Awaiting by Charisse Pearlina Weton

 

I’m going to begin with an embarrassing confession. I first started to write poetry (semi)seriously in University and at one point I wrote a long piece inspired by my stay in Italy called “anomie pompa.’ I’m sure the title meant something profound and clever, though now when I put the phrase into Google translate, I don’t get very far—or, more likely, I’m not as deep as I thought then. The poem was a kind of “mixed-media” collage, full of poetic bursts, dictionary definitions, stage directions, and scraps. At the time, I thought it was my best work ever: a postmodern tour-de-force. Now I’m not sure I could read it without my inner organs petrifying and my brain melting out my ears.

I bring this up because I started having flashbacks to my ex-masterwork while reading Charisse Pearlina Weston’s Awaiting. This is a poetry collection that, like the book in my previous review, was thrust into my hands with no context from Harneet. The back of the book describes it as “part autobiography, part play, part fictive dream as long poem” and as drawing “phrases and motifs from two seemingly disparate plays (Lorraine Hansberry’s What Use are Flowers? and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot) and entangles them into poetic remixes.” For context, I have no knowledge of Lorraine Hansberry’s work, but have read and seen Waiting for Godot several times. Even that did not prepare me, though, for engaging with Awaiting. If the words were lifted directly, I didn’t notice, though there was one part that sounded remarkably similar to a scene in Beckett’s novel Molloy. I would say, potentially, hesitantly, that Awaiting offers very little instruction for ‘how’ to read it; in particular, if this is meant as “part autobiography,” I wouldn’t say I know very much about Weston at all as a result.

But where thinking fails, Google succeeds: I did a Google search and discovered that Weston is a Black visual artist from Brooklyn (how does Harneet do it?! She’s always finding interesting people based on book covers alone). I wonder if engaging with Weston’s art in other mediums would help provide insight into the project here. I imagine she’s adept at speaking in multiple aesthetic languages, and seeing her at work in various forms would likely help me grapple with some of her key themes.

In any case, Awaiting is a bizarre little collection (?) of poems. It’s written as a play—sort of. The dramatis personae is pretty fun in that respect. The narrator is described as “the oiliness of memory” (7), the children are “the muted chorus” (8), and the audience is “the limit” (8). The characters that actually perform are Vision and a woman, who are both given lengthier descriptions.

The format of the poem seems to me to be integral to its core themes. The poem gravitates towards themes of performance and observation. Vision watches the woman. The woman seems to rotate the stage so that the audience is brought to her (rather than the usual inverse of the audience remaining seated and the performer coming to them.) It’s a nice coincidence that I recently finished a book about the male gaze and womens’ bodies that here we have a figure engaged in ambiguous motions being monitored by unspeaking audience members. I know the back of the book suggests this borrows from Waiting for Godot, but I’d be much more inclined to suggest it owes more to Beckett’s Quad and Quad II. It’s more about the motion than the words.

In that respect, there is a lot of playfulness around the spacing and layout of the poem. There is a section in the middle, for example, that is printed on black pages and is divided into some overlapping squares. Even in the main “narrative” (I’m hesitant to call it a story), there are at least two strands. There’s the sort of ‘narration’ which also serves as a dialogue with Vision’s marginal voice. I was drawn back to the description of the Audience as “the limit.” I find that particularly interesting since the limit of the page is taken up by Vision’s voice and we ourselves are forced into certain perspectives by the woman and are forced to navigate the artful and playful spacing of the page—a style I have long recognized the appeal of.

This isn’t to say Weston’s work relies purely on visual flare to create an interest. Her work has some excellent turns of phrase and linguistic intrigue. One passage, for instance, refers to “the kind of touch that flees, / yearns time for reverie, burns as fire / with no source, as beheaded heat, a hull / of agitated halting breath which floats lonely, / lovingly upwards to ceiling to roof to out of / out of reach” (45).First of all, I adore the phrase “beheaded heat.” Secondly, I appreciate the double-down and line break for “out of / out of.” The redoubling suggests an even further limit—not only is it out of reach, but it is beyond even the possibility of being out of reach.

