Tag: LGBT

In uncertain terms – Proxies: Essays Near Knowing by Brian Blanchfield

This is a book braver than I am.

I am not even certain where to begin to unravel my reaction to reading this collection of essays. Until recently I was resisting the dawning recognition that what I needed to say—the subjects I wanted to explore—would be best met through essay/memoir writing. Or to put it another way, I realized that I have neither the patience nor aptitude for fiction. But what of the essay and its personalized variant, the memoir? I wasn’t even sure I liked the form. So I have learned to approach reading essays with an eye to writing. I read not simply for the joy of encountering well-crafted, intellectually and emotionally engaging prose. A work that excites me, in style, content, or both, invariably sends me to my current notebook where I spin, inward and outward, a cascade of thoughts, images, and ideas… fuel for my own scribblings.

Proxies, by the American poet and essayist Brian Blanchfield, is one such work.

proxiesSubtitled Essays Near Knowing, the pieces that comprise this collection were composed under a particular creative constraint. Blanchfield decided to refrain from seeking any guidance from authoritative sources during the writing process. Thus these essays were written unplugged, if you like. Of course, adopting a learned tone without fact checking (and we all do it, especially in conversation), necessitates allowing for a margin of error. Consequently, pages of “Corrections” addressing many of the resultant inaccuracies and inconsistencies, close out the book. However, Blanchfield also gives himself a secondary challenge in this project:

Having determined that this would be unresearched essaying, analytic but nonacademic, I was almost immediately drawn to a second constraint—or better, invitation: to stay with the subject until it gives onto an area of personal uneasiness, a site of vulnerability, and keep unpacking from there.

As he hits these points of reflection that effectively bend the essay toward memoir, there is, he admits, a certain fumbling allowed, stimulating a transition that, in its sometimes sudden movement, creates an energy that is dynamic, emotionally raw. What begins as a focused consideration of a topic, a concept, or theme, seems to turn personal in a heartbeat, and works its way through to a resolution, however ambivalent that may be. No grand narrative arcs here, only furtive digging through the fragmented moments of life, each essay preceded by the same caveat: Permitting Shame, Error and Guilt, Myself the Single Source.

Blanchfield’s starting points are varied. As a poet, it is not surprising that many start with language and meaning: “On Propositionizing”, “On Confoundedness”, “On Abstraction”, “On the Ingénue”, “On the Near Term”. Some have more tangible contexts at the outset: “On Minutes”, “On the Leave” (as in the game of pool), “On Dossiers”. He often draws on specific images from his own life to set the stage, but those musings typically lead him much closer to the bone as the essay takes shape. Relationships with his parents, the tenuousness of his chosen profession, and his sexuality—his queerness of being—are common themes that regularly surface as he ventures into those areas of private anxiety and susceptibility.

As personal as he gets, and he can lay himself bare, these essays are rich with fascinating intellectual ideas, with references to philosophers, psychologists and, naturally, poets. Some essays are simple and relatively self-contained, while others seem to mutate, in the reading, as the author reaches for a subject that expands, like a pool of liquid, resisting the ordered shape one might anticipate. At best, at their most intriguing, these are essays meant to be experienced as much as read.

Take, for the sake of illustration, “On Minutes.” This piece begins, objectively, with a discussion of meeting minutes, the recorded, dispassionate account of the details of a meeting—no place for embellishment, dramatic flair. Expanding on this basic subject, Blanchfield recounts his own experience working as an executive assistant at a performing arts organization in Tuscon at a time when he and his partner were struggling to make ends meet on one salary. It was a job borne of necessity not desire to say the least. He slides from the drudgery of typing up minutes into memories of accompanying his mother to her office job on weekends as a young child, occupying himself creating stories while she worked, reading them aloud to her co-workers at the end of the day. These childhood creations are then parlayed into a link to the remembrance of his return to his mother’s home for his stepfather’s funeral. From there he passes into a reflection on “Paraphrase”, a poem by Hart Crane that, for Blanchfield, “gets the sudden, lights-out fact of death right.” At this point, what has become a quick dip into the territory of memoir, turns again and, as it shifts, the language of the essay slides into richly poetic territory with a meditation on the closing stanza of Crane’s poem in which the white head of the deceased is observed as a “paraphrase” among the roses on the wallpaper:

The word choice is inexplicable, querulous, oblique, just right. A paraphrase among the rows of roses—a relief receding there—renders their locked pattern a kind of language, but what can it say?; and the head in the place where the living being lay is nominated as this titular hermeneutic tool, useless as such without its objective genitive of. It cannot be said what original locution this paraphrase summarizes. A case, I think, for Crane, of Flesh Made Word again. A reversion. Revelation withdrawn.

The essay winds down with thoughts of Crane who, fittingly, worked an office typist; and the speculation that the imagined head on the bed might have been that of his lover’s father. Some strange, small circle, elegantly wrought from very humble beginnings. The essays in this book move like this, through memories, reflections, ideas and poetic contemplation.

One of the most profoundly moving pieces in the collection arises from Blanchfield’s attempt to address his relationship with his mother—once loving, now long strained by her inability to accept his sexuality. “On Peripersonal Space” begins with the notion that an individual’s concept of the self includes all the space within reach around his or her body. He hears a radio discussion with the authors of a book on the subject, a mother and son team, a collaboration that, within his own scope of experience, is unimaginable. Yet he finds it difficult to approach his desired subject, as much he feels it is essential that he make the attempt. This is a challenge I understand—writing about those with whom our relationships are close but complicated, is an uneasy task:

Since I began this project, I have tried a number of times to write about my mother and me, and have abandoned a few attempts already. If these essays are, in part, inroads to disinhibited autobiography, as I have come to claim they are, and demand they be, I feel the imperative to address the subject above all others. But ours is a relationship so deep and damaged and (still) so tenuous it has defied emergence.

So how to start? He takes the peripersonal space as a cue, beginning with an account of the closely bound emotional intimacy and playful games that he, as an only child, and his then divorced mother used to enjoy when he was young. His description and the psychological implications of their connection is startlingly frank and triggers a concern that I also share with respect to writing about close family members:

It is more than embarrassing to relate all of this. I come up against the inappropriateness of, for one thing, sharing what is only half mine to share. But is that partiality, expressed by that proportion—half of one—ethical, or healthy for a grown man? Roland Barthes has famously said that to be a writer is, essentially, to violate a primal taboo, to “play with the mother’s body.” No, I love Barthes and he is a signal influence on my conception of this very book; but the remark presumes a class and level of literacy I was not born into.

The resulting essay achieves a surrogate catharsis of sorts, but not between the author and his mother. The roots of their (as yet) unresolved divide lie deep in the American south where Blanchfield was raised in a Primitive Baptist family. He had to leave to live openly as a gay man, moving to New York City in his early twenties. The years that have passed, and the miles that have separated them have not healed the rift. Honestly sharing the pain of rejection, the frustration at his mother’s inability to come to any terms of respectful disapproval, and the sting of hearing her say “I shouldn’t have to choose between my God and my son” leaves a deep sorrow that lingers on the page.

Essayists are no strangers to the practice of blending intellectual and literary observations with autobiographical reflections. What Blanchfield seems to approach here is a means of allowing himself, as a writer, to push his way inward, passing from the factual (more or less), the abstract or the sentimental into the territory of the immediate, the raw, and the real. He touches nerves (his own) but avoids falling into two traps that can snare those who venture toward autobiographical writing: the artificial narrative and the open air confessional. At the most personal end of the spectrum, what he is sharing are unguarded moments of naked emotional vulnerability, decidedly queer, but recognizable and resonant to anyone who has lived, loved, won and lost.

