{"id":159612,"date":"2022-05-20T15:18:15","date_gmt":"2022-05-20T19:18:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=159612"},"modified":"2023-09-15T18:26:33","modified_gmt":"2023-09-15T22:26:33","slug":"on-penumbra","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2022\/05\/20\/on-penumbra\/","title":{"rendered":"On Penumbra<\/em>, Caio Fernando Abreu, and Alain Mabanckou"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Penumbra\u00a0<\/em>(2022), by Hannah Black and Juliana Huxtable. Press image courtesy of the artists and Centre d’Art Contemporain Gen\u00e8ve.<\/p><\/div>\n

It has always been frustrating to me that animals\u2014whom I love, sometimes feed, and never eat\u2014mostly ignore or even run away from me! For this reason, I enjoyed Hannah Black and Juliana Huxtable\u2019s animated film <\/span>Penumbra<\/span><\/i><\/a>, which stages a court case against a nonhuman defendant\u2014\u201crepresenting all animals or the animal as such\u201d\u2014that is on trial for crimes against human beings in contempt of human reason. The judge is an animal, the members of the jury are animals, too; from the beginning, power and numbers are on their side. There are two humans, but they\u2019re dressed as creatures: \u201cJuliana Huxtable,\u201d the defense, is costumed in <\/span>furry<\/span><\/a>-esque bunny ears, which mirror the headdress worn by the prosecution, and \u201cHannah Black, genus <\/span>homo<\/span><\/i>, species <\/span>sapiens<\/span><\/i>\u201d recalls the animal-headed Egyptian god Ra (in Derrida\u2019s reading of Plato, the father of reason or <\/span>logos<\/span><\/i>). The CGI places human and nonhuman characters on a fair\u2014and very low poly count\u2014playing field of unreality. And so the debate begins.<\/span><\/p>\n

But it\u2019s really a monologue: Huxtable speaks only rarely; her nonhuman \u201ckin,\u201d never. Animals, here, are outside the realm of representation, in both the legal and the semiotic senses. It\u2019s a canny dramatization of the absurd, unhappy impasse posed by the discourse of anthropocentrism, which, in its attempt to \u201cdecenter\u201d people in favor of a more inclusive worldview, must also mute the capacity that enables discourse (and community, identity, thought) itself. This capacity is both subject and object, content and container, of Black\u2019s breathless address. \u201cThrough the use of <\/span>language<\/span><\/i>,\u201d she begins, \u201cI will show you, and you will understand, and through doing so you will have to admit that you do not fundamentally sympathize with the principle of the animal, you respond to abstract concepts, you know how to come when your name is called.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet the dazzling avalanche of words that follows is less an airtight argument and more a poem with the rhetorical texture of a rant. <\/span>Penumbra<\/span><\/i> isn\u2019t just an intervention in theory masquerading as video art; it brilliantly reveals, aesthetically, what analysis cannot: the illogic, the nonhuman, within language and hence within us. Black\u2019s rapid-fire circumlocutions and cascading repetitions are actually impossible to follow; instead, they are reduced to an ebb and flow of breath and rhythm that wash, anxiously, over us. The animals, of course, refuse to respond to her questions, her attempts at taxonomy: \u201cDo you deny that you practice cannibalism?\u201d Legally, the word penumbra<\/em> refers to constitutional rights inferred using interpolative reasoning; in science, it connotes the gray area between a light and a shadow. This trial is an arbitration of gradients via an indictment of law: a tragedy of reason that makes a mockery not just of justice, but at all of our attempts at living in harmony.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s a sign of our species\u2019 self-hatred that most people in Sunday\u2019s audience at Metrograph\u2014where the film screened along with two others from the 2021 Biennale de l\u2019Image en Mouvement\u2014seemed to interpret <\/span>Penumbra<\/span><\/i> as a celebration of the inevitable triumph of the inhuman. Maybe they\u2019re right. And no one wants to sympathize with the prosecution! But I felt so bad for us, the tiny minority in a universe that, though sensate, is senseless. As Black\u2019s character says, \u201cWe have tried to hold on to the collective being, but the animal refuses to speak to us. All that we know about brutality we learned from animals. We learned how to treat each other as food, we learned how to die indifferently.\u201d <\/span>Apr\u00e9s nous, le d\u00e8luge<\/span><\/i>,<\/span> I thought, despondently, leaving the theater.<\/span><\/p>\n

