Indiana Seresin

 When he called from Italy to tell us, he phrased it like this:



“You’re getting a stepmum!”



Even then, in the midst of the spasm of joy that followed, I remember thinking it was a strange choice of words. Not *I proposed to Sarah*, not *We are getting married*, but *You are getting a stepmum*, as if she were a toy we’d requested after seeing it in a TV commercial. There was, within it, the promise of newness, of a whole different person—yours to take home today!—which is, mind you, what people used to think actually happened when women got married.



And, to some extent, it is what happens. The next summer, in the somewhat inexplicable presence of a Catholic priest, we all said goodbye to Miss Wietzel and hello to Mrs. Seresin (a person my own mother, in her brief marriage to my father, never chose to become). More thrilling for my younger sister and me, though, was saying hello to our very own stepmum.



For a long time we had begged them to get married, not because marriage would really change anything, but because we’d wanted so badly to have that word, stepmum. To hold it and wield it in our hands. This is the kind of impulse that comes from growing up in a family like ours: lopsided, always requiring explanation. For four years we’d struggled to know what to call her, scavenging for some way to summarize what she meant to us and always coming up empty-handed. “Dad’s girlfriend” may have been accurate, but could not describe the person who knew the names of all my teachers, who accompanied me to grimy bathrooms in foreign countries, who was the first person I told when—secretive, shy, 11—I got my first period.



Not only that, it dislocated our connection by a degree. “My dad’s girlfriend” does not contain the undertone of ownership we all, on some level, crave in our relationships. My best friend, my fiancée, my roommate, my teacher, my stepmum—myriad bonds tied together by the same infantile word: mine, mine, mine.



“Do you like her?” people ask, often grimacing, picturing Cinderella.



What to say to this? She understands how to talk to people—to me—like no one else I’ve ever met. In sixth grade, my darkest hour, I would spend hours in my room playing loud and terrible R&B on my CD player and crying myself to sleep, and she loved me even then, even though I was objectively horrible. When people ask me if I like my stepmother, I want to say not “yes,” not even “YES!”—I want to tell them it’s a ridiculous question.



***



On the first night of the first trip we took together—a short and low-stakes weekend in the country—my sister Ruby grew suddenly flustered, turned to Sarah, and yelled:



“*You* can’t be Papa’s girlfriend. *I’m* his girlfriend!”



Ruby at that time was five years old and prone to wearing our dad’s baseball caps on her tiny head, where they resembled upended boats. None of this prevented her from seeing herself as competition for my stepmum, who was 23, 5’11”, and modelled for Tom Ford at Gucci— and, among these other advantages, not my father’s biological offspring (though a whole string of waiters over the years have assumed otherwise).



This episode is one of our family jokes. Today, when we laugh about it, it is with that particular ruthlessness of families, a laughter that promises catharsis from future conflict by confirming that our old traumas are truly dead and cold.



Sarah, on the other hand, has a relentless capacity for sympathy. One way in which she sticks out: She is never as thoroughly cruel as we are.



“You must have felt like I was stealing your dad.”



This is probably true. But it’s funny, how we talk like this––as if the people we love are things that can be stolen.



***



“I don’t know what’s happened to you. But remember: There’s no problem too big for Jesus.”



I had been nakedly sobbing for 13 subway stops when the elderly woman sitting opposite me decided to pat me lightly on the knee and tell me this.



“Thank you,” I sniffed. I more or less agreed. The imminent deadline of my senior year extended project—a play I’d written, for which I’d planned to compose an as-yet-unfinished score for solo cello—was likely not too big for Jesus. But it was indisputably too big for me, a fact I remembered immediately, the tears streaming again.



When I arrived at the house that, at this point, Sarah still shared with my dad, my face was swollen and twisted as a red balloon animal.



“Sit down,” she said. “Let’s sort this out.”



My parents—all three of them—are of the “hands-off” school of child-rearing. This is a fact for which I will always be grateful. I recently watched a documentary that chronicled the life of a bourgeois black kid in Brooklyn whose accomplished parents would circle and criticize him every night as he struggled to get through metric tons of private school homework. Watching with horror, I understood properly for the first time what people mean by “helicopter parent.” Seeing these two adults hover and hound and peck at their son, however, I could not help but feel a more accurate term might be “vulture”.



On the rare occasion that my own homework would lead me to sit morosely at our kitchen table and weep, my mother always provided the same, usually sage advice: “Just don’t do it.” My dad, connected to my academic life only in the third degree, never knew these moments even occurred. When he called from abroad and asked how school was going, it was never during those occasional blips when I couldn’t honestly tell him it was great.



Some days, though, I did need help.



  “Here’s a pen. Write down a list of everything you have to do.”



I obeyed. Once the list was complete, Sarah looked at it.



“Right. So now you have to do it.”



“I don’t know if I can.”



She shrugged, but not in an unkind way. No—this shrug was more like a gift.



“I mean, you just have to. That’s all there is to it.”



