"Uncle Pug" by Tyrese COleman

12/6/2022

Tyrese L. Coleman is the author of the story and essay collection, How to Sit, a 2019 Pen Open Book Award finalist published with Mason Jar Press in 2018 and the forthcoming nonfiction book Spectacle by One World, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Writer, wife, mother, attorney, and writing instructor, her essays and stories have appeared in several publications, including Washington Post Magazine, Black Warrior Review, Literary Hub, Parents Magazine and the Kenyon Review and noted in Best American Essays and the Pushcart Anthology. She is an alumni of the Writing Program at Johns Hopkins University. Find her at tyresecoleman.com or on twitter/IG @tylachelleco.

Sophia Olson finds joy in sharing the experience of live music with those around her. If there’s a concert, she always buys two tickets and then finds a friend to go with her. Her driving goal is to build a more equitable, diverse, and representative music industry by fostering dialogue and action. Whether in music or medicine she believes that everyone should be encourage and supported in their journey towards achieving their goals. Currently, she is a third-year student studying International Relations and Literature at American University in Washington D.C. In addition to her studies, she is the entertainment law editor for the school’s pre-law journal and head copy editor for the university’s literary magazine. In her free time, you can find her searching for the next good music biography and a cup of coffee.

Introduction to "Uncle Pug"
by SOphia Olson

Truth is a subjective and contentious matter in people’s lives. How do we understand what our own truth is? Does it match with someone else’s truth? Can our truths be different? This idea is examined in Tyrese Coleman’s piece “Uncle Pug,” a story that focuses on how we understand and reckon with our elder’s truths and the messiness of the dynamics those truths reveal. Using humor and sadness, Coleman investigates what respect is owed in generational divides and navigating race and romantic histories. Coleman challenges us to dive deeper into how identities are both intra and inter personal. The author creates characters who navigate the complexities of telling their truths and the perception of those truths.

Art and life are inexplicably linked, especially in seeking truth.. Our inspirations for our work come from our contexts and experiences. Even fantasy novels have levels of realistic human experience and emotion, art inspired by the artist’s life. Conversely, sometimes life and art are explicitly linked, in memoir form. Writers show how their life experiences directly challenged and inspired them to create the work and be the person they are today. Tyrese Coleman, though, brings both fiction and memoir, and their relation to art and life, into an incredible blend. Coleman’s book How to Sit is a collection of short stories that blend both her own set of memory and memoir and fictional stories. Together they create a piece of work that embodies the space of context and creativity, a work that blends the inspiration of life into direct stories, and loosely based inspiration. Just like the narrator in Uncle Pug, and Uncle Pug himself, Tyrese’s book and this short story have incredible narratives of characters’ challenges in understanding how one tells stories of their own memory, and how they compare and collaborate with the fictions they tell others.

In this story, Uncle Pug is an amputee, and elder of the main character, a physically constant but mentally unreliable pillar of the family home. Uncle Pug’s is not a peaceful placement. The conflicts of holding one’s own tongue for the gentle and fragile emotional will and state of Uncle Pugs is implicitly mandatory. Coleman presents Uncle Pug as a figure who reconstructs his past, particularly his time in the war in France. As the story goes on, we find that Uncle Pug’s lies reveal a deeper layer about racial divides. The innocence of Betty White’s Golden Girls is turned into a vessel of Uncle Pug’s reimagining of his past. He speaks of a white woman who he had a relationship with, a relationship that was heavily punctuated by her whiteness and the fact that her whiteness was not an issue in France. While Uncle Pug tells this story, the narrator continues to add in elements of disbelief. The narrator can’t imagine the person who seems to take up so much disdain in his house could have this relationship. It is an unbelievable truth to the narrator based on the current context he views Uncle Pug in, his placement is viewed with both physical disgust, specifically nausea and smells, and also emotional disgust, of being chastised for standing up against Uncle Pug. However, in a skillful interjection of past conversations appearing as reminders in the narrator's head, the reader begins to understand that challenging Uncle Pug is not an option: the narrator has been scolded in the past for doing so.

The family’s insistence on humoring Uncle Pug, is based on their understanding of Uncle Pug’s self hatred and personal shame. Yes, his stories of romance are woven with levels of misogyny—he claims he’s had women pouring over him—yet there is the clear insistence by Pug that these women enjoyed his romance despite his race. This detail shows that Pug’s view of women cannot be separated from his own understanding of himself and race. When talking about these women he notes not them as people, but instead objects that desired him because of his status as a black man meant something different in France as compared to the US and present day place of this story. This complexity creates a character who navigates his shame by overcompensating. This complex narrative creates a level of shame within the narrator and their torn feelings towards Uncle Pug. His shame is complex in the way that he feels torn between challenging Uncle Pug and his words, those based around his own shame, but he is also ashamed when he does this because of the judgment her family will place on him for challenging Uncle Pug. It's a cycle of shame, fueled by holding people accountable, while also holding up the family’s established rules.

In “Uncle Pug” we find characters who have to navigate the complex boundaries between the fact of a trauma, how the communication of that trauma to other’s presents itself, and how others receive and perceive said communication. Coleman challenges the idea that lies are black and white and highlights how one’s identity, race, gender, and more, affect how we understand our memories and perceive others.