I’d describe this as ‘mostly serviceable’. There are some unnecessary antifeminist comments and I think the author worked a little too hard to make thI’d describe this as ‘mostly serviceable’. There are some unnecessary antifeminist comments and I think the author worked a little too hard to make the sympathetic central character Libby Quarrels not too saintly and perfect – she frequently behaves appallingly by my lights. As a white person I felt that the representation of the numerous Ute Indian characters and their community in this book seems well researched and reasonably true-to-life; what I mean is that it reminded me sufficiently of Louise Erdrich’s and Susan Power’s books that I’ve read for me to think so. I don’t have any relevant lived experience to back up that impression. There are extensive descriptions of a highly sacred ceremony, and I have no idea whether it is accurate and if so whether Bishop sought consent to portray it.
I think this is only the second book I’ve read that prominently features a person with AIDS. Other folks have commented that it is out of date, in terms of medical technology (and computer technology? But I think it’s sufficiently generic to pass muster, except that Bo’s work station takes up a lot of space instead of being a wafer-thin laptop), and that this is in a way a good thing, because it provides a window into history. My number one gripe has to be that the novel does absolutely nothing to dispell the image of AIDS as a ‘gay plague’. I can forgive Bishop for making literally everyone in the book except Bo himself homophobic, and for all the nasty language people use, because when bigotry is displayed, readers know whose side to take, but that did annoy me a lot.
I read this because of Into the Forest group’s March-April unicorn theme. The unicorns in this book are (view spoiler)[refugees from the afterlife, (hide spoiler)] horselike, shy animals. I failed to get excited about them, I think I missed the point, the connections didn’t spark for me. Maybe I was put off by the excess of phallogogising(?). The prose style is OK, I did raise a brow at the occasional hokey analogy, and it got a bit purple in places, but not to the point of annoying me. Apart from Libby, who exasperated me, most of the characters were similarly irritating, with the exception of the Ute folks. I think I’m adding a whole extra star for the character Paisley/Alma, the daughter of Dolores and Sam, both Ute. I really want to know what she went on to do when the book ended!...more
On the surface, this is a novella about a twelve year old light-skinned Jamaican girl, Clare Savage, who stays with her grandmother during the holidayOn the surface, this is a novella about a twelve year old light-skinned Jamaican girl, Clare Savage, who stays with her grandmother during the holidays and ponders a lot, trying to understand her world and her self. There are major obstacles to this effort; Clare is given versions of Jamaican and personal history crafted by colonising forces. The author voice continually characterises Jamaica as an island trying to forget its past. Michelle Cliff interferes in this process by intercutting suppressed histories and untold under-stories into the narrative. The abrupt breakages and fragmented surface created by these interruptions emphasise Clare's separation from these under-stories and back-stories about herself, and the harmful effects of this not-knowing.
The cutting of the text is slightly healed in places where Clare makes a sensory or emotional link with the buried past or hidden truth, such as when she tastes the wall of her slave-owner ancestors house and finds it salty. This relates to the story of Inez and Mma Alli. This intimate story could have been carefully woven from testimony and material evidence by Michelle Cliff, or it could be entirely imagined. Sometimes she makes it clear that she is speaking fact, and at other times while her examples are presumably invented they can be read as true to life. The treatment of 'Mad Hannah' is a case in point; rejected by the community who failed to help her uphold traditional mourning practices, she is eventually institutionalised and thus removed from Clare's life as a (precarious) source of hidden knowledge.
Michelle Cliff's story of Clare is a meta-story in that it comments on the story of the suppression of Black Her/istory. In the depth of its awarenesses and analyses, this could be an academic text, in the form of a novel. The material of black history here includes brutality of the plantation owners and overseers, but also the resistance forces of the Maroons, Nanny and Nanny Town. Clare learns about this in school, but it is overshadowed by the history of Empire. Clare's best friend Zoe, a poor, dark-skinned girl whose mother is a market woman living on land owned by Clare's black grandmother, goes to the same school as Clare's mother. The teacher there is critical of the textbooks provided by the colonial authorities and, having spent time in the US absorbing some of the energy of the Harlem Renaissance, brings the work of black poets into his lessons. He has also been inspired by Marcus Garvey, though he recognises that Garvey's influence by US nationalism led him to a flawed vision of black nationalism. The teacher himself (Mr Powell) is also partly colonised, as evidenced by his opinion of 'Zora', (Zora Neale Hurston?) who visits Jamaica and makes anthropological studies of the people there.
Michelle Cliff is at pains to show the presence and effects of the untold stories, however remote and minor they seem. For example, the she points out that applique, an art & craft practiced by Jamaican women, was 'invented by the Fon of Dahomey', while Clare is observing women's clothes. This links to Clare's relationship with her mother, who is black. Kitty weeps over cultural retentions like African-language songs and burial practices, but does not talk about them. She sometimes takes Clare barefoot into the bush and to washing places, but she does not talk on these occasions about what they mean to her. Clare longs for deeper intimacy with her mother and cherishes these episodes, but she has been marked out by her light colouring, which comes from her father who identifies himself and her as white. At the margin embodied by Clare, the white concept of race is reduced to absurdity (as Michelle Cliff's sketchy tracing of her father's ancestry emphasises) but instead of vanishing, it goes into a frenzy of activity, proliferating meanings and effects that swirl around Clare, affecting her and others. She is petted and admired by her grandmother's friends, but mistrusted by her friend Zoe. She accuses darker skinned schoolmates of being 'inhuman' when they refuse to give the time of day (literally) to an even darker old woman, failing to contextualise their behaviour as part of a struggle to mark themselves off from darkness, which she does not have to engage in. Colourism/shadeism is pervasive, deep, inescapable. In As The Sorcerer Said by Myriam Warner-Vieyra, a 'mulatto' school teacher denies any black, African, slave heritage and severely punishes a black student for claiming her own. This stark incident is mirrored implicitly every day in Clare's environment, but (maybe because she is light) she says 'it was so easy to lose color', to forget it. This unwilling forgetting is enforced by the will of colonial power – 'even South African Apartheid was 'a way of keeping the peace'. Such euphemisms also attempt to obscure colourism.
