The Complexities of Contextualizing Power: A Theory in Thirteen
By Trisha Gupta
I. The woman is not displaying the characteristic physical indications of fear. She is not trembling, slouching, or cowering. Quite the contrary in fact; she is upright on an inlet of taupe dirt with water establishing a sort of photographic frame about her. She is wet; her ebony hair lies matted on her head but for a few wisps deviating from her traditional Indian center parting and her pastel azure sari clings tightly to her dark amber skin. She is cradling a baby to her bosom in a modest blanket while two men struggle behind her in the periphery with a trunk.
II. Displayed in the Modernism on the Ganges exhibit in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Raghubir Singh’s photograph After Crossing the Luni River, Barmer, Rajasthan (1975) sheds light on an intricacy in the relationship between the contextualization of power and female empowerment intimated by the woman’s portrayal in a familial scene in the image. In his study of Singh’s works in Raghubir Singh: Modernism On The Ganges, Shanay Jhaveri bases his description of Singh’s piece on the woman by specifically isolating the idea that Singh portrays her as being “of a certain composure” while the men are “off center and behind her” (54).
III. This consideration of the artwork’s explicit details prompts the realization that Singh may be depicting the woman in an ironic light. She is, as Jhaveri articulates, central to the image and of a
composed manner while two men grapple in the background— possibly indicative of the woman’s power (54). However, the woman is holding a child and consequently assuming the stereotypically feminine role of caregiver while the men assume the characteristically masculine role of manual laborers. This representation of power within the woman’s domestic role seems limiting then, as it reflects the repressive gender norms at the time in India and may, by extension, undermine female empowerment through constraining power to a specific context.
IV. In examining this theory that the contextualization of power can undermine female empowerment, historical background of the piece is essential. At the time in which this photograph was taken —1975—Indira Gandhi, a woman, held a substantial amount of national power in India. Thus, it is interesting that Singh portrayed the woman as central, composed, and powerful in a familial setting during a time in which a woman was in national power.
V. Surprisingly, however, Gandhi expressed that “I have often said that I am not a feminist” in her speech on the freedom of women, “True Liberation of Women.” In the same speech, she went on to say that “Indian women…have the genius of synthesis, to adapt and absorb. That is what gives them resilience to face suffering and to meet upheavals with a degree of calm.” Singh’s image is relevant here as in the piece, the woman’s posture and expression in the midst of “upheaval” indicate a “degree of calm” (Gandhi) or as Jhaveri stated, “composure” (54). Implying that women’s “resilience” comes with adapting to circumstances as opposed to pushing for change, Gandhi bases the “genius” of Indian women
on this ability to “adapt and absorb” – an idea that seems ludicrous and contradictory to her position as Prime Minister (Gandhi).
VI. When pondering feminism, however, it is important to understand that in the late 1900s when Gandhi was in power, the concept was feared. In his study of the empowerment of women in India over time, Jugal Misra illuminates the negative interpretation of female empowerment through his statement “empowerment is a dynamic process aiming at transfer of power to women” (871). Thus, Gandhi may have refrained from calling herself a feminist for fear that the men around her would not approve of a “transfer of power to women” (Misra 871). A variation of these gender dynamics appears in Singh’s image as the woman’s authority is in cradling the baby while the men’s is in physical exertion— demonstrating a lack of equality.
VII. Gandhi went on to state in her speech “True Liberation of Women” that “To be liberated, woman must feel free to be herself, not in rivalry to man but in the context of her own capacity and her personality”. This is both empowering and deeply problematic. C. Vlassof, in his study of the changing mindsets relative to female liberation in India over a few decades, quantitatively illustrated in Gender Equality and Inequality in Rural India: Blessed with a Son that there was an increase in overall liberal thought in relation to women in India throughout the span of Gandhi’s leadership. He found that in 1975, 60% of people believed it acceptable for a wife to eat with her husband while in 2008, 95% believed it acceptable (Vlassoff 68). This statistic, one of many demonstrating the increase in women’s liberation advocacy over the span of Gandhi’s leadership (1966-1984), reinforces the connection in Singh’s
photograph between Gandhi’s national power and domestic female empowerment demonstrated by the woman’s composure in the photo.
VIII. Vlassoff’s statistics are complicated, however, by Arthur Rubinoff’s review of Gandhi’s foreign policy, in which he states that “During her first tenure, 1966-1977, she was preoccupied with the consolidation of her domestic position, and this reduced her role in world affairs” (644). Rubinoff notes that Gandhi encouraged women to find power in their own contexts but when she herself pursued this, she found it difficult to juggle with her “role in world affairs”, thereby exemplifying the limitations of containing empowerment to one context (Rubinoff 644).
IX. This push toward women’s liberation then seems contrived: although Gandhi championed women’s freedom, she encouraged women to find this freedom “not in rivalry to man but in the context of her own capacity”. Gandhi is not saying that women should challenge patriarchy, but instead that they should seek freedom within their own situations without rivaling men to do so. This form of liberation is skewed then, as it is evocative of settling and actively searching for freedom in repressive situations. Consequently, Gandhi’s thinking is limiting as it prompts women to restrict their liberation to present circumstances instead of questioning stereotypes. This is certainly not to say that women can’t find power in being wives or mothers, but Gandhi’s wording “In the context of her own capacity” is problematic as it generates boundaries around women’s potential. This is exemplified in Singh’s photograph as although the woman has found power in 9
being a caretaker, she may be trapped by this specific contextualization of power.
X. However, the men in Singh’s photograph aren’t explicitly restraining the woman and similarly, the men in my family aren’t repressive; I cannot recall any instances of the men asking the women to cook, clean, or attend to them. However, the unspoken expectations of Indian culture are restricting, and by contextualizing power to the realms of cultural norms, my grandmother, mother, and the woman in the photo follow Gandhi’s advice, and aren’t entirely liberated.
XI. In my grandparents’ generation, the kitchen in the traditional Indian household was women’s turf, and consequently, my grandmother’s own context of liberation was in her duties as a housewife and it was in cooking and shopping for the household that she felt most empowered. But this eventual sense of contextualized freedom came with a sacrifice. It was traditional in the mid-1900s, when my grandparents wed, for the bride to change both her first and last name in accordance with the wishes of the groom’s family.
“Dida, tumi ki chyle tōmāra nām paltate?” I asked, “Grandmother, did you want to change your name?” “Na. Kē cā'ō? Karatē holo,” she responded to her inquisitive granddaughter “No. Who wants to? I had to.” My grandmother’s name is Sunanda. She was born Deepali.
XII. My mother still adheres to social norms as my grandmother did. Similar to the woman in Singh’s photograph standing tall with
a child, she draws strength from raising my brother and me; I see her freedom when she drives us in her Toyota and I feel her power when she fearlessly defends my brother when a soccer foul goes momentarily unnoticed. But this is contextualized when the very power that she draws from a familial setting limits her when she follows cultural norms. My father never asked her to return home early, but when his day at work ends, so does my mother’s day out. “This is our culture, Bappa,” I remember my mother telling me.
XIII. Reflecting on Raghubir Singh’s photograph After Crossing the Luni River, Barmer in this historical context further informs the allusion of the explicit details of the woman in the forefront with a child to the implicit concept of the restriction of female power to specific constraints undermining female empowerment as a whole. This deepens the understanding that although the woman in the image, my grandmother, and mother have been empowered in their own domains, they, alongside Indian women worldwide, must shatter the limitations governing their capacities for freedom and redefine what true liberation can be—a task that will not be accomplished by firmly adhering to set contexts and capacities, contrary to Indira Gandhi’s beliefs.
Works Cited
Gandhi, Indira. “True Liberation of Women.” Inauguration of the All-India Women’s Conference Building Complex, 26 Mar. 1980, New Delhi, India. Keynote Speech. Jhaveri, Shanay. Raghubir Singh: Modernism On The Ganges. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2017. Web. 7 Nov. 2017. Misra, Jugal. “Empowerment of Women in India.” Indian
Political Science Association, vol. 67, No. 4, 2006, pp. 867-878.
Rubinoff, Arthur. “India’s Search for Power: Indira Gandhi’s Foreign Policy.”Association for Asian Studies, vol. 44, no. 3, 1985, pp. 643-644.
Singh, Raghubir. After Crossing the Luni River, Barmer, Rajasthan. 1975. Photograph. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Vlassoff, C. Gender Equality and Inequality in Rural India: Blessed with a Son. Palgrave Macmillan US, 2013. Web. 7 Nov. 2017.
