I’m especially interested in exploring our most natural relationships – the bond between a parent and a child, or the relationship within a couple. But I’m only really interested if I can find something new in these relationships: spaces that I had never thought of before, the line at which the natural starts to become quite strange or abnormal. This helps me to rethink my own relationships, to look at them from a more distanced perspective and take the risk of pushing against my own instincts in a way that I probably wouldn’t dare to do in real life.

You often analyse close human relationships and show how they’re weird and creepy. What makes a family such a good subject to analyse in fiction?

It’s an instinctive space that I find myself in. Family is the place where we are shaped, where we suffer our first tragedies. When we don’t know anything about the world yet, we start to learn about it through the family. This is from the view of the child. From the point of the view of the parent there is an even bigger tragedy: there is not any other love more sincere, with better intentions, than a parent’s love. You only have goodwill. But at the end, when you’re trying to protect and form the other to survive the world, at the same time you also deform them, block them, surround them with fears and family matters. It is another kind of tragedy that no matter how good you are trying to do it, you will always also hurt your children. I think it’s an interesting dilemma.

Your fiction has sometimes been described as almost dystopian, in terms of the relationships you describe. 

I think fiction starts with something really unusual. Normality is a big lie, one of the most hurtful lies with which we are confronted. We keep trying to be normal, day after day, but normality is a fiction. It is a space between you and me, but there is nobody who occupies that space. It’s empty. When you build relationships with the people you are closest to, you build connections not in the good moments. You build the best connections over sorrow and forgiveness and acceptance that the other is really different from you. The idea of normality disconnects us.

If you were to create new types of relationships – a utopia instead of a dystopia – what would they look like?

It would be a society in which we’d never come up with the toxic concept of ‘normality’: this mid-point between my being – unique and strange – and your being – equally unique and strange. This fictitious and arbitrary point that we all want to reach, that causes us to limit and shrink and adapt ourselves: our largest social falsehood.

Do you feel that this idea of what is normal is different in different societies that you have encountered?

Yes, absolutely. Some of the stories in Mouthful of Birds are about this. For example, there is a teenager who eats birds and the family seems to be very worried about this behaviour. But we actually eat birds! In some countries, people eat live fish. So why is eating a live bird considered cruel? Again, we’re talking about normality. The idea of normality is a social and economic construction. Sometimes people talk about these short stories as fantastic stories. Maybe there are one or two that are really fantastic, but all of them are about the uncanny. The fantastic genre is built around something that can’t occur in our world. But the uncanny is constructed with something that is strange, that is uncommon, but real. And this makes the stories more terrifying.

Can you tell me about your most recent novel, Kentukis?

As a reader, I realised that literature still has a big problem with technology. We live immersed in technology, we think of technology…

… almost as a natural resource?

Yes, exactly. But then if you try to translate it onto the page it’s high-tech fiction. I found this very disturbing. Why is it normal in our everyday life but when we read about it we feel that it’s the future? I think it’s because literature is the space where we think about ourselves and our culture, and technology is developing really quickly. We’re not capable of dealing with technology and building limits: cultural, ethical, legal, private limits. I was thinking about these themes, and I thought, how can I talk about the problem that we have with technology, the miscommunication we have through technology, without having technology as a problem in the novel. Without turning it into science fiction, into a novel about the future.

Kentukis is a novel about human relationships, about the problems of language, isolation and loneliness. In an ever more globalised and interconnected world, we often see technology as the root cause of all these issues, or maybe as the common denominator that links these problems. But it’s unfair to lay the blame solely at the feet of technology. Some form of technology has always been there: it’s not good or bad in itself. This book is about the dark and strange underside of any form of digital communication, that is, another human being, as fragile, fearful and, potentially dangerous as we are ourselves. It’s about connections between people, not between people and technology. The kentuki is a connection between two people that allows a citizen of one part of the world to connect to a citizen of another part of the world. They get linked forever, but they don’t know who the other is.

I’m interested in how your books are being read differently in different languages and contexts, particularly Fever Dream.

