Myriam Gurba

Myriam

Rice a Rona

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I hear Mike Myers’ voice emanating, yes, emanating, from the living room.

“Have we descended into Wayne’s World?” I holler at little brother.

I peer around the counter separating the kitchen table from Mike Myers presence. Little brother glances up from his tea. He raises a hand in the air. It makes a V for victory which also indicates el número dos.

This isn’t just Wayne’s World. It’s the sequel.

Sorry to interrupt with politics but I’d prefer not to have a white man for president. I’d rather Wayne than what we have though because what we have is a what and not a who. At least Wayne is working class. He knows what it’s like to ride shotgun in a Gremlin. He dates women of color. He cares about his friends and community.

Like you, I am imaginationally and attentionally challenged right now.

I’m writing at little brother’s kitchen table.

“Did you hear they’re making Wayne’s World 3?” he hollers.

I can’t imagine anyone making a movie right now.

I can’t imagine anyone making a movie ever again though that’s not true. I can totally imagine it. It’ll be the first feature film made via TikTok.

There’ll be a new award for this genre, the Toskars.

I’ve never spent this much time with little brother in confinement. He spent a shitload of time with my sister in a confined space called mom. They’re twins. Please do not ask me if they are identical.

According to reality, I’ve spent seven days with my brother. It feels like seven months. He spent seven months in the womb with our sister, a doctor wrangled them free prematurely, and I may have irked little brother last night when I shouted at him, “I’m your new twin!” He raised an eyebrow, sipped his tea, and cracked his knuckles.

There are tales about twins eating twins in hostile wombs.

Mortal wombat.

Little brother has a nameless iguana. Well, he calls it iguana. The job of an intellectual is to name things. I can’t tell if the iguana is staring at me or asleep but I’m pretty sure he’s staring through those slits. The iguana hates people. He’s a misanthrope, like Ebenezer Scrooge without the humbugs. The iguana lives in a large glass aquarium. I could hop into the aquarium with him and we would still have room to fit my brother and sister. We’d be cramped triplets.

On a table next to where I sit teems a box filled with live crickets. They wait to be fed to other things living in this house. I’m not sure how many animals in addition to us are in here. I know there are couple of snakes around these parts and sometimes they get loose. When that happens, and little brother can’t find them, he waits for a scream. The fear allows him to echolocate his friends.

In the living room, actors are not practicing social distancing. Kim Basinger is doing her laundry at a Wayne’s World laundromat and Garth is leering at her. He’s into her and so he offers her red rope licorice and she accepts it and eats it sexily and this strikes me as so dangerous and taboo and cavalier and I feel like I’m writing a low rent version of the Decameron. Have you read the Decameron? I haven’t looked at that thing in a long time, not since I was an undergrad doing medieval history, pestilence and plagues.

The Decameron was written by an Italian, Giovanni Boccaccio, who I always think of as Bitchacho. The book tells about a bunch of Florentines who split town and go into the countryside to escape the Black Death, wait it out. There’s no FaceTime or Zoom or Instagram Live so these motherfuckers take turns telling stories. They tell a series of tales. That’s it. That’s the tweet. The tales are what you’d expect. Stories of sluts. Stories of people falling in toilets. Real Renaissance subjects.

“Ci cacciano in cucina a dir delle favole colla gatta,” rants one of Bitchacho’s lady narrators. “They banish us to the kitchen, there to tell stories to the cat.” She’s describing what happens to women in “old age” but on planet earth 2020, humanity has been collectively banished to the kitchen. And I am on the verge of telling stories to the iguana.

I could tell the iguana about how in high school, in my economics class, for extra credit, I wrote a research paper on the Black Death. My econ teacher gave me a B. I told myself that it was okay that I got a B even though I wanted an A. I told myself, “F is for Fabulous. B is for Bubonic.”

Everybody has got cinematic and literary epidemics on the brain because of mimesis or whatever. A plague fucked up fertility in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and it seems like canonical white literature having to do with ‘demics involves tales. Tales structure the white telling.

Trump tells tales during his press conferences on the rona. Rice a Rona. My brain is doing this thing where anything it can ronize, it will. Remember that Bobby Brown song Roni…?

Irony becomes irona.

