The best piece of writing I read over the past few months crossed my path the way everything else seemed to this past summer: unearthed from old correspondences, fleeting and staccato as a speeding car. It was my first day of work at a feminist magazine in Los Angeles, and as my supervisor sifted through thick stacks of pitches emailed to her over time, I chose a pitch about a haunting short film based on a short story by Delaney Nolan in “Guernica,” which was guest-edited by Roxane Gay. And I had not expected to be so gutted, there at my unfamiliar and cold-edged desk. The language of Nolan’s flash fiction story, “How I Gonna Bare My Neck Outside in the Sweat-Scared Morning,” has the kind of syncopation and its images such inventiveness that I felt like an outside listener of a beautiful language I could recognize but never speak. The piece had me holding my breath from the opening, its unhalting rhythm: “Because he always running around with his pants flung off slobbering toward my apple-thighs and me saying slow down, honey, I see you. You running and I read you.”
Nolan’s narrator has been trapped inside the dark of a cramped Louisiana trailer in August for 16 years by her lover, who tells her the summer heat makes the marsh fungus too dangerous to go outside, that only he can leave the trailer with a gas mask. So she remains stuck, afraid that disobeying will kill her: “Understand, I been scared these many years. Painting my toe nails pink in the dark. Sittin’ around and believing you. Keeping the shutters closed, the doors. And not wanting to stick my head out where no devil-plant-sperm gonna come choke the life out of me.”
The toxicity of the narrator’s surrounding world, which is to say the dangers it poses for women, is inextricable from the manipulation and control of her partner. Until a mosquito gets inside and bites her, and the sight of her own blood causes her to realize that the survival of the mosquito depends on the existence of people outside, and she realizes she can leave. While her lover is asleep, she decides she will swing open the door and enter quietly into the night.
The mosquito and its tiny puncturing, the pulsing life of the blood of the bitten, is an irreversible opening and revelation, and its iterations are all around us. On a large scale, this is occurring in the outpour of allegations that have finally been given the platform to be heard against powerful men who have long used that power to exert control over women. On the individual scale of the act itself, to speak as a woman is to resist the constant threat of being choked that permeates the air: our marsh fungus invisible yet understood. Utterances, the translation of a thing into language that then grants it an existence, are as powerful as the mosquito. I loved this story because it relates the liberation of a woman who recognizes and unhinges the hands around her neck, because there exists the option to fling open the door. To abandon need, something which I have long desired.
These days, I have been reading poetry about love and desire and need almost exclusively: Richard Siken’s “Crush” for the thousandth time, Kimberly Grey’s “The Opposite of Light,” Neruda’s sonnets, Rachel McKibbens’ “Untitled,” Sappho’s fragments. I am always returning to Sappho and the concept, embodied by her poetry, of eros — the intertwinement of desire and dearth, how we want and love and need what we lack. But why would I want to be made incomplete by lack?
I’m fascinated by this tension that I feel both in literature and in everyday life between need and liberation, union and independence. Which isn’t to say that the two are mutually exclusive, but just that the emphasis on liberation that characterizes the feminist movement is often most powerful when it entails the denunciation of dependence, of need, because of its unstable relationship to control. I want very badly a permanent sense of this independence, which I was fortunate to feel often over the summer, surrounded by photos of Gloria Steinem, Dorothy Pitman Hughes and Dolores Huerta in an office full of women who had devoted themselves to spotlighting feminist issues and fighting to resolve them. But I cannot deny that part of what drew me to Nolan’s story, almost instinctively, was its admission of flawed desire. “Six feet tall and arms like bundled wire. He go strutting the length of the house,” Nolan writes. “Loving in your wolfish, in your wicked.”
In fact, much of what I read this summer embodied this double edge of desire and self-sufficiency, from poems about flawed relationships in Erika Sanchez’s stunning debut “Lessons on Expulsion” to stories about Asian American protagonists’ troubled relationships with men in Karen Shepard’s “Kiss Me Someone.” Of course, I realized, the process of gaining freedoms and countering the institutional and cultural controls exerted over women is a difficult one of desire and determination, fear and anger and conviction. But I’ve always had trouble admitting that to myself, unable to feel need without feeling shame.
I also think writing about love, or eros, or needing someone so badly that it hurts transforms the object of desire into a vehicle for the act of expression rather than an endstop goal for attainment. There is a certain level of removal in which writing about desire becomes more about the attempt to communicate, to commune with the inner life, than the desire itself. All the works of literature I’ve read that grapple with balancing need and liberation capture truths about both womanhood and the act of expression, of speaking, as a form of resistance and as a validation of existence. But I’m still struggling with the pure emotional tension of the two that I experience in my day-to-day life.
On my commutes to and from work at the feminist nonprofit office, I would roll up my car windows at stoplights to avoid being harassed by men in the cars pulled up next to mine after it had happened enough times for me to fear it and to fear doing anything about it. As if I were locking myself in from the marsh fungus spores, which I know are fabricated and institutional constructions. Yet through stories and literature like “How I Gonna Bare My Neck Outside in the Sweat-Scared Morning,” I am always moved by the distances of emotional development and liberation that feel within reach. I am also reminded of the complexity and difficulty of getting to that point, the normalcy of need, which comforts me.
Nolan’s protagonist declares her self-liberation in the story’s closing like this: “I’m gonna breathe deep in the sweltered night. And then, heart, you won’t even hear me — I’ll close the door quiet behind me, and walk into the untouched heat, moving off alone, like a woman should.” Despite my fears and uncertainties about relating both desire and independence to my feminism, literature has again shown me what kind of night world I can walk into: sweltering, solitary, wanting something or someone without owing anything to anyone.
Contact Maddie Kim at mkim16 ‘at’ stanford.edu.