des imp(ressions): deep into south (pt. 1)

“DEEP INTO SOUTH” CURRICULUM, PT. 1

HIGHLIGHTS:

blackness ’n’ desire ’n’ gender, oh my!

That is, a collection of informal literary critique of Southern American books by yrs truly,

LAZARUS McCLOUD vol. II covering jan-early may 2015

THE IDEA is to be accountable to my thoughts, ideas, and impressions in a frank (at times impish) manner.

THE BIGGER IDEA is that making things facilitates happiness, and making sense of goings-on facilitates art.

THE TITLE of the zine is sort of in French because i like to pretend that i’m competent with it when there are wordplay opportunities. Des impressions: an undefined yet plural number of impressions, emphasis on imp (English). The French-ness is half-assed but i like it because then the title can be abbreviated to something like “daze-emp.”

THE FREQUENCY will be determined by spirit, but will hopefully pick up where i left off.

THE ZINESTER is a queer-type/nostalgically-oriented/raised-Catholic “child of mixture” who’s in love with Truman Capote and other people/things, frequently.

Here’s what just happened. I tried to mount our full length mirror on the inside of the closet door using command strips, but when i tried to pull the mirror toward me in a peeling motion—not straight away from the wall, as instructed!—the entire infrastructure was destroyed and i started swearing and got seriously upset because those were the last two strips i had and the Home Depot is an unpleasant 12 minute drive away. And i hate when i’m trying to do something nice or homemaking or productive and am foiled. So, adding to this feeling is my anxiety around the black raspberry bush i planted earlier this afternoon. I felt good about my plant job until i checked out there after eating lunch and the sun is not hitting the bush. It’s hitting other plants around the bush but not the bush. And now i’m terrified i didn’t plant it where it'll get enough sun and i’m anxious and what if i have to replant it. I don’t like “it.” I think it’s a she, and her name is Belinda.

So, to assuage these feelings of failure and destruction i went onto the front porch to water the newest plant i got at the Home Depot at the same time i bought the command strips, some compost in a big flat bag, some WD-40 to fix the squeaky-rusty back door hinge that drove me bonkers but that apparently Charlotte had not noticed or was otherwise undisturbed by (that was one project that worked well—wow! watching the rusty water drip away is so satisfying!), indoor plant plant food spikes, and a tiny succulent for the new table in my bedroom, which i acquired off my neighbor’s porch (asked first, of course). So, this new plant is a canna lily, and it’s a lovely red-orange color and i thought it would pop nice against our blue house with a yellow door. I forgot to water her. So i filled a glass and went out to water her and forget about the failures. And i just sat on the porch beside the lily for a minute, watching the chickens mill around the yards and street. Earlier today i texted charlotte that the water company had corrected our meter reading, earning us a $1.34 credit on our next bill (i paid $70 toward an inaccurate balance of $177), and that i feared that one of the three chicks i’d noticed of the past few weeks had been killed, because i was only seeing two on the street now, clinging to their mother like a shadow, of course. All day long i hear their little voices—i kept calling them “their sweet little voices” and finally Charlotte said “they’re peeping!” and i was like of course that’s the word! “Peeping”! That’s, like, the best place to use that word and when else have i really been able to? See, i hear this certain symphony of sounds and voices all day from my street, and usually that’s the adult chickens (both hen and rooster), and crows, and cars, and babies crying, and people cackling, and wind chimes, and dogs, and the 70s-today R&B radio station blasting from across the street, commercials included. I love this soundscape, so when the chicks’ tiny peeping was added to the mix, i noticed immediately. I noticed before i’d even seen them. And one day i did see them First sighting, look how little and sweet! and it was so exciting.

But i was talking to John Henry about it and he said that a lot of the time the opossum gets the chicks—and i know the opossum well, it once was stuck under our house one night and started uttering the most humanoid, unnerving screams i’d maybe ever heard. John Henry is the old man who lives next door and feeds the chickens (when we first moved in we

asked our landlord Seth who the chickens belonged to and he said, “Well…they’re really their own birds.

But if anyone, John Henry. He feeds them.”)—John Henry also got the semi-feral cat pack spayed/ neutered and i think feeds them along with me. So when he told me about the opossum snacking on the chicks i steeled myself for the worst.

But, sitting on the porch steps beside the lily and looking aimlessly, i saw one hen with not two but three chicks! And then i looked over to the left and there was a second hen with two more! So there aren’t the two chicks that i’d resigned myself to, or even the three i’d originally believed in, but a total of five—that i know of! The sight of them all resting in the grass and peeping for whatever reason or other filled me with hope and helped wash the taste of failure from my mouth.

Then the rooster, who Avery and i named Sereysha, ran by in brutal pursuit of one of the hens, and i thought, wow, that’s really ugly, an ugly sex act, and i also thought that maybe we’d have more chicks yet. Isn’t it funny? It’s all there. I wonder if he feels any paternal feelings toward the chicks but i don’t think so; i just saw him chase aggressively after one of the mother hens and her chicks peeped in fear and jumbled themselves around his feet. Emma and i saw Sereysha fuck one of the hens for the first time the other day, on the sidewalk right in front of the house. Before we could say boo he’d overtaken her, standing over her and his glossy wings spreading to cover the both of them, the hen sinking against the ground. He pecked her head a couple of times—foreplay?—gave three little jerks, then hopped off her and scuddled away; she rose from the dirt, ruffled her feathers, and carried on with her tasks (?). I have a rich history of inappropriate/excessive anthropomorphizing, but i can’t pretend i didn’t feel hostile energy beaming from the rooster whenever Avery and i would be out together and touching or being affectionate and he’d look at us.

“I think he’s a little homophobic,” i said to Grace when she came to visit; Grace knows chickens well. I was serious but didn’t think she’d take it seriously, wouldn’t have really minded if she hadn’t.

But she replied, a little grimly, “Yeah…they can be that way.”

Really, the rooster reminds me less of Sereysha, the young son Anna Karenina cares about with intermittent intensity, than of Mellors, the lover of Connie in Lady Chatterley’s Lover; he seems to love (using the term quite euphemistically) with a similar blunt carnality, and seems to have a similar existential discomfort with lesbian*ism. Imagine if two of the hens got together? What even would he do?

But we’re getting away from the point, which is that even—haha, one of my neighbors just yelled over to me “The rooster’s staring at you!” and i said “I know! I think he doesn’t like me!” and she said “I think he’s hungry.” Haha. Yup.—but the point is, even when i’m feeling ineffectual or lost or overwhelmed or whatnot, life is springing up all around me, in the flowers, the chicks, the soil. And the truth is i’ve been pretty happy lately. I feel enthralled with life. Everywhere i look seems to bring me delight. The world has never felt so open to me.

I feel obsessed with plants, the tenacity of life they show. The semi-feral cat pack has that same tenacity, though they express it by breaking into our mudroom through the hole made when the mower Seth was pushing in the [shared] backyard projected a rock through the bottommost pane of our back door. So the cats, knowing the food was kept inside, got together and broke the glass even further, so that three of them could slip into the back room, knock the bag of Alley Cat™ cat food onto the ground and gorge themselves on it; this was the scene that met me when i flipped on the light. It’s paradoxical and upsetting to think that, in their quest for sustenance, which those cats, having no proper home, are always very embroiled in, they could have hurt themselves. They don’t know that glass can cut, do they?

And the glass left in the pane was jagged and fang-like. I scolded them for that. I said, “I hope you feel ashamed right now! That’s how we learn our lessons.” They looked a little ashamed, or at least displeased with the turn of events. And it was a silly thing to say but also sadly true, for better or worse, for lessons

we actually should learn and for ones we never should.

The chicks are still peeping, though, and the cats gather at the backdoor every morning. I’ve taken to sitting out there while i eat my breakfast and watching them, and looking at the plants on the back step, the progress they made over the past day and night. It’s getting to the point where the cats solicit affection from me, whether or not i’ve fed them; i feel in love with them, collectively. I wonder if they get jealous of the plants like i would, now that they get a share of my attention too. But i’m obsessed with the way little radishes sprouted and sprouted in the soil of the cup plant Killian gave me, and a few in the base of the black raspberry bush, too. There was something so sweet and tender and innocent about them; he said there might starting with the cat looking up and proceeding clockwise: Rusty, be some radish seeds mixed in with the soil Frank O’Hara, Jaeger, Lula Mae, José, & Lionel, my bb boy when he potted the plants for me, digging them up out of his backyard, and sure enough there they were, growing in this new place with this new air but under this same sun. It seems ridiculously charming to me, almost magical: things actually grow? Beautiful things, and things we can eat, just popping up out of the ground? What lovely design.

And this morning i tried to carefully remove the radishes from the cup plant and raspberry bush and re-plant them into their own pot, so they have more room to spread their roots. And maybe i killed them. I’ve never done that before, never dug my hands into the dirt before and carefully searched out the roots. Maybe i fucked them up and their tender little pronged tops will wither back into the soil. Or maybe their will to live will surprise and thrill me again and soon i’ll have plump, crisp, peppery radishes —Killian said they’re of the Easter Egg variety, so they’ll be all different colors.

This is a slice of myself southern life so far…hardly emblematic, not entirely immersed, but growing sweet like the radishes, and, most importantly, my own. I told Avery the other day that never has a place given me so much consistent joy—and neither have i ever been so consistently aware of the place i am in. I never forget i’m in New Orleans, and never stop feeling thankful for that fact. To celebrate it i go outside, and i beautify my home, my little (rented) slice of New Orleans. And i talk to people and take it easy and tear up at the sight of the beautiful houses and the bayou even though i walk by it every evening and smell the jasmine and magnolias and let myself be friendlier than is my natural tendency because, actually, once i start to be friendly, i sort of like it (sometimes). And i eat okra and tomatoes with mac ’n’ cheese and love it desperately.

New Orleans is a different sort of southern than the southerns i’ve been experiencing through my curriculum books, but it pleases me to see the ways in which they overlap and inform each other, to see how Southern comma general shades into Southern comma Louisiana and Southern comma New Orleans. My collected responses are already hella long so decided to break what was gonna be one zine into two volumes; i leave for Europe on Saturday and am taking a break on the curriculum until my return, so it seems like a good resting place.

Oh yeah. Just…i can’t believe the difference between where i was last des imp and this one…so much has changed. Just so much. And that about sums that up, but basically if i’d known what it would be like now, i would have been crawling out of my skin to get to it then [not that i wasn’t already].

It would become “hope,” but…

note: these reviews contain spoilers pretty much, though nothing too specific for the most part. i tried to write them so they’d be enjoyable (?) to someone whether they’ve read the book in question or not, but i guess that remains to be seen. the idea here was informal literary criticism, so i’m not rigid about citation style/quote hunting/etc. i didn’t date the responses which is kind of booty but they are in chronological order, addendums etc. aside, and build on each other. sorry if it’s insular.

CONTENTS SALVAGE THE BONES EVERY TONGUE GOT TO CONFESS LADY CHATTERLEY’S LOVER A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE + CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF DUST TRACKS ON A ROAD EVERYTHING THAT RISES MUST CONVERGE IN SEARCH OF OUR MOTHERS’ GARDENS I AM NOT SIDNEY POITIER MADAME BOVARY

SALVAGE THE BONES, JESMYN WARD “His glance is a comma” “He makes my heart beat like that, I want to say, and point at the squirrel dying in red spurts.” “he threw that smile like salt over the shoulder”** The first thing that struck me about this book was its brutality: so many descriptions of insides, guts, the color pink throughout, dissection and killing and vicious, physical fighting throughout, teeth and claws and nails. It’s not gentle. I mean, it begins with a description of a pitbull giving birth, straining, licking up its placenta. But i’m not sure that “brutality” is the best word; it is more matter of fact and less charged than that, just like a family of five eating Top Ramen every day, and being obliged to steal anything beyond the essentials, is matter-of-fact—maybe the better word is “organic.” The Batistes’ poverty is presented as organically as the novel’s births and deaths and dirt and injuries and sex. Organic, and frank.

The second thing i noticed was the dichotomy of language: the black/rural/Southern spoken dialect versus the “standard English,” flowingly poetic style of the narration/the protagonist’s psyche articulated. This particularly stood out to to me as my reading of Salvage and Every Tongue Got to Confess overlapped; while Every Tongue is an anthology of anthropological field research and, as such, the language appears as an exact as possible copy of that spoken by Hurston’s subjects, the language nonetheless reminded me of that of Their Eyes Were Watching God, in which the dialect of the dialogue and narration is continuous. I guess this belongs more in the Every Tongue entry, but still—just this awareness had me thinking about that dichotomy, and what it means. What does it mean that Ward’s protagonist, Esch, thinks in different language than she and her family and friends use when they speak, and that the language she speaks in is less regional/more “educated”/less racialized [or, more subtly racialized, like “he threw that smile like salt over the shoulder,” which references a common black southern superstition, which i love love love]? I don’t know. I’d love speak to Ward about this decision, particularly because Their Eyes is referenced as “further reading” at the end of the novel, and unsurprisingly influential, given the subject matter. It’s less a critique than a question.

The book also gets at a politics of Katrina that, not taking place to New Orleans, differs from that usually discussed. White and/or non-poor people are absent from the novel save to serve as points of contrast: when Esch, brother Skeetah, and friend Big Henry go to the supermarket to pick up food for Skeet’s dog China, they are surprised and a bit unsettled to discover the abundance of worried white people clearing the supermarket’s shelves of canned goods, batteries, bottled water, and other disasterproof goods. Later on, as the severity of the impending storm develops, Esch and her oldest brother Randall attempt to break into the snuggly boarded-up farmhouse of a neighboring white family to salvage any foodstuffs for their own undersupplied family of five [after buying two large bags of dog food for China, Sketch only had enough cash for a flat of Top Ramen, some cans of potted meat, and a few other paltry selections]. The farmhouse, secured, emptied of valuables (people included) and welltended, is a sharp contrast to the Batistes’ ramshackle old house, their property laden with the husks of half-broken machinery, windows boarded with whatever flimsy 2x4s Randall, Esch, and youngest brother Junior could find strewn about the Pit. Though these facts are presented as organically and non-pointedly as any of the novel’s others, their subtext is stark and sobering: Not everyone could afford to leave before the storm. Not everyone could afford to protect themselves even from a non-category five cataclysm. Some people’s best option was to hunker down and hope/pray for the best.

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I’ve never lived through a natural disaster. I guess, growing up in Cincinnati, the likeliest one i might have encountered was tornado or flood, but neither of these were very likely, and it is beyond my powers of imagination to envision, despite the strength of Ward’s description, winds that sound like a train enveloping my home, water rising to fill the house i’ve lived in all my life. Even failing the singular severity of Katrina, it’s hard for me to wrap my head around the concept of “hurricane season,” dealing with several such storms each year, the most intense hurricane stories passed down through generations of a family—but, i guess i’d better wrap my head around those things, because here i am and here it is all around me, the results of Katrina and lesser and more distant storms, too.

And i guess that’s the other side of the “organic frankness,” or the brutality, or whatever it is i want to call it: vulnerability. The Pit’s vulnerability to the storm. The Batistes’ vulnerability to their poverty. Esch’s body’s vulnerability to her pregnancy, her heart’s vulnerability to Manny. Each’s father’s vulnerability to his grief and addiction. Skeet’s vulnerability to his love for China. The vulnerability of China’s puppies to the dirt, to the water, to China’s fickle motherhood. The vulnerability of the throats of China’s dogfighting opponents to China’s vice of a jaw. So, any instance of organic brutality has its soft flipside, but it exists more in the negative than anything else. [END TRANSMISSION] EVERY TONGUE GOT TO CONFESS, ZORA NEALE HURSTON “I want to collect like a new broom.” — ZNH Before ZNH was a novelist, she was an anthropologist, and her first post-Barnard project entailed driving around the Gulf states of Alabama, Florida, and Louisiana and asking black folx for their favorite folk tales, using whatever means necessary to get them to open up to what was, particularly in 1928, a strange sight: an unaccompanied young black woman coming and asking questions. The volume wasn’t actually discovered and published until after Hurston’s death, its publication delayed for reasons never to be known. [Interesting side note/something i’d love to learn more about: the project, and many of Hurston’s others, was funded by one Charlotte Osgood Mason, a wealthy, white New Yorker who was the capital behind many young black artists, apparently driven by her belief in the superiority of Negro creativity coupled with their inferiority in every other facet of existence. Simultaneously racist, generous, and controlling of ZNH’s output (stipulating that she was to share no part of her manuscript with anyone without Mason’s approval, positioning herself as the authority over the info collected by Hurston, etc.), many of Hurston’s colleagues were critical of her relationship with her sponsor; Hurston, however, in letters to Langston Hughes, insisted that she and Mason shared a “psychic bond.” The intricacies of the various power dynamics at play here, coupled with the rather significant contention of a psychic bond, are enticing. Via the introduction, Carla Kaplan.]

