by Bunny McFadden
“In snatching the tool of speculation from my writer's toolbox here on the kitchen table, I've inadvertently made something raw rather than crafted.”
When people compliment me on how well I’m drowning, I grin and show them the bloody gills I’ve carved in my chest.
The madness runs in my family. I was told the tale of La Llorona when my body fit in half a bathtub, squeezed among my three older sisters. The fear of our mom drowning us stood in the corner, but it never introduced itself until I was much older. I was drinking the kind of beer that makes your heart burn in the tiny German kitchen of my sister Jordan, who was named after a baptismal river. We sipped things that tickled our tongues, things that reminded us of how our mother drowned her sorrows in alcohol. And in that hazy underwater clarity, I saw how close I’d been to death.
My mother loved us. Before I dive in too deep, I will tie this anchor tight around me. If I don’t, I’ll drown in remembering. When I wrote my doctoral thesis, I’d often use critical artifactual literacy to recenter myself, though sometimes the pictures turned to hard cement blocks around my feet. In the crafting of speculative nonfiction, artifacts can become gateways to sensemaking, but they can just as easily become the talismans of doom that ease us into catatonia. This is why I am using memory without swimming aides to guide this speculative nonfiction.
I was a stunted child who never learned to swim. One of my first memories was a communal pool the color of Santa Fe turquoise. My sisters called me farther and farther, convinced that luring me to the deep end was the way to teach me how to survive. Instead, as my toes tickled the scratchy concrete, I inhaled water. It’s never really left my lungs; I still cough up goldfish, these cursed luck charms, when I talk about my childhood. This was my first memory of drowning.
My mother drank. I do, too.
The stream of cheap beer she sat under would pour into her eyes, coat her tongue, and transform her into a sneaking, biting fish. She’d snap, gummy and toothless, all the while trying to swim upstream to home. We moved a dozen times, closer and closer to the Rio Grande. And each time, her whiskers and scales and guppy mouth grew more apparent, til she was more fish than mother.
Speculative nonfiction is the twin of autoethnography, but the mother’s womb deprives it of air. It’s born with red skin, dying, drowning before it can be logged as a living soul. When I write about myself, I armor myself with the airy life jackets of reflexivity, made puffy with my own hot breath. This is the methodology of autohistoria. But speculative nonfiction is made when you wade out into the water with a life jacket made of a burial wreath. It is poetic, and seemingly ornamental, but only if you focus your goal on survival. When you write to let go, it is cathartic to let yourself drown.
My dissertation was meant to be a survival manual, but instead it is a passenger log of the people I’ve been who have drowned among the wreckage of my life. I wrote; I wrote because each word was the oar of a lifeboat cutting into the choppy water, offering itself to me as a way to escape. But only looking back at this autoethnographic dissertation within the speculative nonfiction methodology do I see the ways I wrote my own autopsy. Waterlogged, decomposing in the waves, picked at and nibbled by the schools of houndfish who formed my cohort; my autoethnography is crystallized in sea salt, the delicate pages turned to something that looks solid and steady, but will crumble if you poke at it.
The work of Gloria Anzaldua helped me unpack my role as a white-passing, straight-passing, cis-passing queer chicana, but I soon realized that the comfort with which I took on this identity revealed my internalized colonist. What I thought was an autohistoria dresses itself in brag: look how well I pass, look how well I can model the colonizer with my language. Look at me taming my tongue, putting on the “bridle and saddle” (Anzaldua, p. 53).
I came to recognize myself as non-binary in the last months of my dissertation, which ironically focused on autoethnography as a practice of surgically uncovering the deep tissue that choked up my voice box. I’d survived the flaying required by academia by writing about myself. It was as protective as the way I cut my ankles when I was 13: a safe way to self-harm, something easily dismissible as a natural consequence of performing gender, of performing in general. Only at the end can I look back and see that instead of a survival guide, I wrote an obituary. When you cut yourself open for academia, remember how they treat your body as a specimen.
I started my drowning in the dark waters that birthed me. Ostensibly, my thesis was about decolonizing pedagogy using storytelling, but I carefully avoided writing about the water I was in. I wrote about its depth, its chill, its dirt and grime, but never did I write about it as a living body of water that threatens even today to roll over my head. In everything I’ve read about drowning, there’s a moment of calm and peace. I find myself there now.
Some who were raised with Spanish in their hot gasping breath will be angry with me, but I can only tell the stories that survived my mother having her mouth washed out with soap. In school, she told me, any chattering Spanish brooks would be brutally dammed by the teachers. When I asked my mother to teach me Spanish, she told me that it would only make my scales glitter. Anonymity was the cure. She gave me the whitest name she could. I, too, was named after something with water, but mine was the name of a bridge.
When I wrote my thesis, I spent weeks wondering about the words she taught me in Spanish. Did she really not know the English equivalent? Was it intentional that I grew up not knowing the English word for chupos (house slippers) or pala (shovel / dustpan)? Was this her way of slipping messages into the stream of our matriarchy?
My mother was drowning herself when she raised us. We were her baptism, the rebirth made possible through that sacrifice of air that comes when a baby learns to live by crushing your ribs. Each of her four daughters offered hope: Misty, named after the cigarettes she smoked. Token, named after treasure at the arcade where I imagine she hid when her husband beat her. Jordan, a river where followers of Christ were baptized. Chelsea, a port by the ocean; a bridge; a boat. All of us raised near the Rio Grande, all of us seven generations deep in the muddy water of colonizer & colonized; Mexican, Spanish, & indigenous. I wrote about the water but never about drowning.
A cousin drowned in Storey Lake. It became a cautionary tale. A fire raged in my auntie’s shrine to Saint Francis of Assisi. It became a cautionary tale. My mother turned into a fish. Her daughters are only half transformed now, stuck in between. It became a cautionary tale.
When we were young, my mother took us to swim in the Rio Grande. That evening, scrubbed clean and tucked into the double twin bunk beds, the four of us kept our eyes shut tight and listened closely to the news that played on the television in the other bedroom. They’d found bodies up the river from us. The same water that had squelched between my toes and dripped from my hair also hid two unnamed indigenous women. In my academic work, I remember this moment because it reminds me that they’ll drown us all, indiscriminately. The only way to survive is embracing the transformation into becoming a goldfish, even if that means carving my own gills.
Speculative nonfiction itself is an act of decolonization. It plays with epistemology, with perspective and control of the narrative. I spent half my autoethnography on words that would keep it afloat when the academics came to sink it. But with this essay, I find myself slipping underwater. I no longer fight to name these tributaries, because classifying them with mortal words does not strengthen or weaken their powers.
The embrace of ambiguity is something Gloria Anzaldua writes about extensively in Borderlands. Her work is a testament to the decolonizing nature of speculative nonfiction. I read it again and again and again. It is my manual for drowning.
In snatching the tool of speculation from my writer's toolbox here on the kitchen table, I've inadvertently made something raw rather than crafted. It harkens to primacy and feels like I've let my inner child crawl out to speak.
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Dr. Bunny McFadden (she/they) is a Chicana mother who tinkers with words for a living. In addition to being the winner of the 2021 Golden Ox and being published in horror & scifi anthologies, they’ve written widely in academia & hosted workshops on storytelling. They’re the assistant editor of a magazine for incarcerated folks. Their website is DocBunny.com.