The Stories of Devil-Girl E-Book

Anya Achtenberg

• Herausgeber: Modern History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Serie: Reflections of America
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2008

Seitenzahl: 114

Beschreibung

"Poignant and fierce, this book is moving, beautifully written, and urgently relevant."
"Devil-Girl's stories are all of our stories, all of the 'discarded and demonized', all of us who have had to fight to survive, to fight to tell our truths. Achtenberg's wise survivor, Devil-Girl, is witness and seer, and her words are sustenance. There is much pain in this book, much wisdom, and a kind of beauty that sears itself into memory, a fierce beauty that is as necessary as air. Read this book."
--Lisa D. Chave, Author of Destruction Bay; In An Angry Season
"Achtenberg is a cutting-edge voice in the literature of the postglobalization age, an era in which we are uprooted geographically and spiritually, and redefining what it means to be home. What a superbly written book! Read it and be changed."
--Demetria Martinez, Author of Mother Tongue
"Stunning and original! Powerful 'make it new' language that creates-through the runaway energy and precise detail of the storytelling voice--a disturbing world in all its particularities, only to transcend it by grappling with what's at stake in the larger world."
--Stratis Haviaras, Founder and former editor of Harvard Review
"An amazing piece of bravura writing! Devil-Girl takes us from destitution to seedy glamour as a homeless vulnerable young woman tries to survive the savagery of the streets. Poignant and fierce, this book is moving, beautifully written, and urgently relevant."
--Kathleen Spivack, Author, Director: Advanced Writing Workshop
Book #1 in the Reflections of America Series
an imprint of Loving Healing Press

Leseprobe

The Stories ofDevil-Girl

by Anya Achtenberg

Reflections of America SeriesModern History Press

The Stories of Devil-Girl

Book #1 in the Reflections of America Series

Copyright © 2008 Anya Achtenberg

Author information at www.anyaachtenberg.com

No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Achtenberg, Anya.

The stories of Devil-Girl / by Anya Achtenberg. — 1st ed.

    p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN-13: 978-1-932690-62-0 (trade paper : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 1-932690-62-X (trade paper : alk. paper)

1. Racially mixed people—Fiction. 2. Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3551.C418S76 2008

813'.54—dc22

2008013809

Published by: Modern History Press, an imprint of

Loving Healing Press

5145 Pontiac Trail

Ann Arbor, MI 48105

USA

http://www.LovingHealing.com or

[email protected]

Fax [phone]

M  o  d  e  r  n    H  i  s  t  o  r  y    P  r  e  s  s

Reflections of America Series

The Stories of Devil-Girl by Anya Achtenberg

How to Write A Suicide Note: serial essays that saved a woman's life by Sherry Quan Lee

“The Reflections of America Series highlights autobiography, fiction, and poetry which express the quest to discover one's context within modern society.”

From Modern History Press

The Stories of Devil-Girl

Dedicated to allwho were early discarded, demonized,and wildly underestimated.

Praise for The Stories of Devil-Girl

“Anya Achtenberg's The Stories of Devil-Girl is a powerful and succinct account of survival. The narrator, who is by turns surrealistic and unflinchingly realistic, recounts her journey from her beginnings in an immigrant NYC Jewish family nearly wiped out by pogroms and by the Holocaust, through her abuse at their hands, her life on the mean streets, and ultimately into a beginning at healing and forgiveness, as she becomes a teacher of others who were victimized, other Devil-Girls. Devil-Girl and those whom she meets along her path, for better or worse—these characters, these voices, are absolutely unforgettable. I wish every teacher would read this book.”

—Patricia Clark Smith, Professor Emerita, University of New Mexico; Writer of French Canadian, Irish, and Micmac descent

“The Stories of Devil-Girl is a collage of voices weaving birth and death, desire and love, anger and rage, into a powerful spell of words as the speaker ‘raves in the road and stops traffic with her stillness.’ Rooted in the writer's soul and in Jewish culture, this novella speaks the humanity of us all. By writing in the voice of Devil-Girl, Achtenberg arrives at fresh insights into characters who haunt our daily lives. To come to grips with our warring souls, she shows us ‘the difference between prayer and curse.’ At times the speaker seems like the devil of disappointment and death; at other moments she is the lyric of prayer. Whether Devil-Girl or Everyman, Achtenberg enlightens us elegantly and eloquently through her gripping work.”

