Literary tourism: "Miracle in Lagos Traffic" by Chika Unigwe (O. Henry Anthology 2025)

I joked a couple of posts ago about how doing a compare and contrast was a lazy way to make it seem like I was really engaging with a story while not actually working all that hard. It's partly true and partly just a self-effacing joke. There is still some thought involved, but the built-in structure of comparing two stories does tend to make it easier to decide what you're going to write about. There's nothing really wrong about comparing one short story to another as a way of teasing out what's interesting about the one you're looking at. But darned if I'm not here two stories later in the 2025 O.Henry Anthology and the first thought that comes to me after reading "Miracle in Lagos Traffic" by Chika Unigwe is that I should compare it to "Sickled" by Jane Kalu, which appeared earlier in this same anthology.

They're both set in Nigeria, and both have teenage girls with serious illnesses. Both sick girls even have the same name--Ije. One family is a middle-class Igbo family with two daughters living in Lagos. The other is an Igbo family with two daughters that has recently fallen out of middle class status. In "Sickled," the older sister of the sick girl is the first-person narrator, while in "Miracle," the mother is the first-person narrator. 

One thing I like about the O.Henry Anthology, a.k.a. "The Best Short Stories," compared to Best American Short Stories, the other main literary fiction best-of short story anthology to come out every year, is that the editors are willing to pick stories that play off of one another like this. BASS is more likely to pick one Nigerian story and, having checked a box off of its list in order to achieve a goal of a diverse menu of stories, move on to some other part of the world. O.Henry is willing to put stories in an anthology that invite comparisons, that take on more meaning when juxtaposed with the other story. 

Until this year, this thematic gathering was sometimes a lot easier to see, because O.Henry didn't follow BASS in ordering its stories in alphabetical order of the author's surname. From what I can tell, that's new to O.Henry this year. Instead, O.Henry would group stories based on their interplay with one another. In 2019, they put five coming-of-age stories back-to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back. I wish they had done that here with these two stories, which I'm pretty sure were both picked partly because of how well they complement one another. 

A different direction

In spite of how neatly they'd provide a compare-and-contrast project for me, one that would allow me to wrap up the anthology and move on to whatever comes next, I'm not going to do that. Instead, I'm going to use this story as cause to muse for a moment on the act of reading a short story set in a place like Nigeria as a Western reader with no deep knowledge of the country.

Unigwe was born and raised in Nigeria but lives in the United States. While Nigeria is full of English speakers, typically, when we read a story by a Nigerian set in Nigeria, that writer often has had a chance to leave Nigeria for a significant part of their formative years. For example:

• Chinua Achebe: born in Nigeria, traveled for work to London occasionally before making it big with Things Fall Apart. Lived most of the last twenty-three years of his life in the United States.

• Wole Soyinka: Educated in both Nigeria and England.

• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Moved to the U.S. at nineteen to study.

• Ben Okri: Spent early childhood in London

• Teju Cole: Born in the U.S., raised in Lagos, moved back to U.S. at seventeen for college. 

That means the experience someone like me is getting is mediated by someone with significant Western understanding. Of course that's a good thing. Great writers like these, with a foot in both worlds, are able to translate their understanding of one world into the other in such a way that someone like me can more easily digest the information. But that ease of digestion comes with a cost. It's like eating at a Nigerian restaurant in the U.S. that alters favorites for American diners. It's close, but not quite the real thing. Maybe I wouldn't like the real thing, and if I'm being honest, yeah, I'd probably prefer a meal I will like if I'm only going to eat once or a few times. But if it were really going to matter that I understood Nigeria on a deeper level, then I really need to go eat the real thing. Even if I hate it. Even if it gives me terrible diarrhea. 

American military forces have been in South Korea since the end of the Korean War. There's an enormous apparatus there for Americans stationed in the country, one that allows them to live in Korea without feeling too lost most of the time. You can go have Korean "experiences," but they're curated by locals who know how to make the experience enjoyable and safe. Some Americans go away from their time in Korea thinking they really understand something about Korea, but they don't. They can't speak a lick of Korean. They've never eaten anything but bulgogi and kalbi. 

I don't know Korea like a Korean would, but because I speak passable Korean, I had a different experience when I've been there from what most Americans would. I at least have been in conversations with locals in their own language, seen bad, good, and indifferent behavior from people who didn't care that I was watching. I've eaten food that made me sick and food that isn't in any restaurant in the States. I've karaoked 70s Korean tunes and followed Korean news for domestic, rather than foreign, consumption. 

None of this makes me a Korea scholar, but it does mean I understand what farcical bullshit the "Korean experience" experience is. It's the same thing for people who think they're becoming cosmopolitan by checking off countries on a travel list, thinking that because they've been to the twelve places it's safe for tourists to go, they're worldly now. They're actually worse than people who've never traveled, because now they'll substitute their bullshit experience for just being humble enough to admit they don't know anything. The two-star general with a Korean driver who interprets for him and takes him everywhere is quite likely more mistaken in his understanding of Korea than the dude from his hometown who can't locate Korea on a map. 

