Tag: writing

As boundaries blur: A few words and a link to my response to Decima by Eben Venter

A few months ago, I was invited to write a response to a new novel by South African author Eben Venter for knaap.brief, a weekly queer newsletter that publishes work in Afrikaans and English. I have been sticking to my own private corner of the literary universe for the past few years, so this invitation was both unexpected and welcome. There was a time when I read a lot of South African literature—and I still have shelves full of books waiting—so I was familiar with the author and had heard some very good things about his latest work. This seemed a good opportunity to read the novel and write for an editor again. However, since the request was for a response rather than a formal review (though the approach was left to me), I allowed myself to bring the personal into my essay as this book, which is set primarily in the  Eastern Cape Province, inevitably brought back both good and painful memories of time spent in the same region with a very dear friend who has been gone now for more than seven years (remembered here).

The novel, Decima, revolves around the disturbing historical and contemporary conditions threatening rhinoceros in general, and one aging female black rhino in particular. It is also the story of the love between a son and his mother, and about loss and grief. Skillfully balancing memoir, fiction, history, and natural science, Venter creates a story that lingers long in the imagination—and one that refuses to prioritize the human experience of the world. The perspective of Decima, the rhino cow at the centre of this tale, is essential and effectively evoked.

The animal is, as Venter imagines her, intelligent, sensitive, and alert. Solitary but not isolated from either her own kin or the other creatures with whom she shares her environment, she moves her massive bulk through the veld, seeking food, water, and shade. Decima’s reality is gently anthropomorphized, or rather, translated for a human audience.

My full response to this singular novel can be found here. (Also reproduced below if you’re unable to read it on the site.)

Decima by Eben Venter is published by Penguin Random House South Africa. An Afrikaans edition, translated by the author, is also available and both can be obtained outside South Africa as e-books.

As Boundaries Blur  (published at Knaap.brief, 02/18/24)

Dear Wemar

Facing the empty page, I have been wondering for words for more than a week now.

I have been invited to respond to Decima, the latest novel by Eben Venter. Respond. I was told that it does not have to be in the form of a conventional review which, in a way, would be much easier. Reviews have an internal logic and form; reviews, at least in my practice, require a certain neutrality in language and tone. Ideally, a review is about the book, not the reviewer. I respond when I cannot help but stand in my own way and make “I” statements, and when it comes to this inventive and deeply affecting novel, I have a lot I want to try to say.

First off, I am not South African, but a number of years ago I did spend a few weeks in the country, primarily in the Eastern Cape, with one of the best friends I have ever been blessed to know—an incredibly gifted super-butch dyke who has been gone now for over seven years. It was Ulla who first introduced me to Eben Venter’s Trencherman. She would have just loved this book; she would have related to Decima. So this review is for Ulla. After all, it is a book about love, and a book about loss. I loved her like a sister, but I couldn’t save her life.

Decima is a slippery text. Memoir, fiction, metafiction, natural science, history and social commentary all fall into place in a fragmented yet fluid narrative. Fragmentary works are somewhat fashionable, but too often they are forced, as an author tries to shoehorn so many clever facts and ideas into some kind of cohesive whole. However, when they flow effortlessly, the writer in me gets excited—at once caught up in the story and marvelling at how the pieces fit together so naturally. Decima works because the author allows himself, or a faintly fictionalized version of himself, to hold the continuity of the narrative. He lives in Australia but is back in his native South Africa, staying with his aging mother at her home in a Port Elizabeth seniors complex, while he conducts research for the novel he intends to write about the fate of the rhinoceros. As he gathers information he travels to townships and nature reserves and national parks. His memories regularly take him back to his rural childhood, and briefly, in more recent years, to New York and Belgium. His historical inquiries take him to Nepal and to a shipwreck off the coast of Europe, and cast a harsh light on the colonial exploits of King Leopold II of Belgium and the big game expeditions of Theodore Roosevelt. Along the way, he steps aside as needed to invite fictional characters—researchers, natural medicine practitioners, kingpins and middlemen—to expose the network and the demand that fuels the trafficking of rhino horn.

That is just a very rough sketch of the kind of web Venter weaves, moving continuously from place to place, across time, from fiction to fact and back again. But central to it all is a rhinoceros cow, the eponymous Decima, orphaned as a young calf when her mother was killed, and now the aging matriarch of her own crash—her decedents—who live amid the rolling hills of the Eastern Cape’s Great Fish Nature Reserve. One of a dwindling number of critically endangered black rhinos, Diceros bicornis, she passes her time eating, sleeping, watching and waiting.

But we do not simply observe her, we inhabit her world. From the inside. And this is the true magic that sets this novel apart from any other eco-fiction I’ve read.

I will admit I was cautious when I learned that this was a narrative that slipped into the mind of a rhino. It’s always a dangerous game to attempt to adopt an animal-eye view (and Venter does focus on the rhino’s eye early on in his detailed imagining of the drowning of a frightened captive rhino torn from its Himalayan home, meant to be delivered as gift for Pope Leo X) but without Decima’s perspective we would really only have half of what is a very complex story. The animal is, as Venter imagines her, intelligent, sensitive, and alert. Solitary but not isolated from either her own kin or the other creatures with whom she shares her environment, she moves her massive bulk through the veld, seeking food, water, and shade. Decima’s reality is gently anthropomorphized, or rather, translated for a human audience. Her awareness of her surroundings, her ability to gather information from the scents she picks up in the breeze or left in the dung deposited by other members of her crash, and her attention to the shifting angle of the sun and the cycles of the moon reveal a rich inner existence. As the full moon nears, her anxiety grows. She knows that the greatest threat she and her kind face is from a kind of creature that is not native to her space and that the moon’s full force will leave no place to hide.

