Posts in Category: Women in and about literature
Sara Stridsberg
I had some good news today.
Sara Stridsberg is out with a new book called ‘Darling River’, published in Sweden in early 2010 and just translated to Danish pending appearance on August 20th. I, however, (sorry Danish publishers and bookstores) will shoot my future career in the foot and buy it in Swedish and on the internet! My fingers were tingling just by the thought of this book as I was reading an interview with the author in Weekendavisen’s book section. And at one point Stridsberg explains her writing process and I knew just what she meant, only with me it’s in regard to my reading process.
When I am writing on a novel I always have the feeling of being away in a dream for a couple of years and afterwards I almost can’t remember it.
The thing with dreams is (as Mr. DiCaprio says in the movie Inception, which I went to see the other day btw) you are just there in the middle of the dream, all of a sudden. And as with dreams, literature, for me, behaves in a similar fashion. I couldn’t tell you how it started, I can’t remember every detail, there is often just the feeling afterwards of having felt something, which in reality is really blurry, and I really have to concentrate if I want to recollect details. But the bigger picture is so much more colorful and vibrant.
Solanas
I read Sara Stridsberg’s ‘Drömfakulteten’ about two years ago, which is a “literary fantasy based upon Valerie Solanas” – the girl who shot Warhol – and I was blown away by the style in particular, but also the very gripping story that interlaced the pages. There is the factual person Valerie Solanas, and then there is Stridsberg’s fictional Valerie Solanas. What’s so great is that factual Solanas may have been the stepping stone for the fictional one, but neither is in the others’ debt. Imagine a spoon and a bowl of water; you dunk the spoon in, making ripples in the water, and take a very little percentage of water out, drinking it and leaving the water disturbed, touched. With reading I feel like, on it’s own, the pages with signs on them are meaningless and still, but as soon as I read a page it is in my head, occupies my thoughts and forms my consciousness. Stridsberg has translated the SCUM-manifesto, written by Solanas, before writing ‘Drömfakulteten’, so it is a really interesting process to figure out how Stridsberg has read in between and on the lines to create her ”fictional” Solanas. The novel is raw and shifts between the past, present and thoughts of Solanas’, who carries herself with a sense of self-rightiousness of a radical political activist. At the same time it is also a very vulnerable and lonely novel. There is so much unresolved emotional baggage that dart out of the story and the pain is most explicit when Solanas is conversing with Silkboy, her companion and ally. It is a dark universe that sucks you in, and questions of sexuality, wronged and wrong are recurrent in the novel, forming a foundation for the pained individual.
Sara Stridsberg
Stridsberg
If you read Danish and are interested in Stridsberg’s authorship, I would recommend this interview, which is to be found in Weekendavisen’s no. 32 – August 13 2010. And I would definitely recommend ‘Drömfakulteten’ (of course, if you like stream-of-consciousness styled literature, Valerie Solanas, sexual politics, the tormented individual, take your pick!)
I can’t wait to receive my copy of Darling River, but if anyone has read it out there, feel free to make your impression known here 🙂
Euripides’ Medea
My holiday books are in a dead heat with books I have discovered in my mom’s bookshelves. I could have told myself that books were not a necessary item to bring with me on a trip home, but I got greedy. The latest raid left me with seven books in each hand and three in front of me. But incredo-woman as I am in the field of literary vice, I am able to multitask, so this weekend I have been reading Herta Müller’s ‘Der Mensch ist ein grosser Fasan auf der Welt’, Virginia Woolf’s ‘The Waves’, and Euripides’ ‘Medea’. Three completely different books, both in style and theme, and all three keeping me on my toes.
