I was going to avoid this essay because I knew I couldn’t do it justice, but interesting and challenging things deserve to be looked at closer rather than turned away from.
With that in mind, here is the map of “And We Inherit Everything” by Brigitte Leschhorn Arrocha in Kenyon Review, winner of the 2021 Kenyon Review Short Nonfiction Contest.
A brief note: It will be hard to follow this newsletter without having read the essay which is just short of a page and a half printed. You can also listen to it here.
Brigitte Leschorn Arrocha has published fiction in Boulevard magazine and the Southeast Review and an essay in Crab Orchard Review. She is currently an English instructor at Phillips Academy in Andover and is working on her first novel and an essay collection.
The full map:
What I ultimately want to talk about with this essay is our ability to warp time as writers. You can see from my endless red arrows pointing back to “time warping” that this is where the essay pointed me.
Leschhorn Arrocha uses what I like to call the “present-always” tense throughout the essay, it’s something I believe in (maybe in some kind of spiritual sense), but it’s also something that can be manipulated for use on the page. The present-always is evident from the very first sentence of her essay, “We live in the mouth of grief.” It is not a “live” currently, but a “live” in the present tense, and also the past (we lived), the past continuous (we have lived), the future simple (we will live), future continuous (we will be living” and we know this because of how she continues that first sentence with a “a rehearsed recipe we carry in our bones.”
This tense feature of the first sentence leads the reader through the entire essay, which I would argue lives in simultaneity in order to overlap historic time, folkloric time, geologic time, familial time, predictions, curses, the infinite, potential, and not time as a before and an after, but a concurrent, recurring, synchronous thing.
It’s an essay about Epigenetics, which she also names in the first paragraph (environmental impacts on genetics—a scientific study into generational trauma). But in this essay, the generational trauma is not relegated to the familial line (the narrator’s mother), but with a generational trauma of women who have suffered loss, historically, mythologically, and in story. You can imagine the weight of that on the narrator’s shoulders, something like her line, “she sleeps until the earth molds itself into the shape of her, the trees take root there, while whole towns live off her flesh.”
Whole. Towns. Live. Off. Her. Flesh. = Whole. Histories. Live. In. Our. Flesh. // present-always.
How do you do this thing with tense well? The first thing you do is read Toni Morrison’s Beloved. The second thing you do is an exercise in patience, but you write the same section of a story in three different tenses. What changes? What do you have to revise because it no longer works? Which one gets to the heart of the story? Ah, but how do you mess with tense this way in story—you study tense. You revel in the talents of other writers until you feel like you can perform the constricting and collapsing. I would encourage you, if you’re a white person reading this, to study non-white writers particularly for techniques in tense, time, and place.
The second paragraph starts with the sentence, “My mother is twenty-one.” We know in our rational brains this can’t be true for the grown adult writer, timing wise, and yet she uses present tense for a reason, “is twenty-one.” In this paragraph, the narrator begins to conjure those mythological women who came before her, and are the recipe in her bones:
Calypso, who promised Odysseus immortality to stay with her (immortality as a warping of time, and as a form of destruction which we will get to later), and lost him after seven years. She uses Calypso as an allusion to her mother, but then twists time and says, “Odysseus’s women won’t exist until I am in college.”
Her mother who lost her father to his other family after seven years.
Nausicaa who is surmised to have unrequited feelings of love for Odysseus and says to him before he parts for home, “Never forget me, for I gave you life.” Forgetting is a marker of time, giving life is a form of creation and destruction—of motherhood.
La Mepesa & La Sirena (Panamanian folktales) who drowned men or were drowned by them, who are called “sinners,” who chose men over children. I couldn’t find a lot online about these stories, but I did find that in Filipino folktales, La Sirena is half woman (head and torso) and half fish (bottom half). It’s worth noting this because the narrator’s grandmother curses her mother when her mother is pregnant (with her) in hopes she miscarries, and though she doesn’t miscarry then (not until her second and third pregnancies—another time warp), the narrator is born with her right side paralyzed, and she is a water sign. This intimate bodily connection between La Sirena and the narrator feels especially apt as a moment that collapses generational trauma. We often think of these mermaid creatures as alluring, but only in one of two ways, either monstrous and deadly (sirens) or sexual (The Pisces by Melissa Broder). In this instance, the connection is one of loss. The narrator says, “My first few years of life I spend bringing half my body back to itself.” A connection of separation, of division, of halving.
La India Dormida aka Luba, which is a town and hiking trail inside the crater of an ancient volcano (in Panama) which was formed when Luba fell in love with a foreign invader and “rather than betray [her father’s people], she renounces her love, lies down, and dies. The land wraps itself around her body, a lush grave.” The narrator tells us, “This is one version.” But the narrator’s grandfather tells her, “that the Spaniard (foreigner) promises he will return for her, and so as in a spell, she sleeps until the earth molds itself into the shape of her…”
Coatlicue, who prophesied the fall of the Aztec Empire in hopes that her prediction would mean her son returned home to her after the fall of all the cities he conquered. A woman who is bending time for her loss, and a hope of return. Prophecies, curses, and predictions are curious time warps to me. This is what I would call the time that we all spend the most time in (ou, meta!). I love when people say, “I didn’t bring my phone because I really wanted to be present.” But we’re never in the present moment, it’s beyond us by the time we have a moment to think about it. Instead, we’re either in nostalgia, or we’re in prediction and prophecy—the what if, the assumption, the surmise, the forecast, prognosis, projection, and my favorite: the guess. THE GUESS (the hypothesis?) is where we live, sometimes more educated than other times. Coatlicue is also the goddess of agricultural fertility, and war and healing (of course the two go together).
