The Foundationalist Vol. V, Issue II

THE FOUNDATIONALIST a

l i t e r a r y

j o u r n a l

VOLUME V | FALL 2020

VOLUME V | ISSUE II

THE FOUNDATIONALIST FALL 2020

The Foundationalist is a literary journal edited by undergraduate students at Bowdoin College, University of Iowa, and Yale University. The Foundationalist is made possible by support from the Bowdoin College English Department and Student Activities Funding Committee, and is published semiannually in the Spring and Fall.

Copyright © 2021 by The Foundationalist All Rights Reserved.

This digital edition is made complimentary on our website, thefoundationalist.com

Fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and literary analyses are accepted twice a year in October and March. There are no page limits, word counts, or specific themes. Visit our website for full submission guidelines and deadlines. All contributors must be current undergraduate students.

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Cover Design by Rachel Yang

ALEX GALDAMEZ AMANDA WEBER AV I VA B E T Z E R B E A U FA R R I S CAROLINE MEEK CAMILLE LENDOR DANICA CREAHAN DANIEL BISHOP DOMINIC BURKE ELSASOA JOUSSE E R I N YO NA K FA B I O C A B R E R A GENIE HARRISON HARRISON MAHLER JACK WELLSCHLAGER JAEDE SHILLINGFORD J O N AT H A N C H A N J U L I A M . WA LTO N KASEY BROEKEMA L I LY S WA N S O N LOUIS PIETTE MALLORY MOORE M A YA H O L L A N D E R MIRIAM MAYER R O S E G A B B E RTA S SHANSHAN CHAN SOPHIA EWING SPENCER WILKINS TA H A N I A L M U JA H I D

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

F ICT I O N A Culprit's Death LOUIS PIETTE

Whorls

AMANDA WEBER

P O ETRY 2| 50

Panic Attack Poem ERIN YONAK

5| 52

Canopener/ It’s Just that I hate modern poetry sometimes BEAU FARRIS

Marriage

MALLORY MOORE

Book Club

17| 53 Spring Breakdown MIRIAM MAYER

31| 54 !

MAYA HOLLANDER

LILY SWANSON

Man Sans Man DOMINIC BURKE

43| 55 I am not conventionally attractive ALEX GALDAMEZ

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Sueño en la noche del solsticio/ Dream of a Solstice Night FABIO CABRERA

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PO ET RY i joined the foreign legion

AVIVA BETZER

And This Is How I See the East/青春

N O NF ICT I O N 61| 76 Relunctantly I Imagined a Tortoise DANIEL BISHOP

62| 80 Page Count

JACK WELLSCHLAGER

SOPHIE EWING

Letters from DTW

67| 83 Gui-Mi

SHANSHAN CHAN

TAHANI ALMUJAHID

Radiant

DANICA CREAHAN

68|87 Bond Girl

KASEY BROEKEMA

Abecedarian after the 69|131 Unwritable Rape of Medusa HARRISON MAHLER MARIA GRAY

After A.R. Ammons

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boredeom creates & he said he would help us but

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Froth

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CAROLINE MEEK

CAMILLE LENDOR

SPENCER WILKINS

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

E SS AY "Does it have to be 140 |254 complicated?": Technologically Mediated Romance and Identity...

E S SAY 'I was born with the gift of the golden voice': The influence of Federico García Lorca...

GENIE HARRISON

JULIA M. WALTON

Metaphors of 176 |283 'Throbbing Between Afro-Asianism: Two Lives': Gender, from Bandung to the Pleasure and Insight...

Lotus Journal ROSE GABBERTAS ELSASOA JOUSSE

The Eye of the 221 |310 Beholder: Black Feminity as Explored in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Tar Baby JAEDE SHILLINGFORD

'They are not dead but sleep, and it is well to gather a treasure of them'...

JONATHAN CHAN

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STAFF EDITOR-IN-CHIEF KYUBIN KIM, Bowdoin College LILY POPPEN, Bowdoin College RACHEL YANG, Bowdoin College HELENA FANTZ, University of Iowa ELIZABETH JOHNSON, University of Iowa CATHY DUONG, Yale University MANAGING EDITOR Shayley Martin, Yale University WEB EDITOR Ella Jaman, Bowdoin College EDITORIAL BOARD Sharif Abouleish Bryant Blackburn Jisoo Choi Anna Fleming Tony Hao Ella Jaman Di Phung Bailey Prete Hayden Redelman Emma Simpson Alexis Teh Clayton Wackerman Jack Wellschlager ENGAGEMENT DIRECTOR Emma Simpson, Bowdoin College TREASURER Stephanie Stewart, University of Iowa

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DESIGN Layout & Logo KATARINA 11

Illustrations CO EDITORIN-CHIEFS

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EDITOR'S LETTER Like most others, when we published Volume V, Issue I of The Foundationalist in May of 2020, we were scrambling to grasp and adapt to the reality of the pandemic while anticipating a brighter, better second half of the year; a time when we would look back from the vantage point of normalcy and see the challenges we overcame as nothing but an aberration. Yet, our perspectives have been and are continually shaped by a string of the unprecedented.

There was unprecedented political turmoil, unprecedented racial tension, and an unprecedented public health crisis in the history of the United States and beyond. And, for The Foundationalist, there was an unprecedented number of submissions that have somehow, wondrously, found their way from all corners of the world to Brunswick, Maine and to the delight of readers from Connecticut to Iowa to the comfort of each respective board member's room, despite the countless forces that could have obstructed them from doing so.

This particular “unprecedented” may seem frivolous in a time of global crisis, but we read it as a sign of immense hope and comfort. It signals that despite the uncertainty and the isolation, the frustration and the be-

wilderment that seem to overtake the world, artistry flows uninterrupted and perhaps, fiercer than ever.

The word "unprecedented' may elicit fatigue, and rightly so, but it would be a disservice to our contributors and readers to treat this moment like any other; to let this issue be overshadowed by the precedent of our past; to long for the future when we can safely meet together and celebrate the multi-faceted, resonant, and relevant struggles shared by our writers. It can and must be done now. That is a precedent we wish to uphold and further.

From our authors, we perceived the desire to articulate, to inquire, and to sublimate their feelings and experiences by the way of literary creation.

These desires act as our inspiration, and push us to continue to provide a platform for the expression of undergraduate literary voices with our journal. The past year has inevitably pushed us beyond our seemingly controllable norm. This issue is a testament to and for you, our readers and authors, that the power and magnetism of literature will remain a forever constant.

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F I C T I O N

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F O U N D A T I O N A L I S T

A Culprit's Death Louis Piette McGill University

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n my head the dangling bells do not ring as loudly. And the organ is frail, like a whisper in the back of my mind.

When I close my eyes, I do not see gold. But sometimes I remember the bloodstain on His chest, and I blush at the irony of such a thought.

I met a man that looked like glee. In late October, when the wind turns our skin red with frost. I stood in front of him, in the heaviness of God’s light. On his back was nothing but a simple black shirt. Satin, I remember. His fingers were blue, shaking with something closer to death than life. “If you’re cold,” I remember saying, “you can go back inside. They’ll understand.” He smiled and titled his head. And suddenly he was the one under His light, bathed in something holier than God Himself.

I would love to eat meat on Friday. Honey glazed pork and braised chicken thighs. I would wake up each Saturday to a sun free of guilt that would shine truer than red light does through stained glass. If he had smiled at me then, I would have smiled back. “Let’s go back inside,” I would have said.

“Together.” We would have walked side by side, with steps lighter than what I would be used to.

I lay in bed and look at Him, peaceful and lull nailed on the back of my door. When I talk to Him, He does not answer.

Because I do not dare put words in His mouth, because I fear the words He would speak. My bedroom is always too cold and my sheets suffocating. Yet I lay underneath them, to let myself know damnation. Maybe the fire of Hell would keep me warm.

To me, He would be but a myth. I would speak His name in vain and laugh at people who did not dare to. He

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would have laughed with me, with giggles that echoed to the sky, as if we were daring Him. Heaven and Hell would not impress us. To the eyes of men who love, death is a remorseless end. And I would love with all my heart. I would hold his hands, his cold fingers in the warmth of my palm. He would tell me about his day, and I would tell him about mine.

I eat alone in the darkness of my dining room, a burning candle as my sole companion. Sometimes I see glimpses of the moon from the window. I do not dare to wonder if we are watching the same sky. Because I feel His eyes on me. So I bury the thought, under prayers and rosaries. And all I am left with is a bitterness unbefitting of a pious man. Sometimes I go to bed angry; at Him or myself, I do not know.

I think of him too often. I imagine him warm and loving, arms around me as we fall asleep. My bedroom would be empty of His stare, so I would let myself kiss him. And sometimes I would cry with his lips on mine, simply because I would have forgotten how warm they felt.

I do not know much about love. The only love I know is His. But His love does not feel true anymore. I know He frowns upon me. I have become a cautionary tale, a tavern story told by drunken men. And He knows of my sins better than I do myself. Yet when I look at my reflection in the bathroom mirror, I never meet my own eyes. I am afraid to see how lonely they look.

I would wake up to a warm bed and it would smell of love. It would be a scent that I have gotten used to, and yet I would always crave for more. I would smell his pillow without thinking of Him, because sins are but words to the mind of a carefree man. He would wake up earlier to brew coffee. I love the cold breeze of morning, so he would always open the window before I set foot in the kitchen. Every morning we would kiss, bodies drunk with the warmth of our love. And we would not mind our greed, because sins would just be words to us.

I brew my own coffee and drink it with the window closed. The wind is too cold outside, and I refuse to shiver. In the church’s nave, Sister Rose is singing. Her voice is the one of angels, and to hear it is to believe. Because only under God

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could a voice be built of such love. She sings a hymn I know too well, and yet the words come as a shock. They remind me of his love, of his warmth. I walk past her with a frail smile.

My heart feels like fire, and I am scared I might burn myself with it. And even the voice of Sister Rose could not heal my scorched skin.

On Sundays, I would not go to Church. I would not know how heavy the gold of Rome feels on my shoulders. Because He would not be on my mind. Instead, we would drive to the countryside. I would hear bells coming from across a field, and I would love the way they sound. We would drive by a herd of cows, but I would not think of His creations. Because my mind would be on him only, and on how warm his hand would feel on my thigh. I would not go to bed with a prayer. Instead of speaking His words, I would kiss him. And how thankful would I be to have found such a merciful God.

On Sundays, I put on my favourite robe. The gold beads shine under the morning sun, and I wonder if he liked it, back when the wind of October did not feel as cold. I stand on the altar, and before me the sheep bleat. After the sermon, Mrs. Miller tells me I truly shone today. “You are a true servant of God, Father,” she says. And although I disagree, I do not let it show. “I am not worthy of His love,” I want to tell her. I do not deserve to be His son. I do not deserve much but a culprit’s death and the coldness of Earth. Instead, I stay silent and walk to the back of the church. Sister Rose smiles at me, and I smile back. I walk the crypt and wonder about its ghosts.

But what are sins to a dead man? The crypt’s floor is colder even than October’s wind. When I sit down it reminds me of him. And I am lonely. Under the eyes of God, I am lonely.

T H E

F O U N D A T I O N A L I S T

Whorls Amanda Weber Grinnell College

M

al loved me before I existed, or so he tells me. He loved me when I was nothing but an open face and infinite potential, featureless and formless and ready to be shaped. He says that he created me, but I have my doubts.

In the depths of my mind are early memories of gentler hands, that gathered up wet sediment into a little imperfect ball, smoothed out the furrows, and set me out before the world.

And then all those casual, hateful, loving, careless grazes that followed, the pinching out of limbs and lineaments until I was something more resembling a person. I have been molded by thousands of palms and fingertips and knuckles and wrists, but Mal insists that his are the hands that matter.

He says all of this — not for the first time — as we lie in bed, the first rays of sun slanting in through the far window like slivers of pale glass. The light breaks over my forearm, illuminating the little thin hairs and the whorls of four years’ worth of Mal’s fingerprints. They form an overlapping, looping pattern like fish scales. Mal gets out of bed with considerable effort and shuffles off to the bathroom, yawning so wide that I can see glinting canines, pink gums, and the black of his throat all at once.

When the door has closed behind him, I press my thumb hard to my wrist for a couple of seconds and then pull it away. Not a single mark. I cannot tell if it is because of a lack of fingerprints of my own or a lack of conviction.

Mal yells through the water and the wall between us, calls me babe, requests that I make breakfast. I ask if he wants eggs or oatmeal. He tells me I need to start making decisions.

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There’s a painting hanging in the kitchen, or rather, of the myriad of paintings that cover the walls, there is one that is particularly striking. It catches my eye as I put the water for the oatmeal on to boil and begin heating a pan for the eggs. It is the female form, done in scarlet silhouette against a forest green backdrop. It is Mal’s — all of the paintings are. He is an artist, ahead of his time, he says. He paints infrequently, when the mood strikes him; often, the subject is the abstracted female anatomy, although sometimes he paints men staring out over landscapes or nursing bottles of beer. The men all look a little like him. He doesn’t make much money, but he is doing what he loves — you have to do what you love, he says, and besides, it’s his calling, it’s his little contribution to the world.

“It’s garbage, is what it is,” Circe said the last time she came to visit, leaning on the kitchen counter with a cigarette hanging out of the corner of her mouth. “God, it’s derogatory — like he doesn’t even know what a woman looks like, or maybe just doesn’t care.”

I usually trust Circe’s opinion on these things; she, after all, is an artist too. A political cartoonist, her signature style is drawing famous men as pigs, rooting around in the dirt with their wrinkled, rotund snouts. But Mal must be talented or he wouldn’t have made it this far, and he often retorts what does she know about serious painting anyways when all she draws are grotesque cartoons. I certainly can’t argue for either side — as both Mal and Circe have pointed out, I’m far from artistically inclined. And anyhow, some people really like his work. I’ve heard rave reviews at some of his gallery shows from hungry-eyed men in trim suits who stare at his vivid, featureless women as though they wanted to swallow them whole.

I had thought to say all of those things to Circe, but pushed them down. Whether it was because I didn’t believe my own thoughts or because I feared the likelihood that she would scorn my sincerity, I don’t know.

“Why doesn’t he just paint you?” Circe had continued with a rigor mortis grin on her lovely pink mouth. “You’re terribly pretty. And artists do love pretty things.”

I paused at the sink where I had been washing dishes,

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up to my elbows in soapy water so hot that it made my arms glow like coals. “You really shouldn’t smoke, you know,” I say.

“It’s terrible for your health.”

I call Circe my sister, not by blood but in the way that women so often make sisters of one another. She has been perching on my counters since we were thirteen, slipping after me like a quick and clever shadow, brandishing safety pins and pleas to let her pierce my ears, bristling at my affection and always armed with a defense for me, should I come under attack. If I look hard enough in the mirror, I can see the loops and swirls of her fingertips on my scalp where she has stroked my hair, and on my frequently held hands.

I pour the cooked oatmeal into porcelain bowls, top one with a fried egg, and bring them to the dining room table.

Mal must be either really languishing in the shower or still getting dressed, because in the time it takes me to finish my meal, he still has not joined me in the kitchen. I call to him in the bedroom. He does not hear me. I cover his bowl with a plate to keep the contents warm.

I call to Mal again as I am putting on my coat. I am beginning to worry that I will miss the seven a.m. bus—I hate being late to work. To maximize productivity while I wait, I begin the process of buttoning my coat up to my chin. I catch chills easily, so I must remember to bundle up as soon as the temperature first dips in the fall.

Mal comes down the stairs as I am wrapping my scarf thrice around my neck. He takes each step with a casual sort of enjoyment of the movement — he lives in the moment, he has said before, because that’s where the art is.

I prod him to move a little faster. He asks me what’s the rush, tells me to live a little as he sidles over to the table to retrieve his breakfast.

I ask if he can eat on the way. He smiles at me, amused, and shrugs his coat on. Of course, he says, he certainly doesn’t want me to miss my bus, but he could never skip out on our routine, he likes me far too much. He pinches the tip of my nose cheerfully as he sails past me out the door.

By the time we are halfway to the stop, I have soaked

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my scarf with sweat. I pray that I have not also stained the underarms of my button-down blouse, which is beginning to chafe. I am hurrying now, but Mal is a slow walker, and I have to stop every ten or so seconds to let him catch up.

We manage to make it to the stop just as the bus pulls up to the curb, and I launch into a hasty but restrained halfjog to bridge the distance. Mal yells goodbye after me, and I wave over my shoulder as I make my way into the line of waiting bus-riders, an impatient crush of pushy people. I lose sight of him as soon as the horde has swallowed me up. Often in crowds, Mal will say that he feels like a sardine packed in a can; I feel less of that claustrophobic camaraderie and more like I am a sculpture of butter like the kind I saw at the state fair in August, and like all of the other crowd-goers have butter knives for their fingers and elbows and knees. Like the slightest move would cause them to nick away at me and then perhaps butter their toast.

The doors squeal open and, bumped up the stairs by sharp and prodding limbs, I stumble my way to my usual seat and curl up against the cold metal wall. The bus pulls away from the curb, and I sit up just in time to wave to Mal through the window—he has already turned back to the apartment, and does not see me.

I examine my hands and arms. In the crush of people, it is perhaps unsurprising that I did not come out unscathed — there are fingerprints and little dimpled indents all over me.

Sourness rises in my throat, fills my mouth. I tug my sleeves down over my wrists and shove my hands in my pockets; I cannot bear to look at them any longer.

My eyes catch on a young man sitting across the aisle and three seats ahead of me. His blond head is bent to a book, his ankle crossed over his knee. He chews steadfastly on his thumbnail as his eyes scan the page. He is wearing thick tortoiseshell glasses, and he pushes them up his nose every so often just so that they can begin their descent again. In spite of his indefatigable focus, his face reminds me of the way the ocean sounds on a warm, overcast day, steady and calm.

I imagine him walking to the grocery store in a wool

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coat on a chilly winter afternoon, or making spaghetti Bolognese in a cozy, clean apartment on the east side, smiling as the steam rises around his face. Strangest of all, I can imagine myself there with him, laughing as he says something undoubtedly funny, walking home from work with him, sitting beside him on the couch with my head on his shoulder and not saying anything at all. I can see him holding my hand as we stroll along the pier on a summer evening, and when he lets it go to buy us each a chocolate ice cream, there are no new marks on my skin.

The bus jolts to a stop and the reading man stirs, closes up his book, and darts down the steps beyond the shuddering metal walls and into the world. My daydream has left me, but the feeling of it remains as a hot prickling in my cheeks.

I scrub the heel of my hand against my face to get rid of the sensation and then, when that fails, rest the side of my head against the window to cool my skin. The rest of the bus ride unravels like the time between sleeping and waking.

The sixth floor of the office is the only place I’ve ever been that can be simultaneously bustling and still. The air vibrates with the chattering of computer keys, but no one moves.

They sit like statuettes at their desks. There will be a pile of manila folders on my desk, thick with various papers containing numbers and words that I do not understand myself, but which I have been charged with inputting into our system. My job is not a thrilling or creative one—something that Mal and Circe have both pointed out on several occasions, perched before their easels—but it keeps me occupied and pays my way through life. I would never complain about my apartment and my bed and my oatmeal; I could never complain about the thing that provides them.

The pile of folders is not the only thing waiting for me in my cubicle. There’s a man lounging in my chair, watching with a placid smile as I go about my coat-hanging. It takes me a moment of meticulous memory searching, but eventually I recognize him as a new addition to the team. I try to remember his name; my supervisor definitely said it when she was introducing him to the rest of the sixth floor. Henry? Harry?

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New Coworker with the H-Name says, “Thought I’d come get to know the Employee of the Month, see if I could get some pointers.” He points at the framed photo of me on the far wall and smiles, a baring of his teeth; they are perfect and white.

“I’m flattered.” I am many things, but flattered is not one. When I received the accolade two weeks ago, I had been quite pleased. Framed on the wall, I still beam with pride, but the photo is too glossy and a touch airbrushed. No, I am not flattered, just indifferent and eager for New Coworker to leave my cubicle.

“So? Pointers?” he prods.

“Today is actually looking pretty busy for me,” I say with airbrushed politeness, and gesture at my pile of folders. “Maybe another time?”

His smile falters.

“Sure. Rain check,” he says, and brushes past me.

After New Coworker’s departure, I sit down to my uneventful routine, simply letting the words and numbers go in one eye and out the other. By lunchtime, I have managed to make my way through the majority of the files.

I walk to the breakroom, pour some soup into a bowl, dutifully cover it with a paper towel to avoid inconvenient splattering. As I am waiting for humming, imperceptible microwaves to warm my liquid lunch, New Coworker walks into the breakroom and leans against the refrigerator. I hope that he does not attempt to initiate conversation. Every new interaction raises the risk of potential embarrassment should I fail to recall his name.

New Coworker says, “What’s for lunch, then?”

“Um.” I am mostly just relieved that he did not prompt me for his name. “Soup.”

“What kind?”

I briefly wonder what kind will make him stop asking cordial questions.

“I’m not sure. I didn’t check the label before I threw away the can.” The microwave beeps, a small mercy. A minute passed, gone into my bowl of soup. Unwilling to waste another

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moment in this crammed shoebox of a breakroom, I hastily reach into the microwave. As I am extracting my bowl, New Coworker grabs my forearm, his hot, clammy palm sizzling into my skin. Or perhaps that was the soup that I just spilled in my surprise.

“Let me see, maybe I’ll be able to tell what kind,” he says.

I do not register his words. I hardly even register the burn I’ve sustained from my lunch. I set the bowl down and yank my arm away.

He steps away and holds up both the offending hand and its partner in mocking surrender. “Sorry, didn’t realize that you were going to flip out over it.”

I could respond. Maybe I should. But now my gaze is focusing in on the marks on my arm. His entire hand is outlined, shadow black on my skin, as though he had pressed his palm to an ink pad before grabbing onto me.

Behind me, the door swings open — the hinges scream.

Only when I am sure that the sound did not come from my throat do I swivel to face the noise. My cubicle neighbor stands on the threshold, holding a little blue paper cup of microwavable macaroni and cheese. She looks between New Coworker and myself. When she blinks, it is a long and slow movement, a shuttering and unshuttering of her wide green eyes. She clears her throat, looks back over her shoulder.

With a tissue-paper voice, she says, “I think I forgot my spoon.”

The door shrieks again and she is gone. My gaze is dragged back to New Coworker. He smiles, close-mouthed, and the shape does not seem right — absurd and damp, like a piece of cooked macaroni.

I flee.

In the bathroom, I scrub viciously at my arm with hot water and soap, fingernails and paper towels. My skin turns bright red but the hand mark remains as stark as before. As I scrub, all of the other marks on my skin, imprints sustained over all the years of my life, turn darker too. I look up, searching my face in the mirror. I cannot even recognize myself

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beneath all these fragments of other people. Swirling shades of friends and strangers.

Desperate now, I scrabble through the pockets of my dress pants for my phone. The instant I retrieve it, my wet hands are shaking so hard that it almost falls to the ground. I fumble with my contacts list, hit the call button, and try to wait as patiently as possible while my lungs work double time.

Six rings, then Mal’s voice.

“Mal,” I say or, perhaps more appropriately, gasp into the phone. “Mal, can you come here — can you come pick me up, please?”

“What’s wrong? You sound hysterical.” He sounds so calm over the line, and my fingers tighten on the phone, my clammy palm smearing against the case.

“What’s wrong?” I echo, and choke on a broken laugh.

“Mal, I’ve got fingerprints all over me. I can’t even see my face.”

“What are you talking about?” There is more hesitance in his voice now, but it means very little to me. All I want is the car — for him to just drive over here and bring me home.

“I was grabbed by the arm, and now there are these black prints in my skin, Mal. I need you to come pick me up, or—or meet me at the bus stop, or something.”

“I’ll meet you at the stop,” he says, the words accompanied by a heavy and exasperated sigh. Then he adds, his tone streaked through with darkness like an oil slick, “Who?” “Who what?”

“Who touched you?”

My fingers, tight on the phone, find the red end-call button. My hands are no longer shaking. When I look in the mirror, the marks have faded back to their usual faintness, scarcely even noticeable anymore. Only the handprint on my arm remains, but even that appears to be greying. I rub it once more; it does not budge.

I leave my coat behind when I walk out of the office. I tell my cubicle neighbor that at I am not feeling well and plan on taking the rest of the day — my first sick day in two years.

I ask if she can cover for me. She looks at my arm, where the mark peeks out from beneath the hitched-up sleeve of my but-

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ton-down. She looks at my face, and she nods, and she slides her hand across her desk in my direction, a simple bridging of space.

I arrive at the stop just in time to board the two p.m. bus. I find myself looking for the young man with the book without knowing why. Perhaps in the life that I fabricated for him, he was a man who only worked until two, or who went home for late lunches. Maybe in another life, one where I knew the reading man, I would also take my lunch off, and meet him back at the apartment so that we could eat together. Maybe I would pick up takeout from the little Chinese place down the street with the red awning and the peeling gold lettering. I would get him chicken lo mein because that’s his favorite, and Szechuan beef for myself, and egg rolls for us both to share.

After eating, we would, with greasy fingers, open our fortune cookies together, at the same time. My stomach rumbles, wresting me from my reverie. I find myself craving Szechuan beef.

The bus comes to a halt at the stop near my apartment.

The doors swing open. Through them, I see Mal. He hasn’t seen me yet, his head bent to his phone, his brow furrowed. I have thrown us out of rhythm; the five p.m. reunion, six p.m. dinner, seven p.m. whiskey on the rocks, eight p.m. tipsy art sermon have been interrupted, and he will be expecting an apology when I get off the bus, so he can cast it aside in anger and we can return to convention.

I could write an apology in my head right now, I could get off the bus and bring back the rhythm — it would be easy enough. But should I? Should I walk down those stairs, follow him back to the apartment, baste the thawed chicken and put it in the oven, pour whiskey over ice? Mal’s perfect girlfriend would. But I do not move. The doors screech closed, drawing Mal’s attention. As I watch him raise his head, I can’t help but wonder—what will he do now, where he stands on the other side of the door?

Through the dirty window, I meet Mal’s eyes at last. He frowns and beckons to me, an agitated flapping of his hand in his direction, as though there is an invisible marionette string tied between us by which he is trying to lead me. My hand

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begins to rise automatically to wave back, as I always do when the bus is leaving the curb. But I remember the sight of his back today as he walked away from the bus without waving to me — I can almost read the stark white concert dates against the black cotton from memory. I let my hand fall back to my lap. The detachment on my face shapes the shock and anger on his, as easily as if I had reached out and tugged the corners of his mouth down with my fingertips. I see his mouth forming an incredulous question; I turn my cheek, let him read the fingerprints like concert dates on my skin as the bus pulls away from the curb.

I ride the bus all the way to the pier.

Once I am standing on wooden planks and the bus has driven off, I survey my surroundings. The first building to my left is a saltwater taffy shop; on the right is a wax museum. I’ve never much liked taffy — it always gets stuck in my teeth — and I don’t feel like walking all the way down the pier, so I walk into the wax museum. The entry fee is five dollars. There is a crumpled-up ten in my pants pocket. I smooth it out with the heel of my hand before passing it to the ticket seller, a bored-looking teen whose face shimmers with oil in the dim light. He points unenthusiastically to the entrance.

“Thank you,” I say.

He does not respond.

The showroom is impossibly dark and cold inside, the way I imagine it must be in the far reaches of space, beyond the sun and stars. I drift in the ether, space debris. In the distance, I spot a pinprick of blue-white light — but it is not distant after all, just a few steps away. A wax statue of some Hollywood darling, lit from below. She is a star; I orbit obediently.

Her eyes are an indecisive shade of brown, at once the color of both light autumn leaves and the dark husk of a chestnut. They remind me of Circe’s eyes, which is strange mostly because Circe’s eyes are blue. I stare into the figurine’s eyes, waiting for something I cannot quite place, perhaps a change in expression. But she just continues to pout blankly at a camera that does not exist. She is beautiful and empty, and I feel that emptiness in the hollow of my ribs like moonlight.

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I drift on through the dark and silence to the next statue, another young celebrity I do not know with the impossibly long lashes of a young deer. I press my fingers to her wax cheek. Her not-skin is somewhere between cold and warm, as though devoid of temperature altogether, and leaves the pads of my fingers feeling strangely slippery. She too is beautiful with her wide, expressionless eyes, and when I pull my hand away there are the slightest little indentations in her cheek.

Another figure catches my eye — a male actor with blonde hair wearing tortoiseshell glasses. He looks a little like the bookish man from the bus, but with less tranquility, less focus, less… everything. I walk up to him, take his outstretched wax hand. I wonder if the artificially pensive curve of his mouth was designed to look pleading, or if the inanimateness of him simply lends it that appearance. I lean forward, press my lips to his wax ones. My nose bumps his glasses. Up close, I am enveloped by a faint, candle-like scent.

This statue in front of me is beautiful like the rest, but he will never make spaghetti Bolognese or walk along the pier or read fortunes from cookies. He will stay here forever, staring off into the dim distance through glasses he doesn’t need, gaining marks on his skin from the touches of normal people, less lovely than him but more alive. And my chest aches for it, for him, and for the little prints I’ve left now on his mouth and his hand.

I leave the wax museum then. I walk down the steps on the side of the pier and out onto the beach. As I watch the waves, I think about wax statues of real people. I think about how Mal loved me before I existed. I think about the marks on my skin.

My phone buzzes in my pocket. I do not check the caller ID; it does not matter much to me if it is Mal or Circe. I simply don’t want to talk.

I slip off my shoes and leave them at the water’s edge.

I wade into the sea until it is up to my knees, not minding that my dress pants will likely be ruined or that the water is colder than the inside of the wax museum, than the far reaches of space.

A large wave washes in, striking the shore and me with

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it. I am soaked to just below my elbows. When I look down, the handprint on my forearm is gone, and years of fingerprints with it. I roll my wrist, touch the inside of my arm, the back of my hand. I have never seen my skin so smooth.

The watch on my wrist says it is eight p.m. Normally, I would be at home, drowsy and full, listening to the Gospel According to Mal, his words punctuated by the rattling of ice in an empty glass of whiskey. Instead I am here, awake, ravenous, as I survey the landscape before me. Later, I will walk back up the beach and retrieve my shoes. For now, I will stay in this moment, fixed in time like a painting, watching the wind stir the water in whorls like fingerprints.

T H E

F O U N D A T I O N A L I S T

Marriage Mallory Moore University of Chicago

M

y marriage died the day I turned forty-nine. Years later, everyone would forget that it had been my birthday at all. To those who I care to remind, they answer with a dismissive sigh, “Correlation is not causation, Jones.”

To the rest of the world, it was Winola’s day of transformation.

It was the day she shed her role as wife and mother and became…something else. Was it art or was it madness? Who am I to really say?

The media sure had a field day. The medical community couldn’t figure her out. The art world was equal parts infatuated and perplexed. The feminists re-wrote entire theories.

Me? I woke up one day to a kiss and the soft sound of her footsteps and nothing has ever been the same.

The memory is hazy. She padded downstairs into the pre-dawn. She had a way of gliding over the wood floors like she wasn’t there at all, but I could hear her slipping through the halls, into the living room, the dining room, the family room. It was soothing, tracking her movement like a familiar dream. I fell back asleep. How was I supposed to know that with each step, each creak of the floor, she was shaking free of a yoke I didn’t know had held her?

Some blog described her later as a cicada shedding a too-tight skin. Apparently, it was a metaphor for our misogynistic culture. Personally, I thought the insect metaphor was a little rude, but I thought about it a lot. I thought about how you have no idea there’s something underneath until all you’re left with is an empty shell in your hands to crush into air. The cicadas themselves hide in the trees and sing loud and long. They’re all voice and no body.

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All I can say is that, the next thing I knew, I was waking up again to the sheets being pulled straight off my bed.

With a sharp tug, the hospital corners snapped free and, whoosh, the sheet was a wave over my head. Wind in the sails.

It was mighty breezy for a moment there, lying in my ratty sleeping boxers.

Then, with an agile flick of her wrists, Win swept the sheets into her arms as if she was at the reins of a wild horse.

“What the hell,” barely had time to escape my lips before she was charging down the hall. The words bounced back on me, unanswered, like a maxed-out credit card. I blinked in shock, lying breach on the bare pallet. I imagined Win reappearing in lingerie, sliding up against the doorframe in the bold, sultry way of her twenties. I was right to wonder; me and Win had done it all. Before children and back pain and preemptive fears of menopause, we used to wake twisted in the bedsheets like acrobats in a circus act. I thought things might change again now that we were empty nesters. Our sex life would be like the magician’s act where they saw apart a woman’s body and then put it back together whole. But, that day, my image of her in the doorframe was just another illusion.

Downstairs, Winola was whipping the living room into a hurricane. She looked at the couches and their smudgy white slipcovers with vengeance. Kneeling on the floor, she yanked at the Velcro flaps. Her muscles rippled like an earthquake, small but seismic. She peeled off the couch’s tough skin, tugging at the baggy costume. She shook it out, and the thick canvas billowed angrily as renegade crumbs sprang up and scattered across the carpet. A pile of the discarded shells began to accumulate on the floor.

Next, she pounced on my chair, clawing to get a grip on the fabric. The Velcro made a roaring rip. I swear I could hear its growl. What does it matter if I was upstairs the whole time? I can see it clear as day.

I couldn’t let myself just lie there, shivering like a freshly hazed plebe, so I decided to plod downstairs. I let each step fall loudly enough to announce my presence. Maybe she’d at least fixed me a goddamn coffee. These were the

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mundane sorts of thoughts I still entertained.

I wish I could say I was less annoyed, but there’s nothing like the impending doom of middle-age to shorten your patience to the length of a cigarette butt.

I can’t say if it surprised me to find her standing in the center of the family room on an island of crumpled slipcovers, surveying the terrain as if it were something new entirely.

It was certainly different. Things had been the same for so long with us, it almost made sense. The scale had tipped.

Without any purpose molding them into shape, the cushions did take on a strange, new form. Exposed stained pillows and yellowed foam were all laid bare. The stripped furniture stood like great monoliths encircling her. It was like fucking Stonehenge. It was about the calmest sort of chaos I’d ever seen. I recognized my sheets at the top of the pile, the drool on the corners still wet.

It looked as if she’d raided the hall closet too, purging it of anything remotely white. I imagined neat stacks of washcloths crashing silently into her outstretched arms. We used to fight about shades of white—eggshell, taupe, ivory— and whether I was pretending not to know the difference to protect my masculinity or if I actually didn’t. Now, she stood there, triumphant, looking like some bizarre astronaut.

“Honey, would you pass me my pinking shears?” She asked as if it were the perfectly normal thing to do.

You might want to cast me as the bad guy in this story.

It’s tempting to say she was driven to do all this because of her dick husband, but that’s a bit reductionist. Here’s what I really did that day. I didn’t grumble. I didn’t curse. I didn’t ask questions. I just handed her the shears. The handoff was a bit awkward, my fat thumbs got stuck in the holes, but that wasn’t my fault.

I stood there for a while as she ripped up the sheets and the fabric split like stiches or the skin of a lip that’s gotten a good punching. I puttered around with the toaster until I realized she wasn’t going to offer an explanation. At a certain point, the more you ask what’s wrong the less likely you are to get an answer. Of course, others will be quick to note that I’m being presumptuous in assuming there was some-

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thing wrong at all. Artistic genius, like twenty-years of homemaking, requires sacrifice.

After a couple cups of coffee, I had that frenetic sense of purpose caffeine gives you but nowhere really to direct it.

It was a Sunday morning, I was officially middle-aged as far as I was concerned, and, outside of work, I had no real hobbies besides fixing household appliances and falling asleep to Food Network Star with an arm around Win. These facts didn’t bother me. I actually quite liked my life, but it seemed inevitable that things would change. I just thought it would be more momentous and, yeah, I thought the change would involve me.

Grabbing the car keys, I decided to strike out for the day.

“I’m headed out,” I stated the obvious and pulled the door shut behind me. The door slammed, and I was surprised by how relieved I was that it closed before I had the chance to see if she would respond. Back when I still had to make the soccer carpool rounds with the kids, I never had to worry that she wouldn’t notice if I was gone.

I don’t remember giving much of a second thought to Win’s little project on my drive that day. I thought about how, if you think of life as a bell-curve, this day should have been the moment I stood at the peak and could see everything clearly. I thought about how, as a kid, my own family used to pile into the car for a Sunday ride. We didn’t go anywhere per say. It was just a chance to take out the nice Mustang, us kids squashed in the back with no seatbelts. Running my fingers through my thinning hair, I wondered about what my dad may have been thinking on those rides. I’d venture it wasn’t about bell-curves but who’s to say. A twangy rendition of Country Roads came on and I turned up the radio, enjoying the crackle and the breeze. There are worse ways to spend a birthday.

By the time I got back, it was near impossible to ignore the gyre of fabric spread out on the floor of the den. Even I could tell there was something intentional about it. The Times would later compare it to an ammonite. The Post deemed it a whirlpool. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

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I trapezed aimlessly around the kitchen. It was getting late, but I was reluctant to head upstairs without her. We weren’t even talking really, just existing in the same space, her weaving a web of design, me creating crisscross tracks around the appliances like an animal circling before sleep.

I opened the fridge for all the usual reasons people do late at night. The fluorescent light made my eyes water. There, on the bottom left shelf, was a birthday cake, buttercream chilled in stiff rosettes. Staring with the fridge door wide open, I noticed how soothing and cool it felt like a washcloth on a feverish forehead. She hadn’t forgotten. I wiped the runny corners of my eyes.

I cut a big slice and kept thinking. If she hadn’t forgotten, then why hadn’t she said anything all day? The cake was one of those gestures like taking out the trash for you and then leaving the new bag out on the counter; you couldn’t tell if it was passive aggressive or kind.

Was the pre-made cake just a way of saying she had been planning this along, plotting her departure for this very day? I chewed with a vengeance even though her spite was a fantasy conjured by my own mind. The dishes clattered carelessly into the sink.

“Don’t wait up,” she flashed from the other room. She spoke not unkindly, misinterpreting a question in my rude loudness. It’s funny how, after so long, you start to assume you don’t need words to communicate. I liked thinking of the two of us as having our own language, but, then again, maybe we’d been speaking two different ones all along. Without language as an anchor, meaning just sinks to the bottom and your actions float on top, blocking the view down.

I took my own sweet time unloading the dishwasher.

She didn’t seem to notice, which pissed me off a little. I left the rest of the plates in the sink. They’d be there in the morning. For once, she didn’t notice that either. I’ll admit, I was the tiniest bit satisfied that we finally agreed; the dishes could wait. That’s the last thing I thought about that night, and then I slept like a rock, plunging like a deadweight, hook, line, and sinker, into middle age.

At this point, I could embellish the story a bit. I could

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say, that night, I had auspicious dreams. I could say I dreamt of me and Win at sea in the kitchen sink, waves of dish soap slopping over the sides. I could say that the head splitting noise, which woke me, infiltrated my vision as the stern cracking in two, tossing us apart. I could even say I used to smash plates against the wall when I got angry and that’s why Win decided to start smashing our ceramics to add to her creation.

People eat that shit up, especially the broadcast networks. I think it’s easier than saying I just didn’t know. I still don’t, but there’s no story there. Is there?

The next morning, I woke to the sound of things breaking. It was painful in the way that confusing things are, dulled a bit by the surreal-ness. I dragged myself from bed, cursing my back and my knees and my shoulders, and ran down the stairs, a million thoughts running through my head.

In an empty house at five am, almost anything is possible.

Yet, there Win was, sitting at the kitchen table, calmly bringing a hammer to our plates. She took the little tea saucers we never used but she’d insisted on adding to our registry once upon a time and snapped them delicately like crab legs. My mind struggled to catch up with my body. My heart pounded from the fast start but also from the flood of “what if” fears, how strongly I wanted to protect her but then nothing was wrong.

“What the hell, Win.” I wish I could say my speech was more original. I think about how we played the same script over and over again like a slapstick comedy.

“I ran out of sheets,” she said plainly. I felt a remnant of her dry humor bloom like a flower in the desert.

“When you put it like that, it makes me seem like the irrational one.” I cracked, regaining my nonchalance. She shrugged, bleary-eyed. I imagined she had been up all night.

I watched for a bit, got bored for a bit and almost nodded off. To walk away seemed like admitting that I was utterly useless. Besides, I didn’t have to clock in for another four hours.

She arranged the splintered pieces so that they stuck out from the curves of fabric like the spines of a roulette wheel.

M A R R I A G E

“Can I help or anything?”

“No, dear.” She was polite but firm. There was nothing fascinating about this situation. It was the same conversation we’d been having for a decade.

“Fine then, I’ll be upstairs.” I noticed the swirl of fabric had started to puddle onto the kitchen tile, its tentacles reaching out from the heart of the living room. I always hated the whole open-floor plan. In a huff, I tried to kick it on my way out, but it was so floppy I got tangled in the damn thing and ended up tripping. I got about as much relief as from kicking a deflated soccer ball.

“Careful with my installation, Jo.” Win scooped up the limp corner and fanned it out again like the train of a dress.

“B.S.” I muttered under my breath. We weren’t really the type of people to go to lots of museums. I didn’t even know how she knew what an installation was, but I thought the whole idea of it seemed pretty haughty. I didn’t think it was art. It was just another big pile of dirty laundry.

In fact, the idea of it didn’t even dawn on me until a few weeks later when her niece came over for an impromptu visit. By this point, Win had ventured out to Costco a few times for “supplies,” and the layers of towel and sheet and paper tunneling around our family room reached up to her waist. I’d taken to calling it “the doughnut,” which I think pissed her off a little but she never said anything.

I was out mowing the front lawn, rocking out to The Killers, when I looked up to our lanky niece waving her arm at me.

“Hey, Uncle Jones!”

I paused, an earbud dangling around my neck.

“Hi, Olivia. What brings you round?” I asked, wiping away some sweat and grass clippings.

“Oh, just stopping by. I haven’t seen you guys in forever. I told Aunt Win I was coming.” That was news to me, but I just wiped my hands on my jeans and said,

“Well, come on in.”

“Oh my god, air-conditioning,” she proclaimed, waltzing in the door. I was about to offer her something to drink, but, when I turned, she was already halfway down the cor-

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ridor, her flipflops casually kicked off in the entryway. There was something comforting about seeing a self-assured teenager.

“Whoa, Aunt Win. This is awesome!”

I imagined Win gave that shy smile she’s so good at.

On the radio, they would go on to describe it as Mona-Lisa like, enigmatic. Really, though, it was just her smile. She let Olivia take it in, eyes wide as saucers. I thought this generation took more to impress. Then again, I’d grown accustomed to the behemoth over the weeks. I didn’t even think it all that unusual anymore. It was just a fact of life that I had to step around to make the coffee.

“Thanks, hon.”

“Can I post a picture to my story?” Her fingers were already flying.

That photo created an avalanche bigger than the one taking over our house.

At first, it was just a few gangly pre-teens awkwardly lingering on the doorstep like stray cats. I found them on my way to take out the trash. I didn’t realize how I had been living in Groundhog Day, the same Win, the same whiteness, the same routine. They surprised me, the way they just stood there, surprised I had opened the door to my own house before they had quite figured out what to say.

One stepped forward, twisting her hair.

“We, uh, saw the photo on Instagram and Olivia tagged you guys and we were just like in the neighborhood and like could we come in and see too?” Most of the words registered with a sort of vague familiarity but didn’t hold much meaning to me.

I wavered for a second. I was still thinking about taking out the trash and debating whether I could make it through the blockade of braces and flat-ironed hair.

She blurted out, “Olivia said it would be fine,” giving one of those challenging looks. Gosh, you forget so quickly what it’s like to have kids around. I felt a bit of a pang and motioned for them to go in. They hovered on the threshold like they were entering a haunted house. I mused at how easily their confidence had been used up.

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“Company!” I hollered to Win and then continued out with the garbage. Admittedly, I tend to get a bit fixated on the task at hand, but some things just have to get done. Only once I’d chucked it in the bin and firmly replaced the rock on top of the can to keep the raccoons out did I start thinking about them ogling at my house and Win. It made the back of my neck feel hot. Then, I heard their giggles trickling from around the front of the house as they left.

“That was wild. She didn’t even say like two words.”

“I know right? And he’s so stalker-ish.”

“Do you think they’re like crazy or something?” They can’t have been inside for more than five minutes. I rubbed my temples and tried to imagine being in middle school again. It felt too far in the past to really seriously remember.

I didn’t know, but that was only the beginning. I’m not sure how word got out, social media, the neighborhood list host, an obscure blog, a less obscure blog. It was like following a piece of string through a maze. It must have been a slow news cycle because, one day, the local team showed up. I was confused and just stood there, blocking the door, opening and closing my mouth like a guppy. It made no sense to me why the people on my screen would be right in front of me.

“See, viewers have been asking about a mesmerizing art installation allegedly being created at this location. And, at Channel 4, we like to provide the answers.”

I didn’t speak.

“It’s currently trending under #cosmos,” the lady who usually does the weather report thrust a smartphone towards me as proof.

“We’d love an exclusive with the artist,” the reporter craned her neck.

Win was puttering around in the back with her pajamas still on.

“Who’s that?” She asked absently. People rarely interested her anymore.

“It’s nothing.” I snapped and closed the door, angry about their cheap, canned comments.

“Oh, don’t be rude,” Win said, almost automatically.

Her tone fell flat, but I saw from the glint in her eye that she

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was joking. She really didn’t care too much.

The segment, which aired that night, was mainly of me slamming the door in their faces. “Art or Dark” ran across the screen in the big bold letters of emergency. The commentator noted a pale woman alone in the background of the grainy footage. Of course, she was fucking pale; she hadn’t left the house in weeks. The last clip was of a shaky zoomed-in shot of a white fabric tendril creeping over our back window like a little flag. “Is it art? Is it a cry for help? A signal of surrender?

This is Channel 4.” Fucking Channel 4.

“Can you believe this?” I said. She barely looked up, and I realized that I hadn’t meant it as a rhetorical question.

For a second, I saw it through their eyes. I watched as she drifted through her work like a ghost. She didn’t seem to have the same vigor as when she started the project. It was more like she was looking for something lost, like a dropped pill skittered across the bathroom floor.

I didn’t really like that view of things. There was something disturbing about it. It made me sad and it made me angry. I wanted to shake her shoulders and wake her up from whatever dream she was having without me.

I didn’t have much time to think about it, though, because the agent first called the same night. At least, I think that was the order of things. Time had begun to take on a very different quality. Win had stopped thinking about it entirely, defying even the binary of night and day but not able to escape the growing circles under her eyes. The days were like clothes in a washing machine, all tangled and mixed up and inside out. I felt seasick, but the bills still needed to be paid and the phone still rang.

That’s what this agent guy so kindly wanted to remind me, speaking from the bottom of his capitalist heart.

“Look, whatever’s going on, you have an opportunity here. I don’t care about any bullcrap between you and your wife. I’m here to help you monetize this whole thing. Bills have to be paid, right?”

I saw it as justice in some sense. Win deserved compensation for her work. We deserved more. I asked Win what she thought.

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“Sure. As long as it doesn’t have to affect me.” People called her modest, but I think they just didn’t get her motivation. Like most artists, it certainly wasn’t achievement or fame. It was something hardwired inside of her, and even I wasn’t granted admission.

Saying yes to that agent was like opening Pandora’s box. I thought it would make the whole thing feel less exploitative, but, somehow, the coins clinking into lockboxes on our front porch and lines stretching around the block, straining behind new chain-link fences, didn’t make me feel much better. The lines snaked in and out of our house like tubes for a blood transfusion.

Even during showings, Win refused to leave her art alone. She roamed listlessly through the dunes of her work, adjusting a corner here or there, smoothing the curves. I hated how the captive crowds looked at her like some animal in the zoo. I couldn’t tell if they were coming to see the art or her. It concerned me, the idea that I had inadvertently put my wife on exhibition.

In fact, I didn’t see art at all when I glanced into the den. I saw her pallor, a dulled passion, a firm set jaw. It was like one of those optical illusions where you either see two faces or vase but never both at the same time. I could only see Win. Everything else was white noise, irrelevant and insignificant. I didn’t find it beautiful. Maybe I just blocked it out because I couldn’t understand. I couldn’t hold them both in my hands.

On the phone, our agent had said that this was our chance to claim the narrative. You have to get ahead of the media, he philosophized. He was right that I didn’t like their version of events, but now it dawned on me I wasn’t sure I liked the alternative either. What was our story?

I had always thought of life as something that just happens not something you mush and mold like clay. I don’t know how I had been ok with that for so long.

I began asking Win if she would go on tv for that interview they kept bugging us about. At first, I brought it up like a joke.

“I can’t believe they keep asking us to go on prime-

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time. People must be really bored if they want to watch our life all the time.” As soon as I said it, I remembered that we weren’t really as normal as I liked to think.

“Besides, it’s out of the question,” I continued, trying to reassure myself. “I mean I heard even the guys have to wear makeup.” I wanted her to disagree, to show interest for something outside the four walls she lived in and tell me we should go.

I didn’t realize how much I cared, but it started to nag at me. Her refusals were like a squeaky door. She wasn’t doing anything wrong, but it annoyed the hell out of me. Every time, I heard her say no it bothered me more and more. We pushed the question back and forth. No, yes. Open, closed. Why wouldn’t she just agree? Why all of this?

One night, I just erupted. I hated begging. I hated being just as much in the dark as the strangers who strutted through our house like they had a right to be there. I wanted to know the answers to the same questions as everyone else. I wanted the world to look at us standing together, even if just on a screen.

“After all I’ve done for you, and you won’t even go on one show for me. One.” I shook my head in disgust, feigning disbelief at her denial. In actuality, I was more surprised when she finally said yes than I was by any of the nos.

I saw her weighing it in her head, tallying the energy it took to say no in a crude cost/benefit analysis.

“Fine,” she said. She made eye-contact with me for a moment.

She wasn’t resentful. She just seemed tired. That look made me feel worse about asking than ever. Then, I felt mad at her for making me feel guilty by just giving up like that.

In the end, it probably wasn’t worth losing sleep over.

She didn’t seem particularly upset about it.

On set, she blinked in the too bright lights, looking very profound somehow. She looked different in the makeup they put on her, a pantomime version of herself. The background was dark, like 60 minutes.

“I can imagine you haven’t been getting out much these days,” the newscaster began, sweetly. “How’s that been for your marriage?” That’s how all good journalists are, laying

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honey before the trap.

“Well, it makes us very loyal,” Win joked. She’d always had an offbeat sort of humor. I grinned forcefully so that people wouldn’t take it the wrong way, but, when I watched the recording later, it looked sort of like a grimace. The interview proceeded generically. We traded short, occasionally witty answers.

“So, how’s your work life balance then?” Win fidgeted.

“You know, know that you mention it I do probably need to get going,” she cracked a sheepish smile that seemed to convey, “you know how it is.” The interviewer shared a sympathetic nod, which I suspected was rehearsed.

“Well, just one more question then…how will you know when it’s finished?”

“Oh darling, you’re never really finished.” The cameras still rolling, Win picked up her handbag and left the studio.

“Alright then,” the interviewer seemed at least a little surprised or perhaps just vaguely disappointed. “And you.”

She twisted in her seat towards me and I felt the same dread as being called on unprepared.

“Does this feel like a sustainable project to you? As the spouse.” There was no honest way to answer that question.

Until she said it out loud, I hadn’t expected this to last forever.

“I mean it’s not really my project,” I said, sounding exactly like a cavalier, defensive jock. I don’t know if you will believe me, but it hurt to say that; it felt like cutting off a limb. How could this be any less mine than Win’s?

I was still trapped in my own thoughts when they whisked me out of the studio. The interview was over, but, inside my head, it echoed and echoed, stupefying me.

I came home and, compared to the saturated set, the quietness of the house stung. The monochrome of our walls meshed with her art, all of it jutting up against the technicolor experience of the afternoon. People don’t see us at this time of day when the evening light casts dirty dishwater shadows on the heaps inside our house. It’s not photogenic enough for people to be interested.

Now, time is so slow and so fast. It sweeps us up like

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dust bunnies. I know you want her to be a hero, a heroine, but there’s a sadness to the way she moves. It’s the sadness of all ambitious people. They move like they have to have a purpose even when they don’t.

I don’t sleep well. There are so many questions still fizzing in my stomach like seltzer. I’m sweaty. My mouth feels dry as I run through everything again. Win is downstairs and I am upstairs, and I know how we got here, physically anyways, but I don’t get it. I watch the full moon playing at the edge of the blinds and allow myself to feel sad though I can’t quite pin down the feeling and attach it to something.

Around midnight, I sneak downstairs.

“You tiptoe like a grizzly bear,” she used to say. I smile at the memory.

As I round the corner, I pause. In the night, I’m stunned by the sheer immensity in a whole new way. For a moment, I don’t see her at all. I’m not even looking. Streaming with moonlight, it truly is stunning, a lunar landscape all of its own. I navigate carefully through the curling orbits of fabric and then peer into the deep center. She lies curled in a ball in the sunken heart of her artwork like she was waiting to be rescued from an ice-cave, but no-one ever came.

I

She is all edges to the curves of material around her, beautiful collarbone, frail wrists, sharp elbows, like a bird in her nest. Grey streaks through her hair like comet dust from shooting stars. It’s shocking to see time literally weaving itself through her hair. I want to touch it, hold it, and not let go. I want to, but I don’t. She looks at peace here, think, and then I pad back up to bed.

T H E

F O U N D A T I O N A L I S T

Book Club Lily Swanson University of Kansas

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our book club decides they’re going to murder Katelyn Becker’s terrier. It’s a pure Jack Russel, inbred into floppy-eared complacency, totally white except for russet-brown stains on its eyes and ears. It has a habit of escaping into the front yard. You’ve seen it once or twice in the day, but its presence is most felt at night when that yap yap yapping fills the street like gunshots and Katelyn Becker cries out like a wraith: Dais-y! Dais-y!

Patti wants to shoot it with her son’s air-rifle. Jen suggests feeding it some chocolate left over from Easter. You offer the front bumper of your Dodge Grand Caravan. Everyone is calling out suggestions, but the rain from last night evaporating off the tarmac catches your words so they don’t carry up the hill to the Becker’s big white McMansion. The air is hot honeydew, kissy-face damp. You fan each other with paper plates and drink boozy Arnold Palmers in the shade of Nora Jane’s modest veranda.

Nora Jane is a gracious host. She never forgave her parents for squeezing her out in some sidewinder East-Georgia peanut town but she sure knows how to put out a damn fine spread. You nash on box crackers and smoked cheese and she keeps the drinks flowing with a kind of intimidating gentry that turns sincere the more time you spend North of Mason-Dixon.

The book for this month is a memoir by a Texas girl whose parents were rodeo clowns. She traveled all over the state during rodeo season until her father took the full force of a 600-pound steer and couldn’t bring himself to step back into the ring. You’re the only one who read it. The other women sit

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around with their copies under their arms, spines intact, bookmarks placed 150 pages deep last minute to falsify some kind of conscious effort.

You can’t hold it against them just for being busy.

Lunch breaks are lenient at the city commissioner’s office and since Sawyer is ten now and no longer demands to be read to, you can spend the last hour or so before bed reading to yourself about how the dangerous part of falling in love with a bull rider isn’t the pounding hooves or broken bones but the way West Texas boys learn to love with just half their hearts.

Everyone works except Lina. Lina’s the wide-eyed baby blogger who collects everybody’s grade schoolers on weekdays and lets them play Lord of the Flies in her backyard until mommy or daddy swings by to take them home. Lina’s services have been required less and less over the years. There are now 8 to 10 latchkey kids between the six of you.

Three of them are Patti’s. Her oldest two are already in community college. She’s a caseworker for Child Protective Services. Jen and Lina and Nora Jean don’t like it when she talks about work, but you listen.

“You won’t believe what’s out there till you see it, baby girl. I’ve been in meth caves, hoarder’s nests, tent cities. I went into this one-story that stank so bad of cat piss it had to be torn down and even after that real estate people wouldn’t go near it cause the goddamned foundation stank like cat piss. I’ve seen some shit holes, and I mean literal shit holes. Have you ever been in a house without indoor plumbing?”

You don’t know why you listen. Maybe it’s politeness or morbid curiosity. Either way, you listen, and because you do she’s closer with you than anyone else in the neighborhood.

“You’d have to cover up your plates,” she says, to your idea of running over Katelyn Becker’s terrier. “Just slap some duct tape on there, wait till the little guy hops the fence and bam!” She slaps her hands together. “No more barking.”

Lina shakes her head and says it’s all too brutal. There’s no need for this kind of talk. Patti shrugs her off. You wonder if you should try and bring up the book. No. There’s no matter as pressing as Katelyn Becker, so your club silently watches her enormous windows and useless pillars like a line of Roman

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senators casting pollice verso, thumbs down.

❦

The next time you see Katelyn Becker you’re getting ready to pick up Sawyer from soccer practice. Bobby’s your oldest, he’s still in his uniform from St. Michaels tossing a frisbee around with your husband. He’ll be in high school next year, which you can hardly believe since he’s the size of a sixth grader. He’s got these gangly forearms and shins that make him look sort of like a model skeleton in a biology classroom. You watch him through the window. He can’t seem to throw the frisbee right. Somehow every time he does it spins sideways into a tree or falls flat on the ground. Your husband goes huffing after it and they try again. You wonder if Bobby has some kind of disability you don’t know about.

You step outside and tell him it’s time to go pick up his McBrother. Since it’s friday and neither you nor your husband feel like cooking you’ve decided to surprise Sawyer by taking him to McDonalds. You started a game where you add “Mc” to the beginning of every couple words.

“Go put the McFrisbee away,” your husband says.

“McFine!” Bobby says. He scoops it up and heads for the garage.

Your husband moves towards you, panting. You met him at state college where you both worked at the radio station. He spun Sonic Youth and old Beatles records. In between he took mic breaks to promote his zine no one was buying.

He’s grown out since then, put on some weight and a beard.

Sweat pours through his t-shirt around his armpits and belly, darkening the logo of some IPA called Unsung Hero.

The first thing you see are her leggings, because they’re practically glow-in-the-day. Pink like spun sugar, like bubblegum barbie doll shoes. Her ponytail is low, but it’s not like when you wear your ponytail low and the shape of your head is revealed in its bald form. Everything is effortless and chic.

Constructed yet casual.

Katelyn Becker’s husband is with her. You’ve only seen

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him at a distance, never up close like this and Jesus, you can’t help but trace the lines of his abdomen through that tight, tight top he’s wearing. You watch in disbelief as your husband goes up to him, pit stains and all.

You want to hide him. Cover him up with a blanket or something. You want to pretend your husband went overboard in some boating accident and was never seen again, but they’ve already started talking so you smile politely at Katelyn Becker, feeling caught but not really sure why.

❦

Bobby graduates eighth grade and gets confirmed on his fourteenth birthday. Afterwards he insists you call him by his confirmation name.

“Mom, you have to call me Peter now.”

He thinks it’s funny but it makes you feel like he doesn’t need you anymore. There’s a party at Patti’s house for all the other St. Michael’s kids who also got confirmed. You throw together a plate of store-bought brownies and walk a few houses down the block.

Patti’s place is the second oldest in the neighborhood.

It’s a little two story colonial made of red brick with vines pulling at the mortar. There used to be one just like it at the end of the street.

“At least a hundred years,” Patti says, when you ask how old it was. She helps you clear a place to set the brownies. “I don’t know, I think it was built during the civil war. That’s what Hannah told me.”

Hannah and Levi Gershowitz were a kind, childless couple who sold the old house so they could move closer to Levi’s family in upstate New York. They left little notes in the closets and under floorboards, hoping one day they would be discovered by the future tenants. Somewhere in the process the place changed hands to the Beckers, who were able to out-bid a family of six at the last minute. A few days after the Gershowitzes left, a construction crew came in and reduced the house to rubble.

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The kids are in the living room playing some deafening video game where cartoon characters blast lasers at each other.

You sit in the kitchen with the women from your book club, keeping an eye on Sawyer. Bobby is in the backyard with the dads. He’s always been better at talking to adults. The house is packed like a pulsing nightclub. Bodies move in and out without discrimination—grown ups, toddlers, girl teens, boy teens.

Everybody slaps bean dip and casserole and chicken wings and a whole host of midwestern, semi-southern delicatessen fare on flimsy paper plates. Those old enough to drink guzzle down whatever they picked up from the liquor store that morning.

Someone comes through the back door, and you can see Jen’s husband showing Bobby how to open a bottle with the side of a fork.

You’re worried about Bobby. You worry about him not having enough friends, so when he asks if he can go to a Halloween party even though it’s full of older high school kids, you let him.

Your husband says it’s fine. He just needs to find some more hobbies, join the robotics team or something. Maybe one day when his head doesn’t look quite so big for his body he’ll even find a girlfriend.

The whole time you take Sawyer around the block dressed like Axel Rose (you are Slash), you worry about Bobby.

When you get home you try to distract yourself with the book for this month, which is the Crimean War retold as a series of intergalactic space battles.

He calls you at midnight and asks to be picked up. You want to scream at him, but since you never established a curfew, you tell him you’ll be there in a couple minutes. He asks if you can park a few houses down.

You let your Dodge Grand Caravan roll past the venue.

Music shakes the suburban split-level, but it’s not the music you remember from high school parties. It’s asynchronous, pounding trap beats in dire want of melody. Bobby comes down the sidewalk and you can tell he’s focussing very hard on walking normally. You don’t bother with questions. When he climbs in he just puts his head down and doesn’t say anything.

Somewhere near the end of the drive he puts his hand

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on your arm. You don’t react. Then he does it again and says, “Mom,” and that’s when you see what he’s looking at.

At first she’s just a pinkish figure shifting around in the dark on her knees. Then you hear the wails and finally you recognize the limp white fuzzy thing spilling out her arms.

You call the right people to come take away the body.

The police ask Katelyn if she saw the license plate. She shakes her head and tells them she didn’t even see the car. You hold her hand and help her inside.

