Caroline Hagood is an Art Monster, and the more I read her prose and poetry, the more monstrous she becomes. She is Frankenstein, Ursula, the Wicked Witch of the West, and Lady Gaga rolled into one. She is also, by the way, not “in the way,” a mother, but as Hagood declares in her new book length essay, Weird Girls: Writing the Art Monster (Spuyten Duyvil Publishing, 2022), the two are not “mutually exclusive.” “I absolutely find it to be practically a fight to the death,” she says, “to ensure that the duties and expectations of ‘mother’ and ‘woman’ don’t suck up the artist in me . . .I think if you fight tooth and nail for your art, being a mother can feed it.”
Yes, this is a monster story, a mother story, a declaration of independence perhaps, a “taking back of art from men . . . for mothers—even if it is a bloody battle.” Woman as monster. Monster as artist. Woman as artist. Monster as mother. …” the M of Mother and the W of Writer as flipped versions of each other.’ “When I got pregnant,” she says, I “contained multitudes.” She is the best monster her kids know. “I chase them around the house while roaring loudly and they love it. . .And then it starts: the monster questions: “Are there any nice monsters?” They ask. You don’t have to be afraid of monsters,” she tells them, “Because I’m queen of the monsters. Mommy Monster, and they’re all afraid of me.’” Her children are her inspiration. These sticky creations are also her art. She sees her “literary and biological creation as feeding one another.”
Hagood is keen on “crafting a new genre for women in ‘my workshop of filthy creation’ just like the one Dr. Frankenstein had. This time I’ll make do with this sticky desk in my kid’s room.”
Indeed, according to Hagood, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein “can simultaneously be read as a book about three kinds of creation: the creation of an actual monster, the creation of a book, and the creation of a child.”
Then there’s Lady Gaga, a particular favorite in the author’s “art monster coven of women,” Lady Gaga, who “march outside the expected gender and sexuality borders,” whose song Frankensteined “creates an alternate reality, a safe space, in which the woman monster lives to tell her story.” The Bride of Frankenstein is doomed to destruction in both novel and film, but in Gaga’s Frankensteined, she lives to dance to the beat of her own ‘twisted rhythms and create create create.’” Gaga becomes mother monster “to what we can only imagine will become a gaggle of ‘little monsters’ . . . She too, like Shelley becomes the tripartite monster giving birth to herself, her music, her fans.
Entering Caroline Hagood’s mind, is like entering a living room, or maybe a “sticky kids’ room,” littered with lots of esoteric fun and games for the imagination, dog leafed books and journals, notepads with brilliant insight and grocery lists of who and what we should all be reading. When listing all the “hybrid and super cool work being done by women writer’s today,” she parenthetically tells us to “email me and I’ll send you too long of a list.”
This book length essay is made up not so much of chapters but of chapterettes, observations, allusions, conversations, fragments, revelations, suggestions, asides, creating a whole book, like body parts stitched together to make a whole monster, reflecting the author’s intention to “derange reality . . .fragment it . . .make of it a mosaic, a collage.” Reading this book, sometimes I feel like Frankenstein’s monster, leaping from chapter to chapter, thought to thought, speculation to speculation, as if from one craggy mountain or beautiful azure lake to another.
Hagood takes us, as usual, on a wild journey, through body and mind, from the reality of her kids’ poop and dirty diapers to the mythical labyrinth of the Minotaur, “that real world counterpart to our inner space, external corollary to the thrilling but baffling inner tangle within us.” How wondrously entangling, how grammatically labyrinthine is that sentence alone!
“Perhaps.” she reflects, “philosophers link labyrinths to thought structures because of this eerie sense we have that we inhabit something that seems patternless but if we can only rise above ourselves and take a look, we’d suddenly get it.” Indeed, the structure of the book itself is somewhat “patternless” as if she has constructed her own labyrinth, her words, her memories, her aspirations, leading herself and us along the winding road towards revelation.
“. . . the labyrinth fascinates me,” she continues, because of the monster at its center, at the center of us all . . .as a writer I don’t run from the monster but towards it, beg it to haunt my labyrinth. The monster is the story, the inspiration, the beating heart of the narrative. . . The writer is the one who navigates the labyrinth, encounters the monster, and lives to tell about it.” And it is in the “telling about it,” that we begin to hear our own hearts beat louder, as with joy and anticipation we welcome another great art monster to the world.
Mitch Levenberg has published essays, reviews and short fiction in such journals as Fiction, The New Delta Review, The Saint Ann’s Review, Local Knowledge, The Assisi Journal of Arts and Letters, The Same, and others. His collection of stories, Principles of Uncertainty and Other Constants was published in March 2006. He teaches Writing and Literature at St. Francis College in Brooklyn Heights, N.Y.
We’re thrilled to announce the release of Double Clothesline, a thrilling new short story collection by Justin Bigos. A must-have for your Summer reading list — you won’t be able to put it down!
“These four finely wrought, evocative stories are packed with action, power, and heart. Justin Bigos is a fabulous writer, and Double Clothesline is a knockout collection of his work.”
— Peter Kispert, author of I Know You Know Who I Am
David Greenspan’s debut collection, One Person Holds So Much Silence,explores, at its heart, the
relationship between mind and body, and what happens when one- or both- fall
apart. The collection opens with, “Poem for a god of my own understanding,”
which situates us in the pressing needs of the collection: corporeal existence,
mental illness, drug use, and the myriad ways a person can slip through
society’s cracks. See how the poem starts with, “Opening my palm on a fence,”
and then later, “opening / my knee on a mirror” after “the doctor / sputters up
lust small / tablets.” We see the speaker’s body mirror the speaker’s mental
health; both are unraveling.
The
speakers of these poems struggle: addiction, mental illness, poverty. In
“Skinny Fisted Sons,” the rural setting is rife with decay, alcoholism, and
other “magnificent ways to die.” We see the ways that poverty kills, causing
the “sons” to turn not on society, but on each other. Their life, a cycle of
abuse and decay, is eating them alive. Generational trauma is present in
“Skinny Fisted Sons” and can be traced throughout the collection. In “Three:
The Dead,” the narrator states, “we lived with memory / we have no answers.” In
the closing poem, “A Poem to Pass the Time,” the speaker relates a traumatic
experience with his father. “He anesthetized our dog / beneath a pignut hickory
sky / I was a child / I wanted to be / nothing.” There is no escape; to be
alive is to live with memory, to live with memory is to live with trauma.
Greenspan’s
collection is concerned with the ways that we, as humans, continue existing
despite reason. In “Where are the worms in my mouth brother in your mouth,” the
Q speaker, filling the role of therapist or doctor, asks, “How are you doing
threaded together so.” Later, A responds, “Beneath my skin is a zipper. Beneath
the zipper is more skin. Shapeless, without tuft of muscle, bone, organ.” The
body is held together so delicately, paralleling the speaker’s mental health.
“I’m sad enough / to put real thought / into how I’d kill myself…but not sad
enough to do it” confesses the speaker of “I don’t like to sing about boxing
but I hope you’ll understand.” There is no hope to be found in medication,
which keeps the speaker “at an acceptable level of sad.” Medication becomes
another source of trauma, a way for the speakers of these poems to lose
themselves in escape.
Drugs
appear and reappear, slipping out of the poems as quickly as they enter. In
“Where are the worms in my mouth brother in your mouth,” the speaker bleakly
states, “Endless reaches of lithium flavor.” Later, “I was as much as anyone.
Grafted and grifted the first time she found needles. Slouching toward death,
both of us.” In “Poem for Florida,” the speaker mentions “lemon bright
distraction,” then, “Pills and pills.” “Palliative on Rooftop” is about a group
of friends hanging out “with clonidine and gabapentin / prescribed off label.”
Within these drugs is not liberation or relief, but instead, “overdoses and
tumors,” the slow slide towards death. “Unspool with us,” states the speaker of
“Body by Adderall.” The process of slipping through the cracks becomes
communal.
This book is a coming to terms: with mental health, addiction, place, personal history. The failings and wailings of the body. The collection closes with “A Poem to Pass the Time” which poses Greenspan’s response to his traumas. “Here’s what I have… culpability of language/ a rush of pencil on paper,” and despite the claim that “the poem isn’t very kind,” there is relief in the process of creation. “I can’t understand anything / unless it’s wet with metaphor.” Poetry becomes the act of meaning-making, and in meaning, there is the shimmer of hope.
Nikki Ummel is a queer writer, editor, and educator at the University of New Orleans. Nikki has been published or is forthcoming in Painted Bride Quarterly, The Adroit, Hobart, The Georgia Review, and more. In 2021 she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in Poetry and awarded an Academy of American Poets Award. She is currently the Associate Poetry Editor for Bayou Magazine. You can find her on the web at www.nikkiummel.com.
Rita Banerjee’s essay in three parts, “The Female Gaze,” is an excerpt from her memoir and manifesto on how young women of color keep their cool against social, sexual, and economic pressure. In her essay exploring the female gaze, female agency, and female cool, Banerjee asks:
What if women, especially women of color, were the progenitors of cool? That is, did women have to cultivate their own cool—their own sense of style, creative expression, and coldness—in order to survive patriarchy across millennia across cultures? If the male gaze aims subordinate and colonize, what does the female gaze, tempered by cool, desire? What does the female gaze cherish or hold dear? If a woman were fully aware of her gaze, would she use it to objectify and colonize, or could her gaze destabilize and decolonize?
Photo still of Zowa and Ariane, a French couple from Burning Down the Louvre (2022), a documentary film about race, tribalism, and intimacy in the United States and in France.
III. I see you seeing me
In
the line outside of the Beauté Congo exhibit at the Fondation Cartier,
Michael digs into me.
His
hands make a gesture like he’s solving a Rubik’s Cube.
“You’ve
got a 30,000 foot aerial view on things, Rita, you’re never are going to get
your hands dirty that way.”
My
lips press together into a tight smile before I speak.
“And
what about your view?” I try to parry, “Is everything in the world reduced to
something that’s just Oedipal? Isn’t your gaze, in essence, Freudian?”
I
avoid his eyes and know that I’m not saying what I really think. I’m afraid to
say what I really think in front of him. What I want to ask is: isn’t
everything you talk about invariably and essentially about sex?
Michael’s
eyes are two dark missiles pointed at me. He aims and doesn’t look away. Our
arms race occurs in silence. The silence stretches into infinity.
He
leans closer. My heart speeds.
“Exactly,”
he says with a half-smile as if he can read the thoughts I am afraid to
articulate.
