Polyphony by Tijdschrift Heroïne

HEROÃ¯NE STUDENT MAGAZINE OF LITERARY AND CULTURAL ANALYSIS

Year 6 nr. 1

Colophon Year 6, Volume 1 2018-2019 Text editors: Liesje Verhave, Matija Stojanovic, Tiffany Lai, Borianna Hadjieva, Serina Tatham, Emily Standen, Marie Debarbieux Image editor and design: Nikole Wells Cover: Nikole Wells Back Cover: Balou Verhave General board members: Rosalie Holmshaw, Tiffany Lai, Nikki Kerruish, Talia Altun, Carlota Font Castello With special thanks to Fabula Rasa. Contact and submissions: email: redactie.heroine@gmail.com facebook: Tijdschrift Heroine Would you like to be a part of the creation process of this magazine? Please contact the editorial board. We are also looking for new stories and images for our next issue: “Money Is An Issue” Do you want to subsbribe to our magazine? Mail us. You can choose between an annual subscription (€8) or a subscription for two years (€15).

Ting Xu

Contents 04

EDITORIAL

MEET ME BETWEEN THE LINES ULRIKA SPACEK AND THE MALE GAZE

06 08

THE COOLER KING

HOMERGASTEN-KASIA MIKA

ROMEO ELVIS

CRUSH-VALKAN DECHEV

THE FROG

POLYPHONY PLAYLIST

LA PROMENADE

DEATH IN VARANASI

CRUSH-MARINA LAI

SUB ROSA

HOMERGASTEN ESTHER PEEREN

UNTITLED-BESIANA VATHI

UNTITLED-ANONYMOUS

Editorial Clashing cymbals, dull thudding drums, hissing highhats… other obnoxious percussive instruments creating annoying noises. These are the things that first pop into my head when I hear the word ‘polyphony’; a loud and confusing assortment of sounds, almost like an amateur orchestra playing music for the first time. But have we considered before the more elegant side of ‘polyphony’? A choir of harmonising voices, blending different languages into one melodious hymn. The tension between clear, vivid descriptions and ambiguous phrases, bearing the weight of indescribable emotions. It is astonishing what a big part sound and silence take in our everyday lives, and yet we often dismiss them as undifferentiated background noise, or even take our own voices for granted. This is why in this issue of Heroïne we want to pay close attention to all things sound: the tone and pitch our vocal chords produce, the noises our mouths shape into words, the thoughts we express through this wondrous medium of communication. Whether you are a musician in love with creating harmonies of interweaving chords, a spoken word poet enthralled by the power of speech, or a language enthusiast fascinated by the beauty of languages at work, we invite you to take a closer look at polyphony with us and share in our rediscovery of sound. ~The Editors

Meet Me Between The Lines by Lara-Lane Plambeck

Meet me between the lines Where the sounds of two tones rhyme Like words do in poetry find ourselves in Symphony. A symphony can tell no lies and even if you dare to try tones will collide, Shivers will go down our spines when we both hear the dissonance of a song that won’t convince

Of ‘I love you oh so much’ Has it never sounded wrong? It comes out so naturally when everything inside of me says that it does not fit and the harmonious melody of life destroyed by a false sounding pitch. Whatever, let’s not kill the dream of love’s warm sounding song By a frustrated one that does no better in its rhymes – nevertheless goes on.

A song that has been sung so much I hear it every day from all around the city comes this well-known melody And every time again we share that we do not distrust

Maybe we should try again Love’s good old Symphony But pleaseLet’s meet not far outside of this sweet melody

This sweet sound of “I love you so” When we don’t have The slightest clue Of what it really says.

Let’s meet right in between the lines where we can really feel that all the tones do purely rhyme in sheer polyphony.

Can’t you hear it? The tones they rub against another Sandpaper’s ugly sound Telling you of how you lost your freedom and your ground Don’t you get lost between the tones of this sweet little song?

Nikole Wells

Ulrika Spacek And The Male Gaze by Nils Rehlinger

Repetitive and hypnotising, Ulrika Spacek is a five-piece London-based Indie-rock band who incorporate psych, avant-garde and stoner elements in a slumbery fashion. Their music is best describable through the metaphor of a loving family household: A supportive fatherly bass, triplet guitar children playfully harmonising, a moody teenager singing eerily in their locked room and a percussive mother who makes sure that the family’s day routine keeps its rhythm. Now, apart from the brilliant music, the band’s artistic work also addresses interesting topics, such as the male gaze which has already been featured twice in the band’s videography. The music video for their song ‘Full of Men’ has a rather easy setup, yet it is rich in meaningful subtleties. The video showcases a film set that looks like a TV cooking show. An elderly lady is preparing a dish from a cook book, all under the cameraman’s supervision. However, the longer the video proceeds, the more unsettling it gets. At first, you will notice that the ingredients are not the freshest, but rather rancid. After careful observations of her facial expressions, one might find that her stare is bizarrely blank, disillusioned and somewhat creepy. It all comes to a high when she grabs the raw pale sausages and starts

cutting them into little pieces with her scissors, all while the music grows louder and more distorted. The entire scenario seems a bit out of place and that is exactly what I believe the video is trying to establish. The cooking, a typical act of female gender roles, takes place under the commandment of the camera man. It is all being done to satisfy the man’s eyes, his gaze, his desire. The elderly lady is forced to perform, but it is this involuntariness which renders it all rather unnatural. Nonetheless, the lady shows resistance by menacingly cutting up phallic objects, such as the sausages, and cooking up a nasty, unappealing dish. The foul food alludes to the decaying façade of gender roles. They all supposedly had their purposes and were thought to be necessary for the functioning of society, but within the last few decades or so, more evidence has surfaced and proven how toxic and oppressing they can be for the development of personality and women’s freedom. All of these negative consequences are delicately present in the music video and to me it concludes that gender roles are ideals from the past rotting away, just like the food that looks at least fifty years old. The male gaze makes its second appearance in ‘Silvertonic’. Once