There is something beautiful about British pragmatism, a method of problem-solving guaranteed to cure even highly-advanced strains of emotional hysteria. Neither of my biological parents are British, but Sarah is, and though I generally feel rather estranged from the culture in which I grew up, at this moment I could have got down on my knees and kissed the Union Jack.



But it was more than just that. I needed my stepmum’s help at that moment because of how little she cared— how little she was capable of caring. Make no mistake: We have come to love one another unconditionally, a love grown from the ground up, the way a colossal oak tree blooms from the tiniest of seeds. Yet unlike a “real” mother, Sarah does not see an image of herself in me.



I used to think about this during parents’ evenings at school, which always reminded me of the first scene of *101 Dalmations*, in which Pongo watches dogs and owners who resemble each other in comic ways—the same sloping walk, the same fluffy hairstyle—parading together down the street. There was something in the eyes of the parents that betrayed a feeling that each triumph, each sting of embarrassment, belonged as much to them as to the child being discussed (hence the evening’s unfailing atmosphere of high drama).



Mothers and daughters are especially susceptible to this conflation of identities. I have a friend who starts dieting a few weeks before every vacation in order to make sure that, when she gets home, she’ll fit into her mother’s clothes. My relationship with my own mother has, thank God, never come close to resembling that one. Yet sometimes, in the middle of the simplest conversations, her eyes glisten—with tears of pride, concern, or simply the ferocity of maternal love.



Writing on pregnancy in *The Second Sex*, Simone de Beauvoir reflects: “[The mother] experiences it both as an enrichment and a mutilation; the fetus is part of her body, and it is a parasite exploiting her; she possesses it, and she is possessed by it.” It is from this intense reciprocity, this place of possession, that my mother’s tears flow. And it is for this same reason that, when I have spent 13 subway stops sobbing about a minor problem, I go to see my stepmum.



***



Since I’ve been in college, we’ve made a tradition of drinking bison-grass vodka at her kitchen table and talking until I miss the last train home to my mother’s apartment. This winter, when I call to arrange this, she says my half-sister, Marnie, has been sick with a consistent 109 temperature and they’ve all been trapped inside for a week.



I picture the three of them confined indoors: my half-brother crazed as a puppy to get outside again, my stepmum celebrating New Year’s Eve alone while Marnie sleeps in the room next door, her lungs rattling like little radiators. I tell Sarah I will make us dinner.



This is the kind of thing I relish about growing up: making promises like this, embarking on a special trip to the grocery store to buy fresh herbs and tahini, and refusing Sarah’s offer to pay me back. It’s a particularly adult way of showing love, a performance I’m still in the process of learning.



When I think about how families are supposed to love, my mind drifts to nouns: a good wife, a good parent, a



good daughter (that the nouns are skewed feminine should not require explanation). Such phrases litter our culture. *The Good Wife* is a popular CBS television show; Simone de Beauvoir herself called her first autobiography *Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter*. There is no such thing, however, as “The Good Stepdaughter”—not even “A Good Stepdaughter.” There is only me, insisting that Sarah sit still while I look for an ice-cream scoop, opening all the wrong drawers.



***



Often, when people talk about non-biological parents—step, adoptive, or otherwise—they speak in terms of a special connection that’s supposedly missing. I won’t deny such a connection exists. As a kid I was once involved in a horse-riding accident, and before my best friend’s mother (whose watch I’d been under) had a chance to let my family know, she got a call from my own mother, miles away.



“Sorry to be paranoid, but is Indiana alright? I just got a weird feeling.”



Regardless of the unconditional love that has over the years steadily blossomed between my stepmum and me, regardless of the fact that I consider her as much a parent as my own dad, I doubt she would ever experience this kind of cosmic tug. Here’s another example: When I was nine, I fell off a boat. Within seconds, my father, the only person capable of commanding the boat, jumped in after me. The look on his face is still frozen in my mind, and there is no way to describe it other than stupid: eyes round as coins, lips pursed single-mindedly.



All instinctive love is stupid, and without it, none of us—not one dumb, devoted mammal on God’s green earth—would survive. Yet its consequences can be disastrous. For just as one child was heroically saved that day (more so by her lifejacket than her father’s love, but that’s not how this story is told) the other was left stranded on a boat, yelping, accompanied only by a stepmother who didn’t know how to sail.



This story, too, has become a family joke, albeit one we approach with more caution. For years afterwards it remained charged with the potential to provoke an argument between my stepmum and my dad.



“It’s the *one* rule of sailing!” Sarah would cry in exasperation. “If you’re the only one who can sail, you don’t abandon the boat!”



After the birth of my half-sister, however, her anger subsided.



“I do get it now,” she tells me, a tinge of disgruntlement lingering in her voice. “It was still a terrible idea to jump in after you, but I get it, because I would probably do the same.”



What actually ended up happening was, while my dad and I bobbed fairly contentedly in the warm water, my stepmum and sister zoomed off toward the horizon, propelled by a suddenly violent wind. Sarah—25 at the time, only three years older than I am now—had no idea how to even begin slowing the boat, let alone turning it around. She didn’t even know the three-digit emergency number, the only means of contacting dry land. Meanwhile, the shoreline withdrew, and the wind swallowed my sister’s screams.



