Freeman's E-Book

John Freeman

• Herausgeber: Grove Press UK
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

'The oldest is 70. The youngest, 26. In between, the best list of this kind I have ever seen.' Marlon James In three issues, the literary anthology from leading editor and literary critic John Freeman has gained an international following and wide acclaim: 'fresh, provocative, engrossing' (BBC.com), 'impressively diverse' (O Magazine), 'bold, searching' (Minneapolis Star-Tribune). Freeman's: The Future of New Writing departs from the series' progression of themes. This special fourth installment instead introduces a list - to be announced just before publication - of thirty poets, essayists, novelists and short story writers from around the world who are shaping the literary conversation right now and will continue to impact it in years to come. Drawing on recommendations from book editors, critics, translators and authors from across the globe, Freeman's: The Future of New Writing includes pieces from a select list of writers aged 25 to 70, from over a dozen countries and writing in almost as many languages. This will be a new kind of list, and an aesthetic manifesto for our times. Against a climate of nationalism and silo'd thinking, writers remain influenced by work from outside their region, genre and especially age group. Serious readers, this special issue celebrates, have always read this way too - and Freeman's: The Future of NewWriting brings them an exciting view of where writing is going next.

Leseprobe

Freeman’s

The Future of New Writing

Previous Issues

Freeman’s: Arrival

Freeman’s: Family

Freeman’s: Home

Freeman’s

The Future of New Writing

Est. 2015

Edited by

John Freeman

Grove Press UK

First published in the United States of America in 2017 by Grove/Atlantic Inc.

First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Grove Press UK, an imprint of Grove/Atlantic Inc.

Copyright © John Freeman, 2017

Associate Editor: Allison Malecha

Managing Editor: Julia Berner-Tobin

Copy Editor: Kirsten Giebutowski

All pieces not included in the credits section on page 313 are copyright © 2017 by the author of the piece. Permission to use any individual piece must be obtained from its author.

The moral right of the authors contained herein to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

Grove Press, UK

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.groveatlantic.com

Trade paperback ISBN 978 1 61185 513 5

Ebook ISBN 978 1 61185 942 3

Printed in Great Britain

Published in collaboration with the MFA in Creative Writing at The New School

Contents

Introduction

John Freeman

Seven Shorts

David Searcy

Dinaw Mengestu

Pola Oloixarac

Fiona McFarlane

Marius Chivu

Claire Vaye Watkins

Andrés Felipe Solano

The Stoker

Nadifa Mohamed

Beauty

Solmaz Sharif

America Is Not the Heart

Elaine Castillo

Come and Eat the Largest Shrimp Cocktail in the World in the Region of the Worst Massacres in Mexico

Diego Enrique Osorno

The Case That Got Away

A Yi

Where Are You, Sweetheart

Mariana Enríquez

A First-Rate Material

Sayaka Murata

History of Violence

Édouard Louis

The Liberator

Tania James

Twenty After Midnight

Daniel Galera

Sympathy of a Clear Day

Ishion Hutchinson

Good Girls

Sunjeev Sahota

(15)

(16)

(33)

Athena Farrokhzad

An Unlucky Man

Samanta Schweblin

The Dog’s Been Barking All Day

Xu Zechen

With Nothing to Hide

Garnette Cadogan

I Is Another

Valeria Luiselli

The Flower Garden

Mieko Kawakami

Partly True Poem Reflected in a Mirror

Ocean Vuong

A Song for Robin

Heather O’Neill

Max, Mischa, and the Tet Offensive

Johan Harstad

Bearded

Ross Raisin

Contributor Notes

Credits

About the Editor

Introduction

John Freeman

The first book I received as a gift wasThe Little Prince. My grandmother mailed me a copy for my sixth birthday, the illustrated edition with dreamy watercolors painted by the author, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. I was not a reader back then. I rode a yellow banana bike and imagined it was a chopper. I played whiffle ball and soccer and yearned for little else than to be a starting pitcher for the Phillies. The world as I knew it began and ended with Emmaus, Pennsylvania, the town where my family lived. A giant tree loomed over our front yard, where snowdrifts built canyons in winter. On weekends, after baseball games, my brothers and I sucked down cherry slushies at Dino’s, the pizza place next door to the WaWa, where my father sometimes bought milk for 99 cents a gallon.

And then I readThe Little Prince. The story of how a downed pilot encounters a bescarfed alien prince cracked my world open. Not all trees looked like the one in the front yard. There was such a thing as a baobab. There were deserts. There were princes and airplanes, and asteroids, and aliens who spoke and talked like us. Foxes who could be friends or tricksters. I was mesmerized. I read that book over and over belly down on the scratchy carpet in our front room, the hours tilting by invisibly. I have since realized that the experience of turning those pages was like taking off in an airplane. Fly often enough, you know how it works, the wings deflect air around them, creating a force pushing up and the plane has no choice but to leave the earth behind. Yet every time the ground subtracts beneath me, I hold my breath in wonder. What a thing.

