Karen An-hwei Lee
Epilogue for A Woman in the Dunes
Dear Mister Jumpei – If I were the insect-woman who lived in the dunes, the one living at the bottom of a quarry accessible only by a rope-ladder the villagers lowered – I would tie you up and let those letter-bearer beetles you loved mercilessly bite you on the way out of their killing jars. Potassium cyanide you issued in those little bottles – your amateur entomologist’s collection – I would release into the air as you slept. What would you dream, then? Not of my sensual hunger as a young widow rather, this rage. No. I would not hold a paper parasol over your head while you ate a soup of broiled fish I made with my own hands. You see, I am angry. I would say this in our novel over and again. Burning sand would cascade in a fever over your skin yet I would not bathe you. My namelessness shifts in the palimpsest we sweep away, our relentless fate. Your name for all women is no name. In your dream, I am hungrier than all the insects you ever collected, more human than any dune butterfly. When I raise my arms, they do not turn into sheath-wings. I spread my legs and do not run. This is real life. Our unborn child never to grow – an ectopic pregnancy – forces me out of our hovel for the first time in years hemorrhaging while you remain mute, your desire to escape now lost, cradling cold well water in your hands. In solitude. Wordless, you wonder whether you will see me again. You won’t.
Karen An-hwei Lee is the author of Phyla of Joy (Tupelo Press, 2012), Ardor (Tupelo Press, 2008) and In Medias Res (Sarabande Books, 2004), winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award. Her book of literary criticism, Anglophone Literatures in the Asian Diaspora: Literary Transnationalism and Translingual Migrations (Cambria, 2013), was selected for the Cambria Sinophone World Series. She earned an M.F.A. from Brown University and Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, she lives and teaches in greater Los Angeles, where she is a novice harpist.
