Chris: Hello again Cat and Andrew. I’m going to get things started on week two of our reading club roundtable for The Girl in the Road. Last week’s discussion centered on the question of reliable narrators, and whether Meena and Mariama could be trusted by readers. Now we have even more reason to question these young women. But what else do we have going on here?

First, there is Meena naked in her sunken pod in the middle of the ocean, waiting out a cyclone, as an unseen something brushes past her underwater bubble. Then, right out of a Jules Verne horror story, a single handprint presses into the skin of the pod. I just wanna shout out to Monica for that moment because holy shit is that brilliant and terrifying.

Okay, moving on. I thought it’d be good broaden the conversation this week and we can get more targeted after everyone’s finished. So here are a few things that struck me in books 5-9.

The symmetry between the stories of Mariama and Meena has moved to center-stage. I wanted to mention the solar-plexus in our earlier discussion but didn’t get the chance. The snake-bite/sea-snake meat was perhaps the first obvious connection (itself full of meaning to unpack, what with solar like the energy, and the sociopsychology of solar, as well as the solar-plexus chakra, etc.). But now we’re seeing not just metaphorical/symbolic connections but direct links in the text as well, most importantly the appearance of the eponymous Girl in the Road. You’ll recall the Girl in the Road appears to Mariama dead, sprouting wings, and imparting some dark wisdom (“better to die than be taken by a man”), only to have Meena refer to herself as the Girl in the Road in the next book.

I’m not sure how The Girl in the Road is going to pull together (one of the more exciting aspects I’d say is having no clue how this going to end). But now both Meena and Mariama have seen some kind of vision of the other as they travel to the same place…I’m a little worried by the level of overt-ness in the symmetry between the stories. Not too worried. But a little. We’ll see. As I said, I trust Monica Byrne to take us safely to Addis. But still. A little.

What else.

The continued blurring of fantasy/reality/dreams/visions. This relates back to the issues of reliable narrators. How can Meena or Mariama relay their story accurately to us readers when they have difficulty knowing it themselves? This element leads me to wonder what kind of ending is possible. How sci-fi/un-sci-fi is this book interested in becoming? That kind of question excites me. I’m very curious.

Speaking of science-fiction, I’m struck by Byrne’s appreciation for and referencing of previous work in the genre. Book 7 is basically a love letter to Ursula K. LeGuin, with Meena’s talk of summoning Goddesses in the chambers of an unknown temple, and the “dream of finding new room’s in one house.” The conversation between texts decades or even centuries apart is one of the great pleasure of literature, and in that conversation The Girl in the Road has not been silent. Meena’s story includes a love of stories past (such as Mariama’s, perhaps?), so it’s no surprise to see Monica Byrne doing the same thing herself.

I could run on and on in a list like this so I’ll pass it over on this note: my a favorite part of The Girl in the Road is Byrne’s attention to the bodies we carry. It’s rare to get a sci-fi (literary or deeply genre) book combining the technology and science of the future (the glotti and the pod and the Trail itself) with the physical reality of human life. Walking along the top of a thousand kilometer solar/hyrdo power generator is interesting, but figuring out how to take a shit while doing it, that’s also part of great human stories. The fluid realities of sex with a trans woman or running out of fantasies to masturbate to are just as critical as the impact of the sun on skin or the pouting tears of a child. Byrne has a manner of keeping that physicality present as her story veers into sci-fi or religion or family or any of her many interweaving subjects. And as a reader, I really appreciate that.

So what struck you, Andrew, other than the complicated nature of Meena shitting on the Trail?

Andrew: What jumped out to me in this middle section was the complexity of Monica Byrne’s symbolic language in the novel. What we have in Meena and Miriama’s parallel stories is a system of signs and signifiers that overlap, echo, and stand in tension with one another. There are so many symbols, each one leading to another, and another, and another, that I hardly know where to begin. There’s “Semena Werk,” for instance, the dissident group that is also a “golden meaning.” In Mariama’s storyline, Yemaya briefly connects the “golden meaning” to sexuality and love and the integrity of one’s own body; in Meena’s story, the golden meaning is her dead mother, the goddess at the center of the temple that is Meena’s innermost being.

Motherhood brings up Yemaya, a symbol that moves in many different directions. The goddess of motherhood and the sea, Yemaya may be the mother that Meena unknowingly seeks in the Arabian sea, penetrating deeper into the temple with each step—yet at the same time, Meena also seems to herself be Yemaya, a woman of voracious sexual appetites who is rumored to have tamed a sea snake in the ocean (just as Meena seeks to conquer the Trail?). Meanwhile, Yemaya is a literal character in Mariama’s story, a surrogate mother who shepherds the girl across the dry sea of the Sahara.

Then there’s the symbol of energy. For Meena, energy and its transfer sometimes connotes sex, both consensual and nonconsensual—in one striking passage, Meena recalls Mohini observing that we are all, somewhere in our lineage, “the result of energy forced, not welcomed. The waves coming whether we want them to or not.” Energy also has an environmental component: the world’s need for electricity, literal energy, is what is causing the seas to rise (water and Yemaya again), and Meena walks on a bridge built to take advantage of the surplus of energy in the atmosphere by harvesting that energy in the form of waves—waves which come and destabilize Meena’s journey whether she wants them to or not.