Little Brother's Iguana
Little Brother’s Iguana

Carne De Res Ipsa Loquitur

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family portrait

When they first elected dumbass, scads of white men assured me that his buffoonery would be he his undoing. I remember one who grinned at me, baring his teeth as he condescended. He wore a lab coat and spoke to me in a tone I can’t imagine he’d use with a dude patient. “Don’t worry about him,” he said. “He’ll self-destruct.”

The doctor couldn’t see what was clear those of us forced to lurk in the margins, that free-range buffoonery doesn’t only harm the buffoon.

Free range dipshits cause collective harm.

. .

When discussing the dipshit-in-chief, my naysayers seldom sounded disgusted. Instead, they often sounded amused and slightly envious, as if they were discussing a devilish manchild pulling a looooooooooooong practical joke that we were somehow required to endure and figure out how to make the most of. You know, April 1st as political regime.

It was never funny to me though. Sure there have been funny things about it, funny moments, but the thing itself? No, the thing itself isn’t funny.

. . .

Like you, I opened my eyes the morning after the 2016 election.

Shit felt urgent.

I ran to the toilet.

After my diarrhea concluded, the bathroom smelled like what the electorate had done.

. . . .

Did that November give you the shits too?

Did you know that the shits are a symptom of COVID-19?

The shits are a sign of the times.

. . . . .

I have witnessed grown men rooting for toilet paper like truffle pigs.

. . . . . .

Do you remember those “halcyon days” when they talked about politically quarantining him? People would talk about the possibility of governing around him. They discussed doing so as if it was plausible. When I listened to these discussions, I’d imagine an abscess. Behind a wall of skin and pus, he sulked. Whose body was he trapped in? Yours? Mine? Ours? I was once trapped in my mom. And my dad. I prefer not to think about myself swimming in my dad though I did write a poem about it. The poem was called “Squirtle.”

. . . . . . .

I tend not to the think of our polity as a body. When I think of people forming a body, I get Catholickly triggered. Body of Christ. The church as a living body, a parochial organism. My parents raised me to be a Catholic but religion disappointed me before puberty ruined my life. My parents enrolled me in catechism classes to prepare me to make my first communion, to ready me to eat Jesus. The day that I finally let him melt in my mouth disappointed me.

He tasted like gluten. I’d been expecting meat.

. . . . . . . .

Now I’ve been ordered to isolate. Perhaps you’ve been ordered to isolate. We’re trying to survive a pandemic, an outbreak of a novel virus. There are befores, there are afters, and there are durings. We’re in a during. I’ve been thinking about the way things were before we went inside. I keep thinking of a moment at work, at school. English teachers had assigned Huxley and students who’d been dragging their feet were trying to cram his dystopian novel for a test.

Have you ever watched someone try to read Brave New World in fifteen minutes? It’s an ambitious gesture.

. . . . . . . . .

My mom has gone from coronaque? to before-we-die-tell-our-stories-tell-the-stories-of-mommy-and-daddy. She urged me to do so in a light-hearted way but even the light-hearted is heavy right now.

. . . . . . . . . .

Last month, school administrators forced me to take administrative leave. Someone deemed me a “disruptive” force and they ejected me from my classroom and told me to stay home. I felt shunned.

It seemed they were trying to quarantine me as a result of my politics.

. . . . . . . . . .
.

Looks like we’re all on forced leave now.

I’m not gloating. Not at all. Just commenting.

. . . . . . . . . .
. .

We’re all in this alone together.

We’re all in this together alone.

Where are you located, anatomically speaking, in our body politic?

Are you in the head? Are you in the respiratory system? Are you below the belt? Are you hair, skin, or teeth? Do you secrete? Are you a gland?

I might be a vestigial organ.

I might be the spleen.

. . . . . . . . . .
. . .

Yes, it’s weird to be ordered to stay home and to keep a distance of six feet from others. People call it quarantine though I think sheltering is a better term. Self-isolation is fine too. It gets to the point.

Many of us have lived in isolation before.

. . . . . . . . . .
. . . .

I’m worried about my uncle Henry.

Once upon a Cold War, our government drafted him to go do terrible things in Vietnam. He served in the jungles as an artillery officer. He killed people. He returned unable to stop hearing the screams of adults, children, and babies he killed.