For prospective or developing essayists, Proxies is, as a project, idiosyncratic, bold and illuminating. Barthes’ essays, as he admits, are an ever present influence and Blanchfield demonstrates a similar natural ease with the form. To be able to unfold ideas and follow their course without fact-checking is an interesting exercise in itself, useful at the very least in drafting an essay in its early stages. Lifewriting in this format offers ample reward for readers and some significant points of interest for those of us who struggle to achieve the balance between a story we want to explore and the open wounds that may not have quite healed—the truths that give a personal essay its soul.

For me, this book generated a series of provocations, flash points for my own writing, current and potential. I loved the way Blanchfield focuses in on ideas and uses them as pivot points to make his way from concept to experience and back to ideas. It took me, I confess, over a month to read this collection of twenty-four short essays. But in that time I lost both of my parents, the outcome of two intersecting, but unrelated series of events. I sat long at the bedsides of both my mother and father, witness to their final days. I want to attempt to capture the immediate experience, in its unfiltered rawness, before my memories begin to become distorted by time. I gleaned some possibilities, some instances of inspiration, some ideas to bring into my own project which will be, in its own way, necessarily imprecise, emotionally liable, and queer.

And that, to borrow from the title of the final essay, will suffice for the near term.

Proxies: Essays Near Knowing is published by Nightboat Books.

What it means to be grown up: Thirteen Cents by K. Sello Duiker

“Grow up. Fast. Very fast. Lightening speed. Everything is always like that. Quick. You must act quickly. Understand quickly. Otherwise someone will fuck you up nicely. They’ll beat you up so that you must always remember.”

Meet Azure. Standing shoeless on of the cusp of manhood, thirteen or about to turn thirteen, he is not really sure when he was born. Both his parents are dead. Murdered. He has made his way from Johannesburg to Cape Town – a mean and ugly Cape Town – where he sleeps near the swimming pool in Sea Point or, later, when that option is denied him, under a bridge in Green Point, home to a wretched collection of thugs and gangsters.

13centsHe makes money primarily picking up tricks, engaging in degrading, often rough sex with closeted married men. He is hardened, tough, able to endure these encounters with a detached resignation. Yet when he looks inside, when he faces the more invisible persistent fears that haunt him as he wanders though the city, past the train station, up Long Street, into the Company’s Gardens; we see what he truly is – a child on the street. His is a coming-of-age story that is relentless, ruthless and, in the end, remarkably redeeming.

As Thirteen Cents, the debut novel by K. Sello Duiker opens, he has taken to looking after nine year-old Bafana, a boy who has run away from home, his life on the streets a drug fueled choice. Azure lectures him on his addictions. The only drug he himself has any interest in marijuana when he can afford it.

“I’m not his father, I say to myself. That laatie is getting under my armpit, under my soft spot. I mustn’t let that happen, I tell myself. I’ve seen too many kids disappear. There’s no point in getting too close.”

Azure knows where to find discarded food, has a few trusted “grown-up” contacts, many of whom will turn out not to be the allies he had thought. In a slice of Cape Town in which each man or woman has to look after themselves first, judging character is a slippery exercise. One that can be brutal, if not fatal, if the shifting rules are not understood or respected. His one friend from home, Vincent, a man who is beholden to the same rules but somewhat older and wiser, manages to impart to young Azure an unusual vision that will ultimately prove more valuable than money or any other form of protection.

In the meantime, his greatest liability is one he cannot control. He has black skin and blue eyes. Hence the name, pronounced he informs us, Ah-zoo-ray. It is a gift he holds from his beloved mother which is stolen when Gerald, the powerful thug currently holding sway over the homeless population, renames him Blue.

“… I can never look at myself too long in the mirror as my blue eyes remind me of the confusing messages they send out to people. I wear my blue eyes with fear because fear is deeper than shame.”

Race is a currency of power in the community in which he has found himself. Gerald who is a coloured man, trading on his lighter skin, straight hair and reputation of exceptional violence, is especially drawn to and maddened by those blue eyes. The punishment he extracts on our young hero is by far the most persistent, horrific, and devastating aspect of this gritty tale. He is beaten, locked up, starved, and abused for days on end for no apparent rational pretext. But the emotional abuse, the attempt to undermine his self worth cuts deeper:

“Why do you feel sad? I ask myself. Because my mother didn’t love me. Gerald is cruel. That is the ugliest thing anyone has ever said to me. It is worse than having a bus crush you. I think of my mother and I feel confused. No. She loved me, I tell myself. And I loved her, no matter what Gerald says.”

As much as Azure/Blue holds to the conviction that he is almost a man, must not cry, must hold within himself the emotions a man can not afford to admit; he continually talks with frustration about “grown-ups”. Their ways allude him, anger him and ultimately drive him on a mission of self healing driven by an almost supernatural desire to destroy all that is trying to destroy him.

As Thirteen Cents moves into its final chapters, the story takes on a folkloric, mythical tone. The stark hyper realism of the earlier account crosses the threshold of magical realism. To escape the horrors existing for him in the city below, Azure makes the first of two ascents up the slopes of Table Mountain where he will spend several nights, have dreams and visions and find, we are led to believe, the beginning of a path out of the life in which he had found himself trapped. The voice that lingers, long after the book is closed, is one of resilience, one of hope.

Sadly his creator could not hold to that same strength. K. Sello Duiker was born in Soweto, South Africa in 1974, raised in middle class black family. His university educated parents wanted to secure a good education for their son. After achieving a degree from Rhodes University he studied briefly in Cape Town where drugs and mental illness disrupted his academic career. He would draw on his experiences in the city to write Thirteen Cents and his other major work, The Quiet Violence of Dreams (TQVOD). Recognized as one of the first important young black voices emerging in post Apartheid South Africa, he ended his own life in 2005 at the age of 30.

The edition of Thirteen Cents that I read, published as part of the Modern African Writing Series of the Ohio University Press, includes an introduction by Stellenbosch University professor of English, Shaun Viljoen which provides an exceptionally helpful context for the placement of Duiker’s work in the evolution of contemporary South African literature along with a glossary of the expressions and slang, mostly Afrikaans, employed throughout the text.

I have not, to date, read many black South African writers, but I brought a selection of titles back from my recent visit to the country. Duiker has long been on my radar and all 600 pages of TQVOD has been stting on my bookshelf for more than a year. I am glad I went back to this novel first, standing as it does in a pivotal context for black South African literature and look forward to reading more of the young voices that have emerged in recent years.

For another positive review of this powerful book, see my friend Penny’s blog.

Coming of age in the 60’s: The Children’s Day by Michiel Heyns

Small town South Africa. The 1960’s. Rules govern social engagement. Black and white, Afrikaner and English, richer and poorer. Even in the smallest of towns a hierarchy of social stratification evolves and is reinforced with a blend of gossip and charity. And then there are those most ineffable mysteries of life: love, sex and death.

childrensSuch is the context of The Children’s Day by Michiel Heyns. At the heart of this Bildungsroman is Simon, a sensitive, intelligent boy charting his way through the machinations of childhood in the dusty environs of Verkeerdespruit. He is keenly aware that he is living in the heart of nowhere. But the books that are such a vital companion to this only child cannot even begin to answer the questions that his interactions with classmates and the curious behaviour of the adults around him continually raise. Simon is left with the impression that he is trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle without all the pieces.

The novel opens in the modest, relatively speaking, metropolis of Bloemfontein, where Simon, now 15, is attending Wesley College, a “second-rate” Methodist private school. The occasion of a tennis match between the boys of Wesley College and a nearby technical high school on a stifling hot December day in 1968 unspools a series of flashbacks that reach six years into the past and gradually move forward. Simon’s reflections are triggered by the unexpected, unwelcome appearance of a former classmate on the visiting school’s team – the awkward, epilectic Afrikaner Fanie van den Bergh.

