I was in America at a very expensive writers’ workshop, trapped in the middle of a pew listening to a pale man riffing when I thought—I don’t know if it happened like this but maybe it did—I thought, I don’t want to be a feminist anymore because I’m sick of complaining. I’m sick of sitting through lectures like this and subliminally counting the number of female thinkers who are referenced, or not, thinkers from the colonies, thinkers who didn’t do their thinking just because they were given the freedom to, were expected to. I thought: it’s humiliating, I’m sick of interacting with reedy tepid well-read men and I’m sick of writing from behind the injury of colluding in my own oppression and not saying anything new because all I want to say has been said by other women and better.
I was at a very expensive writers’ workshop and a faculty member, a mid-career writer of American fiction, gave a lecture about how she had only recently understood that she’d been pandering to the white male authority reader this whole time and now she was finally committed to changing her tune, and, well, I skipped this lecture, because the description seemed rudimentary to me, and instead I walked deep into south-eastern Portland with my new-found soul friend till we found a park filled with towering pines, majestic structures in the cathedral of the sky, breathing and groaning and creaking in slow motion, and for one moment I felt lifted, truly outside myself, and on the way back my soul friend and I sat down for a beer. By the time we returned to campus the women writers, a demographic which of course constituted ninety per cent of the cohort, and most of them white, were energised, really excited, because for perhaps the first time they’d heard a woman angry in her own words within the walls of a hallowed institution and I can’t, I could never, begrudge a woman coming to consciousness, but it stung a little to witness it in 2015, and even now, these fist-bumping women, these new recruits to the écriture féminine, might not pick up a bell hooks book any time soon but maybe that’s okay. I am an advocate of course for women’s writing, for women writing, for writing that declares its difference; gender is complicated, but it’s also sometimes a means of articulating your specific needs, though the sex binary is perhaps less helpful for gender non-conforming people with needs and experiences outside of that particular ontology, and both of these arguments can co-exist and why shouldn’t they? On the one hand it is important for gender to be considered in any understanding of a text’s materiality but on the other is the singularity of an author whose classes and categories are movable they are inconsistent they are disobedient. So what good is it to be a woman except to resist the universal that denies us specificity (as does the category ‘woman’), to occupy a position as a female person in solidarity with other women? This is something I talk about with a friend who is trans and femme, whose femininity has been violently denied to them by the public and continues to be, and so is an expert in femininity more so than I am because for them their claim on it is a claim to a recognition of their full humanity, and in this sense their femininity is politically significant in a way that mine which is naturalised and unquestioned is not. One day my friend was telling me about the breasts they longed for, and how at some point they’d have to decide the what and the how, what ‘type’ of visible, legible femininity they might stake a claim on, and they said—‘the question is not how large should they be, but how many?’—and this for me confirmed the answer to the question of what is a female person. And what is a female voice. And what is the point of continuing the class of women. The point is always to be in resistance the point is to play the point is to be relentless in the desire to unmask callous reductions the point is to multiply breasts the point is to love what is different.
I was in America, pondering very expensively my discomfort in the ready adoption of feminism in academic contexts and online when life goes on as usual, and perhaps my discomfort is old-fashioned distrust of cheap signals, it is based on my understanding that these realms are purely discursive and it is difficult for me to understand the tension between material and symbolic realms, as I am certain they are sometimes the same, but other times they are not. And in lieu of shame and in lieu of a material crisis like war or madness to test these ideas, perhaps the struggle is contained in the signifier after all. But then what is the relationship between these things: of the pale male faculty member gratuitously unaware of himself; of gender-neutral toilets that are entirely necessary and likewise naturalise very expensive liberal arts colleges into supposedly radical discourses; of the chasm between a student and a faculty member, the labourer and the elite; of the woman writer at last throwing off her shackles and writing, singing, in the voice of a woman, of herself; and of the limits of this category, woman, which has for so long remained static for fear that its hasty stitching will be revealed, that no one ever knew in the first place what a woman was and until we did how would we ever be able to say ‘this is what a woman needs’? The last battle of feminism is not how will mothers also work nor is it female presidents nor will it be the warm embrace of transwomen. The last battle of feminism will be fought when the category of woman won’t need to hide its epistemological limits, when the category exhausts itself by a change in the weather, when being female will not involve degradation and it will not involve shame and it will not involve a woman writer waiting forty years before she garners the resolve to write what she longs to write.
