| | | ...plus thoughts on Toni Morrison, a designer hitting reset, and more | | | | | | | | | |  | | | | August 9, 2016 | Letter No. 46 | | | | | | | | | | | | Hello, hello, hello,
I'm Kaitlyn Greenidge, Lenny's contributing writer. This is my first letter to you, Lenny readers, so let this be a formal introduction. Let me tell you a story, to get acquainted.
When I was in middle school, I had an alter ego. Her name was named Katie Greenwald. She was me, but me without my awkward edges. She would never be too messy or too sweaty or too late for things. I imagined being Katie Greenwald so often, and then I switched schools and was shocked to find, on the cubby beside mine, the name "Katie Greenwald," carefully lettered on a white plastic label. There she was, my other self. I spent most of seventh grade avoiding looking her in the eye, because I was convinced if we spoke to each other something would break or tear in some part of the universe.
I keep thinking about this, about the power of naming oneself and naming things and how that power can be so difficult to define and understand. I loved Héloïse Chung's story of her name and her name change, her description of the many names she's been given and the names she's responded to. I love that she can trace the story of her life and the story of her relationship with her family through her names. And I love that in this funny, heartbreaking essay she acknowledges the awkwardness of picking a new name, hoping it will stick, waiting to grow into it.
In 1994, Toni Morrison said, "What I think the political-correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define. The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them." I thought of this as I read Jasmine Sanders's meditation on miscarriage and rediscovering Beloved. In this essay, Jasmine delicately insists on defining both these events for herself. She quietly claims the power of description, and the end results are devastating.
Padmini Parthasarathy's interview with Michele Mitchell is also affecting. Mitchell directed The Uncondemned, which follows the stories of women who testified about the Rwandan genocide. The women, who testified under pseudonyms about the use of mass rape as a weapon of war, presented their stories to the court from behind a curtain. This documentary is one of the first times that these women have shown their faces. I think about the power that comes from naming and describing crimes that have been committed against you, of stating what has been done.
We also have an essay from Gabrielle Rucker on the pleasures and dangers of creating virtual selves in the Sims. Gabrielle's story of creating an avatar, only to have it turn on her in disturbing ways, is one of the funniest, strangest, and most poignant essays I've read in a long time. Plus, if you have a sister or are a sister, this essay will make you rethink that relationship in different ways.
Finally, we have a fascinating interview with Lisa Mayock about her T-shirt label, Monogram. As I read Lisa's explanations of her love of vintage T-shirts and her desire to find good ones, I thought of how much of self-definition can sometimes be distilled into a simple, enigmatic slogan on a T-shirt. Plus, I want to see the collages Lisa makes from the dead letter department in the basement of the Pasadena Public Library.
That is all, Lenny readers, for now. Here's an issue for all the many selves we each hold inside of us, named and unnamed, real and unacknowledged.
Kaitlyn | | | | | | | | | | | | Laws of Another Universe | | | | By Gabrielle Rucker | | |
In 2008, right before my senior year of high school, my parents informed my sister and me that we would be moving in a month. Earlier that year, my father had lost his small plastics plant to the automotive crisis. I was old enough to know that moving under our circumstances was embarrassing and that it wasn't going to be the last shameful thing that the recession brought our way. I watched as relics of my childhood flew into Dumpsters or were sold off. By August our home was empty and we were driving away.
At my new high school, I ate lunch alone; I spoke to no one; I sat in the most inconspicuous seats during class; I made no friends. The only friend from home who made the time to visit me was my on-again, off-again boyfriend, DeAngilo. DeAngilo and I shared a group of friends, enjoyed the same type of humor, and both harbored a deep love for video games. He didn't like the Sims, though. He said it wasn't a real video game, and only losers with no friends played it. But I loved it, and, needing something to do with myself, I downloaded it at my new home. As the opening screen loaded, a wave of comfort overtook me. I pressed start.
Creation was my favorite part of playing the Sims. I was meticulous, taking hours to create my characters. I tweaked their appearance, dressing them in the whimsical yet sexy outfits I saw on Girlfriends and Sex and the City. I built them lofty homes and formulated their personalities so they were just right. Sims exist on a spectrum between placid obedience and something near autonomy, and, I always made my Sims defiant, like me. Comforted by their creation, I knew that even if my future seemed uncertain, my curation of their world was sound.
I intended this game to be a re-creation, a meditation of what I anticipated out of my nearing adulthood. I made DeAngilo's Sim first: Evan, a tall, skinny chef in dark jeans and layered shirts; he wore a single metal spiked bracelet. I found cooking to be a profession far more suitable than DeAngilo's real-life aspiration to become a horror-core rap artist.