Katelyn Becker collapses into your lap and cries. You pat her shoulders, but you can’t stop looking at how high the ceilings are. The hardwood’s immaculate, deep cherry. The appliances are delicious and jesus—fuck there’s a kitchen island!

You’d cut off your left arm for a kitchen island. You’d sell your drunk son for a kitchen island.

You ask her if there’s anyone she can call. She says her husband is out of town on business, but she has a sister who lives twenty minutes away. You agree to stay with her until she arrives.

“So you don’t have any children?”

“No, but we’re trying.”

You picture them trying.

“You have a lovely home.”

“Thank you. We wanted to do something good for the neighborhood.”

❦

The Beckers leave you a thank you note with a $1,000 gift card to Best Buy. Your mother would tell you to return it out of principle, but Sawyer really wants a Playstation for Christmas. Your husband says you ought to make more rich friends.

Everyone at book club wants to hear about the incident. They want to know what the inside of her house looked like, how much she cried. You relay the facts with a little embellishment but leave out the part about Bobby and the Halloween party. They eat up every detail and spit out hypotheti-

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cals.

“I’ll bet he’s cheating on her. Who goes on a ‘business trip’ Halloween night?”

You know it’s your story, but telling it to the other women feels like you’re betraying Katelyn somehow.

Patti pops open a bottle of champagne she’s been saving for her son’s graduation. “To a good night’s sleep!” she cheers.

“To a good night’s sleep!” everyone echoes.

Your book club drinks, but when the bottle comes your way you just pass it along.

❦

When you see Katelyn after the incident, her attitude towards you lightens. She was always nice before, but now it seems some kind of barrier has been broken and the two of you can participate in ordinary human interaction. She’s more animated than before, and she tells you about her pinterest page and Keystone ski trips instead of the bland small talk you used to make.

One day she invites you to go on a jog with her. You’ll have to miss Bobby’s robotics tournament, but your husband will still be there. You stop by Target and buy a new pair of leggings with little neon lightning bolts all over. They don’t flatter you the way they do the mannequin, but at least they hold your stomach in nicely.

You drive up to a park in the nicest part of town and meet up with Katelyn to stretch. She does most of the talking, but you feel special just being spoken to. The two of you jog over to a coffee shop and sit side by side in the window. They have little menus by each seat, and your heart skips a little when you see how expensive everything is. Katelyn orders an eight dollar late and you settle for a cup of Earl Grey, which is still six bucks.

❦

A week or so goes by and Katelyn calls to tell you that she’s finally pregnant. She says she just found out and she’s calling to tell all her friends. You let her blabber, but you’re still

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reeling from the fact she called you her friend.

The jogs turn into walks, and on one such “jog” she invites your family over for dinner. You accept.

❦

Sawyer is being difficult. He doesn’t understand why he has to wear his church shoes. You tell him he has to look nice for dinner. He says he never has to dress nice when you go to Patti’s house.

Katelyn’s husband makes lemon ricotta parmesan pasta with grilled chicken. He pours everyone (besides the boys) a glass of chardonnay.

“My uncle has a vineyard in Napa Valley. He gave me a case to take home,” he says. He looks at your husband, who just blinks.

“My buddy Mark brews his own lager.”

Once everyone’s eaten Katelyn takes you upstairs to see the nursery they’ve just finished. The nursery is bigger than your entire living room. There are cameras installed in every corner of the ceiling. At the bottom of the crib is a special cushion filled with a kind of cooling agent to keep the baby from overheating at night. Beside it is a shelf filled with Dr. Seuss classics you assume were either Katelyn’s or her husband’s when they were babies. The book on top of the shelf though, is too big to be for children. You recognize it as this month’s book club choice—a romance about an English teacher who goes back in time and falls in love with William Shakespeare.

You tell Katelyn about book club and, surprising yourself, invite her to the next meeting.

❦

Nora Jean puts out an extra folding chair. The other women aren’t angry, just intrigued. When Katelyn Becker shows up, book under her arm, everyone stands instinctively.

She sits by you, putting you between her and Patti. You go around and introduce everyone. They smile and wave politely.

Throughout book club everyone is shooting each other

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looks. Lina laughs at something Katelyn says and Jen glares: hypocrite. Nora Jean complements her sandals and Patti scoffs: kiss ass.

As things are winding down, Patti turns to talk to you about work like she usually does. You feel panic set in and pretend to be listening to Katelyn and Nora Jean.

“I made a house visit on Friday. Not a single person in the family had clothes on.” She speaks broadly, to everyone in earshot. “Mom, dad, everybody, just walking around buckass nude.”

Everyone acts like they don’t hear, as they often do when Patti brings up work stories. She knows only you will listen, so she grabs your arm laughing a little.

“It wasn’t like they couldn’t afford clothes, I mean, this was a nice house. I had to shut my eyes and tell the dad that if we were gonna have a civilized conversation I needed him to at least go put a towel on!”

“Uh-uh,” you say and turn away. Patti’s hand slowly lets go of your arm. Katelyn shoots you a brief look: what’s wrong with that woman?

❦

After book club Katelyn invites you to her baby shower the following weekend. You spend all morning making scalloped potatoes to bring. Your husband wears his commemorative Cardinals tie with a giant baseball on the front, even though you beg him not to.

The street is filled with Lexuses. You’re glad you decided to walk instead of taking the Caravan. You move through a silver and gold balloon arch into the backyard where a banner reads: CONGRATULATIONS JOHN AND KATELYN!

You scan the crowd for Katelyn and instantly feel underdressed. You’re in a snappy little summer dress but some women here are in full length evening gowns. Katelyn is in a pale pink dress that makes her look like a swollen fruit with a white feather boa and a little tiara stuck in her hair. She spots you and comes up to say hi.

“What’s that?”

“Scalloped potatoes.”

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“Oh!” She laughs. “We have a caterer!”

There is a line of tables with metal serving containers, little dessert trays and a chocolate fountain. You set your dish at the end of the buffet with the silverware.

Katelyn’s friends are young. You don’t know how to talk to them. You’re only 37, but most of the women in book club are already well into their forties. Patti is turning 50 soon.

Some of the women here are barely even thirty. For the first time you feel ancient. Not only are they younger than you, they have more money than you, which only widens the gap further.

You stand around with a group of five or six girls, trying to become interested in whatever the hell a “balayage” is (some expensive way of going blonde), and you can’t tell if you’re ignorant because it’s a young person thing or a rich person thing.

Just to say anything, you blurt, “I dyed my hair blue in college.”

They look at you briefly and go back to referring each other stylists. Even Katelyn pretends like she didn’t hear. You slip away from the group to go get some food and no one asks where you’re going.

You see your husband bumbling around on the other side of the lawn, alone with a beer in his hand. You see John Becker with a small circle of guys laughing and talking in those booming, round voices men use when they get a little alcohol in them and stand around in groups. You watch them go quiet when your husband approaches. You watch them turn away and pretend they don’t see him. Your husband either doesn’t realize he’s being spurned or doesn’t care. He notices you watching and smiles.

In that moment you love him more than you’ve ever loved him before. You love his eyes, you love his shoulders, you love his beard, you love every pound he’s gained since undergrad. As he nears the buffet, you even love his stupid tie.

“Is something wrong?”

You kiss him softly on the forehead and tell him it’s nothing.

Katelyn Becker is surrounded by the same group of girls, who you now realize are probably her sorority sisters. You

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move towards them with a renewed sense of purpose. “Why didn’t you tell me there was a dress code?” The conversation dies. Katelyn looks confused. She can’t ignore you now.

“Didn’t I tell you to dress formal?”

“I thought you meant church-formal.”

She smiles knowingly and takes your hand.

“I’m sorry, you must be feeling left out,” she says. Your mood softens. Perhaps you were overreacting. “It’s just there’s a lot of people who want to build houses here, so I thought it would be nice to invite someone from the neighborhood.

I should have known that your formal and my formal are two different things.”

You pull your hand back and her smile fades. The buffet table is only several feet away. You tear the tinfoil off the top of the glass tray, grab a handful of scalloped potatoes, and throw them in Katelyn Becker’s face. The sorority sisters gasp and flutter around her. They preen the potatoes from her tiara.

Everyone at the party is paying attention now. Your husband grabs you.

“What on earth—!”

John Becker comes sprinting over when he sees his pregnant wife is in tears. He shoves you so hard you almost fall over. Your husband tells him to calm down.

“Why don’t you tell your bitch wife to calm down?”

Oh fuck.

You try and grab him but it’s too late: your husband clocks John Becker right in his perfect jawline. Katelyn screams and goes to help him, but John gets up quick. You step out of the way just in time to watch your husband get tackled into the buffet table. Tea cakes come raining down. Glass pitchers of lemonade crash and explode. The chocolate fountain hits the ground and splashes onto a sorority girl’s dress. Everyone is shouting, someone cheers.

Your husband tries to get back up, but it’s no use. John Becker has the high ground. He throws punch after punch and doesn’t stop until you and Katelyn are able to pull him away.

You help your husband into a standing position. There’s a welt forming above his right eye and his suit is wet from the soup that fell off the buffet table.

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No one says anything for a while, then Katelyn Becker takes a deep breath and screams at you to get the fuck out of her baby shower.

❦

First Lina stops going to book club. Then Jen. They both sell their houses once their kids are gone. Home prices inflate so high they’re able to garner a profit large enough to buy bigger places further from the city to get old in. The others follow suit and pretty soon it’s just you and Patti.

Patti sits out in your front yard smoking. Nora Jean’s little house with the veranda got bulldozed last summer to make way for a sprawling split level with not one, not two, but six bay windows. You haven’t smoked since college, but since Patti’s turning 55 today when she offers you a cigar you take her up.

“You’re a real one, baby girl,” she says. “You and me, we’re the only real ones left.”

In five years economists predict market prices will reach a climax. You will sell your house for a small fortune and use the money to pay off Bobby’s college loans. Your little colonial will be torn down and you will live in a new development in a small town somewhere far outside the city.

Sitting here with Patti, in a pair of water-stained folding chairs, on your front lawn overgrown with weeds, blowing cigar smoke up into the suburban ether, you imagine staying forever. How funny it would be, to watch your new neighbors pretend you don’t exist, like the couple across the street just now as they pass through the French doors of their four story Italianate with a trio of golden retriever puppies.

You wave. They pretend not to see the cigars, the folding chairs, the thrush of dandelions. They pretend you don’t exist. They pretend you don’t remind them.

Our formal and your formal are two different things.

T H E

F O U N D A T I O N A L I S T

Man Sans Man Dominic Burke University of Sydney

A

n exceptionally weak man named Brian Neumann lived in an area that had no character or life. He was a short, stout thing of unremarkable appearance and balding head. Brian may have even looked normal in another life, but it was his unbearably vacant disposition that made Brian grotesque. He had unfortunately bushy eyebrows and acne at 32 years old. His eyes were serviceable, but a little beady. His lips were bright red, always wet. And he thought he might be a woman.

Brian’s apartment was filled to the brim with worthless paraphernalia from hobbies long since abandoned; a second-hand keyboard lay collecting dust in a small nook behind the couch.

He might have played when he was younger but not even Brian would remember now. Ferns in various states of brownness and decay seemed to grow in concert with the black mold that one could hardly distinguish from the wallpaper in the dim light of the apartment. The white stained curtains were always drawn. The centerpiece of the room was Brian’s mum’s flat screen TV mounted on the wall. He had inherited it when she passed. Brian had connected his computer in such a way that he could, with his light-up rainbow keyboard, browse high speed pornography on the big screen while laying down. It was possibly his greatest triumph. And it was, in this semi-reclined state befitting of a decadent Roman emperor, that Brian passed the days when he wasn’t at work.

It’s not that Brian didn’t leave the house at all, quite the contrary! He did it quite often. Brian had to leave each morning

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for work and occasionally for certain groceries. Whenever Brian left the house, he tried to avoid eye contact with the gaggle of homeless who moaned out the front of his building and often screamed into the night. Brian never lingered in the street. The street was nothing more than a place between destinations for Brian. The more time Brian spent on the street, the more likely it was that someone would try to interact with him.

With few exceptions, he did his best to pretend that no one else existed while he moved from building to building.

Brian was far too ugly to sit in the cafes, though it hardly stopped him. His favorite haunt was a cafe that seemed to be native to no country. The walls were faux wood with fake exposed brick interspersed with black modern plastic. Brian sat down awkwardly and without grace, his oversized messenger bag bumping between the tables when he squeezed through to sit against the wall. The waitress took little note of the spectacle and shambled over to him. Brian looked up at her with pathetic needy eyes.

“A matcha milk tea, thanks.” Brian stretched his cheeks in what he thought a smile might feel like. The waitress scurried back behind the counter. Brian peered around the cafe, although it may be more accurate to say that he conspicuously leered at the woman breastfeeding two tables down from him. The other patrons saw this, but none could muster up the courage to deal with Brian. Glutted and bored with the woman’s nipples, Brian pretended to read the newspaper, like every morning.

The small analogue on the wall of the cafe threatened 9. Work started at 9:15, or so Brian thought. In actuality, everyone else came in at 9:30 and Brian hadn’t yet copped on. Nobody was quite sure who had told Brian to come in early, so no one attempted to correct him. Brian secretly thought they were all lazy slobs. The manager so despised seeing Brian’s expectant, puppy-dog face that leaving the door unlocked for him seemed the easier option.

Aside from his manager, he was generally well tolerated by his workmates because he tried his utmost to slink by at work, as

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if he were a worm. Brian always made room for others in the halls; Brian never made a fuss. Brian was the first to turn on the lights in the cavernous office and always made a ‘thunk’ noise with his mouth when they sequentially flicked on. Brian’s childhood dream was to work in a warehouse. The office that Brian spent his day at could be best described as ‘proudly Kafkaesque’. It was inside a converted cathedral. The engineers had removed any trace of artwork and covered up the walls and floors with dullness and gypsum. A new internal roof hid the vaulting of the ceiling. The rows of desks and computers stretched on without end and all those who had known the cathedral as children swore it was never this big before. The whole office amounted to a big, plastic box built within the old cathedral, and thus, it had no windows. According to the firm, it would be disrespectful to set up shop in the cathedral itself, and so the firm had come to this compromise with God. Brian sat down at his terminal, matcha milk tea in hand, and began the day’s work of reordering client files. It was an exercise that required his full attention at the beginning of every single day. Brian had barely started ordering the files by ‘date of second renewal’ when he took his first scheduled toilet break of the day. Brian and his well-regulated bladder dutifully engaged with the client files until their ordering was ‘satisfactory’.

The day dragged on like a droopy ballsack over broken glass.

The workers and Brian were lost in their own personal labyrinths of KPIs, reports, spreadsheets, team goals, personal goals, emails, more reports, meetings, online meetings, overthe-phone meetings, scrum meetings, making appointments to go to other meetings, drafting meeting schedules, reviewing the minutes of previous meetings, making appointments to attend therapist sessions, and of course, suicidal ideation.

Occasionally, someone would start to cry. Their cry would reverberate throughout the office and mix with the soft droning of hundreds of computers and the soft clicking of just as many mice.

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The most Satanic of all the work rituals occurred every day at noon. When the clock struck 12, Brian and the rest of the office would stand up in unison and begin a procession towards the underground food court next to the old cathedral. The office workers made sure to maintain a single file line and descended down to receive their sustenance. The procession entered the underground court by a discrete escalator, leading on to a chrome hallway that stretched out before them. The silver tube seemed to serve no other purpose than to cultivate a futuristic aesthetic. The designers had even neglected to plaster the walls with ads, which Brian had always found odd. The entire food court felt like an arena, both because of its red/purple lighting and the strange design choice which meant that all of the curry-fusion places surrounded the maze of furniture like spectators to a fight. The fake windows sat just above the shopfronts. They showed scenes of flowery meadows and windmills in the Alps. All of the Cubist furniture in the food court was pitch black plastic so that it could be cleaned less often. This had the unfortunate side effect of making it impossible to find anywhere soft or comfortable to sit in the vast feeding ground.

Except for the Muzak, they all grazed in silence, craning their necks between forkfuls of ‘food’ to contemplate the fake landscapes. Brian chose the purple curry today, because it reminded him the least of vomit.

The 45 minutes allotted for lunch had expired and without any sort of whistle or signal, the procession began again. Nevertheless, the middle managers at the firm felt the need to round people up and herd them back to the office. The afternoon section of the day was much less productive in terms of papers pushed and meetings held. HR had estimated in one of their psychoergonomic studies that by the time five pm had rolled around, 72% of the workforce had lost the will to live. This could be empirically observed by watching men of the office practicing their nooses with their ties, and watching the women intently watching them.

The clock striking five had the same effect on the office workers as the fire alarm going off. Everyone scrambled out with

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M A N

enough energy to fascinate the middle managers.

“Not five minutes ago, they all looked ready to be buried,” they often said to each other in hushed tones while the stampede took place before them. The parking lot next to the office became a hive of activity. People in their motor vehicles honked and swore at each other, ‘love taps’ were exchanged both inside and outside of cars. They all fought for the pleasure of listening to crime podcasts in traffic.

Brian was not one of those happy motorists. Brian could definitely afford a car, but instead preferred to drip every nonessential cent into the high interest savings account he had set up as a young boy. It was his rainy-day fund, as if something, anything would ever happen to Brian. The microwave reheated Brian’s meal-prepped rice and beans while he scoured the net for the most depraved Japanese cartoon pornography imaginable. He tried to find that father/son stuff from last night. Brian attempted to hastily finish his meal and masturbate at the same time. With rice and beans dribbling out of his mouth, he let out primal grunts and stared transfixed at the television screen for hours. The grunts were a force of habit, Brian had long lost any real feelings of pleasure. Nevertheless, he kept going. But once he had finished, Brian entered into a dreamless languor, from which he never really left, and deep inside him there was no voice left to cry out into the darkness.

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Panic Attack Poem Erin Yonak Washington University in St. Louis

Halloween is not for ghosts it’s for academia PhD candidates going door to door with their diplomas and their Bad News and their End Of Times hysteria. But it’s not academia it’s the news but it’s not the news it’s social media but it’s not social media it’s the politicians, corruption natural disasters too much too much too mu ch.

The skeletons in your closet are not secrets, they’re realities we keep shut tight so we don’t have to think about them or see them and that’s why Aunt Nancy posts all that political

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conspiracy theory shit on Facebook and why Uncle Willy keeps a confederate flag monument In his “study” but it’s not a study it’s a space for hiding and curating your reality and we bury our bones not to lay them to rest but so we can forget they existed in the first place.

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Canopener/ It’s Just that I hate modern poetry sometimes Beau Farris University of Colorado Boulder

the soapboxer only stands on their street corner to yell at other soapboxers / and who am i to make my own soapbox and stand and question the other soapboxers for wooden boxes when the box i made in my dead neighbors garage is cardboard / and i’m not talking about the kind of ignorance that comes from me only being 20 years old / i just keep on listening to the man in the little machine that gets too hot to keep on my lap tell me why i can’t go out and swallow the world whole / but maybe it's time to unhinge my jaw / my perception is based off the words i learned with all the other ignorants behind brick walls / where lying was and is a constant because a teachers pen wouldn’t work if i didn't sit up straight / so yeah it’s kinda disheartening to see the people around me start building their own soapboxes / but god forbid these soapboxes are anything like the ones that are sturdy and made of wood / and i’m still not sure why the so called box that the condesender made out of a bicycle wheel isn't a unicycle to everyone else / what i mean is most of the time i don't feel / like an outlier / and i am wrong most of the time / but no one wants to tell me because they tell me all the time and i don't listen / 2 in the morning me doesn't necessarily disagree with 2 in the afternoon me / 2 am me knows that the best time to yell in the ears of someone i don't like is when they are asleep / at least after i hide the belt / the worst part is i am a cufflink in the belt hole to make the pain hurt more / and the way the world beats me down after i don’t understand why the french mathematician didn't just say he felt sad about his wife dying hurts less / than my realization i won’t ever have a negative capability to others / because i only write for myself / i just forget that sometimes

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Spring Breakdown Miriam Mayer Hamilton College

I was eighteen when Mama found me asleep in front of the TV, head lolling onto Max’s innocent arm.

I was dreaming of the beach.

Mama woke us quietly, ice in her eyes, and marched me into the laundry room.

She whisper–yelled how I was far too comfortable with my body, how I needed to better respect myself, how I was sure to get pregnant and drop out of school, how I was a disappointment and it was a god-damn shame.

Next thing I remember, I was lying on the laundry room floor, cold tiles beneath my hot hands.

Mama was cradling me like she hadn’t in years.

With soft eyes but a stiff jaw she demanded to know what had happened gripping my feeble frame until I dissolved so all that was left of me on the laundry room tiles was a handful of sand.

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!

Maya Hollander Tel Aviv University

I am what remains of Babel, when we spoke the soft tongue of our fellows, and I swear, I remember that we were greater than God in our loud, harmonious efficiency; He must have been lonely, that was all, in the moment when our fingers almost touched the sky, we almost realized something, I think we realized something, I suppose a Eureka was building in our throats, oh, it’s all a bit of a blur, only that since then I have held one word in my blood, but every time I say it aloud, it comes out sounding like something entirely new.

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I am not conventionally attractive Alex Galdamez University of California, Santa Cruz

Brown Like the shit you have to clean off your condom after you fuck some twink Eyes as black as the bruises we got as teens when we came out

They were harder to see on my skin.

A little bit of pudge caking my body A “fats,” in your language Too masc to fix your mommy issues Too fem to fix your daddy issues I only called you daddy because I needed the money.

Not masc enough, (a “fems”) For your gym fantasy where the coach fucks you in the shower not fem enough

To be your fantastic, abused cum-slut My hips are too (w i d e) to pound too feminine for muscular hands You hate my stretch marks and I learned to hate them too.

I was and am too thick too bottom heavy to get eaten out to get thigh fucked because you were too small but I was always too big I was too intimidating because I wore breasts skirts

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and stockings something too radical for a gay man and, when I told you I was no man Gross Was your response I am not trans not some trap that you fap to pretending it’s straight I am me Gross Too radical because I’m not a drag queen You just wear them for fun?

You’re not trans?

Gross Too radical because I wanted to enjoy your presence not just blow you Too radical because I wanted to be a person not your dildo Gross You still respond Where are you from?

No, I mean, where are you from?

Oh, is that in Mexico?

I wasn’t strong enough to be your daddy your gym rat dream man But, I was too strong when we fought legs like a horse something to ride keep in a stable Brown Like the carne asada you refuse to eat because it’s too spicy

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Sueño en la noche del solsticio / Dream of a Solstice Night Fabio Cabrera Cornell University

Sueño en la noche del solsticio El pescador habita en la niebla del ayer liturgia apacible que evoca el tacto, memoria de inocencia en llamas se prende de la carne el anhelo sutil.

El pescador desconoce mi onirismo callado lo guía un faro que perdió su fortuna; corta el silencio por hábito antiguo pretende captar el rumor con un ojo.

Y yo construía un cosmos en la sombra tejiendo memoria de cuarzo masticando el filamento de mis entrañas y yo esperaba un beso de luz intocable

entre el sopor y la angustia

sentirse doble en caricia profunda un abrazo mudo con olor a navío, bañado

en aurora noche esmeralda un pulso vivo de ser laborioso

perdido en la piel del persecutor dormido.

El pescador le da vida a su red—

pequeño mecer

sombra lunar que se decanta vacía.

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S U E Ñ O

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L A

N O C H E

D E L

S O L S T I C I O

Y yo debo formar el harpa de tentáculos

muda canción que nutre el semblante; la espuma de mi vértice seducirá su consciencia

entre sueño y memoria

agua eterna, insondable.

Yo comando la apatía de su cuerpo mi golpe es la esencia de su red, mi mover es callar en lo infinito.

La luz de la luna extingue su clamor; me basta con formar su sombra en la memoria y robarle al tiempo fugaz impresión.

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dream of a solstice night the fisherman lives fogs of the past in peaceful liturgy that evocates his touch, burning memory of innocence a subtle desire that seizes the flesh.

The fisherman knows not my quiet oneirism he is guided by a lighthouse that lost all its fortune; cutting the silence of the night by force of habit wanting to capture my murmur with an eye.

And I was to build a cosmos in the shadow weaving memories out of quartz chewing on the filaments of my loins.

And I was to wait for a kiss of light unreachable to come

in between angst and somnolence

to feel myself double in a touch. a mute hug with the smell of vessels, washed

in nights of emerald aurora. a lively pulse from laborious beings

lost in the skin of my numbed prosecutor.

The fisherman gives birth to his net–

small sway

a lunar shadow is emptied in the water.

And my tentacles shall become the strings of my lair

a mute song that nourishes his semblance; the foam of my vortex shall seduce his conscience

between dream and memory

of unfathomable waters.

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I command the apathy of his body my strike is the essence of his net, my move is the stillness of infinity.

The light from the moon extinguishes its clamor; I form a shadow in my memory and steal from time a fleeting impression.

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i joined the foreign legion Aviva Betzer Tel Aviv University

born in a kibbutz i was wild and scream-full i slashed my insides and gorged on them i ate stale doughnuts because i wanted to be like everyone born in the countryside i got lost many times and my parents put their ears to the ground and listened to the echo of my bare feet then it came the end of the tarmac

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And This Is How I See the East/青春 Sophie Ewing Amherst College

I. Yunnan/云南 And this is how I see the East: I see it always from a low road, a high outline of mountains.

A field, a vast field stretching out behind and before me my friends laugh in enfolding dark and I am feeling green, black-green, like the field and the night.

I see it always from a lower bunk, waking up not knowing where I am, dawn rising but inside it’s still dark.

The gong rings soon— patter of feet, muffled groans, a pillow flung at me

(get up, get up!)— but for now just stillness only listening to those in the upper rooms who toss and sigh and cannot rest, thinking suddenly of home.

I see it always from a hostel room: when the wind wails down the mountain pass and we speak in lamplight by cups of butter tea or in darkness as we wait for sleep.

This darkness holding all these wild things between us; these dear friends that cheer me through the start of spring.

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E A S T / 青 春

“Will we always talk about China like this?”

Talk of China as a place, a time, a feeling, that feeling that wells in you like black-green water like the smell of spring like joy so strong it is already sadness.

Talk of how it is yours and not yours (But is any place ever really yours?

Only when you see it in that dim past think— That path, that stone, that mountain wind was mine.

That well-green feeling was mine…)

To see it always but only a moment, only that moment when we met as we were then, and afterwards when we’ve run our separate paths the one thing left that moment I hold to myself that telephone wire in the dying sky and the small road along a field and that feeling that was mine.

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E A S T / 青 春

II. Family/家人 Talking in a hotel hallway with my jiě jie.

How that word big sister always filled me with fondness, how distance washed away old tarnishes between us.

Now when, following your trail, I come to visit you here in foggy winter, you tell me always to squat (not sit!) even in bathrooms till thighs burn ankles shake, put into my hands warm and plastic-wrapped your favorite jiān bng fried with egg and meat, into my ear your ipod songs of 2012 like a current between us and I am so glad, glad for this well-wrung feeling in my stomach, glad for too much laughter it was China that did this.

It was China that did this, made me see

how I carry my parents even when I have left them behind so that this pine smell on the mountain brings my father sharply to mind my mother laughing (a fresh chicken is a dead chicken?) by my shoulder as I watch the market plucking until face to face my joy for them their joy for me blooms there in that small street among the white stucco walls, the red faded mottos.

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E A S T / 青 春

III. Photograph/摄影 I see it always in this photograph: my father’s sight behind the lens, that group production turning an occasion into a memory.

Some light moment then now weighted with meaning.

Rows of relatives arrayed, each brought sharp to focus by stories I now know. My great aunt Yuxian running from her mother to become a doctor, living long dark years in Heilongjiang watching the birds fly south. Her sister Yuping assigned to the police, surveilling her father’s radio broadcasts in those years when he thought he would return from Taiwan. And Great Aunt Yuhui, loyal to her mother so, they criticized her cut her hair left bitterness so strong the next generation could not speak of it but cry.

All those old enough living with a shadow on their hearts.

Even Auntie Xiao Hong, perplexed by happiness, even Cousin Zi Bei sitting so small eating so hungrily that hóng shāo ròu, even my grandmother, a Guomindang daughter, who dodged family divides and red history by escaping to America. What it was to leave behind sisters and jianzi games and nationalist hopes, live in some other country the rest of her life I am only beginning to imagine—I, who am as young now as she was then—even they had their shadows. How much we know of their lives—how little. Only one moment frozen forever on a sheet of film.

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E A S T / 青 春

IV. Dawn/旦 And this is how I see the East: always from a photograph, a shadow.

Always from a bed or a mountain room, always that moment just before dawn just as Spring is bursting just as something starts to change to grow to rise— I see it always from that road, that low road, The night like a well and I green as spring growing out of it, feeling that feeling that is unnamable—Joy? Sorrow? Love?

It is all in that moment when I opened my young eyes on it.

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Letters from DTW Tahani Almujahid University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Mother, Do you remember then, when you begged me to stay, but knew I needed to go?

Do you remember then, when I said to come with me and you refused, even when my heart went on fire, even when my body fell into paralysis, and I collapsed of grief?

You wanted to stay, even if to die.

Dammi Yemeni, you would say.

You had pride in your land in your garden You loved your fig trees more than me.

I told you.

You felt safe there.

And I prayed for you.

I prayed, but that was not enough The bombs came and you went with them.

With your Quran in your hand and La illaha ill-Allah on your tongue

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Radiant Danica Creahan Loyola Marymount University

I miss the landscape and I miss my left molar Just the middle bit that dentist drilled out.

When afterwards, lips numb, we kissed the dirty windows of the house off Brook street, with overgrown space for a boat never bought, and a damp paper sign promising she could be ours, if we bothered not to trespass.

On Driftwood drive I tell you the trees are growing towards each other, as if they know the secret is we have to hold on no matter how dear this gets.

When drunken rain streams in excess from our pocketed mouths, I could taste- I can taste the back alley metal. Becausewedidn’thaveinsurancebecausemom and dad were magic- and we’d never need it, (mostly) and besides, everyone’s daddy is a doctor- except the dentist who was sad (I think) to hear of his handiwork lost at Firefly Hill.

My molar and the marram grass, forever exchangeable.

We were too scared to spray our names on the Brook house by the time you could drive the bleach-white bug, and now we are nowhere.

And I’m sorry that I clutched and cried for Wilbur, counting clumsily down from ten, because now I know better.

Now when I cry, it’s for Charlotte.

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Abecedarian after the Rape of Medusa Maria Gray Bates College

Zip up. Shove the phantom penis back into your boxers. I was born a bored constituent of God, built like an abacus with a soft spot for string theory, X chromosomes burnt into my wrists; harm done to self, then others. Manic depressive. It’s always psychogenic. Here is the cliff and there is the undertow, violent in its anger and its silence, breaking my bones against the rocks like floodlight passes through a prism. I set a place and saved a plate for you.

This all-American nativity scene, the unsafe street, a feral dog in its biting: here we are. Here it is. All we’ve seen and been. All the fruit we’ve eaten. Apples, rhubarbs, their marriage in a sweet Christmas pie. I wanted to be skinny then, and I jangled my sorrows like keys from a plastic ring, and all the while in Iraq pointless wars raged on, and people we loved suffered and died and came back like boomerangs or angels or ex-friends. O captain, my captain, this strait is too narrow for my gait, and I will never be alive again. This indelible thrush and thrum lingers long after we’re gone. On this, I will not compromise. I will go, pinched and peeling with heat, into the mouth of the volcano. I’m a good fuck, just a little twitchy, and men look like lions until I get to know them. A tranq resolves this hard dissolve. I was a sex object and you liked my sad brown eyes; I have to admit I was tired of looking brave. The girl you loved before me dies — the girl you loved before me died of an overdose and oh, poor thing, fractal and hard in her undoing, spine forever bent in coerced illness and allegiance: veni, vidi, violence, you are the knife that twists inside my back, the crude dam preventing the valleyed village from flooding; you, the meatpacker, the raw canvas corpse on which you blueprint your best fucks. I don’t want you to panic, but the glass between us is gone. You, the charlatan and snake charmer, my latchkey zookeeper unemployed by mass extinction. The boa, the baby, oh mama —

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After A.R. Ammons Caroline Meek University of Iowa

unidentified berries have yet to identify me, either, and as much as I’d like to believe they can reverse their rotting process (shoot up toward branches, reclaim juices sunk into dirt, also deteriorating), I don’t think this is plausible: everything that everyone’s ever seen is slowly crawling away from us and this mutual revulsion (whether in speech, or in action, or in the way we filter our water) has made rivers shrink into atmosphere faster than fish can learn to live on land, meaning we don’t drink water anymore, we just drink something in the shape of water, which fish understand (but too late!), and anyway, this berry didn’t squish when I tried to make juice between three fingers so I wondered if it only looked like it was rotting: berries of unusual color and structure have the right to lie to my face: or your face;

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they do, because they’re close to death and soon it’ll just be more dirt in the grass instead of a berry, and maybe in one hundred years there will be a cow grazing on something that wasn’t meant to be grazed on (but by then they will have the information needed to identify the berry) though no one will ever know it was there– unless they read this poem, which won’t tell them where it came from, the berry that became dirt which became a grazing pasture for cows who eat unidentified grass, won’t tell them what it looked like as it was rotting, other than the fact that it wasn’t squishy when I tried to squish it – it just pushed back, which made me wonder if soft things push back against my fingers when I push them too, and if this thing was just exceptionally good at being a soft thing, to the point that it became a hard thing: still a discolored, rotting thing, but one that might last a few days longer than the other irreversible berries in the grass.

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"boredom creates" & "he said he would help us but" Camille Lendor University of Toronto

boredom creates misplaced adrenaline radiating through my body — pulsating through my toes my soles my ankles my shins my knees my thighs — straight to the mushy walnut that rests within my compressing skull. is it my blood or my brain pressing against my thumb? should i eat the drywall? or should i climb the walls until the beige-yellow paint lifts my nails from their beds, while my ten weeping nubs streak their offensive cheeks red?

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&

H E

he said he would call someone to help us, but he was a store clerk named Samson who had no hair

S A I D

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Froth Spencer Wilkins Bowdoin College

Split starfruit steaks we pair with sparkling peach pit flesh, floating up champagne.

I draw circles on myself with sour string plucking, gyrating , and navel piercings cold on my elbows.

Pueblos blow reeds of honey wax when the drum cracks.

Same decry, clink!

Now, another drink.

A manic acts as much as any mannequin.

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Reluctantly I Imagined A Tortoise Daniel Bishop University of Cambridge

I

was out running in the rain up a hill through the mud.

I was thinking about psychosomatic disorders. That’s when what’s in your head affects how your body works. It seemed relevant at the moment, during the coronavirus lockdown. Everyone was noticing that whenever they felt a slight urge to cough, whenever their forehead felt slightly warmer than normal, they started fearing the worst. Maybe, in some cases, this paranoia contributed to genuine physical decline, I don’t know. A variation of this was certainly believed by a psychologist I was sent to as a child; she believed that if I tried hard enough, with my mind, I would get better. I can’t remember her name. She was young, she worked at St George’s Hospital, her office was opposite the playroom where there were PlayStations and table football tables. I remember this because long-term inpatients were encouraged to play here. There were the children who were visibly sick — some were hooked up to machines, and one girl’s stomach had swollen to the size of a watermelon after swallowing an open safety pin had resulted in a series of extreme infections. Then there were the other children, like me, for whom it was more difficult to tell what was wrong, if anything was wrong at all. The playroom made me as nervous as the psychologist’s chair. I was throwing up a lot at the time, and so I politely brought a towel to place on the floor in front of me, to catch the inevitable sick, wherever I went.

The psychologist saw it as a comfort blanket for an anxious, bulimic child; she took notes. In her office, she would sit me down and ask me to draw my pain. Maybe this was her way of

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trying to show me that my pain was imaginary, created entirely by me inside my own head, and that it could be created or uncreated with thick crayons on coloured paper. I remember drawing a lightning bolt impaling a thunder cloud to describe the pain in my stomach. I drew it in blue. She asked me to draw it again but this time in red. It turned out I wasn’t bulimic; I had an autoimmune condition, but they hadn’t done the required tests as it seemed so clear to them that I was mentally ill. Gaslighting, I guess, is what people would say now, maybe always.

The psychologist once told me a story about a boy who had cancer. Each night the boy would imagine a little man, who took the form of a toy bear, crawling down from his brain, burrowing towards all the affected areas in his body and scrubbing the tumours away. The boy would imagine this every night and he eventually got better; the cancer went away.

She asked me to do the same, to just close my eyes and make it go away. Reluctantly I imagined a tortoise wearing janitor overalls and a bright red baseball cap. I forget his name, Lenny or Larry or maybe Harold. Each night I would imagine him strolling down to my oesophagus, the epicenter of my autoimmune condition, sweeping up all my infected cells, always whistling as he worked. I was very open with my mother about how stupid I thought this was. I joked with her that, when I’m in the psychologist’s chair, I fantasise about jumping out the window. I felt very grown up that as a ten-year-old I could joke about something so dark. My mother laughed, perhaps through tears, about her son seeing the funny side, but she was also probably terrified that he was genuinely mad. I would find out a few years later that the hospital had asked social services to enquire with my parents about what was going on at home, what was causing me to be so anxious. Trouble at home? Years later again, in therapy, I would realise — or decide to realise — that this physical autoimmune condition resulted in an anxiety disorder, rather than originating from one. I have left suburbia, running now on grass. People walking dogs with their hoods

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up, taking their allocated hour of daily exercise. A secondary path has formed a sort of halo around the grass’ original path; it must have been created by walkers and joggers trying to stay two metres away from their fellow citizens. Soon the halos will have halos.

I started thinking about ice sculptures. Whenever I write essays for school or university, I visualise them as an irregularly shaped block of ice which needs an ice sculptor to first shape it into a square and then carve it into something specific — something both easily comprehensible and identifiable to the viewer, but also impressively inlayed with intricate designs. Passing women wearing raincoats and wellington boots. I think, you are the sculptor and the viewer of your own everything. You are in control of your own narrative, I guess, is what people would say now, maybe always. Attempting to shape meaning by seeking connections and correlations which may or may not be really there. Like the connection between a psychologist early in her career, trying her best to help a child in need, and the internal conflict of a population amidst a pandemic. Like the correlation between forging your own path to maintain social distancing whilst running and trying to shape your own life apart from other people. Like anxiety stemming from trauma (anxiety as an autoimmune condition, the body attacking itself); phantom causal links.

There is another boy I remember from my time in that hospital whose appendix had ruptured whilst he sat on a plane, waiting for it to take off. He arrived at the hospital too late, and so, what should have been a standard procedure took thirty-eight hours, and after almost two days of surgery, the boy had to go under again because the surgeon had taken out the wrong organ by mistake. The boy was given his own room, the least they could do. Mute, I stood by his bed, both of us in our one-size-fits-all gowns, and I looked at him whilst he lay above the sheets. Every few months, for the rest of his life, he’d need an operation to straighten his intestines as his insides were now so fucked up. I imagined hair straighteners pressing down

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on meat. He told me his story matter-of-factly, keeping his eyes fixed on the TV which came with the room. He asked me if I wanted to play the video game with him and I shook my head.

I’m spoilt but I share, I remember him shrugging. He told me he was supposed to be diving for GB at the 2012 Olympics, but now he’d never be able to dive again. He told me that after his diving career, he was supposed to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a fighter pilot, but now this would never be a possible reality. He told me his parents were divorced and his mother owned a sandwich shop. Fantasies and realities created and uncreated amidst a body attacking itself. I walked back to my ward and felt my intestines burn.

In the woods now. I am twenty-one years old. I have scars on the backs of my hands. Time moves faster as it becomes increasingly smaller fractions of lived experience: I am both impossibly young and terrifyingly old. I am not the boy in the psychologist’s chair anymore. I realise, maybe for the first time, there was no boy with cancer, no toy bear; the ice sculptor gets back to work, reshaping meaning with thick crayons on coloured paper. When the pandemic is over, a shift, dislocated from the past, mourning a previous naivety, a youth. The enquiries begin, the ice picks come out. We must confront our own recklessness, our self-destruction, the autoimmune condition attacking the body; we will all have to call our mother more often from now on. (The cold of the contact lenses, the cold air in my lungs. Soon the correlations will have correlations.)

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Page Count Jack Wellschlager Bowdoin College

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eading is at its absolute hardest when I think too much about it. I’m talking about those moments when 10 pages and 20 minutes into reading, I realize I’m 90 pages and 180 minutes out from finishing. The number at the top of the page stares me down, daring me to watch it slowly, painfully, inch towards a finish. I try to forget; I try to avoid its glare; I try to let time go; still, sometimes I just focus too much on endings to enjoy anything at all.

The Kindle app is the worst for this kind of problem.

On the bottom of the screen, above a gradually filling progress bar colored eye-poison blue, the app displays the proportion that I’ve read with a percentage. Page numbers are bad enough, but the arithmetic simplicity of percentages means that I instantly know a three percent marker means I’ll repeat that process 33 more times. Perhaps worse, a few taps on the corner of the screen away, there lurks a prediction of how much longer the book or chapter will take me to read. Page numbers, unlike time, are a malleable measurement. Maybe I’ll speed up as I go along. Maybe it’ll get easier to read as I get used to the prose.

The Kindle app says ‘Absolutely Not’ — it etches those minutes into stone. Pages at least give me agency, but time moves for no one.

•

All of this was on my mind as I began The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery. It was August 28, and Amy and I had been apart for four days. Over the summer, when we

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started dating, we’d seen each other almost every single day.

Over this first semester, while she studied abroad in Ireland, we’d see each other for three days if we were lucky. Two and a half months together would turn into four months apart. I had never been in love before; I had no idea what would happen.

I knew only one thing for certain: four days down meant we were three percent finished.

•

I was on Vinalhaven Island, off the coast of Maine. That day, 11 other students and I drove an hour and a half to Rockville, rode a ferry for 45 minutes, and explored the surrounding town for at least 20 before retiring to our church floor. In a rectangle of open space behind the legion of pews, 12 “beds” of sleeping bags and camping pads lay strewn across the ground.

In mine, while most of the others were outside enjoying the sunset, I was trying to get through my book and get through this trip.

•

We weren’t allowed to bring our phones to the island.

Amy and I knew that we wouldn’t be able to talk for a few days, and we knew that it would be hard. I picked out a wholesome book for us both to read. I also brought a flimsy little journal, so that I could write with the intention of sending it all to her when I was back. At least in some way, I thought we could still do something together.

•

I got through about 10 pages before deciding to go to sleep. By then, everybody was back inside, ready to turn in after a long day of traveling. I wasn’t tired, but I didn’t want to be awake any longer. I wanted this night, this trip, this semester to be over with. I wanted to be back with her. A clock feels slower

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while you’re watching: that’s why I wasn’t watching the sunset.

•

The Vinalhaven trip ended quickly, but once I was back at Bowdoin, the semester didn’t. Amy and I had both downloaded countdown apps. We both had the same picture backgrounding a counter of months, days, hours, minutes, and seconds until we saw each other. The only difference was that hers said “Until Jack,” and mine said “Until Amy.”

•

Most nights before I went to sleep, I’d look at the countdown and think. Ireland is five hours ahead of the East Coast, so she would be long asleep. When I was staring at that countdown, even a second felt long. Looking at the time in analog, the skinny second hand’s speed is almost sickening compared to the leisurely, deliberate crawl of minutes and hours. But once I attach numbers to that movement, reducing the fourth dimension to pixels, the seconds abandon their free-flowing pace. Watching the app’s digital clock enumerate every integer from 60 to zero, the process completely unnoticed by the rest of the numbers but for once a minute, the immensity of all those months, days, hours, minutes, and seconds would overbear like a starless night.

•

If I waited long enough, the sun would always rise, and on most days that meant Japanese class. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday mornings always began with an 8:30 a.m. meeting at the top of Coles Tower. This 16 floor housing building looms high over the rest of the humble campus. In the classroom at the top of the tower, I could see further than anywhere else on campus. Our class was arranged into two

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long, parallel tables, nine students on each end. I sat at the table opposite the window, so every morning I’d see the odd bird, Maine’s cloudy sky, and maybe a person from the nearby town walking their dog across the fields far below.

•

Every day class started with Aridome-sensei asking us to say the date. “Ohayou,” he’d begin the session with: good morning. “Ohayou gozaimasu,” we’d all reply. He’d show the date on his powerpoint. “Nannichi desu ka?” he asked.

“Juugatsu, nijuusannichi desu,” we said in unison: October 23rd. I wrote “10/23/19” across the top of my page, marking the day’s lecture notes. He’d then run through a gambit of date-related questions. What day of the week was it? What was yesterday’s date? Two days ago? What was the day of the week then? It was a helpful reminder of our Japanese dates and an unintentional reminder of time’s slow procession. At the top of every morning of every day of classes, sitting in the tallest building on campus, answering question upon question about what day it was, what day it had been, and what day it will be soon, the beginnings of these classes were the page numbers at the top of my life.

The numbers went by slowly, but by either great mercy or great cruelty, time always moves forward. December 19 did eventually come around, and Amy and I were back together.

She flew back on a six-hour plane from Ireland, went on the 15-minute drive from her house to mine, and we hugged, talked, and set up the Christmas tree with the rest of my family. We were back together. It was over. We had done it.

But in two weeks, she’d go back to school. My friends would leave soon after, and I would be alone at home for another two weeks before my classes started up again; and even when we were only a three-hour train ride apart back at school, it would take three weeks for her to have a weekend free enough to come visit; during most summers, she’d

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be working internships in Boston; one of these semesters, I’d be going abroad to study in Japan. Maybe after I graduate, I’ll even be living in Japan for a year or so. And maybe even then, she won’t be able to follow. Maybe, it never ends. Until it did, when we broke up eight months later.

•

In those free two weeks I had before school, I worked up enough courage to start Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84. It’s an almost 1200-page book, so I thought it’d be perfect for such an empty time. For the first one or two hundred pages, I couldn’t stop thinking about how ridiculously long the novel was. How much time would it take, I kept wondering. Still, I also kept reading. Slowly, those page numbers melted away. Gradually, I learned to keep an eye trained more to the page and less to the number. And eventually, I stopped caring when the book would be finished. In every chapter, I found passages so moving that I had to save them onto my phone. I found ideas and metaphors and characters that took over my imagination. I found pages and pages and pages of real, soul-stirring beauty.

I’m at page 1057 out of 1157 right now. I’ve been at that spot for a month. I could finish it whenever I want. For days and days, though, it’s sat on my desk, those final pages untouched. I’m sure that ending will be great. Or maybe it won’t. Either way, I hope to get there someday.

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GUIMI 闺蜜 Shanshan Chan The New School

ARTIST STATEMENT The original piece uses thinner margins, at times, smaller font, type-writer font, spill-over, image-hugging language.

• guimi is an issue of intimacy. it’s an issue of language, loss— (language-loss). it’s an issue of migration. it’s an issue of community. it’s also not an issue but a reckoning with, together. pronouns they/we/i/you/me/she/he/it; pronouns any and all. with reading poetry, prose, academic literature like Schizophrène by Bhanu Kapil, Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans by David L. Eng and Shingles Han, Women who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, we explore psychoanalytic symbols imparted through collective memory, language. i am telling a chronological narrative, insofar as they chose images that follow from further to more recent history— connect the dots or cross the sea or stitch our languages (chinese and english) together— but the the matter of lineage is not chronological; i interview my mom talking about her mom and my grandma talking about her daughter and her daughter talking about the both of them. the grammar (part translation part un-translatable) is a migration to where? in an unrelated but synchronistic context a professor once asked what happens to creation at the margins? in other words, where do our marginal identities go? where do we cling between signs and symbols?

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Bond Girl Kasey Broekema Columbia University

Do Not Fear I come into this world with the inevitability that I will die another day.

If God wound up the clock, then is it not the snake who set the world into motion? The snake hissed at Eve to take a bite, for an experience she never would have known. The world was born off of Apophis’ back, a black void of nothing. Taking the form of a serpent, Apophis chases the sun god, Ra, across the sky each day, the gods of Ancient Egypt battling the chaos he brings with each night. Shiva dances, standing on one leg in a circle of fire, the continuous creation and destruction of our world. A serpent coils along the lord of dance’s right arm – there are evils in this world with a license to kill. Shiva’s hand extends past the snake, gesturing to the viewer with his palm raised; abhaya mudra. Fear not of change. Fear not of the evils lurking in the darkness, for tomorrow never dies, and we must be undone before coming closer into being.

Plates are shifting, the world is always becoming and undoing. We are all wandering away, returning home, dancing in solitude with the serpents hissing at our ankles. Do not fear the change, since the shift of the world is always underneath us, and all we can do is live and let die.

My first dance studio is in a small college town and large enough to be coined on the morning news as “The Hollywood of South-Central Kentucky.” The high school girls have their group dance to “Live and Let Die” by Paul McCartney, shimmying in gold ‘70s costumes and pulsing red lights, reaching up to the sky with their arms and posing back-to-back with pistol fingers like a Charlie’s Angels pose. I want to be up there with them. I know their whole dance because I sit in the

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auditorium and never miss a chance to watch their rehearsals, sitting criss-cross applesauce, eyes wide open. One of the girls is kind enough to teach me the chorus step, so I wiggle along in the back of the auditorium with my gun finger poses – Bang, bang!

I am not afraid. I can be the Bond Girl.

• Killer Mise en Scène “This song was out before you were even born!” Phil exclaims. I haven’t seen him since the night I met Robert, and he looks strikingly different without his jet-black ski cap. His pale, shaved head accentuates his trimmed red beard and wild blue eyes to make him all fire and ice.

What the hell is that supposed to mean? I reply with something stupid like, “And you’re thirty-four and have roommates.” Weak response. Weak, for chugging down beers and blasting ‘80s rock ballads on a Saturday night in the company of federal agents. I hear Robert’s distinctive voice taking a call on his burner phone in the kitchen down the hallway. I feel the lingering absence of his warmth beside me.

The Upper West Side ground floor apartment is a genuine bachelor’s pad, complete with a black faux leather couch which I sit curled up on, my black stilettos kicked off.

The room is accented with a combination of empty IPA and Heineken beer bottles scattered around the tables; the caps strewn along the floor. The only notable decor is a bizarre Emmy trophy, an angel holding the weight of the world in her hands. Robert had some way or another fallen into possession of the authentic item, as he tended to do with most things.

I am holding my beer more for show – like a trophy, as I did when I first held the Emmy angel – than actually drinking it, and nurse the lukewarm piss water between my palms. I meekly stare at Phil and Joe sitting to the right of me on ugly plush chairs designed for comfort rather than aesthetic, or at Axl Rose on the television screen, swiveling his legs side to side as if trying to ice skate his way out of his skintight leather pants.

He’s crooning the lyrics of “Sweet Child O’ Mine” into his mic,

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which is the anthem song Phil insisted we designate for the night. The room flickers in the glow of the television, flashing black and white and technicolor from the B-roll tapes of the band smoking and making out with groupies.

Momentarily more entertained by my retort than the ‘80s rock band, Phil bounces up from his seat, popping open the cap of another Heineken with his hands and plops down close to me, his legs spread wide, his elbows resting on his knees.

Joe swishes a swig of beer through his mouth, as if that could chase away the unease which has settled in the den with Robert’s absence. “Okay, Phil, she cued ‘Live n’ Let Die.’ A Bond Girl over a Guns N’ Roses fanatic, unlike someone else here.”

“Right, right,” Phil nods, “A ballerina who knows her Bond movies and rock covers and throws back whisky shots.” I feel there’s a mocking tone in his voice. He’s amused.

Thankfully, I’m saved by Slash stepping forward in his steampunk gear and top hat for Phil to drunkenly digress, “Best guitar solo. Ever.” Phil redirects his focus back to the men in bandanas and is bobbing his head intensely as if it were the first time he has ever heard the song, even though it is the sixth time he’s replayed it this evening. As the vocals return for the final refrain, I escape the room using the weak excuse of the restroom slip.

Robert’s room is the first door on the left. I found this out the hard way when I once drunkenly stumbled into Joe’s room in the middle of the night, thinking it was Robert’s. His door is slightly ajar, and I still hear Robert talking down the hallway, but I can’t make out what he’s saying since Phil cranks the volume of the speaker up to an astronomical level.

A glass case of buttons, ribbons, and patches denoting the date and the association of achievement with the assignment, training, or protection detail, spans the wall to my left.

Most of them are similar, with “Robert Young’’ stitched on in a thin, all-caps print, except for the patch of the cartoon of a dog smoking a pipe in a room full of fire and a button pin, which over a picture of a cat said something like “Smittens for Prez!”

I freeze as I hear Robert end the phone call and his footsteps pass the door, not noticing me inside. I hear him step

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back into the front room.

Phil’s voice shouts over the music, “Robert, ya missed it!”

“One more time for Young!” Joe toasts.

I don’t hear Robert’s response, but I hear Phil say something along the lines of “In the restroom…”

They continue to talk over the particulars of tomorrow’s security detail, but I can only catch snippets over the music.

Where did Robert say the diplomats were from this time?

Chad? No, that was last week. Tanzania… or is it Burundi?

He had mentioned the cat button was from an ex, and I can’t help but wonder if it’s the girl. Naturally, I’m curious. A shelf stuffed to the brim with old DVD movies is to the right of the case, naturally consisting of Indiana Jones, Jason Bourne, and James Bond franchises. There is a bookshelf which contains an odd assortment of works of philosophy, the Pali Canon, the Bible, and the Torah. Their presence makes sense considering he spent time studying English at Berkeley, but I wonder also if they keep sentiment with him because of his mother’s multiple marriages. I never noticed Anna Karenina also on the shelf. Other than his evening jacket tossed on the bed, the room resonates a regiment of order which does not align with a hasty cleaning for my good impression, but rather reflects his years spent in the navy.

A flicker catches my eye, and I see that Robert left his Walther PPK out. I approach the sleek handgun which glossily blends in with the nightstand, a sliver of moonlight highlighting it from the gap in the curtains of the shafted room. I know there is a second, the Glocks he carries for work, concealed in the drawer. Daintily, I trace my finger along the textured handle, wanting to pick it up, to feel it cold in my hands, to close my eyes and imagine feeling the control of holding fast against the reverberation of the pellet escaping the shaft, to regain the control I’d entirely lost.

I back away from the nightstand, wondering if Robert’s choice of carrying a Walther PPK gun off duty was intentional.

Looking away from the Bond gun to his desk, I see the ballet program propped up in front of a plainly framed photo. I am surprised he kept the ballet program; a month has passed since, and the edges of the pamphlet are beginning to yellow.

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But I’ve been wondering if the girl in the photograph that the program has been so annoyingly concealing could be the one who left him. Taking care not to disorient its placement, I tilt the program to its side to reveal the girl’s face. Robert and the girl are standing, arms wrapped around each other’s backs and smiling at whoever is behind the camera. Her eyes are not green, but they have the same kindness in them. Robert references his brothers occasionally, but he’s never mentioned a sister. I’m disappointed the photograph only leaves me with more questions.

Suddenly, a piece of feminine, floral stationary catches my eye in his trash bin, a note that seems to have ‘for your eyes only’ written all over it. I can still hear the “Aye, aye, ayeeeahs” of Rose blasting through the walls, so I bend down to my knees, carefully pull it out, and unfold it.

I’m not sure what I am expecting it to be, but I see the script is in a bouncy cursive. I skim the handwritten personal note quickly. My next exhale is more ragged than relieved as the guilt of reading this innocently personal Easter note from his mother engulfs me, yet I cannot deny the unease I feel in my growing skepticism. As I begin to reread the note more patiently, I hear footsteps in the hallway. My heart lurches into the depths of me, and I quickly shove the letter back in the bin and stand up, straightening my dress, covering my ass. The door handle begins to turn and then bangs against the framework – I must have unintentionally locked it when I entered the room in my tipsy state. I have been habitually dead bolting my own door at home ever since the incidents with Anatole started. Robert knocks on the door, and I scramble over to unlock it with a soft click.

Robert eyes me suspiciously as he stands in between the doorframe, one foot in the room, one out of it. I’m breathing heavily, and I can feel my eyes betraying my blatant panic.

His gaze darts over to the exposed firearm, and secondly to the dark computer screen on his desk covered with organized files and paperwork. I sheepishly know that my accident of locking the door and my unplanned discovery of the letter are not a flattering combination. “...You locked me out of my room,” he says. It’s a statement and not a question. Robert takes a step into the room,

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and I take a step back. Closing the door behind him and not taking his eyes off of me, he asks, “Why did you lock me out of my room?”

“Just a habit,” I explain. Weak response. Weak. I can’t possibly explain to him my habit of deadbolting doors behind me.

Alarm flashes across his eyes and drowns the kindness out of them. He furrows his large eyebrows in and walks closer.

I look to my right at the case full of DVDs. If undercover cars, international crime chases, and false identities are all true, maybe the movies had something right. Even though this is real life, I am a Bond Girl.

Tracing both of my hands up to the ends of his broad shoulders, nearly spanning the width of my reach, I tilt my head back and stand on my toes to kiss him. Forcefully. Robert kisses me back. Reluctantly. He glances over again to the gun on the nightstand. I undo the top button of his dress shirt and swiftly in one motion pull my dress over my head and stand there looking straight at him in my black brassiere and panties. “…Are you a spy?” he asks, raising his eyebrows and looking me up and down. The question is ridiculous, but his tone has no indication of humor in it.

I step in to kiss him and pull the rest of his dress shirt off and he picks me up off the ground and throws me back down on the bed next to the discarded evening jacket.

“I would make a killer spy,” I tease.

• Let’s Play Telephone Ever since I saw my younger sister’s body crumpled on the wooden floor, her pale, golden complexion glorified by her stillness, and discovered the empty handle of vodka resting against the uneven molding, I established the daily ritual of calling her. Other than that, I never have all too many incoming or outgoing calls, and I rarely text.

Rather, I tend to avoid my phone since the call from Anatole: (I just want to be sure these rumors going around about me aren’t true); What rumors? (Have you heard anything?); Shouldn’t

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you be talking to Amy about this? (I talked to Meg); No, I don’t know what you could be talking about then (You’re my friend, if you were my friend you wouldn’t spread these rumors that I assaulted someone); I don’t know what rumors you’re talking about (Everything that happened last summer was consensual, right?); Right (And you wouldn’t lie to me if you’d talked about this); Friends don’t lie to each other (You didn’t talk to anyone about it?); Did you? (Exactly, no one needs to know about it. Besides, we’re just friends.)

I never call my mother, but it’s a pity that when I have, it’s because I was a bearer of bad news: I’ve been assaulted (This is because you asked for it, look at the way you dress); I’m taking a leave from school (Your father and I fear you won’t go back to finish); Mom, did he ever hurt you (I love him)?

There are three voice messages on my phone from Robert. The first is finding a time to get dinner; the second calling to ask after me since he heard I was returning home; and the third, months after he has moved to DC, to wish me a happy birthday. His voice is deep and rough, but gentle and full of inflection. He sounds like when you’re watching a British television show and an American comes into the scene, and you suddenly realize how strange and foreign we all sound even to ourselves.

• Sancho Panza Everything and nothing crashes around me in peaceful stillness, like the way your ears ring when acclimating to the silence in the wake of an explosion in an action movie, a readjustment to white noise after being subjected to listening to a fight scene in a movie theatre with surround sound. I have become acquainted with this sensation more than any singular person through my past year of being perpetually skeptical of everyone’s intentions and my ultimate withdrawal into solitude. Every time the consequences of Anatole’s manipulations come crashing resoundingly into my world, I’m flung harshly to face the reality that there is always more of the movie after the explosion, after the screen flashes white and dissolves into

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darkness. I am always waiting for whichever betrayal comes next.

I feel terrible that it had to be Georgina this time, such an impressionable young girl. As if the threatening phone calls, almost losing my job, and being reported to administration for drug abuse wasn’t enough, Anatole had to make my only escape from this reality my prison too. After discovering Georgina has been reporting to Anatole where I am in rehearsals, for which performances, and replying to his messages with photos of me from my digital dance portfolio, the last thing I want to do this evening is attend our first cast gathering outside of rehearsals. Yet in a time of war and peace, I reconcile with myself that if I don’t make an appearance at the party, I will only raise more suspicion. The parties are just as much of a battlefield.

I rally through painting my lips a dark red and, dressed in all black, head to the bar.

Five shots of Fireball later prove that I probably rallied too hard, as I am literally thrown out of the bar: the bouncer comically picks me up clean off my feet and hurls me out the door. I’m laughing the whole time. Given that the quiet ballerina in the lead of the show suddenly has a new appeal to the rest of the cast, a small posse follows me out and washes up to another bar, among them some man I only knew from a few rehearsals of Don Quixote as playing the mime role of Sancho Panza.

Grunge rock music is playing louder than I think it is as my drunken haze dials my sensory level down. The bar is devoid of its regulars and boisterous drinkers: the blind professor with his golden retriever guide dog isn’t playing Jenga with his colleague in the back corner, the rather unpleasant businessman isn’t here to complain about the janky lock in the bathroom, and even Kelly isn’t white-wine-wasted at the stool at the end of the bar. Other than our posse and the two bartenders, the bar is a ghost town for a Friday night.

Georgina is over at the bar with Sancho Panza and another girl, Melanie, taking shots with the bartenders. I’m sitting in a black highchair booth next to Erin in the back corner, and a red electric neon wall casts an eerie glow over Erin’s signature, voluminous curls and angular features. Our friendship has been on the rocks ever since she started sniffing coke and

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sleeping with the ex-prince of Ethiopia, and me getting the lead over her in the ballet sent it crashing to the bottom. We sit in awkward silence; she is still pissed at me for getting us tagged with a bad rep and thrown out of our usual bar.