Clare is an intelligent and empathetic girl; she makes intense efforts to understand herself and her world. Reading The Diary of Anne Frank, she connects with the young Jewish girl and feels with her. She asks her teachers about Jewish people and the Holocaust, but they make strenuous efforts to deflect her enquiries into nostalgic British nationalism. When she pins them down, they are vague about the events, and present a surprising explanation:
Jews were expected to suffer. To endure. It was a fate which had been meted out to them because of their recalcitrance in belief, their devotion to their own difference. Their suffering was at once governed by the white Christian world, and when it seemed excessive, then it was tempered by the white Christian conscience. Unless, of course, it got out of hand and what her teachers called a “madman” came to power and the “good” people didn't see that he had gone too far until it was too late
Clare does not accept this, and her thoughts drift to the burnt bodies of the Jewish people and the Japanese people killed by nuclear weapons – she thinks of the dust of those bodies passing into other bodies and changing them. Thus the text insists on the persistence of embodiment: genocide and oppression cannot be explained away. Clare, dissatisfied, seeks further information and reassurance from her father, but he also engages in victim blaming and denial of responsibility
Well, we were trying to stop them, but it took time. And no one knew what was really happening. The Jews didn't even know. It was a terrible thing. But you know they brought it on themselves. They should have kept quiet. You can't antagonize someone like Hitler, you understand. The man was insane.
Clare demands to know whether her father, himself, would have protected Jewish neighbours if he could, and is deeply disappointed by his non-answer. He concludes
I sometimes feel that Jews were put on this earth only to put people like me in difficult positions
Clare's reaction to this distressing conversation is to secretly research the history of the Jews in Europe, continuing to seek connections with her own heritage and experiences. Here, Michelle Cliff demonstrates both that oppression is rooted in ideas about whose lives matter, and that despite the specificity and heterogeneity of oppression, connections can always be made that strengthen awareness and foster solidarity. Clare's father continues to view her 'sympathy' for the Jews as a bizarre aberration, but he remembers it, and dismisses its importance, when considering how to punish her for an unexpected misdemeanor. This underlines his failure to see how depriving Clare of information with which to make sense of herself is detrimental to her.
Abeng also deals with queer experiences and marginalisation. The story of Inez and Mma Alli shows that intimacy and sexual practice between women was just an ordinary part of life for some of the black and native people who lived on the island during slavery times. In Clare's world, such behaviour is never mentioned, but gay/queer men are ostracised. Christianity, so central to the lives of Clare's family, along with colourism and racism, defines what relationships and associations are permitted. Clare's reflection on the prohibition of gayness leads her back into thinking about colour and about her mother who, she concludes 'cherished darkness'. Here, Michelle Cliff points our that Kitty, Clare's mother, did not know the stories of Nanny, of Inez and Mma Alli, and that if she had, she might have proudly told them to her daughter. She knew her people as victims, and wished to protect her daughter from sharing in their fragility. Inspired by her teacher who taught black poets, she herself wanted to become a teacher and 'go further' in decolonising the minds of her students. The revelation of how this ambition was quashed, though not spelled out, is quietly devastating.
The relationship between Clare and Zoe as a case study in privilege and colourism. Here, Clare becomes a flawed character with a sense of entitlement and degree of ignorance that make her a danger to Zoe. The girls speak together in patois, but Clare drops this when she wants to leverage her light-skin privilege, as she does in self-defense on a few occasions. In general though, she is critical of this privilege and tries to divest from it; she consistently refuses the designation of whiteness, finding truth in her body as she consistently does. Her legs are 'brown', her knees 'ashy' (don't worry, she's dealing with it) so, she concludes, she can't be white. Clare's way of seeking and knowing through her body (tasting the wall, anticipating menarche), finding truth, connections, pleasure, and ways to resist oppressive socialisation in a sweet, cis-female body experience, is supplemented by external sources. The narrative constantly brings her into contact with marginalised people like Mad Hannah, Anne Frank, Zoe and Miss Winifred, who hasn't washed for 35 years and will not let water touch her. All of these people give Clare valuable counter-knowledge and understanding, in contrast to her teachers and father, who misinform and mislead, and her mother, who keeps quiet. As another compassionate, thinking black girl, Clare joins the band of my favourite protagonists, and I can't wait to find out what she encounters and does in No Telephone to Heaven...more
Margaret Busby couldn't find the book she wanted, so she created it. More than a book, an act ofI read this because of Aubrey's review, please read it
Margaret Busby couldn't find the book she wanted, so she created it. More than a book, an act of resistance, a work of love, a gift. Samples of writing by Black women from all over the world, gathered and presented for delectation, for celebration, for the daughters of daughters. For you to decide what to read next, Reader, of all races and all genders, because we both know the publishers who think you would rather read another run-of-the-mill yarn by a mediocre White man than an extraordinary one by a brilliant Black woman are wrong, and we'd better let them know.
