Anthology II

ANTHOLOGY II

ANTHOLOGY II Critical and creative writing by students of BA English Literature and BA Creative Writing, The Sir John Cass School of Art, Architecture and Design.

Designed by students from Ellipsis studio, Visual Communication, The Sir John Cass School of Art, Architecture and Design 2017/18.

Anthology: A collection of critical and creative writing by BA English Literature and BA Creative Writing students at The Sir John Cass School of Art, Architecture and Design. published by

The Sir John Cass School of Art, Architecture and Design London Metropolitan University Old Castle Street London E1 7NT thecass.com designed by

Students of Ellipsis Studio, Visual Communication, The Sir John Cass School of Art, Architecture and Design 2017/18 Lead book designer: Carlos Valencia Cover design and illustration: Karl Fitzgerald Other illustrations: Jubedha Akther, Abby Batucan, Karl Fitzgerald, Samantha Friend, Miriam Garofalo, Jennifer Garwood, Cecile Genevier, Katie Hardcastle, Viktoria Hristova, Caleb James, Puro Laevuo, Katherine Lozada, Vivienne Mahon, Charlotte McGlinchey, Marius Matulevicius, Nadia Mokadem, Michael Nemorin, Godi Panzout, Hannah Phillips, Harriet Robison, Carlos Valencia and Hubert Windal.

Copyright Š 2018 Printed in the UK on Naturalis by GF Smith All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.

Contents

Foreword by Andrew Stone Introduction by Trevor Norris and Angharad Lewis

v vi

AT HOME

3 The Mushroom Fields by Phil Durham 13 Red Atlantic by Dominique Sinagra 23 While I Was Sleeping by Phil Durham 33 The Birthday by Franki Barker-Johnson

THE OTHER SIDE William Blake & The City of The Imagination by Beatriz Fiore Confessionals by Franki Barker-Johnson Murderer J. Cassidy to be Shot in The Head Every Day for 30 Years by Alessia Galatini Allen Ginsberg & Howl by Adam Worsley Run by Sam Ellis-Hunter

45 53 59 65 73

WORLDS WITHIN WORLDS Haraam Fucks With Silence by Fatha Ibrahim London Coffee Houses in the 17th & 18th Century by Ria Dunn The Black Arts Movement by Beatriz Fiore Experiments in Form by Phil Durham

91 101 107 117

TOO CLOSE TOGETHER, TOO FAR APART Mass Culture in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita by Lewis Duncan White Noise by Ciaran Bankwalla Frank O’Hara by Ciaran Bankwalla Is Hell Other People Or Is There Some Way Out? by Imran Haque

131 137 145 151

POWER BEYOND COMPARE Ghosts in America by Dominique Sinagra The Epic of Gilgamesh by Ria Dunn Dracula & Gender Trouble by Eleanor King Whale Song by Dominique Sinagra The Doll by Alessia Galatini

161 169 177 185 193

Foreword Andrew Stone, Head of School The Sir John Cass School of Art, Architecture and Design Anthology II is the second publication arising from the collaboration between English and Creative Writing and Visual Communication students and staff in The Cass.

The book builds on last year’s launch. It contains the work of more than 30 students and the project has seen an increase in the number of pieces of writing to 22. The saying is that the second book, album or project is the hardest so I would like to thank Trevor Norris and Angharad Lewis for their continued ambition for the Anthology and for the students’ grasping of the opportunity to progress the idea further.

The purpose of the Anthology is of course not only to professionally document and present student work but to enable a dialogue between disciplines and different approaches and expertise. This is evident in the interplay of text and image, of different genres and different styles and of their final capturing as a single volume.

That such a collaboration is then presented publicly is key. As artists, writers and designers ‘what you see is what we do’ and the consequent impact of the students’ work beyond the University is an equally important consideration in developing the project.

I am delighted that students from both areas have engaged so fully and congratulate everyone involved on producing something of such quality. This is a rich and beautiful book integrating the ideas and skills of students to enrich and extend the readers’ understanding and engagement.

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Introduction Trevor Norris, Course Leader English Literature and Creative Writing This is the second anthology that CASS design students have created from the work of writers in the Creative Writing and English Literature programmes and it’s been a pleasure once again to see the design students’ ideas develop over time. Everything in the book is the result of months of creative decision making and discussion by the design students about how best to respond to the ideas, themes and images in the writing students’ work.

This year’s anthology ranges through a number of themes from the domestic to the mythic. We begin in the apparently familiar territory of the home and the relationships closest to us but quickly realise not all is as it seems. From here we move into transcendental visions where our writers explore altered states and a different sense of self. The unfamiliar becomes the disruptive in our third chapter as we see how literature disturbs not only the reader’s sense of things but creates powerful political effects by demanding new ways of being read and heard. The penultimate chapter expands the book’s analysis by examining how literature can make broad social and philosophical critiques, and we end the book with several pieces that show how we can amplify ourselves to the mythical dimensions of the figures literature contains.

My thanks go to Creative Writing and English Literature tutors Sunny Singh, Sid Bose, Andrew Cutting, Adam Beck and Tanya Nash for their creative and critical guidance and support of our third year students in the writing degrees. Many thanks also to colleagues Angharad Lewis and Alistair Hall for leading the design studio, steward-

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ing the book’s production and helping the students create such a beautiful piece of work. Thanks also to Head of School Andrew Stone for his continuing support without which the book could not exist. Once again, this project shows the extraordinary creativity and collaborative spirit of students in the CASS. I wish all of the students involved the very best in their future careers.

Angharad Lewis, Course Leader Design for Publishing, Visual Communication For the second year, the Anthology project has proven a rich ground for learning and creating. Our BA Graphic Design and BA Illustration students have responded to the work of students in English Literature and Creative Writing, to elucidate their words and give tangible form to their achievements. In the process, the students from Visual Communication had the privilege of unpicking and rethinking some very fine content– they wrestled with challenging themes and radical language, they interpreted wide-ranging form and content and added their voices to those of the writers to create a collaborative visual document that is true to the definition of an ‘anthology’: collection of artistic works that have a similar form or subject, often those considered to be the best.

Just as the writing students’ work traverses a broad terrain of themes and styles, the illustrations in Anthology II demonstrate the a range of image-making and illustrative processes and materials, including collage, letterpress printed type, photography, hand-rendered type, lino-printing, paper marbling and screen printing.

What has resulted from the collaboration of students from different disciplines is a transformation of their work and their practice. The writing students’ words are presented on a stage beyond the word processing document or notebook, they are crafted, duplicated, reproduced and distributed. The graphic design and illustration students’ skills and creativity are stretched by the experience of working with original content and a ‘live’ relationship. Above all, the work of both groups of students is delivered into the hands, eyes and ears of an audience that, through the pages of this printed book, travels beyond the expected confines of the academic setting.

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1

At

e

Hom

AT H O ME

The Mushroom Fields

BY PHIL DURHAM ILLUSTRATED BY HARRIET ROBISON

THE MUSHROOM FIELDS when the dust rises from the earth and the pollen returns to the bees, to the flower, to the stem, the bud. when the earth spits out a poison rain and the storm calms talcum clouds: the mushroom fields will billow, still. plankton, sharks, whales and all will be carried out from the beach, and the sea will swell in its enormity, when the crust wave coolly sweats, the buildings reset, and regrets fade: the mushroom fields will billow, still. when the first bone wraps ligament, solid flesh and skin around itself, becoming the first and last, undying. when the glare fades from the TV, the office PC, the window, the street:

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the mushroom fields will billow, still. when reason whets the wallet belly, and the money comes folding in to parliament, to congress, to us. when all causes retrace their steps, and the roads re-tarmac themselves: the mushroom fields will billow, still.

MAHA BANDHA BY CAMDEN LOCK I went limp by camden lock when she asked me to walk with her. we both knew what she wanted, but I could hardly do one half of that. she’d caught me under the lustre of slim jim’s badly-lit, brassiere-chandelier last weekend and

quizzed me on femininity.

I’d thought-out-loud that, “you do what you want.” and known that I could never do one half of that for myself.

I wish you’d hanged my masc -ulinity from the rafters and asked me the same question twice: so that I’d’ve had a chance

to find lucidity; and lament for you. instead I stood there with lucifer in my fist, sipped at his jugular, and decanted bravado

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into a voodoo doll – or something like me.

I wanted to go limpid with her when she asked me to walk with her down camden lock, down by the canal

but instead, I could only think, “you know more than I know.” and did nothing.

A MOTHER’S HEX I needed a pair of black brogues for a funeral. we’d been having good weather, so I wore my cut-off, corduroy shorts.

I had to go back up the tufnell park road to old nag’s head. there are shops there that’ll sell you almost anything, but I only needed a pair of black brogues for a funeral. along the way I saw another mother, smiled to her child, and somehow had to question myself – even for that. so, I tried to pull my chin up, and away, and into the clouds: where I only needed a pair of black brogues for a funeral.

I felt the mother’s hex upon me as I walked behind her in my haphazard manner – she must have thought that I’d been drinking. one after another, hallmark thoughts added to the hubbub in my head but I only needed a pair of black brogues for a funeral. in a hollow homage to lost faith I crossed my heart, poured one out, and proceeded to swallow my heresy. how I thought that I was holier-than-thou, I’ll never understand

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again – I only needed a pair of black brogues for a funeral but I came away with a busted lip and a low-order of miracle.

O/I they keep whispers from me in the dim, lint-corners of their homes: where otherwise there would be insects and a glimpse beneath the floor boards. they move like spiders on fingertips, like the creaking of a fractured skull. they crawl inside synapses and spark flint on rock. somewhere, there must be a god, catcher of waking dreams. fold me away in a fourth dimension so that I can sit silently and watch moonlight refract, and dissipate.

I want to feel. if it means I must burn – then let me watch from outside of myself. let there be a grand procession and a brass band; a float; a cliff; a fall. eradicate my more misshapen moods. forget I ever said, “diecuntfuckmurder” I was lying when I meant it. so, you may, by all means, place roses on my coffin.

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DEATH, TAXES & TERRORISM it began with intuition and a cold sweat, hot sweat, gone cold again.

I’d met murder that night, and his seven hounds followed me home into the morning. a glance, swiped, and my phone glared back at me. my eyes hurt. they bled like oceans that beat brains against the shore. the tens of thousands that made the crowd, cast amongst the rocks, screeching, screaming, flowing tears, and the white horse behind them caked in blood. a trampling that shook the ground, carried terror, and rang out like the hives of the twenty thousand tormented.

I stood with them, in spirit, as one fled past – a manic mother of two – and her name was Hope, though her face echoed in despair. we stood with one another, as the dust of death piled up around us, and hushed our cries. for the lion slept calmly, still in his keep.

PROPER GANDHI i’m a want do. do. do. i’m a we will. we can. we man. i’m a we. we. i’m a peopleof-the-people person. person of the people’s people. i’m a want do, can do, we can do, you me. i’m a will-gonna. a will have a. a will gonna have want, me. me a will gonna have want but know don’t need-a/take-but-not-needer. so fuck. fuck you. fuck you a disease want a make. fuck you a disease in another place. fuck you a try disease taster want a maker-doer. or at least a try-maker-doer. fuck. a difficult trier. difficult try with the no, no. difficult-maker. more difficult you a want-maker, you. with the brain freezer basement, you. you a taker. you a taker, too. take two. you take a wanter. make a want-taker. but i’m a make-wanter. i’m a want-say, a want-need-taker. i’m a take-you, i’m a take you-want-needs. i’m a take you want you need you kill it. i’m a take-you, kill you a thief. i’m a take you, thief. i’m a take-you-put-a-person person. i’m a take-you-put-you-dead person. i’m a take-you-put-you-not-a-person-no-more person. i’m a take-you-put-you-

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want-away-put-you-want-no-more-want-say-no-more person. that’s the type of person i am. a whichever puppet wears the pope did make the rape hand dance an arbitrary yet bland dance-making-man and the signature stamped a sign “apres”, a sign I pray, a sign. a pre-cosine angular deformity, a predetermined deformity. whichever hat the black crap sits in. whichever snapback the bat man rapes in. the informal party. the in formal party. the in-out-informal formal party. the form: all hardy. where the party boys go wild the girls go wild while the others. wild at home. their hovel. their hole. their basement. their car park, abandoned. their corner, abandoned. their street-sign, abandoned. their bar, two, bars, three bars, two bars, again. can’t hear. can’t hear them speak. can’t hear them think. can’t.

Can’t Hear Their dreams. can’t.

won’t.

Sleep. connect.

COMMENTARY While writing these poems, I felt innately, acutely aware of their connection in terms of theme. However, upon returning to evaluate them as a brief collection, I found the connection to be somewhat more elusive than I had initially imagined. Eventually I concluded that they are tied together by an existential nihilism which begins in a fairly Freudian fear of impotence, and ends in a deeper, surrealist-psychoanalytical examination of the search for meaning, and belonging.

Through the cycle, less focus is given to the importance of place and time, shifting, instead, to more introspective modes of thought – ending in an almost complete syntactical breakdown and the loss of a coherent sense of self.

Of the various influences permeating through these poems, John Berryman’s “Dream Songs” is almost certainly the strongest. Although I cannot say that I have borrowed much from his use of form, I feel that I have been deeply influenced by his often nihilistic attitude, and the way in which he is able to flit between symbols and images without degrading the inherent meaning of either. Which leads well onto Baudrillard, and Saussure, whose individual dissections of semiotics at a nuclear level of intimacy have (if not always translated to a profound understanding) certainly made an impression on the way in which I now approach language as a craftsman. Baudrillard asserts in

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his “Symbolic Exchange and Death”, that, while Saussure considered language as a formula, “What is essential, whatever the formula is, is to consider the poetic not as the mode of the formula's appearance, but as its mode of disappearance.” Which I have taken to be an apt description of the deconstruction essential to the craft of good poetry, and the elimination necessary to the craft of great poetry. In other words, the production of something jarring, or entirely unfamiliar to the reader.

Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue” and “Little Root of a Dream” are each excellent examples of this mode of poetry which remove all but the essential context to present their contents in a raw, emotional provocation. The closest I came to this pure state in my work would most likely be in “O/I” where the speaker laments the regret, torment and lack of meaning in his life. Celan’s repetition in “Death Fugue” inspired the repetition in, “A Mother’s Hex”, which deals with the holding-at-arms-length of the mourning process.

In “Death, Taxes and Terrorism”, I reacted to the recent events which transpired at a pop concert in the Manchester Arena. I used Shelley’s, “The Masque of Anarchy” as a shell framework for the piece and transcribed myself into the piece as a visionary spirit – in the spirit of romanticism – so as to revisit his work from a modern context.

I wrote “The Mushroom Fields” as a reaction to one of our class prompts and was inspired by Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse 5” – particularly the passage in which bombs rise out of explosions, from the ground and are eventually picked apart in factories.

I also held Bukowski’s, “Dinosauria, We” in mind for this piece, while maintaining a deeper pessimism throughout with the refrain, “the mushroom clouds billow, still”.

In “Maha Bandha by Camden Lock” the issues of physical and mental impotence are raised in response to a sexually charged confrontation. The titular reference is to a yogic practice which is also known as the “great lock” and is intended to provide sexual restraint amongst other things. To my eye, however, the position, when held, has the appearance of a person enduring a great mental and physical strain. The cycle begins with this poem as a wry implication that many of the world’s greatest problems begin with what psychoanalysts would refer to as sexual frustration, and/ or repression.

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To complete the cycle, “Proper Gandhi.”, depicts a syntactically unhinged descent into political dissociation. In many ways, it also portrays the effect that politicians such as Donald Trump have on their supporting electorate. What starts out as the interpretation of a positive message is quickly subverted and becomes deeply disturbing by its conclusion. I wrote this poem as a stream of consciousness while listening to a montage of Mr. Trump’s speeches leading up to his election. The constant repetition in each encourages the reader/listener to slip in and out of the monologue – consciously and subconsciously absorbing information as they progress.

This final poem is a departure from the forms of the previous poems in the cycle, and is stylised akin to a newspaper column. Which leads me to another of the processes which tie these poems together: that of the disintegration of form – alongside the senses of place and time. In the first of these six poems, the speaker’s register is clearly conversational – if somewhat affected – but by the final poem, the reader is subjected to an almost entirely incoherent pseudo-psychological garble. Along the way, the reader may notice the affectation of more recognisable poetic devices.

Being that poetry, in my world-view, is a discipline in pursuit of the expression of basic human truths, I had the intention of leading the reader to one final, wry chuckle at the misdirection they will have suffered by discovering that my conclusion comes in the form of a near-illiterate newspaper column filled with false idioms and the effects of propaganda.

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Red Atlantic

BY DOMINIQUE SINAGRA ILLUSTRATED BY CECILE GENEVIER

N

o one in my family was meant to be born. My father had been married before he met my mother to a woman named Sandy. We saw her on occasion standing on the curb in front of East Gloucester Variety Store smoking cigarettes.

“Hey Sandy, how ya doin’?”

“Hi Joey, How’s it goin’?”

Sandy and my father tried to have children but couldn’t. My father had all the appropriate tests and was deemed infertile by doctors. My mother hadn’t been in Gloucester long when she met my father. She went there one day for no reason at all, just one day she decided to go for a drive. She drove north from Boston on Route 128 in her blue Jetta her father bought her. Route 128 stretches all the way from Florida, up the East Coast of the United States, until finally finishing in Gloucester.

Gloucester is at the tip of Cape Ann and juts into the Atlantic Ocean. Cape Ann is the point just above Cape Cod. It has been home to fishing families since the 1600’s and boasts being America’s oldest Seaport. My mother drove over the Annisquam River; a salt water river that is more a canal than a river that cuts Gloucester off from the mainland, creating a man-made island.

“What is this place?” my mother thought as she drove east through the city passing the boats bobbing in the harbor like head nodding in agreement. A few weeks later she moved into a cinderblock building on Rocky Neck over looking the railways,

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where they hauled boats up to mend leaks, do paint jobs, and scrape the barnacles off their hulls. My mother had spent the last decade in Manhattan, trying to be an actress. She did a lot of waitressing and a lot of auditioning and got a few roles in soap operas. When she turned 30 she decided she no longer wanted to live that life and packed up and headed north, to New England where she grew up. She spent the summer painting her parents’ house in Rhode Island and letting her legs grow brown.

Her roommate in the cinderblock building, overlooking the railways, was a Gloucester girl. The type who has never been to Boston even though it was only 45 minutes away and let alone New York, forget about it! Her roommate said my mother was a space cadet for all her acting and journalling, but other than that they got along just fine. One cold January night, my mother’s roommate opened the window and yelled down to the street below.

“Hey! Joe come up here!”

My father grew up in Gloucester. His mother, Pat, had him when she was 18. He was the oldest of five kids. Pat had wanted five boys because everyone knows boys are easier than girls, but instead she got three boys and two girls. Vicky, my father’s younger sister, died in a car accident when I was six months old. She and a friend were leaving a bar and pulled out into oncoming traffic. Vicky wasn’t wearing her seat and went through the windshield. Her friend, was wearing her seatbelt and lived.

My father and his five brothers and sisters grew up on Portaguee Hill, named for all the Portuguese who lived there. Portaguee Hill looked down on the harbor through the frame two blue domed steeples of Our Lady of Good Voyage Church, where a statue of the Virgin Mary held a ship in the crook of her arm like it was the Holy Infant. My father grew up in a green house with vinyl sides that slouched over the pavement and always had its shutters closed.

My mother’s roommate invited my father up to say hi and have a beer. He came up the stairs and stood in the living room holding a trash bag of scallops and a trash bag of shrimp.

“Choose one,” he said. My mother chose shrimp.

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A few months later my mother discovered she was pregnant with me. At the time, my father was skippering a dragger called the Barbara Jean that he kept tied to the wharf at the railways, next to the Italian Princess, the Midnight Sun and the Vincie N. He went out ten days at a time fishing for cod on George’s Bank, off Nova Scotia.

Towards the end of my mother’s pregnancy, my parents moved into a brown duplex behind the Colonial Inn and up the hill from Rocky Neck. On a freezing night, just before Christmas, the Italian Princess, the Midnight Sun and the Vincie N rubbed against each other and groaned, their ties tightened and pulled, frozen and rigid. Sea smoke rose out of the harbor like souls of lost fisherman and my mother ran up and down the hallway trying to get away from labour pains. My father was downstairs watching the Discovery Channel.

When my head was free from my mother’s body, I was still for a moment and looked around, eyes wide. My father, who had been hiding under a pillow, had to be nudged by the midwife and told a daughter had been born. We lived together in the brown duplex behind the Colonial Inn for six years. My parents bought a twenty-foot long sail-boat they named the ‘Thunder Road’ after the Bruce Springsteen song.

“Screen door slams, Mary’s dress waves Like a vision she dances across the porch as the radio plays…”

The Thunder Road was held by a cradle of stilts, two on each side, in front of the brown duplex. Her sails were kept in a canvas bag in a cupboard under the stairs.

Her mast was balanced on saw-horses along the side of the house. My parents were going to fix the Thunder Road up and sail around The Cape and maybe even down the coast. Outside our brown duplex tiny little berries grew from white blossoms and red ants munched them and I believed fairies lived in and amongst them. Inside, our house was always a mess and the fairies wouldn’t come inside unless it was clean. The brown carpet in the brown duplex was never vacuumed and there was stuff everywhere. Toys, my father’s fisherman boots, my mother’s clothes covered the floor. It was impossible to walk across the room without stepping on something.

Bits of onion peels, and shrimp tails were on the kitchen floor. The table was covered with my father’s drawing and dirty plates from many meals ago. The sink was always

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overflowing with more pots and pans and plates and grease formed a layer on the top of the undrained water.

We had a dog named Fonzi and three cats, Sophie, Delilah and Elliot. We had a cockatiel named Homer and two goldfish. Fonzi, was always scratching until his skin bled.

Elliot was missing his tail because a motorcycle hit him and his tail got caught in the spokes. Delilah once went missing for a week, and my father said a coyote must have got her. But she came back eventually, with her mouth all torn up. Her flea collar must have gotten caught on a bush and got stuck in her mouth as she tried to get it off, until she broke free. Sophie, was black with green eyes and once drank anti-freeze and was never quite right after that.

Homer talked to himself.

“Hi, Homer.”

“Pretty bird.”

My mother worked as a Kindergarten assistant at the Cape Ann Waldorf School. The Cape Ann Waldorf School frowned on television and plastic toys. Once my mother and father got in a huge fight over a jack-in-the-box my father bought from a bargain bin. My mother made him throw it away. Instead, she gave me cloth dolls and wooden blocks and read books to me. My mother wore long skirts to work and her long dark hair in a braid. My father still wasn’t fishing then and I stayed home with him. He’d lie on the couch and sketch boats and let me watch Sesame Street.

“Don’t you tell Mommy.”

But when my mother got home I always told her I watched Big Bird.

“For God’s sake, Joe!” “What? What’s the matter? It’s just big bird!”

Then my mother would go upstairs to take a nap and he’d look at me and say, “Rat fink.” Ever since my mother got over the pains of my labour she had wanted another baby. But miracles usually happen only once. Years went by and my mother continued to pine for another baby. Instead, we bought a new boat; a 65-foot eastern rig. He bought her from someone in New Bedford and I remember looking at her tied to the wharf.

“That’s a nice boat.”

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Eastern rigs are fishing boats with the pilothouse in the stern, originally made from the hulls of the schooners when engines were replacing sails. Eastern rigs usually pull nets along their sides. The boat’s name was The Gale. My father painted The Gale green and black and steered her north from New Bedford to Gloucester Harbor. He hired some guys as his crew and said he was nervous as hell to take her out fishing.

He used The Gale to fish for slime eels or hag fish. Slime eels are long pink fish at the bottom of the Atlantic. They have eyes but are nearly blind because there’s nothing to see down there. They use smell to find carcasses of dead creatures from above that sank to the bottom of the sea. The body of a whale would make an excellent feast for slime eels and they’d inhabit it and eat until there was nothing left but bones. If my father squeezed the head of a slime eel yellow teeth appeared.

My father made traps from 55-gallon drum barrels in the front yard, under the watchful bow of the Thunder Road. He cut round holes into the sides and put in plastic cones and inside he put bait. The slime eels could swim in but not out. When the eels felt threatened they produced white slime from their bodies, so the barrels were filled with sticky slime and seawater when hauled on deck. My father sold the slime eels he caught on the Gale to Koreans and they made shoes and bags and lipstick cases out of their skins. My father was beginning to make pretty good money selling the slime eels to the Koreans. I remember going down to the wharf and shoving my hands in the barrels of eels and pulling two handfuls out. There was a guy named Dan who was 6'5" and scared to death of them and I’d chase him all over the dock, holding my hands out laughing.

The Koreans gave me a $20 bill when I saw them.

“To buy a cookie.”

My mother opened a savings account for me at Cape Ann Savings Bank, into which I deposited my cookie money. When I was six, my mother discovered she was pregnant, again. It turns out miracles can happen more than once! My mother said she was going to have a home birth because she wanted complete control and I could be there if I wanted. My mother said it might be a scary but she thought I could handle it. I asked why would it be scary and she said because “mommy will be in a lot of pain.”

I said she could hold my hand and squeeze it as much as it hurt. She said she might

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hurt my hand and I said I didn’t mind. My mother showed me videos of births. There was a lot of howling, groaning and moaning and I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to film themselves looking like that, but then there was a little baby all covered with gook on the mother’s chest and I thought that might be worth documenting.

My mother took me with her to the midwife’s for the first check up. My mother lay down on a bed and lifted her shirt. The midwife lathered it with some blue jelly that mother said was cold. Then pressed some contraption with a speaker against my mother. Some sounds came out of the speaker like the sounds my father described when he was standing in the engine room of the Gale. Then out of the ocean inside my mother was a thump-thump. It must have been a fish.

“Do you hear the baby’s heartbeat?”

“Yes.” A woman pregnant with a daughter carries three generations in her body. She has herself, her child in her growing belly, and not long into gestation the unborn develops eggs, waiting for someday down the line to be fertilized.

On February 26th, 1996, I was woken up in the middle of the night.

“The new baby is coming,” my father said.

“The fish?”

“Yes, get up.”

I went down the brown carpeted stairs and walked over the linoleum floor that was peeling up around the edges. My mother called the midwife and she was on her way.

My mother decided the best thing to do while waiting for the midwife or the baby, which ever came first, was to vacuum and cook a pot of chilli. My mother bent over the vacuum while she had a contraction and then carried on trying to suck all the dirt up from the carpet, which was a losing battle.

The midwife arrived with her assistant just after 6 AM. In between contractions my mother made everyone tea and coffee and was the best host she’s ever been. The midwife checked for the fish’s heartbeat and said it was strong and it seemed the ocean inside my mother was creating great waves to throw the out and onto land.

“What happens next?” my mother said to the midwife.

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“Nothing. It can be romantic.”

Upstairs in my parent’s bedroom where the fish was going to be born, my mother had laid a big green tarp and a shower curtain over the futon bed and covered it with plastic sheets and covered those with old cotton sheets.

My mother walked up and down the hallway groaning because the waves in her ocean were becoming stronger and more frequent, crashing against her shores.

The midwife turned up the heat in the room so the fish wouldn’t get too big a shock when it was born from warm waters. It was hot in my pyjamas so I took them off and just wore my pink underwear. My mother came to the bed heaving and wailing, her face all red and her dark hair in her face. I was going to catch the fish in a white blanket and put a tiny little cap over its head. I’d been looking forward to it for 9 months.

But when I got up from my place at the bottom of the bed to get the blanket on the other side of the room, I looked back to see the fish had already been born along with a whole lot of red ocean.

The midwife was rubbing the fish with blankets and someone handed me some scissors to cut the umbilical cord, but I wasn’t strong enough and someone else had to help me. The cord was pinkish and thick with blue running through it.

The great red ocean was still pouring out of my mother even after the Fish had been placed on her chest. The red waters were soaking the old cotton sheets and through to the green shower curtain and the tarp, which was protecting the mattress. The midwife administered a shot into the vein on my mother’s arm. But ocean kept coming, like the surge of a high tide when the moon is full, onto the beach. My mother didn’t seem to notice the Atlantic was coming out of her and just looked around at the ceiling.

Then the midwife wiped the hair out of my mother’s face and held her by the arm and said, “Emily! Emily, look at me. Emily you have to stop bleeding now.”

Eventually, she did stop bleeding, but not before the red Atlantic soaked through the sheets and into the bed. The midwife said my mother should eat lots of iron to make up for the blood loss.

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COMMENTARY I was inspired specifically by a number of female writers and artists that we explored over the course of the module, namely Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath’s confessionals, as well as, Angela Carter’s exploration of the bloody side of life through fairy-tales. I was closely inspired by Frida Kahlo’s painting, “My Birth.” In this piece I write from a fairly autobiographical point of view, describing real life events of my parents coming together, my conception and birth and then my sister’s birth. As I said, in the story, none of us were meant to be born. My father was never meant to be able to have children, according to doctors, but over 10 years he and my mother ended up with 3 children, before their divorce.

The tone of this piece is very personal and I think revealing, not dissimilar to Plath and Sexton’s work. It is also all set in New England where the two poets lived and worked. Although, I was writing from a child’s perspective, but still a female child’s perspective. I feel much of the critics of the confessional poetry were by men who wished to overlook the female experience, especially that of the housewife at that time. By writing about my childhood and my mother, our life, and her birth of my sister and my relationship to it, I hope to be giving voice to a very common experience of birth that is often overlooked or called taboo.

I decided to specifically focus on a home birth, one away from doctors and the Western medical system, and one with a midwife – also one where a child was allowed to be and describing it through a romantic, poetic child perspective. A perspective that I think is unique for the subject. I also want to focus on blood and try to, in my own way, recreate the Frida Kahlo, “My Birth” painting with words. In an effort to keep with the ocean theme of the story and the world of the piece, I didn’t call the blood during the birth, blood, instead I called it the Red Atlantic. I think it makes sense that a child would believe an ocean could exist inside their mothers’ womb – to a child one probably does, certainly to an infant!

Although, I wanted to use a poetic voice and description, I didn’t want to shy away from the grotesque, primal nature of birth and wanted to be sure to make it very clear to the reader what was happening.

I was also inspired by outside reading, “Angela’s Ashes” by Frank McCourt. McCourt balances a grave story and circumstances with a humorous child’s voice. This voice worked very well and is one I tried to emulate.

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While I Was Sleeping

BY PHIL DURHAM ILLUSTRATED BY CARLOS VALENCIA

WHILE I WAS SLEEPING now that it all came true and my back aches without cause and my knees crack at the bend and the mornings sneak in like torpedoes with brittle teeth and bloody gums - just like he said they would the first thought of the day is that today could, just be the day that every dog and all thatthat every cloud.

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but then the kettle boils thin air and the toaster trips a fuse and the shower spits at first cold like hale. like they all, together, somehow contrived the betrayal while I was sleeping.

I’D LIKE TO SHOW YOU SOME PHOTOGRAPHS in the first photograph I’m playing with a toy truck. the truck is loaded with sand and my spade is overflowing. the sun is beaming down behind the trees and, through the glare, I’m smiling. in the second photograph the moon is drawn full with chalk and the carry-bags are empty.

I have a pumpkin in my arms, my top is tied above my head, and a tiny candle tickles a flame as frayed shoelaces sit by my ankles. the third photograph is the oldest. you’ll hardly make me out - in the black and the white -

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I was holding myself there.

I was there catching sonar when the night was ever-lasting. in the fourth photograph you can hardly miss me.

I’m right there in the print.

I burned the fifth photograph on top of a mini-tipi bonfire.

