writer of all sorts of things
Read an interview with J.L. Powers at Through the Tollbooth!
Q: What about this novel makes you most proud?
There is absolutely nothing on the market like it! It is young adult magical realism, set in a poverty-stricken township of South Africa. It is a love story but it also deals with the clash between science and traditional medicine in Africa, and it highlights and focuses on the HIV-AIDS epidemic in the part of the world with the highest rate of HIV infections—the heart of the epidemic.
I feed my dogs first thing each morning, otherwise, life would be miserable for all of us. Then I try–*try* being the operative word here—to make them wait until 4:30 before I feed them again.
Around 3:30, they start pushing their noses into my hands to interrupt my typing. “C’mon, we’re hungry!” Petting doesn’t satiate their voracious appetite. Telling them, “It’s not time yet,” doesn’t work either (no matter how exasperated I feel!). Their noses get ever more insistent. “C’mon, Jessica, we are not playin’ around!”
That’s a little bit how I feel as I wait for my second novel, This Thing Called the Future, to be released on May 1. I feel like I’ve been waiting a looooooooong time for this one to come out!
I started writing This Thing Called the Future in the summer of 2007, just after my first y.a. novel, The Confessional, was released. I’d taken a leave of absence from my Ph.D. program in African History at Stanford to promote the book and I was already thinking I wouldn’t go back. The scariest thing about leaving the Ph.D. program was the realization that it meant saying goodbye to my easy access to South Africa. Stanford was paying for my Zulu language study…summer travel…etc. But I was miserable trying to be both an academic and a writer and I knew I had to make a choice.
So I left the Ph.D. program and I started writing this book. It was a way of feeding my voracious appetite for all things South African. And it was one of those books you feel like you *have* to write, anyway. I’d felt that way ever since the day my two Zulu sisters—thirteen and fourteen years old—crawled onto my bed one night before I went to sleep and giggled out stories of sugar daddies and secret boyfriends, men in their thirties.
“How do you meet these men?” I asked. All I’d ever seen was two very responsible young women, largely in charge of the household because Mama worked in another city as a teacher and only came home on the weekends. Gogo, the grandmother, was the adult in charge but she was tired and slow, with weak knees and swollen ankles.
They eyed each other. Then the13-year-old volunteered, “We sneak out to go to parities sometimes.”
“We are the V.I.P.’s at those parties,” my 14-year-old sister said.
“Does Gogo know?”
“No! Well…She caught me kissing my boyfriend at church last Sunday,” the 13-year-old said. “So I’m not allowed to go to church by myself anymore.”
“Are you guys, like, protecting yourselves?” This was my vague question, unsure how, exactly, to broach the topic of condoms or abstinence with girls so young, possibly having sex with men so old. And I was a guest in their home. I was pretty sure Gogo wouldn’t be pleased if I took the liberty to provide sex education, American-style.
Yet I was worried. The official HIV-positive rate is 30% among Zulu women ages 15-35. (Not to mention, it’s never good when a 13-year-old is dating a man in his 30s, certainly a case for the police in the U.S.)
So that sparked the novel I started to write in the summer of 2007. What would it be like, I asked myself, to be 14 and to start liking the opposite sex when HIV is running rampant in the community and people you know—close people, members of your family—are dying? Would you become afraid of love? What would your attitude towards sex be? What would you think of the older men seeking your attention? Would you find it flattering or scary?
Meanwhile, I was following this sexy little thread of research I’d uncovered—news reports about the killings of suspected witches all over South Africa in the late 90s and early 2000s. Why were so many people killing witches? Were these so-called witches actually practicing witchcraft or were they entirely innocent? And what did witchcraft mean in South Africa anyway, especially to this imagined young woman of 14 years old? Scholar Adam Ashforth described modern South Africans as experiencing a great deal of “spiritual insecurity” and the killings of suspected witches is only one example of it.
I soon discovered that practicing witchcraft in an African context looks only a little different than the western concept of a woman chanting hexes over a cauldron at midnight in a deserted forest. A Zulu who practices witchcraft is actually trying to send illness or death to a neighbor or family member. Usually, they purchase a poison or potion, which they then sprinkle in somebody’s yard or give to them in their food. The curse can bring all sorts of bad luck and/or illness. People told me that many of these illnesses mimic Western diseases—hypertension, for example, or arthritis, or some kind of STD—but they can’t be cured with Western medicine. That is how you know it is witchcraft.