again, we are on a film set, but this time the scenario is a fitness video shooting presented by a brawny trainer who instructs his skinny trainee. Throughout the video, the young man is struggling to get through a number of intensive exercises while the trainer keeps a cold, unmoved face and continues to command him around. In-between the exercises, the trainee drinks a silvery potion, probably a sort of protein-shake to boost his muscle growth. The music video is topped up with shots of the trainer flexing his chiselled body in typical body building positions, captured by the cameraman with a dirty smirk on his visage. Even though this video is not as rich in disturbing subtleties as the previous video does not mean it is any less interesting. The video clearly focuses on the male body ideal of being muscular. This intention of focus is efficiently highlighted in the shots illustrating both men flexing their contrasting bodies. It shows the enormous transformation that a man is expected to go through and the cameraman’s perverse grinning unveils that the ideal of having a buff pred-

ator body is also a construction of the male’s desire to dominate. The trainer’s apathic orders reflect macho men’s merciless pressure given by macho men who do not have arms like boa constrictors or the ability to choke a cow to death with the mere force of their biceps. The silvertonic in the video outlines the strangeness of protein shakes. If you think about it, these drinks are substitutes for a lack of ingested protein meaning that you are incapable of eating the amount of food that is required to bloat your supposed muscles: a tiny sign that you wish to exceed the nature of your body. Still, it is this striving for unnaturalness that is the ideal every man is presumed to pursue. So, throughout both videos, Ulrika Spacek demonstrates how the male gaze sets standards for both genders and that the obligement to conform to these roles is simply an undesired pain in the ass. If you like their messages and are also into bands like Sonic Youth, Deerhunter or Pavement, then I highly recommend that you give the band a listen and perhaps you will also grow fond of them.

The Cooler King by Pippe Weytingh

East of Eden there’s a dogear left Dry-eyed I close the book Turn on my right side left side right side again Waiting for the metaphor shower My means of escape are losing their irony I catch myself, 4am huddled in blankets and secondary needs Plans of getting out just to go back in smarter I catch myself, trembling Why don’t you join me? This balcony’s built for two I let my legs dangle over yours like we’re in love To cross the wire is death but try it nonetheless I declared my own independence tattooed a declaration on my shoulder blade A reminder whenever I get dressed Inside I could convince myself it was a comedy Then the end-credits begin to roll and you realise I wish you didn’t speak my language wish you couldn’t understand a word of what I just said so all you had would be the campfire behind it all The whipping sound of a single tennis ball shadows on a screen on a wall My reality’s a cooler cell Every morning I cut my way through the barbed wire Sisyphus the Cooler King

You hug me tightly and say ‘Well then we dig!’

I cut my way through the barbed wire Sisyphus the Cooler King You hug me tightly and say ‘Well then we dig!’ Careful A broken mind can still be broken sometimes A Triumph aggressively sputtering I can see the fence can hear the cavalry they are right behind me but I insisted on doing my own stunts I won’t let you down this time Oh, how I have missed you Steve McQueen.

Liesje Verhave

Carribbean Cadence by Kasia Mika

In his History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean (1984), Kamau Brathwaite famously claimed that ‘hurricane does not roar in pentameter.’1 Trying to forge new modes of writing the Caribbean, the Barbadian poet insisted on the need to find a radical form of literary expression, rooted in histories of imperialism, that might reflect the ecologies and histories of the Caribbean region. At the same time, the poet’s call for a new aesthetics, poignantly captures the lived experience of that complex cadence of Caribbean ecologies where: We would be almost well in our untroubled, carefree vision of the future because the future in the Greater and Lesser Antilles is always the same […] except when a hurricane passes or a volcano roars like a cow with swollen udders […] expect when the earth trembles.2 The 12th of January 2010 earthquake in Haiti is one such historical event which tore apart any calm Caribbean cadence and, at least initially, seemed beyond all words and comprehension. Goudougoudou3, an onomatopoeic approximation of the unearthly sound made by the tremors, permanently disrupted any attempt to account for it as just one in a sequence of many

Zep de Bruin

life-events, or just another reiter ation of a Caribbean cadence. Still, however traumatising on personal and collective levels, disasters are neither isolated nor single events. Rather, they are slow-onset,4 have processual5 and oft human-caused character,6 and are extended and complex crises.7 They are ‘the extreme situation which is implicit in the everyday condition of the population’8 that requires ‘creat[ing] ways of analyzing the vulnerability implicit in daily life.’9 It is precisely the everyday ‘normal’, defined by long-term vulnerability processes,10 that creates ‘the conditions for a disaster,’11 determining the scale of their impact12 on individuals and communities. In other words, after Carr, ‘[n]ot every windstorm, earth-tremor, or rush of water is a catastrophe. [...] It is the collapse of the cultural protections that constitute the disaster proper’13 with pre-existing factors and structures, as well as community’s ability

to respond, directly determining the development of a disaster. Vulnerabilities not environmental phenomena and hazards, such as storms or tremors, are root causes of disasters.1⁴ Within this longer and integrated view, one that joins environmental, political history to personal experience and oft contrasting interpretative and sense-making frames, the pre-disaster pasts emerge and are best conceived as multi-scalar vulnerability. It is one that exists, manifests itself and cuts across multiple, non-exclusive levels and timescales. For Caribbean communities, disasters and multi-scalar vulnerability are first and foremost lived realities and overlapping ‘incremental and accretive’1⁵ violences that, as Rob Nixon emphasises, are played out, experienced, and belatedly manifested ‘across a range of temporal scales.’1⁶ These intertwined histories of ecology, environmental

hazards, capital, political interest, on the macro-level, for those thrown in their midst, on the micro-level, are experienced as, what Erica Caple James calls ensekirite (insecurity in Haitian Kreyòl); that is ‘an ontological, pernicious, and powerful state of “routinized ruptures.” ’1⁷ Such ‘wounding ontology’ where, after Greg Beckett, crisis is ‘ordinary’, and is this ‘uneventful’ structure of the everyday rather than a rupture, an event, is precisely what the poem speaker in Kamau Brathwaite’s ‘Negus’1⁸ protests against. In an insistent rhythm of sistance and opposition to the equally regular cadence of depravation and marginalization, the poem’s speaker asserts: resistance and opposition to the equally regular cadence of depravation and marginalization, the poem’s speaker asserts:

[…]

it is not it is not it is not enough it is not enough to be free of malarial fevers, fear of the hurricane, fear of invasions, crops’ drought, fire’s blisters upon the cane […]

It is not it is not it is not enough to be pause, to be hole to be void, to be silent to be semicolon, to be semicolony; (‘Negus’, pp.66-7)

The consecutive lines, in a triadic mode, from repetition turn to a mode of positioning in the world, one that moves towards a new political imaginary; towards, after Crapanzano, an ‘imaginative horizon’ of a future otherwise. The repetition is not a stutter, by any means. Rather, ‘it is’, which comes back as a refrain throughout the poem, is an affirmation of a resolve and an attempt to carve out and opening, a space of ‘more.’ While being clearly critical of the halted present, the poem’s speaker still affirms that, like the punctuation

mark turned political category, the semicolon(y) is only ‘[an] intermediate in value’ (OED). It ‘marks a break’ (Oxford Dictionaries), is not final and separates two major sentence elements: what is from what is to come and to be. The confined present, the silence of the semicolony, is not all that there is. After the halt of the semicolon, a short pause, a moment to breathe in, comes an exhale, and a future-oriented throw that breaks the silence and the void of the earlier stanza:

fling me the stone and the void of the earlier stanza: fling me the stone that will confound the void find me the rage and I will raze the colony fill me with words and I will blind your God. Att Att Attibon Attibon Legba Attibon Legba Ouvri bayi pou’moi Ouvir bayi pou’ moi (Negus, p. 67)

The hole turns to a stone; the rage fills the void; words counter silence, and the hesitation of the semicolon becomes the decisive fling of a stone, one that echoes the Biblical struggle between David and Goliath (1

Samuel 17). The poem’s speaker wishes for and, in some ways, anticipates, this righteous anger of David’s throw to man ifest itself in a future to come, starting at kalfou/kafou, the crossroads in Haitian Kreyòl.

The Vodou chant for Papa Legba that the poem concludes with calls out: ‘Attibon Legba, open the gate for me!/ You see, Attibon Legba, open the for me!’. In the Haitian Vodou cosmology Papa Legba, one of the Spirits (lwa) is the ‘Spirit of rituals, keeper of the gates, lwa of the thresholds, and guardian of the crossroads between the sacred and the mortal worlds.’1⁹ This ritual call to Legba echoes the poem’s earlier visions of an ‘openedup,’ freed future, beyond the bond, the bounds, and the halt of semicolon(y). These lines, culminating in an ellipsis (...) signal, in formal terms, a thought-pause and point towards the unknown; that which comes once the gates are opened and the threshold is crossed. At the same time, the closing words, usually accompanied by the beat of the Vodou drum, echo and resound the Middle Passage and formulation of the beginnings of Creole literature, inaugurated in ‘[a] sudden cry arising from the ship’s hold’ [italics original].20 The chant then calls out to all the spirits and ancestors in

Guiné and marks a hoped-for opening up, ‘an appreciation of historica

towards the unknown; that which comes once the gates are opened and the threshold is crossed. At the same time, the closing words, usually accompanied by the beat of the Vodou drum, echo and resound the Middle Passage and formulation of the beginnings of Creole literature, inaugurated in ‘[a] sudden cry arising from the ship’s hold’ [italics original].20 The chant then calls out to all the spirits and ancestors in Guiné and marks a hoped-for opening up, ‘an appreciation of historical contingency: that things might have been and so might yet still be, otherwise.’21 The future, indexed here, starts with the idiosyncratic vocabulary of Vodou, hoping to create new words, new vocabulary for a convalescent world. Moving with this resolute cadence, full of strenght, the poem’s speaker calls:

I must be given words to shape my name to the syllables of trees I must be given words to refashion futures like a healer’s hand (‘Negus’, p.67)

With news-reports filled with images of consecutive disasters unfolding in the Caribbean, it is easy to give into apocalyptic visions of Haiti and the wider region as one, ongoing crisis. In a reverse, hopeful if somewhat naïve mode, subsequent disaster recovery efforts are hailed as unique opportunities to ‘build back better.’ Calling for ‘new words to refashion futures/ like a healer’s hand’, the poem does not conjure some idealized vision of an easily recoverable better tomorrow. Against illusions of an achievable wholeness, one that is often equated with the recovery of the pre-disaster past, this future-oriented perspective and vocabulary that the poem hopes to forge, seek to reconfigure and repair discourses and structures of vulnerability all the while recognising that even if some structures can be amended, the personal losses and absences will never fully be alleviated. ‘On Tuesday, January 12, 2010, eternity lasted less than sixty seconds […] and forever altered the landscape of a city, a country, and our memory.’ However it is framed, the sudden and arbitrary character of the experience, which is affirmed in Evelyne Trouillot’s remark, contrasts

with its lasting personal and collective impact. The earthquake is both a point of rupture and an untimely unfolding event that disrupts conventional notions of time as based on the separation of past, present and future. However, Goudougoudou is equally embedded within national and global histories that, jointly, determine the force of its blow. The difficulty of living in the post-disaster everyday lies precisely in having to confront and to battle against this seemingly ordinary—yet no less violent—vulnerability which halts and disrupts any attempts at linear recovery. In effect, the post-disaster everyday emerges as a liminal site and remains a work in progress; an attempt to formulate and slowly move towards non-spectacular, non-catastrophic, everyday futures. As such, both the healing present and the future are a work of imagination which, in Starobinski’s gloss, ‘anticipates and previews, serves action, [and] draws before us the configuration of the realizable before it can be realized.’22 These ‘times to come’ might well start with that symbolic invocation of Legba, and the crossroads. Yet, they carry into the unknown: whatever the ellipsis holds.