I had nothing good to bring around. and in this last photograph looking into the dirt I am behind the lens.

ON WALKING THE TUFNELL PARK ROAD walking up the tufnell park road saw a few snoopers’ vans

at the top – felt I was going soft around the middle –

pulled down my hood to get a better look.

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grey-brick house, red door ajar, cream-painted keystone arching on a blue, crystalline afternoon – squeezed my eyes in their sockets no tape, no lights, no siren just the man in the hazmat suit and handcuffs. no fuss, no dogs, no hollers.

I had a moment of clarity

walking up the tufnell park road

with the bus gust in my ear

with the bars and grocers ahead

with the school kids on scooters

with the mothers’ middling chatter

with day dreams of the American kestrel

and the sky above me

my feet on the ground that life is a motion picture.

I had a moment outside of myself again.

SOME POEMS AREN’T MEANT TO BE WRITTEN on frost-bitten mornings, with a newspaper under-arm, I’d walk half a mile to sit, and wait, and watch the clock.

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there are times when I go to sleep without a thought in my head except, sometimes it takes me a while to dilate in the silence.

I tried to call you late at night but your phone rang out.

I had to go to work in the early hours and that cat cried from eleven to “oh, three-or-four.” when I wake, he’s always just there – on the armrest with his eyes half-open like mine. they gave me a cream for psoriasis applied twice daily for a month and ten days. last week we had good sales.

I got an extra hand with the deliveries but sometimes I think there’s a reason for all of this and then I miss the burn of the bell-ringer’s rope so I put old socks on twice a day once in the morning, and once at night, and I try not to think about it. it really is nice around here- sometimes you might even get a stranger to smile.

But when I think of my friends and they’re getting high together and getting drunk and talking about recording studios and house parties and an interview they did for Thrasher and a gig they saw in New York I get jealous and I want to go home. I want just to stop. I can’t see myself in the place I came from and I can’t imagine where I’m going to go and I just can’t quite hold a thought.

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so I put on an old pair of socks and I get up and I try not to write a poem about it.

WHEN THE WORLD BURNS I think I see them now like the man said, “it’ll be guns and roving mobs” so I’ve been keeping this collection of buttons under my bed since 1981 too scared to deal them out because other people always want to put their noses some place and I can’t keep them back. don’t you wish you could wear silk pants and smoke all day with a harem of cherubs to bathe you in plutonium and oil? and don’t you think it’d be nice, on a Wednesday afternoon, to send everybody home to hold their children? like it was a brand new day one more time – like it was sunday in the suburbs on repeat. and you’d think that’s all they’d have to say, but you’d be wrongthere’ll be a litany of excuses tossed down there in that fountain. but that’s your future, and my future, and, wellthey’ve got tentacles in many pie-holes, you see, and you can bite one off, butthere’s always another joker in the pack-

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and when the clown holds his face in his hands and laughs, We laugh

COMMENTARY When composing these poems, influenced in my approach by some of the exercises from seminars, I became aware that the juxtaposition of trauma and the everyday was an idea that I could not untangle my thought from.

Auden’s “Memorial for the city” was, in particular, an inspiration to many of the ideas I attempted to tackle – explicitly, voyeurism/surveillance in, “I’d like to show…” and, “On walking the…” and the ruin of the city in “When the world burns”. While “Slaughterhouse 5” informed some of the schizoid, irrationality of the narrative voice and “Lolita”, an element of deflection and unreliability.

My central effort with these poems was to create a speaker whose paranoia would be, to some extent, believable, whose delusions would be relatable and in effect disconcerting to the reader. In some instances, the reader is directly addressed so as to create a conversational tone and to solicit sympathy, or even – such as in, “when the world burns” – complicity. I intended for the reader to feel as though they should do something, but ultimately realise that they could do nothing – that it’s just a poem.

In terms of style and form, I undoubtedly owe most to the Beat generation et al. and hope to riff with the perspective of the flaneur while attempting incorporate a certain Britishness by way of locale, class distinction and northern idiosyncrasies.

A technique new to my endeavours is one which I became familiar with firstly through David Bowie, then the Dadaists and eventually through Burroughs. It is the “cut-up”.

This is something that I played with for inspiration – printing copies of some of my favourite poems about “the city” to tear up and put together into something new, see bibliography – rather than composition concerning these poems. However, I think that the influence can be seen quite clearly in the fragmented nature of “when the world burns” and “some poems…” During the composition of these two I listened to recitals

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of several poems simultaneously while ingesting copious (…) and consulting my notes.

The intended effect of this fragmentation is to open the mind to previously unseen, or unconscious, connotations in the work. Another method of accessing Rimbaud’s “derangement of the senses”, in this case best attested to by the reader, rather than the author.

Although the bulk of the text in these pieces concerns very mundane events, there are scattered disturbances which derail the speaker. In the first poem, the displacement of blame onto inanimate objects personifies them in a comedic, yet perturbing vision.

The second poem wrestles with agency in that the speaker offers a position of judgement to the reader, only to later sit “behind the lens” in judgement. The third poem depicts a soporific neighbourhood in which the ephemeral figure of a handcuffed man jars the speaker. The fourth poem revolts at the mundanity of it’s being a poem.

And the fifth discusses the futility of inertia and repetition.

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The Birthday

BY FRANKI BARKER-JOHNSON ILLUSTRATED BY VIKTORIA HRISTOVA

1 It’s ten to ten and he tells me to call. I do, push-pushing Alex and Anna aside to make room for the flat dry grass in winter. He used to behave like summer, hot as hell. We continue to talk and see each other naked but we have already had our fun. I’ve slept with other people but it’s not really cheating if we were on a break for like, an hour.

Having bipolar disorder is an excuse, you can’t concentrate on one thing, and that’s fine, we are free, aren’t we? Parks are only for prostitutes or for people to piss in. I’ve never sat in a park or anywhere for long. I know God is watching. He was amused for a while but now his pissed off. It’s over, its over it’s over, now. You have done all you can. You are exactly where you need to be.

He doesn’t want to listen to us. The song has sung itself to pigeon shit. Words are scarce and they lie. Real words, don’t you wish you could mean them? Don’t you wish you could feel them as much as you did when you wrote them down? But now they’re gone, as the spoken word, they say, don’t they? Gone, Gone, Gone.

There is no such song and if there was I wouldn’t sing it with you.

We don’t speak the same – you don’t want me to move my limbs.

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The birds mate and make more noise science is a clit surrounded by barbed wire secrets you weren’t supposed to spill God is angry, is it him who makes me ill?

His calling me and I refuse to look up I wear guilt darker than the bruises of a lady battered by her boyfriend death is living in the pockets of my mind cuckoo-ing at moments when I’m not switched on most of the time you’re still on the phone you wait for the yes, less energy to say I hang up again and now I wait.

He arrived, late as usual. Crazy girl. Crazy girl. He drives a BMW but we’re drinking so were getting cabs tonight is that alright with you?

My mother is the devil she wants to make me cry my mother is the devil don’t sing no lullaby “Don’t make jokes like that”, he said, interrupting my prosody, he wouldn’t find this funny would he? His mother’s an angel. I made him open the present I bought him that sat in the fridge. We didn’t need to go to a bar. He is Muslim but he likes prosecco and sex out of marriage.

My mother is the devil she doesn’t want me to smile my mother is the devil Lord, she is so fragile A bottle of prosecco with two glass flutes. I poured us both a glass. I’m not planning to get him drunk. I bought him the prosecco because I wanted to drink prosecco.

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My mother is the devil and I fucking hate the truth my mother is the devil breathing fire under her roof The smell had punctured my nostrils before filling me with a dizziness like the bubbles that were rising up, popping, few by few, to the top of the glass. Who’s going to love me tonight? You are. You will. He drank his before I drunk even half of mine, greedy bastard and as we left for the cab in the spitting, ashy rain – we shared my glass.

My mother is the devil blazing hisses of disrespect my mother is the devil Lord, I must reject I had bought a black lace dress for the occasion. It stuck tightly to my body from my shoulders to my ankles, hugging my slender body, exposing my tiny, tiny curves, leaving a gap below my breasts and above my hips for him to hold if he got cold.

He always tells me how warm I am. How I am like a radiator. Burn, parrot, burn.

Here I am, Stepping out of the darkness you can’t see my burning halo anymore.

But you have devil’s horns too, don’t you?

They curl up slightly, when you have nothing to say.

You walk away, facing me, you walk away Is this farewell?

I am NOT an angel.

I am NOT a princess.

And I DO NOT have WINGS made of FEATHERS and BEAUTIFUL THINGS.

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2 We sat in the cab with my legs resting up on his knee. The lining of the dress stopped at my knees, and the lower part was only lace – exposing my white, white legs underneath. “I love your skin, I love your skin”, he whispered. We drove slowly as the darkness fell, through the West-End that shined all its lights on us. I had this woozy feeling, like tonight I would murder him?

My mother is the devil please deliver me from her claw the women whom I loved so much, looked up to and adored, And she, did this – to me?

Before eight.

“I told you to stop touching me…carry on and we won’t go to the rest…”

We arrived in the low-lit restaurant and were invited in through the big glass doors that extended from the ceiling to the floor.

“What are you going to get?”.

Then we ate slowly, and sometimes we looked up and smirked at each other from across the table. We always smirk like we are committing a robbery. I grabbed a cheeky kiss from him from behind the menu, because even though the lights were dim and we had a booth – he was still brown and I was still white. We were both sitting together, our knees touching and our anxiety fading into cocktails. The steak knife rested on the wooden board, the blood of a cow wrongly wetting its edge and smelling like beautiful metal.

I already knew what I was getting and what he was getting. I planned this months ago. After an hour or so, he went to the toilet and as I raised my head I saw the painting; It was the gone girl with her head thrown back and black lace covering her weak and tired body. The whitest, palest skin and the smallest feet that could possibly carry her body

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around were slumped on the ground as if she was taking her last breath. Save her, save her.

Her eyes rolled back like she was lost and you would be the knight that should find her, give her roses, make her smile again. The background blacker than life, her skin; ill white, drowning white, no-white; hazard, warning white. Corrupted bride waits in the painting for all to see and feel sympathy for the lady in waiting, who is damaged without a bruise to bare, the painted lady given life by the gentle, receptive painter. He must have caressed and controlled the brush until she looked so delicate she could almost be an angel if it wasn’t for the black lace wrapped around her skin, (not so much as to hide her breasts or the gap between her thighs, but enough to give her to the world as corrupted, unclean and broken).

3 I paid the bill. We left the dimly lit glassy room into the night, and I handed my bag to him. The golden strap had fallen off after repeatedly being tangled with the dress of lace I wore like it was really me. “You got to hold on to that, mate”, I reminded him and we got back into a cab. We both sat in the back. He didn’t talk much and I ignored him when he told me that he was already drunk. I am sick of already.

We got to our final destination, a rounded town house with lights that shone against it. We walked in. The posh red of the carpet, cushioning my feet, was met by my pointed posh black shoes. I took the key. We got into the lift. It was an old-fashionedposh-lift. There were metal rails across it that required a pulling to be shut…great big buttons that needed a press inwards before they could shine, dimly, then take us to our floor. The key opened the door easily, like it hadn’t even gone in, and we walked through it. Oh my God. The long, long, long, velvet, grand, heavy, deep, red curtains were the first thing that I saw.

And as we dance, moving to the same rhythm I wonder why this is not allowed to be Forget the wasted red petals on the bed symbolic of dead nature, dead love, human wreckage of earth snatching Gods beauty for our own delight, the chocolate strawberries on a plate covered in dusting that will eventually go off, and the towels placed neatly on the bed in the shape of two swans, (swans break arms with their long, long necks; not as graceful as Swan Lake), I adored the curtains – the deep, red,

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heavy, heavy, heavy, long curtains. They blackened the room with their closing. The best feature of the room! “I want those curtains”, I shouted. “They are like the ones in the theatre”, I said, more macho than the first time.

4 We had more prosecco, some weed, some water, some slightly bland chicken kebab skewers with rice and bread and chocolate covered strawberries dipped in hummus.

That’s what he’s made of chicken and protein shakes and chicken liver. Chicken liver pâté.

If my body is an animal then I am attracting a mate swelling nipples, my body is in want of your offspring, - 13:14 We made love and to be honest, he can’t really be that racist – he knows about the one drop rule.

I, swim now, in your oxygen, and you keep on breathing my lungs are filled, I want to pop like a chicken would our eggs be free range?

I ain’t sure We woke up. Made love again. I ran myself a bath and then I closed my eyes. I listened to all his sounds, muffles… his jacket, his trousers, his big old belt-buckle making a tinning sound in the background.

And I shall die with Mercury painted cheeks

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Stained, harmless Making me blind.

Growing, monopolizing like graveyard ivy We ordered breakfast. Both; full English. His without the bacon.

Life is not what it says on the tin There are far more ingredients that need to go in Never managing to spill the beans or the spaghetti Our breakfast came on large trays, covered by silver dishes like the ones in the films.

I anticipated lifting the dish; I wanted to be the one to lift the dish. It was such a fancy thing to do. He passed me the trays, trust me trust me trust me trust me, the dishes surrounded by tissues, (good for blowing your nose) tea, sugar, milk, apple juice for me and orange juice for him – in long glass flutes again, of course, forks and the sharpest of knives. The reflection in the dish was on one side; the great, grand, long curtains; and on the other – you.

5 We dressed. We got in another cab. The rain was spitting again. The car was red. The music played.

England is an amazing place to sightsee because it’s not like you have much choice stuck in the middle of the M25 in Luton.

COMMENTARY Inspired by Dostoevsky’s register in “Notes from the Underground” (as the speaker directly addresses and interrogates the reader), by his incoherence of form, (the prose falls into poetry) which alarms/dislocates the reader. Adopting these tech-

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niques resulted in a multidimensional piece – enjoyable to create, allowing me to “think outside the box”. Sentences permitted me to write inconsistently; challenging yet reforming. “Suffering being the sole origin of consciousness” constructed the central idea, bringing each element together. Imitating Dostoevsky’s style by mentioning judgements which renders them invalid; “he was still brown and I was still white” forces reader to observe interracial relationships, live with them – silencing technique.

Inspired by Confessional poets, readers may identify influences of Sexton, Hughes and O’Hara, when considering the instantaneousness/time-conscious awareness of the piece – a result of living in a city and of having a mental illness. The self-consciousness of the text may burden readers with anxiety/contradictory thoughts which illuminate selected themes.

Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chambers inspired me to intertextually attack and satirize fairytales which reinforce hegemonic narratives and ideals of gender roles, particularly female: socially (to be subject to danger and victimized). Grand theatrical setting and colour red exemplify joke plays with reader, harks on “little red riding hood” where the lover plays the “wolf”, the orchestra; created using multiple voices; exposes trauma and rebellion against conformity which educate and inform the speaker’s choices; written in poetic lines of irregular, evocative lexis which distract/ disrupt the pace of the piece, adding incoherence and indeterminacy. There are also nuances of Cinderella; “the golden strap had fallen off”.

A creative performance: allegorical features; caesura, italics, poetry and prose combined, work to entertain and surprise the reader with the audibly unstable dynamics.

Using lists, food items become props – adding to playfulness. Self-conscious use of pathetic fallacy forces reader to feel opposite to the signified – adding to the indeterminacy. “Red” unconventionally represents acute awareness which creates tension for the reader: symbolic of anxiety and the burning red face (scarcely seen in media or described in literature as a valid/natural emotional/physical reaction).

Role reversal: The speaker adopts wolf-like traits; attention to texture and detail highlight the speaker’s critically attuned senses which allow her room to have fun without harm due to her power of knowledge, contrasting with Fairy Tale tropes. The text exemplifies the largeness of the man’s physicality; however, not mentally, vocally

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or sexually “already”. Despite using him as subject matter, (it’s his Birthday), the piece disregards him as Hero, saviour, teacher (note the lack of attention to sex) and the focus lies upon the female character, her agency, and, creative power.

This story is, in part, a light satire of the westernized ideal of a Woman; who is either angel or devil, who must perform a feminine, domesticized role which is often fantasised by the young girl, the consumer of art, the painter himself, the creator of art, the media and literature, who produce fairy tales, stereotypes and false representations of women, which reinforce hegemonic narratives of the submissive, domesticated woman and underline patriarchy. The speaker abandons these expectations and represents; not so straightforwardly her own individuality, consciousness, internal “no” saying, and an awareness of past generations and their influxes and influences upon her – the sardonic tone adopted echoes the astuteness of speaker, whilst also playing with incoherence.

Filled with deception and secrets, key reflections are exhibited throughout. Incorporating symbol and allegory is a technique of illumination… perhaps the role of a woman here is purely fantastical, a “fun” role to play however not a genuine or viable lifestyle choice. Some reflections used are the restaurant door, the second; (a pastiche) the painting, the third – the silver dish. The speaker deceives the reader through costume as she performs her role whilst remaining acutely aware of the past, the present and her plan of the future as it rigorously unfolds. Slowly leading to the truth through a fast paced, partially erratic yet subduing tone; the speaker is revealed at the end as the director of the performance, not a reflection of the painting.

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THE OTHER SIDE

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William Blake � The City of The Imagination

BY BEATRIZ FIORE ILLUSTRATED BY KATIE HARDCASTLE

William Blake’s City in ‘Jerusalem, The Emanation of the Giant Albion.’

T

o map out William Blake’s city of Golgonooza, present a systematic structure of his cosmology and make a coherent and linear summary of the plot of the poet’s prophetic book ‘Jerusalem, The Emanation of the Giant Albion,’ would be a near impossible task and one which Blake himself would have likely disputed. This essay, while having to make an attempt at grasping and visualizing the world of ‘Jerusalem,’ will instead explore Golgonooza by diving into the mystic city, contemplating it through an imaginative lens, like as readers we assimilate its chaos and beauty through the senses for it does not pretend to appeal to rational comprehension or any orderly manner of cognitive thought.

Trying to visualise Blake’s city through concrete images in our mind becomes problematic, rather it must be conceived through abstract values and ideas while simultaneously embracing the plausibility of the setting, the familiar names of well-known streets in the heart of London. Golgonooza is alive with contradictions and contrasting elements, while ever-moving towards the common goal: the unification, or salvation of Albion. It is a living, breathing, pulsating human city and at the same time a place of mystical, spiritual and imaginative experience; an amalgamation of blood and stone, of sacrifice and rebirth, of men and women separated and of the fusion of the sexes, a city of intuition and feeling and a city of brick and cement. As it is city of

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creation and continuous transformation, it is also a city of violence and destruction, which are both inseparable from the process of revolution and renewal. There are instances of horrific and savage destructiveness; in fact Robert N. Essick points out that “dismemberment is particularly important, it bodies forth the psychic and cosmic fragmentation defining Blake’s sense of the Fall.” A fragmented, harrowing city which comes together in the end to become a great Divine Body. It is many separate entities all striving to be one, a place which cannot be accessed without the human body but at the same time could not exist without the Divine; Golgonooza is a sacred city, its essence is Art, its origin the creative Imagination.

For the poet, Art is the transfiguration of man, the physical manifestation of the divine through the body, the radiation of a pure, spiritual being and Golgonooza, being the city of truth and salvation, is essentially a city founded on Art. Just like its author’s graphic representations of his poetic works, this is a magical place of fusion between other worldly and natural life, but also an attempt, or rather, a struggle to model the material in the service of transcendental ideas, despite the unwillingness and resistance of the material, or the flesh. This is a city that exists in time and is the permanent labour of men and women to realise on earth the eternal vision of heaven, to, as Kathleen Rains writes, “make the politics of time conform to the politics of eternity.”

The struggle seen by Blake between the material and the immaterial, between the spirit and the flesh which separates the inner world of ideas from the outer physical reality, comes about after the Fall; in fact, before this happens, Blake writes of a paradisiacal state where humankind, the earth and all its creatures are living beings, taking part in the world of Eternal Imagination, all things unified in God. It is his vision of paradise, not just a hypothetical possibility of what awaits after death, but something achievable on earth, a state where all living beings come from and to which they will return. Similar to the Platonic conception of the distinction between the world of ideas and the physical reality, in his ‘A Vision of the Last Judgement,’ Blake writes, “There Exist in that Eternal World the Permanent Realities of Every Thing which we see reflected in this vegetable glass of Nature. All things are comprehended in their Eternal Forms in the divine Body of the Saviour, the True Vine of Eternity, the Human Imagination, who appear’d to Me as Coming to Judgement among his Saints and throwing off the Temporal that the Eternal might be Establish’d.”

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There are many similarities between this idea and what philosopher Henry Corbin describes as his ‘Mundus Imaginalis,’ the place of all spiritual happenings; it is impossible to ignore how Blake’s vision of the world contains elements of that reported by Corbin in his studies on Islamic mysticism. Furthermore, William Blake’s syncretic cosmology is a phenomenal and hallucinatory amalgamation of ideas and iconographies from many different cultures and religious beliefs: there are elements from Ancient Greek myths, from the Old Testament’s ‘Book of Revelations,’ there are Christian symbols (including a revisited perception of the central figure of Jesus Christ and the concept of the Holy Trinity), aspects of Sumerian and Chaldean Middle Eastern civilisations, images from Ancient Persian Zoroastrian angelology, rudiments of Babylonian prophecy, of the Medieval Book of Nature (a book which, read alongside the Holy Scriptures, was believed to lead man towards the knowledge of God Himself), and inspiration from the visions of the philosopher and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, who wrote first-hand accounts of his visits to heaven and hell.

This merging of beliefs and traditions to form a unique and extravagant imaginative cosmology is shown above all in Blake’s concept of the four Zoas. These are four “beasts” which stand around the throne of the Lamb, worshipping and guarding Him, and each projects one of the four riders of the Apocalypse. In traditional iconography, these four beings can be correlated to the four evangelists, instead Blake identifies them with the four principle aspects of Man: Tharmas (the body, or instinct), Urizen (abstract reason), Luvah (passion, emotion) and Urthona (the principle of Imagination.) Every Zoa has an embodiment and Los, the welder, creator of Golgonooza, is the embodiment of Urthona in the temporal world. These aspects of humanity were all united before the Fall, but are now split into antagonistic capacities that are at war within us; as they also take physical shape, they are at war with one another in the tangible world.

His spiritual beliefs, free from any established doctrine, were of course extremely blasphemous at the time (especially as the poet used the irregular strophic verse form and tone of the Bible, making it inevitable to draw comparisons), but perhaps Blake saw that every religious practice and cultural tradition had, at its core, the ultimate desire of humankind’s unification with a Supreme Being and, no matter which formal creed is professed, we are all capable of reaching this state by looking within ourselves.

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The poet condemned the age of science and reason and of positivist philosophy which dominates the Western world, a “mutilation of consciousness”, a view which values empirical knowledge above all else and thus considers valid and relevant only that which is experienced in the physical world; this way of thinking has forced man to neglect the exploration of the most profound regions of the soul. Many established religions, according to Blake, have embraced this positivist way of perceiving life, teaching its followers to worship an outer, abstract idea of God, impenetrable and unreachable from within the self, separate from all which is tangible and visible, withdrawn and wiped out from our memory and impossible to detect in our manmade cities. In plate III of ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ Blake writes: “The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations and whatever their enlarged and numerous senses could perceive. And particularly they studied the genius of each city and country, placing it under its mental deity. Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of and enslaved the vulgar by attempting to realise and abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood. (…) and at length they pronounced that the Gods had ordered such things. Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.”

That all deities reside in the human breast is, in short, what Blake’s prophetic works seek to communicate. Golgonooza is itself like a human striving to reach the Divine within. In this city, as within ourselves, we are able to open up doors of perception, portals that communicate directly with the Eternal and it is from this transcendental realm that our ideas are conceived. Ideas are therefore innate and we are not, as Locke presumed, a blank slate: we, as spiritual beings, come from an infinite world of Imagination which we can sometimes access through both outer and inner portals, and to this world we shall hopefully return. Therefore, as we are encouraged to look through the material and into the city of Imagination, we can potentially find gateways in London which lead us into the city of Golgonooza.

London manifests itself in the prophetic poem of ‘Jerusalem, The Emanation of the Great Albion’ also in its visible, palpable nature. Furthermore, Blake builds Jerusalem with descriptions from the real London, and in plate 27 the spiritual Jerusalem is composed of specific regions and areas of the city and its surroundings: he does this not to corrupt the idea of the Holy City, but to redeem it from abstraction.

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“The fields from Islington to Marylebone,/ to Primrose Hill and Saint John’s Wood,/ Were builded over with pillars of gold,/ And there Jerusalem’s pillars stood.”

The history of the ancestors of Golgonooza seems to be deeply rooted in the city and the author takes us through its streets, which become a ‘memento mori’, to ruins beside Paddington where Satan had his first victory and to the place where “Albion slept beneath the fatal tree” while human sacrifices were rife. He goes on describing how victims “groan’d aloud” on London Stone and Tyburn’s brook (London Stone’s vicinity to Newgate prison would have made this a reality in Blake’s contemporary London too, and public executions were carried out on the banks of the Tyburn brook). Lambeth, on the other hand, where the poet resided for seven years with his wife Catherine, is depicted as a Bride, as the “Lamb’s wife”, where Jerusalem’s foundations began. Blake’s evocations of Lambeth are often accompanied by a sigh and by memories of a time when the city was held in glory, the awakened Albion a reality.

Alas, London is now a blind old man, led by a child through the streets of Babylon and the tears and the voice of this wandering beggar echo through the city streets, reaching all the cities of all the nations across the Western world, “and all is distress and woe.”(p.84, ll16) Golgonooza is, therefore, an imperfect city. However, the cause of its malady for Blake does not coincide with what his contemporaries thought was at the root of its sickness. The metaphor of the city as a human body is nothing new: this analogy, especially referring to the politics and hierarchical structure of the city existed from medieval times and was used to highlight the different divisions of power and order, rather than cooperation of the members as part of a whole entity. In the centuries to come, with the growth of commercialism and capitalism, the city’s comparison with the body was used to emphasize the flow of the free market, of goods and labour (like the free circulation of blood in the arteries), an organic system always in motion, in need also of green spaces (lungs) and directed by a central power (mind.)

Well into the 17th century this analogy becomes damaging, as the city grows in an uncontrollable fashion the body becomes monstrous, an all-consuming, infected beast (with the advent of the plague, the single bodies in the city share the same fate as the diseased carcass, the macrocosm and the microcosm, like in Blake, are one): even after the plague and with better sanitation, the damage to its inhabitants and its surroundings passes from being physical to being moral. Hence, this illness is caused

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by the cohabitation of large masses of people in a restricted space and, as some people thought and lived in fear of, the inevitable mingling of the different classes of society, the poor infecting the rich. Instead, for Blake, London’s malady is one of the soul and its cause is quite the opposite of the coming together of people: the city’s spiritual sickness comes about with the alienation of its members.

The cure lies in the unification of humankind towards the common goal of building Jerusalem on earth, constructing the outer city in the image of the inner city, through the process of artistic creation. This change must come from within the self, conceived in the human mind and realised through the human body. The body and the material city is necessary for the fulfilment of the prophecy. London, Golgonooza, goes through a healing process and its intricacies and infrastructures are themselves healing.

This perception of Blake’s city coincides with James Bogan’s comparison of Golgonooza with a mandala, and perhaps on looking at a mandala it is the closest one can get to visualising a map of Golgonooza. Bogan compares the construction of the city with the healing process that occurs when one draws or loses him/herself in a mandala and mirrors it with the words Jung uses to describe the mandala as “an attempt to abolish the separation of between the conscious mind (Albion) and the unconscious (Jerusalem), the real source of life, and to bring about a reunion of the individual with the native soil of his inherited, instinctive, make-up (as) loss of instinct is the source of endless terror and confusion.” Mandalas are used to establish a spiritual and sacred space, as a gateway to the transcendental, a tool of spiritual guidance. This can be a practical example of what Blake means when he writes that prayer is the study of art. Though Blake avoids providing us with a visual representation of the city of Golgonooza, we do however know some of its infrastructural aspects and again, may juxtapose to it an image of a mandala.

Blake’s looms and furnaces (and Los’ palace) are found at the centre of the city, just like the generative symbol at the centre of Tibetan mandalas which brings forth life into a new world. It is also, like the intricate structure of a mandala, a fourfold city, a four-dimensional space which has a fantastical and seemingly complex structure.

Golgonooza is guarded by four gates which coincide with parts of the human body, with the four cardinal points and protected by mythological creatures. Each of the

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four gates has then four openings to the four regions of Eden, Generation, Beulah and Ulro: the Northern gate (Gnomes,Nadir, Eden, Ear), the Southern gate (Eyes, Ulro, Zenith, fairies), the Western gate (Nymphs, circumference, Generation, Tongue) and the Eastern gate (Genii, Center, Beulah, Nostrils). Again the city is made in the image of both the physical and the spiritual man: “And every part of the City is fourfold; and every inhabitant fourfold� (as the four Zoas reside within us).

The task of imagining Golgonooza is left to the reader, and we must recreate the city in our own minds using our sensory perception and multidimensional minds, thus, it takes a different form for each one of us just like all mandalas differ in pattern and scope. Centuries later, we are allowed to take part in the common construction of Jerusalem, turning inward to our Imaginative faculty, we are all part of the rejuvenation of Albion.

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Confessionals

BY FRANKI BARKER-JOHNSON ILLUSTRATED BY MIRIAM GAROFALO

“I am the only Confessional Poet” – Anne Sexton.

A

n effective poet, playwright, actress and model, born in 1928 in Newton, America to parents of a violent and abusive nature, Sexton was a multi-talented individual who used various art forms to break from her childhood trauma that lead to mental illness, by escaping into different personas and characters. A celebrity to the literary industry in the 1950’s, Sexton became one of the most honoured poets in American literary history within twelve years of her writing. Sexton’s subject matter and raw, explicit deliverance is precisely what makes Sexton’s work so compelling.

The Confessional poem became “an instrument that mirrors and critically diagnoses the culture”. Informed by Freud’s unconscious and Sexton’s own experiences, Sexton’s poems host an uneasy duality of the physical and the psychological; each toying with time, disrupted by memory and informed, yet dislocated by place. Sexton’s Self in 1958 concerns the subject of domesticity; the first half of this essay discusses Sexton’s exploration of the subject using structure, stanza and image. The second half will focus on how Sexton uses voice and style to explore and illuminate the subject matter of mental illness.

“The use of le moi,” the self, “was being cultivated in fashionable literary journals everywhere”. Confessional poetry encompasses the socially excluded and observes a

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world that is kept behind ‘closed doors.’ These doors are many, however, first opening for us is the “big front door” of the doll’s house, the domestic home, in ‘Self in 1958’, one of Sexton’s early poems.

‘Self in 1958’ offers the reader the self-exposure attached to much of Mid-20th century American poetry. The subject matter and its frustrations are immediately available to the reader by use of form and structure. Anne Sexton highlights the domestic life and the role of a woman through characterizing the speaker into a “plaster doll”. The figure of the housewife “is marked by a similar uncanniness in women’s confessional poetry, where she is variously identified with dolls, puppets and other forms of automata”.

Sexton uses four stanzas of ten lines each which conceivably signifies the ‘four walls’ that the domestic woman has the privilege of beholding; the even numbers display balance and order to the reader, note Sexton’s “Radical Discontent with the Order of Things”, each stanza has the same amount of lines. The architecture of the piece connotes the repetition of the household routine and the monotony it projects upon its offspring. “Sexton again investigates the destructive effects of women’s over identification with the home on their ability to achieve and narrate a coherent sense of self-hood.”

The reader is confronted by the four walls and the same again-ness of domesticity prior to reading the poem.

