Few people go through the all-obliterating pain of childbirth and retain enough presence of mind—or even the desire—to portray the experience. But that’s exactly what Belgian writer Anneleen Van Offel sets out to do in this excerpt from her novel The Voice of Sulina. Through prose that ripples, churns, and overflows, the reader is plunged into the narrator’s mind, which leaps wildly between the hospital room, Greek myths, her increasing pain, and the feeling of the nascent life inside her. Van Offel’s entrancing stream-of-consciousness style mirrors the fluidity and chaos of labor, dissolving the distinction between the female body and bodies of water. Fiona Graham‘s electrifying translation of the original Dutch adeptly captures the deepest transformation a person can undergo: a “primal dance of compression and resistance.”
Body of Water
Thinking back to that time, the walls are white, but of course they’re not white, they’re covered in grainy, pale yellow wallpaper, and on them are devices with wires poking out, papers full of procedures and guidelines and a poster showing various labour positions, and there’s an old armchair, and a tile hanging loose from the dropped ceiling, yet when I think of the room, it’s a white room, and it’s empty. Leon and I are standing in the middle of a plain, there’s no vegetation, and it’s silent.
Utterly silent. For hours on end.
We sit on the bed and walk around a bit, read through all the procedures and guidelines, and from time to time someone comes in to ask if anything’s happening yet, but nothing’s happening, I took the tablets two hours ago with plenty of water, the tablets that will set off the labour pains – it’s better to call them waves, said the midwife on the course we took, they’ll hurt less then. I’m not far gone enough, I think, we’re not ready, and the course didn’t tell us anything about this, even though we studied and practised diligently, on an exercise ball and a yoga mat, and went through the various options, on five consecutive Saturday mornings. Naturally I highlighted passages in the course book and made notes and comments in the margins, because that’s the way I am, and now we’re running through the scenario from beginning to baby. But nothing’s happening.
A few hours ago I found out that my body is poisoning itself. The gynaecologist rang with the results of my blood test; my liver’s failing and there’s protein in my urine, the HELLP syndrome, she said; you don’t want to hear your doctor utter a name like that, but it’s not a disaster, she added, your pregnancy is far enough advanced. It’s best to give birth as soon as possible.
This has to do with Leon’s antigens, as I understand it, it’s an auto-immune reaction to his presence in my body. The blood vessels feeding into the placenta are constricted and my body has to pump more blood round, raising the pressure, like water behind a dam, while my own organs are drying out and slackening, meekly making a maternal sacrifice.
For several days now, a band beneath my breasts has been gradually tightening, a phantom corset, and there’s a tingling in my fingers that I try to squeeze out, clenching my fists until my skin whitens with subcutaneous ink. Now, of all times, the baby is still, as if there were no tablets on their way to drag her by the scruff of her neck out of the bubbling primeval swamp.
But it’s inescapable.
The pain attacks from the rear, so I don’t see it coming. It begins as a whining, drawn-out shriek from somewhere behind my kidneys, the screech of a fingernail, then it’s gone again. I don’t register it at first, I’m still absorbed by the plain, the view, I look for Leon but he’s some way off, it’s only on the second shriek that I realise there was a first one, muted and drawn-out like my blood announcing its monthly arrival, and then comes a third, but it’s so gradual, so insidious that I press the red alarm button and, in anticipation—as if I’ll be able to divide the pain into familiar, controllable pain and a pain exceeding anything I can imagine for now—I ask for a Dafalgan.
Which I don’t get, of course; what I get instead is the diagnosis that things are moving too slowly, so suddenly there’s a tube coming out of my hand, attached to a drip, and I’ve got a pole on wheels, that’s fine, I say, I consent because things are moving too slowly, so I understand, we’ve been in this room for hours already and I’m being poisoned by myself, so there’s a tube coming out of my arm, and synthetic oxytocin flowing through the tube and the cannula into my veins. A grey support belt, horribly itchy, is wound around my belly, linked up to a machine monitoring the baby’s heartbeat, printing it onto fax paper divided up into millimetres, a seismographic measurement, tremors beneath the earth’s crust, the needle jerks back and forth, my body now extends to the machine, I’m giving birth to paper. Itch, itch, I want to tear the belt from my belly and scratch, rip my skin open with my nails, if necessary so deeply that I can extract the baby myself through one of my new, silvery striae, just a moment, says the midwife, monitoring the measurements, we don’t have enough of it yet.