Roméo Elvis by Marie Debarbieux

Roméo Elvis is a Belgian rapper and hop-hop artist who touches his fans through the underlying lightness and humour of his otherwise classical rap lyrics. No matter the subject, be it drugs, sex or grief because of his grandpa’s death, Elvis makes you feel. This contrast with the rest of his often emotionless rapper peers is what attreacts a lot of people to his music. His cultural and musical background is also intrinsic to his songs, Louai Cesar Mroueh (@louaimroueh) and he frequently praises his home city, Brussels, showing how deeply rooted in his own experience his lyrics are. However, this doesn’t mean his songs necessitate deep analysis and understanding: as Louai, the photographer of these photos, says about the artist “in the end, it’s fun music that always gives me a pleasant mood”.

Sarah Postema

CRUSH

with Valkan Dechev Valkan Dechev is a third year student in the Literary Cultural Analysis program and is currently doing an internship with the Amsterdam-based magazine Glamcult. We were able to speak with him about his experience at the magazine and his thoughts on the internship. How did you first get this opportunity?

I was at some second hand store during my first week in Amsterdam and saw one of the old, free copies of Glamcult lying around at the entrance. I picked it up and was so happy to find out that there was a fashion, music and art platform in English that was based here, in Amsterdam. A little while later they did the iconic Sevdaliza cover and I thought to myself, OK Valkan, this is something special and you need to be a part of it. When I have something on my mind, like a place I want to find myself in, I really work hard to manifest it into a reality. I’d go to events related to Glamcult or other creative platforms in Amsterdam, and I’d just meet as many people as possible and keep in touch with them afterwards. At some point I felt ready to finally reach out to Glamcult and ask if they have an internship offer (this was around halfway through my second year). They said no to my application, but thank god, Subbacultcha said yes! Then, because

of Subbacultcha, I got experience and met friends who got me even further into the whole scene. I sent a second application to Glamcult in May of this year. I got invited for an interview some days later and somehow convinced the editor-in-chief that my LCA background will bring something different and new to Glamcult. He believed me, and that’s how it all happened. What do you do at your internship?

Literally everything, from doing groceries and taking out the washing machine, talking to legendary DJs and new fashion designers to sitting front row at Amsterdam Fashion week and going on a trip to Berlin for Red Bull Music Academy. It’s an incredible variety of tasks that simultaneously humbles and prides me. Could you go through a typical day at work?

I have to be there at 9AM. First thing is to unload the dishwasher and take out bread from the freezer; the

latter is something I almost always forget. Then I make a coffee and check my email box. Before I can start with any interviews or editorial tasks, I need to catch up with replying to people and checking out what options are available for features. Then, if it’s a Monday, we have an office meeting with everyone, which is followed by me and two other interns getting the week’s groceries. If it’s any other day then I simply make an agenda with what I have time for and go from there. Tasks almost always include research preparation for an interview, editing and publishing features for the website or planning a new Instagram grid. On some days I have a Skype call with somebody. It has also happened that artists can only do Sundays when it comes to a Skype interview, so there’s been a couple of times where I’ve had to work at 9 or 10 PM on a Sunday. Oh, and I also answer the phone in the office quite a lot. Generally it’s super diverse, varying from some very ‘intern’ stuff to preparing big interviews and features, as well as travelling to nice events for work. happened that artists can only do Sundays when it comes to a Skype interview, so there’s been a couple of times where I’ve had to work at 9 or 10 PM on a Sunday. Oh, and I also answer the phone in the office quite a lot. Generally it’s super diverse, varying from some very ‘intern’ stuff to preparing big interviews and features, as well as travelling to nice events

for work. What are your fields of focus?

Mainly music and fashion, especially working with new artists whom we offer a platform to. Also a few art exhibitions, as well as a bit of commercial copywriting. I should stress that I have lots of freedom, and am able to work on what I think best fits Glamcult, which is great. I also do the Instagram profile, most FB posts, website features, and lots and lots for the upcoming print issue. Do your studies in LCA help you with this?

I think LCA’s main influence on me was to make me question literally everything around me, which I feel is true for everyone doing the bachelor. A song becomes an object that speaks, a painting becomes a battleground for philosophy and culture; last night I was even thinking about how the staircase as an object has so much potential in terms of philosophy and culture. So, when applying for my internship, I simply convinced them that LCA will offer a new, different touch to the magazine in terms of critical, cultural and philosophical thinking. A music or fashion journalist/editor may have lots of technical and historical knowledge about the field, but what we can do is question that knowledge and move on from there.

What would you recommend to people who are also interested in working in journalism?

I’ve only worked at one ‘journalist’ platform, so my opinion is based on that experience only. And I’m also someone who can’t remain interested in one thing. I need music, art, philosophy, literature, film, dance and so on to be constantly around me so I remain sane, and my choice for where to work and who to work with embodies that – at Glamcult you can dive deep into absolutely all these fields and interests. So, I would recommend this type of all-encompassing journalism for people who like to think critically about a variety of topics – you can’t really be a specialist at one thing if you do this type of work. You really need to keep in touch with what’s up to fully soak in the creative networks your magazine/platform works wiWth, but at the same time to have a observant and critical look on them. Where do you see yourself headed with this? (City, magazine, and work wise) I might catch a one-way flight to NYC this coming summer and see where that takes me. I’ve been interested in moving to the US for quite some time now, but things never worked out for me. I do love Aperture magazine (they’re based there), so that’d be dope. If not, perhaps London – there’re tons and tons of totally amazing publications there that I love.

