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Thomas Hale | Financial Times | November 2, 2022 | 3,902 words
After visiting a bar in Shanghai where a COVID-19 case is detected, Thomas Hale is whisked away to a close-contact quarantine facility on an island somewhere north of the city — “the kind of place that finds you, rather than the other way around.” Hale stays in a small shipping container-like cabin with an iron bed and other basics. (Interestingly, the internet connection is 24 times faster than at his hotel.) Although he never tests positive, he remains there for 10 days, and keeps to a routine that includes language study, work, exercise, online chess, and streaming TV. When he’s able to open his door or wander around, he has conversations with workers and other “residents,” which are captured in the piece as unexpected moments of human connection in an otherwise eerie place. Hale offers a chilling look into China’s zero-COVID approach, which uses constant testing, contact tracing, quarantines, and lockdowns to stop community transmission. This particular facility, “P7,” is one among many, and just a glimpse into a vast monitoring system, workforce, and way of life that most of us outside of China cannot fathom. —CLR
Sam Edwards | Guernica | October 18, 2022 | 2,646 words
In leaving Algiers, Mohammed wanted to escape compulsory military service and seek adventure. He knew there would be danger along the way. “His life at home was bearable, he said. But he wanted something more.” What Mohammed didn’t count on was spending years in a makeshift migrant camp in Spain, as his paperwork winds through the byzantine asylum process. As Sam Edwards reports at Guernica, the delays are punitive and performative; some rich countries want to make it difficult to enter. “Melilla had become a de facto holding cell for asylum applicants — and a symbol of two increasingly common trends in how rich countries handle asylum cases. Refugees are detained ‘offshore’ while their applications wind through the system; wait times drag on as applications pile up, and ‘host nations’ seem to deter future migrants by making those who are already there more miserable.” —KS
Kim Cross | Bicycling | November 3, 2022 | 6,878 words
Whether I’m on my feet or on a bike, I love climbing. Love it. (My wife hates this, especially when we’re hiking and I shift gears without realizing it.) It’s not the pain involved in the effort that attracts me; at least, not entirely. It’s more that the climb — or, rather, finishing the climb — in some way physically embodies the idea that hardship is temporary. It’s mindfulness in corporeal form. But all the lofty platitudes in the world don’t change the fact that I have no earthly idea how Braydon Bringhurst operates. Kim Cross’s profile of Bringhurst and his unfathomable quest to ride up one of mountain biking’s most brutally technical descents, known as The Whole Enchilada, makes that very clear. It’s partially his outlook, honed in part by taking the same sports-psychology class 10 times in college. It’s partially his otherworldly proprieception, which made him excellent at airborne sports from slopestyle skiing to pole vault. But there’s something else lurking in there too, and I suspect it’s the same something that fuels people like Eliud Kipchoge and Alex Honnold: the drive to do the impossible, paired with the absolutely certainty that you can. It’s never not fascinating to read about, and in this case Cross pairs it with an unerring descriptive eye that manages to turn the intricacies of the climb into something we mere mortals can understand. No matter the hill in front of you, you’re bound to take something from this. —PR
Jaq Evans | Truly*Adventurous | October 11, 2022 | 5,334 words
As it sets the opening scene, Jaq Evans’ essay reads like a thriller: As the light fades, two thieves search among the stones atop the Second Mesa on the Hopi reservation. It is a search that is fruitless until one of them sees an unnatural divot. A divot that affects the course of their lives for years to come. It marks the entrance to a cave where the pair find four figurines they later steal, planning to sell them on the black market. The figures are a family: Dawn Woman, Corn Maiden’s Husband, Corn Maiden, and Corn Maiden’s Daughter. Central to the religion of the Hopi, they are regarded as living entities. When they go missing, the Hopi priests hear them crying in the night, longing for home. After the theft, the essay gracefully morphs into a supernatural tale. The thieves see the faces of the figurines in their dreams and struggle with misfortune after misfortune. Desperate for a release from what they see as a curse, they sell the family of deities at a cut price — but still, remain haunted by them. I, too, found myself haunted, gripped by their story, hoping for an ending where they all return home together. Discovering their true fate was a gut punch. —CW
Matti Friedman | Smithsonian | November 7, 2022 | 5,377 words
I love visiting supermarkets while traveling, perusing aisles of foods both familiar and not. An Armenian grocery in the San Fernando Valley introduced me to pinecone jam. A store in Bishkek surprised me with its wide array of ketchup options. Then there was the supermarket in Abu Dhabi that boasted a bar filled with nothing but dates: big ones, small ones, stuffed ones, fresh ones — and in a rainbow of brown or orange hues. Until then, I’d had no clue there were so many varieties. Matti Friedman’s feature about the sumptuous fruit is equally surprising and instructive. It traces the date’s history from ancient times to the present and posits that the fruit tells the long, complicated story of the Middle East. Friedman takes readers on a tour of mythology, architecture, and empire; inside a Jurassic Park-style genetic experiment involving “resurrected” date palms; and into the halls of an agricultural conference about the future of the date in a fraught world and changing climate. By the end of reading this piece I felt enriched — and hungry. —SD
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Isabel Quintero writes a lovely personal essay about divorce, longing, tacos, and Mexican cuisine and culture. (Careful if you read this when you’re hungry — I really wouldn’t be surprised if you were salivating by the end of it!)
I could have ordered asada or buche, but the al pastor eclipsed everything else. It was like the first time I had good sex—I didn’t know it could be like that. I ate seven tacos. I didn’t want to stop but my body told me to keep going and I listened to my body. Nothing I’d eaten in an empty lot or at liquor store counter or food truck in California compared to the level of excellence that was served to me on a bright blue plastic plate. I watched the taquero slice with such swiftness that his knife was not a tool but an extension of his thick brown arm. These tacos had to have been made by hands that inherited this particular kind of magic making.
Is it a profile? A testament to the power of sports psychology and positive thinking? Sure. But it’s really the story of how a single human being does something that seems functionally impossible: riding a mountain bike up one of the most technically demanding descents known in the sport. (Watch the documentary embedded along with the story for the full Free Solo experience.)
Riding down it was a double-black-diamond tantrum. It zigged and zagged down a slickrock cliff that scraped the edge of a mesa. The prelude was an off-camber cascade with a steep hairpin turn to the right. After a chunky narrow chute came the moment of truth and pucker: a nearly 180-degree switchback on the precipice of a cliff. Trying to turn would jackknife the bike, so most riders would brake to a standstill, then try to hop and pivot. The final descent hugged a handlebar-scraping wall and plummeted down two slickrock slabs as steep as playground slides. The sandstone was blackened by skidding tires and polished by sliding butts.
