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Vietnam United
by Gabriel Tan
Stranger’s Guide: Vietnam

The evenings are never quiet in Vietnam’s two most bustling cities, but on a 2018 night, the cacophony of motorbike horns and whooping voices was unusually deafening. From Hanoi to Hồ Chí Minh City, thousands waved flags and pennants while riding through the streets. An endless sea of red peppered with yellow stars, which combine to make the Vietnam flag.

This is Đi bão, or “to go and storm.” Storm the streets, that is. It’s a scene that would hardly look out of place were it in celebration of a national revolution. But, in the few years preceding the pandemic, this sort of patriotic, boisterous display has come alive when the Vietnamese national football team is in action. And given what the sport means to a nation of nearly 99 million—the world’s 15th-most populous country—perhaps what their footballers have achieved over the past four years could be deemed nothing short of revolutionary.

THE ROAD TO QATAR (OR NOT)

The most obvious milestone in Vietnam’s fast-evolving football program is their campaign for the 2022 FIFA World Cup. For the first time ever, Vietnam reached the third and final round of Asian qualifiers, the last stop before the globe’s biggest football event, to be held later this year in Qatar.

Granted, odds are that the club will ultimately come up short in its quest to play in the prestigious tournament. At the time of writing, the Vietnamese were at the bottom of their group, having lost the first six games of Round Three play, and while advancement to the Qatar tournament isn’t mathematically impossible, it’s highly improbable.

Not that they’ve really lost at all. As the lowest-ranked team in their group, the odds were never in Vietnam’s favor. Especially considering they were coming up against four of Asia’s traditional heavyweights—Japan, Saudi Arabia, Australia and China—national teams who combine for 17 previous World Cup appearances. There have been 21 of the quadrennial tournaments since 1930.

Yet the Vietnamese have given these giants a run for their money. While one-sided thrashings are a frequent occurrence in the sometimes lopsided field of Asian football (the previous round of Asian World Cup qualifiers saw Iran beat Cambodia 14-0), none of Vietnam’s defeats have been by more than two goals. Expected to be put to the sword by the physically and technically superior Japanese and Australians, Vietnam lost their meetings against those teams with close scores of 1-0 in each. And they almost held the Chinese to a 2-2 draw, but for a heartbreaking third Chinese goal, which found the net in the fifth minute of added time.

The lack of victories might have meant there was no opportunity for Đi bão—probably a good thing, too, with COVID-19. But, even with pandemic restrictions reducing the number of spectators allowed onto the grounds, an impressive 20,000 fans returned to Hanoi’s Mỹ Đình National Stadium in November’s two matches against Japan and Saudi Arabia.

FOOTBALL COMES TO SOUTHEAST ASIA

To understand why football means so much to the people of Vietnam, it is perhaps useful to take a look back through the rich, but also at times volatile, history of a former French colony that was deeply affected by a civil war.

As is the case with almost all of Southeast Asia, the sport first entered the region through colonization. The British introduced the game to Singapore and Malaysia. Indonesia learned of it through the Dutch and will go down in history as the first Asian nation to feature at the World Cup. They appeared in 1938, as the Dutch East Indies. (The Dutch East Indies remain the only Southeast Asian team to ever play at the tournament.)

In Vietnam’s case, football first reached its shores in the late 1800s when the region was colonized as part of French Indochina. The game started in the southern region of Cochinchina, spread up to Annam in the center of the country, and reached the northern region of Tonkin.

Although official records from that era are understandably hard to come by, the first local competitions are believed to have taken place as early as 1907. These were hardly the highly competitive, gladiatorial battles that now define professional sports, but instead were more casual, recreational “contests” with little more than bragging rights on offer. While it was the French colonists who got the ball rolling, it did not take long for the adopted game to grow in popularity among Vietnam’s native-born athletes. But the national and international strife that was soon to follow would have lasting implications on every aspect of Vietnamese life, including the nation’s footballing history.

World War II saw the Japanese occupation of Indochina, and the 1945 Allied Forces victory created a local vacuum in power, which the nationalist Việt Minh group—headed by Hồ Chí Minh—viewed as an opportunity to declare independence. The French refused to relinquish their colonial claim, which led to the First Indochina War. The Việt Minh emerged victorious in 1954, but the division of the country as per the Geneva Accords would only lead to more conflict. The civil war—known around the globe as the Vietnam War—began in 1955 and would last for nearly two decades.

With the country divided into two, national teams formed on both sides of the 17th parallel. South Vietnam would compete internationally and were featured in the first two AFC Asian Cups in 1956 and 1960 as the qualifiers from the confederation’s Central Zone, which encompassed Southeast Asia at the time. (Effectively, they were the best team in the region.) North Vietnam did not join FIFA, football’s international governing body. Operating outside of this system, they played a mere 25 matches across a 14-year spell, largely against teams from fellow Communist states, for seven wins, three draws and 15 losses. Given none of these were competitive matches, they were of little significance.

REUNIFICATION AND REGENERATION

With the reunification of Vietnam in 1975 came the rebirth of a football team under a single national identity, but things were tricky initially. An important early milestone on this path to merging the clubs—and the nation—was the reunification game that took place on November 6, 1976. It was a match between Northern interests, the CLB Tổng cục Đường sắt (TCDS), a team affiliated with the General Department of Railways, and Southern ones, represented by Saigon Port.

Scott Sommerville, a British national based in Hồ Chí Minh City, has done extensive research on the reunification game. In his feature for These Football Times, Sommerville wrote that some viewed the match as potentially “a show of Northern might against the fragile, weak and unorganised Saigon team.”

Le Buu, the General Director of the Sports Administration Department, even admitted to the propaganda at hand. He was quoted in Sommerville’s article as saying that the choice of TCDS to represent the North was to promote “a sense of unity” with players that “were seen as working class, equals.”

As Le Buu and other Community party leadership had hoped, TCDS would go on to win 2-0 in front of 40,000 spectators—a crowd that spilled over into the running track of the 25,000-capacity Thống Nhất Stadium. It must have been a surreal experience—players recounted the sound of distant gunfire and explosions from outside the arena.

The match was to be the start of a new chapter in Vietnamese football, as life in the now-unified country began to return to stability. Over the following decades, the national football program evolved, but importantly, the fan base changed, too. In time, the sport was allowed to thrive due to the passion of a new group of younger fans who did not have to endure the turmoil of the previous generation.

“I think the older generation, like my father, could not care as much about football,” said Hanoi-based Võ Minh Kha, who—having been born in 1981—grew up at a time when the country was just recovering from the war. “They had other things to worry about. My father just wanted to work hard in order to raise me. Sure, they watched [football], but I don’t think they were able to experience the emotions that my generation did as we followed the sport growing up.”

Vietnamese football was finding its feet again, slowly but surely. Its infrastructure and organization both needed to be reestablished after decades of neglect. It was 1991 when the Vietnamese made their long-awaited re-entrance on the international stage—under a single flag—with the Southeast Asian (SEA) Games, a regional multi-sport meet. Just two editions later, they brought home a silver medal. It was a generational awakening. “For me, and for millions of other kids at that time,” Minh Kha explained, “the national team was what started a love for football.”

“As a child, the success of the national team at the 1995 SEA Games gave me a high unlike any other,” Minh Kha added, recalling the matches he watched as a young teen. “There was a sense of nationalistic pride. We have to remember that, during this time, Vietnam was still in a difficult place in terms of the economy.”

Indeed, this was a country that had to do much of its rebuilding without the support of the international community. While the conflict was over, the economy remained battered. Financial assistance, via the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, was blocked through the 1980s, a period during which the country saw 400 percent inflation. Basic necessities such as food were subject to stamp rationing. The lights, at times, were literally out. The American trade embargo on Vietnam would only be lifted by President Bill Clinton in 1994.

Locals were in desperate need of a lift—one that could elevate or separate them from their trying daily lives—and sports offered that. Minh Kha said football “affected the cultural and spiritual aspects, as well. Apart from the odd memorial event or a historical anniversary, we didn’t have many chances to enjoy the emotions that football brought to us. Each match was like a festival for all.”

YEARS OF SUFFERING

That 1995 SEA Games silver could only buoy their supporters’ spirits for so long. The AFF Championship—Southeast Asia’s premier tournament—began in 1996, and with it, several regional rivalries really took off. Vietnam did not initially fare well with its neighbors. In the first two decades of the (mostly) biennial competition, Vietnam would only taste success once, in 2008.

It wasn’t for lack of talent. Lê Huỳnh Đức, who made his international debut in 1993, was the first bona fide star of Vietnamese football. Always wearing a steely gaze of determination on the pitch but ever ready to break into a warm smile off it, Huỳnh Đức established himself as one of the region’s most feared strikers. At a time when some of the football pitches in Southeast Asia resembled paddy fields, often so waterlogged during the monsoon seasons that they were nearly unplayable, Huỳnh Đức somehow made it look effortless, like he had the ball tied to his foot by a string. The sight of Huỳnh Đức sprinting to the crowd after firing an unstoppable shot into the back of the net became a common one. He was idolized by an entire generation of impressionable fans, fans who were crying out for a hero to lead them to footballing glory.

His high profile and beloved position would be surpassed by his successor—both in the striker position and star-player status—Lê Công Vinh, who made his debut for Vietnam in 2004, the same year Huỳnh Đức retired from international play. Exuding a roguish charm while also making headlines for being in a high-profile relationship with Vietnamese singer Thủy Tiên, Công Vinh appealed to a new era of fans. Fans in the early 2000s were newly exposed to pop culture and trends, and they became invested in the lives of their favorite footballers outside the stadium nearly as much as their on-field performance. These new fans were not only beginning to be able to afford the expensive cleats their favorites players endorsed, but they were also heading down to the barber each time they saw a new hairstyle sported by the same star. It was no longer just about football.

Of course, it did help that Công Vinh could play. With his decisive two-goal display in the 2008 AFF final, he would be the pivotal figure in Vietnam claiming their first-ever AFF crown, and he remains their all-time top scorer and appearance maker till this day.

While superstars like Huỳnh Đức and Công Vinh roused fans across the nation and could lay claim to being among the best in the entire region, Vietnam faced a major problem that was perpetually holding them back: there are still 11 players on the field at any given time, and the sort of generational talent these players espoused were just too few and far between to field a team truly capable of being competitive internationally. “During the lean times of the national team, there was some slightly less-feverish support, but attendances and interest was still piqued when it came to the ‘big’ games,” recalled Sommerville, who still counts the 2008 triumph as his fondest memory from Vietnamese football, as it was also his first experience of Đi bão—the now-frequent storming of the streets following a win.

THE START OF THE PARK HANG-SEO ERA

For all of Vietnam’s underachieving ways, fans could have been forgiven for not getting overly excited in 2017 when a new coach was appointed. “Park Hang-who?” was the common refrain.

In fairness, at first blush, Park Hang-seo wasn’t the most rousing pick: a diminutive, bespectacled Korean gentleman of 60, who, understandably, could not speak a word of the local language. And the inquests into his credentials all returned the same claim to fame, if it could even be called that: Park was the assistant to South Korea’s Dutch coach, Guus Hiddink, who famously led the team to a fourth-place finish at the 2002 World Cup—the first time a team not hailing from Europe or the Americas placed in the top four.

Despite the fact that Park had thereafter been handed the reins at several South Korean top-flight clubs, any significant success eluded him, which is perhaps why it was still his role as a second-in-command that he was best known for.

“Nonplussed” was how Sommerville described the initial reaction to the appointment. Hanoi-based journalist Lê Bảo Ngọc went even further. “No one believed he could succeed,” said Bao Ngoc. “He said he could bring the team into the world’s top 100 and was subject to a lot of skepticism from the public.” Personally, Bao Ngoc was ambivalent. “I thought this could be the next failure of Vietnamese football, but deep down, many of us hoped for something.”

Four years on, that same diminutive, bespectacled South Korean man is celebrated across the country. Ironically for a man who was once viewed as an uninspiring sight, companies have come knocking with endorsement deals, and Park can be seen on billboards advocating everything from banks to a brand of noodles. At a moment when the world has been captivated by Korean culture, from Squid Game to BTS, it wouldn’t be preposterous to suggest that Park is the most well-loved Korean export for many Vietnamese.

IT TAKES A (YOUNG) VILLAGE

So how did Park become a national hero? He certainly put in the work—according to Bao Ngoc, “He is always focused and serious, ready to voice his opinion when needed.” Park did have to learn the best way to voice that opinion in Vietnam. Bao Ngoc said, “Many players revealed there were some difficulties working with Mr. Park at the start, but things became easier as cultural differences faded. [Now, he] understands Vietnamese culture and treats the players like his own children.”

It’s worth emphasizing that last word: children. Because, for all Park’s hard work and accomplishment, he has also been handed a lucky break: a generational anomaly of many talented players coming up all at once.

A golden generation. These things do happen in football from time to time. And it’s imperative to capitalize when it is your turn. Portugal infamously failed to achieve any notable success with the players that won back-to-back FIFA Youth Championships (now known as the Under-20 World Cup) between 1989 and 1991. At present, Belgium is still trying to win a trophy despite boasting some of the best young players in the world.

As for Vietnam, the jury is still out on how it happened. It could have been sheer good fortune as the stars decided to align for Vietnam, or they may have gotten it tremendously right for a period in their youth development and grassroots programs. One thing is for certain. This crop of players, who mostly grew up in the 2000s, would have found themselves in a far more stable Vietnam without the tribulations that came with rebuilding of a nation after 30 years of war, with a far more advanced footballing ecosystem to hone their early craft. And in a more modern society where they, as impressionable young boys, would have been able to watch the likes of Huỳnh Đức and Công Vinh on television and have idols to aspire toward. And where Huỳnh Đức and Công Vinh were let down in the past by flying high without enough support across the squad, this entire cast of talented prospects emerged at the same time Park embarked on his first major assignment: the 2018 Asian Football Confederation (AFC) U-23 Championship.

There was Nguyễn Quang Hải, the generational successor to Huỳnh Đức and Công Vinh. But this time, he was backed up by several others.

The inspirational captain and defender Quế Ngọc Hải, whose selfless ways were clear for all to see. (In 2016, he offered to play as a goalkeeper—the sport’s most-specialized position—in an AFF Championship semifinal, after the first-choice custodian had been sent off and the team had used all of their substitutions.) The tireless Nguyễn Trọng Hoàng, by no means the most talented footballer, makes up for whatever he lacks in skill with sheer endeavor. And the Moscow-born goalkeeper Đặng Văn Lâm, whose half-Russian heritage has blessed him with a hulking 1.88 meter stature, offers Vietnam a presence between the goalposts unlike any they have had before.

With many of the “golden generation” having come up through the developmental teams together, Park knew he had at his disposal a quantity of quality unlike any Vietnam had ever produced before. But Park was also savvy enough to understand they would still be underdogs coming up against traditional powerhouses at the AFC U-23s. So he set his side out to frustrate their opponents: defensively stable and risk-averse, but looking to hurt on the counterattack.

The Vietnam team would reach the final—a final that was delayed by snow that January 2018 afternoon in Changzhou. When the squall lightened and the teams took the wintry field, the Vietnamese players, usually drenched in sweat from the sweltering Mekong heat and humidity, were almost unrecognizable decked out in long sleeve undershirts and gloves. Uzbekistan had the lead until Quang Hải, having had to brush away enough snow on a blindingly white surface to create enough clean grass to place the ball down on for a free kick, proceeded to equalize for Vietnam with his wand of a left foot. But in the final minute of the contest, the Uzbeks would score again to win the tournament and break Vietnamese hearts.

While it was not to be, it was still a commendable achievement and one that would pave the way for more to follow. Seven months later, once again coming up against teams that were on paper far superior, Vietnam would finish fourth at the Asian Games, another Under-23 tournament. By the end of 2018, with the full senior team largely comprised of these young starlets, Park would lead Vietnam to a second AFF Championship title.

PROVING THEY CAN MATCH THE CONTINENT’S ELITE

By now, the sentiment surrounding Park had shifted drastically. But the targets were shifting as well: could he ensure Vietnam would start heading into future tournaments as genuine contenders rather than rank outsiders? Park only had to wait a fortnight for an opportunity to prove that the transformation was underway.

After the World Cup (in which, in 2018, a maximum of five Asian countries could qualify), the Asian Cup is the next biggest tournament for teams in the continent. As a unified country, Vietnam had only appeared at one previous edition prior to 2019, and that was by virtue of qualifying automatically as co-hosts.

This time around it was different. They had qualified by merit, and there was a sense of optimism that they might pull off an upset…until the draw pitted them against two former champions—Iraq and Iran—in their opening matches.

They were defeated but hardly humbled in those two games, and they still had a chance to qualify for the knockout stage with a win against Yemen. Another free kick awarded to them on the edge of the penalty box. Another effortless strike from Quang Hải’s left boot sent the ball arrowing into the top corner. Vietnam was up 1-0. A second goal followed, and Vietnam were through.

In the Round of 16, Vietnam faced a physically imposing Jordan outfit; the team seemed to stand, on average, at least a head taller than the Vietnam squad. (Two heads even, in the case of the bantam-sized Quang Hải, standing at just 1.68 meters.) But what he and his teammates lacked in size, they made up for in grit. With the teams still in a 1-1 stalemate after 120 minutes, it was the Vietnamese who held their nerve to prevail in the tie-breaking penalty shootout.

Ultimately, the quarterfinals would be as far as they would go. A 1-0 defeat to Japan, the Asian Cup’s record four-time champions, was nothing to be ashamed of. Park and his charges returned to Vietnam with a hero’s welcome. Quang Hải, like Huỳnh Đức and Công Vinh before him, was the new name on everyone’s lips. But unlike his luckless predecessors, there were many around him who were celebrated in equal measure.

A FUTURE NOT WITHOUT UNCERTAINTY

What is the the road ahead for Park and his squad? Their performance in round three of the recent World Cup qualifiers has had cynics questioning if the national team has gone as far as they can under Park. To some fans and followers, another important, unrealized marker of Vietnamese football success would be for Vietnamese athletes to thrive within the larger multinational market. Vietnam has yet to have a successful export player, even in Asia, let alone Europe. It’s not for lack of trying: several have played for stints in Japan, South Korea and the Netherlands, but they haven’t made much of a ripple.

There are several factors at work. The domestic club football scene is not the most well-run, which could be a factor as to why a prodigious talent like Quang Hải has yet to embark for greener pastures. “The local club scene is slowly getting better, but it’s still not in a good state,” Sommerville admitted, pointing out that the most meaningful player growth would happen if athletes were able to thrive abroad. “This needs to happen now.”

However, it’s not as easy as just packing a suitcase full of cleats. Sommerville also cites “restrictive, long-term contracts” that allow some clubs to “almost have an ‘ownership’ over players.” As if to further illustrate the influence that some of these powerful club owners exert, hardly anyone has openly identified the specifics of such draconian contracts, although many acknowledge they are in place.

The COVID-19 pandemic has not helped matters, with the 2021 campaign of the domestic V.League 1 cancelled after 12 games, meaning the entirety of Vietnam’s professional footballers missed out on more than half a year of regular action. While Vietnamese fans do not turn out in the same numbers for club matches as for when the national team is in action, they’ve missed V.League 1 all the same, and they have been starved of their regular fix of seeing their favorite players take the field.

