grown-up experience… the one where he talks to his mom about some really hard things and she helps him rewrite his narrative more fully. It’s a door that opened for me this winter when my maternal grandmother (a well of toxicity) died and I finally had a long overdue conversation with my mom. I heard some of the things I needed to hear that day, but I’m still having trouble trusting that our next conversation will build from there. And I fear that this next quote is optimistic.

“There is a difference between the fear of upsetting someone who loves you and the danger of losing them.” – Melissa Febos

Other Things I Loved in This Book

There were so many moments in these essays I related to in ways that were not about my mother. From Jamison’s description of writers as vampires to Machado’s love/fear of toddlers and how children destroy writing to Kiese Laymon’s observations that “the folks I’ve been most harmful to in this country are people I thought I loved.” The stark patterns in “Fifteen” by Bernice L. McFadden broke my heart hard and I felt deeply for the woman Dylan Landis’s mom could have been (even if only romantically so) in “16 Minetta Lane.” I recognized the woman Cathi Hanauer’s mother is in “My Mother’s (Gate) Keeper” and am still learning from the idea of living with the itch of a mosquito bite. The way Melissa Febos inhabits her mother’s lexicon in “Thesmophoria” is pure magic and Michele Filgate’s reminder that sometimes the deepest hurt is betrayal was illuminating in ways I won’t go into now. The book is rich and the experiences varied. I think readers of all kinds of backgrounds will find something in it to relate to.

What I Really Want for Mother’s Day

Since becoming a mother I haven’t been the best celebrant of Mother’s Day in regards to my own mom. I’ve wanted to soak up the time and love of my son and husband. I’ve wanted to enjoy the cupcakes and flowers and uninterrupted baths. This year I’ve asked them for a trip to the garden store and a planting-a-thon in our gorgeous back yard—my safe haven from the world. But this year I also want to talk to my mom. I don’t know what I want to say and I don’t know what I want her to say, but I do know that the cord between us is not completely cut, nor do I want it to be. So I’m going to sacrifice some of my guaranteed bliss for a shot at the bliss of mending fences. Wish me luck!

I don’t recommend you send your mom What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About for Mother’s Day, but I do recommend you send it. Start a conversation about something you’ve never said or about something you’ve never asked. Talk to her like a human you love, one who you may not have fully recognized as a separate human. I’ll bet money hearing from you is what she really wants on any given day.

Your homework is to pick up a copy or two of What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Friday Night Lights on Race, Class, and the Makings of a Hero in Texas

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When I found a copy of Friday Night Lights by H.G. Bissinger in a Little Free Library on Super Bowl weekend, I thought it was placed there to help me brush up on my football lingo before writing a big article for work. Instead, I think it was there to help me get through the following weekend—the weekend of my Djiedo‘s memorial service in Austin. It was a timely lesson, too, in the problems of racism and classism that persist in our country, but what made it just right for me right now was understanding what makes a hero in Texas (or anywhere).

Endemic Racism

We know we have a problem with racism in our country. Or at least I hope we know how much of a problem it is. It was helpful for me, though, to dig into this story of a small(ish) Texas town obsessed with football and how much they did not see (or did not want to see) how they excluded entire categories of people based on the color of their skin. Living (as a white person) in the Northwest, it has been easier for me to pretend that the civil rights era put us on the right road to setting ourselves straight. But reading about Odessa forced me to look hard at some ugly facts. It’s hard to change the views of people who are comfortable with their lives, even (especially?) if those lives are lived on the backs of others. I was gobsmacked by the fact that Odessa’s high schools were not integrated until 1982. Not only that, but the sense of white entitlement that accompanied that segregation.

This book made me look differently at my Texas experience this time around. I’ve been looking even harder at my own actions and beliefs in the past few weeks as I’ve watched the Ralph Northam controversy unfold. I’ve never worn blackface nor a klan uniform, but I know I’ve said some racist, bigoted, sexist, and downright mean things in my life. I’m actively trying to be better, but that doesn’t change the hurt I put into the world. Looking around me in Texas this trip, I’m seeing so much of what I’ve failed to see at home—the stratification of the society around me. I see the Hispanic cashiers at the CVS, the Hispanic cooks working behind white cashiers at the BBQ joint, the almost entirely white and Asian audience at my grandfather’s memorial.