The complexity, the shades of grey, that emerge in this multifaceted tale lie, of course, entirely on the human side of the equation and the reach is wide, across continents and centuries. Venter wisely lets these factors arise without resorting to obvious moralizing. Some villains are clear, some well-meaning folk might risk being overzealous, and those tasked with the direct protection of threatened species know the obstacles they are up against. However, if it is somewhat daring to attempt to take a reader inside a wild animal’s mind, Venter also opens up the thoughts and motivations of two poachers, both from economically deprived backgrounds, who have their own reservations and fears about the dangerous task they agree to perform.

As the novel progresses, the boundaries between the author’s research, his memories, his relationship with his mother, the facts he has gathered and the fictional characters he has met or imagined into being, including Decima herself, blur. Tension builds as the events leading up to the inevitable encounter between poachers and rhino take centre stage. In the aftermath, the narrative falls back into the realm of what feels more solidly memoirish. That is, we return to the story of the narrator as author and son with a mother who is aging and alone.

On its own, Decima is an exceptionally impressive novel, one that is very difficult to let go of even weeks after one is finished. I hope it gets more attention outside South Africa—here in Canada it is only available as an e-book—but, at the same time, as a work that Venter composed in English (and self-translated into Afrikaans), it reads with a rich South African tone and flavour. Usually, a South African book written in or translated into English, then edited for publication in an international market can be linguistically neutered to the point where there’s not even a bakkie in sight. This is not the case here. And, on a more personal level, my reading experience, and my response the this book, has unleashed a flood of memories: the long bus trip from Cape Town to East London and back, an afternoon at Addo Elephant National Park where we were the object of fascination for a juvenile rooikat, and watching the sun burst into flame over the sour veld, night after night, with a friend who, in the end, could not outrun the black clouds that chased her. So, even if there is a qualitative difference between what I might call a response and a review, sometimes the boundaries between the two are not that clear after all.

Oh, and having had a glimpse of the world through Decima’s eyes, I’ll never think of the full moon the same way again.

 

 

Beautiful scavenger: We the Parasites by A. V. Marraccini

“I’m boringly good,” A. V. Marraccini confesses. “Except when I write critique, I guess.” I am also boringly good, even when I write critique—or so I thought before I read We the Parasites. Now, I’m not so sure.

What I will admit, off the top, is that I have been staring at this hot pink volume waiting patiently on one of my overcrowded bookshelves for the better part of this year. As someone who has written and edited critical essays without any of the prerequisite training many of my literary friends seem to have, I was afraid that a book about criticism would be thick with the names of all those critical theorists I have not read and likely never will, and page after page I would be smiling and nodding politely, off in the corner, with no idea what was going on. I needn’t have worried though; for the most part, none of those folk were invited to this party. However, I was still concerned that, given what I’d heard about this book, I might yet be stranded outside my comfort zone.

You see, Marraccini puts her cards on the table right at the beginning. After describing the mechanics of the relationship between the fig and the fig wasp that burrows deep into the fruit flesh in a somewhat haphazard partnership that enables the reproduction of both fruit and insect, she finds a distinct affinity, as a critic, with the latter:

The critical gaze is tearing apart, clawing into the soft, central flesh of the tree bud.

The critical gaze is also erotic; we want things, we are by a degree of separation pollinating figs with other figs by means of our wasp bodies, rubbing two novels together like children who make two dolls “have sex”, except that we’ll die inside the fruit and someone else will read it and eat it, rich with the juice of my corpse.

And although the wasp/fig process involves, to unequal ends, male and female wasps and figs, there is an element that is, for our parasitic critic, inherently queer and, thus:

Criticism, too, is queer in this way, generative outside the two-gendered model, outside the matrimonial light of day way of reproducing people, wasps, figs, or knowledge.

Okay, I think. I will need to be convinced. The idea of digging into a work appeals quite naturally. That is what I do when I write about a book, whether in a literary journal or, at least most of the time, here on this site. I inhabit the words of others in order to write, but try to stay out of my own way in my writing so that my reading experience seasons but does not obviously alter the flavour of someone else’s. And erotic? Well, that is not something that comes naturally to me, nor does queer even though I’m hard-pressed to know what I am if not queer. I have a fraught relationship with matters of sexuality and identity. It’s complicated. Yet, I am intrigued. And, as We the Parasites demonstrates, reading—or viewing, since Marraccini is an art historian—with the body can be a messy endeavour. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Deciding to give this much-praised work the benefit of the doubt, I held my anxieties to the side, burrowed into the flesh of this curious text (I know, I know) and, my god, what an excellent read! (Please excuse the abandonment of all the niceties of proper critical reviewing and even accept an errant exclamation mark, because this book is one that invites you into the critic’s heart, mind and bed in a way that is completely, even joyously unexpected.) It is wise and funny and, best of all, it draws its references from the most unlikely places. My limited acquaintance with the stalwarts of the Western canon was no barrier to my enjoyment and, much to surprise, the two years of Classics that preceded my eventual academic journey through Biological Anthropology and Philosophy, was finally of some use. I not only have The Illiad (who doesn’t?), but I also could pull long untouched copies of Xenophon’s The Persian Expedition and Arrian’s Anabasis off my shelf and feel so clever. Not to worry, though, there’s always Google which you will need to see Twombly’s The Age of Alexander for this particular discussion, unless you have a photographic memory. But my point is, really, that you don’t need any special background to enjoy the musings that arise in this book; Marraccini writes with such enthusiasm, even about work that she views with some skepticism, that anything that is not offered within the text itself will have you happily popping online for a quick refresher.

The parasite analogy, if at first odd, sparks the author’s playful love of the dark and yet speaks with striking accuracy to the nature of the critic’s task—burrowing into and feeding off of the work of (mostly dead) writers and artists, to produce a reading or a response that brings light to the spaces darkened by time. However, if the wasp burrows into the fig, the tape worm finds it way into its animal or human host, consider the fish-louse that swims into the gills of its victim, severs the roots at the base of the tongue and eats away at the flesh until it becomes the tongue itself. This offers Marraccini an image, graphically detailed, that corresponds to the way that she has, when appropriate, stolen the tongue of Homer, or John Updike, or whomever. Strange? Maybe, but it aligns with the experience I’m often referring to when I say that I write about books to “open up” a potential reading (or readings). It’s even more relevant when one has the runway (that is, the venue and necessary word count) for an in-depth critical essay. If not stealing, we are perhaps echoing a voice, while our “I” self remains in the shadows.