An abrasive bang causes me to snap my senses out of my intoxicated stupor. Three men storm into the bar with purpose and assertively commandeer our booth. We’re surrounded: a man in a jet-black ski cap and the stubble of shiny red hairs hinting at the thought of growing a beard takes Erin’s right, a man wearing a flannel shirt who has tanned skin in a way which makes me think he’s recently been someplace close to the Tropic of Capricorn in winter flanks my left, and a man with beautiful dark skin and a blinding smile which seems plastered on his face sits directly across from me.

“Are you models or dancers?” the flannel man asks me.

Disappointed with this man’s alarmingly accurate deduction and turned off by their invasion of our booth, I throw on the most disagreeable character I can conjure on the spot.

I reply with my voice raised to a high-pitched whine, drawing out my vowels and ending every sentence as if I am asking a question, “Ummm, no! I mean, I play the flute?”

“The flute? My father’s a musician,” the flannel man replies.

The beautiful man lunges across the high table and interrupts, “Where were you guys before this?”

“Just some bar four blocks south and over an avenue on Amsterdam,” I reply.

“Oh, yeah?” the beautiful man says past his smile. “I think I saw you there.”

I cringe on the inside. “Did anyone get thrown out of the bar?”

“No, no… I don’t think so,” the beautiful man says.

“Then you weren’t at that bar,” I shrug.

“What did we miss out on here?” the beautiful man asks, widening his eyes and his smile.

“You don’t want to know,” I save myself.

The flannel man bumps my arm gently. “So, you’re a flutist? Where do you play?”

“Oh, yeah, no. I play for fun. I study communications,” I say, imagining the blandest, broadest detail possible. I’m re-

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lieved this less-interesting flannel guy swooped in before I had to orchestrate an unrehearsed lie to the beautiful man.

“What does a communications major flutist like to drink nowadays?” the flannel man asks.

“What’s your name?” the beautiful man interrupts.

“Chelsea,” I drawl, still sticking with my shtick. For extra emphasis on the dreadful personality, I twizzle my finger around a strand of hair. “And I, like, live in Chelsea, so I’m Chelsea from Chelsea!”

“What brings you uptown, then?” the flannel man asks.

“Just visiting my friend, Tif. Right, Tif?” I gesture to Erin who’s in a conversation with the man in the ski cap. She doesn’t hear me trying to save her.

“What can I get Chelsea from Chelsea to drink?” the beautiful man smiles.

I twist my lock of hair with increased vigor and roll my eyes up to the ceiling, as if I have to think really hard about it.

“Umm… I’ll have something… bubbly!”

“Bubbly it is,” the beautiful man says, sliding off his stool and walking towards the bar.

The flannel man next to me appears slightly disappointed that he was not the one getting me a drink, but this act seems to have finally shaken him off. I turn to Erin during a lull in her conversation and drop my accent to whisper in her ear. The beautiful man returns with two very out-of-place glasses of sparkling wine in this dive bar setting – one for me, one for Erin.

I continue talking between her and the beautiful man and lose track of time and sense of place almost completely.

I entirely forget about the tan man in the flannel shirt beside me until the beautiful man with the dark features stands and begins to swing dance with Melanie. I glance over to Georgina, who is still drinking with the bartenders.

Looking at the man in the flannel shirt, I’m shocked to see that lying on his opposite shoulder is Sancho Panza, mumbling and nearly passed out. The man is patting Sancho Panza’s head and trying to get him to drink water from a clean collins glass. I drop my shtick and apologize profusely to the man in the flannel shirt as I reach across his lap to shake Sancho Panza’s shoulders as I shout, “Sancho Panza, Sancho

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Panza! It’s Kitri. It’s me, Kitri. Are you okay?” The man must think I’m entirely off my rocker.

Sancho Panza mumbles something unintelligible and stands to stumble over to Georgina at the bar. I see her give him her own glass of water and slide her arm over to support his back.

“That – that was really kind of you,” I say to the man in the flannel shirt. It’s the first time I’ve actually looked at his face the entire night, and I have to restart my sentence because I notice that he has the brightest green eyes and somehow smells refreshingly of fresh laundry, even after a night of hitting the bars. “What’s your name?”

“Robert,” he says. “And that’s my roommate, Phil,” he gestures to the man in the ski cap. He and Erin are both on their phones.

“Oh, you’re all roommates in the area, then?” I ask, looking towards the beautiful man still swing dancing with Melanie.

“No, no. We just sort of picked him up along the way…

Don’t know his name, actually,” Robert chuckles.

I meekly explain that I am, in fact, a dancer and part of a production of Don Quixote, hence the boy being Sancho Panza. He says he’s a diplomat, has been in New York City for two consecutive years, although he’s from San Diego and is moving to Washington, DC in a year and two months in April.

He likes to write in his spare time; mostly personal things, some short stories. He’s lived in New York City before, and he has an affinity for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We both talk about the Costume Institute’s Alexander McQueen tribute in 2011. At this extent, I’m not sure if he’s being sincere or not, but the Met holds the key to my heart. He suggests we visit the museum together sometime.

Robert pulls out his phone and has ‘Chelsea’ typed out in a contact. “Did I spell that right?” he asks, handing me his phone to put in my number.

“Well, actually…” I delete Chelsea. I enter my real name and number and expect for him to never contact me after this. Phil is standing by the door, seeming a little impatient to leave, since nothing went anywhere for him with Erin.

Looking up to the bar, I notice that Georgina is gone, and Erin

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with her. I realize how inebriated I am, since their departure passed me by. Melanie is now the person holding up Sancho Panza, and she’s still talking to the beautiful man.

“Robert, come on,” Phil barks from the door.

I give a curt wave goodbye to Robert, and the beautiful man says goodbye to Melanie, and we all bid a good evening to the bartenders. As I exit through the door, I curse my stubbornness for only wearing a blazer and not wanting the burden of a winter jacket as the bitter February wind slices my cheeks.

The three men walk south. Shivering with my elbows crossed tightly across my chest, I ask Melanie if she’s going to text the beautiful man the next day. She says she’s not sure and says that she is heading south as well.

Standing outside the bar I lift my cracked, purple fingers to light a cigarette and stay there in the cold to smoke one with Sancho Panza. His name is Aaron.

•

Snapshot After messaging back and forth on the phone for a month, the first time Robert and I met again was not at the Met. But looking back on the photo of us together there, I see a broad man with his arm wrapped around a shorter girl with a youthful face, both smiling and standing off-center on the balcony across from the landmark arches of the main entrance of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There is no magic when I look at the photograph, no feeling regained. There is only a prism of color captured to create shapes that feel as if they could be a memory I once lived. This singular photo I have of Robert and I could easily be the same singular photo I have of Anatole and I, where we are holding glass bottles of watermelon-infused juice and smiling beside each other on the steps of the Met, barely eighteen, with extended, lanky, awkward arms to prove it.

Robert and I had arranged to meet on the steps of the Met. As we enter the museum, I am enchanted with the haunting acoustics of the chamber string group playing what I would imagine the chilling landscapes of Scotland could sound like.

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I’ve never been, although he has. I remember we drank some sort of rare scotch he still had from the trip later in the evening. I was twenty and had never had scotch before that night, but I decided I liked it.

We walk arm in arm up the central staircase over to the balcony. Robert asks for a table, and my heart flutters in childish giddiness as I see we are being led to the central table, right in front of the chamber orchestra, with a sweeping, grand view of the architecture of the Met. It is a work of art in itself.

I ask if he had somehow schemed for this setting, and he jokes that he begged the host with his eyes. Our waiter brings us drinks and insists we must take a photo together before we leave, we must.

The chamber orchestra launches into a delightful cakewalk as I embarrassingly discover I have left my phone off mute and faceup on the table. A photo flashes across my screen of me on the tip of my pointe shoe on one leg, my other leg extended far behind my head. I explain I’d had my promotion shoot earlier that day for Don Quixote.

Robert pulls out his phone to say he’d had a photo-op of a sort earlier in the week. He was unflatteringly caught in a paparazzi photo with Meghan Markle and said it had been plastered all over his office the entire week. Bewildered, I became skeptical of everything he’d ever said; there is no way possible this could be true. A serenade and an allegro later, I excuse myself to use the restroom where I whip out my phone and promptly Google search “Meghan Markle dinner Tuesday night.” Indeed, plastered all over the internet was a humorously terrible photo of Robert on her majesty’s secret service, with Meghan Markle in the background.

My entrance back to the table is accompanied with a devastatingly soaring aria which lets my mind wander. I think of a photograph of Robert framed on the wall in his apartment bedroom: he looks about my age in it and is cheekily smiling at the camera in his all-white navy uniform. It’s of no use to wonder over things that could be different if it’s not how they are.

Robert initiates our conversation with the first violinist as the chamber group packs up. It turns out that the violinist had played for a performance I was a dancer with at Lincoln

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Center three years prior. The tables around us are emptying, and the atmosphere becomes even more intimate, so we slurp the bottom of our drinks and aimlessly, slowly, walk arm in arm towards the exit. Something about this intimacy must prompt Robert to disclose this fact to me: a little under a year ago, he was prepared to propose to his girlfriend of five years.

She suddenly left him for her high school boyfriend two days before he had planned on proposing, and he was stuck with a customized – she had the tiniest, most delicate fingers he’d ever seen – engraved, diamonds-are-forever engagement ring.

The waiter chases after us down the foyer, exclaiming that we never got our photo, insisting that we must take it, we must. Robert hands his phone to the waiter, wraps his arm around me, and I face the camera and smile.

•

Bless Your Soul, Child Dizzy from the color in my cheeks, I walk backwards in my sparkly stilettos, flashing Robert a wink as he goes back inside the front door of his apartment. I take a spin holding my unbrushed, tangled curls to my head in the harsh, truthful midday spring sunlight glaring down from above. In my wrinkled black dress and slightly smeared mascara, I am the undeniable definition of a walk of shame, yet I laugh joyfully. I turn around again to watch his front door close behind him, and as I pivot back over my shoulder, I collide straight into a person.

Looking up, my hungover insensibility hinders my realization that I’ve just collided into a priest of the small Spanish Catholic church Robert lives next to. The midday churchgoers dressed in tweed jackets and hats are all out congregating on the street and give me a solid up-down stare, and the priest says, “Bless your soul, child.”

I take every bit of strength not to spew laughing and totter down the street, passing the statue of Jesus and notice that someone has finally repaired his missing hand.

I run towards Amsterdam, as my sister and father have just arrived in the city to take me away. Anatole had given me no other choice; there’s no way I could ever hold up against

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him in court. He’s a privileged young boy at the center of a set of drinkers and womanizers with a bad reputation, but his family’s influence always prevails. My father is more likely to drive up Broadway, and I thought the only thing that could be worse than the collision with the priest would be running into anyone, let alone my father coming to pick me up from dropping out of school, in this state. I can’t imagine any worse scenario, that is, until I pass two other church congregations letting out as I dash northbound along Amsterdam with the stilettos surrendered from my feet to my hands.

Once safe in my empty dorm room – walls stripped of the decorations I hung up to cover the holes and wires in the walls, the sentimentality of the loveseat sold for sixty dollars – I change into the most conservative outfit I can find near the top of my suitcase, just as my sister and father arrive. The fourteen-hour drive home from the city to middle-of-nowhere Kentucky is long, but the week there is even longer. The week is timestamped in my memory by listening to Guns N’ Roses on loop.

About five days into the week – I know all of the lyrics now – I am in my father’s school office, and I sniff my nose.

“Are you sick?” my father asks.

“No, just allergies,” I say, clearing my throat.

“What are you allergic to? Being around your mother and I?” I breathe in and out, trying not to sniff again, and choose to de-escalate. “No. It’s springtime; it’s the pollen,” I say pointedly.

“But you didn’t deny it. You’re sick of your mother and I.” “It’s springtime. I have allergies. I never said that.”

“But you didn’t deny it.”

“Don’t put words in my mouth. I have allergies, I sniffed.”

“You shouldn’t disrespect your mother and I like this.”

I cannot de-escalate anymore.

“What the fuck? Where the hell is this coming from?

What the fuck.”

My father steps forward and grabs me by the wrist.

“Don’t talk to your father that way.”

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I forcefully yank my wrist out from his grasp and leave my hand in the air. I calmly say, “I’m turning twenty-one this summer, I don’t have to put up with your bullshit. I’m going to take myself back to the house now.”

My father grabs me fully by the arm now. “You’re not going anywhere–” His words fade out from my hearing as my fight or flight response sets in, and I throw my bodyweight to pull free from his clutch and bolt down the hallway. I don’t look back, but I hear him screaming and hear what sounds like a chair or something hollow and plastic being hurled down the narrow hallway in my direction. The crash echoes and continues to ring through my ears even as I don’t stop running, running outside, bolting all the ways to the house, thunder up the battered wooden porch steps, and barricade myself in my room. My family’s house does not have any locks on any of the bedroom doors, and I press a chair and a bookshelf to the door and keep my back against it.

Hyperventilating, memories pour through my mind like a prick of fresh blood trickling over my ivory skin. It’s inevitable that the dark liquid pumps and pulses, my coat of skin permeated by the presence of it. I hear my father enter through the backdoor. I hold my breath and press my ear to the wooden floorboard to overhear the hushed discussion with my mother in the kitchen. The back door closes again, and the sound of footsteps inch closer to my sealed fortress. Between ragged breaths, I press all of my weight with renewed determination against the furniture barricading the door as someone tries to open it.

“This is ridiculous.” It’s my mother’s firm voice. She realizes I have furniture blocking the door. “Open up, you’re being a child.”

“No,” I say, trying to keep my voice from cracking but it does.

“What happened?” my mother asks.

“No,” is all I can say.

“This is ridiculous, what happened?” she persists.

I surrender and allow the door to be opened only a sliver. I can’t hide my tears.

Her voice softens when she sees my face, and it’s a ten-

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der expression I don’t see from her often. “What happened?”

I concede. She grows extremely silent, and my mother’s expression turns to one I had never seen as a child. There’s always a moment where a child no longer sees their parents as parents, but as people, and this is the moment the sweet child will lose their innocence forever.

“That’s not what your father told me,” she states.

I allow the door to open entirely.

“Pack your things. I’ll drive you to the airport first thing tomorrow morning. I’ll come in at three in the morning to wake you,” my mother reports dryly. Factually. She pauses before she turns to leave. “You don’t have to say goodbye to your father.” She closes the door behind her.

On the plane ride back to the city, I fly into the sunrise of the living daylights, listening to “Sweet Child O’ Mine” on repeat.

• Smoking Gun Dinner dates as first formal dates are never my forte; nerves get the hold of me and comments like “Aren’t you supposed to be a ballerina?” follow as I knock over an entire freestanding dinner table, nearly set a restaurant on fire with an out-of-control candle, or in this case, choke on an unexpected pit in an olive and spit it out onto the tablecloth — only for it to roll across the floor at a dismal volume and pace in the tragically empty family-owned Greek restaurant. But somehow, even after lying about my identity and me being perpetually dodgy about committing to an official date for an evening, Robert is signed into and sitting in my matchbox of a dorm room. He jokes he had more space underwater in a submarine for a month.

I’ve somehow managed to cram a small loveseat into this space, sandwiched smack between the bed, the door, and the wall which we’ve managed to squash into side by side, legs brushing. Robert leans in and kisses me: a butterfly kiss, a ghost, a mere impression of skin on skin. His lips taste sickly sweet of the cheap rosé, but he smells of fresh laundry. He

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does not caress my neck with his hands, he does not pull me close in his arms. He only kisses me tenderly, slowly, delicately. I don’t notice, but he points out that I am shaking. I don’t respond but begin to unbutton his blouse and suddenly stop.

There’s something tucked inside of his belt loop concealed under his shirt, and I don’t need to see it to know it’s a gun.

I pretend not to see it. Robert stands up to turn off the soft lights and unbuttons the rest of his shirt, artfully removing it without revealing the gun. I can’t tell if he noticed me noticing it or not.

He lifts me into the bed and crawls in behind me. Robert stays there the entire night, unmoving, holding me in his arms because I can’t stop shaking.

•

Motorola Time A piercing scream escapes my lips. Snakes are fine.

However, rats?

I squeal, “Rodent of unusual size!” and Robert swoops me over to his other side on the sidewalk, over a spring shower water puddle, as he promptly responds, “I don’t believe they exist.”

The week before I dropped out of school, the elected heartthrob by the girls in my class year asks me on a date. He graduated last year, and is two years older than all of us. He’s a paralegal at a decent firm, and a composer. His family has a nice Upper West Side apartment, and his bred Cavalier Spaniel is quite lovable. We make a routine out of eating New York pizza slices on park benches on rainy days next to a tennis court so that the rusty clay stains the soles of our shoes.

At midnight of some day in November, I begin to cry face down on the pillow, and I don’t know if Robert notices me or not, and he reaches over my exposed back and the light from his phone illuminates the headboard so that I can see shapes in the darkness, blurry through my eyes.

A medical student pursues me for nearly a month before I agree to the date. He is impressively clever and makes me laugh. He takes me to explore speakeasies and authen-

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tic Harlem jazz bars, and on top of the secret rooftop of his brownstone, breathing in the crisp winter air, we discuss journals and literature. Even the stars seem intellectually stimulated.

Sometime around Christmas I surprise him at my apartment with a Greek spread, and he understands I didn’t need to say why. He looks around the tea candle-filled room askance as I anxiously scramble between the oven and the microwave. I open the fridge, and he takes my hand to halt my stream of meaningless words. I keep talking even as he pulls me to face him, but my words putter out as I look into his green eyes. He says, “This is profoundly the sweetest thing anyone has ever done for me.” The door of the refrigerator is open, and the room is filled with the sound of the electric humming.

The northern Brit I started to see in the start of the next year is taller than Robert, and he graduated from Harvard.

Athletic. Pale blue eyes like white marbles. He has taken me out to play darts, and then on a long walk to get stuck in the rain and kiss me in Midtown for my Hollywood moment. I say, “Cat! Cat!” but he doesn’t get it. I suggest an evening at the Frick Collection, and he takes me to one of those fancy dinners where I use the wrong knife. I keep blowing the candle out every time I laugh. In a thick Cockney accent he says, “You’re very pretty,” and then, “I like you,” where I say, “I like you too,” to which then he says, “You’re very beautiful,” followed by “I like you very much.” When he catches me staring at nothing, he’ll excuse me to his friends saying, “She does that a lot,” but I know very well where I am when I am staring away. I scatter a part of my story with him as he inevitably finds out about Anatole since I’m getting message after message from Anatole’s ex on my phone on an evening out together, and he just holds my hand in both of his through the entire night and doesn’t let go.

Yet, here I am on Robert’s doorstep, except now it isn’t the ground floor apartment next to the Spanish Catholic church. Exactly a year ago on this same mid-February evening was when Robert and I first met, although I am certain he doesn’t realize it. Robert and Phil and Joe have already vacated the apartment. I think Joe is in South Africa. I don’t know where Phil went. I’m buzzed up to a studio in a painstakingly modern building. Robert lets me in with a yawn; it’s almost

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midnight. His bookcase, DVD collection, and badge wall are nowhere to be seen in this foreign space. It’s a pre-furnished studio with a sign above the bed that reads both ‘Love is forever’ and ‘Home is where the heart is.’ The bedsheets are incredibly soft, however.

The next morning I’m surprised when Robert offers me a ride home in his car on his way to work. Robert says my street is right along his way to his work location for the day, but I have learned at this point not to ask for more details, even for the sake of small talk. The car is a discrete Ford Crown Victrola, but inside there is an additional dashboard of an assortment of intricate buttons which I don’t recognize from any ordinary sort of car. The interior is just as paranoically clean as Robert keeps his room. It also smells of fresh pressed laundry.

Robert doesn’t talk much as we’re driving north, and the Motorola burner phone strapped onto the dashboard flashes up and starts speaking in a garbled voice, although it’s interrupted swiftly by Robert hitting a button on the dashboard, and the lights turn off. At this moment we turn onto my street, and he pulls into an empty slot conveniently in front of my building. Leaning across the dashboard, he kisses me in silence, and I jump out of the car without a word. Robert waits to see me open the front door of my apartment to drive off and turn north to continue his day. I have a feeling this is the last time I will see him. He moves to DC at the start of the next month.

• Sergeant “Prost!” the three of us toast our beers and sip the foam from the top. I’m clinking cumbersome mugs with Robert and his first navy sergeant from back in San Diego. Robert hasn’t seen him in five years, and the sergeant is out on the town for one day only. Somehow, after not seeing Robert for a little over a month myself, he thought it not in the least bit strange that I join them on their last stop of their Oktoberfest beer crawl at four in the afternoon on a Sunday.

The sergeant and Robert had been out to New Jersey

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at the shooting range this morning, and after my beer clunks down on the oak bar, I pick up the lead pellet Robert hands me. It feels light and rubber-like and is barely the size of the tips of my fingers, and yet after gaslighting and a combustion of something along the lines of physics and chemistry, it would be deadly. What a transformation.

“So, what did you do with the ring, pawn it?” the Sergeant asks Robert.

“No,” Robert says. “I kept it. Seventeen grand, but I kept it.”

Biting my lower lip, I continue to be extremely preoccupied with this little lead pellet. I never knew a bar could be so silent at four in the afternoon on a Sunday, especially as Robert, with such an acute sense of timing, excuses himself at this moment to use the restroom and leaves me sitting here with his empty high stool chair between the sergeant and me.

“What do you do?” the sergeant asks.

I roll the pellet over along the bar, so it halts against Robert’s glass. “Well, I’m a dancer,” when he looks at a loss, I add, “Classical ballet.” I think I lose him even more.

He nods his head. “On stage with the shoes and everything?”

“That’s about it,” I say.

There’s more silence. I know he’s just trying to make conversation, but it isn’t helping.

“I bartend,” I say, grasping at anything to fill the silence.

Robert seemed quite chummy with the bartender at this location, and I see her glance up from polishing her glasses, as if not putting the pieces together as to why I was here at all. “Not far from here, actually,” I stupidly continue.

“Ah,” the sergeant exclaims, but without the emphasis of an exclamation point. There’s more silence. “Well, cheers!”

I drink heavily this time and the sergeant does too.

I’ve never been more thankful for the fact that men can piss so fast. When Robert returns, he summarizes to both of us the wedding he had been the best man for at the end of September for a childhood friend. As a wedding gift, Robert wrote a short story about the weekend for the bride and groom and asks if I want to read it. I am surprised he wants me to, here and now, but he has a copy on him. I prompt for Robert to tell

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the sergeant his story of driving a car spinning three-sixty out of control on a track, or about rolling out the carpet for the Pasha, and he delves into both of these favorite tales which he always tells with lots of animation and hand gestures, and I immerse myself likewise in the world of his friend’s wedding.

Not that I expected his writing to be dry, but I was not expecting it to be eloquent. His story is strikingly detailed and hauntingly poetic for the mere subject of a wedding weekend. If I had received this as a gift myself, I would have almost certainly cried joyfully. I know in this moment I have to write myself; I have to stop hiding thoughts in journals, thoughts scribbled away on notepads for taking orders at the bar and crumpled in the trash bin. The romanticism of a life on the stage has melted away; my reality is too harsh for that life to be mine any longer. I have words I want to write, identities I want to try on, and things I want to say and am not afraid to. The Bond Girl can be whoever the hell she wants to be. I am only allowing Anatole and all the others to win by stepping down.

That very same evening, I return home and send a message to the dean of my school. I go back to school in the start of the new year, and I begin to write.

•

Euphoria Standing in line to order two glasses of champagne during the intermission of the ballet has never felt so scandalous, so dangerous, so exultant. Never have I possessed everything I have desired in a moment, nor have I ever wanted other things so badly. I’ve decided to leave school, to break free of the web of lies which has been spun around me, and my head is giddy with the excitement of this freedom. Robert’s strong, muscled arm wraps around my waist and reaches all the way to the front of my ribcage, pressing me into him. Even in my fourinch heels, I can only reach the small of his back, but where my small palm rests over the richly threaded suit is a small, cold lump professionally hidden and tucked away under his jacket. After we stand in comfortable silence – as we do so well with each other and understand – we walk outdoors onto the

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balcony overlooking Lincoln Center, glasses of champagne in hand. The spray from the fountain mixed with the first spring winds of April whistle over the balcony to dampen and chill our faces. It is a view to a kill. I am free. I am walking away, and Anatole will have no hold over me.

The spinning in my head and my heart beating fast mixed with the effects of the champagne is pleasurable. Holding Robert’s cufflinks, gifted to him by Prince Harry, is pleasurable. Feeling oh-so-elegant at the ballet on this perfect spring evening is pleasurable. As Robert pulls me in for a kiss, I wrap both of my arms around his waist and place both of my palms over the concealed gun which only he and I know is hidden under his suit, and which I didn’t yet know contained the ring.

This kiss with the man with the golden gun, at this moment, is joy.

•

Surrender to the Night Robert knows more now than he did before. I told him of Anatole, but only of him, not all of it. I think if I ever told anyone everything all in one breath, they would understandably not want anything to do with me at all. Instead, I scatter pieces to let them exist on their own as part of a larger truth.

Different people I know cherish different versions of me. It’s been about six months since I’ve known Robert, so inevitably some piece of it comes out. This has become a harshly unavoidable part of who I am.

I don’t tell Robert about crying on the ground at sixty pounds, screamed at by my mother that it doesn’t matter what I wear to the high school dance, that my weight gain would show, that I would never keep a man interested in me this way.

I don’t tell him about the night I threw my friend into Anatole, to escape from him running his hands through my hair in a crowded room. I don’t tell him how I was told by those I thought closest to me that I was nothing but a homeless vagrant on the streets, that I could die tomorrow and no one would care. I don’t tell him about a stranger’s assault on me in the night, as I sat curled up on the wet stone bench. I don’t explain why I left him a panicked voicemail and as he replies in

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the morning, I was already asleep, I figured as much and I was fine. I don’t tell him about the set-up, the bag of coke which tumbled out of my pants pocket and onto the public bathroom stall floor, as the report of my alleged drug abuse all made sense to me: someone didn’t want me gone, but also wanted me dead.

But I am not afraid. Anatole knows what happened in the room.

I don’t tell Robert how my door swung open and made me jump. I was expecting Anatole, yet I didn’t know how he let himself in. The apartment door was locked. His shadow casts long over the room in the light of the three o’clock sun, over the same spot on the uneven wooden floor of where my sister’s breathless golden frame had lain. The open window made the curtains dance in the gentle Hudson breeze. I don’t tell Robert how Anatole joined me on my couch to begin kissing me behind my neck, my skin warm and the air intoxicating with the still summer heat, how he lifted me to the bed and pulled my loose frock off my frame. I don’t tell Robert that I never saw the break coming, that I wonder why the snap ever happened.

I don’t tell him that I screamed for Anatole to stop, stop, stop, all muffled and muted as I struggled to breathe and began to see stars. I was as breathless as my sister was, crumpled on the floor, but my frame was not glorified and golden, I was broken and gone. I don’t tell Robert about the shock I saw in Anatole’s eyes as I regained my vision on the floor, resurfaced gagging, gulping, gasping on my own vomit. I don’t tell him I crawled along the dark, slanted hallway, collapsing on the bathroom floor to continue to retch into the toilet. You had too much to drink last night, you’re sick. You’re sick, this never happened. Why did I even come here for this, you whore? If I wanted to be disappointed, I would have just gone downtown, I would have just taken a car. You’re going to be fine, you’re just sick. I hope you feel better tomorrow.

I don’t tell him about the sound of the door that had somehow let Anatole in close and how I remember crawling back into the room, weak, and sitting unmoving in the pool of retch, watching the smoke of my cigarette linger in the humid air until the room turned dark and the next day dawned. I don’t tell him how I sat in the open windowsill of the seventh

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story window, looking down at the steam hovering over the roofs of the other buildings, a thin orange strip kissing the horizon emerging from the fog, pulling me in, preparing me for boarding, ready to take flight, walking up the stairs in the dark to your bedroom and thinking there is one more step than there actually is, the feeling of betrayal for allowing yourself to believe in something you thought you knew so well, sky fall, sky fall, sky fall – Crying out, I bolt straight up in my bed and can feel only shapes in the darkness. Everything and nothing crashes around me in peaceful stillness. Robert holds me close and he doesn’t tell me that everything is going to be alright. He doesn’t tell me to just breathe. He says, “I’m not going anywhere,” and it is nice to think that for a pretty moment as he holds me in his arms, and I slowly fall asleep.

• Asalaam Alaikum I know the email chain exists; I’ve seen Robert refer to it on social media blasts throughout his month long, globe-trotting trip. He’s been to Hong Kong, Mumbai, Jordan, Morocco, Lisbon, Mexico City… and I am disappointed I have not been on the chain for the email blast short stories he’s been sending out from each location. A week ago, he called me from his hotel in Rio and said he’d add me to it. I was sure it was another empty statement which was just pretty to say in the moment.

This Monday evening, I’m working at the bar and without forewarning receive ten emails simultaneously from Robert. Altogether, these emails thread into a nearly novel-length account of his adventures, which consist of visits with old friends, motorbiking alongside elephants, being brought to a jail in Egypt, and spending a night with an attractive Dutch girl in Jordan that he joked to be like a Bond Girl spy.

In the way which the Portuguese concept of the word saudade cannot translate directly into any other language, I cannot possibly convey words in the way which Robert does to express what this saudade has echoed through his life. I can say

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I had no idea he lived his relationship with his ex in secret for years under a bunker in Africa, or that his seventeen grand engagement ring rests in a hiding spot in the back of the Glocks gun he carries on duty, or that in the safe of the Walther PPK he leaves on the nightstand beside his bed. I had no idea he lost his youngest sister to cancer and, being so distant from her when she was alive, decided not to be there to see her pass.

Instead, he leaves a framed photograph of a distant memory in his room on his desk and scatters locks of her hair around Islamic and Buddhist temples on his journey. Asalaam alaikum.

Reading these letters, I am consumed with guilt. The noise of the bar goes white, and everything and nothing crashes around me in peaceful stillness. What does guilt sound like?

Guilt sounds like the dead phone line after I hung up on my mother sobbing after she told me she still loves my father, as quiet and dead as the sliver of moonlight hovering over the midnight firearm. Guilt looks like my sister’s still, stone cold, blazing golden body on the floor after her alcohol overdose, looking like a little Emmy statue, holding the weight of the world in her arms, and me letting her lay there and not calling for help, just bent over her body, gambling her life with a prayer. Guilt tastes like the bile in my mouth after my assault

by Anatole, and even before any ill intentions shown, guilt smells like Anatole’s girlfriend’s perfume on his shirt as I took it off.

Guilt feels like not knowing the first thing about this man who is closer to being a stranger than the Robert Young I thought I knew.

•

Pangea I have all I want at the cost of all I have. Finally performing on the Metropolitan Opera House stage isn’t as climactic or glorifying as I ever imagined it would be, and my costume looks like a crossover between Obi-wan Kenobi and Shrek. It was our final run of the week, and leaving the theatre for the last time, I leisurely walk through the empty tunnel running underneath Lincoln Center, flooded with yellow lights

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illuminating the steam off the pavement in the humidity of the summer. I hear the solitary echo of the heels of my boots clicking around the tunnel, my strides kicking up the hem of my dress. I can still feel remnants of dirt smudged across my face and chest from the performance stage makeup, since I played a homeless vagabond.

My solitude is interrupted with a ping echoing through the tunnel. It’s Robert, and I head uptown to his ground-floor apartment. Phil, Joe, and I are all coincidentally wearing floral print, so we heckle Robert into one of Joe’s spares while blasting The Final Countdown at a volume simply inconsiderate to neighbors before storming out to the bar.

Joe heads out after a beer, and I make my typical weak conversation starter with Phil by asking him who’s playing the baseball game on the television screen. Phil soon leaves Robert and I in the bar alone with the bartender.

The conversation between us wanders somewhere or other and flows so well with understanding, which it always does, leading me to make some ridiculous metaphor to Pangea, and when I say, “Pangea,” Robert begins to laugh and cannot stop.

Pangea, Pangea, something that once was but still is, the world is not enough, yet will never be, evolving, existing, escaping meaning; it means everything now, but will all mean nothing, yet will still be with us, unstable, unsure, steady and predicted, moving into being, becoming into something.

“You know, I was just having a conversation earlier today with someone who said we don’t talk about Pangea enough. So, you’re right on the ticket.”

“Here we are, talking about Pangea.”

If the night at the ballet together was joy, then this moment is euphoric. I can’t remember what was so funny about it, but that things would never be the same again, that tomorrow never dies, and I couldn’t stop laughing either.

Pangea, Pangea, Pangea.

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Unwritable Harrison Mahler George Washington University

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he neurologist’s office does a good impression of hospitality. Warm color palette, enticing toy chest in the waiting area, and a generous spattering of decorations in each patient room. My shins hit only the cushiony edge of the checkup bed as I clamber up onto it. The other doctors had uneven drawers, cold metal protrusions that scrape at a kid’s legs like a lion not quite trapped in its cage.

I know the feeling. I’m that lion too. My rapid foot taps add a backing soundtrack to the quiet office and my mom tells me to stop it. I move to my nails, biting through a middle finger’s worth before my mom threatens a mouthful of soap once we’re home. I start rhythmically clenching and crashing my teeth together to the beat of a song I’ll one day know, but the doctor shows up before my mom can hold my jaw still.

The neurologist is the kind of man who will always look fifty-something no matter what age he actually is with perpetually balding hair and a thick Israeli accent I’ll eventually hear behind no less than four different languages.

“Well, little man,” he says, flipping through a folder of diagnostics and test results too thick for any normal four-yearold. “We’re going to put you on some new medication. You know how to swallow pills, right?”

I nod. I like taking pills because they make me feel like a grown-up. I love the ritual of it, the medically mandated clockwork regularity, the way you can cheat in a solid along with a liquid, the unknowable magic behind the capsules dissolving into the body. The one he gives me is a small beige-yel-

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low thing containing 18 milligrams of what I assume must be salvation. No more being told to be quiet because I will be quiet. No more being told to sit still because I will sit still. No more being told to focus because I will focus. On the car ride home, I daydream of being the smartest kid at school, of the birth of a new me, a better me, a me under my own control, a me that will see all my dreams come true effortlessly.

And it works. An hour after I down the capsule on a waterfall every morning, the switch happens. My entire body tenses up, the muscles in my face and extremities vibrate, my heart rate rises, and the whole world slows down because it turns out the cure for hyperactive disorder is a stimulant. Go figure that one out.

But then there are the side effects. Some days my appetite gets so suppressed that the mere smell of food makes me nauseous. Some days I get headaches so intense that I can feel my heartbeat in my brain. Some days my body runs too hot, slicking me and everything else I touch with sweat. Some days I’m asleep for ten hours and wake up feeling like I just pulled an all-nighter anyway.

And of course, some days I forget to take it at all.

There’s something cliché about that realization. Usually it’s about an hour after breakfast, when I notice all my nervous ticks are ticking at once and that I’ve only gotten hungrier since I ate. By that point, it’s a lost cause. If I take it that late, I’ll be lucky to squeeze a single hour of real sleep out of the night.

So I try to live anyway. The world’s covered in a fog thick enough to swim through and yet there’s so many things happening that I can’t stop my mind jumping helplessly between them. I tear at myself, always mentally and sometimes physically, as if I can beat myself into controlled submission.

And the hunger, oh the hunger, the hunger of a side of me that has been locked away for months, of a side that has dopamine receptors so broken and fried that it claws pathetically at any and every pleasureful stimulus in a useless attempt to

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feel anything at all in a world that is too fast and too silent and too numb and too much and too little all at once. The trick to coping is to make your mind scream nonstop until the day is over. Reality may be covered with static, but at least some of the buzzing background noise is yours, and that’s enough to latch onto sometimes.

No wonder I got called a retard so much.

Ableism is the one side effect every doctor conveniently fails to mention. I was able to hide amongst the neurotypical for a while. Every kid is a little jumpy, aren’t they? Maybe not quite as jumpy, twitchy, or tick-y as me, but I don’t think you’d have noticed unless you looked with a magnifying glass. For a time, I got to laugh at the special-ed kids on the other side of the schoolyard with everyone else. They were the ones who weren’t lucky enough to be able to hide it, who got cordoned off lest an “episode” occur with one of the beautiful normal children that could cost the school who knows how much in legal fees and reputation. The isolation of the different is a small price to pay for a sense of normalcy, right?

But then the masquerade broke. See, ADHD isn’t my only disability, it was just my first. I think of it as a sort of “Neurodivergence 101: Intro to Your Fucked-Up-Beyond-Repair Brain.” Things wouldn’t get bad until my hands betrayed me.

In kindergarten, I learned how to write. I wasn’t very good at spelling, putting spaces between words, keeping lines straight and stable, or remembering when exactly to use a capital or lowercase letter instead of whatever my hand found easiest. It was kindergarten though, so no one was that worried. All my other work was fine. More than fine actually, more than fine enough for me to “earn” a spot in the “Alpha Program,” the one for the “smart” kids to have their own space separate from everyone else. The salvation pill was working, my mind was getting faster and sharper every day, and I couldn’t imagine anything was enough to slow me down.

Which is why it was all the more surprising that my scrawl didn’t get any better. It might have even gotten worse in

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first grade. By the middle of second, the failing marks in handwriting were starting to become a problem that the adults in my life were noticing. I was sent off on the weekends to more psychologists for more tests until they came back with a diagnosis of something called dysgraphia.

“It means you’re going to have to try a little harder than normal when you’re writing, okay?” one of the nicer doctors said after I spent three hours playing with blocks and failing to draw the shapes I made afterwards. That meant it was catchup time for me. I started getting pulled out of class two or three times a week, confined to a closet-like room in the basement to spend an hour trying fixes, testing my motor coordination, and exercising my hand muscles. Soon, the other kids started to notice.

“What do they pull you out of class for?” one of them asked me during lunch while I tried out the pencil grips I learned in the basement on a chicken tender. I hung out at the smart kids table, the one for all the young little boys and girls who would someday realize that intelligence is an awful thing to build an identity upon. The teachers told us we were so very sharp, curious, and observant, but in the hand of a third grader that could turn into a weapon.

“Oh, just some extra help for some stuff.” My answer was plain and vague because I didn’t fully understand what I was getting pulled out for either. After all, I was only 18 milligrams different from the rest of them, right?

“Oh, okay. Does that mean you’re retarded?” The question wasn’t meant to be hurtful. Their voice was more concerned than anything, afraid that the appointments meant I’d soon grow a wheelchair, lose control of my arms, and be pushed over to the side of the playground where all the other retards lived.

“No, of course not!” I answered, even though I was surely afraid of exactly the same thing. I’d have plenty more conversations like this and you’d be surprised how many were with adults. Yes, I already know that my print seems to have

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evolved from chicken scratch rather than anything human. Yes, you’ve already made the joke about how I’ll never be able to hold chopsticks right. Yes, I understand that someday the real world will come knocking and I won’t have anything to hide behind anymore. Maybe that has something to do with why a year and a half of physical-developmental therapy did nothing.

Or maybe dysgraphia is just a real son of a bitch. It manifests differently in different people, but for me things always come back to the physical side of it. Handwriting hurts, in the most literal sense. The medical term is “writing fatigue,” but I don’t think that does the feeling justice. That doesn’t cover the way that my muscles ache and tremor after writing only three sentences, the way I half-drop-half-throw a pen when I’m done like it’s turned to molten rock in my fingers, the way I instinctively shake my arm afterwards like the dysgraphia can be forced out if I try hard enough, the way “h”s and “n”s and “r”s and “m”s melt together under my pen until they’re interchangeable, the way “f”s and “y”s and “G”s are like syringes being forced all the way through my palm, or the way that I stab at the paper with a pencil until one or both break like I can finally carve the right runes if I just push down hard enough.

By fourth grade, the school gave up on fixing me and my atrophied hands. A year and a half of stenciling exercises, pages of copying, all kinds of exotically lined paper, gigantic pens with squishy grips, all for nothing.

So they started trying to work around it instead. For big tests, they would put me in that same basement closet with some college student who wasn’t getting paid enough to scribe for me. This worked in the sense that it let me do the assignments at all, but each new scribe brought a unique and thrilling flavor of ableism to the table. One forced me to listen to them read the test passages out loud, torturously slowly, even though reading had never been an issue for me. One bubbled in the responses on my answer sheet for me even after I told them I could do it myself. The worst was when they’d ask me to spell out what felt like every other word of my essay answers to

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make sure I wasn’t “cheating on spelling” even though spelling was part of my dysgraphia too. One time, I was practicing spelling with a new developmental therapist and he yelled at me because he thought I was doing so badly that it had to be on purpose. “Sivilisaton” is carved into my memory alongside “least favorite movies” and “high school crushes.”

School quickly became a series of coping mechanisms.

They put a scribe in class, but I begged them to leave once my friends stopped associating with a retard like me. They gave me voice-to-text software to use at home, but the technology wasn’t exactly there in the twilight of the 2000s. They gave me this typing-pad thing that seemed promising, but it was just a poor digital imitation of a typewriter with a long calculator-like screen that couldn’t display more than three lines of text at a time and that only scrolled if you sacrificed a goat or two first.

All of these failed, tried to get around the wall that is the pencil and paper by putting up different walls that were more visible to everyone else. I lost a lot of friends to those walls back then. You can’t ask an elementary schooler to deal with the stigma of sitting next to the kid who spends all class muttering to a scribe or to himself or tapping clumsily on a keyboard that broadcasts just how different he is from everyone else, just how retarded he is. I wouldn’t really say I was bullied. Then again, it’s only recently that I put all the memories together, so make up your own mind. Everything was about to change for me anyway.

In fifth grade, someone decided it might be a good idea to try giving me a laptop. My grades were starting to slip across the board, the content now too complicated for me to slide by without taking any real (or readable) notes. It was a small and shitty thing, a $200 or so netbook with a battery life of two hours on a good day that lagged if you tried to type too fast or do anything fancy with Word.

Yet somehow, and I still don’t know how, I freed myself with it. The laptop didn’t feel like a new wall, not to me. The keyboard was – no, is an extension, a true-to-life metaphor

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for the self, for my self. Cold blue lightning sparks from every keystroke like a thunderstorm, carving language onto reality the way a pen and ink never could. Under my atrophied, dysfunctional hands, the keyboard feels like it could let me write forever.

But there was a whole new kind of ableism to contend with: Jealousy. “Why do you get to have a laptop?” asked in all shades of curiosity, accusation, anger, confusion, and want. For a while I made up answers or dodged questions, but eventually I figured out answering honestly was a useful filter. I watched their face muscles as I said “It’s called dysgraphia” for those hints of displeasure, annoyance, or paper-thin pity that I’d had so many opportunities to practice spotting. I’m still using it actually, and it’s as good as ever at turning away assholes, ableists, and others who still somewhere in their heart believe in a version of phrenology.

As middle school came and went, the jealousy got worse. Classmates started asking teachers if they could use their laptop too, and sometimes the teacher would make me explain why they couldn’t. I’ve been accused by peers and adults alike of doing anything in class from watching porn (never true) to playing video games (only sometimes true). Sometimes teachers would rip the laptop away from me, force me to write on paper with hands now more atrophied than ever thanks to disuse, and watch me with eyes daring me to slip up the “act” and write legibly by accident. Even when they caved in, I never got any apologies.

It’s funny how, as time has gone on, teachers and professors have become the chief source of any issues. In high school I still stood out, but my classmates were on the whole “mature enough to understand what it meant to be different” phase. Sometimes I caught a hint of envy in their eyes on test days, but I wasn’t the one who got singled out when someone called me a retard anymore.

My “superiors” though, they’re a different story. With them, I’ve had to fight for the right to my tools and my met-

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aphors more often than not. I’m lucky that I was able to get my difference made official, wrapped up in some nice looking papers that obligate even the most old-school of curmudgeons to let me fill their classrooms with the tip-tap of my typing.

But the worst still comes out sometimes. Stop me if you’ve heard any of these ones before:

“Computers distract you and all those around you.”

“Studies show that students encode information better

when they write it down.”

“Screens inhibit creativity.”

“All writers should carry a notebook with them.”

“I don’t want to be staring at the back of a laptop when

I look at you.”

“Take out a piece of paper and…”

You get the picture. Whether the spiel was six years ago or last week, it’s always the same. The word “cliché” comes to mind, and I have plenty of those. There’s the part where I have to decide on the first day if the “no laptops” section of the syllabus is worth getting into a public spat over. The part where I have to write my email on a sign-in sheet and convince them that it’s not a lie or a gag; it’s just me. The part with the joke about doctor handwriting, which they always seem to think I’ve never heard before. The part where they convince me that this will always be the thing holding me back. The part where I really am just another fucked up retard with a pair of learning disorders who’ll never really be a writer. There’s an intuitiveness to the thought that almost wins sometimes. Obviously, a writer has gotta know how to, y’know, write, right?

Funny how that’s worked out so far. Very funny.

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“Does it have to be complicated?”: Technologically Mediated Romance and Identity in Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends and Normal People Julia M. Walton Princeton University

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ne of the hottest stars in contemporary literary fiction is the young Irish novelist Sally Rooney. The attention surrounding her has been both overwhelming in scale and overwhelmingly positive. She was named the 2017 PFD/ Sunday Times young writer of the year for her debut novel, Conversations with Friends1; in 2018, Normal People, Rooney’s sophomore work, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize,2 won the UK’s Costa Book Award,3 and was named Waterstones’ Book of the Year,4 among other accolades. The critical praise directed her way, however, has taken on a specific shape: she has been hailed as the voice of the millennial generation. The New York Times has referred to her as the “first great millennial author” and “the Jane Austen of the precariat,”5 and her own editor dubbed her the “Salinger for the Snapchat generation.”6 Media outlets have included these monikers in scores of reviews, profiles, interviews, and think pieces about Rooney, which have sported headlines such as “This 28-Year-Old Irish Writer Really Captures Millennial Life”7 and “Sally Rooney’s Great Millennial Novels,”8 while offering insights such as “Rooney’s books capture certain essential aspects of the millennial experience.”9 Celebrities have in turn made sure to champion her “deeply relatable” work, including model Emily Ratajkowski,10 Lena Dunham,11 and Sara Jessica Parker.12 Perhaps naturally, Rooney’s novels have emerged as an “Instagram status symbol,”13 artfully arranged near cups of coffee, candles, and potted plants in an impressive 47,300 posts, roughly, as of January 2020.

Rooney’s “millennial” branding is, of course, a marketing strategy aimed to generate interest, both for sales and

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media outlets themselves. Sometimes these millennial-centric monkiers are merely gestured to by critics who recognize them as essentially empty or suspect14—after all, it is impossible to capture the lived experience of millions—but given such widespread attention, and given that Normal People sold roughly 64,000 copies in four months15 in a genre (literary fiction) where 25,000 copies is “sensational,”16 it is a strategy that has worked spectacularly. No matter Rooney’s original intentions, it remains clear that Rooney’s works have been invited to participate in a public discourse that sets out to define what it means to live and love for young people who came of age around the turn of the century. However, as we consider this discourse of “millenniality,” it is important to remember that novels and other cultural media do not just passively express or reflect social phenomena, which the news media have sometimes suggested Rooney has done. As Nico Carpentier writes in his discussion of cultural media, novels and the like are “specific machineries that produce, reproduce, and transform social phenomena,” that is, they are affected by certain discourses, but also actively disperse them.”17 Therefore, even if Rooney’s works do not capture something organically true about “millennials,” they might still advance a certain picture of life as a young person in the modern world that critics cast as “millennial” for the reason that they help define what we, as readers, think a “millennial” reality is.

Undoubtedly, the place and time details that frame Rooney’s two novels mark them as contemporary. For one, its main protagonists are all university students who attend Trinity College Dublin, which makes them just barely old enough to be considered “millennial” (Normal People [NP] takes place between 2011 and 2015,18 and while Conversations With Friends [CWF] is not given a specific year, it does take place after 201119).20 Rooney’s works also embed modern technology, as her characters “read the Internet” (CWF, 62) and access Facebook, while email, IM, and text messages between characters constitute central passages of her text. Magazine critics have pointed out the deftness with which Rooney has done so: Elizabeth Donnelly calls “Rooney’s facility with writing so

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naturally about . . . technology” authentic21; Lauren Collins writes, “she has assimilated online communication into a new kind of prose,” suggesting a successful integration of characters’ virtual lives into the narrative, and argues Rooney’s subtle, winking phrase “read the Internet” (62) “has the ring of native digital literacy.”22 Indeed, while the narrative turns on dramatic moments made possible by online communication, these very tools, so entrenched in her characters’ lives, also seem to fade into the background.

Rooney’s deftness at including technology and technologically mediated communication in her romantic dramas is of special interest. Firstly, high-speed communication and information processing has seemed to mark a radical change in modern life; MacKinnon, building on Niklas Luhmann, writes, “Love and intimacy no longer function to shield us from the ‘immense complexity and contingency of all [possible] things . . . ,’ but facilitate increasing access to complexity, contingency, and possibility,” arguing that technology offers more information, partners, and opportunities to interact than ever before.23 Most crucially, though, in both Rooney’s work and lived experience, “it is exactly the invisibility of media,” fueled by ubiquity and constant use, “that alerts us to their profound prominence.”24 For us, then, “the medium” will be “the message”25: if we step back from the content of interactions and examine the “character”26 of technologies, we can be alive to the important changes “in scale or pace or pattern” that they effect in Rooney’s characters’ lives.27 Knowing, then, that Rooney’s novel not only reflects, but creates an image of life as a young person, considering how Rooney treats moments that involve technology enables us to explore that so-called “millennial” reality, and we will discover what she sees as the profound alienating effects of a technologically mediated, complex present on the romantic relations and psyches of young people. This paper will ask, first, how a technologically mediated reality affects Rooney’s characters’ relations with each other, especially their romantic and sexual relations, and, second, how it shapes her characters’ understanding of their identity.

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POST-DIGITAL EPISTLES: COMMUNICATIVE COMPLEXITIES AND FACE-MAINTAINING ROMANCE In Collins’ New Yorker profile, Rooney agrees with critics who have “noticed” that her two novels “are basically nineteenth-century novels dressed up in contemporary clothing,”28 implicitly assenting to comparisons between her works and the works of Austen, Eliot, and other major female authors of that century. Given that her characters read Emma and Middlemarch (CWF, 167, 256; NP, 71), Rooney herself directs us to make the comparison. Like Austen’s and Eliot’s novels, CWF and NP are realist social dramas, concerned primarily with the psychological nuances of relationships between characters; various contemporary social issues serve as central objects of thought and forces that shape the characters’ lives. Perhaps Rooney’s novels, though, find their closest analogue in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion. In both, like in Rooney, correspondence between characters are inserted directly in the body of the text, and readers are privy to the hero/ines’ reactions to the content, form, and context of these correspondences, which are often visceral. When CWF’s heroine Frances “lean[s] over the toilet basin to be sick” in response to an email from her best-friendand-ex-lover Bobbi, we hear echoes of Anne, “obliged to plead indisposition and excuse herself” because “she looked very ill” after reading a letter from Wentworth.29 Using computer-mediated communication (from here, CMC, which includes email, text, IM, video chat, and social media correspondence), though, is a very different social experience than sending letters. As Clarke notes, the technological and the social are inextricably connected,30 and new technologies, with changes in efficiency, usage, and interface, inevitably influence relationships. This is one of the major themes Rooney wrestles with in her works.

There are many theoretical models of communication, but most useful to us will be that outlined by Niklas Luhmann: he defines communication as “a synthesis of three different selections, namely the selection of information,” what is said; “the selection of the utterance of this information,” how something is conveyed; “and selective understanding or misunderstanding of this utterance and its information,” essentially, what the recipient of the utterance decides its meaning to be among

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various possible interpretations, which might be different than what was intended.31 Rooney is as attuned to these distinct “selections” people make while communicating as she is interested in the influence CMCs have on people while negotiating these “selections”: “the what,” “the how,” and characters’ interpretations of CMCs’ meanings are all forces that affect her characters’ ability to understand each other. Her depictions of characters’ behavior in relation to CMCs, and their relations to each other in light of their CMCs, will be the focus of this section—and we will find that Rooney’s hero/ines find communication much more fraught than Austen’s Anne does. In Persuasion at least, letters serve as conveyors of both characters’ earnest personalities and undeniable revelations that propel the narrative forward. CMC in Rooney’s novels, though, offer layers of “complexity, contingency, and possibility”32 that make written communications a realm of constant choice-making, obfuscation, confusion, and misunderstanding.

Perhaps the most obvious difference between letter writing and CMC is that CMC takes place over shorter timescales. Because a letter travels physical distance, delivery of a letter may take days or weeks, and due to concern about paper resources and labor, composition as well as contemplation of a letter’s contents may take place over long time frames: in Persuasion, Anne’s sister Mary composes a letter over the course of days in order to contain as much information as possible in one delivery.33 Thanks to cellular networks and the Internet, though, messages sent using mobile and digital technologies are often received immediately. IM- and text-message-based communication are even designed for interactions in which “[u]sers send a message to their interlocutors and receive replies almost instantly,”34 with both parties present at their devices at once for a back-and-forth that occurs in real time.

Given a reality of immediate communication, temporality is a site of romantic and dramatic tension for Rooney’s characters. For example, when Marianne, heroine of NP, texts Connell, her then-secret lover, to find out if he’s coming to a party, Rooney writes, “Within thirty seconds he replies” (33). Here, not only the fact of their communication, but also the rapidness of his response seems to signify their intimacy

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relative to others, and Marianne exhibits her pleasure at this knowledge when she thinks, “Nothing would be more exhilarating to her at this moment than to say: They’ll be on their way shortly” (33). On the other hand, a lack of immediate response suggests the opposite about a relationship: during an IM exchange with her lover Nick, Frances, feeling Nick to be unaffectionate, repeatedly “let[s] more time go by” before responding to his messages; Nick subsequently takes this as annoyance on her part and ends the encounter, to her chagrin (84). Later, after their climactic break-up, as “time move[s] past visibly on the illuminated onscreen clock,” Frances “stare[s] at [her] phone for hours on end and accomplishe[s] nothing,” wishing that he would text or call her (276). This suggests to her that Nick has finally stopped caring about her. But though he never does call her, Frances also knows that Nick could contact her at any point, which paralyzes her. Indeed, the constant potential for conversation creates many more opportunities for joy and pain for Rooney’s lovers than for Austen’s letter-writers: a conversation partner’s silence, and for how long it lasts, communicates just as much about affection and intimacy for the recipient as what is said and when.

Time dynamics are complicated further in relation to email specifically. Email is sometimes thought to be akin to letter writing in that it gives users the ability to “contemplate before composing and responding,”35 affording the user a large degree of control over the content of messages, which often means emails are exchanged asynchronously. Because emails are delivered instantaneously, though, sometimes “the speed of email interaction approaches real-time communication”36; thus email itself is imbued with “an inherent tension between asynchronicity and simultaneity.”37 Given that both “modes” are possible, Rooney’s characters must navigate choosing between the two when sending emails. For one example, after Frances and Nick’s first kiss (an illicit one, because he’s married), Frances “ma[kes] [her]self take an hour before responding” to his emailed apology, both to give herself time to respond to the email and to signal her emotional distance from the event. After she sends her own apology, though, Nick “email[s] back promptly,” bringing the conversation into a new,

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emotionally-intense sphere. Frances’s physical reaction reveals a strong affective response: like in the moment with Bobbi discussed above (which also involves a near-immediate reply), she feels “dizzy and restless,” and her heart beats “too quickly for her body.” When Nick takes “about twenty minutes” to reply to Frances’s spontaneous, provocative question (“Do you often kiss girls at parties?”), though, it reads as a backing-off on Nick’s part. Of course, we cannot know Nick’s intentions for sure, because the narrative is told from Frances’s point of view—but Rooney’s specificity with elapsed time indicates that this information is important to the dynamics of the conversation. In just this one scene, then, we can see characters’ choices of how long to take to reply suggesting a great deal: here at least, immediate replies signal emotional engagement and earnestness, while longer replies signal hesitation or characters intentionally forcing distance between themselves and others (CWF 59).

If the mechanics of how messages are sent over time within one mode of communication signal information about moment to moment emotional engagement, characters’ choices of which mode of communication to use also suggests meaning about the intimacy of characters’ interactions—furthering the spheres of choices that potentially convey meaning. When Frances becomes cold over IM, Nick sends her an email in order to end their conversation (84), signaling both in word and in mode that he is distancing himself from her (here, it seems that email serves as a more distant form of communication). Similarly, during another IM conversation, Nick asks if he can call Frances, leading to a warm conversation in which Nick “sound[s] sleepy in a nice way” (178) and both can hear the other’s “sincere laugh” (180). It seems that, though they lack visual cues, the presence of “aural paralinguistic cues like intonation, pausing (hesitation), and the like” is an improvement on IM “psychological[ly] and communicative[ly]” for them.38 However, since their conversation was already jovial, the move from IM to phone call more importantly acknowledges their closeness even as it deepens it in real time. However, conversely, when Frances spontaneously calls Nick at a bad time (while their relationship is still secret), his anger is so upsetting to

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her (162) that she does not tell him about her hospitalization for days afterward (216). Her expression of vulnerability, suggested through her choice to call him, and his rejection of her through this same mode, generates a much greater emotional intensity and divisiveness than likely would have been achieved via email.

Adding to conversational complexity even further, Rooney also shows differing modes demonstrating differences in intimacy between relationships, though the meaning attached to each mode differs. For example, when NP’s Connell goes on a trip abroad, “he calls Helen [his new girlfriend] on Skype, he sends his mother a free text message from his phone network’s website, and he writes Marianne [his now ex-lover] an email” (160). Connell’s texts to his mother are short and “businesslike” (161), revealing no emotional engagement whatsoever. However, given a phone call’s claim to intimacy, one may expect that a video call would signal the most intimate relationship of these three, but this is not the case. Since others are often nearby, his less-than-private conversation with Helen “can get a little awkward,” and though “he feels better after talking to her” and likes seeing her face, “[h]e finds himself rushing to the end of the conversation” so he can “retrospectively savor how much he likes seeing her” (160). All this suggests a lack of intimacy, though he is not aware of that himself; he enjoys the thought of her (and her “beautiful” appearance, her surface looks), but does not connect with her emotionally through their conversation. On the other hand, he puts extreme time and effort into his emails to Marianne, which are “absorbing” and “lengthy”; since “[t]he experience of writing them feels like an expression of . . . something in his identity,” these emails allow him to engage with with Marianne on the deepest emotional level (162).

Perhaps Rooney is drawing on a sense of discomfiting uncanniness, or not-quite-reality, elicited by the experience of video calling, or further shares some scholars’ opinion that “when one must interact solely with what is written, some social barriers may be diminished,”39 allowing Connell to overcome fears of emotional rejection. Whatever the inspiration, we see that here, unlike Frances and Nick, Connell and Marianne achieve a “distant,” yet emotionally rich epistolary style of email commu-

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nication that brings them close to Austen’s earnest letter-writers. Although the meaning attached to characters’ chosen modes does not seem inherent to the modes themselves, and changes over time, Rooney’s emphasis here on the differing modes her characters choose for each relationship suggests the mode of communication offers information about characters’ relative intimacy with their interlocutors.

The potential meanings of Rooney’s characters CMC usage (how long to take to respond, which mode of CMC to use, etc.), we have seen, are varied, making communication a complex sphere—decisions as to “how” to use CMC must always be made, and all suggest meaning. This meaning is packed most densely when characters are romantically involved, but one further example demonstrates Rooney’s preoccupation with this intentionality within CMC beyond romantic pairs. One of the major tensions of CWF is that Frances’s lover, Nick, is married; after Nick comes clean about their relationship to his wife, Melissa, she sends Frances an email that is nearly four pages long (224-227). The message appears to be stream-of-consciousness: the message is written in one continuous block, and Melissa flits from saying she’s “not angry” at Frances, to warning Frances about Nick, to confessing details about her emotions and married life, to inviting Frances to dinner. This seeming earnestness, though, makes Frances suspicious. “It seemed like an affectation on Melissa’s part not to include paragraph breaks,” Frances thinks, “as if she was saying: look at the tide of emotion that has swept over me. I also believed she had edited the email carefully for effect, the effect being: always remember who is the writer, Frances” (228). It is still possible that “[m]aybe a tide of emotion really did sweep over her” (228); however, Rooney suggests that precisely because email allows users to reflect over content, emails do not inherently convey the author’s earnest thoughts, as they do to an extent for Connell and Marianne. On the contrary, Rooney suggests that email involves the possibility of deceit and manipulation: here, Frances is attuned to the many ways in which Melissa may be threatening her, asserting her authority, and “disguising what she really felt” (229) in order to improve her position relative to Frances. It is important for this end that Melissa chose

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an email over another mode, as email offers her greater control over her language: when Frances calls Melissa at a later point, Melissa’s facade soon falls (“Why did you fuck my husband?”

[282]). However, while readers may find themselves questioning the meaning of every line, it is impossible, looking at the letter itself, to see through to the message’s intention. Far from Persuasion’s transparent, straightforward letters, then, the many possibilities attached to email as a mode of communication actually obscure Melissa for Frances.

This kind of textual manipulation is in fact central to Nick and Frances’s CMCs; to follow Luhmann’s model, it is important not only “what” they say to each other, but also what they do not say even as conversation continues. To understand this, we can make use of Erving Goffman’s concept of “maintaining face,” which requires “face-work,” performances through which “individuals create and maintain faces that are intended to manage that impression on others.”40 Although Goffman’s work pre-dates the Internet, we can apply it here, because “[w]ithout the nonverbal cues available face-to-face,” CMCs make it significantly easier “to create and maintain a desired face.”41 Indeed, Frances’s narration is filled with face-maintaining considerations, which sometimes involve agonizing choice-making in order to achieve the desired effect: “I wrote a simple message, then deleted the draft . . . . Then I did the same thing again. . . . I moved the sentences here and there . . . ” (29-30). Frances also says that, at the start of their relationship, she and Nick “were always being flippant with each other,” and calls exchanges with Nick “competitive and thrilling” (42), emphasizing that in their CMCs, they try to impress each other with witty, cool facades, but never stray to vulnerable topics. When they’re physically together, though, sometimes the “face” breaks down: after they first sleep together, it is now “impossible” for Frances “to act indifferent like I did in the emails” (69). Indeed, like social media catfishers, Frances and Nick use CMC “conscientiously, perhaps even strategically” to present themselves; it is performance as “articulated rhetoric,”42 and they are able to re-calibrate before each discrete message.