On the eve of its series finale, Justin Charity engages with the most sneakily influential show to hit television since Tony Soprano started therapy. There’s no limit to my love for Atlanta, but don’t let the color your decision to read this; it’s no flowery paean to the program. Instead, it’s a peeling-back of the impulses and contradictions that made creator Donald Glover the perfect pugilist to step into the ring at the very peak of Peak TV.
The show thrived on the strength of its contrarian impulses. If the rest of respectable television was going to become synonymous with movie-length episodes, then Atlanta would pack its prestige into a good, old-fashioned 24 minutes. If other shows would chase middlebrow magazine raves, then Atlanta was going to primarily obsess over its standing with the average Black viewer. If other race-conscious works of the past few years would treat Blackness and whiteness as relentlessly solemn concerns, then Atlanta would tackle race with the utmost irreverence and ambivalence; the viewer would struggle, or perhaps not even care, to discern what exactly the writers’ room was “trying to say” with the chaotic scene of looters laying siege to a Target while Darius tries to return an air fryer in the opening minutes of the fourth-season premiere.
Jason Guriel | On Browsing | November 2022 | 4,361 words (15 minutes)
Let’s browse a bookstore—a Platonic one, a composite. Let’s wander an aisle, running our fingertips across a wall of spines. One spine, thick and black, juts out: the recent NYRB Classics reissue of William Gaddis’s novel The Recognitions. It’s a block of a book, though you’d never know that, scrolling online. The back cover even features a blurb by Don DeLillo. Let’s linger on it.
I remember the bookstore, long gone now, on Forty-Second Street. I stood in the narrow aisle reading the first paragraph of The Recognitions. It was a revelation, a piece of writing with the beauty and texture of a Shakespearean monologue—or, maybe more apt, a work of Renaissance art impossibly transformed from image to words. And they were the words of a contemporary American. This, to me, was the wonder of it.
There’s a lot to like about this blurb. There’s the spectacle of one great novelist plumping for the work of another. There’s the real-time search for the right words (“or, maybe more apt”) and the wonderful ones arrived at (“a work of Renaissance art impossibly transformed from image to words”). There’s the subtext of a green writer, a budding DeLillo, stumbling on the kind of writing he hadn’t thought was native to his American soil, something he didn’t even realize he was searching for. “And they were the words of a contemporary American,” he tells us, in awe. “This, to me, was the wonder of it.” There’s a bildungsroman buried in DeLillo’s blurb.
But then there’s that opening bit, which the blurb could reasonably live without. “I remember the bookstore, long gone now, on Forty-Second Street,” writes DeLillo, eating up precious back-cover real estate.
Why recall the bookstore where he first read the opening paragraph of The Recognitions? Perhaps the paragraph was so brilliant it imprinted the moment on DeLillo’s memory as if on film. Perhaps it was a Proustian madeleine, a prod to memory. Or maybe the bookstore itself played a part in DeLillo’s first encounter with The Recognitions. Maybe something in the very plaster pulled him to Gaddis’s book. Whatever the case, the bookstore had stuck with him. Stuck to him. Paragraph and place had fused in the novelist’s mind.
I can certainly remember where I was when I first encountered a great many of my favourite books. I never meant to keep these memories; I seem to have had no say in the matter. The bookstores, my mind decided, were important: the setting for a bildungsroman.
For instance, I remember standing in Toronto’s World’s Biggest Bookstore—“long gone now,” to lift DeLillo’s line. It was around 1996, and I was considering a paperback copy of Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash. The cover, you see, had cried out to my teenage self. A ninja type, sword raised, stands before an arch of ancient brickwork, bulging with duelling bulls in relief. But beyond the arch, across a plain of circuitry, a futuristic skyline awaits. Above the title, a header declares the book to be “THE #1 SCIENCE FICTION BESTSELLER,” the definite article doing some work. Below the title, a blurb from something called Los Angeles Reader (also “long gone now”) is blunt: “Stephenson has not stepped, he has vaulted onto the literary stage with this novel.”
On the back cover, there’s a vote of confidence from William Gibson no less, maybe my favourite writer, plus other appealing endorsements. “A cross between Neuromancer and Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland,” says one blurb. A “gigathriller” sporting a “cool, hip cybersensibility,” says the publisher’s copy. Hey, it was the 1990s.
I stood there, holding the paperback. The World’s Biggest Bookstore was low-ceilinged and harshly lit, with many rows of orange shelves. The building itself had two floors, one entrance, and a long approach, and there was usually a homeless person right by the doors, so you had time to root for change or steel yourself, especially if you were a shy, naive kid from the suburbs. It wasn’t as obviously welcoming as the tony megastores of today, like Indigo, which dedicate a lot of space to pillows, candles, and Starbucks (though I seem to recall the World’s Biggest, late in its life, grudgingly attempting a café—a counter with a few tables).
I’ve never thought about a book I own and then recalled where I was when I ordered it off a website.
Still, you could linger there for hours because of the sheer volume of books. Tongue in cheek, the store marketed itself as an admirably shabby foil to its competitors: “We occasionally have soft mood lighting. But then we replaced the burnt out fluorescent tubes.” World’s Biggest was about the books, shelves and shelves of them. When my father and I were downtown, we’d often arrange to split up for an hour or so, then meet at the bookstore. If one of us was late, the other would have more than enough to occupy himself with. This was before smartphones, when killing time took creativity.
Anyway, perhaps I looked like I was on the fence, because a passing employee paused long enough to inform me that the book I was holding was excellent. I remember a thin, middle-aged woman with jet-black hair, bearing a stack of books. I want to say she was wearing the sort of apron bookstores foist on their staff, and black shoes, maybe even Doc Martens. She gave off the vibe of a mostly reformed Goth, someone who’d dabbled in dark arts or, at least, Neil Gaiman comics. I immediately decided she was childless, a serious reader, trustworthy, and very cool. I bought the book.
As I grew older and spent more time with friends, I tried to continue the practice of arranging to meet at large bookstores, where the early worm might browse for a bit. But World’s Biggest—which was owned by Coles, a chain eventually absorbed by Indigo—was torn down in 2014. You could buy a latte at the newer, upscale stores. You could retreat to a comfy chair or even listen to live music on an actual piano. But standing around under strong lighting— basically loitering as you waited for ex-Goth angels, clad in dark raiment, to descend and offer guidance—was off brand and off the table.
I’ve never thought about a book I own and then recalled where I was when I ordered it off a website. Perhaps I was sitting at the dining room table. Perhaps I had my laptop on the sofa. Screens absorb and disperse us. When we’re online, we’re everywhere—and nowhere.
