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upfront

editor's note contents

Dear Readers,

Only I remain at 195 Angell, tasked with penning this week’s editor’s note. In this issue’s Lifestyle section, there’s talk of love lost between an undergrad and a recent grad, of the toll taken by loneliness, and of fateful encounters in thrift shops. Over in my section, Arts & Culture, Trump’s face refuses to fade from our TV screens and Pulitzer finalist Daniyal Mueenuddin lays out his literary MO in an open-hearted interview, conducted by a fellow student and dear friend. Features sees a defense of personal poetry and a look at France’s poorly approved of president. Though diverse in content and style, these pieces all point to troubles that face our world. Heartache and solitude. Emptiness and fear.

Lack of inspiration, exclusion, a need for validation. But, more importantly, these pieces also share a hope for overcoming these troubles. Acceptance, closure, destiny. Solidarity and ambition. Self-confidence. Perseverance. In the aftermath of last week’s electoral fiasco and in advance of next week’s holiday, Thanksgiving, or as I like to call it, Black Friday Eve, I have decided to reflect on the things and people in my life that I’d like to give thanks for. My family and friends, to be sure. Light roast coffee and very dark chocolate. And the millions I don’t know and will never meet who continue to make this campus, this country, and this world worth fighting for. Thank you, and may the odds be ever in your favor.

Best,

upfront features 3 • to call myself a poet

Alex Walsh 4 • small, tasteless peas

Saanya Jain

lifestyle

Ryan

5 • ego and the end

Grace Yoon 5 • shopping as the second hand

Sarah Clapp 8 • lonely Sara Al-Salem

arts & culture 6 • writing is a way of living

Ananya Shah 7 • turn off the trump tv

Joshua Wartel Please send your photos to alicia_devos@brown. edu!

staff

Editor-in-Chief Yidi Wu

Features Editors Saanya Jain Claribel Wu

Managing Editor of Arts & Culture Ryan Walsh

Lifestyle Editor Alicia DeVos

Managing Editor of Features Monica Chin

Creative Director Grace Yoon

Managing Editor of Lifestyle Rebecca Ellis

Copy Chiefs Alicia DeVos

Arts & Culture Editors Joshua Lu Anne-Marie Kommers

Serif Sheriffs Logan Dreher Kate Webb

Head Illustratrix Katie Cafaro Staff Writers Sara Al-Salem Daniella Balarezo Anne Cheng Pia Ceres Sarah Cooke James Feinberg Anna Harvey Katherine Luo Jennifer Osborne Lindsey Owen Rica Maestas Ameer Malik

Chantal Marauta Isabella Martinez Randi Richardson Spencer Roth-Rose Ananya Shah Celina Sun Alex Walsh Joshua Wartel Annabelle Woodward Xuran You Staff Illustrators Clarisse Angkasa Alice Cao Tom Coute Socorro FernandezGarcia

Ruth Han Diana Hong Jenice Kim Kay Liang Doris Liou Emma Margulies Michelle Ng Tymani Ratchford Natasha Sharpe Maggie Tseng Claribel Wu Yidi Wu Stephanie Zhou

Cover Jenice Kim

features

3

to call myself a poet finding my place in the literary world

ALEX WALSH staff writer illustrator SOCO FERNANDEZ GARCIA

I will admit to being sad when I got my first rejection letter. I was sixteen, I had just started writing poetry, and I’d submitted my work to the well-known (and extremely selective) American Poetry Review. But—and if you’ve made art before, you’ll understand what I’m saying—I believed I had something important to offer.

When you write down a piece of yourself, it takes years to be able to see it from an outside perspective.

I will admit to being sad when I got my second rejection letter, and my fourteenth. I will admit that every time I got an email saying my work wasn’t a “good fit” for a publication, I felt as though it wasn’t a good fit for any publication. I loved my poems, and I wanted the literary world to love them too. But the more you fail to enter the literary world, the more you begin to question whether you’re literary enough to belong. Especially as I got older, the poems I wrote were short, direct and relatively mundane—very different from what I read in the archives of the journals

I submitted to. I kept coming up against the same definition of poetry, the same forms, the same archetypes, even from journals who claimed to be “avant-garde.” And because I didn’t write in that style, it seemed unlikely that I would get published.

So I started trying to emulate the poets I read. I tried to make my writing longer, more descriptive, more image-based, denser. I tried to write poems that had more layers and thus more substance, more meanings to be discovered and unfolded. And several things happened over the course of this process. First, my family started complaining that they didn’t understand my work (a criticism I generally don’t trust, but more on that later).

I would send a poem to my grandma, and she would write back saying she didn’t really “get it.” Gradually, I started to think that this was just what happened as you became more literary: your work required a higherlevel audience to appreciate it. Once a friend and fellow poet asked me if a poem had to be accessible in order

to be good, and although I said yes, I couldn’t defend my answer. It all came down, I supposed, to what the poet wanted out of her work. Did I want to be understood by my family, or published in the Kenyon Review? I wasn’t sure. I wanted both.

The second important effect of my experimentation was that my poetry became hollow. I was writing about personal events, the way most poets I read did, but the voice behind the words wasn’t mine (although it took about a year of distance to be able to see that). In trying so hard to mold my format into that of other writers, I lost the degree of self that was evident in my older pieces. The writing was technically improving, in other words, but the level of meaning was declining. When I look back on the poems I wrote during that time—around my senior year of high school—I see myself desperately attempting to fit into another person’s shoes. I hear myself echoing many other voices without a real sense of why I’m speaking. I wrote about war, death, love, without having

experienced any of them. And, oddly enough, I did get some of those poems published. But when I shared my work with friends, I wanted to open with a disclaimer. That’s not what I really sound like. It was just an experiment.