The oxytocin comes from above my head, a cloud emptying rain into my hands, and my fingers are tingling and everything’s itching, let it progress; Leto is forbidden to give birth, she is pregnant by Zeus and therefore cursed by Hera, who is pursuing her with Python, a serpent born of the ooze left by a deluge; there’s not a single wild, fragrant, forested land reckless enough to grant her refuge, so she wanders about in despair, forbidden to give birth until she’s found a spot where she can bring her child into the world. All’s quiet, but the midwife says it’s bound to start soon, to start in earnest, and
here comes the wave, surging forth again from the rear of my spine through my pelvis into my belly; I want to rise from the bed and they let me, and I jack-knife over my swollen belly, which is still an obstacle for the time being; the baby churns in a maelstrom, her heart rate is high, it’s high tide, high time to get her out.
And no matter where Leto goes, she faces the menace of Python looming up from behind a back, a wall, a tree; sometimes she sees her own shadow with its heavy, bulging belly begin to undulate, to sway like a serpent; she turns swiftly aside, tired to death, unable to halt for an instant without hearing the hiss of a forked tongue, she senses his presence before she spots him; and there’s no land that will open its arms to her; driven and despairing, she trudges on through meadows and along country roads, she even stands imploring at the shoreline, but the froth-jawed ocean too casts its curse before her feet.
Only the bleak island of Delos allows Leto to give birth, between the shifting sands and the rocks where no blade of grass can grow, and she brings Artemis into the world, a daughter. Weeping in relief, she suckles her child with stones cutting into her back, then senses another presence within her body, a fiery, seething monster at bay between her organs, a scorching heat: is this a flaming fist of fury at the injustice done her? Despairing, she surveys the barren expanse of sand around her; her infant daughter has clamped herself to her breast; she’s a hunter, Leto realises instantly on looking into her appraising eyes, a ruler over life and death, and Leto bawls, Leto sings in pain
we’re an hour further on
let it progress
deliver me.
Fortunately, I’m allowed to walk about, which I do, clasping the chilly pole with the drip; my trousers are gone and I’m now wearing hospital mesh pants under the dress I selected specially for the occasion; the woman who studied how to give birth didn’t want to give birth in a hospital gown, now the dress seems such a triviality, I don’t care what I have on. I’m growing impatient
drip drip
it’s still silent. Facing this room, in the opposite wing of the hospital, there are offices, people craning at screens; between us, three storeys down, I spot a moving ambulance as I look down through the window, a blue aureole that doesn’t extend as far as the maternity ward; soundless because alarms are unnecessary in this place, everyone silently sidesteps the unfortunates here.
Each following wave is a slow-burning fuse, the fire is coming closer, there it is, the dragon blasts its breath into my face, lies down again, Leon presses my back as if he could push the wave forward, there’s a midwife in the room, we’ll measure you, she says
back onto the bed, feet in the stirrups
four centimetres
dilation, the cervix is opening but too slowly
so the dosage goes up.
For nine days and nine nights, Leto gives birth to her fury, and it is Artemis who helps her find positions that bring relief, who fetches water from the sea to cool her brow, who leans on her belly with her full weight and, finally, between the bloodied legs of her exhausted mother, takes hold of her brother’s head, cupping her hand under his neck and carefully pulling his body out of hers; she’s a hunter but she’s also a midwife, and Apollo is born in a nimbus of light, clenching his fists, resolved to slay the monster that pursued his mother.
