god is sad
This Week in Reading
The People of Paper by Salvador Plascencia
The People of Paper is short in page count, but epic in scope. It tells the story of Federico de la Fe-- a man whose bed-wetting drove his wife away, the story of Merced de Papel-- a woman whose skin and organs have been crafted from literal paper by an origami surgeon, the story of Baby Nostradamus-- an infant who appears brain dead but holds the entire past and future of human history in his mind.
The novel is narrated by Saturn. Saturn does not control the characters’ actions, but he watches them, observes them, describes them. And they resent him, resent this invasion into their lives. The characters of El Monte stage a revolt. They build lead houses to hide in, out of sight of Saturn’s omnipotent gaze, they censor their thoughts so Saturn can not read them. A third of the way into the novel they discover Saturn has another name: Salvador Plascencia. Saturn, the god, the writer, is also a man. And the god is very sad.
Heartbroken and bereft, Salvador Plascencia transcribes the story of Little Merced and her father and their war and their sadness while coping with his own devastation. He writes to forget Liz, he sleeps with Cameroon to forget Liz. He doesn’t forget Liz. He writes: “I don’t know what they are called, the spaces between seconds– but I think of you always in those intervals.“ Liz is not a character in the literary epic he is penning, but she is undeniably a character. She too, is a person of paper, pinned to the page by Plascencia’s words. Like all of his characters, Liz starts to talk back, starts to become resentful of the writer’s relentless eye. On page 139 she says, “Do what you will. I have only one request: you need to remember that I exist beyond the pages of this book. One day, I don’t know when, I will have children, and I don’t want them finding a book which their mother is faithless and cruel and insults the hero. Sal if you still love me, please leave me out of this story. Start this book over, without me.” And the next page is the title page, again, in the middle of the book, and after that— the dedication page, Liz’s name expunged from it.
What is god, if not the one telling the story? And if we are the ones in control of the narrative, are we not god? Writing is a form of omnipotent power, not granted as a reward for any kind of worthiness, but seized-- wielded recklessly.
We tell our stories in the first person, I, I, I, as if we are the only ones in them. We all have the right to tell our own story, but none of our stories are ours alone; there are always other characters we suck into our vortex, people that become collateral damage as we storm towards narrative clarity. The parts of their stories that intersect with ours belong to us, but it belongs to them as well, and if you tell the story first, it can feel like theft.
It is a question memoirists and fiction writers alike struggle with. Am I allowed to write this down? Is it allowed to be read by strangers? Writing, good writing anyways, is a blade. Has anything been written that didn’t cause pain? Is writing ever not a weapon?
I think about authorship a lot— what stories do I have the right to tell. I didn’t really start talking about my racial identity until a few years ago, resisted making art or writing about my family history. I was worried that I was taking something that did not belong to me, that I was co-opting my mother and grandmother’s stories in some kind of attempt to be more interesting. I try to only talk about my family history as it pertains to me. I am not the omniscient narrator— I am character, listening, recounting. I cannot tell you how it feels to escape a burning city in the middle of the night, your home a shrinking point across the black water— but I can tell you how it felt to hear that story as a seven year old, how it feels to hear it now.
I made a project several years ago where I took letters people had written me and turned them into penmanship guides. I wrote these letters, addressed to me, by myself— my hand learning the slope of my ex’s g, the swoop of a my mother’s y. It is one of my favorite pieces I have ever made, but I also feel deeply weird about showing it, like I have violated the privacy of the letter writers, that these sheets of paper, in my possession, should not have an audience bigger than two.
At some point, the heartbroken Saturn grows too weary to fight back against his characters, and falls out of the narrative. The novel continues: jumbled, disorganized, each character jockeying to have their say. The story is always ongoing, even if god is too sad to participate.
I am stingy in how I dispense the label “art.” Poets, musicians, actors have their own vocabularies to describe their work. Call it poetry, call it music, call it theater, don’t call it art— visual artists only have the one word, let us have it. But every so often I will come across something that seems to push beyond it's categorical vocabularies. The People of Paper is something I will gladly label as art. Yes, each sentence is a beautiful, masterful piece of writing, but the story pushes beyond the structure of a novel, beyond the concept of a book. The formatting of the text is as pivotal to the plot as the words on the page. This is the second time I have read it, I liked it just as much on the re-read.
Studio-ing
An only child is another kind of omniscient narrator. Growing up, I always felt like I was watching my parents have a marriage. When the ratio of adults to children in a family is skewed towards the grown-ups, the dynamic is defined by adult life. My parents have been married for nearly 30 years and remain deeply, disgustingly in love. They like to make out in front of me to gross me out, travel the world together, rarely miss dinner.
It is a beautiful marriage, something I spent my childhood living next to, but was inherently outside of. When I was home last, I dug through old photo albums to find pictures of my parents that I had taken as a child. The earliest one I found was taken by my three year old self. The angle is strange, the camera pointed upwards from my low altitude, my toddler fingers hitting the shutter. I took all of these photos, framed them, and hung them at the height I was when I took the photo originally. The final installation is documentation of the passage of time: my parents growing older as I grow taller. It is also a way of reinserting myself into their relationship. Though I appear in none of these snapshots, I am very much present, invisible behind the camera, bearing witness.
Other big art news: I got a big public art commission with the San Diego Art Institute! It will be part of their Little Saigon art walk in March of 2019. There was a good chunk of money attached to this— this is a big deal for me. More details to come.
Further Reading
Another book I would say transcends the label of literature: Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004 by Tan Lin