Back then I didn’t for a moment consider the author who wroteThe Little Prince. The book came from my grandmother; she might as well have written it. I didn’t think,I am reading a French novella, nor did I congratulate myself for exploring literature in translation. Everything, when I was that age, had to be translated. Something was an object or a person or an experience, then it became a word. Simultaneous to that reduction, the world beyond my front yard was expanding daily. My parents gave me a globe and I spun it like a basketball on my finger, unaware that Saint-­Exupéry wrote his miraculous book after crashing his red and white Caudron C.630 Simuon in Egypt’s Wadian-Natrun while trying to set a speed record with his friend AndréPrévot for a flight from Paris to Saigon. They had gone down without a map and carried just enough liquid—a thermos of coffee and some wine (Frenchmen!)—to survive one or two days. I learned only later they were tricked by mirages, marveled at their hallucinations, and nearly died. Their lives were saved by a passing Bedouin tribesman who resuscitated them with a native rehydration method.

When I read these details in Stacy Schiff’s gorgeous biography of Saint-Exupéry a few years ago, my world split open once again. A book written about being grounded, a novel born from heartache and destruction—Nazism had chased Saint-Exupéry from France; his brother had died—brought my imagination to life several decades later in a part of America Saint-Exupéry had never seen, a town of hot rods, twirling barbershop poles, and crumbling VFW halls. This was as magical as flight. The world seen from above reveals its patterns. The way Saint-Exupéry abstracted tyranny and loss in a story about an alien had made it possible for me to understand those concepts as a child. To identify their shapes from a distance. Only I thought I was reading about friendship, and adventure.

We read differently as adults. The world around us and the people we have in it are long since named and labeled. With each passing year, our lives carry greater weight, some of it, oddly, acquirable only through loss. So most of us seek out different kinds of books. We have to—flight, as we also learn, is dangerous. Life is lived on the ground. Books are presented to us in a different way for this reason. Their covers look familiar enough to tell us what to expect, but mysterious enough to suggest we might not predict everything that will happen in their pages. Names of familiar authors attest to these pleasures on back jackets. If you live in the United States, most of the books you read will be written in English. If they are not, they will immediately place themselves in a tradition of other well-known writers from the author’s part of the world. How many people began reading Gabriel García Márquez because another Colombian novelist attested to his greatness? And yet that is how most books from most parts of the world are pitched to us as adult readers.

These are just some of the barriers to being a cosmopolitan reader—which I contend is our original state. I am talking, not about what the philosopher Paul Gilroy labeled jet-set cosmopolitanism, but rather about the expansive and enlarging category that Gilroy also sets out in his books, and which the writer Aminatta Forna expanded upon in a recent gathering on the topic at Georgetown. “A cosmopolitan,” she said, “is a person who has or embraces more than one way of seeing, whose perspective is not boundaried by the values of a single national culture. You can be born it, achieve it or have it thrust upon you.” Think about this—the migrant is a cosmopolitan, the refugee is a cosmopolitan, the person living in two places who can imagine their plight is as well. What a beautiful idea, especially in an age when so much ugly policy and institutionalized cruelty has been rolled out in governments across the world, especially in the United States, upon an exactly opposite belief: that some people are in essence fundamentally more valuable than others.

What we read is a political matter, an ethical issue; it has always been so, but particularly now, as governments enact violence upon people who do not fit definitional purity as citizens—and as liberal democracy itself faces existential threats at its former heart, in Europe and the United States. Make no mistake, there is a culture war raging right now with the multitudinous, with hybridity, with global culture. I am not going to argue that in this time of conflict wemustread against our own national cultures, but if we rarely do, what does that say about our values? What does that say about our imaginations? How, if we reinscribe national borders with how we talk about literature, can we ever expect to live in a free and open world as well? If we cannot first imagine it, we cannot in turn imagine its actuality.

Can we push against these forces with our own reading? I contend here that we can, and that we can do it without making literature a stern task. We must merely return to the broader experience of reading, the one so many people begin with—of reading as a gateway to surprise and delight and complexity and wonder, not as an imagined map of what we already know. This issue ofFreeman’sis an attempt to make it easier to do this. How many times have literary pages pointed to the future and given a list of writers from just one nationality? Or one genre? Increasingly, this seems a folly to me, not least because writers themselves do not work that way. Without Günter Grass, Salman Rushdie could not have imagined his way into the heart of Salaam Sinai’s story ofMidnight’s Children, without which Junot Díaz could not have conjured Oscar Wao, the hero of his eponymous novel of life during the Trujillo years and then as an immigrant in America. Writers are by nature in favor of cultural and national miscegenation, because they write with the part of the mind we read with as children.

What you have here then is a celebration of the multitudinous in all its forms. Beauty has never had a passport. It arrives unbidden, uninvited, and thus in selecting the writers for this issue—the writers I believe represent the future of new writing—I set no age, genre, or translation restrictions upon who was eligible. I wanted the writers whose lives and careers are just beginning to take flight, the writers who I believe have yet to be recognized for the full scale of their greatness, and in whose pages the possible shines like a spark in the dark. They come from a vast array of backgrounds, but were in no way selected for these distinctions: the oldest is a seventy-year-old essayist who lives in Texas, the youngest a twenty-six-year-old French novelist.