Sexton plays on the Victorian ideal of the Domestic woman with the words “black angel” used twice to describe the plaster doll, the speaker. Subverting the conventional Angel by using the opposite colour creates an interesting juxtaposition that haunts the reader and symbolizes death; this resonates with the second, slower; “black-angel”.

A scorned and unhappy woman – the domestic setting is the cause of the darkness which blackens the prior innocent, pure and worthy Angel. The domestic home makes a mockery of the speaker, manufacturing and producing the “plaster doll” denoted before us.

Aesthetically, the ‘simple’ imagery used is resonant and obtrusive, Sexton gives the reader further clues to the subject matter as the reader departs from each stanza. In the first stanza “some advertised clothes,” cries consumerism. All that the “plaster doll” can see in the domestic home is material, and for the speaker, there is nothing else there.

Spoken in a spondaic voice, the dreary list of shop-bought items encourages the reader

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to feel the emptiness of the domestic setting, its unfulfilling compromise for the contemporary woman and the emptiness of the speaker. The speaker is dressed as a product of the home; part of the furniture, the only living thing. Simple, actual and physical - the doll and its accessories are described; “four chairs, a counterfeit table, a flat roof and a big front door”. The listing emphasizes the flat, two-dimensional life which is so mundane that its flatness becomes desperate, satirical and almost hysterical. These lists of household items deliberately ignore the speaker’s presence – heightening the lack of ‘self’ felt throughout the piece.

The penultimate line of the second stanza continues with “windows that flash open on someone’s city,” which is bitter and quick caused by Sexton’s use of sibilance. It is brutally dislocating; the city is not the speakers; therefore, the domestic wife is not free.

It is apparent that the figure of the housewife “is marked by a similar uncanniness in women’s Confessional poetry, where she is variously identified with dolls, puppets…”.

The third ‘simple’ image is “stale bread”. If this poem were to be considered biographically, one would wonder; Why a middle-class woman with children has no fresh bread?

“Confessional works is regularly assumed to correspond, straightforwardly to the facts of the poet’s life”. This may be a sign of Sexton’s inability to stick to a routine, unable to purchase the basic essentials, too anxious to go to the shop perhaps. However, symbolism and intertextuality beckons one to consider the bread in terms of Christianity.

Bread means life; the bread is “stale,” the speaker is conscious of the end of life and watches a living-death commence around her – the reader identifies Sexton abandoning the colour white and its associations in this poem and in others. Sexton carefully destructs each domestic item stanza by stanza.

The final image projected upon the reader is tears, however they are absent; “if I had the tears” verifies the resounding numbness and lack of self-expression of the Domestic woman. “Domesticated femininity is regularly evoked by Plath and Sexton as a means of examining the limited opportunities for self-expression afforded to women in the post war period.” Being unable to react to your surroundings or circumstances could be labelled passive and self-consumed and then perhaps oppressed. “Judgments of confessional poetry… Detractors have read the poems as naïve, autobiographical utterances… exhibitionist, sensationalist, self-serving performances.” Consider paralysis. Is Sexton suggesting that the domestic home paralyses the woman? That the four walls,

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the material items, the entrapment and lack of life are causes for extreme mental and emotional paralysis? Sexton uses structure and strong yet simple images to consume the poem, indicative of a lack of self, perhaps it was this idea which founded the title.

Confession is the revelation of a shameful secret; stepping into a closed box and confessing your sins to a priest; a Christian exercise. Unmasking secrets and moral problems, “the confessant unveils secrets despite the stigma of shame and reveals the moral problem of judgement”. The solo act of Confession is transposed into the poem through voice; - “Anne Sexton often employed the first-person voice to explore transgressive autobiographical subjects including mental illness, family trauma, gender…” the origins of Confession indicate the extremity of Sexton’s work as a poet. Ironically, a priest refuelled Sexton’s drive for writing, if not for life; “the psychiatrist and then the priest put an imprimatur on poetry as salvation, as a worthy goal in itself”. The Confessional poem, in all its ruin, gave Sexton a life line despite “the voices that urged her to die”.

The Confessional Movement was greatly affected by the development of psychoanalysis, however, Sexton’s poetry focuses on the mechanics of institutionalization and of fighting mental illness rather than the dynamic of Freudian analysis. Despite being “Accused of exhibitionism (Sexton) was determined only to be more flamboyant”.

Maxine Kumin recollects “how… she worked to achieve through rhyme and the shaping of the poems three parts a direct rendition of the actual experience”. In “The Operation” unlike other poems where “the poet and the speaker are not synonymous, no matter how effective the poem might be in generating this illusion”, Sexton writes herself into the narrative, which becomes a mode of psycho-biography. Sexton attempted suicide, was institutionalized at Westwood lodge Mental Institution and diagnosed with what is now known as Bipolar Disorder and Hysteria. Sexton wrote of her experiences in a conscious female voice which amounted to the bold master narrative of psychoanalysis, of which is presented through non-rational modes of understanding the world.

Fighting mental illness for most of Sexton’s adult life, having her first manic episode at the age of twenty-six, Sexton explores the physical realms of the experience and treatment of mental illness; of convulsive therapies and tranquillizers; particularly in The Operation, which was an “arduous struggle to complete”. In an unornamented style, doctors are notably described as powerful monsters, who dominate Sexton’s physical body and reassure her in a patronizing and naive ways. The lack of power in

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understanding Sexton’s mental illness is indicated through description with “almost mighty”, and sardonically “The great green people”. Sexton, despite a desperate wish to be cured, mocks their inability to cure her. “The close identification of the body of the speaker with the body of the confessional text; both are sites of expert interpretation over which speakers and poets exert little or no final control”.

The reader falls witness to an extremely vulnerable person, sleeping in an “aluminium crib”, like an infant placed in a hostile environment, which harks back to Sexton’s childhood, perhaps. Problematically; the doctors example of successful treatment is a physically compliant patient who is silenced by medication which suppresses the body.

Sexton demonstrates the frustrations of experiencing symptoms of Bipolar Disorder; a racing mind and pacified body; through animalistic language; “I wait like a kennel of dogs jumping against their fence”. The reader is suffocated and disturbed by the static yet chaotic, noisy metaphor.

The subject matter of mental illness is brought to life through voice; focusing solely on the sounds of the words; Sexton’s use of tough and hard words that spit from the tongue as one speaks them. Creating a numb and bitter tone, the speakers observations of her surroundings include the; “sterile sheet,” the “fat and female” character, in “blue-struck days”. The speaker explodes with observational excess combined with a lack of bodily action which exemplifies the silent panic felt throughout the piece and in much of Sexton’s work. The reader can hear the “boots slapping,” hear the speaker “scuffing a raw leaf, kicking the clumps of dead straw”; these emphatic sounds disturb and attack the reader, as we are burdened with helpless frustration, entering a physically pacified body adjoined with an erratic and imprisoned mind. The self-watching, ghost-like register is direct yet displaced, the reader is pushed and pulled in several directions. The speaker (Elizabeth? Anne?) thumps back down to reality and the reader hears this with a thud; “tied where it was torn”.

Killing herself at the age of forty-five, Anne Sexton is now understood as a prominent historical female figure and heroine, remembered as “flamboyant, proactive,” bold and raw; a woman who “wrote the largest, most sustained body of poetry our literature offers on what this culture calls ‘mental illness”. Sexton is described by Maxine Kumin in The Complete Poems as and “a gifted, ghosted woman’’. Confessing, to the reader, without hanging her head in shame; “I am queen of all my sins”.

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Murderer J. Cassidy To Be Shot In The Head Every Day For 3� Years

BY ALESSIA GAL ATINI ILLUSTRATED BY ABBY BATUCAN

MURDERER J. CASSIDY TO BE SHOT IN THE HEAD EVERY DAY FOR 30 YEARS St Paul, Minnesota – J. Cassidy, convicted of the murder of beloved pop icon S. Solano, will be the first to undergo the Kyle-Zima virtual-reality technology, the Court ruled yesterday after a long-fought trial. This result had been anticipated by many, given the global attention the case had received, and Cassidy’s lawyer’s pleas for a regular life imprisonment went unheard.

“We’re thrilled that the world will finally get a chance to see the effectiveness of our technology,” Ms Zima commented as her former husband backed her statement. The innovative punishment took the technology industry partners seven years to refine, ever since their daughter was killed by Cassidy, who was on parole after being released from a threeyear imprisonment for stalking.

“It is our belief that the current criminal justice system is more concerned with punishing and keeping threats confined than to teach criminals empathy and show them the wrongfulness of their actions,” Mr Kyle added. “And that’s where our virtual-reality technology comes into play”.

Celeste put the newspaper down. An old technology, its pages had become yellowish over the years but she could still recall with clarity the horror of seeing that headline for the first time and the way she cried when she watched her father being taken out of the courtroom. Many would say her father didn’t deserve to say goodbye. She was

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just five at the time and she thought he did.

“They won’t harm him, not for real,” her mother kept telling her on the way home, “it will all be in his head.”

Not for real.

They kept him in a room. Thirty years. Made him believe for 10950 days that he had a gun to his head, made him feel the bullet breaking through his skull and his heart giving out. And then when he was finally dead they reset the whole thing to start again the next day. 30 years of waiting 24 hours to be killed. He never made it out of that room. Physically, yes, but they put him where all the criminals like him end up nowadays. The Kyle-Zima recovery centre. A new kind of asylum. Kind of made you miss the plain old death sentence. Celeste didn’t forget that her father had killed an innocent woman. She never stopped being angry at him for that meaningless, violent and cruel act. She never stopped being angry for losing the chance to ask him why.

The father they gave her back opened his mouth but only saliva came out. No words.

The Kyle-Zima system had become better over the years. They had learnt how to balance time and modify the effect and experience of violence in the simulation. Not everyone was destroyed by it. Some even integrated back into society, in a way. The crime rate had been reduced. The rest of them, those in the recovery centre, became guinea pigs to ease the fate of the criminals that would come after them.

The door creaked and she turned to see her mother peeking in.

“They’re waiting for you in ten minutes,” she said, her tone flat.

“Mum,” Celeste called out, “What do you think I should do?”

“It should be your choice, honey.”

She didn’t look at her while saying that.

“There’s always prison…” Celeste tested out. Still no reaction. “I mean, after what happened to dad I don’t know if -” “Things are different now, don’t forget that.”

And with that she was gone.

Celeste turned the TV on.

“LIVE FROM CNN, results for the Cassidy vs Truman poll are coming in quicker than expected. Over 55% think Miss Cassidy should choose the Kyle-Zima sentence for her

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rapist, while the remaining 45% would settle for five years in prison. It is still unclear how the virtual punishment would be set up but if we look at previous cases -” She switched it off and checked the apps.

There were over two thousand new posts with the #CassidyvsTruman tag. ‘@CNN @CelesteCass00 he had it coming’ ‘We have definitely evolved: from eye for an eye to rape for a rape #somuchprogress maybe @CelesteCass00 wouldn’t have to choose Kyle-Zima if the State took rape charges seriously #5years #WTF’ ‘@CNN @CelesteCass00 Rape is still rape, it doesn’t matter who’s the victim #chooseprison’ ‘Only Kyle-Zima will make him come to terms with what he’s done #5yearsisnotenough’ The time had come.

She knew what she’d find in the adjacent room. The judge, her mother, confined to a corner to avoid any undue influence – although nobody thought about confining the world into a corner – and the man she thought she would never have to look at again.

They would be there, waiting for her guidance as if she was a prophet, telling them what was to come. Could she do it? Could she purge herself of the memory by consenting to something she swore she hated? Was she right to feel such anger, such desire for vengeance? Would she be any better than those who hurt others in real life?

“Please don’t do this,” a voice said the minute she walked into the room. “Please.”

“Mr Truman, under court rules you are not allowed to talk,” the judge interrupted but Celeste’s eyes had already darted towards the man. He seemed so fragile then, huddled into his chair. Begging. Tears in his eyes.

She wanted to break him.

“Have you reached a decision, Ms Cassidy?” the judge asked.

“Yes,” Celeste said. “Kyle-Zima.”

“You bitch,” he screamed. “You fucking bitch!”

He kept shouting as two policemen dragged him away, every filthy word validating her choice.

“Rot in whatever hell’s left inside your brain,” she said to him with a smile.

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COMMENTARY Reading Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 and watching The Atomic Cafe documentary, the question of how far can one go to achieve peace rightfully arises. The film show us footage of American people bursting into the streets to celebrate after Hiroshima is burnt to the ground. The voiceover laughs before saying the following: “This is the destructive power we pray God we never have to haul upon any Nation, but should it become necessary, let us not hesitate because it is foreign to our nature to use the power which has been given us.” (Atomic Cafe, 1982). Hiroshima is treated as a sacrifice that America has to make: the US’s actions are a necessary step towards peace. In Postwar: a History of Europe since 1945 Tony Judt talks about how after the war people dismissed Dresden and Hiroshima as things of the past. The bombings of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Dresden by the Allied Powers are all the more appalling given the explicitly civilian targets of these military actions. At the same time, we cannot forget the Nazi Holocaust and the Axis Power alliance of the Germans and Japanese. Was the Allied violence then justified?

In the Marat/Sade I was intrigued by the ironic line that was drawn between the acceptable systematic murders of the aristocracy by the Jacobins and outrage at the murder of one single member of the Revolutionary Committee. For this science fiction piece, the idea of a psychological torture seemed fitting, as the theme of insanity following the trauma of violence is common in many of the literary works we have studied in the module. This piece also looks back at the law of contrapasso in Dante’s Inferno, that the sinner should be punished in a way that resembles the sin, but is inflected with reference to modern technologies.

The theme of history repeating itself is also important. We often see the world falling back into its old habits, wondering how it is that we learnt nothing from our past, which may very well be a consequence of the distortion of history through different narratives. The main character of the story goes from witnessing a person she cares about being punished to inflicting the punishment herself. I wanted to try and analyse what could make her point of view change: being a victim of violence herself, external influence from media and mass culture, and having to confront an enemy instead of a loved one. But Celeste does something which I think is important before making

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her decision. She looks back at past violence, whether for peaceful reasons or not.

Kurt Vonnegut sums it up well in Slaughterhouse 5 when he writes “And Lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been.

But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned into a pillar of salt. So it goes.”

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Allen Ginsberg � Howl

BY ADAM WORSLEY ILLUSTRATED BY CHARLOTTE MCGLINCHEY

How does Allen Ginsberg’s Howl illuminate the principle themes and stylistic concerns of the Beat movement?

G

insberg described how his long-time friend and fellow Beat writer Jack Kerouac would drink heavily, lose his mind, and find himself thrown out of bars and beaten up in their alleyways; Ginsberg admitted that, stylistically at least, he “very definitely” owed a lot to Kerouac’s On The Road while he wrote Howl. Beat came to mean many different things to many different people. Kerouac understood the grand orchestra of universal reality as music; “everything is going to the beat – It’s the beat generation, it’s beat, it’s the beat to keep, it’s the beat of the heart, it’s being beat and down in the world and like old-time low-down.” He coined the name ‘The Beat Generation’ after meeting Hunke, who simply told Kerouac he was feeling “beat”.

The bloodshed caused by the world wars had beaten down world consciousness, and it struggled to understand the horrors which had taken place; the full impact of the German-ordered Holocaust and the American atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities Nagasaki and Hiroshima reached the limits of imagination. The Beat Generation wasn’t “a political or social rebellion” at its inception, but it certainly grew that way as the poets matured. Over the course of Ginsberg’s poem Howl, beat changes meaning from being beaten down to feeling beatific.

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Ginsberg and Kerouac studied at Columbia University. They met through Kerouac’s girlfriend, Edie, and bonded over “the tearfulness of [their] ghost presence,” while they walked through the campus; Ginsberg did not expect “a big jock” to be so “sensitive and intelligent about poetry.” Encouraged by Ginsberg along with Carr and Burroughs, Kerouac began to write. Ginsberg was a massive promoter of Kerouac’s work. He would take Kerouac’s manuscripts and try to get them published wherever he could; The Town and The City was published in February 1950 and Kerouac received a thousand dollar advance for the manuscript.

Kerouac spent three weeks and three nights typing the first manuscript of what became his second published novel, On The Road. Stylistically, the prose reads as rushed as the composition was; Kerouac’s continuous stream of consciousness style was fuelled by amphetamine and hundreds of miles worth of unrestricted awareness into the American psyche. Kerouac had an admiration for jazz music, which he emulated in his prose style. He wanted to be considered “a jazz poet blowing long blues in an afternoon jazz session on a Sunday.” Fellow beatnik William Burroughs described how Kerouac would believe the first draft of a text was the best. Kerouac would take up “sketching with words” which allowed his innermost thoughts pour out of him. Ginsberg set out to “build a modern contemporary metaphorical yak poem using the… weaving rhythm that Jack [Kerouac] does in his prose”. The United States was alive with the music of syncopated rhythms in downtown dives as jazz swept across the nation during the 40s and 50s. In 1944 Kerouac introduced Ginsberg to the sound, and Ginsberg discovered that Kerouac’s literary style was based on the jazz played by Charlie Parker. Kerouac improvised haikus which were translated into music by freestyle musicians. The beat writers had found a “new consciousness,” founded on a rejection of “dominant spiritual norms and established religious institutions.” The writers believed in their “new vision” which spread beyond the confines of the United States, reaching Europe, and through the tenacity of characters like Gary Snyder, the Far East.

Satori is a “non-dualistic state of mind outside the parameters of language.” Ginsberg considered himself a spoken word poet, influenced by Buddhist mantras written to capture the spiritual power present in sound. Although Ginsberg and Kerouac both vowed to undertake Eastern philosophy and spirituality, they traversed very different paths. Kerouac practiced celibacy and viewed nakedness as a sin through a combina-

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tion of his Catholic upbringing and Hinayana Buddhist studies, while Ginsberg practised yabyum, an Eastern sex tantra, and was renowned for his participation in orgies.

After consuming various narcotics at parties, Ginsberg would remove his clothes and suggest everyone “get naked”.

Ginsberg’s sexuality is a dominant theme in his writing, particularly in Howl. He had homosexual fantasies at a young age and these developed into humiliation and master/slave fantasies as he grew up. Although his poem Howl was taken to court over obscenity charges, Howl is tamer than some of his other poems in terms of sexual imagery and desire; because Howl was never banned, Ginsberg was free to explore his more intimate perversions present in Please Master, which he wrote in 1968.

Howl does make reference to his sexual desire; he has drugged dreams of “alcohol and cock and endless balls.” The sexual liberation apparent in Ginsberg’s life is reflected in his poetry; free from sexual norms, Ginsberg understood himself to move freely between homosexuality and heterosexuality as his mood took him. A revered psychologist named Timothy Leary publicly claimed to have challenged Ginsberg’s sexuality during a psychedelic session he hosted, leaving Ginsberg to describe how he would “have babies instead of jacking off into limbo”.

Ginsberg met William Carlos Williams’ work while he was studying at Columbia University, and although his professors dismissed Williams’ work as “immature,” Ginsberg was inspired enough to pen him a letter after watching Williams perform in New York. Williams had met Ezra Pound at the University of Pennsylvania which began a stylistic harmony with the European imagists; whenever Pound thought that Williams’ work was out of touch, he would provide Williams with reading lists. The imagists dealt with “direct treatment of the thing” and Williams made sure to convert Ginsberg to this way of thinking about poetry. Ginsberg was preoccupied with tight rhymes and classical language, which Williams believed to be slightly artificial. Ginsberg acted upon this advice as he grew as an artist in the build-up to writing Howl.

Williams also practiced spontaneous writing in an attempt to free his poetry and he discovered “more flexible, jagged, patterns of form and syntax”.

Walt Whitman’s long line captured his “expansive freedom of poetic style and vision of an expansive American culture.” Although Whitman was taught during Ginsberg’s college course, Ginsberg believed his teachers to disrespect Whitman, putting him

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down as “a negativist crude yea-sayer who probably had a frustrated homosexual libido.” A pioneer of free verse, Whitman’s long lines include repetition and parallel syntax. Ginsberg would frequently use anaphora throughout Howl. He begins the majority of lines by returning to the pronoun ‘who’ in Part I, ‘Moloch’ in Part II, ‘I’m with you in Rockland/Where’ in Part III, and ‘Holy!’ in Footnote To Howl. The incantatory syntax produces cumulative episodes of speech that “simply exist, next to each other, without conflict and without hierarchy of greater and lesser, and they are unified not by complex relations among the parts, but by a simple and all-embracing relation between any part and the whole.” Influenced by Whitman, Ginsberg employed a ‘Hebraic-Melvillian bardic breath,’ where he would reel off long lines in one breath, returning to the anaphora after exhaling. Ginsberg explained that often “the page determines the length of the line,” and that generally shorter lines, for example those which might be written on a pocket notebook, “could be extended out on the page to be like a long line, or strophe.” These poetic long lines are “all held together in the elastic of the breath, through varying lengths”.

Ginsberg received a vision upon reading William Blake’s poem Ah! Sun-flower! “It was like God had a human voice” and the tender and prophetic voice read the poem back to Ginsberg in such a manner that made Ginsberg reinterpret the poem until he understood it from the perspective of the sunflower. The sky became “ancient, the gateway to infinity,” and Ginsberg began to look upon his surroundings anew; he marvelled at the ornamental rooftops and “this consciousness of being alive unto [himself].” Ginsberg experienced Blake’s voice reading two other poems in his room, The Sick Rose and The Little Girl Lost. These hallucinations brought with them a “rhyme and rhythm, that if properly heard in the inner inner ear, would deliver you beyond the universe;” it was as if “Blake had penetrated the very secret core of the entire universe.” Ginsberg referenced this experience in Howl: “who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under a tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology”.

Blake was privy to his own mystic visionary experience and obsessed with plotting the path to spiritual cognition within his works. Ginsberg searched through Blake’s published poems, looking for a method to regain the vision that Blake’s poetry had offered him. Ginsberg began to see “all types of divine significance” in the texts he read, and “supra-consciousness” returned to him as he read from Blake’s The

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Human Abstract. The faces in the shop around Ginsberg turned “wild” as he once more entered “the eternal place.” Influenced by Blake’s poetry, he thought his mission was to “annihilate ordinary consciousness and expand mystic consciousness,” which he believed to be possible through consuming “every powerful hallucinogen [he] could find”.

Ginsberg became a public advocate for psychedelic drugs, including cannabis, over the course of his life. “Everywhere he went, he spoke of legalising pot and the benefits of LSD,” although he was careful to discuss the drug’s effects without withholding the hell narrative potent narcotics can unravel in one’s mind. He became a public voice for drug legalisation movements, speaking on the podium and to news crews at a pro-cannabis rally in Hyde Park, London. Speaking to a crowd gathered at the Arlington Street Church in Boston, Ginsberg suggested that “everybody who hears my voice, directly or indirectly, should try the chemical LSD at least once; every man, woman, and child in good health over the age of fourteen.” Ginsberg’s “visions!

Omens! Hallucinations! Miracles! Ecstasies!” are brought on by a counter-culture desire to explore an unknown internal reality; the revolution of the self proceeded the ‘peacenik’ revolution Ginsberg fathered during the 60s and 70s. Blake wore a red bonnet symbolic of his support for French Revolutionaries, and wrote fervently about rebellion; Ginsberg proudly toted his own anti-establishment views openly in his mannerisms, advocation, and poetry.

Blake was born to a family of religious dissenters. His parents did not follow the conformist Christian church, and neither did Blake; he saw religion as something still being discovered, and set out to try and capture the wonder and horror of God in his poetry. Ginsberg described the “sphinx of cement and aluminium” he named Moloch, the demonic power behind civilisation. Partly modelled on Blake’s Urizen, pure reason and abstract form, Moloch is manifest in man-made objects from skyscrapers to bombs, “a vast, all-encompassing social reality.” The urban apocalypse outlined in Part II of Howl is produced by Moloch, who “like Blake’s Urizenic God… reigns over a world cast in the image of his own singularity;” Moloch is alone in the material and the physical realms and as he consumes both worlds he is swept up by the rivers of time. Ginsberg stated that “Blake really is the great source of radiant awareness”.

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Ginsberg was notoriously politically active. He protested Madame Nhu, the First Lady of South Vietnam, who had famously mocked Thích Quang Đuc after he had set himself on fire, calling it a “barbeque”. Ginsberg would appeal to the crowd using “pure hippy rhetoric, enunciated for the first time”. His first march was in Paterson, New Jersey, protesting Mayor Hague. Ginsberg was still a child, handing out leaflets. He referenced these activist ideals in Howl; “who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism/who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union Square”. Aghast at anti-communism military intervention by the United States in Vietnam, but powerless to stop them with his method of peaceful protest, Ginsberg began tracking the source of the opioid drugs he had found on American streets; he boldly claimed that the CIA was involved with trafficking opium from South East Asia. He calculated that 80% of American street heroin was imported from South East Asia, claiming that with the help of the CIA, Madame Nhu and Nguyen Van Thieu, who was head of the US-backed “puppet government” in south Vietnam, were behind the influx in order to get the support of poppy farmers in countries where they were fighting their ideological war.

Ginsberg became fascinated with the atomic bomb and the devastating mushroom cloud it left in its wake. During a psychedelic session with Leary, he worked up the energy to propose a phone-tree system, whereby he would make calls to his contacts, and demanding that they do the same, speak about “peace and love… and settle all this about the Bomb once and for all”. Ginsberg accepted an award for literature from the French government while they were undertaking nuclear tests on some Pacific islands; he told the culture secretary who handed him his award that he did not agree with their nuclear tests, although he was grateful for the recognition.

Although Howl was successful as a printed book, the real poetic experience was invoked by his live performances. Inspired by vocal Eastern mantras, Ginsberg believed in the spiritual power of specific words and repetition. “The poem’s chanting rhythms, iconoclastic language, and accumulating energy had the audience weeping and cheering.” Ginsberg was not shy of accumulating fame; he “wanted big mass distribution”.

Politically and spiritually, Ginsberg viewed his work at a crossroads in consciousness, straying away from war and heterosexual male-dominated narrative to produce poetry reminiscent of Blake, Whitman, and Williams. “Ginsberg’s particular success has been to become the truly popular poet that Whitman only imagined himself to be”.

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The movement the Beat Generation developed, temporally linked with Leary’s mind-expansion psychology, was rooted in the sound the Beats had discovered in New York dive bars in the 40s and 50s. “If there had not been a Gallery Six Reading, there would not have been an ongoing Beat Generation.” Kerouac was excitable during the Gallery Six Reading, even though he did not perform himself; he would shout “Go!” at the end of each of Ginsberg’s Whitmanic lines, in order to further mesmerise the crowd. When describing his influences, Ginsberg stated that “I was conscious of Blake’s prophetic books, and Whitman… Kerouac, most of all, was the biggest influence”.

In the Beat movement, Ginsberg’s Howl especially, was somehow attempted to be portrayed in a way that was understood on an everyday level for the time. Yet, it was still considered controversial after its publication due to references to Ginberg’s life that included a lot of obscenity. However, even though it being controversial, Howl was eventually ruled to be not obscene. This implies that Ginsberg’s lifestyle would go on to have an impact on how the Beat generation’s poetry would therefore be popularised ever since.

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Run

BY SAM ELLIS-HUNTER ILLUSTRATED BY KATHERINE LOZADA

1. EXT. CEMETERY. DAY The sun is breaking through the clouds.

Murky grey day.

Autumn trees.

Lonely headstones.

A few people dressed in black.

An open grave.

A priest.

He lets three handfuls of earth fall on to a coffin.

PRIEST From dust you came, to dust you shall return. Jesus Christ, our Saviour, shall raise you up on the last day.

People weep.

A WOMAN is embraced.

2. INT. HOUSE. DAY PRIEST V.O Lord God, our Father in heaven, Lord God, the Son, and Saviour of the world, Lord God, the Holy Spirit, have mercy on us. At the moment of death, and on the last day, save us, merciful and gracious Lord God. Camera pans through a decent looking flat.

Off-white walls. Art. Modern furniture.

The living room.

A woman, SERENITY, sits at a desk.

We don’t see her face or at least not fully.

Next to her computer is a picture.

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PRIEST V.O (CONT.) Let us now listen to the words of Holy Scripture that assures us of God’s safe-keeping in life and death.

SERENITY and an older woman smile in the frame.

The phone rings.

We still haven’t seen her face.

Close ups of her mouth, eyes etc as she speaks.

SERENITY (Jolly) Hi Jessica.

Hi. How you doing?

Good.

Well thanks.

Oh really?

Sounds great.

Sure.

Yeah, not a problem.

She slides over to her calendar.

It’s chock-a-block. The 28th?

Something is already due on that day.

Yeah, that’ll be fine.

The bottom of her computer screen says the 21st.

You’ll email me the details?

Fantastic.

Ok then.

Thanks Victoria.

Speak soon.

SERENITY Yeah, ok, take care, bye.

Bye. She starts typing again.

The screen reads. ...

And that’s why I see this as my only option.

Hopefully one day you’ll be able to understand. Then again, you won’t.

Today I finally decided to run away from myself.

I’m sorry.

She saves the document leaving it open and adjusts the framed picture.

Slowly she walks through the house admiring it.

Perfecting it.

The sofa.

The plants.

The walls.

The pictures.

The curtains.

The bedsheets.

Everything is as it should be.

She changes into a pretty outfit.

In the kitchen she grabs some tablets and crushes them up.

Out of a cupboard she grabs a bottle of whiskey.

She drinks the concoction.

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She plays some music and then hangs herself.

We still haven’t seen her face.

3. INT. HOUSE. DAY

SERENITY and her mum are sat in the kitchen.

MUM It’s good to finally have a chance to see you in the flesh!

Have a proper chat.

Look at you.

She squeezes her cheek.

SERENITY Mum, behave!

MUM I’m just happy to see you, that’s all.

So, come on.

What’s the gossip?

SERENITY There isn’t any.

MUM I don’t believe that for a second.

I haven’t seen you in months.

SERENITY We speak on the phone almost everyday.

MUM While I appreciate the calls, nothing beats seeing you in person.

Reaches out and strokes her hair.

SERENITY Honestly Mum, you need to stop.

MUM How’s the job going?

SERENITY (Flat) Ok. Good.

MUM Is that it?

Good? Ok? Is there something bothering you darling?

SERENITY (Startled by the question) No. No. (More relaxed) Sorry.

It’s just been a really busy week that’s all.

Just a bit tired.

MUM Well ok, if that’s all it is.

You’re sure?

SERENITY I’m fine mum.

MUM (Smiling) Ok. So what about the freelance writing?

SERENITY She tries to break a smile.

It’s going really well.

I’ve got quite a few assignments.

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MUM Oh that’s great.

Well that’s what happens when you’re talented.

MUM Anything interesting?

SERENITY Oh, nothing you’ll be interested about.

Anyway enough about me, what about you?!

Looks like you’ve lost weight?

MUM Well, funny you should mention it.

She gets a SLIMFAST drink.

I’ve been giving that slim fast diet a try.

For the last three weeks.

Here’ya, try some of this.

SERENITY Good for you.

Sips the drink.

It tastes kind of alright. Not bad actually.

You look great mum.

MUM Thanks darling.

It hasn’t been easy.

Borderline torture if I’m honest.

It’s the snacking more than anything that gets me.

I mean, I shouldn’t complain really they do have treats but what I wouldn’t give to wrap my lips around a Snickers.

SERENITY Mum! She laughs at the inappropriate innuendo.

MUM Serenity!

Breaks into laughter.

Get your mind out the gutter.

SERENITY Honestly that was bad.

MUM I miss this.

SERENITY What?

MUM (Pause) Us. Laughing like this.

Seems like I haven’t heard you laugh in a long time.