I want a bath, they fetch a trainee to fill one; kneeling, she tests the water to see if it’s warm enough; I stand naked beside her and my mother feels whether the water’s warm enough; now I’m being scrubbed by a vigorous hand that knows my body as well as I do, as it’s her body, and what a sense of wellbeing there is as the water envelops me; I immerse myself, exhaling slowly, blowing bubbles on the surface
a jab in my back, my teeth pierce the delicate skin of my lower lip, I taste blood, it trickles down my chin, or is it water from the bath; I want to turn round but forget that I’m linked up to the drip, I beat the surface of the water
the wave surges in, and again before subsiding, and now there’s another coming
this is something I’d not expected, pain in my belly I could breathe away, but not this
this is synthetic, this comes from outside, this was developed in a laboratory this
this is toxic
I can’t breathe
Leon is counting, what’s he counting, it’s too fast to count
someone enters the room
behind her back I see they’ve switched on the lights of a plastic Christmas tree in the corridor, yellow blue green flickering in a dripping meshwork of fake snow someone yells she pulls the concertina shut behind her, this is a storm of birth pangs, that’s the judgment proclaimed, coming from my back, the midwife shakes her head as if to erase it
within the tapering space of my pouch bones are turning, joints starting to shift, a bony shuddering, soft tissues giving way, fibrous webbing yielding to downward pressure, muscles arching forward, the cervix opens
and I want to thrust my feet into the muddy river-bed and wade through the slimy waterweed to the bank, catch my breath on the pebbly beach, I want to sleep, I want out
out of this primal dance of compression and resistance; I’m cloaked in a towel, rubbed dry, my mother eyes my body, says this is the last time; our bodies close off from one another
the midwife is holding out a hospital gown, a last stubborn spark ignites somewhere—all right then, or shall I take control—I point to the dress but she refuses
we have to be able to tear it open
there’s the anaesthetist with an impressive medical trolley and someone presses down on my shoulders so that I remain sitting while the injection goes into my back, I clench my teeth don’t collapse now
on the other side of the room Leon is sitting in the armchair behind a pattern of branching nerves, black patches of acute pain I drift away from him I want out
they help me onto the bed, put a cover over me, and I see the arching entrance to the cave, a slime-secreting fold, I go inside
and fall, in the throes of labour, into a dreamless sleep.
It is an initiation. Thinking back so that I can describe it, the walls of the room are white, but of course they’re not white, though my face is, deathly pale, I’m lying on the bed, my head has slipped to one side, my eyelids are almost translucent, blue-veined. I hang beside her face and shape her from the clay of language, her mouth half-open, the grey under her eyes, clotted blood on her lip
give her a name—I.
Leon has started a game of chess.
We wait.
Can she perhaps hear my voice, formless, a long, drawn-out sound? Can she hear the funeral song the Romanian storyteller sung for her just before reaching the river delta, is she already at the source in that song, where you meet an old woman, pen in one hand, paper in the other … The song in which the living show the dead the way in the underworld: take the path to the right, to the water, where a female judge stands with a pen in one hand and a paper in the other … A voice that’s so familiar and yet alien, out of reach, can she hear the song in which the Black Sea forms a border between this world and the other, and it’s calm, so unsettlingly calm, the sea, destructive and pitiless, but now so calm, unsettling … Can she hear the song about a deer wading across a river in full spate with a swing slung between his antlers, carrying a girl who warns him about her brothers, the hunters; if they catch him, his flesh will be her wedding feast, his bones the pillars of her house, his pelt her roof, and they will quaff wine from his hooves …
I lay my hand along the edge of her jaw, feel her bone beneath my fingers, the dip in the line of her throat, her head, it’s as if she were sleeping … And I sing the song for her, the song that only we know because it’s haunted us our whole lives, I sing it to reassure her, but I don’t know if she can hear me, has she abandoned the constricting armour of language, has the dark pool closed about her throat, is she gradually sinking until only a tiny ring remains visible above her head, then nothing more …
I sing, brush her hair aside so I can get closer to her ear, so that she knows she’s not alone, and I sing our song, lull her with my voice to shield her from what lurks in the darkness, her darkness, which haunts her, curses her, the fear that’s festered all her life, that runs through her, the fear she was born with: the sense that deep deep deep inside she’s alone, that there are fissures in the web enfolding her, it’s only a question of time until it tears, just as an abrupt movement can make a star in glass branch out, one false word and it shatters—the primal fear of being alone in the steppe with wolves circling about you, you can sense but not see them, you’re cut off, and the tear line is your whole body, it chafes, you’re naked, you can’t run away from something that comes from within you, the herd of wildebeest that thunder through your chest whenever you can’t understand something that others seem to grasp, the backs turning on you, the clan in which you’ll always be an outsider, you blink and they’re gone, the door slams shut behind you, you don’t know where to go, you try to assume a primal position, chin on chest, legs drawn up, your back like a shield against the chilly night air, to protect your soft belly, the spot where the opening is, oh to be a worm again, to disappear, I want to go home …
I sing, and at the same time I stroke her cheeks and cheekbones and forehead, and my hand slides over the hospital gown, over her breasts and down to her belly, where I sense movement, and I sing to cocoon her, to keep her company, to show her the way.