After an undetermined stretch of time—to my dad and me, minutes, for Ruby and Sarah, years—a yacht cruised by. Restraining her panic, my stepmum managed to communicate with the two experienced sailors aboard, slowly regain control of our boat, and eventually steer it back toward my father and me, who were still buoyed by our life- jackets and amusedly comparing our plight to the movie *Open Water*. With some fumbling, we climbed aboard— me first, then my father—into an emotional thunder- storm of relief, fading hysteria, and furious glances.



Not for the last time, my stepmum had rescued me. 

    Last September, the McNally Jackson bookstore in SoHo, New York, hosted an event to celebrate the publication of the critical edition of Chris Kraus’s *Aliens and Anorexia*. The event was called “Alien Insurrection: An Evening with Chris Kraus, Emily Gould, Ariana Reines, Kate Zambreno, and Others,” and Kraus and seven other women were to give readings of the book and discuss “new feminism,” which I had never heard of. The venue was packed, the whole bottom ­floor of the bookstore over­flowing with women: women wearing all black, women with notebooks, women with their hair heaped on top of their heads in the turn-of-the-century Gibson Girl style popular in the lit world. It was clearly an event that both the audience and the panel of readers had dressed up for, and everyone was eyeing each other up and down, unused, I think, to seeing so many other literary women in a room, uninterrupted by the presence of men.



    Yet the event that everyone had dressed up for never materialized. Chris Kraus and the other panelists did read from *Aliens and Anorexia*, but it was almost impossible to understand any of them. Each spoke with her own theatrical affect; some in a quiet, sexy husk, others with an overly-dramatic swell of gravitas. The result was that no one in the audience—which I imagine was mostly made up of fans of Kraus’ more famous book *I Love Dick*—gained any sense of what *Aliens and Anorexia* was about.    



    Inclined to leave, I made myself stay because I wanted to hear the panel about “new feminism.” This, unfortunately, did not occur. After over an hour of reading, ten or fifteen minutes were spent on audience questions, all of which were, like the reading, answered obscurely with varying degrees of performative ­flourish. Then the event ended. There was no panel, and “new feminism” was never mentioned. My suspicion is that this is because new feminism does not exist.



    One of the readers at the Alien Insurrection talk, Kate Zambreno, wrote a book called Heroines that was edited by Kraus and published in 2012 by what Zambreno calls the “dumb cunt” imprint of Semiotext(e), an MIT-based publisher founded by Kraus’ husband, the French literary and cultural critic Sylvère Lotringer. Heroines is memoir-criticism, a hybrid text that blends Zambreno’s investigation into the crimes against the “mad” wives of modernism with an account of her own life. “Mad” is in quotation marks because part of Zambreno’s project is to challenge the pathologization of these women as insane. Perhaps “wives” of “modernism” should be in quotations too; after all, not all the women Zambreno writes about were wives (Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein), some were more famous than their husbands (Virginia Woolf), and several were not from the modernist period at all (Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Hardwick, Sylvia Plath).



    Zambreno’s initial premise is to accuse the modernist husbands— along with other male conspirators—of their wives’ spiritual, creative, and even literal murder. (Zelda Fitzgerald, as most people know, burned to death in Highland Hospital, the asylum in which Scott had originally placed her. She was confined within a locked room, most likely tied to a bed.) In fact, she claims, few or none of these women were mad in the first place, but were rather driven insane by the impossibility of life alongside men who beat, raped, and neglected them, stole and suppressed their work, forbade them from writing, committed them to asylums, and abandoned them. There are probably few within the cautious world of the academy who would have attempted such radical revisionism for this large and messy collection of cultural figures, and Zambreno’s work is persuasive and important. Yet *Heroines* works best when Zambreno’s touch is light or nonexistent, when she lets the modernist women speak for themselves. Take, for example, this announcement Vivien(ne) Eliot, wife of T.S., unsuccessfully attempted to have placed in the* Times*: “Will T.S. Eliot please return to his home, 68 Clarence Gate Gardens, which he abandoned Sept. 17th, 1932.” Zambreno is a skilled curator of this kind of astonishing, heartbreaking primary material. Perhaps her greatest asset is knowing when to let the modernist women speak for themselves, and allowing their broken, desperate words ring out.



    Zambreno told an interviewer in *The Paris Review*: “I’m not sure I think much about academia.” This is evident in *Heroines*, a text entirely out of touch with contemporary academic feminism. While this out-of-touchness is certainly not a bad thing in itself (it could, under different circumstances, have been a great thing), even the most casual reader of “third wave” academic feminism will cringe at much of Zambreno’s book, and for good reason. As much as she rails against the second wavers, Zambreno still succumbs to many of their most embarrassing missteps: erasing queerness and people of color, embracing gender essentialism, and treating the issue of domestic labor with haughty disdain.



