Whiting Award Winners
Since 1985, the Foundation has supported creative writing through the Whiting Awards, which are given annually to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama.
By 1924, there were about 200,000 Arabs living in the United States¹ and by 2000, at least 3.5 million Americans were of Arab descent².
It is 2010. A census form arrives in the mail.
I check OTHER and write-in: A-R-A-B.
In 2016, Obama wants to add a new racial category and has chosen an acronym to describe a group of people: MENA (Middle Eastern and North African)³
I note the absence of the word “Arab.”
Still, they do not sense us⁴.
I thought, I bet the daughter’s glad she’s dead, because what her mother was doing, throwing herself into the grave on top of the box like that, looked funny. It looked funny because her mother was fat, and it looked so much like the mother was doing the Fat Man Dance, because her arms were spread out too, as if she were waiting for her daughter to spread out her arms also, and then they could hold hands and smack bellies together and dance in circles on the box just the way we always did in the summer when we did the Fat Man Dance. Because we always did the Fat Man Dance in the summer when we ran around with no clothes on and danced a lot because it was summer.
Was I sad to leave the country? Is that where I was born? Am I my grandmother’s child? Am I a child of potion? Am I a child of folklore, or family crisis, some need for gender balancing? Maybe some need to keep my father? And who is my father too, is he Buddy my daddy, or is he some country man whose lasting seed my Grandma’am could pickle till it got to Detroit? Maybe a man prone to girls, maybe Mr. Howell Jones or Mr. Harold Grayson Senior or maybe his brother who looks nothing like him. Are my brothers really brothers to me, or am I sister to bay leaf and scorched root of cayenne?
By our second day at Camp Crescendo, the girls in my Brownie troop had decided to kick the asses of each and every girl in Brownie Troop 909. Troop 909 was doomed from the first day of camp; they were white girls, their complexions a blend of ice cream: strawberry, vanilla. They turtled out from their bus in pairs, their rolled-up sleeping bags chromatized with Disney characters: Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Mickey Mouse; or the generic ones cheap parents bought: washed-out rainbows, unicorns, curly-eyelashed frogs. Some clutched Igloo coolers and still others held on to stuffed toys like pacifiers, looking all around them like tourists determined to be dazzled.
There was a space across which you and your shadow, pacing,
broke,
and around you pockets of shadow, sucking, shutting.
By now the talk had changed.
There was a liquid of wall and stove and space-behind-the-stove.
And x where the mirror had been.
And x where the window had been.
And x where my hand slid over the tabletop breaking a glass.
There were shadows in the shadows, and in there were cuts.
Any time Manny wanted to sell a gun or a big load of weed he’d hand the deal over to one of his main boys. Manny called Chico, Beto, and Paco, then Chevy and Rafa, his right hands cause they was ready to slice open an enemy or blood up a buyer that didn’t pay up, and so they got the juiciest sheep and the most money. Got the most room on the street. The rest of the Lobos was just taggers or third-raters. Tagger babies are the locos who sprayed our sets all over town so people know we own it. They’d dog around here with their spray paint cans and their fake-tough faces, bragging how they did a job up on the freeway signs or almost got busted by the police for messing up a mural. “Hey, homes!” they’d laugh out to each other. “You see the job I did? Got up twenty feet that time!”
LOCAS © 1997 by Yxta Maya Murray; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc.
By 1924, there were about 200,000 Arabs living in the United States¹ and by 2000, at least 3.5 million Americans were of Arab descent².
It is 2010. A census form arrives in the mail.
I check OTHER and write-in: A-R-A-B.
In 2016, Obama wants to add a new racial category and has chosen an acronym to describe a group of people: MENA (Middle Eastern and North African)³
I note the absence of the word “Arab.”
Still, they do not sense us⁴.
I thought, I bet the daughter’s glad she’s dead, because what her mother was doing, throwing herself into the grave on top of the box like that, looked funny. It looked funny because her mother was fat, and it looked so much like the mother was doing the Fat Man Dance, because her arms were spread out too, as if she were waiting for her daughter to spread out her arms also, and then they could hold hands and smack bellies together and dance in circles on the box just the way we always did in the summer when we did the Fat Man Dance. Because we always did the Fat Man Dance in the summer when we ran around with no clothes on and danced a lot because it was summer.
Was I sad to leave the country? Is that where I was born? Am I my grandmother’s child? Am I a child of potion? Am I a child of folklore, or family crisis, some need for gender balancing? Maybe some need to keep my father? And who is my father too, is he Buddy my daddy, or is he some country man whose lasting seed my Grandma’am could pickle till it got to Detroit? Maybe a man prone to girls, maybe Mr. Howell Jones or Mr. Harold Grayson Senior or maybe his brother who looks nothing like him. Are my brothers really brothers to me, or am I sister to bay leaf and scorched root of cayenne?
By our second day at Camp Crescendo, the girls in my Brownie troop had decided to kick the asses of each and every girl in Brownie Troop 909. Troop 909 was doomed from the first day of camp; they were white girls, their complexions a blend of ice cream: strawberry, vanilla. They turtled out from their bus in pairs, their rolled-up sleeping bags chromatized with Disney characters: Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Mickey Mouse; or the generic ones cheap parents bought: washed-out rainbows, unicorns, curly-eyelashed frogs. Some clutched Igloo coolers and still others held on to stuffed toys like pacifiers, looking all around them like tourists determined to be dazzled.
There was a space across which you and your shadow, pacing,
broke,
and around you pockets of shadow, sucking, shutting.
By now the talk had changed.
There was a liquid of wall and stove and space-behind-the-stove.
And x where the mirror had been.
And x where the window had been.
And x where my hand slid over the tabletop breaking a glass.
There were shadows in the shadows, and in there were cuts.
Any time Manny wanted to sell a gun or a big load of weed he’d hand the deal over to one of his main boys. Manny called Chico, Beto, and Paco, then Chevy and Rafa, his right hands cause they was ready to slice open an enemy or blood up a buyer that didn’t pay up, and so they got the juiciest sheep and the most money. Got the most room on the street. The rest of the Lobos was just taggers or third-raters. Tagger babies are the locos who sprayed our sets all over town so people know we own it. They’d dog around here with their spray paint cans and their fake-tough faces, bragging how they did a job up on the freeway signs or almost got busted by the police for messing up a mural. “Hey, homes!” they’d laugh out to each other. “You see the job I did? Got up twenty feet that time!”
LOCAS © 1997 by Yxta Maya Murray; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc.