Jay Ebhomielen
In Time Binds, Elizabeth Freeman uses an art film named K.I.P. as an example of queer time. The film depicts a portion of a pornographic film that skips and is distorted, due to being overplayed, as observed by a mostly emotionless face. Freeman argues that the skipping in the video allows both the actors in the pornographic film and the spectator to stay in the moment, isolating and manipulating time. In Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater, protagonists Little Dog and Ada, respectively, are taken through the narratives of their coming of age and sexual awakening in disjunctive time, jumping through instead of experiencing it chronologically. Time is used in both novels to create a duel between enforcing power dynamics and allowing moments of coping, both harmful and helpful.
Vuong adds moments set during the Vietnam War into the present-day narrative in his plot, further complicating the timeline with events that took place before Little Dog’s existence. While many of these flashbacks pertain to Little Dog’s grandmother, Lan, marrying a soldier and leaving Vietnam, there is one section where the focus changes to the history of Earl Woods, another Vietnam veteran, and father of Tiger Woods. Tiger Phong is a Lieutenant Colonel pinned down by enemy fire with Earl Woods. We learn that Tiger Woods’ nickname was given to him to honor Tiger Phong and that Phong died in captivity without anyone knowing. The reason for Woods’ nickname is so that Phong would recognize him as Earl’s son. But this lineage is complicated by Tiger Woods’ relationship with his ethnicity, which either erases his Vietnamese roots in exchange for amplifying his black ones or muddies his ethnicities, distilling and omitting each distinct part of what makes him who he is. Vuong includes Tiger’s background to contradict this erasure, as key parts of his life and identity are direct products of the Vietnam War. Vuong sets up this sidebar in the narrative with a flashback in which Lan is both rationalizing and lamenting over her choice of becoming a sex worker back in Vietnam, repeating the proverb, “A girl who leaves her husband is the rot of the harvest” (Vuong 47). However, Vuong chooses to isolate and repeat only “A girl who leaves…” invoking both Lan getting kicked out of her house for sex work and her leaving Vietnam to have her child with the American soldier, Paul. Vuong pits this family memory and the story of Tiger Phong against each other to show both sides of Lan’s decision. Those who stayed in Vietnam during the war could die; by contrast, their greatest tie to legacy could be tied to someone who barely acknowledges their origins. However, Lan’s choice of leaving dooms her to embody and pass on the “rot of the harvest,” as both her daughter and grandson deal with generational trauma, language barriers, and racial prejudice that comes from immigrating to another country. Vuong’s notion that both paths–one taken, one not–create a loss of Vietnamese culture creates an inevitability in Little Dog’s life, making the point that Little Dog’s nationality would be a struggle for him no matter Lan’s choice.
The first chapter in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous establishes Little Dog’s familiar power dynamics. Vuong depicts multiple scenes of Little Dog’s mother’s abuse, mixed with fond memories that he has of her. He begins every incident with “The time…,” catching on to these specific moments, much like how Freeman describes Butler’s theory as “[showing] rhythms of gendered performance -specifically, repetitions – accrete to “freeze” masculinity and femininity into timeless truths of being” (Freeman 4). Vuong catches on to these power imbalances with Little Dog’s mother, cutting them between moments of vulnerability and animal imagery, to freeze the repetition of his inferiority, which is then carried on throughout the story with further abuse within his family, and the racial and status inferiority in her relationship with Trevor, a white boy whose dad is Little Dog’s employer.
There are also instances in the novel where memories are told in the present tense. In one, Little Dog, after being hit by his mother, is healed by his grandmother rubbing an egg over his bruise. When she finishes, Lan urges Little Dog to eat the egg, to consume the pain inside the egg to finish the healing. The passage ends with the statement, “And so he eats. He is eating still” (Vuong 106). The telling of this moment in the present tense and the addition of iterative language, in the end, freezes and cycles the healing process as something that Little Dog can come back to and relive, like a save point in a video game. Preserving this moment emphasizes how little these moments of tenderness are left untampered by prior trauma. There’s no telling when Little Dog will have time to heal again, so it is best to freeze this moment in time for later, much like how the segment in K.I.P. is relived by the emotionless spectator, allowing him to momentarily live in a point of time that has since passed.
