Liminal Souls: On Juliana Lamy’s You Were Watching from the Sand

Juliana Lamy’s You Were Watching from the Sand arrives with praise from Kevin Brockmeier and Laura van den Berg, two practitioners of the weird, and for good reason—her debut short story collection is, itself, weird. It’s a weirdness that announces itself right off the bat, at the beginning of the first and titular story, in a declaration that barrels past introduction, and past orientation, forcing familiarity with the protagonist and, perhaps, the reader: “Of course I remember you.” It’s a masquerade of a sentence, revealing nothing of the knowledge it claims but asking to be questioned all the same. The narrator hovers, disembodied but solid in voice. What follows then is a chant, incantatory, a loudness whose intent is to intimate and obliterate in the same breath. Consider this passage which comes halfway into the story—

You can’t remember, you don’t know, you don’t know, you don’t know because before it even started you’d left your body behind, you’d swam to the shore. You were watching it happen from the sand, some tiny Black boy with a face as blank as the rest of the universe, eyes so empty you couldn’t believe they’d ever been anything but.

—after a long evocation of the protagonist’s birth on a day when “all the branches of Exhaustion the River empty out inside their [everybody’s] stomachs,” after a lyrical detailing of secondary traumas, after the brief interpolation of a mother’s neurotic fixation on a religious apocalypse. It comes in a scene of direct trauma, the boy dissociating, vacating his body and the crime scene. He is unable to fully see himself for the duration of this story, the burden of intimation taken up by a divine witness (and architect) who he can’t not recognize when they meet in the coda which is at once a promise and a curse. In this opener, everything, including beauty and tenderness, is yolked inside with disaster and this is the mood of the collection.

Che, a secretly ajar girl, squats with Nadia on the upper floor of a bodega in “The Oldest Sensation is Anger”. Their relationship is rough-and-tumble, textured with minor provocations and unruly emotions, almost like cohabiting lovers. The latter is so legible in her desire for transcendence that she falls back down to earth each time she tries—“Bungee jumping when I swear, I bet anything, your ass couldn’t skydive.” The former is a riddle, a regenerative two truths and a lie, her life so disruptive to her Haitian town that she has been sent into exile in the United States. She has a “Simpsons suitcase,” a flimsiness in the specificity, as though she could have left it behind or could cast it aside any moment now and just go again.

Lamy’s collection is most comfortable in liminality and the instability of both geographical and metaphysical borders. No one is fully at home anywhere. They are either arriving or departing, appearing or disappearing, breaking in or escaping, running from or towards something. Sylpha from “Sylpha” is obsessed with Voyager (most likely the 1991 film about the post-disaster odyssey of a construction engineer), Kiki has to lay low in her mother’s sister’s house because she is in trouble in “Manticore,” Eli in “Eli” is kidnapped from his street and transported and transported for thirteen pages. And so on. 

By the final story, “Mermaids!”, all these instabilities have taken on a more logistical form: papers. “We both know that the government can send you back for not having papers,” the first-person narrator says and, a little later, “I wonder out loud if anybody’s ever tried to split papers before.” 

Despite or because of this, the characters carry their home, the Caribbean, within them like a vital organ, their minds tuned to the finer details of the histories and myths of their heritage. They are conduits and conductors for ancestral and spiritual practices. Take Sylpha’s explication of dreams for instance. 

Before Sylpha had any children, she’d wanted, more than anything, to train her dreams. All the Haitian women she knew had had dreams of the number of children they’d have before they existed in the world, and what kind of people they’d be, and Sylpha started to think that the dreaming was the point. The dreaming made a funnel of itself and forced real life to drip right through, forced real life, molten, to run here or there. And if she could train her dreams, she could control the pour of reality through them.

A private and quiet event is made into a communal and ritualistic spectacle. This is quite different from Jung’s and Freud’s dream theories although an alter ego saunters through “Belly” later. Rather, it harkens back to the arcane art of indigenous black cultures whose dream practices proceed against psychology’s run of play, the dreamer inducing the dream, coaxing something tangible out of it. In “Sylpha,” it is specifically “a Haitian thing.” 

Sylpha dreams up twins and gets, instead, a single beautiful child with a full head of hair. One auspicious phenomenon is replaced with a different one as though a token of compensation. A successful birth is, of course, cause for celebration, and yet there is despair. The fulfillment of her wish is truncated, maybe merely deferred, and in this is contained an alienation from all the Haitian women she knew. The inverse is the case in “Manticore.” Two adult sisters offset from their origin, desperate to figure out a daughter who may be possessed by godhood, pool their knowledge together to conjure their grandfather’s ghost using the vodou religion they inherited from him. It is a moment of preternatural connection between the living and the living, then the living and the ascended:

We kneel in close to each other, gathered together like fingers in a fist. I turn to my Grandpa’s picture, and I pray truths too ugly for Elijah’s god. The first? That when Kiki crashed into Arley outside of that D&B, ruptured him, a part of me wishes that I could have watched.

There’s something insistently inflammable about the bodies in You Were Watching from the Sand. They are fragile and often in danger; their identities are fluid or interchangeable with other peoples’ depending on the beholder’s desires; they are dead or incarnations of death. Their souls, however, are sturdy and ‘wayward’ in historian and writer Saidiya Hartman’s broader sense of the word: “To claim the right to opacity. To strike, to riot, to refuse. To love what is not loved. To be lost to the world.” 

Not unlike Hartman in her ethnography, Lamy fills her prose up with the world. She hyphenates traditions and genres. She stacks up impressions and sensations to the point of almost synesthesia. The collection roils with extended metaphors, a live-wire lyricism, and mythic language. Her stories appear to talk back to other writers. Is that a whiff of Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Husband Stitch” in “The Oldest Sensation is Anger”? Does “July in New Orleans” bear a note of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods? As earlier mentioned, Freud’s psychology manifests androgynously in “belly,” incandescent like the book they come in.

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“You Were Watching from the Sand” is available now, from Red Hen Press.

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