Nay’s writing is spellbinding.
Neko Case
The Capture of Krao Farini
Nay Saysourinho
September 2023
The Capture of Krao Farini is part Turing test, part circus flyer. Written in the imagined voice of Krao Farini, a real sideshow performer brought to the United States at the turn of the 20th century, the book dissolves the line between algorithm and spectacle to reveal the ultimate consolation prize – to be acclaimed as human enough.
About the Author
Nay Saysourinho is a writer, visual artist and recipient of a 2023 Baldwin for the Arts Fellowship. She was previously a Rona Jaffe Fellow at MacDowell and a Short Fiction Scholar at Tin House Winter Workshop. In 2019, she was chosen as the inaugural Adina Talve-Goodman Fellow by One Story and in the same year as a Marion Deeds Scholar by the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference. She holds a Berkeley Fellowship from Yale and has received support from Kundiman, The Writers Grotto and the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards. Her writing has been published in Kenyon Review, Ploughshares Blog, Fairy Tale Review, The Funambulist Magazine, and more.
Praise
The Capture of Krao Farini hit me so hard. It is two things at once; first it is a lyrical, tender tribute to the wondrous and exploited, Krao Farini but it is also a clear-eyed and unflinching autopsy of the cruelty and mega-entitlement of colonialism and the invented “authority” that it gave her “father” to “purchase” Krao's human body and soul. The “I am not a robot” sections are incredibly nimble and powerful. Nay’s writing is spellbinding.
Neko Case
Everything is poetry in Nay Saysourinho's hybrid visual-lyric story The Capture of Krao Farini—everything—reCaptcha codes, internal monologues, the constellations of Braille and Lao script. Each literal and figurative image, every symbol or script, is infused with an intelligence and tenderness that Saysourinho voices in Farini herself—qualities that make her vulnerable to those who would consume and profit from the colonization of her mind and body. "Inhale the spectacle of my skin: deep-fried amoebas of popcorn and donuts, frankfurters and fresh clams." The language is hearty and aromatic, a cornucopia or buffet, and one whose ingredients highlight historical and present-day systems of oppression—languages, technologies, hierarchical relationships, conceptions of race and disability and culture—and exposes the way that to be an extraordinary woman—polyphonic, lyrical, philosophical, imagistic—is also to be treated as a spectacle. This book asks what does it take to be an animal? Who does it take?
Keith S. Wilson
“Nay Saysourinho’s The Capture of Krao Farini is an interactive performance of decolonial imagination. This story smells and spits, sounds and licks; it translates, and it refuses to translate; it names and negates; it captures, holds captive, and captivates. What we are left with is the stench of desire and decay: “In this carnival you will learn that you want funnel cake and that your morphology was spared by God.” Saysourinho is a translator of the elsewhere, the otherwise—a metabolizer of the monstrous. This text—threaded with ink and eyelashes, perfumed with stale fruit and bread—is itself errant, errored, and the author bends towards this deviance: “I live. That is good enough for me.
Claire Foster
Nay Saysourinho’s The Capture of Krao Farini is a glitch in an otherwise unflinching system, a ruptured vein in history’s violent, long arm. Subverting spectacle and the white, colonial gaze, Saysourinho brilliant book dares to stare back, to take back, to hold accountable all that preserves categories and cages. This is a rare voice. This is a fugitive place. Embedded in this book is a fearless threat whispered through steel bars: “You may stare as much as you like, but sooner or later you all pay for this.” No, no, I haven’t come to see Krao Farini. I’ve come to witness the reckoning.
Jessica Q. Stark
In the News
Publication Details
Chapbook
40 pp, 6 x 5 in
Publication Date: September 01 2023
Distribution: Direct Only