PHOEBE RUSCH / excerpt from EMPATHY
“Empathy” appears in its entirety in Always Crashing Issue Four, now available to order via Bookshop, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, and local bookstores everywhere (we particularly like Pilsen Community Books in Chicago and White Whale Books and City of Asylum Bookstore in Pittsburgh).
Carnival
The white girl first met the frenemy at the start of carnival, after messaging on OK Cupid for a week. The frenemy, a Haitian American Phd drop-out turned NGO worker, rocked a bald head and bold frames. Her face possessed an austere elegance. Haiti was tiny and their circles tinier; they inevitably shared mutual friends. The frenemy had tickets for spots in the stands. A group banded together to brave the hip-checking, pelvic-thrusting crowds and watch the people partying on floats as they blared by.
The veve on your arm, the frenemy said in the van on the way downtown, indicating the white girl’s shoulder tattoo. Why Erzuli? What does she mean to you?
I got it to signify my love of Haiti. It was probably a mistake. It’s appropriative.
Are you just saying that because it’s what you feel like you should say? The frenemy, not yet revealed as a frenemy, inquired. I actually like it. You’re literally wearing your heart on your sleeve. That’s cute. Does telling people that you know it was a mistake make you feel like you can get away with it more easily? Oh my God, your face. Okay, okay. Reeling it back now. We don’t know each other like that yet. Too much too soon. It’s cute. You’re cute. Very.
The white girl’s heart stammered in her chest.1
Who Is the Audience?
I don’t want to write another story about navel-gazing middle-class white people in a failing marriage feeling vague ennui, the white girl told the frenemy, hoping she sounded pithy and smart. The frenemy’s intellect intimidated and excited her. I want to write something that looks outward.
The white girl had sent the frenemy her novel-in-progress, a biopic of the Haitian American vodoun rock musician Richard Morse, whose hotel she’d been staying at when the earthquake happened. The white girl and the frenemy were on a date (?) at Yanvalou, a café and bar where Port-au-Prince’s queers congregated. On a Monday night, they had the back courtyard to themselves. Nina Simone’s face, spray-painted on the razor-wire topped dividing wall by a local artist, stared down at them.
No offense, but your book seems like it’s written for white Americans. The frenemy licked the sugar off the rim of her rum sour. Like to explain Haiti to them. It presumes itself as an authority.
The white girl tried to keep her face neutral but still blushed hard. She’d thought that, by writing from the POV of the character based off of Richard, she could avoid appropriation. He existed in a liminal racial space where he was often read as white. Like the white girl, he had gone to boarding school and then Princeton. He’d belonged to the same eating club, Terrace, the one for misfits and stoners and gays; his band had played there on Thursday nights.2 For good measure, she’d added in a character based off of her, a white girl infatuated with the fictionalized version of the Morse family, as a narrative frame.
Even with the metafictional aspect? The white girl’s voice cracked.
A white participant-observer as window character is nothing new, the frenemy said.
Window Character
While still in undergrad, the white girl had read the work of an acclaimed Haitian author. A derivative narrative formed in her head, a historical novel about the Tonton Macoutes, President “Papa Doc” Duvalier’s secret police force. She didn’t want to write about the Chicago suburbs because she wanted to disassociate herself from them. She avoided telling people that she was from the North Shore or, if she did, she foregrounded that her mother worked multiple jobs in food service and that her father delivered pizzas and that she’d received full scholarships to every school she’d attended. Her advantages in life felt embarrassing because she knew, on some level, that she hadn’t earned them, and because she seemed unable to function as well as such a fortunate person should. She didn’t want to write about her father because dwelling there made her sick; she mostly pretended he didn’t exist. Asking herself why she’d never been south of the Chicago loop other than when her father took her on voyeuristic car rides through Black neighborhoods as a child felt too uncomfortable, so she shut these questions down as well. Her friends freshman year were almost all international students.