When my Djiedo’s people came to the U.S., they were just hunkies—a racial slur that encompassed anyone from Eastern Europe. He worked his way up from coal miner to professor to presidential advisor, but none of that makes me entitled to better treatment or a better life just because my ethnicity blended out in a generation. I was shocked to read about the casual racism in Odessa and it was also all too familiar. It’s easy to think I’ve earned the life I have based on my merit (that’s the American ideal, right?) when really I’ve had so many advantages (and not just racial ones).

Class Matters

One of the stories I was raised with was that my Djiedo was friends with everyone—from the man who made paperclips to the man who owned the paperclip factory. In some ways I think this was true as I’ve met some of the friends he accumulated over the years. True that many of them had achieved much in life, but some of that was that age gives us time to accomplish much and I often had the feeling that Djiedo had known many of these men “when”—before they became the titans they became.

Reading about Odessa’s origins and the glorious days of oil booms and the terrible failures of busts, the fact that people were pulling down large salaries with little to no advanced education and then were flat busted when the price of oil changed reminded me how much of our identity we tie up in our achievement—and how hard we fall when that achievement is taken away. It made me think about how harder it’s getting to make a living wage, even with a college education and how, as a country, we’re drowning in student loan debt because school seemed to become the right (only) option after 2008 even as tuition skyrocketed. How this takes us all so much farther from the “pull yourselves up by your bootstraps ideal. How it makes us afraid. How in our fear we pull even farther apart as a country. How a life like my Djiedo’s is still maybe possible, but not really. And I wonder what we’ve become.

The Making of Heroes

On a hill in the middle of the Texas State Cemetery stands a granite stone as close to burnt orange as you nature allows. On that stone the names of my grandfather, grandmother, and aunt are engraved, their ashes buried beneath. It was a big deal to my Djiedo that he was able to be buried there. Having never forgotten where he came from, acclaim mattered in every bone of his body.

I couldn’t help but think of my Djiedo as Bissinger returns again and again to the image of the Permian Panthers as gladiators—boys who carry the hopes of an entire town for a few months in the fall. While being a player didn’t change their class, they were heroes on the field. Until they weren’t. Some of those boys made good after, but not based on the brutal things they did to their bodies in that stadium.

Because my Djiedo was building for the long haul, his sense of achievement only grew with time and he never had to experience that sense of bubble bursting. Instead, my family and I sat in a large hall on Saturday while deans and a university president lauded my grandfather. They talked of his energy, the way be made friends with everyone (and for life), and his propensity for throwing erasers at sleeping students. It was a surreal experience. The kind of thing Djiedo soaked up and loved, the kind of thing most of the rest of us dreaded (being trotted out for display for the achievements of others can make you feel, well, less than achieved yourself), but something I know he earned. The stories were familiar, the film, too, but appreciated, all of it. There was a lot of love in that room for my Djiedo. And reminders that my own heart could (and should) be more open. That I have been given everything and now my life is only what I make of it (in alignment with whatever values I choose).

Life is not linear. Nor is the path to success. I was reminded of that and inspired when, at my Djiedo’s graveside, my cousin did what I would never have thought to do—she opened the lid to the urn and let my curious son release a smidgen of Djiedo back into the world. Djiedo lives on in places of honor—that cemetery, the John J. McKetta School of Engineering at the University of Texas, in my heart. And his legacy is set. Now it’s my time on the field. May I do honor to the name of great man and to the life I have been given.

Olga Tokarczuk’s “House of Day, House of Night” and the Beauty of Not Knowing

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House of Day House of Night - Olga TokarczukBless the books that find you at just the right time in your life. I first started hearing about Olga Tokarczuk and House of Day, House of Night this past fall, received it for Christmas, and started reading it the weekend after my grandfather (Djiedo) died. The book so perfectly met me where I was that I felt as though Tokarczuk was sitting at my side, comforting me with stories and reminders that the best things in life are unknowns. No matter that the book was first published 31 years ago on a different continent in a language I barely speak anymore.

First Impressions

I did not know what Tokarczuk was doing when I read the first seven pages of House of Day, House of Night, but I was in love enough to recommend it to everyone at the cabin where I was staying. I knew the book was about a town in Poland that had once been German and then the Germans had been relocated, the empty town filled with Poles from the side of the country that was now Russia. But that’s not how the book starts at all.