As you can perhaps predict, I eventually started to return to my voice.

Poems I’d gladly claim as mine would creep in, little by little, until they became frequent in my writing. I started to find some consistency in my work.

Somewhat ironically, the way I initially tapped into this truer version of my voice was by writing about things not at all related to my personal life: oranges, colors, objects on the street.

I wrote philosophical poems, I wrote in French, I wrote about fire hydrants.

And when I came back to speaking about my life, I found myself returning to my old style of short, direct lines— but with greater purpose. My words were deeper, stronger, more complex, even though my style had outwardly changed very little. My ideas fit into my writing in ways they never had be-

4 features fore. Although my grandmother still claimed not to understand my work, I came to terms with the fact that people often say they don’t understand a poem if any piece of it eludes them—a quality most “good” poems have.

Armed with this new version of my writing, I was happier with myself, but still not sure I was ready to face what I saw as the real literary world. Although the poems I wrote were more substantive, they were still stylistically similar to the poems I had submitted when I was sixteen––they were not much nearer to the poems I had read. If anything, their style had diverged further: They were stranger and still more pointed. But because I was finally pleased with what I was writing, I turned my spite from my own work to the prestigious journals themselves. The journals, I decided, were too exclusive: Their poems were written by high-brow literary folk, for high-brow literary folk. I knew by this point that I wanted my writing to be “accessible”—something the average reader could pick up and get something out of—and that, although this

wasn’t necessary for it to be good, it was necessary for it to have the impact I wanted. Granted, I wasn’t prepared to write for the sake of accessibility.

But the journals, I felt, took it too far.

How might this conflict end? How could the writer make peace with the public and still take ownership of her work? As I quickly came to realize my struggle was in no way unique to me.

The number of poets upset with the literary community far outweighed the number of poets satisfied with it. But rather than dismantling the literary community, or boycotting it, poets, I discovered, were expanding it. They were creating their own literary magazines, their own journals, in whatever style appealed to them.

Some journals advertised for funny poetry, some for accessible poetry, some for poetry that used bizarre key words like “truth” or “hallucination.”

The internet was making room for all kinds of poetry, not just the kind that had been published for years. And as I discovered just how many different kinds of journals there were, I submitted to more and more places and

began getting acceptance letters for the same poems that had been rejected elsewhere. For each type of poem I wrote, there was a publication for which I thought it was well-suited. It was—for me—a revelation.

My writing style still isn’t consistent enough to publish a chapbook. I’m influenced by every poem and poet that I read, and I don’t quite know what audience I’m looking for. But I have come to appreciate each kind of poetry I encounter: the image-based, lyrical poetry I once thought was the only kind of poetry; the sarcastic, pointed poetry I wrote early on; the poetry too weird for me to begin to understand; the poetry I carry in my heart. Instead of seeing the literary world as a dichotomy of those who care about accessibility and those too elite for such concerns, I see it as one group of people trying to write and read for other people who want to write and read. And in that light, I’m happy to be a part of it however I can. I will always want people to understand my work, and I will always want even the snobbiest

of literary snobs to see me as a valid member of their community. But in order to call myself a poet, I have to write the way I write and then seek a place for it. Otherwise, no matter how many times my name is published, the work won’t really be mine.

small, tasteless peas hollande takes a plunge

SAANYA JAIN features editor illustrator CLARIBEL WU

French President François Hollande’s approval ratings are currently at four percent. To put this into perspective: George W. Bush’s lowest day in office was a comparatively healthy 25%.

Some commentators have touted this as partly due to a more pessimistic and disapproving French outlook.

In other words, were he the president of a more sunny electorate, his ratings would be higher. That theory gets a little dented once one considers that the French public’s approval of Vladimir Putin is higher than that of their own president’s, and that he is at the bottom of the stack by even French standards: no President has had lower ratings in the Republic’s history.

Nicolas Sarkozy’s never dropped below 30%.

Hollande’s ratings were already in

the low double digits in the past few weeks, but took a final plunge (there isn’t much more room to fall) when the book A President Shouldn’t Say That was published last week. Its 662 pages include such gems as: calling the judiciary a “cowardly institution”, the national football team “badly brought-up kids”, and the poor “toothless.” He poked fun at top officials, including his education minister for not having gone to the elite Ecole Nationale d’Administration, his alma mater. He also said that there is “a problem with Islam” after the attacks in Nice, risking the alienation of his left-wing party base. Perhaps the 4% that remain are the ones he somehow forgot to insult. To be fair, this is not an entirely new phenomenon for the French people: Nicolas Sarkozy did compare magistrates to “small, taste-

less peas,” a uniquely French insult.

These quotes weren’t captured on a clandestine recording device or slipped to the authors by an anonymous source. They were given directly, on the record, to two journalists from le Monde over dinner at the Elysée Palace over 61 meetings over four years. Some are arguing that if President Hollande had put some of that time towards actually governing, he may not be in this position right now.

The result of all of this? He has sent eight separate apology letters where he has imaginatively claimed that his comments bore “no relation to the reality of my thinking.”

At least this isn’t coming out at the worst possible time. No, wait, it is.

There is a looming presidential election, and his party’s primary is in January. It will be the first in fifty years

due to his unpopularity, which was announced when his ratings were at a comparatively radiant 11%. His party already has slim chances of even making it to the run-off ballot after the first round of the French elections.