A word on the selection. Typically, literary journals and magazines that compile such a list depend upon a distinguished panel of judges to read through a few dozen books to make their selection. I have sat on several such juries and each experience was a joy, and without those experiences atGrantamagazine, I would never have been able to put together this issue ofFreeman’s. Still, I believed with a bailiwick this wide it would be far more helpful to have a very large number of casual advisers. So for the past two years I have talked to dozens upon dozens of critics, translators, writers, publishers, agents, book scouts, university professors, festival organizers, activists, and booksellers, asking them who represents the future of new writing. I have read Flemish poetry and unpublished writers from throughout sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, and visited countries where the language barrier is severe—such as Japan—more than once on errands of exploration. It would require many more pages than I possess here to thank all of the people involved in this quest, but chief among them has been Allison Malecha, the assistant editor ofFreeman’s, who has read virtually everything seriously considered alongside me, and who has often come to swifter, sharper conclusions than I ever could. I am so grateful to have had a copilot who packed the coffee, not the wine.

So who are these writers? Or more aptly,whatare they? After all, a writer’s true nationality is his or her style. This is the writer’s face to the world. I was happy to discover that, if national and genre borders are stripped away, an enormous palette of tones, tics, obsessions, and syntactical variety surges through the world’s best new writers. On the one hand, there are writers of torrential muchness and dazzling architecture, like Johan Harstad, whose recent 1,000-page novel,Max, Mischa, and the Tet Offensive, is excerpted here; or Ocean Vuong, who keeps a skittering momentum bursting down the page of a new poem. In her as yet unpublished 200,000-word debut novel,America Is Not the Heart, a section of which appears here, Elaine Castillo, with the sheer propulsive power of her voice, blasts a reader into her story of a family living under a repressive regime.

It is miraculous what a voice can do on the page. Testimony, in the best writers’ hands, never has to defend its credentials as art. Édouard Louis relives the days after a horrifying violent assault when the news of that experience longed to be exploded from his lungs. Heather O’Neill pushes us fathoms deep into the life of a teenage girl whose life is unraveling around her. Pola Oloxoirac describes growing up as a beautiful young woman: the field of pressure, and the warnings constantly draped around her by mothers, aunts, and others. Mariana Enríquez’s character speaks frankly and beautifully about her obsessive love of damaged hearts in a story that will make you feel the voice of Jean Genet is alive and well in the twenty-first century.

Realism is not nearly so dominant a style when you look to the world for good writing. In Mieko Kawakami’s short story, a woman who recently lost her house comes up with a grim solution for how she will never have to part with it again. Sayaka Murata, who works an early morning shift every day at a convenience store to give herself time to write, describes a world in which women covet clothing made of human hair, bone, and other body parts. Sometimes the world itself refutes realism’s design. In his gorgeous riff on turning seventy, David Searcy recalls how a peculiarity within the compression chamber of an aging VW bug turned the little vehicle he was driving into a rattling, unlikely supercar.

The best writers I came across in this search found a way to look at and regard the world closely from a fresh perspective. Andrés Felipe Solano moved to Korea some years ago and his journal entries of everyday activities sparkle like unsolicited satori. Diego Enrique Osorno has risked his life numerous times to cover the devastating effects of North America’s transnational dependence on drugs in Mexico. In the piece selected here, he visits a town attempting to scrub itself clean of the associations of violence by holding a festival for the world’s biggest shrimp cocktail. Samanta Schweblin is one of the globe’s best short-story writers, and in her brief, whimsical piece a family rushing across town comes up with a novel way to signal its emergency.

Adornment, I increasingly feel, is a distraction from beauty, especially in writing. In his piece about a teacher who has survived a militia raid in Uganda, Dinaw Mengestu simply allows his subject’s story to take over and speak for itself. Solmaz Sharif’s poem about disquiet is poised on the knife-edge of a single moment, where despair and revelation threaten from either side. In her brief memoir of traveling in her youth, Fiona McFarlane reminds us of the way everyday life could be a revelation, or present an opportunity for self-destruction. The facts, simply stated, sometimes have an effect all their own.

There are pure storytellers here in these pages, and it’s hard not to muse on the way big stories eventually must deal with justice. Sunjeev Sahota, whose novelThe Year of Runawaysmight be the best published anywhere in the last five years, has contributed a short story about the way intergenerational cohabitation threatens a family marriage. In his story Xu Zechen writes of a family whose fortunes are echoed by the fate of an endlessly barking abused dog. Nadifa Mohamed conjures the life of a sailor living in Wales at the midpoint of last century, when men of his ilk prayed that a crime was not committed by someone resembling them. In Tania James’s short story, a hit-and-run car accident leaves a young man dead, and a bicycle in tatters—and no one to blame. A Yi, who worked until recently as a provincial policeman, tells the hilarious story of two detectives sent to a factory in search of the thief of a missing wheel.

