Thrust: A Novel

Sometimes I picture the ocean where a window should be in this place, away from this all-too-human light and hard concrete floors. If I close my eyes, I can still smell the salt. I can still feel the rhythm of the waves. I think of all the people who have been carried by water, or lost to it, reaching for life. We are coming for you. Someday we will be enough. Children, I mean. And our imagination. We are relentless. Insurgent.

You can’t kill the future in us.

Acknowledgments

How do you thank the idea that history is alive? This book simply would not exist if I had not read other books and encountered ideas in a kind of constant flux, a little like swimming in the ocean. The statue and story in Thrust is both real and imagined, or maybe in some liminal space in between. The idea of a “carrier” came from my mentor and friend, Ursula K. Le Guin, from her 1986 essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” Of the many books and articles I used for research on the Statue of Liberty, I was most mesmerized by and I am forever in debt to the story that Elizabeth Mitchell told in Liberty’s Torch: The Great Adventure to Build the Statue of Liberty, particularly in terms of the biographical material on Bartholdi, which inspired the character of Frédéric and served as a magical departure hub, while also helping me to conjure the details of a statue’s journey. Mitchell’s book contained many delightful (and sometimes troubling) firsthand accounts of the construction and reception of the colossus in America. Alongside her book and many others, I was drawn to an important article by Angela Serratore in the May 28, 2019, issue of Smithsonian magazine, “The Americans Who Saw Lady Liberty as a False Idol of Broken Promises,” the source of the quote from the early days of the Cleveland Gazette, as well as collected sentiments from suffragists, African Americans, and Chinese immigrants. This article prompted me to conjure the stories underneath a story. I also read a roomful of books on immigration, settler occupation, and early American labor ethnography. I am forever changed after learning to listen to the past differently from the way it was delivered to me.

Gratitude and Love to my dear friend J.M.L.B., who educated me mightily on the history, family, and social structure of the Haudenosaunee, and who gave me an incredible resource in the book Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States by Audra Simpson, as well as several articles on the Mohawk steelworker tradition (the Kahnawake Skywalkers). I was also inspired by an article by Lucie Levine posted on July 25, 2018, in 6SQFT, “Men of Steel: How Brooklyn’s Native American Ironworkers Built New York.”

While reading ethnographies, I was also deeply inspired by the book Decolonizing Ethnography: Undocumented Immigrants and New Directions in Social Science by Carolina Alonso Bejarano, Lucia López Juárez, Mirian A. Mijangos García, and Daniel M. Goldstein, which brought me to many books and articles about the fluid nature of ethnography. The reimagined ethnographies in Thrust are my attempt to agitate the form of the novel by amplifying what M. M. Bakhtin so vividly described as heteroglossia. The closing ethnography in Thrust draws its inspiration from the direct interviews with children documented by Clara Long in her July 11, 2019, testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Reform, Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, transcripts of which appeared on the Human Rights Watch website. I am reminded how important it is to remember that unintentional distances exist in any human interaction that leads to bearing witness or representing the experiences of others. In particular, anyone interested in representing stories of oppression or repression — including a novelist — faces a hard and enduring challenge when liberty itself is under lock and key. It is my hope that the plurality of voice, body, and experience especially available in the form of the novel might serve to keep the tensions, contradictions, conflicts, and desires of the many rather than the one alive, noisy, unflinching.