Author: Mirella Reichenbach Livoti

Helen Weinzweig’s novel Basic Black with Pearls tells the story of Shirley Kaszenbowski, a married woman and mother from Toronto who has an alternative lifestyle as she travels around the world searching for her lover Coenraad by following clues left by him in The National Geographic publications. As a result of her two identities, Shirley adopts the name Lola Montez in her travelings and in her relationship with Coenraad which at first glance might seem liberating but, in reality, turns out to be just a different form of confinement, from being a housewife to solitarily waiting for her lover in endless hotel rooms.  When Shirley receives a call from Coenraad, she is informed that her last assignment would involve going back “home” to Toronto which for her was filled with memories she did not necessarily want to remember. The author’s personal experiences resonate with the issues raised in the novel and provide a radical perspective to the possibilities of women, especially middle-aged women, reflected in the thrilling and painful adventures of Weinzweig’s protagonist Shirley or/and Lola.

Some of Shirley’s characteristic traits have a direct connection to Weinzweig’s life. Helen was married to the renowned Canadian composer John  Weinzweig, and they remained married and together throughout their lives, unlike the protagonist and her so-called husband. However, according to Sarah Weinman who wrote the afterword for the most recent publication of the novel, Helen and John’s relationship was not one of equals. Theirs was an artistic marriage and Helen had to pay the price of being overshadowed by John’s success. Moreover, as Weinman was going through Helen’s archives at the University of Toronto and reading her diary entries around the period of Basic Black‘s publication, she discovered that Helen felt a strong indifference coming from her husband, yet she dealt with this indifference by hiding the effects it had on her and thus using a “mask of a perfect marriage” as a coping mechanism (in certain ways similar to the allegory of Shirley’s outfit and the book title I would suggest that her outfit makes her more of an “invisible women”). In order to deal with this indifference, Helen also took on relationships outside of her marriage one of which inspired the creation of Coenraad. Another interesting aspect of her life is that it was not until her late 40s that Weinzweig actually started writing. According to Helen herself, as she reached the undirectional crisis people at their 40s reach, she consulted a psychiatrist who led her to start writing. Basic Black With Pearls was only published when she was 65 and her personal archives reveal that there was a real sense of thrill and lament resulting from the publication of the book which was seen by some as unfit for Canlit at that point in time. Additionally, in a couple interviews, Helen talked about her process of writing and how she had to translate male-dominated literature into a female perspective.

Sarah Weinman has described Helen’s work in Basic Black With Pearls as “interior feminist espionage novel”.  I believe it is important to unpack what Sarah meant with this description to fully consider the complexities that can be found in the novel. Firstly, with “interior” Sarah is referring to the degree of emotions in the novel. The readers are somewhat aware of Shirley feelings, however, there is still a distance between us, especially in regards to trust and the question of unreliable narrative. Secondly, with the term “feminist” Sarah wants to emphasize how radical is the narrative not only in the sense that it explores in depth the role of women in relationships and society at large but also the fact that the protagonist is a middle-aged woman, an uncommon characteristic as Shirley still presents agency and desire that are not lost with aging. Lastly, the term “espionage” refers to the trapping of the plot which resembles that of a spy fiction where suspense and trust play key roles in directing the characters paths and interactions. Expanding on Sarah’s description, I agree with the emphasis she gives on the role of perspective in shaping the novel and its effects on the reader. I do not believe it would be constructive to engage in a conversation of whether Coenraad is real and whether her experiences are real, but for a matter of fact, as a reader I know that have real consequences to Shirley and can be strongly felt in her disguise as Lola Montez.

