The Female Gaze Pt. III

Read The Female Gaze Pt. I

Read The Female Gaze Pt. II

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.

            “Your stance, it’s always political, political, political.”

            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.

[REVIEW] Big Gorgeous Jazz Machine by Nick Francis Potter

(Driftwood Press, 2022)

Review by Alan Zelenetz

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 at the 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 akin to 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 against grey 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 respond intentionally adds gasoline, 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.

[REVIEW] Bath by Jen Silverman

(Driftwood Press, 2022)

REVIEW BY LILLIE GARDNER

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.

[REVIEW] Ultramarine by Wayne Koestenbaum

(Nightboat Books, 2022)

REVIEW BY C. FRANCIS FISHER

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.

The Female Gaze Pt. II

Read The Female Gaze Pt. I

Read The Female Gaze Pt. III

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.

The Female Gaze

Read The Female Gaze Pt. II

Read The Female Gaze Pt. III

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.

[REVIEW] Glass Bikini by Kristin Bock

(Tupelo Press, 2021)

REVIEW BY CATHERINE IMBRIGLIO

In 1949, at a Berkeley symposium on poetry, the young Jack Spicer complained about the smallness of the audience for poetry.  Poetry should be as entertaining as popular culture, he argued.  “The truth is that pure poetry bores everybody,” he said.  “It is even a bore to the poet.” Instead, according to Spicer, poets “must become singers, become entertainers.”   If poetry managed to be more generally entertaining, Spicer thought, it would be less insular, it would have many more readers. 

The situation for poetry hasn’t changed that much since 1949. Though in the US today there are more outlets for poetry than in Spicer’s time and many vibrant nationwide poetry communities and festivals, it’s probably a safe bet that most of the audience for poetry consists of people who write or have written poems themselves.  In terms of the general US populace, poetry has sunk into a mighty insignificance.  (I’d be very happy to be wrong about this.) One only needs to look at the NY Times’ list of 100 notable books of 2021 for evidence. (Two books of poetry made the list.)   Or look for the poetry section in one’s favorite bookstore or local library.  What’s there? (The Boston Globe, which lists 20 best poetry books for 2021, appears to be one of the few media outlets that take contemporary poetry seriously.)

If Spicer is right and entertainment is an essential factor for increasing poetry’s readership and significance, Kristin Bock’s Glass Bikini is more than up to the task.  Her book is disturbingly entertaining, in a rubbernecking at the accident sort of way.   The book delights in picking apart illusions of humanity’s goodness, dignity, and value, instead presenting us with a nightmarish, absurdist poetry that is as bizarre as it is horrifying. In Bock’s inside-out, upside-down, Lewis Carroll-ish scenarios, humans are the deadly accident, the catastrophe.  Art is the first thing to go: the opening poem “Overcome,” with its biblical overtones, starts the book off with a whacky sense of belatedness and loss.  With art gone there is little left that provides us with the inspiration for changing what got us to here. Museum galleries have empty walls. People are entertained by the degrading antics of other human beings.  They piss in DuChamps missing fountain, weep “for what might have been”:

And it came to pass, art became extinct.  Still, we flocked to museums and stared into barren rooms.  Look!  Someone would exclaim.  There’s a man rolling around on the floor, acting like an unbalanced washing machine, knocking into things and coughing up wet rags.  Isn’t it horrifying? Oh, yes, excruciating, someone would yell out.  People whizzed in Duchamp’s missing fountain.  They blew each other like whistles where L’Origine du Monde used to hang.  They wept under restroom signs for what might have been.  People shredded their clothes, oozed from chandeliers.  … And thus began the gnashing of hair and the pulling of teeth that lasted for the rest of the unknown world. 

(My ellipsis, Bock’s italics)

The poems that follow, some with ghoulish titles such as “Snuff Poem,” “Everything Coming Up Rifles,” “The Killing Show,” “Postcard from the Coffin” pull us along with their inventive, unsettling strangeness.  Monsters, mannequins, dolls, robots – the almost human – populate many of the book’s poems, in competition with actual humans.  (The humans are losing.) The book’s overall atmosphere is menacing and creepy, often involving the human body’s dismemberment:

No, those are not starfish scattered on the sand.

Those are hands curling in on themselves, making

little nests on the beach.  Sometimes, they scuttle

away to cut off other hands.