That Nick’s profession is acting and Frances gives slam-poetry readings especially highlights the performativity of their rela-

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tionship.

Because these interactions are textual, it is easy for Rooney’s characters to “maintain face,” obscuring feelings and intentions. However, even further, Rooney suggests that written forms of CMC—email, text, and IM—have a tendency to instill confusion about others’ intentions and emotions: Rooney’s characters often fail to grasp each other’s meanings even when they want to understand each other or convey themselves clearly. We have already seen this above, as Frances forms her own opinions about the meaning behind messages when that meaning is far from certain. As with Melissa, though, Frances is also often conscious of indefinite meanings: of one of Nick’s emails, Frances thinks, “On one reading it might give an impression of devotion and acquiescence, and on another it appeared indecisive and ambivalent” (265), indicating her confusion as to how to interpret only a few sentences. Frances is also on the opposite end of confusion: of one “effortful” conversation with Bobbi, Frances remembers “the sense that Bobbi was misunderstanding me, or even intentionally averting her gaze from what I was trying to say” (187). Therefore, online, characters not only keep to conversations about “trivial things” (81)—perhaps a result of a lack of facial, auditory, and other emotional cues—the text of their conversations often fails to illuminate the messager’s intent and feelings anyway. As a result, within CMCs, the third step of Luhmann’s communication process often falls on the side of misunderstanding for Rooney’s characters.

As Clarke points out, CMCs uniquely “not only mediate but memorialize—capture and store—their content” in searchable inboxes, logs, and so on (136), but paradoxically, this adds to misunderstanding further. Frances is intimately aware of this “record of [her] romantic relationship[s]”43: during one IM conversation with Nick, Frances thinks fondly, “our relationship was like a Word document that we were writing and editing together” (178), and she actually searches her messages with Bobbi multiple times, thinking it “comforting” that “textual evidence of [Bobbi’s] past fondness for me would survive her actual fondness if necessary” (173). These written accounts, though, provide her even less information than was present to

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her while sending and receiving them. When Frances downloads a file of messages to Bobbi, she remarks that it “didn’t take a coherent narrative shape” (173), and when Frances thinks her relationship with Nick is over, she begins “searching my emails and texts for ‘evidence’ of our affair, which consisted of [only] a few boring logistical messages . . . . There were no passionate declarations of love or sexually graphic text messages,” which makes her feel “robbed” (91). Here, even as Frances seeks meaning and accurate memories of her relationships through their written, concrete memorializations, Rooney shows that Frances’s “practice of isolating interactions from their physical contexts,” that is, in time and so on, results in the obscurity of “some of the most important aspects”44 of communications that are already complex and obscure.

For Rooney, misunderstanding and confusion is not limited to the digital sphere, however. The logic of Rooney’s characters’ behaviors when they’re physically present together, especially Nick and Frances’s, also mirrors their “face-maintaining” CMCs; even after they first sleep together, they struggle to overcome the “face-making” game they institute over email. Frances, on her part, often refuses to tell Nick what she really wants, or how she really feels. For example, when Nick confesses he still loves his wife and says, “I’m sorry if that hurts you,” Frances replies, “No, of course not,” when, obviously, it does (128). After Nick says he’s started sleeping with his wife again, she thinks, “He wanted to reassure me, I could tell, but I wasn’t going to let him” (262), again hiding her anger. Even though Frances withholds her feelings, however, Frances is hurt when Nick does the same. It is only because Nick seems “withdrawn” (81) in the IM conversation above that Frances becomes “cold and sarcastic” (82), Even in bed, where her “face” tends to break down, Frances complains that Nick “doesn’t seem that enthusiastic” (119). Indeed, it is not a lack of affection, but simple miscommunication that leads to the subsequent breakup (“I thought you wanted me to leave you alone,” Nick confesses [110]; “no, I wanted you to tell me that you dreamed about me at night,” Frances thinks, but, even still, does not say [111]), as well as their second, climactic one (305).

It is hard to trace causality here, but it is clear that for Rooney,

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online and in-person “face-work” are intimately connected. As a result, for much of the novel, the lovers are lost not only as to the other’s feelings, but the nature of their romantic and sexual relationship itself, which often leads to unhappiness.

The crux of Frances and Nick’s dysfunctional relationship is, of course, that neither can admit love (for a time) or profess commitment for fear of rejection. We can see this dynamic in the passage below, which occurs one night at Nick’s house: So is this just sex, I said, or do you actually like me?

Frances, you’re drunk.

You can tell me, I won’t be offended.

No, I know you won’t, he said. I think you want me to say it’s just sex.

I laughed. I was happy he said that, because it was what I wanted him to think, and because I thought he really knew that and was just kidding around.

Don’t feel bad, I said. It’s terribly enjoyable. (77) Frances’s goal, as she admits earlier, is to become someone “worthy of love” (40), and she angles for an affectionate response from Nick here. Yet, Nick earnestly believes she wants the opposite relationship, one of sex with no strings attached.

In opting to maintain her “face” to protect her feelings (“it was what I wanted him to think”), and overestimating Nick’s ability to see through it (“I thought he really knew that”), she actually sets herself up for misery when he later distances himself, thinking it is what she wants. It is no surprise, though, that both times Nick leaves Frances, her “face” is what she clings to: she thinks about “all the things I never told Nick, and I started to feel better then, as if my privacy extended all around me like a barrier protecting my body” (275), but this reads as a false happiness. Indeed, though I will not describe their plot in detail, Connell and Marianne have the same problem. Although their emotional entanglement is intense, Connell tells Helen, “We’re just friends” (172)—Marianne’s devastation, and separation, ensues (156). And echoing Nick (“[I]t’s obviously hard for me to tell what you actually want . . .” [88]), Marianne still tells Connell late in the novel, “I don’t find it obvious what

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you want” (241), leading to a scene in which Marianne breaks off love-making and Connell cries “alone in his room” (251).

It seems that the lovers are restrained by a computer-mediated social world with a “rhetorical nature”45; their tendency to “maintain face” to protect feelings parallels their ability to hide their literal faces from each other online. The lovers therefore often find themselves unable to articulate their real desires to each other—even in person, even at the basic level of whether their relationship is romantic or not—which in turn works to sabotage their relationship and sow heartbreak.

One final example encapsulates Rooney’s pessimistic prognosis for relationships in a technologically mediated, possibilities-rich present. Frances, jealous of Melissa, once downloads Tinder and goes on a date with a boy named Rossa, which involves a sexual encounter (200-201). Many scholars have written on Tinder as a social phenomenon; Thylstrup and Veel argue it is an instance of “platform capitalism” which commodifies and superficially gamifies sex46 and offers a “[t] opology of consumption and control.”47 Rooney subverts this, though, as Frances actually loses control in this situation: “It started right away,” Rooney writes, and Frances “lay[s] there,” “rigid and silent,” while Rossa “pulls her hair” against her request (201). This is unlike encounters with Nick, who comfortingly talks “in a low voice” (201). If Frances and Nick’s—and Marianne and Connell’s—relationships often suffer from living in a world of such possibility, complexity, and “face-making,” this alienating encounter, devoid of affection or connection, shows technologically mediated relationships pushed to the extreme. Thus, though Rooney’s lovers struggle to understand one another—in CMC and live—and unhappily drift apart as often as they find happiness together, she posits, through this hyper-digitized hook-up, that there is a worse reality to be achieved.

PLASTIC SELVES, FRAGMENTED BODIES: TECHNOLOGY, IDENTITY, AND GENDERED ALIENATION

We have seen that Rooney ascribes layers of complexity to her characters’ use of CMC: many aspects of the communication, including elapsed time and mode, convey meaning

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about the sender’s intentions and emotions—or may only seem to, since every message, or lack thereof, has the potential to express meaning. Characters often also make use of the “rhetorical nature” of CMC to evade frank discussions of their intentions and emotions, which they also do while physically together. As a result, characters are left foundering within relationships that are certainly not devoid of real love: they misunderstand each other, are left hurt by the others’ seeming lack of affection and commitment, and, as a result, often break up as often as they achieve understanding and happiness.

If, in their technologically mediated social world, characters misunderstand and often separate from each other, though, what effect does this world have on characters’ understanding of themselves? As Bernard Siegler, a student of Derrida, has argued, our subjectivity, or perception of the world, “at any given historical moment is necessarily tied to the technologies that mediate human experience,”48 and we will discover in this section that if complex, confusing, and obfuscating digital mediators often facilitate destructive forces within characters’ relationships in Rooney’s works, it not only heightens, situates, and reflects alienations that characters experience internally, but, as a result, seems to underpin even physical self-harms and mental illness.

As I mentioned above, Frances, Nick, Connell, and Marianne are often unable to articulate their desires to each other. This, though, is often motivated by a lack of characters’ understanding of these desires, and indeed, a sense of alienation from their own selves. We may continue by examining Rooney’s Frances, who is deeply unable to understand her own emotions, needs, and desires. As we have explored above, Frances sabotages her goal, being loved, by self-protectively instituting her “face.” But she also thinks of Nick, “I didn’t know what I wanted from him. What I seemed to want . . . was for him to . . . pledge himself to me exclusively. This was outlandish . . . because even now I was preoccupied by other people, particularly Bobbi . . .” (265-266). Her use of “seems” here indicates she has only a cursory understanding of her own desire.

She is preoccupied by an emotional impulse that reads to her like a logical fallacy, which confuses her, and causes her to

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shut down: when Nick starts sleeping with his wife again, even though Nick assures her, “I know you don’t like to seem upset by things,” she tells him this is “not an emotive topic for me” (266). This lack of understanding of her own grief over Nick’s affront, and inability to define her desires as to the nature of her and Nick’s relationship, leading to bitterness, is the central motivator for their climactic misunderstanding and break-up on page 272.

Yet, Frances’s problems with communication are larger than a lack of understanding of her desires in relation to her love affair. She also feels herself unable to pinpoint who she is as a person. Scholars have commented on digital media’s tendency to affect this result: Deuze writes that “in media life, our world seems intrinsically open to intervention, thriving on our constant remixing and over-sharing of it.”49 Indeed, Rooney’s use of the phrase “read the Internet” (62), which I discussed in the introduction, has this sense of aimlessness and bottomless possibilities. As a result of this “expansion and enhancement” of ways of “thinking about who we are as human beings in conjunction with each other,” Deuze continues, the self in media life is malleable and endlessly virtualizable,50 and “[t]his plasticity inevitably extends to our sense of self.”51 Frances frequently demonstrates the plasticity she sees in her own identity by stating that she believes she has no personality. Perhaps this tendency originates with Bobbi, a formative relationship for her (“Bobbi told me she thought I didn’t have a ‘real personality’”), but Frances “agree[s] with her assessment.

At any time I felt I could do or say anything at all, and only afterward think: oh, so that’s the kind of person I am” (18), indicating that she would be willing to accept any characteristic “at all” into her definition of herself; her “self” could be any possible self. Frances also thinks of Nick, “I was aware of the fact that he could pretend to be anyone he wanted to be, and I wondered if he also lacked ‘a real personality’ the same way I did” (37), extending this sense of identity confusion—a condition of endless possible identities—by way of comparison to Nick, who is, fittingly, an actor. Of course, Frances does not have a “fake personality,” but this phrase highlights the extent to which she cannot pin down what defines her, because she

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sees her personality as potentially “endless.” Indeed, Rooney’s preoccupation with the “complexities” that disrupt CMCs seems directly related to the sense of endless “possibilities” that disrupt Frances’s self-image. But, of course, Frances does have a certain personality—it is only that she cannot “see” herself.

Rooney’s interest in the problem of undefinable selves manifests in physical, “see”-able ways in her two novels. Chiefly this occurs through mirrors and photographs, which both reflect kinds of images. The first paragraph of CWF, in fact, opens with Melissa taking photographs of Frances and Bobbi after a poetry night, during which Frances “self-consciously” holds her left wrist “as if [she] was afraid the wrist was going to get away from [her]” (3), which suggests immediately Frances’s hyper-awareness and her interest in self-scrutiny. Throughout CWF, therefore, Frances often looks at herself in the mirror or references practicing expressions in a mirror (or as if in a mirror; 3). Her intense self-scrutiny via mirror, though, does not imbue Frances with self-understanding. On the contrary, it not once, but repeatedly invokes surprise. Early on, she thinks, “Sometimes . . . I liked to imagine that I looked like Bobbi. . . .

The pretense was so real to me that when I accidentally caught sight of my reflection and saw my appearance, I felt a strange, depersonalizing shock” (14); after a fight with Nick, Frances “glance[s] in the mirror over the fireplace, and my face looked awful, so bad it shocked me” (129). A physical self-image, we realize, is beyond Frances—which parallels her lack of interior self-understanding. Her desire to look like Bobbi also suggests a desire for the endlessly changeable, indefinite selfhood she sees in her own personality; the shock, then, comes from the temporary realization that her self is actually finite and definable. Yet, Frances never seems to be able to sublimate the perspective the mirror imparts, and what’s more, images—exactly by way of scrutinizing them—seem to give misleading or alienating impressions, as when Frances describes her reflection as “depersonalizing” above.

Rooney often depicts photographs doing this work: just as mirror images often shock, yet fail to enduringly educate Frances about herself, digital photographs are shown to be not

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only a misleadingly performative sphere, but a fragmented and “depersonalizing” one. When Melissa takes photos at a dinner party, Frances thinks, “. . . the dinner party depicted in the photographs bore only an oblique relationship to the one we had actually attended” (19). This suggests not only the photographs’ failure to educate the viewer about the nature of the event, but that the photographs leave the viewer with a false impression, since Melissa intentionally captures only certain moments (which is similar to the “face-making” tactics Rooney’s characters use). Scholars have interrogated this seeming distance from reality: Mitchell argues digital images may “have lost their casual, indexical linkage to ‘the real’” because they have “becom[e] untethered appearances subject to willful manipulation”—as through Melissa’s deliberate framing—or because of the “exponential increase in the number of images, and the rapidity of their transmission” due to digital technologies and the Internet (44), which reminds us of the proliferation of “selves” available for Frances. It seems that for Rooney, CMC and images are both “oblique,” “snapshots” stripped of real-world context and imbued with endless, performative possibilities that confuse and mislead. In images, though, the understanding generally at stake is not between characters but of oneself, here Frances’s self, as a person in the world. To this end, Rooney also suggests that alienation from reality may arise not only through an aggregate of images, but also through the fragmentation inherent in a digital photograph itself.

When Frances inspects Melissa’s photograph of Bobbi, Rooney writes, “It was a high-quality image but I zoomed until I could see the pixelation” (9). The more Frances scrutinizes Bobbi, then, the more Bobbi fragments, and the more obscure she gets. This suggests that digital photographs, by nature of being fragmented, or enabling fragmentation, tend to prevent understanding of a comprehensive meaning and “depersonalize” the person depicted for the viewers. The presence of simple, un-digital mirrors may suggest a detachment from reality exists for Frances beyond technology; however, Rooney’s language in reference to photographs here points to digital images as an essential contextualizing factor.

Given Rooney’s tendency to depict images as “deper-

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sonalizing” forces, images not only convey that Frances misunderstands her interiority, but also reflect a distance Frances feels toward her own physical, embodied self. Indeed, Frances’s observation that she holds her own wrist “as if [she] was afraid the wrist was going to get away from [her]” (3) suggests that she sees this wrist as an object apart from herself. However—just as Frances’s lack of understanding of her interiority sometimes leads to self-hate (“Was I kind to others? It was hard to nail down an answer. I worried that if I did turn out to have a personality, it would be one of the unkind ones” [169])— the space between Frances’s interior and physical selves seems to enable Frances’s disgust for her physical self. Not only does Frances wish she looked like the gorgeous Bobbi (mentioned above [14]), she also thinks of herself while gazing in the mirror, “I looked like something that had dropped off a spoon too quickly . . . . For a while I stood there looking at myself and feeling my repulsion get deeper and deeper . . .” (174). Like zooming in too far on a photograph “until [she] could see the pixelation” (9), conveying hyper-definition and scrutiny, Frances’s fragmentation of her body into discrete parts (her hip bones, pelvis, abdomen, shoulders [174]) conversely leads to obscurity (“something”). Her use of “repulsion,” though, most of all indicates a self-hate achieved precisely through distance from her own body. Before we can continue to address the subject of technologically mediated bodily alienation, though, we must consider that Frances’s body is inherently gendered, and that her mirror-mediated self-hatred also reads as a largely feminine one, since it’s conceived in terms of attractiveness (“[m]y hip bones jutted out unattractively . . .” [174]). Indeed, Rooney’s characters’ relationships with technology and, mediated through technology, themselves are always entangled with a gendered sociality.

Theorizations of the awareness of self through outside mediators, of course, originates in Hegel and his master-slave dialectic. More useful to us, though, will be Simone de Beauvoir, who drew on Hegel’s master-save dialectic in her seminal feminist work, The Second Sex (1949).52 Beauvoir does away with the terms “master” and “slave” and institutes that of “Subject” and “Other”; her central argument is that men throughout

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history have instituted themselves as “Subjects,” while women have been relegated to the position of “Other,” always needing to be defined in relation to male “Subjects” (26). This subservient relation “imperiously modifies [a woman’s] consciousness of herself” (349). While Beauvoir argues for equality, though, she also argues that men’s and women’s bodies (in terms of biological sex) give rise to different embodied experiences, and that female psychological distress largely stems from attitudes that regard these different embodied experiences as suspect.

For instance, from a young age, Beauvoir argues, woman are are aware of “not being free in their movements” (358); at the idea of sex, women’s bodies seem “odiously threatened” (360) because of the ideal of chastity and threat of pregnancy; menstruation is taboo and therefore horrifying and disgusting (374-375); and the threat of sexual assault instills fear and paralysis (380), among other psychologically damaging phenomena unique to women’s bodies. Ultimately, because she is seen as an “object destined for another,” Beauvoir argues, a woman “feels herself at risk” in a “flesh” that is “alienated” by society—thus, she finds her own body alienating (384). Beauvoir’s work, indicative of its time, is a hetero- and cisnormative one, but it overlays well because Rooney is chiefly interested in heterosexual romantic dynamics, and always among cisgender characters.

Indeed, Frances’s technologically situated perception of distance from her own body is not only seen in moments of heterosexual romantic tension (when she perceives Nick as abandoning her, Frances writes poetry that “figured [her] own body as an item of garbage, an empty wrapper or a half-eaten and discarded piece of fruit” [90], which indicates that Frances, echoing Beauvoir’s point, sees herself as an object to be “consumed” by Nick). It is also further developed through a plot that is inherently feminine: Frances lives with chronic pain that she first describes as merely period pain, but that she later learns is endometriosis. The first episode of this pain, in fact, begins with Frances’s sense that “it felt like a dream or maybe a film,” indicating that Frances not only feels disconnected from this pain, but that it contains a sense of unreality in the same sense digital media does (a “film,” of course, can be fragmented

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just like a digital photograph). During another episode, though, the pain and clots of tissue “scared me so badly that the only comforting idea I could think of was: maybe it’s not happening” (159), indicating that here, she wishes the pain to be unreal and seeks comfort in that alienation. At the hospital, the idea that she could be miscarrying Nick’s child again leads her to try to distance herself from the emotional shock by thinking about things in “physical” terms: “Anxiety was just a chemical phenomenon producing bad feelings. Feelings were just feelings, they had no materiality” (163). Here, Frances again wants to hide from her feelings, like she does via CMCs with Nick, by thinking “logically” (163); however, like CMC, which are also (only seemingly) “immaterial,” these chemicals produce very real, adverse effects on Frances—and like with mirror images, her body’s reality as indivisible from herself shocks her via her pain. Frances continues to avoid even this bodily reality, though, by hiding her illness from Bobbi and Nick (“By refusing to admit I was sick, I felt I could keep the sickness outside time and space, something only in my own head” [294]), which is “face-maintaining” logic helps her maintain alienation from her body. Even when Frances searches her eventual diagnosis on the Internet and finds a proliferation of “interviews with people whose lives had been destroyed by suffering” and “gruesome after-surgery images,” she tries to remain “dispassionate” (260), to separate from embodied reality, in an attempt to protect herself from being overwhelmed.

Beyond female embodied experiences, Rooney is also interested in female characters’ constructions of the self in response to male violence, which also underpins a sense of physical alienation. In this respect Rooney draws on a legacy of Irish women authors writing on this topic (Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls trilogy is a seminal example), but these moments also entangle with Rooney’s sense of the alienation imparted by digital technology. For example, Frances remembers a time she formed a relationship with a grad student on an Internet message-board: “One night he sent me . . . a flash photograph, zoomed right in on the erect penis, as if for medical examination” (34). Again, the photograph, being zoomed in, fragments the human body, but here, fragmentation isolates and height-

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ens the sexual violence of the image; Frances “feels guilty and terrified” (34) and tells no one. Further, Frances and NP’s Marianne share a history of abuse by alcoholic and violent male relatives. Frances first becomes aware of this by way of comparison to happy “couples on film and television” (47), who read as false and constructed given her parent’s actual relationship; when Frances’s father throws her shoe at her face, and it lands in the fire, she “watched it smoldering like it was my own face smoldering. . . . I would have let my real face burn too” (48), a statement we must realize underpins her later self-hatred toward her own body.

Indeed, Frances develops more notable self-destructive tendencies. As Beauvoir argues, Frances later seems to need to “realize herself as passivity, to accept dependence” (399) because of her implicit knowledge that she is vulnerable among men—an impulse that bubbles up in her later sexual relations.

For instance, after her failed Tinder date, France wants Nick to “hit her” (207) during sex: “I wanted him to be cruel now, because I deserved it. I wished him to say the most vicious things I could think of, or shake me until I couldn’t breathe” (212), which stems not only from her guilt at the pointlessness of that technologically-mediated encounter, but also her powerlessness there. Beauvoir understands Frances’s self-hating impulse in terms of “masochism,” which paradoxically stems from self-interest: “in reality this dream of nothingness is an arrogant will to be” (417)—and Rooney, too, connects Frances’s “will to be” not only to submission to Nick, but to a larger attempt to reduce her physical alienation. In many other passages, Frances is also shown committing self-harm, which helps her “stop thinking about how bad I felt” (275); she wants to hurt herself “in order to feel returned to the safety of my own physical body” (175). Frances, therefore, wants to reduce the alienation she feels toward her own body precisely via this violence, which does offer some catharsis (“It was over then” [165])—but it is essential that she inflicts upon herself. Her request to Nick to perform violence, then, is actually an attempt to secure control of her body and reduce physical alienation, especially since the Tinder hookup this scene follows is not only emotionally alienating, but reads like a rape (discussed

161

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above [201]). It also mitigates the lack of bodily control she feels and enforces in terms of her endometriosis pain.

Rooney also situates NP’s Marianne in a technological world: early in the novel, Rooney paints Marianne sitting “at her dressing table looking at her face in the mirror. . . . It’s a face like a piece of technology, and her two eyes are cursors blinking. . . . It expresses everything all at once, which is the same thing as expressing nothing” [9], which suggests Marianne has the same sense of indefinite identity imbued by digital technologies as we discussed above in relation to Frances.

Further, though, the masochistic themes that intersect with this technologically mediated world are brought closer to the surface in NP than in CWF, since Marianne repeatedly endures physical violence at the hands of both her father and brother.

This causes Marianne to feel “trapped inside her own body” (67) and also alienated from it: “. . . now she simply detaches, as if it isn’t of any interest to her, which in a way it isn’t” (68). As a result, Marianne follows the same kind of masochistic downward spiral Beauvoir articulates: “wildly enslav[ing] herself to the male . . . she will wish to be humiliated, beaten; she will alienate herself more and more deeply out of fury for having agreed to the alienation” (474). Indeed, Marianne repeatedly pursues relationships in which she asks to be objectified and struck by willing men (for instance, Jaime [138-139]), even though afterward her body “feels like a carcass, something immensely heavy and awful that she has to carry around” (117).

When this alienation reaches a climax—when Marianne pursues with a relationship with Lukas, a sadistic photographer, while studying abroad—Rooney puts this abuse back in terms of images: their “game,” which involves verbal abuse, restraining Marianne’s hands, and choking (196, 202-203), also involves taking pornographic photos of Marianne that (the reader thinks) end up on the Internet (222). As a result, in her daily life she is often “shocked briefly into the realization that this is in fact her life, that she is actually visible to other people,” reminding us of Frances’s shocking encounters in the mirror discussed above; she also often forgets to eat or drink, indicating even further her lack of sense of possession of her own body (197). Therefore, while Frances’s attempts to achieve a sense

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of unification with her body and control via self-violence are even dubiously effective, Marianne’s, we see, are a total failure.

Symbolized by the images that objectify and “depersonalize” her, she is left even more alienated from herself than when she began, advancing her inner turmoil. In the end, she feels she “belongs” to Connell (242).

It is worth noting, though, that Rooney explores the other side of Beauvoir’s theorization: while she describes her female characters’ experiences of being alienated and “othered,” which are often mediated by technology and interplay with the alienations affected by it, she also explores the effects of being expected to institute this “othering” on male characters, mainly Connell, which are similarly situated with technology. At the beginning of the narrative, Connell not only describes moments of “face-work” (“he didn’t say anything, he let her talk” [25]) underpinned by a lack of understanding of himself (“[m]oments of emotional pain arrived like this, meaningless or at least indecipherable” [26]), which parallels our discussion of Frances above. Connell also reports having had multiple sexual encounters in high school that were “so stressful as to be largely unpleasant” (5), one-off encounters that he was undoubtedly pressured to have, given his hyper-masculine friend group. When Rob, for example, shows nude photos of their female friends, Eric “laughed and tapped parts of Lisa’s body on-screen with his fingers” (79), depersonalizing her through a fragmentation of her body parts. Connell later describes this culture as “alienating” (223), which reflects both his feeling of lack of control over his body and the alienation of female friends as “images” to be consumed sexually. His experiences of gendered alienation further intersect with that of Rooney’s alienated female protagonists, though, when this friend Rob commits suicide.

Connell’s experience of this suicide synthesizes various technologically mediated alienations discussed above.

Connell’s friend group collectively mourns on Rob’s Facebook page (232); when Connell returns to a Facebook message from Rob, though, Connell tries “to summon an exact mental picture of Rob’s face,” but finds “that he couldn’t: an image would appear at first, whole and recognizable, but on any closer in-

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spection the features would float away from one another, blur, and become confused” (212). Like the many images Rooney considers throughout her works that break apart upon scrutiny, Connell’s mind’s-eye image is a fragmented one that fails to help Connell connect to Rob. Connell had also ignored the crude message Rob sent (“are u riding her?? NICE haha” [212]). In retrospect, though, Connell realizes Rob only wanted “the approval of others” (219), especially male peers, which makes Connell feel guilty; thus, again, Rooney situates events in technologically mediated terms, since Rob’s brief message masks depths of vulnerable emotions, like CMCs throughout her works. Here, via Facebook, Rob’s “identity” has become “synonymous with being recorded”53; Connell’s friend group’s technologically constructed grief, and the inability of Facebook to help Connell grasp the reality of his friend’s life, though, leads Connell’s mental break. He is described as depressed (77) and repressed (88) throughout NP, but now his condition is so bad that he seeks therapy (207). He feels “dissociation from his own senses . . . . Things begin to look . . . slower, artificial, unreal” (213); even while not having an episode, Connell reports feeling “alienated from his own body” (211). Like Marianne and Frances, then, Connell also experiences mental and bodily alienations influenced by his gender role. No matter the character, though, these alienations are exacerbated by, appear in relation to, and are understood through technology. We also may briefly think of Nick, who is considered a passive man, against gender roles; also struggles to articulate himself within and outside CMC; and has been hospitalized for depression (224-227). Indeed, Rooney’s technologically situated characters are often not only alienated from themselves, they are also chronically unwell.

CONCLUSION: ACCEPTING ALL (POSSIBLE) HAPPINESS

If we take Rooney’s novels as articulating a “millennial” life, we have seen that Rooney paints this life as a fraught one: far from being an aid to clarity or efficiency, in CWF and NP, technology is a complex, confusing, and rhetorical communicative tool through which couples enact distance and misunderstanding. In this technologically mediated world, lovers find it

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difficult to communicate even live (“I guess we misunderstood each other” [240]), find themselves unable to define themselves, and experience alienation from their bodies, leading to self-destructive behavior and depression. They are often deeply unhappy, and indeed, it is happiness that seems to be at stake for Rooney: in the final pages, Nick asks, “If . . . I say . . . I’ve been a fool, is it working then?,” and Frances replies, “If two people make each other happy, then it’s working” (305).

For Rooney, on the other end of technology, then, is love. Unlike with CMC and digital images, Rooney’s characters’ experience of love, when it works, is tied up with being seen with clarity, for “the body mediates its meaning via the gaze of others at the same time as it mediates between the world and the construction of the self.”54 Sometimes this is scary, of course, (“. . . that night it was clear to me . . . how badly I had underestimated my vulnerability” [CWF, 129]), but more often, lovers help each other see themselves in positive ways. For example, Frances reports, “[w]hen Bobbi talked about me it felt like looking at myself in the mirror for the first time” (8); with Nick, looking at each other in front of a mirror, “Blurred out on the periphery I thought I looked quite formidable” (191).

As for Connell, “[i]t was Marianne who had shown him” that he doesn’t have to “conceal the parts of himself that he found shameful and confusing” (219). All lovers overcome depressive funks when they feel actualized with one another (“He brought her goodness like a gift and now it belongs to her” [NP, 273]).

When Marianne asks, “Would she ever have been happy [without Connell]?” (272), we again see Rooney’s interest in lovers’ happiness.

For Rooney, though, moments of connection and happiness are only ever temporary. Despite their digital, post-modern world, Rooney’s characters do not overcome gender roles.

Marianne demonstrates this especially toward the end of her arc: “. . . she remembered a time several years ago when she had felt so intelligent and young and powerful . . . and now she knew she wasn’t at all powerful, and she would live and die in a world of extreme violence against the innocent . . .”

(234). Indeed, both Marianne and Frances try to protect themselves from a hurtful world through their intelligence and

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“logic” (CWF, 163), but find they ultimately cannot escape hurt. Perhaps Rooney sees “logic” as another way to fragment problems that are best seen in totality, or addressed with the heart. Whatever the case, Rooney suggests that like gender roles, complexity at large cannot be overcome. In both novels, the central couples still misunderstand or explain a previous misunderstanding until the final pages (CWF, 297-307; NP, 238, 244, 270).

Thus both Rooney’s novels land on an ambivalent note for their central lovers. Frances asks Nick before agreeing to see him again, “Does it have to be complicated?,” to which he replies, “Yeah, I think so” (CWF, 306). Again they neglect to define their relationship, placing them at risk to continue their habit of misunderstanding, breaking up, and reconciling.

Marianne thinks, more or less summarizing Rooney’s philosophy, “No one can be independent of other people completely, so why not give up the attempt” (269), but her final words have her releasing Connell to pursue an MFA abroad (“I’ll always be here. You know that” [273], which also suggests her inability to overcome submission). In both novels, though they ultimately feel unable to part, Rooney’s characters still refrain from boxing in their partners romantically, freeing them to go where and pursue whom they want, more or less maintaining the detached relationship they have throughout the novels (though Frances resumes romance with Bobbi, but not as “girlfriends” [292]—so Nick and Frances actually end with a polyamorous configuration). Although the characters are more self-actualized after all they’ve been through and seem somewhat happier, the sources of complexity, of the difficulty and unhappiness characters experience, are not resolved. The problems are, simply, understood and sublimated.

Rooney’s young protagonists all make a final “choice” within their relationship, but Rooney suggests a radical change—to restrict their relationship or break up—would be a less satisfactory outcome, or is perhaps too difficult; therefore, characters find an easier peace in a (presumably smarter) continuation of the status quo. This is true no less in their political than in their romantic relations, since their critiques of capitalism fade when they secure jobs (Frances, Marianne), aim to

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join academic institutions (Connell, Bobbi), and start a path toward joining a marketable literary elite (Frances, Connell).

Perhaps it is in relation to this acceptance that we can suggest a provisional answer to Lauren Collins’ question: “I wanted to know . . . how a Marxist ended up writing a book that sits alongside body lotion and silk pajamas in GQ’s ‘30 Fail-Safe Gifts for Her’ guide”55—how Rooney became the “first great millennial author” in the first place. Her characters’ ultimate steadiness in the face of these issues, requiring no major changes in their lives beyond growing up, likely motivates it in part. À la Lyotard56, in an unsettling post-modernity without “grand narratives,” it’s not surprising Rooney is suspicious of marriage (as in Austen), or even relationships themselves, as a “solution” to the “immense complexity and contingency of all [possible] things.”57 But even as these endings unsettle the reader, they are also comforting, and like her predecessor, Rooney still champions love. Rooney’s characters are ultimately poised to endure the complexities and alienations of their technologically mediated world, because they perceive happiness as not constant but achievable, and because they accept an often fraught happiness with their lover over unhappy estrangement, which satisfies them.

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• Works Cited

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Barry, Ellen. “Greeted as the First Great Millennial Author, and Wary of the Attention.” New York Times, August 31, 2018. https://www.nytimes. com/2018/08/31/world/europe/sally-rooney-ireland.html.

Beyes, Timon, Robin Holt, and Claus Pias. “By Means of Which: Media, Technology, and Organization.” In The Oxford Handbook of Media, Technology, and Organization Studies, edited by Timon Beyes, Robin Holt, and Claus Paus, 498-513. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier. New York: Vintage Books, 2010. https://uberty.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/1949_simone-debeauvoir-the-second-sex.pdf.

Calka, Michelle. “Polymediation: The Relationship Between Self and Media.” In Beyond New Media: Discourse and Critique in a Polymediated Age, edited by Art Herbig, Andrew F. Herrmann, and Adam W. Tyma, 15-30. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015.

Carpentier, Nico. “Discourse.” In Keywords for Media Studies, edited by Laurie Ouellette and Jonathan Gray, 59-62. New York: NYU Press, 2017. www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1gk08zz.21.

Clarke, Bruce. “Communication.” In Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, 131-144. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.

Collins, Lauren. “Sally Rooney Gets in Your Head.” The New Yorker, January 7, 2019. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/07/sallyrooney-gets-in-your-head.

Costa Book Awards. “Costa Winners 2006-present.” Accessed April 26, 2020, https://assets.ctfassets.net/royi30b2qd26/4LC6oXmI73ZmhNt6yRw410/2fb46a2b6146393ecc5ced44085760bc/pastwinners-complete-list.pdf.

Deuze, Mark. “Media Life and the Mediatization of the Lifeworld.” In Mediatized Worlds: Culture and Society in a Media Age, edited by Andreas Hepp and Friedrich Krotz, 207-220. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014.

Dimock, Michael. “Defining generations: Where Millennials end and Generation Z begins.” Pew Research Center, January 17, 2019. https:// www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/01/17/where-millennials-end-and-generation-z-begins/.

Donnelly, Elisabeth. “This 28-Year-Old Irish Writer Really Captures Millennial Life.” BuzzFeed News, March 20, 2019. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/elisabethdonnelly/sally-rooney-conversations-with-friends-normal-people.

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Dunham, Lena (@lenadunham). “I love and adore a lot of fucking writers but for me right now Sally Rooney is my fave writer working in modern fiction I just die for her.” Twitter, September 8, 2018. https://twitter. com/lenadunham/status/1038531710588268544?lang=en.

Grady, Constance. “The cult of Sally Rooney.” Vox, September 3, 2019. https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/9/3/20807728/sally-rooney-normal-people-conversations-with-friends.

Hu, Jane. “Sally Rooney’s Great Millennial Novels.” The Ringer, April 26, 2019. https://www.theringer.com/2019/4/16/18311711/sally-rooney-normal-people-conversations-with-friends-millennial-novel.

Jones, Rodney H. “Inter-Activity: How New Media Can Help Us Understand Old Media.” In Language and New Media: Linguistic, Cultural, and Technological Evolutions, edited by Charley Rowe and Eva L. Weiss, 13-31.

Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2009.

Lindsay, Kathryn. “Is Carrying A Sally Rooney Book The New Instagram Status Symbol?” Refinery 29, April 16, 2019. https://www.refinery29. com/en-us/2019/04/230058/sally-rooney-normal-people-popularity-instagram.

MacKinnon, Lee. “Love Machines and the Tinderbot Bildungsroman.” e-flux 74 (June 2016). https://www.e-flux.com/journal/74/59802/lovemachines-and-the-tinder-bot-bildungsroman/.

Manning, Jimmy. “Ipsedixitism, Ipseity, and Ipsilateral Identity: The Fear of Finding Ourselves in Catfish.” In Beyond New Media: Discourse and Critique in a Polymediated Age, edited by Art Herbig, Andrew F. Herrmann, and Adam W. Tyma, 83-108. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015.

Marshall, Alex. “Graphic Novel in Running for Man Booker Prize for First Time.” New York Times, July 23, 2018. https://www.nytimes. com/2018/07/23/books/booker-prize-graphic-novel-ondaatje.html.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw Hill, 1964.

Mitchell, W. J. T. and Mark B. N. Hansen. “Time and Space.” In Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, 101-113. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.

Luhmann, Niklas. “What is Communication?” In Theories of Distinction: Redescribing the Descriptions of Modernity, edited by William Rasch, 155-168.

Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002.

Michallon, Clémence. “‘Normal People’ by Sally Rooney named Waterstones book of the year.” Independent, November 29, 2018. https://www. independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/sally-rooneynormal-people-waterstones-book-of-the-year-dublin-ireland-conversations-with-friends-a8659186.html.

Neary, Lynn. “When It Comes To Book Sales, What Counts As Success Might Surprise You.” NPR, September 19, 2015. https://www.npr. org/2015/09/19/441459103/when-it-comes-to-book-sales-whatcounts-as-success-might-surprise-you.

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Parker, Sara Jessica (@sarahjessicaparker). “This book. This book. I read it in one day. I hear I’m not alone. X, sj.” Instagram, February 21, 2018. https:// twitter.com/lenadunham/status/1038531710588268544?lang=en.

Quan-Haase, Anabel. “Text-Based Conversations Over Instant Messaging: Linguistic Changes and Young People’s Sociability.” In Language and New Media: Linguistic, Cultural, and Technological Evolutions, edited by Charley Rowe and Eva L. Weiss, 33-54. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2009.

Rooney, Sally. Conversations with Friends. New York: Hogarth, 2017.

Rooney, Sally. Normal People. New York: Hogarth, 2018.

Rowe, Charley. “E-mail Play and Accelerated Change.” In Language and New Media: Linguistic, Cultural, and Technological Evolutions, edited by Charley Rowe and Eva L. Weiss, 75-98. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2009.

Storey, John and Katy McDonald. “Media Love: Intimacy in Mediatized Worlds.” In Mediatized Worlds: Culture and Society in a Media Age, edited

by Andreas Hepp and Friedrich Krotz, 221-232. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014.

Thylstrup, Nanna Bonde and Kristen Veel. “Dating App.” In The Oxford Handbook of Media, Technology, and Organization Studies, edited by Timon Beyes, Robin Holt, and Claus Paus, 191-200. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.

Warner, John. “Sally Rooney, defining novelist of the Millennial generation?

Not so fast.” Chicago Tribune, April 19, 2019. https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/books/ct-books-biblioracle-0428-story.html.

Wegenstein, Bernadette. “Body.” In Critical Terms for Media Studies, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, 19-34. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.

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ENDNOTES 1

“Sally Rooney Shortlisted 2017,” Young Writer Award, accessed April 26, 2020, http://www.youngwriteraward.com/book/sally-rooney/.

2

Alex Marshall, “Graphic Novel in Running for Man Booker Prize for First Time,” New York Times, July 23, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/23/books/booker-prize-graphic-novel-ondaatje.html.

3

“Costa Winners 2006-present,” Costa Book Awards, accessed April 26, 2020, https://assets.ctfassets.net/royi30b2qd26/4LC6oXmI73ZmhNt6yRw410/2fb462b6146393ecc5ced44085760bc/past-winners-complete-list.pdf.

4

Clémence Michallon, “‘Normal People’ by Sally Rooney named Waterstones book of the year,” Independent, November 29, 2018, https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/sally-rooney-normal-people-waterstones-book-of-the-yeardublin-ireland-conversations-with-friends-a8659186.html.

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5

Ellen Barry, “Greeted as the First Great Millennial Author, and Wary of the Attention,” New York Times, August 31, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/31/world/europe/sally-rooney-ireland.html.

6

Michallon, “‘Normal People.’”

7

Elisabeth Donnelly, “This 28-Year-Old Irish Writer Really Captures Millennial Life,” BuzzFeed News, March 20, 2019, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/elisabethdonnelly/ sally-rooney-conversations-with-friends-normal-people.

8

Jane Hu, “Sally Rooney’s Great Millennial Novels,” The Ringer, April 26, 2019, https://www.theringer.com/2019/4/16/18311711/sally-rooney-normal-people-conversations-with-friends-millennial-novel.

9

Donelly, “This 28-Year-Old.”

10

Ratajkowski calls Rooney “deeply relatable” in her post. Emily Ratajkowski (@ emrata), “Sally Rooney,” Instagram, April 9, 2019, https://twitter.com/emrata/status/1115668120688046080?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1115668120688046080&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.refinery29.com%2Fenus%2F2019%2F04%2F230058%2Fsally-rooney-normal-people-popularity-instagram.

11

Lena Dunham (@lenadunham), “I love and adore a lot of fucking writers but for me right now Sally Rooney is my fave writer working in modern fiction I just die for her,” Twitter, September 8, 2018, https://twitter.com/lenadunham/status/1038531710588268544?lang=en.

12

Sara Jessica Parker (@sarahjessicaparker), “This book. This book. I read it in one day. I hear I’m not alone. X, sj,” Instagram, February 21, 2018, https://twitter.com/lenadunham/status/ 1038531710588268544?lang=en.

13

Kathryn Lindsay, “Is Carrying A Sally Rooney Book The New Instagram Status Symbol?,” Refinery 29, April 16, 2019, https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2019/04/230058/ sally-rooney-normal-people-popularity-instagram.

14

For example, John Warner, “Sally Rooney, defining novelist of the Millennial generation?

Not so fast,” Chicago Tribune, April 19, 2019, https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/ books/ct-books-biblioracle-0428-story.html.

15

Constance Grady, “The cult of Sally Rooney,” Vox, September 3, 2019, https://www.vox. com/culture/2019/9/3/20807728/sally-rooney-normal-people-conversations-with-friends.

16

Lynn Neary, “When It Comes To Book Sales, What Counts As Success Might Surprise You,” NPR, September 19, 2015, https://www.npr.org/2015/09/19/441459103/when-itcomes-to-book-sales-what-counts-as-success-might-surprise-you.

17

Nico Carpentier, “Discourse,” in Keywords for Media Studies, ed. Laurie Ouellette and Jonathan Gray (New York: NYU Press, 2017), 61.

18 19

Sally Rooney, Normal People (New York: Hogarth, 2018), 1 and 261.

Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends (New York: Hogarth, 2017), 81. Subsequent citations of Conversations with Friends and Normal People will be given in parenthesis in the text.

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20

Michael Dimock, “Defining generations: Where Millennials end and Generation Z begins,” Pew Research Center, January 17, 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/facttank/2019/01/17/where-millennials-end-and-generation-z-begins/. Frances, Bobbi, Connell, and Marianne were likely born in the mid-1990s.

21

Donnelly, “This 28-Year-Old.”

22

Lauren Collins, “Sally Rooney Gets in Your Head,” The New Yorker, January 7, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/07/sally-rooney-gets-in-yourhead.

23

Lee MacKinnon, “Love Machines and the Tinderbot Bildungsroman,” e-flux 74 (June 2016), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/74/59802/love-machines-and-the-tinder-bot-bildungsroman/. Quoted in Nanna Bonde Thylstrup and Kristen Veel, “Dating App,” in The Oxford Handbook of Media, Technology, and Organization Studies, ed. Timon Beyes, Robin Holt, and Claus Paus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 198.

24

Mark Deuze, “Media Life and the Mediatization of the Lifeworld,” in Mediatized Worlds: Culture and Society in a Media Age, ed. Andreas Hepp and Friedrich Krotz (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), 207.

25

Marshall McLuhan. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964), 7.

26

McLuhan, Understanding Media, 9.

27

Ibid, 8.

28

Collins, “Sally Rooney.”

29

Readers of Austen will know these parallel reactions originate in very different emotions! Jane Austen, Persuasion, ed. Gillian Beer (UK: Penguin Books, 2015), 223.

30

Bruce Clarke, “Communication,” in Critical Terms for Media Studies, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 133.

31

Niklas Luhmann, “What is Communication?,” in Theories of Distinction: Redescribing the Descriptions of Modernity, ed. William Rasch (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 157. Quoted in Clarke, “Communication,” 142.

32

MacKinnon, “Love Machines.”

33

Austen, Persuasion, 155.

34

Anabel Quan-Haase, “Text-Based Conversations Over Instant Messaging: Linguistic Changes and Young People’s Sociability,” in Language and New Media: Linguistic, Cultural, and Technological Evolutions, ed. Charley Rowe and Eva L. Weiss (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2009), 35. Quan-Haase builds from G. Faulhaber, “Network effects and merger analysis: Instant messaging and the AOL-Time Warner case,” in Telecommunications Policy 26, no. 5/6 (2002), 311-333.

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35

Charley Rowe, “E-mail Play and Accelerated Change,” in Language and New Media: Linguistic, Cultural, and Technological Evolutions, ed. Charley Rowe and Eva L. Weiss (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2009), 78.

36

Rowe, “E-mail Play,” 80.

37

Ibid, 82.

38

Ibid, 76.

39

Ibid, 82. Rowe builds from W. Mihalo, “The microcomputer and social relationships,” in Computers and the Social Sciences 1 (1985), 199-205.

40

Michelle Calka, “Polymediation: The Relationship Between Self and Media,” in Beyond New Media: Discourse and Critique in a Polymediated Age, ed. Art Herbig, Andrew F. Herrmann, and Adam W. Tyma (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), 22.

41

Calka, “Polymediation,” 23.

42

Jimmie Manning, “Ipsedixitism, Ipseity, and Ipsilateral Identity: The Fear of Finding Ourselves in Catfish,” in Beyond New Media: Discourse and Critique in a Polymediated Age, ed. Art Herbig, Andrew F. Herrmann, and Adam W. Tyma (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), 97.

43

John Storey and Katy McDonald, “Media Love: Intimacy in Mediatized Worlds,” in Mediatized Worlds: Culture and Society in a Media Age, ed. Andreas Hepp and Friedrich Krotz (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), 227.

44

Rodney H. Jones, “Inter-Activity: How New Media Can Help Us Understand Old Media,” in Language and New Media: Linguistic, Cultural, and Technological Evolutions, ed.

Charley Rowe and Eva L. Weiss (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2009), 15.

45

Manning, “Ipsedixitism,” 97.

46

Thylstrup and Veel, “Dating App,” 197.

47

Ibid, 195.

48

W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen, “Time and Space,” in Critical Terms for Media Studies, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 109. This quote glosses Bernard Stiegler, “The Time of Cinema: On the ‘New World’ and ‘Cultural Exception,’” in Tekhnema 4 (1998), 62-114.

49

Deuze, “Media Life,” 217.

50

Ibid, 218.

51

Ibid, 217.

52

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (New York: Vintage Books, 2010), https://uberty.org/wp-content/ uploads/2015/09/1949_simone-de-beauvoir-the-second-sex.pdf. Subsequent citations will be given in parenthesis in the text.

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53

Timon Beyes, Robin Holt, and Claus Pias, “By Means of Which: Media, Technology, and Organization,” in The Oxford Handbook of Media, Technology, and Organization Studies, ed.

Timon Beyes, Robin Holt, and Claus Paus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 501.

54

Bernadette Wegenstein, “Body,” in Critical Terms for Media Studies, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. N. Hansen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 25.

55

Collins, “Sally Rooney.”

56

This concept originates in Jean-François Lyotard’s 1979 work The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.

57

Luhmann, quoted in MacKinnon, “Love Machines.”

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my advisor Bradin Cormack, since there are many things I have to thank him for. He not only suggested thinkers and topics to pursue, patiently encouraged my ideas, and posed many generative questions as this project developed. He also taught me what it means to be a student of English—and how to ask a question myself. I am also thankful, though, for the wonderful semester he hosted in London, where this project began. Thanks to Professor Cormack, I read and “experienced” with equal vigor—and was able to access many experiences I would not have been able to otherwise. As that semester informed this work, it will undoubtedly inform my work to come.

Thanks also to DeAnna Christenson, Linsday Emi, and Jason Seavey ’21, who thought with me, always reassured me I wasn’t going terribly wrong, and were generally excellent company.

I am indebted to Fintan O’Toole’s course “Introduction to Irish Studies” for informing my knowledge of Irish history and literature; the University College London’s team-taught course “The Romantic Period” for preparing me to engage with Austen, and my tutor, Benjamin Dawson, who gave important feedback to arguments I made about letter-writing in Persuasion; Atsuko Ueda’s course “Postwar Japanese Narrative” for informing my thinking about modernism and post-modernism; and the many professors who team-taught the “Humanities Sequence” for informing my knowledge of philosophy in general, which was crucial throughout my research.

Finally, thanks to the staff at Firestone Library for their help in accessing materials and navigating purchase requests. I would also like to thank English Department Administrator Tara Broderick for her accessibility and generosity. And of course, thanks to the friends who supported me through this project, and to my family, who saw me through the end of it.

I pledge my honor that this paper represents my own work in accordance with University regulations. /s/ Julia M. Walton

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Metaphors of Afro-Asianism: From Bandung to the Lotus Journal Elsasoa Jousse McGill University

INTRODUCTION

Richard Wright summarized the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung, Indonesia in his travelogue The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference as having “an element of ‘Asianism’ in the whole conference” (558). This citation implies a lack of African representation in the Bandung Conference, “the famous meeting of over two dozen Third World representatives” (Burton 1) from which the term “Afro-Asian solidarity” emerged, and throughout the following decades when its “spirit” continued to inspire those opposed to colonialism. Wright’s quotation also refers to a uniform representation of “Asianism,” which reveals the Orientalist aspects of the Western gaze an American, albeit an African American, casts on Asian people. The aim of this Honours essay is to explore the representation of Afro-Asian connections in literature arising from the Bandung Conference of 1955 and the journal Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings published between 1967 and the early 1990s.

I will challenge the romanticised notion of the “Bandung spirit” as an ideal of peace, equal participation, and inclusion between African and Asian nations with the goal of promoting decolonisation and anti-imperialism. To do so, I will analyse its representation through tropes and lexical fields in Richard Wright’s The Color Curtain and in a selection of preserved publications of the Afro-Asian Writers Association (AAWA) from the 1960s to the mid-1970s. The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) is a coalition of countries, “mostly former colonies and developing countries” (Singham and Hune 1), with the goal to create “an independent path in world politics

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that would not result in their becoming pawns in the struggles between the major powers” (Singham and Hune 14), and the AAWA “fashioned itself as the literary equivalent of the Non-Aligned Movement” (Djagalov). Through a study of the tropes present in accounts of Bandung and the Lotus journal, I will also study the political dimension of Afro-Asian relations during the Cold War with the development of the NAM, its application—or lack thereof—to Afro-Asian literary alliances, and the influence of this political movement on literature.

My choice of topic was inspired by the 50th anniversary of the Afro-Asian Conference in 2015 and the recent scholarship about its history and the literature surrounding it that commemorates the significant historical event. I looked into this scholarship as part of an internship project I did in Jakarta, Indonesia. During my free time, I visited Bandung and the Museum Konferensi Asia Afrika. While Richard Wright’s 1956 travelogue The Color Curtain has become a major reference work about the conference for the Western world, a lot of criticism can be made about Wright’s Orientalist depiction of “the Asian personality” (The Color Curtain 20) and translation of Asian cultures for primarily white Western audiences.

Brian Russell Roberts’ and Keith Foulcher’s Indonesian Notebook: A Sourcebook on Richard Wright and the Bandung Conference was published in 2016. In it, Roberts and Foulcher translate and introduce various Indonesian texts related to Richard Wright’s visit to Indonesia. Access to more resources about Bandung brings in new perspectives on the conference’s context, attendance, significance, and Wright’s description of Indonesia and the event. New scholarship about Bandung helps deconstruct biases about Afro-Asianism by providing different points of reference to understand the variability and significance of its representation.

In the first part of my essay, I will analyse Richard Wright’s literary representation of the Bandung Conference in The Color Curtain. Paying attention to formal elements in the travelogue, I will show the political implications of Wright’s presence in Bandung and his role as ‘translator’ of the conference event for the Western world. Wright uses the travel trope,

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as a symbol of his physical and intellectual learning journey, to insist on his position as a neutral third-party observer who has access to information more easily and clearly than white Western people because of his African American ethnicity.

The travelogue has served its intended purpose of representation as it is the most famous reference about Bandung for the Western world. However, Wright’s self-assigned position as neutral translator for white Western people makes his reading of Bandung and “the Asian” Orientalist in tone and imagery, therefore rendering it problematic. Drawing from Bill Mullen’s study of Wright’s commentaries on Asia in his book Afro-Orientalism, I will not only address the development of Afro-Asianism as a movement, but also of this specific understanding of Orientalism and its reductive meaning. To properly engage with the notion of Orientalism, I will also take into account Edward Said’s definition as “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (88), the Orient being the West’s “contrasting image, idea, personality, experience,” or more simply, “the Other” (87), and base my criticism of Richard Wright’s report on this definition.

I will use Brian Russell Robert’s and Keith Foulcher’s Indonesian Notebook as an Asian reference about Bandung to compare and contrast with Richard Wright’s depiction of Bandung. The Indonesian Notebook is organised to introduce documents in relation to Richard Wright and place his travelogue in a larger narrative that includes his influence on Indonesian authors.

Robert and Foulcher chose and contextualised documents, essays and literary excerpts to bring in a new understanding of Indonesia’s political and literary history by showcasing the relationship of various authors to Wright.

In the second part of my essay, I will discuss materials from the 1960s to the mid-1970s pertaining to the Afro-Asian Writers’ Conferences and the related Lotus journal. The Lotus journal included writers from Africa and Asia as well as other places such as Black Americai, in the hopes of bringing together writers of the Third Worldii and potentially tend to “the absence of attention to Asia in Africana studies, and to African American writing on Asia in postcolonial studies, […] an Orientalist albatross for both Welds” (Mullen Afro-Orientalism

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XLI). The journal will serve to show the involvement of African writers in Afro-Asian alliances and their role, in contrast with the focus on the Asian experience at the Bandung Conference depicted by Wright. The inclusion and exclusion of contributors and works from certain nations by the editors of the Lotus journal will help me determine their vision of Afro-Asianism.

Reading the editorials and scholarly articles included in Lotus, my focus will be on tropes through which cultural ties are expressed such as metaphors of connection. More generally, I will study the use of style, tropes, and themes by the contributors of the journal to see the application and evolution of the ‘Bandung spirit’ ideal in literature, and more specifically, in Lotus. The journal and the AAWA are particularly relevant as a counterpoint to Richard Wright’s travelogue because while the African American writer was funded by the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the AAWA fell under the influence of the Soviet Union.

The goal of the AAWA was to bring together writers in order to defeat imperialism, attain national independence for previously colonised countries, and promote world peace.

These goals correspond to the ideals expressed by the “Bandung spirit” during the Bandung Conference and the creation of the Non-Aligned Movement. However, the first Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference happened in Tashkent, leading to the creation of the “Tashkent spirit,” and the Lotus journal was subsidized by the Soviet Union. The Bandung Conference defined imperialism as the enemy, but for the AAWA, the definition of imperialism changed from a reference to both Soviet and Western domination to solely Western imperialism. This either points to a failure to follow the “Bandung spirit,” or to a modification of the Afro-Asian ideal through the “Tashkent spirit” with the inclusion of peoples from the Eastern bloc, thus making Afro-Asianism aligned. Here again, the use of metaphors of connections, themes, and references to political ideals in the representations of Afro-Asianism in Lotus will guide my assessment of the writers’ attachment to the Non-Aligned Movement as part of Afro-Asianism.

As a postcolonial literature essay, my intervention is a literary analysis of the tropes and style used by Richard

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Wright, Brian Russell Robert and Keith Foulcher, and the contributors of Lotus to represent Afro-Asianism, itself a “metaphor for the fraternal connections between ex-colonial people in the wake of decolonization” (Burton 1). This literary analysis should expose the problems with the romanticized view of the “Bandung spirit” as articulated in the Bandung Conference and its legacy, the “Tashkent spirit,” and show the complexity of the concept of Afro-Asianism and Non-Alignment in the context of the Cold War. PART 1: Richard Wright and the Indonesian Notebook, building an imaginary of Afro-Asianism for Western audiences in the Cold War context of Communist threat

“An insider’s view: the magic word that bears within itself a seal of approval. What can be more authentically other than an otherness by the other, herself?” –Trinh, “Not You/ Like You” (417). This argument by Trinh T. Minh-ha explains the effect on a Western readership of being an insider in telling stories of Third World peoples. The credibility automatically conceded once one presents the insider exclusivity of their access to Third World perspectives motivated Richard Wright to represent himself as an insider at the Afro-Asian Conference of 1955 in his travelogue The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference. Richard Wright was an African American man who dedicated an important part of his writing career to depicting Black life in a society governed by Jim Crow laws and white supremacy in novels such as Native Son (1940) or his memoir Black Boy (1945) before moving to Paris, the capital of an Empire, which he celebrated as a “city of refuge” (Baldwin 249). From this position, Wright has asserted his authority as a figure who experienced and understands Western imperialist oppression, which helped him interpret the Afro-Asian experience in Bandung. Being a Black person in America allowed Afro-Asian peoples to trust that Wright would relate to their experiences, but as a Westerner, Wright’s perception of the conference is also that of an outsider.

In The Color Curtain, Richard Wright combines insider and outsider tropes to fashion the ethos of an observer and uses this self-asserted authority to report to a Western reader-

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ship. The first step to creating this image of the observer-interpreter is to prove to his readers that he is qualified to describe the Bandung Conference, not only as an Afro-Asian alliance but as “the diplomatic debut of newly decolonized peoples on a bipolar world stage” (Leow 430). Wright depicts himself as an insider through tropes of kinship and mutual understanding between Afro-Asian peoples oppressed by imperialism to create a trustworthy image of himself for them and therefore a convincingly authentic image of Bandung for his readers. Showing that Asian and African people relax around Wright, but do not reveal all their thoughts to white foreigners lets readers know that they have access to exclusive content through him. His need to fashion himself as an interpreter suggests that his depiction is tainted by the Western gaze and its supporting anti-communist sentiment which prevents his complete identification with people at Bandung and pushes him to use Orientalist tropes.

Without parallel sources in English to compare his depiction of the event to, Richard Wright’s description has reigned almost unchallenged in the Western collective memory of Bandung. However, 2015 marked the 50th anniversary of the Bandung Conference, and for this occasion, academics have written about the Bandung era. A recent significant work that supplements the vision of Bandung created by The Color Curtain is Brian Russell Roberts’ and Keith Foulcher’s Indonesian Notebook: A Sourcebook on Richard Wright and the Bandung Conference. In this section, I will draw on the Indonesian Notebook as well as various secondary sources such as Bill Mullen’s Afro-Orientalism to criticize Wright’s metaphors of Afro-Asianism and destabilise his self-created ethos of the observer with an exclusive insight on Bandung who can authoritatively interpret Afro-Asian desires and experiences for a Western audience.

The first section of the travelogue is not necessary to an understanding of the Bandung Conference, but it allows Wright to establish his trustworthy ethos as the reader of Bandung and justify the need in the Western world for his travelogue. In contrast with his European friends’ lack of enthusiasm about the conference, Wright’s excitement serves as proof that he understands the value of Bandung. Wright notes

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his “disbelief” at his Spanish friend’s question “What Conference?” (18), which shows his understanding of the importance of the conference and highlights the divide between his perception of the world’s political news as a Black man and his the perception of his white European friends. Wright includes this dialogue to establish a sense of distance between white Westerners. He understands other Afro-Asian peoples better than they could. With this first image, Wright creates a need in the Western world for his translation: according to his excitement, the Bandung Conference is an important global event that Westerners are missing out on because they do not understand it.

Conversations with his white friends about Bandung are occasions for Wright to point out that the legacy of colonialism is still present in Westerners’ discourse. Wright addresses colonial history directly by designating Indonesia to “a young Dutch girl” as “one of your ex-colonies” (17). The second person possessive adjective “your” englobes the Dutch nation while explicitly including Wright’s interlocutor in the colonial system, which should have caught her attention but instead highlights her lack of positive concern with the future of her nation’s former colony. The Dutch girl does not only miss the political importance of the conference, but she even interrupts Wright to exclaim “Oh, God! Then maybe you can bring me some spices?” (17). The news of Wright’s departure for Bandung also seem worthy of excitement for the Dutch girl, but this excitement is made ridiculous not only when juxtaposed to Wright’s political interest, but also by the repeated invocation of God’s name and Wright’s physical description of her enthusiastic reaction that drags for several lines and ends in an anticlimactic trivial request. The anti-climax brings out the discrepancy between Wright’s excitement about the political and social event and the girl’s interest in imperial and materialist matters, thereby adding to Wright’s legitimacy as a brother of the Afro-Asian struggle and educator for Western audiences who do not even realise their own colonial discourse.