Another important element to keep in mind and one that is crucial for all readers is the weight of judgment while reading the novel. Our preconceived traditions and values may from time to time cause us to judge Shirley’s behaviors as for examples when she goes back home, encounters Francesca taking over her role as the housewife and instead of being assertive, she sleeps with her and her husband in their bed. The main goal of feminist literature is to challenge such rooted taboos, in Shirley’s case what being a “good” mother means, thus I believe we as readers should be aware of our own judgments. Weinman urges us to approach the novel by trusting its underlying emotional truth, the real pain, and trauma underlying the relationships. The image of Shirley, or better say, Lola Montez, in a hotel room in a different country going over a pile of postcards trying to relive her moments with Coenraad while alone in bed is one of profound pain and submissiveness.  It does not really matter if Coenraad is real compared to the feeling of being solitary and having nowhere to call “home” as Toronto is too difficult to endure and Shirley’s physical return to her “home” is brief and her place in that institution has already been substituted.

Above all, I appreciate how Basic Black With Pearls challenges conventions of gender, sexuality, and affection, among others. The open ending of the novel leaves space for us readers to decide what Shirley’s future holds. Will she no longer look for Coenraad? Will she stay in Toronto? Will she find another partner to fulfill her needs? Even more important than answering these questions is to recognize that Shirley challenges the boundaries of what it is to be an older woman, a mother and to love, however, just like any of us she faces personal and societal constraints to her liberation.

 

Sources:

• Helen Weinzweig’s Interior Feminist Espionage Novel by Sarah Weinman

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/04/12/helen-weinzweigs-interior-feminist-espionage-novel/

• The Backlist episode 2

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thesundayedition/the-sunday-edition-for-february-3-2019-1.4997146/helen-weinzweig-s-interior-feminist-espionage-novel-about-illicit-love-1.4998463

 

 

The novel Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf takes place during a single day in London, after the end of the First World War, following the main character, Clarissa Dalloway, who is preparing for her party happening that same evening. Despite the novel being centered on Clarissa, we get to meet several characters and get to know their stories by “invading” their consciousness. Woolf is known for implementing free indirect discourse in her novels, opposing the post-Victorian traditions of literature and thinking about the mind, hence becoming one of the main figures in modernist literature. Free indirect discourse can be described as the merging of both the narrator’s and the character’s thoughts resulting in a series of unmediated streams of consciousness and causing the reader to find itself in some else’s head, without knowing who exactly the thoughts belong to. Although the novel is set up in a single day, it deals with several essential themes surrounding the human condition such as war, trauma, love, time, aging, nostalgia, etc. However, from the themes and characters we meet,  I find particularly interesting how gender plays a defining role in the novel and how it affects the lives of Lucrezia and Septimus.

Firstly, I would like to bring your attention to the fact that the novel is called MRS. Dalloway making it clear that Clarissa’s position and identity are defined by her marriage, moreover that gender is a constraint influencing all characters in Woolf’s novel. Such characters include Septimus Warren Smith and his wife Lucrezia. Septimus is a veteran of World War I and suffers from shell shock, today known as PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), he is lost in his own mind and through present interactions with objects or even words relieves his experiences during the war. One of the main scenes which to me highlights how painful the experience of war can be for both men and women is when Septimus and Lucrezia are at the park and he becomes fixated by an airplane, advertising for toffee in the sky, so he starts crying.  Lucrezia tries to convince herself that everything is alright with her husband, “(who had nothing whatever seriously the matter with him but was a little out of sorts)” (21). This belief is a reflection of the lack of medical understanding of the trauma resulting from war. Since veterans were not physically harmed the only explanation for there being something wrong with them was that these men were being cowards, and failing their roles as strong and courageous veterans. When  Lucrezia takes a moment away from Septimus and walks to the fountain she thinks:

“For she could stand it no longer. Dr. Holmes might say there was nothing the matter. Far rather would she that he were dead! She could not sit beside him when he stared so and did not see her and made everything terrible; sky and tree, children playing, dragging carts, blowing whistles, falling down; all were terrible… Look! Her wedding ring slipped-she had grown so thin. It was she who suffered-but she had nobody to tell.” (23)