…
I was in America, complaining very expensively about the lack of equality between the sexes in life, a power dynamic that is replicated in the relationship between art and capital, marginal and elite, which expressed itself through the student–faculty dynamics of this writers’ workshop, and all the while I felt the thud of guilt knowing that someone, like, I don’t know, my own mother, would have wrung her neck to have been given the opportunity to attend her art’s version of the workshop I was at; and then, a crack of anger that we’re all supposed to feel nothing but grateful when we are chosen to participate in these elite expensive rites, our little ant egos light up and we cough up money when they say we have been accepted into the MFA PhD masterclass.
I was in America at a very expensive writers’ workshop, working on my social mobility.
I was in America at a very expensive writers’ workshop, working on my writing by working on my cultural capital, which is an impolitic statement but no doubt a true one. The accumulation of cultural capital for the purpose of social mobility is a stone-cold fact of life and yet usually, in writing, in art and in the academies, it is shrouded by and passed under the guise of something else. Yet if this form of accretion underpins each facet of the production and industrialisation of art, why does it follow that we don’t much talk about it let alone admit when we are in on it too? This labour, this acquisition of esteem, is only marginally secondary to the production of the art itself—sometimes you’ll see it where there’s cultural capital and no art at all, just a fake artist standing in where their work should be, but the artwork was the hustle itself and this is obviously rage-inducing and frivolous but there it is, more common than you’d think, or maybe just as common as you’d think. And anyone who denies that this hustle is almost as important to the art itself is admitting their failure to understand the central role of capital in art. But being aware of its operation and participating in it doesn’t guarantee its successful acquisition.
I was in America at a very expensive writers’ workshop, working on my social mobility, which was foolish, not because social mobility and cultural capital are useless pursuits, but because people who have already passed into the field of the elite tend not to attend these very expensive writers’ workshops. That the students did not know this proves that they had not passed, may never pass, into the field of the elite. Which is also not to say there were no deep, thoughtful, stylish writers attending this very expensive writers’ workshop, because elitism is not excellence it is barriers to entry.
My new-found soul friend at the very expensive writers’ workshop now lives in New York City, which means I don’
t see her, which also means she works in comms for a start-up in order to live in an apartment and feed her dog. My new-found soul friend is toying with throwing in her paycheck to go back to just writing and I know she needs to, it’s how she will be able to write what her body burns to write, but also there’s no endgame, devotion and talent and well-connected friends doesn’t necessarily change the situation because the situation is too closely connected to the truths that linger just behind slogans and conspiracy theories. Anne Boyer says that writing ‘is the production of culture is I hate culture is the world of wealthy women and of men’. Like all this emotional work I just did, just dumping this essay into my two-hundred-dollar laptop, which made me feel insecure and mediocre but also ‘good’ as opposed to devastated because the act of typing stimulates some reward system in my brain, writing this essay was only ever about articulating how best to go about reproducing—without pay, with minimal pay—the cultural capital that is exchanged between wealthy women and men.
The Museum of Rape
1.0
On International Women’s Day I buy a waist trainer on Amazon. Do I want to upgrade to Amazon Prime? No, I don’t. This is the last time. The last impulse purchase. Checkout. I mentally apologise to a lot of consciousness-influencing figures. Sorry, Gayatri Spivak. Sorry, Queen Latifah.
An individual is not responsible for the corsets they buy in time. I mean, I probably won’t even use it. I hate working out. Never stick to regimens, beauty or other.
2.0
A video of the last sixty-one seconds before cumming, him breathing into his phone, ‘I love you I love you I love you’ (18.1). I watch it in the writers’ studio at the artist colony, alone. My bowels are full and hot blood is ready to erupt from me so I don’t touch myself, though I simulate touching myself in my mind. Like, wanking, video, simulation, imaginary wanking; several tiers removed from the flesh centre.
It is not quite morning-bright yet, the air still champagne coloured, and the yellow mimosa are really singing.
3.0
There is a guy on the internet who is cataloguing every false rape claim in history. I discovered this log while trying to find out if anyone had done the same for every rape (4.2). He writes,
In 2015, singer-songwriter Chrissie Hynde claimed she was gang-raped at the age of 21, and caused outrage when she appeared to blame herself for the violation. I have to say I don’t believe any of these claims, and I hope they are not true, especially the one by Chrissie Hynde, whom I’ve always liked.
and this tickles me, pink, red, raw, all over. Does he mean: ‘I always liked Chrissie Hynde, hope she didn’t get gang-raped’? Or, ‘I always liked Chrissie Hynde, hope she didn’t lie about it’? The answer to this is too bad to think about. I think Probably nobody has ever loved this person. And everything is worse than it was.