From the example of the Dutch girl, Wright makes a generalisation about European people to convince readers that there is still a lot of progress to be made with the education of

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“European minds” concerning Eastern nations’ post-colonial struggles. Wright closes the scene with an analysis and judgement as “[e]ven before leaving Paris, [he] was discovering how the reality of Eastern nations was reflected in many European minds: the islands of the Atlantic and Pacific, and the millions of people who lived on them, still meant spices…” (18). Wright roots his analysis in his asserted authority on the subject of Eastern nations and peoples as it is not only colonial discourse that is reflected in the girl’s request, but “[their] reality.” In analysing and criticizing Eastern interviewees’ opinions, Wright establishes himself as someone who has the knowledge to argue with people whose opinions should be represented at Bandung. Thereby, Wright presents himself as a knowledgeable insider whose connection with Afro-Asian peoples makes him capable of explaining Bandung to a Western audience.

It is important that Wright introduces his European friends with their political inclinations as even “liberal, anti-racist” (17) people who end up being caught up in the colonial discourse Wright criticizes. The political inclinations, discussion, and commentary format that Wright uses puts forward the need for Western people to be educated on African and Asian post-colonial struggles. Here, even liberal people do not understand the importance of the decolonial efforts of the Bandung Conference. Wright’s excitement for Bandung and final commentaries on the conversations, by pointing out Western people’s continued colonial discourse, qualify him to understand people at Bandung and their requests whereas Western people would not. Through his conversations with his European friends, Wright calls readers’ attention to white people’s lack of awareness of their racial, social, and political position. Emphasizing this lack and establishing a distance between a limited white Western perspective and an African American perspective benefits Wright’s image as someone who understands his own life within the post-colonial context and can have a better insight on the decolonial discourse thanks to this awareness. While the conversations are not informative to the event of the Bandung Conference itself, they convince the readers of Wright’s ability to understand and report on the event accurately.

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However, despite being on the receiving end of racism in the West, Wright enjoys privileges that make him misjudge his Asian counterparts. As Wright realises the set of questions he wrote to interview Asian people is not best-suited for his goals, he points out that “If [he], an American Negro, conscious of [his] racial and social and political position in the Western world, could misjudge the Asians’ willingness to bare their feelings so completely, how much more, then, must white Westerners misjudge them?” (25). While this comment shows the limitations of his understanding, it is yet another occasion to highlight the qualities that make him a good interpreter of Bandung, and the sentence culminates on white Westerners’ even more limited awareness in comparison to him. The first word “if” introduces a conditional clause, which creates a demand for the main clause and suspends readers’ awareness while Wright describes his failure to judge Asian people.

Placing the main clause about white Westerners last brings the focus on their disadvantage in conversing with Asian people.

Wright uses this syntactic trick to distance himself from white Westerners’ lack of understanding of Afro-Asian peoples and simultaneously build his image as an insider who can penetrate the Eastern world’s truths as opposed to white Westerners.

Wright establishes tropes of kinship both before reaching Bandung and at Bandung by means of interviews with different Afro-Asian peoples who might be represented at the Conference. Wright keeps asserting his authority of interpretation and translation by analysing his interviewees’ answers.

He uses three types of narration to present the results of his interviews: free indirect discourseiii, indirect discourse, and direct speech. Direct speech and indirect speech serve to make Wright’s depiction vivid and current and allow him to gain the trust of his readers as he quotes his subjects both directly and through “a paraphrase” (Rimmon-Kenan 113). Free indirect discourse is a significant choice of discourse: Wright uses it to create an authoritative list-of-facts effect about the interviewees—whom he designates as “subjects”—which makes the presentation of Wright’s “findings” scientific. The scientific presentation gives off an air of authority and makes the inser-

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tion of his analysis easier and the descriptions more difficult to challenge for readers. The act of preparing extensively for Bandung combined with the authoritative scientific air of free indirect discourse reinforces Wright’s ethos of expert of the Afro-Asian experience, which predisposes the readers to trust his description of Bandung.

The first dialogue occurring in The Color Curtain presents Wright convincing his wife that he should go to Bandung for the conference. The dialogue is a platform for Wright to legitimise his position as an observer of the Bandung Conference for the readers. Building a justification is mainly done through tropes of identification with the people who organised and would be represented at Bandung. Wright has “had a burden of race consciousness. So have these people” (15). He structures his speech in pairs of clauses that mirror his personal experience and the experience of the Afro-Asian peoples at Bandung, constantly juxtaposing and balancing the personal pronoun “I” and “these people” to establish an undeniable link of common experience and understanding between the two subjects. The conclusion of his argumentative monologue comes with the triumphant emergence of Wright’s legitimate authority to comment on Afro-Asian relations at Bandung as his wife presents his departure as an obligation: his empathy for the Afro-Asian experience designates him as a logically appointed intermediary between people at Bandung and the readers.

Wright discusses grievances that he has in common with Asian people as an African American to establish and highlight the links between himself and those people. When giving a synopsis of his interviewing experience, Wright describes the “factor that no white Westerner could claim” (25) that makes him a good candidate to discuss Bandung and anti-imperialism with Asian people. Again, Wright distances himself from white Westerners, but the focus is on the similarities of his experience with that of Asian people: “[he] was ‘colored’ and every Asian [he] had spoken to had known what being ‘colored’ meant. Hence, [he] had been able to hear Asians express themselves without reserves” (25). The only common aspect that is mentioned is being “colored,” but it is implied that “col-

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ored” englobes complex experiences that African Americans and Asians have had under white supremacy. Being “colored” and rejecting white imperialism is the key to building trust with Afro-Asian peoples around the world. To demonstrate this point, Wright describes the relaxation and opening up of his interlocutors when they learn that he is African American: “Until that moment he had not asked who I was; now mental pain flickered over his sharp, brown face. ‘You are an American?’ he asked me.

‘Yes.’ ‘Negro?’

‘Yes.’ He relaxed. I was to get to know that reaction very well.

The Asian had many truths to tell. He had one truth for the British, one for the Dutch, one for the white Americans, and still another and a special kind of rueful truth for American Negroes, who shared a background of racial experience that made them akin to the Asian.” (78) One-word communication and the sudden, visible “mental pain” at Wright’s delicate question about class in Indonesia are signs of tension triggered by topics such as class, racial, and political consciousness, which the interlocutor would hesitate to discuss with someone whose racial experience is too different. The tension is dropped immediately after Wright’s confirmation that he is also “colored.” The anaphora that Wright then uses brings white Westerners of different nationalities together in their limited access to truth, while African Americans such as himself are separated from this group and receive “another and a special kind of rueful truth.” They are separated only to be united with Asian people through the lexical field of kinship with “shared” and “akin.” This discussion sample allows Wright to prove his kinship with Asian people as they relax and trust him due to their assumed shared experience and understanding of the effects of white supremacy and imperialism.

While in Bandung, Wright does not limit his connexion-building to the trust of the people he encounters. His use of rhetoric outside the travelogue also participates in forming his reputation as an Afro-Asian connector, building bonds

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between African Americans and decolonized countries. Brian Russell Roberts and Keith Foulcher, the editors of the Indonesian Notebook: A Sourcebook on Richard Wright and the Bandung Conference, have translated the lecture Wright gave while in Indonesia in 1955 entitled “The Artist and His Problems.”

Roberts and Foulcher put “The Artist and His Problems” in context of White Man, Listen!, a four-lecture collection Wright published two years after the conference. Wright introduces the four lectures he made in Europe with the hope to make “a comment, connected and coherent, upon white-colored, East-West relations in the world today” (White Man, Listen! 16).

Roberts and Foulcher classify “The Artist and His Problems” as a fifth lecture to complete White Man, Listen!, as Wright puts himself in a self-asserted benevolent position of artistic authority, giving advice to people at Bandung “searching for human unity” (“The Artist and His Problems” 129). The translation of this lecture gives more information about the role Wright projected for himself in Indonesia: Wright comes from the Western world with a racial experience similar to that of Asian peoples, therefore he can assert his authority as someone who understands both the West and the East. It is significant that Wright shares his insight on being a writer in front of an Indonesian audience as that requires an insider outlook and a certain degree of kinship with the local population. By cultivating the image of the insider, Wright rejects any suggestion that he could be an Orientalist. After all, how can he present people at Bandung as “the other” when he is part of them, he understands them, and they accept him as an insider.

Yet, Wright’s insider outlook and kinship is limited by his “reactions and attitudes [that] are those of the West” (Afro-Orientalism 43) as the aim of the travelogue is to interpret the Bandung Conference for people in the Western world.

As an interpreter, Wright caters to white Westerners’ lack of knowledge of Asian, African, and even African American customs. Choosing this role demands that Wright approach the Eastern world with a Westerner’s gaze while still providing the knowledge of an insider. Therefore, proving his kinship with Asian people and his experience as a “colored” person is also part of the interpreter ethos Wright presents to the Western

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world. Wright’s—sometimes unasked for—role as an interpreter is especially visible in a context where he has the most authority. As a visitor in Asia, Wright is conscious of his limited understanding of Asian people, so his authoritative tone is not overwhelming. However, when a white woman asks him for help with understanding her African American roommate, Wright feels justified in interpreting the actions of a woman he does not know by speaking for her: “It’s her way of saying: ‘Forgive me. I’m sorry that I’m black.’ [...] Every day that woman commits psychological suicide,” [Wright] tried to explain” (187). The Black woman is also a journalist from America, but as the object of the discussion she is given no voice at all. Instead, Wright uses the first person to speak on her behalf and takes a rather diminishing stance on her experience through the judgement of her “[committing] psychological suicide” by straightening her hair. While the Black woman’s insecurity is a result of white supremacy, Wright blames her for her own suffering as she expresses her feeling of inferiority to white people. Through this blame-shifting, Wright seems to be focused on comforting the white woman.

Even if he is also African American and is therefore closer to the Black journalist’s experience than a white person, as a man, Wright has not experienced the same kind of pressure to wear white hairstyles and to whiten his skin as African American women. Wright’s limited explanation in this scene hints to his unfiltered bias in the rest of the travelogue. Wright does not even know the Black journalist. Yet, he still speaks in her name, infantilizing “the girl” (183) by claiming to explain the psychological process of her actions without pointing to the history of repression of Black hair in America. Wright accommodates his interlocutor and generalises the feeling of inferiority as an explanation valid for all previously colonised and enslaved people. Including a detailed account of this episode clearly defines the expected audience of the travelogue: if the audience was Black Westerners, Wright would not have needed to include his explanation to the white woman.

This example is a hint that Wright’s opinion on the “colored” experience is subjective. Wright, as an interpreter of the Third World for white Western people, uses his “colored” authority

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on the subject to speak in the name of other people in a way that might erase their voices when their experience differ from hisiv. Wright’s accommodation of the white woman metafictionally points to his accommodation of white Western readers of the travelogue, and by extension, the need for his Western gaze as an interpreter. Wright’s takeover of the Black woman’s experience suggests that while he presents himself as a traveller who is also an insider in Asia, Wright might not be exempt from Orientalism in his depiction of the Bandung Conference.

The role of interpreter is also present at a meta level in that Wright wrote a travelogue and used travel tropes to fit the genre. The first part of the travelogue is dedicated to preparations and travelling to Bandung. Classifying The Color Curtain as a travelogue creates the expectation for readers that Wright is a visitor in a foreign country. It helps with fashioning Wright’s observer image. A voyage is more than just a journey: it is a typical Orientalist trope for enlarging one’s mind.

For example, genre-defining Romantic writer Samuel Taylor Coleridge used the travel trope in his Orientalist poem “Kubla Khan,” adding in the preface that this poem was inspired by a vision he had from falling asleep while reading Samuel Purchas’s travel book “Purchas’s Pilgrimage” (486n1). The travel trope insists on Wright’s position as a neutral third-party observer who is still a visitor from the Western world. As Bill Mullen notes in Afro-Orientalism, Wright is conscious that he is a Westerner (43) and he does not deny it in The Color Curtain when “[his] mind [turns] toward the vastness of Asia and its unknown life” (20). This comment both introduces the travel trope and contradicts Wright’s self-made insider position.

Wright’s approach of the “unknown” “vastness” suggests that his being “colored” does not exempt him from having an Orientalist approach to Asian people. Indeed, Wright designation of Asian life as the “unknown,” making it “the Other” that he explores in his travelogue, fits the West’s patronising depiction of and engagement with Asia and Asian people described by Edward Said. Bill Mullen argues that “Wright primarily uses language of distance and Othering to describe the non-West” (Afro-Orientalism 64), which the travel trope enables Wright to do as he is just a passing traveller. Most of the travelogue is

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dedicated to describing Asian peoples at Bandung, which for Wright means an analysis of “basic Asian attitudes,” not meaning customs, but rather “the Asian personality” (20) as a single unit. Wright develops tropes of kinship with Asian people but insists on the travel trope and remains outside of the orientalised other that he dubs “the Asian.”

On the grounds that The Color Curtain is a travelogue, Wright describes life in Indonesia. However, the details that Wright choses to focus on in a pseudo-ethnographic display of detachment show his Western gaze and Orientalism. For example, Wright dedicates several paragraphs to the bathroom culture and the dirt of Indonesian streets, which shows his judgement of Indonesia as a country and ridicules the culture.

As he passes by some “famous canals,” instead of showing what makes the canals famous, Wright says that “[he] saw a young man squatting upon the bank of a canal, defecating in broad daylight into the canal’s muddy, swirling water; [he] saw another, then another… […] …a tiny boy was washing his teeth, dipping his toothbrush into the canal…” (94). Wright emphasises the otherness of Indonesia with an image that inspires disgust at the lack of sanitation. The anaphora and the list of people defecating and washing make it seem like Wright’s observations are part of all Indonesian life and culture, with no social and class context. The water is muddy, holding up a mirror to the image of Indonesia that Wright projects to his Western readers. This scene makes Wright and the readers feel alienated from Asia, and as one of the first descriptions of Indonesia, it shows that Wright is reading Indonesia as an “other” that his Western traveller perspective can orientalise, regardless of his claimed understanding of “colored” Asian people.

With anecdotes such as the dirty canals of Jakarta in mind, readers are guided through Orientalist stereotypes that Richard Wright explores and reinforces with tropes that divide and define people by nation or continent. Wright argues that the main difference between Western and Eastern people is that “if the men of the West were political animals, then the men of the East were religious animals…” (80). The travelogue dedicates an entire chapter to “Race and Religion at Bandung,” and Wright discusses Asian leaders’ and people’s focus

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on religion and religious expression extensively in relation to their politics. Wright “[tries] to give the Western reader some idea of [a potential Indonesian] Moslem state” (120), thus identifying for Western readers what makes Indonesia an “other.”

The metafictional mention of Wright’s potential readers while specifically discussing religion shows that religion and the push against secularism is the most prominent “other” and Oriental aspect of the East. While religion is indeed a major part of many Asian people’s lives, Wright’s effort to make it the main difference between the West and the East seems either hypocritical or imperceptive. Indeed, while Wright himself is an atheist, his own experience in the West is deeply marked by religion as he had to attend a series of churches and religious schools such as “the black Protestant church” (Black Boy 166).

In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois confirms the importance of religion for African Americans not only as spiritual guidance but as a character-defining trait when “[t]he Negro church of to-day is the social centre of Negro life in the United States, and the most characteristic expression of African character” (121). Wright’s othering of the East through religion is an Orientalist claim from his subjective experience as an educated atheist who lives in self-imposed exile in Europe and never had a personal interest in the religion of his parents.

Wright’s characterisation of “the men of the West” as “political animals” in opposition to “the men of the East” (80) creates division between the West and the East in a more foundational way than simple customary differences. By “political animals,” Wright refers to Aristotle’s notion “that man is by nature a political animal” (Aristotle 1253a), as in they live among others in a “polis,” a society governed by laws and customs. Wright unironically applies Aristotle’s expression to the West as opposed to the East, and thereby suggests that that men of the East differ by nature from men of the West. This is especially problematic in that it evokes John Burke’s breakdown of race ideology in The Wild Man’s Pedigree cited in Ania Loomba’s book Colonialism/Postcolonialism, according to which white European men are “governed by laws” (100), unlike men of other races. Richard Wright does not claim a separation between men of different races, but his Orientalist othering of

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Asian people from a Western point of view is rooted in an unsettlingly similar rhetoric of division based on what regulates the Eastern and the Western man.

Wright’s Orientalist division between West and East is also present in his conception of art. This approach is brought to light by Keith and Foulcher’s inclusion of the notes, translation and edition of Wright’s lecture “The Artist and His Problems.” From Wright’s notes on morality and art, “[T]he East […] stresses the aesthetic claim and the West […] stresses the moral or theoretic claim.” (“The Artist and His Problems” 134). Here again, in the context of writing, Wright makes a distinction between the East and the West in fundamental ways: the focus on aesthetics and morality. The division adds to his point in The Color Curtain that Westerners are governed by and value politics and morality while the East is governed by more subjective values such as spirituality and aesthetics. The lecture is addressed to Eastern people at Bandung, and yet, it still creates an effect of othering between an Eastern audience and a Western Richard Wright. The division of Eastern and Western art contributes to Wright’s Orientalist discourse, and the omission of this passage in the Indonesia Rayav suggests that Wright did not pronounce this argument during the lecture. According to Keith and Foulcher, Wright’s host Mochtar Lubis might have helped him remove parts of the lecture that were ill-suited for an Indonesian audience, in this case, probably because of the Orientalist discourse. Keith and Foulcher’s edition of the lecture confirms Wright’s Orientalism as it highlights and criticizes his generalising division of the conception of art according to East and West.

What Keith and Foulcher’s Indonesian Notebook demonstrates, apart from highlighting Wright’s othering of the East as opposed to the West, is that even if he goes to Bandung to learn, Wright does not adapt his behaviour to try and connect with people from different backgrounds. Indeed, in the introduction to “The Artist and His Problems,” Keith and Foulcher note that “[reading] through Wright’s typescript lecture notes [held among the Richard Wright Papers in Yale University’s Beinecke Library], one is struck that they frequently address issues that may not have been well suited for an Indonesian

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audience of the day” (124). Wright’s approach to lecturing an Asian audience is not adapted at all as he primarily references Western artists and concepts that clash with Indonesia’s culture, such as the notion of a godless universe and the praise of “Jews, Proust, Kafka, Stein, [who] have made brilliant contributions in the realm of combining the aesthetic and the moral in great art” (134). Jewish writers, as balanced their art may be, might not be the ideal example to use in front of a mostly non-Western Muslim audience. This lack of adaptability, especially concerning discussions about spirituality, is surprising as Wright himself notes in his travelogue that Asians accord a lot of importance to religion. What Keith and Foulcher’s inclusion of Wright’s lecture notes show is that Wright’s approach is elitist and Western-centric, not only dismissing people who have not received a Western education in English, but also people who are not highly educated, even if their education is European or American.

Wright’s praises of people’s characters and opinions are not only limited to people who have received a Western education in his lecture, but in his travelogue and interactions as well. In the case of people who have not received an education at all, Wright systematically dismisses their attempts at discussion. That is the case, for example, when he tries to avoid the crowd of curious Indonesian people in Bandung: Lubis and I got out at my hotel and swarms of children with Oriental faces rushed forward with notebooks. […] “Me, I no write.” I pointed to Lubis. “He important man. Make him sign. Me, I no write. (The Color Curtain 134) Wright pushes all responsibilities of conversation with uneducated people onto his host. This episode could be read Wright’s simple annoyance of the crowd, but Wright generally surrounds himself with people who think like him. The Indonesian Notebook shows that Wright mainly engaged with the Konfrontasi literary group of artists and critics, whose ideas are largely influenced by the Western world, after his host Mochtar Lubis wrote a “List of Indonesian Writers and Artists” for him to contact. Keith and Foulcher infer from the list and the

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travelogue that Wright’s main influences to describe Asians are intellectuals such as Sutan Takdir Alisjahbana or Asrul Sani.

Keith and Foulcher also note that painters “did not attain a prominent place in Wright’s orbit in Indonesia” (92), which means that Wright’s main circle was almost exclusively comprised of writers, poets, and journalists. In light of Keith and Foulcher’s observations on Wright’s inadequateness among non-Western educated people, the scene with Indonesian children and Wright’s only contact being with fellow intellectuals show his lack of effort to understand the Eastern world, which is both driven by and drives his Orientalism. Tropes of Afro-Asianism are limited by Wright’s outsider stance and refusal to acknowledge alternatives to Western education and to learn from people who are not educated.

Apart from the simple reproduction of Western Orientalist tropes, Wright’s detachment from the East could also be an act of self-defence against associations with communism.

African and Asian countries created a Third World alliance and the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) under the design of the Prime Minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru in response to the bipolar world of the Cold War. Despite Nehru’s interest in being non-aligned, he is the one who “[persuaded] the Colombo countries […] that China must be present” (Mullen, Afro-Orientalism 62), and as a result, “China’s very different formulations of Asian and international solidarity between 1949 and 1954 defined the parameters of discussion at the conference” (63).

China became a Communist country in 1949, which means it was aligned. Its important role at the Afro-Asian Conference suggests that Afro-Asianism may be a threat to the United States’ international capitalist influence. As one of the main organisers and speakers at the conference, Nehru’s insistence to invite China reinforces the suggestion that Asian countries are potential subjects to China’s—and by proxy, to the USSR’s—communist influence. Wright wonders, “if there was no effective opposition to Chou En-lai, [the first Premier of the People’s Republic of China], at Bandung, among the Asian and African elite, how much more would there be among the illiterate millions sprawled over Asia and Africa?” (The Color

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Curtain 162) and thus summarises the tension about Bandung from the North American point of view.

Wright is very conscious of the American fear of communism spreading around the world, especially so as he published “I Tried to Be a Communist” in “the 1949 anti-communist collection The God That Failed” (Keith and Foulcher 91). Wright’s trip to Indonesia was sponsored by the American Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), which “was revealed to have been a front for the CIA and State Department, themselves surveillants of wartime and Cold War radicals like Wright” (Mullen, Afro-Orientalism 66). Wright includes anti-communist propaganda in The Color Curtain, possibly to satisfy the CCF. The most prominent anti-communist passage is the travelogue’s conclusion: Seen through the perspective of Bandung, I think that it can be said that FEAR of a loss of their power, FEAR of re-enslavement, FEAR of attack was the key to the actions of the Russian Stalinists who felt that any and all efforts to modernize their nation would be preferable to a return of the status quo…. Today the Russians can feel bitterly, defiantly satisfied that they did what was brutally necessary, no matter how hard, inhuman, and terrible, to keep their power and industrialize their country. BUT MUST THIS TRAGIC METHOD, WITH ITS SECULAR RELIGIOSITY OF HORROR AND BLOOD, BE REPEATED ON THE BODY OF THE HUMAN RACE? (The Color Curtain 221) Wright adds capitalisation to the anaphoric repetition of the word “fear” to emphasize the power of this emotion and uses the lexical field of horror and tragedy to ironically instill or reinforce fear of communism in his readers. He also capitalises the second-to-last sentence of the travelogue, uses a hyperbole with the “secular religiosity of horror and blood,” and projects these extreme threats onto the large-scale allegory of the human race, invocating blood and its body to create a visual image of physical trauma. The oxymoron “secular religiosity” takes up major themes of the travelogue and Wright’s atheist condescending outlook on Asian attachment to religion in order to criticize communist fanatism and idolisation. This propagandist ending reminds readers of the Cold War context

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of the Bandung Conference and shows Wright’s need to fulfill expectations regarding United States institutions as a priority in his formatting of the travelogue. Since the conference and the leaders of the conference can be easily associated with communism, Wright’s Orientalism is also a way to detach himself from those potential communist sympathies in the eyes of anti-communist institutions that directly affect the production of his work.

In the travelogue, Wright references anti-communism not only as one of the main causes for his Orientalism, but as an Orientalist trope. Bill Mullen demonstrates that “Wright […] effectively posited working communism as a surrogate for Asian nationhood and identity, thus destabilizing coherent analysis of both color-based politics and the practical potentiality of Afro-Asian solidarity” (Afro-Orientalism 67). Communism is perceived as an Asian threat through the Chinese government and other countries associated with China. Even government officials who refuse to associate with communism are attached to this threat in Wright’s description. This is the case, for example, when Wright interviews his fourth subject, a “full-blooded Indonesian,” about whom he states in a matter-of-fact tone that “[he] was totalitarian-minded, but without the buttress of modern Communist or Fascist ideology […]

Allah was his dictator” (The Color Curtain 55; 62). Wright argues religion is more essential to Asians than to any other people on Earth as “the men of the East were religious animals…” (80).

Therefore, using political metaphors to describe Asians’ attachment to religion makes politics an essential part of the Asian character and contributes to the othering of the East. Wright compares his Indonesian interlocutor’s belief in Allah to the belief in a Communist state, over which he expresses a patronizing judgement that spreads fear through the noun “dictator.”

Wright also compares both Communism and belief in Islam to Fascism in a post-World War II world. Thus, Wright’s Orientalist discourse creates a narrative of the threatening Asian character, predisposed to authoritarianism and Communism.

Even if the object of the travelogue is the Afro-Asian Conference, Wright barely mentions Africa in the travelogue

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and when he does, his descriptions are very superficial. The lack of citations from African delegates is also relevant to the Museum Konferensi Asia Afrika in Bandung today, which suggests the powerlessness of Africa in the Afro-Asian alliance. In his introduction to Making a World after Empire, Chris Lee cites numbers to back up the imbalance of representation between Asia and Africa: With China and the Colombo Powers included, twenty-nine countries in total attended, comprising a group nearly half the size of the U.N. and ostensibly representing an estimated 1.5 billion people, thus underscoring the numeric significance of the meeting. But of these countries, only six were from Africa, which tilted much of the agenda toward concerns found in Asia, including the Middle East. (11-12) The 1.5 billion people, read in light of Wright’s description of Asians as predisposed to a belief in dictatorship and thereby Communism, intensifies the reading of Asia as a potential threat to the United States’ power. In Wright’s report, Africa is the “weakest part of the Conference” (128) and does not pose any threat to US imperialism in comparison to Asia. The focus on Gold Coast delegates’ colorful togas “adding a blaze of brightness” (135) with little mention of their ideas sets an almost contemptuous tone to the discussion on the presence of African nations at the conference. Africa’s intellectual involvement in the movement is erased and dismissed in favour of Wright’s focus on the visual descriptions of its delegates.

Wright’s involvement in the United States’ campaign against communism poses the question of whether Wright’s choice to underrepresent Africa in the travelogue is due to his belief in Africa’s lack of power in the unbalanced Afro-Asian alliance or a deliberate attempt to separate Africa from Communist sympathisers in the eyes of his readers. To take up Bill Mullen’s title, Wright is not simply an Orientalist, but an Afro-Orientalist as his experience of white supremacy and racism does not prevent his setting of an “other” in Asia. Wright can criticize Asia as the “other” without being associated with this criticism as he is only an external visitor; however, as an African American, it would be much more difficult for him to

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distance himself from Africa through tropes of division between different people. Wright actually shares his concern for Africa as a possible victim of its alliance with Asia, as he notes that Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai “had built a bridgehead that had found foundations not only in Asia but extended even into tribal black Africa” (The Color Curtain 162) at the conference.

The erasure of Africa in the travelogue, and thus the omission of any African ideas attached to communism apart from its position as a potential victim of it, highlights the role of Orientalism in protecting Wright’s image against communism as Wright’s African ancestry associates him more easily with Africa among the general public.

Wright went to Indonesia to witness and report on “‘one of the most important events’ of the twentieth century” (Keith and Foulcher 97). In his travelogue The Color Curtain, Wright constructs the ethos of an insider with exclusive access to and understanding of Asian people with Afro-Asian tropes such as the common experiences of all “coloured” people.

However, as an American outsider—a position he focuses on through the travel trope—and a self-established interpreter for white Western readers, he carries the Western gaze in his choice of scenes to represent and manners to represent them.

Wright’s paradoxical position of insider and outsider at once is best summarized by Bill Mullen in Afro-Asia when he describes the travelogue as “an oddly anti-Communist and at times Orientalist rendering of his own dislocation from both the ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ worlds during his American exile” (5). This Honours essay shows Wright’s anti-communism and Orientalism on their own, but also establishes a mutually non-exclusive connection between these two methods to approach Asian culture as an interpreter for Western readers.

Wright’s Orientalism is influenced by his anti-communism as it manifests his wariness of potential alliances Asian countries are making with communist ideas and nations, and his anti-communism is influenced by his Orientalism as Wright explores an “Asian mind” predisposed to belief in an authoritarian regime by its religious fervour.

Wright’s Orientalist Western gaze places the new Afro-Asian alliance inaugurated at Bandung as both harm-

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less; only a couple of countries taking the lead among mainly underdeveloped countries, and threatening; some of the countries at the conference are potential communist sympathisers.

In this way, Wright protects himself from possible associations with communism as only “the Asian” is shown vulnerable to the “threat” of communism. The Indonesian Notebook shows that Wright’s point of view is biased by his Western, anti-communist gaze and Orientalism as the connections he builds and the artistic and intellectual figures he references show his entanglement in the Western mode of thinking. Wright’s anti-communism seems to be the main source and motivation for his Orientalism as distance cuts the ties between him and the Asian communist threat in the eyes of Western readers. As Wright also appreciates the value of an Afro-Asian alliance, his outlook on communism is translated more as a threat Asia should watch out for rather than a reality that prevents his association with Afro-Asianism altogether. Reading the travelogue in light of the funding he received from the CCF and the late revelations of the CCF’s role for the CIA in 1966-1967 explains parts of his anti-communist stance and choice of metaphors of Afro-Asianism. Despite all its limitations, as one of the only English language accounts of Bandung, Richard Wright’s travelogue and the transcription of his enthusiasm for Afro-Asian alliances in the post-colonial world remains an important memory and depiction of the “Bandung spirit” ideal, now further complicated by the work of Brian Russell Roberts and Keith Foulche.

PART 2: The Lotus journal and the Tashkent spirit, paradoxical Afro-Asian tropes in relation to the NAM and the USSR

Something Richard Wright’s travelogue The Color Curtain does not tell us about is the Afro-Asian efforts to maintain the “Bandung spirit” and the evolution of its representation after the Bandung Conference. The second part of this essay will focus on the Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings journal and other publications by the Afro-Asian Writers Association (AAWA) from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s, the period from which we have the highest number of preserved AAWA materials. As seen in Wright’s account, “Africans are staged but not often

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heard in this ‘Bandung moment’” (McCann 3), and most widely studied sources about Afro-Asian events and literature focus on the Asian perspective, with the exception of interpreters for the Western world. The lack of African literature about Afro-Asianism studied by anglophone scholars raises the question of the involvement of African nations and writers in the alliance. Moreover, the Afro-Asian Conference hosted the representatives of twenty-nine nations, but of these, “only six were from Africa” (Lee 12). In his travelogue, Wright observes that “it was rapidly becoming evident that Negro Africa was the weakest part of the Conference” (Wright 128), which might refer to a weak African presence but also criticize Africa’s lack of investment in the conference. The Lotus journal, with writings from Africa, Asia, as well as other parts of the world such as the USSR, provides the study of a less one-sided Afro-Asian alliance, where African writers can be represented equally alongside their Asian counterparts.

Beginning in Cairo in December 1957-January 1958, the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization (AAPSO) organized the first Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, which led to the creation of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau (AAWB) in Colombo, Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka), and, later on, to the publication of the Lotus journal, the “official cultural mouthpiece for the AAPSO” according to Duncan M. Yoon (234). This attempt to bring Asia and Africa together in their common goal to defeat imperialism was represented by the “Tashkent spirit.” The “Bandung dynamic inaugurated the Third World Project,” which was “for peace, for bread, and for justice” as presented in the “Bandung communiqué” (Prashad, The Poorer Nations 1), and it inspired the creation of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), whose goals of independence from the two Cold War ideological poles the AAWA tried to materialise with literature. The publications of the AAWB are the embodiment of a legacy of the “Bandung spirit,” the “Tashkent spirit.”

While Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings is a good example of equal Afro-Asian representation, it fits strangely with the ideal of non-alignment that is associated with Afro-Asianism. Still based on the principles established at the Bandung Confer-

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ence, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) was created in Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1961. Fidel Castrovi described its objective as the “struggle against imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, racism, and all forms of foreign aggression, occupation, domination, interference or hegemony as well as against great power and bloc politics” (Castro). The goal of the AAWA, as presented by its publications, is to defeat imperialism and colonialism and promote world peace, which corresponds to the goals expressed by the NAM and at Bandung. The Lotus journal is introduced in its first issue by its “[struggle] against the various forms of imperialist cultural activities and the reactionary and racist movements that undermine human culture” (El-Sebai, “Introduction” 3). However, as an institution openly supported financially by the USSR that explicitly praises the USSR either as part of the Afro-Asian alliance or as a model to follow, the AAWA and its publications navigate their adherence to non-alignment in a biased—if not suspicious—way. Alignment even manifests itself in the Lotus contributors’ anti-imperialist modes of writing as they favour realist styles reminiscent of socialist realism. This ambiguity raises the question of the place of Afro-Asian nations and Third World writers in a bipolar world.

Instead of asserting differences between the Western and the Eastern man like Richard Wright had done in his comparison of the “political” to the “religious animals” (The Color Curtain 80), one of the main focus of the Lotus journal was on similarities of experiences between Africa and Asia.

In order to support this expression of Afro-Asian solidarity, Lotus included many works by African authors as well as Asian authors so that voices from both sides of the alliance could be heard. The AAWA ensured Africa was equally part of the alliance as Asia. Although Tashkent started in Delhi, India, “during the ‘Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Conference’ held in Cairo in 1957, writers from Egypt expressed the wish to invite African writers to participate in the meeting at Tashkent alongside their Asian brothers” (“lors de la ‘Conférence de solidarité des pays d’Asie et d’Afrique,’ tenue au Caire en 1957, les écrivains d’Égypte exprimèrent le vœu de voir les auteurs africains invités à participer à la rencontre de Tachkent, aux côtés de

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leurs confrères asiatiques.”; Écrivains d’Asie et d’Afrique). Contrary to the Bandung Conference where African voices were barely heard and African representative were rarely mentioned in reports, articles about Tashkent and other conferences related to the AAWA mention that African countries asserted their voices to have their writers participate and be included in the development of the writers’ conferences.

African writers actively took part in the alliance, and African nations encouraged their inclusion in the project by investing in the AAWA. Egypt became one of the main sources of funding for Lotus according to Hala Halim who affirms that the journal was “funded mainly by Egypt, the Soviet Union, and the German Democratic Republic” (566). From Africa, it was not only Egypt that invested in the AAWA; several countries offered active governmental involvement in the form of different scholarships for writers, for example. This was the case for the 1979 Workshop for Afro-Asian Writers, for which the “governments of Iraq and Nigeria sponsored two participants each to the workshop” (Workshop for Afro-Asian Writers 3). While African political and financial involvement in the Bandung Conference was relatively invisible, African nations took active part in funding the Lotus journal and other projects for the Afro-Asian alliance directed by the AAWA.

African representation did not stop at finances as most conferences and publications related to the AAWA included a balanced representation of Asian and African members and writers. Unlike at Bandung where only six out of twenty-nine countries were African, the Association of Afro-Asian Writers Executive Council had thirty-seven countries represented, and out of these thirty-seven countries, eighteen were from Africa (Programme 17). Similarly, the executive board of the workshop had an equal number of members from Africa and from Asia, as it was written in its final report that it “should consist of a maximum of ten members, five from African countries and five from Asian countries” (Workshop for Afro-Asian Writers 7).

Even if it might be in part due to the augmented number of decolonized African countries as the AAWA published years after the Bandung Conference, while Bandung looks more like a pan-Asian conference that decided to include some African

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nations, the AAWA and its affiliated conferences made sure African and Asian nations were more equally represented.

The equality in African and Asian representation was also respected in the selection of works to be published by the AAWA. In the first issue of the Lotus journal, for example, “The Concept of an Asian Mind” by Dr. Mulk Raj Anand is immediately followed by Leopold Sedar Senghor’s study “Negritude and Arabism.” Both discuss traits common to Asian and African people and societies, respectively, thereby providing a balance in the study of people from these continents. Two articles with the same theme applied to Asia and Africa opening the first issue of the journal one after the other serve as a symbol of what Lotus wishes to express: the editors placed the pieces in this order to brand Lotus as a journal that perpetuates the Bandung spirit of decolonisation and celebration of African and Asian cultures through equal, coordinated representation of Asian and African writers.

So far, this essay has discussed the AAWA in comparison to the Bandung Conference, but more importantly, the AAWA should be understood as the perpetuation of a preserved, enhanced, and idolised Bandung spirit translated into the updated “Tashkent spirit.” Afro-Asian writers of the AAWA worked explicitly in the legacy of the Bandung spirit, stating numerous times in the report of the Tashkent Conference that “‘the idea of Tashkent’ […] was determined by the Bandung spirit” (“‘l’idée de Tashkent’ […] était déterminée par l’esprit de Bandung”; Écrivains d’Asie et d’Afrique 3) and that the conference itself, a sort of “LITERARY BANDUNG,” was “based on the Bandung principles” (“BANDŒNG LITTERAIRE”; “sur la base des principes de Bandung”; Écrivains d’Asie et d’Afrique 6). Tashkent, not as a conference of political leaders but as a conference of writers, transformed the Bandung spirit into a more literature-focused and—on the surface—less politically confrontational Tashkent spirit.vii

Whereas Bandung was a first attempt at joining African and Asian nations together despite their political and—as emphasized by Richard Wright—religious differences, the Tashkent spirit does not mention these differences so much as it emphasizes a “spirit of camaraderie and mutual understand-

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ing,” as defined by Uzbek K. Yachen (“l’esprit de camaraderie et de comprehension mutuelle”; qtd. in Von Stackleberg 33). The principles established at Bandung such as a push for political self-determination, mutual respect for sovereignty, non-aggression, non-interference in internal affairs, and equality, are part of the journey to make Afro-Asian cooperation possible; according to the contributors of Lotus, the Tashkent spirit has been able to practically take up that role and make the “internationalist brotherhood” a reality (Rashidov 17). With more African representation and the Tashkent spirit, the AAWA takes the possibility of cooperation in the legacy of Bandung and furthers it by focusing on mutual understanding and camaraderie instead of non-aggression.

Apart from the perpetuation of the Bandung spirit in the equal representation of African and Asian writers as well as a definition of the new “Tashkent spirit,” Lotus presents reoccurring literary devices through which cultural ties between Asian and African nations are expressed such as the lexical fields of tradition and connection. Contributors of the Lotus journal bring African and Asian peoples together as inheritors of great culture and heritage: Youssef El-Sebai celebrates “the right of the peoples of Africa and Asia to cherish and hold fast to that heritage; to preserve the glory and splendour of those traditions we have given to all peoples” (“Editor’s Note,” Lotus 116) as the two continents gave mankind its first civilization. He uses the common “we” to refer to himself as part of the African and Asian peoples brought together through heritage and tradition. In “Poetry and National Liberation in South Africa,” Barry Feinberg describes his meetings with a young Palestinian poet who, upon being shown South African poetry remarks how “uncanny [it is that] these poems could have been written

by Palestinians” (Feinberg 10). Feinberg’s use of the anecdote shows in a relatable and realistically convincing manner how similar Afro-Asian experiences and the artistic transmissions of these experiences can be: revolutionary poets from South Africa and Palestine find common cause and modes of expression for both their “harsh realities” and “similar dreams for the future” (10). One of the main characteristics of the AAWA publications is its language of friendship and mutual under-

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standing between African and Asian nations as they perpetuate an image of the Tashkent spirit as a cooperative Afro-Asian alliance based on similar past and interests to preserve and understand their own and each other’s cultures.

Although the Tashkent spirit primarily serves as a metaphor for similarities and mutual understanding between African and Asian people, reinforcing this mutual understanding is still a tool to encourage Afro-Asian efforts against imperialism. The AAWA, through its camaraderie, keeps the same anti-imperialist ideals as the Bandung Conference.

Throughout the Lotus publications, the demonization of imperialist powers and the common struggles between African and Asian people against colonialism are emphasized connectors between African and Asian nations. For example, in “The Role of Afro-Asian Literature and the National Liberation Movements,” Youssef El-Sebai uses a trope that brings African and Asian people together in their humiliation and grief over their “youths who were used as fodder in imperialist wars” (“The Role of Afro-Asian Literature” 6). The “fodder” introduces a metaphor of imperialism as cattle that devours colonized youths to depict the common Afro-Asian feeling of having been used and exploited. Afro-Asian tropes in Lotus serve to perpetuate the Bandung spirit through tales of common struggles under and against imperialism.

Even if Lotus and the Tashkent spirit are presented with less emphasis on politics and more on literature and culture than the Bandung spirit had been, their affiliation suggests that they might be aligned with one of the poles of the Cold War world. The emphasis of Lotus on the struggle against imperialism does not exactly match the one expressed at Bandung or by Richard Wright. Even though Richard Wright was originally a leftist, his travelogue was funded by the CCF, potentially as a way for the US to make sure what he published was not anti-capitalist. At the opposite of Wright’s involvement with the CCF, the Lotus journal received funding from the USSR through the AAPSO, and unlike with the CCF, the source of funding was overt for all the contributors of the journal to know. Lotus helped “the USSR and its Eastern European satellites [to offer] direct publication support to African writers

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and cultural organizations sympathetic to the cause of communism and, in a similar manner to the United States, worked to win over the hearts and minds of intellectuals from the Third World through subtle soft-power mechanisms, such as cultural diplomacy” (Popescu 48). According to this description, Lotus contrasts with publications supported by the CCF, as it was revealed by the US publication Ramparts in April 1967 to be funded by the CIA. The Lotus journal and the AAWA are particularly relevant as counterpoints to Richard Wright’s travelogue because while the African American writer’s project was funded by the CCF and through it the CIA, the AAWA relied on the Soviet Union for funding, which explains the end of its publication with the fall of the Soviet Union.

Political alignment goes beyond organisation and funding: the AAWA highlights the influential role of literature in politics when it shows a predilection for realist styles over modernist styles.viii The New Delhi workshop taught Afro-Asian writers that “scientific methods should be used for creative writing” and that “while writing for children, a writer should be more realistic than imaginative” (Workshop for Afro-Asian Writers 12, 14). Lotus considers literature a tool for revolution as it expects writers to “create literature connected with the life of the people and capable of helping them to fight” (Rashidov 14). In light of the Cold War context, advocating for realism is a reminder of Communist socialist realism, and the conception of a purposeful literature that actively encourages Afro-Asian peoples’ fight against imperialism implies that literature should be used as a weapon of propaganda. Moreover, as suggested by the way “European centralism”—as in the literary styles of “bourgeois literature” symbolic of the West—is criticized in the Tashkent Conference report, it is clear that the AAWA is striving for a style that contrasts with Western literature (“centralisme européen”; “littérature bourgeoise”; Écrivains d’Asie et d’Afrique 4). The AAWA’s wish for an active role of literature in politics suggests that its financial affiliation to Communism might also be a political affiliation.

A large amount of the creative writings published in Lotus provide a realistic description of life in Africa and Asia, sometimes fitting the style described by leftistix writer

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Pramoedya Ananta Toer as “bitter realism” (Roberts and Foulcher 47)x. In Lotus, Kim Chi Ha’s poems “Hunger,” “No Return” with a war theme, and “The Sea,” a cry against oppression, are examples of “bitter realism.” In “Hunger,” Kim Chi Ha uses exclamations to emphasize the hunger felt by the speaker. The anaphora of the first-person pronoun and the simple future tense show the extent of the speaker’s despair as he expands the possibilities of what he is willing to do to sate his hunger.

The poem is full of hyperboles of what the speaker would be capable of eating while “Yet still [having] an empty belly” (Kim 126), which suggests that the poem is expressing more than literal hunger. The whole poem can be read as an extended metaphor with hunger representing general suffering from oppression and poverty for people in Third World countries as capitalism and imperialism exploit their resources. Kim uses an accumulation of objects the speaker will eat in a crescendo of incongruity, creating a build-up that includes human flesh, whose apotheosis is not flesh but money to show the absurdity of the importance accorded it in the capitalist world. Despite being an extended metaphor, “Hunger” portrays a bitterly realistic experience, hunger, with the goal to present another bitter experience. As shown by the example of Kim Chi Ha’s poetry, Lotus writers’ response to bitter experiences is intrinsically transposed in realist writing as they attempt to influence people to pursue social and material progress as well as self-determination. With that conception of writing in mind, examples of realism in Lotus associate the journal with a Communist style of writing as bitter realism can be used to stir revolutionary or at least anti-imperialist thoughts.

A more direct example of the effect of USSR funding on the AAWA publications is that members of the AAWA praise the USSR openly. Alex La Guma’s address to Yuri Andropovxi praises the “confident voice of reason [that] once again [comes] from Moscow” (Programme 6). La Guma designates Moscow through a synecdoche that gives authority to the mysterious, disembodied voice of the members of the government who demanded action against the American military threat, thereby elevating decisions and actions taken by the USSR. The appeal by La Guma encourages its readers to join him in

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his praise of Soviet military decisions and makes the AAWA literary influence directly political and propagandist. La Guma adapts the Afro-Asian trope of brotherhood to his description of the USSR as he wishes “long live peace and fraternal unity of the people of goodwill” (Programme 7), which in the context of the Cold War implies a wish for Soviet victory against the USA. The AAWA publications’ necessary response to overt Soviet funding is expressing thanks and praising the USSR, as without it, Lotus and other AAWA texts could not be published.

Praising the USSR in Lotus is not only a formality as it could have been in La Guma’s address: indeed, the theme of some of the creative writings selected for publication by Lotus are about praising the USSR, which suggests that Lotus might prioritize writers whose ideas seem to be aligned with the Soviet Union for publication. Mongolian women’s leader, politician, and writer Sonomyn Udval published a short story in Lotus entitled “A Bouquet of Flowers.” It references a program for young Mongolian people to study in the Soviet Union and presents the encounter between Mongolians and the USSR in a favourable light. The welcome reserved to the characters of the story shows how outsiders from Asia are appreciated

by Soviet people, “whose eyes grew more friendly” (Udval 156) after learning the characters are from Mongolia. The short story contains scenes of war, to which the Mongolian students respond with empathy, finding it “impossible to study calmly, seeing how selflessly the Soviet people were working to rehabilitate the war-ruined economy” (Udval 156). These scenes and the students’ empathy are significant as they encourage readers to consider the Soviet Union with empathy as well; they show that Soviet people have struggled against Tsarist Russia the same way Afro-Asian peoples struggle against colonialism and imperialism. Through this passing on of empathy, the narrator directly praises Soviet people for their “selflessness,” and, since the story is an embedded narrative, the narrator indirectly praises them for having succeeded in their struggles. In the frame narrative, the legacy of Mongolia’s bond with the USSR is represented by Dolgor’s—the narrator of the framed narrative—choice to honour the Soviet soldier G. Krylov. Udval uses the love story trope to materialise the Soviet Union-Mongolia

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bond and leaves the love story inconclusively melancholy as a way to honour and praise Soviet struggles. While Richard Wright’s anti-communist messages throughout The Color Curtain do not explicitly praise US capitalism as a counterpoint to the USSR during the Cold War, some writers of the Lotus journal such as Udval form elegies for the USSR.

The praise goes both ways as the USSR puts on an effort to create a welcoming environment to attract Afro-Asian writers. In the same manner as Wright creates an insider ethos, USSR speakers and writers take up metaphors of Afro-Asianism and the theme of kinship to relate to their Afro-Asian audience. “Brotherhood” is an important motif used by Afro-Asian writers.xii In The Afro-Asian Writer,xiii the Extended Meeting of the Soviet Liaison Committee with the Writers of Asia and Africa launched an appeal in which they emphasize the same motif, putting forward “[their] dear brothers from Asia and Africa” at the beginning and end of the appeal, punctuating the whole appeal with enthusiastic exclamation points, and pressing their “great sympathy” and “common aims” as fellow, brotherly writers (Afro-Asian Writer 39). The reuse of this motif by Soviet writers shows how they imitate Afro-Asian language to appeal to Afro-Asian sympathies. Soviet writers used the language of connection to gain the friendship of Afro-Asian writers who can relate to their aims and experience as writers.

Soviet writers and leaders also use the lexical field of understanding and kinship to create a connection with Third World writers and the Third World on a more intimate level than literature. For instance, Nikita Khrushchev, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, welcomes Afro-Asian writers to the Tashkent Conference by emphasizing that “[They], Soviets, especially understand [Afro-Asian writers’] beautiful aspirations, [as] on the ruins of Tsarist Russia, which was the prison of the people, the Soviet people has edified a powerful socialist multinational state” (“Nous, Soviétiques, comprenons particulièrement vos belles aspirations.

Sur les ruines de la Russie tsariste, qui était la prison des peuples, le peuple soviétique a édifié un puissant État socialiste multi-national”; Écrivains d’Asie et d’Afrique 20). Khrush-

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chev elaborates upon the “multinational state” which suggests that he knows how to appreciate the development of national consciousness and different national cultures, which is one of the main objectives of many Afro-Asian nations during decolonisation. He describes the heroism of the Soviet people in their Revolution, setting the Soviet Union as relatable for independent Afro-Asian nations and as an example to follow for Afro-Asian nations that still struggle against colonialism.

The language and tropes Krushchev uses also mirror the ones used by Afro-Asian writers. For example, he refers to Tsarist Russia as “the prison of the people,” which heralds back to various Lotus writers’ tropes to describe the Afro-Asian struggle against colonialism, sometimes in revolution, such as Mohammed Saleh Bawaih’s lexical field of fetters and prison used to call upon the Algerian people to fight in his poem “The Revolutionary” (Salem 120). Lastly, Krushchev emphasizes the notion of understanding in order to gain the trust of Afro-Asian writers. USSR writers and leaders mirror Afro-Asian writers’ language and tropes in order to make them feel welcomed and understood by the USSR-funded AAWA.

Soviet writers and leaders go farther than using tropes of understanding and kinship in their attempt to welcome Afro-Asian writers and create cultural alliances during the Cold War: they describe the Soviet Union as “Asiatic” and present it as part of the “colored” world in opposition to the white Western world. Bill Mullen throws light on the ambiguity of Russia’s relationship to Asia as its “geographic affiliation with the East […] complicated early-century hemispheric definitions of race” (Afro-Orientalism XXIX), and members of the Soviet Union use this ambiguity in order to include the Soviet Union in Afro-Asian relations further than it already is as part of the AAWA. The introduction to the Tashkent Conference report mentions a “trip in Russian Asia” (“voyage en Asie Russe”; Écrivains d’Asie et d’Afrique 2), and the USSR is also referred to as “Central Asia” (El-Sebai, “Editor’s Note,” Lotus 23 7) which prioritizes the geographic interpretation of Russia as part of Asia and creates distance from the notion of the Soviet Union as a political pole of the Cold War. The AAWA’s attachment to the Soviet Union goes beyond its financial dependence as the

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USSR plays on its geographical ambiguity, its closeness to Asia, and history of having been considered part of Asia in the past.

Geographic connections are not enough for the USSR to be considered an Afro-Asian insider, so the organisers of the Tashkent Conference emphasized the cultural link between the USSR and the Islamic World. Monica Popescu discusses the USSR strategy to turn “urban centers like Tashkent […] into ‘showcase cities’ that advertised Soviet achievements in central Asia” (51). This strategy is also analysed by the Service des Enquêtes sur l’Europe Orientale, who concludes that the USSR uses the cultural history of Turkestan, whose authors had “influence, during the Middle Ages, across the frontiers over all of Islam” (“dont l’influence, au Moyen-Âge, se répandait en dehors des frontières sur tout l’Islam”; Écrivains d’Asie et d’Afrique 35), in order to gain cultural influence over Afro-Asian nations. The Soviet Union’s use of “showcase cities” and the emphasis put on the influence of the region over Islam not only turns the Soviet Union into an Afro-Asian insider, but it also “[downplays] a history of Russian colonization in the area” (Popescu 51). The role of Tashkent is evidenced by Afro-Asian writers such as Youssef El-Sebai who reminisces his trip to Tashkent in Lotus. In the 23rd and 38th publication of Lotus, he depicts romantically how he was shown Tashkent, its architecture and culture, and more specifically, the relationship of Tashkent’s inhabitants to Muslim culture. In “Memories of ‘The City of Orchards,’” El-Sebai’s “[wandering]” in Tashkent reminds him of “the Arabian Nights with the high walls, the orchard trees full of fruit and closed wooden doors behind which music could be heard and I fancy a princess walking among the trees and a knight jumping the wall” (8). The orientalising comparison of Tashkent to the Arabian Nights coming from someone whose country, Egypt, is usually orientalised creates a cultural bond between the two spaces. From El-Sebai’s depiction, outsiders perceive both Tashkent and Egypt with the same orientalising point of view. This common outsider view depicts Uzbekistan and Egypt as fighting the same Western Orientalism, and, by extension, the same Western imperialism. The USSR attempts to establish a cultural link with Asia and the Islamic world of its republics to shape an image

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of insider that can be included in Afro-Asian endeavours.

As explained by Mullen in Afro-Orientalism, Russia’s ambiguous relationship to Afro-Asianism is not purely geographic or cultural but also racial, as the Soviet Union comes to pose as an alternative not only to Western capitalism but to white supremacy. This conception of race has also been expressed by African American writers: for instance, “Stalin’s and Lenin’s writings on the national question had drawn Black American intellectuals like Du Bois to a conception of Soviet Communism as an alternative not just to capitalism but to white supremacy” (Afro-Orientalism XXIX). In Afro-Asia, Fred Ho and Bill Mullen explore how American involvement in the Cold War parallels European colonialism in its approach of race. They analyse conflicts such as the Korean war, the Chinese Revolution, and the Vietnam War by using the term “war of color,” through which they interpret the American motive to perpetuate “world white supremacy” (62). These “wars of color” are relevant to the Soviet Union’s self-interpretation as part of those “colored” nations, as some Americans’ reading of the “wars of color” included “Russia’s ‘Asiatic’ character in order to argue that the struggle against communism and the threatened race war might well fuse together” (Afro-Asia 62). The notion of “war of color” involves struggles against “world white supremacy” imposed by Europe and the United States, and Mullen poses the USSR as an alternative. To include Russia’s “Asiatic” character in the “war of color” is a way to link the Soviet Union and Afro-Asian writers more intimately in their common struggle against Western white supremacy.

The possibility of the USSR as an alternative to Western white supremacy is developed by the exclusion of the role of Soviet Russia in imperialism and colonialism, therefore making the United States and the legacy of European colonialism the only imperialist powers in the post-colonial world.

AAWA publications contrast the descriptions of American imperialism to their praises of the USSR. In his poem “Poisoned Mind,” Mazisi Kunene conveys the feeling of satisfaction in revenge with the speaker “Watching Europe burn and its civilization of fire, / Watching America disintegrate with its gods of steel, / Watching all persecutors of mankind turn into dust”

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(87). The anaphora shows the speaker’s feeling of complacency, the lack of reaction as he voyeuristically observes chaos and destruction against which he has no desire to intervene. The speaker rejoices in the destruction of imperialist Europe and America, but the USSR is deliberately excluded from the list of “persecutors of mankind.” AAWA writers oppose “barbarous forces of American imperialism [that flood] the world” (Afro-Asian Writer 30) to “Brothers and Friends” (7) and their “legitimate aspirations for self-determination” (8). Against the flooding of American imperialism that blocks Afro-Asian nations’ metaphorical lights of aspiration for self-determination, the Russian Revolution is said to have dispelled the “darkness,” and the day it happened “is marked as a red letter date in the calendars of all nations and continents,[…] the day of the 1917 Great October Socialist revolution” (Rashidov 13).

The USSR is praised as an example of revolutionary struggle against imperialism, while the United States is depicted as the hand of imperialism through its interventions in the Third World such as during the Vietnam War and the Lebanese Civil War. More starkly, the “Appeal to the Writers of the World” praises the USSR in its struggle against the USA and presents a paradoxically one-sided arms race, “unleashed” by “the USA” only (Programme 2) when a race should have two sides competing. Some of the AAWA publications present the USSR in an angelic light as the exemplary heroic revolutionary fighting against American imperialism, which takes form through its interventionist policies.

The AAWA publications show the continuation of the “Bandung spirit” through the “Tashkent spirit” as an ideal of peace, understanding, and cooperation against imperialism and neocolonialism. Unlike at the Bandung Conference and in Richard Wright’s travelogue, the Afro-Asian dimension of the “Tashkent spirit” is heavily emphasized with strict policies for equal inclusion of writers from African and Asian nations as well as financial participation from both continents to encourage writers to be a part of this Afro-Asian alliance. Access to Lotus and other AAWA publications permits an outlook on the role of Africa in the Afro-Asian alliance and its representation in Afro-Asian literature in a way that most other anglophone

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Afro-Asian sources such as the Indonesian Notebook or The Color Curtain do not. In Lotus, Afro-Asian writers are able to interact with each other’s cultures and heritage such as South African writers Alex La Guma in his short story “Thang’s Bycicle” set in Vietnam and Barry Feinberg in his interaction with a Palestinian poet in “Poetry and National Liberation in South Africa,” and the contributors of Lotus frequently use tropes of connection among Afro-Asian peoples.

The Afro-Asian Writer’s Association compares itself to a literary Non-Aligned Movement. However, the USSR is involved in most parts of the production of Lotus and the AAWA, from hosting the conference to funding and contributing to Lotus. The USSR and the AAWA take up Afro-Asian tropes and expand them to include the USSR, yet exclude the USSR to place blame on Europe and North America for imperialism.

From its association with the Soviet Union, the AAWA cannot be a literary equivalent of the NAM. However, the NAM itself has been described as tending toward the Soviet pole in the Cold War, as “the non-aligned movement had slipped away from its initial, genuinely non-aligned and notionally equidistant position and had developed a tilt in favour of the Socialist bloc and against the Western” (Rajan 67-68) and there was a “theory of the Socialist states being the ‘natural allies’ of the non-aligned movement” (68-69). Seen in this light, the AAWA does resemble the NAM. Yet, the AAWA ceased publication after the fall of the USSR, which shows that it is much more directly reliant on the USSR than the NAM. Indeed, even before the NAM tried to distance itself from the theory of being the USSR’s “natural allies,” the “USSR and Eastern bloc saw the NAM, and the G77, as allies, but since the East was wary of the UN and its bodies, its allegiance was in parallel to the NAM, rather than to it directly” (Prashad, The Poorer Nations 26). From these observations, it appears that Lotus and the AAWA enabled the USSR to engage with the NAM in parallel to it. More notably, what this essay demonstrates is that the AAWA’s role is close to that of the USA’s Cultural Congress for Freedom as a tool for the USSR to expand its soft power over Afro-Asian countries.

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CONCLUSION

The objective of this essay was to observe metaphors of Afro-Asian connections in literature from Richard Wright’s description of the Bandung Conference to the Afro-Asian Writer’s Association publications. More specifically, The Color Curtain and Lotus provide an outlook on the evolution of the embodiment of the “Bandung spirit,” first as an ideal of cooperation and peace against colonialism and imperialism, and further in its “Tashkent spirit” legacy as an ideal of camaraderie and friendship. The motifs present in the literature that influences the collective memory of these spirits are tropes of connections and the lexical field of brotherhood. Richard Wright relies on the theme of brotherhood and the insider ethos that he lends credence to through his African American experience in order to be read as an interpreter of the Bandung Conference for the Western world. The AAWA gains credibility as an Afro-Asian source from anti-imperialist motifs, lexical fields, and tropes of connection as well as an equal African and Asian representation.

However, this essay suggests that the materialisation of the Bandung and Tashkent spirits in literary production is not as ideal as the tropes and styles used by Afro-Asian writers attempt to demonstrate. Indeed, despite his African American experience, Richard Wright takes on the perspective of his education as well as his experience in the imperial capital Paris and projects it onto his interpretation of the Bandung Conference. More specifically, Wright’s Orientalist study of the Asian character is influenced by his anti-communist Western view and his expectations to translate for a white rather than an African American or Afro-Asian audience. Moreover, even though it might be due to the imbalance of representation between African and Asian nations at the conference, the presence of African representatives is depicted as merely symbolic in The Color Curtain and the travelogue’s funding from the CIA through the Cultural Congress for Freedom reflects Wright’s anti-communist sentiments. As The Color Curtain has been one of the only major anglophone works about the conference until recently, the perspective of the Bandung Conference the West had access to in literature was unique and necessarily

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biased— influenced by Wright’s Orientalism and rejection of communism. The publication of the Indonesian Notebook in 2015 has provided a more complete understanding of the Bandung Conference in literature, even while still being centred on Richard Wright and people’s perception of him.

The AAWA is a better example of the Afro-Asian dynamic as it is less one sided. However, the AAWA’s ambiguous relationship to the Non-Aligned Movement as a neutral “anti-imperialist peace movement” (Singham and Hune 1) that rejects associations with either the Communist or the Capitalist bloc challenges its fit to the Bandung spirit ideal. Indeed, the AAWA was openly reliant on USSR funding and both praised the USSR and received its self-inclusion in Afro-Asianism through metaphors of connections and other literary devices used by Afro-Asian writers. Moreover, in its struggle against imperialism, the AAWA only distinguishes Western, or American imperialism and does not mention the USSR’s imperialist endeavours such as its presence in Afghanistan, and later in Kampuchea through Communist Vietnam, as discussed in the “September 1979 Summit Conference of the non-aligned movement” (Rajan 60). Lotus and other AAWA publications work as a counterpoint to Richard Wright’s CIA-funded travelogue and show that the literary expression of the Bandung and Tashkent spirits, more specifically in their non-aligned form, is necessarily biased to some extent.

