Greenland

by David Santos Donaldson

Genres: Literary Fiction; LGBT & Pride; Historical Fiction

Synopsis

Shortlisted for the 2023 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction 

A dazzling, debut novel-within-a-novel in the vein of The Prophets and Memorial, about a young author writing about the secret love affair between E.M. Forster and Mohammed el Adl—in which Mohammed’s story collides with his own, blending fact and fiction.

In 1919, Mohammed el Adl, the young Egyptian lover of British author E. M. Forster, spent six months in a jail cell. A century later, Kip Starling has locked himself in his Brooklyn basement study with a pistol and twenty-one gallons of Poland Spring to write Mohammed’s story.

Kip has only three weeks until his publisher’s deadline to immerse himself in the mind of Mohammed who, like Kip, is Black, queer, an Other. The similarities don't end there. Both of their lives have been deeply affected by their confrontations with Whiteness, homophobia, their upper crust education, and their white romantic partners. As Kip immerses himself in his writing, Mohammed’s story – and then Mohammed himself – begins to speak to him, and his life becomes a Proustian portal into Kip's own memories and psyche. Greenland seamlessly conjures two distinct yet overlapping worlds where the past mirrors the present, and the artist’s journey transforms into a quest for truth that offers a world of possibility.

Electric and unforgettable, David Santos Donaldson’s tour de force excavates the dream of white assimilation, the foibles of interracial relationships, and not only the legacy of a literary giant, but literature itself.

Release date: May 3, 2022

Publisher: Amistad

Print pages: 304

Sample

Part 1

The Very Last Englishman

One may as well begin with the gun. I’m holding the neat little thing in the palm of my hand. A Glock 22. It weighs like a sinker with the magazine fully loaded. Ten Golden Sabers. Such a glamorous name for bullets. The truth about my current situation is that I am locked up in this basement study, confined here for three weeks, and I have a gun.

I’m sure you’ve already figured out that since there’s a gun, there’s sure to be a violent death. But I can assure you I will do my best to avoid it. I despise violence. Honestly. I’ve actually taken a solemn vow against killing even a tiny insect.

I know you barely know anything about me, aside from the fact that I’m locked up in this basement study. My name is Kip Starling. Kip is short for Kipling. I was named after my father’s favorite writer, the staunch British colonialist. A problematic literary destiny set from birth. It may seem like too much information to say what I’m about to say, but we don’t have time for niceties. Three weeks is all I have for this entire crazy endeavor. There’s no time for the old literary conventions. “Show, don’t tell,” they say. I know. But I think it’s more important that we start off on the right foot. I need to be crystal clear about one thing: the reason why truth is paramount to me.

Eleven years ago, when I was twenty-six, after I was essentially kicked out of my Columbia MFA writing program—feeling lost, with no purpose—a concerned friend dragged me along with him to a meditation center on the Upper West Side. We sat on the floor and chanted beautiful but incomprehensible words in Sanskrit. It initially seemed silly to me, but to my surprise I had a mystical experience—something truly mind-blowing. In my meditation I experienced a self I instantly recognized as the true me. It’s hard to put into words exactly. But I became expanded, infinite. And yet infinitesimal too, all at the same moment. The stars and the oceans sang through me. It was pure ecstasy. I wanted that experience to last forever. After that, I was convinced that the spiritual path was my new purpose in life. So I signed up to become a monk—a sannyasi in the yogic tradition. In less than a month, I found myself in India, living in an ashram, shaved head, saffron robes, vows of celibacy—the whole nine yards. Nothing was stopping me from attaining that ultimate truth.

Well, the monastic pursuit lasted about a year before I fell in love with another novice, Darren Albury, who had an equine bum and the cross-eyed, inward-looking gaze of a saint. We were the only Black guys in the entire ashram—and both of us of Caribbean descent! Narcissus’s magnetic pull got too strong to resist, along with my eternal struggle of sacred and profane, the spirit and the flesh. Darren and I were quickly discovered and dismissed from the ashram due to “adharmic behavior.” We slinked our separate ways in shame. I had failed again, first at my MFA writing program, now at spirituality. I stopped meditating altogether, out of spite, I suppose. What a proud fool I was!