On occasion here, writers allow us to see them making themselves, like an artist painting his own portrait into a large fresco. In a moving personal essay, Garnette Cadogan reveals how a childhood of step-parental abuse forced him to think of himself as a character destined for abuse or revenge. Valeria Luiselli muses with shame and revelation in an essay upon the many ways she punished female writers for insufficient authenticity while going to a graduate program staffed by men. Marius Chivu, who is primarily a poet, reveals the loss that made him a poet and muses upon how gladly he would give his gift back in a second if he could have his beloved mother with him today. Claire Vaye Watkins flinches to realize she has become the kind of person her mother never would have known in her lifetime.

Even among the writers mentioned above, who are using experience as an aperture for discovery, I was surprised to discover a startling lack of self-awareness, of self-consciousness, the digital age’s gaze into the mirror. There is, it feels, in the most beautifully expressed style, a deeper level to intimate contemplation, even within personal work, such as that of Athena Farrokhzad. It emerges in her poems as a slippage at the crux of contemplation, where the lack of a recognizable past creates a steeper cliff of doubt. In Ishion Hutchinson’s exquisitely baroque verse, the poet yokes together traditions to create footbridges over such yawning caverns within his past.

Iwent looking for my copy ofThe Little Princenot long ago, and I was dismayed to realize it had disappeared into my library, probably buried or, more likely, long gone in one move or another. My family was itinerant. I gave up on my search after I realized that if I thought hard I could imagine almost every single one of its panels, including the frontispiece and my grandmother’s looping script and the year of her gift. Just as I can see the page on which my mother’s hand once inscribed a copy of Dylan Thomas’s poems to me for my seventeenth birthday, and I also have no problem seeing the words of love on an anthology of City Lights pocket poets given to me by an old friend.

I suspect you have books like these in your house, well-preserved or tattered copies that are so old they are no longer books but hanging door frames you once walked through. I hope you can accept this collection of new writing in the same spirit—less as a grand pronouncement and more as an invitation. With rare exceptions, I have never enjoyed or been moved by books I was told I ought to read—I was simply lucky that certain writers reached me when I needed them, whether they were from France or Wales or Colombia or Ghana, and whether they had imagined me as a reader or not. One of the great joys of sending this issue out into the world—it will be simultaneously published in Swedish, Italian, Romanian, and English—is that the writers herein make such dictates unnecessary. Their words do this in a matter of sentences—no matter how much we weigh, they can accept the load. Like them, I cannot imagine who you are, holding this, where you are. I can imagine only that we are on the same plane together and there goes the ground, away.

Seven Shorts

I’m getting old. Yet writing more. And maybe better. Or maybe only with more urgency. Which might amount to the same thing, right? To get the limitations of the system more excitingly involved. Like Lindbergh’s monoplane accelerating, bouncing down the runway trying to get some air before it hits the trees—my favorite moment in the movie. The unlikeliness of everything revealed. What were we thinking? This can’t possibly hold together. I’ve had health issues as well. So I would like to make the case for pathological revelation. What emerges as the limits are approached. When things begin to break apart.

I think of Giorgio de Chirico (I tend to think of him a lot in any case), inventor, or discoverer, of that cold surrealist surface which eventually would support the weird unlikeliness of others, too, like Dalí and Tanguy. I tend to think of him recovering from severe intestinal illness in a Florentine piazza back in 1910 or thereabouts—how, in his weakened state, in the autumn light, the ancient city square became a stage whereon could be observed, and then recorded in his “metaphysical” paintings, all laid open like an anatomy lesson, the mutual detachment of the arbitrary objects of the world. The silent, airless gulf between them as imponderable as that between the stars. You get a glimpse sometimes when things go wrong. The mechanism opens up a bit and you see through it and beyond it in a way.

All through my college years I drove a much-abused VW ­Beetle. Drove it pretty much into the ground—to the point where you really needed a tailwind to sustain the usual highway speed of fifty-five miles per hour. On its final voyage it carried me and three others to an air show in Fort Worth where the big attraction was the recently top-secret SR-71 spy plane guarded by a rope and an armed Marine and rumored capable of speeds beyond Mach 3. I think we might have had a tailwind going out, but coming back it was a struggle for the first few miles. And then it’s like we’ve topped the hill or something. Cars no longer seem to pass us quite so frequently. My friend Jim Lynch is driving. He loved driving. But he was a little crazy. Now we’re doing sixty-five. So I lean up between the front seats and say, Hey, what’s going on? We’re pushing seventy. Jim is hugging the wheel with this wild expression and a squint like he needs goggles. What the hell? He’s got it floored. He’s not about to back it off. He’ll never get this chance again. We look around at one another. We’re beginning to pass some cars. We’re doing seventy-five and still accelerating. Holy crap. We’re quiet now. There are these aerodynamic sounds I’ve never heard before. Jim’s locked onto the wheel. He is committed. We’re at eighty. We are passing into a new regime. At any moment we might leave the road, go into hyperdrive with fenders, mirrors ripping off, the paint igniting, flaming away in flashes as we slip beyond the envelope of atmosphere and ordinary life. When you’re that age, you’ve no idea. A thing like this might be your destiny. Then suddenly just silence. Not transonic, but the engine cutting out. No bang or clatter. Just the whistling of the wind through those little side vents like we’re plummeting from altitude. Somehow we manage to coast it off the highway into a service station. Hardly even tap the brakes. We don’t need gas. It just won’t go. It’s done. We call someone to pick us up. I sell the car to one of the guys who can use the parts. A week or so later I’m informed it threw a rod—though how so violent an event could have been so quiet is a mystery. Maybe a day or two after that, my friend comes over to present me with the camshaft. He regards it as a marvel. As suggesting both a further mystery—how my car could have run at all with cams so worn and misshapen—and a plausible explanation for its ultimate performance. Proper cams—that lift and close the engine valves controlling intake and exhaust—have tapered ovoid profiles much like that of a hen’s egg. Mine have profiles more like that of a piece of popcorn. My friend speculates that, somehow, at the end, these cams had worn into a shape that suddenly duplicated the function of what’s called a “racing cam”—think of the deep, irregular gluggedy-glug of a hot rod at a stoplight, and the way it all smooths out into a roar as it accelerates away. Such engines, fitted out with racing cams, will sacrifice performance at low revs to find efficiency at speed. So, it appears we had an accidental hot rod for a moment. An ungoverned and self-generating hot rod. Had it not blown up? My God. We’d still be on our way, I guess, my friends and I, into the silent, airless gulf. Into the dark where two of us, by a different route, have gone already.