Given this, the recent Trump win and the Brexit vote, Marine le Pen, the front-runner for of the far-right France’s National Front party, looks to have a solid chance of becoming France’s next president. The morning after Trump’s win, she tweeted: “Today the United States, tomorrow France.”

lifestyle

5

ego and the end when self-pride haunts you in the long run

GRACE YOON creative director illustrator RUTH HAN

It’s hard to say what truly motivated me.

I don’t know if it was because the feelings were still there or because I felt obliged to follow up on a vague promise for the sake of being the “good one.” But, within the 48 hours that I was back in the U.S., I reached out to the man who for seven months had been 6,795 miles away.

I couldn’t make it so simple. I couldn’t fathom a trip to Boston solely to see him.

Instead, I told myself it was pure coincidence that I happened to be attending some hackathon in Boston over the weekend. Maybe we could even meet up while I was in town.

I committed myself to this patched up plan, participating in the conference and saving Sunday evening for our dinner.

As soon as I arrived, I saw him standing aloof and hunched over his phone. The anticlimax of his cordial hug, tinted with awkwardness, seeped into my consciousness.

For months I had told myself to expect little

if this reunion were to ever take place. But, deep inside, I had harbored a glimmer of hope that I’d be proven wrong.

Amidst the strings of choppy, cryptic conversations, neither of us verbalized the question weighing on our shoulders: Is there something left between us? But perhaps the signs were clear, and to put them into actual words would have caused a pain neither of us could bear.

As he was dropping me off in front of the station, he said, “Keep in touch! Say hello to Brown folks for me.”

I could only utter an overly high-pitched “Bye!” before swiftly turning around and swiping my way through the turnstile. The unspoken words were much clearer. * * * I’m fascinated by how strongly we can feel, remember, as well as how much we can forget, and the memories can dissipate within minutes. I can’t help but resort to writing as a way to give these emotions and memories some permanence.

But some memories come back without the help of writing, uncomfortably clearer than before.

My immediate reaction was to blame the bitterness of our meetup on him, scoffing at the thought that, after all the hurdles I went through, the only thing he could do for me was say those half-hearted words: “Keep in

touch!”

Over time though, I’ve come to realize that I’m as culpable for the things that I accused him of.

I exhausted myself from the hackathon and lugging two days worth of clothes and inventories on my back. I never allowed myself to stop being jetlagged. Worst of all, I did not explicitly communicate any of this to him. I was too afraid it would reveal an inordinate amount of effort and care on my part. Instead, I forced a smile and shrugged my shoulders.

Nevertheless, the grand pretense of coolness I had painstakingly created crumbled apart. I cringe as I remember the moments when I couldn’t quite hear what he said or didn’t even realize he was asking me a question, inadvertently thwarting the conversation.

While I was taken aback by his apparent nonchalance, I was likely more detached and distressed than him. And, without any affirmation of how the other person was truly feeling, we each went by what we saw and deduced. Discouraged, we went around in circles and avoided the simplest yet scariest solution of all. * * * I still think about him, now and then.

Occasionally, I even dream about him. Suddenly, I’m back in the fateful meeting, wit-

nessing once again the unfolding pain. Other times, we’re in a new setting, but I still bring up that night, owning up to my series of faux pas and apologizing for the hurt I caused him.

I wanted to tell him this in person, outside of dreamland. I placed my bet on the Campus Dance last May, thinking that maybe he would return to College Hill and partake in the reunion events as an alum. I never found out if he actually came. The campus proved to be too big and crowded, and I got too drunk trying to alleviate my anxiety at the prospect of the encounter. There was no way we could have found each other.

Some may point out that I could simply reach out to him and get this off of my chest.

I still have his number. But I’m afraid that he might say just a different version of “keep in touch.” That maybe all my worries and guilt were actually unwarranted, that maybe his disinterest was genuine and independent of my standoffish demeanor. It’s another form of rejection I fear.

Writing this, now, doesn’t change the reality that I haven’t spoken to him. But it’s taken me over 11 months to realize that silencing myself only prolongs this charade of not caring and that I’m too exhausted to carry it any further. It’s not perfect, but at least I can be honest and allow myself the closure I’ve needed for so long.

shopping as the second hand in celebration of being thrifty

SARAH CLAPP contributing writer illustrator CLARIBEL WU

I caught the second hand shopping bug before I even got my first allowance. I was with my mom at a thrift store off the highway called “The Children’s Orchard.” The store always had a new crop of corduroy overalls, sweaters, and plastic toys whenever we’d visit. I was mesmerized by the skorts and shirts with penguins printed on the front. My mom was mesmerized by the prices.

Ever since I was in elementary school, I’ve used thrift stores to define my personal style (floral prints, ‘70s silhouettes and things a librarian would probably wear) while still being frugal (everything should be $8 or less, please). In my vintage wanderings, I’ve found that there is as much variety in the kinds of second-hand stores as there is in the items they sell. Savers and Salvation Army are someone’s spring cleaning, promising the odd hidden gem (a wicker picnic basket, a waffle maker, a t-shirt from Sea World). There are resale boutiques that display designer cashmere and patchwork mannequins with last season’s statement necklaces. And then there are places that look like the contents of your attic have been dumped out onto the tables, tarnished and mismatched and full of domestic charm.

Providence has all of these. There are donation department stores downtown, a Second Time Around on Thayer, and knick-knack packed places like Nostalgia on Wickenden, which reinvigorated my en-

thusiasm for sifting through retro treasures.