—Preston Hood, Author of A Chill I Understand, Honorable Mention, 2007 Maine Literary Award

“Devil-Girl's stories are all of our stories, all of the ‘discarded and demonized’, all of us who have had to fight to survive, to fight to tell our truths. Achtenberg's wise survivor, Devil-Girl, is witness and seer, and her words are sustenance. There is much pain in this book, much wisdom, and a kind of beauty that sears itself into memory, a fierce beauty that is as necessary as air. Read this book.”

—Lisa D. Chavez, Poet (Destruction Bay; In An Angry Season), and Nonfiction Writer

“Achtenberg is a cutting-edge voice in the literature of the post-globalization age, an era in which we are uprooted geographically and spiritually, and redefining what it means to be home. What a superbly written book! Read it and be changed.”

—Demetria Martinez, author of Mother Tongue

“Stunning and original! Powerful ‘make it new’ language that creates—through the runaway energy and precise detail of the storytelling voice—a disturbing world in all its particularities, only to transcend it by grappling with what's at stake in the larger world.”

—Stratis Haviaras, Founder and former editor of Harvard Review

“An amazing piece of bravura writing! Devil-Girl takes us from destitution to seedy glamour as a homeless vulnerable young woman tries to survive the savagery of the streets of New York. Poignant and fierce, this book is moving, beautifully written, and urgently relevant.”

—Kathleen Spivack, Author, and Director: Advanced Writing Workshop; Visiting Professor of American Literature and Creative Writing: Université de Paris, France

About The Stone of Language:

“Achtenberg is a poet of lyrical intensity… interested in detail for the wealth of revelation and music it will yield up.”

—Luis Francia, The Village Voice

Table of Contents

Introduction

Storytelling

Mother and Child

Mother and Father

Curse

Prayer

The Birthday Girl's Requests

Falling in Love

Lesson in the Elevator at A&S

First Try

Coffee and Wine

Pictures

Work

Search for the No

Marriage Rituals

Devil-Girl Goes Home

Swimming

On the Way to School

Education, or Getting Into the Pictures

Hurricane, or A Family Visit

Devil-Children

Greeting the Millennium with Devil-Girl

Milagrito (Little Miracle)

Notes for The Stories of Devil-Girl

About the Author

Introduction

Devil-Girl has been through many incarnations. She has been a double-CD set and is still an MP3 audio file. A nickname for a dear friend's daughter; a candy bar discovered long after Devil-Girl had named herself in my head; and, after going a million miles away to the other side of the mirror, she is perhaps being reborn in Devi Mau, the central character of History Artist, a novel-still-in-progress as of the date of this publication of The Stories of Devil-Girl.

As various people would question my racial/ethnic “identity”, even to the point of the bluntest question presented in the sweetest tones, “What are you, dear?”, so may readers question this small volume, looking for its identity in its genre. Looks like prose, sounds like poetry, at least, some of the time. Reads like a fable, but smacks of the truth. Just as I would respond to the question about my identity with a simple, “It's all true,” so would I admit the mixed identity of The Stories of Devil-Girl with a nod to the way that history must not be buried or allowed to remain the food of amnesiacs. While it can be a challenge to keep track of the truth, I must offer this so-called novella as a true hybrid that aims with its lies and its music only for the edge of truth, and its ability to cut. Cut through, cut away, cut into.

The writing of this novella was much longer than the volume is, and moved with me from my main writerly occupation as a poet into my obsession with storytelling in prose. It took along my own story on the journey of the writing and dropped it down an airshaft or into the sea to explode, or to splatter, into fiction. Once mostly poetry, it left the stutter of line breaks that would not tell what I needed to tell.

The Stories of Devil-Girl is prose fiction, with much that is autobiographical, and, as our lives always are, pushed by poetry.

It is, more for me than for the reader, a document and a time capsule, an air bubble, the black box from the crash, the beginning of breath. Lifesaver. It was the release for me into becoming a fiction writer and novelist. It marks for me the letting go of autobiography, until perhaps some distant moment, and the freeing of my voice into the multiplication of characters who somehow hold the forces that move us. My first memory is that of someone trying to strangle me in my crib, a memory I seem to always have had, reasonable in context. I read, after this novella was mostly complete, of the first woman, Lilith. It is, then, no surprise, but an act of balance to find a voice in Devil-Girl—the demonized speaker who roams the globe not to strangle babes in the crib, but to protect children.