What’s most interesting about these last two is that they’re compared to each other, the narrator says, “But Luba is really Coatlicue, and we have failed to give her a human heart all these years.”
The human heart metaphor is curious because I couldn’t find evidence of this being part of Coatlicue’s story—she’s divine, and perhaps gods don’t need hearts—I’ve never actually thought about the anatomical creation of a god across ideals and cultures other than sitting in front of white Jesus in Catholic Church for my whole childhood, who had abs and calves. Coatlicue, in some stories, is said to be part snake, or wearing a skirt of snakes, but no mention of whether or not she has a heart.
And this brings me to a theory about the end of this essay, which details the narrator’s own miscarriage with callbacks to everything we’ve been through in the first part. I tried to come up with a sort of cycle for the women in the essay and am at a loss for what to title it, but it would be in the family of “hero’s journey" only because that’s what we’re working with as the narrative framework of mythological stories. I have the cycle being: loss —> wait / waiting periods —> return (but the return isn’t the original heroine returning to some place, but something returning or promising return to her). She can’t return, we see this again and again in the essay, in the warping of time, in geological time—hello, climate change, and in terms of motherhood—there is no return from motherhood, and no return from destruction.
The heart lines about Luba and Coatlicue are I think referencing a sort of sacrifice when placed against the narrator’s statement, “On the eighth week, I learn the words fetal heartbeat and fetal demise. The clock ticks back and forth on the same sixth second as the doctor explains. The fetus measures six weeks and one—six weeks and one day, when it stops and its heart never becomes a muscle.” There’s the double loss here, the loss of the child, but also something lost to the mother of the child too. I am not sure (if anyone knows, please email me) about the heart’s involvement other than that being some sort of signifier of life. Hm. We’re getting into weird waters.
Like her own mother, the narrator calls back to her grandmother’s curses, her grandmother praying to bone, to St. Jude, while the daughter / narrator “hears poetry, songs, and folktales”—her prayer to Oyá, “the mother of everything.” It makes me wonder if the time warping is a way to create a community of mothers, and therefore a community of loss. Perhaps the cycle should be named for mothers. Mothers don’t need to journey to the underworld because, friends, we are already there.
The narrator’s concern is not bone, or body—though she viscerally describes her miscarriage as a “shedding” and the “Caribbean Sea as torrents, Oyá’s wails echo as gale-force winds”—her concern, her meaning-making, her explanation is story—separate from bone but still genetic as we learn in the first line with the term, “Epigenetics.” Like the allusions made throughout the essay, she feels “heavy as a mountain” (Luba), “This is what the body feels like when it’s a grave”—the loss before return (or destruction?), “In the forest La Mepesa calls out for her children”—the wait, waiting period.
In the last few paragraphs, she says, “I am Luba, the fantasy version, the fake-ass fairy tale, the one who betrays her land.” She does not stay and wait, she lives in a country that is not Panama, she does not lay down to be covered in mountains, grass, and roots, her waiting is an act of mourning. There is no return, and yet, the last paragraph, “I sit with Calypso and Nausicaa, with La Sirena and La Mepesa, with Coatlicue made into Luba. We cannot see the horizon beyond the mountains, but we are waiting, always waiting.”
We will not get this physical return in the essay?
But the very last line, “I dream my child is in my arms, and I am kissing her scars to know them.”—is it a return to story, to “rehearsed recipe we carry in our bones” (from the very first sentence).
It is a return. We know people, and we know ourselves through story, housed in a body that is living, reliving, has lived, and going to live story. A body that is passing down and passing on and passing through story. The always time, the prediction, the prophecy, the dream:
“I dream my child is in my arms”—is: not present, not past, not future, but always.
A thought on time from an agent perspective:
Time is such a curious thing in writing—it’s definitely related to pacing, structure, momentum, and therefore related to tension and nuance and emotional complexity. It’s one of the more important aspects to get right, from my perspective, in the querying trenches. A few things I’ve come to believe about time after reading thousands of queries are:
Know which moments you need to slow down. Tension does not equal fast-paced. You have to know when readers need a breath, when moments are pivotal enough to warrant as little as a line or a dramatic few pages. Slowing down does not mean you’re writing a quiet book, it means you know when the reader needs to sit in the emotional space you’ve created.
Know when to reveal and when to conceal—what needs to happen early and what needs to happen later for the structure of the book?
If you find yourself in nonfiction naming a lot of dates and times as you move through a story, perhaps you need to look at timing and structure. If the reader needs a lot of direction towards when exactly something is happening—I wonder about a thoughtful consideration for order.
Sometimes you really do need to just write the whole book in a new tense. If anything, test this out with a chapter. See how it feels.
One of the biggest things I see is a character study that is not yet a plot. Now, yes, I know that Moshfegh exists—but study how she’s moving through this internalized character’s voice. Are you telling the reader what they need to know to move forward or are you spending time on information that on the surface reads beautifully, but won’t be necessary anywhere else. You’re telling a reader what to pay attention to—where do you want them to pay attention, focus there, don’t focus on the spoon story tangent unless it’s necessary to something larger.
About Cassie Mannes Murray:
Cassie Mannes Murray is a literary agent at Howland Literary, where she started from the bottom with a cold email and a dream, and is building her own publicity company to launch in 2022: Pine State Publicity. Before she weaseled her way into publishing, she produced a robust blog called Books & Bowel Movements, and taught public school. For writing, she has an MFA in creative nonfiction, has received a notable in Best American Essays 2020, and a Pushcart Prize nom. Her work has been featured in The Rumpus, Story Quarterly, Passages North, Hobart, Joyland, Slice Magazine, and Fugue. She’s married and pregnant lives with the fireflies in North Carolina where her dog chases street chickens.