Something that happened a lot is that countries that are well informed about what is going on with agrochemicals immediately got what is going on in the novel. They can read and judge the danger; for them, the dangerous works in a very real, concrete way. Then there are countries where they don’t have any idea. They’re not well informed, even when they have those agrochemicals in their own countries, for example Mexico. In Mexico there were elements of the novel – the continuous miscarriages, children that are physically deformed, animals that drop dead – they read all of these signals as related to ghosts, something mystical. It was a nice reading. Of course it is a book that is built to have all these reflections, so that worked. But it was nice to see how different the same secrets, sign posts, can be read. On the other hand it became clear how a society that isn’t well-informed is capable of seeing ghosts everywhere.

You have lived in Berlin for five years now. How are you finding it?

What I don’t miss about Buenos Aires is the simplest thing: as a Latin American woman, I’m not allowed to go out alone at night and come home alone. It would be so dangerous that it would be stupid to do so. A taxi is also dangerous. Even if you go out with your friends, you have to bring your boyfriend, or a friend drops you home by car. If you take the risk of going home alone, when you’re finally home, you send a message to your friends to say, I’m home. It took me five years of living in Berlin to realise that what that message was really saying was: I’m alive. When I go out in Berlin, I come home at three in the morning, and I feel so free. I told myself that I deserve it. It’s my right. And that’s when I get a little furious with Latin America.

Samanta Schweblin is the author of three story collections that have won numerous awards, including the prestigious Juan Rulfo Story Prize, and been translated into twenty languages. Her debut novel Fever Dream was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2017. Her collection Mouthful of Birds is out now. Originally from Buenos Aires, she lives in Berlin.

Interview by Theodora Danek.

Photo: © Alejandra López

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To focus on pleasure is to act in opposition to patriarchal and capitalist orders, where sex as Silvia Federici argues, ‘can only exist as a productive force at the service of procreation and the regeneration of the waged/male worker and as a means of social appeasement and compensation for the misery of everyday existence.’ Much of the world around us wants to pretend that it is not pulsing with carnality. Outside of sanctioned times and spaces, we are asked to pretend this energy doesn’t exist, and in this way, we are being asked to stem the natural flow of dialogue with ourselves, isolating a central aspect of our being. To be attuned to erotic energy, to pursue pleasure, to want to connect in this way can also be isolating. Not least because one can be so easily misunderstood.

My interest in pleasure, commodified and non-commodified, has led to much frustration and disappointment. I wanted an emotional connection to accompany certain inquiries into pleasure, and so in my twenties, I hoped to find a romantic partner, long or short-term, with whom to explore. However, once my intellectual and recreational interests in the erotic were revealed, it would often change things. My preference for fetish-themed nightclubs, my job at an adult industry trade publication, and even the art modeling that had been my income in my early years of trying to build a writing-related career put a spanner in the works. Somehow, it meant I could not be taken seriously, wasn’t a viable romantic partner, or was only good for one thing. Our mutual appreciation of I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue was no longer of interest to the person sitting across from me, instead they only wanted to talk about sex. I would get the feeling that my interest was oversized, that they wanted to contain it or found it frightening. (I thought it strange that my interest was novel to them, even though sex was on the table.) The conversation never seemed to work its way back to BBC Radio 4.

It felt like a form of quarantine. We had been two people seeking connection. Now I felt on display, being asked to account for myself.

Worse than wary lines of questioning and a severed connection were the men who then thought this meant that there were no boundaries anymore. I should be up for anything.

These experiences left me with questions—about the role pleasure plays in our emotional lives, the puritanical nature of American dating culture even in a city of dreams like Los Angeles, the value of sex work, and indeed, how the patriarchy fails us all—and those questions grew into my debut novel Permission. Permission, in part, is about Echo, a failed young actress who finds something sacred and healing in the erotic, following the sudden death of her father. Feeling unseen within her biological family and everyday life, she seeks out a ‘logical family’— to borrow the title of Armistead Maupin’s memoir about abandoning his conservative roots and having a sexual and political awakening in San Francisco’s gay bathhouses. In Echo’s case, she finds freedom through a connection with her new neighbors: a dominatrix called Orly and Piggy, the foot fetishist who is Orly’s housemate. Unlike Piggy, Echo isn’t exploring a specific fetish, but like Piggy, she is working through old wounds and frustrated desires. The BDSM community gives Echo the space she needs to understand the role the erotic plays in her emotional life and provides a testing ground for new forms of connection and intimacy, opening up the idea of what “family” means.