In the context of HIV-AIDS, when enormous numbers of young people are dropping dead from terrible diseases, the temptation to attribute it to witchcraft is enormous. But most South Africans understand HIV as a virus, communicated through the transmission of blood or bodily fluids. Writer Jonny Steinberg has suggested that Africans have readily accepted the biological explanation; to believe it is caused by witchcraft is too terrible for most people to contemplate. The epidemic is so widespread that if it was witchcraft, it would mean possibly hundreds of thousands of neighbors and family members engaging in wholesale murder—and the insecurity that would engender would be too terrible to imagine.
I was curious to explore all these threads—the young woman falling in love, surrounded by people dying of AIDS, living in a community experiencing great spiritual insecurity. And it took me years to layer it all into one cohesive novel, one that depicts the realistic and magical and loving and scary world that a young urban Zulu girl occupies in 2011.
Here it is….3 ½ years later, on the cusp of being released to the reading public and my friends and my family. It’s a nerve-racking and exciting business.
I can’t wait until May 1 when it’s available. Which is why I’ll be releasing an excerpt next month on my website, a little snack of what’s to come.
Back to the dogs: Yesterday, I fed them at 3:45. When they started bugging me, I thought, “What the hell? Why make ‘em wait when they don’t have to?”
Advance review copies of This Thing Called the Future went out today and my publisher sent me a link to a YouTube video of Urban Dance Squad singing “Prayer for my Demo” at a 1990 concert….
Here it is: Urban Dance Squad-\”Prayer for my Demo\”
Yesterday as I walked to my doctor’s appointment, some random dude leaned out of his car and screeched something at me that I couldn’t understand.
But I definitely understood his final epithet: “BITCH!!!”
His scream startled me so badly, I jumped and tensed, the pain from a day of hunching over my computer shooting through my shoulder blades and one sudden, hot tear smarting my right eye.
It’s a small thing, really, that some stranger would get their rocks off calling you a bitch as they fly by in their small white car, insulated from any real retaliation, probably horsing it up with their buddies, not really meaning it in a personal way. For that guy, I’m a bitch for reasons that have no real bearing on who I am. Maybe, to him, I’m a bitch because I’m a woman, or because I was walking down Portola Avenue at 4:15 in the afternoon, or because I was wearing jeans and a sweater, or because I have long brown hair that reminds him of his ex-girlfriend.
And while I know that, like gays with the word “queer,” some feminists have reclaimed the word “BITCH” as part of their self-description, I also know that when someone hurls it at you as an invective, it’s a violation. A small one, but a violation nonetheless. You can reclaim terms for personal use, but you can’t dictate how others use those terms.
It got me thinking about other times I’ve experienced small, but important, violations with complete strangers. One of those moments came to mind right away and it’s amazing how much it smarted to remember it several years later. Unlike the stranger calling me “bitch,” this one seemed more personal, even though I had never met the woman who violated me.
I was a graduate student at Stanford at the time, and I had recently come to the conclusion that I no longer wanted to use the Mirena IUD as my form of birth control. The conclusion had come pretty quickly after it was inserted, for a variety of reasons. 1) The way my uterus cramped and bled for two days after it was inserted convinced me that it’s not a good idea to have a foreign object camping out and having a party in your uterus. 2) I suddenly started having skin problems that hadn’t bothered me for years, skin problems that started occurring within two days of the insertion. 3) While I’m pro-keeping-abortion-legal due to some complicated reasons that don’t belong in this post, I am not pro-abortion, and the realization that the IUD is, essentially, an abortifacient was keeping me awake at nights. 4) My sister-in-law, who had never had a miscarriage in her life and had already had two healthy children, suffered 3 miscarriages after using the Mirena IUD for only a few months. Coincidence? Perhaps. Worth the risk to my personal health? Absolutely not.
Anyway, the point was, I wanted the IUD out. And I wanted it out now.
So I went to my friendly Student Health Center on the Stanford campus, Vaden Health Clinic, where I know many of the staff by name (and they recognize me by sight as well) because I spent so much time going there after that truck hit me while I was crossing a street in downtown El Paso. They were all very good to me and I love them very much.
My nurse practitioner at Vaden, Carolyn, is a wonderful, kindly, caring woman, in her fifties I think, who teaches yoga on the side. She reminds me of one of my sisters-in-law who is a medical doctor. She takes her time with her patients and always listened to what I had to say and, the next visit, would remember it. I felt well cared for her in her hands.
