Reading list: Talk so loud
We had a quiet lock-down. And now it’s time to be noisy again.
I’ve been thinking about gazes: male gazes, sure, and western gazes, definitely. I’ve been thinking about the long generations of silencing: of women and of intersectional folks – whether women or men or both or neither – definitely.
But first, a short whakapapa is important. My grandfather on my mother’s side was a refugee from Turkey, my grandmother displaced to a series of kāinga after she was orphaned, my mother immigrated to Aotearoa from Greece when she was 22, my father, from Ōtepoti, went his own way when I was six and we grew up as if he’d never existed.
And before this, the stories. I feel complex things when I think about ancient Greek history and mythology. It’s Greek, but is no longer just Greece’s. That history was adopted by the West while Greece was occupied for hundreds of years, missing many fab moments like the Renaissance, scientific revolution, the Enlightenment. And culturally, Greece is much, much more eastern than western, though is branded western and white.
What I’m saying with this is that stories don’t start at a finite point.
Do we want all the stories? Differently told stories? Intersectional stories? Dominance, and the idea that somethings or someones can be known fully, is so extinctive, and rude, and end-game anthropocene. So we need to constantly reset. Women, othered, colonized, refugees, migrants, kids of diasporas have no choice but to offer antidotes, and hurl flares at all the unknown backstreets.
The books I chose to kōrero with Michalia and Laura in this reading list talk to each other about exile: from voice and selfness, against franchise or privilege. They reject the definitions imposed upon them, and instead self-define and talk out loud so we can hear them.
I hope you can get your hands on some of the following lightning stories, and support your local booksellers in the time of coronavirus.
Let’s open with a tetraptych of four books that tell the stories of unsilenced selves who were ancient or fictional, famous or not.
First is Jeanette Winterson’s Weight where Jeanette retells the Atlas myth (you know: the one with the guy with the world on his shoulders) but switches up the tired old (young, white, male) hero trope to become Atlas herself and emancipate him/her/them from his/her/their own personal history. Then, there’s Ali Smith’s Girl Meets Boy where she says, ‘It's what we do with the myths we grow up with that matters’. The book is a wondrous repositioning of the Iphis and Ianthe myth where Iphis is born a girl though grows up a boy, and loves Ianthe as both or neither. Desire, gender and identity are synthesized, and Ali gives the lovers back their porousness. Helen Rickerby follows, with her How to Live, where she does some serious empowering of Hipparchia for one. In her ‘Note on the unsilent woman’, the philosopher is illuminated, and the very idea of silence interrogated, (‘4. Silence isn’t always not speaking. Silence is sometimes an erasure’), and then reclaimed (’19. Silence might not be not speaking. It might be listening’). And lastly, Anne Carson. She takes on Proust in The Albertine Workout and liberates Albertine, whom Proust based on his chauffer Alfred, and with whom he was in love – and who, according to a world expert on Proust – ‘a reader may safely and entirely skip’. From the opening: ‘2. Albertine’s name occurs 2,363 times in Proust’s novel, more than any other character… 4. On a good 195 of these pages she is asleep.’ – A lot of waking up happens in these four books.
Get your copy of Weight here
Get your copy of Girl Meets Boy here
Get your copy of How to Live here
You can access The Albertine Workout on the London Review of Books here.
Life on Volcanoes: Contemporary Essays – Tulia Thompson, Tze Mink Mok, Courtney Sina Meredith, Ruth Larsen, Tui Gordon and Janet McAllister (editor)
Here’s another chorus of women, this time in a single book which everyone must, must read. In Volcanoes the five poet-essayist-writer-thinker women blast out in full-throated volume about poverty, pain, boundary, healing, love, diaspora, persecution and responsibility in Aotearoa – and I love that Greek people imagined /imagine volcanoes to be the results of huge releases of trapped air from deep inside Mountains. I was at Tulia’s, Tui’s, and Janet’s ‘Voices Rising’ session at Going West last year in 2019, and it was of heat and of heart. A serious no-joke call to righting a lot of wrong. it amazes me how renegade and activist it still feels when a group of women call shit out.
Get your copy here
Night Sky with Exit Wounds – Ocean Vuong
I deeply loved the code-switching in this book (‘In Vietnamese, the word for grenade is “bom,” from the French “pomme,”/meaning “apple”’); and after reading Night Sky I thought Ocean might also be part-spirit from another world (but let’s watch that whole exoticising/ fetishising thing). Ocean is gay, was a refugee with his family until they migrated to the States, and his actual physical liminality is central to his poetry. But he is also luminal – definitely, of light and for light. He lights up grief, war, memory, family, sexuality, and otherness with all of his senses – and his ability to slide under your warm skin is one of them. ‘Stars were always what we knew they were: the exit wounds of every misfired word’ he says. His intersectional voice guides to the above over the solid confines.
Get your copy here
Girl, Woman, Other – Bernadine Evaristo
There’s a lot to be thankful for in Bernadine. The daughter of her English mother, of her father migrated from Nigeria, she is an experimenter and an iconoclast. In a 2013 interview with Bookslut, she said, ‘I see myself as a storyteller who uses whatever forms seem to fit the story I want to tell. I started off as a poet writing verse dramas for theater, then just wrote poetry, then moved into the verse novel genre….I (maybe?) invented the novel-with-verse genre, which used verse, prose, prose-poetry, scripts, and other non-literary techniques’. For me, hybrid comes to my mind in the best possible sense in this book too, because hybrid is related to hubris, to insolence; and in Girl, Woman, Other, Evaristo celebrates insolent selves, spaces – and form. Amma, the awesome, glorious, black lesbian theatre director, might be the main character, but it’s the complex chorus of subsequent voices – who all gather to sing their stories, in their ways – which collectively make the texture bullet-proof. The text is fast, present, more poetry than prose, (I reckon), or neither, with an awesome disregard for rules and punctuation. There are multiple ways to tell stories.
Get your copy here
He’s So Masc –Chris Tse
Multiplicity is the idea that also strikes me when I think of Chris’ rich, moving, honest, second book. In an interview with Paula Green he said that ‘sometimes I do feel like I’m performing the part of a Chinese New Zealand writer…this book was a chance to draw from the intersectionalities of who I am’. From the book:
I’ll go to my next grave wondering
whether I pushed them hard enough to never settle
for being the token Asian in a crowd scene
(from ‘Punctum’)
‘Push, ‘never settle’, ‘crowd scene’: these signal the many territories in the text, and they all influence and check each other, the lines as unique as a fingerprint. When I read Chris’ line, ‘I could step into a crowd and never resurface’, I remember bumping into him at an Interpol gig at Vic Uni years ago; he was brilliantly dancing.
Get your copy here
If They Come for Us – Fatimah Asghar
Fatimah’s book is so powerful and so heart-rending, it’s hard to know what to meaningfully say about it from the outside; and it’s the kind of book you read through again and again, even though it’s relentless enough the first time through (though there is deliverance also). She slices through identity, feminism, religion, war, death, race, pain; and her experiments with form – there are maps, games, flipped text – are a crucial part of the space. Fatimah’s parents immigrated to the States from Pakistan and Kashmir, and she was an orphan by five after losing both of them. Her story-telling doesn’t need veneer, restraint or definiteness.
‘From the moment our babies are born are we meant to lower them into the ground? To dress them in white? They send flowers before guns, thorns plucked from stem. Every year I manage to live on this I collect more questions than answers.’
(from ‘For Peshawar’)
Get your copy here
You Don’t Love Yourself – Nathalie Sarraute
Nathalie Sarraute [or Natalia Ilinichna Tcherniak] immigrated with her father to France, a child from Russia, and became the queen of the French nouveau roman. I went through a Nathalie phase a few years back and she totally transformed the idea for me of what is possible in form and intention: her work never settles, it’s all about the doubt and unfixedness. In You Don’t Love Yourself, she dissolves the narrator, (the self), into multiple voices and spaces, and translates this fracturing and fragmentation with ellipsis and an unorthodox anti-crafting of plot (or no-plot): because again, ego is not a single, rational, robust thing, but mobile and constantly talking. In an interview, she called the book a dialogue.
Request a reading copy at the National Library of New Zealand by clicking here
As the Earth Turns Silver – Alison Wong
I read this when it came out ten years ago, and remember having slightly mixed feelings even as I thought the poetic writing very beautiful. Lately, I’ve come to question these older ideas. Though it won the NZ Post Book Award, I remember some of the reviews not liking the light quality of the writing; but now I wonder: who were those people to say? I’m considering Wong’s choices of form and language as functions of a less explaining storytelling. It’s so exhausting when stories told by non-dominant culture storytellers are looked at through dominant culture lenses (good writing/not-quite-as-good writing). The story follows two Chinese brother grocers at the turn of the century, a Pākehā woman and her family. So: racism, voiced cultural history, voiced feminist history.
Get your copy here
Just Give Me the Pills – Koraly Dimitriadis
Koraly is the Greek Cypriot-Australian poet and performer, who wrote Love and Fuck Poems, and she is wielding some fire. I read her novel-in-verse exploration of gendered roles, repression and liberation, a few weeks ago when I was feeling really fucked off myself. Here’s another opening from ‘Wedding Day Photography’: ‘arms as thin as the branches her mum would cut from the tree to smack her with…when she walked down the aisle of the church she was so happy her chest and shoulders broke out in a love-red rash…’. Koraly’s writing is antidote to shushing, (‘Why don’t I shut the fuck up?’), her voice is resuscitating. (She also said ‘one thing I am certain of is I am not white, and if anyone calls me that, I get angry. Really angry’ in her article ‘I’m Greek-Cypriot. Does that make me a Person of Colour?’ Contentious).
Get your copy here
Ransack – essa may ranapiri (Ngāti Raukawa)
Language, or rather the newing and hybriding of language, is the major thing that really hit me essa’s book. Yes, I loved the kōrero with Orlando, but I also loved the earth of the poems – the page or canvas (or setting or context or trap or air) on which the words (or parts of) split, became isolated or ecstatic. I felt I was watching play and protest salvage or defy blanked terrain. There was body in this work, hot, spread out, unruly. I agree with Jackson Nieuwland’s response in their Pantograph review of the gorgeousness of the nonstandard ‘it consumes it and is made by it planet and body’. (Next, I’ll sit with essa’s echidna, the [not/Greek] ‘daughter of te Ao Māori’, and other forces).
Get your copy here
Bloodclot – Tusiata Avia
Let’s circle back to myth, to automythography, (or Audre Lorde’s biomythography idea), specifically to Queen Avia: Samoan-Palagi-wahine toa. Nafanua, Samoan Goddess of War and Tusiata merge to make one molten, moving, time-travelling shape-shifting, spiraling force field. Here there is body/bodies/body parts, here there is a crossing between spaces that seems ethereal and peopled only by ghosts. I could include all of Tusiata’s books in this list, but Bloodclot has been particularly red and possessing of me. Psychological, violently redemptive, insolent, it’s on another plane.
‘Nafanua on the other side of the world climbing into her Triumph
she covers the mirrors, pulls out the choke and roars off into the Va’.
(From ‘Nafanua and the New World’)
Get your copy here
