the characters
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Exit
My dear reader, it is late. Please switch off the light. Turn over the page. Sleep.
dream
And when you look up at the stars, do you not feel a sensation as of falling forward, turning in? Are you not like the dry seedpod dispersing seed, the wave crashing onto the beach, the wrist turning to present the watch face? Is not all of life a turning in? Do you not see your own shadow cast across the dome of the cosmos as the warm sphere beneath you spins? Can you not sift the stars with your fingers? And the sky is beautiful. It gleams. And your eyes are closed, not open. Dream.
the sisters, outside
The sisters are called on from both directions. They are pulled at from below and from above. Tonight, they step outside after Mother and Father have gone to bed to sleep the unenchanted sleep of the toiling wage earner in the new country, tucked beneath their new-life comforters, which make Father’s feet tingle and swell with false heat, and Mother’s bladder fill too early in the night with the same false heat, and cause husband and wife to toss and turn under a barrage of false dreams, dreams like many supermarket apples. And the girls, unable to sleep, small and wafery, step outside and onto the lawn, wet with dew. They gather beneath the grandfather tree, now wakeful and watchful in the night, as he is not by day when he is more tree than memory. The sky is clear. And the sisters are pulled on from below and they sense the earthworm, warm and moist and not-forgotten beneath the skin of the earth under their feet. And the worm, which writhes and works tirelessly, turns the earth in all places and with equal force, minuscule, in all places minute, but proportionate in all places, so that the earth is tilled and the earth turns and is made to rotate on its tilted pin. And while the earthworm wiggles and turns the earth, the earth draws and draws its offspring to itself and pins them to her surfaces, holds there their many feet, many and multiplying, feet crooked and clawed, hoofed and horned, feet spread and flat. And the sisters, with their soft, arched feet bound to the earth and kissed by filaments of dewy grass, walk out onto the lawn to stand bound, drawn by earth and earthworm. But their eyes are called to the sky. Above them, the Milky Way writhes and pulses.
The sisters are not asleep. They are tugged at from below and from above and it is neither the earth nor the sky that makes them girls, flesh and living. It is the draw, calling them up and pulling them down, that makes their blood circuit through their small bodies and makes their breath leave and return, exit and return, and makes them stand upright. But how is it possible we should be standing upright, like reeds, we are animal and yet we stand upright and the blood circulates, is drawn down and then fights this pull to rise up only to fall again and rush upward again and plummet again. And standing upright, the girls are not gods, and they are not of the gods, and the gods were conceited to think so. It is not god who speaks through the child, the child born of two opposing forces, forever bringing these two colossal forces into equilibrium, at every second breathing them into balance, at every moment knowing that she has little choice if she is to stand upright, if she is to feel the star’s light upon her cheek and the earth’s moisture between her toes. It is a strength the gods cannot fathom and can therefore not claim as their own. It was an illusion. Theirs. From the beginning. When the gods passed over the earth and saw the upright children, they could not help but smile and could not help but weep and this weeping, new to them, kept them gazing down with parental pride. And with the pride of parents new, they took to dancing, putting on their best theater to entertain the earthbound child, all the while their own gazes set and bound upon the child. But the child has parents elsewhere and, like all orphans, senses these parents but does not know them, senses them and yearns for them, comes out nightly in search of them. The mysteries of the world lie deep. The child, bound, upright, yearns but does not know that the writhing worm, the spinning earth, and the spiraling arms of the galaxy are the forces that move her blood, and fill, then relieve, her lungs.
Z
Zenith. The point on the celestial sphere directly above the observer. The point that drew and drew the sisters’ eyes.
Zenith. The highest point reached in the sky by a celestial body. The point where nightly the sisters’ forms, drawn crudely with the light of passing stars, linger momentarily.
Christian Fagerlund
Fowzia Karimi was born in Kabul, Afghanistan and grew up in Southern California. She immigrated to United States in 1980 after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Karimi has a background in Studio Art and Biology, and received her MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College in Oakland, California. Her work explores the correspondence on the page between the written and the visual arts. She is a recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and has illustrated The Brick House by Micheline Aharonian Marcom (Awst Press) and Vagrants and Uncommon Visitors by A. Kendra Greene (Anomalous Press).