SERENITY I laugh a lot mum.

MUM With your pals?

SERENITY Yes, with my friends.

Who else?

MUM You never talk about any of them.

SERENITY Well, what is there to say?

They’re just friends.

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MUM When you were growing up you never stopped talking about your friends or bringing them around.

What were their names?

Natalie, Phoebe andSERENITY Tiffany.

MUM How are they?

SERENITY Don’t know.

MUM Assumed you still kept in touch.

Why haven’t you?

You guys were the best of friends.

SERENITY I don’t know.

(Pause) Just grew apart I guess.

MUM That’s a shame.

It happens though, doesn’t it.

(Pause) I wonder what they’re doing with their lives now.

SERENITY The last time I had contact with them was after we left college. Like a year or two later.

Natalie weren’t doing much. She was signing on trying to find a job.

Tiffany was doing great. Started up her own business.

MUM Oh wow!

Really?

That’s fantastic.

Doing what?

SERENITY Um. Can’t remember. Something like facials.

Beauty. A beauty therapist.

to

do

with

massage

and

MUM Well good on her!

Make a lot of money they do, beauty therapists.

SERENITY Yeah.

MUM Good on her.

Always knew she had her head screwed on.

You should’ve kept in contact with her.

SERENITY Well.

(Pause) Anyway.

And Phoebe, she got pregnant in college. She dropped out, ain’t seen her since but we found out she had a boy.

MUM What?!

SERENITY Come on mum, I told you that.

MUM Did you?

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SERENITY Yes, and you reacted in exactly the same way you are now.

You had quite a lot to say about it actually.

MUM (Pause) Maybe you’re right.

Goodness.

The baby must be four, five now.

SERENITY Yeah, something like that.

MUM Mind you, I weren’t that much older when I had you.

SERENITY (Slightly choked up) Ok. So that’s something you definitely didn’t say back then.

MUM Well, there’s methods to this parenting malarkey.

You’ll find out one day.

SERENITY (Adamant) No I won’t.

MUM Of course you will.

SERENITY No mum, I don’t think I will.

MUM You don’t want children, not even one?

SERENITY No. MUM Because of work?

I understand you got your hands full at the moment.

Not now, in the future?

SERENITY It’s not work.

It’s nothing to do with work.

MUM Why then?

SERENITY I just don’t.

MUM You’ll change your mind.

SERENITY I won’t.

I don’t want to talk about this.

MUM Serenity.

SERENITY Mum! MUM I’m just surprised.

SERENITY Will you stop going on about it?

I don’t want to have children.

Leave it alone.

MUM What if I had of thought the same thing?

There’s never been a day that I’ve ever regretted having you.

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SERENITY (Pause) I can’t believe we’re even having this conversation.

Just because I’ve got a womb, mum, doesn’t mean I have to use it!

Just shJust stop it.

MUM Ok, ok.

I can see you’re getting upset.

I’m sorry darling.

(Long pause) MUM Anyway, I suppose it ain’t such a bad thing I’m too young to be a grandmother now anyway.

SERENITY Mum! MUM (Laughs) Ok. So when you going to bring your work friends round?

What’s their names?

SERENITY Soon.

MUM Names?

SERENITY (Almost bitterly) Lindsey.

And. Taylor.

MUM Ok. What are they like?

SERENITY Mum, I’m not thirteen anymore.

You don’t need to know everything.

Really.

MUM (Concerned) Are you sure your ok Serenity?

SERENITY Yes. MUM Nothing’s bothering you?

SERENITY No. MUM How’s the flat?

Managing alright?

Need anything?

SERENITY Everything’s fine.

It’s really nice. Beautiful actually. Exactly how I want it.

MUM That’s good.

SERENITY Mum, I’m gonna get ready to go.

MUM Already?

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You haven’t even finished your tea.

SERENITY I know.

Sorry.

I’ve got an early start tomorrow.

MUM Well, ok then darling.

Come here and give me a hug.

SERENITY Mum? MUM Yes? SERENITY You got any plans for the 21st?

MUM What day’s that?

SERENITY This time next week. Sunday.

MUM No, no plans.

SERENITY Will you come and see me?

MUM Oh I’d love to!

Do you want me to bring anything?

I could pop to Mark’s and get you that moussaka you like?

SERENITY No mum, you don’t need to bring anything. Honestly.

Here.

MUM A key?

You sure you want me to have this?

SERENITY Yeah. I usually go for a jog so might not be there.

You can let yourself in.

MUM Oh. OK then darling.

SERENITY Thanks for today mum.

It was nice to see you.

(Genuine smile) MUM You too.

SERENITY Bye mum.

MUM Alright, see you next week.

SERENITY Love you.

MUM Love you too.

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4. EXT. STREET. DAY Pavements.

Shops.

People.

SERENITY flustered.

She’s on the phone.

SERENITY Ok mum.

Look, I’m outside work now.

I’ll see you tomorrow.

Ok. Bye. She stops outside a building and looks up at it.

She sighs.

5. INT. WORK. DAY SERENITY is in the canteen/staff room.

LINDSEY and TAYLOR walk in.

SERENITY’s body language changes.

TAYLOR Oi, oi.

Here she is, the office slut.

Serenity pretends she hasn’t heard.

TAYLOR Lindsey, looks like something’s caught her tongue.

LINDSEY That’s strange.

She walks up to SERENITY. Doesn’t look like she’s got a dick in it.

TAYLOR Still can’t believe you turned up to work after that?

Oi! I’m talking to you!

SERENITY Haven’t you ever made a mistake before?

TAYLOR What did you say?

SERENITY I saidTAYLOR I know what you said.

It’s not a mistake when you’ve done it more than once.

LINDSEY And don’t even deny it.

That’s slutty behaviour.

SERENITY That was over a year ago.

LINDSEY So. SERENITY What have I ever done to you?

You’ve had a problem with me from the day I started, why?

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TAYLOR You’re an ugly, dirty bitch and we don’t like you.

That’s why.

SERENITY Do you know what?

I’d be careful what you say to people.

6. INT. CHRISTMAS PARTY. NIGHT Disco lights.

Music.

Dance floor.

People dancing.

Glasses.

Bottles.

Party food.

Chairs.

SERENITY sits alone.

PERSON 1 Come on, let your hair down.

SERENITY No, I’m ok thanks.

PERSON 1 Come on!

SERENITY (Hesitantly) Ok. She dances.

And drinks.

And dances.

And drinks.

A guy, RICARDO, approaches her.

RICARDO You having a good time?

Her inhibitions have left her.

SERENITY Yeah.

Really good.

RICARDO Good.

I’m Ricardo by the way.

SERENITY I know who you are.

RICARDO Yeah?

I’m sorry, ISERENITY Serenity, my names Serenity.

RICARDO That’s a nice name.

They smile at each other.

INT. STAFF TOILET. NIGHT Grotty toilet.

The sound of music is muffled.

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Toilet tissue on the floor.

Graffiti in the cubicle.

Heavy breathing/panting.

SERENITY and RICARDO. They’re kissing passionately.

Zipper undone.

Skirt up.

Knickers down.

They fuck.

Female voice off screen.

FEMALE Is someone fucking in there!?

7. INT. HOUSE. MORNING/NOON/NIGHT

The following things take place throughout the day or over a period of days, weeks or months.

Bedroom.

SERENITY gets up.

Makes herself a cup of tea.

Living room.

Turns TV on.

Checks her phone.

No messages.

No missed calls.

She scrolls through her contacts.

Three names.

Mum, Victoria and work.

At her desk.

Google search “Is there something wrong with me?”

Bathroom.

Splashes water on her face.

Looking in the mirror.

SERENITY I deserve to be happy.

I’m beautiful I love you.

I deserve to be happy.

I’m beautiful.

SERENITY I love you.

Kitchen.

Food.

Living room.

Eating.

Desk.

Google search, “How to deal with regret.”

Bathroom.

Looking in the mirror again.

She slaps herself.

SERENITY I’m sorry.

Crying.

Living room.

Desk.

Google search, “I can’t cope anymore.”

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Bedroom.

Laying down.

Ceiling.

Lights.

Tears.

Living room.

Desk.

Google search, “Ways to kill yourself.”

Her phone rings.

Caller display, MUM.

8. INT. HOSPITAL. DAY SERENITY lays on a bed.

Lights.

Metal apparatus.

Doctors.

9. EXT. PARK. DAY Girls, SERENITY, NATALIE and TIFFANY. Spliffs and cider.

TIFFANY Here.

She passes her the bottle.

SERENITY Nah, I’m good.

NATALIE Pass it if she doesn’t want any.

She takes it.

TIFFANY Here then have some of this then.

She offers her the spliff.

She doesn’t take it.

SERENITY -TIFFANY What’s wrong with you?

NATALIE You’ve been bare quiet all day.

SERENITY I’m pregnant.

I think I’m far in to it as well.

Ain’t seen my period for like two months.

TIFFANY (Laughing) What!? For Marlon?

NATALIE Serenity man.

SERENITY I don’t know what to do you guys.

TIFFANY What do you mean? You ain’t actually thinking of keeping it are you?

NATALIE Allow that.

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SERENITY It might not be so bad.

TIFFANY (Laughing) What and end up like Phoebe? The talk of the endz?

NATALIE If I was you I would get rid.

SERENITY (Pause) It’s there though.

Growing inside me.

Like, an actual baby.

(Pause) It could be a girl.

What if it is?

What if she looks just like me.

(Smiles) NATALIE Fix up and stop all of that.

You know what you need to do Serenity, trust me.

Don’t worry about it we’ll be here for you, always.

TIFFANY Yeah, and what did you say your mum said when she found out about Phoebe?

If you know what’s best for you you’d get rid otherwise you’ll both be dead.

10. INT. HOUSE. DAY Bathroom.

A teenage girl, SERENITY. She sits on the toilet.

She’s crying.

A pregnancy test drops from her hands.

It’s positive.

End.

COMMENTARY For my script I used Martin Amis’s novel Time’s Arrow as my point of inspiration and reference. What makes the book so interesting is the fact that the narrative is so complex. There are at least three techniques within the craft that confuse narrative time: in media res, reverse chronology and a non-linear narrative. In media res, Latin for, “in the midst of things,” means just that. We are catapulted right in to the middle of a narrative usually at a pivotal moment and consequently the story moves forward in action with the aid of flashbacks to piece everything together. An example of this would be the film Fight Club. The non-linear approach doesn’t conform to a straight line nor does it to a strict backstory. Time plays no relevance, narratives are scat-

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tered and go in multiple directions, hopefully, by the end making sense. This device is often found to be used when characters are confused or troubled and/or trying to make sense of things. Film: Forrest Gump.

Lastly, the style Time’s Arrow employs is reverse chronology. This is when a story is told from back to front. The end of the film becomes the beginning and the beginning becomes the end, and there are no interruptions within the narrative. Film: Irreversible (Warning - extremely violent and explicit.) Prior to reading Time’s Arrow I was already aware of films using this method of writing but with all the buzz surrounding this piece of literature and it being on the module, I figured something had to be marginally different. Having read John Mullen’s review for The Guardian, I was able to to identify credible reasons for that being the case. Almost straightaway Mullen talks about how the book is different compared to other works because, “the protagonist gets younger, the universe contracts. The action is like a film being run backwards”.

Nothing I’d seen or read was crafted in the same manner as Time’s Arrow. To further expand, Time’s Arrow leaves no gaps from where the story begins to where the story ends. Everything runs tightly and consecutively, everything is accounted for. On the surface of things this doesn’t offer anything different to the structural premise of reverse chronology however, there is a notable difference. Amis has used the device to directly apply it to the book’s main character, Todd Friendly, whereby his age diminishes as the story goes back in time. There are films where we see the protagonist get younger but there is usually some sort of break that makes us aware of it. Let’s take The Curious Case of Benjamin Button as an example. Just as is the case for Todd Friendly as is the case for a Benjamin, he too gets younger throughout the story but we are taken out of the narrative and are made aware of time with year dates and a voice over in the beginning.

The only film that I found to be on par with Time’s Arrow’s reverse chronology was Irreversible. The film is strict and runs consecutively as it depicts the events of that tragic night. But that being said, even looking at Time’s Arrow itself, there has been no film adaptation and I think that’s perhaps because it just wouldn’t work on screen.

I’m referring specifically to the language being spoken backward, the graphic scenes (e.g hospital scenes) and the constant voice of the narrator. Most of these things would have to be omitted and thus as a result not staying faithful to the book

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and what makes it uniquely different. Book yes, film no. This lead me to wonder, why?

Some things just can’t be done visually. With my research complete there was one final question, what was the point? Why would an author, script writer or poet go to the trouble of reversing the chronological order of their works? I think the answer to that would be, reverse chronology demands the audience’s attention and asks you to move from the consequence to the cause.

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L WORLDS WITHIN WORDS

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Haaraam Fucks With Silence

BY FATHA IBRAHIM ILLUSTRATED BY JUBEDHA AKTHER

Haraam fucks with Silence My pussy’s wet Haraam.

Go and lay down Silence.

Come and touch it.

Haraam.

Hoyoo are you goin to cut it?

Silence.

One touch they say it feels nice Haraam.

Would you believe me if I say that they can cut your clit?

Silence.

How big can a cock be?

Haraam.

My mum cut hers… so did her mum…so did hers…hers too Silence.

My pussy’s wet and it’s not water Haraam.

She was pinned down

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Silence.

I’ve read 50 shades of grey and I liked it Haraam.

I’ve read their Quran and I was the Shaytaan Silence.

What exactly is sex?

Haraam.

There is only Allah. He gives us children Silence.

Doggy? Reverse Cowboy? 69?

Haraam.

Legs open for the old lady Silence.

Open my legs to see me ready Haraam.

The blade reflecting against her eyes. The old lady is the blade.

Silence.

You can put your mouth down on my pussy Haraam.

The lady edges forward and swipes. They scream Silence.

I bet it would feel good. Your tongue. I’ll scream Haraam.

Screams and swipe with lovely red Silence.

Please, let me feel that again Haraam.

Stitch it up Silence Stick it up Haraam.

Finished. Legs snapped closed… for him Silence.

Legs opened. cumbucket Haraam.

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Bloodbucket. Drained.

Silence.

Stick it up inside Stick it up inside me, See if I'm worthy inside. am I worthy for that cock of yours?

Husband it’s for you, This ebony flesh for you to pierce through.

Hymen for him, His hymen.

Protected and perfectly‌Black!

A hidden land for you to set up camp, Mark your territory, Set up your borders, Split my legs open like nations.

Desires and kinks all for you to take.

Stick it up inside and make me cum.

The earth-shattering orgasm white ladies cry for, that hip thrusting anthem that men kill for.

Make me know the feeling of an orgasm, I want to scream like they do in porn.

I saved this all for you, My hymen for you, Your hymen, yours.

Rip into me and make my desires open Arouse me inside Stick it up inside me Quickly the night is almost passing, it has to be done now.

Make your semen seep past through your invested hymen.

Tear me up and make me scream.

Is that it?

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We finished?

I haven’t screamed, I screamed in pain.

Hurts, not the good kind Stick it up inside me it’s Your enjoyment now, Your explosion.

Does mine not cum after yours?

I didn’t cum first Your hymen ploughed through Stuck it up inside me Hymen is gone Blood dried On my side Wet With tears His hymen Not mines His.

Where can we touch?

Touch me.

I said it. Touch me.

I didn't stutter.

One touch, right there I'll reciprocate where do you want my hands?

Wrapped around you, tight, glove-like we’ve got time, Let’s not rush ourselves.

We're not going anywhere. Stop thinking.

Just touch me. Touch yourself.

I’ll lead if you don’t want to Touch me there… slowly

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Don’t scratch, pinch or stroke.

Caresses… caress me, gently Let us last through the night Use whatever means you want Tongue, hands…– It’s just us with our own time No one’s watching, except- forget it Follow me down to Naar (Hell) Don’t follow the others follow me instead We've been doing this since Adam and Hawa Take your time.

Behind closed doors. No expectations It will be just us No porn just us.

Where can you touch?

Touch me anywhere that's right.

Don’t leave me We’re so close to Temptations are guide I see the devil on your shoulder He’s happy Another one for his team We’re fucking to Naar (Hell) Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.

Take your fingers out your pussy And wake.

Wake and pray.

A sinner starts her day.

Cum quick Hoyoo Hoyoo cum quickly Hoyoo cum quickly Cum and see.

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My ecstasy.

The sweat dripping down to our butt crack A new exhaustion not from cleaning the house But being made dirty inside.

I’ll fuck in the living room The living room for the men to eat See me as I get eaten out The kitchen where the ladies hang See me hang from the counter getting fucked The shower to clean away the sins Water obsessed I fuck in that water now How dirty can I make the water?

Haraam is fun now.

Now let me cum

Stroke my hair Stroke my hair softly run it through your fingers.

Stroke my hair.

No more puffiness stroke my hair with the comb Stroke my hair Stroke my hair feel my texture. I’m different.

I’m rough. I’m soft. I’m kinky.

Stroke my hair and feel its struggle Stroke my hair and feel its history Stroke and see what I fought for Hair Just hair.

Hair that continues to be colonised How about just understanding it is hair.

Hair that wants to be free.

My hair is wrapped, trapped and put away.

In a Hijab, Bonnet, Weave.

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Constantly trained, relaxed, permed, straightened, curled.

Leave our hair alone.

Stroke my hair Grab the comb. Quick, it’s a party A party with friends. We don’t want no bush round here Stroke it apart. Stroke it hard.

Needs to be presentable Acceptable to others. don’t be different.

Stroke it straight.

No more bushy hair here.

Stroke my hair softly.

Feels nice. Feels relaxed?

Well it burns It burns as though I’m on a stake.

Condemned.

You condemn hair that is covered Yet hate hair that is not straight What do you want?

Shave me Shave me and make me pretty Shave because no one likes hair Shave me so I can feel you glide in and out.

Shave me and let me watch it go down the drain Swirling, twirling, little hairs curling away Haraam hair disappears.

Shave. Shave. Shave.

It’s disgusting. Revolting. Unhygienic The hair down there Hair all gone.

It feels nice. Rub me more.

One finger, two finger, how about more?

ABCDEFuckmeGHIJKLMNOPQRubmeStrokemeTouchme

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Haraam. You’re like the kufaar.

Fuck me like a kufaar.

I'll shave for them not for me.

COMMENTARY In this assignment I gave myself the task of expressing my own activism. This is my giving a voice to those who are portrayed as being voiceless. Using poetry allows a more fluid structure of language and lets me create varied ways of expressing my views. I have written a poem about female genital mutilation (FGM) and this is something that is quite personal to me but through its looser, associative qualities poetic form gives the topic a commonality that a more exact and descriptive prose style might exclude. The sequence of poems starts with sex and FGM which are an unlikely mix but I have tried to establish similarities between them.

My research included social media such as Twitter, Instagram and broadsheets like The Independent and The Guardian. Social media gave me wider access to the experience of minorities from ethnic backgrounds because these platforms allow diverse voices a platform and an audience that mainstream media do not. I didn’t want only to focus on FGM but also show other experiences that conflict with where I live and to discuss sexual relations as a person of colour, as well as someone who comes from a community which tends to see subjects like this as taboo.

In the first poem I play with the Islamic word of ‘Haraam’ and how it can be a synonym of ‘Silence’. The word Haraam is defined as ‘Haraam is that for which the one who does it will be punished and the one who abstains from it will be rewarded’ (What is the Definition of Haram & Halal? 2000). I use the words Haraam and Silence repeatedly in my poem as a repetitive chant that makes the reader understand these contrasting words and the actions that arise from their contrast. I used FGM and sex as the discourse for this poem and linked them together. The sentences start off with sexual expression which is quickly stopped with the word Haraam. The procedure of FGM and the intimacy of sex are both expressed in terms of silence, implying the silence around discussion of both sex and FGM, and the silence of those who view it as normal.

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The second poem describes a harsh reality for some newlywed couples. I have used the subject of an eager wife wanting to experience losing her virginity in comparison to an eager husband. The expectations of rushed passion are what I have been trying to incorporate into my poetry. The selfishness of the husband and wife due to wanting to fulfil desires. The wife who has been living with the constant demand that she should keep her virginity for her husband is left disappointed in the end. The lack of consideration towards the opposite sex when it comes to sexual intercourse is the fault of not being taught that sexual pleasure is not something to be guilty of.

The third poem is about masturbation and how the poet is labelled a ‘sinner’ in the end. I want the reader to understand that the poetic voice is not shaming the women but is trying to locate her frustration. The woman having to imagine scenarios with her imaginary lover shows her sexual frustration. This can also be linked to the fourth poem as I have used Somali dialect: ‘hoyoo’ translates as ‘mother’. Here the poetic voice is also trying to explain that sex is something to not be ashamed of. This is why I end it with the line “Haraam is fun now”.

The two last poems shift as they begin to discuss the narrative of being a coloured woman. I had decided to include hair as the subject, both natural hair and pubic hair.

The shameful subject of this comes to light in the struggle whether to accept natural hair and then line it alongside the issue of shaving and how that is sometimes perceived as disgusting.

In these poems I wanted to make the progression linear and give each identity a structure. I also wanted to avoid the overt explanation of prose and use visual markers of emphasis. This was achieved by crossing out certain words that are thought of as vulgar but in doing so adding emphasis to them, i.e. pussy, cum, cock. I enjoyed this technique because it made it seem as if I was trying to hide the words that I use in my poetry, which I’m not. Explicit words are present everywhere but erased by social pressure.

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London Coffee Houses in the 17 th � 18 th Century

BY RIA DUNN ILLUSTRATED BY PURO L AEVUO

S

eventeenth century Puritan England, between 1649-1660, was a time of huge moral and aesthetic restriction where there was political censorship and news was suppressed. In 1652, a Greek servant named Pasqua Rosée introduced London to coffee for the first time when he opened the first coffeehouse in St Michael’s Alley, Cornhill, which triggered the coffeehouse boom in the capital. Within just a few years the city was saturated with coffeehouse culture; which was understood as a much healthier and virtuous alternative from the alehouses and taverns.

The coffeehouse was a place where gossip and ideas were shared regarding current cultural and political issues and all coffeehouses held a universal principle that promoted the interaction between their customers; creating a place of convivial sensibility.

In 1660, when King Charles II came into reign, England witnessed the flourishing of artistic and cultural life, although a kind of cultural Renaissance, political and news censorship remained and was controlled by the state. In 1665, the government replaced the two weekly news books with one sanctioned source of news called The London Gazette. Therefore, the circulation of news in the coffeehouses was absolutely integral for their success. Thus, this essay will evaluate the significance of the seventeenth and eighteenth century coffeehouses on literary and intellectual culture.

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The coffeehouses were appearing in London around a time of highly political media censorship and were therefore being “accused of encouraging political dissent and rebellious attitudes” that directly challenged the censorial beliefs of the king. The social networking structure of the coffeehouse allowed people to converse in current news and political discussions as demonstrated by Samuel Pepys in his diary, where he wrote about visiting the coffeehouse on Cornhill in 1660, “I in the evening to the Coffee House in Cornhill, the first time that ever I was there, and I found much pleasure in it, through the diversity of company and discourse […] Where much talk about the Turk’s proceedings, and that the plague is got to Amsterdam, brought by a ship from Argier; and it is also carried to Hambrough.” Pepys also visited the Rota coffeehouse, which supports the idea that coffeehouses were locations of political gossip, “The Rota club was established for the primary purpose […] to debate matters of politics and philosophy, and it gathered some notoriety despite its brief existence.” Due to the censorial society, the coffeehouses were becoming places of threatening sedition and were not encouraged by the state, “The use of coffee houses for political discussion did not endear them to the authorities […] They were viewed with suspicion by royalists and politicians who feared a resurgence of radical political and religious groupings that had flourished during the Interregnum”.

The egalitarian atmosphere that poured through the British coffeehouses ran directly counter to the state’s established traditions of rank. Robert Bucholz supports the idea that the penny entry of the coffeehouses meant that they were extremely accessible to a large, diverse amount of people. “Coffeehouses were thought to be even more corrosive of the status quo than inns and taverns because […] their low admission price made it possible for almost anyone to go there.” Seats could not be reserved in the coffeehouses, resulting in a variety of people conversing, regardless of rank, as expressed by Brian Cowan, “The coffee house has been understood to be a novel and unique social space in which distinctions of rank were temporarily ignored and uninhibited debate on matters of political and philosophical interest flourished.”

Access to the coffeehouses therefore, was not reliant on a person’s status or class but it was purely based on what news they had to trade. The coffee houses therefore became non- hierarchical media institutions that represented the beginning of British democracy.

The king quickly became suspicious of the democratic culture and started seeing the

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coffeehouses as a threat; resulting in him announcing the coffeehouse proclamation in 1675 which resulted in tensions between the state and the British people. The proclamation was later rescinded when the King settled the demand under the condition that coffeehouse owners would refuse the entry of any seditious or trouble -causing behaviour.

Whilst the opposition of the monarch and society continued, a new radical political relation began to form. The coffeehouses began to develop associations with certain political attitudes and specific relations with the status quo. This resulted in two main political parties dominating the era: The Tories and the Whigs and the coffeehouses were therefore argued to be imperative to the flourishing of these political parties as they acted as watering holes for serious debate and opposition between them, “Certain coffee houses around Pall Mall became politically exclusive: Tories tended to gather at the Cocoa Tree and Ozinda’s and Whigs at St. James’s”.

The coffeehouses were also seen to defy the interests of the King, aristocracy and the church by becoming gathering spots for merchants and investors to negotiate business deals. At this time, the king and church had fixed traditions of power and rank based on inherited land, property and wealth. Therefore, the coffeehouses were believed to directly counteract the status quo by involving and promoting international trade and auctions. Edward Lloyd’s coffeehouse for example, “held auctions of ships, sold insurance, and eventually published his own financial paper, Lloyd’s News, from his coffeehouse.” Lloyd’s coffeehouse mainly catered for merchants and ship captains as it was, an important clearinghouse for the posting of official notices regarding overseas trade.” Primarily, Lloyd was dispatching runners to accumulate the latest shipping news from the docks that was then published and read by his customers in his own trade periodical. Jerry White supports, “It was from the coffee houses that information on stocks and shipping and business news- as well as City gossipfound its way into an ever-rising tide of newsprint”.

Coffeehouses became huge media outlets by allowing the emerging newspapers and periodicals to circulate in them; giving rise to a sphere of literary culture and professional journalism that had not been witnessed before. Coffeehouse owners were using journals and newspapers as a way to attract custom to their houses. Consequently, they regularly made publication agreements and deals between publishers

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for the rights of distribution. Through the coffeehouse phenomenon, a new modern social world of authorship was beginning for the first time.

In 1694 the Government refused to renew the 1662-licensing act, which left the right to publish open to anyone rather than just members of The Stationers’ Guild.

Consequently, there was an anxiety rise on individual rights of publishing and people were finding it increasingly difficult to make a living from their own work. The copyright act was therefore brought into existence in 1710, which gave authors fourteen years of legal protection of their new published books. If this was not renewed however, the book entered the public sphere, “Culturally, the increasing availability of printed publications and the decline of press licensing facilitated the development of a ‘public sphere’ of rational discourse”.

An important literary figure in terms of this copyright act was the eighteenth century bookseller, Jacob Tonson; who bought the copyright on William Shakespeare’s plays, resulting in a huge financial gain. Additionally, Tonson was also a highly influential character in terms of literary culture and the satire boom that flourished in eighteenth century London. Tonson was the founder of the Kitkat club from 1697-1717, which had literary associations and was a place where writers from the Whigs met.

Similarly, another coffeehouse that attracted people with fine literary interests was Will’s coffeehouse in Covent Garden that, “was at the time the center of London’s literary life, and […] famous as the favourite haunt of John Dryden.” As Clayton states, “The tendency of certain writers to gather together in particular coffee houses, coupled with the emergence of literary criticism and moral essays in The Spectator and similar periodicals, contributed to the growth of a literary public sphere”.

The coffeehouse was therefore, a huge influence on literary history and the public sphere, with the introduction of such periodical subscriptions. Tonson co-published The Spectator journal, which was a highly satirical observation of London life at the time. Favouring the whigs, The Spectator was an extremely successful and entertaining piece of publishing that included moral instruction and political intelligence.

To conclude therefore, the coffeehouses of 17th and 18th century England represent a modern mass media network of the distribution of periodicals, subscriptions and literature publications as a way to promote political and economic culture. The cof-

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feehouses allowed unpredictable collision of people’s ideas and opinions to come together, which created the perfect environment for innovation and therefore, the coffeehouse was crucial for the birth of the enlightenment.

Although modern day coffeehouses are extremely different environments from the seventeenth and eighteenth century ones, the legacies are still being felt in society today. From the social environment of Lloyds coffeehouse for example, grew the huge business organization that exists today as Lloyd’s of London. Our modern political parties also derived from the Tories and the Whigs coming together in the seventeenth century coffeehouses to discuss and exchange ideas.

Differences between modern day coffeehouses and seventeenth and eighteenth century coffeehouses are clearly noticeable. The coffeehouse of today for example, focuses more on the taste and quality of the coffee, rather than the atmosphere of news circulating, as Ellis states, “The heritage with which Starbucks prefers to identity is the romance of the coffee bean, rather than the less palatable coffee-house history of gossip, scandal and sedition, reliant on the contestatory forms of irony and satire.” It is clear therefore that coffeehouses today have a much less influence on literary and intellectual culture, Ellis states that the modern day “coffee-house is no longer oppositional, rebellious and dissident. This is their profit, but our loss”.

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The Black Arts Movement

BY BEATRIZ FIORE ILLUSTRATED BY GODI PANZOUT

How is poetry a vehicle of protest? Show how Baraka and/or any other poet associated with the Black Arts Movement developed a poetics of black identity and protest.

A

n extensive reading of black poems from the early twentieth century until the post-civil rights era can offer a perception of how African Americans dealt and reacted against the crippling discriminations they faced daily. This, indeed, was an era which produced some of the most powerful and memorable protest poems in American literary history; a literary movement which stemmed from the bountiful creativity of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and 30s and culminated in the poignant and dynamic Black Arts Movement in the 1960s and 70s. Taking into consideration some of the most prominent poems of the movement, (we will see that the analysis of these poems is inseparable from the biographies and political activism of their authors) this essay will attempt to construct, along with written manifestos on black art, what the exponents of the movement really proposed to do with their art and how they went beyond writing mere protest poems towards a creation of a new cultural history, language, identity and aesthetics for the black people of America.

Early poetry such as Claude Mckay’s “If We Must Die” and Sterling A. Brown’s “Strong Men” portray the horrors of the slavery and abuse black men and women have been subjected to through generations. These examples are protest poems as, by depicting the horrors of the history they have been made to live through, white imperialism is

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laid out and condemned.

They broke you in like oxen, They scourged you, They branded you, They made your women breeders, They swelled your numbers with bastards…

They taught you the religion they disgraced. (Strong Men, 1931. ll 5-10) The scars of slavery are ever present and burn even more ferociously after the disillusionment of the achievements of the civil rights movement compromised by violence, the assassination of Malcolm X and later that of Martin Luther King. Physical violence is a recurring theme in black protest poetry, horrific images which nonetheless act as a powerful tool to both record and remember this dark history and to hold up a mirror and denounce the racism of white America. Sonia Sanchez closes her 1970 poem ‘right on: white america’ with the words, “check out the falling gun/shells on our blk/tomorrows.”

