Posts filed under 'gender politics'

When Shadows Evade Shadows: Wen-chi Li on Ko-hua Chen and Taiwan’s Tongzhi Literature

July 17, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

Queer Taiwanese literature has inherited the motives of escape and exile from its pioneer writers.

Historicising tongzhi wenxue, or gay literature, in Queer Taiwanese Literature (2021), Howard Chiang finds the origins of this political and literary movement in the “changing sexual configurations of the post-WWII era and the militancy and vibrancy of tongzhi 同志 activism in the 1990s.” Since its origins, the writers and texts of this subgenre have been prolific and varied, from avant-garde politico-cultural magazines such as Daoyu bianyuan (Isle Margin) to Qiu Miaojin’s Notes of a Crocodile, Tsao Li-chuan’s The Maiden’s Dance, and Chu Tien-wen’s Notes of a Desolate Man. But what can be considered as the movement’s foundational text is Decapitated Poetry by Ko-hua Chen, a writer, visual artist, and critic who came out of the closet in that historical decade, making him Taiwan’s first openly gay—or tongzhi—writer. With more than thirty books and a body of work that span from poetry, film criticism, novels, paintings, scripts, photographs, and song lyrics, he merges in writing the thematics of Buddhist philosophical thought, science fiction, and porous queer masculinities. Chen, like his tongzhi writer-contemporaries, is living proof of a literature that has been tested by time, fortified by the activism of its believers, and has withstood the police brutality of the state and the skewed conservatism of religious groups. Decapitated Poetry came out in its Chinese original in 1995, and was published last April by Seagull Books in English translation by Colin Bramwell and Taiwanese anthologist, poet, and scholar Wen-chi Li.

In this interview, I asked Wen-chi about the history of tongzhi literature, the diverse Sino-specific gendered identities of Taiwan, the dynamics of co-translating Chen’s poetry collection, and the post-Sinophone/Japanophone futures of contemporary Taiwanese literature.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): In the introduction to Decapitated Poetry, you and co-translator Colin Bramwell “felt that it was important to give a sense of the broadness of Chen’s output as a writer,” referring to the poet’s transcending beyond the corporeal-cerebral binary. Can you speak further about your experience in co-translating the aesthetic and thematic expanse of Chen’s oeuvre? How was the selection process of the poems in this collection? 

Wen-chi Li (WCL): When we submitted a translation sample to Seagull Books, we originally chose Chen’s work “Notes on a Planet,” which was composed from 1978 to 1980. One of the editors, Bishan Samaddar, replied to us that he was searching for “explicit poetry” for the Pride List series, and this queer sci-fi might be too lyrical and spiritual. I said to Colin that we could then instead directly focus on the works in Decapitated Poetry. The text was a milestone in queer Taiwanese literature, the first to intentionally expose homosexual lewdness and muscle love in Sinophone communities. We thought its English collection should provide a broad view of Chen’s eroticism, so later works like “Body Poems” were also included in the compilation—but we still could not forget the glamour of “Notes on a Planet,” which intertwines topics of gay exploration and posthumanism in the form of lyrical epic (something so unique in world literature). Colin also thought that putting “Notes on a Planet” in the last part of the English collection created an upward scale from concupiscence to otherworldliness, from corporeality to spirituality. The English collection harmoniously combines such opposite elements.   READ MORE…

A Place for Malice in Literature: On Izumi Suzuki’s Hit Parade of Tears

April 3, 2023  |  in Reviews  |  by Bella Creel

Women lead the stories in Hit Parade of Tears—with their desires, their passions, and their fears. . .

Hit Parade of Tears by Izumi Suzuki, translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, and Helen O’Horan, Verso, 2023

In the moody, deliriously humorous worlds of Hit Parade of Tears, Izumi Suzuki’s protagonists embody searing emotions, from anguish to apathy, all felt at an apex that seems like a breaking point. Sharp and achingly present, these eleven short stories are transposed by writers Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, and Helen O’Horan, and present emotional and often unsettling glimpses into worlds both familiar and fantastical. Though each story stands on its own, there are elements that draw them together: the stream of Japanese rock from the 1960s and 70s playing in the background, a woman searching for her younger brother, a blurry line between mental illness and otherworldly abilities, and perhaps most consistently, a spotlight on some of the ugliest aspects of human nature—pettiness, cynicism, self-obsession, vitriol. We find these traits in her characters across the board, and those who veer from this standard are noted for their irregularity. Whether it’s a spunky teenage girl or an ungrateful husband, the dialogue in translation is natural and engaging, and each character reads with a distinct voice; descriptions are elevated by clever word choice, from a “galumphing figure” to “laparotomized remains,” and each paragraph is a newly vivid scene.

