Editor’s Note: This piece was originally published in Sept 23, 2018. 

Exactly one week after my arrival in the US, I witnessed a man nearly get shot. By the police. Four squad cars, eight police officers, guns drawn after two quick commands, “Get on the ground!” “Get on the ground now!” It wasn’t a black man. It was a White man on a bicycle. Tanned, but definitely white. Just an ordinary Californian Tuesday. At least that’s what the casual strolling by of the dozen or so white folks suggested. In Ghana, I am not black. I am short. Educated. Low to middle class. But never black. Maybe that’s why it took me about 45 seconds to realize that “Oh! I’m black!” My heart got the message. The 8O8 of a Hip-Hop hook had nothing on it in that moment. The gun was pointed in my general direction after all.

Barely an hour before this, my answer to the question “So how are you liking the US so far?” had been “It’s been fine actually. Everybody here seems so kind and warm.” I had meant it. Felt it. Even though I had already had a preliminary baptism in American microaggression, conducted by the kind courtesy of a middle-aged Asian woman. It didn’t seem relevant. And if it was, that was neither the time nor place.

After a tedious year-long process of preparing applications, I got the opportunity to pursue an MFA at Chapman University. I knew enough about US race relations to feel somewhat prepared to venture into that old and monstrous system. But nothing can truly prepare you for inhabiting the existential experience of the Black body in America. What I found in one week of living in California is that, cultural identity politics within the grand economy of racism, demands from the Black body a perpetual duality of expression. This duality of expression is the currency that will in times mundane and times grave, determine the weight of your existence.

While riding in the front seat of a cruiser, not of the official police variety, but driven by a former police officer, I realized that I was perched on an ease that should have been unfamiliar. It was as if I had been riding with (former) cops in the front of their cruisers all my life. Then he asked me “So when did you start learning how to speak English?” In that moment, time slowed, and I had two choices – 1. Take offence. React against what I’d be interpreting as microaggression. 2. Smile. Take the opportunity to re-orient genuine white ignorance (but is “genuine white ignorance” ever that innocent? Maybe?). I told him that we speak English in Ghana.

If you have ever dealt with an American (regardless of race), chances are that you would have picked up on some brand of unmistakable and unapologetic casual arrogance. The arrogance isn’t necessarily evil. It is an arrogance that partly emanates from America’s hegemonic status within the global politico-economic system. A status, that ensures that several aspects of American lifestyle and living are leached to millions of other cultures and socializations all over the world. For this reason, it is more likely that an American would ask about my country with genuine ignorance than I would of theirs with the same level of ignorance.

However, when you realize that people at the bus stop or on the bus generally opt not to sit by you or close to you, even when that is the only vacant seat, it certainly gets you thinking; is something wrong with me? (Or them?) Is something wrong with me for having to perpetually censor the fullness of my expression, because I don’t know when it would be interpreted as too much? And too much Black in a place that would swiftly move to mute me. The question of whether a Black person is reading too much into a situation or is legitimately being subjected to microaggression embodies the very visceral reality of the Black body’s duality of expression.

The kindest and warmest people I have met in America are mostly white. But it would be folly to utilize that as license to let my guard down. To be Black in America implies to be alert by default. A little nap in the library could mean I get the police called on me. Foul hard in a basketball pick-up and the police could be interrogating me. And from what I have seen, the guns come out after two commands (for a White man). So, while my mother back in Ghana brags about her son in grad school in America, she must of absolute necessity also pray for his safety.

The problem isn’t even that some or most White people are racists. The problem is that the Black body, for survival sake, must be constantly self-censored. The problem is that duality of expression from a Black body isn’t only expected currency, it is demanded. And it isn’t even always valuable. Prince Jones is proof enough. So is Tamir Rice. And Freddie Gray. And Eric Garner. And Michael Brown. And Philando Castille. And Alton Sterling. Amadou Diallo was from Africa just like me, 19 of 41 shots was what his life was valued as.

I am going to make great, lifelong friends here in America. I am going to enjoy the little joys I can afford. But will I ever let my guard down? Will my heart forget what it means to morph into an 8O8 at the casual brandishing of a gun? I don’t have that luxury. The only luxury I do have, is to burn as brightly as I can, and love as courageously as I can.

Nana Prempeh has an MFA in Creative Writing from Chapman University. He is an incoming MA/PhD student at UMass, Amherst with a focus on Early Modern Race. Nana Prempeh’s  works appear in Kalahari Review, Praxis Magazine and MoreBranches. He was longlisted for the 2018 Koffi Addo Prize in Creative Nonfiction.

Featured Image: “Millions March NYC” provided by The All-Nite Images licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

These aren’t traditional stories where one of us speaks and the others listen. No, these are interactive, collaborative stories. Together, we build the narrative, roll some dice, and see where our imaginations take us for hours on end.