This study of the “Bandung spirit” in literature resonates with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s observation that “as a writer [he] can never be non-aligned” (qtd. in Popescu 63): during the Cold War, where politics revolve around two poles and the power these two poles possess is exerted over Third World countries with “a million voices crying out in unison for the right to control the natural and human resources of their own land; the right to control the fruits of their sweat, the products of their labour” (qtd. in Popescu 63), writers can hardly be neutral. When most platforms that allow Afro-Asian writers to be recognized internationally are either financed by the USA or the USSR, it is reasonable that Afro-Asian writers would publish in venues supported by the two powers if not openly

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ENDNOTES

I use Black and white “out of a dedication to centering the leadership [and] authority of the people I’m writing about” because “until equal treatment exists in our larger society, calls for equal treatment in language only serve to whitewash cultural context, identity, and history” (Kapitan, “Ask a Radical Copyeditor”). ii

To “[evoke] the Cold War context” (Popescu 194n8) and “refract the Afro-Asian Writers’ movement and its journal toward contemporary geopolitical realities” (Halim 566), I use the original term Third World rather than the contemporary Global South.

For more information about the emergence of the Global South, see Vijay Prashad’s The Poorer Nations. iii

Free indirect discourse “represents characters’ thoughts and feelings as well as the narrator’s voice” without a “reporting clause” (Hakemulder and Koopman 41-42). iv

Wright’s authority remains unchallenged by his narrative as the Black journalist’s response is not included in the travelogue. v

The omission of this passage in the Indonesia Raya publication of the lecture transcription is indicated by Keith and Foulcher’s use of italics as “wherever the Indonesia Raya version of the lecture does not contain material that is included in the notes, [they] have reinserted the elided material and designated these reinsertions by placing the text in italics” (Keith and Foulcher 126). vi

Fidel Castro was the elected chairperson of the NAM from 1979 to 1983 and the de facto spokesman in Havana in 1979. vii

Political leaders aimed to hide behind the literary theme of the Tashkent Conference and the AAWA. Instead, writers took on the role to turn “the conferences [into] a venue for political discussion” (Haddad-Fonda). viii

The art of the Soviet Union and other socialist countries during the Cold War is famous for its socialist realism, while “modernism […] came to be presented as a pro-Western, pro-‘freedom,’ and pro-bourgeois movement” (Barnhisel 2). ix

Pramoedya was branded Communist and hence imprisoned and censored under Indonesian president Suharto. x

For Pramoedya, Indonesian literature should not follow Western principles of beauty, that is, “the creation of beauty through the written word,” (Heinschke 153) but should instead reflect the world and all its unpleasantness. xi

Yuri Andropov was the General Secretary of the CC CPSU and President of the USSR Supreme Soviet. xii

For example, “brothers” is repeated several times in the “Declaration” at The Third Session of the Permanent Bureau, Cairo on the 4th and 5th of July 1967 (Lotus 1 149). xiii

The Afro-Asian Writer was an earlier publication of the AAWA than the Lotus journal.

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The Eye of the Beholder: Black Femininity as Explored in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Tar Baby Jaede Shillingford McGill University

“If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.”

— The Combahee River Collective, 1977 INTRODUCTION As scholars of English Literature, or even casual observers of the craft, we have long understood the works of woman authors—Austen, Woolf, Brontë and all their equally inclined colleagues—to be intrinsic cornerstones of feminist literary thought. This is not necessarily because the women centered in this fiction were any less marginalized by oppressive hegemonic ideology than the minds from which they came, but rather, the importance of these authors within the canon stems from the boundaries they broke simply through their courageous wielding of the pen. For readers of both past and present, Austen and Woolf are to literature what Earhart was to the sky—phenomenal and unafraid women who endeavored to use writing as a vessel for challenging the conditions of their time.

Through their brilliant criticisms of the patriarchal condition and its hierarchal framework, feminist thought was given new life between the Victorian and early modern novel’s loose pages.

It was here that the curious reader grew to consider the value of feminism’s place in literature, how dichotomous gender politics could intricately shape a writer’s prose to, in turn, further collective understanding of a woman’s subordination. And while the rise of this kind of woman writer marked a shift within the literary landscape—something akin to a decades-long bat-

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tle for political suffrage—it is imperative to both acknowledge and consider how the framing of these women’s victories in the canon leaves much to be desired in the way of truly accessible feminist literature.

Just as the first women’s rights movements neglected the idiosyncrasies of gender experience as it relates to race and intersectionality, the novels pioneered by the woman authors traditionally placed on the literary field’s feminist pedestal represent a kind of womanist breakthrough that was once, and partially remains, largely unattainable to writers whose works do not center, or cater towards, the idea of whiteness. Much of the literature we are exposed to and work with, specifically that of the American variety, is pervaded by white imagery: white faces in white neighborhoods—white protagonists and their equally white counterparts. This, of course, is no flaw within the larger system that perpetually works to inform what and who an author will write about. Rather, this is, by design, a system engineered by white minds working exactly as it was intended to.

Whiteness as a concept is so firmly entrenched in society that the universality of it has no choice but to serve as an extension of the novels idly resting on our shelves. As a result, readers have been conditioned to rarely, if ever, question the presence of this whiteness in the literary works which they are presented.

This condition of white acceptance in reading, however, raises an issue in how feminism is perceived in literature—namely, the inadvertent exclusion of a key figure in larger discussions of feminist prose: Toni Morrison.

While undoubtedly one of the most renowned literary minds of her time, and even beyond it, Morrison’s writing is frequently examined within the context of Blackness and being Blacki as an overarching condition. Beloved, for example, while widely studied at the collegiate level in lecture halls across North America, is seldom acknowledged as a powerful piece of Black feminist scholarship. Instead, students are largely encouraged to consider this poignant account of a Black mother’s horrific act—we learn not too far into the story that its protagonist, Sethe, is being haunted by the ghost of her baby whom she killed to save from the devastation of slavery—as a tale of the African American slave’s greater historical plight. The era-

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sure of the Black womanhood Morrison so obviously alludes to in her representation of Black women’s collective strength, sacrifice, and unity speaks to a greater culture of Black women’s general erasure from feminist discourse as a whole. As it was once so brilliantly put by Black feminist theorist, Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, the Black woman’s identity is a tricky one—as often she is expected to either operate under the impositions of her Blackness or her womanhood but is rarely given permission to do both (Crenshaw 1991). The same rhetoric applies to Morrison’s position as an author who is, not only Black, but as one who is also female. Consequently then, her writing—which rejects the white gaze entirely—is commonly understood as being a reconstruction of the Black reality, however, the intersectionality of how the women she portrays navigate these lived experiences is rarely given proper literary consideration. When Morrison writes, she is seen as only writing Blackness—and this very perception of her writing severely hinders its capacity to be discussed within the feminist context. I maintain, however, that Morrison and her writing is as feminist as it is, decidedly, Black.

In this paper I will be discussing Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Tar Baby as works of feminist literature, particularly examining the ways in which Black feminist thought is represented throughout her prose, greater themes, and subtle literary choices. Through her exploration of the African American woman’s socialization in both white and Black society, I maintain that Morrison’s writing holds greater intersectional implications that not only highlight the lived experiences of Black Americans, but consciously bring to light how the brutality of Black womanhood differs from that of Black manhood. Here, Morrison unequivocally captures a history of the Black woman’s degradation perpetuated mercilessly by both white bodies and those born into the very community to which she belongs.

THE BLUEST EYE Set in 1940s Lorain, Ohio, The Bluest Eye tells the story of Pecola Breedlove, a young child whose idealizations of Eurocentric beauty standards serve as a partial catalyst for her tragic and shattering descent into eventual madness. The novel’s title is an

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allusion to this central conflict, as Pecola equates blue eyes—a marker of whiteness—to desirability, believing that she would become more loveable if she possessed this rare feature. Perhaps one of the greatest and most telling literary encapsulations of what it means to live underneath the white gaze of American society, through Pecola, Morrison articulates how “the perpetuation of a physical Anglo-Saxon standard of female beauty as a measurement of self-worth is one of the most damaging components of sexist and racist oppression experienced by the black woman” (Doss 146), as Arul Doss so brilliantly summarizes it. The idea of whiteness and white superiority consumes the novel’s integral characters, as each of them experiences the internalization of self-hatred in their own unique way. Further deconstructing this narrative in order to “periodize” Morrison’s literary works, Malin Walther Pereira illustrates the consequences of the central characters’ preoccupations with white imagery in the following interpretation of the novel’s primary conflict: “References to idols of white female beauty, Greta Garbo, Ginger Rogers, Jean Harlow, and to the child icon of beauty Shirley Temple, bespeak an obsession with a standard of white female beauty that, in turn, renders black women and girls invisible” (Pereira 74). What is most revealing about Morrison’s conceptualization of the white presence in this novel, however, is just how prevalent and destructive its ideologies prove to be even in her deliberate exclusion of any real white antagonists: “What do I care about her old black daddy?” asked Mau reen.

“Black? Who you calling black?”

“You!” “You think you so cute!” I swung at her and missed, hitting Pecola in the face. Furious at my clumsiness, I threw my notebook at her, but it caught her in the small of her velvet back, for she had turned and was flying across the street against traffic.

Safe on the other side, she screamed at us, “I am cute!

And you ugly! Black and ugly black e mos. I am cute!”

(Morrison, TBE 73) In The Bluest Eye, colorism, as a system of oppression, is routinely perpetuated by Black women, girls, men, and boys. It pervades a greater sense of being, separating the desirable from the de-

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jected—largely informing the experiences of the women more than it does the men. This, of course, is no accident on Morrison’s part. The commonly held belief that light-skin Maureen and Geraldine are the cutest or more appealing of the Black girls and women who surround them can be accredited to white supremacy’s expansive reach. A culture that began on plantations still standing on American soil, the birthplace of what is known as the house negro-field negro mentality.ii The one-drop rule once used to separate African Americans of mixed heritage into racial categories: octoroons, quadroons, and hexadecaroons.iii Attitudes of Black separatism are routinely indoctrinated into the novel’s characters; it is the reason why Maureen calls Pecola and Claudia, ‘Black’, as though the word were an insult. It is evidenced by Geraldine who carefully explains to her son, Junior, “the difference between colored people and niggers” (TBE 87).

How according to this racially separatist rhetoric, “colored people were neat and quiet; niggers were dirty and loud” (TBE 87).

Though Geraldine’s son, like her and her family, is Black—she maintains and imparts on the child a sense of elitism inherently tied to their financial status and lighter appearance. Junior is taught that white children will not want to play with him if he acts like a lower-class Black child, though we as readers know this is flimsy reasoning that parallels the misconceptions of the slave era. Just as there was no real distinction in whether one worked inside the plantation or on its fields during the era of American enslavement, as at the core of it white slave-masters still saw those they enslaved as subhuman, Black elitism and colorism can only do so much to shield The Bluest Eye’s characters from white hatred and ultimately works to inform a greater system of violence and oppression.

Pecola undoubtedly suffers under colorism’s oppressive hand more than any of the novel’s other characters. She learns to hate herself before she can properly conceive of her own beauty, only eleven years old and already traumatized by hegemonic iterations of desirability that she will never be capable of physically conforming to. This unrelenting cognizance of Blackness follows Pecola everywhere she goes, stripping her of a sense of self long before it does her sanity: “Long hours she sat looking in the mirror, trying to discover the secret of

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the ugliness, the ugliness that made her ignored or despised at school, by teachers and classmates alike” (TBE 45). The steady erosion of Pecola’s self-esteem is what ultimately primes her for, and makes her most susceptible to, the abuse inflicted by those around her. And while Black girls and women are shown to play both a passive and active role in upholding the demoralizing principles of colorism, Black men are some of the novel’s most violent offenders: “A group of boys was circling and holding at bay a victim, Pecola Breedlove.

Bay Boy, Woodrow Cain, Buddy Wilson, Junie Bug—like a necklace of semiprecious stones they surrounded her.

Heady with the smell of their own musk, thrilled by the easy power of a majority, they gaily harassed her.

“Black e mo. Black e mo. Yadaddsleepsnekked. Black e mo black e mo ya dadd sleeps nekked. Black e mo ...”

They had extemporized a verse made up of two insults about matters over which the victim had no control: the color of her skin and speculations on the sleeping habits of an adult, wildly fitting in its incoherence. That they themselves were black, or that their own father had similarly relaxed habits was irrelevant. It was their contempt for their own blackness that gave the first insult its teeth.

They seemed to have taken all of their smoothly cultivated ignorance, their exquisitely learned self-hatred, their elaborately designed hopelessness and sucked it all up into a fiery cone of scorn that had burned for ages in the hollows of their minds—cooled—and spilled over lips of outrage, consuming whatever was in its path.” (TBE 65) This passage speaks to the nature of how the Black woman experiences oppression in her own community: a cycle of subjugation kept alive by Black men who, despite their Blackness, are still capable of leveraging their gender privilege in order to participate in violent misogynoir against women of darker skin tones. “The most disrespected person in America is the Black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the Black woman. The most neglected person in America is the Black woman,” so said Malcolm Xiv at the height of his political activism and is reflected in a failure to preserve Pecola’s own fragile girlhood. Morrison makes clear that Black women have never been afforded the luxury of being children. More than

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that, she cements this idea that it is in the formative years of a darker-skinned Black girl’s life where she will first experience the common doctrine that is the Black woman’s general undesirability within both white and Black society. Whether this is perpetuated by young boys on a schoolyard who are quickly taught to project internalized attitudes of self-hatred onto darkskinned Black girls and women, racist white store clerks, or men like Pecola’s father, Cholly, whose own experiences with racism will inform their future acts of violence against the Black women who remind them of their racialized degradation, misogynoir undeniably shapes Black womanhood and Black women’s experiences with sexism in a respect far more complex than what white feminist theory will acknowledge.

Morrison expertly traces Black men’s role in the upholding of patriarchy through the destructiveness of a young Cholly’s hatred for Darlene. After the pair are caught in the middle of a sexual encounter by two white men who then proceed to humiliate them, the following reflection is offered: “Sullen, irritable, he cultivated his hatred of Darlene.

Never did he once consider directing his hatred toward the hunters. Such an emotion would have destroyed him. They were big, white, armed men. He was small, black, helpless […] He was, in time, to discover that hatred of white men—but not now. Not in impotence but later, when the hatred could find sweet expression. For now, he hated the one who had created the situation, the one who bore witness to his failure, his impotence.”

(TBE 150-51) Here, Morrison crystallizes the grassroots of gender oppression within the Black community, a social condition rooted in the nuances of the Black man’s racial inferiority complex—violent ideations expressed towards an undeserving receiver based on the implications of race and racial relations. This hatred for and simultaneous powerlessness against white oppressors, in time, manifests as a subconscious compulsion to dominate Black women as a means of inflicting the same abuse and pain the Black man has long been subjected to by white society. Cholly’s inability to reconcile his conscious and subconscious understanding of who his true enemy is, an internal conflict that fuels his rage towards the wife he mercilessly beats and the house

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he burns down in drunken stupor, affirms the nature of violent actions and ideologies endured by the Black woman within her own community. A culture of abuse firmly entrenched in early ideas of gender superiority; brutality made permissible under an antiquated system of sexual hegemony that still defines contemporary conditions of gender relations. Through these acts of violence against women, the Black man is perceived as having elevated his status among his own people. This inherently allows for a reclamation of the masculinity stripped away from him and his ancestors who were subjected to the same sexual and physical violence perpetrated by white slave owners.

As readers we are made to consider this culture of violence for a final time through the horrifying rape of Pecola, who Cholly violates in what is construed as both an act of tenderness and hatred: “Cholly loved her. I’m sure he did. He, at any rate, was the one who loved her enough to touch her, envelop her, give something of himself to her. But his touch was fatal, and the something he gave her filled the matrix of her agony with death. Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe.” (TBE 206) Though Pecola conceives a child through this act of violation, like the marigolds planted in volatile soil by Claudia and her sister, Freida, the baby dies—and it is here that we bear witness to Pecola’s devastating mental unravelling. It is a chilling psychotic crescendo, made even more tragic by Pecola’s delusions of having finally received her greatest wish: blue eyes. And in her subsequent community disownment and condemnation to a life in isolation, we come to understand the ways in which Black girls and women are misused and abused, only to be discarded in the end by those who did the using: “This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live” (TBE 206). While this metaphor alludes to the greater concept of African American oppression in a nation whose greater values have never aligned with the preservation of Black life, Mor-

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rison’s use of the dying marigold reinforces the destructiveness of racialized gender oppression. How, under the watchful and unforgiving American eye, the line that divides love and hatred is easily obscured by white cruelty that has outlived an era of bondage. So long as our systems of patriarchy and racism are not dismantled, those who do not benefit from the privileges of these institutions will only suffer a shared misery beneath its oppressive hand. Black men, like Cholly, will continue to mistreat Black women, even those they purport to love, because they are a reminder of their own traumas deeply sewn into the fabric of America’s history: a pattern of sexual abuse and violation that greatly conflicts with society’s dehumanizing ideas of what a man ought to be, inspiring both confusion and rage within Black men who have separated the idea of their victimhood from that of the Black woman’s—though we know the two to be painfully similar. Trauma, then, becomes a vessel for the perpetuation of moral and physical degradation primarily endured by the susceptible Black woman, a victim whose intersectional identity ensures a culture of violence that she will become subject to at the hands of her sex and later held accountable for as a condition of her race.v TAR BABY If Morrison’s The Bluest Eye situates Black womanhood within what is, perceivably, the collective African American struggle to maintain a sense of social, cultural, economic, and mental agency underneath the authoritative white rule—Tar Baby, undoubtedly then, serves as its contextual opposite. Jadine Childs, one of the novel’s two protagonists, is perhaps one of Morrison’s most unexpected characters in that she almost seems to defy the writer’s earlier depictions of how the Black woman is made to navigate her place in both white and Black society. With eyes the color of mink and a long, elegant stature, Jadine—a European model perpetually surrounded by the grandeur of white affluence—is the picture of conventional beauty. Her relationship to Blackness and Black femininity starkly contrasts that of Pecola Breedlove’s, more so mirroring the privilege of The Bluest Eye’s light-skin characters as to further explore the complex

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nature of colorism. Pereira expertly summarizes the polarizing racial conditions of these two novels, emphasizing how in her writing before Tar Baby, “Morrison repeatedly depicts Black female characters as being engulfed by white ideals” (Pereira 74) and transfixed by their dazzling public figures. Jadine, however, differs from these female characters who are “hurt by, struggle with, and ultimately succumb to internalized views of beauty” (75) as a result of her fitting into the restrictive mold that is the Eurocentric image of desirability. It is not, then, the white-defined standard of female beauty that Jadine struggles to identify with—as her conformity is not inherently a facet of self she endeavors to challenge—but rather its Black-defined counterpart (75). Through the development of Jadine, Morrison imagines up a critical dimension of Black womanhood as it relates to the diaspora, introducing readers to a figure of conflicting cultural identity: the Black woman whose severance from her community and racial ambiguity has consequently alienated her from a sense of Blackness entirely.

In Tar Baby, the laboring class, which seems to be the primary subject of Morrison’s previous novels, is purposefully replaced by the one percent and those carefully positioned within their highly illusive world. Here, opulence—as defined by a colonial authority—operates in place of a collective sense of economic and emotional turmoil shared by the developing African American community. Notably, Morrison removes this novel from the American context almost entirely, primarily situating the story on a French island somewhere along the Caribbean Sea. An ode to the luxurious wealth of high society, unlike The Bluest Eye, where white characters play a passive role in facilitating the novel’s underlying conflict, much of the interactions that make up Tar Baby are situated around Jadine’s relationships with white people. Her boyfriend, Ryk, is a wealthy white man. Valerian Street—Jadine’s elderly patron who finances her studies abroad in Paris—and his second wife, Margaret, are also white. Through Morrison’s departure from her own literary conventions and subsequent adoption of an overwhelming colonial presence, we are quickly made to consider the nature of Jadine’s cultural and mental alienation. After the death of her parents early in her childhood, Jadine is taken in by her aunt

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and uncle who work for the wealthy Street family. As two of the novel’s only Black characters, Sydney and Ondine Childs play a supporting role in the establishment of Jadine’s identity as an antithesis of Blackness as a social construct. Though their existence is reduced to a socially permissible kind of servitude, the Childs’ take pride in sharing their employers’ narrow values, adopting the house negro disposition as to separate themselves from the island’s indigenous. They view themselves as superior to Gideon and Thérèse, another Black couple employed by Valerian Street until they are accused of stealing from the family, due to their belief that they are respectable and “genuine Philadelphia Negro[es]” (Morrison, TB 284). This, of course, introduces the conflict of racial purity—as the Childs’ are not considered by other characters as being “fully Black” but, instead, implied victims of a cultural hybridity comprised of the dominant white standards imparted upon them by their employers.

Having been removed from the American environment during her formative years, and subjected to the eurocentrism of cultural diffusion, Jadine does not know what it means to be a Black woman in the “traditional” sense as a condition of her upbringing. Her education is presented as having prioritized colonial recollections of history, rather than centering the heritage of her own people. Her travels are oriented around Westernized sights and cities. She is intrinsically linked to the novel’s Black characters who struggle with their own racial identity issues— Sydney and Ondine—at the hands of the white superiority complex. And through the generous relationship she has with the wealthy Streets couple, she is inherently socialized to value white culture over that of her own to the point of distancing herself from her biological family, identifying with Valerian and Margaret as surrogate parental figures. Though she is a success and symbol of beauty as measured by white standards, her racial identity presents an internal conflict representative of Jadine’s cognizance of how she differs from those she is surrounded by.

One of the most notable instances of this sense of racial insecurity is seen when Jadine reflects on her encounter with “the woman in yellow” at the Parisian market. Jadine observes that the woman materializing before her is “much too tall” with “too much hip” and “too much bust” (TB 45). To Jadine, she is an

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“unphotographable beauty” who her modelling agency would “laugh out of the lobby” (TB 45, 46), which causes her to question the inexplicable preoccupation she and those around her have with this woman: “Why was she and everybody else in the store transfixed? The height? The skin like tar against the canary yellow dress […] The people in the aisles watched her without embarrassment, with full glances instead of sly ones” (TB 45).

When Jadine finally makes eye contact with the woman, she believes herself to have seen “something in her eyes so powerful it had burnt away the eyelashes” (TB 45). Through this observation, we come to learn that Morrison’s brief inclusion of this minor character is meant to challenge a conventional standard of beauty that Jadine, and those who think like her, have been routinely encouraged to idealize. Jadine’s sense of self is threatened by the woman in yellow’s audacity to be authentically and unapologetically Black. How she walks down the market aisles “as though her many-colored sandals were pressing gold tracks on the floor,” with “two upside-down V’s […] scorned into each of her cheeks” and her hair “wrapped in a gelée as yellow as her dress” (TB 45). In portraying the woman in yellow as having a strong tether to her African heritage, Morrison contrasts this assurance of authenticity with Jadine’s lack-there-of. A double orphan in both the literal and cultural sense, the short encounter ends with the woman contemptuously spitting at Jadine, leaving the model with lingering doubts regarding the security of her success in the Western world.

This sense of insecurity is further reflected in Jadine’s fear that through her position within Western culture despite her racial dissimilarity, she is only performing an implied sense of Blackness that does not align with who she really is inside.

We are given an intimate glimpse into this moral plight as Jadine reflects on her relationship with Ryk: “I wonder if the person he wants to marry is me or a black girl? And if it isn’t me he wants, but any black girl who looks like me, talks and acts like me, what will happen when he finds out that I hate ear hoops, that I don’t have to straighten my hair, that Mingus puts me to sleep, that sometimes I want to get out of my skin and be the only person inside—not American—not black—just me?” (TB 48)

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Jadine’s insights are crucial in understanding both featurism and tokenism as they relate to the Black woman’s experience outside her own racial community. Morrison’s decision to revolve much of Jadine’s character around inherently being an ethnic token of white society, as articulated through the implications of her career and the countless number of men who pursue her, is incredibly important as it actualizes the colorist phenomenon of the “socially and sexually acceptable” Black woman. Jadine’s success among those who belong to high society is an attribute of a white fascination with exoticism as it is presented through Blackness and Black aesthetics. The Black woman’s existence is widely subject to both passive and active appropriation by a white society that is both intrigued and repulsed by her. With her pronounced features, she is a figure of overwhelming sexuality made for covert consumption as articulated in the works of feminist theorist, Patricia Hill Collins, who argued that once “the fear and fascination of female sexuality was projected onto Black women; the passionless ‘lady’ arose in symbiosis with the primitively sexual slave” (Collins 138), solidifying the colonization of the Black woman’s body and her implied inability to fulfill the marriageable woman’s highly coveted, yet sexless, role. An exploitation that is further illustrated in the Elle magazine photoshoot spread Jadine shares with the novel’s second protagonist, Son: “After rummaging awhile she pulled out a fashion magazine with her face on the cover. When she handed it to him he sat down at the desk and made a flute sound between his teeth. And then another as his eyes traveled from the crown of her head to the six centimeters of cleavage supported (more or less) by silver lamé. Her hair in the picture was pressed flat to her head, pulled away from her brow revealing a neat hairline. Her eyes were the color of mink and her lips wet and open. He continued the flute sounds and then opened the magazine. After flipping the pages for a few seconds he came to a four-page spread of her in other poses, other clothes, other hair, but always the same wet and open lips.

“Goddamn,” he whispered. “Go-oddamn.” (Morrison, TB 115) In this passage Jadine is presented as being styled and directed

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in an overtly sexual manner by white colleaguesvi as evidenced, not only in Morrison’s use of descriptive imagery, but through Son’s spirited reaction to the pictures. This perverted form of “admiration,” however, is largely reserved for the Black woman who is capable of conforming to the Eurocentric standard of beauty. Her appeal is rooted in how she reflects whiteness while still retaining some semblance of Black “authenticity” that intrigues those observing her—a representation of what white women and men desire without straying too far from their perceived sense of self. Even the title Jadine is known by in the modelling world, “the copper Venus,” serves as a subtle marker for her simultaneous sexualization and tokenization underneath the white gaze. Venus was, of course, the Roman goddess of love, beauty, desire, and sex. The name then, serves as a sexual-inuendo while also being an allusion to Blackness without direct mention of it, hence the use of the word ‘copper’ in place of something more racially concrete. This is the Black aesthetic as it relates to Eurocentric pillars of beauty. A reminder that Blackness is only seen as beautiful in the context of how it reflects whiteness, and when it is represented as an extension of erotic imagery. Lauren Michele Jackson explores the subject of appropriation with far more nuance in White Negroes, affirming this culture of everybody wanting “the insurgence of blackness with the wealth of whiteness” (Jackson 19). Accepting “blackness only as a suggestion” while still remaining non-black as to “keep centuries of subjugation and violence at bay with the prefix of non- firmly in place” (19). The Black woman, especially the racially ambiguous one, is routinely stripped of her individuality in order to fulfill an image made for white fetishization at the expense of her own personhood. It does not matter that she does not, in actuality, adhere to a preconceived notion of her cultural background, so long as she fills the mental channel that is the white observer’s dehumanizing perception of her. In that grain then, she is a highly eroticized commodity made easily dispensable by those who do the consuming. The vision of her is seamlessly projected onto the next permissible model—her entire identity a figment of the white imagination and its highly generalized expectations.

This sentiment echoes in Jadine’s feelings of perpetual

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“loneliness” and “inauthenticity” as inspired by her brief engagement with “the woman in yellow.” Her questioning of Ryk’s intentions towards her—“is the person he wants to marry me or a black girl?”—and if he will still find Jadine desirable should he learn that she does not have an affinity for jazz as the conventional and caricatural African American woman should. When he realizes that she longs to transcend the constraints of both her Blackness and womanhood, the impositions of a culture she has been stripped of at the hands of her environment. While Pereira elects to pose Jadine’s character as a portrait of “the cultural costs to the African American community of blacks who identify with white culture to the extent that they reject their own” (Pereira 75), I argue that this is far too simplistic and reductive of an approach to understand such a multi-dimensional and complicated character. Though Morrison makes clear Jadine’s complacency in her own cultural assimilation and preference for the white aesthetic, as opposed to the one of her ancestral heritage, I posit this preoccupation with whiteness as a means of survival in a world that has historically failed to safeguard the futures of Black beings—especially those belonging to the Black woman.

When Son Green, an African American fugitive on the run for the last eight years after killing his wife, is revealed to be hiding in the Streets’ island home—Morrison juxtaposes the values of what is, seemingly, authentic Blackness with that of the colonized Black identity. Son serves as Jadine’s opposite in almost every conceivable way. He believes that Black people who adopt the white mentality and its values are traitors to their race, a palpable disdain that is reflected in the contemptuous relationship he shares with Sydney and Ondine. Son also takes great pride in being defined by his Blackness and feels a strong sense of attachment to his hometown of Eloe, Florida. Morrison’s use of this character as a love interest for the racially conflicted Jadine serves to highlight the intricacies of how the protagonist perceives and is perceived by the world around her. Upon their first encounter in her room, Morrison accentuates Jadine’s assumption of the colonial doctrine through her racially charged presumptions of Son. When describing his appearance, she is quick to note that he has “wild, aggressive, vicious hair that

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needed to be put in jail; uncivilized, reform-school hair” (Morrison, TB 113). The precision of these words implies that, through her removal from the African American community, Jadine has been socialized to view her own people through the eyes of their white oppressors. She reduces Son to a caricature that is the threatening and aggressive Black man. This is seen shortly again when the pair get into an argument after Son voices his vulgar assumptions of the lengths Jadine must have resorted to in order to advance herself in the modelling industry: “Valerian will kill you, ape. Sydney will chop you, slice you …”

“No, they won’t.”

“You rape me and they’ll feed you to the alligators. Count on it, nigger. You good as dead right now.”

“Rape? Why you little white girls always think somebody’s trying to rape you?”

“White?” She was startled out of fury. “I’m not … you know I’m not white!”

“No? Then why don’t you settle down and stop acting like it.”

“Oh, God,” she moaned. “Oh, good God, I think you better throw me out the window because as soon as you let me loose I am going to kill you. For that alone. Just for that. For pulling that black-woman-white-woman shit on me. Never mind the rest. What you said before, that was nasty and mean, but if you think you can get away with telling me what a black woman is or ought to be …”

“I can tell you.” He nestled his cheek in her hair and she struggled in his arms.

“You can’t, you ugly barefoot baboon! Just because you’re black you think you can come in here and give me orders? Sydney was right. He should have shot you on the spot. But no. A white man thought you were a human being and should be treated like one. He’s civilized and made the mistake of thinking you might be too. That’s because he didn’t smell you. But I did and I know you’re an animal because I smell you.” (TB 121) Jadine’s repeated use of the word “ape” and references to being “civilized” reflect an unconscious alignment with the white ethos. I pose this alignment as being an unconscious one due to Jadine’s strong resentment of Son’s referring to her as a “little white girl” and her immediate recognition that his words are a parallel to her cultural severance. In this moment, she is taken aback by this attack on her character, though while she tries to

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distance herself from the identity Son projects onto her, she cannot help herself from reaffirming his beliefs when she reverts to calling him an “ugly barefoot baboon” who cannot be civilized. Here, Jadine’s racial insecurities are unearthed once more, and we are shown that even in her attempts to reclaim a semblance of her ethnic identity, she cannot help but to succumb to the white ideologies that have consumed her since the death of her parents. This, of course, becomes a catalyst for the novel’s central tensions as Son and Jadine grow closer in the remaining half of the story. As Jadine begins to fall in love with Son, the pair travel to New York City where they live in a borrowed apartment with little worries about money or finding permanent work. Jadine feels most alive in New York, as she takes the time to ruminate on her feelings towards the city: “This is home, she thought with an orphan’s delight, not Paris, not Baltimore, not Philadelphia. This is home.

The city had gone on to something more interesting to it than the black people who had fascinated it a decade ago, but if ever there was a black woman’s town, New York was it.” (TB 222) Having grown closer as lovers, the carefree sense of happiness shared by Son and Jadine in the city is quickly replaced with resentment when the two leave for Florida to visit Son’s hometown. Here, Jadine grows bored with the southern African American culture that Son holds so dearly, wishing they could return to their life in New York and the extravagant plans Jadine envisions for the two of them. She has trouble understanding his insistence on returning to his roots, how even in the tender moments they share, he still longs for the stability of Eloe. Bitterly, Jadine comes to her own dissatisfied conclusions about life in the South: “Eloe was rotten and more boring than ever.

A burnt-out place. There was no life there. Maybe a past but definitely no future and finally there was no interest. All that Southern small-town country romanticism was a lie, a joke, kept secret by people who could not function elsewhere” (TB 259).

Son, while deeply in love with Jadine, cannot reconcile his feelings for her and his devotion to his sense of cultural self. Even Morrison’s naming of this character illuminates his fidelity and valuing of ancestral heritage and family—the principles that

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have been passed down to him and those who share the color of his skin. So, when Jadine returns to New York with intentions of reforming Son who ultimately decides to re-join her, it is here that the novel’s central tensions reveal the irreconcilable nature of white and Black culture regardless of who happens to be fulfilling its social obligations. Jadine wants a life with Son as she sees fit, eager to have him enroll in college as to find him a respectable job in the eyes of white society, underscoring its firm grasp on the model’s sense of autonomy. Son, however, resists Jadine’s efforts to rebuild him into the colonial caricature she cannot help but to idealize despite her affections. He violently accuses her of willingly assuming the role of the tar baby the white man has created out of her, an outburst that results in Jadine leaving Son permanently: “You can go to law school,” she said.

“I don’t want to be a lawyer,” he said.

“Why?” she asked. […]

“I can’t hassle nobody that looks like me, or you either.”

“Oh, shit. There’s other kinds of law.”

“No, there isn’t. Besides I don’t want to know their laws.

I want to know mine.”

“You don’t have any.”

“Then that’s the problem with it.”

She fought him, but she never mentioned the night women. They fought instead about Valerian Street. He would lend them the money to open a shop or start an agency.

Son said, “No way and I am not about to sit here and argue about that white man.”

“Who cares what color he is?”

“I care. And he cares. He cares what color he is.”

“He’s a person, not a white man. He put me through school.”

“You have told me that a million times. Why not educate

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you? You did what you were told, didn’t you? Ondine and Sydney were obedient, weren’t they? White people love obedience—love it! Did he do anything hard for you? Did he give up anything important for you?

“He wasn’t required to. But maybe he would have since he was not required to educate me.”

“That was toilet paper, Jadine. He should have wiped his ass after he shit all over your uncle and aunt. He was required to; he still is. His debt is big, woman. He can’t never pay it off!”

“He educated me!” Jadine was shouting, “and you can’t make me think that was not an important thing to do. Because nobody else did! No. Body. Else. Did. You didn’t!”

“What do you mean, I didn’t?”

“I mean you didn’t! You didn’t!” She slapped him and before he could turn his head back she was choking him with both hands around his neck, screaming all the while, “You didn’t you didn’t.” (TB 263) It is at this breaking point that Morrison reveals the core of Jadine’s character: an indebtedness to white saviors who she believes to have rescued her from a life of struggle that is exemplified in the burden carried by The Bluest Eye’s laboring women. The life she observes in Eloe where women put men ahead of themselves in order to assume the role of homemaker, a motherly instinct Jadine has never actively subscribed to. We see this even before the boiling over of the novel’s underlying tension during their time in New York when Son asks Jadine why she had ever left America to pursue a life abroad: “She said she always thought she had three choices: marry a dope king or a doctor, model, or teach art at Jackson High. In Europe she thought there might be a fourth choice” (TB 225). Jadine’s allegiance to whiteness, then, reflects the ways in which Black women are pigeonholed by the racial constraints of life in America.

Through proximity to whiteness and the opportunities provided by colonial institutions, Jadine partially transcends the oppression we see so violently consume Black girls and women who are subject to constant degradation at the hands of their circumstances. Women with no identity outside of being mothers and daughters; a mammificationvii of the Black woman that

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has historically reduced her to the role of “caretaker” for those around her, though she herself is seldom taken care of. When Jadine takes a stab at Son, enunciating the word “you” while speaking of her education, she does not mean him, but instead, the word is used to implicate the limitations of Blackness. The world has never been kind to Black women, and while Jadine harbors her own racially fueled strife as an extension of her ethnic identity and cultural severance, in the end, she is still able to discern the privilege her life holds in comparison to the one that Black women are expected to be living—the life Son would have preferred to give her should they have stayed in Eloe. While Jadine’s decision to leave Son and return to Paris at the novel’s conclusion can be read as a selfish and self-hating one, I present it as being necessary in order to convey just how few choices the Black woman is given in matters of building a life for herself. Jadine has those choices, and she has them because she is able to fit the white mold. She knows, by the novel’s end and even before this point, that the charm of her life is an extension of how effortlessly she slips in and out of white culture with a fluidity that has not been afforded to those like the woman in yellow. And while the inauthenticity she feels at the hands of this cultural dichotomy is enough to make her question her own security, there is an awareness that in a capitalist system that favors and rewards whiteness while punishing Blackness, the education she has been given and the advantages that follow could only be provided by white hands. That options for the Black woman’s survival are few and far between under this oppressive economic and social regime. Without Valerian Street, Jadine would not have amounted to the success that she is—she would be just like the women she resents in Eloe and the mammy caricature she has slowly watched her aunt conform to: “I don’t want to be … like you […] I don’t want to learn how to be the kind of woman you’re talking about because I don’t want to be that kind of woman” (TB 282).

Though Son can partially “unorphan” Jadine through the love he gives her, as articulated in the stunning details of their trip to New York City, he could never save her from the reality that is the Black woman’s perpetual sacrifice. Jadine reminds us that the Black woman is rarely in the position of

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having it all, even when her circumstances appear as far more desirable than those of the one perpetually condemned to her struggle. She can be loved, or she can be successful, but never both. She can either be the authentic, culturally-enlightened Black woman or the tar baby—but the two must never converge.

Jadine chooses her career and opulent lifestyle over Son, resigns herself to a future spent trying very hard to “forget the man who fucked like a star” (TB 292). She chooses to be the tar baby the white environment has made her; despite the pain and insecurity it brings when she lays awake at night. And this is, perhaps, one of the most powerful yet poignant decisions she could make as a Black woman who has been afforded the luxury of having options. Morrison leaves much of Tar Baby up to interpretation; its ending and even elements of characterization intentionally ambiguous. There are no right or wrong characters; no conclusions or definitive answers as to what the correct way is to live. Son and Jadine are simply two odds of a spectrum that has been fashioned by the white imagination and its cunning divisiveness. While, in the end, she sacrifices a great love, her authenticity, and cultural agency for a life and career in Paris— Jadine spares herself from the mothering shackles of the Black feminine expectation that destroys women like Pecola’s mother and defines the ones who haunt her many dreams. And though she’ll spend her entire life enduring the degradation that is being the exotic apple of the white eye, her suffering will be a quiet kind of pain—it will be one of privilege.

Returning to Morrison’s earlier convictions so eloquently expressed towards The Bluest Eye’s powerful and provoking conclusion—the intersections of colorism’s oppressive values, as further explored in Tar Baby’s articulations of racial ambiguity, affirm that the only thing this idea of American soil is good for, decidedly then, is nurturing the insidious seeds of white supremacy. And it is those very seeds which ensure, even in the absence of white imagination, a future of racial oppression to be endured far beyond the point at which the strange fruit grows too ripe for the popular tree. This seed, in all its deliberateness, has been buried so deep within the American core; it permeates susceptible Black existence regardless of geographical and cultural borders—viscously consuming collective consciousness as

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to satisfy the will of slave-masters long after their passing. Both The Bluest Eye and Tar Baby show that through colorism and the inextricable self-hatred of racial identity politics, the oppressive ideologies of the past never die, nor can they be severed entirely from their cruel origins. Instead, they live on in those whose destruction they have historically taken great pleasure in, and at the center of this menacing and intricate component of Black oppression is the Black woman. Unquestionably, it is the Black women—particularly those of a darker complexion—in Morrison’s work who suffer the greatest and most overlooked form of subjection due to the intersections of race and gender, as well as proximity to whiteness, which greatly inform how they are viewed by the surrounding world and made to operate within it.

As it stands then, so long as the values of colorism continue to survive America’s history, white oppressors—while still playing a prominent role in the perpetuation of racial subjugation—do not have to lift a hand to inflict the pain and violence of the past—for Black men and women have subconsciously been given the tools to inflict it upon themselves.

TONI MORRISON AS A FEMINIST AUTHOR & CONCLUSION

In a 1978 issue of The Radical Teacher published March of that year, Barbara Smith argues the following regarding Toni Morrison’s feminist authorship in her article, Toward a Black Feminist Criticism: “The mishandling of Black women writers by whites is paralleled more often by their not being handled at all, particularly in feminist criticism” (Smith 21). This sentiment echoes in the enduring silence that surrounds Morrison’s work as a vehicle for feminist discourse within the greater academic setting. The feminist themes traced in this paper as presented in both The Bluest Eye and Tar Baby make clear the grounds for the induction of Morrison’s novels into the feminist literary category, and still there exists a culture of hesitation around her work that almost tokenizes her writing when presented to students in major academic institutions. Earlier I argued that Morrison’s work often suffers from the condition of being examined in the context of Blackness and being Black, thereby hindering its potential for thoughtful consideration within any

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other literary framework. In this final section, I will be closely examining why this is and how the strict racial pigeonholing of Morrison’s novels is detrimental to Black feminist thought’s survival in the literary world.

When Morrison completed her 1955 master’s thesis at Cornell University, her writing partially centered the work of Virgina Woolf and her portrayals of isolation as it relates to the nuances of womanhood. We later see this influence in Morrison’s most acclaimed novels, a redefinition of alienating factors as to apply this repressive lens to the conditions of American racism (Williams 2000). In Beloved, Sethe is made to feel alienated from the African American community that shuns her after committing infanticide to prevent her child from being recaptured and sold into slavery. The Bluest Eye’s cast of darker-skinned female characters are isolated from their light-skin counterparts due to the colorist principles of what it means to be a desirable woman.

Sula further epitomizes this common thread, as Nel and Sula grow distant from other Black women, and even men, as a result of rejecting the constraints of conventional Black womanhood.

And then there’s Tar Baby’s Jadine Childs, who is alienated from a sense of Blackness and Black authenticity at the hands of her deep immersion into the Western culture she was raised in. This underlying presence of Woolf’s influence as a canonical literary feminist figure should be enough in and of itself to affirm Morrison’s own status as a feminist writer. The overt difference in how her work is handled in primarily white intuitions, when compared to the handling of white woman authors, speaks to a greater social condition that fails to address the intricacies of race as it intersects with gender. Smith touches upon this in her dissection of Jerry H. Bryant’s 1973 review of Alice Walker’s In Love & Trouble: Stories of Black Women. In an excerpt of the criticism provided by Smith, the white male reviewer asserts the following: The subtitle of the collection, “Stories of Black women,” is probably an attempt by the publisher to exploit not only black subjects but feminine ones. There is nothing feminist about these stories, however.viii Smith’s analysis of this critical conclusion exposes a common

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mindset that has become an implicit deciding factor in which works are presented as feminist and the ones that are presented as being, simply put, Black: “Blackness and feminism are to his mind mutually exclusive and peripheral to the act of writing fiction. Bryant of course does not consider that Walker might have titled the work herself, nor did he apparently read the book, which unequivocally reveals the author’s feminist consciousness” (Smith 21). Here, I take this argument a step further as to extend it to the root of the Black female author’s feminist erasure: the literary canon’s overwhelming culture of whiteness.

The word America and its various derivatives, whether we choose to consciously acknowledge it or not, is synonymous with white. It is the reason why any other race that claims this nationality must indicate such with a prefix markedly in place as to denote their ethnic identity. Whiteness is the standard; it is the default. American literature, then, suffers from the symptoms of this cultural norm to the point where the white presence has become so highly ingrained in the works which we read, its inherent overtness is shrouded by its own commonality.

Morrison touches upon this condition in a collection of scholarly talks that would later go on to become Playing in the Dark, a compelling literary criticism that explores the racial imagination in writing. When discussing Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, Morrison makes a crucial observation regarding one of the novel’s characters, artfully noting that: “Eddy is white, and we know he is because nobody says so” (Morrison, PITD 72). If the white presence is so deeply entrenched in our society, culture, and art—to the point where it effortlessly evades the politics of distinction when being written about in the literary context—then it is no wonder why the response to a shift in this perspective to highlight a Black variant often results in such a jarring reaction from the reader who has grown accustom to the white standard. The foundational years of America’s history have rendered the concept of Blackness so uncomfortable that its inclusion in literature evokes a response in white readers that does not allow them to see past Blackness in order to pull apart the connections between our various oppressive institutions. Yet, while the idea of collective Black suffering is one of great discomfort for the white audience, it remains the only

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thread that can be pulled at when discussing the Black presence in America. I maintain, then, that there is very rarely an equilibrium when it comes to the consumption of Black art and literature, but rather a general academic propensity for studying Blackness as an overarching condition solely in the context of struggle and seldomly in triumph. What this does then, is that it tokenizes the Black novel by proposing that every hardship that is thoughtfully illustrated, particularly by the Black woman writer, is a circumstance of Black people’s general mistreatment throughout the many periods following American enslavement.

This expectation that all Black literature must, in every respect, adhere to a strict criterion reflective of a known history is not a new one. James Baldwin has voiced similar frustrations as they relate to his departure from expected Blackness with the publication of Giovanni’s Room—a novel that confounded white audiences due to a perceivable conflict between the absence of a distinct literary Black presence and Baldwin’s own status as a Black author. “Whites want Black writers to mostly deliver something as [if] it were an official version of the Black experience” (qtd. in Grandt 273). Though Baldwin’s convictions arose in response to his inherent distancing from Blackness entirely to, instead, write about white subjects, the reductive nature of this very mindset harbored by white readers can still be understood as playing a crucial role in the inadvertent harm posed to the conventions of Black feminist thought as it is conceptualized in various works of literature. The demand for authentic articulations of the Black American experience, as expressed by the white audience, implies that there may exist something as simple and compact as a universal reality shared by all Black people. There is, however, no such universality to Blackness nor is there any simplistic means of depicting the Black condition. Not when we must factor in the constraints of gender and sexuality—not to mention economic and social class—which will play a crucial role in determining how one experiences oppression both inside and outside of their racial community. Thus, the overlooking of the distinctive patterns of how Black femininity shapes the Black woman’s reality in comparison to that of the Black man’s in Morrison’s work, and others just like it, in search of a more uniform understanding of Blackness in America, results

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in the dismissal of key feminist themes that allow us to really conceptualize the Black woman’s unique existence as a figure of intersectional subjection. Smith summarizes these very convictions with a high degree of eloquence in her discussion of the Black feminist writing approach: “The way […] Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Walker, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker incorporate the female activities of rootworking, herbal medicine, conjure and midwifery into the fabric of their stories is not mere coincidence, nor is their use of specifically Black female language to express their own and their characters’ thoughts accidental. The use of Black women’s language and cultural experience in books by Black women about Black women results in a miraculously rich coalescing of form and content and also takes their writing far beyond the confines of white/male literary structures.” (Smith 22-23) Toni Morrison deserves a place in feminist literary discourse and criticism just as much as the women before her who are widely and actively discussed in this grain. The overlooking of her works as literary formulations of the constraints of womanhood only reinforces the idea that the thoughts, ideas, and presence of Black girls and women are, ultimately, dispensable.

Since the earliest women’s liberation movements, the experiences and contributions of Black women have been placed on a perpetual backburner as to amplify the voices of white women. However, just as the gendered nuances of the Black man’s reality differ from the Black woman’s, the same rhetoric can be applied to the racial implications of the Black woman’s feminism when compared to her white counterparts. Jane Austen’s literature is not accessible to all women because it is situated around the white woman’s position in society, which looks very different from that of the Black woman’s. The same can be said of the novels penned by both Woolf and Brontë. What are we saying, then, when we collectively uphold these works as universal pillars of feminist literary thought while renouncing those of Toni Morrison’s in similar context? We are telling Black girls and women that feminism, specifically as it is presented in the literary field, is not for us. The ways in which we examine Toni Morrison’s work in the academic context needs to be reshaped

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as to spotlight the intersectional dimensions of her text in order to recenter the Black woman in literary feminist discourse. This begins with understanding the theology of Morrison’s work, especially Beloved, which is frequently examined solely in the realm of historical context as a result of its meta-slave genre categorization, concurrently neglecting the fact that, at its core, the novel is a highly poignant and unmistakably spiritual piece of Black woman scholarship.

The framing of Beloved as primarily being a historicized recapitulation of slavery’s harrowing atrocities is unquestionably challenged by the novel’s own supernatural authority firmly rooted in the feminine energy of the Yoruba religious myth which circumvents a monolithic historical approach to writing.

Teresa N. Washington’s The Mother-Daughter Àjé̱ Relationship in Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” details the Black feminine spiritual quality of Morrison’s work with a level of feminist recognition that surpasses traditional explorations of Sethe’s relationship with the ghost who haunts the novel’s breathtaking pages. “Àjé̱ is a Yoruba word and concept that describes a spiritual force that is thought to be inherent in Africana women” (Washington 171). This concept of Àjé̱, as Washington explains, is tethered to a kind of “female ownership” and “administration,” and “heralded as the ‘Womb of Creation’” (171). For that reason, then, “owners of Àjé̱ are said to control reproductive organs, and they are bonded through the cosmic power and the life-giving force of menstrual blood” (171). The spiritual maternity of the Yoruba religion is essential in understanding the nature of Sethe’s haunting and the inherent femininity of Morrison’s prose. When the spirit of Beloved emerges from the water as a tangible incarnation of the ghost child who haunts 124 Bluestone Road, “sopping wet and breathing shallow” (Morrison, Beloved 60), Sethe’s bladder almost immediately fills to capacity resulting in her having to relieve herself behind the house: “She never made the outhouse.

Right in front of its door she had to lift her skirts, and the water she voided was endless […] like flooding the boat when Denver was born […] there was no stopping water breaking from a womb and there was no stopping now” (Beloved 61). Morrison’s brilliant comparison of Sethe’s full bladder to the action of water breaking from a womb affirms the feminine lineage of

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African religion. Sethe is cosmically linked to the spirit of her deceased child with a kind of painful grip that goes far beyond the act of killing to spare one’s offspring from the devastation of American enslavement. Instead, it takes on a cosmology of its own, comparable to the Yoruba legends which establish Black women as having a mother-daughter unity beyond a secular understanding of blood ties. Though Morrison’s best-selling novel is loosely based on the story of Margaret Garner, the real-life fugitive slave also charged for committing infanticide to prevent her child’s capture, I would encourage readers to still consider the significance of relaying such a tale through the perspective of a woman and the importance held in the fact that, similar to Margaret, the only child Sethe is able to succeed in killing is a girl, unwittingly sparing her boys. If the gravity of Beloved was rooted solely in capturing the historical barbarity of slavery and its moral consequences, then the novel’s integrity would remain largely unchanged if Morrison were to tell this story from the perspective of a man. There is a deliberateness to the novel’s textual elements firmly rooted in the divine Black feminine that cannot be separated from the very elements of Beloved that make this story so impactful—and this goes far beyond a dedication to historical accuracy. Sethe’s pain, which makes this novel the literary equivalent to a raw and gaping wound, is one that could only be inflicted so deeply within the mother who has felt her child grow inside her, only to be subjected to the agony of witnessing the slow and prolonged starvation of that very same life at the hands of her violent and oppressive slave-masters: white children suckling every last drop of milk from her breast, leaving her barren and unable to provide for her own child. This is not, then, a story about slavery so much as it is a story that employs slavery as a contextual backdrop to accentuate our understanding of the Black woman’s history of loss and longing mirrored by the way in which Morrison so poignantly writes Sethe’s humiliation, her exhaustion, inherent dehumanization and eventual reclamation of self. And how the very same Àjé̱ that is crystallized by this text is reflected in its source material, the capturing of Margaret Garner’s own devastating plight that epitomizes a unique sort of brutality that is reserved for and can only be understood by the Black woman:

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“It is well-known that Beloved is a re-membering and re-ordering of the life, actions, and Àjé̱ of a woman named Margaret Garner. In “The Negro Woman,” Herbert Aptheker recalls Garner’s act of Àjé̱, which occurred in 1856: “One may better understand now a Margaret Garner, fugitive slave, who, when trapped near Cincinnati, killed her own daughter and tried to kill herself. She rejoiced that the girl was dead — ‘now she would never know what a woman suffers as a slave’ — and pleaded to be tried for murder” (qtd. in Washington 178) […] Garner ordered her existence, and that of her progeny, with the only means available to her — her Àjé̱. And Sethe uses the same maternal, retributive, protective Àjé̱ as the historical Garner.” (Washington 177-78) It is hardly coincidental that towards the novel’s end, when Beloved’s tormenting of Sethe grows great enough for Denver to seek outside help, that it is a group of Black women who come to Sethe’s aid in order to exorcise the spirit from 124 Bluestone Road. This is a nod to the strong spiritual bond that is the Black feminine, a unity that supersedes the politics of individuality to push for collective liberation. At its core, there is a feminist theology that Morrison interweaves throughout her work that once began with the very nuances of how Black womanhood was molded under the influence of slavery—creating a shared identity that has allowed Black women to find a semblance of strength in the divine. Jacqueline Trace expertly touches upon this critical component of Morrison’s text in Dark Goddesses: Black Feminist Theology in Morrison’s “Beloved”: “Black feminism […] originating from the institutions of slavery and Reconstructionism, reflects beliefs, values, and behavior indigenous to Black women. The value system confirmed in Beloved is supported by and channeled through a creative and spiritual energy that sets the novel apart from Morrison’s earlier work. In creating a value system rooted in the “supernatural sensitivity” of her characters, Morrison discloses a theology that is both Black and feminist.” (Trace 16) Toni Morrison’s writing is unapologetically rooted in her dedication, not only to a sense of Blackness, but Black feminism.

And this variant of womanhood and its literary depictions have every right to be given the same praise, consideration, and recognition as those pioneered by the minds of white woman writ-

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ers. Until these novels are evaluated in the same light as those of Austen, Woolf, and Brontë, the once solely white-oriented literary field will never be fully decolonized, as the gatekeeping of the feminist genre will only further segregate the Black woman writer by exclusively placing her in a category of Blackness. We must, then, actively challenge our own approaches to how we conceive of feminism in the context of Blackness when presented with these works of American literature. This begins with decentralizing, by way of normalizing, the idea of Blackness in literature to, in turn, map the connections between the political, and even spiritual, undercurrents of these multidimensional texts. It means catching ourselves when we instinctually attribute conditions of violence and subjugation experienced by the Black woman solely to the consequences of race and racism. Now more than ever, we must practice being critical and thoughtful readers as to create a space for the exploration of Black feminist theory in the study of literature. We must defy our status-quo in order to give Morrison and characters like Sethe, Pecola Breedlove and Jadine Childs the respect and justice they have long deserved.

• Works Cited Bryant, Jerry H. “The Outskirts of a New City.” The Nation, 1973, p. 502.

Collins, Patricia H. “Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment.” Electronic Copy.

Routledge, 2000.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé W. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review, vol. 43, no. 6, 1991, pp. 1241–1299. JSTOR, www. jstor.org/stable/1229039.

Doss, Arul N. “Feminism and Ethnicity in the Novels of Toni Morrison.” Indiana Journal of Research, vol. 4, no. 11, pp. 146–47.

Global Journal for Research Analysis, 2015.

Grandt, Jürgen E. “INTO A DARKER PAST: JAMES BALDWIN’S ‘GIOVANNI’S ROOM’ AND THE ANXIETY OF AUTHENTICITY.” CLA Journal, vol. 54, no. 3, 2011, pp. 268–293. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44325797.

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Jackson, Lauren M. “White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue … and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation.” Electronic Copy. Beacon Press, 2019.

Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia. “The Jezebel Stereotype.”

Ferris State University, https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/ jimcrow/jezebel/index.htm.

Johnson, Walter. “The Slave Trader, the White Slave, and the Politics of Racial Determination in the 1850s.” The Journal of American History, vol. 87, no. 1, 2000, pp. 13–38. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/2567914.

National Museum of African American History and Culture. “Popular and Pervasive Stereotypes of African Americans.” Smithsonian, https:// nmaahc.si.edu/blog-post/popular-and-pervasive-stereotypes-african-americans.

Morrison, Toni. “Beloved.” Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2004.

———. “The Bluest Eye.” Vintage International, 2007.

———. “Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.”

Vintage Books, 1993.

———. “Tar Baby.” Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2004.

Pereira, Malin Walther. “Periodizing Toni Morrison’s Work from The Bluest Eye to Jazz: The Importance of Tar Baby.” MELUS, vol.

22, no. 3, 1997, pp. 71–82. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/467655.

Smith, Barbara. “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism.” The Radical Teacher, no. 7, 1978, pp. 20-27. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20709102.

Trace, Jacqueline. “Dark Goddesses: Black Feminist Theology in Morrison’s ‘Beloved.’” Obsidian II, vol. 6, no. 3, 1991, pp. 14–30.

JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44485265.

Washington, Teresa N. “The Mother-Daughter Àjé̱ Relationship in Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved.’” African American Review, vol. 39, no. 1/2, 2005, pp. 171–188. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40033646.

Williams, Lisa. “The Artist as Outsider in the Novels of Toni Morrison and Virginia Woolf.” Greenwood Press, 2000.

X, Malcolm. “The Race Problem.” African Students Association and NAACP Campus Chapter. Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan. 23 January 1963.

———. “Who Taught You to Hate Yourself? (Transcript)” Genius. Los Angeles, 5 May 1962, https://genius.com/Malcolm-x-whotaught-you-to-hate-yourself-annotated.

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ENDNOTES i

Though some of the sources I will be referencing in this work do not capitalize the word ‘Black’ and its various derivatives, as a Black woman writer, I have elected to do so in my own writing as to acknowledge the history and racial identity of Black Americans. ii

Malcolm X touches upon the history of this racial paradigm and its social implications during a speech delivered in 1963 at Michigan State University. See X, Malcolm, “The Race Problem.” iii

For further discussion on the history of racial determination in the United States see Johnson, “The Slave Trader, the White Slave, and the Politics of Racial Determination in the 1850s.” iv

Echoing the words of Zora Neale Hurston who, in her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, states that “de nigger woman is de mule uh de world,” Malcolm X calls for the protection of Black women in this short excerpt of his speech delivered at the funeral service of Ronald Stokes on May 5, 1962. Here, he asks, “Who taught you to hate the texture of your hair? Who taught you to hate the color of your skin? To such extent you bleach to get like the white man. Who taught you to hate the shape of your nose and the shape of your lips? Who taught you to hate yourself from the top of your head to the soles of your feet? Who taught you to hate your own kind?”

These questions, of course, will come to inform my conclusions on both The Bluest Eye and Tar Baby. See X, Malcolm, “Who Taught You to Hate Yourself ?” v

For further discussion on the intersectional violence matrix see Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins.” vi

While there is a strong argument to be made for women’s general sexualization in the modelling industry regardless of race, given the historical characterization of Black women as the “Jezebel” caricature, I posit this excerpt as an example of the hypersexualization Black women frequently experience in the media. This portrayal of Black women as seductive and tempting by nature is as long enduring as the “Sapphire” caricature which labels her as argumentative and disagreeable. See Jim Crow Museum, “The Jezebel Stereotype.” vii

Here, I am referencing the “Mammy” stereotype that arose from the racial caricature constructed during the era of African enslavement in America and later immortalized through the production of minstrel shows. “Enslaved black women were highly skilled domestic workers, working in the homes of white families and caretakers for their children. The trope painted a picture of a domestic worker who had undying loyalty to their slaveholders, as caregivers and counsel.” See National Museum of African American History and Culture, “Popular and Pervasive Stereotypes of African Americans.” viii

Bryant, Jerry H. “The Outskirts of a New City.” The Nation, 1973, p. 502.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to acknowledge and thank the incredible Black women in my life who gave me the encouragement, strength, and guidance to see this paper through. Namely, my mom, older sister, my cousin Makeba (plus her two wonderful children), and my two best friends, Esinam and Toriana. Every excerpt you read, connection you helped me piece together, and the kind words you’ve shared over these years have made me the writer I am right now. This would most likely not exist if not for your bravery and power. You are all my inspiration and I dedicate this piece of work to you. I would also like to acknowledge and thank my two instructors at McGill, Professor Manshel and Felix Fuchs, whose expertise, invaluable advice, teaching and guidance I was able to learn from in ENGL 227 have irrevocably shaped the way I read and write about literary texts. Thank you for giving me the encouragement to continue pursuing my interests in English Literature.

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‘I was born with the gift of the golden voice’: The influence of Federico García Lorca and the duende on the poetry and songs of Leonard Cohen Genie Harrison University of Cambridge

ABSTRACT Throughout his career, Leonard Cohen identified Federico García Lorca as an important influence on both his poetry and his songwriting, despite reading his works in translation. In this dissertation I argue that this influence may be best understood in parallel with an examination of the spirit of the ‘duende,’ an ancient Spanish concept embodying the passion or inspiration of an artistic performance and its ability to enthral both performer and audience. The ‘duende’ necessitates interpretation by a ‘living body’ aware of its own mortality, leading me to explore the theme of death in the songs of Cohen and his inspirations from Lorca. As the ‘duende’ is grounded in physical performance, I also explore the boundaries between poetry and song for these two poets, investigating the role of oral poetry and the capacity for these different art forms to achieve the duende.

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Introduction: Federico García Lorca’s influence on Leonard Cohen ‘I used to think I was some kind of gypsy boy.’i In 2011, Leonard Cohen received the Spanish ‘Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts,’ recognising his contribution to songwriting and poetry. In a humble acceptance of this accolade, Cohen paid tribute to Federico García Lorca: It was only when I read, even in translation, the works of Lorca that I understood that there was a voice. It is not that I copied his voice; I would not dare. But he gave me permission to find a voice, to locate a voice, that is to locate a self, a self that is not fixed, a self that struggles for its own existence.ii Cohen never learnt to speak Spanish; the ‘voice’ he refers to here is neither a physical speaking voice, nor a singing voice.

