Contemporary Revolutions: Turning Back to the Future in 21st-Century Literature and Art 1350045306, 9781350045309

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Contemporary Revolutions

Also published by Bloomsbury: American Literature as World Literature, edited by Jeffrey R. Di Leo Ancient Greek Myth in World Fiction Since 1989, edited by Justine McConnell and Edith Hall Literature and the Experience of Globalization, Svend Erik Larsen The Return of the Storyteller in Contemporary Fiction, Areti Dragas

Contemporary Revolutions Turning Back to the Future in 21st-Century Literature and Art Edited by Susan Stanford Friedman

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Copyright © Susan Stanford Friedman and Contributors, 2019 Susan Stanford Friedman and Contributors have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. Cover design by Eleanor Rose Cover image: ‘Black Out Poem 33‘ by Selina Tusitala Marsh, from Blacking Out Pouliuli, unpublished, book-length found poem, with the source text Pouliuli (1977), by Albert Wendt All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Friedman, Susan Stanford, editor. Title: Contemporary revolutions: turning back to the future in 21st-century literature and art / edited by Susan Stanford Friedman. Other titles: Back to the future in 21st-century literature and art Description: London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic / Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2018. | Contributions to a panel on “Revolving Modernisms, Recycling Revolutions” held at the 2015 Modernist Studies Association Conference in Boston. The conference’s unifying theme was Revolution, a gesture toward the city as a birthplace of the American Revolution. The panel grew out of the recognition of contradictory meanings hidden in the etymology of the word revolution. Revolution originally meant a turning back, a rotation back to move forward, as in the cycle of the planets; later, revolution came to mean radical overthrow, rupture, change, particularly of political systems and the social order. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018008899 (print) | LCCN 2018018668 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350045309 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781350045316 (ePub) | ISBN 9781350045293 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350045316 (eBook) Subjects: LCSH: Literature, Modern–21st century–History and criticism–Congresses. | Literature, Modern–21st century–Themes, motives–Congresses. | Art, Modern–21st century–History and criticism–Congresses. | Arts, Modern–21st century–Themes, motives–Congresses. | Literature and revolutions–Congresses. | Arts and revolutions–Congresses. Classification: LCC PN780.5 (ebook) | LCC PN780.5 .C66 2018 (print) | DDC 808–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018008899 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-4529-3 ePDF: 978-1-3500-4530-9 eBook: 978-1-3500-4531-6 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Figures Notes on Contributors

vii viii

Part One  Beginnings

Introduction: The Past in the Present: Temporalities of the Contemporary  Susan Stanford Friedman 3

1

Recycling Revolution: Re-mixing A Room of One’s Own and Black Power in Kabe Wilson’s Performance, Installation, and Narrative Art  Susan Stanford Friedman 21

Part Two  Recycles: Aesthetics of Unsewing and Blacking Out 2

Stitch Works: Ellen Bell’s Unpicking Aesthetics and Victorian Women’s Creative Labor  Susan David Bernstein 51

3

Making It Niu: Blacking Out Albert Wendt’s Pouliuli the Tusitala Way  Selina Tusitala Marsh 71

Part Three  Revolutions: Arts of Resistance 4

Curating the Syrian Revolution Online  miriam cooke 103

5

A Thousand Times No!: Spray Painting as Resistance and the Visual History of the Lam-Alif  Bahia Shehab 123

Part Four  Restages: Palimpsests of the Past 6

The Folds of History in William Kentridge’s Black Box Theatre: Sampling German Nazism and Colonialism  Rosemarie Buikema 143

7

The Revolutions of Antjie Krog’s Lady Anne: A Chronicle in Verse  Rita Barnard 164

vi Contents

Part Five  Rereads: Then, Now 8

Repair Work, Despair Work: W. G. Sebald’s Contending Modernisms  Elizabeth Abel 191

9

On Rereading Woolf ’s Orlando as Transgender Text  Margaret Homans 212

Index

237

List of Figures Figure 1.1 Kabe Wilson. Page from Of One Woman or So, by Olivia N’Gowfri 28 Figure 2.1 Ellen Bell, Sleeve Notes (2001). Japanese tissue paper, thread, and wire. Photographed by Nigel Kennedy 60 Figure 2.2 Ellen Bell, Love (Bag) (2008). Text from Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (New York: Walter Scott Publishing, 1920), acid-free glue, card 83 × 61 × 5 cm. Photographed by Simon Cook 61 Figure 2.3 Ellen Bell, Love (Pistol) (2008). Text from Shorter History on Historical Principles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), acid-free glue, card 83 × 61 × 5 cm. Photographed by Simon Cook 62 Figure 3.1 Black Out Poem Back-Front Cover 72 Figure 3.2 Selina Tusitala Marsh. “Black Out Poem 145” 82 Figure 4.1 Wissam al-Jazairi. Ibrahim Qashush 108 Figure 4.2 Wissam al-Jazairi. Phoenix 109 Figure 4.3 Screen-shot of the Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution website. Homepage 111 Figure 5.1 Bahia Shehab. 1,000 Times No. Cairo, Egypt. March 2012 126 Figure 5.2 Bahia Shehab. We love life if we had access to it. Marrakesh, Morocco. April 2016 134 Figure 5.3 Bahia Shehab. Those who have no land have no sea. Cephalonia, Greece. August 2016 136 Figure 5.4 Bahia Shehab. One day we will be who we want to be. The journey has not started and the road has not ended. Amsterdam, the Netherlands. December 2016 137 Figure 6.1 William Kentdridge. Black Box/Chambre Noire. 2005. Projected images with mechanical prototypes 146 Figure 6.2 William Kentridge. Black Box/Chambre Noire. 2005. The rhinoceros as the black box of postcolonial Europe 155

Notes on Contributors Elizabeth Abel is Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to publishing articles on gender, race, psychoanalysis, and visual culture, she is the author of Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis (University of Chicago Press, 1989) and Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow (University of California Press, 2010). She has also edited or coedited Writing and Sexual Difference (Chicago, 1982), The Signs Reader: Women, Gender, and Scholarship (Chicago, 1983, 1993), The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development (Dartmouth, 1983), and Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (University of California Press, 1997). Her chapter (Chapter 8) in this book is drawn from a book-in-progress about unexpected afterlives of Virginia Woolf. Rita Barnard  is Professor of English and Director of the Undergraduate Program in Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of The Great Depression and the Culture of Abundance (Cambridge University Press, 1995), Apartheid and Beyond (Oxford University Press, 2016), and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Nelson Mandela (Cambridge University Press, 2014). A collection (coedited with Andrew van der Vlies) entitled Writing in Transition: South African Temporalities is forthcoming (Bloomsbury, 2019). Among her essays in global modernist studies are “A Tangle of Modernism and Barbarity: Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief ” in Modernism and Colonialism (Duke University Press, 2007), “Postapartheid Modernism and Consumer Culture” (Modernist Cultures, 2011), and “Locating Gordimer: Modernism, Postcolonialism, Realism” in Modernism, Postcolonialism, and Globalization (Oxford University Press, 2018). For ten years, she was the coeditor of Safundi: South African and American Studies, a pioneering journal in transnational cultural studies. Susan David Bernstein  is Research Professor of English at Boston University and Professor Emerita, University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has published in Victorian studies, gender and feminist studies, and digital humanities. Her books include Confessional Subjects: Gender and Power in Victorian Literature and Culture (North Carolina, 1997), Roomscape: Women Writers in the British



Notes on Contributors

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Museum from George Eliot to Virginia Woolf (Edinburgh University Press, 2013), and a coedited collection, Victorian Vulgarity: Taste in Verbal and Visual Culture (Ashgate, 2009); she has published two scholarly editions of novels by Amy Levy, Reuben Sachs (Broadview, 2006) and The Romance of a Shop (Broadview, 2006). Her recent publications include an article about teaching William Morris and new materialisms, and an essay about seriality, Victorian literature, and psychoanalytic theory. She teaches a course on gender, life-writing, and forms in literary and visual arts. Rosemarie Buikema is Professor of Art, Culture, and Diversity at Utrecht University, where she directs the Graduate Gender Program and the Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies. She has published extensively in the field of feminist and postcolonial theory. Her recent monograph Revoltes in Cultural Critique (Amsterdam University Press, 2017) concerns the role of the arts in political transitions and transnational justice. Her latest coedited publications include Doing Gender in Media Art and Culture (Routledge, 2017 and LitVerlag 2017), Theories and Methodologies in Feminist Research (Routledge, 2011), and From Boys to Men (University of Cape Town Press, 2007). She is currently the Utrecht University principal investigator for the Horizon 2020 Cultures of Equality PhD program in Gender Studies and academic coordinator of the Museum of Equality and Difference (https://moed.online/). miriam cooke  is Braxton Craven Distinguished Professor of Arab Cultures in the Department of Asian and Middle East Studies at Duke University. She has been a visiting professor in Tunisia, Romania, Indonesia, Qatar, and Istanbul. She serves on several national and international advisory boards, including academic journals and institutions. She is an editor of the Journal for Middle East Women’s Studies. Her writings have focused on the intersection of gender and war in modern Arabic literature and on Arab women writers’ constructions of Islamic feminism. She has written about Arab cultural studies with a concentration on Syria, the Arab Gulf, and the networked connections among Arabs and Muslims around the world. She is the author of several monographs that include Women and the War Story (1997), Women Claim Islam (2001), Dissident Syria: Making Oppositional Arts Official (2007), Nazira Zeineddine: A Pioneer of Islamic Feminism (2010), Tribal Modern: Branding New Nations in the Arab Gulf (2014), and Dancing in Damascus: Creativity, Resilience and the Syrian Revolution (2017). She has also published a novel, Hayati, My Life (2000).

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Several of her books and articles have been translated into Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, and German. Susan Stanford Friedman  is Hilldale Professor of Humanities and the Virginia Woolf Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of WisconsinMadison. She has published extensively in modernist studies, feminist studies, narrative theory, psychoanalysis, contemporary world literature, and migration/ diaspora studies. She is the author of Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time (Columbia University Press, 2015), Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (Princeton University Press, 1998), Penelope’s Web: Gender, Modernity, and H.D.’s Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 1990), and Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H.D. (Indiana University Press, 1981). Her edited or coedited books include Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses (with Rita Felski, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), Analyzing Freud: Letters of H.D., Bryher, and Their Circle (New Directions, 2001), Joyce: The Return of the Repressed (Cornell University Press, 1993), and Signets—Reading H.D. (with Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Wisconsin, 1990). She is the recipient of the Wayne C. Booth Award for Lifetime Achievement in Narrative Studies (2010) and the founding coeditor of Contemporary Women’s Writing (Oxford University Press, 2006–12). Her work has been translated into Chinese, Czech, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Serbian, and Spanish. She is at work on Sisters of Scheherazade: Religion, Diaspora, and Muslim Women’s Writing. Margaret Homans is Professor of English and of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University, where she teaches courses on Virginia Woolf, feminist and queer fiction from Wollstonecraft to the present, and the intellectual history of feminist, queer, and transgender theory. She has published widely on feminist and queer theory and on British and US women writers, starting with Women Poets and Poetic Identity: Dorothy Wordsworth, Emily Brontë, and Emily Dickinson (1980). Her books also include Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing (Chicago University Press, 1986) and Royal Representations: Queen Victoria and British Culture, 1837–1876 (Chicago University Press, 1999). Her most recent book is The Imprint of Another Life: Adoption Narratives and Human Possibility (University of Michigan Press, 2013). Her edited volumes include Virginia Woolf: A Collection of Critical Essays (Pearson, 1992) and Remaking Queen Victoria (with Adrienne Munich, Cambridge University Press, 1997).



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Selina Tusitala Marsh is Associate Professor in the English department at the University of Auckland, teaching New Zealand and Pacific Literature and Creative Writing. She is the current New Zealand poet laureate (2017–19). As a poet-scholar of Samoan, Tuvaluan, English, and French descent, she focuses in her critical and creative work on giving voice to marginalized communities. Her award-winning poetry collection Fast Talking PI (Auckland University Press, 2009) featured at the 2012 Frankfurt Book Fair, and its titular poem took on cult status in schools and community groups. She was a Poet Olympiad for the 2012 London Olympics Poetry Parnassus event and in 2015 returned to the UK to win the London Literary Death Match at the Australia New Zealand Literary Festival. Her second poetry collection, Dark Sparring, was published in 2013 (Auckland University Press). As the 2016 Commonwealth Poet, Marsh performed her commissioned poem “Unity,” for Queen Elizabeth II at Westminster Abbey. She has had her poetry published in over seventy anthologies, academic texts, and print and online literary journals. Since 2007, she has performed at over 130 national and international events and given over 100 poetry writing workshops. She is currently working on a book Star Navigators: First Wave Pacific Women Poets (1974–2017) and has published widely on Pacific literature, with a recent chapter on New Zealand–based Pacific writers in the History of New Zealand Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Her third collection of poetry, Tightrope, launched on National Poetry Day in 2017 (Auckland University Press), has been long-listed for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Bahia Shehab  is Associate Professor of Design and founder of the Graphic Design Program at the American University in Cairo. Her artwork has been on display in exhibitions, galleries, and streets internationally and was featured in the documentary Nefertiti’s Daughters (2015). Her work has received a number of international recognitions and awards: the Technology, Entertainment, and Design (TED) fellowship (2012) and TED Senior fellowship (2016), inclusion in the BBC 100 Women list (2013), the American University in Beirut Distinguished Alumna (2015), a shortlist for the Victoria & Albert Museum’s Jameel Prize 4 (2016), and a Prince Claus Award (2016). Her book A Thousand Times NO: The Visual History of Lam-Alif was published in 2010. She is the first Arab woman to receive the UNESCO-Sharjah Prize for Arab Culture.

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Part One

Beginnings

2

Introduction: The Past in the Present: Temporalities of the Contemporary Susan Stanford Friedman

How does newness enter the world, by what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made? Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (8) The past is not surpassed but revisited, repeated, surrounded, protected, recombined, reinterpreted, and reshuffled. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (75) Contemporary Revolutions began serendipitously, as I was surfing the net for allusions to Virginia Woolf ’s iconic A Room of One’s Own. Up popped an extraordinary interview with Kabe Wilson, a multimedia artist based in Britain.1 He spoke eloquently about how he had spent five years cutting up A Room of One’s Own and recycling each of her words to construct a novel for the twentyfirst century. His Of One Woman or So, by Olivia N’Gowfri, made up entirely and solely out of Woolf ’s own words, features a biracial, queer, scholarship student at the University of Cambridge whose alienation and experience of racism leads to her engagement with the revolutionary writings of the 1960s Black Power movement and a decision to burn down the libraries, including the manuscript on display of A Room of One’s Own. Mysteriously, however, the manuscript refuses to burn. Olivia realizes that she can cut up and re-order Woolf ’s words to make a “new wor(l)d order” that serves the needs of the present and the future. Wilson calls his contemporary aesthetics a form of recycling, a term he deliberately uses to gesture toward the human-made global crisis of climate change and a political commitment to recycle the past, waste nothing, reuse everything in new ways, indeed, in revolutionary ways. Wilson’s multimedia performance, installation, and narrative art became the germ of a panel on Revolving Modernisms, Recycling Revolutions that

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Christine Froula, Margaret Homans, and I put together for the Modernist Studies Association Conference in 2015.2 Held in Boston, the conference’s unifying theme was Revolution, a gesture toward the city as a birthplace of the American Revolution. Our panel grew out of our recognition of contradictory meanings hidden in the etymology of the word revolution. As I discuss at greater length in Chapter 1, revolution originally meant a turning back, a rotation back to move forward, as in the cycle of the planets; later, of course, revolution came to mean radical overthrow, rupture, change, particularly of political systems and the social order. This double meaning of revolution seemed especially suited to Ezra Pound’s modernist dictum—“Make It New,” the title of his 1934 book and a phrase that appears in Canto 53. “Make It New” became an iconic catchphrase in modernist studies, a kind of proto-tweet that encapsulates the revolutionary aims of early twentieth-century modernism in Europe to reflect in radically new forms of representation the upheavals of modern life in which “the center cannot hold” (to echo Yeats) and “all that is solid melts into air” (to echo Marx and Engels).3 But as Eric Hayot points out, Pound was “thinking of innovation not as novelty but as renewal, the development of a relation to the past that brings it back to life in the present, that activates the history and tradition of thought within the contemporary, and opens up space for a transformation that is also a return” (161). Significantly, however, for our project, Pound advocated this kind of renewal by returning to the distant past—China’s Confucius and Tang Dynasty poetry, Provenç al’s troubadours, Italy’s Sigismondo Malatesta, for example. For our Modernist Studies Association panel, in contrast, we were interested in how many twenty-first-century artists like Kabe Wilson turned back to the relatively recent past, to the early twentieth century in particular, to “make it new.” Why the recent past?4 Why the arts of early twentieth-century modernism? And what elements of the past—its general history of events, its cultural and aesthetic engagements with those events? “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” writes William Faulkner about the South obsessively reliving the Civil War (Requiem for a Nun 92). “History,” Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus laments, “is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake,” caught in the tug of war between British colonialism and Irish rebellion, able to imagine only an uncertain and guilt-ridden future (Ulysses 2:377). What is it about the recent past that can so haunt the present? What in particular do the arts contribute to the drive to work through the past, to engage in acts of creative instead of obsessive memory? This is of course the question that underlies Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” and the whole field of trauma studies, as well as memoirs like Woolf ’s A Sketch

Introduction

5

of the Past. As Theodore Adorno provocatively suggests, “The past will have been worked through only when the causes of what happened then have been eliminated. Only because the causes continue to exist does the captivating spell of the past remain to this day unbroken” (103). As upheavals, revolutions of all kinds fill the stages of contemporary life across the globe. The Arab Spring has spoken to the hopes of revolution as autocratic regimes fell across the Middle East and North Africa, only to be reconstituted, or to descend into bitter civil war and ongoing conflict with uncertain outcomes. Refugees across the planet flee their homes, bringing past traumas with them as they hope for safer and better times ahead. Migrants of all kinds experience the diasporic attachment to old homes as they accommodate to new homes, often facing hostility, fear, and prejudice. Individuals and groups targeted for violence—by gender, sexuality, religion, ethnicity, nationality, disability—face upheavals around the world, while climate change has brought extreme weather, catastrophic floods and landslides, and rising seas. The Digital Revolution has transformed the scale, speed, and nature of communication and knowledge production, in ways whose impact has yet to be comprehended, from the rapidity of global finance to threats of cyber war, artificial intelligence, and genomics. All that is solid is melting into air, all over again. And yet, the contemporary world is not done with the recent past of the twentieth century. Haunting twenty-first-century upheavals are the shattering cataclysms and transformative advances (dystopic, utopic) of the past century: the two world wars killing many millions; the genocides and “ethnic cleansings” of whole peoples, from the Herero, Nama, and Armenians to the Jews and Roma; wide-scale famines in Asia and Africa and epidemic diseases decimating populations; the revolutions of Russia, China, and Iran; the anticolonial, nationalist wars ending European, Asian, and American empires; technological innovations that transformed nations and everyday lives; the Nuclear Age and threat of planetary annihilation; the opening of new freedoms for the oppressed and circumscribed (racial, gender, sexual, class-based); cultural revolutions that began to dismantle the ossified structures of power; the flourishing and globalization of the arts.

THE TEMPORALITY OF THE CONTEMPORARY What is the “contemporary”? What notion of temporality does it embed? Is it the historical period that follows the “modern”? The perpetually moving

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target of the Present, the Now? An interrogative state of mind? A new kind of temporality especially suited to an intensely globalized, interconnected world? Critics of contemporary arts and literature don’t agree on what they mean by contemporaneity. For the editors of Time: A Vocabulary of the Present, “The postwar period—our present—is animated by certain kinds of time consciousness” (Burges and Elias 2). For them, the contemporary is not a periodizing concept, with temporal bookends. But they do argue that “in our time”—presumably the early twenty-first century—“the present has emerged as an experience of simultaneity in which temporalities multiply because they are synchronized as simultaneous on economic, cultural, technological, ecological, and planetary registers” (3). “Times conjoin” in “our present,” they argue (3). The contemporary writers and artists discussed in Contemporary Revolutions synchronize and conjoin different times. Instead of breaking with the past or forgetting the past, they and many other contemporary writers and artists reengage with differing elements of the past as a way of moving into the future. Their temporality is not based on a radical break from the past, as the futurists proposed, but rather on a present that returns to the recent past to rethink it anew, as a precondition for imagining the future. They engage, in other words, with the original meaning of revolution—to turn back, cycle back—as the precursor for moving forward. Such recycling involves not a linear temporality from the past to the future, but rather a layered, palimpsestic, multidirectional, and multidimensional temporality. In distinguishing contemporary art from postmodern pastiche or nostalgia for an absent past, Amelia Groom writes about contemporary art: “Early 21st-century art has seen a rising concern with re-present-ing the past. Many artists are embracing obsolete technologies, abandoned places, and outmoded materials; resuscitating unfinished ideas; revisiting documents and testimonies; and restaging downtrodden possibilities” (Time 16; quoted in Burges and Elias 19–20). As Rita Felski puts it, “Pastness is part of who we are, not an archaic residue, a source of nostalgia, or a return of the repressed. . . . Cross-temporal networks mess up the tidiness of our periodizing schemes; they force us .  .  . to grapple with the coevalness and connectedness of past and present” (159). Memory, as some memory theorists would have it, exists in the present as a reconstruction of multiple pasts.5 Cross-temporal networks play havoc with conventional, linear historical periodization. And yet the drive to periodize the contemporary remains strong. Historians of art and literature typically draw a fixed line between “the modern” and “the contemporary,” although just where the cut-off point falls

Introduction

7

varies considerably. The “contemporary” variously signifies post-1945, post1960, post-1989, or post-2000, as Theodore Martin notes in Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present (2). Whatever the precise dating, the distinction between the “modern” and the “contemporary” is maintained. The Oxford Guide to Contemporary Writing, for example, states that “‘the contemporary’ means since about 1960.” The journal Contemporary Literature welcomes submissions on post–World War II literature; the Journal of Modern Literature invites essays on “modern and contemporary literature”; and Contemporary Women’s Writing designates post-1970 writing as “contemporary.” The Literature Now series at Columbia University Press asserts a distinction between literature now and then, separating itself from the press’s series in modernist studies, Modernist Latitudes. The organization aptly named ASAP, Association for the Study of Arts of the Present, identifies its focus on the “present” as distinct from the “modern” past. The Post*45 group of Americanists formed in 2006 after having panels rejected at the Modernist Studies Association meets annually to share work in post-1945 American Studies. Amy Hungerford, one of the Post*45 founders, has published Making It Now (2016), a title that plays with Pound’s “Make It New” while distancing itself from modernism.6 As time passes, however, what constitutes arts of the “contemporary,” “the present,” or “the Now” has become less fixed, more open to debate, and much less chronologically linear. Some, like art historian Terry Smith in What Is Contemporary Art?, continue to regard “the contemporary” as a historical period distinct from the “modern.”7 But for Smith, what characterizes contemporary art is “an interrogation into the ontology of the present” (1). As a meta-formation, “Contemporary art is always aware of itself in a larger frame,” reaching from the individual to the global, and it is “aware of itself in time—of the planet’s ‘unfolding,’ the coexistence of distinct temporalities, of different ways of being in relation to time” (3). Alluding to Lyotard’s famous formulation in The Postmodern Condition, Smith argues that contemporary art does not pose the “grand narratives” of the modern, nor the “petit narratives” of the postmodern (3). He invokes instead the root meaning of contemporary: that is, con tempus, a “multiplicity of relationships between being and time” (4). The “deepest sense” of contemporary involves “the coexistence of distinct temporalities, of different ways of being in relation to time” (3–4). The contemporary, then, is always “cotemporal” (4).8 Like Smith, Theodore Martin wants it both ways: the contemporary as historical and meta-historical. In “The Currency of the Contemporary,” Martin argues that the contemporary is both the period of late capitalism and a concept

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of time that self-reflexively combines the present and a sense of history. But in Contemporary Drift, he states categorically, “The Contemporary is not a period” (2); rather it is a “conceptual problem.” For Pedro Erber, “Contemporaneity is in fashion” (29), but just what the term means is uncertain. He recognizes the common assumption that “the contemporary [is] the historical period that succeeds the modern period” (29). But he also regards the contemporary “as the epoch that we happen to inhabit in the early twenty-first century,” which in his view is an era of contemporaneous globalization. The “contemporary refers to that which is contemporary with us—whoever and whenever we are—and is in this sense synonymous with the present” (29). Interested in the temporalities of contemporary anthropology, Erber highlights the arguments about twentyfirst-century globalization in Johannes Fabian’s Time and the Other and Marx Augé ’s An Anthropology for Contemporaneous Worlds. Augé , Erber writes, argues that “the speed of cultural, economic, migratory circulation inaugurates a generalized sharing of time: ‘The world’s inhabitants have at last become truly contemporaneous, and yet the world’s diversity is recomposed every moment; this is the paradox of our day’” (Augé  89; cited in Erber 35). For Erber, the contemporary is, on the one hand, “the present”—necessarily a moving target—and on the other hand, the early twenty-first century, when time has become space, or at least spatialized. For him, this “present” is a time when “the West and the Rest have become increasingly contemporaneous and therefore indistinguishable from each other,” a conflation that leads to “symptoms of profound disquiet with the contemporary moment” (43). We might fairly ask if this spatialization of time wasn’t already present in the scientific and aesthetic avant-gardes of the early twentieth century—in Einstein, for example, or cubism, or the spatialized form of experimental narrative. But for Erber and others, the twenty-first-century “present” is globalized geographically, resting on the history of colonialism and the disintegration of twentieth-century empires. Others, like Giogio Agamben in “What Is the Contemporary?,” move further from historical periodization by regarding the contemporary as a reflexive state of mind immersed in the present, but aware of its temporal shadows within, aware as well of what he calls its “archaic” pasts. The contemporary, in other words, is not a specific historical period, but is rather a relationship to time that incorporates an awareness of multiple temporalities. Agamben’s position shares a notion of the “present” with Wai Chi Dimock’s concept of literary “resonance” as analogous to the “traveling frequencies of sound” (1061). Past and present texts interact dialogically, as the traveling frequencies of a past text are “received

Introduction

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and amplified across time, moving farther and farther from their points of origin, causing unexpected vibrations in unexpected places” (1061). The temporal scale of Agamben’s “archaic pasts” and Dimock’s resonances through the centuries, however, do not directly address why so many of the arts of the “present”—that is, our present, in the twenty-first century—are preoccupied with the immediate past, especially the global histories of the twentieth century and with the cultural and aesthetic representations of those histories. The chapters in Contemporary Revolutions illuminate the multidirectional and multidimensional aspects of today’s contemporaneity, one in which the historical events of early twentieth-century modernities and their modernisms are recycled to understand our present and future. As I have argued in Planetary Modernisms, modernity is a multiple, polycentric, and recurrent phenomenon in the longue duré e of history, not a singular event or historical period. As such, modernism is the aesthetic dimension of any given modernity, not the aesthetic styles and sensibilities of a single time and place. Modernism isn’t dead; it isn’t even past yet. The present—the Now—is the new modernity of the twenty-first century. Our modernity—the early twenty-first century—has folded within its recesses both the dystopic and utopic elements of earlier modernities, especially those of the twentieth century, but also those reaching back to the modernities of the Industrial Revolution and European colonial expansion. As Michael D’Arcy and Mathias Nilges argue in their introduction to The Contemporaneity of Modernism: Literature, Media, Culture, early twentieth-century modernism is ongoing in the sense that it “occupies a crucial role in the general effort to critically engage with our present as history” (7). Like Agamben and others, “contemporaneity,” for D’Arcy and Nilges, “is a relation to the present that does not simply live the now but that interrogates the present as history” (6–7). As such, our contemporaneity in the arts often develops in dialogue with early twentieth-century modernism, not “merely .  .  . a matter of the retro or of the nostalgia mode that has long been associated with postmodernism” (4). A retrospective engagement with the recent past, in other words, is a precondition of moving into the future. As Amir Eshel argues in Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past, contemporary arts look to the past in a way that “opens up the present to new political, cultural, and ethical possibilities” (book cover).9 As the double meaning of the word revolution suggests, artists of the contemporary who turn back to move forward are not engaged in a playful postmodern exercise but are instead addressing the political dimensions of the past

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in the present with hope for liberatory change. As Nikos Papastergiadis remarks about contemporary art, “There is a dual level of commitment to the aesthetic and the political” (365). He sees this commitment take the form not of manifestos but rather as “reference points for cultural and aesthetic revolutions,” affirming that “the power of the poetic gesture in art is revolutionary” (369). Revolution in this sense is not a wide-scale overthrow of the political and social order— something that artists alone cannot accomplish, whatever role they might have to play in revolutionary movements. But they can engage in a kind of revolution that takes the form of cultural recycling—connecting the past and present. Such recycled forms of representation can pressure the contemporary political and social order by exposing its histories and imagining alternative futures that do not repeat the evils of the past. This form of twenty-first-century cultural revolution differs significantly from Julia Kristeva’s notion of the lyric (semiotic) subversion of narrative (thetic) in Revolution in Poetic Language, an important philosophical work that contributed to the poststructuralist critique of Enlightenment humanism. Revolution in twenty-first-century cultural terms envisions new freedoms through a multidimensional and multidirectional renewal of past aesthetic expressivities. Recycled through the concerns of the present, cultural memory reconstructed in literature and art can enable new futures.

BEGINNINGS Contemporary Revolutions opens with a discussion in Chapter 1 of Kabe Wilson’s multimedia performance, installation, and narrative art because his work encompasses all the different strands explored in the subsequent chapters. I examine the meanings of words like recycle, re-mix, sample, and revolution to illuminate Wilson’s twenty-first-century aesthetic temporality. In recycling Woolf ’s text by creating the re-mix Of One Woman or So, by Olivia N’Gowfri out of Woolf ’s own words, Wilson exposes the racism buried within A Room of One’s Own, thereby recycling her attack on patriarchy into a fuller critique of other systems of power. He asks us to rethink the meanings of revolution for the twenty-first century not only by recycling Woolf but also by interweaving the intersectional racism, sexism, and classism of the present with several Black Power texts from the 1960s. Wilson performs the workings of historical memory as acts of the present. And his multimedia art promotes rereadings of past texts as a precondition for making it new.

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RECYCLES: AESTHETICS OF UNSEWING AND BLACKING OUT In Chapters 2 and 3 Susan David Bernstein and Selina Tusitala Marsh examine how a contemporary fabric artist and a poet take apart—literally and physically— preexisting texts and reassemble them in ways that highlight the gendered and racialized nature of women’s work. In “Stitch Works: Ellen Bell’s Unpicking Aesthetics and Victorian Women’s Creative Labor” Bernstein focuses on British artist Ellen Bell, whose sewn artworks highlight the class and gender dimensions of women’s labor in sewing in the nineteenth century. Drawing on depictions of women’s sewing in Victorian fiction, Bernstein argues that Bell invents an “unpicking” aesthetics that reproduces the tedious labor of nineteenth-century seamstresses taking apart garments for reuse as well as the fine stitchery expected of middle- and upper-class women. Bell stitches together a range of materials— from paper and tissue to feathers, buttons, and maps—into replicas of garments, purses, and other objects from women’s daily lives. Bernstein features Bell’s cutouts from Charlotte Brontë ’s Jane Eyre, reinserted into elaborately stitched fabric forms to retell Jane’s story by highlighting her inner emotional life. Bernstein suggests that the very slowness of Bell’s process, which in recent pieces she does as performance art in public, suggests an evolutionary rather than a rupturing revolutionary process that brings the past into the present and future.10 In “Make It Niu: Blacking Out of Albert Wendt’s Pouliuli the Tusitala Way,” Marsh, New Zealand’s poet laureate and a widely known poet and critic in the Pacific Islands, discusses her own use of “Black Out” poetics, in which a new text is formed by blacking out most but not all of the words of a prior text. Contextualizing her work in the poetics of Tusitala, a Pacific Island concept of drawing on the traditions of the past in decolonizing the present and future, Marsh shows how her Black Out poems confront the misogyny of Albert Wendt’s novel Pouliuli and affirm women’s cultural authority within Pacific Island cultures, even as she continues to honor him as her mentor and for his pathbreaking role in establishing Pacific Island literature. Like Ellen Bell’s sewing performances, Marsh’s “Tusitala Way” renews the past, not by overturning it but rather through a process of revolutionary evolution. Worlds apart, the art of Ellen Bell and the poetry of Selina Tusitala Marsh recycle the very materiale of work preceding their own and illustrate the spatial scale of a multidirectional temporality. Both highlight gender and the plight of women; one emphasizes class, and the other colonial racism. But the art and poetry of these contemporaries share a poetics of physical dismantling and reassembling of the material of aesthetic texts.

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REVOLUTIONS: ARTS OF RESISTANCE In Chapters 4 and 5, miriam cooke’s “Curating the Syrian Revolution Online” and Bahia Shehab’s “A Thousand Times No!. Spray Painting as Resistance and the Visual History of the Lam-Alif” rethink the meaning of revolution in the context of the Arab Spring and its aftermath in Syria and Egypt. cooke, a noted scholar of Middle East art, politics, and feminism, examines the website Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution, curated by Sana Yazigi in Beirut, as a way of remembering the ongoing production of Syrian art as the horrors of the six-year-old civil war unfolded. Yazigi uses the Internet to recycle the arts of resistance, ensuring that the ephemeral art of the Syrian revolution will not be forgotten. Her site, cooke shows, becomes itself a space of artistic production, juxtaposing all kinds of contemporary art that engages with the past, documents the present, and articulates a hope for the future, in spite of Assad’s ongoing and ferocious grip on power. Revolution in the Syrian context, cooke argues, is not the overthrow of the Assad regime but rather the artistic record online of historical atrocities and the hope for a different future. Bahia Shehab is both an historian of Islamic art in Cairo and a street artist who spray paints her resistance to injustice and hopes for revolution on walls in the streets of Cairo and cities around the world. In “A Thousand Times No!,” she recounts her own history of participation in Egypt’s revolution, starting in 2011 as a street artist. Knowing that her work was both dangerous and ephemeral, she drew on a 1,400-year, transnational history of Islamic calligraphy by spraying a thousand Lam-alifs, the superimposition of two Arabic letters that mean “no,” on the walls of Cairo. When that became too dangerous after 2013, she has taken her spray painting to the cities of the world—Vancouver, New Orleans, New York, Madison, Marrakesh, Istanbul, Paris—to assert the arts of resistance and, like the Syrians, to affirm revolution as the ability to keep hope alive. Like Marsh’s drawing on the Tusitala Way of the Pacific Islands in forming her poetics, Shehab’s art brings the beauty of Arabic calligraphy’s past traditions into the present.

RESTAGES: PALIMPSESTS OF THE PAST In Chapters 6 and 7, Rosemarie Buikema and Rita Barnard take up the question of historical memory as a constituent part of contemporaneity by exploring the palimpsestic restagings of the past in the contemporary works of two South Africans: William Kentridge, the theatre and performance artist, and poet

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Antjie Krog. In “The Folds of History in William Kentridge’s Black Box Theatre: Sampling German Nazism and Colonialism,” Buikema examines Kentridge’s insistent memory of twentieth-century genocidal histories in Black Box, an installation/theatre piece performed in Berlin in 2005 and at the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam in 2012. Kentridge, she argues, collages palimpsests of German genocides, from the Herero of South Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century to the Holocaust and its aftermath. Juxtaposing historical documents, military decrees, death rolls, edited maps, colonial photographs, film footage, animated drawings, shadow play, and mechanical puppets, Kentridge interweaves the German colonial army’s early twentieth-century extermination of the Nama and Herero in Southwest Africa with samples taken from African music and Mozart’s Die Zauerflö te (The Magic Flute). Buikema highlights the multidirectional materialization of colonialism, modernism, and fascism as staged in Kentridge’s multimedia layering of time and texts that attest to the legacies of violence within and outside European borders. Rita Barnard’s “The Revolutions of Antjie Krog’s Lady Anne: A Chronicle in Verse” meditates on Antjie Krog’s experimental text (1989) newly translated into English (2017) from the original Afrikaans poem. She reads it as a critical restaging of the writings of Lady Anne Barnard, a visitor to the Cape Colony during the Napoleonic era, intercut with personal poems and collages of quotations about politics and aesthetics, a menstrual chart, and an election poster of the day. The work deliberately layers three historical moments, in order to invite comparison between two women writers’ confrontation with Africa as a terrain of inequality and suffering. Barnard explores how the text asks whether the poet (white, female, Afrikaans) can do more in her particular historical moment and circumstances (1980s) than her predecessor did in hers (late 1700s/early 1800s). Barnard also discusses ways in which the recent twenty-first-century English translation addresses a contemporary international audience and contributes to debates about whether revolutionary temporalities have currently stalled, both in South Africa and globally, given that gross inequalities remain unaddressed and the legacies of slavery, colonialism, racism are as evident as ever.

REREADS: THEN, NOW In Chapter 8 and 9, Elizabeth Abel and Margaret Homans return us to Virginia Woolf, where the volume began with Kabe Wilson’s recycling of A Room of One’s Own. They explore ways in which contemporary writers and theorists reread

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Woolf ’s fiction, memoirs, and essays, not to mirror her but rather to adapt her work for the needs of the present. In “Repair Work, Despair Work: W. G. Sebald’s Contending Modernisms,” Abel highlights what few have noticed in Sebald’s Austerlitz, his pervasively dialogical relationship with Woolf ’s work, which underlies his profound engagements with both modernism and the catastrophes of early twentieth-century history. She argues that Sebald’s layered and fragmentary accounting of the Holocaust in Austerlitz stages an opposition between Walter Benjamin’s despairing image of the “Angel of History” with Woolf ’s view in “A Sketch of the Past” that art can make “whole” what has been shattered. Identifying pervasive resonances between Sebald’s last work and a variety of Woolf ’s writings, from “The Death of the Moth” to Mrs. Dalloway and Orlando, Abel argues that Austerlitz wavers between utopic and dystopic views of the relationship between art and memory. In “On Rereading Woolf ’s Orlando as Transgender Text,” Homans examines the evolution of contemporary debates about transgender in the context of different readings of Woolf ’s “biography” of the trans figure of Orlando, a man for half his five hundred years, then transformed into a woman in the eighteenth century. She identifies a key disparity in trans debates between minoritizing and universalizing discourses, that is, between those who advocate for the rights of trans people and those who see trans issues dismantling dualistic systems of gender. Orlando, in its original novel form and in later film and theatre adaptations, has been appropriated for different sides in these trans debates. Homans argues that a more productive approach is to see the form of the novel itself—embodied in the gender fluidity of the biographer’s narrative voice—as the site of transgender. In rereading Orlando with attention to narrative voice, Homans refreshes an early twentieth-century modernist, feminist novel about androgyny so that it speaks to contemporary debates about transgender.

WHY WOOLF? The central importance of Virginia Woolf for the chapters that frame Contemporary Revolutions leads me to ask: Why Woolf? It could be just an accident of the original Modernist Studies Association panel and the ensuing networking that fostered the organic growth of the volume among some Woolf scholars and a widening circle of critics and artists focused on gender or the broader issues Woolf wrote about in the context of her experimental aesthetics: fascism, colonialism, war, education, and politics in its most general and pervasive sense.

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But serendipitous networking doesn’t explain everything. Kabe Wilson, it should be remembered, spent five years surrounded by digital technology galore to undo and redo A Room of One’s Own, ending his project with a performance in drag of Virginia Woolf herself to explain why he put so much effort into making something new out of something old. What is the hold that early twentiethcentury modernism has on many contemporary writers and artists? And why is Woolf a central figure in many of these contemporary returns? Certainly, she is not the only figure to be recycled for the twenty-first century. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness has spawned more rewrites, writings back, and writings against than Woolf ’s novels—from Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North to Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.11 Joyce, Proust, and Eliot (among many other modernists) have surely stimulated aesthetic responses. But as Brenda Silver’s Virginia Woolf Icon demonstrates, the figure of Woolf along with her work has traveled the world, to be perpetually rewritten, recycled, and refreshed—a phenomenon most recently explored in Pamela L. Caughie and Diana L. Swanson’s Virginia Woolf Writing the World, Jessica Berman’s A Companion to Virginia Woolf, and Trans-Woolf: Thinking Across Borders, edited by Claire Davison and Anne-Marie-DiBiasio.12 Kabe Wilson attributes Woolf ’s ongoing significance in part to her being “an amazing curator of words on top of being a genius at arranging them.”13 Woolf ’s centrality to the interlocking and distinctive voices making up diverse global feminisms explains some of her contemporaneity. But the complexity and variety of her own renderings of temporality may also explain some of the contemporary drive to reengage with her work. From the leaden circles of Big Ben pounding out the masculine structures and the proleptically anticipated demise of the British Empire to the shockingly different scales of human and cosmic time in To the Lighthouse, to the family secrets of multigenerational time in The Years, to the ironic pageantry of historical time in Orlando and Between the Acts, Woolf ’s work continuously and variously probes the nature of temporality, in its human, institutional, historical, and environmental forms. Like the various theorists of contemporaneity I have reviewed, Woolf continually interrogated the meanings of temporality, adding sharply to the concepts of time among her contemporaries. Her work is saturated with a self-consciousness about time, thus exhibiting the immersion in the present, the Now, which is aware of the past and future enfolded within. Finally, Woolf ’s work “opens up the present to new political, cultural, and ethical possibilities,” to echo Eshel in Futurity. Above all, her feminism and her experiments with space, time, form, and language contain an engagement

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with the political, with the structures of power at home and abroad, that are particularly resonant with the writers and artists explored in Contemporary Revolutions. A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas—Woolf ’s two major theoretical essays—are revolutionary in their own way and still resonant in many parts of the contemporary world today. At the same time, however, the limits to her political thinking have stimulated critical recyclings of her work, a desire to renew it by exposing its blind spots. Contemporary American soul rapper Bryan Thomas, for example, in his song “Orlando” thanks Woolf for getting him to write again by provoking him to ask and re-ask why Orlando had to begin with the horrible image of young Orlando swinging his sword “at the severed head of a dead African.” His “Orlando” is a “literary reparation”: “just to refresh / You return to the text,” in this case, the text of Woolf.14

ENDINGS How does “newness enter the world?” Rushdie asks in the epigraph to this introduction: by reshuffling the past, Latour answers. Contemporary Revolutions explores twenty-first-century writers and artists who refresh past texts as imaginative acts that remake the new. At times, these recycles of the past reflect despair, the fear that the past is not dead; it’s not even past, as Faulkner said; or a fear that the nightmares of the past are repeating themselves in the present, as Joyce suggested. But at times, these recyclings have the optimism of youth. Renew for the future, for a future built on hope that by confronting the evils of the past a better and more just world might come to pass. Sometimes a cycle is not a circle of the same; it’s a helix, a spiral to the future.

NOTES 1 Interview with Wilson, by Malachi McIntosh. 2 Contemporary Revolutions owes a great deal to this collaboration with Christine Froula and Margaret Homans; we had intended to coedit the book together, but other obligations intervened. I am nonetheless grateful to them both for their vision and support. Special thanks to Margaret Homans for her advice, continual support, and astute readings for Contemporary Revolutions. Thanks also to Susan David Bernstein and Elizabeth Abel for their critiques of my drafts.

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3 See W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” and Marshall Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts into Air, a title he takes from Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Berman 21). 4 The word recent, of course, is relative, depending on the scale of reference. The essays in this volume engage with different scales of recent time: from the Victorian Age, to the first half of the twentieth century, to the more recent past of the Arab Spring. 5 See, for example, Michael Rothberg’s Multidirectional Memory; for an overview of memory studies, see Sara B. Young’s Memory in Culture; for classic and contemporary theories of historical memory, see Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz’s Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates. 6 For an account of Post*45’s formation, see Hungerford, “On the Period.” 7 Smith, like many others, has retreated from the use of the term postmodern, as too derivative of the modern. 8 See also Smith’s introduction, “The Contemporaneity Question,” in Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity, where he emphasizes globalization and multiple temporalities as distinguishing characteristics of the contemporary. 9 For varied contemporary approaches to time, see Burges and Elias’s Time: A Vocabulary for the Present. 10 Bernstein notes that Melvyn Fein’s Evolution vs. Revolution is a useful intellectual history of the entanglement of these terms. 11 See Regelind Farn’s Colonial and Postcolonial Rewritings of “Heart of Darkness”: A Century of Dialogue with Joseph Conrad for an exhaustive review of creative responses to Conrad’s novel. 12 See for example Christine Froula’s “Orlando Lives: Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando in Global Adaptation and Performance” and Susan Stanford Friedman, “Migration, Encounter, and Indigenisation.” 13 Email to author, November 16, 2017. 14 Thanks to Christine Froula and Margaret Homans for directing me to Bryan Thomas’s re-mix of Orlando.

WORKS CITED Adorno, Theodor W. “The Meaning of Working Through the Past,” 1959. In Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. Trans. Henry W. Pickford. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005, 89–103. Agamben, Giorgio. “What Is the Contemporary?” In What Is an Apparatus? And Other Essays. Trans. David Kislik and Stefan Pedatella. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009, 39–54.

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Augé , Marc. An Anthropology for Contemporaneous Worlds. Trans. Amy Jacobs. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. Berman, Jessica, ed. A Companion to Virginia Woolf. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016. Berman, Marshall. All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. 1982. 2nd ed. New York: Penguin, 1988. Burges, Joel, and Amy J. Elias, eds. Time: A Vocabulary of the Present. New York: New York University Press, 2016. Caughie, Pamela L., and Diana L. Swanson, eds. Virginia Woolf Writing the World. Clemson, SC: Clemson University Press, 2015. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Paul B. Armstrong. 6th ed. New York: Norton, 2016. D’Arcy, Michael, and Mathias Nilges, eds. The Contemporaneity of Modernism: Literature, Media, Culture. London: Routledge, 2015. Davison, Claire, and Anne-Marie Smith-Di Biasio, eds. Trans-Woolf: Thinking Across Borders. European Modernism. Vol. 2. Perugia: Morlacchi Editore University Press, 2017. Dimock, Wai Chi. “A Theory of Resonance.” PMLA 112.5 (October 1997): 1060–71. Erber, Pedro. “Contemporaneity and Its Discontents.” Diacritics 41.1 (2013): 28–48. Eshel, Amir. Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Farn, Regelind. Colonial and Postcolonial Rewritings of “Heart of Darkness”: A Century of Dialogue with Joseph Conrad. Diss. Florida Atlantic University. 2004. Faulkner, William. Requiem for a Nun. New York: Random House, 1951. Fein, Melvyn. Evolution vs. Revolution: The Paradoxes of Social Change. London: Routledge, 2015. Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” 1917. The Freud Reader. Ed. Peter Gay. 584–88. Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Migration, Encounter, and Indigenisation: New Ways of Thinking about Intertextuality in Women’s Writing.” In European Intertexts: Women’s Writing in English in a European Context. Eds. Patsy Stoneman and Ana Marí a Sá nchez-Arce, with Angel Leighton. Bern: Peter Lang, 2005, 215–71. Friedman, Susan Stanford. Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Froula, Christine. “Make It Old: Revolutionary Modernisms, Contemporary Returns.” Paper delivered at Modernist Studies Association Conference. Boston, MA. November 22, 2015.

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Froula, Christine. “Orlando Lives: Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando in Global Adaptation and Performance.” In Contemporary Woolf. Eds. Claire Davison and Anne-Marie Smith-DiBiasio. France: Presses Universitaires de la Mediterranee, 2014, 233–57. Groom, Amelia, ed. Time. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. Hayot, Eric. “Chinese Modernism, Mimetic Desire, and European Time.” In The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms. Eds. Mark Wollaeger, with Matt Etough. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013, 149–72. Hungerford, Amy. Making Literature Now. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016. Hungerford, Amy. “On the Period Formerly Known as Contemporary.” American Literary History 20.1 (Spring/Summer 2008), 410–19. Joyce, James. Ulysses. 1922. Ed. Hans Walter Gabler. New York: Random House, 1986. Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. 1974. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Martin, Ted. Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. Martin, Ted. “The Currency of the Contemporary.” In Postmodern/Postwar—and After: Rethinking American Literature. Eds. Jason Gladstone, Andrew Hoberek, and Daniel Worden. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016, 227–39. McIntosh, Malachi. Video Interview with Kabe Wilson. Web. www.dreadlockhoax. co.ulk/interviews-and-talks. September 11, 2015. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, UK: University of Cambridge Press, 1993. Lyotard, Jean-Franç ois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. 1979. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Papastergiadis, Nikos. “Spatial Aesthetics: Rethinking the Contemporary.” Smith and Enwezor 363–81. Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses. New York: Viking, 1989. Silver, Brenda. Virginia Woolf Icon. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Smith, Terry. “Introduction: The Contemporaneity Question.” Smith and Enwezor 1–22. Smith, Terry. What Is Contemporary Art? Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Smith, Terry, and Okwui Enwezor, eds. Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Sturrock, John. The Oxford Guide to Contemporary Writing. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1996. Thomas, Bryan. “Orlando.” Web: https://bryanthomas.bandcamp.com/track/orlando. November 6, 2017. Wilson, Kabe. Of One Woman or So, by Olivia N’Gowfri. Art installation on scroll and unpublished typescript in PDF. 2014.

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Woolf, Virginia. “A Sketch of the Past.” In Moments of Being. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. 2nd ed. New York: Harcourt, 1985, 61–159. Yeats, W. B. “The Second Coming.” In The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. New York: Macmillan, 1956, 212–14.

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Recycling Revolution: Re-mixing A Room of One’s Own and Black Power in Kabe Wilson’s Performance, Installation, and Narrative Art Susan Stanford Friedman

How can we combine the old words in new orders so that they survive, so that they create beauty, so that they tell the truth? That is the question. Virginia Woolf, “Craftsmanship”1 And what can the present be taught about the future by the thought of more than a century ago? Kabe Wilson, Of One Woman or So, by Olivia N’Gowfri2 Picture it. May 19, 2014, at 43 Gordon Square, London: The scene of “The Dreadlock Hoax” in a Bloomsbury drawing room next door to where Virginia Woolf once lived. Kabe Wilson, a multimedia artist, dressed up as Virginia and read an essay about writing his novel Of One Woman or So, by Olivia N’Gowfri. He begins: “‘Of One Woman or So’ is a book, written by putting every single word of A Room of One’s Own in a new order. Now that is not easy. It took five years, and day to-day the words would offer some different obstacle. This short talk will look at the difficulties of writing with such unnatural constraint on word use.”3 Even before he speaks, his look initiates the uneasy performance and awkward prose. Dreadlocks pass as Virginia’s hair, a loose-fitting blouse signifies cross-dressing, and an androgynous body gestures at a contemporary trans-gender and trans-race based in fluidity between man and woman, black and white. Signaled by his title, Wilson’s performance calls to mind the controversial the Dreadnought Hoax of 1910, when Virginia Stephen and her Bloomsbury companions dressed up in blackface and successfully passed as Abyssinian

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royals aboard the British navy’s premier battleship, the HMS Dreadnought, thereby piercing the patina of invincibility upon which the British Empire was founded and maintained. Wilson, as a British subject of half English/half Ethiopian heritage, performed Woolf in his natural “blackface,” so to speak, thereby joining those who have criticized the Dreadnought Hoax for reinscribing Britain’s imperial and racist power even as it subjected that power to mockery.4 However, Wilson’s “Dreadlock Hoax” represents a much more complex relation to the British past than a simple writing back to empire’s racism. He performs Virginia not as parody, not even as a Bhabhaian colonial mimicry. “The question of old living beside new is emphatically what the novels about,” he explains in “The Dreadlock Hoax” performance. “The words remain on minds and lips as if they are new, and because they seem so fresh they are useful for our craft.” Wilson means this literally, revealing at the end of “The Dreadlock Hoax” performance that every word he has just read to the audience comes from his re-ordering of all the words in Woolf ’s essay “Craftsmanship,” written in 1937 and read on the BBC by Woolf herself in the only known recording of her voice. “The Dreadlock Hoax” performs Woolf ’s essay recycled: cut to pieces, nothing wasted, just shuffled, re-ordered, made into something new. Wilson’s performance adapts the cut-up technique first used in 1920 by Tristan Tzara in his manifesto poem subtitled “To Make a Dadaist Poem,” which begins, “Take a newspaper. / Take some scissors. . . ./ Cut out the article. / Next carefully cut out each of the words that make up this article  /  and put all in a bag.  /  Shake gently.”5 More elaborately and laboriously systematic, Wilson reinvents Tzara’s cut-out strategy and radical iconoclasm in Of One Woman or So, by Olivia N’Gowfri. To make the novel, Wilson cut up A Room of One’s Own and reassembled every one of its 37,971 words and only those words the exact number of times Woolf used them. Instead of Tzara’s random grab-bag of words, Wilson’s cut-up words are re-ordered to tell a radical story about an initially lonely, then alienated, and finally really angry, mixed-race, queer scholarship girl at the University of Cambridge. Inspired by the revolutionary writings of Stokely Carmichael and H. Rapp Brown in the Black Power movement in the United States, Olivia starts multiple fires in five Cambridge libraries but stops just short of burning the manuscript of A Room of One’s Own. If she cuts it to pieces and re-orders it, she realizes, Woolf ’s essay can be remade to speak to the present and the future. In a riveting video interview conducted by postcolonial Caribbean scholar and fiction writer Malachi McIntosh and posted on YouTube, Wilson uses the contemporary discourses of environmentalist “recycling” and musical “re-mix” to

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imagine “what the present can be taught about the future by the thought of more than a century ago.”6 This recycling creates a contemporary version of Woolf ’s earlier project of revealing the political structures embedded in Oxbridge, the British Library, and English literary tradition. Wilson’s re-mix requires forays into the intellectual, literary, and material structures shaping Olivia’s life—the politics of race and class, as well as gender and sexuality. Recycling A Room involves, for Wilson, a mixing of Woolf ’s re-ordered text with yet other past texts, particularly those of diasporic West Indian and American writing about racism, including women like Toni Morrison, bell hooks, Octavia Butler, and Zadie Smith. Curiously, Wilson’s re-mix veers away from the tense racial environment most affecting Olivia’s life—the anti-immigrant movement catalyzed by Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968 and the Midlands “race riots” of the 1990s and early twenty-first century. Instead, he braids Woolf ’s attack on patriarchy with the Black Power movement’s calls for “Revolution” in the 1960s. This move overtly connects the poetics of recycling with a revolutionary demand for radical change, particularly in race relations. Instead of disordering the past, Wilson re-orders it for the future. What, Wilson’s cut-up experiment leads me to ask, is the significance of his backward glance toward early twentieth-century British modernism? What meanings for both contemporary aesthetics and politics might the wittily indirect A Room of One’s Own have, in spite of or even because of its limitations on issues of race, its reluctance to engage in direct anger and attack? Even more broadly, how might artists immersed in contemporaneity find a usable past as they look to the future? What might be the potential link between aesthetic recycling—the way all new art both engages with and departs from its precursors—and visions of radical political transformation?

RECYCLING, RE-MIX, REVOLUTION The words Wilson uses in the McIntosh interview to describe his project bear some reflection as indicators of his relationship to temporality. Take, for example, recycling, a relatively new English term that made its first appearance in 1925 in reference to the reuse of material in an industrial process to return it to a previous stage (OED). Soon recycling focused especially on waste, referring to the reclamation of waste into a usable form (OED). As usages proliferated in the twentieth century, recycle incorporated such meanings as to bring back, adapt to a new use, pass through a series of changes, return to an original condition so

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that operation can begin again, and so forth (OED). By the twenty-first century, recycling is ubiquitous in daily life among the environmentally conscious. It is also big business, and globally speaking an often tense political issue threatening the oceans, reflecting inequalities of wealth and power around the world. Above all, recycling has become a moral imperative in the age of climate change and fears about the earth’s future. As a process, recycling is something of a miracle: taking apart the old into its component parts enables the making of something new, making waste useful, wasting nothing. The processes differ. Sometimes, old paper just becomes new paper: a repetition of sorts, but in a new time/space, deployed for new uses. But sometimes, the old becomes fully new: a metamorphosis of sorts, like the transformation of plastic water bottles into polyester clothing. Recycling also partakes of creation, of making one thing out of other things: quilt designs made of used scraps; found art made of objects displaced or replaced anew; found poems made of words set in different spaces; re-mix made of prior musical tones and rhythms; art made of trash; use made of waste. Not creation ex nihilo: the creative act as a form of recycling implies a transformative, transactional relation between the old and the new. Cycle means to move in a circle; recycle means repeating that circle with a difference. The re- prefix also suggests a range of additional words, all of which involve some form of intertextual encounter, like reassemble. Trending in the contemporary period are repurposing and reversioning, both forms of revisting, with a difference. Or, to go back to a key feminist term of the 1970s, there’s re-vision, coined by Adrienne Rich in “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision” to advocate the seeing again that revises. To move beyond the reprefix, words like sampling, shuffling, and signifying on have common currency. All these terms emphasize how artists and writers are always already embedded in preexisting signifying systems, a phenomenon variously theorized as influence (Harold Bloom), heteroglossia (Mikhail Bakhtin), inter-textuality (Julia Kristeva; Roland Barthes), différance (Jacques Derrida), signifyin’ (Henry Louis Gates, Jr.). Recycling, I am suggesting, is a twenty-first-century addition to these terms. Creations of the new—even radically new—recycle the old, renewals with a difference. The more startling the difference, the more transformative the act of recycling appears to be, but recycling it remains, from trash to treat. Re-mix (sometimes spelled without the hyphen) is a word in contemporary popular music signifying a kind of recycling, a genre with its roots in Jamaican dance hall culture of the 1960s and now widespread in hip hop and rap music. The word first appears in print in 1969 (OED) and refers to “a new version of

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a recording in which the separate instrumental or vocal tracks are rebalanced or recombined” (OED). Increasingly, re-mix involves a “reinterpretation or reworking, often quite radical of an existing recording” (OED). Now a highly technical digital procedure, re-mixing reworks, revamps, and remakes prior musical forms into new ones: the new built digitally out of recombinations of old musical phrases and rhythms. Sampling and splicing are techniques that make the re-mix. Sampling involves lifting a portion of a prior tune or beat or song to place it into a new musical piece through splicing. The techniques of musical re-mix spread rapidly to other aesthetic forms— videos, photographs, paintings, poems, and so forth. Or, perhaps more precisely, forms of versionality long familiar in the arts often exist now under an umbrella concept of re-mixing. Since all creative forms are new arrangements of at least some preexisting forms, what distinguishes a re-mix is often its degree of selfconscious, or metafictional, awareness of its recycling of what’s come before to create something new. In one sense, Picasso’s Les demoiselles d’Avignon samples carved African masks, which he spliced atop the bodies of European nudes. In another sense, this iconic painting of early twentieth-century European modernism is a re-mix, carefully reproduced African masks altered by their radical juxtaposition to bodies painted in the conventions of the European nude. Contemporary digital forms of sampling or re-mix—visual, aural, kinetic, performative—often intensify and play off of some form of recycling. Samples or re-mixes assume a before and a now, a temporal recycling. But in the context of intensified global circulations of cultural forms, the re-mix and sample also contain a spatial displacement: the reuse of a cultural form from elsewhere into the here and now. Kabe Wilson dubs this spatial recycling: “(T)here” (Of One Woman 5). Re-mixes recycle artifacts in space along with time. Revolution. Today, the word primarily connotes its core contemporary meaning: “overthrow of an established government or social order by those previously subject to it” (OED). Change, upheaval, the OED pronounces, constitute revolution’s overarching meaning. But the history of English usage reflects its original meaning in Latin: revolution as rotation, a turnaround, in other words, a cycle. Revolution in English appears first in the fourteenth century from the French revolucion and signifies a turning, specifically a turning back, a returning, as in the revolution of the sun, moon, stars, and planets, as in a cycling through time and space: a rotation, repetition. By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the English usage of revolution broadened to include the notion of any recurrence of a point or period in time (OED). By the seventeenth century, especially after England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688, revolution had acquired a new meaning,

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the one we predominantly associate with it today: revolution as overthrow, as explosive change, as complete rupture. These are the meanings that took on added ideological, nationalist, and internationalist associations with the advent of revolutions from the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries in the Americas, Europe, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. In the 1960s and 1970s, in the United States and elsewhere, the discourses of revolution permeated the cultural, social, sexual, and political upheavals of the times, reflected in the marches and movements and in the popular music of the day—for example, the “Revolution” hits of the Beatles, Bob Marley, and Jimi Hendrix, among others. Revolution as radical change in every aspect of life spread, especially through mass culture. By the twenty-first century, the Digital Revolution signaled revolutionary changes in knowledge production and dissemination. The word revolution has repressed its earlier meanings of turning back to suggest a longing for and often dashed hopes of liberation, emancipation, change as freedom from the old, and then all too often, or in bleaker moments, like George Orwell in Animal Farm, the reassertion of the old political and social orders in new forms.7 Revolution as rupture and radical change from the past underpins many early twentieth-century avant-garde and manifesto modernisms—from futurism and vorticism, to Dadaism, and surrealism.8 “We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries!,” Filippo Tommaso Marinetti proclaimed in “The Futurist Manifesto” of 1909; “What is the use of looking behind at the moment when we must open the mysterious shutters of the impossible?” (22). Wyndham Lewis and the cosigners of Blast 1 answered in 1914: “We stand for the Reality of the Present—not for the sentimental Future, or the sacripant Past” (Blast 1 8). “Our vortex is not afraid of the Past: it has forgotten it’s existence” (Blast 1 147; sic). Later, in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” (1924), Woolf famously declared, “in or about December 1910 human character changed. .  .  . All human relations have shifted—those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change, there is at the same time a change in religion, conflict, politics, and literature” (319, 320). Cut off from the past, it was the age of the New Woman and then the New Negro in manifestos of the Harlem Renaissance. So insistent was the rejection of the immediate past—especially the Victorian Age—that Pound’s resonant book title Make It New (1934) was and continued to be misunderstood.9 Where he called for a return to the literatures of the distant past and faraway places, from medieval Provençal to ancient China, to “make it new,” his imperative became a rallying cry for the overthrow of the past, especially the immediate bourgeois past and the embrace of the new, the modern, the now. Revolution as rupture, not return.

