Literature – Page 2 – Paola Trimarco

Writing about and with our senses

In her book Sentient: What Animals Reveal About Our Senses, Jackie Higgins quotes from Leonardo Da Vinci who observed that the typical person ‘looks without seeing, listens without hearing, touches without feeling, eats without tasting . . . [and] inhales without awareness of odour or fragrance.’ When it comes to using our senses, Higgins concurs that ‘We are guilty of underappreciating – and underestimating.’

Higgins’ book is chocked with fascinating facts and anecdotes about animal and human senses, presented in accessible language that at the same time is not shy to use scientific terms. By senses, the author is not considering only the five senses delineated by Aristotle, but others that have since been examined, such as the senses of balance, pain, time and space.

I learned among other things that octopuses are covered with tactile sensors. Higgins cites studies showing how octopuses can use their heightened sense of touch to navigate mazes, dismantle Lego sets and even open childproof caps that leave us adults flummoxed. Other sea creatures can see colours that humans cannot, and some humans are so colour blind they experience the world in greyscale. The legendary speed of the cheetah is explained through recent studies of their acute sense of balance. This idea is explored further through experiments with athletes and dancers.

Along with these fun factoids, I also came away from this book thinking about the ways writers exploit the senses in creative writing. This is a well-worn topic in writers’ workshops and in those ubiquitous how-to books on writing. I won’t disagree with any of it. To transport the reader into an unknown place through words alone involves attention to all the senses and not just that of sight – visual description tends to be overdone and over-adjectived by novice writers.

This week I’ve been reading Black Dahlia and White Rose, a collection of short stories by Joyce Carol Oates. In ‘Spotted Hyenas: A Romance’ Oates employs the sense of smell in a few noteworthy ways. First, she uses smell to create fear and intrigue. A middle-aged woman, Mariana, thinks there’s a male intruder in her home and when he disappears all that is left is an animal scent. A few days later, the man reappears and seems to be half man, half animal. He enters a room filled with books. After he disappears for a second time, Mariana finds a book sticking out from a shelf – ‘The paperback Origin of Species was still warm, as if the furry man had been breathing on it. There was a smell—a distinct, acrid, animal smell…’. Mariana later realises (or strongly believes) that the man is someone she knew in her student days. The sense of smell becomes integral to the developing plot as the realisation triggers a flashback into an earlier life, full of dreams unfulfilled. This leads to a reunion at a pungent hyena habitat and this gem, when she first encounters her old classmate: ‘He stared bluntly at her and leaned close. Mariana could smell his breath—a meaty, earthy smell—a faint under-smell of decay like something overripe.’

If Da Vinci and Higgins are accurate about humans not appreciating their senses, perhaps writers and artists are needed to remind us of the copious world our senses can produce.

Some thoughts on dialogue in prose

Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain and Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees have been among my summer reads. The two novels are studies of poverty and familial relationships. Shuggie Bain is a coming-of-age story set in the council estates of Glasgow spanning ten years of the 80s to early 90s, while in The Bean Trees, a quasi-road story, a young woman in a beat-up car drives from Kentucky to Arizona over several months creating a new life for herself.

While I found both stories engaging and interesting in the worlds they inhabited, their handling of dialogue made Shuggie Bain the better read. This is despite losing its pace about three-quarters in. The Bean Trees, Kingsolver’s first novel, is tightly constructed and held its pace, but occasionally the dialogue fell flat as it appeared to try too hard to sound like the way people speak. Let’s be honest – in everyday speech, people wear out idioms and exhaust popular expressions. It’s part of the interpersonal function of language (for you M.A.K. Halliday fans). That is, we speak in familiar, tried and tested, language to connect with people.

In Shuggie Bain, the dialogue worked – which I wouldn’t have expected from a novel containing the Glaswegian dialect. Despite having lived in Edinburgh for five years and regularly visiting Scotland ever since, I still stretch my ears to understand Glaswegian. Perhaps Stuart knows this. He’s allowed the narrative prose to do much of the work, leaving the dialogue gently sprinkled throughout the text.