    Lesbianism is mentioned twice in* Heroines*: once, when Zambreno erases it (“I mean, Gertrude Stein was basically a patriarch, right?”) and again when, discussing Djuna Barnes, she irritatingly refers to it as “girl-on-girl.” This absence is certainly a strange choice for a book that includes fairly extensive analysis of Barnes’ *Nightwood* as well as exploration of the biographies of Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Simone de Beauvoir, Anaïs Nin, June Miller, and Barnes’ lovers Thelma Wood and Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, all of whom were unquestionably on the spectrum of what we now think of as queer.



    Throughout* Heroines* Zambreno returns to the idea of a wife: what it means to be a wife and to act as a wife—“to wife” as a verb. In discussing her relationship with her own husband, John, Zambreno goes back and forth between enthusiastically placing herself within the lineage of the abused modernist wives, and claiming that John—who cooks and cares for her, ­financially supports her, and facilitates her career as a writer—is really the one doing the “wifing.” In any case, Zambreno’s point is clear: To wife is to lose. In her words, the wife is the “pawn,” powerless and used. The author Mary Gaitskill, whom Zambreno lists in her book as one of her contemporary heroines, argued in an interview with The Believer that while she and her husband take turns playing the “wife,” what they could really use is a third party to “wife” both of them so they could get on with the important aspects of their lives. As our post-second wave, post-Equal Pay Act society shows us, the idea of wife-as-loser inevitably leads to the desire for a “third party wife.” Indeed, almost all powerful white women—women who, according to popular culture, are the ones advancing the cause of feminism, the shards of a broken glass ceiling glittering at their feet—are “wifed” by poor brown women who they employ to be the loser so they don’t have to, so they can be on equal footing with their powerful white husbands. What Zambreno and Gaitskill don’t acknowledge is that someone is always going to have to perform the domestic labor and personal sacrifices associated with the role of the wife, and that therefore characterizing the wife as loser preserves the hierarchy of some people over others, even if the actors end up being switched. If Zambreno’s argument were more expansive, if it acknowledged queerness not only within the lives of its historical subjects but also as something that exists now, she would probably have found an escape route out of this wife-as-loser trap, born out of a narrow, white, “lavender menace” era of feminism.



    The front cover of* Heroines* is a collage of pictures of women featured in the book. They are all white except Nina Simone, and I was intrigued to see how Simone would be incorporated into a book about the wives of modernist writers. Well, this is how: There is a single sentence about Nina Simone in the entire book, and the sentence is *about her irrelevance*. It is during a scene in which Kate the narrator and John are on a tour of Highland Hospital, the asylum where Zelda Fitzgerald burned to death. Kate feels that the tour guide is paying insufficient attention to Zelda, and illustrates this by writing: “For a moment maybe these tourists are silent, attuned to Zelda’s story: a screwball comedy become tragedy. Or perhaps the guide is now narrating that Nina Simone took singing lessons with Dr. Carroll’s [the hospital director’s] wife as a young girl.” This is how Nina Simone ended up on the cover of *Heroines*. It’s almost comical, like a private school brochure trying to disguise a racially homogenous student population with a picture of a black girl. This lie—this appropriation of one of the most important black artists of the 20th century—is a crime in itself. Yet it also reveals a key flaw in Zambreno’s work: its limited perspective, its ­fixation with the visible. To say that there were no modernist writers of color is exactly the kind of lie, the kind of erasure, that *Heroines* is supposed to be reversing; yet with her whitewashed cast of characters, Zambreno becomes a perpetrator.



    One of the most pervasive ideas about feminism is that it is in constant need of reinvention—a damsel forever in need of saving. From this perspective, “new feminism” is an appealing title, though a completely non-speci­fic one; those outside of academic and activist feminist movements are keen to see every phase of feminism as a revolutionary, back-to-the-drawing board moment, as opposed to something that has grown organically out of centuries of heterogeneous thinking and fighting. The blurb on the back cover of *Heroines* claims that Kate Zambreno “reinvents feminism for her generation.” Is this the “new feminism” that was promised at McNally Jackson? If so, this would suggest a movement encompassing Zambreno and Kraus and the other speakers, along with people like Kathy Acker, and Eileen Myles, and Sheila Heti, and even the horrendous performances of Marie Calloway, whom Zambreno defended in an essay on Thought Catalog called “All the Sad Young Pretty Girls.” Note the word “pretty.” In one of the few negative reviews of *Heroines*, Emily Keeler wrote in the *Los Angeles Review of Book*s, “A feminist friend emails me about *Heroines*… ‘I inherently distrust the kind of woman who is obsessed with glamour, to me a bit of an empty suit.’” It’s true: Zambreno is obsessed with glamour to the point of shallowness, often to the point of absurdity. She fixates on the outfits of the modernist women, describing how she buys ­flapper-style dresses so she can look like them. In perhaps the most ridiculous moment in an often ridiculous book, she writes about buying a nail polish from the “Swiss collection” of the expensive brand O.P.I. as an “homage” to the period of Zelda Fitzgerald’s life she spent locked up in a Swiss asylum. I would assume this was a joke, were this not a book filled with details about Zambreno’s outfits and many trips to Sephora, and which argues that to dismiss these details as insulting to Fitzgerald, frivolous, or vain, would automatically be an anti-feminist move.    



    Zambreno, having saved the modernist women from the pathologizing, belittling narrative bestowed on them by academic literary criticism, having emphasized that their writing is important and worthy of study, bizarrely appropriates them in order to make an argument for—to adopt a series of the adjectives she uses—“damaged girl internet diary writing.” This genre unfortunately extends beyond Zambreno and the blog that provided the basis for *Heroines*, Frances Farmer Is My Sister. It encompasses Calloway and others—in fact, according to Zambreno, encompasses all of the girls and women blogging on Tumblr (“So many of these Tumblr spaces are gorgeously written.” Are they?). It takes us beyond the premise that there is value in women’s writing to the weirdly essentialist idea that there is inherent value in all writing by women. “A disgust for Anaïs Nin is perhaps a disgust for the girls with their online diaries.” Perhaps. But even if this is true, the reverse is not; just because one woman’s diaries are worth reading, doesn’t mean all women’s diaries are.



     The kind of internet writing Zambreno is fighting for is more regurgitative than deliberate (she actually uses the word “bulimic,” in the true Tumblr tradition of glamorizing eating disorders and thinness). In the online diaries of Zambreno’s “fucked up girls,” suffering—particularly gendered suffering, eating disorders, self-harm, and degrading sexual encounters—is aestheticized. This raises suspicions about much of the critical content of Heroines, fixated as it is on the mental illness, abuse, and suicide of the modernist women it seeks to save. Woody Allen in *Annie Hall*: “Sylvia Plath—interesting poetess whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic by the college girl mentality.” Why else is Sylvia Plath even in Heroines? She’s not a modernist and wasn’t married to one, but she is very popular on Tumblr.



    Zambreno’s “new” feminism is decidedly anti-aspirational. (Stylish) suffering is presented as an integral part of femininity or “girliness” (the words Zambreno uses are “fucked-up,” “toxic,” “damaged,” “messy,” “goopy” (?), “gooshy” (??), and, hundreds of times, “girl”/“girly,” as if it were an intentional fuck-you to feminism that tells people not to use “girls,” but “women”). Zambreno’s feminism is for women whose mothers were feminists in the ’70s and ’80s and who therefore resent the shoulder-padded, you-can-have-it-all, you’re-a-woman-not-a-girl kind of feminism. It is unsurprising that Kraus, Zambreno, et al. are popular with college-educated, white, heterosexual literary women, women who are smart and accomplished and who were told they were inheriting the earth, yet who find themselves still surrounded by Great White Literary Men who would rather fuck them than read their work. New feminism is for women who sleep with men in an era of unpaid internships and ubiquitous internet porn. There’s a moment in Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig’s zeitgeisty* Frances Ha* when Frances’s best friend Sophie, who has a successful career in the lit world, describes the guy she’s seeing: “It’s like with me and Patch…the way he always likes to come on my face.” She adds, “He’s a nice guy,” and later in the movie they get engaged. New feminism is for the women engaged to Patch.



   The problem is that, like the talk at McNally Jackson, like most of the internet girl writing Zambreno defends, there is no substance to new feminism. At its worst, new feminism is a way around feminism, a way of accepting anti-feminist practices under the banner of feminism. Zambreno writes that, earlier in her life, she was “convinced that I was going to be a writer, even though I hadn’t yet written anything.” She later says of the Tumblr bloggers, “Many of these girls identify intensely as writers, as artists,” never drawing a distinction between identifying as something and producing the work (be it art or feminist theory/practice) that qualifies you to adopt such an identity. The same problem exists for new feminism, so often a title with nothing beneath it. New feminism was born into a climate of unchecked sex positivity, of a desire for feminism that was appealing to the general public, and of extreme sensitivity to what Zambreno calls “girl-on-girl crime”—misogyny committed by women, women labeling other women as “bad feminists.” New feminists thus cannot be called bad feminists even when they are; even when they erase women of color, ventriloquize dead female writers, or glamorize mental illness. It is within this lack of borders, of boundaries, that new feminism supposedly resides. But there do need to be boundaries of quality. There need to be standards for what counts as valuable writing, just as there need to be standards for what counts as valuable feminism.



 



    Without these boundaries, everything bleeds out and in, and in place of so-called new feminism we are left with nothing. 

*“I can assure you, there is no panic, no fear, no despair in London town.”

**                            **London Can Take It!*, 1940



    “There are terrorists in London.”

    Two Bengali Muslim girls in my class told me this. I laughed. No there weren’t. These girls were always making things up: that Lianna in 8C was pregnant, that our mild-mannered geography teacher had pinched a girl’s bum.

    Even now, they were laughing with me. But something in their giggles was sour. Nervously, one of them pushed onto my desk an article from BBC News, still warm from the library printer.