—David Searcy

Gladice Aymare has a peculiar, almost infectious lilt to her voice—a singsong cadence that softens the hard syllables of her French. She occasionally hums between sentences, her voice barely rising above a whisper, as if she were treating her words like her patients—gently, with an almost excessive kindness that makes it hard to imagine anything could ever go wrong. Among local and expat aid workers in the Central African Republic, Gladice is a veteran on multiple fronts. Trained as a midwife in Bangui, the capital of the C.A.R., Gladice followed the peripatetic path common to aid workers. There was her first Médecins Sans Frontières mission in Boguila, a small village in the northwestern corner of the country, followed by later missions in Damara and then Sibut. She was born and raised in Bangui, but her life now is built along the borders of her country, in remote villages reached either by plane or by several days’ drive along the C.A.R.’s winding roads, which are so few in number that a map of every major road in the country can be memorized without much effort.

Gladice has, I imagine, traveled on every known path in the C.A.R., and that knowledge grants her more than just a privileged position. In the standard narrative of foreign aid, help, if not salvation, arrives from the outside, but on the distant back roads of a country like the C.A.R., nothing moves without someone like Gladice’s direction. In 2012, when a coalition of armed groups toppled the government of François Bozizé, Gladice was working in a clinic in Damara and then later Sibut. She treated war-wounded soldiers and civilians, including forty-two rape victims, alongside her usual responsibilities in the maternity wards. When later that year Gladice returned to the hospital in Boguila, she was moved to the intensive care unit, where, she notes, she was more than just a midwife. It was a sort of homecoming for a woman who had come to know her country intimately, through its hospitals and clinics, through its sick and wounded.

She recounts this particular period with an obvious whiff of nostalgia, her gaze fixed on some indeterminate point just beyond the walls of the courtyard we’re sitting in. We’ve just returned to the M.S.F. mission in Bambari, the second-largest city in the C.A.R., after two days of nonstop work in mobile health clinics. Despite the long hours and daylong drive to return to base, Gladice insists this is the perfect time to have our conversation. She speaks slowly and proudly about her work in the maternity ward and the responsibilities charged to her in the intensive care unit. Knowing how the story ends, she seems to linger deliberately on the bright spots. The Seleka forces that had swept into the capital and seized power at the end of 2012 had done so quickly, with little resistance from the military. When Gladice returned to the hospital four months after the coup, it was still possible to imagine that this vulnerable and profoundly underdeveloped nation would shrug off its latest political crisis. There had been coups and attempted coups before—but so far, in four decades of independence, the C.A.R. had never fallen victim to the type of violence that had afflicted nearly all of its neighbors, from Chad, Sudan, and South Sudan to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. At the hospital, there were wounded soldiers and civilians from sporadic fighting between Seleka and the former army, but it was the common daily concerns of malnutrition and malaria that demanded the most attention.

The bright spots that Gladice lingers on are centered on her former colleagues. All the staff lived next to the hospital in Boguila—a communal arrangement born out of necessity that also served as a daily exercise in bonding.

“We always ate together,” Gladice says. “We lived together. We would leave at the same time to go to work. On Sunday we went to church together.” Back in Boguila, she was nicknamed “Mamma Coffee.”

“My friends would come to my room and they would say, ‘Mamma Coffee, Mamma Coffee,’” Gladice tells me, because they knew she loved coffee, and as a lover of coffee, would make anyone who asked a cup.

Gladice never describes the bonds with her former coworkers in familial terms, although certainly there was the intimacy and proximity of family, but perhaps the term “family” is a poor substitute for the peculiar binding of work and life that comes with this type of aid work. Families separate—their members leave and go to school and work and then come together at the end of the day. At the M.S.F. hospital in Boguila, like the mobile clinics in Bambari that Gladice now attends to, no one was left alone, no one had a life alone. There was only the work and the post-work gathering that followed.