Unlike Little Dog, whose voice and perspective shape On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ada is barely audible in Freshwater. At first, she is objectified, being called “The Ada” by Smoke and Shadow, the first two ọgbanjes that are fused to Ada. While conversations happen between her and Asughara, another spirit, Ada is more puppeteered through her narrative than experiencing it, with us seeing her life through the eyes of Smoke, Shadow, and Asughara. In Ada’s entry perspective chapter, she ends with, “I’m talking as if I’m them. It’s all right. In many ways, I am not even real. I am not even here” (94). When Ada has a space in the novel to share her perspective, she expresses that she is not “real” and “here” even though the story cannot progress without her body. Even though other characters can see Ada doing the actions described by the ọgbanje, she isn’t presently narrating until this moment, drained from immediate and imminent trauma. In addition, Ada previously talked about Ewan, her ex-husband. This mention folds time in the narrative, as up to that moment Ewan hasn’t been mentioned at all, showing Ada’s detachment from the narrative before being given the story of the relationship through the eyes of Asughara, who has more context for the relationship failing. Ada copes with trauma through dissociating, giving up control of her body and her choices to those who can deal with them better. However, the ọgbanje are choosing avenues that endanger Ada in exchange for their interest, like Smoke and Shadow’s interest in another boyfriend Soren’s anger, which results in Ada’s assault.
The ọgbanje that inhabit Ada tend to steal landmark moments from Ada’s life, both chrononormative and queer. Soren’s multiple assaults, which are taking place while Ada is dissociating, include her losing her virginity. The first time that she’s lucid while being assaulted, which takes the place of a virginity milestone in chrononormative structures, is punctuated with the emergence of Asughara. Asughara also takes milestones away from Ada, stating, “when Ewan took off her clothes, me, I took my place under her skin. I had made her a promise. I do not make exceptions” (Emezi 104). This is Ada’s first time with the man she loves and would later marry, an important milestone in a heteronormative society that Asughara takes away. Milestones important in a chrononormative timeline are dissociated through or taken from Ada by ọgbanje and are replaced by milestones important to the spirits. This focus on alternative motivations disjoints Ada from heteronormative structures, putting importance on moments of power imbalance between her lovers, herself, and the ọgbanje.
The ọgbanje’s disjunction does not stop with chrononormative time; queer temporality is also disrupted. After Ada and Ewan divorce, a masculine spirit named Saint Vincent takes over while Asughara is weakened. While he fronts, Saint Vincent “[goes] to clubs with satin-padded walls and red velvet curtains, where he kissed women with Ada’s mouth” (Emezi 164). Moments of gender expression and discovery are milestones in queer narratives, but Ada isn’t in control of her gender discovery. Instead of this scene being framed as Ada discovering her gender, it’s Saint Vincent expressing his gender through Ada, high-jacking this moment with his motivations while Ada is spiraling. While this takes away from queer milestones, this does not un-queer the temporality of Emezi’s novel. They state in a BuzzFeed interview that Ada’s conflict is that “…she was embodied: that she existed, that she had selves, that she was several” (Emezi, BuzzFeed News). Ada’s focus on herself and her multitudes takes the narrative away from heteronormative milestones and trajectories, thus retaining the queering of time.
Both Little Dog and Ada move through these narratives in an unorthodox way, with their narratives focusing on power imbalances and trauma that veers them away from heteronormative structures. These moments influence the way their stories are organized, disjointing their experiences with time, either connecting their stories to parallel timelines that emphasize their agendas or glazing over chrononormative milestones that did not go the way that’s promised in normative society. Instead, Ada and Little Dog are forced to manipulate time to bring about the safety and healing they search for, freezing or giving time to others to ground them amongst the chaos.
Works Cited
Emezi, Akwaeke. Freshwater. Grove Atlantic, 2018.
Emezi, Akwaeke. “Writers of Color Are Making Their Own Canon.” BuzzFeed News, 7 Feb. 2018, www.buzzfeednews.com/article/akwaekeemezi/writers-of-color-are-making-our-own-canon.
Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Duke Univ. Press, 2010.
Vuong, Ocean. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: A Novel. Penguin Books, 2019.