With the majority of people now working from home for the foreseeable future, there is suddenly so much more free time. We aren’t spending the majority of our day commuting to and from an office.  Not being around our friends can feel isolating, lonely, potentially even creatively stifling. We humans are natural storytellers, working together to paint grand adventures with our words. That’s what we are constantly striving to accomplish. Whether it’s written or spoken, we string together words, phrases, sentences, details, applying our verbal brush to the awaiting blank canvas of our imaginations.

In the past decade, such storytelling has experienced an unprecedented boom in popularity. Roleplaying games exist in the hundreds, ranging from mainstream games like Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder to indie games like Monster of the Week and Monsterhearts, each bringing unique twists to fantasy, science fiction, horror, and more. And while Dungeons and Dragons maybe be one of the most well-known systems, having been around since Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson sat down and devised what would become the 1^st Edition in 1974, it isn’t the only choice. Say you want to tell a story that isn’t centered around high fantasy adventures of magic, wizards, elves, and gods – you want something more flexible, more modern. The Powered By The Apocalypse system, designed by Meguey and Vincent Baker, has welcomed dozens of unique settings while still using the same rules system. While the “Dungeon World” setting is still based in fantasy, “Monster of the Week” takes a more Scooby-Doo twist to investigating modern monsters and mysteries. Then, of course, there’s more cosmic horror adventures like Call of Cthulhu and The Dresden files, where players can experience the incomprehensible terror of H.P. Lovecraft and Jim Butcher. Whatever mood you want to set, whatever tale you want to tell, there are dozens upon dozens of options to help you and your friends create an immersive experience.

The best part of trying out a roleplaying game comes from gathering the resources to play. You don’t need to invest in pricey rulebooks or accumulate a hoard of dice – although that’s arguably the best part of getting hooked. Many systems offer free, downloadable PDFs and basic rules available on their websites. There are online resources like Roll20 that function as online databases of ready-to-play games complete with customizable systems and settings, including assets to build visuals and background music to accentuate your tales. And when it comes to actually coming together, nothing is more important than being able to see and hear your fellow storytellers. Google Hangouts, Discord, Skype, and Zoom are just a few programs that can allow you to be with your friends almost as if you were there in person.

I like to think that everyone has a story to tell, whether they know it or not. As is the nature of roleplaying games, the person in charge of running the game doesn’t have to know the whole story from the beginning. If anything, all they need is a good idea and a basic outline – and the players take it from there. Everyone involved helps to craft the story, learning how to cooperate, troubleshoot, and improvise in real-time situations to determine what happens next. And most importantly, the stories you and your friends tell are entirely unique. Even if you follow a published module or stick to pre-written story beats, there’s always bound to be an errant dice roll or sudden character choice that throws the whole plot out the window in the best, and most chaotic, way possible.

It is, in my opinion, one of the best ways to bring together a group of friends who want to have some fun and be together as much as they can in the face of isolation and social distancing. Together, we can burn off some of that pent-up energy from not being able to leave the house. We can laugh, cry, fail, and succeed together, forging and strengthening our bonds before, during, and after our games. As distant and digital as it may be, when we’re in the moment we forget that we’re not actually sitting around a table side-by-side. Distance doesn’t have to be a factor in when and how you see your friends and spend some time together. So, go ahead and tell that story you’ve always wanted to. And get your friends in on it too, while you’re at it.

Aysel Atamdede is a MA/MFA student at Chapman University and Assistant Editor at Anastamos. She graduated from Santa Clara University with a BA in English and minored in Studio Art, specializing in fiction and animation.

You can follow her on Twitter @AyzPlz

And while I believed myself liberated of this perception, after reading Deanne Stillman’s Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West (2009), I realized I’d better take a step down from my academic pedestal. While the book is enlightening in numerous ways—tracing the wild horse from its evolutionary origins on North America to the eradication campaigns it faces today—as I read, one thought bothered me more than most: This horse, the wild and free mustang, is one of those “invasive species”? One of those destroyers of ecosystems? Parasites of local economies? I heard the term often enough, even grew excited at the mention of new ways to combat them, and never did I question the need for such charged rhetoric. Until I did, in an interview I was fortunate enough to conduct with essayist, playwright, professor, and author of numerous works of literary nonfiction Deanne Stillman.

Sam Risak (SR): In Mustang, you take us through the horses’ history in the United States, opening with Cortes’s use of the animals in his conquering of the New World. Time and time again, we see how America used the horse to invade and win wars—ironic considering the horses’ current label as an invasive species. Did this ‘invasive’ parallel drive the structure of your book? And if so, what do you hope readers take away from it?

Deanne Stillman (DS): Actually, I take the history back further than that. In the chapter called “Dawn of the Mustang: Eohippus to Equus,” I talk about the fact that the horse is indigenous to this continent. It evolved in North America, then headed across the Bering land bridge in Alaska, and then fanned out across the world, evolving as it went. Meanwhile, it went extinct on this continent, and then returned with conquistadors. I say “returned” because there has in fact been a DNA match between the horses of the Ice Age on this continent and the horses that arrived in the New World with Cortes and other conquistadors. These horses became the basis for many of the wild horses that range across the West today, though some mixed with cavalry horses and others over time. So what’s ironic is the fact that the wild horse has, in the course of the last couple of hundred years, become demonized in various quarters as an “other” when it is in fact indigenous, as science has shown. I talk about this demonization in other chapters that explore the history of rodeo, for instance; rodeo was when we first started seeing terms such as “outlaw” and “son of a bitch” used in reference to wild horses. Later, when cattle grazing took over public lands, the term “varmint” was rolled out in reference to mustangs. In other words, they had to go.

So it’s not so much that the “invasive” parallel drives my book, but rather it’s the idea that “it’s come to this.” As I ask in Mustang, “why are we, a cowboy nation, destroying the horse we rode in on?” I am talking about a spiritual sickness in this country that needs to be reconciled. Of course we are seeing this now played out in spades, with coronavirus upon us, a plague that comes out of wild animal markets in China. Nature is now responding to the endless assaults all over the planet, and our wars against what’s wild must now come to a halt. For more, there is this, which I wrote awhile ago about a trip I made to the Little Bighorn battlefield for the annual commemorations. https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-battle-of-the-little-bighorn-and-our-war-against-the-wild/

SR: A main argument fueling the often-cruel means of population regulation for mustangs is their lack of purpose when compared to other grazing animals like the cattle our agricultural industry depends on. To what extent do you think capitalism fuels our attacks against the horse? Do you think America has space for both? Or are capitalism and the mustang set in a permanent patriotic clash?

DS: Those are great questions. At the beginning of the 20th century, the time of the horse as our partner had come to an end. The car was here, and before that the railroad. We no longer needed it for transportation and that’s when the mass round-ups began. The mustang came to be viewed as a cash crop, part of the bonanza in the open spaces of the West. Millions were shipped to the slaughterhouse and the railroads offered special “per pound” rates for wild horses. This machine was voracious and yes, capitalism, unchecked capitalism that is, propelled it. Fortunes were made then as the range was cleared and then cleared again, often to make way for cattle. But there were other things afoot as well. Across the West, there are other valuable resources – timber, minerals – and mustang herds were viewed as being in the way. Today, under Trump, grazing fees – meaning the amount that the federal government charges ranchers to graze their cows on public lands – are at their lowest point ever. In the late 1800s, there was a popular book called The Beef Bonanza and it was read widely in England and Scotland, attracting many emigrants to the Great Plains and the West. Today the bonanza continues unchecked.

We have plenty of wide open space in this country; certainly there is room for wild horses and grazing at the same time. It’s already happened WITH heavier regulations. There really isn’t a clash, other than the one that is commercially driven. But again, the horse is indigenous, and the cow is not. The horse is protected by a federal law. The cow has a powerful lobby, as do the other industries that ply public lands. By the way, this is not to demonize cows; it’s not their fault! Part of the problem here is that our great icon, the cowboy, is part and parcel of the wild horse/cattle puzzle, and it’s very hard to imagine American without this most basic part of our identity. But, as I write at the end of Mustang, if we can’t reconcile our schizophrenic nature – our love of freedom versus our urge to dam it up, wall it off, round it up – the one of these days, America is going to walk on down the road, on foot, without a horse.

By the way, even Paul Revere’s horse had wild horse bloodlines, as I recount in Mustang. America was born in hoofsparks, as per Longfellow’s famous poem about Revere’s ride (“The British are coming!”). Yet we seem to have forgotten all about that, and remembered only the guy on the horse. Incidentally, her name was Brown Beauty, and when the British captured Revere after the ride, she collapsed and died. So here we have a horse dying in service of giving birth to this country.

SR: In the pandemic that is COVID-19, reminders of how we contaminate our surroundings are everywhere—from freeway signs flashing social-distancing messages to the taped-off playgrounds. Even in America, the land of individual rights, we are instructed to not only worry about our own well-being, but the well-being of those around us. Do you believe this shift in perspective has the potential to expand beyond the virus to incorporate our responsibilities to the planet and the needs of other species on it like the mustang?

