Modern Language Studies — Issue 55.2 — Winter 2026 by mls_susqu

front matter

CAITLIN SCHERESKY (THE GOOD ENDING)

a slice of lemon. a token. face-up. a ballad. a girl. a boy. warm. terrible, awful. young, younger, and younger still. open. blue. a hush. a puzzle. stained glass. butterscotch. a cliff. soaked in ink. a scandal. pierced. an arena. a ghost. transcending translucence. inferior. colliding. screaming. clenching its teeth. a demon. a woman. an organ. a soul. an ocean. a body. empty. full. dancing on the edge of existence. a pig. a loss. grief. opal. a sword-tipped sternum. a bone. an instrument. holy. a reaper. a mission. a kiss goodbye. dying. reborn. a songbird. lilac. seraphim. its own vernacular. pitch-black candlelight. a mother. the happy ending. the sad ending. deadly, but alive. deadly and alive. on fire. encapsulated. steel. reflecting. absorbing. arms out. pleading. bared fangs. digging its claws in. a new year. pineapple, acidic. a cannibal. hopeful. holding a pen.

55.2

VOLUME 55, NO. 2

staff

LAURENCE ROTH EDITOR

AMANDA LENIG CREATIVE DIRECTOR

PATRICK THOMAS HENRY ASSOCIATE EDITOR Fiction and Poetry

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about NeMLA

The Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) is a scholarly organization for professionals in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and other modern languages. The group was founded as the New York-Pennsylvania MLA in 1967 by William Wehmeyer of St. Bonaventure University and other MLA members interested in continuing scholarly discourse at annual conventions smaller than that hosted by the Modern Language Association. In 1969, the organization moved to wider regional membership, election of officers, formal affiliation with MLA, and adoption of its present name.

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Reparative Re-Composition: Redirected Historical Language in Hymn for the Black Terrific Anne Duncan

“The Front Door Is Locked”: Space and Female Agency in Alice Munro’s “Meneseteung”

Robert Lecker and Kyra Odell

Creative Writing

Seán Carlson: Homework as Gaeilge

Caitlin Scheresky: i dreamt of god and she looked like you

Audra Wolfmann: Message from the Beyond Reviews

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers. Misbehaving at the Crossroads: Essays & Writings

Beth Brown Preston

Thomas Leitch. Engagements with Adaptation

Phillip Zapkin

55.2

REDIRECTED HISTORICAL LANGUAGE IN HYMN FOR THE BLACK TERRIFIC

I. PRELUDE

As the twenty-first century rounds its first quarter, a pervasive undercurrent of presentism in the United States butts heads with a rising call to keep our nation’s past in full view. In the summer of 2020, for instance, when the COVID-19 pandemic was routinely described as “unprecedented times,” the murder of George Floyd simultaneously sparked a public reckoning with the historical and discursive roots of our country’s racist structures and ideologies. Public-facing media about racial history, like Ava DuVernay’s 2016 documentary 13th and New York Times Magazine’s 2019 The 1619 Project, rose in popularity. Meanwhile, the Trump presidencies have been compared and contrasted with nationalist fascism in 1930s Germany, especially because of fascism’s tendency to suppress history (Stanley). Truly, the present is always entangled with the past. Indeed, the most recent incidents of anti-Black violence are not anomalous failures of American “freedom” and “equality” as common presentist framings may suggest, but rather late symptoms of the nation’s racist economic and discursive foundation, what Saidiya Hartman calls the “afterlife” of slavery (Scenes). Refusing the lure of presentism, scholars like Hartman have examined the “silence in the archive” (Venus 3) to imagine counter-histories of slavery, Black life, and acts of resistance — to wonder at what may have been lost to history and how it paved the way to our present.

Just as literary scholars and historians have done, contemporary poets too have turned to historical documents, public records, and canonical texts to account for the enduring racist ideologies that continue to mold individual and communal identities and experiences. Five years ago, Michael Leong observed, “Within the realm of contemporary North American poetry, we are witnessing a vigorous turn, or return, to found material and source texts because, among other causes, the aggressive

presentism of our historical moment has thrown our cultural memories into conflict and chaos” (1-2).

Poets like Kiki Petrosino, M. NourbeSe Philip, Don Mee Choi, Layli Long Soldier, Eve Ewing, and Tyahimba Jess have revisited historical documents to reconsider lost historical accounts, juxtapose sterile state documents with complex individual experience, and/or bring more of the past into clear relation with the present.

This twenty-first century trend bears a likeness to Modernist collage poems and conceptual found language poems. However, in this contemporary genre, sourced language is not placed on a stool and called art, but instead interrogated for its rhetorical and affective impact, butchered for parts, or dissected for experimentation. Characterized by this repurposing or “redirecting” (Reed) of sourced language, such poetry does not simply quote another text, but more indirectly integrates piecemeal words, phrases, and ideas to recompose something new out of the raw material. Poets “redirect” language by “appropriating others’ words, redacting them, and presenting them as their own,” and by so doing, “invit[ing] readers to think about the relationship among authorship, medium, genre, context, and meaning” (Reed 759).

As this twenty-first century genre has taken shape, scholars have variously defined it by its relation to genre, authorship, originality, and temporality. For instance, Mandy Bloomfield has defined a similar subgenre of contemporary poetry as “archaeopoetics,” emphasizing its epistemological engagements with a material-textual historical archive. Leong has similarly theorized “documental” poetry with an emphasis on its generic interaction with (mostly public) documents, “those objects and artifacts stored in offices and archives, on disks and in databases” (2). In my own theorization of this genre, I adopt Jacques Derrida’s portmanteau “hauntological”1 to emphasize the haunting temporal and affective

relationship between past and present that poems may explore by redirecting historical language (Duncan). These terms denote a genre of roughly the same categorical shape. However, differences in connotation are important for an understanding of this genre as a hermeneutics, not merely a category (Frow). Brian Reed’s term, “redirected language,” suggests the momentum with which historical texts propel into our historical present. “Redirected” also accounts for the agency with which poets can tweak those texts’ orientations. While “documental” or “archaeopoetic” significantly point to the relation of this poetry to other sorts of knowledge-making and recording (e.g., documentary journalism or archaeology), the source material is metaphorically static as paper or fossil, unlike Reed’s “redirected” or the uncanny force suggested by “hauntological.” In this paper, I use the term “hauntological poetry” to refer to this subgenre of poetry, which uses the citational technique of redirected language to reorient a relation between past and present.

One standout work of hauntological poetry is Kiki Petrosino’s “Mulattress” poem sequence in her 2013 Hymn for the Black Terrific (hereafter Hymn), which fragments and repurposes language from Thomas Jefferson’s 1785 Notes on the State of Virginia2 (hereafter Notes). Ranging in scope from the length of Virginia’s rivers to a plan for emancipation to the “disappearance” of native peoples to the purported inferiority of Black literature, the Notes were initially written in response to a French diplomat’s inquiry into the characteristics of the emergent United States (Magnis), but they also addressed the debates of transatlantic philosophers and scientists, as well as the concerns of Jefferson’s Virginian constituents, as Jefferson revised and expanded the text over seven years. Petrosino responds to a particularly racist passage of the Notes via a golden shovel sequence. Initially developed by Terrance Hayes in homage to Gwendolyn Brooks, the poetic form of the golden

shovel is a type of redirected language in which a quoted poem, line, or sentence is broken into words and/or short phrases and used as line endings. As such, the right side of the new poem can be read vertically to reveal the quoted text. Petrosino wields this Black poetic tradition to butcher and digest Jefferson’s words, refusing him the sort of honor that Hayes offers Brooks. In her golden shovel sequence, Petrosino intentionally takes Jefferson’s words out of context to juxtapose his conception of blackness-as-monstrosity with the speaker’s own larger-than-life, even supernatural, power. The result is a recomposed self-portrait of the persona-speaker: the “black terrific,”3 the “mulattress.”4

Through intertextual allusions, Petrosino ties her poems to canonical theories and depictions of Black and biracial peoples’ bodies, while also breaking down the American historical canon5 into fodder for her fantastical speaker’s song. White supremacist discourse (exemplified here by Jefferson) has perpetually defined Black people as non-human and used blackness as a counterpoint for a construct of the white “Man” (Wynter). As Zakiyya Iman Jackson argues, “Eurocentric humanism needs blackness as a prop in order to erect whiteness: to define its own limits and to designate humanity as an achievement” (4), attainable by definition only through whiteness. Hortense Spillers similarly speaks to white America’s dependence on a construction of black femininity when she writes, “My country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented” (65). In particular, historian Robert Forbes argues that Jefferson’s construction of blackness ultimately serves a construction of whiteness: “it is in fact not blackness that is being established by the investigation, but whiteness” (201), as is apparent from Petrosino’s rhetorical examination of Jefferson’s language.

Though the poems certainly do reveal the racist underbelly of Jefferson’s writing, they go beyond “exposing” Jefferson’s racist influence on modern

conceptions of Black femininity. Petrosino redirects his harmful language into something that can sustain and nurture her speaker’s subjecthood.6 Hymn for the Black Terrific’s redirection is equal parts hauntological in its representation of Jefferson’s discursive possession of the speaker’s body and reparative in Eve Sedgwick’s sense:

[T]his is the position from which it is possible in turn to use one’s own resources to assemble or ‘‘repair’’ the murderous part-objects into something like a whole—though, I would emphasize, not necessarily like any preexisting whole. Once assembled to one’s own specifications, the more satisfying object is available both to be identified with and to offer one nourishment and comfort in turn. (128, italics original)

Sedgwick presents the reparative as a reading practice, which is applicable to Petrosino’s poems in the sense that a re-composition of Jefferson’s text is a sort of reading. In particular, I suggest that by redirecting Jefferson’s language into a daring self-portrait of the “Mulattress” persona-speaker, Petrosino assembles the “murderous part-objects” of Jefferson’s words into a new whole that is more amenable to the speaker’s life — or, what Kevin Quashie calls “black aliveness”:7 a form of worlding which centers neither whiteness nor black death but rather makes space for black life. As such, I suggest that these poems’ reparative self-portraiture respond to Hortense Spillers’ 1987 call to make possible new forms of black subjecthood. “Actually claiming the monstrosity” (Spillers 80) that white supremacists have projected onto Black women, the “Mulattress” persona-speaker occupies and repurposes the role of the black matriarch. Starting with this language of anti-blackness from the American canon, Petrosino fractures and redirects its pieces to chart out a space more amenable to

her speaker. Petrosino undoubtedly leaves her reader orbiting the speaker’s Black world, in awe of her power and her language, her Black terrific. In sum, Petrosino makes her speaker’s aliveness possible in her poems not only in spite of Black life’s exclusion from dominant historical discourses, but also through the actual language of that discourse, repeating, recomposing, and redirecting it until something new can emerge. Through an analysis of Petrosino’s hauntological poetry, I suggest the broader potential of such a poetics to reparatively revise public discourses of humanity and subjecthood, making space for marginalized lives to rise from the cracks of the canon.

II. VERSE & REFRAIN

A vexing historical figure, Jefferson simultaneously gave language to American conceptions of humanity, citizenship, and equality, while also cementing myths of racial difference — informed more by personal inclination than actual research, but nevertheless permeating American ideologies. As historian David Greenberg writes, “In national lore, no Revolutionary leader except George Washington looms larger than Jefferson.” This is in part because of his widely-read Notes, “the work that catapulted the once little-known former governor and diplomat to international fame,” as states the editorial description of Robert Forbes’ edition of the Notes. Despite the overt racism of the Notes, Jefferson’s white supremacist ideologies have been minimized, and even outright dismissed by historians over the years, who preferred to reify his status as a national hero (Holowchak).

Jefferson’s racism is in full view in the epigraph to the “Mulattress” section of Hymn: “Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry. Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry” (Hymn 25). In this section of the Notes, Jefferson specifically demeans contemporary-to-him Black writers Phillis Wheatley and

Ignatius Sancho, extrapolating to a claim about the inherent intellectual inabilities of Black bodies. Defying the epigraph that dismisses the value of Black poetry, the “Mulattress” poem sequence picks apart another of Jefferson’s sentences, one that turns Black bodies into discursively fungible and affectively disgusting flesh: “They secrete less by the kidnies and more by the glands of the skin which gives them a strong and disagreeable odor” (Jefferson 212). By including these quotations from Jefferson, Petrosino could be seen as “revealing” what has otherwise been obfuscated. In this case, her project would fall into the culturally dominant “paranoid” approach Eve Sedgwick observes is typical of cultural criticism that seeks to reveal unseen potential dangers: “paranoia is characterized by placing, in practice, an extraordinary stress on the efficacy of knowledge per se—knowledge in the form of exposure” (138). Petrosino’s “Mulattress” poems spotlight particularly damnable words from Jefferson in what may be called a “demystifying exposure” (Sedgwick 144) of his racism.

Certainly, such a paranoid exposure carries a counter-hegemonic potential, as Leong argues for documental poetics:

If bureaucracy and documentation have the power to traumatize through the exercise of state power, then a documental poetics can function as a counterhegemonic, unofficial, and demotic practice that authenticates marginalized experiences at the fringes of our cultural memory … [T] he insistence on redocumenting marginalized lives is a resistance to their social deaths, to their public erasures. (4-5)

The documental project of making visible (by “redocumenting”) what has been occluded (through “public erasure”) bears a resemblance to Petrosino’s open interrogation of a U.S. historical canon that

“IF BUREAUCRACY AND DOCUMENTATION HAVE THE POWER TO TRAUMATIZE THROUGH THE EXERCISE OF STATE POWER, THEN A DOCUMENTAL POETICS CAN FUNCTION AS A COUNTER-

HEGEMONIC, UNOFFICIAL, AND DEMOTIC PRACTICE

THAT AUTHENTICATES MARGINALIZED EXPERIENCES AT THE FRINGES OF OUR CULTURAL MEMORY.”

has established and reinforced white supremacist state power. Like Leong’s documental poetics, Petrosino’s poems offer counter-hegemonic potential to redocument the lives insufficiently captured by Jefferson’s canonized text: Hymn openly interrogates the canon that has established and reinforced white supremacist state power; it counters that canon with portraits of the speaker and her kin, whose shimmering images might otherwise undergo social or literal death in the wake of enslavement and the ongoing workings of a racist state. The “Mulattress” speaker acknowledges, “I live in a country they / didn’t leave for me” (35), and in this context, paranoia seems appropriate and valuable.8 Leong argues: “paranoid knowledge has a value beyond challenging a public order or consensus reality and is of intellectual interest in the way it attempts to account for, and analyze, abstract structures of power” (82). He pays particular attention to the role of paranoia in confronting a history of oppression. Describing Amiri Baraka’s “Somebody Blew Up America,” for instance, Leong writes that such documental poetry “raises the question of whether one can be paranoid enough when reading history, when reading one’s own subject position within a threatening socio-discursive landscape or within an oppressive network of power relations” (82).

Thus, the elements of paranoid anticipation and exposure in Hymn are not necessarily weaknesses. Still, Petrosino’s Hymn is not exclusively or primarily characterized by paranoia, unlike the archive-fevered documental poetry that constantly seeks new connections between near-forgotten documents (Leong 100). I suggest the “Mulattress” poems are more significantly characterized by their reparative approach, spinning Jefferson’s words into new shapes through the “golden shovel” form. It may seem strange to describe Petrosino’s dark, festering poems as “reparative,” but per Sedgwick’s theory, the reparative and paranoid affective modes

can be coexistent and codependent. As a supplement to paranoia, reparation is a valuable alternative mode for finding and making life in a wasteland. Exemplifying this theory, the “Mulattress” poems’ paranoid uneasiness does not diminish their reparative potential. Petrosino’s reparative approach never requires the reader to dismiss the harms of national narratives like Jefferson’s, but rather brings us to work through and around those harms, salvaging whatever sustenance can be found in fragments of the threatening or harmful material.

Through the quoted language of Jefferson’s Notes, Petrosino’s Hymn boldly names the harms posed to the speaker and her ancestors but also redirects Jefferson’s harmful language to rebuild a source of power for her speaker. Each of the ten poems in the “Mulattress” section contain the quoted sentence from Jefferson — “They secrete less by the kidneys…” — though these words (or close homonyms) are camouflaged, lingering in italics at the line ends. The presence of Jefferson’s words, even out of context, demonstrates the lasting impact of his language on her speaker’s self-image, exploring his version of blackness in all its horror rather than debating or artificially silencing his long-lived philosophies. While Jefferson’s Notes may no longer be a household name (and to this extent, Hymn “exposes” its influence), historians agree that the Notes “proved to be a uniquely powerful factor in the formation of the idea of the United States. The book appeared at a time when most readers’ understanding of the new American nation was a blank slate, or at best a jumble of vague impressions and stereotypes” (Forbes “Introduction” xxvi). Jefferson’s overtly racist statements on Black people’s bodies and poetry have been extensively commentated on and argued against (Gates) and could easily bear further response. Petrosino certainly does engage with Jefferson’s argumentation but does so largely by trace implications of his text’s presence in her

speaker’s self-portrait. Much as Ayo Coly argues that “colonial discourses compulsively ghost postcolonial African discursive engagements with the female body” (2), the form of the “Mulattress” poems suggests that Jefferson’s racist philosophies perpetually haunt the speaker’s life and body, even while the speaker refuses to endorse his authority over her selfhood.

