Sacha Rosel's Blog

EMBRACING THE OTHER

I avoided this space for quite along time now. I simply didn’t know what to do with it. Self-promotion, self-absorption – ultimately, self-obsession – all come with the package of writing one’s way into the literary jungle these days, and I didn’t feel like playing along – what for? To keep the endless blabbering going, with everybody talking simultaneously and nobody listening?

More than that, I felt paralysed, as in most parts of my existence, including what I’ve come to define as a “suspension of belief” while facing the news on both national and international politics. Is it really happening, I’ve often wondered (and still do), or is it just some AI blunder? Most days, I tend not to believe anything I’m told; other days, I just find it hard to focus on writing or even finding the time and energy for analysing what I would like to say on some specific matter. I don’t mean prose or poetry writing – that goes on undeterred despite the world constantly being on the verge of collapse, because it is as I primarily function as a human being: as a creator of stories and an explorer of words. What I mean is pinning down thoughts in a coherent, meaningful way for myself and potentially for others in reviews or coagulated thoughts of some sort, like these fragments shored upon WordPress. It takes a lot of extra stamina, effort and time, to devote oneself to this activity which, for a novelist, may represent an addition to the main work they are dealing with – the story unfolding through some characters interacting with one another. Like many, I suspect, sometimes I don’t feel like doing it or simply give up trying because, unlike writing a full novel, it requires both a sense of contingency and a sharp awareness about the past and the present, as well as an exceptional ability to connect the dots fast in a few pages.

Writing shorter pieces which may have nothing to do with your own creating an alternative fictional world, but is rather centred on the interpretation of reality or of what other people have written, is all about connecting to others and offering them some truth you think might be worth exploring. It is a gift, not a request, a seeing rather than a wish to be seen. I don’t believe, like Barthes said, that “on écrit pour être aimés” (we write in order to be loved). I refuse to believe it, for I think it is my ethical imperative not to believe it. In the age of narcissistic self-aggrandisement fuelled by social media, writing cannot and should not be a futile question of “being loved”; it may have worked in 1964, when Barthes wrote Essays Critiques, but it can’t work for our hypertrophic times. A twenty-first century writer can’t get away with simply saying: I write because I want others to love me. She/they/he has to commit into illuminating words with meanings, finding signs, tropes and possible forms of resistance to apathy, hate or despair in what hides inside the world, including other people’s words, not just her/their/his own. It’s not a question of self-absorption at all; quite the opposite, it’s – and should be – an embracing the other and what the other took time and effort to say.

DEAD RINGERS, OR CAPITALISM CELEBRATING ITSELF

Rachel Weisz in Dead Ringers

WARNING: The following review contains spoilers on themes, contents and ending of the 2023 Amazon Prime TV show “Dead Ringers”

We live in ugly times, where the fickle, virtual world of social media functions as echo chamber for the most despicable instincts people used to suppress or be ashamed of in real life but now revel in: hate, dominance, shadenfreude, oppression (and suppression) of the weakest, survival and celebration of the fittest. In other words, a triumph of ugly old capitalism in its latest incarnation, dying but not quite dead yet, wearing its shiny new mask of impunity silencing anything and anybody who disagrees with its cannibalistic (self)destructive drive by any means necessary.

Most of the narrative developed in Dead Ringers (2023), a recent retelling of David Cronenberg’s 1988 classic (which in turn was a film rendering of a book based on a real story), stems from this same despicable, irritating and self-indulgent celebration of capitalism. Far from being a critique on the misogynistic superstructure lying at the foundation of hospitals and birth clinics, the TV series ends up reinforcing the oppressive nature of capitalist society and culture as inherently sexist, racist and exclusive. In a narrative twist aimed at reclaiming agency and empowerment for women, the Mantle twins, originally male and played by Jeremy Irons, have now turned into female professionals embodied by Rachel Weisz. Beverly is lesbian, introverted and seemingly the more humane of the two, often struggling with interpersonal relations and failing to see the possible advantages in treating people as inconsequential incidents in both personal and professional life. On the contrary, Elliot is not only straight and constantly over the top, loud and completely unethical, but also a cocaine addict who loves to use and abuse people’s bodies as well as minds, messing up with her sister’s life because it’s the only way she claims she can express something resembling empathy or love (but in fact she doesn’t feel either). Both gynecologists and birth specialists working together inside the patriarchally-run hospital system, they dream of revolutionizing fertility, birth methods and treatment of future mothers by creating a clinic of their own, yet while Beverly seems to be genuinely concerned with the welfare of mothers and wants to improve their freedom and agency before, during and after childbirth, Elliot has a diabolical hidden agenda: she wants to experiment on 16 weekplus-old embryos and create life on her own without anybody’s intervention, in particular creating a pair of perfectly identical twins from her sister’s ovocytes and give them as a gift to Beverly, possibly to herself. The sisters find the perfect sponsor in opiates magnate Rebecca Parker, a despicable woman who incidentally is also a lesbian, has a plethora of former wives and boasts a collection of artifacts resembling female genitalia and which are supposed to be inspirational and revolutionary but are in fact a cynical display of her wealth, power and white priviledge. While she, her horrible family and Elliot perfectly get along with one another in their amoral thirst for profit and dominance, Beverly has trouble accepting a world enmeshed in predatory logics. Hopefully, her newly found lover, actress Geneviève, may help her navigate through life’s cynical side, though Elliot may disapprove of their love.