A Sims version of myself was much more difficult. It had to represent the person I desired to be. Simone was a slender, messy-haired young adult whose only aspiration was to become a best-selling (or at least published) author — a dream we shared. Dressing Simone, I was reminded of my loneliness. What was it that DeAngilo had said? That only people with no friends played the Sims? I finished her up and watched as she and Evan danced around, smiling and hugging, excited to be alive.
I filled Simone and Evan's house with beautiful things — walls lined with bookshelves, state-of-the-art kitchenware, fish tanks, bizarre oblong furniture — and deposited the couple in their new home. Simone nestled into a corner with a book while Evan put out a fire in the kitchen after an attempt at making a pot of mac 'n' cheese.
Evan's kitchen fire was not an anomaly, even though I had created him as a chef. Sims are notoriously bad at cooking; they often burn even things like cereal or milk. Sometimes they accidentally light themselves on fire. As Evan patted down the flickering, pixelated flames, I realized it was late. After saving the game, I wandered back up the stairs of my new home to my new room and finally went to sleep.
I was deeply invested in Simone and Evan's life — after all, it represented my ideal future. But it wasn't any fun to play alone, so I introduced my younger sister, Felicia, to the game. She built her own home, just a few blocks away from Evan and Simone's, and populated it with Marissa, DaNaisha, and Marie, a group designed to mirror herself and her two best friends. Felicia played with her Sims sporadically, just enough to keep them happy and alive. She had other interests, while my life orbited around the Sim world, the avatars falling in and out of visibility like a moon.
The next time DeAngilo visited, I rushed him into the basement to show him Evan and Simone. He liked that his character was a chef, and he thought the spiked bracelet was a nice touch. I smiled like a proud parent as Simone hunched over her desk, furiously typing away at a computer while a knowledge gauge floated above her head, slowly filling to the brim, showing that she was learning.
Life in my Sim household was cheerful, while my real life continued to blur around me, a haze of lonely school days and a continuous stream of past-due bills piled onto the kitchen table. In Evan and Simone's world, any expense could be paid for by typing in a quick cheat code. Your friends and your life and your house couldn't just be taken from you. Evan and Simone's world thrived in a way that mine could not. I needed it to survive.
When the game sent a notification that Simone wanted to throw a party for some of her Sim friends, I was confused. The idea of throwing a party, virtual or otherwise, doesn't interest me. I was proud of my ability to create Sims that seemed to share my temperament, so her deviation stung a bit. Nevertheless, I allowed the party, curious as to what might happen.
The party was not very exciting. A dozen or so Sims milled around Simone and Evan's home making small talk about sports and the weather, according to the illustrated speech bubbles above their heads. Halfway through I realized something was wrong. Simone had spent the last hour or so talking to a Sim named Marie — the Sim my sister had created as a version of herself. Marie and Simone spoke excitedly with each other, ignoring everyone at the party. After a while, hearts and roses danced in their speech bubbles while they giggled. They swatted at each other, flirtatiously.
I reminded myself that in the game, Simone and Marie were not sisters. But still, I grew feverish. I had designed Simone and Evan to get along, to love each other. I ended the party, but it was already too late: Evan had seen them stealing a kiss on the couch.
For the next few Sim days (hours or so in our time), I tried to salvage Simone and Evan's relationship. I made Simone ignore calls from Marie; Evan tried to make extravagant meals for Simone, but he served her only burned food. I wanted Simone to proposition Evan with romantic activities like bubble baths and promises of Woo-Hoo, the Sims version of sex, but she was stubborn and bored. Evan was heartbroken. Their relationship was failing, and to me this meant that DeAngilo and I could fail too. I decided to act as any Creator might: with terrifying omnipotence.
The decision to kill Marie and her roommates was easy. I had killed Sims before out of sheer boredom or annoyance in various ways such as casually deleting ladders from a pool so the Sim, unable to climb out of the water, would drown. A floating entity aptly named the Grim Reaper would then appear to escort it to the afterlife.
I convinced my sister death was the only way to remedy Simone and Evan's relationship. She allowed me to log into her game and stick Marie, Marissa, and DaNaisha into a doorless room with only a refrigerator and an oven. I had them take turns cooking, filling their exitless room with smoke and filth. It didn't take long for Marissa to catch fire. She perished quickly, and her tombstone appeared just outside the room. The death of their housemate drove Marie and DaNaisha crazy. They sobbed, throwing their hands into the air as if they were trying to communicate with me. Without a bathroom, they pissed themselves. Hungry, they kept trying to cook. Eventually, DaNaisha also passed, leaving Marie alone in the charred room, banging on the walls, hoping for escape.