In this extended essay in which the subject is criticism itself, Marracinni draws on a wide range of sources and images from classical history and mythology, to poetry, prose and, of course, art. Cy Twombly is her main man on that last front. One can move from Updike, to Centaurs, to Genet and Rilke, but it seems there’s a Twombly painting or series for almost every season and, in her explorations, she manages to carry us right down into the layers of crayon and paint. This affinity between artist and critic is so vividly rendered I wish I could have read this before my only direct encounter with his work at MOMA in San Francisco, but that would require bending time.

Our parasite, in inhabiting the works of the artists she consumes, also develops a strange relationship with the notions that arise out of that connection—a who-did-that-idea-come-fromness—that emerges in unlikely settings. Like dreams. Like when a nocturnal lecturer pontificating about the attributes of a strange painting-carpet he insists is a Twombly says No one wants queer art to be queer any more, Marraccini acknowledges, “to be clear, (that) is my brain saying that, and yet me in the dream is somehow intimidated by his prognostic authority” and she wakes up in a puddle of sweat. This is, for me, the kind of uncanny thing that only occurs when one is so deeply engaged with an idea or a book or an artwork or an artist, that the boundary between the ruminations of the sleeping self and the waking self is breeched. Blurred.

The question then is one of embodiment. Is the reader/viewer/critic inhabiting the work, or is it the other way round? Is this a risk of reading/viewing with the body? Marraccini writes about longing and desire, how they can be awoken or perhaps interfere with the engagement. Yet desire is not necessarily realized (at least not without breaking a law). And she does write about the body, her body, but typically in the most clinically frank way about the myriad way the body and its discontents can betray one. To be a parasite it one thing, to host one is something one would rather not entertain, thank you. Yet there are illnesses, physical and mental, that many of us live with and to pretend that they never mediate the way we read a poem of look at a piece of art would be an act of denial.

Finally, Marraccini is writing all of this against the backdrop of the early months of the pandemic, when London was eerily quiet and she could wander at will under the cover of darkness. (We are both naturally nocturnal creatures, it seems.) She captures the eerie otherness or suspended unknown of that period of time so well:

The whole world is so new now, there will surely be a spate of essays like this one, about The Before and After, or there will be no After and there will still be essays anyway.

I love this sentence. There surely was a spate of essays—as nonfiction editor for 3:AM Magazine, my inbox saw four or five new pandemic inspired essays arrive nearly every day. Meanwhile, a temporary medication change made it increasingly difficult for me to make my way through them as 2020 wore on, and by the end of the year I was no longer editing or entertaining the idea of pitching or writing any more essays myself. Whether there actually has been an After, as year four of Covid dawns, there are still essays, but I’m not writing them. However, reluctant queer, recalcitrant parasite that I am, perhaps I should be, duly inspired by this idiosyncratic, astute and undeniably queer essay. This is an original and very entertaining book.

We the Parasites by A. V. Marraccini is published by Sublunary Editions.

A reflection for Winter Solstice 2023

As soon as we pass the longest night of the year, there is a noticeable change in the quality of light. The afternoons immediately seem brighter as the days begin to lengthen, minute by minute, week by week. I can remember more than a few winter solstices that found me mired in a darkness that was soul-black and heavy. But this year, as the world, at home and afar, is facing so many serious threats, it feels essential to remain focused on what needs to be addressed—war, climate change, increasing polarization, a pandemic that is still causing illness and disability, and so much more. Heaven knows there is much to worry about, many reasons to be angry, ample cause for despair, but, at the moment, as someone who has known deep depression borne of chemistry rather than circumstance, what I tend to feel is a positive anger, that is, an emotion that fuels a desire to be more active in my speech and action as the new solar season dawns. There is an opening up to the other that, after years of relative isolation, has been reignited in me in recent months and I hope I can keep that energy in motion.

This past year was one of connection and reconnection. In mid-September I returned to India for the first time in four years—my first trip anywhere since 2019. As I made my way from Bangalore to Calcutta, Delhi, Pune, Mumbai, Jaipur and back to Bangalore, I enjoyed so many long and meaningful conversations over coffee and meals, and in cars, autos and trains, with friends old and new. I was looking for the inspiration and confidence to write again after a prolonged period of silence, and by the time I was getting ready to fly home I was beginning to feel a renewed creative drive. And then, the outbreak of conflict in the Middle East diverted my attention, shifted my reading, left me distressed and found me treading words with caution, shocked by the ability of apparently reasonable people to rationalize the massive destruction of infrastructure and indiscriminate killing of innocent children, women and men that we have witnessed these past two and a half months. Even now I know that whatever I say or don’t say, someone will take offense. This is the deeply fractured world we now inhabit.

Here in the northern hemisphere, the days grow longer as a new calendar year approaches; in the south, summer solstice marks the longest day of the year. What will we do with this light, that we either presently have or are eagerly anticipating? There is no condition—conflict, climate or clinical—that we cannot resolve, but, as human beings, we have to be able to do the one thing that seems to drive us apart over and over again: we have to recognize that every person is of equal value and deserving of dignity and life and commit to working together toward that end.

I will let you decide for yourself if that is a dream worth holding on to or justification for accepting that our problems are impossible to solve.

Photo by Joseph Schreiber

Roughghosts is nine years old today

It seems I skipped the annual anniversary post last year, but since I’m not writing the review I should be working on, I thought I’d stop and acknowledge this small achievement and thank everyone who has stopped by this literary space since I first recklessly launched it while I was unknowingly spiraling into a manic crisis that would ultimately end my career back in 2014. If nothing else, it has provided me a place to talk about books and writing, and make the acquaintance of many wonderful readers, writers, translators and publishers around the world. Roughghosts would be nothing without the company of others who also cherish literature.

