Suzan-Lori Parks and "The Venus Hottentot"

Suzan-Lori Parks is a playwright who has been unfairly responded to negatively by critics, partially due to the controversial topics that she addresses in her works. Instead of reading her play, Venus, as a nonfiction work, I read Parks as a writer who wants to show her take on uncomfortable circumstances, never claiming that she is an expert.

In case you are unfamiliar with the Saartjie Baartman story you can catch up here. In short, Baartman was born in the 1700’s in Africa and taken to London because of her elongated vulva and large buttocks in order to be paraded around like a circus freak. Baartman spent her life on display due to her “oddities,” and remained on display after her death in a Paris museum, finally being transported back to Africa in 2002 to rest in peace.



According to an explanation in this New York Times article, “the story of Sartje Baartman, the inspiration for "Venus," is rich in dramatic potential and social reverberations.” Critics claim that Parks “doesn't present Baartman as just an uncomprehending victim. This woman is clearly an accomplice in her own humiliation.” Audience members and critics were angry with Parks for painting a picture of Baartman that differed from the view of her as an innocent victim, with no choice in her destiny. Parks chose to present Baartman as a confused girl, showing the conflicting thoughts of whether or not this was “fun” for her, something that the audience believed the real Baartman would never get confused. This is subject matter with intense political charge.

This presents an argument of whether Parks, and authors like Parks, have the authority to write about things that “they don’t really know about.” There is a debate in literature that deals with whether or not an author has the credibility to write about something, whether it be an event or a culture of people, that they were not there for or are not a part of. I believe that the work that an author is creating is their own creation, their own take on something, and therefore is a work of art. This gives the piece room to breathe, to become a thing of its own, even if this is not completely historically accurate.

Dorothy Porter vs. Lyn Hejinian

So when it comes down to it, which is easier to read? Language poetry or a verse novel? You can find my explanation of what language poetry is here. A verse novel is basically a novel written in a series of verses, or poems, that have metrical composition. Which is “opposed to prose which uses grammatical units like sentences and paragraphs.”

Lyn Hejinian wrote in prose poetry. A critic said “crucial to understanding Hejinian's work is the realization that it cultivates, even requires, an act of resistant reading.” The less you try to read her work, the more you get out of it. That’s a bit confusing. In my previous blog entry about Hejinian, there is also information about how I read My Life, her most famous work.

An Australian author, Dorothy Porter, is famous for her verse novel. One example of this is The Monkey’s Mask, which is a thriller about a lesbian detective who wants to solve the case of who killed Mickey, a university student who loves poetry. Porter follows Jill, who is working on the case, but finds herself distracted and romantically involved with one of Mickey’s professors.

Even though Porter deviated from the standard prose approach to writing, I found her work understandable and easy to follow. Though the poems look much different on page than blocks of prose, I quickly forgot I was reading poems and was able to pick up the story line. Though I was reading short, usually less than a page long, poems, the story line was clear and sequential. This is quite the opposite of Hejinian, who often times leads her audience in circles with repetition and a hard to find plot.

I found Porter’s work to be easier to understand at first read, but both works to be equally enjoyable and rewarding, even if I had to work harder at reading Hejinian’s work to read it how she would want me to.

Monique Wittig

I just finished reading another book by a feminist author, Monique Wittig. Her novel, Les Guérillères, was written in French in 1969, and translated to English in 1971. The main story line of the book follows a war that women of the world started against the men. Wittig employs a prose poetry style, featuring short vignettes of scenes that do not seem to follow each other in sequential order, though are loosely placed in order of how things happened.

According to a critic in The Times Book review: “perhaps the first epic celebration of women ever written.” An opposing view in The New York Review of Books says, “the book itself turns out to be, sadly, oddly, at times almost maddeningly, quite dull.” Maybe a little harsh to feature this quote in her obituary in The New York Times, I unfortunately agree with the latter review.

Wittig creates a story that has potential to be groundbreaking, but the writing style does not do the story matter justice. As I read the book, I felt like I was going in circles, without learning much. Maybe some of Wittig’s meaning was lost in the translation from French to English, but I feel like Kathy Acker’s in-your-face style of writing was much more effective in getting her point across: women have been mistreated and must rebel against men.

If you want to see how you read Wittig’s style, the first thirty three pages of the book are available here.

