abuse

One Hundred Bottles

annette — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 08:00:00 +0000

An intensely vivid and riveting story of abuse, pain, honesty, erotica and discovery-this combination of words may not sound appealing, but the provocative and imaginative novel of these topics woven together creates a graphic fall from the literary world into our laps of reading desire. Crafted by Ena Lucía Portela, One Hundred Bottles is the story of a young woman named Z, who is incidentally an amazing storyteller (as well as a reluctantly educated person) and who leads us through her story while trying to find meaning behind her experiences. Given her challenging background, Z delivers a step by step account of her life (with creative backstory included) and you hope she will end up a champion. Z faces what seems the most challenging of all living through an unlucky survivorship; however, she keeps moving along through life, and author Portela puts you, the reader, right next to her. You feel the slaps, you feel the insults, and you breathe a sigh of relief with her at the climax.

Educated at the University of Havana, Ena Lucía Portela brings her life to fiction and brilliantly sets her story in the historic rocky era of Cuba in the early 1990s. All characters seek a chosen lifestyle and all are survivors; depending on their current resources, people enter and spin through Z's life while their own tales turn-and none are left unexplained.

Although she is called "stupid", Z is curious and insistent. Her friends and support range from her priest to a lesbian mystery author. At certain points in reading One Hundred Bottles, you feel like you are reading strictly a whodunit sort of detective novel, but actually the author (and best friend of Z) writes the detective novel based on Z's retelling of actual real events in her section of the world. Brilliantly juxtaposed, the work keeps you engrossed; at times powerfully violent, the novel reminds you that this is what a certain group in a certain culture experienced during this time; if a reader is intimate with abuse or violence, he or she may identify with these parts, but redemption triumphs and allows readers to breathe deeply a sigh of relief.

Published originally in Spanish in 2002, this novel holds up. Reminiscent of Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Brando Skyhorse's The Madonnas of Echo Park, One Hundred Bottles brings the reader a culture delightfully retold through the eyes of a woman who remarkably survives. As well, the story offers hope and fulfillment, both necessary traits for living in today's world.

Written by: Carolyn Espe, February 18th 2011

Why Girls Fight: Female Youth Violence in the Inner City

alicia — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 20:00:00 +0000

By Cindy D. Ness

New York University Press

Ness holds doctorate degrees in Human Development, Psychology, and Anthropology and in Why Girls Fight she blends the theories and research methods from these three fields to discuss female youth violence. Ness argues that the majority of studies tend to examine either individual factors in explaining and understanding youth violence or emphasize sociological, macro-level factors. Ness’ interdisciplinary approach allows her to address how individual girls respond to and navigate the racial and class constraints as well as the limited economic opportunities within their communities.

Ness problematizes previous research on female youth violence. She addresses the racist and classist underpinnings of the term “violent girl” used in studies, noting that much of this research has relied on a framework in which girlhood is viewed through the lens of white, middle-class femininity. Within this framework girlhood is mostly associated with passivity and relational aggression (mean-girl behavior) if any aggression at all. Moreover, within this framework girls are almost always constructed as victims of violence rather than as agents of violence. Failing to address issues of race and class in relation to youth violence, Ness argues that much of the research depicts girls as delinquents or sociopaths and focuses on faults within the individual.

In acknowledging the social realities girls face in two working-class Philadelphia neighborhoods, Ness is able to sidestep this type of moralizing and pathologizing that taints much of the research on female youth violence. Ness offers a brief history on the economic decline of working-class neighborhoods in Philadelphia, noting how once major industries folded and left the city, entire households and even neighborhoods suddenly found themselves without jobs leading to rundown neighborhoods and schools without adequate funding.

Ness also conducts an ethnographic study, interviewing girls from these two respective neighborhoods on why they fight. In providing a space for the girls’ own words, Ness uncovers a complex set of reasons for female youth violence within the two neighborhoods, reasons ranging from a lack of upward mobility within their communities to issues of physical abuse at home. Furthermore, almost all the girls Ness interviews recognize that street fighting is considered a necessary survival skill within their homes and their communities.