When I next returned to the game, Marie was feverishly speaking with a man in a doctor's coat and large comedic glasses. This character, the Therapist, appears to Sims in times of distress. It took one more day for her to finally die as well. Like any good Creator, I tidied up the place, deleting the room I had trapped them in and building a small gate around the three tombstones that were left in its absence — a memorial.
Back at the other house, Simone was crying and mourning Marie day and night. Evan pretended to care but secretly laughed at her. Things were not getting better.
DeAngilo, deeply amused, suggested I move Simone and Evan into Marie's abandoned house, which was bigger and nicer than theirs, with a backyard and a small pool. This proved to be my final mistake. Evan fled on their first night in the house when Marie's ghost appeared as he was making dinner. Simone, excited to see her dead lover once more, began to talk to the ghost, confessing her eternal love.
Marie haunted Evan, sabotaging his activities and popping out from walls to frighten him. Simone continued to mourn Marie, and eventually the Therapist appeared for her as well but was unable to help. She was in love with a phantom. Exhausted and disappointed in my ability to fulfill my vision, I started to cry.
I was not crying for Evan or Simone, or for Marie or her housemates. I was crying for me, for all the pain I had tried to condense into a small, manageable world. For the home I had been ripped from, for the city and the friends who would continue to fade the older I got. I cried for the child I knew I could no longer be and for the god I had played the role of so poorly. I cried because change had finally found me, and I had nowhere to hide.
Preparing to delete the game, I curled up in the small corner of the house where the computer lived, watching Simone. Sitting at her desk, feverishly typing away at a novel she was working on, she had on formal wear, as if she anticipated something big was on its way. I let her write for a while, curious about what type of world she was creating. Somewhere in the house Marie fluttered through the walls; in the kitchen Evan was creating an extravagant breakfast. Eventually Simone paused, pulling away from the computer. Slowly, she raised her arms above her head to stretch, and before she could even lower them, she ceased to exist.
Gabrielle Octavia Rucker is a writer from the Great Lakes. Currently she lives in Brooklyn, where she can often be found on the subway aggressively cursing under her breath. | | | | | | | | | | | | Hi, My Name Is Héloïse | | | | By Héloïse Chung | | |
Maybe I'm in the minority, but I don't think we'd feel the same about roses if they were called "grumkenpickles." Names matter, and for most of my life, mine felt wrong.
My birth parents in Korea named me Suyong Lee. But when I was adopted at age three by my aunt and uncle, they changed it. My aunt had just married an American airman and wanted to start a family. She couldn't have children of her own, but since my parents already had three daughters and another on the way, they had one to spare, and they spared me.
I was to have a new, Western, name because my aunt-turned-mother thought it would help us integrate better in American culture. She changed hers to Loreen and asked me to pick mine. With my limited English, I'm pretty sure I suggested "Ketchup," so they went with Kathy instead. My new last name was Bryant, like my new dad's. So I became Kathy Bryant, a name I later associated with suburban moms in sweatpants and hair rollers or Cathy from the comic strip, and one with no connection to my heritage.
I started thinking about other names when I was around ten. My name idol was Jo from Facts of Life. She had jet-black hair like mine, she never took no for an answer, and best of all she had a boy's name, which Blew. My. Mind. For a while, I was also obsessed with being "Tony" or "Charlie."
Home life was a bitch. I had to reckon with my mother's anger on a near-daily basis, subject to her arbitrary rules and punishments. She would stand at the door counting down the seconds when I was coming home from school. If I missed the cutoff, I'd be grounded for a week. Tiger-mom syndrome this was not. Her strictness wasn't about discipline; it was about control. My father would yell at us that we were both driving him crazy and storm out of the house. I prayed for escape, too, but we literally lived on an island — we were stationed in Okinawa, Japan, where there wasn't anywhere for a teenage girl to run to.
When I got to college in Indiana, I was grateful for the ocean between us. For the first time, I was free to do anything, be anyone. I began the work of figuring out who I was and what her name would be. I scrawled potential names into my journal — characters from stories and movies, people I'd met who seemed especially happy and carefree. There was Salinger's Esmé (with love and squalor), Sloane from Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and friends of friends named Celeste, Olivia, Eva. I leaned toward names made of calm, feminine sounds that never sounded like someone was yelling at you. The harsh K in Kathy conjured up my mother's words for me: kigibe, keoji, shikkeuro. Korean for girl, beggar, and shut up. But I still wasn't ready. I switched from Kathy to "Kate," which felt like a small step, but not one nearly big enough.
After college I moved to New York, where I met people with cool names like Zoë, Genevieve, and Annemieke. I kept looking. Then, after almost ten years in advertising, I finally started writing my own screenplays and short stories. I didn't want to create art that had "Kate Bryant" on it. I wanted a name that represented the real me, to go with my real work. Yet even after all those years of wanting to change my name, timidity intervened. For another five years. Changing my name felt self-indulgent, in the same way that calling myself an artist did.