I dressed in that little flimsy cotton gown that opens in the back (or the front, if you put it on wrong, as I have on occasion) and she did my pap smear and we chatted about this and that, joking about how I was getting wrinkles and acne at the same time, which somehow seemed really wrong and unfair to me. She needed help to remove the Mirena IUD, so she left the room to fetch another nurse.
The other nurse came marching in to the room, Carolyn on her heels. “Now, exactly why do you want to remove the Mirena?” she asked, her voice busy and important.
“Well, I’ve been having some skin problems ever since it was inserted and I’m not convinced it’s entirely healthy for the body,” I said vaguely.
She peered at my face, one of her hands on her hip. “Your skin problems don’t look bad to me,” she announced.
“Well, they’re bad for me,” I said. “For what I’m used to.”
“Well,” she said, “a lot of women in their thirties start having skin problems.”
“Okay,” I said.
“You might regret having the Mirena taken out,” she said.
Carolyn interrupted. “Jessica and her husband are talking about starting a family,” she said.
“But you’re going to Africa next week,” the nurse said. Everything she said came out forceful, almost like an accusation.
“Yes,” I said, wondering what her point was. I was, in fact, leaving for South Africa a few days later.
“You don’t want to get pregnant when there’s a chance you could get malaria,” she said.
“There isn’t any malaria in South Africa,” I said, beginning to feel frustrated and defensive about wanting to remove the Mirena IUD, “at least, not the areas I’m going to. And my husband won’t even be with me while I’m gone.”
“Still, that’s a risk you don’t want to take,” she said, the little wagging finger in her voice. “It would be very very bad for your baby if you got malaria.” She stared at me, strongly concerned, and waited for me to agree with her.
“I’m not in danger of contracting malaria,” I repeated. “And, anyway, I’m not in danger of getting pregnant while I’m there either because my husband won’t be with me.”
Did she think I was a floozy and would be getting it on with a bunch of strangers while I was overseas?
“It’s not a good idea to remove it right now,” she said.
I don’t even remember what else she said, I just remember that I was holding my tears back as she talked me out of removing an IUD that I no longer wanted inside me just in case it was fucking up my reproductive system.
And Carolyn pressed forward and said to me, looking me directly in the eyes, “If you want the IUD taken out, we will take it out, right now.”
She was trying to repair the damage that the other nurse was creating. She was, subtly and kindly, reminding me that this was my body and my choice.
This was precisely why I always chose Carolyn as my primary health provider. And I was glad in that instant—and ever since then—that I had never before or since encountered that other nurse in my many trips to the health clinic.
Nevertheless, as I write this, my throat aches with unshed tears. Why? Because despite Carolyn’s reminder that this was my body, the pressure from the other nurse—a perfect stranger, but one who had some power over me—was so great that I backed down and decided against removing the Mirena that day.
Later, it made me angry. Later, I wished I’d made a scene and told that nurse to shove off. Later, I wish I’d asked her, “Why do you have such a personal investment in preventing me from getting pregnant right now? What fucking business is it of yours?”
Later. Later. Later.
But at the time, I let myself be violated.
A small violation? Sure, small, though it won’t seem so small in ten years when a group of women come together in a class-action suit against the makers of IUDs because of some health problem that’s occurred—like they’re doing with Yaz and Yasmine right now.
A small violation? Sure, small. I went to another doctor a few months later and, two seconds later, it was out. “Do you want to see it?” he asked, and I said, “Yes,” and the reason I said yes was borne out of that encounter with that nurse, with the sudden fearful stabbing thought that a doctor could say he’d removed something like an IUD from your uterus but, in fact, leave it in. That’s a paranoid thought, I know, but not so paranoid after my encounter with that nurse who really really really wanted me to leave mine in, wanted it so badly that she applied considerable pressure and used manipulation, even to go so far as to suggest that I’d be putting my as-yet-unconceived-child in danger if I didn’t leave the IUD in. And not so paranoid when you consider all the violations of human rights that have occurred in the medical profession since the profession was created.
I love doctors and nurses, I do, and this is not an invective against them, though it does point out the ways they have power over their patients in ways both large and small, and the very fact of that power makes violations so easy to occur. The jerk that yelled “bitch” at me as he passed didn’t have any power over me because there was no relationship but he managed to violate me anyway.