The playfulness of the language seems to offer an alternative conception of relationships between self and society. There is, I would say, some political undertones to the work, though not as bludgeoningly transparent as Instagram poets. There is simultaneously a philosophical register I find difficult to resist: “We are in no danger of thinking anymore, / not here in the aftermath of vacated time, in the residue of barricaded remembrance / in the slow deliberate and deafening violence of curtain in a hasty crawl / to the meeting of itself” (40). There’s an ominous quality to the passage that evokes for me someone like Maurice Blanchot; the disaster, as he describes it, has a striking resemblance to “the aftermath of vacated time.” I think also about memory as an involuntary faculty, where there is the “residue of barricaded remembrance.” The “deafening violence of curtain” is also a great line, even if I can’t quite place it within a broader context of the poem—although it does seem to have a parallel to Nudités féminines: Images, pensées et sens du désir by Laurence Pelletier. 

Some of my favourite sections of the poem are the ones that are more sustained and, in some ways, direct. One section discusses “redacted lavender” (what a phrase, again!) “whose pages threaten turns / to so much more” (37). There’s a sort of violence to the language, or at least the possibility of it. The passage continues to discuss how “those professions unconscious / hardly ever arrive / but to the closure / thriving damp of solitude. / to the kind that boils / from its own, foreclosing longing” (37). In this section, there’s also an exploration of the central relationship in the collection. There’s a tenuousness to the connection and a recognition (or misrecognition) that the speaker documents as follows:

i liked when he called me
by another name
because it was deliberate
he told me later
to imagine so many different
things in the midst
of actions so specific

and so about being with

and in somewhere
so vast and small
in the same instance. (37)

There are a few moments in the poem that discuss being named and here the idea of multiple names reflects the multiplicity of identity. There is a shifting nature to who we are and here, tenuous though the relationship with Vision seems to be, the woman values this recognition of multiple identities existing simultaneously—”so vast and small / in the same instance” (37). The lines which follow serve an almost incantatory function in their repetition:

to imagine while

folding into the intimacy

he said
of my faltering soul
he said
of my faltering soul
he said
was a gift to never be
without remark.
and time.
within just those little
utterances
space chopping hour
doubles
and minutes crinkle. (37)

The notion of folding into one another really draws on some central themes in the work. I can picture all of the squares in the black page section similarly folding, overlapping, relying on one another. Here the repetition serves to redouble a statement (because saying it once is too precarious? Because saying it more makes it more real?). The motif of time also recurs and “minutes crinkle.” There’s a fuzziness and fragility, even a brittleness, to the rigidity of time that starts to poke through here.

Earlier in the text, there’s another section that is very well-developed and once again relies on doubling—of identity, of words. Weston writes, “forest i hardly hold any [longer] / except in the flesh of leaves / [amongst] dreams, i begin to fall / so deeply in love with loving / for the first time that i learn / to unusually speak in circular beats” (29). I suppose this is where Weston offers some strategy for reading her work. The repetition of “in love with loving” and noting that it’s the “first time” (again that time motif) sets up the premise of the book. The phrase “unusually speak in circular beats” is also unnatural. It would make more sense to say “speak unusually in circular beats” or “speak in unusually circular beats.” Yet here we have an unnatural-sounding phrase that initiates us into the work and inaugurates our expectations. Weston gives us an unnatural reading to prime us into the unnatural modes we’ll have to force ourselves into—again, the woman controls the audience, not the other way around.

That section of the poem then goes on to tell the story of the woman and her brother and their father, “at this point in the the play / a compilation of the admiral agent spy / the cyclopic tyrant scooping us up out from] / the squalor of our bleeding / breathing dark fleshy lives [and into the valleys of his decommissioned fingerprints]” (29). You can easily see the word substitutions or aural similarities that are hinted at, allowing multiple meanings to exist at once. For example, “the squalor of our bleeding” would likely double with the phrase “the squalor of our breeding”, given that the father is brought into the discussion immediately prior. Also, as an aside, “decommissioned fingerprints” is a perfect poetic phrase.

Within that same passage is a complicated development of the relationship. It’s unclear whether “a woman listens. leans in. holds up holds up / and neither i nor he in this draft / register / the one at the desk peering under / her.” It’s unclear how many people are actually in this situation. We’re not clear on whether she is experiencing or watching or remembering someone else’s memory. It’s even more complex because the next line introduces the first person: “as i remember it / thick rimmed glasses / her raising one light-skinned / freckled cheek to curl one side / of a full pale purple set of lips” (29). Is the first person also the third person? It feels playful to have a first person speaking in third person in a situation where the number of figures in the room is ambiguous. It should also be noted that I’m removing the spacing here, which makes the situation even more complex.

