Lidia Yuknavitch
Hope Is A Story We Haven't Figured Out How To Inhabit Yet
Lidia Yuknavitch is a visionary. And her vision holds both the deepest, most hollowed-out sorrow of life and the soaring beauty. In her worlds, one aspect cannot be alive without the other.
Her latest novel Thrust devotedly preserves this balance. It’s a book of everything: there’s talking turtles, whales and worms, motherwaters, orphaned children, abused children, magnificent children, children in trouble, children healing the world, water, immigrants, trauma, landscape-altering-climate-change water, gender fluidity, staggeringly glorious sex, prison reform, the Statue of Liberty, cunt apples, lifewaters, time travel, godlessness, bigotry, freedom, mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, violent pressures on men, violent pressures on women, bodies as healers, more water, anguish-and-strength-and-joy lineage, liberty of architecture, revolution of objects, floating boys, healing rooms with ropes and ass holsters, and hope.
What connects all of this, what offers sweet harmony, is Laisvé, a young motherless girl, and the precious objects she collects. Laisvé is a “carrier” and her objects act as talismans transporting her through time with the guidance of a talking box turtle to save lives—and create a new, kinder society. Dodging the raids of a growing police state in 2079 where her city is steeped in water, Laisvé travels to the 1990s, the 19th century, and the early 21st century meeting with Frédéric, a French sculptor and the architect of the Statue of Liberty; Mikael, a wrongly imprisoned boy; Lilly, a dictator’s daughter hoping to help Mikael; a group of laborers manifesting the Statue of Liberty governed by their lineage stories: and Aurora, who lost her leg during the Civil War, runs healing rooms, and takes in forgotten children.
The prose is tender and lyrical and precise, yet unyielding. The horror and sadness will be witnessed. The beauty and promise will be witnessed. The braiding of the stories is gentle, as fluid as Lidia’s beloved motherwaters, yet likewise steadfast. The world is revulsion; the world is radiance. And Lidia is master of both language and love.
Lidia herself is kindness and love. She’s a stalwart supporter of the writing community and of humans in general. I sometimes think she has more belief in us than we deserve. She’s the author of The Chronology of Water, The Book of Joan, Verge, The Small Backs of Children, The Misfit’s Manifesto, and Dora.
We chatted about coexistence, the younger generations, and, of course, hope.
Let’s talk about animals of the land, sea, and air. Humans have been unspeakably cruel, genociding thousands of creatures, engaging in factory farming, experimentation, circuses and other forms of “entertainment,” fighting, hunting, demonizing them, and so much more. One of the things I adored about your book was the sensitivity to the emotional, psychic, and physical violence humans have perpetuated toward animals. What moved you to have animals so interwoven into the fabric of this story?
In our lifetime, we've inherited an understanding of humans as being toward the top of an existence hierarchy. But from the first recordings of human history, in indigenous cultures, we aren’t on the top of a hierarchy unless it's a power hierarchy. That's not a new idea. That's a very old idea. But what I'm interested in is if love is a character in this book, and love could move beyond just human concerns, person-to-person concerns, how might love travel? Or how might freedom travel, if we detach it, or dislocate it from primarily human concerns and let it move more freely, and laterally, and less hierarchically. For me, that means toward the planet and other forms of existence. It doesn't seem complicated to me.
Humans have this cool thing about them, which is they're capable of love. What we do with it has kind of been stunted or contained by the stories we've been told about what to do with it. So, in my own way, I'm trying to set it loose again and ask, are there other things we could do with that mighty, incredible power, which is love, besides procreate and have a bunch of failed relationships?
What types of stories do you think we’ve been sold that have created this dominance that we believe we have over animals?