In its early days, my blog was filled with much of my frustration about chronic mental illness and the stigma that has never been overcome. The subject still arises here on occasion but many of angriest posts have been made private. I try to stick to books, sometimes the subject of writing, and only when I am really down, do I open up a little more. (Of course, those are the posts that tend to get the strongest immediate response—always supportive—but I try not to complain about the world too often.)

The past year has been pretty smooth, if quiet. I have stayed close to home, tracing the same beloved trails and trying, with some difficulty, to regain the level of fitness I had prior to breaking my leg last year. I am, I suppose, at the age when it takes longer to get back to where I used to be. The weather—prolonged cold through the winter and unexpected heat early in May—has been one factor, but a new respect for caution has slowed me down a little. I rarely go out without my trekking poles and (wisely) take fewer risks than I once did. I’m also looking forward to travelling for the first time since 2019, hoping to return to India in September.

As I look back over the last twelve months, I’m pleased with the number and quality of the reviews I’ve published. I’m a slow reader and a slow writer and, aside from a post like this, I rarely ever compose online—every piece is typically written over several days on a Word document and uploaded to WordPress. For now this is still a satisfying activity for me; I have yet to feel a strong desire to pitch essays or reviews for publication elsewhere. To be honest, I do like being able to track the amount of attention my reviews get, at publication and over time. It’s a window into the varying interest certain books generate. And because this is my blog, I am not tied to reading only new releases. That is, I believe, the true beauty of the book blog, or when I’m being fancy, “literary site.” Over the past year, for example, my most popular post—over 4500 views since last September—is a review of Mahsweta Devi’s classic Mother of 1084. I can only assume it has been on the school curriculum in India (and wonder how many suspiciously similar reports teachers have received).

I have no special objectives for the next year of roughghosts. I read and write about books for myself first and foremost—that is, as an exercise in both reading and writing—and I am ever grateful for everyone who has stopped by (even those who, judging by their bizarre search terms, must have been sorely disappointed by what they found). Here’s to another year of great books and excellent company!

After three years, where am I? A personal reflection

walk on the perimeter
of your dreams. it’s not
that the roads are blocked
but that the hearts have
given into the violence of the wind

“Friday, March 25 at 4PM”
Etel Adnan, translated by Sarah Riggs

Into the second week of February and here we are, still living in interesting times, as the apocryphal expression goes. The past three years have brought disease, war and natural disaster, and have, sadly, served to demonstrate just how little we can care for one another. For many of us, it has also been a time of deepening isolation, especially for those with fragile connections to the community and outside world.

For days now I have debated putting my feelings into words, uncomfortable, as always, in talking about myself, even if most of my non-review related writing falls into the sphere of the personal essay. Of late, I have mostly written about how even that avenue feels fraught with barriers and challenges that my own sense of self worth cannot overcome. Then, when I turned to look at some of my occasional journal notes, I found that what I am feeling now I had already clearly articulated two years ago. Little has changed, except that the despair runs deeper and the mental health resources that were so important to me are now gone. I had overstayed my welcome in a system that is buckling under the pressures currently crushing healthcare services here and elsewhere.

Since the pandemic started, I have crossed into my sixties, encountered new medical challenges—none especially serious, as far as I know, and as of yet, no Covid—but I have not been outside the city limits and, apart from my immediate neighbours and my children, I have engaged in little social interaction. Finances have been a major factor, as have problems at home, yet I fear I have become increasingly withdrawn over this period. Trapped even. I go out every day, marking kilometres on the trails but the satisfaction that used to come with a good outing is increasingly elusive. I want to travel again and yet I cycle between anticipation and anxiety and keep pushing possible departure dates back.

I feel old, I feel tired and overwhelmed by loneliness. I fear I am drifting. It’s hardly a new sensation but it somehow seems that the past few years have made me feel at once anchored and anchorless.

I am also troubled by a continuing anxiety about my identity. Or lack thereof. At a time when identity has become such a loaded term, for better or worse, I can’t understand how people take some measure of pride, even comfort, in being queer or trans or something. I feel that the layers of my fundamental identity—sex, gender, sexuality, nationality, politics, religion—have all been stripped away. I am worse than naked. I am emotionally and socially flayed. Who am I now? Better yet, what am I? I have no job, no title, no vocation, no partner, no value.

I read. I write about the books I read and publish my thoughts in this space, typically trying to remain to the sidelines of my reviews. Any other words I try to write spiral into the void. I distract myself with little satisfaction, little connection, and a meagre measure of confidence. What do I have to show for sixty-two years? A differently gendered past rendered invisible on the outside that has left me in a body I will forever be at odds with? And a chronic psychiatric condition that has robbed me of the freedom of  trusting my own worth, my own sense of self, my own existence.

There are far more books dealing with gender identity and mental illness on the shelves these days than there were twenty-five years ago when I was navigating crisis after crisis on both counts, but at this point in my life most of them seem to be speaking to someone alien to me. Rarely do I hear a discussion on either subject and think: Ah, yes, that’s so familiar. I wonder who I might be today if an understanding of the two separate and yet interwoven conditions that set me apart from such an early age had been available when I needed it. I might have had a different life, but I’m not convinced it would have been better. By the time one reaches sixty, the tangled complications of a life lived are impossible to unwind and reimagine. One can only look ahead.

In recent weeks I’ve been reading Etel Adnan’s collection Time. Published when she was well into her nineties, the poems in this handsome volume would have been composed when she was in her late seventies and early eighties. Clear and precise, her poetry crosses borders and time, touching again and again on myth, memories of war, desire, the body and the inevitability of death. With wisdom and grace, the poet untangles, reimagines and reminds me that life is marked with beauty and longing even as the end looms closer.