DS: I hope so, as I’ve said in my earlier replies here. We are already seeing signs that nature is on the rebound. Funny how it doesn’t take much. Birds are returning everywhere as cars and people disappear from freeways, parks, and beaches. Other animals are starting to make a comeback. Already some mustang round-ups planned by the government for this summer have been postponed (though that can easily change down the line; wild horses have not had a friend in the White House since Richard Nixon).

But clearly, there is a worldwide shift across the board underway. We are in a moment of great danger and great promise. It’s going to take a long time to right the ship, but there is an opening right now and we can do this. The planet can take care of itself if we treat it with respect. Horses have been on this continent since the Ice Age and having re-established themselves in a land where they seem destined to endure, they are not going anywhere. Now, the task for us is to honor them as our partner and great icon of freedom, not just revere muscle cars called “mustang” or have football teams called “broncos” and so on. No horse, no America, as I often say, and if it goes, our spirit is greatly diminished.

Stillman and Bugz at Wild Horse Spirit in Carson City, NV, where the horse lived after being rescued in the Virginia Range outside Reno following the massacre of her band during the Christmas holiday in 1998. Stillman tells her story in Mustang, and also the story of the Virginia Range horses.

For more on Deanne Stillman and Mustang, see Pam Houston’s review in the LA Times: https://www.lapl.org/collections-resources/e-media/podcasts/aloud/mustang-saga-wild-horse-american-west and her conversation with fellow nonfiction author Samantha Dunn at the LAPL for the Aloud series: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008-jun-29-bk-stillman29-story.html

Works published in Los Angeles Review of Books and Entropy and upcoming in The Writer’s Chronicle, Terrain.org, and Crab Orchard Review, Sam Risak is a Florida transplant pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing and an MA in English Literature at Chapman University.

This language of invasion is often employed to rally support, the “us versus them” mentality it conjures encouraging active participation from the listener. If you don’t want to be overrun, you need to act. However, such language does not come without its share of dangers. While there is no plant or animal actively waging a war against human existence, once hit with the label “invasive species,” they might as well sound a battle cry. Regardless of how concerned you may have been with an ecosystem before, when you hear an enemy has appeared on the front, you know you need to defeat it to protect those land and those with the right to live on it.

But how do you decide who has such a right? The “not native” portion of the definition implies time is the determiner; however, one look at America’s history of colonialization and you should know that isn’t always the key factor. Take the wild mustang. A symbol of Americana, the horse has lived on the soil here longer than any white American, and yet, today it has to fight to live, its label as “invasive species” making it the target to some horrific eradication campaigns. Why? “If the horses get to be too numerous,” says rancher Jackie Ingram in an interview with the New York Times, “it affects the sage grouse, the elk, the antelope and us. All of us depend on the grass.” Ingram claims the wild horses leave so little grass to eat on the Bureau of Land Management land that it has caused other wildlife to disappear and forced her family to cut back on their cattle herd.

There is not enough grass to go around.

That fear is not only central to Ingram’s sentiment, but to the American identity. With every update on rates of unemployment or homelessness, you are reminded to keep working, that it will be your labor alone that protects you from economic despair. It seems hard to believe that this world of fear and suffering is one humans created for themselves, certainly no other species made a priority in its construction. Are you, as Ingram suggests, simply the victim of a lack of supply? Not according to Deanne Stillman, author of Mustang: The Saga of the Horse in the American West. “We have plenty of wide open space in this country; certainly there is room for wild horses and grazing at the same time. It’s already happened WITH heavier regulations,” say Stillman, “There really isn’t a clash, other than the one that is commercially driven.”

Commercially-driven—that’s the key. While there may be more than enough land for mustangs and cattle to co-exist, there is not enough land for mustangs and the massive amounts of cattle necessary to feed our industrial agriculture system—a system that has led to the Dead Zone in the ocean and even driven some populations of grizzly bears and wolves (key predators to horse) extinct. Given such extensive destruction, it seems obvious you should target the industry and promote small farms and ranches. But that locally-sourced beef is pricy, and with the current economic instability, can you really risk the added expense? Will it make any difference if you do?

It can be demoralizing to realize how little effect you have, which is why the competition embedded within capitalism can appear so seductive. If you can’t touch those on top, you need someone or something to control and prove you still have power. And whom better than those villainous “invasive species”? While you may not rally behind the “eradication of the mustang,” you can certainly get behind “curbing the spread of an invasive species.”

Unfortunately, such language is not applied to plants and animals alone. In a poem titled “Super-Insensitive Species,” Korean-American poet Ed Bok Lee parallels the portrayal of immigration in the U.S. against that of the Asian carp consuming native ecosystems. Before I moved out to California, I remember seeing evidence of this “Asian-American-as-Invader” narrative in online comments that described cities like Irvine as “nice until Asians overtook the place.” And it is this narrative Donald Trump capitalized on when he referred to COVID-19 as the “Chinese virus.” While he may not have used the words “invasive species,” he encouraged the same sort of “us versus them mentality” to redirect attentions onto a non-white population and away from his crumbling economy, the ecosystem where he so readily thrived.