(“The Island of Zerrissenheit”)

Along the same lines, in another poem Bock cuts up body parts to chart humanity’s eventual evolutionary demise:

Some time after the extinction of whales, babies were born in pieces.  Lungs, feet, spleen all separate and in heaps.  We dumped the remains of our babies in the woods, in the fields and into the seas.  To our dismay, the single parts rose and animated.  Heads without necks rolled around trying to connect with other parts.  Hearts, arms, and tongues crept over the Earth in grotesque parades.  Organs and limbs clumped together and survived for a time. …

(“How Rabbits Finally Took Over the World”)

At the same time, Glass Bikini is darkly humorous, provocatively so.  (Think Jonathan Swift, A Modest Proposal.)  The humor here is double-edged.  While Bock makes it clear that humor may be one of the few psychic defenses left in times of existential crisis, she also dilutes its power by reminding us of some laughter’s underlying cruelty. In one of the poems that I see as central to her project, she stages an evolutionary reversal, with humans trying to escape back to their watery origins.  The poem starts at a party, where the speaker’s mother “curls into a set of ovaries and vein-blue tubes.”  The speaker picks up her mother and carries her upstairs.   What follows is a laughter that is deeply disturbing:

…. I drop my mother, and everybody laughs.   It’s just so funny.  She slumps over and throbs in the corner.  My brother slouches toward her.  I try to grab him by the stumps, but they are slick from the forewaters.  I keep dropping him in the rising muck.  Everyone is convulsively laughing.  We can’t stop.  We slip, go under.  It’s hilarious.  All of us grabbing onto each other.  All of us ill-made, laughing, and trying to get back inside.

(“Get Back”)

“Get Back”’s suggestion that humans are “ill-made” comes up in other poems.   In “Belief Is a Default Setting,” newly-made human replicas “sense something ugly and festering in the heart of a friend.  Where there is none.” In “Prometheus Report,” human characteristics are explained by mutations in the genes: “Do you have the M-T-H-F-R mutation?  You know, the “Motherfucker” gene? You can’t detox with that one.”  Such deterministic notions of genetic composition, begging the question of whether human life is worth preserving, place Bock’s work within a distinguished line of dystopian writing. Kurt Vonnegut’s Galapagos immediately comes to mind. (In his book, humans end up as seal-like animals, with no hands.)

A reader might understandably wonder if the book provides any relief from the near-apocalyptic visions which dominate most of Glass Bikini’s poems or if the book is a complete downer. I would say there is a modicum of relief, if one looks carefully. I’ll point out two possibilities.  The first is the poem “Invitation,” where Satan is unexpectedly the hero.  On Monday through Saturday, Satan takes out the garbage of the world.  On Sunday, he writes a short note to the “Dayside Creatures,” a note with lovely lyric simplicity that stands out against the horrors in the surrounding poems:

I am a boy who lives in the woods.

I’ll leave the moon on

all night among the leaves.

The other poem I want to mention, “The Inside-Out,” is also lovely, though sadder and much more complicated.  It could be read as a commentary on the book as a whole, in that it validates the imagination via a “dark specter” that “grows so heavy inside, it’s hard to carry around, hard to bear through the dream of the inside-out, where the wind whistles through the bones of birds choking on their own feathers….”   It’s imagination, even a delusional or despairing one, that compels one to carry on with one’s life, “as if no one can see it beating you down.”  The fact that such imaginative poems, however outrageous, actually exist in Glass Bikini – the book’s pages are obviously not blank, in contrast to the barren museum rooms of the book’s opening poem – gives us at least some short term hope that readers might be moved by Bock’s scathing critiques of our cultural moment. (See the poem “Pluto” for a catalogue of human miscreants.) Like the Emily Dickinson quote that Bock uses as an epigraph to one of her sections (“Tis so appalling – it exhilarates -“), this collection is unsettling, but by no means boring. It demonstrates that the comedic mixed with horror can be more scary and enthralling, more memorable, than pure solemnity.

Catherine Imbriglio is the author of two books of poetry, Parts of the Mass (Burning Deck), which received the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and Intimacy (Center for Literary Publishing), which received the Colorado Prize in Poetry. Her poetry and criticism have appeared in After Spicer (John Vincent, ed.), American Letters & Commentary, Aufgabe, A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line, Conjunctions, Contemporary Literature, Denver Quarterly, Epoch, Green Mountains Review, New American Writing, Pleiades, West Branch, and elsewhere. A selection of her poetry was anthologized in the Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries, ed. Reginald Shepherd (University of Iowa Press). She is a senior editor in poetry for Tupelo Quarterly.

