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.

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.

Why Superheroes Wear Capes

BY SHAMECCA HARRIS

I twirled to Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” at the center of a doll town I’d created in my mother’s living room. Teacher Barbie stood at the foot of a plastic-covered couch that I’d routinely spill juice, or milk, or germs on. Her forced smile greeted a toy classroom of Tuttis and Todds, Barbie’s lesser-known tween twin siblings. Nearby, just beneath the glass wall unit where my mother hid the good china, a Barbie Bride admired an abstract mannequin in a tiny white dress. Her groom, a hand-me-down Donnie Walberg from Mattel’s New Kids on the Block collection, sat waiting a few feet away in a flamingo pink convertible. I wanted the townsfolk to have a prime view of ABC’s Saturday morning cartoons, so I placed Skipper behind the cash register at the bodega replica in front of the TV stand. In retrospect, I realize that I was no genius architect; I was merely a seven-year-old hoarder of toys.

Fashion occupied the center of my makeshift Barbie world. Each extended holiday away from school, I’d wake up with the sun, splash the entire contents of my toy box onto the floor, and dress and undress dozens of plastic torsos for hours. Barbie’s elaborate costumes reminded me of trips to Buster Brown’s, a local children’s store where my mother and I shopped for the perfect Easter dress, ruffle socks, and patent leather shoes every year. While most children squirm at being poked and prodded by a seamstress, I indulged in my real-world opportunity to play dress up. I was a Barbie girl, after all. I’d dress and undress my own flat torso in fluffy church dresses while blowing kisses at my reflection in the water-stained mirror.

Years after I dumped my doll collection down the trash incinerator, I am still a Barbie girl. As an adult, I no longer need a holiday as an excuse to play dress up and embrace every day as an opportunity for spectacle. My mood is the preeminent muse for each outfit of the day. On mornings when I am feeling fierce, I channel Beyonce with a yellow maxi. On nights when I am feeling fiercer, I channel Rick James with my platform boots.

And then, there are days where there are no words to describe the wildfire blazing in my gut, days where I’m convinced that, if there is a God, He has forgotten I, too, am His child, days where I don’t believe in anything, least of all myself.

July 7, 2016

“Stay with me!” Diamond Reynolds pleads from the passenger seat,  as her fiancé, Philando Castile, bleeds out behind the steering wheel.

Castile, a 32-year-old Minnesota man, has just been shot by a police officer during a routine traffic stop. Blood spills out from his torso, soaking clear through his crisp white T-shirt. As Reynolds live streams his final breaths from her smartphone, the couple’s 4-year-old daughter, Dae’Anna, looks on from the back seat.

“He’s licensed to carry,” Reynolds explains to the camera as Castile moans in distress. “He let the officer know he had a firearm and he was reaching for his ID and his wallet, and the officer just shot him in his arm.”

“I told him not to reach for it! I told him to get his hands up!” the officer retorts angrily, still pointing his gun at Castile who appears to drift in and out of consciousness.

Castile’s eyes rotate to the back of his skull as he rocks his head slowly back and forth in a hypnotic wave. When he finally stops moving, his eyes settle into a cryptic gaze.

“Oh my god, please don’t tell me he’s dead,” Reynolds wails. “Please don’t tell me my boyfriend just went out like that.”

Each time I lay down to sleep, I see flashes of Castile’s eyes in a hostile roll. There is no use trying to sleep; I may as well stay woke. Desperate and dumbfounded, I resort to making a political statement with my wardrobe. I am well are a good outfit can’t eradicate systemic racism but, if I was going to save the world, I needed to look the part. In tribute to the loss of black life, I reach for a black cape with wide sleeves that gave the illusion of wings each time I lift my skinny arms. I complete my costume with a black bandana tied around my face like an LA gangster.  I take a final peek in the mirror and I look like a black-American super-shero, an awkward mashup of Solange and Tupac. I call her Queen Goddess and endow her with the power to kick white supremacy’s ass.

Bodies quickly shuffle into the subway car to avoid being trapped by the temperamental doors. I am among the growing mass of travelers and yet feel as if I’m in a world removed, an invisible bystander of Queen Goddess’ swag. She is I and I am and she.

“Excuse me,” Queen commands. Her voice is robust and powerful. She is not apologizing for taking up space so much as she is demanding that space be provided to her. She speaks to everyone and no one in particular, all at the same time. The crowd parts and Queen confidently strolls down the narrow aisle, her cape catching the breeze of her graceful stride. Shortly after she snags a rare empty seat, a preppy meets hipster man in his early ’30’s, plops down in the seat next to hers. 

 “Is everything alright?” he whispers in her ear.

Normally, I might be moved by this thoughtful gesture. I might thank the subway creeper for his concern and, despite yearning for peace of mind, I might lie and tell him I was just fine. Queen, on the other hand, isn’t so impressed, nor is she so polite. Queen quickly shifts her gaze and covers her eyes with a pair of dark sunglasses. She is blind to the bullshit today. The part of her that wants to be liked is dormant, and what survives is a bad-ass alter ego who just wants to be free.

“No!” she responds, positioning her dark frames on the brim of her nose to flash the fury in her eyes. “I am not okay!”

The man quickly transforms from a pale white to a crimson red as he gets up and walks solemnly to the other end of the car. He keeps his head bowed for the rest of the ride with the exception of an occasional nod. Queen assumes that wasn’t the answer he was looking for, but either way, she has no interest in catcalls or small talk. So long as the world could neglect black lives, she could neglect white tears.

When she arrives at her stop, she exits with the same stunning confidence with which she entered. She floats past the idle booth attendant, flies up the sullied stairway, and welcomes the burning intensity of the early morning sun. She has been contained underground long enough. She is ready to unleash her powers in the real world, but she is not welcome there.

As soon as she enters the office, her revolutionary spirit is deflated by the deafening silence of our peers. Their backs are bent, their heads are bowed, and their gaze is fixed on their desktop screens. Her air of defiance is met with cynical stares. No one cares how angry she is. The only talent of value here is a knack for silence.

This is where I step in. I am an obedient worker. I shut my mouth, I put my head down, and I get shit done. Still, despite my best efforts to keep Queen in check, I can’t seem to contain my alter ego’s rebellion, and she eventually storms up to our supervisor’s desk.

“I’m not feeling well,” she says matter-of-factly. “I have to go.”

Queen darts down the steps and out of the building before her boss can respond. Once outside, she pulls a powder blue pouch of Turkish tobacco from her mini-backpack and rolls a skinny cigarette. She presses her lips to the narrow opening and takes a long pull, inhaling the comfort of the warm thick smoke and exhaling the tension from her listless bones.

“Whatever I do, I will not be silent,” she says to herself between pulls before flying back down to the underground subway with her cape in the wind.

SHAMECCA HARRIS is a creative writer and teaching artist born and raised in Harlem, New York City. She is a graduate of the MFA program in Creative Writing at The City College of New York where she also teaches English Literature and Composition. Her essays, reportage, and experimental writing have appeared in The Rumpus, Global Citizen, and Apogee Journal among others.

Animal Years, an excerpt

Lion by Jean Bernard (1775-1883). Original from The Rijksmuseum

BY LORI GREEN

Before Hal was the beginning. And the lions, still fresh. There were seven of them, each as big as a bedroom and the color of the sun. I was six-years-old and too happy to try being a novelist. Our family had a backyard with shade and acreage and its own stone bench. The maple by the door was devoted to me, and once a year the lilacs bloomed.

Then for Christmas, my parents decided to teach me about responsibility and placed the job of feeding the Pride squarely on my shoulders. I don’t know how they thought it would work long-term when I wasn’t allowed to handle raw meat. Once my maned and tawny darlings had weakened from hunger, they were checked into one of those chimpanzee retirement communities where fur becomes glossy and grabbable again. They thrived and plumped up and made new friends. I sent them postcards and they wrote back but, as my handwriting improved, theirs plateaued.

I mourned. My parents bought me five Goldfish and an indestructible tank. Thinking they deserved better food than brown clumps from a bottle, I fed them the best our pantry had to offer until they died of salted pretzels and sour candy. I mourned again, but less. The fish had been pretty boring. I missed spending summer afternoons with my lions, falling asleep inside the fuzz of their choral purr.

For my seventh birthday, I asked for a notebook instead of another animal. My parents warned This is your last chance! and bought me a spiral-bound soft-cover. That year I completed my first short-story, The Missing Bird, a highly effective series of cliff-hangers resolved sentence by sentence. I knew I’d never top it so I moved on to novels and churned them out, a prolific kid. It was 1998 and by 2000 I’d begun twelve and finished none.

Now it’s 2020 and I spent over a year filling my last Moleskine. Clearly, it’s time for humility don’t forget, a child can write a novel as well as any adult and is probably better at diagramming sentences so I get down on my knees and beg my kid self for direction. She’s lounging under her maple tree flipping through old correspondences, four feet tall and intimidating as hell. I was never that intimidating girl. She tells me, We’ve been starting novels as hiding places. We think we can store faces behind paragraphs, sneak fictions into immortality. We call it stone-soup, believing stone-soup is about the stone.

This seven-year-old is too clever for me by half. I get humble. Patting my shoulder, she says, Just find a store and buy a copy of The Address Book. Better yet, call Hal. She leaves me with a copy of our original story for guidance.

January 27, 1999 / The Missing Bird

Once upon a time, I had a bird; it could talk. The bird was a big help to the family. He was the only pet we had. One day when everybody was out of the house a thief came. The thief stole my talking bird. When I got home I said, “I’m back from school Mad.” Then my mom and dad told me he was gone.

When Mad was about to be choked because the thief was holding his neck, he kept getting closer and closer to a strange mansion. When he got inside he thought to himself, “I got to get out and find a phone to call Lori.” Mad got out by smashing the door down. He had trouble finding a phone. He finally found a phone he called 536-[xxxx]. I answered the phone. “Mad where are you?” “I don’t know, let’s meet at the park.” The next morning I went to the train station. When I got there I saw Mad. We went home and had a great feast!

LORI GREEN studied across genre at the New School’s Riggio Program for Writing and Democracy. Her work has appeared in Silver Needle Press, 12th Street Journal, and Whitevines Review. She lives, writes, and paints with her husband in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

[NEW NONFICTION] Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood

BY ANANYA KUMAR-BANERJEE

Fleabag was, without question, a 2019 hit. Hollywood affirmed the societal value of Fleabag this fall, offering writer, director, and main actress Phoebe Waller-Bridge widespread recognition for her work, winning three Emmy awards in 2019, and two Golden Globe awards.

Set in London, Fleabag reckons with the everyday struggles of a white, English, cis-gendered British woman. People of color don’t really figure into her storyline (except for one sexual encounter, in the second season). The show, though aware of whiteness, doesn’t seem interested in contextualizing Fleabag’s life within the grand scheme that produces her material conditions. Despite this, I still loved the show.

The highlight of Fleabag is not Fleabag herself (I know too many like her– troubled white feminists who daily confront the contradictions of their privilege and oppression), but the show’s narration. Waller-Bridge’s direction cultivates an intimate relationship between the viewer and Fleabag, created by moments when she looks directly into the camera. Through the screen, the viewer has access to the character’s self-reported motivations and thoughts. It’s those moments where she is the most tender, cruel, and honest. What’s interesting is that these connections are established by the visual—they begin when Fleabag makes eye contact with us.

Perhaps more enchanting than these moments was the split second when someone else – the (Hot) Priest – noticed the eye contact was happening. (Hot) Priest’s intrusion into Waller-Bridger’s narration is like watching someone enter the mind of the maker. (Hot) Priest, played by Andrew Scott, is tumbling into the understanding produced by the poet and a clear-eared listener. It is this thing which makes art powerful: the negotiated space between two people trying to understand the thing between them, and by extension, one another. This is what makes (Hot) Priest hot: he wants to build this space with Fleabag. He already sees her. He wants to know her.

These past six months, I’ve been so happy on my own, and yet, even at the heights of my solitude, I wonder: what does it mean to be seen? How does it feel to be known? And perhaps most terrifyingly: are such requests impossible?

//

Seeing and knowing are irrevocably linked for me. This idea I’m engrossed with–being understood—recognizes that our methods of communication are not always useful in sharing the totality of our sentiments. As John Berger says in Ways of Seeing, “Seeing comes before words. A child looks and recognizes before it can speak.” Language, and the intangible and inaccessible images produced by language, allow me a way into recognition. But it is not plain language.

Language is not built for the lives we lead. Though I call my good friends often from the other side of the earth, there’s a part of my life they’re missing by not physically seeing me. Kelsey doesn’t see the way the angles of my face soften when I talk about a new crush. Mia doesn’t see how the new Maggie Rogers song makes my eyes well as I think about that last person I loved. Irene isn’t here to touch my forehead when I think I have a fever. Our texts don’t suffice. They do not make me recognizable.

Earlier this summer, I was traveling around Europe with a childhood friend. The last city we went to was Rome. I was at Palazzo Barberini, which houses the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica or Italy’s National Gallery of Ancient Art.

It plays host to many famous paintings, but perhaps the most singular is La Fornarina (the Baker), a portrait by Raphael.  The figure is believed to have been Raphael’s lover, Margarita Luti. She appears in other paintings by Raphael, but it is this painting that draws out the rapture in me. I am particularly interested in the way Raphael uses translucent cloth to suggest Margarita’s agency in exposing herself. A classic subject of the period is the naked body. Raphael shows this form in La Fornarina, but covers her in cloth. Thus, she is clothed and naked, visible and opaque, at the same time.

The fabric is a delicate muslin, made popular during the Mughal Dynasty in South Asia. This particular weave is the product of weavers in Dhaka, in Bengal. It’s where my grandmother was from. So hands like hers, brown hands, delicate hands, made the medium necessary for this moment of intimacy. These hands remain invisible, translucent, just like the fabric they created. They are unseen in La Fornarina, and so they can’t be known, either.

In the painting, the subject is seemingly trying (and failing) to shield her body, not unlike Fleabag. She, too, makes eye contact with us. But she is unlike so many of the female nudes of the era, drawing the anonymous viewer in. Implicit in her language is her lover. Raphael’s relationship with his subject is not unlike (Hot) Priest’s. His painting suggests that he is peering in on this subject, a woman who attempts to remain hidden, yet still desires to be perceived.

But the perspective of narration is different. In Waller-Bridge’s show, Fleabag unfurls her own story. Raphael, instead, shows us his mistress. His painting then is less about the viewer seeing him as it is about the viewer seeing what he sees. Implied in the image of his lover is his act of looking at and perceiving her. Or, as Berger says, his painting is interested in the act of recognizing her. He wants to share this moment of visual intimacy with us. He wants to create a moment of shared seeing.

Sight, then, also reveals our connections to one another. And in the case of this painting, with the missing brown and Black hands that created its moment, it also reveals the ways we erase one another.

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Consider the Netflix series Sense8. The show follows the lives of 8 people who have a gene that allows them to experience one another’s senses and emotions in real-time. In the show, Kala, a darker-skinned, curly-haired, desi woman falls in love with the German Wolfgang. They fall for each other because they see each other—literally, but also emotionally.

In order to communicate their shared feelings, the directing Wachowski sisters decide to show us that they can see what one another sees. When Kala is in Mumbai, Wolfgang is with her. They are not just sharing their emotions, then. They are sharing their connection with the world.

But we might wonder—what would happen if this connection were not forged in their biology? Would Wolfgang’s seeing of Kala’s body and life lead to him knowing and understanding her? The Wachowskis picked actors of different races, languages, and religions for their show. Could Kala and Wolfgang’s true connection have existed in Waller-Bridge’s world or in our world? Or is it only in a work of fantasy that someone like Kala could be understood by someone like Wolfgang, someone white?

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As a child, when people asked what I wanted to be when I was older, I used to say: I want to be free. Buried inside that statement was something deeper: I wanted to be understood.

These days, many of my closest friendships are with other writers. None of us have perfect vision. Every person I have ever felt romantic affection for, though, has had perfect vision. But even when I showed them my body, they couldn’t see me enough to create that special space of sight, of seeing and being seen. I have wanted to make that space with them, that space shared by Fleabag and (Hot) Priest, by Kala and Wolfgang, by Margarita and Raphael.

They read my work with dedication. My writing is Fleabag’s voiceover, Raphael’s painting. I’m looking for the reader who can see me through the page, who is fighting to make this space with me. Because they do have to fight. There’s much crowding the space where the reader might be able to recognize me.

As a writer, I am in the business of sharing my business. I use my work – poetry, prose, fiction – to communicate essential qualities I see in people and the world. I’m trying to show the reader what I find beautiful about living. These are moments of recognition, and thus, intense intimacy. My writing is about fleshing out the seconds where I am tender with the world. So they reveal me, too.

I’m not trying to make myself hard to understand. When I write a story with complex allusions, I want people to get it. I want them to understand the delicate environment I’ve created with language in order to communicate a more nuanced and delicate thought. My work is a part of a larger project of being understood. It’s about giving the reader enough information so that they can walk through the haze and find me, understand me. One of my biggest fears, then, exists on the opposite end of knowledge and made its way into music a long time ago. As Nina Simone ached on my father’s old record player, Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.

Perhaps the irony here is that life seems to insist time and time again that we are most understood by those who “see” us. But in my experience, seeing my body alone has not rendered me known. My last partner saw me but she did not understand me. I thought she did until I realized, she couldn’t. I wasn’t like her – she who has gay grandmothers – I was always going to have to fight to be seen. Some days, she doesn’t have to fight. Seeing, then, is not directly knowing for people like me. There is work that the see-er has to put in to reach that thing we call comprehension.

Fleabag doesn’t share herself, ultimately, with Hot Priest. She shares with the viewer to avoid being seen by real people. She knows the cost of being misunderstood, as exemplified by those jarring interactions with her family members. But for me, for my friends, it’s different. When I look at Raphael’s painting, I see a subject. I choose to engage in the painting’s constructed moment of intimacy.

There’s a privilege there, in Fleabag’s ability to shift back to the language of recognition with (Hot) Priest when she is ready. I don’t have that space in my life. I can’t help but think of the white person who met me a few months ago, trying to embody all that I was in a few words. Their choices? Indian, Woman, Immigrant. But they would never be reduced down to words. No one would attempt to make a whole person into a series of adjectives.

When I refuse to be seen, it is not an act of defiance. I am giving in. There’s an inertia at work in the way that I am seen and perceived. The inertia tends towards disinterest, erasure, or stereotypes. I have spent my life desperately trying to explain myself through the web of misunderstanding that exists where Fleabag finds love. It’s exhausting.

Unlike Fleabag, I don’t fear being seen. I demand it. I demand you find it in yourself, dear reader, to fight for this moment with me. I need you to see me for who I am. I need you to assist me in undoing the objecthood that I am otherwise left to drown in.

These days, I feel most seen and understood by my friends. Not because they look at me and see a familiar story, but because they have perceived the words of my stories. They take time to tread through the haze created by a world that insists on my objecthood. They had to walk through the haze of “unseeing” made by ignorance, the very haze I was able to escape through books and movies as a child. It wasn’t literally “seeing” other people that helped me forge bonds with them, just as so many saw Fleabag, so many saw Margarita, and so many see me. I was made into an object by the enforcement of a different kind of seeing, making me into a thing to be seen, instead of a person to be recognized.

It is using art as a way of seeing that allows us to understand one another. In his book, John Berger says that “to be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself…Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display.”  I remember painting my own body in a painting class last year. How much I loved my legs. But I could only paint when I was alone. When it was just me and the force of my mind’s eye. My writing removes the pedestal, the slick glory of linseed oil and mohair. I wish to be before you, without disguise. I wish my writing, if not myself, to achieve the velocity of escape from the soul’s nudity, from display. Seeing through my writing is my way of rewriting, of revealing myself. It is the way of seeing me that takes precedence over all else. This is the seeing I cherish. And there is a beauty to it that exceeds all description, and thus, all language.

ANANYA KUMAR-BANERJEE is an undergraduate at Yale where she majors in Ethnicity, Race & Migration. Her work has appeared in Teen Vogue, the Indiana Review Online, Paper Darts, and Broad Recognition, among other places. Ananya’s work is mostly concerned with love, liberation, and certainty. You can find her early in the mornings watering her plants or listening to love songs.

[NEW NONFICTION] Crying and Paintings

BY ALICIA BYRNE KEANE

I.

I remember once going to an Edvard Munch exhibition and seeing an entire room filled with studies of the Weeping Woman. I don’t really know art things so the painting didn’t really seem all that remarkable to me compared to his weirder ones. It’s a nude, standing up in a bedroom, her head bowed. But the longer I looked at it the more I started finding it sinister. The way the same picture has been obsessively repeated. I started to notice how in certain versions the room is claustrophobically distorted to make it look as if her head is almost pushing against the ceiling like she’s standing up in a tent. How in some the palette is unpleasantly oversaturated, her cheeks too red, the shadows in the corners of the room too dark. Something invasive about the angle like the artist is sitting too close to the subject. I never found out the context of the painting, whether it was meant to seem that way. (Weird if not, and weird if so.) There’s something panic-inducing about it.

 

II.

Crying four years ago, surrounded by large abstract paintings. I’m in a top-floor office in a leafy suburb, the very kind of ornate redbrick neighborhood that causes people to employ the cliché leafy suburb, in the office of an academic I have just met. She conducts studies on things like hats in literature.

There is lots of art on the walls, floor to ceiling. It’s not very good art, but it’s large and copious. Particularly vivid, in this memory, is a view of the painting opposite me. It’s sort of pinky beige. It looks the way baby wipes look when I’ve used them to take off my makeup.

‘Beckett was a real guy,’ she is saying. ‘He had sex, he played tennis.’

He played sex, he had tennis.

I manage to say ‘I hate it here’, in a voice that sounds like it’s being squeezed out through a straw.

 

III.

I don’t know my housemates very well, but around the Repeal referendum, one of them bought a little framed painting that sits on our mantelpiece. I can’t see who the artist is because their signature is done down the bottom in pencil and I can’t read it hardly, but it looks like the first name is Anna or Ann. It is titled #togetherforyes and it shows a crowd of people from afar, stick figures with outstretched arms, holding different banners that all give the names of different collectives and organizations. It’s incredibly detailed when you look at it closely and reminds me almost of Quentin Blake drawings, it seems gentle. I need to ask them who made it.

I Google #togetherforyes painting, #togetherforyes ann painting.

Everyone’s away and the house has an uncanny quality. I have been cleaning for hours. It reminds me of grey Sunday dread when I was a kid.

I have put a chair out in our garden and I can see it from the window. The garden is a blaze of sun and if you saw just this scene in isolation you would think you were somewhere nice. I duck into the corner of the kitchen closest to the door, for some reason, because this feels like the least windowy area of the house, and somehow safer than anywhere else for displays of emotion. I don’t know who I think would be watching me. I begin to cry.

I am not sure why I am crying, here in the part of the kitchen that no one can see, where the dustpan and brush hang, trailing bits of grey fluff.

This time last year I walked to a part of the city I didn’t usually go to and read Astragal by Albertine Sarrazin and found the way she was in bed with a broken ankle for most of the story sadder maybe then I was meant to. It made the whole book seem transitory and unfinished like just a really odd part of someone’s life. I read it in a park during a drought, when most of Dublin looked grey and yellow.

ALICIA BYRNE KEANE is a Ph.D. student from Dublin, Ireland. She has a first class honors degree in English Literature and French from Trinity College Dublin and a MSt. in English Literature 1900-Present from Oxford University. She is currently working on an Irish Research Council-funded Ph.D. study of ‘vagueness’ and translation in the work of Samuel Beckett and Haruki Murakami. She has performed poetry at events such as Electric Picnic, Lingo Festival, and Body & Soul, and has assisted on the editing team for the New Welsh Review. She has more recently turned to writing prose pieces.

[NEW NONFICTION] Intro to all my Unwritten Novels

Image by Catherine Green

BY LORI GREEN

Recently I’ve been hearing this sentence: A baby, loose among the banquet, crawls towards the raspberries. I know it’s grammatically off, but replacing ‘among’ with the antiseptic ‘at’ leaves the picture juiceless. So does keeping ‘among’ but turning ‘banquet’ into a word for its people, such as the archaic ‘banqueters,’ of which the baby is one.

I don’t go to banquets, certainly not ones with guests self-possessed enough to bring a baby and set it free to find its own memories. I can’t think of anything more glamorous, except for a story I read in a fashion magazine when I was a teenager: It’s the late 1950s and a couture-clad woman strolls through Venice with a man she just met. They’ve spent hours along the canals tilting their chins toward the moonlight when she realizes she has to pee.

If she asks to interrupt their wandering, she’ll betray herself as a human being with a body rather than the universal antidote. Even if she does admit this fatal flaw and make it to a restroom, her dress is such that she’d need the help of a good friend and a pair of scissors to get the job done. She cannot will the situation away and her wits are failing by the minute. It’s pressing. In the end, she is saved by her nose, which remembers that Venice already smells like sewage. With a fit of sparkling laughter, she hides the sound of urine sliding down her legs under a gown she will never wear again. For me, its cloth has always been a satin in ominous mauve.

Not being fifteen any longer, I understand the scenario’s corrupt. But still, whenever I remember her ingenuity I’m reminded to get off my ass and actually make something of myself. I’ve told this story to friends and family but I can never translate its effect. No one sees the charm, the danger and innocence. I try to emphasize the lines of her dress and the intensity of her gaze, the city’s postcard perfection and its stench, the Woman Victorious.

When they tell me it’s simply disgusting, I know I have failed again. I wonder if it would play out better on film. The baby, loose among the banquet, crawls towards the raspberries. I will not kill this darling.

 

LORI GREEN studied across genre at the New School’s Riggio Program for Writing and Democracy. Her work has appeared in Silver Needle Press, 12th Street Journal, and Whitevines Review. She lives, writes, and paints with her husband in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

[NEW NONFICTION] The Dead Psychologist

BY AMANDA OLIVER

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I’m using a dead psychologist’s pen in a dead psychologist’s house full of dead psychologist’s books and yes, it smells like an old man.

Or dead air, or cooked food aromas that have hung out in the rafters too long, or just a closed-up house at high elevation. It could be comforting, could be warm and familiar, if I knew him. But he is a stranger. But he is dead. But the house is free and his children are so generous to let me use it for two weeks. The floors are real wood and real rock and lush carpet. The bed has memory foam and the couch has a plaid pattern and there are glass roosters, of all sizes, everywhere (everywhere, everywhere). The bedroom has a bay window. The living room has a fireplace and massive television with surround sound. There are games in a closet, there are plush towels in a hope chest, there are family photos on the fridge, there are menorahs.

The ink of the dead man’s pen isn’t working. I’m carving lines into the pages of books I’m reading with it anyway. Hoping that leaves enough of an imprint that I can find it later when I need it.

His children have left this house like a shrine to him. In his den, among books like TREATMENT OF THE OBSESSIVE PERSONALITY and THE OBSESSIVE PERSONALITY and THE EGO AND ITS DEFENSES, is his checkbook. The last check he wrote was to the IRS for $1,079 on 3/20, year unmarked. The check before that was to AT&T for $43.65 on 3/17, year unmarked.

Can you invade a dead person’s privacy?

 

I am in the middle of writing a book. One that requires full sentences and a better version of myself that I do possess, but I possess it like a ghost, which is to say it feels like haunting, like lingering around too long in a place I maybe don’t belong, using words I’m not quite sure of.

Most houses are dead people’s houses, I guess.

This house does not feel haunted, but, somehow, my writing does.

My own psychologist’s name is Suzanne and she has worked with me for eight years. Says things like, “You deserve this” and “Do you think you could ever forgive your brother? Do you think you could ever forgive yourself?” and of course I do and of course I could, but will I?

I’m carving lines with the dead psychologist’s dead pen under words like “he craves a family, a neat nest of human bowls” and I wish that I could unwant anyone. I wish I knew how to satisfy a craving for a person who isn’t here anymore. Isn’t dead, but is still, incredibly, a ghost.

There are mugs full of pens, mugs that say things like ZABAR’S, a gourmet emporium in New York City with A Mezzanine that Has Everything For the Kitchen and Home and they remind me that the dead psychologist had a full and well-traveled life in addition to what seemed to be a successful therapy practice.

I don’t want to discover that none of the pens work, that all of the pens are dead, so I don’t try another one from the mugs.

On page 62 of the book I’m reading, the pen miraculously starts working again and I draw a blue arrow at the words: “The houseplants will appear to have chosen sides. Some will thrust stems at you like angry limbs. They will seem to caw like crows. Others will simply sag.” I have killed more houseplants than I can count on both of my hands. When I moved from D.C. to Southern California I tried to mail six plants in a package to myself. When they arrived, they were, inevitably, dead.

I am constantly doing this. Trying to make things live longer than they want to with me.

What would the dead psychologist say?

Which book would he read after meeting with me?

How much would he charge me for the favor of telling me what’s wrong?

Do we think the dead psychologist had a favorite patient?

I am always trying to be someone’s favorite. The dentist, the barista, the classmate, the coworker. I want everyone to like me. Tucked away in this house at 5,678 feet above sea level there is no one to make like me.

Two trucks pulled over outside of the house windows earlier and I heard a man and a woman yelling from their windows.

“Why can’t we just get lunch some time?”

“I have a husband.”

“What about everything I did for you?”

“I have a husband.”

I do not have a husband. I do not have a boyfriend or a suitor or a crush or an affair or a desire to let anyone touch me. I do not have the feelings of a significant other to worry about. I have freedom that some people would kill for and I’m not sure how much I want it.

If these walls could talk would they tell me I should let someone in for once? Can therapy occur through osmosis, like, if I sit in the psychologist’s office chair? Can therapy occur through death? If I touch and eat and sleep and write in one of the last places it was life?

On my fourth and fifth nights here my electric toothbrush turns on in the middle of night and wakes me up. I press the button to turn it off and it stays off for the rest of the night. This is not the thing I wanted to haunt me, or, I am totally unclear on what this message means and who it comes from. Is it the dead psychologist? Is he worried about my teeth?

Nightmares about losing your teeth are supposedly about feelings of powerlessness and loss of control. I have them all the time, but I haven’t had them here.

Have I gained back some power?

Is the dead psychologist trying to tell me to keep going?

I would like some answers, dead psychologist.

Do you have them?

Can I keep them?

 

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AMANDA OLIVER is a nonfiction MFA candidate at the University of California, Riverside. Her writing has appeared in Electric Literature, The Los Angeles Times, Vox, and more. She is currently at work on a book about being a librarian. She is @aelaineo across social media.