Two great fears of people are that they will be forgotten or that they will be not known by at least one other person important to them. Both fears are addressed with clear-eyed compassion in Justin Torres' National Book Award-winner, Blackouts.
In a decrepit building in the desert, known as the Palace, an aged queer Puerto Rican man is slowly dying. He is found by a younger queer Puerto Rican man who spent about a week with him years ago in a mental hospital. Their mostly silent companionship then is now a conversation. Sometimes, the younger man, who is nameless but addressed as "nene", tells stories or asks questions. The older man, Juan, shares bits and pieces of his life, and quotations from poets. He also shares two volumes of a compilation of personal accounts of gays and lesbians gathered in the '20s and '30s, Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns.
The books have been turned into volumes of erasure poetry, in which words are blacked out and those remaining create a form of poem. Samples are included throughout Torres' book. They exist as testimony that, no matter how factual the original testimony may have been manipulated, what remains gets to the core of individuals searching to be their own true selves. Although the blackouts of text made "a work of intense observation transformed into a work of erasure", the result reinforces the humanity of the original work's subjects.
The books are real. So is one of the original researchers, Jan Gay, whose contribution was erased from the record. Juan goes by the last name of Gay, and in the novel he was a child muse of Jan's wife, children's book illustrator Zhendya Gay.
The graphic illustrations and photographs included in Blackouts contribute to the reader's realization that it doesn't matter how much of the story is fiction and how much is factual. What matters is that all of it, especially the feelings, hopes, dreams and heartaches of the characters/people depicted, are real and true.
One passage in Blackouts is a beautiful display of the difference between being in something and observing from the outside. The younger man is spending the evening drinking in a bar called the Glass Coffin, which has two long windows through which they can be seen. The nighttime scene is one that Hopper could have painted after creating his masterpiece, Nighthawks.
Instead of dancing the few men left remain seated, and now and then one or the other raised his arm in recognition of a tune he particularly enjoys and then kind of floats his hand through the air and mouths the words. Passing by, you might think they're casting spells.
Juan, nene and others in Blackouts fight the ongoing battle of hatred against who they are, both as non-heterosexual and non-white. It is noted both groups of people are accused of being prone to episodes of mental illness because of who they are. The characters actually do suffer from periods of blackouts.
As Juan tells nene about the era between world wars,
The straight culture turned its attention to our culture, and the sudden increased visibility of course provoked a backlash.
Instead of a polemic against the ignorance of hatred, Torres uses these fundamental truths to anchor the search ever-present in the stories the two men tell each other each night, as Juan lays dying. The poetry in the stories adds a dignity to what is conveyed, a way to let the listener or reader know that regardless of the circumstances of any one life, we are all complex beings desiring love and to belong.
Blackouts is a book in which the reader can easily race through the pages or take time and go back and forth, marveling at the beauty of human experience regardless of the outcome of a life. That in the midst of sorrow and searching, there are moments of grace and love. And the memory of love remains.
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