This month, our editors introduce three incredible new works that delve into family, solitude, and fractured legacy. From the lyrical explorations of family by Surinamese author Astrid Roemer, the delightful oddities of Yun Ko-Eun’s sincere and humorous short stories, and the vivid, compassionate vignettes of Kazkah author Baqytgul Sarmekova, these newly published translations invite reflection, tenderness, and joy.
Off-White by Astrid Roemer, translated from the Dutch by Lucy Scott and David McKay, Two Lines Press, 2024
Review by Nestor Gomez, Editor-at-Large
In Off-White, Astrid Roemer weaves a grand, multigenerational narrative around the matriarchical figure of Grandma Bee and her family in Suriname, a South American country on the Caribbean coast. The year is 1966, and each member of the Vanta family is going about their lives in different directions, threatening the bond that is necessary to continue Grandma Bee’s vision of the family’s legacy.
While one part of this narrative is deeply embedded in identity, exploring how structures of race, class, and gender have been encoded within the family, another part is inextricably tied to loss and getting lost, as various characters all reckon with their history (cultural, personal, and traumatic) in different ways. Translators Lucy Scott and David McKay demonstrate remarkable skill and artistry in conveying the story with ease and clarity, relaying the subtle tensions in both the spoken and the unspoken. Through their work, Roemer’s prose enlivens with emotive and physical details (especially that of meals), deeply coloring the multiplicity that threatens the family’s unity while highlighting their diversity of experiences.
Even before beginning the novel, we are immediately confronted with the issue of color in the title: Off-White. The Dutch term, “Gebroken Wit,” is also included in the book’s very first page, and Roemer describes it as having multiple translated meanings, such as “broken white” or “refracted white.” In a conversation with Two Lines Press, Roemer states: “essentially, [gebroken wit] refers to refracted sunlight—a rainbow, for instance—showing a wide range of colors. . . [It] also means that sunlight always finds a way through time and always keeps gathering together.” This imagery of sunlight resonates strongly throughout the novel in the many harrowed struggles of the Vanta family: Heli’s burgeoning relationship with an older married man who teaches at her school, Louise’s ongoing incestuous relationship with her brother, and Laura’s diminishing mental health from the sexual harassment she experienced as a child at the hands of Grandma Bee’s brother, Lèon.
Having found it striking that the languages of Suriname’s colonizers (Dutch, English, Spanish, and Portuguese) all have strong negative connotations and large vocabularies for brown and black skin tones, Roemer is here attempting a linguistic resistance, using off-white to thwart the prevalence of “white.” The term appears in the taffeta of Laura’s engagement gown, in the roots of the family tree (French, English, Dutch), in a plate of sequilhos, in lamplight glowing with orgeat syrup, and in the kernels of bittersweet almonds.
With this struggle of language and ethnic identity in the background, the first mention of off-white is through a moment between Grandma Bee and Imker, her granddaughter:
In Imker’s hand was the piece of clothing the blood had stained. But her granddaughter said excitedly, “Look, Grandma, all clean! I remember when Heli bought a dozen nightgowns with the words OFF WHITE, and everyone at home got two, including our little brother Audi and the lady next door. She even saved one for you, huh?” She’d turned on the radio for the morning benediction. “Did you sleep well, Grandma?” She knew Imker really wanted to talk about something else, something that went far deeper than a good night’s rest. “Off-white is the color of bittersweet almonds once you’ve peeled away the dark brown skin,” she said warmly, and, “Yes, I woke up feeling so much better than yesterday.”
First presented to us in Imker’s memory, it’s unclear whether the words “off-white” appeared on the nightgowns themselves, or if they were more carefully concealed. The emphasis in Imker’s description, however, gives the impression that color is a stark marker of identification, an inconclusive but memorable element of both clothing and people. According to the granddaughter, everyone in the family received a nightgown, including the boys. Reflecting on Roemer’s remarks on the linguistic legacy of colonialism, one can imagine the Vanta family going to sleep in these nightgowns, within the fabric of mixed and clashing cultures and ideologies. Grandma Bee’s words echo this complex intersection: “Off-white is the color of bittersweet almonds once you’ve peeled away the dark brown skin.” It’s almost as if Grandma Bee is implying that these nightgowns are better off on their own, instead of on the dark brown skin of the Vanta family. In this melancholy lies the weight of racial identity within the family, an imposition that is elsewhere explicated through the birth of Grandma Bee’s daughter, Ethel:
When Ethel had been shown to Grandmother after her birth, panic almost broke out. The newborn was nearly jet-black, but her hair, which didn’t have a single curl, was a few shades removed from blonde. The midwife, who handled all her childbirths, called the baby a jewel, mixed from a formidable network of bloodlines that included so many different people.
