A Review of Lote; or, the Unbearable Whiteness of History

By Lucinda Janson (she/her)

Lote is the 2020 debut novel of Shola von Reinhold, a self-described “Scottish socialite and author", and has deservedly won the Republic of Consciousness Prize, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Lote is a fantastic, iridescent celebration of queer Black excess and ornamentation, while also being a weighty exploration of, and lament for, the ways in which queer Black lives and art have been forgotten, and actively erased from the archive. In its interweaving of first-person narrative with reconstructed historical documents and academic texts, Lote demonstrates the horrific erasures of the historical record, while also creating its own resistance to these gaps and silences.

As a tribute to the sumptuousness of Black, queer adornment, Lote is written in a prose that is rich, heady, and luxuriant. It is rife with images which evoke taste, texture, scent, and vision to create a wonderfully decadent sensory experience. Although often described as frivolous and frothy, Lote is in fact a deeply serious book. The struggles of its characters to uncover the forgotten life and lost work of the Black Scottish modernist poet Hermia Druitt demonstrate the injustices done to Black queer lives. From its lilac cover and dedication declaring, "solidarity, love and adoration for all those resisting universal tedium; to all those struggling with fascism, racism and capitalism in any of their forms", Lote announces itself as a profoundly, and radically, queer work.

Most of the novel is told in the first person by Mathilda Adamarola, a Black, queer, working-class woman who dedicates her life to the avoidance of paid employment, to the pursuit of idleness and luxury, and to immersing herself in recovering the lives of Black and/or queer historical figures whom she calls her "Transfixions". She records details of the lives of these people on cards, recording on the back the sensations they inspire in her. For example, the silver transfixion card for the aesthete and socialite Stephen Tennant, written "in shell coloured ink (barely legible)", records that Tennant evokes the sensation of "silver wafer into lead-white paste, soundless string instruments involving beeswax in their production". Mathilda devotes her days to reading about and researching these Transfixions, some of whom are real historical figures, while others are von Reinhold’s invention. The remainder of Mathilda’s time is spent plotting her survival, as well as her "Escape", when her living situations become untenable. As the novel opens, Mathilda has acquired a volunteer position at the National Portrait Gallery Archive, sorting through interwar photographs of the people known as the Bright Young Things. Although she claims to be writing a book about these figures, Mathilda’s interest is less academic than emotional. She asserts that "a day’s immersion" in the black and white photographs in the archive "left the same mental after-dazzle as a sun-glanced afternoon, lakeside."

When Mathilda comes across a photo of Stephen Tennant hand in hand with his lover Siegfried Sassoon, Mathilda is so overcome that she lies down on the floor. But the excitement she feels at this discovery is nothing compared to the unearthing of a photo of a Black woman at a 1920s bohemian party, dressed in an elaborate costume as a Late Renaissance angel, with her hair "brushed into a commanding nimbus". Mathilda is overwhelmed at this discovery of a Black person with natural hair, in a photo taken in a noncolonial context. Looking at the "excruciation of coil and kink" makes her "ache with jealousy and bliss". It is significant that this moment of discovery brings pain as well as joy for Mathilda, since the novel is not in any way an uncritical celebration of a queer, hedonistic past. Rather, it makes clear the racism and prejudice Black queer people faced, and the struggles of living life, and creating art, under these conditions. Lote is also careful to show the ways in which Mathilda experiences similar forms of prejudice and pain due to her race. On her first day volunteering at the archive, Mathilda is denied access by an "incensed blond twink", who views Mathilda’s fabulous outfit of "eBay lab diamonds, silver leatherette and lead velvets" as "the traditional accoutrements of the Maniacal Black Person". While the scene is undeniably comic, the interaction is but a small taste of Mathilda’s struggles to exist as a Black and visibly queer person.

Mathilda’s obsessive research leads her to discover that the mysterious Black figure in the photograph used the name Hermia Druitt, and was an experimental modernist poet. These discoveries — as well as her urgent need for money and accommodation — lead Mathilda to apply on a whim to an artistic Residency in a European town, Dun, where Hermia once lived. To Mathilda’s bafflement, she is accepted into the year-long artistic Residency, without knowing what it entails. Mathilda eventually finds out — to her horror and disgust — that the Residency is run by a group of "Thought Artists", who follow the teachings of a French theorist known only by his surname, Garreaux. The Residents are expected to spend the year creating a submission, known as the White Book Project, which will not be exhibited or displayed in any way, but rather archived in the Residency for posterity. In line with this theoretical asceticism is the drab, colourless way the Residents dress and behave — Mathilda dubs them the "Toast Children", due to their penchant for eating large quantities of plain dry toast. It is, of course, no coincidence that the project is termed the "White Book" — Lote contrasts the bland, self-abnegating white Residents with the brilliant decorativeness of Mathilda, and the friend she makes while in Dun, Erskine-Lily.

The juxtaposition of Mathilda and Erskine-Lily’s cult of beauty, ornamentation, and excess, with the Residency’s white, minimalist anti-aesthetic, forms one of the main tropes of the novel. Erskine-Lily, like Mathilda, is a lover of decoration, and of baroque elegance and opulence. Together, Mathilda and Erskine-Lily research the lives of Hermia Druitt, Stephen Tennant, and others who visited Dun, and their recreation of a mystical secret society known as the Order of the Lotos Eaters, or Lote-Os, who based their rituals on a sixteenth-century alchemical text called The Book of the Luxuries. Mathilda and Erskine-Lily work together to reconstitute the rituals of the Lote-Os, and finally also discover what has become of Hermia’s papers, and her lost poem. In the final pages of the novel, both Mathilda and Erskine-Lily seem to have achieved new, Hermia-inspired forms of Escape. All three characters’ capacities to transform themselves and their lives are shown to be both a precondition of their survival, and a crucial element of their queerness, and transness. All three of them, moreover, queer gender in fascinating, and unique, ways. While it is never revealed explicitly whether Mathilda is a trans woman — von Reinhold has said in interviews that she "could be read as trans" — Mathilda’s Escapes, in which she changes her names, and personae are clear markers of her transness.

Erskine-Lily, by contrast, is a more unambiguously trans feminine person. For much of the novel they are referred to using the pronoun ‘he’. As Erskine-Lily explains, "he but not He" has been the most acceptable pronoun, since ‘she’ and ‘they’ are terms which "flagged up too much". By contrast, ‘he’ had been "mentally ironed down to a film and meant nothing as long as it was said without meaning." Soon after this disclosure, Erskine-Lily admits that ‘he’ has also become "unbearable", and the novel transitions to the use of ‘they’ pronouns. When a character maliciously reveals Erskine- Lily’s deadname to Mathilda, this name is blacked out, so that the reader never learns it. Hermia’s gender is, by contrast, never addressed explicitly. However, von Reinhold has gestured in interviews to the vestigial possibilities of Hermia’s transness. One source mentions an Alexander Wylie born in Scotland around the same time as Hermia’s putative birthdate, who attended the same Paris art school. The possibility that this was in fact Hermia is so faint that the casual reader might miss it completely — a demonstration in real time of the slippages and elisions of gender in the archive.

Lote is ultimately a novel whose form and style mimic and enact its content and arguments. Like the archives it paints, it is a text which can be returned to again and again, yielding new secrets and discoveries every time.