I went there for the first time last November when I was feeling restless and thought visiting a place advertised as a “curious emporium” would fix me. And it did. Everything was perfectly cluttered and Margaritaville

by Jimmy Buffet was on the radio. There were racks brimming with leather jackets alongside tables full of yard sale junk.

And then, it was love at first sight—-a pair of chestnut brown men’s ankle boots.

I tried them on and they fit perfectly. I had made a discovery. For me, this sense of fate is an inherent part of thrift shopping. The unpredictability imparts a satisfying sense of destiny that comes from rolling up your sleeves, digging for treasure, and relishing in the serendipity.

There’s also the wonder I harbor for how everything got there. What family had this encyclopedia set on display? What daughter had to give up her mother’s good china?

How was the Johnson Cousin’s Reunion of 2007, and which cousin donated their commemorative baseball cap to this Savers? I feel like a detective, compiling clues from the names written on the inside covers of books and the scuff marks on shoes.

I become an anthropologist trying to find humanity in unearthed artifacts and then a gallery collection of anonymous contributions, displaying a sweater from a girl in the 80s, pants from a fellow size 4 and an elderly woman’s winter hat.

When I take my latest find home, I’m intersecting with someone else’s story. Last month I went to one of Providence Flea’s weekly markets to talk to vendors about their thrifting stories. I lingered by a table filled with household items and started talking to the man running it. He told me that he’d been collecting at yard sales since 1969, eventually transforming his childhood hobby into a larger enterprise that consisted of the refurbished tables he proudly showed me. The keeper of a rack of 70s Americana apparel told me she had just quit her corporate job and was going around the country selling the clothes of her grandma, and her friends’ grandmas, and probably a lot of other grandmas considering she buys at estate sales. Finding solace in the pea coats, sequins, and silk shifts of another generation struck me as a fitting solution to midtwenties disillusionment, an attempt at belonging to something older and better.

Finally, I came to a table that looked like a page from an I-Spy book—a sprawl of Swiss Army knives, political pins, and football pennants. Two men were overseeing the operation from lawn chairs, joking with customers who couldn’t help but run their fingers over the spines of linen bound books.

I approached one of the men with my purchase and asked my usual prodding questions. He said he’d been collecting sports memorabilia for 17 years, but had

only started profiting from it after being drawn in by the flea market ambience. He said what kept him at it was seeing infectious smiles like mine, which made me smile even more, because isn’t that why we buy and sell second hand? It’s that feeling you get drawing your hands over a rack of sweaters and sneezing from the wool, or crouching to try on turquoise rings, or imagining yourself squeezing into that unreal pair of white platform heels in the corner. It’s part fascination, part bargain, part celebration of the old, and part transformation of yourself into something new.

6

arts & culture

writing is a way of living a conversation with daniyal mueenuddin

ANANYA SHAH staff writer illustrator CLARIBEL WU

Daniyal Mueenuddin is the author of In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, a short story collection that depicts the family and servants of K.K. Harouni, a wealthy Punjabi landlord. The book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Mueenuddin was brought up in Lahore, Pakistan, and Wisconsin. In this interview, conducted over a series of emails, he spoke of the influences on his writing, his newest work, and how his work captures life in both America and Pakistan, especially that touched by the feudal system. *** What advice would you give to college students who are perhaps just starting to write creatively and aren’t all that confident about their work?

Writing is about finding an audience, but it is also about leading a particular kind of life.

You write about your experiences. Some writers find a voice right away – Radiguet, who published Le Diable au Corps at twenty, and died in the same year – something close to a masterpiece. Others take much longer. I began writing fiction at 37, and didn’t publish anything until I was 44. You have to live your life as a writer, which means reading a lot, writing a lot, and living with the intention of developing a particular chosen sensibility. There are easier ways of becoming famous, if that’s what you want, and no matter how hard you try, there’s a good chance that you won’t succeed. It is essential for a writer to be ambitious, but she should be ambitious not about success but about doing good work.

Does writer’s block ever affect you? How do you combat it?

I keep a file containing stories I intend to write, which has ballooned to the extent that I’m sure I’ll never finish the lot. In the long run, I’m certain that I’ll keep writing, so long as I continue to enjoy the process. Sometimes I become paralyzed, because it seems to me that the work is no good, that I can’t write at the standard I aspire to. When that happens, I remind myself that in the end it doesn’t matter at all, that in a thousand years no one will speak my language – English as I know it will be dead. As I said above, writing is a way of living. The problem that we set ourselves: Having nothing at all to do, to do something, whether it’s writing code or saving the Antarctic or writing fiction.

Are there any works of fiction or poetry which you re-read? What draws you to these works?

As it happens, in the past few days I’ve been rereading War & Peace. I first read–or rather, didn’t read–this novel at the age of eleven, when my mother offered me $50 for the job, which in those days and at that age constituted a fortune. I couldn’t keep all the characters straight, so she then agreed that I might read the abridged version. Still no dice. However,

that’s when the book entered my consciousness. In the intervening years, I’ve read it eight or nine times. I do this, first of all, because it’s fun–I love the story, the grain, the sweep, the characters. Superb battle scenes.

The wolf hunt alone is worth the hours of reading the surrounding material. I’m just today at the point in the novel where Natasha betrays Prince Andrei and attempts to elope with Anatole. Even though I know how it’s going to turn out –Prince Andrei in ruins, and Natasha much diminished (in the end, she becomes a bit of a frump)–I find the tension so great that I keep picking up the novel and then putting it down again. I have butterflies in my stomach because, this afternoon lying on an orange sofa with the sun streaming through the windows, I’m going to live through that.

