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SHE
KATE BERNADETTE BENEDICT
“The Shekhinah...is supposed to be everywhere, and it is exile that carries it everywhere.” —Elie Wiesel On the banks of the Ob, at the source of the Nile, in a curtain of reeds, she wanders. She raises a lantern: its flame is extinguished. She stumbles. She reels. She wanders. No clatter of pebbles beneath her sandals. Where night jasmine opens, she wanders. Heat lightning flashes her dark silhouette. Through sandstorm, in snowfall, she wanders. She stops. She weeps. She swivels her neck. She pulls at her garment. She wanders. In fog, in mirage, in a forest of cloud, in vapor of marshes she wanders. Night is her element, exile her destiny. Everywhere, nowhere, she wanders. Ever since, beyond, unto, always, until, she wanders.
“WRITTEN IN THE SAND” BROOKE SHADEN
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“PERENNIAL 1” 6
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THE THINGS WE DO FOR LOVE STORY: DIANE L. MERKEL PHOTOGRAPHY: ELIAS SIDNEY BLOOD
It had to be one of the best inventions, she thought, Mr. Clean’s Magic Eraser. With her hand squeezing the excess water, Julie felt its softness melt into her hand. She released her grip and allowed the sponge, which retained the imprint of her small fingers for a brief moment, to slowly expand to its original shape. Pressing it against the bedroom wall with an aggressive up and down motion, the white sponge turned red. Streaks of red water raced one another down the wall and into the carpet of the same shade. Julie dropped the sponge to the ground and lowered her head into her stained hands. Who was this person she had become and how did she get here? Desperately trying to recall the evolution of how this moment came to be, she turned to face the bed and crawled on her knees to the soaked sheets where he now lay. For the last time she stared into his eyes and for the first time felt no fear. She took her index
finger and gently closed his eyelids, leaving a red fingerprint behind. Every inch of her body was overcome by an uncontrollable tremble. Thought after thought bubbled up in her already scrambled mind, but every one of those thoughts popped and disappeared before she could see it through. What would she do next? Make it look like a suicide? A burglary? Tell the truth? Would anyone believe her? This is not who she was. A murderer. For that split second, she didn’t even know who she was. She wished he had been a doctor, a lawyer, a plumber; anyone whose job didn’t require him to have a gun. Maybe if he were a plumber, she wouldn’t be painted with his insides right now. Or maybe she would have found some other way. A wrench, perhaps; a stethoscope? Julie could just envision it. The somber faces head to toe in navy blue lined like soldiers followed by the elevated casket. The sound of SUMMER 2012
bag pipes cutting through the cold winter air. She closed her eyes and somewhere between her mind and her eyelids, she could see the grieving widow, wearing the same face as her, standing before the freshly dug dirt. Within seconds, that image faded and all she could see in front of her were rusty vertical bars. Still on her knees, Julie wept over his motionless body, “I am so sorry. I didn’t know what else to do. I am so sorry, my love. Look at what I’ve done to you. Look at what you’ve turned me into…I am so sorry…” She leaned in toward his face and delicately placed her lips upon his. They were cold now. She remained in that moment for what felt like forever; her tears washing his colorless face. She lifted her head and wiped her tears from his face and wondered if he could still see her from wherever he was. Cautiously, she stretched her arm over his body to reach for the phone on the opposite side of the 7
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NANCY JOSEPHINE GILBERT MANOR HOUSE QUARTERLY
DWELL/DWELLING GABBY SANCHEZ
MUTE
ANNE DYER STUART The night we broke up he asked me to tell him everything I found wrong with him, everything that needed to be changed. I was sixteen, mute as cheese. I told him to go first. You have noticeable lips, he said, a normal nose, and pretty eyes. You care too much about what people think. You’re not much of a conversationalist. You don’t know how to dress for your body.
We stepped through my window into a moonless night. Mama slept down the hall, away from Daddy for a summer while she worked on her master’s, took courses with teachers who hated to read. I didn’t live there anymore, but I’d gone back for that boy, a boy I’d loved since I was nine for no reason. In the field in the middle of the night we made love in the dirt away from the lights of the town.