So where should one write? Back to the past or into the future?

The poet who learned to fly: The Butterfly Cemetery by Franca Mancinelli

In the years when written words were indecipherable signs, entrusted to a world that I couldn’t even reach on tiptoes, a book would be opened only for its illustrations or because my father’s voice was passing through it, over completely unknown roads, although his index finger seemed to trace them out, leaving short trails in which black letters, like objects in a magical night, came to life, silently spelling out in unison the same story which, open and ready to shift and change its pictures, my father was holding on his chest. It was his voice that brought the stories to us as we three were half-lying in the big bed where my little brother was staying up late, with his tiny ears that would soon close, containing a trail of sound and sense in the warm silence.

– from “The Enchantment of Death: Briar Rose”

If the first books read to us as children opened a world of strange symbols, hypnotic rhythms, and elliptical meanings, translations from foreign languages similarly open a doorway to landscapes and experiences at once distant and familiar. They introduce us to the images and words of writers we might not hear otherwise. Their stories. Their ideas. Their poetry.

The work of Italian poet Franca Mancinelli was first formally made available to English-speaking audiences through a small dual language collection of enigmatic, fragmentary prose poems, The Little Book of Passage, translated by John Taylor and published in 2018. These brief pieces which first appear to explore the vagaries of transit, packing, leaving, travel, soon begin to slide toward the examination of an existential space between internal and external reality—seeking form in that wordless, restless terrain of perception and experience. It was, and remains, a book that speaks to so much of my own sense of groundlessness. A collection containing Mancinelli’s two earlier volumes of poetry, At An Hour’s Sleep From Here: Poems (2007-2019), followed a year later. Once again her work is presented in a dual language format. Like her prose poems, her verses tend to be brief, spare, with an openness and space framing  unanswerable questions of identity, self and the insufficience of our connections with other beings.

Her newly released collection, The Butterfly Cemetery: Selected Prose (2008 – 2021), stands as an illuminating counterpoint and companion to Mancinelli’s poetic work. Her most important stories, personal essays and writings about the poetic spirit are gathered here, including several pieces which have not yet appeared in print in Italian, presented, as before in both languages, and completed with a comprehensive assessment of her work written by Taylor, her long-time translator. For someone who has read her poetry, this collection offers further insight into the creative heart and soul of the poet herself—and that is not to imply that she gives herself away, for Mancinelli is a poet who manages to address the intimate and the universal, by speaking from the essential boundaries of experience—because, in her prose, one can begin to feel how her poetic sensibilities were born and nurtured and share in her vision of where poetry comes from.

Of course, it is not necessary to be previously acquainted with her poetry to appreciate the stories and essays contained in The Butterfly Cemetery (although it may well inspire a reader to seek them out), because this work offers its own rich rewards. If Mancinelli’s poems tend to be very open and spare, in her prose there is a profound lyric intensity. Her writing breathes, deeply and slowly, as her images, ideas and reflections rise, disappear and surface again. The book opens with stories and essays that strike a personal note, evoking memories of childhood and early adulthood, some sentimental, some gently fictionalized, and others tinged with aching and longing. In many of these early pieces, one encounters a sensitive, wistful dreamer, as in the title story about a young child fascinated by butterflies who does not realize her desire to touch their wings will kill them, or the exquisitely simple “How the Fire Loves,” a fable of a little girl who escapes to the comfort of the fireplace after supper:

She had curled up alone on the sofa. The television was turned off, and she was watching the fire in the fireplace, shivering as if it were cold. The fire cannot be caressed by anyone. It is always a little distant from the others, in its own space, alongside newspapers and pieces of wood; they will be in its arms, until they become ashes. This is how the fire loves.

The second section moves further away from the childhood home and the confused pain of first love, to explore the self in relation to natural landscapes and urban environments. Mancinelli wanders, on foot, by ferry and by train, observing and meditating on the landscape and communities that have formed and influenced her. There is a branching out and a cycling back to the people and places of her homeland—the hills, fields, and the waters that have cradled her family for generations. The tension between the desire to leave, the pull to return and the attempt to delineate the fragile borders of a personal geography are recurring themes. One senses that the weight of existence in a land with such a long historical, artistic and intellectual legacy both grounds and troubles the questions of identity and belonging that emerge from the shadows cast by her words. She is ever aware, in her prose as in her poetry, of the importance of darkness as a fundamental source of growth and understanding.

And that brings us to the third and final section of The Butterfly Cemetery. Here, Mancinelli the writer turns her focus to the nature of her own personal, creative relationship with words, and, more specifically, with the existential origins of poetic expression. She writes about the absolute urgency with which she first turned to writing, beginning in adolescence, as a means of “speaking” that which she could not find a way to voice, isolated and alone on the edge of her circle of friends. Feeling she was yielding her words to others, she reclaimed them with her pen:

I wrote within myself, on my body so deeply that ever since, I have taken the road on which I now walk. If had brought that sentence to my mouth, today I would be another person. The part of my life that I have spent up to now would have been different. This is why for me, everything continues to be staked on words. With words I have an unsettled account. (“Yielding Words”)

She speaks about the process of writing poetry with honesty, from the tentative beginnings to the frustrated failures—the lines that will never take flight—in “A Line is a Lap and Other Notes on Poetry” and talks about being mistaken for a traffic policewoman as she stands on a street taking notes in the notebook she always has close at hand. But it is the vital connection to poetry as a “practice of daily salvation” that comes through in the most powerful of these essays. Mancinelli is attuned the essential quality of poetic language, tracing its existence to the moment before it comes into being. In the wonderful piece “Poetry, Mother Tongue” she suggest that writing is the act of trying to translate what is already written within us, of looking into the empty space between “the unknown and nothingness”:

I believe that poetry is a voice that passes through us. For this reason I always begin with a lowercase letter when I write. I’m not beginning anything. I’ve only caught something that I stammer into this broken language, which crumbles and breaks in silence.