Upon first revelation, Grandma Bee and her husband, Anton, knew that Ethel would face immense discrimination and hardship because of her mixed racial features, which distinguished her from the rest of the Vanta family. From this fear, her parents made the heartbreaking choice to give their newborn away to German Moravian missionaries, and throughout the novel, Grandma Bee often ponders what happened to her little girl, and if she’s still alive.
The narrative is propelled when it gradually becomes known that Grandma Bee is ill and growing sicker, and with this imminent loss looming over the family, one symbol of hope is highlighted multiple times throughout: Saint Anthony of Padua. At the beginning of the novel, Grandma Bee knew something horrible was coming when she spat out blood and tried to clean it from the sink. In this moment of despair, she turned to the saintly figure for strength:
She was kneeling, murmuring to the figure of the saint, until her knees could no longer bear it. Then she stood, slipped some coins into the donation box, picked out a candle, lit it, put it in place, looked into the small flame, and mumbled, “May my blood start to flow on this very spot and not stop until I’m found.” The figure of Christ looked down on her. Blood on his torso. Drops of blood on his feet. Bleeding wounds in his palms. To keep from dissolving into tears again, she moved on to the figure of Saint Anthony of Padua through whose intercession all lost things are found again.
Grandma Bee’s spiritual connection to the saints and to Christ is devout and steadfast; they are her crutch in moments of abandonment and isolation. Earlier in the passage, she had thought about how uncaring and thoughtless her family was upon seeing her thin and frail condition. No one came to visit her anymore. No one spoke to her. It is a fear dreaded by all of us as we get older and slowly lose autonomy over our own bodies, and undying faith is her only recourse in this uncertainty.
Roemer does, however, detail another specificity in the connection between Grandma Bee and Saint Anthony: his intercession involves lost things being found again. This theme comes from a story of when the saint lost a book of psalms, an object of extreme value at the time. Saint Anthony had taken his Franciscan vow of poverty and would not be able to replace the book, so he prayed that it would be returned. Somehow, the thief who had stolen it did indeed return the book to Anthony, having had a change of heart, and even became a Franciscan. A similar hope for redemption surges in Ethel’s parents, as is revealed by Anton:
To him, this child was a link to the history and indigenous origins of his ancestors. He’d tried to explain to his English-speaking brothers-in-law and to all his nieces and nephews that Ethel was his masterpiece. “All of you are off-white, but her skin absorbs every wavelength of light; yes, our Ethel is whole.”
This fact of skin having the capacity to “absorb every wavelength of light” is a telling description when it comes to Roemer’s treatment of ethnicity and humanity; the body can contain a rainbow, it is a place where sunlight gathers to find its way through time.
With compassion, lyricism, and depictions of the sensual everyday, Astrid Roemer paints a vivid portrait of the Vanta family’s struggle to navigate the complexities of identity, heritage, and resilience. Expanding on the motif of its title, Off-White challenges colonial legacies, confronting the realities of cultural conflict and oppression through the diverse choices and struggles of its characters. Like color, their lives resist singular definition. Through these greatly varied spectra of human experience, however, the characters continue to find solace and strength in shared connections and unwavering faith, serving as a poignant reminder that difference can work, alongside compassion, as an avenue towards unity. In this, Off-White is not just a novel about family, but a testament to the enduring power of love, resilience, and the human spirit.
