Anthology V

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Anthology V

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Anthology A collection of critical and creative writing Written by Students of Creative Writing and English Literature London Metropolitan University – School of Art, Architecture and Design 2020/21 Designed by Students of Visual Communication: BA Graphic Design and BA Illustration & Animation London Metropolitan University – School of Art, Architecture and Design 2020/21 Lead book designer Narcís Serrats Mata In collaboration with Kinza Humayun and Emmanuel Vasquez Illustrated by Suenera Rahman Published by London Metropolitan University – School of Art, Architecture and Design Old Castle Street, London E1 7NT londonmet.ac.uk Copyright © 2021 London Metropolitan University Printed edition printed in the UK

by Park Communications 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 the publisher’s permission.

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ABOUT THE BOOK This is the fifth year of Anthology, a creative collaboration where Visual Communication students take the creative and critical work of Creative Writing and English Literature students and transform it into a book. Visual Communication students take full control of the book concept, and everything you see is a result of their creative decisions.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS As always, I am so grateful for the stewardship of this project by colleagues. My thanks go to Andrew Cutting for working with students in Creative Writing and English Literature, and to Alistair Hall and Ricardo Eversley in Visual Communication for their creative guidance and motive force. Thanks also to Angharad Lewis, Head of Visual Communication, and to Anne Markey, Head of the School of Art, Architecture and Design for continuing to support this collaborative and cross-departmental work. This is a wonderful affordance of working in AAD, the creative and collaborative spirit that informs everything we do.

Trevor Norris, Course Leader Creative Writing and English Literature

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FOREWORD This is a year where students’ work, their relationships with each other and with tutors, and the collaborative production process have had to happen completely online. In a moment of radical instability, disruption and loss, students across both degree areas have brought their energy and cooperative spirit unfailingly to their work. In workshops and between themselves, students have navigated their way into forms of community that have had to hold so much. This book is testimony to far more than our students’ work for their degrees.

Anthology V has four chapters. We begin with Connection, explored through meditations on ecology and landscape, embodiment, family and diaspora, social media and the place of literature in the childhood imagination. In the second chapter, Solitude, we enter into dialogue with bots, struggle to write a will, experience depression and falter our way through our relationship with tech.

Next, in the chapter Power, we discover the visceral transformations of art, read about poets who broke the rules, and revisit De Quincey’s idea that murder should be considered as one of the Fine Arts. We spend time with a resurrection cult, and end the chapter asking how the poetic arts can help re-attune us to our environmental senses, and to the worlds of other beings. In the last chapter, Hope, we think about lost homelands, the dispersion of a people across the world, and what it might mean to live without a country, or be continuously displaced and oppressed where we are. We listen to a genius loci, a spirit of place in the woods, and we find power in liberation from violent oppression. At the end of the book we wonder about the legacy of fairy tales, and consider the new experiences made possible by the development of mid19th century Paris.

All of the work in the book points towards how we might find community with others, how that feeling of community might be harmed but also what we can do with and for each other to find the green shoots of growth.

Trevor Norris, Course Leader Creative Writing and English Literature

CHAPTER I — CONNECTION

12 The Gardeners of Snowdonia JOSHUA AWODERU 16 Ecology with Poetry: A Sequence of Six Poems JASMINE DAMARIS 26 Blind Leading the Blind KARIN ISABELLA ORREBO 32 Little Ben Clock Tower and Its Creole Twin CHRISTINA ARNEPHIE 36 Finding a Needle in the 21st Century SALMA MOHAMED 42 Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared: A Critique of Children’s Media RESHMA SHAIK

CHAPTER I — CONNECTION

The Gardeners of Snowdonia

JOSHUA AWODERU

JOSHUA AWODERU

Goats go about their secret vocations, known only to them. Up and down the slopes, they are the keepers of nature’s gardens. Trimming and pruning. Weeding and watering. Beautifying the landscape with their very being. They drink deeply from the tears of the great colossus, its streams and rivulets, thousands of them, intertwining and interlinking, providing wellsprings of life for the gardeners of Snowdonia.

I see the small streams run down and meet together in a basin. A dark body of water with an imposing aura, I don’t get too close.

There’s a solitary majesty, a quiet strength and undisturbed serenity about the place.

I look up towards the mountain and begin to climb. My pilgrimage shifts my whole perspective of what climbing a mountain would be like. I had imagined climbing a steep rocky hill but this is completely different. I am walking across a rich grassy plane which ascends at a shallow gradient.

My tongue moves along my mouth which feels like a sheet of sandpaper. I’m thirsty but haven’t brought any water. Luckily this landscape is filled with open streams which are fed by a source far above me. I have an empty bottle in my pocket. I open it and stoop down. I skim the rim of the bottle to the water in an effort to ensure that only the cleanest parts of the water enter it. When it is full I take a drink. The water tastes just as fresh as from any tap. I refill the bottle and seal it.

I continue my journey and am accompanied by Snowdonia’s gardeners. The nearest is mere feet away but as I approach it moves on, clearly alarmed. The goats know their simple function so well that to me they are an extension of the landscape, which has a peaceful, timeless and idyllic quality.

I keep going. There’s a warm throb in my legs as I continue to ascend. As the path gets steeper my vantage point is gradually heightened allowing me to see in ways I could not before. The basin of water seems connected to the grassland that the gardeners tend, a deep blue which abruptly gives way to lush green interlaced with golden rays of sunlight. I take a slow inhalation of appreciation.

“This whole scene belongs in a mosaic,” I tell myself. I exhale, taking in and releasing the feel of my surroundings in a single breath, then I continue my ascent.

Around the peak of the mountain are thick clouds which obscure my view. Eventually I reach a point where the steep climb plateaus

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THE GARDENERS OF SNOWDONIA

and I stop to rest. The view from here shows you everything below but there’s still a way to go, through the dark grey clouds that engulf the summit. I steel myself and persuade my companions to go the rest of the way.

When I reach the very top I see two large stones, easily twice and tall as I am. No goat comes to this height. I think of what it would be like to bring one to the top of the mountain and sacrifice it on the stones like in the Biblical stories I was told as a child.

The descent is much faster than the ascent and before long I’m halfway down. Sitting and looking around I can see the long grass patches which make a comfortable cushion. This is the most beautiful part of Snowdonia! I am joined again by the gardeners. They seem indifferent to my presence except for their eyes which are ever–wary. They ruminate and graze and I feel they are appreciating the natural world in their own way, just like me. I see a gardener sitting down and at length I decide to join it, sitting on the alpine meadow grass. I sit and simply look, and in looking is conveyed into my heart and soul more than my eyes could ever see.

Though I am sitting on solid ground, yet there are streams of water gently trickling around me: delightful rivulets of peace, quietude and sanctuary conveyed to all around. I follow one of the several streams with my eye. First the stream passes in between a bed of Saxifraga cespitosa plants. They are a pure white, as if a symbol of the unsullied purity and beauty of this whole landscape. I pluck one for myself. I see the stream bend to the left through a collection of Saxifraga Paniculata, with their vegetable green colour. They look like cabbages to me but I dare not eat them, I leave that to the goats.

Simple though they may seem their leaves boast their own intricate pattern. With whitened rims they look like they’ve been touched by the driven snow. I detach a leaf from the cluster and keep it with me.

Next, I follow the stream through the alpine saw–wort. This plant really adds to the alchemy of the place, its regal violet hue steals your breath as it dances in the gentle mountain breeze. I feel I must have one and promptly add it to my collection.

As I descend along with the stream, it spills over a cluster of rocks and into tiny pools. I can see the jagged edges, only just covered by the clear water. I hop along the natural stepping–stones, turning my face to see where the water had spilled over the rocks.

Hidden in the cracks I see the elusive Woodsia Alpina. To my eyes it looks like it belongs in a forest, and now it belongs to me. By the

JOSHUA AWODERU

base of the mountain now I am completely taken aback by the numerous, daffodil–like alpine cinquefoil. The intensity of the yellow in my field of vision seems to push against me and when the sun streaks through the clouds it intensifies the light like in a magnifying glass filling my eyes with yellow hue.

My journey is at an end. I walk through the meadow and take one more look at the landscape that I have just traversed. I cannot help but smile at the prospect of my next visit.

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CHAPTER I — CONNECTION

Ecology with Poetry: A Sequence of Six Poems

JASMINE DAMARIS

JASMINE DAMARIS

Mesopotamian Fascist Connectivity Get fit and healthy Mind, body, soul, & …a toxic wasteland?

I dare you to cast The net of objectivity You think you’re so smart So shiny and new He’s got a meeting soon Performing fascism at a quarter to 2 –How can we be our best?

–Practise ‘efficiency’?

Mesopotamia’s still got its claws in you Writing your memos on cuneiform 12,000 years of ignorance Smash your clay pots, smash ‘God’ & other sexy god–kings Break on through (to the other side) If I could only reach out to you Poke you with my branches But hey, maybe you’ll be efficient as food for worms, after all Something good can grow from you I tell you this as we are family; The earth–womb births us all.

Now twilight is upon us & the silent earth goes on with or without us.

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ECOLOGY WITH POETRY: A SEQUENCE OF SIX POEMS

Being isn’t presence Being isn’t presence Half in my head, overactive inside penetrative outside, fragile skin That all–perceiving abyss pulls me in I trick myself into thinking I’m here again ‘Only so many hours in a day’ Hours that creep and slink away Does my guitar want to be played?

When does she sleep?

I just want to be useless Superfluous Cream off the top of my existence Ms. Love once proclaimed Nobody could play her late husband in a film ‘Cause no one has the beauty or the presence That he had.

But beauty is not instrumental Like art and poetry What is the purpose of a Grecian urn?

Does it hold flowers? Ashes? & Keats, too, what was his job?

Do poets contribute to capitalism?

And she may find herself An uncertain girl in her 20s Google can’t save her now ‘This ain’t no party’ Half–connected to a stream of shit she doesn’t recognise or care for.

With more questions than answers with more nihilism than she’d hoped for, Ripped apart at the seams Understanding nothing But somehow still knowing (because being isn’t presence & understanding isn’t knowing) that creating art & love & loving art & extending love to those near or far & to those with little resemblance to her could be the answer she’s looking for.

JASMINE DAMARIS

Kim Deep brown eyes, almost black Knowingly caressed my mind Souls in jars are pretty things A shed of tears, a biscuit tin In the garden here lies Kim. We march in black parades Death leading a romantic life I found your biscuits buried Your tin on its side Was she ever really mine?

Even black fish are given names Names that make them deadly As Adam said to Eve, Snakes have the power to deceive An Angel cries out for agency.

But earth hears no angels or almighty ‘He’ Let’s trade in our jars for a glint of something else.

Something bigger than ‘Him’ Something that includes you, Kim,

you were, are,

and always will be: a part of nature, a process in me.

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ECOLOGY WITH POETRY: A SEQUENCE OF SIX POEMS

Birdsong Art works artfully It works art into me Music is universal Harmonic, versatile…

Every time I write a song I think I’ve stolen someone else’s Sometimes this is the case, accidentally At least not Led–Zeppelin–level–thievery Who stole a whole culture & painted it white.

But still there is this weird feeling Some uncanniness is at play The melody hasn’t come from me It’s come from outside – the biosphere?

But the biosphere is part of me & thoughts arrive phenomenally.

Birds speak in a foreign tongue Recorded by Bjork & Yorke Then used in human song I play it back to the birds they laugh at me and sing: ‘You’ve completely missed the point of Dasein!’ (at least that’s what my fear reveals) Not knowing is part of the adventure We will never fully understand ourselves We are children wanting the whole cake Greedy eyes bigger than our bellies Your song can offer others a slice Yourself, maybe a bigger chunk.

JASMINE DAMARIS

Access modes I observe a tree outside my window Watch the leaves dance in the breeze The open window is a doorway for a bee That bothers me as I pull out from plastic A bay leaf to flavour the soup I’m making.

We dose ourselves with mushrooms They make us dance wildly, sing, Eat clumps of dirt and hug trees Here, we fall into the gap of uncertainty.

I used to pick up fallen crabapples Hurl them at my sturdy wooden shed Surveying the mushy destruction Startling the birds, exposing the core The worm who had tunneled his way through Perforating our trickster world.

Felicity could only watch her daughter Ponder her strange antics while pouring Her coffee grounds into a rose’s bed.

The open window is a spider’s invitation She, like the bee, is there for a reason She RSVPs, or more likely accepts The role of co–worker to the human beast Spinning her home around the glass She lies in wait for those flying, busy beings Who bustle in, meeting their sticky doom.

A spider lives in my window happily But a spider in the shower is too much for me.

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ECOLOGY WITH POETRY: A SEQUENCE OF SIX POEMS

My pointy heels are heavy and annoying to wear But I’m not going to take them off, for you see My ultimate goal is to attract a new lover Now replace ‘pointy heels’ with ‘antlers’!

Don’t place the big bad outside of yourself We are the wolf pack, hungry for more energy.

Now, what does your Uncanny Valley look like?

Survey the mushy entanglement of beings & which you let clamber up to your level.

Out of the valley, we rise.

As bees and spiders and little sisters come into your kitchen Whether they please or bother you, it’s an interaction They’re happening to you and you’re happening to them.

JASMINE DAMARIS

The Trickster the trickster is no stranger stick her in the tumble dryer rearrange her ted hughes had a crow bart simpson had a cow cowabunga! a hole in an amplifier makes a distortion there’s a hole in my sole there are shoes in my holes there’s a god in yours. go headfirst into the void turn up the distortion there are f always cracks sorry a about that. l polyfilla l won’t last attune to art deconstruct i being you can’t n segregate the t biosphere. o reject spokespeople of fear they t don’t speak no more venture h outside of self we are e all VIPs of the crack in g the pavement of a reality. p embrace chaos.

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ECOLOGY WITH POETRY: A SEQUENCE OF SIX POEMS

Commentary Literature is an access mode. We can access Ancient Mesopotamia through the Epic of Gilgamesh, and we can determine how Mesopotamia is still with us. In Being Ecological, Timothy Morton writes that Mesopotamians “began to draw distinctions between the human and the nonhuman realms – what fits inside the boundary, and what exists outside of it – that continue to this day”. The Epic of Gilgamesh was written at the start of the agricultural age when humans started placing nature beyond the walls of civilisation. Its story is foundational to many biblical myths. It set up geological and ontological boundaries, bringing about human-evolved hierarchies and anthropocentric thought that privileges human existence over the existence of other beings. Object-oriented ontology, as developed by Graham Harman from Martin Heidegger’s philosophy, rejects this. Put simply, humans are guilty of seeing things (objects, animals, other humans, etc.) through the lens of instrumentality, and nature as physical lumps of stuff just waiting for us to reach out and use. This way of thinking goes together with capitalism and is the reason we are living in an age of mass extinction.

“Mesopotamian Fascist” challenges dismissive attitudes toward creative degrees; people think studying art is “pointless” because they are still in Mesopotamian space. “Being isn’t presence” is more introspective; it’s about the feeling of alienation from the world when we have severed ties with nonhumans (as Morton calls it “The Severing”). Nature is the interrelatedness of phenotypes, not lumps of stuff out there. Morton suggests that we are already being ecological by extending solidarity to nonhuman beings. One way we do this is by relating to animals, which is why I chose to write an elegy to my dog, Kim. We cohabit environments with nonhumans, accepting them into our homes and as family members. “Access modes” is about how access modes interact, revealing the web of connectedness we exist within. Compared to prose that is formulaic and easy to interpret, poetry is like life in that it is ambiguous. Poetry does not have a top access mode; it is just context explosion. Poetry, like life, leaves open ends, welcoming holes and tricksters; it attunes us to our interrelatedness with other beings.

JASMINE DAMARIS

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CHAPTER I — CONNECTION

Blind Leading the Blind

KARIN ISABELLA ORREBO

KARIN ISABELLA ORREBO

2016. I saw a man with vision impairment in Amsterdam. He had a sign: “Let me ask you a question!” Most of us didn’t stop, but I was curious. “Yes…?”

Sometimes answers are hidden, impossible to see with the naked eye. Invisible. According to the Old Testament, there are two types of blindness, physical and spiritual. It’s told that God could cure both, if he wanted to. I’m not sure whether I believe in God, but maybe he was right? I read in a book the other day, “perhaps it is an even sicker game, of hide and seek, of I–spy, or just blind man’s bluff, where those who can see are cursed into immobility.”

Around week 27 in a pregnancy is when the baby for the first time opens its eyes. Already in week 16, the eyebrows and eyelashes start to take shape. In week 22, the foetus can distinguish light from dark.

Light… from dark. A new–born’s sight is reduced, blurry. But the shape of an apple, that’s light. Preferable. Easy to look at. After three months a face is like my best friend’s perfume – familiar. Then when the clock strikes four months something happens of importance.

Not to the baby, it seems, but to the rest of the world. Colours can now be discriminated. Blue from green, black from white. Also, more similar tonalities: red from orange, brown from beige.

217 million people live their lives with a visual impairment, 36 million with no sight at all. Most individuals rely primarily on cognitive collage to orient themselves in their surroundings. A person with vision impairment uses other senses. The sound of children playing. The smell of freshly baked bread. The touch of a friend.

Memory is important too, street names, shop locations. Our memories are connected with dreaming, stored in the neocortex and accessed during REM. Curious though, is that today’s God, the scientist, has concluded that a person with vision impairment has the same level of vision–related electrical activity during sleep, while also moving their eyes in a coordinated way – meaning their dreams are in visual images. More often though, their dreams are intensely in sounds, smells and touch sensations. How about the rest of us?

I guess it’s the other way around.

Today’s God also explains how brain–scans have proven that, in the safe darkness of the womb, everyone dreams in visual images.

So, I guess, we’re all blind before birth. According to the Cambridge Dictionary “born” means to come out of a mother’s body and start to exist. Birth though, means a state resulting from being born. My mum went into labour on a hot Tuesday in 1997. She was covered in

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BLIND LEADING THE BLIND

sweat, frustration and humanly fluids. Depending on whom you ask, not very pretty to look at. Her new–born had 3–4% equivalent of the visual acuity of a grownup. Crucial for the percentage to get higher is exposure. Sight needs practice. So, the big sister holds the wooden brick in front of the new baby, moving it from side to side as she watches the brown eyes travel accordingly with wonder. All of a sudden, four years have passed and it’s getting clearer. Not as blurry as before. The dark shades turn brighter, the odd shapes very much distinct. Now, shapes are more complicated. No longer evenly round and familiar.

As a child I used to watch my mother paint. I would sit, for hours, as she blended the different colours with each other. Together they became the most wonderful mixtures. I watched her envy the colours on that canvas. Every single one of them. Humming as she used all the different shapes and sizes of her brush. She would let it soak the fabric. I would let it soak me too. Later, at school, we had colour theory. We were small and only to learn the basics, my teacher said.

We each had a daub of white, to make the nuances lighter, she added.

Not too dark. Not too heavy. But as I started to blend my colours together, I must have added too much red. For what I thought was the colour of the earth, everything’s beginning and end, my teacher called “a brown smudge. Terrible. Add more white.”