All three short films from the <\/span>series<\/span><\/a>, which was curated by DIS, are now available to stream online at Metrograph.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014Olivia Kan-Sperling, assistant editor<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reading the queer Brazilian writer Caio Fernando Abreu\u2019s <\/span>Moldy Strawberries<\/span><\/i><\/a> this week, I was reminded of a scene in Samuel Delany\u2019s <\/span>Times Square Red, Times Square Blue<\/span><\/i><\/a> in which Delany meets a stranger who ceremoniously pisses himself before sex. It\u2019s one of many scenes of abjection featuring bodily fluids in Delany\u2019s work\u2014a predilection I encountered, too, in Abreu\u2019s rapturous collection of linked stories, out from Archipelago Books next month in a new English translation by Bruna Dantas Lobato. Originally published in Portuguese as <\/span>Morangos mofados <\/span><\/i>in 1982\u2014under Brazil\u2019s anti-communist military dictatorship and at the onset of the global AIDS<\/small> pandemic\u2014<\/span>Moldy Strawberries <\/span><\/i>is a portrait of queer life in which it\u2019s impossible to divorce pleasure from politics. Abreu attests to the fraught ties between friends and lovers in Brazil\u2019s cities of the time, and his tendencies toward formal excess\u2014jagged, labyrinthine sentences that vault across different registers; innumerable and unabashed appearances of liquid waste (piss, semen, sweat, glitter, cognac, mud, rainwater, blood); a story consisting solely of dialogue between two friends, accompanied by instructions that it be read <\/span>ad infinitum<\/span>\u2014also reflect his defiance of the political autocracy that censored his work and eventually sent him into exile. \u201cI\u2019m not desperate, not more than I\u2019ve always been, <\/span>nothing special, baby<\/span><\/i>,” says one of his narrators. “I\u2019m not drunk or crazy, I\u2019m lucid as fuck and I confidently know I don\u2019t have a way out.”<\/span><\/p>\n

Abreu\u2019s project is entirely different in scope from <\/span>Times Square Red, Times Square Blue<\/span><\/i>, which chronicles the eighties redevelopment of Times Square and its consequences for the cruising scene. But the two writers share an interest in how queer social relations are formed in shifting urban environments, and there can be a nearly psychedelic quality to both of their prose styles. Abreu\u2019s turn to psychedelia, though, was the result of the dissident Tropic\u00e1lia movement of sixties Brazil, founded by a countercultural group of avant-garde musicians and artists that included Caetano Veloso, Gal Costa, Gilberto Gil, and H\u00e9lio Oiticica. Music especially may have been one way Abreu attempted to escape the conditions of dictatorship. The stories in <\/span>Moldy Strawberries <\/span><\/i>reference a varied and intoxicating collection of songs, including ones by <\/span>Veloso<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>Angela Ro Ro<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>Donna Summer<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Chopin<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>the Beatles<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>Elis Regina<\/span><\/a>, and <\/span>Billie Holiday<\/span><\/a>. Abreu even instructs us to listen to particular songs as we read some of the stories. (As I read the collection I was also often listening to the self-titled album of the late-sixties Brazilian rock band <\/span>Os Mutantes<\/span><\/a>, who aren\u2019t named in the book but who were important figures in the Tropic\u00e1lia movement.) The musical dissonance here leaks beautifully into the prose, and Dantas Lobato\u2019s translation moves with lightning speed as Abreu\u2019s characters go out in the rain, drink with abandon, reach across the dance floor, and gaze at the planets and at one another. Abreu hammers away at the core of life until it\u2019s chiseled and brilliant, until it splinters, suddenly, into language. \u201cI was always relearning and inventing, always toward him,\u201d says one of his narrators, consumed by an obsession with a lover, \u201cto arrive whole, the pieces of me all mixed up, he would lay them out unhurriedly, as if playing with a puzzle to form what castle, what forest, what worm, or god, I didn\u2019t know, but I was going in the rain because that was my only reason, my only destination\u2014pounding on that dark door I was pounding on now.\u201d Abreu died of AIDS<\/small> in Porto Alegre in 1996, at the age of forty-seven.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014Oriana Ullman, intern<\/b><\/p>\n

\u201cBut why do we no longer write poetry?\u201d asks the Congolese writer Alain Mabanckou toward the end of his essay \u201cAn Open Letter to Those Who Are Killing Poetry.\u201d \u201cWrong question! Is what is presented to us really poetry? That\u2019s the question!\u201d What is and is not poetry\u2014and who gets to decide\u2014are just two of the many questions Mabanckou has taken up over the course of his decades-long career, which includes the Booker-nominated novel <\/span>Black Moses<\/span><\/i> as well as my personal favorite, the queasy, alcohol-soaked, and at times scatological satire of contemporary Congolese politics\u00a0<\/span>Broken Glass<\/span><\/i>. The essay in question appears at the end of <\/span>As Long as Trees Take Root in the Earth<\/span><\/i><\/a>, a collection of the first-ever translations of his poetry to appear in English (by Nancy Naomi Carlson), and is a fitting companion to the poems that precede it. In spare, untitled stanzas, Mabanckou writes poignantly of the natural world, a mother\u2019s love, and the hypocrisy of borders, observing that \u201cnation after nation \/ despair endures.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014Rhian Sasseen, engagement editor<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We recommend a defense of the human, a defense of poetry, and Abreu\u2019s Moldy Strawberries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68386],"tags":[37799,68438,27211,67827,24180,68439,2562,883],"class_list":["post-159612","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-reviews-review","tag-alain-mabanckou","tag-caio-fernando-abreu","tag-dis","tag-featured","tag-hannah-black","tag-juliana-huxtable","tag-samuel-delany","tag-staff-picks"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nOn Penumbra, Caio Fernando Abreu, and Alain Mabanckou by The Paris Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"May 20, 2022 \u2013 We recommend a defense of the human, a defense of poetry, and Abreu\u2019s Moldy Strawberries.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, 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