It begins with a dream.

“The first night I had a dream. I dreamed I was pure sight, without a body or a name.” – Olga Tokarczuk

Writing teachers always tell us to focus on our opening words and to hone them until they slice open a reader’s curiosity. Achievement unlocked. The dream continues for a page as the narrator hovers over a valley as she seeks her location in space, consciousness. And then it ends.

The tone shifts in the next section as we encounter the quotidian details of the narrator’s home and life including meeting her mysterious neighbor, Marta, a woman whose life details are as elusive of my understanding of this text. I had no idea where Tokarczuk was taking me, but I loved it and trusted her with my fragile psychic state.

The Power of Linked Stories

Linked short stories go in and out of vogue, I think, because so few people do them well. Creating a world that’s larger than one character’s lived experience seems like a great idea. It allows you to see things from a broader perspective and to understand the world as myriad. I’m in. But the temptation to over-fill the blanks between characters is huge, which can result in a world where we know too much about too little. Other writers react to this temptation but linking the stories so sparsely that they become a “Where’s Waldo” where only the truly cool kids are in on the linkages.

Tokarczuk, though, manages her links just right. Maybe it’s because the characters are odd enough, maybe because they’re inhabited enough, maybe because there are connections we clearly see but can’t understand—the result is that we feel as though we are truly in a town full of people as weird, normal, knowable, and mysterious as our own neighbors. There’s Marta from next door (a woman who may or may not be a mushroom), a lycanthropic classics teacher with a fascinating (but hidden) life story, a hermaphroditic saint (and the scholar monk who worshipped them), and a German man who returned to this town to find who he once had been (only to find a final truth), plus a comet, an eclipse, and cloud-based divination.

Fascinating, right? With a list like this, House of Day, House of Night could have been a veritable circus side show except that each of these characters and ideas is so carefully, so literarily, so humanly handled that they feel like a beautiful part of our every day. Which they might be. My Djiedo was a prize fighter, a trumpeter, a coal miner, a professor, an editor, a father, and a presidential advisor. My father has been a pilot, a forester, an economist, a hippie, a Voyageur, a professor, and more. And I, a marketer, mom, wife, poet, novelist, and essayist have lived on three continents and speak five languages. The stories we don’t know about our friends and neighbors are myriad.

Which reminds me, you can put anything in a book if you’re willing to be open to how weird life is and how it’s part of a larger story than maybe you’ve even understood yourself.

“Peter wanted to see his village again, and Erika wanted to see Peter looking at it. She thought it would finally help her to understand him fully, from start to finish, with all his sadnesses.” – Olga Tokarczuk

It helps that much of the story is surfaced in the scenes we see, but it’s also essential that Tokarczuk leaves ample breathing room in the interstices for us to fill in our own rich ideas about the connections therein.

The Not Knowing Bit

“His brain was busy creating the narcotic of a merciful death” – Olga Tokarczuk

“Only sleep closes the old and opens the new—one person dies and another awakes” – Olga Tokarczuk

There’s something about someone you love dying that changes everything. Even if that person is 103 and their death is a mercy. You wonder if you did enough, if they knew they were loved, if holding onto objects will help you hold onto them, if you even should hold on, what your own aging and death will look like, how you can possibly afford forty years of retirement.

Not only did Tokarczuk touch on some of these topics, as with this lovely look at the aging of garments people garments:

“I could see that they were wearing out, going at the seams, softening and getting older all by themselves without my input. And there was a sort of beauty in it, the opposite of ripening.” – Olga Tokarczuk

She also reminded me of the beauty of simple, thoughtful exploration:

“When you’re travelling all you really encounter is yourself, as if that were the whole point of it. When you’re at home you simply are… You can put yourself to one side—and that’s when you see the most.” – Olga Tokarczuk

That in my mourning, I was doing the work I needed to do in order to eventually heal. Here are some other ideas Tokarczuk left me breadcrumbs to explore:

  • The stasis of monks who “live in a constant present”
  • Collectively our dreams mean more than they do individually
  • It’s our “duty to save things that are falling into decay, rather than create new ones”
  • “Only in darkness does the light of the earth become visible”
  • Inside our bodies is only darkness
  • How aging involves taking action only slowly and “watching the ebb and flow of time”
  • Life goes on

I still miss my Djiedo. If the trajectory of mourning for my Baba holds any clues, I always will. But House of Day, House of Night helped me feel part of a greater, unknowable world in the days when I needed it most. And I will love this book and Olga Tokarczuk always for that.

