Summer doesn't officially end until September 22. Here's what to read before then.
Whether or not it's factually true, I have always been of the belief that September feels like the hottest month of the year. This could be because I live in Los Angeles, where there is rarely a meaningful difference in weather once we cross the threshold of August. (A problem that only gets worse each year.) Or maybe it's just some latent, adolescent part of my brain that associates September with school and, therefore, with fall, thus making the heat feel like a punishment—the sun taunting me, the same 80-degree day sitting differently with my body than it did in July.
Either way, early September has always felt like purgatory to me; and while I like summer just fine, come September 1, I often forget it isn't technically over yet: This year, the fall equinox begins on September 22—another three weeks away. With that in mind, I asked a few cool folks to tell us what they're reading until then. (But I think it's a list worth devouring year-round.)
This is my favorite book to bring to the beach. Many books have tackled reimaginings of the classics, and it’s been interesting to see a hearty subgenre emerge within that category of same-sex romance. But for me, Anne Carson did it best with this poetic take on one of the labors of Heracles: Instead of slaying the red monster Geryon, he breaks his heart.
The story is told from Geryon’s perspective. He is soft, sensitive, and insecure. So, you know. Gay. I found that relatable to begin with. The most beautiful parts to me are the passing mentions of Geryon’s wings, which exist, but most people don’t seem to pay much mind to. Love, flight, Greek mythology, being different, the erotic—it’s all here, rendered so splendidly and with such tenderness. It’s an incredibly quick read. It will only take you an afternoon or so to fall in love.
I’m a bit burned out on media about women in their early 20s living their messiest lives—but when I started Sarah Thankam Mathew’s debut, I felt excited by its fresh approach. In a coming-of-age that considers capitalism, queerness, and cultural identity, recent graduate Sneha lands in Milwaukee during the Great Recession thanks to a corporate job that offers free rent and enough money to support her family in India. As funny as she is frustrating, with that naive mix of knowing nothing but believing everything deeply, I saw a lot of my younger self in Sneha, and I appreciated the chance to spend a rainy weekend in the world of her and friends, knowing I’d return to the stability of my late 20s after I finished it.
Personally, summer tends to either be a blossoming time of creativity, or I feel like a raisin withering on a vine. The fact that I’ve mostly spent the summer reading screenwriting guides, I can say this one was the former. One memoir has become the center of my practice, however: Misfits: A Personal Manifesto by Michaela Coel. A quick read, Misfits refuses to sit firmly in any genre. Coel shares stories from her life, explores her creative ambitions, and provides guidance for Black people trying to survive in the entertainment industry. Reading about Coel’s process and life has inspired my own work and the risks I take.
The linked stories in John Keene’s Counternarratives took me a month to read and will take years, I’m sure, to weave through my thinking. This is the kind of book that makes me return to what Toni Morrison and Stephanie Smallwood have said about imaginative literature as a necessary part of the history of slavery (and, I would add, indigenous genocide and survival). How else? In these pieces of the quilt we have an interior monologue from Huck Finn’s Jim (who now belongs to himself), we have a deckhand from Hispaniola on the uncolonized shores of Manhattan, we have conversos in 17th century Brazil. We have Langston Hughes in bed with his translator, Xavier Villaurrutia. We have so many forms and their wild reformations. I was already a fan after reading John Keene’s experimental memoir Annotations, but now he’s a top five fave.
I find summers to be catastrophic for reading, but recently it's been a nice salve. Mostly I have a hard time reading when it's too hot, and of course, the world is the hottest it's ever been. The heat in Toronto has broken just a touch, so I can sit in the shade and finally enjoy a few pages. I'm very lucky to be able to get sent novels all the time, and recently I've been reading the novella by Sam Cottington, People Person, and Allie Rowbottom's new novel Aesthetica. If you know me, I am always buying out of print books and trying to find certain titles. I just got the novelization of the film The Way We Were by Arthur Laurents. I think the story of The Way We Were is one of the best portrayals of romance, ever! I'm hoping reading the novel will be instructive...
When I think biography, I think dense. I was delighted to find Odell's bio of Vogue Editor-In-Chief Anna Wintour to be the opposite. It flows nimbly through decades of media, culture, and fashion history, all told through the lens of one powerful, embattled, iconic, often deeply contradictory woman. Perhaps most impressive is that despite Wintour's fame, Odell manages to neither valorize nor villainize the notorious editor. Her reporting is fair, the book's voice compelling. It's a fascinating look behind the scenes of what makes Wintour a powerhouse—the privilege, the skills, and above all the survival instincts that may make or break her in the years to come.
I just finished reading Samantha Allen’s Patricia Wants to Cuddle, a novel that somehow manages to pack horror, queer romance, and comedy elements all in one book, perfect for readers who love reality dating shows (whether ironically or not). This fun read follows the contestants—and producers—of a Bachelor-like reality show called The Catch as their experience filming on a remote island in the Pacific Northwest turns more Stephen King than Nora Ephron, all because of an uninvited guest lurking in the background. The relationships between the women vying for the attention of the titular “Catch” created legitimate laugh-out-loud moments, only to be followed by suspenseful twists and turns that kept me turning the page. Those who watch reality TV will truly appreciate the way Allen has written these characters, though you don’t have to be a devotee of dating shows to appreciate this book. It’s honestly just so much fun, and a great summer read.
I must start off this recommendation by admitting that I am not a sports guy in any sense of the word; as a Philadelphian, I will defend the Birds and all of our other rambunctious sports teams until my dying breath, but that is only because to do otherwise would be deeply unwise in terms of my personal safety (and would severely piss off my neighbors, who own a meat smoker and like to share its bounty). However, Sam Anderson's sprawling, ingenious, lovingly crafted narrative nonfiction debut about Oklahoma City, its messy frontier history, and its oft-beleaguered basketball team not only got me to care about sports, it made me want to look up the (living, breathing, balling) characters in his book to find out more about them. It scratched my eternal itch to learn about places that seem overlooked and written off, the way that Oklahoma City and its Midwestern brethren often are; it made me consider listening to the Flaming Lips, and taught me a hell of a lot about tornados and the benign cult of the local weatherman. I really cannot recommend it highly enough. Even if you do not care about any of the things I've listed here, trust me—Sam Anderson will change that, and teach you a thing or two besides.
A cult book is a bit like a cat, in that it has many lives, and you never know when you might encounter it. For Imogen Binnie’s Nevada—a squirrely novel about a slacker named Maria—a close friend told me it was absolutely her favorite book, then emailed me a PDF. I read it quickly, as one tends to do with anything on their computer screen, and found it to be the rare, actually-funny New York novel, more possessed by the grime of the city than its glitz. But it’s the book’s surprising second act that takes place in the state of—well, you can guess—and the way it swerves past the obvious ending that has stayed with me.
Nevada was reissued this summer by FSG, giving it a new audience and me a reason to read it again. This time, as a handsome paperback, I told myself I would consume it more slowly. No such luck. The book is too funny! I read the whole thing in a single afternoon at the park.
I just re-read J.G. Ballard’s 1975 novel High-Rise. As the story opens, a hyper-modern tower block welcomes its new tenants. The building offers them every imaginable convenience, from an onsite supermarket and swimming pool to automatic trash chutes and a rooftop children’s garden. Well-heeled women walk pedigreed poodles across the building’s pristine elevator concourses. By the end of the novel their feral husbands are hunting those same dogs for food and roasting them on improvised spits over pyres of burning furniture. The housewives, themselves, have turned to cannibalism. The most alarming thing about this calamitous fall is that absolutely everyone in the building sees it coming—which makes this novel an unsettling read in the early days of our climate apocalypse. It’s easy to call Ballard prophetic, but he was just attuned to the human subconscious and fascinated by the ways in which our desires could be set loose by architecture and technology. In High-Rise, the building itself gives shape to the worst of humanity. I can only hope we imagine some new shapes to avoid such a fate ourselves.
I believe summer reading calls for books that either tap into a refreshing deep freeze or enhance the heat and entropy of the season. Mary Robison’s first novel, Oh!, mixes these effects—it’s the ice in your tea on a blazing afternoon, a pristinely funny account of a Midwestern family, the Clevelands, who seem dysfunctional to outsiders but may be living more authentically than the rest of us. Underneath the booze and bickering is a love strong enough to sustain them through the disasters that, besides the tornados, are mostly of their own making. I felt right at home.