Other significant thing gleaned from the intros to this volume: the complexities of visualizing, via words on paper, all the nuance of any given oral dialectic, in this case, southern African-American dialect of the early 20th century—“eye dialects,” as it were, “the use of nonstandard spelling for speech to draw attention to an ironically standard [ed. note: for whatever particular cultural subset in question] pronunciation”—thank you, Wikipedia [i donated, have you?]. The real point, here, being “[w]hether or not readers can see through the veil of eye dialects’ incriminating constructions and ignore or resist the prejudice they embody remains an open question. Even here in this narratives” (John Edgar Wideman, forward). Which connects back to what i was getting at with the dichotomy of language in Salvage the 2

Bones—does writing Esch’s most profound emotional insights in a dialect that pretty squarely rejects the novel’s spoken eye dialect reinforce the prejudice that, as Wideman points out, such eye dialects force the reader to deal with in one way or another?

I don’t know! But definitely worth considering. And of course Salvage is hardly the first novel in which the language of the dialogue differs from the language of the narration, etc., but the political weight of the decision in that particular novel shouldn't be overlooked.

Anywho, back to Every Tongue. The nearly 500 tales collected by Hurston are arranged by topic, the book opening with more existential tales concerning God, the Devil, Heaven, and Preachers. Ever fascinated by various conceptions of divinity, etc., these were probably my favorite tales. Some of the God tales made me sad, though, because the internalized anti-blackness of the black people telling/ creating them was so apparent—in many of them, black people are portrayed as being lazy or slow with cosmological repercussions, as evidenced in one of the first tales, titled “Why Negroes Have Nothing.”

But in the greater body of the tales, black people are portrayed/self-conceived as, in turn, sly, sneaky, funny, moral, immoral, peaceful, crafty, smart, foolish, mean, good, curious, selfish—that is, human.

For once, it’s the portrait of white people that is less dimensional: white people, who appear primarily in the form of the slave master or boss, are basically either stupid, deceptive, or cruel.

I’m far from a folklore expert, but it seems to me that one of the genre’s main purposes is to provide answers to questions big and small, drawing those answers from the immediate environment of the folk in question. So it’s interesting to think about both these questions [in these tales, ranging from, as noted above why “Negroes have nothing” to why gophers apparently resemble turtles (ever thought about that?)] and their answers [???]. The disparity in seriousness here is both interesting and wounding, these tales attempting to account for questions concerning both ecology and systematic racism. At times, it’s difficult to analyze the tones of the tales that directly address racial inequality, such as in this pair, which deal particularly with the loaded, dangerous societal relationship between black men and white women: [1] “’Twuz uh white lady walkin’ cross the street. Uh colored man stood looking after her as she passed by. She looked nice tuh him, so he said: ‘Long dere’s life dere’s hopes.”

“He didn’t see a white man standing right behind him. So de white man said, ‘Yes, an’ long as dere’s a limb, dere’s ropes.’ — Raymond McGill.”

[2] “In Mississippi a black horse run away with a white lady. When they caught the horse they lynched him, and they hung the harness and burnt the buggy. — Arthur Hopkins.”

Hiding in the wordplay of the first tale and absurd hyperbole of the second, is there resistance or resignation? Is the humor to be felt as wry? bitter? wise? scandalizingly upfront?

Surprise! It’s all of these things. [If i learned anything in college, it’s the rhetorical move of presenting something as an either/or, then BLOWING your professor’s mind when you reveal it’s actually a both/and!!] And while i do find this cohabitation of competing meanings compelling, i’m also interested in my own intense reaction to the ambiguity of tone: i can’t seem to grasp how these black people, swapping these tales with one another, teaching them to their children, telling them to ZNH for her record—how did these people feel? Happy to have put their voices into the situation in a lasting,

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meaningful, multifarious way? Or frustrated that this vocalizing wouldn’t go much further than their own communities, their subtle, deeply reflective critiques really preaching to no one besides the choir?

Again, tho, it’s probably a both/and. A. pointed out that maybe this social critique embedded in the folk tales was so catching to me because, basically, we are led into believing that oppressed people lack the wherewithal to be critical of their situation, let alone organize to change it. Of course i balked at this proposition initially—of course i know black people are and have always been critical of racism and white supremacy and the complex interplay of various gendered/raced/classed/sexualized relations!

Of course i know that! I’m of black people, after all! Any lesser assumption would be a betrayal of my ancestry, my contemporary siblings in blackness, and myself.

And though, as with many things, my gut instinct was to take this matter personally, i am realizing that it is far more systematic—for that’s what racism, in all its insidiousness, does: cause one, if one is colored, to doubt the ingenuity and intelligence and awareness and humanity of one’s own people, via a conditioning so subtle yet so persistent that one fails to notice it almost completely. That’s internalized bigotry. That’s internalized anti-blackness. That’s growing up in a white supremacist/antiblack/institutionally racist society.

And if you’ll allow a relevant tangent, it reminds me of an awesome critique i read of Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. Okay, full disclosure, i enjoyed the film when i saw it, oh, three years ago.

It’s designed to be enjoyed. But even then i knew something nasty lurked beneath the surface, and that monster is pretty clear now: straight up, none of the black people in the film had any agency, Django, the tale’s supposed protagonist, included. If you watch carefully, now, you’ll see that white Dr. King [yeah.] is the real positive driving force behind the narrative and Django is pretty much a glorified puppet. For a full breakdown of this shitty movie, read this analysis by Jesse Williams. But! Probably the thing of it that hit me the hardest from his analysis was his holding up the fact of the silence between slaves pictured: We open on a montage of enslaved men, led in shackles through harsh terrain. Among them is Django. At nightfall, a fascinatingly fearless and witty Dr. King Schultz emerges. He verbally toys with their enslavers before murdering one, wounding the other and liberating Django from his shackles. Without so much as a glance, Django walks directly away from his fellow men. The shackled men have just witnessed a truly incredible series of events, yet at no point in the entire experience do they ever acknowledge or communicate with each other. (Their entire existence is awash with violence, so it’s not a result of shock.) Dr. King throws them the key to their shackles and advises them to head north. These men literally hold the key to their shackles and they never try to free themselves, or even look at each other. They don’t consider or confer. They just stand there mouths agape, like shackled apes, and as if with one mind, they trudge forward on cue, to inflict violence upon the wounded white oppressor before them. This imagery is a choice that defies all survivalist logic. You have the key to the iron shackles that eat away at your raw ankles. Take them off.

When first glimpsing freedom, they look not to each other or their own shackled ankles, but first to inflict violence upon the nearest white person. Which, incidentally is exactly what Django did when freed; physically assaulted the wounded white man by pressing the horses 4

weight into his wound. Could the black men not have looked to North Star themselves? Displayed human initiative by assembling supplies from the wreckage or anything else a real, experienced adult man might do?[…]You didn’t notice that the black people in this scene appeared lobotomized because that’s usually how slaves are portrayed. Black males on screen are consistently represented as dumb, incurious and/or prone to violence. If we want true progress, we have to stop sharing the same lack of curiosity displayed by Tarantino and his fictional slaves. [emphasis added] Now. It’s true that i didn’t notice that the black people didn’t communicate to one another, and that their primary drive was violence, and that they seemed to have no emotional or intellectual grasping of the very unlikely situation arising before them. And it’s true that it’s because i’ve been so conditioned into believing, however tacitly, in these “lobotomized” portrayals of black slaves and, by extension, black men, black people in general. This characterization and my initial buying of it is just an outcropping of internalized anti-blackness, the same force that makes me so surprised [albeit pleasantly] at the nuanced social critiques embedded in the tales collected by ZNH—even though, really, i know so differently, quite intimately. [Seriously, tho, read Williams critique, esp. if you watched the movie, then watch 12 Years A Slave if you haven’t and contrast your impressions. To paraphrase the everilluminating Trudy of gradientlair.com, it’s a joke to pair these films together in any but the most basic sense of subject matter (and Williams points out that Django’s rendering of even the fundamental topic of American slavery, aside from being problematic, is wildly inaccurate, historically speaking).]

Ohkayy…just a few other sundry remarks to finish off this response…One of the storytelling conventions i noticed and liked was that of ending the tale by saying something like “At that point, i left”—like, at that point in the action, the teller of the story, who had theretofore not explicitly been present in the action, suddenly and simultaneously inserts oneself into it by leaving it. Weird and meta. A funny variation on this practice, contributed by one A. C. Williams, is: “I stepped on a pin, de pin bent, and dat’s de way de story went.” Other random thing i liked—so, through reading these tales, i sorta envisioned all of the tellers as old folks, but one of the appendices at the back of the volume revealed that the tellers ranged widely in age, social position, and occupation. I took great pleasure in reading through each contributor’s mini bio (i.e. name, age, hometown, and occupation), my favorites being “Maybelle Frazier: Housewife, when out of jail. About 38. Born in Florida” and “Matthew Brazzle: Born in Fla. About 70. Gardener and mayor of town.” Just a fun way to envision the day-to-day panorama of these folks’ lives, with a granularity that’s often hard to approach. Also, some language i found compelling, tho i present it out of context here: “Skin, oh skin, old skin, don’t you know me?”

“Get him some matches and tole him to go on back and build a hell of his own.”

“Way after while he got tuh hell, but everybody wuz back in de kitchen” “Oh water, to be baptized.” “an’ God stopped pickin’ beans” “they woke up saints that had been sleep for thousands of years—way back in the back rooms of heaven” “Peter wuzn’t goin’ tuh get left dis time, so he tore down half a mountain.”

“One night a man decided to satisfy his wishes” 5

Woo. Thanks for your fine work, Zora.

LADY CHATTERLEY’S LOVER, D.H. LAWRENCE ed note: This’ll be frank, so if you can’t deal, move on.

So, i first read this book in a pretty classic manner: 13 years old, under the covers at night, not really grasping much of the eroticism but losing my shit over the raw sexuality, mixing it among my schoolbooks so the spine peaked out and friends would ask about it and i could tell them that i was reading a sexy book.

I bought it secretly at Barnes and Noble.

Oh, and obviously this isn’t part of the southern curriculum—last month, A. and i each read Anna Karenina, and decided to carry forth with co-reading classics we each either hadn’t read or hadn’t for a while, and after populating a list out of the numerous novels assigned the dubious distinction of “classic,” seems many of our selections have to do with desire/gender/etc. So, the shift from AK to Lady C was pleasingly thematic.

Okay, let’s just start with some lists i made.

Vaginas are: “cunts” “figs” “beaks” “tearing” [at the penis] “pure peace” [to enter] I mean, this whole thing: ‘“What is cunt?’ she said.

‘An’ doesn’t ter know? Cunt! It’s thee down theer; an’ what I get when I’m i’side thee, and what tha gets when I’m i’side thee; it’s a’ as it is, all on’t.’

‘All on’t,’ she teased. ‘Cunt! It’s like fuck then.’

‘Nay nay! Fuck’s only what you do. Animals fuck. But cunt’s a lot more than that. It’s thee, dost see; an’ tha’rt a lot beside an animal aren’t ter? even ter fuck! Cunt! Eh, that’s the beauty o’ thee, lass!’”

Women are: good when they want to be fucked bad when they don’t want to be fucked bad when they want to be fucked for more than a few minutes bad when they don’t come from being fucked bad when they have the man come first then get themselves off [“grind their own coffee,” if you will] bad when they want to do the fucking bad when they lie still 6

bad when they’re lesbians bad when they get off non-vaginally good when they come at the same time as the man bad when they are willful made by being fucked by a “phallus”*: “Oh, and far down inside her the deeps parted and rolled asunder, in long, far-traveling billows, and ever, at the quick of her, the depths parted and rolled asunder, from the centre of soft plunging, as the plunger went deeper and deeper, touching lower, and she was deeper and deeper and deeper disclosed, and heavier the billows of her rolled away to some shore, uncovering her, and closer and closer plunged the palpable unknown, and further and further rolled the waves of herself away from herself, leaving her, till suddenly, in a soft, shuddering convulsion, the quick of all her plasm was touched, she knew herself touched, the consummation was upon her, and she was gone. She was gone, she was not, and she was born: a woman.” [RIPE!] *book’s own term at points, probably more aptly for my purposes than Lawrence might have intended; in re-using it here, i mean simultaneously “penis” and “cis man/patriarchal man/heterosexist man”

Lesbians: are more common than you realize are worse than gay men are tricksters make straight men suffer to the point of feelings of murderousness deserve death Black women: naturally come at the same time as “the” man, more so than white women [impressed that Mellors (Lawrence??) was able to find a way to grant black women even less sexual agency than the already hyper-constricted white women! but isn’t that just the way?] “are a bit like mud” [ :’D ] So…i dunno. Lots of wild accusations being flung around in this book. If nothing else, it’s a big meditation on heterosexuality, and hetero-eroticism. And…yeah. I found it erotic, forsure.

Forsure.

Is that fucked up? I mean, look at all the premises much of the eroticism is based on—isn’t it fucked up that i found the amalgamation of that arousing?

Sure, probably, i can’t even begin to unravel that.

But, i’m interested in the novel’s figurings of the core, i guess, of heterosexuality—that is, generally, difference. Essential sexual difference between women and men. I’d say the novel contains three sexual draping points: Connie and Mellors’ first intercourse, the intercourse referenced above during which Connie is “born a woman,” and the final depicted intercourse, in which Mellors fucks more rawly and less tenderly than ever before. Each of these unions hinge on sexual difference: in the first, Mellors is moved to arousal by Connie’s maternal-womanly-type tenderness before the baby 7

pheasants; in the second, Connie’s sexual difference from Mellors, theretofore presumably present but nascent, is pushed into full realization via the perpetual pounding of his potent plunger; and in the third, Mellors own sexual difference asserts itself most fully: “It cost her an effort to let him have his way and his will of her. She had to be a passive, consenting thing, like a slave, a physical slave…And what a reckless devil the man was! really like a devil! One had to be strong to bear him. But it took some getting at, the core of the physical jungle, the last and deepest recess of organic shame. The phallus alone could explore it. And how he had pressed in on her! And how, in fear, she had hated it. But how she had really wanted it! At the bottom of her soul, fundamentally, she had needed this phallic hunting out…”

And, hm. Far be it to me to tell anyone how to get their rocks off, and the erotic potential of difference, generally speaking, has been long- and well-known. But what gets me here is that the erotic difference between the characters is not particular to the characters; it is not necessarily difference between Connie and Mellors as individuals that propels them to fuck with such satisfaction, but ostensible, fundamental difference between women and men as a whole. Where does the particularity go? Connie herself considers this, when she wonders whether Mellors is actually treating her differently than he had any of the other women he’d been with, or feels differently with her. And so, rather than this being an actual tale of a particular romance, it’s more an allegory of heterosexuality, in which a “real woman” and a “real man” find each other and subsequent sexual satisfaction. So, in a sense, the substance of “real” woman- or man-ness supplants any particular connection between the two characters. And the term “real” is frequently tossed around in reference to gender with no real qualification, particularly by the men in the novel, such as Mellors and Connie’s father. [One cameo character named Olive, blessedly, does break into this discussion: “Oh, when people begin to talk about real women, I give up.”]

It is made clear that Connie’s husband Clifford is not a “real man” because he is more devoted to cerebral matters than physical ones, is sexually impotent due to paralysis in his legs [pulling at my turtleneck and gulping at the implications of that one—though Clifford is portrayed as establishing largely non-physical, erotic connection with another character (and, like, the basis of that eroticism is a nursing, caregiver/caregivee relationship, which eventually evolves into Clifford being treated like a baby and groping his caregiver’s breasts, which simultaneously arouses and disgusts her—all that’s sorta just, y’know, thrown in toward the end there. I would love to read an analysis of this novel in relationship to ableism, and on the off-chance that one doesn’t exist, would love to do one myself!

Honestly, one of the most complex and notable scenes of the novel is when Connie and Mellors work together to push Clifford, in his heavy, motorized wheelchair which has shorted out, up a hill)], and is uninterested in dominating Connie in a full-fledged manner. It’s also made clear that Connie is a “real woman,” mostly on the strength of her enjoying being “really fucked” by a “real man”—that is, Mellors.

Upon taking in a synopsis of the novel, it’s tempting to reduce the real manliness of Mellors to a difference in class: Mellors works with his body while Clifford works with his mind. Mellors is working class, leading a simple existence in a cottage with the barest of essentials, while Clifford is a comfortably monied lord living out his days in his family’s (albeit dreary) estate. Mellors finds passion in the land, the plants, the animals, while Clifford finds it in abstraction, culture, the arts. So, at first pass, the novel could be taken as any old Harlequin in which a rich and pampered lady is seduced by the sheer ruggedness of a [mechanic, farm hand, carpenter, what have you]. But, a complication: 8

Mellors has more formal education than is typical of one in his occupation, is actually rather intelligent and well-read, essentially chose his occupation as groundskeeper, having opted out of real opportunities to rise through the ranks of the military. [Nonetheless, Connie has her moments of class anxiety, such as when she drives through the town, gazing upon the working class in disgust, while simultaneously realizing that “Mellors had come from such a father (as these working men).”] The equation is not quite so neat when Mellors has a sense of agency over his physically-driven existence—indeed, it’s a point of intellectual principle for him. Many times and in many ways he expresses his hatred of industry, development, machines, and the men who have forsaken their true masculinity to perpetuate such things. Interesting, too, is the fact that in his marriage to one Bertha Cloutts, Mellors is considered to have lowered himself by joining with such a rough, “common” woman, a decision that comes back on him when Bertha, most uncouthly, spreads ribald, half-true rumors about Mellors (and Connie) that wreck the former’s reputation in the town. The novel seems to be saying: it is possible and most favorable, in terms of pleasure-seeking, to strike a balance between the cerebral and the physical—it is possible to be earthy and sensual yet not “common,” educated yet not “cold.” But, then again, Connie basically shits on intellectual matters once she takes up with Mellors, so idk.

