Generously Rude: A Conversation with Myriam Gurba

In the following interview, guest editors Jonathan Alexander and Timothy Oleksiak sat down with writer Myriam Gurba to talk about queer generosity. For us, Gurba was an obvious choice to interview. Her powerful memoir, Mean, published in 2017, reads like the queerest of gifts. On one hand, Gurba generously offers us a stark recounting of her own (and others') sexual abuse and trauma in a racist, misogynistic culture, telling deeply personal stories so we might better understand the dynamics of sexual predation in our culture. On the other hand, Mean, as Gurba describes below, makes demands on its readers, refusing them any simple accounting of the damages done to her while also challenging readers to contend with her complex, sharp, and even witty approach to talking about some of the most devastating experiences our culture creates for women, queer women, and queer women of color.

Language becomes the artful manner through which Gurba can articulate her experience while connecting it to the abuse that others have suffered. Mean is full of wordplay as language slips and slides through short sections, mostly narrative, but also frequently poetic, including a shaped poem and several lists. But Gurba's is never language play just for its own sake; her words always bend back to the lives, bodies, and psyches damaged by abuse: "Did you know PTSD is the only mental illness you can give someone? A person gave it to me. A man actually drove me crazy. He transmitted this condition."¹ The mind is turned inside out, internal conditions transmitted through external contact as Gurba's off-hand, almost jokey metaphor literalizes being driven crazy. You can almost hear Gurba chuckling as she writes this line, so shocked with the horror of our culture that laughter seems one, if not the most, appropriate response.

But the jokes are deadly serious. As she puts it, "Art is one way to work out touch gone wrong."² Mean demands our attention not only as a painfully timely story, but also as an artful memoir. It bears striking comparison to Lidia Yuknavitch's The Chronology of Water,³ a book about its author's own tale of abuse, and Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts,⁴ a delicious recounting of its author's own complex erotic intimacies. Like both writers, Gurba turns the complexity of her story into art, claiming that "[w]hat matters is a woman making art out of everything she was born with."⁵ But Gurba makes a distinction between what she was born with and what has happened to her since. Although Yuknavitch and Nelson seem to trust a bit more in the recuperative power of art, sifting the self through aestheticized language, Gurba seems a bit less sure of recovery: "I'd anticipated squeezing a catharsis out of this pilgrimage, but I should've known my dreams of closure would remain dreams."⁶

Such refusal of closure demands its own response, and Gurba turns to "meanness" as one artful strategy to survive her life—meanness that is spilling tea, reading others, powerful forms of truth-telling that are themselves aesthetically shaped. You have to call out the bullshit, the awfulness of the abuse queers, queer women, and queer women of color often suffer, Gurba tells us, but you can also do so with potent displays of verbal acuity and embodied wit. Doing so not only takes some of the sting out of the violence endured, but also shows us to be daringly resilient, and even vivacious and creative in the face of others' cruelty. Gurba claims that "[b]eing mean makes us feel alive. It's fun and exciting. Sometimes, it keeps us alive."⁷ That meanness takes a decidedly gendered turn at points: "We act mean to defend ourselves from boredom and from those who would chop off our breasts…. Being mean to boys is fun and a second-wave feminist duty. Being rude to men who deserve it is a holy mission. Sisterhood is powerful, but being a bitch is more exhilarating. Being a bitch is spectacular."⁸ A...