Seriously, let them know. Because although thanks to GR friends awesomeness and especially Aubrey's 500 Great Books by Women project, a lot of the books I scrambled to add to my to-read list were there already, too many were not only absent from my own bubble, but outrageously unrated, unread, coverless, and in many cases only there thanks to Aubrey's gift of librarian hours to fill the gaps where they were not at all....more
This is a collection of tales told in the voice of discarded or rejected partners; lovers left behind each in some different sense. Moving on has a ceThis is a collection of tales told in the voice of discarded or rejected partners; lovers left behind each in some different sense. Moving on has a certain cruelty and hardness about it from this angle, so this book is a welcome antibody in the plasma we inhabit of heartless individualism that discharges memes like 'get rid of everyone in your life who drags you down'. Here are the draggers, the losers, the people you've laughed off, shrugged off, the people not worth your regret. No regrets! We shout triumphantly as we slough old skins away and emerge fresh, shiny, victors over messy, demanding emotions.
Well they aren't all quite like that - the last story, in which Kay gently (indeed, lovingly) critiques the femme-phobia of two butch gay men - is a bit of a departure, a stunning departure into a glorious landscape in fact, wherein she switches between the perspectives of both partners, but for the most part, with great tenderness and delicacy, she sings in the voices of the no-longer-loved
These voices are not all melancholy and each one is audibly unique. Our author is hydra-headed, she speaks a babel of English, a poet's tongue that has heard greedily. Here is Scotland, mainly, and women, often black or 'dark', who love women, want women, share their beds and hearts and kids and dogs and interests with women (I must make more of an effort to seek out books with lesbian romance since I often find het romance fairly uninvolving). Here is the particular pleasure of rhubarb and ginger jam. Here are careful habits and the satisfying smugness we feel in them, here are embarrassments and rash, regretted, middle of the night decisions. Here is lust and disgust and magic as painfully real as giving birth. Here is the kindly wrench of letting go and the helpless shame of clinging on. Here are all the things nobody ever dares to tell you about love.
Kay captures all this so effortlessly it makes my stomach drop. The disdainful childish accusations, the pomposity of flaunting new intellectual interests, the defiant scone of self-affirmation. Particularly hilarious (not to mention poignant)is the story 'how to get away with suicide', in which a depressed man struggles to think of a way to off himself without upsetting anyone. I can't even articulate how sensitively Kay approaches difficult topics like this. I wanted to find her and give her a hug at the end, and say thank you Jackie! Thank you for giving me this!
Oh and also, this edition has the sexiest cover I've ever seen......more
But I love extravagance, And wanting it has handed down The glitter and glamour of the sun As my inheritance.
I truly do believe no maiden that will live TBut I love extravagance, And wanting it has handed down The glitter and glamour of the sun As my inheritance.
I truly do believe no maiden that will live To look upon the brilliance of the sun Ever will be contemplative Like this one....more
I discovered the existence of the Asian Women Writers' Collective because one of the editors of this collection gave a speech that was published at MeI discovered the existence of the Asian Women Writers' Collective because one of the editors of this collection gave a speech that was published at Media Diversified. I am not sure whether the collective still exists, and the introductions to this book certainly bear witness, as many of its stories do, to the struggle to make art or run an arts organisation in the UK in the 80s and 90s, a situation that has returned with a vengeance after a bit of a reprieve.
While I failed to engage with a few of the more stream-of-consciousness style pieces, mostly I found it a strong collection and reading it was the start of a much needed remedy to my lack of reading in the area of British Asian women's experiences. I have created a small shelf of the featured authors, marking this starting point. It's nice to have something that dates from my childhood as well; I can build a picture of how things have changed by comparing with contemporary work. The stories are 'dated' most acutely for me by the use of the work 'Black' as a political term for all people racialised as minorities in the UK. This usage is explained by history, and signifies genuine solidarity. However the circumstances of racialisation in the UK have changed and perhaps become more similar to the Usian context where it would be offensively appropriative for an Asian person or other NBPoC (non-Black person of colour) to use 'Black'. Media Diversified (yes, I read ALL their articles) published a piece dealing with this by the awesome Sara Ahmed.
I love Afshan Navid Malik's smart, very funny story Shaitan and the Chappal, which brilliantly critiques the hypocrisy of a Pakistani family from the viewpoint of a spirited young daughter, Nina, who is constantly being reprimanded for waywardness and told that shaitan is influencing her to behave in an unruly way. When her aunt visits, she is disturbed by Nina's suntan, got by secretly playing outside in the afternoons, telling her very seriously that she will 'regret ruining your colour'. Nina explains her aunt's attitude 'it's very bad to be dark if you're a girl [...] we'll have to marry horrible fat men with smelly feet'. Her uncles complain that girls today have no modesty and should devote their lives to others, since Muslims should give generously. When they meet a beggar on their picnic trip, their words are shown to be hollow, by shaitan. Apart from Nina's charming voice, which gives this tale the lightness and humour that make criticism easier to take, I like this story because its argument isn't with Islam but with its misuse. What really makes it bite is that Nina believes what she is told, feels fleetingly guilty, and constantly resolves to 'be good', so the reader is left wanting to know more, what will happen as she grows up, will she keep her flaming spirit or be subdued? I was sad not to find any other published fiction by the author.