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The revolutionary aesthetics of the early twentieth century reflect what Pericles Lewis calls “a crisis of representation” (3–10), one which for the modernists sought new forms of representation more suitable for the radical changes wrought by intensified industrialism, urbanization, technological innovation, colonialism, changing class, gender and race relations, and catastrophic war. Arguably, in the twenty-first century, the Digital Revolution and globalization on a new scale of interconnectivity have instituted a new crisis of representation suited to the newest scenarios of global chaos and radical change. Modernity, as a recurrent phenomenon rather than a singular event, requires perpetual renewals of representational aesthetics.10 Like recycling, recurrence suggests not absolute repetition, but repetition with a difference, with the creation of something new out of the old, with a deployment that is distinctive for its own time and place. For Kabe Wilson, the words recycling and re-mixing best capture his notion of the new as renew. What goes around comes around: turning back is the precursor for moving forward. The re-mix is, for Wilson, an aesthetic that begins in a revolution back as the first step in a revolution into new ways of being: revolution as cycling back, revolution as overthrow. The complex process of the re-mix brings into play the double meaning of revolution in Wilson’s temporal aesthetics. Revolutionary recycling involves re-, that is, again, backwards as the precondition for the formation of the new: that is, re-new.

RECYCLING A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN As with recycling in general, the process by which Wilson re-mixed A Room of One’s Own merits as much attention as its final product. In 2009, Wilson was inspired to select A Room of One’s Own for recycling after attending the “Rooms of Our Own: Three Centuries of Women’s Education” exhibition featuring the manuscript of A Room of One’s Own at Lucy Cavendish College, a women’s college founded in 1965 at the University of Cambridge. Of One Woman or So, by Olivia N’Gowfri was some five years in the making—impossible, Wilson explains in the interview, without twenty-first-century technologies: computers, digital resources, and technical collaborations which allowed him to ensure that he used every word and only every word in A Room of One’s Own the exact number of times Woolf used them, altering only some capitalization, punctuation, and font. Once he completed the novel in PDF form, Wilson turned it into an art installation in 2014. Literally cutting out each word of A Room of One’s Own,

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he glued them on the flat paper surface of a very large scroll in the order established by Of One Woman or So, by Olivia N’Gowfri. The full scroll has been displayed twice: first, as part of “The Dreadlock Hoax” performance, and then, on exhibition at the Bodleian Library of Oxford University in 2015.11 Unlike the novel, the art installation took a relatively short time to produce—about four to five weeks instead of five years. A close-up of one section visualizes the physicality of recycling. Resembling a mosaic, each cut-up word has a tactile materiality with spaces separating it from other words—completely unlike the flow of printed text. Wilson’s refusal to publish the novel in print form perhaps signals the fluidity of his multiform productions. The novel-in-print would belie the physical evidence of its recycling and its simultaneous existence as performance, art installation, and fiction—all three ghosted in different ways by A Room of One’s Own (Figure 1.1).12

Figure 1.1  Kabe Wilson. Page from Of One Woman or So, by Olivia N’Gowfri.

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More than the cleverness of the “cut-up” novel technique went into Wilson’s laborious project, however. In the interview, Wilson recalls that he had been a fan of Woolf ’s since high school and that through his Cambridge years, he retained a “great affection” for her work. But he also wanted to bring out a certain critical “tension” as well, one based around issues of race and class. His recycling of A Room began in some sense, he notes in the interview, with one of Woolf ’s throwaway sentences: “It is one of the great advantages of being a woman that one can pass even a very fine negress without wishing to make an Englishman of her” (Room 50). For Wilson, the underdevelopment of Woolf ’s “very fine negress” served as the genesis of his novel.13 The phrase became the wedge that broke open A Room of One’s Own to renew it for the twenty-first century. In what he calls his “collaboration” with Woolf, Wilson developed the storyline of his novel by beginning at the level of words rather than plot or theme. Unlike Tzara’s arbitrary “shake up” of cut words, Wilson rebuilt Woolf ’s text with purposeful attention to the social and political philology of language. Rereading A Room of One’s Own, he first made a list of particularly interesting or unusual words—like negress, coffee-coloured, curly haired. Then he reviewed that list to locate words that might mean something quite different in a contemporary context. Shade, for example, signifies Olivia’s color. Jerk appears in Woolf ’s text in reference to Charlotte Brontë’s anger in Jane Eyre (Room 69) and reappears in the novel as the “jerk chicken and sweet potatoes” found in the Caribbean food of South London (46). The word said becomes Said, an allusion to Edward Said, postcolonial studies, and his famous critique of Jane Austen (Of One Woman 24). Names like Henry James and Mary Carmichael in A Room got “shuffled,” one of Wilson’s synonyms for recycling, and came out as the two Trinidadian writers and Pan-Africanists, C. L. R. James and Stokely Carmichael. Black occurs nine times in A Room, Wilson explains in the interview, but he didn’t waste the word by leaving Woolf ’s black coat intact. Instead, he conjoined black with power to recycle these words into something new: Black Power. These new combinations of Woolf ’s words and the associations they spawned suggested the outlines of the novel’s plot. Structurally speaking, Of One Woman or So, by Olivia N’Gowfri has six chapters that uncannily ghost the six chapters of A Room of One’s Own.14 Olivia is the presumed author of the novel we read, just as Woolf is the creator of the lecture she gives, although the frame narratives differ and Wilson’s play with protagonist pronouns is more complex. Like A Room, Wilson’s first two chapters establish the institutional and ideological power that Oxbridge represents. Woolf ’s Chapter 3 features the fiction of Judith Shakespeare; Chapter 4 is

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her account of her lineage of literary mothers, ending with Charlotte Brontë; Chapter 5 focuses on the fictionalized “modern” writer Mary Carmichael and the gender differences produced by historical conditions; Chapter 6 moves beyond male/female differences to argue for androgyny as essential for creative genius. Roughly parallel to A Room, Wilson’s Chapter 3 recounts Olivia’s ambivalence toward her literary foremothers, including prominently Brontë and Woolf herself; Chapter 4 centers on the Shakespeare Society meeting featuring a review of literary history; Chapter 5 narrates Olivia’s affirmation of her racial difference and decision to burn University libraries; Chapter 6 narrates Olivia’s arson and final decision to re-order Woolf ’s words. Wilson’s recycling of A Room is a fictionalized account of the institutional and ideological exclusions represented by Oxbridge and literary tradition more generally. Olivia’s rage at the system, insistence on her difference, and ultimate recognition of a way to recycle the past for the future roughly parallels while it corrects Woolf ’s more muted, fictionalized journey in A Room of One’s Own from coded anger at patriarchy to androgynous reconciliation of sexual difference. Lastly, the novel’s title page—Of One Woman or So, by Olivia N’Gowfri—is an anagram of “A Room of One’s Own, by Virginia Woolf,” mixing up Woolf ’s letters to skew the by-now tropic status of a room of one’s own, thereby putting the emphasis on an indeterminate woman instead of a room. The author’s name— Olivia N’Gowfri—is ambiguously part of the novel’s title and creolizes the Shakespearean name “Olivia” with a vaguely African-looking name, “N’Gowfri.” “Refresh from the word. Go,” the narrator tells us in the prologue, dated October 26, the same date Woolf provides for her fictional lecture in A Room of One’s Own (One Woman 2; Room 94).

RE-MIXING FEMINISM, QUEERING MARY CARMICHAEL How does Wilson’s novel “refresh” Woolf ’s feminism as he re-mixes A Room of One’s Own? Woolf ’s excursion through the literary history of English women writers, starting with her fiction of Shakespeare’s sister, ends in Chapter 5 with another fiction, Mary Carmichael, the modern author of Life’s Adventure, published in 1928. Proleptically anticipating Of One Woman or So, by Olivia N’Gowfri, Mary Carmichael is “tampering with the expected sequence. First she broke the sentence; now she has broken the sequence” (Room 80). Mirroring the broken sentences and sequence, Woolf ’s account of Life’s Adventures is full of

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erotic innuendo embedded in elaborate play with ellipses, broken rhythms, and coy address to her audience: I turned the page and read… I am sorry to break off so abruptly. Are there no men present? Do you promise me that behind that red curtain over there the figure of Sir Chartres Biron is not concealed? We are all women, you assure me? Then I may tell you that the very next words I read were these—“Chloe liked Olivia…” Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women. (Room 80–81, ellipses in original)

Woolf ’s allusion to Sir Chartres Biron, the magistrate in the obscenity trial for Radcliffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness in November of 1928, makes clear the necessity for writers in Woolf ’s time to encode forbidden desires while remaining closeted in the public eye, if not in private circles. It would seem, therefore, that Wilson’s queering of Mary Carmichael would reside in making Olivia openly lesbian. In Olivia’s Cambridge, being queer is not a crime. While her gay friend Oscar Browning faces the threat of disinheritance for his sexuality, he is fully accepted at Cambridge, evident especially with his coveted membership in the Shakespeare Society, where Olivia hopes to gain acceptance in Chapter 4.15 Without signs of anxiety, Olivia is uncomplicatedly queer. Her thoughts and unfulfilled desires frequently stray to a fellow student, Mary Jane, who unfortunately for Olivia seems more attracted to Chloe. However, Olivia’s story is a well of loneliness of sorts, not one based on issues of sexual desire, but rather on race and class. Wilson’s queering of A Room of One’s Own centers not on sexuality but on ellipses in Woolf ’s text of race and class privilege. These gaps in A Room and at the University where Olivia is a mixed-race, scholarship student, leave her isolated, alienated, eventually humiliated, and ultimately enraged. The feminism Olivia finds in A Room of One’s Own is one to which she cannot relate for two reasons. First, Olivia finds Woolf ’s feminism insufficiently angry, echoing without naming Adrienne Rich’s insistence that “we need to go through that anger, and we will betray our own reality if we try, as Virginia Woolf was trying, for an objectivity, a detachment, that would make us sound more like Jane Austen or Shakespeare” (50). Second, A Room of One’s Own is, in the lingo of contemporary feminist theory, insufficiently “intersectional,” that is, it doesn’t reflect the mediations of gender by other systems of oppression, such as race, class, colonialism, and so on.16 The feminism of Of One Woman or So, by Olivia N’Gowfri, in contrast, is openly angry and is infused with Olivia’s experiences as racially different, as a scholarship student who must serve her more privileged

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co-students working at tables and shelving books in the library to supplement her scholarship. Increasingly, she feels like she doesn’t belong in Oxbridge, this world of privilege where she thinks that others look down on her because she has to work. “Working here, for money,” she imagines other students thinking about her; “We are not meant to, she must be very very poor” (9). Woven into Olivia’s isolating experiences are repeated scenes of reading, above all, reading A Room of One’s Own for the first time and then seeing the actual manuscript at the exhibition “Rooms of Our Own,” at Lucy Cavendish College. Austen’s Emma bores her, while A Room of One’s Own annoys her. Why, she wonders, couldn’t she be studying The Wire, the HBO series on race, class, and crime in Baltimore, or the contemporary films Do the Right Thing or Higher Learning, both of which focus on “the young, and the living” in the context of race, gender, and class (17)? Reading A Room of One’s Own only confirms her alienation. She doesn’t like Woolf ’s adulation of Shakespeare, she doesn’t like her emphasis on money, she doesn’t like her attack on women’s anger, and she wants Woolf to be harsher toward men’s misogyny. She also doesn’t like Woolf ’s reference to “civilizing natives” (34). “‘Civilizing natives,’” she thinks, “was very awkward. 1928, but even so. And the ‘man with curly hair.’ Not so long ago to say that like that… As an Englishwoman. And so, out of date. 1928. Would be discreditable now, ‘you shall not draw comparisons between race and sex’ Bell’s hook, Heroic bell, whose work has more conviction” (34; ellipsis in original). Woolf ’s iconic image of androgyny—the woman in patent leather boots and the man in a maroon overcoat getting into a taxi (Room 95)—also seems out of date to Olivia: “…Androgynous as ‘androgynous’ is thought of these days?... No, not queer” (45; ellipses in original.). This “[either ‘man-womanly’ or ‘womanmanly’]” is “[-before queer theory questioned essential sex labels]” (45; brackets in original.). Woolf ’s problem here is that she “only thinks in terms of sex… Chloe and Olivia, women of shorter hair, yet certainly women of England. No thought to the Other women. 1928…” (46; ellipses in original.). “Queer” in Olivia’s world doesn’t forget “other” women, women like Zadie Smith, whose On Beauty is “half and half and blends them” (46). Her queer includes “An Other great man, and hair that could measure to Shakespeare’s… Were his locks androgynous?” she asks, linking Shakespeare with Bob Marley, Marley’s “No woman, no cry…” from his Natty Dread album of 1974, and her own curly hair (46; ellipses in original). As a measure of her self-consciousness about fitting in, earlier in the day, “She passed a window and wondered at the tone of her skin” (7). Mixed gender is inseparable for Olivia from mixed-race.

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Queering Woolf ’s feminism resides not only in Olivia’s anger that Woolf leaves out racial and class Others in A Room of One’s Own17 but also in Olivia’s anxious self-critique. “Perhaps,” she worries, I am “more like them than I thought. . . . Aspiring to end up in power. Or with it. With ease. . . . One more woman of note from the factory of famous men. . . . Not a real feminist” (12). She worries that “I set myself apart when I chose to join the world of distinctions, in which we are graded against each other and encouraged to think we are infinitely superior to any other” (12). What bothers her, what betrays feminism in her view, is her sense that she has been taken in by the “logic of masculinity, for men, by men. To breed ‘Great Men.’ And I, one of a hundred or so—advantages I do not need from those I do not like, and I become part of the problem, for women. Leaping through any glass ceiling to spend my time talking to men with power” (12–13).18 Woolf ’s fictional Fernham, the women’s college at Oxbridge whose difference Woolf idealizes, appears to Olivia merely as a separatist site of class privilege, “Lady among Lady,” “making themselves the schoolmasters of women. .  .  . Copying the men like Professor John Wild rather than opposing their values” (50). Olivia can only value the feminism in A Room by historicizing it, which “allowed her to feel warmer towards the book. As a moment in women’s history there was no question of its resonant importance” (48). And then seeing Woolf ’s actual manuscript—“a beautifully made notebook, browning with age” (51) at Lucy Cavendish College tempers her negative reaction to Woolf just a bit. But only a bit. And yet, for all her alienation and sharp critique, Olivia longs to belong. After all, she loves books; she loves to read: “I am in comfort. Among books. Which are sometimes good” (13). She has, after all, earned her scholarship with intelligence and drive. When the door to belonging opens a crack—through the elaborate game Oscar Browning sets up19—she rushes through it, hoping for acceptance at what she eventually learns is the secretive Shakespeare Society. Olivia is nervously excited and cautiously confident about what she will face at the Society, where she knows that acceptance depends upon her knowledge of literary tradition and the quickness of her wit: “Because witticisms do it for me. Have to have your wits about you, and presumably they are wits of literature. As I am, reputed for it. So, any reason for nerves? .../ Probably” (52; ellipsis in original). Olivia is right to be nervous, but not for the reason she anticipated. The evening is disastrous for her, though it begins well. The roomful of members all wear a mask of Shakespeare’s face with the name of a famous writer or

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character written upon it. To become a member, she must play the game “Word,” in which masked figures will challenge her with a line appropriate to their author or character, to which she will have half a minute to respond “whimsically, wonderfully, witty, and quick” (54). After a hesitant start, Olivia holds her own, matching wit for wit, appropriate to the panoply of writers and characters, and even surpasses them by showing up their ignorance of writers like Morrison and Rushdie. But disaster strikes when Browning alludes first to poverty, then to the Chinese swarming the globe, and finally to Othello.20 Olivia is silently wondering “Why is that necessary” when Browning turns directly personal, echoing Iago’s iconic reference to Othello and Desdemona having sex. On the subject of beasts, your mother liked making them with two backs. Once you have one, you always want more. Moreover, married and killed at your father’s hands, little wonder you are anxious, child of a broken home. You should be winding down with some wine. (87–88)

Hailed into a black identity in the Althussarian sense, Olivia hears some participants jeering and Browning’s final taunt: “Come on, calm down. Or do you need grass, negress?” (88). Here, finally, is Woolf ’s word negress with which Wilson began constructing the novel. The impact on Olivia is profound. At first struck dumb, she “dashed for the door” and fled. Significantly, “There were no attempts to stop her” (88). Queering Woolf ’s feminism in Of One Woman or So, by Olivia N’Gowfri involves exposing the hidden racism that underlies Oxbridge. For all its leftist attempts at inclusion, the University can’t forget Olivia’s race, and in the hateful figure of Browning can’t help but remind her of being a “negress” in the most vicious and personalistic way. In the guise of a game, Browning’s public humiliation of Olivia hammers home that she does not and can never really belong. That no one comes to her defense emphasizes her fundamental exclusion. The women’s-only space within Oxbridge—Woolf ’s fantasy of Fernham, “the refuge of women among women” (117)—is no solution, Olivia decides (117). The first book she burns is Nigel Watson’s The Opportunity to Be Myself: A History of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge (116). A feminism that addresses only the oppression of women is a feminism to which Olivia cannot belong. Wilson’s re-mix of Woolf ’s feminism recapitulates the insistence by feminists of color—many of whom Olivia alludes to admiringly—that feminism must incorporate the differences among women by race, class, and the histories of colonialism and enslavement.

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REVOLUTION: SAMPLING BLACK POWER Queering Mary Carmichael involves splicing the issue of race represented in the writings of C.  L.  R.  James (1901–89), Stokely Carmichael (1941–98), and H. Rap Brown (1943–) into the re-mix of A Room of One’s Own. Discovering their books in the University Library transforms Olivia’s humiliation into revolutionary anger and convinces her that any attempt to assimilate into the world of Oxbridge represents a violation of her very being. The word revolution, Olivia discovers in the books of these men, does not signify a turning back, but rather the determination to overthrow the past and bring about a new, more just future, one in which black people can take their rightful place. Where Woolf ’s Chapter 5 affirms a historically produced gender difference in women’s fiction, Wilson’s Chapter 5 asserts a historically produced racial difference and the vision of Black Power. Her decision to burn the books that maintain Oxbridge is, in her mind, her contemporary contribution to a Black Power revolution in the 1960s in the United States and the larger Pan-African revolutionary movement. Significantly, Olivia’s job shelving books leads to her discovery of Black Power in books that allow her to claim a black identity without humiliation. By chance, she finds James’s Letters from London, a collection of his dispatches to Trinidad’s Port of Spain Gazette, written during his first visit to Britain in 1932. Chapter 1 concludes with James’s reflection on the loneliness of Bloomsbury rooming house existence, perhaps itself a re-mix of A Room: “But whatever you do the loneliness of the room is dreadful. When you lock the door you are in a world of your own” (Letters 62; Of One Woman 14). James’s six London letters chart a psychological journey that anticipates Olivia’s own. At first, his letters recount in the seductions of Bloomsbury’s mix of intense intellectualism and aesthetic ferment. But the stimulations of nonstop, all-night sessions give way to the loneliness he expresses in “The Houses.” His letters on “The Men” and “The Women” deal directly with white male racial prejudice and the “modern” women’s attraction to black men. His ironically titled final letter “The Nucleus of a Great Civilization” records his disillusionment with Bloomsbury and his decision to join his friend, the cricket star, in the Midlands, where he admires the down-to-earth working-class people who are on strike. His experience speaks directly to Olivia’s own initial attraction to and alienation from Oxbridge’s racism and classism. In The C. L. R. James Reader, Olivia is inspired by James’s lifelong advocacy of revolution and his 1967 essay “Black Power,” extolling Stokely Carmichael and leading her to the works of H. Rapp Brown.21 She finds in their work what was missing in her earlier reading of Austen, Shakespeare, Brontë: above all, a sense

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of belonging, of dignity, and a pathway to rebellion—all the things denied to her at the Shakespeare Society meeting and more broadly at Oxbridge itself. Also, the fact that both men were involved in demonstrations in Cambridge, Maryland, is a heavily weighted coincidence for Olivia, caught up in her own Cambridge suffering. Their lives and ideas are recycled into ways of understanding her own life and what she should do. There is no revolution to join, but Olivia’s re-mix of their writings creates her as a one-woman revolutionary. Carmichael and Brown were charismatic leaders of a diverse and conflictridden Black Power movement in the United States that existed within an even broader span of political activism focused especially on issues of race, but incorporating poverty, war, and to some extent gender. Emerging out of decades of black emancipation efforts, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X are often stereotypically (and inaccurately) set up as the oppositional poles in the movement (integrationist vs. black nationalist), as they are in the movie Olivia mentions, Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. Within that spectrum, Carmichael and Brown agreed by the mid-1960s that Black Power involved rejecting King’s goal of integration, tactic of nonviolence, and multiracial coalition. Instead, they advocated a revolution that black people alone would achieve for themselves. “The concept of Black Power,” as Carmichael defined it in Black Power (1967, written jointly with Charles Hamilton), “rests on a fundamental premise: Before a group can enter the open society, it must first close ranks. . . . The point is obvious: black people must lead and run their own organizations. Only black people can convey the revolutionary idea—and it is a revolutionary idea—that black people are able to do things themselves” (46). Olivia is particularly fascinated with Carmichael’s own life story, recounted in Ready for Revolution, because of its resonance with her own. As an immigrant from Trinidad, Carmichael was a brilliant student who tested into the prestigious Bronx High School of Science, graduated from Howard University in 1965, and was offered a scholarship at Harvard in Philosophy. But here, their lives diverged. As a college student, Carmichael had joined the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and gone on the summer Freedom Rides for voter registration in 1961–64. Carmichael was deeply disillusioned with nonviolent tactics after he was hit by tear gas and hospitalized at a demonstration in Cambridge, Maryland, in 1964 (Of One Woman 111–12). As Olivia herself notes (Of One Woman 2), he turned down Harvard’s offer to devote himself to political activism. As chairman of SNCC, he led the expulsion of white people from the organization in 1966 and then became honorary prime minister of the Black Panther Party in 1968, when he emigrated to Guinea to devote himself

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to All-African People’s Revolutionary Party.22 Black Power attacks King’s civil rights movement, rejects the “goals of integrationists” as “middle-class goals, articulated primarily by a small group of Negroes with middle class aspirations or status” (53), predicts that the ghettos of the north constitute “dynamite” ready to explode, rejects coalitional politics, and concludes: “It is difficult, if not impossible, for white America, or for those blacks who want to be like white America, to understand this basically revolutionary mentality” (184–85). Olivia’s attraction to H. Rap Brown is different. She admires Carmichael’s intellect and cogent passion; she loves his use of Humpty Dumpty’s explanation of the power of words in Alice in Wonderland: “‘When I use a word . . . it means just what I choose it to mean.’ .  .  . ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’ ‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master—that’s all’” (Black Power 36; Of One Woman 98–99). Carmichael’s recognition of how words are central to the “creation of oppression” rings so true in the context of the Shakespeare Society’s hurtful game of Word (Of One Woman 99). But Brown’s book is more personal, more fiery than Black Power. Unlike Carmichael’s writing, his “style was very different. . . . It was the poetry of the street. Men were ‘cats’ and ‘brothers,’ he cursed made ambitious claims without facts” (Of One Woman 119). A Southerner born in Louisiana, Brown was also very intelligent, starting college at age fifteen, but he was impatient with school, in and out of trouble. “All educational systems are propaganda machines, but for Black people, the American educational system is a propaganda machine we don’t need. . . . It makes us hate ourselves. . . . I saw no sense in reading Shakespeare. After I read Othello, it was obvious that Shakespeare was a racist. From reading his poetry, I gathered that he was a faggot” (21). Olivia is uncomfortable with Brown’s homophobia (121) and dismissal of Shakespeare’s poetry (126), but his rap against Othello eases the pain of her humiliation at the Shakespeare Society (121). Reading his account of playing the Dozens gives Olivia a new way to understand her own love of language games (Die 26–31; One Woman 119). “We played the Dozens for recreation,” he explains, “like white folks play Scrabble.” He recognizes that “the Dozens is a mean game because what you try to do is totally destroy somebody else with words. . . . It was a bad scene for the dude that was getting humiliated” (26). But he “seldom was. That’s why they call me Rap” (26–27). He prefers what he calls “signifying,” as a “more humane” word game that allows a choice—“you could either make a cat feel good or bad” (29). In this context, the Shakespeare Society’s game of Word is an Oxbridge form of playing the mean Dozens, in which Olivia alone was the butt of others’ drive to humiliate.

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Like Carmichael, Brown rejected entirely the aspirations of blacks to join the middle class, to assimilate. He terms these people “negroes,” because they call blacks who refuse to assimilate “niggers” (Introduction, n.p.). Olivia is shocked by his use of the forbidden term and by his condemnation of “negroes,” who “have wished death to all Blacks, to all niggers.” For “negroes,” as for whites, the sentiment is “Die Nigger Die!” (Introduction, n.p.; Of One Woman 112). In the mirror of Brown’s book, Olivia worries that she, in hoping to join the Shakespeare Society, is no better than the people he condemns. Where she has no courage, Brown is a rabble rouser, unafraid to lead. A demonstration in Cambridge, Maryland—again, the coincidence of Cambridge—was the scene of his first major run-in with the law, in July 1967, the year he succeeded Carmichael as chairman of SNCC. He famously stood up on top of a car to exhort the growing crowds to revolution: “If America don’t come around, we’re gonna burn it down” (Carson 1), a rallying cry that some prior reader of the book altered to read, “If Cambridge won’t come round we got to burn it down!” (Of One Woman 113). “It was not hard to see how,” Olivia thinks, how he could “rouse” people and “drive them to exercise their anger” (119). After the rioting results in burned stores and elementary schools, he is arrested for causing a riot, and as his book recounts in some detail, he spent years in and out of trouble with the law, often defended by William Kunstler. The book ends with his impassioned “Letters from Jail,” calling for Black Power, for revolution.23 The very word revolution conjures violence—the violence needed to resist oppression or overthrow the repressive state, the violence of the state in crushing rebellion. Olivia’s attraction to Black Power and Die Nigger Die! draws her into the vortex of violence in a seduction that Wilson claims in the McIntosh interview represents a satire on the excesses of Black Power. As chairmen of SNCC, Carmichael and Brown shifted the organization’s earlier nonviolent orientation influenced by King toward advocacy of violence as self-defense in the face of white violence against blacks and the violence of the state more generally. Echoing Malcolm X’s famous line in a 1964 speech, Black Power ends with a call for a “revolutionary mentality” among black people everywhere: “They will not be stopped in their drive to achieve dignity, to achieve their share of power, indeed, to become their own men and women—in this time and in this land—by whatever means necessary” (185; emphasis added).24 Brown’s allusions to violence are less systemic and more personal, filled with references to his trust in guns. “Ever since Ed and I have been active in the Movement,” he writes, “we’ve always carried our guns. I’ve always had the utmost confidence in me and the gun. Give me a gun before you even give me somebody to work with. A gun

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won’t fail you. People will” (81). “Violence,” he claims, “is as American as cherry pie,” justifying black self-defense. But in his Cambridge speech atop the car, he is said to have proclaimed: “Don’t be trying to love that honkey to death. . . . Shoot him to death. Shoot him to death, brother, because that’s what he is out to do to you. Do to him like he would do to you, but do it to him first” (Carson 3). The violence implicit in the word revolution itself and increasingly a part of the Black Power movement brings Olivia to a crossroads, one consonant with key debates in the civil rights movement more generally. On the one hand, about Brown, she feels “a dislike for his views on the uses of violence and his tendency to judge human beings separately” (121). What did the Cambridge riots accomplish? They were “futile. Nothing was redeemed. . . . Nobody likes watching pictures of smouldering elementary schools on the news” (113). But on the other hand, she fears that she embodies the very kind of assimilationist “negro” that the two revolutionaries despise, “without integrity. Wanting to be the odd one in” (91). Their affirmation of black dignity and power is salve to her humiliation, a pathway for her anger, an inspiration to resistance. After much wavering, she chooses her own form of rebellion: to attack as a lone revolutionary the seat of the knowledge embedded in books that sustain the power of Oxbridge and the elites it educates. “Freedom of the mind,” she thinks, “is impossible when the mind has been developed into a shade against its will. Which all have” (113). She determines to destroy “the discourse industry,” the “Heart of the thought business” (114). Reading fiction, she decides, is especially “useless.” Literature “is a theatre to contain women, it holds them to the impediment of their ‘sex.’ And shade…” (106; ellipsis in original.). The libraries containing literature have become her enemy: “I sometimes picture heaven as a library. That illusion has vanished” (115). Adapting Brown’s famous exhortation to burn down America, she determines to burn books in Cambridge libraries, significantly, not people: “knowledge obliterated at its root” (114). To emphasize her action as a defense of the “hundred thousand women” who cannot attend Cambridge, she will start her fires by burning Watson’s History of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge and the manuscript of A Room of One’s Own at the college’s exhibit (116–17). Setting the fire at Newnham burned a “sanctuary for women of money,” one which “is unprofitable to the library of all women” (128). As much as she is uncomfortable with the sexism in the Black Power movement, “These two men”—Carmichael and Brown—“encourage what I must do. And their presence will remind me that not all men are patriarchs” (166). Olivia’s repudiation of—her revolution against—A Room of One’s Own seems complete.

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RE-ORDERING A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN Olivia’s careful plotting to set fires in five of Cambridge’s many libraries, including the huge phallic structure of University Library, with its millions of books (built after A Room of One’s Own appeared), plays with fire in another sense. Book burnings have a long history of state and mob violence threatening both knowledge and vulnerable people, most recently the Nazi burning of Jewish books in 1933 and al-Qaeda’s burning of Timbuktu’s ancient Islamic texts in 2013. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury’s dystopia of burning books (1953), hovers in the background of Olivia’s decision. Destroying knowledge, even knowledge that oppresses, threatens freedom of thought. However, Olivia believes that in burning books, especially A Room of One’s Own, she will succeed in burning her bridges into the elite world Oxbridge represents. “I must set light to the original,” she thinks, “that life manual of Our Own. Because that woman is not my hero. . . . Which is why I embark alone. I, the Woman of October. Summoning the courage to complete a war against fiction, for a hundred thousand women, or so, by an army of one woman, or so. Or so … I had my help. Two men” (130; second ellipsis in original). Olivia’s revolutionary burnings come to an abrupt halt when she actually picks up Woolf ’s manuscript, only to see her flame mysteriously go out. She determines to tear up the manuscript: “But she could not do it” (131). The actual feel of the old manuscript in her hands sets in motion a new train of thought, one that returns to the original meaning of the word revolution, a turning back as precondition to moving forward. A Room of One’s Own, Olivia realizes, “had asked questions that she had had to answer herself, as those of the writer had been inadequate. Its value was its inquiry, not its conclusion” (131). Rejecting Carmichael and Brown’s racial separatism, Olivia instead thinks: “The words were right, they were just in the wrong order.” (131). She will re-mix A Room to make “the right words in the right order” (131). She still believes that A Room “is not poetry. Or truth as I know it… But, it could be… If I were to mend it… Cut it up and put them in a different order… Tampering with the shape of what there is. If the trouble is not with words but with their use” (131; ellipses in original.). Olivia articulates the poetics that govern the novel of which she is the protagonist. The new, Olivia thinks, is remade from the old: “I will give her another go… I will write her again. For the new now” (131; ellipsis in original.). This is the “New Word Order,” she says, a re-mix of the old into a new world order. These reflections give Olivia a new way to say her name: Olivia N’Gowfri— the anagram of Virginia Woolf—becomes “I-live-here, an’-go-free-”; her book, a

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“memoir of a fortnight, An Olivia of My Own” (132). In the end, she recognizes that the letters of her memoir are “Our letters.” They are “by Olivia and…” (132, ellipsis in original). The unnamed Woolf is Olivia’s interlocutor, the one with whom she shares words—cut up in pieces and re-ordered, but nonetheless shared in a cycle of ends and beginnings.

ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL: A CONCLUSION In saving the manuscript of A Room of One’s Own, Olivia has radically revised her relation to past knowledge, but only after she has lit the fires in Cambridge’s libraries. What is her future fate, as arsonist of books? The sirens are wailing, on her trail even as she lays low in hopes of eventual escape. Will she flee the country like Carmichael or end up in prison like Brown? In the novel’s prologue, the narrator (perhaps a persona of Olivia or even Wilson) tells us that Olivia has been identified as the culprit but remains at large, having taken with her and then abandoned Woolf ’s manuscript and Die Nigger Die! (4). Leaving us in suspense, the novel ends with Olivia’s fragmentary thoughts on her “sequel.” A line from Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well encapsulates her poetics of a seasonally inflected, revolutionary recycling: Because we share them, and write the sequel together in conciliation, once morning has broken… Autumn into spring… …I had to. But this is not the end. The very beginning… * “that can such sweet use make of what they hate.” —William Shakespeare (135; ellipses in original.)

“Fantastic,” as in fantasy: Of One Woman or So, by Olivia N’Gowfri is not a realist novel, not even a stand-alone novel; rather it is a manifesto for the revolutionary function of fantasy, of the imagination as it engages with the past, present, and future. Of One Woman or So, by Olivia N’Gowfri exists as an aesthetic space apart, a realm of the comedic imagination, where the extremes of rage, rebellion, and reconciliation play out without setting actual fires. Wilson’s fantasy of Olivia’s Cambridge and her revolutionary resistance to it is akin to a Shakespearean Green World, a forest of Arden where the social order is topsy-turvy as a precursor to a newly refreshed social order, where all’s well that ends well. Instead of a forest, however, Wilson’s space apart is the “discourse industry,” the libraries and

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classrooms of Cambridge, where Olivia dismantles the social order she has been given and imaginatively—fantastically—re-orders it for the future. In “A New World to Build,” a speech delivered in 1968, Carmichael defends the need for colonized people to have “entertainment,” by which he means the need to say “We’re going to burn this city down. We can get Whitey, He ain’t that bad” (Stokely Speaks 146). It’s the speech that’s important, not the action, “because, for the first time, we are publicly saying what we always privately felt but were afraid to say. And while we’re saying it—even though we’re not powerful enough to do what we say—it’s a short of catharsis” (146). Olivia’s re-ordering of A Room of One’s Own performs just such a catharsis. To act on behalf of “the hundred thousand women,” Olivia must play out into its extreme form the significance to feminism of racism and revolutionary resistance that Black Power represents. The feminism of A Room of One’s Own is insufficient for the twenty-first century and must be re-mixed with the Black Power writings of James, Carmichael, and Brown. Inspired by their Black Power vision, the novel’s fantastical fires allow for the full expression of anger in the realm of fiction. Olivia’s decision to “refresh” A Room of One’s Own instead of burning it represents the afterlife of catharsis, the reconciliation of the old feminism with the new through the poetics of recycling that integrates race and class into the attack on patriarchy. Wilson’s comedic reversal of the Dreadnought Hoax in his performance of “The Dreadlock Hoax,” his installation of A Room of One’s Own cut-up, re-ordered, and glued in a mosaic of words on a scroll, and the fantastic fiction of Olivia’s liberating October all build on the subterranean meaning of revolution: that is, a turning back to move into the future. As Kabe Wilson himself writes about revolution-as-turning, “‘revolving’ is a fantastic word to anchor it all around, it’s such a beautiful image, the embrace of being dizzy, of going backwards as well as forwards and not needing to know exactly when and where we are at every moment.”25 To ask, as Woolf does in “Craftsmanship,” “how can we combine the old words in new orders,” becomes for Wilson a question of how the present relates to the past for the sake of the future.

NOTES 1 Woolf, “Craftsmanship,” 198. 2 Wilson, Of One Woman or So, by Olivia N’Gowfri, 95. I am deeply grateful to Kabe Wilson for providing me with the unpublished PDF of his novel, for links related to “The Dreadlock Hoax,” and for his responses to earlier versions of this essay.

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All quotations from the novel are used with his permission. I am also grateful to Susan David Bernstein and Margaret Homans for their astute comments. 3 An audio recording of the performance is available at www.dreadlockhoax.co.ak; see Flood and Marosevic. What appear to be grammatical errors in the printed text result from restricting himself to use only Woolf ’s words. Virginia Stephen lived at 46 Gordon Square with Thoby, Vanessa, and Adrian from 1904–07. 4 The intent of the hoax appears to have been a prank, not political satire, as detailed in Hermione Lee’s Virginia Woolf (278–83). But its effect was a public humiliation of the British navy, much lampooned in the press. 5 William S. Burroughs is also widely known for his cut-up novels in the 1950s and 1960s, especially The Soft Machine, in which he re-ordered words from his own earlier work. 6 I am grateful to McIntosh for this interview and for putting me in touch with Wilson; see also McIntosh, “Re-writing Virginia Woolf ”; Duncan; Flood; Megill; Marosevic. 7 Edward Friedman blended the earlier with the later meanings of revolution in “Revolution: Just Another Bloody Cycle?” (1970) and Backward toward Revolution (1974), both lasting influences on me. 8 For links between revolutionary sensibilities and the manifesto forms, see for example Lyon, Puchner, and Caws. 9 See Eric Hayot’s discussion of Pound’s concept of “make it new.” 10 In Planetary Modernisms I discuss recurrence, along with polycentricity and multiplicity, as defining features of modernity understood in the longue durée of history (esp. 47–182). 11 Wilson notes that his appearance in drag at “The Dreadlock Hoax” on May 19, 2014, was preceded by a viewing of the scroll; an earlier version of the scroll was on display at a modernism conference (email to author, November 16, 2017). See Duncan for an account of the exhibit at the Special Collections of the Weston Library of the Bodleian at the University of Oxford, in 2015. 12 Kabe Wilson initially hoped to publish Of One Woman or So, by Olivia N’Gowfri as a novel but decided against doing so as a way of affirming that he was an artist, not a novelist (email to author, November 16, 2017). But he has been generous in providing people with a PDF of the novel, along with permission to use it in their classrooms and research. 13 See the McIntosh interview for Wilson’s discussion of this origin point for his novel and his interest in Jane Marcus’s “A Very Fine Negress.” He also notes his awareness of Alice Walker’s bracketed insertions into Woolf ’s description of Shakespeare’s sister in “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens”: “Virginia Woolf wrote further . . . that ‘any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century [insert “eighteenth century, insert “black woman,” insert “born or made a slave”] would certainly have gone crazed. . .’” (Walker 235).

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14 The lectures that Woolf gave at Newham and Girton, the two women’s colleges of the University of Cambridge, in October 1928, form the basis for the fictionalized narrative in A Room of One’s Own and the radically revised published text, which appeared in 1929. See Rosenbaum, Women & Fiction: The Manuscript Versions. 15 Olivia’s friend Oscar recycles Woolf ’s allusion in A Room to Oscar Browning, a wellknown fellow at King’s College, Cambridge, and a homosexual whose misogyny Woolf satirized (Room 29, 53–55). See Jane Marcus, “Sapphistry” for discussion of Woolf ’s attack on the gay misogyny of Browning and Oxbridge. 16 Coined by black feminist lawyer Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, the term intersectionality is currently foundational and much debated in gender and feminist studies; see for example Lykke and Hawkesworth. As a term, it has also migrated widely into much contemporary cultural and sociological research. 17 See Sara Blair for discussion of the multiracial demography of Bloomsbury in Woolf ’s time, a mixture of peoples that is absent from Woolf ’s work set in London. 18 Here and elsewhere, Woolf ’s more radical arguments in Three Guineas against women assimilating into the world of male privilege ghost Of One Woman or So, by Olivia N’Gowfri, pervasive echoes that are beyond the scope of this essay to detail. 19 See pages 22, 26, 30, 34, 42, 51 for hints at these exchanges upon which the main plot of the novel depends. 20 The “Browning” at the Shakespeare Society may or may not be Olivia’s gay friend Oscar Browning; this ambiguity makes “Browning’s” racism an especially hurtful betrayal of what Olivia thought was a genuine friendship. 21 Spliced fragments appear in the novel from Carmichael’s Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (1967); Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (2003); and Stokely Speaks: From Black Power to Pan-Africanism (2007) and from H. Rap Brown’s Die Nigger Die! A Political Autobiography (1969) and Revolution by the Book: The Rap Is Live (1993). 22 Carmichael was expelled by SNCC in 1967, basically withdrew from the Black Panther Party after 1968, and emigrated to Guinea in 1968 amid accusations that he was a CIA plant, a rumor demonstrated much later to have been originated with the FBI. He remains a controversial and divisive figure in the civil rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s and 1970s. 23 H. Rap Brown, born Hubert Gerold Brown, succeeded Carmichael as chairman of SNCC in 1967 and served briefly as minister of justice for the Black Panther Party. He served time at Attica Prison for robbery (1971–76), converted to Islam, and became a Muslim spiritual leader in Georgia. In 2002, he was convicted of shooting two law officers, both of them black; he remains in prison. 24 Malcolm X’s iconic phrase—“by any means necessary”—adapts Jean-Paul Sartre’s phrase in reference to class revolution in his play Dirty Hands (1963). 25 Kabe Wilson, email to author, November 16, 2015, in response to an early version of this essay delivered at the Modernist Studies Association Conference in November, 2015.

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WORKS CITED Blair, Sara. “Local Modernity, Global Modernism: Bloomsbury and the Places of the Literary.” ELH 71.3 (2004): 813–38. Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. 1953. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012. Brown, H. Rap. Die Nigger Die! A Political Autobiography. New York: Dial Press, 1969. Brown, H. Rap. (Jamil Al-Amin). Revolution by the Book: The Rap Is Live. Beltsville, MD: Writer’s International Press, 1993. Burroughs, William S. The Soft Machine. Paris: Olympia Press, 1961. Carmichael, Stokely. Stokely Speaks: Black Power Back to Pan-Africanism. 1971. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2007. Carmichael, Stokely, and Charles V. Hamilton. Black Power: The Politics of Liberation. 1967. New York: Vintage, 2011. Carmichael, Stokely, with Ekweume Michael Thelwell. Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture). New York: Scribners, 2003. Carson, Clayborne, and Tom Hamburger. “The Cambridge Convergence: How a Night in Maryland 30 Years Ago Changed the Nation’s Course of Racial Politics.” In Minneapolis Star Tribune (July 28, 1997). Web. web.stanford/edu/~ccarson/articles/ Cambridge_convergence.htm. September 27, 2017. Caws, Mary Ann, ed. Manifesto: A Century of Issues. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. Do the Right Thing. Feature film by Spike Lee. 1989. Duncan, Dennis. “Kabe Wilson ‘Of One Woman or So, by Olivia N’Gowfri’: Virginia Woolf Remixed.” The Conveyor (May 8, 2013). Web. blogs.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/ theconveyor/2015/kabe-wilson. November 2, 2015. Flood, Alison. “Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own Remixed to Form a New Story.” (September 26, 2014). Web. www.the guardian.com/books/2014/sept/26/Virginiawoolf-a- room-of-ones-own. February 27, 2015. Friedman, Edward. Backward toward Revolution: The Chinese Revolutionary Party. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974. Friedman, Edward. “Revolution or Just Another Bloody Cycle? Swatow and the 1911 Revolution.” Journal of Asian Studies 29.2 (1970): 289–307. Friedman, Susan Stanford. Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Hawkesworth, Mary. “Intersectionality.” In Feminist Inquiry: From Political Conviction to Methodological Innovation. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006, 207–48. Hayot, Eric. “Chinese Modernism, Mimetic Desire, and European Time.” In The Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms. Eds. Mark Wollaeger, with Matt Eatough. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, 149–70. Higher Learning. Feature film by John Singleton. 1995.

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James, C. L. R. “Black Power.” In The C. L. R. James Reader. Ed. Anna Grimshaw. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1992. Web. www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr/ works/1967/black-power.htm. September 14, 2017. James, C. L. R. Letters from London. 1932. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2003. Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. New York: Vintage, 1999. Lewis, Pericles. The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Lyon, Janet. Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999. Lyyke, Nina. Feminist Studies: A Guide to Intersectional Theory, Methodology and Writing. London: Routledge, 2009. Malcolm, X. Malcom X’s Speeches and Writings. 2nd ed. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1992. Marcus, Jane. “Sapphistry: Narration as Lesbian Seduction in A Room of One’s Own.” In Languages of Patriarchy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987, 163–87. Marcus, Jane. “‘A Very Fine Negress.’” In Hearts of Darkness: White Women Write Race. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004, 24–58. Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso. “The Futurist Manifesto.” 1909. In Futurist Manifestos. Ed. Umbro Apollonio. Trans. Robert Brain et al. London: Thames and Hudson, 1923, 19–23. Marosevic, Zeljka. “Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own Rewritten as Of One Woman or So, by Olivia N’Gowfri.” 1 (September 7, 2014). Web. www.mhpbooks.com/woolfs-aroom-of-ones-own-rewritten. September 22, 2014. McIntosh, Malachi. “Re-writing Virginia Woolf.” (2014). Web. www.dreadlockhoax. co.ulk/Eng_newsletter.jpg. September 11, 2015. McIntosh, Malachi. Video Interview with Kabe Wilson. Web. www.youtube.com/ watch?v=AzOPxa2y8aQ. September 11, 2015. Megill, Anna. “The Creativity of Limits.” September 26, 2014. Web. www.annamegill. com/blog/2014/9/26/creastivity-within-limits. November 2, 2015. Orwell, George. Animal Farm. London: Secker and Warburg, 1934. Oxford English Dictionary Online. Web. www.oed.com.ezproxy.library.wisc.edu. September 11, 2016. Pound, Ezra. Make It New. London: Faber and Faber, 1934. Puchner, Martin. Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Remixthebook. “Literary Cut-Ups.” Web. www.remixthebook.com/the-course/cut-ups. August 31, 2017. Rich, Adrienne. “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision.” 1971. In On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978. New York: Norton, 1978. 35–50. Rosenbaum, S. P., ed. Women & Fiction: The Manuscript Versions of A Room of One’s Own. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1992.

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Tzara, Tristan. “dada manifesto on feeble love and bitter love: TO MAKE A DADAIST POEM.” (1920). Web. www.best-poems.net/tristan_tzara/to_make_a_dadist_poem. html. August 30, 2017. Walker, Alice. “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens.” 1974. In In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983, 231–43. Watson, Nigel. The Opportunity to Be Myself: A History of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge. London: James & James, 2002. Wilson, Kabe. “The Dreadlock Hoax.” Studies in the Maternal 6.1 (2014). Web. www. dreadlockhoax.co.uk/the-dreadlock-hoax. September 11, 2015. Wilson, Kabe. “The Dreadlock Hoax.” May 19, 2014. Web. www.dreadlockhoax.co.uk/ of-one-woman-or-so/. April 8, 2015. Wilson, Kabe. Of One Woman or So, by Olivia N’Gowfri. Unpublished manuscript (2009–14); PDF supplied by author and cited with permission. Wilson, Kabe. Of One Woman or So, by Olivia N’Gowfri. Installation at the Weston Library, Special Collections Library of The Bodleian, Oxford University. 2015. The Wire. HBO series by David Simon. 2002–08. Woolf, Virginia. “Craftsmanship.” BBC Series, “Words Fail Me.” Broadcast April 20, 1937. Web. www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8czs8v6Pul. November 6, 2015. Woolf, Virginia. “Craftsmanship.” 1937. In The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1942, 198–207. Woolf, Virginia. “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.” In Collected Essays. Ed. Leonard Woolf. Vol. 1. London: Hogarth, 1966, 319–37. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. 1929. Annotated by Susan Gubar. New York: Harcourt, 2005. Woolf, Virginia. Three Guineas. 1938. Annotated and with introduction by Jane Marcus. New York: Mariner Books, 2006. Wyndham, Lewis., ed. Blast 1. 1914. Rpt. Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1981.

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Part Two

Recycles: Aesthetics of Unsewing and Blacking Out

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2

Stitch Works: Ellen Bell’s Unpicking Aesthetics and Victorian Women’s Creative Labor Susan David Bernstein

What can you do with a nearly century-old copy of Charlotte Brontë ’s novel Jane Eyre? Imagine picking up a scalpel and cutting out individual words from different passages across several chapters to compress the Victorian romance between a young inexperienced governess and her much older employer. Then, holding with tweezers each carved out word, picture attaching the words onto a cardstock form in the shape of a woman’s handbag with the help of pins and glue. Contemporary English conceptual artist Ellen Bell’s stitched pieces, even when she substitutes scalpel and glue for needle and thread, create an aesthetics that reclaims Victorian women’s sewing and writing to make visible affective laboring as a painstaking process in time and space. By doing so, Bell not only repurposes the vibrant materials of printed papers from the pages of Victorian books but also uses the techniques derived from Victorian women’s handiwork to encapsulate the embodied and affective labors often rendered invisible or silenced. By affective labor I mean the emotional dimensions that sometimes converge with a passion hidden from plain sight. Stitched or glued words go unexpected places in Bell’s aesthetics; thread, paste, and ink are materials with elusive effects.1 Unpicking, or the disassembling of a garment to re-stitch it into something new (Kortsch 8), is the mainstay of Bell’s method. In a catalogue for Bell’s 2007 installation Speaking Soul in Leicester, England, Jonathan Willett understands Bell working “with and against the grain of 1960s conceptual art by re-negotiating the space between intellect and experience.” I explore what I term her unpicking aesthetics in concept, materials, and practice as Bell recycles from the past and renews and re-forms in her contemporary art the habitual meanings of stitching from Victorian women’s culture. Rather than the radical and rapid change captured

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in modernist versions of revolution, Bell’s aesthetics is consistent with Victorian ideas of evolutionary transformations as incrementally accumulating change, stitch by stitch by stitch. This idea of gradual transition to newer forms and more socially progressive values including gender and class equality takes the long view, much like Victorian evolutionary theory about the history of the planet. Rather than the sudden changes consistent with Western biblical accounts of catastrophic global rupture like floods and fires, Victorian evolutionists, including geologist Charles Lyell and naturalist Charles Darwin, understood a deep time history of the planet where new varieties in plant and animal species emerge steadily over immense spans of time. Bell’s unpicking aesthetics remakes Victorian literary and print materials through reconceiving women’s sewing to envision slow changes, much like the pace of the very process of her stitch working.

BELL’S UNPICKING AESTHETICS AND VICTORIAN STITCHERS Thomas Hood’s “The Song of the Shirt” published in Punch in 1843 turned into a national controversy the plight of the British laborer through his poem about a poor seamstress. The poem’s words and meter underscore the stultifying drudgery of women’s labor: With fingers weary and worn, With eyelids heavy and red, A woman sat, in unwomanly rags, Plying her needle and thread— Stitch! stitch! stitch! In poverty, hunger, and dirt, And still with a voice of dolorous pitch She sang the “Song of the Shirt.” (625)

The exclamations in the line “Stitch! stitch! stitch!” convey the oppressive commands of employer to a seamstress subjected to the repetitive act of needlework. The staccato rhythm belies accumulated stitches as a process growing material into something new, as Bell’s aesthetic arts emphasize. Instead, the stitching is a physical hardship that takes its toll on fingers, eyelids, and voice. Where Bell’s aesthetic understands individual stitching as of a piece with a larger process connecting Victorian women’s labor with contemporary art, “The Song of the Shirt” stresses the isolation and despair of the seamstress. Hood’s

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poem circulated so widely that Victorians reading other literary scenes of the suffering of needleworkers would hear echoes of “The Song of the Shirt.” In Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), a Victorian novel about the hardships of poor families and the conflict between laborers and capitalists in Manchester, England, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the title character’s neighbor Margaret Jennings describes how needlework contributes to her failing eyesight: “if I sew a long time together, a bright spot like th’ sun comes right where I’m looking. .  .  . I suppose I’m going dark as fast as may be. Plain work pays so bad, and mourning has been so plentiful this winter, that I were tempted to take in any black work I could; and now I’m suffering from it” (53). Despite class status, sewing, whether basic or “plain” stitching or fancier work, whether paid or unpaid, was the common activity of Victorian girls and women. Drawn to Victorian literature, especially by women including Gaskell and Charlotte Brontë , since her own youth in the north of England when she too learned stitch crafts, Ellen Bell brings sewing in different guises into her creative work engaging with Victorian books.2 Sometimes Bell cuts out words or excerpted blocks of print and stitches these into garment or accessory shapes including a dress and a purse; sometimes her creations emphasize the arduous process of needlework, the pain and price to women’s bodies even, evident in Hood’s poem and in Mary Barton. Bell not only recycles words from Victorian books into her sewn objects of art, but also highlights arduous acts of stitching that Victorian writers captured. By doing so, Bell restores into contemporary art culture Victorian literary texts through her aesthetics of unpicking. Christine Bayles Kortsch describes “unpicking” as taking apart sewn garments “seam by seam, stitch by stitch” to “re-use the material for new objects” (8). For Bell, unpicking includes taking apart literary texts like Charlotte Brontë ’s Jane Eyre to re-conform the bits of printed paper into a pared-down account that distills the title character’s emotional expression of love and sexual attraction. As such, Bell’s art ruptures, but in small increments, the repression of women’s feelings into re-stitched acts of displayed expression. The unpicking aesthetics of Ellen Bell consists of two dimensions: time and space. Both her materials and her process, including duration and location, are critical to her remaking through art the steady, repetitive laboring of Victorian women’s needlework. Bell’s own artistic labors are extraordinarily time consuming, not unlike how Victorians began to understand the elongated time frame of the earth. Whether fragile handmade Japanese paper for a series of shirts stitched together or carved out individual words from Jane Eyre for an

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outlined handbag, Bell chooses materials and procedures that accentuate the elongated temporality of Victorian women’s piecework and Victorian revisions of the process of change from catastrophically sudden in the biblical account to steady-state gradualism in evolutionary theories. Time-consuming labor of needlework, refashioned in Bell’s procedures and materials, also conveys the drudgery, boredom, and meditative pleasures derived from Victorian women’s sewing; at the same time, Bell’s mixing of sewing and literary texts suggests parallels for women between the life of the needle and the life of the pen. The spaces of Bell’s art and the spaces in which she performs her work convey the tension between women’s labor as visibly public or invisibly private. Bell highlights the domesticity of needlework for Victorian women by displaying sewn shirts on hangers or recycling sections of a Victorian novel into the shape of a woman’s purse, or by showcasing the labor itself in which the performance space mimics a Victorian domestic parlor. Through these elements of time and space integral to Bell’s aesthetics, she unstitches boundaries of class in which poor women did tedious work of repetitive plain stitching as public employment, while more educated women did fancy embellishments with their needles at home. Her unpicking also insists on the power of the needle as a companion tool to the pen, so that stitching and writing generate a hybrid form, a more sophisticated version of the samplers in which Victorian girls learned literacy in the languages of the English alphabet and the needle stitch. Bell’s unpicking aesthetics through her material stitch work recycles Charlotte Brontë ’s Jane Eyre, recreates biographical details from Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1857 biography of Brontë , and draws conceptual energy from Victorian scenes of sewing. As Kortsch shows, the languages of cloth and print were intertwined for Victorian girls and women whose “bilingual” instruction centered on the material language of sewing with its vocabulary of different stitches, and the verbal language arts through reading and writing (2–3). When Jane Eyre, an orphan who works as a governess and then flees when her employer attempts to marry her while he’s married to someone else, teaches the poor female pupils in her school at Morton late in the novel, she remarks that the farmers’ daughters “could already read, write, and sew; and to them I taught the elements of grammar, geography, history, and the finer kinds of needlework” (462). Here Brontë  alludes to two different levels of stitching: plain sewing to make and mend garments, and fancy work of knitting, crochet, and embroidery. The plain work is the basic vocabulary of the needle, while the fancy stitches involve more skill and variety of needles. Bell’s own tools bring together plain and fancy methods, both hand-stitching with needle and thread and a variation on fancy work.

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For Bell, the cross-stitch is essentially “the craft of the amateur . . . democratic, accessible, and inclusive” and fosters an “active inactivity.”3 Bell’s stitched things repurpose printed texts by unpicking words and sewing or otherwise assembling them into new containers. In this recalibrated notion of needlework, she uses scalpels, tweezers, and glue to remove words from an edition of Jane Eyre and to reattach these words, as separate stitches, into the shape of a handbag in the piece Love (Bag) (2008). Her basic needle lexicon includes the cross-stitch which Victorian girls used to copy biblical passages. In Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s verse-novel about a woman who moves to London to pursue a career as a poet, Aurora Leigh (1856), the cross-stitch symbolizes the weary repetition of feminine domestic labor and the social imperative that middle-class girls and women should keep their hands busy: “And last / I learnt cross-stitch, because she did not like  /  To see me wear the night with empty hands / A-doing nothing” (I. 446–9). Where Bell’s creative work sews words from Victorian fiction, Talia Schaffer argues that Victorian novels like Charlotte Yonge’s The Daisy Chain (1856) draw formal and aesthetic elements from domestic artifacts girls and women fabricated. Schaffer demonstrates how Victorian handicraft “stood for a complexly allusive and enabling kind of writing” (58) as women writers including Gaskell and Barrett Browning use the language of needlework to show the laborious piecework, both plain and fancy, of literary creation. These lines from Aurora Leigh exemplify this collaboration of the needle and the pen, as Aurora Leigh laments how women’s fancy needlework serves and is devalued by men: The works of women are symbolical. We sew, sew, prick our fingers, dull our sight, Producing what? A pair of slippers, sir, To put on when you’re weary—or a stool To stumble over and vex you . . . “curse that stool!” Or else at best, a cushion, where you lean And sleep, and dream of something we are not But would be for your sake. (I. 456–63)

Just as Aurora instructs that women’s work is “symbolical,” Schaffer identifies passages about fancy needlework, like “Then I sate and teased / The patient needle till it split the thread, / Which oozed off from it in meandering lace” (I. 1049–51), as how-to tips on reading Aurora Leigh: “We expect straightforward narrative threads; we expect her to knot those threads into a strong central plot. Instead,

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we get ‘meandering lace,’ the meaning of the poem unraveling as we try to follow it” (58). As Barrett Browning unpicks the narrative through the language of the domestic stitching crafts, Bell unpicks the materials of literary texts and recycles them into needle-crafted things that re-mix words into different stories.

VIBRANT ASSEMBLAGES Bell’s blend of materials of old print, glue, thread, handmade paper, and techniques like unpicking and cross-stitching traverse in concept and in practice many boundaries. Bell is less interested in seeing her work as exceptional or “high” art than she is with a way of interacting with lives, words, and inorganic book pages of the past. Jane Bennett calls for the “vibrant materiality” of all matter, with “agential life” aligned with human and nonhuman sources, as she theorizes “a political ecology of things.” Echoing the subtitle of Bennett’s book Vibrant Matter, I am proposing vital materiality as a way to approach Ellen Bell’s unpicking aesthetic from Victorian texts to live performance spaces. As Bennett puts it, “Materiality is a rubric that tends to horizontalize the relations between humans, biota, and abiota” and prompts “a greater appreciation of the complex entanglements of humans and nonhumans” (112). Bell’s art and process emphasize this interrelationship, collaborations mingling unpicked literary texts, whether a century-old edition of Jane Eyre or a Victorian encyclopedia, through sewn layers of lettered words on thread and cloth. Bell draws from a wide array of materials, a range much like Bennett’s collage of matter. Bell explains her archive: As to collecting materials, I went to ephemera fairs, second-hand book shops—the Japanese paper [for Sleeve Notes] was bought from a shop in Holborn. I liked working with used materials, enjoying the stains, fingermarks etc. I also used theatre programmes (of Ibsen’s plays mostly). Dictionaries also. And maps. The recycling of text is an intuitive rather than directed process. I’ve made pieces just from the word “love” and that meant going through all the paperbacks I could source from high brow to low brow fiction. (email to author, June 18, 2017)

Bell’s assorted archive, put into the framework of domestic handicrafts, resembles American feminist artist Miriam Schapiro’s “femmage” from the 1970s, “a type of art that collaged cloth, paint, and fabric—items which had long been associated with women’s activities in the home” and what Schapiro called “a woman-life

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context” (Greenberger). Bell’s unpicking aesthetics builds on a storehouse of stuff, both Bennett’s vibrant matter and Schapiro’s femmage. Like Bennett’s vital materialist who respects “human participation in a shared, vital materiality” (14), Bell’s performance spaces and spectators shape stitched creations. Whether installation, framed art, or performance, Bell creates assemblages, another key concept for Bennett’s vibrant materiality. Inspired by literary depictions of women’s thread labors for garments from different sources including nettles and cotton, Bell has fashioned clothes and accessories from the paper pages of book, handmade cloth, feathers, buttons, stamps, maps, and dust jackets. For her installation Speaking Soul, Bell constructed from an array of Victorian printed texts on language such as Tom Thumb’s Dictionary (1895) and Karl Baedeker’s Traveller’s Manual of Conversation in Four Languages (1881).4 In some narratives that inspire these art projects, women’s sewing involves penance and pain, which Bell emulates by making tiny shirts from fragile tissue paper or a purse from individually carving out single words strung together from many passages of Jane Eyre. In addition to the theme of embodied suffering in women’s stitch work, Bell understands women’s voices as embedded in stitching and spinning and washing where the activities were assigned to domesticate women as a way to keep them present and silent. I compare Bell’s textile creations with textual sources as inspiration and as material she repurposes into visual art forms. The trajectory of Bell’s creative stitching, from A Model Beginning (2000), through Sleeve Notes (2001) and Love (Bag) (2008) to Oubliette (2017) and, in the future, Circle Line, reveals an increasingly interactive style that highlights what Bennett considers “the ensemble nature of action and the interconnections between persons and things” where “a theory of vibrant matter presents individuals as simply incapable of bearing full responsibility for their effects” (37).