The only thing that connects these small violations is the fact that both of the people who initiated them were perfect strangers. I’ll never see either one of them again. And I suspect that the other thing that connects them is that I’m a woman. I’m not saying that perfect strangers don’t try to do these kinds of things to men, but I suspect they occur less frequently, and that most men respond differently (both at the time and after the fact) because they’ve been socialized differently. I could be wrong. I’m curious to hear from men about it.
Why do perfect strangers have such an investment in us that they would behave in these ways? And how should we deal with these kinds of small violations, when they happen so often?
I don’t really know how to end this blog post except to invite you to give your thoughts.
My mother used to read books that had titles like People Pleaser: Learn How to Say No. She used to say this was a real problem for women—we struggle to say no, we want to please others. I don’t know if that’s really true for the majority of women, but my people pleasing mother certainly raised a people pleasing daughter. I feel tremendous guilt when I tell somebody, “No.”
I was the 16-year-old teenager who didn’t really want to have sex with my boyfriend…but couldn’t say no. And once you’ve said yes to having sex with your boyfriend, how do you go back and say no? I tried but it was impossible. There’s a line in one of my all-time favorite short stories, “Lust” by Susan Minot, that describes it perfectly: “Then they get mad after when you say enough is enough. After, when it’s easier to explain that you don’t want to. You wouldn’t dream of saying that maybe you weren’t really ready to in the first place.”
Why was I more afraid of saying “no” to my boyfriend’s insistent demands for sex than dealing with the emotional consequences of saying yes? Continue reading ‘Saying no to sex, Christians, and charities…saying yes to the eternal Why?’
This past week, I’ve been battling the big evil corporations known collectively as Health Insurance Companies. Act
ually, I’ve been trying to figure out whether I should stick with my Blue Shield of California plan or switch to some other plan. The question has boiled down to this: “Which company is going to screw me over the least?” I know that I’m going to get screwed; but if I can choose the degree of screwedness, I’ll feel a little better about life.
My frustration started Continue reading ‘Health Chronicles #1′
A few days ago, I started a new y.a. novel. I should be working on my nonfiction book on healing, South Africa, religion, science–all that jazz, the reason I went to South Africa in the first place. But so much happened to me while I was there, and I interviewed so many people, that it feels like I need a few weeks to synthesize that information, to process the new changed me.
That is, if I am changed.
Except…I know I am. I just haven’t entirely figured out how yet. I had a few epiphanies while I was gone. Some things inside of me broke, but in a good way. Some things inside of me feel calmer now. And one of the first things I did when I got back was buy an orange tree to honor my ancestors–actually, two particular ancestors, my great-grandfather on my father’s side and a child that my mother miscarried–like a sangoma that I visisted advised me to do. We planted it last week in the front yard.
I’m aware more than ever that hokey-ness has nothing to do with whether a thing is true or not. Still, I hate hokey. Which is why all we did is dig a hole and plant the tree and now we’ll watch it grow.
The story of how I visited a sangoma, an African traditional healer, and why I believed what she had to say about my life–that’s a long story, one that will surely be in the book, but one I’m not ready to tell yet. At least not here.
But I can say that I like seeing that orange tree out there in my front yard. I like knowing that it will grow tall and strong, and bear fruit for many years to come, even after I’ve moved away.
I like honoring the people who came before me, reminding myself of what they did for me–and what they might still be doing for me.
The other day, I noticed a clock in a tourist shop called “African time.” In place of numbers, it had common African sayings about time–”just now” (which means sometime in the future), “now now” (which kind of means RIGHT now but also sort of means “wait a few more minutes”), “whenever,” “sometime,” etc. I laughed–it’s easy to laugh until you find yourself up against the wall, the frustratingly blank run-around that, yes, is typical. Continue reading ‘I’m *really* in South Africa’
Had two fascinating conversations yesterday on the plane with the two gentlemen I was sitting next to.
The first man, an Indian who has lived in South Africa for twenty years, introduced himself by asking me if I’m French. I told him, “Non.”
“Funny,” he said, “you look French.”
His name is Varkey George and he’s the director of the Student Health and Welfare Centres Organisation. He hosts student groups that come to Cape Town to do charity work. I told him about the book I was writing, and he thought it odd that I define healing so broadly.
“Well, why not?” I asked. “People seek healing from all kinds of practitioners and I’m not sure there’s a logical correspondence between the type of illness they’re experiencing and the type of healing they’re seeking. I think people have different ideas of what healing is, so they don’t necessarily feel healed by a medical doctor even if their body is in good shape after seeing one.”