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AVAILABLE NOW FROM DEEP VELLUM
MICHÈLE AUDIN · One Hundred Twenty-One Days
translated by Christiana Hills · FRANCE
BAE SUAH · Recitation
translated by Deborah Smith · SOUTH KOREA
EDUARDO BERTI · The Imagined Land
translated by Charlotte Coombe · ARGENTINA
CARMEN BOULLOSA · Texas: The Great Theft · Before · Heavens on Earth
translated by Samantha Schnee · Peter Bush · Shelby Vincent · MEXICO
LEILA S. CHUDORI · Home
translated by John H. McGlynn · INDONESIA
SARAH CLEAVE, ed. · Banthology: Stories from Banned Nations ·
IRAN, IRAQ, LIBYA, SOMALIA, SUDAN, SYRIA & YEMEN
ANANDA DEVI · Eve Out of Her Ruins
translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman · MAURITIUS
ALISA GANIEVA · Bride and Groom · The Mountain and the Wall
translated by Carol Apollonio · RUSSIA
ANNE GARRÉTA · Sphinx · Not One Day
translated by Emma Ramadan · FRANCE
JÓN GNARR · The Indian · The Pirate · The Outlaw
translated by Lytton Smith · ICELAND
GOETHE · The Golden Goblet: Selected Poems
translated by Zsuzsanna Ozsváth and Frederick Turner · GERMANY
NOEMI JAFFE · What are the Blind Men Dreaming?
translated by Julia Sanches & Ellen Elias-Bursac · BRAZIL
CLAUDIA SALAZAR JIMÉNEZ · Blood of the Dawn
translated by Elizabeth Bryer · PERU
JUNG YOUNG MOON · Seven Samurai Swept Away in a River · Vaseline Buddha
translated by Yewon Jung · SOUTH KOREA
KIM YIDEUM · Blood Sisters
translated by Ji yoon Lee · SOUTH KOREA
JOSEFINE KLOUGART · Of Darkness
translated by Martin Aitken · DENMARK
YANICK LAHENS · Moonbath
translated by Emily Gogolak · HAITI
FOUAD LAROUI · The Curious Case of Dassoukine’s Trousers
translated by Emma Ramadan · MOROCCO
MARIA GABRIELA LLANSOL · The Geography of Rebels Trilogy: The Book of Communities; The Remaining Life; In the House of July & August
translated by Audrey Young · PORTUGAL
PABLO MARTÍN SÁNCHEZ · The Anarchist Who Shared My Name
translated by Jeff Diteman · SPAIN
DOROTA MASLOWSKA · Honey, I Killed the Cats
translated by Benjamin Paloff · POLAND
BRICE MATTHIEUSSENT · Revenge of the Translator
translated by Emma Ramadan · FRANCE
LINA MERUANE · Seeing Red
translated by Megan McDowell · CHILE
VALÉRIE MRÉJEN · Black Forest
translated by Katie Shireen Assef · FRANCE
FISTON MWANZA MUJILA · Tram 83
translated by Roland Glasser · DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO
ILJA LEONARD PFEIJFFER · La Superba
translated by Michele Hutchison · NETHERLANDS
RICARDO PIGLIA · Target in the Night
translated by Sergio Waisman · ARGENTINA
SERGIO PITOL · The Art of Flight · The Journey · The Magician of Vienna · Mephisto’s Waltz: Selected Short Stories
translated by George Henson · MEXICO
EDUARDO RABASA · A Zero-Sum Game
translated by Christina MacSweeney · MEXICO
ZAHIA RAHMANI · “Muslim”: A Novel
translated by Matthew Reeck · FRANCE/ALGERIA
JUAN RULFO · The Golden Cockerel & Other Writings
translated by Douglas J. Weatherford · MEXICO
OLEG SENTSOV · Life Went On Anyway
translated by Uilleam Blacker · UKRAINE
MIKHAIL SHISHKIN · Calligraphy Lesson: The Collected Stories
translated by Marian Schwartz, Leo Shtutin, Mariya Bashkatova, Sylvia Maizell · RUSSIA
ÓFEIGUR SIGURÐSSON · Örœfi: The Wasteland
translated by Lytton Smith · ICELAND
FORTHCOMING FROM DEEP VELLUM
MARIO BELLATIN · Mrs. Murakami’s Garden
translated by Heather Cleary · MEXICO
MAGDA CARNECI · FEM
translated by Sean Cotter · ROMANIA
MIRCEA CĂRTĂRESCU · Solenoid
translated by Sean Cotter · ROMANIA
MATHILDE CLARK · Lone Star
translated by Martin Aitken · DENMARK
LEYL ERBIL · A Strange Woman
translated by Nermin Menemencioğlu · TURKEY
ANNE GARRÉTA · In/concrete
translated by Emma Ramadan · FRANCE
GOETHE · Faust
translated by Zsuzsanna Ozsváth and Frederick Turner · GERMANY