Then, David Bowie died. I read that he'd changed his name for professional reasons — there was already a singer named David Jones. It was a revelation. Finally, I felt permission to change my name, since there's already a published author with my name. I could make a business card for it. People would get it, my thinking went, because, essentially, I was "rebranding" myself.
Once the universe gave me the OK, a little space seemed to open up for the name to find me. And so it was that Héloïse fluttered into my head one day, devastatingly perfect. I'm not sure exactly where it came from. Perhaps some derivation of Luisita (a friend) or Elio (a boy I used to babysit). I guess I have a thing for L names. I honed it, trying it with and without the H and with and without the diacritics. I didn't want them to be an affectation. Is it gauche to use French spelling if you don't even speak French? Eff it, I went with the French.
For my last name, I wanted to reclaim my Korean-ness, so I researched family names. I hate how lineage is paternal and opted to take my birth mother's last name, Chung. I know it's passed down from her father, but still, it brought me a little closer to her.
I searched Google, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn to see whose company I would be in. Aside from Héloïse d'Argenteuil, the lover nun, the only other two big results were Hint-full Heloise, the advice columnist, and Héloïse Chong, a Canadian yogi. There was no Héloïse Chung of note. Not only had I found a name I liked, I'd found something unique and truly mine. I immediately snatched up the Gmail address and URL.
The next day, I sent a mass email and updated all my social-media profiles, even Nike Plus, where I have exactly three connections. I compulsively refreshed my feed, wondering if my friends would think it was weird. Would they even respond? They did: Congratulations! You finally did it! So brave of you. Several shared their own name stories. Shannon had always wanted to be called Charlie. Steph felt she'd missed out by forgoing Stevie (do it, you guys!). Most everyone was excited for me. A few fell disappointingly silent, but overall I felt triumphant. I had done a scary thing, and it had turned out OK.
My adoptive father must have seen it on LinkedIn, our one social-media crossover. He texted to ask, who is this? Had I changed my name, and why? I told him yes, because the other names had always felt wrong. He wrote back to say he didn't understand, but "OK." It's not exactly fiery affirmation, but it's more than he'd said when I changed Kathy to Kate.
I told my Korean family last, just my two biological younger sisters, who I chat with semi-regularly on KakaoTalk. They asked what it meant. "Healthy," I told them, because that's what it says on the baby-naming sites. Good, they said, but why that name? Because I liked the way it sounds. And then we'd reached the limits of their English and my Korean, with no opportunity for more nuanced conversation.
Meanwhile, the documentation keeps trickling in. A new driver's license, Social Security card, debit card, checks. Each item feels like a gift; more proof validating who I am. At last. I found my name.
Héloïse Chung is a writer and creative director living in Brooklyn. Her new website heloisechung.com will be launching soon, because of course. | | | | | | | | | | | | Getting Graphic | | | | By Laia Garcia | | |
Designer Lisa Mayock has always known exactly what women want to wear. In 2004, fresh out of design school, she and her friend Sophie Buhai launched their indie label Vena Cava, which became known for its incredible prints and pieces that could equally suit a tomboy or a girly-girl aesthetic. They printed their show notes as zines. They made a short film with Lizzy Caplan. They were just cool. Then in 2013, after numerous awards and a Target collaboration, Vena Cava disappeared, seemingly forever.
So imagine my excitement when about a month ago, I clicked on a link promising to show me "the husband-and-wife duo making cool-girl graphic tees," fully ready to roll my eyes at whatever clickbait trash awaited, and instead found myself reading about Monogram, Lisa Mayock's new label, created with her husband, Jeff Halmos (who back in the 2013 was also known for a cooler-than-cool label, Shipley & Halmos, which he did with his friend Sam Shipley). I immediately fell in love with their site, their Instagram, and of course their tees. (I bought two.) Basically, if you love vintage tees, are a bit of a design nerd, and have a sense of humor, then this is the line for you.
I texted all my friends about my new "discovery" and emailed to set up a Lenny interview with Lisa. I talked to her on the phone about what it takes to start a business with your husband, why working as a team is better, and why libraries rule. Her three-week old baby, Pascal, also chimed into our conversation, and let me tell you, it was the cutest thing ever.
Laia Garcia: How did the idea for Monogram come about?
Lisa Mayock: I am a big vintage-T-shirt fan. I have been my whole life. My dad had amazing vintage T-shirts from the '80s, and I have a couple of his. They are something I've been around and appreciated. I feel like it used to be really easy to find great vintage ones, and they were cheap and plentiful, but that has definitely changed. They're difficult to source unless you know where to go, and they can get pretty expensive. I started looking around for new tees that had that same vibe and came up short. I couldn't find anything that really resonated with me, and I talked to Jeff about it, and we thought, We should just make some.