I found a logical family like this in my twenties in LA. James Stone’s legendary BDSM-themed club nights were rising to prominence in the city’s nightlife, making it easier for kindred spirits to find each other. Events of this kind proliferated: in private homes, rented warehouses, and professional dungeons across the city. We dressed to the nines and danced all night to hard electro and industrial sounds. Kings and queens of the scene took the stage for erotic performances, testing each other’s thresholds, creating moments of beauty with rope, latex, and leather, sometimes just costumes and song. I remember a cheeky burlesque routine set to the Andrews Sisters “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree.” I like to think what united us was a shared interest in the possibilities of pleasure. We wanted to connect to the world in this way, and together we could do so in a safe, sane, and consensual space founded on mutual respect.

Dancing in other clubs was not the same. Ours was a space where men seemed to effortlessly grasp the meaning of the word “no” and have the tools to graciously deal with rejection. Here we were free to explore, whether that meant performing on stage or simply being there, watching.

We shared knowledge and resources: the safest and most pleasurable ways to strike or manipulate the body, how to care for someone in the afterglow of erotic play, making music and costumes for the many other kinds of events we produced or attended, and sharing referrals for healthcare professionals who are equipped to tell the difference between abuse and the consensual exploration of pain, power dynamics, and pleasure. There was something sacred in the spaces we shared, and so many of us were given to worship. Each interaction came with its own language: an understanding of what the balance of power would be, what the limits were, and what kind of relationship this was (friendly, fleeting, forever). I never felt quarantined.

For those who arrived in this community hoping to explore specific fetishes, I can only imagine the relief. Like my character Piggy, a first satisfying erotic experience might only have been possible once this community was found, perhaps with a friend, perhaps with a professional. They might have spent years or decades searching and failing to make a meaningful, satisfying connection. Some had broken with past lives, others were seeking balance between workaday 9-to-5s and larger-than-life nights and weekends, others built their lives inside the community. Our preferences might have been different, we might have been on different journeys, but we cared about each other, built friendships that we hoped would outlast changes in a relationship status. With the support of our logical family, we were finding ways of being that made sense for us, our needs and desires. Like many of my friends in the community, pleasure and the erotic became a directional force in my life. I learned to see the value in my inquiries. These experiences shaped my understanding of my role as a writer and the stories I choose to tell. I do what I do in hopes of spreading the compassion and kindness that I found there with readers and the wider world.

Saskia Vogel is a writer and translator. Her debut novel Permission is out on 7 March with Dialogue Books in the UK and Coach House Books in North America. It is available to preorder here. #permissiontoconnect is the hashtag she will be using to chronicle her spring book tour through Europe and North America.

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Many of us do have people we love because we share DNA with them, but the definition of family is now much looser and more nebulous, and doesn’t need to involve a formal familial connection. Often in life we’ll have ‘found’ families too: a group of people who we choose to love like we would a family member.

As a trope, this is particularly common in fiction, where stories of happy, conventional families rarely prove as interesting as stories of orphans or outsiders forced to find their own family. And nowhere in fiction does the found family, or family of choice, exist in such abundance as it does in superhero narratives.

Found families in superhero stories are brought together for many reasons: through tragedy or the necessity to work together to fight an outsize power, through a desire for love and acceptance, or through a need for mentorship.

Taking a superhero away from their birth parents means their motivations for operating as a hero are more complex than if they remained in happy, birth family situations. Creators of superheroes, as well as writers, illustrators, filmmakers and more playing in these worlds, find a rich stream of issues to explore, from feelings of abandonment and inadequacy to daddy issues. For readers, therefore, this ups the stakes and makes the individual more interesting to fans – essential for the comic book business, which needs people to purchase its work week after week after week. This can go some way to explaining the popularity of the found family trope, which, if you look even briefly, is everywhere in comic books and their film and TV adaptations.