One more point of class difference: in the case of Clifford and his caretaker, the difference fuels Clifford’s feelings of eroticism toward Mrs. Bolton, in which he seems to get off on educating her, teaching her to play chess (“You must say j’adoube!”), simultaneously patronizing her and building her up into someone more closely resembling him and his.

And one more crystallizing point of sexual difference, in terms of that fueling hetero-eroticsm: the possibility of impregnation. This potential is heavily fetishized by Connie, who gets off when she considers the ability of Mellors to inseminate her, particularly when she contrasts it with Clifford’s inability to do the same—indeed, it’s this inability that leads Clifford to grant Connie’s sexual liberty in the first place (though he had assumed she wouldn’t exercise it with someone such as Mellors). And, again, it’s Connie’s entering into maternal feelings, by watching the mother pheasants interacting with their chicks, that leads to her first sexual encounter with Mellors. I don’t feel like quote hunting, but there’s a part where she explicitly meditates on the eroticism and, in a sense, sacredness of carrying the child of the man she loves. And also, a lot of the language of her arousal toward Mellors involves the word “womb”—like, “her womb opened to him,” shit like that, which i find viscerally unsettling, but taken more figuratively, it’s consistent [and also a lot around the word “bowels”; Frank O’Hara wrote: “I don’t know as I get what D. H. Lawrence is driving at / when he writes of lust springing up from the bowels / or do I / it could be the bowels of the earth”]. I dunno, this is just of interest to me because such a factor is generally absent from my experience of eroticism. And again, reinforcing notion of sexual difference in a super fundamental, essentialist sense.

So…yeah. A few other points of interest…I thought it was weird when Connie’s father gets drunk with Mellors and starts asking him about what it was like to fuck his daughter. I thought it was interesting how generally unfazed Connie’s family was by her infidelity—i mean, sister Hilda was displeased but no one was particularly moralistic about it. Maybe it helps that they’re not Catholic?

Additionally, i just really appreciated the integration of the English countryside into Connie’s burgeoning conception of the erotic/sensual (and i mean, that distinction is a whole other ballgame altOGETHER. But i don’t feel prepared to tackle it until i delve further into what “the erotic” even means…which seems long overdue given how much i use it in general life…). Anywho, this is in the way that Connie must actually walk through the wild woods to reach Mellors’ cottage or the hut in which they initially tryst, how they fuck outside once after frolicking naked in the rain, how they

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thread bluebells and other pretty English flowers into each other’s pubic hair. I mean, yeah. That’s just a pretty thing to do, confusing physical/cerebral dichotomy aside.

Idk how well their supposed eventual marriage will work out, but that’s kinda beside the point.

A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE + CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, TENNESSEE WILLIAMS Quick sore spot: At my arts magnet high school, there was a thing called Corbett’s, a competition for juniors of all majors. 16 students would proceed to the finals, from any distribution the school’s seven artistic majors. Though the creative writing major was by far the smallest of the bunch, my junior year, it was well-represented by my girlfriend, two of my closest friends, and myself. Nothing could go wrong, right?

I didn’t win (my girlfriend and one of my friends were among the six winners); later, after i had expelled the last of my shame-making but inevitable tears, my writing teacher offered the consolation that the majority of my portfolio had been dramatic script, and people weren’t used to reading script on the page in the same way they were prose or poetry.

It was indeed a consolation, but also incontrovertible: script is, obviously, meant to be performed, spoken; reading it silently can be weird.

So, when Avery and i undertook two-person dramatic readings of these plays, aside from giving us a chance to exercise our dubious dramatic prowesses, it gave the plays somewhat of a chance to breathe as they should.

So, I basically identified as a playwright in high school, right? Playwriting was a requirement of sophomore writing majors, but i took to it much more than i’d expected, after initial hostility. So, by the time of the Big AP English Paper in senior year (10-12 pp., psh, just you wait, younger Chelsey…), it seemed obvious that I chose a play to spend those several months analyzing—and, given my by then,

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er, established interest (both artistic and personal) in gayness, of our pre-approved lists of works and authors, Tennessee was the clear winner.

I’d already spent time with Streetcar, so opted instead to work with Cat, weeks of anguished pondering producing a thesis of: “Homosexuality is presented in a deeply ambiguous light in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, being neither absolutely celebrated or condemned, but some combination of the two.” [ed. note: Remember what i said?! It’s the good ol’ not “either/or”—but “both/and!”, in less sophisticated form!!

But i must also say how interesting i find it that this, my first really serious piece of literary analysis, contains the beginning of several things i would continue to develop as fascinations through and beyond college: namely, amorphously erotic relationships, and the queerness thereof; one’s own conceptions of one’s sexuality/eros/gender/relationships vs. how those things are read by others; and sexual mismatch.]

Despite my scholastic involvement with Cat, Streetcar has remained FAR sharper in my mind, to the point of me barely even remembering the point of Cat when Avery asked before we started reading. And, c’mon, the freshness of Streetcar has to have at least something to do with Marlon Brando………i mean, we watched the movie after we read it, and i’m mostly gay or whatever, and i basically had a hot flash when he first hit the screen. So… But seriously. Masculinity here! So much to say!

Like, let’s talk about how in both of the plays, a male is the object of desire: in Streetcar, it’s Stanley, despite his violence and roughness—Stella wants him unequivocally, and Blanche wants his gaze, his desire for her in abstraction if not in practice, even as she fears and scorns him and his ways—and in Cat it’s Brick: Maggie wants him to fuck her, Skipper was in love with him, and Big Daddy and Big Mama want to be close to him.

But then, okay, the two plays are totally different. For one thing, Streetcar is ridiculously better.

Like, it’s stupid how much better. And in the back of the volume i read, there’s a self-interview with Tennessee and he’s talking about how he was sick of critics criticizing him for moving forward with his work and not doing the same thing over and over which is of course true and valid and so i’m not saying Cat shoulda been the same, and i do appreciate some of its essential differences: it’s way more of an ensemble play, for one, the climax is much less bombastic, it lacks the morose, fragile Southern belle/there’s no one quite as ridiculous/pitiful as Blanche, it’s faster moving, takes place in one afternoon, doesn’t take place in New Orleans, etc. So thank you, Tenn, for trying something different (I’m looking at you, Flannery O’Connor…).

However, the slow-burningness and bombast is part of what makes Streetcar a great play, not to mention the triadic set-up of desire that i find oh so endlessly compelling. Sure, frustrated (homo)sexuality will always be of interest, but i find the dualistic, contradictory desires between Stella & Stanley and Blanche and Stanley much more compelling than that.

Can we make a diagram?

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Loves her (qua him), wants her; “I pulled you down from them columns and how you loved it�

STANLEY Loves him, wants him a lot, takes perverse pleasure in the depravity of his ways

STELLA

et ecr to s e and l rap y t a i tu or eri even p su d of n an s ir io s, a idat er s e m h n lse inti nate a f o er d t mi y h pelle do b d lse ; com u p ,Re tency e p com

t to tha r of f he ity al o xim rais pro app the ale nd is m ,a ess e, h nn gaz mo is ess om es h len is c rav fema y h e, c d b im rs uste e t Fea disg e sam s d i t th an lla; a Ste

BLANCHE

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Okay, sorta. You get the idea. Blanche and Stella have dynamics too but there’s no room.

So, i guess what i find most compelling about that play is the depravity inherent in all directions of it, and the appreciation thereof. And, like…in the stage directions, Stanley is described with erotic(izing) language (my favorite bit is his torso as his “complete and satisfying center”)—in fact, his character is described as synonymous with his role as a trader in desire, both giving of and taking of it, though not, Tenn is careful to put forth, in any way that makes him vulnerable to the women with whom he swaps this pleasure. Rather, he is completely confident of his deserving this pleasure, and his own role in its manifestation. He is described as possessing “animal joy in all his movements,” and it is intriguing that while Blanche is quick to notice and remark upon Stanley’s animalistic nature, she seems to miss the joy inherent therein. And maybe it is this joy that makes Stanley, in moments, likable (at least as portrayed by Brando). Stanley is violent and disrespectful and misogynistic and that is undeniable, but there is also, as Stella points out somewhat bashfully, something thrilling about the vivacity with which he takes life, with which he loves fucking (rape of Blanche emphatically not included here) and eating and fighting and playing and everything else that is raw.

Brick, on the other hand, is not likable. He is bitter and cruel and detached and selfish. As Avery pointed out, despite the fact that a rather grave family matter is unfolding (i.e. Big Daddy’s acute cancer of the something), the viewer/reader is easily tricked into believing the most pressing matter at hand concerns Brick. Yet, A. also opined: “Tennessee totally loved Brick. He wanted to fuck him.”

Seems plausible; after all, Brick holds himself apart (however prickishly) from (and more, above) his conglomeration of family members who are unsavory for various reasons, with the exception of Maggie —that is, Brick holds himself apart from Maggie in a big way, but she is the most savory character of the bunch, and Maggie is the one who desires Brick most desperately and deeply.

Which leads to the hinge of these plays for me, the complexity and delight: both of them are examinations of desire for men, by women, created (obviously) by a gay man. And…i don’t know what else to say about that here besides, it’s so fun to get lost in that kaleidoscope of desire.

It’s also interesting to me that, setting aside Stanley’s cruelty momentarily, his main motivation is the pursuit of truth: exposing Blanche’s lies and the truth of her past, passing these truths along to

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Mitch, pointing out the futility of Blanche’s attempts to color the truth (ripping the Chinese lantern from the lightbulb), forcing Stella to acknowledge that she fell for Stanley not in spite but because of his “commonness.” Stanley’s manner of divining these truths and what he does with them is dubiously noble, but the truth he seeks out, at least, is pure in its neutral absoluteness. (In this sense, Stanley’s an interesting inverse of Brick, who is emotionally constipated (sorry) with (yet bitterly contemptuous of) mendacity.)

Blanche, meanwhile, actively constructs herself within Stanley’s unwavering and unforgiving gaze—a gaze that seems to take in the completeness of Blanche, both her fragility and her camouflaged strength. So, in this steady gaze, Blanche’s construction is unsuccessful; while she is able to trick both Stella and Mitch into seeing her as only this delicate, wearied, faded woman in need of protection and care, Stanley is able to see that she knows more than she lets on about the demise of Belle Reve (anglicization of “beautiful dream”…), that there is more harshness to her story of how she left her teaching job, and, most importantly, that she has more scrap in her than falling to pieces when the family estate was lost. Blanche conceals her strength, her resourcefulness, her brute will to survive, to the point of whoring in an environment and to men a former incarnation of herself could never have dreamed of, all in the name of providing for herself until she was literally unable to any longer, mentally or legally (having been ejected from town for her dealings). She conceals this strength, and the story it engendered, because she knows a fragile, downtrodden, feminine construction of herself will garner more sympathy from the people who now surround her than the truth—really, the construction itself, though mendacious indeed, is an additional gesture of strength, in that it secured her the pity and shelter of Stella, and, had Stanley not interfered, could have gone on to gain her the devotion and security of Mitch. It’s a shame that Stanley, as the only one to see both Blanche’s weakness and strength, chooses to rob her of the latter.

//

Okay, side note tho, look at the confluence of masculinity and femininity in this photograph of Brando. Um, yeah……

Truman [Capote, duh] once wrote of a certain “androgynous quality, that sexually ambivalent aura that seems a common denominator among certain persons whose allure crosses all frontiers—a mystique not confined to women…a youthful Marlon Brandon [had it].” And yeah, i, er um, get it. // Okay, some weeks have passed since i broke off there, but last thing i wanted to mention, as far as i know now: After reading Cat, A. and i sought out the film version as we had with Streetcar, though i’d only seen Cat once before and A had never seen it. We’d already 14

decided, effectively, that Cat was interesting and definitely had its merits but that Streetcar, on the whole, was a better play. Well, movie-wise, it was no fucking contest: the film adaptation of Cat was a mess.

Stupid directing, off accents, sloppy flow…i don’t know. It was just messily done. But the absolute stupidest and worst part of the film was the fact that it basically corrupted the core of the play—that is, Brick’s forever frustrated desire for his late best friend, Skipper, and the subsequent sexless marriage with Maggie that it led to. In the film, Brick does desire Maggie—i mean, really really does! Like, after they fight, he goes into the bathroom, sniffs her robe or something, and is overtaken by an expression of anguish, balling the delicate fabric in his fists like he wishes he was grabbing something else. But, he can’t allow himself to indulge in the sex Elizabeth Taylor-as-Maggie (those baby blues…) can’t stop trying to throw at him because doing so would be to absolve Maggie of the sin of sleeping with Skipper shortly before he died!! For this, Maggie—and newly hetero/bisexual Brick, by consequence—will suffer eternally, both in this life and the next. Which—in the play, Maggie did sleep with Skipper, but it was a sad sorta fucked up attempt on both of their parts to feel closer to Brick, who was not sleeping with/fully giving himself over to loving either of them, Skipper, due to internalized homophobia/embittering denial, and Maggie, due to, presumably, his homosexuality/greater love of Skipper that, following S’s death, eventually evolves into basic hatred of Maggie. So, in the film, the motive for Maggie and Skipper’s tryst doesn’t even translate. And that’s the thing about the film, generally. With the story’s core fundamentally altered, the characters’ relationships to one another no longer piece together quite correctly; the play’s driving subtext—Brick’s love of the late Skipper—is replaced, i guess?, by his refusal to sleep with Maggie, which everyone makes their business. Which everyone makes their business in the play, as well, but toward the greater gesture of gently having Brick open himself to his own true sexuality—namely the folks who do this are Maggie herself and Brick’s father, Big Daddy. And the tragedy of the play lies in the fact that even when Brick is surrounded by people who support and love him—perhaps more, asshole that he is, than he deserves—he is still unable to admit the truth of his feelings for Skipper, not even to himself.

So, what was a compelling if imperfect play about frustrated desire, [self-]delusion, and loyalty in the face of sexual mismatch became a shoddily made film about punishing women’s sexuality and self-damning revenge.* Cool, good moves there, folks. And like, i’m sure stupid Hollywood codes brought that on, but if you can’t do it right, leave it the fuck alone. I’d love to see a faithful film adaptation—does that exist? Will look. [Yes, there’s 2 television versions, one 1976 w Natalie Wood, one 1984 w Jessica Lange.] It’s also interesting bc the film’s marketing, at least, is way more focussed on Elizabeth Taylor as Maggie the Cat—in fact, the poster art advertises just that, as well as Taylor’s sexy, slipped figure half propped up on a bed, long red fingernails grasping the edge of the poster’s frame. And now, in the play, she’s just another of the ensemble, more important than Big Mama or brother Gooper, but slightly less important than Big Daddy, and infinitely less important than Skipper, despite his physical absence. Of course, a lot of that has to do with Taylor’s star power, esp. c 1958. And she is well dressed, but of course. But yeah. Just an interesting aesthetic re-focussing of the story.

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Anyway, my analysis of the film adaptation may be a little half-baked as we were forced to shut it off forty minutes in due to its overwhelmingly reductive mediocrity. Take that, uh…Richard Brooks and James Poe.

P.S. Oh, shit. According to the Wiki page the film also introduced a third act not included in the play in which Brick and Big Daddy wholeheartedly reconcile. Wow. So glad we didn’t stick that one out.

*there are other themes about like greed and shit but there’s not as interesting to me DUST TRACKS ON A ROAD, ZORA NEALE HURSTON I have to start this on a sobering note, bc that’s the note that continues to resonate with me in the week after i finished reading this book. Dust Tracks was written in 1942, after Hurston had published three novels, dozens of articles, two books of African-American folklore as a result of her post-collegiate anthropological studies in the Gulf states, not to mention her work in the theatre, two-time receipt of a Guggenheim fellowship and an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Morgan State College. Her work had been celebrated, her ambition well-known; she was well-connected to the literati and other artists of her day; and she had plenty of plans for subsequent work. One might assume that Dust Tracks, written when ZNH was 51 years old, would mark the beginning of the golden age of the author’s life, in which she might continue to reap the rewards of her hard and varied work, and the recognition she deserved.

Instead, it was essentially her zenith. While she would continue to publish pieces of cultural criticism, as well as one more novel (with another one being rejected by her publisher in 1945), by 1956 she was filling positions as a librarian or substitute teacher to make ends meet; in 1960, she died of heart complications and was buried in an unmarked grave, to pass out of public consciousness for the most part until Alice Walker’s discovery of her grave and subsequent article, “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston,” published in Ms. magazine in 1975.

[Which i haven’t read yet because it’s not online, whined the lazy millennial. BUT, i went on to use my computer to place a hold on In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens at the library, which i’ve been meaning to read for ages. So i guess sometimes these things work out for the best.]