Reading stories like this is the literary equivalent of a three-day trip somewhere

Look, I'm not in any way ripping on "Miracle" here. It's a fine story. It leaves the reader in the same place of moral ambiguity as the readers of the real-life news event that inspired the story. Yeah, you know that paying an unfortunate person for the kidney is immoral, but also, it's kind of understandable, and when the person doesn't end up fulfilling their end of the bargain, maybe you even feel like they've committed about one-eighth of a sin. It would be good grist for "Literary Court," if I didn't think I'd played that out already. 

There's nothing wrong with the story. In fact, it's the story's total okayness that makes it a good candidate to be the one where I finally stop and more fully consider the notion of including stories like this in an anthology meant for Western readers. (Also, it's the last story in the anthology, and now this post can serve as a wrap-up, because I was thinking to talk about the same thing in a wrap-up anyway.) 

I can guarantee that some of those Western readers of this book know even less about Nigeria than I do, and they're going to use the occasional story that a Western anthology uses to "round out" its collection to fake knowledge, either to others or to themselves. They'll feel like they've done something to become citizens of the world, the same way some travelers congratulate themselves on making themselves better people for having gone to Budapest. It doesn't. Without serious work to understand other parts of the world, traveling just upgrades you from ignorant to ignorant and privileged enough to travel. 

Let's say you are a securities trader. You try to fulfill your democratic duty by following the news, going deeper now and again by reading a longer story on the weekends. You've traveled a bit for work, say to Dubai and London. Most of your time and cognitive energy is spent on your job, but you do the best you can outside of that to improve your mind. You only can read one work of fiction a year, and since this is a highly regarded anthology, you make that your choice. Now these two stories are most of what you know about Nigeria. That, and a few stories you've heard from a woman at work who's from there. How does any of this affect you when you hear the White House, say, threatening military action against Nigeria for persecuting Christians?  

I'm not sure. I like to think that maybe it at least makes you think that Nigeria is a complicated place, and a simple take like "Nigeria persecutes Christians" is probably not quite getting to the heart of it. After all, aren't the parents in "Sickled" super, over-the-top Christians? And is anyone persecuting them? Aren't they doing a good job of ruining their own lives? That's possible, but maybe the well-meaning-but-busy futures trader takes away from it that Nigeria is a dangerous place, full of violence, because that's certainly a take one could have from "Miracle in Lagos Traffic." An alien reading this story might draw that conclusion. Mightn't a reader like this have an intuition where it seems plausible that Nigeria is persecuting Christians, or at least that it is inept enough to allow large-scale persecution. The government in "Miracle" doesn't exactly seem active in preventing crime. And the government in "Sickled" is a military dictatorship, although it's from decades ago. Come to think of it, our reader wonders, maybe those Christians in the story from decades ago are facing hardship now? He'll never know, because now he has to get back to work.

Not sure what the conclusion is

So what would I recommend, not putting stories like these in an anthology? Probably not. I mean, it's still a good story, and it shouldn't get ruled out because it might make someone smug and dumb instead of just dumb. But I do think part of the goal of making these anthologies "well-rounded"--one of the most unfortunate clichés in English, but okay, let's use it--is to give people at least some kind of cursory look into the minds of people from very different backgrounds. Maybe it's not so much to "teach a little about Nigeria" as it is to just experience Nigeria as a setting in a story in which the main point is to live through the psyche of a character in that setting. But some learning about Nigeria does happen. I Googled what a harmattan was while reading the story. I'll never remember that in a month, but maybe it gave me one trillionth of the feeling of living in Lagos for a second. It made me look up the news article about the senator who tried to buy a kidney for his daughter. A window into a few tableaux isn't deep knowledge, but it is knowledge of a sort. I'm not sure I can answer the question of whether something is better than nothing or whether a little learning is a dangerous thing.  

Reading stories like these, unless you happen to have done pretty thorough research or have a lot of experience with the culture coming into it, requires discipline. It also requires humility to prevent your self from making wide generalizations based on a narrow window into a fictional-but-based-on-at-least-some-truth world. Most humans aren't that disciplines, though. They take one fact they know and extrapolate wildly from it. They say Emily Dickinson's poems aren't worth reading because they heard somewhere she lived alone and was weird. They write off North Korea as a credible threat because Kim Jong Un has a funny haircut. So there's a bit of a risk to stories like these, curated by writers who know us so well, they don't let us get lost and terrified in a foreign land. 

O.Henry does something else that BASS doesn't ordinarily do: it included a few stories in translation. If I had to use some kind of fictional narrative to introduce someone to South Korea, I think I'd be more likely to use a novel in translation or even a soap opera with subtitles rather than a story written originally in English by a Korean-American. There is something quite different that happens when you experience art in which a culture is representing itself to itself than with art where a skillful guide represents a culture, knowing it's intended mainly for someone outside that culture. 

Ideally, we'd all have time for both kinds of stories, both those from inside the culture and those created specifically for export. I don't want to rule out the exports. I've certainly written more than my share of those stories myself, based on the hope that I had done enough work to present at least some truth from a different culture back to my own native one. My only point is that it seems to me that most Western readers get more of the literature meant for export, and that when you're consuming this, you have to have an extra level of vigilance to prevent thinking it gives you more knowledge than it does. 

 

The shortest analysis I've ever written: "Strange Fruit" by Yah Yah Schofield

"Strange Fruit" by Yah Yah Scholfield takes the Billie Holliday song by the same name and runs with it. It extends the song's metaphor of a lynched black body, hanging from a tree in the American South, as a kind of fruit the tree has produced. In the story, an entire community of agricultural workers of color works to harvest the "fruit." A very short story, its development of the metaphor ends quickly, and in the end, it produces a brief, albeit jarring, patchwork of images. 

A merciful compare and contrast post so I can slack off: "The Three Niles" by Zak Salih (O.Henry Anthology 2025)

I'm almost always running out of gas by the time I get to the end of blogging through a short story anthology, and this year's run through the 2025 O.Henry Anthology, a.k.a. The Best Short Stories, is no different. I need to catch my breath. How wonderful, then, that I can do a compare and contrast post about "The Three Niles" by Zak Salih. It's the kind of post where it looks like I'm trying, but really the analysis kind of writes itself.

What am I comparing "The Three Niles" to?

I'll be comparing and contrasting it with "The Suitcase" by Meron Hadero, which was in the 2016 Best American Short Stories, the year before I started blogging all the way through it. Meron's story came to mind while reading "The Three Niles" because both were about children of immigrants to the U.S. from the Horn of Africa, and both involved trips made by those children back to the homeland of their parents. 

What's similar about them?

Both stories have children who go to the countries their parents came from, Sudan for "The Three Niles" and Ethiopia for "The Suitcase." Although I hate it when people treat all things African like they're the same and like Africa is one big country with a shared culture and heritage, in the case of Sudan and Ethiopia, there really is a lot that's shared between the two. They're both part of the Horn of Africa, which tends to have a lot of commonalities between countries. They even have their own regional quasi-UN, called IGAD. (Don't quibble about that characterization. It's close enough.) Both Ethiopia and Sudan are immensely proud of the Nile River and their country's share in the history of that cradle of civilization. This pride in the river isn't in "The Suitcase" the way it shows up in "The Three Niles," but it is a commonality between the two countries. Right now, Ethiopia is involved in Sudan's civil war, and Sudan is involved in Ethiopia's. The countries share a porous border.

Both "the boy" in "The Three Niles" and Saba, the protagonist of "The Suitcase," struggle with language. Saba isn't great at Amharic, the language of her relatives, and "the boy" is pretty bad at Sudanese Arabic. In both stories, the returnees from America are feasted and celebrated by relatives while in the homeland, but neither knows how to repay their hospitality or even to carry on much of a conversation with them. 

Both stories contain their primary image or symbol in the title.

Both protagonists feel, in different ways, that they "don't belong here." Saba thinks this explicitly, while it is simply implicit in the boy's every thought, word, and attitude. But here's about where the similarities end.

Obvious differences

Saba is twenty; the boy is thirteen. Saba wants to fit in and become more Ethiopian during her month trip to Addis Ababa; the boy just wants his three-day stint in Sudan, on the outskirts of Khartoum, to end as soon as possible. Saba, who actually did live in Ethiopia when she was very young, wants to connect with Ethiopia to be more fully herself; the boy, who has never been to Sudan before, wants to deny his Sudanese heritage, because he feels that it has nothing to do with his true self. He doesn't even want to be called by his name in Sudanese Arabic. In short, Saba is there of her own accord and wants to be there, while the boy is going purely out of what flagging sense of loyalty he has to his father. 

Photo by Humera Afrid. The boy is kind of a sacrificial lamb in this story, giving up part of himself for his father. But he doesn't give more than he has to.

Less obvious differences

While it's very easy to see not just the outward differences in age and sex between the boy and Saba but also the huge gap in dispositions toward their ancestral home, it might be harder to see the difference in how the major symbols in both stories are working. In "The Suitcase," the major symbol, according to my highly advanced ability in literary analysis, is the suitcase. Saba has brought it with her and now needs to pack to go back home to America. She has actually brought two suitcases with her, one with her clothes and the other with gifts from her family in America to all of her family in Ethiopia. Now that she is headed back, the family in Ethiopia wants to fill that second suitcase with gifts of their own for Saba to take back. They have too many gifts, though, and they are arguing about what to take out. The choice is given to Saba, who, pressed for time to make it to her return flight, decides to dump out her other suitcase, the one with all her clothes, in order to make room for all of the gifts. 

It's such a neat and apt symbol, one that serves as a metaphor for Saba's own process of identity shaping. In order to let in what Ethiopia has to give her, she literally has to empty out her own identity, in the form of the clothes she loves so much. She has brought something to them, and she leaves it there with her family. When she goes back again, it will still be there. None of her identity is lost, but it is reapportioned. The family shares not only gifts, but their core selves with one another, and so bits of who everyone is are shared across continents. I am often mystified when people talk about being moved by literary fiction stories, but this story did move me. It's about as happy a story as one of these anthologies will ever give you.

With "The Three Niles," I have to admit that the symbolism tricked me. The boy resists everything he sees while in Sudan with his father, from the Arabic language to prayers to lamb meat to even remembering who the relatives introduced to him are. At one point, the boy "hated every single person in that courtyard for what they made him do, what they reminded him of." What they remind him of is his cultural inheritance, the one the boy thinks belongs to his father but not to him. That's why when the boy once heard someone in America call his father the N word over the boy's head, he convinced "himself that word, that agony, was his father's lot and not his." This was true because of "how unlike his father he was." 

But I thought, near the end of the story, that Sudan was going to sneak into the boy in spite of himself. The boy has noted how "effortless" the "transition" from talking to killing the lamb to talking again happened, and for a moment, I thought that a similar effortless transition was going to happen to the boy, one where at least something of Sudan would get into him unawares. That moment comes on the last day in Sudan, when the Sudan-based family is taking the father and son out for a river cruise. The father is pointing out the sights of Khartoum, and he indicates to the boy the point where the White Nile and Blue Nile come together to form one river:

The boy looked to a spot where he saw, or thought he saw, a shifting band in the river where the two currents, one murky, one milky, met and intertwined. But there was no crash, no violence. No spectacle to suggest different currents fighting for dominance. The river ahead was complacent, the merging silent and unremarkable. Easy to overlook, were it not for his father’s finger showing the way.

"Aha! This is it," I thought. The boy's American self and his Sudanese self are coming together, and will form one whole, and it will happen so effortlessly, he won't even notice! But just as earlier, when the boy seemed to be sharing a moment of mutual understanding with his father, but it was interrupted, so this unnoticed mingling of two worlds is also interrupted. The family on the boat begins to sing a song in praise of wearing traditional clothing instead of Western clothing. The boy wants to "step into the center of all that dancing and singing, to silence it." He and his father almost share another moment of mutual understanding when neither can eat the sandwiches the family offers them, but then a storm comes up, the boat tosses, and the grandfather is pitched off into the river. 

When it becomes apparent that the grandfather had drowned in the Nile, the boy's main concern is for how long it will take to find him, because he still wants to get on his flight to go home. (God, I love this ending.) He is literally standing between his father and the rest of the family at the end. There is no fusion of identities, only a steadfast refusal to allow himself to be transported back into his other life, the one that might have happened if his father hadn't immigrated. 

Should we blame the boy?

For much of the story, I'd guess most readers would be fairly sympathetic to the boy. He's apparently gay and vegetarian, doesn't speak Arabic, and doesn't believe in Islam. He was so happy when his father couldn't afford to keep sending him to a private, Muslim school in America, he felt liberated, and now here he is in the heart of all that he got away from. Although we might feel the boy is wrong to deny all of his heritage, we can certainly understand it. It's not an unusual attitude for a child of immigrants raised in the U.S. to want to live like the people he knows live. 

Still, the myopia of the boy at the end is pretty startling. He's has a few moments while in Sudan of almost kind of connecting with his father. Shouldn't that have made him able to understand, even a little, how his father must feel losing his own? 

Maybe it can't be helped. Maybe for the boy to be himself, to avoid the death that comes from giving up one's own identity, he has to keep his Sudan self at a distance. He can't allow himself to become blended from two distinct flows into one, because "His" Nile--the "White" Nile, tied to his white existence through his mother--can't join the other. 

Two different experiences of geographic origins as sources of identity

In "The Suitcase," Saba is presented with a seemingly impossible choice. During her entire trip to Ethiopia, her family has gone out their way to try to make her feel welcome and loved, but she feels she hasn't measured up. Now, she is being asked to choose which tokens of their love should make it back to America. It's a real Kobiyashi Maru scenario. But much like Captain Kirk, Saba doesn't believe in a no-win situation, and she comes up with a solution where identity doesn't involve hard choices. 

The same elements are there for the taking in "The Three Niles." We have three generations of men brought together at the convergence of the three rivers. The story could have allowed for an "effortless" blending of generations and rivers and identities. It would have been as satisfying as "The Suitcase." But for the boy, there is no way to cheat the Kobiyashi Maru of identity. For the boy, his identity is so completely at odds with the boy he would have been in a life where he grew up in Sudan, that the attempt to bring together the old with the new can only result in the stormy death of the old. 

Releasing versus freeing: "Rosaura at Dawn" by Daniel Saldaña París (O.Henry Anthology 2025)

I don't have a grand unified theory for "Rosaura at Dawn," something that makes sense of all the parts both individually and in their relationship to the whole. (I just learned the term "mereological" this week, and I could have used it there to sound really smart, but I feel like it'll be obvious I just learned it and was anxious to show off.) I do, however, have some theories about the parts themselves, and maybe these will be useful to readers as they seek their own ideas for making sense of the whole.

Two physical landscape and one personal, bodily landscape

A lot of what's going on during the few pages of "Rosaura at Dawn" involves comparisons and contrasts. One very clear set of comparison/contrast going on is between the physical border between Tijuana, Mexico, and the United States on the one hand and the body of the unnamed female narrator on the other. The opening lines describe the border: "The fence is topped with barbed wire and winds between the shrubs, climbs dry hillsides, zigzags capriciously, and extends into the ocean for about a hundred yards." There are two subsequent invitations to compare the narrator's body to this landscape, one explicit and one implicit. The first is when the narrator describes the scar on her leg from an undisclosed accident as resembling the frontier line, seen from above. (The "bird's eye" that the translator uses is a clever wink to the frequent appearance of birds in the story.) The second is when she refers to the scar on her leg, now fading, as "zigzagging," the same word she used to describe the border fence. 

This juxtaposition of the landscape of the border with the bodily landscape of the narrator likely means that the same feeling the border gives her, one of unfulfilled dreams, is how she feels in her own skin after her undisclosed accident in which her mother died. A body can be a prison, and our scars can serve to remind us of all that's gone wrong.

But then there is another comparison, one between the border and the aviary that Severiano has created for the exotic birds and reptiles the police bring to him after busting illegal exotic animal dealers. In some ways, the aviary performs the same function as the border fence: it keeps some things in and some things out. But instead of being "tall and threatening...the northernmost limit of a dream gone bad," it is, in the narrator's one-word assessment, "awesome." It is constructed "from metal tubes, like the ones used in market stands, and completely covered in chicken wire." Unlike the border, which was built by companies for profit using standard construction materials, this was built by salvaged parts out of love. Chicken wire is much less threatening than barbed wire. The aviary, like the border, is there to restrict entrances and exits, but it shows there can be more reasons for building something like this than fear or (as Severiano's brief time in "the can" reminds us) punishment. Walls and fences can also be a means of providing sanctuary.

There are prisons and border fences, but also bird sanctuaries. Which kind of building will the narrator's body, with its zigzagging scar, end up being? That is the question of the narrative. (Okay, that's sort of a GUT for the story, isn't it?)

The two openings

When I went back to re-read the story, I tried to find the original Spanish version. I succeeded, but only partly. I did find the original online, but only the first few paragraphs. That leaves me to rely on the translation for most of the story. In the little that is available for free online, I did realize that there is a version with a different opening paragraph. The translated version in the O.Henry Anthology goes: 

The fence is topped with barbed wire and winds between the shrubs, climbs dry hillsides, zigzags capriciously, and extends into the ocean for about a hundred yards. It stands tall and threatening, rusting in the sunlight, the northernmost limit of a dream gone bad. People peer through it, projecting hopes and a new version of themselves beyond the ICE patrols. There is no escape from this place.

The other version, with my own translation below, goes:

The enormous fence, crowned with barbed wire, winds among the shrubs, climbs dry hillsides, cuts a capricious zigzag and, out beyond where it can be seen, ends several meters into the ocean. But the waves that break upon one side are the same that break upon the other, and the clouds cross the line routinely, in both directions, without passports or visas. 

I'm not saying the translator made the first version up. I'm sure there's a different Spanish version out there somewhere. Authors change their vision all the time, including after something has been published, so I guess that between the version online and the publication in O.Henry, the author changed his mind.

The version one goes with has an effect on how one views the resolution for the narrator. Are the barriers of her body a sanctuary or a prison? If we read version one, perhaps the narrator views her scars and her body as a confinement to escape from, but her dreams of escape have been disappointed. Her journey is in learning not to escape, but to find a better kind of confinement, one that provides protection rather than restriction. But if one takes reading number two, then there almost never was a confinement. In nature, nothing respects borders. The narrator needs to learn from nature not, as in the first reading, how to find the right kind of enclosure, but how to ignore enclosures altogether. Version one emphasizes the eventual returning of Rosaura, while version two emphasizes the freedom of her flight.

Chickens

I count four references to chickens in the story. The first is when the narrator sees Severiano in Tijuana. She assumes he is waiting for a pollero, a colloquial Spanish term for a guide to take him across the border into the United States. (Coyote is an older term for the same thing.) A pollero is literally a farmer or poultry owner who takes care of chickens. In this figure of speech, all the people the guide takes over the border are chickens that he is herding. The narrator assumes Severiano is a chicken looking to escape from his cage. She is wrong, of course, just as she is mistaken a moment later when she sees Severiano take the cockatoo Rosaura out of a bag to release her. She thinks at first that it is a chicken he has released. But it isn't a chicken, and as he will point out, he hasn't really released her. The bird is going to fly back to the aviary.

The third mention is the chicken wire that protects the aviary, which is a much less threatening and muscular type of barrier than the barbed wire that protects the border. The final mention is the raw chicken that the narrator feeds the hawk in the aviary. If the people moving around the border are chickens, then the narrator is reminded that sometimes they will end up getting caught and killed as prey for the stronger birds. 

I'm not sure what to make of all this chicken imagery. Obviously, birds are ubiquitous quasi-characters in the story, and chickens, which can kind of fly but not very well, are a good symbol of humanity, which shares some of the natural and animalistic traits of birds but not all of them. Birds might be able to fly over borders easily enough, but not chickens. So humans will have to modify their notions of freedom.

The comparison between chickens and humans is apt.

Releasing vs freedom

The narrator mistakes Severiano's letting the bird go for freeing it, when it fact, Severiano is merely letting it roam for a while before it comes back. There is a secret ritual he performs in order to get her to come back, one he teaches to the narrator, but it involves an incantation she will not even share with the reader. 

When Severiano is gone to take care of old business, the narrator releases Rosaura, the cockatoo. She does it in one of the seediest parts of the city and awaits Rosaura's return back at the farm where the aviary is. When the narrator sees Rosaura returning at dawn (roll credits!), she is deeply moved by it. She'd seen this return before, but "it had never felt so personal, as though the birds were celebrating me too, rejoicing that something inside me had also returned." 

As if this was the last thing Severiano needed to teach her, we find out immediately after this that he has left the farm to her. 

Freedom means the ability to roam wherever and not come back. Releasing means being free for a time an then to return. Whichever opening one uses, what the narrator learns is that there is a relationship between true security and true freedom. Without true security--which for the narrator, means a space so safe not even Jesus or Buddha can come into it--one cannot be well enough to venture out. Without returning to that place, our journeys will eventually wear us down. 

I think the theme of "Rosaura at Dawn" is similar to that of Robert Frost's Poem "Birches." While the transcendence of soaring into heaven is dramatic and liberating, it's the homecoming after the transcendence that is the point of the whole thing:

I'd like to get away from earth awhile

And then come back to it and begin over.

May no fate willfully misunderstand me

And half grant what I wish and snatch me away

Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:

I don’t know where it's likely to go better.

I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,

And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk

Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,

But dipped its top and set me down again.

That would be good both going and coming back.

One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

Persian Paradise Lost that gets, um, lost: "Mornings at the Ministry" by Ehsaneh Sadr (O.Henry 2025)

I was pretty sure during my first read-through of "Mornings at the Ministry" by Ehsaneh Sadr that I was dealing with an unreliable narrator. Dr. Amir Musavi insists during his account of his dealings with the other, female Dr. Musavi, that he wishes her well at every turn until she becomes his supervisor, and even then that he only turns against her because of her unkind and dishonorable behavior. He explains that he never actually intends to turn over the incriminating evidence he finds against her--that she went without her chador and allowed men close to her while studying abroad--to anyone who could have used it to damage her. At the very end, we find that Amir is unable to hit his daughter in order to teach her not to be like the other Dr. Musavi, but that he does try to hurt her with words. Maybe Amir lacks the killer instinct needed to have really tried to do Ms. Musavi harm, and therefore, perhaps we can believe some of his claims to have not meant to hurt her. 

My guess was that if I looked at it more carefully, though, I would find that Amir is overlooking his own misogyny, his own complicity with Iran's patriarchal and highly sexually repressive society, and that because of this, he misses his own culpability in Ms. Musavi's undoing. On a second reading, I did find some evidence for this, but I would argue that Amir's moral position is more complicated than that of a sexist, Iranian version of Iago. 

Types of unreliable narrator

In considering whether Amir should be considered an unreliable narrator, it might be a good idea to consider some of the ways in which a narrator might be unreliable.

• They might simply be in a bad position to have reliable knowledge. They might have heard a story second-hand, or have incomplete materials to draw from.
• They might know they are lying, and the narrative is a deliberate attempt to deceive.
• They might have an inkling that they are being less than fully true, but they are deceiving themselves as much as the reader. This is probably the most common type of unreliable narrator in contemporary fiction. It's also probably the most common type of lie you'll hear in real life.

It suddenly hit me while reading through the second time that Amir isn't the narrator. This should have been pretty obvious, since it's a third-person narrative, but because it was so closely told from Amir's point of view, I nearly didn't pick up on it. The third-person narrator was revealing Amir's own self-justifications in Amir's own language, exactly as Amir's own thoughts would have run. Above all, the narrator was logging Amir's many examples of protesting too much that he had goodwill toward Ms. Musavi. For example:

• Amir expresses sincere regret that he and his wife Seema had not "gotten around" to inviting Ms. Musavi over for dinner when both Amri and Ms. Musavi were studying abroad in Australia. The justification is that Amir and Seema were too busy with their children. 
• Amir claims it wasn't just a surprise when Ms. Musavi joined his team back in Iran years later, but a pleasant surprise. 
• Amir records having done his best to get Ms. Musavi acclimated to the team, including getting her a better chair than she otherwise might have gotten.
• Amir, in an unexpected show of quasi-feminist enlightenment, scolds his wife for assuming that Ms. Musavi's high rank upon getting hired was a result of connections, a notion he derides as "sexist." 
• Amir supposedly admires Ms. Musavi at first, but does not sexualize her, in spite of the extraordinary amount of time he spends observing her eyebrows from within her chador.

Because I can never remember which is which, here's a helpful visual from the Montreal Gazette.

Everybody's nice until somebody gets promoted over you

Up until Ms. Musavi's promotion, Amir's claims (or the narrator's claims about Amir) to have largely congenial feelings toward Ms. Musavi seem plausible, perhaps even believable. But when she gets promoted over him, his feelings go off the rails. There are a few sources of his newfound hostility to her: she rebuffs his attempts to suggest she be more genial at work, she is tough on junior researchers, but mostly, he finds her sycophantic attitude toward senior officials at work repulsive--especially when contrasted to her bullying attitude toward junior members.

And here, I have to admit to having feelings a little like those that many people have when reading Milton's Paradise Lost. Milton did such a good job of imagining the motivations of Satan in his poem that many people--myself included--report feeling more sympathy toward Lucifer than with God when reading the poem. I knew that Amir's motives were suspect, and that I wasn't supposed to trust his account of Ms. Musavi, and yet I found myself rooting for him and against Ms. Musavi anyway. This is true even though I highly suspected while reading that Amir--or the third person voice reporting on behalf of Amir-was not reliable. Perhaps because the voice was in third person, I felt it was at least somewhat objective when it recorded events and attitudes. This was reinforced because of occasional admissions, such as Amir admitting to jealousy. Sure, maybe she wasn't as bad as Amir said, but still, she was bad enough to root against. 

Who is at fault?

I'm not going to do my "literary court" schtick here, but if I were to do it, this would be a good story for it. 

It is easy to sympathize with Ms. Musavi because of the pervasive patriarchal oppression she finds herself in. It's an oppression in which refusal to meet with expectations can be met with draconian punishments such as acid thrown into a woman's face. It's an oppression where the word "khanoom," a respectful title for a lady like "Miss," can also mean simply "wife of," such that the title that Ms. Musavi is given to disambiguate her from Amir, the other Dr. Musavi, makes her sound like she is his wife, rather than a PhD of her own accord. 

Even though it's easy to feel compassion for Ms. Musavi for being a highly educated woman in a society where she has to hide behind her chador all day in the presence of men, I still found myself not liking her, and agreeing with Amir when he dislikes her. Just like when reading Paradise Lost, even though I know that this isn't what I'm supposed to feel, I felt it anyway. Ms. Musavi strikes me as the type of woman I've come across in professional circles who was given bad advice about how to act like a man as an act of defiance and also as a way to insist on being taken seriously and get ahead. Most women I've known who adopt this philosophy act either like no man I've ever known, or like the kind of man nobody likes. Maybe a hard-edged, opportunistic shark of man does occasionally rise to the top, but in my experience, the one personality type that does well everywhere is the go-along-to-get-along kind. I'm not saying that's a good thing, but it does seem to be a truth. Amir's advice to Ms. Musavi was essentially that: chill out, get along better with your colleagues. 

Amir has the good sense and tact to give her this advice one morning at the ministry when he and Ms. Musavi are the only ones there, so he isn't putting her on the spot. Up to that point, he had helped her out in her career and noticed her many strengths. The only drawback he has seen is her "inability or unwillingness to make friends at the ministry." He recognizes that as a woman, it is difficult for her to join in some of the banter with men that allows Amir to make friends. He isn't, perhaps, aware enough of the difficult she has as a woman, though, and as a result, he makes a mess of his advice. 

To my mind, though Ms. Musavi is unduly harsh with Amir. His advice is undoubtedly good, at least in spirit, although she was quick to point out the pitfalls in Iranian society of "making friends with all the men" in the office. Had she tried to respond more charitably, though, she might have learned something. If she came off as cold to Amir, she likely came off as cold to others, and it doesn't really even matter if that is just or not. There is a "perception is reality" predicament at work, and Amir, for all his tone-deafness, is trying to help her with it. 

How it turns out

In spite of being perceived as cold, Ms. Musavi advances to division leader over Amir. Her hard work and ability won out over her perceived aloofness. But I'm not sure Amir's feeling that she became unduly harsh can totally be written off as jealousy. I might be misreading the situation. Possibly, it's more normal in Iran for a senior boss to be very harsh, as Ms. Musavi seemingly was, and so she was just acting like any other male boss would have. But it's hard for me to think that, since so many of the workers in Amir's office seem to have been Western educated and to have picked up at least a little bit of the vibe to mellow out their conservativeness. I would guess the ministry isn't a place where her no-excuses toughness approach would succeed.  

The scene in which Amir goes to do the right thing and give Ms. Musavi the photos which were accidentally delivered to him, of her not wearing her chador and being casual in mixed company while in Australia, but then he is derailed from his good intentions by Ms. Musavi's own brusqueness, is pure Greek tragedy. Perhaps it's best to read the scene in that spirit, where Ms. Musavi's own strengths--her independence and her determination to be taken seriously--end up being her downfall. Had she not started the conversation with belittling Amir, he would have given her the photos and that would have been the end of it.

I think many Western readers--who, let's face it, if they're reading this story, are by and large liberals--will come to the conclusion that Amir was largely that ubiquitous boogeyman of online feminism, the insecure man afraid of a strong woman. That may be part of it, but to me, the story is better and far less obvious than this caricature of men that feminist activism often draws 

Rather than being a cartoonishly evil man who masks his evil through culturally accepted ideas of propriety, Amir is a good man who isn't quite good enough. He's been exposed to some modern ideas about women's roles, and to some extent, he agrees with them and is happy to comply. In a less unjust society, his casual willingness to be thoughtful when it isn't too hard for him would probably be all that is morally required of him. But in the context of an Iran that will put the feet of the non-compliant woman into a bed of cockroaches, it isn't enough. Amir is a man of average moral makeup when the situation requires moral greatness. 

Amir has good intentions but is irresolute. He has too much of a tendency to assume what has been passed on to him is good. He accepts most of the cultural conservatism as necessary, although he is willing to "be reasonable" about small sins. When confronted with his own daughter's laxity, his initial response, because he fears for his own daughter's safety, is to hit her for her own protection, in order to prevent her from ever ending up in the same compromising position as Ms. Musavi. He can't bring himself to do it, so he opts instead to call her a jendeh whore, which is kind of like calling her a whore twice. Even with that, though, he doubts himself: "Had he gone too far, saying words that might cause her to doubt her worth? All he wanted was to protect her." The story is a recognition of how difficult it can be for a person of ordinary moral judgment and strength to make sound moral decisions in a society where values are so wrong. 

Symbolism

Speaking of protecting, the story makes wonderful use of symbolism, particularly in the chador. When Amir and his wife were overseas, they tried to explain the virtues of the chador to skeptical Westerners. However, "Amir wasn't sure they were ever able to convince Westerners that the chador actually elevated and empowered women by protecting their delicate and yielding parts behind an impenetrable, iron curtain."

Amir believes that on an intelligent woman like Ms. Musavi, the chador served to both make her even more intimidating compared to unveiled men (maybe with a similar effect to mirrored sunglasses) and also to deaden sexual desire. And with this second claim, I do feel with a greater degree of certainty than with others that Amir really is protesting too much. The chador really does nothing to deaden his erotic feelings for her. He simply redirects them. Given only her eyebrows to work with, he manages to make them erotic and to fetishize them, to obsess about them until the mere suggestion of a similarity in his own daughter, another Ms. Musavi, drives him to act in a way he is himself ashamed of. 

The title of the story is "Mornings at the Ministry." There is only one morning at the ministry that is covered in any great detail in the story, and that's the morning when Amir tries to counsel Ms. Musavi. Yet the story is called "Mornings," plural, at the ministry. This title, perhaps, reveals what Amir has carefully tried to cover through the chador of a third-person narrator, which is that he sexualizes Ms. Musavi, in spite of himself, and that these feelings make him unable to keep his other feelings in balance enough to do the right thing. To the narrator naming the story, the thing that stands out most are the moments when Amir was alone with Ms. Musavi before anyone else came in to work.

It's possible that the erotic attraction is partly about more than sex. It might be that Ms. Musavi represents a greater cultural freedom that attracts Amir even while he fears it. Whatever the feeling is, Amir is eventually unable to reconcile his commitments to public rectitude with the private, undeveloped intuitions of his conscience.