But despite being cast from the Garden of Eden—wayward and, admittedly, ever entangled in the outlying brambles of sensuality—I am still that same honest truth-seeker who made those vows of nonviolence years ago. You must believe me. I wouldn’t be writing this story otherwise.

What else is this mad literary endeavor, if it isn’t my attempt at finding my way back to my lost, unadulterated true self? In the ancient Indian Vedas, the pursuit of becoming a sannyasi is summed up with three simple questions: Who am I? Of what do I really consist? And what is this cage of suffering? I’m still searching for the answers to those questions. If I had a motto, it would be “Seek only truth!” Sola veritate! That’s what all this is for.

On the other hand I am also Black, Caribbean, Brit(ish)—as Afua Hirsh puts it—and now Americanized, living in Brooklyn in 2019, floundering in the wake of a peculiar invention called Whiteness.

“Is there really such a thing as race?” you may ask. Isn’t it all a Kantian philosophical invention? Yeah, sure, that’s all true, but now we’re neck-high in centuries of the Grand Delusion. Fred Moten, the African-American poet-philosopher, says ever since the invention of Whiteness, “Black” has become a stand-in for something fugitive, “a spirit of escape and transgression . . . An

outlaw.”

From the look of me—slight of stature, with my Harry Potter glasses and preppy oxford button-down shirts—you’d never peg me as an outlaw. I even have a new, persistent bulge about my waist—“skinny fat,” they call it. The worst of both worlds. If you had to size me up, you’d probably guess I was a burgeoning history professor, or a hopeless enthusiast of Dungeons & Dragons, or maybe even a struggling youngish writer (and you’d be correct there). But I have to agree with Fred Moten: despite what some might describe as my humble appearance, I am—by the very nature of my nature—an outlaw.

The Outlaw and the Legend

My crazy situation—being locked up in this cramped basement study—starts with the fact that I’m a novelist. At least that’s what I call myself. As of yet, no publisher has wanted to grant me that identity. But I have a literary agent, Wilson—a genuine gentleman and a scholar. He’s a tall, seemingly liberated WASP. Fashionably youthful enough to wear edgy, thick-framed Italian glasses but old enough to be that rare, nearly outmoded literary professional who believes in nurturing raw talent. He’s taken me on and is representing a manuscript I presented to him two years ago. A novel based on the life of the great British writer E. M. Forster.

My historical novel focuses on the three years Forster lived in Alexandria, Egypt, during World War I, when he fell in love with the Black Egyptian tram conductor Mohammed El Adl. At the ripe age of thirty-eight, Edward Morgan Forster (known as Morgan to friends) had never had sex. The affair with Mohammed is well-documented as Morgan’s first and most meaningful sexual relationship and unfortunately, it was a doomed one. I had written the novel in a voice close to Morgan’s perspective. I myself am in many ways like the shy, self-doubting gay British writer—I was even raised in Weybridge, the suburb of London where Forster lived. Wilson liked my novel, a real-life story of gay star-crossed lovers. Also, A Passage to India was one of Wilson’s favorite novels. It was one of mine too—along with Howards End and Maurice. And who doesn’t adore the Merchant Ivory films with Helena Bonham Carter and Emma Thompson? A Room with a View—gorgeous! Wilson, like me, was a fan of the gentle British soul; he sympathized with the repressed homosexual writer, and he helped me to refine my manuscript.

After a year of gut-wrenching rewrites (“Kipling, cut this part,” “I don’t think we need this part either,” “Can we add flashbacks?” “What about flashing forward too?” “It’s great! Just one more thing . . . we need to shave it down about half the length. Make it lean, sharp, snappy!”) it was finally polished—no fat, lean. Nearly emaciated, I thought. But better. I secretly thought it even had moments of brilliance. We—mostly Wilson, really—titled it Morgan and Mohammed: A Love Story.

But after a year of submissions, no publishers took it up.

Then, two days ago, a major literary editor in the publishing industry contacted Wilson. She was intrigued by the novel, she said, and although she would not be offering on it, she expressed interest in having a meeting with me and Wilson. Wilson confessed to me that this was highly unusual. Normally a publisher either accepts or rejects a project and rarely meets with the author after declining. We were both perplexed but also hopeful. I couldn’t sleep that night; my heart and mind were racing like dueling drumrolls. Excitement and fear must be one and the same, I was convinced. Was it finally going to happen, the dream of my life? And not with just any editor; this was the biggest literary editor in the business—a publishing legend!