A writer’s confession – my true love is scriptwriting. While I’m not writing scripts these days and might not ever return to it (a topic for another blog), I have learned some useful lessons from writing in a medium where dialogue does the heavy lifting. Allow me to enter the imperative mode. First, don’t bother trying to replicate everyday speech all the time. As mentioned, it can be dull on the page and duller still when coming out of the mouth actors, unconvinced themselves. Aim for dialogue that sounds natural, but devoid of the mundane parlance of everyday life. Second, use subtext. Characters don’t need to explain their thoughts. In fact, their dialogue is strongest when they say one thing to mean something else or to do something that is not obvious from the literal meanings of their words.

Okay, I’ve left the classroom and the imperatives behind.

P. G. Wodehouse was masterful at dialogue. Nothing sagged in his characters’ speeches, using language more colourful than quotidian conversation. Where a character from The Bean Trees would say something like ‘he thinks he’s the cat’s pyjamas,’ Wodehouse’s Aunt Dahlia huffs out ‘Your uncle Tom thinks he’s the cat’s nightwear.’ As for Jeeves, everyone’s favourite butler provides understated commentary and suggestions to his master that are loaded with subtext. In this example from Right Ho, Jeeves, the text leading up to this tells us that Bertie is confused about a woman’s intentions, and Jeeves offers, ‘Feminine psychology is admittedly odd, sir. The poet Pope…’

‘Never mind about the poet Pope, Jeeves.’

‘No, sir.’

‘There are times when one wants to hear all about the poet Pope and times when one doesn’t.’

‘Very true, sir.’

From this snippet, the reader knows that Bertie is irritable and won’t listen to considered advice, and that Jeeves, due to his station, is going to play along.

There are loads of other great prose writers who command the dialogue in their works, but on a Saturday afternoon in August, Wodehouse was the first to come to mind.

Indigenous in the Age of Identity Politics

Native Americans, Māori and Nahua, those are among the peoples I think of when I come across the word indigenous. What I don’t think of are the Mincéirs, one of several groups referred to as Irish Travellers. Their precise origins are unknown, but they broke away from Ireland to travel to other parts of Britain in the early 1600s. As a minority group that identifies themselves as indigenous, they have their spot on the UN’s List of Indigenous Peoples.

According to the UN, there are over 5000 groups of indigenous peoples, and nearly half a billion individuals qualify as indigenous. That’s larger than the population of the US. These large numbers have come about in part by removing the criteria of firstness. This appears odd given that our understanding of indigenous comes from colonialism, making a distinction between the people who were already occupying a land before the colonisers arrived.

Indigenous derives from the Latin indigena, meaning ‘native’ or ‘sprung from the land.’ Writing in The New Yorker, Manvir Singh observes that the word first appeared in English with reference to people in 1588. ‘Like “native,” “indigenous” was used not just for people but for flora and fauna as well, suffusing the term with an air of wildness and detaching it from history and civilization.’ Singh argues that the notion of indigenous peoples as ‘historical relics’ perpetuates their marginalization and hinders progress towards justice and equality. Indeed, according to the World Bank, although indigenous people make up just 6 percent of the global population, they account for about 19 percent of the extreme poor.

Now, at least for the UN, indigenousness (try saying that after a few drinks) is determined by self-identification. Singh points out that ‘Many groups who identify as indigenous don’t claim to be first peoples’ like the Mincéirs, and that ‘many who did come first don’t claim to be indigenous.’ I understand the feelings of this latter group. This singular label oversimplifies the immense diversity among these communities, each with its own languages, cultures, and traditions, reflecting a rich tapestry of human history. Wearing my linguist’s hat, allow me to add that indigenous peoples account for over 4,000 languages.

Singh also confronts the harmful stereotypes and romanticized notions that persist about indigenous cultures – what I would call coloniality (I’ve waxed on about this before). The author aptly calls for a more nuanced and inclusive perspective on indigenous peoples, acknowledging their diversity and addressing the challenges they face as minority groups.

I agree with the need to reevaluate the concept of indigenous and to adopt a more comprehensive, empathetic, and respectful approach, understanding the intricacies and historical contexts of each community. Yet, I feel I’m being sucked into a wave of identity politics.

Like indigenousness, identity politics can be exploited by opposing sides. Claiming certain group identities or being sensitive to others’ identities makes one woke – in a negative sense – unless you flaunt or ‘protect’ your white identity or your male identity (for example). I know what side I lean towards in such debates, but the currency of these terms and their changing meanings can make it difficult to be understood. For those struggling against discrimination and poverty, the ambiguities surrounding indigenous and identity make it difficult to be heard.