If all fails, art school here. Damn, this all sounds so in the air – I guess I see myself headed somewhere but where to, that’s another thing. However, I do know that it’d be something with writing, visuals, possibly music. Are there other publications in Amsterdam you would recommend people to check out? MacGuffin! That’s the ultimate LCAmeets-design magazine and it’s so beautiful, so smart in design and content. And it’s based here, literally 5 minutes away from PCH! How can people check out Glamcult?

Head to Athenaeum and buy the latest issue! Then put the glamcult.com website in your favorites and follow our instagram account (@glamcult), or just swing by a Glamcult party, that’d be cool.

The Frog

by Boriana Hadijeva His voice is like an actor’s roar Reverberates and multiplies. A husky bass right to the core; A proud old frog’s own battle cry. The echo of his hardened voice Transforms the pond to fluid knives, Desire-coated, slimy, moist, That turns to vapour in icy air. His crude, confusing croaking cries pierce the quiet night disturb the dust and quickly die dare not wait for a response. The only other strange, small whisper That coats the air in silky liquid, Like little bells, but getting crisper, Sounds oddly like a mocking laugh. Grasshopper symphonies surround the pond, And fireflies poke flames into the night. Orchestral tongues, from far beyond The field, augment into a crushing cry. Fine-tuned chirps and silver strings Weigh down the water’s wavy curls, Press on the frog with pinches, stings, So only a voice like pearls Should have the chance to sing.

Nikole Wells

Polyphony Playlist

The Heroine board members reached out to our fellow LCA students and asked them to recommend us songs in their native language. The result is this playlist that we have complied and is available for listening on Spotify!

La Promenade by Anna Peeperkorn

Jâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;aime: Me promener dans les ruelles Me laisser gangner par le temps Oublier la rasion Etre perdu sans etre perdu Un chemin sans fin Une Ballade sans but Une promenade vers toi

Samantha Lozano

Death in Varanasi by Kate Shylo

Banaras. It takes a human body approximately three hours to transform into ashes and leave nothing but skull and hipbone behind. In Varanasi, the air makes my eyes prickle from dusk to dawn and an inescapable smell of burnt hair tries to lure me in. Inviting, it attempts to grab me by the hand. Death by fire. I accidentally kick a human skull on Chet Singh Ghat. What a disgrace to humanity to kick a head, a voice resonates in me. The skull, a memento mori dedicated to the public, is left unnoticed.The only witnesses are the emaciated cows standing in the shade, chewing on cardboard indifferently. I look at them self-consciously. Their gaze will always be that of judgment. A man wearing a dhoti gallops down the steep stairs. “Ramaaaaaaaa!” he yells and spanks one of the cows. I watch his toothless mouth but I avoid looking him in the eyes. “Madam, boat?” He ties a wet shirt around his head and I carelessly continue my promenade along the banks as he disappears in the shade. There is a mysterious, peaceful silence that envelops the ghats once the temperature reaches fifty degrees and the sun starts timidly to pierce the fog that rises from the cremations. Families dawdle around Pandey Ghat;

some children are bathing, others are wringing and whipping the laundry. Men immerse themselves waistdeep in the Ganges. Overcome with serenity, they close their eyes, whisper prayers and take their first gulp of the day. Floating, orange petals trace the outline of their paunches. The silence only dissipates towards sunset when ankle bells wake the moulting dogs and the windows are thrust open. Suddenly, the alleys of the city start to shrink. The oil of pani puri gently caresses my skin, my feet dance with the barefooted crowd and everything merges: the cows, the mopeds, the dung. By sunset, life in Varanasi becomes a performance and you begin to learn how to move to a collective rhythm. The monkeys protest; they are the wolves of the emerging night. They climb the faces of Shiva idols, they jump from temple to balcony and climb to the roofs. A monkey is boasting around as if it owned the labyrinths of the city. It leaps, its body swings through the air and, with a bang, the alley becomes drenched in darkness. The monkey is now throwing a tantrum and its tiny arms are scorching. It has set itself on fire and the crowds watch, yelling and protesting. “This keeps happening”, a shop owner quietly says and examines the ex-

ploded lamp that loosely hangs above his shop I cover my eyes. It is painful enough to watch decaying dogs, now this. The divine flow revives and the monkey is being taken care of– at least that is what we like to imagine. Everyone hurries to the Ganges and the Aarti is about to begin. I wash the ceremony off me with water from a red bucket in a bathroom that resembles a dungeon cell. Two pale, motionless geckos peek at me from under the sink. They do so every night. I scrub away the smell of incense and gently wash off the ash that the sadhu traced on my face with his fingers. I go to bed covered in sweat. It takes the skin three to five minutes to become sticky again after a shower and my nightgown is damp. It’s useless. The heat freezes and hangs over the city through the night. Everyday, I carry my feet to the banks, again and again. I am not yet ready to uncover what it is that I am walking off. All I know is that spending time by the ghats is soothing, to the point of being cathartic. As I take rest by the Manikarnika Ghat, I keep my

distance from the pyre. The smoke overwhelms my senses and I try to think back to my past life. “Women are not allowed to come to ceremony,” a man called Sanjay says and sits down next to me. “Why?” I ask as we watch five men carrying a body on a stretcher. The corpse is coated with flowers and wrapped in what looks like cheap, glossy gift paper. A present is offered to the mighty element. “Women cry,” Sanjay continues. “It is not allowed to cry. The soul will never reach moksha if you cry. Women also can throw herself into fire to join husband. This will ruin his soul’s liberation. So women not allowed.” “Men don’t cry?” I ask and he smiles whilst looking away. Perhaps being consumed by fire is the most natural way to die, the most exalting way. Your soul sings with the flames and rises with the fumes, achieving complete liberation. Image: Nikole Wells