UNPICKING LITERARY TEXT Bell’s process accentuates the exquisitely detailed, the laboriously meticulous, such as her ongoing Sewing Proust project, where she uses the cross-stitch to copy with silk thread on linen the entire text of In Search of Lost Time, first in English, then in French. Even though the Sewing Proust project engages with a modernist literary text, Bell’s conceptual approach comes from Victorian needlework culture. In Sewing Proust, Bell revises the traditional alphabet

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sampler into an elaborately lengthy task, one that embraces the temporal themes of the novel. In other ways, Bell accentuates the repetitive and mundane and even painful nature of the stitching work of both poor seamstresses, as Gaskell depicts in Mary Barton or Hood in “The Song of the Shirt,” and as Barrett Browning and Brontë  write of middle-class women, who do fancy work as part of their feminine skill set. The imbrication of sewn texture and written text—the needle and the pen— recurs in Olive Schreiner’s From Man to Man (1926). Schreiner identifies the needle as the only implement often allotted to women for impassioned selfexpression, and as devalued, often invisible, or discarded work: The poet, when his heart is weighted, writes a sonnet, and the painter paints a picture, and the thinker throws himself into the world of thought, and the publican and the man of business may throw themselves into the world of action; but the woman who is only a woman, what has she but her needle? In that torn bit of brown leather brace worked through and through with yellow silk, in that bit of white rag with invisible stitching, lying among the fallen leaves and rubbish that the wind has blown into the gutter or street corner, lies all the passion of some woman’s soul finding voiceless expression. Has the pen or the pencil dipped so deep in the blood of the human race as the needle? (322–23)

Schreiner’s roving eye follows a bit of stitch work, as it circulates across different materials including “leaves and rubbish” in the street, resembles Bennett’s assemblages of vibrant matter, all converging from different organic and inorganic sources. Kortsch reads this passage from From Man to Man as double-voiced, as she also understands needlework more broadly: “The needle may allow women to express their creativity and ambition, but it creates a type of writing the masculine world cannot decipher, and most often ignores. Yet contrary to what her needle image might imply .  .  . Schreiner figures sewing as a creative, imaginative activity” (1). This dual meaning courses through Bell’s unpicking aesthetics as she disassembles printed texts with needles or scalpels and remakes them into art. An early example of Bell’s unpicking aesthetics is A Model Beginning: a small dress displayed on a tiny, handmade wire hanger, with a tag looped onto the hanger that displays the title of the piece. Bell used a Victorian dictionary which she dismantled into selected segments and then machine sewed into the shape of a simple A-line dress in order to create an assemblage of elements to epitomize ideal femininity taught to girls. An oblong rectangular panel just below the neckline of the dress includes in boldface, with definitions, silence, silently, silentness, silhouette, this last word illustrated with a woman’s

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head. Other dictionary words that make up the dress include carriage, charm, corset, needfulness, pureness, terms that might appear in a Victorian conduct manual. Unpicking the past through the material dictionary to make A Modern Beginning, Bell sews in panels of words that suggest a different lexicon, the underbelly of true womanhood: splint armour, prickliness, corruptibility, and its cognates. The garment stitched from black and white print bears a vermilion heart sewn into the right sleeve and a handwritten Please in faded ink floating on a small white panel, sewn just beneath the dart seam that runs diagonally on the left. Not visible is the back of the garment, but even within the sleeves are printed words that appear to come from the same text. That all is not revealed to the spectator likewise conveys the underside of this “model beginning.” Bell’s unpicked aesthetics take apart Victorian texts to create new forms through old materials associated with the tasks, skills, and expectations of femininity, similar to Schapiro’s femmage.

ASSEMBLAGES OF CHARLOTTE BRONTË  Although Bell has used her needle to splice together other kinds of text drawn from Jane Austen’s novels or theatre programs of Ibsen plays, Charlotte Brontë ’s published words, along with writing about her, have supplied significant materials for Bell’s stitch works. Coming across a passage in Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë  (1857), Bell stitched an excerpt from a letter that Brontë  wrote to her friend Ellen Nussey, where she describes the “task” of editing Wuthering Heights (1847) and Agnes Grey (1847) for the second editions of her sisters’ novels, which were issued after they had died. Quotes Gaskell from Brontë ’s letter: “I found the task at first exquisitely painful and depressing; but regarding it in the light of a sacred duty, I went on, and now can bear it better” (493). Bell’s stitching ends with the word “but” in what she considers a trial piece to emulate Brontë ’s handwriting through Bell’s own handiwork. The suspension between pain and possibility in the midst of a task resembles unpicking the old garment or text to reconfigure into the new, still a concept rather than a completed thing. This layering of words and text remaking letters, whether on paper or cloth, again foregrounds the prominence of stitch work for Bell as she reaches back to Victorian women’s labor in her conceptual art. After reading that Charlotte, Anne, and Emily Brontë  sewed shirts for their brother Branwell, Bell stitched Sleeve Notes (2003), which consists of twelve

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paper shirts suspended from a ceiling (Figure 2.1). Deborah Lutz notes that at a young age the Brontë  sisters learned both plain and fancy needlework, and that their Aunt Branwell guided them to improve these skills through samplers, a common way for Victorian girls to learn literacy and sewing together (42– 44).5 As Lutz has commented, “Victorian women often represented their experience through needlework. Sewing as a type of woman’s labor that had visibility, unlike peeling, kneading, and most everything else, which disappeared soon after completion” (45). Plying needles also provided a cover for women to pursue their own ideas in private while their hands were visibly active performing conventional domestic tasks. Sewing and writing went hand in hand quite explicitly at Haworth Parsonage, where Emily Brontë  divided her days by two activities: “turning” garments by unpicking seams to turn clothing inside out to hide worn areas and writing Wuthering Heights. Lutz remarks, “Putting down the pen and picking up needle and thread, or the knife to ‘pillopatate,’ became a part of the rhythm of her writing process,” and she adds that Nelly Dean, the chief narrator of Wuthering Heights, “sews as she spins out the tale” (41–42). With Sleeve Notes, Bell sewed the shirts from handmade Japanese paper she purchased in a specialty shop in London, and she also formed the hangers for the shirts. Drawn to the surname that her own echoes, Bell stitched a name tag with “Currer Bell” in red thread into

Figure 2.1  Ellen Bell, Sleeve Notes (2001). Japanese tissue paper, thread, and wire. Photographed by Nigel Kennedy.

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a plain white GAP shirt which she then planned to donate anonymously to Oxfam, where she had purchased it. This byline into a name label coordinates stitch work with the ambiguously gendered name Brontë  used to disguise her authorship, much as Bell in effect obscures hers by using “Currer” instead of “Ellen” Bell. Bell’s most extensive unpicking, recycling, and re-mixing of Victorian literature is Love (Bag), where she assembles extracts from seven chapters of Jane Eyre into the shape of a handbag with a handle and clasp. For the template, Bell drew the outline from a nineteenth-century purse seen at the Costume Museum in Bath. The concept for this shape of a bag with a fastened interior conveys enclosure, feelings contained, even hidden, and then revealed through the string of words. The “bag” also works as a euphemism for womb, uterus, vagina. Bell created a companion to Love (Bag) (Figure 2.2), titled Love (Pistol) (Figure 2.3), its associations with penis, aggression, and overt violence (email to author, June 20, 2017). For Love (Bag) Bell harvested the collection of words from a 1920 Walter Scott Publishing Company edition of Jane Eyre because she was drawn to the feel of the paper and the appearance of the text font. First Bell used a

Figure 2.2  Ellen Bell, Love (Bag) (2008). Text from Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë  (New York: Walter Scott Publishing, 1920), acid-free glue, card 83  ×   61  ×   5  cm. Photographed by Simon Cook.

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Figure 2.3  Ellen Bell, Love (Pistol) (2008). Text from Shorter History on Historical Principles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), acid-free glue, card 83  ×   61  ×   5  cm. Photographed by Simon Cook.

scalpel or razor blade to cut out each individual word; then she held the word with tweezers and glued it onto the card shaped as the handbag. Lutz discovers the word “pillopatate” from Emily Brontë ’s 1845 diary, which demonstrates how household work like peeling potatoes with a knife combined with her two other tools for daily labor, a needle for unstitching garments and a pen for writing (42). Bell’s process with Love (Bag) recalibrates the affordances of these implements and actions as she uses a knife to pick apart Jane Eyre, a novel in which Jane both tells her story and occasionally stitches or refers to others sewing. The sequence of words from the top to the bottom of the bag follows the words in order in Brontë ’s novel, and all pertain to Jane’s relationship with Rochester, from their very first encounter in Chapter 12 when he is thrown from his horse in the lane approaching Thornfield to his marriage proposal to Jane in Chapter 23. The larger context of Chapter 12 is important here, because its early passages include Jane’s proto-feminist manifesto in which she claims that stifled women are part of the “millions . . . in silent revolt against their lot” and that women “suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags” (178,  emphasis added). In the novel, Jane rarely plies a needle, but when she does, her needlework is more a prop than a created object. Jane makes clear she knows both plain and fancy work, but sewing is less appealing than painting and reading. After

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Jane flees Thornfield and Rochester’s proposal that they elope despite his legal marriage to Bertha Mason, Jane shows her determination to support herself even if she must stoop to needlework, whether fancy or plain: “I will be a dressmaker: I will be a plain-work-woman; I will be a servant, a nurse-girl, if I can be no better” (443). Earlier at Thornfield, Jane frequently shows her class aspirations to outstrip the domestic tasks Mrs. Fairfax fulfills, who retreats from lively dialogue after tea with Rochester and Jane: “Mrs. Fairfax had settled into a corner with her knitting” (191). For Brontë , women’s needlework is ranked by class with plain stitching for the poorer or uneducated, and fancy knitting and embroidery a notch above, but not part of the ideal life Jane Eyre imagines in her proclamation that women need and deserve more stimulating occupation than “embroidering bags” (178). Roszika Parker comments on an “art/craft hierarchy” where “art made with thread and art made with paint are intrinsically unequal,” and notes that classifying “embroidery is a difficult task” (5) because it is more pictorial than useful. Bell’s Love (Bag) crosses boundaries between art and craft and between fancy and plain work as she emulates needlework but uses a scalpel and glue instead of needle and thread to join together the printed words on paper cut out from a copy of Jane Eyre. The words that Bell extracts, however, abridge Brontë ’s text into the key components of Jane’s first impressions of and feelings about Rochester. In effect, Bell unbags emotions Victorian women were expected to conceal inasmuch as sewing required concentration and often enforced disciplined silence. However, Bell reconceptualizes this cultural history of needlework by using a scalpel to cut out Brontë ’s words that unleash Jane’s impassioned observations about an older, more powerful man. In what follows, I am quoting Bell’s chiseled words from Brontë ’s text: “He had a dark face, with stern features and a heavy brow; his eyes and gathered eyebrows looked ireful and thwarted just now. . . . I felt no fear of him” (182). Repeatedly, Bell selects text to show Jane Eyre as a keen visual observer of Rochester’s countenance: “My master’s colourless, olive face, square, massive brow, broad and jetty eyebrows, deep eyes, strong features, firm, . . . grim mouth,  .  . . were not beautiful according to rule” (252) as she links his facial features to her feelings. Bell includes this passage as Jane describes the effects of looking at Rochester: “an influence that quite mastered me,—that took my feelings from my own power and fettered them to his. I had not intended to love him. . . . He made me love him without looking at me” (252). Bell edits out words in this passage to accentuate the power of Rochester over Jane’s emotions.

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The final lines that form the legible content of Bell’s outlined purse also bring into the open for Rochester to see and hear, Jane’s strong feelings: “I sobbed convulsively; for I could repress what I endured no longer; I was obliged to yield; and I was shaken from head to foot with acute distress” (337). Bell picks her way through what veers into the surprising proposal scene as she mixes in Jane’s continued exposure of her passion to Rochester, words that have the spirit of the earlier feminist proclamation that women “feel just as men feel” (178) and demand more “exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts” than “knitting stockings” and “embroidering bags” (178). Here at the bottom of Bell’s Love (Bag) container, the contents of Jane’s feelings spill out and prompt Rochester’s proposal of marriage, despite his legal wife upstairs in the attic, a secret only revealed to Jane during the church wedding ceremony. Mindful of my students’ (and my own) ambivalence about the central romance of Jane Eyre, where a much older, sophisticated, womanizing, and legally married man preys on the vulnerability of the naï ve and orphaned eighteen-year-old governess in his employment, at first I found the reassembled text of Love (Bag) an uncritical endorsement of the Byronic hero, the brooding, hypersexual man whose arrogant power defines a kind of masculinity popularized by romantic poets like George Gordon Byron. When I unpick my own initial reading, and instead rework the textual contents of Love (Bag) from Brontë ’s novel in tandem with its partner Love (Pistol), I discover a productive tension between Bell’s two forms of “Love”—the feminine (Bag) and the masculine (Pistol). For Love (Pistol), Bell sourced words from The Shorter Oxford Dictionary on Historical Principles (1933), where again she was attracted to the paper quality and font style. However, her process differed from the unpicking slower speed and precision of Love (Bag). Bell worked quickly to disseminate words from the dictionary to sketch a free-form narrative about a series of love affairs of a rakish young man. Bell describes the “general whoring” of this rake with flashpoints of cruelty and kindness, and glimmers of conscience (email to author, August 19, 2017). Rather than the containment of thoughts and feelings through silent sewing, for instance, Bell performs her own needle (scalpel)work to unbag Jane’s sharp perceptions and passions around Rochester. Through Bell’s vibrant materials and tools, Love (Bag) recreates what Lutz observes about stitching for Victorian women: “The motions of plying the needle, or pins or other implements, often expressed a female character’s hidden emotional life. Romance blossomed through needlework” (46). Although Bell does not select text from Brontë ’s novel that directly supports Lutz’s claim here, she uses “other implements” to effect a

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piecing together of words from Jane Eyre that demonstrate her title character’s “hidden emotional life” around her feelings for Rochester. Bell’s unpicking the physical copy of Jane Eyre, not unlike Emily Brontë ’s turning clothing to make a new garment out of worn materials, results in Love (Bag), an object of art that plays with the tension between repressed and expressed feeling.

PERFORMING STITCHES: OUBLIETTE Bell’s creative work has morphed from studio designs to performance pieces. In doing so, her unpicking aesthetics takes up a different conception of dismantling and retooling, this time from the unpredictable materials present in performance spaces rather than weathered pages of Victorian texts. In these projects, Bell makes visible her needlework as performance. Stitching in public spaces, whether a museum gallery or a London train carriage, provides Bell with a shield as her eyes and hands sew, while her ears are attentive to the people who watch or pass by her. Unlike the stillness of the finished object, mobility of vibrant matter brings a different kind of agential life to Bell’s performative art, which values process in motion along with the material thing. Like Bennett’s assemblages, Bell connects in performative webs the tools of needle and thread and cloth and the artist’s body with the spectators who fill the room in an art gallery, or, in a future project, passengers on London transport vehicles. She offers a backstory: “Resulting from a rattle bag of personal mythologies (my mother trained as a maker of wedding dresses after being denied access to art school by her father), a predilection for nineteenth-century culture and classic fairy tale motifs where needle-wielding women are rendered passive, obedient and silent, and a resolutely Luddite attitude to machines, I’m compelled to sew.”6 Such recent shifts in Bell’s stitching projects make visible the hidden labor behind sewn objects and the verbal texts that Victorian women created in order to unpick or lay bare that occluded work. Generating through fixed display the thing-power or distributive agency Bennett ascribes to vibrant matter, Bell brings her body’s movements while stitching words into live display. In February 2017, Bell performed a one-off piece called Oubliette. At Oriel Davies Gallery in Newtown, Wales, where she sat on the floor, dressed in scratchy and uncomfortably restricting crinoline and corset under a black skirt and white blouse, as Victorian women wore, Bell stitched words onto cloth for seven hours. Bell’s lexicon for this project included words taken from fairy tales as well as random words that appealed to her; a sampling of the sewn words include

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silent, waiting, wraith, pelt, borage, and moribund. Bell describes this lexicon as a prompt in case she needed it during the performance in the gallery space set up as a Victorian drawing room. However, what she ended up sewing onto fabric came from chance words spoken by visitors, especially children startled to find her on the floor stitching away. Bell performs needlework as a means of reporting not merely the activity of her spectators, but also the effects of that encounter on her. The concept behind the title Oubliette, which means a dungeon with a small access through a ceiling trapdoor, and the performance itself are twofold: an allusion to the fairy tales of women imprisoned with impossible tasks like spinning gold from straw, and more symbolically the imposed silence and invisibility of the seamstress and her labor. The performance also spotlights the process of making, the technique and minute actions, and in this way gives agential life to the materials that arrest her attention. This turn to live stitch work takes what was a private domestic task into the quotidian public realm, and brings the artist out of an isolating room of one’s own. For Bell, hours of intensely focused cross-stitching of words becomes almost a meditative practice: “The repetitive hand movement and eye scanning release serotonin,” according to a clinical psychologist Bell quotes (“And Other Stories,” 41). While on the one hand, Bell emphasizes needlework as a diurnal task women performed in silent domestic seclusion; on the other hand, this kind of labor formed a community of workers with a shared language of the needle which Kortsch compares with the “imagined community.” Benedict Anderson theorizes about readers of periodicals forming a national identity (Kortsch 10). The gendered identity of needleworkers, for Bell, becomes communal in the sense that the performative nature of Oubliette puts sewing into public spaces where others watch or turn away, comment, or ignore. In Oubliette, the exhibition crew installed three screens on the walls that magnified and displayed Bell’s hands cross-stitching and the words she assembled from the scattered harvest in the folds of her skirt splayed before her. Bell’s performance of stitch work differs significantly from another bookfocused art installation, Tim Youd’s 100 Novels Project. Youd selected 100 novels to copy on a typewriter and in a location that the novelist originally used or in what he describes as “charged with literary significance.” This replication functions on three levels—the kind of typewriter, the physical space, the retyping of the entire text of the novel—and Youd claims that the crux of this performative project is “a devotional and close reading of the novel (the reading is silent, the sound is the typewriter alone).” Similar to Bell’s sense of her stitch work performance

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as meditative, Youd describes his undertaking as the transportative out-of-body experience of engrossing reading, “equivalent to a religious ecstasy.” Despite these crosscurrents, these two projects, each exacting taxing physical engagement with text, diverge in both their forms and connections with their readers or spectators. Youd types each novel on a single sheet of paper backed by a second sheet, where the accumulation of ribbon ink overwhelms the top surface and repeated indentations from the letter keys saturate the back sheet. After he completes typing the novel in this fashion, the two sheets are displayed as “a formal relic” in which “the entire novel is present, but entirely illegible.” In April 2015, I watched Youd typing in this fashion Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando in the garden not far from where the author is buried at Monk’s House, Sussex. Woolf is one of only two female novelists—the other is Flannery O’Connor—on Youd’s list of 100 books, with four of the total collection by these two women.7 It might seem too easy to plant the distinctions between the performing labors of Bell and Youd around the gender binary Bell visualizes through Love (Bag) and Love (Pistol). Even so, the vertical dimensions of Youd’s project contrast strikingly with the horizontal connectivity Bell pursues. Youd’s process of machine copying yields a layered novel that cannot be read except as imprinted ciphers of two surfaces of singular self-distinction. Bell’s Oubliette foregrounds her use of simpler tools and the taxing of her own body from the strain of needlework, and her performance reaches out to encompass the living spectators as collaborative readers and creators. Although she makes her labor visible, Bell draws conceptual energy and compelling forms from the historical invisibility and mundane repetition of stitch work for women. In this way, her horizontal process is a connective tissue of vital assemblages, inert and organic materials mediated through living bodies, her own and those who surround her in public spaces. Youd’s project distances his audience into fixed spectators who cannot read his art pieces except as abstract expressions of his own interior encounter with his favorite novels. In addition, Youd’s embodied practice is more limited and detached; he does the repetitive mechanical labor of copying entire novels as he sits in a chair at a typewriter, but he makes nothing himself, and his body is not pressed into arduous circumstances. Bell first cross-stitches words onto fabric, then costumes herself in restrictive and customary dress worn by Victorian women, while sitting on the floor with the prefabricated words spread before her and her audience; then she stitches words prompted by that live encounter. The monitors amplifying her hands at work underscore the painstaking physical challenges of needlework, as she replicates those conditions of earlier seamstresses. During her performance Bell stitched these

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words: “Lifting my crinoline I take my place in the Drawing Room. Seated on the floor, my back hard against the wall, I wait in silence broken by a clamour of children, running. They stop still before me, a row” (email to author, June 23, 2017). Unlike Youd’s dogged typewriting the text of Orlando as he sits in Virginia Woolf ’s garden at a small table as tourists pass by, Bell’s stitched words are directly inspired by the living and breathing people who encounter her. Bell fashions her body and the needlework she crafts from diversely vital materials as an assemblage which resembles “the ensemble nature of action and the interconnections between persons and things” (Bennett 37). Bell’s upcoming project will take her stitch-working performance onto the London transport system, where she will ply her needle on the Circle Line. Her literary text will be Jenny Diski’s Stranger on the Train (2002), in which the author describes her circular journeys around the perimeter of the United States and the London Circle Line, travels in which Diski is enclosed in a variety of compartments and surrounded by strangers in public. The circle both describes the pattern of her itineraries and the divisions of such enclosures between inside and outside. Bell plans to cross-stitch Diski’s words about her Circle Line travels as she sits in a train carriage retracing the author’s own circular movement around London. In addition to this form of recycling or copying literary text, Bell hopes her live performance of stitch work might draw surprising responses— whether a comment or conversation to disrupt the typical silence—from her captive audience of random passengers on the London Underground.8 As with Bennett’s assemblages, Bell’s current and future assemblages take place in eventspaces Bennett likens to “meshwork” (23).

RE-STITCHING: A WRAPPING UP Ellen Bell’s planned Circle Line supplies a figure too for a temporal circularity complementing the more linear needlework crucial to her unpicking aesthetics. Bell casts back to a Victorian past by her finding source materials in Jane Eyre and a dictionary, by stitching men’s shirts as the Brontë  sisters did, and by dressing in corset and crinoline as she sews in a gallery space. Yet this return to earlier times is also a way to recast in the present habits of femininity in which typically poorer women and young girls labor painfully and in silence. Love (Bag) is not only about Jane taking her passions out of hiding, but paired with Love (Gun), both are about displaying social privileges of class, age, and gender as well as the precariousness of the vulnerable woman with a love bag of emotions and a

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body pressed into work, or sometimes sexual abuse, and the rakish man with a love pistol to discharge. In her performative Oubliette Bell makes manifest the laboring silent seamstress, by putting herself in a museum space and allowing her performance to incorporate words of her spectators. Ellen Bell’s unpicking aesthetics rotates in concept and in practice the sewing Victorian girls and women performed a century and a half ago into the present and every day, a revolution that makes visible the often exploited work of the marginalized and silenced. By staging her Circle Line on the London Tube, Bell will stitch away surrounded by contemporary variations on Victorian needlewomen, who function as placeholders for the poor and poorly remunerated, such as cheaply paid global immigrants. How Bell incorporates what she sees and hears from other travelers witnessing her sewing on the Underground Circle Line promises new directions for her unpicking aesthetics, which draws on the Victorian past in order to highlight the possibilities of making visible and making heard and rendering more equitable the future for undervalued laborers.

NOTES 1 I thank Ellen Bell for her generosity in sharing her work, answering my numerous questions, sending me copies of her applications for grants, and commenting on a draft of this chapter. 2 Ellen Bell began exhibiting her work in solo and group shows in the early twentyfirst century in London and elsewhere in England, and more recently in Wales. Private collectors in Australia, Norway, the United Kingdom, and the United States own her work as well as public collections, including the Victoria and Albert Museum. Her conceptual art engages with language and incorporates verbal texts, with such titles as Body Language (2002), Texting (2005), Speaking Soul (2007), Hard Words (2008), and Talk to Me (2010). See www.ellenbell.co.uk/home/index.htm. 3 Ellen Bell, feedback Q & A statement for the Axisweb application for “Circle Line.” Axisweb is a British platform that supports and profiles artists. See www.axisweb. org/p/ellenbell/. 4 A list of ten texts Bell used for the installation appears inside the cover of Speaking Soul. Most of these texts are on the study of language, speech, and writing, including on English grammar, on idioms, public speaking, and dictionaries of English/ German and Amharic, an Ethiopian language. 5 Kortsch also explores the connection between sewing and literacy through sampler work (6–7). 6 Ellen Bell, Axisweb application for “Circle Line.”

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7 In addition to Orlando, Youd typed Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse in St. Ives, Cornwall, also in April 2015, and he has typed two novels by Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood (at the Flannery O’Connor Andalusia Foundation) and The Violent Bear It Away (at the Savannah College of Art) in February 2016. 8 Ellen Bell, Axisweb application for “Circle Line.”

WORKS CITED Barrett Browning, Elizabeth. Aurora Leigh. 1856. Ed. Margaret Reynolds. New York: Norton Critical Editions, 1996. Bell, Ellen. “And Other Stories.” Embroidery: The Textile Art Magazine. May/June 2017, 38–41. Bell, Ellen. Speaking Soul. Leicester: The City Gallery, 2007. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Brontë , Charlotte. Jane Eyre. 1847. Ed. Richard Nemesvari. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 1999. Gaskell, Elizabeth. The Life of Charlotte Brontë . 1857. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1900. Gaskell, Elizabeth. Mary Barton. 1848. Ed. Edgar Wright. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Greenberger, Alex. “Miriam Schapiro.” Art News. Web. www.artnews.com/2015/06/23/ miriam-schapiro-pioneering-feminist-artist-dies-at-91/. July 11, 2017. Hood, Thomas. “The Song of the Shirt.” 1843. In The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hood. Ed. Walter Jerrold, 625. London: Oxford University Press, 1920. Kortsch, Christine Bayles. Dress Culture in Late Victorian Women’s Fiction: Literacy, Textiles, and Activism. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009. Lutz, Deborah. The Brontë  Cabinet. New York: W. W. Norton, 2015. Parker, Roszika. The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of Femininity. London: The Woman’s Press, 1996. Schaffer, Talia. Novel Craft: Victorian Domestic Handicraft & Nineteenth-Century Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Schreiner, Olive. From Man to Man. 1926. London: Virago Modern Classics, 1985. Willett, Jonathan. “Reading Between the Lines: Ellen Bell’s Object Lesson.” In Speaking Soul. Ed. Ellen Bell. Leicester: The City Gallery, 2007, n.p. Youd, Tim. “Tim Youd’s 100 Novels Project.” Web. timyoud.com/100-novels.html. June 21, 2017.

3

Making It Niu: Blacking Out Albert Wendt’s Pouliuli the Tusitala Way Selina Tusitala Marsh

Niu, the Malayo-Polynesian cognate word for coconut (nut and palm), is known as the tree of life in Oceania. With over a thousand uses (as food, shelter, garment, and utensil) and a pan-Pacific mythological presence, the niu is a beloved and powerful symbol for island sustenance and identity. By “making it niu” I connect Pound’s western metropolitan modernist cry for innovation and interrogation with Pacific literary activism. I apply a Black Out poetry technique to a first edition copy of a canonical Pacific novel Pouliuli (1977) by the hailed forefather of Pacific literature, Samoan writer Albert Wendt (Sharrad 244; Marsh, “Body”). The book-length Black Out poem combines avant-garde poetics with a Pacificinfused reading strategy—the Tusitala Way—in order to “make it niu.” But what happens when a text is revisited four decades later by a proté gé  of Wendt’s—a New Zealand–born, second generation, afakasi Samoan woman poet-scholar feminist—seeking to make it niu for a new generation?1 Given the novel’s reputed misogyny (Griffen), is it possible to use the Tusitala Way to give light to a feminist perspective that keeps the Va (a Samoan philosophy concerning the nurturing of interrelational spaces among people and between people and the environment) between mentor and mentee, first and second generation, men and women, island-based Pacific and diasporic Pasifika scholars and writers intact?2

THE TUSITALA WAY The following poetic upcyclings (defined as creative reuse of existing materials in order to enhance its composite parts) and consequent renewals (reniu-als) made

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possible from making it niu stem from a larger way of engaging with Pacific texts. I call this the Tusitala Way. This Pacific-infused, creative-critical model for reading tales and telling niu ones has been formulated from my identity as a person of Pacific Island descent born and raised in the diaspora of Aotearoa New Zealand, as reflected in “Pouliuli: Back Cover” (Figure 3.1). As an Aotearoa New Zealand–born and –based Pasifika feminist poet-scholar of Samoan, Tuvalu, English, and French descent, my work is positioned from a pan-Pacific metropolitan center: Auckland. Living in the largest Polynesian city in the world gives me access to a vast array of writing published in English from Pacific Island writers.3 To “wake up  /  Samoa” is to awaken island-based epistemologies, aesthetics, and creative energies and “bring” them to the diaspora—in this case, Aotearoa New Zealand. The poem evokes using the “pen” to raise the consciousness of others. From this position, much of my work recuperates lost, marginalized, or ignored literary histories and creative writings of women poets who began publishing sole collections of poetry in English across the Pacific from the late 1970s.

Figure 3.1  Black Out Poem Back-Front Cover

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Raised by a Samoan migrant parent in the early 1970s, I grew up in a multicultural community where English (and its various modes) formed the lingua franca connecting diverse ethnic communities.4 This was not the same English as that in the literature we read. Due to Euro-American colonial incursions from the mid-nineteenth century, British/American English was (and continues to be) the dominant language of education, and hence, reflected in what was published in the Pacific. With the growth of regional universities and associated writing activities, a first wave of Pacific literature written in English was published from the mid-1970s onward, much of it endeavoring to reflect and use the “Englishes” of their reality (Crocombe; Subramani, South).5 While the quest for decolonization loomed large in these creative works in both theme and technique, this was not the case in its mainstream reception, particularly beyond island metropoles. By default, English aesthetics were used to critique Pacific literature written in English. Consequently, these texts were often viewed as the poor cousins of a mature, taught, and institutionalized Eurocentric canon. From the late 1990s, indigenous literary criticism caught up with indigenous literary production and “postcolonial” literature—post as defined by Wendt as “around, through, out of, alongside, and against” (Wendt Nuanua 3). Pacific literary studies began to “wake up.”6 Preceded by research on Pacific Indigenous Knowledge Systems (Thaman, “Acknowledging”) and decolonization movements in other scholarly fields (education, indigenous studies, history, health, development studies, feminism) indigenous literary scholars saw the commonsensical need for Pacific critical frameworks to read Pacific literature.7 Primarily, these literary critical approaches recognized what and how literature worked within the author’s own cultural, sociopolitical paradigms, in addition to how they negotiated and navigated the terrain of English literature and its aesthetics. Such approaches were declaratively part of an Oceanic decolonization process. But the comparative lack of culturally infused frameworks enabling better appreciation of Pacific writing continues to influence who gets published in Aotearoa New Zealand and who is included in curricula, literary festivals, and the like. Here, writers of European descent are 8.5 times more likely to be published than a Pasifika writer and 4.5 times more likely than a Mā ori writer (who respectively comprise 7 percent and 15 percent of the population) (Freegard, Makereti, Barnett, Statistics New Zealand). Making it niu the Tusitala Way seeks to disrupt this vicious circle.

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Tusitala commonly means “storyteller” or “writer of tales” in Samoan. Contemporary usage equates tusi with meaning to write or scribe, and tala meaning to tell (Greenhill and Clark).8 Arguably the most well-known Samoan word outside of Samoa—at least for scholars and readers of English literature—Tusitala is synonymous with canonical Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson (1850), who lived and died in Samoa (1890–94). Stevenson spoke and wrote in Samoan, often signing his letters with “Tusitala,” the title chiefs bestowed on Stevenson in recognition both of his status as a writer and his support of Samoan independence from a New Zealand colonial administration.9 Tusitala is also my maternal Tuvaluan grandfather’s name. Vaelei Tusitala was born in 1897 in Vaitupu, Tuvalu, then part of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands under British protectorship (from 1892, until becoming a colony in 1916 and achieving independence in 1979). Stevenson voyaged for three years around the Pacific and in 1889 had visited the Gilberts (Jolly 16). Given how oral cultures know and keep their histories—by memorializing historical events in the names of people and places—family members supposed that my grandfather was named after the famous author. There are more than a few Tusitalas of my grandfather’s generation around Polynesia.10 I, too, am a Tusitala. But I tell different tales. Notwithstanding Stevenson’s cultural empathy with Samoans, his tales exemplify a dominant white, male canon that has, until recently, represented the Pacific to the world without challenge. The Tusitala Way is informed by two pan-Pacific epistemologies that influence cultural practice and is reflected in Pacific orature (song, chant, proverb, sermon, genealogical recitations). The first is paraphrased as “we face the future with our backs,” evoking how the past provides an active form of knowledge and knowing. People, belief systems, and stories from the past are acknowledged, actively venerated, and incorporated in contemporary daily life.11 In a literary context, this principle is evident in efforts to make visible, honor, and center a Pacific canon of storytellers, one that reaches back into oral histories and forward into contemporary writing (Ihimaera and Long 1–6). The more visible reference points Pacific literature has, the more opportunity Pacific peoples have to see themselves (their stories, their aesthetics) reflected in the “literary mirror” (Marsh, “Body”).12 The Tusitala Way recognizes a genealogy of story that goes back to myth (the oral embodiment of culturally infused ways of knowing) and its dynamic retelling. As I explain below, “making it niu” draws on mythic connections with the

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coconut in order to read and tell niu tales in culturally appropriate ways. In making Pacific writers visible, we take part in “decolonizing the mind” as we move the “margin” to the “center” (hooks). The second pan-Pacific epistemology informing the Tusitala Way can be paraphrased as “the knower is the doer.” Guided by ancestral knowledge and influence, the Tusitala Way recognizes that many indigenous knowledge systems are underpinned by an ontological interconnectivity commonly articulated as ways of “knowing, doing, and being” (Gegeo and Watson-Gegeo; Martin and Mirraboopa; Yee). Many indigenous cultures prioritize inherited embodied knowledge and skills passed down and honed through practice and experience. One way of knowing, doing, and being that informs the Tusitala Way is the recognition that words hold power. The Samoan proverb “E pala le ma‘a, a e le pala upu” (Stones rot but not words) speaks of the enduring sacredness of words in cultures where orality is a treasured and measured form of communication, knowledge, history, and art. As a framework for how Pacific texts might be approached, the Tusitala Way recognizes the energy and potential wisdom held within each word and part thereof, both conceptually and materially. Being led by words—by that which is right in front of us—problematizes the usual practice of imposing a preexisting, a-cultural theoretical framework on text. The Tusitala Way is an organic process, as evoked in the noun way, connecting this literary tool to another form of ancestral knowledge—wayfinding. Used recently to develop critical approaches to Pacific literature elsewhere (Sullivan), I focus on Vince Diaz’s exploration of how traditional Carolinian seafarers conceived of time and space. Based on the concepts of etak and pootok, navigators were guided by that which came to them and conceived of their voyaging canoes as being still and fixed in midst of “moving islands” and a moving environment (Diaz).13 Diaz argues that this disruption of Cartesian, continent-centric concepts of absolute space and stability of landmass reflects cultural values of interdependence based on stewardship of land. It also reflects cultural values embodied in the Va, which I explain below. I liken the static positioning of the canoe to the Tusitala Way practitioner who is guided by the text as its language moves past, recognizing how the text signals ways to navigate itself, as opposed to continent-centric reading practices that steer through texts with set theoretical maps in order to get from here to there. Imaginatively employing textual wayfinding techniques is part of the research methodology for reading and responding to text in the Tusitala Way. It means being led by Tusitala, conceptually and materially.

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TUSI/TALA/ALA AND I Tusitala comprises of the words tusi, tala, and ala. The Austronesian protoform of tusi means to point to and indicate, primarily with one’s finger. It means to show, explain, teach, admonish, and instruct. Its Oceanic protoform means to mark or adorn with color, to somehow brand. In Fiji, the marking refers to the patterning and coloring of tapa cloth. Samoans use tusi to refer to marking siapo (Samoan tapa) and also to write and draw. The Sikaiana of the Solomon Islands use tusi “to make lines in a material; to draw them on paper; the lines on lined paper” (Greenhill, Clark, and Biggs).14 For Tikopians tusi refers to tracing something with one’s finger, to mark something (i.e., with turmeric) or, in its modern sense, to write. For Rotumans, tusi refers to marking with dots. When read in a pan-Pacific cultural context, tusi means to indicate for instructional purposes culturally embedded (and inflected) markings on public surfaces, both ancient and modern. These markings can be both functional and beautiful. Tala has four protoforms. Its Polynesian protoform refers to sharp-pointed objects, a spine or prong. I extend this natural object, as have other poets, to the pen and the act of writing.15 A second protoform links tala to seabirds in general, but in particular the gogosina or grey-backed tern. In much Pacific oral tradition birds are linked with sea voyaging, primarily as navigational aids, underpinning the connection between the Tusitala Way and navigation (Lewis 364). The Fijic protoform of tala means to narrate, or refers to narration. In Tuvalu and East Futuna tala means to expound, to tell, speak, and explain. In Veakau-Taumako tala refers to a “legend or story with factual background or containing some elements of historical tradition,” evidencing the belief that stories contain facts, histories, culture, wisdom (Greenhill, Clark, and Biggs).16 For the Waya in Fiji tala refers to the chief ’s messenger, evoking an earlier proposed model of the “critic as Talking Chief,” one who knowledgably speaks on behalf of the chief, or in this case, the writer (Hereniko and Schwarz 58). A fourth Fijic protoform of tala means to “untie, undo.” In Samoan it refers to opening out and dismantling; for Sikaiana tala means to undo a strong knot; for Tongans tala refers to unwrapping, unrolling, and also, opening up one’s mind or heart toward understanding (Greenhill, Clark and Biggs). These combined meanings of tala reflect the rationale and mandate behind the Tusitala Way, which is proposed here as a functional literary framework to adorn the space between writers and readers. This involves opening up appreciation of the writing of Pacific poets by untying taut/taught knots of

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perception based on Eurocentric literary standards and approaches to texts which have conventionally either left Pacific writing off the literary map or underappreciated it. Ala is the Austronesian protoform for “path” or “road.” Ala reflects the way that knowing the world through the writing and telling of our stories serves as pathways to each other and beyond. Because knowing is doing, it means reading Tusitala as both noun and verb—I am Tusitala; I do Tusitala. In Tusitala the “i” sits between the tusi (the writing) and the tala (the telling). Consequently, the Tusitala Way critic practices self-reflexivity. While Tusitala reflects my particular inherited legacy, we are all Tusitala or storytellers—whether critics or writers. As the path between the writing and the telling, the “i” sits in the Va, a philosophy with equivalences across the consocial Pacific. According to the Va, everything is relational, and open spaces need to be maintained, hence the admonition for all to teu le va, to nurture the spaces in between. I add “beautify” as an additional imperative here, recalling that tusi also means to “adorn” (Ka’ili 89; Ponifasio). These genealogical and literary connections inform the “way,” the ala for my work as a Pasifika poet-scholar, the pathway to service to my community, and for readers wishing to connect with Pacific literature in a Pacific-infused way.

MAKING BLACK OUT POETRY NIU When I first came across the Black Out poetry of Texan poet Austin Kleon, The New York Times’s bestselling author of Newspaper Blackout (2010), the nut dropped. Its visceral navigations of text and ethos of ease and access (poetry for all) appealed to me. Kleon used an ink marker to black out lines of print on the front page of The New York Times every day for a year, leaving a few words to create 365 evocative visual poems. A Black Out poem is made when a poet takes a marker (usually black marker) to an already established text—like in a newspaper—and starts redacting words until a poem is formed. The key thing with a blackout poem is that the text AND redacted text form a sort of visual poem. (Brewer)

The technique of blacking out newspapers and making other creative works has a 250-year-old history (Kleon, “Steal”).17 Black Out poetry is a form of erasure poetry (the creation of poetry by removing surrounding text) and open field

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composition (the making of poetry by composing from existing text and keeping line breaks and spaces as in the original). Both techniques fall under the genre of found poetry, defined as: the literary version of a collage. Poets select a source text or texts—anything from traditional texts like books, magazines and newspapers to more nontraditional sources like product packaging, junk mail or court transcripts—then excerpt words and phrases from the text(s) to create a new piece. (Baker, Ayer, and Dunman)

Tom Philips’s monumental A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel is the bestknown long form of Black Out poetry applied to an entire book. A work-inprogress since 1966 with its first version published in 1973, Philips has continued to work with the same text (W. H. Mallock’s 1892 novel A Human Document), publishing manifold versions of the novel (including an iPhone app) for over five decades by blacking out, drawing, painting, cutting up, and collaging over its pages. Of the process, Phillips notes: I plundered, mined, and undermined its text to make it yield the ghosts of other possible stories, scenes, poems . . . which seemed to lurk within its wall of words.

Phillips’s first rule is to “try and find something good. . . . The second rule is not to muck about with it. Not to change the place of the page” (Smyth and Partington). How could I make an avant-garde (a hallmark modernist term) poetic technique do “something good” for Pacific literature especially given its mandate of decolonization? Rather than unreflexively placing yet another Eurocentric framework over Pacific literature, I infuse the avant-garde technique of Black Out poetry with Pacific epistemologies inherent in the Tusitala Way: the centrality of genealogy and materiality, together conceived of as part of a wider “being, knowing, and doing” ethos. By engaging with Western poetics the Tusitala Way, I continue Tongan anthropologist and satirist Epeli Hau’ofa’s move away from the Western parochial ideological conception of the Pacific as “far flung islands in a big sea” (and thus marginal to metropolitan global poetics) to being part of the flux and flow of ideas, ancient, and contemporary, circulating within “our sea of islands” (Hau’ofa 86). For example, there are resonant methods between blacking out existing text and Carolinian seafaring navigation—both techniques take the words/worlds that come your way and go on a journey. But how might I take an interesting

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poetry experiment and make it part of a literary model based on Pacific research methodologies and underpinned by a teu le va ethos? How might this in turn seek to nurture and adorn critical spaces between the text and reader in order to make the Pacific literary community more visible? Within days the answer stared me in the face—literally. In the Tusitala Way the process of being led figuratively and materially by its own component parts is evident in the parsing of itself. Making it niu holds similar instructions for poetic process. Niu from coastal palms (as distinct from planned inland plantations) fall on sand, are swept out by tides, carried by currents, and eventually wash up on other foreshores to either take root or rot. On my bookshelf stood an old student copy of Albert Wendt’s classic 1977 novel Pouliuli. Its Samoan title means “black” or “darkness.” Pouliuli begged to be blacked out. But this was my only copy—a first edition. Photocopying its pages was not an option as engagement with the original text added an important dimension of authenticity. Three days later, what should wash up on the foreshore of my office corridor? A pile of novels. A colleague “just happened” to be updating her curriculum and getting rid of her class copies—did I want them?18 Natural germination at its best! Wendt’s slim second novel occupies a space in the Pacific literary canon for its critically acclaimed contribution to the telling of Pacific-centric tales. It is also renowned for its misogyny. From the mid-1980s Arlene Griffen, a Fiji-based Indo-Fijian writer and critic, offered the first major feminist critique of Pacific literature (1985; 1988; 1997). Out of three examined Wendt novels (Leaves of the Banyan Tree [1979] and Sons for the Return Home [1973]), Pouliuli is seen as the most unrelentingly misogynistic in its treatment of women as wives, mothers, and daughters who are characterized as passive, greedy, ruthless, unprincipled, deceptive, slovenly, manipulative, and mad. Even when women and men occupy similar roles in the story, the men, Griffen argues, are described in more neutral language with women faring much worse, couched in negative and demeaning descriptions. Women who are subject to verbal and physical abuse are positioned as colluding in their own mistreatment and complicit in their own demise (Griffen, “Different” 46). Griffen argues that while the depiction of women characters might “pass unacknowledged in the continuous reading for the story” (“Different” 48), it is the accumulative debasement and the lack of agency of each female character subject to patriarchal control and written in Wendt’s “masculine monologic voice” that Griffen argues is objectionable from a feminist perspective (“Different” 49). Citing Wendt’s own formula for writing as

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a “search for self-respect,” Griffen queries how this is possible for women readers in his works: A woman reader seeking to find a female character with self-respect in these novels will search in vain. . . . The oppression I take on behalf of these female characters is cumulative and cannot be dissipated by any amount of critical analysis of the literary merits of these works, whether that takes place privately or in my work as an English teacher of young Pacific people, who are looking to our literature for self-respect and some sense of identity as well as for enjoyment. When Wendt says, “I write what I want to write,” I must accept that; but I will not accept works whose persistent misogyny and sexism are not effectively criticized by the work itself and can too easily be taken as authoritatively persuasive if left unchallenged and uncriticized. (“Different,” 51)

In referring to his later epic novel Leaves of the Banyan Tree, Griffen accuses Wendt of being “unjust to women not just in superficial ways but in its fundamental imaginative act” (“Different,” 51). In 1988 both writers appeared on the same panel at a London conference. The exchange did not end well and is now part of Pacific urban legend. Suffice it to note that a breach in the Va occurred and is only evident to the attentive researcher able to read between the lines: Griffen continued to publish and hold Pacific male writers accountable for literary acts of misogyny; Wendt satirized Griffen in his post-apocalyptic dystopia Black Rainbow (175). Sharrad argues that Wendt’s fourth novel, Ola (1991), written from the point of view of a Samoan woman, was, in part, a response to the accusation of his lack of rounded, complex, agentic female characters. Despite the comparatively small community of Pacific literary scholars, to my knowledge Wendt and Griffen never appeared together in public again. As a feminist, Griffen’s scholarship has been influential in my work. I am also Wendt’s proté gé  and enjoy a now familial relationship with my mentor and his partner, Reina Whaitiri. How might “making it niu” offer (and support) a feminist critique while keeping the Va intact? The Va refers to the relational space not only between myself, Wendt, and Griffen but also between groups of people: between men and women; and between first-, second-, and thirdgeneration Pacific writers and scholars, both island based and in diaspora. Could making Pouliuli niu give rise to the more empowering and, as argued by Griffen, the more common voices of mothers, grandmothers, sisters, and aunts, who are “ordinary women who face life with fortitude, enjoyment and dignity” (Griffen, “Different” 51)? Could the narrative breach of the Va between men and women

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in Pouliuli be healed, nurtured, even adorned by another kind of “imaginative act,” even across what ’Okusitino Mahina calls the Ta/Va, across temporal and spatial divides?

BLACKING OUT POULIULI Pouliuli is the tale of seventy-six-year-old Faleasa Osovae, high chief of the village of Malaelua (two meeting places), who one morning realizes the hypocrisy and social control at the heart of Fa’a Samoa (the Samoan Way). In an unforgettable opening scene, Faleasa projectile vomits all over his fale (open-walled house) after his literal and metaphorical awakening. Sickened by the realization that he is now trapped in the very hierarchies and traditional responsibilities he upheld—the same ones he manipulated and rose to power within—Faleasa strikes out in an act of independence: he feigns madness. As Faleasa contemplates pouliuli (an existential darkness) and the meaning of his existence, he surreptitiously observes the attempts by family and friends to cure him of his sickness, all the while continuing to maneuver family and village affairs.19 The village serves as a microcosm of a society where two paradoxical worlds coexist: Christianity and “paganism,” piety and hypocrisy, appearances and reality, cultural integrity and cultural ruination, traditional custom and Western capitalism, and individual hierarchic power and communal control. Faleasa’s lifetime rise to power has led to his total entrapment within what he sees as an increasingly hypocritical society. Like rows of niu, Pouliuli exists on the shoreline, a postcolonial “contact zone” (Pratt 7). Written in English and set in a post-contact Samoa, the novel grapples with the overlaps between Samoan culture, Westernization, and capitalism. In terms of how this affects gender politics, we witness the corruption of traditional complementarity relationships between women and men, parents and children, matai (village elders, chiefs) and villagers, ministers and parishioners, and healers and the sick. In making the text niu, I took an ink marker and, after locating female nouns and pronouns, began blacking out everything around them except for resonant verbs, adjectives, and key conjunctions that shaped a line of story. The plot on each page provides an inverse context, a shadow background against which each found Black Out poem rises (hence titles include page numbers from the original text)20 (Figure 3.2).

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Figure 3.2  Selina Tusitala Marsh. “Black Out Poem 145.”

In textually reproducing these poems within this chapter (when not digitally reproduced), I’ve used poetic license to work within space restrictions and to appeal to my aesthetics rather than attempt to reproduce an accurate spatial record of the source page’s layout. Each poem is centered here to convey how poems rise up from the page. Words appear on the same line only when found on the same line; otherwise a new line may indicate its placement on the next line or a dozen lines down the page. Likewise, spacings between each word are indicative. These textually reproduced poems, occupying their own space on the page in their own manner, become niu poems.

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Pouliuli’s female characters are extensions of their more agentic husbands or fathers. Felefele, Faleasa’s wife and the mother of his feuding sons, is characterized as a schemer and weak. To silence Felefele’s attempts to stop the bickering between her sons, Faleasa (who continually pits them against each other) simply points to the kitchen. Felefele leaves “whimpering and sniffing.” “Black Out 35” rises to the surface: she fight! She challenge and awake the va

The poem contests the narrative’s relegation of women to the margins of family business and, instead, repositions women in roles of agency. She, as the first word, disputes the marginality of women, asserting a proactive stance, and rouses the activation of relational spaces. Mothers are often cast as manipulators who use those around them as pawns for power. Early in his feigned descent into madness, Faleasa enacts spirit possession by a “vindictive aitu” (spirit)—his own mother (5), the act of a son dramatizing his own debasement through maternal shaming gives rise to “Black Out 5”: mother mother go d ess mother mother power a son As witness

We see the primary relationship between mother and son restored as the novel’s profane “mother-as-evil-spirit” archetype is inverted by the sacred “mother-as-goddess” archetype. The repetition of mother before and after the word go d ess forms an empowering incantation. Simultaneously, the spacing

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between the word godess evokes movement and dynamism (“go”) between ancient and contemporary manifestations of “mother.” The ascension of the “mother” to “goddess” and thence to a more ancient power is vitally witnessed by “a son”—a generic role all men occupy, regardless of status, rank, or creed. The “son / As / witness” places him not only as an observer to women’s power (reinforced by the mirroring “ess” in the two nouns), but connotes his ability and readiness to testify to her occupation of the divine as well. In contrast to Faleasa’s manipulative behavior implicating his own mother in his own spirit possession, in “Black Out 13” strong sons are nurtured by their mothers: He’s Strong For his mother loved him. his mother was admired for a loud heart

A son’s strength is conditional upon a mother’s primary love, a relationship characterized by a “loud / heart,” a love that is dictionary-defined as vociferous, noisy, raucous, boisterous, forceful, voluble, and riotous even. A son’s strength is a consequence of having a powerful, active, and demonstratively loving mother. Having instilled fear in the villagers by feigning insanity, Faleasa shares his sanity with Moala, his younger son, and manipulates him into believing that his older brother and mother are set against them. Faleasa calls Felefele an “unscrupulous mother—who doesn’t deserve to be anyone’s mother—” (30). “Black Out 30” rises to the surface: mother you solve anything you plan fix and deepen courage

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In contrast, the poem brings to light the central role a mother occupies in helping her children develop character. We not only see that the mother’s ability to problem solve is openly acknowledged by her children, but the use of the second person pronoun aligns us with the speaking voice—we are complicit in the recognition of these maternal qualities. In Faleasa’s quest for freedom from a normative society (which he now recognizes is based on spirit-corrupting quests for power), women are associated with male suffocation. After Felefele has cleaned the fale in the wake of Faleasa’s deliberately aimed instances of vomiting, and his breaking and throwing of household items, Faleasa likens Felefele’s domestic orderliness to a “smothering womb” (7). In “Black Out 7” the void or existential space in which Faleasa ultimately drowns when unable to escape his madness becomes the same space in which women agentically reniu themselves: she had rebirth in the Void and felt new

Many Black Out poems give rise to strident reclamations of girl power, contrasting with the novel’s narrative positioning of women and girls as passive agents, subservient helpmeets to their husbands, or hounded (and hounding) in-laws. When Faleasa abdicates his chiefly position and endeavors to manipulate the elders’ next choice, Wendt reveals how Faleasa admits to continuing a patriarchal line of manipulative influence: “I am truly my ruthless father’s son” (37). Yet, Faleasa is unable to see how he perpetuates the very system from which he seeks freedom. In contrast, “Black Out 37” reads: powerful girls achieve choice

Here, “powerful girls” stand outside of patriarchy, occupying a position of selfdetermination. Girls actively “achieve  /  choice.” The consonantal resonance between these two words draws attention to choice gained through effort, skill, and courage (definitions of achieve),21 arguably first premised on the ability to

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critique that system. This is a position temporarily afforded by Faleasa’s madness, but not applied along lines of gender. These poems acknowledge the power implicit in less public, but no less influential, arenas of leadership.22 In Lear-like fashion, after stirring them up, Faleasa’s sons and their wives begin arguing about how best to care for him, accusing each other of having ulterior motives (33). Felefele is shown as being powerless in preventing her sons from quarrelling, while their wives are described as engaging in inconsequential and grotesque activities (picking their scabs or dried up snot). “Black Out 33” brings to light the paradoxical nature of women’s power in patriarchal and hierarchic contexts: in darkness Women Speak a loud silence

Studies of gender roles in the Pacific have long complicated the simplistic formula of public shows of power reflecting levels of influence (Schoeffel). As indicated in the poem, women in Samoa impact community affairs through less visible, Va-infused (relationship-based) ways. But women (from mothers to sisters to high chiefs) possess strategic knowledge about when and where to speak up in order to be heard, as evident in “Black Out 31”: women wink at the silence and turn  up the volume

Winking refers to how women partake in informal modes of nonverbal communication, signaling shared private knowledge or intent. In a society that is patriarchal with matriarchal interweavings, public shows of power often reflect the common adage: “Man is the head of the family, woman the neck that turns the head” (Iz Quotes). As the poem suggests, there is a conscious power in the collective female body. Like their mythic predecessors, women are skillful at war. Unlike indigenous men who were more easily co-opted into colonial patriarchal modes of power, Trask argues that women—as mothers, sisters, and

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daughters—tended to focus on what mattered—the communal center (94). “Black Out 11” rises: women show courage      in war and drive the center

In a nation whose very name connotes the sacred power of the center (Sa means “sacred” and moa means “center”) this poem reinforces the common knowledge that women who determine and occupy the center hold more power and influence in Samoa than perhaps first visible from the outside. The next generation of women, cognizant of where and how real power is defined, is evident from the first page of Pouliuli, as seen in “Black Out 1”: daughters respect power rank knowledge integrity and the center

Here, “daughters” are all women, as “sons” are all men. Applying a Black Out technique to Pouliuli gives rise to pouliuli-esque representations of women—empowering, reclaimative, restorative. Samoan cultural understandings of pouliuli are reflected in two phrases used to demarcate time and history: before and after Western (missionary) contact. The phrase aso o le pouliuli translates as “the times of darkness,” referring to life and understandings of the world in precontact, pre-missionary Samoa. Its counter phrase, post-contact, is known as aso o le malamalama, or “times of light, or enlightenment,” referring to, among other events, the introduction of Christianity and the gospel (Macpherson, “Changing” 76). Tui Atua Tupua Tamasese, Samoa’s former head of state and preeminent philosopher of precolonial cultural beliefs and practices, argues that there are two Samoas: one, a modern Samoa, 99 percent nominally Christian, proudly declarative of its religious status; and two, the old Samoa, steeped in ancient and

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traditional beliefs and practices where specialist knowledge is (now) passed on often through less public means. Tamasese refers to these continued beliefs and practices as “whispers,” arguing that Old Samoa continues to “haunt,” influence, and infuse New Samoa (Suaalii-Sauni, Whispers). Clearly, the old world was never fully replaced, but merely made less visible (Salesa, “Cowboys” 342). These shifting palimpsestic worlds are reflected in both Wendt’s fiction and my treatment of his text. In the material production of my novel-length Black Out poem, the hand-drawn, unevenly blacked out pages show traces of letters and part-words beneath. Language continues to “whisper” through uneven shades of darkness. When a sequence of these poems was being prepped for publication, a designer thought he’d “tidy it up” for me, replacing the hand-drawn pages with digitized straight-lined blocks of even-toned black. I rejected these aesthetically conformist versions and kept to the originals with their spontaneous energy and, crucially, their palimpsestic nature.23 Pouliuli, the coexistence of two worlds and two simultaneously unfolding stories, remained.

NIU MYTHOLOGIES One of the worlds that “whispers” throughout modern-day Samoa is evoked through its mythologies (Suaalii-Sauni). The niu, found throughout mythology and associated with two powerful women, Sina and Nafanua, offers niu ways of seeing and hearing the invisible, silenced, and vilified women in Pouliuli.24 There are many myths involving a young woman named Sina, but one in particular—Sina and the Eel—is found in numerous versions within Samoa and throughout Oceania (including Tonga, Fiji, New Zealand, and the Cook Islands). Given that oral traditions are forms of knowledge, sources of authority, and as such guarded and reserved by families, the number of variations is unsurprising (Nelson). The version that Samoan nationalist O. F. Nelson (1883–1944) shares in “The Origin of the Cocoanut Tree” records how Sina’s beauty caught the attention of a son from a rival family. The son had the head of a handsome man but the body of a monstrous eel. The two spent much time together and eventually fell in love. Sina’s parents discovered their clandestine affair and took her away. The eel pursued her but Sina’s family finally killed him. As the eel lay dying he spoke these last words to the distraught Sina: Sina e, a I ai ni ou alofa O’u tufaaga ou fofoga Ia e toina i se pa toga

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A tupu ae ola A I ai ni ona fua Tai tautasi tai tau lua o ni ona lau Tou laga ni tapaau Ma ni ili-tea tali toelau E tali ai aloga pe a sau.

Nelson’s translations reads: Sina, let us part in love (peace) When I am killed, Ask for my head as your portion. Take and plant it in a Tongan (or stone) wall. Its fruit you will drink, And use as water carriers, single and double. With its leaves you will plait mats and roofing, Also a fan to fan yourself When meditating on your love for me. In the nuts you will see my face, Which every time you drink will be kissed by you. (Nelson 133)

The eel, now transformed into the coconut palm, remains central to island life. Reciprocity between Sina (through her descendants) and nature is evident. Sina is tasked with the role of teu le va, of nurturing the Va (both environmental and interrelational) with the eel. In return, the whole of humanity is nourished. Like Sina, Nafanua’s association with the niu is also connected with restoring Va. Before fighting in battle those who worshipped Nafanua underwent purification rites to ensure her blessing and their success. The rite included healing breaches in the Va and seeking forgiveness from anyone they had offended. Washing themselves with coconut water was a symbolic part of the ritual (Sinavaiana-Gabbard 251). Additionally, as the daughter of Saveasi’uleo, the god of Pulotu (underworld), and a war goddess, the connection between the niu and Nafanua also evokes fighting prowess and leadership. Nafanua wore coconut leaves as a breastplate while her warriors wore coconut leaf belts to mark their allegiance. Nafanua led a successful campaign of war against invading Tongans and was praised for her military skill. During battle Nafanua’s coconut breastplate fell away, revealing her breasts—and her gender—much to the shock and further shame of their enemies. The newly won territory was marked with coconut ties, a custom evident in traditional boundary marking practices (Sinavaiana-Gabbard 250).

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Sina and Nafanua are “complementary binaries” of older, powerful, global, pre-Christian, Great Mother Goddess archetypes who, Sinavaiana-Gabbard argues, “embodied all the quintessential human polarities: male and female, creative and destructive, nurturing and aggressive” (244–46). Many of the myths surrounding the goddess share two correlating motifs: connections with the niu and the rescue of men by women. Together, these interconnected mythic figures provide “an originary cultural template for the balance of power between genders” (Sinavaiana-Gabbard 246).

MAKING IT NIU The application of experimental poetic techniques on a first-wave Pacific canonical text25 is not only something avant-garde and new, it is also something Pacific-based and old. Given the colonial impetus to freeze, simplify, and infantilize other cultures, recognizing the existence of a Pacific canon complete with its own history of developing experimental and explorative traditions of criticism is key to decolonizing our minds. Just as oceanic voyaging has been re-storied from the Eurocentric narrative of accidental landfall to deliberate, skilled navigation (Tamayose and De Silva), so too have indigenous and, in this case, Pacific literary studies been reclaimed, re-centered, and reniued in terms of having and being led by its own wayfinding techniques and exploration of niu knowledges. In making it niu and blacking out Pouliuli, what rose to the surface of each page were poems reflecting traits of these niu-infused, proto-feminist figures. Women occupy roles of empowerment and agency that nurture interrelational spaces and serve as a balance to the novel’s characterization of women as manipulators and disruptors of the Va. Making it niu allows seeing through an indigenous feminist lens based on empowering mythic feminist prototypes, which enables these women’s voices not only to rise up against their textual voicelessness and disempowerment, but to hear them in an empowering Pacific-infused context. This is no externally imposed postcolonial or modernist feminist application. It is an act that brings out from the center a preexisting female power.26 These Black Out poems evidence the power of latent palimpsest worlds and voices as they rise to the surface of the same page, brought out by a second generation afakasi Pasifika poet-scholar feminist who is making it niu the Tusitala Way. Rather than judging Pouliuli or its author out of time (late 1970s), as part of the Tusitala Way of critically and creatively responding to Pacific texts, making

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it niu serves the wider Pacific community as an act of literary decolonization. The emancipatory role that such re-centering and re-storying of Samoan-centric ways of knowing, doing, and being is made explicit by Sinavaiana-Gabbard in her own feminist resurrection of mythic Samoan paradigms: We have it in our power to reclaim and restore a conceptual framework of belief that would provide the most powerful antidote possible to the ravages of western hegemonies, whether cultural or political. By reinscribing Samoa’s indigenous epistemologies, her ancient divinities and her wisdom tradition with the respect and honor they deserve—by reinstating them once again in the public conversation—we begin the process of healing the profound sociopsychological wounds, shame and guilt . . . (Sinavaiana-Gabbard 244)

As part of the Tusitala Way, “Making It Niu” Pacificizes Ezra Pound’s famous catch cry through poetic upcyclings and reniuals of existing texts. Reading and responding to Pacific texts from the “inside out” (Hereniko and Schwarz) and driven by Pacific-centric concepts, the Tusitala Way adheres to Thaman’s definition of a decolonizing methodology which “revives, re-invents and re-images Pacific epistemologies and cultural diversities” using “representations and concepts that are rooted in Pacific consciousness and are context-specific” (Thaman, “Culture”). Rather than an emphasis on what Thaman identifies as “classifications and definitions” (the foundation of conventional Western research), the Tusitala Way is positioned here as part of Pacific Indigenous Knowledge Systems, offering “meaning and relevance” through ways of thinking about texts that are “responsive,” “integrative,” and “accretive” (Thaman, “Culture”). To Thaman’s list I add creative. Making it niu doesn’t change the story of Pouliuli, but it does make new ones. This Pacificized form of literary analysis serves to not only “adorn” the space between text and reader but also heal breaches in the Va between generations of readers—especially second generation diasporic feminist readers like myself seeking to reconcile criticism with existing relationships, and in my case, with Albert Wendt, a first generation scholar, writer, and mentor, the “forefather” of Pacific literature who is now part of my aiga (extended family). Griffen’s historical charge of misogyny still stands. But now it also stands alongside acts of making it niu the Tusitala Way. These creative Pacific-infused responses to Pouliuli offer ways out of the confines of authorial, textual, and critical stances surrounded by silence, and moves textual negotiations into voice. In “Black Out Last Page,” Laaumatua, Faleasa’s crippled loyal childhood friend, takes his broken best friend back to his village where the women tend and care for him. In these final lines, Laaumatua admits that without Mua, his

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wife, and his estranged son, he too is lost. While the men sink into existential darkness, women thrive within it: women free beloved in the embrace of Pouliuli

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Fa’afetai tele lava to Maebh Long, Matthew Hayward, and Sudesh Mishra for organizing the Oceanic Modernism conference (University of the South Pacific, Fiji 2015); Susan Stanford Friedman and Helen Sword for critical talanoa; Silafau Sina Va‘ai and SPACLALS (National University of Samoa) Literary Festival 2016 for hearing fledgling thoughts; and my Auckland University summer scholar Zech Soakai for final touches. This chapter is dedicated to the late Teresia Teaiwa, who helped forge the niu paths I walk today.

NOTES 1 An English translation of afakasi—“half caste”—is now a common identity marker, having been somewhat reclaimed from derogative overtones based on racist colonial categories determining preferential treatment between Samoans and “half ” Samoans (or those with mixed blood) (Salesa). 2 Pasifika (the Samoan transliteration of Pacific) is a strategically essentialist identity marker used by those of Pacific descent born and/or raised in diaspora. Other spellings (Pacifica, Pasifica) reflect particular language origins. 3 Many islanders living in diaspora now outnumber those on their island of origin, for example, Samoa, Tonga and Niue (Macpherson). 4 Distinct from different languages and dialects spoken within one island (for example, the eighty-plus distinct languages spoken in Vanuatu or the sevenhundred-plus languages of Papua New Guinea (Crowley 50; Foley x), the “Englishes” spoken within my home communities are more akin to the proliferation of Pijins in heterogeneous islands elsewhere. 5 The first Pacific text was an autobiographic novel by Cook Islander Johnnie Florence Frisbie, Miss Ulysses from Puka-Puka: The Autobiography of a South Sea Trader’s Daughter, published in 1949 by Macmillan.

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6 The 1994 landmark conference “Inside Out” in Hawai‘i was significant not only because of the numbers of Pacific peoples in attendance but in the numbers who presented (Teaiwa 347). Pacific literary activism has continued to grow since its genesis in the late 1960s throughout Polynesia (Subramani; Crocombe; Marsh, “Migrating”; Stewart, Mateata-Ellain and Mawyer), Melanesia (Winduo), and Micronesia (Kilheng; Yamamoto). 7 See for example, Thaman, “Cultural”; Smith; Tamasese et al., “Furthering”; Meyers; Maua-Hodges; Underhill-Sem; Pulotu-Endemann; Mahina; Nabobo-Baba; Vaioleti; Naisilisili; Tamihere; Winduo; and Kihleng. 8 The Austronesian protoform tusi means to “point (to), indicate” while its Oceanian protoform means to “mark or adorn with colour, brand.” Tala has numerous protoforms but the Fijic protoform meaning to “narrate, narration” comes closest to contemporary Samoan usage (Greenhill and Clark 551–59). 9 Britain seized the colony of Samoa, ruled by Germany, at the end of World War II. Stevenson became a friend to Mau independence leader Tupua Tamasese Lealofi III, writing in support of the Mau freedom movement and publishing A Footnote to Samoan History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa in 1892. Moreover, Stevenson was officially introduced at the house of Mata‘afa as “Ali‘i Tusitala,” meaning “Chief Write-Information” in Letters 7: 300 (Jolly 139). 10 Personal correspondence with the then Samoan Head of State, Tui Atua Tupua Tamasese Mealofi Efi Ta‘isi, December 2, 2015. 11 For example, a common protocol for introductions in meetings involves establishing ancestral and land connections before the reasons for gathering are addressed. Makaere argues that one’s genealogy (whakapapa) “embodies a comprehensive conceptual framework that enables us to make sense of our world. It allows us to explain where we have come from and to envisage where we are going” (286). 12 New Zealand needs more culturally relevant curricula to reflect the high Pacific Islands demographic in New Zealand (which is also the fastest growing youth demographic) with Auckland being the largest Polynesian city in the world. Pacific people need to be able to “see” their literary selves in the cultural mirror (Marsh, “Body”). 13 Much has been done and written in recent years to redress the idea of accidental Polynesian voyaging and migration, and to reclaim the Pacific’s incredible oceanic navigational heritage. Notably, this began with the historical 1976 voyage of the Hō kū le‘a, which retraced ancestral pathways from Hawai‘i to Tahiti by traditional navigational methods (Polynesian Voyaging Society). 14 See the Pollex database for the word tusi; https://pollex.shh.mpg.de/search/?query= tusi&field=entry. 15 See, for example, Ma‘ohi Tahitian poet Flora Devatine in her poem “Voyage Through Words and Notes.” On line 13 Devatine links the inky potency of the sea urchin’s spikes to the potency of the pen. This poem appears in Varua Tupu (2006), the first English translation of an anthology of Tahitian literature.

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16 See the Pollex database for the word tala; https://pollex.shh.mpg.de/search/?query= tala&field=entry. 17 See Kleon’s TEDx talk where Kleon traces the origins of Black Out poetry from Russian-born composer Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) through Tom Phillips (1937-), William Borroughs (1914–97), Brion Gysin (1916–86), Tristan Tzara (1896-1963), and Caleb Whiteford (1734-1810). 18 Thanks to the generosity of my colleague Nina Nola. 19 Pouliuli is the first of Wendt’s existentialist explorations, developed later in his other works including the speculative fiction Black Rainbow (1992) and his image-text poetry collection, The Book of the Black Star (2002). 20 Selections of my Black Out poems have been published in my collection Tightrope and in Black Marks on the White Page, edited by Witi Thimaera and Tina Makereti. None of the Black Out poems discussed in this chapter have been published. 21 Definitions of the word achieve in the English Oxford Living Dictionaries include: “Successfully bring about or reach (a desired objective or result) by effort, skill, or courage.” www.en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/achieve. 22 For example, women’s power is commonly exerted “from the back,” implicit in the title given to one of the most influential positions in the village, the minister’s wife, faletua (meaning “at the back”). 23 See the sequence “Pouliuli: A Story of Darkness in 13 Lines” in Ihimaera and Makereti, 235–48. 24 Nafanua has a living genealogical line today, and her tombstone can be found in the village of Falealupo, Savai’i. 25 Wendt’s Sons for the Return Home (1977) is commonly viewed as the first Pacific novel, a watershed for Pacific literature. However, depending on how literary genres are defined, Papua New Guinean Vincent Eri’s epic bio-history The Crocodile (1972) was published earlier. 26 In her novel Potiki (1999) renowned Mā ori author Patricia Grace notes that the carver’s role is to reveal that which already exists inside the wood.

WORKS CITED Baker, Jenni, Beth Ayer, and Doug Lunman. “About Found Poetry.” In The Found Poetry Review. (April 21, 2016). Web. www.foundpoetryreview.com/about-found-poetry/. November 23, 2017. Barnett, Sarah Jane. “Why Can’t We All Just Get Along? The Literature Edition.” Pantograph Punch. Creative New Zealand & NZ on Air. (October 31, 2017). Web. www.pantograph-punch.com/post/getting-along-lit. November 1, 2017.

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Brewer, Robert Lee. “Erasure and Black Out Poems: Poetic Form.” In Writer’s Digest. (November 21, 2014). Web. www.writersdigest.com/whats-new/erasure-andblackout-poems-poetic-forms. September 20, 2017. Crocombe, Marjorie Tuainekore. “Introducing Mana 1974.” Mana Annual of Creative Writing 1974. Suva, Fiji: University of South Pacific, 1974), 1. Crowley, Terry. “The Language Situation in Vanuatu.” Current Issues in Language Planning 1.1 (2000): 47–132. Devatine, Flora. “Voyage through Words and Notes.” In Varua Tupu. Eds. Frank Stewart, Kareva Mateata-Allain, and Alexander Dale Mawyer. Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 2006. 24. Diaz, Vicente M. “No Island is an Island.” In Native Studies Keywords. Eds. Stephanie Teves, Andrea Smith, and Michelle Raheja. Arizona: University of Arizona Press, 2015, 90–108. Eri, Vincent. The Crocodile. Milton, Queensland: Jarcaranda Press, 1972. Foley, William A. Preface. The Papuan Languages of New Guinea. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Freegard, Janis. “Poetry and Gender and New Zealand Publishing—The Latest.” Janis Freegard’s Weblog. Wordpress (October 19, 2014). Web. www.janisfreegard.com/ 2014/10/19/poetry-and-gender-in-new-zealand-publishing-the-latest/. May 30, 2017. Frisbie, Johnnie Florence. Miss Ulysses from Puka-puka: The Autobiography of a South Sea Trader’s Daughter. Basingstoke: Macmillan Company, 1948. Gegeo, David Welchman, and Karen Ann Watson-Gegeo. “‘How We Know’: Kwara’ae Rural Villagers Doing Indigenous Epistemology.” The Contemporary Pacific 13.1 (2001): 55–88. Web. www.jstor.org/stable/23718509. August 9, 2016. Grace, Patricia. Potiki. Auckland, NZ: Viking Penguin, 1986. Greenhill, Simon J., and Ross Clark. “POLLEX-Online: The Polynesian Lexicon Project Online.” Oceanic Linguistics 50.2 (2011): 551–59. Web. www.simon.net.nz/ files//2012/12/Greenhill_and_Clark2011.pdf. February 3, 2016. Greenhill, Simon J., Ross Clark, and Bruce Biggs. “Polynesian Lexicon Project Online.” Pollex Online. Polynesian Lexicon Project Online (May 31, 2010). Web. https:// pollex.shh.mpg.de/. February 3, 2016. Griffen, Arlene. “The Different Drum: A Feminist Critique of Selected Works from the New Literature in English from the South Pacific.” Master of Arts thesis, University of London, 1985. Griffen, Arlene. “Feminist Perspectives on Pacific Literature.” Pacific Writers’ Conference, Commonwealth Institute, London, October 27–29, 1988. Griffen, Arlene. “Women Speak Out in Literature: Pacific and Caribbean Voices.” Wasafiri 25.12 (1997): 22–24. Web. www.tandfonline.com.ezproxy.auckland.ac.nz/ doi/abs/10.1080/02690059708589525. May 4, 2015. Hau’ofa, Epeli. “Our Sea of Islands.” In Asia / Pacific as Space of Cultural Production. Eds. Rob Wilson and Arif Dirlik. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995, 86–98. Hereniko, Vilsoni, and Sig Schwarz. “Four Writers and One Critic.” Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific (1999): 55–64.

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Hereniko, Vilsoni and Rob Wilson, eds. Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999. hooks, bell. Feminist Theory from Margin to Center. Boston, MA: South End Press. 1984. Ihimaera, Witi, and D. S. Long, eds. Into the World of Light: An Anthology of Maori Writing. Auckland, NZ: Heinemann, 1982. Ihimaera, Witi, and Tina Makereti, eds. Black Marks on White Pages. Auckland, NZ: Penguin Random Playhouse, 2017. Iz Quotes. “Proverbs Quote.” Iz Quotes. n.p. (May 23, 2017). Web. www.izquotes.com/ quote/336277. June 4, 2017. Jolly, Roslyn. Robert Louis Stevenson in the Pacific: Travel, Empire and the Author’s Profession. Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009. Ka’ili, O. T. “Tauhi va: Nurturing Tongan Sociospatial Ties in Maui and Beyond.” The Contemporary Pacific 17.1 (2005): 83–114. Kihleng, Emelihter, “Menginpehn lien Pohnpei: A Poetic Ethnography of Urohs (Pohnpeian Skirts). Diss. Victoria University of Wellington, NZ. 2015. Kleon, Austin. Newspaper Blackout. New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 2010. Kleon, Austin. “Steal Like An Artist.” TEDx Talks. TED-Ed: Lessons Word Sharing. (April 24, 2004). Web. www.ed.ted.com/on/JkoLAuJQ. August 15, 2015. Lewis, David. “Polynesian Navigational Methods.” The Journal of the Polynesian Society 73.4 (1964): 364–74. Macpherson, Cluny. “Changing Contours of Kinship: The Impacts of Social and Economic Development on Kinship Organization in the South Pacific.” Pacific Studies 22.2 (1999): 71–86. Macpherson, Cluny. “From Pacific Islanders to Pacific People and Beyond.” In Tangata Tangata: The Changing Ethnic Contours of New Zealand. Eds. Paul Spoonly and George Pearson. Southbank, Victoria, NZ: Thompson, 2004, 135–55. Mahina, Hufanga ’Okusitino. “Ta, Va, and Moana: Temporality, Spatiality, and Indigeneity.” Pacific Studies 33.2 (2010): 285–306. Makaere, Ani. “Whakapapa and Taonga: Connecting the Memory.” In Colonising Myths: Maori Realities He Rukuruku Whakaoro. Ed. Ani Makaere. Wellington, NZ: Huia Publishers, 2011. Makereti, Tina. “Tina Makareti: Stories Can Save Your Life.” E-Tangata: A Maori and Pasifika Sunday Magazine. E-Tangata (May 30, 2017). Web. www.e-tangata.co.nz/ news/tina-makereti-stories-can-save-your-life. May 28, 2017. Mallock, William Hurrell. A Human Document. No. 103. London: Chapman and Hall, 1892. Martin, Karen, and Booran Mirraboopa. “Ways of Knowing, Being and Doing: A Theoretical Framework and Methods for Indigenous and Indigenist Research.” Journal of Australian Studies 27.76 (2003): 203–14. Marsh, Selina Tusitala. “Ancient Banyans, Flying Foxes and White Ginger: Five Pacific Women Writers.” Diss. University of Auckland, NZ. 2004.

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Marsh, Selina Tusitala. “Black Stone Poetry: Vanuatu’s Grace Molisa.” Cordite Poetry Review. (February 1, 2014). www.cordite.org.au/scholarly/black-stone-poetryvanuatus-grace-mera-molisa/. April 7, 2016. Marsh, Selina Tusitala. “The Body of Pacific Literature.” Mai Review (2010). 1–6. Web. www.review.mai.ac.nz/index.php/MR/article/viewFile/318/390. April 7, 2016. Marsh, Selina Tusitala. “Migrating Feminisms: Maligned Overstayer or Model Citizen? Women’s Studies International Forum 21.6 (1998): 665–80. Marsh, Selina Tusitala. “Naming Myself.” Hereniko and Wilson 37. Marsh, Selina Tusitala. Tightrope. Auckland, NZ: Auckland University Press, 2017. Marsh, Selina Tusitala. “Un/Civilized Girls. Unruly Poems: Jully Makini (Solomon Islands).” In Huihui: Navigating Art and Literature in the Pacific. Eds. Jeffrey Carroll, Brandy McDougall, and Georganne Nordstrom. Honolulo: University of Hawaii Press, 2015, 46–62. Maua-Hodges, Teremoana. “Ako pai ki aitutaki: Transporting or Weaving Cultures. Research Report of Field Experiences to the Cook Islands.” Wellington, NZ: Wellington College of Education, 2000. Meyers, Manulani Aluli. Ho’oulu: Our Time of Becoming: Collected Early Writings of Manulani Meyer. Honolulu, HI: ‘Ai Pō haku Press, 2003. Nabobo-Baba, Unaisi. Knowing and Learning: An Indigenous Fijian Approach. Suva, Fiji: University of South Pacific Press, 2006. Naisilisili, Sereima. “‘ILUVATU: A Decolonising Research Framework Capturing the ‘Other’ Knowledge.” International Indigenous Development Research Conference 2014: Proceedings. Auckland, NZ: Ngā  Pae o te Mā ramatanga, 2015: 101–07. Nelson, O. F. “Legends of Samoa: An Address to the Samoa Research Society Delivered 30th November, 1923.” The Journal of the Polynesian Society 34.134 (1923):124–45. Web. www.jps.auckland.ac.nz/document/?wid=1295. August 24, 2016. Oxford English Living Dictionaries. “Definition of achieve in English.” Oxford English Dictionaries. n.p. (March 11, 2017). Web. en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/ achieve. July 26, 2017. Phillips, Tom. Preface. A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel. London: Thames and Hudson. 2012. Polynesian Voyaging Society. “The Story of Hokulea.” Polynesian Voyaging Society. n.p. (February 4, 2017). Web. www.hokulea.com/voyages/our-story/. May 3, 2017. Ponifasio, Lemi. “Mau Spreads its Wings at Home.” NZ Herald (February 18, 2012). Web. www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/news/article.cfm?c_id=1501119& objectid=10786383. November 17, 2017. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 2007. Pulotu-Endemann, Fuimaono Karl. “Fonofale Model of Health.” Workshop on Pacific Models of Health Promotion. Massey University, NZ (September 7, 2009). Hauora. Web. www.hauora.co.nz/resources/Fonofalemodelexplanation.pdf. August 2, 2016.

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Rapaport, Moshe, ed. The Pacific Islands: Environment and Society. Honolulu, HI: Bess Press, 1999. Salesa, Damon. “Cowboys in the House of Polynesia.” The Contemporary Pacific 22.2 (2010): 330–48. Salesa, Damon. Racial Crossings: Race, Intermarriage, and the Victorian British Empire. Auckland: Oxford University Press, 2011. Schoeffel, Penelope. Daughters of Sina: A Study of Gender, Status and Power in Western Samoa. Diss. Australian National University, 1979. Sharrad, Paul. Albert Wendt and Pacific Literature: Circling the Void. Auckland, NZ: Auckland University Press, 2003. Sinavaiana-Gabbard, Caroline. “Sina and Nafanua: Mother Goddess Enacting Primordial Spiritual in Samoa.” Suaalii-Sauni at al. 444–64. Smith, L. Tuhiwai. “Decolonising Intellectual Identity: Maori/woman/academic.” In Cultural Politics and the University in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Ed., Michael Peters. Palmerson North, NZ: Dumore Press, 1997, 182–210. Smyth, Adam and Gill Gill Partington. “Tom Phillips: An Interview by Adam Smyth and Gill Partington.” September 22, 2017. Web. www.tomphillips.co.uk/humument/ essays/item/5859-tom-phillips-an-interview-by-adam-smyth. October 4, 2012. Statistics New Zealand. “2013 Census Ethnic Group Profiles.” Statistics New Zealand: Tatauranga Aotearoa. March 3, 2014. Web. www.stats.govt.nz/Census/2013-census/ profile-and-summary-reports/ethnic-profiles.aspx. August 8, 2016. Stevenson, Robert Louis. A Footnote to Samoan History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa. Auckland, NZ: Pasifika Press, 1996. Stewart, Frank, Kareva Mateata-Allain, and Alexander D. Mawyer, eds. Varua Tupu. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006. Suaalii-Sauni, Tamasailau, Maualaivao Albert Wendt, Vitolia Mo’a, Naomi Fuamatu, Upolu Luma Va’ai, Reina Whaitiri, and Stephen L. Filipo, eds. Whispers and Vanities: Samoan Indigenous Knowledge and Religion. Wellington, NZ: Huia Publishers, 2014. Subramani, eds. Mana Review: A South Pacific Journal of Language and Literature. Suva, Fiji: University of South Pacific, 1976. Subramani. South Pacific Literature: From Myth to Fabulation. Suva, Fiji: University of South Pacific, 1985. Sullivan, Robert. “Mana Moana: Wayfinding and Five Indigenous Poets.” Diss. University of Auckland, NZ, 2015. Tamasese, Kiwin, Charles Waldegrave, Warihi Campbell, and Flora Tuhaka. “Furthering Conversation about Partnerships of Acountability.” Dulwich Centre Journal 4 (1998): 50–62. Tamasese, Kiwin, Charles Waldegrave, Warihi Campbell, and Flora Tuhaka. Su’esu’e Manogi in Search of Fragrance: Tui Atua Tupua Tamasese Ta‘isi and the Samoan Indigenous Reference. National University of Samoa. 2009. Tamayose, Alan and Shantell De Silva. “How Did the Polynesian Wayfinders Navigate the Pacific Ocean?” TED-Ed Original. TED-Ed: Lessons Word Sharin. (October 17,

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2017). Web. https://ed.ted.com/lessons/how-did-polynesian-wayfinders-navigatethe-pacific-ocean-alan-tamayose-and-shantell-de-silva. November 17, 2017. Tamihere, ‘Alamaluloa T. “Ki Hei Lelei Taha: Talanoa Mei He Kaliloa of Successful Tongan Graduates.” Diss. University of Auckland, NZ. 2014. Teaiwa, Teresia. “L (o) osing the Edge.” The Contemporary Pacific 13.2 (2001): 343–65. Thaman, Konai Helu. “Acknowledging Indigenous Knowledge Systems in Higher Education in the Pacific Island Region.” In Higher Education, Research, and Knowledge in the Asia Pacific Region. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, 175–84. Thaman, Konai Helu. “Cultural Learning and Development through Cultural Literacy.” In Voices in a Seashell: Education, Culture and Identity. Eds. G. Robert Teasdale and Jennifer Irene Teasdale. Suva, Fiji: Institute of Pacific Studies, University of South Pacific, 1992, 24–36. Thaman, Konai Helu. “Culture Matters in Teaching and Learning.” Royal Society Te Aparangi Lecture, Auckland Museum. Parnell, Auckland, NZ (November 29, 2016). Trask, Haunani-Kay. From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai‘i. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999. Underhill-Sem, Yvonne. “Maternities in ‘Out-of-the-Way’ Places: Epistemological Possibilities for Re-theorising Population Geography.” Population, Space and Place 7.6 (2001): 447–60. Vaioleti, T. “Talanoa, Manulua and Founga Ako.” Diss. Waikato University. 2010. Wendt, Albert. Black Rainbow. Auckland, NZ: Penguin Books, 1992. Wendt, Albert. The Book of the Black Star. Auckland, NZ: Penguin Books, 2002. Wendt, Albert. Leaves of the Banyan Tree. Auckland, NZ: Penguin Books, 1979. Wendt, Albert. Ola. Auckland, NZ: Penguin Books, 1991. Wendt, Albert. Pouliuli. Auckland, NZ: Penguin Books, 1977. Wendt, Albert. Sons for the Return Home. Auckland, NZ: Longman Paul, 1973. Wendt, Albert, ed. Nuanua: Pacific Writing in English Since 1980. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1995. Winduo, Steven. “Papua New Guinean Writing Today: The Growth of a Literary Culture.” Manoa 2:1 (1990): 37–41. Winduo, Steven. Transitions and Transformations in Papua New Guinea Literature and Politics. Port Moresby: University of Papua New Guinea Press, 2013. Yamamoto, Caitlin. Emergent Voices of (Neo)colonial Resistance: The Contemporary Literatures, Cultures, and Histories of “Micronesia.” Diss. University of California, San Diego. 2016. Yee, Jennifer. “Ways of Knowing, Feeling, Being, and Doing: Toward an Asian American and Pacific Islander Feminist Epistemology.” Amerasia Journal 35.2 (2009): 49–64.

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Revolutions: Arts of Resistance

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Curating the Syrian Revolution Online miriam cooke

Seven years into the 2011 Arab Spring, Tunisians, Egyptians, Yemenis, and Syrians continued to call their uprisings against cruel, corrupt regimes “revolutions.” Although each popular movement seemed to fail after initial successes, many of the revolutionaries fought on, their frustrations matched with an almost impossible hope.1 How was this possible, especially in a place like Syria where the Assad dynasty was more vicious and uncompromising than any other Arab regime? On March 15, 2011, after forty years of atomization and apparent acquiescence to tyranny, the people had together risen up to say “No” to injustice and denial of all freedoms. Overnight, citizens who had not trusted each other and who had never dared to assemble long enough to strategize about their situation were thronging the streets. The wall of fear cracked in March 2011, and the people celebrated, singing and shouting for the regime to fall. The president’s men went wild, and, marshaling Syria’s awesome airpower, they bombed an unarmed citizenry. They threw dissidents into prisons where, without habeas corpus, they were tortured, and many were killed. Yet, the demonstrations continued. In The Crossing, her memoir of three forbidden trips back into Syria from exile in Paris, Samar Yazbek recounts a period of random violence against the revolutionaries. Awed by their resilience and bravery, she writes that they “didn’t give in. They weren’t afraid of being overwhelmed, or of the shelling, or of being killed, and they continued to defend their homes, even when their ammunition ran out” (17). A few days later, Yazbek talks with a fighter whose optimism about the ultimate outcome of the revolution awes her: “The sons of this second phase of the revolution are working hard in the offices we’ve set up to manage life in our liberated lands—offices for relief,

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media, finance and statistics. . . . Every day our engineers have documented the destruction so that we can calculate the cost of rebuilding our town. . . . I’ll never give up on our dream. We’ve accumulated a significant amount of experience, which we need to build on. I will never lose hope” (224, 225). Having once stood up to the cruel Assad dictatorship, the revolutionaries refused to return to their previous passivity. Having lost so much, they no longer cared to count the cost. Today, despite spiraling ferocity and international assessment that the current situation is a civil or proxy war, many Syrians continue to believe in their revolution.

REVOLUTION So what is this revolution that inspires dreams and hopes in the Syrian wasteland? When Wendy Pearlman interviewed Rima in fall 2012, she said, “Syrians defeated the regime the moment they went into the streets. We will not allow anyone to steal our dreams again” (xxv). Two years later, on July 8, 2014, Charif Kiwan, the spokesperson for the emergency cinema collective Abounaddara, unequivocally affirmed the survival of the revolution simmering underneath the mayhem: We don’t feel we are dealing with a war. We are dealing with a revolution. I don’t know what revolution is; I can’t explain what it is, but we have the feeling that we are in front of huge breakdowns, ruptures, something very violent and also very beautiful. So, we cannot qualify this. We accept the idea that it is a revolution.

Charif Kiwan explained to Alex Mayyasi of the Brooklyn Quarterly that the mostly anonymous members of the Abounaddara collective call themselves “sniper filmmakers creating ‘bullet films.’ But we are not targeting Bashar Assad alone. So, although we are firmly committed to the revolution, we have also made films extremely critical of the revolution” (Mayyasi). Two more years later, in 2016, another interviewee Abdul Rahman told Wendy Pearlman, “We come from the revolution and we still support our revolution” (243). Imad explained to Pearlman what had happened to the revolution: “Media has tied the revolution to terrorism . . . in this way the revolution gets buried. It’s getting lost . . . and that alone is a crime against everything that has happened in Syria” (249–50). The revolution is something violent and beautiful that the revolutionaries themselves did not understand but to which they were totally committed. This commitment, which includes a responsibility to prevent the abortion of the revolution when

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individuals betray it, testifies to a remarkable ability to hope beyond the terrible present. Have the revolutionaries achieved anything? In the long run we do not know, but already they have shown that some things have changed. They have challenged a dictatorship that had seemed to be impregnable. Into their sixth year, the revolutionaries have not given up the struggle and the hope that in spite of everything they will succeed. Surprisingly, the revolution opened cracks in what had seemed to be an unshakeable patriarchy. In the early days, “sometimes women were the only ones who could protest. . . . The revolution was challenging traditional and patriarchal gender roles. . . . Many provided logistical support to the Free Syrian Army (FSA), and some formed female battalions to fight the regime. . . . Women have been at the frontline of social change. . . . Samar Yazbek’s Soriyat organization runs the Women Now for Development centers” (Yassin-Kassab and al-Shami 67, 179). Syrian women are determined to create a memory responsible to the future. Their new outspokenness articulates the revolutionaries’ infinite hope to survive. What will all the violence produce? Writing about Eastern Europe and Latin America in the 1980s, political theorist Gene Sharp argues that even though those struggles did not eliminate the ruling dictatorships or occupations, they did expose “the brutal nature of those repressive regimes to the world community and have provided the populations with valuable experience with this form of struggle. .  .  . The downfall of these dictatorships has minimally lifted much of the suffering of the victims of oppression, and has opened the way for the rebuilding of these societies with greater political democracy, personal liberties, and social justice” (2). The Syrian revolutionaries have not yet eliminated the Assad dictatorship, but they have exposed the brutal nature of the repressive regime to the world. We are left with several questions that only time will answer: Will the Syrian people, despite their murderous leader, his allies in Iran, Iraq, and Lebanese Hezbollah, Russia, and the demonic Islamic State, ultimately rebuild their society with greater political democracy, personal liberties, and social justice? Can their revolution produce “an entire society seeking to constitute itself as a blank page with respect to the past, to write itself by itself (that is, to produce itself as its own system) and to produce a new history [refaire l’histoire] on the model of what it fabricates” (Certeau 135)? As is often the case, before the politicians and the scholars can respond to the sphinx’s questions, artists and writers discern answers. For Michel de Certeau, art is “a kind of knowledge that operates outside the enlightened discourse which it lacks. More importantly,

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this know-how surpasses, in its complexity, enlightened science” (66). Will the destroyed buildings, infrastructure, and lives provide that blank page? It is hard to imagine a phoenix rising out of such ashes, but artists are imagining just that. The political and social prospects for the revolution appear in the works of Syria’s prolific artists, writers, and moving image makers. The outpouring of revolutionary cultural production since March 2011 has astounded both Syrians and outsiders. Galleries around the world are hanging this art, theatres are showing the films, and the Internet is awash with creative responses to the revolution and its violent suppression.2 The number of revolutionary videos, paintings, sculptures, graffiti, banners, and digital works circulating in the Internet is beyond calculation. The intensity of this creative outpouring may signify an awareness that this art as memory for the future is finding a response among those whom artists are hoping to touch. At a time when the world has turned its back on this humanitarian crisis, artists fill the vacuum. And in this vacuum, they are holding on to the revolution that at times seems no more than an experience of living an extraordinary historical moment.

CREATIVE RESISTANCE The revolution surprised the Syrians, scholars of Syria, and the world. Who could have predicted that a people living under an absolute dictatorship for forty years would from one day to the next rise up against the regime? Decades of censorship had driven freedom of thought and expression deep underground. But there, like Marx’s mole, those freedoms had survived and tunneled new pathways. The first opportunity for the mole to surface briefly came in 2000 when Hafiz Assad died and his son Bashar took over. He opened up the tightly closed system, closed down two of the most dreaded prisons—Tadmor (Palmyra) and Mezze—and released the country from its decades-long winter. The Damascus Spring flowered. Unprecedented freedoms were allowed, including the two-year “publication of Syria’s first independent newspaper in almost forty years—the satirical weekly Al-Domari (the Lamplighter), managed by renowned cartoonist Ali Farzat” (Yassin-Kassab and al-Shami 20). Although he did not critique regime individuals, Farzat threw caution to the winds, as in an explicit depiction of a cell in Tadmor prison, the dreaded Kingdom of Death near the ancient site of Palmyra. Some torture tools are attached to the walls of a cell and others are scattered on the floor. The prisoner, hand and foot amputated, hangs limp from

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wall straps, his blood drip dropping on to the floor. Meanwhile, his torturer, having completed his assignment, relaxes a bit and weeps at the tenderness of a romance unfolding on the small television screen in front of him (Baghdadi). Modernization and liberalization had briefly been the mots du jour. Political organizations formed, and some issued declarations. Social fora called muntadayat sprang up everywhere. People gathered to discuss what before had been forbidden. Top-down control weakened, especially after the 2006 drought reduced over two million Syrians to extreme poverty and despair verging dangerously close to rebellion (Yassin-Kassab and al-Shami 33). Media censorship returned, and the muntadayat were shut down. The genie, however, was out of the bottle. Even if the increasingly visible opposition was disunited, thin cracks in the wall of fear that the Assads had carefully erected over decades began to yawn. Then in late 2010, the Arab Spring exploded from Tunisia and spread quickly to Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, and Yemen. In mid-March, some schoolboys from the southern city of Daraa, picking up the mood of the moment, scribbled slogans on a wall: “The people want the regime to fall”; “It’s your turn, Doctor”; and “Go away, Bashar” (Mahmoud). The boys were arrested and tortured. The popular response was immediate. Despite decades of prohibition on freedom of thought, speech, and assembly, Syrians flooded the streets and demanded justice and the ouster of Bashar. Across the entire country, the people organized Friday demonstrations because the Friday communal midday prayer in mosques was the only time and place Syrians had official permission to meet. For an idea of how widespread the popular movement became, consider May 25, 2012, a Friday remembered for the brutal murder of the children of Houla, when 939 cities, towns, and villages hosted demonstrations (Majed 65, 72–73). These demonstrations were systematically suppressed. By the spring of 2017, over 400,000 had been killed—over half of whom were civilians. More than six million were internally displaced; countless numbers had been disappeared, many into Bashar Assad’s prisons where they risked extrajudicial execution, and over five million refugees were wandering the world in search of safety. In six years, almost half the population of twenty-three million in 2011 had become homeless (CNN Library 2017). The more ferocious the repression—and it was and still is beyond belief vicious—the more people joined the opposition. Some fought for this new order by demonstrating in the streets and exposing their bodies to lethal danger. They knew that they were living an extraordinary moment in history. Some produced creative expressions in response to the regime’s violence.

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They drew, painted, wrote stories, and turned citizen journalism into videos and films. After government thugs abducted and beat him up, Ali Farzat produced a caricature of himself lying in a hospital bed, bruised, and battered (Kobeissi 2011). Adapting a widely circulated photograph someone had taken, he drew his bandaged hands with the middle finger outstretched in a familiar gesture of defiance. The regime had tried to break his powerful fingers, and this was his response. The case of rapper Ibrahim Qashush who sang his defiance is instructive. Not as lucky as Farzat, he was murdered the day after leading a crowd in a long liturgy commanding Bashar to go: “Yalla irhal ya Bashar.”3 When his body was discovered in the Orontes River, its throat had been ritually cut, disfigured to deliver the message: those vocal chords would never again produce a sound. The song, however, went viral; in its attempted silencing, it had acquired more power.4 In response to the regime’s cowardly murder, Wissam al-Jazairi produced Ibrahim Qashush, an image to show the futility of the regime’s brutality to silence the people (Figure 4.1). The bird of freedom, however, soaked in the blood of the singer’s throat, escapes to fly high. Posting hundreds of images depicting anger, defiance, and hope to his Facebook page, al-Jazairi has been curating the revolution online. His images memorialize countless contestations to the crimes of the Assad government and all who have joined its forces to crush the people’s revolution. Like so many Syrian artists, he depicts dance, the defiant dance that expresses the artists’ reckless determination to stay with the revolution even at the cost of their freedom and

Figure 4.1  Wissam al-Jazairi. Ibrahim Qashush.

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lives.5 Here, in al-Jazariri’s Phoenix, an ethereal ballerina en pointe, arms flung wide in a delicate gesture of hope, rises up out of the ashes as though they were not there (Figure 4.2). This remarkable inter-iconic image celebrates the Syrian phoenix that will surely survive and defeat the devastation. His paintings give voice to the voiceless. Like other Syrian artist-activists who have had to flee their country, al-Jazairi is now in Europe, where he has participated in international exhibitions.6 Memorializing the aesthetic of resistance, al-Jazairi has affirmed hope that the revolution persists, even if for the time being in the meta-space of his virtual archive.

CURATING RESISTANCE By mid-2011, the pervasiveness of online popular, intellectual, and artistic responses to the revolution across class, gender, age, education, and regional lines became evident. Random Facebook pages appeared, and many invited participation. The number of artworks devoted to the revolution spiraled out of control, and some disappeared soon after posting. Archiving this creative wealth became urgent.

Figure 4.2  Wissam al-Jazairi. Phoenix.

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The Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution, an online Arabic, French, and English website, came to the rescue. Its creator was graphic designer Sana Yazigi, a graduate of the Damascus Fine Arts Academy.7 Her goal was to scour the web for creative reactions to the revolution, curate the works into searchable categories, and archive a comprehensive collection of witness. The website curated the Syrian citizens’ resistance in defiance of their regime’s desire to destroy it: “It seemed that all Syrians felt their citoyenneté , their citizenship. In appropriating the streets and public spaces, they re-appropriated the meanings of belonging to a space/country. This the regime forbad with extreme violence.”8 During an early planning session for a Damascus demonstration, Yazigi met a veiled woman from Douma, a large conservative suburb of Damascus, and asked her what she was doing there. As Yazigi recounts, the woman replied, “graffiti.” I couldn’t believe my ears. “How do you dare do that?” “It’s easy. I hide lots of spray cans under my clothes and as soon as I am sure the security agents have gone I go to a wall and write ‘Down with the Assad regime.’ What else can I do?” (Aubouard). This woman had found a way, however dangerous, to articulate her disgust with her president and to affirm her existence. In June 2012, Yazigi and her family went to Beirut, expecting to stay briefly. But when the stay extended, she snapped out of her depression and began work on the archive.9 In the beginning, Yazigi focused on graffiti and banners. But she soon realized that there was much more out there, and she could not do this work by herself, so she selected a team to assist her.10 In May 2013, the Creative Memory went live with dozens of images uploaded daily (Figure 4.3). Yazigi chose to upload creative responses only: “We are documenting the events but via the way people expressed them. Forbidding forgetting is giving sense to the Syrians’ huge sacrifices that gave us hope and made the impossible possible. Otherwise their death and suffering are meaningless.”11 Already in the second year of the revolution, it had become clear that direct documentation no longer had power to influence action, and so artists tried to turn witness into affect. Cartoonist Ali Farzat’s International Sympathy from May 13, 2012, was the first to be posted to the site. It sets the tone—no firsthand witness to events, however important and wrenching, only expressive reactions to them. His caricature depicts a queue of four men distinctively dressed to indicate that they come from China, Central Asia, Europe, and the United States. On the left stands a short man holding out a bowl toward the visitors, and over his head are the words “The Syrian Political Opposition.” The first man in the line has taken off his glasses in order to drip three tears into the bowl that the exhausted opposition representative is collecting, as though they were alms for the poor.

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Figure 4.3 Screen-shot of the Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution website. Homepage.

International sympathy proclaimed around the world is no more than such crocodile tears (Farzat). At times, creativity stalled, especially after August 21, 2013, when the government poured Sarin gas on the people living in the Ghouta district of Damascus. Beyond the trauma of the massacre, the shock that the world and the American government did nothing to help the Syrian people made artistactivists ask themselves why make a poster or compose a song. But that period passed, artworks returned to the Internet, and the site resumed its archival mission. In fact, the more vicious the regime response to the people’s demands for freedom and justice, the greater has been the number of aesthetic responses both online and offline. In order to emphasize the archival function of the Creative Memory, the site features a passage by Jacques Derrida and Eric Prenowitz: “There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation” (Derrida and Prenowitz 11). The archives that revolutionary Syrian artists are creating collect material from the present with the future always on the horizon of thought with the hope that participation in and the access to the archive will some day support democratization.

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REVOLUTIONARY HABITUS By early 2017, the Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution had archived over 25,000 “traces” of creative expression from the Syrian revolution, organized within twenty-two categories. The mission statement on the opening page reads12: The revolution established a space for ingenuity that has astounded us, the Syrians, before even making its mark on the rest of the world, and we wonder, where had all this talent in satire, art, and innovation been? The outburst of the uprising against oppression and tyranny brought on a surge of these remarkable, latent energies, the spontaneous and the organized, in a way never before seen in all of Syria’s years marked by repression and injustice. History relays similar experiences. This project aims to archive all the intellectual and artistic expressions in the age of revolution; it is writing, recording, and collecting stories of the Syrian people, and those experiences through which they have regained meaning of their social, political and cultural lives. Although most of the cultural and artistic output of the Syrian revolution is available somewhere on the Internet, it rushes by and is difficult to find soon after its initial launching. The website also aims to enhance the impact of the artistic Syrian resistance, to reinforce its place in the revolution, to gather, archive and spread the messages it expresses, and to help create networks between its main actors and the outside world, whether they were individuals or groups. Here, the artist is considered a citizen before anything else, resisting with his art and standing by his people’s fight. The promoters of this project believe that it participates in the documentation of contemporary history, so it is crucial that the revolution and its realities are explicitly described, for both contemporaries and makers of the revolution, for the coming generations, for the whole world. It is an archive of national legacies; to protect it is to preserve the Syrian memory, a duty because of its total consideration of historical accounts of all Syrian people.

Note how many times the mission statement repeats the word revolution. Key words and phrases include memory, contemporary, the place of creative resistance in the revolution, networking Syrians inside and outside the country, the artist as citizen, and, importantly, a human being and not the ubiquitous refugee whose victimhood occupies international headlines. The works of these talented human beings attest to the fact that they continue to dream, to love, to hope, and to create testimonies to the survival of the humanity of a people who refuse to be dehumanized.

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The site brings together thousands of formerly atomized citizens as empowered members of a virtual community.13 Yazigi writes that it is “empowering to feel that we are presenting evidence of the people’s counter discourse to that of the regime. To resist amnesia and the erasure of our legitimate cause is a battle! It is very painful to work on remembering when forgetting seems necessary for survival. We are driven by indignation!”14 Indignation was the word that mobilized demonstrators from the beginning of the Arab Spring. A team of ten to twelve employees daily surf the net looking for slogans, sculptures, murals, graffiti, music, songs, paintings, poetry, posters, caricatures, photography, publications, theatre, banners, videos, and even stamps. The site requires constant “correcting, completing, and updating old works according to the continuous progress/development of editorial policies concerning essentially what is a document and how to create it.”15 There is considerable turnover in the site’s personnel since the indefatigable search for revolutionary art online is so urgent and so painful that some have had to seek psychological help.16 Organized chronologically and also thematically, the site follows the trajectory of revolutionary creativity. It traces the exponential growth in both artistic and intellectual expression. It also notes international interest, as a quick scan of the section promoting art events between 2013 and 2016 illustrates. In 2013, the site advertised about 40 events related to Syrian art and performance; in 2014, that number almost doubled to 76; in 2015, there were 112 events around the world and in 2016 over 120 such events. Yazigi’s anonymity in the early days allowed the site and its inhabitants to grow on their own. In mid-2016, however, her name appeared in stories published there and elsewhere. A community of revolutionary artists began to coalesce around her with their recognition that their virtual coexistence had transformed the site into a revolutionary habitus. How did this happen? In February 2015, members of Hamisch (meaning “Margin”) invited her to give a talk in Istanbul, where so many Syrians have taken shelter. Hamisch describes itself as an “independent space for Syrians-in-exile for critical debate, exchange and communication of ideas.”17 They hold regular meetings with intellectuals, scholars, and artists to discuss politics and creativity. For the first time, Yazigi presented her project to a public, and the response was intense and immediate. She was surprised “how useful and interesting this work is to both ordinary people and specialists, Syrians, Arabs and foreigners. Other invitations followed.” A quick review of the site indicates how many international publications and websites then wrote about the site and its founder. In April 2016, Yazigi added a new category “Interviews” to the packed site. She wanted to

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initiate a conversation among the artist-activists who had until then remained separate from each other. It was her first attempt to expose the “unsaid critiques Syrians made of the actions/creative works of other Syrians.”18 Connecting with as many artist-activists as possible, she challenged them to think carefully about their work and its role in the revolution. One of the most remarkable interviews was with Yassin al-Haj Saleh, aka the Intellectual of the Revolution. On December 22, 2016, she asked him about the kidnapping of his wife: “Why didn’t the cause of Samira al-Khalil, your wife, turn into a public cause among the revolution’s public, but remained relatively personal?” Although Saleh had spoken out about his grief at his wife’s abduction by Islamic State, in his response he was careful not to criticize the revolutionaries who had not made his grief part of their cause: “Perhaps because of the gravity and terror of what surrounds us, and the multitude of personal and general problems. It might also be because many people do not want to lose the dream of the revolution, for if they bind themselves to the cause of Samira, Razan, Wael and Nazem, and condemned the kidnappers, they will feel as if they are questioning the revolution in which they have invested all their energy and passion.”19 To question the revolution was tantamount to treason. But Yazigi was not buying such apologetics: “Since the Revolution broke out we have had to pay such a high price that we must break taboos. We have lost everything and yet there is still more to lose. We must say what we have to say but without insults. No more hypocrisy. Enough of the angry, empty blablabla over a glass of wine or a cup of coffee.”20 Revolution and the art it has spawned should not become an empty signifier, just blablabla. In October 2016, Yazigi participated in the Festival International des Arts that annually takes place in Bordeaux. A presentation in Paris had, to her surprise, shaken the audience. Despite all the love and labor she had lavished on the site, she had not expected its art to affect so many people. The foreign audience had empathized with Syrian suffering and in so doing had acknowledged the world’s failure to help the Syrians.21 For the exhibition, she chose thirty pieces, including several works of graffiti that challenged the power of the regime that had forbidden them. Emblematic of the people’s ability to seize back control of the streets, graffiti messages insisted on the people’s determination to survive and return. Sifting through thousands of works, Yazigi focused on Hope. Reflecting the mood of Syrian fighters like those whom Samira Yazbek described in her memoir The Crossing, the show emphasized hope in the face of violence and despair as it contested the media’s occultation of the Syrian revolutionaries. She chose Hope by Abu Malek al-Shami (pseudonym for the mysterious muralist who is also

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known as the Banksy of Syria) as the cover image for the “Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution exhibition.” Painted in the besieged rebel city of Daraya in August 2014, this image of a little girl tiptoeing on a sea of helmet-clad skulls and painting the word Hope in English on a triangle of concrete freshly fallen off a destroyed building was “beamed over television channels and streamed through Facebook feeds across the Arab world, launching Shami to newfound stardom among a community of rebels in need of encouragement.”22 With this use of English, al-Shami addresses the world, telling everyone that the Syrian people are not giving up. Despite the apparent impossibility of their struggle to overcome the Assad regime, the Islamic State, and all the international players exploiting the tragedy, the Syrian people, the fighters, the artist-activists, and even children still believe in the revolution. The Bordeaux Arts Festival marked a vital stage in the life of the Creative Memory site, its artist-activists, and its designer. Curating the physical show in Bordeaux put a decisive end to anonymity. In need of high definition images, Yazigi had to enter directly in contact with and reveal her identity to artists and intellectuals on the site. Would they be angry that their work had been posted without permission? Far from it: “They were very happy. They told me how much they appreciated the site and respected this effort to promote and document their art. It is crucial that their art be seen around the world. These artists’ reaction to me and the site has given us confidence in what we are doing.”23 Beyond informing the world and archiving revolutionary cultural production, the site may be creating new identities and subjectivities in common. The Creative Memory site has become an important platform for cultural, intellectual, ethical, and aesthetic activism. Associated with each other in “a place to become .  .  . a collective ‘becoming machine’ .  .  . that produces a new kind of person,” in the words of Nato Thompson (129, 135), their identities are changing. Through their new awareness of each other and of their creativity in common, artistactivists are entering a single space, a revolutionary habitus of creative signs. New knowledge of their collective presence on this communal site may change artist-activists’ perception of themselves. As a revolutionary habitus, the site promotes practices and works that are “immediately intelligible and foreseeable, and hence taken for granted” (Bourdieu, quoted in Thompson 85–86). Making new meaning out of the chaos that others call civil war, the site draws attention to artist-activists’ role in responding to the revolution, archiving it, creating a revolutionary habitus for all participants, and shaping a coherent sense of identity with political agency. The Creative Memory site provides a treasure house of cultural capital that allows participants and surfers to navigate

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the backstreets of the revolution. After four decades of silencing and atomization under the rule of the Assad dynasty, Syrian artist-activists finally share a space, even if only virtual, where they can converse openly—if sometimes indirectly— about matters of political concern within intellectual, cultural, and aesthetic communities that foster resilience, trust, and mutual respect. Seven years into the revolution, the Creative Memory site remains committed to the revolution as hope, constantly posting breaking news, none more shocking than Amnesty International’s report on the murders of thousands of prisoners since 2011.

THE HUMAN SLAUGHTERHOUSE On February 7, 2017, Amnesty International published “Human Slaughterhouse: Mass Executions and Hangings at Saydnaya Prison, Syria,” its report on the arbitrary arrest, torture, and extrajudicial execution of prisoners in the prison of Saydnaya, located in a historically Christian town a few miles north of Damascus (Amnesty International 2017). Between 2011 and 2015, the Assad regime authorized 13,000 hangings of prisoners. Within a day of the report’s release, several creative responses to “Human Slaughterhouse” were uploaded to the Creative Memory site. Clearly, the artists set to work the minute they heard the news. In each case, world masterpieces and images from Syria were manipulated and altered in such a way that the repurposed pieces created a new, searing condemnation of the cruelty of the ruler. A Syrian artist who has chosen the pseudonym Daali published a kind of film poster he titled The Godfather. It recycles a theme from the early Bashar Assad era when the president’s father was portrayed as a puppet master. Artist-activists were saying then and now that the late Hafiz Assad hovers like the ghost of a Mafia leader in his son’s war against his own people. On the left, a stern Bashar stares at us, oblivious to the puppets representing the bodies of the executed hanging from the puppeteer’s strings. Beyond allusion to the actual hangings at Saydnaya, this image evokes the revolutionary trope of Hafiz still controlling events in Syria from the grave. Indeed, his administration continued virtually unchanged when Bashar assumed office upon the death of his father in 2000 (cooke, Dancing 85–86). The other throwback in this response to Amnesty International’s “Human Slaughterhouse” is to an earlier, nonrevolutionary moment in Syrian history. Execution by hanging continues what had become common practice during the last quarter of the twentieth century (cooke,

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Dissident Syria 133). In The Godfather, Hafiz Assad’s hapless son looks at us impassively, sporting a red rose, symbol of bloodshed in war (Daali). In Hani Abbas’s version of Syria’s human slaughterhouse titled Sednaya Prison we see a recycling of Salvador Dali’s Christ of St. John of the Cross (1951). The crucifix overlays and mirrors the prison architecture with the cells lightly marked along the prison wings that seem to form the horizontal arms of the cross. Nailed to the floating cross is a Christ-like figure in a loincloth suspended high above the carceral complex. Turning back to the crucifixion that launched Christendom, Abbas’s spiritual rendition of the scapegoat seems to promise salvation for the 13,000. Will this scapegoat also resurrect and denounce the traitors? The surreal Dali original has been repurposed for this grimly real. Abu Yousef ’s Human Slaughterhouse depicts Bashar the Slaughterer. His cheeks are full of the flesh of recently murdered prisoners; and his mouth, propped open with prison bars, drips fresh blood from his lower lip. This explicit portrayal of the monstrous president belongs to a genre of revolutionary images insulting Bashar that I discuss in Dancing in Damascus (38–52). In his Human Slaughterhouse, Alaa Allagta has repurposed traditional folklore about Dracula for this image of Bashar. Formally suited up, this Dracula bat flies through a moonlit night. On the lookout for prey, the presidential vampire sports the signature tie said to be the single detail that distinguishes him from the Islamic State murderers. The Arabic words scrolled along the top of the image read: “Terrifying details concerning the execution of 13,000 detainees in Saydnaya prison.” Graphic designer Abed Naji titled his version of the human slaughterhouse Keep Calm. Here again, we see a stark example of repurposing a familiar icon and slogan. Using the UN logo to ironic effect, he replaces the olive branch wreath embracing the UN vision of the world centered on the North Pole with a hangman’s noose. Naji chose English for the international audience that he wants: “Keep calm.” Naji cites the slogan that the British produced on the eve of World War II: “Keep calm and carry on.” The British government wanted to strengthen morale and calm the people’s nerves as news of attacks from Germany were sending panic waves across the country. Scrolled along the bottom of Naji’s image are the words “Saydnaya prison where the Syrian state is silently slaughtering its people. 13,000 people were killed in Saydnaya prison.” These artist-activists threw caution to the wind, and within one day of the report’s publication they gave us their anguished responses to Amnesty International’s “Human Slaughterhouse” report. Those wanting to read the actual report of when, why, and how the 13,000 from Saydnaya prison were hanged or

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to see accompanying photographs must search elsewhere, for here they will only find creative responses to events, not the events themselves.

CONCLUSION The revolution as hope has not abated. Two anniversaries make the point. On March 15, 2016, villagers from the rebel stronghold of Kafranbel in northern Syria displayed their weekly banner with these words: “It is the fifth anniversary of the revolution, Stupid! The Syrian Revolution. Kafranbel 15 March 16” (Saleh). Yes, the world is stupid not to recognize that the revolution persists. A year later, on March 16, 2017, Abed Naji posted his celebration of the sixth year to his Facebook page. He etched the outline of a map of Syria lightly into the center of a large white number six against a grey background; six red roses grow out of the top of the number and beneath the Arabic words spell out his conviction: “The revolution continues.” It is worth noting that this image posted to Naji’s Facebook page on the sixth anniversary of the revolution soon disappeared and it is now available only from Creative Memory (Naji). Here is recent evidence of the archival importance of the site. Artist-activists insist that the revolution continues, but the question remains: what has it achieved? After all, the regime’s stranglehold on the country has tightened: hundreds of thousands have been killed; thousands of prisoners have been hanged; countless numbers have disappeared; almost half the country’s population is now outside their homes inside Syria and outside. What’s new in Syria beyond destruction? The new is not always immediately recognizable without shifting the lens. The revolution has not made Syria a better place for democracy. That may not be a bad thing in light of the abuse of democracy that now characterizes so many states where elections have become meaningless and dictatorships flourish. However, something new and positive has emerged: a fierce hope that points to a not-yet discernible future that is articulated in Syrian revolutionary cultural production. Since 2011, writes Leila al-Shami in 2016, “the arts have become a site of a deep questioning of cultural and social authority and of key notions including individual, community and national identity. Syrian artists are grappling with new realities and a rapidly developing situation intelligently and creatively. The new artistic forms and questions will continue to resonate and may well constitute the most lasting impact of the revolution.” Hip hop artist Abu Hajar from Tartus reinforces al-Shami’s point, deeming art and music to be more powerful than ever before

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because they “can actually help in organizing people, as we saw at protests, and can play a role in the direct political life of people” (al-Shami 2016). These arts have made their way to a website that captures the evanescent and stores it for a time when it will serve as witness to the crimes against humanity that have been heaped on to the Syrian people. Curating, archiving, and promoting this tsunami of revolutionary creativity, the Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution challenges amnesia and commemorates the indomitability of the human spirit. Mobilizing the aesthetic of resistance, each artist-activist has confirmed the persistence of the revolution. Using fragments from the past, artist-activists are projecting the possibility of a coherent and stable postrevolutionary society. This aesthetic and archival project has become an ethical space out of which has emerged a collective desire to build a new Syria. Memory for the future. . . .

NOTES 1 Thanks to Sana Yazigi for frequent exchanges by email and Skype to make sure I got the story straight. For helpful comments on earlier versions of this chapter, I am grateful to audiences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Benedictine University, Seattle University, the University of Washington, the University of Oregon Eugene, Kishwar Rizvi of the Yale University Art History department and the audience at her “Arts of the Middle East” conference. 2 I have written about this outpouring in Dissident Syria and Dancing in Damascus. 3 Web. www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/syria-civil-war. May 28, 2017. 4 Web. www.aljadid.com/content/silencing-singer. May 28, 2017. 5 See cooke, Dancing in Damascus, 3–4, 11, 60–61, 71, 77–78. 6 He has shown his work “in America, Egypt, Britain and Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Kuwait, Germany, Italy, Denmark and Switzerland to support the peaceful democratic movement in Syria.” Web. www.syriauntold.com/en/creative/wissam-aljazairy/. December 1, 2017. 7 Yazigi had broadcast cultural events in Syria through her monthly The Culture Diary in 2007. A first of its kind, this bilingual magazine in Arabic and English informed the Syrian elite about cultural events in the Syrian capital and a few other cities. 8 Email communication with Yazigi, March 11, 2017. 9 Skype with Yazigi on March 8, 2016. 10 Yazigi, Skype lecture to my class on Arab Refugees on March 22, 2016. 11 Email communication from Yazigi, March 11, 2017.

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12 Creative Memory Mission Statement. Web. www.creativememory.org/?page_id=134. October 4, 2017. 13 Funding from the German Friedrich Ebert Foundation, the Swiss and Norwegian embassies, and the French Institute Terre Solidaire allowed the team to push ahead more quickly. Twenty-five people have worked on the site since its inception. 14 Email communication with Yazigi, March 13, 2017. 15 Email communication with Yazigi, March 11, 2017. 16 Yazigi, Skype lecture to my class on Arab Refugees on March 22, 2016. 17 Hamisch. Web. www.facebook.com/Hamisch-474575212646327/?fref=nf. March 11, 2017. 18 Email communication with Yazigi, March 11, 2017. 19 Saleh. Web. www.creativememory.org/archives/#140454. December 1, 2017. 20 Skype with Yazigi, January 4, 2017. 21 Skype with Yazigi, January 4, 2017. 22 Al-Shami. Web. www.creativememory.org/?p=137524. May 20, 2017. 23 Email communication with Yazigi, March 11, 2017.

WORKS CITED Abbas, Hani. Sednaya Prison. Creative Memory (February 8, 2017). Web. www. creativememory.org/?p=153077. October 4, 2017. Allagta, Allaa. Human Slaughterhouse. (February 8, 2017). Web. www.creativememory. org/?p=153090. October 4, 2017. Al-Shami, Leila. “Emerging from ‘The Kingdom of Silence’ Beyond Institutions in Revolutionary Syria.” Ibraaz (December 2016). Web. www.ibraaz.org/ publications/75. October 4, 2017. Amnesty International. “Human Slaughterhouse. Mass hangings and extermination at Saydnaya Prison Syria.” (February 2017). Web. www.amnestyusa.org/files/human_ slaughterhouse.pdf. October 4, 2017. Aubouard, Staphane. “Sana Yazigi: ‘Tô t dans la ré volution, une conscience de classe est né e’”/Early in the revolution class consciousness is born. L’Humanité 10 (October 2016). Web. www.humanite.fr/tot-dans-la-revolution-une-conscience-de-classe-estnee-617451. October 4, 2017. Baghdadi, George. “Syrian Satire Given a Second Chance.” CBS Interactive (November 8, 2010). Web. www.cvsnews.comnews/syrian-satire-given-a=2nd-chance/. October 4, 2017. Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendell. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Print. CNN Library. “Syria Fast Facts.” (April 11, 2017). Web. www.cnn.com/2013/06/18/ world/meast/syria-fast-facts/index. October 4, 2017.

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cooke, miriam. Dancing in Damascus: Creativity, Resilience and the Syrian Revolution. London: Routledge, 2017. cooke, miriam. Dissident Syria: Making Oppositional Arts Official. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution. Website curated by Sana Yazigi. https:// creativememory.org/. Daali. The Godfather. Creative Memory (February 8, 2017). Web. www.creativememory. org/?p=153251. October 4, 2017. Derrida, Jacques and Eric Prenowitz. “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.” Diacritics 25.2 (Summer 1995), cited in Creative Memory. Web. www.creativememory. org/?post_type=cctm_events&p=98444. October 4, 2017. Farzat, Ali. International Sympathy. Creative Memory (May 13, 2012). Web. www.creativememory.org/?p=5041. October 4, 2017. Kiwan, Charif. “Abounaddara’s Take on Images in the Syrian Revolution: A Conversation between Charif Kiwan and Akram Zaatari.” Jadaliyya (July 8, 2014). Web. www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/18433/abounaddara%27s-take-on-images-inthe-syrian-revolut. October 4, 2017. Kobeissi, Kamal. “Egyptian Artists Exhibit in Support of Syrian Cartoonist.” A-Arabiya News (September 14, 2011). Web. https://english.alarabiya.net/ articles/2011/09/14/166851. October 4, 2014. Mahmoud, Zuhour. “The Revolutionary Art at the Heart of Syria’s Uprising.” Huffpost (March 17, 2016). Web. www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/artwork-syrian-war_ us_56eafa60e4b03a640a69e3df. October 4, 2017. Majed, Ziad. Syrie la revolution orpheline. Trans. from Arabic, Suriya al-thawra al-yatima (2013). Fifi Abou Dib. Paris: Sindbad/Actes Sud, 2014. Print. 2017. Mayyasi, Alex. “A New Kind of Weapon in Syria: Fil.” Brooklyn Quarterly 8 (2016). Web. http://brooklynquarterly.org/a-new-kind-of-weapon-in-syria-film/. October 4, 2017. Naji, Abed. Keep Calm. Creative Memory (February 8, 2017). Web. www. creativememory.org/?p=153090. October 4, 2017. Naji, Abed. The Revolution Continues. Creative Memory (March 16, 2017), 1. Web. www. creativememory.org/?p=158143. October 4, 2017. Pearlman, Wendy. We Crossed a Bridge and it Trembled: Voices from Syria. New York. Harper Collins, 2017. Saleh, Maryam. “Labels so Matter: It’s a Revolution, Stupid!” Huffpost (March 2016). Web. www.huffingtonpost.com/maryam-saleh/labels-do-matter-its-arevolution_b_9482538. October 4, 2017. Sharp, Gene. From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation. 2002. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2011. Thompson, Nato. Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the 21st Century. London: Melville House, 2015. Yassin-Kassab, Robin and Leila al-Shami. Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War. London: Pluto Press, 2016.