Sibani Raychaudhuri, whose name I could not find online, contributes a wonderful sad-but-uplifting story, 'Sisters' in which an adult older sister is left behind when her family emigrate from Bangladesh to England. The young narrator Nazia finds new friends and is racially abused by classmates, but when a disastrous flood hits Bangladesh and her sister's fate is uncertain, many pupils in her new school respond by setting up a flood relief fund and taking an interest in Nazia's background. This is a great YA story! It should be republished in a collection of British Asian YA shorts. Leena Dhingra's lovely story The Guest would be a good choice for this as well. Like Anya Sitaram's piece it suggests how migration can positively disrupt cultural norms around trust of strangers and social class prejudice. I have ordered a second hand copy of Dhingra's novel Amritvela which pre-dates this collection, but I cannot find any subsequent work.
Stories by Rukhsana Ahmad, Tanika Gupta and Preethi Manuel deal realistically with traumatic experiences, while stories like Ravinder Randhawa's The Maharani's House take the reader into a layered imaginary of memory, exotified fantasy and modern daily struggle; almost all the stories set here bear witness to the disintegrating welfare state and climate of austerity in the UK that was prevalent when this collection was published (this is once again the tune of our lives here, with new notes). Rahila Gupta uses memory and dream to probe ideas of justice in an interesting short piece, while Smita Bhide and Ameena Meer fantasise escape from conventional lives as women living in the patriarchal societies of England and New York City. Meer's sexually active singleton protagonist begins to shrug out of her malaise by casually accepting her mother's offer to arrange a marriage for her, while Bhide's is inspired by memories to leave her husband and children. These tales spoke to me, because I have 'itchy feet' and constantly fantasise about dramatically walking out of my life as it is and into something (anything) else.
Anya Sitaram's story about an English woman who has married a man from Calcutta and is trying to settle into her new life there is generous to its protagonist, Julie, who is likeable if a bit bland. The whole setting got under my skin and I wanted more, maybe it was just the mention of a mango in the fridge when I was reading on a hot underground train, but in any case I will have to content myself as I cannot find any mention of Sitaram elsewhere. Maya Chowdhry's piece Death Rites manages to explore gay relationships, fatal illness (implicitly AIDS) and matter-of-fact Buddhist ideas about death in a very short piece. I edited her data and books, as I did many of the other authors featured, but could only find one play published. Seema Jena's story The Bamboo Blind deals with the reproduction and adaptation of cultural practices in an adoptive country. It's poignant, and demands much work of empathy for me to feel out why Razia is not more assertive by thinking through her background. It reminded me of Sunlight on a Broken Column which is apt because Jena has written a critical study of the books of Anita Desai, (Voice and Vision of Anita Desai) who contributed an introduction to Sunlight.
Shamshad Khan's piece The Woman and the Chair dips the collection into a distinctively South Asian stream of high fantasy, reminding me of the performances of Bharatanatyam I have seen. Like Janet McDermott's and Parminder Sekhon's stories, it is an uplifting piece whose protagonist comes through her trials and tribulations to self confidence and affirmation. The latter two pieces, which are realistic, both have lesbian protagonists, and I am keen to read more by both authors. In fact, Sekhon's happy, sweetly erotic snippet 'Suhaag Raat' is probably my favourite of the collection after Malik's, and it's a perfect close to this exciting, gloriously varied collection. ...more
There is still a popular fantasy, long since disproved by both psychoanalysis and science, and never believed by any poet or mystic, that it is possibThere is still a popular fantasy, long since disproved by both psychoanalysis and science, and never believed by any poet or mystic, that it is possible to have a thought without a feeling
I might have expected the audacity of this book, but the humility startled me. I expected the old trauma, but the fresh wounds caught me off guard. I was reminded of What to Look for in Winter: A Memoir in Blindness which I didn't think much of at all; the trauma memoir is not a genre I get along with. I love the fictionalised version of Jeanette's growing up, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit so much; it's one of my favourite books, and here she shares that reading herself as fiction as well as fact was necessary and liberating. I think it was necessary for me to enjoy the story, too. I felt for Jeanette here, and I appreciated her insights and on-point mini-polemics, especially into politics and northern working class life, but I definitely got more out of Oranges.
When Jeanette went mad, she met the character Martha Hesse meets in her experiments with madness in The Four-Gated City That jolted me. Lessing knew what she was talking about. I was also furious about the callous bureaucracy Jeanette faced when trying to find her birth mother. What the hell??!? The naked honesty with which she admits her struggles to love and be loved is so humbling, almost intimidating. The social worker, thankfully, knew exactly what to say, though nothing could ever be enough. Most strangely I felt myself working towards some new spaces of creative self acceptance as I read. And most importantly, I was reminded to let myself feel, to love life and be open even when it hurts to be open.
What else can I say? There are lots of quotables, particularly about books (as homes and hearths), but this is my favourite. I'm stashing it for later use, and I imagine I'll be pulling it out pretty regularly:
When we are objective we are subjective too. When we are neutral we are involved. When we say 'I think' we don't leave our emotions outside the door. To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead....more
I've heard that her more recent take on the same material Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal is even better. If that's true, I'm in for a truly supI've heard that her more recent take on the same material Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal is even better. If that's true, I'm in for a truly superlative treat, because I loved this book to the bones. I want to read it again and again to savour its sweet delights.