While the women of Hit Parade of Tears occupy the traditional feminine roles of wives, mothers, and sexual objects, they are not held to stereotypical ideals of femininity when it comes to their emotions and motivations, which makes this a thought-provoking and relevant read for feminists interested in non-Western perspectives. Women lead the stories in Hit Parade of Tears—with their desires, their passions, and their fears—and the men often read like props to the women’s narratives, whether that’s a self-obsessed husband, an ex-lover, a wannabe sugar daddy, a sacrifice, or a younger brother. Men’s bodies are constantly on display and under scrutiny—balding, thin, hot, or literally cut open from the stomach and hung like an ornament in a medical facility—and they rarely have any part in moving the plot forward.

The men in the protagonists’ lives belittle them and take them for granted, but the stories paint them in all their egoistic ways. In the eponymous “Hit Parade of Tears,” we spend the majority of the story listening to the thoughts of a man born over 150 years prior, who hit his prime in the 1960s and 70s. He talks down on his wife and her job archiving that era: “She’s jealous of me, he thought. She’s seething because she couldn’t take part in my youth like someone from the same generation could.” Come to find out, she’s been alive just as long as he has—they even dated briefly a hundred years ago, but he, solipsistic and self-absorbed, forgot, and he can’t imagine her experiences living up to his. Suzuki’s fiction is explicit in its critique of men’s treatment of women—hypocritical, predatory, and strikingly uncool, Suzuki’s men believe they have the upper hand in their relationships. Behind this belief, Suzuki’s women pull the strings, using the hands they’ve been dealt (as housewives, as sexy schoolgirls, as the repressed desires of a depressed woman) to their benefit. READ MORE…

Announcing Our October Book Club Selection: The Italian by Shukri Mabkhout

November 1, 2021  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Rachel Stanyon

The novel lends itself to debates on more universal themes such as power, corruption, the idealism of youth, gender equality, and abuse.

In his seminal work on colonialism and subjugation, The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon asks: “how do we get from the atmosphere of violence to setting violence in motion?” Shukri Mabkhout liberates this idea into story gracefully in his debut novel, The Italian. Delineating the fermenting revolutions in late twentieth century Tunisia through the scope of one young man, Mabkhout paints a vivid reproduction of the oppressive conflicts between nationalism and religion, love and lust, ideology and action. We are proud to present this vivid text, and its detailed contours of individual life in the wider contexts of country, as our Book Club selection for the month of October.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

The Italian by Shukri Mabkhout, translated from the Arabic by Miled Faiza and Karen McNeil, Europa Editions, 2021

Shukri Mabkhout’s The Italian, winner of the 2015 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, was first published in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. Perhaps with some suggestion of history repeating itself, it is set during another period of political upheaval in Tunisia—the 1980s and 1990s, which saw a ‘bloodless coup’ led by Ben Ali, the leader who was to be deposed in 2011. Intricate and detailed, heavy with politics, philosophy, food, and sex, the novel is an insight into Tunisian history and society, human relationships, and the often politically motivated and self-interested inner workings of institutional power.

The novel opens with its own violent outbreak and fallen patriarch. At his father’s funeral, the protagonist, Abdel Nasser—nicknamed el-Talyani (the titular Italian) for his Mediterranean good looks—attacks the local imam. The family and wider community are shocked and shamed, but also perplexed; as the narrator, one of el-Talyani’s childhood friends, tells the reader, grief over his father’s death “didn’t fully explain it.” Abdel Nasser’s family members offer various explanations—the “corrupt books” he read as a child, his university classmates, the personal circumstances of his divorce, or the “deep-rooted corruption” of his morals. While the broader community simply consider him the black sheep of the family, none of these explanations seems to satisfy the narrator. Jumping back in time, the novel thus sets out to unpack what might have motivated Abdel Nasser’s outburst, and, along the way, also details much of the political history of Tunisia during these tumultuous decades.