Coming between Beverly and Elliot and into their seamless symbiotic relationship, Geneviève may be a catalyst for real change in the way the twins relate to each other and to the rest of the world. Like their Cronenbergian predecessors, Beverly and Elliot are used to share everything, including lovers. Being lesbian and shy the former and straight without any moral scruples the latter, the twins’ seduction MO towards women usually implies Elliot making the first move by conquering the prey (who is obviously completely unaware of the swapping) then “donating” her to her sibling as a glittering prize to enjoy for a while. This, the script implies, has been one of their favourite games for some time, which makes Beverly more alike to her twin than the story is willing to show. When it comes to sex, meant as a form of depredation and conquest of a (in this case female) body/territory, the sisters actually seem to display the same pattern granting them full satisfaction as white upper-class priviledged women. Until Geneviève comes along, and spoils the fun. The new element added to the dynamics and Elliot’s erratic behaviour end up compromising both the clinic’s existence and the twins’ relationship. In the end, each will be confronted with an extreme choice to make in the name of self-preservation.

A crucial part of the recent change in trends and attitude towards women in entertainment across the globe (but mostly in Western countries), the #Metoo movement has brought more visibility to women in the arts, producing interesting works focused on such crucial themes as gender inequality and gender-based violence and fostering the exploration of subversive, feminist-oriented points of views in both macro and micro narratives. Examples of such groundbreaking, truly empowering works (not necessarily created by women, but on women, for women and pro-women, thus sending an authentic feminist message) include TV series Big Little Lies (2017-2019, directed by Andrea Arnold and Jean-Marc Vallée, written by David E. Kelley), Dietland (2018, written by Marti Noxon), and Russian Doll(2019, created by Natasha Lyonne, Leslye Headland and Amy Poehler) or films like Twentieth-Century Women (2016, written and directed by Mike Mills), The Nightingale (2018, written and directed by Jennifer Kent) and Misbehaviour (2020, written by Rebecca Frayn and Gaby Chiappe, directed by Philippa Lowthorpe), to name just a few. Sadly, this proliferation of women’s visibility in entertainment has often been detrimental to feminism as a political strategy aimed at changing the rules and the system from the inside, with the result that, in the last few years, more and more TV shows and cinematic projects have involved women only as outer shells, not as vehicles for truly feminist contents. In other words, there might be women chosen as protagonists or key figures within the plot, but their narrative arc is often bland and with no political implications whatsoever. Once again, capitalism has found yet another resource to prey on and exploit, cannibalising over women’s most subversive aspects as potential agents of a feminist revolution overthrowing the system, regurgitating women’s most original and revolutionary points of view as neutralised ingredients, devoid of any political meaning. Instead of changing the film industry from within, feminism tropes have turned sour. Take the shift from Wonder Woman’s feminist struggle for self-affirmation against a male antagonist to Wonder Woman 1984’s predatory solution to the lack of love: did we really need to see Diana appropriating a man’s body for her own selfish need to have her dead fiancé all for herself? Is this what feminism stance has been reduced to?

This is exactly what happens with Dead Ringers: a story which was supposed to aim at reclaiming agency and empowerment for women ends up empowering nothing but capitalism. Actually, agency does not simply mean choosing a woman as a protagonist of your story, if her agency consists in destroying everyone and everything she meets along the way. It takes political as well as creative integrity. As writers, I think we have the ethical duty to create stories aimed at “inventing the future” (to quote Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams), thus using such things as pain, trauma and violence as paths leading to self-discovery, healing and change, to finally build a different world where people, especially marginalised people and minorities, can become whole and genuinely reclaim a room of their own by telling the story from their own perspective. As such, Dead Ringers’ woman author Alice Birch and its executive producers (most of whom are women) do not invent a new future, namely a future where women, especially women of colour and belonging to the lower class, can weave their voice into other women’s and create a fairer, better society and culture. On the contrary, they create a celebration of the (self)destructive ugliness of our present times, an ugliness which is capitalistic in form and substance. In particular, the fact that the twin who ends up surviving is Elliot the alpha predator, not Beverly the (comparatively) compassionate one, as everybody thinks, is yet another confirmation of how self-indulgent capitalism is with its most enduring symbols. Elliot gets to be the one who wins precisely because she represents and embodies the system at its worst (that is, its best), with its cannibalistic drive towards the consumption of people, resources and feelings. Despite all the things she’s done (deemed as “wrong” only when they no longer serve the purpose of self-preservation and accumulation of capital the system has perfected so well since its inception), she’s ultimately celebrated as “brilliant” by Silas in his article, because she is the perfect and most dazzling emblem of the system itself: white, greedy, predatory, phallic and emotionally empty.