WHY FOOTBALL MEANS SO MUCH TO THE VIETNAMESE

The national team’s supporters have been there every step of the way, but just like Vietnamese football itself, they are constantly evolving.

For all that Park has gotten right in his time in charge of Vietnam, he may have gotten one thing wrong. He once quipped, “Vietnamese people love football, but they love winning football matches more.” That could have rung true for the older generation, who desperately needed joy in their lives, who sought out any cause for celebration. But with Vietnam as a country having come a long way since the immediate post-war era, these are different times, with a new generation of fans who not only focus on the successes, but also embrace the experience for what it is worth.

This new mode of fandom was evident in the way those 20,000 fans flooded the Mỹ Đình National Stadium in November as football finally returned to Vietnam, despite Vietnam being without a win in the Round Three campaign. Vietnamese fans no longer need sports heroes to issue a strong statement of patriotism with their victories. Now, they simply want to see the children of the country playing their favorite sport.

Đi bão is truly a sight to behold. But as powerful an image as that sea of flag-bearing fans stretching from Hanoi to Hồ Chí Minh City was, so was encountering the enthused crowd in the Mỹ Đình National Stadium to support a team without a win. It is undeniable that Vietnam loves winning football matches. But today, they might just love football more.

GABRIEL TAN is a general editor for ESPN focusing on the Asian market. He was previously the digital lead for FOX Sports Asia and his work has taken him to a host of major events, including the 2018 FIFA World Cup.

Today’s Close Up newsletter highlights a photo essay from our brand-new print issue, Stranger’s Guide: The World at Work—our very first photography issue! You can purchase the print issue below.

Buy The World at Work here!

Photography by Vladimir Marcano

The transportation system in Caracas, Venezuela is as anachronistic as it is resilient. Many buses in daily operation are 50 to 60 years old, and are primarily used by the city’s poorest residents, as the metro does not reach many low-income areas. These buses were originally purchased during Venezuela’s economic golden age in the 1970s, when companies could afford high-quality German vehicles from Mercedes-Benz. Today those buses are kept running through improvised repairs and homemade parts.

Cipriano Martinez has been a bus driver for 30 years. He lives by himself in a rented room in Catia and eats most of his meals from a food stand near the garage before or after work. Every day, from 6am to 6pm, he drives a 1973 bus along the Magallanes de Catia-Chacaito route. Photographer Vladimir Marcano documents a day in Martinez’s life behind the wheel of one of these aging giants.

TAIWO AINA-ADEOKUN is a visual storyteller and photojournalist based in Lagos and Abuja, Nigeria. Her work highlights societal issues that impact daily life, with a special focus on women’s empowerment, sports, agriculture, and entrepreneurship. Her work has appeared in The New York Times and The Guardian.

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The Cost of Convenience
by Nabiha Syed
Stranger’s Guide: California

You already live in Silicon Valley, or maybe Silicon Valley lives in you. You’ve visited a thousand times, likely at least a dozen times today. One click to order your package. Tap twice to reply to a message. Scrolling your social media feeds? When you’re online, you’re here.

We already know the climate in Silicon Valley is unparalleled. The air is full of the heady scent of disruption, heavy with the ever-present belief that something better comes from upending that which came before. (Don’t breathe too deeply; there’s also a lot of smoke.) You’ll fit right in so long as you remember that convenience is good, friction is bad and growth is valued above all.

By growth, we don’t mean little green shoots poking through the dirt—how pedestrian!—but rather the size of your business: more downloads, more users, more data. And more growth means a higher valuation, which means the promise of more funding from those willing to gamble on you—a cycle that makes sense when you realize you are not too far from the birthplace of the California Gold Rush. A healthy dose of optimism is what makes all of this so intoxicating: Silicon Valley insists that you always have one foot on the edge of the future. The other is on the precipice of an apocalypse brought on by earthquake, wildfire or drought.

It isn’t the only place that occupies our imagination in this way. Hollywood, its sister to the south, is another global center whose culture casts a shadow so long that we all bask in its shade. Hollywood excels in telling us stories that became the building blocks of the American Dream: The good guys always win. Hard work reaps glorious rewards. You make your own success as an individual. The Hollywood dream factory constructed a vision of the West exported around the world, an image of the good life that lured so many immigrants to participate in the American experiment. Of course, Hollywood often conveniently deflects from those who remain tired, poor and yearning to breathe free. But this type of imagined place, and all it stands for, does exactly what it’s meant to do. It creates a map for how we tell stories about our reality. It tells us what is possible and what is meaningful. We know what that looks like for Hollywood: a neat and redemptive ending. So what does Silicon Valley give us?

How do we navigate the world when exposed repeatedly to slogans like “Move fast and break things” (Facebook) or observations from company founders like “To connect the world is to free the world” (Eric Schmidt of Google) or “Fear is the disease, hustle is the antidote” (Travis Kalanick of Uber)? Facebook’s slogan surely appeals to those who prefer the fiction of a blank slate to the reality of a messy history, or who have some interest in rejecting lessons learned the hard way. With Google’s approach, we erase what happens when we connect wolves to lambs. But this isn’t a one-off mistake. This is the optimization of profits standing in for values. Stanford philosopher Rob Reich explains how this overruns the values that a democratic society might otherwise embrace: “The quest to make something more efficient is not an inherently good thing. Everything depends on the goal or end result. [S]uddenly boosting screen time, increasing click-through rates on ads, promoting purchases of an algorithmically recommended item, increasing predictive accuracy in facial recognition, or maximizing profit leads to other important values being lost.” In practice, this can mean efficiency over due process, the strong over those in need of protection. When these platforms become unavoidable, these values become the architecture of our lives.

Real-world consequences result. For example, law professor Kate Klonick meticulously documents the early days of content moderation at social media platforms, illustrating how American free speech norms influenced company content-moderation policy. At Twitter, she observes, “the company established an early policy not to police user content, except in certain circumstances, and rigorously defended that right. Adherence to this ethos led to Twitter’s early reputation among social media platforms as ‘the free speech wing of the free speech party.’”

A hands-off approach creates space for all kinds of information to flourish, sometimes helpful and sometimes misinformed. Conveniently, a hands-off approach pays off: more content means more opportunities for engagement. Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen explained to the US Senate, “the dangers of engagement-based ranking are that Facebook knows that content that elicits an extreme reaction from you is more likely to get a click, a comment or reshare. They prioritize content in your feed so that you will give little hits of dopamine to your friends, so they will create more content.” More engagement means more time on the platform, which means more opportunities to sell your attention to advertisers and profit. This pathway explains why radicalization thrives on these platforms, whether in the form of vaccine resistors or January 6 rioters, and is worth interrogating as we question whether the reality-shaping Silicon Valley architecture truly serves our democracy. Equally important is understanding how embedded values can obscure reality, not just amplify it. The Hollywood myth obscured the backstage and the supporting cast as crucial to the success of any performance. And the backstage, the subterranean level of Silicon Valley, is something that many of us have ignored, averting our eyes and scurrying to the other side of the street to avoid seeing the real people suffering real harm. Think of the gig economy drivers sleeping in Safeway parking lots, or the hospitals treating drivers who have had to postpone bathroom breaks lest the algorithm punish them, or the driver cheerfully promoted by Lyft PR for picking up a customer while en route to the hospital, in labor. That may be the true meaning of Uber’s “hustle is the antidote,” but it certainly does not escape the disease of fear and precarity.

It is so easy to overlook this cost when Silicon Valley convenience provides more food choice than an emperor would’ve had centuries ago and near-instantaneous access to personal drivers. For an artificially low price, we can pretend that we are at the top of the American “meritocracy.” How does convenience make it so easy to erase the labor, the effort and the toil of those who work to provide it? Beyond the staggering individual human cost, buying into the Silicon Valley mindset also presents structural challenges. How are the values of disruption and growth-at-all-costs giving us amnesia about what is truly scarce: time, our attention and the environment?

This is where our ever-powerful imagination can build toward a new architecture for Silicon Valley. Artist Ben Grosser, in his latest installation called Software for Less, reimagines social media platforms to optimize for a better future. One of his exhibits is called “Minus,” a social media network where each user can only ever make 100 posts in their life. Once you have posted 100 times, there is no going back. Imagine how such an architecture might have you embrace what is cherished and priceless, or how it might disincentivize fake-news content farms. What would Silicon Valley look like if we encouraged slowness and scarcity instead of growth? Or deletion instead of endless data capture?

Fascinatingly, California is leading the country in experiments in regulatory imagination: recent state privacy laws have provided residents a limited “right to be forgotten,” allowing for personal information to be deleted from a business database. We are in a moment of “techlash,” a backlash against the massive power tech companies wield over our lives. Whether it’s whistleblowers, Congressional hearings, blockbuster lawsuits, strikes or movements to quit platforms, this moment of imagination is transforming into real change.

To remake the architecture of Silicon Valley, we will have to focus on the values embedded in the very ground we walk on, excavating the hidden bones and making sense of how we got here. Once we do so, we can reorient toward a place built for justice and liberation. That’s not a place I’ve been, but in California of all places, our imagination will lead us there.

COURTNEY DESIREE MORRIS is a visual artist and assistant professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her forthcoming book is, To Defend This Sunrise: Black Women’s Activism and the Authoritarian Turn in Nicaragua.

Our SG Fiction newsletter features an original short story from a different author around the world. It’s part of our set of expanded offerings. At least once a month, you’ll receive an original short story from a different part of the world, today’s selection is by Krys Lee from our South Korea guide.

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A Normal Life

By Krys Lee

After Chorong’s colleagues had left for lunch, she took her second home pregnancy test and waited for the second strip of paper to change color. She looked up at the bathroom light the way she did when she was a child and imagined God’s enormous eye scrutinizing her from above. Knowing she wasn’t forgotten used to comfort her, until she realized that her first calling was women. She might sing hymns and take the wine and wafer on her tongue, but she never forgot I Cor 6:9: “Or do you not know that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals.” For years, she prayed she would change. Sometimes, she woke up thinking, “How little of me is left in God, how little of God is left in me.” The second set of results was the same.

Chorong took the elevator to the roof deck. It was a rare, unpolluted day in Seoul, and she had a clear view of the world. Behind the main commercial strip of Itaewon, there was Hooker Hill, a mosque, the gay bars where Chorong and Hyunmin, her husband, sometimes spent weekend evenings. Their home that wasn’t home. When she was born the last of three girls, her furious grandfather had checked her parts and taken his revenge: at the hospital, he christened her Chorong, a dog’s name. She had worked hard her whole life to prove her name wrong.

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Acid Church
Words and photographs by Courtney Desiree Morris
Stranger’s Guide: New Orleans

It is really easy to fall in love with New Orleans. Especially when you are on drugs.

Ask me how I know.

“I wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for acid. Acid saved my life.”

Alli Logout is a bona fide rockstar. A café con leche, butterscotch woman—down South, we’d call them a yellow bone—with a blonde Afro that floats around their head like a golden cloud. They are the ferocious frontperson of a rock group called Special Interest. The first time I saw them perform at the WITCHES party during Mardi Gras weekend, they roared through the crowd on a motorcycle wearing nothing but combat boots, a black thong, fishnets, a black bikini top and topped with a black feather cape and a Pocahontas wig. Then they climbed onstage and roared into the microphone, “Sodomy and LSD!”

That’s how you start a night in New Orleans off right.

…

We are standing in a backyard smoking cigarettes at a house party somewhere between the Seventh Ward and Bayou St. John. The party is winding down. The early morning air feels cool and good on my skin. Emotionally, I feel empty.

It’s been a hard night. It’s been a hard day. A day that started 200 miles away from New Orleans in Lake Charles, Louisiana at my grandmother’s house.

When I come into her bedroom that morning, she is already awake, propped up on a bunch of pillows watching some evangelical preacher on the Trinity Broadcasting Network and humming gospel songs to herself. I walk over to her bed, plant a kiss on her forehead and pull up a chair next to her.

“Good morning, Miss Bobbie. How you feeling?”

“Pretty good, baby. My arm’s a little bit sore this morning, but you know I’m feeling pretty good.”

Now that I am closer, I catch the faint odor of urine wafting up from the sheets, and I wince. I don’t like the idea of my grandmother stuck in bed sitting in her own piss.

“Hey Mamma, you ready to take a shower?”

“Yeah baby, that sounds good.”

“Alright then, honey, let’s get you out of these dirty clothes.”

I get up and slide my right arm behind her back; once she is upright, I slide her gently to the edge of the bed until her tiny feet are grazing the floor. Then I slide my arm behind her once more as she leans back so I can pull off the adult diaper she wears to bed each night. It is soaked with urine.

“This thing ain’t chafing you, Mamma?”

“No, baby, I’m fine.”

She’s being polite, but she’s lying. Nothing chafes the skin worse than piss. I used to get annoyed at these omissions, but I know that she doesn’t like us to worry or to seem needier than she actually is. Even now as she is dying, she is terrible at asking for help. I sigh. We are alike in so many ways.

I prop her back up, then turn around to grab the metalwalker tucked away next to her dresser. As I do this, I catch a glimpse of her in the mirror. She looks vulnerable and awkward sitting naked on the bed. I hurry back and place the walker in front of her. She grabs the handles and pulls herself forward. As she shifts her weight from the bed to the walker, she begins to pant as she struggles to find her balance.

“You good Mamma?”

“Yeah, baby. I’m good.”

She leans forward and begins to waddle towards her bedroom door. I position myself behind her just in case she begins to look too wobbly. I can feel her shivering as we walk the short distance down the hall to the bathroom. My uncle has already turned on the portable heater in the bathroom. I begin to sweat immediately when we step inside, but my grandmother continues to shiver. She complains about being cold all the time since she started the chemotherapy treatments.

She parks the walker up against the side of the sink while I turn on the hot water in the tub. Then we begin the awkward dance of maneuvering her into the bathtub. The narrow bathroom is not designed to accommodate an elderly, overweight, ill woman and an adult granddaughter trying to bathe her. I pull the detachable showerhead from its cradle. As the warm water pours out of the shower head I move it over my grandmother’s body, watching the water stream down over her shoulders, her wide breasts, sliding into the folds of her back and stomach, down her thighs and calves. Her body reminds me of the Venus of Willendorf. I linger over her neck, shoulders and back ‘cause I know she likes that, and she sighs quietly.

“Girl, that hot water feels good.”

“Yeah, I bet it does, Miss Bobbie,” I say and we both laugh.

In the beginning, she is still strong enough to soap up her own washcloth and scrub her upper body. By the end, when she is too weak to lift her arms, I take the rag and scrub her down like a baby, pulling the soapy rag around her neck, washing her armpits. The easy part finished, I turn my attention to her genitalia.

“Alright, Mamma. I gotta get in there and clean out your pocketbook.” At this, her face breaks into a toothless cackle.

In the beginning, I knew she was embarrassed having her grown granddaughter wiping her ass and soaping up her private privates. But I learned that if I breezed through it like it was no different from cleaning her armpits, then she would feel less embarrassed—and honestly, after the first two or three times, it really started to feel just like that. She leans back and spreads her legs, and I go to work, wiping between the folds and making sure she smells clean and fresh. After I rinse her off, she rolls her body to the side, exposing her bottom. She holds one cheek up while I scrub her behind vigorously until I am satisfied that she is clean.

“Alright, sugar. We done with that.”

I towel her off, help her out of the tub and get her back to her room. I powder her down, put on a fresh diaper, slide a pair of stretchy cotton sweatpants onto her and help her push her arms through a soft gray sweatshirt.

When she is dressed, she takes her walker and slowly makes her way to the living room. I follow her with a jar of Miracle Gro hair grease, a comb and a brush. Once she is settled, I slide myself between the recliner and the wall and gently begin parting her thick, gray hair with the comb. Even with the chemo, Bobbie got a full head of beautiful wavy hair. I cut pathways through her hair with the widetooth comb and then grease each row. She doesn’t need much product—her hair lies down with just a little bit of grease and water. After I wet her hair, I take that brush and pull it through and over her hair until it shines like polished silver. Once it’s smooth to the touch, I take her hair and twist it into a simple bun on top of her head and then secure it with a few bobby pins. I reach into my pocket and fish out some gray pearl earrings I bought at Wal-Mart for her. I place these in her ears and step back to admire my handiwork. She looks so good I can’t keep it to myself.

“Damn, Bobbie, you still got it.”

She laughs, smiles at me, blushes and then waves me away like she’s shooing away a foolish young suitor.

“Go on now, girl!”

…

Ostensibly, I am in Louisiana to do research on environmental racism and my family’s displacement from Mossville, a small, historic freedmen’s community just north of Lake Charles. At least, that is what I told the Ford Foundation when they awarded me a fellowship to pursue the project. I spend entire days poring over old documents in the Frazar Archives at McNeese University, flipping through ancient, dusty ledgers of property records in the Calcasieu Parish Clerk of Court tracking the history of black land ownership and dispossession and interviewing my relatives and the small diaspora of former Mossville residents scattered across east Texas and southwest Louisiana. Southwest Louisiana is a forgotten pit stop on Cancer Alley, a marshy petrochemical landscape of oil refineries and natural gas processing plants.

As a kid, I always knew we had arrived when I saw the clusters of pine trees along I-10 and could taste the metallic, toxic air. Now, nearly 30 years later, I drive through the region and try to imagine what Black social life might have been like in this place before the arrival of the refineries more than 80 years ago. Or 200 years ago, when indigenous Atakapa peoples maintained their small, migratory settlements along the shores of Prien Lake before first the Spanish and then the French and then the British and white American settlers arrived and decimated their communities with disease, Christianity and alcohol. I go to Mossville to remember a history I do not fully know.

Mossville is a small place: an unincorporated town located just north of the industrial Port of Lake Charles in southwest Louisiana. Varying accounts of the town’s early formation suggest it was founded as early as the 1790s, potentially making it one of the oldest free Black communities in the South. The town flourished during Reconstruction as a safe haven for recently freed Blacks looking to escape the racial terror of the emergent Jim Crow social order. But since the 1930s, the community has been home to a cluster of petrochemical plants whose operations have irreversibly contaminated its air, soil and water. 14 petrochemical companies currently surround Mossville, including an oil refinery, a coal-fired power plant, several vinyl manufacturers and a chemical plant in a town that is approximately five square miles in area. In the 1940s, southwest Louisiana became a critical site in the international petrochemical industry. Today, its proximity to natural gas and oil fields in Texas and northern Louisiana as well as the Port of Lake Charles and the Gulf of Mexico, about 30 miles away, make the region a strategic location for the industry. The petrochemical industry drives the state’s economy; in 2019, it generated $73 billion of the state GDP and supported 249,800 associated jobs. But that wealth has come at a high cost, one that has been disproportionately borne by the people of Mossville.

In 2011, then-Governor Bobby Jindal announced that Sasol, a South African multinational petrochemical corporation, would begin construction of an ethane cracker complex that extended farther into the town than any of the plants in the area—actually, right across the street from the cemetery where my grandmother is now buried along with all her people. The ethane cracker facility breaks down natural gas into smaller molecules that are used to make ethylene, a chemical product used in a variety of everyday consumer products including cosmetics, detergents, adhesives, packaging materials and plastics used in laptops, cell phones, IV drip bags and faux leather vehicle interiors. Following the announcement of the expansion, Sasol launched a voluntary buyout program that left only 62 residents in the community.