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Yazbek, Samar. The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria. Trans. Nashwa Gowanlock and Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp. London: Rider Books, 2015. Yazigi, Sana. Website curator. Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution. 2013–. Web. https://creativememory.org./ Yousef, Abu. Human Slaughterhouse. Creative Memory (February 8, 2017). Web. www.creativememory.org/?p=153090. October 4, 2017.

5

A Thousand Times No!: Spray Painting as Resistance and the Visual History of the Lam-Alif Bahia Shehab

A revolution is an awakening. It is the realization that a situation is not humanly favorable and the decision to change it. The actions taken toward this change are a revolution. This act can be on a personal level; as individuals, most people go through a phase of rebellion, especially in their teenage years. It could be the human brain developing its own perception of the world and rejecting its immediate authority, in most cases, its parents. Each of us can experience a rebellious act later in life mostly by challenging authority. We challenge our teachers by not submitting homework, our supervisors by rejecting assigned tasks, and our governments by refusing to pay taxes. But such challenges remain individual acts of rebellion. Collective acts of rebellion occur when a large group of people decides to reject an act of injustice together. We are at peace when we can say “no” to things that we find objectionable to us as human beings. We feel better when we are able to voice our dissatisfaction with something wrong that impacts our immediate life. We do not always have the ability to say “no” because it takes courage to defy authority. But it is gratifying to reject injustice. Our individual rebellions are for our own desires; our shared rebellions are for our collective justice. A prerequisite for both is a battle. I chose to fight. I never thought of myself as a rebel. I was never in Tahrir Square during the first eighteen days of the revolution in January 2011. I never smelled tear gas, nor was I ever beaten with the stick of a policeman. Snipers did not take out my right eye, and armed thugs did not chase me with their hatchets. My face was not the last one seen by a dying stranger as I held him in my arms. I never chanted for the ousting of Mubarak on the street, nor did I serve in any field hospitals. I

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have two Egyptian daughters, and this became reason enough for me to say “no,” a thousand times. During the Egyptian uprising and for nine months, I was simply a historian. I was documenting events that were unfolding before me in Cairo, online and on the street. I conceived of my job as that of a person documenting a historic event that happened to unfold in the land where I lived. Nine months into the revolution, the information I was documenting became difficult to accept. Of the many videos, pictures, memes, jokes, sound bites, wall paintings, songs, and street art I was documenting, one video was a breaking point for me. Dead people dragged and stacked on the street with a pile of garbage was not a visual I could live with. It was impossible to stand by and play historian.

A THOUSAND TIMES NO! In January 2011, as the uprising was beginning in Cairo, my artwork 1,000 Times No had been taken down at the Haus der Kunst in Munich.1 In that project I traced the chronological evolution of one Arabic letterform, the Lam-alif (‫ ا = ال‬+ ‫)ل‬, which means no in Arabic. I used it in varied forms a thousand different times to illustrate the common Arabic expression: “No, and a thousand times no.”2 The different letterforms were taken from Islamic artifacts and buildings produced under different Islamic dynasties and patrons from Spain to the borders of China over the past 1,400 years. In 2010, Huda Smitshuijzen, a curator at the Khatt Foundation, had asked me to contribute to the exhibition “The Future of Tradition—The Tradition of Future, 100 Years after the Exhibition ‘Masterpieces of Muhammadan Art’” at the Haus der Kunst. Her condition was that I use the Arabic script in my artwork. I was assigned a wall in the museum and given the freedom to paint any message I wanted. In that exercise I wanted to keep in mind my audience who did not speak Arabic. They could not appreciate the beauty and the subtleties of the language. I did not want them to get a translated message, and I was not going to put up a set of meaningless letters. So I asked myself the question: If I had one thing I want to say to the world at this point in history, what would I say? I decided to say “NO” a thousand different times. By November 2011 in Egypt, civilians were being shot on the street by their own government. The civic community was coming together: doctors were helping the wounded; lawyers were dealing with the imprisoned; and here I was, trained as an artist, designer, and historian. I felt helpless and useless. I started following all the work that artists were doing on the streets of Cairo. This is when

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I began thinking of my “Nos” as ammunition. I added a contemporary message to my historic “Nos,” making them relevant, and finally I felt that I could now contribute to the uprising. Technically, as an artist, I drew on 1,400 years of Arab and Islamic visual heritage and connected this calligraphy—these old Lamalifs—to contemporary issues. I made the work drawn on tombstones, walls, and artifacts of the past relevant again in our life today. It took me two years to be able to speak of my street interventions to friends and relatives. I lost a partner and many friends in the process but gained so much more. As a human being, I connected with like-minded people in my city and later around the world. I found my tribe. All is fair in love and revolution. I was more comfortable working alone. So I went down to the streets of Cairo by myself. On the one hand, it was faster to move in and out of a place when I had no one with me. On the other hand, I did not want anyone to get killed because of my stencils. In November 2011, I sprayed my first “No”—No to Military Rule—on the outside walls of the fence of the building of the Arab League in Tahrir Square. It was a liberating moment. I felt that I was finally part of something more important than myself. The “Nos” flowed easily after No to Military Rule: No to Emergency Law; No to Postponing Trials; No to Military Trials; No to Stripping the People; No to Blinding Heroes; No to Snipers; No to Sectarian Divisions; No to External Agendas; No to Killing; No to Burning Books; No to Violence; No to Barrier Walls; No to Conspiracy Theories; No to Bullets; No to Tear Gas; No to Aliens; No to Stealing the Revolution; No to a New Pharaoh3 (Figure 5.1). Each “No” took its form from history with a new message that became relevant to the revolution. Many were from tombstones and cenotaphs, and some were from mosques. No to Military Rule, the first stencil I sprayed, and No to Killing both contained a “No” from the calligraphy on the same engraved tombstone at the Islamic Museum in Cairo (#1240; 236 AH/850 CE). No to Stealing the Revolution was taken from another engraved tombstone from Kairawan in Tunisia (303 AH/915 CE). No to Violence was from the wooden cenotaph of al-Husayn at the Islamic Museum in Cairo (sixth century AH/twelfth century CE). “No to Burning Books” came from the cut brick epigraphy on the Great Mosque of Heart in Afghanistan (596 AH/1200 CE). Masjid-i-Haydariya was another mosque I borrowed from to stencil No to a New Pharaoh; the original “No” was molded in stucco in Qazvin, Iran (sixth century AH/twelfth century CE). No to Emergency Law was an image carved in wood at the Ibn Tulun Mosque in Cairo (256–65 AH/870–79 CE). No to Barrier Walls echoed a stucco at Pir-i Bakran, an Il-Khanid mausoleum in the district of Linjan in

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Figure 5.1  Bahia Shehab. 1,000 Times No. Cairo, Egypt. March 2012.

Iran (698–712 AH/1299–1312 CE). No to Sectarian Division came from an engraving in marble on an old Fatimid gate, Bab Al-Futuh in Cairo (480 AH/1087 CE). Each “No” was linked to a current event or a specific incident where I saw great injustice. It was clear that the country was being hijacked. Even before the revolution the state of the country was not promising. I had looked the other way every time a beggar knocked on my car window. The system was broken, and no one felt like they could do anything about it. Looking back now at the years of the revolution, I see that there was a sweet naiveté in the masses of people on the street who believed that they could change the country, myself included. It is all a learning curve, I guess.

REVOLUTION RELAPSE On the street during the two years of the revolution, from 2011 to 2012, I painted issues that concerned me. I was commenting on unfolding events on the street. Eventually, I stopped painting the “Nos” and started painting other

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problems. Before the presidential election in May and June of 2012, it was clear that we—the people supporting the revolution—had lost. The final round of elections was between a military man and the Muslim Brotherhood. The mass sentiment was very low, and there were a lot of anti-revolution feelings in the air, even by people who were strong supporters of the revolution. I designed a campaign to remind people of the aims of the revolution and the sacrifices that people made for us to get to where we were. I called the campaign “There Are People,” and its five stencils read in Arabic: There are people who have had their head put to the ground so that you can raise your head up high; There are people who have been stripped naked so you can live decently; There are people who have lost their eyes so you can see; There are people who have been imprisoned so you can live freely; and There are people who have died so you can live. The authorities erased this campaign three days after I sprayed it, which proved to me one thing: the faster they erase, the stronger the message. So I sprayed it again a month later, this time with bigger images and clearer text. Two weeks later somebody took a photo of my stencils, and the idea went viral. Three weeks later, it was featured on the third page of one of the leading local newspapers, right under the image of Mubarak.4 The message had surpassed the medium, and I felt like maybe we were getting somewhere. In the summer of 2012, Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood candidate, was elected. We were happy that we finally had an elected president who was not a military man, and I felt that I should stop working on the street. I went to a street that leads out of Tahrir Square, and I painted a message before the speed bump: Beware of Speed Bumps. After the bump, I painted: Long live the revolution. To the taxi drivers—who were thanking me for highlighting the problem of the hidden speed bump at four in the morning of a Ramadan day—I was doing a socially responsible act. I was doing the work the government should do to keep them from harm by highlighting a speed bump on a busy street. But people with more insight understood that I was highlighting another warning. As people leaving Tahrir Square and heading toward a new phase of the revolution, we should be aware of speed bumps. We should keep the main aims of the revolution very clear in mind. My decision to stay off the streets did not last long. Mohammad Morsi lost the sympathy and support of the Egyptian people in November of 2012, although the rest of the world unfortunately did not notice. A flawed constitution and a series of dictatorial declarations by the president inspired millions of Egyptians to take to the streets on December 7, 2012. His actions made me go down again

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to Tahrir Square to paint the following message on the road leading up to the square: We are back. No to a new Pharaoh, No to Morsi. On November 17, 2012, in an Egyptian village near Assuit, a train crashed into a school bus, killing fifty-one children. These kinds of accidents have always been brushed aside as random acts of chance during the Mubarak era. The Muslim Brotherhood’s minister of transportation resigned as a result, and the families of the children were compensated financially. There was a huge public outcry, and eventually these children were forgotten. But the details of this accident that circulated on social networks were still very vivid in my mind. There was a video of a regretful father who, when asked the last thing he said to his son before he got on the bus, cried bitterly and said that he had hit his son so that he would not miss the bus. Another video showed a girl, only nine years of age—one of the survivors—saying calmly on TV to the government, “You are all dogs.” A note circulated commenting on the price paid by the government to each family and comparing it to other more expensive items, like an iPhone or the front light of a Mercedes Benz. There were other details: the image of the children wrapped in their shrouds; the cries of the mothers who lost two or three or four children in that accident— one of them was admitted to a psychiatric ward; and finally a list of the dead children’s names. All the other details were very painful to read and watch, but the list of names just locked the deal in my head. I wanted to paint these children. To me these children were killed by a corrupt system of governance. The revolution started so that accidents like this would not happen again, so that we could prove to the world that Egyptian lives are valuable. I wanted to bring the children back to life. I collected the names of the children and grouped them into boys, girls, and families. I wanted to paint the sisters and brothers who died together—so that they could come to life again on the streets of Cairo, together. I painted each child walking on a train railway. They were painted in black, but their wishes and dreams were painted in color. On January 25, 2013, the second anniversary of the revolution, I started painting the children of Assuit on the walls of Cairo. Some of them appear alone to express a hope: “I wish I grew up to be a princess” or “I could have grown up to be a policeman or a scientist.” A sister calms her brother with a lullaby near a bus stop. The lullaby reads, “Mother is on the way,” and her brother asks her, “Soon?” A little girl states that she has died and gone to heaven, but they (meaning the responsible ones) are all going to hell. My favorite is on a barrier wall in downtown Cairo. I painted eight children playing hide and seek.

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Child 1: Khalawees (Are you done? Did you hide?) Child 2: Not yet. Child 3: Has the revolution succeeded? Child 4: Not yet. Child 5: Did we get the rights of the martyrs? Child 6: Not yet. Child 7: Has Egypt become heaven on Earth? Child 8: Not yet.

This barrier wall holds a special place in my heart. It was the first wall I ever covered with my “A Thousand Times No” series on February 15, 2012. Another group of artists came on March 15 of the same year and painted the street perspective with a very special character, Hanzala, added to the wall as part of a campaign called “There are no walls.” Hanzala is the ultimate Arab symbol of resistance; the Palestinian artist Naji al-Ali who was assassinated in 1982 in London for his political cartoons supporting the Palestinians conceived him. The Egyptian artists painted the street and pretended that there was no wall— they danced and they sang. When I came back a year later, on January 25, 2013, even though artists had pretended that there was no wall, the walls were still there. So I decided to add the children, with their questions and their dreams, to the image of Hanzala. We should have guessed that something was wrong because we were allowed to roam free on the streets during the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood. I did not realize that the old regime, led by the generals and el-Sisi, was busy getting ready for a coup in the spring of 2013. Tamarod, a new grassroots movement, began collecting signatures of people who did not support the Muslim Brotherhood regime. The news circulating on social media was that twenty-two million people signed the petition. When Tamarod called for mass protest, the mainstream media estimated that thirty-three million people all over Egypt protested on June 30 and July 1. Both numbers were obviously inflated. At the time, anything was better to us than the Muslim Brotherhood. How could we have expected the military not to hijack the revolution? The old regime had been suppressing opposition since the 1950s, from the time of President Gamal Abdul Nasser, who himself was an army colonel and served as president for fourteen years until his death. I was still unable to see what was really happening and just thought that we were actually enjoying another wave of the revolution. So I went to work on June 7, 2013, aiming to feminize the act of rebellion with my art. Tamaradi ya Outta (Rebel Cat) was a call to women to join the revolution. I feminized the verb to

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rebel in Arabic so that women could relate to it, and I added the word cat, a howl that men sometimes call to women on the street. I painted the cat with a halo in many colors along with the slogan. One of the reasons I decided to target my work at women in the summer of 2013 was the aggressive, organized, and targeted sexual harassment campaigns that followers of the old regime employed to intimidate the women of Egypt from going down to protest in the squares. They tried to frighten half the population to keep them away from the street. I sometimes get flashbacks from the square. The most beautiful scene from Tahrir this time was the women’s zone, surrounded by a cordon of men to protect them from any harassment. The most beautiful chants came ringing from this section, from the voices of these women who knew that they were the heart of the revolution. On June 7, 2013, I sprayed another message, a message to the men who wanted to silence and intimidate the women of Tahrir, a message to the men who claimed that the voice, the hair, the body, and the face of a woman is an awra, a shameful thing that should be covered. I sprayed a big brain composed of naked women body parts with the message “Mokhak Awra”: “Your brain is shameful and it should be covered.” In 2013, I was not naive enough to believe that things would become better overnight, the minute we elected a new president. I knew that we were in a constant state of learning. But the machines of the deep state are strong, and they came back to power. However, I was naive enough to believe that there was a second wave of the revolution, starting with the overthrow of President Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood leader who had been elected in June of 2012. The current president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, was a military man who had promised the people in 2013 that he would never run for president and that the military had no interest in running the country. My friends outside Egypt called the military takeover in July 2013 a coup. We did not want an Islamic State, and so we were stuck between a rock and a hard place. It was either the military or the Muslim Brotherhood. The ideologies were different, but the old regime, represented by the military, had all the keys, allowing the Muslim Brotherhood for a year to convince the world that Egypt had a democratically elected president. But how can you have a democracy when Egypt has a 60 percent illiteracy rate? There are no proper statistics, but it is very clear from what you can see on the street every day—the garbage, the lack of order, the way people behave, the astronomical number of advertising billboards polluting the horizon line. The streets do not present themselves as those of an educated nation. Who are we to blame? The government has left the people with corrupt systems for decades,

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and the people in power do not want this to be discussed. They are in control of the schools and the media, and they brainwash as they please. You cannot be liberal or progressive in Egypt today because there are no mechanisms to support your thoughts. You are a minority, and you will be attacked by the masses if you stand out. As someone born and raised in Lebanon, I also question our notion of nations. What are these borders that we have drawn for ourselves on this planet? Why do we need them? What are we identifying with when we say I am Lebanese, or Egyptian, or French? What is special about belonging to a plot of land whose borders we did not draw? Then the whole discourse on colonization comes flashing into my mind. I imagine the room where a group of generals sat and divided these lands among them. The people inhibiting these lands are now confined to lines drawn by colonizers. They cannot move in or out without papers or without someone allowing them to cross this border. The real borders are inside our minds. Twenty years ago, when the European Union was announced, I dreamed of an Arab Union. It still does not make sense to me that we are 400 million people who speak the same language and still cannot form an economic unity. It seems obsolete at this point in time for us to still try to build a nation’s identity when it is originally not our creation. We are nations that need to be restarted.

OFF STREETS OF CAIRO—ON STREETS OF THE WORLD For two years between 2011 and 2013, the streets of Cairo became an open gallery for many artists wishing to express their views, dreams, and hopes for a better Egypt. Artists were using the walls of the city to tell their stories, to lament the death of martyrs, and to call for political and social change. Each painted wall acquired a life of its own. No longer just belonging to a building, a bridge, or a street, it was recruited to serve a cause and to rally a group of people to support that cause. Artists discovered that to reach the people they had to be physically with them. They had to invade the social spaces of the city and bombard the onlookers with their messages. For two years I had the honor of being one of these artists. After June 2013, I stopped working on the street, and by 2014, I stopped believing in anything. In Egypt, I felt stuck, and all the dreams we had had for change seemed to have diminished. I was no longer working for my present; I did not think I would live to see the change we had dreamed of. I was working for the future of the coming generations—the ones who have no chance, the

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underprivileged, the discriminated against, the oppressed, the suppressed, the aspiring, and the dreamers. Freedom, however, is addictive. In 2015, I decided that if the streets of Cairo were no longer accessible to me, then the cities of the world would be. After being invited to do a gallery show in Freiburg, I seized the opportunity and took to the streets again. To my surprise, this small German city on the border with Switzerland has twelve legal walls for local street artists to paint. An anti-Islamic wave was sweeping through Europe, and now my cause was no longer concerned only with my locality but with the world at large. The local “Nos” that were targeted at specific events in Egypt now became international “Nos” refusing our current human condition: No to Blood; No to Extremism; No to Discrimination; No to Borders; No to Killing; No to Fascism, No to Racism; No to Hatred; No to Violence; No to War; No to Colonization; No to Stupidity; “No to Closed Minds.” Like the “Nos” in Cairo, the international “Nos” first sprayed in Frieburg were taken from calligraphy on historic buildings in many places in the world: the Karatay Madrasa in Konya, Turkey; buildings and cenotaphs in Cairo; plates in Nishapur, Iran, and Samarkand, Uzbekistan; a minaret in Afghanistan; and Persian manuscripts now housed in New York. We are united in our humanity and our suffering, even when we are in the most developed of countries. Another phase of liberation ensued for me when geography was no longer an issue. I could now use the freedom of movement that I enjoyed as a person from my part of the world to help spread my messages. The new series of “Nos” travelled with me to different cities—New Orleans, Istanbul, and Vancouver. But there came a point again when painting the “Nos” was not enough. I had other messages I wanted to share. Communicating these confrontational messages was not an option back in Egypt, with a vicious and repressive regime where everyone has to watch what they say. I found my global family in the global street art scene, a more comfortable place for me to be. The gallery setup is linked to a market; your work is bought, sold, and exchanged, which is a different dynamic from the street. The gallery speaks to a specific audience, and the street speaks to all. On the street you are exposed to the elements, and they decide whether your work lives or not: not the curator, not the gallery, not the collector, not the museum, but the street and its elements. All street artists know this. If it is not your government, it is the sun, or the rain, or the wind, or an unhappy teenager. Someone or something will cover your work, and that is the whole point. Street art is ephemeral, and this is how it should be. Street art is an experience that you either have the chance to see or just miss it.

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Poetry always comes to my assistance. I have been a great admirer of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, and his poetry became very relevant to my condition. The first poem I painted was in downtown Vancouver, Canada, on the corner of a makeshift wall for a construction site in February 2016. I chose the line “ ‫( ” قف على ناصية الحلم و قاتل‬Stand at the corner of a dream and fight).5 The most striking thing I found in downtown Vancouver was the drug addicts using drugs openly on the street. More of them in an alleyway indicated that there were no cameras and that it was safe to spray. A middle-aged woman stopped to help us. She was wearing jeans, trainers, and a dark blue sports jacket; looked like a native Canadian; and was smoking a cigarette. I had connected with a street artist from Vancouver who takes photos of people jumping for joy. She had suggested that we paint in downtown, as it is a safe place to do street art during the day. But the number of drug users struck me. All I could see were lost souls from all backgrounds, hiding at the corners: a young woman in a pretty dress, an older man in a thick jacket, an older woman wearing eyeglasses. They could all be my colleagues at work, my friends, my neighbors. But they were using drugs on the street, and it made me wonder about the effect of the Canadian government’s decision not to criminalize using drugs on the street. It takes addiction out of the dens and the illegal places, out to the street where people can clearly see it. From everything I saw, heard, and experienced on drug addiction, the image of this group of people will stay with me forever. It is their vulnerability that struck me the most. A country can be judged by the way it treats its most vulnerable. I was supposed to paint the Darwish poem—“Stand at the corner of a dream and fight”—in the United States a few months later, but one of the organizers thought the poem might be problematic and incite hatred because it was in Arabic, so I painted it in Vancouver. I was coming into the United States through New York City, so my friends secured me a legal wall on 207th Street and 10th Avenue in March 2016. I painted my second line from a Darwish poem: “‫( ”ن لي يو ٌم يكون و فراشةٌ بنت سجو كان‬I had a day that will come and a butterfly cocooned in prisons).6 It was the first time I had worked with actual street artists, and we all shared a wall, each of us getting a space next to the other on a beautiful early spring day. We worked in silence. I was the only woman surrounded by masculine New York street artists. They went by names like Snake and Cool Kito X-Vandel. Their names were a cover for very kind souls. In April 2016, I moved on to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to paint a line from a third Darwish poem, “‫( ”ال للمستحيل‬No to the Impossible), conduct a workshop, and give lectures, sponsored by the Center for Visual Culture and the Middle East Studies Program.7 More important than the work itself was the

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community that joined me to paint the mural. They were film producers, minorities, ex-army veterans, masters, students, and muralists working in the city, the majority of whom were women, including the army veteran. We painted inside due to the cold weather. While we were painting the artwork on the floor, we shared stories, and suddenly my artwork became a carpet of narratives like the ones in workshops in central Asia, where a group of people, usually women, come together and share histories. In that same month I was invited to conduct a master class at the Ecole Supérieure des Arts Visuels in Marrakesh, Morocco. It was April, and the temperature during the day was 40 degrees Celsius outside. I would start my day at eight o’clock in the morning, teach until four o’clock in the afternoon, and then go down to the wall in the school and paint till sunset. “‫”اذا ما استطعنا اليها سبيال نحن نحب الحياة‬ (We love life if we had access to it) was the Darwish line that I chose for this wall because it was the first one I painted in the Arab world8 (Figure 5.2). It made sense to use a poem that reflected what I believe to be the state of Arabs now. I used my invitations to conferences in different cities to connect with local street artists and communities, where I could find walls that I could paint. In June 2016, I was invited to a conference on peace studies in Tokyo. I was lucky to find an art space that donated a part of its façade for my artwork. In every

Figure 5.2  Bahia Shehab. We love life if we had access to it. Marrakesh, Morocco. April 2016.

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poem I paint I try to experiment with the ways in which the Arabic script can be relevant to our contemporary world. In spite of a rich artistic and calligraphic history, Arabic calligraphy has had difficulty transitioning into the digital world for use in modern Arab visual communication, due to different social and political conditions. Every time I design a wall, I try to push the boundaries of how the Arabic script can be designed. For Tokyo I designed a script based on circles, which seemed very relevant. Darwish’s line “‫”الحياة على هذة األرض ما يستحق‬ (On this earth there are things worth living for) was painted at the Higure Art Gallery.9 The owner had visited Cairo a decade ago and was kind enough to find me volunteers to help. A student from the university where the conference was taking place helped me navigate through Tokyo and taught me subway etiquette. I chose this line for Tokyo because I felt that from what I saw of the city, Japan has more humane solutions to some of our contemporary problems. I saw eight-year-old children going to school on the metro of a city that has nearly thirteen million people. Something must be right, I thought. In the same summer, of 2016, I visited Istanbul and immediately felt at home. It is the first and only city in the world where people invited me inside their private spaces to spray, twice in the same afternoon. I was also chased away by a passer-by who, without asking for a story, thought that what I was doing was vandalism. I guess that people trust their instincts in Istanbul and either like or hate you and your work on the spot. The young women who showed me around the city both lived with their boyfriends. In the Arab world, a woman still cannot live with a man outside of wedlock. One of the women worked at the museum I was visiting, and the other was a designer with whom I connected on an online design-learning platform. They were both beautiful, smart, and ambitious. They were my guides around the city, and they helped me find safe spaces to spray my “Nos.” A month later, a dear friend invited me for a summer artist residency at the Ionian Center on the island of Cephalonia in Greece. This was the first time someone bought my paint for me. The owner and manager of the center is a typical Greek mother. This was also the first poetry wall I painted with my daughters. In 2011–12, I had regularly taken my daughters to the streets of Cairo to show them my work during the revolution. Everything I was doing was for them so it made sense that they should be the first to see it. “‫”من ال بر له ال بحر له‬ (Those who have no land have no sea) was painted at a sports complex where Greek Olympians train on Cephalonia.10 I painted it for the people fleeing war zones hoping to cross to the other side but drowning at sea. I designed the

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letters in the shape of small sail boats with some of them at the bottom of the sea (Figure 5.3). I was visiting my mother in Beirut in September 2016 and wanted to leave her a gift outside her window, and so I painted Darwish’s line “‫( ”وطني ليس حقيبة‬My country is not a suitcase) on a concrete illegal structure set up by one prominent politician to block people from accessing the street that led to his palace.11 My brother helped me paint; it was not a big wall, but working with him in the night is a memory that I will cherish for the rest of my life. The poem was erased a week later by the same people who hang huge pictures of this same politician during election time. I guess poetry is dangerous for some people. The last wall I painted in 2016 was at Mediamatic, a tourist site in Amsterdam. I wanted to end the year on a positive note, and so I painted in bright orange, square-shaped script this line from Darwish: “‫ ال الرحلة ابتدت و ال‬،‫( ”الدرب انتهى سنكون يوما ً ما نريد‬One day we will be who we want to be. The journey has not started and the road has not ended)12 (Figure 5.4). In September 2017, I met my real street art tribe. A curator found my work online and decided to invite me to my first official street art festival in Norway. The annual NuArt Festival was in its seventeenth year, and the organizers

Figure 5.3  Bahia Shehab. Those who have no land have no sea. Cephalonia, Greece. August 2016.

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Figure 5.4  Bahia Shehab. One day we will be who we want to be. The journey has not started and the road has not ended. Amsterdam, the Netherlands. December 2016.

decided to bring a group of activist-artists from different parts of the world to paint walls in Stavanger, a small city in the south of Norway. I was assigned a wall outside a beautiful building that housed a design innovation center; the view was magnificent, overlooking the ocean and beautiful green mountains. I felt it was time for me to reference the revolution again, and so I painted “‫ ما اكبر الفكرة ما اصغر الدولة‬،‫ ما اضيق الرحلة‬،‫( ”ما اوسع الثورة‬How wide is the revolution, how narrow is the journey, how big is the idea, how small is the state).13 A veiled young woman came running up to me. As she smiled, she told me that her name was Amal, which means “hope” in Arabic. She was from Syria, and she lived in the building block where I was painting. She thanked me because I was painting Arabic in big letters in her neighborhood. “Thank you for showing them that we are not all terrorists,” she said. This sentence is the reason why I work. The curator sent me a photo of young Syrian students reading my work to their peers in school. My work is building bridges where they are needed. I am filled with gratitude. The last line from a Darwish poem I painted was in Paris in October 2017, at the Institut des Cultures d’Islam as part of the exhibition “Lettres ouvertes, de la calligraphie au street art.” I painted one word in Arabic : “‫( ”سأحلم‬I will

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dream).14 Every Arab nationality imaginable passed through the street while I was working. Some of these people were excited, and others were skeptical. For every ten “bon courage” by passers-by, I would get one angry old French woman asking me not to write Arabic on the streets of Paris. Like any other city in the world, either people hate your work or they like it. A lot of the time they are vocal about it, which is a good thing. The street is theirs after all.

CONCLUSION I look back at some of the comments I made during the revolution and think that dreamers are naive. Six years ago I started with one small stencil on a street in Cairo. I took historic ligatures—the Lam-alif—and brought them to life to reject contemporary injustice. I used them also to highlight the beauty and versatility of Arabic calligraphy. Doing so makes a statement for us: look for solutions from within. The main gain of the revolution was that it brought all the dreamers together. For a short time we believed that we could actually change things. We touched our dreams. But problems that have been piling up for decades will not disappear because a group of dreamers wake up one day and decide to chant on the streets for bread, freedom, and social justice. I can only paint poetry on streets outside my city now. I will keep painting walls until I have nothing more to say even though everything I paint disappears.

NOTES 1 A Thousand Times NO. Art installation for the exhibition, “The Future of Tradition—the Tradition of Future, 100 years after the Exhibition, ‘Masterpieces of Mohammadan Art.’” The Khatt Foundation Room, Haus der Kunst. September 2010–January 2011. Munich, Germany. 2 The Lam-alif is a ligature (the linking of two Arabic letters, written together), with a rich cultural, religious, and aesthetic history. 3 Titles here and following are translations from the Arabic. The “Nos” were sprayed with stencils using 1,400 years of Islamic calligraphy. All paintings discussed in this chapter are listed chronologically in Works Cited, with English titles only. 4 There Are People, wall spray stencils reproduced in the newspaper Shourouk. Fourth year Edition # 1226 (June 10, 2012), 3.

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5 This line comes from Mahmoud Darwish’s poem “‫( ”كان ما سوف يكون‬It was what it was going to be). Web. www.adab.com/modules.php?name=Sh3er&doWhat=shqas& qid=64867. December 15, 2017. Lines from Darwish’s poetry in this and subsequent wall paintings discussed below were painted in Arabic; all translations here and following are my own. For the collected poems of Darwish, see Mahmoud Darwish, ‫( األعمال الجديدة الكاملة‬The New Complete Works). 6 From Darwish’s poem, “‫( ”تلك صورتها‬That Is Her Image). Web. www.adab.com/modules. php?name=Sh3er&doWhat=shqas&qid=64865. December 15, 2017. 7 From Darwish’s poem, “‫( ”وتحمل عبء الفراشة‬And tolerate the burden of the butterfly). Web. www.adab.com/modules.php?name=Sh3er&doWhat=shqas&qid=64873. December 15, 2017. 8 From Darwish’s poem, “ ‫( ”أحد عشر كوكبا‬Eleven Planets). Web. www.elsaba7.com/ NewsDtl.aspx?id=65031. December 15, 2017. 9 From Darwish’s poem, “‫( ”على هذه األرض‬On This Earth). Web. www.adab.com/modules. php?name=Sh3er&doWhat=shqas&qid=79598. December 15, 2017. 10 From Darwish’s poem, “ ‫( ”مديح الظل العالي‬In Praise of the High Shadow). Web. http:// mahmouddarwich.blogspot.com.eg/2006/03/blog-post_114323366625436135.html. December 15, 2017. 11 From Darwish’s poem, “‫( ”يوميات جرح فلسطيني‬Diaries of a Palestinian Wound). Web. www. adab.com/modules.php?name=Sh3er&doWhat=shqas&qid=64838. December 15, 2017. 12 From Darwish’s poem, “‫( ”جدارية‬Mural). Web. www.adab.com/modules.php?name=Sh 3er&doWhat=shqas&qid=69386. December 15, 2017. 13 From Darwish’s poem, “‫( ”مديح الظل العالي‬In Praise of the High Shadow). Web. www. adab.com/modules.php?name=Sh3er&doWhat=shqas&qid=69386. December 15, 2017. 14 From Darwish’s poem, “‫( ”جدارية‬Mural). Web. www.adab.com/modules.php?name=Sh 3er&doWhat=shqas&qid=69386. December 15, 2017.

WORKS CITED Darwish, Mahmoud. ‫ األعمال الجديدة الكاملة‬/“The New Complete Works”. 3 vols. Beirut, Lebanon: Riad El-Rayyes Books, 2009. Shehab, Bahia. 1000 Times No—Restaged. Series of 12 wall spray stencils. New Orleans, LA, United States. October, 2015. Shehab, Bahia. A Thousand Times No. Series of 25 wall spray stencils. Cairo, Egypt. March 16, 2012. Shehab, Bahia. A Thousand Times No. Series of museum wall stencils. Istanbul, Turkey. 2016.

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Shehab, Bahia. A Thousand Time No—Restaged. Series of 14 wall spray stencils. Freiburg, Germany. May, 2015. Shehab, Bahia. Beware of Speed Bumps. Long Live the Revolution. Wall spray stencils. Cairo, Egypt. July, 2012. Shehab, Bahia. Children of Assuit. Series of two wall spray stencils, with 52 names. Cairo, Egypt. January–March, 2013. Shehab, Bahia. How Wide is the Revolution, How Narrow is the Journey, How Big is the Idea, How Small is the State. Wall spray stencil. NuArt Festival. Stavanger, Norway. September, 2017. Shehab, Bahia. I had a Day that will Come and a Butterfly Cocooned in Prisons. Wall spray stencils. 207th Street and 10th Avenue, New York City, United States. March, 2016. Shehab, Bahia. I will Dream. Wall spray stencil. Exhibition on “Lettres ouvertes, de la calligraphie au street art.” Institut des Cultures d’Islam. Paris, France, October, 2017. Shehab, Bahia. Mokhak Awra. Wall spray stencil. Cairo, Egypt. June 7, 2013. Shehab, Bahia. My Country is not a Suitcase. Wall spray stencil, painted with brother. Beirut, Lebanon. September, 2016. Shehab, Bahia. No to the Impossible. Community mural on fabric. Spray stencil. 460 × 520 cm/15 × 17 feet. University of Wisconsin-Madison. Madison, WI, United States. April, 2016. Shehab, Bahia. One Day We will be Who we Want to be. The Journey has not Started and the Road has not Ended. Wall spray stencil. Mediamatic. Amsterdam. The Netherlands. December, 2016. Shehab, Bahia. On this Earth there are Things Worth Living for. Communal wall spray stencil. Higure Art Gallery, Tokyo, Japan. June, 2016. Shehab, Bahia. Rebel Cat. Wall spray stencil. Cairo, Egypt. June, 2013. Shehab, Bahia. Stand at the Corner of a Dream and Fight. Wall spray stencil. Vancouver, Canada. February, 2016. Shehab, Bahia. There Are People. Series of 5 wall spray stencils. Cairo, Egypt. March, 2012. Shehab, Bahia. Those Who Have no Land Have no Sea. Wall spray stencil. Olympian Sports Complex. Cephalonia, Greece. August, 2016. Shehab, Bahia. We are Back. No to a New Pharaoh, No to Morsi. Wall spray stencil. Cairo, Egypt. December, 2012. Shehab, Bahia. We Love Life if we had Access to it. Community Mural spray stencil. 2.5 m × 22 m. Ecole Supérieure des Arts Visuels. Marrakech, Morocco. April, 2016.

Part Four

Restages: Palimpsests of the Past

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6

The Folds of History in William Kentridge’s Black Box Theatre: Sampling German Nazism and Colonialism Rosemarie Buikema

On the one hand we say: Well, the Enlightenment is our last, our best hope. But my work also acknowledges the Enlightenment’s imbrication with so many other disasters. William Kentridge, That Which Is Not Drawn (17) Characteristic of our post-socialist and postcolonial age are the ways in which nation-states are held accountable for their histories of oppression and/or human rights violations. These processes in which authorities are called to justice are best described as processes of revolt, rather than as revolutions, if we are to follow Julia Kristeva’s differentiation between the terms. In her essay L’avenir d’une ré volte (1998), Kristeva argues that revolt always points toward radical and cultural transformation, but never represents a one-off break with the past. Revolt, as deployed in Kristeva’s later work, implies a process of selfreflection and working through—a process that is never finished and constantly needs to be reenacted.1 The revolt is a reversal, a relocation, a transformation, but also a return; it is the most powerful and promising force within our culture. In Kristeva’s work, revolt is first of all aimed at the renewal of mental life. Yet, so she immediately adds, up to the extent that the revolt is concerned with a turning point in the relationship between the individual and meaning, individual cultural revolt always also affects society in a wider sense. The Freudian concept of Durcharbeitung, which is best translated as the process of working through, is of crucial importance to the revolt. In a psychoanalytical sense, working through points toward the re-rooting of the self as a precondition for transformation. In an interview with Philippe Petit, Kristeva states: “Re-rooting the self will take

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us nearer to revolt. Put yourself on the line to reciprocally stimulate memory, thought and will” (Revolte 85). Through the labor of working through, undesirable processes of repetition in mental and sociocultural life can be denoted and set into motion. In a process of working through, one can potentially overcome the resistance toward that which cannot yet be known—be it for personal or political reasons. The underlying thought behind such a psychoanalytical line of thinking is that the articulation of the repressed clears the way to liberate the subject from mechanisms of repetition. The analytical space thus enables the retrieval of lost memory and lost time. In other words, working through enables both new relations of signification and novel representations. The general argument, which I will establish further throughout this chapter, is that renewal takes place most vitally when it emerges as the result of an analysis and working through of existing structures—the network of relations and meanings that lies at the base of the phenomenon that ought to be changed or renewed. Additionally, when processing histories of violence and oppression, the aim toward a politics of “never again” is likely to be most successful when it is accompanied by a process of systemic reorientation and reconsideration. In a Kristevian sense, the revolt thus occurs in the psyche—in thinking, feeling, and manifestations thereof, such as literature and art—yet always simultaneously entails a renewal of social relations through symbolic rearticulation. When understood as an individual working through of existing relations of signification, revolt has serious political implications; it asks for a different politics—the politics of permanent contestation (Kristeva, Revolte). If anyone has managed to make the revolt both the method and the theme of his impressive oeuvre, it is the South African artist William Kentridge. Based in Johannesburg and of Lithuanian and Russian Jewish descent, Kentridge has produced work that, over the past two decades, has taken the world of modern art and contemporary art critique by storm. Countless exhibitions and multimedia productions have been exhibited, from Johannesburg, Cape Town, Sydney, and Melbourne to New York, Boston, Kassel, Venice, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, and Berlin. From a variety of ever-changing paths of flight, Kentridge’s performances articulate the violent and oppressive aspects of modern narratives of progression, address concomitant cultural amnesia, and thematize acts of memory and working through as an inescapable contemporary responsibility. One of the most characteristic aspects of this work is his method, which he himself ironically calls stone-age animation (Huyssen 17). This seemingly premodern technique effectively materializes his particular politics of contestation: a critique of the blessings of technological progress and the promises of Enlightenment and

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modernity. His stone-age animation literally catches up with progress as a linear process by means of visualizing and staging that which has been lost in the process. Throughout his work, objects come and go, constantly changing matter, form, and meaning—like memories. Thus, animated matter takes form, and iconic forms become matter. Time and again that which has been lost is made present, relived, reshaped, and re-signified, establishing new relations between present, past, and future while never ceasing to mourn that loss. One of the installations that addresses and embodies revolt as a process of re-rooting and working through most explicitly is the multimedia spectacle Black Box. This work can be considered a Baroque Gesamtkunstwerk, in which history unfolds itself; yet these folds of history are never smoothed over.2 As I will demonstrate through a virtual tour of the installation, Kentridge here transforms the seemingly simple, premodern genres of the shadow play and the proscenium theatre into contemporary political instruments.3 From the wings of the Black Box theatre, archival material and historical data are continuously unfolded and worked through until they constitute an inescapable expressive power. It is precisely the dynamic and multilayered interaction between message and medium, materiality and form, I argue, that embodies the revolt as a process of resistance against clear-cut truths. In this sense, Black Box is exemplary of a twenty-firstcentury poetics of recycling by showcasing how transformations and renewals best penetrate existing structures when they do not present themselves as a radical break with the past, but rather as a process in which those facts and narratives from the past that ought to be worked through are researched, complemented, corrected, and/or bent. As such, Kentridge demonstrates how the arts contribute to contemporary revolutionary thinking and in doing so joins the planetary turn in modernist critique in his own characteristic and medium-specific way.4

BLACK BOX AS A CRITICAL MULTIDIRECTIONAL MEMORY DISCOURSE In 2012, William Kentridge exhibited the multimedia installation Black Box/ Chambre Noire in the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam (Figure  6.1). Black Box was originally commissioned by the German Guggenheim Foundation in Berlin, where it was exhibited for the first time in October 2005. Through this multifaceted spectacle Kentridge simultaneously confronts both the African history of the producer and the contemporary European history of its client. The stylistic devices of the shadow, the trace, the metamorphosis, and the palimpsest

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Figure 6.1  William Kentdridge. Black Box/Chambre Noire. 2005. Projected images with mechanical prototypes.

are the most explosive manifestations of a heritage that has been erased from European memory: the first European genocide of the twentieth century in the form of the merciless extermination of the Nama and Herero tribes at Waterberg in South-West Africa by the German colonial army. Represented as a reenactment of a colonial archive, Black Box thematizes a Euro-African heritage that has yet to be acknowledged. To this end Black Box erects a visual monument in memory of the German genocide on 10,000 of the 20,000 Nama people, and 65,000 of the 80,000 Herero in South-West Africa by exhibiting both a reassembled archive and a centrally situated multimedia projection of historical documents.5 The staging of exhibited historical material—military orders, death rolls, land maps enhanced with charcoal, colonial pictures, and drawings—is framed within a miniature Baroque proscenium theatre, in which a shadow play is performed within the narrative structure of Mozart’s opera Die Zauberflö te (The Magic Flute). However, in Black Box Mozart’s music is juxtaposed with Herero laments (outjina).6 In this way, some of the best and most beautiful classical music that German history has produced is simultaneously mixed and contrasted with the exceptionally cruel colonial aspects of that very same history, a cruelty that, according to Kentridge’s interpretation, is already anticipated in Die Zauberflö te’s libretto (Kentridge, “Black Box” 51). In the opera, the utopian ideals of progress

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and Enlightenment are voiced while the high priest Sarrastro, motivated by feelings of charity, leads Pamina, the daughter of the queen of the night, out of the darkness (symbolizing captivity) into the light (symbolizing freedom and reason). Kentridge argues, however, that this utopian Enlightenment is not a real Enlightenment because Sarrastro’s emancipatory project is realized through the use of violence. In accordance with this, Adorno might have suggested that here progress employs reason in much the same way as a predatory beast employs its claws (Horkheimer and Adorno). The parallel between Die Zauberflö te’s discourse of light as a precondition for vision, progress, and truth, and that of many colonial missions—the Enlightening of a dark continent to be carried out, if required, with the use of violence—is overtly present in Black Box at a narrative, visual, and musical level. If Die Zauberflö te embodies the utopian aspects of Enlightenment, Black Box embodies the other side of the coin and performs the insights to be drawn from darkness and shadows. The interaction between light and shadow, progression and destruction, becomes the very core of the performance through Kentridge’s deployment of a historically significant recording of Die Zauberflö te: the performance that was played for the entire Nazi elite in Berlin in 1937. No matter how layered and intertextual this introduction to Kentridge’s artifact may already sound, this is still the most basic interpretation of the ways in which Black Box evokes, through the use of multimedia, the memory of different legacies of violence within the museological contexts of Berlin and Amsterdam, urging the spectator to work through these repressed memories in order to clear the space for a future in a globalized postcolonial world. The staging of a suppressed German colonial history within the context of the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam marks an important step toward a disruptive reanimation of the Holocaust as Europe’s Deckerinnerung—as Europe’s primary memory investment par excellence.7 Yet it is not only because of this specific geopolitical framing that Black Box unfolds the forgotten genocide as a narrative that both preceded the Holocaust and left a complex mark on contemporary political relations within as well as outside Europe.8 The structural intervention into mainstream memory practices comes from the reenacted archive and the wings of the proscenium theatre. Re-mixing facts as well as artistic modes and genres, Kentridge’s multimedia approach epitomizes what critical memory scholars understand as a multidirectional memory practice. Introducing the term multidirectional memory, Michael Rothberg intended to transform the national or transnational competition between histories of violence into processes of productive cultural exchange: “Against the framework that understands

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collective memory as competitive memory—a zero-sum struggle over scarce resources—I suggest that we consider memory as multidirectional, as subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing: as productive and not privative” (Multidirectional Memory 3). General Lothar von Trotha’s extermination order (1904) plays a central role in the display of this multidirectional historical archive: I, the Great General of the German troops, send this letter to the Herero. The Herero people must leave the land. If they do not do this I will force them with the Groot Rohr [Cannon]. Within the German borders every Herero, with or without a gun, with or without cattle, will be shot. I will no longer accept women and children, I will drive them back to their people or I will let them be shot at. These are my words to the Herero people. Signed: The Great General of the Mighty Kaiser, von Trotha. (Olusoga and Erichsen 139)

The explicit showing of this crucial and rather awkwardly written text is a geopolitical statement in its own right that evokes rather concrete questions. The omnipresent and disruptive confrontation between memory and forgetting, barbarism and culture, light and dark, the human and the inhuman, tradition and modernity, is documented and guided here in, and by, an exemplary colonial text. Spectators are inevitably led to ask themselves: What is the backdrop of such a text? Who is fighting whom, and why? How do other objects within this archive relate to the facts reproduced in this military order? Evoking questions and contesting historical and narratological perspectives is not only one of the political effects of, but also one of the most important drives behind, Kentridge’s artistic practice, as is evidenced by an anecdote he shares in an interview about the inspiration behind Black Box. In preparation for the performance, Kentridge visited the Waterberg memorial site in Namibia. During his visit, he was baffled by the absence of a multidirectional perspective on Germany’s colonial history:9 The site is now a national park in Namibia. At the bottom of the mountain, there’s a German war cemetery where 23 German soldiers are buried. It’s well maintained with a visitor’s book, where German tourists write things like: “thanks for keeping such good care of the graves” and “please can there be no more wars in our times and you do such honor to these people.” In the campsite dining room there are photographs of the Kaiser and his wife and of German troops, but nowhere is there any word of what happened there. It’s as if you had Auschwitz and a few Germans who died of dysentery while they were working there and then had a sign where they were buried, but not a word else about

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what happened in Auschwitz. . . . The big thing was the invisibility of the story in Namibia. It would be very hard to imagine our relationship and the history of WWII in the absence of records, books, writings, films, memorials, museums, debates. (quoted in Coumans 95)

To counteract this hegemonic memorial practice, the installation is accompanied by panels that briefly address the events that led up to the memorized catastrophe. In order to gain a better understanding of the historical intersections and the overwhelming symbolism of the performance, I will here elaborate a little further upon these predominantly forgotten events. South-West Africa—now known as Namibia—was colonized by the Germans in 1884. The German army agreed upon treaties of protection with the different ethnic groups, the Herero and the Nama, who were embroiled in mutual struggles over cattle and land. Not only were these treaties intended to suppress these mutual struggles, but they also sought to repress both parties’ quest for independence. The treaties, however, merely increased the disunity between the two populations, as well as the colonial tensions. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, an outbreak of cattle plague led to the further destabilization of colonial relations. Countless poor Herero were forced to hand over their land to their German occupiers, and then forced to work on German farms, where they were often treated as slaves, beaten, raped, and lynched. Governed from Windhoek and Berlin, the colonial army translated its responsibility for the weakened position of the Herero into a desire to create a viable German colony in Africa. The Germans started to claim land in increasingly violent ways. Led by Henrik Witbooi, the Nama initially supported the German troops in their battle against the Herero from the standpoint of facing a common enemy. However, the leaders of both the Herero and the Nama—who were scattered across the area—later decided to break the treaties communally, an initiative of the Herero leader Chief Samuel Maharero (1856–1923). In 1904, the Herero and the Nama reunited in an uprising against their colonizers. Initially, the Nama did so in the form of a two-year guerrilla war, whereas the Herero openly turned against the colonial occupation, gathering at the sacred area of the Waterberg plateau. Von Trotha suppressed this legendary uprising in an intensely bloody and violent way.10 When it became apparent that part of the Herero people had fled the massacre, Von Trotha wrote the following to his superior in Windhoek, Leutwein, the governor of South-West Africa: The eastern border of the colony will remain sealed off and terrorism will be employed by the Herero showing up. The nation must vanish from the face of

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the earth. Having failed to destroy them with guns I will have to achieve my end that way. (Olusaga and Erichsen 155)

In order to make these intentions known to the Herero, Von Trotha announced his now infamous Vernichtungsbefehl (extermination order)—which Kentridge cites. The colonial conflict that ensued resulted in a genocide, a practice that was fed by the German people’s eagerness to expand their living space, if necessary at the expense of other peoples (Baranovsky 57; Conrad 27).11 In the following years, tens of thousands of Herero who had escaped the battle of Waterberg were driven into concentration camps, where they were forced to wear metal plates around their necks, showing the emblem of Emperor Wilhelm II. The men were humiliated in every possible way, beaten, and lynched. The women were raped with such frequency that currently about half of the surviving Herero has a German (great)grandfather (Gewald).12 These facts, and the question of which story hides behind the objects in the archive, drive the project of Black Box. We are challenged to ask ourselves what it is exactly that we are seeing here. What hidden knowing is lurking within this colonial archive?

CROSS-REFERENCING THE COLONIAL ARCHIVE The installed archive of Black Box shows original maps covered with meaningful words such as Berlin, Waterberg, Windhuk, and Vernunft. We see shadow figures torn from black cardboard and mechanical puppets covered with paper, variously drawn upon and otherwise inscribed by the artist. Significantly, the base material used for the drawings of the objects animated later in the performance consists, besides the death rolls and maps, of pages belonging to old books such as encyclopedias and other references to nineteenth-century taxonomies and scientific beliefs. These protagonists—laden with historical references—will later carry the narrative plot during the performance.13 This consistent reworking of existing objects and texts epitomizes the simultaneous presence and absence of the past. This technique, by which the traces of the old are visible in the new, is known as the trope of the palimpsest. In Kentridge’s work, the palimpsest underlines how returning to the historical source is always already a deconstruction of the possibility of a tale of origin—a process in which the final meaning of history is continuously suspended (see also Rothberg, “Progress”). Historical meanings, continuities, and discontinuities do

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not grow on trees, but have to be made and remade again and again, and are therefore always already multidirectional—always in motion as it were. As such, the specific inscribed and reinscribed texts and drawings each evoke different narratives and traumatic histories simultaneously. One of the most obvious examples of Kentridge’s deployment of European iconography in order to simultaneously make different histories of violence visible is offered by the many skulls that feature in the exhibition. In Black Box, the countless skulls drawn on the original death rolls refer in a multidirectional way to the scope and range of the remembered catastrophe. Skulls—iconographically referring to the vulnerability of life—are, anthropologically speaking, overdetermined signs in reference not only to German colonialism in SouthWest Africa but also to many other European-African colonial tragedies that happened in the context of the utopian ideals of progress and Enlightenment. All over Europe, skulls have been displayed in museums within the context of racial theories, but also as trophies of war. In recent years, skulls and even preserved heads of prisoners from the South-West African concentration camps have been found, especially in the medical collections of a number of German universities.14 The skulls inscribed upon archival documents that underpin modernity thus simultaneously point toward different geopolitical histories of violence. The associative connection between the drive for knowledge, colonial practice motivated by conquest, and the racial theories of the Nazis as visualized in Black Box has been substantiated in great detail by a variety of historians on German colonialism (e.g., see Olusoga and Erichsen 358). The deployment of both the colonial archive and the artist’s studio in Black Box thus results in a sampling of fact and fiction that inevitably activates the spectator. Dynamic relations of signification demand an active involvement in the emergence of a point of view. Similar to every critical approach to memory and practices of remembering, Black Box addresses the working of memory, the dynamic between knowing and forgetting, the possible connections that can be made, and the meanings that are simultaneously possible through differing perspectives. Thus, techniques such as the rewriting of source material, erasure and reconstruction, sampling fact and fiction, in Black Box already go hand in hand on the level of opening up these sources. Black Box demonstrates that access to the ongoing process of remembering history as both a continuity and a discontinuity is always mediated and therefore both dynamic and productive in relation to the forever changing relationship between present, past, and future. This process of construction and reconstruction, of writing and rewriting, of

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folding and unfolding, takes place from generation to generation and is never finished.

PERFORMING THE COLONIAL ARCHIVE Centrally placed within the intimate exhibition space of the Jewish museum, we then finally lay our eyes on the miniature theatre. The bare wooden construction—within which photographs, film projections, and mechanically operated paper dolls perform a play of light and shadow—simultaneously returns us to the peepshows of our childhood, and reminds us of a traditional chamber play stage that we know from the Baroque: the experimental Black Box theatre. A crucial signifier effected within that familiar viewing experience is the proscenium stage, framed with a series of coulisses and canopies that add depth and context to the spectacle. The players and objects in the performed tragedy appear from, and disappear within, those wings, thus bringing the folds of history to life.15 Whereas in the exposition that surrounds the performance the leading role is monopolized by the historical and manipulated documents; in the actual animation the viewer is confronted with six mechanical dolls that carry the different storylines. However, these protagonists appear not only as clearly defined mechanical dolls but also in the form of projected drawings that morph into other objects and figures. With these drawings, a couple of central powers and players are immediately situated in a visual continuum. People become objects, and objects become people. Drawings of well-dressed people become insects; globes morph into exploding skulls. In the course of the performance, drawings of dividers unfold not only as scales but also as executioners, swastikas, guns, and gallows. In Black Box every emblem of instrumental rationality (Horkheimer and Adorno) is in a constant state of flux, multiplied, sucking in histories, bursting apart and rising again, becoming their counterparts. Both the performance of matter as a continuous metamorphosis of form and the performance of form as an ever-changing variation of matter are underscored by the explicitly Baroque framing of the spectacle. Here, Kentridge seems to visualize Walter Benjamin’s philosophy, which draws a connection between the discourse of the Baroque and a twentieth-century critique of modernism. In his discussion of German tragic drama, Benjamin tried to expose the shaky foundation of modern rationality. He went back to the era of the Baroque in

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which, for the first time in history, disenchanted reality became articulated. The loss of faith in the transcendent led to a melancholic state of mind and a return to objects (Benjamin 344). In the case of Benjamin (and Kentridge), this return to the object should not be seen as a substitution—as in the replacement of ideas by objects—but as an attempt to demonstrate the fact that ideas are part of a complex history of material and sensory transformations. Following the Baroque mode of thinking, history is not remembered through monuments, but through the materiality of concrete objects, their decay, and their ruins— through the repetition of visual and discursive narratives that interact with one another in ever-changing relations. To Benjamin, the mode used to express this experience of the past represents the allegory. Distinctive of the Benjaminian allegory is the so-called loyalty to the world of things and to the suffering history of the world. “Allegories are,” he writes, “in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things” (Benjamin 354). This return to the object and its histories is what Benjamin calls the nature of the allegorical gaze. The allegorical gaze forces objects to retreat from their conventional context. It denotes and deepens, destroys and crushes, only to then bring them back to life again. Unlike the symbolic image, the allegorical image remains opaque. The images do not merge into their meaning, and they are simultaneously the material for new images. Within this frame of thought, every object is the key to a domain of hidden knowledge and unimagined relations. From a Baroque perspective of history, there is no linear perspective emerging from one central subject position. Rather, every concept becomes a narrative— an endless, horizontal unfolding of images and relations of signification. There is no stable perspective from which the whole can be viewed. The Baroque point of view can best be described as the view of a spectator who follows the folds of a curtain.16 Such a view is always in motion and has no vanishing point. Inside the fold the view is different than outside of the fold. Or, as Mieke Bal formulates it in her discussion of Benjamin’s perspective on history, “A Baroque point of view establishes a relationship between subject and object, then returns to the subject again, a subject that has been changed by that movement, and that goes back, in its new guise, to the object, only to return, yet again, to its ever-changing ‘self ’” (87). When Deleuze argues in his Le pli: Leibniz et le baroque that the subject has become a point of view, he means precisely that the subject does not precede the point of view, but is rather constituted by it. The point of view thus precipitates both subject and object. Thus one history made publicly visible at the expense of another—the process of knowing and forgetting to which Kentridge refers in the report of his visit

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to Waterberg—is thus visualized and counteracted in great detail. The Baroque perspective on history carries with it the kind of visual excess that characterizes Kentridge’s work. It is no longer centered upon a reconstruction of historical events, but upon a literal working through in order to enable the emergence of new relations of signification. As such, progression is possible necessitating neither the disappearance of the old, nor its mourning. Thus, in Black Box, the traditional avant-garde critique of modernity is transformed into a critical instrument that can be utilized in a postcolonial world that is becoming ever more globalized. In relation to this, cultural memory scholar Andreas Huyssen speaks of Kentridge’s “avant-gardism from the periphery” (Huyssen 74). The uncertainty about what it is exactly that becomes visible that is so central to the spectator’s experience of Black Box here counteracts neoliberal optimism as well as the mass media’s monumental, capital-driven, and amnesia-producing exhibition of the past. Institutionalized forgetting takes on a material form in the Baroque performance of Black Box, forcing us to be accountable for the potential blind spots in our knowledge and to appreciate the knowledge that can be coaxed and drawn from the space in between images, from the folds, the pleats, from the darkness, and from the shadows. As charcoal drawings transform into shadow figures of torn paper during the performance, so too do the projected shadows of human hands create a bird that transforms into the projection of a German eagle torn from paper and so on and so forth. In this way, connections are drawn, associations become images, and both the content and the very structures of memory and the repressed become visible. “To remember means to read traces; it demands imagination, attentiveness of the gaze, construction,” Huyssen states in an essay dedicated to the work of William Kentridge (39). To remember is to seek traces, to make meaning, to fold and unfold. In the rebellious deployment of overdetermined early modern forms and techniques—strikingly described by Huyssen as a “revolt of objects”— the experience of the simultaneous erasure and eruption of the past imposes itself on the present. The deployed material implies a continuous development of form. This “revolt of objects” is an alternative name for that which, according to Walter Benjamin, happens to objects in the context of the allegorical gaze.

THE RHINOCEROS AS THE BLACK BOX OF POSTCOLONIAL EUROPE In Black Box, the story is narrated by the Megaphone Man, who carries the word Trauerarbeit (meaning the labor of mourning) on his chest. This narrator,

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hidden in the folds of history and frequently emerging from the wings, seems to be the most literal embodiment of this allegorical gaze. The loyalty to the world of the object, under the allegorical gaze of the mourning Megaphone Man, eventually leads to the moving final scene: the dance of the rhinoceros and the Megaphone Man.17 Throughout Kentridge’s work, the megaphone and the rhinoceros assume roles in diverse constellations and combinations. Both figures refer again to archaic and outdated forms and practices that, in their isolated and newly contextualized appearance, perform an avant-garde critique on the cruelties of modernism and colonialism. Through the allegorical gaze of the Megaphone Man, however, this general critique of modernism becomes very concrete and mingles on the level of the narrative with some of the grotesque details of the encounters between Europe and its colonies, specifically, Germany and SouthWest Africa. The history of signification attributable to the rhinoceros is crucial here, fulfilling a prominent role next to the skull, the pair of dividers, and the typewriter, specifically in the final scene, as well as throughout the performance (Figure 6.2).

Figure 6.2  William Kentridge. Black Box/Chambre Noire. 2005. The rhinoceros as the black box of postcolonial Europe.

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The prehistoric palimpsestic folded skin of the rhinoceros echoes the atmosphere of times long past. However, iconographically speaking, the drawing of Kentridge’s rhinoceros leads to a topos in European art history, in the form of the often-cited woodcut by Dü rer, entitled Rhinocerus. In an interview with Sandra T.  J. Coumans, Kentridge briefly referred to the exemplary colonial history of the specific rhinoceros that was the model for the woodcut that Dü rer made in 1515 (Coumans 141). The recorded history of this particular animal includes its shipping from India to Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The animal, extinct in Europe from the third century onward, was a supposed gift from the Portuguese king Manuel to Pope Leo X to make the latter favorably disposed in reference to the fixing of the boundaries between Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the so-called “new world.” During the journey from Lisbon to Rome, however, the rhinoceros died and reached the Vatican stuffed with straw. The woodcut, produced as a result of this grotesque history, has influenced European interpretations through visual representations of the rhinoceros by Dali and embodies, in a broad sense, the memory of Europe’s colonial history as an ongoing destabilizing encounter between East and West, North and South. Once sacrificed and used as a colonial means of exchange, the rhinoceros has now become an endangered species. In some ways mirroring the Herero and Nama, the number of rhinoceroses on the African continent is also dramatically reduced. Due to the human predilection for progress and the longing for profit, the animal has been almost completely exterminated. The deployment of the rhinoceros in Black Box is yet another manifestation of the Baroque art aesthetic—that the pre-folded texture of the material is the starting point of the final artwork. The significant parallel between the Herero genocide and rhinoceros hunting is visualized throughout the performance by the clearly traceable triptych amid the plethora of images and sounds. The triptych, which is constantly observed by the Megaphone Man during the performance, consists of fragments from the film Nashornjagd in Deutsch Ostafrika (Rhinoceros Hunting in German East Africa). These images were produced around 1911–12 by adventurer and big game hunter Robert Schumann and were shown in Germany as a form of colonial propaganda. The first panel of this imaginary triptych consists of a projection of a fragment from this colonial film footage—the empty African landscape—along the front of which a Herero woman moves against an audio backdrop of traditional Herero sounds. The central panel consists of the projection of a film fragment in which colonial

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settlers kill a female rhinoceros and her young, accompanied by the sound of Sarrastro’s aria “In diesen heil’gen Hallen,” after which the third tableau mirrors the first scene and the Herero woman, once again, sings her lament—her outjina. However, the backdrop of the empty African landscape is now replaced with the projected death rolls during this traditional African response to Mozart. While the Megaphone Man watches from the wings, the spectator has thus become a witness to the way in which Africa, in the early twentieth century, functioned as the playing field of the Europeans. The eye of the camera and the barrel of a gun converge in the framing of Black Box and form vital parts of the instrument of appropriation of colonial politics—a politics that initiated a transformation of light into darkness. While the colonial settlers are enjoying themselves hunting rhinoceroses, the despot Sarrastro sings of the triumph of light over darkness, the disappearance of hate and feelings of revenge, and the love between humans—“wen solche Lehren nicht erfreuen, verdient nicht ein Mensch zu sein” (He who is not gladdened by such teachings does not deserve to be a man). Simultaneously we learn that the entire Nazi elite listened to the same performance. Following this scene, the drawing of the rhinoceros emerges from a charcoal drawing of a German eagle, only to then morph into a spurting showerhead, which in the context of World War II carries obvious connotations of destruction. The rhinoceros, the Herero, and the other European genocides thus become associated with one another through these iconic images that morph into each other, brought simultaneously into the spotlight. Pulling the performance to a conclusion, the final scene of Black Box consists of a relatively slow (compared to the preceding rhythm of the performance) and long dance between the mechanical Megaphone Man, still bearing the word Trauerarbeit on his chest, and the animated drawing of the rhinoceros. The dance takes place accompanied by a sampling of indigenous music and the melody of Pamina’s aria “Ach ich fü hl’s, es ist verschwunden” (Ah, I sense it has vanished). In the dance with the Megaphone Man, the rhinoceros one last time unfolds itself, this time into letter scales, encapsulating, as such, the history of the Herero massacre as well as the body of the Herero woman. The reassembled rhinoceros then dances toward the open ending of the performance, tumbling over the Megaphone Man time and again. Gracefully skipping over the stage the rhinoceros thus recycles the walk of the colonial hunters to the extent that it becomes a mesmerizing decolonizing gesture, creating new configurations of knowledge and power.

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THE FOLDS OF HISTORY In light of the multidirectional history that has been documented and revealed by the Black Box performance—that is, the material metamorphoses, encounters and transpositions of the documents and protagonists—the dance of the rhinoceros and the Megaphone Man evokes affects that inevitably lead to a reflection of the imbrications of Enlightenment and catastrophe: the entanglement of knowledge production and progression on the one hand, and the atrocities of the EuropeanAfrican encounter and their impact on the further vicissitudes of the German drive for expansion within Europe in the antebellum period on the other. The separate scenes and tableaus are kept together by the coulisses of the theatre and, as such, form the folds of a history, as a multilayered tissue that is subjected to constant contestation, motion, and change. In times of increasing political contestation and polarization, Black Box urges the spectator to work through these particular folds of history in order to clear the space for a different kind of memory practice that is able to accommodate a future in a globalized postcolonial world. By mixing the African voice and African iconography with European Enlightenment discourse, Black Box creates an openness in which there is place, both for hegemony and forgotten historical details. This openness does not so much lead to the destruction of traditional Enlightenment discourse, but rather redefines this hegemonic tradition within the assemblage through an excess of facts and memories. Crucial to this re-signification is the realization that current global power relations are inextricably linked with multidirectional histories of oppression and violence. Although we cannot break with this heritage, we can, through the allegorical gaze, draw from it a new perspective for the future. The sampling of matter and form, subject and object, Western and Southern traditions, creates new points of view in which finite meanings need to be suspended, time and time again.

NOTES 1 Her critical focus thus shifts from the process of transgression in textual practice (revolution)—as in Revolution in Poetic Language (1984)—to the processes of movement and repetition (revolt), and to the social and critical impact of such practices. See also my Revoltes in de Cultuurkritiek, where I further develop the concept of revolte and revolution.

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2 A Gesamtkunstwerk is an artwork that transgresses the boundaries of individual artistic disciplines. My analysis of Kentridge’s work in this chapter elaborates on the research presented in “The Revolt of the Object.” 3 See the twenty-minute performance displayed in the center of the exhibition space. Web. www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6COnGRIFsw; www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Yd2q9XkVt3c. Web. September 20, 2017. 4 See Friedman, Planetary Modernisms for an enlightening analysis of interlocking modernisms in the wake of empire. Building on the postcolonial and transnational turn in modernist studies, she challenges the center/periphery frameworks of traditional modernist thinking and proposes new lines of flight such as interconnected centers and contradictory outcomes. “Modernity can,” she claims, “enslave or free, shatter or exhilarate, displace or replace, dismantle or reassemble— thus, utopian and dystopian at once” (4). 5 Of the 14,000 German soldiers, about 1,500 died in battle or of disease (Conrad 201). In 1985, the UN Whitaker report formally acknowledged the murder of the Herero and Namaqua as genocide (Whitaker). 6 Outjina are laments and songs of praise that are part of Herero oral culture. The songs tell the history of the Herero people as well as the fall of a large part of their people due to the colonial war with the Germans (Coumans 65). 7 See Chambers et al. and Skarveit and Goodnow for more information about the transformation of museums as transcultural spaces in the light of global migratory movements and repressed histories, voices, memories, and so on. 8 Ever since Aimé  Cé saire, in Discours sur le colonialisme (1950), and Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), tried to think Nazism and colonialism together, the idea of a relationship between both legacies of violence has resulted in continuing disagreement and debate among historians. Briefly summarized, this continuity versus discontinuity debate addresses the question whether the Holocaust and/or the German quest for living space (Lebensraum) in Eastern Europe can be understood, at least in part, as a result of the abominable aspects of German colonialism and imperialism (continuity thesis), or whether World War II politics should be perceived as another singular catastrophe in world history (discontinuity thesis); see Kundrus; Langbehn and Salama; Moses. Michael Rothberg, a key player in surveying this debate, coined the term “the colonial turn in Holocaust studies” (Multidirectional Memory 101). This turn has been key to our understanding of postcolonial Europe ever since. 9 In the bookstore of the Jewish History Museum we now find a few items on German colonialism next to the documentation of Jewish cultural heritage. 10 General von Trotha was recruited by Kaiser Wilhelm II for this particular mission and had already acquired a reputation for cruelty and violence in Northern China and East Africa (Conrad 189). When he was asked to intervene in South-West

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Contemporary Revolutions Africa, his response was: “I shall destroy the rebellious tribes by shedding rivers of blood and money. Only then will it be possible to sow the seeds of something new that will endure” (Olusoga and Erichsen 139). Although Germany was a latecomer on the colonial stage, its colonial politics were driven by the same principles as those of other European empires of that time. Under the promise of modernization, national and socioeconomic interests were hidden, such as the desire to fight social conflicts outside of one’s own borders, and the aim to found new settler communities overseas. In the case of German colonialism, two distinctive features have to be added: the degree of racial segregation—only the German empire introduced prohibitions of interracial marriages—and the extreme violence (Conrad). In 2004, the German minister of economic cooperation and development, Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, visited Namibia and apologized for what she explicitly described as genocide (Wietersheim; Ziel). Keeping with postcolonial accountability politics, the Von Trotha Strasse in Munich was renamed the Herero Strasse in 2006. In 2007, a reconciliation meeting took place between Trotha’s descendants and several Herero leaders at the invitation of Chief Alfonso Maharero, Samuel Maharero’s grandson (Olusaga and Erichson 359). To this day, however, Berlin refuses compensation (Moshenburg), although the Herero territory does receive a large proportion of German development funds (Claus; Vensky). There is a narrator, the Megaphone Man, carrying the word Trauerarbeit (mourning) on his chest; there is a Herero woman defined by her headdress—in the form of a spring with a piece of transparent gauze on her head; a mechanical running man, that is, a cut-out piece of paper that runs; a pair of dividers measuring skulls and geography in the performance; a skull in the armature of a globe; and a second Herero woman based on a German postal scale from 1905—a scale for weighing letters—as Kentridge explains in an interview (Rosenthal 163). In October 2008, the Namibian Government formally requested the repatriation of all South-West African remains held in German universities. In 2011, Germany returned twenty Herero skulls that had been seized during the genocide (Schoonenboom; Wegmann). The methodological difference between historians and memory scholars—that is, starting from the basic laws of archiving and/or foregrounding the effects of the mediation of both archive and affect—is mirrored in the way in which the reception of Kentridge’s work has developed in the last decade. On the one hand, critics emphasize that Kentridge’s work must be understood within the geopolitical context of accountability politics and the history of (post-) apartheid South Africa (Christov-Bakargiev; Godby). On the other hand, there is a growing interest in Kentridge’s work as critical memory discourse (Breidbach; Chapuis; Huyssen;

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Krauss; Rothberg, “Progress”; Tone). That is to say, as a research after the ex officio, always mediated entree to the (experience of the) historical event (Krauss 27). 16 See also Ernst van Alphen, who adapted this image for narrative texts. 17 Web. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd2q9XkVt3c. September 21, 2017.

WORKS CITED Alphen, Ernst. Caught by History. Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature and Theory. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Schocken Books, 1951. Bal, Mieke. Traveling Concepts in the Humanities. A Rough Guide. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2002. Baranowski, Shelley. “Against ‘Human Diversity as Such:’ Lebensraum and Genocide in the Third Reich.” In German Colonialism: Race, the Holocaust, and Postwar Germany. Eds. Volker Langbehn and Mohammad Salama. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. 51–72. Benjamin, Walter. Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels. Vol. 1 of Gesammelte Schriften. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972. 205–430. Black Box/Chambre Noire. Berlin: Guggenheim Museum, 2005. Installation by William Kentridge. Breidbach, Angela. William Kentridge. Thinking Aloud. Gesprä che mit Angela Breidbach. Kö ln: Walther Kö nigs Verlag der Buchhandlung, 2005. Buikema, Rosemarie. “The Revolt of the Object: Animated Drawings and the Colonial Archive: William Kintridge’s Black Box Theatre.” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Critique 18.2 (2016): 251–69. Buikema, Rosemarie. Revoltes in de Cultuurkritiek. Amsterdame: Amsterdam University Press, 2017. Cé saire, Aimé . Discours sor le colonialism. Paris: É ditions Pré sence Africaine, 1955. Chambers, Iain, Alessandra De Angelis, Celeste Ianniciello, and Mariangela Oraboris, eds. The Postcolonial Museum: The Arts of Memory and the Pressures of History. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. Chapuis, Nathalie, ed. William Kentridge: The Refusal of Time. Paris: Editions Xavier Barral, 2012. Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn, ed. William Kentridge. London: Phaidon, 2004. Claus, Sybilla. “Vergeten Duitse gruwelen.” Trouw: n.p. (August 30, 2003). Web. www. trouw.nl/tr/nl/4324/Nieuws/archief/article/detail/1772329/2003/08/30/VergetenDuitse-gruwelen.dhtml. March 18, 2014. Conrad, Sebastian. German Colonialism: A Short History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

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Coumans, Sandra T. J. Geschichte und Identitä t: “Black Box/Chambre noire” von William Kentridge. Berlin: Regiospectra Verlag, 2011. Deleuze, Gilles. Le pli: Leibniz et le baroque. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1988. Friedman, Susan Stanford. Planetary Modernism: Provocations on Modernity Across Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Gewald, Jan-Bart. Herero Heroes: A Socio-Political History of the Herero of Namibia, 1890–1923. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999. Godby, Michael. “Memory and History in William Kentridge’s History of the Main Complaint.” In Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa. Eds. Sarah Nuttall and Carli Coetzee. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, 100–12. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. 1987. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Huyssen, Andreas. William Kentridge/Nalini Malani: The Shadow Play as Medium of Memory. New York: Charta, 2013. Kentridge, William. “Black Box zwischen Objektiv und Okular.” In William Kentridge: Black Box/Chambre Noire. Ed. Maria-Christina Villaseñ or. Berlin: Guggenheim Museum, 2005, 43–77. Kentridge, William. Black Box. 2005. Web. www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6COnGRIFsw. March 18, 2014. Kentridge, William, and Rosalind C. Morris. That Which Is Not Drawn: Conversations. London: Seagull Books, 2014. Krauss, Rosalind. “‘The Rock’: William Kentridge’s Drawings for Projection.” October 92 (2000): 3–35. Kristeva, Julia. L’avenir d’une ré volte. Paris: Calman-Levy, 1998. Kristeva, Julia. Revolte, She Said. New York: Semiotext(e), 2002. Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. 1974. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Kundrus, Birthe. “German Colonialism: Some Reflections on Reassessments, Specificities, and Constellations.” In German Colonialism: Race, the Holocaust, and Postwar Germany. Eds. Volker Langbehn and Mohammad Salama. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011, 29–49. Langbehn, Volker, and Mohammad Salama, eds. German Colonialism: Race, the Holocaust, and Postwar Germany. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Moses, A. Dirk. “Hannah Arendt, Imperialisms, and the Holocaust.” In German Colonialism: Race, the Holocaust, and Postwar Germany. Eds. Volker Langbehn and Mohammad Salama. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011, 72–93. Moshenberg, Dan. “Namibia: Herero Women Challenge German Amnesia.” The Guardian (2012). Web. www.theguardian.com/world/2012/oct/23/namibia-hererogerman-land. March 18, 2014. Olusoga, David, and Casper W. Erichsen. The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism. London: Faber & Faber, 2010.

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Rosenthal, Mark, ed. William Kentridge: Five Themes. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. Rothberg, Michael. “Progress, Progression, Procession: William Kentridge and the Narratology of Transitional Justice.” Narrative 20.1 (2012): 1–24. Schoonenboom, Merlijn. “Eerst genocide, dan wetenschap.” De Volkskrant: n.p. 2012. Web. www.volkskrant.nl/vk/nl/2844/Archief/archief/article/ detail/2958314/2011/10/08/Eerst-genocide-dan-wetenschap.dhtml. March 18, 2014. Skartveit, Hanne-Lovise, and Katherine Goodnow, eds. Changes in Museum Practice: New Media, Refugees and Participation. New York and Oxford: Berghan Books, 2010. Tone, Lilian, ed. William Kentridge: Fortuna. London: Thames and Hudson, 2013. Vensky, Hellmuth. “Aus Deutsch-Sü dwestafrika wird Namibia.” Die Zeit. (2010). Web. www.zeit.de/wissen/geschichte/2010-03/namibia-unabhaengigkeit. March 18, 2014. Wegmann, Heiko. “Schä del im Schrank.” Die Zeit (2011). Web. www.zeit.de/2011/42/ Schaedelsammlungen. March 18, 2014. Whitaker, Benjamin. UN Report on Genocide. (July 2, 1985). Web. www. preventgenocide.org/prevent/UNdocs/whitaker/. September 16, 2014. Wietersheim, Erika von. “Versö hnung nach hundert Jahren. Herero und Deutsche gehen die Last der Vergangenheit an.” Neue Zü rcher Zeitung: n.p. 2004. Web. www. nzz.ch/aktuell/startseite/articleA07H3-1.344382. March 18, 2014. Ziel, Arjen van der. “Duitsland worstelt met Namibië -verleden.” Trouw: n.p. 2004. Web. www.trouw.nl/tr/nl/4324/Nieuws/archief/article/detail/1740425/2004/11/26/ Duitsland-worstelt-met-Namibie-verleden.dhtml. March 18, 2014.

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The Revolutions of Antjie Krog’s Lady Anne: A Chronicle in Verse Rita Barnard

In the 1989 poem “Die Transparant van die Tongvis” or “The Transparency of the Sole,” Antjie Krog lovingly describes her four sleeping children as a little school of fish, lying on their sides, “finely balanced between anal and dorsal / tiny fins at the throat uncommonly soft” (93).1 But the poem is no comforting lullaby. The poet imagines the sleepers as undergoing a painful metamorphosis to which she gently, but irrevocably commits them: dear child of the lean flank yield to the seabed yes the stretching makes you ache . . . the eye beneath . . . migrates cautiously with a complex bunching of nerve and muscle till it’s up beside the other pert little mouth almost pulled out of shape with time the tongue will settle in its groove pigment of the upper flank begin to darken . . . I press my mouth against each distended face mother knows you will survive the tide (87)

These lines can be read as the culmination to Krog’s Lady Anne, one of the most powerful and risky texts to come out of the low-grade revolutionary war in South

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Africa during the late 1980s and recently published in an English translation as Lady Anne: A Chronicle in Verse.2 The poem lyrically distills some of the volume’s central preoccupations and tropes. It evokes, most notably, the profound changes to which white South Africans, especially the younger generation, will have to submit in order to navigate their turbulent times. This theme is present throughout the volume—in fact, it comes up on the very first page, a prefatory collage of the poet’s reading notes on literature and politics. The last note on the page is from the dissident Dutch Reformed minister Nico Smith who, in the late 1980s, took up residence in Soweto to be close to his black congregation: “As my kinders nie kan leer om wit Afrikane te word nie, vernietig ek hulle toekoms. . . . Ek dink hierdie land het ’n revolusie nodig om hom weer gesond te maak” (2). Smith’s words are left untranslated in the English edition, to serve as a marker— and not the only one—of the ways in which international readers will have to extend themselves to absorb the full meaning of this challenging volume.3 But I will translate for us: “If my children don’t learn to become white Africans, I am destroying their future. . . . I think this country needs a revolution to heal itself.” This imperative to change is equally compulsory in Krog’s poem, even though it is rendered more tenderly: for her children’s sake she chooses to retain the evolution in revolution. She thereby invites us to ponder whether revolution could accrue new meanings in our times, other than the sudden and violent seizure of the state by a mass revolt. We might, as a start, bring to mind here Antonio Negri’s remark that emancipation cannot be attained “without first revolutionizing subjectivity.”4 Such a process would require precisely the painful, slow, ethical, and bodily mutation of the self recorded in Krog’s writing over the years. Nor can revolution occur without the transformation of language. Indeed, revolution is for Krog a translational project: “the moment you translate,” she has said, “you start transforming self and others.”5 The metaphor of the fish is crucial here—so crucial that it appears throughout the work as a paratextual detail: a little drawing on the title page of each of the five sections of the volume. In the original Afrikaans edition of Lady Anne, the drawing is even accompanied by its scientific classification, Hippoglossis hippoglossis: the Atlantic halibut. For Krog the intriguing connotations of the Greek etymology (hippos [horse] and glossa [tongue])—partly retained in the Afrikaans tongvis (tongue fish)—are at least as important as the term’s scientific denotation.6 Her poem therefore responds not only to the fish’s tongue-like shape, but also to some of its stranger biological properties. A bottom feeder, the halibut mutates as it matures; its

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eyes migrate gradually to the surface-facing flank, the skin of which gradually darkens to a greenish black. All of these associations make the “tongue fish” a fitting figure in this poem for her sleeping children and an emblem for her entire oeuvre. Wherever it appears, whether in the text or paratext of Lady Anne, or on the cover of Krog’s 2003 memoir A Change of Tongue, it gestures toward the task—poetic as well as political—to which the Afrikaans writer and translator, responsive to her times, must commit herself. A more riddling metaphor is the “transparent” or “transparency” alluded to in the poem’s title.7 A transparency is, of course, a film or plate that can be overlaid on other textual materials without obscuring them and also permitting them, with back lighting, to be projected onto a screen for an audience’s attention. It is a metaphor fraught with methodological implications. Far from implying an absence of linguistic mediation, the idea of the transparency suggests certain strategies of reading that bring to mind Walter Benjamin’s meditations on that visionary temporality he terms “dialectics at a standstill.”8 With this metaphor, Krog invites her reader’s interpretive eye to look through the various historical moments, texts, and counter-texts that make up her fractured chronicle in verse. This is to say that, despite its skeletally narrative structure, the volume’s semantically richest moments are not to be thought of as sequential, leading up to a single climax.9 Rather, they make visible a “constellation” (Benjamin’s term again), elicited by their sudden relevance or recognizability at a given moment. The transparency, moreover, differs from the related metaphor of the palimpsest, in that it may involve a layering, not only of scripted, but also of auditory materials. In other words, Krog generates constellations not only out of things read and seen, but also out of things heard: sonorities performed and restaged, words uttered and reechoed. Most importantly, as Benjamin also made clear with regard to his “dialectical images,” the poetic transparency does not simply mean that the past comes to illuminate the present or the present the past; it brings to light interrelated nodes (rather than back-and-forth lines) of transformative force.10 Whatever the constitutive materials, the transparency enables a particular way of looking—or listening—that may suddenly release transformative insights: a redemption of forgotten potentialities, antithetical to any teleological narrative of revolutionary progress. It is possible, to be sure, that the metaphor of the tonguefish and the metaphor of the transparency imply different temporalities and different conceptions of change (the poet herself admits in the poem that she “treads clay” with her metaphors).11 But I start with these lines as a preamble to a reading that aims to discover in the layered acts of translation that constitute this volume,

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certain illuminating configurations—call them prophecies—that might help us understand and perhaps transmute our disappointing present.

THE LADY AND THE BARD: ON TEXTS, TIMES, AND TRANSGRESSIONS One aim of this chapter is to show that it is in the transhistorical, transnational, and metatextual aspects of Lady Anne that we may discover its contemporary significance. In order to launch this argument, I must first describe the work more fully. I would note, first of all, that it engages three distinct historical moments. One is, of course, the moment of our reading; the others are the two (proto- and post-) revolutionary periods that the volume specifically evokes: 1789–1802 and 1985–89. The latter period—and I will turn eventually to the others—marks the time of writing. Lady Anne was mostly composed in Free State town of Kroonstad during the two states of emergency imposed by the apartheid government, when both information and personal mobility were constricted. Krog could not enter the township where she was teaching without a permit and, even though white middleclass life could, to some degree, continue as before, the struggle and its brutal repression was palpable every day in military cordons, arrests, and anxious rumors. This was also a time when the culture of resistance adopted what Louise Bethlehem has termed the “rhetoric of urgency.” Artists’ commitment to the struggle (which was then conducted through the intensely local and place-bound strategy of making black townships no-go zones for the regime) was to be demonstrated in linguistic immediacy, a focus on the here and now, and a dedication to reportorial rather than aesthetic concerns. This rhetoric is deftly captured in the poem entitled “parole”: the order comes: words should be AK47s should always fight  poetry should be useable deed  related the struggle  take sides weeds are mightier than roses (30)

Instead of abiding by these diktats (though always registering their power), Krog opts for a daring stratagem of indirection: casting herself as the self-appointed “bard” to a white female epic hero of long ago. More precisely, she takes the gamble of using the persona of Lady Anne Barnard, a Scottish aristocrat and prolific writer who resided at the Cape of Good Hope from 1797 until 1802, as a distancing device in a process of self-discovery through self-alienation. This is to say that Lady Anne is fundamentally an act of translation: an imaginative and free

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rendering of passages from Anne Barnard’s letters, diaries, and travel journals into poetry.12 The result is a dialectic of estrangement and transformation. Krog transmutes the authoritative, foreign female voice by making it reecho in a new tongue, at the same time as she stretches the Afrikaans language and poetic canon through the inclusion of unfamiliar subjects, sonorities, and political perspectives. As I observed earlier, the volume as a whole, though far from univocal or coherent, does adhere to a fractured narrative line, which leads from Lady Anne Barnard’s journey to the Cape, her first impressions there, her journey to the interior, and her eventual return to London to the death of her husband near Stellenbosch and the composition of his epitaph. This narrative line is interrupted by the more personal story of the poet’s initial writer’s block, her discovery and invocation of her subject/muse, and her troubling experiences as wife, mother, and political dissident in Kroonstad in a time of political turmoil. But the whole of the volume is stranger than this initial outline of its crisscrossed narrative arc and dialogic strategies would suggest. It also includes a series of equivocating poetic manifestos, sundry interpolated documents (such as an election poster and a menstruation chart), and, of course, the scrapbook-like collages that I referred to earlier. A quotation from the second of these collage pages reveals the rationale for the work’s experimental structure and implicit instructions to the reader: “To locate a text without careful attention to the interplay .  .  . between textual procedure and proposition, is to ignore the constructedness of its concepts, its exercise of power, its complicity with the oppressor; it is . . . in short a failure to transgress” (2). In Lady Anne, Krog strives to avoid this complicity. Her deliberate transgressions are registered in three aspects of the text. It presents itself, first of all, not as a finished project but as a process, by offering a confessional account of its own making—of the poet’s search for a transformed grammar, vocabulary, and even a “new alphabet” (86). It is, secondly, a work of historical revisionism and feminist anger. This quality is pervasive, but is perhaps most succinctly captured in the sardonic title of the poem “Lady Anne Barnard: remembered for her parties in my history book.” And it is, finally, resolutely global—at a time when the national liberation struggle seemed to take up all imaginative space. The poems in Lady Anne encompass journeys southward and northward, and they meditate not only on the seething revolt in South Africa, but on Caribbean slave rebellions, as well as the Haitian and the French revolutions.

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To fully grasp these historic ramifications, we should bear in mind that, while the historical Lady Anne Barnard’s time at the Cape was in many ways idyllic and provincial, her social activities—those “parties” she threw—were far from trivial, given the international political context in which she operated. Her years at the Cape were the years of the French revolutionary wars. After the French invasion of the Netherlands, Great Britain launched an operation to take over Dutch colonies across the globe, to defend against the possible depredations by the French navy. Lady Anne Barnard saw it as her mission to assist the new British governor, Lord George Macartney, and her husband, Andrew, the freshly appointed colonial secretary, to reconcile the restive Dutch settlers of the Cape to the new British rule. Her efforts were remarkable: very few women of her day, let alone an extremely well-connected socialite—a friend of the Prince of Wales and romantically entangled with two of the most important gentleman of the day, Henry Dundas and William Windham—would have been inclined to follow their husband to a remote outpost, climb Table Mountain, venture 200 miles into the interior, sleep at the homes of Dutch colonists, and attend a church service at a remote mission station along with Hottentot congregants.13 But then, few women would have gone to France at the height of the revolution, as Lady Anne did, to try to force a lover (the brilliant, but elusive Windham) to propose to her. Krog’s interest in Lady Anne Barnard is, therefore, not at all strange from our retrospective vantage—she is a fascinating figure—but it arose at a time when such transnational and historicist gestures were considered irrelevant to the pressing political situation in South Africa. The justification for Krog’s poetic wager, however, is made clear in the text itself, and it is far from apolitical: I wanted to live a second life through you Lady Anne Barnard—show it is possible to hone truth with the pen to live an honourable life within so much privilege weave a language of revolution and conspiracies liberate slaves     clinically plunder royalty and with your expedition through the interior cleave the boers to the bone. (34)

For all their distance, then, the lady and her bard are yoked in several ways (“Antjie” is, after all, the diminutive of “Anna”): as women, writers, and also questers, yearning to find a way to be accepted by Africa despite the privileges colonial domination has accorded them.

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Yet, as the work evolves, Krog comes to see them both as failures. Midway through the volume, she declares that Lady Anne isn’t “worth a fuck” as metaphor and that her writings ultimately reveal her as frivolous and trivial (34)—a reminder of the poet’s presence in the text not just as bard, but as researcher and reader.14 Krog even renumbers the sections of the work, so that the middle section, in which Lady Anne returns with relief to the Castle in Cape Town after her venture into the interior, is numbered V, even though it should, chronologically speaking, be III. Krog thus marks narrative’s outcome and culmination as a cowardly retreat. And a sense of failure arises again, even more poignantly, when at the end of the preface to the English translation, Krog, with twenty-six years’ retrospect, asserts not only her subject’s shortcomings, but also her own: “Both the Lady and her Bard have lived their lives without honour— failing the demands of their time” (ix). Now, the rhetoric of failure is familiar to students of modernism (we might think, for instance, of Faulker’s description of The Sound and the Fury as a “splendid failure”).15 And formal failure is, in a sense, courted by the operations of the text itself, with its disjunct materials, its insistence on questioning and exposing its own processes, its aesthetic unevenness, and its risky range of rhetorics, from the arcane to the crude. But the failure Krog registers is not so much a formal as an ethico-political one. Throughout the text she registers her inability to speak about or for the oppressed; indeed, toward the end of the chronicle, she confesses that the very device of bringing Lady Anne to life as alter ego and interlocutor is only a compensatory strategy: “I want to write to you my brother” (surely a black compatriot), “but you are further away than a woman in the previous century” (86). It is as a kind of vengeance, then, that in the final poem, the bard appears to strangle her all too obtuse and privileged, all too European heroine: . . . the most important part of this bankrupt poem is its farewell to you (hear the gong at the gallows) and your kind and your kind’s language from now on you will have to dither elsewhere. under my thumb lies the delicate syntax of your throat. (104)

But, as I will suggest when I return to the figure of the gallows at the end of this chapter, failed literary experiments, failed efforts at egalitarian engagement, failed revolts and transgressions, may have a belated efficacy. As Jennifer Wenzel has argued in her meditations on failed anticolonial prophecy in South Africa, utopian

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dreams never go entirely underground: they survive and continue to resonate, often in the afterlives of their successive translations and reinterpretations.16

REVOLUTIONARY TRANSPARENCIES: ON HAVING AND BEING Few critics have yet commented in any detail on the remarkable set of poems about the French Revolution included in Lady Anne. Lady Anne Lindsay (as she then was) visited Paris shortly before the revolution: she went to Versailles, visited the Bastille, and observed the grotesque inequalities of French society. And, as I have already noted, she returned to Paris at the height of the terror, in pursuit of William Windham, the evasive but brilliant man with whom she was at that time desperately enamored. In Lady Anne, Krog not only elaborates imaginatively on the written accounts of these visits, but restages them to mirror her own situation. If the bard’s experiences of the liberation struggle in Kroonstad are mediated, often uncomfortably, by her somewhat resented role as wife and mother, so, too, are the imagined Lady Anne’s perceptions of the revolution mediated by her pressing private concerns as a woman: dare I while the revolution is the only valid word while refugees dance in dresses flecked with blood (a red ribbon indicates family members beheaded, 4000 already hacked to death) dare I, already a pampered glutton, sit so utterly famished for love (62)

But despite this failure to react with full ethical responsiveness to the unprecedented and violent situation (and what might that have entailed?), the Parisian poems in Lady Anne include stunning moments of witness and insight. For instance, among the list of “wordless episodes” recalled in the poem “1798, Windham’s Paris” is the view of “neighbourhood after neighbourhood / slums, shacks, furrows of distress / ploughed up from the snow,” which, apart from the climate, might also describe Kroonstad or Soweto (59). The overarching conceit here is that Windham is attempting to school Anne in the meaning of revolution: “The firewood lies ready for a revolution Anne, which will not simply change the rider on the horse But revolution that will renew everything: will bring a new awareness between man and his fellow man” (60)

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The lines are irreducibly radical. And in the poem marked “1793,” Krog stages Windham’s uncompromising response to Anne’s horrified remark that only barbarians would engage in such bloodshed: “this is the amount of blood necessary to compel people  /  to see each other instead of each other’s possessions” (61). In lines like these, the “something” that Windham is trying to “lay down” (59) in Anne is, of course, also laid down in Krog’s poetic chronicle, in which the radical reimagining of social relations—as well as blood—is a sustained motif.17 The theme is again initiated by the collage of reading notes on the very first page of Lady Anne. A quotation (from the 1986 study Contending Ideologies in South Africa) declares: “the oppressor can only learn to love through a commitment to the fundamental change of those structures that keep the poor and oppressed deprived and powerless” (2). This exhortation clearly accrues a further poetic layer (think here of the transparency) in Windham’s observations on the French Revolution. Yet another layer is added, it seems to me, in a series of poems that examine the deep structures of privilege and ownership. A striking example is “to have or to be,” which parses both verbs, meditating not only on their semantic aspects, but also on their grammatical functions. The poem begins by listing the former, but rapidly moves to more fundamental transformations: 1. - be in possession of - keep available - more or less always accessible - be part of - enjoy the advantages of - contain - carry within you - keep at your disposal - gather interest The habit of having and holding on it never changes its appearance though it looks like us even the moment it is used as an auxiliary verb

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2. the child whose parents have both died can exist as copulative verb actualized (28)

Informing this strange poem is surely the discussion in Marx of how, in capitalist society, being and having are opposed: the more you have, the more impoverished you are in your being.18 The poem suggests that the structures of privilege are evident even in the most basic linguistic forms, such as the “have” of the auxiliary verb. This is a structure also operative in Afrikaans, where it shapes not only the perfective, but also the basic past tense (as in ek het geë et, ons het gesien / “I ate, we saw”). Privilege, in other words, is a grammar. This idea spills over into the following poem, “gnome,” which reveals how the struggle seeps into small family disputes, giving new meanings to familiar rituals and objects. A preference for “white coffee,” for example, comes to seem like choosing a side, and even a banal word like “microwave” can accrue “a political gloss” (29). But for all this, the poem shows the “having” of the family to remain incontestable. It concludes with the line: “our language’s glossary / lies chiefly in the genitive,” in other words, in the declension that signals possession. It is worth remembering here that the Afrikaans word for surname is van, which is also the pronoun that forms the genitive, and that the most typical Afrikaans surnames, like Van Niekerk, Van Wyk, Van Reenen, Van Breda,” deploy that selfsame word to indicate places of origin or belonging. In other words, whatever new “political gloss” may be given to old disputes and habits, the fundamental structures—those pertaining to language, family, and the sex-gender system—are not so readily dislodged. By contrast, the orphaned child imagined in the second part of “to have or be” has nothing. (And we should note that these lines extend a reference in the preceding poem to military incursions by South African security forces to take out militants in the frontline states.) Grammatically reduced to the merest copula, he or she simply is. Such is the grammar of oppression and deprivation. The task then, clearly, is to reimagine and relearn a lexicon and a grammar of freedom and equality: the ongoing work gestured at in the volume’s manifesto poems, like “parole,” “new alphabet,” and “a poem about guilt.” I lack the space to unpack these poems fully (“parole” is especially interesting in the way it stages a covert debate between the conservative South African poet Stephen Watson and the radical American Carolyn Forché ). However, it seems to me that Krog’s

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politically committed poetics can also be explored, in ways that are responsive to the central ideas of translation and transparency, in two poems located in the eighteenth century: “Genadendal, 10th May 1798” and “Castle of Good Hope— 14th December 1799.” Both of these poems stage moments fraught with revolutionary potentiality. The former is a poetic elaboration on an incident from Lady Anne Barnard’s travel journal, where she attends a sermon at the Moravian mission church in Genadendal. Here the pious pastor addresses his Hottentot congregants simply as “myne lieve vriende.” (The Dutch words my dear friends remain untranslated in both the original journal and the English translation of Krog’s poem.) In its quiet way, the phrase is a perfect expression of the radical egalitarian vision that animated the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man (a document that still feels quite radical reread in the age of Trump). Face to face with the congregants, who are “clothed somewhat / in skin” (in other words, not yet entered fully into a world of having rather than being), the poem’s Lady Anne has a vision anachronistically akin to that of liberation theology: . . . Before Him we are all naked, but I see, as always, He sides with them: the hungry, the poor, the crowds without hope the silent stubble, those without rights. He becomes human in this rough building and turns to look at me. (49)

She recognizes the demand this “look” makes on her, asking the perpetual question, reminiscent of Tolstoy and Lenin, “What is it that I must do? How do I get rid / of this exclusive white stain?” (49). This is a moment, of course, where Lady Anne ventriloquizes the bard’s own, deeply felt predicament. Indeed, in an earlier poem, the one directly preceding the poem on “having and being,” the poet, too, feels overcome amid a Sotho congregation in Kroonstad by the potential of equality before God: “black is indeed a colour passionately bleeding us into one” (27). The presence of the divine is conjured by the choral singing: “bass voices carry God, does He hear us?” At first the poet reacts with feel-good reformist piety, reflecting “that we all just want to be human I with less / they with more.” But she ends up utterly overwhelmed by the sound of “the swelling of a mighty / grief,” a force that cancels out whatever “white retort” she might have to offer (27). The parallel with Lady Anne’s Genadendal vision is evident. In that case, too, the Hottentots’ hymn unexpectedly “swells into garish passionate grief / allpowerful in pain (For the past or what is still to come?)” (49). And the Lady’s

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response is constrained and inadequate, both ethico-politically—she thinks of the proverbial eye of a needle through which the rich man must pass to get to the kingdom of heaven—and, eventually, artistically. The next day, as recorded in the second section of the poem, Lady Anne attempts to paint the landscape around Genadendal: the rugged mountain landscape of the Cape Folded Belt, which the historical Anne Barnard admired and frequently drew and painted. Trying to find an advantageous perspective, she discovers that her sketchbook’s “pages forever  /  spell ‘window’”: the aesthetic with which they seem to be imbued is protected, distanced, European. And while she recognizes that she could “pick up a stone . . . and shatter the glass”—in other words, truly yield herself to a landscape of “wild abundance and abuse”— it is as if her hand is stayed. The possibility of direct, exposed encounter is eschewed; Lady Anne remains, the poem tells us, “Madame” (the mode of address brings to mind the names of the French aristocrats referred to in the Paris poems), who “wants to live here: observing the country / safely through glass—wrapping in pretty pictures and rhymes” (51). And with the word rhymes, the distinction between heroine and bard, between Anne and Antjie, again fades out: they are both silenced and disarmed, despite their insight and fellow feeling, by the intractable, unanswerable suffering of the oppressed. The second poem in which the bard stages Lady Anne’s response to suffering others is “Castle of Good Hope—14th December 1799.” One of the most powerful poems in the volume, it is fascinating from a historical point of view, in that it shows the complicity of the Cape during the British occupation in the African slave trade. In terms of the feelings staged in it, it elaborates as freely as the Genadendal poem on the record of the journals and letters.19 The poem narrates how Lady Anne’s attention is drawn to a ship in the harbor, from which an appalling smell is drifting in. And as was the case with her experience of the violence of the French Revolution, her sensory and ethical reaction is informed by a man’s explanation. Here, her husband, Andrew Barnard, answers her question “But why does it smell so?” in some very compelling and gruesome lines:           “Annie, in the ship,” my stolid husband, “they are lying row upon row packed, shackled, to form filthy strings, shelf upon shelf. The doctor does not dare go down because of diarrhoea, heat, stench; the deck slippery from mucus and blood.” (74)

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The evocation of the pitiful human cargo is intensified further in the poem, not only by the vision of shark fins circling where the bodies are thrown overboard every morning, but also by yet another sound of suffering: “A kind of howl, sobbing / from the abdomen of that pleading cargo of misery” (75). Again Lady Anne is depicted by the bard not as unfeeling, but as inadequate in her response. Indeed, a later poem has her wondering if she shouldn’t perhaps buy “a Wedgewood cameo necklace: am I not human and brother?” (78). The reference here is to Josiah Wedgewood, an abolitionist, who produced a porcelain cameo with that question as its motto: perhaps the world’s first item of radical consumerist chic. Clearly, such a purchase is not a response that will alter the grammar of having and being; but this reference does make us see through— such is the methodology of the transparency—to the contemporary Band-Aid of consumerist charity. Nor does Lady Anne’s visual response of looking at the ship through a telescope foster ethical engagement: it is, rather, a distancing device, much like the perspectival window adopted in “Genadendal, 10th May 1798” to render the radical demands of the mission congregation safe and manageable. This resort to the abstraction of the visual, however, is canceled out by the sound of grief and suffering, which here, too, like in the two poems discussed earlier, is utterly gripping. The bard, however, goes on to suggest that events and sensory encounters need not exhaust their ethical or aesthetic or political power in one moment. “Castle of Good Hope—14th December 1799” concludes with the following remarkable lines (and the scholarly reader will immediately pick up the canonical allusion): After I had seen that for many days my brain rushed forth with a dim undetermined sense of unknown modes of suffering. In my thoughts was a darkness, call it solitude, a blank desertion, no familiar shapes of trees, of sea or sky, no colors of green fields “But huge and mighty Forms that do not live Like living men mov’d slowly through my mind By day and were the trouble of my dreams” —haunt me haunt me like a fever (75)

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What the bard performs here is a translation and a rewriting: literally she translates Wordsworth into Afrikaans (in the original Lady Anne) and, more metaphorically, she recasts and repoliticizes Wordsworth’s aesthetic. The famous passage from Book I of The Prelude does indeed have an ethical and pedagogical charge (a looming cliff, you will recall, seems to admonish the boy to return the skiff that he has stolen); but it is part of one man’s moral education. Such “spots in time” (as Wordsworth famously calls them in Book VII) yield memories of “renovating virtue,” recollected and relived in the wake of the original experience, which thereby become part of the poet’s formation as an individual.20 Here, however, the “Forms that do not live / Like living men” are not crags and lakes, but they are, in fact, men: men reduced to mere possessions. It is the horror of the slave trade rather than the austere landscape of the Lake District that comes to haunt Lady Anne, as well as her twentieth-century bard and her twenty-firstcentury readers. Now: it is important that we see these lines as operating quite differently from the usual modernist literary allusions—like those of T. S. Eliot, say, which invoke and resonate in the house of the English poetic tradition. This translation, on the contrary, is intended to stretch and, indeed, revolutionize Afrikaans, by bringing into the language new semantic registers, new sounds and rhythms of great dignity. Wordsworth’s grand nouns (“solitude,” “desertion”) retain their passionate gravitas in the slow—and somehow very Southern African— words verlatenheid (desolation) and leegheid (emptiness), and the blank verse is transmuted into emphatic alliteration and rhyme: “magtige vorms wat mensloos lewe / roteer deur my brein bedags / dring deur my mure snags” (79). The last phrase, “invades my walls at night,” even adds a metaphorical intensity lacking in Wordsworth’s spare abstractions. The translation permits The Prelude—to recall again the method of transparency—to shine through, defamiliarized, reconstellated. It intensifies and radicalizes the Wordsworthian aesthetic and challenges us to consider what it might mean for a moral education if the influential “Forms that do not live / like living men” are human, like us.

UNEXPECTED FORMS: ON KNOWING, WAITING, AND LEARNING TO LISTEN My meditation on the revolutionary resonance of several poems with eighteenthcentury date lines has already given some sense of the second revolutionary

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moment that Lady Anne illuminates: the final years of the anti-apartheid struggle. I should perhaps state explicitly that, yes, democratic South Africa arose from a negotiated settlement, not civil war and armed struggle, and that the transfer of state power did not abrogate structures of inequality. The Mandela reconciliation, miraculous though it was, left the fundamental grammar of having and being largely intact. In this sense the revolution didn’t happen—the promises of freedom, equality, and fraternity were denied by entrenched material interests, ingrained racism, and gross corruption. Nevertheless, the characteristic structure of feeling of the late 1980s was proto-revolutionary, and it is captured poignantly in several of the poems that focus on the bard’s experience at the time of writing. The sardonic poem “Lady Anne at the microwave oven,” about the frivolous lives of bourgeois Afrikaans women and their soccer-mom-like routines, ends with an ominous (if, in the end, not wholly accurate) prophecy: we know that we are the last the last whose children are being tenderly blonded on milk and honey this is the end behind us under us around us with the soft sound of ash structures that keep our kind in place are crushing themselves to bits (67)

And if the blood running in the streets of Paris during the French Revolution is not visible in Kroonstad, the women’s efficient cutting up of beef for a Dutch Reformed church bazaar, described in rather ghoulish detail (66), becomes something of an equivalent. This knowledge of the revolutionary emergent arises despite the repression of news: if gossip surrounds Lady Anne Barnard, political rumor and an anxious decoding of signs is pervasive in her bard’s world.21 In the poem “first Christmas weekend under the second state of emergency 1988,” the affective temporal structure of waiting (much discussed in South African literary and cultural studies) is captured as follows: we murmur on the verandah at dusk it’s as if ears stir in the ivy strung in blood around the house and fences unexpected forms wait in the shade we hesitate opened letters fall into the house someone runs up the street

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we wait the garden rustles in mists of suspicion we speak more softly so many children in prison so many arrests the trains moan restlessly is it true so many thousands of children? rumours crawl from the foundations like rats. (26)22

If the Christmas decorations are rendered sinister, “strung in blood,” the entire celebration of birth and the newborn divinity is mocked by the detentions and imprisonment of young activists. As the poet’s own children gather to sing a hymn, rumor is replaced by belief and knowledge: “Al was ons nie daar nie/Ons weet dit is waar” (We were not there / But we still know it’s true).23 The effect is both of antithesis and similarity: the seasonal reverence of the Christ child stands in contrast with the present violation of South Africa’s children; yet both the unbelievable rumors about the political situation and the miraculous story of the incarnation are, at the poem’s conclusion, taken as known—as true. If we look at this poem as another node or layer in the volume’s textual transparency, the “unexpected forms” that “wait in the shade” are given a kind of historical weight. They bring to mind—at least in the constellation I am creating in this essay—“Forms that do not live / like living men”: vague, disturbing forms of otherness that once came to haunt the lady and now also haunts her bard. In a revealing interview, Krog has gestured toward the parallel between herself and her poetic subject, but also noted a difference: “While Lady Anne never transgressed the political status quo, I said Okay, but for a South Africa to survive here in the 1980s, you have to transgress” (Dimitriu 274). The nature of her transgression, as we have seen, is a linguistic and poetic one, and could perhaps be specified further by comparing the contemporary poems from Lady Anne, including what I have called the manifesto poems, with those collected in Jeremy Cronin’s Inside. Cronin’s volume, after all, also imagines a venture into the interior and reveals a profound interest in sound (speech sounds, however, more than song). He also, most importantly, shares Krog’s understanding that, as he puts it, “liberation will be a major linguistic event” (“No” 8). In Cronin, however, the emphasis is on oral performance and, as the most famous poem of the collection would insist, on learning “how to speak / With the voices of

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this land.” This is how he imagines the task of opening up the English language democratically to different accents and new sounds—the task of turning English into “South African” (Inside 64; “No”). Saddled with her Afrikaans guilt (which Cronin, as a committed revolutionary and political prisoner, is spared), Krog opts for an even more humble pedagogical exercise. It is described as follows in “a poem about guilt,” the last of the volume’s manifesto poems: But the tongue will have to lie differently free the most wordsome word through lines that want to wingflap towards each other and in new ways show the poem how word becomes truth in this landscape for the sake of the word along the new poem will have no end bard who learns to listen (94)

These are the linguistic evolutions required for survival, for the poem without an end, beyond the time of anxious waiting. The closing lines from “a poem about guilt” return us to the beginning of this chapter, where I already broached, in response to the trope of the “tongue fish,” the revolutionary imperative of those intra-linguistic translations and transformations that Krog believes Afrikaans (and Afrikaners) must undergo. But, given that the revolution anticipated in the Kroonstad poems did not happen and that the evolution of a new, liberatory language has therefore stalled, I would like to end this section of my chapter with reflections on a fittingly valedictory poem that permits us to draw the curious historical method of the transparency into focus once more. I am thinking of the poem entitled “January 1802, Journal,” which describes Lady Anne’s emotional departure from the Cape. I quote at some length: Our Dutch friends wait on the beach visibly upset As if they expect a disaster. Fare thee well, I mutter to the mountain: May God protect this country from grief, never let it be maimed by what freedom and power demand. We row away in the small boat. On the ship I lean over the rails, as under the salute everything Draws away from me: becomes smaller: the marrow of slavery, tyranny, ignorance, seagulls hanging in suspense: a continent as undiscovered fountain of affirmation, its contours flowing with affectionate consent. (84)

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Vivid and precise in their restaging of a particular moment, these lines also permit us to look through them to other moments with which they resonate: to the years of continued oppression under apartheid, the anxious prerevolutionary waiting of the 1980s, and to the unfulfilled dream of democratic “consent,” affirmation, and fraternity. Lady Anne’s valedictory greeting to Table Mountain (“may God protect this country from grief, never let  /  it be maimed by what freedom and power demand”) is taken from her actual journal and strikes me as particularly intriguing in its transhistorical and translinguistic travels. In the 1989 edition, Krog, of course, translates these powerful words into Afrikaans (“mag God hierdie land bewaar van verdiet, dit nooit / laat skend deur dí t wat vryheid en mag van mense verg”); the recent English edition reverts to the original declaration verbatim, except for the line divisions. It is a moving, but, if one ponders it, rather strange message: why, we might ask, should the country be maimed by freedom? Clearly, Krog herself found it arresting as well. In the Afrikaans original a reading note is, as it were, pasted onto the page in a little asterisked text box, like those that frame the reading notes in the collages I referred to earlier: “Ek ruk my kop van die teks / kyk met nuwe oë  na jou / die teatrale woorde spu / mos profesie!”(I lift my head startled / from the text and look at you / with new eyes these theatrical words spew prophecy!) (89). The note, it seems to me, reveals the extent to which Lady Anne is a project, not only of translation, but of listening, reading, and historical interpretation. At the moment of the poem’s composition in the late 1980s, Krog already intuits that the valedictory words of her eighteenth-century subject are not only prayer, but prophecy. However, the poignancy of the curious lines make all the more sense as such from our present vantage in the (waning) age of Jacob Zuma and the criminalization of the ANC government: post-apartheid South Africa has indeed been maimed in recent years, not by oppression, but by “power and freedom”—and in egregious and unexpected ways. Krog’s translation and transmutation of Lady Anne’s utopian hopes, especially given how they are embedded in a later revolutionary context by the work’s compositional strategies, remind us of their failure. But in fostering that very realization—that sudden revelation of a transhistorical configuration—Krog’s poetry also helps to keep those hopes alive.

CODA ON A MARIMBA: ON FAILURE AND FREEDOM I return in conclusion to Antjie Krog’s denunciation of her own and of Lady Anne Barnard’s failure: the claim that they “lived their lives without honour—failing

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the demands of their time” (ix). Setting aside for a moment the accuracy of the judgment, I would note that the declaration raises the question of how we are to define “their time”—an important consideration given our collective interest in not only “revolution” but also the “contemporary.” It might behoove us here to recall Rita Felski’s reminder, in her provocative essay “Context Stinks!,” that texts do not operate solely in one box, but that they can traverse historical and linguistic frameworks and become productively strange and also productively recognizable in their travels (589). This indeed is the utopian potentiality of the compositional device of transparency and also of translation, that ever-surprising practice of “carrying across.” It is interesting that right before the dismissive sentence I cited, Krog records, precisely, the new recognizability of the Lady Anne poems in the present: “Translating these poems twenty-six years later, I realise that they were busy then with what is now being put under the spotlight by the angry black youth: the many layers of white privilege, the impossibility of adequately responding to guilt, as well as to the colonial gaze” (ix). In other words, the 1989 volume may not have foreseen the release of Nelson Mandela in February 1990, nor the negotiated settlement of 1994, as Krog laments. But it is precisely because the optimistic teleological narrative of the transition is absent in the Lady Anne poems that they speak again with particular vividness about the deferred dreams of racial equality and renewed social relations that are felt so pressingly in Zuma’s South Africa and Trump’s America. Written in dark times, they force us, in Jennifer Wenzel’s phrase, to “rethink failure” (8). Consider here the astonishing poem in the form of a letter to Henry Dundas, dated May 14, 1800: Thus begins our new governor: commission on every slave ship illegally dropping anchor and the following “free blacks” executed this morning for being “rebellious”: Domingo of Bengale Moses Aaron of Makassar Joost Venture Sampoernaij Abraham de Vyf Rebe of Guinee Jan Coridon Mira Moor Kijaija Moeda And Claas Claasz of Bengale

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Just a list of heretics for future composers– they hang this morning on the open ground next to the Castle: a decorative marimba (76)24

In this poem, the remembered names of participants in a quelled revolt are transformed, changed utterly. Understanding this requires that we, as it were, look through all the volume’s poems on music and the ear: in this way, the bodies of the hanged men indeed become a keyboard for future sonorities. The marimba may be a suitably African instrument; but it is evident that the dead men on the scaffold were transported from across the entire colonial world. Their spirit of resistance can therefore be retranslated, transported, across time and space, transfigured from failure into what Wenzel calls “prophetic memory” (21, 121). We should also bring to mind here the reflections, in the poem “gnome,” on the grammar of belonging and ownership. The names of the executed men are slave names (though something of their original identity does shines through: Sampoernaij, for instance, means “perfection” in Malay). The preposition of— “van” in the original Afrikaans—marks the translation of a man into a possession. The z suffix, likewise, here identifies a former Bengali slave as the possession of a Dutchman called Claas; and we can be sure that Joost and Jan also had these names imposed on them. But read in a different way, as pertaining to place, the van identifies the rebels as members of a global diaspora, not only from Bengal, but from Guinea, Indonesia, or possibly Madagascar (there are cities called Macassar in both of the latter). Moor signifies a dark-skinned Muslim from North Africa or India, while Moeda denotes a Brazilian coin. And one cannot help but feel that the names Aaron and Moses, though also imposed in conditions of subjection, retain a certain liberatory power. The list of names, one might say, releases a potential sound of protest: it works against the nomenclature of ownership to set free a spirit of rebelliousness that might be reclaimed by “composers” anywhere. Of these the imagined Lady Anne Barnard—and, of course, her Afrikaans bard in Kroonstad—are the first. In a poem titled only “journal,” she recalls “so many images” of revolutions and revolts: of peasants on her Scottish estate, of slaves in Guadeloupe, Jamaica, of the Coromantee in Santo Domingo. This leads her to reproduce the enduring cry of the black Jacobin, Toussaint L’Ouverture

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(and we should imaginatively “hear,” as we read it in translation, its stunning impact on the sonorities and semantic registers of apartheid-era Afrikaans): “. . . By overthrowing me you have only defeated the trunk of the tree of freedom it will grow back because its roots are deep, numerous and vivacious—the threads of being free have been mercilessly woven into every civilized tapestry’s most intimate warp and woof.” (77–78)25

What transformative work, then, may translation do in our disappointing day and age? To try to answer this question I will return once more to Lady Anne’s opening collage. The very first quotation is from the guilty plea of the Afrikaans revolutionary and communist Bram Fisher, who in his peroration reached for a line cherished in Afrikaner tradition, but redeployed and transformed it to serve a completely different political agenda. These lines (left untranslated from the Dutch in the English edition) are the words of the revered President Paul Kruger in his declaration of the Boer War in 1899: “Met Vertrouwen leggen wij onze zaak open voor de geheele wereld. Het zij wij overwinnen, het zij wij sterve: de vrijheid zal in Afrika rijzen als de zon uit de morgenwolken” (It is with confidence that we lay our case before the entire world. Whether we overcome or whether we perish, freedom will rise in Africa like the sun from the morning clouds) (2).The meaning of freedom might have changed, from Kruger’s white nationalist days, to Fisher’s, to ours. But therein lies, precisely, its survival—beyond the failure of Kruger’s war, beyond the failure of Fisher’s resistance. Words of protest can be made to ring true again, as they are reclaimed, performed, and transformed across time and space. And perhaps all revolutions are failed prophecies: the ruins, even in their accomplishment, of the past’s future.

NOTES 1 Few students of South African literature will be unfamiliar with Antjie Krog’s standing as one of the most acclaimed and internationally acknowledged Afrikaans writers active today. Her international reputation has also been solidified in recent years, especially by her trilogy of memoirs, Country of My Skull (1998), A Change of Tongue (2004), and Begging to be Black (2010), all published in English and also by translations of her works into Dutch, German, and Spanish. Krog has been a prolific

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poet since the publication of her first collection Dogter van Jefta in (1970) at the age of seventeen. In the course of her career, she has garnered all of South Africa’s major awards, including the Hertzog Prize (which she won for the first time in 1989 for Lady Anne), as well as several international prizes and honorary doctorates. She has also established herself as a translator, most notably of Nelson Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. Among her best-known poems are “Song of Praise,” which was read at Mandela’s inauguration, and “because of you,” which was included as an epigraph to volume seven of the official Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa’s Report (on victims’ testimony). See https://www.legaltools.org/doc/e596fa/pdf/. 2 The publication of the English translation by Bucknell University Press was timed to coincide with the new biography of Lady Anne Barnard by Stephen Taylor. To abide by the required chapter length, I have not often included the Afrikaans original, only where it seems essential to my interpretations. Krog's advisercollaborator on the translations is Karen Press, as noted in the acknowledgments (v); Denis Hirson is credited separately for the translation of “The Transparency of the Sole.” 3 I cherish this as a reminder that the global must not be imagined as born-translated. Krog opts for translations that foreignize both the source and the target languages. See also Lawrence Venuti’s critique of recent uses of the notions of translation, an argument which is consistent with Krog’s view that texts that are intensely locally specific will in the end have greater global impact. 4 Negri, “Afterword: On the Concept of Revolution,” 254. 5 Dimitriu, “The Splendour and Misery of Translation,” 278. 6 The English appellation “sole,” is to me an example of the miserable inadequacy of translation, something that Krog accepts, because there are also “splendours.” An image of Solea solea, however, does appear in the original edition (87). 7 Here the English resonances of word seem productive, suggesting, as they do, a “parent” who is committed not to the reproduction, but to the transformation of the status quo. 8 Benjamin, Arcades Project, 462. 9 It is important to note, therefore, that while I have described Krog’s poem for her children as a culmination of the volume’s themes, it does not suggest a spectacular terminus, but rather an ongoing process of mutation. 10 Benjamin, Arcades Project, 462. 11 Kleitrap is idiomatic in Afrikaans: it means to struggle, to screw up. The direct translation seems to me a rather dubious maneuver; however, it is perhaps justified by the image of the sea bottom in the poem. Also, Krog likes for the textures and sonorities of her original language to remain visible and somewhat strange in the translation.

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12 The writings by Lady Anne Barnard that Krog translates into Afrikaans and transmutes into poetry include the ballad, “Auld Robin Grey,” letters to Henry Dundas, the account of a journey into the interior, as well as diaries and memoirs, and letters from her husband; all sources are acknowledged in the English edition (107). Lady Anne also includes two prose pieces about Krog’s 1987 visit to the Lindsay family estate, Balcarres, near St. Andrews, where her subjects’ descendants warmly welcomed her and opened up the castle’s library and archives for her research. These pieces constitute yet another quasi-metatextual layering in the text, emphasizing the status of the volume as process rather than a finished, autonomous product. 13 Dundas was the colonial secretary and secretary of war; Windham, who eventually succeeded him in these roles, was an intellectual, Whig politician, and abolitionist. 14 Viljoen remarks quite rightly that Lady Anne cannot accurately be said to be a metaphor: she is not a semantic vehicle without claim to any presence in the “actual” narrated world of the text (46–47). 15 See Meriwether and Millgate, 238, 217. Another modernist who famously participates in this rhetoric is Samuel Beckett, noted for his admonitions in Worstward Ho to “fail better.” 16 See Wenzel’s Bulletproof, especially the section, “Redefining Failure,” 5ff. 17 Blood, too, is a recurrent image, straddling the political and the personal. See, for instance, the chart tracking the poet’s menstrual cycle (54). In one of the manifesto poems, moreover, the bard declares “No pasts just prophecies / No mediators just mercy / Also everything that is blind, blissful, blood” (93). 18 See for example: “The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is the store of your estranged being” in Marx and Engels, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, 109. 19 It is often thought that the Cape Colony’s slaves were brought by the Dutch from Indonesia and Malaysia; but, in fact, the period of Lady Anne’s residence saw a surge in the slave population and their provenance was much more dispersed. Sir George Younge, the dubious successor to Lord Macartney, benefited personally from permitting the slave ships to dock and disembark. 20 William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book VII, lines 202–10 ff. 21 One is reminded of the unease felt by Mrs. Curren in Age of Iron, J. M. Coetzee’s novel of the same period: “Guguletu,” she notes from her suburban balcony, “is not burning today, or if it is burning, is burning with a low flame” (39). 22 See, for instance, Vincent Crapanzano’s Waiting: The Whites of South Africa, an anthropological study from 1986. 23 Here, the published translation is disappointing, missing the point of the poem, as I see it, and its resonance with others: “away in a manger / a trough for a bed” (24). 24 The translation again is inadequate: Krog’s sonorous rhyming of ketters (heretics) and toonsetters has a kind of performative force: it announces the bard as making music from the keyboard offered by Lady Anne Barnard’s journal entry.

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25 In translating the words of l’Ouverture, Krog (who once declared that one can only revolutionize one’s own language), forces that language to articulate a vision utterly different from the agendas of those who would keep it white, pure, and nationalistic. See Krog’s A Change of Tongue, 271.

WORKS CITED Beckett, Samuel. Worstward Ho. New York: Grove Press, 1984. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press/Belknap Press, 1999. Bethlehem, Louise. “A Primary Need as Strong as Hunger: The Rhetoric of Urgency in South African Literary Culture under Apartheid.” Poetics Today 22:2 (2001): 365–89. Coetzee, J. M. Age of Iron. New York: Random House, 1990. Coullie, Judith Lü tge, and Andries Visagie, eds. Antjie Krog: An Ethics of Body and Otherness. Scottsville: University of Kwazulu-Natal Press, 2014. Crapanzano, Vincent. Waiting: The Whites of South Africa. New York: Vintage Books, 1986. Cronin, Jeremy. Inside. London: Jonathan Cape, 1987. Cronin, Jeremy. “No Unnecessary Noises Allowed, OK?” Ingolovane 1 (n.d.): 8–12. Dimitriu, Ileana. “The Splendour and Misery of Translation: Interview with Antjie Krog.” In Antjie Krog: An Ethics of Body and Otherness. Eds. Coullie and Visagie. 269–90. Felski, Rita. “Context Stinks!” New Literary History 42:4 (2011): 573–91. Foran, John, David Lane, and Andreja Zivkovic. Revolution in the Making of the Modern World: Social Identities, Globalization, and Modernity. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. Krog, Antjie. A Change of Tongue. Johannesburg: Random House, 2003. Krog, Antjie. Lady Anne. Bramley, South Africa: Taurus, 1989. Krog, Antjie. Lady Anne: A Chronicle in Verse. Translated from Afrikaans with a Preface by the Poet. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2017. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Trans. Martin Milligan. New York: Prometheus, 1988. Meriwether, James B., and Michael Millgate, eds. The Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner, 1926-1962. New York: Random House, 1968. Negri, Antonio. “Afterword: On the Concept of Revolution.” Foran, Lane, and Zivkovic 252–60. Taylor, Stephen. Defiance: The Extraordinary Life of Lady Anne Barnard. New York: Norton, 2017. Venuti, Lawrence. “Hijacking Translation: How Comp Lit Continues to Suppress Translated Texts.” boundary 2, 43.2 (2016): 179–204.

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Viljoen, Louise. Ons Ongehoorde Soort: Beskouings oor die Werk van Antjie Krog. Stellenbosch: State University Press of New York, 2009. Vosloo, Frances. “‘Inhabiting’ the Translator’s Habitus: Antjie Krog as Translator.” Coullie and Visagie. 291–313. Walkowitz, Rebecca L. Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Wenzel, Jennifer. Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Wordsworth, William. The Prelude: 1799 1805, 1850. Ed. M. H. Abrams and Stephen Gill. New York, Norton: 1979.

Part Five

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Repair Work, Despair Work: W. G. Sebald’s Contending Modernisms Elizabeth Abel

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise . . . [that] irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (257–58) And so I go on to suppose that the shock-receiving capacity is what makes me a writer. . . . I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together. Virginia Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past” (72) There are many forms of writing; only in literature, however, can there be an attempt at restitution over and above the mere recital of facts, and over and above scholarship. W. G. Sebald, “An Attempt at Restitution” (205) Memory, even if you repress it, will come back at you and it will shape your life. Without memories there wouldn’t be any writing; the specific weight an image or a phrase needs to get across to the reader can only come from things remembered—not from yesterday but from a long time ago. W. G. Sebald, cited in Maya Jaggi, “The Last Word” (3)

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W.  G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001), published shortly before the death of the German-born author who spent his adult life teaching and writing in England, sits at the cusp of two centuries, two literary cultures (among a range of others), and two modes of engaging a shattered history.1 Composed retroactively by an unnamed German narrator from the stories and photographs transmitted by the eponymous Jewish protagonist, Austerlitz stages a multifaceted process of assembling the fragments of memory and history that Austerlitz fitfully relays about his origins in Prague and arrival in Britain via Kindertransport as a refugee from Hitler’s Europe. As its title underscores, Austerlitz is a backward-turning text freighted by centuries of European violence culminating in the signal midcentury trauma for which Sebald, who came of age in a postwar Germany eager to forget its recent history, felt an impossible burden of commemoration. Only literature, Sebald tells us in “An Attempt at Restitution,” affords the possibility of restitution, at the same time that he acknowledged the presumptuousness of the claim that history could be redeemed aesthetically. This impossible dilemma undergirds Sebald’s culminating work, which re-mixes contending modernisms to grapple with the contradictions of seeking to “make whole” what history has smashed. Drawn from late, unfinished, and posthumously published texts produced in different geopolitical locations that were nevertheless both profoundly threatened by the advent of World War II, my epigraphs from Benjamin and Woolf distill contrasting views of literature’s restitutive capacity.2 Each speaks to a facet of Sebald’s cultural mandate and location, but only Benjamin has been widely recognized as “a kind of patron saint—not to say ‘totem’—of Sebald’s fictional universe” (Santner xix). Sebald’s embrace of Benjamin’s melancholy vision of history as “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage” is anchored in the statements of many of Sebald’s characters who, propelled like Benjamin’s angel of history backward toward an obscure future, witness only a growing “pile of debris” they cannot stop to reassemble. But it is precisely the fictionality of Sebald’s universe, the product of his own imaginative vision, that affords him both the privilege and the burden of repair. Melancholy, both an attitude toward and attribute of “our history” as “a long account of calamities,” finds its primary expression in Sebald’s early hybrid prose nonfiction that, in John Zilcosky’s pungent formulation, “wandered along the borders between travel diary, memoir, collage, and short story” (Sebald, The Rings of Saturn 295; Zilcosky 685). Austerlitz, by contrast, is Sebald’s first and only novel.3 Unlike the first-person commentary of The Rings of Saturn (1995) or the four discrete narratives that constitute The Emigrants (1992), Austerlitz displays the

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formal complexity and integrity that endow it with the literary artifact’s capacity to “take away the pain.” For a variety of reasons—Sebald’s critique of the realist novel’s narrative machinery and his obsession with Europe’s melancholy history—the problematic force of this restitutive mission has been underscrutinized. Sebald is variously characterized as an elegist, a melancholy essayist, even a melancholy elegist, but the slippages among these terms reveal (even as they seek to conceal) a fissure at the crux of his poetics. As Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” suggests, elegy as the literary form of mourning—the work of moving through loss toward aesthetic consolation—is at odds with a melancholic fixation on the recalcitrant wounds of history. Sebald compounds this distinction by associating each term with a set of cultural and genre coordinates: melancholy with a “form of prose fiction” that “exists more frequently on the European continent than in the Anglo-Saxon world”; mourning with a form of literary repair affiliated with Britain’s political history as an asylum from Nazi Germany and its cultural history as an hospitable site for the development of the novel whose modernist iteration in particular harbors a restitutive potential (Wachtel 37). In the imaginative geography of Austerlitz, the Anglo-Saxon world, the formal architecture of the modernist novel, and the elegiac project are complexly interwoven and contrapuntal to the melancholic course of European history.4 Austerlitz, according to Sebald, is “in the form of an elegy, really, a long prose elegy” (Cuomo 103). He gives this form a modernist inflection by reconfiguring elegy’s temporal progression from loss to consolation as the juxtaposition of diverse “pockets” of time that recall Woolf ’s invention of “beautiful caves” behind the narrative present.5 The unnamed narrator to whom Austerlitz bequeaths the task of composition, along with the keys to his London home that functions as a site and figure of the text’s composition, structures his account of Austerlitz’s memories within distinct narrative and spatial locations: the restaurants, waiting rooms, sitting rooms, bars, observatories, and taxis in which Austerlitz tells the narrator the stories that had often been recounted to him in similarly dramatized scenes of narration. Drawing from the British troping of the twentieth-century novel as (in Henry James’s celebrated phrase) a “house of fiction,” Austerlitz crafts a form for its protagonist’s impression that “time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry” (James 46; Austerlitz 261). Sebald’s “house of fiction” carves out rooms, in contrast to James’s, which calls attention to the “millions” of windows through which narrative perspectives observe the outside world; as Jamesian observation yields to Sebaldian (and Woolfian) memory, windows open inward to spaces

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of recollection. An intricate but integrated narrative architecture results from the enfolding of stories within stories and the interplay among diverse sites and subjects of narration. Woolf is Sebald’s primary vehicle for evoking what Jesse Matz calls the “utopian temporalities” of modernist fiction: the strategies that encourage our belief that “the landscape of time is open to cultivation through narrative intervention” (Matz 16). But Sebald also subjects this belief to pressure by rendering a landscape littered with history’s inassimilable debris: the piles of bones buried beneath the Liverpool Street Station, the expropriated belongings of the Holocaust dead, the particulate matter that clogs the atmosphere. These scattered objects, withdrawn from affective investment or aesthetic integration, are presented as both agents and evidence of the melancholic wreckage of history.6 Whether to leave what civilization has ruined in a state of ruination (no lyric poetry after Auschwitz) that would pay tribute to Benjamin’s philosophical legacy and extend into the present the strand of European modernism with which Sebald is most often aligned (Kafka, Mann, Stifter, Freud, among others) or to make an effort at repair that would align his text with Woolf ’s belief in literature’s capacity to “make it whole” remains an open question. Repair work or despair work, mourning or melancholia, the Anglo-Saxon world or the European continent, a multichambered novelistic architecture or the linear propulsions of history, the choice is unresolved (and unresolvable). This binary formulation is part of the dilemma, however, for rather than fixed oppositions, Sebald’s world is characterized by fluctuating degrees and modalities of difference that traverse or shade into one another. As the syntax intertwines multiple voices, and the elimination of paragraph and chapter breaks creates a continuous textual flow, the relay of the protagonist’s story through a narrator difficult to distinguish from him thwarts the effort to sustain categorical distinctions. Sebald borrows a key figure for this troubling of boundaries from Woolf. The “mysterious world of moths” whose luminous nocturnal flight traces “thousands of different arcs and spirals and loops” at the Welsh home of Austerlitz’s boarding-school friend, Gerald Fitzpatrick, displays the oscillation between phantom and substance, spirit and matter, transcendence and mortality, that is implicit in a figure whose metamorphosis from worm to moth marks a passage from earth to air (Austerlitz 128). In Woolf ’s short essay “The Death of the Moth,” Sebald found a figure through which he could modulate the stark encounter between a capacious British modernist reshaping of temporality and a melancholic continental vision of history. If at one pole of Woolf ’s imaginative spectrum we could place the restitutive project of Orlando (1928) that seeks to

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restore through literary fantasy a home that had been forfeited to law, at the other we could read “The Death of the Moth” as a skeptical counter-narrative that transports mortality back into the temporal horizon and indoors. The trope of the dying moth enables Sebald to temper British modernism’s utopian temporalities with what Paul K. Saint-Amour has eloquently described as the “tense future” of the interwar years: the proleptic recognition that the fragile peace negotiated at the end of World War I was doomed to eventuate in another war.7 Instead of dilating the present moment, memory in this context triggers the apprehension of a future in which the violent past returns. By offering a pivot toward this darker view of history, the figure of the moth also facilitates a shift in Sebald’s literary allegiances from the “butterfly aesthetic” he celebrated in Nabokov (that rare European exile whose faith in the transformative potential of art resisted the grimmer tolls of history) to what we might call Woolf ’s “moth aesthetic,” whose engagement with mortality extends (in Sebald’s reading) toward a melancholy view of history.8 Presiding over The Emigrants, Nabokov is a member of the exilic band of brothers that Sebald salutes in lines often taken as a figure for his literary affiliations: “Indeed it seemed as though in such works of art / Men had revered each other like brothers” (Sebald, After Nature, 6). The writers that (along with Nabokov) comprise this international fraternity include Hoffmann, Kleist, Kafka, Mann, Benjamin, Calvino, Rousseau, Barthes, Borges, and Primo Levi, but the signal pair is Kafka and Benjamin, whose own fascination with Kafka lay the groundwork for Sebald’s. Nabokov’s displacement by Woolf in Austerlitz marks a turn, in tandem with the turn to the novel, to a non-exilic figure of origin, the (woman) writer who stays home. Yet the novelistic architecture with which Woolf is aligned continues to accommodate the death of the moth and the wanderings of Austerlitz’s deracinated, disoriented, and doubling narrator and protagonist, who constitutes split halves of a single exilic Kafkaesque subject that imports the legacy of European modernism both into and in contradistinction to the integrative energies of the British novel form. Because of the critical vacuum surrounding the writer constitutively absent from the band of brothers, I dwell on two metaphoric clusters that register Woolf ’s presence in Austerlitz before turning briefly to Benjamin’s welldocumented influence.9 Juxtaposed, I hope, these figures will illuminate the challenge posed at one burdened European locus of the contemporary: how to affirm both the melancholy of history and a novelistic architecture that seeks to recuperate historical debris to the elegiac project of enabling us to grieve and then—perhaps—move on.10

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THAT MOST ABSTRACT OF HUMANITY’S HOMES You are taken out of time, and that is in a sense a form of redemption, if you can release yourself from the passage of time. W. G. Sebald, cited in Eleanor Wachtel, “Ghost Hunter” (41–42) Sebald weaves Woolf into Austerltiz’s modernist temporalities through a network of tropes that negotiate the longing to be “taken out of time” with a protest against modernity’s standardization of time. Austerlitz’s initial encounter with the narrator in Antwerp’s Central Station is dominated by the protagonist’s disquisition on the disciplinary nature of the standardized time that was devised to synchronize intercity train schedules in the mid-nineteenth century. The railroad’s subjugation of space enabled the ascendancy of time, Austerlitz explains, for only after being standardized could “time truly reign supreme,” as is evidenced by the station’s “dominating feature”: a “mighty clock . . . with a hand some six feet long” in an elevated central position from which “the movements of all travelers could be surveyed” (13–14). Austerlitz’s discourse on the “new omnipotence” of time recalls the centralizing presence of Mrs. Dalloway’s Big Ben. The Woolfian echoes are more precise in the narrator’s observation of the stop-and-start movement of the clock hand “slicing off the next one-sixtieth of an hour” (9), recalling Clarissa’s response to the chiming of Big Ben—“how year by year her share was sliced” (Mrs. Dalloway 30)—and the commercial versions of state time (“ratified by Greenwich”) evidenced by the “clocks of Harley Street” “shredding and slicing, dividing and subdividing” (154–55). Time’s subjugation of space is countered by the spatialization of time manifested in the architecture of the Liverpool Street Station at which Austerlitz recalls his arrival as a four-year-old child on the Kindertransport from Prague. Half a century later, Austerlitz finds himself inexplicably drawn back to the station where, in an echo of Woolf ’s “beautiful caves” of memory, he begins to recover “memories behind and within which many things much further back in the past seemed to lie, all interlocking like the labyrinthine vaults I saw in the dusty grey light and which seemed to go on and on for ever” (192). Austerlitz’s point of entry to England is an architectural and imaginative structure that counters the temporal machinery installed at the Antwerp station, which (like the clocks on Harley Street) is ratified by Greenwich, the world’s prime meridian and the standard of world time since 1884.11 Austerlitz pays a visit to the Royal Observatory in the winter of 1995. After guiding the narrator through a display of “ingenious observational instruments and measuring

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devices, quadrants and sextants, chronometers and regulators” (140–41), he issues an impassioned manifesto against the tyranny of clock-time from the octagonal observation room that affords a 360-degree panorama of the surrounding landscape. Standing at the apex, and in defiance, of the global site of temporal regulation, Austerlitz declares that time is “by far the most artificial of our inventions” (141) and that a clock is “something ridiculous, a thoroughly mendacious object” (144). Beyond echoing Woolf ’s characteristically high modernist assertion of the “extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind” (Orlando 72), Austerlitz evokes her more distinctive figure of time as a multichambered residence that accommodates disparate moments. Translating time into space, anteriority into posteriority, Austerlitz declares his desire to “turn back and go behind” [hinter] time—rather than “before” [vorher] it—“and there find everything as it once was, or more precisely . . . find that all moments of time have co-existed simultaneously” (144).12 Woolf evokes a similar domicile in her mock elegy for a lost home, Orlando. Written as a literary compensation for Orlando’s prototype, Vita Sackville-West, who was legally barred by gender from inheriting Knole House, which had been granted to her ancestors by Queen Elizabeth I, Orlando performs a fanciful act of aesthetic restitution, an elegy on steroids, we might say, a hyperbolic iteration of literature’s ability to restore what has been lost to law. And not only to human law, but also to the ultimate law—mortality: subjection to the passage of time. Casually rescripting the restoration of Orlando’s home through a parodic legal document, Woolf also restores it metaphorically by taking advantage of Knole House’s architectural oddities and stature as one of England’s five largest country homes to remodel time itself, “that most abstract of humanity’s homes” (Sebald, “Against the Irreversible” 150). Constructed like its prototype with fiftytwo staircases and three hundred and sixty-five bedrooms, the “great house” Woolf fashions for Orlando is a capacious and inalienable domicile contoured to accommodate the “(at a venture) seventy-six different times all ticking in the mind at once” and the multiple selves “all having lodgment at one time or another in the human spirit. . . . built up, one on top of another, as plates are piled on a waiter’s hand” (225).13 Sebald evokes this fantasy home as a foil to the privations imposed by Austerlitz’s foster home in Bala, Wales, and by the global home of standardized time, the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. The invocations of Orlando take off from Austerlitz’s account of his emotionally and physically frigid foster home, whose constraints come most sharply into focus during Austerlitz’s returns from boarding school in 1947: “the coldest winter in human history” (87), an echo of

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Orlando’s Great Frost, “the most severe that has ever visited these islands” (25). In Austerlitz’s account, Even Lake Bala, which I had thought as big as the ocean when I arrived in Wales, was covered by a thick sheet of ice. I thought of the roach and eels in its depths, and the birds which the visitors had told me were falling from the branches of the trees, frozen stiff. (89)

During the Great Frost in Orlando, Birds froze in mid-air and fell like stones to the ground. . . . the ice which, though of singular transparency, was yet of the hardness of steel. So clear indeed was it that there could be seen, congealed at a depth of several feet, here a porpoise, there a flounder. Shoals of eels lay motionless in a trance. (25–27)

Although less explicit, the evocation of Orlando at the Royal Observatory is more significant, for it serves to offset the authority of global time by an equally but antithetically ambitious vision of the multiple temporalities accommodated by Orlando’s great house. Geographically local and aspirationally global, both the Royal Observatory and Orlando’s great house stake their competing claims to universality in and as a manifestation of England. “No other country but England” could have produced Knole House, according to Vita SackvilleWest, since it is “above all, an English house” with “the tone of England” and a distinctly English mandate of exemplifying an ideal commonwealth capable of harmonizing the natural and the social (Sackville-West 2, 18). In Woolf ’s rendition, the great house commands a panoramic vista of thirty or forty English counties that rivals the vista afforded by the Royal Observatory. From their parallel and antithetical vantage points, the country house and the scientific observatory are charged with translating a national location into a global representation of temporality. It is in the phantasmatic mode of its final evocation in the narrative present of Orlando that the great house is best able to fulfill its role as a halfperceived, half-remembered backdrop to the Royal Observatory: an “elsewhere” behind the “pre-formed images already imprinted on our brains,” a flickering impression like the six-pointed Star of David that haunts the star-shaped design of fortification architecture or the phantasmatic lost twin brother that haunts Austerlitz’s self-image (101). Adopting Sebald’s formulation, we could say that the “remembrance” of Orlando’s house—by Woolf, by Sebald, by the reader— initiates us “into time recounted and into the time of culture” that opens behind individual perceptions (Sebald, “As Day and Night,” 93).

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In Orlando’s final scene, the great house is derealized as the moon rises over the weald at midnight: Its light raised a phantom castle upon earth. There stood the great house with all its windows robed in silver. Of wall or substance there was none. All was phantom. All was still. All was lit as for the coming of a dead Queen. . . . A Queen once more stepped from her chariot. (240)

The visionary house presented to a resurrected queen reverts to its true owners in an elegiac form. The past has been restored, history transcended, in the shape of a phantom castle raised by the moon. As phantom, the great house is rendered both portable and vulnerable. Sebald signals its fragility by having it collapse during Austerlitz’s descent from the Royal Observatory. Despite seeming to arrest time’s passage, the spatialized coexistence of “all moments,” Austerlitz realizes, would necessarily include moments of historical disaster whose contemplation would open up the Benjaminian “bleak prospect of ever-lasting misery and never-ending anguish” with which his disquisition concludes (144). At its culmination, Austerlitz’s lengthy and lofty disquisition on time (die Zeit) submits in a final deflationary turn to the pressure of history (die Geschichte) that Sebald’s British modernist precursor sought to hold at bay. More particularly, the entire Greenwich scene, set in the narrative present and interrupting Austerlitz’s account of his formative years in Britain, both resists and reflects the knowledge of history the adult Austerlitz has painfully acquired, as if his very protest against clock-time has been a defense against acknowledging the course of human history. That knowledge gains implicit recognition as, after a dash that underscores the break, the narrator takes over from Austerlitz with an uncharacteristically precise notation of clock-time—“It was around three-thirty in the afternoon and dusk was gathering” (144)—as the two men descend from the panoramic vista to a darkening temporal world ruled not only by the mechanics of clock-time but also and more painfully by the melancholic declines and uncanny repetitions of history. As daylight dwindles, the narrator notes the “drone of the great planes flying low . . . towards Heathrow. Like strange monsters going home to their dens to sleep in the evening, they hovered above us in the darkening air, rigid wings extended from their bodies” (144–45). The description seems calculated to remind us of the fluttering wings of the insects that populate this text, especially in view of the name of the first generation of British recreational aircraft: Moths. The airplanes that accompany Austerlitz and the narrator on their descent from

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Greenwich also guide us from the temporal aspirations of Woolf ’s architectural figures to a trope that she and Sebald share for negotiating a more accommodating relationship with history.

AS A READER OF VIRGINIA WOOLF The Moths still haunts me, coming, as they always do, unbidden, between tea & dinner, while L. plays the gramophone. Virginia Woolf, Diary (III:209) From the age of seven, everything I felt in connection with a rectangle of framed sunlight was dominated by a single passion. If my first glance of the morning was for the sun, my first thought was for the butterflies it would engender. Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (119–20) A thing that appeals to me particularly in the moth is its secretiveness. Butterflies flit about in daylight, moths hide in darkness. W. G. Sebald, cited in Sarah Kafatou, “An Interview with W.G. Sebald” (34) In “The Death of a Moth,” the house that had figured an escape from temporality shrinks to a figure of mortality as the narrator observes a moth trapped indoors fluttering helplessly against the window pane. Unable to restore the moth to its upright position by stretching out her pencil, the narrator accepts that this “tiny bead of pure life” enclosed in a hay-colored body and a human habitat cannot be “righted” by writing (4). Rather than offering aesthetic transformation, the narrator praises the “decently and uncomplainingly composed” body of the moth that seems, like a stoical soldier, to acknowledge that “death is stronger than I am” (6). To write without righting is to offer the recognition, not transfiguration, of mortality. Sebald asserts a similar perspective in a 1998 interview with Sarah Kafatou. Responding to Kafatou’s suggestion that an “elusive figure for the spirit of art is the Nabokov-like butterfly collector” or “the butterfly itself, or the moth,” Sebald sidesteps the reference to Nabokov to pay homage to moths: I’ve always been interested in invertebrates, in insects, and very much in moths. They are infinitely more numerous than butterflies, more various, and often more beautiful. They exemplify the so-called biodiversity which is now being

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lost. A thing that appeals to me particularly in the moth is its secretiveness. Butterflies flit about in daylight, moths hide in darkness. You only see them when, for instance, they get into a house. Then they sit absolutely still in a fold of curtain or on a whitewashed wall, for days on end, until all life has gone out of them and they fall to the floor. . . . Perhaps that is what we should do, instead of bustling about going to see the doctor and causing trouble to everyone around us. The idea of transformation, metamorphosis, in terms of turning from a pupa into a beautiful winged thing, doesn’t particularly appeal to me. It strikes me as rather trite. To me the really wonderful thing about these insects is the way they perish. (34–35)

Without repudiating Nabokov, Sebald mimics the subtle ways of moths to indicate a shift in his literary allegiance from the butterfly-collecting Russian é migré  seeking to net an elusive spirit of art to the moth-observing British novelist who remains at home to honor the material boundaries that delimit both life and art. The echoes of Woolf become increasingly explicit in a subsequent interview with Michael Silverblatt, in which mortality expands to an engagement with historical casualties. In response to Silverblatt’s observation that the horror of the concentration camps is the “invisible subject” of Austerlitz, a text in which “one watches moths dying,” Sebald comments: Yes, precisely. You know, there is in Virginia Woolf this—probably known better to you than to me—wonderful example of her description of a moth coming to its end on a windowpane somewhere in Sussex. This is a passage of some two pages only, I think, and it’s written somewhere, chronologically speaking, between the battlefields of the Somme and the concentration camps erected by my compatriots. There’s no reference made to the battlefields of the Somme in this passage, but one knows, as a reader of Virginia Woolf, that she was greatly perturbed by the First World War, by its aftermath, by the damage it did to people’s souls, the souls of those who got away, and naturally of those who perished. So I think that a subject which at first glance seems quite removed from the undeclared concern of a book can encapsulate that concern. (Silverblatt 80–81)

Sebald’s critical purchase on Woolf ’s essay (not among her best-known works) reveals him to be an astute and knowledgeable reader of her oeuvre. Leonard Woolf ’s selection of “The Death of a Moth” as the title essay of the first posthumous collection of Virginia Woolf ’s essays, published in 1942 during the darkest phase of World War II, corroborates Sebald’s intuition that this essay speaks presciently about both world wars and the implication of the second in the first. (Vanessa

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Bell’s design for the dust jacket for the Hogarth Press edition, which positions the elm tree under which Woolf ’s ashes are buried and the banks of the river in which she drowned between the large black-lettered title of the volume at the top and the black-lettered name of its author at the bottom, further aligns the death of the moth with Woolf ’s own demise and situates them both in the context of war.14) Anticipating Paul K. Saint-Amour’s argument that the specter of a future war haunted the interwar period, Sebald nevertheless maintains a distinction that Saint-Amour disputes between the aesthetic optimism of the “high” modernist 1920s and the political pessimism of the “late” modernist 1930s, for although the “The Death of a Moth” and Orlando were probably composed within a year of each other in the late 1920s, they articulate divergent relations to the modernist temporalities that Sebald sets in play.15 The initial locus of the moth aesthetic in Austerlitz is Andromeda Lodge, the family home of Gerald Fitzpatrick, who invites Austerlitz for extended visits during the decade spanning their arrival at Stower Grange at age twelve in 1947 through Austerlitz’s departure to pursue his studies in France in 1957. Under the guidance of Gerald’s great-uncle Alphonso, a naturalist, water colorist, and critic of the “passion for collecting” displayed in the cabinets of natural curiosities that have turned Andromeda Lodge into a “kind of natural-history museum,” Austerlitz is introduced to the world of moths swarming outside at night (127). As a contrast to the inert specimens exemplified by a photograph of one of Nabokov’s butterfly collections, Alphonso leads Austerlitz and Gerald outside on a moonless night and, in a scene that echoes Jacob’s Room (“If you stand a lantern under a tree every insect in the forest creeps up to it”), places an incandescent lamp in a hollow (Jacob’s Room 30).16 Thousands of moths are drawn to the lamp in a “wonderful display” of the “endless variety of these invertebrates, which are usually hidden from our sight” (Austerlitz 128). Alphonso is Sebald’s spokesman here, voicing the language with which Sebald opens his response to Sarah Kafatou, but as Austerlitz transmits what he singles out as Alphonso’s “especially memorable” lesson, the language tilts toward the increasingly sober scenario of Sebald’s subsequent interview and the essay by Woolf with which it engages. The echo of that essay’s title in the lesson Austerlitz references as “the life and death of moths” is amplified in his report by a subtle shift in setting from Andromeda Lodge (the pastoral home of his adolescence) to Alderney Street (the urban home of his maturity), and from the thousands of moths swarming outside to a particular moth that (like Woolf ’s) “strays indoors from the small garden” and meets its death with dignity, “clinging to the wall, motionless . . . until the last breath is out of their bodies”(132).

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It is a revision of this scenario during the narrator’s overnight visit to Austerlitz’s London house in March 1997, and again during their final encounter in Paris the following September, that Woolf ’s essay achieves the full historical scope Sebald attributes to it. After Austerlitz recounts the first lengthy installment of his discovery of his childhood in Prague and his mother’s disappearance in the camp at Terezin, the narrator goes to bed in the room next door, where he notices “seven variously shaped Bakelite jars on the mantelpiece,” each containing “the mortal remains of one of the moths which—as Austerlitz had told [him]—had met its end here in this house” (233). By constructing an altar to the seven moths (a number that gestures toward the seven attempts made by Woolf ’s moth to resume its flight), Austerlitz has also fashioned a tribute to Woolf, which evolves as the narrator turns on an old-fashioned radio (in its own Bakelite coffin/case) that channels the nocturnal voices of female announcers and musicians from romantic European cities whose enumeration culminates in Prague. These ethereal female voices “weaving their erratic way far out in the air” compose a sonic elegiac web that reaches back from late twentieth-century London to mid-century Prague. During their subsequent encounter in Paris, at which Austerlitz hands over the key to his house, Austerlitz recommends to the narrator’s attention an eighteenth-century Ashkenazi cemetery he has just discovered next door. By noting that he has come to suspect that this cemetery (rather than the garden) breeds the “moths that used to fly into his house,” Austerlitz weaves Woolf ’s legacy into the web of women’s voices that tacitly lament the Holocaust (408). But is this a regressive sentimental move that recuperates to Woolf ’s reparative aesthetic the inexpiable crimes and inassimilable ruins of history on which a different modernism insists? Sebald brings the question into focus through the narrator’s conclusion to Austerlitz.

ALWAYS RETURNING Culture is not the antidote to the mayhem we wreak—expanding the economy or waging wars. Art is a way of laundering money. It still goes on. It’s more obvious with art because it’s an expensive commodity. But literature is also affirmative of society—it oils the wheels. W. G. Sebald, cited in Maya Jaggi, “Recovered Memories” (8)

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There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (256) Although distinguishing between the voices of Austerlitz and the narrator is often challenging, their narrative functions clearly differentiate the source from the compositor of the text. After giving the narrator the keys to his house, Austerlitz exits the text to reprise his search for traces of his father, while the narrator rounds the text off with an account of his return to its point of departure in Antwerp and its neighboring fortress Breendonk, which the Germans repurposed as a penal camp during World War II. In his signal act of independent and intentional framing, the narrator circles back in a decidedly aesthetic (and distinctively Woolfian) form, but the circle returns him to an incoherent mass of materiality that resists symbolic form. The narrator’s impressions of Breendonk are his most graphic signature on the text, for despite Austerlitz’s passing reference to the fortress, there is no indication that he has actually visited it. In contrast to the scholarly history and diagrams of fortifications that Austerlitz presents, the narrator’s immediate perceptions of Breendonk render a lump of unshaped material antithetical to the very conception of the architectural that undergirds the figure of novelistic form: “a low-built concrete mass, rounded at all its outer edges and giving the gruesome impression of something hunched and misshapen. . . . Covered in places by open ulcers with the raw crushed stone erupting from them, encrusted by guanolike droppings and calcareous streaks, the fort was a monolithic, monstrous incarnation of ugliness and blind violence” (25–28). Whereas Austerlitz proceeds directly from a theoretical discourse on the traces of pain through history to the defensive architecture of fortifications, the narrator follows an alternative route to Breendonk’s incarnation of unredeemed materiality, a monstrosity arguably more alien than the paranoid structure of fortifications or the instrumentalized rationality of the camps to the project of repairing the pain of history. When the narrator returns to Breendonk in the novel’s closing scene, however, he brings along a book that Austerlitz had lent him during their first meeting in Paris. Scenes from his reading of Heshel’s Kingdom, a memoir by Austerlitz’s colleague Dan Jacobson about his search for traces of his grandfather who died in Lithuania, now mediate his impressions of Breendonk. In the last scene from Heshel’s Kingdom the narrator relays, a record of the names and arrival dates that French prisoners scratched on the walls of Fort IX outside Kaunus, Lithuania, where the Nazis slaughtered over 30,000 European deportees

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between 1941 and 1944, brute materiality has been transfigured into a surface of inscription. The final name in the sequence—Max Stern—references Sebald’s middle name (Maximilian); and Stern’s date of arrival at Fort IX coincides with Sebald’s birthdate.17 That the name of the author of the text we have been reading is inscribed on the wall of the fort about which the narrator has been reading outside the fort that has stood as inassimilable matter interposes layers of human articulation on what had been unrecognizable as “anything designed by the human mind” (28). At the end of Austerlitz, we close our book as the narrator closes his and sets off on his way back to town, which he reaches—in the novel’s closing words—“as evening began to fall” (415). We are invited, as day draws to a close, to put the book to bed. Sebald’s declaration during an interview titled “Recovered Memories” that literature oils society’s wheels accords with Benjamin’s project of exposing civilization’s foundation in barbarism. But Sebald, writing half a century after the catastrophes undergirding Benjamin’s perspective, has greater confidence in literature’s restitutive capacity. Austerlitz stages this ambivalence by both resisting and affirming the consolations of form. Although at the opposite extreme from Orlando’s great house, Breendonk provides a site and figure of narrative (en)closure. The narrator’s return to the fortress draws the wreckage of history into a frame that is rendered as exterior (in content) and interior (as form) to the text of Austerlitz. By framing the text with a monstrosity presented as extrinsic to all framing, Sebald insists on history’s inassimilablility and its recuperation to literary form. Austerlitz sustains two modernist modes in unresolved tension within and in excess of its carefully rendered novelistic home. Sebald’s untimely death in 2001 left unanswered the question of whether the book (literal or metaphoric) can ever be closed on the past. One thing not in question, however, is that Sebald’s retrospective gaze continues to resonate within the expanding canon of contemporary global literature, one of whose most innovative figures is also the most emphatic about the need to turn back—specifically to Sebald—in order to move forward. In a New Yorker’s essay titled “Always Returning” a decade after Sebald’s death, the Nigerian American novelist, essayist, photographer, and Internet aficionado Teju Cole describes his visit to Sebald’s grave in Norwich, England. Recreating Sebald’s characteristically associative process of reflection as the older writer’s words surface and recede in counterpoint with the local histories, also anchored in remembrances of World War II, recounted by Cole’s taxi driver, “Always Returning” perpetuates Sebald’s meandering and meditative narrative mode. In his novel, Open City (2011), Cole disseminates these Sebaldian

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hallmarks beyond the boundaries of Britain and Europe to the United States and Nigeria. Even as Europe’s mid-century crisis recedes from its still-acute deposit in Sebald, the challenge of negotiating aesthetic consolation with the wreckage of a melancholy history is likely to keep returning as contemporary global cultural production is increasingly re-mixed with non-European modernisms and emergent technologies.

NOTES 1 Born in the Bavarian village of Wertau in 1944, Sebald left Germany first for Switzerland and then for England, where he began his career as a language assistant at the University of Manchester in 1966, becoming a professor of European Literature at the University of East Anglia in 1970. He often expressed a sense of suspension between two equally foreign national homes, as in his claim to Maya Jaggi in September, 2001: “The longer I’ve stayed here [in England], the less I feel at home. In Germany, they think I’m a native but I feel at least as distant there.” 2 For a thoughtful consideration of the parallels between Woolf ’s and Benjamin’s conceptions of history, see Angeliki Spiropoulou, Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History: Constellations with Walter Benjamin. 3 Sebald’s critique of “standard novels . . . whose purpose is just to move the action along” (Jaggi, September 2001) and his assertion that his “medium is prose, not the novel” (cited by Meyer ix) have been inflated into an alleged repudiation of all versions of novelistic form. Austerlitz, however, is very much within the tradition of the fractured chronology, layered narration and self-conscious fictionality that characterize the modernist novel. For a concurring assessment that Austerlitz is Sebald’s “first ‘real’ novel,” see Huyssen (177, note 40). 4 Noting the Englishness of the correlation between interior domestic and mental space, Michael McKeon in The Secret History of Domesticity discusses the distinctively English character of a novelistic tradition that took advantage of domestic architecture as one of its enabling tropes. 5 Sebald invokes the metaphor of pockets to describe the circumscribed persistence of ancient forests (and thus of an ancient era) in modern Corsica (Cuomo 102–03). Woolf, August 30, 1923, Diary II: 263. 6 The allegorical figure of melancholy for Benjamin, Sebald, and Santer is the brooding angel depicted in Dű rer’s engraving of Melancholia surrounded by her abandoned instruments and tools. Santner gives this scenario of stranded objects a psychoanalytic inflection, Benjamin an historical materialist one. Sebald draws from both discursive traditions.

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7 Although Saint-Amour examines Woolf in detail as “one of our central anatomists” of anticipatory dread, he focuses on “The Mark on the Wall,” Mrs. Dalloway, and The Years rather than “The Death of a Moth” (93). 8 On Nabokov as the “butterfly man” in The Emigrants, see Curtin and Shrayer, de la Durantaye, and Karen Jacobs. 9 Woolf ’s absence from the reigning lists of Sebald’s influences is striking. In Sebald’s obituary in The Guardian, for example, Eric Homberger cites comparisons to Borges, Calvino, Thomas Bernhard, Nabokov, Kafka, Proust, and James. 10 Although the transnational turn has radically expanded the framework of modernist studies, Sebald’s own European orientation delimits the scope of this inquiry. For some of the most incisive interventions into what Susan Stanford Friedman has designated “planetary modernism,” see Doyle and Winkiel, Friedman, Gikandi, and Walkowitz. 11 On Greenwich in this context, see Amir Eshel and Stephen Kern, who suggests that the move toward standardized time fostered the modernist exploration of multiple private temporalities. 12 Interestingly, Carol Jacobs’s nuanced delineation of the diverse theories of time in Austerlitz does not include the figuration of redemptive time as home, although she rightly argues that no single account of time prevails in the text. 13 The most immediate source for Woolf ’s knowledge of Knole House was Vita Sackville-West’s Knole and the Sackvilles, which asserts that “there are in the house fifty-two staircases, corresponding to the weeks in the year, and three hundred and sixty-five rooms, corresponding to the days” (4). 14 The dust jacket can be seen as part of the exhibit on “Woolf in the World: A Pen and a Press of Her Own” at the Smith College library. In her notes on the exhibit, Frances Hooper identifies the elm tree but doesn’t mention the likelihood that the blank longitudinal spaces represent the river Ouse. Web. www.smith.edu/libraries/ libs/rarebook/exhibitions/penandpress/case15c.htm. July 15, 2017. 15 Although “The Death of a Moth” is undated, it is presumed to have been written during the period between a May 3, 1927, letter from Woolf ’s sister Vanessa Bell on vacation in Cassis, France, in which she describes the “moths flying madly in circles round me & the lamp,” and Woolf ’s diary entry explaining her decision to abandon The Moths as the title for the text that became The Waves. Vanessa’s letter is cited by Bell, Virginia Woolf II: 126. Woolf ’s entry is September 16, 1929, Diary III: 254. For the canonical distinction between the pessimism of the “late” modernist 1930s and the aesthetic optimism of the “high” modernist 1920s, see Jed Esty, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England. 16 The photograph of Nabokov’s collection has been identified by Lynn Wolff in “Untangling Fact from Fiction” (130). For an analysis of Sebald’s critique of the assumptions underlying the systematic practices of collecting, see Kraenzle, 126–45.

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For an appraisal of Nabokov’s scientific contributions as an entomologist, see Gould. On the literary ramifications of Nabokov’s avocation as a lepidopterist, see Nabokov, Boyd, and Pyle. Nabokov’s Butterflies. Woolf ’s own sustained interest in entomology found recurrent literary representation as well; the scene from Jacob’s Room, for example, occurs twice in that novel and recurs in a more detailed form in her essay “Reading.” 17 These coincidences are not the invention of Sebald, whose only alteration of Jacobson’s text is to make Max Stern the final name in the sequence. See Heshel’s Kingdom, 161.

WORKS CITED Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf: A Biography. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972. Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken, 1969, 253–64. Cole, Teju. “Always Returning.” The New Yorker. July 30, 2012. Web. www.newyorker. com/books/page-turner/always-returning>. October 30, 2017. Cole, Teju. Open City. New York: Random House, 2011. Cuomo, Joseph. “A Conversation with W.G. Sebald.” In The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald. Ed. Lynne Sharon Schwartz. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007, 93–117. Curtin, Adrian, and Maxim D. Shrayer, “Netting the Butterfly Man: The Significance of Vladimir Nabokov in W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants.” Religion and the Arts 9.3–4 (2005): 258–83. Doyle, Laura, and Laura Winkiel, eds. Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. de la Durantaye, Leland. “The Facts of Fiction, or the Figure of Vladimir Nabokov in W. G. Sebald.” Comparative Literature Studies 45.4 (2008): 425–45. Eshel, Amir. “Against the Power of Time: The Poetics of Suspension in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.” New German Critique 88 (Winter 2003): 71–96. Esty, Jed. A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans and ed. James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press, 1917, XIV: 243–58. Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Periodizing Modernism: Postcolonial Modernities and the Space/Time Borders of Modernist Studies.” Modernism/modernity 13.3 (2006): 425–43. Friedman, Susan Stanford. Planetary Modernism: Provocations on Modernity Across Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.

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Gikandi. Simon. Preface. Modernism in the World. Special Issue on Modernism and Transnationalism. Modernism/modernity 13.3 (2006), 419–24. Gould, Stephen Jay. “No Science Without Fancy, No Art Without Facts: The Lepidoptery of Vladimir Nabokov.” In I Have Landed: The End of a Beginning in Natural History. Cambridge: Harvard, 2011, 29–53. Homberger, Eric. “Obituary: W.G. Sebald.” The Guardian. December 17, 2001. Web. www.theguardian.com/news/2001/dec/17/guardianobituaries.books1. July 1, 2017. Huyssen, Andreas. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003. Jacobs, Carol. Sebald’s Vision. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Jacobs, Karen. “Sebald’s Apparitional Nabokov.” Twentieth-Century Literature 61.2 (Summer 2014): 137–68. Jacobson, Dan. Heshel’s Kingdom. 1998. London: Penguin, 1999. Jaggi, Maya. “The Last Word.” The Guardian. December 20, 2001. Web. www. theguardian.com/education/2001/dec/21/artsandhumanities.highereducation. June 15, 2017. Jaggi, Maya. “Recovered Memories.” The Guardian Profile: W.G. Sebald. The Guardian. September 21, 2001. Web. www.theguardian.com/books/2001/sep/22/ artsandhumanities.highereducation. July 15, 2017. James, Henry. “Preface to ‘The Portrait of a Lady.” In The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces. Intro by Richard P. Blackmuir. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1962. Kafatou, Sarah. “An Interview with W.G. Sebald.” Harvard Review 15 (Fall, 1998), 31–35. Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983. Kraenzle, Christine. “Picturing Place: Travel, Photography, and Imaginative Geography in W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn.” In Searching for Sebald. Ed. Lise Patt. Los Angeles: The Institute of Cultural Inquiry, 2007, 126–45. Matz, Jesse. “Introduction.” In Modernist Time Ecology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. McKeon, Michael. The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. Meyer, Sven. “Editorial Note.” W. G. Sebald. Campo Santo. Trans. Anthea Bell. New York: Modern Library, 2006. Nabokov, Vladimir. Speak, Memory. 1951. New York, Vintage, 1967. Nabokov, Vladimir, with Brian Boyd and Michael Pyle. Eds. Nabokov’s Butterflies: Unpublished and Uncollected Writings. Trans. Dmitri Nabokov. Boston, MA: Beacon, 2000. Sackville-West, Vita. Knole and the Sackvilles. New York: George H. Doran Co, 1922. Saint-Amour, Paul K. Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015.

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Santner, Eric. On Creaturely Life: Rilke Benjamin Sebald. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2006. Schwartz, Lynne Sharon. Ed. The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007. Sebald, W. G. After Nature. 1988. Trans. Michael Hamburger. New York: Modern Library, 2003. Sebald, W. G. The Rings of Saturn. 1995. Trans. Michael Hulse. New York: New Directions, 1999. Sebald. W. G. “Against the Irreversible: On Jean Amery.” In On the Natural History of Destruction. 1999. Trans. Anthea Bell. New York: Random House, 2003,143–67. Sebald, W. G. “An Attempt at Restitution.” Campo Santo. 2001. Trans. Anthea Bell. New York: Modern Library, 2006, 197–205. Sebald, W. G. Austerlitz. 2001. Trans. Anthea Bell. New York: Penguin, 2002. Sebald, W. G. “As Day and Night, Chalk and Cheese: On the Pictures of Jan Peter Tripp.” In Unrecounted. Trans. Michael Hamburger. New York: New Directions, 2004. 85–96. Silverblatt, Michael. “A Poem of an Invisible Subject.” Bookworm (December 6, 2001). Rpt. in The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald. Ed. Lynne Sharon Schwartz. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007, 77–86. Spiropoulou, Angeliki. Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History: Constellations with Walter Benjamin. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Wachtel, Eleanor. “Ghost Hunter.” CBC Radio, Writers & Company (April 18, 1998). Rpt. in The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald. Ed. Lynne Sharon Schwartz. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007. 37–61. Walkowitz, Rebecca L. Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism beyond the Nation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Wilson, Mary Griffin. “Sheets of Past: Reading the Image in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.” Contemporary Literature 54 (Spring 2013), 49–76. Wolff, Lynn L. “Untangling Fact from Fiction: Sebald’s Extratextual Materials.” In Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies, Vol. 14: W.G. Sebald’s Hybrid Poetics: Literature as Historiography. Hawthorne, NY: De Gruyter, 2014. Woolf in the World: A Pen and a Press of Her Own.” Smith College. Northampton, MA. www.smith.edu/libraries/libs/rarebook/exhibitions/penandpress/case15c.htm. Web. July 15, 2017. Woolf, Virginia. “The Death of the Moth.” In The Death of the Mother and Other Essays. 1942. New York: HBJ/Harvest, 1970, 3–6. Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 2, 1920–24; Vol. 3, 1925–30. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1978, 1980. Woolf, Virginia. Jacob’s Room. 1922. New York: HBJ/Harvest, 2008. Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. 1925. New York: HBJ/Harvest, 1981. Woolf, Virginia. Orlando. 1928. New York: HBJ/Harvest, 2006. Woolf, Virginia. “Reading.” In The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays. New York: HBJ/Harvest, 1950, 151–79.

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Woolf, Virginia. “A Sketch of the Past.” In Moments of Being. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. 2nd ed. New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1985, 61–137. Zilcosky, John. “Lost and Found: Disorientation, Nostalgia, and Holocaust Melodrama in Sebald’s Austerlitz,” MLN 121 (2006): 679–98.

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On Rereading Woolf ’s Orlando as Transgender Text Margaret Homans

This chapter reads recent reinterpretations of Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando and offers a new rereading of the novel itself in order to address the problem of how transgender histories can be located (found, or placed) in representational works from historical epochs that precede our own time’s fast-changing formations of gender and sexuality. Starting with critical debates about how transgender readings can and cannot be done, I show how recent efforts to enlist Orlando as a transgender fiction do not do justice either to the novel or to the needs of transgender reading subjects. I then reread the novel with a focus not on the alluring central character but on the novel’s narrative form—specifically, the narrative’s voices. Compared to prior transgender readings of Orlando, this reading method offers a potentially more satisfying way to read for transgender presences in a literary work of the past. My rereading is thus both a new reading of one novel and a contribution to methods of transgender reading; it is also a polemic in favor of the vital work of rereading. With two exceptions (a play and a film) the rereadings that I discuss and perform are not recyclings, since they do not take apart and recombine the material they read; instead, turning to the past to move into the future, they treat the literary text as an infinitely renewable resource.

READING TRANSGENDER HISTORIES Two founding documents of transgender activism and transgender studies from the early 1990s, Leslie Feinberg’s “Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come” and Susan Stryker’s “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above

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the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage,” locate precedents for contemporary transgender identities in distant pasts that might not have recognized them. These powerful founding essays aggressively repurpose historical texts, finding in them, or imposing on them, new meanings to validate and empower the present. Feinberg searches for “transgender warriors” across geographies and through history, claiming documented and mythic figures alike (Joan of Arc, the Amazons, an Egyptian statue of a bearded woman) for “the persistence of transgender” up through the transwomen who led the Stonewall Rebellion. Stryker goes to literary history for a related purpose: The transsexual body is an unnatural body. .  .  . It is flesh torn apart and sewn together again in a shape other than that in which it was born. In these circumstances, I find a deep affinity between myself as a transsexual woman and the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Like the monster, I am too often perceived as less than fully human due to the means of my embodiment; like the monster’s as well, my exclusion from human community fuels a deep and abiding rage in me that I, like the monster, direct against the conditions in which I must struggle to exist. (“My Words” 238)

Finding “affinity” with a fictional character, Stryker is not concerned with what Shelley’s text may have meant in its historical moment or whether Shelley, long before the first documented transsexual surgery, could have had a transsexual body in mind. The debate is never quite over about whether texts from the past may be read unhistorically. The academic rise of “queer temporalities” (among other trends) blurred the line dividing “historical” from “unhistorical” readings. Linear history is an effect of the straight mind, all readings serve the moment in which they occur, and “history” is as unknowable as sexuality itself (see, for example, Freccero, Menon, and Traub). Rita Felski calls for acknowledging “the historicity of artworks” while also refusing to see them “imprisoned in their moment of origin” (“Context” 575). Arguing for a greatly expanded definition of the “context” in which texts from other times and places are read, she writes, The significance of a text is not exhausted by what it reveals or conceals about the social conditions that surround it. Rather, it is also a matter of what it makes possible in the viewer or reader—what kinds of emotions it elicits, what perceptual changes in triggers, what affective bonds it calls into being. What would it mean to do justice to these responses rather than treating them as naï ve, rudimentary, or defective? (585)

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Stryker’s repurposing of Frankenstein’s monster as a figure for the contemporary transsexual exemplifies this expanded definition of context, an “unhistorical” reading that foregrounds “affective bonds” between reader and character. Transgender activism and transgender studies have depended on “unhistorical” readings to create a transgender past because of their relative newness as socially visible and nameable phenomena. In an essay on “transaware” and “inclusive” pedagogies, Kirsten Saxton, Ajuan Maria Mance, and Rebekah Edwards, who teach at a women’s college that admits transgender students, write about their efforts to locate transgender subjects wherever they can in literary and cultural history. Eighteenth-century scholar Edwards discusses the challenge of assessing what might count as a transgender voice in eighteenth-century court documents, fiction, and autobiography. Although as an historical project this search can be anachronistic, like hunting for homosexuality prior to David Halperin’s “hundred years,” the authors sympathize with a student who complained that their experience was “erased” when the teacher referred to The Well of Loneliness as a lesbian book (as it had been for most of its critical history) rather than as the transgender book it became when the student read it (Saxton, Mance, and Edwards 177). The three authors urge colleagues to teach texts that will sustain a transgender reading and offer students a sense that transgender people have a cultural history, so that, with Leslie Feinberg, it is possible to “find myself in history.” The Well of Loneliness can be read as a transgender (rather than a lesbian) book on the basis of historical context, as Jay Prosser does; but for Saxton, Mance, and Edwards, felt affinity matters just as much. From an historicist point of view, however, presentist reading for affinity may constitute misreading or appropriation. Responding to a trend to search the past for queer-positive figures to match the “affirmative turn in queer studies,” Heather Love argues that texts of “backward feelings” such as Hall’s “turn away from us” and “resist our advances” (4, 8). Does it matter, for instance, that the cross-dressing eighteenth-century author Charlotte Charke, or Hall’s hero Stephen Gordon, might not have considered themselves transgender subjects or transmen in our contemporary sense? And does it matter that Stephen’s “personhood made in the image of the other’s hatred has survived attempts to reread the novel as a narrative of heroic resistance” (Love 26)? In order to avoid appropriating texts out of context, Felski and others turn to Wai Chee Dimock’s “resonances”:

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Texts are objects that do a lot of traveling; moving across time, they run into new semantic networks, new ways of imputing meaning. What Dimock calls resonance is a text’s capacity to signify across time, to trigger unexpected echoes in new places. (“Context” 580)

Similarly focusing on “affinity” and “affective bonds,” Alexander Eastwood makes the case for searching for transgender phenomena far and wide in literary history. Asking poignantly “what readings have been lost?” to a too-rigorous historicism, he wants to join the “turn away from the trenchant historicism” that has dominated literature departments and “take a capacious approach to trans literature without effacing the specific materiality of trans experiences” (590– 91). He does so not by (anachronistically) looking for transgender characters or identities but instead by listening for Dimock’s resonances and thus locating the “latent presence of trans affects, temporalities, and bodies” in texts that may lack any explicit transgender elements (601). Like Dimock and Felski, Eastwood licenses an almost infinite latitude for such unhistorical repurposing projects, particularly transgender ones.

HISTORIES OF READING ORLANDO To return to the question with which this chapter began and ask it of Virginia Woolf ’s novel, how might Orlando serve as a location for the “latent presence” of transgender histories, as it so patently seems ready to do, if Woolf ’s text could not literally have referenced twenty-first-century transgender subjectivities? What assortment of historical discoveries and unhistorical affinities would allow such an act of location to take place? This section traces two principal and opposite strands of transgender readings of Orlando; in the next section, I suggest another way of locating the novel’s transgender presence. I share my approach to the novel as a cis-gender reader who is nonetheless deeply concerned, as a teacher and scholar, to enable transgender readings wherever such resonances may be heard. Although my subject here is principally readings of Orlando, the novel has also been subject to more creative recyclings than any other Woolf text besides A Room of One’s Own. The characteristic changeability of the hero-heroine, who becomes a new Orlando with every passing century, seems to authorize an extreme “versioning” in both creative and critical domains (Silver). It is the only Woolf novel to have been made into a widely released film. Christine Froula’s

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“Orlando Lives” surveys myriad filmed and performed Orlandos around the globe, all of which take apart and recombine the text, from Sally Potter’s elegant 1992 film starring Tilda Swinton to three different play scripts, including Sarah Ruhl’s frequently performed version (I will later discuss the Ruhl and Potter Orlandos). With its famous sex-change scene, where Woolf ’s narrator announces that Orlando “was a woman” even though “the change of sex . . . did nothing whatever to alter their identity” (102), its teasing reflections on whether gender identity is deep or superficial (is gender socially constructed through learned behavior and clothing, or was it “a change in Orlando herself that dictated her choice of a woman’s dress and of a woman’s sex?” 139), and its sequence of scenes demonstrating the historical variability of gender, it has presented not only to filmmakers and playwrights but also to generations of readers an alluring resource for thinking about sexuality, gender, and, more recently, transgender being. The novel has invited widely varying interpretations: in debates about gender and sexuality, where feminist and queer came into conflict, Brenda Silver writes, “Woolf was claimed for almost every position” (212); similarly, in conflicts between queer and lesbian readings of Woolf, “Woolf is a powerful figure of identification” for all sides (Sproles 11). First celebrated as an odd yet beautiful fantasy, Orlando became in subsequent readings—to note only those focused on gender and sexuality—a witty roman à  clef about a bisexual aristocrat, a brave or well hidden defense of lesbianism, an undoing of such sexual/gender categories as bisexual or lesbian, and a postmodern account of the social construction, historical variability, performativity, and/or fluidity of gender. Transgender readings of the novel, following these critical developments, have tended to fall into two categories: to borrow Eve Sedgwick’s useful distinction, identitarian or minoritizing readings on the one hand, anti-identitarian or universalizing readings on the other. The identitarian strand descends—conceptually though not thematically—from lesbian readings such as the reading of Leslie Hankins, who claims that “Orlando came out of the closet as a lesbian text in the 1970s and remains out” in the 1990s (181), with a continuous line of lesbian readings leading to her own in 1997. Patricia Cramer in 2012 maintains the lesbian reading of the novel as a defense of a specific sexual minority; I will return to this tradition later. Meanwhile, the postmodern trend in reading for gender fluidity and performativity builds on an earlier focus on Orlando’s androgyny in works such as Maria DiBattista in 1980 or that of Makiko Minow-Pinkney, who in 1987 linked Orlando’s androgyny to transgression and the carnivalesque. Toril Moi drew on Derrida and Kristeva in 1985 to champion Woolf as avatar of

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the postmodern destabilization of fixed identity categories; Rachel Bowlby in 1988 focused on “Orlando’s vacillation”; Pamela Caughie’s Woolf of 1991 was postmodern, all linguistic construction and literary play; Karen Kaivola, reading Orlando in 1998, found that Woolf claimed no sexual identity, seeking instead to escape categorization. Jane deGay at the annual Woolf conference in 2000 saw Orlando through the lens of theatrical performance and (citing Judith Butler) as a challenge to the unified subject and stable gender identity; and summing up in 2000, Laura Marcus (in no less authoritative a venue than the Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf) discussed the novel chiefly in terms of Bowlby’s interests from 1988: “Orlando is . . . ‘postmodern’ in its production of ‘performative’ identities, and its radical undermining of fixed gender identities” (240). Identitarian, lesbian readings were not only minoritizing but minoritized. By 2000, among feminist and queer scholars, there was something of a consensus around this postmodernist-feminist-shading-into-queer-theory vision of Orlando’s anti-identitarian fluidity. Around 2000, however, this consensus was challenged by the emergence of transgender subjectivity as an identitarian lens through which to see Orlando. At first transgender is just another adjective for the gender fluidity and performativity that so enchanted postmodern feminist readers in the 1980s and 1990s, especially after Sandy Stone’s 1991 “Manifesto” argued for the power of transgender subjects to challenge gender norms and create new gender possibilities. Stef Craps uses transgender in this way in 2000, citing Butler to find Orlando “a transgressive figure who recognizes no borders or rules of time, gender or sexuality” and who reveals “the arbitrariness and instability of the binary system of gender differentiation” (178–79). Up to this point, Craps’s essay is indistinguishable from the postmodern gender readings of the 1990s, eventually quoting the same passages Bowlby quotes for Orlando’s “vacillation.” But then Craps invokes “the transsexual as text” (Stone’s term) as offering to “reconstitute the elements of gender in new and unexpected geometries” (Stone 296). Craps comments, “Transsexuality, then, is a position from which dominant discourses can be criticized,” and, further, Stone “makes us realize that we are all passing. All of us have to work hard at being men or women, at achieving culturally recognized identities, and in that sense we are all transsexuals” (181– 82). The transsexual is invoked but only to buttress and continue the postmodern feminist and queer reading of the 1980s and 1990s. Craps’s use of “transsexuality” as (merely) a fresh way to name Orlando’s disruptive effects echoes other contemporaneous uses of transgender or transsexual as a metaphor. Felski pairs Baudrillard’s apocalyptic 1993 claim

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that we have reached the end of history now that “we are all transsexuals” with Donna Haraway’s “redemptive” use of the same figure as equally “cultural appropriations of the figure of transsexuality as a semiotically dense emblem” (“Fin de Siecle” 341–42); she adds: Its elevation to the status of universal signifier [risks] homogenizing differences that matter politically [such as] the difference between those who occasionally play with the trope of transsexuality and those others for whom it is a matter of life or death. (347)

Twenty-first-century transgender studies, too, insists on distinguishing transgender used as an emblem of postmodernity from the lived experience of individuals in particular bodies, from whose perspective remarks such as “we are all transsexuals” is an impolitic act of appropriation. Susan Stryker, whose two Routledge anthologies of 2006 and 2013 did much to institutionalize the field in the academy, notes that transgender became in the 1990s “an overdetermined construct, like ‘cyborg,’ through which contemporary culture imagined a future filled with new possibilities for being human, or becoming posthuman” (“[De] Subjugated” 8). Instead, she claims, “Transgender studies considers the embodied experience of the speaking subject” (12), and both anthologies favor social science and historical research over literary theory or philosophy. In insisting on this distinction and announcing this identitarian turn, Stryker echoes Jacob Hale’s “suggested rules for non-transsexuals,” including, “Don’t imagine that you can write about the trope of transsexuality, the figure of the transsexual, transsexual discourse/s, or transsexual subject positions without writing about transsexual subjectivities, lives, experiences, embodiments. . . .” (In an update, these rules apply to transgender, too.) In this view, Craps’s reading of Orlando as a figure of indeterminacy appropriates and allegorizes “the transsexual” and so reduces and dehumanizes the subjectivities of those who actually live transsexual or transgender lives. By contrast to Craps’s essay and in harmony with Felski and Stryker, Melanie Taylor (like Craps writing in 2000) sees transgender Orlando not as a trope of indeterminacy but as an account of a person living a transsexual life. Conceptually if not thematically, Taylor follows the identitarian, minoritizing approach of lesbian readings such as those of Hankins and Cramer, and she also follows Jan Morris, who in 1974 found Orlando to be a model for transgender living. Sharing Prosser’s conception of gender transition as the attainment of a subject’s right body and true gender, Taylor finds similarities between Orlando and recent transsexual autobiographies, even though doing so requires her to read without

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irony the sex-change scene in which most readers see Woolf ’s mockery of the “truth” of gender (“the trumpets pealed Truth! Truth! Truth! We have no choice left but confess—he was a woman,” 102). Taylor acknowledges that the novel can support a reading of Orlando as “the transgendered figure allegorized in queer theory’s constructionist account of gender” (203), but, emphasizing the novel’s homage to Vita Sackville-West’s cross-dressing, she maintains that Orlando is closer to transsexual life-writing than to the universal allegory of Baudrillard, Haraway, or Craps. Similarly and more recently, Madelyn Detloff, while arguing that Woolf “queered heterosexual norms in her life and work,” also treats Orlando’s sex change not as a trope for gender fluidity but rather as an account of lived experience: “Orlando’s character .  .  . troubles the presumption that if one is born a certain sex (male), that one inevitably must live one’s life as the corresponding gender (a man)” (“Woolf and Lesbian” 345, 348). This sentence presupposes transgender subjectivity and uses a suitable pronoun—one—to refer back to that subject position. As in Taylor’s essay, “the transsexual” is not asked to represent a universal human condition.1 In the spring of 2015—at the time of the first season of Amazon’s TV series Transparent, of Caitlyn Jenner coming out as a transwoman in Vanity Fair, and of a spate of public announcements by elite women’s colleges about their admissions policies for transstudents—I taught Orlando in a course called “Fiction and Sexual Politics.” Students were not much interested in Orlando’s “vacillation” and the teasing passages in which Woolf ’s narrator offers contradictory accounts of gender ontology. Instead, like Taylor and Detloff and as if following Stryker’s blueprint for minoritizing rather than universalizing transgender studies, the students saw Orlando as a transwoman whose relative degree of social acceptance presents a pleasing model for transgender life in the present. One student took us to the scene where Orlando, having left England in the seventeenth century as a handsome, aristocratic ambassador to Turkey, returns in the eighteenth as a woman. Despite having lost the title to her ancient estate, Orlando is greeted joyously by the family servants. They notice the change—“Mrs. Grimsditch . . . was overcome with emotion and could do no more than gasp Milord! Milady! Milord! Milady!”—but the change doesn’t make any difference: No one showed an instant’s suspicion that Orlando was not the Orlando they had known. . . . Moreover, said Mrs. Grimsditch . . . if her Lord was a Lady now, she had never seen a lovelier one, nor was there a penny piece to choose between them; one was as well favored as the other; they were as like as two peaches on one branch. (125–26)

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For students in the spring of 2015, this scene of a transwoman’s social acceptance (never mind that it also illustrates the power of class hierarchy) was the high point of the novel, which they loved for its prescient imagining of a scene that was rare in 1928 (we had also read The Well of Loneliness) and remains unusual today. Thus, transgender readings of Orlando since 2000 bifurcate in opposed directions, with the novel enlisted on both sides of a debate about what constitutes the proper object of transgender studies. On the one hand, Orlando represents gender fluidity, or the post-human, or “we are all transsexuals”; on the other, Orlando is a lifelike character who transitions from male to female, exhibiting, in Stryker’s terms, “the embodied experience of the speaking subject.” In the fall of 2015, Stryker herself visited my classroom; she was at Yale to receive an award and give a speech; this time the class was “Feminist and Queer Theory.” Having read the introductions to her Routledge anthologies, a student pressed her on the claim she makes (before objecting to transgender’s appropriation to stand for “new possibilities for being human”) that around the year 2000 “‘transgender’ [as a term] moved .  .  . from representation to reality” (“[De]Subjugated” 2). Acknowledging that this is not a sustainable distinction, nonetheless Stryker insisted on the shift of emphasis, with a dismissive remark: “Representation? That’s just Orlando.” Why might Stryker have gone to Orlando to epitomize an unwanted “representation,” or the appropriation of transgender existence as a universalizing emblem? Prosser’s Second Skins, which appeared in 1998, led the shift “from representation to reality”; Stryker may have been channeling Prosser’s dismissal of the novel for its failure to depict gender transition in a realist mode. Chris Coffman argues that Orlando’s popularity as a queer text in the 1990s ebbed with the rise of views like Prosser’s that favor “realism as a literary genre” over “linguistic experimentation and gender fluidity” (paragraphs 10, 12). In a pedagogical trend aligned with Prosser’s and Stryker’s views, transgender works that typically appear on college syllabi (e.g., Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues, Imogen Binnie’s Nevada, the stories in Tom Leger and Riley MacLeod’s The Collection: Short Fiction from the Transgender Vanguard, or Kim Fu’s For Today I Am a Boy) use first-person narration by, or focalization through, a central transgender character, and the most popular current literary mode of transgender representation is memoir, with its definitional focus on the bildung of the central character in such works as Jennifer Finney Boylan’s She’s Not There or Janet Mock’s Redefining Realness. If “embodied experience” is the core of transgender studies, for Stryker as

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for  Prosser, then Orlando—along with any work of fiction, especially by a cis-gender author—doesn’t count and can’t help the transgender reader “find [her]self in history,” despite Taylor and Detloff ’s minoritizing defenses of the novel’s transgender reality and despite my students’ embrace of Orlando’s brief scene that invited their identification.2 For Stryker, as for Prosser, because Orlando functions as a figurative representation of gender indeterminacy, she can’t also be a believable, relatable transwoman. And indeed, the novel doesn’t readily support such an identitarian reading. The main character only occasionally brings contemporary trans experience to mind: as Coffman points out, she suffers neither social stigma nor gender dysphoria, nor does she ever seek to change her sex or gender, least of all through medical intervention. Moreover, given the novel’s shimmering surface of illusions, its selfconscious and ironic narration, and its conspicuous anti-realism, it is difficult to see the protagonist as a person at all—if characters ever simply model human beings.3 Reducing Orlando to a contemporary transwoman who transitions in a linear way from one gender to another depends on unseeing too much of the novel, and it can’t do justice to the novel’s experimental textuality. Yet alternate ways to read for a transgender “latent presence” remain: when Coffman seeks to “open up the territory of transgender literary and cultural studies to questions that have gone unposed” (paragraph 4) by Prosser and Stryker (with their preference for the realistic depiction of transgender lives), she goes to Orlando to do so. There are better ways to reread Orlando for the contemporary transgender moment, besides either over-relying on a narrowly realist view of character or returning to a discredited universalizing metaphor.