It could’ve been otherwise. When William Gibson minted the term “cyberspace” in his 1982 short story “Burning Chrome,” he imagined something like an internet, but in spatial terms. You “jacked in” using an Ono-Sendai VII deck and a pair of trodes, the trodes held in place by a “white terry sweatband.” Here is one of Gibson’s characters, a hacker, describing cyberspace.
A silver tide of phosphenes boiled across my field of vision as the matrix began to unfold in my head, a 3-D chessboard, infinite and perfectly transparent. . . . Legitimate programmers jack into their employers’ sector of the matrix and find themselves surrounded by bright geometries representing the corporate data.
Gibson’s vision of linked computers was prescient, but quaint too. Cyberspace was still a “somewhere,” a grid populated with “bright geometries,” a terrain to navigate, to move through.
A decade later, in Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson refined Gibson’s idea and proposed the “Metaverse” (no relation to Mark Zuckerberg’s). Accessible via goggles, the Metaverse is organized around the so-called Street, a “grand boulevard going all the way around the equator of a black sphere with a radius of a bit more than ten thousand kilometers. That makes it 65,536 kilometers around, which is considerably bigger than the Earth.” You can customize your avatar, but be warned: “cheap public terminals” produce a “jerky, grainy black and white.” There are “vast hovering overhead light shows” and “free-combat zones where people can go to hunt and kill each other.” You can “write car and motorcycle software” and take your “software out and race it in the black desert of the electronic night.” In the Metaverse, the code’s the limit.
We’ve grown used to this atomized, blinkered arrangement, each of us in our carousel, fed by our feed. We’ve acclimated to online shopping, to typing in the title of a book and being hustled straight away to its unique page.
We didn’t get these sci-fi internets, of course. We didn’t even get the internet as originally advertised. (The early, buzzy metaphors—“information superhighway,” “surfing”—promised dynamic motion.) Instead, we got an endlessly metastasizing stack of two-dimensional pages—and browsers to sort them. But then the language of “browser” is a feint as well. You don’t “browse” the internet. You don’t move through it. It’s a galaxy’s worth of content with none of the space. It’s infinite density. You either already know what you want to see (and duly type in the URL) or you try the search bar, which can bring up millions of possibilities. You can keep many different browsers open at once, fanned out like cards from decks of different provenance, a bespoke set specific to your needs. Miraculous, sure, but you’re never quite somewhere. There are no aisles, no vistas, no long views.
We’ve grown used to this atomized, blinkered arrangement, each of us in our carousel, fed by our feed. We’ve acclimated to online shopping, to typing in the title of a book and being hustled straight away to its unique page. We’ve given up the journey for the destination. We’ve achieved two-dimensional teleportation.
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There was something steadying, though, about standing in an actual, cavernous bookstore and taking it all in. Your fellow customers shared a room and a set of options. The scale was human, and the stock was present. Some of it disappeared from day to day as people purchased books. But you had to walk past the stuff you thought you didn’t want to reach the stuff you thought you did. Thus, you could stumble on something you hadn’t set out for. (I’d never heard of Snow Crash the day I picked it up.)
Or you could cozy up to a title slowly, over time, flirting with the idea of it. I remember visiting a copy of the novel Gravity’s Rainbow, by Thomas Pynchon, over and over. It resided at The Book Company in Sherway Gardens. I’d won a high school English prize, and my teachers had arranged a gift certificate for the store. Thirty dollars, if I recall. A fortune for a teenager in the 1990s.
There’s plenty of information about the World’s Biggest Bookstore online, but there are only two hits on the entire internet that remember, by name, The Book Company at Sherway Gardens. The store seems to fall within what writer Tom Scocca calls
the Internet Event Horizon, the gap between those things that were around to be incorporated in real time into the eternal present of the World Wide Web, and those pre-Web things that were old enough that the World Wide Web reached back and made note of them for their nostalgia value.
The first hit, a blog post, features a digitized Polaroid snapped at a 1990 Douglas Adams book signing. The blog’s text describes the store as “a lavish, decadent shrine to literature, swathed in dark, classy forest green”—a shade purple, that, but it confirms my memories. The second hit, on Reddit, is about the exact same signing and references “a now-extinct bookstore in Sherway Gardens, The Book Company.” Worryingly, both blog and Reddit post are by the same author. Are we the only two who remember? (It turns out there were a few other Book Companies, including one in Ottawa which the Indigo Empire gobbled up and eventually shuttered.)
In any case, my teenage self had judged The Book Company in “dark, classy forest green” a serious store, and Gravity’s Rainbow a serious novel. I’d been eyeing it for some time, the Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics edition, with mint green spine, V2 rocket blueprints for a cover, and that iconic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt quote on the back, which might’ve invented the very idea of desert islands:
Fantastic! . . . Fantastically large, complex, funny, perplexing, daring, and weird . . . If I were banished to the moon tomorrow and could take only five books along, this would have to be one of them.
“Weird,” indeed; the plot summary described a book whose main character’s “sexual conquests” are correlated to “V-2 rocket bombs . . . falling on London . . .” Clearly, Gravity’s Rainbow was a classic of some kind, but kooky too. Contraband hiding in plain sight. Words for a high school student to get high on.
I’d been circling the book for some time. (I’d also been circling the Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics Ulysses, with the cover shot of James Joyce in Shakespeare and Company, the Paris bookstore that published the novel’s first edition.) The Gravity’s Rainbow was in mint condition—except for a small white crease in the upper right-hand corner of its cover. Sign of in-store manhandling? Minor mishap at the printer? I was fussy about my books, and the crease had been bothering me, which is why I’d been reluctant to close the deal. The crease was a barrier to cross.
Nearly twenty-five years later, the book is still with me. It’s yellowed some, and the corners have lost their crisp points. The spine stayed smooth (I never crack a spine if I can help it), but I worry about the cover, which is beginning to show signs of detaching. The crease is still there, of course, a little creek I’ve learned to live alongside. Surely every Gravity’s Rainbow should have one.
A few years later, I was browsing in Pages, an independent bookstore in downtown Toronto. By this time, my passion had passed from fiction to poetry. And yet I’d struggled to admire Canadian poetry or, rather, the attenuated version my profs had been pushing in university. A species of free verse bordering on plain speech, Canadian poetry waved o the metaphor and music—too florid. Instead, it counted itself direct and unshowy. It even seemed to take perverse pride in its lack of vision. “The animals / have the faces of / animals,” says one Margaret Atwood poem, coolly, as if avoiding description were a positive; as if conjuring a blank in the reader’s mind were an act of courage. Canadian poetry was as scrubbed of formal texture as a prairie.