    “Innit?”

    Innit might be the most frequently spoken word in British slang. It can mean both “isn’t it?” and “it is,” depending on the tone, and therefore has a kind of limitless use. Unsurprisingly, it is young people who say it the most: we who want nothing more than to be approved of, to be in agreement. *Innit? Innit.

*    I looked for signs that the article was a spoof, a prank. There was the BBC logo. The correct date and time. The pictures of ambulances, smoke, panic. The number 30 bus. The Circle line.

    We tried to get our religious studies teacher to acknowledge what was going on. Her cheeks turned red. Yes, something had happened, but it was going to be all right and we were going to continue with the class. This was 2005, two years prior to the release of the first iPhone. We sat there lamely, taking turns to read that one BBC article over and over again. In the background, our teacher lectured on Sikhism.



   * **“London looks upwards towards the dawn and faces the new day with calmness and confidence.”*



    The day after the bombs, all of London was back on the buses and tubes. That’s how the story went, anyway, the one that the politicians told the world—and it wasn’t exactly untrue. On the train I took every day, the 8:12 to Camden Road, I counted off the faces. The white businessman with his copy of the Financial Times: still there. The Serbian schoolgirls in their hideous plaid uniforms: I could hear them in the other carriage. The young professional-looking woman in a hijab with her eyes closed, always listening to her MP3 player: leaning against a window. The old black man in stained clothing who sang to us softly about Jesus: he was there, too. Everyone a different color, everyone’s gaze pointed in a different direction, back on the train that was ours.







*    “London manages to get to work on time, one way or another.”*



    A terrorist attack in a certain place turns all who use that space into potential targets. In hindsight, any of us might have been the intended victims, something we made sure not to forget.

    “I got the Circle line last week at exactly ten minutes to nine.”

    “My dad’s office is a five-minute walk from Tavistock Square.”

    “The 30 goes right outside my house.”

    Almost no member of British society is above riding public transportation. Even the Queen took a spin on the Jubilee line when it first opened. And I have never encountered another city as willing as London to symbolize itself as a subway map.



*    “London is fighting back.”*



 



    In 1940, in the fifth week of the Blitz, the British government produced a nine-minute propaganda movie entitled *London Can Take It!* that was distributed across the UK and US. It begins with scenes of Londoners commuting home from work during rush hour: boarding buses, descending into subway stations, crossing a bridge over the Thames on foot. The narrator describes them as “the greatest civilian army ever to have been assembled.” The film makes other similarly grandiose declarations about London and its citizens. According to the narrator, London is free of panic and despair: there is only “calmness and confidence.” At night, the people sleep fearlessly as the bombs bring their city to the ground.

    Sixty-five years later, the UK government partnered with advertising firms, newspapers, and other private corporations to create an enormous post-7/7 media campaign that ended up costing over three million pounds, called “7 Million Londoners, 1 London.” The idea consisted of a single logo: the phrase “7 Million Londoners,” with the words “1 London” highlighted within it in a different color.

    “London is an urban, multicultural community,” London’s then-mayor, Ken Livingstone, stated in his endorsement of the 7 Million campaign. Straying from the nationalist rhetoric of the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, he noted that the campaign was important because it celebrated “the principle of difference rather than unity.”

    And yet, there were those words—“One London”—etched in an uncompromising bright red. Later, the campaign added another phrase, sealing its promotion of cosmopolitan unity: “We Are Londoners, We Are One.” Any Londoner could order a poster, badge, or window sticker inscribed with either of these slogans for free. “7 Million” banners lined every major street; billboard-sized posters could be found on the side of most buses and on the walls of every tube station.

    The campaign underlined a narrative that was already circulating in media and politics on both sides of the Atlantic. Londoners were being described as inherently tough and resilient. Our decision to ride public transportation the day after the attacks was “courageous.” Politicians worldwide praised the city for its “business as usual” approach to a post-7/7 world. Few failed to claim that London’s reaction to the attacks was demonstrative of an attitude of stoicism and defiance that we had all somehow collectively inherited from the Blitz.

    “We survived the Blitz. We lived through 30 years of IRA outrages...” The British tabloid *The Daily Mirror* reminded its readers. “Once again the British people will triumph over evil.”



    *“Do you see any signs of fear on these faces?”*



* *    In the weeks following July 7th, the fact that all four of the suicide bombers were English, or had at least grown up in England, grew awkwardly prominent. Three out of four had been second-generation British citizens, born and raised in Leeds, in the north of the country. None of them were known to the authorities before the attacks. Three were of Pakistani descent; in many of London’s boroughs, the population is around 10% Pakistani. One was Jamaican, as are so many Londoners whose families have emigrated to the UK since the beginning of the Empire Windrush in 1948.

    This wasn’t the Blitz, then; it wasn’t possible to speak of “the Germans” who wanted to kill us, nor to anthropomorphize every bomb that dropped as a manifestation of Hitler’s villainous wrath. These were men who worked in the primary schools that our children attended and prayed at the same mosques as we did and had sat next to us on tubes and buses many times before without ever having blown us up.

