An Open Letter to a Private Fox

Consider this a love letter. As such, it requires patience.

Settle in. Fold under your legs. Curl your tail around the bean of your body, keep the ashy tip poised over your nose. But be quick about it. It is cold tonight, and my voice will carry.

There are many places to begin. One day I saw a hollow under a rock. I had a hunch. Another time I spotted a rotten tree, the pulp soft and pungent. I could see you there, waiting out the night. You could be there now. No one would wait for you but me.

I used to think you were always hiding, but now I know better. We simply are not worthy of your presence.

Forgive my warm cheeks, this terrible sequence of halting gestures. I don’t know how to tell you this story. Should I leave a screed in branches, a chit in stones at your door? My affections are spelled out in river water and berry juice, in layers of soil. The soft bone-glow of the moon.

If I could I would yap at you, wowwowwow, crack open my face in some approximation of love. But I am not vulpine. I would make a mistake, my teeth would clack out the wrong song. I’m used to the grayer ones, understand. The Western ones, thick bodied and substantial. They could pass as coyotes. You could pass as a cat. You keep all your secrets around you.

I know your stealth – once, the cupreous flicker of your tail at mid-morning, my clumsy presence sending you over the hill – but you aren’t so clever at hiding evidence. Those hastily concealed digs in the leaves, the hind end of a mouse, that bird wing in your scat. The tracks by the lake where your thin legs punched through the dry mud. I don’t mean to be presumptuous. You will, I hope, correct me if I’m wrong. I admire your work. You speak a different language from the wild hysteria of the whitetails, the hang-dog pessimism of the possums.

It’s not as if I understand you. For instance, there is the matter of the turkeys. Three, fat and searching. They come in the yard jerking their heads like diplomats, high stepping with raw feet. I watch them peck the ground, and I call them miracles; I chew my dinner and wonder how it is you haven’t chewed them for dinner. Easy prey for you, no doubt. Surely some nights you pray for such prey. Why have you spared them? Is it your humanity? I’m sorry. See, another stupid mistake. There is no word for what I’m trying to say. Altruism, perhaps, but that has a sheen I don’t intend. Your animality?

Your choices do fascinate. Vulpine. I marvel over your aptitude, over the unpredictable, unswallowable desires that crawl up into your mouth like bile.

I never imagined you’d want that pumpkin, discarded in the street, slammed into pieces by a 14 year old’s baseball bat. Not you. The pregnant, waddling raccoons, maybe, hiding their shame behind dumpsters. The ambitious squirrels, who plan but never consider the big picture. I waited for their teeth marks, a dental x-ray of late night hunger.

But you came instead, boldly standing under the street light, orange strings of pumpkin meat hanging between your teeth. You turned your ears toward me, the threat of me, and listened to my blood, to digestive juices, to the thumping and beating of life. Oh, you. You put your head back down, drooped the tail. A meal in front of you.

You marvelous beast. You sexy, beautiful thing. If they saw you, they’d start a fan club, goddammit. They’d build a religion around the jewel of your heart.

You ate, unafraid of me. You swallowed down that orange flesh, vulnerable under the yellow lights, a mouthful occluding your breath.

I could have killed you then. You could have been seen by others, struck down by machinery, snared and put in a loud block of a truck. There is, always, the threat of death. Do you know what they’d do to you? Rubber and asphalt. Latex gloves, a syringe. Do you run from these things? Do you even know, in all your cleverness, from what you’re running? You just run.

That night, you stayed and ate. A gamble. Warm air from your wet mouth, between bites. Your stomach, I knew, would be full of pumpkin. White seeds. You’d sleep dense bellied. In the morning, I’d find your scat heavy with vegetable instead of bone.

My god, you can’t lie.

I should not be saying this. I am married, and you are a fox. I can’t give you my ring finger to chew on, but I can give you my gratitude. A humble meal to soften your pangs.

Thank you for not running away that night. For running away every other time, for making yourself invisible long enough to exist.

Thank you living in this place we have carved into and ruined, making a life in a crumpled shoebox of wilderness. Thank you for moving each night, stone to stone. There is not room enough for a mate or kin. There is only space enough for you, this day, and perhaps another.

In the winter, I will look for your tracks. Tiny feet on the snow. If you make it that long, I will cry for your endurance. If you do not make it, I will cry for your absence.

How long you have made it, already, all alone in the empty ribs of these woods.

New essay at TNB

I've got a new piece up at The Nervous Breakdown on why we should stop writing obituaries. Check out Everything That Scares Us Is Dead.

Interview for A Tutta Cultura

In July, Bone Worship was released in Italy as Il Mio Matrimonio Combinato. Journalist Emanuela Frate just interviewed me about the novel and modern arranged marriage for the Italian website A Tutta Cultura. (Q&A is in English.) Check out the interview here.