A day later, just yesterday, we found ourselves in the editor’s huge Madison Square Park office—a tasteful, sunny room with tall windows, a gray leather Milo Baughman sofa with matching armchairs, white metal bookshelves, and a towering fiddle leaf fig tree.

The publisher—a straightforward, handsome woman with short silver hair—sat upright on the sofa with the warm yet detached air of a Buddhist nun. She said she admired my book, that the novel was moving. It was clear I had talent and that I’d done a great deal of research but that, in fact, was the problem for her: she disliked my adherence to historical facts, some of which I had interpreted differently from the way she did. (She clearly knew a lot about Forster.) She said she wanted to encourage me as a writer, but as Wilson and I knew, she wouldn’t be publishing this novel. Forster’s story had already been told by biographers and his voice was already known through Forster’s own work. Although my novel was well executed, she said, it offered nothing new in content or style.

When I realized my golden opportunity was slipping like sand through my

fingers, my heart leapt to my throat and my palms got sweaty. I cannot let her say no, I said to myself—not when I’ve gotten this far.

All my life, through all the various ups and downs, I’ve only had one enduring dream: to be a published writer. I’m useless at anything but writing. In school I was the awkward kid shunned at every turn. The only ones who truly appreciated me were my teachers. “Kip writes wonderful stories,” they told my parents. “He has a rare and vivid imagination.” And they encouraged me too. “You’re a real talent, Kip. Your parents didn’t name you after the great Rudyard Kipling for nothing. It’s your destiny!”

I knew I had to dedicate my life to becoming a writer. I had no time for friends; my extracurricular hours were consumed with obsessively studying novels. Between the ages of twelve and fifteen, I read Crime and Punishment five times because my mother had mentioned that Dostoyevsky was a great writer. I had to drum his narrative techniques into my brain to become a great writer too. That was the only way I was finally going to matter. Me, the skinny, awkward Black boy who, for some reason, imagined he was going to fit in with his school peers. In my first year of secondary school, I discovered Giovanni’s Room and realized that becoming a writer had successfully exalted the skinny, gay Black American James Baldwin, so I decided I had to go to America to write, to be saved. Then I too would matter. Even my parents, despite their disappointment at having a “batty boy” for a son, would see that I could be a success.

I could not say all this to the publishing legend yesterday, of course, but I also could not take no for an answer. “Please,” I said to her, my voice betraying my desperation with a quiver. “Tell me what version of my Forster story would theoretically interest you for publication.” I needed to understand where I had failed to appeal to this gatekeeper of the literary market.

She tugged at her brown tweed jacket and then clasped her hands on the knee of her pleated wool trousers. “Mr. Starling,” she offered with an earnest frown, “a commercial media conglomerate is acquiring my publishing company in four weeks. Your novel would have been my last acquisition before the merger, and frankly I don’t know if literary fiction is something the conglomerate will be interested in publishing—they seem more interested in highly commercial authors.”

“But—” I was unable to contain myself. My insides were jumping like popcorn in a popper. “Sorry, but I must ask you this: If—if it were possible,” I said to the publishing goddess, hearing my own voice come out strained but deep, more aggressively than I’d

intended, “if I could get you a new version of my novel in three weeks, before the merger, a version you’d really want to publish, what would need to change for you to say yes?”

The publishing legend tilted her head back and caressed the string of tasteful white pearls around her neck. She gazed up high, above the plant.

“Well,” she said, focusing on me again, speaking firmly, “perhaps if you were to tell it from the perspective of Mohammed. That would be interesting!” 

 

Here I go: Mohammed’s Story. A draft the literary legend cannot refuse. I only have three weeks. Time is of the essence. I’ll have to work nonstop. I’m not leaving this basement study until I’ve finished the entire manuscript.

To secure my success, I’ve taken some drastic measures: I’ve boarded up the door from the inside, with seven planks of two-by-four pinewood nailed across the doorframe (that’s why I needed weapon number two: the hammer). If I leave this room, it will not be on impulse. I have all the necessary provisions with me—five boxes of Premium Saltine Crackers, three tins of Café Bustelo, and twenty-one one-gallon jugs of Poland Spring water—occupying almost all of the desk’s surface. That’s all I’ll need until I’m done. I can’t escape. I can’t sabotage my life’s dream. Drastic times require drastic measures, don’t they?