Ness’ book is groundbreaking in addressing how mother-daughter relationships relate to female youth violence. Sidestepping the typical mother-blaming that occurs in studies on this subject, Ness examines how the girls’ mothers’ own views on street-fighting affect how they raise their daughters and she sheds light on the unreported incidents of mothers stepping into fights in order to protect their daughters and at times fighting alongside their daughters.

In neighborhoods that value the ability to handle oneself over passivity, Ness’ work clearly demonstrates that a white, middle-class framework of girlhood cannot begin to explain female youth violence and with Why Girls Fight Ness provides a more adequate model for future studies.

Written by: Kristen Lambert, February 14th 2011

The Truth about Me: A Hijra Life Story

andrea — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Tamil by V. Geetha, A. Revathi

Penguin

What is it about the form of the life story—the autobiography—that makes it so seductive and so deeply discomfiting at the same time? I think it’s how the boundaries between private and public, someone else’s life and your own, blur in your reading. The relationship you forge is rich and colorful and insightful, but it’s also dark and violent and difficult to come to terms with.

The Truth about Me: A Hijra Life Story is the autobiography of Revathi. Revathi’s ‘truth’ is the first of such to be published in English: at once an illuminating, and a scarring read, that leaves you changed. Hijras are a community of people who are born men, but feel they are women, and so live as such. What differentiates them from eunuchs, or other trangendered/transsexual people is their culture: to be a hijra is to live in a community with other hijras, where you have a mother figure (a guru), sisters and daughters, and a tight set of rules within which you relate with them, what work you can do, how you look and behave.

The book is rich in detail and pulls you determinedly into the whirlpool of Revathi’s experiences—sometimes exciting and joyous, but more often sad and violent, physically, and emotionally abusive—a life of alienation and extreme frustration.

In The Truth about Me, Revathi leads us through her discovery of a community, experiences castration (nirvaanam—this makes her a ‘woman’—‘I felt like a flower that had just blossomed’), learns to dance and sing, becomes a beggar, performs sex work, works as an activist for a nonprofit, is stripped naked and tortured in police custody, falls in love, and more.

What is fascinating about Revathi’s way of telling, and almost painfully illuminating for the reader, is how she sets her own life – her familial relationships, her acceptance of her identity, the journey of becoming a hijra – parallel to the structures that she lives within. We see the demands and injustices that patriarchy inflicts, and its discomfort with her transgression; but on the other hand we also see the norms of the hijra community, which must be followed to be accepted into its fold. The sense one gets is of the (marginalised) self constantly struggling with something—both the mainstream and the alternatives available. She says, ‘A man sometimes has to struggle to live; but for people like me, to live was to struggle and fight…The world looks askance at me.’

While the book validates the necessity and power of a distinct hijra culture and community for a people pushed to the margins, as a slightly distanced onlooker, I felt that it falls silent on how unrelenting and inflexible this culture often seems. When Revathi interacts in the world with her hijra identity, but outside of the confines of the community, the fissures between her numerous worlds are too deep to see, the loneliness almost too cruel to read about: ‘Everyday my feelings died only to be reborn and to die again.’

Written by: Disha Mullick, November 2nd 2010

My Sweet Wild Dance

kristin — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 18:00:00 +0000

By Mikaya Heart

Dog Ear Publishing

It is always difficult for me, as a writer, to review another’s work. I find sentiment and solidarity too often hold sway, making me a bit kinder than I should be to those whose ghastly prose tarnishes the craft I have spent so many long years attempting to master. As someone’s whose known both praise and condemnation in my own career, I find myself, perhaps far too often, seeking some positive contribution I can offer to a fellow wordsmith, something which at least partially redeems the frequently soul-crushing process of reading critiques of one‘s own work. After wading through My Sweet Wild Dance, reluctantly in the end and with only the reviewer’s duty as motivation, I find there is neither sentiment nor solidarity enough in the world.