“She recognizes an era not by the people who were alive then, because people are woefully similar to one another, but by the colour of the air and the leaves, the way the light fell on objects.” – Olga Tokarczuk

Embark on your own Tokarczuk adventure, pick up a copy of House of Day, House of Night from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Beginning a New Year as I Mean to Continue – with the Alchemy of the Word

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I wanted to write this review in December, but I was busy stealing moments to make writing from the inspiration I found in Alchemy of the Word.

I wanted to write this review over the Christmas holiday, but I was practicing balance.

I wanted to write this review on New Year’s and fill it with links to all the posts I’ve previously written about inspiration, but I had just found out that my grandmother died.

So here I am beginning the new year as I mean to end it, practicing balance, experiencing the fullness of life, and giving myself a little grace for the fact that I am trying my best. (If you need to give yourself a little grace, let Icess guide you).

Practice, Practice, Practice

alchemy of the wordI used the word “practice” very deliberately above, because I am not good at balance but it is a skill I’m trying to polish, just as writing is a skill that requires practice. The writers whose essays make up Alchemy of the Word are all very practiced writers and, as members of the faculty of Goddard College (my alma mater), are also tasked with helping new writers get into the habit (practice) of writing. The essays in this collection come from the speeches our teachers use to inspire us at residencies and to (lovingly) warn us about the writing life to come at commencements. They are about subjects as myriad as craft elements, literary activism, and failure. This last one is especially important (and frequent) because failure looms when you don’t practice. More so, failure plagues when you “fail” to see the success that is simply continuing to practice.

Rebecca Brown on failure

As I read this book, I found myself looking for essays I might have originally heard delivered aloud but ultimately found that didn’t matter. The know-how of practicing is something I’ve already absorbed. Instead each of the essays in Alchemy of the Word served as a much-needed reminder to practice.

Balance is Tricky, Balance is Necessary

As a working writer/mom/wife, the breadth of life in these essays reminded me that writing is part of my balance, not something I can add on after. Deborah Brevoort contextualized the anti-intellectualism that’s plaguing our politics (and chinking away at my soul), Elena Georgiou encouraged me to search for my own personhood and to fill myself, Keenan Norris reminded me that I actually love the humility that comes with writing, and Micheline Aharonian Marcom exhorted me (again) to “Do [my] work.”

But to do my work (well), first I must fill up again. And I must develop a plan to keep myself filled during all the things that are to come. Here’s the advice from Alchemy of the Word that I’ll be carrying close to my heart as I navigate finding my balance:

“As a writer, I think of my body as a well that is mostly filled through reading.” – Elena Georgiou

“Remember to be absent, Writer. Be in the habit of being absent more often.” – Kyle Bass

Keenan Norris on humility in writing

Life Happens. And Then You Write about It

The sympathy that might have jumped into your heart when you read “my grandmother died” is not really earned. I hadn’t spoken to my grandmother since 2012 when she called on my birthday to yell at me for not inviting her to my wedding. I didn’t invite her to my (tiny) wedding because I didn’t like her. I didn’t like her because she’d never taken the time to get to know me. Are there things to mourn in my history with my grandmother, yes, but they are probably not what you expected at the outset.

“Inherent in the creative process is a perpetual tension between love and loathing that gives art its life.” – Aimee Liu

I wish that my grandmother’s tension between love and loathing of the female line she created had tipped more toward love, but the tension is something that gives life to my own work. In Alchemy of the Word, I was reminded to write deeply:

“You have to go to the scariest places, the absence, where nothing has been said so there is no protection at all.” – Rahna Reiko Rizzuto

“It is our duty as artists to enter into those places that are kept most secret in ourselves, and bring them to light not so much that we may be healed, but so that others might.” – Paul Selig

Today is the first time I’m explicitly writing about my relationship with my
grandmother, so I don’t pretend my thoughts are profound. I do hope that at the very least I can offer someone the comfort of solidarity in the complexities that are family relationships.