Before the words there is a rhythm: a cadence that suddenly reaches us, in silence through a hollow space that we carry inside us.

There is a strong sense in Mancinelli’s view of poetics that writing itself is a dangerous act, one that calls us to face the dark and the difficult, one that takes us into our own “darkroom,” that place where we are most vulnerable. “Writing,” she tells us, “is a soul surgery that calls for a steady hand, and a deep place to which uncertainty and tremor can be convoked. It is an act of internal self-surgery.” And yet in the writing, there is a possibility of decentring and being set free. Poetry (and prose) that arises from within, although grounded in direct experience and observation, allows for space and a measure of abstractedness to guide writer, and reader, from the individual toward the universal.

But, to return, once more, to the ability of translation to open doors to those who lack the fluency to read a writer’s work in its original language, John Taylor’s collaboration with Franca Mancinelli, has brought one of the most compelling voices in contemporary Italian poetry to a wider audience. Unexpectedly that has also come to have a special resonance for me. Shortly after I read and reviewed The Little Book of Passage, I had the opportunity to meet and spend time with the poet in Kolkata when a visit I made happened to overlap with her poetry residency in the city. Her English far outpaced my non-existent Italian and although I felt no lack in our conversations, all of the subsequent interviews, poetry and prose that has become available in English has only deepened my appreciation and affection for her sensitivity and vision. Translation truly expands the world as we know it.

The Butterfly Cemetery by Franca Mancinelli is translated by John Taylor and published by Bitter Oleander Press.

Life keeps writing my story for me: A personal reflection on my mother’s birthday

May 2, 2022. My mother would have been eighty-eight today. This week just passed, between my father’s birthday on April 26 and today, is always the time when I think most of my parents. When they feel closest to me, like stars circling the planet. When their memories haunt me. This summer, they will have both been gone six years. But this past week has been a whirlwind of emotion in its own right and I’m afraid the time I wanted to set aside to be with them has evaporated.

Which has led me to think about what family means. About how much love and pain we can bear. And yet, what I can really say at this moment is guarded.

Same trail, same time, last year.

Last Sunday, April 24, I took a fall on a muddy, icy trail and fractured my left fibula above the ankle. At the time, I was still a treacherous distance from a point where I hoped medical attention might reach me and I knew from the screaming pain in my leg that I would never be able to walk all the way back up the hill to my home. Or, for that matter, drive my small standard transmission vehicle to the urgent care clinic to get it checked out. But I was still hoping on the idea of a “bad sprain,” so I called my son and asked him to come down with a trekking pole and I started to limp toward the access point.

I was inching my way down an incline thick with mud, clinging to a rope railing, when a young man came along. He was new to the city and new to the trail but he didn’t want to leave me alone. There was no place to sit without putting undue pressure on my injured leg so we waited until my son Thomas arrived and together the three of us continued down and then across a desperately slippery sheet of mud-covered ice. Soon a third helper arrived, one of the men I regularly meet and talk to on this path, and he provided extra support as we made our way up another hill and down a flight of rough steps to an open paved area. I called the emergency line and we tried to figure out how I might be reached. The normal access road is still impassable at this time of year, but a paramedic in an SUV was able to reach me on the bike trail and drive me out to where an ambulance was waiting.

Of course, there was still a long wait ahead, five hours at least, just to see a doctor at the clinic. With x-rays I had the verdict that leg was indeed broken. I was incredulous. I have some early bone loss and my diet and daily exercise have been focused on strengthening my body, but in the end it only took a rather classic fall to produce a common fracture. Common in athletes, I might add, if that is to make me feel better because I did not take up trail running until I was fifty-nine and never imagined myself even a casual “athlete.”

One week later, a little grief and depression has settled in along with the discomfort and agonizing difficulty of accomplishing absolutely anything on one leg and a pair of crutches. My injured leg can bear no weight at all for at least the rest of the month. I return to the orthopedic surgeon on June 1. I did rent a wheelchair for outings (assuming someone is available to carry it down a flight of stairs from my second floor apartment while I cautiously and gracelessly make my way down on my bottom end. I am terrified of falling on the narrow, old staircase. Chances are that could spell my end.  And no cruise around the neighbourhood will replace my daily walks and runs on my beloved trail—especially as spring arrives in force.

In the meantime, I have my adult son close at hand to help out. But I’m afraid that the responsibility and fear heightened his anxiety to the point that he turned to even more alcohol than usual and we had some very difficult moments. That’s all I will say at this time, because it seems like a change may finally be on the horizon (or a bottom has been reached). It won’t be easy but I’m willing to provide as much emotional caregiving as I can along the way.

It is this situation, however, that brings me to what I really wanted to talk about. For years I have fussed with the idea of a “memoirish” project while, at the same time, memoir and autofiction has exploded into a genre of often very dubious quality with authors who seem to be able to drop boundaries and expose everything about themselves and those close to them without thinking twice. That holds no appeal to me. As a writer or as a reader. There are ideas I want to explore about living with mental illness, having a gender-different history and parenting a child with his own challenges. But my questions have always been more metaphysical than personal-detail-oriented, and I believe that my experiences, if interesting in themselves, are at once unique to me and in some sense universal to this messy business of living we all engage in. I am also aware that, even though both of my children are intrinsic to my story, they each have their own stories (or versions of my story) that I do not own.

How can one tell a “true,” yet necessarily subjective story that involves others closely and still respect their dignity and boundaries? There is a lot of anger, grief and joy in my story, like any other, but how can one write toward that emotion without exposing too much of one’s self or others? I know I keep waiting to move beyond all that before writing while knowing at the same time that writing is possibly the only way I will ever understand what I feel.

In recent years, I have published a few personal essays and poems in which I have sought to strike a chord between the raw and the abstract, but more recently I have been frozen. I only feel safe writing about the words of others. My own words about my life have remained strangely out of reach. However, of late, the desire to find them has returned.