Raided books
MEDEA
I finished the copy of Medea first – it wasn’t that long, so it was a good night’s read – which I found out both my mother and my uncle read in high school. As I was reading it, I thought about the famous line “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorn” (originally from W. Congreve’s play ‘The Mourning Bride’ from 1697, but often misquoted as a Shakespearean line, it goes like this: Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned / Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.) I also thought about how you often toss it out whenever a woman gets angry to disarm or delegitimize a miffed out female. In the context of Medea it is also relevant to mention that Fury is a female spirit of punishment in Greek mythology (The Furies (Roman mythology) or Erinyes (Greek mythology) in the Underworld punish the guilty, and are avengers of violations of natural order, among these kinship murder). The story of Medea in Greek mythology is this: deeply in love with the warrior hero, Jason, sorceress Medea agrees to help him in his quest as long as he promises to take her with him and marry her. As many mythologies go, there are a lot of hindrances and creatures with different divine powers to be conquered. In the beginning of Euripides’ tragedy Medea, although now married to Jason, has been scorned by him in favour of the daughter of king Creon, in order to help his political status. So enraged by this treachery she wows to take a most gruesome revenge. Medea is known and revered in the land as a wise woman, and Creon genuinely fears her retaliation, so he exiles her, but she persuades him to give her time to find a new haven. Unknown to him, she has just bought time to concoct a plan to hurt Jason by killing his daughter. Jason himself goes to her to smooth things out, the first time of no use, but on the second visit she leads him to think she has forgiven his actions and wants to give his wife to be a present of a dress and a coronet. In fact, she has poisoned the clothes and in the most horrific way Glauce (Creon’s daughter) dies. When Creon touches her he is also killed by the poison. Two down, two to go, as Medea has no intention of stopping here. In order to really get to Jason, she also kills off their own children.
The tragedy is truly worth the read, it is pure spears to the heart, and the dialogues are beautiful, and each sentence is laden with moral and ethical food for thought. It truly is tragedy in its truest sense. The character of Medea, also the interpretation Euripides makes, has been an inspiration and topic of many men and women throughout history, not only literary history, but living history in general; her actions scolded, her passions revered, her sorrow felt and discarded, she truly is a being of great magnitude. The sacred role of motherhood is contested, she is cast into the role of a monster, and yet maintains an aura of pride about her. And there is always the question if her intelligence is a stumbling block or an asset – is intelligence of the mind or heart, or maybe a harmonious fusion of the two? Throughout the whole ordeal she holds her head high, places the full blame of occurring events on Jason, and seeks justice for her lost honour. She truly is complex, and although the play in itself, as I earlier said, is a quick read, the story is not easily out of mind. I suspect it will not be long until I go through the play again, and I would really love to see it played out, even if it could never stand ground with the impressive characters and scenery I have built up inside my head 🙂
Different images of Medea
Medea
Scene from a South African adaptation of Euripides’ Medea. Performed by Jazzart Dance Theatre during 1994-1996.
Directors: Mark Fleischman and Jennie Reznek
Photographer Ruphin Coudyzer.
Choreographer – Alfred Hinkel
Composer – Rene Avenant
Actor – Bo Petersen (Medea)
Medea
Medea about to kill her Children - Delacroix
Medea about to kill her Children - Delacroix
Medea killing her son - Vase
Adichie’s women
You had just finished Adichie’s latest book and sat down to write a post to your blog about it. You had realized that it was drawing your mind towards yourself and the people and places around you. It was the summer you did not go to Roskilde Festival, the summer you finished early at uni and started late, the summer your mother was waiting anxiously for your arrival back home, where you belong, on the little islands in the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean. The islands very few people knew, and most outsiders deemed either breathtakingly beautiful when speaking of the nature, or backwards and stubborn when speaking of its inhabitants, of course they did not know the incredibly fabulousness of the society because they weren’t insiders. You were watching the sunny pavement outside and wondering what kind of weather would form your holiday visit to your homeland.
Copyright © 2008 Beowulf Sheehan/PEN American Center
Adichie speaks to me. The little section here up above is my own humble way of showing one of the narrational techniques she uses and the air with which she does it. She is a storyteller of refreshing confidence. The stories are pervaded with curious impressions of her women protagonists, who either are out of their cultural boundaries, relocated in geography or seeing new situations arise out of old settings. So many of these short stories deserve attention on so many levels but what most struck me (probably on a relational level) was the sense of being or existence on the one hand, and the quizzical reflection the narrators have on people who deny their culture and identity. There is a lot of emphasis on who someone is, and why someone is. What does culture mean, and how ingrown are you? Is it easy to change from one cultural identity or are you just posing, trying to fit in? When you no longer feel kinship with a former identity, do you feel shame, or do you scorn others for not evolving as much as you? Do you have the right to weave your own culture into someone else’s, to put your mark on it? All of these questions arose in my mind while reading Adichie, and all of the women are so beautifully human.