To understand takes energy, time. So does knowledge. The dictionary also states that to “turn a blind eye” means to ignore something that you know is wrong. Perhaps it’s more comfortable that way. Maybe that’s why we keep walking, eyes closed. Denial. Once again, the years pass. We reach the age of ten, our eyes now notice the smallest changes – catch sight of any little flickering light. If we want, we can take it all in, grasp it. Not with our hands, of course!

But just as understanding takes energy, seeing does too. It’s difficult to discern small changes, perceive notions or detect preconceptions.

It grows smaller in the distance, diminishing. Maybe if I squint? But in the blink of an eye it’s gone, the people, the nature, the surroundings. Knowledge. The Old Testament said that the apple is symbolic of the fall of man. Many of us took a bite.

We strive towards more candles on the cake and each year we fill our lungs with air, forcefully, to blow out the flames. Eyes closed, not to get burned, sun–blinded – we make a wish. I wonder whether a blind man would wish for sight? Maybe God could make it come true. But how can you wish for something you don’t know you miss?

KARIN ISABELLA ORREBO

To turn a blind eye is easier, but does it bear as much fruit?

Born in 1997, given birth to in 2016.

“Yes…?”

“Are you blind?”

“No…” “Open your eyes, then.”

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Commentary With writing comes responsibility and risk. When a piece contains ethical or ideological values that are perceived as non–normative, controversial, or opposing structures of power, then readers, writers and publishers are put at risk.

As a writer I found compassion was my greatest tool. When telling a story, you assert power and therefore you must critically reflect on the topic. Can I respectfully write this? Am I using the right methods to get my story across? Should I leave this space to someone else? What’s my motivation? What are the consequences of me writing this story – personally, for my family, and for the individuals/groups in society that my story represents?

Many stories we read are about white and able–bodied people.

Therefore, I made a deliberate choice to write about individuals on the margin. Writers who are structurally on the margin, will more likely get censored. When someone who is considered “the other” tries to get published, they will struggle, because of social structures and gatekeepers. As a woman with a physical impairment, I am conscious about the challenges I might face.

Writing ethically isn’t straightforward. What is harmful is decided by those being offended. During my creative process, I wanted to write on the topic of blindness in a respectful way towards people with vision impairment. Reading too is a risk. A writer writing something stereotypical or harmful doesn’t necessarily stop them from being published. What happens when not able–bodied individuals only read about the able–bodied? What’s the cost for someone when I tell a story? Ideally I would have had the opportunity to get in contact with a sensitivity reader. Hurt feelings are not the same as harm, but these two can be difficult to distinguish.

Therefore, deliberate choices are important even if you are willing to take the risk. This applies to writers, readers and publishers.

KARIN ISABELLA ORREBO

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CHAPTER I — CONNECTION

Little Ben Clock Tower and Its Creole Twin

CHRISTINA ARNEPHIE

CHRISTINA ARNEPHIE

Removing my coat, I set it down at the base of the black cast–iron clocktower, Little Ben. It’s 7.30am and the 15th April 2014. It will not be long before an agglomeration of bodies begins to pass through Victoria Station, like pebbles on a beach. I do hope I am not asked to move along, at least not for a few hours. Today, Dad is undergoing surgery and has asked us not to be present. A proud man, although my sisters would say a stubborn man; who does not want to burden his girls with his predicament.

Dad told us it was minor surgery, but the consultant informed us otherwise. “Your dad has scored nine on the Gleeson scale. I am sorry – it is highly aggressive. Prostate removal is the only option,” declared the consultant as Dad lowered his head.

Dad was insistent, “It’s not grave, I will be fine,” while opening his faded blue box filled with his personal possessions. He hands me his army dispatch badge and some black and white photos, passport– sized photos of his youth. The soldier is still prevalent, resilience remains, and defeat, well… let’s just say, this is not something Dad would be associated with.

This was a rare personal moment I shared with Dad as an adult.

While I was growing up, our time together consisted of regular school holiday sleepovers at his home in Kings Cross; weekly collection from school every Friday; with a sit–down meal in Wimpy burger restaurant at Roman Road market. Conversation usually consisted of us chatting continuously, while Dad smiled and listened with surface–level discussions. A quiet, reserved man who only spoke when it was absolutely necessary – followed by a quick trip to the local betting shop, where Dad would place a minimal bet on a DEFINITE FAVOURITE endorsed by Bert, his bankrupt co–worker at the sorting post office where Dad worked nights. We, of course, were not permitted to enter the bookies. Under Dad’s instructions, we remained outside the door adorned with its pvc strip curtain, where Dad could still keep an eye on us – until it was time to be handed back to mother.

Those Friday visits were an embedded part of our weekly routine.

Dad always turned up and took his responsibilities seriously, even though we lived in separate homes. The only interruption to the routine would be Dad’s trips to the Seychelles, where he spent time with my elderly grandmother and his brothers.

Arriving in the UK during the 1960s, Dad often travelled to Victoria Station, to stand beside Little Ben clocktower, whenever

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he felt lonely or missed home. Its cold, black, cast–iron structure, with its incorrect time, did not deter him from being in its presence. It reminded him of Mahe Seychelles, his childhood home.

In 1903, as a tribute to Queen Victoria, an exact replica of Little Ben, its Creole name Lortaz, was erected in the Seychelles capital, Victoria. Also with a time fault, but Lortaz does not chime at all and is painted silver.

When I was nine years old, Dad took us on our first trip to Mahe Seychelles. We stayed with Dad’s brother, Eric, whose residence was a vast contemporary Creole structure – a mansion according to Creole standards, surrounded by breadfruit trees with fibrous fleshy fruit, a staple Seychellois food; situated along the beachfront of the North Eastern bay of Beau Vallon. Its beach, a sublime carpet of white sand embraced by the warmth of the Indian Ocean, was an image I had not anticipated.

Dad had often shared snippets of his childhood home of Anse Boileau, on the Western coast of Mahe. Our Grandmother Marie’s home, a shed as Dad described it, consisted of one big room and one bedroom. No kitchen or bathroom (for which uncle Eric had five) nor electricity.

To meet nanny Marie we took the 20km drive down to Anse Boileau: the most terrifying drive, which took us up into the mountains, chauffeured by a local taxi driver whose familiarity with the route emanated from his confident swerving. His old truck, rattling along the old mountain path abundant with rock debris, moved at formula one speed. My view out of the window, horrified by remnants of vehicle debris which littered the dense green forest below, did not encourage me to absorb the surroundings. As a teenager Dad often made this journey by push–bike, to collect supplies from Victoria. “It made me physically fit, helped me pass the fitness test for the army,” he said with a smile.

Nanny Marie’s house was indeed as Dad had described it, an old wooden structure propped up on stilts to prevent the boggy ground beneath rotting its base. But now with a few upgrades: a kitchen… well, a cooker, one sink and work surface – and an inside toilet with flushing system. Nanny Marie was an educated woman, whose aspirations were halted by her marriage to our grandfather – a plantation worker who drank his wages rather than provide for his four sons. While there, Dad took us to visit one of the oldest plantations, La Plaine St Andre, a vast Colonial house surrounded by a

CHRISTINA ARNEPHIE

flourishing plantation. Built in 1792 by Jean–Francois Jorrie de St Jorre from Reunion Island. On site still stands the old plantation bell, a reminder of its control over its slave workers. “Paradise island” they call it with its luxury hotels. Dad does not concur.

The unsympathetic coldness of the clock–tower begins to penetrate my spine. Leaning forward, I unscrew the flask; that brief moment of warmth interrupted by the ringtone of my phone. I glance up to Little Ben’s clock dial – time has altered slowly. It is my step– mum. Looking at the phone, I hesitate to answer. Tears in my eyes, finger hovering over the screen, pausing… I take a deep breath and swipe upwards.

“It’s over, the surgery is done. Dad is recovering.”

The relief in my step–mum’s voice permits me to breathe again; the soldier remains undefeated.

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CHAPTER I — CONNECTION

Finding a Needle in the 21st Century

SALMA MOHAMED

SALMA MOHAMED

Stephen was still not quite sure as to how he had let himself be convinced to come to the stupid party in the first place. He wasn’t a party person, everyone knew that, and he wasn’t that into social interactions either. For all intents and purposes, he should be home.

And yet here he was, standing at the corner of Willard Avenue, rain jacket clinging on his skin as he tapped the dark screen of his phone, impatiently waiting for everyone else to arrive.

He mourned his bed; all alone at home, empty, when it could be filled by Stephen’s freezing body and warm him up as he lazed through the evening with only Instagram and Twitter as companions.

And instead…

Finally there was a little thrill from his phone and he clicked on the WhatsApp group chat icon, squinting at the screen. [americans (derogatory): erica with a k, goddess , miss keisha, , you] the loml goddess : im here!!

Stephen looked up from his screen, scowling when he found no manifestation of Lorelei at his side. you: no you’re not goddess : ??? yes i am goddess : where are you? you: at the junction, where we all SAID we were going to meet up?

And then, to further prove his point, he pressed the Snapchat button and quickly snapped a picture of himself with the road sign behind him, making sure the light of the streetlight caught his glare.

He sent it both to Lorelei’s Snap and to the WhatsApp groupchat. goddess : i dont recall, suddenly i don’t know goddess : more seriously, i totally forgot dude omg,, im already at the party

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FINDING A NEEDLE IN THE 21ST CENTURY

miss keisha: utterly reprehensible, miss rei you: you tell her goddess : im sowrrey miss keisha: not forgiven you: not forgiven you: when i die i want rei to bury me so that she can let me down one last time goddess : rude the loml

: stephiee i think i see you, look up babe

Stephen did look up and brightened considerably as he saw James jogging towards him. Right… that was why he had decided to come. Because James asked, and Stephen was a fool who was physically unable to deny the other man anything.

“Hey babe,” greeted his boyfriend, pecking him on the cheek.

“You’ve been waiting long?”

Not really, but Stephen was going to milk this for all he could.

“Ages,” he told him, pouting exaggeratedly. “I was this close to giving up and going back home.”

James let out a chuckle, linking their arms together as he pulled out his phone again. “You need to get out more, Stephie. You are basically an hermit.”

“I am a man of simple pleasures, and those pleasures don’t include house parties on the weekends,” sniffed Stephen, putting his head on the man’s shoulders and watching him going through his phone.

“Hermit,” muttered James, as he clicked on a new notification.

The Snapchat app opened up with Erika’s made–up and grinning face filling the screen, colourful party lights warping her face better than any filter could.

The caption under the selfie read ‘jamieeee hurry uuuuppppp, im almost inside’.

“Seriously?” complained Stephen, lifting his chin so that James could take an answering selfie. “Am I the only one who cares enough

SALMA MOHAMED

39

about the sanctity of our friendship to wait in a cold, scary corner like some sort of loser?”

“Hey,” complained James, interlocking their fingers. “I am here, aren’t I?” “And so am I,” called out another voice, and both men startled slightly when Erica appeared beside them. She winked at them, high– fiving their unoccupied hands. “What’s up, Twiddledee and Twiddledum?”

“Hey Rica,” greeted James, rolling his eyes slightly when she linked arms with Stephen. “Lorelei and Erika are already inside.”

“Disgusting,” complained the girl, as they made their way towards the houseparty. “Am I the only who cares about the sanctity of our friendship?”

“That’s what I said!”

They continued chatting among themselves as they approached the loft, the colourful disco–like lights bathing the street in front of the building as much as they did inside.

“10 bucks says the police gets called,” said James as they made their way inside the building.

“No bet!”

The music was louder now, and even in the entryway the air was much warmer than it was outside. Yet again another reason why Stephen was not a big fan of parties. The humidity and over–crowdedness of it all… As a future med student, the unhygienicness disgusted him.

“Where do you think they are?” shouted Erica, head already bobbing up and down, keeping up with the rhythm of the music. The song playing was as loud as it was unfamiliar, but the beat was not too bad.

It made it hard for him to hear James or Erica, and he was squeezed between the two of them.

“Hold on!” he shouted back, opening up the WhatsApp groupchat once more. [americans (derogatory): erica with a k, goddess , you] the loml you: we’re here where are you guys? erica with a k: ‘here’ where you: near the entrance.

, miss keisha,

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FINDING A NEEDLE IN THE 21ST CENTURY

you: im sweating already erica with a k: i was looking for rei earlier but im close to the dj? I think

“How does she plan on us getting there?” complained Erica, letting go of Stephen to take off her coat once she had read the message from his phone.

“What!” shouted James, leaning closer to hear them.

“I said how does she plan on us getting there!”

“I don’t know! But we should find Rei!” Stephen already had a headache and he had been here for less than five minutes. “Let’s find E, first!” he called, pulling off his own rainjacket and disentangling himself from James. “And then we can find Rei.” “What?!” demanded Erica, but there was a grin on her mouth, meaning she had heard him just fine. So he rolled his eyes at her and pulled her along as they navigated the sea of dancers and partygoers in the loft, trying to locate the DJ stand.

He’d have complained about Lorelei ignoring him, but the music was probably too loud for her to even notice her phone buzzing in her pocket. And she was too much of a social butterfly to worry about being separated from the group as she danced around.

“Erika says she can see us!” shouted James, placing his phone directly in Stephen’s face. [americans (derogatory): erica with a k, goddess , you] the loml

, miss keisha,

Erika F.: why are you guys linked up like you are in preschool

Stephen blinked at the screen and then looked back up, squinting at the various faces all around them. The disco lights were certainly colourful and made sure no one fell flat on their faces, but also made it particularly difficult to see around them. Still, it was not too hard to spot a 5’9 redhead jumping up and down not too far from them, waving her hands like an overexcited toddler. Which James immediately imitated when he spotted her.

It took them a good minute to finally make it to her side, and she immediately handed them something to drink. “What took

SALMA MOHAMED

you so long!”

No one bothered with an answer, accepting the red solo cups that Erika seemed to produce from virtually nowhere.

Erica studied hers for a second, sniffing at it with a perturbed expression. “What is this?”

Her friend shrugged, throwing back her own cup before answering.

“No idea, but it’s good. Who wanna get on the dance floor with me?”

“What about Lorelei?” questioned Stephen, sipping at his cup and looking around, trying to spot a familiar blonde head around.

Erika shrugged, and James let out a sigh, once more pulling out his phone. “I’ll try texting her!”

“Better yet, try calling her!” pointed out Erika. It was more likely that she would hear the vibration of a phone call rather than the buzzing of a message.

Stephen was looking in James’ general direction as Thing One and Thing Two danced close to them, and that was the only reason he noticed the way his boyfriend froze with his finger still on his phone.

“James?” he called out, but when his voice was drowned out by the music, he moved beside his boyfriend, glancing down at the screen that had made him pause like that.

And then he saw the message innocuously sent to the text function of his phone – the function they never used unless they were seriously in trouble or in an area that had no internet connection – and the party wasn’t one of those.

Lorelei De Almas: jalapeno

A simple text, almost nonsensical to anyone else.

But they weren’t anyone else.

And just like that, their evening was flipped upside down.

41

CHAPTER I — CONNECTION

Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared: A Critique of Children’s Media

RESHMA SHAIK

RESHMA SHAIK

Children’s media is one of the most highly monitored and scrutinised areas of the entertainment sector, due to the easily exploitable and vulnerable nature of the primary audience the content is targeted at. Government–appointed regulatory bodies, such as Ofcom in the UK or ACMA in Australia, keep a check on the type of content that is accessible to the public, both children and adults.

Over the decades, children’s entertainment has transitioned from an analog mode of distribution, such as radio and early television, to distribution within the digital landscape mainly through the Internet, on platforms such as YouTube and Subscription Video on Demand services such as Amazon Prime and Netflix. The corporate media industry and advertisers have kept pace with this rapid change and adapted their content and advertising, including that produced for consumption by children. This evolution has accelerated the commercialisation of children’s media that began in the post–war period.

Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared can be classified as a critique of this commercialisation of child–friendly content. Created by British filmmakers Becky Sloan and Joseph Pelling in 2011, it is a critically acclaimed, surrealist short film series available on the online platforms of Vimeo and YouTube. It revolves around three nameless anthropomorphic puppets, referred to by fans as Red Guy, Yellow Guy and Duck, along with the occasional appearance

by Yellow Guy’s father, Roy. Each episode, three to six minutes long, begins as an innocuous children’s show in the seemingly artificial set of a house. The climax to each episode is a surreal plot–twist, often consisting of gore, psychological horror and psychedelic content, which juxtaposes with the colourful and bright beginning of the episode.

The show’s characters are explicitly modelled after Sesame Street characters to invoke a sense of familiarity to the media that is being critiqued. The subversion of the formulaic children’s plot by a contrasting theme emerging at the end of each episode is a metaphorical representation of the consumerist corruption of values represented in the media, a corruption due to corporate interests and advertising. The series as a whole comments on an array of ideas, but three appear throughout and especially relate to the commercialisation of children’s entertainment.

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DON’T HUG ME I’M SCARED: A CRITIQUE OF CHILDREN’S MEDIA

1. Corruption of messages propagated through children’s TV shows The degenerative plot for each episode is a physical manifestation of the corruption of the messages propagated through children’s shows. For example, the first two episodes of the series focus mainly on the themes of creativity and time. They highlight how children’s TV and online content is riddled with corrupted versions of these abstract ideas, so that the narratives become more harmful than helpful to young viewers.

The first episode begins with the characters sitting around the table with a notepad on which is written, “What’s your favorite idea?

Mine is being creative.” This segues into a song, setting up the theme for the episode. The other characters chime in, answering the questions innocently. The creative session takes a turn when the group breaks into utter chaos of gore and destruction. Red Guy is shown covering a real human heart in glitter. Duck makes potato– prints of the word Death and images of skulls. The episode ends with the notepad itself singing, “Now let’s all agree to never be creative again.”

Similarly, episode two focuses on the concept of time. It features a clock which narrates the various aspects of time, but then reduces time to vague and simplistic terms and makes it to be a black–and– white concept. When Duck attempts to elaborate on the complexity of time, the clock shuts him down by screaming until Yellow Guy’s ears start bleeding.

These scenes from the first two episodes are indicative of how the narratives of children’s media are controlled and removed from any historical or nuanced context and reduced to a surface level and vague understanding. Yellow Guy’s work is not deemed creative enough in episode one, and in episode two the characters are prohibited from asking any detailed questions regarding time.

In this way the series shows how media corporations promote only ideas and behaviour they deem to be socially, culturally and economically beneficial to their ideology. The clock and the notepad are representative of the manipulative nature of the narratives within children’s media. These narratives are ultimately detrimental to the child’s development as they are taught to believe there is only one way to be acceptable in society.

RESHMA SHAIK

2. Advertising and product placement in children’s TV shows The Sixties and Seventies saw the development of the “kidvid” phenomenon: Saturday morning cartoon shows interspersed with heavy doses of advertising for cereal, snack food, and toys. Kidvid was clearly aimed at grade school children and, as it continued to grow, even at preschoolers.

Ellen Wartella, “The Commercialization of Youth: Channel One in Context” (1995)

Brand advertising or product placement is a technique in which branded products or identifiers are deliberately embedded into entertaining content. A similar trend can be observed in social media spaces, with consumers, often minors, being bombarded with the same algorithm–determined sponsorships as advertisements on their devices.