The language itself is not truly horrific, but neither does it offer any literary value. The constant use of the present tense, which can offer such intensity and immediacy in the right hands, seems a meaningless affectation here. The descriptions are rather vague and well, nondescript. The much-ballyhooed dialect shift between British and American English is barely noticeable as neither is written very convincingly as a distinct dialect. And there are no sentences or passages that grab the senses or make you want to read them again to relive the experience. The words are just there.

So, language is a but not the problem. It’s the plot, the perspective, and the characters that truly offend. Although purportedly the true story of “an extraordinary and courageous woman,” My Sweet Wild Dance comes off as nothing more than New Age navel-gazing, devoid of both empathy for the other characters that people the book and any sign that either the author or the protagonist has done enough real self-reflection to confront her own perceptions or prejudices. The central narcissism of the book is best exemplified, I think, in the author’s choice to deny many of her male characters a unique identity, labeling them all John as “what matters is how they affect the protagonist, Chris, at that time period.” No female character is similarly treated; each is given her own name at least. However, none of the characters, male or female, take on any real depth or humanity. They are merely one-dimensional stage props for Chris, who manages to be only two-dimensional herself while flitting disjointedly from one poorly portrayed, stereotypical life-event to another.

The worst aspect of the book is the gratuitous misandry that simply leaps from the page. Through most of the story, we are presented ad nauseum with one detestable male character after another, not a single one given the option of being merely unlikable. Instead, men are indicted, by both implication and outright accusation, of being nothing more than child abusers, molesters, and rapists, devoid of any sympathy for or true emotional connection with anyone or anything beyond their own genitals. We do eventually see a male character with some humanity, but he is set up to apologize for his sex and is described as if he, a man of integrity, is some sort of rare species and thus further proof of the depravity of the overwhelming majority of men.

The problems only compound themselves from there as we travel into the land of New Age woo and pseudo-empowerment. But really, it’s no more worth further dissection than it is worth reading.

Written by: Melinda Barton, September 19th 2010

Lily's Odyssey

kristin — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 10:00:00 +0000

By Carol Smallwood

All Things That Matter Press

This book is such an incredibly intimate look inside one woman’s life that I was almost ashamed of myself for reading it. The author’s voice is so true in its halting, neurotic narration that it was difficult to remember that this is a work of fiction.

We first meet Lily when one of her abusers dies and the reader is gently led through her mind’s wanderings as she tries to make sense of her role as a victim of incest. From the outside, Lily could be seen as any other woman raised in the Catholic Midwest during the baby boom generation. She managed to make her way to college, get married and divorced, and find a way to support her children largely on her own.

Lily’s Odyssey is not concerned with outward appearances, however. This story is about a woman’s journey to recall childhood abuse and come to terms with the way it has changed her life. Lily not only struggles to remember the abuse itself, but how to share that information with others, if at all. As a middle-aged woman, she has managed to find an awkward but polite existence with her extended family and worries that cracking open the past in order to be true to herself may destroy these relationships forever.

The dilemmas and internal monologue ring true as Lily takes the reader into her past and her nightmares. The story is a painful one, if only because the effects of the abuse on her life are so clear in so many ways. Lily’s view of herself and the world around her has been clouded by her mind’s attempts to reconcile her family’s inability to protect her from her abusers and the tangle of emotions and fears and rational thought is a difficult one to unravel.

It is said that one in four women suffers some kind of sexual abuse in her lifetime. With those statistics, it is not unreasonable to think that there is something in this book for everyone. If not victims ourselves, we all certainly know someone who has struggled with thoughts and feelings much like Lily’s and the author’s tender, accurate portrayal of the victim’s thoughts and emotions is a powerful way to increase our empathy.

Written by: Kari O’Driscoll, September 19th 2010

Starting from Scratch: A Novel with Recipes

admin — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Susan Gilbert-Collins

Touchstone

In Starting from Scratch, Olivia Tschetter successfully defended her doctoral dissertation and lost her mother all in one day. The youngest of four siblings, Olivia moves back home to be with her father, to run away from her responsibilities at school, and to grieve. Her connection to her mother, who was an incredible cook, is food. At first, she uses food as a way to shove her pain aside, but it eventually becomes one of the ways she gets past her grief.