As we near the difficult part of the story, Gladice lists the names and jobs of the eight staffers who lived with her. She leans over to make sure I spell each one properly.

“Before the attack we felt very secure,” she says. “We had a guard day and night, a safe room. We had three blocks—I was the supervisor of our block, block 2. During the night we guarded the radio with us. And they [the guards] would call us on the radio if there was a problem.”

Two days before that conversation, I followed Gladice into the back of a white Land Cruiser as it prepared to leave for a mobile clinic four hours south of Bambari. There were eight adults in our SUV—six of us squeezed onto folding benches in the rear. Underneath our seats and at our sides were the building blocks that would later be used to construct a temporary clinic on a patch of grass a few hundred feet away from the country’s largest sugar factory, and the internally displaced persons’ camp huddled in its shadow.

Within a few minutes of leaving the compound, we reached the edge of Bambari—a point marked by an unofficial transfer of power from the UN forces to a pair of teenage boys in military fatigues, each with an automatic rifle dangling indifferently around his neck. The young soldiers were the first official checkpoint marking the end of government-controlled territory. Almost the entire province from that point on was controlled by an ex-Seleka militia that had rejected the peace agreements that brought a measure of stability to the rest of the country.

We were casually waved through the checkpoint without the slightest hesitation, but something was obviously different on the other side of the barrier. Here, along the road to Ngakobo, the C.A.R. was still undoubtedly at war. In Bangui, the costs of that war had been evident in the camps and in the clinics and hospitals. Here in Ouaka, the proof was in the burned homes and abandoned villages that lined the narrow red-dirt road. Ten kilometers away from that initial checkpoint, we drove past what was left of Jean-Claude Pouzamandgi’s village. Jean-Claude, a technician in the clinics, was responsible for dispensing medication, and when we neared his home—of which only half a wall and a pile of bricks remained—he leaned over from his side of the car, pointed out the window, and stated proudly that this was where he had lived, and, as he explained, would certainly live again.

For the next several hours, we drove through more burned villages and roadblocks—each barrier manned by soft-faced boys in military clothing a few sizes too large. With every one passed, it was hard not to feel that whatever security and authority had been present in Bangui, and to a lesser degree in Bambari, was eroding. We weren’t in a dangerous area; it was, in fact, just as Gladice had described it—an insecure zone. Initially that description had sounded slightly romantic, but in retrospect, it’s a phrasing generous enough to include all the threats and possible threats that make Gladice’s work necessary.

On April 25, 2014, Gladice went to bed very late. She was the designated night guard and was slow to wake the next day.

“On the morning of the twenty-sixth, I came down. At one p.m., I went to the hospital for an online course on malnutrition. I went to the office for one or two hours. I was feeling tired. It was a ten-minute walk to get to the office.

“I had two hours of courses per day. When I was finished with the two hours, I returned home to wash clothes. I had just begun to wash my nurse’s outfit. I had the radio next to me when I heard the guards begin to talk in their local language: Souma. It’s the language of Boguila.

“When I heard them talking, I asked them to talk in Sango or in French. I then had a response—the [rebels] are starting to arrive in the hospital. And then right away, there was shooting.

“In our area—Jean-Claude and Raissa and Fiacre were sleeping. I started slamming on the doors telling them to wake up, the Seleka were here. We started looking for a place to hide.

“We quit our block to hide in block 3. There was me, Jean-Claude, and Raissa. We hid in the kitchen of block 3. It was big and there was a lot of shooting. They started around two p.m. while we were in the kitchen—the kitchen was exposed, only partially brick, so we went to go hide in the shower. It was a shower with three doors. We stayed there while they continued shooting. And because I had the radio, I turned down the volume. And we stayed like that on the floor and they continued to shoot and shoot and shoot. And it was at that moment I began to pray. ‘Is it the end of my life?’ I said to God. ‘We’re here to help the people, help us. We’re here to save lives.’

“We were all in the same shower. Fiacre also began to cry. We stayed there for at least forty-five minutes of shooting. We didn’t know they were killing.

“After, there was silence, we heard the cars pulling away. And then there was calm. And then I turned up the volume of the radio. We heard the voice of our project coordinator, Will. I heard him in conversation with our nurse. We heard him say there were injured at the hospital. He gave the authority to leave and go to the hospital. The first person I ran into was Raassaoul—and it was he who told us that we lost Papa Daniel. Automatically we hugged and began to cry. I went to the hospital and there were bodies everywhere.

“In addition to Papa Daniel, there was the guard supervisor, who was called Papa Jean-Paul Yainam.

“When we arrived everyone was running, crying, hugging. We went to the O.P.D. (the external consultation area)—there were eleven village chiefs killed there. That’s where the meeting was.

“We did the triage—we found three survivors. And among the three was one M.S.F. guard who had a bullet in his abdomen. He had a severe hemorrhage. The doctor took him straight to surgery.

“We began to search for people to donate blood, but the guard died at the block. Then other people in the neighborhood who were attacked began to arrive at the hospital—they began to bring their survivors. We were all together—staff, expat, inpat—to stabilize those who were still alive. That Saturday everyone spent the night in the hospital.