In a capitalist society, you are taught to compete, and if you want to win, you need to choose an opponent you can defeat, i.e., someone society has disadvantaged more than you. Should this raise ethical concerns, dominant classes can placate them, writing populations off as “invasive” so you know you are fighting the good fight. More and more, you separate yourself from everyone around you, until you believe you only have you to rely on. Place us in a pandemic, however, and we can see the harms embedded within such a mindset. As people wear face masks and practice social distancing, we can finally see how interdependent we are, a perspective we must not only use to combat COVID-19, but to create a world where more than a few can survive.

—

Works published in Los Angeles Review of Books and Entropy and upcoming in Terrain.org and Crab Orchard Review, Sam Risak is a Florida transplant pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing and an MA in English Literature at Chapman University.

“But there is enough food,” I said, “This is scarcity from greed.”

“Not greed, fear,” he said.

I’m not sure they’re so different.

I saw the man rolling away with eggs in different versions everywhere: the toilet paper snatchers, the people clearing out Costco’s pads and tampons. Greed in the sense of gluttony obviously exists—imagine being the richest man on earth and not providing your warehouse employees health benefits or PTO—but it also trickles down into an anxiety felt by people who would otherwise be prosocial. It’s hard to let go of whatever we’re clenching if we believe no one will catch us.

If you have a serious illness, you can spend even generous savings in a week. If you lose your job, you can be evicted or default on your mortgage within a month. I feel this clenching in myself when I see the news, and I don’t immediately write a check to the food bank. Even if you’re fortunate, you’re always looking over your shoulder, seeing how far you can fall. In these circumstances, charity starts to look suspect. It doesn’t make sense to hope for generosity when we haven’t made a pact to catch each other as a nation.

When my grocery store put limits on how much we could buy, I exhaled. I know in a few weeks the milk will be back. I’m relieved and also so ashamed that an inky voice in my gut has been cuffed. The grocery store’s guard rails have spared me the moral exercise of not taking an extra bag of rice, even though I know there are people who will take ten. The social safety net not only catches people in hard times, it puts a ceiling on how much can be hoarded. This anxiety of this pandemic has convinced me that I’m ready to let go. Please raise my taxes. I’m ready to give more if I know we’ll take care of each other.

As I’ve been processing what the future can look like, I had a dream that I was cave diving on SCUBA. We were passing through a rocky tube too narrow to turn around in. I could touch the fins of the person ahead of me, and behind me, there were people who could touch mine. Sediment clouded the beams of our flashlights. Inching through on our hands and knees, it occurred to me how we were limited to the air in our tanks, how there was no turning around if the person in front of me panicked. I could panic and drown thrashing for an exit, and the people behind me would be trapped, too.

So I didn’t. One hand in front of the other, I crawled out for myself and everyone behind me. The cave widened and we swam to the open water. At the surface, we spat out our mouthpieces. We could speak again, and then our masks came down. We helped each other carry our air-tanks off the beach.

When I woke up, the crisis was still unfolding, but a tightness inside me felt loosened. We have the capacity to escape this crisis. I hope we choose to help each other out of the water.

Author and Visual Artist Biography

Paige Welsh is Anastamos’s creative director. She is pursuing an MFA in fiction. Her thesis at UC Santa Cruz won the Chancellor’s Award. You can follow her on Instagram and on Twitter @MarkthatPaige.

When I first picked up J.G. Ballard’s Crash, I did not expect its premise to impact how I see trauma on the body and the suspended concrete freeways that so many drivers like myself love to hate. A quick search online makes the book seem like some perverted Bible. There was an essay of praise from Zadie Smith here, there was a Cronenberg film adaptation there with a fancy award from the Adult Video Network for best alternative adult feature film back in 1996; all these results and more gave me the impression that the 200-page book, with an innocent blue cover and calm drawing of a car crash, held some secret, some power that might burn my hand if I held it in my hands for too long. The novel, as told by a fictionalized version of the author himself, begins with a deliberately explosive crash into Elizabeth Taylor’s limousine (she survives, no need for Elizabeth Taylor fans to worry). We learn that the mastermind and driver behind this horrific act is Vaughan, a Charles Manson-esque leader who preaches a new sense of liberation through a deep sexual attraction to violent car crashes; he has just committed this last act of complete “unification” and the narrator feels more stirred than shaken by this explosive feat.