A psychiatrist diagnosed him with schizophrenia, a phenomena which can result in incredible social isolation.

When Henry speaks, I watch listeners become overwhelmed. Henry talks in poetry. His language is mostly metaphor and synecdoche, a word I’ve seen teenagers add a ‘u’ to. A lot of people have a hard time processing incredibly poetic speech so rather than try, they turn away from Henry and ignore him. I’ve watched people do this to him over and over.

He became homeless for a while and then lived in his childhood home for a bit and then we, his family, worked to get him into a skilled nursing facility. Henry has hardware in his hip now. Parkinson’s shakes him. He suffers from chronic urinary tract infections and last year, a surgeon removed a stone the size of a Russet potato from his bladder. The surgeon asked to keep it. He said he wanted to display in the hospital museum.

Last week, the director of facility where Henry lives called me.

“You’re the one I see here all the time?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“That’s great.” He paused. “We’re calling all of our patients’ families to ask that you not visit. We’re trying to limit exposure to coronavirus.”

“Of course,” I agreed. “Not a problem.”

He sighed with relief. “Good. Some families haven’t taken it so well.”

“We’re not going to give you grief. We’ll obey the order. It’s important.”

“Thank you.”

Henry had surgery the other day. My dad was allowed to see him.

They sat alone in isolation together. Henry looked at my dad.

“We’re getting old,” he said.

My dad answered, “I’m not,” and made a joke about being twenty- one.

. . . . . . . . . .
. . . . .

I thought that my great grandma, the one I’m named for, my tocaya, died during the 1918 flu pandemic.

She did not.

. . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . .

My great grandma worked as a housekeeper for a wealthy family in New York.

She was young, Polish and divorced.

She parented an only child, my grandpa Peter.

. . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . .

I’ve seen one photo of my tocaya.

She wears a white Victorian dress to her ankles. A belt with a butterfly-shaped buckle cinches her small waist. Her blond hair is swept into a Gibson-girl-esque bun. Liplessly and defiantly, she stares into the camera, smile-free.

I love that the only picture of my Polish housekeeping great grandma doesn’t front.

Her facial expression says life is hard and so am I.

. . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . .

My great grandma loosened her corset to cough. She coughed so much that health officials sent her to Roosevelt Island. There, in a public hospital, she coughed herself to death. In isolation, tuberculosis ended her short, blond life.

. . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . .

My grandpa attended his mom’s funeral. He was a little boy, at an age where sugar is everything, and after the service, his aunt handed him two pennies. My grandpa went to the store and exchanged the coins for hard candy.

When he returned to his new home, his aunt’s house, she asked him, “Where are the pennies I handed you?”

My grandpa showed her the candy.

She smacked him. She scolded, “Those were the pennies that we placed on your mother’s eyes!”

Sometimes, when I smell copper, I think of my tocaya’s eyes.

They were blue. Goethe, whose name I always feel funny saying aloud, wrote about this color. He said, “The appearance of objects seen through a blue glass is gloomy and melancholy.”

This essay might be a little blue but don’t worry. Blue is just a color.

Henry Gurba

Coercive Control

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coercive control

Content Warning: Sociology. Language. Misogyny.

I miss teaching so I’m going to use this thread as my classroom. I want to discuss a term I dislike versus a term I prefer. I dislike the term domestic violence. I prefer coercive control. Here’s why.

I became a battered woman after a man trapped me in what some people euphemistically term a “relationship.” I reject that euphemism because it implies that he and I engaged in a consensual romance. That was not the case. My batterer prevented me from fleeing by using threats, violence, surveillance, stalking, and micro-regulating my day-to-day life. For three years, an “or else” proviso hung over me. It hangs over every battered woman: Stay or this man may kill you.

The threat of femicide hangs over every battered woman.

In this US, men murder four female partners a day and men often kill after a woman flees. If we follow the headlines, we’ll notice that these misogynists frequently have two letters in front of their “romantic” status: ex-husband, ex-boyfriend, ex-fiancé…

Forensic sociologist Evan Stark argues that the domestic violence model fails to capture the true scope of harm perpetrated by batterers. The DV model focuses on discrete acts of violence, a punch here, a slap there, a threat here.