This is the simplest way to describe a book that is both straightforward and layered at the same time, particularly when revealing those layers would give away all the best parts. Let me just say that it’s easy to enjoy this book on a superficial level—it’s well-written, the characters are easy to relate to, and it’s a quick read—but there are also moments that can be appreciated more deeply. For example, when Olivia unexpectedly starts with an old friend of her mother’s, Winnie, she stumbles into a minefield of sorts as Winnie reveals secrets Olivia’s family has kept from her. It turns out that Winnie is estranged from her own daughter, and the parallels between the way Olivia is suffering and the way Winnie and her own daughter deal with their own issues are quite compelling. It all reminds the reader that life-changing moments are universal, and that even if we deal with things in our own way, we don’t have to deal with them alone.

Another thing I must point out (again, without giving too much away) is the way this novel pulls off having both food and abuse as its subject matter. It sounds completely absurd, yet Starting from Scratch does it in a beautifully poignant way.

Food is almost like this family’s own language; it’s the way they communicate with each other, for better or worse. As Olivia works to finish the cooking newsletter her mother was working on when she died, the reader is taken through Olivia’s mourning and her reaction to the secrets she’s learned from Winnie. Meanwhile, the way women and their families deal with abuse is at the very heart of this story. Surprisingly, one thing does not take away from the other or make the abuse seem trivial. In short, Starting from Scratch is a pleasant surprise. I found myself laughing out loud at some parts, and weeping at others. The story sucks you in and it’s over all too soon. By the end, I felt like I was a part of this family, and I wanted desperately to find out what happens to all of them beyond the point at which the story ends.

Written by: frau sally benz, August 22nd 2010

At Last

admin — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Eternia and MoSS

Fat Beats

It seems counter-intuitive by now that women rappers would rhyme about anything other than leftist politics, feminist ideals, empowerment and sexuality, and anti-corporatism. I’m clearly biased; I listen to Invincible and Missy Elliott and spoken word artists like Ursula Rucker. But in the genre that is righteous, emboldened female hip-hop, Eternia is the reigning Canadian queen. On her new album At Last, along with producer MoSS, she speaks against pay-to-play and sponsorships, confronts an abusive past, and admits she looks for love in all the wrong places.

“Pass That” is a particularly intense track, chronicling one woman’s battle against an abusive religious husband and her sixteen-year-old daughter’s sexual proclivity, reasoning, “She figures they gonna take it so why not pay for that.” Other songs address heavy issues like alcoholism (“Dear Mr. Bacardi”), single motherhood, dropping out of school, running away, molestation, abortion, and gang rape (“To The Future”).

The lyrics are tough, raw, and full of references to race (Eternia is white), competition between women (on “The BBQ,” Fergie is called “corny”), and devotion to God and family. Particularly if you’re a hip-hop fiend, you’ll appreciate “Any Man,” on which Eternia explains how she works hard, regardless of the fame she earns, and often shares the stage with the big names you already know and love. “It’s not cockiness, it’s confidence, it’s what I been through,” she explains. Elsewhere, she drops lines like “The game needs me like Jay-Z.” I may be a big fan of the Jiggaman, but Eternia couldn’t be more correct; we desperately need revolutionary ladies on the charts.

A couple of years ago, Eternia put out a T-shirt that reads, “My favorite rapper wears a skirt,” which I could easily wear with pride. Could you?

Written by: Brittany Shoot, August 11th 2010

Manhater

admin — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 00:01:00 +0000

Directed by Anthony Doublin

Canyon Falls Productions

I recall visiting a horror movie convention soon after Kill Bill had come out. Nearly every film production table had at least one "sexy lady getting revenge" movie poster predominantly on display. Attractive female murderers are the perfect shortcut to fulfilling violence and sex in films. Over the years, the number of "lady revenge" movies has dwindled.

However, there are a few stragglers being produced, like Manhater. Manhater is described as "horror... with a good, unique story," but to consider it a horror film is questionable. Instead, I consider it a supernatural film with a Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde plot, punctuated with gore and nudity.