Abdel Nasser has a complex and somewhat distant relationship with his family, and in particular with his brother, Salah Eddine. Salah Eddine left Tunisia as a young man, and is now an “esteemed academic and international finance expert” living in Switzerland—in other words, he is the epitome of cosmopolitanism and institutional economic liberalism. When Salah Eddine leaves Tunisia, Abdel Nasser assumes the throne as the de-facto eldest son—which Mabkhout explains endows a special status and freedom within the Tunisian family. He also takes up residence in his elder brother’s room, which provides him with an intellectual awakening through books and records, and in which he also experiences a sexual awakening: he is groomed by the family’s significantly older neighbour, who—by no means coincidentally—is his brother’s ex-lover. The room eventually also becomes a political hotbed where Abdel Nasser discusses philosophy, politics, and Marxist economics with select classmates, for he is set apart from others not only by his good looks, but also his astute mind and leadership skills. He goes on to study law at university, where he acts as a leader and recruiter in an activist student organization. READ MORE…

The Queen’s Argot: The Language of Chess Around the World

January 21, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Allison Braden

Players worldwide understand the pieces . . . but our understanding . . . depends in part on what we call them.

Netflix miniseries The Queen’s Gambit illustrated the international culture of chess. As it turns out, the game’s spread around the globe is a story of translation. In this brisk and brainy rundown, Editor-at-Large Allison Braden tackles its evolution through time and space, setting up a board in which pawns can be farmers, bishops can be fools, and queens can be counselors.

In December of last year, Netflix miniseries The Queen’s Gambit smashed viewership records for a limited-run series on the site. In the show’s first month of streaming, over 62 million people around the world tuned in to the story of a young woman who overcomes several challenges in her quest to become a world chess champion in the 1960s. The series was based on Walter Tevis’s 1983 novel of the same name, and like readers before them, viewers rooted for plucky chess prodigy Beth Harmon. Her eventual triumph was, for many, a bright spot at the end of a long and difficult year.

You won’t become a grandmaster by watching the series. (In fact, one of the only aspects of the show that pro chess players took issue with was the speed of the games. In a concession to viewers, they were faster paced than matches at real tournaments.) But The Queen’s Gambit is a crash course in the culture of chess. It’s fiercely competitive, requires visual and strategic intelligence, and remains extremely male dominated (despite studies showing men aren’t inherently better at the game). Chess is also truly universal—and where there’s an international pastime, there are translators.

In the show, Harmon travels to Mexico, France, and the USSR. As her skill grows, her competitors increasingly hail from foreign countries, and as it becomes clear that the ultimate test of her ability will come in Moscow, she begins to study Russian. In the heady final scenes, commentators relay her moves in a variety of languages for listeners around the world. After The Queen’s Gambit was released, interest in chess boomed. One of the most popular ways to play is online. Chess.com boasts users from dozens of countries, and they can all play one other. Like many sports, chess transcends language; in a way, it is its own language. Players worldwide understand the pieces: the king’s hesitance, the queen’s might. The bishop, which can only move diagonally, speaks his own sideways tongue. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

January 15, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Allison Braden, Carol Khoury, and David Boyd

The latest news from Argentina, Japan, and Palestine!

This week our writers bring you exciting news from Argentina, Japan, and Palestine! In Argentina, the legalization of abortion has been celebrated and supported by many, including renowned feminist writer Nora Domínguez; in Japan, leading women writers and their translators will be in conversation for the Japan Foundation New York, whilst translator Yukiko Konosu shared her recommended new reads from Japan, including Rin Usami; and in Palestine, four great new works of Palestine literature are soon to be published in English. Read on to find out more! 

Allison Braden, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Argentina 

Two days before 2020 slid into history and memory, an anxious crowd gathered outside Argentina’s Congress in Buenos Aires. They watched the Senate debate on big screens and the summer heat dissipated as day turned into night, Tuesday turned into Wednesday. Many—though not all—of those who stood outside wore green scarves, the symbol of a yearlong movement to legalize abortion in the historically conservative country. In the small hours of Wednesday morning, after a long and suspenseful Senate session, they found out that their work had paid off: Congress legalized voluntary abortion through the fourteenth week of pregnancy.

Several of the pro-choice activists who advocated for this major legislation were writers. The day before the senators took up the bill, a collection of Argentina’s most notable writers, including Claudia Piñeiro, Florencia Abbate, Agustina Bazterrica, and Gabriela Saidon, released a statement and video expressing their support. “The green wave puts an end to hypocrisies, inequalities, injustices and replaces a long dark violence with dignity,” they wrote. “Like the deep and living heartbeat of the sea, it instills in us a pulse to continue fighting.”