Maybe Laura Doan's essay 'Sexing the Postmodern', about Winterson's work and theme development over this and two subsequent novels The Passion and Sexing the Cherry gave me a hunger to read this that made it taste so good ('hunger is the best sauce'). Maybe I felt along with Jeanette so keenly because working-class northern-ness and being in trouble for being queer and weird are familiar territory. Maybe because I grew up around Christianity from a position of looking on in mixed horror, contempt, admiration and amusement I was primed to laugh at all the jokes.
Being working class, living in scarcity, means sharing space, often uncomfortably. Jeanette and her father go outside to the bathroom for respite. The Sally Army banish Jeanette's inept tambourinists from their shared concert. Death meets ice cream. Poison meets progress. Unnatural passions.
There is a combination of elastic lightness and looseness of expression that makes for tiggerish bounding jollity, a feast of poetic allusions to lesbian love, and archly spoken cycles through remade mythology and fairytale. I don't feel this as bildungsroman; Jeanette travels around in her life as in a tableau vivant rather than being changed by or absorbing the world. Revelatory moments and drastic, transformative events seem carved in niches. Jeanette passes them, points them out, sails on.
Without this distancing and the comic tone to leaven, it would probably be an unbearable story. As straight memoir I don’t think I could read it, but of course it's not straight in any sense, it's subjectively and structurally queer. It evades the snares of a heterosexist culture and its language by turning them aside: 'to the pure all things are pure' cries Jeanette of her love for Melanie, convinced it must, as all good things, be holy.
Perhaps the event has an unassailable truth. God saw it. God knows. But I am not God. And so when someone tells me what they heard or saw, I believe them, and I believe their friend who also saw, but not in the same way, and I can put these accounts together and I will not have a seamless wonder but a sandwich laced with mustard of my own
The winged lesbian on the cover of this book gazes anxiously at the hand with which she finishes drawing her second, presently missing trouser leg, whThe winged lesbian on the cover of this book gazes anxiously at the hand with which she finishes drawing her second, presently missing trouser leg, while in the other hand she holds aloft a fragrant bottle of essence. This image got funnier as I understood more and more about it, which was a relief as for the first two essays I wasn't sure I could understand anything else. It got easier, but (disclaimer!) this review is bound to be full of gross oversimplifications.
Doan's preface to the collection tantalisingly promises that it will unsettle rather than settle questions arising from the confluence of the lesbian and the postmodern, two fraught terms with no immediately obvious relationship. Judith Roof begins her essay by resisting the conjunction, but after tracing their parallel histories finally finds readings of both that set them up for a potentially fruitful collaboration. Other essays are more direct in their intention to utilise, to put to work some relation to the postmodern for something, for the benefit of the lesbian (community)? I feel postmodern divestment from epistemic foundations holds out the possibility of testing the effects of thinking words and structures differently. We are at sea and it is up to us to work the winds
Sometimes this relation is negative. Emma Perez is perhaps the strongest voice critiquing postmodern approaches to categories of identity and subjectivities. Perez shares (in an essay I loved) that claiming her subjectivity as a Chicana lesbian is a practice of strategic essentialism (needed for survival). Robin Wiegman and Sagri Dhairyam expose postmodernism's repositioning of power as ever more concentrated in academia, which remains white and male, and critique the complicity of the (postmodern) intellectual in the commodification of categories of identity. Erica Rand points out that 'postmodern' readings are often esoteric, and have limited use. But these authors are not calling for divestment from postmodern ideas and attitudes, but for critical and pragmatic engagement.
Wiegman offers, the suggestion that it is postmodern thinking that helps feminism to recognise that categories of gender race and class are inadequate to define and critique all relations of domination; Dhairyam notes that lesbian/queer as subject position/identity is only reached via the sanctions of race and class privilege.
My favourite was Elizabeth Grosz's beautiful, inspiring contribution 'Refiguring Lesbian Desire', which critiques the Platonic concept of desire as a lack of something, which leads to the complementarity model of heterosexual relationships. Grosz shows that desire-as-lack means that desire is annihilated by satisfaction, so its only appropriate (or sustainable) object is another desire. She proposes a Spinozist/Deleuze & Guattarian idea of desire as productive, creative, making something, making connections. In so doing she moves away from psychoanalysis, from 'latencies and depth' and to 'intensities and surfaces' 'energies, exitations, impulses, actions, movements, practices, moments, pulses of feeling'. This is great! Postmodernism's suggestions of relational and dynamic... transformations? directly offer something to the erotic (not only sexual) This refiguration would have an interesting meeting with Audre Lorde I think.
Colleen Lamos asks who is reading the lesbian porn publication On Our Backs and finds that apparently everyone is. She suggests that this represents something like the mainstream becoming lesbian as well as the lesbian becoming mainstream. One of the themes I feel in the collection is that as soon as a step beyond the constraining frame of heterosexuality is taken, gender, romantic and sexual diversity flows in myriad directions. This is perhaps the effect of restless subjectivities seeking languages, styles, modes of being and becoming not overdetermined by the hetero/cisgender-normative, but it also, I think, exposes the artificiality of those norms.
J Halberstam (writing from a trans perspective) goes so far as to suggest that 'we are all transsexuals': all gender is a fiction, and one that seems to need readers. This essay seemed in danger of erasing trans people to me, but on the contrary I think, it was seeking to centre the experiences of trans men in particular. The proximity of butch lesbian women and trans hetero men reads uncomfortably through my awareness feminism's shoddy record on trans rights, and the all too common conflation of sexual orientation with gender (although it surely harmonises in some ways with Julia Serano's discussion of oppositional sexism in Whipping Girl). Halberstam's suggestion that gender confirmation surgery be reclassified as cosmetic rather than medical rings urgent alarm bells, but is an attempt to undo the pathologisation of trans people rather than to trivialise their needs. Perhaps the head-in-the-sand syndrome of the privileged postmodern intellectual, critiqued elsewhere in relation to race, is at work here.