Poems
By Brittany Abou-Suleiman
I humming strings of words want into the nape of your neck to lay about how you could heal skin to almost any skin thing with the bend of your body I will lay with your body for the rest of our days
humming strings of words into the nape of your neck about how you could heal almost any thing with the bend of your body I will lay with your body I want to lay Skin to skin with you
For the rest of our days
i will love the way light drips from me like open windows the way i have begun to melt like lakes in the spring soil into water ice in the sun melt you into me one entangled body bearing light into the dirt. yield we buzz around each other under summer’s eye rubbing mouths like the wings of cicadas, clicking heat clings to skin like a film
and i sink into you like feet in damp soil
i will never doubt that all of it was music and i will never wonder if you will stay through the fall
The Diva Summarized In 6 Pages: About Mariah Angela Carey
By Jenny Yae
She was officially put on par with the pitch of a dolphin when she was inscribed in the Guinness Book of World Records for reaching a G#7. She has a five-octave vocal range, meaning she can reach notes beyond the seventh octave. A diva from the start, she expressed her craving for stardom early on when she told her mother she did not need to do homework or clean her room because when she was rich and famous, she could have someone do it for her. Signing on to a record at the age of 18 and then releasing her first album at 20 years old, she then became one of the greatest voices and #1 hit songwriters of all time after releasing 14 albums. A voice with a strong vibrato, belt, soft undertone, and whistle register, her versatility is a rare talent. Her songs are a fusion of R&B, pop, and hip-hop, keeping audience members excited. Her talent made history and has been an inspiration for the now-famous artists that have preceded her. She personifies the
glitter she is associated with, being the eye-catching spectacle that never runs out of style. “She” is no one else but Mariah Carey.
Mariah Angela Carey was born on March 27, 1970 in Huntington, Long Island in New York. She was born to Alfred 1 Roy Carey, who was African American and Venezuelan, and Patricia Hickey, who was Irish-American. Being raised in a mixedrace household in New York was dangerous for young Carey and her two older siblings. She experienced extreme racism as a child, such as having her family car being blown up, finding burnt crosses on her lawn, having her dogs poisoned, and getting a shot fired through her kitchen window during a meal. The Carey family frequently moved around New York to find a safer area to live.
Her parents got a divorce when she was three and while she and her brother stayed with her mom, her older sister moved in with her father. A vocal coach and an opera singer, her mother was the first to discover Carey’s remarkable singing ability. As Carey’s mother was rehearsing her role of Maddalena in Verdi’s “Opera Rigolettos” in the living room when Carey was four-years-old, she had trouble reaching the notes-- but was shocked when she realized her toddler was able to perfectly imitate the singing. Her mother thus helped Carey develop her voice and Carey had her first public performance when she was six. Carey’s passion for singing and performance was a prominent part of her childhood, which eventually became a life commitment.
In high school, Carey was nicknamed “Mirage” because she rarely attended her classes; she traveled to Manhattan to study music with professionals instead. Carey’s 16th birthday was a turning point in her career when her older brother paid for her first professional recording session. During the recording session, she "Mariah Carey." Biography.com. A&E Networks Television, 28 1 Apr. 2017. Web. 10 May 2017.
met keyboard player and songwriter Ben Marguiles, who would later help her craft her debut album.
Carey graduated high school in 1987 and then immediately moved to Manhattan to embark on her singing career. Upon 2 arriving in Manhattan, she worked several jobs including waitressing, hair sweeping at a salon, and coat checking. She also studied cosmetology while writing songs and trying to pursue her singing career in the evenings. When Carey was 18, she became a backup singer for Brenda K. Starr. The two young performers quickly became friends and Starr invited Carey to a party hosted by CBS Records, a night that changed Carey’s career and ultimately her life. Before leaving for the party, Brenda convinced Carey to bring one of her demo tapes, just in case. 3
After arriving at the party, Carey headed toward Jerry Greenberg, the president of Atlantic Records, to give him her demo. Yet Tommy Mottola, the president of Columbia Records, intercepted it. Mottola listened to her demo on his way home in a limo and was shocked. He immediately asked to be driven back to the party to find her, but she had already left. Mottola was desperate to have Carey on his record label and then signed her on the next day.4
Her eponymous first album, Mariah Carey, was released in 1990 when she was 20 years old. She had 11 songs and four of
"Mariah Carey." Aceshowbiz.com. Ace Showbiz, n.d. Web. 10 2 May 2017.
“Mariah Carey." Biography.com. A&E Networks Television, 28 3 Apr. 2017. Web. 10 May 2017.
"Mariah Carey." Aceshowbiz.com. Ace Showbiz, n.d. Web. 10 4 May 2017. 17
them became #1 hit singles: “Vision of Love,” “Someday,” “Love Takes Time,” and “I Don’t Wanna Cry.” The album stayed on the US charts for 22 weeks, a monumental achievement for a young artist. A year later, she released Emotions and won two awards at the 33rd Annual Grammy’s: one for “Best Female Vocalist” and one for “Best New Artist.” Rolling Stone also named her “Best New Female Singer.” Her early recognition created a sturdy platform 5 for her music career. Within a year of her becoming a young celebrity, she had already gotten national recognition from a wide audience base. In 1993, she married Mottola and released Music Box. She then released Merry Christmas in 1994, an album that eventually became one of the best selling modern Christmas albums of all time. Her music career thrived until 1995 when she was in her apex, but she slowly began to lose friction. She released Day Dream in 1995, which had two of her most popular songs, “Fantasy,” and “One Sweet Day,” which made imprints on the scope of music production. A little while after releasing her second album, she separated from Mottola and then toured Europe and Asia for her hit songs. She expressed her liberalization from Mottola by going from the “good girl next door” look to “rich bad girl” image during the tour. In 1997, she released Butterfly and then divorced Mottola a year later. Her album was number one on the Billboard 200 and spent a week on the top charts, certified five-times platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America, and received the Million Award in Japan. She released #1 in 1998, which was a compilation album that amassed her most popular songs from different albums into one. This project became more popular than expected as it reached #4 on the Billboard 200 and became number one in Japan. #1 also
Ibid. 5
became the best selling album of all time by a non-Asian artist in Japan. 6
With her increasing popularity, she signed on to Virgin Records in 2001 and then released Glitter, which was accompanied by her first and only movie. The movie was a failure in the box office and became a laughingstock of the nation, especially during a time when people were mourning over the effects of the September 11th attacks in New York. Talk show hosts jeered at her release in attempts to provide comic relief during the period of mourning and tragedy. Because of this humiliation, Virgin 7 Records rescinded their contract with her. Carey was hospitalized for “extreme exhaustion” shortly after-- Carey’s mother had immediately called emergency services after seeing her daughter bleeding from slit wrists and cuts all over her body. She was thus hospitalized for her nervous breakdown and a suspected suicide attempt. Her drinking was also out of control during this time, as she was frequently seen switching from champagne to hard liquor. She was also upset from her break up with Luis Miguel, whom she briefly had a relationship with after her divorce with Mottola. 8 Even with these obstacles, she was released from the hospital after two weeks and underwent a swift recovery.
“Mariah Carey." Biography.com. A&E Networks Television, 28 6 Apr. 2017. Web. 10 May 2017.
"Mariah Carey." Aceshowbiz.com. Ace Showbiz, n.d. Web. 10 7 May 2017.
"Tragic Secret behind Mariah's Breakdown."Mcarchives.com. 8 Mariah Carey Archives, 17 Aug. 2001. Web. 10 May 2017. 19
Carey signed with the Universal Music Group Island in 2002 and released Charmbracelet. Upon releasing her comeback 9 album, she stated that Charmbracelet had autobiographical songs that expressed her turbulent year. The album hit 3rd place on the chart, but the ratings were not nearly as successful as her other singles. Despite this disappointment, she was awarded the World Music Awards in 2003 for her reaching 100 million album sales worldwide. Glitter and Charmbracelet were two of her lowest 10 album sales, but her accumulating success from past albums crafted her celebrity status. After achieving the World Music Awards, she released The Emancipation of Mimi in 2005. This album was about self-discovery and self-image, an honest album that expressed her dynamic realism. This album was an instant success and it was number one on the charts and a million copies were sold during the first week alone; it also became the bestselling album in the United States.11
“We Belong Together,” one of the defining songs on the album, was written shortly after her divorced with Mottola, and the wedding dress she wore in the music video was the same dress she wore at her actual wedding. She wanted to dispose of the dress, but the video producer figured that she should make use of it once more before disposing the gown and the memories that go along with it. “We Belong Together” became the number one song for 14 consecutive weeks and was placed as the 2nd longest running
“Mariah Carey." Biography.com. A&E Networks Television, 28 9 Apr. 2017. Web. 10 May 2017.
Cinquemani, Sal. "Charmbracelet."Slantmagazine.com. Slant 10 Magazine, 19 Nov. 2002. Web. 10 May 2017.