Images of fragmented, fungible body parts seep in through the redirection of Jefferson’s construction of blackness. The first poem of the section opens with a consideration of the speaker’s ugliness and imperfection, as a body and a poet:

[1]

What would you trade they ask, if you could trade for beauty? If you could secrete or slice or tender an exchange? A little less by this business of poetry, they ask; rather, the kidneys cut into bright arcs, plated with care & more vivid now because divorced from your body? If, by the glands you could alter your person, strip your skull of the skin & imagine the eye’s dry orbital a window which gives onto your grandmother’s terrace (full of pigeons look at them million wings burning)? If you could become a very strong horizon made crisp with towers & huge stones, would you slip your disagreeable knot of flesh, then, O apple of dark, O Door? (27)

To some extent, Petrosino uses her “Mulattress” poems to consider the haunting afterlife of Jefferson’s

language. In this first poem, Petrosino allows Jefferson’s gaze to fragment her speaker’s body into pieces: kidneys, skin, dry bone. “They” suggest that the speaker ought to trade her body (something less than beautiful) on the market. The repeated allusion to a market exchange necessarily recalls the slave trade, adding weight to the way in which the speaker is fragmented into fleshy parts that are valued more highly than her personhood: her kidneys become “ more / vivid now because divorced from your body” (27). By entertaining “their” perspective,9 Petrosino acknowledges the white gaze that has and continues to objectify Black people into fungible flesh. In this way, Jefferson could be understood as haunting, even possessing, the speaker’s body, just as his words haunt the poem.

The atomization of the body (in Poem 1, into kidneys, glands, eyeball, and eye socket) both mimics Jefferson and exemplifies a broader white supremacist discourse. Through enslavement and its afterlife, Hortense Spillers argues, Black bodies have been made into fungible flesh in the ocean, ungendered and unmade. Spillers distinguishes between the body (a coherent being who can be an agent in a liberal humanist society) and the flesh: “In that sense, before the “‘body’” there is the “‘flesh,’” that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography” (66). The flesh is not cohesive as a “person” or “body” but “seared, divided, ripped-apart[,] riveted to the ship’s hole, fallen, or ‘escaped’ overboard” (Spillers 66). One result of objectifying Black bodies (i.e., persons, per Spillers) into “flesh” is social death:

This profitable ““atomizing”” of the captive body provides another angle on the divided flesh: we lose any hint or suggestion of a dimension of ethics, of relatedness between human personality and its anatomical features, between one human

personality and another, between human personality and cultural institutions. To that extent, the procedures adopted for the captive flesh demarcate a total objectification as the entire captive community becomes a living laboratory. (Spillers 68)

Jefferson’s laser-focus onto the functions of the kidneys, glands, etc., thus reflect his observations of the population of Virginia as “a living laboratory.” In particular, Jefferson equates a “lower” form of humanity with pseudo-diagnoses of individual, ungendered flesh (kidneys, hair, skin) mingled with hypersexualized animalism (orangutang-like lust), culminating in a sub-human Frankensteinian creature of his imagination.

As Spillers inherited a white supremacist construction of Black persons as ungendered flesh, as cargo, as objects, so too does the “Mulattress” speaker inherit a similar racialized depiction of her body, twenty years after Spillers’ essay. Spillers accounts for the trans-temporality of such discourse by theorizing “a kind of hieroglyphics of the flesh” (67). The Black body has historically been marked by literal and metaphorical scars. On the one hand, Spillers writes that the “severe disjunctures” of these racial signifying scars “come to be hidden to the cultural seeing by skin color” (67). On the other hand, she suggests the persistence of such racial signification across time: “This body whose flesh carries the female and the male to the frontiers of survival bears in person the marks of a cultural text whose inside has been turned outside” (67). While the literal scars of enslavement might not be passed on through generations, racialized skin color still signifies a violent unbelonging.

This transtemporal marking of/by the skin enables a pervasive, habituated affect of disgust, horror, and/or abjection, as is evident in Jefferson’s description of the Black body and the poetic speaker’s

own representation of and reaction to her body. The disgust in Jefferson’s original writing is palpable, as he describes the “disagreeable” secretion and odor of a Black body. As if infected by this affective orientation, the speaker stares at this disgusting body and realizes it is her own, though that identification is troubled by a fog of abjection. Speaking to the temporal nature of affects like disgust, Sara Ahmed describes disgust as “sticky” in that “stickiness depends on histories of contact that have already impressed upon the surface of the object” (90). Disgust has seemingly “stuck” to the speaker’s dark skin, in the sense that its historical affective reception (exemplified by Jefferson) has become conditioned and so is difficult for even the speaker to shake off centuries later. The “Mulattress” poems attest to a pervasive sense of disgust, horror, and abjection uncannily stuck to the speaker’s body, as if her racialized flesh itself is a “hieroglyphic” signifier of abjection. Ahmed significantly compares disgust with abjection, as each involves the potential or real dissolution of boundaries between the self and the subject. The dissolution of bodily boundaries through disgust and abjection is readily apparent in this poem as well: Is the speaker a body? a voice? a kidney? a horizon? Is she in danger of dissolving, or are “they” in danger of contamination by her body? The speaker’s body is turned inside out, and through this overt display of disgust at her speaker’s dark body, Petrosino draws attention to the gruesome results of Jefferson’s dissecting gaze, like the dry orbital that is left after removing black skin. The speaker seems to call back to Jefferson, Is this bone the whiteness you find so beautiful? Is this what you want from me?

Through the golden shovel’s consistent end-words (e.g., “kidneys,” “skin”), the entire “Mulattress” sequence is predisposed to splice the body into fleshy parts, reflecting the white supremacist discourse that Jefferson exemplifies. But Petrosino’s project does not stop with revealing such discourse, instead moving

reparatively to twist its words into a new context. For instance, in the third poem of the sequence, the speaker’s body is fragmented, but it also appears to be a source of wonder, not only disgust.

[3]

I didn’t know my color till they called me by its dirty name: a coin secreted in the body’s bank. Now I move less by gathering names to swelter in the kidneys or in the lake behind my teeth, & more electric-wise, crackling in air. I can show you by the glands how I surpass my proofing dish. Of the skin there’s nothing more to confess, a fact which gives me leave to sing. I want to tell them: A colored body confirms a bridge, very strong across the synapses & disagreeable to caliper. Still, between us, this human odor. (29)

Along with the piecemeal cataloguing of the body, the speaker wonders at what it is she is, 10 the expansiveness and power of her body, as figured by “the lake behind my teeth,” an image which suggests the immensity of the speaker’s powers of appetite, language, and naming — an immensity that cannot be explored and enumerated by a quick gaze, much as the poems themselves may feel untraversable. Unsuitable to a phrenologist’s caliper, this speaker buzzes “ more / electric-wise, crackling in air,” extending her energy beyond her body to the world she speaks into being, jolting the reader like a static shock. This poem redirects the language of the historical discourse at a slant, breaking it down for scraps and recomposing it into an entirely new portrait of the speaker as the powerful force behind her own black aliveness.

The “Mulattress” poems significantly decenter the white gaze exemplified by Jefferson’s writing. Jefferson’s depersonalizing “they” no longer refers to a mass of Black bodies but instead to those who find the speaker’s dark body disgusting, “called me by its dirty name” (29), and believe it would be better off sold on the market than writing poetry. Rebecca Morgan Frank writes in a book review, “The speaker responds to the brutality of Jefferson’s words and beliefs by shifting the address of ‘they’ to the perpetrators, while naming the consequences to the ‘they’ Jefferson addresses” (176). Through “their” gaze, the speaker sees herself turned into a racialized prop: “I’m a Moor / now, I’m a Moor” (32). Jefferson’s use of “they” is significant, as noted by Forbes for its contrast against the more widely used “we” in the rest of the Notes: “it is in fact not blackness that is being established by the investigation, but whiteness—the “we” who are silently actualized by the reader’s involuntary assent to Jefferson’s premises about difference” (“Laws” 201). Twisting who “they” are from the point of view of the speaker, Petrosino acknowledges Jefferson’s voice and lingering presence in the American psyche, while deflating his power to define her speaker’s selfhood.

Though the fragmentation of flesh may originate in the white gaze, Petrosino twists its signification, enabling her speaker to wonder at her own self and redirecting abjection into wonder or even sublimity. Yes, the speaker breaks her own body into pieces as Jefferson does, but she does so to answer the questions, Who am I? Where did I come from? What life can I make? If the speaker arrives anywhere, it is in wonder at the presence and power of her body. For instance, the fourth “Mulattress” poem begins with the image of a “colored body” under white spectatorship — “a wreck they /race with a strobe light” — but ends with images of the speaker’s powerful aliveness: “Myself: slewfooted, strong & disagreeable. / Iron in the head. Iron, my odor” (30). By the end, the speaker is both

powerful and monstrous, strong but deformed, smelling of blood (hers, or perhaps “theirs”).

Whether with horror or wonder, the speaker significantly beholds herself from the outside — a standing outside the self that literally defines poiesis and that Quashie takes as integral to his concept of black aliveness. Although fragmented into body parts, the speaker’s self-study suggests her “oneness,” a state characterized by self-abstraction or self-regard: “It is the syntax of philosophical self-projection where the speaker throws herself into question and possibility, imagining the instance that she is and is not (yet)” (Quashie 43). This self-regard is apparent throughout Petrosino’s Hymn, as the speaker inspects her own face,11 dissects her own body, considers her own lineage and presence in the world. This invocation of visuality is more radical than it may sound, as Quashie attests:

Spillers advocates for one’s act of seeing as a profound agency, and I want to extend seeing not only as a ‘return of the gaze’ but as a calculus of self-orienting: of seeing one’s self, of being engaged in the act of beholding one’s self as a one. Or, to be the object and subject of study, to be the theorist of one’s being as well as to be the thing made in the theorizing of being: again poiesis, where ideation constitutes the breadth of aliveness rather than inaugurating the denigration of breath. This characterization resonates with the lyric poem, a domain of being where a speaker can render themself as object for the sake of beholding experience and feeling. (63)

Quashie suggests the potential to reclaim visuality as something other than a technology of subjection, spectacle, and violence; he specifically argues that this is possible through “the critical use of distance to navigate black alienation” (11), just as Petrosino achieves in her distancing not just between herself

and her speaker, but also between the speaker and the face she gazes at. Yes, the speaker’s gaze recalls a tradition of bodily spectacle perpetuated by Jefferson and theorized by Spillers, but it also reorients the speaker’s own body to be the object of her own study and theorizing. Neither perpetuating nor refuting the racist construction of blackness recorded by Jefferson, this poetic speaker redirects it for her own benefit. This embodied experience of self “gushes with existence, the knowing that Audre Lorde theorizes as embodied consciousness” (Quashie 43).

The “Mulattress” poems are a powerful assertion of speaker’s black aliveness, even in the face of memorialized racist discourse — but this is not without ramification. By exercising power, the speaker establishes herself as a threat to the white patriarchy and so may be seen as monstrous or dangerous. As Spillers theorizes, the historical transformation of Black bodies into fungible, ungendered flesh leads indirectly to the non-normative gendering of Black women: not feminine, but monstrously, dangerously powerful, displacing the father as head-of-household. At the center of Spiller’s argument is a response to the 1965 Moynihan Report, officially titled The Negro Family, the Case for National Action and written primarily by Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Towards its report on Black families’ social and economic status for the Department of Labor, the Moynihan Report pathologizes Black matriarchs as the socially dysfunctional centers of unstable families, in contrast with normative white patriarchy. Spillers problematizes this way of thinking about Black women’s power by arguing that Black mothers actually cannot usurp the role of the father, when enslaved mothers had no legal claim over their children and, even still, “‘motherhood’ is not considered a legitimate procedure of cultural inheritance” (79). Even years after enslavement, Black people are marked by the “hieroglyphics of the flesh” (67), thereby excluded

from coherent personhood and its corresponding family structures and considered (e.g., by Moynihan) a social threat to normative white patriarchy. This same transformation is mirrored in Petrosino’s poetry, as the speaker is doubly-presented as fragmented flesh and as something that “trouble[s] grown-up men” (32) — sexually and/or socially. What to do in the face of these troubled men? Rather than resisting a characterization of “monstrous” matriarch, Spillers calls for a radical embrace of monstrosity:

This problematizing of gender places her [the Black woman], in my view, out of the traditional symbolics of female gender, and it is our task to make a place for this different social subject. In doing so, we are less interested in joining the ranks of gendered femaleness than gaining the insurgent ground as female social subject. Actually claiming the monstrosity (of a female with the potential to “name”), which her culture imposes in blindness, ‘Sapphire’ [the stereotyped Black woman] might rewrite after all a radically different text for a female empowerment. (80)

Seeming to follow this call, Petrosino writes a “radically different text” from Jefferson’s white supremacy. Hymn makes visible the constructions that have been “imposed in blindness,” thereby claiming the speaker’s monstrous power for self- and world-making.

Considering Spillers’ account of the historically pathologized Black family, it is no coincidence that Jefferson, and in turn Petrosino, are both concerned with the Black familial structures. Both of Jefferson’s sentences quoted by Petrosino come from the “Laws” section of Jefferson’s Notes , specifically from a widely-cited passage where Jefferson argues for the emancipation of slaves — but only under the condition of anti-miscegenation. He argues that enslaved children should be taken from their parents,

“educated” by the state in art, science, or farming, “according to their geniusses [sic]” (of which he believes they have little), until age eighteen for women, age twenty-one for men, and then sent to a new colony, to be maintained by the United States’ “alliance and protection” (Jefferson 211). What would happen to the parents of these colonial non-citizens is not mentioned. Strangely enough, this hedged argument for emancipation was cited by pro- and anti-slavery legislators in the decades leading up to the Civil War, each cherry-picking the portions of the Notes that serve their political needs (Rogers). Indeed, Jefferson’s plan is anything but simple, revealing both a call for emancipation and an insistence that Black people be removed from white society.

Why separate free Black children from their families, assimilate them through education, and ship them to a managed colony? Because, according to Jefferson, miscegenation must be avoided at all costs. Jefferson cites the racism of white society, the trauma undergone by the enslaved, and what he imagines to be “the real distinctions which nature has made” as reasons that a mixed-race society would end in “the extermination of the one or the other race” (211). Of course, Jefferson’s own relationship with Sally Hemings — his slave, whom he likely began a relationship with when she was fourteen years old, had multiple children with, and never freed (Nicolaisen) — points to the personal nature and blatant hypocrisy of Jefferson’s argument. Though Jefferson writes of the depersonalized “they,” his relationship with Sally Hemings as well as his mysterious commitment to composing the Notes (on which he spent the better part of a decade,) tell of his deep personal investment in this political project. 12 Historian Peter Nicolaisen explains Jefferson’s private, personal investment in his anti-miscegenation plan:

Jefferson’s advocacy of colonization … was directly connected with his personal situation; when Jefferson renewed his proposal in a letter of 1824, forty-five years after he had first outlined it, he was — consciously or not — speaking also of his own mixed-race children. … ‘By removing the living evidence of their sexual transgressions and freeing the next generation from the temptations to which they had succumbed, the fathers of Virginia would redeem their republic,’ [Peter] Onuf concludes. To fathom the personal element at stake in such ‘redemption’ remains a chilling task. (114-115)

Forbes places even more pressure on the presumption that Jefferson may have been unaware of the impact or relevancy of his rhetoric:

In this light, Hemings’ absence from Jefferson’s writing is all the more glaring: it is neither accident nor coincidence that Jefferson’s life and writing are archived and canonized, while Hemings’ life, or even her role in Jefferson’s life, is less documented, less prominently remembered, and certainly not recorded and considered by Jefferson in a publication like his Notes. As Gordon-Reed suggests, Jefferson may have kept Hemings in slavery precisely because “freeing her in a document that would become a public record

… would have been rubbing his violation of the ultimate taboo in the faces of white society” (208). Gordon-Reed theorizes that he may have intended for her to be freed after his death (which she was) — the smallest of saving graces.

Jefferson himself refuses to delve into the personal relevance of race in the Notes. Instead, he keeps Black bodies at an antiseptic distance in his Notes, turning them into objects of criticism instead of humans with agency. In particular, to strengthen his argument for colonization, Jefferson chronicles wildly fictitious descriptions of Black minds and bodies as inferior to those of white people, using an impersonal “they” to encompass all Black people in his broad-brushed portrait of blackness:

They seem to require less sleep. A black, after hard labour through the day, will be induced by the slightest amusements to sit up till midnight, or later, though knowing he must be out with the first dawn of morning. They are at least as brave, and more adventuresome. But this may perhaps proceed from a want of forethought, which prevents their seeing danger till it be present. (213)

…Their griefs are transient. Those numberless afflictions, which render it doubtful whether heaven has given life to us in mercy or in wrath, are less felt, and sooner forgotten with them. In general, their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection. (213)

[…] in imagination, they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous. (214)

In these horrific accounts of “their” inferiorities, including the two quoted by Petrosino, all consideration of abolition, legal rights to freedom, or the

“BY REDIRECTING JEFFERSON’S LANGUAGE INTO A NEW SHAPE, THE SPEAKER RE-VISIONS AND RECREATES HER POETIC WORLD AND ITS INHABITANTS...THE SPEAKER’S SELF-MADE WORLD IS DEFINED MORE BY ALIVENESS THAN DEATH; THE BLACK INHABITANTS OF THIS WORLD ARE BODIES OF A ‘HOLY SHAPE’ MORE SO THAN DISGUSTING, ODOROUS FLESH.”

moral case against slavery is lost. Instead, Jefferson’s anthropological, eugenic white gaze takes over, compares Black people to animals, claiming even Black peoples’ “own judgment in favor of whites, declared by their [sexual] preference of them, as uniformly as the preference of the Oranootan for the Black woman over those of his own species” (212). It is obvious that Jefferson’s claims are premised on racist imaginings, though he writes in direct response to purportedly “scientific” debates contemporary to his publication (Rogers 2021). Moreover, Jefferson’s rhetorical claims to objectivity stand in stark contrast to his own sexual relationship to Sally Hemings, as well as to the complex relations of family and enslavement that he held with Hemings and their children.

