The Unquiet Underground

There are two books that sit quietly upon my sill and both are made and lived in Neverlands. I’ve read them through and through, and begin my review like this, in fairytale mode, because the books deserve nothing less, and quite a bit more. They deserve to be heard. One book, Jenny Boully’s not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them, is set in the Never Never Land of Wendy and Peter Pan, that old tale, forever new in Boully’s hands. And the other is Roxane Gay’s book Ayiti, which is like a compass, showing us the way to the Haitian Diaspora—a diaspora that is neither north, south, east, nor west, but somewhere in between, and that leaves the needle wavering, if always, finally pointing toward the heart of Haiti.

Both books, slim yet dense volumes, explore submerged worlds, both of them bending genre as they do so. Gay’s publisher refers to Ayiti as a “unique blend of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.” Boully’s work is classified under “fiction/poetry.” Both books also examine the lives of women living, many times uncomfortably, in these submerged worlds—as if pushed beneath a line they desire to rise above. It is perhaps this aspect that I am most drawn to.

Last spring, Cate Blanchett accepted an Academy Award for best actress for her performance in Blue Jasmine, a powerful role, which she performed stellarly—with all the madness of superficiality and loss with which Woody Allen imbued his protagonist. In her acceptance speech, she reprimanded Hollywood for its “foolish” perceptions of women in film and TV. “The world is round, people!” said Blanchett, admonishing those who are still “clinging to the idea that female films with women at the center are niche experiences. . . . They are not. Audiences want to see them.”

I would argue the same is true for literature. Readers want to read work written by and about women. And no, this work is not just for women but also for all readers, and that’s the crucial part of this argument. These books, Ayiti and not merely, among others, are not “women’s writing” or “chick lit,” or a vast array of other condescending titles attributed to work written by female authors. These two books are a prime example of loud and powerful voices that have not yet found the audience they should find. Boully and Gay make an argument fiercer still than Blanchett’s, because they dispel the fairy tale that, in some ways, Blanchett still embodies by fulfilling Hollywood’s particular ideals of bright, white, and impossibly thin female beauty. Boully and Gay, on the other hand, force their readers to turn expectation on its head.

In one of Ayiti’s 15 poem-story-essay hybrids called “Things I Know about Fairy Tales,” we come to the fast realization that there is no such thing as snow or Snow White in Haiti.

The story begins, “When I was very young, my mother told me she didn’t believe in fairy tales. They were, she liked to say, lessons dressed in fancy clothes.” The tale then continues to detail the kidnapping of the story’s narrator. As we traverse the chronicle, we see the narrator being bid for, paid for, violated, raped, and we see her, by the end, changed. All of this happens in the first person of a woman’s voice, and all of this ends without a “happy ending.” “Alice had choices in Wonderland. Eat me, drink me, enjoy tea with a Mad Hatter, entertain the Queen of Hearts, down, down the rabbit hole,” says the narrator. But by the end, after Gay’s narrator is released from her captors, she stares at herself, “a stranger in the mirror,” she says, and “[imagines] going down, down the rabbit hole of [her] own happily ever after,” which we know by the...