In addition–I’ve been ambitious to be a writer most of my life. Since I was first exposed to Tolstoy I wanted to write the way that he does, with that clarity and authority. I chose him as one of my models very early–perhaps because I was shown his work early–and I’ve stuck to him.

Of course there are many other writers I revert to, some more often than others. I cook a lot, and listen to novels and poetry while I do it. Over the years I’ve heard all of Remembrance of Things Past – Neville Jason’s amazing performance reading the whole thing, 150 hours. I first read Proust in college, back in the 80s, and now keep him in the rotation, dropping in wherever my fancy strikes. Neville Jason’s rendition of the Baron de Charlus’s whinnying laugh is priceless, to mention just one detail.

You’ve spoken a lot about your long apprenticeship with poetry and how you still write it sometimes. Has the experience of writing poetry influenced your approach to fiction?

The finest thing of all for a writer is to be a poet. Fiction writers are pedestrians–while the poets soar above our heads. They tonally use the language best–the best ones do–and so of course anyone who uses language should study them. (Note that this includes anyone who speaks–only the mute are exempted from this prescription.) I imagine that there is no writer worth his salt who hasn’t got a cache of heartfelt adolescent poems tucked away in a drawer somewhere. All the great writers are attentive to the sound of their work.

Since so many of the stories of In Other Rooms, Other Wonders are set in rural Punjab, do you ever find yourself drawn to local art forms or media, such as music, to understand your work better?

Interesting question! The tangy Punjabi and Seraiki and Urdu of the people I know in Pakistan, and the local art–paintings on trucks and tongas, the English used in the newspapers, posters for movies and kabbadi matches– and most of all, the music, which is of a very high standard–all this is woven through my experience of the place. One night I had gone to dinner with a neighbor–in South Punjab, we include as neighbors anyone living within an hour’s driving distance. Returning, near my home I had a puncture. Shut off the car, got out. Beautiful spring night, two or three in the morning. We happened to be by a canal, water murmuring. No one about, deep countryside.

Far away I heard a tractor plowing, playing on its incredibly loud and very tiny loudspeakers Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s Musst Musst. I was reminded of a story that someone had told me, about a boy with whom I played in the village

when I was five or six, and who had become a great lothario in the area, sleeping with everyone’s daughters and wives. Apparently one of these women fell so deeply in love with him that she would come out late at night for a rendezvous, and after their loving had finished, he would ask her to plow his fields for him on his tractor, while he snoozed nearby. I hope she was driving the tractor that was playing Nusrat so loudly that spring night.

Are you working on anything new?

I’ve just sold a novel to Norton. It’s set entirely in the US, all the characters are American. It describes the entire life of a woman from Wisconsin, starting when she’s eighteen and living in a small farming town known as Miller’s Prairie, until her death many years later as a New York lady. It’s about money and class, which are so much more freighted in America than they are in Pakistan. (Joke!) I’m working on the final edits of the book, with my editor standing by me and tapping her heel.

Your stories—the characters especially—have been described with a lot of sensitivity, even when their content borders on the brutal. Is this a conscious choice, and if so, could you speak a little about how you enforce it?

Violence is part of life, and much more overtly so in Pakistan in the countryside than in the West. Armed men there often settle their disputes with violence. The law is poorly administered. Drama is central to writing stories, so I make use of that–describe that violence– which is both dramatically useful and also is true to the place. Violence is, however, universal. People, especially men, are programmed to dominate each other, in the course of their competition for resources. Unfortunately, a man conquering kingdoms makes better copy than a man happily raising a happy family.

In several interviews, you’ve mentioned how you write for a Western audience and can’t make any assumptions about what they know. How do you strike a balance between explaining and overexplaining certain concepts that aren’t readily apparent in Western society?

Did I say a Western audience? I write for Pakistanis, as well – and Turks and Japanese and whichever readership is enough interested in my work that someone will translate it for them.

But stories are all about translation, about translating a particular experience – mine – and giving it meaning that resonates with readers. We write about our commonalities.

I’ve never climbed an 8,000 meter peak, and yet I found myself engrossed recently in Maurice Herzog’s Annapurna, about climbing that mountain. Because he tells the story in terms that I understand, I can experience the brutal effort required to climb in deep snow at altitude, throwing the dice, which means death if you lose.

That said, there are aspects of Pakistani culture that are not known to a wider audience – the biradri caste system, for example, which is not a caste system at all – there is no English word to describe it. In those cases, I try to explain enough so that any reader, a Croat today or a Brazilian in a hundred years, may understand. In general, a little is better than too much – I’d rather have my reader puzzled than bored.

In many parts of South Asia, people often speak a hybrid of their regional language and English, such as Urdu-English, or Hindi-English.

I was curious whether you had ever thought to include such language in your work, especially if you are writing a piece set in the present age as people use it all the time colloquially and on social media?

The problem with using Hinglish or Engdu is that those (delicious! delicious!) compositions can only be understood by people conversant in both languages. My audience is limited enough by the fact that I occasionally use four syllable words– I’m not sure I can afford (or my publishers can afford) for me to refine my audience further.

You have elaborated on how there is a shrine of a Sufi saint on your farm, and that people hang cradles on the trees next to it as offerings, and that part of your land was cordoned off by religious authorities. Will such manifestations of religion enter the lives of your characters on the farm? Perhaps not to make a political statement, because in your conversation with Reza Aslan, you mentioned how writing shouldn’t necessarily be motivated by political intentions, but in the same transparent, individualistic way as the other social and class structures that govern your characters?