Of Writers and Recluses

In some distant corners, the border bushlands of Botswana, for example, there are writers so unaccustomed to human contact that they journey into London for their book tours only to jump at sidewalk cracks, thinking puff adders are underfoot. Authors living in remote Rocky Mountain cabins built into shale, tethered to the publishing industry via the last bar payphone in the world. People who are reticent to move among the thought-scattering, thing-gathering townies below. These storytellers have forgotten their social skills, misplaced them under a pile of words, leaves, and snow. It’s the writer-as-madman, the old coot (or tangle-headed banshee) who comes down the mountain or treks out of the desert just once a year or so, when injured. Or when his truck is.

Everyone sees him in his glorious leonine dishevelment and marvels.

I wonder sometimes if it’s really possible to write about people without being among them. If there’s a way to store up human truths, the ones that don’t expire, anyway, and then disappear into the land of bear grass. Perhaps reclusive writers have found some way to keep themselves undiluted by our herky-jerky business down below. Or, less generously, it’s possible they are doing themselves and their writing a disservice by drawing a line and building their cabins on one side of it. Who defines the world, and why would you want to play cartographer? I suppose it’s merely a choice, and as such, it is meaningless. As long as they keep writing. There are still those brief moments when civilization must pull them in, at least for a new fan belt. Time enough for a draught of humanity.

After all, one can’t draw a steadfast line in rock.

Lately I’ve been thinking about how important having a “place” is. Whether you can move away and take that place with you. And whether “placeness” is even real. If you ask me where my place is, without hesitation I will tell you it is Montana. My husband jokes that when someone meets me for the first time, within five minutes they will know how much of my life was, and is, centered on our four years living there. When I’m feeling especially romantic about it, I am certain I will be writing about Montana for the rest of my life, even though my Montana is not necessarily the same as a hunter’s Montana, or a developer’s Montana, or an equestrian’s Montana. Of course, the bitterroot doesn’t care about such trivial distinctions.

Can there be one place for a person, or many? I want to go to Iran, and Morocco, and I want to return to South Africa and find my way back into the mess of people and puff adders, so maybe those are my places too. How will I know?

Even here, on the other, more metropolitan side of the country, I want to be no less than a zealot in my quest for placeness. I want to see everything. There is the easy beauty of the spider living in the hollow of a lopsided oak, but there is also the extraordinary beauty of a subway rat in New York City, persistently making its way along the smooth, steel tracks, searching for food under shards of glass and soot and cigarette butts, eyes evolving to a life of darkness and the sporadic, subterranean earthquakes of human passage. Say what you will, but not a one of us has the toughness in the last segment of a rat’s tail.

Right about now, I feel like a subway rat plucked from its shadowy life under the city, left to squinny around. The first weekend we drove out to a park on Long Island Sound, looking to get away. We got honked at twice on our way there, found a sandy beach covered with shiny, tattooed bodies, chicken bones, tailgate barbecues. I had to fight my old urge, my Montana urge, to disappear into the periphery, find some mountain to climb. It was chaos, or life. Basketball. Loud music. Puerto Rican women in cut-out bathing suits taking glamour shots of each other with their cell phones. I looked for animals. Twice a gull flew by, having adapted a new city camouflage, some smart slate gray color mixed into the feathers.

Each morning I walk in the woods here, what constitutes woods, tracts of precious land purchased by cities and rich benefactors whom I’ve never bumped into once. They are eerily empty. A handful of turkeys and doves, a dozen or so squirrels. I trip over the rocks, my footing still awkward after a month. I routinely hear sirens and people’s conversations in the suburbs around these acres, creating the impression that I’m inside a movie set. Trees marked for cutting are bound by plastic, yellow tape. This is not the wilderness.

I can’t get lost. I’ve tried.

This is a start. I am good at this, this moving, this adapting to new places, new accents, new habits, but in the beginning, there is blindness. Temporary, but acute. Sometimes all day it’s a single question in my mind, on a loop: “Okay, okay! Turn where?” Perhaps it’s a different kind of lost. What they say is true. It’s faster here, crowded. One keeps looking for mountains, but comes up empty. But it’s not all bad, just different. And I can’t yet see it.

Sour Milk Published in 52 Stories

My short story, "Sour Milk," has just been published in 52 Stories! Have a look here.

Bone Worship Reviewed

Two wonderful writers and colleagues, Persis Karim and Chris Clarke, recently reviewed Bone Worship, in the Women's Review of Books and the acclaimed blog Coyote Crossing respectively.