4.0
A long time ago I shared a yellow house with a couple. They became my parents, though we were more or less the same age. This dynamic is sure to get old, and it did, and afterwards they became, particularly my ‘mother’, my first official former friends. Awful at the time, losing friends like that, to something mundane like, I don’t know, immaturity. Now just a thing that got assimilated with all other things. Like a hot dry wind gently sanding the surface of my body.
I look like this. Smooth.
Ninety per cent of all human endeavours are said to fail, which seems like a low estimate.
4.1
They were going through something during the time we lived together, and what they were going through really put the body, for me, into perspective. His heart was fluttering, pain stabbing. At one point they thought, A heart attack. Midnight taxi to the hospital. And she, cold-sweat waking in the small hours to horror scenes playing endlessly in her mind’s eye. In the daffodil daylight, she bleached every surface and organised the crockery in a way that made living impossible.
We fought without words. I moved away.
But still I think about that friend who I saw as a mother figure, or perhaps an older-sister figure, and I feel thankful.
Our fourth housemate, though. Beloved by all, truly, really died. My love for him is old and uncomplicated. Though there are always regrets (11.0).
4.2
She had this idea, my housemate-mother, to make a museum of rape. Well, she said. There are museums for every tragedy, every genocide. Why not the persistent all-encompassing mundane treachery of rape.
I really thought, before our friendship closed down, that we would make this happen (13.0). I would, I don’t know, write the catalogue. Maybe interview survivors and activists, or go through archives to find the most typical and awful and compelling and also the most enlivening stories of girls and boys and women and men who had lived through or lost loved ones to it.
She would do the meetings. Her brilliance. Her backbone. My looking like a stunned fish whenever I am asked to answer for myself.
Possibly there is already a committee for this museum. I wouldn’t know.
4.3
So I wait.
5.0
I was thinking of a word.
Burrow duct gap hole narrow crevice
canyon corner cavity black hole
supernova portal man hole shadow
shadow shadow cleft space nook
underside pharynx cave passage pit
absence valley opening fissure
parentheses anus valley abscess chamber
depression blow hole depth slit
valley favour forgiveness. I can’t feel
the edges. From the beginning. Without
recourse to the beginning.
5.1
Lacuna.
5.2
I know what it’s like to fall into an abyss.
5.3
I thought. Maybe. I could be. I, a saint. It would explain. Feeling of constant stirred up. And voices. But not God. Mine.
6.0
My first assignment for a bilingual nightlife/city-culture magazine I worked at briefly in Saigon was to interview a Parisian Viet Kieu artist who lived in District Two. In his studio, spacious and awash with sunlight, hung massive oil paintings. Confident, expressive work, but not particularly original. Sentimental, maybe. The piece he was working on hung in the most spacious of the studio’s quarters: seven long panels strung together, depicting a vivid colour-scape, a few figures, some words, patterns. Midway through my questions, the artist urged me to look at the work in silence. I sat and looked without focus at the brushstrokes, affected a serious demeanour. A few minutes in, I felt heavy in my head. Holding a hand to my face I let my eyes well with warm liquid. The artist, arrogant in his silence, gazed at me inscrutably.
I let out a quiet sob. And said, ‘I’m in Saigon because my friend died. He lived here.’
And he said, ‘Sometimes sitting with the work evokes these feelings.’
And then, more kindly, he said, ‘What’s your friend’s name? I’ll write it into the piece.’
I blinked. What was his name?
‘Sam,’ I said. ‘His name was Sam.’ (5.2)
6.1
But his name was Dan. Daniel Wright. Sam was the name of another dead man entirely. A dead man who had never lived in Saigon, and one whose tragedy hung heavier on others than it did on me.
And so now Dan’s memory is inscribed in a French artist’s work, under the name Sam.
Five years now. Don’t read the emails.
7.0
I read so much I don’t know where my ideas come from (5.2). Who is speaking when I hear what I hear. Is that how words become mine? Too many voices. Too much. A human being is not sufficiently evolved for the internet.
I remember, with total clarity, the line, the story, but never who spoke it.
Blueberries Page 5