"How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder"

Nina McConigley was born in Singapore and raised in Wyoming. Her short-story collection Cowboys and East Indians was the winner of the PEN Open Book Award and a High Plains Book Award. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Orion, Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly Review, High Country News, O, Oprah Magazine, Parents, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction, and The Asian American Literary Review among others.

McConigley applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder, and reported the following:

From page 69:

But poor Papa, poor Papa

He’s got nothing at all


And Mama eats ham, and Mama eats lamb

Mama eats bread with strawberry jam

But poor Papa, poor Papa

He eats nothing at all

Amma taught it to us one day when we had a wet spring snow that snapped the power lines in two. She made a fire and roasted hot dogs over the fire with chopsticks. Vinny Uncle was sleeping. Auntie Devi was at work. We wrapped ourselves in sleeping bags. Narayan sang the loudest of us all, his thumbs hooked under imaginary suspenders as he marched through the house. Vinny Uncle woke up and joined us. He and Amma sang loud and clear. All of us danced. And then Agatha Krishna switched to “Papa Don’t Preach.” Her hair had started to grow back and she was trying to style it like Madonna. We all laughed.

But most days, we were in a house of women. Most days we felt the air between Amma and Auntie Devi. The only songs were Agatha Krishna trying to record songs off the radio with her tape deck.

After Vinny Uncle died, we never sang like that again. Our fathers were gone—one dead, one on the rigs. Poor, poor papas.

I think if a browser opened the book to page 69 they would get a sense of the book. In that so much of the book is the day-to-day, the quotidian, at the house, Cottonwood Cross. The page opens with an old folk song, "Poor Papa," which the kids perform. It was performed by the mother in India and now in Wyoming by the girls. It harkens back to a nostalgia and an enamoring of all things Western. It also shows how the house is mostly a house of women. The men are absent or weak.

What page 69 reveals is that even with the horrors of the house, there is happiness and a kind of joy. There is a coziness of fires and hot dogs and songs. We also see the innocence of the children, and how much they are kids. And even within the scene of domestic unity, there is something underlying that is dangerous. Poor Papa is starving, and in a way, the girls are too.

Visit Nina McConigley's website.

--Marshal Zeringue