Sorrowland - 29 August 2023 » 8pm EST
Sorry for the delay & piecemeal notes. It has been impossible timing with O having a severe case of hand-foot-mouth & the days have "stumbled one into the other like a toddler into its mother’s ankle"
Write what terrifies you —Rivers Solomon
On August 29, at 8pm EST (Zoom/in-person) we will discuss Sorrowland (2021) by Rivers Solomon (368 pgs.) alongside the Unsewn Series by by Alison Croney Moses.
Moses explains Unsewn I, II, and III:
… there's rectangles where you cut off a thin layer and they peel away. They're bent to peel away from the primary wood piece. Right before the surgery, I had to stop holding my kids. I knew that the recovery process would be a long time and based on what I could hold then, I said goodbye to holding them, for good.
The Joy in Repair is an addition of her “post-recovery that’s similar but emphasized joy coming from strength” because now as a result of the repairs, she’s able to hold her kids together again (Guerra, 2023).
Moses’s work was part of The UnADULTerated Black Joy, a group exhibit she curated in Boston. An exhibit that she wanted to represent “my kind of experience of joy in community. But I also did a lot of investigation for this exhibit around physical transformation that's needed to access or re-access joy in my body.”
Like Vern, too, had to do.
I had read Sorrowland in June, immediately following The Leavers. Oof! I’m glad we chose it only because it is not something I would have picked up on my own, despite the subject matter.
Sorrowland is a gothic science-fiction novel, and a coming of age story. It follows the wild life of 15-year-old Vern Riley after she gives birth to twins, Howling and Feral. The novel starts with her in active labour running through the woods, a place she’s escaped to from the Blessed Acres of Cain compound/cult. Imagine running while in active labour! Except Vern has extraordinary strength and healing powers because of a fungus that is growing within her, a fungus caused by an experiment the compound begins to conduct on its people, under the disguise of Eamon Fields (a plant, and her husband’s father), in the lineage of “MKUltra, Project 112, the Edgewood Arsenal human experiments, Tuskegee.”
It is a slow read yet a page-turner at the same time. Mostly because it reads like a thriller—evocative and gripping—with something uncanny constantly happening to Vern, or being brought back from her past. Solomon’s writing also has some gorgeous lines, like “the child gushed out from twixt Vern’s legs ragged and smelling of salt. Slight, he was, and feeble as a promise. He felt in her palms a great wilderness — such a tender thing as he could never be parsed fully by the likes of her.”
Solomon is telling us that Vern’s power is limitless, that she is able to make life happen through her body (a thread we see throughout and especially at the end). Vern’s turning into another creature — the fungal metamorphosis—only happens after she gives birth (by marital rape). As such, I read Sorrowland also an ode to the power of Black motherhood.
While the fungus has been given to everyone through “vitamin injections”, not everyone reacts the same way.
Christina Orlando aptly writes in LARB that
[t]he monstrosity of queer bodies began as a narrative put upon us by cisheterosexual society to elicit disgust and distrust; queer bodies are transformed to something grotesque, queer desire is twisted into bloodlust, dark magic. But this concept has since been reclaimed by the queer and trans community as a means to discuss the way otherness can become power, the way bodies and desire can transcend the bounds society attempts to put on us. Solomon’s work exists within a growing canon celebrating queer and trans monstrousness, and the surrealism of life in the margins.
However, they, along with other reviewers, omit mention of how the theme of queering motherhood flows throughout. Motherhood, too, easily slips into something grotesque, eliciting disgust or distrust from society, and can proffer a life in the margins, especially for those who don’t or can’t reproduce its traditionalism (as we saw in Nightbitch). And Solomon seems to be acutely aware of that slippage.
Like some other speculative fiction novels (Ling Ma’s Severance, Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, Octavia Butler’s Earthsea Trilogy, etc.), it takes place in a liminal space that takes its characters north. Why do characters always seem to take refuge north?
Solomon writes in the Author’s Note,
While Sorrowland is set in a United States with a speculative and amorphous shape, the geography and settings explored are based on areas traditionally stewarded by the Tonkawa, Caddo Nation, and Lipan Apache in what are colonially known as Central and East Texas, as well as on lands historically, inhabited by various Plains nations with shifting territories, including the Apsáalooke/Crow, Oceti Sakowin/Sioux, and Arapaho, in what settlers have designated Wyoming and Montana.
I was significantly gripped by the action scenes, especially with Lola, the humor of parenthood in conjunction with the devastating commentary on white supremacy and Black rebellion made the book easier to read. Although it is evident that Solomon is also pushing back against what a book should be to its audience, especially a white audience: Christina Orlando continues, that “every page of Sorrowland seems to say, This work isn’t for you, it has not been written with you in mind. We’re not playing that game anymore.”
And in the moments when I felt frustrated by the way Vern acted as a mother, like when she first left her twins alone to go fuck someone else, I brought myself back to questioning: who am I to try to insert myself into the mother characters in books?
In any case, sometimes I have thought about it—could I just go out in the night while the baby is asleep? I mean, we do let her cry out in the night, unless it seems something is wrong, which most nights it isn’t. Recently, she was sick and sleeping, and J was dropping off S at camp, and I needed to move the car for street cleaning. Surely, she would be okay for the two minutes I park on the other side of the street. I didn’t do it as I’ve never actually done that, and J came back home in time, but maybe I would have? Would you?
Yet, like many of us, Vern, despite being 15 (!), also has moments of the mother guilt.
“[R]ight now she couldn’t deal with all their questions. Each one was a reminder of her failure. She might as well not have birthed them at all—kept them wrapped in her womb flesh. She was no better than her own mam, who’d raised her in a den of falsities and ignorance.”
And, like many of us, she also becomes annoyed at the twins doing annoying, toddler shit that transcends where you are raised: in the woods, or in a city apartment.
They tested the world on their own terms, drew their own conclusions. Vern couldn’t think of a toddler or small child who didn’t butt heads with grown-up rules.
What about the title, Sorrowland? While it seems it is referring to the compound, the book isn’t about the compound, but about the potential of Black people to overcome the unjust and violent histories they are continually subjected to. Although I really wish that there was more interspersed about the '“violent history in America that produced it” but that could also be me, as a white person, wanting a history that isn’t mine.
There is also her complicated, soft yet hard, relationship with Gogo.
It’s intriguing that a fungus made her have supernatural powers, as some scientists are predicting that the next pandemic will be fungal. The complexity of fungi and its communication system, as well as its ability to help and harm humans undergirds the book.
Thank you for being here, together.
See you next week.
xx
Magdalena
Hi all, I won't be able to make it tonight. Sick child who has breathed directly into my mouth many times over the past few days (he sleeps in my bed, has been extra extra extra clingy—Covid tests negative but who knows). Not feeling so great. But I did read the book and I mostly loved it! It made me desperately sad at the treatment of so many communities (as I often do feel, living in Canada) and yet at the end I felt hopeful and it made me cry. I really want to know others' thoughts so if it could be recorded (somehow?) I'd appreciate it.