* * *
In Town Bloody Hall, Germaine Greer engages
in a battle of wills and wits with Norman Mailer as he argues that men are
merely passive slaves to women, who are the ones who really hold power, in The Prisoner of Sex.
The debate takes place at NYU in
1971.
In the film, Mailer introduces
Greer as the “lady writer” from “England,” although Greer is clearly exhibiting
an Australian accent and despises the term “lady” to qualify anything.
Her
fur stole drags on the floor as she responds to Mailer:
“I
turned to the function of women vis-à-vis art as we know it. And I found that
it fell into two parts. That we were either low, sloppy creatures or menials,
or we were goddesses, or worse of all, we were meant to be both, which meant
that we broke our hearts trying to keep our aprons clean.”
Mailer
doesn’t look up, Greer doesn’t pause:
“I turned for some information to
Freud. Treating Freud’s description of the artist as an ad hoc description of
the psyche of the artist in our society, and not in any way as an eternal
pronouncement about what art might mean. And what Freud said, of course, has
irritated many artists who’ve had the misfortune to see it: He longs to attain to honor, power, riches,
fame, and the love of women but he lacks the means of achieving these
gratifications.”
Greer pronounces the words and the
camera settles on Mailer’s worried face. The audience chuckles at his unease. She
does not stop:
“As an eccentric little girl who thought it might be worthwhile, after all, to
be a poet, coming across these words for the first time, was a severe check. The
blandness of Freud’s assumption that the artist was a man sent me back into
myself to consider whether or not the proposition was reversible. Could a
female artist be driven by the desire for riches, fame, and the love of men?”
* * *
Throughout my MFA program and grad school days, I had a batik tie-dyed image of Saraswati on my bedroom wall. She was strategically placed to hover over my writing desk at all times. Because goddesses were part and parcel of the modern Bengali imagination, and because my life couldn’t get any more hippie.
Several
years later, when I moved to Munich, I started to teach creative writing
classes in town at a local English-language bookstore called The Munich
Readery. One of the first classes I taught involved “evocative objects.”
The
room was packed. With thirty students or so. I asked them to come up to the
stage, one-by-one, and pick up an object from the table that they found strange
and fascinating, and write a lyrical, essayistic, or narrative piece that spoke
to the object or spoke from it.
Emily
Phillips, an expat African-American poet and dramatist living in Munich, came
up next. She took her time rummaging through the objets d’art, and chose at
last a small object gleaming silver, and then sat down to write an essay about
India and the recent rape of Jyoti Singh Pandey in Delhi and her fears of
traveling to Asia all alone. As I walked around the room and listened to her
read her piece aloud, I found myself wanting to reassure her that women could
not only combat the male gaze but could subvert male violence, too.
But
the conviction in my voice faltered as I made my way up to her. I scanned her
face and saw her eyes flash with confusion, hope, disbelief, worry, and rage. What
could I say in reassurance to those eyes? Was there any society on earth worth
defending that only saw women as bodies, as anonymous vessels for male
enjoyment and cruelty?
“What
do you have there?” I asked, avoiding her glance, and peeking over her notebook
at what she held in her hand instead.
“It
looks like it’s a seated woman wearing a machine gun,” Emily answered.
“A
machine gun?”
“Yes,”
Emily elaborated on the story of the female figure. “It looks like she’s
holding a machine gun in her hand and swearing a chain of bullets.”
“Oh,” I did a slow double-take and let out a breath, “that’s Saraswati. She’s the goddess of the arts.”
* * *
In
Cambridge, in August, when the sun dapples through the old lindens and wisteria
and makes everything seem like a mid-summer night’s dream, Michael and I find
ourselves interrupted. We are shooting a scene for our documentary film on race
and racism in Paris. We are laying down the narration and plot point B for the
film, when our film crew revolts.
Two
members of the camera crew, two young men, both in their early twenties, take
over our mics and seats. They push us out of our chairs and literally off the
stage.
“You’re
not commenting on the action happening on the film reel behind you,” a Harvard
undergrad exclaims, fanning a hand through his dirty-blonde hair. “I mean look
at the cops hitting black protestors, that’s racist, right?”
In
the back of the room, behind the rolling cameras now, Michael and I watch and
listen.
“I
feel complicit,” says the other young bespectacled man, also with blonde hair
but tinged with gray. “I feel like I’m part of some sort of psycho-sexual
drama.”
My
ears pricked. In the dark, Michael grips his paper coffee cup and wrings it, as
if it were the neck of an undergrad.
“I
mean, Rita,” the tall, blondish undergrad continues, now addressing me, “you
said yourself that you’re a fan of Beauvoir. But as Michael mentioned, when one
becomes a woman, one becomes both subject and object. To not recognize that one
is an object would be to deny oneself the eroticism of objectification.”
Excuse
me, I think, but don’t get a chance to counter before he continues.
“So we think that you and Michael should explore that space. There’s some sort of dynamic building between you. So why not go for it? Why not become a woman, Rita?”
Excuse
me?
The
twenty-one-year-old issues his dare and stares at me, off-screen. His more nervous
and thoughtful, bespectacled friend does the same. Michael barely turns my way,
but I can feel the tension radiating from every part of his body. I am
surrounded by the ferocity of three male gazes: three white male gazes: three
white male cis-heteronormative gazes. And all these gazes are asking me to do
is become the thing I fear most: a woman.
You’re
standing on my neck.
* * *
Bengali culture is full of ghosts and goddesses. Sometimes, they are even the same. Every autumn, from mid-October through February we would celebrate puja season in New Jersey. Puja, or an act of ceremonial worship, always appears to center on the honor and reverence of goddesses.
The season always began with a puja to Durga, the wife of Shiva, a woman warrior and fierce mother figure, who was the only god with enough chutzpah to defeat the buffalo-demon Mahishasura. She could do this, in part, because she was female. From the feminine, came her strength.
And her desire, too. Because Durga soon transformed into Kali, after that first death. Once she tasted violence, Kali could not get enough of it. She danced around the world naked, covered in garlands of her victims’ severed heads, hands, and other trophies of war. Only when she stepped on the body of her husband, Shiva, did her rampage stop. The wife’s foot on her husband’s body. The ultimate patriarchal mark of dishonor.
Later in November, during Navaratri, there’s the celebration of Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth and prosperity. At night, wax candles in copper lamps are lit to illuminate her way into each home.
And finally, in February, Saraswati, the goddess of learning, knowledge, elocution, and the arts is celebrated. She is seated beside her owl or swan. She often has a quill in her hand, or often is depicted playing the sitar.
Goddess worship is innate to Bengali culture. Bharat, itself, is often referred to as “Mother India” in many local tongues. In Hindu and Jain cultures, the cow is not holy, but she is, of course, female.
Of
his kinsman, Rabindranath Tagore once wrote, “Bengali mothers don’t raise men,
they raise Bengalis.” It was meant as a form of barbed criticism but was
received as praise by his native audience.
Over
coffee one day, my mother, Gargi, the scientist and the philosopher turns to
me, “Do you know that the Sanskrit word for power is feminine?”
“You mean Shakti?” I ask, thinking the term connotes strength.
“Yes,” she answers, “shakti is power, absolute, divine. Without shakti, there is no human power. Without feminine power, there is no masculine.”
I
pause and smile, “Then how do you explain the patriarchy?”
* * *
In
Cambridge, the day after our shoot ends, Michael asks about the camera
operators. Both men were blonde and blueish-eyed, but he inquires about the
young man he knows personally. The tall one. The one who doesn’t wear glasses. The
one with the roving eyes. The one who suggests the crew should step out, the
cameras keep rolling, and Michael and I make out on screen. The one whose gaze
cuts me like a knife.
“Do
you find him beautiful?” he almost whispers. We are alone in the faculty
cafeteria, staring at my computer screen. We watch the video footage from the
day before as the two boys overtake us on stage.
Michael
sounds thoughtful and tired.
He
might as well be asking: Do you find me beautiful?
My
eyes rove over his nervous hands, his cool glasses, his face. When they finally
meet his, it’s a union of hazel against deep brown. He’s looking right back at
me. His eyes are softer than they ever should be. They catch light. So I
whisper back:
“Who says the eye loves symmetry?”
Rita Banerjee is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Co-Director of the MFA in Creative Writing and Publishing program at the George Polk School of Communications at Long Island University Brooklyn. She is author of CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing,Echo in Four Beats, the novella “A Night with Kali” in Approaching Footsteps, and Cracklers at Night. She received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Harvard and her MFA from the University of Washington, and her work appears in Hunger Mountain, Isele, Nat. Brut., Poets & Writers, Academy of American Poets, Los Angeles Review of Books, Vermont Public Radio, and elsewhere. She is the co-writer and co-director of Burning Down the Louvre (2022), a documentary film about race, intimacy, and tribalism in the United States and in France. She received a 2021-2022 Creation Grant from the Vermont Arts Council for her new memoir and manifesto on female cool, and one of the opening chapters of this memoir, “Birth of Cool” was a Notable Essay in the 2020 Best American Essays.
I’m
imagining Charles Baudelaire shaking off his signature melancholy and “viewing”
his way, for a devilishly delightful hour or so, through Big Gorgeous Jazz Machine, Nick
Potter’s new collection of “Comics/Poems” (as it’s category-tagged on the
front cover). No question, the nineteenth-century
Parisian poet savors his twenty-first-century counterpart’s synesthetic blend
of sound-sense-color-image splashing rhythmically across the book’s pages. And then, just before his return to the past,
that sullen Frenchman tenders a nod of approval in fraternal recognition of Potter’s
artistic vision. What vision? A dark-humored, offbeat scrutiny of the confounding
dread and indecisiveness, the obsessions, hesitations, and foreboding uncertainties
that constitute the human experiment on this fragile laboratory planet of ours.
Global spleen.
To be clear, Potter is not pretending
in this collection to plumb the philosophical depths of our existence, but he
certainly is leading us, like
anxious surfers atthe shores of Teahupoo, towards some monstrously heavy
waves.
Big Gorgeous Jazz Machine opens with a pair of erudite epigraphs,
mischievously misquoted so that “comics” rise to the manifest aesthetic stratosphere
of “music,” “architecture” and
“geometric space.” First alert, we’re to be engaged in serious business here. What
follows then is, well, to call it Comics Poetry is eminently fair, but. Perhaps a tad too easy? Semantically efficient,
but. A bit cautiously genre-neutral? What
the product of Potter’s creative process really merits—deservedly so and not
for the sake of disruption—is that we tweak tradition and stre-e-etch
conventional boundaries, like “Hey, make some room there.” BGJM delivers a combo of words and pictures metaphorically akinto
nuclear fusion’s release of energy – so why not just call it what it is, “Sheer
Poetry” and leave it at that? Sheer poetry vested in the verbal and visual, a
marvelous marriage of past traditions and present day pop culture, of classic
conventions and contemporary sensibilities.