I suppose so. If I’m writing a story in the future that requires me to speak of the character’s religious attitudes, then I will explore that.

The people I know well are either not religious at all (people I know in the cities) or are religious in such a fundamental way that, while it colors their entire view of the world, they never think about it much – certainly not as an abstraction. When Chekhov writes about a man whose entire life is taken up with religious devotions (The Bishop) the story is not about religion at all.

Could you speak a little bit about Husna, the protagonist of the story In Other Rooms, Other Wonders? Even though she tries to curry favor with K.K. Harouni and transcend her social station, there seems to be something fundamentally different about her because she is Mr. Harouni’s distant relative.

I suppose that, because she is a distant relative, K.K. Harouni lets down his guard with her. For him to import a woman off the street into his house would be a betrayal of his principles. Her being a distant relative makes her slightly more halal.

Since your short stories show a fading feudal aristocracy, how do you think the third generation of this feudal class looks upon their heritage? For example, how would Sonya and Sohail’s son view his family farms?

I’ve been working on the same book, set in America, for six years now. In my present state, Pakistan is such a juicy subject. Once I slip the bonds of the novel, by turning it in to the publisher, I intend to clear my throat with a few short stories. One of these is about a thirdgeneration member of that feudal aristocracy and his difficulties with his property. I invite you to read it (meh ap ko dawat dehta hoon) and there find the answer to your question!

But Sohail’s son is unlikely to be willing or able to lead the kind of life that includes managing a Pakistani property, under present conditions. I suppose he would either sell it or lose it to the machinations of some interesting character.

In the book, the elite Pakistani women, such as Rafia and K.K. Harouni’s daughters, are familiar with the West—they holiday in London, Paris, and Rome. However, they seem mildly suspicious of Helen and Sonya, both American. Could you

arts & culture speak a little about this dichotomy?

These types of Pakistanis have an odd relationship with Americans. They want to be like them, but they can’t help thinking of them as slightly ridiculous. The Pakistani government has been picking Uncle Sam’s pocket for the last fifty years. It’s hard to take seriously the victim of your repeated frauds, the partner whose moneybags you plunder.

Women like Rafia and Harouni’s daughters are, in any case, Pakistani to their core.

They’re Westernized only to the extent that they go abroad and enjoy Western facilities.

At bottom, they’re Punjabis.

In an interview with Asia Society, you spoke about how love in Pakistan is like a “forbidden secret,” and your collection depicts lots of sex, used mostly to disrupt the status quo. I was wondering how you make the distinction between love and lust in your work and if you think it is

important at all?

My mother said that sex isn’t enough to make a marriage, but that without sex there is no marriage. I suppose there are lots of couples married these last four decades who would dispute this with her. Of course lust can exist without love, and generally does. The distinction between them is important. Many people mistake lust for love, and in life as in fiction this is a very expensive confusion.

Could you speak a little about the interlinked nature of your short stories?

I began writing short stories when I entered the U of Arizona MFA program. Two or three stories in, I became aware that, with a bit of jimmying and shimmying and coordination of details, I could make the ones set in Pakistan or involving Pakistani characters into a coherent set. This coordination appealed to me – it adds richness to the collection – and

so I began consciously working on those lines.

Each story stands separately, I hope, but a collection of them is larger than the sum of the parts.

You mentioned that you’d originally written twenty-five short stories, out of which eight were selected for the collection. Will we ever get to read the others? Were they also interlinked?

I doubt that I will revise and publish the rest of those stories. I’m no longer the same person that I was those many years ago, nor do I have the same artistic sensibility. I would rather go forward than back.

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about your choices on time?

Time management is one of the most vexed aspects of writing fiction. Movement through time naturally offers all kinds of risks and rewards in terms of the pacing of a story.

In general, my view is that it’s best to move quickly. Emerson says, In skating over thin ice, our safety is in our speed. Stories are illusion, which is thin ice indeed. *** Ananya Shah ’17 is a staff writer for Postwho concentrates in Literary Arts and Applied Math-Economics.

Time functions differently in your short stories. For some of them, we get the whole life story of a particular character, such as in “Saleema,” or two very different accounts of a character’s life, such as Sohail’s in “Our Lady of Paris” and “A Spoiled Man.” Could you tell us a little more

turn off the trump tv america goes dark after election day

JOSHUA WARTEL staff writer illustrator KATIE CAFARO

“Who would have guessed that everything could end so suddenly on a pretty Tuesday morning?” – Jonathan Franzen, Sep. 24, 2001 No one who showed up for the Brown Democrats victory party in Metcalf Auditorium on Tuesday night had ever seen anything like this.

Under two enormous screens streaming CNN and CBS, many of us did our homework, ate birthday cake, made small talk. A few people drank. The last time I could remember so few empty seats in such a large theater was almost a year ago, among a similar surge of anticipation and sea of happy faces that greeted the return of Star Wars. In that movie, entire planets were blown up, and yet, we walked out just fine, maybe even saw it again the next day, or forgot about it. It didn’t really matter. Whatever kind of evil was on the screen stayed there.

Tuesday night, though, was a “waking nightmare,” someone said. The Times TV critic, James Poniewozik, wrote the next day: “It was as if an asteroid hit.” Staring up at a giant Wolf Blitzer and John King, I couldn’t help but think of Godzilla tearing up New York or perhaps of Independence Day. “Florida is lost,” my neighbor said. “But there is still hope in Ohio.” Flashback to four years ago and we were all laughing about Karl Rove and his made-up math on his whiteboard.