[REVIEW] Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful by Rohan Chhetri

(Tupelo Press, 2021)

REVIEW BY HANNAH RIFFELL

Rohan Chhetri does not write poems for the faint of heart. Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful is a book divided into four parts, the first of which is titled Katabasis, a word that translates to mean a downhill retreat or a descent into the underworld. True to the word, Chethri opens with a monolithic poem that first evokes a bloody folk story before leading into sharp lament for the poet’s own deceased relatives, a transition that weaves subtle inferences of love into a framework of mortality. If the meaning of Katabasis escaped the reader, this introductory poem ought to be a clear forewarning. This physically slim volume of poetry is an emotionally demanding work of art, as Chhetri turns an unblinking eye towards the violent, death-filled nature of reality and questions how it is possible to live in harmony with and to produce poetry alongside the darkness.

“The King’s Feedery,” as the first poem, contains likewise the first lines of the collection, lines that are jarringly stark. “After the rape and the bloodbath,” writes Chhetri, setting the stage for a panoply of poems about sincere pain, but also signalling that the heart of the book extends beyond the actual rape and bloodbath. While Chhetri rarely shies away from graphic details, Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful seems more attuned to the complexities of the “after.” This is a book concerned with the process of remembering desolation and telling stories about agony.

In the first part of the book, the Katabasis section, Chhetri exposes the brutal nature of reality, dwelling on stories of war and genocide and massacres. In “Lamentation for a Failed Revolution,” Chhetri parallels the corporal and psychological effects of violence with a poetic style of disjointed lines, vivid diction, and spliced paragraphs. The images in this poem are horrific: he writes about a man with “blood sluicing down an eye” as he walks to a pharmacy, about a nurse patching together on a fifteen-year-old boy “a medieval coin-sized chunk of skin fallen off the areola,” about “paint-thick blood on the rained streets.” The poem is exhaustive, spanning five pages and nine stanzas; the story does not come quickly or easily to an end. How could it? There is a haunting character to suffering that does not end when the event itself has culminated, something that Chhetri understands keenly. “They dragged our children’s fathers down to the river/ Held them by the hair, pulled their tongues out of their mouths taut like catgut.” This is a historical trauma, one that will affect not only the tortured fathers but the children who observed and will inherit that trauma.

The poems take on a personal note in the second part, called Locus Amoenus in reference to a literary utopia, and seem to describe an intimate effort at reconciliation, as the poet shoulders the lasting legacy of generational trauma. In “Dissociative Love Poem,” he writes that “We are nothing but/ A sum of our history of shame. Grandfather rising/ from a ditch, blood-washed face bloated purple,/ Single pulse beating behind ear, left to bleed out/ By the man who married his only sister- / That’s as far as we talk about in the family.” This is the voice of a man struggling to live in a world where violence is so prevalent, even though it may not have happened to himself in particular. Even so, while Chhetri frequently writes about the violence-marred past of his grandparents and the unspoken griefs of his parents, he also alludes to a lover, who has presumably died, adding a deeply personal layer of sadness to the poems. Indeed, the third section of the book is named Erato, after the Greek muse of love poetry. In Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful, the pain is universal and unique and at all times overwhelming. And yet the words are invariably ornate and powerful, while gruesome at times, sheltered in verses that are appropriately unstructured and free-form. This is one response to tragedy: to frame the tragedy in exquisite language, thereby creating a kind of locus amoenus out of the agony. Chhetri’s poetry, however, challenges this response. Is there truly any way to shape the language of ruin into something permanently beautiful, or is the beauty only found “in transit,” the rest blemished by the reality of death?

There are brief and brilliant moments when the poems reveal a glimpse of beauty. “Bordersong” begins quaintly, deceptively so. “We lived downwind of a bakery,/ butter sesame roasted black cumin.” But it becomes clear that the loveliness of the bakery image is short-lived, as the poem spirals into despair, ending with the line “Downwind blew kerosene & ragsmoke/ in some young martyr’s evening.” It is as if the trauma is inescapable, despite the best efforts of the poet to invoke gorgeousness. Nowhere else in the book is the struggle to move beyond grief more evident, until the third-to-last poem, a pentych entitled “Recrimination Fuge” that a forward-motion is suggested, as the poet manages to refine hope through the simple process of remembering grief.

“Recrimination Fugue” arrives in the fourth and final part of the book, Grief Deer, the name of which derives from the title of one poem and is echoed in the imagery of the closing piece: The ravens calling for the wolves to split/ Open the light from the dead deer’s belly/ Jeweled in the dark purse of its pelt. It is not until this moment in “Mezza Voce” that Chhetri finally admits to the discovery of beauty in spite of horror. “We are each given heaven for brief so heavy./ We put down dance small around it.”