Parthenogenesis and Seahorse Dads

It’s not a word that rolls off my tongue, but I had to use parthenogenesis to avoid receiving an obscene sticker from the bots at WordPress for using the word virgin as in virgin birth. Pity the seedy surfer who was looking for a virgin and wound up here in my sociocultural blog.

Clare Chambers’ novel Small Pleasures sparked my interest in the topic of virgin births. The story begins with a journalist investigating a claim of a virgin birth to have taken place ten years before, with the proof being a ten-year girl without a biological father. As this is not a book of fantasy or SF, there’s no spoiler in saying that it turns out not to be a virgin birth after all. If it were set in the present, this would be a rather dull and short book with a DNA test revealing all. But this story is set in the late 1940s in Britain. The recreation of post-war austerity and medical practices of the day make this an interesting historical read. The 1940’s medical examinations of rudimentary blood tests and skin grafts fail to discount the possibility of a virgin birth. It’s the detective work of the journalist that uncovers the truth.

Gratefully, the parthenogenesis story soon becomes a subplot for the more interesting love story between the female journalist and the husband of the woman who professes her virginity when her child was conceived. At different points in the unfolding story, the journalist and the husband find it hard to not believe the woman. This is without religion coming into the story. Naivety, perhaps. Or yet another example of otherwise intelligent people believing the impossible. I recall as a child still believing in the tooth fairy long after accepting the Biblical virgin birth as a myth, a creation of faith and not science.

Virgin births do exist among some species of reptiles, fish and insects, but let’s try to stick to humans. Today, popular culture has us wrestling with the idea that men can become pregnant and give birth. Of course, I’m talking about transmen who were assigned female at birth and can become pregnant after transitioning. A term that has been floated around in recent years by the mother/father themselves is seahorse dad. The female seahorse lays her eggs in the male seahorse’s abdomen, and it is the male seahorse who carries the eggs to maturity and releases the offspring into the water, effectively giving birth.

The label of seahorse dad evokes a cute analogy, a metaphorical relationship between seahorses and transmen who give birth. After watching a few interviews with the seahorse dads, however, I’m left feeling a bit uneasy. I heard these mother/fathers speak of themselves as almost literally being seahorses. I’m not questioning their transitioning or living as a different gender from their birth sex, or even their suitability as parents. But humans are not seahorses, and when it comes to reproduction, these humans were able to get pregnant and give birth because they had female reproductive organs.

I wonder if I should have entitled this blog ‘The things we choose to believe’? Nah, better to build my vocabulary by using a new word, even if it’s one for a very old concept, and an even newer term – those seahorse dads – for a concept I accept, metaphorically speaking.

The Older Writer

Older than who or what? I don’t know. I’m leaving this a dangling comparative for now, something I would tell my students and editing clients not to do.

I’ve realized of late that I have become an older writer,to use a phrase that gets bandied about these days in writers’ networks. Though I see myself as middle-aged, who happens to possess a Senior Railcard, I’m not eligible for some writing competitions and funding grants reserved for the under 35s. The flipside of this is that I can enter competitions for the over 40s and others for the over 50s. I’ve not convinced these age categories help the underrepresented. They just decrease the number of possible applicants, making these smaller and usually less-noteworthy awards.

There’s also an underlining assumption that older writers write for older, more mature, audiences. Children’s literature and young adult fiction blows that theory out of the water. In my thirties and forties, most of my protagonists were in their twenties. In my fifties, I wrote about a nonagenarian. Sure, my writing style has changed somewhat over the years, and I would like to think that I’m a better editor and rewriter of my own work than I was thirty years ago. But when it comes to published writing, I usually can’t tell the age of the writer from their works.

Martin Amis once said that ‘Talent dies before the body.’ He supported his point by claiming that Roth, Nabokov, Updike, Joyce and Tolstoy ‘disintegrate before your eyes as they move pass seventy.’ The generalization is obviously ageist, and in typical Amis fashion tinged with sexism – where are the great women writers in his list? I don’t think he was implying women writers didn’t disintegrate with age the way men apparently do. It’s more likely women writers weren’t worthy of study or mention. Examples abound of older writers having their first novels published or winning literary prizes in their 50s and 60s. Margaret Atwood, Annie Proulx, Hilary Mantel and Annie Ernaux come to mind. All females for sake of balance.