But aside from the research, the truth is that I am really in Lake Charles to see my grandmother. Barbara Jean Freeman has a lot of names. Her husband and her sisters called her Bobbie. Her neighbors called her Mrs. Freeman. Her children called her Madear. Her grandchildren and great-grandchildren called her Mamma, in a slight Anglicization of the French, maman. She was born in 1933 in the town of Westlake, just east of Mossville. Her father was from Westlake but her mother’s people, the Williams family, lived in Mossville and were among the founding families. She was a small child when the first plant, the Cities Services Corporation oil refinery, opened. She died in 2019, three years after the Sasol buyout.

In the summer of 2014, I was driving with my husband as we made a cross-country move from Houston, Texas to State College, Pennsylvania when my grandmother called. The news was not good. She had been diagnosed with colon cancer, which quickly spread to first one lung and then the other. The cancer was tough, but Bobbie was tougher. When I saw her a few months later and asked her how she was feeling, she was defiant and unequivocal: “I’m gonna kick this cancer in the ass.” She proceeded to do just that. But by the time her cancer came back a few years later, things were different. It didn’t take long to notice how tired she was, how slowly she moved. I began to understand. This time, the cancer was going to kick her ass, and it wasn’t going to be pretty.

So I began going home to my grandmother and Lake Charles and Mossville as often as I could. Each time I came, I sat with my grandmother and asked her about her life: about growing up in Mossville, the arrival of the plants, her memories of life under Jim Crow, stories about her ancestors. At first, she was self-conscious about the camera recording her every word. But then she became used to it and started dropping dimes.

So I was not altogether surprised when I arrived in Lake Charles in October 2018 and she told me that her doctor had delivered more bad news: the latest round of chemotherapy had not yielded any results. Her cancer was terminal. When he asked her if she wanted to try another round of chemotherapy, she was as resolved as she had been four years earlier. “Why spend money when it’s not doing any good? So let’s just sit this out and do nothing.”

As she speaks, I listen quietly, hearing everything she isn’t saying. My people are deeply religious. My grandmother reads her Bible every morning, talks to God every day. She reminds me that Hebrews 9:27 says, “It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment.” My grandmother is dying. Her speech is deliberate and certain. There is no fear. She is at peace and ready to face her Maker. My heart sits like a brick in my chest, and as she speaks, I feel a small knot tighten in my throat. The weight of her pending death feels like more than I can bear. I had planned to go to New Orleans the following day. Now, I am unsure if I should leave her. She is nonplussed. “No, baby. Go and see your friend. Have a good time. I’m not leaving yet.” She smiles. “I will see you when you get back.”

…

I make the drive from Lake Charles to New Orleans in a daze. I keep thinking about Mamma and the cancer tearing through her body. On the radio, a journalist on NPR is reporting that a lone gunman entered the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, killing 11 people and wounding six others. They report several Holocaust survivors among the victims. My jaw clenches with rage and grief. Those folks survived Hitler but couldn’t survive America.

The bad news continues to pour in. Ntozake Shange, the Black feminist writer and author of for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf, is dead.

By the time I reach New Orleans, I am exhausted with grief. I don’t know what to do with myself. So I check my phone and text my friend, Alix.

“Just made it to NO. What we doing tonight?” He writes back 15 minutes later, “Anything we want!”

I’m down.

There’s a house party happening, he says. It’s going to be a queer POC vibe, should be cute. Dancing sounds like a godsend right now. He sends me the address, and we make plans to meet up. I don’t know exactly what kind of evening I’m getting into, but with Alix—my black Adonis, good looking in the kind of way that makes people stop and stare at him on the street—in the mix, it will most certainly involve any number of mind-altering substances.

I arrive in front of a nondescript, white, double shotgun house. Before I step out of the car, I can hear the music pulsing from inside. I make my way along the side of the house to the backyard and find Alix there. “You made it,” he shouts before scooping me up in his arms and covering me in kisses.

“I just got some Molly. Want some?”

Without blinking, I say, “Yes.” He gives me a tiny capsule and a beer to wash it down with. After I swallow everything, he claps, takes my hand and we walk into the house like Hansel and Gretel.

The living room has been cleared out for a makeshift dance floor. I got a thing for DJs and musicians, and this one—a cute, extra thick, genderqueer, indigenous Hawaiian covered in tattoos—is working the turntable like a licensed massage therapist. The Molly starts to hit, and I feel my body open up and begin to vibrate with the bass pulsating through the speakers. Suddenly, the DJ drops the beat, and the strains of Fleetwood Mac’s “Everywhere” fill the dance floor. Can you hear me calling/Out your name?/You know I’m falling/And I don’t know what to say/I’ll speak a little louder/I’ll even shout/You know that I am proud/And I can’t get the words out.

My heart is beating in time with the song, and before I know it, I am rocking and bouncing on the balls of my feet and singing, “Oh I, I want to be with you everywhere.” I spin and see Alix dancing alongside me out of the corner of my eye. People flock to the dance floor, and soon, I am enveloped in a crush of vibrating flesh. The Molly is pulsing through me in waves, and I can feel the heat of the high spreading from my scalp down my back through my arms and into my feet. I realize the feeling is joy.

Suddenly, I feel sick. I rush to the bathroom. I barely have the door closed before I feel my stomach heave, and suddenly, I am on my knees retching into the toilet. I vomit over and over. I feel as though I am hacking up all the sorrow living in my body. As I puke, I wonder if I am dying. I am sad for a moment. Alix will have to tell my husband; I know it will hurt him to learn that I am dead. But I am not dying. Instead, I vomit until I am exhausted and sitting breathless on the floor. I have no idea how long I sat there. Eventually, I pull myself up to the sink, rinse out my mouth and stare at myself for a long time in the mirror.

When I finally stumble out of the bathroom, I look around and then plop down onto the nearest couch I can find. My body feels empty and clean. I am out of my head entirely, descending into myself as the Molly reverberates in my body. It takes me a minute to come back up for air. When I do, I realize that two women are fucking next to me. I hadn’t noticed them, and they don’t seem to mind that I am there. I feel strangely better. Like now the Molly can finally do its work.

I return to the dance floor and dance for the DJ for what feels like hours. I roll my hips like the Mississippi, joints loose and easy, feeling light and free. I cannot remember the last time I felt this way. That makes me sad. I accept this insight and let it go as quickly as it comes. I am here in my body right now, and I am dancing like a bad bitch. The beat drops into a smooth bassline as I sweat the grief out. I dance for my grandmother. I dance for the elders in the synagogue. I dance for Ntozake. I dance for all the Black women I know dying from cancer and strokes and stress and sadness. I dance and dance and dance and laugh and celebrate and feel my aliveness.

Later when I give the DJ, whose name—appropriately—is Heavy Pleasure, my gratitude for their set, they say, “I know. I was spinning for you.”

This isn’t my first time in New Orleans. I’ve come to New Orleans a handful of times over the past decade, usually for academic or activist conferences. Even though I am an anthropologist and I know better, I have moved through the city like a fucking tourist. I eat the beignets at Café du Monde and delicious fried chicken at Dooky Chase’s, admire the art at the Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden in City Park, spend a few nights bar hopping on Frenchman Street. I do the things you are expected to do in New Orleans. But I haven’t really connected to the soul of the city. Tonight, however, feels different.

It’s late, and the party is winding down. Alix and I head out to the backyard. Most of the revelers have already left, and we are down to the party faithful. Alix introduces his friends: Juicebox, a stunning Black femme who reminds me a bit of Grace Jones and is elegantly dressed in a full length ball gown and bridal veil; Choux, a sweet and quietly hilarious day laborer, who shyly welcomes me to the group; and his partner, Pi, a stunning mixed-race Chamoru sex worker wearing an enormous curly wig and holding court like a bored monarch. I finally meet the DJ who saved my life: Kahelelani, AKA DJ Heavy Pleasure. And then, there is Alli. They remind me of my beautiful, silver grandmother who is dying, and suddenly, I feel homesick and sad.

Alix comes and snuggles next to me. We can feel each other’s pain from miles away, and in the moment, I feel more grateful for him than I ever have before.

Someone announces that they’ve got acid. Alix turns to me and says, “You want to take acid with me?” The Molly is wearing off in a clean, steady burn, and I am feeling relaxed and safe. Also, I am not quite ready for the night to end and am dreading going home to be alone with my feelings. We smile at each other as we swallow our tabs.

I am not sure when the acid starts to kick in, but I am suddenly having three conversations at once, not including the one that I am simultaneously having with myself. I am holding Kahelelani’s tiny dog, Maka, in my arms, and he licks my nose and sniffs at my hair. Alix is whispering something in my ear as Choux lights my cigarette, and I smoke and listen and laugh at everything and feel myself quietly expand.

I find that I am telling Alli about my grandmother. I don’t mean to—it just comes pouring out. They are quiet and listen thoughtfully. When they respond, they are gentle and sympathetic.

“When I’m sad, acid helps a lot.” I lift an eyebrow. “I’m serious! Acid is the best thing that has ever happened to me.” They’d been in a bad relationship that left them feeling raw and stripped. “I didn’t want to live,” they say. “The acid pulled me back from the edge and made me want to hold onto life. That’s when I knew that acid is medicine. That’s why they don’t want anyone to have it.” Everyone chimes in, sharing their own acid deliverance stories. They all agree: acid, like a good DJ, can save your life.

Pi says, “That’s why everyone needs to make a trip to Acid Church at least once in their lives.”

Alix turns to me and asks: You wanna come to Acid Church?

I don’t know what that means at all, but I love it, and without blinking, I say, “Yes, I do.”

And then the night really begins.

In a stroke of serendipity, Pi has a car that she borrowed from a friend. When she pulls up in front of the house, we pile into the SUV like the Brady Bunch. And we are off.

I feel warm and safe in the back seat, snuggled between Alix and Kahelelani and Maka. Alix puts a bounce track on, and the whole car feels as though it is rocking as we dance inside. When Pi stops at a traffic light, Alix jumps out and begins twerking on the hood of the car, in the crosswalk, in the lane next to us. He jumps back in the car just as the light turns green—this ain’t his first time stopping traffic like this.

We careen through the streets, flying down the city’s wide boulevards, the truck soaring like a spaceship. Suddenly, we hit a massive pothole that sends the truck’s nose up into the air before crashing back on the surface so hard that it blows out the headlights. Pi slams on the brakes, and the group swings into action. Every single last one of us is riding dirty, and driving through New Orleans at 4:00 in the morning with no headlights is a no-go. Pi pops the hood, and she and Alli begin inspecting the engine to see what is going on. Minutes pass in tense silence. It might be the end of the evening if we can’t get these fucking lights back on.

Alix: “Maybe try turning the car off and then on again?”

It works on computers, we reason. Why not? Pi shuts off the car and then cranks it back up. Miraculously, it works. Alix shouts, “CTRL + Alt + Delete!” We roar our approval, and the trip to the Acid Church continues.

Choux is fiddling with his phone and asks everyone and no one in particular, “What ya’ll want to listen to?” I don’t remember who recommends Fiona Apple, but it’s the perfect choice because she’s a funky white girl like Joni Mitchell, and I like that bitch. We settle on “Criminal,” and suddenly everyone is singing along:

I done wrong

And I wanna suffer for my sins

I come to you

Cause I need guidance to be true

And I just don’t know

Where I should begin

The entire group pauses dramatically along with Fiona before launching into the chorus:

What I need

Is a good defense

‘cause I’m feeling

Like a criminal

And I need to redeemed

To the one I sinned against

Because he’s all

I ever knew of love.

The city feels empty and peaceful as we barrel down St. Claude’s Avenue past the Bywater towards Pi’s house. When we cross over the canal into the Lower Ninth Ward, the sun comes up, breaking through the clouds with a brightness that I have never seen in my life and expect never to experience again. The clouds are fat and lush, tinged with a pink and orange glow that looks so warm that my cheeks feel hot. The acid is hitting me hard now, and I feel like weeping and laughing and dancing and fucking and kissing and twirling, and I feel a happiness that I have never known before. I’ve never seen a sunrise so bright. I’ve never felt this much joy rushing through every cell in my body. I feel as though my whole life before this moment has been muted shades of gray, and suddenly, my heart, my ears, my soul is flooded with technicolor. Acid is saving my life. I want to scream this epiphany at the top of my lungs. But instead I just sing.

I am falling in love with this queer tribe of brilliant freaks. I know it in real time. Singing in the warmth of the car, driving into the sunrise, they feel like the family I have always longed for, full of wounded, beautiful survivors who wear their scars proudly like the city. Smart and tough like New Orleans, they alchemize their trauma into art, music and dance parties, those sacred safe spaces big enough to hold all kinds of folks in their arms, including a lost little colored girl like me. That night, I felt held in a way that is hard to explain—it is like the old folks say: “Better felt than telt.”

…

Pi is an elegant hostess. She offers us tea, coffee, a light breakfast, cuts neat lines of coke onto a mirror on a rickety coffee table. When she says make yourself comfortable, I know that she means it. This is the Acid Church.

I walk outside and sit in the garden. The grass is an otherworldly shade of green so vibrant it glows.

I hold this feeling of aliveness in my chest, look at my skin as it vibrates. It occurs to me that there is a lesson here. My grandmother is dying; in fact, one day, everyone I love will die. So will I. But today I am alive. She is dying, but I must live. I close my eyes and think of Mamma’s tired body, which I know almost as well as I know my own body. When she is gone, I will hold the feeling of her flesh in my hands forever. In accompanying her to the end, she is teaching me how to live—and how to die. I do not try to wipe away my tears as they fall to the ground. I am alive.

The rest of the group finds me there. Pi brings me a cup of coffee. We spend the rest of the morning lounging on Pi’s trampoline in her backyard. When Alix strips down to his underwear to enjoy the warmth of the rising sun, it suddenly strikes me as a brilliant idea, and I take off my top. The sun feels good on my skin. I snuggle with Maka, who is wrapped up with Kahelelani in a warm quilt. Pi takes a drag of a cigarette, offers it to me. I thank her, take a quick puff, hand it back. Already I feel that we are sisters and will be for a long time. We talk about everything and nothing. We talk about our families, where we grew up, where we come from. We debate the merits and mechanics of trying to have sex on a trampoline. We inquire about each other’s astrological signs. Pi, obviously, is a Pisces; but with her sexy ass, you’d swear she’s a Scorpio. We talk about music. We talk about art. We talk about drugs. When the conversation stops, it feels natural, as though we are all collectively exhaling while the sun works on our bodies. We all breathe quietly, slowly. Watch the sun climb into the sky. There is nowhere else to be. We hold the moment in silence and gratitude. It feels good to be alive this morning.

The day slowly resumes its natural pace. Pi and Choux climb off the trampoline and migrate inside to finally go to bed. Housemates are waking up. Alix needs to catch a flight, and Kahelelani needs to get Maka home and get ready for work.

On the ride home, I glide down Esplanade Avenue up to the I-10 and take the on-ramp. I rise above the city as downtown comes into view. The disk of the Superdome shines in the sunlight. Behind it sits the old Charity Hospital, abandoned in the triumph of post-Katrina disaster capitalism. On either side of the freeway, I can look down and see the city streets lined with oak trees draped in Spanish moss and edged by stately old wood frame houses that resemble cakes with their pastel shades, intricate latticework and ornate embellishments. I look at the city, place my hand over my mouth and feel something like wonder swelling and aching in my chest.

I look over the city from the highway, see the Mississippi snaking along its shoreline and I realize that I love this wild, wounded, fucked up, magical city.

I have never felt as free as I do when I am in New Orleans. I think it’s the freest city in the United States of America. And my people know something about freedom. What it means to make your own freedom, to lay claim to the land and to try to make a place for yourself that you can call your own. Watching Mossville die taught me that not all freedom dreams survive. Sometimes, the powerful show up and crush them. But freedom is not found in buildings or monuments but in the love that we share for each other, for the land. Freedom is found in the insistence that we live and live and live, even when everything around us feels as though it is dying. But we cannot live until we grieve and honor what we have lost. I went to Louisiana to mourn the death of everything that I love in Mossville. My tears led me to New Orleans, and the city and her wild children have held me ever since.

They say that if you love New Orleans, she will love you back. NOLA drives me crazy. When I am away, she is all I think about, and when I’m there, I spend all my time just rolling in her hair.

COURTNEY DESIREE MORRIS is a visual artist and assistant professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her forthcoming book is, To Defend This Sunrise: Black Women’s Activism and the Authoritarian Turn in Nicaragua.

Today’s Close Up newsletter highlights a photo essay from our brand-new print issue, Stranger’s Guide: The World at Work—our very first photography issue! You can purchase the print issue below.

Buy The World at Work here!

By Taiwo Aina-Adeokun

Certain professions have traditionally been deemed unsuitable for women based on cultural expectations of femininity. Across Nigeria, where gender has long dictated the boundaries of possibility, women are stepping into roles historically reserved for men. The professional athlete is one such case.

Taiwo Aina-Adeokun’s photo series “Game of Confidence” showcases female boxers in Lagos, Nigeria—women who inhabit a sport still strongly associated with masculinity and physical dominance. Whether it is a couple of punching bags and tires hanging in a dusty lot in the Bariga district, or a ring tucked within a 9-story building on Victoria Island, these work environments are training grounds for discipline and confidence.

As a Nigerian photographer herself working within a field once dominated by men, Aina’s own experiences resemble her subjects’. “In my part of the world, photography was majorly practiced by men and taking on the profession, I get queries from different people, some strangers, about the motive behind my choice of career. Some ask why I do not consider more ‘feminine vocations.’”

For the women in this series, boxing is not merely about combat. It is a means of self-discovery, healing and empowerment. Some pursue competitive excellence on the national stages, while others are drawn to the sport by a desire to build strength.

TAIWO AINA-ADEOKUN is a visual storyteller and photojournalist based in Lagos and Abuja, Nigeria. Her work highlights societal issues that impact daily life, with a special focus on women’s empowerment, sports, agriculture, and entrepreneurship. Her work has appeared in The New York Times and The Guardian.

There is struggle, but also dignity and humanity inherent to work. The labor we do in the world is central to how we understand who we are and our place in society; be it as a writer, a miner, an athlete, a dog walker or a politician. Work can offer a salve for our deeply human yearning for direction and purpose. But it’s also a material necessity, it is how we feed and clothe ourselves, care for others and simply survive. The time we spend each day working is time spent serving, agonizing, toiling, creating and thinking.

The latest print issue of Stranger’s Guide is out now! This special photography edition, Stranger’s Guide: The World at Work features stories and photos centered around work and labor across the globe. You can purchase the print issue here!

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Did you know?

Pilot is the world’s dream job, with over 1.3 million global annual searches

Top 10 dream jobs (according to global search data for 170 countries)

Honduras…………..YouTuber
Belize…………..Customs Officer
United States…………..Real estate
Jamaica…………..Flight Attendant
Nicaragua…………..Hacker
Sierra Leone…………..Doctor
Niger…………..Actor
Latvia…………..Model
Estonia…………..Model
Sweden…………..Model
Finland…………..Model
Slovakia…………..Police Officer
Egypt…………..Football Player

***

Women of Color in 9 to 5 America

By Qiana Mestrich

A few years ago I discovered a collection of vintage photos of my mother as a “white-collar” office worker in New York City in the late 1960s. I looked at the images and pored over every detail of this bygone era, wondering what it might be like if the movie 9 to 5 were remade with women of color?

