{"id":149009,"date":"2020-11-13T09:00:37","date_gmt":"2020-11-13T14:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=149009"},"modified":"2020-11-15T11:26:08","modified_gmt":"2020-11-15T16:26:08","slug":"what-our-contributors-are-reading-this-fall-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/11\/13\/what-our-contributors-are-reading-this-fall-3\/","title":{"rendered":"What Our Contributors Are Reading This Fall"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Contributors from our Fall issue<\/a> share their favorite recent finds.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Tourmaline (Photo: Mickaline Thomas)<\/p><\/div>\n

A few months ago,\u00a0this essay<\/span><\/a> on freedom dreaming, by Tourmaline, found me when I needed it. The whole thing is a wave of beauty. When I first read it, I thought: I see that world. I want that world. But I more than want\u00a0<\/i>the world it describes; I need it. Fast forward. The Nigerian government\u2014using its police force and army\u2014turned a peaceful protest against police brutality into the widely reported massacre we are still recovering from. Ten days after, I read this essay<\/span><\/a> about abolition by Mariame Kaba. With my mind still raw from footage of live rounds ripping through the air as people screamed and then fell quiet, I was too scared and exhausted to dream that day.<\/p>\n

But these two essays remind me of the same things: We can have more than what we have always known. We can imagine beyond everything we have ever seen. We deserve more than make-do, more than empty promises of reform. We owe the dreaming to ourselves and to each other. If the first thing about revolution is creation, as Kwame Ture stated, then our ability to create newness, to make the immaterial tangible is crucially linked to our freedom. It looks different often, but I am trying to do the daily work of ensuring that nothing\u2014including my own rage and grief\u2014destroys the place where my imagination is stored. \u2014<\/strong>Eloghosa Osunde<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

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Rachel Eliza Griffiths.<\/p><\/div>\n

At a time of so much loss, what could be more necessary than an elegy turned affirmation of identity?\u00a0 If an elegy usually focuses on the dead, Seeing the Body<\/em><\/a>, Rachel Eliza Griffiths\u2019s latest collection of poems written after the loss of her mother, directs the elegy back toward the living self. The opening title poem asks \u201cHow does the elegy believe me?\u201d The pulse of the book is a series of unlabeled photographs, which make up the middle section Daughter: Lyric: Landscape<\/em>. In a white dress set against majestic rocks or folded nude into furniture, the poet figures herself as both ghost and geological element. Loss strips the self but it also distills the spirit. Elegy becomes self-portrait.<\/p>\n

In a country afflicted with such a deep and ongoing history of systemic racism and racial violence, death and grief are defining aspects of Griffiths\u2019s life and identity as a Black woman. Toward the end of the collection, \u201cGood America, Good Acts,\u201d a poem for Chikesia Clemons, a young mother and victim of police brutality, ends with these powerful, punishing words: \u201cYes, \/ America, you\u2019ve done just about enough.\u201d The book is as much a political lament as it is a personal memorial. In poems ranging formally from quick rivulets to dense meditations, there is no distinction between monumental loss and the body as monument (\u201cNow we meet in my body\u2026 \u201d). Griffiths draws our attention past absence to the mirror processes of dying and grieving, both embodied (\u201cA grief makes its own blood\u201d).<\/p>\n

Griffiths reconsiders her own birth and her mother\u2019s birth (while filling out her death certificate), and in one of the most powerful poems, she depicts her own rebirth as the labor and delivery of language: \u201cExamine the fontanelles \/ of syllables, pressing \/ & striking \/ the echoes of her voice \/ until I scream & shriek \/ inside the lonely gauze \/ of my rebirth.\u201d The impulse of poetry is physical. Both the poems and photographs function as illuminating fragments of the poet and her mother (\u201cWe break mirrors inside of each other \/ to see again.\u201d). The distance of death is shattered by exquisite intimacy. Alive with pain, rage, and desire, this kind of grief has knuckles. As someone for whom grief and motherhood are inextricable, I am invigorated by Griffiths\u2019s vision in Seeing the Body<\/em>. Beyond memory and ritual, we have the power to incorporate our dead. \u2014<\/strong>Elizabeth Metzger<\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