Laura Doan's own contribution is a wonderful essay on the delights of Jeanette Winterson and the risky but potentially transformative work of 'sexing the postmodern' which lesbian feminists must undertake, in Doan's view, to bring liberatory possibilities to life from the collapse of Enlightenment foundationalism. ...more
I identified strongly with Cassandra for several personal reasons, which I won't detail. This probably helped me maintain sympathy for her despite herI identified strongly with Cassandra for several personal reasons, which I won't detail. This probably helped me maintain sympathy for her despite her often inconsiderate thoughtless behaviour (one of the reasons is that I also tend towards these unattractive traits) and vitriol:
There again, I thought, say it twice and underline it. The emblem of good women is always this anxiety about drinking – other people's drinking. And I knew why. Because alcohol releases truth and truth is something good women never care to hear. It frightens then. They only want to hear cliches about how lovely it is to be home again, and what an exciting occasion this is, not only a glad reunion but with a wedding thrown in.
While I share Cassandra's repulsion towards romantic convention, I'm less sure about this negative description of the benefits of alcohol, as is the narrative, which not only lands Cassandra with a killer hangover but also a near-fatal dose of disillusionment after drunkenness led her into deception self and otherwise. Personally I suspect that the centrality of alcohol in White Usian/British social life is one of the reasons most of us can't actually talk or relate to each other with sincerity and warmth, or love and enjoy each other in the raw as opposed to performing unqualified admiration or blissful contentment. Still, I don't do better, and I abstain.
In so far as I find the novel irritating, it's as I generally do the malaise of privileged people; the Edwards' have all the money they need to buy the things they want, but as Deborah Eisenberg points out, not only does Baker make us well aware of this, but unlike much of the well-regarded fiction of the day, she also presents economic privilege in a positive light. The family derive genuine pleasure from the comforts they can afford, which Baker puts to expository and character-developing work, with no wallowing. The text came freshly alive for me when Cassandra thinks with pleasure about the dress she has just bought on her grandmother's account, and how both the dress and the charge will make her grandmother happy.
To be honest I find this appreciative attitude towards agreeable possessions realistic and relateable – I love nice stuff too. It also rings true that this family, whose material wants are well-supplied, take their fondest pleasures in the voluptuous joys of thought and creativity. They do not consume to demonstrate their status or to assuage other deficiencies. The twins' father is a philosopher, their mother, who died before the story starts, was a writer, while Cassandra is a blocked writer, and Judith is a musician. More objectionable is the lack of consideration of where the family's wealth originated (unstated, but slavery built the US economy) and the narrative treatment of Conchita, the Latina housekeeper, who has no speaking part, making for an all-white script in my (admittedly feeble) white imagination.
That Cassandra wants to reject convention and live permanently with her sister is a fact treated fairly respectfully by the author, who is also unjudgemental about her lesbian affairs. Unfortunately the same can't be said for Judith, who considers her partners 'beneath her' or her fiance, who represents compulsory heterosexuality in his words, actions and location in the text. Judith is underdeveloped as a character, and her fiance is barely more than a cipher. Grandmother represents convention and tradition, while the twins' father stands for everything unconventional that Cassandra values about her background. Judith is most interesting when she says something that inadvertently supports Cassandra's argument that the twins belong together, but her apparent misunderstanding of Cassandra's grief, even more than her desire to escape from her sister's overpowering personality, undermines it, I think.
What I would have liked more of is Vera, Cassandra's 'irresistible' analyst. Eisenberg's afterword is pleased with the harsh advice she throws at her about finding a way to live, but Cassandra seems not to register it. When she allows herself to believe that Vera's dramatic and excessive reaction to Cassandra's plight was self-interested, I can't tell whether she is deceiving herself to survive the hurt of a second rejection, or she really believes it. In any case, I was left wishing for a story that didn't leave love between women still beyond the pale....more
In focus and structure this bore a lot of resemblance to another book I read recently, Preeta Samarasan's Evening is the Whole Day, so much so that I In focus and structure this bore a lot of resemblance to another book I read recently, Preeta Samarasan's Evening is the Whole Day, so much so that I wondered if there's anything about the historical moment that precipitates stories of sad, damaged families and their ghosts and their haunted houses, because it doesn't seem likely from the authors' comments on their processes that one of these books inspired or influenced the other. Like Evening, this book reminded me of Toni Morrison in its loving, forgiving and lyrical way of working through characters' painful histories and intergenerational trauma. Summer shares with Morrison's work the focus on an African American experience and like her uses synaesthetic description to weave emotions and sensations into palpable textures, getting the story under my skin.