Originally from Panama, my mother migrated to New York City to pursue her dream of a new, American life. For her, life in New York City as a Central American immigrant was feasible, promising and mostly exciting. At that time New York still resembled the glittery “big town” she’d seen in movies.

After working in a perfume factory, where she sometimes bruised herself during mishaps on the assembly line, my mother gladly accepted a sales position in the offices of the Rugol Trading Corporation, a hardware wholesale company. Rugol’s offices were located on North Moore Street (in what’s now Tribeca) on a block of dirty warehouses that functioned as factories, artists’ studios and discotheques.

Emigrating to a foreign country by herself and eventually having to raise a child alone while working full-time was a necessity for my mother. Being a “working girl” was a source of pride for her and a crucial part of her identity. I remember admiring her typing skills as a child, watching in awe at the speed with which her fingers ticked away on those IBM typewriters.

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I am thrilled to announce the publication of the latest print edition of Stranger’s Guide magazine and our first ever photography issue. Inside you will find photo essays from Nigeria, China, Venezuela and New York. We’ve also done something to make this issue a little different. Rather than focus on a location, we chose a thematic approach and concentrated our stories and photos around work and labor.

There is struggle, but also dignity and humanity inherent to work. The labor we do in the world is central to how we understand who we are and our place in society; be it as a writer, a miner, an athlete, a dog walker or a politician. Work can offer a salve for our deeply human yearning for direction and purpose. But it’s also a material necessity, it is how we feed and clothe ourselves, care for others and simply survive. The time we spend each day working is time spent serving, agonizing, toiling, creating and thinking.

Alongside our photo essays, we have a fantastic new piece of fiction by Maurice Carlos Ruffin. We also commissioned 15 journalists and writers from around the world to interview people about their work and create first-person narratives from their stories. These include reflections from a toy maker in Iran, a train conductor in Ukraine, an American Marine in Afghanistan and a bodyguard in Atlanta, Georgia.

Thank you, as always, for joining us on this journey. If you are not yet a subscriber, I hope you will join us or buy single issues here!

Kira Brunner Don
Editor in Chief

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Weekly Long Read is for everyone but it’s made possible by our paid subscribers. Thanks to those who support our work, and if you’re not yet a paid subscriber, today is the perfect day to join!

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Corkscrews
by Gabrielle Bellot
Stranger’s Guide: The Caribbean

One night, when I was young, the woman who helped us around our home ran her hands through my then-short curls. “You have nice hair,” she said in her dark voice, rounded face smiling. Her hand was large and faintly callused, her skin the deep brown of rained-upon wood. “Soft.” I was sitting on her white, rumpled bed in the little room my parents had converted for her, where she could go if she wanted to rest. It was not uncommon for Dominicans to have helpers who assisted with things around their homes, and this woman, who lived in a small house higher up in the village of Giraudel, had come to feel like part of our family after years of her walking the winding mountain road to our home each morning, which was hidden behind patches of forest and fields of razor grass flecked with chartreuse clumps of bamboo. She was thickset and strong but kind, and her own hair, which was tighter-curled than mine, was either hidden under a wrap or pulled back in short cornrows. I don’t remember what I said, but I know I felt a slight confusion, because what she was telling me conflicted with what my mother always declared.

My mother never wanted my hair loose and long. “Your hair is coarse,” she would say. “You don’t have good hair. It will never look good. You don’t want that.” She seemed convinced that my black corkscrew curls could never be proper—propriety the faintly British-colonial ideal she still lived by decades after our independence from Britain. Her own hair was almost always straightened, curled only faintly at the ends and dyed a glittering reddish or a deep brown; she looked beautiful, the hair framing her slender, light face, but for many years I didn’t even know that my mother had curls like mine. She hid them. It was only when she was coaxed into the sea or into a pool, without a haircap, that her true hair began to emerge, tight swirls she hid in a ponytail until she could go again to the salon her sister owned in the capital city. My father, who was the darkest-skinned in my immediate family, had obvious curls, but he kept his hair short, so I never knew just how tight they were.

It was complicated by the fact that I wanted to be accepted as a girl, yet everyone called me a boy. I knew that I wanted to be a girl from a very young age, but I had no concrete language for that internal sense; I wouldn’t even know the word transgender existed until I was a teen. In Dominica, queerness wasn’t an identity I could openly wear. On the radio and in church, evangelicals denigrated homosexuality as an iniquity that the Americans and Europeans were trying to force upon us; the Prime Minister declared in 2014 that Dominica would “never accept same-sex marriage” as long as he was in power (and it’s unlikely other prime ministers would be more lenient). Because I seemed stuck, somehow, in the wrong body, I had been sent to a religious all-boys primary and secondary school, where we were required, to my silent frustration, to have short haircuts; long hair, it seemed, was devilish.

I tried to breathe, slowly, rigorously, mantra-like, the way I would later learn in Dominica is how you breathe while scuba diving. I tried to keep myself calm, so that I would not sink, so my bubbles, drifting up like brief jellyfish, would not stop. I didn’t understand why the girl inside me refused to go away even when I tried to calm myself down, even when I read the Bible, even when I condemned and cursed her.

Even with short hair and trying to pretend to be macho to keep anyone from learning my secret desire to be female, I was shy and awkward, and it wasn’t long before people began picking on me at school for it. People pushed me around. Once, a group of laughing students asked me if I preferred a drawing of a penis or a vagina; once, a boy dropped a rock on my head; one time, people called me a buller or boggerah, the terms we used for gay persons; another time, a boy told me I looked like a girl and didn’t belong in a boys’ school. Secretly, I was happy to hear this last comment, but I was terrified all the same. I only escaped worse violence through my association with my cousins, who were well-known as “cool;” without them, I know I would have been stoned and beaten up more.

As a teen, after I graduated from secondary school, I had a little more freedom, so I began to grow out my hair. Longer hair on men wasn’t uncommon in Dominica, at least if it was tied back, in dreadlocks, or in cornrows; most of the young men who grew out their hair were trying to imitate American rappers who had done the same, as American hip-hop had an outsized influence in our island. But this, of course, wasn’t what I wanted; I wanted to do my hair like my female cousins and girlfriends did. I was lost. I felt like a dinghy without a captain, sent adrift into the Atlantic into that particular patch of sea where the world seems to stop and all you can hear is the quiet bones of old shipwrecks played upon by the water.

When I told my mum I was considering putting my hair into dreads, she looked at me with the impassable sternness of a statue. “Do that,” she said, “and you’ll sleep outside with the dogs.”

So I wore my hair in a perpetual ponytail or low bun. It felt hidden; more than anything, I wanted to wear it out, so that it brushed my shoulders. But I lived so deeply in the closet then, knew the scent and roughness of the wood so well, that I felt afraid to wear it down in public.

I hid in that closet for most of my life. In Florida in graduate school, I came close to killing myself with poison, so unwilling was I to keep up the charade of being perceived as male. I came out, finally, as trans, knowing that I would never be able to live as a woman openly back home in Dominica—and when my mother told me the same, told me I was her shame, I cried, but I understood, too, even as she did not understand me. I felt like I had lost an entire world, the place where my memories, even now, still live brightest—but I had gained a new world, as well, one in which I finally felt right. I was haunted, still; my mother’s condemnations rang loud in me like the sound of your breaths when you scuba dive, but I could live with that ghostly voice, somewhat, if I could live as my truest self.

I let my curls down in public, and everything changed.

…

In 1974, the government of Dominica, then led by Patrick John, passed one of the most remarkable bills in the history of the island, if not the Caribbean as a whole: the Dread Act, which authorized the police to arrest and even, in certain circumstances, kill people wearing dreadlocks on sight, without requiring warrants. “Dreads,” as the dreadlock-wearers were known in the bill, inspired their namesake in the country: a pervasive paranoia that people who had such hairstyles were violent, seditious and worthy of incarceration or death. And the bill went beyond mere hairstyles, allowing the imprisonment, often for up to nine months, of people who simply possessed memorabilia associated with Dreads in general. A Dread who took a single mango or coconut from someone else’s land could easily face mandatory jail time, despite the inconceivability of such an “offense” prompting any response from the authorities if Dreads were not involved. If Dominicans found Dreads dwelling “illegally” in households—a criminally vague description—they were allowed to kill them; police officers and security forces could receive immunity if they murdered Dreads.

The bill was repealed in 1985, but by then, an estimated twenty-one Dreads had been killed. The number may seem low, but the fact that any Rastafarian—for it was primarily followers of the Rastafarian faith whom the bill targeted—died as a result of this discriminatory legislation is unacceptable. Beyond this, it’s impossible to know how many other Rastafarians might have been killed without being recorded at all, given the legal ease with which one could brush such homicides under the rug. Given the many raids that the authorities conducted while the bill was in effect, it’s likely that the death toll is higher. It’s likely that many ghosts whose names and faces were lost to our history books haunt the mountains, still hearing the gunshots that released them from their bodies four decades ago.

“Love is Earth’s mission / Despite the massed dead,” the Jamaican poet Anthony McNeill wrote in the final lines of what is perhaps his best-remembered poem from Chinese Lanterns from the Blue Child, a poetry collection McNeill completed just before his death in 1996. It is a simple statement, almost clunky in its cadence, yet it has stayed with me for years. It comes back to me now, as I think of those ghosts, those forgotten dead, and the way that such legislation is so often presented not as an act of hatred, but one of love, one of protection and safety. Yet this bill—little-remembered even in Dominica to this day—was hardly crafted out of love; it was written, instead, out of a desire for death. It was written, we are meant to believe, to stop terror, when its very means to do so were to allow our citizens to engage in acts of terror against innocent civilians.

At moments like these, I think of McNeill’s lines, again,

and I wonder if this Earth has any discernible mission at all.

…

I like those curls, ma. You so curly. Rock it natural. Beautiful. I want to live in those curls. Yes, my sister.

I began to hear these comments from men once I started to present as female in public in America. I would walk down the streets, sit in the subway, sit at a bar, exist as a profile picture on a dating site—it didn’t matter. Men sexualized me immediately, and if it wasn’t my lips or my eyes, it was my hair, which I now wore down almost exclusively, my ringlets (when my hair was not too frizzy to form ringlets) brushing my shoulders and nape as I walked.

My hair taught me something in these interactions: that in America, with hair like mine and skin of this olive brown, I was as often perceived to be Hispanic as black. Back home, I was a shabine, a neutral-to-positive term we used for mixed-race people with skin anywhere from mango to murky olive, but in America, I was suddenly fully one thing or the other, as if the one-drop rule was back in full effect—and, of course, the one-drop rule has never vanished, but simply evanesced into the background. If I wore my hair up in a bun with hoop earrings, men were more likely to catcall me in Spanish; if I wore it up with drop earrings and red lipstick, Indian men occasionally asked me if I was Indian; with my hair down, I was just about anything.

It was a surprise, the way that wearing my hair up or down so totally transformed how strangers viewed me. All my life, I had grown accustomed to people asking what I was, ethnically, but now, out as a woman and with my hair down, people seemed more certain than ever. My hair had become a marker of my identity in a way I had never imagined possible. And it was far from the coarse mess my mother tried to get me to hide; it had become, instead, one of my little mundane superpowers, the thing people often noticed about me first and remembered most of all afterward.

…

The Dread Act did not come out of nowhere. It was an amendment to the larger Prohibited and Unlawful Societies and Associations Act, and it appeared in Parliament after a series of attacks in the south of the island by people wearing their hair in matted locks. These incidents, which targeted tourists and local farmers and families, engendered widespread panic and people began to imagine that anyone who wore dreadlocks might engage in arson or other sorts of violence. It was unfortunate, given that the majority of Rastafarians followed a firm code of peaceful coexistence with everyone else; due to the acts of a few, all Rastafarians suddenly became potential terrorists in the eyes of the law. Many fled into the mountains and less obviously accessible parts of the island, sometimes utilizing paths that the escaped Maroons had used centuries before. Dreadlocks had become political dangers in a way almost unprecedented anywhere else in the region.

The era of the Dread Act was a remarkable time in Dominican history. Four years after the Act passed, Dominica became independent from Great Britain; the following year, Hurricane David famously devastated the island; the year after that, Eugenia Charles took office, becoming not only Dominica’s first female prime minister, but the first in the Caribbean as a whole. Yet amidst all of this political progressivism and tempest destruction, Rastafarians were constantly ostracized. If the island had gained its independence, its dreadlocked inhabitants had acquired just the opposite.

But perhaps the most remarkable—and also least remarkable—thing is how few people seem to know about this period in our history. Whenever I or someone else brings it up, it is almost always met with wide eyes and expletives; it seems extraordinary to them, most of the time, that this period has been so thoroughly forgotten, even in an era where it is frustratingly banal to see yet another story of some dreadlocked or natural-hair-wearing woman told she must “fix” her tresses to look more “professional.” But Dominica, like many islands in the Caribbean, is a place where we forget things quickly, where ghosts roam all of our roads and hills, but we rarely see them.

…

When I scuba dive, I let my hair out. It flares behind me in the blue. My breaths are loud and exaggerated in my ears, shimmering shifting bubbles rising up as I descend. Later, I may regret not tying back my hair, when I return home and find it tangled as seaweed and tightly, frizzily bunched up from the salt. But in the moment, it’s worth it. I feel a sense of power, of beauty, of wonder. In the water, I feel, if not weightless, a particular blend of lightness and gravity, a soft cool pressure in which I feel freer than ever. Under the sound of breath and the deepening blue, I forget my ghosts, for a bit.

I breathe slowly, like someone repeating an old mantra.

GABRIELLE BELLOT is a staff writer for Literary Hub. She grew up in the Commonwealth of Dominica. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Shondaland, Guernica, Slate, Tin House, the Paris Review Daily and the Caribbean Review of Books.

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Literary Cork
by James O’Sullivan
Stranger’s Guide: Ireland

It is 1892, and Douglas Hyde—the man who will later become Ireland’s first president—is speaking at the Irish National Literary Society in Dublin. He is calling for a sustained program of cultural de-anglicization, calling for Irish culture to be privileged so that it might be reimposed. Cultural nationalism is all the rage, as Hyde shows by book-ending his speech with the foundation of the Gaelic Athletic Association and the Gaelic League, respectively tasked with promoting indigenous sports and the Irish language.

But beyond these hotel rooms, another group is already at work, busying themselves with the task of cultural rejuvenation. They are the writers, poets, novelists and playwrights, and such is their success that the final years of the nineteenth century will mark the beginning of one of Ireland’s most significant cultural moments: the Irish Literary Revival.

The origins of Irish literature can be traced to pre-Christian mythology, including tales such as The Táin, The Children of Lir and the Salmon of Knowledge. They are stories teeming with warriors and druids, the supernatural and witchcraft. They can still be seen reenacted most weekends as revelers spill onto the streets in the early hours, in their war paint, ready for blood. From the twelfth to the sixteenth century, the history of Ireland is one of subjugation and resurgence, culminating in the ascendency of British rule by the seventeenth century. By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Ireland’s most notable literary figures were—with the exception of a few holdouts who persisted in the Irish language—Anglo-Irish, members of a well-educated, largely Protestant upper class writing almost exclusively in English. While there were some Anglo-Irish nationalists, most were imperialists, identifying as “British” rather than “English.” It was all very grim for a while, with much of the population isolated from much of the literary canon.

Then, in 1818, a young Dublin poet named James Mangan saw his first works published. As James Clarence Mangan, he would go on to be recognized as one of the first authors to further the nationalist agenda through literary means, laying the foundation for the Revival that would come some 50 years after his passing. The great value of the Revival is that its chief architects did not simply ensure continuity of Mangan’s legacy; authors like Yeats and Joyce contributed to a modern Irish literature that sought to both uphold and subvert nationhood, marking the early twentieth century as a golden age of Irish literature. Central to this golden age was the city of Dublin.

Present-day Dublin is a place of tension, a city with a rich cultural heritage belied by its unsustainable cost of living and gaudy tourist traps like Temple Bar. Situated in the middle of O’Connell Street, the General Post Office has long been a symbol of modern Irish history, most notably for its role in the 1916 Rising. Yet the chief thoroughfare in the capital city has been allowed to decay; its environs have been overrun by fast food chains and glaring arcades. It is pleasing to see how O’Connell Street has resisted the gentrification seen across other main streets in Europe—the Champs-Élysées is an entirely different sort of ugly—but the general mood of Ireland’s most-visited stretch of concrete is entirely representative of a city where the best bits are far too hidden.

Dublin’s literary tradition is a major part of this hidden culture. Dublin is the city that gave rise not only to the aforementioned W. B. Yeats and James Joyce, but also to other modern greats like Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett, George Bernard Shaw and Elizabeth Bowen. Literary modernism, as it existed at its height, belonged to Dublin.

Those who are concerned with the task of demarcating cultural epochs like nothing more than a clear distinction between the modern and contemporary—now as we know it, and now as it just existed in our immediate past. Contemporary Irish literature has several peculiarities in relation to its antecedents, one of which is the decline of Dublin as the nexus for literature on the island. Beyond the Pale—as is said by those outside the capital—there now exist a great many literary communities, both urban and rural.

Irish parochialism is a damaging social force, but it is also useful in that one can quite readily identify distinctive scenes. To the west there is the Galway crowd, for which the Emily Cullen-directed Cúirt International Festival of Literature stands as the centerpiece. Meanwhile, Limerick’s literary community revolves around the Limerick Writers’ Centre, which has flourished under Dominic Taylor. Kerry is home to vibrant writers’ groups in Killorglin and Tralee—Noel King country—while Wicklow, circling back east, belongs to Bray Arts.

Some authors successfully cross between disparate scenes, but doing so leaves them vulnerable to appropriation. Ireland operates as something of a federation of local communities, and if one engages with a particular literary parish, they may see that acknowledged for the remainder of their career. Every parish claims those who have passed through, because every parish wants to be what the other parishes are not.

This is particularly so in Cork, to which its writers belong. Whether you come or go, you have no say in your personal identity—once Cork says you belong, then you belong, whether or not you wish it. This is because the literary traditions of Cork are rooted in the city’s characters, real figures to which there is now attached a sort of mysticism. They write characters, but they are themselves characters, as valuable to Cork storytelling as the stories themselves. Their works are lauded in all the most well-to-do venues, and the scholars—the canonmakers—are turning to them with increasing fervor. But you don’t really know Doireann Ní Ghríofa if you don’t know and wonder why she does her writing in a carpark, or that one cannot be considered a credible artist in Cork until photographed alongside Cónal Creedon—whose annual appearance alongside John Spillane at the Everyman Theatre marks the beginning of Christmas in Cork—in the window of Cork Coffee Roasters. These are our characters, more intriguing than any fiction.