Art, particularly in the form of poem and song (i.e. performance, spoken word, readily accessible and easily spread without the necessity to publish or put together a production) has long been an effective tool to give voice to the oppressed. Furthermore, to give someone a voice, to give the chance for the oppressed to be heard also bestows dignity, brings back their denied humanity. An example of this valiant, dignified voice is heard in Mckay’s 1919 poem, “If We Must Die:” If we must die, O let us nobly die So that our precious blood may not be shed In vain; then even the monsters we defy Shall be constrained to honor us though dead! (…)

Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack, Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back! (If We Must Die, 1919. Ll 5-8; 13/14)

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The reality of black America is stained with blood and frustration and from this emerges the political clenched fist of the Black Power Movement as a response to injustice. The tone of Mckay’s poem resonates in these militants’ speeches and attitudes: this response is impatient, unapologetic, visceral and proud and the Black Arts Movement is defined as its “spiritual sister,” dealing with black traditions and aesthetics but not less political. The poetry of the Black Arts Movement speaks directly to the aspirations of black America, it is poetry about the people and for the people, it rises intuitively, visceral and incensed it motives and inspires; it is revolutionary and impulsive while being sensitive and beautiful, it is inclusive and aims to form a strong, cohesive collective while originating in personal experiences and anxieties.

The word “protest”, however, becomes problematic. Whether the exponents of the Black Arts Movement wanted their poetry to be defined in such manner, is questionable. Larry Neal, essential in defining the role of the arts in the Black Power movement, refuses in fact to define this poetry as protest poetry. To protest is to beg, supplicate for better conditions, to underline the wrongs and plead for the rights: by doing this, however, one is adhering to a white aesthetic, it validates the very society that is denying their right to live, it acknowledges that there are a certain set of people in power and these are the ones to challenge, or turn to in order to advocate change; it is a mere continuation of the master- slave dynamic. Neal writes, “Only when that belief has faded and protestings end, will Black art begin.” How can this be achieved? The only way to invalidate white supremacy, or repudiate a society whose set of ideals does not coincide with the consciousness of black America, is not to protest it but to bring forth a new aesthetic and define the world in their own terms.

The movement proposed not only a reordering of the white aesthetic but a complete destruction of it; the white aesthetic had run its course and had proved to be damaging and inhumane. Art must now speak to the spiritual voice of black people whilst also re-evaluating its social function. The Western notion of “Art for art’s sake” is no longer relevant, when it can be such a powerful tool to awaken consciences, create traditions and forge identities.

“We advocate a cultural revolution in art and ideas. The cultural values inherent in western history must either be radicalized or destroyed, and we will probably find that even radicalization is impossible. In fact, what is needed is a whole system of ideas.” (Neal, Larry. ‘The Black Art Movement.’)

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Euro-American cultural sensibilities have failed principally because they are based on abstractions. As the Movement puts it, their ethics and their aesthetics do not coincide; Black aesthetics must consequently be ethical and must come from the oppressed and speak directly to the oppressed; it must be active, social and political. Poems become living entities and take on human form; they observe, accuse and fight back. The most important poem of the Movement is undeniably Amiri Baraka’s “Black Art,” which demonstrates this way of thinking about art.

Poems are bullshit unless they are Teeth or trees or lemons piled On a step. Or black ladies dying Of men leaving nickel hearts Beating them down. (…) we want "poems that kill."

Assassin poems, Poems that shoot Guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys And take their weapons leaving them dead With tongues pulled out and sent to Ireland. (‘Black Art’ ll 1-5; ll 19-23) Art is used as a weapon, this is the fundamental political aspect of the Black Arts movement and the line of thinking which connects it to the Black Power movement.

Baraka does not call for a peaceful protest, what was attempted with Martin Luther King had failed and had ended in his assassination; the poets want active resistance and mobilisation. Poems must have root in the physical world, they must be flesh and blood and reflect reality. Baraka goes on to say “Let there be no love poems written/ Until love can exist freely and/ Cleanly;” this only reinforces the fact that art should mirror reality and as we live in a world where true acceptance does not exist, neither should love poems.

A strong desire for self-determination and the idea of nationhood are the pivots from which all else stems. Activist and writer Mualana Karenga vehemently professed this notion that culture is the most important element of the affirmation of a people.

“Culture is the basis of all ideas, images and actions (…) without culture Negroes are only a set of reactions to white people.” This is precisely what the black poetry of the

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time refused to be; merely a protest, a reaction to the white agenda. Karenga talks of a profoundly Afrocentric transformative liberation which occurs in the consciences of people, but which needs a new language, a constant dialogue between the traditions and myths of Africa and the new ones emerging in the streets of black America.

He identifies seven core areas which need to be seized by the current wave of black cultural nationalism: history/tradition, spirituality/religion, social organization, political organization, economic organization, the arts and ethos. Only through the transformation of these principles can people aspire to build and maintain a moral community. The notion of a black public sphere becomes an attainable ideal and we see the flourishing of social and political organisations, aiming to feed, educate, empower and sometimes arm (as was the case with the radical Black Panthers) black citizens. We witness also the rise of black operated publishing houses and journals, essential for the circulation of poems which would have otherwise fallen into oblivion. Scholar Gershwin Avilez writes, “This new consciousness that involves finding radical methods of expression and empowerment describes succinctly the BAM, as a social phenomenon, symbolises one of the best instances of the historical attempts at a black public sphere.”

The fact that this was not fully achieved is unfortunate, but the ripple effect that both the political and literary movement (again, inseparable) had on black consciousness and identity is undeniable; the way language shapes identities, awakens spirits and depicts situations which become aspirations for reality demonstrates how creativity and imagination can change the world. Author and social activist Bell Hooks speaks of this imaginary capacity and the importance of seizing and using one’s own language when working towards social change. Imagination sustains one’s revolutionary spirit and affirms one’s inner freedom, art and literature can also become a refuge which makes reality more bearable for it offers the possibility of an alternative world. She argues, “All too often the colonized mind thinks of the imagination as the realm of the psyche that, if fully explored, will lead one into madness, away from reality.

Consequently, it is feared. For the colonized mind to think of the imagination as the instrument that dos not estrange us from reality, but returns us to the real more fully, in ways that help us to confront and cope, is a liberatory gesture.”

In fact, many poems of the Black Arts movement rely on the notion of “image making”, which is seen as a fundamental part of human affirmation. By using the magic

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of words one can evoke a universe which appeals to one’s own sensibility and speak to one’s truth; the power of this lies in that this reality, once created in the poem, can be exemplified in people’s homes and then made possible on the streets. Art is seen as being able to reshape nature and change human relationships; however, it cannot do this if it appeals to reason, it must speak directly to the senses, to “call forth a spontaneous emotional identification with other men and with the universe.” The following extracts are from Carolyn Gerald’s poem on the destruction of Greco-Roman Western muse, blonde and white, to give way to a new black reality: Dress the muse in black…

No! Kill her!

Make her jump Burning bright white bitch From the pitched peaks of our houses (…)

Clap and stomp round the fire And shout the spirit out of her And draw your circle close For we’ll kill us a devil tonight.

Come on away, now!

Now! We’ll find our own saint (or another name for her) No need for hell’s fire now.

The fire’s weak And burned out The universe is black again.

This image attempts to destroy the myth of all the other images which create an opposition between black and white. Traditional Western symbolism must be turned on its head, as it is impossible to advocate a return to old African traditions while ignoring historical continuity and the Europeanization of black Americans. Gerald desecrates the muse and ends the poem with a powerful and evocative “the universe is black again”.

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Moving away from the concept of myth and imagination, black poets also focused on the mundane, which was given the same weight and importance, perhaps more, than abstract symbols. The focus was on the performance of poetry, rather than the written word. Gwendolyn Brooks recalls that writers seized every literary genre and created a language which spoke to the people on the street: poems were performed in bars, libraries, churches, prisons, schools, parks etc. and this made literature a living, breathing, organic entity which used the same language and subjects that appeared in people’s daily realities. In a later interview, Amiri Baraka will explain that once must realise that everything in one’s life is significant, that there is no symbolism or metaphor or object more important than any other; what makes something significant is the kind of light invested in it. An example of how powerful the mundane can be, especially when the banal is what is held in importance in a capitalist society, is Don Lee, or Haki Madhubuti’s poem ‘The Primitive’. (…) their bible for our land. (introduction to economics) christianized us. raped our minds with: T.V. & straight hair, Reader’s Digest & bleaching creams, tarzan & jungle jim, used cars & used homes, reefers & napalm, european history & promises.

Those alien concepts of whiteness, the being of what is not. against our nature, this weapon is called civilization – The language is straightforward and prosaic; however the form is somewhat fragmented, reminiscent of be-bop and jazz’s irregular and itching rhythms and the impassioned tone makes the very words we use on a daily basis seem dark and

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obscene. Don Lee invalidates the whole idea of western capitalism, of “whiteness,” making “civilization” a dirty word.

Thus far we have seen a subversion of Western ideals, from the white Muse to slavery, from guns to T.V., but another crucial element is the carefully crafted “black voice,” a voice which seems spontaneous and is made to echo various aspects of African American reality, consolidating the idea of the existence of a strong African American culture: from church sermons in experimental free verse, to vernacular songs, jazz, the blues and characteristic colloquial language. All of this reality from the American streets was fused with African myths and symbols to create an aesthetic amalgamation unique to this black generation and which has certainly resonated in the subsequent pan-African movements which flourish to the present day.

The poetry of the Black Arts movement is a concrete example of how art can move the masses and ignite revolutionary spirits. Black America was reminded of its ancestry, empowered against its oppressors and called to political activism in order to create a world in which equality and acceptance is a reality. Poems inspired the coming together of black consciousness and the oppressed found an inner pride and freedom in an antagonistic society which only art could have achieved. Amiri Baraka concludes his ‘Black Art’ piece in the following way: Let Black people understand That they are the lovers and the sons Of warriors and sons Of warriors Are poems & poets & All the loveliness here in the world We want a black poem. And a Black World.

Let the world be a Black Poem And Let All Black People Speak This Poem Silently Or LOUD

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Experiments in Form

BY PHIL DURHAM ILLUSTRATED BY VIVIENNE MAHON

Sinking Isle

Oh, words!

I’ve got words, alright.

I’ve got words that’ll shatter an eardrum at twenty paces.

I’ve got words that’ll take

the pen and suck the ink right out.

I’ve got words that’ll bend cutlery, and cut tension in two.

“words,”

yes, I’ve got words, alright.

I’ve got words that’ll take decades to dilute in meaning.

I’ve got words that’ll take

you to the moon, and back to bed.

I’ve got words that’ll turn two ounces of shit into a pound. “words.”

I’ve got words, see.

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I’ve got words like, “Geronimo!”

“Gung-ho!” and “Mosquito!”

I’ve got words that’ll shuck you from your bubble.

Oh, words!

I’ve got words.

I’ve got my words. go get yours.

Ode to John Frum I took the cardboard from a coca cola crate and crafted an origami crane: so that John would make it rain. and I carved a cuckoo in a cathode ray tube

above a scratched wish-hit-list. and

before bed time I hold

a séance for John Frum. nowadays,

I have a garage full of spark plugs and little eccentricities.

children in the local area call me “mad pat”,

and don’t think that I can hear

so good any more.

but I just turned thirty last year. and

I’m balding now, but my mother’s

father was bald by nineteen-sixteen.

it’s a hereditary condition; amongst other things.

like how my father used to say, I think,

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“we’re all only animals, anyway.” and although

I’m sure he meant it metaphorically,

but the way he chewed his steak said otherwise.

that was when I took the safety cap off a cheap lighter

and scorched a runway down my arm

so that John would take me out of school that day.

The Five-year Plan there at least fifty ways to escape debt. i.

ii. iii. iv. v. vi. vii. viii. ix. x. xi. xii. xiii. xiv. xv. xvi. xvii.

lock

doors and windows. respond to all received paperwork in an elusive yet strident register. burn or shred all received paperwork (reinforce with method i.) move in a frequent and erratic manner. learn professional-grade hacking and/or anti-hacking techniques. avoid educating oneself institutionally. avoid advertisements for desirable goods. quit digestion of solids. sell your body, or self. go insane. lose use of limbs (though this has since been proven to have mixed results). birth, or sire, bountiful spawn. prove self fortnightly unable, or, unfit to work (while preparing methods i.-xii.) win a lottery. regularly win at the casino. print own money. steal others’ valuables.

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xviii. acquire, and sell, illicit substances. xix. overuse illicit substances. xx. write to your local MP. xxi. devour all members of parliament. xxii. blow up parliament. xxiii. join armed services. xxiv. strong-arm friend into fabricating credentials for referencing purposes. xxv. create an app. xxvi. solve oil crises. xxvii. simultaneously disarm all nuclear weaponry (hold world to ransom). xxviii. discover extraterrestrial life (elope). xxix. drink excessively (a part-time solution). xxx. learn about stock. xxxi. fictionalise one’s self. xxxii. sell air, water, or medicines. xxxiii. run for election. xxxiv. exploit charity of others. xxxv. found own religion. xxxvi. become a high-ranking member of an established religion. xxxvii. wear the skin of a monarch. xxxviii. become impregnated by, or impregnate, a member of a monarchy (BEWARE). xxxix. own land/sell land. xl. accumulate a mass of convincing disguises. xli. injure self at home or at work. xlii. inherit money from a convicted felon. xliii. photograph celebrities in compromising situations. xliv. fabricate scandalous news items to exchange with tabloid presses. xlv. lose a mortally wealthy loved one. xlvi. murder a wealthy loved one. xlvii. keep swine (proceed to murder all visiting bailiffs and process them as pig feed). xlviii. fake death. xlix. murder self. l. invent time travel.

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Inertia and Reckoning I received a phone call this morning. it seems my pig had died flying

a kite between overhead power lines.

I took two valium tablets and seeded grass on scorched earth.

I switched on the kettle and toasted a bagel for my bacon. yet, the question remained: would I walk on eggshells,

or lie down on a bed of nails?

it seems my libido had buried itself beneath years of depressant abuse.

I received a second phone call in the stifling afternoon.

it seems that I had proved honey-mouthed,

and popped the blisters systematically. my carnivorous sister spoke

on the end of the line, washing her laundry

electronically. she said

that the banks just

wouldn’t take her money.

she said it

with such conviction, such

assurance, that

I half-believed her.

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Marilyn of Mornington Crescent I unbuckle my belt before my morning begins, sitting inside the bloated concave of a tapeworm that burrows its way through underground miles. he has eaten all his passengers whole, so that we sit together – less lonely than Jonah – but barely alive, and wait for the bell to sound, the conductor to call…

A young woman is reading – so too is a bearded man.

She has, “Wagner the Wehr-wolf”, and he, “Cosmopolitan Culture and Consumerism in Chick Lit”.

I step off the train with the consequential wry smile wrapped around the inside of my dry, stony face. and I buckle up my belt and put my nose into it. it’s a dusty monday on the concrete surface above, but for two seconds, my friends, the worm fans me and Wagner’s woman loses six inches off her skirt to the breeze. I suffer a fit of sneezing and miss it – my very own moment of consumerism in chick lit – but bet on a diagram being in the bearded man’s book.

Bart’s Vengeance on Barthes when Poets talk about graveyards; I get saline for my stomach,

and breathe hot air in a hospital morning. but some day there’ll be a cemetery

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for almost everyone.

there’s a cemetery for oscar wilde. there’s a cemetery for elvis. there’s a cemetery for mark twain. there’s even a cemetery for bruce lee.

but I visit the cemetery that keeps karl marx’s tomb clean.

it costs me four pounds each time.

but I find the scene indescribable.

there’s a hyperlink in my head

that goes

from karl marx to malcolm maclaren. and there’s a network of tree roots, insects and germs that also connects the two. so, when Poets talk about graveyards;

I only wince and think

about my seat in the shrub

beneath his face,

or my bed in the ocean, and my fiery death – printed in italics – behind red arrows in the mid-summer sky.

and I get all walter white. and I get all charles bronson or I go all mark “chopper” read.

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so, I shave my head, and I grow my beard, because I am the centrifuge of everything.

and the world only spins for me. the rain falls because I allow it. the sun shines when I will it.

I can go wherever I please and nobody can stop me.

I can turn the stars inside out, or align them in your name – if only I wanted to.

so, I call my ghost in for questioning.

I wind in my sails;

I call off the troops;

I depress the button;

I rewind the footage;

I straighten the spine;

I turn it off and on again;

I beat the blanket and lay it flat;

I scrub my face with witch hazel;

and I sit cross-legged and breathe;

and I write my lines on the board

before I take a single step outside:

#Iwillnotmisusemyomnipotence. #Iwillnotmisusemyomnipotence. #Iwillnotmisusemyomnipotence. #Iwillnotmisusemyomnipotence. #Iwillnotmisusemyomnipotence. #Imustobligeallbelievers.

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#Imustobligeallbelievers. #Imustobligeallbelievers. #Imustobligeallbelievers. #Imustobligeallbelievers. #Iamonlyattheheartofavoid. #Iamonlyattheheartofavastvoid. #Iamonlyattheheartofavastomniscientvoid. #Iamonlyatthevastheartofacoldomniscientvoid. #Iamonlyatthecoldvastheartofasupremeomniscientvoid.

COMMENTARY For this cycle of poems, I have attempted to tackle attitudes towards form, address and theme in postmodern poetry. As the website “Textetc” – run by former geologist-turned-poet, author and publisher, Colin John Holcombe – rather neatly asserts that there are four main, concurrent features of postmodernity in poetry: iconoclasm, groundlessness, formlessness, and populism; I will discuss each of these, here, in relation to those poems that have influenced me, or forced reaction in my own poetry.

The issue of iconoclasm in postmodern culture largely refers to the way in which artists have turned their backs on the heritage of their craft, in favour of etching out looser definitions and perceptions of art. The accelerated pace of fashion in culture and consumption during the mid-to-late 20th century proved to be a great strain on the economics of culture and heritage across the globe. With this in mind I turned to poets such as Amiri Baraka and Joanne Kyger who underwent personal, political and religious change during this period, and expressed this openly through their work.

With regard to my own work, I feel I have made attempts to shake off the shackles of my British poetical heritage by sending it up in, “Sinking Isle” – which addresses the occupation and cohabitation of language by varying nationalities – and “Ode to John Frum” – which revels doubly in the irony of each the speaker’s privilege and naivety while faced with the hyper-commodification of human experience.

Each of these efforts lead equally well onto the topic of groundlessness, which refers

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to the inescapable philosophical problem posed by the assertion “that reality is entirely created by language and intellectual concepts.” In postmodern texts, reality is often expressed as a transitory notion. It is formed by the readers’ conscious, and subconscious, cohesion of often sporadic lexical signposts left by the author. In much the same way that our most complex opinions are formed merely by the potentially random stimuli that make up our daily comings and goings, postmodern poets aim to form their poetry.

Modernist poets such as Eliot and Pound stressed the importance of precise choice in their craft, going in fear of abstractions, where Ginsberg et al. embraced the “reality” of these cacophonic fragments and crafted equally meaningful, and stirring reflections on the human condition. In, “Inertia and Reckoning” I come mostly closely to this latter method, which becomes almost Freudian in its language and ventures into abstraction willingly so to propel a reader toward introspection from a position of judgement.

The question of form has always been one that I have found difficult to comfortably position myself in regard of. Traditional forms have largely been dropped, chopped or bastardised in postmodernity, and so I have wrestled with various techniques and alternatives to these. I have enjoyed, at times, crafting concrete poetry, or darting in and out of blank verse and more concise forms such as haikus; however, in Joanne Kyger’s poetry – as well as in several poems chronologised in The Poetry Review – I believe I have found a loose form which fits. And which I have demonstrated in four out of five of the poems contained in this submission. Admittedly, it is none-too-dissimilar to that employed by Eliot in works such as Prufrock and Wasteland.

Addressing Holcombe’s assertion that postmodern poetry claims to be populist, while generally remaining void of mass appeal; I would concur that any poetry that inherits directly from Modernism will struggle to attain a proper populist fraternity – as the canonical rights to this heritage belong to an elite few. However, I would argue that the burden lies with those that strive to retain this narrative by applying complex theories to poetry written by those attempting to unbind their language from such pretences.

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The content of postmodern poetry is often akin to that found in older forms such as border ballads and limericks. Its tone and wit often make light of what may generally be considered taboo material. Though the form and theory may appear inaccessible – bucking at conventional preconceptions associated with poetry such as meter and rhyme – postmodernist poetry is an essential, iconoclastic barrage against convention. And, on a personal note, I consider it to be a welcoming step forward into history.

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4

Too Close Together, Too Far Apart

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Mass Culture in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita

BY LEWIS DUNCAN ILLUSTRATED BY SAMANTHA FRIEND

L

olita is a novel crafted with an exuberant and lavish style of prose. Indeed, Nabokov was a writer who placed aesthetics above socio-political engagement.

Any “ethical concepts and metaphysical preferences emerge from… the connotations of [his] definition of ‘aesthetic bliss’” found within the foreword for Lolita. He portrays a state of heightened awareness and ecstasy within which the individual can engage more thoroughly with their environment than ever before. His novel is stylised and his protagonist’s consciousness is constructed through his decadent writing in order to purposefully draw the reader into a temporal state where artistic exuberance is present within every facet of his character’s, and therefore the reader’s, perceived sense of reality. Nabokov said himself that he does not believe in ideological abstractions but rather that meaning is extracted from prose through examination of the details. Indeed, this is reflected in Lolita, a novel which appears to the reader as a finely spun silken web of extravagant phraseology, transcendental language, and yet, at its core, a sense of overtly rational, almost scientific precision and attention to detail is dominant.

Contextually, Lolita is a novel written and set in post-War America. The post-War (or Cold War) years were a period of time concerned with methods of re-normalisation – of rectifying the damage done throughout World War II and returning America to a state of comfort and peace. Perhaps influenced by America’s growing fear of com-

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munism (demonstrated through its conflicts with Soviet Russia), America became introvertedly concerned with maintaining its own sense of ideological and socio-cultural Americanism. Emphasis was placed on creating a sense of suburban and marital normativity as well as a glorification of values in line with America’s sense of Christian religiosity and capitalist culture. This rejection of alternative methods of social organisation (such as communism in the Cold War and fascism in World War II) fuelled the growth of Western consumerism. Capitalism became ever-more ingrained in the American psyche and the Average American became engrossed in gorging themselves on the fruits of mass-production, media culture and Americanism.

Lolita is a novel very much concerned with this transition. Through its treatment of intense modes of obsessive desire (the semi-relationship between Lolita and Humbert), it explores the pornification of youth culture and the development of an appetitive nature in America’s children. Through the sham marriage of Humbert and Mrs Hayes, it examines and critiques the emergence of a hollow suburban dream where a person’s social status is comprised of mediocre and mundane sociality and the consumption of goods and services. The tale as a whole is a tale of indulgence, appetite, the hyper-sexualisation of pubescence and a carnal obsession with beauty that more than ever consolidates itself in the culture of post-War America.

It seems logical to firstly begin with the central and catalytic relationship of the novel (Humbert and Lolita). Ellen Pifer stipulates that there is a correlation between the monster in Frankenstein and the young girl in Lolita – “The linguistic parallels are … remarkable: the analogy … between Humbert’s self-styled ‘deadly demon,’ the alluring nymphet, and the dreaded ‘daemon,’ in Dr. Frankenstein's words, who haunts his creator.” Through the branding of Lolita as a Nymphet, Pifer is insinuating that like Frankenstein’s monster, Nabokov presents Lolita as captivating her ‘creator’ or pseudo-father figure.

It is arguable to an extent that Lolita is somewhat seductive as a character. Throughout the novel, she is portrayed as a typical pre-teen consumer, devotedly idolising celebrities, reading magazines and watching films – feasting on America’s avidly sexualising and glamorising pop-culture. Even at her young age, she has a preoccupation with style and applies makeup and even develops a sense of vanity: “short-sleeved, pink, checkered with darker pink, and, to complete the colour scheme, she had painted

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her lips”, “she stood … and stared at herself contentedly, not unpleasantly surprised at her own appearance, filling with her own rosy sunshine the surprised and pleased closet-door mirror.” Does her preoccupation with prematurely, yet perhaps unknowingly, sexualising herself, as influenced by American media culture, possibly place some of the blame for Humbert’s morbid fascination on herself? Certainly, towards the end of the novel, Lolita, during their road trip and pseudo-family life, in a sense, becomes aware of the power she has over Humbert, and perhaps calculatingly, uses her beauty, and his obsession, purposefully to manipulate him.

However, it is also arguable that, unlike Frankenstein and his monster, Humbert create Lolita through imaginative distortion. It could be argued that Humbert is the archetypal unreliable narrator and that through tarnishing Lolita as a concept with so much carnal lust that an illusion of reciprocity is created, for the reader, she is transformed into the nymphet that he envisions her to be.

Although Humbert’s fascination with Lolita is singular, prior to their meeting, he treats his fascination with nymphets generally as a scientific and fetishist impulse.

When unable to enact his sexual perversions into reality, his desire becomes a vague motif that he placates through visiting parks and psychiatric wards to voyeuristically fantasise about children and he even purchases a prostitute who most closely resembles the nymphet archetype he has conceived. Does he love Lolita? Or is Lolita simply the best actualisation of his fetish that he can find?

Nabokov was a well-known lepidopterist who eagerly collected and categorised beautiful creatures – butterflies. This mode of harnessing something natural, or possessing something beautiful, through comprehensive analysis and categorisation is mirrored in Lolita through Hubert’s analysis of the nymphets he encounters – “photographs of girl-children; some gaudy moth or butterfly, still alive, safely pinned to the wall (‘nature study’)” – and through merely presupposing a particular sort (or species) of young-girl as a nymphet, Humbert is categorising them and this in turn paints him as a sort of morbid and perverted connoisseur. This typically modern preoccupation with luxury and beauty is perhaps being suggested by Nabokov as being encompassing of more than just possessions but also of people and their romantic relations.

Is Lolita just his prized specimen? Is the love, depicted in Lolita, in this sexualised cultural modernity, merely an assessment of aesthetic symbols which leads to a con-

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clusion on the romantic and sexual value of the individual? Humbert’s preoccupation with Lolita’s physical attributes would certainly suggest so.

Apart from just the pornification of American culture, however, Lolita is very much concerned with the appetitive pandemic and banality of suburban consumerism. In Nabokov’s essay Philistines and Philistinism, he describes an archetypal member of society who he calls a Philistine: An individual who is by their very nature anti-artistic, a walking cliché comprised of stock ideas derived from a pre-conceived vulgar pop-cultural pallet – “A true philistine has nothing but these trivial ideas of which he entirely consists.” Lolita’s mother (or Mrs Haze) is the central Philistine in Lolita.

According to Nabokov, a defining characteristic of a Philistine is the all-encompassing need to conform. Mrs Haze is instantly characterised as a conformist who is depicted as ideologically and intellectually shallow yet a master of benign sociality – “She was obviously one of those women whose polished words may reflect a book club or bridge club, or any other deadly conventionality, but never her soul … women utterly indifferent at heart to the dozen or so possible subjects of a parlour conversation, but very particular about the rules of such a conversations.” Upon her and Humbert’s marriage, her first act as a married woman is to promptly interrogate Humbert about God, when throughout the novel, apart from the societally expected visits to church, she has shown little or no spirituality. The next step is to appropriately decorate the house with the correct furniture and ornaments. Vapid and superficial Mrs Haze is the embodiment of American suburban mundanity; she is a gossiping socialite who is insistently focused on materiality.

However, perhaps it is not Lolita and Humbert’s American road trip, the ultimate leisure activity and the vessel for Humbert to actualise his erotic obsessions upon Lolita, or even Mrs Haze’s insipid and congenial vapidity that forms the central example of “poshlust” – Nabokov’s phrase that encapsulates low-brow and materialistic pop-culture – within Lolita. “The leading example of poshlust in Lolita would not be its heroine's immersion in mass culture … Nor … would it be Charlotte with her weakness for Humbert's ‘European’ cultivation. Instead it is Beardsley School with its much loftier pretensions to culture. After all, by sponsoring a student production of that fashionably arty play The Enchanted Hunters, Beardsley was the agent that in delivering Lolita from Humbert drew her into Quilty's orbit.” The play represents a turning

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point in the relationship dynamic between Lolita and Humbert of which Humbert is unaware. In the lodge (The Enchanted Hunters) Humbert is the hunter and Lolita is the pray. In the play, Lolita is the huntress or seductress and synonymously, in the plot, she gains increasing amounts of power over Humbert as the novel progresses. Theatre, in the novel, becomes symbolic, an encapsulation of artifice, and Humbert, aside from aligning Lolita with Quilty, blames the play The Enchanted Hunters for Lolita developing the ability to lie and manipulate him.

All in all, Lolita deals with issues surrounding mass culture in post-War America with devastating insight and through incredibly well-crafted prose. The novel was received with incredulity and shock and yet went on to consolidate itself in our cultural psyche as a prominent symbol of sexualisation, carnal obsession and the rise of consumerism. In 21st-century pop-culture, the character Lolita has been distorted. Lana Del Rey, a pop-singer, even devoted an album thematically to the character Lolita by metaphorically identifying herself with the figure of the young girl used and abused by older men by sampling lines directly from the book and using them as lyrics in her songs.

Through glamorisation and further sexualisation of Lolita as a motif, it has become clear that as time has gone on, we have become only more introvertedly and increasingly concerned with our own sexual perversions to the point where the victim of molestation is culturally celebrated as a sex symbol. Whether Nabokov intended the novel Lolita to read as a warning against cultural pornification or not, Lana Del Rey’s version of Lolita is deeply ironical. Lolita from the outset was a victim of the sexualised mass culture she was born into, and of predatory older men, and yet Lana Del Rey takes part in the very evil the book is concerned with through her perverse influencing of children’s sexual sensibilities. In the novel, Lolita ends up emotionally scarred, pregnant and poor by the age of 17, and Humbert ends up heartbroken and imprisoned. Although Nabokov states that he wishes to distance himself from ideological abstractions, I cannot help but feel that this novel enacts itself as a warning against the polluting capacity that mass-sexualised culture can have upon our fragile and easily-influenced sensibilities.

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White Noise

BY CIARAN BANKWALL A ILLUSTRATED BY CALEB JAMES

D

eLillo’s White Noise is brimming with mortality, to the extent that the title of the book was called ‘The American Book of the Dead’. The novel investigates the postmodern condition and its relationship with death; a world where technology has become a super power in the postmodern world, stepping in on the religious vacancies left by Darwinism and filling in the voids left from the angst of nuclear threat. DeLillo’s White Noise is postmodern; and although it is a truism that postmodernism cannot be condensed into a singular definition, it may help the reader to understand the kind of setting DeLillo was writing in when his novel falls into this bracket. Lyotard argues that postmodernism is “the state of our culture following the transformations which, since the end of the nineteenth century, have altered the game rules for science, literature and the arts” (Lyotard 2010 page 1).

It provides a hyperconscious intertextuality with an ironic post-modern view; a view which concentrates on image and consumerism, and a stance in which reality is overlaid with images and signs that relate to one another. In terms of architecture – it would be of value to think of the typical post-modern building: because a post-modern building is a bit of everything. “Everything is neatly arranged, everything is labeled, and, presumably, everything has a price” (Lentricchia 2010 page 4). Additionally, it would be important to think of Fredric Jameson who claims that parody overtakes pastiche – along with a predilection for nostalgia and a fixation on the perpetual present. Perhaps it is no surprise that decades years later, Simon Reynolds felt that the

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pop-music scene was nothing more than “a never ending 1980s revival” (Reynolds, The Guardian 2010). The backdrop of postmodernism that White Noise falls against is significant in its relationship with mortality. It is the entire setting for DeLillo’s novel. There is an essence of never ending continuation in 1980s America; a constant state of deja vu triggered by the endless recycling of image. Existence becomes condensed to image and shopping: with the Gladneys who shop for hours in order to top up “existential credit”. DeLillo’s interpretation of the postmodern condition reduces one to capital value – and Jack Gladney’s days become aimless days of media consumption and hiding from death. For DeLillo, the supposed shelter of death can be found in culture.