While I enjoyed what reminded me of other favourite authors in it, I also thought The Summer we got Free was revelatory and original as an exploration of queer histories in a period when heteronormativity had a steelier grip, and those who didn't fit often risked ostracism at best. The setting is a close-knit AA Christian community which in many ways I found enviable, even idyllic, though the text makes space for non-believers that the community does not. McKenzie uses the character of Ava, an exceptionally creative, questioning and spirited young girl, to criticise the rigidity of religious interpretation and social codes enforced by some of those in positions of power, who unfortunately include the egocentric, authoritarian pastor, while making clear that this excess is a bug rather than a feature. Her angle on faith community remains generally positive, allowing space for acceptance and embrace of difference through the willingness of individuals to change their minds as well as their faith-influenced habit of care and reserved judgement towards each other. In this carefully painted environment McKenzie presents queer, black characters of two generations; a 1950s (ie experiencing young adulthood in that decade) generation, for whom self-disgust, shame, invisibiity and secrecy define their queerness, shattering their emotional lives and injuring those close to them, and a 1970s generation who are able to get free and live as they want to, but only at significant personal (and often economic) cost.
Structurally the book is two-stranded, with a present section in 1976 and past section rolling forward from 1950. Unlike in Evening is the Whole Day, the present situation progresses thanks to the arrival of a catalyst in the form of curious, caring Helena, unravelling the sad tangles of trauma and its effects gradually explained by the earlier sequence, which allows deepening sympathy for each character, including those who appear cruel and self-absorbed at first. Each thread of the split narrative progresses fairly linearly, stoking my constant thirst to find out what was happening in both periods at the same time. The story has a strong, satisfying mystery aspect that reminded me, actually, of Charles de Lint, because of the warmth, detail and clarity of the description and gentle aspect of the otherworldliness I guess. It might make your hair stand up but it won't give you nightmares.
Compassion, healing, second chances, moving past hate and anger and self-discovery are the major chords that ring through this story and make it sweet and healthy at the same time, but McKenzie also makes music of the backdrop of Philadelphia, including a rural beauty spot that helps Paul and Helena come to terms with painful revelations by aiding reminiscence. This place isn't wholly harmless though; Paul's fall hints at risks of being out and about while black, and while the story is free from gazing white characters and neighbours, there are plenty of indications of the context of USian antiblackness: George moved his family North for better chances, while Helena responds to Ava's question 'Are you one of those women's lib types?' with 'Not really. That movement isn't really about is it?' Such detail provides the narrative with a grounding physical and human geography, so that its flaring celebration of high spirited creativity and freedom has a place to jump off from into clouds and rainbows...more
Philosophy! The foundation pit of all the sciences and all the arts and all the humanities, no? Philosophy! A praxis... of thinking about stuff more tPhilosophy! The foundation pit of all the sciences and all the arts and all the humanities, no? Philosophy! A praxis... of thinking about stuff more than usual, of following the trail of ideas, seeing where we can go with them… something like that? It's how I would describe Sara Ahmed's writing. An image for it might be going for a walk on a beach and examining the shells, turning them over, listening to them, seeing what colour they are on the inside. Except that sounds a bit floaty and whimsical, which this emphatically isn't, it's just that it's an investigation of the often overlooked, a hearing of the seldom heard.
For example, thinking about Husserl thinking about tables, Ahmed thinks about the labour involved in keeping the table and the space around it clear and available for Husserl to sit and think and write at, labour performed by others, presumably women. Ahmed asks: what's going on behind Husserl while he's thinking and writing at his writing table? She asks and suggests lots of other things too related to the way people are facing, what they are able, thereby, to notice, what effect spaces and objects and work have on bodies, how these effects depend on those bodies, whether they are read as bodies of colour, female bodies, queer bodies.
Thinking about orientations around things and toward things shows how things get missed, how barriers that stop some can be invisible to those they let pass. Racism isn't much of a problem these days, say my class of white students…
I was taught, as a student of philosophy, not to value the personal, but to admire the 'objective'. Yet, philosophers have spoken as if their own thoughts were universal. By investigating the personal, (queer) feminists of colour like Ahmed have rehabilitated the specificity of experiences, opening paths and windows onto nodes of commonality, meeting points, communal tables as well as places of tension and friction.
I'm sure I'll read this again and keep making connections, keep following paths I'd never noticed. One point of affinity I felt was with Elizabeth Grosz's essay 'Refiguring Lesbian Desire' in which she elaborates on the preposition that desire, rather than being a painful lack, is creative and productive. For Ahmed desire, specifically lesbian desire, certainly is that: it creates paths, reshapes the world. I love reading Ahmed, not just because I recognise and learn to recognise the world spoken differently to the way I have been trained to hear it, but because of this pathbrea/making world shifting potential she points to....more
What struck me most strongly about this work is the intense male supremacy it highlights. The laws of inheritance that Ahmed/Zahra's father's deceptioWhat struck me most strongly about this work is the intense male supremacy it highlights. The laws of inheritance that Ahmed/Zahra's father's deception is designed to subvert are significant, and the voice-shifting, fragmented, erased and reiterated narration of Ahmed/Zahra's experience provides an interesting perspective to embody gender conflict, but I am most haunted by the seven nameless sisters, the meagre Macabeas who, being female, are excluded from public and narrative space.
Ahmed/Zahra's pain is murderous, driving her to suicidal thoughts and to flee her family. The sadness she describes reminded me of the 'gender sadness' Julia Serano mentions feeling before her transition. She longs to live as a woman, yet fears to give up the rights and freedoms of a man. She speaks about her tormenting conscience - but Ben Jelloun does not take this hint at feminist solidarity(?) further. She also speaks of being taught to consider herself superior to women, something difficult to unlearn.