Table for One by Yun Ko-Eun, translated from the Korean by Lizzie Buehler, Columbia University Press, 2024
Reviewed by Willem Marx, Assistant Editor
It begins with a fear of eating alone. Every day at lunch, a young woman’s colleagues disappear in a throng, leaving her stranded in the urban city center, too self-conscious to enter a restaurant and make the titular request. Then there’s the man whose phobia of bedbugs becomes a life-altering obsession. There’s also the writer who, out of an all-consuming commitment to her art, takes up residence in the fourth-floor women’s bathroom of a local mall. These are a few of the unlikely iconoclasts that populate South Korean author Yun Ko-Eun’s debut English-language collection. In its nine stories translated by Lizzie Buehler, modern life’s oddity and caprice are elevated to absurd and epic proportions.
Each tale homes in on a seemingly minute example of the world’s ever-fluctuating nature, and pairs it with a character who can’t help but draw their own peculiar line in the sand. A fourth-grader takes exception to “the wind blowing its organic gusts” into her neighborhood, making “good” junk food harder to come by, and turns it into an affront against humanity, since “liking junk food was instinctive, regardless of nationality or age.” A man who hocks dreams digs into his low-tech, artisan style of working when dream-selling becomes a popular business. Occasionally, however, heady narrative points are tossed out the window altogether in favor of humor, as when a young actress flees the castmate who offers her a change of clothes. The offer: “Hey, I have a lot of new panties at my house!” The response: “I ran away blindly. It felt like she and her new panties were chasing me.”
This eccentricity becomes familiar in Yun’s writing—none of her characters are anything less than articulate and strange. They exaggerate wildly, carrying ideas well beyond their logical conclusions as a matter of course, but underwriting the high concepts and hyperbole is a baseline sincerity, a good-hearted naivety, and genuine passion. In “Table for One,” the narrator, Inyeong, enrols in a course designed to teach her the skills she needs in order to confidently eat at a restaurant alone. As she studies utensils, food types, and eating rhythms (“On Monday, we learned how to eat steak in two-four time; on Wednesday, black bean noodles in three-four time”) with laughable intensity, philosophic musings trickle forth:
Eating alone wasn’t really that difficult. And a lot more people than I’d expected were eating alone. Just like there are islands when there’s a mainland, there are also individuals scattered around a crowd. Islands scattered here and there—that and the fact that I didn’t know anyone here gave me a sense of relief that eased my digestion.
Slowly, in learning about the overlaps of solitude and food, Inyeong’s old fear becomes a kind of new opportunity. The class on eating alone becomes an outlet for improving oneself, shifting perspectives, and even making friends. After weeks go by and her officemates finally accept her and invite her out to lunch, companionship doesn’t mean what it used to anymore. A coming-of-age has occurred; Inyeong is impatient to get back to class and continue exploring the experience of solitude. At a certain point, the singular focus on what seems to be an insignificant element of life—solo-restaurant-going—expands into nuanced complexity. “Restaurant or not, every place in the world looked like a dinner table of a different size.”
A transmutation of feeling—from embarrassment to curiosity, boredom to obsession, indignation to love—patterns each story into a journey towards self-discovery. “Sweet Escape,” the collection’s second story, follows a recently-fired man as he turns the aimlessness of unemployment into a crusade against bedbugs. Rather than hunt down a new job, he spends his days learning about the danger of these mercurial insects, raising the alarm that South Korea is ripe for infestation, and in the process, he uncovers a passion and satisfaction that his professional career never provided. He forges a like-minded community from his building of anonymous neighbors, finds significance in his daily life, and eventually monetizes his obsession with bedbugs in a nausea-inducing turn of events.
Within the paranoid universe of “Sweet Escape,” filled with arcane, bug-related conversations (“they taught everyone what bedbugs smelled like using cilantro bought at the market”), it’s difficult to catch hold of anyone in particular or distinguish individuals from their singular obsession. Concept and ideology, rather than feeling, make these people tick, and that makes “Sweet Escape” among the collection’s weaker stories. But it’s in teetering on this fine line, attempting to draw the richness of the world out of monomania’s truncated view of things, that Yun elevates mundane fixations and reveals the meaning they give to people’s lives. Hers is an art of turning pastimes and mind-boggling theories into small truths about what it takes to live.
