murray-cover

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/inside-snake-safest-place-nation-identity-impossibility-going-back-sabina-murrays-human-zoo/"></div>The cultural theorist James Clifford asserts that one can to go to a former home but not go back. The pull of nostalgia or the need for closure that often motivate such journeys and their anticlimactic conclusions are, unsurprisingly, rich grounds of exploration in fiction. In W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001), a narrator intent on meaning-making revisits and documents the locations of his early years. In The Kite Runner (2003), author Khaled Hosseini has one of the two main characters (Amir) travel back to Kabul so he may belatedly do good by his childhood friend (Hassan). In both works we find that the travelers and the physical geography they return to have been deeply altered by personal and national trauma, respectively. The moment of re-encounter between the two shocks reader and traveler-character alike. The meticulous self-documentation of Sebald’s narrator is interrupted when his visit to a train station conjures up a memory, and with it, a past, that he has no conscious recollection of. Amir’s arrival to Kabul confronts him with a tragedy that shuts off any possibility for the kind of closure he seeks. <a href="https://groveatlantic.com/book/the-human-zoo/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://groveatlantic.com/book/the-human-zoo/', 'The Human Zoo');">The Human Zoo</a>, by Sabina Murray, who is the winner of the PEN Faulkner award and whose previous novel Valiant Gentleman was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, is written in this rich tradition of Sebald and Hosseini: it is about a journey that underscores the impossibility of going back.
Troubled by a marriage that is on the verge of ending, Ting, the narrator of The Human Zoo, travels from the US to the Philippines, her mother’s homeland, a place where she seeks grounding in the company of her aunts (her deceased mother’s sisters), Tita Dom and Tita Rosa, and her friends, Inchoy and Bibo. Her husband does not appear on the page. We hear his voice, later in the novel, in the heated exchanges that Ting has with him. But an object that Ting reluctantly carries with her from the US to the Philippines, a coat that takes up most of the room in her luggage, exemplifies the condition of their relationship. Ting reflects:
<blockquote>The coat had no purpose in the Philippines, but I had forgotten it hanging on the coat stand in the hallway when packing to leave New York. My other things had already been boxed and sent to storage. I could have left it, but the coat… had been an extravagant birthday gift bought by my husband as he tried to convince me to stay… if I had left it there for him to find, it would have made a statement that did not express how I felt. (20)</blockquote>
I was a student of Murray at the University of Massachusetts MFA Program for Poets &amp; Writers, and in one of her novel writing workshops she spoke to us about metonymy as a craft device: a single narrative event (a family dinner, for instance) that, on the page, functions as a stand-in for multiple such events and broader narrative concerns (the family dynamic, to continue the example). Ting’s coat serves such a metonymic function, succinctly illustrating, in place of multiple flashbacks and extended interior monologue, the condition of her marriage.
A return to the Philippines allows Ting to appreciate the language and its practice in a new way. For instance, she observes that “the local term for people like Bibo was binabae, or ‘womanly.’ There was also the broader term bakla, which just meant gay. Regardless, gender here was simplified by siya, Tagalog’s gender-neutral third-person pronoun” (30). The retrospective narrative also allows her to identify key differences between the Filipino-Americans who “suffered from the shame of otherness” and Filipinos who migrate to the US and who have a “disdain for gauche American culture” (20). The fact that in the States, they are “seen as being of the same tribe” is, Ting notes, “a flawed taxonomy” (21). Yet, despite her lucid understanding of Tagalog and Filipino identity, she says, “I thought myself less articulate in the Philippines, not only in the language, but somehow in my being… During my years in the Philippines, I felt American” (17). She tells Inchoy, in reference to her aunts, “Although they are family, and I love them, I come from a different world” (94). Tita Rose tells Ting a story in which a ghost serves as a witness in a murder trial, and Ting finds herself incapable of leaning into the story like her aunt. America doesn’t evoke a sense of belonging either: “Back in the United States, I felt alien… my husband would introduce me as American, my whiteness assumed. And I had gone along with it, managing a good impression, until ‘good’ became ‘effortless’” (17). Her fractured identity and the difficulty she has with belonging to one place or another have their roots in her complex ancestry: Ting’s grandfather, Benjamin Klein, an American, chose to stay in the country and marry a Filipino woman; reflecting on his decision, Ting says: “after shooting these people, he was now going to marry one. And make me a person who had stakes on both sides of the battle” (141).
The book that Ting works on — the ostensible motivation for her return to the Philippines —  looks at the human zoos: colonial forces dehumanizing individuals who are taken out of the country and paraded in the US for the western gaze. Passages from her book appear in the novel. We learn, for instance, that in 1905, the anthropologist Truman Hunt (1905) offered to “pay any willing Bontoc fifteen dollars a month in wages to travel to the United States and perform their most barbaric selves for a hungry American public… and the Bontoc had seen nothing like America and had never earned a wage. Why not go?” (85). We receive the description of an actual photo of the Bontoc as they are paraded in the US: they are “naked, huddled around a fire” even as “the white observers, lounging on the railing, are all bundled up” (85). One of the Bontoc men is pointing at the camera, returning the gaze of the colonizer. At her recent book launch, Murray notes that, when writing a novel that is informed by research, the page should, at a given point in time, have only as much information as the character can hold in her mind in one go. This craft tactic is in service of The Human Zoo that, owing to Ting’s struggle with writing the book, does not overwhelm readers — or interrupt their reading of Ting’s narrative — with too much information about the notorious practice alluded to in the title.
In the Philippines of today, as Ting finds out, it is not external influences like Hunt but rather the systems of power within the country, driven chiefly by a dictatorial leader, that dehumanize citizens of the country. The violence Ting sees includes “beheading, a church bombing, [and] journalists disappearing” because they are seen as “treasonous” for reporting against the government (198). She observes, “this [i]s how people were assassinated: a motorcycle with a gunman sitting on the back” (69). Chet, a former boyfriend who also belongs to a line of Spanish mestizos, continues to remain complex. He is now constantly accompanied by a bodyguard who goes by the moniker of Top Gun, and he begrudges the fact that “the police get a bounty on the dealers” (44). In the climactic act, without giving too much away, a disillusioned Inchoy attempts to assassinate Gumboc, and though Ting witnesses the scene, she will not be implicated because, as she observes, “I was now part of another story that would hold against the truth,” a story that Chet fabricates for her to facilitate her escape from the country (214).
In a recent interview with LitHub, Murray talks about the benefits of writing about history through fiction. It allows “what happened” to be told through the lens of humor and the personal and thus be humanized. In her words, such an enterprise “helps to express the quotidian bizarreness of living under a dictator.” The story of the political chaos in the Philippines is juxtaposed with Ting’s deeply personal encounters: her aunts’ belief that her dead uncle, Tito Inigo, has now reincarnated as a dog; there is a certain tenderness to the way Ting sees Chet: “I watched Chet pulling at the rope and the children leaping to grab the prizes. He was laughing and making jokes. He caught me looking and delivered a dazzling smile” (104). And it is this juxtaposition that amplifies the consequences of the dictatorship that play out a break-neck speed in the two concluding chapters even as it deepens the resonance of the intimate: indeed, one may not be able to go back to one’s former home, but the care and loyalty that family and friends that people that landscape has a way of reaching you even in — especially in — times of upheaval.
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Works Cited
Clifford, James. Returns Century. Harvard University Press, 2013.
