Ink

Sabrina Vourvoulias

Description

Her name is Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand glows world-wide welcome. "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me." America has lost its way. The strongest of people can be found in the unlikeliest of places. The future of the entire country will depend on them. All across the United States, people scramble to survive new, draconian policies that mark and track immigrants and their children (citizens or not) as their freedoms rapidly erode around them. For the “inked”—those whose immigration status has been permanently tattooed on their wrists—those famous words on the Statue of Liberty are starting to ring hollow. The tattoos have marked them for horrors they could not have imagined within US borders. As the nightmare unfolds before them, unforeseen alliances between the inked—like Mari, Meche, and Toño—and non-immigrants—Finn, Del, and Abbie—are formed, all in the desperate hope to confront it. Ink is the story of their ingenuity. Of their resilience. Of their magic. A story of how the power of love and community out-survives even the grimmest times.

Sabrina Vourvoulias is an award-winning Latina news editor, writer and digital storyteller. An American citizen from birth, she grew up in Guatemala during the armed internal conflict and moved to the United States when she was 15. Her news stories have been published at The Guardian US, Philly.com, Public Radio International’s Global Voices, NBC10/Telemundo62, Philadelphia Weekly, Philadelphia Magazine, City and State PA, and Al Día News, among others. Her short fiction has been published by Tor.com, Strange Horizons and Uncanny, GUD, and Crossed Genres magazines. She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and daughter. Read more at www.sabrinavourvoulias.com, and follow her on Twitter @followthelede.   

Kathleen Alcalá is an award-winning author of six books of fiction and non-fiction, including Deepest Roots and Spirits of the Ordinary. She received her second Artist Trust Fellowship in 2008, and was honored by the national Latino writers group, Con Tinta, at the Associated Writing Programs Conference in 2014. Kathleen has been both a student and instructor in the Clarion West Science Fiction Workshop. Until recently, Kathleen was a fiction instructor at the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts on Whidbey Island. She now lectures for Antioch University, and an instructor at the Bainbridge Artisan Resouce Network . 

Sujets

• Magical Realism
• Science Fiction
• Dystopian
• The Handmaid's Tale
• Speculative fiction
• General officer
• Magic realism
• General
• Latino
• Dystopia
• Fiction
• Immigration
• Latin

Informations

• Publié par: Rosarium Publishing
• Date de parution: 25 septembre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781495627378
• Langue: English

Extrait

Praise for Ink
Tight-paced and surreal, Ink paints a dystopian vision in which the American dream morphs into an immigration nightmare. Weaving the fantastical with the everyday, Vourvoulias tells a story as unsettling as it is timely. A resonant, indelible novel.
-Jhumpa Lahiri, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Interpreter of Maladies, The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, and The Lowland
With mythic insight and journalistic integrity Ink shows us the future that we must prevent.
-Will Alexander, National Book Award-winning author of Goblin Secrets, Ambassador , and A Properly Unhaunted Place
A clear-eyed, prescient depiction of a possible future that seems all too real today. Vourvoulias writes with complexity and compassion as her characters struggle with injustice, and as they carve out small triumphs amid tragedy and pain. A deeply grounded sense of magic permeates this story, as well as the gift and burden of memory for what has been left behind and might still be rescued or acknowledged.
-Kate Elliott, World Fantasy Award and Nebula finalist, author of multiple fantasy series including Crown of Stars and Court of Fives
We ve never needed Sabrina Vourvoulias more than we do right now. With Ink her journalist instincts and storytelling chops bring to life a terrifying tale of a dystopia that just happens to be our reality. If we re going to survive this present political moment, we need books like this, to show us how we are awful - and remind us how we are strong.
-Sam J. Miller, Shirley Jackson Award winner and Nebula, World Fantasy, and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award finalist, author of The Art of Starving and Blackfish City
A page-turner in the best sense, this is a heart-thumping, unflinching look at lives, loves and escapades in an America where fear of the Other has blown away any pretense of democratic ideals. But where there s terror and betrayal, there is also love, and courage, and humor. This is a book for our times.
-Vandana Singh, physicist and author of Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories
Like Margaret Atwood s The Handmaid s Tale, to which this novel has been compared, Vourvoulias s text makes chillingly clear how close beneath the surface of a liberal civil order lies a more oppressive regime yet it also gives us reasons for hope that people might rise above their defensive reaction to difference, refuse such separations, and seek common human community.
- Los Angeles Review of Books

In memory of my mother who gave me Guatemala, and my father who gave me the United States; and for Bryan and Morgan, who have given me the rest. Mi manda, Morenita
Cover art and design by Vincent Sammy
Ink: Rosarium Edition 2018
Copyright 2012 Sabrina Vourvoulias
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any forms or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher at the address below:
Rosarium Publishing
P.O. Box 544
Greenbelt, MD 20768-0544
www.rosariumpublishing.com

