This week’s First Words/Last Words feature comes as a total accident. I was researching the poet Hiromi Ito, and came across the Japanese-Canadian writer Hiromi Goto, whose work strangely enough has a lot of crossover with Ito’s, and with my own obsessions, specifically with stinky brown alien girls. I’ve only read some of the stories in Hopeful Monsters, of which “Stinky Girl” is one, and look forward to reading more. (The collection is partially accessible through the Google Books feature.) I’m including “first words” here this time, too; what, I never said I was systematic.
As I understand it, Goto writes both “young adult/children’s” literature and “adult” literature concerning—much to my delight—alien abduction, depressed Asian girls who go on epic quests to save their neglectful mothers, abnormal or hysterical pregnancies, unconventional bodies, monstrous bodies, a woman who slices off her painful lactating breasts and transplants them onto her husband, then gently instructs him to “do what comes naturally.”
From the back cover of Hopeful Monsters: “Hopeful monsters” are genetically abnormal organisms that, nonetheless, adapt and survive in their environments. In these devastating stories, the hopeful monsters in question are those who will not be tethered by familial duty nor bound by the ghosts of their past. Home becomes fraught, reality a nightmare as Hiromi Goto weaves her characters through tales of domestic crises and cultural dissonance. They are the walking wounded — a mother who is terrified by a newborn daughter who bears a tail; a “stinky girl” who studies the human condition in a shopping mall; relatives on holiday with a visiting grandfather who cannot abide their “foreign nature.”Â
Then the cover says something about magical realism which I think is a somewhat simplistic way of getting out of talking about the urgencies and immediacies of what Goto does with the writing in this book, with the body, with sexuality and maternity and monstrosity, how monstrosity is conceived, and how it can be reclaimed.
In the essay “Alien Texts, Alien Seductions: The Context of Colour Full Writing,” Goto writes: “How will we go about dismantling our desire to read the alien? How will we disrupt our desire to be seduced by that which does not seek to seduce in the first place?”
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