My point is: ZNH was a well-respected, hard-working black woman artist and intellectual but died penniless and without even post-mortem recognition, and that really fucking sucks and just sort of crushed me. [I’m pretty sure Alice Walker already said that, and more, a lot better than me.]

ANYwho, that realization just sort of colored me with a kind of disappointed sadness that really brought me down from the overall satisfaction i gleaned from the memoir…and it’s not a typical memoir. Zora obviously didn’t give a shit about telling the stories she “should” tell; while there was relatively little in the book about her writing life/books/adult work, she spends pages expounding on the imaginary friends she made for herself as a child out of a bar of scented soap, a corn husk, and spools of thread—which i think is just great for a couple of reasons. First, fuck any predetermined standard of what is important in the telling of a life story. Second, those are details intimate perhaps only to her, while there would have been much greater record of her adult work, so happy that she took a chance to tell those little, interior stories when she could. And third, of course it’s invaluable to learn of these early-life gems for the sake of tracing them to her work as an adult—between the storytelling, 16

and the exploring, and her father’s work as a preacher, and the town general store where she’d hang out against her mother’s wishes to listen to the adults tell gossip and folktales—it all just fits, and i love seeing that.

The memoir also includes a handful of more expository/philosophical chapters on the topics of race, romantic love, friendship, and religion. And this is where the bones to pick arose.

Now, Zora was raised in the all-black community of Eatonville, Florida, of which her father once served as mayor and lawmaker. Her mother also held positions of community leadership through the school and church. Young Zora, then, grew up surrounded by no uncertain examples of black competence, agency, and innovation—not an unusual experience itself, to be sure, but indeed unusual in its marked officialness, the town being recognized and recognizing itself explicitly as an all-Negro community. I doubt these early impressions were unimportant to her eventual stance of the beside the point-ness of race, and particularly of [her own] blackness. While in, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” she offers the oft-quoted, “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background,” [a background she was able to largely avoid in her youth], she also states: “I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored.” In this statements, i detect the real both/and-ness of black identity, particularly in Zora’s time: yes, i am black—that both matters in the sense of my culture and lineage, but also does not matter in the sense that i am, inherently, not different and therefore worse than. It’s as if any allowance for difference, in this racial context, introduces the potential for degradation.

All of this is tricky for me to navigate. As a biracial black person, much of my recent personal project has been claiming, without anxiety or undue qualifier, my own blackness, introducing it as a positive (that is, present, effective, active) aspect of my identity rather than a dormant one. And here Zora frames it, essentially, as that—not totally dormant, maybe, in that it clearly and beautifully shaped the entire trajectory of her work, novelistic and anthropological, yet it was not an aspect of her identity she felt called upon to address in a personal sense, or apparently dwell upon much. And of course that’s fine! Each black person has every right to relate to their blackness as they do; there is no best or right or one way to do so. Maybe Zora’s relative nonchalance toward her blackness is simply symptomatic of its thorough incorporation into her psyche, whereas this is not the case with me.

Anyway, that’s not the bone i had to pick with her. The bone was Zora’s essential disregard of the effects of systematic racism. And her appeal to a sort of respectability politics. In a chapter titled “My People! My People!”, Zora notes that the “well-bred Negro has looked around and seen America with his eyes. He or she has set himself to measure up to what he thinks of as the white standard of living. He is conscious of the fact that the Negro in America needs more respect if he expects to get any acceptance at all.” In contrast to the “well-bred Negro,” she presents an image of black people eating messily and speaking loudly of private matters in public. And, okay. Let’s just try to break this apart a little.

“Well-bred,” from all i can ever guess, is a nebulous term encompassing concepts of a wellrespected family of origin, overall decent personal motivations, a good working sense of etiquette, and access to some level of education. Fair? And it seems fair to assume that Zora would’ve considered herself well-bred. “…has looked around and seen America with his eyes”—that is, they see the country in which they live for exactly how it is, absent any subjective hopes or fears—that looking revealing a country dominated culturally, economically, and legally by whites who, 80 years prior at the time of Dust Track’s writing, had enslaved blacks, and who, in slightly more recent times, had done much to continue a legacy of mental and economic enslavement of blacks, physical enslavement now being off the menu, not to mention a perpetuated narrative of blacks’ inherent moral and intellectual inferiority.

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Right? K. “He or she has set himself to measure up to what he thinks of as the white standard of living.” So, underlined part first. Let’s assume, as no other definition is given, that this “white standard” comprises the same attributes noted above as part of being “well-bred.” So, this language implies that while the well-bred and presently respectable Negro may feel alienated from this “white standard,” feeling it is not truly theirs to claim or embody, actually, such a standard is as much for the Negro as for whites. So, here i’m getting two pieces of troubling and paradoxical subtext: first, the “standard” for “decent” living and, ultimately, respectability, while ultimately accessible to all people regardless of race, is nonetheless—and uncontestedly—defined by white culture/people. And second, though, again, while this standard of respectability belongs as much to the Negro as anyone else, because they do not really believe that (“what he thinks of”), the “respectable” Negro is essentially engaged in an on-going performance, an on-going act of racial/respectability drag.

Last: “He is conscious of the fact that the Negro in America needs more respect if he expects to get any acceptance at all.” That is, this on-going racialized performance of standardized respectability serves to garner the Negro respect from white America, in whose account he stands in inherent deficit from the get-go—so, this deficit demands more rigorously “respectable” behavior to make it up. And it is through respect from white America that the Negro’s presence therein will ever be accepted, period.

Rather than calling bullshit on this hiked rent, if you will, Zora seems to take it as an exhilarating challenge: “It is thrilling to think—to know that for any act of mine, I shall get twice as much praise or twice as much blame” (“How It Feels to Be Colored Me”). [The edition i read included some contemporary critical responses to the book, and white reviewers ate up this stance of Zora’s, one noting: “She might have taken either of two attitudes from [her life events]; either an arrogant, selfmade Negro attitude, or the conventional bitter and downtrodden one. She takes neither because she does not see that she was under any special disadvantage, and in the end she has no reason for bitterness…The race consciousness that spoils so much Negro literature is completely absent here.”]

And again, while each black person has every right to relate as they do to their blackness, it strains me to think that Zora couldn’t have seen how, while these raised stakes thrilled her, they might have paralyzed her neighbor, infuriated her cousin, depressed her friend. And hell, maybe she did, really—i want to give her the benefit of that doubt—but really i don’t see any reason to believe so from what she’s written. And i guess here is another instance of the personal/political divide: Zora took the higher demands of respectability/success/etc. for black people as a motivating personal challenge, but did she see its problematicness in terms of black people as a whole?

I just feel like not, judging from the language she uses around systematic racism in other parts of Dust Tracks. At one point, she essentially cops to this: “The solace of easy generalization was taken from me, but I have received the richer gift of individualism. When I have been made to suffer or when I have been made happy by others, I have known that individuals were responsible for that, and not races.” And maybe the folly i find here is that, when Zora was made to suffer for racial reasons, she was reticent to blame white people while she would have been well within her rights to blame institutional racism. While of course individualism and granularity have their place, it is not solely individuals who shape the trajectories of entire races of people and the dynamics of power between them—it is the greater structures and institutions and ideologies that these individuals comprise.

The divide between individualism and collectivism arises in another interesting way: Zora asks “And why should Negroes be united? Nobody else in America is.” While it’s always crucial to recognize the multiplicity of any group of people, to reject monolithic narratives, it is simultaneously true that, in Zora’s time and today to perhaps a somewhat diminished extent, black people are perceived as a monolith by white America, and that while various black people of course have their own motives and 18

investments and concerns, it seems equally certain that all black people would be invested in the defense of the monolith that represents them in white America—which perhaps, only after the humanity and respect of that monolith has been firmly secured, can the monolith then be deconstructed to reveal the multiplicity of blackness that truly and has always existed.

In other words, we are not ready, whether in 1942 or 2015, to attempt a “raceless” society.

Later in that chapter: “Since there is no fundamental conflict, since there is no solid reason why the blacks and the whites cannot live in one nation in perfect harmony, the only thing in the way of it is Race Pride and Race Consciousness.” &, re: slavery, “I see no reason to keep my eyes fixed on the dark years of slavery and the Reconstruction. I am three generations removed from it, and therefore have no experience of the thing. From what I can learn, it was sad…Still, there seems to me to be nothing but futility in gazing backward over my shoulder and buking the grave of some white man who has been dead too long to talk about.” These sentiments taken together present a simplistic reading of the history between black and white Americans, and slavery in particular, as an comprising uncharged, episodic events, whereas the economic disparity between the current state of blacks and the amount of work they, both as slaves and as underpaid workers post-Emancipation, put into America to build its economy is well-known and -considered today (well, by some). Not to mention the cultural and emotional inheritances set off by slavery, whether three or six generations past: most encompassingly, the inferiority of blacks and corresponding superiority of whites. Again, in the second quotation, Zora’s individualistic perspective is actively at play. Zora’s views on the folly of considering a race of people collectively, particularly black people, also seems informed by the folklore she both heard growing up and studied as an adult, particularly one tale, referenced in my response to Every Tongue Got to Confess, in which black people receive their color from God accidentally, as a result of their being late to a meeting: “So according to that, we are no race. We are just a collection of people who overslept our time and got caught in the dark.”

But here, i have to check myself a little. It feels important to me to critique Zora’s ideas, both because i’ve learned the value of considered, respectful dissent, particularly with those who you, overall, admire, and because the cores of many of her views continue to be at play in today’s racial politics, from the question of respectability politics to the question of the cultural legacy, or lack thereof, of slavery. However, it’s also important for me to remember Zora’s temporal location. While i don’t want to be condescending and discount the complexity of her own commentary on race or that of her contemporaries’, it is also true that Zora lived before the Civil Rights Movement, before the named concept of black power, before the cultural uplifting of blackness as both a constitutive identity factor and point of positive difference from normative white American culture. It was, simply, a different time, and the investments of blacks as a whole must have been different from now, as was the character of their collective power. That power was perhaps more covert than now, more outwardly appeasing and aspiringly non-offensive, non-divisive.

For example, today, even as unarmed black people continue to be murdered by police, the Black Lives Matter movement exists—there is a voice, comprising individuals both black and non-black, that unequivocally asserts the inherent value of black lives, that insists that black people need rise to no “standard” in order to be valued as human beings. Even if these demands are not heeded, they are being vocalized, loudly and over and over; there is space in today’s America for them to be heard, exerted, however grudgingly, to whatever effect. Whereas, in Zora’s time, such a space was far more restricted, such demands far less voluble, necessarily so. Essentially, there was less space for dissent, less space for the collective power held by black people to be openly exerted into white America. This is not in any way to imply that then and now are opposites, that today’s racial American landscape is 19

utopian [ed. note: i wish that word were “utopic” instead] in any sense. In fact, the very same threats to black people asserting their power in America exist today as they did in 1942, or 1842: those being, silencing, violence, lack of safety, removal of resources, removal of power, removal of community, removal of credibility, removal of humanity, belittling, alienation, and/or death. The difference today, though, is the nature of the space that responds to the power, to the voices—that space comprising, in no small part, white response to this power/these voices.

Maybe in order to have any will whatever to carry forth with their lives in the face of overwhelming bigotry and racism, Zora and others who held views similar to hers were obliged to commit to a narrative of blackness as, personally, beside the point, and slavery as an uncharged fait accompli, and any collective understanding of race as limiting and not useful. I don’t mean to completely devalue patterns of thought that came of a time and disempowered positionality that i will never understand, never having lived it. But at the same time i can’t (evidently) let it pass me by unremarked upon, uncritiqued.

Whew. Just a few other things here [though i did acquire In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens, and may have a few more things to add after i read the Zora bits]. I found myself super struck by Zora’s discussion of —or, perhaps more accurately, depiction of, colorism and, by extension, misogynoir within the black community. She sums up the views of one participant in her black folklore research on dark-skinned black women: “They were evil. They slept with their fists balled up ready to fight and squabble even while they were asleep. They even had evil dreams. White, yellow, and brown girls dreamed about roses and perfume and kisses. Black gals dreamed about guns, razors, ice-picks, and hatchets and hot lye.”

She goes on to directly quote the man: “I done slept wid yaller women and I done slept wid black ones. They is evil. You marry a yaller or a brown woman and wake her up in de night and she will sort of stretch herself and say, ‘I know what I was dreaming when you woke me up. I was dreaming I had done baked you a chicken and cooked you a great big old cake, and we was at de table eating our dinner out of de same plate, and I was sitting on your lap and we was just enjoying ourselves to death!’ Then she will kiss you more times than you ask her to, and go on back to sleep. But you take and wake up a black gal, now! First thing she been sleeping wid her fists balled up, and you shake her, she’ll lam you five or six times before you can get her awake. Then when she do git wake she’ll have off and ast you, ‘Nigger, what you wake me up for? Know what I was dreaming when you woke me up? I dreamt dat you shook your old rusty black fist under my nose and I split your head on wid a axe.’

Then she’ll kick your feets away from hers, snatch de covers all over on her side, ball up her fists agin, and gwan back to sleep.”

The absurd hyperbole of this second passage might be amusing if it weren’t so depressing. Zora doesn’t offer a whole hell of a lot of commentary on this herself, but there are a few clear things to notice, even so. First, the internalized racism/anti-blackness implicit in the portrayal of the darkskinned/black-black woman. She is violent, unfeeling, dangerous, and coarse—all attributes deemed constitutive of blackness by the white gaze. It’s as if the black men offering these characterizations, 20

unable to fully denounce these dehumanizing stereotypes of blackness, instead compartmentalize them within the body of the dark-skinned black woman, the mule of the world—despite the fact that he may love those bodies, those women, may sleep with and beside them, may indeed have come from one. And of course inherent in that compartmentalization is misogyny; the two forces’ confluence is misogynoir.

Second, of course, is the proposed inverse of the dark-skinned woman, the inverse of the misogynoir of which she becomes recipient: the yellow or brown black woman, lighter on the broad spectrum of blackness. The light-skinned woman is sweet, subservient, and traditionally feminine —“traditionally feminine” here meaning “in the way of the white tradition of femininity,” gesturing toward a model of femininity that white women, regardless of class, are conditioned to aspire toward [if the white woman is poor, she is conditioned to long for the delicate femininity of her wealthy counterparts, to feel inadequate for being unable to fully attain it; if she is wealthy, she is conditioned to rid herself of any desires that fall without the purview of this image]. Embedded in this characterization of the light-skinned woman, then, is the positioning of traditional white femininity as the most desirable manifestation thereof. There is also the dubious implication that because the lightskinned woman “looks more white,” she “acts more white,” or perhaps “is.” While the dark-skinned woman has agency, will, and desire of her own, however violent and unflattering, the light-skinned woman exists for the gaze of the man, even down to the content of her dreams. Fuck that; misogynoir all around, though i do maintain that dark-skinned women receive the rawer, more damaging end of the deal, being basically portrayed as being incapable of being desired, even if light-skinned women are desired for the wrong reasons. (Though then again, what is the power of being desired within a fuckedup gaze [narrowly skirts that rabbit hole]?).

[Ed.’s side note: For the first time in my life, here, in New Orleans, i was referred to as “high yellow.” I was simultaneously thrilled and deeply and complicatedly aware of the subtext of high yellow womanhood, especially in this city with its history of plaçage and other well-marked traditions of interracial desire. See also: my tortured journal entries.]

I guess the main takeaway here is that i feel appreciative to Zora for doing her work, for sticking to her guns, for holding her own position, for being complicated and thorny and not on this perfect pedestal we can look up to and pet and not question and not critique.

And two final quotes from her—the first one isn’t really related to anything, i just love it; if i was still writing poems, i’d write one responding to it.

“I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads.” (“How it Feels to Be Colored Me”) “I maintain that I have been a Negro three times—a Negro baby, a Negro girl and a Negro woman. Still, if you have received no clear cut impression of what the Negro in America is like, then you are in the same place with me.

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There is no The Negro here. Our lives are so diversified, internal attitudes so varied, appearances and capabilities so different, that there is no possible classification so catholic that will cover us all except My people! My people!” (Dust Tracks) ADDENDUM Okay, as promised, tracked down In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, and Alice Walker had plenty to say about ZNH, and Dust Tracks specifically.

First, this: For me, the most unfortunate thing Zora ever wrote is her autobiography. After the first several chapters, it rings false. One begins to hear the voice of someone whose life required the assistance of too many transitory ‘friends.’ A Taoist proverb states that to act sincerely with the insincere is dangerous. (A mistake blacks as a group have tended to make in America.) And so we have Zora sincerely offering gratitude and kind words to people one knows she could not have respected. But this unctuousness, so out of character for Zora, is also a result of dependency, a sign of her powerlessness, her inability to pay back her debts with anything but words. They must have been bitter ones for her. In her dependency, it should be remembered, Zora was not alone— because it is quite true that America does not support or honor us as human beings, let alone as blacks, women, and artists. We have taken help where it was offered because we are committed to what we do and to the survival of our work. Zora was committed to the survival of her people’s cultural heritage as well. (91) And really, that’s all i need to add—that analysis really succinctly framed the dissonance i was feeling between the sentiments expressed in the later part of the autobiography and those of its beginning, slash Zora’s body and ethos of work more generally speaking. And just deepens the sadness i expressed at the beginning of the Dust Track entry, for not only had Zora died impoverished and lacking enduring recognition of her work and its quality; she had, further, been forced to abandon her integrity in a desperate bid for support. The “racial health” Walker feels is characteristic of Zora’s work as a whole—that is, “a sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings, a sense that is lacking in so much black writing and literature”—was, if not compromised by the sentiments expressed in Dust Tracks, definitely put to a different sort of test, brought to face a greater complication.