The first storyteller says that Islam is the source of the social inferiority of women, and later another character describes the Koran as a book whose words have "the force of law yet lack a woman's perspective". But the story reveals how some men will go to great lengths to maintain the concentration of economic and social power in male hands, subverting Islam and the law. Ahmed/Zahra's own authoritarian behaviour in early adulthood is particularly revealing of the consequences of patriarchal socialisation. This is a skillful and nuanced part of the story.
Ben Jelloun makes careful efforts to socially place his various narrators, and perhaps I missed many of the significances of this because I lack experience of Moroccan society. However, the impression I got was that Ahmed/Zahra's story is not uncommon. While the focus on an individual (though divided) consciousness allows intense interior reflection and some character development that helps empathy, the fragmentation of the narrative suggests to me both public obsession (like the circus) and a multiplicity of people in Ahmed/Zahra's situation.
Ahmed/Zahra's body is constantly referred to as a secret that will betray her, but she also has a distinct male self with whom she corresponds. This self is fascinated by her and sometimes admonishes, but never objectifies her. For most of the book, the first storyteller speaks of Ahmed/Zahra as he/him, but switches when she begins to live, still ambiguously and partly in secret, as a woman, appropriately marking a social transition. This is the last moment of clarity for me, except a few subsequent mentions of political struggle, brief and vague but intriguing.
This style of writing, images flowing in succession submerged in interior reflections and unobtrusive transitions between tellers, is rarely a success for me. I find the bulk of the text unmemorable and the constant mention of dreams, death and so on wash over me as unaffecting commonplace despite its eloquence and poetry. I accummulate an overall discomfort at sexually explicit descriptions and images of illness, aging and burial, but I find it hard to make sense and meaning from these passages....more
Now that I teach English as my main job I am more than ever aware of how language shapes and limits what can be expressed, how it makes and remakes thNow that I teach English as my main job I am more than ever aware of how language shapes and limits what can be expressed, how it makes and remakes the social world as it is made and remade. I have read few books from the Japanese, but I would wager I can tell such a text after reading a page! Perhaps it was the themes, not only the flavour of the language, that made this taste so distinctly Japanese to me. Quirky relationships, dramatic melancholy, organised and comfortable domesticity, defiance of convention, appreciation of food and eating, and a kind of pride of place, a cultural pride, chimed with my preconceptions.
Anyway, I love this book, which makes writing look effortless (it isn't) and feels like a personal gift. Mikage, the protagonist, could hardly be more sympathetic as a lonely young adult struggling to overcome grief, and the relationships she is lucky enough to be pulled into nourished my heart as they did hers. The writing is spare, poetic, direct, and often original in its images. As a love story, this feels gloriously contemporary and cinematic.
One of the important characters in the book, Eriko, is a transsexual woman, and Yoshimoto both has her speak her own truth and presents her in a very positive light as self-willed, resiliant, highly atttractive, extremely generous, and surrounded by loving friends. She is also a victim of anti-trans violence.
Personally, I felt sad that both Mikage and her friend Yuichi are negative about vegetarian food! Otherwise, I might give it 5 stars....more
I'm evidently just not brilliantly smart enough to enjoy this book as I couldn't see the point of it at all. In a way it reminded me of Shakespeare, eI'm evidently just not brilliantly smart enough to enjoy this book as I couldn't see the point of it at all. In a way it reminded me of Shakespeare, extemporising on themes of love, sexual jealousy and personality in flights of poetry. But remember why Shakespeare is a little bit obscure and difficult, because we hear it through the long shadows of the centuries; a couple more, I read, and we'll have to translate it, like Chaucer. Nightwood is dense and difficult at eighty, presumably because it wasn't written for the peanut-crunching crowd. And I don't have a problem with dense and difficult per se, but for whatever reason I didn't get a lot out of it here.
T S Eliot reverentially introduces the text and warns us it's not a philosophical treatise but since it did nothing for me as poem, what's left? Am I supposed to ignore the blows of the hammer with which Barnes nails the world and its peoples to their definitions, to history and racialisation? Don't tell me whites haven't always known not to use the n-word, don't tell me Barnes is speaking in sympathy when when she calls it inadvisable to give birth to a Jew. I know, no ill intended, and I'm not appeased.
Unlike Shakespeare and his sister Virginia Woolf, who open the world like a magic box and run its distinctions together like oil paints, Barnes pins down the rising spirits she caught dancing to the strange music of a new century and turns them back into dust and metal. Gender might have broken in her hand like an egg but inside it is the same old misery.
Here love redeems nothing and no one, all life rots on the vine of poisoned Europe, which may well be the truth of the day, for afterwards Europe convulsed in a sickness and swallowed its children again, but while it may be truth it's not life Eliot, don't tell me this is life, it's only music, and I've heard enough European dirges....more
I wasn't going to comment on this book at all, since I was already familiar with most of the material from elsewhere. I very much enjoyed reading it aI wasn't going to comment on this book at all, since I was already familiar with most of the material from elsewhere. I very much enjoyed reading it as a for-us (and our friends) by-us piece of loving activism excavating and preserving a body of stories in danger of being lost. As such it's a worthy journalistic project well executed.
On reflection though, my familiarity with trans histories made me insensitive to the urgency of that project. I really hope general readers pick this up, because trans histories need to be read and heard, to counter the the trans mythologies of white supremacist patriarchy, wherein, for instance, trans men don't exist, trans women are always extremely femme and heterosexual, and gender is read entirely through a paradigm of whiteness. From this perspective, Stryker's compilation of diverse individual and collective stories of struggle, survival, collaboration, campaigns, conflicts and mutual support, is disruptive in the best possible way....more
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