In one
spot the artwork reminds us of Renaissance sketchbooks, in another of French
Fauvism; look over here it’s abstract, over there, representational. At one
moment words appear as the integral and distinct elements of speech and meaning
that we’d expect from daughters of the alphabet, at another they spring a
surprise — fracturing into separate letters consigned to corners, or peeking
out from a puddle of
colors, or—in
grey calligraphy againstgrey background— playing hide and seek with us ready
or not. Some words and letterstransform
themselves into lines of art, improvising as they curlicue over and across
comic book panels, challenging us to join all this jazz, to enter these boxes of
poetry and endeavor to make sense of what we’re reading and looking at—or what
we’re viewing, to attempt a term that might or might not better focus our
attention on the graphic design, the fluid blend of text and image on the page.
And the
poems we view leave little room for doubt that, all influences considered, we’re
not in Da Vinci’s workshop circa 1500 or the Belle Époque studio of Matisse. Why, we’re even a whole century
past Krazy Kat’s first comic strip appearance. We’re in the very here and now.
Yes, in our own fraught post-aughts, where Potter casts an unerring and
apprehensive eye on us humans in an absurd new millennium as we sink or swim to
soundtracks by FKA twigs and Phoebe Bridgers.
Welcome to
a world where vacationers, “People being who they are,” casually ignore a man
who catches on fire, while the one woman who does respondintentionally addsgasoline,
to extinguish the man, not the flames. An absurd fable fueled with a mean
moral.
In this
world, the
eponymous Jazz Machine of the book’s title leaves a trail of suffering, chaos, and
erasure in its wake, while a building’s infrastructure, rather than providing
support, bends and hobbles and collapses into rubble.
Here, guests
go missing and the disappearance of “Alvin Dillinger’s Brother” is conveyed by
means of a worrying Beckett-like monologue with some wordless panels, several blotted
black ink stains, and omnipresent forebodings of death.
As for Domestic
Objects and Phenomena? Sinister. They portend Life’s design to fill us with
recurrent dread, and they include uncertain dinner plans, dying plants, hidden
wires, and threats by mom to sell our creature comfort television set. The unremarkable
occasion of going for a haircut becomes a “Maybe”
filled with indecision, hesitation, stuttering thoughts, and Kierkegaardian
angst, all packed into a grid of claustrophobic rectangular panels better suited
to an Excel spreadsheet—that product of dispassionate, dreary binary digits,
over and over—than to capturing the relaxed atmosphere of an everywoman
enjoying a pleasant talc-scented grooming.
And, yes, in
this world, water is for drowning.
Not even an
“Interlude” brings relief. In scratchy black and white, it suggests storyboards
for the ill-fated fetal creature in David Lynch’s underground film Erasherhead. And by book’s end, the whole earth’s
ecological catalog is reduced to smoke, flood, and cyclone. Despite a momentary
hint and tint of some exquisite Japanese woodcut, we face a landscape bereft of
animal life and a horizon devoid of any particular promise, fading off into a
colorless “Epilogue” in grey and black and white, ovoid and jagged and wormy
and flinty and sad.
Many of
his themes may be dark, but Potter evidently enjoys plying and playing with the
tools of his trade, all those letters and lines, words and crayons and colors
and grids, fashioning them into his poetry, at times creating a sort of variation
on haiku form.
“WHA/ T S/ HOULD
WE DO/ A BO UT D IN
NER ?”
reads
across four panels awash in soft lavenders and blues, the words doing double
duty as both semantic and graphic elements, the pictures not just sitting there
looking pretty but propelling the narrative.
“A
HIDDEN / KNIFE BUTTERS / MY HAND IN /THE LEAVES”
reads another
set of panels, florally decorated and channeling the brevity, lyricism,
elusiveness and, yes, pressed leaves of Emily Dickinson.
True,
piecing together these poems requires a bit of cryptographer’s determination,
and patience, but the rewards of penetrating the space of the panels, of
“reading” into the Rorschach of Potter’s imagination and solving the puzzles he
proffers are payoff enough.
Sure, the world might be a dread-full place. And, of course, we readers will recognize characters and circumstances on these pages all too well, as Taylor Swift intones in another context. Who hasn’t felt fretful at times? Boxed into the corners of an existential crisis? Fearful of an uncontrollable future, whether it be minutes, or months, or a millennium away? And yet, when a true artist interprets, depicts, and shares with us that world, those feelings—well, that, that is a joy-full experience. Such is George Potter’s Big Gorgeous Jazz Machine.
Alan Zelenetz is an East Coast – based writer and educator whose most recent publication is the collection Kull the Conqueror: The Original Marvel Years Omnibus.
A bath can be a lot of things, and Jen Silverman holds a magnifying glass up to each of these meanings and incarnations in her gorgeously wrought poetry chapbook Bath, available May 24th from Driftwood Press. Silverman writes about baths that are baptisms, baths as floods, baths in dreams, baths of dust—all while holding the reader in literal baths of words (the poems are entitled “Bath 1,” “Bath 2,” and so on). From the opening’s pairing of a Bible quote about iniquity with a defiant “don’t fuck with me” line from Joan Crawford, Bath holds the reader in spaces that boldly confront the meanings of redemption, rebirth and love.
The
chapbook consists of eleven poems that are set in cities around the world, from
American towns like Iowa City and Louisville to faraway places like Cairo and
Cuzco. The words stretch across time as well as space, with nods to ancient
pharaohs, sacrifices and gods, and images of Egyptian stone bathtubs and the
streets of Alexandria that “are sheets of dust and ochre.” Silverman’s encompassing
worldview also includes the future. Characters on New Year’s Eve “set ourselves
towards the people we wish we were” and one poem’s narrator dreams of “talking
to children / I haven’t had.” In a particularly compelling passage in the
chapbook’s final poem, Silverman describes how all times coexist, concluding
with the lovely line, “and my partner is a bright horizon that has yet to
arrive.”
A sacred, biblical
tone permeates Silverman’s writing, particularly in “Bath 2” when the narrator
waits in Cairo for a flood:
The
locusts. The plagues. The pharaohs,
long-dead
and staggering over the sands from beyond.
But
no gods showed up to punish us.
And yet
the poetry is unmistakably contemporary. Silverman’s tone is often casual, even
blasé, with lines about relationships like “the sensitive ones will leave your
bed and go / out into the cold, hearts bruised, and what can you do” and “Oh,
he has panic attacks / all the time now.” Other moments are emotional and
poignant, such as the way a father’s love for his daughter “becomes a
weather-system / of love.” The poems are resplendent with powerful images,
including “the wind / flakes like mica, our skins glitter, / our hair is
jeweled with sand.” Silverman beautifully intertwines the moments in love and
heartbreak that hold us inside them with the weight of an ancient past,
revealing the fragility of humanity in between. In “Bath 2,” she writes:
We’re
not so special.
Just
a story so old it has escaped its meaning:
How
things of one fabric fall to pieces.
The eleven
“Bath” poems are divided by a contrasting poem between “Bath 6” and “Bath 7”: “The
Devil Dogs My Steps, But If It Weren’t Him, It Would Just Be Someone Else,” a
four-part poem about the Devil visiting the narrator with an unexpectedly
nonchalant, whimsical reckoning. “The Devil peels potatoes,” begins the third
section. “He’s throwing a dinner party. He / invited my landlord and all my
exes.” Unusual images abound, including the Devil lingering at CVS and sitting
in a hotel sauna. Throughout this poem and others in the collection, the
narrator expects punishment—desires baths to wash away sins and make redemption
possible—but doesn’t actively seek it out. In “Bath 4” the narrator echoes Mary
Oliver with “You do not have to be good,” and “Bath 10” includes a reference to
its characters’ “lack of shame,” suggesting there is not much that can be done to
eradicate living with sin.
Bath is a journey of relationships ending and going, of water and dust, of the containers that hold us and release us. With stunning syntax and captivating characterizations of times and places as well as people, Silverman considers the redemption and purity that humanity aspires to, and ultimately explores what it is to be submerged in it all.
Lillie Gardner is a writer based in St. Paul, Minnesota. Her writing has appeared in the Delmarva Review, Long River Review, Sentient Media, Funny-ish.com and more. Her screenplay American Virtuosa won Outstanding Drama Pitch at the 2021 Catalyst Story Institute and was a Top 3 Finalist in the Big Break Screenwriting Contest. She reviews books for EcoLit Books and writes for Feminist Book Club.
Intro: In David Scott Hay’s new novel, The Fountain, a water fountain at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago magically grants drinkers the ability to create exactly one masterpiece of their own, a gift that carries dire consequences. The Fountain is a mad dash, meta and epic and loud. Hay shreds fine art culture and all its pretensions, sounding the call for true artists to do the very thing they were born to do: Create.
His small press debut, The Fountain is scheduled for winter release by Whisk(e)y Tit, a publisher proudly “committed to restoring degradation and degeneracy to the literary arts”. It will also be translated and released in Russia in 2022. Order now at The Fountain | Whisk(e)y Tit (whiskeytit.com).
In this interview, we cover a range of topics such as authenticity in art, drugs as a creative crutch and Ted Lasso. Also, we drink.
Damien Roos: I decided on Yuengling Black & Tan for this interview. It’s sort of a November go-to for me. I assume you’re drinking the patented Old Fashioned you mention in your author bio?
David Scott Hay: Yes, with less of the simple syrup in this batch. I’m actually drinking it out of a Whiskey Tit glass. Swag from the publisher. Can you see the logo?
DR: Oh, that’s nice. Yes, the W logo.
DSH: When I pitched Miette, the editor of Whiskey Tit, my first line was, “If we end up working together, I’m going to get a tattoo of your logo.” And then I flew out to AWP (Association of Writers and Writers Programs) to meet her. This was just a year and a half ago, right before everything got locked down. And Miette was like, “Where’s the tattoo?” and I was like, “Where’s the book?”
DR: [laughs]
DSH: I haven’t gotten the tattoo because the book hasn’t come out yet.
DR: Well, as a read, The Fountain is the sort of book in which you can really sense the author’s glee. It seemed like you had a lot of fun writing it.