Edward Said famously examined ‘late style,’ as he called it, of artists, composers and writers towards the end of their lives. He didn’t make judgements on the quality as Amis did. Said was interested in the commonalities in these later outputs, only to suggest that such works are about dreams unfulfilled, understandings never reached – a sense of being out of touch with tradition and popular trends at the same time. Different and reflective, rather than disintegrating talent. Being older than I was when I wrote my first short stories and essays, I accept this view and put a knot in the dangling comparative.

Mansfieldmania

Whenever I regale people with the attractions of the French town of Menton, something I’ve been doing a lot lately as we’re on the lookout for an apartment there, I include a former home of Katherine Mansfield. I’m met with more or less the same response – ‘Oh, I love Katherine Mansfield! She’s my favourite short story writer.’ To which I add, ‘There’s a street named after her too!’ Eyes light up. This is the ‘cult’ (not my word choice) of Katherine Mansfield.

It’s been described as ‘a cult unique in modern literature’ because it was started after Mansfield died by her husband, the writer and literary critic John Middleton Murry. Only three of Mansfield’s books appeared during her lifetime. After her death, Murray edited and published eleven others, along with articles about her works, giving his late wife a status far greater than she had in her lifetime. According to literary rumour, when Murry received a handsome royalty cheque for The Dove’s Nest and Other Poems, he was reported to have said, ‘It was by far the biggest cheque I had ever received, and ten times as big as any Katherine had received for her own work.’ Most biographers agree that Murry’s motives for creating the myth of Mansfield (better alliteration than ‘cult of Mansfield’) had more to do with his financial needs than any literary conviction.

The intense interest in Mansfield’s work goes beyond her husband’s dealings. Like other idolised figures, Mansfield died young. She was 34 when she fell victim to tuberculosis. Though short, her life was scandalous and intriguing. She married twice and was known to have affairs with women and men, and her friends included D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. Mansfield broke barriers, taking up topics such as women’s sexuality and support for the Indigenous peoples of New Zealand.

This year, marking the 100^th anniversary of Mansfield’s death, the veneration has been rekindled and interest in her life and works have resurfaced. Helen Simpson, writing in The Guardian, notes that biographers have wildly varied in their account of her personality and motives for writing. I agree. Some have painted her as a saintly feminist icon (the phrase ‘free women’ is overused), others as a liar and literary imposture, while others still describe a tortured life and consequently aggressive personality. Simpson attempts to make sense of this divergence of opinion: ‘One explanation might lie in Mansfield’s keen sense of the absurd and the striking lack of anything deferential in her attitude – whether towards men or anyone powerful or rich or influential. The “ripple of laughter” (a favourite phrase of Mansfield’s) at play throughout her writing could cause offence (particularly coming from a young, upstart, female New Zealander). A sense of humour for a woman is a double-edged sword. When one of her finest tragicomic stories, The Daughters of the Late Colonel, was published, the reviewers found it “cruel;” in a 1921 letter Mansfield commented: “It’s almost terrifying to be so misunderstood.”’

While I have a few ‘favourite’ short story writers – J.D. Salinger, Joyce Carol Oates, Italo Calvino, Anton Chekov, Helen Dunmore and William Faulkner – Mansfield is up there, but not an all-time favourite. It’s not that I don’t like her work. I simply haven’t read much of it. Despite Mansfield’s popularity, her books didn’t appear on the undergraduate reading list during my years as a student or as a teacher of literature. I stumbled across a few of her stories, such as ‘At the Bay’ and ‘The Stranger,’ in anthologies of great short stories. I was surprised to see that the Literary Encyclopedia, which I have written for over the years, does not have any entries for her books, only a short paragraph about her life. I see an assignment proposal in my mental in tray.

I’m currently reading Mansfield’s first collection of short stories, In a German Pension, published when she was only 23. It’s a beautifully subtle work, often involving what modern audiences would call observational humour. It draws me in, and I can see myself engaging in Mansfieldmania – ah, that’s the word I want. ‘Cult’ connotes David Koresh, the Tr*mp base and the horrific deaths reported this week in Kenya at a Christian doomsday ‘church.’ Mania in a non-clinical sense is about enthusiasm and joyful obsession. I submit.

I tell my Mansfield-adoring friends that the house in Menton is called a ‘memorial’ with a plaque on the exterior wall. At this point, I confess that every time I go to this house, it’s always closed, and the plaque is impossible to read from the gated fence. I stand on my tiptoes to see what inhabits her garden. The mysteries of her short life metaphorically captured.

Some Thoughts on Six-Word Short Stories

I was recently invited to write a response piece to a scholarly article about six-word short stories for Connotations. The original author, David Fishelov, and I agreed that while all six-word stories in his study were narratives, they weren’t all truly stories. Fishelov defines narrative as ‘a represented action that involves “a change of fortune” … or a change or evolvement from one situation to a significantly different situation.’

Here’s an example of a six-word story that I would classify as a narrative but not story:

I invented a new word: plagiarism. (https://www.reddit.com/r/sixwordstories/top/?t=all)

This first appeared in a section of Reddit with the label of “Jokes.” Then it reappeared in a section on six-word stories. This mini-narrative reads as if it were a one-line joke. The only action in this narrative is the invention of a new word, with the punchline being that the word is about the wrongful borrowing of other people’s words. The action would be meaningless to the narrative if the invention were not of the word plagiarism. This example has a narrative element but would not be categorised as a story by most readers.

Since writing this piece, I’ve stumbled across a few other stories that I think are good examples of six-word stories:

Poked hole in condom. Divorce final. (From generatorfun.com/6-word-story-generator)

Alexa, where did my parents go? (By Lucy-Jo Dalby Six Word Story 2020 shortlist and winners announced | First Story)

It’s still you. Always will be. (From a Buzzfeed reader: messinab on BuzzFeed)

These little stories give us not only events or suggest a change in a situation, but also imply other events and narrative elements, such as background, resolution and character.

But my favourite six-word story is still the famous one attributed to Ernest Hemingway – he never published it, so I imagine it written on the back of a cocktail napkin at a bar in Havana:

For sale: Baby shoes, never worn.

Five Vignettes About Trees

I attended Joyce Kilmer Elementary School in Chicago, where the first line of Kilmer’s best-known poem was painted in old-worldly script above the stage of the auditorium: ‘I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree.’ The metaphor still works for me, but the rhymed couplets throughout the poem (I will spare you) edge close to doggerel. Thankfully, loads of other poems about trees have been published. I’ve recently discovered the French-Canadian poet Hélène Dorion, whose collection ‘Mes forêts,’ as the title suggests, features trees. Here’s a sample:

Trees bite into the soil
their bodies parched
in the cold of their roots
gaunt shadows bodies
pressed together
we hear the song
of fracture and desire
body like the tide going out
pale boat
lost in its night

body of love and storm
given over to the earth
that it licks as if
it were a wall to pierce through

Hélène Dorion (Translated by Susanna Lang)

With talk of today being the Spring Equinox in the marginalia of the news, I was reminded of St Joseph’s Day. It’s the day before the equinox, but nevertheless it was for me as a child the Italo-American version of St Patrick’s Day. It was customary to wear red. In Italy, it’s also celebrated by gorging on a zeppola, a custard-filled pastry with cherries on top – the cherries represent the buds on the trees in spring.

At the start of the year, I enrolled in another MOOC intended for French undergraduates to help me expand my French vocabulary. The course, entitled ‘Les Arbes,’ was about the biology of trees and their contribution to the Earth’s biodiversity. Once again, learning scientific French highlighted the paucity of my scientific English. Many of the words I looked up in French were the same or close to it in English.

In Cambridgeshire where I live, a furore has erupted over new plans led by the county council to build a busway (a bus-only road) from a new 6000-home development to the town of Cambridge. Building such a road will involve cutting down 1,000 trees. The majority of these arboreal victims are in the Coton Orchard, one of the UK’s largest and oldest orchards, with a unique ecosystem that cannot be mitigated with planting new trees elsewhere. This is part of a pattern in Britain, where the mass felling of trees has been carried out in the interest of road building. In 2018, despite two years of protests from residents in Sheffield, the city council allowed for the felling of some 17,500 trees. It later turned out that the justification for this was based on misunderstandings of an environmental survey coupled with misinforming the public.

I’m not just being sentimental about trees – all trees everywhere. Trees are also a crop that provide wood for furniture and pulp for toilet paper, among other things. Some trees also need to be cut down due to disease or public health reasons. The destruction of trees in our parks and towns is a different matter altogether. With the loss of these trees, the bird and insect populations, already in catastrophic decline, suffer greatly. To this, it’s necessary to add negative effects of such barbarous acts on the human population, both in terms of our physical health (such as the quality of the air that we breathe) and psychological health (where studies have shown improvements in emotional well-being with the introduction of sylvan spaces).

Every year, I buy an artsy calendar to add some colour and visual creativity to my home office in Ely. It’s also a place to jot down writing deadlines, meetings and health club activities – things that are on my phone calendar as well but are sometimes forgotten when my head is in the comfort of clouds. My 2023 calendar has a tree theme. Every month displays a painting of trees by some famous, and some not so famous, European artists. Looking at these photos of paintings everyday – these meadows, these tree-lined shores, these shaded forests – gives my days a natural sense of calm and beauty. Since according to a French professor lecturing on the MOOC, there are over 60,000 species of trees, every year could have a tree theme, a different tree calendar, and in the remainder of my lifetime, I still will have only scratched the surface.

Above: Emmanuel Gondouin, La Forêt, 1912
Feature image: Henri Charles Manguin, Les oliviers à Cavalière, 1905

Native American Redux

Any kind of revival or revisiting of something from long ago is a set up for disappointment, a total deflation of the nostalgia bubble for sure.

Like so many things in my early life, my entrée into Native American literature came via my determination to be a spiritual person – connected to universal powers, trying to levitate in incense-filled rooms. During my teens, I believed Native Americans were more spiritual than the rest of us. In popular culture, thanks largely to second-rate westerns and new age marketing, these indigenes appeared to have a sixth sense allowing them to see through people and communicate with flora and fauna in mystifying ways. I saw traditional Native American stories with their supernatural elements of talking animals and powerful deities as spiritual as opposed to the mythology and morality tales of the Bible and classical literature.

By my late twenties with my feet more firmly on the ground of literary and linguistic criticism, I was able to straddle Native American fiction as replete with episodes of magical realism. Yet, I privately thought of it as still somehow spiritual. That is, such fiction could be used spiritually, where the magic is mystical, for people in those native cultures and for those of us on a spiritual path – though my path was already becoming marred with potholes of doubt. Indigenous people were still more naturally spiritual in my mind’s eye, but I wouldn’t dare say this to students on my Native American Literature course. I had learned at university some important social skills, including not sounding like a new age hippy in public – such talk is easily mistaken for gullibility. The novels on my course were taught devoid of spirituality and as fictional retellings of reservation life and the treatment of native peoples by the US government with magical realism woven into the stories to reflect the traditional teachings of these peoples.

It was around this time, in the early nineties, that I attended a Native American languages conference in New Mexico, thinking this might be a direction to take my linguistics career. I know this sounds nerdy, but I think I would have done well in language documentation research, recording and transcribing dying languages. This gathering was unlike any linguistics conference I had been to before or since. Talks were introduced with songs and prayers, the latter a strange mix of indigene spiritual teachings and Christianity. As much as I enjoyed the songs and the linguistic research on these heritage languages, I felt disconnected. Two things were at play here. I was one of a few non-Indians in attendance and soon realised that native peoples were also linguists and training others in their tribes in language documentation. I was an interloper. The other point of disconnect came from the very earthy – and I would argue, political – Catholicism out on display. At the time, I was quite uncomfortable around brandishing formal religions of any sort although I was tolerant of spiritual speak and its cousin psychobabble. Suddenly Native Americans were no more or less spiritual than anyone else.

Fast forward 30+ years and several jobs in linguistics later, to where I found myself reading a work of Native American fiction for the first time in decades. Erdrich’s The Night Watchman caught my attention after it won the Pulitzer for literature. I approached this book with a sense of nostalgia, reminiscences of my younger, spirit-seeking, self, gobbling up Indian fictions. Set in America in the 1950s, it’s about an extended family of Chippewas living on a reservation and working under oppressive conditions at a jewel-bearing plant while their tribe’s leaders take on the US government. At the time a bill was going through Congress to end tribal recognition and Indian rights to their ancestors’ lands.

The story has magical realism elements in it – prophetic dreams, a talking dog and an owl that gives signals, but for me they are no longer aspects of spirituality. The story is more socio-political about the way American Indians were oppressed and subjugated to the reservations. I was struck by the language of this passage, referring to the bill proposed in Congress:

‘In the newspapers, the author of the proposal had constructed a cloud of lofty words around this bill—emancipation, freedom, equality, success—that disguised its truth: termination. Termination. Missing only the prefix. The ex.’

