The Bookshelf
Short stories from Robert Drewe, Curtis Sittenfeld, Roxane Gay, Lauren Groff, William Trevor & John Edgar Wideman
So some of them are very short and vignette-like and others contain very detailed stories.
The Bookshelf
Short stories from Robert Drewe, Curtis Sittenfeld, Roxane Gay, Lauren Groff, William Trevor & John Edgar Wideman
The one that I haven't been able to stop thinking about is called Sweet on the Tongue.
The Bookshelf
Short stories from Robert Drewe, Curtis Sittenfeld, Roxane Gay, Lauren Groff, William Trevor & John Edgar Wideman
Can you explain that one?
The Bookshelf
Short stories from Robert Drewe, Curtis Sittenfeld, Roxane Gay, Lauren Groff, William Trevor & John Edgar Wideman
So the woman at the centre of it has travelled from, she lives in America, she's travelled to Haiti with her husband and she's kidnapped and brutally raped, which you don't quite realise at first.
The Bookshelf
Short stories from Robert Drewe, Curtis Sittenfeld, Roxane Gay, Lauren Groff, William Trevor & John Edgar Wideman
And then some members of her family don't know that it's happened.
The Bookshelf
Short stories from Robert Drewe, Curtis Sittenfeld, Roxane Gay, Lauren Groff, William Trevor & John Edgar Wideman
and she has a child, but it's not told as straightforwardly as that, is it?
The Bookshelf
Short stories from Robert Drewe, Curtis Sittenfeld, Roxane Gay, Lauren Groff, William Trevor & John Edgar Wideman
Which is part of the power of reading it.
The Bookshelf
Short stories from Robert Drewe, Curtis Sittenfeld, Roxane Gay, Lauren Groff, William Trevor & John Edgar Wideman
I was going to say pleasure, but that's not the right word, is it?
The Bookshelf
Short stories from Robert Drewe, Curtis Sittenfeld, Roxane Gay, Lauren Groff, William Trevor & John Edgar Wideman
And part of that remembering body, as you call it, is that there's literally sugar.
The Bookshelf
Short stories from Robert Drewe, Curtis Sittenfeld, Roxane Gay, Lauren Groff, William Trevor & John Edgar Wideman
I mean, there were piles and piles of sugar in a warehouse and
The Bookshelf
Short stories from Robert Drewe, Curtis Sittenfeld, Roxane Gay, Lauren Groff, William Trevor & John Edgar Wideman
And of course, in that context, the whole history of sugar is something that you can't help but think about with its connections to slavery and so on.
The Bookshelf
Short stories from Robert Drewe, Curtis Sittenfeld, Roxane Gay, Lauren Groff, William Trevor & John Edgar Wideman
But she can taste and feel the sugar.
The Bookshelf
Short stories from Robert Drewe, Curtis Sittenfeld, Roxane Gay, Lauren Groff, William Trevor & John Edgar Wideman
It's not just on her tongue.
The Bookshelf
Short stories from Robert Drewe, Curtis Sittenfeld, Roxane Gay, Lauren Groff, William Trevor & John Edgar Wideman
It's sort of stuck into her skin.
The Bookshelf
Short stories from Robert Drewe, Curtis Sittenfeld, Roxane Gay, Lauren Groff, William Trevor & John Edgar Wideman
And if people don't know anything about Roxane Gay as a writer and an activist and a feminist, part of her story is that she was herself gang raped as quite a young woman.
The Bookshelf
Short stories from Robert Drewe, Curtis Sittenfeld, Roxane Gay, Lauren Groff, William Trevor & John Edgar Wideman
I mean, she was still a child, essentially.
The Bookshelf
Short stories from Robert Drewe, Curtis Sittenfeld, Roxane Gay, Lauren Groff, William Trevor & John Edgar Wideman
And so she keeps on revisiting that and writing about what rape and trauma and sexuality, all of that, what that means.
The Bookshelf
Short stories from Robert Drewe, Curtis Sittenfeld, Roxane Gay, Lauren Groff, William Trevor & John Edgar Wideman
And so approaching that in fiction is a really interesting thing to do, I think.
The Bookshelf
Short stories from Robert Drewe, Curtis Sittenfeld, Roxane Gay, Lauren Groff, William Trevor & John Edgar Wideman
Roxane Gay's Aiti is published by Hachette.
The Bookshelf
Short stories from Robert Drewe, Curtis Sittenfeld, Roxane Gay, Lauren Groff, William Trevor & John Edgar Wideman
Now, Roxane Gay calls herself a Haitian-American.