This passage reflects how much of an emotional and physical burden it was to love someone who suffered from shell shock. Lucrezia thinks “to love makes one solitary”(23), which makes her ascribe to the gender role of women in the post-war period, taking care of their husbands, loving them without reciprocity, not being able to tell anyone how they felt and pretending to be fine.  Dr. Holmes, who had checked on Septimus before, had told Lucrezia to urge her husband to take interest in things outside himself, in real things, therefore she keeps on repeating and imploring “look” while he remains daydreaming, distant from her isolated in his own world. As Maisie Johnson passes them by at the park she has the impression that they are queer when in reality their pain, frustration, and suffering is immeasurable.  Hence, we can compare this scene to how the society at the time seemed to overlook war veterans, their traumas and its impact on relationships. Later on in the novel when Clarissa is told about Septimus who commits suicide she explains how she did not pity him, how she was glad he had done it and how she felt a connection with the young man. According to the sociological imagination, all personal troubles are connected to historical issues, hence the fact that Septimus committed suicide is at the same time personal as well as a societal issue resulting from the experiences of WWI. It is only Septimus trouble, it was Clarissa’s as well as the whole English society. 

Regarding Septimus death, as he jumps from the window in order for Dr. Holmes not to separate him from Lucrezia, it is interesting how even though it was an individual act it felt like Lucrezia helped him both physically and emotionally. She attempted to stop Dr. Holmes from going up the stairs and once Septimus was about to jump the window the narrator describes it as: “it was their idea of tragedy, not his or Rezia’s (for she was with him)” (149).  Personally, what I find most interesting in this scene is that the couple feels no longer distant,  Septimus finally escaped his own mind and Lucrezia prior to him jumping was able to have a few minutes during which he was present, he was himself. Furthermore, while Lucrezia ascribes to the gender role of women in the post-war period, Septimus does not. At first, we believe he does since when Evans died he was proud that he felt nothing, but this scene with Lucrezia shows that he had a lot of unresolved emotions which he was not able to deal with, he was not a strong man who was unaffected by his friend’s death, he was a coward.

Additionally, when I was reading Mrs. Dalloway and when we were learning about Freud in class it made me question how close to us are such experiences of war? How long ago have they affect my family and who did they affect? And so I decided to ask my father about my grandpa who I did not have the chance to meet. His name was Letterio Livoti and he was an Italian immigrant who made Brazil his home. Turns out though that my grandpa was born in Tunisia to his Italian parents and he had to fight for the Axis power in Africa. He was young and really had no other choice. Thankfully he did not serve for too long and from what we know did not suffer from any severe trauma resulting from the war.  After the war, he went back to Italy with his family but the country was destroyed, thus he bought a ticket with his friends to Brazil. Similarly, from my mother’s side, I know that her father’s family escaped Germany/ Russia before the war truly broke and his mother’s family moved to Argentina where there was a large German community. My grandpa’s father who had a lot of children mainly boys was scared that they would have to serve, hence they moved to Brazil.  It seems to me that Freud’s death drive is closer to us than we think, the drive for aggression and our attempt to delay death by immigrating for instance. It is also extremely interesting to draw on war and its effects on geography. As we learned in class, every process happens in a specific place and yet somehow it seems like war promotes globalization in a sense, with the movement of people and their interconnectedness, the creation of families in new places while maintaining ties with still other places. Septimus fought in France for his nation, England, while my grandpa fought in Africa for Italy and because of it moved to Brazil.

Lastly, in GRSJ (Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice) we are learning about epistemology and storytelling, how we create knowledge and which stories we find valuable. Personally, from all the post-war novels that I have read (which being honest haven’t been many) were centered in a male experience of war. Although Mrs. Dalloway challenges this male-centered notion of war especially with Lucrezia’s character, I believe we as literary critics must make the move towards looking for literature that reflects women’s experience of war or children’s experience of war.  For instance, what about reading novels regarding comfort women?

My point with this post is that war is mostly gendered but its consequences do not discriminate, all people are affected by it directly or indirectly. I believe that Virginia Woolf was aware of that and if she tried to battle gender constraints in her literature why can we battle gender constraints in our choices of reading and understanding current and past wars?