The story is neither good nor unique. The plot is, well, this: An abuse survivor takes a magic potion from a witch, and the potion makes a demon appear. The demon kills all the men that hurt the woman, but the witch is actually involved with the woman's rapist. The rapist wants to control the demon and has a glowing necklace that he holds while talking gibberish at the demon. Yes, you read correctly.

First, kudos to the crew and performers who stuck it out until the end! I wonder if they were paid; hopefully, they were at least fed lunch. Some of the performers went by aliases in the credits. Were they embarrassed to be in this film? Also, the film score earned "Best Original Soundtrack at Idyllwild," though I hardly noticed it.

This film’s creators don't seem to have valued good production in any form. The camera work varies anywhere from poor to acceptable quality. I noticed camera shakes, awkward movements, and questionable shots. The lighting is sometimes off or completely absent. There are a few outdoor scenes in pitch-black darkness. The audio doesn't always sync up with its source. Lips are moving without sound at times, like in poorly dubbed kung-fu films. The editing is unclean. Many cuts did not mesh well with others or were abruptly cut off.

The makeup is better meant for a theatrical stage, not a film screen. Big, false eyelashes are distracting and corny on movie performers. Also, at one point, a woman has paintbrush stripes on her cheeks for blush. The acting talent ranges from non-existent to lukewarm. These performers would have shone more if they were given character roles with more than one dimension. The characters are unrealistic, unlikable, or both.

Also, there is a Token Black Female Best Friend in this film. You know, in predominantly white films, we sometimes see a black female best friend who has no real personality other than to act as a cheerleader for the (usually bitter) white female protagonist (as in the film Julie and Julia). The story gets more ridiculous by the second, the plot holes are vast, and the dialogue is vapid. The special effects, while respectable on such a low budget, are pretty dorky.

Most problematic, this film begins with a rape scene. It's obviously fake, but still graphic, and insensitive to both performers and viewers alike. If a movie absolutely requires such a scene, then it needs to do it with understanding and discretion. Later in the movie, the survivor talks to the abuser; not just once, but often, and in a mildly annoyed tone more appropriate towards someone who owes her money, not someone who has brutally assaulted her. She even accepts an invitation to join him alone in his house.

The writer of this film clearly does not understand the seriousness of sexual assault, instead confusing it with edgy sex. The fact that he botched this topic, as well as the film’s overt objectification of women and senseless gore, proves that Manhater is just another cheap combo platter of sex and violence to be devoured by stupid people.

Written by: Jacquie Piasta, August 10th 2010

A Kind of Intimacy

admin — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Jenn Ashworth

Europa Editions

In Jenn Ashworth’s debut novel, A Kind of Intimacy, the reader follows a few weeks of Annie's life. Annie is not exactly a well person. She doesn’t have much going for her either. Her father was abusive and she married early partly to leave home and partly because she doesn’t have anything better to do. She was lucky, more or less, to have met someone who could support her, who wanted to do so, who was kind, and whose worst faults were tending toward the cheap side of thrifty and wanting to have children.

Eventually the demands of family life get to Annie. She kills her husband and their baby and moves into a new house across town with little more than her cat (to whom she is attached), a trove of self-help books, and a "File" into which she organizes the wisdom from the books into an elaborate system of cross-references she can apply to daily situations. For example, how to get her neighbor’s live-in girlfriend, Lucy, out of the way so that they can realize their destined Great Love. Obviously, this doesn’t go over very well.

The fact that Annie’s perspective on, well, everything is terribly and tragically wrong slips by most of the characters until it is nearly too late. The reader, however, is permitted access to Annie’s mind. At her housewarming party, Lucy, who is young and occasionally manifests the snobbery of youth, opens a bottle of wine, pours it into a glass, swirls it around, sniffs it and then drinks. Annie sees this and wonders, scornfully, “Did she think I was going to poison her or something?” I think, for me, that was when it clicked, when I got my first jolting sense of what it was like to be Annie. The world, for her, is a somewhat bewildering place where everyone but her seems to have attended some secret meeting where they learned all the rituals and understandings that would mark them off as normal, lovable, sane and special. Annie has missed this meeting but believes she knows enough about it to resent it. Annie also doesn’t doubt her grasp on reality and trusts herself to assess the world accurately.