PERGENTINO JOSÉ · Red Ants: Stories
translated by Tom Bunstead and the author · MEXICO
FOWZIA KARIMI · Above Us the Milky Way: An Illuminated Alphabet · USA
TAISIA KITAISKAIA · The Nightgown & Other Poems · USA
DMITRY LIPSKEROV · The Tool and the Butterflies
translated by Reilly Costigan-Humes & Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler · RUSSIA
GORAN PETROVIĆ · At the Lucky Hand, aka The Sixty-Nine Drawers
translated by Peter Agnone · SERBIA
C.F. RAMUZ · Jean-Luc Persecuted
translated by Olivia Baes · SWITZERLAND
TATIANA RYCKMAN · The Ancestry of Objects · USA
JESSICA SCHIEFAUER · Girls Lost
translated by Saskia Vogel · SWEDEN
MIKE SOTO · A Grave Is Given Supper: Poems · USA
MÄRTA TIKKANEN · The Love Story of the Century
translated by Stina Katchadourian · FINLAND
From Rona Jaffe Award-winner Fowzia Karimi, a highly anticipated, lushly illustrated debut novel about a young family forced to flee their war-ravaged homeland of Afghanistan, leaving behind everything and everyone beloved and familiar. The novel’s structure is built around the alphabet, twenty-six pieces written in the first person that sk
etch a through-line of memory for the lives of the five daughters, mother, and father. Ghost stories and fairytales are woven with old family photographs and medieval-style watercolor illuminations to create an origin story of loss and remembrance.
Above Us the Milky Way is a story about war, immigration, and the remarkable human capacity to create beauty out of horror. As a young family attempts to reconstruct their lives in a new and peaceful country, they are daily drawn back to the first land through remembrance and longing, by news of the continued suffering and loss of loved ones, and by the war dead, who have immigrated and reside with them, haunting their days and illuminating the small joys and wonders offered them by the new land.
Praise for Above Us the Milky Way
“A sharply etched treatise on the objects of memory … powerful in both its beauty and its uncompromising horror whose themes are as sadly timely as they are eternal.”
—Starred Review, Kirkus Reviews
“A skilled technician whose prose flows like intuition, Karimi parses the beats of her paragraphs with the attention of a poet. Rich with images and imagery, the book is beautiful, both illuminated and illuminating.”
—Starred review, Foreword Reviews
“Karimi’s inventive, allegorical debut renders a family’s wartime emigration through a polyphonic mix of voices and genres along with evocative color illustrations and photographs … Fans of Lost Children Archive will love this.”
—Publishers Weekly
“An ambitious abecedary of family, trauma, and life, and a love letter to the universe with many moments of power and resplendence.”
—Jennifer Croft, Homesick, translator of Man Booker International Prize-winner Flights
“Reading this book—its use of the alphabet, its art, its running commentary on story, on what is deeply human and what is vaster and greater than the human, the realization and reckoning of which helps make for what is the human, our fleeting place among the places—is like coming upon a forgotten dream suddenly remembered and recognized, a dream feeling more familiar and real than whatever reality supposedly was, to the point that maybe what was in the dream—or this book—was real. This is storytelling of a high, profound, most beautiful order.”
—Rick Simonson, Elliott Bay Book Company (Seattle, WA)
“A stunning, visionary debut: it hums and glows with blinding brilliance and profound humanity. It’s a book about war, love, family, displacement, dreams, grief, beauty, and the secret alchemies that form our inner worlds. At once boldly cosmic and keenly relevant to our times, this book is a peerless treasure.”