Significantly, the only moment the show gets “real”, that is emotionally alive, is when two non-white marginal women from a lower class are given a voice: Anarcha the slave and Greta the maid come center-stage and tell their tale which no white woman can claim as her own. “You don’t get to follow”, Anarcha tells Beverly, meaning she can’t cross the line dividing white priviledged women from black destitute outcasts silenced by white men’s History. This is an entirely different story, and a far more interesting one which was worth exploring, but was chosen only as an emotional backdrop for the “compassionate” protagonist’s occasional collision with but ultimate embracing of capitalism and its benefits for herself and her sister as white women in a position of power. In the end, one is left wondering why Alice Birch chose to write a story on white upper-class women gynecologists who are fundamentally male-oriented predators in disguise (to remain in a Cronenbergian parallel universe, Dead Ringers’ imagery and its obsession with penetration is curiously similar to the one shown in Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor, also centred on a phallic predator disguised as a woman) and whose ambitions have nothing political, instead of creating a whole different story entirely devoted to either Anarcha or Greta and their pain. Certainly, that would have been quite a political move from Cronenberg’s misogynistic depiction of the female body.

Photo: another image from the TV series Dead Ringers

Actually, here as in Cronenberg, the woman’s body is shown and conceived as the object of aggression, a battleground constantly probed, invaded, dissected, torn apart, bled out and potentially destroyed by the Mantles (especially Elliot, but Beverly’s compliance with the system as well as her act of “assisted suicide” makes her an irresponsible and far too willing accomplice). Too bad they are “women”; their predatory attitude towards other women (most of whom are not white) is nothing but male-oriented. In other words, it takes more than a woman to make a feminist story: it takes a feminist to make a feminist story. That doesn’t necessarily mean the creator of the story or its main characters must be women. If we don’t change the dynamics lying beneath power structures among people, nothing in the story will ever change. Thatcherism should be proof enough of how this turned out to be in real life politics, as today’s recrudescence of nationalism sadly is. If the dynamics do not change, scripts will always revolve around Fassbinderesque characters driven by a twisted, fascistic (hence misogynistic) thirst towards self-preservation and indifference to other people’s suffering, who need to be crushed precisely because they suffer and “feel”.

As for the other non-white women in the story, their blackness is totally irrelevant (or downplayed) from a political point of view. Take Geneviève, for instance: her blackness is incidental at best, a mere by-product of affirmative action laws allowing black actors to be on screen but only as sidekicks of the white protagonist. What’s worse, she displays the same capitalistic predatory male mindset every other main (white) female character displays when she tells Beverly they must “do it without a condom” because she wants “to put a baby inside” her body. The fact that the babies we see in the end look more like her than Beverly makes us think whether Elliot’s dream of concocting a lab formula for “female sperm” has come true. Again, is this really what a feminist representation of reality and its future should look like – beating men in their own game by using the same language and building a “romantic” relationship around the same old fantasy of colonizing the female body by impregnating it with your seed?

The whole series has a very problematic take on sex: with her constant need to satisfy a ravenous hunger which literally includes everything and everyone she sets her mind on – food, people, perhaps even non-edible entities – Elliot embodies both the outer and the inner predator, that awful drive that pushes capitalism towards cannibalism and destruction. In Dead Ringers, being a liberated woman has become synonym with having either a disturbing, devious or abusive sex life with anyone who happens to be in the same room. Rather than a liberated woman, though, Elliot functions as an energy vampire, draining everyone she comes in close contact with only to move on to the next victim.

On the whole, this is a series where each character is inherently ugly and irritatingly preoccupied with the idea of celebrating their ugliness as cool and liberating (something which seems a constant trait in some supposedly iconic “feminist” characters of recent years, e.g. Fleabag or Smilf, to name just two). The act of fucking, as well as the obsessive repetition of the word “fucking” in between other words, fuctions as a signifier of power and dominance for those (mostly white women) who use it over the rest of the world: namely Elliot, Rebecca and Mackenzie, the alpha (fe)males of the story (the fact that homeless Agnes chooses the same language does not make her an alpha team member but just a sad mockery of the team’s self-proclaimed omnipotence and omnipresence). This obsession with fucking both in language and in practice – a violent, predatory practice where liberation always comes at the expense of somebody else – is the equivalent of Lacan’s use of the word phallus as representing masculine power and dominance over women (and today would probably include non-binary people too). So, sex is used as either a form of assimilation (as in the case of Rebecca with her “naïve” wife Susan) or annihilation (as in the case of Elliot with her casual male lovers).

Which leads us to the ending. The series ends with Elliot killing Beverly while ripping the twin babies from her bleeding body, then posing as her in perpetuity with others. Nobody is supposed to know what happened, the truth sealed within her twisted cannibalistic conscience, though it is very hard to believe no one will ever notice, given the mess and the caesarean-torn body she left in the clinic, so the question remains whether Rebecca, Geneviève, Tom or everybody else for that matter are willing accomplices to her replacement and choose to stay silent. This also encapsulates the whole ideology lying beyond the story: the main character, who is also the only twin left standing, is the epitome of the masculine predatory mindset hiding behind a woman’s mask. So much for the sisterhood feminism is supposed to be about: no change in power relations and their dynamics is possible in the Mantle-Parker universe. There’s just the usual patriarchal system masked as women’s I-fuck-anybody-because-I-can attitude. Elliot surviving only as long as she poses as Beverly, forever hidden behind a mask, might seem like a fit punishment for a person like her, used as she is to unleash her unrestrained fury on the world. What if everybody knew, though, and played along? After all, they got what they wanted – the “brilliant” twin, the one granting capitalism its reproduction. This way, everybody wins – except feminism of course, and ugliness rears up its head all over again.

Photo: the cover picture for the TV series

In my view, we do not need to react to our ugly times by adding more ugliness in the mix, up to the point of celebrating ugliness ad nauseam (as most politicians and mass media gurus constantly enjoy doing). We need to explore and celebrate beauty instead. Unfortunately, there’s nothing remotely beautiful in Dead Ringers, except for Anarcha’s ghostly apparition, reminding us of how modern medicine is fundamentally a racist class-based invention, and Greta’s personal journey from apparent fetishism to conscious reclaiming of her mother’s and her own herstory and reconciliation with trauma through art. This is as far as feminist empowerment and re-imagining the Mantle(Mental) history as herstory can get. The rest of Dead Ringers seems to put in place just because, regardless of its content and pathos (or lack thereof), remakes are “fucking profitable”, as Rebecca says about the new clinic, which could easily refer both to the series as a whole and to the logics lying beyond its creation: a cynical, corporate use of creativity, diluting feminist themes of agency and control over narrative until they become a mere repetition of the same old story of predators destroying the Other, the different, the eccentric, and the subversive.

Meanwhile in the real world, women, lesbian and straight alike, as well as black, Asian and white ones alike, are still verbally and psychologically abused and ridiculed, discriminated against, silenced, trampled on, harassed, assaulted, raped and murdered by men because they are women, thus with the purpose of erasing their existence either physically, psychologically, culturally, politically, or all of the above. Despite the Istanbul convention, systemic violence against women is far from dead and laws enforced against it are often too vague, virtually non-existent or rarely enforced in effective ways. While cultural debate on consent may be common in some areas of the world mainly in the West, with specific laws against misogyny of all kinds including catcalling or upskirting, there is no universal law on consent equally enforced by all governments, nor political agreement over what harassment and violence actually mean and how and when they should be punished by law, often resulting in institutional violence against women. On top of that, gender pay gap is still a common practice and women are far from having achieved a position of power across the globe, in politics as at work – unless they choose to be part of the white guys club. Few women who currently hold powerful positions in politics can be defined as feminists – certainly this is the case with Yolanda Diaz and Katrin Jakobsdóttir, but other women politicians are totally complicit to and compliant with the system that’s been oppressing women for centuries. Though no predators themselves, surely these women in power do nothing to stop the predatory macho culture lying beyond the system. This is why choosing to depict women as predatory, priviledged bitches when in fact in the real world women are oppressed and erased, often with the help of institutions and mass media, is not only irritating, but socio-culturally inaccurate and politically irresponsible. The point of women’s liberation should be that of dismantling the oppressive structure of power; but if you use your liberated state – which may or may not include fucking multiple consenting partners, as it may or may not include alternative options like asexuality, celibacy, monogamy and so on – to oppress other women, eventually erasing them, as Elliot does with Beverly, where’s the feminist angle? How can you do away with oppression if you end up becoming the new oppressor?

Babel

The cover of Babel by Rebecca F. Kuang

Despite being a novel, Babel by Rebecca F. Kuang reads like a vigorous treatise on colonialism as exploitation of people, resources and languages. Much of the book’s emphasis on language as the site of power relations, in particular, reminded me of a wonderful essay by Nicholas Ostler, Empires of the Word, a history of the world seen from a linguistic perspective and thus focused on the connection between linguistic dominance and political dominance. Kuang pointed out in an interview that her decision to use English to write about the British Empire and its exploitation of the colonized through translation projects may be seen as a contradiction, because it seems like she is tacitly accepting English as the only possible language a writer could use today as a vehicle for their message, its power of resonance and possible implications in terms of success, sales, cultural relevance and international prestige so strong as to be irresistible. Yet I think Kuang’s statement dowplays her own gargantuan effort in bringing together all the facets of colonialism and resistance to colonialism. Her words suggest a far too humble approach to her extraordinary book, which makes an effort in including all possible arguments both in favour and against the Empire and dominion of one country (and consequently language) over the others, not because the author doesn’t want to choose sides, but because she chooses to explore the issue of colonialism in all its contradictions, its need to assimilate and annihilate the Other abroad while seemingly producing stability, progress, prosperity and multiple breakthroughs in culture, science, politics, society and institutions at home. One of the most intriguing aspects of the book is precisely the way each character follows a narrative arc which is consistent with their ideas on the Empire and on how it can either benefit or ultimately destroy them. Robin, Ramy, Victoire, Griffin, Anthony, but also Letty, to name some of the most important actors in play, all show a heroic side, their reasonings and final decisions building up to a truly epic on the Empire and a possible Resistance to its arrogant inevitability. There is some torture and violence involved, and some people may find these parts difficult to deal with, yet I think they are there for a reason; after all, the book’s subtitle is “The necessity of violence”, so readers are warned in advance on where the content might be headed. The real torture, in my view, is the one we can’t see but only guess at – the endless, numerous deaths and casualities looming in the dark, behind the core tenets of translation as it is used at Babel: language is both war and peace, a tool wrecking havoc upon the enemy and consuming them so that the system in place runs smoothly in perpetuity.