He could understand that. The question, he said, is this: “What is the wound?”
A good question to ask. What IS the wound? Even if you are physically ill, that may not be the wound you’re seeking to cure even when trying to cure your body.
I also sat next to Barnard Gardiner, who works for the Red Cross as the Manager of the HIV Global Programme, Health and Care Department. We had a long and involved conversation about AIDS, especially AIDS in South Africa, and he asked several provocative questions about how we could stop the epidemic in Africa.
First, he asked me if I knew about the theory that HIV is spread when people are engaged in simultaneous relationships, not necessarily promiscuously but one man has two relationships and both his girlfriends also have two relationships, and so on and so forth, until it creates a network where HIV is easily transmitted. Of course I was so he continued. He said that gay men were able to stop the transmission of HIV because, without coordination, they somehow figured this out and realized that they didn’t need to use condoms all the time, but they should use condoms outside of their primary relationship. So they didn’t use condoms with their primary relationship but when they slept with other people, they did.
He suggested that there are two ways to stop the epidemic—either be monogamous or use condoms all the time, something that no group has been able to do. He said that nobody realized that Africans had concurrent relationships—women as well as men—until the epidemic, so he said, “We’re asking Africans to either use condoms all the time (something nobody has been able to do) or to stop being African.”
I thought this was a disturbing way to put it. Is it African to have concurrent relationships all the time? Polygamy, yes, but to my knowledge, there is not a long history of African *women* also being involved in more than one relationship at a time. I pointed out that there was no evidence from archival materials and early European recordings of African behavior that would suggest this was a common part of African culture. And Europeans were certainly happy to exaggerate any behavior they found odd!
“It may be a common part of African culture today,” I said, “but I struggle to believe that it’s a long-standing feature of African culture, that it’s been around for centuries, because there’s no evidence of it in the record. Maybe it could have gone by unnoticed for so long but…”
It disturbed me to think that the reason the epidemic has spread in Africa is intrinsically related to something that is fundamentally African. Maybe that’s true and I just have sickly-sweet, politically correct, academic-trained-by-the-book knee-jerk reactions that are misplaced and misguided. But still…
Then I remembered a few things: thigh sex and Facing Mt. Kenya. I told him that there are African practices that indicate that women did have multiple partners when they were young, but they didn’t engage in penetrative sex. I told him how Jomo Kenyatta outlined practices that the Gikuyu engaged in, that young people were encouraged to indulge in sexual play with multiple partners as long as they didn’t go all the way. And the Zulu trained women how to have “thigh sex,” that is, how to get a man to come by rubbing his penis together with their thighs.
He got kind of excited when I mentioned that and said that this might be the answer—if Africans could re-learn some of these traditional behaviors, then maybe it could stop the epidemic.
Like any good academically-trained historian, I have knee-jerk reactions to the concept of “tradition” as well. There are always people that believe if we go back to some idyllic past, to practices that they believe have been corrupted or have disappeared from society, that we will eliminate or reduce some problem that has cropped up in modern life. But many times, our idea of what is “traditional” is based more in nostalgia and romance than in reality. And furthermore, I’m not sure it’s ever possible to resurrect old practices that way without enormous controversy.
Both interesting conversations on my way to South Africa to explore this topic!
I’m currently revising 50 pages of my novel WITCHES, HEALERS, AND THIS THING CALLED THE FUTURE for a publishing company that’s interested.
I have to laugh, because whenever I need to start revising something, I do the same thing everytime. It’s routine:
First, I have to find just the right music to listen to. Okay, good, Emily Wells. She’s perfect to write to.
Now it’s a pressing need to check if anybody has sent me messages on MySpace, my blog, or in email. Ooh, look, somebody friended me on Facebook—who IS that? Somebody I haven’t seen or heard from since ohmigod COLLEGE. How many freaking years has that been? How old am I again?
Suddenly, I need to examine my face up close—as if the flaws on my face are easier to deal with than the flaws on the page. This morning as I examine my face, I find minute traces of the chile colorado sauce I cooked last night. Obviously, forgot to wash my face last night. Must do now! Can’t wait another second!
Yep, the routine is always the same. I’ll probably through a similar process again in fifteen minutes.
It’s amazing how many blogs I post when I’m revising my novels….