We’re Americans who hate being American, observed her crush, a sweet, Birkenstock-wearing, seemingly crunchy white boy in her circle who would go on to work for Goldman Sachs.3
She’d been unwell for a while and grew more unwell still. Sitting in a coffee shop, she looked over to see a baby staring at her, and the baby began to cry. The baby was crying, she knew, because it could sense that she was monstrous, that she possessed the soul of evil inside her. She might lunge for the baby and grab it and smash its skull against the wall in front of its mother. She might plunge the plastic knife she’d used to butter her bagel into its neck. The mental image beat a violent tattoo into her brain, reinscribed itself in dreams. Her thoughts knotted and braided upon themselves. She didn’t think she wanted to smash babies’ skulls or to stab their arteries, but how could she know for sure that she didn’t? The groove these neural ball-bearings had worn in her synapses confirmed that she constituted a danger, that she had to eliminate herself to protect others. But she couldn’t do that to her mother. She stopped eating and sleeping, stopped showering and going to class. A few months later, after she’d dropped out of Princeton, she received a diagnosis of OCD.
To assuage her mother’s anxieties about her sudden loss of ambition, she attended massage therapy school. She fantasized about working at a spa resort in the Dominican Republic, improving her Spanish. Then she read about the Hotel Oloffson, a turn-of-the-century Gothic gingerbread mansion, in a Lonely Planet travel guide. She emailed the owner Richard Morse to ask if they had a massage therapist. No, they didn’t, he said, and the NGO workers and journalists who passed through the hotel might make a good client base. He was willing to cut her a deal on a room to live in.
Her mother did not especially want her to move to Haiti but was also glad that she at least appeared driven to do something with her life. She moved into the hotel on a Monday night. The earthquake happened the next afternoon.4 A friend of the Morse family took her sightseeing in the Champs de Mars. The National Palace collapsed approximately two hundred feet away from where they were standing, and then running, and then ducking down. They were lucky to be outside.
She stayed in the country for two months afterward. Now medicated, she returned to finish her degree at Princeton, then got into an MFA program in creative writing. She kept traveling back to Haiti every summer, hoping with each visit that she’d find a tangible purpose. Some service to offer. I’m doing research, she said when asked why she was there. For a book based off the history of the Hotel Oloffson.
The more honest answer would have been that she was getting drunk at the kind of parties she would never have been invited to in the states, becoming enmeshed in a claustrophobic social circuit consisting of other expats, Haitian diaspora, and the Haitian business class.5 That her life in Haiti mostly involved waiting to be driven from one walled compound where there was alcohol to another, and that universities paid her to do this. She wrote very little, instead revising the same thirty pages about Richard attending a party at Katherine Dunham’s estate. Tweaking them ad nauseum like a form of cosmic classroom punishment. Tightening the well-worn sentences into existential thumbscrews.
If she wrote strictly from her own point-of-view the story would be stale, stillborn, she felt sure of it. An imitation of a Graham Greene novel, using a foreign country as an exotic backdrop for a white person’s unraveling.
At Yanvalou, Con’t
Over their second round of rum sours, the frenemy asked the white girl why she hadn’t stayed longer after the earthquake. The frenemy, born in Haiti and raised in the states, had dropped out of her Phd program to act as an emergency first responder, and then stayed in Port-au-Prince to work with an educational non-profit.
I felt like I was in the way of people who were actually qualified to help, who had something useful to offer, the white girl said.
Are you sure that wasn’t just white guilt making you shut down? The frenemy’s mouth folded. To be fair, it was a lot of trauma to absorb. I don’t know that staying was the right decision for me. To build a life in Haiti, you either have to sell out and work for USAID and become part of the problem, or else you work for a smaller organization like me and have to budget ferociously. Who knows where I could be now if I’d chosen differently. But my students need me. She shrugged. Misery is sweeter under the sun, right?
A Self-Reflexive Tic
Back in her MFA program that fall, the white girl attempted to write from her own positionality without centering the white gaze, but skirting her limitations proved impossible.
Your narrator has a self-reflexive tic, a cynical golden-haired boy in her workshop wrote on his copy of her thesis draft. Everything she sees relates back to her, but then her reflections are essentially contentless, letting her off the hook. While this may be an accurate portrayal of the type of person who is drawn to work for humanitarian NGOs abroad, you could be doing something more productive and interesting with this framing than just using it to preempt criticism.