Ciabattari, Jane August, and Sabina Murray. “Sabina Murray on the Limits of Journalism and the Wondrous Possibilities of Fiction.” Literary Hub, 4 Aug. 2021, <a href="https://lithub.com/sabina-murray-on-the-limits-of-journalism-and-the-wondrous-possibilities-of-fiction/" onclick="__gaTracker('send', 'event', 'outbound-article', 'https://lithub.com/sabina-murray-on-the-limits-of-journalism-and-the-wondrous-possibilities-of-fiction/', 'https://lithub.com/sabina-murray-on-the-limits-of-journalism-and-the-wondrous-possibilities-of-fiction/');">https://lithub.com/sabina-murray-on-the-limits-of-journalism-and-the-wondrous-possibilities-of-fiction/</a>.
Murray, Sabina. The Human Zoo. Grove, 2021.
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“Inside the Snake is the Safest Place to Be”: Nation, Identity, and the Impossibility of Going Back in Sabina Murray’s The Human Zoo

“Inside the Snake is the Safest Place to Be”: Nation, Identity, and the Impossibility of Going Back in Sabina Murray’s The Human Zoo

akella-mcelroy

<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/reviews/technology-monstrous-children-alex-mcelroys-daddy-issues/"></div>I am often drawn to long works of fiction: I admire their ability to sustain my interest in strikingly original characters through a patient accumulation of detail and layered narrative brushstrokes. So reading and reviewing Alex McElroy’s Daddy Issues, a compendium of flash fiction and very short stories, published by Cupboard Pamphlet in 2017, posed a challenge to my reading sensibilities. Several of McElroy’s stories are just a couple pages long, and even the longest piece, for which the collection is named, spans seven pages but begins with a collection of short vignettes, some of which are a mere sentence. I was no stranger to McElroy’s works, having read and loved several his stories published in literary journals (my favorite being &#8220;Beneath the Bruise is a Beach,&#8221; which appears in Gorse). I was already fan of his sharp, clean sentences, and of the strange, yet oddly familiar worlds of his fiction and the characters who populated them. So I dove into a book that was atypical, so far as my reading list went, with no small degree of pleasurable anticipation.
Having now read Daddy Issues, McElroy’s debut collection, end-to-end, and more than once, it occurs to me that in his succinct masterpieces McElroy accomplishes the affect that draws me to longer works of fiction — layered, memorable characters — by applying a particular narrative device: a precision of textual placement. Consider “Popi to Life,” a story of two children left to fend for themselves: Lester, the stronger, meaner sibling, and String, his younger, sensitive double. This not-uncommon trope is animated by a striking sequence of events: String fetches his grandfather’s corpse and leaves it before the television, which, unbeknownst to Lester, brings the grandfather back to a sort of life. As technology alchemizes death to life, the relationship between the brothers, as they preside over the grandfather’s body, undergoes an alchemy of reversal: Lester surrenders his power, String takes on the role of a caregiver. McElroy wonderfully captures this moment: “Lester was folded over his knees. The sight chilled String with pity and guilt. He put his arms on Lester’s shoulder, bracing to feel him recoil, and was relieved when Lester slackened into his touch.” The tender moment appears after two pages packed with brisk action, slowing down time and expanding the succinct impressions formed by Lester and String, turning those impressions to perceptions, more detailed, more complex, giving Lester a concealed vulnerability in his act of violence, and String formidable strength even when he quietly accepts the bullying he is subjected to. Thus, even when the text does not explicitly layer the character, the reader, owing to McElroy’s masterful act of placement of text, layers the character in their imagination. The story continues in the reader’s mind after it ends, turning it, in this way, to a haunting.