Cork has chosen its characters well. Thomas McCarthy, a Cork poet who was instrumental in the region’s late twentieth century literary revival, was born in County Waterford. But McCarthy—whatever he may say—is a Cork poet. He is ours, chosen by Cork and given no say in the matter. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, another of Ireland’s most celebrated contemporary poets, has spent the best part of her life in Dublin. She has spent her entire career at Trinity College and has published in Ireland almost exclusively with the Dublin-based Gallery Press. Still, she was born and raised in Cork. She is ours.

Danny Denton’s stunning debut novel, The Earlie King and the Kid in Yellow, is set in Dublin, but it’s a Cork novel. The word “Dublin” is there for all to see, but the condition is Cork. Writing on the novel elsewhere, I could only go as far as referring to it as being set “in Ireland,” because while it’s staged in Dublin, it’s dripping in Cork. The rain it so masterfully emphasizes is Cork rain. Danny is a great writer and character, and so, we will claim all that he does.

Cork’s attitude toward its writers reflects a deeper characteristic: a palpable exceptionalism that betrays a genuine sense of disassociation from the rest of Ireland that exists in the imagination of Corkonians, a notion satirically known as the People’s Republic of Cork. People from Cork see an otherwise socio-politically complicated map of Ireland in very simple terms: Cork / Not Cork.

It is unsurprising that such a context has given rise to a thriving literary scene in Cork—modern Irish literature may belong to Dublin, but the contemporary situation is entirely different. Contemporary Irish literature belongs to Cork.

As Ireland’s second-largest city, Cork has always had a strong literary community. But the wealth of writing to be encountered in Leeside is a consequence of strategic and sustained investment in the practices that make literature happen by a selection of local organizations across the city and county. Among these is University College Cork, through whose gates many of Munster’s most-fabled storytellers have passed. UCC is present throughout the lineage of Cork literature; Seán Ó Faoláin, Theo Dorgan, Maurice Riordan, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and Billy Ramsell are just a few of the institution’s graduates, while the current staff includes—among many others—Leanne O’Sullivan, Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh, Mary Noonan, Graham Allen, John Fitzgerald, Cal Doyle, Mary Morrissy, Martín Veiga, Eimear Ryan, John Mee and Eibhear Walshe, who oversees UCC’s highly respected MA program in Creative Writing. There is enough talent just within UCC to sustain a generation of artistic practice. But universities, in their ability to hold and distribute cultural capital, enjoy considerable influence over who “makes it,” and thus tend to accumulate such cohorts through either recruitment or elevation.

Beyond UCC’s lesser-known southwestern gates, up and over Fort Street and down Barracka, is Douglas Street, where one finds Frank O’Connor House, home of the Munster Literature Centre, founded in 1993. A traveler entering this house and making their way to the top floor—some three or four narrow flights high—will come upon a small attic space crammed with books and space heaters. There are two workspaces in this room, one of which is usually occupied by Patrick Cotter. An award-winning poet, Cotter is director of the Munster Literature Centre, which has flourished throughout his tenure, becoming an exemplar of how a not-for-profit artistic organization should function. Currently, the MLC organizes the Cork International Poetry Festival and Cork International Short Story Festival—possibly two of the biggest such festivals in Europe—as well as innumerable workshops, readings and competitions. There are many unsung heroes behind the pages of any successful book, and Cotter has long been an unsung hero within Cork literary circles.

There is much more, most notably Ó Bhéal, a weekly Monday night meeting organized by Paul Casey. Ó Bhéal is mad. Hosted in the Long Valley Bar, it is the fight club of Cork literature. There are some rules, as evident in the Five Words Competition, and open-mic readers are requested to refrain from epics. Poetry marathons that break midnight on a school night are not for everyone, but for anyone wishing to see a literary community, unified and raucous and productive, this is it.

That’s what literary communities should be: unified. They should be more than pyramid schemes designed to help some and not others. They should be about education, about collegiality and reciprocity. It excites me to see Cork’s literary stars—Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Lisa McInerney, Danny Denton—gaining increasing recognition, nationally and beyond. As a Corkonian, their stories are my stories, and I take pride in their telling as you would the hurlers winning an All-Ireland. There is reciprocity, the fact that their words can be used as anchors when you begin to drift.

When I was a 15-year-old secondary school student wasting most of my time with assholes, my English teacher, Michael Sexton, took my class to a reading at the Granary Theatre to mark Cork’s stint as the European Capital of Culture. Prior to this event, English was just a subject for me, a thing I liked in school because it was easier than science. Then, I heard Cónal Creedon read “The Cure.” I heard him describe my city in smells. I could smell the crusty bread, the molten sugar, the oak casks, the sherbet, the malt and fish. I was compelled to feel, experiencing more than could be accomplished with any nodge. I came away from the Granary with a sense of what I wanted to do with my life, with a sense that I wanted to belong to a community like this, to save myself from something. I didn’t even know what it was I wanted to save myself from, or if it really would have been all that bad, but I wanted to save myself, nonetheless. So I did.

When literary communities become about authors instead of people, they have failed. Cork’s literary community is still—for the most part—about its people; its characters.

JAMES O’SULLIVAN lectures at University College Cork. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Irish Times, the SHOp, Cyphers and Southword.

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By the late 1990s, 80 percent of all logging in the Amazon was illegal. There were few incentives to replant trees, and this led to a loss of habitat and biodiversity and overhunting of the wildlife. Instead of replanting the trees that were lost, farmers converted some of what remained to agricultural use or as pasture for cattle. Elsewhere, ranchers clear-cut forests to use for cattle grazing by setting fires. Today, cattle ranching accounts for 80 percent of current deforestation throughout the Amazon region. Gold mining has expanded since the early 2000s. Miners dredge rivers and mix liquid mercury with the sediment in order to separate out the gold. But there’s little regulation. Gold mining causes deforestation, and the extraction process pollutes the air and rivers.

The Brazilian photojournalist Victor Moriyama has been documenting the impact of logging, burning, ranching and mining on the Amazon for years. Based in São Paulo, he was part of the New York Times teams that won the George Polk Award for investigative reporting and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 2022. Moriyama specializes in documenting rural conflicts, the battles to conserve tropical forests, the genocide of Indigenous populations and the impact of climate change.

His photographs of the Amazon tell a story of destruction: a forest has been clear-cut, leaving just stumps, loamy soil, clumps of grass and burnt spindles where trees once stood; workers, their faces weathered, process the wood; images chart the destruction of forests by fire from both the ground and the air; villagers cover their noses and mouths with their hands in a dense fog of smoke; herds of cattle dominate cleared areas of forest; dead fish lie on the ground next to a stream, victims of the toxic fallout of mining. It’s a bleak but necessary visual depiction of the myriad negative forces acting on one of the most biodiverse places on the planet.

VICTOR MORIYAMA is a Brazilian photojournalist based in São Paulo covering South America and the Amazon rainforest for The New York Times, the international press and NGOs. Concerned about the scarcity of in-depth reports on conflicts in the Amazon, Moriyama created @historiasamazonicas, a community of Latin American photographers committed to documenting contemporary processes taking place in the Amazon.

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The Call of the Wild in the Age of Convenience by Jeff Howe
photographs by Kent Vertrees
Stranger’s Guide: US National Parks

In August of 2019, I go into the mountains. I leave behind my wife and my children, my work and assignments, my students and a long list of chores. I leave behind the developments and scandals and fast-breaking scoops that daily demand my attention. I go to the deep backcountry of Yellowstone National Park so that I might “learn the news,” as John Muir once wrote. Because, he lamented, “I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men.”

The news, it turned out, was good. It had been a wet, cool, summer, so the alpine wildflowers were still in bloom, the rivers were full and the fish were healthy and hungry. Early one morning a friend and I leave our campsite and begin working our way up the headwaters of the Lamar River in Yellowstone National Park. This was well off-trail, and animal tracks—bison and elk and mule deer, mostly—outnumbered the few footprints in the gravelly sandbars we cross. We catch a lot of fish, close to 40 between us, most of them healthy Yellowstone cutthroat trout that are native to the greater ecosystem here and in decline everywhere else. They are named not for any behavioral malice, but for the scarlet slash on the underside of their jaw. The lower portion of their body is painted in shades of gold, ochre, olive and black spots cluster densely at the tail. Individual fish have wildly varying patterns though, and every time I catch another one I fall in love all over again.

It isn’t easy to leave the river, even after the sun slips behind the canyon wall, even after the bite goes cold, even after realizing there isn’t enough daylight to retrace our steps back down the river. The dark is dangerous in the mountains. It gets down to freezing and predators lose their inhibitions. On the other hand, the best fish is the one lying in wait just around the bend. Finally, the instinct to survive overpowers the lure of one last cast. We shoulder our daypacks and start switch-backing up a steep hill to look for a route back to our campsite. This is high country, over 7,000 feet, and the scramble up leaves us breathless, our bare legs etched in red from the thorns and thistle.

We eventually crest a saddle between two buttes, and the whole Lamar River Valley comes into view, its rolling meadows bathed in an orange glow from the setting sun. In the distance, a herd of bison works its way slowly through the sage. “It really is the American Serengeti,” Kent says. If you stood here long enough, you would see the wolves come out of the forest to harry the bison, as well as the pronghorn and elk that all graze the flora down to their roots, creating the wide, open vistas that have drawn people to this spot for thousands of years, mostly to hunt but also to pray. We stand in silence for a moment, then study the map.

“Is that Cache Creek?” I ask, pointing to where the folds of open plain dove out of sight into a forested canyon.

“It must be,” Kent says. He points out the game trails—paths worn to bare dirt from the hooves of countless animals over at least as many years—that converge off in the distance. “If we can get down to those trails, they’ll lead to the ford, then we can get to the site from there.” We’ve been fishing and camping and climbing and skiing together for over 30 years, but he makes his living in the mountains, and I just write about them, so I follow Kent’s lead.

The sun has dipped below the ridge on the other side of the valley, this time for good. As we start back down the other side of the ridge we enter a dark thicket of lodgepole pines. This was ground zero for the great fire of 1988, which burned over one-third of the park, and the sun-bleached skeletons of dead trees cover the ground like a jumble of matchsticks, so thick that we hop from one fallen trunk to the next. It’s slow, treacherous going, and at one point my footing gives way. I fall to the ground with a thud, just missing a gnarly branch that shoots up off the trunk like a spear.

Kent looks back and gives me a hand up. “Be careful. My buddy fell down on one of those and impaled his thigh. They had to airlift him out in a chopper.” Kent has lots of these stories, each one as disconcerting as the last. We push on, anxious to break out of the thicket. It’s getting darker, and I begin to wonder if we’re even moving in the right direction. Kent stops and points to a little clearing where the underbrush is matted and flat to the ground, some large animal’s bed. Nearby is an enormous mound of feces, black as tar.

“Huh, that’s pretty fresh,” Kent says.

“Is that bear scat?”

“Yup. From this morning or last night.” Kent says this without expression. We keep walking. Bears are the backpacker’s bogeyman—the topic around every campfire and trailhead. During the 10 days I spend in Yellowstone, my bear spray will be literally attached to my hip or next to my pillow as I sleep. Bear sightings are common in Yellowstone, and they usually aren’t dangerous, until they are. Every year, on average, someone will be attacked by bear, and sometimes they die. Following some simple rules can decrease the risk, but we’re breaking most of those rules at the moment: We’re hiking off trail, in bear country, right in the kind of thickly forested areas grizzlies like the best. And we’re hiking at dusk, when both predators and their prey are most active.

Ten minutes later we emerge from the woods back into open country. We find a bison trail that takes us downslope to the promised ford, and from there, just as darkness descends in earnest, back to our camp. It’s been a 20-mile day, and I would like to crawl right into my tent, but there’s a lot that needs to done. Kent puts water on to boil, and I go to a copse of lodgepole pines to retrieve our food, which hangs some 20 feet in the air, suspended from a horizontal trunk hung high above. There are deep gouges in the trees from where a bear once tried to get to someone’s food. Sitting on a nearby log, I strip off my wading boots, three sets of socks, and the gauze and tape I’ve inexpertly applied to my ravaged toes. My old blisters have begot new blisters. I dress them and bundle up in dry layers. We eat in silence, then go to bed. A full moon casts a pale glow over the valley, and for a moment, I think snow has blanketed the American Serengeti.

…

Only two percent of visitors to Yellowstone camp out in the backcountry, which has given rise to a great irony: Some of worst traffic in America lies a mile or two from the wildest country in the lower 48 states. I’ve sat in traffic for 30 minutes behind people peering breathlessly through their binoculars at a herd of bison, then found myself walking through the same herd before the hour is out.

So are 98 percent of Yellowstone’s visitors missing out? Maybe. On the other hand, it’s a reasonable decision to opt for the relative safety of prescribed hotels and campgrounds. In order to secure a backcountry permit at Yellowstone, one must watch a 20-minute safety video delineating the many hazards one encounters in the park. You could be struck by lightning, or suffer terrible burns from a fumarole, steam vent, or mud pot. People regularly run afoul of the quarrelsome bull bison, and gorings are not uncommon. Nor is stalking moose or elk to be advised, as these animals also outweigh the average human by many hundreds of pounds. Then there are the rattlesnakes, and the simple danger of becoming lost, or suffering from hypothermia in a part of the world where the temperature can drop 70 degrees in the course of an afternoon. The last 10 minutes of the video are devoted strictly to bears. “We cannot guarantee your safety,” the narrator notes toward the end, giving the impression that, while the park can’t openly forbid you from staying in the backcountry, they’d sleep better at night knowing you’d decided to stick to the RV.

One night I decide to relax and just pitch a tent at one of the official campgrounds. One after another turns out to be full, but before I can despair, an older couple offers to let me pitch my tent next to their camper.

“Aren’t you worried about bears?” asks a woman named Linda. Every summer she and her husband Steve drive their Honda Goldwing up from Alabama, sleeping in a small pop-up camper. I tell her yes, which is true. No one who has watched Leonardo DiCaprio get mauled by a bear in the movie The Revenant sleeps easy when grizzlies are around. As the three of us sit around the tailgate to my rented SUV, our conversation meanders, touching on college football and the schism between Harley people and, well, everyone with a Honda or a Triumph. Then, it swings back to the park and why we’ve come here. We’re watching the sun set against the Thunderer Range, which rockets up out of the Lamar Valley in a sheer, vertical face. It becomes clear that we’re here for the same reason—the mountain air, the stunning vistas, etc.—and yet different reasons altogether. Linda and Steve are on vacation. I’m here because I’m broken, for the same reasons any of us break—too much work, a death I expected, and one that I didn’t, a president indifferent to any noble purpose. And when I’m broken I come to the mountains. The wilderness can’t fix me, but it can make me feel whole for awhile. The truth is that there are probably 4,114,999 reasons to visit Yellowstone, which is to say, one for every person who visited the park in 2018. And it may not matter. The park isn’t really here for us, anyway.

II

In the summer leading up to my 21st birthday, I decided to take some time off from college. One of my best friends had moved to San Francisco, and she was living in a squat with two club promoters from Ireland. By the standards of my life in Ohio, her life seemed interesting and glamorous, even if they couldn’t afford toilet paper all the time. The fact that the Irish squatters were also dealing ecstasy wasn’t my primary motivation, but it didn’t discourage me much, either. A few weeks before I was supposed to leave, my friend announced she was returning to Columbus. The scene in San Francisco, she explained, had gotten way too heavy. I’d already missed the deadline to register for fall classes, so I needed a backup plan. I decided to go live in the woods.

That these two propositions seemed more or less synonymous in my mind—become a club kid; spend three months alone in the mountains—says a lot about my state of mind in 1991, as well as the milquetoast counter-culture of the Midwestern United States of that era, in which frat boys might spend their summers following the Grateful Dead before preparing for a career in corporate law.

By mid-August, I was in the Mount Jefferson Wilderness of Central Oregon. I was alone, I was scared, and becoming aware that my primary motivation for doing this was because it sounded cool to the spritely hippy girls back at Ohio University. And then, on the fourth night everything changed. Four days of cloudless skies had given way to a blanket of low, dark cloud cover. In the city the clouds are an abstraction, a thing that lies above and beyond you. In the mountains, you walk among the clouds. The breathtaking vistas disappear, replaced by dark and foreboding shapes that reluctantly resolve into forest and rock formations. If you’re already lonely and scared, and I was very much both those things, it creates a very gloomy atmosphere. Eventually I found an old lean-to and pitched my tent inside it, trying to put multiple layers between myself and the wild. Outside, the wind howled through the fir and the hemlock, and it began to drizzle.

I don’t know how to explain what happened next; some of the most profound transformations we barely notice at the time. When I woke, the weather front had moved on, and my depression and dismay had lifted with it. It’s not that I felt any less alone—it’s that I stopped. I spent the next 12 weeks in some of the most remote parts of Oregon and Washington. I rarely encountered other people, and had so few conversations that, when my father picked me up at the end of my trip, I had to accustom myself to hearing my voice out loud again. For months afterward my dreams were full of long, slow pans of bird’s-eye views over the terrain I’d covered, as if part of me was still in the woods.

I came back a different person, though that wasn’t immediately evident at the time. The things I saw were beautiful, imposing, and sublime. I experienced periods of exaltation and transcendence. But none of this, I would eventually come to understand, changed me. In the mountains, living alone, every decision had consequence. The stakes were always high, but only for me. The universe would be unaffected by my passing.

Nature, Joseph Conrad once wrote, isn’t for or against you, but it’s highly intolerant of error. I had entered the woods an overgrown man-child, lacking both confidence and competence. I left it in possession of a soul.

III

In the beginning, there was no wilderness. There was just the world, and we were in it. The latest offshoot from the hominid family tree, Homo sapiens looked like it would also be the runt. We were slender, delicate creatures, burdened with large, calorie-guzzling brains in an age of brawn, ill-adapted for survival in an environment that was short on foodstuff and long on sharp-toothed predators. The early chapters of our collective biography make for dull and pitiable reading. For several hundred thousand years, we supplemented a meager diet of fruits and nuts by scavenging the kills of larger, better outfitted carnivores. Unlike our more robust brethren like the Denisovans or Neandertal, we remained home, an unimportant species largely confined to a few marginal valleys in Eastern and Southern Africa, our population rarely exceeding the size of a small Midwestern town.

We should forgive our ancestors if they failed to regard nature as awesome or wondrous or sublime. The mountains wanted to freeze us, the winters to starve us, the fauna to eat us, the flora to poison us. Nature, so to speak, was the leading cause of death for almost our entire existence. Around 70,000 years ago, anthropologists believe, our species crossed a threshold. Having survived a genetic bottleneck that may have reduced our numbers to fewer than 40 “breeding pairs,” sapiens began a slow but sure ascent. Our tools, heretofore limited to simple hand axes, grew more complex. We learned to cooperate, and by working together, evolved from scavengers into predators. Our language, according to at least some theories, became more complex, allowing us to achieve greater levels of cooperation. Our population expanded, and we crossed out of Africa and spread our seed across the land, eventually outcompeting all the other hominids we found in our way. Homosapiens were on their way.