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I couldn\u2019t have wished for better reading during the pandemic than a new manuscript by Maureen Gibbon. I was transported from our insane world into that of Manet during his last years. Delving into a story about the great painter\u2019s syphilis managed to distract me from the pandemic. I decided to reread Gibbon\u2019s first novel, Swimming Sweet Arrow<\/i><\/a>, an all-time favorite, which I first read when it came out in 2000. The novel is sharp, deep, and direct. I\u2019d never before read a woman\u2019s coming-of-age, both sexually and emotionally, told in such a straightforward, unpretentious manner. Gibbon, with reverence but without sentimentality, presents us with the life of a working-class girl as she learns about drugs, sex, and men. The opening of the novel is one of the best first sentences ever:<\/p>\n

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When I was eighteen, I went parking with my boyfriend Del, my best friend June, and her boyfriend Ray. What I mean is that June fucked Ray and I fucked Del in the same car, at the same time.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I think Maureen Gibbon is criminally underrated. She\u2019s able to create worlds where someone else\u2019s everyday becomes my own. \u2014<\/strong>Rabih Alameddine<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

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Jack Dylan Grazer and Jordan Kristine Seam\u00f3n in We Are Who We Are<\/em>. Photo: Yannis Drakoulidis \/ HBO.<\/p><\/div>\n

For the last eight weeks, I\u2019ve been awash in Luca Guadagnino\u2019s sublime We Are Who We Are<\/em><\/a>. The cultural reframing of American families transplanted to a military base in Italy becomes, in Guadagnino\u2019s hands, a study of a cross section of U.S. citizens suddenly forced to externalize \u201cAmerican values.\u201d Against this backdrop, Guadagnino trains his lens on the emotional lives of teenage children, exploring their protean desires, rage, melancholy, and their emerging and still amorphous sexual identities. Guadagnino\u2019s range and insight reels in the subtle tonal shifts of the interstitial as well as the high points of raw Dionysian energy. He displaces and upturns most of our visual expectations for the interior lives of the young. His gaze is both tender and unrelenting, picking apart complex relationships and the multiple ways they manifest across the jagged spectrum of eros. I recognize something similar in the lush tonality of American artist Jesse Mockrin<\/a>\u2019s work. Mockrin re-creates key details from paintings of the Rococo and Baroque eras to depict the cycling of myth and narratives through time. Her paintings transform and invert the expected horror<\/em> vacui<\/em> of the images from these periods by using elision, where the subjects fall out of the frame. This in turn highlights the energeia<\/em> of the minutiae\u2014the central act and the hands that guide the act. The negative space in her paintings is compounded and given a potent psychic charge by this sense of disorientation brought about by what is left outside the frame. \u2014Rohan<\/a> <\/strong>Chhetri<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

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Sufjan Stevens. Photo courtesy of Asthmatic Kitty Records.<\/p><\/div>\n

I\u2019ve long been a Sufjan Stevens fan. The second album I bought was Seven Swans<\/em>. The tone and lyrics on that collection brought me fully up to speed on Stevens\u2019s unironic use of Christian allusion, story, and dogma. Wait\u2014a highly gifted singer-songwriter who was plainly a believer, but not part of Christian rock? How can this possibly be?<\/p>\n

As soon as it was available, I got Stevens\u2019s newest album, The Ascension<\/i><\/a>. It is what I think is called electropop, and it has the catchy hooks and the highly processed synth sounds one might expect from such a category. I am not finished listening, but at this point I can say that even though I don\u2019t respond strongly to every cut on the album, the many I do respond to represent an advance. The album is a passionate reexamination of Stevens\u2019s faith, one that includes the doubt that is part of any fully aware Christian\u2019s journey. The strategy brings to mind the Songs of Solomon (as well as literature, such as Kabir and Rumi, from other traditions) in their blurring of the borders between eros and theos<\/em>. There is also a kind of Old Testament exhortation to the lyrics\u2014Stevens does not shy from complaining, vehemently, to God about His hiddenness, His apparent lack of presence, particularly in our current historical moment.<\/p>\n

Some songs gloss Stevens\u2019s frustration at being either reviled or deified for his faith: \u201cI don\u2019t wanna be your personal Jesus \/ I don\u2019t wanna live inside of that flame.\u201d And it may be that my recommendation also leans too heavily on the religious angle. I assure you, the album continues and extends Stevens\u2019s musical explorations. His sound is, as always, eccentric, melodic, and unique. But the most subversive and idiosyncratic element in The <\/em>Ascension<\/i>, as in all Stevens\u2019s work, is his faith. And I am most grateful for that. \u2014Jeffrey<\/a> Skinner<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

