When Dr. Namita Kumari of the University of Delhi wrote to me to ask me to review her novel The Serpent’s Longing, she said, the “novel is rooted in the founding legend of Funan — one of the earliest kingdoms of Southeast Asia, preserved in 3rd-century Chinese chronicles and Cambodian oral tradition,” and I was hooked. I love mythology in any culture, which is part of why, in college, I took every course in non-western art history and architecture that I could. I also had the pleasure of visiting Angkor Wat with my brother in 2005 (or was it 2006? God, I need to get on a plane again), but I knew nothing of the Funan Empire. What I didn’t realize is that I was about to read a gorgeously written love story that would teach me something I still need to learn about grief.

The Power of Choice in Loving Across Lines

The story begins with Kaundinya, a holy man who’s lived in solitude but who feels drawn out of that solitude to cross the eastern seas. There he meets Soma, a Naga princess. She, as the blade of the kingdom, has been sent to investigate the rumors of this man, but they are immediately drawn to one another. The way I’ve written it could be the beginning of any tawdry romance novel. The way Kumari writes it is lush and incantatory as she uses phrases like “stone that outlasted dynasties” and “a place where growing and dying happened so fast and so close together that they had stopped being opposites” to describe the environment.

Soma’s mother, the queen, advises her that “To love one of them, a human, is to become one,” explaining from experience that she who had been “three shapes before the sun was up” would be giving up her power of shape shifting if she chooses to love Kaundinya. She is afraid of becoming singular, but returns to meet him in the forest again and again.

Kaundinya also has something to lose by loving Soma as the powers he has spent a lifetime perfecting drain from him the closer they get.

“He was tired in a way he had not been in years. Not in the body; the body had been trained past ordinary fatigue long ago. This was the tiredness of return, of a mind shaped by the great silence of the heights now taking in the low constant noise of people. He moved through it as he had moved through every hardship of his practice: feeling it fully, holding to it not at all.” – The Serpent’s Longing, Namita Kumari

He waits as she continues to visit and they experience dreams that don’t imagine, they remember. Soma allows Kaundinya to see her many faces and all the while the potential cost of their love hangs over the choice they must make about whether to be together. But it’s not all about costs because it’s clear from the prose that there is beauty in allowing themselves to be seen, too.

“The woman did not vanish. That was the first wrong thing he had believed, that the serpent would replace her, that one would be a mask over the other. Instead she opened.” – The Serpent’s Longing, Namita Kumari

Soma’s sister, Takshaki, plots against the couple as she seeks the eventual throne, setting into motion the rest of the plot. And all the while something is changing in the water that used to be fresh and free of darkness.

I could have told you all of the above without finishing the book, but I kept reading because the writer’s enchantment pulled me forward with triumphant prose that belongs alongside that of Rebecca Roanhorse and Sabaa Tahir.

“[T]he great prices of a life get paid either way, chosen or unchosen, and… the only freedom anywhere in any of the roads was to choose” – The Serpent’s Longing, Namita Kumari

Exploring Grief and Shared Burdens

The potential to lose the ones you love is my kryptonite, a fear formed when I was very young and one I let stunt me still. It’s also inevitable and I’m grateful for the ways Kumari helped me reexamine grief in The Serpent’s Longing. Soma and Kaundinya have to deal with her potential grief over losing him, because he is mortal and she will certainly outlive him. But they also have to deal with the queen’s grief.

“[L]ives are rich because they are short, that the shortness is the whole of it, that a thing you will lose is the only kind of thing you can hold this way” – The Serpent’s Longing, Namita Kumari

Without going into too much detail, Soma and Kaundinya discover by going into the deep dark together the beauty of sharing a burden and that “the absence of the weight is not rest. It is only absence.” They also embrace the fact that “loving means losing and choose it anyway.”

I totally wept while reading this book. But I also felt restored. Because there is a lot more power in opening yourself to love than there is to sitting inside your fear of what could be lost. This may be a book I need to read again someday. For now I am grateful for the huge hug it made me bestow on my husband, a hug that he returned with equal intensity.