DSH: It’s funny that you say that. Lauren Groff was one of my thesis readers. She said the book felt like it was written with half-repressed glee, or something to that effect.
Yes, the book was joyfully written. I wrote it in secret, so I didn’t have any outside
pressure, or whatever. At that time, I was
building furniture, and Bob Bellio (the real-life protagonist in The Fountain)
was across the hall creating sculptures. If I
had an idea, I would write a chapter here and there, just exploring different characters. I would go 6 months without looking at the manuscript. Then I’d check out a show or something, or have an inspiring
conversation, and I would go back and revisit. I’ve
done a number of screenplays and plays
and books, but the process always seems to be a
little different every time and I think that’s what keeps me from feeling like I’m
just hammering out something. Which is different than building furniture, where there’s a very linear process.
You design it, you go get the wood, you bring it back, you do your rough cuts,
you sand, you put it together, stain it, lacquer it, and do the final touches or whatever.
With a book, especially one that’s very scattershot,
it’s like, “Okay, now I need to start connecting the
dots and putting stuff together.” I finally gave some chapters to a good friend
of mine and he was like, “Yeah, this is good,
keep going.” And I got to a point where I
realized it would take me another 10 years to finish the book. So I was
like, “Oh, let’s go to grad school. I’ll already have the jump on things.” And then I went to work.
Smoothed it out to where everything worked
craft-wise, solved head-hopping issues
and what not.
But in the initial stages, I just wrote freely. Whatever
amused me and made me laugh, I wrote. There are so many inside jokes with
friends of mine and snippets of song lyrics in
that book. Some of my favorite opening lines
from books are even buried in there. I won’t
say which ones but…it just made me happy. My thesis advisor got through it and was like, “I know
there are a lot of coded references in here.
The ones I caught were amazing.” It really
elevated the joy of it.
DR: And did you set out to do a takedown of art culture and commodification, or did the narrative just take on that message?
DSH: Narrative on this one. I was at the Museum of Contemporary Art and I swear to God, this is what happened. We’re walking along, checking out contemporary pieces. I mean, you talk about the old masters and stuff like that, “I got no beef.” But with contemporary art, I’m like, “Well, that is a big red cube, I can do that. My kid has done that…is it art?” So, it gets controversial. My whole litmus test is this: “If I can do it, it’s not art.” So, I’m looking at the red cube and going, “Well, that’s not art,” But then sometimes you get some stuff that really affects you. I saw one particular piece at the MCA, and that was kind of the inspiration for Tabitha’s piece in the book.
DR: What piece did you see that affected you?
DSH: It was a Lee Bontecou retrospective. I can’t remember a specific piece, but I know it was a combination of her mobiles and sculptural work. I don’t think I glanced at her ink work. But her mobiles… “Oh, this is actually crafted and it’s doing something and I’m physically drawn towards it. Her work was not easily dismissed.” And we continued along and came upon a water fountain with a little bubble man on it and the little dots going up for the water. You know, like the generic bubble people they use on restroom signs?
DR: Yes.
DSH: It was one of those inspirational moments. I’ve only had a handful of those, a lot of times it’s just craft and curiosity, hoping for discovery. But every now and then I get an idea that’s like, “Okay, so, what if people took a drink of water from this fountain and became these brilliant artists?” And then they had the Kiddie Art Exhibit area at the MCA too. Same thing. I saw it and was like, “Oh, wouldn’t it be funny if somebody actually created something in the Kiddie Art Exhibit area that rivaled whatever? What would that look like?” I couldn’t shake the idea.
DR: I want to talk about the water fountain. Like, the device itself. As the story goes, a drink from it grants a person the ability to create exactly one masterpiece, and then they die soon after. I read it as basically symbolic of the often destructive nature of artistic creation, the “staring into the abyss” aspect that sometimes manifests as addiction, depression, or dysfunctional living. Is my analysis on track?
DSH: Perhaps in hindsight. It was really as simple as just going off the premise. So, literally, it’s not so deep– the inspiration, after all, was the little bubble man drinking the water and a question of “What if?”. Write for story and cut for theme.
That
said, it’s really a matter of authenticity. Ross Robert, who starts as a minor
character and becomes a main one by the end, has a problem with being authentic
with himself. And the dilemma with the water helps him realize that. His wife is like, “No, there’s no instant anything to
successful art. Art has to be self-expression and it has to be authentic.”
So, there’s a little
bit of that whole “just add water” adage, right? Literally, just add water, Damien,
and you can have an artistic masterpiece, and fame and fortune. But no, for him art is therapy and he’s working out something.
He’s exploring something. And that’s what I did with The Fountain. It started off as a joke, like “What would happen?” It’s the high concept pitch, right? And
then I have to argue every side; for, against, and their temptations and
rationalizations.
DR: I believe one of the characters states that some artists use heroin, some are heavy drinkers etc. There’s that element of self-destruction.
DSH: All those junkies and drinkers. Yes, yes, yes. That’s the thing that makes me happy, getting to explore all these different sides of the argument. Tabby, the character you mention, came from the Midwest, never had an artistic bone in her body, drinks from the fountain, suddenly gets all this attention. Right?
DR: Yes.
DSH: This younger art critic is suddenly like her little boy toy and she’s got these art students worshipping her. She justifies it like, “Why is this any different than doing heroin or taking LSD or doing anything else? It unlocked my potential.” That’s her argument and, as a reader, you’re going to be like, “Well, yes, The Doors, I’m sure did a little of something and Johnny Cash sure did something too.” Her argument is that everybody needs a little help.
DR: Yes. I think it’s a compelling one, too. Maybe I took that thread and really ran with it in a way that you may have not even intended as an author. But that might also be because numerous pop cultural references you cite in the work would fall into that category.
DSH: And what does that say about a successful artist? They all had access. There’s no leg up. I mean, what if the Beatles hadn’t discovered drugs? And thank God Fentanyl wasn’t popular in the ’60s.
But that’s
also the time, right? Hendrix was doing drugs. Everybody was doing drugs. The
Stones were doing drugs. The Beatles were doing drugs. The Beatles were
thugs pretending to be gentlemen. The Rolling Stones were gentlemen pretending
to be thugs. It is what it is.
I mean I’ve
written sober, I’ve written stoned, I’ve written drunk, I’ve
written however. I’ve written while feeling
sick, I’ve written sober. The difference in output is negligible. As long as
I’m not assholing my way from point A to point B. But yes, you could argue it’s like a creative
crutch. Right?
DR: Sure. Could be to some.
DSH: Of course, the water fountain is the ultimate crutch. The Beatles still have to sit together writing songs and they still have to figure out musical problems, even when they’re drinking or high or whatever…
DR: And they had talent, of course.
DSH: Tabby gives that as an excuse. But at the end of the day, she’s not drinking alcohol, she’s not getting high. She has no talent. No sense of craft. She took a drink of water and she made this thing. Suddenly, her whole life has changed.
And then
she was unable to
replicate it. It’s the Sophomore Slump at age 70. There’s that panic with her,
like, “I need another drink of water.” Because in her mind, that’s
what did it. She’s craving the drug for success and I guess digging deeper into
the idea that some artists use drugs or
stimulants or whatever as part of their process. That her rationale.
DR: I guess I’m trying to even go a little deeper into the rabbit hole with this question. But it’s not even necessarily, like, the performance enhancement aspect. That’s not even what interests me as much.
There’s the quote from Nietzsche about gazing into the abyss, and how the abyss eventually gazes back. I feel like for artists, writers and musicians, their work may take a toll mentally, spiritually, whatever, that people feel they have to alleviate chemically or something.
DSH: Are you talking about in terms of part of their process, or part of the recharge?
DR: I would say the recharge. But I guess it can spill into either category. I think for some people, like the musicians in that era that you were just discussing, it was a lifestyle thing, too.
DSH: I think for the people we referenced from the 60s drugs were certainly a part of their lifestyle. But they were still working their craft.
If you want to
talk about the Eagles, or Jackson Browne, or the Laurel Canyon scene, or
whatever, those guys were building a network. They were jamming with friends. They were
learning. They were listening to records, trying to figure out how the fuck
they did certain things.
For those guys, I think it was part of the lifestyle, maybe. Creatively,
it was a baseline throughout. But those
guys talked to one another, they hung out with
one another, they showed each other chord progressions, they sang campfire songs. They
were really in a culture that fostered creativity and sharing. And yes, I’m
sure there was mutual recharging as well. There’s a lot of pressure on every
level.
DR: And everyone approaches their craft differently, of course. Writers, for example, prioritize different aspects of storytelling.
DSH: Yup. People in Hollywood and MFA programs talk about, “Raise the conflict. Conflict, conflict, conflict.” And for me it’s, “No, establish the connection. Bolster the connection. Conflict doesn’t matter if there’s no connection. Don’t bother upping the stakes if there’s no connection.”
Sometimes the level of conflict I want is Ted Lasso or Peppa Pig.
Which if you don’t have kids, you wouldn’t know Peppa Pig. It’s a show for very
young grade schoolers featuring pigs with
English accents. It’s all polite misunderstandings or things being misplaced. Sometimes
that’s the level of conflict I want.
It’s a little “All right, let’s figure it out. Hey, we’re
going to sing the song. Figure things out,” That’s what I want. Marvel’s like, “The known universe
is going to be destroyed.” But with The
Fountain it’s like, “Oh, it comes down to personal choice and
whatever. I say that knowing it has apocalyptic undertones.” Do you watch Ted Lasso?
DR: Everyone’s asking that. I guess I need to get around to it.
DSH: It’s very fun. It’s very heartfelt. But the conflict is very low. It’s just navigating relationships, hurt feelings and all that. If you have the connection, you can have that low-level conflict seem big. Then any conflict, whether it’s a misunderstanding or somebody’s ignoring somebody, it gets heightened emotionally.
DR: Let’s go ahead and move to Bill Hicks, who you mention in this book. He was railing against over commodification and “brand culture” back in the 90s, when the idea of selling out was an actual problem that artists considered. This might be why I ultimately read your work as precisely the dystopian nightmare that Hicks seems to be warning us about.
DSH: I think in retrospect, that works. I don’t know. Consciously, I wasn’t trying to do it. Again, it was this kind of exploration of the premise.
DR: Retrospect would be fine. I mean, it’s a very dystopian novel for anyone who’s involved in the arts. It’s kind of frightening, right?