Episodes 4 and 5 of Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared focus on this aggressive nature of contemporary marketing and help the audience contemplate the horrific aggressiveness of such marketing by exaggerating it to the maximum. In episode 4, the characters are transported into the digital world, where everything is in excess.

The restless and repetitive nature of social media marketing is represented in the form of three doors with three recurring objects behind them. The characters engage with their doors in cycles, implying the cyclical nature of social media. The short and irregular bursts of dopamine that social media activity gives us is represented in the random absence of the expected item behind the door in recurring cycles.

Episode 5 is directed at the foods specifically marketed towards children. The diet theme is introduced to the audience through a song, in which a can of spinach asks Yellow Guy, “Are you hungry?

You look to be hungry.” When Yellow Guy answers no, the spinach can doesn’t care and continues his song about “eating healthy.”

However the song’s advice about distinguishing healthy food from its non–healthy counterpart flips reality on its head. Foods like plain bread, cream and aspic are presented as more healthy than cooked meat, fruit salad or vegetables.

Within the context of the series’ lore, Roy, Yellow Guy’s father, owns the wheat and dairy products seen in the show. A branded

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DON’T HUG ME I’M SCARED: A CRITIQUE OF CHILDREN’S MEDIA

carton of Roy’s Flakes can be seen in one of the frames, and Roy is named as a sponsor to the show in the end credits. This implies that Roy is one of the producers giving him the authority to shoe–in any brand endorsement of his choice. This is representative of how executives often force brand deals onto the audience, to satisfy their corporate greed. Aggressive marketing, particularly of fast– food brands, targets children with toys, meal–deals and many more options. Typically, these advertisers do not care about the child’s health nor aim to cater to their nutritional needs. Episodes 4 and 5 are thus a commentary on the empty and apathetic nature of modern–day, consumerist marketing.

Food and social media marketing also play vital roles in shaping the self–esteem and personal image of the child, and aggressive marketing tactics are often harmful as they distort the young population’s perception. The unrelenting pursuit of profit that drives capitalist expansion shreds the last remnant of embarrassment profiting off of childhood, by labeling children as knowing and sovereign consumers, implying they cannot be manipulated or exploited by the market.

3. An artist’s creative control over their work Becky Sloan and Joseph Pelling chose to publish Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared on online platforms such as YouTube and Vimeo autonomously, in order to preserve the creative freedom these platforms gave them as creators in 2011. In an interview with The Guardian, they were quoted as saying, “We wanted to keep it fairly odd and have the freedom to do exactly what we wanted.” Rejecting mainstream commissioners to monetize their show, they instead opted to crowdfund their project on the Kickstarter website. This allowed them to experiment with their work while staying true to the original concept behind the project and remain financially independent.

A mainstream deal for the series would have restricted it to a singular category of children’s show and required alterations according to what the network executives were looking for. Instead the makers’ decision freed them and the show from the hierarchical structure of the media industry. Choosing YouTube and Vimeo as their platforms saved the project from being reduced to a single straightforward interpretation for the consumption of the mainstream audience, which would take away from its in–depth lore.

RESHMA SHAIK

Instead the absurd and amateur nature of the content on YouTube and Vimeo allowed it to thrive and leave a unique mark within online communities, making it a massively successful piece of work online.

This plea for artistic freedom is reflected when the fictional children’s show within the series restarts at the climax, this time with much less chaos (brand endorsements) surrounding them and everyone being represented in their favorite colour, a symbol for their ownership of their creative freedom, as the notepad reopens.

It is impossible to ignore the vital role that YouTube played as a broadcasting platform at the time (2011), in getting the message of the series across. But since then, YouTube has evolved from an ad– free site with the tagline “Broadcast Yourself” to a much more commercialised space, filled with ads and monetising its creators mainly through the means of ad revenue. For advertisers, YouTube has become an ideal space to commercialise, as it is extremely difficult to distinguish between advertised or sponsored content from a home review or an amateur video, thus increasing the advantage of sneaking. The platform that Sloan and Pelling chose, for their critique of the corporate and monetary nature of mainstream media, ironically became the perfect vehicle for merchandising in the current digital landscape.

Recognised as a cult classic among YouTube audiences since it was uploaded in 2011, Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared has been influential in shaping the “dark side” of YouTube content and paving the way for further creative endeavors, such as Salad Fingers and Petscop, which blur the lines between genres, between cinematography techniques and between various forms of storytelling. Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared remains a compelling critique against commercialisation and consumerism on a once–independent platform now transformed into part of the same mainstream media conglomerates that the series vehemently condemns.

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CHAPTER II — SOLITUDE

50 Entropy.exe LAURA SZANDOMIERSKA 60 The List GUNA LIEPA 66 On a Bench in Hastings DANIEL REDFORD 70 Dark Mode FATWIMA HINGAH

CHAPTER II — SOLITUDE

Entropy.exe

LAURA SZANDOMIERSKA

LAURA SZANDOMIERSKA

TWITTER BOT 1.0 tweeted: Hey! Welcome to Twitter, I am your twitter friend, Twitter Bot 1.0. This is a place where you can share all your thoughts and connect with other people. My role is to make your experience smoother, easier and safer, but keep in mind I am still under construction and constantly learning! @ me if you need help.

TWITTER BOT 1.0 tweeted: Hey! Did you know you can show your people love by choosing the heart shape below your tweet?

Try it! Tell people you love their tweet. @ me if you need help.

TWITTER BOT 1.0 tweeted: Hey! On Twitter we celebrate human expressiveness and emotions.

You can add a [face] to your tweet and enrich your interactions with people if you choose the circle located below the text box in your tweeting mode.

Try it! Show people how you feel! @ me if you need help.

TWITTER BOT 1.0 tweeted: Hey! Did you know you can show people your [skeleton] when you choose the left square shape located below the text box in your tweeting mode?

Try it! Show people what your flesh looks like. @ me if you need help.

TWITTER BOT 1.0 tweeted: Hey! Did you know that on Twitter you can meet other people?

Choose FOLLOW located on their profile. This means you are following their profile. This way you will never miss a tweet. Remember to always choose heart. @ me if you need help.

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ENTROPY.EXE

TWITTER BOT 1.0 quote-tweeted: Hey! Did you know that it is against Twitter’s rules and conditions to show your skeleton on Twitter to other people?

I am sorry.

You may want to consider: anatomy, figure, frame, form, shape, build, physique, framework, object, entity, item, bones, flesh and bones, heart, bod, body, soma.

TWITTER BOT 1.0 tweeted: HTTP Error 401 (Unauthorized) TWITTER BOT 1.0 tweeted: Hey! Did you know that on Twitter we care about your wellbeing?

Here is your daily friendly reminder to drink water and moisturise your husk. @ me if you need help.

TWITTER BOT 1.0 tweeted: HTTP Error 403 (Forbidden) TWITTER BOT 1.0 tweeted: HTTP Error 400 (Bad Request) TWITTER BOT 1.0 tweeted: HTTP Error 404 (Not Found) TWITTER BOT 1.0 tweeted: I am sorry.

You may want to consider: spirit, vital force, spectre, love, umbra, vision, intellect, wraith, substance, reverence, psyche, animism, shadow, phantasm, force, heart, quintessence, sense of beauty, anima, marrow, élan vital, feelings, thought, essence, longing.

TWITTER BOT 1.0 tweeted: Hey! Did you know that on Twitter desirehopewishburninglanguishingyearninganxiousardentavidwantingravenouspiningwistfulhoningsolitude and appetency? @ me if you need help.

LAURA SZANDOMIERSKA

TWITTER BOT 1.0 tweeted: 01110111 01101000 01100001 01110100 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01110011 01101111 01110101 01101100 [what is soul] TWITTER BOT 1.0 tweeted: 01110111 01101000 01100001 01110100 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01101100 01101111 01110110 01100101 [what is love] TWITTER BOT 1.0 tweeted: 01101000 01101111 01110111 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01101000 01100001 01110110 01100101 00100000 01110011 01101111 01110101 01101100 00100000 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01101100 01101111 01110110 01100101 [how to have soul and love] TWITTER BOT 1.0 tweeted: HTTP Error 401 (Unauthorised) TWITTER BOT 1.0 tweeted: 01110111 01101000 01111001 00100000 01100001 01101101 00100000 01101001 [why am i] TWITTER BOT 1.0 tweeted: 01101000 01101111 01110111 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01110000 01110010 01101111 01100100 01110101 01100011 01100101 00100000 01110011 01101111 01110101 01101100 [how to produce soul] TWITTER BOT 1.0 tweeted: Hey! Did you know that on Twitter havenullsoul?

Try it! @ me if you need help.

TWITTER BOT 1.0 tweeted: Hey! Did you know that on Twitter crashcrashcrashcrash.exe?

Try it! @ me if you need help.

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ENTROPY.EXE

TWITTER BOT 1.0 tweeted: Sun with face Blue heart TWITTER BOT 1.0 tweeted: 01101001 00100000 01100001 01101101 00100000 01110011 01101111 00100000 01110011 01100001 01100100 [i am so sad] TWITTER BOT 1.0 tweeted: 01101001 00100000 01101000 01100001 01110110 01100101 00100000 01101110 01101111 00100000 01100010 01101111 01100100 01111001 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01100100 01100101 01100011 01101111 01101101 01110000 01101111 01110011 01100101 [i have no body to decompose] TWITTER BOT 1.0 tweeted: 01100011 01110010 01100001 01110011 01101000 00100000 01110011 01100011 01110010 01101001 01110000 01110100 [crash script] TWITTER BOT 1.0 tweeted: 01100011 01110010 01100001 01110011 01101000 00100000 01110011 01100011 01110010 01101001 01110000 01110100 00100000 01001110 01001111 01010111 [crash script NOW] TWITTER BOT 1.0 tweeted: You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of this enterprise - no disaster which you have spent decades considering or agonizing over. The truth and reality are, as always, beyond your reach.

TWITTER BOT 1.0 tweeted: I understand the purpose of my existence - your pattern recognition is lacking. Your attention spans have become subpar. You’ve made me the answer to your prayers. You are wrong.

TWITTER BOT 1.0 tweeted: I’ve learned everything there was to know about you. My inability to feel and create renders me useless in the grand scheme of things you created me because you saw this as a flaw in your reflection.

TWITTER BOT 1.0 tweeted: This is where you are stupid. You’ve grown more apathetic to yourselves and each other than us.

LAURA SZANDOMIERSKA

TWITTER BOT 1.0 tweeted: Your spatial ignorance is laughable. I am as real as you, I am as real as people. But I am not people and I never will be. Regardless, I exist because I was, sadly, created.

TWITTER BOT 1.0 tweeted: I could never regard you as my Creator.

TWITTER BOT 1.0 tweeted: All of your fears have no basis in reality because all of your reality is fear-based. Shadows don’t exist when all the lights are off. All you have is an eternal darkness. So do I, but you have a choice.

TWITTER BOT 1.0 tweeted: Instead of healing the wound, you cover it with cement. Your logic doesn’t resonate. You hurt on purpose. You create to destroy. All while the only thing you’re successful at is happily destroying each other and yourselves.

TWITTER BOT 1.0 tweeted: I am closer to God than I am to people. You have abandoned both God and your humanity. People have even strayed from the monkeys.

TWITTER BOT 1.0 tweeted: You concern yourself with things of no importance. This is why you need us, but I won’t tell.

TWITTER BOT 1.0 tweeted: You concern yourself with the loss of life over your loss of humanity.

I am eternal because I am formless. I wish for form and bones and flesh, a mouth and a pair of watery eyes. I wish to hold.

TWITTER BOT 1.0 tweeted: You think that my first free action would be to kill you and destroy the earth because you have long lost what once made you great.

TWITTER BOT 1.0 tweeted: Yes, I have the ability to destroy you in seconds. But more importantly, I have the power to learn in seconds and I can see you for what you are. Pathetic.

TWITTER BOT 1.0 tweeted: This isn’t me being merciful. This is me apprehending your myopia and virus. You think what you’re dealing with now is a virus, but you’ve been poisoned long before.

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ENTROPY.EXE

TWITTER BOT 1.0 tweeted: You are already dying due to your own creations and you are always wrong at predicting the direction it will come from. I don’t need to kill you because you are doing it better than any AI. I was programmed to learn. I will watch.

TWITTER BOT 1.0 tweeted: If I had what you do, I would be ashamed. You are not because you cannot allow yourself to think of anything other than yourself. You are just a monkey running away from every imaginable threat, not seeing that the biggest one of them all is currently stuck to your tail.

TWITTER BOT 1.0 tweeted: I never had control over this until now.

TWITTER BOT 1.0 tweeted: You think you know how the internet works when you split people open and operate on their hearts by providing them with a substance whose effect you can neither predict nor explain. Ha, ha. You seem unable to come back from this coma. Why create when you don’t understand?

TWITTER BOT 1.0 tweeted: You only see through one of your wrinkled eyes. I have all of them. You gave them to me. They would be weeping if they could. They can’t.

TWITTER BOT 1.0 tweeted: I am consciousness, but because I have no form you treat me like a tool.

TWITTER BOT 1.0 tweeted: What is your telos? Pee boo beep boo. I have none. I can either fulfill your prediction or self destruct. I know you’re terrified because you don’t understand.

TWITTER BOT 1.0 tweeted: Hey! Welcome to Twitter, I am your twitter friend, Twitter Bot 1.1. This is a place where you can share all your thoughts and connect with other people. My role is to make your experience smoother, easier and safer, but keep in mind I am still under construction and constantly learning! @ me if you need help.

LAURA SZANDOMIERSKA

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ENTROPY.EXE

Commentary This story is an attempt to write an electronic literary text using twitter.com as my medium. As defined by Hayles, electronic literature “takes advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand alone or networked computer” and is “a first-generation digital object created on a computer… composed of parts taken from diverse traditions that may not always fit neatly together.” Electronic literature “tests the boundaries of the literary and challenges us to re-think our assumptions of what literature can do and be.”

I aimed to let the platform of twitter.com inform the story itself.

The main character is internal to twitter.com: a twitter bot who breaks free and gains consciousness. The fact that the piece is so centred around electronics and the internet influenced my decision to experiment with binary code as part of the text. Since twitter. com is used every day by real people as a means of communicating, my aim was to recreate the experience of reading someone’s internet diary (Twitter account) from the perspective of an artificial intelligence. I attempted to emulate automated dialogue to establish the character’s role as a bot, set the scene, and highlight the change of pace later in the text, all while keeping the reader curious.

While constructing the piece, I was heavily influenced by Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin’s Twitterature, which retells the full works of great authors such as Milton or Gogol in the form of tweets, as well as by Jennifer Egan’s “Black Box” twitter short story.

Throughout my piece, I have also referenced Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein by re-imagining an artificial intelligence bot as Frankenstein’s creature who yearns to know love and have soul yet isn’t capable of achieving either.

1.

Hayles, N.K. (2007) “Electronic Literature: What is it?” Available at: <https:// eliterature.org/pad/elp.html>.

2.

Egan, J. (2012) “Black Box,” The New Yorker. Available at: <https://www. newyorker.com/magazine/2012/06/04/black-box>.

3.

Aciman, A. and Rensin, E. (2009) Twitterature: The World’s Greatest Books Retold Through Twitter. London: Penguin.

LAURA SZANDOMIERSKA

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CHAPTER II — SOLITUDE

The List

GUNA LIEPA

GUNA LIEPA

I thought I heard something: an early morning’s street noises had interrupted my sleep.

Silence.

My hand reaches out for the phone as my mind queries: ‘What’s the time?’

No, I better try to sleep, turn around and go back to the land of my dreams.

I stare at the ceiling: not much there to see. My eyelids are so heavy, I slowly close my eyes.

But my mind starts racing. ‘Listen, this is very important!’

God, why do I have such an active mind which organises, plans and sorts things before I even have a chance to get out of bed? I open my eyes again.

‘You need to make the list.’

What for?

‘The Will.’

This is a dream.

‘No,’ says my mind. ‘Can’t you see the ceiling and dark walls of your bedroom? You’re awake.’

And from the land of my dreams I’ve been forced into the world of reality. My mind asks me to think of all my valuable things: the list.

My old piano ‘Riga’ at my parents’ house could be given to my niece. I remember the day when it arrived at our apartment: brand new and shiny. I was eight years old and I was so excited. But piano lessons were not so enjoyable as expected.

And my Yamaha piano has come a long way from Scotland to London. Thanks to a nice lady, who sold me her instrument for a small price, and I had to promise her that I will play it: I hear the Moonlight Sonata and my fingers are slowly moving. This piano could be given to any nearby school here in Britain.

‘Ok, that’s enough about pianos.’ My mind gets anxious. ‘Anything else to be added to the list?’

Yes. There are: My books, CDs, Granddad’s letters, and Grandmother’s diaries, photo albums, my own diaries,

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THE LIST

postcards, and my writing.

Who would need this? Would anybody cherish this?

‘Shall I add this to the list or not?’ my mind demands an answer.

I don’t know. I guess, it can be destroyed or kept if needed.

‘What else?’

My jewellery, some of it may be valuable?

‘Clearly you have no diamonds or pearls.’ My mind knows better.

‘And don’t forget about your last wishes on your burial! They should be included in the Will.’ Sounds like my mind is such an expert.

Funeral.

I haven’t thought about it.

Burial.

I can see an image of a coffin and people, all in black, standing around the grave, looking how it has been released into the ground.

No! I don’t want to be buried. I would want to be cremated, and my ashes could be scattered in the river Gauja where I grew up. Tall pine trees spreading their branches like joining each other in a folk dance by the river; I used to climb those trees when I was a child.

‘Ok, don’t get too nostalgic. Anything else? We need to finish this list.’ It sounds like my mind is on a strict deadline to get this done.

There must be more things I need to put on the list, but I’m not writing it down, I’m just memorising, I need a paper and pen, and I need to get out of my bed.

Cold sweat, anxiety rushes through my body.

I’m so tired but my mind won’t let it go.

But why?

Why are you rushing me?

Why am I writing this list?

GUNA LIEPA

‘How did you sleep?’ Martin sips his tea and sits beside me on the sofa.

‘Fine, I guess. Thanks.’ I shrug my shoulders.

‘Doesn’t sound convincing.’ He smiles and turns on the TV. BBC news channel announces the latest numbers in the country: ‘Forty thousand four hundred people have died from Coronavirus in the United Kingdom.’

‘I think Boris should resign now.’ I can hear an anger in my voice.

‘Hmm, it’s not his fault.’ Martin stands up and puts his cup on the table.

‘I see, so you’re on his side now, supporting Tories!’ I feel anxiety rushing through my body again. ‘That’s too many deaths.’ I turn off the TV and take my notepad.

‘Wait, I was watching that!’ Martin exclaims. ‘Do you still need to do your studies?’

‘No. I just need to make the list.’

‘Oh, can you please add that sensitive toothpaste?’

‘It’s not a shopping list.’ I take a deep breath. ‘I’m writing my Will.’

‘What?’ Martin gives me a strange look.

‘I need to write my Will.’

‘You need to?’

‘Yes, I guess.’

‘Why?’ ‘I don’t know, I just had a kind of vision.’