Nora Domínguez was among the writers who endorsed the statement. She’s one of three directors of an ambitious project to publish the history of Argentina’s literature through a feminist lens. The first of six volumes, En la intemperie: poéticas de la fragilidad y la revuelta (In the Open: Poetics of Fragility and Revolt) was published by Eduvim late last year, but it’s chronologically the last in the series, focusing on the period between 1990 and 2019. The work features a collection of analysis and criticism from Argentina’s leading feminist thinkers—part of the project’s larger effort to give form to “certain absences, not to build a counter-canon but rather to provoke detours, scandalous stops, fissures, divisions, and contradictions” in the existing canon. In a December interview, Domínguez confirmed that Argentina has experienced a boom in recent years of new voices in the country’s literature, not just women but trans writers and young people as well. This century’s feminism is a culmination of both feminist and literary genealogies. The work to interrogate and revise a patriarchal canon and the work to advocate for laws that respect women’s autonomy go hand in hand. READ MORE…

Turkish Dude Lit Has a “Dad Rock” Moment: Barış Bıçakçı’s The Mosquito Bite Author

January 14, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by Matthew Chovanec

[A] stream of academic writing still holds up these dudes and their self-pity as emblematic of national identity.

Turkish dude lit is much like dude lit elsewhere: it deals with the trials of privileged man-boys. Unlike some of the genre’s more vilified geographic variants, though, it has yet to be carefully examined. While grateful for the chance to indulge in it freely, former Asymptote contributor Matthew Chovanec has his qualms; in particular, he argues, pinning Turkey’s Volksgeist on its male antiheroes actually does them (and their readers) a disservice. Enter The Mosquito Bite Author, in Chovanec’s own recent translation: might acclaimed writer Barış Bıçakçı’s subtle parody of the vain male figure pave the way to its survival?

I really enjoy Turkish novels about men wasting away in their comfortable, petty-bourgeois lives. I can’t get enough of them. I love following along, a vicarious flaneur, as the protagonists stroll through my favorite Istanbul streets. I’m charmed by their ability to take just the right line of surrealist poetry from the Ikinci Yeni movement and make it fit as an oracular judgment on their own personal haplessness. I even like reading about them sitting at home, staring at their bookshelves and resenting their wives. Something about them has me consuming these titles with the faithfulness of a reader of policiers or harlequin novels, and Turkey keeps producing them with almost pulp-like regularity. Every decade, it seems, brings its own antihero, yawning at modernist art exhibits, slinking away from military coups, scorning the superficiality that comes with economic liberalization, or trying out the latest fashions in postmodern soliloquy.

While I myself am a voracious reader of highly literate accounts of sociopathy, I appreciate that they aren’t for everyone. As an American, I can also admit that I’ve basically taken a circuitous linguistic route to enjoying works that would face derision back home, reveling as I am in another country’s “Dude Lit.” Laura Fraser describes the genre as one whose “books generally propel a confused, often drug-addled or alcoholic, narcissistic, philandering male protagonist to, well, not self-discovery, but some semblance of adult behavior.” Her description could just as easily apply to the protagonists of Turkish novels like Yusuf Atılgan’s Aylak Adam, Oğuz Atay’s Tutunamayanlar, Vedat Türkali’s Bir Gün Tek Basına, or Ayhan Gecgin’s Gençlik Düşü; they, in turn, make frequent reference to the Slacker International, inhabiting the same fictional universe as Seymour Glass or John Shade. READ MORE…

F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry (and the verse as an explosion, the book as an island)

January 7, 2021  |  in Essays  |  by José García Escobar

We wanted gender politics to enter literature as if it was its native part, as an irreplaceable part of reality.

The new poetry anthology F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry is the second work published in isolarii, as series of “island books,” released every two months by subscription. Edited by Galina Rymbu, Eugene Ostashevsky, and Ainsley Morse (with forewords by Eileen Myles and Amia Srinivasan), the groundbreaking collection features the work of twelve feminist Russian women and members of F pis’mo. As well as co-editing this anthology, Galina Rymbu is a famed Russian poet, whose own work was published by Asymptote in 2016 and whose poems are included in F Letter. Rymbu formed the F pis’mo poetry collective with other feminist and LGBTQ poets in 2017 in order to use language as a form of political protest. F pis’mo‘s work has since inspired a new generation of Russian poets to challenge patriarchal society by giving voice to their own personal experience through poetry. In this essay, Asymptote‘s editor-at-large for Central America, José García Escobar, speaks with Galina Rymbu as well as other F Letter poets, translators, and editors to discuss the collective’s work.