However, I also have some reservations with the stories. In general, the issue of race, and especially the multifaceted power issues between white and black, somehow always ends up in the same critique of the former and the self-negating puppet actions of the latter. The former is always displaying condescending attitude towards the latter, no matter if he means well or is trying to forcibly impose his ideas, and the latter takes the rottenness of the former and pervades himself with it. Granted, the issue is fraught with so much background by now, that no matter what stance you take, you take the wrong one. But it gets tiring, and I do wish (fairytales and pixie-dust) that we could move on, individual to individual, on more equal terms.
‘The Thing Around Your Neck’ did for me just what I want books to do for me: they opened a door into a realm I am not entirely aquatinted with and invited me to think (even if some doors were closed and some places were thought for me).
Mailbox entry
I have talked so much about my mailbox these last entries that I think I should name one category ‘mailbox’.
Today was no exception: I opened my mailbox and two books came tumbling out, much to my delight.
Blixen and Adichie
The Blixen book I received for the tweet I talked about in my earlier post. It is so pwetty! I think I will wait a while before reading it, and just enjoy its crisp, white cover for a while before I smudge it with my ever so clumsy butterfingers.
The second one I received so I could review it. And this one I will definitely start on today. I have bought Adichie’s earlier book ‘Half of a yellow sun’ – which coincidentally is also on my ever-growing to-read-in-summer list – so I contemplated if I should read that one first, but really, I don’t really see the point in keeping up with chronology.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is Nigerian, educated in the USA and has written two novels before this one. ‘Half of a yellow sun’ is set in 1960’s Nigeria in civil war-time and it centers on three main characters.
‘The thing around your neck’ (the book on the photo) is a collection of short stories, originally published in 2009 and translated/published to Danish in June, 2010.
I have never read (that I remember, or know of) any African writers’ works, so I am looking forward to see how she writes, and what she writes about. It seems that Africa is for the most part narrated in the Western culture through monetary/monitory voices, so it will be nice to hear from the people who actually grow up and live in Africa. With the craze of the World Cup in South Africa, where the vuvuzela has been no. 1 item on news channels’ report list, it has managed to overshadow every other good story they could run about this fascinating country. So I will turn off my TV (my mother and brother are going: “Blasphemy!!”), make a good cup of tea and sit in my chair reading my way through Africa, until the day I walk the continent and see it for myself.
Telling stories
I have started to read Karen Blixen’s Seven Gothic Tales and I am really liking it. The first story ‘Roads around Pisa’ reminded me a lot of Don Quixote and how Cervantes playfully deals with sexuality and misconceptions that invite a reconsideration/reaffirmation of the cultural meaning of gender. There is an awful lot of reflection about women and their stand in life in Blixen’s tales. It is really fascinating to read when most of it narrates through the characters of men, and that which is narrated by women is done with regards to their station within the realms of society’s norm. The seven tales from the title are interspersed with many, many tales that use this power of narration to get their story out.
I am a firm believer in the idea that we sculpt our world through narration. The stories we choose to tell are our takes on reality as we perceive it, or in some cases how we challenge it. We accept and join in on some narrations, while we reject and replace others and in doing so we create meaning for ourselves. The characters of Karen Blixen are all trying to communicate their knowledge or view of the world through their tales. There are those in her character-base who create stories that are double-edged, recounting past experiences with present knowledge (older, wiser attitude) while forming their explanation by present outlook. And then there are stories that attempt to incite future action, stories that distress, stories that bring joy and stories that contemplate life’s fickle nature.
Karen Blixen - Syv Fantastiske Fortællinger
Narration has a great power over humans. We relate to each other when we tell tales and listen to stories of others. We invite others to see what we see and use stories to understand others, and mostly ourselves. Telling stories is a very common pastime in my family (both immediate and extended). There are some great storytellers among them that capture their audience with exhilarating stories, and it is of no matter how often we have heard them. It is not so much the story per se, as the setting, the way the story is being told and the feelings that the storytellers convey that have an effect on the listener. Without being told to ‘laugh here’, ‘cry here’, or ‘be shocked here’ you use all of your sociocultural learned skills on picking up signs and identifiable markers.
I guess this inclination towards stories and narration in my family has been naturally conveyed into the wonderful world of literature for me. I feel at home in processing stories and using my skills to look at a text not as an inanimate object that is merely to be read or seen, but a living creation always up for interpretation and always experienced by the next listener/reader in line.
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