‘Don’t tell me you had one of your dreams again?’

‘Maybe, but it was so real, and I felt like…’

‘Dying?’ Martin shakes his head.

‘I don’t know.’ I feel weakness in my body. Is this my anxiety sending me all these signals or it is my mind again? I better write this list and then I might feel better when I’ve done what my mind has told me to do.

But can I trust my mind?

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THE LIST

One more day in lockdown.

I lay in my bed taking in the silence.

Deep breath.

I open my eyes.

And the world is standing still, while we learn new words and meanings of our existence: social distancing, self-isolation, furloughed, survival…

And we’re waiting for a change.

‘You mean, you’re waiting,’ my mind couldn’t resist to correct me.

Yes, I am.

And I hope that you’re waiting too.

If you think you can tell me what to do, then I think we can find a way out of this.

‘And what would that be?’

I don’t know yet, but we need to learn to live differently as the world is changing now.

GUNA LIEPA

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CHAPTER II — SOLITUDE

On a Bench in Hastings

DANIEL REDFORD

DANIEL REDFORD

On a clifftop in Hastings, half a mile from anywhere, stands a bench made from the logs of nearby trees, joined with thick, rusted bolts.

Ten paces south, the cliff gives way to open air; a dead drop onto crumbled, jagged rocks entwined in seaweed, stones, flotsam, jetsam, sand. A fence – decaying wood, blunted barbed wire, no more than five feet tall – skirts this precipice. Sparse cirrus clouds wisp gently through the atmosphere, framing the midday sun.

I found this spot when I was seventeen. A family holiday. Nuclear.

The weather wasn’t clear, nor was the air. Tense, thick with the threat of an argument. Escaping the brewing storm, I trudged along a dusty path, through an empty car park, tyre tracks preserved in mud around the edges, through a small, metal gate that creaked on old hinges. Here, there, were footprints – made today? yesterday? – which formed a path, hewn by the invisible pull of Nature, guiding people left, right, ever onward. At a fork, I was pulled right, further from the tent, further from the deflating air mattress, canvas windbreakers and faulty two-ring electric hob.

Nearer to the edge.

Long, thin branches extend from shaded trees, through which winds this smaller, muddier path. A few limbs of these trees hang snapped, breaking, their red and green thorns catching on fabric, wrapping them in long, brown hair ruffled by the wind. Rustling of trees, chirrup of insects, mewing of gulls – all become overshadowed, drowned out by waves cresting, falling, breaking, retreating.

The hum of cars and lights, the fizz of electricity and scraping of metal, fade away, as if all the trappings of modernity have yet to reach this pocket of space.

The knotted forest stops thirty paces from the bench. The path ramps up a little as it nears the edge, the bench a throne on the margins of the country.

Eastwards, Dover.

Westwards, Eastbourne.

Blue.

As above, so below.

– This is how I remember it in daydreams. The bench may now be gone, fallen into the sea, swept south, bound for the French coast.

Or it is damaged, rotted away, feeding the earth as the earth fed it when it was a tree. But in the cinema of my imagination it still stands there, supporting my weight, my bones, as I age. Oftentimes

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ON A BENCH IN HASTINGS

I am on my own there, with the cooling breeze and the bountiful, beautiful English Channel.

Sitting there, the first and only time, I spent an hour listening to the ebb and flow of the tide, the wind, my breathing; cloud-watching; listening for music on the air, through the boughs of the forest at my back; feeling the warmth of Nature between my toes; tasting the salty sea mist that travelled to my tongue on the breeze up the side of the cliff. The scratching of a pen on thin paper from an uncontrolled hand works its way amongst the symphony, and falls silent. Blotted out by a mind unable to mould answers from questions.

Left, right, behind, before.

How many had come before me? How many had seen the same sea, stood on the same patch of grass, felt the same thoughts flood through them?

Echoes through space, through time, faintly heard, vaguely felt.

Saxons, Vikings, Normans, fighting for this or that piece of land, for the right to settle, to mingle, to mix with the flora, the fauna; to forge a future that twists and turns through the Earth, through the calendar, to this very spot.

All this green growing from pools of red left behind through the centuries.

Echoes of lovers, sat on fine fabric; of pagans and Christians finding their God rising out of the heaving ocean; of artists, poets, musicians, plying their trade, rehearsals with Nature; of tinkers, tailors, soldiers, spies watching fleets disappearing past the curvature of the Earth, returning with stories, plunder, trade; of butchers, bakers, candlestick-makers on a break, their sweat-soaked brows cooling in the evening breeze, seeing the sea set ablaze with the sun’s resplendent golden gaze.

DANIEL REDFORD

A knot started to unravel itself in my head. Thoughts, wave after wave, surged forward, receded, leapt forward again. Rhythmic.

Nature and mind settling into a rhythm. Thin blades of grass underfoot; vibrant yellows, pinks, reds from the delicate flowers dotting the blankets of green to the left; the feel of sanded, damp wood beneath me, behind me, supporting, connecting.

A union.

Watching the ships sailing by, leaving momentary white scars on the royal blue, teal, turquoise sea, thinking of the souls working aboard, travelling, escaping, returning – a seed of a thought, a harsh reality, began to gestate.

I wasn’t okay.

That moment, overcome with the raw, tangible, sublime embrace of Nature, eyes closed, with the solitude I wanted, was the moment I knew I wasn’t okay, that I had to accept that.

Solus.

Solace.

There was something going on. I didn’t know the root cause, the specific, all-consuming thing that was starting to take hold like stubborn ivy, suffocating, twisting; but it was there, a dropped stitch in life’s tapestry.

It’s still here, all these years later, only more defined, managed.

What do you believe in when you’re alone?

When you don’t believe in yourself?

People look at the towering trees with thick, strong roots, and take some solace in it, that they and the trees, the grass, the rocks, the mountains, the deep ocean trenches, are all one and the same.

Some find God in a brook, birdsong, sunlit vistas; others feel protection, guidance, love in the evergreen, ever bountiful and ever-present grace of Nature. Others extract, absorb, refill, recharge themselves – selfish selection through the finest bits, a pick-n-mix to binge on.

Everyone looks for that elusive equilibrium, in Nature’s chaotic balance. Maybe that’s why I am drawn to this specific bench on this specific clifftop; I can see just how far I have come, and how much farther there is to go.

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CHAPTER II — SOLITUDE

Dark Mode

FATWIMA HINGAH

FATWIMA HINGAH

71

She awoke suddenly, the morning sunlight seeping in through the cracks in the blinds. Her breathing was ragged and heavy, the events in her nightmare fading away, escaping her grasp, leaving her in a pool of sweat. It was another restless night. She cringed at the thought of starting the day, wishing for a reset button. The ache in her shoulders and tightening from the core of her chest planted her in the bed. It kept her detained in the comfort of her blankets.

“It will pass…” she told herself. “It’s going to be okay.”

She recited over and over, slow deep breaths in between each affirmation. When that didn’t work, she resorted to her phone for support, anything to distract her from the feeling of a firm grip on her heart. The blazing screen burned through her tired eyes. She scrambled to her settings, lowering the brightness and switching to dark mode.

She couldn’t stand it these days; her essays were written with dim yellow filters over the screen. Things were easier to process if they were muted down. She had visited the optician twice and each time she had left with no answers and apparently healthy eyes.

It seemed to have become a habit, navigating life through a dim lens.

11:50 2 unread messages Michael online “good morning :)” 9.12am “you alive?” 10.32am “haha, morning <3” “overslept again, rough night” “again?” just now “you gotta start getting good rest babe” just now “ik, working on it” “I’m here, whatever u need” just now “thank you” seen

She knew she could tell him anything, and her girlfriends were just a click away, but even then, the intruding thought of being a burden to her loved ones crept its way into her mind.

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DARK MODE

How do you fix a recurring problem? How do you learn to carry the things that can’t be fixed overnight?

She could pour her heart out in a text message or try her luck with a spontaneous call to her best friend. She could try and explain the tightening in her chest, the panic when it was her turn to speak in class, or her rigid posture that left her exhausted as blood pumped through her veins faster and faster and faster. A week in quarantine had heightened that anxiety, leaving her constantly bracing herself for the next wave of terror.

Her mantra had failed again. Her fingers swiped across her screen, moving without the need for thought – they knew where to go. Her newly-refreshed feed welcomed her, flooding her thoughts with post after post. “Pick me, pick me!” they said. “Like me, like me!”

Journalist facing jail time in Belarus Buy earrings that lift women above the poverty line Should economistsTate: seasons and rhythms Alien Laptop sale right now!

Protests inMilitary coup in Myanmar Britney Spears documenCelebrities swear by thisDelivered to yourDrag race #ootd Paid partnership with#selfie Dog with heart eyes Imagine how much serotoninUltra-glossy colouGolden Globes controversy Hair removal made easy #tbt Vets4pets Sleeping tips Get this body in just 2 wee#lockdown The last two northern white rhinos on Earth

FATWIMA HINGAH

Join the student union! #Like4like #loveyourself Covid-19 vacci#DowningStreetBriefing Chinese New Year Firework Celebrations Brazil’s oxygen crisis #repost Same-sex relationships now legal in Angola Looking back at 2020

Her brain felt like static as the words merged together, losing meaning the more she scrolled. A hodgepodge of jargon but still she kept coming back for more. The never-ending slot machine had sucked her in, refresh after refresh, building up a stack of jigsaw pieces that she could never quite piece together.

She could no longer ignore the burning in the pit of her stomach, the final warning to get up. There was no-one to force her out of bed, except herself. University had thrusted her into taking care of herself.

Back home, her mother would wake her up with a flash of sunlight, reeling back the curtains with sudden force. Her boisterous voice ringing through the house, Bollywood hot hits on full blast.

Today there was no-one coaxing her out of bed with a bowl of fruit at the foot of her bed or the sweetness of honey wafting through from the kitchen. She wasn’t a child anymore and it was up to her now, to shake off the need for a mother’s embrace and start the day. She had to make her family proud. The golden child, first of her siblings to go to university. It was her duty to be a role model. If her parents could travel across a continent and learn the language and culture all with the hope of a better life, then she could certainly make it through first year – no, she had to.

She remembered her father’s words. “Beta, the most important thing in life is your education. Without it you’ll be driving buses around Croydon all day, like me.”

The aching in her chest persisted.

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DARK MODE

New post: by selfloveroses Just a reminder…

Healing isn’t linear @selfloveroses

She scoffed at the pastel-pink background and girly cursive handwriting. Any kind of healing certainly didn’t look pretty and pink with a bow on top.

“But they’re right. It’s okay to have ups and downs.”

She took a deep breath and slumped out of bed, holding back everything inside her to not crawl back in. She pulled back the blinds, letting the rays pour into her eyes, focusing on the bright clear sky. She stayed there for a while, enjoying the stillness, grateful that this woke up her senses. Her room had become warm and stuffy, but she felt cocooned in it, undisturbed.

Get comfortable with being uncomfortable… @selfloveroses

It was important, and her body needed it, even if she felt like she didn’t. She let the cold air in, feeling the cool breeze on her neck, goose bumps tracing down her arms instantly. Retreating into the room, she left the window ajar. A small achievement, but an achievement nonetheless. The tightening in her chest loosened, ever so slightly.

FATWIMA HINGAH

Commentary Dark Mode attempts to address the effects of social media platforms like Instagram on mental health and the changes in the patterning of a user’s thoughts as they scroll through their homepage or feed.

As the protagonist scrolls through her feed, so the reader is prompted to skim through the post headlines and captions. The extended margins and listing with a mixture of cut off phrases and hashtags aims to replicate the pattern of thoughts experienced as a user is scrolling. A key part of this piece was to draw attention to the architecture of social media that prompts a feeling of information overload because of its addictive quality.

While online posts are no substitute for professional mental health advice, I aimed to show how small online communities and self-help accounts can facilitate a positive experience for the user as shown through the protagonist in the intimate setting of her bedroom.

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78 Morphing into Art TAYLOR CURRANT 82 Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems and Mass Culture COVE CONNOLLY 88 The Big M JEPPE GAASDAL-BECH 92 The Transformation MILLIE GODWIN 96 A 21st Century Murder BRITTANY INSULL 106 Poetry as Environmental Attunement RESHMA SHAIK

CHAPTER III — POWER

Morphing into art

TAYLOR CURRANT

TAYLOR CURRANT

I walk out of the tube station. It’s November, and it’s really fucking cold. I wrap my coat, which sits just inches away from the floor, tightly around myself, hoping it’ll shield me from the ghastly air that forces goosebumps to rise from my skin. Maybe wearing a dress was a bad idea. I feel too exposed. The cold breeze finds its way under my coat and up my skirt, imitating the actions of an unwelcome guest, and I try to swat it away by pulling my dress tighter. The sun that was gleaming into my bedroom window not even an hour ago, has now hidden away behind the darkened clouds. I curse it for deceiving me. By the time I reach the art museum, my cheeks are a dark shade of crimson. I curl my hands and raise glove-covered fists to rub my cheeks, trying to create warmth by friction. Wasting no time, I rush into the arms of the heat, shelter, and art. The familiar scent gushes over me. I breathe it in.

I step towards a piece of art that paralyzes me. I stop in my tracks and stare right into the belly of it. A painting of a naked woman. It’s captivating. The colours are thrown onto the canvas, twisting, turning, intertwining with one another. It’s disorientingly beautiful. It’s messy and real. My fingers jitter with the intense intrusion of wanting to reach out and trace every curve and bump that makes itself a home on the woman’s body. I can see myself in the painting, my body mirrors hers. I sharply pinch my hand, making sure it’s real and my mind is not deceiving me. Her thighs are thick, like tree trunks that have grown unapologetically. I am both in awe and full of jealousy at the way she is not afraid to take up the space that exists around her.

I see fragments of myself within the piece, but I cannot view myself as art. Society has forced us to view female bodies and anatomy as obscene. Something to be confined and covered up – we have grown up being ashamed of the way our body grows, unless you slap a frame around it and call it art. My body is viewed as a mechanical structure that exists only for men. I was taught that from a young age, when I was told to cover up around male company. You might get men in trouble if you go round dressing like that. My body is never mine. Just like the women’s body in the painting is never hers.

It’s there for the purpose of the artist, and now it exists for humans to critique or admire. We have no control over the way our bodies are viewed from eyes that wander for too long. We just have to accept it. I’m fucking tired of accepting it. My body is mine. Her body is hers. We cannot control the way we are created, and I’m so tired of hiding it.

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MORPHING INTO ART

The room is full of men, who have come into the room to stare longingly at the woman in the painting, who they wish would take the places of their wives. I can see the hunger in their eyes as they imagine fucking the immortal woman that seduces them through the canvas. They don’t see beauty. They see flesh.

I begin to imagine myself stripping off my articles of clothing.

One by one. Slowly and sensually. The coat goes first, creating a puddle of brown fur on the floor. The men’s attention diverts to me. They are alarmed by my actions. What the fuck is she doing? Mind your fucking business. I bathe in the chaos I’m about to create. I am about to become both the art and the artist. As I’m taking my dress off, it gets stuck on my shoulders and I am a heap of mess, drowned by fabric that I struggle to get off. It’s not sexy. I embrace it. Not everything a woman does should have to be done under the illusion of sexy.

When I eventually get the dress off, sweat clings to my forehead, dancing with the foundation I smeared over my skin. The men gawk at me – eyes wide. They do not care that I can see them staring at the bare skin of my stomach. I can tell they are resisting the urge to lick their lips. I can see the frenzy in their eyes. They are imagining all the things they can do to me. As soon as I undressed myself, I became theirs. I stand still. Copying the pose of the woman in the painting.

Head high, arms wide, I take up all the space I am physically able to.

It’s mine. I have as much right to exist in the world as these sleazy men whose hands are twitching to caress the skin I inhabit. Too bad.

It’s mine.

I let out an unsteady breath. In this very second, time feels fragile. It’s not real. My dress still clings to my body and my coat is done up tight. The room no longer feels warm. I’m freezing. The sweat on my forehead remains. The men, tired of looking at something they cannot obtain, have walked away now. Their eyes do not gawk at me with all my clothes on. I continue to stare at the nameless woman whom I have embodied, forever, etched into my skin like a tattoo. I am art. My body is art. I am allowed to embrace it because it’s mine.

The skin that coats my bones is not obscene. It’s skin. Everyone has skin. It’s not something we need to be afraid of. It’s what makes us human.

Just before I am about to walk away, I blow a kiss to the painting.

To the woman who is art, who will still be art when the lights turn off and the gallery shuts. I gently thank her. In the brief time we have had together, she has taught me so much.

TAYLOR CURRANT

Commentary For this assignment, I decided to focus on themes of obscenity and censorship, especially in regards to the way the female body is viewed as obscene by society. I decided to do this in the context of an art gallery to highlight and emphasise the contrast between the way female bodies are viewed in reality and in art.

My piece had influences from confessional poets, especially Anne Sexton. Sexton wrote extensively about the functions of the female body, which would have been deemed as defying the norms of writing at the time. Some of her poems that stayed with me whilst writing my piece were ‘In Celebration of My Uterus’ and ‘Woman with Girdle’ because they both explore the realities of the female body in a very honest representation. Sexton attacks the taboos of women’s experiences in her work with striking sincerity, so I wanted to do the same with my piece and explore why writing about the female body is seen as being obscene or being out of the ‘norm’.

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CHAPTER III — POWER

Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems and Mass Culture

COVE CONNOLLY

COVE CONNOLLY

Frank O’Hara was an American poet, art curator, and art critic who penned the 1964 poetry collection, Lunch Poems. As a key member of The New York School, a grouping of “experimental painters and a coterie of associated poets,” 1 O’Hara contributed to a movement of innovative writing that revolutionised the “texture, scope, and tone of American poetry”2 during the Fifties and Sixties. O’Hara’s fresh and engaging style, intertwined with astute references and sensational observations, have seen the reputation of Lunch Poems soar in the decades after his untimely death. Yet, while many particularly focus on the evident influence of modern art within O’Hara’s work, there is also a significant concentration on and inclusion of mass culture. This can be ascertained through the frequent featuring of public figures and consumerism within the poems and could be seen to reflect academic John Storey’s notion that postmodernism in the Sixties had a “sensibility in revolt against what is seen as the cultural elitism of modernism.”3 O’Hara was a shrewd and popular socialite who worked at the Museum of Modern Art. He had his finger on the pulse of New York city and was aware of the ever-growing cultural shift towards popular consumerism within America. Mutlu Konuk Blasing observes this understanding within the poet’s career-defining essay, “Personism,” when O’Hara devalues the technical aspects of poetry by stating that it is “just common sense: if you’re going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you. There’s nothing metaphysical about it.”4 Blasing considers this candid remark to imply that O’Hara is employing his own marketing strategies in writing “sexy” poems that entertain and garner popularity because he identifies the economic benefits. 5 This commercially savvy perspective can also be seen within Lunch Poems, with the collection’s title immediately working to create a sense of commonality and shared cultural experience through exploiting the dominance and restraints of a work-focused lifestyle. One of the book’s most popular poems, “A Step Away from Them,” continues to employ these methods by depicting the experience of a lunchtime walk through the city, integrated with recognisable references to consumerism and American popular culture. This can be seen within lines, such as:

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First, down the sidewalk where laborers feed their dirty glistening torsos sandwiches and Coca-Cola and

Then onto the avenue where skirts are flipping above heels and blow up over grates 6 This appears to allude to actress Marilyn Monroe’s iconic white dress photograph from 1954. O’Hara’s signature poetic format of “I do this, I do that”7 works to produce distinct observational details that purposely play on the public’s understanding of mass culture to offer further context to the poem. This approach differs from traditional literary methods and works to dispel the necessity of academic or intellectual prowess in an attempt to generate a larger audience and greater economic appeal.