Here are a couple excerpts:

Making Sense of an Iranian Past

Bone Worship
By Elizabeth Eslami
New York: Pegasus Books, 2010,
368 pp., $15.95, paperback

Reviewed by Persis Karim

The late 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century saw the publication of a large number of memoirs by Iranian-American women (among the most notable: Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi [2003]; Lipstick Jihad, by Azadeh Moaveni [2005]; and Funny in Farsi, by Firoozeh Dumas [2003]). Many of these memoirists were narrating the traumas and losses associated with the Iranian Revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, and their relocation to the West.

More than once I have been asked why there are so many Iranian-American women writing-and so few men. The question is partly answered by the history of literature and writing in Iran: for millennia, well into the twentieth century, Iranian letters were the jurisdiction of men. Women were undereducated and in large part limited to the private realm; public disclosure was discouraged, when it was not forbidden altogether. Although there were some female writers, their work was not taken as seriously as men’s and was often judged more harshly. Today, however, women’s long-suppressed voices and stories have been released by the floodgates of history. They can write and publish in ways that were difficult or off-limits to them before. And, just as women have emerged at the forefront of literature in Iran today, so too have they dominated the literary stage in the diaspora. Their personal stories recount the challenges of migration, their struggles to reinvent themselves in new contexts, and their hybridized experiences as hyphenated Americans.

Currently, the urgency of the first-person memoir is giving way to an emerging Iranian-American novel that does more than simply evoke the typical American immigrant story. Two novels by recent MFA graduates exemplify this trend: Laleh Khadivi’s The Age of Orphans and Elizabeth Eslami’s Bone Worship. Both, necessarily, draw from what they know, and don’t know, of their immigrant parents’ journeys to the United States and what they lost in the process. However, each provides her own complex, nuanced perspective as a writer navigating the aspects of “old world” culture in an America dominated by predictable and tired narratives of Iran and the Middle East, post-9/11. Both of these books complicate our notions and invite our curiosity.

Khadivi and Eslami share a longing to connect with and make sense of the past, in order to unravel their characters’ futures.

Bone Worship, Elizabeth Eslami’s debut novel, is also suggestive of her own experience as a first-generation Iranian-American. Eslami spins the story of her protagonist from threads of the old and the new. When the American-born Jasmine flunks out of college, she faces the prospect of an arranged marriage.

Instead of simply playing with the classic stereotypes about arranged marriages as antithetical to Western values, however, Eslami helps us to appreciate the old-world rituals, which are not devoid of meaning, even in the modern world. Jasmine’s rather shaky relationship with her enigmatic doctor-father has real resonance. He decides to involve himself in her life at the critical point when she’s defining herself as an adult, and she becomes curious about what he left behind in his native Iran. She takes the endeavor of finding a suitor as a challenge that resonates with her interest in zoology and biology, and her “research” eventually helps her to understand her father’s motivations. When he left his country, he also left parts of himself, and beneath his gruff, cool personality is a tender concern for his daughter. In the end, Jasmine finds a husband, but what she really discovers is that the culture that shadows her life has something to teach her about the different ways that people “arrange” their lives and loves.

Both these novels communicate important information about the Iranian and Iranian-American experiences (and yes, Kurdish too), in language that opens up western readers’ vision of that part of the world, rather than closing it off in a classical trope of “us” versus “them.” Fiction really is the best ambassador of us all.

From the blog Coyote Crossing, by Chris Clarke:

This review has been a while in coming, partly because life and the accompanying events have overtaken me, but partly because after finishing Bone Worship: A Novel, I wanted to let it sit for a while before I reacted.

Full disclosure: the author Elizabeth Eslami is a friend, and has blessed a book of mine with a glowing review. Situations like this can be awkward, and so over the years I’ve developed a de facto policy when I find myself faced with reviewing a work by a friend. Generally speaking, that policy is that if I find a friend’s book lacking in more respects than is acceptable, I tend not to review it.

Fortunately that’s not the case here. Eslami’s debut novel is wonderful.

The basics: Jasmine Fahroodhi is a young woman with possibly the worst case of sophomore slump on record, which endures until her parents pick her up at graduation — only a few days after she lets them know she’d flunked out of school. Her father, a Persian-born doctor, seems less rattled by his daughter’s failure in school than by her choice of a major other than pre-med. Jasmine goes home to Georgia with her parents, where her father embarks on his “Plan B” for Jasmine’s future: hastegar, an arranged marriage. Jasmine, as unenthusiastic about home life as she had been at the University of Chicago, musters only the mildest American Feminist opposition to this plan.

Dr. Fahroodhi is a classic fish out of water. Opaque even to his family, he is frequently hostile to Jasmine — “you’re stupid” being among his most frequent utterances. Her reluctantly co-dependent mother, born in the Old South, oddly supports her husband’s plans for an arranged marriage, helping him take out “Bride Available” ads in newspapers catering to Iranian-Americans. From Chapter 8:

“Listen to me. I know you think arranged marriages are a thing of the past, and maybe they are, but that doesn’t mean they don’t work. It doesn’t mean they’re wrong.” She had stopped blinking completely, something she did when she was worked up. “You’re the one who looks at everything in black and white. If you’ll just give this a chance, you’ll see —”

“Jesus, how would you even know? You were born here! You married Dad for love. Your own choice. Or am I missing something?”

The calendar on the coffee table was still open, showing a boy bending over for a shot from a malevolently cartoonish doctor.

“I know, Jasmine. I know. And look what happened.”

Jasmine reluctantly goes along with the plan, which — true to the book’s dust-cover teaser — results in humorous and awkward meetings with potential suitors, and then the unexpected happens, though not in the saccharine way this telegraphic summary might lead you to expect. In the meantime, Jasmine stumbles through a series of suburban job-hunting moments, culminating in one of those menial jobs a lucky person finds every now and then that utterly transforms them.

That’s the plot, but this novel isn’t really as much about plot as it is character, primarily that of Jasmine’s father. Jasmine’s relationship with her difficult father is the central point of the novel. Early on, she remarks that despite having known him all her life, “if I had to stand up at his funeral one day and tell the world about his desires and hopes and who he was as a person, I’d stand there mute.” In the novel’s first few pages Jasmine lists the seven big things she knows about her father — his lifelong aversion to broccoli; his habit of calling his parents in Iran every other Sunday; the fact that he used to beat their dogs with a shovel; his having pushed a young cousin off a wall in Iran, badly injuring her, and a few others as well distributed along the spectrum from banal to vile. As the chapters unfold, Jasmine examines each of those seven known things in some detail. Eslami deftly structures the narrative around each of these channel markers.

Eslami’s portrayal of Dr. Fahroodhi is frank, and there is much to dislike in the man. His vulnerabilities, explored as the book unfolds, may make the reader cringe on his behalf, but they do little to soften our impression of him; they mainly help reveal what broke him. Jasmine’s relationship with her father is one of those that might seem inexplicable to an outsider, a bond that apparently persists out of duty alone, with neither party gaining much. At that, it’s like a lot of father-daughter relationships. There is tenderness there, but it’s deeply masked: the unrequited love of a daughter for a man who observed his children “from a safe distance like a potentially flammable lab experiment,” the arguable love of a man for his incomprehensibly un-Persian daughter that mainly manifests as frustration and anger. That anger and frustration, felt on both sides, never comes to a head. Conflict builds, tension mounts, and then just as a blowout seems inevitable something turns the narrative and submerges the tension: Mom, or the telephone, or circumstance, or even just Yusef Fahroodhi’s unwillingness to engage with his daughter as an adult worthy of respect. Maybe it’s American of me, but I did find myself wishing for a more open confrontation between the two.

All that notwithstanding, Eslami has not created a loveless father. Jasmine sees his love for her mother plainly and from a bit of a remove, as though it’s a specimen described in one of the natural history volumes she checks out of the small local library:

My parents, when they were first in love, swam out into the ocean and kissed until a lifeguard blew his whistle and yelled at them and made them come in, up to the sand. He was afraid of them drowning, their bodies tangled together in a way that made staying afloat impossible. He was afraid of what he saw from his white wood post high in the sky, the inability to tell if they were one person or two. He was afraid that if you looked up at them from deep under the green water, you would first see the light on the surface slicing down into the water, and then you would see them, and you would get their arms and legs confused with an octopus, a starfish.

One of the things I liked best in Bone Worship is exemplified in that paragraph: Eslami uses images, memories, passing conversations and other bits of detail to represent Jasmine’s exploration of her relationship with her family and herself. The lifeguard is Jasmine, afraid of what her parents’ love for each other might resemble. So is the boy in the magazine illustration, submitting to pain inflicted by a doctor who knows what’s good for him. The remembered Doberman pinscher punished with the shovel, growling at the boundaries of the family as it peered through myopic eyes, stands in for the father who beat it. The whole hastegar plot itself is a fair symbol for the involuntary relationship Jasmine has with her family — as we each have with our families. Eslami weaves these images into her prose quite deftly, and in ways that made me frankly envious of her sight. This is a hell of a fine novel, especially for a debut, and I highly recommend it.

Bone Worship in Italian

The Italian translation of Bone Worship, Il Mio Matrimonio Combinato, debuts this month! To watch the trailer and read more about it, click here.