This model obscures the totality of the crime, ignoring the *effect* of the batterer’s actions, the *environment* he engineers. That environment is a cage tailor-made for the battered woman. Stark argues that instead of looking at what batterers do to women, we ought to consider what batterers *take* from women. They take our freedom. They create a hostage-like situation that they *force* us to endure.

Enter coercive control. Coercive control re-frames the battering of women as a liberty crime.

The batterer’s aim isn’t to inflict occasional violence during “interpersonal conflict.” The batterer’s aim, and make no mistake, coercive control is a *gendered* crime facilitated by male privilege, is the total domination of another human being.

Coercive control results in the subjugation of women in private life and it involves a technology of its own. I’ll be discussing this technology in a follow up thread.

This post originally appeared as a thread on Twitter. Click below to read the original thread and any comments.

On Katie Hill and American Girls

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I’m reading former Congressional representative Katie Hill’s account of wanting to kill herself after her abusive ex-husband and the Republican party attacked her by using a method of sexual assault called cyber exploitation. The attacks made Hill, a powerful white woman, curl into a ball and contemplate suicide. I wonder if her suicidal ideation was partly motivated by this reality: Hill’s enemies sent her a barrage of death threats, and in light of this danger, perhaps suicide came into focus as a dignified exit.

As columnist Masha Gessen has written, in the era of #Metoo, “Terror is reserved for the women.”

Everyday in this country, teenage boys attack teenage girls with the same cyber techniques used to destroy Hill. These victims also contemplate suicide and guess what’s done about it. Next to nothing. The New York Times doesn’t invite them to pen op-eds. Nobody muses about them in the New Yorker. Instead, their grades decline. They drop out. They are treated as less than collateral damage. The impact on their lives isn’t taken seriously because girls aren’t boys.

I know teachers who have, upon learning that girls have been sexually assaulted, referred to these victims as “whores.” These teachers have actively encouraged victims’ peers to shun them. I know teachers who, once they’re six feet under, should be eulogized as slut-shaming bullies. And it’s not just teachers. Administrators perpetrate similar garbage.

Several months ago, my district offered a training on the prevention of sexual abuse. I was eager to attend because in middle school, male classmates sexually abused me. Male teachers watched and did nothing, and as the district training unfolded, its trajectory horrified me. A good part of it was spent discussing how teachers might avoid false accusations…HOW TEACHERS MIGHT AVOID FALSE ACCUSATIONS. With that priority, the workshop’s intent became clear. Protecting predators and promoting the myth that girls lie, that a girl’s word is suspect, that girls don’t deserve testimonial justice, that girls are a bunch of petty shit talkers, that girls aren’t as trustworthy as boys, THAT GIRLS DON’T MATTER, matter most.

I say GIRLS because GIRLS are the primary victims of sexual abuse, a fact omitted from the workshop.

Perpetrators are primarily MEN, a fact that I think was intentionally omitted from the workshop in order not to hurt men’s feelings, and we’ve seen how wet powerful men get when someone, especially a woman, hurts their feelings.

Do you recall Brett Kavanaugh’s rage-weeping?

Tears earned him a seat beside Clarence Thomas.

Here’s a further example of shitty behavior being brazenly performed.

Last week, at a meeting, a male teacher sat next to me.

Without saying hello, he asked, “Have you attended the sexual harassment training yet?”

“No,” I answered.

He responded by explaining the steps I could take to avoid the training and emphasized that his steps were foolproof: he’d used them to avoid it.

That’s the truth of how we help female victims of abuse and assault in the United States: by avoiding the truth, strangling the truth, and punishing girls and women who survive. This truth is why I say dump the pussy hats, sharpen your weapon, and if you think I’m a self-righteous bitch, my stretch-marked nalgas utter that you may kiss them. JK. Get away from me.

If you’re interested in launching or participating in an education- and/or Long Beach-centric #Metoo, please message me. Those interested in civility need not apply.

On the Banality of the Epstein Scandal and the Naming of Shitty Men

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In an essay on E. Jean Carroll, Moira Donegan grimly addresses the underwhelming response that Carroll’s rape allegation against President Trump garnered. She writes, “We have stopped pretending, collectively, that we expect those on whom we bestow tremendous power to behave with commensurate responsibility.”