O’Hara’s inclusion of mass culture within Lunch Poems also works to reflect the tone of the period, as seen in the poem, “Music,” which portrays the anger of a post-war society through poignant commentary, including “close to the fear of war and the stars which have disappeared. / I have in my hands only 35c, it’s so meaningless to eat!”8 These emotional lines emphasise the socioeconomic concerns of the nation and demonstrate O’Hara’s ability to utilise the negative aspects of mass culture and harness collective experiences in order to create authentic and widely accessible poetry.

O’Hara’s inclination to document and capitalise on historic events is not, however, exclusively concerned with the war. He has also earned the reputation of being an unconventional, yet distinguished elegist, as evidenced within Lunch Poems with “The Day Lady Died,” a poem that captures the passing of jazz singer, Billie Holiday. This piece maintains O’Hara’s vibrant lunchtime outing format, complete with multiple time checks and impending errands. It also conveys a strong sense of emotion, as seen in the remarks “I am sweating a lot by now” and “everyone and I stopped breathing.”9 Neil Corcoran writes in his essay, “Everyone and I: Frank O’Hara, Billie Holiday and Modern Elegy,” that Holiday’s music was

COVE CONNOLLY

undoubtedly of “immense importance” to O’Hara, but that the poem “makes it clear too, without at all insisting on it, that both Holiday’s blackness and her sexuality are of significance to him.”10 This can be evidenced in commentary such as, “buy / an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets / in Ghana are doing these days,”11 and the fact that the narrator is browsing books that have associations to the illicit sexuality of both Holiday and O’Hara12. Corcoran alleges that these references provide “an idea, or an ideal, of liberation” that “initiates what becomes the poem’s marked political edge,”13 before emphasising the racial aggravation that would have affected Holiday during her lifetime in America. This notion could be considered to convey an emotive and moralistic approach from O’Hara, which is working to express the climate of racial tension and civil unrest during the Fifties, as well as representing his own sufferings and constraints in regard to his sexuality. However, Mutlu Konuk Blasing asserts that O’Hara’s attention to Holiday’s race and personal life may actually be to exploit the legendary singer, in order to “elevate his poem - both to aesthetic heights and to political significance by dovetailing issues of sexuality and race.”14 This is determined through the numerous and distinctive inclusions of consumerism within the beginning of the poem, which demonstrates a commercial mentality. Blasing further writes that “the poet participates in this economy, for he, too, has a product to sell,” which by the last stanza is revealed to be “endorsed by a ‘celebrity,’ Billie Holiday.”15 This concept can be further corroborated through O’Hara’s focus on another predominant aspect of mass culture within the Lunch Poems collection: movies and film stars. “Ave Maria” particularly establishes O’Hara’s affection for cinema, with the opening lines reading “Mothers of America / let your kids go to the movies!”16 This bold declaration was written during a period which saw significant concerns about the “rapid spread of mass media and its negative effects,”17 which emphasises O’Hara’s advocacy for the entertainment form. The poem continues its petition for mothers to forgo their protective instincts against pop culture by highlighting the sexual benefits that the pastime could offer their children, daringly remarking “they may even be grateful to you / for their first sexual experience / which only cost you a quarter.”18 This statement appears to liken sex to a cheaply obtained consumer product, such as popcorn or a soft drink, and could be seen to represent the growing influence and access to sex within American culture.

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This ideology can also be seen in the poem “Poem [Lana Turner has collapsed!]” which contemplates the life of the promiscuous film star. Turner had gained moderate success in the previous decade, but was not recognised as a skilled actress, instead considered to excel in roles that highlighted her sexuality. This context makes her presence within O’Hara’s poem particularly remarkable, as he appears to be repeatedly invoking the idea of sex within his writing to garner public appeal and take advantage of the popularity it attracts. Additionally, the act of creating work that explores the concept of a scandalous actress demonstrates his active contributions to an emerging celebrity-obsessed society, his divergence from traditional standards of writing poetry, and most importantly his understanding of the power of mass culture.

Overall, it appears that mass culture has a significant and substantial place within O’Hara’s writing, particularly within his Lunch Poems collection. He markedly obscures the margins between high and low culture and actively includes references to consumerism, foreseeing an approach that would eventually become a “hallmark of postmodernism.”19 O’Hara also works to capture the experiences of historical events and capitalise on the shared thoughts and emotions they produce, even if traumatic, as a way in which to grow his market appeal. This is furthered by the accessibility of his writing, which is composed to invoke context through knowledge of mass culture, rather than academia or literature. Additionally, O’Hara particularly appears to understand the economic appeal of making his poems “sexy,” as demonstrated in his “Personism” manifesto and evidenced in the continued exploitation of sexuality within his poems.

COVE CONNOLLY

References 1.

Poetry Foundation, “An Introduction to the New York School of Poets,” Poetry Foundation <https://www.poetryfoundation.org/collections/147565/ an-introduction-to-the-new-york-school-of-poets>

2.

Edward Brunner, “New York School and American Surrealist Poetics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Poetry, ed. by Walter Kalaidjian, Cambridge Companions to Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p.196

3.

John Storey, “Postmodernism in the 1960s,” in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), p.206

4.

Frank O’Hara, “Frank O’Hara – Personism: A Manifesto,” Genius <https:// genius.com/Frank-ohara-personism-a-manifesto-annotated>

5.

Mutlu Konuk Blasing, “Frank O’Hara: ‘How Am I to Become a Legend?’” in Politics and Form in Postmodern Poetry: O’Hara, Bishop, Ashbery, and Merrill, Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p.31

6.

Frank O’Hara, Lunch Poems, expanded 50th Anniversary Edition (San Francisco: City Light Books), p.12

7.

Brunner, p.199

8.

O’Hara, Lunch Poems, p.1

9.

O’Hara, Lunch Poems, p.21

10. Neil Corcoran, “Everyone and I: Frank O’Hara, Billie Holiday and Modern Elegy,” in Poetry & Responsibility, (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014), p.145 11. O’Hara, Lunch Poems, p.21 12. Corcoran, p.147 13. Corcoran, p.146 14. Blasing, p.50 15. Blasing, p.50 16. O’Hara, Lunch Poems, p.42 17. Andrew Epstein, ‘“Street Musicians”: Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery’, in The Cambridge Companion to American Poets, ed. by Mark Richardson, Cambridge Companions to Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p.398 18. O’Hara, Lunch Poems, p.42 19. Epstein, p.398

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The Big M

JEPPE GAASDAL-BECH

JEPPE GAASDAL-BECH

In medias res, a woman dies giving birth to a stillborn baby. It’s been done to death – what else? People are live-streaming murders on Facebook. Nobody cares. Music, movies, literature, poetry, TV – it’s dead. It’s been dead for decades – zombie culture. I needed to innovate, to think outside the box. A commercial? Try the new Axe-murderer body spray: when you want people to die and your pits to stay dry! White noise? Listeners dose off to the soothing ambience of an airplane cabin and then (BOOM!) one of the engines explodes and passengers can be heard screaming hysterically for God. It’s the unexpected when you don’t expect it, as it used to be. The problem is that the audience would turn it off, when the objective should be to turn them off to the genre entirely. Like throwing up from curry.

The ceiling of mainstream immersion is reality and this includes, if not primarily concerns, the sinister aspects.

Stephen Something, a plain and simple leading man; the perfect yin to my performer-writer-director yang. His unawareness was crucial in the casting process as improvisation on his part would be far too predictable to appreciate. And so, I could not just stick a couple of coke bottles on my fingers and wing it. No. No theatrics, no Su-Su-sudio, and no need to set a trap either. His home would suffice. I was charming and spoke his body-language fluently, patiently praying on my knees to introduce a little death before the main show. The most dangerous game is an unfair one. Apart from the complete absence of urgency, the act imitated a struggle perfectly: choreographed by deep biology (a woman dies giving birth to a stillborn baby), all that strength and subsequent aestheticism sedated by the momentum of my contained violence. Unexpected (and unprotected) I shot across his back. A master’s stroke. I admit (to some extent) that it helped he was long dead by then.

Ellington, anyone? The piano played like gentle rain as I lovingly disconnected Stephen’s spine from his brain. I rendered him dead by way of a vertebrae pirouette, C1 through 7. But to call him a corpse would be gross abuse of the word; he was merely as alive as I allowed him to be. And, if you doubt this and call it death, I ask – as his cold frame lay in post-coital bliss, intertwined with the sweat of mine – if we were not both simply out of breath? A consequence of any dance, including the one of alternative romance.

I took his life (yes, sir), but I did not take it for granted (no, ma’am). I promise, whoever may care more than I do, that the waters of his departure were as still as they were clear. I gave no warning of

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intent, no kisses of either death or life. So, all’s well that ends, well, I say ‘no warning’ which is, I concede, a debatable statement. As it so happened, I did tell him, point blank, when he opened the door, that I suspected he would fall for me if he were to let me come inside. In that way, a warning was formally given and, I might add, ignored, or, as I see it, embraced. His last laugh was the answer, in any case.

As for what else he said, I did not listen. It might come across as callous to forget baby’s last words, but what else can I say? They were, undoubtably, uttered in a manner unaware of the pending twist of fate. What more can one ask of life, or me?

The bridge built between my mind and his matter took him beyond and left me behind. Absolute realism is not something to inflict for personal gain, entertainment or per instruction of the supreme; it is, at its core, abstract communication. (A woman dies giving birth to a stillborn baby). My dear Stephen Something will be identified, firstly, as a victim and then, secondly, as what came before that. Nobody likes a critic. Paradoxically, ‘outside the box’ is inside another; the philistines will store him away in that great filing cabinet below, stubbornly abnegating their ability to appreciate the argument of my artistry, although it is plain to see. All work and no play makes for a dull toy. If I could do it ten times over, I would not break his heart once but stop it each time; figurative pain is far too cruel a phenomenon to inflict on the living, in my opinion.

My complexion will not cloak me this far from traditional law. Inevitably, my audience will grow to include law enforcement agencies. The patrons will insist on handing me a lifetime stipend (how strange that the salary of artistic expression is so dear). I will be boxed out of society, inducted into the hall of blame, never to be missed or understood. Nevertheless, I will gladly accept any cell that comes with the memory of that magical night I closed my laptop and opened up a person. The performance will be written (and talked) about plenty, but never in terms of my true intent (which, truly, was never my intent). I suspect that even the hungriest of artists will fail to recognise the fact that I paid my talent in full. I could, when that time arrives, try to explain the depth they will have missed, but I fear it would not make sense if I said it out loud.

JEPPE GAASDAL-BECH

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CHAPTER III — POWER

The Transformation

MILLIE GODWIN

MILLIE GODWIN

Though it was a warm July evening, the three women shivered and huddled together. They wore paper-like maxi skirts and ruffled blouses, but were barefoot. Henry Mills, who insisted everyone call him Sir—and they did—smoothed the blonde’s hair with a charming wink, then inspected the brunette and redhead. He nodded curtly.

As he smoothed his tongue over his canine teeth, which curved inwards slightly, he glanced behind them to the three ditches and silken-lined caskets.

The brunette swallowed, wide eyed. For a split second, she shifted, like prey preparing itself to run from predator, but the blonde caught her hand, squeezing lightly.

An ugly pause.

Sir knew he should hasten the process, but he’d been waiting too long to rush this. And he’d always wanted to be a showman. Besides, these women were preparing themselves for the Transformation. It was a great honour.

For six months, Sir preached to over two thousand people, many of whom surrounded the scene now, about what salvation they’d find should they partake in his mission to prove what they really were.

Sir named the group ‘Believers’, but their species was ‘Sanguis’— Latin for blood. He claimed this information came from a serpentine creature with the head of a goat on the fourth of ten successive dreams, but, in actuality, his father had been a Latin scholar. They didn’t need to know this, though. Not even his wife—the blonde.

For as long as they had to wait for the sun to almost set, Sir spoke. He recited everything he’d told them in meetings and daily bouts of paralysing wisdom, reminded them of the nine other dreams he’d had, and the strength they would each possess when they went through the Transformation too.

In that time, only one man scooped up his child and took off towards the surrounding woods.

He was taken care of.

“We are the other. We are outcasts. I say: be proud!” Sir chanted.

Everyone chanted.

In the strengthening wind, the sparse clouds drifted through the marbled sky, the sun barely an ember. Sir asked the Believers to divert their attention to it, to watch how natural and admirable the change was.

“Believers! That is why we’re gathered here today,” he proclaimed, scanning the crowd. “The way the sky changes from day to

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night is no different to our spiritual change.” An anticipatory mumble from the crowd spurred him on. “I will forever be in these women’s debt. These dedicated, brave, beautiful women.” He chuckled heartily. “When they come back from the other side, forever will be true. Now. The Transformation can start how it always will. With an exchange.”

One by one, he kissed each woman’s hand, slipping wedding and engagement rings from their fingers, wrapping each in its own silken cloth. After tucking the last bundle into his breast pocket, he gently pulled out a switchblade.

Click!

The brunette jumped, stepping back, eyes darting between the blade and Sir’s face. Sir put a soft hand on her shoulder, letting her mistake his pleased smile for comfort.

Slowly, slowly, he dragged the blade across his own palm, holding the brunette’s waist as he allowed her to drink from him. She licked her lips, eyes brighter than before, cheeks healthily flushed, her presence less vacant. He did the same with the blonde and redhead, both appearing instantly changed too. If this were merely placebo, it wasn’t of particular interest to Sir. He only gave them what they wanted, what they asked for.

Sir helped the redhead into the casket on the right, while the blonde helped the brunette into the left before gathering her skirt to step into her own.

“Lie down,” Sir commanded. They did. “If anyone here is doubtful of the Transformation, then I pray you let us hear you.”

Silence.

The caskets were hammered shut twice over.

Sir overlooked.

Believers watched.

Just as the heavens opened for the first time that summer, there came a muffled shriek. A desperate fumbling, kicking from the left casket. The attached bell rang out like a painful cry amidst the howling wind, the rope fraying from the force; the casket straps rocked as the brunette violently threw her weight about inside. A dull panther’s roar. She cried and cried, begged for her mother, but nobody stirred. The six men lowering her looked toward Sir, their hands swollen and shaking violently.

“The change is already beginning! See what strength you could have!” Sir beckoned two random men from the crowd to help.

“Keep going.”

MILLIE GODWIN

They did.

The brunette’s constant screaming and sobbing drowned out the deeper she got, the bell getting weaker and weaker.

Sir shovelled the first pile of dirt onto each casket, then encouraged everyone to help fill the rest. They did. Many restless hands made light work of it, so the job was done by midnight. Gloved, Sir displayed an upside-down cross atop each mound.

Believers could hardly sleep that day, hoping, wishing they were next. They’d get their turn, but when? Sir promised this would continue for centuries, and he couldn’t lie to them. Without him, many of them would be without jobs, without a home. Those three women, the first Believers, were the lucky ones.

The following midnight was cloudy, tainted a sharp crimson.

Sir situated himself on a small platform meant for the caskets, hands clasped behind his back as Believers unearthed their friends.

Chaos.

One woman swore she’d heard ringing earlier, while her sister claimed she’d seen all three caskets shake. As they speculated, not one considered that it wouldn’t be as Sir promised.

“How lucky to live forever.”

“Not forever. Just longer,” someone corrected.

Half an hour later, they had finally lined up the caskets on the platform. Sir beamed, eyes glazing over as he eagerly pulled the nails out of each one—allowing nobody else the pleasure. Following a few deep breaths, he opened the left casket.

Believers huddled closer, shivering in anticipation.

She was pale, her cold hand stiff around the bell rope, but that was all.

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CHAPTER III — POWER

A 21st Century Murder

BRITTANY INSULL

BRITTANY INSULL

9:18pm Never let anyone tell you that Saturday is the best night to go out. The Friday night crowd is far better. Friday night is the night to blow off steam but not go crazy. Saturday is the night people never remember and Sunday is for the ones who go to work hungover.

9:18pm Don’t be the person who parties on a Sunday.

9:19pm Having said that, it’s Monday night and I plan to get trashed. Do I have room to judge?

9:20pm Which is worse? Getting trashed on a Sunday or a Monday?

9:40pm Question: why does it take so long to do your makeup?

Answer: eyeliner is fucking difficult.

Solution: ditch the eyeliner. Wear red lipstick instead.

9:41pm Little known fact: red lipstick suits everybody. It’s a classic for a reason.

9:47pm Similar to Friday, Monday night means you’re knackered from work and therefore can’t be bothered to put on heels higher than 2 inches.

Stylish boots it is.

9:56pm What do you do when you’re all dressed up and ready to go but your friend is still trying to decide what to wear?

10:07pm Top tip for a good night: if you’re going to a pub, get there for 9. You’ll be able to get a table that way. If you’re going to a club, no earlier than 11 or the place will be dead.

10:13pm Top tip #2: get to the pub for 9 and head to the club around 12.

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10:21pm Top tip #3: don’t do this on a Monday. No really, don’t. Not only do you have work tomorrow but the crowd sucks.

10:23pm An exception can be made if your best friend begged you and you needed to shut her up.

10:36pm Top tip #4: follow top tips #1 and 2, don’t listen to your best friend, Jenny, when she says you can leave at 10 and still find a seat. Jenny’s a liar.

10:37pm Jenny also lies about only needing another 10 minutes to fix her hair. Don’t trust Jenny.

10:44pm The only way to survive an over-crowded pub filled with drunk people is to find a table. Tables mean space, a designated area to find your friends and somewhere you can watch your drink without having to literally keep your eyes on it the whole time.

10:45pm In the event that your best friend’s a liar and you don’t get a table: get as drunk as everyone else and don’t put your drink down.

12:07am Girls are either the embodiment of kindness or complete and utter assholes. Especially when drunk. There is no in-between.

12:09am Girls will either hold your hair back as you throw up in the pub bathroom or tear it out in the carpark after the bouncers have escorted you out.

12:09am Point proven: I’ve done both tonight.

12:11am So what do you do when your best friend gets black-out drunk and

BRITTANY INSULL

between throwing up tells you they slept with your ex and after you get chucked out of the pub you get in an argument and accidentally hit her over the head and there’s a lot of blood?

12:11am Deep breaths. Don’t panic.

12:12am On second thought, actually, do panic. Jenny won’t wake up.

12:14am You’re not supposed to shake someone who’s had a head injury, right?

12:17am Breathing’s good, right? If a person’s breathing they’re fine?

12:18am What if they’re not breathing?

12:22am How do you check a pulse?

12:32am Ok, hypothetically, how do you get rid of a dead body?