In the postmodern world, supermarkets take on a new power; like a cultural Cathedral. “Consume or die” says DeLillo in Underworld (DeLillo 1997 page 287) and that is what the Gladneys do. The bright lights and images that saturate the supermarket are a perfect distraction from the threat of death. It becomes an illusion – stealing one’s attention away from reality. For DeLillo, consumerism “produces what we might call an aura of connectedness among individuals: an illusion of kinship” (Lentricchia 2010 page 20) and this is why the family shop together. There is no mention of Sunday services at Church, rather weekly shopping trips which unite the family under a different setting. It is as if the Gladneys feel that the more they buy, and the longer they are distracted from death; the longer they escape it. Death, then, is repressed. But the supermarket is merely a false haven for the Gladneys; because the accumulation of buried issues eventually leads to bigger problems. (In current times, the reader is encouraged to think of the financial crash of 2008; a collapse of economic powers, largely due to ignored symptoms in the years preceding it.) And this is where DeLillo’s critique sheds an ironic light in the modern day. Supermarkets grow to provide the consumer with everything – and perhaps DeLillo thus naturally envisioned the day when, one day, the supermarket would even start to offer funeral services; offering a reminder of the very thing it covers up. (The coop now have a funeral care service).

Likewise, the title White Noise is a metaphor for covering up and repressing the natural world; hiding from an acute awareness of death. It is an “artificially produced electronic noise invented to cover over the silence which disturbs workers in modern soundproof office buildings” (Lentricchia 2010 page 81). However, DeLillo feels that

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the perception of one’s mortality can lead to the “extraordinary wonder of things” (DeLillo 2005 page 301), which is an idea echoed in Heidegger’s existential analysis in Being and Time.

For DeLillo, the avoidance of death soars beyond the supermarket – treading into the territory of all technology. “Television menaces the home with an omnipresent temptation to substitute the communal experience of the image for the ties that no longer bind” (Lentricchia 2010 page 24).What Lentricchia is essentially reiterating is that communal binds are found in culture and that they are empty. However, the television in the family home is used for more than just adverts and communal binding. The media have a “special hunger for death and destruction” (Lentricchia 2010 page 45) and yet the television distances the viewer from it. The transformation of death is condensed into film and print, creating a “mass bodies for consumption” effect; and heightening the illusion that death only happens to others. This resembles the Aristotelian theory that luck is when the person next to you is struck by an arrow – or more significantly, Heidegger’s concept that ‘one dies, not I.’ The media becomes DeLillo’s own version of what Heidegger called idle talk; a representation of people dying at a distance, and by turning death into an eagerly consumed product (the Gladneys appear to thoroughly enjoy televised disasters), the media continues to reinforce the illusion that death only happens to others. The avoidance of death is accentuated by technological media which appears to create its own reality; free from the natural limits of death. But for some critics, technology has become self-governing; like nature itself. The reader is confronted with what is known as the postmodern sublime: a feeling of terror and awe directed not at nature but at technology. It has become self-governing like nature itself and something which people fear has developed a “malevolent, undesirable life of their own” (Lentricchia 2010 page 14). This is why DeLillo uses an airborne toxic cloud event as Jack’s awakening of death; the word ‘cloud’ containing natural connotations, but the toxicity of ‘toxic’ implies a tarring of cooperate meddling.

In the postmodern age, a ubiquity of history is flattened and the consumer has an array of options for whatever they require. The consumer experiences a rendering down of everything, including politics, into a spectacle which then avoids critique – and this is what happens beyond the satire of Hitler Studies in White Noise. “It’s not a question of good and evil” (DeLillo 1984 page 63). DeLillo flattens him; presents

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him as bland and something which amorally slots into an academic discourse. What does this tell us? “Once a horrifying phenomenon like Hitler can be represented, it can be stripped of its aura and turned into a commodity,” explains Lentricchia (Lentricchia 2010 page 44). Indeed, turning Hitler into a commodity and domesticating him strips him of the horrors committed. Mass death becomes flattened by culture and technology.

When the toxic cloud spreads, Jack Gladney wakes up to the idea that death can indeed happen to him, and as Becker suggest, “there is nothing like shocks in the real world to jar loose repressions” (Becker 2011 page 21). Gladney’s paranoia is unleashed and his fear takes hold of the novel. “Our sense of fear – we avoid it because we feel it so deeply, so there is an intense conflict at work. I brought this conflict to the surface in the shape of Jack Gladney.” “I think it is something we all feel, something we almost never talk about” (DeLillo 2005 page 71).

The repression of death can be so effective, that some people are almost entirely unaware of it within themselves. One may feel that if they avoid disasters or accidents, they will simply live forever – or at least, that it will happen later. Likewise the economic contentedness that the Gladneys live in provides a comfort blanket; the illusion that disaster doesn’t happen to wealthy people. For Jack an immediate awareness of death reemerges with the toxic. Death is inside him and, in a way, always has been.

It will take decades for him to learn if the poison has shortened his life, of which a death through old age will almost certainly reach him before he finds out. DeLillo reminds us here that death through old age is possible; and by placing the threat with immediacy, brings new life to Jack’s fear of death.

But Jack’s fear of death is on the brink of obsession even before the airborne event.

His “personal obsession with death and the finality of his own life” (Hantke 2012 page 47) is embedded in the narrative; and his obsession with death causes him to see it regularly. “For that reason the world of White Noise is teeming with events that do, in fact, seem to testify to the omnipresence of death.” (Hantke 2012 page 47).

The reader only has to cast their mind back to the poison material in school building, plane crashes and an elderly couple who almost starve to death. This is not placed in the narrative unintentionally; it is done to show Jack’s unhinged relationship with mortality. Although he attempts to live under the intentionally ignorant assumption

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that death cannot happen to him – he is paradoxically always aware of it, and it surfaces in the novel’s narration. He fears he is pursued by a “fateful sense of purpose and inevitable mechanistic inevitability.” (Hantke 2012 page 47) and accordingly, the narrative follows Jack through dangerous situations.

It is the paranoia of death that motivates Jack to hide behind the image of Hitler. As a teacher of the Hitler studies, “Gladney is searching for someone who can restore significance and value to his life, and the powerful image of Hitler offers fullness to his emptiness.” (Lentricchia 2010 page 47) “Hitler is larger than death. You thought he would protect you.” Claims Murray (DeLillo 1987 page 287). It is the idea that by flattening a figure; one lives like a commodity, and thus eternally, because they are not human. But likewise, Gladney is attracted to Hitler’s hypnotic power over crowds and this is explored in his own lectures. He believes that he can fill a religious need in his crowd, giving them someone to look to – in the same way that Hitler took control of his own supporters. It is in this sense that DeLillo comments on the culture of Nazi Germany, claiming that many of Hitler’s supporters were looking for someone to turn to in the face of a somewhat religious void. “Still experiencing a spiritual void, Americans turn not to an actual political leader but to a purely artificial image of greatness” (Lentricchia 2010 page 53). DeLillo’s commentary is apparent with such lines as “Crowds came to form a shield against their own dying.” (DeLillo 1984) It emphasizes the idea that Gladney’s profession is steered by the concept of beating death.

Becker discusses man’s desire to be heroic, claiming that it is also his tragic destiny to “justify himself as an object of primary value in the universe” and “show that he counts more than anything or anyone else.” (Becker 2011 page 4) This is why the book satirically claims that Hitler is larger than death. If man creates something long lasting in nature, they feel they have created a legacy; something of value and “of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine.” (Becker 2011 page 4) But this is the crisis of the postmodern world; because society reminds us that the youth can no longer feel heroic in their surroundings. The great historical truth is described as “the great perplexity of our time” by Becker (Becker 2011 page 7), who feels there is an ignoble heroics of all societies. It can be “the viciously destructive heroics of Hitler’s Germany or the plain de-basing and silly heroics of acquisition and display of consumer goods” (Becker page 7). DeLillo’s protagonists thus have nothing else to turn to, aside from images.

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Once Gladney’s fear of death has taken hold of him – he turns to Dylar, a drug which is designed to repress the fear of death. It is the ultimate metaphor for the postmodern condition; manufactured to distract. It is at this point that where Zilborg is useful for understanding why Dylar would be a counterproductive idea if it actually worked.

“The business of preserving life would be impossible if the fear of death were not as constant. The very term self-preservation implies an effort against some force of disintegration, the affective aspect of this is fear, fear of death” (Zilborg 1943 page 465).

The fear of death has to be present behind our normal functioning in order to be armed towards self-preservation. This is why Orest wants to engage in the activity of breaking a record. However, “the fear of death cannot be present constantly in one’s mental functioning, else the organism could not function.” (Becker 2011 page 16) This imbalance is prevalent in Babette; who feels she is almost unable to function with her fear of death. She becomes “extra-sensitive to the terror of death”. (DeLillo 1984 page 226). Here, Zilborg is echoed by DeLillo’s Winnie Richards who warns Jack: “It’s a mistake to lose one’s sense of death… Doesn’t it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition” (DeLillo 1984 page 228). However her views are contrasted against Murray who is the symptom of a postmodern age, and his views represent the majority of DeLillo’s characters: “Fear is unnatural.. Pain, death, reality, these are all unnatural.” (DeLillo 1984 page 289) This is why DeLillo’s characters cannot be heroic. In Heidegger, Dasein’s mode towards death is always anxiety, but not an obsessively crippling fear. And although DeLillo’s characters fear death – they cannot face this fear.

When Jack attempts to understand how much the airborne cloud has affected his mortality, he hopes that the signs in his world will signify a connection – and they don’t. His consultation with medical experts merely reveals a representation of stars and digits. The signs transmitted by the whole system could mean trace amounts of Nyodene D or high levels of potassium. Gladney then looks to images for answers with a body scan, only to “discover that he has no directorial control over what the screens broadcast” (Duvall 2013 page 88). “The computer displays a picture of someone being consumed from the inside, someone whom death has unquestionably entered” (Duvall 2013 page 88). His subjectivity and his belief over what makes him Gladney is lost in a flurry of digits and stars; and images which relate to nothing.

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Add this, then, to Heinrich’s brain theories, that a human being cannot distinguish “what’s you as a person and what’s some neuron that just happens to fire or just happens to misfire” and Jack is at a loss (DeLillo 1984 page 46) This is what makes DeLillo the “laureate of terror” (The New Yorker 2011). Individuality is jeopardized, and in death, the concept of subjectivity is threatened by the concept of nothingness.

Gladney’s pursuit for answers and meaning through the images that punctuate his life leads to nothing. Consider Mink’s perceived damaged from Dylar; a frail mess huddled by pills when Jack finds him. DeLillo is highlighting something more than just a physical death; and instead looks to a death drenched in a postmodern angst. It is the “disintegration of the humanist sense of self” (Duvall 2013 page 90). DeLillo paints a world resting on the foundation of empty image; a world without faith, and a world desperate to condense, flatten and hide behind death. And Mink’s deterioration is the result of this – it is the postmodern death.

The conclusion features young Wilder escaping death on a busy highway. It is apt that DeLillo finishes with this passage, as it becomes commentary on the development of one’s awareness of death and how it develops through age. When trying to comfort Babette, Jack declares “There’s no one who has lived past the age of seven who hasn’t worried about death” (DeLillo page 226). For Becker, the child slowly develops an awareness of death through the development of actually existing; and during this stage, the world must appear quite magical to them. They appear to be eternal in their lacking knowledge of death. Becker then argues that by observing the ability to acknowledge and live with death, the child is slowly able to mirror their parents’ treatment of it. But Jack and Babette do not triumph over death. “What if death is nothing but sound?” worries Babette, “Electrical sound” (page 228). Here is DeLillo’s use of terror. What if the entire system that is designed to be a distraction, is actually death? The empty signs, the busy supermarkets, white noise; all of which are used by DeLillo to cover up the fear of death are all of the things which simultaneously carry the reminder of it. For the Gladneys, death is subliminally embedded in the postmodern world; and it is conclusively inescapable.

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Frank O’Hara

BY CIARAN BANKWALL A ILLUSTRATED BY HUBERT WINDAL

T

he New York School emerged during the 1950s, at a time when America had risen to a “new power on the world stage” in the wake of World War II (193945). Painters who embodied the “avant-garde spirit” were no longer led by the domineering influences of artists from the School of Paris and poets who were closely linked with the painters became known as the New York School of poets. The poets were placed into new positions of power – which allowed them to challenge the doctrines of the literary establishment in the 1950s. Poets preceding the New York poets in the early 1950s varied in terms of a serious nature, the trauma tinged Confessionals and the Beats generation, the latter of which encompassed a rejection of narrative values and in some cases, heightened tones of aggression. It could be argued, then, that The New York School of poets emerged as a reaction to the formerly mentioned movements. But this would not be entirely accurate. Rather, the New York School of Poets worked in an abstract and witty style that combined literary and artistic influences to create a new post-war aesthetic. The poetry which emerged from poets like Frank O’Hara was less of a reaction to the writers before him, but more of an observation.

As with the Beats Generation, the New York School of Poets had an immediate, direct manner embedded in their style – writing as outsiders. But poets like Frank O’Hara distanced themselves from the overt aggression seen with the Beats generation, and they were less likely to use their art as a protest. The New York poets used an abstract and witty style, incorporating ironic humour and Hollywood-esque gossip. On the

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surface, Frank O’Hara’s work appeared as if it was casually put together – and it appeared as an art form which contained an inclination towards parody and pop culture. But O’Hara’s casual poetics were not merely reduced to simplistic pop-poetry. To the casual reader, his poetry was an illusion; of a deep sea disguised as shallow water.

O’Hara’s ‘I do this I do that’ poetry is fuelled by his style. The use of enjambment in A Step Away from Them represents the image of a poet walking casually through the city of New York. The pacing is calm, and the poem itself is a constellation of poetic images, observed like a cruising eye drifting down the street. His poems avoid a systematic poetic structure (rhyme, meter), flowing like a stream of consciousness – rarely using fall stops and commas to break apart the lines. This, of course, affects the rhythm – of which O’Hara appears to oppose: “I don’t even like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff.” Instead, O’Hara is inspired by free form jazz and improv theatre. His poems reflect the dream like images of French Surrealism. But the absence of particular poetic convention does not take away the quality of his work. Moreover, O’Hara was able to create a casual style of poetry because he was acutely aware of the techniques. The way in which O’Hara thought about his technique can be seen in his art criticism, in which Hampson states that O’Hara was “a deeply committed art critic” and one who “lingered lovingly over the question of the artist’s technique”. This can be seen in Porter Paints a Picture – where O’Hara writes of canvas size and the blending of colours.

Furthermore, the writer’s awareness of poetical convention allowed him to effectively reject theories of poetry: claiming that the “philosophical reduction of reality to a dealable-with system” was counterproductive; adding that it “distorted” the reward of poetry, and could in fact be seen as an illness.

But O’Hara was not interested in the permanence of text. The free flowing, spontaneous framework reveals O’Hara’s “casual attitude to his poems” with critics citing that his vast collection of published poetry contains “only a third of his work”, often stuffed in drawers or collected together in scribbled stacks. This is mixed with his inclusion of Hollywood-esque gossip; lines which mirror disposable chat and one with less of a timeless feel. Additionally, he churned out poetry – writing several poems a day, referring to writing as playing the typewriter. His technique is fast, jovial, fun; and he viewed “the speed and spontaneity of composition as integral” to his work. For O’Hara – poetry was not about the published masterpiece. It was about the given moment and the experience. The skill in his craft was the act of writing poetry

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– and the method of marketing and publishing was nothing more than a careless afterthought. “He was notoriously careless about marketing and even preserving his work” .

Likewise, language is an important part of O’Hara’s exploration of casual poetics.

“His language is often casual, relaxed in diction, yet it presses forward with a kind of breathless urgency” The use of ‘I guess’ (A Step Away from Them Line 8) adds to the apparent casual tone of the poem – despite the hours and days which were probably spent designing it. Through such a simple insertion, ‘I guess’ allows the poem to achieve simplicity. Additionally, the blurb for Lunch Poems is carefully crafted in its simplicity and humour. “While never forgetting to eat Lunch his favourite meal.”

Before his poetry, O’Hara was known for his personality. “OHara’s first real accomplishment was his personality, which became famous long before his poems did.”

When critics write of his personality, it resembles his casual poetry; “practically a work of art” and “improvised, self-revising, full of feints” – which almost allowed his poetry to act as a transcript of himself. Not only does his work incorporate his jest and personal interests – but they provide the reader with an insight into his lifestyle.

“I have been to lots of parties and acted perfectly disgraceful”. Consequently, O’Hara’s poetry appears as somewhat auto-biographical and much of it is an observation of what is happening to him in the moment, “what is happening to me.” O’Hara’s work is a simplicity of the given moment and separates him from the Confessionals, who relied on a visceral manner and violent adjectives. From the term ‘I do this, I do that’ – the reader learns of O’Hara’s routine. It is a spontaneous, genuine approach of how he stumbles across discoveries, observations and images. Likewise, his work is prominently written in the first person, which provides the poetry with a personal tone.

Terrence Diggory refers to such a journey as “the casual movement through the events of a day or the fluid alternation between concrete, even surreal, imagery and abstract, philosophical reflection” Such simplicity loads O’Hara’s work with a feel so personable – that they read like diary entries: “It is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine”.

Commercial signs and products are significant in O’Hara’s poetry. As a speaker who walks across a commercialised city – it makes sense that he would observe glittering neon signs and famous faces plastered on posters. ‘JULIET’S CORNER’ (A Step Away from Them line 28-29) is capitalised to create the physical image of a large sign. Likewise, O’Hara learns of the Lana Turner controversy (the reference to a scandal in which a Hollywood

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actress’ lover was stabbed to death by her daughter) when he suddenly sees a headline ‘LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!’. (Lana Turner has collapsed line 11). But the eruptions of a media scandal are condensed into headlines – and the speaker is not physically engulfed in the drama. He is merely passing by, witnessing fragments of the story as a piece of the city. Where some aspects of popular consumerism feature heavily, O’Hara uses other names with more subtlety. Having a Coke with you is about experiencing a given moment – but the use of a popular fizzy drink feels like a modernised version of product placement in a movie; adding to the glitzy image of prevalent advertising rather than prestigious literature. Coca-cola also features in A Step Away from Them – which adds to the poem’s commercial aspect. The image is rendered down to an appearance of desirability; the language that adverts trade in. Likewise, the “skirts flipping” (line 9) in A Step Away from Them reads as a tribute to Hollywood icon Marilyn Monroe.

O’Hara is fundamentally a city poet – and in that sense he embodies the rush of New York City. “The only way to be quiet is to be quick” (Frank O’Hara Poetry) states O’Hara. He was interested in arresting time; seizing a moment and exploring the surroundings like a painting. “Cats playing in the sawdust” (A Step Away from Them line 14) and labourers eating sandwiches presents the reader with an image – one that suddenly stops when “everything honks” and the motion of the city is revived.

I have previously cited Woolf’s stream of consciousness as one of O’Hara’s influences in the development of poetry – and such modernity echoes in his tour of the city. In A Step Away from Them the millions of relations in the city hum across the poem.

Citizens blur together, amassed as a composite of feeling and dialogue; where individual storylines are explored as the speaker walks past each individual. It becomes a modernist city, where memories are placed into the banal: the image of a neon sign for example makes the speaker think of something else, “JULIET’S CORNER. Giulietta Masina, wife of Federico Fellini.” (A Step Away from Them lines 28-30). Likewise, moments which mirror Mrs. Dalloway occurs in various points of the poem – a scene in everything happens in an instant and then clicks pack to the present. It becomes a dense constellation of experience in the moment.

As O’Hara casually drifts across the city – his free-flowing style becomes a distraction into death. O’Hara’s poetry is subdued in tranquillity; eating lunch, reading the newspaper and relaxing. But it is suddenly shaken by the interruption of death: ‘First

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Bunny died’ (A Step Away from Them page 37). O’Hara’s imagery suddenly forces the speaker to recall the passing away of a friend – a device which parallel’s Woolf’s stream of consciousness. The casual poetics are disrupted by death, in the same way death eclipses Clarissa’s party in Mrs. Dalloway. The congenial environments are an effective backdrop for a sudden loss because it jolts the reader; and stands out by wedging a contrasting element into the mundane. Even the title of A Step Away from Them features the underlying theme of mortality: for every observation that O’Hara makes, for every step he takes – death is only a ‘Step Away’. For O’Hara, casual poetics is not just about triviality, it’s about death.

I previously mentioned that O’Hara was not interested in a “permanent final text”.

This correlates with his experience of death; watching those he loved and those he admired, pass away. Death is the physical removal of a person; the end to a life, and a concept which reminds O’Hara that there is a limit to how long one person can live for. There is a parallel, then, with a person’s limited mortality – and the permanence of O’Hara’s own work.

The Russian Poet Vladimir Mayakovsky was reportedly one of O’Hara’s favourite poets – and it is from Mayakovsky that O’Hara may have been influenced by the “intimate yell”, a device which enables O’Hara to convey powerful meaning and imagery into the reader’s mind while presenting it in an every-day, conversational language. It is a type of text which requires close reading – and one where skimming the surface voids it of value. This was not detectable by every reader. An O’Hara poetry reading was once interrupted by the drunken jeering of Beats poet Jack Kerouac, who claimed O’Hara was ruining American poetry. “That’s more than you ever did for it” responded O’Hara. The exchange is an apt reflection of not only O’Hara’s wit, nor the strength of his work – but of the scepticism some readers initially had. Perhaps it is easy to see why some critics and writers were dubious of O’Hara’s work. His methods were almost viewed as slap-dash – dosed in a blasé attitude towards publication, but that did not mean his poetry was without meaning. As I have explained, it is through O’Hara’s knowledge of poetic device that he was able to remove the conventions of it from his work. His abilities to explore death, arrest time and scan the psyche of a city were disguised; hidden behind a veil of casual poetry. It is through the mode of casual poetics that the reader is able to fully experience the value of O’Hara’s ‘I do this I do that’ poetry.

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Is Hell Other People Or Is There Some Way Out?

BY IMRAN HAQUE ILLUSTRATED BY MARIUS MATULEVICIUS

O

ne of the concerns of existentialists is whether existence precedes essence or whether essence precedes existence. This concern establishes that there are two types of being. Being-in-itself is that being which is an object such as a table, while being-for-itself is human beings. One human being’s essence comes from the gaze of the other, as it is impossible to access one’s-self through introspection which establishes that we are being-for-others. The epistemology of accessing ourselves through the view of the other is problematic, as it causes conflict, when the other tries to objectify my autonomous nature, by looking at me, which urges one to engage in mechanisms to control the other’s freedom. Sartre’s play, No Exit shows us the human condition of being, in which he portrays the experience of other people being hell.

He illustrates this through the trickery of love in objectifying a being-for-itself, and with sadism objectifying autonomous beings. However Sartre’s main purpose, drawing his ideas most closely from Heidegger, in the wake of fascism’s defeat, is to free people from the experience of other people being hell, by ridding them of bad faith and advocating ethical responsibility.

Does existence precede essence or does essence precede existence? Talking about the disparity within existentialists Sartre says regarding people “what they [existentialists] have in common is simply the fact that they believe that existence comes before essence,” (Existentialism & Humanism, 1946, p26). This means, as Spade said in short “when the creator of a letter opener makes the letter opener, he already knows

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what the letter opener will do. The essence of the letter opener precedes its existence.

Sartre believes people have freedom, therefore God can’t exist, because that implies God knew what they would do, before he created them,” (1996, p73-74). Because people have freedom their essence can’t precede their existence as opposed to chairs.

Warnock talks about things that are a being-in-itself which must be understood to understand what being-for-others means. In the introduction she did to Sartre’s book; Being and Nothingness she says “if being is in itself, this means that it does not refer to itself as self-consciousness does,” (Being and Nothingness, 1972, pxli). For example a chair is a being-in-itself which does not have the freedom people have to freely choose because a being-in-itself lacks consciousness. A chair can’t decide on its own to become a table, as the function of consciousness is absent in its being, therefore it is what it is. We know the purpose of the table is to serve as a table, and it does not have the capacity to independently change. In support Warnock says “we have seen indeed that it can encompass no negation… it knows no otherness; it never posits itself as other-than-another-being,” (Being and Nothingness, 1972, pxlii). This means that a thing that is a being-in-itself, can’t, by itself be what it is not, because it is what it is due to the fact that it lacks consciousness, and therefore a being-in-itself lacks freedom.

Sartre wrote “the for-it-self looking deep into itself as the consciousness of being there will never discover anything in itself but motivations; that is, it will be perpetually referred to itself an to its constant freedom,” (Being and Nothingness, 1972, p83). From that statement, to understand what a being-for-itself is we must look at the following issues. A person is an individual being, and there are many components that make this person a whole. Therefore this autonomous human being can’t be fixated with one thing. People are conscious beings, aware of their fleeting motifs and emotions. This requires negation to any sort of fixation. Being-for-itself renders that the person has the freedom to choose what it is, and at a later point to not be what it currently is. In support Sartre wrote “the for-it-self, in fact is nothing but the pure nihilation of the in-it-self,” (Being and Nothingness, 1972, p617). This leads the idea of a being-for-itself to another issue of it becoming a nothingness, void of any content due to constant negation of what it is not, because of its changing nature along with its consciousness to maintain its freedom.

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The self can’t properly be derived from within a person because there is no stable thing within us that has content which can truly tell us what we are. The self exists only with the gaze other people have on us and their resulting opinions. In support Sartre wrote “Shame is by nature recognition. I recognize that I am as the other sees me,” (Being and Nothingness, 1972, p222). This established that we can’t access our self without others. It is impossible to live in solitude and in support Myerson says “Sartre does not think true alienation is conceivable,” (2002, p61). No Exit portrays this with; “Garcin: the solution's easy…each of us stays put in his or her corner and takes no notice of the others. You here, you here, and I there…we mustn't speak. Not one word…I could stay ten thousand years with only my thoughts for company,” (No Exit, 1989, p11). However this idea does not work because the other two will not abide by his rules, and neither can he be satisfied without the other two helping him figure out if he was a coward or not. People for one another, being the radically other to the other, problematizes the concept of being-for-others, however without these radically different others, the thing that is the self within us ceases to exist therefore we prefer suffering instead of solitude as Garcin doesn’t leave when the door opens.

Having established the nature of being and the origin of the self, to properly understand the existentialist idea we must understand where conflict fits into this discussion.

By looking at the two different types of beings, humans were distinguished as beings; who are free entities in the sense that they can independently choose to be what they are currently not, as opposed to chairs. However if we leave the issue of being-for-others at this conclusion, the idea of existentialism is a vain project. By problematizing the origin of the self as an inseparable discussion with the issue of being, the existentialist idea becomes critically relevant in understanding the ontological nature of being in the world. Since self exists only with the gaze and resulting opinion other people have about us, and we share the world with other people, we live in a mode of perpetual and inescapable conflict. Each time others look at me, they develop an opinion about me and thereby the thing that is the self in me becomes accessible to me. In support Sartre wrote “by the mere appearance of the other, I am put in the position of passing judgement on myself as on an object, for it is as an object that I appear to the other,” (Being and Nothingness, 1972, p222). The conflict is in the fact that I am an autonomous being, therefore I must not be restrained by the view of the others and become a being-in-itself, fixated to one identity for all of eternity. Without the view of the others

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I am just a nothingness who has no content, although with the view of the others my freedom is curtailed, yet, by enjoying my freedom I sacrifice my only access to knowing myself. This inescapable mode of being-for-others means the original nature of being in this world is that we live within this everlasting conflict with our fellow yet radically other human beings, who are constantly trying to objectify us, making us into a being-in-itself although we are free entities, nonetheless we have to live with other people for sake of our own selves.

It is this experience that Sartre’s play, No Exit, is trying to demonstrate. Hell and damnation are metaphors for the human condition of being-for-others which establishes that being-for-others is; to be in perpetual conflict with the other because our consciousness negates objectification to maintain our freedom. The room in which the three characters are placed in is a microcosm of the world, which billions of people share together within its given space. Sartre said before a performance of No Exit as Contat and Rybalka noted “there are a vast number of people in the world who are in hell because they are too dependent on the judgement of other people,” and then he said “no matter what circle of hell we are living in, I think we are free to break out of it,” (1976, p199-p200). It seemed like the existentialist idea was making progress towards an end, but the play problematize the existentialist idea by making conflict inescapable, which when we understand we don’t really want to admit. Sartre wrote “GARCIN: Well, Estelle, am I a coward?

ESTELLE: Don't be so unreasonable, darling.

GARCIN: I can't decide.

ESTELLE:…You must have had reasons for acting as you did,” (No Exit, 1989, p22).

This problem is that the view of the other is the view of the other which we have no way of ascertaining whether it is what it is presented as. Therefore Garcin turns to Inez with his question as he does not believe Estelle is telling him the truth, but only making him happy. We may attempt to manipulate the view the other person develops regarding us, but even then we can never truly know how true the view regarding us is because it is presented by the other who is just another autonomous being. Being unable to ascertain the view of the other, despite that we can only know ourselves through their views, even though they try to objectify the autonomous being we are, is the human condition which is portrayed in Sartre’s play, No Exit, that makes hell other people.

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Hell is other people and love is a mechanism by which people overcome the anxiety of recognizing that we can’t control the freedom of another person. Because I’ll never know what others really think of me, I enter the project of becoming the most important object for the other, hoping that the other is so besotted by me that I know with certainty what their opinion about me is. I thereby obscure the fact that in reality I have no control over the freedom of the other, whose views about me generates the self in me. Love is wanting to be loved by the other, because it feels like one has achieved the impossible of controlling the freedom of another autonomous being. This enables me to think I have control over knowing myself as I have the ability to manoeuvre the freedom of the other regarding their views on me. Sartre wrote “these projects put me in direct connection with the other’s freedom. It is in this sense that love is a conflict… the other’s freedom is the foundation of my being… precisely because I exist by means of the other’s freedom,” (Being and Nothingness, 1972, p366). The impossibility of love is that it objectifies a being-for-itself as rhetoric around love shows lyrics such as you are the sunshine of my life, although a being-for-itself is not an object. It is impossible for me to freely give up my freedom for another autonomous being to think of me as I would like to be thought of because it is their freedom to think of me as they freely wish to, that gives me access to myself. Therefore even in love we remain in a mode of perpetual conflict as we are beings-for-others, but due to our desire to find out who we are which is problematic because the view of the other is beyond our control, hell is other people.

Sadism is the opposite idea to that of love in the notion that hell is other people, as in sadism a being-for-itself tries to make another being-for-itself an object so the sadist can gain control over the other’s freedom for the purpose of knowing with certainty what the view of the other is regarding the sadist. The problem with sadism is that it wants a being-for-itself to be a pure object such as a being-in-itself, however it simultaneously wants this being-in-itself to admit that it is a pure object, in order to validate the sadist, so the sadist knows what the self within it is. In support Sartre wrote, “the [being-for-itself] becomes an instrument in his [sadist’s] hands,” and he also wrote “what the sadist tenaciously seeks…is the other’s freedom,” and also “the sadist will want manifest proofs of this enslavement of the other’s freedom,” (Being and Nothingness, 1972, p402-403). This is impossible because the idea is contradictory, because objects do not speak to admit anything, therefore the sadist can never know what their self is, and they can never find fulfilment and therefore hell is other people.

