July Westhale

Even from the description, Elizabeth Swados book Walking the Dog sounds like a thrill; lauded as “a singular and unequaled artist,” this was the last published work that Swados wrote before she died in January of 2016. The book details the struggles of “former child prodigy and rich-girl kleptomaniac” Ester Rosenthal (aka Carleen Kepper) as she navigates a post-prison life as a high-end professional dog walker. The novel also maps the relationship between the ex-con protagonist and her hyper-religious Orthodox daughter.

The descriptions don’t do the novel justice—not only is this a story of a woman brutalized by a system that doesn’t understand or make space for those living with mental illness, it is also the story of art. And even more than that, it’s a story of the non-traditional love between a sometimes frustratingly troubled mother and her daughter.

The intro begins with the perfect summary sentence: “I’m not used to walking on grounds without fences.” Carleen (who was a child prodigy turned convict, and changed her name from Esther Rosenthal to Carleen Kepper in order to escape anti-Semitism in prison) succinctly parallels her post-release disorientation with that of training dogs. Fencing in, she says, is comforting. This is an unsettling thing for readers to read, yet somewhat intuitive, similar to receiving a diagnosis as opposed to not receiving one. Dogs need boundaries, people need boundaries.

But for Carleen/Esther there are, for better and worst, barely any boundaries. When they are presented to her, they are done so arbitrarily, or for reasons she doesn’t understand. Her brain works best within strict parameters. And while the novel does a phenomenal job of demonstrating a mind bent and harangued by the legal system, it also shows the nuance and multi-dimensionality of a person who has experienced chronic compound trauma.

This book is a beautiful and enthralling read. It manages to contain genius without presumption, illness without stigma, and characterization without oversimplification. The balance of these empathetic factors makes the novel a true work of art, and a must read.

Walking the Dog
By Elizabeth Swados
The Feminist Press
Paperback, 9781558619210, 392 pp.

“Well, this is just like that. They keep doing it even though they don’t want to. They’re called homosexual addicts.”- Vanda, Juliana

Historical fiction is a hard genre to hack. Couple that with the idea that lesbian literature—in a canonical sense, at least—has largely been reclaimed as queer retroactively, and Vanda has quite the job to do: create a historical novel about a time period in which we know very little about queerness—World War II. This includes the experience of, the sociopolitical landscape of, the vernacular of, etc. However, throughout this large, wieldy novel (which has been adapted to stage performances, book club fodder, etc), the author manages to balance historical relevance with a history that could not possibly have been recorded to any modicum of accuracy: the life of one country lesbian who moves to the big city, the love and strife she finds, and the community she manages to build in a time of war.

To complicate the author’s job even more, war literature is an entity unto itself—particularly, the patriotism and jingoism that existed in the United States during this particular war, where there were few cases of dissent, and a collective effort to support the government from the ground up (literally: Victory Gardens). So in writing about a time of patriotism and identity in the United States, Vanda is tasked with the seemingly insurmountable labor of creating and melding personal identity (that of the queer characters) with national identity (a country at war). And she does so well, her narratives, prowess of timely language and setting, and character development lend a poignant message: to be queer was to be anti-American, in a time where being anti-American meant isolation and ruination.

Though in her forward, the author ties her interest in the time period to her own curiosity about the experiences of those in her own family (and the era of American history so many seem to be nostalgic about), the interest goes beyond that—falling into line with other contemporary queer historical fiction (thinking here specifically of Tipping the Velvet), the novel seeks to tell stories that were erased or changed, and to give voice to the voiceless.

Juliana
By Vanda
Booktrope Editions
Paperback, 9781513702216, 376 pages

Every cell of my body. Naked and tough, something new and beautiful, adorned. Learning these streets and how to walk down them. Learning how to find red silk in a  bargain bin, to tighten straps, to walk. To meet the eyes. To swish my ass, to insist in the pleasure of thighs brushing together, glaring, I will fucking kill you if you look at me. I would fall into bed, exhausted.

–Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

A few years ago, I saw Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha read at Culture Fuck, and Oakland-based POC/Mixed reading that happens on a monthly basis. She had just gotten back from a trip to Australia, and was describing the lush landscape, her ancestry, the complicated nature of the landscape. She described walking down a street she hardly knew, in a slip and boots.

“I’ve been walking, scantily clad, down dark, unknown streets for decades now,” she finished her story.

She proceeded to read a poem, a manifesto to hard femmes, that knocked me out. And when I picked up Dirty River, I felt the same lose of wind, the same landscape both familiar and harrowing. Throughout the memoir, which winds around itself as a car winds around an island—with more emphasis on journey than destination, with panoramic views of vast oceans, pitted vistas, the isolation and unparalleled magnificence of land unto itself—I felt the same push-pull that I felt reading other literature that speaks specifically to femme, survivor, working-class queers. Piepzna-Samarasinha’s book weaves together her life as a series of rivers that merge into one another, upon the foundation of family (complicated narratives, mixed-ness, mothering, abuse, trauma, dissociation).

There are so few narratives about/by femmes of color, about/by femmes who have been harmed and hurt by intersecting systems of oppression. They are so few stories and archives of walking in the world as a way to be seen (as an act of war against said systems of oppression). And within the narratives that do exist, there are even fewer stories about femme survivorship that encapsulate the struggle, the trauma, and also, the compassion:

You can say: this is not a story about hating the abuser, about the abuser as monster. Some abusers are monsters, but most are not. If they were nothing but horrible looming giants who tore through our days, even the neck-high levels of denial and dissociation in this culture would not allow the abuse perpetuated to stand.

I once read an article by Piepzna-Samarasinha where she said, “I want to live in a world where no one is disposable.”

I once heard her say, “People go to the ocean because they’ve run so hard that they need to either stop running, or fall off the edge of the world.”

Her words, and her work, are the things that stick to the ribs, that make a meal from dried beans and coconut, that find red silk in a bargain bin, that embody—truly embody, in a disembodied world—what it means to be both in the world in a way that you want to be (in seemingly little armor, even), and to be full of sharp stars. Ready to both love and fight.

She explores the here and now of the past and present—a mechanism that is not only difficult to do in writing, but also difficult to do in a way that does justice to raw experience. Dirty River goes above and beyond being a story of survival; it is a manifesto for those of us who have also been walking, scantily clad, down dark alleys for most of our lives.

Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home
By Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Arsenal Pulp Press
Paperback, 9781551526003, 240 pp.