What doesn't kill you makes you bi-curious: "The Almadraba" by Maia Jenkins

There's a temptation while reading the first few pages of "The Almadraba" by Maia Jenkins to write it off as another story about a privileged kid living out what will later become their "what I learned on my study abroad about the rest of the world" essay for law school. Megan is a twenty-one-year-old virgin in Spain, clueless in Spanish and clueless in love, whose biggest decision seems to be which of the twin nephews of her host mother she's going to let deflower her. During the year I spent as a fiction editor for The Baltimore Review, I probably saw a hundred of those stories come in. I was quite prepared to hate it and write about why I hated it.

But the story is aware of the privilege of the narrator. Meg is herself somewhat aware of it, and becoming more aware, but the story frames Meg's privilege in context in a way that Meg herself isn't quite yet capable of. Meg meets Elena, a double-expat by way of both America and Colombia. Meg can notice that Elena doesn't share all of the privileges Meg does, although Meg doesn't know the whole story of why. Whatever Elena's circumstances are, Meg interprets them as as a thing to respect: "I sense a point of some terrible loss. It's that intolerance for self-pity, the brittle joy I've only ever seen exhibited by people who have suffered, their optimism not so much an outlook on life as a mode of survival. Unlike me, I decide, Elena is tough." 

One could read this as Meg idealizing those less fortunate than her, seeing them as the world's wretched refuse made noble through suffering. I'd think that, too, if it weren't for the fact I've spent a fair amount of time around the African migrants who make a cameo appearance in this story later. The fact is that I've never met one of these refugees who wasn't unreasonably optimistic. If life has stacked the deck against you and you still want to survive, then you really--to use the title of a quack self-help book from decades ago--can't afford the luxury of a negative thought. Meg's observation that those who have suffered have become resilient isn't just the blinders of privilege. It's a generally true observation, and Meg is a sharp young person to have made it.

I don't want to fetishize suffering. I just know I've met a fair number of people who were on ships like this, and never met one who didn't smile a lot. 

Meg does what many young people do, then, and looks to suffering as a way to become tough herself, but she'll spend the rest of the story learning about the subtleties of suffering's mechanisms. If Meg is the character showing privilege, and the refugee family that shows up at the beach is the far end of suffering so great Meg can't even begin to imagine it, Elena is somewhere in the middle. Her father died when she was a girl, and she was molested by her father's identical twin uncle. At least, she tells Meg this, although she later says she made it all up, which, whether it really happened or not, makes whatever Elena's current situation is seem worse. Elena flits from relationship to relationship, and is dodgy about all of Meg's questions. (Karen Carlson focuses more on the unreliability of the narrative in her reading of this story here.)

Meg conflates her belief that suffering will make her stronger with her painful desire to get her first sexual experience out of the way. She expects her first time will hurt, but she wants to go through the pain so she can feel wiser and more worldly. While she and Elena share a beach vacation together, Meg gets burned, but the two keep repeating the refrain that "it'll turn into a tan," a mantra that reflects the belief that there is a reward for suffering. 

But Meg will discover two caveats to the "suffering brings rewards" axiom. When she finally has sex, with a waiter she meets at a bar, she anticipates pain, but finds "there is nothing besides a silence in my stomach like a fast-growing ink blot, the last thing I'd expected." Not all experiences she will learn from are going to hurt. They might also not feel great. Most experience is just experience. 

In her obsession with the nobility of suffering, Meg also misses her opportunity to alleviate some of it. She and Elena come close to sexual intimacy on their last night of their vacation, but the moment inexplicably passes. Instead of staying with Elena, whom Meg has just realized she wants badly, she goes to a party with the waiter from the restaurant. The friendship between Meg and Elena ends the next day, and Elena presumably continues on with whatever series of bad choices she's been making.

There's an image that gives the story its title. The Almadraba is the name of a fishing technique used to catch tuna back in the day before commercial rigs ran the traditional fishers away. This technique only caught the strongest fish, while the weaker ones were thrown back and given another chance. 

There's a cliche some religious people like to cite, that "God will only give you what you can handle." This leaves people who haven't had a life that's been all that difficult feeling like they must be weak, because the universe spared them grief. To people like Meg (and me) fortunate enough to not be caught in life's Almadraba net, there can be feelings of survivor's guilt, or the notion that we, too, ought to be given our share of misfortune. But Elena, made wise enough by real suffering, sees through this temptation. She asks of the person explaining the technique what the weaker fish are given another chance for. "To get caught later?" She asks. 

Suffering doesn't come equally, but it will come when it's your turn. You don't have to go looking for it, and there are ways to learn without it. Focusing too much on it accomplishes nothing but make you less able to address the suffering already going on in the world.