Reckoning With Our Own Monstrosity in Puloma Ghosh's "Mouth"

samherschelwein

June 14

For three days now, I have woken up with the first line of June Jordan's "Intifada Incantation" in my head: "I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED / GENOCIDE TO STOP." It has also been three days since I have finished the somewhat spooky, emotionally luminous collection of stories, Mouth, by Puloma Ghosh. The convergence of my waking thought and this book feel entirely connected—both complex, delicately holding interpersonal love and navigating the horrors of imperialism. The stories of Mouth showcase a range of women main characters in bizarre landscapes devastated by colonialism who are navigating a familiar problem: how do we have a life in the wake of mass upheaval? Though each story highlights mythical creatures and supernatural ordeals, we feel most connected with the women's journeys through grief, love, loss, and being misunderstood, even at the end of the world.

"You would think the introduction of time travel and extratemporal diplomats and stealthy timeline-disrupting agents would give everyone a new perspective on life. Our species was allegedly on the cusp of evolution, spies sweeping in from the future to influence us, but people were still as corny and boring as ever," Ghosh writes, in the story "Anomaly," which mirrors the social dynamics of our global pandemic. In this story, society is trying to return to normal after everyone was labeled possibly dangerous or a threat. Ghosh asks, how do we, as people, try to live on after that psychological shift? There are detailed descriptions of time travel, horrifying realities of how capitalism controls us even more after a global catastrophe, (very relevant!) and the marketing and sale of "Anomalies," or time loops. In this world, you can now pay to enter and exit them, like at a county fair. But Ghosh uses the anomaly unexpectedly—a grieving girl at a dead-end job enters the Anomaly to reconnect with her dead ex-girlfriend, with the speculative becoming a vessel for processing deep grief in an apocalyptic hellscape.

The story "Leaving Things" is narrated by a mid 20's girl who used to be a veterinarian, and is now staking out in her apartment with an apocalypse of wolves roaming the streets outside. She finds a werewolf baby and takes him in, raises him. Still, she's contemplating what her life has been and realizing the spell of capitalism and how it's swallowed her life, and how her defiant act to remain in her apartment, in the evacuated city, feels like an agency she hadn't always known. "I always felt like the odd one. I was sad often. Maybe this was because of my father or my mother, or the books I read or the songs I listened to, but for my whole adolescence, my insides squirmed." Though the extraordinary is happening in this story, werewolves taking over the city, patrols fighting them off, safety dwindling by the day, the character reflects instead on the very normal sadness of trying to find meaning in the day-to-day. This story rounds out with a provoking passage, "Who was I to think I was better than my mother? The little apartment Austin and I had was no different from the place we had left. We still went to our jobs, came home, and made dinner. We still had just a few rooms to call our own, a few friends to spend the weekends with. The hypnosis I feared had me in its chokehold before the wolves arrived."

There is a sense of dread in these stories that tricks us at first to blame the supernatural villains that show up: werewolves, political time travelers, vampires, mythical trees on other planets, a strange human-eating bird creature. But the genius of this book subverts these mythological happenings as regular, and shows how the real nightmares are global imperialism and capitalism, wrecking our planet and others. The first story, "Desiccation," starts off in a post-apocalyptic society of only women, where two girls are competing to be the best ice skater in their hometown and one of them is a vampire. The story begins with the line "Ma wanted me to befriend the only other Indian girl at our skating rink because Ma knew the rest of the girls didn't like me." The story brilliantly opens itself up to such a larger world just a few pages later.

"There's a war going on, unlike anything that preceded it. Eight years ago, things became so dire, they conscripted all the men in the country for a top-secret purpose. There were no battles we could see, no bloodshed on soil … shortly after, they switched all communications to local: mobile devices bricked, internet access restricted to nearby servers, all packages and shipments thoroughly regulated, landlines hitting an apologetic operator when people tried to dial outside their area codes… we entertained ourselves with hobbies, competitions, books, and old movies. I was lucky that my town had a well-established skating rink before things fell apart. I twirled and twirled around the rink every day until I ached too much to think, but to say I could "be anything" was a stretch."

Despite this apocalyptic world where this young girl is shunned both because of racism and because of her mother's job, tracking down all the boys in the city so that they disappear to "the bureau" when they turn 18, the main character also develops her first crush and has a sexual experience with Pritha, the other Indian girl at the rink. Of course, the girl was also found sucking the blood out of rats, though she wouldn't admit it.

"Are you a vampire"
"What is that?" She blinked, and I almost lost my nerve.

These complex characters did not reconcile much with their queerness or with the mythical creatures in these stories. It always felt natural and unquestioned. They are much more haunted by their dead mothers they haven't met yet, by the grief of their dead exes, and how they have been unable to process those and move on until they are performing their ex's autopsy. There is a planet-wielding, spiritual tree in the last story, "Persimmons," that is there to signify the speaker's relationship with her mother, how even being the children of prophecies leads to natural painful conflict. On this other planet, like any planet, mothers struggle to understand that they do not own or control their kids. This book subverted all my expectations for its spookiness, and made me realize the real horror is our own lives—we too can become monstrous.