LG: Were you hesitant about working with your husband? Or had it been in the back of your head that you'd probably do something together eventually?
LM: We were initially pretty hesitant about working together … we tried to avoid it, but we really liked this idea so much. I was a little bit more into the idea of working together than Jeff was. He interviewed probably five couples, people that he knew and friends of his parents who are married and have businesses together, and he made an Excel chart with all of their feedback in it. It was so cute! The chart had the rules that different people had set up, like how to make separate time for their relationship versus their business, and that's kind of how we started thinking about it.
LG: Do you have an office?
LM: We have an office, a little studio in Bushwick, and that has definitely helped the work-life separation. Before, we were working out of one of the rooms in our home. The business kind of took over, and it was really hard to separate.
Basically, we are business when we're in the office, but when we take a break for lunch, we go and take a walk together, have a little personal time. And we decided that when we're at home, if one person is talking about work and the other one is just done and is really ready to veg out on the couch or watch Silicon Valley or whatever, then we have to shut it off. If someone says, "We need to just have personal time right now," we need to honor that. So far it's working great.
LG: And how did you feel about starting another fashion business?
LM: I felt like there was really a place for this idea in the market. I didn't feel like we were entering into a super-crowded space with what we were doing, and that definitely made both of us feel much more confident about the idea. It's very different from what we did before — we both had wholesale businesses at contemporary price points. That's a space that I probably wouldn't dive into right now, just because, to me, it seems like there's so much out there. Doing T-shirts, which I think of as a very democratic item, in a direct-to-consumer model with a lower price point was just very appealing to us.
LG: Both of your labels have been done as team creations. Do you prefer working this way?
LM: I have always loved working on a team and having brainstorm sessions. If you're doing something creative on your own, it can be really easy to get in your own head and not recognize the way that something is coming off to the world. You might see it one way and think, This is definitely the message that's being sent, but everyone else might see it a totally different way. I think it's really important to keep other people involved in your creative process. It's such an asset.
As far as Monogram, I feel like 50 percent of our day is just brainstorming ideas and showing each other images. Also, I'm not a graphic designer, although I'm learning how to use Photoshop, so we work with a couple of really talented graphic designers who are able to execute things that I'm not able to execute. We feel super-lucky to be able to work with people like that, because they add so much to the final product.
LG: What is the best piece of advice that you've learned about starting a business?
LM: I think that it's easy, from the outside, to assume that if you have a business in fashion, you're going to sit around sketching and looking at fabrics, and that is definitely a piece of it, but the business part of it is so important. That's really where you're going to spend 90 percent of your time. I'd say take a business class. Take a merchandising class, take a bookkeeping class. I think those things are hugely important, because you can have an incredible amount of talent and not be able to get a business off the ground.
LG: If you're ever feeling a bout of creative block, what is your go-to to start the brain flow and renew your inspiration?
LM: That, for me is the public library. I love having a physical place to go to and to look in actual books. I think there's something that's cool, that's tangible, that happens in the library where the book that you're looking for might be next to something that you're interested in but you had no idea about. That's where I go to refresh my ideas.
I recently discovered that where I grew up in Pasadena, the basement of the library has an incredible trove of old magazines that goes all the way back to the '20s and '30s — weird old food magazines and fashion magazines. I look through them for images and then photocopy and collage them. That is definitely a place that is very powerful for me.
LG: You have a two-year-old son, and you just had a baby, plus you have your business — what do you do when you have a little bit of time to relax? Does that ever happen?
LM: Honestly, it's neighborhood walks. I really relish the opportunity to zone out. I kind of brainstorm on my own, taking walks in our neighborhood. We like to do family art projects at our house. There's a lot of markers, crayons, and Play-Doh, a lot of stuff like that at home. I haven't done this in a while, but I'm really looking forward to getting back into lifting weights. It's been my go-to exercise for a really long time, and I'm psyched to do that at the Y in a couple weeks. I love feeling physically strong. It's very empowering.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Laia Garcia is the deputy editor at Lenny and has loved graphic tees since her days as a Gwennabe. | | | | | | | | | | | | On Toni Morrison's Beloved and Maternal Ambivalence | | | | By Jasmine Sanders | | | |
I lose myself in Toni Morrison's Beloved and I know that I am Sethe's and she is mine. I see my own reflection in the black pools of her eyes; I recognize the curves of that wide mouth that drove the male slaves of the plantation to fuck cows in their longing for her. Beloved is Morrison's Pulitzer Prize–winning fictionalization of the life of Margaret Garner, an escaped slave woman who chose to murder her children rather than return them to bondage. Morrison reimagines Garner through Sethe, a slave forging a kind of life on Sweet Home, a Kentucky plantation, complete with a husband and four children: two boys and two girls. When Sweet Home falls into the cruel hands of a new owner, Sethe takes her babies and runs, crossing the mighty Ohio River and settling into a small Cincinnati community of former slaves.
