"Piñata" is out, ¡Olé!

Several copies of the latest issue of the Alabama Literary Review arrived in my mailbox yesterday. While I always prefer to receive cold, hard, roll-in-it-nekkid cash, contributor's copies are always appreciated -- especially when they look so nice.

My story in the issue, "Piñata," is about a woman who has recently immigrated to San Francisco from India, and what she finds in her newly adopted country--and within the strange environs of her arranged marriage, which comes complete with an obnoxious teenage stepson, an aggressively perky  sexpot who may have designs on her husband, and confusing jellybeans. Here's a brief excerpt:


In San Francisco it rained most of the time, and the streets filled up with fog. The sunlight that came through was pale and damp, like something that lived in a cave. Divyesh was more silent than he had seemed in Delhi, his son was a terrible, cruel boy, and the English lessons she had daydreamed through had not prepared her for how it was spoken here, quickly and with mysterious inflections. The house they lived in was small and modern, so close to the next house that Jimi could climb out onto the roof and pee on the tiny herb garden that belonged to their lady neighbor. Divyesh did not know he did this, but Sahana had seen the streams arcing past the kitchen window. The lady next door, a stout Latina who worked on the city council, thought that the urine smell was due to homeless people passing through the alley. She had left a note recently, asking them to report strangers they saw. 

A few weeks after Sahana arrived, Divyesh taught her to drive his little Toyota, guiding her slowly around the streets. He showed where to catch the streetcar, and the grocery store where she could buy Jimi’s terrible foods—noodles with orange powder, cereal shaped like letters, trays holding frozen rafts of brown meat and potatoes. Once he had provided instructions on the care and feeding of his son, Divyesh withdrew. He worked long hours at a software company and was usually not home until after nine. He seemed pleased to find a clean house when he arrived, but his expression when he saw Sahana was always mildly puzzled, as though he’d arrived to find the furniture had been moved just slightly.

I am happy with this story, though I feared as soon as it printed that everyone would immediately read it and find it obvious that I have never lived in San Francisco, never been to India, and never seen the parrots of Telegraph Hill. However, thus far it's gotten good reactions from a few people who've spent a lot of time in India, and if the parrots find their minor role in the story offensive, I haven't gotten any nasty emails from them yet.

Thanks to the ALR for taking this story. I'm happy to find Sahana some space.  

The Image, The Power, The Distance Between Them

I've been following the story of the New Delhi gang rape with reluctance and horror. It's truly one of the most repugnant cases I can remember, a terrifying example of mob mentality and misogyny at its most base and sickening. I don't want to get too much into the details here; if you haven't read about the case and want to lose a little sleep, you can read the basics here. If you want to lose a lot of sleep, you can read about the "women's empowerment" session that happened in the wake of the attack, at which a female professor told the audience that the girl was responsible: "Had the girl simply surrendered when surrounded by six men, she would not have lost her intestine," Dr. Shukla said. "Why was she out with her boyfriend at 10 p.m.?"

(That's right, ladies: If confronted by six men who want to rape you, go along with it. If you decide to fight, don't get all PMS-y when they decide to pull out your intestines. GIRL POWER!)

But I digress.

I thought about the case more last week after Ram Singh, one of the accused perpetrators, was found dead in his cell, an apparent suicide that's still being investigated as a possible murder. How his face was known to me only in the context of this case, and how in that context, it was virtually impossible to look at it and not see signs of extraordinary cruelty, knowing the act he was involved in.

And then I saw this photo taken by AP photographer Manish Swarup, and found it almost unbearable. This is Ram Singh's mother after finding out that her son had died violently in prison. 

I felt angry on seeing it. It felt invasive and cruel to take pictures of this woman at this time. It felt private, like something we shouldn't get to see. Hasn't she been through enough? I can scarcely imagine what it would be like to find out your child had done what her son did, and then, in the midst of dealing with that -- the horror mixed with the almost unavoidable desire to protect one's child -- find that he had then died. The mind reels.

And yet after that first reaction, I found myself grateful for this photograph. It made me angry, sad, and uncomfortable. It reminded me that this man was a human being, and that other human beings loved him and grieved his death. Also -- and I mention this not in some love-thy-enemy, "rapists and murderers are people, too" sort of way; I can't even pretend to be that big -- but I do think of it more seriously: Rapists are, at the end of it, people. They have mothers and fathers and friends. They are not invincible formless monsters. I don't know if that's more or less frightening, but it certainly bears consideration. What blend of influences -- genetic, cultural, parental, psychological, social -- turn a person into someone capable of what was done to this girl?

So I'm grateful for the picture, as hard as I found it to look at. It reminded me of how powerful -- and how difficult -- journalistic work (be it in the form of the written word or the image) can be. How much do we carry around of what we witness and report?

It put me in mind of the story of photojournalist Kevin Carter and the photo that won him the Pulitzer -- the same year that he killed himself. While this was his best-known shot, he'd been working in conflict zones, risking his life to record horrors, for years. After this photo was published, Carter was frequently vilified for getting the shot rather than helping the girl. The question: At what point do one's responsibilities as a human being (assuming one thinks we have any, and aren't just chomping snorting raping bits of fleshgoop held together by laws and clothes and the fear of being caught) trump the responsibilities of a job?

I've thought about Kevin Carter's photograph a lot and about the heat he took for waiting for the right shot and snapping it, rather than helping the girl. At my most optimistic moments, I like to think he thought that the right shot -- taken and published somewhere prominent -- might do more to stop the suffering he was seeing every day than he could possibly do on his own. Perhaps he believed that seeing was stronger when collective. That in the face of such an image, no one could fail to act.

***

Vulture Stalking a Child

(Kevin Carter, Sudan, 1993)

There is such distance

between him and the girl,

toppled onto herself in the dust,

between him and the bird,

watching quietly behind.

Through the tunnel of his lens,

continents stretch between them.

Buses rattle through mountain roads.

The fleet messenger sent on foot

stops to rest beside a quiet stream,

entranced by the bright fish

drifting against the current.

The wires bearing the dots and dashes

unspool; the telephone poles are laid flat

by strong winds.

He waits, remembering

how the moths come back to the streetlights

at night after the gunfire stops,

how they pay

no attention to blood on the tar,

seeking only the light, the light,

beating their wings against it.

There is a moment when death

is at its most beautiful,

when that beauty may cause motion.

Otherwise, it is just death.

He waits and waits

for the bird to open its wings.

Stopping By the Blog on a Less-Than-Snowy Evening

Whose blog this is, I think I know
She's overwhelmed with living, though
She's barely even stopping here
To note this blog's becoming slow.

It isn't stopping, though it's sere.
The blogger is just shifting gears,
and has more wordy things to make,
including trifles over here.

Hope you'll stop by. I'm working on several writing projects and haven't been updating Ecstatic Doggerel as much as I'd like to, but I'm not abandoning this blog.

Will be adding more here when I have serious writing/poetry/fiction/reading pieces to post, but you can catch lighter stuff (politics, pop culture, drinks, snark, etc.) at the more succinct (and hopefully more frequent) Ginger on the Half Shell tumblr.