This move must have been difficult for Zora, rubbed against her grain, having lived the majority of her life boldly and, yeah, blackly: With her easy laughter and her Southern drawl, her belief in doing “cullud” dancing authentically, Zora seemed—among these genteel “New Negroes” of the Harlem Renaissance—black. No wonder her presence was always a shock. Though almost everyone agreed she was a delight, not everyone agreed such audacious black delight was permissible, or, indeed, quite the proper image for the race. (89)

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And lastly, this bit struck the hell out of me: Zora was a woman who wrote and spoke her mind—as far as one could tell, practically always. People who knew her and were unaccustomed to this characteristic in a woman, who was, moreover, a. sometimes in error, and b. successful, for the most part, in her work, attacked her as meanly as they could. Would I also be attacked if I wrote and spoke my mind? And if I dared open my mouth to speak, must I always be ‘correct’? And by whose standards? (87) Walker stated this in the context of her having looked into criticism of Hurston’s work when Walker was a “young, impressionable, barely begun writer”—a move she, in hindsight, identifies as a mistake. It resonates; as a writer in a similar position, not to mention a person frequently anxious about articulating herself period, a false, ultimately implausible imperative to be perfect, to state everything you mean in a perfectly correct manner, can become paralyzing, even in terms of simply getting words down on the page. And truth is, of course, sometimes you will be in error and, even failing that, sometimes someone won’t agree with you, but i’ll strive to take as a model the way Zora lived her art and the majority of her life—that is, boldly, and stingy with fucks.

THE SOUND AND THE FURY, WILLIAM FAULKNER [Okay, this is one of Avery’s favorite books so i thought it would be nice to have a convo about it with her in lieu of just writing my own response; that’s coming, eventually, i guess in part 2 of this zine.]

EVERYTHING THAT RISES MUST CONVERGE, FLANNERY O’CONNOR I think it makes the most sense to say that i approach Flannery O’Connor as if she were an enormous block of granite: with some reverence, with some sense of mystery, yet, at the same time, a sense of confidence and certainty. Like an enormous block of granite, Flannery feels to me imposing, dense, intense, and uncompromising—yet, at the same time, essentially uniform, consistent, and, if not predictable, reliable.

I first approached that block as a senior in high school, choosing Wise Blood for an independent reading choice once my teacher referenced, basically, the weird Catholic shit Flannery was hung up on; the recognition was instant, seeing as how that year, i was toiling in a seemingly endless capacity on a triptych of a play concerning the Church, covering such topics as female priests, illicit clerical sexuality, and the divide between priest’s duty to “man” and duty to god. [The independent reading assignment was focussed on our providing some sort of “sensory object” to share with the class alongside our analysis of the text; my object of pink and yellow cake, which one of the characters sees in a diner, was a weak yet tasty connexion.] Didn’t come to Flannery again until my senior year in college, in a class about modernism, in which she was posed as falling just at the outset of the literary movement; we were reading The Violent Bear It Away. My professor asked if anyone had read any other O’Connor and, though i said i had, i found i could not remember any of the details of Wise Blood for the life of me, apart from its overall mood/geography, that is: bleak, dusty, ruthless, and kinda ugly and kinda weird.

Andy joked something like in a way it didn’t really matter since Flannery was such a recycler of her themes, images, and characters.

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Having at that point only read Wise Blood, i took his word for it, but as my consumption of her work has broadened, that comment has never left me—has, in fact, pretty rigidly proved itself, to the point of my intense frustration about halfway through Everything That Rises Must Converge. Slamming the book down halfway through a story, I complained to Avery, “I don’t even feel like finishing it! I already know where it’s going. Something violent will happen at the end of the story and then it’ll pull out into some weird, abstract image in which the attacked character enters the landscape or the horizon or some shit.”

Which, okay, in that particular case, i wasn’t wrong. But, my continued if troubled faith was rewarded by the very next story, “The Enduring Chill,” in which the main character, a young, onceaspiring artist, travels home to the country because he believes he is dying from a nonspecific, incurable illness [which, to me, seemed eerily like AIDS, tho this story was written decades before the first case]. Between behaving callously to his mother, sister, and the county doctor, Asbury finds the time to resign himself to the basic failure of his life: he had gone to New York to become an artist; he failed as an artist, failed to even make art in the first place, let alone secure recognition for it. He had failed his god and now he was dying; he takes a perverse sort of comfort in his failure, its finiteness: no, he was not the artist he’d always believed he would be [key tense: conditional], but at least now, he wouldn’t have to struggle toward it any longer; fate sealed. But then, huzzah! Doc reveals he isn’t dying after all, but rather afflicted with a manageable condition! And suddenly, Asbury has to face the rest of his life after having resigned himself to his own existential failure.

I mean, wow. Wow!! WOW. Sorry. It just strikes some deep sorta chord—this story, i knew even as i began to read it, tearing up with excitement throughout the buildup, was gonna be different—but no worries, it’s still violent!

But psychically violent, psychically uncompromising and punishing, violence contained within the loop of one person and their own self-perception. What could be more essential, more fundamentally damaging? And it’s so nasty! Asbury, you poor son of a bitch.

This particular story is especially interesting in that Flannery wrote it after receiving her diagnosis of lupus, a degenerative condition of which her father had died and of which she too would die in 1964, only 39 years old. One can’t help but wonder at Flannery’s relationship to the, as it turns out, non-fatally ill Asbury: does she envy him for his restored opportunity, or did she feel herself, having worked hard and strong in the ~20 years of her career, set apart from him, both sicker than him and more faithful than him to their ostensibly shared principles? Did she scorn his comfortable acceptance of life-failure in order to make peace with her own life-truncation?

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In “Beyond the Peacock: The Reconstruction of Flannery O’Connor,” an essay in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, Alice Walker says: “Whatever her characters’ color or social position she saw them as she saw herself, in the light of imminent mortality.”

Lupus is relevant, too, in that in entailed confinement to her mother’s home in rural Georgia for the last ten years of Flannery’s life—so, as Andy and others have pointed out, if Flannery’s geography seems at times limited, this literal spatial and physical limitation likely played a part. The Paris Review’s “Flannery O’Connor and the Habit of Art” reveals that O’Connor’s original artistic endeavor was in cartoons, and traces the relationship between this highly visual, observational art form and its instruction of her subsequent fiction writing. Poignant, then, to consider that in her final days, she was not only housebound and restricted to the same repeating tableaux, but worked with her desk turned, pointedly, against a plain wall instead of toward the window.

It’s true, too, that the consistency of her trappings aside, the central loci of O’Connor’s work— transcendence, redemption, reckoning, purification, rebirth—are certainly heavy and intense enough to be mulled over from many angles, however finely tweaked. And let’s not forget that, despite her thematic intensity, Flannery’s work is oddly funny, too! And while her themes might be treated in a secular capacity, Flannery’s treatment is unabashedly Catholic [though many of her characters are, being Southerners, Protestant], which just adds a whole other wash of—uncompromisingness [ew]. After finishing The Violent Bear It Away, Andy asked us what there was to like about her; i answered her lack of compromise. And it’s true, to me; even as she obsessive, or seemingly uncompassionate, or violent, she does not compromise her beliefs or her stories—or, really, her characters’ bone-deep, occasionally hideous humanity. And fuck, gotta respect that. So, even as i naturally gravitate toward stories that are more intimate, or interpersonal, more gentle in their intensity, i continue to be drawn to Flannery, who is flame [& she was an Aries, duh].

The volume is introduced by Robert Fitzgerald, with whose family Flannery lived for a period in Connecticut; Fitz points to the confluence of different cross sections of human life—class, race, age, and gender, primarily—and the complications that arise from this in each of the collection’s stories. In the way of race, Alice Walker makes a fascinating point about O’Connor’s portrayal of black characters: “…her black characters, male and female, appear equally shallow, demented, and absurd. That she retained a certain distance (only, however, in her later, mature work) from the inner workings of her black characters seems to me all to her credit, since, by deliberately limiting her treatment of them to cover their observable demeanor and actions, she leaves them free, in the reader’s imagination, to inhabit another landscape, another life, than the one she creates for them. This is a kind of grace many writers do not have when dealing with representatives of an oppressed people within a story, and their insistence on knowing everything, on being God, in fact, has burdened us with more stereotypes than we can ever hope to shed.” (52) Wow! This meant a lot to me as a person who has for several years now felt slightly paralyzed at the prospect of writing characters whose backgrounds differ from mine, especially in contexts in which i have more privilege, and especially considering the fact that as a biracial person, i don’t feel i have a clear, unequivocal people i “belong" to, about whom i have an inalienable “right” to write [so i've decided to start with writing some GD mixed people, isn't that fancy??]. The feminist politics of writing 25

fiction…Anywho, this felt like a good way for me to frame O’Connor’s black character characterizations, esp. contrasting with that of, say, Faulkner, with, say, Dilsey.

Other interesting thing brought up by Walker—so, the last story in the collection, “Judgment Day,” is a many times reworked version of the first story Flannery published at age 21, originally called “Geranium.” It concerns an old man from the rural South coming to live in NYC with his daughter, and his attempts at connection with the black people who move into the apartment next door.

Assuming they are like the other black people he has known, he does racist yet embarrassingly friendlyly-intentioned things like calling the black man “preacher.” The pair get fed up with the old man’s insults and are eventually violent against him. My reaction was mixed: i feel on the defensive every time a black character is portrayed as violent by a white writer, even when, as becomes clear as i type this, most of O’Connor’s characters are violent in some capacity. It was also clear that the man would not have survived in New York, and was not going to make it back home [not even, given the falseness of his daughter’s promise to ship his remains down South, after death], so perhaps the black man’s violence could be figured as a deliverance, even a mercy. Even so, i felt mixed up and a little wary.

Then, “Beyond the Peacock” offered the fact that in the story’s earlier incarnation of “Geranium,” the black neighbors had suffered the old man's abuse and insults with “self-effacing” passivity, an image completely altered in the story’s final form: “The quality added [to “Judgment Day”] is rage, and, in this instance, O’Connor waited until she saw it exhibited by black people [via the Civil Rights movement] before she recorded it” (54)—this reading, of course, reflecting Walker’s assessment of O’Connor characterizing blacks “by example”—an example which, in this case, empowers two black characters to act with the ruthlessness and violence to which her white characters have long been entitled. I find the dissonance between this reading of the story and my own gut reaction to it mildly fascinating. What, then, do i make of the relationship between power and blackness and violence? What is my discomfort around it? A topic for different pages than these, but some pages nonetheless.

Last thing, the story “The Lame Shall Enter First” [incidentally, a foreghost of The Violent Bear It Away] contains the most satisfying click of realization/perspective shift for a character that i remember encountering. I said “mmm!” out loud, that satisfying. Don’t wanna say more, just read it.

IN SEARCH OF OUR MOTHERS’ GARDENS, ALICE WALKER i.

So, the professor who taught me both Intro to Women’s Studies and Creative Non-Fiction—two deeply formative classes of my undergraduate career—named In Search as one of the most affecting books she’d read, in terms of her feminist and personal consciousness. So, my wanting to include “Looking for Zora” in my response to Dust Tracks on a Road was a nice little nudge for me to get on reading a book i’d wanted to for a while. And how pleasing; though it was not included in my original southern curriculum, it’s added a ton of perspective, both in terms of contributing a critical framework for some of the writers i’ve been dealing with [ZNH, O’Connor, Faulkner], from a black Southern woman’s perspective, and in terms of Walker’s more personal essays which directly deal with her experiences as such. It’s a long book handling a lot of topics, so i thought it would be good to respond in two parts; i’m a bit more than halfway thru now.

So, as the title of the volume suggests, part of this book involves seeking out and honoring literary models for black women artists—rediscovering and restoring literary models, and interrogating the sources of their inspiration and nourishment. So the first section is a collection of profiles of some 26

of Walker’s models, who variously black and white, woman and man, including Zora and, complexly, Flannery. And i don’t have a whole lot to say about the content exactly, but rather i just appreciate the concept itself, as well as Walker looking at white women writers like Flannery and ! Virginia Woolf ! [—30 second swoon pause—] in both deep appreciation and critique, with a simultaneous sense of closeness to and distance from her psyche and lived experience as a black woman. Ionknow, man, there’s this one part where she takes a piece of A Room of One’s Own and intersplices phrases like “black” and “enslaved” to apply it to the life of enslaved black poet Phillis Wheatley* and—aw, hell, why don’t i just quote it…

Virginia Woolf wrote further, speaking of course not of our Phillis, that “any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century [insert “eighteenth century,” insert “black woman,” insert “born or made a slave”] would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard [insert “Saint”]… […] Yet genius of this sort must have existed among women as it must have existed among the working class. [Change this to “slaves” and “wives and daughters of sharecroppers.”] Now and again an Emily Brontë or a Robert Burns [change this to “a Zora Hurston or a Richard Wright”] blazes out and proves its presence. (235, 239-40) Like, righteous!! I dunno, it feels like a really inspiring example of reappropriating/ recontextualizing texts of minds who you, in general, respect/admire but whose perspectives ignore your experience/identities. It’s possible! You don’t have to toss it all out, or even only approach it with an enormous grain of salt, but rather, you can make it yours.

The other thing that struck me was Walker’s really strongly articulated and considered position as a black person not only from the South, but one who chose to return (for a time) to the South, spending seven years in Mississippi after two and half years of college at Spelman, and the final 1.5 of undergrad at Barnard. I’m not from the South and hold no illusion that possessing a New Orleans address for, oh, ~4 months now makes me a Southerner. But my family on my dad’s side did come to the Midwest from the South, in search, for all i can assume, of a better life with richer opportunities for themselves and their descendants. And now, here i am, one of their descendants, rejecting the place they chose as worthy of being left, and returning to the place they’d deemed unlivable—not just South, but just about as deep into the South as you can go, geographically if not culturally speaking (New Orleans/Louisiana culture is a bit apart from deep Southern culture in general). I’m very aware of this all the time, in a way that’s more complex and loaded than simply being a regional transplant in a new city.

For Walker’s part, she finds a lot of integrity in Southern blacks who elected to remain in their places of birth—not that she is not understanding of the reasons some blacks did chose to leave, or condemns them for doing so. Rather, she contends that she as a black person will not feel fully at home in America until she can be at home anywhere in America, and that such a pervasive sense of belonging can never come to pass if blacks elect to abandon whole regions of the country, however strong and ugly the pressure for them to do just that.

As a markedly Southern black, Walker was profoundly moved by Martin Luther King, Jr.’s perspective on the Southern black experience—and ownership thereof:

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And when he spoke of “letting freedom ring” across “the green hills of Alabama and the red hills of Georgia” I saw again what he was always uniquely able to make me see: that I, in fact, had claim to the land of my birth…This may not seem like much to other Americans, who constantly move about the country with nothing but restlessness and greed to prod them, but to the Southern black person brought up expecting to be run away from home—because of lack of jobs, money, power, and respect—it was a notion that took root in willing soil. (160-1) As i said, i was not born a Southerner, and approach with profound respect and interest the dual wound and joy of Southern black experience and lineage. Walker goes on to say that settling in the South “might and must be…purely a matter of choice or preference” for subsequent black artists. And for me, it certainly is—a choice that my father, i’ve joked somewhat anxiously, might not understand if he knew about it, but one that is mine to make. *one of the elementary schools here in NOLA—originally built in 1954 as a segregated school for black students—is named after her and i get it now! ii.

So, the thing that stuck out to me most about the second half of the book is its final essay: “One Child of One’s Own: A Meaningful Digression within the Work(s),” in which Walker meditates upon the intersection of mothering (one child specifically) and her writing work and her own sense of womanhood. This seemed particularly juicy from the get-go, as i’ve read Walker’s daughter Rebecca Walker’s memoir Black White Jewish and know from that that Rebecca was not completely satisfied with the maternal relationship proffered her; it was intriguing to hear the relationship from the other side— intriguing and, to be completely honest, very complicating!