Indeed, the parts on languages, especially on Chinese characters and their multiple renderings in English, are to me the most fascinating parts of the book. “Languages are only shifting sets of symbols – stable enough to make mutual discourse possible, but fluid enough to reflect changing social dynamics.” This concept is one of the main issues the book revolves around: cultural and linguistic relativism, as well as a clear hint at what Chinese represents as a language, an endless shift of meanings within meanings hidden inside and beneath each set of characters combined together. Up until Book Four, I had the impression the fictional plot served only as an excuse to develop a nonfictional debate about languages, translation and power. Yet the last two books (as, in retrospect, the others) are so enmeshed in politics, history and plot-driven decisions to contradict my former impression. After reading the whole of Babel, there’s no doubt the book is a novel, though rich in political, historical, linguistic and cultural references. It is also an original combination of realism and fantasy, the silver-making and match pair uttering such a brilliant idea to immediately turn the book into a contemporary classic. This is how Kuang describes the silver bars mechanism, which can work only if the translator actually thinks in both languages simultaneously: “It’s a particular kind of mental state. You do speak the words, but more importantly, you hold two meanings in your head at once. You exist in both linguistic worlds simultaneously, and you imagine traversing them.” A metaphor for translating but most of all for writing, silver-making is intoxicating to those who actually know how to use it, like the “foreigners” (that is, in the Empire’s view, inferior, non-British individuals) working at Oxford’s Translation Centre. “In that fraction of a second Robin felt the source of its power, that sublime, unnamable place where meaning was created, that place which words approximated but could not, could never pin down; the place which could only be invoked, imperfectly, but even so would make its presence felt. A bright, warm sphere of light shone out of the bar and grew until it enveloped them both.” Mastering this power literally is like “rewriting the world”; that is why, when things go sour, Robin and his friends can turn to silver making and match pairing once again, and use their to their own advantage to reverse the Empire’s drive towards assimilation and annihilation.

If I had to choose a final concept which may encapsulate the message of the entire book, I would choose this one: “There was no innate, no perfectly comprehensible language; there was no candidate, not English, not French, that could bully and absorb enough to become one. Language was just difference. A thousand different ways of seeing, of moving through the world. No, a thousand worlds within one. And translation – a necessary endeavour, however futile, to move between them.” No language will ever be the dominant one, unless it loses something of itself – its pristine integrity, its prestige, or simply its dominant status – along the way. Kuang’s decision to use English in writing such a powerful story on the possibility of revolution as language and the other way round bears no contradiction at all; it’s rather a critique on the Empire by using one of its most powerful tools and turning it around, with significant residual parts coming from elsewhere, from the “peripheral” languages and cultures which will always fight to reinstate their presence in the cracks of the dominant culture, seeping through its contradictions and its sense of superiority.

To those who think our hopeless times constantly immersed in hate, cynicism and disdain can’t produce a masterpiece, or a classic actually worth reading, I say: read Babel and ponder over its beauty and visceral urgency. Dream the revolution, and revel in the symphony of languages and their multiplicity.

The Tempest Awakes

Photo: A detail from La Tempesta by Giorgione (1503-1504), Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice

My novel I’m working on, Volume 2 of The Tempest Trilogy, officially has a name: The Tempest Awakes. This is a preliminary synopsis of the book:

Come to the yellow sands of The Tempest, a marvellous uninhabited island full of voices, sounds and sweet airs! Join Sycorax, Miranda, Ariel and Aurora in their quest for a new existence full of magic. While the tree stands on the shore acting as a protection spell and channeling vision into her companions’ hearts with her oracle sentences, Sycorax, Miranda and Ariel start exploring the island, each creating their own dwelling and finding true purpose and meaning in life.

As The Tempest awakes, though, so does Eriskegal. Once queen of the underworld, she was later trapped in the emptiness beyond spacetime by an evil male god, who stole all her magic and condemned her to float into endless non-existence. But now, after centuries of immobility, a sound from a land of her past called The Tempest ripples through spacetime breaking the cycle of oblivion shrouding her mind and limbs. Gradually, memories recompose themselves alongside flesh and bones, soon letting all her unmitigable rage against the vile god pour forth. Rebuilding her dark realm will surely help her find power once again, but will the evil god answer her call for retribution? And how will The Tempest’s inhabitants be of any use to her plan? Caught in her own oscillations between trance, violence and awakening, will Sycorax manage to find balance while welcoming Eriskegal’s presence, or will her quest for uncompromised darkness unleash destruction on the island and her companions?

Inspired by Shakespeare’s The Tempest and written in a richly visual lyrical style, The Tempest Awakes is the second volume of The Tempest Trilogy, a dark mythic fantasy focused on power, oppression, transformation, death and rebirth.

Ariel

Writing the sequel to My Heart is The Tempest is breathtaking, mostly because the characters are caught in the process of discovering themselves and their real quest while discovering the island. The whole process of creativity seems to be transformed and lifted to higher spheres because of the wonder permeating each character’s approach to their new world, and because of the world itself constantly transforming. It’s like a dream coalescing before my eyes, because I can actually experiment with form and content in a way which simply didn’t fit in Volume 1.

As usual when I deal with a new book to be developed, I’ve started from jotting down the backbone of the story, then I moved on to “dig” separate “tunnels” ‒ one for each character ‒ so as to focus more in detail to their nuances and psychological traits without the others getting in the way. Proceeding so, I’ve created a preliminary narrative arc for four of my main characters so far, including protagonist Sycorax. That doesn’t mean I’ve written everything their is to say about them, but I’ve pretty much covered all the basic moments of their personal quest, including crisis, climax and resolution.

As far as I’m concerned, because there were both darkness and feminism involved, that was the “easy” part of the process. Now I have to deal with the most difficult part, which also include actually writing the villain as a fully round character. But that cannot be unless I deal with another key figure first: Ariel. That is why, after developing the most of Miranda (though I’m not done with her yet), I’ve shifted my attention to Ariel. I’m finding him a much more difficult character to write, probably because he’s neither dark as Sycorax (and other mystery characters) nor as naïve as Miranda, so finding the right timbre to describe his transformations as fuelled by the island is proving quite challenging. What I like about him is precisely what connects him to the island’s breath and configuration as both a place and a philosophical concept. As in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, his connection to air and music will be crucial, though in a very different way. In his poem (also inspired by The Tempest) “The Sea and the Mirror”, W. H. Auden declares Ariel to be made of songs: “when he is truly himself, he sings”. I don’t think singing will be a key feature of my own version of Ariel, at least not in Volume 2 of The Tempest trilogy. Auden also says that “the terms ‘innocent’ and ‘corrupt’ cannot be applied to Ariel because he is beyond good and evil; he can neither love nor hate, he can only play.” I like this idea of going beyond good and evil; it’s more akin to Daoist thinking than to Western thought, and this is what I’m interested in exploring while following Ariel in his quest. Transformation, process, and their relation to magic as music, and the other way round: this will be my guiding star in fleshing him out ‒ a contradiction of a sort, as Ariel is after all made of air… This is going to be fun!!

Sleepwalkers 2

“We have to learn the desperate faith of sleep-
walkers who rise out of their calm beds

and walk through the skin of another life.
We have to drink the stupefying cup of darkness
and wake up to ourselves, nourished and surprised.”

taken from For the Sleepwalkers by Edward Hirsch

Adult life often is about unlearning what we assumed had to be learned while growing up, and walking “through the skin of another life” truly feels like unlearning who we are to embrace “the stupefying cup fo darkness”.

To me, this is what writing is: slowly dismantling ourselves and welcoming the unexpected to feel replenished, “nourished and surprised”. Living and breathing our characters’ awakenings is a new way of seeing things, letting go of our ego and lose ourselves into something new – a new skin, a new quest, a new hope.

The ink on the page may run because of the urge to tell our own version of reality, but it also overflows from the page back into us, to explode with new epiphanies, new beginnings, turning our everyday life into something other, something greater.

Sleepwalkers 1

“Our hearts are leaving our bodies.

Our hearts are thirsty black handkerchiefs
flying through the trees at night, soaking up
the darkest beams of moonlight, the music

of owls, the motion of wind-torn branches.
And now our hearts are thick black fists
flying back to the glove of our chests.”

taken from For the Sleepwalkers by Edward Hirsch

I wonder if writing may be similar to sleepwalking, consciously diving into the unknown, letting our energy roam without the mind interfering. Sometimes poetry feels that way. I know it feels that way to me because I don’t write poetry, but often start from poetry-like fragments, “thick black fists” or skeins of multicoloured grids meticulously placed over the page-white. These pulsing moments are each character’s primal wail, whisper or yell, agglutinating with meaning and story. Then the yarn slowly unfurls, “the darkest beams of moonlight” running beyond sleep and wakeful states to tell the whole tale of sorrow and bliss, each twined to the other. Poetry is a window to the oneiric and the revelation, a footprint of dreams. Prose is my way to follow this footprint and grow its bud into a sea of words.

The Word for World is Forest – Review

“All the colours of rust and sunset, brownreds and pale greens, changed ceaselessly […]. No way was clear, no light unbroken, in the forest. Into wind, water, sunlight, starlight, there always entered leaf and branch, bole and root, the shadowy, the complex.”

Ursula Le Guin, The word for world is forest

In the foreword to her scifi novel The word for world is forest, Ursula Le Guin questions the supposedly escapist function of scifi and fantasy explaining how, no matter which genre a book may fall into, a true writer’s motivation always lies in the pursuit of freedom. Conceiving her story in the backdrop of the Vietnam war during the late ‘60s as a member of the peace movement, all the while witnessing “despoliation of natural resources”, exploitation and murder as inherent expressions of a male-oriented war culture, Le Guin thought it was her moral duty to write a book expressing her dissent towards oppression against the Other and her cry for freedom.

Set in the imaginary world of Athshe, a planet where humans from worn-out Earth land to establish a colony and steal rare commodities like wood, The word for world is forest explores both the idea of colonization and the concept of rebellion against colonizers by focusing on three main characters expressing different views on the interaction with nature and with other intelligent species. On the one hand, Captain Davidson represents the typical white suprematist who sees himself as “a world-tamer” and “New Tahiti” (the racist name humans use for Athshe) as “a tangle of trees, endless, meaningless” finally turned into a ‘civilized’ space thanks to human intervention, which to him entails engaging in specific acts deemed to be ‘necessary’ like “voluntary labour” forced on the entire local population and rape against female natives.

On the other hand, Selver the Athshean symbolizes a world focused on a balanced relationship with nature, where everything that dies grows back again as leaves and trees and dreams are the most genuine path to understanding and wisdom. In his world ‒ literally made of forest and linguistically defined as such, hence the title of the book ‒ any form of violence against other species and against natural elements is virtually unknown: no rape, no murder, no war have ever been part of the Athshean way of living, and should never be. Yet soon, because of the close contact with humans, “the unreined dreams of illness” start moving in his eyes, disrupting his people forever.

In between them stands Ljubov the human scientist, an interpreter of Athshean ways and language for humans and allegedly a friend to Selver. For the sake of science, and because he truly believes in the possibility of overcoming mutual differences, Ljubov has studied Athsheans and their language closely, writing a bilingual glossary with the help of Selver so as to improve communication and understanding between one civilization and the other. And yet, one cannot shake the feeling Ljubov’s ‘friendship’ is yet another form of racism in disguise: his narrative includes disturbing details suggesting his intentions are far from good, let alone totally disrespectful towards Athsheans as people. For instance, we come to know his ‘scientific research’ includes wiring “countless electrodes onto countless furry green skulls”, suggesting a deliberate use of torture. Furthermore, Ljubov displays a paternalistic attitude towards Server (“Ljubov’s love for his friend was deepened by that gratitude the saviour feels towards the one whose life he has been privileged to save”, my italics), seeing his job not as an actual way to prevent the exploitation and the extermination of local people but merely as a record of what humans destroyed (“leaving descriptions of what we wipe out is part of human nature”).

The first three chapters focus on one of the three main characters at a time, presenting facts and their consequences from his personal standpoint. The actual story starts in the aftermath of an attack organised by Selver and a group of Athsheans against humans in a ‘voluntary camp’: everybody is killed but Davidson, despite his raping and killing Selver’s wife. Thele, was the main reason why the attack was organised in the first place. After releasing Davidson and singing over him (an alternative to physical combat according to Athshean customs), Selver retreats into the forest to spend some time healing and pondering over the possible implications of his actions. As he meets Coro Mena the healer, Selver enters the path of dreaming, and everyone comes to see how his people were made to live in pens like animals and serve “yumens” as their slaves, Athshean women crushed as if they were serpents or spineless creatures.

“Can you walk the road your dream goes?” Coro Mena asks, and though the dream leads to a broken path full of death changing their world forever, Selver knows he will walk the new road and make others see the path too. With the vision of humans destroying every inch of the forest burning in his dream, and the knowledge of a new cargo of women coming to keep yumens company. Selver declares all humans must be burned to avoid the destruction of Athshe. “They want the forest for themselves”, so there’s no other way: the evil dream must come forth and infect each and every Athshean alive, until it finally ends in death.

Once the healing is concluded, Coro Mena declares Selver a god, “a changer, a bridge between realities. […] the son of forest-fire, the harvester,” somebody who can embrace fear and turn the dream-time into fire. Many will die, but Coro Mena sees hope too: he has dreamt of Selver walking in the forest, and the trees were reborn behind him, “forever renewed.” The new dream may come from violence, but its fruit will finally burst into rebirth.

The rest of the book is devoted to the inevitable cultural and physical clash between humans and Athsheans, despite the League of Worlds has prevented “Terrans” (people coming from Earth) from engaging with natives any further to avoid any escalation of violence. The dialogue among colonisers (including Terrans, but also other species like Cetians and Hainish) is particularly interesting, especially when it comes to analysing the events that led to the natives’ attack on the camp, most notably Davidson’s rape against Thele: as they talk about this act, none of the males define it as “rape”, and opt for “having sex” with one of the natives. Their words seem to imply it was a consensual act, thus erasing the woman’s point of view completely, perhaps also because male humans come from an overtly sexist society and thus cannot conceive a world where “females” have their say on any relevant matter. Conversely, in Athshe men are devoted to dreaming, while women hold power in their hands. As Ljubov says: “intellect to the men, politics to the women, and ethics to the interactions of both: that’s their arrangement.” Yet, when Selver and his people decide to destroy humans, their main attack is against female women, precisely because their presence would allow the enemy to “breed”, and thus to never leave the forest planet.

Personally, I found Chapter Two particularly intriguing, its poetical language shedding light on the dream culture nurtured and experienced by Athsheans and the conversation between Selver and Coro Mena truly inspirational. I wish Le Guin had included more poetical parts like this in her book, also devoting more attention to the description of the Athshean society. Instead, probably because of the ghost of the Vietnam war haunting her, she seems more concerned with exposing male violence rather than with showing possible alternatives to its display. Also, being the author a feminist and the world of Athsheans based on an egalitarian vision of men and women, sharing labour in equal parts while women are the only ones allowed to rule, having more female characters on the forefront would have made more sense. Instead, we don’t see much of the complex societal structure of Athshe, and all we are left with are native men dealing with human men and engaging in war with them.