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One of the most transformative literary experiences of my past few months has been a podcast called Literature and History<\/em><\/a>, which is written, researched, performed, sound-engineered, and everything-elsed by one incredibly talented guy, Doug Metzger. It was first introduced to me by my partner, Steve Potter, who\u2019s also a writer; he stumbled across it after we\u2019d been longing for a survey course that could orient us to all the literature we\u2019d half-forgotten or that we wish we\u2019d read. In Literature and History<\/em>, Metzger led us on a comprehensive and generous march through Anglophone literature\u2019s lineage of influence\u2014not just the white-washed Greek and Roman classics, but a very intentional widening of the canon that includes work once influential to English-language traditions but is rarely studied now, like Mesopotamia\u2019s creation epic and the lower-class folktales of Ancient Egypt. Metzger focuses on one piece or genre of literature at a time, and he offers a lyrical and moving summary before moving on to historical context, discussing everything from how the work was received at its making and how it has been received over time, to its influence on later writing, to what we find problematic with it in a modern context. Metzger is a careful and thoughtful reader and historian, and over the many, many hours I\u2019ve now spent with this podcast, I\u2019ve learned to really trust the deft way he incorporates gender, race, class, and time into the discussion. Besides being very informative, Literature and History<\/em> is also unabashedly punny and delightful to listen to; I once spit out lukewarm mocha in the car when Metzger referred to Olympic wrestlers in Hesiod\u2019s time as \u201cwell-oiled\u2014or maybe we should just say well Greeced.\u201d I was initially skeptical about the episodes\u2019 concluding comedy songs, but they are more often than not a pedagogical, musical, and linguistic joy. While listening, my partner and I often bet on what he\u2019ll choose as a topic. Babylon\u2019s gods sing about how much they love beer; the heroes of Greece and Troy engage in an epic rap battle; Orestes and Electra share a bluegrass hoedown. The podcast embraces silliness but is, in its research and context, incredibly serious. I can\u2019t recommend it highly enough for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the ancient literature that influenced today\u2019s. \u2014Emma<\/a> Hine<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

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Still from Soleil \u00d4<\/em>. Courtesy of Janus Films.<\/p><\/div>\n

On September 29, the Criterion Collection released the latest box set of Martin Scorsese\u2019s World Cinema Project. Founded in 2007, the World Cinema Project started as an extension of Scorsese\u2019s Film Foundation, as a means of preserving cinema from countries outside of Americentric and Eurocentric traditions. Of the six films released in the latest box set, Soleil \u00d4<\/em> (1970), by Med Hondo, from Mauritania has made quite the indelible impression on me as an expansion of the oeuvre of postcolonial, Africa-centered films. Like other postcolonial films, such as Touki Bouki<\/em> (1973), by Djibril Diop Mamb\u00e9ty, or Ousmane Semb\u00e8ne\u2019s 1966 film Black Girl<\/em>, Hondo\u2019s film takes on the question of African identity, the effects of colonialism, and the inheritance of trauma. What sets Soleil \u00d4<\/em> apart is the protagonist\u2019s voice as he chronicles his travels through Paris until his descent into madness. The audience is fully enmeshed in the psychosis of the protagonist as he attempts to make sense of his humanity, or lack thereof. The fourth wall is intentionally broken throughout the film. There are no extras, because everyone is a spectator. Spectators in the film are as much an audience as the people watching the film. Often, spectators look to the camera or gawk at the protagonist without being cued. Hondo shows us how Blackness becomes theatrical in the imagination of white people. The juxtaposition of the white gaze within the film and the film as an artistic object with an exterior audience shows how two-fold this violence is, how it happens in real time for the protagonist. I have seen this movie a couple of times now and the protagonist\u2019s descent into madness resonates with me, as I think of the camera that is always present. The protagonist has no private space. As an audience, our last act becomes to witness him, and to confirm his descent by imposing our gaze until the film\u2019s end. \u2014Cheswayo<\/a> <\/strong>Mphanza<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n