Much of it has to do with my own perceptions of parenthood, childrearing, and particularly motherhood—i hate to digress personally (right…), but i feel untangling all of this is important to understand why the essay hit me so viscerally. So, i don’t know. I just feel very intensely about all of the things mentioned above, partly, i think, because i grew up not having a mother, and came to idolize that role in abstraction, so to speak, if not my own personal mother (which is part of the reason why Virginia Woolf and To the Lighthouse in particular speak so strongly to me—Virginia dealt heavily with an idea that can be summed up as the “empty center”; that is, if the mother figure is absent, the child lacks a “center” against which to model themself [particularly if the child is also female and presumably looking to the mother for gender norms/conceptions of “woman”], and all that can be, to understate, hard to deal with!). So, mother issues coupled with other traumatic aspects of my childhood lead me to take extremely seriously the notion of childrearing, and perhaps romanticize the idea of carrying and giving birth to a child—i also take children themselves extremely seriously, as beings who haven’t yet been brainwashed by the preponderance of bullshit all around us, who can cut to the truth of matters with sometimes startling alacrity, whose intentions and motivations are not necessarily always kind or good, but which are always frank and therefore pure.

I had a babysitting gig for a few weeks when i first moved to New Orleans—3 children, ages 2, 5, and 8—after not having babysat since, oh, junior high (it’s not my bag, but i needed ca$h). More than the basic challenge of managing and entertaining 3 children of different interests/needs for 8 hours on end, i was supremely challenged by the intensity with which i was taking the whole matter—good, 28

beautiful things, and ugly, unsettling ones. It’s like any layers of veneer i’m usually able to keep between myself and other adults were stripped away with these children, and everything they did or said to me or to one another hit me a thousand times harder than it typically would have. For example, when the littlest kid, Charlotte, would reach for me when she was overwhelmed by her older siblings’ spirited play, and tuck her head against my shoulder as i gently swayed back and forth with her, and brush my earrings with her little hands—or how my singing “Moon River” to her before naps and bed became a ritual she would look forward to, drifting off to the sound of my voice—or how, after changing her, i’d stand her to face the mirror that hung over the changing table, point at her face in the mirror, and say, “That’s you! That’s Charlotte!” and watch the look of deep puzzlement overtake her little face— the tenderness that rushed into my heart in those moments felt like enough to make my knees buckle, and i just wanted to bathe that baby i hardly knew in my love.

But there were more complicated, more troubling incidents, too, like watching the oldest boy lord over his 5 year old sister, watching her vie desperately for his love and watching him gleefully withhold it, ripping up the pictures she’d draw him, watching her grow jealous of his tenderness for their younger sister, watching her crave both her brother’s attention and my own [“What did you get for Christmas, Miss Chelsey?” “Y’know, i really didn’t get many presents this year.” “Oh. Miss Chelsey?

You know what i would’ve given you for Christmas?” “What?” “A wedding ring.” (sly grin)] Basically, i was watching these kids’ wholehearted assimilation of values lent to them by their family, school, church, and other institutions, like Bitsy explaining to me what it means to be a “lady,” that “ladies” don’t sit like that, and ladies will wear dresses, or George telling me i’m pretty good at throwing a football for a girl, Bitsy catering to George, as if his attention were the most valuable simply for his maleness and olderness and brotherness, her modifying herself however she could in order to receive it.

In desperate correspondence with friends who had either grown up with siblings or worked in childcare themselves, I was assured many times over that sibling rivalry and the sort of power play i was witnessing between Bitsy and George was 100% normal, and to not take it so intensely. My more experienced friends suggested, basically, that i zoom the lens of my analysis out about twenty levels and, basically, chill the fuck out. But all i was seeing were these microcosmic humans, taking in the assumptions, patterns, and behaviors that they would either be guided by—or struggle to leave behind— for the rest of their lives. By the end of each shift, even when the kids had been relatively wellbehaved, i felt incredibly drained and overwhelmed with all i’d witnessed, frequently unable to fall asleep for all the impressions and interpretations swimming in my head (only to make me less sharp for the next morning’s go).

It was all just so bared.

All of that to say—childhood is intense to me, was for me when i was in it, is for me to witness, is for me to consider. So, when i think of myself as a custodian of a child—especially if it’s a child i’ve personally brought into the world—i’m sort of paralyzed with the sense of gravity, responsibility, and love i imagine feeling toward them. I know no one can make anyone else happy—but fuck, i’d do everything i could to make sure any kid in my care had every possible making for the most fulfilled, free, nurturing existence they themselves could muster. And i worry, because of the intensity i feel around the very thought of that, that if i were to actually have a kid, i’d just be…subsumed by feeling.

They would be it all. They would be everything. And though that’s sort of the romanticized version of parent-feelings, especially for women parents, outside of my heart, i know that’s not actually ideal.

Alice Walker knows it’s not ideal, either—in the essay, she flat out states that the three reasons for her having a child were: “Curiosity. Boredom. Avoiding the draft.” Later in the essay, she speaks to working while childrearing: “I feel very little guilt about the amount of time ‘taken from my daughter’ 29

by my work. I was amazed that she could exist and I could read a book at the same time. And that she easily learned that there are other things to enjoy besides myself. [emphasis added]” In a poem she wrote after completing her novel Meridian, Walker wrote: “Now that the book is finished, / now that I know my characters will live, / I can love my child again.” In the text immediately following Walker concedes that she of course had loved her daughter all along, and that the poem was self-pitying and grandiose, but that the sentiment was present even as exaggeration felt disturbing to me. At the same time, the underlined sentence of the previous passage leapt out at me as a balance i would long to achieve—not only with my hypothetical child, but, interestingly, with my lover(s), by whom, when in close proximity, i can feel consumed, reluctant to act independently, as if she might disappear if i do.

Which, what silliness, as if she/he/they might only exist in my gaze.

And i guess that’s the issue of motherhood (and romantic love??) as it’s popularly conceived— the child’s personhood does not depend on one’s own gaze; the child is its own subject, nurtured and dependent upon you, the parent, yes, but ultimately its own being. It reminds me of a conversation i had with my friend Zach, on his own experience of being a child to his particular mother.

“My mother never saw me as a lump of clay, who she had to mold or shape a certain way, like many parents do,” he told me.

“If not a lump of clay, what did she see you as?” I asked, feeling slightly breathless.

He hesitated, smiled. “As Zachary! A person she was happy to help bring into the world and send along his way. She provided me with what i needed to survive but other than that let me figure out what i needed to do…And, her seeing me as just Zachary has enabled me to see her as just Teresa.”

And i sort of flushed with the honesty of that approach—the rightness, the frankness. I felt he he was so ahead of the rest of us in that respect—in seeing one’s parent(s) as a holistic person as opposed to simply one’s parent [the inverse of the gaze noted above]—and, due to this aheadness, that he operated with a certain, deeper, more mature empathy than many of us could achieve so readily.

So, all of that to say even as i found extreme merit in the independence and self-possession of Walker’s approach to motherhood, i was even so affronted and a little disturbed by the lack of romance of it, the dispassion—even as i realize that, for many, parenthood and children are super unromantic realities, that it is in a sense a privilege to regard them as otherwise. A whole kettle of fish here! But it felt bracing to be exposed to deep-seated problematic assumptions within me of how a mother should feel/be to be a good mother—and i know i would not have felt similarly if Walker was a father—and to realize that, even if a rather romanticized approach to it all (even only in abstraction) feels right and natural to me, it doesn’t and needn’t for everyone.

Simultaneously, Walker speaks to the tension between re-writing the script of herself as a woman parent (particularly one who is an artist) and a black woman parent—that is, simultaneously challenging the notion that a woman parent should or will naturally make her child her world if she is at all worth her salt, versus the notion that a black woman parent is inherently less loving of her children than her white counterparts, less soft and nurturing, less of a “good” parent: “Better then to deny that the black woman has a vagina. Is capable of motherhood. Is a woman,” she writes; “She [the white woman mother] fears knowing that black women want the best for their children just as she does.

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But she also knows black children are to have less in this world so that her children, white children, will have more (in some countries, all).” Boom.

Unsurprisingly, there’s no definite conclusion re: these tensions, but it really does drive home to me the extreme constraint of one’s own compulsions and desires when placed into the social context—in other words, it’s nearly fucking impossible to do what you want to do without it bucking up against some deeply entrenched and fucked up societal expectation(s), particularly if you are [of color/female/queer/trans*/etc.!]. Damn.

In simply living your life—your very own and only life!—in the way you wish to lead it, you are consistently read as either complying with, subverting, or challenging some presupposed narrative of your life that you never ever agreed to Alice Walker w daughter Rebecca, 1970 in the first place—and are rewarded or sanctioned accordingly. Like, fuck off.

So, that essay finished things off for me in a intense, more complicating way than i’d felt the rest of the book. Holistically, i felt very appreciative of the integration of Walkers’ identities: she is, unequivocally, a black womanist woman writer, and each of her perspectives surge confidently from the confluence of these experiences that is her psyche.

Another highlight i appreciated from the second part of the book [in my own division] was an essay called “If the Present Looks Like the Past, What Does the Future Look Like?”, a discussion of colorism both within and without the black community, which i found moving and—well, i guess complicating after all, in that Walker references the dark-skinned/black black woman, how anyone who is black would have come from her at some point. And while this is definitely true, it’s odd that my own blackness comes most immediately from my father [which opposes, too, the narrative of biracial identity that Walker both references in the piece and enacted herself with her daughter/her daughter’s white father]—so, for me, black maternity is a rather remote concept. Neither here nor there, really, just something that came up. Also includes an analysis of colorism in Their Eyes Were Watching God, which i’ll have to keep in mind when i get around to re-reading that sucker, as i hope to in the not too distant future.

I AM NOT SIDNEY POITIER, PERCIVAL EVERETT Okay, the truth is i take things rather seriously. I oftentimes don’t realize a thing is supposed to be funny until/unless i read it out loud, or talk about it with another person. So reading satire can be tricky for me, which maybe means i ought to read more of it. Not that this book didn’t make me laugh out loud, as it did on several occasions, but in the greater picture, i don’t quite know where/how to place its absurdities, its strange juxtapositions and twists of plots. I imagine some much sharper, more cynical, more clever reader, finishing the book, closing it, and nodding sagely, a smug yet weary smirk on their lips. That’s…not me. In fact, throughout my reading, i imagined that other reader

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sitting across the room and making fun of me—maybe even Percival Everett himself sitting across the room from me and making fun of me and being sexy at the same time.

But, let’s start with the basics. The novel is about a young man named Not Sidney Poitier, who looks like Sidney Poitier but is not and is Not. The plot is rather Odyssey-like, in that Not Sidney moves through extreme and episodic situations with different constellations of folks, such as surviving a prison bus crash and fleeing the scene while handcuffed to a fellow prisoner, a bigot who Not Sidney IDs as a “cracker.” The main points of consistency are Not Sidney’s ridiculously and constantly ballooning wealth, left to him by the mother who died when he was young; the status afforded him by his cohabitation with (not adoption by) media mogul Ted Turner; and the understandable confusion over Not Sidney’s name, particularly given the fact that Not Sidney Poitier looks rather strikingly like Sidney Poitier, especially as the novel progresses. And each of the situations Not Sidney finds himself in invariably center on difference between race and class.

Okay?

Okay. But it became apparent that a deeper familiarity with Sidney Poitier was necessary to continue with this consideration. I knew the basics: that he is celebrated for his dignity, his handsomeness, that he was the first major black movie star, that Oprah really likes him. And i remember when i was young, my father saying to me (he had this habit of offering me very serious, non-sequitur pronouncements that i would instinctively bookmark): “Never forget the name of this movie: Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.” And I didn’t, and fast forward fifteen or so years and here i am, watching this movie not for the first but second time, the first time being when i was fourteen, i think; i’d been bored at the time by how conversational and interpersonal the action was.

This time, of course, it felt different. First, i was watching Sidney Poitier closely. Second, i was watching as a 60s enthusiast. Third, i was watching as my father, wondering when he might have first seen this movie [him being only 8 when it was released], wondering if it was before or after he met my mother and my mother’s family, and if it was before, wondering whether he felt the foreghost of his own path, and if it was after, wondering if he’d felt his own experience better or rougher. I know my grandparents left the house when my mother brought him home for the first time; they had been dating for some time in secret, and he was coming over, funnily enough, to cook dinner for her. More than anything, though, i was wondering how he would have felt about Sidney Poitier, the respectability politics that many of his characters and, some feel, his career as a whole feed into—or the fact that, ultimately, two factors lead to Dr. John Prentiss’s securing Joey’s hand in marriage: his fabulous success in the medical field and the wealth that attends it, and the fact that they love each other (in that order).

It’s easy to critique both of these things. The first relies upon a capitalistic, elitist, respectability-compliant frame of thinking—i.e., if John were as blue collar as his parent, or even just an average old office-working [black] schmo, doubtful Joey’s parents would’ve gotten on board. As probably doesn’t need to be pointed out/has already been discussed here re: ZNH, the stakes and expectations for black people are twice as high. And the second relies upon a very romanticized, heteronormative understanding of love and partnership, in which what actually amounts to a superficial if strong attraction must be valorized to the point of overriding any reasoned or nuanced discussion of the union of question. In the special features of the disc, director Stanley Kramer notes that he’s never found a thesis more inarguable than “Love conquers all.” And yes, i like to believe so, too, but…what we were looking at between John and Joey wasn’t really love, or perhaps, more generously, was only love’s beginning—they’d only known each other for ten days! And i know i’m being picky and a little cynical, but i can’t help but be irritated by the fact that something so flimsy 32

becomes the foundation of both sets of parents’ acceptance of the union—and, too, i’m irritated that the couple wasn’t asking for the acceptance of their love itself, but of their marriage. Would the love have been less meaningful, less intense, if they were not moved to marry it up as soon as humanly possible?

[Here, any parallel between my parents and the characters fades; my parents dated eight years before they married.] It’s also true that if Joey and John were both men, say, or both women, doubtful that their love, however new or old, would be considered worthy enough to override their racial difference (slash worthy at all).

But, at the same time, better that than nothing—that is, no acceptance. I dunno, it’s complicated.

I was also annoyed that it is the acceptance monologue of Joey’s father—the [old] white man in the room—that not only seems to seal the couple’s destiny, but also concludes the film itself—regardless of the fact that John’s father, the old black man in the room, was not given the chance to accept the matter for his own part. Like, “Okay, white man says it’s okay, end of the story.” Reminds me of a quote from Mad Men: “The conversation doesn’t stop just because you leave the room.” Indeed, Joey’s father assures the young couple that, given time, they will get John’s father to come around. It was very irritating to me that Mr. Prentiss is not given the agency to definitively decide himself how he felt about the marriage—an opportunity afforded each of the three other parents. This discomfort was deepened by the fact that the characters are, after all, highly symbolic of entire social forces/groups of people/milieux: working class black women and men in the form of John’s parents, upwardly mobile and highly educated black men in the form of John, modern, progressive young white women in the form of Joey, progressive, compassionate religion in the form of the Monsignor [that one was a bit of a curveball, tbh, though i guess the film is set in San Francisco], liberal, educated, wealthy yet slightly hypocritical whites in the form of Joey’s parents, etc. So, when John’s father is denied the right to speak his peace to the group, it resonates as something way larger than this particular character being held silent.

ANYway, i’m getting away from my point which is: of course the part where Not Sidney goes home with his college girlfriend to meet her parents is a parody of this film. DUh. Given, y’know, the title of the novel, plus the intertextuality of Erasure (which contains a novel-within-a-novel that parodies Richard Wright’s Native Son), i feel i should’ve been sharper. Of course, though, parody, and the sense of difference/departure that attends it, are intriguing: for one, Not Sidney’s girlfriend is also black but is, however, a lighter shade of black, as are her parents, while Not Sidney is dark-skinned. The discomfort of [shit sorry forget his gf’s name]’s parents stems not from Not Sidney’s blackness, racially, as it does with Sidney/Dr. John in Guess Who, but Not Sidney’s blackness, pigmentally. And while Sidney wins over Joey’s parents through his impeccable decorum and stellar credentials, ?’s parents are seduced when they learn of Not Sidney’s obscene wealth. When Not Sidney overhears them discussing this, he decides to exploit his position of power by being a prick. While the film’s cast never actually makes it to the dinner in question, Not Sidney and co. do, and it’s an uncomfortable one, Thanksgiving, in which Not Sidney reveals his knowledge of ??’s parents’ motives, and reveals to them the ugliness of their opportunism and unapologetic anti-blackness, and states that the only sensible one of those assembled is the family’s dark-skinned maid, who, he also points out, has not even been invited to sit and partake of the meal she’s spent the day preparing. [In the film, Sidney and Tilly the maid forge a contentious relationship, Tilly calling him “boy,” deriding the pro-black race politics she assumes he holds, and unearthing her claws in protection of Joey, stating, pretty amusingly if fucked up-edly, “Hurt that girl and i’ll show you what black power REALLY means!” In the novel, the maid reacts to Not Sidney similarly at first but, following his dressing down of everyone at the table, ends up 33

slipping him a doggie bag of Thanksgiving dinner on his way out.] The question of love is also treated differently by Everett: while Not Sidney and gf like each other, they definitely don’t love each other, and it becomes clear to Not Sidney that gf is mostly using him/his blackness to rile up her parents.

This bit was probably my favorite of the novel, especially when read alongside the film it parodies: while Guess Who is an (obviously dated) inquiry into the politics interracial desire and domesticity, the scenes in I Am Not Sidney Poitier explore the in ways much more complex dynamics of intraracial desire (or, at least, romantic relationships), and perceptions thereof, bringing together questions of colorism, status, respectability, class privilege trumping race-based lack of privilege, and anti-blackness.

