San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Masterful writing on extent of ‘Violence’
In the foreword of Miah Jeffra’s new shortstory collection, “The Violence Almanac,” the San Francisco author and founder of the vital queer literary collaborative Foglifter Press opens with a growl. “The rumble comes from deep in the throat, a low place, breath slow and soaked in the shaping of sound,” Jeffra writes. “We are predators, this sound speaks.”
It’s a tonesetting opening, one that hints at the violent potential of the human animal that Jeffra sinks into with this collection. It is followed by a fictionalized story based on the crimes of Andrea Yates, who drowned her five children in their bathtub in 2001. The violence ranges from mass shootings to seemingly more benign events like the exchange of angry words at a coffee shop, a film blogger being sent an increasingly disturbing
series of films and a Realtor cheerfully chronicling the troubling history of a house. The stories here tread on both familiar and unexpected ground.
Jeffra — who previously authored two books and edited an anthology —is a master of writing that stands out in how unflinchingly it inhabits and experiments with abstract ideas. In this case, it’s the idea of violence — what it means, how it manifests, what it says about people and societies and the Earth we live on. In the afterword, Jeffra writes, “Structures — big things — are making me panic lately. Large, beyondthesizeofhuman things that we dwell in, that we swarm inside, that we rely
By Miah Jeffra
(Black Lawrence Press; 200 pages; $21.95 )
on to stay intact. Made by us.” This existential reckoning permeates these stories.
Jeffra probes into questions of danger, of erosion of the psyche. The violence of American individualism and understandings around masculinity leave the reader uncomfortable at best, which is by design. The story “Eye Wall,” in particular, portrays a man so consumed by narratives of masculinity that his anger at injustice turns to contempt, his obsession with weakness and control driving him to commit horrific acts. It is tricky to write from the perspective of a person inflicting harm, especially extreme violent harm. Embodying the person who, in these stories, snaps or succumbs to anger and hatred, even though it is indoctrinated into him by societal and political structures that ultimately harm even the harmer, runs the risk of making a character committing monstrous acts seem sympathetic. Whether this is a useful, purposeful or even interesting endeavor in literature will forever be a debate. Jeffra’s approach is not to answer this question, but to render it.
Other stories capture more tenderness and the small and large fault lines between people, the way we treat each other, and the way we exist in the structures and civilizations that make us. “Growls suppose incivility,” Jeffra writes, and this is the point. We live inside “the emotions of survival: either fear or love, but one can never see the difference in such small apertures.” Jeffra shines light into these apertures, and it is not peaceful, but it is a compelling work of art.