More importantly for my older self, this is a story about the treatment of women in 1950s America. The women play the roles of cook, doctor, nurse and maid while coming up against sexual assault and forced prostitution.

While reading The Night Watchman I was reminded of an academic collection of Native American essays and fragments of memoirs, for which I wrote a review in the Journal of Language and Literature. Key to all these writings is the idea of survivance, as opposed to survival. The collection’s editor, Ernest Stromberg explains that ‘While survival conjures up images of stark minimalist clinging to the edge of existence, survivance goes beyond mere survival to acknowledge the dynamic and creative nature of indigenous rhetoric.’ Erdrich’s narrator employs what I would call survivance rhetoric:

‘You cannot feel time grind against you. Time is nothing but everything, not the seconds, minutes, hours, days, years. Yet this substanceless substance, this bending and shaping, this warping, this is the way we understand our world.’

After all these years, I’ve come to realise that survivance is what unites works in the genre of Native American Literature, which includes poetry and memoirs, and this is what is shared between writers and readers. I guess, this realisation is my spiritual experience after all.

Daphne and Daphne

My nod to International Women’s Day 2023 comes in the form of noting two women named Daphne.

The first is the original Daphne, a figure from Greek mythology. Not important enough to be a goddess, she was a type of nymph associated with freshwater structures, such as wells, streams and brooks. Her story is certainly a woman’s story. Determined to be independent, Daphne wanted to stay single and untouched by a man for the entirety of her life. Unfortunately, she was beautiful, and even worse, Apollo wanted her. In one version of this tale, Eros, punishing Apollo for his hubris, speared Apollo with a golden arrow, making him desire Daphne. To protect her from Apollo’s clutches, the river god Paneus transformed Daphne into a tree. A linguistic aside: In English, the type of tree that Daphne becomes is called a laurel tree, and in Greek, the word for laurel is the same as Daphne.

Was Daphne happy and fulfilled being a tree? That, we don’t know as Daphne’s storyline ends there. From versions and adaptions written by men, this is Apollo’s tragic story. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the moral is the lesson Apollo learns about his haughtiness. Daphne is left in the dust, a conduit for the man’s (or god’s) story. Ovid’s version also has Daphne being pierced by Eros’s lead arrow to make her repel Apollo – that is, she loses her agency and her desire to be independent from men. I’m waiting for a feminist scholar to take up the perils of this Daphne.

The other Daphne is du Maurier. You probably guessed that. The author of modern classics Rebecca, Jamaica Inn and The Scapegoat was only on my radar as a novelist until I read Margaret Forster’s biography. Du Maurier was also a scriptwriter and film producer, eventually owning a production studio, none of which were easy feats for women in post-war Britain or America. She was also the breadwinner, earning a great deal more than her army general husband – who was portrayed by Dirk Bogarde in the film A Bridge Too Far.

Yet, du Maurier was not just another woman of extraordinary accomplishments bucking the social gender-defined trends. For me, she was also an everywoman of sorts. According to Forster, du Maurier battled with depression throughout her life and was at its worst towards the end when it was accompanied by anxiety. Women are more likely than men to experience depression and anxiety. Women are also more likely to speak about these conditions and to be prescribed medication. Between 1977-81, du Maurier suffered from such a severe bout of depression she couldn’t write. She was trapped in a cycle of being too depressed to write while believing that some inspiration to write would take her out of her depression. She was prescribed Halcion (a benzodiazepine). That medication heightened her anxiety, which du Maurier felt was caused by a lack of creativity. For the anxiety she was put on the sleeping pill Mogadon, which triggered a deeper depression, for which she was given Prothiaden (a tricyclic antidepressant). After a severe panic attack accompanied by spells of not eating, she was taken to hospital. She wrote about it in verse:

“They said it was not my body but my brain,

Had ceased to function in its normal way,

So back to hospital I went again, Doctors

Would find out what had gone astray.

A week of tests. Results? I am not told, but

Appetite has gone, has ceased to be. The sight

Of food appals me, hot or cold, the character sitting here

No longer me. I walk around the block, then

Come inside, no reason to exist or to reside upon

This planet here, myself has fled to unknown starts

Far lower than this earth.

Dear God, did you intend this from my birth?”

These Daphnes shared more than a name and an undaunted spirit. They both struggled in ways clearly indicative of their womanhood.