Happiness isn’t a word that appears in this book, but something akin to it drives each character towards a horizon that appears brighter, or at least a little more agreeable. The final story, “Don’t Cry Hongdo,” brings the entire collection together in the first-person voice of a precocious elementary school student. Hongdo, caught in the awkward throes of puberty, wants to be noticed by her Korean teacher—but also yearns for her widowed mother to date him. She draws pictures that are misinterpreted, imagines falling into a junk food heaven, rejects the idea of having a goal in life, and stumps the authority figures who constantly pester her:
My teacher urgently tried to come up with a career path for me, a child with no interest whatsoever in becoming president. I should have said I wanted to be a CEO or a manager, like everyone else did. Or if not those jobs, then I could have said something like “a celebrity.” Seriously, though, I had no ambition. That was it. But adults treated children without aspirations like they were children without thoughts.
In all of this—her obstinance and longings, her embarrassments and barefaced rejections of what others tell her is right—Hongdo exudes a joyous curiosity. She’s trying to understand what she sees, to decide what to do with it all, and relishing the process. As the only child narrator in the collection, her view of the world exemplifies what the tired office workers and washed-up adults are trying to recapture elsewhere in the book. Possibility is inherent to Hongdo, while for everyone else, the rules have already been made. It is with this throughline of laughter and warmth that Table for One explores the teeming expanse of life, that always seems to begin just to the left of where we’re looking.
To Hell With Poets by Baqytgul Sarmekova, translated from the Kazakh by Mirgul Kali, Tilted Axis Press, 2024
Review by Georgina Fooks, Director of Outreach
Cursing poets and singers, mourning loved ones and lost horses, and holding fleeting moments of tenderness throughout, To Hell With Poets is the English-language debut collection of Baqytgul Sarmekova, a powerful force in the realm of contemporary Kazakh literature. Translated with sensitivity by Mirgul Kali, these careful vignettes reveal the tensions and contradictions of modern Kazakh life, inviting reflection upon the way history continues to shape the contemporary. From the aul to the city, the old to the young, the ambitious to the downtrodden, Sarmekova portrays a series of people and places, eliciting waves of empathy with skillful brevity.
The story that opens the collection, “The Black Colt,” is exemplary of Sarmekova’s evocative skill. Our narrator is unnamed, but voices the hearsay of the community in the aul, a rural village or town typical in Kazakhstan. Kali’s translation choices are noteworthy from the outset, grounding us firmly in the Kazakh context with limited explanation (aul is only glossed with the word “rural”), and her rendition of certain idioms has highly expressive results, such as the depiction of the teasing women whose breasts are “plump and quivering like intestines filled with sour cream.” By matching the visceral and sensory language that Sarmekova uses, we are immersed in the sights, sounds, and smells of the aul, from the clouds of dust to women’s white headscarves “blended with the gray smoke.”
“The Black Colt” is also representative of the collection in its depiction of cultural difference. When we meet Turar—an older, unmarried man with tobacco-stained teeth—the writing contrasts the unflattering description with enough charming details to generate compassion, or perhaps pity. We learn that Turar is a nervous giggler, full of positivity; when he meets his potential future wife, “the grin didn’t leave his lips until the meal was over.”
The narrator’s grandfather is given a colt as thanks for finding a wife for Turar, but Turar’s untimely demise means the wedding can no longer go ahead, and a miserly relative decides to sue to get the colt back. In different times, the gift itself would have been enough to confer ownership, but in this case, the court rules that the colt must be returned to Turar’s family, with compensation given to the grandfather for rearing the horse. The money arrives, but instead of “gallop[ing] away across the barren steppe” in an expected fit of rage, the grandfather calmly throws the envelope onto the fire. In this moment of quiet dignity, Sarmekova induces sympathy while encouraging the reader to contemplate generational differences: the divides between the old and the young, the aul-dweller and the city slicker, the traditional and the modern, the content and the greedy, are all sketched with sensitivity and aplomb.
Several stories touch on these divides, but their most potent and urgent iterations come in the stories that deal with gender. Sarmekova is interested in representing contemporary Kazakhstan in all its complexity—as a post-Soviet society reckoning with the difficulties of modernity, urbanization, and capitalism—and she is unflinching in her depiction of patriarchy. These tales feel even more urgent when they address the intersection of gender and writing, as they do in the titular “To Hell With Poets” (and it is significant that this story is chosen to name the collection). In a few sentences, Sarmekova portrays a “rrrousing… rrroaring… revered poet” with casual disdain, as the bald top of his head “glinted in the light of the restaurant’s chandeliers, calling to mind the glazed surface of a lake surrounded by glassy shores.” The audience is largely bored, with the exception of the young and impressionable Oryngul, who is passionate about poetry. The poet goes on to promise her everything—fame, mentorship, publication—only to then kiss her in a skin-crawling “shower of dandruff flakes.” The heavy dose of irony in the following line—”It was a charming gesture worthy of a poet”—makes it clear that poets are worth very little. The story ends with the poet using her for her body and making good on his promise to publish her poem—except every single line has been edited beyond recognition.