But there seemed to be an embargo on saying as much. Canadian poetry was a duty read. A pity read. It demanded patriotism and kid gloves. Book stores gave the frail stuff its own shelf, isolated from the other poetry. Anthologies like Gary Geddes’s 15 Canadian Poets x 2 kept Canadian poetry on life-support. Homegrown garlands, like the Governor General’s Award, were gently placed.
All of this I understood half-consciously, somewhere in my gut, where the acidic feelings churn. But a military-educational complex had arisen around the work of Atwood, Al Purdy, Michael Ondaatje, Anne Carson, and so many other socially approved mediocrities. A campaign of bad opinions—reinforced by journalists, prize committees, and academics—can buffet one’s confidence. You can start to second-guess yourself. It’s not the poems, it’s you.
It was in this mental climate that I lifted Carmine Starnino’s book of essays A Lover’s Quarrel off the new releases table at Pages, leafed through it, and felt a crackle of kinship. Here are the first few sentences:
I want to do this right, and the best way to begin is to fess up to reservations. Luckily, I have a few. Chief among them is whether these previously published reviews, stacked a decade deep, are interesting enough to survive the second life I’ve forced upon them. Such resurrectionist strivings have always seemed suspect to me. Past its occasion, a review’s relevance isn’t likely to run very high, and it’s a rare opinion that, appearing imperishably robust on first print, doesn’t evaporate into vapidity when invited back for a permanent stay between covers. I can only hope that’s not the case here. I’ve also been put on notice by the fanaticism with which others have fattened similar collections.
It was the style that struck me—the image of “published reviews, stacked a decade deep,” the barely concealed rhyme in “evaporate into vapidity,” the wicked alliteration of “fanaticism” and “fattened.”
Perhaps this is what browsing bookstores will be like in the future. Still, I’d give up my vision of aerodynamic pods and virtual aisles for a few more afternoons among the grubby orange shelves of the World’s Biggest Bookstore.
I hadn’t been looking for A Lover’s Quarrel that day—I hadn’t even known it existed. But Pages had armed me with an IED of a book. Here was a critic exploding pieties and expressing the very doubts I’d long kept contained in my mind. Here was a critic dragging Canada’s past for the worthy poets we’d cast off, the poets whose work hadn’t fit our narrow definition of Canadian poetry. Surely someone had erred in placing Starnino’s subversive book in plain view.
That was the joy of an indie like Pages; it stacked the Starninos on the sort of precious prominent real estate a larger chain reserves for the bestsellers that need no help finding readers’ hands. That is, Pages stacked the deck in favour of the quirky, the prickly, the heroically uncommercial. In favour of discovery. A Lover’s Quarrel never shifted that many units; it was never going to be a Heather’s Pick. But its dissident sensibilities riled and reshaped a generation of poets and critics.
Sadly, Pages vanished a few years later, in 2009, a victim of Toronto’s swelling rents. But Starnino’s book had left its blast crater.
Imagine a version of the contemporary web laid out before us, like Gibson’s cyberspace or Stephenson’s Metaverse. Picture an endless plateau, planed flat, with aloof skyscrapers: a gleaming city in draft, a Dubai dispersed. That giant #1 on the horizon is YouTube, that tower of shipping boxes, Amazon. Smaller structures suggest modest websites: businesses, blogs, and more. The buildings roll away, as regular as dominoes, around the horizon. Occasional fissures, venting steam, allude to the catacombs of the dark web.
In this vision, your browser is a pod. You punch in coordinates and zip around at light-speed, passing smoothly through other browsers, whose hulls turn transparent at your approach, as in the Metaverse. Hyperlinks are wormholes: tunnels of swirling light.
One wormhole wings your pod across a digital Atlantic and deposits you in front of a quaint green building on the banks of a pixelated river. Other quaint buildings surround it but are spaced apart to accommodate pods. (It’s as if someone clicked on the edge of a city and dragged it, distending space itself.) You are now at the online shop for Shakespeare and Company, on the banks of the Seine in Paris. It’s never closed, and the door is decoration: you float cleanly through it.
Inside, your pod hangs like a wasp, scanning spines. You move down the centre of aisles like a Steadicam shot in Kubrick. You alight on the roof of a stack of books, rising from the new releases table. The store senses that you’re squinting at something—the new Sally Rooney. The cover sharpens. Text boxes bloom in midair—blurbs, hot takes, a JPEG of the Irish author, a throbbing BUY NOW button. You look away, and the book dims, the boxes closing like tulips.
Time travel is an option here. You toggle to a 1922 version of the store, managed by the long-gone Sylvia Beach, and scrutinize a first edition of Ulysses, with blue cover, the one James Joyce’s first reviewers likened to a phonebook. In microseconds, Shakespeare and Company’s invisible AI, lurking on some server, has worked up a précis on the available copies, including prices and comps from recent auctions.
Perhaps this is what browsing bookstores will be like in the future. Still, I’d give up my vision of aerodynamic pods and virtual aisles for a few more afternoons among the grubby orange shelves of the World’s Biggest Bookstore.
I’ve bought plenty of books online, books that have come to mean something to me. But location matters to our minds. We all have personal associations—individual, inner text boxes—which float above certain objects. They can’t be swatted away. “I remember the bookstore,” begins Don DeLillo. He will never forget it.
Writing this essay, I was surprised to find myself growing emotional. Google’s supply of images of the World’s Biggest Bookstore conjured a lost civilization and its peoples, including memories of teachers I adored, my late father, and other ghosts. What had I been doing while the civilization crumbled? I’d been busy, I suppose—with grad school, a failed marriage, career, a new marriage, kids, poems, essays. By 2021, many of the bricks-and-mortar bookstores I’d browsed in my youth were gone.
But some, like Bakka-Phoenix Books (an indie specializing in sci-fi and fantasy) and Book City (an indie chain), survived. Plus, new shoots have sprung up: Ben McNally Books in 2007, Queen Books in 2017, a Type Books here and there. The stores tend to be in high-density, gentrified, and walkable neighbourhoods. (The suburb I grew up in will likely never draw a Type, with its trendy totes, to the local plaza.) And the new stores aren’t as desirably dingy as, say, Pages. I’m glad they exist, though. They’re offering sanctuary and succor to the next generation.
Consider Ben McNally Books, which started out in Toronto’s financial district, in the sort of high-ceilinged, chandeliered, and ornately columned space once reserved for banks. (It has since decamped east.) Ben McNally offers a thoroughly grownup browsing experience, with beautiful wooden shelves, excellent non-fiction and poetry sections, and book launches. (It has even launched yours truly.)
The point is the paper, the poignantly musty smell of the past. E-books and NFTs have yet to figure out how to yellow handsomely with age.
But the shop’s most valuable contribution is its calm, authoritative curation. I recall the Ben McNally shelf dedicated to the NYRB Classics imprint—the very same imprint that revived The Recognitions. (NYRB Classics is to literature what the Criterion Collection is to film: a prestige label addressed to connoisseurs.) What a delight to discover a bookstore that had corralled the imprint’s individual titles in one section. (What an innovation: curation by publisher!) Different but brilliant books that demand discovery—like Arthur Schnitzler’s Late Fame and Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts—always make more sense grouped together. A well-curated indie like Ben McNally helps you make those connections. It hyperlinks its wares the old-fashioned way.
Or consider the new bookstore in the east end of my city, the Scribe. Defiantly launched during the pandemic by Justin Daniel Wood, the Scribe is a vintage concern devoted to the exquisitely old: to first editions, signed books, and antiquarian delights. What I’ve most enjoyed, though, is turning up affordable books that have gotten harder to source in bricks-and-mortar shops, like, say, Bruce Sterling’s Heavy Weather, a 1994 sci-fi novel about tornado chasers (which I remember first spotting at World’s Biggest). The first edition I picked up at the Scribe happens to be signed, but I was happy just to have found a reading copy.
You can’t scroll through a formal catalogue, but the Scribe updates online photos of its shelves every week so that, in the words of its website, “you can browse from your living room couch.” But there’s no substitute for standing on the Scribe’s antique hardwood floor and hefting a beautifully preserved, out-of-print book in your hand. Plus, you can’t always believe your eyes when scrolling—someone might’ve already borne away the book you’re eyeballing—but you can believe them when browsing. The real world never struggles to load content. The real world never freezes.
Whether you choose to visit the Scribe in vintage flesh or shelter at home and squint at pixelated spines, Wood’s store is selling something special: a product we want precisely because it occupies space, because it came from a printing press and survived its early handlers. It’s a relief, really, to encounter something that doesn’t have a digital doppelgänger—a digital solution. The point is the paper, the poignantly musty smell of the past. E-books and NFTs have yet to figure out how to yellow handsomely with age.
Still, Toronto’s renaissance aside, it’s hard not to miss the specific stores that once offered my young self sanctuary and succor. They weren’t just stores, after all; they were hothouses that helped me grow into a reader and writer. How often the aisles, back then, steered my aimless mind. How often I simply stood around, still, as if I were potted, thumbing through a book I knew nothing about. Sometimes I was waiting for someone, sometimes I was on my own. But there was no way for anyone to reach me. How wonderfully subversive it was to feel like I was alone in a city. No alerts, no pop-ups. Just the press of books all around, the world distilled to words on a page.
There’s a postscript to the Snow Crash story. Not long after buying it, I loaned it to a high school classmate. The book came back a mess: cover scuffed, spine cracked, edges blunted. The classmate wasn’t a fetishist—just a reader. My (eternal) bad: handing the book over, I had failed to convey my fussiness.
The book stayed with me, but the state of it needled. So, a few years ago, I decided I’d try to source a new copy of the same nineties-era edition. A mint copy to supplement the mangled one. Snow Crash had since wriggled into and out of several cover designs, but I didn’t want any of them. I wanted the one commended to me by the ex-Goth angel.
I tried different websites. None was very promising. You could certainly find a copy, but I couldn’t seem to secure a mint specimen, and anyway, I didn’t trust these faceless sellers’ descriptions of the state of their stock. This was a mass-market paperback from over twenty years ago. How many decent copies had even made it into the twenty-first century?
Reader, after many months of searching, having abandoned the internet, while browsing She Said Boom! (exclamation point theirs), a used book and record store in Toronto, browsing in the flesh, alone, just before the pandemic—I found my out-of-print Snow Crash. Not only was it in pristine condition, but it also seemed to have been opened exactly once when its original owner had slipped the receipt in the inside cover. I know this because the receipt was still there; it had left a rectangle of white on the browned cardstock, indicating where it had turned back the slow creep of light and air.
The receipt was dated 1995. Printed at the top, in ink that had dried a quarter of a century ago, were the words “World’s Biggest Bookstore.”
This essay appears in Jason Guriel’s collection On Browsing, which will be published on November 15, 2022, by Biblioasis Publishing.
Jason Guriel is also the author of Forgotten Work (Biblioasis 2020) and other books. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Air Mail, Slate, ELLE, and elsewhere. He lives in Toronto.
Lewd comments. Unwanted touching. Bullying. Retribution. These are just a few of the indignities that a group of former Tesla employees, all of them women, say they experienced while working at the company. And as Stephen Rodrick shows, it’s impossible to separate these claims, which are now working their way through the legal system, from the fratty, sexist, politically incorrect persona of Tesla’s head honcho, Elon Musk:
Tesla’s defenders would argue that every large company will at times face lawsuits, HR challenges, and disgruntled employees. However, Tesla seems to be an extreme case both in the quantity of legal actions brought in quick succession and the consistent nature of the allegations. And most companies don’t have a rule-defying leader like Musk, what with his tweets floating the idea for a new school whose acronym just happens to spell out TITS — “Am thinking of starting a new university: Texas Institute of Technology & Science. … It will have epic merch.”
The women’s legal filings detailed alleged incidents ranging from being asked for hand jobs to being stalked by drunk-on-the-job employees in the parking lot. While the cases make their way through the system and Tesla pushes back against the allegations, the fallout has been catastrophic for the women. One couldn’t leave her bedroom for weeks. Some feel ashamed, a common reaction among sexual-harassment victims. And many are having trouble jump-starting their careers after their time at Tesla left a black hole on their résumé. The women tell Rolling Stone they can’t understand why the kind of behavior they claim they experienced was, and possibly still is, being tolerated by Tesla and Musk. They believe Musk should be held accountable.
An alternate headline for this piece could be “How Dates Explain the World.” Ancient, diverse, and delicious, dates are staples on Middle Eastern plates. But as Matti Friedman explains, they are also windows into the past and the future:
At ten feet up the trunk of a date palm and rising, you’re still thinking about the ground receding beneath your feet, but at 20 feet your gaze shifts upward toward the approaching explosion of green above your head. At 40 feet the hydraulic platform shakes to a halt, and Yuval Shabo and the other workers at this Israeli date orchard grasp the trunks and leap into the fronds. It’s spring, when date palms reproduce, and the workers use curved knives to harvest pollen from male flowers, place the pollen in squeeze bottles and then apply it to the white petal clusters atop the female trees. It’s a different world at this height—birds gliding at eye level, the Jordan Valley stretching north toward Syria and south toward Egypt, the green frond sea waving in all directions. The workers stop on occasion to sip water or roll a cigarette. Ground-bound humans and their concerns seem irrelevant. Up here all that matters is the little brown fruit.