What this novella is for the reader will, of course, vary, but I can only hope that it is a container holding something of use, something to connect to, something that opens up a bit more space for memory and story, for passion for the world. It is in this spirit that I now offer in print The Stories of Devil-Girl.

—Anya AchtenbergMay 2008

Storytelling

I was born September the first, my entry into the visible world precisely following the month of August, Devil's Month in Bolivia, far away and not so far from New York, an expensive city because there is always the Devil to pay. I was born here as the one I had violated during another lifetime, I'm sure of it. I was born here to walk the avenue between life and death. To fill out the forms of denial. To rave in the road and stop traffic with my stillness, as some do with their anger. To prowl the bootless alleyways, to drink the spoiled fluids of men. To flail beneath the Devil. To sprout breasts in the lunar lots of Bushwick, where the maws of an old Frigidaire caught my friend Penelope and she froze to a fetus, knees to lips, gray fists clenched.

Devil's month, exhausted and febrile, lay down in me, and I wailed a love song to the Devil, that dapper demon, as I fell from the clutch of my mother's thighs and she waved me away, and something invisible scooped me up and kissed me on one baby nipple, then bit it hard, as I bleated and bucked and shivered in the whiteness of the hospital corridor, fleeing dark as a stain on the Maimonides sheet.

Actually, as I recall, we never made it to the hospital. I couldn't wait, and had for some time been having nightmares of forceps sliding around my tufted skull and squeezing me past thought, or, if not that far, just into the land of deformity. I lived with that nightmare for the last month of my float, and came up pigeon-toed and anxious.

Because of the circumstances and moment of my birth in a speeding taxicab on the evening of the Devil's retreat to gather up force for his next spree, and because of my furious race to be severed from my mother after the nightmare of strangulation I slept with all those months, because of my flight, then, from my origins, my howl moved through all parts of the city, and returned to each neighborhood as I searched for the word my mother said to my first ear at the moment I slipped into hearing the solid world. Repelled so far from the welcoming word and the breast of life, my body was able to measure distance in units of hunger and fear.

Now, understand this, it was because of the silence that spoke in me, because of the daily stories that fed me through the window and the mountainous decay of events in each room that waited for a teller loud enough to be heard, that I have the ability to tell a story. It was because of playing at life in my mind, because of how things shattered, and because of hands. It was because my screams always gave me something to cry about, something to hide and seek. And it was because words also fly away from their origins, and in their dream lives continue to search for them in unbearable whisperings, that I possess the ability to read a man according to his reactions to my storytelling.

Soon, I could measure the distance between a man and his soul, as well as the speed of his flight away from it, by the strength of his punch and the angle at which his knee jabbed into the softest part of my thigh. If he could finish a rape, the taking or the buying peppered with a beating, after a story from my collection, I judged that he had journeyed too far from his soul to ever return home. I soon realized that, for some, a good story only helped to push a rape along. But it was only after a certain someone, a solid businessman with three kids, hurled me through the air into the wall, that I fully understood the power of the word and the limits of matter.

Pretending that I'd never had a mother, I told him a story of myself as a little girl who suddenly appeared in a lively neighborhood uptown with absolutely no memory of a home or parents. I depicted my arrival as a remarkable event, but one with no history. I began to speculate on the route of my entry into girlhood, and on the invisible world that rubs up against the one we can see, from which, perhaps, that girlchild had come. He had no interest in talking spirit talk, and while a man's silence sometimes stopped my words, at other times it set my old tongue wagging with stories. I began to tale him, rapidly. This new child, I said, wandered from tenement to tenement, taken in by families from everywhere, a Black family from North Carolina who watched over me fiercely, a Puerto Rican family who surrounded me with questions and with children who matched me story for story, a Jamaican family who taught me secret language, an old Russian couple who hugged me and wept, on and on, the list drove the fellow crazy. He didn't want to believe me, but he began to enter the weave of the fabric I spun, and could see in my Devil eyes and wild hair that this might all be true. He put his mouth to my ear, but I switched and put mine to his, to whisper more tales.

I described myself to him like this, having read it in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein