Generation F
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I wonder if he remembers how, the last time we slept together, he argued with me about using a condom. I wonder if he remembers saying that I was overreacting when I told him he had a problem with consent.
I wonder if he is as ashamed of me as I am of myself for sleeping with him one more time, after he raped me.
My rapist is a feminist. He hosts events focused on equality and queer love. He attends future feminist dance parties and reposts articles on intersectional feminism.
I wonder if he remembers the night that it happened. If he remembers me telling him to stop. If he remembers pretending not to hear me. If he remembers pretending to be sorry. If he remembers the email he sent me, confessing and apologizing for all of the pain he caused me. If he remembers what a good showman he was.
My rapist is a feminist.
I wonder if he knows what that word means.
CRYSTAL ADOTE
YEARS AS MENTEE: 1
GRADE: Sophomore
HIGH SCHOOL: School of the Future
BORN: Queens, NY
LIVES: Queens, NY
MENTEE’S ANECDOTE: Working with Girls Write Now and Arielle has been a great experience. They have taught me new writing techniques, confidence, and optimism. Something I like about the program is the speakers that they bring in for the workshops. It is interesting and exciting to listen to other writers’ work and their histories. I also enjoy how we can write about anything we want and let our creativity run wild. I am particularly proud of my Column Writing piece—it taught me to state my opinion while being open to other people’s as well.
ARIELLE BARAN
YEARS AS MENTOR: 2
OCCUPATION: Account Supervisor, Derris
BORN: Los Angeles, CA
LIVES: Brooklyn, NY
MENTOR’S ANECDOTE: When we started the Girls Write Now year, my mentee and I embarked on Intergenerational Memoir writing. I learned about her family and story as a friend, writer, niece, and daughter. It was an opportunity for us to share and learn about each other. Six months later, we have built on that experience of learning through our writing.
Dela’s Dream
CRYSTAL ADOTE
My aunt is my role model—she inspires and motivates me. She’s an independent woman who came to this country with nothing and made her way up with the help of some friends along the way.
In Togo, the public schools had small rooms—the students were crammed into hot, mosquito-infested spaces. The parents were uninvolved. As a result, the teachers fed off the feeling that the parents didn’t care that much about their children’s education and just needed them to get out of the house. The private schools were different, with better learning environments.
The private school teachers were nuns. As they walked around the school, the extreme heat from the Togo sun left the nuns hot and sweaty under their wool habits, but they never complained. They had dedicated their lives not only to God but also to nurturing the next generation to excel. After a long day of teaching, they went home to their beds in the church and awoke the next morning, doing it all over again. Their lives revolved around the school.
One of the lovely children whom the nuns taught was a girl named Dela. Even though private schools were expensive, Dela’s father insisted that all of his children attend a good school where the teachers and administrators cared more about education. Dela was a small girl who laughed a lot; she enjoyed the time she spent with her friends. While she wore khaki skirts and long black stockings to school every day, she dreamt of wearing shorts or pants and letting her legs breathe! Dela always dreamed of being a fashion designer and going to school in America. Whenever Dela’s mother visited her family, she would find her sewing machine and fix or make new clothes. Dela always knew in the back of her mind that her father did not agree with her dream, but that didn’t stop her.
While she had big dreams, she needed to face reality and middle school first. Dela didn’t grasp things that easily or quickly, so her dad found tutors to help her. Her first tutors were her brothers, but they weren’t that helpful. They would make fun of how slow she was, saying things like “This is so easy, how do you not get it?” or “Only a dummy would get this wrong.” This did not help Dela. Her dad saw that she wasn’t growing—she wasn’t learning to believe in herself at the hands of her brothers. So he got her a new tutor, a close family friend. There was a massive change in her learning, and she started doing better in school.
Dela’s father, proud of how well Dela was excelling, wanted her to be a teacher. He sent her to a boarding high school that focused on language. There she learned how to speak English, and she was very grateful for the opportunity. There were many people living in Togo who didn’t have the privilege to go to school and get a good education or any nurturing. Sometimes strict nuns were available only to the few who could afford it. Many children had to stay at home to take care of their siblings and clean the house while their parents were at work. Others would have to go to work to make some money to support their family.
The boarding school gave Dela many opportunities, including being able to attend university. After she graduated from college, she joined a program that connected her with some summer camps in the U.S., and she traveled there for the first time to work in Massachusetts. When she arrived she didn’t want to leave—she loved it there. The people were nice and accepting. They didn’t judge her or make fun of her accent like her brothers would. She made many friends quickly, many who have helped her to get to where she is now. Every day she is grateful and blessed for the people she has met along the way.
GRANDmother
ARIELLE BARAN
My grandmother passed away a week before Trump’s inauguration. While I missed the Women’s March to celebrate her life, she is my guidepost for strong womanhood today. She is my Generation F.
One month before she passed away, my grandmother condemned me for not wearing lipstick. I was sitting at the edge of her hospital bed, running my fingers through her beautiful gray hair, when she pointed to her purse on the nightstand. She pulled out her beaded makeup case and placed it in my hand, motioning for me to gloss a layer of red lipstick over my heartbroken smile. There was no one quite like her. Even as she suffered from Parkinson’s and dementia, my tiwa never stopped being the fierce, lipstick-wearing grandmother who helped raise me.
She was one of a kind. She was known to place hexes on any driver who dared to cut her off. She always kept her nails long and manicured with a bright, orangey-red polish. She never left the house without her elegantly layered pearls or diamond earrings. She always set the table according to etiquette expert Emily Post and taught each of her grandchildren the purpose and preferred placement of each fork. She owned and managed a Western clothing store with cunning and business savvy. She placed hundred-dollar bills in plastic Easter eggs and hid them around the house during the holidays for her grandchildren, and later great-grandchildren, to find and save for college.
I grew up surrounded by strong women; my grandmother sat at the helm of our tribe. From my mom to my teenage cousins, my grandmother taught each of us how to define our own fierce version of being female. Sometimes the fierceness collided with big opinions and large personalities crescendoing at one of our large family dinners, but at least, because of her, the women in our family have big opinions and personalities to share with the world.
SOLEDAD AGUILAR-COLON
YEARS AS MENTEE: 2
GRADE: Junior
HIGH SCHOOL: Beacon High School
BORN: Bronx, NY
LIVES: New York, NY
PUBLICATIONS AND RECOGNITIONS: Scholastic Art & Writing Award: two Silver Keys, Honorable Mention
MENTEE’S ANECDOTE: These past two years with Linda have been eye-opening! There was this one particular Monday when Linda and I met at our usual spot, the Atrium in Manhattan, and did what we always do, talk. But this time, Linda and I decided to go further in our discussion. Instead of discussing politics or daily life frustration
s, we talked about family. From then on, I felt a shift in our relationship and that reflected itself in the topics that we wrote about because we felt more open and comfortable with each other.
LINDA CORMAN
YEARS AS MENTOR: 8
OCCUPATION: Freelance Editor and Writer
BORN: Newton, MA
LIVES: New York, NY
PUBLICATIONS AND RECOGNITIONS: Community Preservation Corps, Underwriting Efficiency
MENTOR’S ANECDOTE: Sole had given clues that she wanted to discuss her sexuality on a number of occasions, but I did not know how to respond. One day, she talked candidly about her displeasure with the sex-education course at school because it ignored same-sex couples. This was the beginning of our ability to talk more openly about sexuality. For this, I am infinitely grateful to Sole. It really felt like Sole was the adult in creating this opening.
Who Is Ozzie?
SOLEDAD AGUILAR-COLON
This piece began as an exploration of masculinity through the lens of a young Afro-Latino boy but became an exploration of my own struggles with my identity through this character, Ozzie.
Who is Oscar Rosario? What does he look like? No—what should he look like? Ozzie was already familiar with his own face. The same brown skin, brown eyes, and curly-almost-kinky fro sitting on top of his head like a lion’s mane. Wild and free. Como el espíritu de Puerto Rico, his mom used to tell him as she pulled and yanked at the tangled knots forming at the back of his head. Every damn morning he saw the same person in the mirror, intently studying the tiny mole on the left side of his cheek, or the slight widow’s peak that only could have been inherited from his grandfather, whom he had never met, and heard from only occasionally. Every year on March 16, his abuelo would call from Puerto Rico to sing him a feliz cumple and remind him of the protests in New York to Free Oscar Lopez from incarceration. “Siempre pa’lante negrito”—always go forward—he would say, and Ozzie would picture his abuelo sitting on a plastic lawn chair in front of his little red casita, drinking rum and wearing a white guayabera with the socialist flag swaying behind him.
Sometimes when Ozzie stared at himself for too long, his image started to dissolve into the features of his ancestors: his nose resembling that of his defiant abuelita as she would cook maduros in hot oil during the day and teach the other campesinos (farmers) how to read at night. Or his infamous, untamable fro resembling that of his cigar-smoking black grandfather, who chased chickens during the day and held secret radical meetings with the neighbors about the revolution in Cuba by night. But he never just saw Ozzie. It was as if his face carried the reminder of only the oppression and poverty of the Puerto Rican people.
As Ozzie finished rubbing leave-in conditioner through his hair, he could see the ghosts of his heritage flickering inside the reflection of the mirror. Clapping and hip-bumping. Dipping and swaying. The colors before him flashed like a memory across his mind: the red, yellow, and blue skirts of the local women dancing to the beat of the conga drum. “That hijito is Bomba y Plena,” his mom had whispered as they watched the Puerto Rican Day Parade pass by. He had never seen so many coffee, cream, and brown faces like his own, all crammed into one place, eating and drinking together as if they had never left the island to begin with. He was so captivated by the movement of the parade that he let go of his little sister’s fingertips and ran right into the heart of the crowd. His mother’s urgent calls for him to come back were quickly drowned out by the throaty sound of what Ozzie would later learn was a guirro.
The older man next to him looked down at Ozzie and offered him the toffee-colored instrument. At first Ozzie just stared, perplexed by its oval shape and strange marks indented in the middle. Finally, he took the small instrument into his even smaller eight-year-old hands and ran his fingers along its body. “Put it to your ear and you’ll hear the ocean waves from Puerto Rico,” said the man, gesturing to the hole at the top, and then held his hand up to his ear like he was holding a cell phone. As Ozzie was just about to put the delicate instrument to his ear, he felt a hand grip his Star Wars shirt tightly and yank him away from the man. The instrument fell with a clunk onto the ground and as he was dragged away by his mother yelling words she had banned him from saying, Ozzie wondered if he would ever get the chance to hear the sound of Puerto Rico’s ocean.
Now the memories swirling in his mind blinded him to his surroundings as he tried grasping for . . . for what? Every day Ozzie walks past the posters plastered across the 191st Street train station entrance doors, wondering if that’s what he should look like . . . like a light-skinned rapper with triangles tattooed on his shiny bald head and fake, gleaming gold chains hanging from his neck. This year the new Latino icon was Bad Bunny, but only a couple of years ago Pitbull had taken over the radio, rapping about naked girls in Spanglish. So when he couldn’t find himself in the posters, Ozzie tried rummaging through the old comic editions at St. Mark’s Comics bookstore, searching for a brown face and kinky fro dressed in a Spider-Man suit. And yet, even after searching New York’s most famous comic book store, Forbidden Planet NYC, Ozzie always left with his money still in his wallet and disappointment hanging over him like a thick cloud ready to pour. Ozzie couldn’t tell anymore if what he saw every morning in the bathroom mirror was him or a reflection of years of searching through the city he calls home and always feeling like a lion swarmed by a crowd of eagles.
A Gen F’er Meets Her Great-Great-Grandparents
LINDA CORMAN
The novel I am working on is about the impact of one generation on the next. So, when thinking about the meaning of Generation F, I immediately considered it in relation to preceding generations.
What would my grandparents think of Generation F? (And what, by the way, should their generation be called? Generation Sh, for shtetl? Generation S, for survivors? Generation TR, for Teddy Roosevelt?)
I picture my great-niece, the Generation F’er Madeline, at her great-great-grandmother’s dining table. My grandma’s head is shaking, as it has at least since my generation gathered at this same table for matzo ball soup and matzo sandwiches of haroset and bitter herbs.
Madeline is peeking at her iPhone beneath the white embroidered tablecloth, under which my generation ducked to sneak sips of sweet and sticky Manischewitz.
Madeline knows this shaking may be Parkinson’s. Her generation knows these things. It’s the beneficiary of the gradual ending of the hush around so much—illness, sex, race, gender.
My generation, Madeline’s grandmother’s generation, when it sat at the same table, thought the shaking was an expression of disapproval. Grandma, we thought, was onto us and the Manischewitz.
The shaking, as we saw it, was an incessant reproach for our wayward thoughts, for whatever we secretly did that the grownups didn’t want us to do.
But this, Madeline’s generation, isn’t prey to that. It’s been brought up to be unashamed, proud of whoever they are. They live by their beliefs and values; they don’t compartmentalize to make their way under present circumstances.
Madeline’s parents, too, would know the shaking was probably Parkinson’s. But they retain some of the fear of being disapproved of by earlier generations. Possibly the shaking had something to do with the contrasting colors of their skin.
“Shvartze,” the great-great-grandfather had been heard to say—a racist Jews’ word for a person of color. All succeeding generations had cringed when the offending word had come out of the family patriarch’s mouth, and they were glad the great-great-granddaughter had never heard him say it.
And if she had, what would she have said?
Whatever it was, it would have been forthright. It would have been impossible to mistake for a degenerative disease. It would be thoughtful, devoid of rancor and not intended to shame. It would respect her great-great-grandfather’s experience. But it would give him pause.
NAZERKE AKILOVA
YEARS AS MENTEE: 1
GRADE: Senior
HIGH SCHOOL: Inter
national High School at Lafayette
BORN: Almaty, Kazakhstan
LIVES: Brooklyn, NY
PUBLICATIONS AND RECOGNITIONS: Scholastic Art & Writing Awards: Silver Key
MENTEE’S ANECDOTE: At a cozy coffee shop, Leslie and I started discussing my personal statement for college applications. It was a rainy and miserable day. Anxiety triggered me every time I looked at the 1,000-word essay. The more we sat there, sipping our tea, the easier it was for me to confidently share my thoughts. Not only did Leslie pave a path toward an effective personal statement, she listened, empathized, and helped me polish emotionally raw ideas into a beautiful and solid piece of writing. This day was an integral part of realizing how soulful and sincere my mentor is.
LESLIE PARISEAU
YEARS AS MENTOR: 1
OCCUPATION: Writer/Editor
BORN: Findlay, OH
LIVES: Brooklyn, NY
PUBLICATIONS AND RECOGNITIONS: The New York Times, Saveur, PUNCH, New York magazine, SPRITZ (2016); 2017 James Beard nominee; 2014 Forbes 30 Under 30
MENTOR’S ANECDOTE: On a cold, rainy fall day, Naze and I got to talking about her college essay. We were looking for a solution to writing the essay in a way that might tick college admissions’ boxes while communicating the breadth of her personal journey—and letting her creativity sing. Eventually, I saw Naze recognize how it could come together without sacrificing the passion she’d woven into the piece. Fast-forward several months, and she’s got her pick of colleges, no doubt in part because she’s a killer writer who can make the world listen to what she has to say.
A Gift from My Mom
NAZERKE AKILOVA
My mom’s strength, passion, and kindness became my main inspiration for writing this piece. Her rush for freedom and feminism became my main definition of Generation F.