transversea comparative studies journal

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transverseuniversity of toronto

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transverse annarita primier * lisa fiorindi * pablo pemeja * laurel damashek

transverse. a comparative studies journal copyright as per contributors 2005centre for comparative literature

university of toronto

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The National Library of Canada has catalogued this publication as follows:main entry title:

Transverse: A Comparative Studies Journal

if you would like to contact the editor(s), please send an email to:transversejournal@yahoo.ca

table of contents

critical

1 the impersonal in emerson and borges james a. hussar 8

2 shakespeare’s hamlet, III .iv: tracing the spectator’s perspective joel benabu 14

3 an exilic insider and scattered nationalism: male body at the margin in karen-tei yamashita’s brazil-maru rie makino 21

4 blurring the boundaries: challenging binaries in the god of small things michelle blackwell 29

5 imagined towers: vladimir tatlin with andrei platonov joshua backer 34

creative

1 unconvincing stacey may fowles 47

2 beautiful bruises christian mcpherson 49

3 untitled being anders nora m.peterson 55

4 at the mercy of chronology j.j. steinfeld 59

5 pedro ii sandra dawson 61

6 midori elizabeth kate switaj 63 7 io diana en la carniceria anna x mara pastor 65

8 mekong james mcnaughton 70 9 derry the oldest tools last longest jesse p. ferguson 71

10 heavens down krystyna kouri 73

11 tangents (for a susceptible season) notes to myself (the veiled interval) paloma yannakakis 74

12 grown-up son, reading sarah: pregnancy 2 elizabeth smither 77

13 ritorno moonbirth josie disciasio-andrews 79

14 solo in giappone alone in japan (translation) domenico capilongo 81

15 petty theft married former prostitute kim’s story trail, day 1 richard stevenson 83

16 the alena cantatas kate baggott 91

17 pool hall princess sandy ashton 101

visual

1 pesonmaraesnua3 pesonmaraesnua4 azucenofragmentomaraesnua2 fragmentomaraesnua6 mara pastor 104

2 radar sweep 1 radar sweep 2 radar sweep 4 tim dwyer 108

3 mist travelroads philip o’sullivan 111

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the impersonal in emerson and borgesjames a. hussar

In an interview with Willis Barnstone, Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges expressly states his profound admiration for Ralph Waldo Emerson’s skill as a poet, commenting, “I love Emerson and I am very fond of his poetry. He is to me the one intellectual poet—in any case, the one intellectual poet who has ideas. The others are merely intellectual with no ideas at all. In the case of Emerson he had ideas and was thoroughly a poet” (Borges at Eighty 5). Clearly, Borges’ stories, essays, and poetry evidence Emerson’s influence; in fact, Borges alludes to his frequent appropriation of Emersonian thought by remarking, “I like to be indebted to Emerson, one of my heroes” (Eighty 67). Although he mentions Emerson’s poetry in particular, and even pays homage to the Romantic author by composing the poem “Emerson,” Borges also knew Emerson’s essays very well; his Spanish translation of Emerson’s Representative Men (1947) testifies to this fact. Furthermore, Borges’ own work shows him to be a translator of both Emersonian language and philosophy. Borges’ short stories and essays find him working through several very Emersonian ideas. In particular, Emerson’s notions of the universal mind and the One Book appear to have intrigued Borges, as these constitute prevalent themes in the Argentinian’s work. Emerson’s declaration in “History” that “there is one mind common to all individual men” (Essays and Poems 237) resounds in Borges, who frequently contemplates this statement as it relates to the status of the individual author. For Borges, Emerson’s philosophy questions not only the artist’s role as Creator, but also the very notion of originality. Building on Emerson’s thought, he posits that the value of ideas far outweighs that of individual authors; consequently, ideas endure to be recycled by subsequent generations, even as authors’ names are condemned to oblivion. In their respective responses to the prospect of authorial anonymity, however, Borges and Emerson appear to diverge. Even as he endorses the notion of the universal mind, Emerson preserves the distinction between artist and Everyman. Specifically, he exalts the position of the Poet, ascribing to him skills and sensibilities beyond those of mere mortals—a portrayal that suggests Emerson’s interest in his own status as an author. On the other hand, Borges’ comments offer every indication that he aspires to anonymity. He appears to eschew recognition for his work and downplay his own importance as an author, viewing the distinction between his role and that of the reader as a matter of circumstance. In this sense, Borges fully embraces Emerson’s philosophy, claiming impersonality as a personal credo. He does not merely read Emerson “for the lustres” (“Nominalist and Realist,” EP 579); rather, he takes impersonality very personally. If every complete book contains its counter-book, as Borges suggests in his story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” then every Emersonian essay contains its counter-essay. Several of these essays find Emerson struggling with the notion of the universal mind, a significant source of tension in his texts. On the one hand, this theory works decidedly in Emerson’s favor, allowing him to place his own thought on par with that of such revered geniuses as Plato and Shakespeare. Comments such as, “in every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts” (“Self Reliance,” EP 259) and “in their grandest strokes we feel most at home” (“History,” EP 238) suggest that Emerson feels himself fully capable of the type of thought that characterizes 8

his “representative men.” By the same token, the universal mind theory posits that every man is capable of Platonic, Shakespearian, or even Emersonian thought. Perhaps Emerson recognized in this philosophy a potential threat to his own status as an artist; consequently, his essays evidence a delicate negotiation through which the author seeks to distinguish himself from the Everyman while affirming the possibility of his own upward mobility. Emerson accomplishes this task by arguing that, although thought occurs to men of all stripes indiscriminately, the Poet’s keen sense of perception and superior means of expression place him in a class by himself; he “stands among partial men for the complete man” (“The Poet,” EP 438) as a veritable spokesperson for Nature. This distinction appears clearly in the following passage from “Intellect”:

Perhaps if we should meet Shakspeare,1 we should not be conscious of any steep inferiority; no: but of a great equality,—only that he possessed a strange skill of using, of classifying, his facts, which we lacked. For, notwithstanding our utter incapacity to produce any thing like Hamlet and Othello, see the perfect reception this wit, and immense knowledge of life, and liquid eloquence find in us all. (EP 421)

Emerson stakes his claim for Shakespeare’s exceptionality not on the basis of the originality of the playwright’s ideas, but rather on his unique ability to associate and express those ideas that occur to all men. In several essays, Emerson acknowledges the impersonal aspect of artistic creation; for instance, “Compensation” portrays the writer as a type of conduit, rather than active participant, in the creative process:

That is the best part of each writer, which has nothing private in it; that which he does not know; that which flowed out of his constitution, and not form his too active invention; that which in the study of a single artist you might not easily find, but in the study of many, you would abstract as the spirit of them all. (EP 293)

This gesture permits Emerson to court and elevate the Everyman, as well as justify his own aspirations to greatness. Through his sanctification of the Poet, however, Emerson also recognizes certain personal attributes necessary for artistic creation. As the author notes in “Self-Reliance,” “every great man is a unique. The Scipionism of Scipio is precisely that part he could not borrow. Shakspeare will never be made by the study of Shakspeare”(EP 279). In other words, commonality of thought links the great man to the common man, but does not eliminate the distinction between them. Only those endowed with a poetic gift akin to that of Shakespeare can aspire to Shakespearian status; or, as Emerson stipulates in “Spiritual Laws,” “if the poet write a true drama, then he is Caesar, and not the player of Caesar […]” (EP 323). In this example, Emerson places a premium on the word “poet”; through such semantic maneuvering, he preserves his own privileged status while seemingly “capping” the potential of others. Although Borges’ writings clearly appropriate Emerson’s philosophy of the universal mind, these exhibit none of the insecurities and vacillation that characterize Emerson’s essays. Rather, Borges appears wholly unimpressed by his own status as a writer, even going so far as to shirk personal responsibility for his

1 Emerson consistently uses this variant spelling of Shakespeare’s name.9

work. In typical self-deprecatory fashion, Borges claims to be “sick and tired” of himself (Eighty 1), giving every indication that he fully expected—and desired—that his name be stricken from the annals of literary history. For instance, he comments, “I would wish my personal name to be forgotten, as in due time it will” (Eighty 9). Borges, by repeatedly stressing the impersonal aspect of his work, prompts the reader to accept the insignificance of the individual author, thus moving toward the anonymity to which he aspired. Unlike Emerson, Borges draws no distinction between the author and the Everyman. On the contrary, he considers the roles of “writer” and “reader” to be completely arbitrary, as he suggests in “A quien leyere,” the introduction to Fervor de Buenos Aires: “Si las páginas de este libro consienten algún verso feliz, perdóneme el lector la descortesía de haberlo usurpado yo, previamente. Nuestras nadas poco difieren; es trivial y fortuita la circunstancia de que seas tú el lector de estos ejercicios, y yo su redactor “(Obra poética 11). In addition, Borges’ subscription to the Emersonian notion that all men are capable of the same thoughts invites the reader to disassociate text from individual author, moving literature from the realm of the personal toward the universal. Borges explores the issue of authorship in “Borges y yo,” an essay that, in some ways, reads like a manifesto of impersonality. The author distances himself from his literary alter ego, stating, “Al otro, a Borges, es a quien le ocurren las cosas” (Obras completas 808). In a particularly Emersonian moment of the essay, Borges questions the very notion of thought as the intellectual property of an author: “Nada me cuesta confesar que ha logrado ciertas páginas válidas, pero esas páginas no me pueden salvar, quizá porque lo bueno ya no es de nadie, ni siquiera del otro, sino del lenguaje o la tradición” (808). Here the author suggests the irrelevance of both Borges the literary persona and Borges the individual, noting that both are destined to obscurity. In such passages, Borges appears to move in a direction contrary to that of Emerson; while the latter struggles to preserve the renown of the individual author, Borges fully embraces the notion of impersonal literature. Although Emerson’s overtures to the impersonal read like insincere attempts at magnanimity, Borges puts the theory of the impersonal into practice at the syntactic and thematic levels of his own work. Two tendencies speak to Borges’ attempts to extricate the figure of the author from the text. First, Borges’ abandonment of the baroque excesses of his early writing, and his subsequent search for plain, simple means of expression, represent a move towards a type of literature in which the identity of the author becomes an afterthought. Second, Borges consciously avoids expressing opinions in his stories, in fact insulating his fiction from any imposition of the author’s personality. He comments,

[…] I am a conservative, I hate the Communists, I hate the Nazis, I hate the anti-Semites, and so on; but I don’t allow these opinions to find their way into my writings—except, of course, when I was greatly elated over the Six Days’ War. Generally speaking, I think of keeping them in watertight compartments. (Borges on Writing 59)

In both cases, Borges would have the reader focus on the ideas, rather than the author, of his stories by removing any traces of “Borges” from his work. Borges’ essays, stories, and interviews clearly find the author working over Emerson’s theories on the One Man and the One Book. For instance, “La flor de Coleridge” quotes the following passage from 10

“Nominalist and Realist”:

I am very much struck in literature by the appearance, that one person wrote all the books; as if the editor of a journal planted his body of reporters in different parts of the field of action, and relieved some by others from time to time; but there is such equality and identity both of judgment and point of view in the narrative, that it is plainly the work of one all-seeing, all-hearing gentleman. (EP 579)

Borges both adopts and adapts Emerson’s monistic philosophy, conjecturing, “Perhaps the eternal books are all the same books. We are always rewriting what the ancients wrote, and that should prove sufficient” (Eighty 9). Borges and Emerson coincide in the belief that all ideas belong to the public domain, and that literature constitutes a reworking of a finite number of themes. The authors differ significantly, however, in that Emerson establishes a specific and selective criteria to determine who, precisely, qualifies to do the “reworking.” The Emersonian philosophy of monism, by privileging the Poet, works to preserve the personal in literature. Here the dual function of Emerson’s theory of the “unattained but attainable self” (“History,” EP 239) comes into play, protecting the author’s aspirations to greatness even as it relegates other, “lesser” individuals to perpetual “unattained” status. Borges, on the other hand, avoids such negotiations altogether. He draws no distinction between Author and Everyman; rather, Borges appeals to an impersonal literature in which the roles of author and reader are so interchangeable as to be negligible. Borges’ contemplation of the universal mind theory extends to his fiction, but not without some alteration; rather, the concepts of Emersonian philosophy often constitute fantastic elements in Borges’ stories. For example, in “La Biblioteca de Babel,” Borges imagines an incomprehensibly vast, yet finite and perfectly complete, library: “[…] la Biblioteca es total y que sus anaqueles registran todas las posibles combinaciones de los veintitantos símbolos ortográficos (número, aunque vastísimo, no infinito) o sea todo lo que es dable expresar: en todos los idiomas” (Ficciones 94). The story speaks to Emerson’s thoughts on originality in that, in the Library of Babel, every possible book has already been written and has a place within the collection. Furthermore, the pilgrims who wander throughout the Library seek a text analogous to Emerson’s “Book,” a volume that represents “la cifra y el compendio perfecto de todos los demás” (Borges’ emphasis) (97). In Borges’ Library, only mortality prevents man from gaining infinite knowledge; all the texts await the eager eyes of the reader though even the most industrious scholars die before having perused even an infinitesimal portion of the collection. In “El inmortal,” Borges ponders the ramifications of Emerson’s monistic philosophy as they relate to time, positing that, were men to live eternally, each at some point would live the sum total of all possible experiences. Cartaphilus, the story’s protagonist and the “immortal” of the title, subscribes to this idea: “Sabía que en un plazo infinito le ocurren a todo hombre todas las cosas” (El Aleph 21). Emerson’s monistic philosophy, when viewed from the perspective of the immortal, renounces all possibilities of individuality. Emerson explores this idea by examining the repetition of ideas over the course of successive generations; Borges, for the purposes of his fantastic story, explores the consequences of Emerson’s philosophy for one exceptional man. Like “La Biblioteca de Babel,” “El inmortal” questions the notions of artistic creativity and originality.

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Picking up on Emerson’s One Man theory, Borges writes, “Homero compuso la Odisea; postulado un plazo infinito, con infinitas circunstancias y cambios, lo imposible es no componer, siquiera una vez, la Odisea. Nadie es alguien, un solo hombre inmortal es todos los hombres” (22). As the story’s conclusion reveals, Cartaphilus had in fact been Homer, and any number of other authors, throughout a life which spanned from the time of the troglodytes until the twentieth century. Yet in death, Cartaphilus loses all claims to individuality; he comments, “Yo he sido Homero; en breve, seré Nadie, como Ulises; en breve, seré todos: estaré muerto” (27). Here, Cartaphilus’ fate speaks to Borges’ thoughts on the insignificance of the individual author. “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote” works through many of these same themes. In this story the protagonist, a twentieth-century French writer, attempts to compose a version of Don Quijote identical to that of Cervantes, and in fact succeeds in reproducing the ninth and thirty-eighth chapters in their entirety, as well as a fragment of chapter twenty-two, before his inevitable death. Nevertheless, Menard proposes, “Me bastaría ser inmortal para llevarla a cabo” (Ficciones 53). The protagonist reflects both Emersonian and Borgesian thought when he comments, “Todo hombre debe ser capaz de todas las ideas y entiendo que en el porvenir lo será” (59). By placing protagonists such as Cartaphilus and Menard in the role of writer, however, Borges avoids Emerson’s distinction between the author and the Everyman, suggesting that any individual is potentially capable of both the ideas and the expression of the artist. The impersonal, like the labyrinth, the tiger, the doppelganger, and the Kabbalah, constitutes a major theme in Borges’ work. He repeatedly returns to Emerson’s monistic philosophy in his stories, transforming Emersonian ideas into elements of the fantastic. Ironically, the impersonal nature of those stories obscures Borges’ own opinions on the impersonal aspect of all literature, precluding the reader from drawing conclusions regarding Borges’ thoughts on Emerson’s philosophies. Because Borges purposely avoids imposing his opinions on the text, many critics assume that references to philosophy and theology in his stories represent mere intellectual and aesthetic appropriations, veritable “siervas de la literatura” (Najenson 51). But this conclusion overlooks the manner in which Borges’ commentaries inform the reading of his fiction. In interviews, the author suggests that he subscribes to Emerson’s philosophies regarding the universality of ideas; consequently, impersonality for Borges represents a personal credo—a “personal impersonality.” Furthermore, the intentional impersonality of Borges’ stories suggests to the reader how Borges would like his stories to be read. By eliminating traces of his own opinions from his fiction, Borges shifts the reader’s focus from the authorship of the stories to the ideas that they contain. In this sense, Borges puts Emerson’s philosophy into practice, sans Emerson’s characteristic waffling over the issue of the “unattained but attainable self.” Borges’ work evidences none of the concerns for status and immortality that pervade Emerson’s essays; rather, Borges minimalizes the significance of the individual author, himself aspiring to be forgotten. As far as Borges is concerned, his name need not survive; an anonymous chapter in the Book suffices.

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works cited

Barnstone, Willis, ed. Borges at Eighty. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982.

Borges, Jorge Luis. Borges on Writing. Ed. Norman Thomas di Giovanni, Daniel Halpern and Frank MacShane. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1973.---. El Aleph. Madrid: Alianza, 1990.---. Ficciones. Madrid: Alianza, 1987.---. Obra poética. Madrid: Alianza, 1975.---. Obras completas, 1923-1972. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1989.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Emerson: Essays and Poems. New York: Library of America, 1996.

Najenson, José Luis. “Borges: Tan universal y particular como el pueblo odiado-amado.” Borges: El judaísmo e Israel. Ed. Mario E. Cohen. Buenos Aires: Sefárdica, 1988. 49-55.

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shakespeare’s hamlet, III .iv: tracing the spectator’s perspective

joel benabu

Of the many scenes in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Act III .iv has attracted the attention of critics interested in defending a theory of the hero’s madness. The sudden appearance of the Ghost in Gertrude’s closet has been presented as conclusive evidence in support. Unaware of the apparition, Gertrude, undoubtedly, is convinced that Hamlet is mad; but does the omniscient spectator necessarily share this conviction? Critics, from as early as Kellogg (1866) to Findley (1994) have been too eager, in my opinion, to adopt Gertrude’s perspective as being somehow representative of the spectator’s. Their probing of the text for the characters’ personality, psychology, motivations, and familial relationships has obscured considerations that become salient in the context of theatrical performance. The following paper examines several of these considerations and proceeds to demonstrate that in the theatre the spectator is fully aware that Hamlet is not lost to madness in Act III .iv. Consequently, the scene ‘opens up’ to a wider spectrum of signification. Act III .iv is a complex and powerful scene theatrically. Towards the end of the scene, Hamlet’s numerous references to Gertrude’s violation of the sacred marriage vow are suddenly subsumed by references to his banishment. This abrupt transition, however, is not nearly as disturbing as the fact that there are no indications in the text as to how Hamlet comes to know of the banishment. The statement he makes in reference to Polonius: “this man shall set me packing” (III .iv 213) may hint at the hero’s concern for any reprisals to his actions, but it falls short of explaining how he attains such precise details about Claudius’ plan to send him overseas, and the confidence he has in subverting it: Ham: I must to England, you know that? Queen: Alack, I had forgot. ‘Tis so concluded on. Ham: There’s letters seal’d, and my two schoolfellows, Whom I will trust as I will adders fang’d – They bear the mandate, they must sweep my way And marshal me to knavery. Let it work; For ‘tis the sport to have the enginer Hoist with his own petard, and ‘t shall go hard But I will delve one yard below their mines And blow them at the moon. (III .iv 202-211)

The apparent ambiguity may easily give rise to the impression that the construction of Act III .iv is somehow flawed. In order to avoid this displeasing conclusion, Jan H. Blits has been willing to concede that “Hamlet seems to have informers at court”1. In the Arden edition of Hamlet, Harold Jenkins claims that any speculation as to how the hero comes to know of his banishment is irrelevant, “since the text, as editors note, is silent”.