From the time he first arrives in Verkeerdespruit, Fanie is a curiousity. His fits alarm his classmates and teachers, while his inarticulate, easy-going nature sets Simon off balance. He regards Fanie with a measure of contempt to which the latter appears oblivious. Yet  Fanie is a constant source of surprise. When Steve, in his tight jeans and white t-shirt, roars into town astride the magnificent Matchless G8 bringing a touch of heroic glamour to streets of the sleepy village, attracting the adoration of the boys,and the fluttering of female hearts, it is Fanie who disappears on the back of his bike. The fallout resulting from Steve’s arrival marks the advent of Simon’s awareness that the world is full of joys and dangers that the adults around him allude to with the most cryptic references. Frustratingly alert to the innuendos around him, Simon is delightfully naive as only a child of the pre-internet era can be. I remember it well myself. As Simon admits:

“Though I was probably quicker than my contemporaries at fitting together apparently unrelated observations, I was hampered in my deductions by an almost complete ignorance of sexual matters. I had arrived, for instance, at the conclusion that kissing was both a much sought-after pleasure for oneself and a much-ridiculed weakness in others, and that adults were too old for it and children too young.”

By observing the parade of adults that passes through his home town, Simon’s glimpses of the outside world become broader, if not necessarily clearer. A teacher who takes harsh discipline in the classroom a step too far is sent away, a pretty young girl he assumes is a special friend abandons him for the school jock, a woman with a shocking past appears and breaks the heart of one of his favourite teachers. And then there is Trevor with his dyed hair and pink shirts who shocks everyone by shaking up the life of the stuttering shy bachelor postmaster and his mother, briefly redesigning the beehived heads of the local women before being run out of town once speculations about the true nature of his friendship with the postmaster spread. Again Simon is perplexed, though it is Trevor who first implies that he sees in the boy a likely kindred spirit. The only outlet he has for the really “big” questions that trouble him are his Saturday afternoons at the local soda fountain with Betty “The Exchange”. The cynical, unfortunately chinless, telephone operator entertains Simon’s queries but confuses him as much as she informs him – children, after all, are only allowed so much enlightenment in this era.

It is Fanie who, in the end, stands to call attention to the missing puzzle piece that Simon has been holding in his hand all along.

I have an affection for strong coming of age/coming out stories. This is one. Sexually Simon is a slow learner, a boy who is less in touch with his body than the more viscerally grounded if intellectually dimmer Fanie. He over thinks the world even though he encounters more than one adult male who recognizes in him an inclination that he has, at an early age, no context for. Today with the ubiquity of queer conversation, imagery, access to internet, resources and young adult novels that explore queer themes, it may be hard to imagine how isolated a child could be growing up in earlier decades. Some claim this is an argument for censorship or against realistic sex education in the school system. But that is a spurious argument. One could still grow up LGBT in a vacuum. Or worse in denial. Many of us did.

I grew up in the 1960’s and 70’s in conservative rural Alberta. My parents, like Simon’s were liberal, but, like my peers, there were so many facts of life we did not understand and would not have dared to ask. Especially if there was any inclination that our own sense of self was off the norm. Long before one could retreat to the wisdom of Wikipedia, our resources were limited. I will never forget when the word “faggot” started to appear on our radar, probably as 10 or 11 year-olds. We would scurry to our dictionaries to find only “A bundle of sticks or an unpleasant woman”. Somehow we knew that couldn’t be right!

With The Children’s Day Heyns captures all of the curious confusion of growing up smart, bookish and not quite fitting in. And he does so with a warm, understated humour. Through his perceptive, yet naive, narrator the wonder and mystification, shame and humiliation of adolescence are evoked with remarkable resonance. Like many coming of age tales this was also a debut novel. But first published in 2002 when the author was in his late 50s, this novel also marked the debut of second career as a writer and translator – one that is still going strong – an inspiration to the rest of us in mid-life with writerly aspirations.