When I read literature and stories, I want to be confronted with the truth, especially around pregnancy and birth and infant loss and women’s bodies.
shannon gibney
(March 31, 2021) This special episode is devoted to an issue so many women experience, and so few people discuss. Shannon Gibney and Kao Kalia Yang, co-editors of What God Is Honored Here: Writings on Miscarriage and Infant Loss by and for Native Women and Women of Color, talk about why it’s necessary to give voice to this common pain.
FROM THE EPISODE: READING LIST & REFERENCES
What God Is Honored Here: Writings on Miscarriage and Infant Loss by and for Native Women and Women of Color
Kao Kalia Yang
RESOURCES FOR GRIEF & BEREAVEMENT
From What God Is Honored Here
Shannon Gibney
Shannon Gibney is an award-winning author of books of all kinds—from novels to anthologies to essays to picture books. She writes for adults, children, and everyone in-between. The through-line in all her work is stories that may have previously gone untold. Sometimes these perspectives have remained hidden because the speakers have not had an outlet for their stories; other times, the stories carry darkness and fear that we prefer to look away from. What God Is Honored Here: Writings on Miscarriage and Infant Loss by and for Native Women and Women of Color (University of Minnesota Press, October, 2019), exemplifies this approach, as does Gibney’s most recent novel, Dream Country (Dutton, 2018), which Kirkus describes as “a necessary reckoning of tensions within the African diaspora—an introduction to its brokenness and a place to start healing.”
Kao Kalia Yang
Kao Kalia Yang is an award-winning Hmong-American writer. She is the author of the memoirs The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir, The Song Poet, and Somewhere in the Unknown World. Yang is also the author of the children’s books, A Map Into the World, The Shared Room, and The Most Beautiful Thing. She co-edited the ground-breaking collection What God is Honored Here?: Writings on Miscarriage and Infant Loss By and For Indigenous Women and Women of Color. Yang’s literary nonfiction work has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Chautauqua Prize, the PEN USA literary awards, the Dayton’s Literary Peace Prize, and garnered three Minnesota Book awards. Her children’s books have been listed as an American Library Association Notable Book, a Zolotow Honor, a Kirkus Best Book of the Year, winner of a Minnesota Book Award in Children’s Literature and the Heartland Bookseller’s Award. Kao Kalia Yang is a recipient of the McKnight Fellowship in Prose, the International Institute of Minnesota’s Olga Zoltai Award for her community leadership and service to New Americans, and the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts’ 2019 Sally Award for Social Impact.
sound bites
Writers look to literature to reflect our experience as a way to start to heal, as a way to start to put trauma in perspective. @GibneyShannon
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In putting together this book, we could finally meet these stories and place them somewhere in the spectrum of our lives, in ways that we couldn’t have earlier. Before having my boys, I would have never been ready to meet Baby Jules in the way that I am able to today. I think we were then ready to carry not only our own stories but the gravity of others.
Kao Kalia Yang
It made me feel more isolated to encounter the stock language around stillbirth and miscarriage, like, “Oh my angel,” you know … “now she’s in heaven, and I know my heart will never be the same.”
Shannon Gibney
When I read literature and stories, I want to be confronted with the truth, especially around pregnancy and birth and infant loss and women’s bodies. @GibneyShannon
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“There are all these things shrouded in mystery around women’s bodies, and a lot of it is painful, difficult stuff. @GibneyShannon
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One of the most important things about this journey for me is knowing that we were not alone. In putting together this book, we felt our togetherness rise. That was one of the gifts of this experience. For all of the hurting, there was in that so much hope and so much beauty.
Kao Kalia Yang
One of the hardest things to ask was for our writers to linger. There are moments when a writer wants to run fast across a landscape of trauma or grief. One of the hardest things we had to ask contributors was to just slow down. And some of them said, “I need more time,” or “every time I try, all I find is tears, all I find is space.”
Kao Kalia Yang
There was the violence of what we had experienced, and then there was the violence from, in so many ways, white majority culture. From the very onset, when we published the call for contributors, we got personal messages from white people saying, “Why are you isolating us? Why are you excluding us?” And then, when we got the submissions, white men submitted. The evening of our launch event, a person whose social media icon was a rifle posted in the launch page. We were meeting certain forces in the majority culture along the way, where Shannon and I understood there is always a measure of risk that we were taking. At every turn, Shannon and I chose to do the work before us as courageously as possible.
Kao Kalia Yang
The writer decides who you want to be, whether you’re going to give in to bigger forces trying to push down voices and presences like yours, or while you take up that space and you do so with dignity. @kaokaliayang
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“There are particular ways women are embodied in American dominant discourse. We’re allowed to be objectified sexually, and in this cult of motherhood, as long as all your buttons are in a row. You can be a mess, but you can’t be a grotesque mess. We know that miscarriage and infant loss and dead babies happen, but we don’t really want to know about how that happened in the body and what that feels like and what are the ramifications of that, in terms of recovery and all this stuff. We really don’t want to hear about that as a culture.
Shannon Gibney
There are particular ways women are embodied in American dominant discourse. In this cult of motherhood as long as all your buttons are in a row, you can be a mess, but you can’t be a grotesque mess. @GibneyShannon
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There are many reasons women are separated from their children that our country has never reckoned with; the forces that create broken mothers who have to be stronger than they are to hold some idea of family and legacy. @kaokaliayang
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Women need representation in research. We need representation in literature. We need you to understand that our lives are important to the whole of this operation, the human experiment. @kaokaliayang
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In this pandemic, all of our rituals for grief have been effectively obliterated. We cannot grieve together. I think about the layering of that for women who have undergone miscarriage and infant loss in this pandemic. These are the undercurrents of our existences. They’re not on pause because we’re going through something else right now. I cannot begin to conceive of what it must have been like for so many women who’ve experienced loss at this time, when our focus is on the magnitude of this big thing we are suffering from. Also layered and complicated is that onion of womanhood that nobody really wants to peel back the surface of.
Kao Kalia Yang
After a reading, an older white woman came up to me and said, “You just said it. You just said, ‘The baby’s dead.’” She was like, “I never felt like I could say that, just say what happened. I had to sort of dance around it delicately—she didn’t make it, we lost her, or she’s in heaven now. I never could just lay out the bare truth of my baby died. She’s dead. Because I knew that other people couldn’t handle it, and I had to take care of them and their emotional needs.”
Shannon Gibney
A woman is never going to forget a baby she’s had ever, no matter what the outcome is. @GibneyShannon
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I grew a person inside me, and they died before they came out, and that is written in my body forever. It’s written on my soul. @GibneyShannon
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The reason I feel such searing pain that cleaves me is because of the immensity of the love I had and still have for my daughter. You can’t have one thing without the other. @GibneyShannon
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When my daughter was born, something inside of me was able to fly again. But the flight was now so much more treacherous than I had ever imagined. I knew the fragility of life in a way that I couldn’t have conceived of. And now I write from this place that cherishes life so much more than before. There’s a gentleness with which I approach all living things, because of the loss of the living thing inside of me, because of my own fragile life in the days after. That informs everything I do on the page, the sensitivity of my touch, the gentleness of my regard for everything that lives; how hard it is to live. I wanted to speak to that, how we are forever changed by our experiences, and how these experiences enable and embody so much of who we are across the realms of our lives.
Kao Kalia Yang
If you’re writing and not telling the truth, I don’t know why you would write. We can’t choose the truth that we’ve been tasked to document. @GibneyShannon
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There’s a gentleness with which I approach all living things because of the loss of the living thing inside me. That informs everything I do on the page; the gentleness of my regard for how hard it is to live. @kaokaliayang
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