To make things clear, Vaughan, as well as the other “thrill” seekers, do not share the serial-killer mentality found in every true-crime podcast. No, murder and death are pretty much an aftermath for the characters. It’s the mutilation of the bodies being slammed against concrete and metal that becomes their painful yet poetic sense of freedom and vulnerability. That freedom and escape from what we expect to be tidy and clean, in both a physical and psychological sense, becomes the most relevant lesson this 1973 novel offers for contemporary readers: Crash shows how liberating it can be to speed past trauma, and the subsequent cost of achieving that liberation.

The book will send readers like myself into a state of shock and disgust as fluids of every type splatter from organs against a cold, apathetic concrete. There’s even a point in the first chapter where the narrator stares into the pool of blood and vomit from a woman who just finished performing a blowjob in the car after a crash. And yet, Ballard majestically presents it as a hidden revelation or a forgotten cure to our sense of alienation, writing: “in this magic pool, lifting from her throat like a rare discharge of fluid from the mouth of a remote and mysterious shrine, I saw my own reflection, a mirror of blood, semen and vomit, distilled from a mouth whose contours only a few minutes before had drawn steadily against my penis” (16-17). I didn’t feel very well after reading this scene, and not just because of its disgusting castor-oil like description of vomit. I’ve never felt such a visceral sense of disgust mixed with a shocking appreciation for descriptive storytelling. There was nothing else for me to explain. It was a deeply vivid image. I didn’t just witness a disgusting mess of blood, semen, and vomit; I saw a deeper glimpse of Ballard’s insecurities towards the body and its functions within our lonely world of fast cars and concrete freeways. And then I read the rest of the 200-page novel feeling like I witnessed some firework show of blood, concrete, and descriptive writing.

All of these moments, of course, are surprising and gruesome subjects to read. However, after reading certain passages in the book, such as the description of bruises on the face as “outlines of a second personality, a preview of the hidden faces of her psyche which would have emerged only in late middle age,” it’s obvious that this book is a meant to be a mental trip. Whether you’re holding the corners of the book while wearing surgeon gloves or clenching its pages a bit too close to your face, Crash is an experience and a revelation. Lights flash as angelic beams signaling salvation. Bodies are kissed and scars are caressed like secret hickeys. Concrete will never look or feel the same again.

Author Biography

Ariel is Anastamos’s copy editor and the co-host for the reading series, Write to Read. He received a B.A. in English from UCLA in 2017. You can follow him on twitter @tiesto_eliot.

*                    *                    *                    *                    *

 
“Oh, you’ve been to Taiwan? I am so jealous. I love Thai food.”
 

*                    *                    *                    *                    *

 
You see a performance along the beachside. There’s this teenager doing acrobatic tricks before a crowd. When he is done, he brings a hat before people, asking for money. Your partner gives you money and asks you to give it to him. You turn to your partner and ask why he won’t go give it to the boy himself. He shrugs and nods you to go with his five-dollar bill. Confused, you go and drop the money in the hat.
 
“Thank you,” the performing teenager smiles at you. You gesture a nod for him.
 
“Japanese?”                                                                                                        You stop. Blink. Shake your head.
 
“Korean?”                                                                                                           You smile and shake your head.
 
“Vietnamese?”                                                                                                   “No,” you say to be polite.
 
“Filipino?”                                                                                                           “Nope.”
 
He is absolutely lost. “What are you, then?”                                                 American?
 

*                    *                    *                    *                    *

 
You are with family for the holidays. The table is set and the food is warm. Chatter from all around the house fill the air. A sudden burst of laughter reaches your ears. It is in a language familiar for you to hear.
 
They ask you about school. They ask about your grades. Your internships. Your health. Your sleeping schedule. How much you eat a day. What connections you’ve made. Did you not know that your cousin is doing just fine in that other Ivy League in the east? They ask why you have gained weight. Do you always look this messy? Maybe consider using some skin products. You need to get more sleep. You need to graduate, soon. Are you dating anyone?
 
Oh. You are. Well.
 
Did you meet at school? At your internship? At work? Who are they? What race are they? Who is their family? What do they do in their free time? What sport do they play? What about instruments? What languages do they speak? What kind of—
 
Your partner only knows English? They know nothing of their own culture?
 
Now that you mention it, you could also do with some improvement. You need to know your language. What’s English going to do for you? Everybody speaks English. You’re no different. Do you want to work at some small company with no international communications? How far do you want to go in life? You should think about that.
 
Eventually.
 
Eventually, the conversation changes pace. There is reminiscing of your parent’s hometown. To the home of your grandparents. It captivates you. There are stories of war and survival. Of running along the banks of rivers in bare feet to catch little shrimps. Stories of walking down the street after school to the local candy shop where your mother would pick up her favorite dessert, once a week, with her allowance. You mention you’ve been to that city once, to add to the conversation as your family bite at pieces of pears and apples and dragonfruit after dinner.
 
To your mistake.
 
So what if you’ve been there? What you see is the city that’s been rebuilt and modernized in the last twenty years. You know nothing about when the city was just a town, nothing about when the country was of a different name, nothing about anything that had been, before globalization. You’ve lived in the United States all your life, you’ve been so modernized. You know nothing about what it means to grow up there, in that part of that country, and breathe in that air. Your mind has been so simplified. It knows nothing of war and the struggle for survival. You don’t even know your own language. The traditions of our life and your family will die with you.
 
Your mother calms down your father’s mother.
 
But she is right, your uncle says. He leans back with a hand on his chin and looks at the table as if in heavy philosophical contemplation. Kids these days, the ones from Asia. None of them care about their heritage.
 
The table nods all around you. You make quick eye contact to the siblings and the cousins who share in your struggle, but silently wish you had kept your mouth shut. You turn to the younger ones who do not understand and have yet to learn what lies ahead in their future, in this home.
 
They grow up so ignorant, your uncle continues, shaking his head. You’d be lucky to find any Asian kid born here that’s truly bilingual. That knows what the hell they’re supposed to prepare for the Lunar New Year. I mean, just the other day…
 
You bow your head to excuse yourself and bring your plate to the kitchen sink. You place it in softly and turn on the water to pretend you are rinsing your plate. You are rinsing your thoughts. You tell yourself you belong in your family.
 
You must belong with your family, because even when they see how Americanized you’ve become, it is still not Americanized enough for you to belong in the United States, in a land where the narrative is so black and so white, so black against white, so determined to throw everyone in every shade in between back to their motherlands, back to a land that does not wish to call itself your mother, back to the Eastern lands of this Westernized world, full of mysterious superstitions and strange mouths eating strange food and speaking strange languages, conversing with different looking people and filling their days with unordinary things, as if bound by a different part of space, a different place in time.
 
You turn off the water and rejoin the table.

Author Bio

A group of boys played guitarras and tambores. The beat of the heart; the tempo of the music. The world was alive, as the car inched forward.

Camila watched an old man craftily add butter, mayonnaise, chili powder, cotija cheese, and lime juice to an elote. A true artist. They passed taco and burrito carts, blankets with large animals printed on them, hungry children, and beautiful ollas with swirls of black and white designs. The words “gorditas de azcúar” were hand painted in bright yellow on a white cart. Filled with dulce de leche or Nutella, the sweet Mexican griddle cakes were Camila’s idea of heaven touching earth.

“Mama, can we get some gorditas please?”

Her mom nodded and smiled, “We’ll get some horchata too.”

Camila could already taste the smooth flavor of rice, milk, vanilla, and canela.

“They are still hot off the comal,” her mother said as she handed Camila the gordita.

Camila held it carefully, allowing the sweet aroma to transport her back to childhood. A place of comfort and safety; she treasured its familiarity. It was perfect really. Lightly crispy but still soft. She tore off a small piece and placed it into her mouth. The creamy dulce de leche hugged by the fluffy and warm crust was all she could ever need.

Outside of the car, a little boy that couldn’t be older than 7, had one arm wrapped around a baby with sunken cheeks, and another arm balancing straw hats and a gray tin can. He trailed behind an older woman selling beaded bracelets made of purples, blues, pinks, and oranges. Camila rolled her window down and waved at the little boy. She dropped all of her pesos into his can and handed him the gordita. His murky gray eyes met hers, “Gracias.”

She sunk lower into her seat. The delicious flavor of the dulce de leche still lingered on her taste buds, but her chin trembled, and her eyes were wet with tears.

Karina Trejo Melendez is an MFA in Creative Writing student at Chapman University. Her focus is on fiction and non-fiction writing. She earned her B.A. in Psychology and Child and Adolescent Development from Cal State Fullerton, where she conducted research and taught a class at a therapeutic arts non-profit. She is originally from Nuevo Casas Grandes, Chihuahua. As a first generation Mexican American and college student, she previously worked with student organizations to bring opportunities, inclusivity, and social justice to the CSUF community. She continues to advocate for these values as a Graduate Assistant for the Promising Futures Program at Chapman University.

Featured Image: Photo by Ricardo Esquivel from Pexels

Greg Yerumyan holds a BA in English and Political Science from UC Davis and is pursuing an MA in English at Chapman University. His poetry has appeared in Westwind, The Allegheny Review, and Z Publishing’s California’s Best Emerging Poets: An Anthology, among other publications. He works as a writing tutor at Chapman and Fullerton College.

Featured Image: “loneliness” provided by alainlm is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Most of the ads in the Daily Record, the newspaper in Northern Jersey where I grew up, said “SWM looks for SWF” or “SWF looks for SWM.”  Some ads were more inclusive, and racial identity wasn’t an issue.  Other ads were M4M or F4F.  Now and then an ad with the word “passing” would show up in the middle of these lists.  These days, this language would seem either archaic or offensive.  The ad would say something like “Transsexual Woman, Passing, Looking for Single Male” or “SWM looking for beautiful, passing, transsexual woman.”  What passing meant is that somehow a person could “fake” being cisgender.

There are many reasons why passing is problematic.  The word suggests that part of our being, our identity, who we are can be erased.  Of course, it’s normal to want to fit in.  But, fitting in isn’t always a good thing.  We lose something when we are passing.  We conform because we are afraid.  Passing is the negation of identity, the negation of self, the negation of history, the negation of critical thought.  By sticking out, by being unique, we take a stand against oppression and find the freedom that comes from living out our identity.

My mother’s, parents emigrated to this country from Italy during the early 20th century.  Like many other children of Italian immigrants, her mother didn’t teach her Italian.  My mother was told by her mother that she wanted her to be “an American.”  My grandmother was afraid that if her daughter was bilingual, that somehow my mother would be bullied.  Americanness equaled the English language.  My grandmother’s, native Sicilian dialect seasoned with Arabic, Greek, French, Spanish, and Catalan words was not handed down to the next generation, perhaps, to evolve on new soil, growing on United States soil.  In effect, her family wanted my mother to pass as “American.”  I understand why my grandmother felt this was necessary, however, the loss of language is really a tragedy.  With the loss of language came the loss of a culture.  Something that made us who we are, that was a birthright of our ancestors who were born in a place that they loved, has been severed from our mouths.

The problem with the United States is that we are fed the idea that identity is a bad thing, that culture, color, and language have to be set aside so as to become whatever an “American” is supposed to be, when the word “American” literally encompasses everyone from Greenland to Tierra Del Fuego.  It’s time that we recognize that our “Americanness” is artificial.  Even the histories in our textbooks are a mixture of truth and fiction.  We are taught to buy into mythologies in order to be American.  We venerate our Presidents when many of these men were far from perfect.  We often ignore the fact that slavery and genocide built this country.

“Passing” never leads to peace.  During the 80s and 90s the slogan “Silence equals death,” was used by AIDS activists. Our political leaders had to confront the fact that our LGBTQ population the fact that their ignorance and prejudice were literally killing people, especially those from marginalized populations.  When people, especially gay men, put their lives on the line those who were in authority had to take notice.

When people are “Passing,” the status quo never realizes that they exist.  Instead, people become invisible.  “Passing” is a form of slavery that binds our minds and souls with invisible chains.  It submits to oppression because it has given up trying, given up marching in the streets for change.  Instead, it merely walks mindlessly accepting that the world will destroy itself.  The way to free one’s self is not with conformity, but the truth.  Our truth, that truth that makes us who we are, will set us free.

It’s hard to define “Americanness.”  If we are honest with ourselves there isn’t one American identity.  There are over 500 Native nations within our boundaries.  There are regional identities in this country too.  Often people from Boston, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Honolulu, Nashville, and Miami differ drastically from one another culturally, not only because of where they live, but the immigrant communities that have flavored their regional identities.  There are many speakers of indigenous languages in this country like Navajo / Dine, Inupiaq and Native Hawaiian.  Also, descendants of settlers and immigrants have brought Spanish, French, Mandarin, Tagalog, and various Italian dialects to these shores.  At times the lines between identities blend, creating new colors.  That ability to create something new is uniquely American.

It’s time that we live out the motto “E Pluribus Unum,” “Out of Many, One.”  America is a multiplicity of Americas bound together by history and histories, bound by a common fate.  We are at war with ourselves because many of us are afraid of the diversity that is the cornerstone of American culture.  If we defend that multiplicity, we defend ourselves and preserve our heritage for many years to come.  We are a quilt of various pieces.  The way these pieces are mended together means preserving both our diversity, and the thread that binds us together.  This is accomplished not by passing, but by being our, unique selves.

Daniel Miess is a graduate student at Chapman University, pursuing a Master of Arts in English and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. He graduated Summa Cum Laude from New England College in May 2016. His work has been published in the Adelaide Literary Magazine, the Henniker Review, the Harbinger Asylum, and Mud Chronicles: A New England Anthology. He recently moved to Orange, California. He grew up in New Jersey, and has lived in Long Beach, California; Jay and Auburn in Maine; as well as Lebanon and Concord in New Hampshire. He lives with his husband of six years, Kelly.

Featured Image: “Individuality” provided by Loozrboy is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0