 

 

 

Mohsin Hamid’s novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist begins with the protagonist, Changez, and an American man sitting at a coffeehouse ordering tea in Lahore, Pakistan. The plot of the novel is developed through a monologue in which Changez describes his experiences in the United States to the man. He talks about his experience studying at Princeton, working at a well-known company called Underwood Samson and falling in love with an American woman called Erica. On the other hand, with the 9/11 terrorist attacks his experiences start to shift, he begins to question his purpose and ends up returning to Lahore.

The 9/11 were a series of terrorist attacks orchestrated by the Islamist extremist group Al-Qaeda against the United States in 2001, which included a series of airline hijackings and suicide attacks. Around 2750 people were killed in the attacks in New York City, 184 at the Pentagon in Washington D.C., and 40 in Pennsylvania, where one of the stolen airplanes crashed after the passengers attempted to regain control. As a result of the tragedy of the 9/11, the U.S. government began a massive campaign against terrorism which furthered the consequences of these attacks, causing an increase in the discrimination against Muslim people or people who were perceived to come from the Middle East. In addition, President W. Bush popularized a master narrative of us versus them strengthening the divide in the U.S.’ society at the time. Therefore, the importance of The Reluctant Fundamentalist is that it provides a counter narrative through which the 9/11 can be understood from a perspective that has been silenced. Although Changez does not mention being Muslim the fact that he comes from Pakistan and appears Middle Eastern causes him to suffer from the societal impacts of the attacks. The author gives complete control to Changez through the monologue while the American man is made voiceless. Furthermore, through the use of second person narrative Changez refers to the American man by saying “you”, consequently this choice can be interpreted as suggesting an implicit audience.

In order to “break the ice”, Changez tries to make the American, and the audience, comfortable. The actions described by Changez show that the man does not trust him since he is sitting with his back close to the wall and does not remove his jacket. Hence, Changez goes straight to the point and starts talking about his experience attempting to lower the American man’s guard, and becoming more approachable to the reader as well. Additionally, in this first scene we can already identify the role of stereotypes in the novel and how the fact that he is trying to challenge the stereotypes associated with Middle Eastern people after the 9/11 causes thriller and suspense. As he moves toward the man, Changez says: “Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance? Ah, I see I have alarmed you. Do not be frightened by my beard: I am a lover of America” (Hasin 1). Similarly, in this scene the American man is stereotyped. Changez says he recognized that he was American because of his bearing, generalizing that there is something about how Americans behave or portray themselves that is distinct.

For our sociology class, we were asked to watch a lecture about “stereotype threat” by the psychologist Claude Steele. According to the findings of his research, he defines the impact of experiencing negative stereotyping as “stereotype threat”. When a person is in a situation in which a negative stereotype about a group he is part of might apply, it causes the person to worry if their behavior will conform to the stereotype, thus it can lead to underperformance. Steele argues that if the person cares about the group he is a part of, if it is part of your personal identity then the effects of the “stereotype threat” are greater. The concept of “stereotype threat” can be applied to Changez shift in behavior after the 9/11 in his work at Underwood Samson. Throughout the novel, he demonstrates pride in his country and before the attacks there were no explicit threats associated with being Pakistani or looking Middle Eastern. Thus, he was the best intern at Underwood Samson and had an excellent performance. After the attacks, there is a shift in society, Middle Easterners  and Muslims start to be directly associated with terrorism. The simple act of interacting with other people is seen as a possible “stereotype threat”. Since Changez deeply cared about his culture and about being Pakistani, working for Underwood Sanson becomes a great threat. Underwood Samson was a consultancy firm which shared the principles of meritocracy and focusing on the fundamentals. Changez’ job was to evaluate businesses and help determine their worth. With attacks, Changez gradually starts to underperform and cannot escape the thought of the attacks, and how his family in Pakistan is being affected by the actions taken by the U.S. military.  The “stereotype threat” that Changez is placed under and the fact that as we read, his behavior may or may not confirm the general assumptions the reader might hold against Middle Estern people creates the thriller of the novel. 

When Changez is sent to Chile to evaluate a publishing company, he meets Juan-Baptista (the chief of the publishing company) who asks him if he does not feel bad doing his job and determining the future of so many people. Juan-Baptista compares Changez’ job to that of the janissaries, who were “[C]hristian boys captured by the Ottomans and trained to be soldiers in a Muslim army”(Hamid 151). The boys were “[f]erocious and utterly loyal: they had fought to erase their own civilizations, so they had nothing to return to”(Hamid 151). Through Juan-Baptista’s analogy, Changez came to the realization that he was playing the role of the janissaries. He was helping Underwood Samson, which serves as a symbol of the U.S. government in the novel, to expand its interests at the cost of people’s jobs and practices in their own countries. Hence, the title of the book is a reference to this realization. I believe that Changez is a “reluctant fundamentalism” in the sense that prior to meeting Juan-Baptista, Changez was not aware of what the real effects of working for Underwood Samson were, it was not a conscious choice it was part of the system. I believe that if he had notice before that he was getting deeply involved in the system, he would not have taken the position at Underwood Samson.

Ultimately, Mohsin Hamid’s book provides a counter narrative of the 9/11 from the perspective of a person who was deeply stigmatized as a result of the stereotypes held against Middle Easterners and Muslims after the attacks. The novel reflects the racism resulting from these stereotypes and how they affected, and currently affect people on a deep personal level. Instances of stereotyping against Middle Eastern and Muslim people, or people with Middle Eastern descent still happen in the United States and I would argue that it has spread to other countries as well. The consequences of 9/11 are present in our society, from the people who mourn the deaths of their relatives and friends, to the people who are wrongly judged due to their skin color, appearance, religion, name, nationality, heritage, etc. One of the cases that most shocked me was that of a teenager called Ahmed Mohamed who was arrested for bringing a homemade clock to school in 2015. His teacher did not consider the fact that he was interest in robotics, instead took his name as an evidence that it was a bomb and that the police should be called to deal with the situation. This incident reveals how racial profiling and Islamophobia have become part of our society and guide daily intereactions. For this reason, learning to combat these stereotypes from the people who directly suffer it is something we should all strive for and something that the novel help us achieve. 

The graphic narrative written by Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis, is based on the author’s personal experiences growing up under the Islamic regime in Iran after the Revolution took place in 1979. The Revolution was responsible for taking Reza Shah out of power and implementing the rule of the clergy, led by Ruhollah Khomeini. Through the perspective of a child, Satrapi approaches themes including the war, governmental oppression, gender roles, social inequality, identity and remembering by making use of the non-verbal language represented in her iconic black and white style of drawing, as well as verbal language including dialogues, speech bubbles, and narrations. Satrapi’s intent in publishing Persepolis, which was banned from her country, is to change people’s perspective of Iranians who have increasingly being attributed a bad reputation due to the rise of extremist groups. According to Marjane, “one should forgive but one should never forget”. This motto serves as Satrapi’s foundation as she tells the audience her individual story and to a certain extent the story of her people. The tittle Persepolis alludes to this motto since it was the capital of the Persian Empire, hence a reference to Iranian history being placed in a modern context.

When talking about memorializing trauma, it is important to first define trauma. Generally, trauma is understood as a form of injury or the result of a deeply distressing experience. Even though I agree with these definitions of trauma, I believe it is crucial to take into account the broad effect that it can have, not being limited to the person who had a first-hand experience of it but also to a whole group of people, and in some cases a whole nation. For example, in Persepolis, we are introduced to the fact that Marji’s grandfather was a political prisoner because he was a communist under the Shah’s rule. The title given to the chapter is “Water Cell”, which refers to one of the forms of punishment he would face, being locked in a cell filled with water for hours. Since little Marji’s mother, Taji had been conditioned to seeing her father being taken away from her and on the 3rd panel she has an emotional breakdown, stating that “all his life he was in pain”. The use of graphic weight, the contrast between black and white, in this panel makes Taji’s tears stand out, providing the audience with an idea of what the burden of carrying this trauma must feel like. In these panels, we notice that Marji’s grandfather faced physical pain, as when Taji would visit him at prison he would try his best to play with her but his suffering was visible. Additionally, the emotional distress of being away from his family contributed to his suffering. The trauma resulting from the experiences that Marji’s grandfather lived in prison were transferred to Taji as it affected her childhood and memory of her father, and are now being transferred to Marji, who is visibly shocked and tries to put herself in her grandfather’s position by staying a long time in a bathtub filled with water. Marji’s attitude reflects her innocence as a child. In the second role of panels, we can neatly see Marji’s reaction which contrasts with her mother’s reaction. While her mother is crying as she feels the pain of trauma and remembering, Marji is unsettled as it is her first time hearing about trauma in her family and getting a sense of its lasting consequences.

Likewise, it is interesting to reflect upon the private and public spheres of trauma which are evident in the chapter “The Heroes”. We are presented to two political prisoners who Marji’s parents knew, Siamak and Mohsen, and they tell Marji’s family about their experiences being tortured in prison. These experiences although personal to them can be generalized to other political prisoners and despite the different time periods, Siamak, Mohsen, and Marji’s grandfather, as well as their families, have to deal with the trauma resulting from the oppression and torture they had faced.

Based on our class discussion looking at Chute and DeKoven essay, “Introduction: Graphic Narrative”, there is a “risk of representation” associated with the genre of graphic narrative chosen by Satrapi and with the concepts of private and public deriving from her story. One of the risks that Satrapi runs is making use of humor in order to deepen the audience’s understanding of the social reality under the Islamic regime since the use of humor is a characteristic of the comic genre and it is usually superficial, not connected to heavy themes such as war. Satrapi once said in an interview while receiving a prize from Stanford University’s department of Iranian Studies that “laughter is the highest degree of understanding the other because it is based on abstraction”. When looking at trauma it is easy to feel a sense of hopelessness, but due to  Satrapi’s choice of approaching the theme of humanity through the use of humor, she shifts the discourse of trauma emphasizing its universality. In the chapter “The Sheep”, for example, Satrapi’s representation of the Siamak and his family escaping Iran by hiding among the sheep breaks with the prior panels of what was happening with the families of political prisoners, which included Siamak’s sister being choked. The “laughter” does not come from escaping with the sheep being unreasonable, contrastingly, it comes from the realization of how deprived of humanity was the Iranian society, to the point that people who followed different ideologies were killed and forced to escape by hiding among flocks of animals. Satrapi’s iconic (non-realistic) drawings provide lightness to the graphic narrative, serving as a juxtaposition to the seriousness of reality and thus adding on the humor.  Above all, the drawings maintain a certain loyalty to Marji’s perspective coming from a child, as although she grows into an adult the iconic drawings remain the same. A similar use of humor can be seen when Marji and her friends laughed at the formalities performed in respect to the martyrs in the chapter titled “The Key”. Humor prevents trauma from taking over the narrative, it balances the heaviness of reality with the lightness of the drawings and Marji’s perspective. In order to deal with trauma, parties were used as tools to make the governmental repression psychologically bearable and so trauma was not limited to Marji’s family, but was an issue dealt and still being dealt with by a whole society.

Another interesting connection would be between the way trauma is portrayed in Persepolis and in Sarah Polley’s documentary Stories We Tell, which was also discussed in class. In the film, Polley interviews her family members and friends in an attempt to gather as much information as she can about her mother, who had died from cancer when she was young. However, the trauma present in the film is not only in her attempt to reconstruct her mother but also in the personal quest to figure out who is her biological father. Just as in Persepolis, the boundaries of public and private become blurred.  Still, the people being interviewed by Polley laugh at certain situations in order to cope with the retelling of their stories. When we laugh with them, the connection developed goes beyond empathy. Even though we might not necessarily laugh at Satrapi’s graphic narrative, as in physically laugh, but unconsciously there is something funny about it, something about how fragile and resistant people are which connects to the laughter in Polley’s documentary.

Finally,  the limitations of memorializing trauma can be seen in the fact that both Satrapi and Polley needed something visual, a graphic narrative and a film, to come close to the reality of it. The use of laughter and humor balances the pain that remembering brings and makes sure that despite trauma persisting, it does not take over from the greatness that it is to live, to experience and build your own history.