I have no affiliate link to offer for this book, but I hope you’ll find a copy and read it. It was a genuine pleasure to read.

I love a dark story, I think because I’m always trying to understand the worst of what humans can do so I can think about what to do about it. The danger for me in a dark story, though, is that too few writers are writing from a place I can learn from. Some are putting forth unprocessed material (okay if you want to be there to process it with them) and some are titillated by the dark events (not my bag either). Enter Somia Sadiq and her novel Gajarah, which has become my textbook on how to write about the darkest parts of human behavior with humanity, respect, and foresight.

Honoring Our Stories

The novel centers on Emahn, a Punjabi girl being raised in the U.A.E. with her family who has deep roots in Lahore. Most of the book is in Emahn’s delightful and precocious first-person voice. Poems and myths are also woven in, and from all of this we get a full, rich, and loving picture of Emahn’s family’s life in both countries. This makes us care for her and for them. In life, I also hope that raising a child with this much love builds resilience.

Emahn needs resilience too young, as she is attacked by a stranger one evening very close to her home. We see the before and the after, but Sadiq does not force us to walk through the during. This artistic choice puts a very important focus on Emahn’s experience of the aftermath. Her family reacts in a variety of believable (and sometimes humanly imperfect) ways, but we never doubt their love for her. It’s a family I’d wish for everyone.

There is more to come in Emahn’s life, the trigger warning at the beginning of the book includes rape, sexual abuse, domestic violence, racism, and more. But the book is never about victimhood. It’s about life and love and survival.

“Pain is pain…The how and what is not important. It’s what we do with it that is more important.” – Emahn’s Naano jahn in Gajarah by Somia Sadiq

When not writing, Sadiq is a peace negotiator and conflict readiness strategist and I’m certain that’s where the holistic look at experience and healing in this book comes from. There are many characters who experience tragedy and pain, but each is presented as a whole human and their story is honored. They are also portrayed as more than the things that happened to them and we are reminded to keep our hearts open.

“The strongest way to fight back is to be.

To be in our languages, in our customs, our ways of being. To be comfortable in our own skin. To know inherently in every cell of our bodies that we deserve to be treated with kindness, compassion, fairness, equality.” – Gajarah by Somia Sadiq

Ceremonies of Life

One of the other things I loved about Gajarah was the focus on daily rituals and life in Lahore and in Canada among the Anishinaabeg community. Moments as simple as making burfi on a rooftop and brushing fingers over cedar become meaningful when the proper attention is paid, just as with the rest of life, and I found myself wanting to slow down and look while reading this book (and now, again, just thinking about it). Such is the attention to details that the advance copy of this book that I received came beautifully packaged in materials that recall some of the gorgeous text.

My only regret was that I spent a lot of time wondering whether the words presented in the text were Punjabi or Urdu (such is my imperfect understanding of the region) and I let this curiosity (read: obsession with linguistics) take me out of the sumptuous text sometimes.

Make no mistake, Gajarah deals with some heavy subjects, but I don’t know that I’ve ever read something that felt so alive. I’d tell you more, but I want you to experience it for yourself.

For a gorgeously written book that will make you think more deeply about the beauty of the world and how we survive it, pick up copy of Gajarah. If you use that link, I earn a commission.

One of the main reasons I read books is to learn more about other humans and deepen my own understanding of my own life. That’s a long way to say that reading makes me less lonely, but at the best of times, reading is also like spending time with that one friend who sees the world clearly and who will tell you the whole truth. Let me share with you the three authors who recently gave me the gift of that spine-tingly “oh my god that IS how people work” revelation: Susan Choi in Flashlight, Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe in Thunder Song and Jenny Erpenbeck in Kairos.

Flashlight by Susan Choi

My uncle, one of the most faithful readers of this blog, recommended this book to me very soon after it was published and I rushed out and bought it this last week when it finally reached paperback. The book revolves primarily around Anne, Serk, and their daughter Louisa. Anne and Serk are both estranged from their families which makes for the small microcosm of a family where people can really push each other’s buttons. I won’t go too far into the story (Serk disappears from the beach one night in Japan, leaving a young Louisa drowning on the shore and Anne and Louisa suffer estrangement as well) because Choi beautifully weaves us back and forth in time to illustrate other parts of the family (and extended family) dynamics in a way that can only be properly experienced by reading the book yourself.