Instead, it is best understood as the lyric ‘I,’ expression ‘which is no longer mere bodily sound,’ but ‘the pure intention to mean.’iii Cohen explains how reading Lorca’s poetry encouraged him to uncover and attempt to determine his own artistic voice. By conflating the ‘voice’ with the ‘self,’ Cohen is also emphasising the individual quality that this ‘voice’ must possess; he could not, and would not, ‘copy’ Lorca. Mladen Dolar describes the physical voice, declaring it to be like ‘a fingerprint, instantly recognizable and identifiable.’iv This definition can be broadened to also include the internal or artistic voice, which must be individuated. But, as made plain by the ‘struggle’ referred to, Cohen acknowledges that this is neither an easy nor a static task: the process of determining the artistic voice is energized and active, a constant fight for survival. This dissertation will explore Cohen’s creative ‘struggle’ in conversation with Lorca’s poetic and theoretical influence, exploring the energy simultaneously required of and created by the artistic voice in performance.

Cohen’s biographer Sylvie Simmons describes the ‘Big Bang of Leonard’: the moment at which Cohen happened upon The Selected Poems of Federico Garcia Lorca,v whilst

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browsing through a secondhand bookshop as an adolescent.vi It was here that Cohen became ‘“completely hooked”’ by the poet’s writing, and where he first felt the urge to ‘respond’ to his predecessor.vii Lorca had provided a sense of consolation and intimacy for Cohen by illuminating ‘“a landscape that you thought you alone walked on.”’viii What unites both artists is their shared passion and talent for both poetry and song. Their careers are almost the inverse of one another; as a young man, Lorca trained as a classical pianist, found fame as a writer, but continued to write music.ix Conversely, Cohen is predominantly known as a musician, but his first publications were novels and poems.x Indeed, the real impetus for Cohen becoming a singer-songwriter was ultimately a matter of economic necessity: he had been living on the Greek island of Hydra with an inheritance of $750 a year, but his lifestyle eventually became ‘impossible on a writer’s income.’xi

Crucial, however, is the importance of both art forms to both men. In 1969 Cohen told the New York Times: ‘There is no difference between a poem and a song. Some were songs first and some were poems first and some were situations. All of my writing has guitars behind it, even the novels.’xii Similarly, biographer Leslie Stanton explains how Lorca ‘conceived of poetry as music,’ explaining that: ‘when he read his poems to others, he drew his hands through the air, stretching and modulating individual lines of verse, playing “with a word as if it were an accordion,” a friend remembered.’xiii It is hardly surprising that Lorca considered himself to be ‘a musician before anything else,’xiv and wrote ‘as if song and poetry were part of the same breath.’xv Referred to as the ‘Godfather of Gloom,’ or the ‘poet of the sad song,’ there is a certain sorrowfulness that characterises Cohen’s work, be it poetry, prose or song.xvi Cohen suffered from clinical depression for many decades, and even suggested that ‘a little [depression] is valuable for writing.’xvii However, whilst an intense sadness often motivated his work, Cohen also acknowledges the sorrow that writing itself can produce. In an interview with Sandra Djwa in 1967, he suggested: ‘creating a work is a lot of pain and that’s all I’m trying to get across.’xviii Writing functioned as both a response to and a cause of a lin-

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gering sense of profound sadness.

This atmosphere of emotional conflict similarly characterises Cohen’s relationship with Lorca. Cohen suggested that Lorca had ‘ruined his life,’ as the Spanish writer had ‘taught [him] to understand the dignity of sorrow through flamenco music.’xix Flamenco played an important role in Cohen’s musical education: whilst living in Westmount as a teenager, Cohen was taught the six-chord flamenco progression by a local Spanish man he had persuaded to be his teacher. These six chords became ‘the basis of all [his] songs, and of all [his] music.’xx However, it was Lorca who opened Cohen’s eyes to the ‘dignity’ of flamenco, which he interpreted as ‘a strictly rural phenomenon, an intimate and anonymous cry of pain and longing.’xxi There is an evident overlap between this ancient style and Cohen’s own sorrowful artistic disposition. Lorca’s theoretical work also demonstrates the effect that flamenco music had upon Cohen: his own fascination with rural Spanish folk music precipitated his study of the ancient concept of the ‘duende,’ by which Cohen was enthused, believing it to be ‘the dynamic of true art and artistic expression.’xxii The spirit of the duende resonates in Cohen’s voice, articulating the struggle of the self and becoming his own ‘cry of pain and longing.’

At a very basic level, the ‘duende’ can be defined as: Passion or inspiration in (esp. artistic or musical) performance, esp. that which is regarded as having the power to possess the performer and is of such a level or quality as to captivate and move an audience.xxiii However the duende is fundamentally experiential, best understood by means of performance as opposed to delineated through words. Lorca himself explains, ‘The duende, then, is a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought.’xxiv It is worth noting that both Lorca and Cohen have used the word ‘struggle’: from the Spanish ‘un luchar,’ meaning a ‘struggle’ or ‘fight,’ the term is important: it outlines the active nature of the duende, in line with Cohen’s own understanding of the creative process. One of Cohen’s most beloved songs, ‘The Tower of Song’ (1988) helps to elucidate the effects of this struggle.

Whilst it would be unwise to unhesitatingly conflate Cohen

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the man with the ‘singer’ of the song, the biographical gestures of ‘Tower of Song’ render it a useful point of reference from which to consider the effects of a creative career. Here, an older, weary Cohen sings: Well, my friends are gone and my hair is grey I ache in the places where I used to play And I’m crazy for love but I’m not coming on I’m just paying my rent every day in the Tower of Song.xxv Also using this term, socio-musicologist Simon Frith argues that the best songs are those ‘that can be heard as a struggle between verbal and musical rhetoric, between the singer and the song.’xxvi In ‘Tower of Song’ Cohen is describing the after-effects of the struggle that he has endured as a consequence of experiencing the duende; he finds himself physically wounded and exhausted at the hands of an artistic fight, trapped in his ‘tower.’ Lorca himself describes this process, stating: ‘Every man and every artist, whether he is Nietzsche or Cezanne, climbs every step in the tower of his perfection by fighting his duende.’xxvii Cohen referred to this same image of a ‘tower’ throughout his life. In an interview with Paul Zollo, he explained that: “Freedom” and “restriction” are just luxurious terms to one who is locked in a dungeon in the tower of song.

These are just… ideas. I don’t have the sense of restriction or freedom. I just have the sense of work. I have the sense of hard labour.xxviii Cohen’s understanding of his artistic vocation as something strenuous is closely linked to the same fight that Lorca depicts.

The artist must struggle to create and have his ‘voice’ heard.

The relationship between the duende and death: ‘Night Comes On’ and ‘Chelsea Hotel #2’ ‘go back, go back to the world’xxix Lorca sketches out how and where the duende is most likely to

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be experienced from a practical perspective. He states: All arts are capable of duende, but where it finds greatest range, naturally, is in music, dance, and spoken poetry, for these arts require a living body to interpret them, being forms that are born, die, and open their contours against an exact present.xxx Each of the art forms that Lorca specifies are modes of performance, and whilst they can be recorded and played back an infinite number of times, no one performance can ever be exactly replicated, requiring the human energy to materialise.

Accordingly, the duende can ‘never repeat himself,’ and thus must be experienced in this ‘exact present.’xxxi A hyperawareness of the present moment intensifies the transient nature of performance: eventually, the struggle will be forfeited, the performance will be over, and the spirit of the duende will dissipate.

An experience of the duende, like a performance, is fundamentally unique and ephemeral.

This notion of ephemerality and the requirement of the ‘living body’ implicitly introduces the significance of death to the duende: Lorca explains that ‘the duende does not come at all unless [the artist] sees that death is possible.’xxxii Death held significance for Lorca. Spanish poet and critic Pedro Salinas argues that he even felt life ‘through death,’xxxiii believing that it provided him ‘an understanding of the full and total meaning of life.’xxxiv Salinas’ seemingly paradoxical argument can be understood more fully with a consideration of Lorca’s own commentary on death in ‘Play and Theory of the Duende.’ He states: Many Spaniards live indoors until the day they die and are taken out into the sunlight. A dead man in Spain is more alive as a dead man than anyplace else in the world.xxxv Being taken ‘out into the sunlight’ connotes the state of enlightenment achieved at the end of one’s life; the dead man is ‘alive’ because he becomes momentarily aware of both life and death.

Like the bullfighter who ‘risk[s] his life,’ the artist must strive towards this same awareness, if the duende is to be achieved.xxxvi

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It is through this struggle that the duende ‘wounds’ the artist and ‘in the healing of that wound, which never closes, lie the strange, invented qualities of a man’s work.’xxxvii The ‘living body’ is required because its own mortality enables a recognition of the ‘exact present’ and its own mortality: the body is, like the spirit of the duende or the performance itself, ephemeral.xxxviii

Leighton Grist observes the acute awareness of death in the songs of Leonard Cohen, explaining the tendency for critics to label him “gloomy.”xxxix Throughout ‘Night Comes On’ (1984), a desire for death is palpable: calling to his mother, who lies ‘waiting/Under the marble and snow,’ the singer alludes to the expectancy of the grave below him. He repeatedly sings: ‘I wanted the night to go on and on/But she said, go back, go back to the world.’ By opposing ‘night’ and ‘world,’ Cohen prompts the association of ‘night’ with death; both are devoid of daylight and vivacity.xl The title of the song ‘Night Comes On’ — a phrase which is also repeatedly sung — becomes a metaphoric reminder of death’s unavoidable approach. However, Grist also notices the proximity between death and sex in the song. Reading an ‘Oedipal typicality’ in the ‘need for [his mother’s] comfort,’ he draws out the sexual undertones in the singer’s attitude towards his mother.xli In fact, he argues that this becomes ‘near explicit’ in the song’s penultimate verse, where the singer lies ‘in her arms’ and promises to ‘be yours.’xlii As the singer expresses his longing to ‘cross over’ and ‘go home’ to his dead mother, the desire to return to an intrauterine existence becomes intertwined with sexual desire.

‘Night Comes On’ articulates the dichotomy between the ‘sex drive’ (Eros) and the ‘death drive’ (Thanatos), first identified by Sigmund Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and later in The Ego and the Id. Freud defines ‘Thanatos’ as: ‘the task of which is to lead organic life back into the inanimate state.’xliii However, his definition of Eros includes ‘not merely the uninhibited sexual instinct proper’ but also ‘the self-preservative instinct’; this is not simply the ‘sex drive,’ but the ‘life drive.’xliv The conflict between these two instincts replicates the dual-impulse of the duende, which is predicated not only on the existence of death, but also relentlessly searches for ‘new landscapes and unknown accents,’ depending on the continuation of life.xlv

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The fame Cohen amassed throughout his career intensifies the temptation to read his work from a biographical viewpoint; in light of his Oedipal reading of the mother-son relationship depicted in ‘Night Comes On,’ Grist gestures more broadly to Cohen’s almost obsessive devotion to women throughout his life.xlvi This being said, Grist admits that ‘the use of “Cohen” to designate the subject implied by the songs and their performance is, in essence, little other than a convenient fiction.’xlvii This problem is similarly considered by Frith, where he recognises that as listeners of popular music, ‘we assume that we can hear someone’s life in their voice.’xlviii However, Grist rightly notes that in Cohen’s case, ‘his output’s evidently close relation to his self, beliefs and experiences and knowledge of the personal motivation and reference of the songs can augment interpretation.’xlix ‘Chelsea Hotel #2’ (1974) becomes an obvious example: Cohen publicly named Janis Joplin as his muse for this song, although his decision to do so was later met with regret.l This biographical exposure tinges the song with morbidity, as knowledge of Joplin’s untimely death in 1970 positions ‘Chelsea Hotel #2’ as almost an elegy for the late singer, and unsurprisingly colours the depiction of the brief love affair shared between the two.

As with ‘Night Comes On,’ the song ‘Chelsea Hotel #2’ captures the conflict between sex and death. It begins: I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel, you were talking so brave and so sweet; giving me head on the unmade bed, while the limousines wait in the street.li The explicit nature of Cohen’s writing is unavoidable, and presumably accounts to some extent for his regret towards naming Joplin. However, knowledge of Joplin’s death intensifies the description of this act; there is an uncomfortable macabre juxtaposition between this explicit sexual act and the reality of death: ‘Eros’ is directly confronted by ‘Thanatos.’ However, as the song continues, Cohen once more explores ‘Eros’ in connection not only with sexuality, but moreover the instincts of self-preservation detailed by Freud and necessary for the duende to emerge.

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He sings: ‘And those were the reasons, and that was New York,/ We were running for the money and the flesh.’ Both ‘money’ and ‘flesh’ serve as examples of one’s ‘self-preservative instincts’: the two are sought out as means for survival. Consequently, the line captures a sense of living “fast and loose”; toying with existence like the brazen bullfighter. Yet, simultaneously, death is yearned for. In the chorus, Cohen sings: ‘But you got away, didn’t you baby,/you just turned your back on the crowd.’ This idea of ‘getting away’ connotes escape: the subject has been relieved of the world in a manner similarly desired by the singer. This longing to escape, of course, would be explored further in ‘Night Comes On’ some years later. However, what the two songs depict is both a yearning for and an awareness of death, closely and inextricably linked with one’s survival and sexual instincts, outlined

by Freud but similarly articulated in the conflict situated at the heart of the duende.

Transforming poetry into song: from Lorca’s ‘Pequeño Vals Vienés’ to Cohen’s ‘Take This Waltz’ ‘You see, you hear these funny voices in the tower of song’lii ‘Take This Waltz’ (1986) is a musical adaptation of Lorca’s poem ‘Pequeño vals Vienés’, (Little Viennese Waltz) from Poeta en Nueva York (1940), and was originally released as Cohen’s contribution to a collaborative Lorca tribute album: ‘Poets in New York.’liii Cohen’s inability to speak Spanish makes it unsurprising that it took him an estimated one hundred and fifty hours to translate Lorca’s poem into what he declared to be a ‘clumsy’ reimagining of the work — even with the help of his Puerto Rican girlfriend.liv However, Cohen did more than simply ‘translate’ the words of his predecessor; the poem has also been transformed into a song, inviting the question of where the boundary between the art forms might be drawn — if anywhere.

Written in three-four time, Cohen’s ‘Take This Waltz’ imitates the dance setting of Lorca’s poem.lv However, Cohen captures the rhythmic essence of the waltz beyond simply the time signature of his song. In a waltz, the first beat of

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the bar must be the most prominent, with the following two accordingly understated (represented in poetic scansion by the dactylic foot). Accentuating this rhythmic hierarchy, every utterance of the word ‘waltz’ in the song’s chorus coincides with the first, most important, beat of the three-four bar (see Appendix, Fig. 1). This is maintained even after the rhythmic pattern changes, demonstrating Cohen’s close attention to the dance’s signature: becoming ‘this waltz,’ rather than ‘take this waltz,’ ‘this’ functions as an upbeat, as Cohen lands once more on ‘waltz’ as the opening minim of the next bar (see Appendix, Fig. 2).

‘Take This Waltz’ recalls the stylistic qualities of the Viennese waltz, the oldest of all ballroom styles. Cohen’s song begins with suitable grace: an opening falling sequence is played by wind instruments in thirds, dovetailed by an ascending guitar accompaniment. As the verse begins, Cohen is accompanied by strings neatly punctuating the triple-beat rhythm of the waltz, sustaining the sense of poise. However, this graceful accompaniment is contrasted by Cohen’s vocal style. As he begins to sing: ‘Now in Vienna there’s ten pretty women’ his voice is notably rough; he trawls the notes along the melody line. Indeed, as he sings ‘There’s a shoulder where death comes to cry’ and ‘There’s a tree where the doves go to die,’ he moves heavily down the descending phrase, pronouncing the final words ‘cry’ and ‘die’ with gruff emphasis. The weight of the words sung juxtaposes the light tranquility of the waltz.

This timbral disparity is similarly discernible through a comparison of the singing-style adopted by Cohen and that of his backing singers. This is particularly noticeable in the chorus: Aey, aey, aey, aey Take this waltz, take this waltz As with the accompanying strings, the voices of Cohen’s female backing singers are seamlessly blended together, their final ‘aey’ handled with gentle vibrato. By contrast, Cohen often cuts his own notes short: when he sings ‘aey’ it is more

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akin to an involuntary exclamation, as though he has been suddenly struck. Indeed, this becomes increasingly apparent as the word is repeatedly sung. As Cohen sings ‘take this waltz’ — now without the supporting voices — he leans into both ‘take’ and ‘waltz’ with a heaviness that suggests compulsion; he sounds as though he is forcing the words out. In fact, as he sings ‘take’ for the second time, a slight hesitation is noticeable, implying the arduous nature of his task. When a harmony line accompanies Cohen’s exclamation of: ‘[t]ake this waltz, it’s been dying for years’ in a subsequent chorus, the graceful quality of the backing singers accentuates the clunky characteristic of Cohen’s own vocal performance.

These subtle inflections colour Cohen’s performance with physicality: the raspy quality of his voice draws our attention to how he is making this sound and the relation of the voice to his physical presence. This effect can be better understood in conversation with a concept proposed by Roland Barthes, who defines the ‘grain’ as ‘the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs.’lvi This ‘grain’ is evident in Cohen’s singing, as its gravelly quality disrupts the smoothness of a melodic line, reminding the listener of the person behind the microphone. Lars Eckstein proposes this to be a quality typical of folk music, where listeners ‘are encouraged to enjoy the physicality of the music and the “graininess” of the voice.’lvii Cohen distorts the tranquility of the measured waltz, asserting his physical presence within the song. This physicality similarly recalls the relationship between the duende and the ‘living body’ that Lorca outlines: by drawing attention to his body and its struggle, the duende becomes palpable, reverberating in the energy discernibly required by his singing.

Additionally, the sense of restraint and struggle that characterises how Cohen sings is similarly reflected in what he sings. In the first chorus, Cohen urges his addressee to ‘Take this waltz with the clamp on its jaws.’ This set of ‘jaws’ metonymically likens the waltz to an animal. Yet, ‘clamped’ down, the creature is restricted, prevented from moving — or presumably, dancing — in the desired manner. This waltz-creature recurs throughout the repetitions of the refrains. In the

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song’s bridge, Cohen imagines it ‘Dragging its tail in the sea.’

Building upon the metaphor already created, this trawling movement reinforces the sense that this waltz-creature has been restricted and imposed upon, reflected in the struggle that characterises Cohen’s performance and aligns it with the duende. Exasperation is felt: as Cohen paradoxically laments that this waltz has been ‘dying for years’ with its ‘“I’ll never forget you, you know,”’ he expresses immensely frustrated anticipation. In a microcosmic reenactment of the state in which duende is suggested to be achievable, the waltz is simultaneously alive and dead, acutely aware of its own mortality but still relentlessly present.

Considering the musicality of ‘Pequeño Vals Vienés’: An acknowledgement of how ‘Take This Waltz’ functions as a song invites a discussion of how Cohen was able to transform his source text. If Lorca conceived of poetry as though it were music, as Stanton suggests, it is necessary to consider the ‘musicality’ of ‘Pequeño Vals Vienés.’ Northop Frye proposes that the term ‘musical’ in relation to poetic writing is ‘concerned not with the beauty of sound but with the organization of sound’; it is an acute attention to rhythm that suggests a ‘musicality’ to the poet’s writing.lviii Lorca’s decision to entitle his poem: ‘Pequeño Vals Vienés’ (‘Little Viennese Waltz’) declares the musicality of the verse even in its title, evoking what Frye calls ‘the music that we know, with its dance rhythm, discordant texture, and stress accent.’lix In fact, as he repeats ‘este vals, este vals, este vals,’ we feel the triple-rhythm inherent in the phrasing: the stress falls upon the first syllable of ‘este’ in an imitation of the triple-time of waltzes. Additionally, Lorca’s language often functions in groups of three. The poem begins: En Vienna hay diez muchachas un hombre donde solloza la muerte y un bosque de palomas discedas.

In Vienna there are ten girls, A shoulder on which death is sobbing And a forest of dried-out pigeons.lx

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The word ‘hay’ (‘there is’) is used in triplicate in this sentence, expressing the presence of ‘diez muchachas’ (‘ten girls’), ‘un hombro’ (‘a shoulder’) and ‘un bosque’ (‘a tree’), but is also used three times throughout the whole stanza. Similarly, as Lorca defines his ‘waltz’ as being ‘de sí, de muerte y de coñac’ (‘about itself, about death and about cognac’), the triplet motif recurs. However, the most telling use of this triplet idea comes in the poem’s final verse: Dejaré mi boca entre tus piernas, mi alma en fotografías y azucenas, y en las ondas oscuras de tu andar quiero, amor mío, amor mío, dejar, violin y sepulcor, las cintas del vals.

I will leave my mouth between your legs. my soul in photographs and white lilies.

In the dark waves of your journey I want, my love, to leave — the violin and tomb — the ribbons of waltz.

Although the verb ‘dejar’ (to leave) is used in two different forms here (‘dejar’ being the infinitive, and ‘dejaré’ the first person future) Lorca repeats the idea of ‘leaving’ three times (‘my mouth’ ‘my soul’ ‘the ribbons of waltz’). However, the variation of the verb ‘dejar’ in its final use is significant given that it both disrupts the pattern and is the last verb of the poem itself. Whilst the first two uses of the verb express a definitive statement of what the speaker will do, this third and final instance declares what he wants to leave: ‘las cintas del vals’ (‘the ribbons of waltz’). Mark Booth works to differentiate songs and poetry, suggesting that ‘the existence of songs in sound, in time, is the simplest distinction between them and written verse.’lxi The ending of Lorca’s poem becomes a demonstration of this: frustrated desire creates a feeling of entrapment, as the speaker becomes entangled in a never-ending cycle of triplets.

The stasis of ‘Pequeño Vals Vienés’ demonstrates the atemporality of the written poetic text, as it circles back within itself.

Exploring ‘words for music’ versus poetry: Drawing on Booth’s suggestion, the differences between

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Cohen’s ‘Take This Waltz’ and Lorca’s ‘Pequeño Vas Vienés’ become useful for exploring the subtle distinctions between poetry and ‘words for music.’ As already noted, Lorca repeats the word ‘hay’ three times in the poem’s opening stanza. However, his sylleptic use of the verb is not a technique imitated

by Cohen, who repeatedly states ‘there are…there’s…there’s… there’s…there’s…,’ and fails to be economic in his employment of verbs throughout the stanza. Lorca describes that in Vienna, there is ‘un hombre donde solloza la muerte’ (‘a shoulder on which death is crying’). This is translated by Cohen as ‘there’s a shoulder where death comes to cry.’ He not only repeats ‘there is,’ but adds the verb ‘comes’ to determine the location of death. Lorca continues: ‘Hay un fragmento de la mañana/En el museo de la escarcha’ (‘There is a fragment of morning in the museum of frost’). In ‘Take This Waltz,’ this becomes ‘There’s a piece that was torn from the morning/And it hangs in the Gallery of Frost’). The verb ‘to tear’ is incorporated here, as well as ‘to hang.’ Throughout the poem there are several examples of where Cohen has used additional verbs in his translation of Lorca.

Contrary to the stasis of ‘Pequeño Vals Vienés,’ the presence of these additional verbs in Cohen’s text invokes a sense of immediacy and action in the song; as Death ‘comes’ and doves ‘go,’ and a ‘piece’ of the morning ‘hangs’ in the Gallery of Frost, we can feel the movement of the piece more distinctly than in Lorca’s poem. One could therefore argue that this sense of forward movement is what characterizes the song in comparison to its poetic counterpart, and where the ‘struggle’ essential to the spirit of duende can be felt in this medium.

Edward T. Cone suggests that: ‘in reading or listening to poetry, the mind can move backwards and forwards through the work; […] Not so in music, where the mind is so to speak chained to the vehicle of the moving sound.’lxii The presence of the verbs simultaneously contributes to the natural forward motion of the song, but also helps to locate the listener in the quick succession of images thrown up by the lyrics, given the inability for one to refer back, as it were, to whatever the ‘main verb’ of the sentence might be, as we are able to do when reading poetry. As Booth observes: ‘song words are given once in a per-

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formance and then are gone, carried along by the music.’lxiii The listener is fixed within the dictated temporal framework, but is guided through this movement by words written accordingly for music. As Cohen stated in an interview, songs ‘have energy, whereas poems, pure poetry, just stand there.’lxiv The stasis of Lorca’s poetry is what makes it ‘pure,’ and for Cohen to transform it into song, it must be energized by movement.

The transformation of poetic meaning into distinct, musical meaning complicates the claim that Cohen himself once made that there is ‘no difference’ between poetry and song. In fact, the relationship between Cohen’s words and his music works to support a statement he made in later years, where he told Paul Williams: ‘“Very rarely one crosses into the other realm. But the songs are by and large designed as songs, and the poems designed as poems.”’lxv Whilst Cohen’s own complicated and at times contradictory understanding of poetry versus song underscores the intricate tensions between the two, an awareness of how the musical workings of song affects and supports the meaning produced by the verbal text alone demonstrates the co-dependency of the two.

Glenn Fosbraey argues that this distinction is an important one, and he questions the tendency for critics to blur this boundary by labelling song-writers ‘poets’ as an expression of achievement. Citing the ‘praise’ of Carol Ann Duffy, he declares: labelling songwriters as “poets” is nothing new, and Duffy isn’t alone in her thinking that it is a compliment to lyricists in such a manner, suggesting that the highest praise that can be offered to masters of the song-writing craft is to remove them from their chosen art form altogether.lxvi For Fosbraey, to label a song-writer a poet is to forget the very thing that separates song and poetry: the very real, and very important role played by the accompanying music.

Fosbraey is somewhat over-zealous in his division of these two art forms: they are, of course, closely linked. However, Cohen’s own description of the song-writing process helps to differentiate the two in a more nuanced fashion. He sug-

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They are born together, they struggle together, and they influence one another. When the lyrics begin to be revised, of course, the line can’t carry it with its new nuance or its new meaning. And generally the musical line has to change, which involves changing the musical line, which involves changing the next lyrical line, so the process is mutual and painstaking and slow.lxvii

Cohen depicts the working relation between lyrics and music that naturally takes place in the process of songwriting. Unlike with poetry, the two are bound inextricably together, affecting and depending on one another.

V. C. Clinton-Baddeley helps to elucidate the importance of the distinction between poetic writing and song lyrics: ‘during the last two hundred and fifty years a dispute has been growing up between poets and musicians. There was none so long as words and music were created together by the people who sang them.’lxviii He details the divergence of the two art forms — which were once ‘sisters’ — claiming that by the end of the 1600s, the codependent relationship started to break down as ‘both poets and musicians had begun to elaborate their arts, and to discover separate destinies.’lxix Like Cohen, he describes ‘words for music’ as ‘words which have been deliberately written for music, and it is this which is the true and ancient art of the song.’lxx This delineation is in accordance with the separation pedantically asserted by Fosbraey: ‘Yes, Cohen is a poet. But importantly, not when he’s writing songs. When he’s writing songs, he’s a lyricist. And neither facet of his creative output should be confused with the other, nor should their levels of academic consideration be unbalanced.’lxxi Cohen is arguably in danger here of ‘wronging’ the poet Lorca when translating ‘Pequeño Vals Vienés’; he manipulates the words of poetry in the manner that Clinton-Baddeley warns fervently against: ‘first when he sets words to music in a way which stultifies the sense of the poetry, or destroys by his rhythms the rhythms of the original work; and secondly when he sets words to music which ought never to have been set at all.’lxxii However, Cohen avoids falling into this trap and demonstrates his own separation of poetry and song in two ways: as

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he is translating Lorca’s words in addition to simply setting them to music, he is in fact curating his own set of ‘words for music’ rather than merely lifting the words of Lorca’s poem and manipulating them arbitrarily. Additionally, the inherent ‘musicality’ of Lorca’s poetry emerges to assist the songwriter Cohen as he transforms Lorca’s poetry into song. As Carol Hess suggests, Lorca ‘exudes musicality in imagery, rhythm and subject matter’ and ‘supplies constant cues for music in his writing.’lxxiii The evident musicality of his work negates the suggestion that these words ‘ought never to have been set at all.’

David Boucher touches upon the various distinctions between these different media as perceived by Cohen, explaining that: ‘although [he] does not discuss at length the relationship between his novels, poetry, and song, and, to some extent, sees them all as part of the same creative energy, he does want to maintain a difference between the song and poetry proper.’lxxiv ‘Words for music’ are somatic, requiring the presence of the physical body and thus creating the potential for the duende to emerge.

Oral Poetry and the duende: ‘The Faithless Wife’ and ‘The Night of Santiago’ ‘Now, as a man, I won’t repeat The things she said aloud Except for this, my lips are sealed forever And for now’lxxv Despite the dichotomy that Cohen creates between ‘poetry proper’ and song, oral poetry — another art form Lorca believed to be capable of the duende — sits somewhere between them. Fiona Sampson notices that: ‘when I’m giving a poetry reading the experience is similar to that of giving a concert.’lxxvi Sampson draws attention to the performed quality of spoken poetry, just like that of singing a song or playing a piece of classical music. She lingers on the sensation produced by this experience, suggesting that performance is ‘an occasion when the self — particularly the performer’s self — is mediated by what is being performed.’lxxvii Sampson’s description

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recalls the possession the performer felt when the spirit is achieved; her sense of ‘mediation’ can be likened to the ‘duende.’

An awareness of the relationship between performance and the ‘duende’ explains why Lorca believed poetry to be, first and foremost, an oral art.lxxviii However, it also becomes indicative of the powerful influence that traditional Andalusian verse had upon Lorca’s writing. Christopher Maurer states that ‘foremost among the elements of style in Lorca’s poetry are the genres and forms of traditional verse, including the traditional ballad, the lullaby and popular songs.’lxxix Each derived from an oral tradition, these art forms depend on the presence of a performer — a ‘living body’ — and demonstrate the impact that these rural traditions had upon the young poet.

Taken from Lorca’s Romancero Gitano collection, ‘La Casada Infiel,’ (‘The Faithless Wife’) is also found in the Selected Poems of Lorca that Cohen first stumbled upon as an adolescent. Published in 1928, Romancero Gitano (‘Gypsy Ballads’) demonstrates both ‘Lorca’s abiding interest in the traditional ballad,’ but moreover his fascination with Spanish gypsies.lxxx Translated by Cohen for his 2006 collection The Book of Longing, ‘The Faithless Wife’ is, in many ways, an archetypal gypsy ballad, demonstrating a range of the poetic qualities noted by Maurer as indicative of the influence of Andalusian writing on Lorca’s own work.lxxxi However, this ballad also provides evidence that Cohen was drawing on his own folkloric tradition, just as Lorca did. Amongst other musical inspirations (Billie Holliday, Hank Williams, etc.) Cohen also ‘greatly admired’ the music and life of Pete Seeger, one of the compilers of Alan Lomax’s The People’s Songbook that he had been introduced to whilst at Jewish community camp in the 1950s.lxxxii Figures such as Seeger and Lomax were attempting to preserve the tradition of folk music in the USA, one aspect of this being the ballad form.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to define strictly such a mutable form that has been used so variously throughout history. However, ‘ballad metre’ is commonly understood as ‘that alternate iambic tetrameter with iambic trimeter’ and follows an ABCB rhyme scheme.lxxxiii Although not entitled a

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‘ballad,’ the influence of this tradition on Cohen’s translation of ‘The Faithless Wife’ is apparent, even from a structural point of view. Albeit with a degree of irregularity, Cohen’s verse loosely follows this metrical pattern, and closely conforms to the rhyme scheme. Ballads are also commonly associated with ‘story-telling’; the OED defines the ballad as ‘a narrative poem in short stanzas, esp. one that tells a popular story.’lxxxiv Mark Booth clarifies this definition in The Experience of Songs, where he suggests that ‘ballads often give highly objective and impersonal accounts of dire or uncanny events.’lxxxv Detailing a brief and spontaneous romantic encounter between an unknown man and a married woman, ‘The Faithless Wife’ certainly falls into this category.

However, the relationship between the ballad form and this poem becomes more pronounced in Cohen’s ‘The Night of Santiago,’ which was released posthumously in 2019.lxxxvi In this recording, Cohen ‘speak-sings’ the ballad with a flamenco-inspired musical accompaniment composed by his son Adam. The recording demonstrates the capacity of the performed poem to straddle the genres of poetry and song; whilst the words are not strictly ‘sung’ by Cohen, there is a musical awareness evident in his intonation throughout the reading that renders it almost chanting. Like others, the Spanish ballad tradition was ‘accompanied by music and transmitted orally by a mostly illiterate folk community’; Cohen’s performance style here demonstrates an awareness of this.lxxxvii The structural differences between the recording of ‘The Night of Santiago’ and ‘The Faithless Wife’ on the page also highlight the distinctions between written and performed poetry, ‘poetry proper’ and ‘words for music.’ ‘The Night of Santiago,’ which is designed to be heard rather than read, employs a refrain – which neither Lorca nor Cohen’s written texts do. The lines: It was the night of Santiago And I was passing through So I took her to the river As any man would do are repeated throughout.

Booth explains that ‘th[e] repetition of phrasing in successive

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stanzas, where small modification adapts the words to a new use or effect, is the signature of the oral ballad,’ and that this was not merely a ‘stylistic convention,’ but was ‘logically related to the nature of the ballads as orally composed and orally transmitted.’lxxxviii As with the repetitions of verbs in ‘Take This Waltz,’ the repeated stanzas help to locate the listener as the story of the ballad develops.lxxxix John Hollander traces this movement: ‘the refrain breaks into the unfolding or unrolling of any lyrical text. It partakes as well of that action of restraint invoked by our doublet word in English, “refrain.”xc The refrain can be seen, in one sense, to work against the forward motion of the ballad’s narrative; the propellant energy of the song is halted momentarily. The listener is unable to move backward within a performed piece, and so refrains ‘synecdochically figur[ing] the stanzas they terminate,’ providing a reconciliatory pause in the narrative flow.xci However, Cohen’s speak-singing performance style additionally reveals an intersection with a broader ballad tradition. Boucher notes the influence of growing up in Montreal upon the young Cohen, suggesting that he ‘could not have escaped the moody, almost spoken, and barely sung French chanson.’xcii The performance of ‘The Faithless Wife’ or ‘The Night of Santiago’ sees Cohen slipping into the role of the ‘chansonier,’ where ‘it is style that matters and not perfect pitch or performance,’ and ‘the aesthetic sound of the voice determines the excellence of the work.’xciii It is this timbre of voice that closely links ‘The Night of Santiago’ with Lorca’s meditations on the ‘duende’; as with ‘Take This Waltz’ this is not ‘a question of ability,’ but instead ‘of true, living style, of blood, of the most ancient culture, of spontaneous creation.’xciv The struggle between Cohen as a ‘chansonier’ and his text infuses his voice with the ‘grain’ once more, expressing deep-felt, uncomfortable pain. As with song, the somatic nature of oral poetry creates the potential for the duende to emerge.

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Nineteen days before his death in 2016, Leonard Cohen released the album You Want It Darker. Its title track sees Cohen adopt this same ‘chansonier’–style of recitation, chanting against a backdrop of haunting choral voices: ‘Hineni, hineni / I’m ready my lord.’xcv From Hebrew, ‘hineni’ is translated as ‘here I am,’ and expresses a moment of liminality. Cohen is found in the ‘exact present,’ opening himself up to mortality. The music is a call to God, but also a call to life: the ‘duende’ is captured in this simultaneous awareness of being alive and the encouragement of death. In ‘Play and Theory of the Duende,’ Lorca quotes a Romani flamenco singer, Manuel Torre: ‘“All that has black sounds has duende.”’xcvi Repeatedly declaring: ‘You want it darker / We kill the flame,’ Cohen articulates through a conflagration of formic elements — voice, lyric, melody — the ineffable spirit of the ‘duende,’ tending towards darkness and relinquishing forever his struggle. Cohen’s corpus reveals a life-long conversation with the poetic works of Lorca, a conversation in which he translated and transformed for the twenty-first century an understanding of the ‘duende,’ and its power to remind us, through our proximity to death, of the ephemerality of living.

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• Works Cited

Primary Works Cohen, Leonard, Book of Longing (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2007) ———‘Chelsea Hotel #2’ in New Skin for the Old Ceremony (Columbia Records, 1974), [on CD] ———‘Night Comes On’ in Various Positions (Columbia Records, 1984), [on CD] ——— ‘Take This Waltz’ in Poets from New York (CBS Records, 1986), [on CD] ——— ‘The Night of Santiago’ in Thanks for the Dance (Columbia Records, 2019), [on CD] ——— Tower of Song’ in I’m Your Man (Columbia Records, 1988), [on CD] ——— ‘You Want it Darker’ in You Want It Darker (Columbia Records, 2016), [on CD] Lorca, Federico García, In Search of Duende, trans. by Christopher Maurer et al. (New York, NY: New Directions, 2010) ———Poems, trans. by J. L. Gili and Stephen Spender (London: The Dolphin Book Co., 1942) ——— Poet in New York (Poeta en Nueva York), trans. by Pablo Medina and Mark Statman (New York, NY: Grove Press, 2008) Secondary Works ‘Ballad, n.’, OED Online (Oxford University Press) <https://www.oed.com/ view/Entry/14914> [accessed 17 February 2020] Barthes, Roland, Image, Music, Text, ed. and trans. by Stephen Heath (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1978) Billingham, Peter, ed. Spirituality and Desire in Leonard Cohen: Visions from the Tower of Song (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017) Blasing, Mutlu Konuk, Lyric Poetry: The Pain and the Pleasure of Words (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007) Bonaddio, Federico, ed. A Companion to Federico García Lorca (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2010) Booth, Mark W., The Experience of Songs (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1981) Boucher, David, Dylan and Cohen: Poets of Rock and Roll (New York, NY: Continuum, 2004) Clinton-Baddeley, V. C., Words for Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1941) Cohen, Leonard, and Jeff Burger, Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen: Interviews and Encounters (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2014) Dolar, Mladen, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006) Eckstein, Lars, Reading Song Lyrics (Amsterdam; New York, NY: Editions Rodopi, 2010)

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Frith, Simon, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1999) Freud, Sigmund, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. by James Strachey, 24 vols (London: Vintage, 2001), XIX: The Ego and the Id and Other Works Frye, Northrop, Sound and Poetry: English Institute Essays 1956, 1957 <https:// doi.org/10.7312/frye92892> [accessed 17 February 2020] Hess, Carol A., The Life and Music of Manual de Falla (Oxford: Oxford University Press) Hollander, John, Melodious Guile: Fictive Pattern in Poetic Language (New Haven, CN; London: Yale University Press, 1988) Nadel, Ira B., Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen (Toronto: Random House of Canada, 1996) Salinas, Pedro, ‘Lorca and the Poetry of Death’, The Carleton Drama Review, 1.2 (1955), 14–21 Sampson, Fiona, Lyric Cousins: Poetry and Musical Form (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016) Simmons, Sylvie, I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen (New York, NY: Ecco, 2013) Smyth, Gerard, ‘Leonard Cohen, the Poet Channelling Byron and Lorca’, The Irish Times <https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/music/ leonard-cohen-the-poet-channelling-byron-and-lorca-1.2864218> [accessed 24 January 2020] Stanton, Leslie, Lorca: A Dream of Life (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1999) Works of Reference The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. by Roland Greene et al., 4th edn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012)

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Appendix

Figure 1. Leonard Cohen ‘Take This Waltz’, bars 28-40xcvii

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Figure 2. Leonard Cohen ‘Take This Waltz,’ bars 81-92i

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ENDNOTES i

Leonard Cohen, ‘So Long, Marianne’ in Songs of Leonard Cohen (Columbia Records, 1967), [on CD]. ii

Gerard Smyth, ‘Leonard Cohen, the Poet Channelling Byron and Lorca’, The Irish Times <https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/music/leonard-cohen-the-poet-channelling-byron-and-lorca-1.2864218> [accessed 24 January 2020]. iii

Mutlu Konuk Blasing, Lyric Poetry: The Pain and the Pleasure of Words (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 29. Blasing offers a useful account of the lyric ‘I’ in the opening chapter to this book. iv

Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), p. 23.

v

The edition referred to here is: Federico García Lorca, Poems, trans. by J. L. Gili and Stephen Spender (London: The Dolphin Book Co., 1942). vi

Sylvie Simmons, I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen (New York, NY: Ecco, 2013), p. 46. vii

Simmons, p. 45.

viii

Simmons, p. 45.

ix

‘Music’ by D. Gareth Walters in A Companion to Federico García Lorca, ed. by Federico Bonaddio (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2010) gives a helpful account of Lorca’s musical endeavours throughout his life. x

Cohen released The Favourite Game (1963) Beautiful Losers (1966) and four poetry collections before ever recording a song. xi

Simmons, p. 220.

xii

Simmons, p. 219.

xiii

Leslie Stanton, Lorca: A Dream of Life (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1999), p. 46.

xiv

Ira B. Nadel, Various Positions: A Life of Leonard Cohen (Toronto: Random House of Canada, 1996), p. 23. xv

Simmons, p. 46.

xvi

John Leland, ‘The Prince of Prurience and Loss’, in Leonard Cohen and Jeff Burger, Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen: Interviews and Encounters (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2014), pp. 1081-1101 (p. 1082). xvii

Steve Turner, ‘The Profits of Doom’, in Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen, pp. 468-483 (p. 475). xviii

Sandra Djwa, ‘After the Wipeout, A Renewal’, in Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen, pp.

50-65 (p. 56). xix

Nadel, p. 23.

xx

Simmons, p. 51.

xxi

Federico García Lorca, In Search of Duende (New York, NY: New Directions, 2010), trans by. Christopher Maurer et al., p. vii. xxii

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Loranne S. Dorman and Clive L. Rawlins, Leonard Cohen: Prophet of the Heart (London: Omnibus Press, 1990), p. 38.

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xxiii

‘duende, n.’ OED Online, Oxford University Press, December 2019, <www.oed. com/view/Entry/58254>. [Accessed 10 January 2020]. xxiv

Federico García Lorca, ‘Play and Theory of the Duende’ in Federico García Lorca, In Search of Duende, trans. by Christopher Maurer et al. (New York, NY: New Directions, 2010), pp. 48-62 (p. 49). All further references to this text will use Christopher Maurer’s translation. xxv

Leonard Cohen, ‘Tower of Song’ in I’m Your Man (Columbia Records, 1988), [on CD]. xxvi

Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 182. xxvii

Lorca and Maurer, p. 50.

xxviii

Burger, p. 498.

xxix

Leonard Cohen, ‘Night Comes On’ in Various Positions (Columbia Records, 1984), [on CD]. All further commentary on this song refers to this recording. xxx

Lorca and Maurer, p. 54.

xxxi

Lorca and Maurer, p. 59.

xxxii

Lorca and Maurer, p. 58.

xxxiii

Pedro Salinas, ‘Lorca and the Poetry of Death’, The Carleton Drama Review, 1.2 (1955), 14–21 (p. 16). xxxiv

Ibid, p. 18.

xxxv

Lorca and Maurer, p. 55.

xxxvi

Lorca and Maurer, p. 60.

xxxvii

Lorca and Maurer, p. 58.

xxxviii

Stanton, p. 345.

xxxix

Leighton Grist, ‘Sex, Religion, Politics, and the Death Instinct: “Night Comes On”’, in Spirituality and Desire in Leonard Cohen’s Songs and Poems: Visions from the Tower of Song, ed. by Peter Billingham (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017), pp. 71-90 (p. 71). xl

Grist, p. 80.

xli

Grist, p. 80.

xlii

Grist, p. 80.

xliii

Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. by James Strachey, 24 vols (London: Vintage, 2001), XIX: The Ego and the Id and Other Works, p. 42. xliv

Freud, p. 41.

xlv

Lorca and Maurer, p. 62.

xlvi

Grist, p. 80.

xlvii

Grist, p. 77.

xlviii

Frith, p. 185-6.

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Grist, p. 77.

Simmons, p. 301-2.

li

Leonard Cohen, ‘Chelsea Hotel #2’ in New Skin for the Old Ceremony (Columbia Records, 1974), [on CD]. All further commentary on this song refers to this recording. lii

Leonard Cohen, ‘Tower of Song’ in I’m Your Man (Columbia Records, 1988), [on CD]. liii

A slightly altered version of ‘Take This Waltz’ was later released as part of I’m Your Man (Columbia Records, 1988), [on CD]. liv

Burger, p. 251.

lv

Leonard Cohen, ‘Take This Waltz’ in Poets in New York (CBS Records, 1986), [on CD]. Any further commentary on this song refers to this recording. lvi

Roland Barthes, ‘The Grain of the Voice’, in Image, Music, Text, ed. and trans. by Stephen Heath (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1978), pp. 179-189 (p. 188). lvii

Lars Eckstein, Reading Song Lyrics (Amsterdam; New York, NY: Editions Rodopi, 2010), p. 82. lviii

Northrop Frye, Sound and Poetry: English Institute Essays 1956, 1957 <https://doi. org/10.7312/frye92892> [accessed 17 February 2020], p. xiii. lix

Frye, p. xiii.

lx

Federico García Lorca, Poet in New York (Poeta en Nueva York), trans. by Pablo Medina and Mark Statman (New York, NY: Grove Press, 2008), pp. 160-164. All further references to this poem and its English translation are taken from this text. lxi

Mark W. Booth, The Experience of Songs (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 7. lxii

Edward T. Cone, ‘Words into Music: The Composer’s Approach to the Text’ in Frye, pp. 3-15 (p. 9). lxiii

Booth, p. 7.

lxiv

David Boucher, Dylan and Cohen: Poets of Rock and Roll (New York, NY: Continuum, 2004), p. 19-20. lxv

Paul Williams, ‘The Romantic in a Ragpicker’s Trade’, in Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen, pp. 168-194 (p. 188). lxvi

Glenn Fosbraey, ‘I’m (not) your man’ in Spirituality and Desire in Leonard Cohen: Visions from the Tower of Song, ed. by Peter Billingham (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017), pp. 57-70 (p. 58). lxvii

Paul Zollo, ‘Leonard Cohen: Inside the Tower of Song’ in Leonard Cohen on Leonard Cohen, pp. 584-664 (p. 598). lxviii

V. C. Clinton-Baddeley, Words for Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1941), p. 3. lxix lxx

Clinton-Baddeley, p. 4.

Clinton-Baddeley, p. 23.

lxxi

Fosbraey, p. 58.

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Clinton-Baddeley, p. 11.

lxxiii

Carol A. Hess, The Life and Music of Manual de Falla (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 3. lxxiv

Boucher, p. 19-20.

lxxv

Leonard Cohen, ‘The Night of Santiago’ in Thanks for the Dance (Columbia Records, 2019), [on CD]. All further commentary on this song refers to this recording. lxxvi

Fiona Sampson, Lyric Cousins: Poetry and Musical Form (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), p. 3. lxxvii

Sampson, p. 4.

lxxviii lxxix lxxx

Stanton, p. 46.

Maurer, A Companion to Lorca, p. 18.

Maurer, A Companion to Lorca, p. 26.

lxxxi

Maurer sketches out some of these poetic techniques in the chapter entitled ‘Poetry’, in A Companion to Lorca (pp. 16-38). lxxxii

Boucher, p. 100 and p. 138.

lxxxiii

The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. by Roland Greene et al., 4th edn (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), p. 113. lxxxiv

‘Ballad, n.’, OED Online (Oxford University Press) <https://www.oed.com/view/ Entry/14914> [accessed 17 February 2020]. lxxxv

Booth, p. 16.

lxxxvi

Leonard Cohen, ‘The Night of Santiago’ in Thanks for the Dance (Columbia Records, 2019), [on CD]. lxxxvii

Maurer, A Companion to Lorca, p. 27.

lxxxviii lxxxix

Booth, p. 59.

Booth, p. 59.

xc

John Hollander, Melodious Guile: Fictive Pattern in Poetic Language (New Haven, CN; London: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 133. xci

Hollander, p. 75.

xcii

Boucher, p. 136.

xciii

Boucher, p. 137.

xciv

Lorca and Maurer, p. 49.

xcv

Leonard Cohen, ‘You Want It Darker’ in You Want It Darker (Columbia Records, 2016), [on CD]. xcvi

Lorca and Maurer, p. 49.

xcvii

Leonard Cohen, ‘Take This Waltz’ from Poets in New York (CBS Records, 1986) [Sheet Music Direct, purchased 07/03/2020]. i

Leonard Cohen, ‘Take This Waltz’ from Poets in New York (CBS Records, 1986) [Sheet Music Direct, purchased 07/03/2020].

T H E

F O U N D A T I O N A L I S T

‘Throbbing

Between Two Lives’: Gender, Pleasure and Insight in Literary Representations of Tiresias Rose Gabbertas University College London

O

riginally born out of ancient Greek myth, the figure of Tiresias is one that has endured and fascinated readers for many thousands of years. Stories of Tiresias’ etiology differ hugely within classical literature, but he is widely recognized as the blind prophet who lived through seven generations of the Theban saga. Famed for his faultless clairvoyance, which he variously obtained from a series of visions, signs, haruspicy or augury, Tiresias is also renowned for having been transformed into a woman for seven years.

Indeed, the most widely accepted depiction of Tiresias in the Western literary canon is found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which narrates how Tiresias, having been interrogated by Juno and Jupiter as to which gender garners more pleasure from sex, is blinded by Juno for revealing that women take nine times more pleasure from sex than men. Since the time of Ovid, Tiresias has been widely invoked by poets, writers and artists, and has successfully emerged from antiquity to speak to a modern readership. This essay will follow Tiresias’ literary representations from Ovid and Sophocles in classical literature, to his portrayal in the modernist era of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, right up to Kate Tempest’s modern-day interpretations of the ancient prophet in her poetry collection, Hold Your Own. The enduring literary fascination with Tiresias is inextricable from the fact that there is something undeniably queer about Tiresias. The term “queer” has lived through various stages of meaning, and in the case of Tiresias it is multifaceted in what it signifies. Although queerness is often in-

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terpreted as homosexuality (and in some texts this perception of the term is relevant for Tiresias), the evolution of “queer” has seen it emerge in the 21st century as an umbrella term to represent a large spectrum of sexual and gender identities, ideologies and politics which are deemed to be non-normative. As a semi-immortal man, blind prophet and mythical transsexual, Tiresias has long represented a “liminal identity and forms of knowledge associated with the crossing of epistemological and ontological boundaries.” (Madden 13). From his supernatural prophetic power to his physical disability to his sexual ambiguity, Tiresias is represented as unequivocally “other” within literature. Tiresias’ queerness is further developed though his troublesome intertextuality, which renders him very difficult to define. In classical literature, Tiresias is an effeminized male who is supernatural, yet disabled; T. S. Eliot portrays Tiresias as a judicious hermaphrodite, whilst in Hold Your Own he is explicitly homosexual, and a figure who almost transcends gender difference. Thus, although Tiresias’s literary portrayal is inconsistent, he is consistently “other”. Regardless of his literary context, Tiresias always operates within a marginal societal space, and finds himself “othered” in terms of his gender identity, sexuality, supernatural ability or social class. Indeed, Tiresias is a distinctly liminal character, edging the boundaries between male and female, immortal and mortal, human and divine, homosexual and heterosexual. Since Tiresias is predominantly presented as male within literature, this essay will use the pronouns he/ him to refer to Tiresias, however given the sexual ambiguity of the prophet, “he” might equally be “she” or “they” in today’s world.

The classical figure of Tiresias ultimately represents and advocates a non-normative, non-conforming gender and sexual identity. Depending on the text or readership, Tiresias has the potential to be interpreted as transgender, transsexual, androgynous, hermaphrodite, or even gender neutral.

Deployed as a figure with which to confront binary gender norms, Tiresias’ ancient, mythical origin partly serves to legitimize these non-normative identities. Indeed, particularly

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within 20th and 21st century literature, Tiresias “has come to function as a kind of ambiguous cultural shorthand for variant or deviant sexualities” (Madden 13). Tiresias’ experience of living as both a man and woman not only confronts and informs gender difference and but also examines the inequality between the sexes. Whilst Tiresias’ representation in Eliot and classical literature sheds light on the oppression of women by patriarchal social structures, Kate Tempest’s Tiresias also explores the prejudices suffered by men as they struggle under the pressure to prove their masculinity. The classical debate amongst the gods regarding feminine sexual pleasure acts as the catalyst for Tiresias’ transformation into a seer, and in accordance with Tiresias’ assertion that women enjoy sex more than men, this essay will also investigate the conflict between male and female sexual pleasure. The figure of Tiresias explores the disconnect between the supposed superior pleasure of women and the historical suppression and shaming of female sexuality, as well as the systemic sexual violence suffered by women.

It is somewhat ironic that the blind Tiresias enjoys such an enhanced insight and understanding of the world.

Although Tiresias is granted supernatural prophetic vision as compensation from Jupiter (following his wife Juno’s furious blinding of Tiresias), it is not only this which gives him superior insight. Tiresias’ experience of living as both a man and a woman bestows upon him a unique, “insider” knowledge which is coveted by both men and women. Tiresias possesses an elusive understanding of the long-standing debate regarding essential gender difference and has the capacity to throw light on the universal fascination and misunderstanding between the sexes. Many literary representations of Tiresias have linked his insight with sexual knowledge, associating his “mantic power with his change of sex”, and forging an “interconnection between sexual change and poetic capacity” (Michalopoulos 228-9). From this perspective, Tiresias’ knowledge can in part be interpreted as knowing “in the Biblical sense”. Tiresias is renowned in literature for telling uncomfortable truths, yet he is almost universally disbelieved even

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though his prophecies are literally never incorrect. However, despite his boundless knowledge and prophetic vision, Tiresias is a character who comparably speaks very little. Tiresias is often spoken for, or else tells us about others, but he rarely tells us about himself; we are always left wanting a greater share of what he knows. One of the fascinating features of Tiresias is that he doesn’t give much away, despite the fact that he has the most to say. In this way, Tiresias’ blindness ultimately comes to signify his “superior vision” (Iampolski 3), which is largely inaccessible to us.

TIRESIAS AND THE PROBLEM OF FEMALE PLEASURE IN ANTIQUITY Old man, Theban prophet, former woman, shapeshifter, Tiresias is perhaps the most prolific mortal figure within classical mythology and literature. Tiresias’ broad classical intertextuality is both complex and inconsistent; the portrayal of Tiresias varies significantly from Athenian tragedy to Homer’s epic Odyssey to the Roman poetry of Ovid. However, the discrepancies in Tiresias’ literary depictions produce a rich tapestry of cultural representations of this androgynous figure, from which we can unpick ancient perceptions of the relationship between gender, pleasure and knowledge. Many scholars have remarked that Tiresian criticism sees a shift in focus from his prophetic vision (often said to be the primary point of interest in classical scholarship) to his ambiguous sexuality in modern readings. However, that is not to say that antiquity was solely concerned with Tiresias’ mantic powers.

On the contrary, Tiresias partly functions in classical texts as a locus in which to explore ancient fascination with gender difference. The etiology of Tiresias’ sexual metamorphosis brings to the forefront female pleasure, appropriation and otherness, and how this is negotiated by the male. Not only this, but Tiresias’ participation in Greek tragedy demonstrates how his prophetic insight is largely rejected on account of his otherness or “queerness.”

Book 3 of Ovid’s magnum opus, Metamorphoses, figures as perhaps the best-known and most widely accepted version

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of Tiresias’ etiology, which has been written and re-written by numerous classical authors. Wandering through woodland, Tiresias stumbles across a pair of copulating snakes, and interrupts them with a blow from his staff. Almost instantaneously, Tiresias is transformed into a woman, in which form she lives for seven years. On the eighth year, Tiresias once more encounters the coupling snakes, and in striking them again is returned to the male form. Ovid relates how Tiresias’ experience of living as both man and woman is exploited by the quarrelling Olympian spouses, Jupiter (Zeus) and Juno (Hera): The story goes that Jupiter once, well-flushed with nectar, laid his worries aside and, as Juno was none too busy, he casually cracked a joke. ‘Now listen,’ he said, ‘I bet you women enjoy more pleasure in bed than ever we

men do.’

When Juno disputed the point, they agreed to ask the opinion of wise Teiresias, since he’d experienced love from both angles. (3.318-323) Tiresias responds that if sexual pleasure was divided into ten parts, man enjoys only one, and in her fury, Juno blinds Tiresias: Jupiter won his bet, but Juno unfairly resented Teiresias’ verdict. They say that in disproportionate fury, she sentenced her judge and condemned his eyes to perpetual

blindness. (3.333-335, emphasis added) Jupiter, unable to reverse the work of another immortal but still feeling pitiful, gives Tiresias the gift of prophecy as recompense. Ovid affords particular emphasis to the ferocity of Juno’s rage, and how the extent of her anger seems unjustifiable; the goddess “unfairly” (333) resented Tiresias’ revelation, and responded by maiming Tiresias with “disproportionate fury” (334). Why, then, is Juno so especially furious with Tire-

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sias for his assertion that women take more pleasure from sex than men? Is it because Juno, as the guardian of the orthodoxy of marriage, feels Tiresias’ claim jeopardizes the cultural passivity of brides and wives? Does the idea of compromised masculine pleasure justify Jupiter’s chronic infidelity? Is it because Tiresias, who has lived as a woman for only seven years, has audaciously spilled such a well-kept female secret?

Thus, Tiresias’ blindness and subsequent prophetic power is ultimately manufactured through the problematization of female pleasure.

In many respects, Juno has good reason to be furious with Jupiter and Tiresias’ negotiation of female pleasure. In a debate regarding the sexual experiences of women, Juno, despite her relative power and influence as the queen of the gods (not to mention the fact that she herself is a woman), is virtually excluded from participation. Genevieve Liveley has written that: Juno’s knowledge of her own experience is explicitly denied authority in this debate. Indeed, Juno’s autho rity is undermined by her sex, and women are denied the right even to speak of and for women; this right, instead, is given to men. (153) In Ovid’s narrative, then, pleasure is seemingly the rightful domain of men, and Jupiter recruits another “male” figure - or “man-made-woman” (Liveley 149) - to confirm his suspicions about female pleasure. Nor is Juno the only woman excluded from the discussion; the illogical absence of Venus, the goddess of sexual pleasure amongst other things, is particularly noticeable. Though women may experience erotic pleasure, any knowledge or understanding of this pleasure remains the territory of men. Herein lies the essentiality of the figure of Tiresias; he has personal experience of “superior” female sexual pleasure, but can enjoy a rational knowledge and insight of it in his recovered male form. Juno is not permitted to directly speak of her knowledge of female pleasure, but in blinding Tiresias she clearly communicates her feeling that Tiresias is ignorant of her sexual experiences, and

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that he does not truly see as a woman since his female experience is colored by an engrained masculinity. Indeed, the universality of this eroticized debate is such that it is echoed in the late 20th century ideological dispute between Jacques Lacan and Luce Irigaray. In order to validate his assertion of women’s incapacity to understand or articulate their own sexual pleasure or jouissance, Lacan – much like Jupiter – did not appeal directly to a woman, but instead to a “man-madewoman” (Liveley 149), this time in the form of Bernini’s statue of St. Teresa (Lacan 70). Irigaray confronts Lacan’s assumptions that “the geography of feminine pleasure is not worth listening to,” and “women are not worth listening to, especially when they try to speak of their pleasure” (Irigaray 90).

Thus, the frustration shared by Juno and Irigaray stems from the erotic silencing of women and subsequent prohibition of female agency and sexual emancipation. For Juno, there is a fundamental disconnect between the alleged superiority of the female sexual experience and culturally enforced female sexual passivity (as well as the long history of sexual violence against women). Contrary to Tiresias’ claim, it seems that shame, pain and suffering are more typically associated with women than pleasure.

The crux of the debate regarding the problem of female pleasure hangs on the assumption that women are fundamentally unlike men – that they are not just different, but entirely opposite. The mythological, sexually ambiguous figure of Tiresias embodied a simultaneous anxiety and fascination with gender difference in the classical period. Nevertheless, given the total dominance of the masculine within antiquity, it is tempting to perceive Tiresias as essentially and absolutely male. As we have seen, Juno refuses to acknowledge or validate aspects of the feminine in Tiresias’ identity; she views him as entirely oppositional to the feminine.

Indeed, the notion that Tiresias, despite his transgendering transformation, remains essentially male is upheld in the vast majority of English translations of Metamorphoses. It is interesting that even after Tiresias’ metamorphosis into a woman, Raeburn’s translation maintains the male pronoun: “In the

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eighth [year], however, he saw the very same snakes again … / …he struck at the snakes / and promptly recovered the figure and bodily parts he was born with.” (Met. 3. 326-331, emphasis added). The emphatic position of “bodily parts he was born with” (331) at the end of the line works to immutably connect infant genitalia to an individual’s essential gender identity.

Thus, for Raeburn, Tiresias is unambiguously male, and his gender is immovably fixed. When we first meet Tiresias, he is wandering alone with his staff, seemingly ready to assault anything that has the misfortune of crossing his path. His initial attack upon the mating snakes seems unnecessarily and excessively aggressive. Ostensibly this figure, susceptible to unprovoked violence and presented amidst an onslaught of phallic imagery (striking the enormous snakes with his rod), is one of undeniable, uncompromised masculinity. However, parts of Ovid’s poetry also seem to dissolve conceptions of fundamental gender difference. In the original text, the close positioning of the Latin terms vir and femina as Tiresias’s metamorphosis from male to female is described implies that man and woman may not be so inextricably adverse as we thought (deque viro factus, mirabile, femina, 3.326). Indeed, the idea that men and women are in fact closely related – perhaps neighboring, rather than opposite, sexes – is implied in Tiresias’ seemingly swift and easy transition from one sex to another. Liveley has suggested that Ovid’s initial hyper-masculine portrayal of Tiresias actually mocks the phallogocentric notion that linguistic, intellectual power and authority is the exclusive, absolute property of the male sex: …in appointing Tiresias as both man and woman with such an excess of phallic attributes, Ovid’s narrative makes ironic use of the symbol of the phallus qua ult imate symbol of sex and gender identity. (161) Thus, the Ovidian Tiresias actually confronts and destabilizes essentialist gender politics by demonstrating that “masculine” and “feminine” are accessible positions which either sex has the potential to occupy.