I imagine the wife of the cremated body weeping just around the corner. She must be hiding somewhere. Because I need to distract myself from the peeling flesh, my eyes search for the wife, avoiding the gritty details of the decomposition. the wife of the cremated body weeping just around the corner. She must be hiding somewhere. Because I need to distract myself from the peeling flesh, my eyes search for the wife, avoiding the gritty details of the decomposition. The wife could have been one of the bald widows that I had met that morning when I prostrated myself before Kali and offered her jasmine flowers. When the cremation is over, whatever remains of the body is thrown into the Ganga. The spectacle is over. Tourists pack their cameras and walk away, looking for the next bizarre adventure to be the silent spectators of. The ground is slowly clearing: it is chai time. Only one man lingers around with a wok-like plate. He is sifting, looking for remnants of golden rings and golden teeth that the generous body left behind. Thank you, brother. The cremated are charitable, whereas the buried won’t sprout. They will never bloom. “Let me read your palm,” a sadhu says and takes my hand and leads me to a chai shop. I decline the palm reading, but we talk of my home and I reminisce how, when I was four, I almost experienced death by water. By the black sea, the last thing I saw was the light of the sky drifting further and

further away. The water felt familiar and it was easy to give in because the water felt homely. I never made it. I was saved and eventually learned how to swim. Why is it that we learn how to swim but never learn how to walk through fire? I join the goats in the shade this time. Exhausted from my daily walk, I sit down to read from a novel. With its 500 pages, it resembles a brick, a bright green brick. It is about forgiveness and repentance in suburban America - basically nothing that I am currently experiencing in my daily life. There is death in the novel I am reading, lots of it. There is jealousy and middle-class, American problems. There is so much food that I get nauseous, the characters seek repentance in eating. A husband kills his wife for adultery. I take my eyes off my novel and I see a girl standing in front of me. “You read this, only you?” She points at the book with amazement. We start talking and I forget about the novel. We struggle to understand each other and our dialogue is accompanied by nervous sighs coming from the girl and my attempts at sign language. I take my eyes off the novel in Varanasi and I feel estranged. The familiar but ridiculous world of the book does not exist here. My belongings and all the clutter back home in Europe do not exist, nor do they even matter. Everything is so foreign in the holy city and I sigh in relief. I am pleased to be scared to swim in the Ganges.

When boatmen tell me stories that I have never heard before it is soothing to hear them. These are stories that I will never comprehend. I want to walk the ghats of Varanasi forever, until the end of this lifetime. Because this is Varanasi, this is supposed to be confusing; it is supposed to make you shrink, desire and simultaneously recoil. You ought not to know where to look nor what to hear. Life is meant to be chaotic, unstructured, spontaneous and overloaded. But this is not life, this is Varanasi and it isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t death either.

CRUSH

with Marina Lai Marina Lai grew up in London before a three-year marketing stint in Shanghai led her to the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, where she broadcasts trivia, indie hits and the latest world news over the soundwaves of Ara City Radio. We caught up with her to find out more about her job. Can you give us a brief overview of your show?

My show is the lunchtime slot from 11.30am-2pm, so it’s something you can tune into to keep you company over your lunch break. I wanted to create something that would make people feel like they were hanging out with their friends, touching on topics that are circulating in group chats as well as more controversial headlines that divide an audience. I also invite listeners to call in and participate in daily topics between tracks. How much freedom do you get regarding what you play?

We get sent music by the labels on a weekly basis and this is usually what we play; each week we sit down with all the DJs to go through the music that we’ve received and to see which songs reflect our station and which don’t. If we discover something that we like that hasn’t been provided by a label we can still play it, so long as we get a licensed copy from the artist.

We also try to feature new upcoming artists who have sent us LPs of their own music. How did you transfer from marketing to broadcasting?

When I left my marketing role to study an MBA I needed something to do on the side and I dabbled in TV presenting. I really enjoyed it but I worked for the national station in Shanghai, which meant that everything was scripted down to every expression. I realized that I enjoyed broadcasting but also needed a platform where I could express my own personality and opinions, so when I moved to Luxembourg, that was the first thing I sought out. You didn’t enter the industry with any specific training; how did you adapt to the new environment? It’s definitely harder. There were no vacancies at the station when I applied, but they offered me the opportunity to train as a newscaster. I was

disappointed at first but knew that I should just take what I can get, since I had no training or background in broadcast journalism. Thankfully though, I was able to learn so much and my style of broadcasting comes from those months of training. When I compare my work to that of my colleagues who all have degrees in radio broadcasting, I’m definitely not as hands on with the technical work and they can “play” with files and recordings much more. It’s apparent in their shows and I try to listen to them and ask them to give me pointers. But I do play to my strengths: I love to speak and I love a debate so I try to make sure that my show is unique in that way.

Gretel Diaz

Your show is pretty interactive, with listeners calling in to give their political opinions or music requests. What’s your favorite way of including your listeners on the show? The easiest way to get interaction is usually through a competition, but that’s not my favourite way. My favourite way is actually to find a conversation topic which is very ‘grey’ and cannot easily be defined as right or wrong and to throw it to the listeners and see how they tackle it. This is the most interesting way to engage listeners and we all learn something about the other point of view.

I found it difficult at first, mainly because I’m a pretty spontaneous person. I’ve had to learn to become very organized. I didn’t even use my phone calendar before and relied on my memory for appointments, but once I moved to Luxembourg I bought a paper diary and I wrote down every little appointment or meeting with a friend. I book meetings and get-togethers with friends in advance so that I make sure that I’m making the most of my free time and not just leaving it to the last minute. Now I enjoy my diary so much it’s one of the things I can’t live without!

What’s been the highlight of your radio career so far?

Live events with the whole team are pretty cool. We do a monthly book club as well as the annual music quiz and various live music events. There’s a great relationship between the DJ’s at the station and we’re all good friends, so when you put us all together in front of a live audience, our chemistry comes alive even more. It’s a feeling that I haven’t found in any other work so I feel pretty lucky to be working with them. What’s the hardest part of interviewing guests?

Some guests are incredibly media trained; they’ve been told what to say, they know how they want to come across and no matter what curveball you throw at them, they bat it back the way they want. That’s hard to deal with when you’re trying to find out something unusual about them, or when you’re trying to get them to show a bit of their own personality beyond their profession. You often know within 5 minutes of the interview if someone isn’t going to drop their guard with you and that can sometimes be disappointing as an interviewer. How do you balance your time between Luxembourg and London?

You also do a podcast with your colleagues Sam and Elliot; how do you find the format of a podcast compared to a radio show?

The podcast is called ‘Pubcast’ and the idea is that we meet once a week at a pub for a few pints and chat about everything that’s been going on lately. From global topics down to Elliot’s dating disasters, it’s a way for people to learn more about our personalities.. It all started because listeners loved our handovers. Handovers are the 5-10 minutes of exchange between the 2 DJ’s when one DJ ‘hands over’ the show to the next one. We realized that people enjoy listening to our conversations, and all the funny things we were saying to each other off air was actually great content for a podcast. It’s a different format to a

show because we aren’t in the studio: it’s very relaxed, we don’t play music, it’s just pure banter and chatter.

tened to. People don’t listen to albums as much anymore. When this album came out I was 14 and if you liked an artist you would buy the entire album on CD. You would rush home to put it in your discman, hold the album sleeve and listen to every song, word for word, whilst reading along to the lyrics on the sleeve. I really love rap when it’s done well, when it’s not about girls in clubs, when the entire story is told in just one song. Eminem does that better than anyone else. The perfect example of this is When I’m Gone from this album.

Are there any artists that have impressed you recently?

I really like Loyle Carner. He’s an English hip hop artist with some really important things to say and he says it so eloquently through his music. I’ve also got my eye on Tash Sultana who is a very talented Australian singer-songwriter who has risen to fame so quickly, and rightly so. What is your desert island album?

It would be Eminem’s Curtain Call album. It was the soundtrack to my teenage years. The man remains one of the most talented lyricists I’ve lis-

Catch Marina at Aracityradio.com Mon-Fri 11:30-2pm or on Itunes at Pubcast by Ara City Radio.

Sarah Topa

Sub Rosa

by Pippe Weytingh I don’t want you to hold me right now Not because I don’t like you holding me cause I like it very much like a hungry toddler balancing on the counter I want to reach for your candy jar I do But you holding me means me being held means feeling my body pressed against your slender arms and my body is not my temple it’s my tomb Smiles to smithereens Yes I do want cracked furnace and echo chambers Have you howling through my veins

Samantha Lozano

I want you to tell me tell me tell me you adore me like a sunday morning steaming cup-a-coffee I want you to yell in my face with bulging eyes and wobbly knees that I am to blame -how much easier that’d be Just don’t blink so I won’t move I need to not move right now My carcass is built from pencils and apple cores -I hold it together with bad habits Kiss your elbows and run to the cornershop for cover Of what? If it’s a tunnel how can we tell start from finish? I crawl through fleshy alleyways and come out panting for fresh sounds Break all mirrors and I promise you I’ll be more courageous today than I was yesterday Until then I’d rather you let me have my own nightmares tonight Don’t worry, we’re just one balloon ride away from true happiness.

Polyphony:

Staging Responsive Worlds beyond the Human by Esther Peeren Zep de Bruin

What is polyphony and what can it do? The term is taken from musicology, where, according to Rokus de Groot, it refers to the “simultaneity of two or more ‘voices’ which, in the perspective of simultaneity, differ in their melodic and rhythmic shapes” (129). “Voices” is put in quotation marks here because polyphony does not necessarily involve only the human voice; it can also refer to the voices of instruments sounding simultaneously. What is essential for polyphony is that the “voices” can be individually identified (that they are separate, different), that no one “voice” dominates or does so consistently (that they operate at the same level, in a kind of equality), and that the relationship between the “voices” involves both counterpoint as “antagonism” and harmony as a “mutual attuning” (de Groot 130). Because the “voices” cannot just exist besides each other but are made responsible to each other, they

“may be perceived as transforming each other continuously” and “even new voices may be heard which are not performed as such” (de Groot 131). This potential for transformation and for the possible emergence of new “voices” is what has made polyphony such an attractive concept for other fields than musicology, where it is no longer a descriptive term but an aspirational one, sinaling a desired form. One important adaptation of polyphony can be found in the work of Edward Said, who, as de Groot traces, saw its use by Johann Sebastian Bach and Glenn Gould as exemplifying a “never-ending process of invention, that is, reinterpretation, reinventing, elaborating, rethinking, offering new modes of apprehension” (135). In polyphony, invention is not the creation of something fully new out of nothing, but of something different out of what was already there, a reorganization on the

basis of combining different “voices.” Extending the meaning of polyphony beyond the musical realm, Said argued for identity as a “polyphonic texture” (de Groot 136). Although polyphony does not appear in Said’s seminal Orientalism, it is easy to see how his endorsement of it elsewhere fits into his critique of the harmfulness of presentations of the Orient from the dominant Western perspective, which not only entails an erasure of alternative voices from the Orient itself, but can even make these voices from the Orient speak in Orientalist ways. Polyphony is anti-imperialist in that it accommodates multiple responsive voices, none of which dominates. This anti-totalitarian impulse of polyphony was not just attractive to Said as a way of imagining a more equal postcolonial world and a form of identity that did not rely on a notion of fixed selfsameness but was permeable and developed dynamically in dialogue with other identities, but also to the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, who, in the early twentieth century, took up polyphony as a metaphor to explain the genius of Dostoevsky’s novels. These novels present “not a multitude of characters and fates in a single objective world, illuminated by a single authorial consciousness,” but rather “a plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its

own world [that] combine but are not merged in the unity of the event” (Bakhtin 6, emphasis in text). Here, voices become consciousnesses or even worlds that interact over the many pages of Dostoevsky’s novels without the author/narrator privileging one, subsuming all to an overarching perspective or creating a Hegelian synthesis: “Each novel presents an opposition, which is never canceled out dialectically, of many consciousnesses, and they do not merge in the unity of an evolving spirit” (Bakhtin 26). Consciousnesses are opposed, brought into dialogue with each other, shown to agree and disagree (dialogue or dialogism for Bakhtin is not a matter of reaching consensus but an ongoing process that requires, of each involved consciousness, an attitude of responsiveness or answerability), with the tensions between the consciousnesses forming the story. At one point, Bakhtin writes that “the artistic will of polyphony is a will to combine many wills, a will to the event” (21). For Bakhtin, the most important will remains that of the author, who orchestrates, to borrow another musical term, the polyphonic novel. However, the author does so in a way that seeks not to bend the fictional world to her will but rather to stage an interaction between many wills, including her own. This interaction and its unpredictable outcome (the author

sets up an encounter between voices that lacks finalization) constitute the event, as the emergence of something different. In Bakhtin, polyphony becomes an ethics – the author relinquishes authority and places herself next to rather than above the voices consciousnesses, worlds or wills she combines on an equal plane – and a politics – creating a space in which claims to truth and power can be made and contested on a footing of equal answerability that, in the social realm, where there tend to be many voices that cannot make themselves heard at all, is elusive. For Bakhtin, dialogism (the fact that no word, utterance, consciousness or world exists independently of others) is unavoidable, but nonetheless countered by a drive to monologism (the pretense that one word, utterance, consciousness or world can be fully self-sufficient); in contrast, polyphony is the result of a deliberate act of accepting, highlighting or enhancing dialogism, of letting it play itself out on the pages of the novel or in the musical piece. Voices, consciousnesses, worlds or wills that in the social realm do not interact or only interact interact or only interact on vastly unequal terms can be brought together in the novel (or, I would argue, in other literary and non-literary art forms) and made to take each other seriously. Although both Said’s

and Bakhtin’s uses of polyphony highlight its potential as a tool to give marginalized voices their due, both seem to limit its use to the realm of the human. DeGroot notes that polyphony “meets [Said’s] basic humanistic mission of the presentation of difference without desire to dominate” (137), while Ben De Bruyn points out that Bakhtin’s account of the polyphonic novel ‘is based on a conception of society that implicitly excludes the nonhuman’ (366). From the perspective of posthumanism, it is essential to include the voices, consciousnesses, wills or worlds of humans together with those of nonhuman animals, living and nonliving matter in the polyphonic will to the event. De Bruyn has made a start in this by proposing a “polyphony beyond the human,” but his attempt, which focuses on reading the sounds of animals in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and Richard Powers’ Orfeo and The Echo Maker as part of these novels’ polyphony, does not go far enough. First of all, by privileging the realm of sound, he forecloses the possibility of including nonsonic forms of signification (such as theones taken into account by Eduardo Kohn in How Forests Think, work De Bruyn references but does not engage extensively). Second, in concluding that, in Coetzee’s novel, “the minor sounds of animals perform the major function of making the protagonist’s

fully humanized voice ring out more clearly” (382), he both suggests a hierarchy between the sounds in the polyphonic system of the novel (“minor sounds”) and ends up privileging the human voice by putting the animal sounds in its service. Thinking polyphony beyond the human, then, remains a task. This task is made easier by letting go of the anthropocentric terms of the “voice” (even in quotation marks), consciousness and will. World, frequently used by Bakhtin to describe what a particular consciousness forges – he speaks of “a plurality of consciousnesses and their worlds” (17-18) – might be useful here: nonanimals and other living and nonliving matter can be seen to engage, each in their own way, in worlding and the worlds that result from this can be staged polyphoni-

cally to respond to each other in events that may yield better ways of being in the world together. Works Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1997. De Bruyn, Ben. “Polyphony beyond the Human: Animals, Music and Community in Coetzee and Powers.” Studies in the Novel 48.3 (2016): 364-383. Groot, Rokus de. “Music at the Limits: Edward Said’s Musical Elaborations.”How the West Was Won:Essays on Literary Imagination, the Canon and the Christian Middle Ages for Burcht Pranger. Ed. Willemien Otten et al. Brill, 2010. 127146.

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by Besiana Vathi

In this long left honeysuckle, I see a ridge of blood, limpid, curt, soft, kind,

Samantha Lozano

hollow around the hole – the image is very clear and not said vital if said natural, but the plunge – don’t see, feel the covenant made and underestimated, knife nailing paper to the wall. “I own you,” – and indeed said so, fantasy submerged under pain, pink and fluffy letters without the pride to breathe in liquid blue, but the electricity – weaving webs of wire in the conditional, with no rewards to give.

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by anonymous Aimlessly perched on the curb below Solitary Gaze fixed upon your window Familiar fractured ceiling, paint flakes amongst decaying floorboards Bare Familiar dim light bulb, with no cover resting upon Entangled limbs, warm embrace shared Winter wind cracking lips and hands becoming Callous Never did I fathom this nature resided within you Or was there some rapture of your soul I failed to notice Before I suspected you were, but as the clock hand shifts and Amongst solipsistic swathes of resentment Distortions are disrupted and cataract lenses clear Now It has dawned upon me in this moment That you are, As I am; Unwittingly Cold

Samantha Lozano