DSH: Well, there is the commodification of the water, of course. And the curator of the MCA doesn’t know how it works. He doesn’t even care how it works. He knows you can only get one masterpiece out of each person who drinks. He’s not curious. That’s a big Ted Lasso thing, being curious. And the curator is not. He just knows this is good for the museum and good for his pockets. And later while the character of B is presented with a great financial opportunity, any sense of selling out is completely flooded away by the freedom the windfall would provide. He’s done with his war.
In
regards to Bill Hicks, I always liked his joke about Willie Nelson selling out,
and he’s like, “That’s okay. He owes the IRS a $100 million. He can cash
in. Willie is given a free pass because he’s Willie fucking Nelson.” I love it.
DR: So, let’s get some insight into how you craft your characters. I notice for example that the antagonist critic Duckworth shares the same affinity for antique typewriters that you express in your bio. Likewise, the loveable badass Jawbone apparently suffered a similar miter saw accident as yourself. Do you believe there are pieces of writers in all the characters they create?
DSH: Yeah. Part of it is laziness, I guess. Part of it is also that I’m a big fan of The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film by Michael Ondaatje. It’s such a great book. Michael Ondaatje, a not-too-shabby writer, interviews Walter Murch a few times over. It’s one of the few books I have. It’s dog-eared. I got Post-it notes everywhere in it.
A lot of
writers are like, “Oh, I can’t read your book right
now because I’m writing and I don’t want it to influence me.” I adopted that
for a while. Walter Murch was like, “No, no,
no. These are spark points.” His dad was a painter and would lay out canvas in their New York apartment hallway. So,
all these people would actually step and then walk on his canvas and then he
would pick up the canvas and he would paint but he would still have the
footprints of people on it. He talked about spark points and was like, “When I’m editing,
I watch everything, I listen to the radio. If
I hear a jingle that’s got a weird rhythm,
I’ll try that in the editing.” He allows his outside world to influence him in
terms of art at that moment. For me, that was really freeing.
So, I was like, “Yeah, I’m going to give Jawbone my
finger thing.” Because I lost the tip of
my finger in a chop saw accident, right? I’m going to give her that because
that’s something that happened to me. I can certainly describe how it happened. Same with the
chicken fried rice incident. But the old saying is “just because it happened to
you doesn’t mean it’s interesting.” So how do
I make that interesting and serve my story?
So, in The Fountain, every
character has something that happened to me and/or
a feature I thought was interesting or I had done a
deep-dive into.
DR: Well, tell me this, while we’re still on the topic of characters. I’m curious to know: Ross Robards’ character is inspired by Bob Ross, I assume?
DSH: Uh-huh.
DR: Yes. Okay. And how did that idea come about?
DSH: Twenty years ago, I saw a stand-up comic who did a bit about Bob Ross being a Vietnam Veteran with PTSD. And he did a little 3-minute bit. It wasn’t super funny. My dad’s a Vietnam Vet. But the way he did it stuck with me for so long and every time I saw Bob Ross I was waiting for him to go off his tit. And 20 years later I needed an example of a commercially successful artist for my novel. I need somebody who has done the work and been successful. Right?
DR: Yes.
DSH: And Bob Ross seemed to be the most generic successful artist. I was like, “Okay, I’m going to make him Bob Ross. It’s going to be Ross Robards. I’ll change the name into something less obvious.” Which I never did.
DR: So, you basically stuck one of those disguises on him with the glasses and the fake nose thinking we wouldn’t know the difference.
DSH: Yes, I Grouched him. So, it’s also, “Okay, that’s my character, what’s his reaction of the things that are going on? What’s his backstory? What’s his point of view?” And Ross is the commercially successful artist and fuck him for having had success. But in writing him I realized he probably has the strongest artistic point of view of anybody in there. Jawbone kind of equivocates about the water and Ross is like, “No. Art is about what comes from within, it’s about working out whatever problems you have, and it is an outlet.” I mean, he is a stronger point of view character. He doesn’t compromise his point of view about art. He digs his heels in and, actually, his point of view becomes stronger. So, that pleased me because he wasn’t becoming a joke character.
DR: Probably my favorite question The Fountain presented concerned the value of the artistic end versus the inherent worth of the artistic process. And I know it’s something that you’ve talked a little bit about. And so, basically, a drink from the fountain is like the ultimate hack for hacks, allowing anyone to produce one masterpiece before the water kills them. I’m kind of curious to hear your direct thoughts about that question too. Process versus pure end result. Can’t beauty maybe just sometimes be easy?
DSH: Yes. Beauty can be easy. Like a dandelion or rose or nature. It can stimulate afterward. But we also know that’s evolution, the green fuse, that it takes time to get to that particular point. Writing The Fountain was a process. I came up with a premise and I explored it. And I’d gone through an MFA program and bolstered my craft and really focused on how to fold the story back in so it became coherent and cohesive. Connections, right?
But, sure, art can be
effortless too. I can’t imagine that Jackson Pollock towards the end of his
life was really stressing over those last paintings. I mean, somebody did a Red
Cube at the MCA. Not a lot of talent is involved. Still, it’s kind of under the shield of art. Right? Everything is art. It can be art. And it’s
like, “Well, come on.” To me, art always needs to have a little bit of craft
behind it. Even if we’re talking about a rose or a dandelion. There’s a line in
Rian Hughes’ XX that gob smacked me. This SOB nailed it in one sentence: “In
short, she saw that there was an art to Art, and that it was not something
magical or transcendent, but a craft,
and good art – the type that could really move you, that you felt with your
diaphragm rather than your intellect – was simply the endgame of being very
good at your craft.”
DR: I figure this is probably a good one to end on. I found it funny how Jawbone and B so often express the ultimate anxiety of any artist, the worry that they are frauds, doubting their own authenticity as artists. I wonder if this is something that you’ve felt yourself and if it’s a feeling that haunted you while writing the book.
DSH: No, no, no. Well, maybe sometimes a fraud. I did Chicago Theater and I know so many actors and playwrights I talked to had that feeling of, “I’m a fraud and they’re going to find me out because I’m not Edward Albee.” Look, there’s only one Edward Albee, there’s only one Shakespeare. And there’s only one Jackson Pollock, and there’s only one whomever, right? I’m not competing with Tom Wolfe. I’m not competing with the Met. I think some people with talent and a dollop of self-awareness have a tendency to think, “If I’m not as good as the greats, then what I have to say doesn’t have value.” Again, I’ve never had that feeling where I’ve felt like a fraud. But I’ve had that moment where people have taken me seriously and I feel a certain responsibility to seem like I know what I’m talking about. To have answers and to present them in a coherent manner.
The closest to feeling like a fraud vibe comes from working on a
first draft and that a little voice telling me it’s not as strong as my last
polished work. Of course, it isn’t. But that’s my biggest creative fear, I
guess, or obstacle. I don’t trust the process. I’m very suspicious of it, for
whatever reason. But when I do it’s a
very joyful process.
I think for some reason writers, and I’m projecting of course, with any kind of self-reflection or self-awareness feel like frauds because they feel like, as I said, if I can do it, it’s not art, right? Well, I wrote a book. I spent a lot of time on it, crafting it, making myself laugh. If people react well to it and connect with it, then there’s something of merit to it. I have to believe that whatever I’m working on has something of merit that people might connect with, maybe become a spark point.
David Scott Hay by Mycki Manning
David Scott Hay is an award-winning playwright, screenwriter and novelist who once lost the tip of a finger to a chop-saw in Chicago. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, son, dog, chickens and a dozen typewriters. Find him on DavidScottHay.com.
Damien Roos is an MFA candidate in Fiction at The New School, a former editorial fellow at Guernica Magazine and a reader for PANK. His work has appeared in such outlets as New South Journal, The Master’s Review and Gravel. He lives in New York City with his wife and bluenose pit bull. damienroos.com
The worst kind of reading can become a tussle for tyranny. It is this sort that turns people off of poetry – the feeling that the poet must shroud something important in complicated diction or syntax, dangling a carrot the reader must work to decipher. In this struggle, both author and reader vie for supremacy. The author obfuscates meaning with symbols or other poetic devices, and the reader penetrates the text, lifts its skirt, revealing its hidden meaning through analysis.
Wayne Koestenbaum’s Ultramarine, the third and final book in his trance poem trilogy, calls into question this struggle between writer and reader, or poses another question altogether. In order to read Ultramarine, one must relinquish control. These deeply personal musings are impenetrable if you try to understand every reference or connect each logical leap. Relatively early on in this 472-page tome Koestenbaum asks, “who dominates? or does / no one dominate? and is / domination not the issue?”
Koestenbaum intervenes into the question of domination by blowing it up completely. One is both completely inside the mind of the writer – as evidenced by lack of explanations, shorthand in place of names and other devices – and completely outside insofar as the text remains opaque to us – for example the first page includes a character denoted by “M” whom we will never know. In exchange for submitting to the tyranny of the text, the reader is endlessly entertained. After all, how many books ask “why isn’t smegma / more frequently discussed?”
The themes of these poems revolve around the body: sex, the performance of gender, alienation. The first poem in the book, “#1 [my prostate is a shopping mall]” leads with a paradox: “I meant to begin / in Barbra’s voice / but I’m speaking in my / own voice as Ralph Fiennes.” Here, we have a speaker who starts at the point of failure and moves in to the self as persona or performance. From the outset the idea of the atomized self so popular in Western thought is no longer tenable when a speaker declares they speak in their own voice as the voice of another. We are always already influenced by the cultures around us; there is no possibility of purity.
The poem goes on to move through a dizzying array of thoughts before landing on “her discovery / of my cock began / to equal my own / apprehension of its / rumored existence.” The alienation of the self from the body becomes clear and collides with external anxieties: in the mind of the speaker other people talking about his cock is more real than his physical cock itself. The notion of self-formation the first poem offers pivots on an idea of influence.
In “#2 [do-it-yourself-placenta],” we arrive at a completely different manner of constructing the self. Here Koestenbaum offers a self forged through otherness. He writes, “closest companion / is my cough – I hug it.” It is through defect or disability that the self recovers from the alienation the previous poem expressed. What does not work in a normative fashion announces itself, thus bringing the self into the body. Later in the poem, “the turtle beheld / [the speaker’s] inhumanity.” The animal returns the experience of the speaker back to himself, allowing him to be seen the way he feels. These explorations in the ways otherness can behold the self point to the possibility of relationality.