There, in the home of her free mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, Sethe and her family enjoy 28 glorious days of freedom, where she can finally love up on her children in a real way because she feels that they are hers alone. When slave catchers close in, Sethe gathers her darlings and dashes to a woodshed, where she intends to kill them all, including herself. She succeeds in killing her crawling baby girl, taking a handsaw to the child's neck and watching the blood pump out of her tiny body. Sethe, Baby Suggs, and her remaining children continue living in the house, haunted by the spirit of the murdered baby. When a strange, beautiful woman arrives calling herself "Beloved," which is the single word marking the dead baby's headstone, Sethe claims the woman as her daughter returned from the other side.
Beloved earned Morrison the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, cementing the work's status as a classic within the American literary canon. Morrison typically deals in the beauty and horror of contemporary black life, but in Beloved, she travels back in time to provide an origin story; the novel is a retelling of our very first black American traumas. It is a recounting of the first Africans to be dragged across the Atlantic and have "American" tacked onto their identity. Sethe, the daughter of a captured African woman, is a first-generation slave, and in the continuum of Morrison's oeuvre, she functions as a literary Eve.
The official diagnosis was an incomplete spontaneous abortion, but what I claim as truth is stickier, more complex. It is the summer of 2008, the year that thirteen-year-old cicadas burrow out of the ground en masse, filling every room with their endless drone and those red eyes that are always, always watching me. I fail to graduate high school, so I attend my friends' graduation festivities and work ridiculous hours at a phone-accessory store in order to buy name-brand clothes and enough weed to numb myself.
I am eighteen and in love with a boy who will never be able to love me back. Our relationship has always been delicate, precarious, but that summer, my unplanned pregnancy finally causes us to fall and break. I don't love what I am carrying, but I do love the boy who planted it there, and every day I fight for him harder, close my fists around him tighter. Around my sixth week of pregnancy, it becomes obvious that he does not want me or what I am carrying; he wants the abortion we had initially agreed upon. He denies me, refuses my attempts to bind myself to him, and my maternal ambivalence matures into a sour contempt; I carry it in my womb, alongside the small seed that is the beginnings of a baby. I wake up one morning with a hot, aching pelvis and notice that the small beating inside of me, rapid and light as a cicada's wings, has stopped. It's as if the shock of being refused by the love of my young life and my resulting vitriol for the embryo was enough to kill it. I could almost hear the soft "crunch" as it was done.
My doctor waits for my body to rid itself of the embryonic materials. For two weeks, I carry death in my belly, and I even begrudge it that, turning my body into a graveyard. But the fetus remains entrenched, so on a morning too cold for summer, I walk to the hospital alone for a manual vacuum aspiration. The anesthesiologist has called in sick, and I am given the option of either waiting another week to have the procedure performed or going ahead without general anesthetic. Initially I do not choose to go forward.
I sit to think, and I can't tell if I am imagining the smell of death and rot floating from between my legs. I inform the doctor of my decision and down a couple of ibuprofen, which we give fifteen minutes to kick in. I enter the surgical room and undress before positioning myself on the table, legs in forceps. A resident covers the lower half of my body in a disposable sheet. I tense at the invasion of cold steel, and almost vomit when I see the length of the needle that will be used to inject a numbing agent directly into my cervix. There are light cramps as it is injected, then blinding cramps, ripping through me like lightning, as a series of dilators are inserted to forcibly expand my cervical opening. After the dilators are in place, the doctor tells me there are just a few seconds left. I ask for constant narration during the procedure; not necessarily out of fear, more of a dissociated interest, the way one observes a classroom science experiment or carnival exhibit. A long tube attached to a suction device is inserted, and I hear the light pumping of the instrument as my midsection twists and cramps. I count Mississippis, and after a final sharp and bloody yank, the procedure is over.
I ask the nurses to see it. They show me the jar of wet and purple pulp and like Sethe, I do not look away. I rise from the bed and a flower of blood blossoms and spreads in the white center of the sheet before a pair of gloved hands throws it away. I enter the early-morning chill and a million red eyes follow me home, my ears filled with their song.
As a girl, I found Beloved in my cousin's spare room, junked with other useless papers and documents. "You can have that," she said. "It's about a dead baby or something. I couldn't get into it." Neither could I. I attempted to dive in, but even the opening sentences stumped me: "124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom." Years later, after my own tragedy, I reached for the novel again, and finally it reached back. For Sethe, and for the ugliest parts of myself I saw reflected in her, the spite I know it takes to still the beating heart of a baby, I return to the book time and time again.
