34
2019
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
Like most apocalyptic work, speculative fiction attempts to understand a disordered world: Elizabeth K. Rosen in Apocalyptic Transformation, discusses how “the apocalyptic impulse is, in effect, a sense-making one,” as it not only pushes further than conspiracy or chaos theories, but it also “is an organizing structure that can create a moral and physical order while also holding out the possibility of social criticism that might lead to a reorientation in the midst of a bewildering historical moment.”1 This reorientation of a disordered, chaotic world is investigated by both Michele Tracy Berger in Reenu-You and Jason Mott in The Crossing using the organizing structure of hope: Berger unravels racial invisibility and politicized beauty, and her characters find home in surrogate motherhood, and Mott examines the consumption of war memories as a way to keep love. Both of these authors use female protagonists, experimental formats, and viruses in their narratives.
THE STRUCTURE OF HOPE IN SPECULATIVE (AND WAR) FICTION a review by Helen Stead Michele Tracy Berger. ReenuYou. Astoria: Book Smugglers Publishing, 2017. Jason Mott. The Crossing: A Novel. New York: Park Row Books, 2018.
HELEN STEAD earned her PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Tennessee. She teaches in the English Department at ECU, where she serves as an assistant editor of NCLR. MICHELE TRACY BERGER has had winning entries in the Carolina Woman Magazine Writing Contest, the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Poetry Contest, and the Winston-Salem Writers’ Contest. Her fiction work has appeared in UnCommon Origins: A Collection of Gods, Monsters, Nature and Science (Flying Monkey Press, 2016) and You Don’t Say: Stories in the Second Person (Ink Monkey Press, 2012). Even though her main love is science fiction, she has also published creative nonfiction and poetry. She was one of the 2016-2017 UNC Chapel Hill Faculty Mentoring Award winners. She was a columnist for The Chapel Hill News from 2012 to 2014. She currently lives in Pittsboro, NC.
The title of Michele Tracy Berger’s novella, Reenu-You, refers to a hair relaxer, advertised as organic and so-yummy-you-can-taste-it – sounds great, right? Unfortunately for users, the beauty product contains a virus presenting as unique (green and purple) facial lesions, nausea, and vomiting. Throughout the novella, black and Latino women are afflicted by this disfiguring and eerie condition, which is rapidly mutating and spreading, and neither medical personnel nor
1
Elizabeth K. Rosen, Apocalyptic Transformation: Apocalypse and the Postmodern Imagination (Lexington, 2008) xiii.
government officials seem to be able to help. Berger’s main narrator is Kat, a mid-twenties, black ski instructor living in Aspen, who has come to New York to pack up her deceased mother’s things. Kat’s rash erupts two days after using the product, and she is unnerved by how familiar the rash feels on her skin: “like the quarter of an inch-long mole I have on my left leg, or the pebbled dark scar on my left hand that I got from a roller-skating accident. Like it belonged there with all the other markings on my body” (13). These disc-like markings continue to bloom all over her face as the virus progresses. While Kat’s narration is the main drive of the novella, Constancia, a nineteen-year-old Puerto Rican woman, whose own mother died when she was young and who is a bit rough around the edges, acts as a secondary narrator. She is a natural counter for Kat, as she is able to do what Kat cannot: freely express herself, “leaking aggression out of [her] pores” (60). Constancia has also lived her entire life around black and Latino women, while Kat often feels out of place wherever she is. When Constancia tries the product, she thinks its warmth is “like your mother tucking you in and giving you a kiss,” but then as it develops on her hair, she gets this “strange feeling, like that white goo was sinking into [her], going through [her] dark, kinky hair into [her] scalp, hunting for the core of [her]” (26).