Agriculture, in the larger sweep of our history, is a relatively recent phenomenon. Once the central epiphany—nature, the wilderness, is malleable; we can bend it to our will—spread, we quickly learned to apply it to all manner of lifeforms, from ungulates like horses, cattle, goats and sheep, to all the seed-bearing plants of the forest and field. A restless, migratory species settled down. Homosapiens flourished and multiplied, gathering into ever larger communities in fertile valleys carved out by the Indus and Nile and Yellow rivers. We surrounded these cities with walls, for the first time creating a barrier between us and the world. The wild, the place outside the walls, out beyond the field, up high in the mountains and deep in the forest, was born. It was fearsome and powerful, symbolized by mythical beasts with terrible appetites and gnashing teeth. For several thousand years, nature continued to be an opponent, an instrument of divine wrath, the anvil against which heroes were forged. This struggle with a cosmos that bestowed grain and fish and wine but exacted a terrible cost must have seemed as enduring as the ocean or the stars.

Then, quite suddenly and to our general surprise, we won. Curiosity, that most human of attributes, led to inquiry, and inquiry led to a flurry of discoveries, We began to discern that nature had rules and that we could learn them, and exploit them. In short order, the scientific revolution led to the industrial revolution. Nature could not compete with the cotton gin, the sawmill, or the repeating rifle. With our longtime foe finally subdued, we had to invent the wilderness all over again.

By the late eighteenth century, that project was already well underway. In 1768, James Watt built his first prototype of a steam engine, Captain James Cook left Plymouth harbor on his way to discover Australia and an Anglican vicar named William Gilpin published a book that forever changed how we would look at the world around us. An Essay on Prints was essentially an extended treatise on composition in the visual arts, but it popularized a term—the “picturesque”—that was “expressive of that particular kind of beauty, which is agreeable in a picture.” A painter himself, Gilpin went on to publish a series of guidebooks to the English countryside, which advised readers not just on what to see, but also how to see it. Gilpin proved so influential that the tableau of well-born tourists traipsing through the English countryside with canvas and watercolors in hand, looking for a vista that was “rough” yet also “varied,” with a “dark foreground,” and if at all possible, containing a ruined abbey or castle for “consequence.”

“The past,” observed the British writer L. P. Hartley, “is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” It is hard for us to imagine that, until Gilpin and the rise of English romanticism of which he was a part, there was no appreciation for the scenic. In America, this evolution toward a new way of seeing, of making the wilderness beautiful, took an especially long time, possibly because the battle to subdue nature was taking place long after most of the world had already hemmed in its forests with fields and harried the last of its wolves up into the highest reaches. Our forests, on the other hand, seemed dense and boundless, and our mountains were recognized as barriers to the country’s growth and development. In America, it took a bizarre tragedy, and the morbid curiosity it inspired, for us to begin aestheticizing nature.

…

On the night of August 28, 1826, Samuel Willey and his family heard a foreboding rumble. They had moved to the White Mountains the previous year, and they tended a small farm at the foot of Mount Washington, then believed to be the country’s highest peak. A torrential storm had blown in that night, and great swaths of the slopes hanging over the Willey house were beginning to give way. Fearing for their lives, Samuel Willey, his wife, their five children, a hired man, and a boy took flight from their home. When the neighbors arrived the following day, they found the beds mysteriously unmade and a Bible lying open on the kitchen table. The Willey family, the hired man and the boy had fled right into the path of the landslide. Three of the bodies were never recovered. The house had been spared, the river of mud and rock and shattered timber parting at a ridge just above their home, then joining again just below it. A miracle, in reverse.

The bizarre tragedy made the headlines in all the Eastern papers, and soon sightseers were trickling into the valley to witness the Willey house’s mute testimony to the vagaries of chance. The locals were quick to capitalize on people’s interest in the region, running guided horseback trips to the top of Mount Washington as well as other impressive sights in the White Mountains.

The timing was propitious. In 1825, an English painter named Thomas Cole had taken a trip to upstate New York and ended up creating America’s first artistic movement, the Hudson River Valley School. Cole found a warm reception among the prosperous merchants and professionals of New York City. It was a patriotic time—no home complete without a print of George Washington—and well-heeled art patrons were eager to show that America was just as picturesque— moreso!—than anything in the old country. Within a year Cole had brought his canvas and palette to the Willey house.

A host of America’s artists and intellectuals followed in his wake: Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a series of newspaper sketches and short stories from the locale and Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote the founding document of transcendentalism, “On Nature,” four years after returning from the White Mountains.

In her book, Inventing New England, the historian Dona Brown makes a persuasive case that the hoteliers, tour guides, railways and tradespeople effectively partnered with America’s budding creative class to sell the country on the scenic getaway as a form of recreation. The very idea of leisure was novel in the Jacksonian era—still considered a sinful indulgence in strict religious circles. But by the 1850s, thousands of Americans from both working and professional classes were supporting this nascent tourist industry.

“By the 1850s,” Brown writes, “an infrastructure was in place to prod, cajole, and threaten such tourists into the proper scenic experience of the White Mountains, whether they had been trained for it or not. Developing the tourist industry also “developed” tourists: It transformed masses of people into scenic consumers.” The White Mountains created the template that would ultimately result in the 419 protected areas, among them 61 national parks, 84 national monuments and 19 national preserves in the United States, to say nothing of the additional 154 national forests. It is a reach to say that our national parks started with a painting, but it is true that before we could protect the wilderness we needed to be taught to see it.

IV

In Europe, the most desirable land belonged to those who could afford to buy it. The exclusion of the public—from the great estates of France to the English king’s vast game lands—was what established its value. Even the word “park” originates from an old German word for fence. So in 1872, when President Ulysses S. Grant signed a law creating Yellowstone National Park, America had added a new and radical variable to our democratic experiment. Unlike every available precedent, we proposed that a nation’s most priceless treasures should be owned equally by all of its citizens.

Like all experiments, this one took a lot of fiddling to get right. If Wallace Stegner was right in calling the national park America’s “best idea,” then it was one that dawned on us slowly. The bill creating the park described it as a “pleasure-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.” Americans were still a long way from protecting the wilderness for the sake of the wilderness.

Because a national park was unprecedented, people didn’t know what to do with Yellowstone. And because Congress hadn’t thought to fund their creation, there wasn’t anyone there to tell them. In fact, it was still contested land—some of the first sightseeing parties found themselves in the middle of a war. In 1876 a tourist, George Cowan, was shot in the head by a Nez Perce warrior. He survived and turned the flattened musket ball into a timepiece. The Northern Pacific Railroad arrived, swelling the mining and logging towns of Idaho, Wyoming and Montana. The railway exploited the popularity of Lewis Carroll’s recently published children’s book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, using images and language from the book in pamphlets and guidebooks to market “America’s Wonderland.”

The tourists crowded in. They hunted the elk, the pronghorn, the bear, the birds, the wolves, the mountain lion and the bison that could no longer be found on the plains. Hotels and concessionaires sprung up to serve the “excursionists,” who bleached their handkerchiefs in hot springs and threw enough coins, bottles, rags and trash into one geyser that it ceased erupting. When they left, visitors to the park hauled out fossils, rare stones, ancient artifacts, hides and anything else that might look good on the mantle or bring a fair price back home. By 1883, Americans still weren’t sure what a national park should be, but they knew what it shouldn’t be. In February, Congress kicked out the profiteers, more than doubled the park’s budget, and appointed the US Army to patrol the park, literally calling in the cavalry.

“The great wilds of our country are being rapidly invaded and overrun,” lamented John Muir, the Scottish-born father of American conservation, “and everything destructible in them is being destroyed.” The bison, which had roamed the entire continent in vast herds of 60 million, had been reduced to a single herd struggling to survive in the Yellowstone plateau. The last wild passenger pigeon, once the most numerous bird species on the planet, would be killed within a few years, victim as much to the country’s rapid deforestation as it was to overhunting.

The photos from this period provide damning testimony to the rapacious energies of that time: A pyramid of buffalo skulls rising against the flat prairie sky; a redwood, recently dispatched, that survived the entire Christian era but not the two proud teen boys in giddy delight at their own destructive powers. It’s hard not to judge, and harder still to imagine that we didn’t know better. But we didn’t: Aristotle had taught us that “nature [had] made all things specifically for the sake of man,” and the Bible commanded us to subdue the earth and have dominion over the fish and the fowl and “over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” We did not hear the dissenting voices because there were none to be heard.

Until, quietly at first, and then louder and louder, voices were raised. The great German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt theorized that nature was a giant organism, everything connected, everything dependent on everything else. John Muir brought rhapsody and theology to the wilderness, seeing salvation in the mountains, delivery from our modern sins. It was a vision in which humans were pushed to the fringe, aptly summarized by a speech Teddy Roosevelt gave to a crowd of Arizonans while whistle-stopping his way through the Grand Canyon: “Leave this as it is. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it.”

At first, Muir was, quite literally, a voice in the wilderness, but by the end of the century the United States Census Bureau had declared the frontier officially closed, and the tide began to turn. In 1890, the government created Sequoia and Yosemite National Parks; Mount Rainier gained the same status nine years later. Teddy Roosevelt, who bullied the conservationist movement onto the American stage, protected millions of acres via a system of parks, national forests and national monuments, working with Congress when he could, and behind their backs when he had to. We still were moved to protect the environment so that we might exploit it, for our souls as well as our pocketbooks, but it was a start. The American colossus bestrode the twentieth century like a conquering giant, but at home, we reserved more and more of that power to preserve some of the land in a state that pre-dated our arrival. In the end, John Muir’s vision to preserve and protect the wild carried the day. But the question I keep wondering as I wander through Yellowstone, is whether we want humans relegated to the fringes. Greenland is melting and entire ecosystems are rapidly going extinct. Has our emphatic isolation from nature protected it, or accelerated its demise?

V

About halfway through my trip, Kent and I fish the Snake River. The Snake seeps out of Heart Lake in one of the most remote parts of the park, which is to say the country. From there it meanders past the feet of the Teton Mountains before draining most of Idaho and flowing into the Columbia. It is the ying to the Yellowstone’s yang, and the rivers come within feet of each other at Two Ocean Pass. Spit in one direction and you deposit your DNA in the Atlantic; spit into the Snake and you become part of the great Pacific. There’s something exhilarating about wading across one of America’s greatest watercourses. You feel, momentarily, like you’re Paul Bunyan striding across the land. We don’t often talk about the national parks as a bulwark of American exceptionalism, but we should; it’s enough to remind one that even in the age of mendacity and strife, America contains the sublime.

Fish generally eat other fish, so you’d think someone who spends a lot of time with the species would occasionally catch one in the act. In fact, I rarely do, which is why I am surprised when Kent catches a 16-inch brown trout with a rare, Snake River fine spotted cut-throat trout sticking up from its gullet. I generally support intimate contact with the food chain—every kid should, at least once, kill a creature and then eat it, so that they’ll know that things die, every day, so that we may live. But we are fishing the headwaters of the Snake, and the brown is a distinctly unwelcome visitor to this part of the world, an immigrant— if many generations removed—from the slow reaches of Europe’s mountain streams, and a primary target in an ongoing campaign to eradicate invasive species—even if, like the Brown trout, the park put them there in the first place.

Kent calls me over to look at the brown. We take turns holding the net and examining both fish, one very much alive but guilty looking; the other small and showing every sign of having passed over to the other side. We debate what to do, then finally elect to kill the brown trout, smashing its head with a stone then cast it up onto the bank, surely making some bird or badger’s lucky day.

The National Park Service is in conflict, not with poachers or oblivious tourists or forest fires, but with a previous generation’s vision of what wilderness should be, and the way that vision sent down roots that have been difficult to extricate. In the early years of the parks system, when the government was still in the business of selling the parks in order to save them, marketing them as wonderlands of endless novelty, park managers enthusiastically managed the wildlife to the advantage of the “sportsman,” as hunters and fishers were then called. Because the wolves culled the herds of elk and deer and bison, the wolves were extirpated. Because many of Yellowstone’s rivers and lakes were isolated from lava flows, waterfalls, and other evidence of the cataclysm’s in the park’s recent geologic past, they were fishless. So the park service introduced the brown and the brook trout. The parks needed customers, and they needed them to leave happy. Without them, Congress frequently informed the park service, the parks would lose their justification for being. After all, the human wolves—the mining, logging, farming and tourist industries perched just at the edge of the parks, eager to expand their interests—were far from extinct.

By this time, however, there were voices of dissent, the most powerful ones coming from within the administration of the park service itself. A generation of young biologists had grown up reading John Muir, and were ready to fight for a vision of the park in which humans occupied the margins, as visitors, instead of the center, with the management of the wild revolving around our own concerns. People like George Melendez Wright, who in 1933 published the first survey of wildlife in the parks system, and Adolph Murie, who fought relentlessly to show that far from harming the herds of quadrupeds that were central to ecosystems like Yellowstone, they helped them grow and thrive by culling their weakest members. This vision was finally encoded into law in the Wilderness Act of 1964, so that parts of America might “retain its primeval character.” It has, for years now been the reigning paradigm of wildlife conservation.

The brown trout—not just the one we left lifeless on the bank of the Snake, but all of them living within the boundaries of Yellowstone—are both a symbol of that struggle between these two conceptions of wilderness, one long past, one vibrantly present, as well as the thing itself. The science writer David Quammen compared the trout in the Western wilds as a synecdoche, representing the larger struggle. But the truth is that this current vision of wilderness is, in its set of root presumptions, just two sides of the same coin. And just as dangerous, as it keeps us isolated and separate from the very ecosystems of which we are such a powerful element.

JEFF HOWE is an associate professor of journalism at Northeastern University. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, is a longtime contributing editor at Wired magazine and has written two books.

KENT VERTREES works with Steamboat Powdercats, one of the oldest snowcat skiing operations in Colorado, as the “Master of Chaos.” He serves as photographer on client trips.

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We asked seven California residents to describe the allure of the California dream and to question whether the state lives up to the myths and stories that precede it. Something has driven people to head west and stake their claim in this state for hundreds of years, be it the Gold Rush, Hollywood, tech or simply the dream of something better just out of reach. Here is Alicia Garza’s take on the California dream.

California is widely known for the Gold Rush, and the repopulating of California is largely centered around people going west to find prosperity, to start a new life, to innovate. People were seeking wealth, but they were also seeking a different kind of lifestyle, one with safety and dignity that is more rooted in Black communities. The migration westward and the Great Migration north was really people trying to escape segregation, racial terror and racial violence. The railroads brought people out west for prosperity, but also for dignity. Oakland in particular became a place where Black people could be prosperous. People come here to be who they are, freely.

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Frontier Town
by Chibundu Onuzo
Stranger’s Guide: Lagos

The Lagos my mother grew up in was a small city. She lived a middle-class life in a part of town that some considered a slum, playing on the streets with neighbors. My grandfather was a doctor, and other professionals lived nearby, but the neighborhood was also home to petty traders, mechanics and blue-collar workers. Since the early 1960s, Lagos has grown from a population of fewer than one million people to more than 20 million today.

My mother was raised in a part of the city called Isale Eko. It was known for street parties. Neighbors would erect canopies in the middle of the street to contain the spill out of guests from their front parlors, while loudspeakers blared music all night. The dancing went on until morning. My grandfather often got into arguments over these “‘block-road”’ parties, as they were called. He grumbled about living in the “slums” but never joined the middle-class exodus.

Lagos’s population growth is fueled mostly by migration. It is a city of travelers hoping to either find their luck or make it from scratch. My father was one such migrant. He grew up all over Nigeria, moving from the north to the east to the southwest, but he only settled in Lagos as an adult, after qualifying as a doctor. He and my mother are from different ethnic groups. He is Igbo and grew up Christian, and she is Yoruba and was raised Muslim. His parents were not wealthy, whereas her father sent her to boarding school in England.

Elsewhere in Nigeria, their relationship might have seemed “Romeo and Juliet-esque”— star-crossed lovers fighting against the prejudices of their families and the wider community. But in Lagos, there was nothing unusual about them. Interethnic, interreligious, international marriages were common. It was a cosmopolitan city, a capitalist city. Where a man was from was secondary to how much money he made. The naira, the Nigerian currency, had no caste

In many ways, my father lived the Lagos dream. After moving to the city, he and my mother founded the first private dialysis center in the nation. Lagos was fertile ground for his dreams, as London, New York and Paris have proved to be for the dreams of other migrants. Their practice was successful. At first, my family lived in the hospital, in a room at the rear of the building. Then, they moved to a nearby house and finally into a house in a private, gated estate. It was in this house that I spent almost all of my childhood. As the last born, I never experienced the early, peripatetic years.

By the time I was a child in the late 1990s, many members of the professional classes had retreated into gated communities like ours. Although Nigeria is an oil-rich country, decades of corruption and mismanagement had weakened the economy. Crime was high. If you could afford it, you and your neighbors banded together to form an estate. Ours had about thirty families. There was only one entrance, a gate manned by private security. The guards didn’t have guns, but they had flashlights, whistles, sticks and a large padlock to bolt the gate from inside.

All households in the estate paid monthly dues. In exchange, the gutters were always clear, the streetlights remained on, the roads were swept clean, rubbish was collected weekly, the gate was manned 24 hours a day and the streets were tarred. In the Lagos outside our estate, things did not run so smoothly.

Years later, I wrote my master’s dissertation on private estates in Lagos and their relative functionality. How did they stop free-riding residents who didn’t pay their dues but enjoyed the public services paid for by others? And was it possible to scale the order of private estates to the rest of Nigeria?

You couldn’t be brought to court for failing to pay your dues, as you could be for, say, not paying your taxes. Nor could you be stopped from walking on the pristine estate roads and enjoying the streetlights. But your trash could remain uncollected, forming a stinking mound outside your house, although this method was not foolproof. In the dead of night, trash from a free-rider would be moved in front of the home of their dues-paying neighbor.

Of the estates I surveyed, one of the most effective methods of coercing residents to pay their dues was public shaming. In some estates, the names of defaulters were printed in bold and hung at the gate for all to see. In others, guards at the entrance would refuse to open the gate for defaulting residents. Those people would be forced to get out of their cars, in all their finery, in full view of the world, and push open the gate themselves.

This method was effective because Lagosians are very susceptible to shame. We want to be seen by our peers to be winning, and nothing shouts “not winning” more loudly than being shamed for unpaid estate dues. Lagos engenders competition in its inhabitants, as do all cities, but nowhere else is the contest so brazen. Consider standby generators. They are common in many countries where the electricity supply is erratic (as it is in Nigeria) but in Lagos, the most common standby generators are called “I beta pass my neighbour,” which translates to “I am better than my neighbour.” You are better than your neighbour because you have a standby generator and they do not, or even if they do, yours is bigger and louder. You are better than your neighbour because your children go to private school and theirs do not, because you traveled abroad for holiday and they did not, because you drive a Range Rover and they peter through Lagos traffic in a Ford.

The conspicuous display of wealth is a hallmark of Lagos culture. “Dress the way you want to be addressed” is one popular maxim. Dress so people think you are rich, even though your account is overdrawn. We call this tireless attention to outward presentation “packaging.” We know our brands and designers. We can distinguish our Hermès from our Chanel. Lagos is the only place I know where the noun “oppressor” is used as a compliment.

Let’s say you walked into a party, decked out in designer clothes, your face beat to the gods (heavily but stylishly made up), your hair on fleek (perfectly coiffed). Friends might shout out in praise as you made your entrance: “Oppressor!” In a choice between Moses and Pharaoh, we know who we want to be: the head and not the tail. The victor, not the vanquished. Except perhaps Pharaoh is not the best example. In that story, the oppressor lost. The slaves went free.