In this way, although strictly delineated gender bina-

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ries were ingrained into classical societies, the Greek psyche was, somewhat paradoxically, also occupied with an ideological “mixture” of the sexes. Nicole Loraux has suggested that the ancient Greek male psyche appropriated and absorbed typically “feminine” qualities as a means of developing masculine interiority and enhancing virility, which were “probably more threatened than would appear” (Loraux 13). Given Tiresias’ engagement with and experience of the feminine, he embodies the Greek fantasy of the ultimate, “complete” male.

Indeed, Loraux’s theory of an androgynous mixing of the sexes is a notion that is particularly Greek. Spartan marriage customs required the bride to be masculinized in having her hair cropped short and being dressed in male clothing before being ritually kidnapped by the bridegroom (Millender 509), and the ritual Argive festival of the Hubristika saw men and women trading clothes as they reversed roles for the day (Loraux 8). By encouraging citizens to indulge in a carnivalesque experience of the other sex for one day of each year, the Hubristika festival evolved so that individuals might then more fully understand themselves and what it meant to live as a man or woman. In her seminal work, Playing the Other, Zeitlin suggests that the transvestism necessitated by the prohibition of female actors within Greek theatre actually signified the essentiality of women in Athenian culture.

Zeitlin has argued that female characters were represented in Greek theatre not for their own sake, but for what they could reveal about masculinity and male identity. By exploiting the supposedly “essential” qualities of the woman, Greek theatre deployed the feminine as a means of “imagining a fuller model for the masculine self” (122). Thus, within the Greek imagination the feminine was essential for moderating, mediating and supporting the masculine, and vice versa. Part of the cultural fascination with Tiresias, then, stems from his completely unique insight; his capacity to know and modulate both sexes internally, to temper and balance the binaries within himself and therefore be able to authentically adjudicate the interaction of the sexes.

From his gift of prophecy to his intimate insight into

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the experiences of both men and women, Tiresias is deeply connected with wisdom, knowledge and understanding. For this reason, then, it is particularly peculiar that the prophetic insight of this revered seer is typically rejected and scorned within classical literature. In Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone, Tiresias warns Creon against his sacrilegious behavior, yet Creon responds not with reverence but with anger, accusing Tiresias of being corrupt, greedy and dishonest. Similarly, in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus, Oedipus arrogantly refuses to heed to Tiresias’ warning when the prophet advises him to look within himself to find the source of the Theban plague.

However, Oedipus goes one step further than Creon, dismissing Tiresias as a liar and ridiculing his blindness: … [Creon] has crept up to me and longs to throw me out, setting upon me this wizard hatcher of plots, this crafty beggar, who has sight only when it comes to profit, but in his art is blind! Why, come, tell me, how can you be a true prophet? (385-389) Tiresias, much like the cursed priestess Cassandra, is destined to be disbelieved. Although his prophetic ability given

by Jupiter is identified as an honor and a blessing, it seems that this knowledge does very little to benefit Tiresias, or anyone else for that matter.

However, if the queerness of Tiresias’ sexual ambiguity functions to enhance his masculinity (and correspondingly his intellectual power and rational judgement) in the classical imagination, why is it that Tiresias’ insight is consistently rejected? In the instances of Creon and Oedipus, is it just a case of the wounded egos of two tyrannical leaders instinctively biting back at whoever dares to criticize them with uncomfortable truths? Whilst it is tempting to accept this perspective, Oedipus’ explicit (and ultimately ironic) jeers at Tiresias’ blindness and later taunts belittling Tiresias as “an obstruction and a nuisance” (445-446) direct our gaze towards Tiresias’ physical disability. Recent disability studies, or “crip theory” have examined how questions of queerness and disability inform one another and how those with disabilities

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fall into the binary of “normal” vs. “abject”. Both queerness and disability are non-normative experiences (as opposed to heterosexuality and able-bodiedness) which have historically been pathologized; queerness has long been treated as a disability, whether that be a mental health disorder or a disorder of the body. Notwithstanding the queerness of his transgendered body, there is also queerness in the deviance of Tiresias’ ocular disability. Robert McRuer’s theory of “compulsory able-bodiedness” (2) renders Tiresias socially and culturally abject, since “able-bodiedness, even more than heterosexuality, still largely masquerades as a nonidentity, as the natural order of things” (1). If Tiresias falls outside normative able-bodiedness due to his blindness, his otherness then cancels the legitimacy and authority of his prophecy. In her influential work Feminist, Queer, Crip, Alison Kafer confronts the notion of disability as a pre-determined limit and explores how those with disabilities are often denied any sense of future. For Kafer, sentiments of ableism which consider disability as a signal for the prohibition of a full life can only conceive “grim imagined futures’” (2) for those with physical impairment. Accordingly, there is a disconnect between Tiresias’ perceived lack of future and his prophecies of what the future holds for others. In Greek tragedy, then, Tiresias’ blindness brings about his rejection as non-normative “other”, and his physical impairment signals a deviance which delegitimizes his prophecy.

Although Tiresias maintains a certain level of power and authority in his understanding of both sexes, he is also uniquely singular in his ability to do so, marking him as “other” within society. However, within antiquity Tiresias’ queerness was at its most troublesome when manifested in his physical disability rather than from his mantic powers or non-conforming gender identity. Whilst impulses to categorize Tiresias into a fixed gender did exist in Greek and Latin literature, Tiresias simultaneously embodied a new, exciting androgyny or interiority-enriched masculinity within antiquity. The Ovidian figure of Tiresias also narrowed the void between the sexes in antiquity, working to diminish absolut-

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ist conceptions of gender difference and in doing so encouraging reform in understandings of female pleasure.

“OLD MAN WITH WRINKLED DUGS”: TIRESIAS AND DISORDER IN THE WASTE LAND T. S. Eliot’s representation of Tiresias in “The Fire Sermon” section of his modernist poem The Waste Land consolidates the blind prophet as a canonically central figure, establishing Tiresias as “a figure par excellence of modernist textual and sexual ambiguity” (Madden 15). Eliot deploys Tiresias as figurehead for his exploration of modernist cultural concerns including the place of the individual within an increasingly urbanized, industrialist, isolating and capitalist-driven society. Tiresias’ supernatural prophetic ability and his experience of both male and female pleasure by way of his transgendered body feed into Eliot’s disorderly, barren, dystopian waste land, of which Tiresias ultimately becomes a wizened spectator. Despite Eliot’s modernist lens, The Waste Land is still heavily informed and influenced by classical literature, adopting influences from Ovid, Homer and Sophocles. Whilst critics have consistently commented on the Tiresian voice as a stabilizing insight which works to ground the narrative chaos of the poem, Tiresias’ metamorphosis functions as a queering process which destabilizes the binary terms of modern society – male and female; active and passive; exteriority and interiority. Tiresias ultimately functions as a disordering presence through his revelation of uncomfortable, disruptive sexual truths and from his own ambiguous sexuality, which generates friction between the masculine and the feminine.

T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is canonically renowned for its impenetrability and narrative disorder; the disjointed, highly allusive poem abruptly shifts between a number of fractured, overlapping, polyphonic voices in lieu of a single, authorial voice, mirroring the stream-of-consciousness narratives of modernist literature. Amidst this narrative disorder, Tiresias has been recognized as a central, unifying figure who enables the reader to grasp a sense of narrative

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cohesion. Tiresias appears almost exactly in the middle of the poem - halfway through section III, “The Fire Sermon” – to narrate the awkward and dispassionate sex-scene between the female typist and “young man carbuncular” (231). In his extensive notes for The Waste Land, Eliot places very particular emphasis on the central role of Tiresias, referring to him as “the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest”, who ultimately “sees…the substance of the poem” (60). Notwithstanding his blindness, what Tiresias “sees” (60) or spectates is in fact the longest unbroken narrative within The Waste Land. Indeed, Tiresias asserts his textual significance by explicitly announcing himself as the speaker – “I, Tiresias” – three times in the “The Fire Sermon” (218; 228; 243), when at other times in the poem the reader knows neither who nor what is speaking. From this perspective, then, Tiresias functions as an important cornerstone of The Waste Land, as his figure and voice “impose a temporal and textual coherence on the text” (Madden 117). It seems fitting, after all, to cast the androgynous figure of Tiresias as the enigmatic speaker of the poem; Tiresias’ androgyny creates a narrator who is multi-vocal, who may “[unite] all the rest” (Eliot 60) of the characters in the text, male or female. Helen Sword has suggested that the androgyny of the classical seer is integral to Tiresias’ unique perception of the poetic chaos, arguing that Tiresias’ “prophetic power depends above all on his privileged identity as an emotional androgyne in who ‘the two sexes meet’ ’’ (10). From a modernist perspective, Tiresias’ androgyny works to explore different modes of representing identity, with Eliot’s assertion that all the characters ultimately “melt” (60) into one collapsing the idea of persona or individuality within an industrialized, capitalist society.

However, although Tiresias is often heralded as a steadying figure in The Waste Land, there is a disconnect between the apparent stability of his narration and the fundamental instability of his metamorphic identity. Eliot’s representation of Tiresias’ metamorphosis deviates from the classical model, where Ovid’s stable metamorphic logic sees Tiresias transform from man to woman for a period of seven

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years before converting back into the male form. Eliot, on the other hand, offers an incomplete, distorted metamorphosis, depicting Tiresias – most commonly portrayed as an elderly, heteronormative male – as an “old man with wrinkled female breasts” (219). Eliot thus presents a fractured metamorphosis which further queers the abject body of Tiresias. Whilst in Ovid’s Metamorphoses Tiresias was alternately entirely male or entirely female, Eliot presents the mythological prophet as a hermaphroditic figure. In other words, Eliot’s version of Tiresias emerges “as a metamorphosis of Ovidian metamorphosis, exceeding any logic of transformation as discrete displacement” (Scully 173). Far from presenting a balanced amalgamation of the sexes within one body, Tiresias’ metamorphosis-gone-wrong undermines his position as a stabilizing linchpin in The Waste Land. Eliot’s particular emphasis on the verb “throbbing” (217-18) in “The Fire Sermon” generates in Tiresias’ body a trembling, unsecure rhythm.

Tiresias’ sexual “throbbing” (218) implies a corporeal excess at the center of the poem, an incapacity to conform to a stable gender, therefore articulating his disordering instinct within The Waste Land.

Despite Tiresias’ apparent function to “unit[e] all the rest” (60) of the characters in The Waste Land, his oscillation between the sexes does not lend meaningful sexual coherence to the poem. In “The Fire Sermon”, Tiresias empathetically participates with both the clerk and the typist, “throbbing between” the “two lives” (218) of the couple who seemingly represent the typical modern male and female.

However, from the outset of section III of the poem, Tiresias is inexplicably rooted in the feminine (unlike classical texts which typically identify Tiresias with the masculine). The fact that Eliot portrays Tiresias as an “old man with wrinkled female breasts” (219) renders Tiresias a deeply effeminized male, and “tie[s] his masculine-gendered body to the feminine genitalia and sexual experience” (Frick 21). Not only this, but Tiresias is immediately aligned with the feminine as he explicitly focuses on the typist’s experience whilst he relates the sexual encounter. As the frame of his account shifts from

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the outside world, Tiresias focuses intently of the realm of the typist; her exhausted indifference, the “food in tins” (223) that she eats, even her “drying combinations…stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays” (225-227). Much like the typist, Tiresias also “awaited the expected guest” (230), and has “foresuffered all / enacted on this same divan or bed” (243-4).

Indeed, Tiresias explicitly identifies himself with the female passive role of the typist, as he has also been “explor[ed]” (240) and “assault[ed]” (239), crucially on rather than above the divan. Despite his unique capability to identify and empathize with the clerk as well as the typist, Tiresias is disconnected, distant and critical in his perspective of the young man, and gives a scathing description of his appearance. Tiresias dismisses him as unattractive yet vain, since “the young man carbuncular” (231) possesses a “vanity that requires no response” (241) from the woman in their unconsented sexual encounter. Tiresias also belittles the clerk in a moment of class-based cynicism: One of the low on whom assurance sits As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire. (233-234) In other words, the “small house agent’s clerk” (232) does not wear his assurance effortlessly; it is an uncomfortable, fancy adornment of the nouveau-riche, implying his “assurance” is ultimately shaky and artificial. Although we may look to Tiresias to transcend sexual difference, in The Waste Land this is ultimately “the one thing he most complicates and fails to transcend” (Madden 118). Tiresias’ voice may lend a sense of narrative continuity to the splintered text, but Eliot’s effeminate male Tiresias ultimately muddles and conflicts the sexes and thus fails to establish sexual coherence.

In his notes for The Waste Land, Eliot remarks on Ovid’s Tiresias as an affirmation of something “of great anthropological interest” (60): that is, that women apparently garner more pleasure from sex than men. However, Eliot’s portrayal of female pleasure disorders or contradicts that made by the classical model. Sex in The Waste Land is pre-

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sented as sordid, bleak and barren, and Eliot’s women – including Philomel (II.99-103), Lil (II.139-164)) and the typist - are sexually violated rather than posing as arbiters of pleasure. Instead of being an intimate, passionate union between lovers, the sexual encounter between the typist and clerk is cold, robotic and emotionless to the point that it has often been perceived as a rape scene: The time is now propitious, as he guesses, The meal is ended, she is bored and tired, Endeavours to engage her in caresses Which still are unreproved, if undesired.

Flushed and decided, he assaults at once; Exploring hands encounter no defence; His vanity requires no response, And makes a welcome of indifference. (235-242) In contrast to Jove’s extensive courtship rituals, in which he takes up whichever form best suits his lover of choice before passionately ravishing her, the clerk is lethargic, idly waiting until his prey is full from their meal, and “bored and tired” (235) before he makes his move. Far from deriving superior pleasure from the experience, the unnamed typist seems wholly indifferent, and once the clerk has left she announces, “Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over” (252). Whilst sexual pleasure may be at the heart of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, at the heart of Eliot is indifference. The Waste Land thus disorders classical conceptions of pleasure; Eliot’s modern Tiresias uses his double perspective to differentiate between mythology and reality and speak in defense of women, implying that the classical insistence of the supremacy of female pleasure has historically excused and justified the sexual exploitation of women by men.

Indeed, Tiresias’ description of the typist and clerk seems distant and jaded, reflecting “the veneer of intimacy [and suggesting] that the distant cold mechanics of the act is related to vocation, class and the industrial revolution” (Frick 21). The notion of human beings morphing into emotionless machines is foregrounded by Tiresias, as he first introduces

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the typist not by her name, but as “the human engine” (216).

The fact that Eliot leaves the man and woman nameless and almost exclusively refers to them by their job description establishes a world in which individuals are defined and valued solely for their labor. However, the typist in particular seems especially robotic in her emotionless, passive sexual role; rather than enjoying nine times the sexual pleasure of men (as is told by Tiresias classical mythology), it seems that she is ultimately “a machine acting out what she has been programmed to do” (Frick 22). In Christianity and Culture, Eliot would later criticize the demoralizing impact of capitalist-driven industrialization, and the “tendency of unlimited industrialism…to create bodies of men and women of all classes detached from tradition, alienated from religion, and susceptible to mass suggestion: in other words, a mob” (17).

For the typist and clerk, it seems that sex is for neither recreation nor procreation, and thus ultimately becomes degraded as a set of programmed, repetitive, automatic movements. In The Waste Land, Tiresias’ overarching prophecy is that the consequence of sex and sexual pleasure proceeding in such a mechanical, soulless way will be that sexuality ultimately becomes little else than wearied indifference.

Eliot’s Tiresias, a prophet who has lived since the classical age, has seen it all. Much like the Sibyl in the epigraph to The Waste Land, Eliot’s Tiresias wants to die but cannot, and instead must sit and spectate the shameful deeds of modern mortals. Despite the fact that Tiresias was traditionally disbelieved by the kings and heroes he delivered his prophecies to, Eliot still chooses to deploy Tiresias as a mouthpiece for social criticism, a harbinger “to challenge self-assurance in industrial progress” (Frick 31). Unlike other depictions of the prophet, Eliot’s Tiresias does not combine the sexes or transcend sexual difference but is instead intimately connected with the women of the poem, whom he empathizes with as the by-product of increasing industrialization. Indeed, Tiresias’ prophetic understanding and com-

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passionate experience of sexual conflict and female suffering works to mediate the readers’ perception of Eliot’s female characters in The Waste Land. As Eliot queers Tiresias’ metamorphosis, Tiresias’ empathetic alignment with the female sex becomes literally written on his hermaphrodite body, as he is repeatedly characterized by his “wrinkled female breasts” (219) or “dugs” (228). Tiresias embodies the disorder he imposes on the text, oscillating between his narrative organization and bodily chaos.

TEMPEST’S “BRAND NEW” TIRESIAS Kate Tempest’s Hold Your Own hauls Tiresias firmly into the 21st century, fusing a Homeric-style epic narration with contemporary colloquial language to reconnect her modern readership and audience with a rich mythical past.

Loosely based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Tempest’s 2014 fourpart poetry collection seeks to modernize and democratize classical literature as it traces Tiresias’ metamorphic journey - from child, to man, to woman, back to man and finally blind prophet - and intersperses it with autobiographical stories of her own. As a spoken word poetry performer, novelist, playwright and recording artist, Tempest has performed her work at Glastonbury, and released studio albums as well as spoken word recordings of Hold Your Own and her 2013 poem, Brand New Ancients. It is fitting that Tempest so often delivers her poetry orally, reflecting the pre-literacy, community-based oral poetry scene of ancient Greece that saw bards performing Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Tempest’s hybrid performance style, using influences from classical literature synthesized with subcultural melodies of hip-hop, emerges as “a powerful vehicle for exploring urban class-based impoverishment, sexuality, and queer identities” (Spiers 113), and has induced Tempest to be dubbed a “brand new Homer” (McConnell 195). Both Eliot and Tempest utilize Tiresias to deliver a social critique on their respective societies. Indeed, Hold Your Own is rooted in realism, presenting an animated, humanized Tiresias, who employs his prophetic vision as a means of social commentary on the Britain of the digital age.

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Kate Tempest poignantly holds up the mirror to modern-day life as she endeavors to create a rejuvenated, introspective, self-reflexive present, which is informed by the past and the future (both of which Tiresias can see). Tempest uses Tiresias to scrutinize the construction of an authentic self in a contemporary society governed by an internet which is stimulating and exciting, but simultaneously “frightening, stultifying and increasingly the medium through which we are observed and manipulated as civic subjects” (Rimell 452). The title of the collection, Hold Your Own, candidly endorses a modern commitment to true selfhood and identity, especially for the youth of the 21st century.

Tiresias’ unique prophetic insight is what has induced him to be “wheeled on to mutter prophecy” (Hold Your Own 22) in numerous classical texts, including the Odyssey, Oedipus Rex and Antigone. In classical literature, however, Tiresias is lauded for what he can tell us about others, not what he can tell us about himself. Classical authors portray Tiresias as revered, but supernatural and “other”; he is more than human, and thus little space is afforded into developing his character interiority. However, Tempest subverts this literary tradition by humanizing Tiresias to give a distinctly sympathetic version of his story. Indeed, Tempest represents Tiresias as a human suffering under the onerous weight of an infinite knowledge that he didn’t ask for but was sheepishly given as compensation from Zeus. Towards the end of the opening poem of the collection, “Tiresias”, Tempest relates the moment Tiresias is instilled with prophetic vision, having been blinded by a raging Hera: He staggered like a child pretending blindness, Hands out in the dark.

But couldn’t close his eyes to what exploded in his heart.

He could see the truth of things He couldn’t look away.

Nothing left but to accept, He had been born to live this day. (22) Tempest represents Tiresias’ prophetic insight as a painful

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consequence of him falling victim to external forces. Much like Tiresias’ multiple involuntary metamorphoses, his prophetic “gift” is unwanted and emotionally jarring. Throughout the collection, Tempest conveys both the physical and emotional strain of the seismic changes and losses that a frivolous quarrel amongst the gods has imposed on Tiresias’ life. In “The downside”, Tiresias’ infamous prophetic ability proves to be not just a burden, but an active danger, as he is held at knifepoint to make him reveal “football scores”, “the winning horse” and “lotto draw” (98). Thus, in Hold Your Own Tiresias’ insight figures not as a god-given honor, but a burden, and at times a source of real anguish. Tiresias perpetual omniscience proves that ultimately you can know too much, as “to really see the state of things is lethal” (99).

Despite Tiresias’ suffering from his insight, his prophetic ability combined with his blindness emerges as an unrivalled method of understanding both the present and the future. In a modern world that has become jaded by technology, Tiresias maintains integrity. Tempest remarks on how the contemporary digital age has brought about mass-disassociation in “Progress”: Now we have the Screen, and it rules.

Our kids are perma-plugged into its promise, admiring all its jewels.

And couples eat their dinner, in the glimmer of its rays, we stare until we’ve learned the world’s ways. (95) Tiresias, liberated from the addictive lure of screens by his blindness, can have the retrospect, distance and time to truly see society. Because he is not bombarded by pixelated images, Tiresias, “blind as our greed” (107), ultimately harbors a truer sense of vision, with which he can deliver uncomfortable truths that need to be told. Despite Tiresias’ superior insight,

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he continues to be disbelieved in Hold Your Own, but this time for different reasons: his class and social status. Once transformed into a blind prophet, Tempest’s Tiresias is a far cry from the revered, respected old man in classical texts.

Instead, he is homeless, “shuffling, lonesome, sipping black lager, / Park-drunk. Spouting maniacal laughter. / Hard up.

Head down. Scarf, gloves, parka” (107). He is wise, yet poor, lonely and disabled, and therefore a societal reject, despite (or even because of) his vulnerability. Indeed, to mesh with Tempest’s liberal politics of redistribution, “it is vital that the representative of truth and future vision comes from a marginalized, disenfranchised community” (Spiers 120); Tempest contrasts “Buzzwords everywhere. Progress. Freedom” (108) with visions of Tiresias “[spitting] brown phlegm at the oncoming darkness” (107) and “[picking] his teeth with a dirty needle” (108). Whilst in other texts Tiresias’ prophecy is shunned due to his non-normative gender and disability, in Hold Your Own it is predominantly down to Tiresias’ compromised social status that he is ridiculed and disbelieved more often than he is listened to.

Hold Your Own hails Tiresias as an exemplum for the forging of modern identity. Much of the overriding sentiment of Hold Your Own revolves around questions of power, selfhood and identity in the 21st century, and the importance of standing up for and being true to who we really are. Tiresias’ queer identity has been fractured, inverted and manipulated, and yet in spite of the trauma of agonizing changes between sexual bodies and socially constructed gender roles, Tiresias has held his own: Tiresias – you’ve lost Everyone you ever loved.

But you stand beneath The cruelty of the sun that burns above And you offer only toothless grins For all that you have seen.

Tiresias, you hold your own.

Each you that you have been. (23)

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Throughout his gendered metamorphoses, mutilation and brush with the divine, Tiresias has refused to dilute or compromise his identity, maintaining “strong selfhood and power in contrast to the emptied-out, socially-networked but identity-less ordinary mortals of the twenty-first century” (Roynon and Orrells 355). Once Tiresias has returned to his male form having lived as a woman for seven years, he finds a “lovely partner” (16) and makes a new life with this “gentle man” (17).

Tiresias the prophet is abject and non-normative in every way - poor, dirty, disabled, transgendered, and gay – and yet he is steadfastly resilient in the face of hostility. Tempest holds Tiresias’ queer self-expression and self-advocacy up against the hollowness of jaded, screen-enslaved millennials: “While we assemble selves online / And stare into our phones, / You are bright and terrifying, / Breath and flesh and bone.” (24). Tempest’s confident, unflinching, uncompromising Tiresias figures as a plea for “the idea of commitment to an essential self or agency” (Roynon and Orrells 355) in a fickle, fashion-led modern society where the internet enables the endless trying-on of new and exciting selves.

Tempest also uses Tiresias as a vehicle with which to explore contemporary gender difference and prejudice. Hold Your Own extensively investigates the implications of sudden and painful gender change, and in doing so reveals the discrepancies between societal expectations of men and women.

As Tiresias undergoes a series of metamorphoses, s/he has to desert their respective lives twice, and Tempest subtly suggests that the necessary adjustments are by no means proportionate in terms of sacrifice and hardship. In “Tiresias”, once the young Tiresias has been transformed into a woman, she must learn to diminish herself and play a specific “feminine” role in order to get by in contemporary society: She learns to be small and discreet.

She learns to be thankful for all that she eats.

She learns how to smile Without meaning an inch of it.

She learns how to swim in the stink And not sink in it.

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It’s as if this is all she had known. (5) When Tiresias is transformed back into his male form, he feels sorrow for the life he has lost, but ultimately finds “peace at last” (16) and forges a content, comfortable life: “He’s found a lovely partner / And they’ve made a life together […] He’s started doing pottery. / He’s joined the local choir.” (16-17). For Tiresias, becoming a woman means shame, pretense and invisibility; becoming a man means middle class contentment. Tempest’s Tiresias brings to light how the patriarchal social structures which governed classical antiquity continue to have a grip on modern society. The form and style of Tempest’s spoken word performances of her poetry brings her commentary on gender and sexuality firmly into the present; Tempest’s lyrical, lilting, intimate spoken word performances blur the lines between poetry and rap, and her unique medium of hip-hop subverts the “endemic homophobia and misogyny that is rife in hip-hop culture”, whilst her successful portfolio as a white female rapper “destabilizes the present-day dominance of the masculine hip-hop elite” (Spiers 113). The fact that the female Tiresias has to learn how to function as a “legitimate” woman in society breaks down ideas of gender essentiality, implying that gender is not inherent to us, but ultimately a construct that we learn to perform, as Butler demonstrated in her seminal work Gender Trouble. Indeed, Tempest highlights the tension between interiority and exteriority, the imperative to inwardly stay true to oneself whilst conforming to the external expectations of society. However, throughout the collection Tiresias maintains his fundamental qualities of character (optimism, candor, sincerity, pragmatism): what changes is how these are interpreted by society.

The myth of Tiresias is compelling to a modern readership because of the way it blurs the boundaries between the sexes and speaks to modern discourses surrounding non-binary identities. Tempest uses Tiresias’ sexual ambiguity as a springboard from which to critique restrictive contemporary gender roles and advocate a more fluid approach to gender and sexuality. In the “Manhood” section of the collec-

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tion, the poem “Man down” addresses the biases of contemporary gender norms, which often lead us to “lock ourselves down like we don’t have a say” (82) into rigid and destructive gender roles and identities. Reflecting on Tiresias’ gender changes, “Man down” bridges the gap between the sexes and their respective societal expectations, advocating a gender-fluid attitude to sexual difference: “We come from man and woman combined / And we’ll carry those parts till we see our last day. / Hear me. Let it be known.” (82). Tempest uses this direct address to the reader throughout the poem, which “blends the lyric voice with the prophetic voice of Tiresias, imbuing the lyric I’s statements with the weight and significance of prophetic truths” (Spiers 119). For Tempest, each person is made up of both typically “masculine” and “feminine” traits, and so for her, individuals are wrong to define their identity by their gender. Tempest argues than an individual may be a “man, but human first” (81). Indeed, Tempest pushes back against the contemporary culture of toxic masculinity, encouraging men to embrace their femininity whilst urging women to break out of patriarchal pigeonholes which tell them that they are inferior, weak and passive: No woman’s too woman to stand tall and strong.

No man’s too man to want loving. Need guidance.

All hearts shrink before violence.

All fists clench for their friends. (83) By unpicking and confronting cultural gender stereotypes, Tempest seeks to dissolve fundamental gender difference and essentialism, liberating individuals to “hold their own” whatever gender they may identity or express themselves with.

In Hold Your Own, Tempest urges readers to challenge the issues and injustices of present-day society, to re-evaluate their own lives, recognize their worth and fight to uphold it, and be a part of materializing a happier social future. Tempest has said that “the idea that we are all part of something much bigger than ourselves” (Financial Times) runs as a common, vital thread throughout her work. Tempest tran-

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scends time in Hold Your Own, utilizing stories from the past in the present as a means of imagining a better future. Her assertion that “to really see the state of things is lethal” (99) is literally the case for Tiresias (who is blinded by Hera for his clear insight), but is also metaphorically true for those at the bottom of the capitalist pyramid, to whom screens are sent as “visual opium” (Crown, The Guardian) to blind them. However, Tempest’s use of Homeric-style epic and ancient myths in both Hold Your Own and Brand New Ancients generate a sense of hope and ambition, making this vision of a better present and future “seem viable as the old stories tie seamlessly into Tempest’s present-day setting and engender a sense of continuity” (Spiers 123). Tiresias’ prolific presence in modern literature is down to his innate ability to speak to modern audiences. Despite having been conceived thousands of years ago, he is a mythical character whose queerness and evasion of categorization holds a relevant and meaningful place in contemporary society. Whilst the nuances of Tiresias’ representations in literature differ between texts and literary contexts, he is nonetheless an individual who consistently pushes issues of gender, sex, knowledge and identity to the forefront of the conversation. No matter how Tiresias’ literary representations are interpreted, he is a figure who invariably provokes us to think, and then think again. Tiresias’ queer identity represents a distinct betweenness, a continuous “throbbing” (Eliot 218) as part of his inability to conform to normative binary structures within society. Indeed, Tiresias’ multifaceted queerness ultimately forces us to question our own preconceptions about difference, and our impulses to create binary categories to regulate the world around us.

• Works Cited Primary Works Eliot, T.S. Selected Poems. London: Faber and Faber, 2015. Print.

Homer. Odyssey. Translated by E. V. Rieu, with revised translation by C. H. Rieu. London: Penguin, 2003. Print.

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Homer. The Iliad. Translated by Robert Fagles, with an introduction and notes

by Bernard Knox. London: Penguin, 1998. Print.

Ovid. Metamorphoses. Translated by David Raeburn, with an introduction by Denis Feeney. London: Penguin, 2004. Print.

Sophocles. Ajax. Electra. Oedipus Tyrannus. Translated by Hugh Lloyd-Jones.

Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. Web. Accessed 15 April 2020.

Sophocles. Antigone. Translated by Hugh Lloyd-Jones. Loeb Classical Library.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. Web. Accessed 15 April 2020.

Tempest, Kate. Brand New Ancients. London: Picador, 2013. Print.

Tempest, Kate. Hold Your Own. London: Picador, 2014. Print.

Secondary Works Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 10th anniversary ed. New York: Routledge, 1999. Print.

Crown, Sarah. “Hold Your Own review – powerful poetry from Kate Tempest”.

The Guardian. 31 October 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/ stage/2014/oct/31/hold-your-own-kate-tempest-poetry-collection-review#maincontent. Web. Accessed 17 April 2020.

Eliot, T. S. The Idea of a Christian Society. London: Faber and Faber, 1939, p.17.

Print.

Frick, Adrianna E. “The Dugs of Tiresias: Female Sexuality and Modernist Nationalism in The Waste Land and Les mamelles de Tirésias”. The Waste Land at 90: A Retrospective, Brill; Rodopi, 2011, pp.15-33. Web. Accessed 24 April 2020.

Iampolski, Mikhail. Introduction. The Memory of Tiresias: Intertextuality and Film.

Translated by Harsha Ram. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998, pp.1-4. Print.

Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman. Translated by Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985. Print.

Kafer, Alison. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013, pp.1-24. Print.

Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire Livre XX: Encore. Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1975.

Print.

Liveley, Genevieve. “Tiresias/Teresa: A ‘man-made-woman’ in Ovid’s Metamorphoses”. Helios, vol. 3, no.2, 2003, pp.147-62. Web. Accessed 18 April 2020.

Loraux, Nicole. The Experiences of Tiresias: the Feminine and the Greek Man. Translated by Paula Wissing. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995. Print.

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Madden, Ed. Tiresian Poetics: Modernism, Sexuality, Voice, 1888-2001. Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008. Print.

McConnell, Justine. “‘We Are Still Mythical’: Kate Tempest’s Brand New Ancients.” Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, vol. 22, no. 1, 2014, pp. 195–206. JSTOR, accessed 23 May 2020.

McRuer, Robert. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York: New York University Press, 2006, pp.1-33. Print.

Michalopoulos, Carilaos. “Tiresias Between Texts and Sex”. Eugesta 2, 2012, pp. 221-39. Web. Accessed 22 April 2020.

Millender, Ellen. “Spartan Women.” A Companion to Sparta. Wiley, 2017, pp.

500–524. Web. Accessed 2 May 2020.

Potter, Rachel. “Gender and Obscenity in The Waste Land.” The Cambridge Companion to the Waste Land. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 133–146. Print.

Rimell, Victoria. “After Ovid, After Theory.” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 26, 2019, pp.446-469. Web. Accessed 27 April 2020.

Roynon, Tessa, and Daniel Orrells. “Preface: Ovid and Identity in the Twenty-First Century.” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 26, pp.351–358, 2019. Web. Accessed 27 April 2020.

Spiers, Emily. “Kate Tempest: A ‘Brand New Homer’ for a Creative Future.” Homer’s Daughters, edited by Fiona Cox and Elena Theodorakopoulos. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019, pp. 105-123. Print.

Sunyer, John. “Breakfast with the FT: the politically charged writer and rapper Kate Tempest”. Financial Times. 4 November 2016, https://www. ft.com/content/322150ae-96d9-11e6-a80e-bcd69f323a8b. Web. Accessed 17 April 2020.

Sword, Helen. Engendering Inspiration: Visionary Strategies in Rilke, Lawrence, and H.D. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995, p.10. Print.

Tempest, Kate. Brand New Ancients. Performed by Kate Tempest. Audible, 2013. Web. Accessed 10 May 2020.

Tempest, Kate. Hold Your Own. Performed by Kate Tempest. Audible, 2014.

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Zeitlin, Froma. “Playing the Other: Theater, Theatricality, and the Feminine in Greek Drama.” Sexuality and Gender in the Classical World: Readings and Sources, edited by Laura McClure, Blackwell Publishers, 2002, pp.103-144. Web. Accessed 16 March

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are not dead but sleep, and it is well to gather a treasure of them’: The Role of Memory in the Poems of John Clare Jonathan Chan University of Cambridge

As a laboring-class poet, John Clare’s physical and emotional proximity to his subjects in “rural England” differentiated him as a native voice of his ecosystem.i Rather than calling forth the ineffable, Clare’s countryside remained grounded as a place of organic, unmitigated knowledge. Clare’s textual approximation of the visual bears the influence of eighteenth century pictorialism, in which the long vogue of ut pictura poesis ensured that poets would learn to refine their ways of seeing to enrich the mind’s ability to form images and representations of things, persons, or scenes of being.ii Clare’s painterly eye is apparent in the way his poems telescope into intimate descriptions of sensory engagement, epitomizing an exhaustive understanding of his childhood village Helpston.iii This is perhaps best understood as an impulse toward recollection. Featuring prominently in the titles of Clare’s poems, the term “recollection” takes on tangible and cognitive connotations when understood as both the act of gathering things together again and of recalling something to the memory.iv William Wordsworth’s assertion that poetic composition “takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility”v proves germane in understanding that Clare’s recollections are tinted by nostalgia, a conscious and sustained used of memory to evoke a past feeling.vi That Clare forages his memory for cherished images is vital to understanding his poetry because of the strength with which they approximate physical presence and epistemic engagement.vii In Clare’s early poems (1812-1831), memory functions to capture his experiences of nature’s beauty. However, this is disrupted by the enactment of Enclosure Acts between 1809 and 1820, granting landowners permission to fence fields, heaths,

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and woods.viii Faced with the encroachments of the Industrial Revolution, what solidifies is Clare’s desire to preserve his memories of life before and after societal and environmental collapse.ix Robert Macfarlane couches Clare’s anxiety in the critical language of the Anthropocene by describing his experience as solastalgia, “a modern uncanny, in which a familiar place is rendered unrecognisable by climate change or corporate action: the home becomes suddenly unhomely around its inhabitants.”x Faced with the gradual disappearance of the fields and practices he grew up with, Clare’s estrangement from his home becomes apparent as his poems capture Helpston at its most idyllic. Following his institutionalization at mental asylums in High Beach asylum in Epping Forest and Northampton from 1837 to 1864 for erratic behavior, landscapes take on a sacrosanct position in Clare’s imagination, bolstered by his nostalgia for home as his experience of separation from home becomes a symbolic internal state of mind.xi This transition from the enclosure of common lands to Clare’s physical enclosure reveals an accelerated urgency in remembering, particularly with Clare’s slipping grasp of his identity. The chronology of Clare’s poetry thus reveals an increasing estrangement from Edenic idealizations of Helpston.

In his earlier writing, Clare documents his love for evening walks in stating, “such amusements gave me the greatest of pleasures […] I notic’d every thing as anxious as I do now”.xii “Recollections after an Evening Walk” aptly captures this by presenting a litany of minutiae affectionately packaged in rhyming couplets.xiii As Simon Goldhill describes, the poem educates and directs our viewing as a social and intellectual process.xiv The specificity of Clare’s description is similarly instructive in shaping how his readers follow his eye during his evening walk. With the speaker “[wandering] the fields and the meadows about”, Clare microscopically homes in on people, creatures, and segments of scenery. Clare’s ekphrastic sensitivity to color is emphasized in the contrast between the sun that “seem’d like a ball of pure gold in the west” and the “blue mist [that] came creeping wi’ silence and night”. The poem’s visual sweep descends from the grandeur of sunset to the behavior changes of the laborers as he notes, “The woodman then ceas’d

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wi’ his hatchet to hack / And bent a way home wi’ his kid on his back”. The contrast between day and night, work and rest, is strengthened by Clare’s attention to these nuances. In capturing their moments of rest, Clare dignifies and softens the workmen by alluding to their domestic and natural preoccupations of fatherhood. The poem’s transition to animals makes evident that Clare’s conscientiousness is rooted in affection.

The speaker notes, “the sweetest of all seeming music to me / Was the song of the clumbsy brown beetle and bee”. Clare’s aural recollection aestheticizes the buzzing of insects by transforming it into music. These embellishments are also revealed in the couplet, “little gay moth was too lovely to view / A dancing with lily-white wings in the dew”. Clare’s kinesthetic imagery is tinged with anthropocentricism, evincing his affinity for the animals and their accompaniment on his walk. Clare ties his disparate threads of memory into cogent narration as the speaker arrives home and declares, “The dog bark’d a welcome well pleas’d at our sight / And the owl o’er our cot flew and woopt a good night”, affectionately intertwining the domestic and the wild. “Recollections” is as much for Clare as it is for the reader, revealing a desire to hold onto the excitements of remembering his evening walks.

With the introduction of the Enclosure Acts, Clare’s poetry becomes tinged with a nascent recognition of loss, taking on urgency in preserving Helpston through recollection.

From the 1740s to the 1830s, agricultural capitalism flourished, with widespread enclosures of common land dispossessing the rural poor.xv Clare grew up knowing only the arable land, woodland, limestone heath, meadows, and fen that made up his parish of Helpston,xvi with few permanent fences to obstruct the view across the fields and unbroken tracts.xvii After any enclosure the land in the parish was divided into square parcels, which were quickly fenced and hedged and put under any course of husbandry chosen by landowners.xviii John Barrell argues that it is impossible to disentangle Clare’s nostalgia for the old landscape of Helpston from that of his childhood, which the memory of the landscape can revive but cannot restore.xix As such, the enclosures did not simply upset the countryside’s physical space, but worked to unravel the most

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influential filaments of Clare’s self-recognition.xx Through the estrangement of solastalgia, “To a Fallen Elm”xxi and “Helpston Green”xxii yoke Clare’s memories of natural landscapes to the effervescence of his boyhood, presenting a tendency to portray the time before enclosure as one of pastoral, Edenic bliss.xxiii In “To a Fallen Elm”, Clare’s apostrophe pays tribute to the elm: “into mellow whispering calms would drop / When showers fell on thy many colored shade”. The child’s hesitancy toward the relentlessness of rain is transformed into calmness through the aural image of “mellow whispering calms”, justifying Clare’s affectionate regard for the “Old Elm”. In “Helpston Green”, Clare waxes nostalgic over the fields, noting “The well known brook the favorite tree” and the “nest along the shade” that were backdrops to “Childhoods happy hour”. This nexus between nature and childhood is ensured by the workings of memory, setting up an inevitable binary with the corruptions of industrialization and adulthood. It is significant then that both poems are interspersed with the physical and emotional damages inflicted by development as Clare contrasts his unrecoverable memories of Helpston against its present desolation. Confronted with the loss of his beloved elm in “To a Fallen Elm”, Clare decries “the cant terms of enslaving tools / To wrong another by the name of right”. In “Helpston Green”, Clare rails against the violence inflicted upon the land, condemning the “The tyrants [whose] hand their shade devours”. The forcefulness of Clare’s anthropomorphic comparison ascribes a sense of victimhood to the elm. This deterioration leads the speaker to declare, “All I can do is still to tell / Of thy delightful plain”, referring to poetry’s role in preserving their memory. Yet, this is tinged with melancholy as the speaker notes “When age resumes the faultering tongue / Alas theres nought can save”. What Clare identifies is the existential recognition that the Helpston of his childhood can only exist in the memories of those who lived in it. Clare’s recollections distil not only the systematic, unstoppable means of Helpston’s destruction, but also the melancholy of losing the Helpston he knew and loved.

Upon his institutionalization in 1837, memory adopts a more pathetic function in Clare’s poems. Beyond docu-

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menting the loss of his surrounding environment, Clare’s forced uprooting galvanizes an anxiety toward remembering the landscapes of his childhood. Such was the severity of his displacement that Clare described the asylum as a “hell of a madhouse” resembling a “slave ship from Africa”.xxiv Remembering Helpston can no longer serve as an avenue for Clare’s nostalgic indulgence but as a way of recovering the fragments of his identity. “Untitled (I love thee nature with a boundless love)” xxv is a profound declaration of this yearning. The speaker proclaims, “My harp is in the thunder melting clouds / The snow capt mountain, and the rolling sea.” While his work was previously grounded in the minutiae of daily experience, “Untitled” evinces the extent of his sensory deprivation as he imagines nature’s serenity, happiness and wonder through grandiose pronouncement. Clare’s physical confinement may have induced this expansion of scale in his imagery. Contrastingly, in “Recollections of Home”xxvi we are brought back to Clare’s practice of remembering through microscopic detail. In an enumeration of the asylum’s elements, Clare remarks, “The very layer of crab that’s wattled in the hedge The old post in its red paint crushed with wagons rushing through The teazles prickly burrs or the little hubs of sedge Will bring me to the old place where I lived a moon ago”.

Detached from the familiarity of home, Clare cannot help but grasp onto the details that best resemble it. The texture of Clare’s imagery alludes to the empirical underpinnings of memory, a vivid tactility that allows Clare to bridge the growing temporal distance between life before and after institutionalization.

These disruptions further manifest in Clare’s attempts to discern a “natural” identity preceding his institutionalization. In “Untitled”, he states, “From Eve’s posterity I stand quite free / Nor feel her curses rankle round my heart”. This notion of a prelapsarian innocence, free from the corruption and the toil of human suffering, idealizes nature’s rehabilitative qualities. The maternal quality of nature, one that nourishes and comforts, is contained in the lines,

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“For nature is my brother and I rest When tempests trouble and the sun is gone Like to a weary child upon her breast”.

Clare’s wistful proclamation is deepened from one of appreciation to the intimacy of maternal love. In claiming this love, Clare clings to his identity as a child of nature, one informed by intimate engagements with natural landscapes and his recollection of its tangibility and visibility. Clare’s enclosure within the mental asylum negates this identity by restricting Clare’s mobility, ensuring it can only be recovered via remembering. “Recollections of Home” offers a transposition back home: “Here fifty miles away and I cross another stream It brings me to my own fields the brigs so like So here I only wander in the middle of a dream”.

That home occupies his mental realm indicates the anxious yearning tied to remembering. That Clare can only return home in a dream suggests its reconstitution in his subconscious, a mingling of the absolute senses of temporal and geographical displacement. The dilution of descriptive specificity and fraying of Clare’s mental landscape intensifies his attempts to cling to his cultural identity, a reconstruction of Helpston in its unmarred condition.

The shifting forms that recollection takes through Clare’s literary career demonstrates its inextricability from his poetic composition. It is the temporal distance between him and his youth in Helpston that intensifies the urgency of remembering. From the pleasure of recalling an evening walk, to the anguish of remembering a pre-enclosure Helpston, to the yearning enacted by his enclosure in an asylum, Clare’s engagements with memory become increasingly fraught. It is in Clare’s recollections that we are presented with fragments of his world – a time, place, and self that can only exist in his poetry.

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• Works Cited Primary Works Clare, John, ‘Helpston Green’, in The Oxford Authors: John Clare, ed. by Eric Robinson and David Powell, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984) Clare, John, ‘[‘I love thee nature with a boundless love’]’, in The Oxford Authors: John Clare, ed. by Eric Robinson and David Powell, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984) Clare, John, John Clare’s Autobiographical Writings, ed. by Eric Robinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983) Clare, John, ‘Recolections of Home’, in The Oxford Authors: John Clare, ed. by Eric Robinson and David Powell, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984) Clare, John, ‘Recollections after an Evening Walk’, in The Oxford Authors: John Clare, ed. by Eric Robinson and David Powell, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984) Clare, John, ‘To a Fallen Elm’, in The Oxford Authors: John Clare, ed. by Eric Robinson and David Powell, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984) Secondary Works Barrell, John, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730-1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972) Bewell, Alan, “John Clare and the Ghosts of Nature Past”, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 65.4 (2011), 548-578 Birns, Nicholas ‘‘The riddle nature could not prove’: hidden landscapes in Clare’s poetry” in John Clare in Context, ed. by Hugh Haughton, Adam Phillips and Geoffrey Summerfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 189-220 Clare, John, “Song (‘A seaboy on the giddy mast’)”, in The Oxford Authors: John Clare, ed. by Eric Robinson and David Powell, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984) Goldhill, Simon, “What is Ekphrasis For?”, Classical Philology, 102.1, (2007), 1-19 “John Clare”, The Poetry Foundation < https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/john-clare> [accessed 12 January 2019] Labriola, Amanda, “The Enclosure of Eden: John Clare and the Politics of Place and Past”, BSU Honors Program Theses and Projects, < http:// vc.bridgew.edu/honors_proj/151> [accessed 12 January 2019] Lipking, Lawrence, “Quick Poetic Eyes: Another Look at Literary Pictorialism” in Articulate Images: The Sister Arts from Hogarth to Tennyson, ed. by Richard Wendorf (USA: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), pp.

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Macfarlane, Robert, “Generation Anthropocene: How humans have altered the planet for ever”, The Guardian, 1 April 2016, <https://www. theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/01/generation-anthropocene-altered-planet-for-ever> [accessed 18 January 2019] Monbiot, George, “John Clare, the poet of the environmental crisis – 200 years ago”, The Guardian, 9 July 2012, <https://www.theguardian. com/commentisfree/2012/jul/09/john-clare-poetry> [accessed 12 January 2019] Phillips, James, “Distance, Absence, and Nostalgia” in Descriptions, ed. by Don Ihde and Hug J. Silverman, (USA: State University of New York Press. 1985), pp. 64-75 Porter, Roy, ‘‘All madness for writing’: John Clare and the asylum” in John Clare in Context, ed. by Hugh Haughton, Adam Phillips and Geoffrey Summerfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp.

259-278 Salvesen, Christopher, The Landscape of Memory: A Study of Wordsworth’s Poetry (London: Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd., 1965) Scrivener, Michael, “Literature and politics” in The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1740-1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 43-60 Van Gogh, Vincent, The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, ed. by Mark Roskill, (New York: Simon & Schuster) Wordsworth, William, “Preface 1800 Version” in Lyrical Ballads: Wordsworth and Coleridge, ed. by R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (USA: Routledge, 1963), pp. 241-273 Works of Reference Chirico, Paul, John Clare and the Imagination of the Reader (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) Felstiner, John, “Its Only Bondage Was the Circling Sky: John Clare and the enclosure of Helpston”, The Land Magazine, 2009, <http://www. thelandmagazine.org.uk/articles/its-only-bondage-was-circling-skyjohn-clare-and-enclosure-helpston> [accessed 12 January 2019] Garrison, Alysia E., “Disdaining Bounds of Place and Time,” Staining Language with Furze and Burvine: John Clare’s Nomadic Poetics’, Literature Compass, 3/3, (2006), 376-387 Gorji, Mina, John Clare and the Place of Poetry (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008) The Romantic Imagination: Literature and Art in England and Germany, ed. by Frederick Burwick and Jürgen Klein (The Netherlands: Rodopi, 1996)

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ENDNOTES i

Amanda Labriola, ‘The Enclosure of Eden: John Clare and the Politics of Place and Past’, BSUHonorsProgramThesesandProjects,<http://vc.bridgew.edu/honors_proj/151>[accessed12 January 2019] ii

Lawrence Lipking,‘Quick Poetic Eyes: Another Look at Literary Pictorialism’in Articulate Images: The Sister Arts from Hogarth to Tennyson, ed. by Richard Wendorf (USA: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), pp. 3-25 (p. 7-8, 11). iii

Labriola, ‘The Enclosure of Eden’.

iv

OED

v

WilliamWordsworth,‘Preface 1800Version’in Lyrical Ballads:Wordsworth and Coleridge, ed. by R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (USA: Routledge, 1963), pp. 241-273 (p. 266). vi

ChristopherSalvesen,TheLandscapeofMemory:AStudyofWordsworth’sPoetry(London: Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd., 1965), p. 1. vii

<http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095958111>, [accessed 5 June 2018]. viii

George Monbiot,‘John Clare, the poet of the environmental crisis – 200 years ago’, The Guardian, 9 July 2012, <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jul/09/john-clare-poetry> [accessed 12 January 2019] ix

Monbiot, ‘John Clare, the poet of the environmental crisis – 200 years ago’.

x

Robert Macfarlane, ‘Generation Anthropocene: How humans have altered the planet for ever’, TheGuardian,1April2016,<https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/01/generation-anthropocene-altered-planet-for-ever> [accessed 18 January 2019] xi

James Phillips, ‘Distance, Absence, and Nostalgia’ in Descriptions, ed. by Don Ihde and Hug J. Silverman, (USA: State University of New York Press. 1985) pp. 64-75 (p. 65) xii

John Clare, John Clare’s AutobiographicalWritings, ed. by Eric Robinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 31. xiii

John Clare,‘Recollections after an Evening Walk’, in The Oxford Authors: John Clare, ed. by Eric Robinson and David Powell, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). p. 41. xiv

Simon Goldhill, ‘What is Ekphrasis For?’, Classical Philology, 102.1 (2007), 1-19 (p. 2).

xv

MichaelScrivener,‘Literatureandpolitics’inTheCambridgeCompaniontoEnglishLiterature17401830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 43-60 (p. 43). xvi

Alan Bewell, ‘John Clare and the Ghosts of Nature Past’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 65.4 (2011), 548-578 (p. 550). xvii

JohnBarrell,TheIdeaofLandscapeandtheSenseofPlace1730-1840:AnApproachtothePoetryof John Clare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972) p. 104. xviii

Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730-1840 p. 109.

xix

Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730-1840 p. 112.

xx

Labriola, ‘Enclosure of Eden’.

xxi

John Clare, ‘To a Fallen Elm’, in The Oxford Authors: John Clare, ed. by Eric Robinson and David Powell, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). pp. 96.

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xxii

John Clare, ‘Helpston Green’, in The Oxford Authors: John Clare, ed. by Eric Robinson and David Powell, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). pp. 62. xxiii

Nicholas Birns, ‘’The riddle nature could not prove’: hidden landscapes in Clare’s poetry’in John Clare in Context, ed. by Hugh Haughton, Adam Phillips and Geoffrey Summerfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 189-220 (p. 194). xxiv

Roy Porter, ‘‘All madness for writing’: John Clare and the asylum’ in John Clare in Context, ed. by Hugh Haughton, Adam Phillips and Geoffrey Summerfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 259-278 (p. 262). xxv

John Clare, ‘[‘I love thee nature with a boundless love’]’, in The Oxford Authors: John Clare, ed. by Eric Robinson and David Powell, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). pp. 378. xxvi

John Clare, ‘Recolections of Home’, in The Oxford Authors: John Clare, ed. by Eric Robinson and David Powell, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). pp. 386.

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The Foundationalist is not operated by Bowdoin College, Yale University, or University of Iowa. The views and opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of the institutions or its official representatives.

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C O N T R I BU TO R S ALEX GALDAMEZ (he/they) an inquisitive person by nature, uses their writing to critique many aspects of society and inquire about their social impacts. Their sympathy brings them to prioritize justice and representation. Their poetry reflects that and is only the first step on a long road of social work.

Discover more about this contributor: Twitter AMANDA WEBER (she/her) is a fourth-year English/computer science major at Grinnell College. Like most aspiring writers, she is passionate about stories and the words used to tell them. At any given moment, you can find her in pursuit of good food, a runner’s high, weird roadside attractions, or a song to play on loop for three days straight and then never listen to again AVIVA BETZER (she/her) is a writer in both Hebrew and English. She majored with honors in the studies of Theory of Literature in Tel Aviv University where she presently resides, and wrote her thesis on the representations of the Freudian body in the fiction of David Vogel. Her work has been published in Caesura, Arc 26, Chambers Anthology. Her collection of poetry, Noise, published in Hebrew, came out in 2011.She is currently in her graduate studies in English Literature and American Studies at Tel Aviv University.

BEAU FARRIS (he/him) is a junior at University of Colorado Boulder, where he is majoring in History and Creative Writing with an emphasis on poetry. He plans to obtain an MFA in creative writing after his undergraduate degree. He firmly believes that poetry can change the world, as it keeps influencing him every day.

CAMILLE LENDOR (she/her) is an emerging black queer poet based in Toronto, Ontario. She is a fourth-year student at the University of Toronto, graduating in June 2021 with a specialist degree in English.

CAROLINE MEEK (she/her) is a queer, environmentally-concerned poet from Kansas City, Kansas. She’s currently in her last semester at the University of Iowa, and she’ll graduate with an English & Creative Writing major and seventy-five houseplants. She also edits poetry at earthwords:

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the undergraduate literary magazine. You can find her at your local hardware store buying bags of soil – or on Twitter @carolinedmeek.

Discover more about this contributor: LinkedIn

DANICA CREAHAN (she/her) is an LMU alum who has lived in Los Angeles (almost) her entire life. She was unschooled until high school, when she attended a performing arts charter school and majored in creative writing. She is now pursuing a career in audio storytelling and journalism.

DANIEL BISHOP (he/him) grew up in London and currently studies at Cambridge University.

DOMINIC BURKE (he/him) is an undergraduate at the University of Sydney majoring in English and Philosophy. His favourite books are Moby Dick and Sometimes a Great Notion. Dominic wants to one day live in the countryside.

ELSASOA JOUSSE (she/they) is a multimedia artist from France and Madagascar based in Montreal, Canada. Their main interests are poetry, spoken word, music production, and DJing under the name NGL Flounce. She has researched the politics of Afro-Asian literature during the Cold War at McGill University, the results of which are shared in this issue of The Foundationalist.

ERIN YONAK (she/her) is an artist and designer at Washington University in St. Louis pursuing a BFA in Communication Design. She graduates in May. Her passions include spreading awareness of mental illness through her art and writing, and she believes her responsibility as an artist is to listen deeply and represent the experiences of others.”

Discover more about this contributor: Website FABIO CABRERA (he/him) Fabio Cabrera is currently a sophomore at Cornell University studying Philosophy and Biology & Society. He is from Bogotá, Colombia, and he is currently working on a project that seeks to explore the image of the Nautilus as a symbol of the complexities of his own sexual maturation as a gay man and the intricacies of human desire and loneliness in general.

GENIE HARRISON (she/her) is currently a student on the American Literature MPhil at the University of Cambridge. Her avid interest in the interanimation of poetry and song inspired both her undergraduate dis-

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sertation featured in this edition, and has motivated her MPhil research, which explores the role of jazz music in the late poetry of Langston Hughes. When estranged from books, she can usually be found singing and writing herself.

HARRISON MAHLER (he/him) is a recent graduate of the George Washington University’s undergraduate creative writing program. He writes both fiction and creative nonfiction.

Contact this contributor: Email | Twitter JACK WELLSCHLAGER (he/his) is a Bowdoin College student in the Class of 2023 studying English, Education, and Japanese. He most “productively” spends free time writing essays and working on his Japanese. Otherwise, he might be spending time with his 12 younger cousins, playing overly difficult platforming games, or reading interesting books about boring things Discover more about this contributor: LinkedIn JAEDE SHILLINGFORD (she/her) is a second-year student at McGill University majoring in English Literature with a minor in Cultural Studies. In the future, she hopes to settle down in New York City to pursue a career in fashion journalism, but until then she looks forward to continuing her research on the racial dynamics of publishing and the history of the Black novel.

JONATHAN CHAN (he/him) graduated with a BA in English from the University of Cambridge in 2020. He will begin an MA in East Asian Studies at Yale University in 2021. Born in New York to a Malaysian father and South Korean mother, he was raised in Singapore, where he is presently based. This essay was prepared for Part I of the English Tripos under the supervision of Dr Mary Newbould.

Discover more about this contributor: Wordpress JULIA M. WALTON (she/her) is a senior at Princeton University, where she is concentrating in English and pursuing certificates in Creative Writing, Humanistic Studies, and East Asian Studies. Her scholarly and creative work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in COUNTERCLOCK, The Paper Shell Review, Tortoise: A Journal of Writing Pedagogy, The Nassau Literary Review, Questions: Philosophy for Young People, and The Best Teen Writing of 2016. She has also been awarded the Emily Ebert Junior Prize and the Francis Biddle Sophomore Prize by Princeton’s English Department. A native of the Philadelphia suburbs, she currently serves as

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Editor-in-Chief Emerita of The Nassau Literary Review and is pursuing two thesis projects, a novella and a long-length critical work.

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KASEY BROEKEMA (she/her) born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, is a graduating senior at Columbia University (CC ‘21) majoring in English.

Having been a resident of New York City for five years, you can often find her scheming up story plots in coffee shops, goggling in awe at her favorite dancers at Lincoln Center, and geeking out over Ancient Egyptian art at The Met Museum. Broekema began writing in the summer of 2020 and is thrilled to have her first story published in this issue of The Foundationalist.

Discover more about this contributor: Website | LinkedIn LILY SWANSON (she/her) is a fiction writer at the University of Kansas. She enjoys sipping tea and eating breakfast foods while she waits for the singularity.

Discover more about this contributor: Tumblr LOUIS PIETTE (he/him) is a queer writer from Québec City, Canada.

He is currently studying at McGill University, pursuing a major in English literature and a minor in philosophy. A Culprit’s Death is his first publication.

MALLORY MOORE (she/her) studies English Literature and Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. Her short fiction has been nationally recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, and she is an alumna of the Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference.

Discover more about this contributor: LinkedIn MAYA HOLLANDER (she/her) studies English and Film at Tel Aviv University, and works as a video editor. She likes to explore how stories like people - tend to wander.

MIRIAM MAYER (she/her) is a college senior from Seattle who writes in two and a half languages. She prefers to think of herself as an idea instead of a person. When not writing, Miriam is reading, playing with her dog, or reading to her dog.

ROSE GABBERTAS (she/her) is a final year Latin and English student

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at UCL. She is an editor and writer for SAVAGE Journal at UCL, and is looking to pursue a postgraduate degree in journalism, with a particular interest in food writing. As well as her interest in both modern and classical literature, she is a keen cook and baker and runs a food blog, forkandfooder.com.

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SHANSHAN CHAN (they/them) are a writer, learner who attends the New School and works as a farmer at Brooklyn Grange. They are dedicated to pursuing ways of decolonizing through through caring, loving, and listening to our selves. They are in gratitude always to their queerness and heritage, the community these identities put them in.

SOPHIA EWING (she/her) grew up in Washington, DC with her parents, her sister, and her cat. Currently a junior at Amherst College, she is majoring in English and Asian Languages and Civilizations. She spends her free time writing, drawing cartoons, and watching TV. SPENCER WILKINS (he/him) is a rising senior at Bowdoin College.

Songwriting took him from New York City to New Orleans, although he prefers the seclusion of rural Vermont. He’s currently staging his original play WALDO and watching the Knicks lose.

Contact this contributor: swilkins@bowdoin.edu TAHANI ALMUJAHID (she/her) is a Yemeni-American writer from Dearborn, Michigan. She is an undergraduate student studying English and International Studies at the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor. She currently works with Michigan Quarterly Review as an Editorial and Marketing Assistant. She has written for the Michigan Journal of International Affairs, Michigan Daily, Writer to Writer, Spellbinder, Oakland Arts Review, and is forthcoming in other journals.

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A NOTE ON THE TYPE This issue was set in Baskerville & Didot.

Baskerville was designed by printmaker John Baskerville in the 18th century in England, influencing the development of the Didot family in Paris. Didot is favoured for its condensed armature, vertical stress, unbracketed serifs and is considered a Neoclassical typeface. It was also favoured by Voltaire for his publications, becoming a standard in French printing in the late 1700s.

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AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S We would like to acknowledge our Faculty Advisor Brock Clarke, The Bowdoin Department of English, especially Laurie Holland for always passing along our messages, and the 98+ universities this issue who participated or encouraged students to submit to our journal.

We are deeply grateful for the undergraduate writers who weren’t afraid to be vulnerable, out-spoken, and experimental; sharing their critical words in such an especially critical time. To our committed and enthusiastic board members who carved out space and time in their heart for meetings at all hours (and timezones) of the day and their steadfast presence in our community. And finally, we are so grateful to our readers. With your interest, perspectives, and engagement we are better able to fulfill our mission to serve undergraduate writing across the globe.