Other point: it was loosely that i included Percival Everett in the Southern curriculum because, though it’s true that Everett was born in Georgia, he lives and works in Los Angeles. Not totally surprising, then, that I Am Not Sidney Poitier begins and ends in Los Angeles, with the bulk of it taking place in Georgia. The novel thus deals intelligently and bitingly with place—for example, almost immediately after Not Sidney crosses the city limits of Atlanta, he is pulled over by a racist cop who disrespects and ends up arresting him for no reason [which eventually leads to the aforementioned prison bus crash]. The swift contrast between the sense of adventure and freedom granted Not Sidney by his new purchase of a car (destination, California), and the abrupt truncation thereof by his becausehe’s-black arrest, is both comically absurd and, well, basically pretty true to life.

— So, black/white desire, right? I’m all interested in black/white desire, but Guess Who’s presentation thereof was problematic at worst, boring at best. Rewind two years to A Patch of Blue, Poitier’s film about the relationship between a black man and a poor, uneducated, blind white teenager.

Where Guess’s Joey chose to don the color blinders, Patch’s Selina was blind in every way, including color, and when Gordon starts to show her a bit of kindness and some basic tools to help her make sense of the outside world as she experiences it, she begins to fall in love with him.

Now, SEVERAL things are of deep interest. Wow. Sorry, i’m really jazzed about this right now.

There is so much to unpack. So, whenever i go to analyze something from a feminist/queer/social justice perspective, whatever you wanna call it, there’s always this image hanging in my head of two large cogs, both covered in pegs and holes of various sizes, and the two of them turning together, into each other, me trying to make sense of their turning—because there are always so many factors to consider, and their combinations—and i suppose the twoness in question comes from the dichotomy of, to put it simply, rad vs. fucked up.

For one thing, the very ambiguous nature of the love between Selina and Gordon—who, after all, don’t know each other very well, much like Joey and John, but nonetheless spend time together bonding, talking, doing utterly normal, deeply innocent things, such as shopping at the market and cooking lunch. It’s clear that part of the reason Selina feels as she does toward Gordon is for the way he illuminates her world, in a way that no one in her life has theretofore, and for the patience and kindness he shows her—i mean to say, in a sense she would have fallen in love with anyone who had happened to be that first kind person. But somehow, to me at least, this reductiveness doesn’t come off as cringe-worthy or degrading of the complexity of Selina’s capacity for feeling—rather, it makes perfect sense. It’s natural to fall for the illuminators in one’s life, whether that light-making is figurative, cerebral or, as in this case, quite fundamental and pragmatic.

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Of course, it is Selina’s disability that enables Gordon to speak to Selina, let alone let Selina fall in love with him. And in a lovely moment, the weight of dependency gets flipped. Toward the end of the film, Selina reveals that she has known Gordon is black for a bit of time now, in a totally unsensationalized way. “I know everything I need to know about you. I know you’re kind. I know you’re colored. And I know you’re beautiful.”

Beauty—a concept reflexively associated with the visual, but here, Selina necessarily means in other ways—and yet, the way Poitier blooms to her words, softens like a bashful child, as Selina caresses his face with her terrifically expressive hands, it felt to me that he was taking “beautiful” in its more casual, aesthetic sense.

“Most people would say the opposite, he says, and Selina replies, “That’s because they don’t know you.”

In these lines, it’s as if the characters are talking across their difference in terms, or talking around it, or perhaps they are talking, touching, right up to the point of a barrier between them: for Gordon, who surely already knows he is a good person, nothing could be more meaningful than being told that he, his skin, his blackness, the superficial facet of self on which so much more about his existence rests, is beautiful—physically, visually beautiful. I’m stuck on his expression in that scene; it really did feel like that was the first time he’d ever been called that word, Gordon or Poitier—as if it wasn’t even a word that he thought he could want to be called. But Selina is categorically unable to offer any visual assessment of Gordon’s beauty, must speak of it in other ways, in ways more meaningful to her, and ways that she is highly qualified to assess: beauty of behavior, intention, action, beauty of language and affect. For her, having been raised by abusive people and exposed to a multitude of traumas, this beauty is the meaningful, elusive one, and even as she like most desires to be physically attractive, she is unable to assess personally, re: either herself or others, and so the language visual beauty is, while of interest and some wound to her, ultimately meaningless for her.

Does it matter that the characters, in this interaction, in their bond, their approaching of one another, are reading commonly held talismans—shopping together, eating together, the word “beautiful”—and taking from them different meanings, the meanings that they respectively find the deepest and most healing?

This sense of dual or nesting readings of the same material lends a special bittersweetness to the ending. In encouraging Selina to leave her abusers and attend a school for blind people some distance from their city, Gordon’s knowledge of the situation as a whole eclipses that of Selina, and the mutual attraction and desire for companionship (read: marriage) they hold in common. Even as Gordon may want those things, can easily envision them as Selina anticipates his wanting coffee upon returning home one evening, preparing the cups on a tray, taking the screaming kettle off the heat— even as he could see it growing in all its quaint, heteronormative domesticity, he knows that the world is and must be bigger than him for her; he cannot be the end game, but only a conduit to the larger world and her own capabilities. And so, he lets go of their brief vision and presses her to board the bus to attend the school.

The real thing, though. He had given her a music box which had belonged to his grandmother, which, while still living with her mother, Selina had buried by the tree in the park where she and Gordon would meet, for fear that her mother would take it for her own. It becomes a talisman for her, a symbol of her love for Gordon, and her reading of Gordon’s love for her, and in the ground, it clandestinely gathers power in her imagination. Selina even takes the time to dig the music box back up when she learns that Gordon has arranged for her to depart for the school. But then, when the time has come to get on the bus, after Gordon has given the speech about how she’s about to meet many new 35

people and learn many new things and she has no idea how she’ll feel about him when all that starts happening and maybe in a year they can see how they still feel about each other, after all that, Gordon realizes she has forgotten the music box in his apartment, runs all the way down to the street to try to return it to her, but the bus has already gone, and he returns to the apartment with the box in a kind of humble resignation.

And it just sort of broke my heart. I know the point wasn’t that they were deeply in love, or belonged together, or whatever. What saddened me…what saddened me, i suppose, was that his final gesture toward investing in the talisman, investing in the fantasy he knew they shared even as he overrode it with his pragmatism, his greater, finer sense of love—that that gesture of his was foiled, and that he saw, completely and fundamentally, that what he said was too true, and that what he knew should happen—his becoming a conduit rather than being the end game for Selina—would come true, and there was no point of pretending otherwise.

In his practical comments, too, he tells Selina that after the school has opened up the world to her further, she will perhaps come to understand why their being married in this world might not work out so well. So thorough is Selina’s ignorance of racism and even race period, really, Gordon seems to have a difficult time speaking specifically to her of the difficulties of interracial romance and marriage—for maybe, in her ignorance of the scope of the situation, he himself is almost fooled, almost tricked into thinking that it really isn’t that big of a deal—or, rather, he is exposed to an edenic version of matters which he, as a black person, hasn’t had the luxury of imagining, in which social sanctions around such desires do not exist, the sadistic game he’s been forced to play all his life is no longer a threat, and he can be interpreted as the person he is through his actions. The maneuver here to, again, differentiate Selina’s colorblindness from Joey’s is interesting: while Selina’s comes across as pure, almost rudimentary, Joey’s comes across as, even if good-intentioned, deeply naive.

Something else…in Gordon’s struggle around his race in relationship to Selina’s, his knowledge of the image of them walking down the street together (an image Selina could not take in herself and did not fully know about until most of the way into the film), Gordon is rendered lonely in his grappling with the race question. He, for a while, holds all the cards of the situation, and must decide with every interaction what to do with them; he is unable to discuss it with Selina; they are not “in it together.” And the moment Selina reveals that she knows more than he assumed, he is more affronted and taken off guard than relieved that she doesn’t care that he is black—for, suddenly, there she is, entering into his solitary struggle with a completely innocent outlook on the whole matter. Something about Gordon’s initial aloneness feels deeply central to the experience of being a person of color in a relationship with a white person, particularly if that white person is not conscious: you are dealing with a whole other dimension of social/interior/spatial matters that your partner has no awareness of, that, in many cases, they would not understand if you tried to explain it to them. [A., you know i don’t feel this way now, but i definitely did at the way beginning of our relationship. And have in platonic and familial relationships with white people, too, though it doesn’t tend to come up quite as intensely with those (sometimes).] So, his aloneness in that, and his “partner’s” literal blindness to it, felt deeply resonant.

Another thing about language, though, slash the raddest moment of the film. Selina is at Gordon’s house and they have just eaten lunch. I don’t remember what they’re talking about but they are moving closer together, energistically, Selina puts her hands on Gordon’s face, breathes his name, and kisses him. First of all, in 1965, blacks and whites kissing in film was still pretty hair-raising to some, and in fact the version of the film shown in the South omitted these shots. That the film was deliberately shot in black and white, despite the availability of Technicolor, visually underscores the 36

impact of this kiss—and it’s a nice kiss, sensual and earnest, Selina’s hands finding Gordon’s mouth before kissing it.

Then, Selina says, “I wish i hadn’t been done over”—meaning, I wish i hadn’t been raped by my mother’s john so you could’ve been the first one i “had sex” with. SO much is contained in that line: desire, desire here and now plainly presented by a (white) woman to a (black) man; tacit assumption of sex in the immediate future (gained via her initiative); sexual desire had and articulated by a survivor of abuse and rape; shame of a survivor of rape articulated; sense that rape qualifies as sex; sense of adherence to the concept of virginity, valuing of “purity”; desire to to give this man, whom she loves, “something” [virginity] which has been “taken”* from her by someone else far less deserving, sense of guilt and inadequacy that she is unable to do so.

Just, such a very rich couple of words.

At this point, Gordon becomes upset and pulls away.

“Do you think I’m dirty?” asks Selina.

“No,” says Gordon, heartfelt, “I don’t think you’re dirty.”

That itself being hyper radical.

And then Selina, struggling to believe that Gordon didn’t pull away because he was angry or disgusted with her, says that she only said what she just said “because I love you so much and I wanted you to make love with me.” These words, again, expressed with an openness of spirit, an honesty, a purity—such an utter lack of guile about something that becomes as unnecessarily cryptic and Gordian as desire, as love! Selina feels no need to beat around the bush; neither does she frame the act either as something that Gordon will present to or create for her, or as something that she will allow him to take from her, but rather as something they will manifest together; it is an invitation to self, rather than an abandonment of self. And i just thought it was richly beautiful.

Selina’s agency over her desire and love is echoed in the film’s final scene, in which she asks Gordon if she really has to leave for the school, hinting toward marriage, why can’t they be married.

“You want to know why I won’t ask you to marry me?” he asks her knowingly.

“Not ask, just marry, you don’t have to ask,” Selina replies in her earnest, guileless way— indicating not “you don’t have to ask because i conform naturally to whatever your will may be,” but “you don’t have to ask me because i already asked you.” fojdsjdiosjfoa;dj;dsm Yeah!!

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*NOT to imply that if someone is raped they are incorrect if they feel something has been taken from them; rather, to implicitly challenge the framing of virginity, specifically, as a possessable, transferrable object of value, whether in the context of rape or consensual sex — Okay, after that passionate digression—update! Went and rented me up Lilies of the Field, Buck and the Preacher, and In the Heat of the Night, and let’s just say i feel a whole lot closer to that more cynical, more clever reader who finishes the book and smiles smugly. I mean, of course the whole thing is a parody of Poitier’s films and the values/questions/assertions they put forth, and of course to get it you’d have to have seen them (still waiting for The Defiant Ones to get in, but i get the picture). As Rone Shavers prefaces his interview with Everett, “In almost every one of his works you peel away one layer of references and meaning only to find another, only to then discover another, only to come upon another, until—well, you get the idea. Welcome, then, to an interview about everything, because in many ways the meaning of everything is the only subject Everett really writes about.”

Word, and, in other words, in just basically acquainting myself with the films Everett satirizes, i barely scratched the surface of these many layers of cultural reference. And here’s the sad thing: besides being a decent writer, all in the world i desire is to be acutely culturally literate. So no doubt i would benefit not only from re-reading I Am Not, and digging deeper into its mycelium of references. But as it is i am already re-reading Madame Bovary [see next entry] and i still have half a curriculum to go. Maybe someday. But for this i am left with a sense of just not being smart enough—a sense that Everett seems to hold up in the aforementioned interview, in which he comes off as both incredibly intelligent and deeply elitist. Which, color me unsurprised—but a little glum nonetheless. I’m trying, here, to, as he says, “get educated so [i] can read all sorts of things and have [my life] and society [becomes] richer.” I don’t know—do i need an MFA to be a better reader? Is my self-education puny in the face of such richness? Can’t tell if i’m being earnest or sarcastic. And all of this is especially interesting for the fact that, in the novel, Percival-Everett-the-character (yes), also a professor of English, advises pupil Not Sidney who is considering dropping out of college: “Hell, you can read. You know where the library is.”

Just one example of the class as a complicating agent to narratives of both respectability and race in I am Not Sidney Poitier—though, in the interview with Shavers, Everett-the-real-person, distances himself from his application of class as an agent of complication. Speaking briefly of his own socioeconomic class background, Everett offers: “I’m a card-carrying member of the ACLU, and I go to the ballet, and I train mules and I write fiction for a living [and also teach].”

“What does that mean?” asks Shavers.

“That’s my point—it means absolutely nothing. People live in the worlds they live in, and they’re interested in the things that interest them. That’s what makes this world fascinating. I really don’t think about class.”

Which, frankly, galls the fuck out of me, because both I Am Not and Erasure, the two novels of Everett’s that i’ve read deal heavily with class/status, and class dovetailing with race, Erasure in a sort of darkly humorous way, and I Am Not in a humorous, farcical way. [Not to mention the fact that it’s pretty easy to not think about class if you come from a long line of doctors, as is the case with Everett…no shade—i’m in a similar boat if to a lesser extent—just pointing out some Privilege 101.] In fact, Not Sidney’s extreme wealth is often the factor that distinguishes his adventures from those of his notnamesake: for example, while the random nuns in Lilies of the Field desire simply the labour of Sidney, it 38

becomes Not Sidney’s mission to deliver them a large sum of ca$h as he is able, for the same end: building them a church. [Lilies was a fucking strange film however you spin it, having something, though i’m not quite sure what, to say on the value of black male labor, the presumptive ownership over it by white females; ultimately, though Sidney is not paid and the nun’s leader literally has to be tricked into even thanking him for his work (she contends throughout that God sent him and therefore she shouldn’t thank Sidney but God hisself), in the end, Sidney’s leadership and ingenuity is celebrated and respected by the community. Also, for a spell Sidney is determined to build the whole church his damn self, brick by brick, to prove something, more to himself and/or God than to the nuns. Hm hm hm…] And we already talked about how Not Sidney’s wealth tweaks the script of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Which, i guess if i were to say off-hand, that re-treatment of Poitier’s films was probably my favorite, though i wouldn’t venture as far as saying something like “the most effective,” because what the fuck, apparently, do i know? [Now i’m just being petty.]

Anywho, i’ve thoroughly enjoyed my little mini-module of Sidney Poitier films, and the surprising amount of richness i found in them. Though they are, with the exception of Buck and the Preacher [which i loved loved loved more than i thought i could ever love a Western, damn], about a black man in a white world, the commentaries on race, particularly when read through a lens of respectability and, as we saw with Patch of Blue, desire, are rich and complicated. Through this, Sidney Poitier has come to feel familiar to me, and a little dear. Maybe when this is all over i’ll read one of his memoirs—which, btw, Everett also shits on as a genre, along with Alice Walker, who can “kiss his ass.” :D And okay, i just went back and re-read what i wrote about Patch of Blue and crying love it so much brb going to the library to check it out again.

— Okay, one more P.S. Just watched The Defiant Ones—so good! So much less trite than it might have been.

Tons of great extended, silent scenes of physical struggle, like Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis, two chained-together escaped convicts, attempting to co-cross a raging river. But the real take away was this shot:

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Like, get more precious? [there is a shot of Poitier in profile with a large white daisy tucked behind his ear from Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner that might rival the preciousness, but i couldn’t locate a screenshot :/] But really, i’ve found all of Poitier’s movies that i’ve watched super compelling. If you aren’t familiar and are looking for something substantial to watch, plz check one or several out. I think it’s easy to casually assume that because a piece of art or theory comes from the past, nothing it has to say on race could be sufficiently compelling or relevant under today’s scrutiny—but each one of these films has defied that notion, maybe with the exception of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner—but even that has its complexities when considered as a film in its particular cultural context, if not for its own commentary.

MADAME BOVARY, GUSTAVE FLAUBERT The next installment in the “classics about desire/etc.” series with Avery, though she has yet to crack it open and i’m 60 pages into my re-read, ahem.

