1996 - GLORIA NAYLOR

Normally, as I’ve discussed here before, I’m not a fan of autofiction. However, this book is a very unique and insane take on the genre that deserves more attention than it gets. Naylor was a star in the literary world. She won a National book award in ‘83 and Oprah starred in a mini-series based on one of her well-reviewed, inter-connected novels. However, she struggled to get this novel, her last, published and it basically received no mainstream attention. The reason seems to be the incendiary nature of the book, which, depending on your perspective, either recounts her experience of being gangstalked or her descent into madness. Like I said, the book is auto-fiction, it purports to be a lightly fictionalized account of her real life and feelings, truly the only “fictional” aspect is when she imagines the lives and motivations of individuals in the NSA who are fucking with her. From Naylor’s telling, she moved to a Georgia Sea Island to enjoy a quieter life and work on novels when she gets into a dispute with her annoying neighbor. The neighbor, unfortunately, is both unhinged and has a brother in the NSA who she’s able to convince that Naylor is anti-semetic, based on a misheard word and Naylor’s positive comments about the Nation of Islam, and thus needs to be watched. The NSA employees the ADL and others to fuck with and terrorize Naylor over the course of years. They break into her house, enlist her friends to report on her, kill her garden, follow her everywhere,read her emails, make noise at all hours to keep her up, and all sorts of harassment. Eventually, shit gets really out of control and they employ devices that can both read her mind and place thoughts in her mind, with the stated goal of getting her to kill herself. Like I said, it toggles back and forth from Naylor’s POV, which, according to her is true and autobiographical, and the imagained perspective of her tormentors. As someone who worked in homeless shelters for years, I’m very familiar with gang stalking allegations, it’s a really common delusion, and it was really fascinating to hear someone with Naylor’s level of intelligence and writing skill explain what this sort of thing must feel like to those inside of it. Her particular case might not be true, and I am sympathetic to such claims, as I’ll get into in a minute, but even if you think it was 100% in her head, it’s fascinating to read such a lucid account of going insane. Alright, in terms of the bigger picture, I think we can establish that the NSA, especially all the shit we’ve learned post 9/11, is up to some bad shit. I do think they fuck with people and, occasionally, they and other intelligence agencies encourage people to kill themselves (look at MLK) or drive them insane (MKULTRA). We also know that other countries engage in gang-stalking for sure, the term under the East German Stassi was Zersetzung if you want an example, so it seems foolish and naive to believe that the US doesn’t do that as well. Even the idea of broadcasting thoughts into someone’s head isn’t 100% sci-fi. There have been documented attempts to do this for years and there are dozens of reports from Iraq of the US trying out this type of weapon (usually called a Voice of God, or Voice of Allah weapon) in the field. We spend more money than any country in history developing all sorts of high-tech classified weapons, I don’t think it’s insane to speculate that something like this might exist. All that being said, there is a jews-are-following-me aspect to Naylor’s particular case that shade it into the mental illness side but, again, the veracity of the particulars matter less to me than the sense of dread and insanity that she manages to conjure in the book. Recommended for paranoids. 55 voice of god machines.