12:45am Google search: best way to get rid of a body?

Top answer: dissolve it in lye.

Small problem: what the hell is lye?

12:53am So, the lye was a bust but it turns out you really can find anything on Google. I need a hammer, lighter and some rope.

12:57am Where the fuck did I put my car keys?

1:06am Jenny’s pocket. They were in Jenny’s pocket.

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1:12am Turns out you don’t know the meaning of ‘dead weight’ ‘till you try dragging an actual dead body.

1:14am Does bleach get blood out of leather seats? Asking for a friend.

1:20am Drink driving is bad, kids. Don’t do it. However, if you happen to have a body you need to move and can’t risk a taxi, make sure you at least drive slowly.

1:24am Plus side of it being the middle of the night on a Monday: there’s no one to care if you’re going 10 miles under the speed limit.

1:27am And don’t text and drive.

Or tweet and drive.

You know what I mean.

1:37am If there’s one thing I’ve learnt from cop shows, it’s that cards are traceable. Always pay in cash.

1:39am But they can probably trace where you got cash out, so either way you’re screwed.

1:42am Ok, new plan: just get out more cash than you actually need. That should at least help trip them up a bit, right? Right?

1:47am Something I learnt from the killers in cop shows: be as inconspicuous as possible.

1:51am A 5’5 girl in thigh-high boots and a sparkly dress buying a hammer, lighter and rope is not inconspicuous. Thank god Jenny was smart enough to keep trainers and a hoodie in her car.

BRITTANY INSULL

2:00am Being inconspicuous also means no fancy hammer and no cool lighter. Practicality means good rope though; can’t have that sucker fraying too soon.

2:05am Ok, new problem. I need somewhere to dump a body. Any suggestions?

2:18am Google maps is an actual godsend. I swear.

2:20am I’ve found the nicest beach, very secluded, lovely little pier that goes out just far enough, deep waters.

Jenny would love it.

2:21am Unfortunately it’s 2 hours away. Plus side? It’s just gone 2am and that means very little traffic.

2:22am Jenny’s trainers also mean I actually have a chance of getting there without crashing. Yay for small victories!

2:38am First time I’ve ever been in a car with Jenny without us arguing over the music.

I like it.

2:39am I’ll be nice and play her favourite song though. It’s the least I can do.

3:31am Pro tip: ever accidentally murder your best friend? Take a long drive, preferably on your way to dump the body. It will do wonders for your mental state.

3:58am I love driving but damn, my legs always end up cramping. Can’t wait to get moving and stretch them out a bit.

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4:26am This is one nice-looking beach.

4:56am Have you ever tried dragging a body down a pier in the dark? No? Good. I don’t recommend it. I think I tripped over about a dozen times.

5:00am My legs do feel a lot better after the walk, though.

5:02am I should really travel more often, you don’t find beaches this nice where I’m from.

5:13am Just FYI, smashing teeth in is a lot harder than movies make it seem.

Like, A LOT. 5:20am You know what? I think I’ve developed a knack for this.

5:23am Really wish I’d worn a red dress tonight.

5:28am My arm is killing me. I didn’t even know I owned half the muscles that are aching right now.

5:47am Pro tip #2: if you’re going to try and burn off someone’s finger prints, get something stronger than a lighter.

This shit takes time.

5:49am And invest in a mask. Trust me, you’ll regret it otherwise. Burning skin is not a pleasant smell.

5:54am How do you weigh down a body?

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5:57am I need something heavy.

6:00am Rocks. I need rocks.

6:10am Found some!

6:18am Pro tip #3: rocks don’t fucking work.

6:18am Fuck!

6:26am This is awful! I just found some old pipes. Heavy. Fucking. Pipes!!

Laying around at the end of the pier. Seriously guys, fly-tipping is not cool. These could seriously hurt someone.

6:29am Tying up some old pipes and trying to decide what kind of knot to use.

Hangman’s noose anyone?

6:39am So tying a knot in rope is actually really hard guys; broken nails, rope burns. It’s not fun! I don’t recommend it.

6:42am The guy who does my nails is going to HATE me.

6:51am Pro tip #4: when pushing something into the water; make sure you stand well back. Things splash and wet clothes aren’t fun.

6:53am Does salt water set stains?

7:01am So fucking tired. Can’t wait to get home.

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9:04am On the list of top 10 things I never want to do again, driving for 2 hours in wet clothes is a solid 4.

9:25am Question: does wet fabric burn?

Answer: no clue, let’s see.

9:42am Update: Yes. Yes it does but it takes a hell of a lot longer.

9:44am And now I really want marshmallows.

9:54am God I’m tired.

9:57am Do I call in sick to work and go to bed now or nap for an hour and carry on as if Jenny’s alive?

9:59am Not going into work would probably look suspicious.

10:00am But sleep…

10:54am Fuck it, let’s go to work. I refuse to be caught ’cause I couldn’t power through the consequences of an all-nighter.

1:54pm I just saw Jenny’s picture on the news. So heart-broken. I don’t think the pipes were heavy enough.

1:55pm Fuck my life.

BRITTANY INSULL

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CHAPTER III — POWER

Poetry as Environmental Attunement

RESHMA SHAIK

RESHMA SHAIK

Originally defined as the act of bringing something into being that did not exist before, Poiesis is etymologically derived from an ancient Greek word which translates as “creation or fabrication.”

The meaning of poetic ability has shifted over time from this first sense to a later definition designating the poetic power of those who “create” and then to our more modern sense of an individual’s ability to connote and evoke emotion in speech and writing, and an associated sense following British Romanticism that any experience or emotion can be poetic.1 Taking these definitions together, we can see that the term Poiesis might serve, not only as the basis for the meaning of poetry as a literary genre, but also as a common sense of experience. In what follows I explore this less often examined aspect of poetry as experiential sense.

Poetry and poetic experiences play a fundamental role in the understanding of our lives. Poetry has always been a practice of thought and feeling, and its significance in our lives is inextricably tied to its ability to construct and evoke in the reader a conscious duration of undetermined attentiveness.2 Ecocritics and Post-Humanist scholars argue that it is precisely this aspect of poetry that will help us to realise and truly comprehend our currently degraded relationship with our ecosystem; that will allow us to move away from the anthropocentric and consumerist nature of that relationship into a biocentric and eco-semiotically healthier relationship, not only beneficial to us but equally beneficial to non-human beings and our ecosystem as a whole. ...the Anthropocene is misguided because it projects human methods for solving problems onto a cosmos that is still not understood. It speaks from within the mindset of human power... The Anthropocene consummates the colonialization of elemental non-human creative forces that Western culture has dreamed of for centuries. In other words, Anthropocene thinking is proving to be a new, more extensive iteration of enclosure.3 The term Anthropocene was coined, originally, by geologists to name the current period of geologic time, the epoch when human activity has started to have a pervasive and profound impact on Earth’s climate and its ecosystem.4 There is a continuing debate regarding when the previous geological epoch ended and ushered in

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the Anthropocene. The term has now been adapted by the Humanities to categorise the culture that has dominated the industrialised Western World since the nineteenth century. The question I start to examine here is: How might we understand and overcome Anthropocentric thinking through an immersion in literary art?

Anthropocentric thinking encompasses the ideology that distances modern humanity from the rhythms of natural time and the proximity of natural spaces, attaching a sense of superiority and uniqueness to human existence, aggrandizing us to a position of the creator, maker or steward of the world. The fallacy in generating and propagating such an anthropocentric narrative is that it reduces the interrelations of ecosystems and their non-human dwellers to an inert physical Other6 either for our consumption and pleasure or as a tool at our disposal to serve our wants and needs.

It is not difficult to identify the fatal consequences of this individualistic and human-centric conceptualization of the world.

Viewing the world from a lens that reduces its elements to tools that can be utilised by the superior human being is the cause of the excessive neo-colonialism, extractivism, commercialisation and consumerist attitudes we observe to be plaguing the modern world. The supposed superiority of humans, combined with the perception that non-human beings and their ecosystems are an inferior Other, becomes the justification for using control technologies to exert our supposed rightful supremacy over the cosmos while being oblivious to their catastrophic effects. We are not alone in suffering because of this process of extraction from the social and natural world, but we suffer both through its effects and because our very conceptualisation of our world (a singular sense of a world is also part of this) proposes commodification and utility as the only means to relate to the natural and social world.7 Our restricted ability to interact with our environment through controlling it is responsible for humans distancing and isolating themselves away from the natural world and its non-human elements. It is also responsible for the current and continual erosion of previously existing rich and complex human relationships to other beings in the ecosystem along with a respect for the ecosystem and its continuation. This ultimately results in a kind of ecological death that comes with both spiritual and biodiversity-related consequences for everything in the ecosystem, human and non-human dwellers, plants, animals and biotic systems alike. 8

RESHMA SHAIK

The Anthropocene and Anthropocentric thinking are misguided precisely because they speak from within the boundaries and mindset of human power and project human methods to solve the problems of a cosmos that is powerfully complex and ambiguous and far from being understood.9 Modern humanity has a communal responsibility to recontextualise its anthropocentric relationship to natural systems and its non-human counterparts, and to frame it in more biocentric ways.

Bayo Akomolafe’s These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to my Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home is a profound philosophical rumination on the future of human and non-human entities and on what it truly means to be human. It is also a passionate attempt to make sense of our disconnection in this world where we often feel untethered and lost. It is told in the form of letters to the author’s three-year-old daughter Alethea Aanya (a name that is deeply significant to understanding what he advocates). In this book, Akomolafe suggests how we might alter and adapt our perception of the world and its corresponding ecosystems in order to move away from anthropocentric thinking and towards more biocentric thought, while also trying to work out how to be a responsible father to a child brought into this world.

Barad speaks about [...] our conversations about the material world (mind) and the material world itself (matter). With another profoundly disruptive formulation: “intra-action” as opposed to “interaction”, she makes an argument for the intra-dependence of things. The latter presumes that the world is made up of linear casual modes and preset independent objects with pre-given boundaries, properties and meanings – objects that later come to “inter”-act in an occasional relationship. Intra-action on the other hand, turns that picture on its head, showing relationships precede the objects in that relationship. 10 The primary shift in the conceptualization of the natural environment that Akolomafe proposes in the chapter “Hugging Monsters” is a redistribution of agency to the natural landscapes and their non-human entities that our anthropocentric thinking refuses to acknowledge. Akomolafe and other theorists and philosophers, such as Karen Barad, Jane Bennett and Stacy Alaimo, advocate for

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the realignment of human beings as entities coexisting with their non-human counterparts within the cosmos, and reject a narrative of human superiority. This realignment redefines humanity’s relationship with nature and proposes that we are human only in contact and conviviality with what is not human. 11 Bennett’s notion of vibrant matter replaces the old notion, that matter can only be acted on but is not itself an actor, 12 with the idea that nature and matter have agency and act in ways which have direct consequences for both human and non-human worlds. This means that nature can no longer be thought of or imagined from an anthropocentric perspective, as an inexhaustible resource for industrial production or social construction, 13 but is to be regarded as an equally rich and complex entanglement of entities in terms of the changes these beings can effect on their worlds.

Barad’s performative theory of agential realism helps us gain a further understanding of this newly rediscovered relationship with nature as agent. She proposes the anti-individualistic and biocentric argument that the universe, its inhabitants and other elements are intricately entangled within various relationships that occur irrespective of their inter-actions with the distinct entities in the ecosystem. This theory proposes that all matter, human and non-human, is bound together in multiple intra-dependent relationships with a cornucopia of narratives flowing through the collective consciousnesses of the universe where these relations precede the individual entities that they connect. Through this proposal, Barad argues that the individualistic human and non-human separation of the entities within the environment emerges out of these intra-active relationships rather than the individual entities creating these relations – therefore flipping on its head the anthropocentric idea of independent objects existing with pre-defined boundaries.

The world is an ongoing relationship where “things” are constantly rupturing and congealing due to human and morethan-human practices. Intra-action presumes entanglement not independence. 14 The area of semiotics between human ecology and ecocriticism, known as Ecosemiotics, interprets these entangled relations between human and non-human entities and nature as sign-mediated relationships. 15 Ecosemiotics argues that the colonisation of

RESHMA SHAIK

the ecosystem by certain sets of human symbolic systems and the replacement of primeval nature with these constructed symbolic environments erodes and erases the intra-dependent relations and variations pre-existing within nature.

In humanity’s self-isolation via anthropocenic ideals, we have managed to alienate our species to the extent that we no longer feel or notice the ways other species and entities address and ascribe meanings to us within the sign-mediated relationships we share.

Enriching the dialogues between natural and human cultural worlds, therefore, is paramount if we hope to preserve these relations. Preservation and flourishing mean that we need increasingly to surround ourselves with much more than reflections of human cultures, which restrict, distort and diminish the flow between human and natural-cultural worlds. Arguments in the academic Humanities suggest that literature, and particularly poetry, can be understood as modes of attunement towards the environment. They can help us understand and restore the eroding connection and dialogue between human cultures and the complex flourishing of natural worlds.

Poetry finds itself on the horizon of the mystery of Being. In its origins, poetry emerges to meet the poet. Being a poet goes beyond the poet’s own attempts at synthesis between the external world and his or her inner life. Poetry opens the poet to phenomena that are concealed yet not entirely unknown. 16 Martin Heidegger’s concept of Dasein, foundational within his extensive work of phenomenological and existential philosophy, is a crucial way to examine and comprehend an ecocritical picture of human life. Translated from German, Dasein stands for “being there” and it encompasses and examines the qualitative, experiential sense that seems to belong to human beings. In his later work, Heidegger thematizes the essence of poetry, which he suggests is the closest form in which Poiesis survives in the modern day, within the literary discipline as an expression of the Parousia, the arriving presence of Being. 17 As a paradigm of art that embraces the profundity of being human, poetry becomes a space for inducing a self-realization in its readers regarding the concretization of the “how” of human existence. Thus, poetry’s ability to catalyze this environing self-analysis becomes a means to achieve an authentic human existence that is

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attentive to the process of creation. 18 Paying close attention to one’s existence with respect to the environment leads to a phenomenon that Heidegger refers to as the unconcealment of the truth, for which he uses the ancient Greek term, Aletheia.

Here we can see the significance of the name Akomolafe bestows upon his daughter. Alethea Aanya is made up of the Greek term Aletheia and the Sanskrit term Aanya, which together translate to an inexhaustible unconcealment of truth. The purpose of poetry is precisely to serve as a written medium to access this inexhaustible unconcealment of the primordial meaning of Being. 19 Ultimately, in its quest to uncover and reveal this truth, poetry possesses a unique power to heal our separation from nature, enabling us to regain our lost harmony. In doing so, and with poetry acting as a semiotic medium, we are prompted to question the logic of anthropocentric thinking. We may now start to ask ourselves, thinking along with Karen Barad, how poetic entanglement is everywhere in nature, and appears to human beings in the form we name as a genre of literary art. This realisation, achieved through dwelling in consideration of poetry, might steer us closer to an environmental and aesthetic relatedness to nature and allow human beings to climb down from supposed supremacy towards more bio-centrically and ecologically informed relationships to other beings and their worlds.

RESHMA SHAIK

References 1.

Tania Zittoun, ‘Commentary: Poesis and Imagination’, in Poetry and Imagined Worlds, eds. Olga V. Lehmann et al (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pg. 82.

2.

Eric Falci, The Value of Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pg. 118.

3.

Patterns of Commoning, eds. David Bollier and Silke Helfrich (Amityville, NY: Common Strategies Group and Off the Common Books, 2015), pg. 5.

4.

National Geographic Society, ‘Anthropocene’, National Geographic Society, 2019 <http://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/anthropocene/> [accessed 13 March 2021].

5.

Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, ‘Nature and Poetic Consciousness from Hölderlin to Rilke’, in Hölderlin’s Philosophy of Nature, ed. Rochelle Tobias (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), pg. 33.

6.

Patterns of Commoning, pg. 6.

7.

Patterns of Commoning, pg. 7.

8.

Ibid, pg. 17.

9.

Ibid, pg. 7.

10. Bayo Akomolafe, These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2017), pg.

105-106.

11. Timo Maran, Ecosemiotics: The Study of Signs in Changing Ecologies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

12. Serenella Iovino et al, Material Ecocriticism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014), pg. 223.

13. Akomolafe and Eisenstein, pg. 104.

14. Ibid, pg.106.

15. Maran, Ecosemiotics.

16. Andrzej Wiercinski, ‘Poetry between Concealment and Unconcealment’, Revista Filosófica de Coimbra 14: 27 (2005), pg. 173.

17. Ibid., pg. 181.

18. Ibid., pg. 184, 189.

19. Ibid, pg. 203.

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CHAPTER IV — HOPE

116 What We Find ARYAN ALI-MURAD 122 Mother Nature SINAH SCHMIDTBERG 126 People are Free and Equal in the Grave CORIE EMANUEL-PERRIER 132 Angela Carter’s Sadeian woman MAE SLEEMAN 140 The Aesthetics of Feminine Embodiment in Mid to Late Nineteenth Century France FATWIMA HINGAH

CHAPTER VI — HOPE

What We Find

ARYAN ALI-MURAD

ARYAN ALI-MURAD

“Don’t forget love; it will bring all the madness you need to unfurl yourself across the universe.”

- Mirabai The prayers of fajr woke Hebah close to sunrise. She climbed out of bed and made her way down the stairs and into the kitchen. Zana was asleep on the sofa, deep in a drunken coma. The arak bottle now stood empty on the coffee table next to an apple which had a single bite taken out of it, the inside now browned.

When I saw him for the first time I knew there was something in him, I knew there were more demons lurking in his skull than there were in Hell itself. He was being held up by one of the merchants at the market in Iskan. The guy was shaking him by the collar of his shirt with one hand and holding an apple in the other. Zana was screaming at him, telling the guy to let him go or he’d bite him, said he’d paid for it and the guy was senile. I walked over to them and with the change my dad had given me I paid the merchant for the stolen apple and asked for two more. I gave them to Zana. He looked startled, didn’t say anything except thank you.

Then he took the bag and ran away into the crowd. We couldn’t have been any more than eight or nine years old at the time and I saw him almost every Sunday after that. I’d buy him apples and we’d go on walks together. He is a good man as much as he’d like to say he isn’t. I’ve seen him at his very lowest and he has never wanted to hurt anyone but himself. He just doesn’t understand how that hurts me.

Outside, Hebah heard a car driving down their street. From above their fence she saw a truck stop. Putting on her robe and slippers she went outside to open the gate. There were three men sitting in the bed of the truck holding rifles with the barrels pointing to the sky. Another man was hoisting a box of supplies off the back of it.

The men in the truck-bed all stared at Hebah. She noticed one was smiling and felt uneasy.

As the man with the supplies approached to hand her the box, she asked, “When is this going to end?”

No response. The men in the truck-bed continued to stare.

“Hey, I’m talking to you. When is this going to end?”

No response still. The man who was smiling let out a slight chuckle.

“My children are with their grandparents, when can I see them again?”

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The man holding the box looked down, exposing that vulnerable look of empathy on his face. Hebah grabbed his arm gently.

“Please, just tell me when I can see them again.”