I went to private school in Lagos. There, we enacted the neuroses of our parents on a smaller, pettier scale. We were all identically dressed in uniforms, so we found new markers of status. Shoes. Where did you buy yours? In Nigeria or abroad? Stationery. Where did you buy yours? In Nigeria or abroad? Gel pens were a particular indication of rank. Sports kit. Were your trainers Adidas, Nike or simply some unheard-of brand? We were little capitalists, little strivers, mini Lagosians, waiting to gain our majority so we could begin oppressing in earnest.

The poor of Lagos are very oppressed. They are overlooked by the government when it comes to providing welfare and infrastructure and yet targeted by the government when it comes to scapegoating a class that is stopping Lagos from becoming a “modern mega-city.” They are blamed for crime. Their dwellings are sometimes arbitrarily deemed “illegal structures” and are destroyed by government agencies. Even their jobs can be banned—hawking in parts of the city is prohibited.

The protagonist of my first novel, The Spider King’s Daughter, was a hawker. The idea came from an interview I conducted when I was about 10. My mother entered me in an essay competition, and the topic I had to write about was child labor. As part of my research, I interviewed a hawker who was under 16. I don’t know how my mother found her. We sat in a room for a couple of hours, and I asked questions and took notes. She was amused by my precociousness. “Small journalist,” she called me. Some of my questions were direct, perhaps even insensitive. If I were older, she might have thought me rude. But to be young is often to be blunt, and we spoke with frankness.

“Do you want your children to be hawkers?” I asked.

“Never. I want something better for them.”

Social mobility exists in Lagos, but the odds are heavily weighted against the poorest. The characters in my second novel, Welcome to Lagos, migrate to the city and end up homeless. They live under a bridge, the only shelter they can find. When I was researching the book, I came across many stories of people drawn from the rural parts of Nigeria by the siren song of Lagos. Lagos is where they’d make it, hammer blow (become wealthy suddenly). They come from all over Africa. They give up the close-knit kinship structures of their home towns and come to a city where everyone is a stranger. The penalties for not making it are harsh: poverty, hunger and even death.

Lagos is toughest and cruelest to the poor, but it is also hard on the middle classes and the rich. Workers can spend hours commuting to their jobs, inching forward in traffic that stretches for miles. Basic healthcare and consistent electricity come at a high cost. Many have migrated to Britain, America and Canada, but many others have stayed. Those who remain do so because of a sense of opportunity. “There is a ceiling for black people in England,” a friend who moved back to Lagos from the US said to me. “There is no ceiling for black people here. If I work hard, I can be anything I want to be. I can even be president. Show me your black prime minister.”

There is the feel of a frontier town to Lagos. The city is old, but the people are new. Few can claim to be original Lagosians. We’ve arrived for the gold rush. And, as in frontier towns, there are high stakes, and danger colors everyday, mundane activities. In the Wild West, at least that of Hollywood’s imagining, a man could walk into a saloon for a drink and end up shot dead by an outlaw. In Lagos, a person can drive to work one day and end up robbed in traffic at gunpoint.

Almost everyone has their own tale of derring-do. A friend spun a 360 on a highway because she spotted a robbery happening 100 meters ahead. My mother’s friend saw armed men approaching his vehicle and slipped out of the back seat of his car. He found his way home, changed into his sport kit and still made it down to the club for his evening game of tennis. My aunt’s neighbor was kidnapped while she was out on her morning jog. She was held in captivity until the ransom of millions of naira was paid.

And yet, Lagos remains for many the city of dreams. It is home to Nollywood, one of the largest film industries in the world. Its stars are household names in Africa and beyond. The Afrobeats industry that has birthed giants like Burna Boy, Tiwa Savage and WizKid is also headquartered in Lagos. Lagos weddings, Lagos fashion, Lagos music and Lagos films set trends that are copied worldwide.

My brother moved back to Nigeria after graduating with an economics degree from an American university and a master’s from a British university. He founded a production company with his friends and, over the course of just a few years, produced more than 10 movies, many of which you can now watch on Netflix. Would he have been as successful if he remained in England? Unlikely. According to the British Film Institute, only three percent of people working behind the camera in the British film industry are members of racial minorities.

I left Lagos when I was 14. I moved to Winchester, then to London, neither of which matched the pace of Lagos. In England, I learned that to announce your ambition was considered impolite. I learned that self-deprecation was read as modesty, and one must never admit to being good at anything. In Lagos, people said, “I am the best person for the job.” In England, people stayed silent on their qualifications.

Whenever I visit, I am always struck by an energy that has never quite left me. In England, I am conscious of trying to speak softly, of quieting my effusion, of ending sentences with full stops instead of exclamation marks. In Lagos, I am struck by the confidence and ambition of my friends and acquaintances, some of whom studied abroad before returning home. Many have started their own fashion companies. Some are presenters on television. One has founded a tech company.

Most of my Nigerian friends in England work nine-to-five jobs. Many naturalized and became British citizens. They never have to worry about running water or electricity. On weekends, they don’t write business proposals or make plans for their side hustles. They go to brunch and talk about microaggressions and how slowly they’re moving up the corporate ladder.

Will I ever return to live in Lagos? The chances are good. My parents and brother live and thrive there. The social scene is constantly evolving. Every time I visit, there are new bars, brunch spots, cafés and cinemas that have opened. On my last trip, I went to the Ake Arts and Book Festival, the Lagos Fashion and Design Week and the international art fair, ART X, all in one week.

If I do return, I’ll have to revive my inner Lagosian. I’ll have to put on the lens of a pioneer, never expecting things to work, ready to create a whole infrastructure from scratch, to build a business, then build the road to the business, then build the electricity plant to power the business. My brother always says, “Lagos is not for the faint-hearted.” Lagos welcomes nobody, and yet they come by the thousands. Because dreams do come true in Lagos, but only for those who can dream with their eyes open.

CHIBUNDU ONUZO was born in Lagos. Her first novel, The Spider King’s Daughter, won a Betty Trask award. Her second novel, Welcome to Lagos, was published in 2017.

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Before: The Found Child

By Curdella Forbes

Long ago, when teachers were sent from Britain to teach in the grammar schools of the West Indian colonies (it was Great Britain then, not Little England, as it is now, after Brexit and the fall of empire), there lived in Jamaica, near a town called Oracabessa-on-Sea, a poor fisherman and his wife, who was a farmer and a seamstress, and one morning, they found a pale child in the bushes in a basket made of reeds. The man’s name was Noah Fisher, and his wife’s name was Rachel.

They adopted the child and named him Moshe, which is to say, Moses, which in translation means “drawn out.” They named him in this way because Rachel was a Yahwehist, and because the bushes in which they found him were a tangle of sea grapes running low as a reed bed along the ground on cliffs above the sea, and when she found him (for it was she who first saw the child) the spray from below had made a pool around the basket so that in another few moments it would have sailed. Which is to say that in a manner of speaking, the little boy was indeed drawn out of water.

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Blow, Man, Blow
by Gwen Thompkins
Stranger’s Guide: New Orleans

On April 22, 1959, an elderly Black woman, a former housemaid, sat down with two white men at a friend’s place in New Orleans for a long chat. Never mind that they were breaking state mixing laws, which made most socializing across the color line illegal. Had she been their servant, it would have been okay. But she wasn’t. When the men turned on their tape recorder, she said in a strong voice:

I’m Stella Oliver, the widow of King Joe Oliver. We married in 1912, July the 13th. He was a fine man, a fine husband and a fine musician. We got along beautifully together. We traveled around, had our ups and downs together, but we still stuck. And I’m happy to say this morning that I’m glad to say a few words about Joe. He’s dead now. Nearly 18 years. He died (in) ’38. And I miss him up ’til now. However, his name has lived in the public. He was a great musician and a great man. Everybody loved him. And I still love him, too.

She then described the cornet and trumpet player so central to the story of jazz worldwide as a wife would, sharing details that informed the great musical traditions of New Orleans, including the city’s funeral parades. Of the many rituals of New Orleans, perhaps none captures the spirit of its people more profoundly than the brass band chorus leading them from this world to the next. Oliver didn’t invent the jazz funeral, but he found his voice on those long parade routes, setting in motion much of what jazz would become.

Some of his story the world already knew. The men interviewing Stella were making the recording for what was then the Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University, a collection that was built, in part, on the legacy of King Oliver’s musical significance. Oliver, who’d opened the 20th century in New Orleans as a teenaged yard boy-turned-butler-turned-musician, and later starred in the Magnolia and Onward brass bands, is said to have blown down every cornet king in the red light district, a.k.a “The District,” a.k.a. Storyville. He was a favorite on other New Orleans streets, as well, before lighting up Chicago in 1918 and then 1922 with dream bands plucked mostly from home—Johnny St. Cyr on banjo, Bill Johnson on bass, Honoré Dutrey or Kid Ory on trombone, Louis Armstrong on second cornet, the Dodds brothers on drums and clarinet. Each player brought something shiny to the whole, but, as any jazz musician knows, the first cornet (or trumpet) always leads the band. Oliver was a big man, and he stomped New Orleans into the pilings of the many mansions of jazz, one song after another, with his great big foot: “Dippermouth Blues,” “Sweet Like This,” “St. James Infirmary,” “Canal Street Blues,” “Dr. Jazz,” “Mabel’s Dream,” “Alligator Hop,” “Chimes Blues,” “Shake It and Break It,” “Wa Wa Wa.” Black and white musicians mimicked his style on bandstands everywhere—not just the power, but also the tenderness, the fragility. Oliver’s groundbreaking use of plungers and mutes added new dimensions to the music. He could make his horn laugh. But he could also make it whinge. Or moan. Or weep.

Stella knew all about that. She also knew about experiences that made the outsized Oliver an artist with plenty to say. Born upriver from New Orleans in 1885, Joe had been in short pants when his father, a Baptist minister, died. Stella said his mother brought him to the city to make a new start but died soon after, leaving him an orphan. Taken in by a Jewish family near Magazine and Second streets, he lived on the premises, with privileges to come and go as he pleased as long as the garden was tidy. When there was no girl next door, he married the one around the corner—two houses down. He told her about “raising himself ” from a young age. About washing out on the trombone. About the time he lost sight permanently in his left eye. About how difficult it was for an honest man to make a living in a city riddled with vice. And, perhaps most interestingly for music fans, he told her about not being fond of playing dirges at New Orleans funeral parades, the saddest songs at the saddest tempos, accompanying the dead on the saddest stretch of the route. “But he’d have a great time coming back” from the cemetery, Stella said. “I’m telling you, that man could blow.”

In New Orleans, live bands have been escorting the dead to eternal rest since the end of the Civil War. That’s when a flood of musical instruments from various military bands filled the pawn shops, making it easier for locals to not only learn to play, but to find new uses for music in public life. And while Black as well as white bands accompanied funerals for years, the tradition has endured among Black residents. Long denied burial insurance by white-owned companies, generations of Black New Orleanians raised money and financed their own funeral traditions through a hodgepodge of homegrown benevolent societies later known as social aid and pleasure clubs. A few cents a week, a quarter, a dollar, or more could pay for a kind of consideration in death that few experienced in life. Locals called their tradition “putting away” a member of their community before the processions became known as “jazz funerals.” And without the income those parades generated, elite musicians like Joe Oliver would not have been able to keep performing, to keep improving, and to keep cooking the music until it was hot. Oliver performing on the street made others begin to recognize him as the artist he was. It’s doubtful that anyone other than he could have enticed Armstrong to leave New Orleans for Chicago and subsequently imprint jazz onto the world. Nor might Duke Ellington have found the wah wah sound he needed to establish his fresh, new jungle style in New York. A funny man by all accounts, Oliver took his playing seriously. During funeral parades, he reportedly marched at times on city sidewalks, apart from his bandmates in the streets. That way, he could avoid stumbling into a pothole while blowing—and potentially breaking a note.

Within the dramatic arts, there are formulas for tragedy. In ancient Greece, the playwright Sophocles doomed Oedipus Rex in roughly five parts, beginning with a prologue and ending with a final exodus. Shakespeare dispatched with King Lear in five acts, just as he did with Othello, Macbeth and so many others. In Oliver’s time, New Orleans funeral parades took six acts or more, beginning with the band(s) escorting the body from home to the funeral and onward, then later returning to the bereaved family’s home to eat and play a little while longer. But nowadays, if the cemetery is near, locals can get the job done in five:

One: Someone has to die, which tourists often have a hard time remembering when they ask to see a funeral parade.

Two: There must be a ceremony honoring the deceased, preferably a wake and a service of some kind.

Three: The family and friends of the deceased accompany the casket to the cemetery at the beginning of a cortege, including a police escort and a brass band or bands playing a variety of hymns. Songs like “The Old Rugged Cross,” “Flee as a Bird,” and “Nearer My God To Thee” are rendered solemnly, as dirges, in a rhythm as slow and draggy as you please, through the streets of the city. This is the part of the parade that King Oliver did NOT enjoy.

Four: On the outskirts of the cemetery, the band goes quiet while the family, clergy and friends say their final farewells, i.e., “cut the body loose.” As the trumpet player Henry “Red” Allen recalled, “the band would stand in the road and wait until the moans and the cries went up, which meant that the preacher was saying ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust’ and throwing the dirt on the coffin. Then the drums rolled like thunder.”

Five: Turning away from the cemetery, the band strikes up a series of happy songs while accompanying the funeral participants and the social aid and pleasure club members who’ve collected money over the years to make the funeral possible. Together, they make up the first line of the parade. They are followed by a second line of friends and strangers who dance, often buck-jumping, along the streets and sidewalks. The priority then is to celebrate the life of the departed, as well as that person’s newly found freedom from the burdens of the world. The revelers also are celebrating their own lives, with the understanding that they, too, will be cut loose at the cemetery one day. That’s why the musicians play bright numbers like “Didn’t He Ramble” and “Down By the Riverside.” And, at some point, the people will sing:

By and by, when the morning comes,
All the saints of God is gathering home
We’ll tell the story how we’ll overcome
We will understand it better by and by

An old-school traditional jazz funeral is an awesome sight, depicting a community in grief and triumph over the sins of the world. Anyone who has experienced it never forgets:

“The bass drummer pounded a somber cadence: Boom … Boom … Ba-DOOM!” clarinet player and author Tom Sancton wrote in his memoir Song for My Fathers. He’d been to the 1954 funeral parade for bandleader Oscar “Papa” Celestin.

“Then the horns and the woodwinds went up just like these golden, swirling colors, reaching up,” the documentarian and author Jason Berry said on the public radio show, Music Inside Out. He was describing the 1973 funeral parade for Preservation Hall’s DeDe Pierce.

“The musicians swayed like elephants as they marched, leaning first to one side, then to the other,” Sancton continued. “Trailing behind the bands, five thousand men, women and children formed the second line of this unwieldy procession …”

“I just stood there riveted by it,” Berry said.

“The dirge music had calmed them,” Sancton remembered. “But it was clear … that the second liners were waiting to cut loose and dance to the hot music that would erupt once Papa was in the ground.”

“And then, when they hit ‘Didn’t He Ramble,’ ... I had never seen anything like it,” Berry said. “It was one of the most beautiful moments of my life.”

“That was the New Orleans way,” Sancton wrote.

“These funerals went according to the Bible,” said trumpet player Henry “Red” Allen. “Sadness at birth and rejoicing at death.” Their momentum also bends toward catharsis, defined by the ancient Greeks as an emotional purging that, in the face of tragedy, uplifts the human spirit. In blowing horns, or beating drums, or dancing, or waving handkerchiefs and singing loudly, those who participate in a jazz funeral are not only bearing witness to the terrifying spectacle of death, they are freeing themselves from the flood of feeling that attends death.

And yet, not every musician feels the same way about the look and sound of jazz funerals—the music, the clothes, the politics. Armstrong, for example, embraced the full pageant of emotion in the brass band funereal repertoire. (“You really have a bunch of musicians playing from the heart,” he said.) But Oliver, apparently, did not.

PICK UP THE PACE

“He didn’t like dirges,” Stella says on the tape. But “Joe was always crazy about the hymns … He would take some of those church songs … and he would fix it up.” Just as he did with work songs and railroad songs. New Orleans brass bands have been turning sad music hot for as long as anyone can remember, and Oliver apparently sizzled his share. “When the Saints Go Marching In,” for instance, began as a dirge on the streets of the city. But after the old New Orleans brass bands swung it and Armstrong made his famous 1938 recording, “The Saints” became a rollicking anthem, as well as inspiration for an NFL franchise.

In reimagining hymns and pacing up dirges, Oliver may have been distancing himself from the weight of tragedy. Perhaps he’d had enough. Unlike Armstrong—the phenom—whom he and Stella had showered with attention, Oliver had no parents, no mentor, no formal schooling, no financial safety net, no business acumen and, owing to a love of sugar water and sugar sandwiches, eventually no teeth. Armstrong said “Papa Joe” had lost much of his strength blowing the horn as early as 1923. By 1935, his playing days were done.

HATS OFF

Musicians disagree—just like everybody else. And there’s no telling how Oliver would have landed on the matter of uniforms at funeral parades. On the streets, he and his contemporaries wore coats and shirts of cream and blue, blue and white, but most often black and white, with their shirts and trousers ironed and their shoes buffed. They also wore some form of hat—black for funerals and white for other events. The tradition has continued for more than a century and, for some, continues still. But in recent decades, brass band players in New Orleans have differed over whether their clothes should be as hot as their music. What traditionalists view as a source of pride—a disciplined brass band looking sharp, professional and playing in tune—others now resist.

Practically speaking, milkman’s hats, jackets and starched trousers in the subtropics can be a misery for a musician outdoors, and in New Orleans, it is almost always summer. Even Oliver, more than a century ago, would drape a handkerchief over the back of his neck to avoid the sun. Stella used to follow him on the parade route, often for miles, feeding him boiled eggs for strength.

Beginning in the 1970s, young musicians in the Hurricane and the Dirty Dozen Brass Bands began to wear T-shirts and sneakers on the parade route. By the time the Grammy award-winning Rebirth Brass Band got going in the 1980s with their anthem “Do Whatcha Wanna,” the traditionalists were a minority.

ON MIXING AND MATCHING

Hats and uniforms also may have lost their allure among young Black musicians who see themselves as representing a more modern social consciousness. Race has always mattered in music, and for a long time New Orleans, musicians had to be especially cautious about how they comported themselves if they wished to remain unmolested in the city. That’s because Louisiana did not abide racial mixing for most of the 20th century, despite the fact that music, by its very nature, mingles. A general climate of police harassment helped push Oliver out of New Orleans after World War I, and anti-mixing laws once kept Armstrong and his integrated All-Stars out of the city for a nine-year stretch. Even after the 1954 US Supreme Court decision banning segregation, Black and white musicians often struggled to perform together in public. In those days, the uniforms that Black brass bands traditionally wore likely assured segregationist authorities that the wearers were not socializing with white audiences as equals. People still remember how the laws then could be interpreted as broadly or as narrowly as an individual police officer saw fit. “Blacks and whites could be together in Preservation Hall,” Sancton, the white clarinet player and author, told Music Inside Out. “The band could be Black ‘cause, let’s face it, they were hired help. But mixing, in any social way, in any personal human way, was technically against the laws. All of that ended with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But my experience with this started in 1962. So for two years, every time I went to (Black clarinet player) George Lewis’ house, or he came to our house, we’d sneak.”