I have no body, I consist of words alone, I’ve been here for as long as she’s existed, I, her language, her mother tongue, so close that I disappear within her, I sing, I make her move, I breathe life into her, so close to her, within her …
Leon is standing with his back to the room, gazing at the offices opposite, the ambulances beneath him: he turns round when the concertina door is pulled open again. It’s midday now, the midwife walks in, a different one on a new shift. Introducing herself quickly, she’s about to turn to the sleeping woman on the bed, but Leon has a question: can they see us?
At first the midwife doesn’t understand what he means, then she notices he’s still standing at the window; placing her hands on the cold windowsill, she looks out at the fingers rattling over keyboards, the whiteboards, the people pacing about indoors and outside, the phones, the diaries, and she says no, this is one-way glass, we can see them but they can’t see us. At most, we’re just reflections of sunlight.
She walks over to the bed.
You’re ready now. Fully dilated.
And then, closer to me: it looks as if your baby will be here soon. Emerging from the narcotic void into which time has dispersed, I pull myself up laboriously by the edge where Leon and the midwife are standing, together with my gynaecologist now, she laughs, parasitic suckers straggle around my ankles, it’s so tempting to let go and tune out, but it seems my legs are already braced in a corner of the bed, the stirrups folded to the side, and Leon grasps my hand and whispers something into my ear that I don’t understand, whereupon the void closes behind me, two ink-black plateaus sliding seamlessly together. It’s odd, my hand doesn’t feel like my hand, even though I’m only anaesthetised up to my waist, and I can’t really get the room into focus either, something about its proportions has changed, I’m both here and behind the ribbed wallpaper, out on the plain, windless, dazzling. Leon, the midwife and the gynaecologist seem to be moving more slowly, the weighing scales behind the gynaecologist’s back are toy scales, the whole room is a miniature room, scaled down, is this what the eye of a storm feels like, a zero point, a low-pressure area, and all around me a flood wall, rain, I know how dangerous the eye of a storm is because you’re just emerging from your shelter, you bend down to pick up the debris in your garden and you fail to see a shaking wall of destruction looming behind you.
Intestines sprout from my fingers and veins, intestines suspended from a transparent, leaking stomach slung from a hook on the pole between me and Leon, and there are wires snaking up to the monitor from under the fuzzy belt that’s wrapped around me again, there’s a clip on my finger, also connected to a long wire, a tentacular cluster of yellow, green, red tubes, pipes and wires, I bleep and buzz and sigh. There’s a rising downward pressure in my belly, up and down, the midwife checks the monitoring device and confirms, she counts down and now I’m meant to hold my breath, all right, I wedge my chin on my chest, put my hands on my knees, pull them up and push until I can push no more, gasp for breath, and again, and another time, and then the pressure subsides, it’s fine, says the midwife, we’ll wait for the next one.
In between the rise and fall in pressure, the gynaecologist chats with Leon, the midwife keeps one hand on my belly and the other on the swivel table supporting the monitor, and I’m floating with the motion of the waves, below the surface, at one with the gentle movement, when the midwife says it’s time I hold my breath and sink, I push down with all the strength I have in me, once, twice, a third time, then rest. I close my eyes, their voices are around me, now and then Leon’s fingers riffle my hair, it doesn’t feel like mine, it’s as if something else has taken charge of my body. Another woman enters the room, someone shakes me by the shoulder, another trainee, yes she can watch, and then the pressure rises again, and yes, says the midwife, one, two, three and rest
and every minute adds years to my age and it won’t come out of me, the midwife says I can leave one out, that’s a mercy, and then the pressure rises and falls again, and you’ve got to go with the next one, she says, the baby’s heart rate is rising, I’m in the throes of something unstoppable, yes, says the midwife, again, I push once, twice, three times, a dizzying depth, rise spluttering to the surface
they palpate and conclude that the baby’s not in the right position yet, she still needs to turn her face towards my back so she can emerge from under my pubic bone, then through the birth canal; the midwife bends over my belly, clenches her teeth and presses, still more pressure, and suddenly the baby turns, her back, her bottom, her legs, a seaquake, a serpent slithers away through the sand, what’s the thing inside my body that must be expelled, they’re laughing, the chorus ranged about my splayed legs, this is something they’ve never seen before at any point in their careers, and the pressure rises again, this is the moment, I push and push, deeper and farther than I have so far, but not a millimetre will the baby budge, there’s not a millimetre’s progress, with every millimetre downward she slithers up again just a breath later, up through my cervix, up through my belly, up to my throat, she squeezes my voice till it pipes through my gorge, a shred of fog, mist gliding between my lips and over my chest, I pant