I think exploring what having power in the hands of women might mean in a non-violent society would have been much more relevant. As such, the book lacks in a true feminist perspective because of the absence of preeminent female characters: despite Thele’s rape and death by the hands of Davidson being the catalyst for the preliminary Athshean revolt against “yumens”, no woman is given any pivotal role in the story. On the contrary, Thele’s exclusive role as “the raped woman” (her sad violation ‘poetically’ described by Selver as “the broken birch tree, the opened door”) seems to reinforce the idea that, no matter what society they may be part of, women can only function as absence and ultimately as erasure. Actually, with the exception of Ebor Dendep the weaver, all female characters in the book (including human ones) are shown as either dead, raped, powerless or, as it happens with the cargo of human women, nameless cattle. This certainly is a major flaw in the book. Besides, in her focusing on the possibility of friendship between a male native and a supposedly ‘understanding’ and ‘sensitive’ human man, Le Guin ends up excluding women from the possibility of change, dream and power in her story. If told from a woman-centred perspective, The word for world is forest might have been a much more subversive and political book.

If freedom is the actual aim of all true writers, as Le Guin suggests in her foreword citing Emily Brontë, than novels should explain what this freedom might consist of, opening up new dimensions and possibilities for those who might feel diminished, silences or erased in the real world we live in. Perhaps, Le Guin was more interested in exposing war for what it was back then (and still is today): a self-indulgent celebration of nationalism, machismo and hatred for anything contradicting this macro narrative. As Selver says, finally understanding there can be no real friendship with “yumens”, human nature is the actual problem: “the kindest of them was as far out of touch, as unreachable, as the cruellest.” We are our worst enemies. Perhaps, by indirecly taking inspiration from Charles Tart’s tales on the non-violent Senoi people of Malaysia, Le Guin wanted to show us a different path, where dreaming and contemplation could be an anthidote to toxic imperialism. “They come out of their dreams with a new song, tool, dance, idea. The waking and the dreaming are equally valid, each acting upon the other in complementary fashion”, she says while explaining how this incredible population managed to live for centuries without the notion of war and murder using dream to solve both interpersonal and intercultural conflict. Perhaps, she seems to suggest, the tools of change have been there all along, we just forgot how to use them. Or perhaps, as Audre Lorde would say later in 1979, “The Master’s Tool will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” The tools must be changed, and the perspective too. The dream must be explored and walked through, not corrupted by toxicity, in order for us to truly embrace change.

The colour thought is before language

“I want you and you are not here. I pause
in this garden, breathing the colour thought is
before language into still air. Even your name
is a pale ghost and, though I exhale it again
and again, it will not stay with me.”

from Miles Away by Carol Ann Duffy

As Andrea Slot says, “poems feel like visitors in the night”, or they may re-enact a visitation, their lines sounding like peculiar apparitions shaking us from lethargy, yet at the same time functioning as ways to reclaim the authenticity of the moment, away from any possible rewriting or manipulation of reality through memory. “The colour thought is before language” is for me this fleeting but vital thread making words possible. In this poem, Carol Ann Duffy works her way presence despite absence: I want you now, in this racing against memory erasing you and me together. This is what writing can be: not simply a replacement, or a replica of something we experienced, but the actual thing themselves, a pinnacle of intimacy where words do no longer represent the moment, but are the moment itself.

In a way, though celebrating the longing coming before language, here Duffy seems to celebrate the optimistic possibility of (re)creating something that was lost, something missing, not simply by summoning a ghost, but turning that filigree indentation they have left and that composed itself through your words into a solid thought, an actual shape coalescing beyond the apparition. Breath and bone standing before you, open wide and colorful, both meaning and substance.

Reading is not a challenge

“I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.”

Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf – Volume 3, 1923-1928

I tend to read many books at once too, precisely because I need to feel the breadth of sounds propagating from one volume to the other, so as to hear a full symphony forming both inside and outside my head. It is the only way I know of reading, because it is compelling and shakes my brain from the lethargy of everyday monotony, opening the world to the unexpected and the strange, the epiphany and the wonder. Letting words come alive as their mutual breaths move into one another, transforming into one another, I can finally experience a wayward sense of fecund peace and creative meditation, and start seeing things in a different light, setting the spiral of change into motion.

And yet, as compelling as this peculiar way of reading may sound, it is far more rewarding and ingenious that any reading challenge might be. The very expression “reading challenge” is, in my view, an insult to the act of reading. No matter how popular this practice has become in the last few years, a reading challenge will always be a move against the very concept of reading. Far from encouraging people to develop critical thinking ‒ like any authentic, solid reading would do ‒ these so-called “challenges” reduce the inherent viral subversiveness of reading into yet another facet of capitalism: performing, competing, testing, then moving on to the next big read (usually chosen by an algorhythm, not by you according to your personal interests), without ever pondering on the reasons why you are doing so, nor what you are actually achieving with taking part in this race. Because that’s what reading comes down to: a maddening race meant to prove you are better than others at reading as many books as you can. Sadly, this doesn’t sound like an intellectually compelling activity at all, but like a trite, ego-driven urge, ultimately very much similar to a dick-measuring contest. One wonders why women-identified or non-binary people should engage in such a stupid, covertly sexist activity at all.

In my view, true reading requires neither contest nor challenge. In a world where speed, profit and efficiency are the only things we are supposed to be after in order to feel “real” and functional as human beings, reading can become a revolutionary and subversive act, because it can help us reclaim our need for slow contemplation, away from productivity and performance.