Language Poetry

This weekend I had to read one of the most confusing books I have encountered: My Life, by Lyn Hejinian. Not only did I have to read it, I had to understand it well enough to present it to my class. Understanding it was impossible at first glance because Hejinian seems to repeat herself and made me go in circles. When I got really frustrated with the book, I turned to Google to figure out what was going on.

It turns out, Hejinian is part of a movement called “language poetry.” A big part of language poetry is that the author’s presence is removed from the text. This means that what we get out of the writing is almost entirely up to us. She wrote what she wanted to, but there is no deeper meaning that the whole audience is supposed to magically “get.” Instead, each audience member will get what they want out of the piece and relate it to their life as they see fit. How versatile!

It was difficult to read this book because I try to figure out the meaning of most of what I read. Once I was able to shake that feeling, the book became much more enjoyable. Instead of searching for meaning, I let the meaning come when I would read a certain sentence or paragraph that had relevance to my life.

Skip to about 1:45 to see what you get out of Hejinian's writing here.

My First Encounter with Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire is a name I had not heard of in my three and a half years of college. Baudelaire was a French poet and translator who wrote and lived in the 1800’s in Paris. I have just finished reading his book Paris Spleen. Throughout this book, Baudelaire complains about the city live and the crowds it produces. There are stories of people getting lost due to the anonymity of growing cities. The theme that is most recognizable is that of the passage of time. Baudelaire explains mortality and pushes people to go out and seize the moment and to look at how they are spending their lives.
Looking beyond the interesting stories Baudelaire tells, the reason this book impacted my life is the style that the chapters are in. Each chapter is three pages or shorter, with most of them being about a page in length. There is no linear connection between each chapter; each one seems to tell its own story, and all are potentially interchangeable with one another. Clearly Baudelaire did not haphazardly place the pieces of the book together. He laid each part next to each other with intention and precision. On first read, I did not think much about the way the book was written, but if you keep in mind that Baudelaire had a plan, there are many more layers to the story and one can analyze the book further and further.

I plan to keep this form of prose poetry in mind when I am approaching a writing assignment. I find it to be a challenge to keep the chapters short and concise, especially because in many cases, writing can drag on forever. Authors have so much to say and want to provide every detail they can, but maybe there is a benefit to keeping it short sometimes.

If you want to read an example of Baudelaire's work, here you go.

Kathy Acker

Well, I might as well start off with one of the more intense books I've had the privilege of reading: Blood and Guts in High School, by Kathy Acker. I’m pretty far from a feminist, but due to my required reading lists this quarter, this year might be the year of change. Acker begins her book with anecdotes about her character, Janey, and the sexual relationship she has with her father. Complete with hand-drawn pornographic pictures, which makes this book hard to read on buses when people are peering over your shoulder. Though this book was assigned to me by a professor, I’ve had a hard time getting the images it has left behind out of my mind. One of the main themes throughout the book is that helpless ten year old Janey is subjected to atrocious treatment by the males she encounters in her lifetime.

After reading the painful novel, filled with more horror stories of Janey with her father, Janey as a slut, and, finally, Janey as a whore under the care of a Persian slave trader, I researched Acker to see what went through her mind when she was writing. In an interview found here, Acker states, “I don't remember. I write it to get it out of me. I don't write it to remember it.” This is a very good point. Blood and Guts in High School falls into the category of experimental fiction, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. The important word there is fiction. This work of fiction is a complex, dark story that Acker was able to formulate in her mind, and though it isn’t a true story, she was able to use her life experience and what she has seen to write novel.

Acker also states in the interview, “but I'm starting to worry about self-censorship.” When I read this, I was taken aback. Acker’s writing seems to be so off-the-wall out there that there is no way that she has held anything back. But still, she worries that she has. What I’m hoping I get from this reading is a slightly different approach to writing. I take many writing workshop classes and have ample space to express myself in a peer-reviewed setting. I hope I can begin to take my unique life experience farther and turn them into pieces of writing. Acker is inspiring in the way that she has awful, disgusting thoughts and things that have happened around her, but she manages to find a way to get these things out of her mind and onto paper. This process is ultimately beneficial on multiple levels: Acker can forget the sad memories and a new piece of brilliant literature is available to be read by the world.