So, on my mother’s birthday, with at least a month of down time ahead, as my son is making his own resolutions, I’m thinking it is perhaps time to open that work-in-progress file again. For my parents and my children and myself.

And maybe someone else will want to read it too.

Saying farewell to 2021 with some of the books I loved and best wishes for the future

If 2020 was the year that my ability to read and write felt the numbing impact of a medicated mind, 2021 was the year I had to decide what was really important. My mind is still medicated, but with a drug that does not leave me mentally spongy like the one that I lived on for more than a year. There are pros and cons with any maintenance drug, but I realized that, all things considered, I was better off with the devil I know than the one that was pulling me under. So, by mid-September I began to feel a welcoming release from the haze I’d been struggling against and it became easier to engage fully with literature once again. My reading never stopped, of course, it only slowed, and as I gather my thoughts on my favourite books of 2021, I can see that half of the works I remember most fondly were read in the first two-thirds of the year. But I will admit that every review I wrote during that time was painful, as if pulling my own words together to talk about the words of others was a huge task. In the end, reading only feels like a complete activity if I can articulate a response to each book, regardless of whether it comes out in a “review” of some sort. It is only now that my capacity to read has been restored do I realize how truly impaired it was.

With 2021 and all its global and personal challenges slipping into the rear view mirror, I wanted to take a moment to consider my favourites of the books I read this year. I skipped this readerly ritual last year and, as ever, I am troubled by the fact that each such list necessarily leaves out so many excellent works because, quite honestly, if I am not enjoying a book I rarely feel inclined to finish it, let alone write about it here. So with that in mind, but sticking to a strict ten titles, here’s my contribution to the discussion.

First, my top three. One will be no surprise to anyone who follows my blog: The Last Days of Mandelstam by Vénus Khoury-Ghatta (tr. by Teresa Lavendar-Fagan). Probably the last book I read before transitioning off the troublesome medication, this imagining of the final moments of Osip Mandelstam against a tight, poetic flight back through his life thrilled me with its confident sense that sometimes less truly is more. In the reading I would regularly stop to think: How did she say so much with so few words? This is the work of an accomplished, mature writer. Apart from singing this book’s praises at every opportunity on Twitter, I spoke about it about on this video and recommended it in the December issue of The Bangalore Review.

The Book of Sleep by Haytham El Wardany (tr. by Robin Moger) is one of those books that defies classification—standing somewhere between fiction and nonfiction, it can best be considered an imaginative meditation on sleep and the sleeper that leans toward the philosophical in its grounding, but is unbound in its scope. Thoughtful, intelligent, inspiring.

Finally, I read some amazing poetry this year and as usual I found my limited formal understanding of the literary form a barrier to confident articulation of a response, but with Lost, Hurt, and in Transit Beautiful by Nepali-Indian Anglophone poet, Rohan Chhetri, I just wanted to scream READ THIS BOOK! It has disappointed me to see that this collection seems to have been under-appreciated in its US release (it was published simultaneously in India) because it is not only accessible, but gorgeous, and shockingly violent. Stunning.

The balance of my top ten (in the order that stacked best for the sake of a photograph) are:

If You Kept a Record of Sins by Andrea Bajani (tr. by Elizabeth Harris), is the story of a young Italian man who travels to Romania to attend to the affairs of his deceased mother from whom he has been long estranged. It presents a simmering, spare narrative—the kind of read that I responded to especially well with reduced focus and concentration—that resists the need for any tight resolution.

Outgoing Vessel by experimental Danish poet Ursula Andkjær Olsen (tr. Katrine Ogaard Jensen) is perhaps a little more brittle and restrained than Third-Millenium Heart but once again her work takes you on an operatic post-human, yet humane, adventure. Excellent.

Slipping by Mohamed Kheir (tr. by Robin Moger) offers a different kind of adventure into an otherworldly Egypt that is very much informed by a fragmented post-Arab Spring reality. Hard to follow at first, yet fun to read, with much uncertain resolution.

The Desert of Lop by Raoul Schrott (tr. by Karen Leeder). I had been saving this dreamy little volume, knowing that little of this Austrian poet’s work is available in English. The tale of one man’s relationships with three women, it is also a meditation on deserts and the search for home. Exactly the kind of undefinable book I treasure.

Wolfgang Hilbig’s The Interim (tr. by Isabel Fargo Cole) was an unexpected surprise. I’ve read almost all of his work available in translation, and was a little apprehensive about this novel, knowing that he is perhaps at his best in his meandering, surreal shorter works. But this much more conventional narrative featuring another iteration of the classic Hilbig protagonist felt somehow closer to the man himself—a hard drinking, socially awkward, reluctant literary “star” who cannot find a home on either side of the Wall.

With The Promise, South African writer Damon Galgut has finally won the Booker Prize after three nominations and somehow I fear that certain readers might eschew this book because he won this prize (yes we literary folk are a fickle lot). I have long been a fan, and although this book will never replace some of his smaller, quieter efforts in my heart, The Promise is a sweeping portrait of four decades of South African history through the lens of a mischievous high modernist narrator who is by turns, funny, caustic and clever.

And last, but not least, I was offered an opportunity to read a couple of fascinating MIT Press titles by virtue of ending up on a publicist list, and without that I would never have stumbled across Sandfuture by Justin Beal. This is one of those unlikely hybrid essays—a biography of Minoru Yamasaki, the Japanese-American architect who designed the World Trade Centre that is also a reflection on art, illness, urban planning and more—and it works remarkably well. I had so much fun reading and writing about this book that I can only hope that it comes to the attention of the audience it deserves.

For the New Year, I have no specific reading intentions, aside from a small winter project to read some Norwegian literature—no particular reason, I just have a few things piling up and it seems a suitable goal for the cold, dark  months ahead. I’m also hoping to ease back into writing again after a dry spell. Ideas are starting to trickle to the surface, I’ll see if they lead me anywhere. And otherwise I will probably continue my idiosyncratic literary meanderings and savour the ability to read at a faster, yet deeper pace than I was at this time last year.