And yet, uniforms are not necessarily about race. New Orleans-born jazz raconteur and rhythm guitarist Danny Barker (1909–1994) preferred the optics of his youth—when brass bands looked resplendent as distinct and cohesive entities and played the dirges and other songs in their traditional order. Some of those players, like Oliver, were his heroes and mentors, whose greatness had almost nothing to do with what white people thought of them. As self-made artists, they were incandescent. In 1970, he created the Fairview Baptist Christian Church Marching Band—an inspired collection of Black boys and men from ages 8 to 18 that rekindled youthful interest in brass band music. Barker, a Black man from a large musical family, told Fairview members first-hand about the New Orleans pantheon of musical greats, many of whom he’d followed in the second lines across the city. He also shared his experiences performing with the likes of Cab Calloway and Armstrong, Charlie Parker and Billie Holiday. As a mentor, he reminded the young players of their musical birthright as sons of a city unlike any other in the world. Whatever he said worked. Many of the Fairview members have enjoyed long professional careers in jazz and other forms of popular music.

Without the Fairview, which disbanded in the 1980s, there likely would be no Hurricane, Dirty Dozen or Rebirth brass bands, nor the many constellations of bands that followed. And yet, before Barker died in 1994, he asked that there not be a jazz funeral for him. To his mind, they’d gotten too casual, too crass. The musicians were dressed indistinguishably from anyone else on the street. The second lines of well-wishers were flooding the first lines of mourners. People were dancing on rooftops and pouring alcohol on caskets. Most importantly, the musical repertoires had changed. Some bands, electing to soften the blow of death, had eliminated the dirges altogether. They headed to the cemeteries playing contemporary R&B and hip hop-influenced songs. Reverence appeared to have become old hat. Only when former members of the Fairview persuaded Barker’s family that they could organize an event he’d be proud of, did his jazz funeral proceed.

Oliver never got a traditional jazz funeral. After leaving New Orleans in 1918, he didn’t go back. Ever. Stella said that was a mistake, especially when pyorrhea and other reversals stopped him from playing music. She said she was living in New York City during those final months, when he was stranded in Savannah, GA selling fruits and vegetables on the street and then tending a local pool hall. It was not an end that anyone could have predicted for a man whose triumphs and troubles furthered the reach of New Orleans jazz in such profound and wonderful ways. After he brought Armstrong up from New Orleans to Chicago in 1922, Armstrong made his first recordings with Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, which helped catapult the young genius to fame. And Oliver’s decision to turn down the Cotton Club in New York City in 1927 made way for a young Duke Ellington to take the job and begin his rise in the annals of music. Ellington nursed a life-long love for the sounds of New Orleans. He hired a slew of New Orleans musicians for his orchestra, including bassist Wellman Braud and clarinet player Barney Bigard. Even his first muse on trumpet had spent a week watching Oliver up close in Chicago and adapted his style to mimic that of the “King.”

In April, 1938, the Negro Actors Guild of America reportedly paid for Oliver’s body to be transported from Georgia to New York’s Grand Central Station. Armstrong met the train. Then, he accompanied “Papa Joe” to services in Harlem. “Most of the musicians turned out,” Armstrong later said. “The people who really knew him didn’t forget him. It would have been nice if they’d had a parade for him, but instead they took him into the chapel across from the Lafayette—that big rehearsal hall in Harlem.”

Armstrong, who attributed Oliver’s decline to physical maladies, poor business skills and an unwillingness to adapt his playing style to the changing times, nevertheless understood the enormity of his contribution to the world. “He started all of us youngsters off,” he is said to have told the mourners at the chapel. “There isn’t a riff played today that he didn’t play 15 years ago.”

And, yes, Louis played a dirge for Joe.

Armstrong talked about Oliver until the day he died. So did other musicians, whether or not they knew him personally. An internet search today reveals a long list of books and articles that mention Oliver, his best known songs, and the sweet polyphony of his Creole Jazz Band. But while everyone else describes a giant, Stella Oliver describes a man worth having. Her 1959 oral history in New Orleans may be the only record of her experiences in life, and she didn’t mind giving most of her time to her husband who’d been dead 18 years. “He was a grand fellow to know,” she said. After the interview ended, she slipped out of history without any fanfare at all.

GWEN THOMPKINS is the executive producer and host of a New Orleans-based public radio program, Music Inside Out. Currently, she’s writing a book on the Music Inside Out interviews to be published by the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Press.

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First-Person Narratives

Twenty one million people call Scandinavia home, of which almost 3.8 million are immigrants. Like almost everywhere in Europe, immigration has become a flash point in Nordic countries, pitting politicians and everyday people against one another and leaving vulnerable communities feeling unaccepted in their new homes. Though Norway, Sweden, Denmark and other countries in the region have entire economies built around welfare states and are known for being bastions of equal rights and opportunity, the increasing politicization of immigration has created tensions. Denmark is considered one of the most restrictive countries in Western Europe in regard to immigration; Sweden, the most liberal—and politicians in both countries have attacked each other. Swedish ministers called Danish asylum policy osolidarisk—disloyal—during the 2015 refugee crisis.

The people you’ll meet on the following pages are all immigrants. Some are refugees. Each has arrived at their respective destination either by choice or by circumstance, and each has had a different experience of integration. Some have experienced an initial warm welcome from their new homes, only to feel abandoned soon after. All of them have had their struggles. Their stories pose tough questions about the acceptance of immigrants in their new home countries and the challenges created by anti-immigrant sentiment from some corners of Scandinavian society.

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From Trash Heaps to Park Land
by Alexis C. Madrigal
Stranger’s Guide: California

Apple Park is perfect. A circle of glass and light, there’s a park inside the circle, complete with sports fields, health care facilities, a pond and fruit trees. The lunchroom is so bright and so white they could film a remake of 2001: A Space Odyssey in it. This may be the very center of the Bay Area that invents new things, making the old things into bricks, trash. What hold does history have on the pure light of innovation?

And yet, even here, every once in a while, someone must throw away a takeout container from the hamburger they snuck past their coworkers. The basic debris of modern life has no place here, but it must have a place. Like other trash in Cupertino, it gets trucked across the Bay to Newby Island, a waste mountain in the very southeast corner of the San Francisco Bay, which serves as the primary landfill for the heart of Silicon Valley, where Google, Intel and a host of would-be and has-been tech concerns have campuses.

Think of it as something like a watershed, but for trash. Newby Island drains some of the most expensive places on this green earth. Two of the five most expensive ZIP codes in the US are in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley sucks in money from all over the world—ad rubles from Russia, iPhone yen, Google ads placed in Ethiopia—and here, it’s used to build sweet little neighborhoods stitched with bike lanes, where a modest 3 bedroom house might run $4 million. And when little Johnny tosses out yet another broken toy, it goes to a place like Newby Island.

When you imagine a landfill, you might think of a huge, open pit. But now, it’s common practice at Newby, as well as other facilities, to cover the trash with dirt. The trash forms massive hills, with just a small patch open for dumping. At the edge of the landfill, the trash heap, covered by dirt, rises roughly 100 feet over the Bay flats. Thanks to an environmental deal cut in the 1980s—preserving a large stand of pickleweed and waterfowl habitat—you can hike a sun-baked gravel road right up to it, passing through the strangest part of the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge. On your left, waddlings of ducks hunker down in a muddy ditch. On your right, in an anonymous lot, every parked car is a Tesla.

…

The berm is made of millions of cubic feet of trash, topped with California’s characteristic dead grass. This is the hot part of the Bay, and on the day I visited last year, it was probably 100 degrees, cloudless. Down at the base of the trash heap, where the Coyote Creek Slough widened out into a few substantial acres of wetlands, it was peaceful and cooler. At the end of the trail, someone had placed three forlorn chairs facing the water, which is murky and rich with birds that twittered in the marsh grass around me. Somewhere, gently, I could hear the beeping of trucks dumping another load of garbage. It was quiet, though. A white truck came barreling down a road on the trash berm that I hadn’t noticed before. Dust rose, and then the vehicle disappeared up and into the landfill, which remained as invisible as the inside of a computer.

Today’s Bayshore is ringed by landfills, retired and still operational. At least 16 of them have been converted into parks, according to the environmental group Save the Bay. To look at these locations is to see a different Bay Area, a Bay where physical work was done, before this place came to control production, not engage in it.

You can pick out many of these former sites because they are built big and flat on the top like a dam. If you really start to look around the Bay, anywhere you see hills down at the water, you can be pretty sure those are a former landfill. We are walking on the refuse of the past, as the earth’s tiny creatures slowly convert it into a habitat.

Much of what we take to be “the land” is something more complex in the Bay’s inner ring. In Oakland, for example, there were tidal estuaries that would have made most of the west side of the city one big muddy slop pile. But we filled it into land.

Fill is literally all around the Bay. At one point, the US Commerce Department projected that by the 2020s, “the Bay could be little more than a wide river,” as the Oakland Tribune put it. Making new land was a long-established practice along the shoreline, and it was only because of major environmental activism that the practice ended in the Bay, preserving the shoreline more-or-less as it was in the 1960s. Slowly, the Bayshore became a place for recreation, not manufacturing explosives, tanning hides or dumping garbage. The jobs that relied on an ugly, polluted bay went elsewhere, taking the wages to other shores, degrading other waters. Quite a trade.

…

So, now, you can traipse along the remnants of a former gunpowder manufactory in Pinole. Or you can visit the outsider art installations on the Albany Bulb, the red valerian and their bright pink blooms cascading down some combination of rocks and bricks and cement. Hell, there is a whole island out in the middle of the Bay that was built just for one of those World Fairs in 1939. Now, Treasure Island lies mostly abandoned, but someday in the future, it could be home to thousands as developers reconstruct it into a multibillion-dollar futurescape. What alchemy!

…

It doesn’t take voyaging beyond the heart of San Francisco, though, to encounter this history. Downtown is, to a considerable degree, fill. Some ships that sailed here for the Gold Rush simply stopped and got buried over time. There are dozens just sitting there under the asphalt and cement. Workers tunneling regularly hit them. The Google spinout that produced the mixed-reality game, Pokemon Go, even took its name from one of them: Niantic.

I think a lot about whether it matters that people know this history. What does anyone care if the street was once used tires and diapers? What does it mean that there’s a ship filled with old whiskey bottles, coffee cans of buttons and Bibles under the coffee shop? The world we have now was built atop the previous generations’ hopes and wreckage.

There is great hope that through a reckoning (that is the word everyone uses), the nation will be transformed. History is imagined as an almost magical catalyst—apply it to race relations or the collapse of trade unions or coal plants, and surely something must happen. If you can see how the current structures of society are put together, if you know you are walking on trash, then maybe you will dismantle, abolish, reimagine.

Along a road in Emeryville called Shellmound, Ohlone native people once placed their own food refuse and buried their dead until they were dispossessed of their land, and it became an amusement park, and then a shopping center. People protest every few months and have for years. And yet, the sunglass cart keeps selling knock-off eyewear to the people leaving from P.F. Chang’s. As a society, we do not face up to the most basic of our dirty histories—where our trash went and how it formed the literal landscape of our lives. What chance do we ever have to tackle the other tragedies that brought our country and economy into existence?

…

Consider the landfill again. Making a landfill into a park takes the work of bureaucrats in the capital, workers on the ground and even tiny microbes eating trash deep in the piles of our history. To make a new America, we’ll need cellular-level change scaled across a continent. And in that sense, maybe our ruins should be seen as a redeemable dump rather than a reified skeleton like the Acropolis or the Constitution. The answers to our dilemmas will not come from digging, but from growing new things within and atop. And it is those novel forces of life that will actually transmute our history, not the other way around.

At César Chávez Park almost directly across from the Golden Gate in the water off Berkeley, a trash hill creates the most perfect kite-flying conditions. Children run over verdant landscape, dragons and quadrangles fluttering above them, ground squirrels skittering for underground burrows. Some green cover can hide so much. And yet: are the kites not flying and the children not running free?

Maybe there is something to the Bay Area’s refusal to remember, the tech industry most especially. Both the American right and left have a strange obsession with our past, choosing moments and people to elevate as special. But the answers don’t actually lie back there. At best, history can help us unlearn, get to zero, know the ground we are standing on. Beyond that, we have to make new paths, ideas and institutions. Silicon Valley at least gets that. It is not walking backwards into this century. The future must be created, and we can’t leave that to the people encased in a perfect circle of glass and light.

ALEXIS C. MADRIGAL is the co-host of KQED’s Forum, a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of a forthcoming book about the Bay Area and capitalism.

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The notion of home evokes tranquility and comfort. But home can be a stage where families enact frustrations and anger, longing and desire, and it looks different when seen through the eyes of each member. The point of view of the woman, the mother, consumes the lens in Sunmin Lee’s two series “The Woman’s House I” and “The Woman’s House II.” The gender wage gap in South Korea is the largest among the 36 member states of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, rising in 2018 to a 37.1 percent difference between men’s and women’s pay. Half of all women do not work outside of the home. And inside the home, women are responsible for the majority of all cooking, housework and childcare.

Rather than respite and comfort, Lee’s camera lays bare the exhaustion, clutter and tedium of daily family life for young South Korean mothers, many of whom were taught that finding a mate would be the ultimate life fulfillment. We glimpse in these women the edge, the conflict between the dream they are sold and the reality of the home life. This life is often played out in tight spaces where the lines between adult and child are blurred.

Lee observes extended families, too, the relief and tension that comes with three generations under one roof. Her photos ask: What is family intimacy? Does sharing space foster connection or distance? Where do we put disappointment when it is bound up with love? Perhaps most importantly: what does it mean for a woman to be in her house?

SUNMIN LEE was born in Seoul. For 25 years her photography has documented women and families, with an inquiry into identity and their place in Korean society. She is currently working on a portrait project focused on immigrant and older generations.

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Prison, Post-Apartheid
by Derrick Thulani Ndlovu
Stranger’s Guide: Johannesburg

The high red brick walls of “Sun City,” otherwise known as the Johannesburg Correctional Center, are about six or so meters high, obstructing the sun, so you only see it for a few hours. The roof and floor of the prison are concrete, so summer or winter, Sun City is always cold. I know all this because when I was arrested for the first time in 1996, I was housed in the remand center at Sun City. I was scared—the jail was notorious for gang violence during the apartheid years. It was also known for its harsh living conditions; the cells were just empty halls with far fewer bunk beds than there were detainees. Most of the detainees slept on the cold cement floor, me included.

There are seven prisons in Joburg. All of them were inherited from the apartheid days. In those times, the prisons were largely there to house and punish offenders who did not adhere to the apartheid laws. Black people were the main victims of these laws: pass laws, curfews, segregation, and homestead. Those who could not obey were imprisoned, punished and used for cheap labor in industries that needed workers, like farms and construction industries.

When the country became democratic in 1994, the spirit of freedom gave hope to the people of South Africa. As these changes were taking place both in the government and the private sector, the prison system also needed a makeover—restructuring to align its policies and day to day management to the new democratic order. Many said it was time to do away with punitive system that was practiced by the apartheid government and to introduce human rights to the correctional system.

However, it was not an easy task to rewrite history or to change the legacy of four decades created under the apartheid government. During Mandela’s tenure as the first democratic president, most of his cabinet members had experienced the prison system during apartheid. One would expect that since they went through it, they’d want to reform the nation’s prisons. But when I was held at Sun City, there was no sign of change. Going to the kitchen for breakfast was a nightmare. I had to walk in a two-by-two queue, enter the kitchen, sit on benches four-by-four. We’d walk in a single line, pick up a plate, as we passed the wardens who were holding dogs as we approached to put our plates for dish up. During that whole process, you must be vigilant: not too fast, not too slow, or wardens would unleash the dogs to bite you. You have to be fast, but don’t spill. If you spill, you will hear with a button stick from the warden. Again, find a space at the table, sit and eat the hot porridge quickly, while the wardens shouted “Fast, fast there are no bones in there. This is not your mama’s table.

Wardens would beat you for no apparent reason. They had their own unique language: wardens would say “squat,” a term they used to call for attention. When you hear that, you should squat down on your heels, hold a position and look down at the ground.

Fortunately, the first time, I only stayed in for a week before my case was dismissed. The saying goes, “once bitten, twice shy,” but that was not me. I tried, but unfortunately, prison would become my second home, one that I would visit almost every year after that first time.

When I visited Sun City again in 1999, it was for armed robbery, not fraud as before. The changes were slowly trickling in. Wardens were now called “officials;” prisoners, as we were called before, were now called “inmates” or “detainees.” And the bunk beds. This time, there were enough for the original number of people the cells were built to accommodate: 40 inmates for the communal cells. But overcrowding is one of the problems inherited from the old prison system. There were never enough beds for everyone, so they were claimed by the inmates who had power. Power in prison could come from having money to belonging to a gang or having a relationship with wardens or just being in for a violent crime. That would put you in a position where you could access certain favors in prison. This time, my court case would require a minimum of two months, up to six months before I would go to court at all. This gave me the power to negotiate for a bed, while those who were arrested for petty crime slept on the floor.

I spent many years in and out of the system but it did not teach me any lessons. I thought I was untouchable, and life was entertainment, until my then-girlfriend got pregnant with our son. It was a life-changing experience for me because now, whatever I was doing was for my unborn child. Although I was contemplating an exit plan from crime, it took me time. The law caught up with me in 2005, and I was gone until late 2014.

Almost a decade into democracy, DCS had undergone a lot of changes, having adopted a human rights approach. Instead of sentencing offenders to do hard labor in the farms and quarries, as was the policy in apartheid, they were now given a chance to go through a rehabilitation process. But incarcerated people still work for next to nothing in the workshops run by correctional facilities under the banner of “skills development.” When I was inside, the salary scale ranged from R30 ($1.87) up to R120 ($7.49) monthly, depending on the type of work. And what does rehabilitation look like in a correctional center? Programs like education, sports and social worker-run programs, which include anger management, substance abuse and life skills.

Over time, the changes I saw were that the hurrying up of detainees to eat quickly was gone, no more forced showering with cold water, no more harassment by officials for no reason, no more dogs. In the cells, the stealing and smuggling are things that prison will never eradicate, but they have decreased. Unfortunately, there was no change in overcrowding; instead, it was worse. There was at least some difference: they had put in more bunk beds. The beds were stacked up three stories instead of two. Overcrowding was counteracting any attempts to make real change. In February 2006, my cell, designed for 40 people, fluctuated from 102 to 106 inmates. People slept on the floor between the bunk beds, in the passage leading to the door and in a small space where there was a toilet, shower and sink.

In Sun City, the odor of thick, dirty air circulates in the cells and in the corridors. You can cut through it with a sharp sword. You can feel its heaviness no matter how much you clean. No matter how you try, it will only smell fresh for a few minutes.

DERRICK THULANI NDLOVU is a writer and poet who currently works as a counselor for a health organization. Formerly incarcerated, he volunteers as a consultant, advisor, lobbyist and advocate for inmates.