Saint Petersburg. January 2, 2017. Poetess Galina Rymbu was in her house, waiting for a knock on her door. Hopefully several. Galina had sent out an invitation to everyone interested in talking about feminism in literature.

“We thought that only a few people would come,” she writes, from her house in Lviv, Ukraine, where she has lived since 2018.

In the end, more than forty people crammed inside Galina’s tiny kitchen.

“Some were standing, some were sitting on the floor.”

Not only poets and writers went. Activists, artists, and theatergoers were there as well. Galina says that there were no feminist literary communities in Russia at the time. It is a country where the work of heterosexual, cisgender male authors sits, untouched, at the forefront, and where women and LGBTQ authors are often ignored. Galina describes Russia’s literary community as conservative and patriarchal.

“During that first meeting, we said that we didn’t want to be locked in our small circle of ‘feminist literature,’” she says. “We wanted to change literature to make it more gender-sensitive.”

In Russia, according to Galina, only artists working for the state receive financial support. They work under a set of rules, naturally. Don’t write about the LGBTQ community, don’t write about the occupation of Crimea and Donbas, cooperate with Putin’s regime, for example. Poets, writers, musicians, and film and theatre directors who abide by these rules have access to public platforms, large publishing houses, and galleries. These spaces must also follow the rules. Galina says that censorship is everywhere—in the media, television, literary, and film festivals—and compares it to Kafka’s Der Process. Those outside the cultural circuit of Russia’s state, like Galina, resort to independent publishing, where there’s no censorship, but also no visibility—much like Russian writers did before 1991 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The existence of these artists is a political act. Their work is often, and by definition, dissident.

“It was impossible for us to remain feminist poets and express our views only in the space of political activism,” Galina says. “We wanted gender politics to enter literature as if it was its native part, as an irreplaceable part of reality.”

And thus, F pis’mo was born. READ MORE…

The Queer Lives of Arabic Literature

October 7, 2020  |  in Essays  |  by MK Harb

[T]he question of translating the “Arabic queer” . . . looms large . . . [H]owever, the canon does not lack for contemporary contenders.

The role that fiction plays in both relating and shaping our reality is pivotal, and this power that lies in representation is oftentimes an essential source of strength for individuals who persist under oppression and negation. For writers of queer texts in the contemporary Arab world, the complex paradigm of politics, history, storytelling, and interiority has culminated in an explosive multiplicity of voices and experiences, coming together in revolutionary expression. In this essay, MK Harb, Asymptote’s Editor-at-Large for Lebanon, focuses in on three novels which engage their queer characters and environments in surprising and enlightening narratives, denying easy categorization to tell the poetry of the personal.

Oftentimes, when discussing the subject of queerness in contemporary Arabic literature, the idea of time travel arises in tandem. I say this only half sarcastically: it is not strange for a piece of criticism on a twenty-first-century Arabic novel to have an introduction valorizing the homoerotic poetry of Abu Nuwas, an Arabo-Persian poet from the ninth century. To put this in literary perspective, imagine an article on Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous beginning with an introduction discussing a queer text from the European Middle Ages. This bemusing conundrum is a product of orientalist academic training, often popularized by the faculties of Middle Eastern Studies departments across Western universities: a standard that singles out race in using the past to justify the present, imagining an uninterrupted continuum of the “Arab” experience irrelevant of space and time.

This obsession with the queer past of the Middle Eastern archive rarely comes from an investigation into the transgressive capabilities of past writings; rather, a strong exoticism governs this curiosity, and it often falls into the trappings of fetishizing the body and the experience of male love. Now, the subject of queerness in contemporary Arabic literature is itself fraught; many countries across the Middle East and North Africa engage in heavy censorship of books, particularly ones with characters that defy the hegemony of national and patriarchal orders. The other dilemma is that of language—in the past years, many queer Arabic characters came to us through writings in English or French. Whether it is Saleem Haddad’s Guapa or Abdellah Taïa’s An Arab Melancholia, the question of translating the “Arabic queer” and its various experiences looms large. Regardless of such constraints, however, the canon does not lack for contemporary contenders, which shed some much-needed light on the developments in queer livelihoods and philosophies. In this article, we will go on an elaborately queer journey through the works of Samar Yazbek in Cinnamon, Hoda Barakat in The Stone of Laughter, and Muhammad Abdel Nabi in In the Spider’s Room. What binds the protagonists of these novels together is not simply their queerness, but also their strong interiority and internal monologues, through which they shatter and construct social orders. READ MORE…

WIT Month: An Interview with Ariana Harwicz

August 27, 2020  |  in Interviews  |  by Josefina Massot

I try not to be labeled as a feminist writer because I don’t want to be pigeonholed.

