small lives in big times
This Week in Reading:
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid
This was Obama’s favorite novel last year, and if it is good enough for Obama, it is good enough for me. It is a wonderful, wondrous book. Dreamy and tender and undeniably beautiful. It tells the story of Saeed and Nadia, two young people living in an unnamed country on the brink of destruction. Magical doors are opening up, portals to safer, wealthier countries, and together, they decide to go through one of them, in search of safety and opportunity in a new place.
In his Fresh Air interview, Mohsin Hamid said that he used the doors as a plot device because so many refugee stories focus exclusively on the harrowing journey, and by having Nadia and Saeed simply step from one country to another he could focus on the before and after of the refugee story. My mother is a refugee. Her escape from Vietnam is an incredible story-- my grandmother bribing a fishing boat to smuggle the family out the night Saigon fell, gold sewn into the hems of her daughter’s dresses. It is an epic tale, one I have heard many times. But the time they spent bobbing along the Pacific Ocean, before they were picked up by a cargo ship, before they were shuttled forward to Guam, and California, and Arkansas, and Seattle, was only a few days. The things that define the refugee experience are the experiences that come after—struggling to reposition themselves in an alien environment, translating their homework from English to Vietnamese and back into English, wearing donated clothing that never fit quite right. The choice to leave, and the choice to begin, are bigger than the leaving itself.
Exit West is about two people undergoing great turmoil, but the turmoil is the backdrop, not the focus of the novel. Instead, Exit West is about the mundanity that continues to exist within times of crisis. How persistent the ordinary is, even in the most extraordinary of times. Saeed and Nadia’s city has been taken over by extremists, their neighborhoods destroyed by bombs, yet amid the terror, there is still time to share a joint, there is still time to fall in love. They have boarded up their windows and stocked up on canned food, but life continues around these disruptions.
In fact, chaos and disruption leads to an unexpected wealth of time. As the city becomes more and more dangerous, it’s citizens begin to stay home from work, begin to skip many of the commitments that occupy their regular life. In times of unrest, people undoubtedly live in constant fear; but there is also a kind of leisurely boredom that comes with the world ending. When Saeed and Nadia resettle, first in Greece, and later, in London and California, time continues to stretch. There is nothing to do but wait.
When I would read about cataclysmic historical events in high school, I would always wonder: what does it feel like to be there at these moments of great change? What does it feel like to see history unfold before you? And then the 2016 election happened and America felt like it was crumbling out from under my feet. Every day I would scroll through headlines describing new ways in which my own country was being dismantled. People were taking to the streets; everyone was mad and hurt and scared. I seemed to live within a haze of worry— I could hear a tea kettle going off in the back of my brain constantly, behind all of my other thoughts. My country, or at least my perception of my country, seemed to be thrown off of its orbit. And yet, my daily life carried on. I started calling my senators, started carrying cardboard signs that said I HATE PAUL RYAN on Saturday mornings, but I still went into work at 8:45 am everyday, still went to the movies, still drank wine on my couch. This, I realized, is what it feels like to live inside history. You can sense the monumental times you live in, but the terror and drama of historical change remains distant, or at least more distant than the routines and habits of daily life. My life remains small as ever, no matter how big history swells around it.
Studio-ing
Thank you so so so much to everyone who came to my opening on Friday. Truly, deeply, from the bottom of my heart, thank you. I have so many sappy things to say about this show, but primarily I was so awed by the outpouring of support I received from friends and mentors near and far. Since graduating, I’ve been focusing on making, not showing, and while making is still the more rewarding and more important part of any practice, it feels good to see everything framed and lit, see all of my friends reading my wall labels and drinking the boxed wine I bought from Trader Joe's.
What is so cool about this show is that nothing was half-assed, which honestly feels so unusual for an art show. When I lined up the show in November, the vast majority of the work was complete, which meant I had 6 months to make custom frames, fabricate pedestals, build an entire freaking cherry coffee table. (Bringing it to the gallery I thought, did I really spend weeks of my life building a 16 legged table to essentially act as a glorified pedestal for my books? And then I brought it into the gallery and put all the cushions I had stitched around it and set all of my books on top of it and decided it was totally worth it.) Every aspect of the show was given the time and attention (and money) it needed to be the best version of itself. The show was executed to a level completely unimaginable to my nineteen-year-old self that had no idea how to make anything and was notorious for her shoddy craftsmanship.
The show is a little bit of an inside joke with myself: for years I’ve been saying that I just make art so that I can put it under my couch. This show was me taking all of my art out from under my couch and hanging it in a gallery. And so I brought my whole living room into the gallery, brought my coffee table, did an installation version of This Is a Bad Place To Camp where I balanced a tent on the top of a bookshelf filled with every single book I owned.
I’m including some photos of the show here, but it will be up through June 10th if you happen to be in town. Gallery hours are weekends 12-6pm.
Buy some art maybe? There is something for ~every budget~ (zines are $12, almost everything else is $160-$500, with a few notable exceptions)
Further Reading:
Magical realism rarely works for me, but I loved it here. Another magical realist book I can wholeheartedly get behind is The People of Paper by Salvador Plascencia.