The logistics of this endeavor are not pretty, I must warn you. I have my essential writing supplies: my MacBook with its power cord and an Oxford English Dictionary (the shorter, two-volume set). My iPhone is stored away in the bottom drawer in case of emergencies—I barely get a signal down here anyway—and I’ve turned off the internet router. I want no distractions from the external world. Yet there are the internal distractions to consider, the bodily necessities. In the study there’s a tiny “half bathroom,” as they call it—a little water closet—but we never use it; the toilet doesn’t always flush properly. I’ll save flushing for when it’s absolutely necessary—otherwise I’ll piss down the sink; that ought to help. They say W. H. Auden, while a don at King’s College, customarily tinkled in his study sink. The expediency of poets! Art is a savage undertaking.

The only other distraction is, of course, people. In my case, two specific people: Ben, my husband of the last seven years, who announced last week he’s breaking up with me—he wants a divorce (details to come)—and my ex–best friend, Concepción (Concha). I haven’t spoken to Concha in eight months now, or rather, she hasn’t spoken to me—not since our disastrous lunch at the Broadway Diner last April. It was either a colossal misunderstanding we had or else too much truth told all at once. In any case, it ruptured our perfect “friendom,” the private kingdom we’d created for ourselves, fortified, I thought, with bulwarks as thick as the old city walls of her Spanish hometown, Seville, where we first met during our college years. Now our friendom has been pillaged and abandoned. But Ben has somehow rallied Concha to break her silent treatment, to help him save me from what he calls “the madness of my extreme measures.” Together they’ve been outside my study for an hour now, pleading for me to unbarricade myself.

They claim they are worried about my approach—not against the work per se, but against the insanity of locking myself away like this. “Write your book,” says Ben, “but just do it in a practical way! You don’t have to harm yourself, Kip!” Even in my ire I have to smile when he says “harm” the way we Brits say “ham.” I still find his Boston-Irish brogue adorable—damn him! Concha warns me against “starving” myself. She learned English in London and has an even posher accent than mine. If you close your eyes, you can’t tell it’s not Emma Thompson speaking. The only difference is that Concha’s gestures remain very Spanish. She emphasizes her words like an orchestra conductor bringing a baton to the downbeat. Her every move, no matter how small, seems to carry the flare of flamenco—always a stomp of defiance against the cruelty of life. Now, together, Ben and Concha have come as a unified choir to save me from myself.

I’m ambivalent about them both right now. My heart actually feels like it’s melting in my chest at the thought that they care enough to protest. I almost wish they’d break down the door to prove how much they really love me. Then we’d all embrace, beg forgiveness, and sob in each other’s arms. But on the other hand, they have both broken my heart terribly, and I can’t forgive them. How can I trust in their motives? I’m not sure if either of them ever truly loved me. The real me. But then, my therapist, Margaret, suggests maybe it isn’t their fault. “Do you ever show them the real you, Kip?” she asked me.

Do I ever show myself the real me? I thought. Who is the real me? Isn’t that the existential question? The same question posed in the ancient Vedas?

I can hear the two conspirators whispering now. Do they think I can’t hear them? The study door is paper-thin—another reason why I’ve nailed up the two-by-four planks. I hear every word they’re saying: Ben wonders if I’m taking our breakup too badly. Concha says she’s been worried about me since last year. I’ve been getting more and more unstable as my Forster novel’s not getting sold, she says. “He’s completely self-absorbed, Ben. Obsessed with nothing but that book.”

“I know, I know,” says Ben. “Do you think we should call his therapist? There’s something really off about this stunt of his. Manic. Nailing up boards over the door? Who does that?”

“I know, I know,” says Concha. “And only eating crackers for three weeks?”

“Maybe we should take him to Bellevue,” says Ben. I bet he’s deepening those vertical furrows between his fifty-six-year-old brows, his “empathy marks.” I can practically see his pale, freckly face. “Kip should probably be on medication. Maybe a mood stabilizer. I actually wonder if he’s becoming delusional.”