…
The same overriding sense of the date’s importance struck me several times during the past few months, sitting in air-conditioned libraries, hunched over books, looking at the ancient art and literature of this part of the world. When I began my research, the date palm seemed to appear merely as a background detail in art, from pharaonic tombs and Assyrian palaces to a 2,500-year-old seal impression showing the Persian Emperor Darius shooting arrows at a lion. But after a while my perception changed. The date palms stopped looking like decorations and came to the fore. After all, the pharaohs are long gone and Darius no longer matters, but the date palm does, feeding multitudes, linking people with their ancestors, rising everywhere like millions of green fireworks frozen mid-blast. Maybe these trees are the stars in the story of this region, and we’re the extras?
Mohammed, who made it to Spain in part to find adventure and escape compulsory military service in Algiers, has had his autonomy stripped away by a performative political system designed to deter migrants from leaving home in the first place. In the process, he may have sacrificed “the best years of his life” for nothing.
What I found was an entirely different story: a generation of young men for whom the greatest barrier to starting a new life was not physical but bureaucratic. They were effectively held prisoner by a byzantine application process so interminable that people had begun scaling the fences — to escape and return to their home countries.
He seemed to sense he stood little chance of being granted the right to stay, but he felt unable to concede that he had spent so much time here for nothing.
In 2018, Tahlequah, a female orca from the Southern Resident community of the Pacific Northwest, gave birth, but her baby died shortly after. Tahlequah swam with the dead calf for 17 days before letting it go. During this “tour of grief,” the other female orcas in her pod took turns carrying the calf in an incredibly moving display of maternal support. I’d forgotten about this heartbreaking story, which Grace Loh Prasad mentions in the opening of her recent essay at The Offing.
In this reflective and braided piece, Prasad explores the bonds of family, building a life as a mother, and the need for community, among other musings. What’s it like to live thousands of miles away from your loved ones, and what happens when that family is gone? What’s the alternative, and what sort of network can take its place? I’m grateful that my parents are healthy and still live in my childhood home, less than an hour away, and that I’m able to see them often. For Prasad and her parents and brother, an ocean came between them. She writes about planting roots in the U.S., but no matter where she built a life, that family unit would remain intact, even if they weren’t all physically together.
Although my brother and my parents weren’t present in my daily life, they provided an invisible scaffolding that I didn’t realize I depended on until they were gone. All the things that proved I had a home in California—house, job, passport, driver’s license, ability to vote—were the result of choices I had made, rather than natural ties to a culture and community. It was a one-sided equation: I could claim it, but it did not claim me. The only true unit of belonging I had that was intrinsic and undeniable and could not be undone, that understood my complicated identity without needing an explanation, was my family.
I constantly think about the sacrifices my husband, who is British, had made when we got married at San Francisco City Hall a decade ago. Like Prasad, he adopted California as his home, choosing a future and day-to-day life without his family and friends in the U.K. But I also know that he will never fully feel like he belongs here.
In Grace Loh Prasad’s Longreads essay, “Uncertain Ground,” she realizes that mourning is complicated when home and homeland aren’t the same place.
My daughter was born in 2018. She’s an only child, and her cousins, who are much older and live four hours away, are hardly playmates. When she was a baby, we lived in a small town in California’s wine country; it lacked ethnic diversity, but we liked the slower pace and rural lifestyle. But we hadn’t made any real friends: people to text spontaneously for playdates, or to hang out and get a beer with. In fact, since we got married, we haven’t really made any new good friends as a couple. That has felt even more isolating as new parents.
We’ve spoken over the years about why that is: Are we too introverted? Are we not able to find people who share our interests? The answer to both is no. But it’s hard to make new friends as adults, and as individuals we miss our existing friends — across the U.S., the U.K., and other parts of the world — and would love to strengthen those relationships, especially friends who now also have kids. Geography, of course, makes this challenging, and these last several years, it’s been impossible.
Even before coming upon Prasad’s essay, I’d been thinking about the word “community.” We’ve moved seven times in 10 years, and have lived in four different homes with our 4-year-old daughter. We’ve now settled in Berkeley, have gotten acquainted with parents of her preschool friends, and live in a lively and diverse neighborhood that’s walkable and accessible to so much — community gardens, parks and playgrounds, free family-friendly events. Yet we still feel as socially adrift as before. But why? What are we really looking for?
Prasad reflects on raising a child without a family network, but also writes about a type of tight-knit community, beyond blood ties, that I’ve longed for.
I envy my friends who have healthy parents that live nearby, who have the ability to slip out for a spontaneous date night or to take off on a weeklong, kid-free vacation. How I wish we had occasional help that we didn’t have to pay for—something my friends take for granted—although it was never about the money. How I wish I had a sibling or cousin with children in the same city so that we could send our kids to the same school, share dinners and holidays, coordinate vacation plans, and so on. How I wish my son could grow up with a clan, a group of mothers and children traveling together through life like a pod of orcas, always looking out for each other, secure in their belonging to something bigger than a family of three.
Prasad also writes about the maternal qualities of spiders, recounting the first time she saw “Maman,” a giant spider steel sculpture by artist Louise Bourgeois, in Tokyo’s Roppongi Hills. I saw this sculpture when I visited Japan; I remember it to be massive and menacing, not at all the strong and nurturing motherly figure that Prasad describes. I’d simply never considered a spider in this way.
Although monstrously large, as if made for a vintage Japanese disaster movie, getting close to Maman brings an unexpected feeling of intimacy. You can stand underneath her. You can be enclosed and sheltered by her, the same way your mother once enveloped and surrounded you. The spider mother appears delicate with her fragile skinny legs, but she is literally made of steel.
Maman is stronger than she looks. She is your first and forever home, and she weaves the world into existence.
Prasad describes her own mother as “a weaver of community, responsible for maintaining the social fabric that cushioned our lives,” and questions whether she has been able to do and build the same for her son. This hits me in the gut: I know that as parents, we’ve only just begun to build our family’s life, but I wonder whether we’ve found the right corner of the world to weave that web.
The older he gets, the more I worry that I have not done enough to knit a tapestry that will enfold and protect him, that will open doors and give him room to stretch while keeping him out of harm’s way, that will imprint a pattern so deep and recognizable that he can always find his way home. This is what I am most afraid of: that I will be exposed as the mother who cannot weave, who cannot on her own produce the work of many hands, the unseen web that no one notices but everyone needs. Try as I might, there is no material stronger than kinship.