I wrote to a friend:

Maybe i’m just feeling uncertain of my reading abilities after my experience with I Am Not Sidney, but i also know that Mme B is a bastion of realistic fiction and that anything worth reading is worth reading twice so…here i am again. In the second reading thus far i am more appreciative of things, am sometimes hit hard with, yes, the beauty of Flaubert (+ the translator) ’s rhythm, the sheer craft with which he unfolds the story…trying to be a better appreciator, now that i know what’s coming, because i guess the story doesn’t really matter much anyway. [And i felt a little smart just now because in the interview with Percival Everett, the interviewer accuses him of being a “damn modernist,” but Everett speaks to the absolute privileging of plot over form, which isn’t necessarily true for modernists, who were quite interested in form, so ha, gotcha, Everett—i mean, Shavers…Hm.] That digression to say: even though in this second read around i am paying more attention to language and form than the plot, in the first reading i was mostly struck by how much of an odyssey of desire it is: really, an odyssey, Emma moving through these episodes and people, all of them contributing to her grand narrative of what constitutes romance, passion, and true, “worthy” desire, a journey begun in earnest the night she and poor-bastard-husband Charles attend a swanky ball at a Viscount’s house. Emma meets the standard by which she will measure all subsequent romance, which is, for her, inextricably intertwined with luxury and grandeur. This single, rather random evening of her life becomes the underpinning of her future shenanigans in both love and luxury, romantic and sentimental literature having already prepped her mind to receive it.

And i mean, it’s sad! It’s sad as fuck. Not because Emma dies bc whatever, suicide seemed like the best bet at the point (though i pity the fuck out of her daughter Berthe)—or, maybe yes, because Emma dies but not for any personal feeling for her. But because: Emma was never going to stop wanting, and neither was she ever going to get what she wanted, because what she wanted was inherently evanescent—eros, unless meticulously strategized “against,” by its very nature, runs itself out.

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She finds this out with Rodolphe, who truncates their tawdry eros by running away. And she finds it out for her own part with Léon, when she herself stops feeling gushy feelings for him. So unless she was going to have a steady diet of new, appealing lovers to replace the lover for whom eros had been spent, and also buckets of francs to plush out her lifestyle, well, she just wasn’t going to have what she wanted! Even if a stream of lovers were possible, the fact that she was married would have eventually reared its head against her. And even if she wasn’t married, questions of propriety, etc. Unless Emma became a whore? Maybe then? But still, the question becomes: if we categorically can’t have what we want, well, why not commit suicide? Bleak, man. But really. Somewhere in us from pretty early on, i believe we know what we want. And to live in a world, to be dealt into a particular existence where we are simply unable to attain it—and/or, to be dealt a desire that is inherently impossible—i mean, what’s the point?

Because Emma didn’t want a particular lover, or even a loving relationship, per se. Indeed, once she was in something like a stable, consensual if illicit affair with Léon, “he became her mistress rather than she becoming his”—that is, Léon ceased to be a person or subject and becomes an instrument of Emma’s fantasies, as well as a target of her irrational jealousy and control; she demands from him particular acts of affection that she regards as supreme, such as original love poetry, and nags him to decorate his person and home with a fashionable opulence that he can’t afford any better than she. Emma didn’t want Léon, not really, nor even any old lover: she wanted non-stop eros, perpetual romance in both sex and circumstance. She was obsessed with it, and convinced that others around her had it but that she was not to be allowed it—and in one of these presumptions, she was correct.

In the article i read comparing Mme B and AK [Priscilla Meyer, “Anna Karenina: Tolstoy’s Polemic with Madame Bovary” Russian Review 54.2 (1995): 243-259], Meyer proposes that AK is a “rewriting” of Mme B, in which AK is a more realized, mature, sympathetic incarnation of Emma—after all, unlike Emma, before meeting Vronsky, Anna is well-grounded, even-keeled, and generally content with her life, if not ecstatically happy. It’s her particular, unprecedented love for Vronsky that rocks her world, not a vague, pervasive desire for eros with just about whoever—and, in perhaps the starkest difference, Anna subverts the typical adultery narrative by being completely transparent and rather unapologetic with her husband about her transgressions, and leaving him to his decisions thus fully informed. Briefly, Anna can be viewed as an Emma who developed some integrity, an Emma who meets her desires, however illicit, with realism [at least initially; eventually Anna is subsumed by paranoia and fantasy]. Still though, it’s telling that this personal development aside, the two characters meet similarly tragic and hopeless ends, but Meyer argues that while basically Flaubert is making an existential/philosophical point with this, Tolstoy is making more of a moralistic one [“moral” relating to God’s laws specifically, markedly not socially-imposed “morals,” which Tolstoy does a wonderful job of fleshing out through his steady realism to the point of exposing their inherent absurdity].

And idk, as far as Mme B with Lady Chatterley’s Lover, it sorta felt like apples and oranges to me, basic subject matter aside, for reasons i’ll try to think about.

Anyway, that’s what i took from it in first reading. And i don’t really disagree with the central premise—i believe that life is too difficult to not get what we want out of it. So, i guess…i hope what we all want is possible?

Also, yesterday i re-read “A Simple Heart” from Three Tales and someone somewhere pointed out what an inverse of Emma Félcité is and it’s really true and also pleasing. [also, what was Flaubert’s deal with naming servants Félicité?]

UPDATE 41

Okay, i read it again and i’m feeling very passionately toward it. Basically, i’ve never read a book that is so encompassingly about desire—i mean, the other books in this “series” with Avery (Anna Karenina, Lady Chatterley’s Lover) have been about desire, in particular a certain sort of illicit desire, but at least to me, the commentary ended there, within the realm of sex proper. Maybe it’s shortsighted of me, but where those books seem more concerned with sexuality, carnal desire, and those things intersecting with culture, social codes, and institutions (i.e. marriage), Mme B seems to deal more with the existential nature of desire. Yes, Emma desires people other than her husband, but that’s hardly the whole point, that’s more of an emblem of her greater, existential state of wanting, wanting more, wanting better, wanting what cannot really be. I know i said this before but the second reading really just enforced it and endeared the book to me more on those grounds; i’ve been considering my own relationship with wanting lately, with desire broadly, whether for sex, connection, nice clothes, food, plants, a welldecorated home, or whatever. The truth is, i’m a wildly desirous person. Sometimes i am content but very often i am wanting something, or something else, or that last touch to make a given experience or creation or whatever the finest incarnation of itself (hanging yellow flowers for the porch, the perfect song to heighten a particular mood, fresh chives for the dinner even though they’re $2.99 for a packet and you never used them all before they go bad).

Historically, i have felt somewhat disempowered by this tendency of mine. I’ve felt defeated, always outrun by my own wanting, or not adequately prepared to fulfill it myself. But now i feel differently. I feel incredibly empowered to fulfill it myself. It feels strong to want, to create a space that can and will be filled. It’s odd that i should feel so optimistic about this in the face of reading Mme B. After all, Emma wants, too, and ostensibly gets what she wants, but it comes back on her in a real bad way. It seems some people don’t like this book because superficially it reads like a woman being punished for desiring. And that’s true, but it’s not because she’s desiring things that are “wrong” or bad: it’s because she’s desiring things that are impossible (i.e. endless eros). She is desiring the illusory, and lacked the circumstances to even live in a highly designed life which carefully orchestrated something like endless eros (i.e. circumstances of wealth and the freedom to take as many successive lovers as she wished). The real tragedy was the constraint of her circumstances and times, not the wanting itself. Sure, she comes off as vapid, her desires romantic (obviously) and impressionable, but if she was actually able to manifest them in a safe way, well, who would give a fuck how grandiose they are? You do you, girl.

So, i take hope from Emma’s story in something of an inverse: as long as i, unlike she, want things that are real and possible, and maintain a sense of freedom around my circumstances and trajectory, wanting cannot help but be a powerful, shaping, enriching force, one that i shouldn’t be afraid to throw myself into. I dunno, this is pretty much a huge paradigm shift for Catholic-raised me.

Okay, so i still adore the conflated vibe of the desire Flaubert constructs—a layering that is both temporal, in the sense of Emma finding each of her former objects of desire, human-wise, nesting within the most current one—a palimpsest of desire. Like, look at this passage, which takes place when Rodolphe first starts to woo Emma: “…she noticed in the distance, right on the far horizon, the old Hirondelle, the coach coming slowly down the Côte des Leux, trailing behind it a long plume of dust. It was in this yellow coach that Léon had, so many times, come back to her; and along that very road that he had gone away for ever. She thought she saw him over the way, at his 42

window, then it was all a blur, clouds went past; it felt as if she was still turning in the waltz, under the bright chandeliers, on the Viscount’s arm, as if Léon were not far away, was going to come…and yet all this time she could smell Rodolphe’s hair beside her.”

So, both temporal and “horizontal,” in the sense of it encompassing not only sex and “love” but beauty, opulence, grace, style, intensity. The desire the novel engages with, on these grounds, feels incredibly rich to me. Just sorta rings true. And i’m sort of obsessed with it. It’s sorta like how eroticism blurs the lines between those areas of life that seem superficially different, the lines between sex and desire and intimacy and art and beauty and nature and sensual pleasures like eating or bathing—and i’ve been thinking a lot about that blurring in my own life lately, especially as it gets warmer and warmer and the world around me seems to blur these boundaries in a similar way.

And i know, despite the way i just carried on again about theme//desire, that i said on this second read i’d pay more attention to language and form. And i did. I don’t know that i have a whole lot of special things to say about them, but i was definitely more appreciative; there are so many moments, gorgeous moments, that are arrived at so elegantly and so understatedly, all in their due time —much like life. It’s chugging along, you’re getting the all details of all this random crap you don’t really care about, the type of drapes so and so has, the brief life history of this tangential character, etc., and then suddenly, a breathtaking collection of details, only possible to be arrived at because of the consistent thoroughness of the gaze theretofore and thereafter—not quite a culmination, but rather an inevitable spike of insight and beauty, feeling more episodic than crafted. Just like life. Wow. In those moments and in others, the text itself reads as erotic, in its intimacy and in its encompassing, sensual realism. There are so many scenes of Emma’s pining, her fantasizing, her waiting, her self-pitying that get to the very heart of the experience of eros, the pain bound up in it, the melodrama; maybe my favorite is a passage of Emma studying the landmarks of her customary coach ride from Yonville to visit Léon in Rouen, a journey she eventually comes to take every Thursday, her counting down the landmarks and stops with a familiarity that is both weary and arousing, for she knows that as they tick away that tree, that cottage, she is drawing closer and closer to her lover, desire inside her bristling with gathering potential energy. Oh, and the bit right before her first tryst with Léon, when they are at Notre-Dame in Rouen and the cathedral equivalent of a docent insists on giving them an interminable boring tour, Léon all the while growing more and more anxious to be alone with Emma. That was all at once real, funny, and compelling for the juxtaposition of desire with religion.

[That’s sorta a thing throughout, or rather religion serves as the low points of Emma’s W-curve of boldness, if you will; whenever she’s been burned by desire, she’ll briefly take up a religious fervor— yet, even these periods are marked by her true tastes, coming across as overly sensual and paradoxically hedonistic. When Léon and Emma speak privately for the first time after crossing paths again, Emma speaks woefully of her sorrows, claiming she’d love to become a Sister of Mercy: “The most deplorable thing, surely, is to drag out a life as useless as mine. If our miseries were only of use to some other creature, there would be consolation in the thought of sacrifice!” Thus, Emma finds grandeur and tragiromance and glamour even in religion. At a point it’s even more explicit than that: “Whenever she went to kneel at her Gothic prie-dieu, she called upon her Lord in the same sweet words she had once murmured to her lover, in the raptures of adultery.” " # And of course, the marvelous carriage scene shortly follows the bit in the cathedral. Léon and Emma fuck in the back of a carriage they hire to drive aimlessly around the city for the whole afternoon, the cab driver worn out and driven desperate by their oblique and unreasonable orders. This 43

is the most “explicit” sex scene in the novel, and we don’t see nothing but this carriage driving around and around Rouen, the driver pouring sweat, being yelled at by his passengers whenever he calls back suggesting that they {finally) commit to a destination. And it’s totally sexy. The physical intensity of what’s going on inside the cab is sublimated into the driver’s weariness; the rawness is expressed through the “fury” Léon responds with whenever the driver yells back to the cab and interrupts his hidden exchange with Emma; and there is delicious paradox of secrecy—no one knows who’s in the cab that keeps driving around; they are hidden from sight—and wantonness—everyone in town starts to notice and wonder about this strange cab—a paradox that could be applied to adultery in general. Just a thin membrane between concealed pleasure and intrusive discovery.

It’s all so bold yet so subtle and sly and subtextual and basically smokin hot. I felt thrilled when i was reading it the first time, especially, thrilled at being held at arm’s length from what could be considered the peak of Emma’s realization of her desires. Flaubert, you tease. Not that he could have exactly been 2015 explicit in 1857. But it’s significant that, rather than dealing with this sex scene in allusion or brief snapshot as he does the others, Flaubert instead gives it its full due, word-wise—just from a titillating distance. [Right after Emma exits the cab/fuck fest and returns to her hotel to catch the coach back to Yonville/her husband and child, the narrator refers to her, rather pointedly, as “Madame Bovary,” whereas she’s usually just “Emma.” I see your side eye, invisible storyteller.]

And i gotta say, this is just fresh in my mind bc i finished re-reading this morning, but i was really super duper intrigued by the conflation of death and desire that takes place in the final pages of the book, when Emma poisons herself—which, first of all, first time i read it i was surprised it didn’t stop there, with her death, but i guess it wasn’t really quite Emma’s story after all. First of all, Emma’s desire for the arsenic that will kill her is eroticized: “But she spoke again, in an urgent whisper, soft and melting: — I want it! Give it to me”—words basically descriptive of her life. In her final moments, Emma is described as especially if hauntingly beautiful; it is on her death bed that she makes her only sincere act of sensuality or affection toward Charles, that is, running her fingers through his hair, a sensation whose “pleasure” “intensified his sadness.” Again with the desire/religion, when Emma is offered a crucifix as part of her last rites, “she laid upon him [Christ] with all her ebbing strength the greatest loving kiss she had ever given.” The following passage plainly weaves together sex and death: the priest applies unctions “first upon the eyes, which had so coveted worldly splendours; then upon the nostrils, so greedy for warn breezes and amorous perfumes; then upon the mouth, which had uttered lying words, which had groaned with pride and cried out in lustfulness; then upon the hands, which had found delight in sensual touches…” The last words Emma hears are a sensual tune sung by the grotesquely afflicted beggar, the Blind Man: “Maids in the warmth of a summer day, / dream of love, and of love always…The wind is strong this summer day, / Her petticoat has flown away!”

The death itself, and Flaubert’s treatment of the corpse, is consistently realistic, organic, and slightly grotesque; honestly, one of the novel’s finest, boldest moments to me is when the pharmacist Homais, tasked with snipping a lock of Emma’s hair for Charles, accidentally “stabbed several little holes in the skin around her temples” because his hands were trembling too much. How refreshingly 44

irreverent and frank, a fascinating if incidental violence against the beauty Emma had so relied on in life, a beauty which had once deified her in the eyes of some now just as dead as the rest of her.

It seems even after her death, Emma’s desire is too powerful to die with her; rather, it seems to transfer to Charles, who insists upon ridiculously luxurious funeral arrangements, and who refuses to part with any of the late Emma’s material possessions, to the point of totally alienating his own mother.

Indeed, the brief remainder of Charles’ life seems characterized not exactly by grief, but by longing, a grieving longing—as much as he strives to hold her close, he begins to have dreams in which she turns to “putrid flesh in his arms” when he goes to embrace her. He even takes to constructing specters of Emma out of the living body of the maid Félicité: “Félicité took to wearing Madame’s dresses; not every one, for some of them he had kept back, and he used to go to the dressing-room to gaze at them, with the door locked; she was almost the same build, and often, when he saw her from behind, Charles was caught in an illusion, and cried out: — Oh, don’t go! Stay there!”

And so he lives for a little while, until one day, Charles is sitting in the garden: “The sunlight was coming through the trellis; the vine-leaves threw their shadows over the gravel, jasmine perfumed the air, the sky was blue, cantharides beetles were droning round the flowering lilies, and Charles was choking like an adolescent from the vague amorous yearnings that swelled up in his heart.” Apparently those yearnings, though vaguer than those of a certain other in the novel, were similarly not only amorous, but fatal; Berthe finds Charles dead in the garden, the lock of Emma’s hair in his hand; when the doctor opens him up in an autopsy, he “found nothing.”

Welllll…I don’t really know what to make of all that mixing of death and desire, other than the fact that i found it hugely compelling and catching. I guess the whole novel is relating the twinship of those two forces, and in its final pages, the twinship becomes dramatically stark; it’s a long game suddenly moving in for the final punch of meaning. And it lingers with me, for in both of those “forces,” for want of a better word, there is a particular grim finality, and certainty. They are the ongoing conditions of most everyone’s lives, and the intersections between them are consistently compelling, rich, and a little ominous-feeling.

Ugh. I love this book.

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FINAL ANIMAL UPDATES: Today, one of the hens bullied the cats and i kept having to chase her off, pushing my maternal feelings toward the semi-feral cat pack to a whole new level.

And look! They’re still growing, too.

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zine © LAZARUS McCLOUD, 2015