These Dark Skies: Reckoning with Identity, Violence, and Power from Abroad - Paperback

by Arianne Zwartjes (Author)

In These Dark Skies, Arianne Zwartjes interweaves the experience of living in the southern Netherlands--with her wife, who is Russian--and the unfolding of both the refugee crisis across Europe and the uptick in terrorist acts in France, Greece, Austria, Germany, and the Balkans. She probes her own subjectivity, as a white American, as a queer woman in a transcultural marriage, as a writer, and as a witness.

The essays investigate and meditate on a broad array of related topics, including drone strikes, tear gas, and military intervention; the sugar trade, the Dutch blackface celebration of Zwarte Piet, and constructions of whiteness in Europe and the U.S.; and visual arts of Russian avant-garde painters, an Iraqi choreographer living in Belgium, and German choreographer Pina Bausch.

This is a lyrical, timely book deeply salient to the political moment we continue to find ourselves in: a moment of incredible anti-refugee and anti-immigrant sentiment, a moment of xenophobic and misogynistic violence.

Author Biography

Arianne Zwartjes teaches for the Sierra Nevada University MFA program. She is author of Detailing Trauma: A Poetic Anatomy (Iowa, 2012). Her writing has been awarded the Gulf Coast Nonfiction Prize, been a Best American Essays notable essay, and a semifinalist for the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize. She lives in Tacoma, Washington.