“Mariah Carey." Biography.com. A&E Networks Television, 28 11 Apr. 2017. Web. 10 May 2017.
number one song in the United States’ chart history. This was also widely known to be the song of the decade.12
Carey made history once more after releasing E=MC² in 2008. “Touch My Body” brought her to an untouchable standard. She surpassed Elvis Presley, who was arguably one of the most significant cultural icons of the 20th century, to become second only to the Beatles for the most number one hit singles in the United States. She released Imperfect Angel (2009), Merry Christmas II You (2010), and Me. I Am Mariah… The Elusive Chanteuse (2014) and each of these albums thrived. By this time, she had sold more than 200 million albums worldwide and according to the Recording Industry Association of America, she received the title for being the 3rd best selling female artist of all time. Her successes have reached international reclaim at a young 13 age and along with her hit songs, she has also created a legacy of singing techniques and musical composition.
Carey’s unique vocal talent and musical creativity has changed the course of how contemporary music is made today. Originally a defining 1970’s characteristic of Minnie Riperton in “Loving You,” Carey popularized the whistle register. Carey can reach a C7 note, a skill that was left untouched for decades until Carey made it fashionable it once again with her stardom.14 Melisma, an “ornamental phrase of several notes sung to one Heyman, Jessie. "5 Things You Didn't Know About Mariah 12 Carey." Vogue. Vogue, 01 Feb. 2017. Web. 10 May 2017.
"Mariah Carey's Legacy & The Artists She 13 Influenced." Prince.org. Prince, n.d. Web. 10 May 2017.
"The Diva Definition: 10 Ways Mariah Carey Changed 14 Music." Trinitrent.com. Trini Trent, 12 Feb. 2017. Web. 10 May 2017.
syllable of text,” was also a technique that Carey popularized. An 15 example of melisma would be when Whitney Houston, in her hit song “I Will Always Love You,” holds the syllables in “I” in the last portion of the song. The hold on the “I” is melisma, and Carey used this impressive technique in her songs, while also holding the notes with a perfect pitch in a high octave.
Carey is also commended for writing nearly all of the songs that have reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100, and most of them are autobiographical. Some critics say that her songs and lyrics are “sugary” and “artificial” but according to New York Daily News, “…vocalizing is all about the performance, not the emotions that inspired it. Singing, to her, represents a physical challenge, not an emotional unburdening. During some vocal moments, she becomes too overwhelmed to put her passion into words.” She 16 differentiates her emotional burdens and her performativity in that her singing becomes her emotions. It is a catharsis of her entire self, not only her emotional baggage. Her craft is exemplified by the fact that she personifies the song by being its creator and its livelihood. She embodies the songs that she sings, a physical manifestation of her art.
Her lyrical style is also unique in that she uses “higher level vocabulary” yet includes a playful element. In “Heartbreaker,” her song featuring Jay-Z, she sings: “it’s a shame to be so euphoric and weak / when you smile at me / and you tell me the things that you know / persuade me to relinquish my love to you / but I cannot resist at all”.
"Melisma." Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com, n.d. Web. 10 May 15 2017.
"Mariah Carey's Legacy & The Artists She 16 Influenced." Prince.org. Prince, n.d. Web. 10 May 2017.
For her emotional, articulate, and catchy lyrics, she has become the third most successful songwriter behind Paul McCartney and John Lennon. Carey has also become a top artist 17 in Japan, which has the second largest music market in the world and the largest in Asia. She appeared four times on the top 13 best selling non-domestic artist recordings of all time. She was also awarded the Million Award—the highest certification of music, equivalent to “Platinum” or “Diamond” in other countries—for six of her albums: Emotions, Music Box, Merry Christmas, Day Dream, Butterfly, and #1. Her talent has gained international 18 recognition and her consistent reclaim has been indicative of her immortalized talent in the public.
Carey’s ethnic roots are also an important contributor to her legacy and the way she crafted herself as a fusion artist. She contributed to the rise of black presence in pop culture in 1990 by participating in the movement that had cultural crossovers in melodies and musical ornaments. Before then, a black singer was only able to achieve success by singing “white” songs but the rigid boundaries of musical style were blurred and the cross between two or more culture systems became popular, a phenomenon known in ethnomusicology as “polymusicality” Being a mixed- 19 raced woman, Carey was able to transgress these boundaries and
"The Diva Definition: 10 Ways Mariah Carey Changed 17 Music." Trinitrent.com. Trini Trent, 12 Feb. 2017. Web. 10 May 2017.
"Recognition." Soundsiconic.weebly.com. Sounds Iconic, n.d. 18 Web. 10 May 2017.
Rischar, Richard. "A Vision of Love: An Etiquette of Vocal 19 Ornamentation in African-American Popular Ballads of the Early 1990s." American Music 22.3 (2004): 407-43. JSTOR. Web. 10 May 2017.
formulate her own passage of entry. An international crowd therefore liked her music because it was contingent upon black, white, and Latina music forms.
In addition to becoming a legendary singer and making history multiple times throughout her career, she has also contributed to other projects. She has released 14 signatures fragrances that are now sold in Kohl’s, Amazon, and Kmart. 20 After inspiring the American Idol vocal school earlier in her career, she was asked to be a judge on Season 12 in 2012. Carey has also played the voices of minor characters from The Butler, American Dad!, and Lego Batman Movie. She has recently taken residency in Las Vegas and had her “#1 to Infinity” tour at Caesar’s Palace, where she performed her hit tracks. In 2016, E! featured televised documentaries, The Sweet Sweet Fantasy and Mariah’s World, which followed her European tour.
She was also featured on the news when she was briefly engaged to the James Pecker, an Australian businessman. She met Nick Cannon after he was featured in her music video for “Bye Bye” in 2008, married him shortly after, and had twins but they divorced in 2016. She then started dating Pecker and he proposed to her with a 35-carat ring, which is bigger than Elizabeth Taylor’s and the same size as Kim Kardashian West’s and Beyoncé’s engagement rings combined. In the middle of April 2017, she then announced that she and Cannon were together again for the sake of the children.
Although she is now 48 years old, Carey’s name and persona still trigger the image of an ultimate diva. Her name
May 2017.
precedes her glittery reputation, as people know her for a variety of reasons; whether it’s due to a specific song, her Christmas album, or her diva tendencies, Mariah’s musical variance has permanently changed the course of standard music.
Crawlspace
By Larenz Brown
And we’ll float away from it at the end I suppose. It’s always gray here in the mornings and I’ve come to expect it to clear regardless of if it actually does. Sometimes it rains and a black hole flattens in front of me and you and I’d like to think I’ve prepared myself for loss I may or may not come to know. And we agreed on finality to disband certain tremors and I’m not even sure what that means but I’m seasick now so I try to distribute my weight evenly. There’s bird shit where I’d like to put my hands and they tell me it’s cleaner than most food and I wonder this to be like when you let dogs kiss you on the mouth. And dogs of my breed go to hell for a bone before sneaking out the back to bury your things in the yard.
And I suppose this to be the first I’ve been back in some time.
And I find myself sitting cross-legged on the stoop choosing a lighter over a pen over a keyboard. I ask myself to look away from sometimes and I’m always asking. I worry of opportunity costs and money and evildoing in collecting coin. The garage opens soft, but louder than I thought it would. And I’m alone in a house built for many.
I’m a visitor and nothing else.
But maybe I should take better care of knowing that instead of realizing it last night and this morning and tomorrow again. I think you know it, but every time it comes up you pretend that you don’t and I’d love to tattoo it on you so you may never forget. And you won’t hold the keys for much longer but I suppose we decided that together.
It will be a window and not a door when it happens.
And I will long for you and ache with the lost cause of things we didn’t know were common between us. And I will see you because you’ll make sure of it even outside of your own design. You’ll need me to see you, for training wheels in the expansion of the small and stupid world you’ve built for yourself in the time I spent blinking things out of my eyes.
I always faked my tears and I was never sorry.
It will be a window and not a door when it happens.
Fifties Music
By Pim Supavarasuwat
The fans shake their heads. Shake their heads. Shake their heads. You all knew a song that went something like that. The ballad tells a story of a man who goes around asking everybody if anyone liked him and even his household appliances said no. It was a hit. No one could look at an oscillating fan without humming
the tune. Bangkok heat made people get angry and do stupid things; fans were installed to stop all that. It seemed that all you ever did was wait for the fan to turn your way, be relieved, then grieved desperately as it turned away.
The mall was one of the first few places in Bangkok that had air-conditioning. You’d all troop into the building and march through the departments on the ground floor to dry off sweat. Everyone wore the same large white shirts and blue knee-length shorts. The salespeople’s eyes followed all of you, watching out for bulky pockets. Sure, stealing erasers that smelled like fruits used to be the best thing ever until you discovered the back right corner of the third floor.
One guy worked there. An oldish man whose name was Tom. No, not Tom for Thomas. It was a Thai name, pronounced the Thai way with hard, dental ‘T’. Th-om.
He looked about the age of most teachers at your school: old enough to be intimidating, but young enough that, if pressed, could be asked to supervise gym lessons without fainting. You all eyed him suspiciously the first time you stepped under the twenty or thirty records hanging from the ceiling. You imagined them falling over all of your heads. Are the edges sharp? Would our heads be cut off?
“No! Of course not! Step right in!”
You all ducked instinctively but when the shortest of your group slowly eased back into full height, the others soon followed. Something played loudly in the background. You heard words like “money”, “cat”, “yeah” and “baby” so you understood that it was English, but no more.
“What is that?” One of you asked the moment the sharp guitar made you all shrivel.
The sound made you aware of a core holding your body together, a hummable core; it vibrated noticeably as you listened to the lead guitar in the song.
“It’s your heart.” He said and touched his hand to the wrong side of his chest, pushing his fingers so hard against the knitted fabric that the tips temporarily disappeared. You all touched your hands to your hearts too.
The music continued playing and something in you began heating up and melting and reforming and heating up again. You squeezed your shoulder blades together trying to alleviate the sweet discomfort.
“Whose song is this?” one of you asked, out of breath. You were hoping that the disruption would somehow lessen the effect the music was having on you but no such luck.
“Chuck Berry.” The man said simply.
“Shug Burly?” Several of you tried to pronounce the name the way he did but it came out all wrong. Your tongues weren’t used to doing sounds like that.
The man knew exactly what was going on in your bodies. He knew the music was churning all of your insides up like a big pot of curry and that you, all of you, were guiltily enjoying every second of it.
“I have to go home-”, one of you announced and ran straight down the escalators.
The rest of you paused only for a second before someone shouted “me too!” and you all sped after the one who fled. You emerged in the usual heavy air and the noises of the city and for the first time were glad to be in the familiar heat. “What the hell was that?” You didn’t discuss it. You didn’t tell your parents. You didn’t even want to think about it because the tiniest attempt to
recall the face of the man brought back the guitar noise that made all your limbs feel strange. The next day, you passed each other along the corridors and looked at one another the same way you did when you all agreed to sit in the same row and slide the tiny cheat sheet along the seats underneath your sweaty knees. Unwittingly, you all gathered after school and walked to the department store.
“More?” Tom asked.
“Yes, please.” You all stood there and listened until your knees were about to collapse and your arms started to feel like they might fall off. With every note, you were moved a step closer to breaking down in tears. Just as you thought you couldn’t take the pleasure anymore, one of you announced “I have to go home” and you all ran after him.
The next day you came back and made a comment about Tom’s warm-looking clothes to which he replied, “No, it doesn’t get hot in here, boys.”
“But what about when you leave?”
“I don’t leave.”
You all thought he was kidding and laughed loudly. “Lucky!” you all chimed but didn’t say anything else. You were all waiting for him to take that record out of its sleeve, blow on it, brush it lightly with the velvet cleaner and in the gentlest of motions rub the black, shiny surface again and again until it’s free of dust. The man was so unnecessarily elaborate that someone eventually begged: “Can you play us Elvis now?”
You came back again and again and again and again and again. You didn’t even have to attempt small talk or comment on his thick clothes anymore for him to put the record on for you. When you couldn’t bear the length of the escalator ride to his
department, you walked up. When you couldn’t bear the length of the walk up the escalator, you ran. You sprint. You sprint from your classroom to your locker. You sprint from your locker, not caring if you dropped a book or two. You sprint to the front gate. You sprint from the front gate to the mall. No one waits for anyone anymore. You showed up in front of the man in sweat, your shirts soaked and stuck to your backs. The man watched you pant and quietly put the record on the turntable. You closed your eyes and imagined yourself lying on top of that spinning disc, turning. Before you knew it you were skipping last periods; you were learning more English from the man and his rock n’ roll music than you ever did at school anyhow.
One day one of your parents interrogated you about the plummeting grades. It was Somchai’s parents. Thankfully, Somchai didn’t blame it on Elvis, but he was no longer one of you. He even stopped coming to school and all of you thought that he moved away. The mom showed up at school to look for clues and you all recognised her because Somchai had her nose. One of you showed the woman to the teacher’s office and then hid in the closet to listen.
It turned out they didn’t move. It turned out Somchai fell ill. It turned out the parents didn’t know why. It turned out the doctor didn’t either. It turned out you did.
You in the closet were tempted to burst out and shout He needs lock n’ loll! Lock. And. Loll. But decided that your English was not yet up to snuff and you would confuse everybody.
“What do we do?”
“They can’t know about the man.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re not supposed to be there, stupid.”
“Why? It’s a mall. We can shop, can’t we?”
“I don’t know. We’re not supposed to know him.”
“No, perhaps not.”
“But what about Somchai?”
“Well, we have to help him somehow.”
“How?”
You need the music. Yes, you do. You need Elvis, Carl Perkins, Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly singing That’ll Be The Day. You all emptied your pockets and ran your hands along the seams and folds of your school bags. You came up with enough to buy a mechanical pencil.
“We have to steal it.”
After school, you told your parents that you were going to stay at each other’s houses and headed over to the mall. You piled into a changing room, turned the lights off and kept the door a crack open. No one’s here, no need to look. You watched the room get darker in ten-minute intervals, like the sunset. Once completely dark, you padded to the third floor in your yellowed socks. You found that the records corner was covered with a thin dark fabric and the boldest of you pulled it with one big tug. You stared at the rows of squares as if you were looking at a sleeping tiger.
“Isn’t that Somchai on the record sleeve?”
“What?”
“Look here.” Three of you crowded around a square cardboard.
You blinked once and it was Elvis. You blinked twice and it was Somchai with his hair combed voluminously. You blinked again and it was Elvis.
“What the hell?”
“I’m sorry boys. I had to do it.”
You all whipped around and saw the man wearing only a towel. He was drying his hair. “The marketing department was after me. If my sales didn’t improve they were going to kick me out. Then all you boys started showing up and I had an idea to inject the records with, well, how do I put this—”, he smiled at you sympathetically.
“What idea?” the non-paralysed one among you asked.
“This idea-” the man said before switching on the turntable and lowering the needle. In the low light, you could barely see the record. It was so dark and black that you only knew it was there and spinning because your knees started to soften, your ribcage heated up and you were aware of all the bones stuck between your flesh.
Excerpts
from
“Madame Bovary: Seeking Refinement In ‘Un Vieillard Mangeait’”
By Hannah Benhamo
As with other romantic reveries in Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert indicates a departure from the mundane with word choice. Madame Bovary does not notice the old man in the ballroom, “there,” as the English translation suggests, but instead finds him after the narrator’s sudden interjection of cependant [literally “there”, but with the more emphatic connotation of however as well]. Evidently, the narrator demands that we contrast this somewhat gluttonous old man with the immediately prior description of wine glasses surprisingly unfilled with gloves, a departure from the nineteenth-century custom of upper class women resting their gloves in a wine glass to indicate their
abstaining from alcohol. Despite the conflation of Paris, desire, and the opposite sex, the depiction of the old man serves a greater purpose than merely distinguishing Madame Bovary’s consumption of nonreality from the other women’s consumption of substance, both literally through alcohol and figuratively through satisfaction with the material world. Rather, the scene rearticulates Emma’s desire for true love into a futile quest for fulfillment and self-affirmation through an erotic vampirism.
With a single image, Flaubert introduces the notion of material fulfillment into the text: “Madame Bovary noticed that several of the ladies had not put their gloves inside their glasses” (Flaubert 284). The comparatively cosmopolitan women at the ball refuse to abstain from alcohol, and consequently do not partake in the provincial habit of putting gloves inside their glasses to indicate as much. Emma certainly admires the Parisian sophistication of these women, but the contrasting images of a filled glass and a glass stuffed with gloves also evoke Emma’s own yearning for evasive fulfillment. Emma admires the women at the ball precisely because they do not, in forgoing substance, rely on the pseudo-fulfillment of a glass filled with gloves. That Emma often literally substitutes substance with fabric, seeking fulfillment in dresses and aesthetics, underscores her own appreciation of this small act. Emma self-negates by refusing sustenance; these women affirm themselves through their filled glasses.
In lieu of food, Emma consumes fantasies; here, a fantasy about the brutish old man whose debauched past Emma giddily romanticizes. Here, the language of fulfillment appears once more in the description of “son assiette remplie” [his filled plate] (Flaubert 284). In stark contrast to Emma, this man consumes a filled plate with great satisfaction, “drops of gravy dribbling from
his lips” (284). Emma’s interest in the man resembles lust, and ostensibly stems from his having “lived at court and slept in the bed of a queen” (46). In the vieillard, Emma glimpses the tumultuous, ecstatic fictions of her romance novels. Whereas the other women are content with wine, Emma desires glamour and wonder. She associates the lively man with the promise of excitement. Through wordplay, Flaubert links her romanticizing of the man with Paris, which, like true love, also serves as an elusive apparition for Emma, a promised land symbolic of everything she desires. The narrators speaks somewhat breathlessly of the man’s life “pleine de duels, de paris” [full of duels, of wagers” (Flaubert 284). Certainly, the word “paris” refers to wagers rather than the city itself, but its inclusion in the old man’s brief description testifies to the city’s haunting influence over Emma’s desires. Nonetheless, the narrator’s cependant does not chiefly contrast Emma’s phantasmic non-substances, her proverbial gloved glasses, with the women’s filled glasses. The departure the word actually suggests requires a more thorough examination of the corporeal imagery in the depiction of the vieillard. Critically, the man is not attractive but slovenly and ancient with “les yeux éraillés” [bloodshot eyes] and “lèvres pendantes” [sagging lips] (Flaubert 284). His elderly appearance contrasts to that of Emma who, curiously throughout the novel, does not accumulate wrinkles as she ages. Whereas Emma fails to reconcile her own existence with time, attempting to exist outside of it in her own artificial paradises, the vieillard exists concomitantly within time. The narrator also compares the vieillard to an infant; he sits with his napkin tied around his back “comme un enfant” [like a child] (Flaubert 284). In addition to providing humor, the description highlights the novel’s oral fixation , which often emerges in
relation to issues of Emma’s consumption and fulfillment. Eating as an infant does, the vieillard satisfies himself, and completes the perfunctory stage of oral incorporation. Emma denies herself of such substance, and thus exists perpetually at a stilted stage of development, removed from time and unable to seek satisfaction despite her feverish efforts. She repeatedly returns to this man, to the vitality of his “sagging lips,” overflowing with “drops of gravy,” because he embodies the fulfillment she craves. As the narrator informs us, the “vieillard mangeait” [the old man eats] (Flaubert 284). While the usage of the imperfect tense is grammatically necessary here, the phrase also implies the man’s involvement in present life. The vieillard continually confirms his existence with frequent, gluttonous, imperfect nourishment. Emma, meanwhile, lives removed from the present, in the prolonged promises of perfection from which she seeks satisfaction.
The old man clarifies Emma’s pressing interest in the opposite sex, elevating her desire to the metaphysical realm. The vieillard is not the object of Emma’s desire, but rather a substitute for Emma herself, an object upon which Emma can project, and thus displace her own repressed desire. Through the vieillard, the narrator links Emma’s sexuality with her quest for fulfillment. She observes a servant “announcing loudly, in his ear, the dishes which he pointed to with a mumble” (Flaubert 284). Emma craves the explanatory reason lurking behind her existence. The somewhat scandalous, penetrative image of the server intimately yet coherently naming the sources of the vieillard’s fulfillment in the vieillard’s ear contrasts with Emma’s wedding night, where the consummation of her marriage offered no such knowledge. Understandably, given her stilted stage of oral fixation, Emma’s 35
interest in men is not so much objectification as it is envious vampirism.
In consuming the non-reality of the vieillard, Emma attempts to claim his sense of self-fulfillment as her own. The narrator’s initial portrait of the man “au haut bout de la table, seul parmi toutes ces femmes,” [at the head of the table, alone among all these women,] certainly invokes Emma’s visions of grandeur, and also represents the complete, independent self-affirmation that Emma desires. While Emma, like the other women at the castle, agonizes over filled wine glasses, the man appears independent, unafraid to occupy space and consume liquor as he pleases. The English translation of “there”, substituted for cependant, incidentally underscores the French conjunctive adverb’s intended meaning. Emma admires the women who, like the men, affirm themselves through consumption, but she is ultimately unable to do the same. When she does manage to look away from the man to take a sip of champagne, the substance only freezes her mouth, ossifying her existence. She thus externalizes, rather than internalizes, her own fulfillment, and evades satisfaction.
Thus, a closer examination of Emma’s interest in un vieillard mangeait can transpose Emma’s dissatisfaction into the language of sublimation. Although Emma admires the women who affirm themselves through consumption and resents her provincial habit of substituting sustenance with trivial pleasures, she ultimately fails to do the same. Instead, she seeks satisfaction in the men whose virile self-assuredness she envies. Her addiction to romance does not stem from equating an elusive true love with fulfillment, but rather from attempting to vampirically absorb the vivacity and self-satisfaction she admires in her lovers. It is precisely the vieillard’s piggish physicality that appeals to Emma,
a vaporish nonentity. The emphasis on oral incorporation and age in the depiction of the old man underscores Emma’s inability to incorporate herself through consumption and exist within, rather than apart from, materiality and perhaps even time itself. The vignette both elucidates and complicates Emma’s desires, exposing Emma’s quest to both ground and sublimate her own desire, while universalizing the envy-driven vampirism inherent to sexual attraction. Thus, Emma admires those who find satisfaction in the physicality of their own existence, but ultimately negates herself in striving for fulfillment solely in a vaporous romanticization of the other.
Works Cited
Flaubert, Gustave, Margaret Cohen, and Paul De Man. Madame Bovary: Contexts, Critical Reception. 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 2005.
Poems
By Natalie Cortez Klossner
Tri-Cultural Body
The poems that follow are an ode to my experience as a halfPeruvian half-Swiss individual living in the United States.
I: CUERPO / BODY
Somos cuerpo o tenemos cuerpo/ Are we a body or do we have a body
Mi madre tiene cuerpo / My mother has a body
Mi abuela tiene cuerpo / My grandmother has a body
Mi hija tendrá cuerpo/ My daughter will have a body
Yo tengo cuerpo / I have a body
II: PALABRAS / WORDS
On an entrance unidentified the utmost authoritative lacking an enclosure on a mind on an argument
Without imprisonment
running between slits in the rear of a throat surpassing thought without a beginning without an end
To words I cannot translate into any language
III: SACRAMENTOS / SACRAMENTS
I grew up Catholic I grew up Catholic confessing my sins not bounded by doctrine to a man I recall awaiting forgiveness a nightclub I learned to forgive watching woman dance alone before I learned to speak limbs reaching into heaven I grew up Catholic A nightclub, a church awaiting salvation bodies offering themselves to music from my first communion chanting to the ecstasy from a man’s flesh as if to say of bread and wine look at the night
Rejoice
IV: ESPÍRITU / SPIRIT
De-pollute your mind
Divide Contest
Secure
What you are accustomed of knowing
All the understanding You crave
Gathered
To carve out a glory
V: LANGUAGE/ IDIOMA/ SPRACHE
I think I want silence
But for a soul
As my own
It is the heaviest to keep out el espíritu hurts when it cannot speak
fluency
VI:
CUERPO PARTE 2 / BODY PART 2
Somos cuerpo o tenemos cuerpo / Are we a body or do we have a body
Each Tremor felt
Accordant or assonant
Is reflected
Mirroring thoughts
Every anguish
A shadow of truth
The human flesh knows
Skilled at reproducing each slit
Without true awareness of its consequence
Fixed and unsteady
Amongst the boundaries of a physical self
A material self
And the unworldly
Tengo cuerpo, cuerpo me tiene / I have a body, body has me
This short anthology was not necessarily a story of triumph or the overcoming of adversity. It was not meant to represent every person who identifies with two ethnicities, three cultures or as a tri-cultural body. Nor was it about the superiority of a specific nation over another. Humans have a tendency to want their being
to have meaning as if it were words—words in a poem. As if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. Above all, the compilation was not entirely concerned with poetry. The subject of it was mêlée and the pity of misidentification and identity. The prose was in the battle to blend and be moderated.
Excerpts from “Bathrooms, Minimalism, Shame: Bathrooms in Postwar French Literature”
By Audrey Deng
The modern bathroom, though highly atomized, extremely private, does not stand alone. It depends on and is part of a vast infrastructural network, which we usually never see, never smell, never speak of—the sewage system. But there is also the metaphorical network the bathroom is tied to. This is the network of social attitudes and beliefs formulated by the world beyond the stall, which the bathroom, this tiny private public space, distills and expresses through its design, its methods of segregation, and its users. The bathroom can be a divisive space; it can also be an imaginative space. In literature, the bathroom acts as a sort of literary chameleon, whose presence is hidden but still tangible.
The bathroom is interesting as a place of affect in literature because it is a designated space for our most base actions— defecation, excretion—while also hosting rituals for cleanliness and beautification. Literary depictions of the bathroom present this paradox between animal and human, shame and self-care.
In Ulysses, James Joyce writes a scene in which Leopold Bloom takes a satisfying shit in the bathroom and wipes himself with the newspaper he had brought in with him. The bathroom is gross, mocking the traditional literary values of beauty in
literature. To the other end, as an Occupy Wall Street protester cleans up in Ben Lerner’s bathroom in 10:04, Ben cooks dinner for them both, feeling paternal and full of well-meaning. In Kafka Was the Rage, the bathroom presents a schism in Broyard’s growing-up. These paradoxes, shrunken down in this small space of the bathroom, make the bathroom an immense space of literary merit. Fyodor Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment, Part IV, Chapter I, writes: “We always imagine eternity as something beyond our conception, something vast, vast! But why must it be vast? Instead of all that, what if it’s one little room, like a bath house in the country, black and grimy and spiders in every corner, and that’s all eternity is? I sometimes fancy it like that.”
In Spaces of Feeling, Figlerowicz presents the bedroom as a private space, where its “narrow confines give [the characters’] affects more coherence than they could ever have in a crowded salon…small rooms allow these characters to maintain the temporary illusion that their minds and bodies are easily, autonomously self-knowing. Within these rooms they also reach insight about themselves that they could not hold onto in a wider social space.” The same could probably be said about the 21 bathroom, but to the extreme. The bathroom is wholly private, and intrusion is not only unwelcome, but offensive. Bedrooms at least could still stand as a sort of social space; bathrooms, conventionally understood, cannot. The intersections of private and public, ugly and pretty, exist in the bathroom simultaneously—the conjunction and paradox of “and” makes the bathroom a malleable space for literary interpretation.
21 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017). Figlerowicz 71
Marta Figlerowicz, Spaces of Feeling: Affect and Awareness in Modernist Literature.
The bathroom in literature is constantly being repurposed, taking different shapes. In Kafka Was the Rage, the sink is repurposed as the bathroom. Every time the bathroom appears in literature, space is being repurposed for other activities. The bathroom, despite its utilitarian purpose, inspires so many other uses in literature: antechamber, perch, trap, and home.
Narratives taking characters to the bathroom show how this space of contradictory feelings is cast into language. In literature, the bathroom is continually mapped into stories as a malleable space for feeling. Its absence from literary analyses may be because the affects performed in the bathroom are normally performed entirely in private, hidden from any gaze.
Representations of bathroom in literature are never the same. The bathroom is under a constant state of reconstruction in literature. To better examine its incarnations, I will focus my paper on postwar French representations of the bathroom—La honte by Annie Ernaux and La salle de bain by Jean-Philippe Toussaint. These two works are paired because both books are examples of French literature featuring a confessional but reticent narrator, written by writers notable for their trademarked minimalism. This minimalism will work well in this examination of the bathroom in literature because it sharpens the focus of the bathroom. Ernaux and Toussaint write about the personal in a way that doesn’t feel personal at all. This voice of the postwar French writer adds something new to the representations of bathrooms in literature. Ernaux, in her memoir, challenges the amount of privacy expected of the writer in order for something to be constituted as a memoir —Toussaint, in his novel, challenges the amount of privacy expected from the narrator in order for him to be relatable. Both writers wish to undermine literature and language by writing without style, thereby creating a new stylistic choice. Like the
bathroom—like any piece of work—the design hints at an ideology. Using the flat style of these two books to examine the bathroom would reveal the ideologies which go into the writing of a bathroom. I will first examine La honte, because it takes place before the setting of La salle de bain; this allows us to track the chronological development of the French bathroom over time.
La honte is a book about shame. From the title onwards, Ernaux makes this clear enough—the memoir is called Shame and it contains Ernaux’s reflections on an impoverished childhood in a small, rural town in France. The memoir begins with a terrifying memory: Ernaux’s memory of her father attempting to kill her mother one Sunday afternoon in June. Traumatic events can give rise to both shame and terror, and Ernaux beginning with this event cements the trauma as the origin of the shame to come. She then proceeds to examine, in retrospect, how this event reconfigured her adolescence as a series of shameful events. “C’était le 15 juin 52," she writes. "La première date précise et 22 sûre de mon enfance. Avant, il n’y a qu’un glissement des jours et des dates inscrites au tableau et sur les cahiers.” By beginning 23 with her mother’s near-death, her father’s attempt at murder, Ernaux sets the mood of the book—it is an event that, by sheer tragedy and horror, irrevocably colors the rest of La honte. Ernaux, sustained by this horrible event, then reverts to a simple, direct voice, occasionally bordering on pedantic or inappropriately mundane. Immediately following this scene, Ernaux describes how
Annie Ernaux, La honte. (Spain: Composition Jouve, 2016). Ernaux 16. “It was June 22 15, 1952. The first date I remember with unerring accuracy from my childhood. Before that, the days and dates inscribed on the blackboard and in my copybooks seemed just to drift by.”
Annie Ernaux, Shame, trans. Tanya Leslie. (London : Seven Stories Press, 1998), 15. 23
she used to tell certain men she would sleep with how her father had tried to kill her mother, and how they could not find a way to respond. “A quelques hommes, plus tard, j’ai dit : ‘Mon père a voulu tuer ma mère quand j’allais avoir douze ans.’ […] Tous se sont tus après l’avoir entendue.” Their silence had led Ernaux to 24 believe that she had done something wrong, “qu’ils ne pouvaient recevoir cette chose-là.” La honte strives to answer where this 25 sense of fault comes from, and how Ernaux can make this shame communicable, if not through words. In this phrase also, there is a visual rhyme between “tuer” and “tus,” or “taire,” connecting violence to silence. Not only is silence a symptom of violence, but the two words are intimately linked in the French language by sound and spelling. “Tuer” and “taire” are near-homophones; a clumsy tongue could render them the same word.
Conventionally understood, gesture is an expression of the body to indicate a response to stimuli, or to express an idea or sentiment. In La honte, gesture helps establish Ernaux’s depiction of the world around her. It is the vertex of body and social context, a small physical response to a social world. For example, licking one’s lips could communicate many things: it could communicate a strong appetite, signify cold environments, or lust. But the meaning of gesture depends, first, on a shared experience of the world. There must be a unified “usage du monde” [way of relating to 26 the world], as Ernaux puts it. Ernaux, who has written about sociology, is also a reader of Pierre Bourdieu, a sociologist who
Ernaux 16. “Later on, I would say to certain men: ‘My father tried to kill my mother
just before I turned twelve.’ […] I All were quiet after hearing the sentence.” (Leslie 15)
Ernaux 16. “[she] had made a mistake, that they were not able to accept such a
thing.” (Leslie 16)
“the
wrote extensively on micro-sociology in house-level investigations such as “The Berber house or the world reversed.” In that particular paper, Bourdieu writes that:
As a microcosm organized according to the same oppositions which govern all the universe, the house maintains a relation with the rest of the universe which is that of a homology: but from another point of view, the world of the house taken as a whole is in a relation with the rest of the world which is one of opposition, and the principles of which are none other than those which govern the organization of the internal space of the house as much as they do the rest of the world and, more generally, all the areas of existence.27
The house is both consistent with the universe and opposed against it; the rules which govern internal spaces are the same as those which govern the rest of the world—all areas of existence. Ernaux’s “usage du monde” is the language used to bridge the difference between the space of the interior and the outside world. A gesture is most efficient at doing its job when its meaning is locally agreed upon. “[L’usage du monde defini] les gestes pour s’asseoir, rire, se saisir des objets, les mots qui prescrivent ce qu’il faut faire de son corps et des choses.” The way people behave— 28 their externally performed gestures—relies on a preconceived social context and a locally agreed-upon language of movement.
27 9, no. 2 (1970): 151-70. doi:10.1177/053901847000900213.
Bourdieu, P. "The Berber House or the World Reversed." Social Science Information
28 way we sit down, laugh and grab hold of objects—and familiar words telling us what to do with our body and the things around us.” (Leslie 47)
Ernaux 58. “[The same experience of the world] is defined by familiar gestures—the
Gestures and the ability to understand them signify a shared experience of the world.
Ernaux provides some examples of gestures which make up this “usage du monde”: how to use bread frugally (dicing leftover bread into cubes), kill rabbits (swiftly), and show silent disdain (slapping one’s ass vigorously). She also distinguishes the 29 everyday gestures which separate men from women. For instance, the act of raising an iron to one’s cheek to check its heat, kneeling on all fours to clean the floor, sitting with widely parted legs to pick food for the rabbits, smelling one’s underwear at night—these are the gestures of women. Male gestures include spitting in one’s hand and putting a cigarette behind one’s ear. The gestures used to describe the female gender have intense sexual overtones in the text, while the gestures to describe men are more generic. If gesture represents a shared experience of the world, Ernaux hints at a local world where women’s gestures are sexualized, or where a childhood is spent oversexualizing gesture, or a world where women move in such a way. Ernaux’s method of distinguishing the sexes by gesture rather than personality traits, appearances, or clothing demonstrates that people—the sexes—can exist as gestures and can be identified by gestures. What determines a gender is movement. Seeing people as gesture requires a great deal of watching—done by Ernaux—as gestures emerge from patternbased behaviors within the usage du monde.
Ernaux’s characterizations of gender by gesture is her way of showing how she could navigate the rest of her childhood (outside the violent moment) through pure gesture. In describing her childhood, Ernaux does not describe places and people, but rather the gestures performed and how she had behaved in places
or in relation to people. In her description of her hometown, Ernaux takes great, painstaking lengths to reconstruct her town through movement and gestures, the way she would have walked or seen the town. Gesture takes precedence over language, as her town, as Ernaux states: “Ici rien ne se pense, tout s’accomplit.”30
The way of experiencing the world in her town was through gesture. Another, more frequent stance she takes to gesture is not as a participant, but as an observer, a third-party voyeur—Ernaux does this in her description of the family store and the three bathrooms in and around it.
If gestures make up the usage du monde, then the bathroom is the site of habitual, gendered gesture, where the relation to the world is cleaved distinctly into male and female sites. Habitual gestures are the result of a place in a community, and bathrooms are where these habits are the most ingrained—the experience of the world is both shared and separate in the bathroom. In La honte, there are multiple encounters with the bathroom. The first is in Ernaux’s description of her family’s store. When Ernaux describes the family’s combination cafe-grocery-coal depot, she takes note first its physical location and outward appearance, then describes its interior by moving through the house. The ligaments of her descriptions hinge on gerunds and prepositional phrases, and these enable her to create long sentences that, though long-winded, present her methodology of remembering places. It is as if she is moving through the house as she writes this description or remembering her body in that location. For instance, this detail: “La porte d’entrée et une devanture donnent sur la rue du Clos-desParts, une seconde devanture regarde la cour ou il faut pénétrer Ernaux 63. “In our lives nothing is thought, everything is done.” (Leslie 50)
pour accède au café, dans la partie paysanne” shows active 31 engagement with the scene, particularly when Ernaux incorporates the act of looking within the description. “[…] devanture regarde la cour ou il faut pénétrer pour accède au café” animates the description of the second window by looking through it and presenting the field of vision of that window. As a window looks out onto something, the act of looking out the window is incorporated into the description of the house, and the route through memory becomes active. The sentence structure is a form of navigation; it instructs the reader where to look in a memory of a description of a place, directing their gaze through the second window that takes the scene into the café. Her pattern of recreating scenes places herself in that environment and allows her to live in the memory, showing that it is possible to recreate memories through movements and gestures. Orgasm, for instance, acts as the link connecting Ernaux the writer to the girl in the photograph. “C’est elle seulement qui faire de cette petite fille et de moi la même, puisque l’orgasme ou je ressens le plus mon identité et la permanence de mon être, je ne l’ai connu que deux ans après.”32 Orgasm—not so much a movement/gesture as an experience—has the ability to evoke memories from forty years earlier. Directing the image in the novel also creates the effect of incorporating the reader into the book. Because the reader is told where to look, there is the added effect of forced complicity, in which the reader is coerced into taking part in the world of
Ernaux 52. “The front entrance and one of the store windows give on to the rue du
31 Clos-des-Parts; another window faces the courtyard, which one walks through to enter the café, set up in the original farmhouse.” (Leslie 42)
32 I feel the most of my identity and the permanence of my being, which I experienced two years later.” (Deng translation.)
Enaux 133. “The only thing that makes this little girl and me the same is orgasm, when
gestures. Ernaux interacts with the reader through instruction and direction, and this control over the readerly gaze will be used later when Ernaux describes the bathroom habits of strangers in the store in rich detail. After saying how “Aucune pièce du rez-dechaussée n’a d’usage privé,” Ernaux follows this image of her 33 parents speaking with café customers through the door-less kitchen with a description of the store’s bathrooms: the chamber pot in the attic, the urinal in the courtyard, and the toilet in the garden. Ernaux’s forays into the bathroom continue up the staircase in the kitchen leading to the attic, where we see the bathroom: the first private space in the house. Even the bedroom is shared by Ernaux and her parents.
As is typical with the rest of the house, Ernaux does not shy away from describing the bathroom. However, Ernaux does not depict the bathroom by its appearance, but by who uses each bathroom, and when. In the first instance, when she is describing who uses the chamber pot upstairs, she uses the pronoun “qui” to introduce who, precisely, uses the chamber pot, when “qui” could have been used to bring in details about the bathroom’s location or interior decorations. Instead, she writes: “Dans cette pièce est installé le seau de chambre qui sert habituellement à ma mère et moi, à mon père la nuit seulement (le jour, il utilise comme les clients l’urinoir situé dans la cour, un tonneau entouré de planches)”. Bathroom designation becomes a method of 34 describing the house. Prior to the description of the bathroom, the house had been relatively unpopulated, but suddenly, when
33 43)
Ernaux 53. “None of the first-floor rooms afford any privacy whatsoever…” (Leslie
Ernaux 53. “In this room belongs the bucket used as a chamberpot by my mother and
34 myself, and by my father at night (in the daytime he and the customers use a urinal set up in the courtyard—a barrel surrounded by planks).” (Leslie 43).
describing the bathroom, people’s locations matter. Each bathroom’s occupants are carefully tracked, and her father’s urination habits are carefully contextualized within the world of bathrooms:
De la cuisine, un escalier mène en tournant à une petite pièce mansardée desservant la chambre à gauche et le grenier à droite. Dans cette pièce est installé le seau de chambre qui sert habituellement à ma mère et moi, à mon père la nuit seulement (le jour, il utilise comme les clients l’urinoir situe dans la cour, un tonneau entouré de planches). Le cabinet dans le jardin est pratique par nous l’été et toute l’année par les clients. Sauf quand il fait beau, que je peux m’installer au-dehors, je lis et fais mes devoirs dans le haut de l’escalier, éclairé par une ampoule. De là, je vois tout à travers les barreaux, sans être vue.
Ernaux 5335
Ernaux’s point of view allows her to see people as they come in and out of the bathroom. These intricate details of bathroom habits are the types of details which are acquired over time, by years of careful observation—now that this private information is made legible, Ernaux places the reader in an uncomfortable position of knowing too much about people they do not know themselves. The sensation of sudden intimacy Ernaux creates here is similar to the
Ernaux 53. “From the kitchen, a winding staircase leads to a tiny loft with the bedroom
on the left and the attic on the right. In this room belongs the bucket used as a chamber pot by my mother and myself, and by my father at night (in the daytime he and the customers use a urinal set up in the courtyard—a barrel surrounded by planks). The outdoor toilet is used by us in the summer and by customers throughout the year. Except when it’s a nice day and I can sit outside, I usually read and do my homework at the top of the stairs, under a light bulb. From there, I can see everything that goes on through the bars of the banister, without being seen. (Leslie 43).
act of going to public bathrooms: private acts are performed in shared spaces with strangers.
Explaining Me
By Beth Sattur
In elementary school, I spent a lot of my free time in the "Gifted and Talented" program. We put on a mock trial and had to solve thinking exercises. My most vivid memory of that place is when we read something and I asked aloud what the word “nude” meant.
The moderator smiled at me, a smile that said I was a troublemaker and wasn’t going to get away with my shit. Not entirely recognizing that, I just smiled back, and she dismissed everyone.
“Why are you trying to humiliate me?” She demanded when everyone left.
“What?” I gasped, caught off guard.
“You asked me what the word ‘nude’ means as a joke to embarrass me.”
“It wasn’t a joke. I don’t know,” I insisted.
“You smiled afterward.”
“I just … smiled?”
She looked at me for a long moment. “Nude means naked.”
“Oh.” I knew what naked meant, and now instead of a new word, I had one of those words that just meant the same as some other word. It was disappointing.
In elementary school, we didn’t give normal letter grades. It was stuff like “E” for excellent or “S” for satisfactory. I think I had mostly Es, as if it even mattered. In middle school, I was making honor roll every marking period, but a smattering of Bs occasionally marred my As. Also, I remember this as the time when more teachers were constantly annoyed with me.
“Here’s my journal entry,” I whispered in sixth grade to my honors English teacher.
“What is this?” She snapped, loud enough for everyone to hear.
“It’s my…”
“No! You didn’t follow directions.”
“But…”
“I don’t want it.” She handed it back to me. I had a lot of trouble following or understanding directions, and a difficult time paying attention. Once when I was picking my nails in class, a teacher exploded at me, saying, “All you do is pick and pick and pick your nails!” The entire class was silent. Another time a teacher took a book I was reading away from me and gave it to someone else. Back then I assumed that, since I wasn’t that popular, teachers weren’t going to help me because they had their own social status to worry about. Maybe humiliating me would give them extra points. However, as I got older, I wondered if it was more rooted in the lack of training public school teachers received to handle neurodivergent kids; specifically, my thenundiagnosed ADHD. Despite that, I was still brilliant, which is what contributed to my sense of superiority during my formative years. Between my grades and my admissions exam score, I was admitted to a prestigious private high school, Mother Seton, with a $2,000 a year scholarship.
My freshman year of high school was, somehow, the most productive year of my life. For once, I became extremely popular and hung out with some of the most popular girls in my grade. Academically, I was thriving. I was anal about completing every task given to me. When I had to study, I laid on the floor and studied for hours. For my history midterm, I spent days at a time doing nothing but writing flashcards for every single term we were given, until I could barely feel my fingers and my Mom had to massage my hand. I finished that year with straight As and a sprinkle of A-pluses; no small feat considering that my school didn’t believe in minuses. Anything below a 92.5 was a B+.
Sophomore year can be definitely quantified as the year in which my life started slipping downhill. Either I wasn’t as popular
with the popular girls as I thought, or my friendships just naturally disintegrated and I found myself without any friends at all. Not only that, but B+s began to seep into my perfect transcript. I found I was no longer able to devote infinite energy to my work, but was doing the bare minimum.
The problem was, despite doing the bare minimum, I was still absolutely brilliant. I know this sounds like the opposite of a problem, but it seemed like I was still getting mostly As no matter what I did. I could do an essay the night before and still get a 97. It made me wonder why I was wasting so much of my life on effort during freshman year, but another part of me wondered if that same level of effort would have eradicated the B+’s.
This problem grew even more insidious when one day I realized that it wasn’t that I could complete a good essay the night before, it was that I no longer could start it any earlier. It persisted all the way until college, executive dysfunction growing worse every year. I had straight As my freshman year once again, but during my sophomore year, the first B+ had sullied my Dean’s List transcript. I didn’t even know what to do. I desperately wanted to begin my work early and go to bed at a decent hour instead of staring at the wall until 1 A.M. or scrolling through Tumblr when it had stopped being interesting hours ago.
I looked at other people in my class and were sometimes amazed at how hard they tried. The professor would give me a reading during class, and I would just read it. Other people would take out highlighters or even make notes on the text. Why? I always thought. I read through the text, I understood it, and that was it. I don’t mean to say that I think I’m inherently smarter than people who like to take notes. It’s more like I don’t need to take them. But what if I do? What if my refusal to take notes is what’s keeping me from success?
An issue that arises from branding children as geniuses too early is that no one ever bothers to teach them study tips, assuming that they’ll just “get it” on their own. I don’t really know if I “have to” study for a week leading to my midterms and finals when I
usually prefer to study the night before, and it turns out fine. If I get a low grade, does that mean I should have studied a few days earlier?
I am often praised for how much I work hard, and each time I am I feel like a fraud. I do essays the night before, I study the night before, the truth is sometimes I don’t study at all.
“Do you do any schoolwork at all?” People asked me suspiciously.
This makes me want to scream. Yes, I do work, but maybe you didn’t see it because I started at 3 a.m. when the panic was finally strong enough to make me begin. Like an addict, it takes more and more panic over time to force me to begin an assignment. Why are you like this? I ask myself on a daily basis. Is some of this work I think I should be doing superfluous? I have a friend who works much harder than me, who actually does the readings. I essentially stopped doing readings freshman year and I skim everything if I even look at it. She meets with professors, she studies days in advance, and she has me edit her essays. Yet, I have a higher GPA than her. Is that fair? Is she being punished by a system that values good memory over learning? I am trapped inside the own hellish prison of my mind, and saved only by the fact that I have learned to game the system. Why would I exhaust myself doing so much work when it doesn’t even matter? When I have calculated the exact amount necessary to get me by?
I always wonder, when I get that B+, if I could have done better, or if I only understood the material at a B+ level and no amount of highlighting can change that. I wonder if I am being too hard for myself, for it is certainly not as if I have slacked off. I know college students whose parents still write their essays for them, and I have written hundreds by myself. When I was struggling in Spanish, I pushed for extra credit and constantly met the professor in her office hours. I have tried to stay kind, charming, and professional, and I work over thirty hours a week to support myself. I graduated high school magna cum laude and I
will graduate college with the same. Why, then, is there a nagging thought in my mind that says that if I did more I would have graduated summa cum laude?
Is it really I who have manipulated the system, or has the system manipulated me? When I could have used support in my preteen years, most teachers treated me like I was trying to make their lives difficult. I do not blame underpaid and overworked public school teachers for not always being in a good mood, nor for not receiving the training to understand how to help me. But I do think they could have showed a little compassion. All I can imagine are the thousands of other young students in my position who berate themselves for being lazy and unable to pay attention. I still blame myself for it.
I can’t hear people either, sometimes. Nowadays, my supervisor will say “I have the utensils in the front, can you get them?” and what I heard was, “……in the front, can you get them?” I have to pause a moment to remember the words that preceded, or figure it out from contextual clues, and hope the person is patient. They usually aren’t.
There is a similar thing, I think, happening with my appearance. When I stopped shaving, I was often either praised or criticized for being too feminist, but the truth is I never intended a lack of shaving as a feminist statement. I merely never had the inclination to shave, which in my opinion is the biggest waste of time ever invented. If you wait months between it like I do, it takes over an hour, and no matter how hard you try you always miss a spot. The missed spot, just like the B+, always drives me crazy; so close to perfection, but not quite there.
The truth is, though, it doesn’t matter to me whether my legs have hair or not. If they could magically be hairless, without any effort on my part, I would be by no means opposed to that. I even try to make an effort to shave in the spring and summer when I’m wearing shorts, and it is also practical due to the heat.
Makeup was another subject that presented this dilemma. When I started working a part-time job in college, my shifts started
at 9 a.m., and I cut out everything in my routine that wasn’t completely essential to sleep as late as possible. I ordered breakfast at Starbucks instead of cooking, showered at night, and laid out my clothes and backpack the night before so I could grab them and go. Makeup would have been the first thing cut if I had previously been wearing any.
“It can only takes five minutes,” Mom assured me, and magazines like Reader’s Digest claimed that women who wore makeup are viewed as more professional. I do not doubt them, and there is a whole world of misogyny behind makeup culture, but let me leave the obvious aside for now. I am not opposed to wearing makeup either, and if I pictured my perfect self, she would most likely be well made-up, probably even with a mani-pedi. But I know I will never have the time or patience, so I have to accept that this is how I look.
It could, I suppose, have something to do with the fact that my Mom wore makeup every day and, as her only daughter, I assumed she hoped I would share her interest in typically feminine things. Perhaps it is an unconscious rebellion to remain barefaced, but more likely it is the easiest thing executive dysfunction can trick me out of doing. The consequences for sleeping in for 10 more minutes instead of wearing makeup are far less heavy than failing to complete an essay worth 20% of my grade. I might be hurting myself professionally, as society typically assumes there is something wrong with women who do not fuss with their appearance. I am fulfilling a different stereotype; after all, there is something wrong with me.
I imagine that reading this would come as a surprise to my bosses or professors, who either consider me a model student or one of their best workers. I have never received anything besides glowing recommendation letters or good reference requests. For those who know me closer, and have observed my habit of not showering for several days in a row because I just don’t have the energy, or putting off washing my dishes, I imagine it will sound like either an explanation or an excuse. Maybe it’s a little of both.
The Brio editors are enormously grateful to many wonderful people for making this journal possible. Thank you to Alyson Wild and the entire New York University Comparative Literature Department for their insight and advice. Special thanks is also in order for erstwhile editor-in-chief Nicole D’Alessio, who patiently guided us every step of the way. Without the support of all these incredible people, our ambitious endeavor might not have come to fruition. We would also like to thank all those who contributed their work-- you challenged our expectations and helped us define the journal and bring it to life. And thank you, of course, to our readers. In the spirit of comparative literature, we encourage you to criticize, analyze, and submit to Brio. Above all, we hope it helps you see the world in a new light, and opens up a dialogue where you go.
The Spring 2018 issue of the Brio literary journal is edited by:
Libby Torres, Editor-in-Chief, studies Comparative Literature with a focus in Spanish and Creative Writing. She likes dumplings, Derrida, and dogs.
Mark Sologuren, managing editor, studies Comparative Literature. He brings good tidings.
Anastasia Damaskou, editor and staff writer, is a senior in CAS studying Comparative Literature. She speaks Greek and English fluently and some Spanish acquired while studying abroad in Buenos Aires.
Ai Xin Liew, editor and staff writer, is a freshman at the College of Arts & Sciences whose first name consists of two words, not one. She hails from a city-state-nation, and misses all the food she
wrote about. Though technically a music major, she is also interested in exploring writing-related fields.
Cindy Sharra, editor and staff writer, is a sophomore studying Comparative Literature, Philosophy, and foreign languages.
Zachary Lewis, editor, is a senior in the Department of Comparative Literature, with concentrations in sociology and Spanish language literature. His interests include 20th century continental philosophy, political economy, post-boom Latin American literature, and Marxist theory.
Cover design is by Andrea Long Chu, a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at NYU who works on gender, sex, bad politics, and all the feels. Her work has been published in Transgender Studies Quarterly, Women & Performance, and n+1.
For more information on submissions and editorial positions, visit the NYU Comparative Literature website at http:// complit.as.nyu.edu/object/complit.ug.brio. Or email us at briojournal@gmail.com.