Introduction
W HEN I WAS GROWING UP , there was a test that people used to see if you could pass for white-the paper bag test. If your skin was lighter than a paper bag, you could pass. If it was darker, it would be harder. My color has always crossed back and forth across that line in the same way my family has crossed back and forth across the Mexican border for generations.
Sabrina Vourvoulias Ink is about a nation in which passing means being able to hide the code tattooed inside the wrist of every person foreign-born or of foreign ancestry. It is a complicated system of blues and blacks and greens meant to be permanent, but that can be obscured or even removed by those with the resources or inclination. It is a nation in which one s status can shift from one day to the next, depending on political currents or even on whether or not one was pregnant. In other words, it is a nation much like the one we live in today, which is why six years after it was first published, Ink is still pertinent and coming out in a new edition.
If Margaret Atwood were Latina, said Latinidad in Best Books of 2012 , this eerily believable depiction of where U.S. immigration policy is heading is the novel she would have written instead of The Handmaid s Tale . And there is much in this book to remind us of Atwood s classic: underground networks, disguises, the stealing of children, and compassionate collaborators.
There is also much to remind us of the alternative systems of governance and poderes-powers-that predate this literature. Every Latinx character in the book has a spiritual twin, a nahual, that serves as protector and projection of its human spirit. The nahuales do battle in the grey areas between worlds, often against trolls who seem to be straight out of European mythology, and wish only ill to these humans.
So much takes place under the official radar that gangs of young Latinx who can straddle the knowledge of high and low tech come to be a necessary form of order and governance. As a result, a part of this book is taken up with a teen romance between an Anglo girl and a gang leader, which no doubt has added to the book s continued popularity.
This book is written from multiple points of view-if it were a play, we would call it ensemble acting. As a result, every main character is allowed to speak, and I m sure every reader develops favorites from whom we hope to hear more. I certainly did.
Ink draws directly on Vourvoulias Guatemalan heritage and her experience as a reporter in Pennsylvania, portraying a journalist, Finn, who becomes involved with Mari, the focal point of this tangled web. Mari, rescued as an infant from her Guatemalan village when the military wipes out the rest of her family, grows up in the U.S., home of her father. She acts as a bridge between these divergent worlds, able to see and communicate with the old spirits, while navigating the perils of a system increasingly controlled by local vigilantes intent on purging itself of foreign influences.
As more and more people are rounded up and imprisoned in inkatoriums, we see the horrors of earlier times repeated-the incarceration of Jews in World War II Europe and Japanese American citizens in the United States, the discussion of a wall to keep the wrong people out and the right people in, the gradual withdrawal of societal compassion for people who are marked. We are reminded of how easy it is for people to become marginalized, then abandoned to their fates unless direct action is taken. Martin Niem ller s famous quote comes to mind:
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out-
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out-
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out-
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me-and there was no one left to speak for me.
Vourvoulias strength as a writer is in refusing to give us easy answers. Yes, we are rooting for a set of people, but they are not all good and not all bad-they are human. The author takes us on flights of the fantastic that emphasize the different worlds in which we all live-some of us seeing the invisible world that envelops us, others intent on blocking it out. Entire battles are fought in the invisible realm while others take place in that most prosaic of settings-the human heart and its infinite capabilities for compassion, sacrifice, and revenge.
Uncanny Magazine calls Vourvoulias An exciting voice in speculative fiction, and I am tempted to call her work-along with writers like Carmen Maria Machado, Daniel Jos Older, and others, the new New Journalism-in that it is not confined to words printed on the page but has an energy that calls for a multi-dimensional, multi-lingual form capable of being summoned out of thin air or painstakingly copied out by hand.
In short, these stories will survive to be repeated by those who inherit Mari s gift of storytelling whether flashed across our digital screens or passed clandestinely as samizdat. I can hardly wait to see what else Vourvoulias has in mind.
Kathleen Alcal
Prologue
T HE SOURCE TEXTS ME .
All my sources text me these days. Or send me pictures and videos they ve taken with their cell phones. The rich ones have smartphones; those with just a little money use pay-as-you-go phones. Doesn t matter to me, as long as the message gets through and the image is clear.
Most journalists have a sixth sense. So even though the message I m looking at is bare of story, it makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. It s going to change everything.
Tats. Color-coded.
My source is an ex-girlfriend. Long legs, even longer memory-which works to my advantage in this case. Political dreams as bright as her copper hair.
Not that our dreams have gotten us very far, yet. I m at a small daily in a market that hardly registers a blip in the national news cycle; she s on the communications team of a first-term congressman who s greener than mint chocolate chip.
But luck is better than dreams any day. And both she and I have always been lucky. Lucky to fall in with each other at college, lucky to fall out in a way that kept our friendship intact. Lucky that Rep. Anspach ended up part of the subcommittee reviewing the identity bill.
She doesn t text me from her official phone but from an untraceable throwaway.
When? I text back.
Vote is Thursday.
And?
It sails. Only 3 nays. Prez is :D.
I wend my way to Melinda s desk after I get the specifics. The Hastings Gazette newsroom is huge-proof of days when even regional newspapers were flush with advertising dollars-and the managing editor s