This is a beautifully told story with an almost ethereal quality to it — which is apt for the mystical figures it discusses. When two friends stole figurines from the Second Mesa, they didn’t realize they were stealing the heart of the Hopi religion. After being tormented for years, they came to understand what they had done.
Inside the cave were four gnarled figurines carved from cottonwood root, each about three feet long. Three lay on a mat of feathers with their heads pillowed by a log, surrounded by braided prayer bracelets and prayer sticks made of cotton twine. The fourth, twisted like a figure eight, leaned against the sandstone wall as if protective of the others.
This story from the New York Times and UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism looks into years of torment and abuse at Ware Youth Center, one of Louisiana’s largest juvenile detention centers. Megan Shutzer and Rachel Lauren Mueller conducted more than 100 interviews with people previously held at the facility, as well as current and former staff members; they also examined security footage and thousands of pages of records and court documents. What they found: repeated abuse from staff members (30 have been accused of sexual abuse, including a manager), children held in prolonged isolation, guards bribing children to beat up other children, and an increase in suicidal attempts. For years, Ware’s leaders have not reported complaints of abuse, while local law enforcement has continued to brush off allegations. As Shutzer and Mueller’s reporting shows, this horrific place, meant to help and support children, has descended into “chaos and cruelty.”
In fact, while some of the children at Ware are held for violent crimes, a vast majority are girls and boys like Solan Peterson, sent there for nonviolent offenses or infractions as minor as skipping school. “We knew there would be consequences,” his mother said, “but my kid didn’t deserve to die because he set fire to a roll of toilet paper in a school.”
Thomas Hale’s account of his experience in a COVID-19 quarantine facility, inside China’s zero-Covid regime, offers a glimpse into an eerie, dystopian parallel world.
The daily rhythm went as follows. Early in the morning, we awoke to a lawnmower-like noise, which was in fact an industrial-grade disinfectant machine spraying our windows and front steps. Meals were provided at 8am, noon and 5pm. Around 9am, two nurses in blue hazmat suits came by to administer PCR tests. Once, I asked if I would be taken somewhere else if I tested positive. “Of course you’ll be taken away!” one of the nurses said. “A new life!” she added in English.
The first time I saw Gisoo tree, I thought it was a wish tree, people attaching their colorful offerings to it. But when I went close, I saw braided hairs hanging on the boughs.
The teenage girl stands at her mother’s grave, a middle-aged woman who was killed by the Iranian police during recent unrest in the nation. A white veil hangs around her neck. Her eyes shine with the same rage I’ve seen in the eyes of people who have lost a loved one during the Islamic regime’s brutal crackdowns. Her hair is shorn and she holds her long tresses in her hand. The other hand is obscured by gladiolas on the grave, but I can imagine the scissors she has used to cut her hair. She is from Kermanshah, the ancient city on the foothills of the Zagros Mountains. She knows — like all Iranian women — that to mourn is to cut her hair.
Iranian women took to the streets on September 16, 2022, to protest the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini. The Kurdish girl died in police custody after the “Morality Police” detained her for a loose hijab. Every day, I wake up anxious. I read the news, scrolling through horrifying scenes of police brutality against women who burn their scarves in the streets alongside the men who support them in cities all over the country. I go to the neonatal intensive care unit where I work as a doctor, and attend deliveries of premature and at-risk babies, but my heart flutters for yet another day of harrowing news emerging from Iran. Another day of police beating people with batons and shotguns, another day of high school girls shouting Woman Life Freedom in schools, another day of young women sauntering scarfless in front of Basiji militias in a country that has required women to cover their hair for more than 43 years. I am worried, like Iranians who live in Iran. I never thought that after 20 years of living in America, a day would come that I’d be troubled for the country I lived in during my adolescence and young adulthood. The news brings back doleful memories and a desolation that in all the years I’ve been outside Iran, I have tried to forget. But the shocking scenes are so powerful — they erupt remote, fading memories.
My mother didn’t wear hijab; neither did my grandmother or my aunts, like other modern families in Iran. But after the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the Islamic regime forced women to wear hijab outside the house in public. Even though I saw Maman grabbing a scarf and throwing it on her head before she went out, wearing hijab never materialized in my mind until the first day I attended school. I woke up early in the morning, calling Maman, ready to go to school. She smiled at my blue jumpsuit and said, “I’m afraid you’ve forgotten one thing.” She pointed to my hair and said, “They will need you to cover your hair at school.” All the way to school, I struggled to keep the scarf on my head. It was a small, square scarf Maman had given to me. The knot kept loosening under my chin and as the day went by, one side became shorter and shorter until it freed itself from the knot.
She knows — like all Iranian women — that to mourn is to cut her hair.
Hijab law strengthened over the years and the dress code for girls in school changed to a black scarf that covered shoulders and breasts, and an extra-long dark cloak. I remember a hot day in June, in the late ’80s. I was sitting on the low steps of our middle school yard in Tehran, wrapped head to toe in heavy hijab, trying to solve an algebra problem just before my final exam. I was writing the solution when I noticed our school principal’s shadow hovering over my head. I jumped up immediately and pulled my scarf forward. By that time, we were conditioned to shove our hair under our scarves as soon as we saw a school official, the revolutionary guard, or Basiji militia in the streets. The principal fixed her gaze on my veil and, without hesitation, snatched the scarf under my chin. “This is too loose. You need to sew a couple more stitches under your chin.” I forgot the solution I had sketched on the paper and took the test with trembling hands and an anxiety that never left me during the exam.
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After Reza Shah Pahlavi ordered mandatory unveiling of women in public in 1936, Iranian women who chose to step out of their homes and pursue higher education abandoned hijab, attended universities, and achieved an active role in society. In conservative families, women had no choice but to stay at home for their reluctance to show their hair in public. Even though the obligation to unveil was relaxed after Reza Shah abdicated in 1941, wearing hijab was dictated by the family’s core beliefs. Men in conservative families set the rules for women’s appearance in public. In those families, women continued to use chador (a long garment that covers a woman’s body from head to toe, but is open in front).
After the Islamic Revolution, the regime forced women to wear hijab and once again the government policed women’s attire. During the first decade after the Islamic government was established, Iranian society was extremely radicalized and girls were scrutinized everywhere outside the house. Even a single strand of hair could put them in trouble at school or in danger of having acid squirted in their faces in the streets. The Islamic regime defined hijab as a core value in a Muslim woman’s beliefs. Women could hardly say a word against obligatory hijab. The regime’s Morality Police enforced this core value, enshrined as a sacred family law. We are told we are sinners if we show our hair from under our scarves. Islamic regime teachers said that on Resurrection Day, women who disobeyed the hijab law would be hung from their hair over heaps of fire. They would feel their skin sizzle in hell, just to grow a new skin that would burn for eternity. We were brought up by a doctrine that humiliated and vilified female beauty and alienated us from our own hair and body.