Thus, when Petrosino writes from the voice of the so-called “Mulattress” speaker, she is dealing with Jefferson’s writing as well as what he left unwritten. For instance, the personal nature of Jefferson’s anti-miscegenation writing is spectrally redirected as the “Mulattress” persona-speaker walks through Jefferson’s Monticello estate. Inside the walls of Monticello, “even your chair turns its spine” to look at the uneasy speaker, who speaks directly to Jefferson: “Strange, how the cabinet of the skin / you hardly registered, until you did. Which gives me such a headwound” (31). Indeed, to consider the nature of Jefferson’s possible relationship with Hemings gives a headwound. Though Hemings (a mixed-race woman) and her children are spectrally invoked by the mention of Monticello under the section title “Mulattress,” these poems are not primarily about Hemings, but rather they focus on the speaker’s own biracial ancestry. 13 In particular, the speaker repeatedly turns to her own mother. Much as she does with her own body, the speaker considers her mother first as a fleshy object and then as an agent of life and creation:

[2]

My mother, with legs like a deer. How they carry her slimwise in winter. Her secret name. Her holy shape. Always, she’s less by than with, or near to me. Like the kidney–shaped sadness I carry in my head, & more brightening ever. You can read by the glands of the skin how she knitted me. I love her hands, which lift into sudden lakes. In Baltimore, all water gives itself to them that’s brave enough to walk on ice. A very strong mother like mine walks by & disagreeable ice weeps itself to mud. Sometimes I catch my mother in a handful of mint, its odor fresh as stars. (28)

Just as the speaker’s self-portrait begins with a consideration of her objectification through the white gaze, this poem begins with a depiction of her mother carried like a hunted deer by the ominous “they.” Echoing Spillers, this poem also problematizes the mother’s name as something “secret,” as if it would not be accepted or legitimated by society. But the speaker moves soon enough into a meditation on her mother’s life with the sentence fragment, “Her holy shape.” Without a hint of disgust, the speaker feels her mother’s proximity and proudly claims her own body as evidence of her mother’s “knitting.” Her mother is a powerful figure, able to make other bodies and hold entire lakes in her hands, and brave enough to walk on ice. Through this loving, if melancholy, portrait of her mother, the speaker disperses the dominant stereotype of Black motherhood (for instance, the cultural myth of the “welfare queen” in Baltimore, perpetuated by Moynihan).

Not unlike the mother’s appearance against the backdrop of her stereotype, this poem evokes surprise and curiosity at unexpected pairings of words like the agrammatical “them / that’s brave enough” and the synesthetic “odor / fresh as stars.” These phrases are also enjambed on the golden shovel words, enhancing the effect of surprise. Reeling the reader in through surprise and curiosity, Petrosino diminishes Jefferson’s words to a whisper, inviting her mother’s memory instead to haunt us with the lingering scent of fresh mint (gardener’s bane and scavenger’s delight: a hardy herb that holds its ground by the root and is nearly impossible to eradicate).

This poem is also the only one in the “Mulattress” section with “bonus” lines, meaning that it presents the only lines in the entire section which do not contain Jefferson’s language: “ice weeps itself to mud. Sometimes I catch my mother” and “fresh as stars.” Here the speaker gains insurgent ground in the white supremacist, patriarchal discourse of Black womanhood and motherhood, becoming one of “them / that’s brave enough to walk on ice” (36). In this poem, the speaker and her mother both exhibit powers of creation and definition, but they are not imitating the white patriarch as Moynihan suggested; they are worlding beyond his reach. Such a reparative approach to the speaker’s mother recalls with tenderness: “Among [Melanie] Klein’s names for the reparative process is love” (Sedgwick 128).

Though her mother receives the most attention throughout the collection, the speaker also sings of her ancestors in general. She appears fascinated with the mystery of her creation, reflecting the obfuscation of Black American genealogies. 14 She comes to various narratives of her creation and inheritance:

They say a witch dug me up from a barrow (32)

Mother says I came from angels (34)

I live in a country they didn’t leave for me. (35)

The “Mulattress” section ends without clear answer of where the speaker came from or who her ancestors were exactly, but even without that genealogical data, the speaker is able to sing a hymn for those “who made me,” whether genetically, metaphorically, or discursively. This hymn crescendos in the final poem of the section:

[10]

They’re blessed, who made me. They who gave me lungs & life. Who mixed, in secret centuries, by garden-light, in weightless air, who mixed in air made weightless by the shades of touch. Who set my kidneys & my bones like beryls. Who sketched my hairline more by love than math. Who tuned the glands & strung the veins along my legs, are blessed of me, they’re blessed. I must bless the skin I carry through this dark. I bless this dark, which carries on for miles. Those fathers, I give them back their tractors of light. To those mothers, I give a cabin, bright with breath. For every strong & sullen pull of this blood, I crown their s weet disagreeable names with heliodor. (36)

The speaker may not know exactly who made her, and the legend of her creation maintains a tone of mystery: she comes from the garden, is made of minerals which are often cut into gemstones. She

was also sketched and strung like an instrument. She may not even appear quite human in this version of her making, but through her singing she claims the power to bless her ancestors and “the skin / I carry through this dark.” The speaker claims the dark as her own through the deictic “this” in “this dark” on line 10. While Jefferson theorizes blackness from a distance, the speaker posits “this dark” as something specific to her own self, her perspective, and her body. Moreover, the repetition of “this dark” allows for two differing interpretations: one where “this dark” is the blessed thing the speaker moves through, and another where “this dark” is the very skin which travels, “carries on for miles.” In this delightfully ambiguous imagery, the speaker seems to fill the space of her world like a gas filling its container, suggesting yet again her immensity and the complicated definition of her selfhood. Petrosino’s repetition of Jefferson’s words, among others, ironically supports her movement away from their original meaning in his Notes. Though this redirected-language form might be considered a formal constraint, the speaker brazenly echoes Jefferson’s words even when not “required,” until they lose their original meaning, as in the repetition of “weightless” and “weightless” (lines 3, 4) as well as “give them” and “give a” (lines 11, 12) in this poem. The excess of repetition gives the speaker some agency in her self-portraiture and turns down the volume of Jefferson’s writing until it is a faint echo of its original proclamation. Petrosino repeats even her own chosen words like “blessed,” “who,” “this,” and “dark,” mapping out the space of the speaker’s world through the recurring images and words that populate it. At first glance, Jefferson’s words seem unshakable; they fundamentally define the speaker’s world. Yet, those words twist into new meanings, their power and prominence becoming diluted by the repetition. Thus, repetition begets redirection, recalling Sianne Ngai’s theorization of

mimicry as a political tool to transform, or even destroy, the identity of what is mimicked. In relation to white supremacist constructs of blackness, Petrosino’s “Mulattress” speaker might be a bad example, following Ngai’s definition: “an example that destabilizes the argument it is supposed to bolster” (165). Purporting to take on the role of Jefferson’s dreaded “Mulattress,” her mimicry of his language actually “harbors terrible powers of deviation and digression” (Ngai 166, Brian Massumi qtd). Ultimately, the speaker usurps Jefferson with her own self-definition, an old portrait made new. The speaker’s claim to agency is further enabled by the performative power of this final poem in the sequence. Note the overtly performative “I bless this dark,” whose performative structure exemplifies J. L. Austin’s theorization of performative speech, while also recalling the Black matriarch’s forbidden power to name (Spillers). The speaker’s ability to bless also aligns Petrosino’s poems more closely with their nominal status as a “hymn” and recalls a historical relationship between poetry and prayer in the Western Christian tradition, as Jahan Ramazani details in Poetry and Its Others: “Poems incorporate the performativity of prayer but stand outside and inspect it; they give voice to prayer but fictionalize it” (132-133). Indeed, the last “Mulattress” poem self-consciously invokes the form of hymns and blessings, redirecting their performative power without entering the institutions of the Christian church or the nation that sanctions the performative power of naming, marriages, and other speech acts. The final lines are more loosely performative to the extent that they realize an imaginative or phenomenal possibility for the reader. For instance, perhaps considering the historical narrative of the slave-owning white “master” reproducing with enslaved Black women, as was the case with Jefferson and Hemings (and Hemings’ mother and grandmother), the speaker gives “those fathers” back their light, with

which they might have dispersed the darkness to illuminate their gazing; to “those mothers,” she gives a place to live, and the chance to breathe: a “cabin” which might be imagined in a ship or on land.15 These lines are performative in the sense that they bring the reader to see “those mothers” safely housed in their cabins, and reparative, as it repurposes the language of anti-blackness to instead sustain Black life.

The speaker’s performative speech is significant because it claims the power to bless, to house, and to name — authorities not granted to Black women in Jefferson’s society and still troubled today by the afterlife of slavery. True, this speaker may not have the legal or social power to bless, name, and claim her kin,16 but she uses her poems to optatively perform these actions, meaning that, like a prayer, they express an if only (so close to what if) without necessarily insisting on its reality or even possibility (Ramazani). The “Mulattress” section ends with the speaker crowning her ancestors’ names with the very stuff — heliodor beryl — that makes up her own body.

It is significant, if challenging, that the “Mulattress” poet blesses both her white and Black ancestors. When Petrosino writes, “They’re blessed, who made me,” this could extend to Jefferson, who may not be a direct ancestor of the poet or speaker, but nevertheless “makes” her in discursive construction. In the last “Mulattress” poem, “[t]hose fathers” (36), potentially including Jefferson, are given back “their tractors of light” — a tonally ambiguous image that suggests both a refusal of the white gaze (which, like a beam of light, may seek to lighten the speaker’s skin) and also an acknowledgment (returning instead of withholding the tractor, which they might use for a farming livelihood, or even a project of transforming the land, recalling Jefferson’s utopian dreams for a future America). This return does not endorse the fathers’ actions, but it also does not participate

in them. In many ways, it would be easier to accept the speaker’s cutting rebuke of “those fathers,” but Petrosino instead describes her project in the reparative language of love, even for Jefferson:

But I still love the man who wrote that book, and my love is a sad and delighted thing. I put my hands on the bare fact of this, grasping it on either side and drawing it toward me like a beloved face. I am grateful, now, for difficulty. As a woman of color, descended from white and afro-Virginians, and as a proud alumna of his University, I take Jefferson’s sentence as balm and warning. I still want him to bless me, to include my family and me in his Book of Good Things. Over the years, I’ve grown into my body, claiming it like land. (“The Art of the Sentence” par. 18)

Using Jefferson’s words as a reparative balm and paranoid warning, the “Mulattress” speaker returns to Jefferson and “those fathers” the tools of their trade but does not take up their project for her own. The highly constrained formal uptake of Jefferson’s words reflects the difficulty of reparative love in the face of dehumanization, but it is through this form that the speaker comes to claim her own body “like land.” By redirecting Jefferson’s language into a new shape, the speaker re-visions and re-creates her poetic world and its inhabitants. She thus answers Spillers’ call to “make a place for this different social subject” (79) — the monstrously powerful Black woman. The speaker’s self-made world is defined more by aliveness than death; the Black inhabitants of this world are bodies of a “holy shape” more so than disgusting, odorous flesh. And all this is done on the speaker’s own terms — even if via Jefferson’s words and even while acknowledging the violence of white supremacist discourse.

III. CODA

Neither hauntological, nor documental, nor a poetics of redirected language must be reparative in their approach to other texts. But Hymn shows us how such poetry, made by scouring historical archives and public records, can nevertheless engage a reparative affect. I argue that Petrosino’s Hymn represents a model for a (difficult but not hopeless) reparative poetics that reorients the histories that continue to haunt our lives. Petrosino’s deft treatment of Jefferson’s legacy makes black aliveness possible within the constraint of its atypical form, and this achievement stems from its reparative affective orientation towards Jefferson’s lingering racial definitions.

I define hauntological poetry in part by its piecemeal redirection of quoted text (Duncan). In her theorization of a reparative orientation, Sedgwick draws upon metaphors of fragmentation to demonstrate the way this affect theory can select and connect elements of a potentially harmful object: “Hope, often a fracturing, even a traumatic thing to experience, is among the energies by which the reparatively positioned reader tries to organize the fragments and part-objects she encounters or creates” (146). Given this description of reparation as working with fragments, it is fitting (and no coincidence) that Petrosino picks up this affective orientation as she fragments and redirects Jefferson’s writing. Just as the speaker is fragmented into body parts, she fragments Jefferson’s writing, breaking open historical narrative, much as ice cracks and “weeps itself to mud” (28) under her mother’s feet. Through the “additive and accretive” (Sedgwick 149) reparative impulse, the speaker is able to sustain her own life and, more generally, make space for black aliveness in and beyond our national history.

Hymn (and by extent, I’d suggest all hauntological poetry) also significantly reorients its temporal orientations to past, present, and future. Certainly, the repetition of Jefferson’s words suggests the lingering violence of the past, coupled with the Notes’ scholarly

reception as “timeless” (Coolie Verner, qtd. in Forbes “Introduction” xxii). Yet, Petrosino’s poems do not react to the Notes with a paranoid sense of inevitability. Instead, the poetic repetitions pulse through the speaker’s present life and into a reimagined world of black aliveness that may just be her future. Such a temporal orientation is definitionally reparative, refusing the pull of the paranoid attitude “tied to the notion of the inevitable,” which Sedgwick (non-coincidentally) illustrates in terms of generational trauma and atypically gendered reproduction:

The dogged, defensive narrative stiffness of a paranoid temporality, after all, in which yesterday can’t be allowed to have differed from today and tomorrow must be even more so, takes its shape from a generational narrative that’s characterized by a distinctly Oedipal regularity and repetitiveness: it happened to my father’s father, it happened to my father, it is happening to me, it will happen to my son, and it will happen to my son’s son. But isn’t it a feature of queer possibility—only a contingent feature, but a real one, and one that in turn strengthens the force of contingency itself—that our generational relations don’t always proceed in this lockstep? (147)

Following from a history of non-normative gendering, the “Mulattress” poems’ consideration of the speaker’s ancestors carries with it a sense of loving hope placed in the power of language, rather than paranoid anticipation of an inevitable repeated fate. Characteristic of a reparative affect, Hymn troubles a notion of linear inheritance of the past. Moreover, the poems do not read as melancholic (in Freud’s sense of the term) as one might expect. Certainly, the speaker returns to the past to bless her ancestors, but she also blesses her own “ skin / I carry through this dark” (36) in the present moment of her speaking. Yet, the speaker

does not lose herself in her attachment to the (inaccessible) past, but rather constructs a counter-memory of her own ancestry through Jefferson’s memorialized words in order to make sense of her present and to make way for imagined (hopeful, potential, future) black aliveness. Much like a ghost story, these hauntological poems “not only repair representational mistakes, but also strive to understand the conditions under which a memory was produced in the first place, toward a countermemory, for the future” (Gordon 22), and so connect history with the speaker’s lived present and potential future.

This reparative orientation toward history sets Hymn apart from other prominent examples of found, redirected, or documental poetics. In my consideration of Petrosino’s reparative orientation toward American history, I do not refute paranoia’s status as a form of knowledge, nor do I diminish the role it can play in documental poetry’s challenge to historiographies via the archive. But if some documental poetry asks “whether one can be paranoid enough when reading history” (Leong 82), then Petrosino’s redirected poetics demonstrates what valid alternatives exist beyond paranoia. As Sedgwick suggests, “What we can best learn from such practices are, perhaps, the many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture—even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them” (150-151). Paranoid poetry might anticipate a jump-scare around every corner, but these poems seek to “talk to and listen to ghosts, rather than banish them” (Gordon 23). Sure, paranoia can protect against death, but reparation can make space for living, and that is the reparative, hauntological project of the “Mulattress” poems: to make the speaker’s life and subjecthood possible by facing her ghosts. Petrosino’s Hymn therefore represents hauntological poetry’s potential to use redirected language

not only to confront the narratives, documents, and myths that continue to define our social fields, but also to reparatively shift their magnetic poles, if only incrementally. Can Petrosino’s book of poems undo a national history of racism by revising and recontextualizing its language? No. But if that history of racism is founded on philosophies like those espoused by Jefferson, then there is real social power in creating new portraits of Black femininity through his words — to acknowledge the harms past, present, and future, while creating space for black aliveness, even if it starts on the page. As Adrienne Rich writes on her method of “re-visioning,” “We need to know the writing of the past, and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us” (19). Petrosino knows Jefferson’s writing like she knows the back of her hand, and she uses it to write a bold, insurgent future for Black femininity.

I argue that Petrosino’s Hymn for the Black Terrific represents a significant variation on the theme of documental and redirected language poetry popularized by poets like Philip, Ewing, and Long Soldier. Through Hymn ’s distinctly reparative orientation to American history, Petrosino is able to answer Spillers’ call to open up the definition of Black femininity. When debating white supremacists becomes tantamount to shouting into a void, Petrosino’s Hymn offers an alternative approach: to sing instead for Black aliveness. Hymn ’s future-orientation is built on a historical-orientation: it shows us that to inhabit the present moment is to stand on the past, and to write our future is to re-read our history. From Petrosino’s example of redirected language, we are left to wonder: How might other poets take up the reparative potential of this poetic form? What histories might be chipped apart and made into new f utures? ■

NOTES

1. “Hauntology” is Jacques Derrida’s coinage to describe the lingering after-effects of Marx’s writings in Europe, particularly in another moment of distinct presentism at the end of the twentieth century. The term has since been utilized by literary and cultural critics alike to consider spectral relations of affect, temporality, epistemology, and power — part of a larger spectral turn emerging from the 1990s and exemplified by Avery Gordon’s Ghostly Matters. Poet M. NourbeSe Philip calls her work hauntological to suggest that her poetic redirection of historical documental language evinces and explores the haunting relationship between past and present. Following Philip, I utilize Derrida’s coinage to theorize such poetry as a genre with particular affective and epistemological affordances and limitations.

2. Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia was written for private circulation across 1781-1783, first published in 1785, and re-published 1787. The edition cited here accounts for the various revisions Jefferson made over the course of his iterative writing and publication.

3. Petrosino’s use of the phrase “the black terrific” is an allusion to Moby-Dick, in which Captain Ahab is described as “the black terrific.” The implication seems to be the poetic speaker’s powerful omnivorous consumption and de- or re-composition of the American canon.

4. Jefferson himself does not use the word “mulattress” or “mulatto” in his Notes. Petrosino (2013) cites the word’s seventeenth century French derivation and its definition as “a woman with one black and one white parent” (55).

5. It is important to distinguish here between canon and archive as Leong and others do, where “canon” refers to a curated or preserved selection from the archive and “archive” more broadly refers to the set of documents and materials that barely avoid permanent forgetting but are always in danger of becoming buried in the fog of history.

6. As Petrosino, a woman of African and European descent (“The Art of the Sentence”), and her “Mulattress” persona-speaker are both complexly positioned in relation to gender, race, and nationality, I make note of my own intersectional social positionality as a white, female, American reader of Petrosino’s poetry. I do not identify myself with Petrosino’s speaker, nor do I wish to occlude her voice with my own. In refutation of Jefferson’s anti-Black discourse, I claim no authority over a definition of blackness, but instead follow the hymns’ incantatory self-assertation and the Black studies scholars cited here.

7. I defer to Quashie’s choice not to capitalize “black” in the phrase “black aliveness.” I similarly leave “black” uncapitalized when referring to skin tone specifically and the racial concept of blackness, but I do capitalize “Black” when referring to Black people, in order to acknowledge the depth and complexity of Black culture and experience across the African diaspora. For a summary of the recent discourse around capitalization, see: Appiah.

8. For more on the usefulness of paranoia, see Ngai.

9. Petrosino’s attention to Jefferson’s pronoun “they” is particularly appropriate because of Jefferson’s purposeful use of the first-person plural “we” elsewhere, as Forbes notes:

the “timelessness” of Jefferson’s writings derives less from their specific content and more from the effect that they produce. Jefferson’s language seduces and flatters far more often than it persuades. The most powerful rhetorical voice in Notes is the first-person plural: it is difficult to resist the lofty, urbane, amiable, and philosophical “we” with which Jefferson addresses his readers, or rather invites them to partake in his perspective—particularly so since the unstated alternative is to be classified with the excluded “they” (“Introduction” xxiii).

Forbes further remarks on the racialization of “we” and “they” in his introduction to the “Laws” section of the Notes, in which he pushes back against historians who presume Jefferson unconscious of his rhetorical effects:

If, however, instead of conjuring a Jefferson who is backward-looking, self-deceiving, and disoriented in the face of slavery, we allow for the possibility that he is fully in command of his rhetorical powers, we will find that he has artfully and economically laid down the fundamental rules of race: illogical and irrational by design, internally self-enforcing, and only more deeply embedded by every attempt at refutation, since it is in fact not blackness that is being established by the investigation, but whiteness—the “we” who are silently actualized by the reader’s involuntary assent to Jefferson’s premises about difference. (“Laws” 201)

10. An epigraph to the book cites Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “In the Waiting Room”: “I scarcely dared to look / to see what it was I was.”

11. This self-gaze recalls many of Petrosino’s other poems, such as one earlier in Hymn: “So this is what I’ve been tilting at, for so long. This is the face I’ve asked to see” (l. 22).

12. Jefferson’s own writing about the Notes also suggests that he was deeply invested in this work (Rogers).

13. While the persona-speaker’s ancestry is only implied by the section title “The Mulattress,” my assumption is further supported by a poem outside the “Mulattress” sequence, which describes the speaker’s white and Black ancestors: “One rages, white as wood. … One darkens like an oyster in the autumn smoke” (10). It is arguable that the persona of the speaker shifts from one section to the next in this collection. (Is “the mulattress” also “the eater” of the last section?) However, Petrosino’s consistent poetic engagement with biracial ancestry in general, and Jefferson’s lineage in particular (in her latest collection, White Blood), suggests that biracial identity is consistent across her speaker(s) of various sections and collections.

14. After the 1865 legal abolition of slavery, the first census to record the lives and citizenships of newly freed Black Americans was in 1870, meaning that the few Black American genealogies that can be successfully traced to the nineteenth century often then hit a “wall” at the 1870 census and cannot be traced back farther (Schor 2017). One particularly glaring census error occurred in 1830, when Sally Hemings and her sons were listed as white (Gordon-Reed 1997, 209). That same 1830 census marks the dead-end of Petrosino’s own family tree: “Petrosino’s family tree construction, however, was stopped cold in Louisiana around the 1830s by what she called ‘the wall, or the cleaver, of white supremacy.’ The discoveries slowed and disappeared because consistent records were not kept for those not granted the basic rights of personhood. Erased in death as in life” (“White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia by Kiki Petrosino”).

15. Petrosino does not identify the race of the mothers or fathers, so these lines may resonate with a variety of historical narratives, but the interpretation described here seems to me most relevant, given the sequence’s grounding in Jefferson’s writing and biography.

16. Debate around Jefferson’s descendants flared up in the 1990s, when Annette Gordon-Reed published the first monograph on Sally Hemings and, a year later, DNA results confirmed her sexual reproduction with Jefferson. In particular, the DNA results sparked public and legal disputes around the rights of his Black and multiracial offspring to be buried in the family cemetery, among other privileges (Nicolaisen 2003).

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Robert Lecker + Kyra Odell McGill University

The Front Door IS Locked

Throughout her career, Alice Munro was preoccupied with the relation between space and identity. Her earliest stories delineate characters—and particularly female characters—through the symbolic spaces they inhabit: houses, kitchens, bedrooms, privies, stores, hospitals, planetariums, barns, bedrooms, yards, fields, roads, offices, churches, schools, cars. Walls and doors and rooms and passages are everywhere. Munro’s spaces delineate boundaries, power structures, metaphors of containment and escape. For Munro, space turns into place. As Christine Lorre-Johnston and Eleonora Rao observe (referencing Yi-Fu Tuan), “place is space that we know and endow with value.” The process of turning space into place “expands and diversifies into perception, desire, affect, vision, and memory” (2). J.E. Malpas emphasizes the link between place and existential experience: “The crucial point about the connection between place and experience is not . . . that place is properly something only encountered ‘in’ experience, but rather that place is integral to the very structure and possibility of experience” (31 – 32). For Merilyn Simonds, “place, in Alice Munro, is a chimera: deceptive, implausible, sometimes one thing, sometimes another, made up of scales, woolly skin, a lion’s roar, and a feral laugh that, once heard, haunts forever” (26). In “The Office,” an early story published in Dance of the Happy Shades (1968), the narrator expresses a belief that “A woman who sits staring into space, into a country that is not her husband’s or her children’s is likewise known to be an offence against nature. So a house is not the same for a woman. She is not someone who walks into the house, to make use of it, and will walk out again. She is the house; there is no separation possible” (49 – 50).

Through the words of this narrator, Munro confirms Robert McGill’s observation that “houses are at the centre of Munro’s art” (28). Lives of Girls and Women , comprised of multiple linked short stories, is similarly invested in the significance of place, be it the town of Jubilee, Del Jordan’s family homes, or the local geography that defines her coming of age.

One of the most compelling explorations of Munro’s interest in spatial identity can be found in “Meneseteung,” first published in The New Yorker in 1988 and later revised for inclusion in Friend of My Youth in 1990. It remains one of Munro’s most frequently anthologized short stories, perhaps because it offers an intriguing exploration of how female agency is formed in relation to domestic and public domains. “Meneseteung” is a richly layered narrative set in the late nineteenth century in a small Ontario town. The story follows Almeda Joynt Roth, a single woman and poet, whose life is marked by isolation and societal constraints. She lives in the family home she has inherited from her father. Its front faces Dufferin Street while its back looks over Pearl Street and the Pearl Street bog. Munro employs a fragmented narrative structure, blending historical detail with fictional elements to blur the lines between reality and imagination. Almeda is an unmarried woman dedicated to her poetry, living a solitary life that sets her apart from the more traditionally domestic women in her community. Her poetry serves as an outlet for her inner life and struggles, highlighting the limited roles available to women during the time and the sacrifices required to pursue a creative life.

However, all spaces in “Menesteung”—including Almeda’s town, her home, her poetry, and her mind itself—are subject to the perspectival framing of an unnamed archivist-narrator. This narrator, internally signaled as female, pieces together Almeda’s life from such fragments as her poems, newspaper

articles, and local history. Her speculative approach is evident in the way she fills in details about Almeda’s thoughts and experiences, often acknowledging the limitations and uncertainties of her perspective (“I may have got it wrong” [186]). While the narrator seeks to honor Almeda’s creative spirit and personal struggles, she also recognizes the broader social and historical forces that have marginalized the poetess and is further distracted by personal ambitions, convictions, and interests. Almeda’s mind, her poetry, and her spaces are thus not entirely her own—“Meneseteung” is just as much, or even more, the story of the narrator than it is of Almeda herself.

For this reason, the narrator has emerged as a central fixation for Munro scholars. In one of the earliest critical approaches to “Meneseteung,” Pam Houston identifies the differentiation between metaphor and metonymy—the former confinable and solid, and the latter fluid and abyssal—as crucial for Almeda’s story. The narrator’s stance devolves from that of presenting a front of historical accuracy (a metaphoric system of direct correlation) into one of complete narrative fantasy (a metonymic construction based on abyssal mystery). “Meneseteung” thus positions “the fictional narrative as the only possible rescuing device,” reshaping metonymy and femininity alike from “dependence and lack” into “unlimited generative potential and creative possibility” (Houston 87 – 91). For Houston, the narrator’s fictional surmises become Almeda’s saving grace by virtue of their proving the masculine disciplines of history and metaphor to be contingent on the unsolvable mystery of the feminine archive. Thus, the central fixture of the story, the poem “Meneseteung”—as imagined by Almeda, the narrator, and Munro alike—connects all three women in a generative, nonlinear metonymic process of giving “birth to one another” (91).

Magdalene Redekop’s reading of “Meneseteung” as mock-historical congruently analyzes the

importance of the narrator, identifying that the archivist’s mediation between the reader and Almeda gives rise to an “ironic distance that allows us to see ourselves in the act of looking at a woman who is in the act of looking” (218). Through the narrator, Redekop maintains, Munro self-consciously foregrounds the process of projection inherently contained within the historical interpretation and reconstruction of stories recovered from visual artifacts alone.

Dermot McCarthy similarly represents the narrator’s “dreaming back” to Almeda’s nineteenth-century womanhood as a means of dreaming forward “her own contemporary consciousness” (3). In doing so, the narrator is not producing anything resembling a history of Almeda, but is instead re-writing, and thus fictionalizing, her female literary predecessor. As literary archivist, she seeks to both “correct the version of Almeda written by the Vidette” as well as reimagine her own “prose substitute” of Almeda’s literature; the modernist short story presented by the narrator is essentially a reformulation of Almeda’s unwritten poem (McCarthy 11). This literary genealogy is further elaborated upon by Deborah Heller, who perceives within Munro’s story an implicit “competition for narrative authority” between the narrator as “privileged literary daughter” and Almeda as voiceless, deprived predecessor (75 – 84). “Meneseteung” therefore foregrounds a lineage of women – as Heller puts it, a “sisterhood encompassing the invisible author, the narrator, Almeda,” and the bestial Pearl Street woman – who loosely relate to, reflect, and ultimately struggle over the power to rewrite each other (85).

In her 2014 article “‘Deep deep into the river of her mind’: ‘Meneseteung’ and the Archival Hysteric,” Katrine Raymond highlights the “affective natures of both hysteria and the archive” embodied by the relationship between Almeda and the narrator (98). Like Houston, Redekop, and McCarthy,

Raymond perceives the narrator as attempting to “rescue” Almeda from both the archive and hysteria through literary reconstruction. She defines the “archival hysteric” as one lacking sufficient boundaries against the world around them, which allows their mindbody to serve “as an archive of intersubjective interactions” with the individuals and environments surrounding them (Raymond 99). In reclaiming authority over the act of interpreting Almeda’s hysteria from the erroneous patriarchal readings applied by Victorian medicinal and social practices, the narrator provides the hysteric with a degree of “social connectedness”—the element defined by Raymond as “the missing link in Almeda’s recovery” (113). Raymond intuits the process of understanding oneself through the archive of another as an inherently regenerative process for narrator and narrative subject alike.

Tracey Ware effectively identifies and synthesizes the problematic mother-daughter relationship between Almeda and the narrator repeatedly employed by critics in her chapter of National Plots: Historical Fiction and Changing Ideas of Canada. In a departure from previous scholars, however, Ware places doubt upon the links between Almeda, the Pearl Street woman, and the narrator, claiming that they lack sufficient strength to bear the “interpretive weight placed upon them” (72). Instead, Ware suggests that Munro’s approach in “Meneseteung” is one of extreme skepticism towards “the ethics of historiographic metafiction”: rather than self-consciously ironize the act of literary projection, Ware argues, Munro’s story reprimands the narrator’s self-entitled appropriation of history with her present-day concerns (76).

While there exists considerable commentary on the complex power dynamic—or perhaps more accurately, the imbalanced power dynamic—between the narrator and Almeda, there remains much to be said regarding the narrator’s approach to space

in “Meneseteung.” The narrator’s archival reimaginings pervade every corner of Almeda’s life, far beyond the boundaries of her person: the attempt to rescue Victorian femininity through rewriting extends to deeply impact the manner in which physical areas are manifested. Space in the narrator’s rendition of Almeda’s story, as a reconstruction founded on archival evidence and speculation, is thus injected with an immense degree of imagined significance. There are, therefore, very few if any actual borders in the imagined world of “Meneseteung”—readers are not presented with space as it existed for Almeda, but rather with the narrator’s carefully coordinated reconstruction of her environment. The latter’s desire to “rescue” Almeda from the patriarchally repressive archive transforms physical space into a set piece in which Almeda’s transition from meek submission to artistic independence might seamlessly unfold according to the narrator’s visions. In this, Almeda is in many ways counterproductively lost again, becoming, in an odd reversal of Ibsen’s Nora, another doll in a dollhouse. By reducing Almeda’s mindbody and lived environment to empty instruments serving the exploration of her own convictions about and visions of femininity and its textual “liberation,” the narrator objectifies the feminine as a borderless abyss requiring interpretation, thereby perpetuating the same patriarchal practice that she claims to rescind.

A central facet of the domestic interior’s immense significance in “Meneseteung” is its function as a mirror for Almeda’s conscious state. The narrator’s initial descriptions of both Almeda and the Roth family home erect a bridge between the two: the former has “dark hair gathered around her face in droopy rolls and curtains” (165), whereas the latter features “lace-curtained windows” that “look like white eyes” (168). Later in the story, when Almeda is awoken in the night by an altercation on

Pearl Street, “she has the impression that the noises she hears are knives and saws and axes—all angry implements chopping and jabbing and boring within her head” (176). The vocabulary of violence used to describe her psychological processing links Almeda’s mental state to her physical residence. This linkage gains further significance through the undeniably Freudian description of Almeda’s house (McCarthy 2). The Roth residence is positioned at the intersection of two vastly different streets: the front faces the distinctly middle-class Dufferin Street, “a street of considerable respectability” occupied by merchants, factory owners, and salt well operators (170). In contrast, the rear end of the house (with its scatological association) is the debauched, lower-class, and implicitly feminized Pearl Street. It is, the narrator tells us, “another story” (170).

In “Meneseteung,” domestic space articulates the patriarchal ghosts that haunt Almeda’s consciousness and impede the complete realization of her independence and creativity. Her house was built at the behest of her father, a “harness-maker by trade” (165 – 66). His vocation connotes binding, restraint, and control—all of which he is likely to have applied to the regulation of his home and family. The Roth patriarch’s authority is ubiquitous in the narrator’s conception of Almeda’s consciousness, particularly as it applies to her understanding of the family home. Notably, Almeda “would not think of moving to the large front bedroom,” choosing instead to remain in her childhood bedroom “at the back of the house” (170). This front room, as the nucleus of rational order in the Roth household, serves as a concrete manifestation of patriarchal influence: it is the space “where her mother used to lie in bed all day, and which was later the solitary domain of her father” (170). Aside from re-asserting Almeda’s father’s position as the literal head of house through his spatial association with Dufferin Street (the front as opposed to the back), Almeda’s memory of her

parents’ bedroom makes it apparent that, under his domestic authority, women—as represented by her absent mother—are forced into stasis, afforded neither autonomy nor independence.

In the narrator’s construction, Almeda has been conditioned to revere this domestic hierarchy; she actively seeks a sense of fatherly dominance deep into adulthood. Almeda fantasizes about Jarvis Poulter, her only marital prospect, by equating him with her father. For the “twelve years” following the death of her mother, Almeda and her father were the sole occupants of the home, during which she assumed the wifely role of “housekeeper” (166). The narrator indulges in Freudian speculations about Almeda’s attraction to her father and her willing submission to his patriarchal authority. When she returns from church with Jarvis, she associates him with her father: his “correct, orderly, heavy clothes are like those she used to brush and starch and iron for her father” (174). Almeda is attracted to Poulter through the forms of domination she associates with male authority. Ironically, she recognizes that married women are largely responsible for creating the qualities of that authority:

One thing she has noticed about married women, and that is how many of them have to go about creating their husbands. They have to start ascribing preferences, opinions, dictatorial ways. Oh, yes, they say, my husband is very particular. He won’t touch turnips. He won’t eat fried meat. (Or he will only eat fried meat.) He likes me to wear blue (brown) all the time. He can’t stand organ music. He hates to see a woman go out bareheaded. He would kill me if I took one puff of tobacco. (174)

While Jarvis is associated with Dufferin Street and all that it represents in terms of power, commerce, and control, the rear of Almeda’s house faces an

entirely different space. Pearl Street is inhabited by townspeople of an explicitly lower class. The street marks a path of increasing deterioration, from “small but decent row houses” to derelict makeshift shacks occupied by “the unrespectable and undeserving poor,” ultimately culminating in the Pearl Street Swamp, an untamed bog hole rife with overgrown weeds and debris (170). The end of Pearl Street is, from the narrator’s perspective, the pinnacle of depravity: “No decent woman ever would” dare to venture to the “last block or the swamp” (170). The Roth house’s liminal positioning between these two vastly different worlds expresses the tension between rationalism and instinct, the formal and the feral.

The story vividly depicts Almeda’s encounter with the abject world of Pearl Street, particularly in a pivotal scene where she observes a violated woman lying against her back fence. Almeda is thrust into a confrontation with the rawness of Pearl Street in a climactic scene that shatters the innocence embodied in her romantic poetry. As a drunken couple from the shantytown near the swamp engage in a violent quarrel, Almeda inadvertently becomes a voyeur, hearing the sounds of a tumultuous coupling that at first seems like an altercation. The woman is in a state of disarray, covered in bodily fluids, “heaped up there, turned on her side with her face squashed down into the earth,” bloodied, with a bruise on her “haunch” that is “big as a sunflower” (178). She lets out animalistic “grunts” (179) while she lies there, barefoot, contaminating Almeda’s fence, “Smelling of vomit. Urine, drink, vomit” (178). When Jarvis prods the woman with the toe of his boot (“just as you’d nudge a dog or a sow”), the woman raises herself: “The body heaves itself onto all fours, the head is lifted—the hair all matted with blood and vomit” (179).

The encounter involves a confrontation with what is socially and personally repulsive, mirroring

Almeda’s precarious position in her community. Almeda’s perception of the bleeding woman from the Pearl Street Bog illustrates several forms of abjection described by Eugenie Brinkema:

forms that disrupt, interrupt, reinsert, demand, provoke, insist on, remind of, agitate for: the body, sensation, movement, flesh and skin and nerves, the visceral, stressing pains, feral frenzies, always rubbing against: what undoes, what unsettles, that thing I cannot name, what remains resistant, far away (haunting, and ever so beautiful); indefinable, it is said to be what cannot be written, what thaws the critical cold, messing all systems and subjects up. (xii)

“Meneseteung” is centrally dependent upon speculative exteriorizations of unknown interiors. It is a series of sprawling, intimate inventions founded upon little more than superficial appearances and fragments of the past. It thus presents a unique interpretation of Munro’s often-cited perspective on her fiction as the exploration of “deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum” (Lives of Girls and Women 236). This contrast between surface and depth pervades the story far beyond the bounds of narrative structure: the dynamic relationships between interiority and exteriority, private and public, domestic and commercial, and feminine and masculine form its thematic tensions.

It is primarily the domestic interior—as manifested by the house formerly occupied by the Roth family and inhabited by Almeda alone during the time frame of story—that embodies these tensions. The narrator grants Almeda’s home with an agency of its own, using it to mirror and supplement her story’s preoccupation with control, confinement, and power hierarchies. Munro herself has defined the short story through comparison to a house, explaining that the former mirrors the latter because

it “encloses space and makes connections between one enclosed space and another and presents what is outside in a new way” (“What Is Real?” 224).

The domestic space at the center of “Meneseteung” is a physical enclosure in which nonmaterial meanings are both created and represented. The Roth home becomes a location to unravel, investigate, question. In it, gendered values are subverted. Domestic interiority paradoxically becomes both container and liberator, prison and refuge: Almeda comes to embrace a domestic ideal that challenges the stability of patriarchal understandings of domesticity.

The concept of interior space, with its boundaries and architectural limits, is highly subjective, constantly redefined within the literary realm. At its core, interior space is a shell that demands to be filled. This space is populated not only by material furnishings but also by invisible emotional and intellectual forces. These elements create a deeply interdependent relationship between the physical space and its abstract significance. The nuances of these relationships are entirely dependent on the perspective of the individual occupying the space. A single interior will be perceived differently by each person, thus generating a myriad of unique significances.

In “The Imagery of Interior Spaces,” Dominique Bauer argues that literary interiors “can all be analyzed as codes of a paradoxical, both assertive and fragile, subjectivity in its own unique time and history. They function as subtexts that define subjectivity, time, and history as profoundly ambiguous realities” (26). According to Bauer, this subjectivity is founded on the fluid boundaries between interior and exterior, private and public, real and imaginary. Representations of indoor spaces in literature primarily serve as discourses on the inherently fragile nature of human knowledge and the structures established to understand and

codify the world. Even the home, regarded as a central place of refuge, is less a concrete shelter from the outside world and more a psychological construct designed to preserve a sense of security that can never be fully attained. This cerebral dimension of the home becomes a focal point in “Meneseteung” and its treatment of space.

In Munro’s fiction, the body is also a place. Literary interiors reflect the subjectivity of the characters who inhabit them. As Briganti and Mezei note, “the house and home are frequently perceived as symbols of the self, the psyche, and the body” (8).

Parallels between homes and humans are telling: both operate on the fine margin between private and public, creating, possessing, and protecting interiority through contrast with what lies outside. The most culturally recognizable instance of this correlation is likely Freud’s use of the house as a metaphor for the human psyche. Freud additionally defined the “boundary between mental impulses and consciousness” as a psychological threshold congruent to the home’s physical threshold, with both distinguishing private interiors from public exteriors (Winton 51).

The dissolution or overstepping of the mind’s boundaries, in allowing carnal desires to prevail over conscious rationale, can thus be paralleled through a breakdown of the home’s physical boundaries between privacy and public exposure (51). The relationship between the physical interior and the psyche is complex in its co-dependence. Not only is the home given significance through its inhabitants’ psychological realities, but it can further be seen as a means of replicating and codifying subjectivity. A room may be a physical prison in the mind of its inhabitant; it might equally serve as a figurative representation of the prisoner’s repressed state of mind.

The process of distinguishing humans from animals is largely accomplished through the

establishment of social and domestic rules and hierarchies. Pier Vittorio Aureli and Maria Giuduci define the house as a “specific mode of dwelling” originating “from a desire for stability” (105). It is an enclosure not only meant to protect its inhabitants from the perils of the natural world but also to provide a “temple for the ritualization of life”—a place where people can “establish and preserve” the concrete order and regulation that ensure the stability and longevity of community or family (105). Gaston Bachelard similarly conceived of the home as “a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability,” as did Lieven Verschaffel in defining the house as a “device for articulating differences and defining a hierarchy in the meanings one lives by” (Winton 56 and Verschaffel 153). The domestic interior is, as Bachelard and Verschaffel suggest, a concept abstractly constructed to distinguish human from non-human life. It is a space that affirms hierarchy and order to reinforce a uniquely human construction of civility or reason.

These ideas are reflected in the origins of the word “domestic,” derived from the Greek root demo, meaning “to build” (Aureli and Giuduci 113). This seemingly innocuous root also gives rise to terms associated with control and authority, such as dominus, “head of the house,” and its derivatives, including dominion, domination, and domestication (113). Aureli and Giuduci conclude that the domestic sphere is inherently tied to power hierarchies, necessitating a paterfamilias or head of household to be recognized as such (113). This claim is further supported by the etymology of “family” from the Latin familia, which refers to a group of slaves and relatives led by a paterfamilias (113).

Although these etymologies are often overlooked in contemporary discourse, Aureli and Giuduci’s work reveals that the concept of domestic space and family, inherently biased toward male hierarchy, is embedded within the very language used to describe

these social constructs. Thus, each time a home is referred to as a “domestic space,” it implicitly operates under phallocentric structures of power. It is, therefore, unsurprising that much critical discourse on domestic space in Western scholarship, particularly within early feminist studies, has centered on the recognition and critique of its inherently patriarchal bias (Briganti 8). Contemporary understandings overwhelmingly categorize domesticity as being predicated on the patriarchal enforcement of women’s confinement and repression, along with the denial of their agency and individuality. Jean Baudrillard, for instance, theorizes that the structured organization of the domestic interior—where each room and piece of furniture is assigned a specific purpose and meaning—mirrors the anatomy of the “patriarchal relationship founded on tradition and authority” (210).

Within this framework, the woman in the home becomes less an individual inhabitant and more a decorative element, part of an aesthetic arrangement (Burbank 130). As Burbank says, the feminine presence is deemed essential to transform a “house” into a “home,” providing a domestic vitality that converts the space into a sanctuary from an unforgiving, mercantile, and masculine exterior (130). This perspective positions the domestic interior as an institution designed for men’s benefit, at the expense of the women tasked with its maintenance. Women are expected to be both ornamental and labor-oriented, yet they must conceal the simultaneous fulfillment of these roles from the outside world. Essentially, they are required to embody and sustain the house’s image, merging their identities with its presence.

The narrator suggests that Almeda derives a form of sexual satisfaction from paternal control: she misses the domestic tasks that elicited “her father’s appreciation, his dark, kind authority” (174). This reflection spirals into a fantasy in which Almeda

imagines Poulter entering their bedroom “in his long underwear and his hat” (174). In this reverie, the domestic interior becomes deeply eroticized. Poulter’s euphemistic entrance into Almeda’s bedroom, as an invasion of her domestic and personal space, is presented as intensely arousing, culminating in Almeda’s climax: “a fit of welcome and submission overtakes her, a buried gasp” (174). The words “welcome” and “submission” unite the female body and domestic space in their readiness to be invaded, colonized, and controlled by paternal authority. In contrast, the male body and home are depicted as impenetrable. Almeda perceives men as “deprived in some way, incurious” —lacking the vulnerable, easily objectifiable interiority inherent to women (174). This is mirrored in the inaccessibility of Poulter’s home: when Almeda seeks his help for the Pearl Street woman, she can only glimpse “a little of his cheerless front hall. His hat on a chair” (179). Unlike the vivid descriptions of Almeda’s interior space and her compelled vulnerability to elicit Poulter’s affection and aid, it becomes evident that the assumed privacy of domestic space is profoundly gendered. Men are permitted to maintain an impermeable boundary between interior and exterior, while women must remain porous to their environment, open to having these boundaries violated without their consent. Or as the narrator puts it, “A man may keep his home decent, but he will never—if he is a proper man—do much to decorate it. Marriage forces him to live with more ornament as well as sentiment, and it protects him, also, from the extremities of his own nature—from a frigid parsimony or a luxuriant sloth, from squalor, and from excessive sleeping or reading, drinking, smoking, or freethinking” (171).

Paradoxically, women experience such unequal repression in the domestic interior because of the perceived threat they pose to domestic and social structures. “As soon as a man and woman of almost

any age are alone together within four walls,” the narrator says, “it is assumed that anything may happen. Spontaneous combustion, instant fornication, an attack of passion, triumph of the senses” (173 – 74). As Verschaffel notes, domestic female presence is inherently contradictory: “she does not stand just for home and hearth and Ithaca, woman is not just the name for what drives homewards … Woman also lures into the woods and the sea and the night, she invites to danger and death” (153). Just as feminine spaces are often imagined to embody the masculine fantasy of a resting place wholly resistant to the outside world and the brute forces of nature, those same spaces are equally imagined to encapsulate domains associated with carnal desire. This double depiction of female spaces as both ordered and animalistic points to the inevitable objectification of the female body. The womb itself is frequently represented as an ideal embodiment of a domestic space requiring the control of a paterfamilias (Bauer 30). In contrast, the overbearing nineteenth-century fixation on hysteria equally positioned women’s bodies as precariously eccentric and their “bodily flows” as dangerous in their resistance to patriarchal control (Raymond 98). The female body is thus weaponized by patriarchal forces, resulting in the categorization of women as paragons of domestic space or as the very force that threatens the dissolution of rational domesticity.

In this light, the narrator makes it apparent that Pearl Street is disdained and feared by the middle-class citizenry of Dufferin Street mainly because it serves as an acute reminder of femininity’s most threatening aspects. The two streets between

which Almeda’s home is situated are not only representations of humankind’s universal psychological divide—they are decidedly gendered (McCarthy 2). Dufferin, with its patriarchal name and alignment with the realm of commerce, is masculine. It houses “merchants, a mill owner, an operator of salt wells” (170). The girlishly named Pearl Street and the untameable wilderness of its bog are feminine. These distinctions further position human consciousness as equally gendered, with rational consciousness signed as masculine and irrational subconsciousness signed as feminine. Pearl Street’s wilderness embodies a form of femininity ruled by instinct over reason— the weeds of the bog hole are “bushy and luxuriant,” beyond the realm of human control yet strangely alluring as a result of this resistance (Munro 170).

The inhabitants of Pearl Street are regarded more as organic creatures than as humans. There exists little to no association between civilized domesticity and these residents with their “makeshift shacks” and refusals to “build privies”: they are “unrespectable and undeserving,” a crowd—even a herd—of beings incapable of rational thought. “Things deteriorate toward the end of the block, and the next last one becomes dismal” (170). Pearl Street is perceived as an acute threat to the male sanctity of Dufferin Street. As the narrator remarks in her survey of the town, “yards must be fenced to keep animals out”—the inhabitants of the masculine world are eager to erect boundaries against untamed, natural forces through the relentless construction of barriers to female intrusion (168). It is not entirely because of potential physical dangers that “no decent woman ever would” leave her domestic safety to venture to the end of Pearl Street (170). Rather, it is because doing so would be to acknowledge, and even to enter, the wilderness of her femininity outside the boundaries of patriarchal control. For the town to establish itself as a valid social organism, Munro’s narrator suggests, femininity must be fenced out or

erased—a mechanism expressed both in Almeda’s domestic confinement and through the exclusion of Pearl Street’s feminine heterodoxies.

This repressed aspect of femininity is manifested most significantly by the Pearl Street woman attacked outside Almeda’s home. The narrator represents her in solely animalistic terms: when observing her body, Almeda cannot detect a human face, only a “brown nipple pulled long like a cow’s teat, a bare haunch and leg,” and skin “like a plucked, raw drumstick” (178). The woman and her feral qualities are further combined with a perverse sexuality to the extent that the boundary between violence and pleasure becomes indecipherable. Propped against Almeda’s fence, the woman and her assailant generate sounds of “gagging, vomiting, grunting, pounding,” ending in a climactic “long, vibrating, choking sound of pain and self-abasement, self-abandonment, which could come from both or either of them” (177). As she bangs her head against Almeda’s fence, “she finds her voice and lets out an open-mouthed yowl, full of strength and what sounds like an anguished pleasure” (180). The Pearl Street woman is simultaneously enraged, arousing, aggressive, ugly, unrestrained, and unsilenced—qualities that represent the complete antithesis of the domesticated woman. Her anonymity and bestiality are both demeaning and empowering: she is excluded from human recognition by the patriarchy because of the threat she poses to it, yet this allows her to exist unbounded by the mores of Almeda’s world; she experiences “eccentric freedom” (McCarthy 8).

In this geography, the placement of the Roth house at the intersection of Pearl and Dufferin Street is intended to exhibit Almeda’s struggle between two constructs of femininity. This internal clash is implied in her full name, “Almeda Joynt Roth” (165). Her middle name, a homophone of “joint,” indicates that she lives at the intersection of the antithetical worlds embodied by Pearl and Dufferin. The narrator

describes her rational consciousness as strictly under the control of Dufferin Street’s patriarchal strictures, as evidenced by her fantasies about fatherly domination. Equally, however, she is shown to possess a profound instinctual attraction towards the wildness of Pearl Street. Almeda’s decision to continue occupying her bedroom at the back of the home can thus be interpreted not only as deriving from a fear of her father but also as a sign of her fascination with the bestial feminine. Although she possesses a certain apprehension of Pearl Street, she cannot resist being mesmerized by its concurrent beauty and chaos.

The narrator’s long-winded description of the street’s filth and barbarism is essentially negated by a closing observation that “that same swamp, lying to the east of Almeda Roth’s house, presents a fine sight at dawn … from her window she can see the swamp mist filling with light” (170). Notably, Almeda admires this sublime display from the confines of her home. Physically and rationally, she remains planted in the masculine world of Dufferin Street and her father’s teachings; yet her yearning for the swamp recalls a side of her that she longs to set loose—that which lies outside the harness of patriarchal control she has been conditioned to seek. The fence between Almeda’s home and the Pearl Street alley behind it thus takes on an immense significance: it comes to mirror the fine line between two forms of femininity—the patriarchally controlled and the wildly untamed—two worlds caught on a borderline.

In this tension between opposing worlds, the beating of the Pearl Street woman presents a definite turning point. Before the event, Almeda’s home serves as a reminder of her father’s looming authority; it represents the masculine, rational control that has long kept her submissive and disconnected from authentic self-expression. By exteriorizing the patriarchal abuse that she has internalized throughout her lifetime, the assault forces Almeda to reach an epiphany. If we are to accept Dermot McCarthy’s

suggestion that the woman and her assailant are a married couple, the scene serves as a warning against marriage itself. Once Jarvis does arrive on the scene, Almeda’s discomfort intensifies in witnessing his treatment of the woman. He displays a complete lack of empathy, prodding at her with his boot. When the woman stirs, Almeda notices that she is bleeding. Again, Jarvis dismisses Almeda’s concerns, telling the woman to “‘Stop it. Gwan home, now. Gwan home, where you belong’” (180). McCarthy notes that Poulter’s first imperative can be applied to both the woman’s incessant headbanging as well as her bleeding: “it is as if he is ordering her to stop the blood” (7). Immediately after these events, Almeda begins to menstruate; she is forced through her own bleeding to recognize that she has more in common with this woman than she does with Jarvis and his contempt for uncontrollable female blood. Poulter’s second imperative, ordering the woman to “Gwan home,” is equally ambiguous—he might be asserting that “where she belongs” is in the uncivilized depths of Pearl Street or the confinement of the domestic space, under the control of her presumably abusive husband. Either way, his conduct profoundly unnerves Almeda, who is now more concerned with her bodily functions than she is with Poulter’s newfound expression of interest in her as a potential mate. She feels sick, bloated, and dizzy, wishing only that Poulter “would leave her” so that “she could go straight to the privy” (Munro 180). Ironically, it is at this moment that Poulter is described as most attracted to Almeda by her vulnerability. He “follows her as far as the back door and into the back hall”—invading her private space just as she fantasized, but this is no longer a cause for erotic delight (180). The Pearl Street woman’s circumstance has compelled her to recognize that, were she to marry Poulter, “she would end up strung up by the feet, plucked and bloodless, in a marriage of convention” (McCarthy 10). Accordingly, rather

than perceiving her home—and her body—as a space presenting itself for the sole purpose of being occupied by a man, she now recognizes the two as her only possible refuges from the masculine violence encroaching on all fronts. From this point onwards the body and the home are conceived of as threatened spaces requiring defense. She cannot even speak: “if she opened her mouth, she would retch” (180).

As soon as Poulter leaves, Almeda begins her project of shutting herself away from the outside world: she “closes and locks” both back and front doors and leaves a note indicating her refusal to attend church with Poulter the following morning (181).

Contrary to the inhabitants of Dufferin Street, however, she is not represented as fleeing into her home to escape the decadence of Pearl Street; rather, she is escaping the rationally justified brutality of Dufferin’s male-dominated hierarchies. Here, the narrator instrumentalizes the female body as crucial in the changing role of the interior space. Almeda’s internal conflict is mirrored in both the upheaval within her body and the tumult of her surroundings as she paradoxically contains herself within the home to allow her bodily fluids to flow freely. This motif of “flow” figures repeatedly in the representation of interior space in “Meneseteung.” Even before her psychological conversion, Almeda is imagined to regard femininity as inherently fluid in contrast to the rigid masculinities around her. In one of her poetic excerpts, Almeda describes the Meneseteung River as “spreading her blue skirts from the solemn wood” as she encounters the “pointed dwellings” of men; in the narrator’s reconstructions of her mind, the river is actively feminine (171).

The narrator’s focus on the intersection between the river and the town signals a belief that the feminine fluidity it embodies is permissible and admirable only if it remains distinctly separate from the domestic realm. This is reflected in the fact that Almeda can marvel at the beauty of the

swamp solely from the confines of her home. Similarly, the “plop, plup” of her grape jelly must be inevitably confined to “little jars” (178,176); her menstrual flow must be bandaged and hidden in the privy, while her poetic expression is only allowed when delivered in masculine rhymed “quatrains or couplets” (167). Because it cannot be controlled by the rules or rationale of society, Almeda’s poem suggests that the natural flow of femininity, both in body and mind, necessitates either exile or interior containment.

In light of this, the narrator presents Almeda’s withdrawal indoors as an act of resistance rather than madness—she upends patriarchal custom by unabashedly releasing the flow of her femininity within the interior space. As part of her self-confinement, Almeda drugs herself and remains physically stagnant in her dining room for an entire day, during which she reaches a state of psychological harmony with her surroundings. She begins to drift away from the compulsive need to conform to expectations: her “occupation for the day” is solely to observe the room’s decorations and to ruminate, an activity considered unacceptable for a Victorian woman with domestic and social obligations (182). The longer she watches the minutely detailed features of the room, the more “every one of these patterns, decorations seem charged with life, ready to move and flow and alter. Or possibly to explode” (182). The simultaneous beauty, volatility, and mutability of the room echoes the duality of Pearl Street’s picturesquely violent terrain: the interior has shifted from an emblem of patriarchal repression to another embodiment of femininity that lies outside the bounds of external control.

Increasingly, Almeda longs to “understand it, to be a part of it”—to embody this flow, this equal potential for beauty and explosion (182). These observations become tied to “a flow of words,” a

poem that she believes will encapsulate the “obscene racket on Pearl Street and the polished toe of Jarvis Poulter’s boot and the plucked-chicken haunch with its blue-black flower”; it will capture the feminine experience in its unfiltered violence, tragedy, disorganization, animalism, and strange magnificence (183). But the story reveals, again and again, that words cannot be trusted, and that Almeda’s story mirrors the instability of the narrator. As Houston says,

What is true is untrue, what is untrue is true. We have an hysterical bleeding woman inside an admittedly fictitious account, written by a narrator who doesn’t even know her name. We have a distortion of reality within a distortion of reality, within a story that is also a poem, and sometimes a river. Nothing here will stay still long enough to mean just one thing. (90)

McCarthy makes a similar point: “the patriarchal right/wrong, true/false views of history are not operative here” (13). Almeda’s poetic conception becomes further linked to “the river, the Meneseteung, that is the poem” (183). Her epiphany is complete—she has connected her interior surroundings, her poetry, and her femininity to a common flow embodied by the river or the swamp and antagonized by the interior confinement enforced by patriarchal society. Similar to her attraction to Pearl Street, Almeda admires the river primarily because it is permitted to exist in a flux of multiple forms: it contains “deep holes and rapids and blissful pools under the summer trees,” “grinding blocks of ice thrown up at the end of winter,” and “desolating spring floods” (183). The river is also Almeda’s writing, “not specific words but a flow of words somewhere, just about ready to make themselves known to her” (182).

The narrator recognizes that this type of existence is impossible to achieve, for it is not compatible

with the demands of a social environment that requires women, and the biological changes in their bodies, to be contained and regulated by external forces. As Almeda looks “deep into the river of her mind and into the tablecloth,” she observes the roses crocheted by her mother. Although they are “bunchy and foolish,” she interprets their “effort, their floating independence, their pleasure in their silly selves” as admirable (183). Inspired by this domestic emblem of her mother’s eccentricity, Almeda chooses a life of confined exile as a reclusive nonconformist over one of public objectification as a housewife. She no longer has concerns about “keeping Jarvis Poulter’s dinner warm” or restricting herself for the sake of masculine approval (183). At this moment, her basin of grape jelly overflows and stains “the boards of the floor, and the stain will never come out”—the change is irreversible, and Almeda resolves to no longer occupy herself with self-censorship or restriction (183). She abandons herself to “her perfect immobility, her unresisting surrender to her surroundings” (182).

Following Almeda’s day-long meditative confinement in the dining room, the narrator begins to glorify the domestic interior as a center for female empowerment and creative expression. Rather than feeling as though her solitary inhabitation of the space is a transgression that must be solved by submitting herself to a new patriarchal authority, Almeda now feels truly at home in body, mind, and edifice alike. For the first time in a life regulated by the mores of masculine society, she allows herself to forego domestic responsibility and propriety in favor of completely accepting her physical form in its simultaneous beauty, disorder, and repulsiveness: “she walks upstairs leaving purple footprints and smelling her escaping blood and the sweat of her body” (184).

Almeda’s “unresisting surrender” to her surroundings and the natural flow of her body allows

her to transform her previous loneliness and inability to be fully accepted into patriarchal society into an unorthodox form of creative and personal independence (McCarthy 9). The narrator stresses that this interior confinement is not motivated by fear or timidity. Almeda is no longer wary of her solitude in the home and what society might surmise about what occurs in her private space—she recognizes that this home is her home and, in truth, her greatest weapon against the forces that wish to repress her creativity or individuality. Her reclusive actions represent a deliberate decision to ignore participation in the customs of Dufferin Street, to allow its citizens to label her as “hysterical” amidst her private knowledge that “she is sane” (184). She has turned from an unwilling claustrophobe to a fervent claustrophile: the interior becomes the only space in which she is permitted to exist in an unfiltered state of femininity, to flow and change and bleed and create messes without interruption.

In this choice lies the central paradox of the story’s treatment of the domestic interior: to be free from patriarchal relegation to their home, women must confine themselves. For the narrator’s vision of Almeda, this manifests itself on both psychological and physical levels. She first shuts herself into her home, and subsequently into her mind, so that her body and consciousness may flow uninterrupted. Her death encapsulates the simultaneous peace and agony that her spatial choice entails; she develops pneumonia after “a ramble in the Pearl Street bog” (184). Although the invasive gaze of the Vidette hypothesizes that

Almeda was chased into the bog by a group of “urchins,” it is far more likely that she entered the bog on her own will, finally succumbing to the allure of its “bushy and luxuriant weeds” and the untrammelled feminine freedom that it represents (170). Brenna Raeder notes that Almeda’s death from pneumonia— her body drowning “itself from the inside”—is a “physical manifestation of the ‘river of her mind’” (11). Her fate is not an accident, as construed by the Vidette, but rather a final punctuation on her unending quest for true freedom. It embodies the tragedy of her circumstance—she must die to fully release the uncontrollable flow of feminine corporeality that has been withheld for far too long.

This martyrdom goes wholly unnoticed by the residents of Almeda’s town; only the narrator and the reader are privy to the supposed reality of what occurs inside Almeda’s mind. Is Almeda really sane, as she claims to be? Munro makes it clear that this assertion is open to question. The final pages of “Meneseteung” return to the narrator’s internal dialogue, reminding us that the deep caves we have just entered are little more than imagined interiorities. We are forced to recognize that it is the narrator, and not Almeda, who conceives of the domestic space as a physical manifestation of Almeda’s psyche and uses it to construct a narrative that creates the gendered binary between Dufferin and Pearl Streets, imagines Almeda’s attraction to the latter, and makes the home a place where the narrator and Almeda can imagine themselves, inside something they have constructed, temporarily free. ■

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Redekop, Magdalene. “Friend of My Youth: Making Connections.” Mothers and Other Clowns: The Stories of Alice Munro. Routledge, 1992, pp. 209 – 228, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315778235.

Simonds, Merilyn. “Where Do You Think You Are?: Place in the Short Stories of Alice Munro.” The Cambridge Companion to Alice Munro, edited by David Staines, Cambridge UP, 2016, pp. 26 – 44.

Staines, David, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Alice Munro. Cambridge UP, 2016.

Tuan, Yi-Fu. Place and Space: The Perspective of Experience. U of Minnesota P, 1977.

Verschaffel, Bart. “The Meanings of Domesticity.” The Domestic Space Reader, edited by Chiara Briganti and Kathy Mezei, Uof Toronto P, 2000. Proquest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest. com/lib/mcgill/detail.action?docID=3284229.

Ware, Tracey. “‘And they may get it wrong, after all’: Reading Alice Munro’s ‘Meneseteung.’” National Plots: Historical Fiction and Changing Ideas of Canada, edited by Andrea Cabajsky and Brett Josef Grubisic, Wilfrid UP, 2010, pp. 67 – 79. https://doi-org.proxy3.library.mcgill. ca/10.51644/9781554581610-006.

Winton, Alexandra Griffith. “Inhabited Space: Critical Theories and the Domestic Interior.” The Handbook of Interior Architecture and Design, edited by Graeme Brooker and Lois Wenthal, Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com /lib/mcgill/detail.action?docID=1589535.

55.2

creative writing

The night before my daughter’s first day at camp, I made a note to myself to stop by the hardware store to buy a dipstick for the oil tank and a broom for the shed in our garden out back. My wife Cathlin reminded me we also needed to stop by one of our two local bookshops to place an order for the upcoming school texts while we were there: Abair Liom B, Na Consain Leabhar a hAon, Na Consain Leabhar a Dó, Gafa le Mata, and Mrs Murphy’s Junior Infants cóipleabhar. The intentions behind our purchases hinted at the different needs we could anticipate as a family with our decision to return to live in Listowel, the place of my mother’s birth, in County Kerry.

When we awoke the following morning, I prepared oatmeal on the burner with the kitchen window angled open over the concrete an uncle had re-laid beside an unkempt overlay of brambles. The relative warmth of late June was cooler than the weather we had left behind in Rhode Island. As our children ate breakfast at the table, I practiced counting aloud, reading the numbers as printed in an Irish language guide I had purchased to support Eliza, our oldest daughter, in the lead up to her first year in school. Aon, one. Dó, two. Trí, three. Ceathair, four. Cúig, five. I stopped before sé, six, repeating my rundown with my best effort at enunciation according to the phonetic suggestions of a handheld guidebook I had picked up for support: Ain, doh, tree, cahher, coo-ig. Cathlin packed Eliza’s backpack, a patchwork of soft pinks and blues, with a snack and water bottle while I focused on getting Emaline and Conall ready to follow their big sister on the walk to what would be her new school come autumn. Eliza wore a light jacket with a pattern of constellations matching the flicker of her silver sneakers as she walked on ahead with her mother. I pulled the green door of our stone rowhouse to a close behind us and fiddled to strap Emaline into her stroller and latch Conall onto my chest in his BabyBjörn carrier.

We held hands at the crossing, deferring to the tractors and dairy lorries returning from their morning deliveries, and paused to assess the snails holding fast in the morning dampness along the crevices of neighboring homes. Even given our unhurried pace, we reached the open gate of the schoolground within minutes. The wall out front introduced our local Gaelscoil and An Naíonra, the pre-school program where Emaline was due to begin as well in several weeks. Eliza stood for a few photos, her braided pigtails tightly bound and a clip holding the wisps out of her eyes. I looked for some inclination toward nervousness behind the navy frames of her glasses, but saw only a measured determination as she tucked the thumb and index finger of both hands into the pockets of her coat and continued toward the modular classrooms at the end of the cul-de-sac. Too early for blackberries to give fruit from between their briars, buttercups and daisies dotted the grass patch along the pathway. The county council’s COVID

warnings remained staked into the ground, though more than two years into the pandemic we were rather relieved to have all made it through our family’s first bout with the virus only two weeks earlier. When we reached the fence posts painted as a rainbow array of colored pencils to mark the school’s entrance, I recognized the familiar welcome of fáilte from the longstanding tourism mantra—céad míle fáilte, promising a hundred thousand of them—but had no idea what to make of the text beside the intercom: Nil cead isteach. Had I the chance to check my phone for a quick translation, I would have found a prohibition of entry beyond the main gate, but the principal came out to greet us. Dia duit, she said as if we already belonged. I understood hello—or literally, God be with you—and attempted to respond with the appropriate rejoinder, Dia is Muire duit, or God and Mary be with you. Despite my effort, I found myself at once floundering into the safety of English. As we stood watching, Eliza turned to join her future classmates.

The week of camp came and went. We dropped Eliza each morning at the front gate and collected her there again at lunchtime. She sprinted out to greet her little sister with the first hug, and as we meandered our way back home again Eliza taught us how to ask for the leithreas, what we would have called a bathroom, and insisted that my attempts at counting were flawed, that each of the numbers began with what I assumed must be an article but that I learned instead served as a kind of indicator that the successive noun should be understood as numerical. I repeated after her: a haon, a dó, a trí, a ceathair, a cúig, a sé, a seacht, a hocht, a naoi, a deich. We washed our hands counting, figuring the sounds and order with the reinforcement of repetition. Over tea and scones at our kitchen table, Eliza reported on her first time trying to hula hoop and generally having fun at her camp. She explained that the teachers spoke first in Irish and then repeated the meaning of their instructions or intentions in English, but stayed light on details except in the minutes before bed when the name of a future classmate or a schoolyard game might buy her a moment longer before we turned the lights out. Even so, the evening sun at our new latitude streamed through the shades as the girls drifted into sleep. Oíche mhaith, goodnight.

When the school year started at the end of August, Eliza entered naíonáin bheaga, junior infants, what would have been an approximate equivalent of kindergarten back in the States. With her third birthday still on the horizon, Emaline became the youngest of the children, na páistí, in her Naíonra classes held in another classroom. Only ten months, Conall had the benefit of staying home with us, claiming a mid-morning nap and some time with either or both of his parents. The rhythm of our days began to take form, starting too early with whoever broke from sleep first and the other two following like dominoes. As the kids colored at the kitchen table or made games to play together

on the stone tiled floor, I played the national public radio programming of RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta to set a backdrop of the Irish language while preparing a first cup of coffee and pot of oatmeal on the stovetop. The voice of Gráinne Ní Dhomhnaill spoke to us at intervals as we ate while listening to Nead na Fuiseoige. The girls at times excused themselves from their seats to dance to a particularly inviting reel, usually leaving a trail of oatmeal on the floor to clean up later. The eight o’clock jingle that announced the transition from the songs of her show into the day’s news on Adhmhaidin served as our own family alert system to finish the last bites of breakfast and change in time to leave for school.

We tended to take the most direct route in the mornings, a walk of roughly eight minutes with the girls, though I found I could cover the same distance in two flat when alone on pickups. In the afternoons, we allowed ourselves more opportunities for detours, often walking the long way home past the building in which my mom had been born more than seventy years earlier. The two-level house was set back from the road with an overgrown yard out front that at the time of her birth in 1950 had given rise to the common name used for the facility, the Green Lawn. The previous fourteen children in her family had been delivered at their farmhouse down a lane in a townland beyond the nearby village of Moyvane, then known as Newtownsandes. My mom, like her younger sister Imelda, was born in town in the care of a nursing home, as the Green Lawn was considered on account of being staffed by religious Sisters who brought with them some form of medical training or practice as nurses. Whenever we passed “Nana’s birthplace,” as we had assigned the landmark, the girls seemed more interested in balancing themselves on its low wall than in my tendency to drift into the stories of my mom’s childhood.

But as the early days of our school year grew into weeks and Eliza came home practicing new words and singing songs she had learned in class, recounting for us how her teacher played guitar and fun games, I couldn’t help but compare her experience with my mom’s at the same age. Like her older sisters and brothers, my mom walked up to the two-room public schoolhouse at the top of her lane, where the Master, as the teacher was known by his students, seemed to reign with a degree of terror. My mom concedes that he must have loved nature, for she saw him stop on his bicycle to marvel over various flowers along the hedgerows, and some of the better students remember him with greater forgiveness because they received his encouragement and were rarely hit, but my mom still quakes over the memory of standing, often cold as well, at the front of the classroom while the Master stood behind her with a hand beside each ear ready to box the side of her head over any mispronunciation of the vocabulary he expected them to know in Irish. At least he didn’t use his rod on her, she figured, that

punishment meted out more often on her brothers, but she never knew which hand would be the one to hit against her head and even if she knew the word before she took her place in front of him, she simply couldn’t remember it at his request, so the clout would come and then the Master, without offering the answer, would send her back around the room to line up again insisting she ought to know the word by her next turn. Her parents had been able to speak and write in Irish as well as English, as had their parents, but they had little use for the language in their day to day efforts as a dairy farmer or within the home. Still, to this day my mom holds onto a few words that have lingered, though turned plural with the English practice of adding an “s,” as she recalls the joy she felt over the newborn piglets, the banbhs, and the fledgling chicks, the gearrcachs, peeping softly in the crook of her hands while she sat in the company of her mother on the flagstone floor beside the hearth fire.

Within little time at all, Eliza had learned more Irish than my mom had learned during her entire childhood growing up in Ireland, having left for England shortly before turning seventeen, or that I had been able to pick up in a lifetime of visits of my own as well as taking introductory adult classes after work while living in New York. My own limitations were no fault of my instruction, only the obvious struggle to absorb much when it was a matter of dropping in and out of any new tongue for an hour or two each week. What my own time more than a decade earlier, studying seated in the second-floor Hell’s Kitchen classroom of the original Irish Arts Center building learning basics like the months—Eanáir, Feabhra, Márta, Aibreán, and so on—and the foundation of sentence formation in a language that foregoes a binary “yes” or “no” for the more conversational assertions of “I am—” or “I am not—” or “I have—” or “I have not—.”

On one homework assignment to describe ourselves, I made use of the initial vocab and structure I had learned: Is scríbhneoir mé. Ní pancóg mé. I am a writer. I am not a pancake. I was not wrong.

As the days began to shorten and my parents planned to visit us around Halloween, Eliza came home singing songs grounded in the traditional Samhain festival celebrating the end of the harvest season. We learned around the kitchen table by joining our fiveyear-old as the lead:

Oíche Shamhna, Oíche Shamhna.

Báirín breac, Báirín breac.

Úlla is cnónna, Úlla is cnónna. Is maith liom iad, Is maith liom iad.

Halloween, Halloween. Barmbrack, barmbrack—a sultana-speckled bread my mom remembers hers baking. Apples and nuts, apples and nuts. I like them, I like them. Again and again, we sang.

When Eliza began to bring home homework with assignments to practice her penmanship in her cóipleabhar, undertake basic addition, identify shapes, and read a book together, I sat beside her knowingly failing at my pronunciation but trying to impart that even though I may not be as adept as she was becoming with the language, I had a leg up on understanding instructions. Aided by online translations and the Teanglann foclóir Gaeilge agus Béarla, a searchable dictionary that includes audio pronunciation playback in each of the main dialects, Ulster, Connacht, and Munster, the latter of which was the one we used. And so I learned my primary cruthanna— ciorcal, circle; triantán, triangle; cearnóg, square; dronuilleog, rectangle—and read aloud the anthropomorphic animal tales of Mici, Lulu, and Rita, a monkey, elephant, and fox. Bit by bit, I learned as well, but for every improvement of my own, hers was at an exponential scale.

While out for walks pushing Conall in his stroller along the recently opened greenway bike trail built over the railway lines that had long been dismantled in large part during the war for independence and subsequent civil war more than a century earlier, I listened to podcasts and videos that helped me better enunciate the diphthongs and triphthongs that most tripped me up. At home, Eliza taught me how the letter “c” remained constant as in “cat.” I made a mental note to stop thinking it might ever switch into the “c” of a “cistern.” I dwelled longer on the local place names better known in their Anglicized forms but that appeared as Gaeilge in a secondary position on street signs and paid attention to the bilingual posters in local government offices. And while sometimes our homework devolved into tired tears, the more that Eliza and I sat together to work through her new material, the more comfortable we both grew in the tongue. In the mornings, it became second nature for us to shift from the news reports of Adhmhaidin to ensure we were ready with her mála scoile, cóta, hata, and bróga—school bag, coat, hat, and shoes. And with time, the sounds and meaning of the language became for me more natural.

Around us, we saw a future in something that most of my life had felt like part of the country’s and its diaspora’s past, its knowledge often shed and forgotten within a generation. There were always the outliers that surfaced, of Corey Kilgannon’s New York Times feature about Ed Shevlin, a garbage collector who practiced Irish with residents on his route in the Rockaways, of the Gaeilgeoirí exiles from the Great Blasket Island and Dingle Peninsula who carried their community into Springfield, Massachusetts, of Yale University Press publishing Alan Titley’s translation of Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Cré na Cille as The Dirty Dust, followed by Liam Mac Con Iomaire and Tim Robinson’s rendition, Graveyard Clay. But to sit in a local hall or cinema and

hear song or witness film in an ancient language that engages with our present, to see our daughter and her classmates finding in the course of their own early learning, there is a foundation that cannot be broken even if the words themselves slip away with time or distance. When I asked her once what she liked about doing her obair bhaile together, Eliza thought for a moment and said “I like you being able to help me, and I like being able to teach you.”

When we told Eliza that we may need to return to the States as a family, she cried not only over the prospect of leaving friends and teachers and our home, but lay beside me begging us not to take her Irish from her. I held her, accepting her sorrow, fighting back my parental urge to provide some immediate reassurance. To say I’m sorry as Gaeilge, “Tá brón orm,” is, in a literal sense, to say “sorrow is on me.” I wanted to tell her no matter what happened for us in the near term, that her future was open yet, that still the happiness she held in her language would remain part of her, inseparable like her Nana’s unforgotten banbhs and gearrcachs. But for the moment, I felt my own anguish alongside hers, having seen the love of a language as a love of learning, instilled in a classroom and at our kitchen table together in the hours before sleep, being able to put words to feelings and to find feelings in words that don’t have obvious equivalents. ■

An Editorial Note : Gaeilge is the Irish word for the Irish language, which some would understand more commonly as Gaelic; however, the term “Gaelic” refers to a broader group of languages including Scottish and Manx (from the Isle of Man). In Irish, “as Gaeilge” translates as “in Irish” (though its literal translation is more akin to “from” or “out of”), so the title of this essay, “Homework as Gaeilge,” is intended to function with respect to both languages: “Homework as the Irish language” in English and “Homework in the Irish language” in Irish.

i dreamt of god and she looked like you

/ CAITLIN SCHERESKY

when iridescent beasts flew for the first time. she looked like you

when she gave me the sun and all was quiet except for the humming shine in my throat. she looked like you

in the crash of silence and the peace of anarchy, religious longing and piercing tongues, she looked like you.

And when I saw her, bloodless ivory paintings and unfaltering she looked gaze, scars like ice and scars like you she looked like she looked

like warm snow-shivers, butterflies and strawberries, looked like she looked like a mother like a friend like a fire like a ghost like you like you like youyouyou

she looked like someone who loved me once, soft and gone, she looked like a fable and smelled like an ocean. She heard me from Italy, she knew me from the Dark. She knew me, and she loved

me and I have seen her soul and her skin and her tattoos, her eyes. I saw her eyes, and I saw the snow-capped Rockies and shell— shocked beach and I saw a ghost.

I saw a god, I saw a girl who made a home In this haunted blood of mine.

And when I haunt you, (do I haunt you?)

I wish for you to see me in my present absence, in the mauve towels and pink lilies and sparkling lip gloss that surround you in my dreams.

In public and in private. At the dinner table and in restaurants. In line for the movies and inside department stores. In the car and at parties. They fought ceaselessly and viciously about everything from my father’s chronic overeating and my mother’s capacity for exaggeration to imagined slights that happened during their honeymoon. Their apparent seething hatred for each other and mutual love of verbal assault kept them happily married since the mid-1960s. As a result, I was a nervous wreck of a kid with tension headaches and stomach problems.

Most kids’ parents would refrain from insulting each other until the children went to bed, but not my mom and dad. It seemed to me that they enjoyed working out new material in front of an audience. They unleashed their latest biting cut-downs while my sister and I were doing our homework or when I had friends over for dinner.

“Can’t you stop shoving food into your mouth for one goddamn minute?!” My mom would shriek.

“Shut your verkakte trap,” my dad would answer and then resume the story he was telling about a co-worker’s latest indignity while bits of meatloaf scattered onto the stained tablecloth.

My dad certainly had an eating disorder and my mother had a very colorful way with words.

My friend Kelly was a regular attendee at this tragic dinner theater, part of the live studio audience since we were in middle school. Sometimes she even participated. Her parents hardly spoke to one another, so watching my parents hurl insults really opened her up to new modes of communication. Her dad was firmly planted in his garage workshop sawing bits of wood while her mother watched a never-ending deluge of CNN at top volume and chain-smoked Virginia Slims. Kelly thought the multilingual profanity heard around my house was a sign of culture. I disagreed, but I didn’t like spending time at her house. My house was big, old, and all my stuff was there. It was easy enough to retreat to the silence of my bedroom. Once there, miles from reality, we would create our own noise with selections from my goth-centric vinyl collection, which I carefully sourced from garage sales, thrift stores, and the stuff my older sister failed to take with her when she moved out of state for college. We blared Bauhaus and Siouxsie Sioux while talking endless amounts of shit about our classmates.

“Frankie thinks he’s so punk, but I remember him wearing those M.C. Hammer pants, like, last year,” Kelly opined while wandering around, touching everything in my room. Frankie and several other boys at school had just discovered sexual harassment and practiced it on us during classes and after-hours obscene phone calls. It was humiliating and debasing, but mostly it was annoying. They would feign interest in me, talking about classmates, teachers, and movies, and just when I would think, “Hey, maybe this guy is kinda into me” and begin to consider the possibilities of what that might mean . . . BAM! They would follow up with a gem like, “Do you suck dick? I heard you do.”

I said, “Nah, he wore those pants in sixth grade. But he does totally suck. And that pet rat? I mean, come on. Who does he think he’s kidding?”

But I wanted more out of life than rat-based gossip and horny boys. I knew there was something else out there, beyond the veil of what we could touch and see. Almost every night I would have dreams in which I explored haunted houses, found books of forbidden knowledge, stumbled upon meetings of secret societies. My waking life was spent scanning the horizon of suburbia for signs of the supernatural. Needless to say, I didn’t find much in the way of occult symbolism and hidden meaning in our tract home development.

It all started in elementary school. I took an interest in books upon learning that I could block out the sounds of my parents’ yelling while I was reading. When the wrath of Mom and Dad turned towards me, I could pretend I was so immersed that I couldn’t hear them.

“Dee. Denise! Jesus fucking Christ, what a space cadet.”

That’s right, Mom. I’d rather be in outer space than talk to you.

I read books like my grandma chain-smoked cigarettes, starting a new one just as the last neared completion. I checked out most of the books at my elementary school’s library. Eventually I found two books on ghosts and the supernatural. In middle school, our library had a few random books in a series on the uncanny and paranormal published by Time-Life Books called The Supernatural. I was thrilled to find more volumes once I began haunting my high school’s library. These books were published in the ’70s and transported me to a very groovy place despite my early-90s teen cynicism. The subjects in the photos had long, lank hair parted in the middle and wore a lot of brown, but I forgave them. These people were connected to a higher truth. Images of séances, goddess worship, vampires, and psychics filled my mind. I looked in earnest for ghosts around the house at night to no avail. I wanted it too badly. Sometimes I would sit in a dark room for hours in the afternoons, hoping for spontaneous astral projection, but my mom or dad usually broke the trance, barging in to ask me why the door was closed and why the lights were off.

Toward the end of my sophomore year, my mom’s aunt Zelda died and, as a result, my paranormal home studies intensified. My mom flew to New Jersey for the funeral and our house was relatively quiet for three days. My dad and I ate dinner in front of the classic movies channel and then went our separate ways for the evening. When my mom came home, she produced from her suitcase a large flat box from another era and perhaps another realm. The decaying cardboard box was a little larger than a board game and featured illustrations of seemingly random subjects in decidedly random sizes: a small blue Sphinx, a huge green book, a medium-sized gold genie lamp, and— almost as an afterthought—a very small planet earth suspended in the upper right corner. Above it all loomed the words HASKO MYSTIC TRAY.

“Uhm . . . what’s this, Mom?”

“It’s an old Ouija Board. You’re into that stuff.”

She was right for once. I was into that stuff. I had read about spirit boards, but I thought they were like Super Nintendos or ski trips—unobtainable, expensive, not

available to a Jewish girl like me. I didn’t yet know that a modern board could be procured at a Toys “R” Us.

“Whoaaaaa! THIS was Aunt Zelda’s?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said with a practiced, yet still shrill, nonchalance she used when she knew she was one step ahead of me. “Sometime in the ’40s, Aunt Zelda bought this for my mother, but she didn’t want anything to do with it, so Zelda kept it.”

This didn’t fit with my memories of Great Aunt Zelda, a tiny, ancient woman who was once a WWII WAC and liked to listen to truckers talk to each other on a CB radio from her plastic-covered couch in Maywood.

“Did you ever use it, Mom?”

“No, I was just a kid and they wouldn’t let me. Once, I crawled under the table to see if there were strings or magnets or whatever. Aunt Zelda kicked me, but I didn’t see anything moving the hand piece.”

“Planchette,” I corrected.

“Whatever.” She returned to unpacking her suitcase.

I called Kelly and within the hour we were locked away in my candle-lit bedroom contacting the dead.

“How does this thing work? Do we need batteries?” Kelly asked, turning the board over as she looked for a battery compartment or a power cord.

“No! It works on ghost power.” Suddenly, I was an experienced necromancer. From what I had gleaned from the hippies in those library books, two participants (living) placed their fingertips lightly upon the planchette, and telegrams from the beyond were slowly spelled out by the spirits (dead) using the alphabet and numbers on the board. There was a YES, NO, and GOODBYE painted on the board, perhaps for the terser spirits. The Mystic Tray also featured a cartoonish figure in each of the four corners of the board—a man in a turban, a man in a turban with a crystal ball, a man in a turban on a camel, and, finally, a green witch who looked like she was cribbed directly from an old Disney cartoon.

Kelly and I sat cross-legged on the floor with the board between us and placed our fingertips lightly on the planchette. I kicked off proceedings in a voice I imagined spiritual mediums would use. “Ohhh spirits. Is there anyone out there who would like to speak with us today.”

The planchette circled slowly. Picking up speed, it transitioned into a looping infinity symbol. Kelly’s eyes opened so wide that I was afraid they would plop right out onto the Mystic Tray. I felt like I had consumed a liter of Jolt Cola, but I had to remain steady for Kelly and the spirits.

I managed to croak out, “Spirit, would you like to talk to us today?”

The planchette swung towards YES, stopped, and then went back to tracing the infinity symbol. This was the moment I had been waiting for all my 15 years of life.

Kelly’s eyes were still bugged to maximum capacity. “Are you moving it?!

That’s not funny.”

“No way, man. Spirit, do you have a name?”

♾YES♾

Of course it had a name. “Spirit, what is your name?”

The planchette reversed gears and headed towards Z. Then E. Then L. From there it went on a smoke break. That’s how I knew that it must be my great aunt.

“Zelda? Is this my aunt Zelda?”

The handpiece began to move again. ♾YES♾

Now MY eyes were in danger of popping out. My Great Aunt Zelda resided in her own Ouija Board. An image flashed through my mind of a spectral living room filled with plastic covered couches for my deceased great aunt to lounge on for eternity within the thin balsa wood of the Mystic Tray.

As if reading my mind, the planchette swung towards NO and repeatedly ran back and forth over the word.

NO, NO, NO, NO, NO . . .

“Now you broke it.” Kelly said glumly. “I don’t want to talk to your great aunt Zelda anyway.” She looked like she was starting to lose interest in our communications with the dead.

I got the sense that this might not be Great Aunt Zelda after all. The summer I turned eight years old, my family visited her in Maywood. She and I watched a lot of TV and played some boardgames while my parents and sister went into New York during the day. I was fascinated by the CB radio, but she wouldn’t let me use it. “You never know who you’re gonna get on this thing. There’s some real weirdos out there.” For whatever reason, it was ok for her to talk to weirdos, but not me. I looked up at her thoughtfully and said, “Well, maybe one day when I’m older I can talk to weirdos.”

Her words, “You never know who you’re gonna get on this thing” seemed to be ringing true for the Mystic Tray. Was this a CB radio to the other side?

The planchette furiously spelled out a message from the beyond. It moved so quickly that I could hardly keep up. First an A, then an R, then an E, and then Y, O, U. My heart pounded as I realized the spirit world was asking me a question. ME. A ghost actually wanted to talk to ME and had an interest in what I thought or what I felt! It would listen to ME. My opinions mattered. It was a new sensation.

“Yes?” I whispered breathlessly.

W, E, A, R, I, N, G, U, N, D, E, R, W, E, A, R.

I swept the hand piece onto the ground with disappointment and annoyance. We had been prank called from the beyond.

Kelly and I stared blankly at each other and held a great silence between us for a moment.

She then asked, “You wanna get some fries at the mall?”

“Yes, I do,” I stated. Fries at the food court never sounded so good. ■

55.2

Misbehaving at the Crossroads: Essays & Writings

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2025. 351 pp. $30.00/hardcover.

Beth Brown Preston

What I admire most about Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s collection of essays Misbehaving at the Crossroads is her critical voice and the intellectual acumen with which she writes on each important topic—from essays on our country’s current political dilemmas to commentary on the literature of the great Toni Morrison. I remember my introduction to this writer’s art through her first novel, The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois , winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. And I have since become familiar with her work on the early African American poet Phillis Wheatley.

In these powerful essays, Jeffers presents herself as an African American woman at the crossroads. African and Black American cultures represent the crossroads as “a place of simultaneous difficulty and potential....” Black women in America stand at a crossroads, attempting to fit into ideas of femininity and respectability formerly assigned only to White women. Yet Black women must still devise strategies to combat their continuing oppression. In Misbehaving at the Crossroads, Jeffers explores the historical and psychological tension in Black women’s lives, both public and private. She writes about her own journey from girlhood to womanhood, the obstacles of racial oppression, the challenges of tracing her ancestry, the adultification of Black girls,

Black women in politics, the origins of womanism and Black feminism, and the resistance to White patriarchy and supremacy. The essays in this important volume are autobiographical, and they are intensely polemical. The woman writes of her search for a personal identity along with the necessity of exploring her consciousness as a writer:

Alice Walker was a woman who (like me) was raised by Black women from Eatonton, Georgia. My mother and she loved each other. Her essays pointed me to a new consideration of women in African- American history, and in those moments when I wanted to kill myself, when I would set down that razor or put those pills back into my medicine cabinet—or vomit up the pills I’d swallowed—I didn’t do it for myself. I survived for those Black women who had gone before me. I was determined to live for them, because I knew they had prayed me into being, long before I was conceived. Alice Walker gave those women to me. (47)

Jeffers’s mother was a Spelman graduate and a teacher. Alice Walker was one of her students. Jeffers turned to Alice Walker’s collection of essays “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” during her

“turbulent twenties” as a vehicle to discover the possibilities of the “crossroads of Black and woman.” She learned to define womanism, “our own brand of feminism,” Black feminism. In the 1990s, while reading Alice Walker’s work, she learned to articulate her own worldview: “In turn,” Jeffers writes, “I saw myself, who I’d always been and was meant to become. I was no activist. I did not march. I wrote no rage-filled declarations. But I could speak on the page” (48).

In another fierce essay, “Blues for Moynihan,” she foresees the family as the rock-solid foundation of African American life. She attacks the propaganda spread by the data of the 1965 Moynihan Report and subsequent studies of that same nature, tearing at the structure of the Black family. According to Moynihan, the “matriarchal structure” of most Black families hinders Black equality. The study concludes that families headed by males are the only successful model for the Black family. Jeffers supports the opponents of “Moynihanism” and offers her readers autobiographical essays describing her own family’s life, with her strong mother and grandmother as the family heads after their separation from her father:

Mama settled the four of us in one large room in a yellow house down the street from her own mother, on Concord Avenue. When my sisters and I walked to Grandma Florence’s

house, we passed the residences of our relatives: Aunt Iola, my grandmother’s younger sister who lived across from Mr. Rice’s Funeral Home. Farther down the road was the house of Aunt Iola’s son. … [M]y grandmother was formidable; she was known—and seemingly feared—by everyone in that tiny town’s Black community. Her name was a passport through any dicey situation. Then, too, my mother was a graduate of Spelman College, and that fact alone made her close to a god to every Black person that I encountered in that town. (93 – 94)

Honorée Jeffers’s autobiographical essays about her childhood, coming of age, and the wisdom that arrives with adulthood are complemented by additional essays full of historical fact and sociopolitical detail. She traces the history of her ancestors through census records and personal narratives dating from the time of slavery until the births of her grandmother and her mother. She uses fable and myth to weave the story of the Black woman’s emergence to consciousness, her rejection of any person or movement that would bring further oppression, and the value of the strength of women in maintaining the future of the Black family. This volume represents an important work in redefining the role of Black women in contemporary American society.

Engagements with Adaptation

Thomas Leitch

London: Routledge, 2025. 184 pp. $152/hardcover, $43.99/paperback, $41.24/ebook.

Phillip Zapkin, Pennsylvania State University

Thomas Leitch’s new book Engagements with Adaptation surveys key methodologies contemporary adaptation scholars use to answer the foundational question: what does the discipline do? In the first and second paragraphs, Leitch frames this issue, noting that adaptation “remains a non-discipline, even an anti-discipline—a decidedly marginal field of study, if it is indeed really a field. The marginalization of adaptation studies begins with the exceptional reluctance of its leading practitioners to define its subject” (1). Despite this premise, Leitch himself does not actually define or delimit adaptation studies. Instead, his approach is diagnostic, analyzing major trends, methodologies, and analytical approaches used by contemporary adaptation scholars. Leitch is exceptionally well placed to compose such a survey, being one of the field’s best-known and most prolific writers. (I had the good fortune to present alongside him on a digital conference panel several years ago). Engagements provides a comprehensive introduction to six different approaches utilized—as the title suggests—to engage with adaptations today, identifying strengths and weaknesses of each.

Following a brief introduction, Engagements devotes a chapter to each major approach: aesthetic, intertextual, industrial, biological, sociological, and participatory. Across the chapters, Leitch addresses

individual adapted texts/genealogies/franchises to highlight unique critical perspectives highlighted by that chapter’s engagement; he creates continuity by returning in each chapter to Greta Gerwig’s 2023 film Barbie, demonstrating the flexibility of the various modes of engagement.

The first two chapters could be categorized as textual approaches, whose scholarly focus aligns closely with traditional literary or film studies. Leitch characterizes aesthetic engagement as deeply implicated by fidelity criticism, which he calls “something like the F-word in adaptation studies” (16). These engagements presume intermedial adaptation (e.g., novel-to-film), positing that adaptation’s goal is to reproduce a single source text as exactly as possible in a new medium. Leitch sums up aesthetic engagement: “Its bedrock assumptions are that the primary goal of studying adaptations is to compare them to the texts they adapt; that the basis for this comparison should be to evaluate them on the grounds of their aesthetic success; and that the result of most evaluations is the verdict that the book is better” (6). Leitch also addresses the paradox that adaptation scholars have critiqued fidelity criticism virtually as long as the discipline has existed in even a nascent form (15). The second chapter addresses a more complex and multi-faceted critical approach.

Intertextual engagement figures adaptation as process, acknowledging a multiplicity of ways to understand adaptation: as the creation of a new text, a response to or commentary on an earlier text, and a (possible) blending of multiple texts and contexts (34). This chapter addresses scholarly methodologies seeing adaptations as forms of artistic creation that simultaneously respond to canonical texts—figuring adapters as creating new works through complex negotiations with the past, writing back to canons, and addressing contemporary concerns for modern audiences.

The next three chapters survey engagements focusing on how adaptations move, proliferate, flourish, or struggle within societies. Industrial engagement is scholarship addressing the financial imperatives to adapt and keep adapting, especially in contemporary capitalist-dominated film industries. Spending extended time on the Marvel Cinematic Universe and DC Comics films, the chapter demonstrates industrial engagement’s focus “on the sociology of the adaptation industry itself, whose governing imperative in generating and assessing adaptations as products is not to challenge or uphold aesthetic standards but to extract the greatest possible profits from those products” (63). Somewhat more problematically, biological engagement maps Darwinian evolutionary principles onto textual

“Leitch also addresses the paradox that adaptation scholars have critiqued fidelity criticism virtually as long as the discipline has existed in even a nascent form.”

“Spending extended time on the Marvel Cinematic Universe and DC Comics films, the chapter demonstrates industrial engagement’s focus “on the sociology of the adaptation industry itself, whose governing imperative in generating and assessing adaptations as products is not to challenge or uphold aesthetic standards but to extract the greatest possible profits from those products.”

adaptation, seeing individual instantiations of a text as genes transmitting information in new forms with each replication (89). As Leitch points out, though, this approach risks confusing random Darwinian mutations with purposeful reworking by conscious artists, focusing on singular evolutionary trajectories (i.e., excluding multi-sourced hybrid adaptations), and prizing ‘successful’ adaptations as those most fit to survive (89-90). The fifth chapter addresses sociological engagements, which conceptualize texts as migrants across borders, whether legally or illegally. Readers can see adaptations as immigrants, or outsiders from the perspective of adapting cultures; as emigrants, or defectors from the perspective of originating cultures; or as migrants moving between places under complex systems of power, hospitality, and exclusion (116). Both biological and sociological modes raise questions about whether agency rests exclusively with human adapters or whether texts themselves exert agency in their dissemination.

The final chapter focuses on participatory engagement, a form with long roots increasingly central in the information age where fandoms and multi-media promote user input. In participatory engagement, “the fans, once relegated to the sidelines as mere consumers, now join individual and corporate producers in determining which stories are important” (142). Digital spaces particularly allow participatory engagement, through fan art and

fiction, attending cons, debating canon, and even using services like AI to generate new material.

One weakness of Engagements is that it lacks a conclusion. The book ends with the sixth chapter, and the absence of a wrap-up and potential invitation to think further about specific overall themes or concerns raised feels like a missed opportunity. Certainly, the introduction provides initial framing, but sans conclusion the frame does not feel closed. And by the time readers get to the end of the book, we are more prepared to engage a comprehensive assessment from a position of knowledge.

Overall, Engagements with Adaptation is an extremely useful introduction to contemporary modes of adaptation studies, particularly encouraging readers to think beyond fidelity criticism-style comparisons. The book will likely expand the framework through which professionals in the field view the discipline. But Engagements is designed to be accessible and useful to students, including both graduate students and advanced undergrads. Leitch identifies one of the book’s primary goals as “to invite you…to consider adaptations more thoughtfully and resourcefully on their own terms” (4), which strikes me as encouragement aimed at aspiring or emerging scholars. Additionally, each sub-section includes questions for additional thought or discussion, adapting a common textbook technique to provoke readers both to think further and to better retain the information.

Executive Editor: Timothy Yu

ISSN: 0010-7484, e-ISSN: 1548-9949

Published four times per year

Contemporary Literature publishes scholarly essays on contemporary writing in English, interviews with established and emerging authors, and reviews of recent critical books in the field. The journal welcomes articles on multiple genres, including poetry, the novel, drama, creative nonfiction, new media and digital literature, and graphic narrative. As a forum for discussing issues animating the range of contemporary literary studies, Contemporary Literature features the full diversity of critical practices. The editors seek articles that frame their analysis of texts within larger literary historical, theoretical, or cultural debates. cl.uwpress.org twitter.com/C_L_Journal facebook.com/contlit

contributors

Seán Carlson is working on his first book, a family memoir of migration. His writing has appeared in The Common, The Irish Independent’s New Irish Writing, The Irish Times, The Missouri Review, New England Review, and elsewhere. Seán was awarded a 2025 St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award for Literature and a 2024 Elizabeth Kostova Foundation poetry fellowship in Bulgaria.

Anne Duncan is a PhD and MFA candidate in English at the University of Washington in Seattle. Her scholarship is forthcoming in Global Nineteenth Century Studies. Her poems are published in Cherry Tree, Permafrost, and elsewhere.

Robert Lecker is Greenshields Professor of English at McGill University. His books include On the Line: Readings in the Short Fiction of Clark Blaise, John Metcalf, and Hugh Hood; Robert Kroetsch; Another I: The Fictions of Clark Blaise; Making It Real: The Canonization of English-Canadian Literature; Dr Delicious: Memoirs of a Life in CanLit; The Cadence of Civil Elegies; Keepers of the Code: English-Canadian Literary Anthologies and the Representation of Nation; and Who Was Doris Hedges? The Search for Canada’s First Literary Agent. He is the editor of Canadian Canons: Essays in Literary Value; Canadian Writers and Their Works; and Do You Want To Be Happy and Write?: Critical Essays on Michael Ondaatje.

Kyra Odell is a student at McGill University, where she studies English Literature and History. Her areas of interest include nineteenth-century Russian history and literature, the short story, and metanarrative.

Chloe Elisabeth Onorato holds an MFA in Fiction from American University, where she was awarded the Moyer Prize for Literary Achievement in Prose. She was fiction editor, and then editor-in-chief of Folio. She received her BA in English, magna cum laude, with an Honors Concentration in Creative Writing from the University of Notre Dame. She was a Fiction Finalist for the New Millennium Writings Award 2025, and her work was one of the top ten stories for the Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award 2025. She is currently teaching at American and George Washington Universities.

Caitlin Scheresky is a North Dakotan poet, writer, and editor. She is currently pursuing her Master of Arts in English-Literary Studies at Bucknell University, where she serves as the graduate assistant at the Bucknell University Press. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in Floodwall Literary Magazine, The Southern Quill, and Sheepshead Review. One day she will learn to skip stones but today is not that day.

Audra Wolfmann has an MFA from Mills College and lives in San Francisco where she handles the Bay Area marketing for Amoeba Music, the last great record store. She’s also been a technical writer, dancer, filmmaker, and many other professions to pay the rent. She’s been published by Flash Fiction Magazine, Wired, Make, and in fiction anthologies by Manic D. Press and Seal Press. She’s also a founding member of Tight & Nerdy, the world’s first (and only) Weird Al burlesque troupe. A documentary about their decadelong odyssey is touring festivals and winning awards now.