Oh yeah, and if travel feels feasible again, I hope I might be able to pack my bags and catch up with distant friends by the time this old earth makes its way around the sun once more.  May you be warm, well, and have plenty of light to read by.

Image copyright Joseph Schreiber

Changes: Ever in search of balance – A reflection

I don’t know when I ceased to exist, or how I fell off the face of the earth. 

I wrote this line in my journal on July 15 of this year. I’d been plagued by a persistent emotional heaviness for months, but over the summer that weight seemed to intensify. I began to look to the future with anxiety, to wonder how to find the will to keep existing. I had not written a single creative piece in the better part of the year. I struggled to read. I had given up editing because the necessary focus was gone. The only thing I could manage consistently was to put on my shoes, head out the door, and walk and run.

I have not missed a day.

Calgary, Alberta: Bow River Pathway

Of course, these days everything  is tinted by the pandemic. Normal is a nebulous concept. Where I live, our fourth wave is rising fast, we are once again leading the country in all metrics except vaccinations. Hospitals are beyond capacity and those who work the frontlines are exhausted and demoralized. All for lack of political will. The situation fuels stress, anger and concern. But I’m not alone in my reaction—in fact to feel less would be worrying.

My own condition has held firm no matter.

Calgary, Alberta: Bow River Pathway

A few weeks ago I made two decisions. One after extensive consideration, the other under relentless pressure. First I decided to go back onto the medication I went off a year ago last July following a diagnosis with bone loss. I’d taken that drug for twenty years and it seemed that a change might be good. But the transition onto the new (to me) treatment was extended, difficult, and, as I discovered, cost a vital aspect of my creative spirit.

Second, the day after beginning to add the target med, I agreed to take on a supervisor role at our unnecessary federal election—on the first day of confusing new COVID restrictions. When I expressed my concern about side effects and a sixteen hour day requiring some ability to focus, my worries were waved off. I made it through the day but it was blur. Somehow it seems that if you have a mental illness but can still tie your own shoes and drive a car, your symptoms are disregarded either at the beginning or during treatment. And it seems like this medication change is shaping up to be another. I was so excited when I finally decided to return to my old treatment. I was looking forward to catching up on reading and reviews. I had not factored in letters that would appear to dance across the page  or the associated nausea and instability.

I sure hope I can still read when I get to the other side. And run too.

Calgary, Alberta: Douglas Fir Trail

Meanwhile autumn has settled in around here. There’s a chill in the air and the trees are bursting with colour but a certain sadness lurks in the vibrant leaves. All those branches will soon be bare. Life is but one change after another, seasons tumbling down the years.

All photos by Joseph Schreiber

Seven years of roughghosts, now on to the eighth

May 31st, 2021. roughghosts is seven years old today. This space did not begin as a book blog, as I’ve said many times. I’m not sure what it began as other than a wildly impulsive fit of increasing mania. About three weeks after I posted my first sketchy musings, I crashed out completely, bipolar disorder effectively destroying my professional career and reputation. Much has passed since that time—cardiac arrest, my parents’ deaths, a dear friend’s suicide, travel to South Africa, Australia and India, depression, mixed moods, and diagnosis of bone loss. Oh yeah, and a global pandemic.

The only constant is the existence of this little blog which seems to sputter along and even grow in followers and visitors regardless of whether I add regular fuel to the fire.

I will confess that the creation of this space seemed to offer me an avenue to writing. I wrote poetry and stories all through my teens, but as I reached my twenties I became aware that I had little to say. I needed to live a little first. Then as I got older, I accumulated life experiences as we all do, yet the more I lived, the less I could channel any of it into writing. I could no more steal from my clients who all had fascinating stories than I could draw on my own. I discovered that I am not the kind of person who can violate the boundaries of others for the sake of writing, nor could I afford to push my own limits. By my forties I had found myself a closeted single parent whose gendered past had to remain a secret. It was not a space my twenty year-old self would ever have expected to be in, but I had a job, two children to support and no way out.

Except madness.

When I lost my job, my kids were in their twenties and I was in my fifties, I had this internet space and, well, I no longer had an excuse. On one level, writing was easy enough. My blog evolved into a bookish space rather quickly, my first essay submission for a queer themed book was accepted, and eventually I was writing critical reviews, occasional essays, and had been invited (recruited?) to edit for online publications. A scant few of these literary ventures paid but I didn’t care. I was writing.

And I was as out as possible under the circumstances.

Over the years I’ve chronicled my attempts to find a space within an LGBTQ identity and my increasing frustrations with the effort. During that period I became increasingly aware that I was stale dated. The trans man I know myself to be is not welcome by today’s trans community. Too old. Too old school. The essays and work I was creating fell on uncomfortably deafened ears when I shared them with people I had assumed were my peers. Not so when I reached beyond the LGBTQ world, but my fear of being either censored or misinterpreted has impacted my freedom to write. It’s like being closeted on the outside. I have, over time, shed all manner of identification with a space where I only nominally belong.

So, over the past few years, my literary ambitions have withered. My critical energies have, under the weight of intense editing responsibilities, all but disappeared. A medication change last summer affected my physical ability to read, a situation which is now slowly recovering. And although this blog has, in recent years, expanded my world and led to wonderful travel opportunities, the pandemic has taken its toll on my hopes for the future.

Now, having run myself into the ground on this, the beginning of the eighth year of roughghosts, there is probably nothing better to do than to start afresh. Find out, once again, where this blog might take me. Coincidentally, this is also the beginning of Pride Month. Something that no longer fills me with guilt and anxiety. It simply is.

So, going forward, I will set no goals, make no promises, and simply see where the next year takes me. Thank you to everyone who has kept me company thus far.

* All the images taken today on the Douglas Fir Trail, my favourite space.