That’s not to say that traditional family set-ups aren’t a part of the superhero canon but, like any good story, these do often come with a twist.

The Fantastic Four includes siblings in Sue Storm and Johnny Storm, as well as a couple in Sue Storm and Reed Richards – as a foursome the group has elements of both a conventional and found family, and is also a group of colleagues. Spider-Man seems to have a conventional family set-up – although he’s an orphan (his parents are killed in a car crash), he is brought up by his aunt and uncle. In the newest reboot of the Spider-Man films though, he’s also got a found family – Tony Stark (Iron Man) and his chauffeur Happy both act as mentors and father figures for the teenager. Wonder Woman has a mother –Wonder Woman’s official title Princess Diana of Themyscira, Daughter of Hippolyta –, and in later comics her dad is Zeus, but she is brought up by a collective group of women on Themyscira.

Perhaps the most famous example of the traditional/found family melding is the Kents. Kal-El, whose parents send him to Earth to save his life, is literally found by Martha and Jonathan Kent after his rocket reaches the Kansas town of Smallville. He is adopted and grows up in a fairly conventional family set-up as Clark Kent before assuming his Superman identity – Martha and Jonathan become Clark’s found family only after he’s a superhero and understands that he has a blood family. Here, we get the best of both worlds – a loving family set-up, and a person who is also seeking who they are outside of this family. Superman, although he has lived through his fair share of hard times, is a superhero who has love and support in abundance from his found family and his birth family.

Bruce Wayne, aka Batman, is an altogether more angsty superhero. His desire for revenge for the death of his parents motivates him to become a crime-fighter. More compelling, perhaps, than Batman’s battles against the dark forces of Gotham City are Wayne’s daddy issues – his need to both live up to the father who died a hero after being shot and his desire to find someone to look up to and teach him how to be a man. His relationships are often complex, from Alfred, who is a substitute parent but is also in Wayne’s employ, to Dick Grayson (Robin/Nightwing), who in some narratives, such as the recent Netflix show Titans, has left his role as Robin because of Wayne’s increasing need for control and for blood.

Many superheroes are, like Batman, searching for a new family after losing theirs. Others need a new family because they were rejected by their original family for being different, or left them for their protection. Outsiders can become insiders once they find those in a similar position to them.

The X-Men, for example, are brought together by their Mutant status; hiding from the world they find a home – sometimes literal in the form of the X-Mansion – and a band of people who have experienced the same emotional journey as they have.

The aforementioned Titans brings together four people who don’t have a family in the traditional sense. Rachel Roth discovers the woman who brought her up is not her mother; Dick Grayson lost his parents in a tragic circus accident as a teenager; Gar Logan has until recently has been living with another found family, all of whom share the fact that their corporeal forms can change in ways that don’t fit with accepted norms; and Koriand’r remembers nothing about herself except that she is on a mission that involves Rachel.

The Titans are also fighting outside forces, something families of choice like the Avengers and Justice League also do. But it’s not only superheroes that operate in found families; supervillains, the other side of the same coin, also need love and companionship. The Suicide Squad – from the 2016 film – is a found family of supervillains brought together to execute dangerous black ops missions, while the DC TV show Legends of Tomorrow sees a grouping of villains and lesser superheroes working together.

These groupings are fascinating because they often bring a disparate group of individuals together: the Avengers are made up of stoic Captain America, gregarious Iron Man, mysterious Black Widow, et cetera. There’s nothing like the feeling of satisfaction you get when seeing or reading about people who set aside their differences, find a common cause, and work together in the name of the greater good.

But in this kind of found family the possibility for tension and disagreement is high – the rifts hurt so much more and feel more like a betrayal when it’s people you have chosen to love who turn against you. Take Civil War, billed by Marvel as a political conflict. It’s actually the story of a found family torn apart when Steve Rogers/Captain America and Tony Stark/Iron Man find themselves on opposing sides of a government proposal to register all superheroes. The consequences of this conflict (spoilers ahead) are devastating – not only does the argument cause rifts between other superheroes, in the comics it also results in the death of some characters including, in the aftermath, Steve Rogers himself.

When we’ve had to watch or read about those found families working their way through internal conflict, we appreciate it all the more when they come back together. After all, all families – chosen or not – fight, but when something bigger threatens them they, hopefully, make up.

In their found families, superheroes find friends, mentors and romantic partners and, most importantly of all, a family that accepts them without any judgement. A found family doesn’t judge its members for being a bit different – in looks or abilities – because they’re usually all a little different.

A found family doesn’t look down on someone who has trouble voicing their struggles sometimes, because all the members understand what it’s like to suffer. A found family is there to stand by a superhero’s side in times of trouble and in times of triumph.

And really, isn’t that what everyone wants from a family?

Sarah Shaffi is a freelance literary journalist and editor. She writes about books for Stylist Magazine online and is books editor at Phoenix Magazine. She is a judge for the Jhalak Prize 2019. Sarah is editor-at-large at independent children’s publisher Little Tiger Group. She regularly chairs author events, and is co-founder of BAME in Publishing, a networking group for people of colour in publishing. She can be found tweeting @sarahshaffi (where you can often find her talking about superheroes) and online at www.sarahshaffi.com.

The post Super families appeared first on English PEN.

In this issue of PEN Transmissions, we explore different types of family, different ways of building community.

We spoke to Samanta Schweblin about the danger posed by the concept of normality, technology, and how she dissects relationships in her writing.

Saskia Vogel writes about the ‘logical family‘ she found in the fetish scene in LA – which is also the topic of her debut novel.

Sarah Shaffi explores the found family as a beloved trope – and nowhere is it more beloved than in superhero (or, as Sarah points out, supervillain) fiction. Having superpowers is lonely, and who better to team up with than others who deal with the same issue?

Finally, Ege Dündar explores what family means to him, having been forced to live separated from those closest to him.

We hope you enjoy this issue of Transmissions. Until next time!

– Theodora Danek, editor

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Waking up was always special. Before I had properly opened my eyes I’d hear his clicking paws running up the spiral staircase, sliding slightly as he tried to turn into my room, bouncing on the bed in a flash. His long ears and bulging eyes were the first thing I saw every morning. We’d play on the bed, as my eyes would come into focus. The sunlight shone through our seasoned window panes. I could hear starving seagulls yelling in flight; they were nesting in the crevices between our crimson roof tiles and lavender covered walls. My mother would then come in and push the windows open, the mimosas casting delicate shadows on the carpet. Sometimes she’d join in, cuddling. Sometimes she’d just stand there, looking at us, smiling, as if her piercing, arctic blue eyes saw through everything with ease.

It must have been about three years ago that he started falling ill. The last time I was with him – that is, the last time I’ve been home – he was as childish as ever, chasing kittens away, barking incessantly at fallen leaves, scratching his paws on the parquet floor, impatient for walks. These were better days.

My mother called me late one evening.

‘The vet is saying he has this condition. The heart can’t get enough oxygen.’ We could hear him wheezing through the night, gasping for breath.  ‘Fluid builds up over time, enlarging it.’

Like anyone confronted with death I tried to hold on to his life.

’Let me see him’, I said.

She turned over her camera and there he lay, tense, breathing rapidly in his sleep as if he expected to be woken up at any moment. It pained me to be staring through a glass screen, no more than a voice echoing through his worried mind, unsure where the rest of us were.

I wished I could explain what had happened since we had last met. How people were rounded up late at night and how at sunrise, it looked as though nothing had happened. How dad was imprisoned for his journalism, shot at, exiled to Germany.

How mum was illegally held hostage after they confiscated her passport. How the government had chewed up the aspirations of a generation and how I ended up stranded on this island, in London, having not seen them for three years.

He was only seven years old. I didn’t want him to think I had deserted him. At first, I was in denial: I knew I’d make it in time; I knew my father had used nothing but words, that he was neither a spy nor a traitor, that none of this should really be happening.

Tarçın’s heart wore out. Last time I saw him on camera he was panting, in his cosy blue bed on the vet’s table, tubes piercing his body. Every hour was consumed with stagnant updates. Our belief that he would make it slowly dwindled. Mum was beside him, holding whatever was left together. She didn’t talk to us for two days after he died, as we mourned in each of our solitary lives.