Now, we looked for a miracle surge of Hispanic vote in Arizona, a Hail Mary in North Carolina, and hung on every number Nate Silver tweeted.

None of it came true.

The leader of the Brown Dems muted the sound to tell us to call our loved ones. A few

people left, but many others wanted to wait until the very end. Tears were shed but most of us were too shocked to cry. A tattered, half-completed Hillary banner lay at my feet, and a fading slogan (“Stronger Together”) erased itself on the whiteboard. Our life-sized cardboard-cut-out Hillary, the site of more than a few selfies the day before, seemed exhausted all of a sudden. Any photo you could have taken would have been captioned: “Looking for a friend at the end of the world.”

Back in my room, alone again, I turned on the TV. Van Jones was in the process of congratulating one of his co-panelists on CNN, the white supremacist Trump surrogate Jeffrey Lord and his face looked like a plea to just push him out of one of the windows onto the pavement.

On Showtime, Stephen Colbert’s election special descended into the bargaining phase. “I’m so glad you guys are here. I wouldn’t want to be alone right now,” he said. By the time Trump walked out onto the stage to speak after 2:30 a.m.

Wednesday morning and started congratulating his deplorable henchmen for being willing accessories to the killing of American democracy, I was having an out-of-body experience. I couldn’t stop thinking about how late it was for Baron, Trump’s 11-year old son, to be up on the stage. Didn’t he have school the next day? How did we just elect a man who names his son fucking Baron? If someone had touched me, I would have dissolved into molecules.

It took a few sleepless days and nights to get my senses back. Still, for a while, laughter felt like a different language. I thought of Brecht’s famous line, written on the eve of World War II: “He who laughs has not yet heard the terrible news.”

On Wednesday, one girl described it as if, “the entire campus was run over by a bus.” A couple cried on a bench, one of my TAs cried through almost the entire class, another student said their history professor broke down in class. A friend from another college called me on the phone, said her parents didn’t understand why she was so sad, and then she too started crying, until all she could get out was simply, “I miss you.” A group of incredibly strong people cut out little hearts, wrote messages like “We love you” and “Choose love” and put them on the walls of Faunce and the benches on the Main Green. My roommate skipped class and stayed off Facebook. I grabbed the morning papers, even the Providence Journal, which I’d never read, just because some part of me wanted a bit of history before the dining hall threw it out.

On Wednesday night, I went to see Moonlight

down at the Cable Car Cinema, mostly because it was free, because the reviews were good, and because maybe, just maybe, I could forget a second what I’d seen on another screen. The story of two gay black men in Miami is about as far away from “Make America Great Again” as you can get. But it didn’t work. I know I’ll have to see the movie again; it deserves more from me than blank stares of distraction. I wondered who could think of love in the time of Trump.

On the way back from the theater, I caught up to the dying embers of the anti-Trump protest. I saw a girl I almost knew, and I joined in alongside her. We chanted, “Not My President!” but those words didn’t feel strong yet, still too raw. And they weren’t exactly right either. Trump is my president, I thought. Trump is our president.

On Friday night, I went to services at Hillel even though I’m hardly Jewish. I thought of the text I received earlier in the week from another acquaintance: “I don’t know what to say.”

Sometimes it helps just move your mouth, let the words fill you up, the old Hebrew hymns do whatever they’ve been doing for centuries. Sometimes it helps to just let the white noise sing its caring song.

Already, we scanned the scene for signs of change. That that police officer stood outside on a freezing night instead of sipping tea inside. That the rabbi showed up for a student-run dinner.

The box of tissues on the lobby table was one of how many? “It’s been a tough week,” a woman said. “I haven’t been able to sleep.”

At dinner, I sat next to a peer much more committed to Brown Democrats than I was. He spoke of a thousand hours, of his home swing state of Ohio. Was he talking to me? Or to someone else at the table? Of course I should have done more, I thought. But I had my own life to lead.

That night I turned on the TV again, not to the news but to Gilmore Girls on Netflix. I entered a world where Lorelai flirted behind the counter and tried to find the right colors to paint Luke’s diner and Rory dressed up as a 1950s housewife in order to impress her boyfriend, Dean. A world where anything seemed possible, but the ending had already been written. A world where Trump was still just on TV. We have been talking about the election for days now, in every space, but there are too just many thoughts and not enough words and far too few ideas. I want to say, there will be time to talk about the filibuster and infrastructure packages and climate change, that there will be time to donate to Planned Parenthood and sign up for

ACLU alerts and reach out to some of these unicorn members of the white working class. And maybe even that time is tomorrow, but for now, give us a chance to dream.

Trump captured the imagination of millions of Americans on Tuesday; many dreamed of an America without Muslim, black, or gay Americans. Others dreamed of steady paychecks and simple families and big, beautiful walls. But last Tuesday many of us, who cried on Wednesday, pretended we didn’t need dreams. We just assumed life would go on as it had before, just with a slightly different president, because if anyone owned reality, we did. Now, with our country entering a darkness, we stand waiting for some meaning to return to us, for the words, images, slogans to make sense. All the time we wonder: How do we grab hope while our new president talks of grabbing pussy?

