Being a lifelong son of the borough, the Brooklyn pastoral—and by extension, the greater New York one—has always existed for me, both in life and in fiction, as the carrier and creator of local(ized) drama. It is a kinetic land whose neighborhoods, brownstones, English language centers, delicatessens, recreational grounds, and edifices, among other properties, house the universal and millennium-old emotions that fuel the beating heart of any good story: anger, sadness, desire, grief, joy, youthful rebellion, and, arguably the most vital of them all, love. Not love as some grandiose and ultimate monolith, but rather, love in its many divisions and intimate departments: familial love (storge), platonic love (philia), unconditional love (agape), romantic love (eros), guest love (xenia), and self-love (philautia). From Betty Smith’s classic A Tree Grows in Brooklyn to the kaleidoscopic oeuvre of June Jordan, love within the art and soul of the Brooklyn story has always been a test of physicalizing and historicizing its shape, precisely because Brooklyn is a place that uniquely resists any polished shapes and moments. It is chaotically intoxicating, and a storied love within that chaos must compartmentalize in privacies instead of vocalities, rooms instead of skyscrapers, in order to maturely define its nature beyond its mythology.
Yet what happens when love, in all its profusions and transformations, is fated to the fractured state of American immigration? Where does one go when the love you once knew must assimilate to a new country? If the love you once knew no longer feeds you, what will?
In Cherry Lou Sy’s debut novel, Love Can’t Feed You, these questions are brought to the forefront. The narrative opens with the arrival of Queenie and her family (Ma, Papa, and Junior) to Brooklyn from Manila, where the manufactured promises of the American Dream are quickly shed away, replaced with the harsh realities of living in the U.S. i.e., navigating a difficult job market and high cost of living. Initial hopes that the family sought to gain with their newcoming—such as a cinema-perfect life, a harvest of financial freedoms, and a claimed stake to an ever-changing New York—begin to crumble by an intense out-of-placeness and a continual confrontation with a “ledger of past sins and future woes,” and eventually, they lose connection with each other by inhabiting a type of dissociative individuality. Naturally, this creates a relational divide between Ma and Papa, so much so that they fight repeatedly in their new Brooklyn apartment, love becomes emaciated, life-worn, and escapism becomes commonplace.
Queenie is a soft-spoken witness who serves as the novel’s flaneur and coming-of-age protagonist. She is incredibly observant and often relies on distinct references (whether that be stored memories, historical facts, or literary remembrances) to try to comprehend her new life in the U.S. This need for reference veers into therapy and obsession, silence and explanation, awareness and surrender.
For example, when Queenie talks about the anguish of societal hierarchies with a friend, she internalizes this passage:
“I open my mouth and close it again, feeling the weight of unexpressed feeling in my chest. I don’t know where to begin. How do I tell him that this psychological gymnastics routine is a result of over three hundred years of Spanish rule, the Japanese and American occupations, and how over the decades the country once known as ‘the Pearl of the Orient’ became a cesspool of crime and poverty, falling apart from the corruption of the wealthy families that control all aspects of society, from cheap TV and film entertainments to the monopoly of industries?”
Queenie does not want to ask such questions aloud, revealing a frustrating habit of beautifully speculating yet remaining silent. Perhaps my frustration here is rooted in a kind of familiarity. How many of us—immigrants and children of diaspora—upon navigating the wilderness of a new milieu, are forced to dodge pointed questions, steer unwanted inquiries, and are left dreaming of running back conversations? How many of us yearn to reveal ourselves to others, but are unable to? How long can someone remain submissive until they break free? Queenie’s breaking point arrives at the end of adolescence, when her family separates over her mother’s revealed affair. Queenie’s father has a near-lethal response and is banished from home. Junior is forced to move to California. Suddenly, love has become conditional.
It is here where I am reminded of A Feather on the Breath of God by Sigrid Nunez and Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson, two seminal novels of the New York semi-autobiographical canon whose thematic shift from youthful interrogation to the nuances of womanhood is similarly traced here. Yet, as Another Brooklyn writes towards an optimistic tomorrow and A Feather on the Breath of God reflects on a consequential past, the latter half of Love Can’t Feed You insists on mining unpredictable happenings. From entering community college, beginning introductory work at a sex agency found on Craigslist, and willingly acting upon the impulses of her love, Queenie’s transformation—both physical and theoretical, sexual and emotional—moves away from a limiting past and towards a potential-laden present. Despite this, there remains a haunting cyclicality at play, an old nagging question: “Do you know what real woman do?” Building up to this point since Queenie’s youth, a constant that has remained—whether it was brought up in passing by her close friends or her parents—is whether Queenie truly understands the worldly tribulations and realities of womanhood. Like the duality of a coin, Ma has always represented the side of womanhood while Queenie represented the side of girlhood, and the balance of their relationship has always been predicated on each inhabiting and accepting their role. Yet it is now, past her formative years and no longer a girl, when we see Queenie beginning to formulate her own answer and connection to the question, shifting the balance as she wonders if Ma is yearning for a return to girlhood:
“‘Do you know what real women do?…’
The answer is a trapdoor. A girl wants to be a woman. She gets there, somehow—through directions, through maps, through stories. But when she reaches the destination, the ground shifts. Suddenly, what worked before no longer does. What glitters isn’t gold after all. She has no choice but to change. She pulls out a different person inside of herself, like a magician who pulls a rabbit out of a hat. A good girl now, a beggar woman later. Was that beggar woman always inside a good girl? The body holds multitudes.
Ma started out as a beggar woman. Was she ever a good girl?”
The body becomes a container, and a daughter slowly becomes a specter of herself, her mother, and the beliefs that have carried them both. Beliefs that are born in response to how the ethos of patriarchal and generational paradigms muzzle a woman’s liberatory spirit. It is here—this almost claustrophobic state of the in-between—that I find the narrative decision-making and brief vignettes of the novel at their sharpest and most hungry. Every page becomes a colorful snapshot, musings become personal testaments, and answerless questions forever ebb and flow, almost to an incantatory degree. As Simone de Beauvoir once wrote: “On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself—on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger.” As the novel reaches its conclusion, we behold the young adult days of Queenie finding herself instead of escaping—experiencing regretful missteps, confronting her grief, being an active participant in her wanted pleasure—and how throughout her findings, her love converts from being in service to others and turns inwards, tending to the bottled cravings of the self.
Just as Queenie observed her mother during her arrival to America, I find myself left with the same idea of her:
“Here she is now. A woman, once again transformed.”
Sy has written a heartfully-rendered novel full of desire. It’s a love letter to the tumultuousness of adapting to a new home, the lingering memories of the old, and to those who traverse the nebulous and fragile space between them both through love. I find the purest solace in that perhaps one of the numerous incarnations of love will be enough to feed us, even during the hours when we believe they no longer can.
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N.S. Ahmed is an Egyptian-American writer based in New York City. His writings have been featured or are forthcoming in publications such as BOMB, Adroit Journal, Joyland, Waxwing, Passages North, The Margins (AAWW), and The Offing. Currently, he is a CLS Scholar, a TEDx speaker, a Periplus Collective Fellow, a Shenandoah Editorial Fellow, and a recent graduate and Hertog Research Fellow at Hunter College’s MFA for fiction. He is presently working on a novel and short story collection.