Throughout the text,
Koestenbaum returns to the performance of gender. Early on, when the reader is
learning how to approach the text, he writes,
never taught
how to shave, a lost scene –
figuring masculinity out
by myself, and I never
figured it out
Here, masculinity becomes something that must be learned–staged, repeated–rather than an innate quality. He goes on later to return to this scene:
waiting for father
to notice that it was time
for me to start shaving –
he never noticed – I wanted
him to buy me a razor
and shaving cream and teach
me how to use them
Desire meets the
performance of gender. The speaker wants his father to acknowledge his
burgeoning manhood and commend it by teaching him to become even more
masculine. However, if we return to the previous scene, the reader already
knows this recognition never happens. Thus, desire and manhood meet in a clash
that emasculate the speaker, leaving him without the knowledge to perform his
gender in socially normative ways.
Similar moments of confrontation and investigation pervade the text, for example “desire / intensified by talking / to my father.” The speaker sidesteps the incest taboo and Koestenbaum accentuates this reveal by breaking the line between talking and the subject, thus raising the reader’s level of surprise. Not only does Koestenbaum surprise us with content, but also with form. The text incorporates all manner of writing from dreams to factual news. It resists privileging one mode over another. Gossip, too, has a place in this world: “Peter / Hujar’s lover called me a sissy / intellectual, a dying breed.” By flattening the hierarchy between different forms of writing, Koestenbaum queers the form of the book. Further, he questions the idea of owning language. One short passage reads:
I cut hair
for the Shah of Iran,
I had an internationally
known hair salon on
Long Island, please
text me a photo of your
Vermont hot tub
This reads like found language, something said to the speaker, or overheard. By choosing not to place quotation marks around this language, Koestenbaum problematizes the notion of ownership.
Despite the self-interested nature of the journal form, this text brings in themes beyond the personal. Questions of antisemitism and the Holocaust arise throughout the text. “#8 [pumpkin childbirth]” ends “when the pustule / vanishes, a pock remains.” This seems to be a key way of understanding Koestenbaum’s project with history – that which is gone is never truly gone. Rather it leaves scars, wounds, the trace of itself on the body.
One hundred years after publication of “The Waste Land” and its ending invocation of “these fragments I have shored against my ruins,” Koestenbaum reimagines the fragment. If Eliot’s magnum opus is made up of gathered fragments compiled into a dam to protect his life from some external force, Ultramarine attempts “to assemble life from fragments.” A century on, it seems all we have is fragments. They no longer protect us from ruin, rather they are the very thing that makes up our lives.
—
C. Francis Fisher is a poet, translator, and critic based in Brooklyn.
She is currently pursuing her MFA at Columbia University. Her writings have
appeared or are forthcoming in Asymptote, Pacifica Literary Magazine, and the
Columbia Journal among other publications. Her poem, “Self-Portrait at
25” was selected as the winner for the 2021 Academy of American Poets
Prize for Columbia University. Currently, she works as the poetry editor for
the Columbia Journal.
Rita Banerjee’s essay in three parts, “The Female Gaze,” is an excerpt from her memoir and manifesto on how young women of color keep their cool against social, sexual, and economic pressure. In her essay exploring the female gaze, female agency, and female cool, Banerjee asks:
What if women, especially women of color, were the progenitors of cool? That is, did women have to cultivate their own cool—their own sense of style, creative expression, and coldness—in order to survive patriarchy across millennia across cultures? If the male gaze aims subordinate and colonize, what does the female gaze, tempered by cool, desire? What does the female gaze cherish or hold dear? If a woman were fully aware of her gaze, would she use it to objectify and colonize, or could her gaze destabilize and decolonize?
Poster from The Museum of Sex’s The Female Gaze NSFW Exhibit.
II. Be an Object of the Gaze
In Le deuxième sexe, Simone de Beauvoir throws down the gauntlet: On ne naît pas femme: on le devient. One is not born a woman: one becomes it.
Whatever
it is or was or could be—female, feminine, feminist, second, subaltern,
subordinate, submissive, other sex—Beauvoir asserts that an individual is
actively trained, educated, and thus, indoctrinated on how to perform the role
of the woman and eventually become it (neutered, masculine
category). La femme est
une autre. La femme est l’Autre. Je suis l’ Autre. The
woman is an Other. The woman is
the Other. I am the Other. What did Rimbaud know? Je est un Autre. Godard, too, when he exclaimed, Une
femme est une femme? Is a woman just
a woman? Who makes a woman? You?
Me? Society? A man?
* * *
The
first time I consciously remember encountering the male gaze was when I was a
child, just about four years old, in a hotel room in Bangkok.
I
was flying with Nani from San Francisco to Ranchi, with a day-long layover in
Thailand, on what I would soon realize would be a one-way trip.
My
memories of the city are yellow. That
is, every time I try to conjure up the landscape, buildings, traffic and the
bustle of Bangkok, I feel like I’m watching myself watch others through a shard
of amber glass.
When
we land in Bangkok, I feel like we’ve arrived by train. In the whirling ride to our hotel, my hands
grip the bars of our auto-rickshaw and Nani’s palm as my eyes glide over the
people and the beauty of the city.
Yellow. Everything is yellow and
amber and gold. The late afternoon makes
even the light look a little orange.
I
have no language for the architecture or history I encounter in Bangkok. When our cab glides by the Golden Palace, I
think the building looks vaguely European.
Because that’s what the Old World should look like, right?
Our
tuk-tuk driver deposits us in the lobby of the hotel. Its style is a blend of 60’s mod and 80’s
decadence. The concierge hands the
access cards for our room to my grandmother.
He eyes her two rather large suitcases, human-sized carry-on, and
oversized white hand-bag. He takes in my
compact baby-blue suitcase with the images of apples and cartoon airline
tickets printed onto it.
“We’ll
have the bell-hop bring your luggage up,” he murmurs, not smiling.
My
grandmother smiles back, “Thank you, sir.”
And deposits her carry-on bag at his desk and grabs my hand, and
hobble-marches me to the elevator.
In
the corridor, outside our room, Nani wrestles with the door like it’s an
alligator. The black box and metal
handle are a mystery to her. In her left
hand, she balances her white faux-leather purse and she taps her card against
the box impatiently. I dance around her
and touch the box.
“I
think you have to slide the card into the socket,” I tell my grandmother in
Bengali. “Here,” I point to the groove.
She
does and a light on the box flashes green.
This time the door handle actually turns when Nani bangs against it.
“How
clever you are,” she pinches my chin and ushers me in. Then door behind us slams shut. The room pitches into darkness. Nani’s oversized handbag slams against my
ass.
“Now
what?” She asks, her hands flutter to
the walls like she’s a bird. “How do you
turn the lights on?” Her fingers glide
over the striped wall paper and lamps, searching for a light switch.
My
eyes adjust to the dark. I see another
box on the wall.
“I
think you’re supposed to put the card in the box.”
Nani
does, and the lights flicker on. It’s
1986, and the future has arrived.
“How
did you know how to do that?” She asks,
patting my head.
“I
don’t know,” I run to the window and pull the curtains back. The sun is setting over the golden city of
Bangkok. The buildings shine in shades
of eggshell, beige, melon red, and sunset gold.
I stare at the miniature people and cabs on the streets skirting below
me. So many human stories. So many human tragedies and comedies taking
place right here, right now, under my gaze.
“Maybe it’s because I like to watch, and figure out why things work.”
* * *
Thirty
minutes later, Nani is giving me a bath before bedtime. Nani washes the shampoo out of my hair and
then throws an oversized gray towel on me when the doorbell rings.
“Our
luggage!” She gets up from her kneeling position next to the bathtub now
drained of water. Her knees crack when
she rises. She shuffles towards the door
despite the pain in her legs. I jump out
of the tub and follow her. Naked, as the
day I was born, dragging the brown-gray towel away from my hair and behind me.
“Can
I come, too?”
I
ask Nani as she fiddles with her money purse and plucks out some bills for
change.
“Of
course,” she says dismissively as the bell rings again and she hobbles towards
the door.
“But
I don’t know the person at the door,” I whine, half-dragging the towel behind
me. What I want to say is that I’ve
never been naked in front of somebody I didn’t know before. And here’s a total stranger ringing the door,
and I’m not coordinated enough to cocoon myself in the towel just in time.
Nani
doesn’t understand my concern. She yanks
the door open, and the porter comes in.
He teeters in with three suitcases in
his hand, and deposits them, somewhat gracefully at the closet near the front
door. My grandmother goes to hand him
some change. And as he reaches for the
tip, he turns around and looks at the open bathroom door and me, standing there
in the birthday suit in the yellow light.
He stares while he pockets the change.
I
stare back at him, not knowing why he continues to look at me like that.
He’s
white, tall with golden hair and brown-colored eyes. He doesn’t look like the hotel staff
downstairs or any members of my family.
He speaks in English. He could be
American.
He
wears a uniform. A prototypical bell-hop
suit. Black hat with a red visor and
strap, black jacket with brass studs on it, black pants with red stripes racing
up the side. He even has white gloves
on. He looks young. He could be a college student with an
exciting, exotic summertime job in Thailand.
But what matters is that he doesn’t look away.
This
is the first time I am naked in front of a man who is not a member of my family
or a guardian. My grandmother says it’s
all right. I’m just a kid after
all. Our staring contest seems to last a
lifetime as my grandmother talks to the man and thanks him. His eyes never move over to her face. His eyes never leave me. As he continues to stare, I feel a dart of
electricity shoot through my spine. I am
no woman. I am just a child. So what is this transaction? Why does it feel so illicit? Am I meant to be frightened or excited?
* * *
At
the Museum of Sex, there’s an exhibit on the Female Gaze: NSFW. I invite my friends along.
At
noon, I meet Mary Ruth, my former roommate and electric Southern Belle, and my
husband in front of the museum. Mary
Ruth makes sweet tea and orange cake like it’s nobody’s business, but she can
also cut through any argument like a knife.
We
exchange greetings and kisses and pile into the museum. Inside, I’m impressed by the variety and
shapes of vibrators and bongs that greet us near the doorway. Mary Ruth strolls past the devices like she’s
waltzing through any ordinary garden of delights.
I
follow, trying not to let my eye catch on each and every dildo. Beside the vibrating rabbits, Stefan blows
his nose loudly. He’s recovering from a
gnarly cold. The wall of merkins shift
slightly in the air as he sneezes by.
In
the ticket line, I somehow manage to get separated from Mary Ruth and
Stefan. When it’s my turn to buy the
ticket, the cashier asks me if I would like to pay extra for the Bouncy
Castle of Breasts.
“Is
it part of The Female Gaze exhibit?”
I ask her.
“It
might as well be,” she smirks.