Around my eighth reading, depression has peeled back my layers, leaving me raw and weeping, and it is Beloved, her big head of hair and Scorpio ways, who I most identify with. When Beloved shows up in the yard of 124 Bluestone Road, gorgeous and black as night, Sethe's bladder fills, her water literally "breaking" at the sight of the woman. Beloved hums the lullabies Sethe sang to her children and consistently asks about things she shouldn't know, and when Sethe spots a scar, whisper-thin and straight under Beloved's neck, something in her clicks and she knows that Beloved is hers.
The need to claim a person or thing as one's own is often mighty enough to dull the sharp and foul stench of the truth. It is likely that Beloved is not actually Sethe's baby girl, but what matters is the insistence with which Sethe believes that she is. In one of the novel's most stunning passages, Morrison shifts to first person, allowing Sethe's thoughts to flow onto the page in a stream of consciousness:
"Beloved, she my daughter. She mine. See. She come back to me of her own free will and I don't have to explain a thing. I didn't have time to explain before because it had to be done quick … she had to be safe and I put her where she would be. But my love was tough and she back now. I knew she would be."
Sethe needs Beloved to be hers so she wills it so, ignoring the rot that seeps into their initially sweet union. Beloved grows vampiric, emotionally and psychically "whipping" Sethe. Babies and embryos are parasitic, draining and demanding of the mother, but not in the conscious, dogged manner of Beloved; she rocks 124 with a woman's spite and vitriol, not a baby's venom. It is other women from Sethe's community, who are themselves well-acquainted and familiar with death and deathly matters, who force Beloved from 124, saving Sethe physically if not emotionally.
Contemporary pro-choice rhetoric is often hinged upon negating "personhood," arguing that a fetus or embryo is simply a clump of cells tethered to a woman's uterine wall, no more sentient than a fingernail. This does not feel authentic to me; I wouldn't call what I carried a person, but it was definitely a presence, a being. I was hyperaware of it before any pregnancy test was sensitive enough to detect the change in my hormonal level. I knew that it was a boy, and I knew the moment that it died. It wasn't just a happenstance gathering of matter and atoms growing in my center; it was an invasion. I never wish to be pregnant again, but in the event that it happens I know that I will terminate the pregnancy. For me it is more honest to admit that while a pregnancy, a thing that I carry, is alive, I am allowed to want myself more, to desire my own life more than the life of it.
Bodily autonomy is a complicated matter for black women. What does reproductive justice look like for women whose ancestors birthed babies not legally their own and who are currently presumed corrupt and ill-suited for motherhood in a way that devalues black children? When a black woman kills her baby, is she performing a radical act of kindness, enacting her own free will, or undermining the capitalistic system that has historically assigned her body and the fruits of it a monetary value?
Margaret Garner was charged with destruction of property for the murder of her daughter and sent back to her master; she died of typhoid in 1858. In the eighteenth century, Sabina Park, an enslaved Jamaican woman, killed her child in order to avoid turning the three-year-old over to "The Buckra." Mary Thomas, an enslaved woman in Barbados, was suspected of smothering her infant upon birth. Perhaps these were our first stalwart acts of self-determinacy, black women with the audacity to demand a semblance of control over their own lives and the lives they produced. These are our foremothers, feminists and women who demanded sovereignty over their reproductive futures. These are stories to pass on.
Jasmine Sanders is a writer from the South Side of Chicago, where she is currently completing her first work of nonfiction. | | | | | | | | | | | | You Don't Have to Die to Be Destroyed | | | | By Padmini Parthasarathy | | |
| (Courtesy of the filmmakers) |
In 1998 the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda found Jean-Paul Akayesu guilty of nine counts of genocide and crimes against humanity. Akayesu, the mayor of Taba, a town outside of Kigali, Rwanda, had ordered the rape and murder of thousands of Tutsi men and women in 1994. His conviction was due to the hard work of a prosecutorial coalition and the courage of witnesses who risked everything to testify against him. The witnesses were so vulnerable that many were given code names and testified behind a curtain for fear of being identified.
Michele Mitchell's new film The Uncondemned traces the events of the trial and introduces the world to JJ, OO, and NN, three female survivors who appeared in court to tell horrific stories of rape, torture, and murder. It's a strong rebuttal to the dominant narrative of rape as a crime of passion, something the perpetrators cannot control, when it is actually a crime committed as an act of control. The Uncondemned is also a legal thriller of sorts, following the lawyers and investigators as they build the case against Akayesu.
While making the film, Mitchell went through her own form of PTSD, then lost her co-director, Nick Louvel, in a car accident, but she remained committed to getting the story out. The film is a testament to change, the courage that it takes to fight for it, and the enduring spirit of the women who embody that strength.