The follow-up story, “To Hell With Poets, Part Two,” offers some justice. Presented from the sleazy poet’s perspective, we see him as a taxi driver picking up an older Oryngul, who now makes a living through hair-dressing and implied sex work. The poet is shown to be obsessed with money and tries to bribe Oryngul for her affections, but she turns him down, and the story ends with him emotionally destroyed. The ending, though, feels bittersweet—what of the younger Oryngul’s poetic aspirations?
Overall, the text’s depiction of the literary world certainly does not give much hope to women writers; “The Taming of Aqtory” sees one tamed like the titular horse, losing her reputation and job after rejecting a more powerful male writer. Trying to survive in a capitalist society, her economic precarity leads her to sell off her most prized possessions, even her laptop and books, to make rent; as the narrator notes, “the writings I used to hoard like priceless treasures suddenly lost all meaning.” In the end, she returns to a man she had previously rejected, imagining forgotten passions to bear the loss of her dignity. The story ends soon after, in a violent scene wherein the narrator watches a sparrow being hunted by a cat—an image for the injustice she has suffered. Having lingered too long over a stray crumb, the sparrow’s situation is reminiscent of our narrator, who is forced to return to a manipulative man in search of the bare minimum: a cost of living that is always too high.
Sarmekova’s imaginary worlds, however, are not as bleak as they might seem; there are always moments of tenderness, humor, and reprieve. Women have the upper hand in “One-Day Marriage,” scamming a sweet, stuttering man and his family out of the dowry, then running off with the money. After reading the other stories in the collection, it might feel like divine justice, if only Sarmekova had not also made us feel such sympathy for the abandoned groom. In “The Night The Rose Wept,” a night of infidelity brings a moment of sensual escape for a woman whose days are otherwise filled with boredom. “The Cobbler” presents a shy cobbler who pines after his market neighbour. “The Warmth” has the literal and emotional warmth of a grandmother’s hearth and embrace. And “In Search of a Character,” while bearing news of death and endings, also promises literary beginnings, with the narrator “paint[ing] portraits with words,” just as Sarmekova and Kali do.
Literature written in Kazakh remains marginalized in the literary world, within Kazakhstan as well as in English translation. It is mostly in the last decade that the full range of Kazakh literature has begun to reach new audiences. Combined with the marginalization of women writers like Sarmekova (both on the global stage and in Kazakhstan, as several stories in To Hell With Poets recount), it seems nothing short of a literary miracle that the book has reached a new reading public. The advocacy of Tilted Axis Press, in publishing mainly Asian and African writers, is vital for books like Sarmekova’s to exist in translation, alongside the tireless efforts of Mirgul Kali, herself an advocate for smaller literary languages as a founding member of the translation collective Turkoslavia.
Within this context, the fact that the stories of To Hell With Poets were originally written in Kazakh becomes an important political intention. As Kali noted in her 2022 review of another book of Kazakh literature in translation, Amanat: Women’s Writing from Kazakhstan, there are important social and cultural differences within Kazakh literature, stemming from whether the author chooses to write in Russian—a dominant language with an imperial legacy—or in the Kazakh language itself. She also commented on the “structural inequalities” between the two languages, both in terms of Kazakh politics and the infrastructure available to support translators (there is generally a lack of both funding and accurate dictionaries). It gives cause for optimism now to see Kali emerge as a translator of Kazakh-language writers like Sarmekova, who speak out against injustice. From the double marginalization experienced by a woman writer writing in Kazakh, it brings hope that with works like these appearing in translation, there could be a doubled sense of empowerment. In these tender stories that span the spectrum of human experience, something bright glimmers amongst the experiences of violence: a spark of what is to come.
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