Her professor’s notes: There’s a lot here, but so far it lacks a plot. Even if you aren’t a plot-heavy writer, you have to find some kind of organizing principle, some spine that snaps all the pieces into place.
A woman in the workshop: I can’t see Richard’s wife yet. She has to be more than a metaphor for beauty and power.
On the next page: I can’t see the narrator yet either. She’s just, like, a cipher. You have to develop her as a character too if you’re going to keep her in the book. Otherwise, WHY IS SHE THERE?!?!?
The white girl felt petulant, despairing.
A Foucauldian Analysis
What do you stand to gain from understanding Haiti? The frenemy asked the white girl the following summer. They sprawled on the frenemy’s couch, the frenemy’s fuck buddy watching them with weed-glazed eyes from across the living room. The frenemy stroked the white girl’s thigh in slow circles with her thumb. They’d known each other for a year now and still never acknowledged the sexual tension between them aloud. The desire to define the discursive field is an imperial one, stemming from a drive toward power.
I want other white Americans to learn about all the evil we’ve done in the world, the white girl said, second-guessing her words as she spoke them. The frenemy liked to probe and probe and the white girl could never form solid answers to her questions. And for more people to be aware of Haiti’s history.
Okay but your project essentially reifies the larger project of empire you claim to be against, said the frenemy. Haiti gets used this way a lot. As a metaphor. We’re a screen to project onto.
The white girl shifted away from the frenemy’s roving fingers.6 A frown flickered across the frenemy’s face and was gone. She straightened, keeping her hands to herself.
She’s always got to be like this, said the fuck buddy, the pretty, gym-bodied scion of a Haitian business dynasty whose family mansion included a helipad. So intense.
He had recently crashed his ATV into a sewage canal. He disparaged gay men and poor people and coped with the extremes of his life7 by dissociating to a truly frightening degree. He had light brown skin and green eyes. The frenemy had dark skin and had recently lost a significant amount of weight. The frenemy’s need for the validation of a man so clearly undeserving of her made the white girl feel closer to the frenemy.
I love your mind, the white girl fawned, leaning back toward the frenemy. I learn so much from you.
Lol, the frenemy said, and the white girl smiled, hoping the frenemy would touch her again. I’m not your native informant. I wonder if a modern-day Sarah Baartman would get complimented on her brain instead of her ass.
I didn’t mean… The white girl trailed off, not even sure what she had or hadn’t meant.
The frenemy moved to the floor and started rolling another joint. You’ve got to chill with the researching while socializing, she told the white girl.
1. An actual full-on relationship with a woman? the frenemy replied when asked if she’d ever been in one. I’m not sure I even know what that would look like. A fair response: the white girl didn’t either. She hadn’t kissed a woman at that point in her life. While she’d admitted her attraction to women both privately and publicly, acting on it still terrified her.↩
2. Princeton’s social scene revolved around the eating clubs, a series of colonial-looking mansions that lined Prospect Street, collectively referred to as “The Street.” The white girl did not know how to network, being obnoxiously earnest by nature, and too anxious, and so felt isolated. She infused the passages set at Princeton in the 1970’s with her own alienation, thinking it could serve as some point of access for what Richard had felt as one of the few students of color. Richard’s fictional avatar evinced a degree of angst regarding his racial identity that the actual Richard Morse did not seem to feel in life.↩
3. Two kinds of people attended Princeton, it seemed: a) future investment bankers and b) future international development consultants who chose an area of the world to “specialize” in, to treat like a riddle to be solved. See “A Foucauldian Analysis.”↩
4. See Always Crashing, Issue 4, p. 77: “the earth…a live thing…bucking and rearing”↩
5. You should add a passage explaining that there are rich people in Haiti, a professor at her MFA program, a twink-looking but straight white man with ostensibly Good Politics, scrawled in the margins of her manuscript. That might be confusing for your reader.↩
6. She didn’t want to be enjoying this light petting as much as she was.↩
7. His older brother had been held ransom for a month, his cousin carjacked, his uncle gunned down leaving a bank.↩
Phoebe Rusch has an MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writing Program. Their stories, poems, and essays have appeared in The Rumpus, Hobart, and Catapult, among other publications. More of their work can be found at www.phoeberusch.com.