Like “Popi to Life,” many of the stories in the collection portray an interaction of futuristic and ‘80s-era technologies — inevitably, they are causal forces behind the characters’ existential dilemmas. In “My First Memory,” a child finds, at the back of his mother’s throat, “shiny metal gears, spinning with impertinent effort” even as his grandmother tends to the fireplace with a ray gun, an object that to me immediately conjures up dime novels and comics from the ‘80s; the child in Lineage is “bathed […] in nuclear gunk,” a clearly futuristic image, even as he describes his father as a “TV walking on its antennae,” a metaphoric throwback to television sets from a former era. In “A Man and A Man,” a character who expresses his love to his significant other not with texts or over Snapchat but in letters operates under the influence of a device called “The Cutty Sark” that watches over the “restraints in his brain,” an intervention that, at once, seems like it belongs to the dark worlds conjured by Charlie Brooker in Black Mirror and brings to mind George Saunders’s Escape from Spiderhead. The anachronisms, ‘80s artifacts surrounded by futuristic technology, along with a focus on adolescence, will appeal to fans of Stranger Things, It Follows, and more recently, It, which similarly weld a fantastic, horror reality to an ‘80s sensibility, and raise questions about innocence and monstrosity.
Our nostalgia for childhood, says James. R. Kincaid, is a contemporary phenomenon, a post-Victorian construct when children stopped being seen merely as cheap laborers and future caretakers for the aging parents. The same holds true, Kincaid argues, of the “phantasy that children need saving, and that they are inherently vulnerable and in need of adult help,” an impression that is predicated “on the presumption of […] weakness or inefficacy of […] the child body.” Thus, the phrase the child “posits an essentials stasis of meaning in which the subject becomes trapped”; it is the purpose of the monstrous children, the likes of Lester and String, to “escape human comprehension.” The monstrous child characters in McElroy’s fiction, brought to an uncanny life by his keen visual sensibility, exhibit an agency that flies directly in the face of the meaning that has accumulated around the phrases of “child” and “childhood.” They are perplexingly Other.
While the stories of Daddy Issues, with their striking monstrous child characters and quixotic technological realities, could often be categorized as dystopian or horror fiction, the elements of fantasy, where present, are just as thrilling. In “A Man and A Man,” one’s significant other may be a collection of animals: “ten thousand birds, caterpillars wiggling, or a pod of seals, flopping and slapping their fins on the carpet,” a detail that brings to mind Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2015 film The Lobster, except that in the film people turn to animals if they do not find a significant other, whereas in McElroy’s story, people conceal the fact of their anima in order to get and remain married, a cause-and-effect sequence that makes it more sinister than The Lobster. In “Two Lives Saved,” two ladybugs — a staple presence in so many fables that their real-life presence now evokes for me the presence of their fantastical manifestations — emerge from the mouth of a swimmer who wonders why he enjoyed swimming as a child. The brevity of the stories makes them particularly lucrative readings: the stories contain just the right degree of both detail and ambiguity, making them ripe for discussion, and the visual sensibility with which they capture the monstrous and the oddball make them appealing in the era of Westworld, Black Mirror, and Stranger Things.
If stories of children talking to animals were the fables of those of us who grew up in the ‘80s, are stories of children who converse with, are conversant with, or are modified by technology, the fables of our times? Is this, in effect, the first step towards post-humanism, a future in which it will be possible to download the consciousness of a human into a machine, the machine, when switched on, becoming verily the human? There is no one answer to this question; in fact, seeking the answer is perhaps not even the point. Rather, watching how the question comes to uncanny life each story in McElroy’s collection is what makes the readings pleasurable and powerful.
Daddy Issues will appeal, really, to any reader who as a child experienced on more than occasion the frightening feeling that they will remain frozen forever in this phase called childhood, and who, despite having lived through it all, finds the inaccessibility of children’s mind frightening and their capacity for cruelty — that is beyond good and evil, as Nietzsche would put it, for it lacks any moral anchor — frighteningly other.
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Technology and Monstrous Children in Alex McElroy’s Daddy Issues

Technology and Monstrous Children in Alex McElroy’s Daddy Issues

Fine Arts Works Center fellow and UMass MFA/PhD graduate Shastri Akella is represented by Chris Clemans (Janklow &amp; Nesbit). His debut novel, The Sea Elephants&nbsp;will be published by Flatiron Books in 2023. His writing&nbsp;may be found in Guernica, The Masters Review, The Rumpus, Electric Literature, World Literature Today, and elsewhere.