This is an impressive first novel. There are a few editorial errors: a dress (one important to the plot) turns into a pair of jeans and a minor character’s name changes over the course of a few pages. These are insignificant oversights. Ashworth successfully puts her reader in Annie’s place and, amazingly, the reader is able to see the plausibility—from Annie’s perspective—of Annie’s thoughts and judgments. The reader also sees just how wrong Annie gets it, cringes at and for her. I admit, I found the novel a bit stressful sometimes. There was no flaw or shortcoming in the story or its presentation; noting the chasm between Annie’s perspective and my own induced an intense sense of vertigo.

Written by: kristina grob, August 7th 2010

The Killer Inside Me

admin — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 16:01:00 +0000

Directed by Michael Winterbottom

IFC Films

The song "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)" sums up all Jim Thompson’s oeuvre. When he wrote his novels (mostly in the '50s) they were rightly regarded as violent misogynist twaddle. It was only after his death that certain misguided critics mistook his nihilistic, bad-day-at-the-abattoir style for art. Thompson’s writing has all the literary merit of pissing your name in snow. Like Mickey Spillane, he saw two kinds of people in the world: bad men and the women who love them. The mistake director Michael Winterbottom makes in his new adaptation of The Killer Inside Me is to believe Thompson’s worldview teaches us anything apart from bad taste.

In a dusty, nowhere little town in Texas, a young sheriff likes to beat women. He was raised to be bad, by his no-good daddy and his paedophile half-brother. Even his babysitter was a sadomasochist. Now, cloaked by his badge of office and spurred-on by legal impunity, he plots the death of a rich boy who manslaughtered his sibling. Since we’re in Jim Thompson-country, he can’t just kill the rich boy, of course. He must kill a few chicks along the way (because he’s bad and women want him, badly). He’s got two women in his life: a good girl and a whore (one girl, if you read Freud). They both worship him enough to inspire hate, and to turn him on to murder.

I shut my eyes when Casey Affleck beat Jessica Alba to death. Even listening for a minute was tough. This scene, which has stirred the critical backlash against the movie, is true to Jim Thompson’s lurid vision, but watching it doesn’t tell us much. In interviews, Michael Winterbottom has argued that ultra-violence is moral, because it’s unattractive to most people. The trouble is: it’s only unattractive to moral people. (Wife-beaters love watching women get punched in the face.) Does Winterbottom think we’re under some illusion about what beating a woman to death looks like? Jim Thompson wasn’t a feminist, for Pete’s sake. He wrote what he wrote because lurid violence sells. His work only seems insightful because psychos have so few thoughts. Pity the man who wants to see women battered.

As the sheriff, Casey Affleck has a coward’s smile. His signature look—like Ben Affleck if he’d killed somebody—is used to good effect here. He’s got eyes that seem to die on people. His voice is permanently curled into his throat, waiting to be kicked. Everything about him is wounded. Unfortunate women think he’s “vulnerable.” Men mistake him for a servant. But both ways of seeing him look like weakness from his point of view. His wounds aren’t there to be healed, or to be used against him. He’s long past that. His wounds are, in fact, the only reminder there is that he was once a child. For him, feelings are what he fakes, the way a hunter baits a trap.

There’s no such complexity to the women’s roles. (The old action movie maxim: “Any woman is superfluous to the plot unless naked or dead” was probably invented by Jim Thompson.) Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson do their best, but their roles are pretty much confined to the bedroom (or the grave). They are the women who’d sing "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)". Every woman in Jim Thompson’s fiction has a taste for male dominance and bloodshed disguised as sex. The only difference between a murder scene and a sex scene for Thompson is that his killers actually enjoy murder. Sex might be hot for these guys, but it’s always foreplay to death.