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Therefore are we trapped within hell is other people with perpetual conflict being the original meaning of our being-for-others? In the play Inez says “you’re a coward Garcin, because I wish it…You have no choice but to convince me…

Estelle: Garcin!

Garcin: What?

Estelle: Revenge yourself.

Garcin: How? Estelle: Kiss me darling – then you’ll hear her squeal,” (No Exit, 1989, p44). This is hell being other people, but what does Sartre want to achieve by communicating this to the world? Sartre said “hell is other people has always been misunderstood… because other people are… the… means we have… for our own knowledge of ourselves,” and he continues “if my relations [with other people] are bad, I am situating myself on total dependence on someone else… then I am indeed in hell,” (Contat and Rybalka, 1976, p199). This refutes any ideas of Sartre being a pessimist rather his ideas are the opposite.

The idea Sartre has been advocating was perfectly illustrated in the recent boxing match between Anthony Joshua and Wladimir Klitschko. They did not act in bad faith trying to objectify a being-for-itself as Inez and Estelle do as shown in the start of this paragraph.

The boxers didn’t resist the original meaning of being-for-others, but they accepted the fact for what it was and were ethical in getting about their business. Because they were respectful of the other, Klitschko in the post-fight press-conference said [in short] “I think it was a good fight… AJ [Anthony Joshua] did a good job… it is what it is… things work out in sport in the way how they work out… I feel actually pretty good considering even if I lost.” Klitschko didn’t not feel like he was in hell even losing the fight as his relationship with Joshua had been so ethical he could sense Joshua’s opinion about him so Klitschko’s ego – self had not been humiliated. In support Sartre discusses this in length in the part titled Freedom and Responsibility, that we must not resist the nature of being-for others in bad faith but we must accept our freedom and get on with our everyday business ethically without creating a hell like experience, since we can’t escape that being-for-others originally means conflict.

Conflict is the original meaning of being-for-others because our existence precedes our essence, and we can’t have an essence unless the other has a view on me, which is objectifying and creates conflict as that curtails my freedom. No Exit show some

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mechanisms people engage in to overcome the fact that it is the other through which we know ourselves, but here we create the environment of hell, by trying to force or manipulate other people’s freedom. There is nothing that can be done about the nature of conflict being the original meaning of being-for-others, other than to take responsibility and stop acting in bad faith, and getting on with everyday life ethically without making the experience hell, because we are free.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Contat, M and Rybalka M (1976). Sartre on Theatre. London: Quartet Books. p198-202.

Craib, I (1976). Existentialism and Sociology. London: Cambridge University Press. p14-59 and p129-157.

Cumming, R.D. (1992). Role Playing: Sartre's transformation of Husserl's phenomenology. In: Howells, C The Cambridge Companion to Sartre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p39-67. iFL TV (2017) WLADIMIR KLITSCHKO REACTS TO ANTHONY JOSHUA ROUND 11 TKO DEFEAT – {POST FIGHT PRESS CONFERENCE} [Online]. Available at: https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=zv7a70M_42I (Accessed: 12th May 2017).

Myerson, G (2002). Sartre's Existentialism and Humanism. London: Hodder & Stoughton. p1-76.

Sartre, J.P (1966). Existentialism and Humanism. 7th ed. London: Methuen & Co LTD. p23-56.

Sartre, J.P (1972). Being and Nothingness An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology.

7th ed. London: Routledge. p?-?.

Sartre, J.P (1989). No Exit and three other plays. 7th ed. New York: Vintage International.p1-47.

Scriven, M (1984). Sartre's Existential Biographies. London: The Macmillan press LTD. p84-85 and p94-103.

Spade, P.V. (1996). Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness Class Lecture Notes Professor Spade Fall 1995. Available: http://pvspade.com/Sartre/pdf/sartre1.pdf.

Last accessed 9th May 2017.

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Ghosts In America

BY DOMINIQUE SINAGRA ILLUSTRATED BY KARL FITZGERALD

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here were definitely ghosts in Oklahoma. I could see them and hear them. Not literally, with my eyes or anything like that. No, I never felt a cold chill pass through me like a window had been left open nor did I ever see anything inexplicably move across the room. But nevertheless, I could see the ghosts in the soldier’s eyes and in Indian land.

Lawton was nothing like what the land used to be. It used to be where the Apache and Kiowa lived. In the 1800’s, it was settled along with Fort Sill, a military post to keep the same Apache and Kiowa at bay. I came to Lawton by myself to interview people for a project about opposites, about how seemingly disparate lives can have a great deal in common if the right questions were asked, if the right parts of their humanity were spoken to.

I was staying with Justin, a former soldier, a veteran of the war in Iraq. He was amongst the first boots on the ground in Baghdad and came back deeply emotionally scarred from the things that he witnessed and did. Justin lived with his fiancé in a small brown house with brown walls and a brown sofa. The home reminded me of the desert but maybe that was only because of the Iraq connection. Justin and his fiancé work five jobs between them. He woke up at 3am every day to sort boxes at UPS and then he worked at a newspaper office and then in the late afternoon Justin went to work as an assistant at a law office. I asked him once I how he managed on so

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little sleep and he shrugged and said there are guys working a lot harder over at the Goodyear factory making tires. Because Justin and his fiancé were out so often working, I was left on my own to explore.

There weren’t any sidewalks in Lawton and no one seemed to miss them. There were used car lots and new car lots. There were chain restaurants like Arby’s and Pizza Hut and Krispy Kreme and Taco Bell and McDonalds and Wendy’s. There where chain shopping centers like Walmart and Target. There were also Korean restaurants; a lot of them because during the Korean War many Americans went abroad to fight and came back with wives who promptly set up shop. There were also “massage” parlors catering to any young lonely soldier’s need. Most of Lawton’s residents were in uniform and if the wind was right from Justin’s house you could hear machine gun practice from Fort Sill. I drove 20 miles outside of Lawton, Oklahoma in a rented car and a radio that produced nothing but static so I shut it off. A wise woman once told me that if you dug an inch down into the American soil you’d find nothing but blood. I never dug an inch down but I knew it was true. Blood and Indian bones.

As I drove I could hear ghosts talking in same low pitch as a dog whistle or maybe more like a low elephant mourning moan. I could hear vague wails and whimpers, and then deeper still in the hallway of time, beyond the wails and whimpers, I could hear singing and the sounds of eating and love making. I could hear life before death.

I arrived at a place called Medicine Creek, where I met Dorothy Whitehorse, an old, old Kiowa woman. She said she didn’t know when she was born, nor could she even remember what day it was, but she said she can remember only horses and no cars moved about on this vast brown land of hers. We met at a shop owned by a retired U.S. Army general that sold turquoise Indian jewelry and buffalo head nickels. The land in Oklahoma seemed to attract two kinds of people: U.S, military personnel, and mystics, people who believed in spirits and that the water was alive. Sometimes at certain juncture in an individual’s journey these two quests would meet and become unified in one person. For instance, this general. He ran the shop with his wife and warmly gazed at the pieces. On Saturdays Dorothy spoke, telling old stories and sang songs about ghosts. He listened wide and teary eyed, with hands clutching, white knuckled, on his chair. I know this because I was there. At Medicine Creek some ghost hunters picked up a voice. They couldn’t understand what the voice was saying. The

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general played it for Dorothy to see if she could understand. “She’s saying ‘bring the medicine’ in Kiowa,” said Dorothy doubtlessly. Medicine Creek used to be home to medicinal herbs and its waters were said to cure. I wonder who that voice belonged to? And who needed the medicine?

Dorothy Whitehorse and I drove to her daughter’s land. As we drove the land around us reminded me of Africa. It was vast, beyond vast. Being in it, made one feel the smallness as one does standing beneath an unbroken dome of night sky. The land could swallow you up, consume your breath and make it its own wind. We passed homesteads that looked in some ways as though they’d been there since white settlers first arrived and in other ways like the next tornado was going to pick them up and spat them out.

In corrals there were cows and horses grazing contently, unaware that if they bit down an inch further they’d find blood; or maybe they were aware and in constant communion with their ghostly ancestors. “Did you know that horses arrived in the Americas long before historians used to believe?” Dorothy said to me. “The first horse wasn’t the mustang and they didn’t come over with the Spaniards. The first American horse was the Appaloosa, the spotted ones who can dance what is commonly called the Indian-jig. They came over with the First People’s over the land bridge connecting what is now Alaska and Russia. Lewis and Clarke knew it. Sacagawea told them that.”

Dorothy Whitehorse directed me into her daughter’s drive. It was more a road than any driveway I had experienced. It stretched into the distance and dusty and sighed red dirt from under our wheels.Her daughter greeted us along with her husband and dogs, chickens and turkeys. Their home was flat topped and one story. Inside it was dark, with a long table where we sat and talked. I don’t remember what we talked about. What I do remember was the long hallway covered with framed photographs of what are now ghosts. There were images of men and women with jet black braids and faces that resembled the vast beyond vast land of Oklahoma.

There was a woman in somewhere down my familial line who was kidnapped by the Mohawks in Massachusetts. I think her name might have been Mary. She kidnapped and refused to go back to Puritan life – who can blame her? This was not uncommon, as you might already know. Many women were kidnapped and when their release and

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return was demanded by their men-folk, the women simple said no. The standard of living was more or less the same and women were respected. Mary married and raised three children Dorothy led me outside to their old family home. It was dugout, dug inside of a sloping hill and held up with pole. Inside, on the dirt floor, was an old mattress with spring sticking out and in the ceiling was a whole where smoke from fired could be let out.

Dorothy told me that they used the space now only used for ceremonies. She told me about recently they held a healing ceremony for women and whilst the women were sitting together in prayer, they all heard singing. They realized the singing was coming from outside somewhere in the black expanse of a night. The women walked out and saw nothing, but the singing continued. Each woman came from different tribes and each woman heard the singing in her own language. I never saw Dorothy again after that. I assume that she too is now a ghost, as that was a long time ago and even then she was old, old.

I spent a few more days in Lawton. I interviewed Justin about Iraq. He told me about a little boy he befriended who died from a suicide bomber’s blast. The blast didn’t kill him on site, but burnt the boy’s whole body. Just tried to raise money to pay for his treatment, but his fellow soldiers wouldn’t give. They thought maybe the boy’s family was pulling their leg. One night towards the end of my stay, Justin took me out drinking with his friends. A wise woman once said to me that ghosts lurk in corners of bars. These ghosts are not the good kind of ghosts that sing during ceremonies, but a seedy kind of spirit, more like a goblin, that waits in the corners sucking on unguarded life forces. The bar where Justin took me with his friends had a blow-up palm tree and flashing lights and I am sure many ghostly goblins in the corners.

Maybe some ghosts brought back from foreign places like Justin’s Iraqi boy, hanging on to Justin by his boot strings.

I have come to know that ghosts exist everywhere. In every corner of the world, where women and men and their horses and dogs have lived. I know that if you dig an inch into most any ground you’ll find blood and bones.I felt the mourning moans of ghosts in other countries too, not just my own. I felt them in Palestine, their moans mixed in with the called to prayer, and along the roads in Uganda. They are in New York City Subway and sometimes in the rays of sun filtering through the

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Metropolitan Museum of Art and God knows they lie unrested in the Thames. But Lawton, Oklahoma with me especially as a place of ghosts because the ghosts there go unacknowledged. The Native ghosts have been swept under Arby’s and Taco Bell and Justin’s ghosts have been suppressed under three jobs and stale beer at a bar next to a “massage” parlor. Will there ever be a day when the blood under the soil is wiped clean? Or is that blood, the horrible very real blood, part of the fertility that make new and better things grow?

COMMENTARY Beat literature captured the vastness of America and delivers it as a boundless sea possibility for elevated thinking. I wanted to make the land almost another character and explore the ideas of geographic memory – the idea that the land remembers past and especially traumatic events. I also wanted to acknowledge the emptiness and time for reflection while driving across this land, the way Kerouac does, through phrases like ‘the radio produced nothing but static.’ Kerouac captures such feelings in On the Road, and pushes to deliver a text that relentlessly opens the dialogue between an intimately personal account and an existential yearning. A comparison could also be made with Tennessee Williams’ creation of Tom in The Glass Menagerie as he stares widely into the moon.

I wanted to acknowledge that a land holds that history. The ‘wise woman.’ a character we never meet in person and whom stays ethereal, gives magic and mysticism to Oklahoma. A spirituality that isn’t tangible. This is highlighted in ‘I never felt a cold chill pass through me like a window had been left open.’ I want the reader to feel that possibility of other worlds, just beyond our immediate consciousness. This was inspired from The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac, where climbing a mountain links spirituality and the environment closely and we as readers are able to feel ourselves as spiritual beings. For me, I wanted readers to feel themselves as spiritual beings as well as, spiritual beings linked in a larger history. The superficial and blunt description of Lawton’s ‘chain restaurants like Arby’s and Pizza Hut and Kirspy Kreme, and chain shopping centers like Walmart and Target’ is in conscious juxtaposition with the spirituality of previous paragraphs that contain ether in ‘if you dug an inch down into the American soil you’d find nothing but blood.’ I consistently decided to juxtapose

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images of American consumerism, with observations and of the existential and energetic as well as acknowledging America’s previous realities.

I intended to use nature and animals to give a sense of connection with the earth and the life-death cycle where the horses and cows ‘were aware and in constant communion with their ghostly ancestors.’ By making the animals in silent communion with their surroundings I was able to juxtapose it with the current general American relationship with the Earth, seen often playing out in the news in cases like Flint, Michigan and the Standing Rock protests. I was also inspired by the confessional poets such as Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. My prose our unashamedly in the first person and I drew on my own personal experiences and observations to tell shed light on the issues I wish to shed light on. I also touch on physic issues and perceived reality. As well as the trauma the country has faced. Jung speaks about the collective unconscious and I feel that through speaking about personal consciousness, we are also able to reflect the larger consciousness of a group or groups. The reader is aware of the writer’s position in the story, expressed through such rhetorical question as ‘refused to go back to Puritan life – who can blame her?’

We follow Dorothy Whitehouse through her stories of the origins of horses, to her healing dugout and beyond, therefore hinting that the unnamed wise woman at the start of the story is in fact Dorothy. She is presented as ethereal and timeless; ‘She said she didn’t know when she was born, nor could she even remember what day it was.’ This purposely places her outside of contemporary convention, and therefore gives permission for the reader to feel the same and empathise with such statements as ‘Being in it, made one feel the smallness as one does standing beneath an unbroken dome of night sky.’

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​T he Epic of Gilgamesh

BY RIA DUNN ILLUSTRATED BY MICHAEL NEMORIN

T

he Sumerians were the oldest known civilization to ever have existed. It was a civilisation which for a long time its very existence remained a mystery until archaeologists finally revealed that Mesopotamia was once the cradle of a civilization, “Archaeological excavation of the sites of the ancient cities in the Tigris-Euphrates valley has shown that this region […] was inhabited as early as 4000 B.C. by people known as the Sumerians” (Hooke, 1963: 18).

This history of the civilisation matched the geographical region of the area irrigated by the Euphrates and the Tigris rivers. Archaeologists found that the wild growing wheat was what enabled the Sumerian population to expand and find its civilisation.

This fertility of the region was due to the patterns of rainfall, which were to do with the location of the mountains and down land planes, along with the irritability of the land between the two rivers. The discovery of wheat around 15000 BC, along with the Sumerian’s taming of their water source through the invention of the wheel, led to the cultivation and storage of grain. These accidental geological, geographical factors therefore, allowed the Sumerians the settle down in one place. The Sumerians had developed a way of life that dominated their natural world in order to make it serve their own survival. The emergence of this agricultural civilisation thus presents the transition from a nomadic lifestyle to a sedentary lifestyle. This transition is encapsulated through the journey of Enkidu in The Epic of Gilgamesh, a myth written by the Sumerians around 2500 BCE as, “the story of Enkidu tells of the gradual

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transformation of a purely natural into a cultural being” (Jager, 2001). The epic refers to the Sumerian temperament as their exposure to the hazards of nature made them conscious of the fragility of life. It is thus believed that the epic is an allegory about the tensions between Nomadic and sedentary forms of life and the permanent binary oppositions between nature and culture.

Claude Lévi-Strauss identifies that these binary oppositions are inherent in the structure of myths. “For Lévi-Strauss myth is outright scientific because it goes beyond the recording of observed contradictions to the tempering of them. Those contradictions are to be found not in the plot or myth but in what Lévi-Strauss famously calls the ‘structure’” (Segal, 2004: 31). His extrapolations of these ideas are manifested in his book The raw and the Cooked, a study of South American Indian myths where he finds tensions and conflict between the raw, representing nature, and the cooked, which represents civilization and culture. His book therefore forms the basis of the theme identified in The Epic of Gilgamesh, Thus this essay will explore the oppositions between nature and culture in the epic, adopting Levi-Strauss’s structural analysis.

The oppositions of nature and culture are revealed through the opposing characters in The Epic of Gilgamesh. It is a myth of a mighty warrior King of Uruk who is abusing his power and challenging his people as he “behaves abominably, sleeping with all the wives and the pretty girls and constantly summoning the young men to corvée duties or worse” (Kirk, 1970: 135). The people of Uruk finally cried out and begged the gods to create a counterpart to Gilgamesh in order to absorb his energies and restore his balance to become a better king. Consequently, “the goddess Aruru fashions from clay the figure of Enkidu, a wild human creature of the steppes, of surpassing strength” (Hooke, 1963: 50). Enkidu is a wild man that “grazed the fields […] and drank alongside the animals at their watering holes” (Jager, 2001).

After a confrontational brawl, the pair become like brothers and “the two swear eternal comradeship” (Hooke, 1963: 51). This friendship becomes an apt metaphor for culture vs. nature, the duality in which Lévi-Strauss claims lives inherently within us, “The contradictions expressed […] in myth are apparently reducible to instances of the fundamental contradiction between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, a contradiction which stems from the conflict that humans experience between themselves as animals, and so part of nature, and themselves as human beings, and so a part of culture” (Segal.

2004: 115). This suggests that Lévi-Strauss relates the subject matter of myths to that

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of the human mind as he is conveying here the eternal conflicts between nature and culture that plague the human conscience; the conflicts we are constantly trying to balance and establish equilibrium.

Equilibrium between nature and culture appears balanced throughout most of The Epic of Gilgamesh, however, it appears nature is marginally subordinate to civilisation. Cultures’ dominance over nature is portrayed when Enkidu is seduced by the prostitute Shamhat through a sexual encounter, which made “the beasts of the field shield away from his presence” (George, 2003: 8). The rejection he faced by the animals he once grew up with allowed him to gain self –awareness. “This is the first step in Enkidu’s humanizing and civilizing by the woman” (Bates, 2010: 7). Shamhat encourages him to let her take him to Uruk, “You are handsome, Enkidu, you are just like a god! […] Come, I will take you to Uruk- the- sheepfold, to the sacred temple, home of Anu and Ishtar” (George, 2003: 8). It appears therefore that Shamhat assists Enkidu in his journey to civilisation as she adopts the role of his teacher and also mothering figure. “He […] followed her as she gradually led him away from the prairie and from his animal existence. She introduced him to the customs of the human world and accompanied him on his journey from the wilderness to the city” (Jager, 2001). Shamhat is part of and a “member of culture, yet appearing to have stronger and more direct connections with nature, she is seen as something between the two categories” and therefore appears to be the mediator that brings nature and culture together (Ortner, 1972). The poem can therefore be read as a “meditation on the mysterious path of humanization and civilization that leads from a brutish life in the wilderness to a fully human, cultivated life in the city” (Jager, 2001).

Culture as the dominant oppositions continues when Gilgamesh persuades Enkidu to join him on a quest to kill the nature divinity Humbaba, the protector of the cedar forest, and to cut down the trees and bring them back to Uruk. Although the quest is for total masculine bravado, it is also to provide their city with raw materials to allow for its continued development. When they begin to cut down the trees, Humbaba appears and the two kill and behead him. The cutting off Humababa’s head could be a metaphor for the cutting down of the cedar forest and could symbolically mean, “the ‘glory’ of the exploit lies in part with the fact that timber was a precious commodity for the Sumerians, since the plains of Mesopotamia at the time lacked forests” (Barron, 2017). To get this rare commodity the Sumerians would travel to the moun-

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tains of Lebanon to gain wood for living and building materials. This exploitation of resources meant that after the Sumerians, all the ancient civilisations gradually cut down all the cedar trees leaving them few and far between; again representing the tensions between culture and nature. This signifies that nature’s resources are evidently limited and that we are therefore bound to nature’s limitations, including morality.

Enkidu becomes aware of this mortality when he is dying as he longs for the natural infancy he grew up with and appears to reject civilization which he was secondarily introduced to. This is portrayed when he curses the prostitute for having domesticated him, which signifies his realisation that if he were living in the wild he would not be so aware of his death. It is therefore apparent that his humanisation and his transformation to the civilized and domesticated realm, allows him to become aware of what is happening to him. “We may thus equate culture broadly with the notion of human consciousness, or with the products of human consciousness (i.e., systems of thought and technology) by means of which humanity attempts to rise above and assert control, however minimally, over nature” (Ortner, 1972). The idea portrayed here is that through conscious thought and technology we assert control over nature.

However, Enkidu’s consciousness of dying, and that fact that he is dying, clearly portrays nature’s inescapable control over him. It is his awareness and consciousness that causes him so much despair; “The divine element in mankind’s creation explains why, in obvious distinction from the animals, the human race has self consciousness and reason” (George, 2003: xl).

The idea that death is associated with culture is again signified when, “Gilgamesh refuses to accept the reality of Enkidu’s death” as he “finally responds to the situation by moving over to the world of nature and rejecting culture entirely” (Kirk, 1970: 149). Enkidu’s death results in Gilgamesh questioning his own mortality for the first time, “his rejection of the world and of the appurtenances of culture is a rejection of death itself” (Kirk, 1970: 151). As Gilgamesh mourns the death of his friend, he realises the extent of his own mortality and does not want to share Enkidu’s fate. He therefore, sets out on his quest to surmount nature and become immortal. He heard about Utnapishtim, who escaped mortality and achieved eternal life and so he hires a boatman who knows how to navigate and cross perilous waters in order to get to the land which he lives. After failing to stay awake for seven days, as instructed by Utnap-

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ishtim in return for immortality, Gilgamesh is left with a compromise. This compromise consists of the chance for him to rejuvenate and renew himself by collecting a plant that acts as a fountain of youth, explained by Utnapishtim, “Let me disclose, O Gilgamesh, a matter most secret, to you [I will] tell a mystery of [gods.]

‘There is a plant that [looks] like a box-thorn, It has prickles like a dogrose, and will [prick one who plucks it.]

But if you can possess this plant, [you’ll be again as you were in your youth.]” (George, 2003: 98).

Gilgamesh received the plant and claims, “To Uruk-the-Sheepfold I will take it” before placing the plant down and taking a bath in a pool of water (George, 2003: 98). A snake then caught scent of the plant and ate it leaving Gilgamesh distraught as he realises all his life-threatening efforts were for nothing. Therefore, we reach the denouement of the myth, Gilgamesh and his boatman return back to the city of Uruk and Gilgamesh declares Ur-shanabi to, “Climb Uruk’s wall and walk back and forth!

Survey its foundations, examine the brickwork!

Were its bricks not fired in an oven?

Did the Seven Sages not lay its foundations?” (George, 2003: 99).

This ending of the epic portrays a “rebellious young king on his way from savagery to civilization and from narcissism to generosity and wisdom” as Gilgamesh appears to shows Ur-shanabi the boatman his great achievements of the walls of Uruk, symbolising his return to the structure of kingship and sovereignty and responsibility (Jager, 2001). Gilgamesh’s return to Uruk not only “signifies his resignation to death, but he also seems to imply that culture is not […] to blame for disease and the lingering aspects of mortality- or at least that man cannot avoid them, that there is no point in altering one’s life because of them” (Kirk, 1970: 151). Ultimately, Gilgamesh has gained the knowledge that no matter how strong, mighty or powerful you are, you are unable to surmount nature and escape death and that therefore you must live life in happiness and not despair. The parallels between the epic and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem Ozymandias are striking,

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“‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away” (Holloway, 1967: 36).

The poem depicts the history of urban civilised societies in the middle east of Iraq and Mesopotamia; the history that politically it is a series of rises and falls of great empires. ‘Mighty and despair’ is a classic statement used to convey the idea of the vanity of power. Ozymandias, the great brutal king, has erected this giant statue of himself to prove his omnipotence and his immortality. However, the king’s boasts have ironically been disproved as his work and his civilisation has become a wreck of dust due to the destructive power of history. The poem’s conclusion thus parallels The Epic of Gilgamesh as both convey the idea that there is always intractable nature which culture is unable to overcome.

It could be interpreted however, that the stories establish immortalisation and revelation through literature, as the survival of the Ozymandias and Gilgamesh’s name is the fame. The poet therefore becomes the great immortaliser as the stories live on.

The ultimate revelation made by Gilgamesh is that you must accept and live with the tensions between culture and nature and this from Lévi-Strauss’s point of view is exactly what myths are for. “Rather than resolving the contradiction between death and life, a myth makes death superior to immortality, or eternal life” (Segal, 2004: 117). Lévi-Strauss thus believes myths exercise these tensions between nature and culture as models that provide solutions for these paradoxical oppositions that cloud the minds of mankind. Myths are believed to be a way of therefore accepting the natural world as by “telling stories about their mutual relations in terms of human psychology, the Sumerians were able to understand and accept the workings of the natural world in a manner that would have been impossible on a purely logical and descriptive basis” (Kirk, 1970: 89).

To conclude, The Epic of Gilgamesh act as an allegory for civilization; the idea that no culture lasts forever and that we should, instead of trying to resist and surmount nature, just accept the fate that nature holds for us. The tensions between nature and

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culture, that the epic dramatises for us, are however still an ongoing debate in society today as the wish to surmount nature through culture is still a really powerful idea. The epic establishes that there is always intractable nature and our embodiment means that we die and we can never escape death. However, the fantasy of eternal life is still very powerful for people today. This fantasy is portrayed through Aubrey de Grey, a Cambridge scientist, who believes that there are now some humans alive today that will live for another ten centuries. He deems that the ongoing research into “repairing the effects of ageing” will ultimately “create preventative treatments that mean humans would be able to consistently re-repair and live as long as 1,000 years or possible even forever” (Austen, 2017). Another modern idea that continues this theme of eternal life is technological singularity. It is the belief that we will reach a point where artificial intelligence is able to map the world and the human mind to a point where an artificial cognitive structure will be possible. So effectively, we are on the verge off uploading all of conscious experience to an autonomous and digital field that will bring about unfathomable change to the human culture. Thus, in the same way that in the very first work of literature there is someone searching for eternal life, this is still the case today.

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Dracula � Gender Trouble

BY ELEANOR KING ILLUSTRATED BY NADIA MOKADEM

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n Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, the roles of gender are explored as there was a growing sense of anxiety concerning what these roles meant in the Victorian period. Stoker explores the anxieties bound within gender role through the combination of intelligence and passivity in both the female character Mina Murray Harker, and her husband Jonathan Harker. Stoker highlights how the different genders combine these qualities, and also questions who relinquishes control and becomes passive. It is also illuminating to compare these characters and their gender roles with the 1992 adaptation Bram Stoker’s Dracula, directed by Francis Ford Coppola. It is also important to address the reasoning behind Stoker exploring anxieties concerning gender within vampire fiction, and how their roles interchange and hold significance within this genre.

Mina is presented as an educated woman, she has had an independent life before her marriage. She states that she is an ‘assistant schoolmistress’. In Mina having a job, Stoker is demonstrating the new female figure that was arising in the 1890’s, a growing attribute in single Victorian women to seek independence before marriage. Women were, as Emma Liggins highlights, no longer ‘confined to the slavery of home and genteel property’, allowing a ‘remedy for her distress by pursuing paid work’. But once married, women may have been expected to neglect this source of self-sufficiency and become ‘the wife’. This is a concept Stoker explores. Despite being described and portrayed as an intelligent female, who not only has a job but

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is also able to ‘keep up with Jonathan’s studies’, Mina is contrastingly presented as passive – shown through her reasoning in aiding Jonathan, ‘so I will be able to be useful to Jonathan’. This highlights the anxiety of women gaining independence and potentially not wanting to give that up when married. This demonstrates how Mina is tailoring her intention to work and gain knowledge in regards to what will be beneficial to her husband and therefore their marriage. This arguably is what makes Mina so attractive to the male characters in the novel – her willingness to tailor her intelligence when required – ‘[Mina] has a man’s brain – a brain that a man should have were he much gifted – and a woman’s heart. The good God fashioned her for a purpose, believe me, when He made that so good combination’.

In the 1992 adaptation of Dracula, Mina is seen to be typing with her diary entry acting as a voice-over, her back to a lavishly furnished room. She is sat straight at an almost empty desk confessing to her diary that Lucy has ‘never minded that I am only a schoolmistress’. The tone of this differs from the text. In the text, Mina is an assistant headmistress, which she almost proudly reminds Lucy in her letter to her, prompting the suggestion that as a woman she is proud of her self-sufficiency. But in the adaptation, it is almost a confession to her diary which warrants embarrassment or shame.

There is a suggestion that compared to Lucy, who holds no job and is presented as wealthy, Mina holds a low rung position to which she cannot compare or pride herself on. Stoker presents Mina as intelligent and therefore desired as she is knowledgeable, yet the 1992 adaptation suggests that Mina is a helpless, poor damsel who is in prime opportunity to be ‘saved’ by wealth and power. The novel highlights the anxiety of women seeking independence, but this is gone in the adaptation, suggesting that the adapters instead chose to focus on the concept of women in 1897 being of lower importance if they were not wealthy rather than the independently driven Mina in the literary text. In a sense, the adaptation only portrays one element of Stoker’s original exploration of anxiety of the female. However, the adaptation includes Lucy berating Mina for using the typewriter, ‘Is your ambitious John Harker forcing you to learn that ridiculous machine?’, suggesting that instead the adaptation sought to highlight the submissive female, rather than the anxiety of the combination of independence and submissiveness that Stoker does.

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In comparison, the character of Jonathan Harker is described in the novel as a ‘quiet, business-like gentleman’ who is ‘uncommonly clever’. He is not the domineering masculine hero of typical novels of the time, but a lawyer who is smart and quiet.

Where Mina is presented in the text as focusing on her husband, his work and how her intelligence can aid him – Jonathan is presented as a figure who is sexually repressed and submissive. In the iconic scene where Jonathan is at Dracula’s castle and is seduced by Dracula’s three daughters, he describes the experience in his diary as a unforgettable experience, ‘There was something about them that made me uneasy, some longing and at the same time some deadly fear. I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips’. In this scene there is a suggestion and a presentation of the sexually repressed man, thus prompting in the reader an anxiety about male submissiveness. In a society where men were thought to be domineering and in control, to have a man reduced to a silent paralysed figure when surrounded by three overtly sexual female beings would have prompted concern. Especially when Jonathan claims that he ‘was a veritable prisoner’.

This further explores the anxiety of the effect of the diminishment of masculine power, as ‘this interfusion of sexual desire and the fear that the moment of erotic fulfilment may occasion the erasure of the conventional and integral self informs both the central action in Dracula and the surcharged emotion of the character about to be kissed’. In the adaptation of this scene, the screenwriters stuck closely to the depiction of the scene in the text. Jonathan lays back, allowing the act, seduced by the voices and atmosphere even before the half naked females start caressing him. He mostly remains silent, only forming indistinct cries when the seduction is halted by Dracula as he gives the female figures a baby to consume.