What brought the book to mind today was how insightfully Choi captures little details of the characters to really place us inside their minds and their relationships. Take this moment between Anne and Louisa:

After a moment of silent travel, Anne risks a glance in the rearview mirror. Louisa stares down at her book, almost certainly at the wrong page. Anne cannot make it up to Louisa without undercutting her own authority. It crosses her mind that she behaves worst to Louisa when already worried she’s not doing well. Then, Louisa’s mere existence seems to throw emphasis on Anne’s shortcomings, and Anne in self- defense throws guilt and blame back, which against justice stick. Louisa is a high-strung, fastidious child, always quick to believe she has failed. – Susan Choi, Flashlight

Oh, Nelly. Anyone who has ever been a child or parent probably does not need the context of this moment to feel the charge of it, how deeply it’s rooted in the dynamics between the characters, or how inescapable it appears to be. Between the insight into what Anne is thinking, the judgement (Anne’s? Louisa’s? does it matter?) of Louisa’s character, and Louisa’s actions of closing herself off as the one protection she has, this paragraph could have been a short story on its own.

As I read Flashlight, I kept confusing Louisa for Anne, in that I was flipping the role of parent and child. While I don’t think Choi meant for me to completely switch them in my mind, the role reversal is far from accidental as paragraphs like the above show how unhealed Anne is from her own childhood wounds and how that creates a gap into which Louisa must step, adultifying the child. Later, when the (actually) adult Louisa realizes, “her mother seemed to take questions as a form of criticism” her own growth gave me a little light into where I, too, can grow.

I do not mean to imply that Anne and Louisa are the only interesting characters in this book. In fact, in the middle when we lose Serk the book sagged a bit for me (but the energy came back and I very happily finished the book). The magic of the book is that each character is as carefully drawn as these two are, as are the relationships between them all. It’s magic.

Thunder Song by Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe

Thunder Song, by contrast, is a collection of essays by Pacific Northwest writer Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe. I’d seen reviews for her previous book, Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk but never gotten around to reading it. But this week I was stuck on an essay of my own and so I picked up Thunder Song to see what it could teach me about form. Instead, the essays were so engrossing in their own right that a structural read will have to wait. LaPointe writes on subjects from Native healing to the feminist punk scene, miscarriage and abuse, and I felt myself wishing our paths had crossed at some point in our Pacific Northwest lives, because we are a similar age and I think we’d have a lot to talk about.

This book is well worth the read even if you never had the chance to shop at Larry’s on Aurora, though, and LaPointe’s carefully drawn relationships are as insightful as Choi’s (which I think is even harder to do when you are dealing with real people). One relationship where the charged energy is especially well drawn is that with her mother in passages like this:

“We’d have screaming matches and big blowouts. It was easier to leave than to face the complexity of my pain; the truth that I felt unprotected by her or that she had somehow failed me as a parent was too big to unpack at fourteen.” – “Licorice Fern” from Thunder Song, Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe

The beauty and poignancy come in the kind of layered thinking that happens when you are open to the actual experience, not the baggage from before:

“But that day in Swan Creek a sort of softness happened between us. I was rigid with worry, expecting news or some new revelation that would once again remind me that I was alone. That the mother I had was gone, missing in her own healing. I braced myself for something I had learned to do at a young age, to worry and wonder about my mother, to tiptoe and be careful.” – “Licorice Fern” from Thunder Song, Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe

In the end, she writes, “I have compassion for my mother, and it does not translate as rage these days. I see her wounds reflected in my own. I understand the way they worked to keep us quiet.” Thunder Song is filled with this kind of clarity and insight on so many topics and so many different types of relationships. I took it personally in the best of ways (not just because one of my mother’s favorite songs is “Coat of Many Colors” and I used to embroider jean jackets for my young son), and I look forward to reading it again for pleasure and for craft.

Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck

I was interested in Kairos because the relationship between the young Katharina and the much older Hans takes place in East Berlin and then persists over decades as the Soviet Union unravels. What I did not know was how far into the psyche Erpenbeck would take me with this novel. The book starts HOT. Hans and Katharina meet an are drawn to each other with the obsessive longing of teenagers (except that Hans is 34 years her senior and married with a child):

“At first, Hans counted the days, then the hours, and now—she must be in the train bound for home—he’s counting the minutes…What will he do if she doesn’t return to him? Find another woman to bed, as soon as possible, to displace this memory that, during her absence, has moved unerringly into the center of his preoccupations?” – Kairos, Jenny Erpenbeck

The way Erpenbeck delves into their mutual obsession takes this beyond mere romance, though, and I should have guessed earlier than I did that there’s something not right in this relationship (besides the obvious power imbalance). For example, when Katharina follows Hans to the beachside town where he’s vacationing with his wife and child, Erpenbeck uses their sexual chemistry to distract from the fact that this is an unhinged thing to do.

As Katharina grows and experiences more of life, Hans (who has settled already on who he is in life) merely grows jealous and their relationship darkens. What is exquisite about the writing here is how Erpenbeck makes it seem natural for Katharina to turn this on herself and for the two characters to become even more enmeshed the less healthy their relationship becomes. It gets very dark but never ceases to be believable because Erpenbeck captures the very essence of what makes abuse so hard to escape.

This is a very specific book, and I don’t know that I would recommend it widely, but if you want to see the full gamut of what two people can do to one another, I cannot imagine a book that portrays it better. I will say that I was so absorbed in this book that I failed to make any margin notes at all.

If you want to experience the exquisitely drawn humanity in Flashlight, Thunder Song, or Kairos pick up a copy of from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Every day, in this strange new world of unprovoked wars and a hyper-corporatization of everything, my husband and I are trying to find ways to live a life that feels meaningful, authentic, and sustainable. This week I found solace and solidarity in the essays and art criticism of Art on My Mind by bell hooks and the strange assortment of blog posts that make up Lady No by Kim Hyesoon.

Art on My Mind by bell hooks

“Learning to see and appreciate the presence of beauty is an act of resistance in a culture of domination that recognizes the production of a pervasive feeling of lack, both material and spiritual, as a useful colonizing strategy. Individuals who feel constant lack will consume more, will submit more readily.” – bell hooks, Art on My Mind

Given that I first learned of bell hooks at my hippie grad school where we all read Teaching to Transgress, it’s odd that this is the book I most quoted on LinkedIn this week. Odd, except that there’s something about Art on My Mind that spoke so deeply to the creative maker in me that I wanted to share the balm of her words in that awful den of capitalism we feel compelled to show up at every day but that brings few of us any joy (or jobs, TBH).

“It occurred to me then that if one could make a people lose touch with their capacity to create, lose sight of their will and their power to make art, then the work of subjugation, of colonization is complete.” – bell hooks Art on My Mind

There are a lot of things to love about this book, and I learned a lot about Black artists I hadn’t encountered before (including Emma Amos, Romare Bearden, and Alison Saar) and about the racism, sexism, and classism of the art world (the book was originally published in 1995, but I’m willing to wager not enough has changed).

“Anyone involved in the grant-receiving, grant-giving process… can see it is often individuals, irrespective of race or gender, from privileged backgrounds… who are best able to utilize existing funding agencies.” – bell hooks, Art on My Mind

What I appreciate most, though, is how layered hooks’ thought process is. For example, when she discusses the “place of the visual in Black life” in the titular essay, she talks about the lack of representation of Black artists in the art world, but she also digs into how the way Black people have been portrayed in art over time presents an inherent conflict between art being “necessarily a terrain of defamiliarization” and early Black audiences who “were wanting art to be solely a vehicle for displaying the race at its best.” When she writes about “the visual as an experience that can convert and serve as a catalyst for transformation,” I found myself longing for an updated version of this essay that touches on where we are now and where we might dream of going next, although quotes like this are still far too current:

“Transforming ways of seeing means that we learn to see race—thereby no longer acting in complicity with a white-supremacist aesthetic that would have us believe issues of color and race have no place in artistic practices—without privileging it as the only relevant category of analysis.” – bell hooks, Art on My Mind

She applies the same nuance to discussions of cultural appropriation and artists for whom “no critical framework existed to theoretically validate and illuminate the significance” of. Other topics of interest are the choices an artist makes (important in an age of AI), hedonistic consumerism, intuition vs. intellect, the dynamics of competitiveness in art, and “art as the practice of freedom.” Basically this book is a (still too valid) primer for how to think more deeply about the forces that are trying to separate us from our art, and with that our humanity.

“I’m doing exactly what I always wanted to do, and that’s what keeps me going. As an eight-year-old, that’s what I wanted. Now I’ve got what I wanted.” – Emma Amos in Art on My Mind by bell hooks

There’s a celebration in that statement and also a bite, so it seems fitting that I literally bled on this book (I’m okay). For now I’m fighting the good fight by trying to learn from hooks’ commitment to living simply to sustain her own art.

“The task of setting free one’s gift was a recognized labor in the ancient world.” – Lewis Hyde

Lady No by Kim Hyesoon

“To write poetry is to place something that is nothing in the middle of spokes, spinning the machine of oblivion at full speed. Against the judgment of usefulness, it is utterly useless, spinning the absences that can’t even be used as ingredients of a story.” – from “Oh, Honest Poem!” by Kim Hyesoon, Lady No

In a very different vein, I also found inspiration in the forthcoming Lady No, a collection of blog posts by Korean poet Kim Hyesoon that originally appeared anonymously on a Korean publisher’s website in 2014. The posts themselves are eclectic, often taking place in a country called Aerok (Korea spelled backwards if you are also sleep-deprived). Some are stories and some poems. Most are uncategorizable, and it took awhile for my brain to open to what Kim was creating by writing them. Translator Jack Saebyok Jung writes of working at “preserving Kim’s fierce strangeness,” which I gradually learned to appreciate. I’m still unpacking the layers of the work, but she touches on topics including loneliness, motherhood, and authoritarianism— you know, my usual trifecta.

“Is there any metaphor in this country now.

Perhaps if we are forgiven
Perhaps if every poem in this world is forgiven.”
– from “Metaphor Ban” by Kim Hyesoon, Lady No

One of the things this book made me think about is audience. There were whole sections of pieces that I could not initially relate to because I didn’t have the right life experience to unlock them. Others, like “By the River Ouse” spoke to me because I did have the necessary keys to understand this was about the suicide of Virginia Woolf. When writing (or creating any art), there’s always a moment where you must choose to consider an audience (or not) and at what level you want to communicate with them. While I did feel outside some of the work, when I finally worked myself inside, I felt like I had passed some test and achieved complicity with the writer.

One recurring theme in the pieces in Lady No is the literary world itself. From translations to literary festivals, I enjoyed learning from Kim’s perspective on these as she is both more accomplished than I and coming from a completely different culture. Yet I learned from the way she questioned the rigidity of the canon, the narrow slices we view artists through, the capitalist insistence on branding even our creative selves, and how she posits that each poem demands the creation of a new worldview.

“Once you name a poet a woman poet, then manly poetry becomes the standard, and womanly poetry becomes its provincial other.” – from “Witch-Type Poet” by Kim Hyesoon, Lady No

This book is still unfolding for me, but one thing it has me thinking is about how being open to the world and to new ideas is itself a wonderful transgression right now. I hope that you will reach for something that challenges you today—as an act of resistance if nothing else.

“When the ground is shaking under one’s feet, fundamentalist identity politics can offer a sense of stability.” – bell hooks Art on My Mind

If you are interested in broadening your world with either of these books, order a copy of Art on My Mind or pre-order Lady No from Bookshop.org. Your purchase keeps indie bookstores in business and I receive a commission.