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There were the stars, restless, appalled. He’d given me his watch and I wore it until he asked me the next morning, “Do you plan on giving that back?”
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THE SECRET WISDOM OF THE MIDWIVES ESSAY: CAITLYN BURFORD ILLUSTRATION: EMILY GRACE GOODRICH
Our bodies are defined by blood. Our wombs move in an intricate dance of hormones that make them mysterious and living and we create from them. To be woman is to be capable of giving birth and not simply birth to a child but birth to an idea or birth to a holistic motivation for the protection of one another. Women’s power used to come from our wombs. We had a deep understanding of our bodies and how they worked and how we touched and felt and designed them to work. Women shared a secret community of wisdom and magic. In ancient times, women would have celebrations for one another when the blood began to flow out of their
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vaginas because it signified something great and something divine. The Celtic women would run naked under the full moon as they felt their full wombs begin to move and would drum along with the rhythms of the earth to match the patterns in their our bodies with the patterns of the sky. In southern Africa, the Dagara believed that a menstruating woman held wisdom and healing power and they treated her as a goddess, singing songs and prayers to the woman. The Apache tribe across North America would hold five-day festivals for the young girls that began to bleed as they began to embody the Apache goddess, Changing Woman. The ancient Israelite women had a more difficult time celebrating their blood flow in the patriarchal culture that honored only sons. So the women gathered together in secret and decided to tell the men that when they bled, they were unclean
in God’s eyes. A red tent was set up for the women to go into a shameful isolation for their week. Inside the secret tent, the women rejoiced and celebrated in the presence of one another sharing whispered secrets that mocked the men outside that knew nothing of the celebrations. And so these secrets continued. Women’s power came from their knowledge of one another. Midwives perfected the art of birth and mothers taught their daughters how to control their own bodies. But, in the history of humankind, Woman is not allowed to hold her own power. The Roman Catholic church grew fearful of the secret mysteries of women and demanded the authority of their bodies. They became jealous of the blood flow. They required birth to be monitored by the papal authorities and fractured the solidarity of the secret teachings of the women. They began to refer to the midwives as “witches” whose herbal remedies were the devil’s sorcery and birth could only be an act of God. God could only be reached through prayer and the divine intercessions of the holy men and the holy men became doctors. The witches became haggard and poor and when they were found with a sprig of parsley seeping in tea with the intent to bring about a menstrual cycle, they were burned on a stake for using their secret wisdom that now belonged to the church.
It continued; it continues. We give birth in hospitals, our stomachs cut open and the blood leaks out of open wounds because we’ve been told to ignore our bodies and that the men know better about our wombs. We’ve been taught to ingest artificial hormones that control and direct our period and hide us from pregnancy because any other way is impossible and mere witchcraft. When the government takes away our right to birth control, we have been taught to fight as if there is no other way and we need the chemical prescriptions as a last thread of hope to controlling our own bodies and when and how they give birth. But the chemicals are only one side of the story. On the other side, we fight against a self-proclaimed morality that calls us whores and murderers. They don’t give us birth control but forbid us from abortions and call us irresponsible single mothers if we choose neither and if we decide to use food stamps for a child we become welfare mothers that are a drain on the capitalist system. We are villianized as Jezebels. And all of this is because we have lost the secret wisdom of the midwives. Our power is in our wombs and there are ancient mysteries that can restore our authority over our own bodies. SUMMER 2012
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LET’S GET COLD TOGETHER
BY MARISSA PARSONS
SUMMER 2012
SLEEP AND ASH TONIGHT 13
RYAN MCGINNESS
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MARGARET NOBLE
ANDREW GUMM