The collection offers a playfulness that is a devious as it is clever. It was unfair of me to suggest that Weston doesn’t teach us how to read her work. Square brackets offer a guideline to her linguistic shapeshifting:

[the face she makes
as] she [s]lightly pretends to [only]
half listen, [to only] half conceal
amusement by our blind [comfort
within the rubbery flesh ridges
of unfolded greatness]. i do distinctly
recall my brother’s Chesire smile
his white white teeth [purring] (29)

One element of the book that is strange to me (only one?) is that there is a sort of appendix that gives a full different (?) earlier (?) version of the poem. I’d be curious to discuss the genesis of the poem. It seems that the original appears as a footnote of sorts (and again reverses time—that which came first comes last). The extended version flourishes into a series of acts and scenes, but the relationship is not entirely clear. It warrants further examination.

Overall, I liked Awaiting. There is a lot about it that is perplexing, but being perplexed is not entirely without its charm. It almost inspires me to go back into my weirdness.

Happy reading, everyone!

Nudités féminines: Images, pensées et sens du désir by Laurence Pelletier

  In the name of brevity, I’ll briefly summarize one of my traditions: I visit Montreal, I buy a French book. Normally, I buy a poetry book, but this time I tackled a full-length philosophy book. I’m not sure I would have taken on the double challenge of theoretical text that is also in my second language, but Harneet insisted upon this book by throwing it into my hands, neither of us knowing anything about it. So here we are: a philosophy book about the female nude in art.

I hope it goes without saying that, because French is not my first language, I may make some mistakes in translation or conceptualization of this text. If Laurence Pelletier’s Nudités féminines: Images, pensées et sens du désir seems flawed, I assure it is because of my own mistranslations of the text. I’ll take responsibility.

The opening of the book hurls you into the key concepts of the book: art, sex, sexuality, nudity, nakedness, the female nude, the male gaze, and all those interrelated concepts that spark interest and controversy. The essential premise of the book, in my recollection, is that the philosophical significance of the female nude as an art object has been historically defined by men within a male-centric episteme. So, Pelletier is looking to redefine the terms of the discussion in an alternative mode.

Even some of the basics of the argument prove surprisingly controversial. Pelletier explores the discourse surrounding nakedness and nudity as terms, tracing a significant difference between the two terms. To be naked is a fundamentally different quality from being nude. Essentially, the difference seems to be the relation between the viewer and the naked/nude subject and the meaning attached to it: is it primarily erotic? degrading? appraising? Where Pelletier lands is a recurring idea that nudity is attached to knowledge—but whether it reveals or conceals knowledge (and for whom) remains a question the rest of the text explores.

Pelletier traces the discourse around female nudity by examining specific works of art. Much of the earlier pieces in the collection deal with visual art (like Boticelli’s The Birth of Venus or Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde). She later revisits the visual arts in a discussion of Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party. Grounding the conversation in particular works of art served as a helpful signpost for key points in the discussion. The literary works often sounded fascinating, but I missed out a little bit on never having read them myself. In particular, Pelletier’s discussion of the works of Marguerite Duras really inspired me to explore Duras’ work, and Kathy Acker gets a chapter’s worth of discussion—maybe I should follow through on reading her as I promised a random colleague at a conference five years ago. Same for Luce Irigaray and Jamaica Kincaid—I’ve got some reading to do!

The works with which I was most familiar also proved most fascinating in the discussion. The trajectory of Pelletier’s book is essentially as follows: 1) establish who creates the discourse around nudity and nakedness 2) consider how women address the issue of nudity and knowledge 3) explore the distinctions that emerge in trans identities, definitions of femininity, and so on and 4) explore how the issue of femininity manifests differently for women of colour. Thus, Pelletier offers a really compelling discussion of Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party (lots of vulvas—look it up if you’re not familiar) and talks about how Sojourner Truth is the only racialized woman and the only one whose vulva is not represented on the plate. Incidentally, there was a fascinating discussion of the colonial constructions and conversations surrounding Black womens’ rear ends. The fetishistic depictions of them prove a surprisingly fruitful site of historical insight.

All this to say, when Pelletier comments on Zadie Smith’s essay about Their Eyes Were Watching God was a familiar touchstone that emphasized the idea of self-recognition in representations of women. Having read Smith’s essay and feeling deeply moved by it, this was a nice touch for ending off the text. That said, I would note that the book leaves a lot to be desired in terms of conclusions. There are a number of threads that Pelletier follows, but I felt there was never a definitive account of why the female nude is important and what it means. That said, I recognize that offering a definitive account would be as reductive as previous philosophers are accused of being here.

One of the most productive conversations for me came from a surprising direction. One chapter references the Napalm Girl photo. There’s an incredible close reading of the photo. Pelletier contextualizes the image and explains why it was necessary to take the form it did; had it been a man or even an adult woman in the image, Pelletier convinced me it would not have become a part of our cultural zeitgeist. The conversation about the Vietnam war was riveting, but the analysis of the photo was also deeply insightful. Then, the chapter takes a surprising twist: Pelletier moves to a discussion of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, where a nude woman visually evokes the Napalm Girl. Drawing that parallel is not only persuasive but extraordinarily evocative since Pelletier suggests that the filmic woman gives voice to the Napalm Girl that she is not provided in the photo. It produced in me a whole slew of thoughts about diegetic and nondiegetic sound, like if the sound from her mouth can be both diegetic (since it happens in context) and nondiegetic (since it comes from another time, place, and subject)---and to quote Twin Peaks, “What year is it?” Incidentally, Pelletier does discuss the notion of time throughout the book, as well.

At this stage, I’ll try to summarize and extend a commentary on some of the passages that struck me as critical to Pelletier’s overall argument.

1. Womanhood and femininity are connected to conceptions of truth.

This premise is established early in the text and is indeed the reason that exploring the issue is worthwhile. Pelletier writes, “La rhétorique des deux philosophes lie donc les questions de la femme et du féminin à elle de la vérité. Elle utilise le féminin comme l’instrument, le support ou l’écran d’une expérience ontologique se voulant universelle et sexuellement neutre qui précéderait l’ordre social” (31). The notion that femininity is tied to truth and that the woman serves as a screen for an ontological experience is established as critical. Pelletier continues that “Elle laisse supposer que l’accession à la subjectivité, à la vérité du sujet, entretient une relation causale à l'objet regardé: on devient sujet devant ou par la nudité d’une femme” (31). It’s an essential reversal: the person who gains subjecthood in the act of seeing is the person seeing, not the person being observed, who is often erased in the same moment. Pelletier notes that it is a way of rendering woman an “abstraction, un idéal, un objet ou un instrument de discours. Elle est envisagée hors des conditions de déterminations matérielles, sociohistoriques et politiques qui la rattacheraient à l’existence des femmes” (31). It’s a materialist argument that challenges the universality of depictions of women, recalling that each woman is an individual—not a representative of a whole and that, in some capacity, philosophizing about the deep meaning of capital-W Woman serves to distance actual women from the question of Being.

2. The fetishization of nude women is related to a thirst for truth.

The female nude renders woman pure image: “Elle est ramenée à la fonction de pure apparence, de pure image. Incarnation de l’antimétaphysique, la femme dénudée trouble et défait les oppositions conceptuelles, ramène tout à la surface. Elle n’est qu’une forme, une surface idéalisée sur laquelle est projeté le désir de connaître la vérité” (44). While metaphysical questions take a back seat to the actual, visible qualities of the woman, she also becomes a surface upon which to project desire—and specifically a desire for truth. Pelletier suggests that the fetishization of women is related to the idea of the “disparition, dérobade, déception de la vérité, est liée à une fétichisation de la visibilité de la femme” (44). The nude woman becomes a kind of ground zero of knowledge: “la femme est concue comme un point aveugle obligatoire de sorte que la pensée philosophique, déireuse de compenser ce manque, s’acharne compulsivement à la rendre visible, à produire et démultiplier son image, lui octroyant un pouvoir de révélation” (44). The reclamation project is a tenuous one because…

3. Masculine desire muddies the waters of the conversation.

Pelletier continues that “cette dynamique particulière met à jour le désir du sujet masculin” (44). That desire has a sexual layer, but also one that engages with knowledge: “le regard philosophique doit être bloqué, indirect, difficile, de manière à rechercher, continuellement, à se aligner avec le corps de la femme, puisqu’elle est le support d’un manque à voir, d’un <<n’être pas>> de la vérité.” Recalling the hermeneutics of suspicion or paranoid epistemes of Nietzsche, Derrida, and Lacan, the suggestion is that the lack is where the meaning lies, which means the depths can never be reached. In their world, the woman’s power relies also on her own lack of knowledge of the truth: “la possibilité même du pouvoir révélateur de la femme réside dans son inconscience ou son non-savoir de l’inexistence de la verité. Cet aveuglement à l'égard de son propre effet est la condition nécessaire à son idéalisation et son objectivation: c’est ainsi, <<en fermant les yeux sur elle-même, qu’elle devient la pure construction d’un regard philosophique>>” (44). The epistemic appeal of women (for men) depends on women’s lack of knowledge of themselves. It relegates women to a position of ignorance where they are the vehicle to, but never the recipient of knowledge. The passage ends as follows: “Cette posture attribuée à la femme releve d’une volonté théorique visant à destituer le sujet rationnel, idéalisé par les philosophes modernes. Pour ce faire, la femme se voit érigée comme la preuve théorique de la précarité de la raison, de la conscience et, corollairement, de la connaissance. Elle est un sujet qui n’en est pas un, qui ne se connait pas lui-meme. Le fait de sa féminité est à ce titre indicatif du procédé d'altérisation et de différenciation” (44-45). The female nude is defined by a paradox: to be an object of desire is to be unknowable. Or, in Pelletier’s words: “L’autre féminin est pris dans un paradoxe: sa réalité comme objet de désir dépend de son inconnaissabilité” (45).

4. Hence, philosophers come to see women as the limit of knowledge or an abstraction.

In turn, “La femme en vient à représenter la limite de ce qui est maîtrisable, de ce qui est pensable, et c’est en cela qu’elle constitue l’objet du désir épistémologique masculin” (45). In turn, “parce qu’ils l’imaginent occuper l’au-delà de la théorie, la femme figure l’ultime fantasme philosophique. La femme occupe la limite et l’excès de la pensée tout en demeurant, pour la philosophe, inaccessible” (45). Referring to Derrida and others, she suggests that “Dans le discours philosophique, la différence sexuelle est niée puisque la femme devient la véhicule, le support d’un désir <<hom(m)osexuel>> pour réprendre la formule d’Irigay: un désir autoeffectif du masculin. C’est dire que, chez ces philosophes, la méconnaissance est un fait fantasmatique, l’objet d’un désir qu’ils projettent sur une femme, plus qu’une posture qui concerne ou affecte les femmes” (45). The discourse around the female nude erases women in order for men to supplant their own ideas onto them. Misunderstanding becomes as important as actually understanding.

Pelletier continues on to note that when philosophy discusses women, “elle n’en parle pas comme d’une réalité matérielle” (49). Later, this becomes tied to an antiessentialist argument. It’s a timely addition to the conversation. Given how conservatives seem to be using “you can’t define a woman” as some kind of “gotcha” question, Pelletier offers an effective discussion of why all essentialist arguments fail—a woman is not just a being with a vagina and uterus; a woman is not just someone who has children; a woman is not even necessarily feminine. Womanhood is related to lived realities, “un cadre matérialiste, phénoménologique.” That is where feminine consciousness arises. Thus, traditional philosophy denies women their own identities: “Dans la résistance à engager leur pensée dans un rapport spéculaire, les philosophes refusent à la femme une existence subjective, matérielle dans le language et la théorie” (50).

The question remains on how the image of the female nude in art engages with this discourse. It is not immediately apparent whether, by default, the nude form creates an abstraction or brings knowledge to the fore. I don’t know if Pelletier resolves this seeming paradox other than through individual treatments of the subject. It’s not as though there’s a set of rules that we seem able to apply consistently.

Returning to the matter at hand, Pelletier notes that representations create a challenging relationship to essentialism. One woman comes to stand for all women. She notes, “Cette différence exclusive entre femme (réele) et représentation (soit l’une, soit l’autre, <<ce n’est pas une femme, c’est une image>>, écrit Didi-Huberman) est essentialle à une réflextion universaliste, qui repose sur l’indifférenciation sexuelle (il n’y a pas de femme). C’est dire que l’image de la femme a plus qu’une fonction métonymique, métaphorique ou encore symptomatique; la femme – mise à nu – fait office de nouveau paradigme formel et représentationnel” (50). It’s a complex argument to follow, and I admit that I don’t fully understand the nuances. There’s a difference between real women and depictions of them; that much is clear. The image is not the thing, there’s always a distance. But that then becomes a universalist depiction that erodes difference. As an art form, then, the idea of a nude figure inaugurates a new way of thinking.

The subject becomes the site of a sexual difference: “En raison de la relation particulière des femmes au régime de la visibilité, on se trouve dès lors devant la nécessité d’engager une réflextion matérielle de l’image et l’intégrant à une pensée de la différence sexuelle” (50). Pelletier advances the idea that a woman’s image “convoque bel et bien l’existence des femmes, leur réel; cela les concerne, cela les regarde. La forme, et plus précisément la mise en forme des signifiants qui nous présentent une femme, a une consistance matérielle, une valuer de phénomene, une valeur référentielle sensible et empirique” (50). In this moment, the nude subject does seem to offer a perspective of the truth that corresponds to material realities. It becomes a window in itself.

The issue is often that sites of difference become sites of negation. Consider,f or example, the essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. That which communicates differently might as well be erased. So, Pelletier searches for a difference that is not at the same time a negation: “Le virtuel s’actualise en se différenciant, en procédant par une différence sans négation. Et de même, l’actuel peut se virtualiser, c’est-à-dire se déplacer de l’ici et maintenant, vers un autre champ spatio-temporel, dans un champ incorporel. Ainsi, l'actuel et le virtuel coexistent, et entrent dans un étroit circuit qui nous ramène constamment de l’un à l'autre” (66-67). There’s a kind of balance between the artificial representations and the real, a circuit of correspondence. Under the surface here is the primacy of individuality versus the archetypical: “Il a été commode pour la tradition de séparer le féminin à l'intérieur d'un rapport négatif où les femmes se différencient de la <<Femme>>, et où ces deux termes, par leur statut, ne peuvent jamais se rencontrer” (67). This places women once more in a precarious position that instantiates a new ontology, a kind of resistance to being perceived as anything “stereotypically” feminine. This individuation ensures that the collective and the individual remain separate: “L’une n’a pas à voir avec l'autre. L’une est idéale, un fantasme, une abstraction; l’autre est réelle, physique, matérielle. Une femme réelle peut bien penser, fantasmer, imaginer la <<Femme>>. Mais la <<Femme>> ne peut jamais être l’affaire des femmes” (67).

Pelletier’s response to the relationship of the Ideal to the actual is to ensure that the causal relationship is inverted. The idea of capital-W Woman and the existence of actual women are misaligned. In turn, the idea is that rather than having an Ideal Woman against which to measure oneself, the idea of an Ideal Woman can only emerge from the actual lived realities of women. It’s a materialist approach that strives, simultaneously, to go against essentialist discourse:  “je peux envisager le féminin, bien sur comme idéel, toutefois constitutif et existant dans le réel, comme vecteur de potentialités. Car (dans un retournement de la proposition de Malabou, <<le “féminin” doit bien quelque chose aux femmes>>), s’il ya quelque chose qui lie la <<Femme>> aux femmes, c’est peut-être ce qui passe et circule de l’une aux autre: quelque chose de féminin” (67).

This emphasis on the feminine (over, I suppose, the female), problematizes the idea of the Ideal. The feminine exists as “fantasme, comme idée, comme représentation, comme souvenir ou comme discours” (67) and“problématise le réel qui présente, sous diverses actualisations, la contingence de l’identité et de l’existence des femmes” (67). The notion that the real destabilizes the Ideal serves as an effective philosophy which restores the primacy of specific instantiations of womanhood. Returning to the idea of nudity, “La nudité féminine, comme cadre, comme mise en scène, virtualise le féminin; elle interpelle, concerne, regarde et rejoint les femmes dans la réalité de ce qu’il y a chez elle de féminin, de ce qui entretient un rapport avec la <<Femme>>” (67).

In terms of specific instantiations of femininity, Pelletier has several extended sections about the author Marguerite Duras [anecdotally, I want to to read her work and at  Type Books I saw that they’re doing a book club with her book The Lover. But I digress.

In short, the central premise regarding Duras is that she refuses to show: “Elle n'offre aucune image de la Vérité; remet même en doute la présence d'une Vérité” (85). The arboreal interpretation of womanhood (cf. the criticisms of Deleuze and Guattari) is thus subverted. The secret at the core of femininity is not exposed and instead “Elle offre un point de vue depuis le noir de la chambre, sur la <<chambre nue>>, là où est étendue la femme. Elle fait paraître en périphérie ce qui ne se capte que dans un fondu de lumière ou un mouvement de matière” (85). Having not read any of Duras’ work, I’m ill-suited to comment. That being said, Pelletier offers a really compelling and engaging discussion of Duras’ work. There’s a mystery at the core of the work and in refusing to reveal a secret she seems to resist the paranoiac episteme that everything has a deeper and deeper core to explore. In turn, she does not collect truth like a butterfly pinned to its display but instead hovers around them: “Avec Duras, je me permets de penser la nudité féminine comme ce qui flirte avec le fantasme de l’origine – celle du monde, mais surtout celle de la femme –, et ce qui rend visible dans l’écriture le désir de la femme, et sa méchanique proper, qui consiste à mettre en échec le fantasme de la connaissance” (85). It’s a compelling inversion where the male gaze is de-centered in favour of feminine desire and understanding.

Pelletier focuses on “les divers rideaux et systèmes de caches qui ont recouvert la toile de Courbet ont longtemps renvoyé à la volonté des spectateurs masculins de voir et de savoir le sexe de la femme, et de maintenir dans sa potentialité ce désir épistémologique spécifiquement phallique” (85). Hearing this commentary about curtains is particularly interesting, especially given the connection to Lynch. In another recent read of mine, The Weird and the Eerie, Mark Fisher comments on Lynch’s obsession with curtains and, while Pelletier doesn’t comment on it here, it is nonetheless interesting to consider the idea of disclosure in relation to the symbolism—particular because Lynch seems to give voice to the voiceless Napalm Girl.

The curtain is something that conceals, but could also be projected upon. In the work of Duras, Pelletier comments on how “En revanche, le drap blanc qui dit et s’étale dans la chambre de La maladie de la mort figure la toile mise a plat, le voile déjà tombé et absent sur lequel rien ne peut plus se projeter. Seul demeure le corps exposé, exhibé, de la femme qui n’offre rien sinon, peut-être, dans la fausse profondeur de son sexe, par sa plasticité et sa capacité à changer de forme en fonction de la mise en scène, son irréductibilité” (85). It’s paradoxes like these I feel compelled to read Duras’ work—perhaps these sections of Pelletier’s work are best revisited after experiencing Duras’ novels first hand.

Overall, Nudités féminines. Images, pensées et sens du désir offers a fair amount of thought-provoking commentary. I really appreciate how Pelletier gives a nearly chronological narrative, ranging from defining Woman, but then replacing that discourse femininity, bridging into trans and racial experiences of femininity. Dealing with the particular art works is probably where Pelletier most shines. Looking for a comprehensive philosophy is much more challenging throughout the book, but is, after all, not really the point. The materialist, antiessentialist philosophy is worthwhile, even if I sometimes lose the thread of the overarching thought.

For me: a gold star for reading French philosophy. For you: happy reading!

The Kingdom of Surfaces by Sally Wen Mao

  If you pick The Kingdom of Surfaces off the shelf, I imagine you’ll be struck by the beauty of the cover image and that you would expect the poems housed within to be similarly ornate. Imagine my surprise, then, when I began to read Sally Wen Mao’s book and found that every poem serves as a reflection of Walter Benjamin’s quote that “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” The Kingdom of Surfaces offers poems both long and short that call into question the West’s engagement with China throughout history well into the present day.

In fact, an early work in the collection, “Batshit,” addresses the way China was and is portrayed in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Having been born in Wuhan, Mao confronts head-on the racist tropes that emerged following the outbreak. She references the fact that “some love foreign / dogs more than foreign people” (9) and that “they call eating dog barbaric, / but not police brutality” (9). The poem immediately following, “Wet Market,” further explores the shifting meaning of barbarism with reference to cultural practice.

Throughout the collection, Mao includes concrete poems (poems in the shape of things), which seems to have fallen out of vogue with “serious” poets. Here, though, it’s a refreshing take on the genre. Rather than having a poem about cats in the shape of a cat (how cutesy!), Mao replicates the shape of Ming vases to address a history of conflict, of exploitation, and of appropriation. It’s rare to see a concrete poem that addresses such meaningful issues, elevating the form to unabashedly honour the traditions from which the poet has emerged.

This work is important precisely because Western culture aims to decontextualize artistry from its origin. The titular piece of The Kingdom of Surfaces is a sustained, surrealistic piece that draws from Alice in Wonderland and the MET Gallery. The poems in that section, spanning twenty pages, each use an epigraph pulled from the exhibit at the MET China Through the Looking Glass: Fashion, Film, Art. The quotations often make claims about the work being disconnected from its context in a kind of postmodern revelation. Specifically, part of the exhibit reads as follows, provided as the epigraph for Mao’s poem “Humpty Dumpty”:

The China that unfolds before  our eyes is a China “through the looking glass,” one that is culturally and historically decontextualized. Freed from settings, past and present, the objects in this catalogue and in the exhibition galleries begin to speak for and between themselves. A narrative space opens up that is constantly being reorganized by free association. Meanings are endlessly negotiated and renegotiated.

Each poem in the section “The Kingdom of Surfaces” offers a challenge to the MET’s perspective that art can be removed from its context. The poems offer a metacommentary on museums’ accumulation processes and the appropriation inherent in exhibit art from Chinese dynasties. The culture-jamming and satirical bent of offering these quotations as a guidepost for a poem that cleverly appropriates from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (a nice little inversion of Orientalism) is a great statement on the state of curation today.

What makes the collection really powerful, though, is that this is not simply a tirade against the forces of Western culture engaged in yet another colonial exploitation. The foundations of Mao’s culture are also troubled. Take the poem “On Silk,” for example. It’s an eight page poem about the history of the silk trade, and a number of poems in the collection reference the cultivation process of silk and boiling living creatures alive in order to harvest the culturally-coded material. “Romance of the Castle Toppler” similarly tries to grapple with the treatment of women in Chinese culture, another interrogation of a heritage which has ultimately produced beauty, as well.

The poem “Paris Syndrome” really helps to reinforce that challenging disconnect. Paris Syndrome is itself an experience of failed expectations, a medical affliction recognized among Japanese and Chinese tourists to Paris, whose experience of culture shock is so intense that it creates a sense of dis-ease, sweating, anxiety, and panic. The final stanza of the poem addresses the idea of home and what expectations the speaker’s mother had for a house. The final lines of the poem read as follows: “Before we arrived in the beautiful / country, I imagined a house / with walls made of silk. // I imagined a stranger could come up to our door / and whisper a secret through its seams” (35). It’s an evocative image, both familiar and strange. The idea of the house being made of silk is not entirely comfortable, particularly when it is troubled by the other cultural and “barbaric” layers of the silk trade. The idea of a stranger whispering a secret through the seams of the house presents as intimate a scene as it is coded with danger, an alluring danger perhaps, but a danger nonetheless.

The poem immediately after is “On Silk,” which is structured around a series of vignettes that provide glimpses of history in the silk trade and its current incarnations. Mao offers some rich imagery where the speaker narrates, “When I found the water, I debated / drinking its mirage. In the desert, / everything grew wild. I expected / an expanse of death, but everything / sprouted before me, more alive / than I could ever hope to be” (43). It’s a rich and lush kind of image that is immediately undercut by the section of the poem which follows. She notes that “Every evening in the Bund, orange light / bathed the municipal buildings as I strolled. / The cameras captured every transgression— / jaywalking or loitering. On this side of the river, / memories of blood spilled. A luxury watch brand / sells time to the rivers of people walking down / East Nanjing Road” (43). There’s a coldness to the scene. The orange light takes on an ominous quality where “every transgression” is documented. In the passage that follows, there is a dystopic depiction of the skyline “sequined / with fishscale lights, projections on buildings — / cherry blossoms, ads for skin cream, and the / words I love my home in Chinese and English” (43). The passage ends with the line “Even the sky / was a bolt of silk torn in half by God” (43). The short quatrain that concludes the poem discusses “the splendour and squalor” of their collective past. It’s an appropriate phrase for characterizing the depiction of aesthetics in across the collection: splendour and squalor interlinked, and “A worm spitting / and spinning itself into a new luxury, a sensation, / finally, yes, a thing of value” (43).

While the poems often take on a political bent, they are thoroughly infused with the personal and some of those poems really standout. There’s a viscerality to the pieces, notably in the excellent piece “American Loneliness,” where personal memories are recounted and placed within the broader framework of American and Chinese culture. There are some narratives that weave in, out, and around each other for a finely crafted experience.

As you may have noticed, Mao has a knack for striking images and some poetic phrasing. The first piece in the collection is a highlight that offered a beautiful closing line; in fact, it is what compelled me to read the rest of the collection. In describing “Loquats” (after which the poem is named), the poem concludes on a compelling paradox: “A tree so pretty and snakelike / it renders you breathless, then worthless, all at once” (4). Grappling with contradictions like awe and worthlessness before the beauty of the world is compelling, but Mao twists the knife just a little bit more. The small word “then” is in conflict with “all at once.” The experience is both sequential and simultaneous, which gives that irresolvability voice and helps to nourish the pieces which follow.

The Kingdom of Surfaces is an engaging collection. If you’re interested in history, colonialism, aesthetics, and the monuments to barbarism regularly erected in the West and beyond, it has a wealth of narratives to engage with. It’s an informative collection as much as an imagistic one, and there is enough of a personal touch to breathe life into the poems (without simply being a history textbook with line breaks). It was a surprising read, far more confrontational than I would have expected, but also sincere and appreciatory and conflicted. Sally Wen Mao offers a rich collection here worthy of deep consideration.

Happy reading!