laim for In the Belly of Her Ghost
In times such as ours, and the times from which they spawned, ages of violence against all forms of “other” — genders, bodies, skins, ideas — how can we lay to rest the ghosts that haunt us, and invite to the table those that help us live?
Writing from the headlands far into the interior, threading the personal with the public, an elegy with a covert manifesto of hope, Colin Dayan understands what it is to be haunted: by history, by race, by family, by what presses on the definitions of one’s life.
In pages at once strikingly evocative, allusive, and embodied, rigorously sensory in their hard-won wisdoms, Dayan argues for the co-existence of species, variants of identity and belonging, a commonwealth of the living and the dead.
In the Belly of Her Ghost imbues profound remembering with a democracy of looking and listening, where all that matters — objects, animals, people and place — is properly attended. It is a volume appearing undeniably in its necessary moment, and it is precisely necessary because the truths it speaks are as old as our troubles, as required as our joys.
— Andrea Luka Zimmerman
This subtle, ambivalent, deeply thoughtful book makes nothing easy — difficult moments are imbued with grace and familiar parades of ghosts. We hear a series of conversations: with the past, with selves old and new, with memories of Haiti and the American South, with a black woman who effectively mothered the writer, with an actual mother both dead and alive. How many of us could so lucidly say of a disappointed and disappointing parent, “I did not want to love her as much as I did”? At the center of this haunting narrative is an unforgettable ghost story, which, ultimately, is not quite a ghost story at all.
— Michael Wood
I sat rapt, coiled tensely around myself, awaiting I didn’t know what exactly, nothing I could put a name to, but something I felt a fierce identification with, an anxious anticipation, a premonition of dread, a shroud of sorrow, a life encompassed by secrets.
In The Belly of Her Ghost is a soul story that resonates in the body of anyone who has been or is cast out of anywhere she calls home. It’s allusive, elusive; its strength is its narrative freedom from story as we know it. Its brilliance in earth shimmers (I will never again think of a summer night in nature in any other way). Its time is archetypal, images, ideas, affects evanesce and return. For this country is timeless.
— Wendy Lochner
IN THE BELLY
OF HER GHOST
A Memoir
Colin Dayan
LARB True Stories
This is a LARB True Stories publication
Published by The Los Angeles Review of Books
6671 Sunset Blvd., Suite 1521, Los Angeles, CA 90028
www.larbbooks.org
Copyright © 2018 by Colin Dayan
All rights reserved.
Designed by Tom Comitta
ISBN 978-1-940660-48-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018965696
CONTENTS
How to Remember My Mother
___________________________________
I SAW SOMETHING on my left cheek. I thought it was a scab. I pulled it off. It was a tick. Less than a 10th of an inch and very light in color, it was a taupe little thing, not big and black like the tick I found on my back just a month ago. I was living in Nashville much the way my mother lived in Atlanta, but without her beauty or luxury.
As a child, I was in awe of the woman. She laughed at me, screamed at me. She shunned me, but now, dead, she stays close. Sometimes she comes down the wall like a spider.
For years I’ve been writing her story. Much of it remains incomplete, pages with titles like “The Lady with Camellias,” “A Daughter’s Lament,” or “Blues in the Night.” I tried in vain to forget her, but she has stayed around as close to me as my breath, hovering like dust hanging in the air.
After she died, boxes arrived from Atlanta. They filled the garage. I gave away her clothes, her furs, gowns, sequined sashes, golf shoes, and hats. But I kept my father’s photos of her. There were thousands. One had been corroded by water. This photo of my mother just after her marriage shades from pale lilac to ochre to yellow to cobalt blue to gray, as if cinders were eating away at the remnants of color. Her lineaments curve gently in and out of the mold. What shows is one eye, an immaculately plucked brow, a bit of hair covered with something like a hat but more like a towel, pulled down with her hands caught mid-movement. The rest of the body is a blur of fabric dissolved into the waste of wet and dust.
That eye — cinematic, hard as nails, her stare is astoundingly communicative yet closed off, as if letting us know: she knows what to make of us, and she knows we can’t have a clue what to make of her.
Looking through other photos of my mother, she appears a stranger. I can’t be sure who she was