It seems fitting to crown our triple Women in Translation feature with something of a triple threat. On the one hand, Argentine Ariana Harwicz’s work has been published in fifteen languages, most notably English: her debut novel Die, My Love (translated by Carolina Orloff and Asymptote’s own Editor-at-Large Sarah Moses) was a 2018 International Booker and 2020 BTBA nominee. And yet, despite a hailed career in writing, Harwicz feels almost closer to translation—a love partly fueled by her experience as a longtime expat in France. Her latest book deals with exactly that: in the short and deliciously sweet Desertar (forthcoming in Spanish from Mardulce), she and French-Argentine translator Mikaël Gómez Guthart ponder the twists and turns of the craft.

But Harwicz isn’t just a woman in (and in love with) translation; adding to her appeal here is that, much to her chagrin, her work has been routinely couched in terms of her womanhood. In this interview with Blog Editor Josefina Massot, she talks about how even well-intentioned feminism can be used for literary profit, what it’s like to give voice to a man, and why she views her translators as lovers. Dealing no cheap punches or punchlines pour la galerie, Harwicz isn’t afraid to ruffle some feathers—and that is, in part, what makes her such a welcome voice in the context of WIT: thoughtful criticism is arguably the highest form of respect.

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Josefina Massot (JM): In Desertar, you claim books are no longer a linguistic fact but a “thing,” a product of the publishing market—which, in turn, often bows to ideological trends. One of these trends is a somewhat bastardized feminism—a particular strand of feminist discourse that you’ve also questioned. I can’t help but ask, then, at the risk of stirring up controversy: how do you feel about Women in Translation Month to begin with? No one doubts the good intentions of many of its advocates (Asymptote among them), but it’s worth asking whether it might not be exploited by others.

Ariana Harwicz (AH): It’s a very complex issue, and any attempt to annul, minimize, reduce, or stifle that complexity leads to a dangerous trap. If I told you that I straight-out condemned this celebration, this month devoted to women in English translation, I’d be sabotaging a literary movement that I, too, celebrate: at the end of the day, I’m one of these women, and being translated into English has opened many doors to other languages, cultures, and translations (pretty much all of them, in fact, except for Hebrew); there’s nothing more interesting to me than infiltrating these new environments. Some of my opinions are pretty different from those of many female colleagues, or just people I run into in general, but in order to be heard, read, or access the ongoing literary and political conversation, I must first be translated. If I get wrapped up in my own thoughts or turn to ostracism, I’ll only lose.

So, do I support the increased visibility of female literary discourse and poetics through initiatives like WIT? Absolutely. Do I support the application of gender-based discourse to literature? No. Do I support the marketing of women or social, racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities? No. Do I think this rhetoric is a sign of the times? Yes. Do I think the publishing market profits from it? Yes. Do I think some presses abuse it? Yes, many do. But again, to be clear, I don’t condemn the drive for visibility—merely its exploitation.

JM: Speaking of exploiting feminist rhetoric as a marketing strategy, you’ve also complained about editors’ attempts to promote you as a female writer. You’ve said that you’ve had to fight in every language to avoid blurbs like “a feminist novel by a female rebel,” and that you weren’t always successful. How have publishers in different countries handled the promotion of your work in this regard?

AH: When the French translation of my first novel, Matate, amor (Crève, mon amour) was published by Seuil in January, I met up with several distributors. This is typical in France: the author holds a meeting with all the small bookshop owners. There are tons of independent bookstores here (which I guess is also the case in Germany and other European countries), and of course, they’re ultimately more important than the big chains in promoting non-commercial, non-bestselling literature. When I met with them, my editor (a wonderful editor and translator, too) described my book as “feminist punk” or something. I remember half-jokingly correcting him, but in doing that, I was also taking a political stance. We then had a chat and took a close look at the front and back covers of the book, after which I told him to scrap the term “feminist.” I always weigh in on this kind of thing, because it’s ultimately all about politics—the author’s and the text’s. For instance, if someone tries to push a sexy picture of me, or some crowd-pleasing slogan or a title that just doesn’t fit, I’ll have my say and they’ll usually listen.