Harker remains as paralyzed as he is when being seduced. When Jonathan returns to England, and to Mina, he is described to have been deeply affected by his experience of Dracula, his daughters, and being confined within the castle. Mina then takes on a more proactive role. Mina describes how ‘All the resolution has gone out of his dear eyes and that quiet dignity which I told you was in his face was vanished’, as the female vampires destroy his capacity to act as an independent man. Mina then takes this opportunity and does what she believes is her duty, and becomes a motherly figure who seeks to heal and protect her husband. She proudly states that ‘we women have something of the Mother in us that makes us rise above smaller matters when

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the Mother spirit is invoked’. Through this, readers can see how this is the ultimate role for females, one bound by nurturing others and being passive in their own decisions. But arguably in the way Mina presents it, it is a position of power. She is able to possess that which men cannot, the power to ‘rise above smaller matters’ which seemingly leave men to struggle. This proves to be an anxiety to Victorian society as the motherly figure has been previously deemed passive, but Stoker now sheds a new possibility on this role. One of power and authority, especially over men. This is similar to the other female gender role that Mina brings up in the text, that of the New Woman. According the Mina she sees that ‘men and women should be allowed to see each other asleep before proposing or accepting. But the New Woman won’t condescend in future to accept; she will do the proposing herself’. This calls into question the female role as determined by their gender significantly, mirroring the rise in the campaigning of women’s rights at the end of the 19th century.

Mina suggests that men and women should be able to see each other asleep, which negates the moral gender roles that society instructs. And the idea that females should be able to propose marriage signifies a refusal of the traditional gender roles too.

There is no presence of this in the film, instead Mina is portrayed as a young woman who seeks Jonathan’s love and does not mention this worldly power of being instinctively a mother, nor does she seek to achieve it. This may be because of the films audience. With a large socially and politically charged history of the expected roles females and mothers are expected to adhere to being brought into question regarding rights and independent decisions, to have the central figure claiming that she has a motherly instinct would have angered audiences. Instead in the adaptation Mina symbolises the changing qualities a female can have, from the demure and proper to the sexually aware – a concept that still survives in today’s society.

In exploring anxieties over perceived gender roles, it is also significant to examine how and why Stoker used the genre of vampire fiction. As Erik Butler describes, ‘the vampire’s history is one of mass hysteria, obfuscation, and smoke and mirrors’ suggesting that in using a mysterious figure such as the vampire Count, Stoker was able to balance these themes of anxiety in a story world that was already bound by the nature of confusion. For example, the character of Mina does not reside within a specific female gender role. She interweaves herself throughout the different perceptions of female roles throughout the story. Including the figure of the fallen woman.

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A woman who is described as fallen often came from a respectable background, one of class and respect, who then reduces and diminishes her respectability by becoming involved with improper behaviour – often of a sexual concern. An example of this in the text is when Mina is attacked by Dracula, ‘With his left hand he held both Mrs Harker’s hands, keeping them away with her arms at full tension; his right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom. Her white nightdress was smeared with blood, and a thin stream trickled down the man’s bare breast which was shown by his torn open dress’. The imagery and symbolic nature of this scene highlights the anxiety of how seemingly easy it is for a woman to gain the role of the fallen woman. The image of Mina drawing blood from the Count’s ‘bosom’ suggests role reversal, that the power is at the same time held by Mina as she takes control and blood from a man, and held by the Count as it is his breast that she drinks from. This contradiction in power adds to the theme of gender role confusion.

The image of Mina being dressed in white, prompts the idea of purity and virtue, yet this is tarnished by her nightdress being ‘smeared with blood’, not only destroying her virtuous state but her physical representation of it too as it is ‘torn open’.

In addition, the scene construction adds to the image of Mina having become the fallen woman as she is in bed, with her husband Jonathan laying beside her ‘face flushed and breathing heavily as though in a stupor’ as she is described to be ‘kneeling on the near edge of the bed facing outwards… By her side stood a tall, thin man, clad in black’. The positioning of the three characters physically demonstrates this anxiety of the fallen women, turning away from her husband towards sin and sex, as represented by the count ‘clad in black’.

However, in the film Mina is presented as something beyond this. She is presented as a woman who is on the precipice of that which makes her the Fallen Woman, and that which makes her a Femme Fatale – another gender trope that caused anxiety – a female who is sexually aware, and thus predatory and dangerous to men. The first image in the scene of Mina becoming sexually aware is when Mina and Lucy run through the maze as it rains, suggesting sensuous abandonment, followed by Mina and Lucy sharing a kiss, cementing this portrayal of Mina as a femme fatale – much like the female vampires, whom in the novel Jonathan seeks solace in knowing they are nothing like Mina. As this scene continues, Lucy sleepwalks into the maze as the storm reaches its peak to which Mina follows, seeing Lucy having sex with a beast

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like figure. In Mina capturing this act she becomes aware, arguably then becoming a femme fatale as she made aware of sexual conduct – made all the more significant as she does not show disgust, especially as the man is presented as a beast. Also, it is interesting to compare the scene in which Dracula attacks Mina to the adaptations portrayal of it. Firstly, the Count does not appear in flesh immediately in the 1992 film. Instead there is a flow of green air through the open window that infiltrates the bed in which Mina sleeps , creating the illusion of invasion and corruption. Mina calls out for ‘her love’, which is the adaptation is suggested to be the Count, she awakes and Dracula appears upon her – creating a more sexual dynamic to the scene then the one Stoker described. Also, unlike Stoker, the drinking of blood from Dracula’s breast is seen to be something of pleasure for Mina as she cries out ‘Please! I don’t care. Make me yours!’ This heightens Mina’s role as a femme fatale figure, taking her beyond the fallen woman as Stoker presents her as.

For Stoker, the exploration of the anxiety of a woman becoming subject to sin, thus becoming a fallen woman, held enough significance for him in regards to what Mina represented as a female character. But for the 1992 adaptation, the female gender role is less bound by duty as this is not the case for the society watching. Women were more liberated in the 1990s, allowing a more explicit demonstration of female corruption, especially if the female willingly submits to it. This theme of women taking on different gender roles, and the anxiety this creates on the possibility of it happening in society, is what makes vampire fiction. For as Butler described, in the figure of the vampire the theme of smoke and mirrors and hysteria are opened up, allowing Stoker to focus on gender anxiety in a fictional, symbolic sense. After all, ‘the word ‘Dracula’ in Stoker’s novel designates not only a literary personality, but also a creeping process of invasion and corruption’ especially for gender roles. Butler believed that this was important for Stoker, and his main inspiration, as ‘the power of Dracula lies in the fact that the novel sums up, within the space of a few hundred pages, diffuse fears and tensions in the society for which it was written, and gives them a single moniker’. However, whereas Jonathan arguably acts in the same way as Mina does when she is attacked, because of the preconceived gender roles, his behaviour is exempt.

In conclusion, the combination of both intelligence and submission differs between Mina and Jonathan. Mina represents the anxiety of the New Woman who is able to

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be independent from men, yet is aware of the Motherly instinct that can overpower a male’s capability. Whereas Jonathan represents the anxiety of a man who is repressed and how this can lead to utter submission caused by fear, a destructive trait, as seen in the film adaptation. However in the adaptation there is no presence of the desire to gain intelligence for the character of Mina, but instead a pressure to submit to other pleasures. Overall it is the genre which allows Stoker to explore these anxieties as the genre itself is focused on confusion, angst of what is accepted and the shapeshifter nature of humans, especially employed when focusing on the different roles of woman that Mina takes on in both the adaptation and the original text.

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Whale Song

BY DOMINIQUE SINAGRA ILLUSTRATED BY JENNIFER GARWOOD

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his story begins with a seemingly straight forward narrative and voice – matriarchal bitterness and the struggle between generations of women. The story also seems linear and autobiographical, almost following the tone of an essay. As the piece continues, it becomes magic realism, no longer based in a linear structure.

The second half of the piece is inspired by Women Who Run with Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, who uses myth and fairytale from different cultures to explore the idea and archetype of the Wild Woman, the source of life, and the bestower of life and death.

When I write I scratch and bite myself. I inherited this behaviour from my mother, whose favourite pastime is china hurling and my grandmother who pulls her hair out and shrieks the way some people go jogging; it clears her mind and refreshes her.

My matriarchal line is a rageful one. We are prone to flying off the handle, devouring nearby heads, and when there is no head nearby, we’ll try to devour our own. Many women, from my observations, usually halt before the steps of power. Walking up to these is not the problem, nor is recognizing them, but at the threshold, that final step, the history screaming in their bones, usually tightens and pull them to standing, and unconscious petrification. In this moment women usually do one of two things. They either grow very loud or very quiet.

We tend to dance between both. We run and hide, avoiding our bills, that phone call, the dishes, and then when, inevitably the phone still rings, the bills add up and the

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dishes don’t get done, we feel we are not listened to, so we smash the dishes, throw the iPhone out the window and declare literal or figurative bankruptcy. You see, we’ve all been dead since as long as we can remember and have been dying consistently thereafter. I do not mean the good kind of dying, the orgasmic, or the “oh my god I like died,” because the dress was so cute. No, this is the knitting needle kind of dying, the witches stake kind dying.

My mother and my grandmother having been duelling since my mother’s conception or killing each other over and over in a “Tag! You’re it!” game of shames. My mother got the first punch in, when she bound herself, as a fertilized egg, to the lining of my grandmother’s womb. Then my grandmother came in heavy and decided to terminate her. This killed my mother but she refused to die. In utero refusal to die, is a funny thing. It is the supreme rebellion, usually saved for adolescence, and an amazing feat that something so small could wreak such havoc on a life, on a life plan.

As revenge my mother made sure my grandmother got fat. At the time my grandmother was living in her dorm room, but was soon too large for the condition to go unnoticed, so she moved off campus with Lila, her rich friend. She continued with her classes and no professor ever noticed — just goes to show not to underestimate the power of denial.

On May 10th my grandmother and my mother delivered two of their most lethal blows to each other. My mother’s by being born and my grandmother’s by birthing her at the Salvation Army Hospital for Unwed Mothers and then leaving her there. My grandmother tends to give things and then take them away, like tables or oriental rugs, or in this case motherhood. She’d give things as birthday presents and then a few years later, decide that they were hers and she’d like them back now, please. She didn’t always say please. After my mother’s birth, my grandmother gave her the parting shot of her name, Jane (which didn’t stick). Two weeks later, triumphantly graduated wearing a white dress and taking smiling photos with her father. For 30 years my mother attempted to live. Life is, after all the name of game here on Earth. If you don’t watch out, green sprigs will come up through cracks in concrete and a car left for to long on the roadside will become home to life and eventually be consumed by green vegetation.

But 30 years later my mother returned, the way the hero, or in this case heroine in

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fairy-tales returns from the shadowy land where she’d been banished, carrying with her an elixir to save us all. My mother delivered a winning hand to my grandmother when she returned 30 years later, with a two year old on her back (me.) First she searched in a Key West, Florida, where my grandmother had lived, working and writing about a treasure hunt. She had a handsome book deal, but when it came to actually writing about the book she just shrieked and pulled her hair out. Then when the publishing company came knocking, she hired a very good lawyer and claim Writers’ Block as her disability, got a payout from the government. She then packed up and moved back to New York City, where my mother finally tracked her down. My mother sent a letter, laden with clues that only a woman who had birthed a baby on May 10th, 1958 in Brookline, Massachusetts, and named it Jane, would understand. My mother signed the letter, Emily, because that was her name now. Upon arriving receiving the letter my grandmother dropped down and died. She didn’t come out from whatever piece of furniture she’d died behind until Christmas, when we came to visit.

“It turns out, I have a daughter. I gave her up for adoption,” my grandmother said to the doorman.

“Does she forgive you?” the doorman asked back.

My grandmother scuttled off and mumbled something about how she was sure he was the one who stole her opal ring.

My grandmother and my mother have been trying to kill each other since they met, way back when my mother was just a cluster of cells and since they re-met 30 years later. My mother, every time she sets down to write “the book”, or balance her check book, she usually ends up in china hurling rage, because it is Granny Jane’s fault she can’t balance her check book or finish anything because everyone knows people who are adopted have problems finishing things. My grandmother likes to point out that all Emily’s clothes look like she pulled them out from under the bed after the poodle slept on them, and a house this messy isn’t normal and perhaps we should call someone? Then she always reminds me that if I tell mother, I’d lose a confidant, not to mention the best editor around.

My mother talked about killing herself all the time and remarked on whether or not it was normal to imagine the flashing lights coming to take away the body. And my grandmother lives on a cocktail of anti-depressants and trays of fudge that she eats

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in bed whilst reading 99 cent mysteries she buys on her iPad, each of which keep her from diving off the Tobin Bridge and sinking to the bottom of Boston Harbor.

It seems that for both of them their own existence is reason to contemplate suicide.

I’ve come to the conclusion that in order for me to survive, I might want to scrape myself free from the tradition of self denial, annihilation, and sabotage, and to do this I figured I’d better go back to the beginning and have a chat with one who started it all. **** If you slide back through time in my family tree you’ll go tumbling into sea grass and codfish brains, fish scales under the finger nails, breezy Rhode Island summers and teddy bears that smelled of salt. You’d go tumbling into sailing boats, and the world fair in Saint Louis. You’d find a hell of a lot of shame, angry women, who are mean as snakes and spite full women. You’d find fat brothers. You’d find yourself falling into Plymouth plantation, but before that you’d be kidnapped by Indians, meeting the love of your life and refusing to back to the grey puritans. You’d go spiralling past the Salem Witch trials, through the ash and soot, cascading past the Revolution – no one in my family noticed Paul Revere’s midnight ride, or which lamp was shining from the Tower, they were busy making the shopping lists.

If you go piling through my family history you will meet many dead women, like cod in the hold of a fishing boat, you have to search to find a live one. The only live one was Mary the Puritan who got kidnapped by the Mohawks and refused to go ever go back – can you blame her? – and lived happily ever after. If you cross the ocean around the time of 1690 and arrive into the filthy streets of England and then pop over to Wales, and then cross the sea to Ireland and if you push back further still through the grey mists of times, you’ll eventually meet a great grandmother times infinity and she is alive.

She lives in round hut made of stone with a thatched roof overlooking a small harbor.

In the evening she sings to the seals that feed and sun themselves in the area. Her hair was black but now turned silver like the spittle the moon leaves on the rocks and sea. Her eyes are two darts and she speaks to crows. She pours out heather honey as an offering to someone we no longer know. There is no story she doesn’t know and

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her fingers are brittle. Her face is as wrinkled as the inside of a closed palm. I went to meet her one evening on a night when the wind howled like a banshee and it was hard to imagine a world without rain. There were no lights at sea or above, but rather a charcoal expanse. She welcomed me in and I sat. She didn’t say anything.

Only looked up and nodded ever so slightly. A fire in the centre of the space was neither blazing nor dying and was almost merry as it flickered and danced, encircled in grey stone with specks in them that glimmered in the orange glow. She handed me an ointment and gestured to the scratches and bruises on my legs where I bit and scratched myself the last time I tried to write.

I sat for a long while watching the flame make shapes on the walls of people moving and dancing, having conversation and laughing. I watched generations of shadows move. The old woman and I said nothing. But neither of us seemed disappointed or unfulfilled. When she did speak, it was more a wailing hum than human words.

I stayed with her for what felt like many days, eating barely and bread with honey. We followed her collecting wild herbs to cure her tooth aches and to make more ointments for my scratches. In evenings sometime we took a boat out to past the edge of the harbor. We’d rest there, rocking on the swells, bobbing like an infant on a great knee.

Eventually, they came from beneath us. First the water turned white and churned and then their massive grey bodies were made visible. Out there my grandmother x infinite taught me the songs of the humpback. Night came in and the moon made her mark and we sang with the choir of humpbacks. Why did she teach me this song?

Because everyone knows that without the whale song the world would fall apart…

Eventually, I went back, sailing over the ocean, West with time. Through the revolution and patted Mary the Puritan Who Go Kidnapped by the Mohawks and Never Went Back on the shoulder, and into the Saint Louis World Fair and then ran through codfish brains, to now. Where my mother is wishing she didn’t have to clean the house, and my grandmother is eating a tray of fudge. And I think that maybe I’ll write and maybe I’ll do it with out killing myself this time. Maybe my grandmother and mother will waltz around taking turns dying at each other’s hand, but maybe as it turns out their deaths are my Whale Song.

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COMMENTARY In this piece I explore issues of identity, authenticity specifically within women and existential questions of power and truth within that identity. I took a risk with this piece. I began this the story with a seemingly very straight forward and realistic narrative and voice. The story also seems very linear and autobiographical, enabling the reader to take the story for face value; almost following the tone of an essay. As the piece continues, there’s a break and it become magic realism, no longer based in a linear structure. I was inspired 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, and how the seemingly concrete becomes watery, instantly.

Furthermore much like Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, two worlds are presented within this piece. Where Yann uses religion and spirituality, I have used matriarchal bitterness and the subversion of motherhood. I intended to create polarity between the first and second halves of the piece; a gritty realism in the first that lingers on the sub verse and explores the dark ingredients that are used to create twisted and resented bonds, the true bonds of family and DNA. And here lies the crisis of dilemma as a game of one-up-woman-ship: ‘On May 10th my grandmother and my mother delivered two of their most lethal blows to each other. My mother’s by being born and my grandmother’s by birthing her at the Salvation Army Hospital for Unwed Mothers and leaving her there.’ The theme of identity in the first part of the piece is distilled cruelly in factual name giving, only ‘mother’ and ‘grandmother’ are used. Identity is rather formed in this piece through the similarity of rage and inability to cope in self. One might make an observation that the dish throwing, the iPhone breaking or self harming is the common language, identifying them as the same blood.

In the second half of my piece I was very inspired by Women Who Run with Wolves by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes. In the book Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes uses myth and fairytale from across cultures to explore the idea and archetype of the Wild Woman, who is at the source of life, and the wielder of the life / death creative circle. According to the book, it is she that we women (men) must be in touch with to be truly creative and authentic. That is who the narrator in the story goes back in time to find and relearn how to function by looking at the world in a non- literal, non-language based way.

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I wanted to make a comment on the fantastical as being as valid as the “real,” the ‘sea grass and codfish brains’ as being as part of this characters make up as ‘throwing the iPhone out the window and declaring literal or figurative bankruptcy.’ In the second part of the piece, the journey to find the Grandmother x Infinite with silver hair like ‘the spittle the moon leaves on the rocks and the sea’ is one of introspection.

Here, I use introspective narration to find an inner piece that is vacant in the first part. The first part observes a grandmother whose own inward rage causes flights of intense pain and anxiety, and who is cut off from her wild self, and at odds with her own existence. Here, I was inspired by Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit and how the characters were stuck in this dynamic plagued by their own identities. The play itself, as the title would suggest, offer no way out. But in my story, I wanted to offer another option, a way of healing the conflict of shame and struggle with their own existence.

For me, in this story, that way out as expressed in going back to the beginning, to a time before a “power over” society and the meaning of identity and self then.

The identity that is found through a different kind of female relationship and perspective is one that is helpful and peaceful and Wild. One that puts back together the broken pieces of the self. Here I question the integrity of the literal familial inheritance, and explore the depths of a spiritual inheritance and relationship to Earth.

Maybe, there is more validity within that realm than the one that we inhabit, and provides us with a solace that carves our own Whale Song.

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The Doll

BY ALESSIA GAL ATINI ILLUSTRATED BY HANNAH PHILLIPS

It started like a joke, a gateway thought. A human-sized doll of myself. I could build it from scratch. I used to be a glass artist after all, with a degree in engineering.

Sure, it would take effort and skills and a lot of hiding and lying, but it could work.

It’s funny, really. Maybe if they stopped shaming men for playing with dolls when they’re children, they wouldn’t feel the need to treat women as dolls when they’re adults. But since they do, I would only be fulfilling that need: why stay and play the doll, when I could leave him an actual doll to play with? I’d be doing both of us a favour. When I started picturing her, she was carved out of boiling glass, with magenta-stained lips and cutting cheekbones. Smooth. Smoother than skin. Flawless. A new woman, woman-made. If I stared long enough into her eyes, she was almost back to being just a mirror. She’d have my name of course. Nina. She wouldn’t be me, however. There would be no need for me to leave, if that was the case. More like Nina 2.0.

How can I force them, you say, how can I force anyone to be stuck in this place I so desperately want to leave? Well, this Nina is colder. She isn’t born, she is built to fit, and if she cracks, she won’t feel it. I’d still let her bleed once a month. God forbid he doesn’t have anything to blame when she does something wrong. As if Nina could be emotional. God forbid I don’t give her a break from the fucking.

Nina never hurts when she walks in heels. Nina smells like lavender all day. When

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the children call, Nina will smile and ask, “Children, what do you need? Tell me everything.” Nina won’t think that the whistling of the kettle sounds like a train rushing in front of her, disappearing before she has a chance to jump in front of it. Nina won’t think about spilling the scalding hot water on her children’s heads until the skin boils off their bones and they drop dead, finally quiet. Nina, Nina, Nina. Sing them to sleep, Nina. Really, it was just an idea. Unfathomable mostly. But then loneliness pushed me towards a new corner of desperation. The afternoons are long spaces to fill, when one quits ironing.

Now that she’s here, solid and seated in front of me, I am no longer sure what I should tell her. She is beautiful, more than any version of myself I have ever seen in the glass of mirrors. I sculpted her out of my flaws.

“You’re Nina,” I state then, unsure whether that’s an order or a realisation.

“I’m Nina,” she repeats. Her voice sounds almost like mine, except it’s deeper.

More sensual. I can barely contain myself from hugging her.

“You are going to save my life.”

“I am going to save your life,” she says dutifully. It’s been almost two months, and on the good days I tell myself I’ll do it. I’ve taught Nina 2.0 everything there is to know. She can fool them. My husband, the children. She’s programmed to do everything I do, but better. Even the way she folds the bread over the slice of ham.

And I think the key is that the thousands pieces of bread I folded before that one will never weight on her the way they did on me.

I painted every corner of hers to resemble me, slowly realising I had forgotten how to take care Of myself properly. I have thick purple veins scarring my legs, an ass butchered by fat skin and saggy tits. I couldn’t bring myself to ruin her. It’s not like anyone really looks at the me under these clothes. At the very worst, my husband will appreciate the improvements and fuck her more often. Maybe without shoving her face into the carpet. Yeah, maybe. I wonder what my parents would think of this doll.

She does walk with her back straight, she smiles when you tell her to smile. She’s the me that could have had it all. I hate her. On the worst days, I want to tear her to pieces and use the shattered glass to – One time, when my husband spent the night out, I brought her into bed with me. I know now I shouldn’t have. I wanted to kiss her, when I saw the way her body shifted smoothly under the covers, like it belonged there. Like a mermaid in foam of sheets. I almost did. She was staring at me, wrinkles

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shining and eyes wide. I could never love myself. But her, I loved her so much I began to love myself for allowing her to exist.

“What are you going to do once I take your place?” I programmed her to ask me that once in a while, just so I don’t forget what my purpose is.

“I don’t know,” I say. Isn’t that amazing?

“I can drive, so I was thinking about renting a car and going somewhere where people won’t know who I am. I want to see a fountain. It’s ridiculous that there’s not even a fountain nearby.” She doesn’t reply anymore and goes back to folding socks.

I want to see a fountain. I want to leave this place behind. She’s ready. I don’t have anymore excuses. I am making the two of them meet today. I slither out of bed just before sunrise and open the closet. I’ve hidden her in there. It’s just a small signal, a nod. She gets it and in an instant I become the hidden one, observing my life unfolding in front of me, from the little space between the closet doors. Nina goes over to the bed and bows to give him a kiss on the cheek.

“Good morning love,” she greets him. He mumbles as he wakes up and smiles, pleasantly surprised.

“I’m gonna get you some breakfast,” she adds. He even strokes her face. Does he really think I could ever love him like that? She comes back a few minutes later, perfect in her backlit nightgown. She’s carrying a tray with… Oh wow. Toast, jam, even fresh orange juice. That’s what I call effort. He grabs it and dips his face in it. No thank you, no “Would you like some, dear?”. What else is new. But Nina stays there: upright, untouched. Even when he grabs her leg at the end, with his hands still sticky and dirty, she leans in. She puts both her hands around his face and dives into the kiss like it’s the best she ever had. And no later than a couple minutes, he’s shoving himself inside her. It’s uncomfortable to watch. She’s hurting. She must be hurting. And yet she lies there because unlike me she never wanted something more than an average fuck from an average man. When he’s done, he gets up, Panting.

“Time for work,” he says and grabs the clothes carefully folded on the chair. When I hear the door shut behind him, I shiver. It’s done. It’s done. It’s done.

“Breakfast. I have to make the children breakfast.” But Nina knows. She gets up and

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moves into the kitchen. I follow her. She takes the bread, cuts the crust, puts it in the toaster. She’s already cleaning the counter from the crumbs. I hear scampering down the stairs. They’re coming. I hide. They scatter around the table like hoppers, their squealing voices bothering me even if I don’t have to deal with them.

“What’s for breakfast mummy?”

“Eggs on toast, darling. Your favourite,” Nina replies.

“Why aren’t they ready yet?” he insists.

“I don’t like eggs mum,” the second child jumps in.

“I don’t like toast,” the third one nails it. Nina hands the first plate.

“I never said I made eggs on toast for everyone,” she sings, as if she might burst into song were she any happier.

“Toast and fig jam for you.” She hands the second plate, and I notice the jam is spread to form a smiley face.

“And chocolate cookies for you.” Well, at least she has made them shut up.

She even gets a thank you. That’s a record. This is what they want then. Someone to bribe them, to give without complaining. Isn’t that what all mums should be like?

A life devoted to make someone else’s favourite food. Nine times a day, in this case.

After breakfast, Nina carefully tends to their dressing up, tying their shoelaces and zipping up their jackets, pulling the hats jokingly over their little faces. It’s such a perfect picture. Then, once they’re gone, I’m left to stare at her. To the way she goes to pick up the broom to clean after them. And after the cleaning comes the ironing, and the white shirt, the blue shirt, the purple jacket, the green socks, the white socks, the other white socks, the work trousers, the pj trousers, the towels, the silver sheets, the pink sheets, the blue sheets, the school uniform, the panties, the bras, the boxers, the slips. I tell her to take a break after that. She sits on the couch, as the washing machine rumbles in the background.

“What should I do now?” she asks.

“I don’t know. Read a book maybe? Whatever you like.”

“I don’t know what I like.”

I used to like reading but I don’t anymore. It’s too painful to get lost in stories that are so much more wonderful than my own. Stories that will never belong to me. What I can do is create them. Make them mine. Just the way I created Nina. Nina who will

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stay while I leave. Nina who will watch me fill a bag with all the things I care about enough not to leave behind. Nina who will smile as I walk out, thanking me for giving birth to her in hell and deserting her. Nina who will learn to know this house like the back of her hand just like I did, to the point where she could walk around blindfolded and not bump into anything, but that doesn’t mean this house wouldn’t hurt her. It doesn’t mean that.

And I’ll stop thinking about her at some point, while I’m driving down country roads with long dirty hair, screaming “screw the children” as loud as I can. I’ll see a fountain, I’ll see a hundred fountains, and I’ll cook my favourite food and it will be as if these years of darkness never even touched me.

I just have to leave her in charge. I just have to go so far back inside myself that I can fool myself I have a life while she lives out mine. So when I go back to putting clothes on the line, and I cook three different dinners, and I fight with screaming children until they collapse, exhausted, I am gone. When I crawl back to bed tonight, and his sweaty hands close around me, I am gone. It’s all Nina.

I’m watching a fountain as they fall asleep. I have made myself into what they wanted, re-built myself to fit. Now I won’t feel it when the doll cracks.

COMMENTARY “I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and It was what my husband wanted of me. But one can’t build little white picket fences to keep the nightmares out.” This quote from Anne Sexton provided a real starting point for the development of my story. She, as well as Sylvia Plath, contributed to the Confessional movement by providing a new point of view and new settings: poetry is no longer a journey just inside their heads, but inside their bodies, female bodies, and their house as well – a place that they, as wives, mothers and women, experienced in a profoundly different manner than any of their contemporary male writers. And these three elements blend together to form a peculiar new narrative about the effect this life had on their mental health.

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However, as Waters points out in her essay (2015), Sexton struggled with the definition of “confessional poet”, as that seemed to imply that she was writing about herself.

Although she did write about women, and housewives, and used a narrative voice with struggles that could appear her own, she often wrote about things that never happened to her, such as the death of a brother. I was then drawn to this gap between the writer and the narrative voice, which Colburn (1998) described as, “Miss Sexton’s continuing and largely unsuccessful struggle to escape the image of herself which dominates and in a sense pollutes her projections of future possibility. (…) She is dissatisfied with her performance as mother and wife, though the demands she lays on herself are hardly conventional.”

And here is where the conflict is born. A conflict that I tried to convey in my story by using those symbols that recur in many of her poems: the doll, the double self, the mirror, the idea of beauty. Some lines from her poems especially stuck out, such as: “To the me / who stepped on the noses of dolls / she couldn’t break” and “Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself”, which convey the resentment towards certain expectations, while still placing the blame mostly on herself. Another interesting aspect is the potential universality of her works: although she is talking of the consequences of her own mental health and situation, she is tapping into a greater discourse about gender roles and women’s place in society. For example, she implies in her poem “To John, who begs me not to enquire any further” that the readers’ discomfort at her struggles might be very well a sign that they recognise something of themselves in those words. Hence my choice to not have any names, locations or dates in the story.

Only the narrative voice is named, everything else is for the reader to place according to their bias.

In terms of style, I worked with repetition to convey the dullness and monotony of a depressed housewife’s day, both through the language and through the focus on small tasks that seem insignificant but become much heavier when one has to perform them all the time. I also wanted to render the house uncanny and make common objects a source for very dark thoughts.

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About The Book This project is the second volume of a collaboration in writing, design, illustration and publishing between staff and students from two creative disciplines in The Cass – the writers of the English Literature and Creative Writing department, and the illustrators and graphic designers of the Visual Communication department.

Staff leading the project were Angharad Lewis (Lecturer in Visual Communication and Course Leader Design for Publishing),  Alistair Hall (Lecturer in Visual Communication), and Trevor Norris (Course Leader English Literature and Creative Writing). The design of the book and its illustrations were developed by students in 2017/18 Visual Communication studio, Ellipsis. The students worked in teams to research, develop and pitch the typographic design and layout of the book, with successful ideas being developed to create the final design. Each student was paired with a piece of writing from the book, to design and print an individual visual response to it. These sets of visual work were then refined into illustrations for the book. All the visual response artworks were exhibited during the Summer Show at The Cass in June 2018, alongside readings by the writing students of the poetry, prose and critical writing featured in Anthology II.

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About The Cass The Cass (The Sir John Cass School of Art, Architecture and Design; London Metropolitan University) provides high quality Foundation, Degree and Postgraduate education at purpose built workshops and studios in Aldgate. There is a strong emphasis on socially engaged Architecture, Art and Design applied to both local and global contexts, a school wide interest in making and many projects focus on aspects of London.

Students at The Cass are encouraged to learn through practice, experiment with process and gain real-world experience in both individual and collaborative projects, engaging with professionals, communities and companies.

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Acknowledgements This book would not have been possible without the dedication and creative energy of the many staff and students of the English Literature & Creative Writing and Visual Communication departments who have contributed.

Grateful thanks goes to Andy Stone, Christopher Emmett and Susanna Edwards at The Cass for their ongoing support the Anthology project.

And special thanks goes to Alyson Hurst of GF Smith for her invaluable advice about paper, and to the staff at The Print Centre, London Metropolitan University.

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