Yet, time is already telling its own story of hope. Among the many things that have already breached the despair is a tweet sent out by the German Foreign Office last Wednesday that proclaims: “Today, we remember one of the happiest days in German history: The fall of the Berlin Wall.” The Foreign Office, with a perfect-sized spoonful of irony, signs off with the hashtag #NoMoreWalls, and already I’m reminded that history doesn’t run in one direction; it swings back and forth until you seize it with your hands. Only eight years ago, long before I could vote, I stood on the Manassas Fairgrounds in Virginia with my father and waited for a young charismatic Senator from Illinois to deliver his final campaign speech in front of 80,000 Americans. Even though on that night, Barack Obama was two hours late, we said the next day that we couldn’t wait for hope and change. It feels like a long time ago now, but it’s not ancient history.

And so in a few months, wherever the Trump Administration launches its first assault, whether against blacks, immigrants, Muslims or any other group in America and abroad, we will have to refuse and stand in opposition, a wall against his wall. This is not another reality show or movie you can walk out of. You can’t turn this TV off.

Our memories may be short, but our vision is vast. We have less to lose only because we have everything to lose. And when the Trump administration tells us that this is the new normal and tries to erase their crimes and words, as they are already doing, we will refuse their reality, fall asleep thinking and wake up alive. I am already dreaming of the future.

lifestyle

topten

a: it’s not ripe b: i know, that’s why i felt it up if you want to get ahead in this economy, you’re going to need to see some dicks a: that lasgna looks crisp b: that’s my daughter

things to eat instead of turkey next week

1. your own words 2. your vegetables 3. gluten-free, dairy-free, free-range, non-GMO, single origin gravy 4. leftover almond joys from halloween 5. your feelings 6. your heart out 7. beans, greens, potatoes, tomatoes, lamb, ram, hogs, dogs, etc.

8. my shorts 9. sandra lee’s kwanzaa cake 10. this ass

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hot post time machine

You may be thinking to yourself ‘belts and ropes aren’t cool, but it would still be fun to wrap my hands around my hunny’s throat while on top’ (or vice versa), and you wouldn’t be wrong to think that such practices are popular. But so is meth, and you don’t go chasing rocks, do you? We hope not.

yearning 2 be kinky • 09/30/09

lonely so you build a small house

SARA AL-SALEM staff writer illustrator CLARISSE ANGKASA

Your loneliness has become all-consuming. You love being alone, but this loneliness doesn’t feel like a choice. This loneliness feels like abandonment, rejection, disgust—this loneliness tears you apart every night. A part of you thinks you chose this. But a bigger part of you knows this was always going to happen.

You hold onto your mother’s love in times like this. When you’re in bed, clutching as tightly as possible to the skin over your heart, you miss your mother. You want to lay your head on her lap, you want to remember what it feels like to be pure again. You don’t want to feel angry anymore. Your mother’s lap is home. Your mother’s lap is the only peace you can remember.

Heaving, heaving, heaving. There’s not enough air in this room, not enough air in this house, not enough air in this city. Can’t you hear me? You’re not sure who you’re crying out to, but you want a response. You so badly want someone to come out from the darkness and envelop you. But every hand that reaches out feels like a red-hot iron that hurts you more.

So you’re left in the purgatory of your own creation. The sins you’ve created for yourself and everyone around you keep you from the peace people promise exists in this universe.

I think what you struggle with the most is not imagining someone loving you, but imagining someone being able to love you. You find

yourself thinking about all your loneliness as you walk down the streets that have seen you get lonelier and lonelier as each year passes.

That’s what makes the black, loud, allconsuming noise even louder and angrier. The noise that sounds like all the love absent in your life, all the mistakes, all the could-havebeens. You have held so strongly onto yourself these past years, believed so much in your own salvation, that safety in another person’s embrace feels like a delusional lie. If you struggle to hold your own seams together, how can someone out there learn to hold them for you?

What does that kind of love even look like?

You don’t know. You look at the reflection you see every morning and every night, and you feel smaller. There is so much you do not know how to love about yourself that you begin to tear away at every part of your world.

You are so disappointed in yourself. You are so through with yourself. You wish you could commit, at least. Commit to something, to anything. Commit to the thumping of the chest, commit to the disappearance, commit to whatever you think saves you from the noise. Instead, you wake up every morning, and sometimes you feel a little different. Like maybe the noise was just a glitch on the radio.

Like maybe you can expand large enough to fit the world in. You take that one moment of hope, and you try again. You open the door

and say the things you think people want to hear. You try to float back into the world where people find love, and you try to integrate yourself in a world where someone could love you.

But when every night ends and you’re left only with the company of all your mistakes you dig your nails as deep as you can into your palms and you want to disappear. You want to stop this vicious cycle that you have been playing.

What have you become? You disappoint, disappoint, disappoint. You disappoint me. You disappointed everyone who once could have loved you.

So you call this loneliness. You call the dark and sinking feeling loneliness. You call Thursday afternoon loneliness. You call the thumping of your chest loneliness. This is loneliness.

This is what the next several years of your life will look like. This, you think, this loneliness is too much to bear.

But here is what you have to do. You take that loneliness, you take that love you aren’t

convinced exists for you in this lifetime, and you build yourself a small house. A house so small, only you could fit. You move into this house, far away from the noise, and you take the only memory you need: the comfort of your mother’s lap. In this house, you try to greet your loneliness with the love it fears will never come. It won’t be the love you’ve read about; it won’t be the love of the big screens.

But it will be a love your loneliness needs. In this small house, your loneliness will not feel large and looming. In this house, you will grow to accept the loneliness the way you accept that day and night arrive no matter how loud the noise gets. The house will be too small to feel any other way.