I dreamt of him, a few nights after he died. He ran up to me on the front porch of our summer spot in Seferihisar. He was elated, joyous as I petted him. I noticed that there were bugs flying off of his skin, before he sped away like a string of light across the yard, as if he had really missed running.

I write his name on every fogged up window I find.

Perhaps it wouldn’t have hurt as much as it did if people all across the country hadn’t experienced similar upheavals. If my friends – model citizens: writers, teachers, students – hadn’t been persecuted just like we were. If, still dignified, sometimes gravely ill, they hadn’t been slandered and sent to jail for nothing. Waiting, incessantly, for nothing.

If my grandfather, who I also haven’t seen for three years, hadn’t been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and I wasn’t forced behind yet another glass screen trying to capture fragments of his fading memory.

I try to hold on to what I remember, wondering where and what home is for me, without my return.

I reach for it in memories: the green tablecloth on our kitchen table; the sound of our doorbell; the rhythm of the sprinklers out front; the gatekeeper’s whistle as he patrolled the streets; our ivy-covered garden surrounded by iron bars, sheltering us from the dimly lit street and the lurking gaze of strangers out there.

Home lingers in my memories of conversations with grandpa over Salep in winter, talking about his years as an imam in Bulgaria, pondering god and the universe; in my grandmother singing along to songs from her archaic kitchen radio, garlic reeking over the frying pan, the feeling of her hands in my hair.

It lingers in my mother and me in the back of a beat up dark blue Peugeot, listening to Leonard Cohen: grumpy me, a 50 Cent and Eminem fan as a child, growing into a Cohen fan; our mission to find the hotel he stayed in after his İstanbul gig.

Home lingers in the red bike my father taught me to ride, with the comfort of his hands behind the saddle, although he’s long let go.

I remember in pristine detail charging out the door and into the evening with Tarçın, racing each other and, foolishly, the setting sun. I remember the first time we ever saw snow with him, right there, in our garden. Where he now lies buried.

All of these things aren’t really lost. The past isn’t just what has passed. It’s a part of who we are. Maybe we are so eager for the future that we overlook the persistence of then in now. The past’s permanence lies in our inability to hold on to it. Its transience makes it perpetual.

The bank wants to seize our house. Because the government blocked our sale, we were unable to pay our debt. Mum will soon have to leave the home she was forced to live in by herself. Yet I’ve learned home is much more than objects or indeed a place. In my mind, her laughter accompanying the sound of my piano still echoes off the walls of the ancient cistern underneath our house. The one thing that hasn’t lessened has been the only thing that stands against time: love.

My father and I, among many others, have been sent into exile, for no good reason. I couldn’t be with Tarçın when he died. Perhaps I won’t see his grave or walk into that house again, but someday I will return to Turkey. Weary ferries will still oscillate between opposite shores, the afternoon light shattering into violet fragments over the Bosphorus. The streets and people I love will be older, some will have passed, but nothing will take Tarçın, my family or my country from me. I will remember how home grew under my skin. As I toughened up and as life, like a beetle, circled around a familiar street light, home shimmered with a warm hazel hue, guiding me through the dark.

When you wake up in the mornin’, mama, look inside your mirror.
You know I won’t be next to you, you know I won’t be near.
But I’d be curious to know if you can see yourself as clear
As someone who has had you on his mind.

Bob Dylan & George Harrison – Mama You’ve Been On My Mind

Ege Dündar was born in Ankara in 1995. In 2005 he co-authored the fable book Duvar with his father Can Dündar. He produced and presented the weekly music show ‘Alternatif’ in Numberone TV between 2011-2013. He worked as a Sunday columnist in Milliyet Daily newspaper in 2013. His writing has been published in BirGün and LeManyak. A graduate of International Politics at City University Ege Dündar lives in London and has been working at PEN International for the last three years, campaigning for free expression. He is the founder and coordinator of the young writers’ platform İlkyaz. His family is currently campaigning for his mother’s right to travel, click here to find out more.

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