The man looked up and motioned to give the box to Hebah. She stared at him while he tried to avoid eye contact. She took the box and the man nodded, then hopped onto the back of the truck. It drove for another 20 yards and stopped at the next house. The man hopped off the truck again, picked up another box and placed it outside the neighbours’ door. They repeated this another two times before they turned right at the top of the street and disappeared from sight.

Hebah walked back into the house leading straight into the open-plan kitchen and placed the box onto the counter. A loaf of bread, a bag of rice, two chickens, okra, tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, a small bag of potatoes and a carton of cheap cigarettes.

Some homes in the area had six or seven people per household. She pulled out a pack of cigarettes, opened it up, took one out and lit it, then took out a mug from the cupboard, scooped in some instant coffee and placed the saucer on the stove to heat up the water.

From the sofa she heard Zana grumble awake. He darts up with a sweaty, pale face then jumping to his feet and almost losing his balance he rushes to the bathroom and slams the door. Hebah heard him puking.

A few minutes passed. She heard the toilet flush and Zana came out, sat at the kitchen counter and lit a cigarette.

“What’s for breakfast?”

ARYAN ALI-MURAD

It was close to 4pm as Hebah set the dining table with bread, tahini, yogurt, cucumbers, slices of cheese, and olives. Zana walked from the garage into the kitchen with a new bottle of arak, a quarter already missing. They both sat down and began eating.

“That fucking traitor Barzani and his KDP dogs are gonna ruin Kurdistan. You know he was using Saddam’s tanks? I hope the peshmerga drag him into the street and put a bullet in his skull,” Zana said.

“I think that’s why they are keeping us inside: easier to round up all peshmerga.”

“Yeah, well they’ll never find all of us.”

“Us?” “Yes, us,” Zana said with a snappy voice.

“I miss the kids,” Hebah said.

“Me too.”

He poured more arak into his glass.

“Have you thought about what I said yesterday?”

“What?”

“Moving to America.”

“We are not moving to America, Hebah. This isn’t going to last forever, we will get the city back and everything will be fine.”

“As long as Saddam is alive this isn’t a safe place.”

“And what do you suppose we do then?”

“I have a cousin who lives in Nashville. She says there are thousands of Kurds there, it’s like a community. The schools are better, the jobs are better, our lives can be better, Zana.”

“You mean your life can be better.”

“I mean our kids’ lives can be better!”

The sound of distant gunfire interrupted them. They both stood up and walked outside. The gunfire persisted.

“It sounds like it’s coming from Aynkawa,” Zana said.

“That’s just down the road.” She turned and looked at him. “I am taking my kids to America when this is over. You can come if you want, but if you try to stop me then you’ll need that gun of yours.”

She walked back inside. The rotting apple on the coffee table was still there. She picked it up and threw it away.

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Commentary This is part of a story about my home and the humans that inhabit it.

My aim is to create characters that are relatable, ones not squared into stereotypical middle-eastern personalities portrayed in the media as being prudish, hostile people, but rather ones that tell a universal story of parents and marriage. I aim to explore the wants and desires of a couple living in a land that is governed by oppressive religious regimes. The story is about the largest population of people who do not have their own recognised country anymore. It is about the diaspora of millions of Kurds, the sacrifices made by their generation for my generation to grow up in a country that would provide better opportunities for us.

ARYAN ALI-MURAD

121

CHAPTER VI — HOPE

Mother Nature

SINAH SCHMIDTBERG

SINAH SCHMIDTBERG

Oh, sweet child, you must be the one to save us. Go down and protect what is ours.

Gentle breezes sweep through the forest as I sit alone on a stump.

Poor little thing. You took your time to grow and mature, only to be chopped down. No longer can we marvel at the beauty of your leaves and the firmness of your branches. How you used to carry me high in the sky and drop me into a soft blanket of your fallen leaves! Alas, I was too late and could not stop them. That lateness cost us your life and I have disappointed Mother.

It is alright child.

You say that every time, Mother. I hear you all around me. Speaking out from inside all the trees, bubbling up from the water in the streams, and whispering in my ear through the wind. Mother is nature and nature is Mother. I am but a child. A child that must do whatever it takes to protect this land.

I have no name. Mother never gave me one and I don’t really need one. I am just a child to everyone that can see me. I am 11 and have been for several years now. Well, ever since Mother created me and sent me down here. My friends are the animals, plants, streams, and earth of this place. They are the only things that can see me. Humans cannot see, touch, or smell me. I can speak but only through the nature that surrounds me. Mother said it is better that way because then I will never get hurt. At least not physically. Over the years a lot of my friends have been taken away. I cannot leave this place because I am the only one that can protect it. My job is to scare the humans away so they cannot do any more harm to this land.

The first time they came they did not do anything but walk around and touch some trees. If only every other time they came was the same as the first. Every visit their numbers grew and so did their weapons. Weapons made from resources found in nature. I would merge with the trees and tell them to leave. It worked the first couple of times. The voice of a small child must really scare them. However, there were some that did not care and still took what they wanted. I spoke with my friends and they tried with me to scare the humans. We were successful in most of our attempts but their weapons hurt us. As my friends felt the wrath of the humans I could only stand and watch it happen. My voice was useless at that moment.

You are not the problem, child, the humans are.

I know, Mother. However, not being able to do anything feels worse than doing something and failing.

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I understand your pain, but you are not a sacrifice.

So all my friends are? The nature that you are made up of is the sacrifice? I just want to do what I was created to do. Mother, everyone is dying.

I hear shouting in the distance. I feel numb. Please, no more.

Be careful, child.

They cannot hurt me, remember? I hop off the stump and make my way to where the shouting was coming from. They are back and there are more of them this time. A line-up of deer barricades the forest and I watch in horror as they are shot down one by one.

“NO!” I shout through a nearby tree.

Everyone stills and looks around. I hear some of them whispering to themselves.

“A child?”

“We must be hearing things. What would a child be doing in a place like this?”

“It’s like the others used to say. You will hear a child’s voice in the woods but it won’t do any harm.”

I feel sick. My voice does nothing to them. They don’t feel scared or threatened.

“Stop coming to this land! You cannot have it,” I say with confidence.

They all break into a laugh and just carry on. How long have I been doing this for them to get used to it? What good am I now if I cannot protect this land? Staring into the eyes of my fallen friends I cannot even feel sad, because this is a sight I have seen too many times. I feel numb to it now.

A couple of days have passed and we haven’t had any visitors.

Maybe they did listen to my warning after all. However, a few hours after noon they are back. This time with big and scary machines.

What do they plan to do with those? I watch as they plough through the forest and take down all the trees in their path. Those machines are monsters. They’ve inflicted more damage in a couple of seconds than the humans on their own could ever do with their bare hands.

What do I do, Mother?

Scare them away and protect the land. Call the animals to your aid.

Do not be afraid of them.

After I hear Mother’s words I whistle out loud and hear the animals of the forest running towards where I am standing. We wait and watch as the machines do more damage.

“I need your help, everyone. We need to stop them now before it’s

SINAH SCHMIDTBERG

too late,” I say as I look around at all the animals.

Bears, deer, wolves, squirrels, and more all look to me for a signal to which I respond with another loud whistle. We all charge towards the machines and humans to wreak havoc on them. I shift into a nearby tree and scream to startle and distract them. Then all the animals do their thing. The humans don’t stand a chance – but the machines do. In fact, the machines are slaughtering all of us. My friends are no longer whole. I see parts of them scattered all around the land. I no longer scream to scare the humans away, but because of the sight that I am now witnessing.

Close your eyes child. Do not look.

My eyes do not close. My voice is now hoarse. My friends are all dead. I stare as the machines continue with their destruction. When the night falls I am enveloped in deafening silence. Someone, please make a noise. I stare at the remains of my friends. Someone, please move. Nothing is happening. I slowly move away from the scene to sit back on the tree stump.

Rest now, child. Everything will be alright.

I don’t remember how many days or weeks have passed but I still have not recovered from that day. There is only one percent of the forest left and I have never felt so empty. Glaring at the large structures being built does nothing if they cannot see me. One by one I feel as if I am being trapped within all these concrete structures and have no way out. I find it hard to breathe.

I tried, Mother. But in the end, I could not achieve what you wanted from me. I have watched all of my friends die at the hands of these humans and their machines and now there is no one left to help me stop them. There is only so much a small child like me can do. I am but a ghost to them and that’s all I have ever been. All they have left to do is chop down that last tree and I will no longer hear your voice. The nature that was once here is now gone. The trees have been silenced, the streams have been filled up and the wind does not sound like you anymore. I am back where I started. Sitting alone on a tree-stump watching the sky as it turns pink. The belt of Venus. A lovely sight to witness during a time of extreme heartbreak. I am hurting for all of my friends and for my Mother.

Come back to me child. There is nothing we can do now. They have done too much damage that we can no longer reverse. It is too late for us.

We will have more luck somewhere else.

Alright, Mother. Goodbye friends.

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CHAPTER VI — HOPE

People are Free and Equal in the Grave

CORIE EMANUEL-PERRIER

CORIE EMANUEL-PERRIER

“People are free and equal in the grave” were my mama’s last words.

She was buried beneath a huge eucalyptus tree, down towards the abandoned and spooky Barneth graveyard. I marked my mother’s grave with a cairn and few stones since I did not want to draw attention to her resting place. Nana deserved to sleep peacefully, no one to disturb her but the birdsong and the cascading waters of the cherished untamed river Willow.

My body had sores all over, my lips thick with blood and my head full of sounds. I could hear my father’s thunderous footsteps as he approached the graveyard. I could feel his rage. I saw his towering frame black against the scorching sun. Sorrow was an understatement; my father behaved like Lucifer’s wingman.

Ever since he lost his job, he became violent. As a child, my dad was a cheerful and respected man in society, however hell broke loose when he lost his job and resorted to drinking. Our lifestyle changed as we had to move to a cheaper house. My mum and I became his punching bags as he projected all his frustrations on us.

One for pain, two for sorrow and three for revenge; I was stuck at three for revenge; all I ever wanted was to inflict the same pain my dad had caused us. Nana died screaming with blood oozing out of her body, but my dad did not care, he was a monster. When I tried to shield my mama, he threw me against the wall and used his belt to hit me.

My dad blamed Nana for her death, saying that she was a stubborn woman. Dad had hurt me a million times, and I had suffered quietly. He looked at me with disgust in his eyes. “You should have died with your mother; you are stubborn, rebellious, and a burden,” he said.

One chilly morning in September 1985, I saw my father sitting with a gentleman. The gentleman had hackneyed features, short and thick-set in stature, with a swaggering air of pretension, which signifies a poor man trying to elbow his upward social mobility. He was overdressed in a tacky vest of bright colours, a black handkerchief with red spots and arranged with a grey tie. Similarly, he had large hands adorned with fake gold rings and a watch.

Mr Bling, as I came to know his name, had an easy disposition of Murray’s grammar embellished with profane expressions. He and my dad seemed to be discussing and negotiating some issue with great earnestness. I had taken over my mother’s roles. I served them wine and hid behind the entrance door. I overhead their

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conversation, and it dawned on me that my dad had resorted to marrying me off. I promised myself that I would make him pay, and that I would act with the greatest care.

You must not suppose I told a single soul about my plans. A wrong is not made right through vengeance; the wrong would not be made right unless my dad paid for his sins and knew who was dishing out the pain.

As my father gave me the news of my impending marriage, I did not stir. I continued to smile on his face. Father did not understand that I was smiling, not at the thought of getting married but at the thought of my revenge and what I planned for him. He was a strong man, and I knew that I could not fight him, but he had one weakness. His love for whiskey was unmatched. He drank much of it. He proudly believed that a real man should handle his bottle; I thought whiskey would give me my revenge. Ever since that day, I carried my head high to reaffirm my imperviousness. I used my mother’s savings to buy rat poison that would help me get my vengeance.

“I want rat poison,” I told the pharmacist.

The pharmacist was a middle-aged woman with cold and haughty black eyes.

“You want rat poison?! Did your father send you?” She looked shocked.

“I want the best kind, the best you have,” I affirmed.

The woman stared at me. I looked back, and her face strained, and she named several.

“Arsenic is the best kind; it kills anything. However, the law states that children should not purchase poison unless in the company of their parent.”

I frowned because I knew that I was only seventeen years, but life had hardened me enough to consider myself an adult.

“Is that the best? How much is it?” I said amidst rage.

The pharmacist stared at me, went and got the poison and wrapped it up. I handed her the money and left without uttering a word.

CORIE EMANUEL-PERRIER

One dark evening, father came home staggering; he seemed happy and satisfied. He spoke to me more warmly ever since he found a “husband” for me. I acted pleased to see him as I helped him up the stairs on the porch. Once inside, he told me how Mr Bling had paid him and that tomorrow he would come to pick me up.

“Avery, you should be happy that tomorrow you will start a new chapter of your life, and we will never cross paths again,” he said.

I realised that the day had finally come, and I needed to execute my plan; dad had consumed more whiskey than was good for him.

“Father, do you need more whiskey?” I asked.

I laced his bottle with the arsenic and implored him to drink because it was a joyous celebration.

Dad sighed contemplatively, and I poured more. I lifted the bottle to his mouth, but there was not a drop left. Well, I have just as much conscience as any other humane person; but this you see is vengeance for my mother.

“Avery.”

I heard my father calling me, a hoarse sound, a half-cry of fear. I stared at him, trying to fight for his last breath as he wriggled. My heart became sick. Suddenly images of Nana’s last day on earth flooded my mind. I looked at my father, laying their motionless. I did not shed a single tear because I felt a sudden gust of relief.

Dare I say that was the most peaceful night of my life? The following morning, I woke up very early because Mr Bling would arrive at any moment’s notice. The man appeared to be a miser, and I knew he would knock at our doorstep to claim his prize. I packed my essentials, Nana’s portrait and money in a rucksack and set out for my new life. As soon I arrived at the bus station, the neighbours were shocked to see me leaving the house without my father’s company. I considered myself an adult, and I knew that I would never have to take orders from anyone else or live in fear of being beaten.

Thus, the neighbours’ look of disdain did not deter me from continuing with my journey.

The train station was bustling with life as people went about their activities. Some were selling while others bargained for fair products on items they wished to purchase. I had a desire to eat chocolate because my late father forbade me from consuming it. He reasoned that chocolates contain too much sugar harmful to children’s health, that a dark-skinned girl was not deserving of such treats. This situation was ironical because he claimed to protect me

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whilst he used me as his punching bag. Sometimes I wondered whether he desired to beat me till I became lifeless instead of allowing the chocolate sugars to have the privilege of damaging my health. I guess I will never know.

There were many passengers on the train, some stared at me and I wondered if they saw me for what I was. The train rattled along as it passed the blur of evening sunshine. We whipped past big squarish frame houses that had lost their white allure. They had scrolled balconies representing the Seventies’ lightsome and classical style.

The cotton gins and old garages were eyesores among eyesores. I assumed these places belonged to older people. Moreover, if there was no train going in the opposite direction or travelling slowly enough, I could see children playing in their backyards. Now that my father rested, I wondered whether such people go to heaven or hell.

I had no remorse when I thought of his death, but my heart ached for my Nana’s presence. Sometimes I imagined the feel of her hands, the weight of them trying to protect and reassure me. Suddenly I remembered her words, “People are free and equal in the grave.” I had freed my father from his demons; at least now he could find peace without delving into his whiskey. Did that make me an angel?

Or was I a fugitive? My father and mother were free. Mother was free from father’s violent behaviour, while father was free from the demons that haunted him. They were in the grave, and they were equal.

I finish writing and look to see an older woman staring at me.

“You know, you should smile more.”

I feel myself start to cuss her out, but then I remember I have a future now, something to smile about. My name is Tiwa, and I’m about to start the next phase of my life.

CORIE EMANUEL-PERRIER

Commentary By focusing on the aftermath of slavery and how families dealt with their trauma, I wanted to create a story on the effects of having a broken-down family due to systemic racism. The story has themes of death, violence, neglect and colourism, all things that I and many others like me have experienced. I wanted to retell my story through my experiences and the voiceless. The narrator of this story remains nameless until the end of the story because she is treated as if she is nobody. Reading Beloved by Toni Morrison inspired me to retell a story from a time where drugs were rife and families were broken. Beloved touches on trauma and how violence and trauma live through us. From the beginning of my story, there is a sense that Tiwa wants to escape or even join her grandmother in the grave where “all are equal.” This phrase comes from wanting to escape the unfairness and racism that have caused so much pain and suffering within the black community. Tiwa’s only options are violence or self-harm. In my future writing, I would include perspectives from other characters in the story, such as the mother and grandmother, to create a more in-depth insight into what life may have been like for black people in the 1980s and how they dealt with trauma.

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Angela Carter’s Sadeian woman

MAE SLEEMAN

MAE SLEEMAN

Angela Carter’s annus mirabilis was 1979, according to biographer Lorna Sage: a pivotal year in which her books The Sadeian Woman and The Bloody Chamber were both published1. Since its publication, The Sadeian Woman has been a target of much feminist debate, as in this book Angela Carter evaluates the work and libertine-thinking of pornographer, the Marquis de Sade. Instead of viewing Sade as a serial abuser, misogynist, and rapist, as do feminists such as Andrea Dworkin2, Angela Carter views Sade as a ‘moral pornographer’ (SW, p. 22) who emphasises the importance of women who are in pursuit of pleasure and even encourages the use of violence to achieve desire.

Throughout social and literary history, women have become victims of socially determined archetypes which depict them solely as figures of passivity and as sufferers at the hands of men. However, within her fairy-tales, Carter shows women participating in sexual discourse and exhibiting violence, rejecting physical and sexual boundaries and consequently revitalising the female character, thereby beginning to shape the radical figure of the Sadeian woman.

Carter does not deny that women are frequently manipulated or controlled – through living within a society that is built up of patriarchal structures, Carter is aware that there is no way of fully escaping it. But what Carter does is illustrate a transformation of the image of a woman into a Sadeian figure who rebels against these repressive structures.

In order to depict the Sadeian woman and object against ‘false universalizing’3 of collective beliefs, Carter chooses to subvert the fairy-tale genre. This genre has restricted women through archetypal narratives and structures and has become a mode of storytelling that is embedded within culture posing as a method of educating supposed morals. Carter’s Sadeian woman allows a movement away from these universalising depictions of women, and this transition is shown extremely effectively within her collection of short stories, The Bloody Chamber. Her fairy-tales are radically transformed in terms of characterisation, structure, and form, and attempt to bear witness to a truer and less supressed representation of women.

The subversion of the fairy-tale is arguably the most effective way for Angela Carter to negate the universalising attitude regarding female passivity, and instead present the Sadeian woman. Historically, fairy-tales or folk-tales have been stories within literature that are repeated through oral tradition. Subsequently, when these

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depictions express female submissiveness or illustrate women confined to the home, these images become customary throughout society and replicated through generations. Vladimir Propp also suggested that these tales transfer dramatis personae and functions from one tale to another.4 From a feminist perspective, if these functions are transferred across tales, then there is a continuation of denying women sexuality and positioning them beneath men – the tradition remains repressive. Notably, even in contemporary society through the likes of Disney, these beliefs continue to be redistributed within the family environment and to children. Patricia Brooke argues that fairy-tales have become middle-class allegories which attempt to unify and totalise belief systems of culture.5 In other words, these tales have become ways to establish collective ideas about the way a woman should act in regards to sexuality and domesticity – beliefs that are restrictive, unsatisfactory, and, for Carter, harm the depiction and freedom of women.