“Will decided to evacuate the staff—on Sunday a plane came and took one part of the team. [Will] asked me if I had the courage to stay one more day while M.S.F. came to get the rest of the survivors. I stayed with my other colleagues. On Monday, two M.S.F.-France cars came from Paoua, and on Tuesday, we made a convoy with four cars. The chief of our mission, Stephano, stayed with us.

“We stopped at Bossangoa, where the team was waiting to greet us. We hugged, cried, ate together, and then continued.

“After one month, they asked if we were ready to go back to work. They offered us a choice: Grimari, Bossangoa, or Zemio—Grimari is an emergency project, which is what I chose. I didn’t lose my courage to continue to work.”

—Dinaw Mengestu

It is a fact universally known that in Lima, if you are a lady of beauty, you are likely to be a whore. I learned this when I was around thirteen, and my mother was obsessed with me being a lady of the night, too. She liked to check my pockets to see if I had extra money, money I couldn’t account for, a domestic IRS of my little, never-been-kissed vagina. But I digress.

I’ve been wanting to write about the women in my family for some time, but haven’t known where to start. I’ve always located them in a nineteenth-century rural world of dusty roads and wooden carts, like the ones carrying the thirteen-year-old prostitute Eréndira and her abuela desalmada in the Gabriel García Márquez story. Their Peruvian lives ooze a vague Vargas Llosa air, but the places they hailed from would have been irrespirable for his bourgeoisie. Melchora, my great-grandmother, was a native of Huánuco, a small village at the center of the Andean plain, a yellow world trapped between jungle and mountains. She couldn’t read or write, though it really didn’t matter; she spoke Quechua, and Quechua is a spoken language—its real life exists between mouths and ears, though it can be transcribed. Melchora loved going to the movies and yelling at the screen, especially at the villains: You are as ugly as your deeds! Melchora married an Irishman, Byrne, who beat her frequently and was drunk all the time. Eventually he left, and Melchora moved to La Victoria, a shoddy neighborhood in Lima, along with her two daughters, Olga and Ana, and a retarded little boy, Pepe.

Ana was the prettiest: by the time she was twelve a line of suitors had already formed in front of her. Men came to the house and offered their charms and gifts: platters of carne seca, furniture, ham, jewelry. Ana loved dressing up and dancing. She was wispy at the waist, she had wide Bambi eyes, and she loved getting dolled up in capri pants to dance boleros at the Lima clubs. Sometimes she wore jasmine in her hair like La flor de la Canela, a bolero heroine, the Madonna of the Rímac. She enjoyed the vanity of the temptress; she had fun with it.

Once a young man came to visit the family and impressed Melchora: he was well-spoken, and successful in the jewelry business. He was very short, not particularly handsome, and Olga didn’t like him one bit. She assumed he was coming for her sister, but Ana wasn’t staying much at home; she would disappear for days in a row, while Olga took care of little Pepe. One morning, when Olga was getting ready for school, Melchora told her she couldn’t afford to return the gifts and she had to marry Jorge. Olga Byrne left the school and the house to marry my grandfather, Jorge Washington, absurdly named thus because, even though he was Peruvian and his father owned an anarchist newspaper, he was born on the Fourth of July. Ana was not planning on returning any gifts. She left school and moved out to the Rímac neighborhood, where she started seeing a man no one knew. The transition from gifts to soles must have happened at some point, when she had to distribute the earnings, and he became her pimp.

One night, on the way home after the bolero club, he began beating her in the street. She pushed back, took off her pumps, and tried to hit him with the heel. He went on beating her and she kept yelling but people in the Rímac were used to having their night air sprinkled with girls’ screams. He pulled her by the hair down the block as she crawled and cried for help. He kicked and a part of her would move, stimulus and response, like a question and answer or a body spasm. At some point she didn’t move anymore and he tied her body to a wooden cart, a carretilla, for everyone to see. I see him angry and euphoric, riding her dead body on the street and yelling puta de mierda. He did this till dawn, perhaps drunk. He was still babbling puta at the air, or he went into hiding; versions differ. Her body was found naked in broad daylight, rotting in the Rímac river air. Someone found the broken shoes and gave what was left of them to Melchora. She burned them.

Ana had two children who went to live with my grandmother. One of them was apparently my mother. She was careful to destroy all photographs of herself as a child, so nobody would notice the resemblance.

—Pola Oloixarac

In the summer of 1998, my best friend and I went to the Greek island of Kythira: birthplace of Aphrodite (sprung from her father’s seed in the island’s waters), birthplace of modernist disenchantment (Baudelaire, expecting a paradise of love, found instead a hanged corpse), and conveniently located between the Greek mainland and Crete. We were backpackers making our way by land and sea from Rome to Istanbul. We had spent almost all our savings just getting from Australia to Europe. We were twenty but we looked younger; we were younger. We were tender, shy, bookish girls from suburban Sydney; we lived in an ecstasy of passionate innocence rendered largely undetectable by our extreme politeness. This politeness meant we agreed to have dresses we couldn’t afford sewn for us in Athens, strangely modest floral cotton shifts that made us look as if we’d just stepped off a nineteenth-century prairie. We agreed to get into the car of an aggressively solicitous man called Christos who wanted us to come with him to Marathon. These things, and others of their kind, we agreed to. And yet if E and I had been visited on that trip by golden Apollo offering a night of corybantic frenzy or an initiation into the Eleusinian mysteries, we would have turned him down. Politely.