REREADING ORLANDO: NARRATIVE FORM AS TRANSGENDER TEXT What case, then, can be made for rereading Orlando “unhistorically” as a lively object for transgender studies, without either universalizing Orlando’s vacillation (“we are all transsexuals”) or minoritizing the novel as an account of a model character? (By rereading I mean reading with awareness of prior readings, reading the text while also responding to the history of its readings.) Can Orlando be useful to readers as a transgender text because of, rather than despite, the novel’s figurative power and representational complexity? Is there a way to read so as to locate—not only to place, but also to find—a transgender “latent presence” in the novel, seen not as a failed work of realism, but as the marvelous and fantastical “representation” that it is?

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As we have seen, Eastwood affirms an unhistorical theory of transgender reading that relies on listening for Dimock’s “resonances” and shared affect rather than on finding documentable historical connections or plausible transgender characters. This approach has proved productive for recent rereadings of Orlando. Coffman listens for Orlando’s “resonances with contemporary transgender narratives” and “cross-historical reverberations” not by trying to align Orlando the character with contemporary transgender identities but by finding common ground between Orlando’s “anti-identitarian” politics and contemporary feminist politics (paragraphs 24, 35).4 Similarly, Lucas Crawford finds Orlando to be not about the rightly or wrongly gendered body but about gender as transitory affect. Instead of focusing on the sex-change scene and the narrator’s musings about gender and clothes (cited in virtually all readings of transgender Orlando including Coffman’s), Crawford highlights Orlando’s “wandering poetic feeling” (171) in the modern scenes.5 Both of these rereadings sidestep the opposition between “reality” and “representation” (or between minoritizing and universalizing readings) by expanding what counts as the reality of transgender life—politics for Coffman, affect for Crawford—so that Woolf ’s novel can be seen to contain that reality as a “latent presence.” Rereading for resonances, Coffman also locates a transgender presence in Orlando by reading for form. For Coffman, the extension of the narrative of gender change over time “thwart[s] readers assumptions about the coherence of life narratives” and so constitutes a formally transgender narrative structure (paragraph 21).6 Building on Coffman, Pamela Caughie likewise reads Orlando as formally transgender, enjoying the pun that translates “transgender” into French as “transgenre” and shifting the emphasis away from character: “The transsexual in Orlando is the narrative’s organizing principle, not its subject,” she writes; “Orlando provides not the transsexual’s life but a different way to narrate that life” (“Temporality” 507, 518). Like Coffman’s, her formal reading focuses on the novel’s nonstandard temporality: its folding and compressing of times and its stretching of the hero’s story across centuries.7 For Caughie, the novel’s queer temporality and its mixing of genres are sufficient to mark its form as transgender. But, I argue, other features of the narrative are more explicitly gendered than either the resonances heard by Crawford and Coffman or the nonnormative temporality emphasized by Coffman and Caughie, and I will show how these features—perhaps more persuasively—make Orlando legible as a latently transgender text. Although literary forms are not intrinsically gendered, they can become saturated with gendered meanings at particular historical moments.8 Orlando’s

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narrative abounds in (mostly) satirical replicas of just such historically contingent gendered forms. These forms were gendered for Woolf, and they remain gendered for twenty-first-century readers, although what their resonant presence in the novel can mean for readers has not remained static. The highly conspicuous plot of Orlando’s gender change is counterpointed—not in any neat way paralleled—by a less visible and more complex sequence of gender changes and contradictions in the narration. As Suzanne Young observes, “The work tries on a breathtaking array of period styles, from the rhetorical ornament of Euphuism and the digressiveness of Sterne to the bizarre collages of surrealist prose” (170).9 These styles carry gendered meanings, and, recycled by being taken out of context and juxtaposed in unexpected ways, they make the narration—the voice of the biographer and the other voices the narration summons—an important location of transgender resonance.10 Woolf initially dreamed up the book in a distinctively feminine mode: a “Defoe narrative,” a “fantasy to be called ‘the Jessamy Brides’” about two women, based on real-life couples, with “Sapphism . . . to be suggested.” In a diary entry in March 1927, she anticipates the book will be “an escapade . . . great fun to write” (131). But when she wrote it the next year, the first few chapters conjoin a lighthearted and ironic romantic fantasy, coded feminine,11 to the conventionally masculine genre of great-man biography, the model for which was her father Leslie Stephen’s Dictionary of National Biography, which profiles only men, with the exception of George Eliot. The balance of these gendered voices is shifting and unstable, with the fantasy elements constantly disrupting but never entirely silencing the biographer’s dogged pursuit of the truth. For example, Chapter 3, in which Orlando changes sex, begins with the lumbering voice of the seventeenthcentury biographer: It is, indeed, highly unfortunate, and much to be regretted that at this stage of Orlando’s career, when he played a most important part in the public life of his country, we have least information to go on. (88)

The biographer goes on to list Orlando’s ambassadorial accomplishments and then describes the fire that destroyed his papers. Here the mocking tone of the fantasist starts to break through, making fun of the document-obsessed biographer: Often the paper was scorched a deep brown in the middle of the most important sentence. Just when we thought to elucidate a secret that has puzzled historians for a hundred years, there was a hole in the manuscript big enough to put your finger through.

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This intrusively anatomical image requires the reader to stop and imagine the dignified biographer incongruously poking his finger through the precious manuscript; more likely, the disembodied finger is that of the fantasist, hijacking the narrative to poke holes in the biographer’s high-minded but deluded belief in truth. The paragraph concludes: We have done our best to piece out a meagre summary from the charred fragments that remain; but often it has been necessary to speculate, to surmise, and even to make use of the imagination.

With this remark the biographer yields the narrative to the fantasist, who takes over the story for the sex-change scene that follows, even though the biographer also struggles hysterically to preserve control. This shift in the narrative voice, from coded-masculine to coded-feminine, tracks with the story of Orlando’s sex change itself. But because the narrative voice or voices never stay the same, running through a pastiche of period styles as the centuries advance, the early chapters’ gendered duel between stodgy biographer and fantasy writer gives way to other, differently gendered contests for control of the narrative. Another such struggle occurs near the start of Chapter 5, which opens with a pastiche elaboration of Ruskin’s “storm-cloud of the nineteenth century” describing the rain and damp that permeate England, leading to “unparalleled profusion” in home decoration, clothing, verbiage, and human fertility, and thence to the British Empire and to rigid gender difference (Beer 144–46). When Orlando takes out the manuscript of her poem “The Oak Tree,” she finds her hand cannot control her pen, which at first produces a spreading blot and then “the most insipid verse she had ever read in her life” (actual verses by Letitia Elizabeth Landon), including: She was so changed, the soft carnation cloud Once mantling o’er her cheek like that which eve Hangs o’er the sky, glowing with roseate hue, Had faded into paleness . . . (174)

Unlike the intrusive finger at the beginning of Chapter 3, whose fantastic, feminized subversion of the stodgy male biographer is a welcome interruption, this disembodied and distinctly feminine pen pouring out Victorian cliché s has interrupted not only Orlando’s pride in authorship but also the male biographer’s (at this point) less obtrusively gendered narration. The pen continues to make “one lachrymose blot after another” (177) until Orlando resolves the “tingling”

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in her ring finger by finding a husband, who arrives at the climax of a Brontė parody, Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre sent up as floridly sentimental gothic romances (180–83). The pen that took over Orlando’s hand with its “mellifluous fluencies” (177) has now taken over the narrative itself. The narration of the novel’s final chapter involves further contentious gendered conversations between the biographer’s tradition-bound style and other voices that question, intrude, and finally take charge. The biographer finds nothing to say as Orlando completes “The Oak Tree” in the late Victorian period: he needs action in order to narrate, and would settle for love in this case, since (in his androcentric view) “love . . . is woman’s whole existence”; but he looks for love “as the male novelists define it,” and Orlando is merely kind, faithful, and generous (198). Besides, she is busy writing: her writing disables his. As a woman writer, Orlando invents modern poetry (“‘A toy boat on the Serpentine,’ and ‘Ecstasy,’” she repeats to herself, while discovering that what “matters” is “something useless, sudden, violent; something that costs a life; red, blue, purple; a spirit; a splash,” 211) and, with modernist compression, she summarizes all of Victorian literature in six lines. The fusty biographer, resisting Orlando’s feminist modernity and preferring the “sixty volumes octavo” approach to literary criticism, finds no room in his prolix narrative for the last of Orlando’s “six lines” (214). This gendered sparring echoes earlier struggles for control of the narrative, and in the next episode the biographer recalls his long-ago conjuring of a Baroque masque to delay the revelation of Orlando’s sex change. Seeking now to avoid a similarly naked revelation (Orlando is about to give birth), the biographer wishes in vain “that, as on a former occasion, Purity, Chastity, and Modesty would push the door ajar and provide, at least, a breathing space” (214). Admitting he no longer controls “these ladies,” the biographer looks for distraction elsewhere, and in place of the masque’s comforting affirmation of gender hierarchy, the biographer describes a scene in Kew Gardens that is far from orderly and that, surprisingly, reproduces Orlando’s own modernist style: I will show you to-day (the second of March) under the plum tree, a grape hyacinth, and a crocus, and a bud, too, on the almond tree; so that to walk there is to be thinking of bulbs, hairy and red, thrust into the earth in October; flowering now; and to be dreaming of more than can rightly be said, and to be taking from its case a cigarette or cigar even, and to be flinging a cloak under (as the rhyme requires) an oak, and there to sit, waiting the kingfisher, which, it is said, was once seen to cross in the evening from bank to bank. (215)

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Brenda Helt, reading Orlando as a bisexual text, argues that this passage shows “how polymorphous desire enables artistic inspiration” (154). The passage can surely be described as bisexual or polymorphous in terms of desire, or as trans or nonbinary in terms of gender. More striking, in the context of the chapter, is that the biographer speaks these lines only moments after yearning for his old heteronormative allies, Purity and her friends. The biographer’s voice and narrative project seem to have merged with or capitulated to the feminized lyricism—now given a positive, modernist spin—that it has been his long endeavor to denigrate and defeat. Following this passage, the biographer casts doubt on masculine authority, wondering whether “natural desire . . . is what the male novelist says it is” (216) and critiquing the Dictionary of National Biography itself, which has subtended the biographer’s project of creating a linear, rational narrative of Orlando’s life. Such an approach to life-writing, the biographer now admits, fails to capture the subjectivity of time and can capture only “six or seven” of a person’s thousands of selves (226). Still, he cannot adjust to the alternative style required to convey how little Orlando cares about having won a prize: “we must here snatch time to remark how discomposing it is for her biographer that this culmination and peroration should be dashed from us on a laugh casually like this; but the truth is that when we write of a woman, everything is out of place . . . the accent never falls where it does with a man.” (228)

Again linking modernist style with women’s writing (and echoing Woolf ’s 1919 manifesto “Modern Novels,” where “the accent falls a little differently,” 35), the biographer concedes the limitations of male-defined biography. From here on, the voice of the biographer gives way to a voice that more compatibly records Orlando’s thoughts in free indirect discourse, “ecstasy” being the repeated keynote, as if Orlando, the modernist woman artist standing outside herself, were performing her own narration. Anyone who has read Orlando will recognize the changeable voice of the narration, sometimes coextensive with the narrow-minded biographer, sometimes outside or beyond him and channeling the variably gendered voices that I have discussed. In the examples I have detailed, the narration does not so much combine masculine and feminine styles, as we might expect from Woolf ’s celebration of androgyny a year later in A Room of One’s Own, as lurch from one to another in crosscutting interruptions, even as what counts as masculine and feminine changes from era to era. As the narration crosses back and forth over the gender line, a reader could locate a “latent” transgender “presence” in

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the narration itself. This array of voices represents a more complex figure of transgender presence (and one that takes into account more of the text) than the relatively simple one-way transition that comes into view when the minoritizing reader focuses on the protagonist as a person. Nor can the transgender presence in the narration be mistaken for the universalizing, appropriative mode of “representation” to which Stryker objects, for it never congeals into an allegorical figure. If Orlando’s form might be said to offer transgender resonances to the attuned rereader, it could also be said to approximate Sandy Stone’s claim that “transsexuals [constitute not a third gender but] a genre—a set of embodied texts whose potential for productive disruption of structured sexualities .  .  . has yet to be explored” (231).12 For Stone to call transsexuals a genre or “a set of embodied texts” instead of a gender goes a step beyond the commonsense claim for language’s powers of social construction that she also makes when she shows that, in order to obtain surgical intervention, early transsexuals had to conform to surgeons’ binary gender narratives. Stryker too notes language’s constructive power in “My Words to Victor Frankenstein,” which concludes that transsexual “monstrosity” is an effect of mislabeling: “phallogocentric language . . . is the scalpel that defines our flesh” (253). But how can a transsexual, or any person, “be” a text? Stryker may be glossing Stone’s claim about genre when she announces a “transgender aesthetic” that her essay embodies or “replicate[s].” The essay flamboyantly mixes genres by juxtaposing literary criticism, personal reflection, a poem, and a section titled “theory.” Stryker explains: I wanted the formal structure of the work to express a transgender aesthetic by replicating our abrupt, often jarring transitions between genders—challenging generic classification with the forms of my words just as my transsexuality challenges the conventions of legitimate gender. (245)

In this account, Stryker’s text itself becomes a transgender body. In contrast to Stryker’s more recent insistence that “reality” is distinct from and more valuable than “representation” (“[De]Subjugated” 2), the older essay’s creative literary experimentation with a “transgender aesthetic” of “jarring transitions,” together with its narrator’s identification with the fictional monster, suggests that the Stryker of 1994 could join Stone in imagining transgender as a literary genre, and transsexuals as embodied texts.13 Read in such a context, which collapses the distinction between “representation” and “reality,” Orlando could not be dismissed (as Stryker did in my classroom in 2015) as mere representation, since the novel’s multiply gendered narration could be seen, somewhat like the

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“transgender aesthetic” of Stryker’s essay, if not exactly to “replicate” the “jarring transitions” of transgender embodiment, at least to offer transgender resonances for today’s readers to hear. Thus a transgender body may be locatable in Woolf ’s text, but it isn’t, or isn’t only, to be found in the person of Orlando; rather, if we follow the lead of Stryker’s 1994 essay instead of her later views, Orlando’s character is a signpost or decoy alerting the reader to listen for the transgender resonances that can be heard in the narration itself.

TWO POPULAR ORLANDOS: ORLANDO WITHOUT NARRATION Attending to the novel’s narration also highlights what is lacking in the two most visible contemporary recyclings of Orlando, Sally Potter and Tilda Swinton’s 1992 film and Sarah Ruhl’s 1998 play, and I highlight them here as a way of negatively confirming my own rereading. These versions take the novel apart and reassemble it with new parts added and significant parts removed. As products of the 1990s, the decade of queer and postmodern feminist readings, they emphasize Orlando’s “vacillation” and gender fluidity; the film remains a star vehicle for Swinton, who in publicity for the film in 1992 and in rerelease in 2015 emphasizes her identification with the “androgynous” main character. Both play and film capture the universalizing allegory of “we are all transsexuals,” but, I will argue, in doing so they lose an important source of transgender resonance. Through their persuasiveness and popularity, these recyclings may be in the process of replacing the novel: Googling “Orlando” led, for a while (after references to the city in Florida) to Potter’s film and, next, to Amazon’s page for the novel, which opened, “In 1928, way before everyone else was talking about gender-bending and way, way, before the terrific movie with Tilda Swinton . . . .” On my college campus, Ruhl’s play is produced by students so regularly (starting with an initial production at the Drama School in 2010) that acquaintances are as likely to know the play as the film or the novel. In contrast to critics carefully listening for resonances, these bold recyclings have altered the original by turning it into the gorgeous spectacle of a charismatic character performing gender fluidity, drowning out the transgender resonances we have been hearing in the narrative form and risking the novel’s future availability as a renewable resource. To be sure, the novel has invited its transformation into drama by playing with the idea that gender is a performance and history a matter of costume

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changes. Costumes matter: in the film, the many costume and wig changes bear an ostentatiously fake Hollywood look, and in the play costuming becomes a metaphor for the contingency of identity, as when (in one early production) Queen Elizabeth’s costume is a painted board that flies down to attach temporarily to a male chorus member’s body and then flies back up again. Ruhl’s notes on the play and her own choices in early productions encourage directors to explore a variety of casting options with distinctly queer effects.14 Although Ruhl recommends women actors for Orlando and Sasha, with three men taking all the other parts, she also “imagine[s] .  .  . other configurations,” including alternating male and female actors in the role of Orlando (136). In the Potter/ Swinton film and the publicity surrounding it, Swinton’s own androgynous look is emphasized and Quentin Crisp plays a camp Queen Elizabeth. The play and the film are meditations of the 1990s on gender play and gender vacillation presented entirely through the characters—this almost goes without saying—as embodied by costumed actors. As a consequence, the complex gendered variousness of the narration disappears in both the film and the play. Words from the narration do appear prominently in both, sometimes as film voiceover while the camera lingers on Swinton’s face, sometimes as spoken lines in the play and in the film. In the film’s sex-change scene, Orlando says aloud to her image in the mirror, summarizing the biographer’s lengthy narration, “Same person. No difference at all. Just a different sex.” But the biographer’s comical, dialogical struggle to forestall the revelation is gone, and the camera’s focus on Swinton means that the viewer does not feel the presence of a separate narrator. Similarly, Ruhl’s introductory notes on performance clarify her method for absorbing the narration into the characters’ lines: the actors speak of themselves in the third person, repurposing lines from Woolf ’s narration. Orlando’s first spoken line is also the biographer’s: “He—for there could be no doubt of his sex.” Although this practice contradicts the theatre’s “dominant mode of naturalism,” Ruhl asks performers to naturalize it since “we tell stories about our own behavior all the time” (137). Lines in the novel that cannot be naturalized as the characters’ speech are cut, lines such as “that riot and confusion of the passions and the senses which every good biographer detests” (13), which give the biographer’s consciousness and complaints. Missing also are many long sections of narration about Orlando’s interiority: in eliminating, for example, more than thirty pages of Chapter 2, when Orlando retreats to his house to brood and write poetry, and cutting straight to the amusing Archduchess episode, the play not only cuts the biographer’s expressions of distaste for narrating thought, but also mimics

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male-defined biography that, according to the biographer, requires action (or in the case of heroines, love) but eschews reflection. The same effect is produced when Queen Elizabeth and Sasha reappear at the end of the play, in place of Orlando (in the novel) thinking about the past and internally summoning her many selves. Just as Potter and Swinton do in the film, Ruhl successfully eliminates what gives the novel’s narration its transgender resonance: the dissonance between the biographer and his hero/ine and the tug-and-pull between the biographer and the other competing, collaborating narrative voices. Nonetheless (and perhaps showing that the narration is not wholly eradicable), both film and play preserve traces of the narration’s ironic difference. Ruhl allows for a potential gap between character and narration by recommending “non-illustration” or the principle that actors not always match their actions to their third-person lines. While the film likewise eliminates the biographer and mostly collapses the narration into Orlando’s focalized point of view, it too retains traces of a separate narrative viewpoint.15 In the film’s last six minutes, as Orlando sits under the great oak tree with both a smile and tears on her face (she has just left the great house for good), her adorable small daughter unsteadily points a video camera at her while overhead floats and flaps an absurd golden angel that sings a haunting song performed by countertenor Jimmy Somerville, who has sung at intervals throughout the film. The song with its androgynous sound expresses movie-Orlando’s feelings—“at last, at last, to be free of the past . . . neither a woman nor a man, we are joined, we are one with the human race”—even as it comes from elsewhere. The camera in the hands of the child and the song from the sky seem intended to replicate, belatedly, the novel’s separation between protagonist and narration. Yet the tight close-up on Swinton’s poignant face during the song minimizes this distance and underscores Orlando’s androgynous embodiment as the universal human allegory of “we are all transsexuals.” Somerville’s smooth countertenor is lovely, an aural counterpart to Swinton’s smooth and lovely face, but it silences (by replacing it) the partial, jagged effect of Woolf ’s unevenly gendered narration, the source, I have been arguing, of the novel’s currently most usable transgender resonances.

CONCLUSION: (BACK) TOWARD TRANSGENDER REREADING Both Ruhl’s play and the Potter/Swinton film thus foreground the protagonist as a vehicle for a universalizing gender fluidity, at the expense of the complexly and multiply gendered narration with its potential transgender resonances. The

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novel made available the gender fluidity that these transformative recyclers, in tandem with feminist and queer academic readers, found in the 1980s and 1990s: that fluidity was one of the “latent presences” available in that historical moment, so it cannot be said that these interpretations are wrong. But it should always be possible to return to the text to hear something else at another time. I have argued in this chapter that twenty-first-century readers seeking to locate a transgender presence in literary history will do well to attend to the narration’s voices in Orlando and to tune down the siren call of the alluring protagonist, but this can be done only if Ruhl’s and Potter’s gorgeous dramatic recyclings are not mistaken for the ever-renewable reality of Woolf ’s novel itself. As recyclings, the play and the film aggressively take the novel apart and put it back together, minus the narration. But every reading does a kind of violence, by pulling forward some aspects and pushing others into obscurity. The play and the film are extreme instances of this procedure (still more extreme is Kabe Wilson’s brilliant morcellating of A Room of One’s Own to produce an entirely new story, Of One Woman or So); but in critical readings for decades, Orlando’s sex change and a few other passages were the novel, so these readings did a kind of violence, too. The rereading I offer can also be said, by turning up the volume on one aspect of the novel while turning it down on others, to do a kind of violence to the text, although I make no claim that does not leave the text intact for future readers listening for other resonances. I do not claim the narration—still less, the narrator—is transgender, only that there is a “latent” transgender “presence” that resonates forward to this moment of partial reading. No reader can hold the entire novel in mind, together with the infinity of possible meanings and resonances of every word, stretching out beyond the text in time and space. All my rereading does is share how the novel freshly appears to an admiring teacher of nonbinary and transgender students who bring vital questions to the texts we read together, questions not satisfied either by universalizing or by minoritizing views of Orlando’s gender. My rereading equally advocates for students who cannot accept Stryker’s dismissal of Orlando as “just” “representation,” because, turning to literary history to move into their own futures, they look forward to finding what literature offers to the transgender-attuned reader. For these students, Orlando—read obliquely, more for the narration than for the star— could be a valuable location both of transgender “representation” and of transgender “reality”: a textual body in which transgender and nonbinary readers could read themselves. This chapter thus risks the productive violence of rereading, in the hopes of offering back to transgender studies one of its own best early insights: that reading can indeed be revolutionary.

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NOTES 1 Jessica Berman’s essay on Orlando (the title of which duplicates that of an essay by Song Hwee Lim that Berman does not cite) reviews the history of transgender literary studies differently: she sees continuity where I see a divide between transgender identity as a postmodern resource for critique on the one hand and, on the other, as a subject position that can’t be generalized or transferred. The difference in our readings could be seen as one of the emphasis, as we both rely on statements by Susan Stryker. 2 The pull of literary identification is very strong, see for example Laura Green. 3 Alex Woloch shows that even in the realist novel all characters, while implying referential human figures, exist as elements in a “unified structure” (33). See also Deirdre Lynch. 4 Because it focuses on politics rather than character, this reading resembles without exactly duplicating the 1990s postmodern alliance between queer and feminist readings of Orlando’s vacillation. 5 Crawford cites as an example the moment when Orlando steps outside the department store and experiences feelings from all across her long history: “‘Nothing is any longer one thing. . . . Someone lights a pink candle and I see a girl in Russian trousers. When I step out of doors . . . I see mountains. Turkey? India? Persia?’ Her eyes filled with tears” (223, quoted in Crawford 173). Crawford also finds transgender affect in Orlando’s feeling like “scraps of torn paper tumbling from a sack” (225, Crawford 174). There is nothing intrinsically trans about the feelings these passages present, but a reader seeking transgender resonances could find them there. 6 This aspect of the novel also aligns it with the anti-linear temporality of contemporary gender transitions that are not one-way, as discussed by Nael Bhanji and Aren Aizura. 7 Caughie builds on Coffman’s reading of the narrative’s refusal of “coherence,” contrasting what she sees as the queer temporality of Orlando’s life to Lili Elbe’s one-way “bridge” (517), but she also disagrees with Coffman, claiming here and in an earlier essay that Orlando’s gender identity becomes “unbounded.” Caughie also places a premium on historicizing; comparing Orlando to Hirschfeld and Lili Elbe, she sees the novel’s queer temporality and instability as historical, not just artifacts of contemporary reading. 8 Rachel Blau DuPlessis shows that forms can carry gendered meanings at particular historical junctures; for example, romance novel plots of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are “scripts of heterosexual romance” (2) that normalize and naturalize social conventions. Following DuPlessis, Susan Stanford Friedman shows that Woolf genders narrative masculine and deploys “lyric strategies” linked

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to the female domain of feeling to “subvert” narrative’s grip on women’s lives (162). But in different cultural locations, the genders of these forms may be reversed. Young does not see these styles as gendered, finding only that their artifice is like what she calls the “artifice” of transsexuality. That Young can call transsexuality a form of “artifice” shows how much trans discourse has changed in the twenty years since her essay appeared. She aligns the send-up of literary conventions with the refusal to give the protagonist a fixed identity, finding there is no nature in the novel’s presentations of either art or gender. I thank Scarlet Luk, whose dissertation-in-progress on transgender and nonbinary narrators (though not on Woolf) opened up for me the possibility of this way of reading. Drawing on the work of Diana Wallace, Elizabeth English sees Orlando building on the distinctly feminized genre of historical romance, for example, by Sir Walter Scott (114). Caughie alludes to this claim, too, when she calls the novel a “transgenre” narrative. To say that transsexuals are a genre is not to say that they are merely fictional, but rather to say that we live in, as, and by our representations. To be fair, Stryker’s statement about “a transgender aesthetic” could be read with a different emphasis: if literary form (merely) “replicates” or serves as an analogy for (“just as”) transsexuality, then the two remain ontologically distinct and the statement could be seen to anticipate—not contradict—Stryker’s later insistence that “reality” is distinct from and more important than “representation.” But the tone of the 1994 passage differs from that of the later statement, indicating a wish to unite representation and reality, not divide them. Meghan Brodie elegantly describes some of these queer effects; similarly, Detloff describes the costuming of a production that emphasized a campy drag-queen look (“Camp Orlando”). The film takes far greater liberties with the novel than does Ruhl’s play, inventing dialogue and entire scenes, adding extraordinary visual metaphors (such as a maze at Knole through which Orlando runs from the early eighteenth century into the mid-nineteenth), and merging episodes with sometimes brilliant economy.

WORKS CITED Aizura, Aren Z. “The Persistence of Transgender Travel Narratives.” In Transgender Migrations: The Bodies, Borders, and Politics of Transition. Ed. Trystan T. Cotten. New York: Routledge, 2012, 139–56. Amazon. “Amazon’s Orlando Page.” Web. www.amazon.com/Orlando-BiographyVirginia-Woolf/dp/015670160X. July 15, 2017.

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Beer, Gillian. Arguing with the Past: Essays in Narrative from Woolf to Sidney. London: Routledge, 1989. Berman, Jessica. “Is the Trans in Transnational the Trans in Transgender?” Modernism/ Modernity 24.2 (2017), 217–44. Bhanji, Nael. “Transcriptions: Homing Desires, (Trans)sexual Citizenship, and Racialized Bodies.” In The Transgender Studies Reader 2. Eds. Susan Stryker and Aren Z. Aizura. New York: Routledge, 2013, 512–26. Bowlby, Rachel. Virginia Woolf: Feminist Destinations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988. Brodie, Meghan. “Casting as Queer Dramaturgy: A Case Study of Sarah Ruhl’s Adaptation of Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando.” Theatre Topics 24.3 (2014), 167–74. Caughie, Pamela. “The Temporality of Modernist Life Writing in the Era of Transsexualism: Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando and Einar Wegener’s Man into Woman.” Modern Fiction Studies 59.3 (2013), 501–25. Caughie, Pamela. Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism: Literature in Quest and Question of Itself. Carbondale: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Coffman, Chris. “Woolf ’s Orlando and the Resonances of Trans Studies.” Genders 51 (2010), n.p.; paragraphs 1–35. Web. www.atria.nl/ezines/IAV_606661/ IAV_606661_2011_53/genders/g51_coffman.html. November 21, 2017. Cramer, Patricia. “Woolf and Theories of Sexuality.” In Virginia Woolf in Context. Eds. Bryony Randall and Jane Goldman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, 129–46. Craps, Stef. “How to Do Things with Gender: Transgenderism in Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando.” 2000. Rpt. Image into Identity: Constructing and Assigning Identity in a Culture of Modernity. Ed. Michael Wintle. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006, 175–89. Crawford, Lucas. “Woolf ’s Einfü lung: An Alternative Theory of Transgender.” Mosaic 48.1 (2015), 165–81. DeGay, Jane. “Though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it’: Staging Gender in Woolf ’s Orlando.” In Virginia Woolf Out of Bounds. Eds. Jessica Berman and Jane Goldman. New York: Pace University Press, 2001, 31–39. Detloff, Madelyn. “Camp Orlando (or) Orlando.” Modernism/Modernity 23.1 (2016), 18–22. Detloff, Madelyn. “Woolf and Lesbian Culture: Queering Woolf Queering.” In Virginia Woolf in Context. Eds. Bryony Randall and Jane Goldman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, 342–52. DiBattista, Maria. Virginia Woolf ’s Major Novels: The Fables of Anon. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980. Dimock, Wai Chee. “A Theory of Resonance.” PMLA 112.5 (1997), 1060–71. DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. Writing beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of TwentiethCentury Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Eastwood, Alexander. “How, Then, Might the Transsexual Read? Notes toward a Trans Literary History.” Transgender Studies Quarterly 1.4 (2014), 590–604.

On Rereading Woolf ’s Orlando as Transgender Text

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English, Elizabeth. Lesbian Modernism: Censorship Sexuality, and Genre Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015. Feinberg, Leslie. “Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come.” 1992. Rpt. The Transgender Studies Reader. Eds. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle. New York: Routledge, 2006, 205–20. Felski, Rita. “Context Stinks!” New Literary History 42.4 (2011), 53–91. Felski, Rita. “Fin de Siecle, Fin de Sexe: Transsexuality, Postmodernism, and the Death of History.” New Literary History 27.2 (1996), 337–49. Freccero, Carla, Madhavi Menon, and Valerie Traub. “Forum: Historicism and Unhistoricism in Queer Studies” [letters to the editor]. PMLA 128.3 (2013), 781–86. Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Lyric Subversion of Narrative in Women’s Writing: Virginia Woolf and the Tyranny of Plot.” In Reading Narrative: Form, Ethics, Ideology. Ed. James Phelan. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989, 162–85. Froula, Christine. “Orlando Lives: Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando in Global Adaptation and Performance.” In Contemporary Woolf. Eds. Claire Davison-Pegon and Anne-Marie Smith-DiBiasio. France: Presses Universitaires de la Mediterranee, 2014, 233–57. Hale, Jacob. “Suggested Rules for Non-Transsexuals Writing about Transsexuals, Transsexuality, Transsexualism, or Trans_____.” Web. www.sandystone.com/hale. rules.html. November 3, 2017. Hankins, Leslie. “Orlando: ‘A Precipice Marked V’: Between ‘A Miracle of Discretion’ and ‘Lovemaking Unbelievable: Indiscretions Incredible.’” In Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings. Eds. Eileen Barrett and Patricia Cramer. New York: New York University Press, 1997, 180–202. Helt, Brenda S. “Passionate Debates on ‘Odious Subjects’: Bisexuality and Woolf ’s Opposition to Theories of Androgyny and Sexual Identity.” Twentieth Century Literature 56.2 (2010), 131–67. Kaivola, Karen. “Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, and the Question of Sexual Identity.” Woolf Studies Annual 4 (1998), 18–40. Lim, Song Hwee. “Is the Trans- in Transnational the Trans- in Transgender?” New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 5.1 (2007), 39–52. Love, Heather. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. Lynch, Deirdre Shauna. The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Marcus, Laura. “Woolf ’s Feminism and Feminism’s Woolf.” In The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf. Eds. Sue Roe and Susan Sellers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 209–44. Minow-Pinkney, Makiko. Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject: Feminine Writing in the Major Novels. Brighton: Harvester, 1987. Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. London: Methuen, 1985. Morris, Jan. Conundrum. London: Faber, 1974.

236

Contemporary Revolutions

Prosser, Jay. Second Skins: The Bodily Narratives of Transsexuality. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Ruhl, Sarah. Chekhov’s Three Sisters and Woolf ’s Orlando: Two Renderings for the Stage. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2013. Saxton, Kirsten T., Ajuan Maria Mance, and Rebekah Edwards. “Teaching EighteenthCentury Literature in a Transgendered Classroom.” In Heteronormativity in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture. Eds. Ana de Freitas Boe and Abby Coykendall. Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2014, 167–88. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Silver, Brenda R. Virginia Woolf Icon. University of Chicago Press, 1999. Sproles, Karyn Z. Desiring Women: the Partnership of Virginia Woolf and Vita SackvilleWest. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Stone, Sandy. “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto.” 1991. Rpt. The Transgender Studies Reader. Eds. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle. New York: Routledge, 2006, 221–35. Stryker, Susan. “(De)Subjugated Knowledges: An Introduction to Transgender Studies.” In The Transgender Studies Reader. Eds. Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle. New York: Routledge, 2006, 1–17. Stryker, Susan. “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage.” GLQ 1.2 (1994), 237–54. Taylor, Melanie. “True Stories: Orlando, Life-Writing and Transgender Narratives.” In Modernist Sexualities. Eds. Hugh Stevens and Caroline Howlett. Manchester UK: Manchester University Press, 2000, 202–18. Wallace, Diana. The Woman’s Historical Novel: British Women Writers, 1900-2000. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Woloch, Alex. The One and the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell assisted by Andrew McNeillie. Vol. III. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1980. Woolf, Virginia. “Modern Novels.” 1919. In The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. Vol. III: 1919–1924. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1988. Woolf, Virginia. Orlando: A Biography. 1928. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2006. Young, Suzanne. “The Unnatural Object of Modernist Aesthetics: Artifice in Woolf ’s Orlando.” In Unmanning Modernism: Gendered Re-Readings. Eds. Elizabeth Jane Harrison and Shirley Peterson. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997, 168–87.

Index Abbas, Hani  117 Abounaddara  104 acts of rebellion  123 Adorno, Theodore  5, 147 affective labor  51 African slave trade  175 Afrikaans tongvis (tongue fish)  165–6 Agamben, Giogio  8, 9 Agnes Grey (Brontë )  59 ala  77 Al-Domari (the Lamplighter)  106 al-Jazairi, Wissam  108–9 Allagta, Alaa  117 All’s Well That Ends Well (Shakespeare)  41 al-Shami, Abu Malek  114–15 “Always Returning” (Cole)  205 Amnesty International  116 An Anthropology for Contemporaneous Worlds (Augé )  8 “An Attempt at Restitution” (Sebald)  192 Arab League  125 Arab Spring  5, 107. See also Egyptian revolution; Syrian revolution arts  6 aso o le malamalama  87 Assad, Bashar  104, 106 Assad, Hafiz  106, 116, 117 Assad dynasty  103 Association for the Study of Arts of the Present (ASAP)  7 Augé , Marx  8 Aurora Leigh (Browning)  55–6 Austen, Jane  29 Austerlitz (Sebald)  14, 192–205 as an elegy  193 concentration camps  201 imaginative geography  193 modernist modes  205–6 moth aesthetic  200–3

Baedeker, Karl  57 Barnard, Andrew  169, 175 Barnard, Anne  167–8, 167–70 Cape Folded Belt and  175 French revolutionary wars and  169 Hottentot congregants and  174 Lord George Macartney and  169 social activities of  169 Baroque proscenium theatre  146 Barrett Browning, Elizabeth  55–6, 58 Bell, Ellen  51. See also unpicking aesthetics of Bell Circle Line  57, 68, 69 Love (Bag)  55, 57, 61–5, 67, 68–9 Love (Pistol)  61, 62, 64, 67, 68–9 A Model Beginning  57, 58–9 Oubliette  57, 65–8, 69 Sewing Proust  57–8 Sleeve Notes  57, 59–61 Benjamin, Walter  166, 191, 192 Bennett, Jane  56 Bethlehem, Louise  167 Binnie, Imogen  220 Black Box  145–58 cross-referencing colonial archive  150–2 Die Zauberflö te  146–7 Euro-African heritage  146 final scene of  157 German genocide  146 Megaphone Man  154–7, 158 multidirectional memory  147–50 performing colonial archive  152–4 rhinoceros  154–7 “Black Out Last Page”  91–2 Black Out poem/poetry avant-garde technique of  78 described  77–8 and girl power  85–7

238 of Pouliuli  82–8 technique  71 Black Power (Carmichael and Hamilton)  36, 37, 38–9 Black Power movement  3, 22, 35–9 Black Rainbow (Wendt)  80 Bodleian Library of Oxford University  28 Boer War  184 book burnings  40 Bordeaux Arts Festival  115 Bowlby, Rachel  217 Boylan, Jennifer Finney  220 Bradbury, Ray  40 Brontë , Anne  59 Brontë , Charlotte  51, 53, 59–65 Brontë , Emily  59, 60 Brooklyn Quarterly  104 Brown, H. Rapp  22, 35–9, 41, 42 Butler, Octavia  23 capitalist society  173 being and having in  173 Caribbean slave rebellions  168 Carmichael, Stokely  22, 35, 36–9, 41, 42 “Castle of Good Hope-14th December 1799”  174, 175–6 Caughie, Pamela  217, 222 Center for Visual Culture, Egypt  133 Certeau, Michel de  105 A Change of Tongue (Krog)  166 Charke, Charlotte  214 Christ of St. John of the Cross (Dali)  117 Circle Line (Bell)  57, 68, 69 citizen journalism  108 civil war  5 The C. L. R. James Reader  35 Coffman, Chris  220, 222 Cole, Teju  205–6 The Collection: Short Fiction from the Transgender Vanguard (Leger and MacLeod)  220 collective acts of rebellion  123 colonial archive. See also Black Box cross-referencing  150–2 performing  152–4 Columbia University Press  7 Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present (Martin)  7, 8

Index Contemporary Literature  7 Contemporary Women’s Writing  7 Contending Ideologies in South Africa  172 “Context Stinks!” (Felski)  182 Coumans, Sandra T. J.  156 “Craftsmanship” (Woolf)  22, 42 Craps, Stef  217, 218 Crawford, Lucas  222 creative labor of Victorian women. See Victorian women Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution  110–16 archives  111, 112 Bordeaux Arts Festival and  115 creator  110 interviews  113–14 mission statement  112 revolutionary creativity  113 Cronin, Jeremy  179–80 The Crossing (Yazbek)  103, 114 cross-temporal networks  6 crucifixion  117 cultural capital  115–16 “The Currency of the Contemporary” (Martin)  7–8 cut-up technique  22 cyborg  218 cycle  24 Daali  116 The Daisy Chain (Yonge)  55 Dali, Salvador  117 Damascus Fine Arts Academy  110 Dancing in Damascus (cooke)  117 Daraa, Syria  107 Darwin, Charles  52 Darwish, Mahmoud  133 “The Death of the Moth” (Woolf)  14, 194, 195, 201–2 Deckerinnerung  147 Declaration of the Rights of Man (document)  174 deGay, Jane  217 Derrida, Jacques  111 Detloff, Madelyn  219 “dialectical images”  166 Diaz, Vince  75 DiBattista, Maria  216 Dictionary of National Biography  223, 226

Index “Die Transparant van die Tongvis”  164 “transparent” or “transparency” in  166 Die Zauberflö te (opera by Mozart)  146–7 Digital Revolution  5, 26, 27 Dimock, Wai Chi  8, 9, 214–15, 222 Diski, Jenny  68 Do the Right Thing  36 Douma, Syria  110 “Dreadlock Hoax” (Wilson)  21–2, 28, 42 Dreadnought Hoax of 1910  21–2 Dundas, Henry  169, 182 Durcharbeitung  143 Dü rer  156 Eastwood, Alexander  215, 222 Ecole Supé rieure des Arts Visuels, Marrakesh, Morocco  134 Edwards, Rebekah  214 Egyptian revolution  123–38. See also spray painting as resistance relapse  126–31 A Thousand Times No!  124–6 elegy  193 Eliot, T. S.  177 el-Sisi, Abdel Fattah  130 embodied experience  220–1 The Emigrants (Sebald)  192, 195 Erber, Pedro  8 ethnic cleansings  5 European genocide  146 European Union  131 evolution  11, 14, 124, 165, 180 execution by hanging  116–18 Fabian, Johannes  8 Facebook  109 Fahrenheit 451 (Bradbury)  40 Farzat, Ali  106, 108, 110–11 Faulkner, William  4, 170 Feinberg, Leslie  212, 213, 214, 220 Felski, Rita  6, 182, 213, 214, 215, 217–18 Festival International des Arts  114 “first Christmas weekend under the second state of emergency 1988”  178 Fisher, Bram  184

239

Fitzpatrick, Gerald  194 Forché , Carolyn  173 For Today I Am a Boy (Kim Fu)  220 freedom  181–4 Free Syrian Army (FSA)  105 French Revolution  168, 171–2, 174–5, 178 French revolutionary wars  169 Freud, Sigmund  4, 193 Friday demonstrations, Syria  107 From Man to Man (Schreiner)  58 Froula, Christine  4, 215–16 “The Future of Tradition-The Tradition of Future, 100 Years after the Exhibition ‘Masterpieces of Muhammadan Art’”  124 “The Futurist Manifesto” (Marinetti)  26 Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past (Eshel)  9, 15 Gaskell, Elizabeth  53 “Genadendal, 10th May 1798”  174, 176 genocides  5 German genocide  146 Gesamtkunstwerk  145 globalization  27 “gnome”  173, 183 The Godfather (Daali)  116–17 Great Mosque of Heart, Afghanistan  125 Greek etymology  165 Griffen, Arlene  79 on Leaves of the Banyan Tree  80 on Pacific writing  79–80 Pouliuli  79–80 Groom, Amelia  6 Guggenheim Foundation  145 Haitian Revolution  168 Hall, Radcliffe  31, 214, 220 Halperin, David  214 Hamisch  113 hanging, execution by  116–18 Hankins, Leslie  216 Hanzala (Arab symbol of resistance)  129 Haraway, Donna  218 Harlem Renaissance  26 Hau’ofa, Epeli  78 Haus der Kunst, Munich  124 Haworth Parsonage  60 Hayot, Eric  4

240

Index

Helt, Brenda  226 Herero tribe  146, 149 Heshel’s Kingdom (Jacobson)  204–5 Hippoglossis hippoglossis  165–6 History of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge (Watson)  39 HMS Dreadnought  22 Holocaust  147 Homans, Margaret  4 Hood, Thomas  52–3, 58 hooks, bell  23 Hope (al-Shami)  114–15 Hottentot congregants  169, 174 Human Slaughterhouse (Allagta)  117 Human Slaughterhouse (Yousef)  117 “Human Slaughterhouse: Mass Executions and Hangings at Saydnaya Prison, Syria” (Amnesty International)  116, 117–18 A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel (Philips)  78 100 Novels Project (Youd)  66

Khatt Foundation  124 Kim Fu  220 Kindertransport  192 King, Martin Luther  36 Kiwan, Charif  104 Kleon, Austin  77 Kortsch, Christine Bayles  53 Kristeva, Julia  143–4 Kruger, Paul  184

Jacobson, Dan  204–5 James, C. L. R.  35 Jane Eyre (Brontë )  51, 53, 55, 56 “January 1802, Journal”  180 Jenner, Caitlyn  219 Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam  145, 147 “journal”  183 Journal of Modern Literature  7 Joyce, James  4

Lady Anne: A Chronicle in Verse (Krog)  13, 164–5, 164–84 Atlantic halibut in  165 Caribbean slave rebellions  168 French Revolution  168, 171–2, 174–5, 178 Haitian Revolution  168 Parisian poems in  171 significance of  167–8 Lam-alif (Arabic letterform)  124–5, 138 L’avenir d’une ré  volte (Kristeva)  143 Leaves of the Banyan Tree (Wendt)  79 Arlene Griffen on  80 Lee, Spike  36 Leger, Tom  220 Lenin, Vladimir  174 Les demoiselles d’Avignon (Picasso)  25 Letters from London (James)  35 Lewis, Pericles  27 Lewis, Wyndham  26 The Life of Charlotte Brontë  (Gaskell)  59 literature  6 Literature Now  7 London transport system  68 L’Ouverture, Toussaint  183 Love, Heather  214 Love (Bag) (Bell)  55, 57, 61–5, 67, 68–9 Love (Pistol) (Bell)  61, 62, 64, 67, 68–9 Lucy Cavendish College  27 Lutz, Deborah  60 Lyell, Charles  52 Lyotard, Jean-Franç ois  7

Kafatou, Sarah  200 Kaivola, Karen  217 Keep Calm (Naji)  117 Kentridge, William  12–13, 143, 144–56 performances  144 politics of contestation  144–5 stone-age animation  144, 145

Macartney, Andrew  169 Macartney, George  169 Macartney, Lord George  169 MacLeod, Riley  220 Maharero, Samuel  149 Make It New (Pound)  4, 26 Making It Now  7

Ibn Tulun Mosque, Cairo  125 Ibrahim Qashush (al-Jazairi)  108 “i” in Tusitala  77 In Search of Lost Time (Proust)  57 Inside (Cronin)  179 Institut des Cultures d’Islam  137 International Sympathy (Farzat)  110–11 Islamic Museum, Cairo  125

Index Malcolm X  36, 38 Mance, Ajuan Maria  214 Mandela, Nelson  178, 182 “Manifesto” (Stone)  217 Marcus, Laura  217 marimba  181–4 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso  26 Martin, Theodore  7–8 Marx, Karl  173 Mary Barton (Gaskell)  53, 58 Masjid-i-Haydariya  125 Matz, Jesse  194 Mayyasi, Alex  104 McIntosh, Malachi  22 media censorship, Syria  107 Megaphone Man  154–7, 158. See also Black Box Mezze, Syria  106 Middle East Studies Program  134 migrants  5 Minow-Pinkney, Makiko  216 Mock, Janet  220 A Model Beginning (Bell)  57, 58–9 modernism  4 Modernist Latitudes  7 Modernist Studies Association Conference  4 modern vs. contemporary  6–7 Moi, Toril  216–17 Moravian mission church  174 Morris, Jan  218 Morrison, Toni  23 Morsi, Mohamed  127, 130 mourning  193 “Mourning and Melancholia” (Freud)  4, 193 Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf)  14, 196 Mubarak, Hosni  123, 127 multidirectional memory  147–50 muntadayat  107 musical re-mix  25 Muslim Brotherhood  127–30 mythologies, niu  88–90 “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage” (Stryker)  212–13, 227 Nabokov, Vladimir  195, 200–1, 202 Naji, Abed  117

241

Naji al-Ali  129 Nama tribe  146, 149 Namibia  148, 149 Nashornjagd in Deutsch Ostafrika  156 Nasser, Gamal Abdul  129 Nazism  193. See also Black Box needlework/needleworkers. See unpicking aesthetics of Bell Negri, Antonio  165 Nelson, O. F.  88–9 Netherlands, French invasion of  169 Nevada (Binnie)  220 Newspaper Blackout (Kleon)  77 “A New World to Build” (Carmichael)  42 New York street artists  133 The New York Times  77 niu  71 making it  90–2 making Pouliuli  81–8 mythologies  88–90 NuArt Festival  136–7 Nussey, Ellen  59 O’Connor, Flannery  67 Of One Woman or So, by Olivia N’Gowfri (Wilson)  3, 27–30. See also A Room of One’s Own (Woolf) Black Power  35–9 chapters  29–30 fantasy  41–2 revolutionary burnings  40 Woolf ’s feminism in  31–4 Ola (Wendt)  80 Open City (Cole)  205–6 The Opportunity to Be Myself: A History of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge (Watson)  34 “The Origin of the Cocoanut Tree”  88 Orlando (film)  228, 229, 230 Orlando (play)  228, 229–30 “Orlando” (song)  16 Orlando (Woolf)  14, 15, 16, 194–5, 197–9 characteristic changeability  215 gender and sexuality  216 histories of reading  215–21 narrative  223 recyclings  215–16, 228–30

242

Index

reinterpretations  212–31 as transgender text  212, 215–28 “Orlando Lives” (Froula)  215–16 Oubliette (Bell)  57, 65–8, 69 Oxfam  61 Oxford Guide to Contemporary Writing  7 Pacific Indigenous Knowledge Systems  73 Pacific literary studies  73 Pacific literature. See Pacific writing Pacific writing Arlene Griffen on  79–80 and European descent writers  73 and Maori writers  73 and Pasifika writers  73 and tala  76–7 past  4–5 Pearlman, Wendy  104 Petit, Philippe  143 Philips, Tom  78 Phoenix (al-Jazairi)  109 Picasso  25 Port of Spain Gazette  35 Post*45  7 The Postmodern Condition (Lyotard)  7 Potter, Sally  228, 229, 230 Pouliuli (Wendt)  11, 71, 72, 79, 80, 81–8 Arlene Griffen on  79–80 blacking out  81–8 and misogyny  79 Pound, Ezra  4, 26, 91 The Prelude  177 Prenowitz, Eric  111 “prophetic memory”  183 Prosser, Jay  214, 218, 220–1 Qashush, Ibrahim  108 queer temporalities  213 racism  3. See also Black Power Rahman, Abdul  104 “Recovered Memories”  205 recycling  3, 6 Orlando (Woolf)  215–16, 228–30 as a process  24 A Room of One’s Own (Woolf)  27–30 usages  23–4 Redefining Realness (Mock)  220 refugees  5

re-mix/re-mixing  24–5 musical  25 A Room of One’s Own (Woolf)  31–4 re- prefix  24 re-vision  24 revolt  143–4 political implications  144 revolution as awakening  123 Egyptian  123–38 meaning  4, 25–6 as rupture and radical change  26 Syrian (see Syrian revolution) violence  39 revolutionary aesthetics  27 revolutionary mentality  38 revolutionary transparencies  171–7 “rhetoric of urgency”  167 Rhinocerus  156 Rich, Adrienne  24 The Rings of Saturn (Sebald)  192 A Room of One’s Own (Woolf)  3, 10, 13, 16, 21–42, 215. See also Of One Woman or So, by Olivia N’Gowfri (Wilson) recycling  27–30 re-mixing  31–4 re-ordering  40–1 Rothberg, Michael  147–8 Ruhl, Sarah  216, 228, 229–30 Saint-Amour, Paul K.  195 Saleh, Yassin al-Haj  114 sampling  25 Sarin gas  111 Saxton, Kirsten  214 Schaffer, Talia  55 Schapiro, Miriam  56–7 Schreiner, Olive  58 Schumann, Robert  156 Sebald, W. G.  14, 191–206 adult life  192 as an elegist  193 Cole on  205–6 Europe’s melancholy history  193 “house of fiction”  193–4 as a reader of Woolf  200–3 “Recovered Memories”  205 works  192–3 Second Skins (Prosser)  220

Index Sedgwick, Eve  216 Sednaya Prison (Abbas)  117 “1798, Windham’s Paris”  171 “1793”  172 sewing  60. See also unpicking aesthetics of Bell writing and  60 Sharp, Gene  105 Shehab, Bahia  12. See also A Thousand Times No She’s Not There (Boylan)  220 Silverblatt, Michael  201 Sinavaiana-Gabbard, Caroline  90 “A Sketch of the Past” (Woolf)  4–5, 14, 191 Sleeve Notes (Bell)  57, 59–61 Smith, Nico  165 Smith, Terry  7 Smith, Zadie  23 Smitshuijzen, Huda  124 social acceptance of transwoman  219– 20 Somerville, Jimmy  230 “The Song of the Shirt” (Hood)  52–3, 58 Sons for the Return Home (Wendt)  79 The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner)  170 South Africa anticolonial prophecy in  170 post-apartheid  181 South-West Africa. See Namibia Speaking Soul (Bell)  51, 57 splicing  25 spray painting as resistance  123–38. See also A Thousand Times No  streets of the world  131–8 “Stand at the corner of a dream and fight”  133 Stephen, Leslie  223 Stevenson, Robert Louis  74 stitch works. See unpicking aesthetics of Bell Stone, Sandy  217, 227 Stone Butch Blues (Feinberg)  220 Stranger on the Train (Diski)  68 Stryker, Susan  212–13, 214, 218, 219, 220–1, 227–8 Swinton, Tilda  216, 228, 229, 230 Syrian revolution. See also Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution artist-activists  109

243

creative resistance  106–9 curating resistance  109–11 dictatorships  105 drought  107 human slaughterhouse  116–18 media censorship  107 muntadayat  107 revolutionary habitus  112–16 Syrian women  105 Tadmor (Palmyra), Syria  106 Tahrir Square, Cairo  123, 125, 127–8 tala defined  74 Fijic protoform of  76 Polynesian protoform of  76 Sikaiana on  76 and Veakau-Taumako  76 and Waya in Fiji  76 Tamaradi ya Outta (Rebel Cat)  129 Tamarod (grassroots movement)  129 Taylor, Melanie  218–19 technological innovations  5 Thomas, Bryan  16 Thompson, Nato  115 A Thousand Times No!  123–38 revolution relapse  126–31 streets of Cairo and  131–8 Three Guineas (Woolf)  16 Time and the Other (Fabian)  8 Time: A Vocabulary of the Present  6 Tolstoy, Leo  174 “To Make a Dadaist Poem” (Tzara)  22 Tom Thumb’s Dictionary  57 transgender activism  214 “Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come” (Feinberg)  212 transgender text/readings  212–31 Dimock’s resonances  214–15 Orlando (Woolf) as  212, 215–28 reading histories  212–15 twenty-first-century  218 The Well of Loneliness  214 transgender warriors  213 transparency  166 Transparent (Amazon’s TV series)  219 transsexuality  217–18 social acceptance  219–20 Trauerarbeit  154, 157

244 Traveller’s Manual of Conversation in Four Languages (Baedeker)  57 Trump, Donald  174, 182 Tui Atua Tupua Tamasese  87 Tunisia  107 tusi Austronesian protoform of  76 defined  74 Oceanic protoform of  76 and Rotumans  76 Samoans use of  76 Sikaiana of the Solomon Islands use  76 and Tikopians  76 Tusitala comprehension of  76 defined  74 “i” in  77 tala in (see tala) tusi in (see tusi) Va in (see Va) Tusitala, Vaelei  74 Tusitala Way  71–5 described  72 and indigenous knowledge systems  75 and pan-Pacific epistemologies  74–5 Tzara, Tristan  22 University of Wisconsin-Madison  133 unpicking aesthetics of Bell Circle Line  57, 68, 69 dimensions  53 Love (Bag)  55, 57, 61–5, 67, 68–9 Love (Pistol)  61, 62, 64, 67, 68–9 A Model Beginning  57, 58–9 Oubliette  57, 65–8, 69 overview  51–2 Sewing Proust  57–8 Sleeve Notes  57, 59–61 vibrant matter  56–7 Victorian stitchers and  52–6 upheavals  5. See also revolution Va  71, 77 and cultural values  75 and Pouliuli  80–1 Vanity Fair  219 Vibrant Matter (Bennett)  56 Victorian evolutionary theory  52

Index Victorian women. See also unpicking aesthetics of Bell affective labor  51 creative labor  51–69 stitchers  52–6 von Trotha, Lothar  148, 149–50 Watson, Nigel  34, 39 Watson, Stephen  173 Wedgewood, Josiah  176 The Well of Loneliness (Hall)  31, 214, 220 Wendt, Albert  71 Black Rainbow  80 Leaves of the Banyan Tree  79, 80 Ola  80 post as defined by  73 Pouliuli  71, 79–88 Sons for the Return Home  79 Wenzel, Jennifer  170–1, 182–3 Whaitiri, Reina  80 What Is Contemporary Art? (Smith)  7 “What Is the Contemporary?” (Agamben)  8 “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision” (Rich)  24 white South Africans  165 Willett, Jonathan  51 Wilson, Kabe  3–4 cut-up technique  22, 23 “Dreadlock Hoax”  21–2, 28, 42 performing Woolf  21–2 recycling and re-mixing (see A Room of One’s Own (Woolf)) Windham, William  169, 171 Witbooi, Henrik  149 Woolf, Virginia  3, 191, 194, 200–3. See also Sebald, W. G.; Wilson, Kabe “Craftsmanship”  22, 42 “The Death of the Moth”  14, 194, 195, 201–2 feminism  31–4 Mrs. Dalloway  14, 196 Orlando (Woolf) (see Orlando (Woolf)) A Room of One’s Own (see A Room of One’s Own (Woolf)) “A Sketch of the Past”  4–5, 14, 191 Three Guineas  16 Wordsworth, William  177

Index working through  144 World War I  195 World War II  156, 192 Wuthering Heights (Brontë )  59, 60

Yonge, Charlotte  55 Youd, Tim  66–7, 68 Young, Suzanne  223 Yousef, Abu  117

Yazbek, Samar  103–4, 114 Yazigi, Sana  12, 110, 113–15

Zilcosky, John  192 Zuma, Jacob  181–2

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