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TRINH T. MINH-HA
ELEANOR LEONNE BENNETT
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WOMEN: NEW (RE)PRESENTATIONS BY RYAN MCGINNESS EXHIBITING AT QUINT CONTEMPORARY ART SEPTEMBER 15 - NOVEMBER 3, 2012
Quint Contemporary Art is very pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new work by New York–based artist Ryan McGinness. Based on figure drawings from life models, McGinness’ Women series captures the essence of beauty in its simplicity of form. He explains, “Two parallel desires drive these new Women drawings: My desire to simplify and iconify the underlying visually logical geometries inherent in my figure drawings in order to better understand my subject matter; and my desire to embrace and capture the purely aesthetic experience of graceful curves and sensual forms inherent in my models.” Throughout art history, artists have explored the idea of beauty through the use of the female nude. In contemporary art, the idea of this historically male gaze has been explored and questioned. McGinness addresses this idea of the male gaze by collecting visual data from his models and then rendering them oblique through a process of reduction and distillation to elemental forms. McGinness’ iconic drawings speak to the viewer more than to the raw nature of the female nude. The exhibition will feature a range of works within the Women series: from process sketches, works on paper, and cyanotypes to porcelain-baked enamel works on steel, fluorescent glass bead paintings, and the silkscreens McGinness uses to make his paintings. The exhibition will open with a public reception on Saturday, September 15th, from 6 to 8 PM at Quint Contemporary Art in La Jolla, California. The artist will be in attendance. — Quint Contemporary Art
RYAN MCGINNESS WOMEN PARTS (FLUORESCENT, 3) 2011 ACRYLIC ON PAPER 30 X 22 INCHES SUMMER 2012
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44TH & LANDIS BY MARGARET NOBLE IN VISUAL COLLABORATION WITH
BRIDGET ROUNDTREE & CIARA WHITE
As a sound artist, Margaret Noble has placed her finger on the pulse of many art scenes, sonically designing installations, experimental theater, and dance productions. A recipient of the Creative Catalyst Fellowship through the San Diego Foundation, her first exhibition is currently underway with the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego (MCASD). We spoke with Margaret about early sound influences, the process of collaging media to articulate experience, and why one’s own voice can operate with the ultimate resonance. — Camille Tallon
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TRINH T. MINH-HA:
VIEWING THE POET ORATOR THROUGH A GRASSIAN LENS BY MARTHA MCKAY CANTER FILM STILLS:
TRINH T. MINH-HA
“Thus the term ‘rhetoric’ assumes a fundamentally new significance: ‘rhetoric’ is not, nor can it be, the art of the technique of an exterior persuasion: it is rather the speech which is the basis of rational thought.” – Ernesto Grassi, Rhetoric as Philosophy
Trinh T. Minh-ha, a Vietnamese filmmaker, writer, poet, and music composer, employs multiple modes of communication to perform her texts, always speaking nearby rather than for or about women. Minh-ha covers a great deal of theoretical territory in her book, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism, leaving no stone unturned. Within these pages she poetically illustrates, rather than merely telling, stories of paternalism, neo- and post- colonialism, racism, sexism, and patriarchy. Her political writing and palpable sense of urgency heighten the reader’s own sense of urgency as Minhha poses and responds to questions about what happens when women, particularly women of color (who Minh-ha refers to as, “the Other”) speak and write. For Minh-ha, the importance and permanence of history, oral history, and storytelling based on human experiences eclipse the value the West places on logic-based, conclusive proof. Trinh elucidates problems caused by the Western compulsion to place supreme value on the written word and scientific reasoning, over the age-old custom of storytelling among many of the world’s cultures. These texts reveal that Minh-ha is also a rhetorical theorist in that she interrogates and responds to her subject matter reconsidering the canons of rhetoric: invention, arrangement, style, memory and delivery. Minh-ha’s method of meaning making is to observe, perceive, and communicate, rather than interpret, to her audience what she sees so that her readers or viewers can make their own meanings of the matter, and so that she does not intrude upon the meaning being made by the people nearby whom she com20