Like many twelve-year-old girls, I learned about the irresponsibility of the powerful through sex. This lesson was delivered at Orcutt Junior High School when not one but several white boys molested me during the late 80s. Teachers witnessed my abuse but nobody intervened. Instead, my history teacher, Mr. Pauley, blushed and continued grading papers. My art teacher, Mr. Biedinger, smirked and stared. I’d been taught that teachers were benevolent and powerful, that teachers existed to edify and protect students, but after being groped and fondled by my classmates day after day, I quit trusting teachers. I also came to intuit that the foundation of white male supremacy is hypocrisy. These do-nothing teachers proved to me that the very people who were in charge of protecting me were as likely to delight in my sexual degradation than to stop it.

During a school field trip, a science teacher, Mr. Salinas, confronted me about what he called my “bad attitude.” He told me that I had no right to act so glum, that I had it too good to sulk. He wanted to see me get with the program. He wanted to see me do something. He wanted to see me smile.

The last time I’d smiled was on picture day, the day that the abuse in my history class began.

The last time I’d smiled was on picture day, the day that the abuse in my history class began. I hadn’t yet learned to be ashamed of my lips and so I’m not trying to hide them in my school picture. The same white boys who molested me eventually added racial slurs to my molestation, calling me the N word as they lunged at my lips.

School can be so dangerous. It’s one of the two locations where a mass shooting is likeliest to take place. It’s a place where a girl or a woman is likely to be sexually assaulted. It’s where one learns to become a citizen. In fact, many schools have a citizenship grade. School is where I first heard the language of supremacy freely and gleefully exercised. Ho. Slut. Bitch. Cunt. Wetback. Beaner. Dyke. Its no coincidence that school also happens to be where gender and racial identities are in the process of dramatically crystallizing.

The boys who molested me had been taught by an older white man that white men may take what they want. These boys had been taken, molested by their little league coach, Michael Shean. By the time Shean molested my classmates, he’d been abusing young people for decades. The Mormon Church had ex-communicated him for molesting two missionaries but re-baptized him after he completed “therapy.” Upon his reentry into religious life, Shean was given educational duties. In addition to coaching, he taught Sunday school and seminary.

Like Labor Secretary Alex Acosta, the man who shut Jeffrey Epstein’s victims out of judicial proceeding in order to cut Esptein a sweetheart deal, Mr. Shean also practiced law, often representing juvenile clients pro bono. And like Mr. Pauley, Mr. Biedinger, and Mr. Salinas, Mr. Epstein once taught teenagers. In the 70s, he worked as a math and physics teacher at the Dalton School. Did I mention that my Catholic high school math teacher, Mr. Sarkisian sometimes crept up behind me to stroke my hair? Did I mention that he once approached a female student during class and hit her with a rope? Did I mention he would compliment my “exotic” appearance? Did I mention that he married a former student?

The Epstein scandal has revealed a corrupt “network” of men who harmed, exploited, and terrorized girls, but when one strips away the money, fame, and prestige, the scandal simply becomes a magnified version of what girls all over this country regularly experience, a common rite of passage into patriarchal sexual practices. Wendy C. Ortiz wrote about this initiation in Excavation, an elegant masterpiece that chronicles the loss of her virginity to her eighth grade English teacher. In a chapter titled “Why I Didn’t Tell,” Ortiz lists the reasons: “I was afraid of being blamed. I felt responsible for his acts. I was numb…”

It’s difficult not to feel numb these days. A pussy goes numb after being grabbed non-stop and I recall when news outlets first broadcast President Trump’s “locker room talk” tape, many people commenting that the behavior he described sounded strange. Who grabs someone by the pussy? The boys who molested me grabbed me by the pussy. That was how my mis-education began.

One of the few American broadsides which has spoken directly to me has been Zoe Leonard’s art piece “I Want a Dyke for President.” It opens with those lines and goes on to proclaim desire for a president who has “survived rape.” The piece concludes with an implied question: “I want to know why we started learning somewhere down the line that a president is always a clown: always a john and never a hooker. Always a boss and never a worker, always a liar, always a thief and never caught.” I can answer that question. For some of us, it began in school.