I think I had the same issue everywhere. The novel has been translated into fifteen languages and published in Spanish by different presses, and I think they all tried to capitalize on the current moment, which clearly benefits female writing—especially if it’s strong, violent, and combative, which mine is. Still, there are differences among editors, because even if they all think this kind of marketing will benefit the book, some are not willing to make literary concessions to accommodate it; they’re not ultimately crowd-pleasers. Others are. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Excerpts from I Am Not That Body by Verónica González Arredondo

April 7, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Allison A. deFreese

here no one/ is watching, not even God

In this week’s Translation Tuesday, poet Verónica González Arredondo bears witness to the plague of gender violence in Mexico in this excerpt from her forthcoming chapbook, I Am Not That Body. Our narrator speaks from a place beyond the remains of her body, recounting with chilling forensic detail the horrors she has witnessed and endured. From this ghostly viewpoint, the speaker refuses the anonymity, objectification, and cultural silence mandated by Mexican officials and the popular media, leading us to the horrifying and heart-breaking final stanzas where our speaker informs her family—and the reader—the she is not a statistic, or a faded memory, or a voiceless body. This excerpt, sublime in its masterful use of religious imagery, metaphor, and concise, almost staccatoed lines, is a necessary and timely read for understanding the recent wave of protests against femicide in Mexico. 

I Am Not That Body

When the night yawns
there are rows of teeth in its mouth
that pierce every bone in the earth

 

 

violence of a white handkerchief covers my mouth
I don’t scream
I don’t breathe
all my memories
will lose their tongue
I will become another,
identical to the voice I never recognized
I scream in order to wake up in another dream
but the dream has gone missing READ MORE…

In Conversation: Abnousse Shalmani on the Politics of the Female Body

December 15, 2016  |  in Interviews, Translations  |  by Nina Sparling

To cover the female body with a veil, a burqa, a hijab, a burkini, is to accept that said body is a site of desire and only that.

The first time I heard Abnousse Shalmani speak was her TEDxParis talk, which opened with: Oh, putain de bordel de merde [oh, motherfucking shit]. The auditorium echoed with scattered titters of discomfort and appreciation. “It’s ugly, all these curse words in a woman’s mouth, at least that is what parents tell their daughters,” Shalmani continued, “but I think the opposite: that all these swear words—words of the mouths of men—in the mouths of women, are indispensable.” In the remainder of the talk Shalmani exhibited through personal anecdotes and precise historical and literary analysis how sexism and misogyny, through the constraints on women’s bodies, permeate the Republic celebrated for equality and liberty.

To Shalmani, freedom begins with the liberation of the body and the assurance of one’s ability to fulfill corporal desire without limits or restriction. In her first book, Khomeini, Sade, et Moi [Khomeini, Sade, and Me, tr. Charlotte Coombe, World Editions]—which toes the line between memoir, manifesto, and novel—Shalmani expands and elaborates upon these foundations. In September 2016, I had the opportunity to interview the author about her book, feminism, and the conundrums facing contemporary France

Nina Sparling (NS): In Khomeini, Sade and Me, you make the case for a renewed humanist project, a way past all forms of extremist thought. But you get there via an unusual intellectual trajectory: through the libertine literature of authors like the Marquis de Sade or Pierre de Louÿs, both of whom are often associated with the search for extreme—even cruel—sensations and thoughts. Is it possible to reconcile humanism and libertine literature?

Abnousse Shalmani (AS): Above all, I plead for the liberation of the female body. And that liberation is impossible without the erasure of prejudice. The intellectual paths I’ve taken might seem unusual, but under closer scrutiny, their trajectory fits perfectly within the tradition of Enlightenment thought.

I first ‘encountered’ Pierre Louÿs, the prolific erotic writer. What struck me most about this lover of Beauty (“Beauty is made from Greek perfection crowned with Oriental grace,” he wrote) in his erotic poems and pornographic novels was his playful vision of flesh, of sex. Born in Teheran under the Islamic Revolution, all I knew of the body was the drama it provoked, the gravity with which my world covered up the female body, the danger it represented. To read a poet—at fourteen—who laughed about the body, about sex, who took pleasure in both, this took the drama out of the body. I began to see my body as something besides a forbidden place. It began as a literary step; the politics followed.

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