I
pay the extra fee and wait for the others at the entrance. They decide to forgo bouncy castle and enjoy
the exhibits instead.
The
first floor of the museum is all disco.
All female. All gay. All trans.
All color. All other. All sex.
It’s glorious and kitschy.
Decadent and teasingly taboo.
There are images of young men and women in their underwear, wearing
nothing at all, soaking up the foam and the admiration at Studio 54. The expressions on their faces are ecstatic,
inviting, cool.
Upstairs,
Stefan finds a bicycle that looks like a tandem bike, but actually functions as
an overly-elaborate mechanical vibrator.
I watch him as he cranks the pedals and the piston at the front of the
bike starts to go.
“Why
did they make the dildo black?” I ask as
the pumping gets faster.
“Do
you even have to ask?” He winks.
I
shake my head. Mary Ruth studies some
vintage black and white nudies from the viewfinder of a chunky old
Nickelodeon. Stefan stares at a wall of
nipple tassels and tries to read the fine print. I think it’s a good time to abandon them for
the Bouncy Castle of Breasts.
In
the queue for the castle, I’m the only single person in line. The curators take a photo of my ID and make
me sign over my life on the health form.
I enter the dark cave, and suddenly feel like an awkward teenager again.
“Keep
your shoes here. And your pen here. And your notebook there.” The gallery attendant for the bouncy castle
informs me. “Are you sure your friends
won’t be joining you?”
“I
already asked,” I shake my head at him, “They’re too stingy to pay the
additional fee.”
“That’s
too bad.”
“I’ll
get over it,” I smile.
“I’m
Matthew.”
“I’m
Rita.”
I
watch the current inhabitants of the breast castle bounce and shake the walls
of the black room we’re in.
“Are
you on duty, Matthew?”
“Why?”
“Want
to join me in the bouncy castle?” It
feels weird to go in alone.
“Hmm,”
he guides me to the entrance of the castle which is one gigantic pink
inflatable hole. The ladies from the
previous session tumble out.
“Sure,
why not?”
Inside,
I feel like I’m walking on the surface of the moon. The pink walls make me feel like I’m gliding
on cotton candy, literally stepping on air.
Is the pink palace supposed to feel like a womb?
Each
step launches me upwards, onwards and smack-dab on top of a giant inflatable
breast.
There
are nipples and flushed areolas everywhere.
Caramel breasts, chocolate breasts, rosy breasts, creamy breasts, honey
breasts, red-robin breasts, all protruding out from the ceilings, from the
floor, and from each corner of the four walls.
I feel like I’m in a colony of spores and sex.
Soon
I find myself bouncing from one breast to another, tumbling off of one nipple
and latching on to another. Like life is
just some Freudian fever dream after all.
Matthew
cartwheels and jumps around the room with me.
He flips in the air and lands on a giant boob like a pasha. I snap a picture of him, then nearly
dislocate my shoulder as I get slammed by a cluster of boobs.
He
takes a picture.
I
grab a nipple in my hand and bounce over to look at the picture over his
shoulder.
“Nice
picture, maybe I could use the image for my essay.”
“What
essay?” He shouts, sending me the image, and then jumping into a valley of
breasts.
“I’m
writing an essay on the female gaze,” I holler back, bouncing between one black
boob and one white one.
“What
have you discovered about the female gaze?” he somersaults to the ground.
“Well,”
I try to somersault, too, but instead tumble forward. “I’m trying to figure out how I inhabit the
female gaze.” A giant breast greets me
nose to nipple.
“And
have you figured it out?” He asks breathless.
I
stand up against two inflatable areolas the size of my own body. I’m breathless, too by the time the other
gallery attendants come to drag us out through the pink hole.
Between
gulps of air, I confess:
“I
can’t tell if I’m just locked in the male gaze or if I’m actually escaping it.”
* * *
In
“Aesthetic Evolution in the Animal World,” philosopher Alva Noë reviews Richard
O. Prum’s The Evolution of Beauty.
He writes:
“What’s
so dangerous about what Prum calls ‘aesthetic evolution by mate choice?’
“Darwin
grappled with the problem of the diversity…of ornament in the biological
world. It is well known that he wrote in
a letter to a friend: ‘the sight of the feather in a peacock’s
tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!’
For the peacock’s tail is, manifestly, of no adaptive value whatsoever.
“The
thing about the peacock’s tail is that the peahen likes it. It’s sexy.
It’s beautiful to her. It is
attractive. And that’s why peacocks who’ve got it, and are able to flaunt it,
are in fact more likely to have offspring.
So the trait is selected. Not for
its adaptive value, but by the female of the species.”
* * *
After
the Museum of Sex, when we’ve had our share of laughs over sex and pornography,
Mary Ruth, Stefan, and I decompress over lunch.
“Do
you think the female gaze exists?” I ask
Mary Ruth as the aroma of her steaming bowl of ramen fills the air.
“Do
you think it doesn’t?” She fills her
spoon with an elegant amount of noodle.
“I
think it exists,” I muse, “but how does one define it against the male
gaze? Does everything return to Mulvey
and her notions of scopophilia? As
women, can we even see the world outside of the male gaze, or are we always
informed by our relationship and resistance to it?”
Mary
Ruth plays with a piece of parsley in her bowl, and then looks up at me and
laughs. Her earrings wink gold in the
restaurant’s low light.
“Do
you even have to ask?” She smiles. “Of course the female gaze exists. If men objectify women and see them only as
objects, whores, and wives, what do you think women do?”
I
try to keep my cool but I’m losing my appetite.
The sushi is left uneaten on my plate.
“What
do women do?”
“They
decide which men and which genes are going to stick around in this patriarchal
society of ours and which are not. The
female gaze doesn’t just fall on the prowess and beauty of the male body. Women judge men according to their stature
and mobility in life. We respect men who
can move us upwards, forwards, socially, financially, intellectually, physically. The female gaze is political. If it seeks out men, it seeks those who offer
the best gain. The female gaze is
hedging its bet on its own survival, on its own whims, pleasures, and sense of
beauty. A woman will use any man to
better herself in society. A woman who
chooses a man as mate ensures that he survives, too. A woman makes sure that that man, that
mover-and-shaker, has a legacy of his own and doesn’t simply disappear into the
ether.”
I
stare at Mary Ruth and Stefan watches her from the corner, silent with his
mouth slightly agape. My jaw is mopping
the floor as well.
“If you’re looking for the female gaze,” she says with sadness and fire in her eyes, “look no further than biology and desire. The female gaze is the backbone of all political intrigue in society.”
__________
Rita Banerjee is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Co-Director of the MFA in Creative Writing and Publishing program at the George Polk School of Communications at Long Island University Brooklyn. She is author of CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing,Echo in Four Beats, the novella “A Night with Kali” in Approaching Footsteps, and Cracklers at Night. She received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Harvard and her MFA from the University of Washington, and her work appears in Hunger Mountain, Isele, Nat. Brut., Poets & Writers, Academy of American Poets, Los Angeles Review of Books, Vermont Public Radio, and elsewhere. She is the co-writer and co-director of Burning Down the Louvre (2022), a documentary film about race, intimacy, and tribalism in the United States and in France. She received a 2021-2022 Creation Grant from the Vermont Arts Council for her new memoir and manifesto on female cool, and one of the opening chapters of this memoir, “Birth of Cool” was a Notable Essay in the 2020 Best American Essays.
Rita Banerjee’s essay in three parts, “The Female Gaze,” is an excerpt from her memoir and manifesto on how young women of color keep their cool against social, sexual, and economic pressure. In her essay exploring the female gaze, female agency, and female cool, Banerjee asks:
What if women, especially women of color, were the progenitors of cool? That is, did women have to cultivate their own cool—their own sense of style, creative expression, and coldness—in order to survive patriarchy across millennia across cultures? If the male gaze aims subordinate and colonize, what does the female gaze, tempered by cool, desire? What does the female gaze cherish or hold dear? If a woman were fully aware of her gaze, would she use it to objectify and colonize, or could her gaze destabilize and decolonize?
Cover Image of Tripti Chakravarty’s memoir, Duur Nikat, Nikat Duur (i.e. Distant: Nearby, Nearby: far-away; Dey’s Publishing, 1995). Rita Banerjee’s grandmother, Tripti Chakravarty, was a Sanskrit scholar, English teacher, and school principal. She was well-versed in Punjabi, Hindi, and Urdu, and published Bengali essays, short stories, and poems in feminist magazines and popular journals like Desh.
In 2016, at a master class at the Toronto International Film Festival, Jill Soloway, the director and producer of Transparent who recently comes out as transgender, tackles Laura Mulvey’s famous and electrifying essay, “Visual Cinema and Narrative Pleasure.” In 1975, Mulvey introduces the term “male gaze” and describes how scopophilia fetishizes the female body on screen and transforms a woman into an object of pleasure, voyeurism, and eroticism for the male viewer.
Soloway wonders if the female gaze is simply the opposite of the male gaze. That is, is the female gaze simply “visual arts and literature depicting the world and men from a feminine point of view, presenting men as objects of female pleasure?”
Soloway digs further. The female gaze might actually have an identity of its own. An independence, an agency. “The female gaze might be…
I. A way of feeling and seeing, which tries to get inside the protagonist especially when the protagonist is not cis-male. A subjective camera. Reclaiming the body and using it as a tool of the self with intention to communicating a feeling-seeing. II. Demonstrate how it feels to be the object of the gaze. III. Return the gaze. Daring to say, ‘I see you seeing me.’”
I. A Way of Feeling and Seeing
Nani had a fascination for airplanes. Perhaps, her most famous and accessible publication is a book called Duur Nikat, Nikat Duur (i.e. Distant: Nearby, Nearby: far-away), a memoir she writes about her early life growing up in a village with her young siblings and then after marriage, how she became a young English teacher in the hill-station town of Ranchi with a medley of unruly students. This is the summary of the book she tells to our relatives and friends. But secretly the book is about travel. About her adventures crisscrossing the world on airlines starting in her fifties and beyond. She’s my grandmother with cat glasses and a crooked smile.
She
instills in me an unshakeable wanderlust, and a desire to know the world.
* * *
Tonima,
my great aunt, a cousin-in-marriage of my grandmother passes away the day I fly
to Granada. I am in transit when I hear
the news. My mother’s voice, usually so
light and lilting, seems void of emotion on the phone that day.
“Are
you okay, Sona?” Her words are automatic,
carefully chosen, too full of concern.
She doesn’t even have to name her emotion to convey it.
“What’s
wrong?”