For myself, I’m taking solace in the birthday call I received from my other grandmother (my Baba) in 2011—a call I took on the beach at Port Townsend— the very same beach I so often walked while at Goddard. It was the last time I talked with Baba and I was sad that day in knowing that was probably true. But I am filled with joy at the thought that Baba saw me and loved me enough for two grandmothers.

How I Plan to Move Forward

This year I will write. I will try new things and fail. I will try new things and succeed. I will practice. I will read and take time to be absent. I will be kind to myself. Most of all I will play, because these two quotes resonated with me more than any of the others in Alchemy of the Word and helped me find the joy and purpose in this writing life:

“Being a writer is to be a student without end, and it is to be at play without end. The two are tied, study and play. Both commit us to risk and remediation, that is to learning, always to learning.” – Keenan Norris

“The artists I know have the capacity for wonder and surprise coursing through their veins. And they are all riotously free—whether they have, the way my mentor had, summers off or not.” – Michael Klein

I’m off to play now—to read, to soak in a tub, to watch my son create Playmobil orchestras, to joke around with my husband and to think. All of this is practice. All of it is life. And I am lucky.

To freedom.

To reinvigorate your writing practice pick up a copy of Alchemy of the Word from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Stories from the Portuguese: Reading Mia Couto Against António Lobo Antunes

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Rain and Other Stories - Mia CoutoAfter reading more of Bolaño’s 2666 than I ever should have, I cleaned my bookshelves of all the to-read have-tos that I’ve held on to for far too long. And found myself without anything to read. Failure to read good books generally puts me in a state of existential crisis, so I decided to return to an old favorite—Portuguese author António Lobo Antunes. Even after leafing through a few chapters in random order, I could feel myself restored. And I wanted more, so I turned to my shelf of books to review and found Mia Couto, a writer from Mozambique who also writes in Portuguese. I’ve spent a few wonderful days now with Rain and Other Stories and want to share with you the experience of reading this man’s work with Lobo Antunes in the background.

Writing and War

Land at the End of the World - Lobo AntunesI’ve read many books by Lobo Antunes, a physician who fought in the Angolan war. His language is as lyrical as his thought and the books I’ve enjoyed most shift almost imperceptibly back and forth between African memories and European presents. On this read, I found myself immersed in sentences like “Lisbon, even at this hour, is a city as devoid of mystery as a nudist beach” and “I’m traveling the gentle geography of your body, the river of your voice, the cool shade of your hands, the pigeon-breast down of your pubis, but me and Xana and you, the Saturday rain, we are the only ones who truly exist…” Swoon. With a translation it’s always hard to tell whether to credit the author or translator (here, Margaret Jull Costa) but I suspect both contributed heavily to the magic of the flow of this book.

In Lobo Antunes, Africa is half of one whole. It’s either the immediate present of a man immersed in a memory of war or the tortured background against which the luscious European present unfolds. For Couto, though, Africa is everything—the tortured past and the luscious present, the luscious past and the tortured present. Rain and Other Stories was written after Mozambique’s war, and Couto writes in the introduction, “After the war, I thought all that was left was ashes, hollow ruins… Today I know that’s not true. Where man remains, a seed, too, survives, a dream to inseminate time.” Forgiving the decidedly visual metaphor, this is very much a book for our time, a time when we need to see the future beyond the [INSERT HYBERBOLIC ADJECTIVE HERE] headlines. Couto finds magic in those after-war ashes (literally and figuratively) and so shall we.

The Richness of Africa

Most of the books I’ve loved about Africa have been the books of the colonizers… partly because those were the books I was exposed to and partly because they reinforced the ideas of Africa that I grew up with during the “Feed the World” generation. Couto, too, is white. Born in Mozambique to Portuguese immigrants, he could be writing colonial books as well. And maybe the magic and use of folk images that I’m responding too is appropriated, but Rain and Other Stories feels written with the honest respect of someone who loves a country and a culture. Because Couto is Africa born and he lived through the war there, his experience, too is authentic and I wish I could have read this book without thinking so hard about race—because it’s good. I should (and will) read other narratives of different life experiences in Mozambique, but for now let me tell you about this gifted storyteller.