Hijab and women’s hair was always on my mind and we discussed the subject among friends in high school. It was about that time that I read Savushun by Simin Daneshvar, a novel about the life of a landowning family in Shiraz during the British occupation of Southern Iran in World War II. The protagonist Zari, who is a quiet obedient housewife, transforms into an outspoken supporter of her husband’s cause after his death by the British occupier’s agents. In the novel, women mourn for a lost beloved by cutting their hair and attending a ritual deeply rooted in Persian culture. Zari mentions Gisoo tree — gisoo meaning long tresses of a woman in Farsi — and says, “The first time I saw Gisoo tree, I thought it was a wish tree, people attaching their colorful offerings to it. But when I went close, I saw braided hairs hanging on the boughs. The braids belonged to women who had lost a beloved young man, a husband, a brother, or a son.” The tradition of Savushun fascinated me for years. I read more and paid close attention to the symbolic actions Iranian women took during various mourning ceremonies.
In Shahnameh, the epic of Persian kings by 10th-century Persian poet Ferdowsi, Farangis cuts her black, musk-scented hair once she finds out the enemies of Iran have murdered her beloved husband, prince Siavash. She wraps the cut hair around her waist like a belt and starts the tradition of Savushun — women mourning the death of a Persian hero whose innocent blood is spilled in the valleys of the land. In the tragic story of Siavash, Farangis plays a seminal part by hiding and safekeeping her son, the next Shah of Iran, signaling her intention to remain abstinent of any sexual encounter with another hero or prince by fastening her long black hair around her waist. Her haircutting symbolizes her refusal to pursue a normal life after Siavash’s death. It is a protest against the sovereignty of Iran’s enemies.
It is not only in Shahnameh that we read about this tradition. In other literary works such as Darab-Nameh by Abu-Tahir Tarsusi, Burandokht cuts her long hair after the death of her husband, Alexander of Macedonia, and mourns him for 40 days. The tradition is so embedded in Persian literature that numerous poets after Ferdowsi — namely Hafiz, Khaghani, Salman Savoji — use cutting hair as a metaphor for mourning in their poems.
In many parts of Iran, the ritual is performed in different ways. In central Iran, when a young man dies, the close women of his family cut their tresses and hang them on an erect stone at his grave. The gray of the mother, the black of the wife, and the thin and frail hair of the daughter tangle in each other and dance with the wind. They remind the beholder of the silent mourning that continues for the young man. In Lorestan province, from ancient times, women have covered the croup of the dead man’s horse with a black veil and adorn the animal with a necklace of their tresses. In a ritual called Kotal, women sing in a procession following the horse through the streets. In Bakhtiari tribes of Iran, in a ritual called Pal Boran, women cut their hair, and either stamp on it and mourn, or put it in a clean garment belonging to the beloved and bury it with him, or gather around the hair and sing sad melodies.
In the kaleidoscope of rituals that vary based on geographical region, there seems to be a fundamental connection between hair and life. “Life” is woven among the strands of a young woman’s hair and cutting that hair implies her unwillingness that life can go on as before the loss of the beloved. Her liveliness is gone with the departure of the beloved, and so is the hair that once signified the beauty of life. She sends a clear message as she mourns: that she will appear and act differently after the tragic event.
Now for over four decades, in a culture where female hair is revered and linked to life, the Islamic regime is forcing women to wear a veil and cover their hair, degrading women’s most cherished beauty into an evil that seduces men and encourages them to commit great sins. Since the Islamic Republic was established, Iranian women have defied obligatory hijab and the patriarchal ideology that wants to oppress the female body. Women activists have challenged this government-imposed law many times, namely in the One Million Signatures campaign for gender equality in 2005. Almost always, the Islamic regime detains women activists to dampen such resistance movements. Women have turned to civil disobedience tactics like showing more of their body and minimizing their scarves to communicate their unhappiness and disapproval for the law.
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As another day of unrest unfolds in Iran, I think of the symbolic measures Iranian women are taking every day in this fight. Famous women writers, thinkers, and artists in the world have cut their hair in solidarity with them. Elif Shafak, Juliette Binoche, Isabelle Huppert, and many more are among the writers and artists who have cut their hair in protest.
In the kaleidoscope of rituals that vary based on geographical region, there seems to be a fundamental connection between hair and life.
I walk up the stairs to the third floor, to the NICU in our hospital, to care for premature babies. On my way to the unit, I think about those Iranian girls and their protest. This time seems to be different from the past. This time, high school and even elementary school girls are demanding what Iranian women have been asking for, for decades. The short clips that trickle from Iran’s heavily filtered, government-slowed internet picture young girls facing whiteboards, their backs to the camera, hair dancing in the air, shouting Woman Life Freedom in class. I am tongue-tied by their bravery in committing such protests in school without hijab. I was a teenage girl in that country — just like them — and I know the courage needed to take off the veil, when showing their hair could cause them to get beaten or detained. It could even cost them their life, and they know this. They shout in schoolyards that they can be the next Mahsa Amini. Their courageous act of letting their long hair flow loose shows they are fully aware of the power hidden in those tresses, and it is not accidental that they shout Woman Life Freedom with their backs to the camera. They know — like their mothers and grandmothers — that their strength lies within their hair.
Once again, I look at the girl standing at her mother’s grave. She is from Kermanshah, the ancient city on the foothills of the Zagros Mountains. She is young, the same age as the schoolgirls who face the whiteboard. She is aware of the tradition of cutting hair. She cuts her hair to mourn, but above that, she acts at her beloved’s grave. She acts in defiance against the oppressor who has killed her mother and silenced her voice. She and all the schoolgirls who protest with their hair may not have read the story behind the Gisoo tree. The old women of Fars believe when they hang their braided hairs to the tree, and water it with tears, the loved departed comes back. They may not know the legend of the tree, but the collective wisdom shared by Iranian women for a thousand years runs in their veins. It whispers in their ears, and tells them that “Life” is stranded there, and to fight for freedom they must first free their hair.
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Mojgan Ghazirad is an assistant professor of pediatrics at the George Washington University in Washington, DC. She has published three collections of short stories in Farsi in Iran and Europe. Her memoir, The House on Sun Street, depicts her memories of growing in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution and the years of war between Iran and Iraq.
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Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