“Thuna
Aunty, she—”
“She’s
in the hospital?”
“No.”
“She’s
gone?”
“Yes.”
I’m
in Spain the day her funeral takes place.
The olive trees skirting gardens and hotels of the Alhambra seem full of
ghosts. On the grounds, the trees are
sparse. Their branches glow lime-like,
pale, with leaves in the lightest shades of green. The day is arid, and the red earth
overheated. The sky seems almost white
today.
As
I walk through the trees, I can almost hear her words and laughter. Tonima could laugh through anything. She was a lovely remedy for a broken heart.
The
first time I recall meeting her was sometime in the mid-80’s when my parents
had decided to settle permanently in New Jersey and leave the rolling hills and
sunshine of California behind.
I
had just spent the year traveling with my grandmother, Nani. We flew from San Francisco to Bangkok to
Ranchi and back. Well, almost back. Somehow, we landed in central Jersey instead
of sunny California. I was barely four
years old when the journey started, and now, it was just after New Year’s in
1987.
A
bear with the new year emblazoned on its knitted cap greets me at the airport. It’s my marker of lost time. I recognize my mom and dad in the airport,
too, and do hug them when my mom opens her arms and offers me the bear. But before I rush into their embrace, I
hesitate.
Emotions,
for me, are not given freely. A certain
coolness enters into the embrace.
Tonima
Aunty, though, breaks through any icy heart.
She insists that everyone call her Thuna, her pet-name, which in
Bengali, sounds nothing like a type of fish.
I
meet her for the first time, a few weeks after I’ve been in New Jersey. She seems to materialize out of thin air in
the middle of the night. It’s pitch dark
outside and most of our neighbors and fellow apartment tenants are asleep. Tonima enters with her two young boys in
tow. Her husband hides the car somewhere
off-screen.
I
should be sleeping. I might have been
sleeping. But I pad into the living room
in my pajamas and watch as this strange women turns into an acrobat before my
eyes.
One of her sons, Abhik, who looks nerdy in his glasses, is tall and shy and several years older than me. Bikram, her other son, who looks like his dad with a mop of black hair is closer to my age. I look at him and think that he could be a best friend.
That
evening in Edison, Thuna Aunty seems to be wrestling with her two sons in
mid-air. She walks into the room,
carrying one under each armpit and laughs.
The boys laugh, too. One seems to
roll over her back to get free, the other tries to flee by crawling on the carpet. She manages to catch both of them in her
arms. How she does it is beyond me. I watch her laugh and juggle and juggle.
Her
eyes settle on me. There’s so much
mischief in her gaze. I like that
look. It’s cool.
Is
this what it means to be a woman? I
think, and smile as her hand reaches out to me.
* * *
Nani
composes most of her memoirs in Wales, over a summer that stretches into a year
or two, at my uncle Raju’s home. During the day, she cooks lunch for the
family and takes care of my cousins, and each afternoon and evening when the
children are off—to school, to play, to bed—she composes her book.
When it’s finally published, she’s taken by surprise. One of her cousins submits it to a Kolkata publisher on her behalf. The publisher decides to change the title of her book to something more “catchy.” Duur Nikat, Nikat Duur (i.e. Distant: Nearby, Nearby: far-away.) sticks even through Nani protests the change loudly.
The first chapter begins with an epistolary letter. The speaker is addressing her newly diagnosed disease, questioning god, and her own impending confrontation with mortality. But the speaker also sports a barbed-tongue. She looks at her fate and turns her head away. Tripti Chakravarty, my grandmother, writes:
I look up from my reading and turn
to my mother.
“I
didn’t know Nani flew to Jordan.”
“She
didn’t,” my mother says, stirring in okra and mustards seeds into the sambar
she is making.
“But
her memoir here says that she stayed overnight in Jordan, and that one of the
flight attendants confiscated her passport.”
“Let
me see that,” my mother wipes her hands dry on a towel and reads the first page
of the story.
“Well,
Nani didn’t have cancer either,” she points to the first line, “this is clearly
a work of fiction.” She takes out a
glass full of chili peppers from the cupboard and starts chopping them.
“Are
you sure? I’m pretty sure she told
everyone it was a memoir. She mentions
uncle Rana and Raju’s names here, too.”
My
mother lays down her knife. Her ears
prick at the mention of her brother’s nick-names. “And not mine?”
“Nope.”
She
looks ready to grab the book again but stops.
“See,”
she says, resuming her chopping, “it’s a work of fiction.”
I
tap the spine of the book and watch her for a moment.
“Can
it be both?”
* * *
Between
the ages of twelve and fourteen, I read more Thomas Hardy novels than any sane
child ever should. The fascination
begins in part because of Thuna Aunty.
She studied English Honors at the University of Calcutta and knows all
the classics by heart.
Under her tutelage, I race through The
Mayor of Casterbridge and Tess d’Urbervilles. I start reading Jude the Obscure, and
think I’m going to barf.
“What’s
wrong?” Thuna Aunty asks me at a dinner
party hosted at her new house in Westchester County. The house is decorated with artifacts Thuna
Aunty has acquired in Mexico, Saudi Arabia, England, and India. She’s lived in all of these places with her
family.
“What’s England like?” I try to avoid the question. Thuna Aunty and her sons were recently living in London. I hear that Abhik and Bikram even had to go to boarding schools for a bit, and I can’t imagine what they’d look like in tailored shorts, navy ties, and green jackets.
“It’s
gray,” she sits down at the bed next to me, “and cloudy. Far more cloudy than here.”
“Really?” It’ll be a few months before I turn fourteen
and fly to India via London for my middle school graduation trip. I’ve never been to Europe, and never stepped
foot outside of Asia and North America.
“Yes,”
she smiles, black eyes twinkling like jewels, “but they have Chicken Tikka
Masala there!”
“What’s
that?” I ask in all my worldliness.
“It’s
England’s national dish, Mistu,” she laughs, hand over mouth, head thrown
back. She laughs and laughs until I join
her in the joke and my eyes start watering.
“But
seriously,” she pauses for a moment, “tell me about Hardy.”
“Thomas?” I feel like I’m about to spill my secrets
about a boy I just can’t get out of my mind.
“The
one and only,” Thuna aunty winks at me, switching from Bengali to English like
a pro.
“I
love and hate his novels.”
“Meaning?”
Her eyes grow wide.
“Meaning,
I can’t stand his novels.”
“Don’t
you love his language? His
characters? His stories?”
“Yes,
of course, his language rocks,” I flick my wrist to emphasize the point. “But Tess and the Mayor’s wife. And then his daughter—”
“What
about them?”
“They’re
so unreal!”
“Unreal?”
“Do
you think a female writer would write, ‘Out of the frying-pan into the fire!’ as
a bunch of farmers watch Tess climb onto the back of Alex d’Urbervilles
stallion, knowing that she will soon be raped by him?”
“What
would a woman writer write?”
“Nothing
so condescending, so righteous, so masculine.”
“How
would you write the story?”
“I’d
have Tess narrate her own.”
* * *
In
Seattle, during my MFA, I learn Bengali so that I can learn to finally read my
grandmother’s words. What draws me to
Nani’s work is how her writing reveals what she sees in the world, how the
world sees her, and how she is able to articulate her response.
In
the first memoir/fiction story from her book, the speaker describes having her
passport confiscated by one of the security guards at the Queen Alia
International Airport in Amman. She is
then ushered to a hotel to stay overnight.
The guard doesn’t explain to her why he takes her passport, and ignores
her when she says she’s sick. The night
is spent in something like a fever dream.
The speaker can’t get the medication she needs, and no one offers to
help. Her body is sick. But society seems to be ailing, too. She recites Hamlet’s soliloquy sometime in
the middle of the night. As if
Shakespeare can save the day. But then
she sleeps. Perhaps, she dreams. The day breaks.
In
the morning, she is ushered to the tarmac where there is a new airplane
awaiting to take her to Berlin.
On
her way to the airplane, she carries her baggage but has no passport in hand.
The same security guard who confiscated her passport the day before stands next to the buzzing plane on the tarmac. When the speaker sees him, she makes a beeline in his direction. Fever and mortality forgotten for the moment.
I
read the passage out loud to my mother, and she throws her hands up while
cooking.
“What
absolute bullshit,” she replies.
“What
do you mean?” I say, laughing, “it’s
hilarious.”
“My mother didn’t know when to start writing and when to stop.” She turns back to her cooking and dismisses the book.
I
try to stop laughing and wipe the tear from my eye. I take Nani’s book to my office to continue
reading. What intrigues me most about
the passage is not the beauty of her story or the lucidity of her language, or
her fascination with craft, but her inadvertent description of the female gaze.
She
heats up and rebukes the security officer for confiscating her passport, the
emblem and agent of her female gaze.
Without her passport, she has to stop her journey. And the one hampering her path is, by no
surprise, a man. The fight she has on
the tarmac with the officer is existential.
She’s trying to gain back her own agency, her own agenda, and her own
ability to explore and map the world.
For
Nani, the female gaze is intrinsically linked to travel, to world-building, to
world-knowing. From her fifties to her
eighties, she jetted around the world.
Traveling from Ranchi and Kolkata to Amman and London and New York and
San Francisco and Tokyo and Bangkok and back.
She spoke six languages fluently, and could read and write in
several. She became an English teacher
when she couldn’t find work as a Sanskritist.
She spoke in Hindi and Santali to the adivasis in Bihar.
But most of all, she had an insatiable wanderlust. She wanted to see the world and recreate it in her own language. She wanted to know what was beyond her point of view, and see if she could continue to alter it. She wanted to encounter, argue, and brush up against others. Her gaze was ironic, curious, and always questing.
__________
Rita Banerjee is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Co-Director of the MFA in Creative Writing and Publishing program at the George Polk School of Communications at Long Island University Brooklyn. She is author of CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing,Echo in Four Beats, the novella “A Night with Kali” in Approaching Footsteps, and Cracklers at Night. She received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Harvard and her MFA from the University of Washington, and her work appears in Hunger Mountain, Isele, Nat. Brut., Poets & Writers, Academy of American Poets, Los Angeles Review of Books, Vermont Public Radio, and elsewhere. She is the co-writer and co-director of Burning Down the Louvre (2022), a documentary film about race, intimacy, and tribalism in the United States and in France. She received a 2021-2022 Creation Grant from the Vermont Arts Council for her new memoir and manifesto on female cool, and one of the opening chapters of this memoir, “Birth of Cool” was a Notable Essay in the 2020 Best American Essays.
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