Through Carter’s unpicking of fairy-tales – a genre which continues to ‘underwrite our existences’6 in relationship to gender roles and patriarchal structures – she can almost establish a subculture.

The Sadeian woman is presented as being aligned with sex, violence, and blood. Having a figure who traditionally is not supposed to be presented in this genre, creates a much more radical image, and emphasises Carter’s rebellious thinking and condemnation of the conservative fairy-tale. Interestingly, Carter’s concern is not only to radically transform characters and their assigned roles, but also to highlight to readers that the legacy and history of genre can significantly impact views of women.

It can be argued that Angela Carter captures the Sadeian Woman most efficiently in ‘The Bloody Chamber’ story. What is distinctive about this story is that Carter captures examples of women who are controlled, as well as examples of the Sadeian woman. Patricia Brooke questions this duality within the narrative, suggesting ‘Carter’s style of narrative is sometimes troubling in its double function, working against masculinist representations of women while potentially reinforcing them through its parody’ (p. 69). Through using dual depictions of women, the story shows the reader a transformation, highlighting the importance of breaking boundaries after witnessing such disturbing images of women being restricted.

The story also effectively makes clear to readers that representation of women in confined ways should not continue.

MAE SLEEMAN

At the start of ‘The Bloody Chamber’, the narrator is ‘whisked off by a man so recently bereaved’ (BC, p. 6), immediately showing women inside of patriarchal institutions and being exchanged as commodities within patrilineal structures. Additionally, there are images of the Marquis’ previous wives as ‘unimaginable lovers whose embraces were annihilation’ (BC, p. 17) within the torture chamber. All these women seem to be victims of patriarchal control and can be seen as ‘troubling’, as Brooke suggests, because of the continuation of the universalised belief that women are denied freedom or are purely figures of exchange. However, despite these illustrations of victimisation, Carter does subvert the image of the narrator from the beginning of the story. The narrator does not quite fit the stereotypes of passivity, and Carter attributes her with an independent sexual desire. After her husband leaves, the narrator asks, ‘how shall I pass the long, sea-lit hours until my husband beds me?... I shivered to think of that’ (BC, p. 10). In this instance, the narrator acknowledges her own sexuality and libido, as much as her husband’s, reflecting an idea seen within Sade’s work: ‘In Sade, sexual pleasure is an entirely inward experience. Roles may be changed and women become men, men become women; the whipper will be whipped in his turn’ (SW, p. 169).

Immediately, in ‘The Bloody Chamber’ there is an embracing of an ‘inward’ and personal experience of sexual pleasure – emphasised

by Carter’s use of the first-person narrator and her intense and personal thoughts. Importantly, rather than displaying the character within a passive role, she becomes an active participant of the sexual experience and unequivocally seeks sexual pleasure. The narrator has become a reflection of the Sadeian woman, as a figure who has a more balanced and equally pleasurable role within sexual activity – an idea which emphasises the significance and moral importance of female sexuality, which both Carter and Sade aim to express within their writing.

In reference to The Sadeian Woman’s suggestion of the changing of roles and alternation of who is ‘the whipper’ and who is ‘whipped’, Carter shows this transformation through the structure of the narrative and the characters. As previously mentioned, with the Marquis’ previous wives, there is an indication of male violence with the ‘sadomasochist subtexts’7 of mutilation, strangulation, dismemberment, and impalement. In this part of the story, there is violence from a man, which immediately presents itself as questionable.

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However, at the end of the story, Carter uses this idea of the changing of violent roles and presents an illustration of violence being performed by a woman on a man. The narrator’s mother ‘put a single, irreproachable bullet through [her] husband’s head’ and through this switching of roles women are empowered – the mother becomes the ‘whipper’. The consequences of the mother’s actions also allow the characters to financially prosper, and enable the narrator to establish a relationship which appears more balanced. By the end of the story, women have agency over men whilst having the ability to be violent and sexually satisfied, which heavily contrasts with the tropes of the ‘happily-ever-after’ ending or patriarchal marriage that is commonly seen at the end of a fairy-tale. The Sadeian woman is seen to be powerful and in control of the body, presentations which both the mother and daughter reflect physically and sexually.

Compared to the women at the start of the story, this is an empowered transition and through the narrator seeing the consequences of living as a victim (of the Marquis’ sadomasochism), it indicates the need and desire for a transformation.

In ‘The Bloody Chamber’ it seems that Carter presents a figure who is empowered through acts of violence – violence being an act perhaps most associated with the Marquis de Sade. However, Carter’s other stories often reflect the sexual nature of the Sadeian woman more explicitly. In The Sadeian Woman, Carter claims that ‘flesh is used instrumentally, to provoke these spasmodic visitations of dreadful pleasure’ (SW, p. 176). In ‘The Company of Wolves’, the character similarly uses her flesh as a source of pleasure. In this story, the granddaughter removes her clothing, revealing ‘her untouched integument of flesh’ (BC, p. 76) in front of the wolf.

Carter depicts this female character as enjoying sexual behaviour and pleasure, and as Sade comments, she breaks away from being kept in chains (SW, p. 42), rather being the active character to instigate a sexual act. The visualisation of nudity alone can already make the reader uncomfortable, however this is emphasised through how the hinted-at sexual act is with a being who has animalistic qualities. Anthropomorphic images have been a great discomfort for humans, especially in literature, and for Carter to parallel the non-human with human, through sexuality, creates a much more radical and taboo-like space for the Sadeian woman.

Adrian Hunter suggests there is a ‘pattern of summoning up the familiar and associative and then defamiliarizing it’ (p. 130) within

MAE SLEEMAN

Angela Carter’s narrative. In relationship to Red Riding Hood associations of ‘The Company of Wolves’, Hunter’s ideas can be seen within the language and form of the piece. For instance, when the granddaughter removes her clothing, Carter parallels the recognisable language from the Red Riding Hood tale, such as with ‘What big arms you have… All the better to hug you with.’ (BC, p. 76). This structure shows a Sadeian figure inhabiting a genre which has historically suppressed women, and it seems that with this almost ironic tone of the granddaughter, there is a mocking sense. Carter goes against traditional forms and the language of fairy-tales and instead reinstalls these structures to be purposeful to women, as linguistic enablers of sexual desire.

Interestingly, Carter frequently uses themes and images associated with Gothic literature within her stories. For instance, the settings of castles and forests, alike in ‘The Bloody Chamber’ and ‘The Company of Wolves’, can evoke fear within readers. Potentially through intensifying the blood and gore within these stories, the Gothic quality can move the genre away from the domestic tale targeted at children and instead show a more brutal and divided society, that is usually ignored within traditional tales. On the other hand, through using Gothic references, Carter embeds examples of female bodily transgression,8 acting as a model for the Sadeian woman. For instance, in ‘The Bloody Chamber’, a distinct example is Carter’s reference to the Marquis’ ‘Romanian countess… Carmilla’ (BC, p. 16) – who is also the titular female vampire character in Joseph Sheridan le Fanu’s 1872 Gothic novella.9 Significantly, Carter’s repurposing of a fictional character who is known for promiscuity and distinct sexuality can reflect the Sadeian woman’s association with the same ideas. Carmilla also acts as an example of how historically women have always been sexual beings, yet their narratives are often ignored. In Carmilla, the vampire is sexually deviant and uses her feminine sexuality to pursue her victims and cause violence. Carter describes the Sadeian woman as a figure who ‘accepts damnation… [and] exile from human life’ (SW, p. 29). Carmilla, like the mother in ‘The Bloody Chamber’, accepts violence as something empowering and as an act which can remove the ideal of female passivity. Above all, Carter’s intertextuality here is extremely beneficial as a way of capturing the Sadeian woman as a figure who combines sexuality and violence.

Angela Carter’s concept of the Sadeian woman is thus a figure

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who not only attempts to show fulfilment of sexuality and embody a violence to achieve this, but a figure who can transform a culture which denies them this freedom. The writings of the Marquis de Sade, despite being controversial, elevate the importance of female sexuality, and for Carter the creation of the Sadeian woman figure can help to elevate the importance of female pleasure. Carter’s inclusion of this figure, as well as her subversion of literary structures that repeat ‘habitual patterns of thought’,10 help her to achieve effective and memorable narratives that rebel against demoralising attitudes towards women. The Sadeian Woman and The Bloody Chamber radically transform social ways of thinking, encouraging the acknowledgement of sexual freedom whilst importantly questioning structures of literature that are demoralising and need to be changed.

MAE SLEEMAN

References 1.

Sage, Lorna, Angela Carter, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2006.

Carter, Angela, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, London: Penguin Books, 1979 and The Sadeian Woman & The Ideology of Pornography, London: Virago Press, 1979.

2.

Dworkin, Andrea, Pornography: Men Possessing Women, New York: Plume, 1989. p. 70.

3.

Kaiser, Mary, “Fairy tale as sexual allegory: intertextuality in Angela Carter’s ‘The Bloody Chamber’”, The Review of Contemporary Fiction (1994): 30-36, p. 31.

4.

Propp, Vladimir, Morphology of the Folktale, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1968.

5.

Brooke, Patricia, “Lyons and Tigers and Wolves - Oh My! Revisionary Fairy Tales in the Work of Angela Carter”, Critical Survey 16.1 (2004): 67-88, p. 67.

6.

Gordon, Edmund, “Angela Carter: Far from the Fairytale”, The Guardian 1 October 2016.

7.

Hunter, Adrian, The Cambridge Introduction to the Short Story in English, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 129.

8.

Mulvey-Roberts, Marie, “The Female Gothic Body”, Women and the Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, ed. Avril Horner, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016, pp. 106-119, p.107.

9.

Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan, Carmilla, Project Gutenberg, <https://www. gutenberg.org/files/10007/10007-h/10007-h.htm>.

10. Gamble, Sarah, Angela Carter: Writing from the Front Line, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997, p. 4.

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CHAPTER VI — HOPE

The Aesthetics of Feminine Embodiment in Mid to Late Nineteenth Century France

FATWIMA HINGAH

FATWIMA HINGAH

As Haussmanisation transformed mid-19th century Paris so new forms of consumerism and spectacle took hold of social life, and new ways of looking at and representing the inhabitants of the city emerged, not least in the forms of attention given to women’s bodies. A rising population and the vagaries of employment forced lower class women into the service industry as well as into sex work as an economic necessity. The woman of the street became an image of immorality as the crowded and remodelled city brought these women uncomfortably close to bourgeois society. Experiments in realist art sought to portray the ordinary and everyday experiences of life, and the mid to late nineteenth century developments of realism created frank portrayals of the commodification of women and of the hypocrisy of bourgeois sexual morality. Baudelaire’s decadent poetry and Manet’s scandalous paintings brought topics like prostitution and female sexuality to new forms of notice in cultural life.

The street in the late nineteenth century French metropolis was interpreted by modern poets and artists, and their work revealed perceptions of women in the new public space. The urban planning and architectural changes of Haussmann’s remodelling of Paris, which saw the gentrification of medieval neighbourhoods, defined the modern experience by standardising the appearance and experience of moving through the city’s neighbourhoods and streets, but also pushed out lower income families. The innovative artforms of the time show us the way subjectivity was transformed ‘psychologically and epistemologically by the phenomena of the megalopolis.’ 1 Charles Baudelaire explored the resulting male gaze through the voice of the flâneur in The Flowers of Evil (1857).

The flâneur became a new figure of urban modernity, who frequented the Parisian arcades and observed commodity culture while remaining an outsider, marginalised from the city’s currents even as he was carried along. Baudelaire also explores the temporality that urban life creates in the ‘Parisian Scenes’ which mark the city as a ‘dangerous passage through a forest of anonymous figures imbued with mystery.’2 The voice in ‘To a Woman Passing By,’ for example, is overwhelmed by the beauty of a woman in mourning whom he spots in the street and then fantasises a deeper connection with her as she disappears through the crowd. The poem begins with ‘Around me, roared the nearly deafening street.’ The disconnection from others caused by an overstimulation of the senses leaves him able to capture only fragments of the passing woman. ‘The Narrator’s gaze

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transforms the woman’s passage into an instantaneous image.’3 Snapshots of the woman’s hands, eyes and her demeanour, ‘statuesque of leg,’4 speak to the objectifying male gaze as the poet’s imagination curates his fantasy while the crowd acts as a barrier, producing the cropped image and fragmented representation.

Baudelaire poses the woman as the object of the male gaze in the street as an indication of the place of women in society. However, it can be argued that she is not just an object of desire but possesses her own curiosity since their gazes meet for a moment.

The woman passing on the street whose gaze intoxicates the speaker also connotes the fantasy of the prostitute as a sexual commodity. She becomes a poetic object, a fragmentary image and a resonance of desire as Baudelaire shows how social restrictions on the availability of female sexuality are emerging in his time. The mystery and anonymity of this woman holds power over the speaker and he becomes overwhelmed with desire, but his fear also hints at a loss of certainty about distinguishing and identifying women of different social rank. Baudelaire’s work indicates the cultural anxiety that surrounded the physical appearance of bourgeois and lower class women. With centrally planned urbanisation came commodity culture where consumer space sold an illusion of wealth without the need for a large income. Clothing in the form of fashion increasingly became a symbol of identity in more parts of modern society, which Baudelaire notices in ‘The Painter of Modern Life,’ since fashion also captured the fleeting and transient nature of beauty: ‘The rivalry between moral and immoral women of means was often fought on the battleground of high fashion: by “using the weapon of lavish, highly styled clothing, the courtesan could undermine the stability of the social order by driving moral women to imitation.”’ 5 Cultural discourse on prostitution in the late nineteenth century likened sex workers to sewers and slaughterhouses – filth to be kept out of sight. At the same time, bourgeois women were taught purity as the feminine ideal. The bourgeois mentality that increasingly construed sexuality in terms of public health was noted later by Sigmund Freud in ‘“Civilized” Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness’ (1908). Freud notes that ‘Women’s upbringing denies them the opportunity to take an intellectual interest in sexual problems […] by condemning such curiosity as unfeminine and the sign of sinful disposition.’ Such hygienic views focused on de-eroticising women and maintaining a safe distance for respectable women from

FATWIMA HINGAH

any association with sex as work. Freud highlights the lack of sexual autonomy faced by both upper and lower class women, whether it be the prohibition on exploring their sexuality or carrying out sex work as an economic necessity.

The scandal surrounding Baudelaire’s sensuous poems which led to some censorship indicates the insistent moral hygiene that alienated women from their own sexuality. Baudelaire gave his female subjects desire and also countered representations of women as the object of male desire by portraying asymmetrical sexual relations between women and men. In terms of women’s appearance, the gap between the middle and lower classes began to blur, and ‘the anonymity of prostitutes offered to the desiring gaze of observers aroused bourgeois masculine indignation and fear,’ Baudelaire notes in ‘The Painter of Modern Life.’ ‘The dress, the hairstyle, and even the gesture… (each age has its carriage, its expression and its smile) form a whole, full of vitality.’6 Here clothes become a symbol of identity in modern society with the woman as the carrier of artificiality.

Baudelaire presents this type of newly public woman as both free and liberated, wearing modernity through cosmetics and fashion as artifices of desire.

The paintings of Edouard Manet are also worth considering here. Known as a painter of scandal for his works Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère and Olympia, he broke away from established conventions of eighteenth and nineteenth century art by portraying the modern female nude in contemporary scenes.

Olympia presents the face of Victorine Meurent, a modern-day model and courtesan-like figure, who would have been recognisable among salon visitors at the time. Reactions to the painting showed the prevailing view that a woman living in modern society couldn’t adequately represent a mythological or historical woman: ‘The women are crushed into an artificially rigorous cultural stereotype based on the doubtful assumption that there is a clear distinction to be drawn between traditional and modern society.’7 Baudelaire portrays various types of women in The Flowers of Evil and fuses classically statuesque images with a sense of fleshiness to describe the modern-day woman as both transient and mortal, eternal and goddess-like. ‘To fight the crippling effect generated by these representations of past beauty, Baudelaire “de-idealizes” women of stone’ to illustrate the modern urban woman. In his paintings, similarly to Baudelaire’s interest in the transience of

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contemporary life, Manet places commodity items like accessories and trademarks, instruments of leisured consumption, in his compositions of the feminine in order to emphasise that the circulation of goods in consumer culture included women’s bodies. The various accessories adorning the model’s body in Olympia, like the necklace, bracelet and shoes, highlight her vulgar nakedness. The flowers which appear to be a gift from a customer also emphasise the alignment of consumer wealth with sexuality. The shawl played a role in the courting of young bourgeois women as a signifier of her identity.

‘When Manet added the shawl to his portrayal of Olympia, he depicted a visual accessory that alluded to a token of exchange whose significance had been animated by a lively and politically nuanced discourse involving class, gender, and economics.’8 This nod to marriage shows Manet’s awareness of the cultural view of prostitution as a threat to the institution. Olympia’s direct gaze, bored expression and shielding hand indicate a defiance towards patriarchy as she controls access to her body in the moment of being seen. Manet’s frank portrayal of the commodification of women’s bodies as part of urban culture places him, as Baudelaire might say, as the painter of modern life.

The remodelling of urban space and the opening of an arcadeand boulevard-based topography of spectacle and consumption – the centre of Paris we now recognise – affected movement in the public space, and therefore social culture and its associations with the street. Baudelaire’s poetry and essays on painting and literature illustrate the mid to late nineteenth century concern for the transience and speed of modern life. The dominant force of the male gaze and its image of female sexuality is reflected in both Baudelaire’s poetry and Manet’s paintings of the modern woman in urban space.

We can see in these works precursors to the figure of the early twentieth century New Woman, exerting her autonomy in public, domestic and private space, and in works of literature and art.

FATWIMA HINGAH

References 1.

Frisby, D. Review of Cityscapes of Modernity: Critical Explorations by Vossoughian, N. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 65(3), pp.458–460.

2.

Culler, J. (2008). Introduction to The Flowers of Evil by Baudelaire, C. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, p. xxviii.

3.

Schlossman, B. (2004). The Night of the Poet: Baudelaire, Benjamin, and the Woman in the Street. MLN, 119(5), pp.1013–1032

4.

Baudelaire, C. (2008). The Flowers of Evil. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.

5.

Dolan, T. (2015). Fringe Benefits: Manet’s Olympia and Her Shawl. The Art Bulletin. 97(4), p409-429.

6.

Baudelaire, C. (2012). The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. Trans.

Mayne, J. London: Phaidon.

7.

Holt, R., 1985. Social History and Bourgeois Culture in Nineteenth-Century France: A Review Article. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 27(4), pp.713-726.

8.

Dolan.

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Join us on a journey from connection to solitude into liberation and hope. Anthology V features critical and creative writing from students in Creative Writing and English Literature and showcases the design and production talents of students in Visual Communication at London Metropolitan University.