    Was there any “One London” united by a desire to preserve our city and “triumph over evil”? London has 7 million inhabitants, which, in the months and years following 7/7, amounted to 7 million suspicious glances. 7 million reasons to get off and wait for the next train. 7 million sharp intakes of breath as someone who didn’t look quite right boarded the bus. The one out of 7 million chance that you, an unassuming 27-year-old Brazilian Catholic man, would be murdered by the police as you tried to get on the tube at Stockwell station.

    A few weeks after the bombs went off, a Muslim Londoner was interviewed on the radio about his experience following 7/7.

    “Well, I take a bottle of wine with me and hold it on my lap when I go on the tube. So people don’t think I’m a fundamentalist.”

    “Do you drink alcohol?” the radio host asked.

    “Of course not,” the man replied quickly. “I’m a Muslim.”



 



*    “Today the morale of the people is higher than ever before.”*



 



    In London, as in countless other cities around the world, we live with the reality that the next attack is coming. For all their praise of our resilience, no politician nor journalist nor news anchor can assure us that there won’t be more bombs, more chaos, more buses with roofs that are blown off through the air. More suspicion, more racism, more accidental deaths of the innocent in a panicked rush to defeat what we don’t fully understand.



    There are terrorists in London.

The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one can teach them anything.



–Maria Montessori



 



All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar’s teeth.



 –Antonin Artaud



 



Adults fundamentally misunderstand children. Few talk about it, which is odd, because the evidence is everywhere. Tune into any form of media, and you’ll learn that education is in crisis, that toys are too gendered, or that the internet has become too dangerous, while playgrounds are now too safe. Even the most essential facts about children—the level of their need for supervision, for strictness, and for stimulation—appear to be completely mysterious to the people tasked with raising them. Confronting this widespread mystification, it becomes difficult to believe that all adults were once themselves children—let alone how recently this was the case. 



You could argue that film and television made for children is an exception to this principle of misunderstanding. Think of the unshakeable pink joy on a child’s face as she bounds for the couch in time for Spongebob, or belts out Frozen’s theme song for the hundredth time. Yet this enthusiasm hardly proves that producers of children’s film and television have any real understanding of the minds of children. Adults buy the movie tickets, after all. And as anyone who’s ever seen a child go glow-eyed in front of the TV will know, they’re as entranced by adverts for cereal and vacuum cleaners as they are by cartoons. It is the screen itself that hypnotizes, not the content.  



This isn’t to say that all film and television made for children is primarily shaped by the tastes of adults. Universal Studios’ Despicable Me, released in 2010, is a useful illustration of where children’s movies go right. Simultaneously schmaltzy and bizarre, the film’s premise—a supervillain adopts three orphans as part of a plot to steal the moon before growing to adore them and embracing the role of fatherhood—mangles tropes in a delightfully self-aware fashion, spooling out a narrative that feels both expansive and familiar. The film grossed over 500 million dollars and spawned an Oscar-nominated sequel, plus plans for a third (to be released in 2017), as well as a 2015 spinoff devoted entirely to the invention at the crux of the films’ success: a sea of small, banana-colored, absurdist creatures called minions.   



A relatively minor feature of the original Despicable Me, minions have since become a cultural phenomenon. They are ubiquitous online and endlessly purchasable, not only as toys and costumes, but also as images plastered on the surface of every object a child could conceivably desire, not to speak of products that could only be of use to older people, like phone cases and adult-size shoes. (There is even, floating somewhere out there in this world, a minion blimp.) It can be difficult, once this alarmingly rapid evolution from character to brand has taken place, to recall exactly what was appealing about a given figure in the first place—think Mickey Mouse. Yet a clue to the popularity of the minions can be found, I think, in a children’s show that, at first glance, bears little similarity to Despicable Me at all. 



Pingu ran from 1986–2000, and chronicled the escapades of a young penguin and his igloo-dwelling family in claymation. A joint British-Swiss production, the show consisted of 156 five-minute episodes. Unlike Despicable Me, which, like most CGI blockbusters, delivers layers of meaning on multiple levels in order to appeal to viewers of all ages, Pingu’s intended audience was primarily very young children. Its episodes were designed for the shortest of attention spans. They contain not so much actual narratives as quick strings of events that blur into each other, thanks to a strikingly ‘90s overuse of the dissolve technique of scene transition. 



Between the vast, complex, flashy cosmos of Despicable Me and the retro, minimalist landscape of Pingu, we encounter a surprising connection: invented language. A key source of the minions’ comedic appeal is their distinctive mode of communication, which consists of a mishmash of mispronounced and seemingly random phrases of English, Spanish, Italian, Korean, Japanese, etc. (“gelato,” “what,” “para tu”), mixed with a gibberish that echoes the intonations of real language. The characters in Pingu express themselves in a nonsensical yet melodious series of babbles, honks, squawks, mutterings, sighs, and squeaks. 