poses. I argue that Minh-ha’s essays, along with her poetry, reveal that she is poet orator as defined by late-20th rhetorical theorist Ernesto Grassi. Applying Grassi’s theoretical lens, I will discuss Minh-ha’s practice of observation, the words she writes, and the textual style she employs. To begin this discussion I will give a brief overview of Grassi’s philosophy of rhetoric in order to show that his theory in particular provides a sound analytical lens that we can use to enrich our understanding of Trinh as poet orator. Throughout the text I will explain more specific details of Grassi’s theory to reveal their convergence and intersection with Minh-ha’s views on history, oral tradition, women as the bearers of truth, and her implicit censure of the imposition of Cartesian philosophy on human beings throughout the world for its catastrophic effects on native cultures and native speech and writing. ANIMA VIVIMUS, ANIMO SENTIMUS: BY THE SOUL WE HAVE LIFE, BY THE SPIRIT SENSATION. Influenced by his study of Vico and Italian Humanism, Grassi believes humans make meaning through a sense of urgency that spurs us to create or to work and the generation of meaning is the outcome of that work. Language is lodged in sensory perception and the materiality of existence, and metaphor is the means by which humans move from sensory perceptions to language. The tool, the ability for this to occur is ingenium, the Latin word meaning “nature,” and “innate talent”. Metaphor is the bridge between human urgency and the object that emerges from our
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Still from “The Fourth Dimension” 2001, 87 mins Digital film by Trinh T. Minh-ha, © Moongift Films
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KIDS WITH GUNS ELEANOR LEONNE BENNETT INTERVIEW:CORY SAUL
At 16, Eleanor Leonne Bennett is off to a good start. The UK teen photographer’s provocative images have earned her wide acclaim and many first place honors to back it up, including The World Photography Organization’s Photomonth Youth Award and The UK National Geographic Kids Photography Contest. Publications that have shown her work include Revolution Art, NG Kids, and The Guardian. Exhibited around the globe, Bennett’s images tell stories gritty and real, whimsical and affecting. The photos on these pages come from a series Bennett titled “Kids With Guns”. Halfway around the world, she took the time to discuss these photos and her aesthetic style with Manor House Quarterly.
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MHQ STAFF DANE CARDIEL Curator
ARTISTS
DANIEL HEFFERNAN Designer
FEATURED ARTISTS RYAN MCGINNESS - New York, New York
TRINH T. MINH-HA - Berkeley, California
Women: (Re)Presentations
Film Stills, Seleceted Works
MARGARET NOBLE - San Diego, California
ELEANOR LEONNE BENNETT- Manchester, UK
Kids With Guns
44th and Landis
ANDREW GUMM - Nashville, Tennessee
Rashley
CONTRIBUTING ARTISTS KRISTINA MICOTTI - San Diego, California
LAWRENCE SCHIMEL - Madrid, Spain
Cover Art & Creation Myth [Illustration]
Big Game [Translated into English]
BROOKE SHADEN - Los Angeles, California
ELIAS SIDNEY BLOOD - San Diego, California
“Written in the Sand” & “Sac”
Reverie & Perenial 1, 2 & 3
CARE SANTOS - Mataró, Spain
MARISSA PARSONS - San Diego, California
Big Game NANCY JOSEPHINE GILBERT - San Diego, California
Comme Les Oiseaux
EMILY GRACE GOODRICH - San Diego, California
The Secret Wisdom of Midwives [Illustration]
DIANE L. MERKEL - Ozone Park, New York
The Things We Do For Love
CAMILLE TALLON - San Diego, California
ELLEN MCGRATH SMITH - Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
The Annunciation
Dwell/Dwelling
MELISSA STUDDARD - Houston, Texas
DANE CARDIEL - San Diego, California
Creation Myth
This is Where We Wait
RACHEL BELLINSKY - San Diego, California
MARTHA MCKAY CANTER - Tallahassee, Florida
Sister Lambs KATE BERNADETTE BENEDICT - Riverdale, New York
Rashley [Illustration] FRANK SCOTT KRUEGER - Bogotá, Colombia
This is Where We Wait [Illustration] CAITLYN BURFORD - Flagstaff, Arizona
The Secret Wisdom of Midwives 24
CORY SAUL - New York, New York
GABBY SANCHEZ - Los Angeles, California
Vagina XII
CODY GRIFFITH - San Diego, California
Interview: Margaret Noble Interview: Eleanor Leonne Bennett
JEFF ALLEN - San Diego, California
She
Send You Away and Steal Your Skirt, Let’s Get Cold Together, & Sleep and Ash Tonight
Trihn T. Minh-ha: Viewing the Poet Orator Through a Grassian Lens ERIKA DREIFUS - New York, New York
Big Sisterhood CHLOE SPARACINO - San Diego, California
The Key ANNE DYER STUART - Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania
Mute MANOR HOUSE QUARTERLY
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