In the confusion of these final lines, there is of course a sense of still being lost and murmurs of woundedness, of still being hurt. But there is also, at the end of the arduous journey that is Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful, something that truly can be called beautiful, something beautiful that can perhaps be made permanent through poetry.

A native of northern Michigan, Hannah Riffell is an upcoming graduate of Calvin University, where she is a Writing major and a member of the Arts Collective. Her poetry has been published in the on-campus creative journal Dialogue, as well as The National Writers Series Journal and the 2018 book Beyond Stewardships: New Approaches to Creation Care. In 2021, she received the Academy of American Poets University and College Prize at Calvin University. She intends to keep writing and reading poetry long after graduation.  

[REVIEW] Ghosts of America by Caroline Hagood

(Hanging Loose Press, 2021)

REVIEW BY DAKOTAH JENNIFER

Why can’t women write great American novels? What does it mean to be a woman, rewritten by the male gaze, actively striving to tell your own story, imbue your own importance, all while the American canon makes you a fragile, breakable, sexual thing? Caroline Hagood’s Ghosts of America: A Great American Novel demands much of all celebrated, American male writers. Norman Roth III, also known as “Herzog,” is a professor, Vietnam veteran, and well-known American author, visited by the ghosts of women who were the subjects of the novels he’s written.

Herzog, a white male professor and author, the spitting image of lackadaisical literary success, is introduced as a painfully honest man, who takes almost nothing seriously, especially not women. His novels on Jaqueline Kennedy and Valerie Solanas have not only received critical acclaim, but “gotten [him] laid since the 1980s. Because what is literary academia if not the overweight, ugly, balding white guy’s tenured ticket to young tail?” Herzog is a sort of caricature of a lazily patriotic, white, aging, authorially academic, lewd male American man. He speaks profoundly then immediately undermines it with a vulgar, superficial quip or lack of care.

Hagood’s feminist look at the idea of the canon, at the male American writer and erasure of female traumas and histories, is artfully done through the simultaneous retelling and condemnation of the author in one. In the format of A Christmas Carol, Herzog is visited by these women he’s subjectified to the male authorial gaze, and made silent as they retell their stories. Much of the piece feels like a class, a history lesson, but one that is so vital. frequently ignored, unseen, deprioritized. Hagood’s women retell their stories, restore their tongues into their own mouths, relieve themselves of the trauma and the triumph of living through it. We begin to hope that this sort of reckoning Herzog gets becomes an epidemic– that historical women everywhere who were made into objects just for the story will get a change to haunt the authors who imposed their gaze.

Herzog spies on a nude neighbor, defiles women in every other sentence, burdens us with his… personal habits, and seems oblivious to the women he’s used to garner his awards and “get laid.” In all, he’s a self-interested, oblivious academic who still has some profundity to him, and in that way, he is a perfect archetype. He is not only his cruelty but also pensive thought and understanding. In one moment he is recounting when he, “Cut [his] hand on broken glass while sloshed, then rubbed it around on my typewriter paper like something good would ever come of it,” and in another, he writes, “a whole history of building empires on others’ backs. The language of equality in our Constitution was never a promise, but just a super clever and sneaky way of controlling the greatest number of people.” Herzog is not unintelligent, and that perhaps, is what is most truthful about the paradox of it all– he is bright and sexist, he is not uninformed, he is uninterested in knowing. Hagood crafts Herzog’s character, however coarsely, into the perfect mirror image of every man known and unknown who gained praise writing about women who were nothing but tools.

Jackie Kennedy is the perfect pious woman–survivor of tragedy and still standing. A warrior written as a fragile woman made into a First Lady by her husband and broken by the same hand. Jackie’s story is given the most time and is the most informative, and for good reason– Jackie speaks out as a hero, the main character, the protagonist victor, instead of the supporting actress society, and Herzog had seemingly made her. Jackie does not start when John F. Kennedy enters her life, and though she is changed by his death, she does not stop when he leaves. She is “already dead,” but she continues to live, and that is her heroic story, not her downfall.

Valerie Solanas is the woman made crazy by her story. She is the newer sort of woman, who understands, “and yes men are also abused and have to survive it, but I’m not qualified to write that book.” Her more modern take, her futuristic way of being, makes her seem eccentric, but through Hagood’s intricate prose we see that Solanas is not crazy but a visionary–a woman who speaks what she sees, a woman who has been harmed by the male world she attempts to live in. She says, “Nobody knows this, but to be defiled is to attend your own funeral, but you’re on the ceiling and nobody can see you,” and its lines like these that strike us within– Hagood speaks through the characters into women. You feel it deep inside, and suddenly, you are Valerie or Jackie or Medusa or Philomela– Hagood has a sneaky way of making all women one, with just a line or two. Hagood, in contrasting Solanas and Kennedy, allows for both extremes of women– the crazy woman and the perfect woman– and shows us how, through the very same author, they are both inadequate, weak, fragile, sexualized in all the wrong ways. It is not only a compelling story but a strange sort of belonging.

The piece is subversive, entertaining, and informative, in that order. Once Jackie appears, the narrative captures the reader and keeps them. Herzog, though he seems to intentionally be this way, is quite an uncomfortable and hateable character, and grinding through his introduction proves to be a challenge. The male gaze is critiqued, revised, and therefore closely examined through a sort of isolated reckoning– this book is not only a literary work, but an act of revision and restoration.

Ghosts of America: A Great American Novel reframes the ghosts of America as women, true heroes alongside valorized men, and rewrites the consistent wrongs of the canon. In short, through almost fragmented chapters, Hagood’s quirky story takes a gander at redemption– for the canon, for women, for America.

Dakotah Jennifer is a twenty-year-old black writer currently attending Washington University in St. Louis. Jennifer has been published in Across the Margin, HerStry, Popsugar, The Pinch Journal, Voyage YA, Protean Mag, Apartment Poetry, Paintbucket.page, the Grief Diaries, The Confessionalist Zine, Oral Rinse Zine, and Ripple Zine. She was accepted into the Juniper Writing Workshop at Amherst, The Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and the Writing Workshops Paris with Carve Magazine for the 2021 year. She won Washington University’s Harriet Schwenk Kluver award for the 2018-2019 year and The Dramatics of St. Louis Prize for the 2020- 2021 year. She has also published two chapbooks, Fog (Bloof Books) and Safe Passage (Radical Paper Press).

Unpossessed Places

BY CHRISTOPHER IMPIGLIA

The pandemic forced us all to pause, often in solitude. An unfamiliar, uncomfortable place, even for the writer, social engagement now expected, indeed required, and distractions commonplace, writing a navigation between these, between cameos and posts and clicks of elsewhere, nowhere. Between subsisting and pursuing—or being pressured to pursue—more lucrative things, and the guilt we’re made to feel for engaging in what doesn’t readily generate—at least not initially—the only thing we’re told is of value: money.

Netflix, like most media, did its best to invigorate the stillness, force-feeding content, the play button obsolete, the right to choose under scrutiny, algorithms stifling agency, self-doubt fueling algorithms; we trust in them, a safer bet than ourselves. Suggested viewing: not a suggestion, but a necessity, an inevitability.

Season after season after original movie blare on. Every Avenger and their personal trainer will soon have their own must watch show. Streaming platforms have grown into all-powerful megaliths, cementing themselves in the stillness, feeding off our fragility. New ones have absorbed whatever was left lingering in their accessibility, fresh subscriptions and devices required. Add-ons have added to the equation, the extra dollar per-month necessary to elevate us beyond the base subscription and its subscribers. Or simply to rejoin the masses, to not be left behind. Even as in parts of the country, including my own, vaccination has led to re-openings, and maskless faces, scowls—we’ve forgotten how to smile—have returned a sense of normalcy, with variants raging in the background and fresh closures perhaps looming—we turn up the volume, scroll through our phones, try not to think about it—we find ourselves unsure. We hesitate with our greetings—a hug? Cheek kiss? Elbow? Our fragility persists. We crave the ease of our couches. Of content. Our addiction pulsates.

Like many, I retreat. And yet, it’s the stillness I seek. The now familiar discomfort I believe all of us should embrace lest we lose ourselves completely, drown in overstimulation, the ignorance it breeds; the one positive I can draw from the pandemic, its solitude, is that, to some extent, I was able to reclaim myself, forced to. Consuming has its limits. It offers temporary respite. Herein lies the illusion that allows capitalism to endure. I was able to reclaim my world shrunk to a more manageable size: a living room, bedroom, kitchen. A running track. To do what we’ve kept—increasingly—from doing: step back, sit down, and think. Think in the purest sense: about life and by extension death, which has come to sound, unfortunately, like something reserved only for the bygone romantic or emo.

No longer cast into the surging current of a dreaded, endless commute, rapt by overlong meetings and task after endless task, the need or impulse to be productive or social or sociable every second dulled, the gaps in-between widening, no longer filled as they once were, in a paradoxical attempt to rest the mind in its rapture, my innermost self resurfaced. I allowed it to, switching off screen after screen or simply growing bored of them. Books becoming better, more real, company. Welcoming stillness’ strands: boredom, absence, silence. It came in waves, the self, an oft tortuous crashing, ebbing, and flowing.

I was forced to confront it all: the smothered, bottled up, half-forgotten, and ignored, and I have strived, as a writer probably should, to document, summarily, in our age of distraction, what I have gleaned in those difficult moments. What I can only hope will help the reader and fellow thinker find their own stillness. Their own selves. Persist in this necessary state even when eruptions of thought cloud and spill. Singe, engulf, overwhelm.

Life, Calvino notes, is a contemplation of memory. Memory: an unreliable, ever-changing thing that reinvents itself in order to fit your current state physically and emotionally. Where you are in your travels. In your life’s journey.

So that painful longing you feel for someone who inflicted so much pain, who you were certain you were meant to lose; those fragments of your past that haunt you in lulls, tempting you to flood yourself with image, sound, and drink, with oblivion, to dive into motion, shake yourself free, taught, explicitly and subliminally, that a moment of contemplation is a moment lost, to consume, consume; in your dreams and nightmares, buried in your subconscious, in your primal inability to let go, to forget, once an advantage in a primal world, now a hindrance; those words you still hear spoken long ago in voices once music to your ears, now shrieks, growls, wails, poison; words and voices that suffocate, strangle, make your best attempts at soaring a slog through the mud, to which you never replied, but perhaps should have, or did, weakly, wrongly, a better response only later on your tongue, when it was too late: trust none of it. It’s all but what you—we—have been designed to fear: innumerable negatives, some of which we can name: uncertainty, disappointment. Unfulfilled goals, guilt, shame, doubt, regret … harnessing memory, corrupting it, undoing the reality it never intended to record.

This: a realization that might sooth your torment. Allow you to reinvent memory again, sculpt it into idols worth worshipping, into inspiring recollection—feed off it. Let it inform your art, made no longer for catharsis, wet with tears, aflame with anger, but with pleasure. For pleasure. For understanding, exploration, and beauty. All art should aspire to beauty: what all can behold. Into nostalgia—you gaze off, out, back.

A smile comes to your lips. You reach out to an old friend—a real friend, which means a shared past, a perhaps difficult conversation, a confrontation you avoided—nervous, throat dry.     

“Of course I remember you,” they say.

They remind you of who you were. Who you are: flawed, like anyone else. Perfect in your imperfection, to tempt cliché, which hold a certain universality, timelessness. Appropriate. Loved regardless. Like anyone else: capable of being forgiven. Of forgiveness.

“Redemption.” The word rings in your ears.  

Mistakes and successes alike, you now see: glittering gems.

Another realization: you will possess only very little in your lifetime. Considering the vastness of the world, the universe, which only continues to expand, and the fleetingness of your existence, there is so much more you will never have.

Here I again draw from Calvino, who I keep by my side.

Invisible cities the only ones we can now safely occupy.

Everything you possess, therefore, everything you can possess, is precious. As precious as the unpossessed and unpossessable; the grail isn’t meant to be grasped, sipped from. The Fisher King: leave him be. Let him heal his own wounds. Like El Dorado, like fame and perhaps fortune, like the edges of the universe, of consciousness: it’s meant only to be pursued.
  

So take hope, traveler. Continue to retreat. To seek. Lose yourself in unfamiliar, uncomfortable places. Physically: when doors open once more. Emotionally: incessantly. Continue to possess—let moments pass, become memory. Let them acquire that same sacred sheen as miracles. To choose—let memory dictate your choices. Let them be your guide, your lantern, bright with ambition. Continue to entangle yourself in your surroundings, your limbs, like your roots, those of the trees. Your limbs the skyscrapers, the satellites, the reaching, striving of all others. The present: a tangle of all the decisions everyone has ever made.

Trust yourself. Be content with yours.

Christopher Impiglia is a writer from Bridgehampton, NY. He also adjuncts and edits art books. He received an MFA in Fiction from The New School and an MA in Medieval History and Archaeology from the University of St Andrews. A Finalist in Nowhere Magazine’s 2020 Spring Travel Writing Prize and the 2019 Hemingway Shorts Contest his words have otherwise appeared in Columbia Journal and Entropy Magazine, among others. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram @Impigliato.