The minions’ language is only a small aspect of Despicable Me, one zany element in a narrative otherwise dominated by American English. Pingu, on the other hand, features no real words of any kind. Only once in the entire length of the show’s 14-year run can a coherent English phrase be heard. At the end of the Christmas Special episode, first aired on December 25, 1992, Pingu turns to the camera and honks the words “Happy Christmas!” while his plasticine beak pokes out roundly. (The result sounds a little more like “Happy Christ-moose!,” implying that, like a real mother tongue, Pingu-ese leaves an indelible imprint on its native speakers.)



Despicable Me and Pingu are hardly alone in their representation of nonsensical communication. Though markedly absent from American children’s television and from movies in general, several other British kids’ TV shows also feature creatures who do not speak anything close to comprehensible English. The vaguely nightmarish Teletubbies coo and burble like toddlers making their very first grasps at language, while the more obscure, rodent-like aliens that populate the creepy and claustrophobic world of The Clangers (1969–74) communicate exclusively in haunting whistles. Teletubbies was heavily criticized for its use of babble-talk. Angsty child psychologists and parents chastised its creators for supposedly exacerbating the delay in language fluency that has been proven to result when young children are exposed to too much television. This criticism has since been refuted, though the fact remains that the Teletubbies’ sing-song gibberish might be, if not developmentally damaging, so insufferable as to cause real psychological harm. 



The major difference between Pingu or Despicable Me and shows like Teletubbies or The Clangers is that the penguins and minions in the former speak not gibberish but actual invented languages, however rudimentary they may be. After watching a series of Pingu episodes, you will begin to notice patterns, rhythms—even something like structural rules. “Penguinese has a complex intonation pattern,” writes Tony Thorne, Director of the Language Centre at King’s College, London. “It seems to mimic not just the language of human beings, but the sounds that animals—and birds, of course—make, too.” 



Key elements of the minions’ language have been explained and interpreted by enthusiastic amateurs on fan pages across the web. Universal went so far as to develop an app that humorously “translates” the minion’s speech—just one part of its menacingly extensive marketing campaign. 



It is this complexity that accounts for the extent of the Despicable Me trilogy’s critical success and saturation of pop culture. Yet—like the sprawling Pingu Wikia that cannot possibly have been constructed by the show’s primary viewing audience of infants—this interest in the linguistic construction of minion-speak explains the films’ appeal for adults, not children. Kids, while they might be unconsciously aware of the similarities between minion- and penguin-talk to human language, are hardly going to be delighted by analysis of these constructions’ surprising linguistic sophistication. Could this be another case of mistaking adult enthusiasm for real engagement with the minds of tiny viewers? Or is it possible that, while adults are drawn to the obsessive pleasure of picking apart the machinery of these constructed languages, they hold a different—and even more significant—magnetism for the minds of children?    



Compare, for a moment, the delightfully weird babble of the minions and Pingu family with the way English is spoken in the rest of children’s TV and cinema. Recall the deliberate slowness, patronizingly exaggerated emotion, and intense, syrupy feminization of the voice in shows such as Barney and Friends and Dora the Explorer, not to mention the limited vocabulary and extreme oversimplification of what’s actually being said. If anyone spoke like this in real life, it would be nightmarish—perhaps this is why the eerie, sing-song intonation reminiscent of children’s TV has become something of a trope in horror movies. Yet we subject children to it by the mouthful. 



The simplified language of children’s films and television shows reflects the tamed, narrowed, decluttered version of the real world they construct. It is as true on the visual level as it is on the linguistic. Visually, Pingu has a distinctly German minimalism: a sparse white landscape set against a block-blue sky; a homogenous cast of near-identical clay penguins; a set of simple, symbol-like objects (ball, fish, skis). Despicable Me, though infinitely more expansive and varied, remains anchored in the visual archetypes of children’s narratives (orphanage, suburban street, villain’s lair) which tether it to recognizable terrain like a tent to soil.  



The made-up languages of Despicable Me and Pingu open these landscapes up—tearing their horizons like seams, collapsing the boundaries of their conventional narrative arcs. Once they have tapped into the immeasurable imaginative capacity of their young audiences, the possibilities of meaning and sensation within each story become limitless. The central problem—even tragedy—of children’s TV and film is that productions fail to utilize their most potent asset: the outlandish, surreal, and inconceivably vivid minds of their viewers. What makes Despicable Me and Pingu so successful is that—with the melodies of their warped and gabbled chatter—they manage to do exactly this.    



 



After we emerge into the grayscale latter stages of our lives, it becomes easy to forget how frustrating life was when we were children. A child spends her days being spoken down to, misunderstood, and ignored—being told she must follow rules “just because,” that her deepest concerns are humorous or nonsensical, and that she won’t possibly be able to understand until she’s grown. Imagine the relief of that child—legs tucked up against the black plush of the movie theatre seat or the familiar folds of her sofa—as she listens to a language that belongs not to adults but to her and to her alone. A language that is honest as music and rich as a full young heart, without boundaries or barriers keeping her out. A language that, to a child, probably sounds most like the truth.