Actually, E might not have declined Apollo. In search of beauty, she would push at the closed door of any church while I hovered behind her. I was anxious about catching the right bus, turning down the right street, having the right change for the public toilets. I was intimidated by the gorgeous bulk of the Parthenon. I was continually hustling us off public transport in the wrong places because I was so worried we’d missed the right ones. I was the one who bought our ferry tickets to Kythira and was sure, when the boat stopped at a small port on a spit of land, that this was where we should ­disembark—absolutely sure, although no one else got off there. The ferry terminal—the only nearby building—was closed. Two taxis waited at the terminal; we waved them both away. Taxis were expensive. We would walk.

We had spent the day travelling and now it was late afternoon. The sea was blue and everywhere; there was much more sea than land. Land was a low greenish hill, treeless, visible across a causeway. From this distance—and the causeway was longer than it had seemed from the boat—we could make out a few buildings. We assumed that, as we grew closer, more buildings would materialise, if not by magic then because our guidebook promised them. And as we walked and evening approached and lights came on in what we assumed were windows, a town did appear to gather itself on the slope of the hill; so that when we arrived, finally, and found a village of eight or nine buildings, it seemed even smaller than it was. Most of the buildings were modest white houses along an empty beachfront; one was a small restaurant; behind them stood a complex of holiday apartments. The proprietor of the restaurant assured us that we were on Kythira, just the wrong side of it. He could call for a taxi to take us to the main town, but we couldn’t afford it. We had no cash and there was nowhere to withdraw money; we could exchange traveller’s checks at the ferry terminal but it wouldn’t open until an hour before the next boat, on Monday afternoon. It was Friday evening.

It’s not so terrible to be stranded for three days in a village on a Greek island. We accepted this at once; accepted, too, that we would live off the food we had with us (a jar of Nutella and a packet of spaghetti) and use E’s emergency credit card to stay in one of the holiday apartments. These were opened especially for us. Our room was far nicer than any other we stayed in on that trip (there were, for example, no bloodstains on the mattresses). So we were in good spirits as we walked down to the beach to swim. The sun had set but the air was warm and pink and we moved through it as if through soft smoke. The sea was the same temperature as the air. It seemed reasonable to imagine this as the birthplace of love.

A woman in a bathing suit emerged from one of the houses and waded out to join us. She carried her head carefully above the water; she told us this was to preserve her makeup. Her heavy mascara ran all the same, so that eventually she resembled one of the theatrical masks we’d admired in the mainland museums—the sorrowing ones meant to signify tragedy. In fact she was a cheerful woman. She had heard we were Australian. She told us that Australia was known as Big Kythira because more of the island’s residents had emigrated there than to any other place, that there were considerably more islanders in Australia than there were on Kythira, and that for a time after the Second World War the island’s economy was almost entirely supported by these southern emigrants. She proceeded to list the names of her expatriate friends and family. We didn’t know them, but she continued to offer names and we continued to apologise for not recognizing them. There was something both friendly and melancholy about standing in the Mediterranean as this stained, smiling woman recited what might as well have been a litany of the dead.

Swimming that evening, we noticed a large cave along the coast and thought we’d like to walk to it. The next day was hot and bright and we spent it reading on our balcony, but as the afternoon cooled we set out for the cave. We followed a path through dense grasses and low shrubs. The air softened, turned pink, and as we walked I became steadily overcome by dread. The cave seemed the source of some deep, vital terror, and my fear of it was unyielding. E felt the same way. I can’t remember which of us confessed first, but I remember the relief I felt when we agreed that we should go no farther. Perhaps this was, at last, Apollo’s invitation, and we did after all refuse it.

Hurrying back along the path, I heard E say, “I hope we don’t meet a wild dog.” Almost immediately, a great dark dog sprang up from the grass and ran snarling toward us. E, who seemed to have conjured it, blocked my body with hers. Just before it reached us, we heard a loud whistle; the dog, responding to this whistle, left the path.

Now we almost ran back to the village. To calm ourselves, we walked along a jetty that reached into the placid sea and sat with our feet in the water. Bright lamps illuminated the whole empty beachfront; these were the lights we had been reassured by as we walked across the causeway. The sea lapped and soothed. We talked quietly until the mood of the walk left us; then we laughed at the cave, the dog, and ourselves. As we laughed, a short, high wave rose out of the soundless sea and drenched us on the jetty. Then the water was calm again. The wave seemed so specific, so resolved, that without consultation we ran back to the hotel as if pursued.

We spent the rest of the weekend sleepless and baking in our sealed room; afraid of the island, we closed all the shutters and windows. Wrapped in wet towels and eating plain spaghetti, we waited for the Monday sun to rise. When it did, we shouldered our packs and walked to the ferry terminal to wait out the hours until our boat. Shortly before it arrived, the taxis we’d dismissed three days before came driving across the causeway.