1 Blits H., Jan, P. 25014

2 He goes on to make the pertinent observation that “the difficulty passes unnoticed in the theatre”. Building upon this final remark, I should like to suggest that the text remains silent only in the process of reading, and therefore, the apparent ambiguity is merely an impression imposed on the imagination by the constraints of the particular medium. In a curious way, identifying Hamlet’s ‘source of knowledge’ becomes a primary concern only to the reader. Approaching the play, not as ‘story’ but as ‘theatrical action’ reveals the scene’s structural coherence. By the time Hamlet delivers the monologue presented above, both the spectator and the reader are aware of the plan to banish Hamlet through the interchanges between Claudius and Polonius (III. ii), and Claudius and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (III .iii); however, as opposed to the reader’s concentration which remains safely intact within the bindings of the book, the spectator’s concentration is constantly tested in the boisterous reality of the theatre. Particularly within the context of seventeenth-century England, the imminent danger of “losing the spectator” to the action off-stage, in the Yard3, must have surely been a very real concern to playwrights. In order to contend with these potentially hostile circumstances, it would seem imperative for a playwright to introduce into the very structure of the play theatrical mechanisms that would help control the development of the action in performance, and move it in the direction of the desired effect. One such mechanism seems to be embedded in the excerpt presented above. A close examination of Hamlet’s monologue reveals the complex processes that are at play here. The first few lines make clear reference to the commission already drawn up by the king, to the letters dispatched to the ambassadors of England, and to “the executioners”, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. In the theatre, these references conjure up a mental synopsis of events, which the playwright has decided not to represent visually on stage. More interesting, perhaps, is the fact that the penultimate and final lines depict a future dramatic scenario, the details of which become known to the spectator only later in Act IV: “But I will delve one yard below their mines / And blow them at the moon” (III .iv 210-211). These indications suggest that the monologue fulfils an important pragmatic function in the theatre: it taps into the repository of the spectator’s mind drawing out information that is crucial for an appreciation of future events which have not yet been fully developed. In the process, dramatic tension is elevated in anticipation of the crowning event of act IV: Hamlet’s banishment from Elsinore. This example would seem to suggest that a theatrical character, or any other signifier on the stage for that matter, acts merely as a vehicle, or “carrier”, of meaning, and therefore, not every word spoken or action taken by a character serves, necessarily, as a clue to determine its psychology, motivations and relationship to others in the play. When the monologue is delivered, information pertaining to characterization is temporarily suspended in the spectator’s mind in order to facilitate the appreciation of alternative levels of meaning.4 Within the scope of this approach, I should like to proceed to a discussion of an earlier event in the scene, the appearance of the Ghost in Gertrude’s closet, and examine levels of meaning that may arise by

2 Hamlet, P. 331(consult Bibliography for specific edition ).3 The Yard is the area around the stage, from which the spectators observed the performance.4 A good example might be Ophelia’s pledge to Laertes not to be a hypocrite “as some ungracious pastors” (I .iii 46-50). This passage carried a particular meaning for the seventeenth-century spectator, who was conscious of the erosion of Christian morality.

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employing theatrical parameters in play-text analysis. In order to consider the spectator’s perspective of the action, it is important to acknowledge several theatrical processes which are well underway by Act III. In the expositional stages of the play, a plethora of soliloquies and asides are introduced by the playwright, through which the spectator gains an impression of the hero in his most private and intimate moments. Through a string of theatrical transactions, the spectator learns of Hamlet’s predicament, and the prudent course he intends to follow in order to resolve it. Moreover, Act I .iii reveals to the spectator the susceptibility of the hero to a potential threat: the inability to control passion. Transfixed on the beckoning hand of the Ghost, Hamlet moves towards it, unhindered by Horatio’s distinct warning: “What if it tempt you towards the flood, my lord or to the dreadful summit of the cliff” (I .iv 69-70). The hero regains control over the situation only in Act I .v when he charges the Ghost to speak5: “Whither wilt thou lead me? Speak, I’ll go no further”(I .v 1). Although deeply disturbed by the Ghost’s revelation, he is aware that the devil may assume a pleasing shape and by arousing his passions tempt him into damnation. He, therefore, professes the intention to be governed by reason alone.6

In the transition from Act I to Act II, the prospect of damnation converts the hero’s vehement resolve to avenge the alleged offence into a debilitating insecurity which is sure to move even the most unyielding spectator, emphasized, perhaps, by Hamlet’s tender years and the responsibility he bears:

That I, the son of a dear father murder’d Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell, Must like a whore unpack my heart with words And fall a-cursing like a very drab, A scullion! Fie upon’t! Foh! About, my brains. (II .ii 579-584)

The hero’s sentiment gradually leads the spectator to the impression that Hamlet is despondent with humanity as a whole. His relationships with Claudius, Gertrude, Ophelia, Polonius, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are marked by an overwhelming sense of betrayal. From Hamlet’s perspective, Elsinore seems much like Caesar’s Rome where numerous informants are perpetually conspiring to bring about his downfall. Gertrude’s closet scene is a good case in point. Although Hamlet seems to carry over into the scene some of the pent-up aggression that builds up during ‘the mousetrap’, the most erratic behaviour seems to occur after he runs his rapier through the arras and kills Polonius. It may seem that the plotting advisor acts as a catalyst for the hero’s emotional outbursts; however, earlier scenes in Act III offer the spectator ample evidence that at this later point in the action Hamlet has been aware for some time that Polonius is an informant of the king. On

5 If Horatio is seen as a symbol representing the rule of reason in the play, — this seems to be corroborated by the dramatist’s choice to make him the impartial observer in the performance of The Murder of Gonzago – it is interesting that Hamlet employs Horatio’s strategy when he confronts the ghost in Act I .v. 6 This must be the reason he implores Horatio to observe Claudius during The Murder of Gonzago in Act III.

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the other hand, although Hamlet is convinced that Gertrude has betrayed his father, at no earlier point in the action is there any evidence that he perceives Gertrude to be an informant (this must surely be the reason why he discloses his antic disposition to her). Finding Polonius behind the arras indicates to the hero that Gertrude has joined the conspirators’ camp in their effort to betray him. This mistaken impression elicits from the hero a vehement emotional outburst, which confirms to Gertrude that her son is mad. The identical situation occurs with Ophelia in the first ‘arras scene’: Ham: …Soft you now, The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons Be all thy sins remembere’d. Oph: Good my lord, How does your honour for this many a day? Ham: I humbly thank you, well. Oph: My lord I have remembrances of yours… I pray you now receive them. Ham: No, not I. I never gave you aught. Oph: My honour’d lord, you know right well you did. (III .i. 88-97) Ham: Ha, ha! Are you honest? Oph: My lord? Ham: Are you fair? (III .i 103-105)

Polonius’ ploy indicates to the hero that Ophelia has joined the conspirators’ camp. As opposed to the characters, who are forced to misinterpret situations in the world of the play, the omniscient spectator, who has been fully aware of the ongoing onslaught on the hero, acknowledges that his loss of composure is the result of being provoked by a set of unfortunate circumstances, not madness. Unaware of Ophelia’s pure intentions, Hamlet has no choice but to perceive her as an informant. In contrast to the impression created in Act I .iii, namely, that the Ghost’s transcendental power poses a threat to the hero, the spectator becomes fully aware that it is hamartia, an error occasioned by circumstance, that compromises Hamlet. The tragic potential of the scene lies, undoubtedly, in the spectator’s acknowledgment that the characters are unable to read situations objectively, and, as such, they are unsuspecting “victims” of the theatrical reality presented by the playwright. Watching Act III .iv, the spectator is not preoccupied with the hero’s sanity but with the troubling prospects of his inability to control his passions. From this perspective, the sudden appearance of the Ghost opens up to a wide range of signification. In Act I. iii, Horatio, Marcellus and Bernardo see the Ghost; here, despite Hamlet’s petitions, Gertrude sees and hears nothing. This contrariety may lead to the misunderstanding that the Ghost serves as a signifier which conveys Gertrude’s belief that her son is mad. After all, this seems to arise quite naturally from a reading of the following passage: Ham: A King of Shreds and Patches— Enter Ghost Save me and hover o’er me with your wings,

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You heavenly guards! What would your gracious figure? Queen: Alas, he’s mad. (III .iv 103-107)

However, if we consider that in the scene visited earlier (III .i, involving Polonius, Claudius, Ophelia, and Hamlet), the dramatist creates the identical effect without introducing any additional signifier, then the appearance of the Ghost must fulfil a different function: it constitutes a useful theatrical mechanism by which the spectator is made aware of Gertrude’s inability to read the situation objectively owing to the same set of constraints set upon the other characters in the world of the play.7 As a theatrical signifier the Ghost does not carry information pertaining to characterization at this point. Therefore, were it to be cut out of the scene altogether, the spectator’s impressions of Gertrude would not fundamentally change. I mentioned earlier that in the course of the action, the spectator becomes steadily more aware of Hamlet’s struggle to be ruled by reason. Nowhere is this awareness more acute than in III .iv, when the hero impulsively slays Polonius thinking him to be Claudius; detains Gertrude by the use of excessive force; and pelts potent words, which reach her ears as wounding daggers. Introduced at a point of heightened tension, the Ghost facilitates the spectator’s passage into the confines of the hero’s agitated mind. In a very real sense, the signifier allows the spectator to acknowledge that the action on stage represents the hero’s subjective reality. As such, the various interchanges between Hamlet and the Ghost are not perceived as interaction between two characters per se but rather as a succession of the hero’s impressions, or in Shakespeare’s own words as “false creation[s] proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain”.8 Harold Jenkins rightly observes the following: “there is no textual support for assumptions that the Ghost intervenes because Hamlet is ignoring the warning concerning his mother in (I .v 85-86) or to prevent Hamlet from revealing the facts about the murder”9. Although the Arden edition gives virtually no indication as to how “a king of shreds and patches” (III .iv 103) may have been represented on the Elizabethan stage, the stark visual contrast to the armoured figure of I .iii is enough to indicate how important this visual aspect must have been to create the desired effect.10 Walter N. King vehemently opposes this view. In his estimation, the representation of the Ghost in act I and in act III is identical in terms of signification:

Some critics maintain that since Gertrude neither sees nor hears [the Ghost], it is only a projection of Hamlet’s frenzied mental state at the moment it materializes. This possibility must be ruled out. Its visible and existential reality has been so convincingly established in act 1 that Shakespeare would not have dared to tamper with it. 11

I would suggest that his impression stems from the simple failure to acknowledge that the identical stage sign, used in different contexts, may produce more than a single meaning in the theatre. The examples presented

7 I am using Elinor Shaffer’s concept, which identifies the dramatic reality as one in which everything is essential an interconnected (consult Bibliography). 8 Macbeth (II .i. 36-39).9 Hamlet, P. 331(notes).10 In the First Quarto, the ghost appears in a nightgown; however, there is no evidence to suggest that this choice is in any way representative of other seventeenth-century productions. 11 King N., Walter, P 40. 18

here seem to suggest, yet again, that a stage sign serves as a vehicle for signification in the theatre. The levels of meaning it carries are negotiated through theatrical transactions that have a productive effect on the spectator.12 As such the Ghost may conjure up a wide range of associations. Among these must be the inherent dangers a soul ruled by passion is “heir to” (III .i 63); this, after all, is the central impression the two Ghost scenes make on the spectator, the importance of which is undeniable considering that the success of Hamlet’s revenge is contingent upon Horatio’s advice to be ruled by reason. Critical analysis has relied almost exclusively on literary parameters in Shakespeare’s playtexts, overlooking important theatrical parameters that become salient once the spectator’s perspective is considered. The approach presented in this paper suggests that by searching indiscriminately for the characters’ personality, psychology, motivations, and familial relationships, textual considerations that are significant in the context of the theatre may be obscured. I am not suggesting in any way that we do away with literary parameters, but rather seek to place them within the wider context in which they contribute to an understanding of the play as a theatrical experience.

12 They “open up meaning” through the process of association. 19

works cited

Blits H., Jan Deadly Thought: Hamlet and the Human Soul Lanham: Lexington Books, 2001.

Findley, Alison “Hamlet: A Document in Madness” in New Essays on Hamlet. Ed Burnett and Manning New York: AMS Press, 1994.

Kellogg, A.O. Shakespeare’s Delineations of Insanity, Imbecility and Suicide New York: Herd and Houghton Press, 1866.

King, N. Walter Hamlet’s Search for Meaning Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982.

Shaffer, Elinor “The Hermeneutic Approach to Theatre and Drama”, in New Directions of Theatre. Ed Julian Hilton New York: St Martin’s Press, 1993.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Harold Jenkins (Arden Shakespeare) London: Methuen, 1982.

Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. Ed. Harold Jenkins (Arden Shakespeare) London: Methuen, 1982.

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an exilic insider and scattered nationalism:male body at the margin in karen-tei yamashita’s brazil-maru

rie makino

A great deal of criticism has been concentrated on two novels by Japanese American woman writer, Karen Tei Yamashita – Through the Arc of Rainforest and The Tropic of Orange – while very little attention has been paid to the novel, Brazil-Maru.11 This is probably due to the novel’s different style; Brazil-Maru is a historical narrative consisting of the voices of five Japanese Brazilian characters: Ichiro Terada, Haru Uno, Kantaro Uno, Genji Befu, and Guilherme Raimundo, all of whom present viewpoints about their Japanese Brazilian community, Esperanza. In contrast to the postmodern styles of Yamashita’s other two novels, Brazil-Maru is a product of her historical and anthropological research on Brazil through a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship and of her extended stay (1975-1984) in Sao Paulo as a naturalized Brazilian citizen. After the United States government passed the Gentleman’s Agreement in 1908 to limit Japanese immigration to the United States, some Japanese immigrants chose Brazil as the second location in which to pursue their American dream. In terms of constructing identities, these immigrants traced a different route from the internment experience that Japanese Americans in the United States went through during and after World War II. In Brazil-Maru, Yamashita represents the unique geographical location of Brazil as what Homi Bhabha terms “the third space,” where the residents maintained Japanese Brazilian gendered subjectivities by de-centering U.S. imperialism. As a result, Yamashita’s Brazil-Maru cannot be categorized within the field of continental Asian American literature.22 Brazil-Maru addresses the scattered national consciousness portrayed by the Japanese Brazilian male characters associated with a charismatic and destructive community leader, Kantaro Uno. Among these men, Genji Befu, Kantaro’s nephew, is depicted as a perpetually innocent character whose life is threatened under his uncle’s empire. The existence of this community leader as the central “ideal” manhood, creates a domain of scattered male national subjects in marginal positions. Genji’s stance as an onlooker reinforces the absurd and existential aura in this novel suggesting that his anti-imperial masculinity, articulated through his sympathy for the women in this community, demonstrate his durability, resistance, and survival skill. The purpose of this paper specifically examines Genji’s masculinity as a negotiable sexed position between the collective national memory and radical subaltern femininities.

1 Compared with the criticism on these two novels, there is only one article on Brazil-Maru; Elizabeth Espadas focuses her argument on the historical conditions of Japanese immigrants in Brazil. Rather than discussing sexuality and gendered issues portrayed within this text, Espadas explores the immigrant female writers’ ways of analyzing specific his-torical moments in the lives of the immigrants in Brazil. Espadas “Destination Brazil: Immigration in Works of Nelida Pinon and Karen Tei Yamashita,” MACLAS (1998): 51-61. 2 Yamashita calls herself an “Asian-American” writer, yet she also stresses how her novels disrupt the current definitions of Asian/American literature: “her subject matter, and her formal approach to it continue to defy the geographic and canonical boundaries implied in that label,” Jean Vengua Gier and Carla Alicia Tejeda. “An Interview with Karen Tei Yamashita,” Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies (1998):94.

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I. The dearth of Japanese immigrant women creates an inevitable state of affairs that results in the society of Esperanza, repressing or ignoring the female voices under the harsh immigrant labor. Brazil-Maru is what Yamashita calls “a man’s tale” while “[w]omen come along” (Words Matter 338). Since Yamashita could not get enough information directly from these Japanese immigrant women, this observation reflects the author’s frustration as an interviewer and researcher of the first generation of Japanese female immigrants in Brazil.33 If literature, as Arif Dirlik points out, comes from “a sense of the insufficiencies of history,” (211) interruption of the access to Japanese Brazilian subaltern female discourses is an excellent starting point for Yamashita, who is engaged in an artistic challenge to invoke their voices from these silences. Yamashita illuminates Asian American women’s subjects from the perspective of exilic male counterparts under the nation-state apparatus. The theoretical framework that Judith Butler’s delineates in her works provides insight into the cultural and gendered politics in Brazil-Maru. Butler stresses gender performativity as the site of resistance; gender, according to her, is an act of identifying with one sexed position whose definition changes depending on cultures and societies. This identification is an act of mimicking one sexed position; therefore, gender is not a stable element but is reiterated at every moment.44 Take, for an example, a man who tries to act like a woman; he tries to mimic one sexed, historically designated position – woman – with his performance. The important point, though, is that this performance is an act of reiteration that does not faithfully repeat the original. He cannot be a woman, but something else close to this object. This difference between the performance and the original represents the site of resistance. Body in this case is a gender indeterminate site for the performer who attempts to reiterate the pre-existing norms. In Brazil-Maru, this gender performance is a significant element of the character, Genji. To some extent, he attempts to perform the sexed position –a perpetually fragile, asexual, and child-like artist – demanded by Kantaro’s colonial projects, yet he always transcends this position by reiterations. To apply Butler’s concept that “sex” is one of the norms under cultural intelligibility, Genji performs his designated role but simultaneously subverts his submissive elements.55 The “subversive bodily acts” are in Genji’s “emasculated” or “asexual” body as an exilic insider. Similarly, his body is the location through which to interact with the silence of the

3 Yamashita recollects her irritation during the interviews: she was interrupted by the husbands who shared the same table with their wives so that they could monitor their spouses’ talk: “he [the husband] was dying to talk. And some-times we would sit there together, and, at an appropriate moment, she would serve dessert and bring her husband, and he would take over, and she would stop talking. Or she would not remember things and say, ‘Oh, I can’t answer that.’ And so she would drag her husband in and he would answer everything” (334). Words Matter: Conversations with Asian/American Writers. (Honolulu: U of Hawaii, P, 2000) 4 Butler points out “drag” as an example of resistant performance. See Butler, “From Interiority to Gender Perfor-mance” in Gender Trouble. (New York: Routledge, 1999): 171-180. 5 Butler asserts, “’Sex’ is, thus, not simply what one has, or a static description of what one is: it will be one of the norms by which the ‘one’ becomes viable at all, that which qualifies a body for life within the domain of cultural intelligibility” (Bodies That Matter 2). 22

subaltern women. 66 The approach to this textual analysis follows Linda Hutcheon’s delineation of "historiographic metafiction" in the Politics of Postmodernism (14), which consists of dialectic interactions between history and narrative representations. Yamashita bases this novel on her anthropological research, while at the same time inserting her creative transgression as a novelist to disrupt the historical discourse. This paper specifically considers this transgression as a facet of the Asian American womanism described in Brazil-Maru.77 Yamashita positions female autonomy in her portrait of the cross-gender relationships between women and men rather than the female bonding. The main question thus examines how the radical womanism is articulated without losing the novel’s historical sense and what kind of qualities are required so that the exilic male insider, Genji, maintain horizontal affiliations with their subaltern women.

II For the colonialists, decolonization takes on more complex and confusing processes than it does for the colonized. In speaking of the limitation of white literary imagination, Toni Morrison, in Playing in the Dark, points out that colonial white narratives “choose to talk about themselves through and within a sometimes allegorical, sometimes metaphorical, but always choked representation of an Africanist presence” (17). Moreover, Morrison also points out several exceptions that cannot fit into these limited white narratives: she declares, “I am in awe of the authority of Faulkner’s Benjy, James’s Maisie, Flaubert’s Emma, Melville’s Pip, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” (4). These characters are the white subjects who are able to synchronize with the colonized or subaltern women. She identifies a transgressive white imagination in the psyche of the mentally retarded boy, Benjy Compson, who is on the side of the subaltern. The theme of decolonizing the colonial that William Faulkner portrayed is, however, accompanied by physical and psychological trauma. For instance, Benjy in The Sound and the Fury is castrated because of his mental disability. Benjy’s “emasculated” male subject senses his family’s cursed colonial history from his marginalized subject position. An acknowledgement of the colonial self is needed in order to construct one’s complex subjectivity as an exilic insider who sees oneself from both inside and outside. If Benjy Compson is Faulkner’s excellent example of a colonial male subject who can recognize his inner colonial self, Genji Befu, Kantaro’s prodigious nephew in Brazil-Maru, also articulates a similar trauma and struggle as a marginalized colonial subject. Genji's “sound and fury” is described with dark humor and ominous sarcasm toward this uncle’s megaromanical patriarchy. Such frustration is revealed as a combination of his artistic talent, which informs his perception of Kantaro’s imperialism and his fragile physique, which restricts his activities within Esperanza. He is the closest male relative of flamboyant Kantaro-the representation of colonial masculinity and “ideal” manhood in Esperanza- but himself is a shy boy who cannot grow into a mature man. As a nineteen-year-old boy obsessed with voyeurism, Genji never pursues his sexual experiences but remains an observer of other people’s sexual lives, whereas Kantaro, surrounded with his kept women as an

6 I use the term “subaltern” to allure to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s analysis in “Can Subaltern Speak?” Yamashi-ta’s female protagonists are the subaltern women who cannot articulate their autonomy under triple layers of race, class and gender. 7 I use the term “womanism” from Alice Walker’s definition. See In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens. xi

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emperor of this community, is a faithful reflection of the original Genji in Shikibu Murasaki’s novel The Tale of Genji. Yamashita thus splits the original Genji into two characters: Kantaro Uno who simply repeats original Genji’s sinful passion, and Genji Befu who monitors his uncle’s life as if he were Kantaro’s rational self. 88 At the moment of Kantaro’s death in 1976, Genji is in his thirties; yet his mind goes back to the condition of a newborn baby when he reacts to this disastrous event. The scene in which this man-child figure stands by himself in the Amazon Forest as the only survivor of the plane crash recalls Faulknerian tragedy: the only successor of Kantaro is the man-child Genji who thus embodies a failure of Kantaro’s colonial “design.” 99 Genji is obviously an “unmanly” figure because of his physical inferiority. His repetitive statement – “I couldn’t carry a bag of beans” – is his self-acknowledgement that his body does not match the average physical strength of an immigrant male. An awkward combination of his artistic talent and unattractive physique, marked by “a skinny torso and bowed legs” (198) implies a grotesque moth emerging from a beautiful silk cocoon: “she [Genji’s aunt] is amazed that such a cute little child should have grown into something like me” (188). He cannot be a butterfly but rather a nocturnal moth that is not able to expose its ugly body to the sunlight, indicating his talent is not something honorable but a shameful and grotesque product of colonization. With his fragile and grotesque body, he is unable to flee or “fly away” and is thus deeply rooted to the land of Esperanza. Genji’s peeping habit stems from his frustration of not being able to escape from Esperanza. This habit which starts from his peeping people’s sex lives is related to his distorted fetishism, his intense curiosity to see the moment when “something pierces human flesh” (223). This fetishism does not remain dysfunctional yet expands into his intersubjective element. Penetration is one of the embodiments of intense physical pain that gives him lively sensations. During the Vietnam War, Genji follows his friend Guilherme to join the anti-Vietnam War movement and is accidentally involved in the student riot in the Praca Republica. Although he is not aware of the Vietnam War, Genji “feels” the history outside of Esperanza by witnessing of a woman stabbed to death on the street. Yamashita portrays this moment as his epiphany. “Finally, I saw what happens when something pierces human flesh” (223), Genji exclaims. This sublime moment appears to tear down the wall between himself and the “stinking gaijins [foreigners]” (223) - the derogatory term he uses to refer to Brazilians. He also gathers clues as to how to interact within his society through this female “lived body.”1010 The act of penetration, which stimulates his sexual curiosity as a teenage boy, turns out to be his 8 8 In Yamashita’s other novel, there is a similar male masculine object who does not possess corporeal function but reflects the male protagonist’s state of mind – the ball in front of the protagonist, Kazumasa Ishimaru in Through the Arc of The Rain Forest. 9 9 I borrow this term “design” from a merciless colonial figure, Thomas Sutpen in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! who loses his humanity because of his colonial dream: “I had a design. To accomplish it I should require money, a house, a plantation, slaves, a family – incidentally of course, a wife.” Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Vintage International, 1990) 212. In terms of the multiple narrative styles, the colonial theme, and the structure of family saga, there are great similarities between Brazil-Maru and Absalom, Absalom! even though Yamashita claims she did not have in mind Faulkner’s novel . Email conversation between Yamashita and the author on December 10th, 2000.

10 I take this term, “lived bodies” from Elizabeth Grosz. To connect subject and object, Grosz reevaluates the site of 24

interest in his postcolonial Brazilian society. Genji’s problem lies in his inability to relate to the subject of the bleeding woman, who symbolizes Vietnam as a postcolonial wounded nation; Genji, however, as a Japanese Brazilian elite male who always stays in Esperanza, cannot understand the meaning of this pain. His vomiting points to his inability to digest a world that is “too rough” and too complex a material for him to digest. Although he knows the falsities of colonialism, he cannot relate with this subaltern woman whose body absorbs the historical trauma; instead, he considers her as a fetished object to stimulate his curiosity. His exhibitionist style of attempting suicide later in this novel– stabbing his breast in front of his male relatives – points to his masochistic desire to feel real historical pain by mimicking the stabbed woman on the street: “I saw the woman in the plaza again. I saw her blood. She was the people. I was the people”(225). This reveals his desire to be a member of the postcolonial nation, Brazil. Genji’s hysteria indicates his immaturity; however, his decolonization process comes from his child-like sensibility which seeks connection to others at a national level. Genji’s intersubjectivity stems from his act of seeking pain. He seeks others to connect himself to outer society. In particular, he knows of his mother, Ritsu’s agony as a subaltern woman who wants to escape from her male centered society. Her inarticulate translocal desire is intertwined with Genji’s local masculinity at the moment of his mother’s suicide:

Ritsu found some stubby pencils. She found some scraps of paper. She thought I needed them. But she was invisible. She went to the mango groves with a rope. I went there too. I took the stubby pencils and the paper with me. She was hanging there with bare feet. She looked like a mango. I drew the mango. (232-3)

His mother leaves him with paradoxical and complex interpretations of her suicide: on the one hand it could be perceived as a maternal form of self-sacrificial love for Genji by giving him the most shocking material, her suicide, to stimulate his artistic desire. On the other hand, her suicide can be deemed as an expression of a rebellious translocal femininity that cannot be restricted within a patriarchal frame. Ritsu sacrifices her body as corporeal material for Genji; behind this “beautiful” maternal self-sacrifice, is her passive resistance as a subaltern female. Her death is an escape from her condition as a traditional Japanese mother who does not have her own voice, as Genji himself acknowledges: “She was my mother, but she was no one. She was always no one” (232). The suicide, therefore, is the only way to appeal to those who did not even know her existence. Making her son an accomplice, she somehow succeeds in articulating herself. Simultaneously, this event demonstrates Genji’s inhumanity. He almost urges Ritsu to choose suicide without trying to prevent it. For this fallen artist who cannot understand the concept that “life is art; art is life” (198), his mother’s suicide does not mean anything except an event to stimulate his desire and to help him see the ultimate form of physical pain. Moreover, Genji who himself has failed to commit suicide is also envious of his mother’s “success” in entering into the other dimension. His way of identifying his mother’s body with a mango represents his desire to escape from a civilized patriarchal empire, Esperanza, and to assimilate into maternal nature, the Amazon Forest. Genji’s local masculinity in this way interacts with his mother’s subaltern

the body where “experience can only be understood between mind and body –or across them – in their lived conjunction.” Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994): 62-111.

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translocal femininity. Genji, therefore, stands between the colonized and colonial, between woman and man, between phallogocentric language and matriarchal silence, and finally between civilization and nature. His abandonment of narration in the scene of his witnessing Kantaro’s death reflects not only his spontaneous renunciation of phallogocentricism but also his assimilation into the colonized:

Outside, all around I could see the sunlight dancing. Dancing with little feet. I remembered being in a dark basket peeping through the basket, seeing the light flicker, a prism of light flickering through the straw. But this time, I was not a prisoner. (241)

The inside/outside disappears. Genji, as a closet boy who peeps into people’s lives, is now emerging to the outside. This moving outward is an excellent transition to the next narrator, Guilherme, who portrays Genji’s death as that of an anonymous wild man in the jungle. Genji’s obsession with mango is obviously a foreshadowing of his desire to escape. Imagining Ritsu’s body as a mango, Genji “digests” his mother’s body to satisfy his artistic appetite as well as to soothe his translocal desire. His corporeal transformation from an elite Japanese Brazilian artist into a wild jungle man could be interpreted as an act of nature that embraces him by deploring his victimized position under Kantaro’s imperial project. Genji’s life as a wild man in the Amazon Forest suggests that he has undergone a decolonizing process. This freedom, however, is also portrayed within a postmodern existentialist frame that does not exactly mean absolute deterritorialization for this protagonist. His dead body is discovered as “the so called Indian of the Lost Tribe” (248) in a newspaper article that Guilherme reads at the epilogue of this novel. Genji’s dark journey of searching for his decolonized subjectivity thus unintentionally goes back to his anthropological root as “an Indian of the lost tribe” who connects three nations: Brazil, Japan and the United States.1111 His dead body itself is transnational corporeality by the media, yet it also comes to stand for an object of cultural and anthropological fetishism. Genji’s gendered performance is his act of answering his uncle’s expectation by reiterating the norm – an asexual child-like prodigy – designated by Kantaro’s imperial patriarchy. His resistance against this uncle is triggered by his intense desire to be connected to the Brazilian society through which he discovers physical pain to decolonize himself. His upper class elite consciousness as a Japanese Brazilian artist, however, becomes an intervention for him to construct intersubjective relationships with postcolonial Brazil. Yamashita presents an unfortunate prodigy figure who cannot release from his colonial condition because of his essentialized class consciousness.

11 11 In Brazil-Maru, Shuhei Mizuoka, an amateur anthropologist in Esperanza, is one of the exilic insiders who chal-lenges Kantaro’s imperialism. His study that sets out to find historical evidence that native Brazilians are the ancestors of Ainu, the Japanese aborigines, and therefore also related to American Indians, constructs an opposite perspective to that of Kantaro, who ignores Japanese tradition and starts a new life with his own rules. Mizuoka tries to find the connection between the Japanese and the Brazilians. He thus explores two opposite concepts: root and route. When we seek our roots, we construct our ethnicity by going through several routes. Mizuoka’s strategy as a route stresses hybridity between Brazilian and Japanese, but at the same time he also seeks one root of Japanese ancestry. See p.66 of Brazil-Maru.26

III Brazil-Maru has a beautiful gendered symmetric structure in its narrative style, starting from an objective narrative of Ichiro Terada, one of the residents in Esperanza, who sees the fall of the house of the Unos and later establishes a new Esperanza never repeating Kantaro’s mistake, and ending with Genji’s dysfunctional voyeurism. Genji and Ichiro are asexual male subjects who see Kantaro’s empire from the marginal positions. The middle two narrators – Haru with her masculinized first generation immigrant female discourse and Kantaro with his confessional and egoistic voice as a whining hero – also reveal a unique gendered symmetry. In this men’s tale, Yamashita illuminates subaltern femininities through the power of nature. The Amazon Forest, whose name literally symbolizes womanist space, represents the Lacanian real that absorbs everything expelled from phallogocentricism. The male insanity revealed by the moment of Genji’s release in the forest reflects the power of maternal nature that cannot be explained within a phallocentric discourse. Kantaro himself is punished by the power of nature: in his late years, he suffers Parkinson’s disease, depriving him of his physical movements and causing him to die with his eyes “wide open” in the cockpit of the plane to acknowledge the overwhelming power of nature (241). The United States exists at “the inside” of Esperanza as a metaphor for colonial imperialism. Under his utopian mask, Kantaro mimics the strategy of U.S. Manifest Destiny to colonize Brazilian nature. U.S. imperialism is also embodied as the physical violence in the racial attacks during WWII and the Vietnam War. Genji indirectly perceives U.S. imperialism through the body of the bleeding woman in the riot. Evoking Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities”, Japanese Brazil does not exist as a geographical location; rather, it is an imaginary nation that is continuously reshaped by the flow of various people. The male character, Genji’s’ attachment to Brazil is not forced but rather motivated by his interaction with the subaltern women under the postcolonial conditions.

works cited

Bhabha, Homi K. “The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha.” Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. Ed. Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990.Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” Routledge: New York, 1993.

---. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Dirlik, Alif. “Literature/Identity: Transnationalism, Narrative and Representation.” The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 24 (2002): 209-234.

Espadas, Elizabeth. “Destination Brazil: Immigration in Works of Nelida Pinon and Karen Tei Yamashita.” MACLAS Latin American Essays 12 (1998):51-61.

Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! New York: Vintage, 1990.27

---. The Sound and the Fury. New York: Vintage, 1984.

Gier, Jean Vengua and Tejeda, Carla Alicia. “An Interview with Karen Tei Yamashita.” Jourvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies 2.2. (1998):94.Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994.

Hutcheon, Linda. Politics of Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1989.

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992.

Murashige, Michael S. “Karen Tei Yamashita.” Interview. Words Matter: Conversations with Asian American Writers. Ed. King-Kok Chueng. Honolulu: U of Hawaii P, 2000.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?: Speculations on Widow-sacrifice.” Wedge 7/8 (1985): 120-30.

Yamashita, Karen Tei. Brazil-Maru. Minneapolis: Coffee House, 1993.

---. Through the Arc of the Rain Forest. Minneapolis: Coffee House, 1990.

---. Tropic of Orange. Minneapolis: Coffee-House, 1997.

Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose by Alice Walker. New York: Harcort Brace Jovanovich, 1983.

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blurring the boundaries:challenging binaries in the god of small things

michelle blackwell

In her essay “The Rhetoric of English India,” Sara Suleri argues about domination and subordination: “Rather than examine a binary rigidity between those terms – which is an inherently Euro-centric strategy – this critical field would be better served if it sought to break down the fixity of the dividing lines between domination and subordination” (112). Post-colonial literature is often examined in terms of binaries; black and white, colonized and colonizer, ‘good’ and ‘bad’. This perspective tends to oversimplify the complexity of a post-colonial nation’s situation and forces individuals into either dominant or subordinate positions. This simplistic view also reinforces colonial authority and undermines any authority or agency the post-colonial author may achieve. In her novel, The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy challenges these restrictive binaries through complex characters, intricate social regulations, and complicated relationships suggesting that the problems of post-colonial India reach far beyond the dominant/subordinate relationship to the struggle between genders, castes, and races. One of the main issues that Roy challenges in her novel is the binary rigidity between the ‘touchable’ and ‘untouchable’ within the ancient Hindi caste system that is unique to India. The Indian population is divided into four hierarchical categories based on heredity. The most powerful and significant of these castes is the Brahman, a class of religious priest-lawmakers who created the system and placed themselves in the highest position of power. Next in order of rank are the warriors, called the Kshatriyas and after them, the Vaisyas who are farmers and merchants. The fourth of the original castes are the Shudra who are labourers and are born to serve the other three castes. Far below the Shudra, in fact, entirely outside the social order, are the people of no caste, known as the untouchables. These people are limited to performing the most menial and unappealing tasks and are treated as outcasts of Indian society. Sometime between 200BC and AD100, the Manu Smriti, or Law of Manu, was written, outlining the specific rules and regulations regarding all interactions between and within castes. Indians were not permitted to marry outside of their caste or choose occupations not specifically intended for individuals of their social rank. Interaction between castes was limited to a servant/master relationship and the untouchables were forbidden from any form of physical contact with their superiors (Jaiswal 121-22). Over the centuries, the four original castes have been subdivided again and again, resulting in 2000 to 3000 different caste divisions in the twenty-first century.

In The God of Small Things, Roy challenges these strict limitations of caste through her characters who violate the laws enforced by the Manu Smriti. Although the central family in the novel, to which Ammu, Chako, Mammachi, Baby Kochamma, Rahel, and Estha belong, is never situated in terms of caste, its description as “a family of Anglophiles” ( deal about their social position. The wealth and prestige of the family indicate that they belong to the upper tiers of the caste system and have a prestigious position in their community. As Baby Kochamma explains towards the end of the book: “We’re an old family, these are not things we want talked about…” (Roy 245). The character Velutha and his family serve as an important contrast because they belong to the untouchable category of society and expose the existence of two opposing ways of life living almost

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next door to each other. The most powerful way in which Roy challenges the rigidity and injustice of the touchable/untouchable

binary is through Velutha and Ammu’s romantic relationship. While their affair is forbidden and unacceptable in their community, the very fact that it occurs and is a truly loving relationship challenges the very structure of the society in which they live. By making the “unthinkable thinkable and the impossible really happen” (Roy 242), Ammu and Velutha reveal the injustice of the caste system and the unnatural limitations imposed on the Indian people. By creating this unacceptable romantic involvement, Roy removes Ammu and Velutha from the immediate context of their social situations and frees them from the binary constraints of their dominant and subordinate roles. As both untouchable and touchable, these two individuals are forced into dominant and subordinate positions, but as lovers, Ammu and Velutha are equals. Through this relationship, Roy exposes the inherent equality of all Indian people and criticizes the artificiality and immorality of the caste system. In the final chapter, when Ammu and Velutha are making love for the first time, Roy writes: “Then the carpenter’s hands lifted her hips and an untouchable tongue touched the innermost part of her [Ammu]” (319). Through this direct and intimate physical contact, Roy suggests that the dissolution and blurring of the caste boundaries and binaries is, in fact, a very beautiful and very natural phenomenon.

While Ammu and Velutha violate these essential regulations, Roy also describes a conventional relationship between touchable and untouchable. The relationship between Vellya Paapen and Mammachi is unmistakably one of domination and subjection. When Vellya Pappen comes to tell Mammachi about the relationship between their children, he clearly respects and maintains the caste limitations. He does not attempt to enter her “Touchable kitchen” and is acutely aware of the social boundaries. When Mammachi begins to absorb what has happened, she pushes Paapen from her kitchen, widening the gap between them and reinforcing the boundaries of their separate social spheres.

Roy’s choice in portraying two very different forms of the untouchable/touchable relationship challenges the binary rigidities within the caste system. The reader is exposed to four different individuals who choose very different responses to these regulations – two choose to defy them while the other two choose to abide by them. These contrasting responses reveal the complexity of the caste issue and suggest that not all untouchables and touchables can be classified under a dominant or subordinate identity. Gender is another key issue that Roy deals with in her novel. For example: in many cultures, women in India have been subjected to a certain degree of patriarchal rule throughout the centuries and were considered second class citizens for a very long period of time. While women were definitely seen as the weaker sex in the past, India, like most nations, has experienced a form of feminism and is moving towards female empowerment (Narasimhan 10). By designating different degrees of power to different individuals, Roy challenges the dominant/subordinate conventional nature of the female/male relationship. Perhaps one of the most shocking depictions of female/male relationships in The God of Small Things is the relationship between Mammachi and Pappachi. Mammachi is portrayed as the stereotypical vulnerable woman, defenseless again her husband’s violence and powerless against his rage. She makes no attempt to defend herself and constantly lives in fear. While Pappachi is not alive during the unfolding of events, his presence as a dominating, controlling male figure is felt throughout the book and is objectified in the infamous moth that “torments him and his children and his children’s children” (Roy 48). The numerous 30

descriptions of him beating his wife with a brass vase or cruelly destroying the gumboots his daughter adores portray him as a malicious tyrant and reinforces the common female victim/male victimizer binary opposition.

Roy challenges this binary opposition through the character of Baby Kochamma, who is everything but a victim. She is critical, arrogant, and dishonest and completely defies the notion of the weak, innocent, subservient woman. Baby Kochamma is single, but the power she exercises is most obvious through her involvement in the murder of Velutha. While she is not directly responsible for the brutal beating of an innocent man, Baby Kochamma reveals her cold, calculating, and selfish character when she convinces innocent and impressionable seven-year-old Estha and Rahel into accusing Velutha of sexually violating their mother. Perhaps the most disturbing assertion of her power is when she convinces the twins that they are responsible for the death of their English cousin Sophie Mol:

“It’s a terrible thing to take a person’s life,” Baby Kochamma said. It’s the worst thing that anyone can ever do. Even God doesn’t forgive that. You know that don’t you?”Two heads nodded twice,“And yet” – she looked sadly at them – “you did it.” She looked them in the eye. “You are murderers”(Roy 300).

Through this cruel act, Baby Kochamma challenges the binarism of the female victim/male victimizer stereotype by causing the death of an innocent male. She does not conform to the victim role, but becomes the victimizer herself. This portrayal of two women and two men negotiating very different power relations exposes the oversimplifications of the male/female binary opposition in terms of the dominant and subordinate. Through her use of complex characters and their complicated interrelations, Roy reveals the inefficiency of an explanation that pits males and females against each other and suggests that neither one’s morality nor one’s power can be defined by one’s gender. Perhaps the most significant issue that Roy deals with is the relationship between the colonized and the colonizer within the context of the dominant and subordinate. Post-colonial literature is often plagued by the stereotypical portrayal of the colonizer as the unfeeling, white oppressor and the colonized as the innocent, coloured oppressed. This shallow analysis oversimplifies the true relationship between two racially and politically different groups of people. In The God of Small Things, Roy manages to blur the boundaries between the binary archetypes of the ‘bad’ colonizer and the ‘good’ colonized by introducing characters of both races and all possible moral standings to the story. Pappachi is the perfect example of this binary archetype as he is very much a part of the colonized, both racially and politically. His description as an Anglophile or, more crudely, “a Hindi shit-wiper” (Roy 50) places him in a hegemonic relationship with his colonizer. Although he believes that he has some choice and some authority in his social position, it is obvious that Pappachi’s dreams, ambition, occupation, and hobbies are defined and determined by the English and reveal his dependence on the white colonizer’s expectation of him. While he is most definitely a colonized individual, Pappachi is anything but innocent and does not conform to the faultless, innocent, subservient stereotypical role. His behavior exposes his faults as a human being and reveals the abuse of power and exploitation within the colonized group.

Orangedrink Lemondrink Man also serves as an excellent tool in deconstructing the colonized 31

identity. While he is very much a part of the colonized group, he exploits and sexually abuses a young child of his own colonial status and reveals the inefficiencies of the archetype of the colonized individual. The character of Sophie Mol challenges the restrictions and constraints of the colonizer through her innocence. While she may be white and British, Sophie is a young child, blind to the colonized/colonizer relationship and oblivious to her position as a superior. She interacts with Estha and Rahel as she would with any child and is completely unaware of the racial and political privileges attached to her identity. Sophie Mol does not hurt or offend anyone throughout the novel, but is often seen in antagonistic terms. Rahel views her as competition for her mother’s love and Baby Kochamma views her as an unattainable ideal, even though Sophie does nothing to invoke these feelings. Through Sophie Mol, the reader is exposed to the oversimplification of the label of “racial colonizer.” Though she may conform to all its requirements, she is anything but an abusive, exploitative individual. The interplay between Margaret Kochamma and Ammu exposes yet another layer to the colonized/colonizer relationship. When Margaret and her daughter first arrive, Margaret’s reaction to the cook sniffing her daughter’s hands reveals her attitude of superiority towards the Indian colonized when she says: “How Marvelous! It’s a sort of sniffing! Do the Men and Women do it to each other too?” (Roy 170). This comment enrages Ammu who responds bitterly and asks: “Must we behave like some damn godforsaken tribe that’s just been discovered?” (Roy 171) This anger between a white and Indian woman, clearly describes the racism and inequality between the colonized and colonizer. While Margaret Kochamma may not have intended to offend anyone, her remark reveals a great deal about the ideas and attitudes she has absorbed in Britain and reinforces this dominant/subordinate relationship between the two groups. Through the characters of Ammu, Pappachi, Margaret Kochamma, and Sophie Mol, Roy suggests that the colonized/colonizer relationship reaches far beyond racial issues and can not be explained in binary terms, and not all the colonized are subordinate, not all the colonizers are dominating and abusive. Through complex characters, intricate social regulations and complicated relationships, Arundhati Roy deconstructs the binaries that are often utilized to explain the post-colonial situation. By challenging these roles, Roy reveals that there are no clearly defined sides to the post-colonial question and that Indians are not fighting one clearly defined oppressor. The culmination of the novel, Velutha’s murder, is not caused by the conflicts between colonized and colonizer, male and female, or touchable and untouchable, but a combination of these factors. Roy argues that individuals can not be classified into ‘good’ or ‘bad’ categories according to their race, caste, or sex because these binaries do not have clearly defined boundaries or codes of conduct. No two females, males, touchables, untouchables, colonized or colonizers react or behave in the same way to the same situations. By challenging these binary stereotypes, Roy points out that there are more than two sides to the post-colonial question and that the politics and social situation of India is far more complex than a simple black and white issue.

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works cited

Primary Sources:

Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. Toronto: Random House, 1997.

Suleri, Sara. “The Rhetoric of English India.” The Post-colonial Studies Reader. Eds. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Secondary Sources:

Dhawan, R.K., ed. Arundhati Roy: The Novelist Extraordinary. New Delhi: Prestige Books, 1999.

Jaiswal, Suvira. Caste: Origin, Function, and Dimensions of Change. New Delhi: Manohar Publishers and Distributors, 1998.

Narasimhan, Sakuntala. Empowering Women: An Alternative Strategy from Rural India. California: Sage Publishers, 1999.

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imagined towers: vladimir tatlin with andrei platonovjoshua backer

In ten or twenty years another engineer would build a tower in the middle of the world, and the working people of the whole earth would enter it for permanent happy settlement (Platonov 25).

Only a little more than a decade ago, in the center of Moscow, near the Pushkin Museum and gates of the Kremlim, stood the Moskva swimming pool. For years it was the largest heated open-air pool in the world. Half a century before, this was the site of the never completed Palace of the Soviets, an Orwellian superstructure where the Soviet world government would convene. And earlier still, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, a monument to the Czar’s defeat of Napoleon and sign of a new Europe, stood on the same ground (Schlögel 177-180). The architectural progression of this site is a microcosm of the Soviet experience from the Revolution of 1917 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989: a church is torn down to build the Palace of the Soviets, envisioned as one of the more massive projects of the 20th century, but it is ultimately unfeasible; so the structure’s negative, its inverse, its foundation is converted into the world’s largest swimming pool.

In 1919, Vladimir Tatlin’s model for the Monument to the 3rd International helped initiate the particular vein of Soviet monumental architecture that opened the conceptual space for the Palace of the Soviets. These Towers, Tatlin’s and the Palace, soared to mythical heights and would serve as functional models for the organization of the state apparatus. Yet in reality they did not exceed 20 meters in the case of the model for the Monument to the 3rd International. These projects embodied revolutionary ideals specific to their time and in doing so, despite their creators’ efforts towards material permanence, were required to arrive in the present as figments and unformed memories. They are the other shadowy ruins, predecessors of the Berlin Wall and the still warm corpse of Russia under the Soviets.

At the heart of these architectural failures is a traumatizing structure of temporality. This is often perceived as the result of a quick and localized revolution in a vast country and the intense collective effort to repress the extensive Tsarist past. The circumstances underlying the inconsistencies of the Bolshevik Revolution, however, is a project unto itself, but a theme which is nevertheless intimately tied to the Soviet weltanschauung during the periods of planned monumental construction. By taking into account the cultural and practical structures underlying Tatlin’s Tower and to a certain extent the Palace of the Soviets, we can begin to unravel history to the point where their destined failure is rooted in their monolithic and ill-conceived naissance.

In 1930, the year before a bulletin by the Central Executive Committee announced the competition for the Palace of the Soviets, surrealist writer Andrei Platonov anticipated the collapse of this and other colossal projects. In The Foundation Pit, his workers, themselves living-dead representation of the proletariat, set out to build a “general building where all the town’s inhabitants will live happily and in silence” (Ginsburg xiii). They work themselves to exhaustion digging a pit large enough to contain the foundation for such a monumental building – and as the commission is regularly increased, it is a task at which they are destined to fail. The Foundation Pit, the novel and the hole dug by its characters, is an inversion of the grandiose Towers of Tatlin 34

and the competitors for the Palace of the Soviets. In projecting such an image as early as 1927, the novel eerily foreshadows the large swimming pool on the site of the Palace of the Soviets.1 His subject in The Foundation Pit, the Towers of Soviet Russia, real and imagined, rise like so many nodes or poles of the tragic utopia-dystopia diacritic that pervaded the spheres of Soviet culture and politics.

[1] Time Destabilized

The model for the Monument to the 3rd International, embodying a historical identity as much as it represents an avant-garde art movement or Socialist politics, has been referred to as simply Tatlin’s Tower or the “Tatlin-tower” (Körner 71). Vladimir Tatlin’s name has been intimately connected more with this one construction than any of his other sculptures; and his early paintings even less likely to appear in a study of the artist and his work. Moreover, any art historian would be hard-pressed to describe the state of Soviet sculpture or architecture from this time period, perhaps any period in Soviet history, without mentioning Tatlin’s Tower. One question we may ask is how are this individual, his tower, and Soviet political ideology interwoven in the vastness and hegemony of the Modernist art historical narrative? To begin, we may look to Berlin Dadaist Georg Grosz as he describes his inaugural meeting with the Russian constructor:

He was living in a small, ancient and decrepit apartment…Behind him a mattress, entirely consumed by rust, was leaning against the wall; on it sat a couple of sleeping hens, their heads in their feathers. This was the good Tatlin’s frame, and when he played his homemade balalaika…he gave the impression not of an ultra-modern Constructivist, but of a piece of the genuine, ancient Russia. (Grosz 22)

Tatlin is depicted not as a modern, but as a Russian of the 19th century, building a model for the future with the materials at hand. The conflict of past and future residing in a single space reappears time and again in the failure of projects like Tatlin’s and the Palace of the Soviets.

Here it should be mentioned that Tatlin is not remembered in the context of any structure known as the Monument to the 3rd International, but only its model. The word “model”, in the sense of Tatlin’s tower, connotes the intended future existence of what it prefigures - extending outward in time and space. A confident artist, Tatlin had, in fact, wholeheartedly anticipated the actual construction of his design for the Monument to the 3rd International. In 1919, two years after the Revolution, we find Tatlin a man still living in the mode of the past while trying to usher forth a premature future into being; his model, depicting rotating halls of spiraling glass and steel, an effort to this end.2 At this moment in Soviet history we find a country attempting a clean break with its past; a fiery revolution from ideological platforms down to material existence.

Notably, we see in Lenin the inability, despite the fervor of revolution, to break with past cultural attitudes: “Why do we have to turn away from the truly beautiful, reject it as a starting point for further development,

1 A pre-revolutionary believer in Communism, by the time of Stalin’s first Five Year Plan, Andrei Platonov’s writing became symbolic of the despair that shaped the surface of everyday life in Soviet Russia; though denied the status of an actual symbol, most publications of his work suppressed until the 1950’s, and in Russia until the 1990’s.

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merely on the basis that it is ‘old’?” (Lizon 22) Here Lenin is voicing his opinion against the “-isms”—cubism, expressionism, and other abstracted modes— that appeared as constituent styles of the European avant-garde. Despite the violence of the Revolution towards the former Tsarist regime, “Lenin’s opinion had always been that a new, proletarian culture must be founded on the best artistic traditions of the Feudal and Capitalist past” (22). In the years following the Revolution there was a tension between the generally accepted academic styles of representation from the immediate past and the avant-garde styles that, while symbolizing the future, were also seen as catering to a particular intellectual crowd. The abstract and materialist styles were too rarified for the masses and their conceptual grounding an anathema to the proletariat movement. Hence the initial pluralism of style, which for a short time accommodated the revolutionary constructors of the avant-garde, but in due course gave way to the traditional figurative output under the doctrine of Social Realism.

Like Tatlin, Lenin had hoped to herald into existence the luminous future promised by Marx. Yet, this is a Sisyphean task in that they find themselves ultimately inscribed in Russia’s past; it is, for lack of a better term, literally their birthright. In their efforts they rush towards the light, all the while dragging Tsarist Russia with them; Tatlin and Lenin are encumbered by it, and the future covered in shade. In the most vituperative rhetoric of the Bolshevik Revolution the past is to be displaced by the future, but, in fact, in the years directly following the Revolution, the masses are as much steeped in Tsarism as in their hopes for Socialism. The simultaneous rejection of the past-present and thirst for a present which harkens the future relegates Soviet culture to a dystopic non-place, “amid the rest of the world under construction” (Platonov 65).

[2] Deconstructing Tatlin’s Tower

While this is an account of several cultural and social inconsistencies underlying Tatlin’s project, there are particular material considerations concerning the failure of the Monument to the 3rd International. This is also to say less space will be devoted to the politico-ideological reasons behind the decision not to construct a building based on Tatlin’s model. It suffices to say that Tatlin’s project was superfluous in the views of the Soviet leadership. In the words of Leon Trotsky:

There is an inner contradiction in the purposeful exploitation of the material for such a high tower –but for what? This is not building, this is an exercise…From this point of view, Tatlin’s sketch for a monument seems considerably less satisfactory. The purpose of the basic building is to contain premises for the International Council of Peoples Commissars, the Communist International, etc. (9)

The function of the structure, a meeting hall, was not made explicit in the form of Tatlin’s model. The glass congress halls and steel suspension wires, while used in a manner specific and purposeful to the properties of their material, did not serve the over-arching purpose of the building. Trotsky’s rejection of Tatlin’s model is an example of the inconsistent and pluralistic nature of the early Soviet art doctrine. The party leadership tolerates the materiality and the utility as propaganda of Constructivism alongside traditional styles, but finds excessive the most well known work produced by one of the movement’s founders. If Tatlin did not let the primary function of the intended building dictate the form of his model, then

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he certainly overloaded the model to the Monument to the 3rd International with secondary functions. The supportive scaffolding spirals, the glass halls rotate, and even the roof would project Communist party slogans onto the clouds. While such innovations celebrate the ability of new technologies to manipulate material, these additional functions would also serve to situate the place of the Soviet State in the immutable ordering of the cosmos.

Attacking the sky at a projected 400 meters, the Monument would surpass the Eiffel Tower and any contemporary American skyscraper. The steel reinforced concrete spiral surrounding the building suggests the revolutionary character of Marxist history and the Golden Ratio of a perfect order. Enclosed within the scaffolding are three basic geometric structures modeled in glass: for the base, a cube making a full rotation each year; the next stage, a pyramid rotating once a month; the most prestigious hall, sitting atop the tower, is a cylinder rotating daily. This cylinder is topped by a glass hemisphere from which propaganda slogans and imagery were to be projected – an ephemeral spire extending the Monument to heights beyond its material existence (Körner 73).

On one hand, the geocentric principles of the model for the Monument to the 3rd International incorporate the organization of the Soviet state into the natural processes of the Earth and its relation to other objects in the sky. Linking the primary administrative building of the state to the inner workings of the world and the movement of the planets suggests both a chthonian and cosmic rationale for Soviet socialism. On the other hand, the import placed on the Earth’s motion through the heavens recalls the religious orthodoxy of pre-revolutionary Russia. With the emphasis placed on the relation of the earthly to the celestial, Tatlin’s tower redeploys a common myth “in the Russian-Eastchurch tradition [that] the universe and the material to be worked by hand form a single unit” (76). Moreover, Eva Köorner locates the origin of the geometric structures of the Monument, “in the forms of early Novgorod architecture: in the huge square of ground-space of the church, in its triangular gables, relatively small cylindrical tower and small gilted dome –reflecting light” (77).

By varied means, these suppositions somewhat erode the Constructivist goals in the context of the model for the Monument to the 3rd International. They reflect, yet again, in Tatlin’s Tower the temporal non-place of Soviet culture. The geocentric motions of the three main sections both validate the Soviet government’s place in the order of the universe, yet by doing so subverts the administration’s policy and rhetoric by referencing the religious mysticism of Tsarist Russia and creating affect through a nostalgia for a familiar spatial orientation. In like fashion, Tatlin’s use of the basic geometric forms of the cube, pyramid, and cylinder evokes a sense of pared down materialistic functionality, while also redistributing a tradition of religious architecture. And lastly, though the hemispheric projector atop the Monument canvases the sky with Soviet propaganda, still the rays of light connecting man and the heavens gesture towards the transcendental and a meaning beyond the Soviet state.

At the abyssal edge of Soviet ideology, we encounter Platonov’s comrade Prushevsky staring off into oblivion trying to reassure himself that, essentially, the most central the true structure of the substance of which the world and mankind were composed had already been grasped by him; that all the necessary science lay within the walls of his awareness, and beyond it there was only a dull, insignificant place toward which there was no need to strive. And yet, it was interesting to know: had anybody else climbed out beyond the wall? (26)

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Again, below the materially oriented surface of Tatlin’s Tower we observe a temporal rift forming. The same fissure from which issues Lenin’s pluralistic guidelines for the new Soviet art and where Tatlin appears to us not as an “ultra-modern Constructivist, but of a piece of the genuine, ancient Russia” (Grosz 22). In this instance it is specifically manifested in a religious reading of the model for the Monument to the 3rd International. In the gaps and spaces demarcated by the braided glass, steel, and concrete of Tatlin’s Tower we find the incompatible existence of Soviet materialist culture and Russian orthodoxy –the failure of Communist utopia to escape its reflection.

[3] Babel

A silent, yet almost unavoidable, inter-text of the projects of Tatlin and Platonov is the Tower of Babel:

“At one time the whole earth had the same language and vocabulary (11: 1)”

“And they said, “Come; let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the sky. Let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise, we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth (11:5-6)”

“for there the Lord confused the language of the whole earth, and from there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth (11:14).”

These three moments in the story of Babel correlate to three of the general ideological moments in the establishment and decline of the Soviet state. We will take them slightly out of order in that the last verse is a return, an origin and an end. Genesis 11:14 is Russia as it existed under the Tsars; a vast empire heterogeneous and disconnected from itself. The Tsars covered a large area of land, but were unable to unite and rule their country effectively, culminating with the Bolshevik Revolution. Conversely, the Marxist-Leninist project, in its most utopic (and dystopic) permutations, aimed at restoring the one-voice of Genesis 11:1 through socialization and conformity among the masses. Hence the dissolution of individual nationalism in satellite blocs, which, along with the Soviet state proper, was referred to on the whole as the Second World. The end anticipated by the great experiment (and certainly anticipated by dissenting voices such as Platonov, Zamyatin, and others) was a worldwide proletariat speaking one language at deafening volumes. A people whose leaders gather in Tatlin’s Monument to the 3rd International and the Palace of the Soviets, “a city and a tower with its top in the sky” (11:5-6).

The silences of Babel set down in Genesis echo forth to the Soviet project. The silences are multiple and arise surreptitiously from the low murmur of the masses. Emerging from the one-voice of Socialist conformism is the silence of words spoken needlessly and without meaning. Conformity speaks only what is already known to all its constituents; all dialogic exchanges are precluded. “A general building where all the town’s inhabitants will live happily and in silence” (Ginsburg xiii). With one “language and vocabulary” no sign can be made that 38

has not always already in circulation; thus, even when one speaks nothing, silence, is communicated. This is the utopia-dystopia model of silence of the Soviet state and of the general building in The Foundation Pit –the kind of silence of which the model of the Monument to the 3rd International and the Palace of the Soviets are emblematic.

There is also a very real and clamorous silence still in Russia, an effect of the lingering shadows cast by the ruins of its fantastic Towers. After the final collapse of the Soviet Babel, which had been slowly decaying by the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the Second World was returned to Genesis 11:14. Behind the Iron Curtain were actually an entangled bureaucracy and a hyper-centralized governmental structure cutoff from the citizenry, not unlike the situation of the Tsarist government leading up to the Revolution. This new silence is of a mutual unintelligibility that erupted from the millions of Russians who had been without a voice while living under a totalitarian regime. We have returned to Russia in the present, to where the Moskva swimming pool in Moscow once existed. It was one of the many ruins of failed monumental construction under the Soviets. However, the site is now being restored, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior rebuilt. Still, in the capital city the Palace of the Soviet truly exists in the optics of a virtual image: “the seven High Buildings distinctly towering out of the sea of Moscow’s architecture…which still dominate the Moscow skyline today…turn towards a single point of focus. This is not the Kremlin, but the Palace of the Soviets” (Schlögel 182-183).

works cited

Holman Christian Standard Bible. 10 Oct. 2005 <http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=genesis%2011:1;&version=8;15;16;74;77;>

Ginsburg, Mirra Introduction. The Foundation Pit. Trans. Mirra Ginsburg Northwestern University Press: Evanston, 2000.

Grosz, Georg “Reflections on Tatlin.” Spazio e societa. 1999 Jan.-Mar., v.21, n.85

Körner, Eva “Tatlin: outlines of a career in the context of contemporary Russian avant-garde art as related to eastern and western tendencies.” Acta historiae artium 1985, v.31, no.1-4

Lizon, Peter The Palace of the Soviets: The Paradigm of Architecture in the USSR. Three Continents Press, Inc.: Colorado Springs, 1992

Platonov, Andrei The Foundation Pit. Trans. Mirra Ginsburg Northwestern University Press: Evanston, 2000.

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Schlögel, Karl “The Shadow of an Imaginary Tower.” Exhibition catalogue for: Naum Gabo and the Competition for the Palace of the Soviets, Moscow 1931-1933. Ed. Helen Adkins (Berlinische Galerie: Berlin, 1993.)

Trotsky, Leon “Reflections on Tatlin.” Spazio e societa. 1999 Jan.-Mar., v.21, n.85

appendix of imagesFigure 1

B.M. Yofan, Palace of the Soviets, 1933

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Figure 2A

Vladimir Tatlin, Model for the Monument to the 3rd International¸ 1920 (1919)

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unconvincingstacey may fowles

Despite the fact that Marnie always wanted to be an outreach worker for drug-addled street youth, she instead works as a perfume counter girl at a major downtown department store on evenings and weekends. This is partly due to the fact that Marnie’s mother told her she didn’t have the stomach to be an outreach worker for the drug-addled, and that Marnie’s boyfriend discouraged her from studying to become an outreach worker because there was a need for immediate income in the face of him doing his PhD in comparative literature.

Marnie owns three knee-length black skirts, each one purchased at the same mall in the same store for $19.99. Each skirt is a slightly different style and a uniform requirement of her job as a perfume counter girl. On the way to work each day she drops yesterday’s black knee-length skirt at the drycleaner in the same mall where she is perfume counter girl. The elderly male attendant who she assumes is the owner and is always behind the counter takes the skirt from her hands and stares straight through her, telling her the cost daily through his nicotine-stained beard despite the fact that she has the cost memorized and therefore always has exact change. The first few months she worked at the perfume counter she waited for the old man in the drycleaner to recognize her, acknowledge her return on one of her many skirt drop-offs, participate in some witty banter, but he never did and Marnie gave up on waiting for him to do so.

The dry cleaner’s lack of witty banter injustice is directly responsible for Marnie’s complete and total debilitating fear that she will become like the woman behind the counter at her local Hasty Mart. As the woman packs up Marnie’s six eggs and three tins of cat food something in her face seems to suggest she has endured a lifetime of being stared through.

Marnie doesn’t know that the drycleaner has Alzheimer’s that will be discovered by his doctor two weeks after they pull her boyfriend’s body from the lake.

Marnie will be thirty soon.

After her shift at the perfume counter and after making her purchases at the Hasty Mart, Marnie goes home to the tiny apartment she shares with her boyfriend who is doing his PhD in comparative literature and Marnie stares into the bathroom mirror without unpacking the six eggs and three tins of cat food. She is looking for evidence that she does indeed exist, a way to validate that despite the fact that no one connects with her at any moment during the day that she is still flesh and bone. She squeezes her cheek just to be sure as the cat curls around her feet on the fraying blue bathmat. The squeeze leaves a mark of vibrant pink and then the

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flash fades suddenly into nothing. The cat looks up and meows to be fed. She forgets to unpack the eggs and put them in the fridge before she goes to bed and therefore throws them into the garbage the following morning.

Marnie’s boyfriend, who is doing his PhD in comparative literature, hasn’t been home in five days.

During the day Marnie wakes around noon, and eats a poached egg on rye toast while she reads the books she buys on the Internet. Daily they arrive in her mailbox from all over the world, first editions, new releases and rare signed copies, each one read and then carefully placed in alphabetical order in milk crates in the hall closet. Aside from the books, the hall closet also has hundreds of coat hangers in it, each one from the drycleaner in the mall, given to her by a man who will never recognize her despite the fact that she is there almost daily.

At three in the afternoon Marnie showers and slips into a freshly dry-cleaned black skirt, and depending on the day it is slim fitting, A-line or pleated. The pleated skirt costs more to be dry-cleaned. Marnie feeds the cat and checks the mail and takes the subway to the mall. While she is on the subway she notices a rather large, muscular man in a beer t-shirt with a shaved head and the name Carol tattooed all over his body. The name is written in grand looping letters up his left calve, contained in a bursting bleeding red heart on his right forearm, and scripted small in the bulldog folds in the back of his neck.

Marnie is sure that Carol’s beauty is convincing.

Marnie’s boyfriend, who is doing his PhD in comparative literature, hasn’t been home in six days.

Marnie tries her best to look pretty at the perfume counter, but in many ways she cannot figure out why she was hired for a job whose success is dependent on how convincing her beauty is. Marnie believes it to be unconvincing. She believes that her boyfriend has left her for one of the undergraduate students in a class he TA’s for, believes that the undergraduate’s beauty is probably convincing, that the drycleaner would see her and that she would never fear, would never become the woman behind the counter at the Hasty Mart. Marnie believes it is the undergraduate’s phone number she found in the pocket of her boyfriend’s gray overcoat when she took it to be dry-cleaned and was not acknowledged by the man who works behind the counter. Marnie also believes the undergraduate student is the reason she discovered she had chlamydia at her last doctor’s appointment.

Marnie likes to leave messages without making phone calls, never having to return inquiries directly, merely pressing a button and recording a response onto someone’s voice mail. She enjoys the lack of intimacy that technology affords her.

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Marnie cannot recall a time in her life where she has been satisfied, although she additionally cannot recall a time in her life where she has actually complained about being dissatisfied.

Marnie’s boyfriend is bloated and blue, a heavy drinker who drove into the lake and now lies there motionless as the waves lap the shore and his flesh pulls and pops away from bone. The fish gnaw at his pockmarked skin as Marnie daydreams of him making love to her, daydreams of him making love to a petite blonde undergraduate student whose phone number she found in his grey overcoat pocket.

Marnie’s boyfriend did his PhD in comparative literature simply because at dinner and cocktail parties it seemed more appropriate to announce academia as his vocation rather than “telemarketer.” He hasn’t been home in seven days.

On this, the seventh day, Marnie’s mother calls long distance from their family home on the west coast while Marnie is poaching an egg and watching the cat chase imaginary spiders across the living room rug.

“Marianne,” she says in her raspy pack-a-day voice, “you should really get out more. Make some new friends. Go out with the girls in the cosmetics department.”

“I know.”

“How’s Michael?”

Michael is doing his PhD in comparative literature and hasn’t been home in seven days. A petite blonde undergraduate student is calling his cell phone and getting his voice mail. The petite blonde undergraduate student is assuming Michael has decided not to leave his frumpy girlfriend and as a result she is now plotting martinis with her girlfriends and make out sessions with strangers. Michael is at the bottom of a lake in the driver’s seat of an ’84 Volvo being eaten by fish.

“He’s fine.”

Marnie and Michael have been together for three years. Michael wanted Marnie to go and stay on the pill despite the fact that it made her gain sixteen pounds and her moods unbearable. She had to buy three brand new knee-length black skirts because she went up a waist size. Since she went off the pill without telling Michael, she has gone up yet another waist size. She has an appointment at the women’s clinic on Friday, which will be the ninth day Michael has failed to come home and the sixteenth day Marnie has been late.

Marnie has never had an orgasm.

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On the eighth day the petite undergraduate student unexpectedly arrives at Marnie’s front door at two in the afternoon. She is wearing an emerald green mini-dress and a pair of patent leather kitty heels. As predicted, she is convincingly pretty, and apparently drunk.

“Where’s Michael?” she asks without introducing herself.

“At the university,” Marnie replies, deadpan.

“You’re a fucking liar.”

“You gave me chlamydia.”

Marnie slams the door in the pretty blonde’s face and goes back to getting ready for her shift at the perfume counter. She can hear the undergraduate student call her an “ugly cunt” from the other side of the door as she unsheathes a black skirt from its gauzy plastic casing and slips a second black skirt into her backpack.

“That’ll be $4.36,” the drycleaner says.

“I know,” Marnie replies.

Marnie is almost thirty.

On the ninth day Marnie has a conversation with a plump and pleasant woman at the clinic about “options” and comes home to find that the cat has killed and left her the body of a grey mouse on the bathroom floor. There are three messages on the answering machine. The first is from the University stating that Michael has not attended a week of tutorials, the second from Michael’s mother wondering where he is, the third a series of curse words from the petite blonde undergraduate student.

Marnie unplugs the phone.

When the police arrive on the tenth day, her day off and a Sunday, Marnie is picking out baby names and writing them in neat gendered columns in a small steno pad. She makes them a pot of coffee and answers all of their questions politely.

“I last saw him on a Thursday. We had lunch.”“He was wearing a torn black sweater and blue jeans.”“No. He didn’t seem distressed or out of sorts.”

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“We have been together for three years.”“I miss him.”“I didn’t report it because I assumed he had left me for one of his students.”Things she Marnie didn’t say include:“I didn’t care that he had left me.”“The day we had lunch I told him I was late and he had too many gin and tonics and as a result called me a miserable bitch.”“He was suffocating me with his narcissism and self-absorption.”“I am carrying his child because I was deceptive. I am picking out names and writing them in neat gendered columns in this steno pad that is lying between us on the kitchen table. I don’t want him to be involved. In fact, if he is dead I would feel a sense of morbid relief because I despise my life and have allowed him to become the architect of it.”

Michael is no longer the architect of Marnie’s despised life. Michael is at the bottom of a lake in the driver’s seat of an ’84 Volvo being eaten by fish and receiving angry, pleading voice mail messages from a blonde undergraduate student.

On the twelfth day they pull the ’84 Volvo and Michael’s blue and bloated body from the bottom of the lake. Marnie receives a message stating that she is required to come and identify the body, a body that is wearing a torn black sweater and blue jeans. On the way home from the morgue she buys six eggs and three tins of cat food from the Hasty Mart.

It is discovered that the owner of the drycleaner has Alzheimer’s and his thirty-eight year old daughter who has never married and likes it that way temporarily replaces him behind the counter.

Marnie’s list of baby names, neatly written in a steno pad on the kitchen table, exceeds one hundred possible choices. During the week that Michael’s body has been found she has been busy transcribing them into a separate list, this one in alphabetical order.

The following week when she returns to work she drops off a black knee length skirt at the drycleaner and pays $4.36 in previously counted exact change.

“You must come here often,” the drycleaner’s daughter says.

Marnie is thirty.

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beautiful bruiseschristian mcpherson

My love affair with the mud was borne from Lulu, one of the several girlfriends Father had after my parents divorced; as opposed to the ones he had while they were married. Lulu was a hairdresser/beautician with enormous boobs and a big juicy ass that was usually shoved into tight pink pants. She had crazy hair right out of a movie; ’50’s honey yellow beehive hair. Lulu was almost a stereotype walking around in four-inch heels, smacking her gum loudly, and smoking these long movie-star cigarettes in a fancy black holder. But Lulu was no dummy, and with good sense she soon left my alcoholic father. She was attending college part time to become a horticulturist. She loved plants and was always in the garden in the evenings.

“What the hell’s wrong with God-damn hairdressing?” Father would ask.“Nothing Henry, I guess that I prefer plants to people is all.”“What a load of shit. You would die if you didn’t have those little old gals to talk to and turn their hair

blue.”“Whatever Henry, I’m still going to school,” she would insist.

* * *Father was always giving her shit about the plants, and always demanding massages. One night while Lulu was at college, Father got real loaded up, went out to the backyard and kicked the shit out of these beautiful giant peony flowers that Lulu just loved. There was nothing left but petals and broken green stems. And if that wasn’t enough, Father pulled his pants down right there in the backyard and took a shit on a patch of daisies. He laughed like hell.

The next day when Lulu saw what he had done, she packed her bags and left.

“Goodbye Charley, I can’t stay here anymore. Keep your nose clean,” she said as she affectionately gave my hair a rub.

“Bye Lulu,” I said and just watched that great ass swish back and forth down the front lane and into an awaiting cab. I was fourteen and I loved Lulu. I was heartbroken - but I still had the mud.

* * *Two weeks prior to Lulu’s sudden departure, she had looked at me and said, “Gee whiz Charley, I think

you’re really into puberty now. When’s the last time you washed your face?”“What?”

49

“Charley, come here and show me your face.”

I complied and she cupped my chin with those red fingernails and looked at me like she was going to paint my portrait.

“Charley, you’ve got a lot of blackheads on that nose of yours, it’s high time that we clean you up.”

Thus began my afternoon of exfoliation.* * *

The first thing Lulu did was make me wash my face with soap and hot water. She gave me this tough facecloth to use and it felt like steel wool.

“Work the nose, scrub it good,” she said hovering over me in the bathroom.

When that was done she sat me at the dining room table and placed a large bowl of steaming milky liquid, with little red rose petals floating in it, in front of me. It smelled of honey and lemon and roses, a wonderful smell, a Lulu smell.

“It’s time to open up those pores of yours,” ordered Lulu, “put your head over the bowl and cover yourself with this.” She threw me a large white fluffy towel.

I don’t know how long my face was in there – ten or twenty minutes, maybe? Time seemed to have stopped. I zoned out. I was in a warm happy place. I was sure this is what it would be like to be in Lulu’s bosom.

Then all of sudden Lulu whipped off the towel and brought me back to reality, and then to the couch, where I was told to lay down. She put a steaming hot cloth on my face and told me to relax. I could feel my face turning red and my heartbeat in my nose. The next thing I knew the cloth was off and I was directed back to the chair. Lulu came at me with a metal probe, like a demented plastic surgeon in a B-horror film. I was worried, but Lulu’s calming voice repeated “relax”; and so I did.

For twenty minutes Lulu squeezed and poked and worked away at my pores, forcing out the dirt and oils lodged into my adolescent face. When she was done, she looked at me like she had just put the finishing touches on the Sistine Chapel.

“Now for the mud,” said Lulu.“Mud? You just washed my face, why would you put mud on it?”This made Lulu laugh and pinch my check and tell me that I was a doll face.

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“A mud-MASK silly, a mud-MASK.”

This didn’t clarify anything for me at the time, but I just went with what Lulu said.

“This will start to harden and it will start to feel weird, it may sting a little, but that’s normal.”

She spread the runny mud-mask mud, which felt more like paint than mud, all over my face except around the eyes. She brought me back to the couch and told me to lay back down. With a magician’s touch, two giant slices of cucumber appeared.

“Close your eyes Charley, and I’ll put the cucumber slices on.”“What for?”“They’ll keep you from getting wrinkles.”“What will carrots do?”“I don’t know, I’ve never tried carrots.”

I felt the mud tighten and my face stung with a good kind of pain. After another twenty minutes had elapsed, Lulu removed the cucumbers from my face and ordered me to wash up.

When I finally got the mud off, and dried my face, my skin felt reborn. It looked healthy, I looked healthy. Lulu looked at me.

“Much better,” she said, like it was a very casual thing, as if she’d just straightened a crooked picture.Then Father came home. He was full of nastiness and liquor. As it was Saturday, Father had been drinking since ten a.m. at the bus station; they started serving early there.

“What the hellll have you two idiots been doing,” Father slurred.“Lulu cleaned my face,” I replied.“Lulu did WHAT?,” he screamed.“She cleaned my face,” I said backing up as Father stumbled towards me.“Oh yeeaah, YOU LITTLE SHIT, I’LL CLEAN YOUR FACE!”

That’s when Father belted me on the cheek with a big meaty right hook. I fell down and my eyes welled up. He had beat me before, but I wasn’t going to give him any tears. And I didn’t. Not even at his funeral. Not a drop.

I picked myself up and faced him. I felt bad for Lulu. She had had her afternoon’s work ruined in just one quick punch. I could feel that it was going to be a big black and blue nasty sucker. So much for nice skin. Father

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raised his hand to strike me again. I flinched a little, but didn’t move, didn’t shed any tears. He teeter-tottered with that drunken sway, like a tall tree in a strong wind.

“You’re NOTHING,” he yelled as little bits of spit flew into my face.“FUCK YOU HENRY, DON’T YOU HIT CHARLEY!” screamed Lulu as she came running out of nowhere,

brandishing a wooden rolling pin like a sword.

Father turned to see Lulu coming at him and grabbed her arm.

“YOU FUCKING BITCH, YOU THINK YOU CAN SIT ON MY SON’S FACE!”

Lulu dropped the rolling pin. Father managed to slap her a few times while he continued to scream obscenities at her.

“YOU’RE JUST AN ASSHOLE HENRY!” Lulu yelled back as she managed to break free of Father’s grip.

Father came at her again. I was frozen with fear and didn’t know what to do. It wasn’t until years later, when I was eighteen, that I finally pushed Father down to the ground. He never tried to hit me after that.

Father had Lulu again and threw her to the ground. She broke the heel of her right shoe on the way down. She had fallen beside the cheap little wooden coffee table with the large green ceramic ashtray on it. Father grabbed the ashtray and threw it against the wall. It shattered into little pieces.

“YOU FUCKING BITCH! ALL YOU DO IS FUCK WITH THOSE GODDAMN FLOWERS AND MY FAGGOT SON’S FACE!!!”

It looked like he was going to smash Lulu with his sledgehammer fist, like an ape, but at the last second he hit the coffee table instead. It broke in two. Had it not been made from such cheap material, Father would have broken his hand. Too bad.

Then Father backed up a little, removed his belt and undid his fly.

“I’m gonna teach you something reeeeal gooood baby,” said Father in a devil’s voice.

Lulu’s hair had become tangled. It flew out in every direction as if it were the sun. She looked like a wounded animal kicking away at the air with her broken shoe.

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“FUCK YOU HENRY!” she repeated.

He moved towards her, twirling his belt in the air like a lasso.

“You need a good hog-whipping baby, and daddy is gonna give it to yah. YOOOYYAAAHH!!” he yelled with a big smile.

He stepped back to give himself some room to whip Lulu. He stepped back onto the rolling pin. It was something out of a cartoon. He went flying up into the air and landed with a mighty thud on his back. He was out cold and he started to snore. It was all very anticlimactic. Lulu threw me a big grin with her smudged make-up face and then started to laugh.

“That was damn lucky baby,” she said, laughing, although there were tears of fear still running down her face.

I just nodded dumbfounded.* * *

Lulu put some ice on my face and afterwards took me out for a giant banana split at this great restaurant called Benny’s. They put Smarties on their sundaes there. I loved that.

“You’re going to have a one beautiful bruise there, Charley,” Lulu said as she sucked at her menthol cigarette.

“Give me a bit of character, eh?”“Yeah baby,” said Lulu as she turned her head and looked out the window, like she was distracted by a

car or person walking by. I shoveled chocolate mint chip ice cream down my throat.

Lulu finished her smoke and mashed the butt out in the ashtray.

“Charley,” she began, leaning forward over the table.“Yah?”“I don’t know how much longer I can stay.”

My heart sank. But I didn’t blink.

“You should go. I’ll be just fine. Don’t worry about me,” I said as convincingly as possible.

I talked a tough line when Father wasn’t beating me or anyone else. The truth was I was scared shitless that

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Lulu would leave and it would be just Henry and I again. Mom died shortly after the divorce. It was ruled accidental. She overdosed on antidepressants.

Anyway, I told Lulu not to worry her pretty little head about me. She laughed and told me that I was a sweet kid.

The next day Father had no idea what he had done and asked me if I had gotten into a fight at school. I told him it was summer and there was no school. I told him I fell down. Had I told him he hit me, he wouldn’t have believed it, and would have punished me for telling lies. It was a lose-lose situation. Lulu put up with it for two more weeks and then split after the plant incident in the backyard.

* * *When I finally did leave, I was nineteen. I finished tying my running shoes, grabbed my suitcase, and spit on the living room carpet. Father threw a beer bottle at my head. It missed and smashed on the wall beside me as I went out the front door.

I heard him scream obscenities from the veranda. I’ve never looked back.

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untitlednora m. peterson

when I move away or towardirgend where or perhaps (was)

I feel the needmost pressingungemeinto give aufeverything elseand stop thisVerwirrung whirling through me and just live in one

Ort – ganz nur, wo ich bin –

but a burden thickens and brewsso many Stimmenand thousands of pieces like stings to myforgetting they bind me auseinander butwithout themI’m stripped blankinto more alleine.

these rippings of placeare all I can blendinto Heimat

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there is, of course,a possiMöglichKeitthat I existiereas a lessphysicalIch

irgendwhere in zwischen

here andhier

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being anders

i am noch nichtzu Hause althoughi am sleepingin mein own Bett

voices untereinander – they say,she is Andersand i agreeobwohli don’t want to so

i movedmein own Bettbackwo they saidi should bezu Hause

butauch hieri can’t sleep

outside there are

Stimmen amongst themselves – they say,she is Andersand i agreeobwohl

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i don’t want to and mein Bett,is getorn in twoandi can’t sleep,i am noch nichtzu Hause

wenn the voicesare mein own

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at the mercy of chronologyj. j. steinfeld

I dreamed I was dancing with Lucy Maudat least I hope it was a dream, not a fantasy,as fantasy I‘d be in big psychogenic troubledoing my dancing and writing in a psychiatric facilitywhich sounds stilted and stiff in a love poem of sortsabout dancing with Lucy Maud, an eternal word dancer.You see, in this mid-summer dreamLucy Maud was dressed like Madonnain an earlier sensual musical incarnationand I told Lucy Maud thateven making reference to less than immortal songs such as “Material Girl” and “Like a Virgin,”to which Lucy Maud cringed at their mere mention and chastised me about exalting the Madonna to a Presbyterian minister‘s wife.Trying to ease the uneasy dream tensionI sang a bit of “My Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors”improvised two lines with our names included mentioned how marvellous Moxy Früvous wassang a little more of “My Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors”Lucy Maud criticized my irreverence and bad singingnot to mention, she mentioned, my baffling gibberishberating me as if I had tampered with the loveliest dreamdisguised as the firmest reality. I pointed out respectfully that we were dancinga contemporary writer and revered but deceased immortal writerin mid-summer, dream or fantasy,she asking what ache of spirit had brought on my flight of fantasy.Too fierce genuflecting to the gods of tourism and golf,too many slogan T-shirts, too much Anne iconography, just plain too many damn golf courses.

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She didn‘t recall there being all that many golf coursesand wondered if I were referring to her Anne Shirleyand what her Anne had to do with iconography.Oh, chronology, we‘re at the mercy of chronology,I moaned out like a little boy being punished for his mouthiness,she wanting to know what I was really suffering from.Dream chronology, fantasy chronology,I‘m over my head in a mid-summer sea of words,dancing with a larger than life literary figure.Look at it this way, she said, eloquent as an angel:she had been dancing with Milton Acornhe clumsy, uncouth, and with a snappish dispositionbut his heart was in the right placeas is hers, she hopesas perhaps is mineif only I‘d stop my dancingand peculiar, most peculiar, mid-summer metaphors.

60

pedro iisandra dawson

Patricia had seen too much, been hurt too many times. She’d been lied to so often she now assumed there was no truth in anyone’s words. Except Pedro’s. Pedro wasn’t so jaded, Pedro was blunt and sincere and despite his interest in the strange, or maybe because of it, he spoke in prickly facts. Lies were alien.

She didn’t understand why he wouldn’t talk about his feelings.

Pedro: yeah, it was a good book. You should read itPatricia: What was your favorite part?Pedro: I liked the killer robotsPatricia: ah, but even robots can be romanticPedro: pfft. Fuck that. I liked the buzz saws

No matter how she tried to get him to be honest about his emotions, he shut her down. There were clues, little things, well, big things, like spending twelve hours in chat, but whatever affection he might feel for her, he wouldn’t verbalize it.

He was afraid to expose himself, she inferred, but afraid of what? Afraid of her, afraid she might hurt him? That was the last thing she’d do. She treasured him, she valued him highly, she adored everything about him.

It was almost love, but not. Love required two sides.

Instead it was comfortable companionship, irreverent laughter, and slowly understanding each other. The more she learned, the more she liked.

The way he talked to her as though she was unshockable.The way be was bemused that she understood his warped humour.The way they shared a fascination with death.

What kind of girl could relate to all these things? What kind of outlook did it take to appreciate his idiosyncrasies?

He tried so hard to alienate himself from the world, including her, but she would have none of it. His misanthropy

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manifested in creative forms, his bitterness knew no bounds. She got it. He didn’t like humans. Except her.

Why was she different? What made her so compellingly strange they were compatible? And on the flip side, when he tried so hard to be antisocial, why was she attracted to that?

It was perplexing and disturbing. He didn’t want to like her, but he didn’t seem to be able to stop, and neither could she.

She gave him compassion, she gave him laughter, she gave him understanding, and strangest of all, she gave him affection.

He didn’t know what to do with that. There were obstacles, there was distance, and there were differences in age. All her stories and experiences, while he had few. He was naive in comparison.

What he didn’t know is that that was part of the reason she liked him. Sick of players and lies, she wanted freedom in truth, she wanted the genuine, and she wanted him to be nothing more than who he was. Everything. Her own life experiences mattered not at all. More than anything she wanted to start from scratch, and the combination of his youth and her own youthful attitude gave them that starting point.

She cared about him on so many levels it was frightening. For real.

Maybe that scared him too.

The only way to be rid of that fear was to expose it along with all the other feelings. Bring it into the sun and examine it, to loosen the muck.

But he wouldn’t talk about such things, he wouldn’t even consider it. It frustrated her to tears.

There had to be a way.

It seemed like their relationship was evolving, and she didn’t know what would emerge. It could be better than anything they’d experienced, it could be bliss, but it could also be leaden disappointment. He could reject her. Telling him how she felt was a serious risk.

She’d never reject him, she knew that much. She wanted to keep him in her life. Nights weren’t the same without him, dark was darker and music more melancholy. She needed him to smile.

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Needed, needed, pfft, she said to herself. That’s dependence. That’s not healthy, or attractive.

Unless you’re in love.

She wouldn’t hold him so tight, she wouldn’t constrict, she swore. He had to want her too.

Fuck, she still, even now, couldn’t tell if he did.

All she had was hope, and it was cradled in his hands, not hers.

“Hold it tight,” she whispered.

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midorielizabeth kate switaj

When I say her brand’s naive, it isn’t value judgement: I see engraved letters on the plastic case of eyeshadow she buys every week in front of me with my blue basket full of splotched bananas & half-price frozen garlic.

And if I say it’s the colorof a bruise: it’s just description except I don’t know if she’s wearing it

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La serie “Ohdiosas” forma parta de una unidad poética inédita titulada Óxido

iomara pastor

I.Que me mire con sus ojos Así de abiertosMe hace sentir como una corderita

Balo

II.Releo ese poema de CarsonSobre la turista en Roma

Ana se cambia el nombreEspanta a los perrosConduce como una guerrillera

III.El duerme sin cerrar la mirada

Como si tuviese cuarenta y cinco ojosY sólo durmieran dos a la vez

IV. En la isla, nadie - Renuncio -

V. Prendo una vela y la pongo encima de su foto

Roma está llena de gatos

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VI.Luego fuimos egipcioses una ironía

VII.Si pudiera robarme un cuadro famoso:Que sea Cronos devorándose a los hijos- De Goya -Sólo porque tienen un trasuntoustedes

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diana en la carnicería

The blood on it smeared into a mapCharles Simic

1.

El camino lleva un trozo de carne lagrimosa en el celode la faldaSobre bastiones de toronjas se diluye una yola de cítricos

Casi en tu isla,mi nave está a punto de naufragar

Atravieso el canaly no te encuentro

Estás de caceríaConviertes mi camisa en carnada de tus perrosHuelen mis pisadas y detengo mis suspiros

Mejor que no me encuentren

O mejor que yo te encuentre a ti primeroSigilosa Con tropiezos calculadosNo como si fuese un poema épicoUna enredadera de musgo pegada en una torre

A tropiezos como quien se encuentra una idea genial en el caminoy decide llevársela al carnicero a que la adobe

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Nada más

Pero, can eco,tu olfato está entrenadoal olor de la lluvia en la madeja de cobreque es mi fugao quizás tu rutao quizás digo lo mismo disfrazado y no lo noto

quizás sólo soy yo quien está ebria y no recuerda sus gemidospersiguiendo tus pisadas

Can que busca el rastro de una palabra que huyeque huele a óxido de cobreque cobra sangre en el tinterotiñendo papeles derramadoscon agua de mar en celo

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anna x.

She is as beautiful as an islandANNE CARSON

Cuando dijisteQue ella era tan bella como una isla

Te quise

Aunque sabía que te irías

Después de la cáscaratengo la certeza de la retenciónpara apalabrarahoras

Una vez más:fierecitas disímiles

es un placer de corte clásico

como las chuletas fritasen burbujas

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mekong james mcnaughton

Dark palm trees, crickets.A full moon slowsthe river to mercury.

A few fiery stars, Christmas lights

for the touristsin the bars over the roadfrom the temple.

Soft hellos.

*I mint memories like priceless coins and drop them in a pocketwith a hole in it.

*I remember a southern moonrise in a rinsed and darkening sky,the painted wave on a church stoppedin bloodless light,shadows hanged from the eaves.Clouds like used chamoiswere strewn on the floor of heaven.

*I build these wonkyscaffolds of names,scuttled truths,these tiny towers of ink.

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derry jesse p. ferguson

Kissed my girl by the factory wall Dirty old town, dirty old town —Irish folk song you are inert as a sleeping armyou are tucked up as with mother’s lovea lover’s discretion under a vulcanized lorry wheel you are barreling fast at a barrack or postoffice without moving you are quiet and made of horse pissfertilizer, petrol, plumbing supplies IRA standard issuea political pivot, leverage not lobbyist terribly potentialyou shrapnel sausage awaiting the impulseto blossom into the lull of this Ulster morning

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the oldest tools last longest jesse p. ferguson

my father’s workshop is a history of labour in brief, is an archive of handtoolsthat have out-worked hundreds of hands here the floorspace is memorized to the inch how many fingers have spent themselveson this saw? how many harvest tableskitchen cupboardswere shaved true beforethe cast-iron of this hand-plane would bear the hand-shape of men indelibly? such a tradesman as my father deals in ash-handled antiquities, and if you ask himof some curious awl or ball-peen he’ll shrug— he doesn’t know where it came from or where it’ll be when he’s through with it

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heavens downkrystyna kouri

The angels swim Toiling in the rock sided airThe oceans breatheMinnows and algaeReaching down to the heavens

We pray to eternal goddessesHands pointed to the coreWe fear the wicked onesThose that gaze upon us from the waters

At dawn, we swim up to the heavensA blue sparrow draws up from the currentThe soil reaches downDrawing daylight from the darkness

And we, the slightest artifactsWalk aloneIn indigos and purplesScabbing our handsOn the briar patches that pull us down

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tangents (for a susceptible season)paloma yannakakis

The river of water leans in where you stride across it—

not halting for breath, or to observe how the thrips thrive in this verdant region.

Seagulls are snipping away at the horizon,scripting linear algebra on the beach.

One by one the tree trunks unfurrowtheir deep, in-laid cuts. And yes, we left the sunken meadow there. But maybe this is only momentary peace in a savage land,nothing more or less, and the washed-out ridges of mud are the new monuments for an era gone cold.

With the net of my patience I capture a fleeting image of your shoulder descending under a golden light, where mountains form incongruous, mist-filled planes.

Who can tell where the pale shadows find their age, shifting between broken shafts of light?

Down to the heel, wornnear the end of a trembling sky, (even if it was an infinite sky),the alphabet of your reflection closes down.

Everyone has his reasons before which his mirror-image revolts:Not to say that we came upon a sight stripped of everything it once held—but that we know the beast of memory for what it is.

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notes to myself (the veiled interval)

“I am attaching a piece of theoretical work. The way a soldier crossing a stream holds his rifle high. It will be completely dry. Dry as a cough.”

Viktor Shlovsky

1

Not yet in my mid-twenties and already the harmless number weaves ahead without me. My heart grasping for new strings, this morning I foundthe clock in tatters over the kitchen stove.

The numinous light left us for modern, and westand content in half-relief, divided in the lightof our vague, yet persistent desires.Those undeterred by the cold of their mortal skin scavenge the extremes, all for a little vein of feeling—but how easily the blows come to me!

The past and future, each have their own allure, both requiring an entirely separate body, (not to mention a third party to man the technical difficulties of living on the narrow interval between).

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2

Already I have a past to lose sight of—how many more will pile up before I’m done?

Everything wears into life, one body pressing on another with unsuspected ferocity.

By now my childhood notes must be curling into their green, unbound age on a night thick with stars.

Here I am, wearing a variegated shirt, a thread for every moment of doubt,

but perhaps it’s true:to lose the untenable would be the worst.

But then, could it ever be lost or lose its way, having still to be found?

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grown-up son, readingelizabeth smither

He is reading a motorcycle manual. A Kawasaki.while I have my head in an autobiography.

He reads of pistons and fine adjustmentswhile I read of incidents and suppositions.

There is truth for each of us. But howcompanionable it feels. Two heads lowered –

mine raised briefly to record – the lookthat belongs to books. The brow leaning

as if the brain shifts to the forefront of its houselike someone standing lightly at the top of stairs

with one foot lightly on a treadand all self-consciousness gone, no

thought of making an entrance or an impressionthough he rides his Kawasaki to the bottom

to cheers and scandal and thronging girlsand I step lightly through my autobiography.

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sarah: pregnancy 2

Your shape: we know you’re one of those women who become a pumpkin early. Later you’ll place your hand under your belly the way pumpkins are sometimes raised on boards so they ripen dry. Your face however your body grows remains a girl amazed at a gift she can’t believe in while all your cells – your former cells – seem to be singing from a polished throat. The percussive kicks are simply music this time around as if your heart grew limbs and time thickens and slows in the remembered way and races in the remembered way.

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ritornojosie disciasio-andrews

quanti treni urlerannonella nottenei lunghi tunnel delle memorieprima che rinasca il soleall’alba di una speranza chi ci accogliera’alla luce di una giornata nuovala’ dove la realta’ rischiaral’incubocon la fresca rugiada di un mattino senza paure in quale stazionesi fermera’ il cuorecon le sue pesanti valigiedi ricordi quale fischio buonodi quale fermataci ricondurra’finalmenteverso casaverso noi stessiintericom’eravamo prima che la vitaavesse avuto il tempodi sfrantumarci l’animain tanta bianca brecciache schizza viasotto le pesanti rotaiedel direttissimo, sfrenato viaggio del destino.

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moon birth she has seen the black edge of nightbirthing a blood orange moonlighting up the sky with misty glowmagical dark water womancradling a fair headed child it was the face of love she sawthe man in the moontrailing blood across dark wavesflickering flames of memoriesorange, redyolk like a sun, moonemerging out of sombre depths the world’s face glowedas if for the first timebeyond all dreamsbursting illusionswith unexpected moon birthlike the night her children cameand the unknown took shapebeyond her willblood alchemy of newborn skin, eyes, lipscelestial bodies’ perfect formemerging out of waterout of darkness

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solo in giapponedomenico capilongo

quando il sole muoree la notte mi copre come il raffreddore il telefono muto e silenziosoi rumori della strada entrano senza permessoil ballo del ventol’autostrada che non dorme mai

quando chiudo gli occhi e non mi viene sonnoil frigo mi parla con i suoi brividila voce della mammami chiama per mangiarela nonna mi fa ricordare di lavarmi le manifrattelli che mi prendono in giroe papa`, seduto in canottiera, mi domanda come sto

si sente l’odore della pastae la musica della forchettache canta contro il piatto

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alone in japan(translation)

when the sun diesand the night covers me like a coldthe telephone mute and silentthe noise of the street enters without permissionthe dance of the windthe highway that never sleeps

when I close my eyes and sleep doesn’t comethe fridge talks to me with its shiversthe voice of my mothercalls me to eatmy grandmother reminds me to wash my handsmy brothers poke fun at meand dad, sitting in his undershirt, asks me how I am

I can smell the pastathe music of the forkthat sings against the plate

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the following poems are excerpts from a long poem sequence on the MISSING MAINLANDS CHILDREN’S CASE, BC circa 1980. Serial killer Clifford Robert Olson was eventually charged in the abduction, torture, and sexually motivated murders of eleven persons, male and female, prepubescent to adult, though he is suspected of many more. Particularly abhorent was the cash-for-bodies deal struck by the Attorney General’s Department that became necessary to gather enough evidence to convict him and deliver a life sentence. The case is one of the vilest in Canadian history. It is my hope my poetic explorations will go beyond mere prurience in examining the relationship between law and justice, and psychopathology to the capacity of human evil on both micro and macro scales. I see Olson as a pimple on the hide of a macho-demento culture: perhaps a look into his dark doll eyes will reflect much back to us that we need to see about so-called Western Civilization.

petty theftrichard stevenson

You try to steal a $100 planer.The 26-year-old female detective,told to keep an eye openfor a man answering your description,successfully wrestles you to the groundwhen attempts to frog march youback into the store from the parking lot fail. How embarrassing would that be

to any petty criminal? Not to you.You win a few; you lose a few

is the way you look at it. You triedto overpower your adversary but failed,

so now you have to do a leg in the digger.Oh well. It’s not like it isn’t home. When the Surrey cops come, you’re glib,

all smiles and braggadocio.Tell ‘em you’re ready to take your lumps.You’re a recidivist, what can you say?Pay my room and board for a while,I’m used to the scoff? It’s all a joke to you.You’ve gotten away with more than they know.

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That’s the thing, isn’t it? You get to be free as a bird on the wing

when you’re out. Chortle like a budgerigarwhen you’re in. The only sin is gettingcaught, and you’ve beat that beefmore often than not. Simple arithmetic:

you take a lickin’, just keep on tickin’.

married To one Joan Hale, forty-year-old red head.Not the sharpest tool in the shed, perhaps,but loyal and better than you ever deserved. You beat and verbally abused her,

but could be attentive, even adept between the sheets, to hear her tell the tale.

Became a born-again Christian,

attended church regularly to create the Mr. Suburban Clean Machine persona

you so desperately needed to help

keep the feds and local heat at bay, and she trusted you, bought

the endless shovels full you spread

about the need for car rentals in your new construction trade. You’d turn the corner

any day, make the business a success,

for hadn’t you always come up with cash when you really needed it? you said.

Joan became the business secretary,

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had a good head for figures, could always convince the customers drunken hubby would

pay the bills. Even got pregnant,

moved you into a low-rent apartment where the welfare moms made life pleasant

and you would find it suitable for

your own purposes, could feel a cut aboveand find lots of kids easy to impress. Just like a kid’s piggy bank, eh Cliffy –all you have to do is smash it with a hammerto get a little pocket change and get your end wet.

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former prostitute A news item on the radioMr. Walker hears on his way home:

a Clifford Robert Olson, forty-one-year-old construction worker, up on a sex and firearms charge for abducting a former prostitute.

She’s only sixteen, the announcer says. Of course the cops looked into it.Of course he was an early suspect --

one of three, in fact; the cops checked him out right away.

All three had alibis, of course, and Olson was the glibbest one, the best talker. Slow walker with a sheepish grin. He walked.

He walks a lot because he

knows the law. Has spent more than half his life behind bars for boosting cars, driving impaired, B & E’s, other nuisance beefs. He’s street wise, hip, even on the payroll as a police informer. Charges of rape, gross indecency, buggery have all been stayed.

He’s, therefore, not a sex offender – yet. Our girl, the sixteen-year-old

former prostitute, on the other hand, makes a poor witness. Who could trust her word in a court of law?

What corroborating evidence is there?Olson walked. Olson walks a lotand would sue for defamation

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if word got out he diddled kids.

All the cops can do is watch him.Don’t forget, missing kids aren’t

dead kids until they’re found. Missing kids in different jurisdictions, let alone bodies, aren’t necessarily the work of one man. This is before

VICAP, before computers, remember.Who’s gonna get the collar? Who’sgonna make the links? Twenty-twenty

hindsight is perfect; the law? Well …

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kim’s story Duped. Taken in by the promise

of ten bucks an hour to shampoo rugs in an apartment complex in Whistler.

Picked up in Squamish. Drank a few beer. Taken to a motel and raped.Raped again, more viciously

the next morning. Held at gunpoint the whole time. Eventually sodomized

and beaten up. Managed to escape

at a service station by pretending to know the owner. Abandoned like yesterday’s news, more likely.

Not before she watched in horror

as Olson banged off a few caps speeding after three older teens who had dared to beak him off.

Of course she was terrified.Of course she bided her time.

Of course she’d make a convincing witness in spite of having been on the game.

But Olson hired a hotshot lawyer.

He got off that time. Kept his name off the known offender blotter just two weeks before he started killing.

Or so we assume. We have

only his word for that, though it’s a safe bet he’s killed lots

of kids we don’t know about.

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A real graduate. Well traveled.Suspected of gross indecency beefs

in Nova Scotia. A road scholar.Glib as the road is longer. We knew he was a rear admiral.

We knew he diddled kids.We knew he was a violent offender,that these things always escalate. But what could we do? Thelawyer got him off. Do you want usto shoot every fast-talkin’ lawyer?Why do you think there are so many sick jokes about the motherfuckers?Law and justice are distant relations.It’s pretty hard to make a beef stick,

and Olson’s the original Teflon man. He’s had lots of practice, believe me!If I could have throttled the bastard

and gotten away with it, I might have tried.But I’m not like him. I don’t have it in me. Years of practicing restraint, I suppose,

though the Lord knows the guy wouldn’t even make decent fertilizer.

I’d be worried what weird plant would grow.

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trial, day 1 Arraigned. Jury selected. You look

around the courtroom, smile obliquely at members of the news media. Then spy Mrs. Kozma’s youngest daughter, stare

at her with pitiless eyes. The mother sees you; you mouth the words, “fuck you.”

If anyone had harboured any doubts

or bought your ten pleas of innocence or found your business suit and demeanor convincing, the look of the abyss they saw staring back at them then would have given them pause, made them shiver.

Every darting glance a shiv after that,you did your best to look interested,studious; took a pad out of a briefcase,took notes, but no one was buyingyour act. Maxwell Silver’s hammer had flashed

and you were no Thor, God of Thunder, just a nasty, pudgy little troll,ready to pounce on the littlestBilly Goat Gruff whose soft clip clopof hooves could be heard on the bridge.Slowly you sank back into the primordial ooze,only your eyes and nostrils showing.

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the alena cantataskate baggott

Alena had two portraits of Queen Victoria and a front parlour. The Queen had one arm that was shorter than the other. Everyone knew about the defect, but in her portraits - both in the one of her as a young girl and in the one of her as a weary widow and mother - the defect was always artfully disguised. Even with her short arm, Queen Victoria could reach across continents, across oceans, and inspire loyalty. Loyalty not just in the heart of my great-grandmother, but such loyalty that Canadians have celebrated her birthday with a long weekend and fireworks in lieu of the current monarch’s for generations now. She was flawed. She was perfect.

The parlour was filled with ornaments: with figurines of cherubs, of bankrupt dandies, of shy children. There were scrimshaw pieces, water colours and landscape oils mounted in gilt frames. Fruit bowls and silver services were filled with arrangements of dried violets and roses so old that their petals smelled only of dust.

The room looked like the walls were about to cave in under the weight of so many possessions. It was a relief on the eyes to look at the black velvet curtain that could be drawn to cut the room in half. The front half of the room was for men and smoking. The back half—when the curtain was drawn—could not be seen from the street and was for women and talking. Once, before I was born, before even my father was born, my great grandmother’s parlour had often been filled with guests too.

Alena’s piano had stood in the back half of the room and I believe that when she sang it did not matter that the gentlemen were separated from the ladies by a curtain or that there was no view into the room from the street. When she began to sing I imagine that the men emptied their pipes and opened the windows to wave the smoke out with copies of the evening paper. I believe that they hurried to draw the curtain aside. Even in the worst cold of winter people in the street used to stop ice still to listen to what floated out the window. If the strangers in the street had been soldiers in the First World War, or if they took the evening paper, they could put a face to the voice.

In the newspaper illustration she appeared a giantess towering above the soldiers about to sail from lake to river, to Montreal, to the Atlantic, to Europe, toward adventure or death. Her evening fan of black ostrich feathers was fuller and wider than the others I have seen. It was specially made for her. Her neck was bare and arched back to bear the force it took to throw high notes from her throat with lungs that were so strong they could snap the bones in her corset. From the sheer mechanics of it all, Alena had more to hide with her fan than other women.

This was the display that also rewarded guests for coming to dine in the middle-class town house that stood

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behind the apothecary. Alena’s husband, the chemist, was boring and shy. Alena, when she did anything other than sing, was odd. Above the piano Queen Victoria, the portrait of the widow, held up her head that carried the veil and crown with her one strong arm under her chin. She looked capable and weary. History is very short.

***Alena took the temperance oath when she was twelve.

“Lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine,” she used to say and mean it.

“I’ve been drinking Rye and Seven all day long,” my brother Hugh used to say in response.

I was more demonstrative. I owed it to her because she sacrificed cycling for me. On the day I was born Alena donated her bicycle to the Salvation Army. She was seventy-seven. The old ladies in our neighbourhood—old even though they were young enough to be Alena’s daughter—used to stop me in the street to tell me how relieved they were when she gave up cycling.

“We were so worried about Mrs. Lomond,” they used to say. “A married lady of that age had no business ever riding a bicycle.”

The donation ended her rides through the park where she was often seen eating a picnic of orange peel from a paper bag. This caused many to question the reports of her great wealth. It also explains why in a crime-ridden city populated with old ladies living all alone, Alena’s house was never robbed. What I know is that Alena ate orange peel for the sake of her politics. During the Depression Alena had seen a newsreel of Oakies who had arrived in California with such hunger that they picked orange peels up off the ground and ate them. It may have been the secret to her longevity.

I am sure she felt the loss of that bicycle in the same way that other old people fear losing their driving licenses, but she had to give it up. She was following through on a promise made to God after my parent’s first child died. Through the braiding of destiny, coincidence and guilt, Alena thought she had something to do with the infant’s death. She may have thought she’d cursed the conception.

Before the mass for my parents’ wedding Alena gathered my mother’s little brothers and sisters around her to sing them a song. She thought that they were the choir who would naturally need a quick lesson. When she found out that my mother was sister to all ten of them she said, “A Catholic? Oh, my dear, no.” She cautioned my parents on the dangers of starting a large family too soon.

There was no other music at my parents’ wedding.

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I don’t know if there was music at Alena’s own wedding. Alena’s father chose the pharmacist to be her husband for two reasons. The first was his income. The second was that there was a doctor in his family. Alena’s father was the son of a drowned sailor and an influenza-stricken mother. He had been raised with much Dickensian suffering by a doctor and his wife. He was proud that, as an orphan, he and his daughter met the standards of his almost family.

After the wedding Alena’s family found out that the groom’s relative was not a medical doctor, but a doctor of philosophy. They felt cheated, but it was too late.

Three years after the wedding my great grandfather hired a woman from the church to come to tea and talk to Alena. Alena, expecting a newly returned missionary wife, placed the sheet music for her favourite hymns on the piano and prepared the silver service, she was ready to offer shocked reactions to tales of pagan babies and naked tribes.

“Do you intend to have children?” the missionary asked.

“If God is willing,” Alena answered.

“God did not intend for husbands and wives to have celibate marriages. You and your husband must have at least one child to serve Him if you are able. You vowed no less before His witnesses on your wedding day. It is the way of our faith,” the missionary wife preached.

“I beg your pardon?” Alena asked.

“You and your husband must not keep separate bedrooms.”

“My parents kept separate bedrooms and they have two children,” Alena argued.

“Yes, but you see—” the missionary stopped. Alena did not see. “Is your father dead? Did he not explain husbands to you on your wedding day?”

He had not. He later explained that it wasn’t an oversight. He assumed there were advantages to marrying his daughter to a medical man. Alena did not understand innuendo. The lady from the church had to be very clear.

“Imagine that,” Alena said when she finally understood. “I have never heard of anything so strange in my entire life.”

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Alena called on her mother later that afternoon and repeated all that she had learned that afternoon about the mysteries of married life.

“How could you be so stupid?” her mother asked.

The two women left immediately to go visit a doctor in the next town. Alena’s mother thought there must be some physical problem.

“I wish I could do this the natural way,” the young doctor said before he clipped Alena’s hymen with a surgical instrument.

By the time the bills from the good churchwoman and the doctor arrived, my great grandfather was more than happy to pay for services rendered. The evening after their work was done, his first child had been conceived. Alena could not remember the second occasion that would have produced her second child, but she did theorise about a certain thunderstorm.

It was Alena who taught me the language of fans. A fan was the all-knowing eye that fluttered over the innocent young woman. It was the veil that could conceal any girl from the full view of men who knew what women did not. The fan extended the fingers of delicate hands, also hidden, under elbow-length evening gloves. Not disguise, not camouflage, a fan was the cultivated contradiction of decorative hiding and obvious silence. A preface to a face.

She demonstrated all this for me as she stood behind her husband’s apothecary counter. When the fan was closed she held it under her chin, lips pursed with disapproval and her eyebrows drawn close together with thought—the symbols of impending feminine doom. Romantic interest was a gesture illustrated by an open fan, eyes emphasised by covering the lips and jaw, a slight crinkle in her cheeks betrayed a shy and silent smile hidden beneath the ostrich feathers. These were the muscular representations of emotion.

During these lessons all I could appreciate was a self-generated breeze. Afterward I began to believe that I was the last living woman fluent in the language of fans. I tried to come up with some notation system of fan choreography. I wanted to standardise symbols to trace onto the pages of the sheet music Alena left me in her will, so that others might one day know just how she performed the hymns and anthems of her era. That was a project I abandoned. I learned that the language of fans was more than could be noted. A fan extended the ritual of lovers’ gazes from moments into hours, from hours to days. At its essence is the performance acted out every time a woman reaches up, puts her arms around a man’s neck and breaks the lock her eyes had put onto his eyes to glance down on the floor. At that moment, she articulates with one brief glance back into his eyes: “That is all I will do. Now be a man and let me go on dreaming.”

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To keep her voice warm in a house empty of daily conversation, Alena used to do vocal slides, a flow of unbroken notes through an octave. When the door was opened to occasional visits from guilt-ridden relatives all they received was a nod in greeting. Her warm up accompanied the removal of overcoats and shoes. Only when the warm-up was complete could the performance begin.

The audience, the visitors, sat while my great-grandmother stood in a soldier’s posture in front of the silver elephant. As a child my father christened the elephant Albert. To keep the game going we used to rub his trunk and say hello when ever we went to visit. Albert the elephant stood on the floor. He was dressed with a jewelled caravan to carry the rajah upon his back. He was five feet high and almost as wide. The portrait of Queen Victoria, the widow, was hung above. I could never play Cowboys and Indians with my brothers because of that combination. Just when my imagination was ready to storm headlong into the thundering dust-clouds of a stampede of wild horses or buffalo, I would be interrupted by an image of Queen Victoria riding her sedate elephant across the prairie.

There were two parts to every visit with Alena: the lecture and the show. The lecture was composed of quotes from mission reports. “It must be remembered,” she began in colonial verse, “that the Indian people, with the exception of being heathens, are more civilised than we. They bathed once a week while even the most noble Englishmen did but once a year.”

The lecture complete, she would stretch out her stiff fingers. When the sounds of fine bones cracking for want of use had passed, she turned on her heel and came face to face with Albert the silver elephant. Although all I could see was her back, I could visualise exactly how the expression on her face changed from emotional silence, to confusion and finally to remembrance.

“I will have to tell you a story,” she would admit. Her voice would drop and the vaudevillian tone of conspiracy would fill the room.

“The scow was being towed down a quiet part of the river,” Alena began in a calm steady whisper, “when the chains snapped!” There were two people aboard and the roar of the mighty Niagara filled their heads, deafening them as the current drew the vessel closer and closer to the rapids stretched out before the fall. On the shores of both countries the screaming of the men aboard could be heard above the current’s din. Among the crowds of tourists, sweet couples on their honeymoon heard the screams and clung to each other, unable to look away. By some miracle the iron of the hull was caught against the rocks and that held the boat from the edge of the falls. The water, pushing in some contest of the elements, tried to tear the seam formed between iron and rock. The echo of the ship being heaved ever so slightly, ever so constantly could be heard on shore too. The honeymoon couples learned with this sound that love was not about husbands, not about wives.

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“The shipping company men arrived and tried to throw a line to the people aboard the ship. Each time they threw the rope they missed by some slight measure and each time they missed, despite some frantic reach of the people on deck, the old scow moved closer to the falls with that unbearable screech of iron grinding against rock.

“Finally the rope was tied and the trapped had to grasp the rope and swing hand over hand across the rapids to the shore. They collapsed, hearts beating on land. The men in the crowd picked them up to their feet and held them upright so they too could turn to watch the water gather force that, with one final push, would lift the boat off the rocks and send it to the final turn downward—over the falls.

“The boat stayed stuck. It is still there today. The rescued took off their hats and stoked their hair with relief. Both of them, young and strong, had white hair.”

“What colour was Alena’s hair? Before it was white,” I asked my father.“It’s been white as long as I’ve been around,” my father answered.

“So you were after the boat.”

“What boat?”

“You know as well as I do,” my mother interrupted, “what colour Alena’s hair used to be. Tell Miranda the truth, David.

“It was legendary. It was auburn,” my mother said. “It was the colour of perfectly brewed Ceylon tea of the highest quality. Everyone knows that. She wore it loose only for arias and it was said to touch the floor of the stage. When she sang for the soldiers, guards had to be assigned to stop the men from coming up to touch her hair.”

I believed that story like I believed in God. Then, like now, my own hair was thin and brown like soil where nothing will grow. I don’t know how long I went on believing that Alena had been aboard the old scow. I did not know how much smaller her own tragedy was. I overheard it at her sister’s funeral.

Alena’s younger sister Birdie was not a Victorian. She had not taken the temperance oath when she was twelve. Birdie was, in her own words, a tough dame. A tough dame with class. Her husband was a motor company president who believed the Mafia was after him. They lived in Detroit and only visited Canada during prohibition.

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Birdie and her husband came in at three after a night of bathtub gin and bragging about the jazz that could be heard in Detroit. They left the front door open. It was the middle of winter and a thin sheet of ice formed across the contents of the house. Each elaborate curve of every decoration in the parlour took on a glass-slick appearance of fragility. It was that ice coat that made spider web cracks in the surface of everything and caused the sound that woke the household that night.

Every string in Alena’s piano snapped with the cold. It was a horrific sound—like iron grinding against rock. The day after, her husband went out with a large sum of money and bought Albert the silver elephant. It was delivered to the house in a piano crate. Albert broke her heart.

Now this is where the improvisation begins. It’s at this point where I cannot say how much of the memory is about Alena and, all the stories that have been told, and how much it is about me.

Alena did not ride the bus until I taught her how to buy tickets, ask for a transfer and pull the chord to ring the bell. After she gave her bike to charity, Alena took to walking everywhere. She could walk from her home down town to her husband’s grave at the cemetery. She used to amaze people with her old-age athleticism.

Then, when Alena was eighty-nine, she slipped on the ice and broke her leg. She continued to walk on that broken leg until spring. She didn’t even limp.

Shortly after Christmas that winter, my father left for Rome. He had a contract that gave him three months work. It wasn’t unusual for him to leave for months at a time. We weren’t unloving children and I’m sure we missed Dad while he was gone, but reunions and departures were so routine that we didn’t expect our father to show any grief upon leaving or celebration upon his return. We didn’t even expect presents. Nevertheless, when my father came home from Italy at the end of March, my mother packed all five of us into the station wagon to go and meet his plane.

We saw Dad as soon as he cleared customs and dragged himself into the baggage claim area. We were still standing behind the glass doors that separated the baggage carousels from the arrivals lounge when he saw us. Thomas started waving and shouting “Daddy we’re over here,” and Dad dropped his shoulder bags and started to cry.

We knew the Italian influence on my father’s new regard for family life had truly taken hold on the way home. He pulled into the parking lot of a toy store in what—the last time we had driven through—had been a farm on the edge of the suburbs. This was not any toy store. It was a huge American toy super-mall. As far as the eyes could see were the towering shelves stocked with all the movie and cartoon merchandise that Madison Avenue had ever conceived of. My father looked down fondly over his five dumb-struck children and said:

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“Everyone can choose their favourite.”

It must have been a profitable trip because my father put no limits upon us. My sister and brothers went wild. Sarah and Alexander led the charge into the aisles leaving a trail of boxes streaked with drool and fingerprints in their wake. Hugh, who was eleven, and Thomas, who was five, didn’t behave much better. It was the most embarrassing spectacle of my life.

My mother tried to make it easier for me, encouraging me to indulge my father’s whim.

“And now, Miranda, what would you like to have?” She asked in her softest fairy tale and lullaby voice.

The truth is that I had looked at all those rows of Barbie dolls, stuffed animals, electronic games and building sets, and I hadn’t wanted anything. I told my parents that there was nothing I wanted and my father looked like his heart would break.

“Our oldest one is all grown up,” he said to Mum.

“You’re not going to cry again, are you?” I asked my father.

We came home with our returned father, a new dump truck, a bulldozer, a red Corvette and a speed boat. We found Alena waiting in one to the wicker chairs on our porch. We never knew when Alena would come to visit and we never knew how long she had been waiting while we were gone. I’m sure all Alena wanted was to see her grandson home safe after yet another journey. Instead, she became the centre in a frenzy of transportation toy demonstrations. Thomas tried to include Alena in the game and drove his new dump truck over her shoe and up her skirted leg. Grandmama’s face was immediately drained of all colour. Even her lips became as white as snow.

Then she screamed.

Dad bounded forward and folded Alena’s long skirt up over her knee. Her calf was purple, swollen like a tree stump, and the skin looked like it was about to burst.

“Oh my God,” Mum said.

Dad went inside for the afghan we kept folded over the back of the couch, wrapped his grandmother up in it and carried her to the car like a baby. I had never thought of Alena as small and frail before. I had never thought of my father as massive and strong before.

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All of us were quiet while Dad pulled the car out of the drive to take Alena to the hospital, but after they rounded the corner Sarah and Alexander just couldn’t stand the tension any longer. Their speech echoed motors revving and tires screeching once more.

“Be quiet,” Mum shouted at them. “For all you kids know your grandmama is having her leg sawed off right this minute.”

Sarah and Alexander were quiet and still for five seconds.

“Will the doctors and nurses put it in a box for her to take home?” Alexander asked.

Alena’s leg was not amputated. The bone had to be surgically set after she had been given two days of intravenous-drip antibiotics to kill infection. Dad wouldn’t let the doctors admit Alena to the hospital for her recovery. He said that elderly patients lying in hospital beds never fail to catch pneumonia and die. So, Hugh moved in with Thomas and Alexander, Sarah and I moved into Hugh’s room and Alena came home to us in her fresh white cast with a blue rubber heel.

After spending three days with her leg propped up on a stack of pillows, the plaster was pronounced dry and Alena was permitted to put the rubber heel of the walking cast down on the floor. We all gathered in “the girls’ room” to watch Alena try out her plaster leg and we cheered her on like parent’s encouraging their baby to take its first steps.

That night Sarah and Alexander sneaked into Alena’s room with their set of felt tip markers. They decorated the entire surface of Alena’s cast with a tangled arrangement of incredible vines and violets, thorns and thistles, of roses and long pampas grasses.

When Alena came down to breakfast wearing her Technicolor plaster, Dad reached across the table, grabbed Sarah’s ear with one hand and Alexander’s with the other, but he had to let go because Alena was beaming. The cast was a beautiful sight.

“Oh, thank you my dear ones,” she said. “Thank-you. I think I will go home today.”My father devised a schedule. He would check in with Alena every morning, my mother and Thomas would check in with her on their way home from the kindergarten at lunch time. On Sundays she would come to us for dinner. The afternoons and Saturdays were divided up among Hugh, Sarah, Alexander and me.

We were outraged.

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“We are too young to take on this kind of responsibility,” said Hugh.

“That may be true,” Dad replied, “But I have to work with the kids I’ve got. I can’t just pick up the phone and order in a bunch of offspring who are a few years older and more practical to have around.”

“But what are we supposed to do with her?” I asked.

“Take her to the cemetery to visit her husband’s grave, take her to the movies, stay at home and make tea. Sit with her.”

The first Saturday with Alena was my turn. It was raining so we couldn’t go out and risk Alena’s cast from dissolving into a puddle. Alena and I sat in the parlour saying nothing to each other for what seemed like hours. Finally—

“I have some treasures I could show you,” she said and hobbled out of the parlour on her blue heel.

I’m sure I tried to convince myself that it was not wrong to go through Alena’s things. Alexander and Sarah had always run through that house pulling things off of shelves and slamming closet doors as if they lived there. No one ever seemed to mind them doing it.

There was a drawer in the sideboard that was full of pills. There were hundreds of packets of laxatives, stomach powders, aspirins and cough drops. Not one package could have come from a time before 1965.

I could swallow one of these or all of these, I remember thinking. I could get sick and I could even die. It wouldn’t even be my fault because I am just a little girl.

I also remember thinking that it would really punish them. That my parents would be really sorry for sending me there if I got sick. With that thought I knew that I was not just a little girl. Just then, I heard the step-thump of Alena’s rubber heel and I slammed the drawer closed with such a bang that the glass in the picture frames rattled and the mirror hanging by the door fell off the wall and smashed to bits.

“My goodness Miranda,” Alena said calmly. “That was loud enough to wake the dead.” And then she fluttered the feathers in the great fan she was carrying.

I had never seen such a wonderful thing before.

100

pool hall princesssandy ashton

I’m playing pool at the bar downtown drinking heavily.

Water.

The heat brings in the tired and the old from off the streets,

and their ugly faces become hidden by the dim lights.

I watch as stereotypical cultures mingle among other men,

and this hardly glamorous girl is deemed beautiful

because she has no competition in a place like this.

The table is full of multi-coloured solids

and I’m losing once again.

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contributors

sandy ashton is a writer and illustrator originally from Brantford Ontario. Her poem “It’s Dark” was published in the spring 2004 edition of Quills Canadian Poetry magazine that is published quarterly in B.C and sold throughout Canada. She is currently enrolled in a Creative Writing Certificate program in Toronto and working on cover art for a local Brantford writer.

joshua backer

kate baggott is a Canadian writer currently working in Europe. She holds a BA from the University of Torontoand an MFA from the University of British Columbia. Her published work ranges from technology journalism to experimental fiction and everything in between. Links to recently published pieces can be found at http://www.katebaggott.com

joel benabu is currently pursuing a PhD at the Graduate Centre for the Study of Drama at the University of Toronto. Most recently he was the stage manager for Paid on Both Sides (2005) and he has also directed several works on stage including: The Zoo Story by Edward Albee ( Jerusalem 1999), The Jewish Wife by Bertolt Brecht (Jerusalem 1999), Jean Genet’s The Maids (Jerusalem 1998) and Everyman (Jerusalem 1997).

michelle blackwell

domenico capilongo has had work published in several literary magazines including Descant and Lichen. I have also won an honourable mention (2nd place) in the 2004 Toronto Star Poetry Contest and was nominated for the Journey Prize for fiction (2005). I live in Toronto, Canada, and teach high school alternative education and creative writing

sandra dawson is a Vancouver writer who spends far too much time on the Internet. She writes a cyberpunk sci fi short story serial as well as poetry and literary fiction. Pedro 2 was a story she couldn’t resist writing. The romance inspired by her lengthy chats with the irascible Pedro was irresistible.

josie disciasio-andrews is a part-time graduate student of Italian Literature at U of T. I am a full-time teacher of French. In my career I have also taught Italian. I also speak Spanish. I love literature and mostly poetry. I have a few poems being published in Guernica’s and Canada’s Poetry Institute’s 2006 anthologies.

tim dwyer is an audio/visual artist from the States, who recently moved to Toronto, Canada. His “Radar” series is a part of a continuing project to confine randomized processes to a ridged grid format. The source material for this series are magnified images of components from a once classified government radar system developed in the 1970’s.

bjesse p. ferguson is a poet and musician from Cornwall, On. He is a consulting editor for Quills Canadian Poetry Magazine, and is on the editorial board of the Ottawa literary journals Yawp and Bywords. In the fall

of 2006 he intends to begin research for a PhD dissertation on the work of Irving Layton.

stacey may fowles is a writer, text based visual artist, and graduate in English Literature and Women’s Studies. Her exhibited artwork has asked the world to apologize and helped women have g-spot orgasms, while her writing has been published in Fireweed, Kiss Machine, and Hive Magazine. She has recently completed her first novel: Broken Plate Ideology: a collective recollection. For further information contact brokenplateideology@hotmail.com.

james a. hussar is completing his fourth year of studies with the University of Notre Dame’s PhD in Literature program. His research interests include narratives relating to Jewish agricultural colonization in Brazil and Argentina, and messianic themes in Portuguese Literature.

krystyna kouri is French Canadian and was born and raised in Sherbrooke, Quebec. She works as a lawyer and has recently published some of her work in the United States. Krystyna recently moved to Toronto, and is currently working on her first novel.

christian macpherson’s short stories have appeared in Lichen Arts and Letters Preview, the New Quarterly and the Grist Mill. His poetry has appeared in several journals and anthologies, including Queen’s Quarterly, Jones AV., and On Spec.

rie makino is a PhD candidate in English at Arizona State University. She is currently working on a dissertation which focuses on Asian American Women’s Literature.

philip o’sullivan

mara pastor is a student of the PhD Literature Program at the University of Notre Dame. Her first poetry book, “Alabalacera”, has been published with Terranova Editors. In addition, she is coeditor of “La Secta de los Perros” literature magazine and she has been selected by “En Rojo” weekly cultural magazine as one of the resident writers of the “De Trasmano” literary section.

nora m. peterson grew up bilingual and spent her childhood between her two “native” countries, Germany and the U.S. Her search for a bicultural identity and “Heimat” has led her to find her poetic voice. Peterson graduated from Carleton College and is a graduate student at Brown University, where she is interested in late medieval literature.

elizabeth smither was the first woman Te Mata New Zealand poet laureate (2001-2003). She has published 12 collections of poetry, including the prize-winning A pattern of marching (1989) and The Lark Quartet (1999) both published by Auckland University Press. She has also written four collections of short stories and has just completed a fourth novel.

fiction writer, poet and playwright j. j. steinfeld lives in Charlottetown. He has published a novel, Our Hero in the Cradle of Confederation (Pottersfield Press) and nine short story collections, the previous three by Gaspereau Press: Should the Word Hell be Capitalized?, Anton Chekhov Was Never in Charlottetown, and Would You Hide Me? Steinfeld’s most recent publication is a chapbook of short fiction, Not a Second More, Not a Second Less (Mercutio Press). His stories and poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and periodicals, and over thirty of his one-act and full-length plays have been performed in various forms, ranging from staged readings to full productions.

richard stevenson teaches various English and Creative Writing courses at Lethbridge Community College. He writes for both children (YA verse, picture book, YA novel) and adults (more than a dozen collections of free verse; haiku, senryu, and tanka; jazz poetry, etc.) His most recent books are Alex Anklebone and Andy the Dog (Bayeux 2004), Parrot with Tourettes (Black Moss/Palm Poets Series 2004) and Riding on a Magpie Riff (Black Moss Press, forthcoming). He has also recorded a CD with jazz/poetry troupe Naked Ear.

elizabeth kate switaj, originally from Seattle, currently teaches English to elementary school students in Ashikaga, an hour north of Tokyo by limited express train. She holds an MFA in poetics and creative writing from New College of California, and her poems have appeared in several small press journals. Read her blog at http://qassandra.livejournal.com

paloma yannakakis is a graduate student in Comparative Literature at Cornell University. A native of New Jersey, she recently obtained a B.A. from Harvard College. When she is not busy reading modern Frenchphilosophy or the odd poem, she can be spotted hiking on the trails of Ithaca, NY.

transverse

editor annarita primier

critical editors pablo pemeja, annarita primier

creative editor lisa fiorindi

formatting and proofreading laurel damashek

cover design annarita primier

transverse would like to thank the centre for comparative literature for their continued sup-port for each and every issue, pablo pemeja and lisa fiorindi for their infallible skill in editing the critical and creative portions of this issue, laurel damashek for her patient proofreading and formatting, and most importantly, all the contributors for their great works.

thank you for your participation,

annarita primier