In “The Waters of Time,” the first story in this collection, a child rows down the river with his grandfather. It’s a simple set-up that quickly opens into another world as the narrator describes the lake they would row to:

“This was the realm of forbidden creatures. All that showed itself there, after all, invented its existence… Everything around us bathed in cool breezes, shadows made of light itself, as if the morning were eternally drowned in dreams.” – Mia Couto, Waters of Time

This fantastical world where they go to watch white cloths dance in the distance contrasts sharply with the quotidian rituals home. Through his use of tense, Couto manages to make both realms feel habitual and yet his images are rich enough to make both alive. I won’t tell you how the story unfurls because the pleasure of experiencing it for the first time was simply too great. But I want to… Suffice it to say that the river and water are recurring themes in this book in a way that feels very of the place and also ancient and of all of us.

“Water and time are twin brothers, born of the same womb. I had just discovered in myself a river that would never die. It’s to that river I now return, guiding my son…” – Mia Couto, Waters of Time

Aphorisms Abound

Like Portuguese writer Paulo Coelho, Couto makes liberal use of aphorisms, but unlike Coelho’s aphorisms (which can seem canned and cheap), Couto’s sound deeply across time and experience:

  • Fear is a river one must cross wet.
  • The illusion of being right is born when everyone is wrong at the very same time.
  • Work is like a river: even when it’s reaching an end, what comes behind is more and more river.
  • Snakes are bilingual to show that every animal contains a second creature.
  • Love is the world divided by zero.
  • He who tastes unripe fruit soon wants to try its flower.
  • Beauties subtract from one another: we see the butterfly and forget the flower.

These aphorisms were rich enough that I wondered if Couto was borrowing from Mozambican folklore, but while that may be true (I know woefully little about Mozambique), the way he (and translator Eric M.B. Becker) work around language to bring it to life, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the aphorisms were original. A few favorite examples are:

  • swallowed up into never
  • a walking beer-sponge
  • nestled in the night’s womb
  • the dictionary of her footsteps

Honestly I’ve struggled while writing this review, because every time I open the book to find more examples of things I want to share with you, I get so sucked back into the writing that I simply want to read it all over again. That is to say that I’m so enjoying being lost in Couto’s craft that I don’t really want to deconstruct it. Stories I keep returning to are: “Blind Estrelinho”, “The Delivery”, “The Flag in the Sunset”, “Beyond the River Bend” and “High-Heel Shoes”. Each story captures in its own way a very different life, a different experience and yet Couto manages in every single one to seduce me with language and then upend my expectations. The surprise is so much a part of the enjoyment that I don’t want to spoil these stories for you. I want you to read them for yourself. Immediately. (That means you, Dad… I’ll send you a copy.)

Luscious Characters

There’s one more story in Rain and Other Stories I can’t not tell you about. This part does contain spoilers. “The Perfume” is the story of Gloria, a woman “accustomed to living low” whose husband comes home with a present and announces they’re going dancing. In the first paragraph, Couto fully unravels the accumulated staleness of their marriage which contrasts beautifully with Justino’s gift to make us as surprised as Gloria. We’re with her as she warily dresses in the given dress and eventually throws a bottle of perfume Justino gave her when they were courting but that she’s never had occasion to wear out the window where it breaks on the sidewalk.

The strangeness between the pair continues as they leave the house and travel to the dance where habitually jealous Justino encourages her to dance with other men and then leaves her. It’s a confusing and somewhat devastating story as we’re locked inside what Gloria must be feeling at this humiliation, this parting. Except Gloria is a richer character than that. She arrives home, alone, to find her husband certainly gone, and in the morning she wakes in her bed to the smell of that perfume wafting though the window. She steps outside and cuts herself on the bottle and this is how the story concludes:

“To this day, one can find the indelible tracks on the living-room floor from when Gloria shed the first drops of her bloody glee.” – Mia Couto, The Perfume

I have noticed that both of these authors are male and I’m trying to read more broadly than I have in the past. Thankfully someone (@DeepVellum) approached me on Twitter and recommended Maria Gabriela Llansol and Noemi Jaffe. I’ve read neither yet, but they’re on my Goodreads list. And I’ll continue to seek out Mozambican and Angolan authors with different sets of life experiences. If you have recommendations, please leave them in the comments.

To immerse yourself in some of the magic of these books, pick up a copy of Rain and Other Stories or Land at the End of the Worldfrom Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.