Padmini Parthasarathy: How would you describe the film to someone who hasn't seen it?
Michele Mitchell: It's about a group of lawyers and activists from around the world who came together in 1997 to prosecute rape as a crime of war for the first time in history. We were fortunate enough to not only speak with the prosecutorial team, but we also spoke with some of the previously anonymous witnesses, who came forward for the first time in the film.
PP: Can you explain why this case is so important?
MM: It was the first genocide conviction in history. It was also the first time that rape was prosecuted not only as a crime against humanity, but also as a crime of genocide. The definition of genocide is to destroy, in whole or in part. The decision in this case argues that you do not have to die to be destroyed, that rape is a form of destruction that can be used as a tool for genocide. This set a precedent for all the trials that came after this one.
Also, the ruling doesn't specify gender, and that's really important. It's not just about what's been done to women, which is another precedent. Rape isn't something that only happens to women in war. We know it happens to children, we know it happens to babies as young as two months old. It happens to everybody, including men. The fact is we don't have very accurate numbers for how many victims are men. If there's a reluctance for woman to come forward and talk about it, a fear of shame and humiliation … I don't want to say one is greater than the other, but it is extremely difficult for men to come forward. So the gender-neutral decision means that prosecutions can go forward with this understanding, a truthful representation of what really happens.
PP: The women who testified against Jean-Paul Akayesu were faceless before this movie. They literally testified behind a curtain. What was it like to meet them? How did it happen?
MM: No one had seen them until now. The journalists at the trial never saw them. They had code names. For some people, when they see them in the film, it is almost like they are seeing a celebrity for the first time.
I met them through Godeliève Mukasarasi, the director of Sevota, an organization that works with widows and orphans in the communities impacted by the Rwandan genocide. I invited them to have lunch with me at the Hôtel des Milles Collines, which was the basis for the film Hotel Rwanda. It was the most nervous I've ever been to meet somebody, because they changed history. How many people do you meet who have done that? What they did was so brave. To play that role in history, it's daunting. It's very intimidating. But they could not have been nicer and more fun.
PP: Has there been any blowback or negative attention for them from coming out in the movie?
MM: The fact that this is a case that happened so long ago is helpful. There was blowback when they initially testified, but there was blowback against anybody who testified. It was a very unstable security situation in Rwanda at that time.
PP: What led you to make the film?
MM: In 2012 the GOP candidate for the US Senate in Missouri, Todd Akin, said that women can't get pregnant from "legitimate rape" because we have a way to shut down our bodies and prevent it. I was furious, and shouted a few expletives in my car, because I was driving at the time. I decided: "That's it. I'm going to do a story that puts rape so firmly in the realm of where it belongs — an act of power, torture, humiliation — that it will be impossible to ever say anything like that again."
This meant, then, doing a story about rape in conflict, where there is absolutely no ambiguity about it: it is an act of deadly intent. But I also wanted to tell a story about what can be done to stop this crime, which is what led me to the Akayesu case.
PP: I actually wanted to pivot the conversation a little bit and ask you about how you've coped with dealing with this sort of reporting, I would imagine it's very traumatic.
MM: When you cover trauma, what you're not told is that you will end up absorbing some of that trauma. In June of 2014, I absolutely just had a breakdown. It was pretty clear. I remember thinking something I wanted to say, but what came out of my mouth was totally different. I had already been having panic attacks, but I didn't know what they were. Luckily, there are programs set up for journalists here in New York. I went to one, and they said, "You have post-traumatic stress disorder." I'm like, "I don't have post-traumatic stress disorder, I wasn't in an active war zone." Of course, it took about a year to unwind all that, and then as I unwound, I will never forget it, it was September of 2015, I told my therapist, "I think I'm pretty good now." He said, "Yeah, I think you're pretty good, too." Then, about two weeks later, Nick died. I went from working with a collaborator to trying to figure out, Well, how am I going to finish this? I'd been working so hard, and I was already so tired. I felt like Sisyphus, you know, you get the rock up a little bit, and then it rolls back down.
PP: How did you keep going?
MM: The stakes were high. We were always going to push forward, like "Go big or go home," but it became a mission because now it wasn't just carrying the souls of the women. This was Nick Louvel's last film; it was the last thing with his name on it. We wanted it to go as far as possible, be seen by as many people as possible, and I thought, Hey, if I thought failure was an option before, it's really not an option. You're going to have to be under a rock come this fall not to know about this movie.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Padmini Parthasarathy is based in New Orleans, where she writes about feminism and social justice. Her writing has appeared in The Times of India, the Huffington Post, and Vitamin W. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The email newsletter where there's no such thing as too much information.
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