10/04/2020
As a culture, we often fetishize the debut writer as some sort of self-arising wunderkind, someone that comes “out of nowhere” or had “splashed onto the scene” unannounced, seemingly without a pre-history or predecessors. This is compounded for writers of color, who seem, according to this narrative, to arrive at the literary table by “transcending” their cultural, economic or racial milieu into the hegemonic literati. I want to take a moment, in light of this, to put some shine on 10 books that made my debut, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, possible.
Some of these texts (in no particular order) are canonical, some are not—but they each had an idiosyncratic force on my education as a writer and informed and enriched On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, and in particular, supported the novel’s metaphor-rich approach. The metaphor, heavily used in the 19th century as a means toward the ecstatic sublime, became more passé after the World Wars, when the pastoral dream was no longer feasible amidst European fields rotting with cattle corpses. I wanted to use the metaphor differently, on terms removed from a Eurocentric worldview.
Vietnamese refugees, for example, use metaphor as a coping mechanism; metaphor provides a way to talk about trauma without stating the experience outright. An abortion is described as having “papaya seeds scraped out of you,” or sexual assault as having “the doorway of your body broken into.” To die is to”“get on the road.” Likewise, when Abel Meeropol wrote the poem “Strange Fruit” about the lynching of African Americans in the South, he was not reaching for the Romantic sublime—but to render the horrific via an alternative speech act. The metaphor in the mouths of survivors became a way to innovate around pain.
These texts also helped in formulating the novel’s shape. Using Kishōtenketsu, a narrative structure used in Chinese poetry, then later developed in Japanese storytelling, I was able to write about American violence without it becoming vital to the novel’s arc. It was important to me, at least in this book, that violence remain independent from any character’s self-worth, rendering it inert, terrible, and felt—but not a means of “development.” Through Kishōtenketsu, violence becomes fact and not a vehicle towards a climax. Having been a student mainly of Western literature, it became clear to me that the most perennial protagonist is not necessarily the main character, but conflict-driven plot. In Western narratology, the plot is the dominant mode to which all characters are subordinate. But I wanted a novel to hold these characters thoroughly and, most importantly, on their own terms, free from a system of governance, even one of my own making. I could not employ the plot-heavy strategy because I needed these people to exist as they are, full of stories but not for a story.
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