and one two three under, up through the surface gasping for breath
and under again
an invisible tremor, the monitor beeps
push, push, push, out of me
it’s going too slowly, I see the gynaecologist signal to the midwife that the dosage can be increased, the dosage of what, a fat, bloated beast between my thighs, downward, out, out of me
is it alright to make an incision, the gynaecologist asks, you’re getting exhausted, yes, take those scissors, pierce my flesh, tear me open, get the beast
again, one two three
and under
and Apollo storms up Mount Parnassus where Python lies satiated at the feet of his mother Gaia, the earth goddess looks up in astonishment as he rushes into her oracular sanctuary, she rises from her tripod but it’s too late, a bellowing Apollo thrusts his dagger into the serpent’s succulent flesh, and again, the creature rears up, a flaming, shrieking tongue, but then subsides. Her female guardians try to shield the Omphalos, at least, the sacred vase-shaped stone that forms the mid-point of the oracle and which they call the navel of the world, but they cannot stop the man taking possession of the temple and driving out the goddess, through the sweet-smelling vapours that billow from the crevice in the rock towards the oracle, back to the place she came from, followed by her protectresses. As Apollo complacently surveys the abandoned shrine, he’s enveloped by the disjointed sounds of women mourning, which he doesn’t understand; he shrugs, sets the tripod straight and ensconces himself
and in the meantime his sister swims up towards the surface of the water, gasps for breath and brushes the water from her eyes. Her feet grope for support on the muddy river bottom, she keeps her eyes on her reflection in the river as she wades towards the bank, a rippling female figure that appears to look back at her from the depths, a figure as long as the river itself, wavering, its hair always loose, a figure that is hers. But when she feels the riverbed beneath her feet and emerges from from the water, she sees the young Actaeon between the creeping pines and the crackling underbrush, his eyes greedy, avid, an invasion
the naked Artemis is not prey, the naked Artemis is the hunter, she forbids Actaeon to speak of what he has seen and he opens his mouth—mockingly, of course—and before he can utter a sound he sees his tongue spill long and purple over his lower lip, his feet split into hooves, an overwhelming pressure builds in his temples, the weight of a pair of antlers, too heavy to bear, he wants to shout but bellows like a stag in rut, which sets off his own hunting dogs, who pull their noses out of the damp forest floor, prick up their ears and pounce on him, opening their foul jaws, ravening
Leon’s gone, he had to fetch something, where’s Leon, there’s fear in the eyes of the gynaecologist, and the midwife, and the trainee, there’s a commotion, no one has their hands free, you’re losing a lot of blood, Leon’s holding something, a rubber intestine with a kind of suction cup, and then I see it gush forth, cloths are fetched, a breached dike between my thighs, a blood-red widening pulsing pool at my feet a river of blood
push!
I yell, I push with all my might, I too am floating in the river of blood, out, out
out, out, out of me, I scream, I shatter, ripped apart an endless tearing of flesh a disintegration a shriek I shriek
is this me
something is placed on my chest, I’m out of it, out, out of me, I speak to the warm slippery throbbing clump of blood
I’m nothing but voice now
and I’m falling and falling
Translated from the Dutch by Fiona Graham
Anneleen Van Offel is an author who bases her work on research, a journey or an encounter. Her style is investigative and innovative, and the way she examines her subjects shows a highly empathetic and meticulous approach. Her novel Hier is alles veilig (All is Safe Here) has been described as a beautifully written debut about loss and stepmotherhood. De stem van Sulina (The Voice of Sulina), from which this excerpt was taken, is her second novel. Anneleen studied vocal arts at the Antwerp Royal Conservatory. She has written columns for a Flemish newspaper, and short stories and poetry for several literary journals. She has worked as both programmer and moderator at a variety of literary events.
Fiona Graham has worked as a linguist at the Dutch Foreign Office, the European Parliament and the European Commission. Her published translations include Movement: How to Take Back Our Streets and Transform Our Lives by Thalia Verkade and Marco te Brömmelstroet (from Dutch, Scribe, 2022) and The Rocks Will Echo Our Sorrow: the forced displacement of the Northern Sámi by Elin Anna Labba (from Swedish, University of Minnesota Press, 2024). Fiona holds a BA Joint Honours (First Class) in German and French from Oxford University and an MA in General Linguistics from Reading University.
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