“Really?” says Concha. “Is it that bad?”

I shouldn’t have told Ben that Margaret recommended medication. But the truth is, Margaret actually set up an appointment for me to meet with a Dr. Brian Welch, a psychiatrist on Eighty-fourth and Riverside Drive. As soon as possible, she said. I was supposed to have the appointment today. But I don’t need to see Dr. Welch, and I don’t need medication. I just need to be published. There are some of us who know our raison d’être. Publication, that’s my cure!

With all their fuss outside the door, I’m realizing that domesticity is the enemy of Art. I should have planned this better. I should have gone away, stayed in a cheap motel somewhere off the New Jersey Turnpike. A Motel 6 in Elizabeth or East Brunswick. Artistic genius has come from New Jersey, after all: William Carlos Williams, Amiri Baraka, Bruce Springsteen. New Jersey would have been the best idea. Far away from home and loved ones. Loved ones are the most dangerous threat to one’s self-realization.

“Please, please, please bugger off! Both of you!” I finally shout through the door.

I hear the hysteria in my own voice. Are they right? Am I going mad?

There is a precedent for this kind of madness—writers sequestering themselves to create in a flurry of inspiration: Proust locked himself away in his bedroom, refusing all visitors; Virginia Woolf insisted on a room of her own; and Tolstoy raged violently at the slightest disturbance from his needy wife, Sophia 

 Andreyevna. As for speed writing: The Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro wrote The Remains of the Day in four weeks. Dostoyevsky wrote The Gambler in twenty-six days. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in only three days.

Surely, I can survive three weeks on my saltines, espresso, and water. Gandhi lasted over twenty-one days with absolutely no food at all. Jesus fasted for forty days in the desert—the Spirit led him into the wilderness, where he wrestled with the devil. The final temptation was overcome only in absolute isolation.

This is my own sort of wilderness in here, isn’t it? My test: to wrestle and to overcome my demons. I can write Mohammed’s tale and come out a free man. But I need my wilderness—at least this metaphoric place of solitude away from civilization. But to be honest, I’ve always had an ambivalent relationship with the real wilderness. I crave the freedom, the space to be, and yet I fear the loneliness of it. But now it’s time to be brave, to finally be alone in this wilderness of mine.

 

Five hours and not a word of the novel written yet. I couldn’t think clearly with the disruptions from Ben and Concha. But now they’re gone. Thank God.

I’m staring at my MacBook, waiting for her to speak to me—I’ve named her Sophia. She has a lustrous, rosy golden hue. Okay, Sophia, I say, how should we begin this great work? Sophia is stubbornly silent today, just when I need her most. It’s absurd, I know. I’m personifying a silly inanimate object. Projecting my needs for nurturing and support onto this little slab of aluminum that was shipped here from a factory in China.

Ben says I’ve created Sophia out of my need for what he calls a “transitional object.” In psychology-speak, that means something substituting for the “primary object” (i.e., the parent, the comforting one, the desired one). It’s like a pacifier in the absence of the mother’s teat, says Ben. I hate it when Ben analyzes me. Come on, who doesn’t have mother issues? Anyway, even though I realize what I’m doing with Sophia, I can’t help myself. I feel betrayed by her withholding now. A heavy sinking in my chest. Two can play at this game! I get up and sulk towards the window. If Sophia’s playing hard to get, I’ll get my inspiration from nature.

To reach the high-up window and peer outside, I have to stand on top of the black combination safety box that’s on the floor. The study only has this one vista, the size of a small birdcage. Through the black, wrought-iron grates, I have a worm’s-eye view of the back garden.

We’re in a Brooklyn brownstone on DeKalb Avenue. Ben bought the place with his inheritance after his father died. It’s lovely, with way more rooms than we need. I moved in with him eight years ago. That’s when I installed this basement study. I could have chosen any one of many rooms upstairs but I wanted my own space, free from Ben’s history. Yet it’s impossible to escape history in these old houses. We’re just opposite Fort Greene Park, the hilltop park that was conceived by the great American bard Walt Whitman. I look outside this birdcage window for inspiration, but I only face the backdrop of the old cedar fence beleaguered with lime-green moss. If I crane my neck, I can see a dishwater-gray sky, and next to the snowcapped red barbecue grill is our snowman. ...