I spent the last year researching, writing, and promoting a book. It’s been transformative, exhilarating, and frankly exhausting. My goal this summer was to be as lazy as possible. My tolerance for holding a book, as well as my attention span, are at an all-time low, so I turned to audio books (yes, I realize I am decades behind!). Listening to Emily Wilson’s lively, lean, and rhythmic translation of Homer’s The Odyssey, narrated by Claire Danes, is the perfect soundtrack to lying down, on my bed or warm grass, my preferred summer activities. It’s a fun reminder of the physicality of words and storytelling, and Wilson’s accessible language lets me focus on all the human drama—like I’m eavesdropping on some hot, ancient gossip!
I feel like I read Andrew Sean Greer’s Less whenever I’m traveling or trying to write—which, I suppose, is all the time. The book follows Arthur Less, a “minor author” and “magniloquent spoony” pushing fifty years old, who skips his ex’s wedding by going on a round-the-world trip where he writes and teaches and meets a sparkling cast of life lessons masquerading as humans. I have four big trips this summer (Manila, London, Sewanee in Tennessee, and Tuscany; writing through all of it), so I’ve kept Greer’s Pulitzer Prize-winning baby in my carry-on this whole time. It’s been nice having a friend with me for the long layovers, for the writer’s blocks, for the reminders that this burning world is something to love.
I regret to open my first ever blurb for this wonderful publication by triple-bypassing its single instruction and recommending a book that I actually read in the dead of winter, but I devoured The Morning Star by Karl Ove Knausgård, and you should, too. I had never read him before but, based on the man’s healthy ego and reputation for excruciating minutiae, I half expected to give up almost immediately. Instead, this haunting, imaginative, at times philosophical, and at times humorous collection of loosely interconnected stories gripped me from the first page. What can I say, Knausgård can write!
This is a book about being Vladimir Nabokov and wanting to flex with language. Some would say it’s a book about love, or that it’s a family chronicle, but really it’s Nabokov dancing giddily across the page. There’s wordplay galore, with the title itself being an example—”Ada,” the author notes, when pronounced with a “long, deep Russian a” sounds like “ardor,” and so a person can be construed as a tribulation.
There’s a plot to be traveled down, should you need one. But the point of reading the book, to me, is to remind the reader that prose can be pursued so rapturously and with such confidence. It’s a great book to read if you’re experiencing writer’s block. Watching Nabokov shape language like a master ceramicist is inspiring, if you can push past the confusing names (there are two different “Van Veen”s) and, well, the incest. There are plenty of beautiful descriptions of bugs to distract you, at least.
The whole thing also takes place on an entirely alternate Earth called Antiterra, for some reason, which to me gave the austere trappings of the book an alluring sci-fi sheen to it. It’s truly an imagination, run amok.
This new adult contemporary romance is the debut novel of the author of Love in Colour, a master of the love story. Set at a university in the UK, with an exclusively Black cast of characters, Babalola's crafted a world with such care and attention to detail that it rises from the page to greet the reader. You are invited in, summoned to come play with some of the best romance tropes in existence (Enemies to lovers! Fake dating!), and also to bear witness to their reinvigoration.
I devoured this book beachside, taken over by rich characters who by book's end settle into your heart like old friends. Most incisive, to me? This book is ultimately about how hard it is to open your heart: the pits that form when you fear hurting or getting hurt, and the rewards that come when you do the work to do better and be open. A tribute to the "babygirls" and "babyghels" of Babalola's life, the novel's a love letter to all kinds of love, not just the romantic.
This book is an absolute must for anyone interested in trans history, queer history, or any kind of history at all, really. In 1912, Ewan Forbes was born to an old aristocratic family in Scotland; assigned female at birth, he was nonetheless very clear about his identity from a young age, and that resolve (and his mother's love) led him to seek out an early version of gender affirming care. All Ewan wanted was to become a family man and live a quiet, decent life; he achieved this for a while, until a grasping younger brother came knocking, and Ewan's entire world—and identity—was turned upside down. What happened afterwards led to a pivotal, precedent-setting legal ruling that was summarily buried and kept secret for decades, until now. Ewan's story intersects with many different moments and movements throughout his long and eventful life, and as Playdon deftly illustrates (backed up by years of intensive research), the roots of the UK's current abysmal plague of transphobia do not run nearly as deep as its hateful proponents would like us to think. Her thrilling, warm-hearted excavation of Ewan's life and legal battles unravels a fascinating tale that challenges modern ideas around gender, healthcare, human rights, the British legal system, and even the aristocracy. Read it.
I loved Elaine Castillo’s novel, America Is Not the Heart, but I wasn’t sure what to expect from her first nonfiction release. Ostensibly a critique of reading and how we, as readers, can do it better, it sounded esoteric. But Castillo makes a strong argument that reading isn’t just for books, but also the reading of the world: the broader consideration of other people, and ourselves in relation, using topics like Joan Didion, Watchmen, and the films of Wong Kar-Wai as a lens. Her essays are so honest, funny, and sharp in their criticism that after just a few of them, I felt like some of the stuck gears in my thinking had come loose and I felt immediately motivated to write.
This contemporary young adult novel is aMamma Mia remix of the finest degree—and it knows it. The book's main character, an eager Manhattan theater kid, makes frequent reference to the musical, but somehow the novel is never bogged down by its origins. It's a fun read, gripping and gratifying. I found myself looking forward to the end of my workday so I could keep going and find out what happens in both the novel's winning romance and in its mystery. And here's a non-spoiler: That end is as gratifying as you'd hope.
—A.B.
[post_title] => What a Bunch of Interesting Humans Are Reading This Summer/Fall Purgatory
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[post_content] => No one is forbidding anyone from using the term 'woman' or 'mother.'
On October 15 Rosie DiManno, a Canadian journalist, wrote a contentious column for the Toronto Star, in which she claimed that women were being “erased” because British health care providers were introducing gender-inclusive language to accommodate nonbinary people and transgender men. The practice of referring to a menstruating or pregnant person instead of a menstruating or pregnant woman was, DiManno asserted, tantamount to “blotting women out” and bore a “whiff of misogyny.” DiManno’s grievance mongering, with her anger directed at transgender people, follows a pattern we have come to expect from TERFs—the acronym stands for “trans exclusionary radical feminist”—and their enablers. Almost invariably, they invoke problems that do not exist as a means of preempting the expansion of rights and reasonable accommodations for trans people.
Whether the imaginary problem du jour is “men in dresses” invading public bathrooms or, as in DiManno’s op-ed, the supposed erasure of language that captures quintessentially female experiences, this tactic embodies reactionary politics of grievance and scapegoating. The subtext is that transgender women are “really” men, transgender men are “really” women, and nonbinary people don’t exist. DiManno’s views are widely known to Canadian newspaper readers, and rarely elicit a response, but this particular column received international attention because Margaret Atwood promoted it approvingly on Twitter. This is indeed disappointing. Even more disappointing is that Atwood refused to listen to those who alerted her to the trans-antagonistic nature of DiManno’s commentary. Instead, she doubled down.
Before exploring these developments and the key issue of inclusive language in more detail, let me get a couple of things out of the way. First, no one is forbidding anyone from using the term “woman” or “mother.” Secondly, I’m not here to “cancel” an 81-year-old literary icon, even if I had the power to do so. I taught The Handmaid’s Tale in 2018 for an arts and humanities theme course on apocalypse and dystopia in the University of South Florida’s Honors College; and, while I am not planning a return to the classroom, I would teach that book again. Atwood’s novel is an immensely important exploration of what can happen when religious extremism runs amok, with the harm disproportionately falling on women and queer people (“gender traitors” in the terminology of Gilead), and for that reason it is painfully relevant in our time.
As a trans woman, I have no trouble discussing access to abortion care as a woman’s issue, although it doesn’t fit exclusively under that rubric because it also affects trans men and some nonbinary individuals, which makes it also an LGBTQ issue. Nor is access to abortion an issue that affects all women. Cisgender women who are unable to conceive, have had hysterectomies, have gone through menopause, or who have certain intersex conditions, are not personally affected by abortion access issues, but no one would get defensive about applying the word “woman” to people in most of those categories.
I would like to pause here to point out that I unabashedly typed “woman” or “women” five times in the above paragraph, because in each case that was the most fitting term. In addition, in my recent commentary on Brittney Poolaw’s horrific manslaughter conviction in Oklahoma for suffering a miscarriage, I used the word “women” 10 times; by contrast, I used the inclusive phrase “anyone who can get pregnant” just once.
To the second point above— i.e., the issue of “cancel culture”— it should go without saying that criticizing the views of a public figure is not censorship. A highly visible public figure should expect that the expression of their opinion on political concerns will elicit a variety of responses and should be prepared for criticism. Even if one is not a public figure, the right to free speech is not the same as an exemption from consequences for expressing hateful or bigoted views.
In addition to the degree of offense, power dynamics should be taken into consideration. This should be axiomatic for feminists. And yet, when it comes to these issues and “cancel culture,” anti-trans self-described feminists are suddenly unable to understand that women (see what I did there?) like Atwood, gazillionaire Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, and DiManno are not vulnerable people who have to worry about financial insecurity or access to healthcare. They all have white and cis privilege, and they have far more power than the average woman. Trans people, by contrast, are disproportionately poor, highly vulnerable to “cancellation” via scapegoating, likely to face barriers to healthcare access, and, especially in the case of Black trans women, disproportionately subjected to violence up to and including murder.
There is one issue DiManno raised on which I agree with her and, by extension, Atwood: the anatomy of the female reproductive system has historically been erased due to patriarchy and puritanism. Encouraging girls and, indeed, all of us to have a better understanding of the vulva, the clitoris, the cervix, the uterus, and so forth is something our society needs. Jennifer Gunter’s 2019 bestseller The Vagina Bible was a much needed intervention, and I am very glad it exists. At the same time, there is something very odd about women who identify with feminism, a movement that has sought to decouple a woman’s value from reproduction and childrearing, to suddenly wish to define women precisely in those terms so long as it means not having to accommodate “those people.”
Regarding inclusive language, I disagree with DiManno and Atwood’s claim that using it as a means of accommodating some people who can get pregnant undermines the goal of increasing literacy about female anatomy and reproduction. DiManno completely misrepresented the facts to make her case, by referring to an article in The Lancet about UK hospitals using gender-neutral language to accommodate transgender men and nonbinary people. As Stacy Lee Kong points out, rather than prescribe that language across the board, “What did happen is Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust announced in February that it would be adding new trans-friendly terms including ‘birthing people’ and ‘chestfeeding’ to its existing vocabulary as a way to become more inclusive. The hospital was careful to note that it would only be using gender-neutral language in its internal communications and meetings, and that staff would use patients’ correct pronouns while caring for them.”
Intentionally or not, there is a great deal of dishonesty among the handwringing “why can’t we say woman anymore” crowd. That Atwood would throw in her lot with them is more disappointing than surprising to those who have been paying attention, since, as Kong also highlighted in her commentary on the current dustup, Atwood has previously reveled in being a self-described “bad feminist.”
The evolution of language, which is often pushed along by activists and advocates for marginalized communities, is understandably something that can make people uncomfortable. And indeed, activists sometimes go to excesses, though trans rights activists have so little power that the issue is mostly a red herring. Meanwhile, discomfort is sometimes necessary in order to learn and grow. And there is simply no excuse for distorting, exaggerating, and lying about what is really happening when healthcare systems, which often discriminate against trans people, begin to move toward understanding and accommodation. That thoroughly reactionary response is antithetical to the spirit of feminism as I understand it. Atwood seems uninterested in addressing her critics in a serious way, but if she should happen to read this column, I would ask her to look at the actual facts rather than the distorted version found in DiManno’s column, to sit for a while with her discomfort, and to consider leaving the politics of fear, scapegoating, and scarcity to the reactionary Right.
[post_title] => Margaret Atwood's opposition to gender-inclusive language is disappointing, but not surprising
[post_excerpt] => Self described feminists who oppose the expansion of rights and reasonable accommodations for trans people are ddisregarding the facts in favor of a position predicated on fears and biases.
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[post_content] => But can radical inclusion be accomplished without silencing white feminist allies?
I was a first-year student at a prestigious U.S. women's college, back in 1989, when the college's alumnae association invited me to speak at a large event about my experience in coming to America. It wasn't very long into my first semester, and I'd just arrived from Karachi. I was 17 years old.
Karachi had been wracked by ethnic violence for more than a year, with student groups clashing all across the city and the entire province of Sindh. That was a very frightening time, with the media reporting daily death tolls and the military enforcing 24-hour curfews. It is still fresh in my mind.
There were two other speakers at the event, both women: one was a youth organizer and peace activist in her troubled Black urban community; the other had survived a slave camp in Southeast Asia and had been subsequently adopted by an American family. The audience, however, was composed almost exclusively of white American women, many of them rich, older, well-traveled, and educated. Yet for all their worldliness, they seemed unaware that they had propped us up on a stage as though we were exhibits on display.
The three of us stood and told our stories in turn, while the women in the audience looked sad and sympathetic. I don't remember much of what I said: I do remember being in tears as I said I wanted to study and to live in peace, but that my city didn't provide much opportunity for that. Afterward, we joined the audience for dinner. We three speakers were overwhelmed by all the attention from the alums, who came up to us to tell us how "brave" we were. But while I stayed in touch with the other speakers, never again did I hear from any of the alums or from the association.
That I had been asked to perform my story of misery and woe for an audience of white women was a realization that came only years later. Those women meant well and obviously cared about our stories, but they used my life and the lives of my fellow speakers to make themselves feel better about their comfortable American existence. Not only were they more fortunate than a girl from troubled Pakistan, a former child slave from war-torn Southeast Asia, or a Black girl from a rough urban neighborhood, but they were also providing them with a platform to amplify their stories.
Rafia Zakaria's Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption reminded me of this uncomfortable experience, now more than 30 years old. Indeed, the author describes an experience that felt remarkably familiar to the one I describe above: in her case, Zakaria believed she had been invited to a 2012 feminist event in the American Midwest as a speaker—only to be told, upon her arrival, to sit at a stall in a “global bazaar” and sell Pakistani trinkets.
It was a cathartic read, which helped me place my experience at the alumnae association against a backdrop of a white feminist agenda that is oftentimes self-serving, and which leaves behind women of other ethnicities, countries, experiences, faiths, and societies. Beyond just leaving us behind, this type of feminist activism uses us in order to leave us behind: by demonstrating the inferiority of our lives, white feminists continue to play the role of “expert” in the gender development establishment.
Zakaria deftly deconstructs the modern conundrums facing mainstream (white) feminism, with insightful examples, such as the lack of inclusivity at the 2017 Women's March; while the organizers were Black and Brown, the vast majority of attendees were white middle-class women. More broadly, she points to issues of intersectionality and how class and color affect women who struggle to make it out of poverty, but who cannot access essential tools like legal assistance. She also examines the pitfalls of addressing issues like so-called honor killings and female genital cutting/mutilation through a culturally limited white feminist lens.
In the first instance, she draws a parallel between honor killings and “crimes of passion”: while the crimes are similar, she points out, only one serves as an indictment of an entire culture and religion— i.e., Islam, eastern, “foreign.” About female genital cutting, she points out there is no attempt to understand the nuances and complexities of the issue or to distinguish between a ceremonial “nick” and an outright excision of the genitals. Zakaria does not defend honor killings or advocate for FGM. She challenges the idea that there is an innate moral superiority to Western culture, which presents itself as exclusively on the “right” side of these issues.
Zakaria, an attorney and author who lives in Indiana, intersperses these chapters with her own experiences as a young Pakistani-Muslim woman. Born in Pakistan, she consented to an arranged marriage with a Pakistani man in the U.S. when she was 17. It was an unhappy and violent union that she escaped at age 25, fleeing with her toddler to a women’s shelter. She went on to law school and a job with a Black-owned law firm, and to helping immigrant women make their way through the American justice system. With this life story she establishes herself as the opposite of a white feminist, but one who possesses, as the result of her lived experience, a deep understanding of the phenomenon.
Against White Feminism turns middle-class white feminism inside out, like a garment, so that we can view the weaknesses of the seams and the sloppiness of the stitching. It's eye-opening for anyone who identifies as a feminist but has not thought about how strongly its prevailing principles, tenets, and history are rooted in systemic racism and capitalism.
The book is probably strongest, however, in its analysis of how the U.S. justified its 2001 invasion of Afghanistan by claiming they were partly motivated to save women from Taliban oppression. American feminists threw their weight behind the war effort, and the ostensible goal of saving oppressed brown women from oppressive brown men. In doing so, they lent their voices to the American military industrial complex, which visited untold suffering upon Afghan women with bombings, drone attacks, massive displacement, and the destruction and displacement of their families.
Certainly, the situation of some Afghan women—i.e., those in urban areas—improved immeasurably after the coalition forces routed the Taliban. Over the past 20 years, a whole generation of women attended university and built careers. But with the Taliban now back in power and female journalists, teachers, artists, and activists having fled or gone into hiding, the long war seems futile. With reports in The New Yorkerand from the Brookings Institution showing that the U.S. presence made rural Afghan women’s lives a hell, white feminists are now forced to confront the limitations of their support for the 20 year Afghan project and the putative gains in women’s empowerment that it touted.
A debacle like the invasion and withdrawal from Afghanistan does not happen without important historical context. Zakaria looks at the British suffragist movement of the early twentieth century, pointing out that the women who fought for the right to vote ignored the suffering caused by their country’s colonialism and imperialism in places like India. Zakaria also examines how contemporary white feminists engaged in “development” work abroad design aid programs that ignore activists on the ground who would provide crucial cultural and sociological moorings to any program for lasting, deep-rooted change.
The result of this failure to include local activists: campaigns and interventions that are myopic and deeply racist, like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation program that gave sewing machines and chickens to poor women in the Global South. These programs endow women with the white feminist’s fantasy of what a simple livelihood in undeveloped countries looks like, instead of envisioning creative solutions that enable women to access complicated and complex power, as well as agency and respect in their communities.
For the most part Zakaria makes her arguments lucidly; at other times, however, they are a stretch. For example, she dismisses Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom's attempt to introduce feminist foreign policy as empty promises from a disingenuous white feminist. The truth is more nuanced than that: Wallstrom tried very hard to stop Sweden from selling arms to Saudi Arabia because of its poor record on women’s rights, but her government, influenced by powerful arms traders in the Swedish military-industrial complex, overrode her efforts. Zakaria glosses over these facts, perhaps trying too hard to find case studies that conform to her arguments.
In another section of the book, Zakaria refers to a letter signed by Susan Sarandon and Meryl Streep in favor of the invasion of Afghanistan back in 2002. However, the source for this claim is a 2015 article that Zakaria wrote for Aeon, in which she made the same claim. The original article on the Aeon website does not have a source, and there is no trace of the open letter anywhere on the internet. This, I suspect, is a consequence of sloppiness rather than malice, but it does not serve the book well in its call for a higher kind of feminist ethics.
Perhaps the most glaring shortcoming, however, is Zakaria’s failure to offer a proper definition of the term “white feminism” until close to the end of the book; she should have laid it out at the beginning, since her entire argument is a response to white feminism. Zakaria describes it as a system that excludes the needs, voices, and expertise of brown and Black women, "a set of practices and ideas that have emerged from the bedrock of white supremacy, itself the legacy of empire and slavery." But there is a danger in using “white feminism” as a shorthand for the entire system Zakaria is calling out. Pitting brown and Black feminists, a minority in America (the book is written very much for an American audience, which is an unavoidable shortcoming), against the "white" feminist majority is momentarily empowering, but, in the long term, dispiriting and exhausting. It can leave everyone feeling like there's no point in trying to come together because the gap created by past divisions is too vast to bridge.
Zakaria’s indignant refusal to make excuses for white feminists is satisfying, but it leaves very little room for allies among white women. It also leaves little room for brown and Black women who want to work in solidarity with white women, or for those who want to access the networks and power structures that white feminists have benefited from for decades. Instead, Zakaria advocates a further splintering of the feminist movement into "Black feminisms, Muslim feminisms, queer feminisms." Will this breakdown into feminist specializations lead to a more effective global feminism— one that accomplishes the goals of women’s equality? Zakaria does not say.
It's important to point out the injustices and weaknesses of the dominant feminist movement vis-a-vis women of color. It’s certainly not the job of non-white women to provide the roadmap to reconciliation, and there is nothing in Against White Feminism to make white feminists feel more comfortable—rightly so. But the balkanization of feminism is hardly a movement from which women of the world, brown and Black, can achieve true gains. Power-sharing between all women, white, brown, and Black, under the current system, seems impossible if we are to take Zakaria’s perspective to heart. Surely we can envision a system where no woman has to step down in order for everyone to step up, together.
[post_title] => Rafia Zakaria's 'Against White Feminism' is a cathartic read for a non-white feminist
[post_excerpt] => 'Against White Feminism,' by Rafia Zakaria, successfully challenges the idea that western culture holds an innately superior attitude to women.
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[post_content] => To break down the structures of racism and oppression, start with an act of radical solidarity: listening.
A memorial gathering for David Graeber, the activist-anarchist and anthropologist who died unexpectedly in September, was held on October 11 in Berlin. The invitation described it as part of an intergalactic memorial carnival. In memory of Graeber’s activism, the masked attendees shouted “off with their heads!” while gleefully popping balloon heads of Trump, Erdoğan and Bolsonaro, who represented “kings to topple”.
They also chanted against patriarchy, imperialism and racism in the direction of the nearby Humboldt Forum, a controversial project to repurpose the former Prussian Berlin Palace as a museum for ethnographical collections from Africa, Asia and the Americas. Opponents of the project say it perpetuates Germany’s legacy of colonialism with a collection of stolen objects housed in a building that symbolizes European imperialism.
In Potential Histories: Unlearning Imperialism, Ariella Azoulay, an artist, critical theorist and Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Comparative Literature at Brown University, describes the institutionalization of these “kings”, or the manifestations of political, social and economic control through physical violence and cultural erasure, as part of an interconnected system of imperial oppression stretching back to 1492. She proposes the urgent, imaginative task of unlearning these structures.
In many ways, this aim to rethink imperial societal structures is present in the global wave of demonstrations inspired by the Black Lives Matter protests that started in the United States last spring, sparked by the May 25 killing of George Floyd, a Black American, by a white Minneapolis police officer. Black Lives Matter protests have been ongoing since the 2013 founding of the group after the killing of Trayvon Martin. The recent protests, which also build on the decolonial and antiracist efforts against institutions and monuments by groups such as Decolonize This Place, Museum Detox and the Monument Removal Brigade, have triggered a renewed debate on the imperial legacies of Western Europe and the United States, especially the perpetuation of these histories via the institutionalization of material culture.
In June, the King of Belgium responded to a mass Black Lives Matter protest in Brussels by apologizing for his country’s brutal colonial history in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Activists emphasized that this apology was informal, lacked concrete political action and came sixty years too late. In the United States, Black Lives Matter protesters in Washington, D.C. toppled a statue of Confederate general Albert Pike after Juneteenth rallies. In September, Congolese activist Mwazulu Diyabanza staged a widely-reported protest with his attempt to take back a nineteenth century African funeral pole that was on exhibition at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris. In October, London police arrested eighteen-year-old Benjamin Clark for tagging a statue of Winston Churchill with “racist”.
Diyabanza, the Congolese activist, is part of the pan-African Les Marrons Unis Dignes et Courageux, which has enacted similar actions in the Netherlands and southern France. For the Quai Branly intervention in June, he worked with other activists to live-stream the event; in the video he calls for the French government to stop collecting stolen colonial objects. But the judge who presided over his case stated that it should focus only on the specific funerary pole and not the broader context of ongoing colonial reparation efforts. Diyabanza argued that the museum action should not be considered a crime because, “We get our legitimacy from the perpetual idea of trying to recover our heritage and giving our people access to it.”
In Potential Histories Azoulay stresses this idea of legitimacy in which stolen material culture is often used to prop up state, colonial and imperial actors as a basic premise that underlines the (fraudulent) idea of History. While she draws on her scholarship and activism in Israel and Palestine and research on slavery in the United States, Azoulay’s aims to illustrate the international embeddedness of such imperial and colonial structures.
Azoulay’s ongoing critical photographic theory research plays an important role in unpacking this History. She suggests that the “shutter” of photography, which dates back to the late nineteenth century, was a technology that aided imperial conquest. The shutter “acts like a verdict” in that it initiates a linear before and after and results in a document narrating a specific historical vision—i.e., the vision of the (colonial) photographer and the ruling institution that he represents. She describes the use of photography as a means of recording the attempted erasure of native cultures, which were and are territorially separated and ruled. The photograph is a format in which these results were used to create linear historical knowledge, such as how the creation of new borders renders some “undocumented” or “illegal aliens” and some “citizens.” This is upheld by institutions ranging from museums, universities and archives to contemporary formations of nation-based sovereignty and governance.
[caption id="attachment_2232" align="alignnone" width="1920"] From Ariella Aïsha Azoulay's exhibition "Errata" at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona.[/caption]
Azoulay posits that the use of this violent photographic shutter stretches back to 1492, a moment of imperial Spanish colonization of the Americas, the start of the international global slave trade to make this possible and the obliteration of Judeo-Muslim culture through Inquisition decrees. This history also includes the devastation of the Caribbean’s indigenous Taíno people’s politics and culture in 1514; the ruination of the nonfeudal cocitizenship system of the Igabo people in West Africa; the 1872 Crémiuex decree that gave French citizenship to Jewish Algerians but withheld it from Muslims, a divide-and-conquer strategy with ramifications that are felt to this day; and the ongoing ravaging of Palestinian politics and culture since the early 1900s. In this connected schema of colonial destruction and erasure paired with institutionalization and documentation, the concept of history is premised on the ideas of discovery and progress. Each colonial regime “discovered” new artworks and exhibited them in new museums; they documented dispossessed people with the new label of “refugees” and imposed new cultural practices and political institutions premised on the undoing of previous indigenous norms and knowledge.
Potential history is positioned as a means of addressing these historical damages by imaginatively reactivating the memories and potentialities shut off by the imperialist photograph and its material positioning. Azoulay describes “rehearsal methods” for how we can question and begin to undo these structures. One strategy is the act of revising imperial photos through annotation, including notes, comments and modified captions that challenge the histories they describe. When these interventions are rejected by the archives that own the legal rights to the photos, Azoulay redraws the photographs herself.
Another rehearsal method is the idea of striking, found in short chapters that imagine museum workers, photographers and historians going on strike. The idea of striking until our world is repaired means saying no to the relentless new of history. It does not aim to substitute an alternative history or fill museums with new objects, but rather to reject their logic and promote its active unlearning. Azoulay underlines these and other rehearsals as modes of practicing new forms of co-citizenry and solidarity based on critical looking. “Unlearning imperialism,” she writes, “means aspiring to be there for and with others targeted by imperial violence, in such a way that nothing about the operation of the shutter can ever again appear neutral.”
“Being there” is a moment of radical solidarity in which one aspires to listen to those affected by such violence and question the flow of history that imperial institutions strive to promote as casual and natural. This includes recognizing the role of looted objects and their role in building imperial ideas, but also reclaiming them as means to enact other modes of being, such as thinking of them not as protected “art” but as part of people’s real material worlds.
Azoulay also listens to new melodies that arise from such sites of imperial documentation. She recounts the story of her own Algerian father moving to Israel as a child and trying to forget his native Arabic—because in Israel, the European elite actively condemned its use and promoted Hebrew. She first learned that her grandmother’s name was the Arabic Aïsha, the name of the Prophet Mohamed’s third wife, when she saw her father’s birth certificate after he died. Plucked from this imperial document, the name was a “treasure” in her Hebrew-speaking, Jewish-Israeli family; she sought to use it as a site of imagination by adopting it as her own—in addition to her Hebrew name, Ariella. Azoulay speaks of Aïsha as a haunting scream: Aïsha, Aïsha, Aïeeeeeeee-shaaaaaaaa.
Azoulay further demonstrates photographs and documents as dual sites of violence and resistance with images taken by the Civil War photographer Timothy O’Sullivan in 1862. One of his iconic images shows eight Black people standing stiffly near a large house persistently labeled as the “J.J. Smith Plantation.” These words make it clear that the people in the photograph are racialized property. She describes how this violence is repeated in historical archives, in which photographs of Black people taken before and after the Civil War are interchangeably captioned as depicting slaves; she proposes the imagining of a “dismissed exposure,” or ghostly negative of a forgotten image reinserted into the frame. The original image becomes blurred and surreal as it competes with sculptures from the MoMA floating in the background. Since there are no images on display in U.S. museums of Black Americans reunited with objects stolen from them, the dismissed exposure serves as an imaginative placeholder in the photographic archive. It waits for different worlds and meanings.
Potential history dwells in such creative exercises. It resists simplistic ideas of financial restitution for destroyed cultures or the mere substitution of one history for another. Instead, it advocates persistent unlearning of how the world is taught, represented and constructed; solidarity in resisting these demands; listening to those affected; and, above all, imagining. Azoulay’s book is a long (over 670 pages) and challenging read. It brings up the question of who has the resources to read it; while its ideas are currently being filtered through museum exhibitions such as the traveling , the question remains as to how this work can reach a wider and more diverse audience. If you do manage to find a copy, perhaps try following one of the more whimsical moments of the book: dip in as you please, conceiving of no beginning or end, but rather of moments that shine in “a bright, brief and sudden light” against the “dazzling” beam of imperialism.
After all of the “kings” had been “beheaded” at the intergalactic memorial carnival in Berlin, we passed around a hat, on which was written things we wanted to cherish and save. “It’s more about the spirit of hope than destruction,” laughed a person in a wooden demon mask.
[post_title] => 'Potential Histories: Unlearning Imperialism': a review of Ariella Azoulay's new book
[post_excerpt] => How the "shutter" of photography aided imperial conquest.
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[post_content] => A secret language, Láadan, allows women to express feelings and experiences for which English, with its male-centric deficiency of words, phrases and grammar, does not possess.
In May of 2017, while many were still reeling from shock at the spectacle of Donald Trump as president of the United States, the New York Review of Books published an article by Masha Gessen called “The Autocrat’s Language.” Gessen, a non-binary person who uses gender-neutral pronouns, was rapidly taking their place as a Trump explainer, drawing upon years of covering the Putin presidency in their native Russia to position themself as an expert in contemporary authoritarianism. In their piece for the NYRB, Gessen explained that because autocrats distorted the meaning of words by using them to lie, journalists were forced to use an impoverished vocabulary in order to report the truth. Suzette Haden Elgin, a linguist and novelist, uses a variation on this scenario to inform her 1984 science fiction novel, Native Tongue; it is set in a patriarchal future United States of 2205, a place where the nineteenth amendment was repealed in 1991, stripping women of their rights. To combat male dominance, a group of female linguists invent a language of their own. Today the question posed by Native Tongue seems especially relevant to Gessen’s warning about language manipulation: is it possible to restructure language to re-alter our reality?
A particularly prescient science fiction book can offer an eerie prediction of current events years before they happen. Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel A Handmaid’s Tale describes a dystopia in which women’s civil rights had been rescinded; they could not vote or control their own procreation. Adapted for television in 2018, the steep erosion of rights didn’t seem so far-fetched in the Trump era. The dramatic series reflected the emerging reality that resulted from what Gessen describes as Trump’s ability to invert phrases and words dealing with power relationships into their exact opposite, thus doing “violence to language.”
This violence was strongly exemplified in Trump's July 3rd speech, given in the context of the recent protests demanding that Black lives matter as well as the Covid-19 crisis. In an attempt to discredit those calling for change, Trump spoke of a “new far-left fascism.” He argued that, “If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted and punished.” In twisting these words to speak of discrimination against those in power rather than those who are oppressed, terms such as “fascism,” “censor,” “banish,” “blacklist,” “persecution” and “punishment” are stripped of their original meaning and begin to become hollow.
Native Tongue, the first of a three-book series, envisions repairing this damage to language. In Elgin imagined United States of 2205, women effectively belong to men. They are not allowed to own their own property, or to work outside the home without permission from a male relative. Because interplanetary exchange and colonization are crucial for the United States, linguists play a central role in society as interpreters for extra-terrestrial negotiations. Due to the strong demand for translation, linguistic “lines,” or dynasties, have evolved; each child of the lines is trained in at least one alien language and in multiple human languages. Native Tongue follows a group of linguist women whose secret language, Láadan, allows them to express feelings and experiences for which English, with its male-centric deficiency of words, phrases and grammar, does not possess.
Artificial, or constructed and imaginary, languages (conlang) are spoken in popular television series like Star Trek (Klingon) and Game of Thrones (Dothraki and Valyrian). They are also seen in a wide array of speculative fiction by authors like Francis Godwin and Thomas More. Artificial languages have been used in fiction to explore imaginary voyages and worlds, but in a 2007 interview Hadan Elgin described Láadan as a “thought experiment” with directives for women’s change within society. Elgin, who had a PhD in linguistics, was a writer and poet best known for a series called The Gentle Art of Verbal Defense. She also subscribed to the controversial Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which she described in her book Language Imperative as the idea that languages “structure and constrain human perceptions of reality in significant and interesting ways”.
Accordingly, speakers of different languages see the world in very divergent ways: how one perceives the world is based both on linguistic structures in chosen words and their corresponding broader metaphors. For example, binaries such as male/female are often paired with other associations, such as strong/weak or active/passive. Elgin believed that English is dominated by male perception; that its lack of a vocabulary for women to discuss their feelings and experiences directly structures societal inequality. She argued that this configuration is upheld by societal metaphors, such as “women are objects,” reflected in cultural production ranging from fashion magazines to sitcoms. These structures, she posited, must be directly challenged by language itself. “By the technology of language– we insert new metaphors into our culture to replace the old ones, just as we have done in turning ‘war’ into ‘defense’. You don't use guns, or laws, to insert new metaphors into a culture. The only tool available for metaphor-insertion is LANGUAGE.”
Native Tongue provides a fictional blueprint for how these metaphors can change lived reality. While it takes several lifetimes and one more book in the Native Tongue trilogy, the linguist women eventually finish Láadan; they spread it secretly among themselves and then to some of the wider female population. Once enough linguist women have learned Láadan, the male linguists notice a startling change: their spouses, daughters and relatives have stopped complaining. Frustrated by the lack of nagging, which they realize had spurred them to respond, react and experience a sort of catharsis, the men eventually build separate houses for the linguist women. Left to their own devices, the women are freer to live, interact and express themselves, thus reveling in the real change produced by Láadan.
Láadan attempts to enable this freer expression through modifications to both the structure and intent of the language. Much of Native Tongue is occupied with “encodings”, new words for previously unexpressed experiences. The book includes part of a Láadan dictionary, available entirely online, which contains many words that feel very contemporary:
ralorolo: non-thunder, much talk and commotion from one (or more) with no real knowledge of what they’re talking about or trying to do, something like “hot air” but more so
rashida: non-game, a cruel “playing” that is a game only for the dominant “players” with the power to force others to participate
rathom: non-gestalt, a collection of parts with no relationship other than coincidence, a perverse choice of items to call a set; especially when used as “evidence”
While these definitions do fit uncannily well with the present political climate, some of the concepts of Láadan and Native Tongue feel outdated. The stark divisions between gender, for example, fit more with 1980s second-wave feminism in which gender essentialism was a big discussion. There’s also the glaring idea that all women are dominated by all men, which fails to take into account configurations of race, class, ability and non-binary gender identities. The questions posed by Native Tongue feel more relevant to our contemporary situation when “male domination” is replaced with “patriarchy,” which is defined as an unjust social, political and economic system harmful to all who do not hold power within it. In this line of thought, “women’s language” could be replaced with “intersectional feminist language”—i.e., a language that expresses the views of those who, for a variety of factors, experience discrimination and oppression.
Elgin wrote the Native Tongue trilogy with a ten-year timeline, aiming for Láadan to be adopted by 1994, but this never happened. While scholars such as Ruth Menzies point to the difficulty of learning a detailed new language, it is tempting to agree with Elgin, who argued that Láadan failed because women were reluctant to speak a language that forced them to parse their feelings so thoroughly. One additional detail about Láadan is that its structure makes the speaker state the emotion and intent behind everything they say. Necessary speech act morphemes, such as bíi (“I say to you, as a statement”), bóo (“I request”) and bée (“I say in warning”) are paired with suffixes, such as -li (“said in love”), -ya (“said in fear”) and -d (“said in anger”). Thus, in every sentence, the Láadan speaker must clarify their position with words such as:
bíili: “in love, I say as a statement…” (bíi + li)
bóoya: “in fear, I request…” (bóo + ya)
béed: “in anger, I say in warning…” (bée + d)
The type of emotional involvement in constantly analyzing one’s position, intention and feelings seems completely at odds with how English is spoken by those given the most attention, time and money to speak it. Imagine a society in which every politician, but also every citizen, must state their feelings of love, fear or paranoia in every sentence and choose from numerous words for comfort, community and wrongdoing.
In her epigraph to chapter thirteen of Native Tongue, Elgin writes that, “For any language, there are perceptions which it cannot express because they would result in its indirect self-destruction.” Perhaps, as Gessen has warned, this implosion is in the not too distant future, in which the damage done by this era of American politics will leave us with few words that still hold meaning. Native Tongue provides a glimpse of how linguistic repair could be not just a tool to alter reality, but to mold it anew.
[post_title] => In her 1984 science fiction novel 'Native Tongue,' linguist Suzette Haden Elgin created a feminist language from scratch
[post_excerpt] => A particularly prescient science fiction book can offer an eerie prediction of current events years before they happen.
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[post_content] => A few months into his year of reading female authors, he developed a feminist spidey sense.
Inspired by television producer Shonda Rhimes’s manifesto Year of Yes, a friend spent 2017 saying ‘yes’ to every challenge thrown her way. In the same spirit, I decided that 2018 would be my year of reading women. My friend starred in a local production of the Wizard of Oz, and became pregnant with her first child. The shifts in my life were less dramatic, but notable nonetheless
I was proud to call myself a feminist, but had started to realize that my tastes did not reflect my politics. I believed in equal pay, in sharing domestic responsibilities, in righting historical wrongs; but when I got home after a day at the office, I would put on a Kamasi Washington record, pour myself a glass of Eben Sadie wine, and read the new Murakami. If I looked up, I would see an apartment decorated with art by men, with the exception of a lone Louise Bourgeois multiple. I needed a re-education.
A mild panic set in after I made the decision, in December 2017, to spend the coming year reading books by women. It was similar to the one I felt a year later, when I decided to give up alcohol for lent. But I quickly rationalized the project. There was exceedingly more worthwhile literature in the world than I could ever read. By limiting myself to women, I argued to myself, I would not jeopardize the quality of my to-read list; I would just change its focus. And if, after all, it was a big disaster, I could revert to my sexist ways in 2019.
In the publishing industry, conventional wisdom holds that men do not read books by women. The evidence, however, suggests that this perception does not reflect reality, although Joanna Rowling did yield to the suggestion that she might sell more books if she styled herself as J.K.. I knew I was not unique in failing to live according to my ideals, but this knowledge was not validating. I wanted to change, and I believed I could. Research has shown we can reprogram our subconscious: decorating one’s work or living space with images of successful African Americans, for example, is shown to decrease implicit anti-black bias.
I decided that the books I would read over the following year could be in any genre, and on any topic. I would make exceptions for reading related to my work or studies, and for long-form journalism in periodicals. But that was it. Even if a favorite male author published a new title, it would have to wait until 2019.
January was a few days away, so I had to figure out how to begin. I read a New York Times list of best art books of 2017, which recommended the novel Autumn, by Ali Smith. That seemed as good a place to start as any, so I ordered a copy. It was magnificent.
Finding books was, as you might imagine, easier than I had anticipated. We can often identify gender from a name. When in doubt, the dustjacket will typically provide clarity; even if there is no author portrait, a bio will refer to ‘her city of birth,’ or ‘his fifth novel.’ I did occasionally get it wrong: Tracy Daugherty, who authored a biography of Joan Didion, is a man.
I became far more acutely aware that newspapers and magazines review fewer books by women than by men. While I could have guessed this prior to my year of reading women authors, I had never given it much thought. I was discovering the patriarchal pattern that determines what we read, and when. Perversely, this pattern actually turned my experiment into a pleasurable game — a big feminist where-is-Waldo, if you will.
Nowhere was this game more challenging than in airport bookstores. I had struggled to find books while in transit even before 2018, but now I was forced to be open to unfamiliar authors and genres. As a result, some of the highlights of my year originated in airports. I read my first fantasy novel, The Shining Girls, by Lauren Beukes. I liked it so much I followed with Zoo City. On a particularly long intercontinental flight I alternated between watching The Handmaid’s Tale on the inflight entertainment system and reading two books — Margaret Atwood’s Freedomand Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s classic Women Who Run With the Wolves. I am still astonished to have discovered the latter in the tiny bookstore of my hometown airport.
A few months into the year, I started to develop a certain vigilance, a feminist spidey sense. I imagine it is second nature to many women, but it was new to me.
During a visit to Amsterdam I visited a well-known feminist bookstore called Xantippe and asked the salesperson for a recommendation. She directed me to Grand Hotel Europa by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer. A man. Not wanting to appear to second guess the store clerk, whose age, appearance, and occupation gave her a natural authority on matters of gender and literature, I mumbled something about the book’s heft, and asked for other suggestions.
Despite shelves largely filled by women, the next two recommendations were also written by men. At this stage, I quietly suggested I had walked into this book store on purpose. It was an awkward moment. When we regained our composure, we discussed the salesperson’s experience that men don’t read women, which had prompted her suggestions. She also insisted I read Pfeijffer at some point, because it really was that good. I left with a new novel by Eva Meijer.
What my encounter at Xantippe alluded to, of course, was that there is no such thing as women’s literature. Yes, non-fiction with feminist under- or overtones had become one of my staples: I read and internalized the voices of Roxane Gay, Joan Didion, Terry Castle, Sisonke Msimang, Zadie Smith, and Maggie Nelson. They gave me a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the range of female experiences in our sexist world, in a way that only the written word can.
Yet many of my most exciting discoveries were novels. Among them were Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights, which won the 2018 Man Booker International Prize; Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s Call Me Zebra, winner of the 2019 PEN/Faulker award; and The Parisian, the stunning debut of 27-year old Isabella Hamad. Any lingering suspicion I had that women restrict themselves to certain themes or subject matter was put to rest by the depth and range of these three writers.
It turned out that my rule did even not even preclude me from reading about dead white men. One of my other airport bookstore finds was a biography of Seneca, by Emily Wilson.
While it is, in all respects, a classic biography, Wilson is more attuned to the gender dynamics in Seneca’s life than most male biographers would have been. Something similar had happened for me. The spidey sense I first noticed about halfway through my year of reading women had, towards the end of the twelve months, become a program that ran permanently in the background of my consciousness. I instinctively played where-is-Waldo, extending it to other domains, too. I started looking for women in jazz. Female wine makers. When reading the news, I was more likely to notice a byline. I searched out women in politics.
I am now well into year two. While I have recently cheated — I succumbed to the overwhelming marketing for Sapiens, and did eventually read Pfeijffer’s Grand Hotel Europa — I still read women almost exclusively. They enrich my life. They give me a broader horizon. And slowly but surely, they are chipping away at my subconscious sexism. The slight sense of dread I felt when first conceiving the experiment is now a source of embarrassment. To quote feminist icon Diane Lockhart, “I realize it’s alright that the world is crazy, as long as I make my little corner of the world sane.” One book at a time.
[post_title] => His year of reading women
[post_excerpt] => The experience of committing to a year of reading only books written by women gave him a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the range of female experiences in our sexist world.
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[post_content] => When I was 12 years old, a lonely black femme male child, I read The Bluest Eye in a single night. Every character was in me or a reflection of my life.Toni Morrison gave me a blueprint for the meaningful exploration of love and trauma. She accomplished this by centering her narratives on the lives of black femmes, people like me, whom society has traditionally devalued. As a result of this precise focus, Morrison’s body of work surpasses identity politics; it heals us from within the deep darkness of our society and elevates us to its bright but colorless peaks.I spent my early childhood in a single-parent home full of affirmation and stability. But when my mother descended very suddenly into the thick of her addiction, my life changed radically. Today, drug addicts are called victims of the opioid crisis, and there are empathetic national calls for resources to be invested in finding a therapeutic solution for them. When I was a child in the 1990s, people like my mother were called crackheads and super predators. The only solution offered to them was a well-trained beast called the prison industrial complex. Later, I would learn that the well-trained old beast was excited by a charismatic young presidential hopeful I saw playing saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show. That beast chased and found my mother: she was incarcerated when I was 12 years old, and I entered the worst period of my life.I was sent to live in a group home for teenage boys, a house full of strangers and staff supervisors that would come and go based on work shifts. It was cold and did not feel like a home at all. School was no longer the fun, curiosity-inducing place of learning that it once had been. Instead, it was a place where bullies of all genders were waiting around every corner to hurl a fist, or to yell the insults “nigger” and “faggot.” I suffered from both the fists and the insults because I was a black femme male child. Socially isolated, I floated through each day finding solace in the hope that my mother would soon be free and my life would return to normal. My English teacher became my unlikely savior. Mean as a rattlesnake, she was a stern-faced, pale white woman with piercing eyes and a manner of speech so acerbic that she terrorized even my bullies into silence, thus safeguarding me from their venom at least while I was in her class. One day she arrived in an unusually good mood, holding a cloth bag that contained copies of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. I understood that she’d had to fight for permission to teach this book, which she distributed with the admonition that it was a treat for which we should be grateful. That night I sat in my room and read this book with an enthusiasm I hadn’t felt since I devoured Gertrude Warner’s The Boxcar Children, years earlier. Every character in The Bluest Eye was within me or a reflection of my life. I didn't know the word “transgender,” but I strongly believed my life would have been much better if only I had been born a girl. So I identified with Pecola, the violence-damaged, impoverished foster girl who escapes into a fantasy world; but instead of longing for blue eyes to make me beautiful, I longed for female genitalia. I come from a color-struck family so I was my mother’s “dream high yellow child” and treated with care and protected as such. I was Maureen, the light-skinned black girl, and Claudia, who comes from a poor family. I had aunts that were Miss Marie, the overweight and kind prostitute, and a few that had upper-class aspirations like Geraldine. My step father was Cholly, the destructive man who lives on the margins of society. I finished the book and rushed back to class, flushed with enthusiasm. By the end of the semester, I had read Beloved and Song of Solomon. That experience sparked a lifelong love for Toni Morrison and the characters in her novels. I was anchored in the humanity of Pecola, of Sethe in Beloved, and of the women of the Convent in Paradise. I understood the pathology of Pecola’s request for blue eyes because I was bombarded with the same ideals of eurocentric beauty. My advantage was in being born later, by which time there was a well-established counter-narrative: James Brown had been singing “I'm Black and I'm Proud” for decades; Beverly Johnson and Naomi Campbell had appeared on the covers of glossy magazines and modeled haute couture at the Paris fashion shows; and Dorothy Dandridge had broken down barriers so that Angela Bassett could show me what’s love got to do with it. I was surrounded by beacons of light, from Grace Jones to Oprah, so I did not aspire to any attributes of whiteness. I identified with Pecola because she wanted something very badly, but as a child dealing with dysphoria without understanding the bio-psychology of transgenderism, I did not understand the pathology of my own desire. I was told was that I was delusional, mentally ill, and that I needed prayer. After finishing The Bluest Eye, I wondered if the happy ending for Pecola was being lost in the delusion that blue eyes would make her more beautiful. My 12-year-old heart was full of empathy for Pecola; I felt that, had she been given time and care before trauma ravaged her, she would have learned to appreciate her own beauty. It was this insight, gained from reading Toni Morrison’s great novel, that made me appreciate my own humanity before I had to face questions about my trans womanhood. My rock-solid belief that I was a human above all else centered me; I had no doubt that I deserved empathy and dignity while I figured out the rest of my identity.Beloved tells a story of complicated motherly love that is different from the romantic image sold by Hollywood. Sethe saves her daughter, named Beloved, by making a horrible, complicated decision for which she suffers intense emotional trauma. My mother was raised by her abusive schizophrenic grandmother with her four cousins. Although she was the color of peanut butter, she was the darkest girl. Her childhood was filled with physical and sexual abuse all rooted in religion and the color of her skin. She felt that her mother had abandoned her, which undermined her self-esteem and made her feel out of place in the world. So when I was born, a high yellow blue-eyed curly haired infant, she treated me like a baby doll. She said “I just could not believe that something so beautiful could come from me.” She showered me with praise and adoration and told me that no one would ever hurt me, that nobody would ever take her from me. She was overprotective. She was loving. She was the perfect mother. So for all of my childhood I was certain that a mother’s love could never be broken — that it was the strongest thing in the world. I was thus completely unprepared emotionally for her fall into drug addiction and jail. As a teenager who did not understand the concepts of addiction and self-medicating to sublimate emotional pain, I felt betrayed and abandoned by my mother. Morrison’s novel Beloved helped me to understand that a mother’s love can manifest in a plethora of ways when she lives in a world of violence. Sethe, the runaway slave who kills her own child rather than see her returned to bondage, does the best she can to love and protect the children she has later. She is of course deeply traumatized, which hobbles her ability to nurture her living children. By analyzing Sethe’s response to having been given a second chance at mothering, I could see my mother through a completely new lens. I didn't want to haunt my mother like the ghost of Beloved. My mother is still battling her addiction, but I can see her humanity and love her, while holding her accountable for her decisions. We are on a journey of healing.In a black trans woman’s life, community is intrinsic to survival. In 1997, when I was on the cusp of my life as an activist, I read Paradise. The novel is about a black community led by men who turn their rage on a group of ostracized women who have found refuge in a place called the Convent. Three years after reading that novel, I won a First Amendment right victory when I successfully sued my high school for the right to attend the prom in the gender-affirming attire of my choosing. I began my matriculation as the first openly trans woman who was forced to live in a male dorm at the HBCU Jackson State University in the deeply conservative town of Jackson, Mississippi. I could not have survived those ordeals without the help of community. I owe my emotional well being to the black and or femme community; to my white feminist English teacher, who gave me the phone number of the ACLU, which helped me win my case in high school; to the gray-eyed Alpha Kappa Alpha at the college admission office who waived my out-of-state fees so that I could afford to be admitted; to the tall, dark dean of students who protected me from expulsion after I got into a fight with a bully during my sophomore year of college; and to my natural hair Aunt Georgia, who filled my refrigerator with food when I had no money. I owe much to the black young femme students, male and female, who showed me love and support while I went through the perils of being first to do what I was doing. Like the women in Paradise who found refuge in the convent, I found a safe haven in the black femme community. Because of them, I knew that I would never be alone and that somebody always had my back, and that I would survive because I had a safe place to be. Toni Morrison’s characters are complex and unique. By focusing in her novels on the least among us, Ms. Morrison transcended identity barriers. Her stories help me heal and grow my relationships with myself, my family and my community. She will continue to be beacons of light for generations to come.
[post_title] => Toni Morrison's novels taught me to see the world through a lens of compassion
[post_excerpt] => The insight I gained from reading Toni Morrison's novels made me appreciate my own humanity before I had to face questions about my trans womanhood.
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From Ariella Aïsha Azoulay's exhibition "Errata" at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona.[/caption]
Azoulay posits that the use of this violent photographic shutter stretches back to 1492, a moment of imperial Spanish colonization of the Americas, the start of the international global slave trade to make this possible and the obliteration of Judeo-Muslim culture through Inquisition decrees. This history also includes the devastation of the Caribbean’s indigenous Taíno people’s politics and culture in 1514; the ruination of the nonfeudal cocitizenship system of the Igabo people in West Africa; the 1872 Crémiuex decree that gave French citizenship to Jewish Algerians but withheld it from Muslims, a divide-and-conquer strategy with ramifications that are felt to this day; and the ongoing ravaging of Palestinian politics and culture since the early 1900s. In this connected schema of colonial destruction and erasure paired with institutionalization and documentation, the concept of history is premised on the ideas of discovery and progress. Each colonial regime “discovered” new artworks and exhibited them in new museums; they documented dispossessed people with the new label of “refugees” and imposed new cultural practices and political institutions premised on the undoing of previous indigenous norms and knowledge.
Potential history is positioned as a means of addressing these historical damages by imaginatively reactivating the memories and potentialities shut off by the imperialist photograph and its material positioning. Azoulay describes “rehearsal methods” for how we can question and begin to undo these structures. One strategy is the act of revising imperial photos through annotation, including notes, comments and modified captions that challenge the histories they describe. When these interventions are rejected by the archives that own the legal rights to the photos, Azoulay redraws the photographs herself.
Another rehearsal method is the idea of striking, found in short chapters that imagine museum workers, photographers and historians going on strike. The idea of striking until our world is repaired means saying no to the relentless new of history. It does not aim to substitute an alternative history or fill museums with new objects, but rather to reject their logic and promote its active unlearning. Azoulay underlines these and other rehearsals as modes of practicing new forms of co-citizenry and solidarity based on critical looking. “Unlearning imperialism,” she writes, “means aspiring to be there for and with others targeted by imperial violence, in such a way that nothing about the operation of the shutter can ever again appear neutral.”
“Being there” is a moment of radical solidarity in which one aspires to listen to those affected by such violence and question the flow of history that imperial institutions strive to promote as casual and natural. This includes recognizing the role of looted objects and their role in building imperial ideas, but also reclaiming them as means to enact other modes of being, such as thinking of them not as protected “art” but as part of people’s real material worlds.
Azoulay also listens to new melodies that arise from such sites of imperial documentation. She recounts the story of her own Algerian father moving to Israel as a child and trying to forget his native Arabic—because in Israel, the European elite actively condemned its use and promoted Hebrew. She first learned that her grandmother’s name was the Arabic Aïsha, the name of the Prophet Mohamed’s third wife, when she saw her father’s birth certificate after he died. Plucked from this imperial document, the name was a “treasure” in her Hebrew-speaking, Jewish-Israeli family; she sought to use it as a site of imagination by adopting it as her own—in addition to her Hebrew name, Ariella. Azoulay speaks of Aïsha as a haunting scream: Aïsha, Aïsha, Aïeeeeeeee-shaaaaaaaa.
Azoulay further demonstrates photographs and documents as dual sites of violence and resistance with images taken by the Civil War photographer Timothy O’Sullivan in 1862. One of his iconic images shows eight Black people standing stiffly near a large house persistently labeled as the “J.J. Smith Plantation.” These words make it clear that the people in the photograph are racialized property. She describes how this violence is repeated in historical archives, in which photographs of Black people taken before and after the Civil War are interchangeably captioned as depicting slaves; she proposes the imagining of a “dismissed exposure,” or ghostly negative of a forgotten image reinserted into the frame. The original image becomes blurred and surreal as it competes with sculptures from the MoMA floating in the background. Since there are no images on display in U.S. museums of Black Americans reunited with objects stolen from them, the dismissed exposure serves as an imaginative placeholder in the photographic archive. It waits for different worlds and meanings.
Potential history dwells in such creative exercises. It resists simplistic ideas of financial restitution for destroyed cultures or the mere substitution of one history for another. Instead, it advocates persistent unlearning of how the world is taught, represented and constructed; solidarity in resisting these demands; listening to those affected; and, above all, imagining. Azoulay’s book is a long (over 670 pages) and challenging read. It brings up the question of who has the resources to read it; while its ideas are currently being filtered through museum exhibitions such as the traveling , the question remains as to how this work can reach a wider and more diverse audience. If you do manage to find a copy, perhaps try following one of the more whimsical moments of the book: dip in as you please, conceiving of no beginning or end, but rather of moments that shine in “a bright, brief and sudden light” against the “dazzling” beam of imperialism.
After all of the “kings” had been “beheaded” at the intergalactic memorial carnival in Berlin, we passed around a hat, on which was written things we wanted to cherish and save. “It’s more about the spirit of hope than destruction,” laughed a person in a wooden demon mask.
[post_title] => 'Potential Histories: Unlearning Imperialism': a review of Ariella Azoulay's new book
[post_excerpt] => How the "shutter" of photography aided imperial conquest.
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