The rising seas—the result of humanity’s addiction to energy—have an impact on Mariama’s story, too: Yemaya tells Mariama that the rising waters will one day fill the Great Rift Valley, a place associated with Dinkenesh. At first thinking that Monica Byrne had introduced yet another goddess to her symbolic language, I looked up Dinkenesh and discovered that we might know her better as “Lucy”—not a goddess, per se, but the fossilized remains of an australopithecus, the oldest and most complete skeleton we have of an evolutionary ancestor to humans. Dinkenesh/Lucy was found in the Great Rift Valley, and Yemaya’s mention of the valley, and of the notion of its one day being covered with water, invokes at once humanity’s evolution in the cradle of Africa and its eventual extinction as a result of global climate change. Evolution and extinction in a single breath—death and rebirth, wind and water, waves and energy, ancestry and motherhood.

This is powerful, evocative stuff. And there’s a small part of me that wants to tie these symbols down, to interrogate them for stable meanings. As the oceanographers Meena comes across say, “All systems want to be at rest,” and my mind itches for the symbol system in The Girl in the Road to be at rest. But it’s a foolish wish. The best symbols yield meanings that are unstable, like liquid hydrogen. It’s not balance but imbalance that creates waves—waves, in this case, of elusive/allusive meaning.

I’ve spent a lot of time on symbols—but I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least mention Monica Byrne’s social critique. Like her symbol system, her social vision is one that moves in many different directions. Her Africa, for instance, provides a dynamic social setting: it’s beginning to dominate the world scene, yet torn apart by war and unrest and colonialist capitalism that greedily seeks to extract value from the continent. In Meena, meanwhile, we have a vision of gender and sexuality that is resolutely sex-positive, and open to all expressions of gender identity—gay, straight, bi, trans. (Judith Butler fans might particularly enjoy one section in which Mohini suggests that Meena’s sexuality is an “ongoing performance.”)

But I think the most striking hint we get of Byrne’s social vision is in the “Girl in the Road” section, an episode that sits in the center of the novel and, thus far, seems to be the main thing giving the book its name. After an accident, Mariama has a vision of a girl with black wings who tells her that “it was better to die than be taken by a man,” and reassures her that death is always an option, should Mariama need it: “You can just lie down in the road, anytime.”

It’s a prospect that haunts the text so far—the possibility that, for a woman in this world, it might be better to lie down and die than live with the ongoing trauma of what violent men can do. My only real hope, two-thirds of the way through The Girl in the Road, is that Meena and Mariama can find their way to a better fate.

Cat: The ghost girl in the road with her “wiggling” teeth, pink dress turned mustard and fantastic borrowed wings from buzzards, is a very real and possible end for little Mariama. I found this portion the most haunting and truthful. The last dignified and self-determining act for many victimized women (and men) is to chose death over ongoing trauma. For me and at this point of the story, Mariama’s winged doppelganger is little girl’s imagination coping with the unbearable and making it eerily beautiful.

On the flipside of Mariama’s ghost girl are Meena’s spooky encounters. What is she being haunted by? Who is little woman who jumps off the Trail when noticed? Who’s mysterious hand brushing over the pod? Mentions of Bloody Mary and Yemaya pop up everywhere in between. This is mystery I can’t find out about soon enough.

In between her strange sightings, Meena is learning to walk on the Trail by softening. “Now go through your body and find where you’re holding tight and try to let it go soft.” As Meena softens and opens so does her narrative. Her narrative opens into Mohini and her longing for her mother, both of which are keys to understanding Meena’s sexuality and spirituality.

Walking on the Trail is also likened to yoga, another way to open the body and soul. “Great. I’m in a fucking yoga class.” Yoga class means it’s all about Meena’s body now, what’s presently going on and what’s remembered from before. Her body and mind visit memories of the gorgeous Mohini. I loved Mohini’s story: learning of her hijra identity, her singing, the details on her traditional clothing, her anxiety meeting Meena’s parents and their love story.

From memories of being with Mohini flow Meena’s longing for her mother. In Chapter 7, Meena retells the fantasy of her mother as a goddess living in the inner sanctum of a temple and Meena’s life is a journey to that inner sanctum. I found this a beautiful Hindu version of St. Theresa of Avila’s mystical revelation in “The Interior Castle.” Theresa saw every soul as journeying through seven courtyards. At the final courtyard, the soul finds union with God just as Meena hopes to be renunited with her mother in the final temple chamber.

Theresa of Avila could easily be another patron saint (or goddess!) for Meena. St. Theresa had moments of moaning ecstasy with God and in one vision, his fiery love arrow deeply pierced her belly. Sexuality is also where Meena’s spirituality lies. She gives her sex away passionately and freely. In one scene she considers raping a gay man, but she turns away from abuse and loves herself instead.

Meena’s narrative weaves sex stories in and out with encounters of unpredictable weather and scientists foreseeing a grim future.The energy of sex is coupled with the energy of the rising sea. In the light of impending doom, the story of Shiva (often portrayed in a graveyard, covered in ash) coupling with Meenakshi Devi every night in her temple, holds symbolic significance and maybe even comfort.

Meena’s positive sexual energy dances alongside young Mariama’s dark and disturbing one. How Bryne will weave in all the threads we discussed (and more) remains to be seen but I, for one, can’t wait.