There is an audience for this kind of thing. In the '50s—hell, for most of human history—men wrote violent misogynist twaddle, and people lapped it up. As in rap lyrics today, there’s a supposed authenticity in boy-on-girl spite. But woman-haters are all liars. And not even interesting liars at that. Misogyny is the thinnest veil for self-doubt. Women are everywhere, after all. How big a man’s fears have to be to encompass an entire sex! (So big they dwarf him.) The makers of The Killer Inside Me know their anti-hero is a personality void, so they accentuate violence, like real misogynists. This can’t hide the littleness of the man, or how empty the movie is.

Cross-posted at Movie Waffle

Written by: James Tatham, June 12th 2010

Kanyadaan (5/14/2010)

admin — Mon, 24 May 2010 16:01:00 +0000

Directed by Ethnic Cultural Theatre

Seattle, Washington

It is with much anticipation that I attended the opening night show of Kanyadaan, a play written by Vijay Tendulkar and directed by Pratidhwani’s Agastya Kohli. The reasons for my enthusiasm were multifold; for one, I’ve been a fan of Agastya’s (and Pratidhwani’s) work for a few years now, and second, I had personally worked with all members of Kanyadaan’s talented cast in last year’s incisive political satire, Ek Tha Gadha, Urf Aladad Khan. But most of all, from what I knew of the play (and the playwright), it promised a complex plot of important societal concerns that the actors, no doubt, would find challenging to portray, and the audience, perhaps, would find equally challenging to process.

Given the challenging complexity of the characters, the performances by the cast were considerably accomplished. Jayant Bhopatkar, playing Nath, fills the stage with his booming, bombastic monologues that reek of a nauseating brand of “democratic” patriarchy. Nanda Tewari, as Nath’s wife Seva, plays beautifully, his complicit complement in maintaining the status quo, carrying that curious blend of feminist independence and practical subservience that is so characteristic of many of us empowered (Indian) women. But the actors who held my eye the most were Aditi Chaubal, playing Jyoti, and Ankur Gupta, playing Arun.

It couldn’t have been easy to step into the shoes of an abused woman, trapped between her idealistic upbringing and her misplaced muse, or those of an oppressed dalit flitting between mouthfuls of crass expletives and self-flagellating, indulgent remorse. I found my heartstrings empathetically connected with Jyoti throughout the play, beyond reason – beyond the need to understand, judge, or admonish her. And, quite paradoxically, I found Arun’s condition just as poignant; he too was an anchor for my heartfelt attention, once again, beyond my need to understand, judge, or admonish him. Both Aditi and Ankur came out on top, bringing forth with surprising ability the complexity and contradictions of these two central characters, each of whom manifests the societal conditions and conditioning that Tendulkar wants us to consider.

Bhushan Mehendale, playing the support role of Jyoti’s brother Jai Prakash, embodies to great effect the emasculation of his father’s domineering presence and the confusion and repressed frustration of an under-expressed youth. Even C.P. Ramakrishnan and Ravi Sathyam, appearing briefly as insolent sidekicks of Arun, demonstrate with their body language alone that no role is a small one. The performances left no doubt in my mind that Kohli selected a great cast and nurtured the best out of them.

In terms of storyline flow, on occasion the rapid-fire pace of the deliveries disabled me from stopping to ponder, to read more between the lines, to connect more fully to the complex characters, especially with Jyoti’s and Arun’s. I missed the whitespace – the larger canvas that might have better held and cradled the complexities and contradictions portrayed – and for this reason alone, some of the turns in the plot may have come across as somewhat simplistic and not-so-believable. Yet, a tight cadence was necessary to keep the intensity and tension of the storyline; so, achieving a fine balance was undoubtedly no mean task.

My heartfelt kudos go to director Agastya Kohli and the entire cast and crew of Kanyadaan, for taking on this challenging subject and play, and for orchestrating yet another thoughtful production for the Seattle Indian diaspora.

Cross-posted from Pratidhwani

Written by: Shahana Dattagupta, May 24th 2010

Daughters of Empire: A Memoir of a Year in Britain and Beyond

admin — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Jane Satterfield

Demeter Press

The poet and essayist Jane Satterfield writes a hauntingly discontinuous prose-poem about a sort of exile. To those of us with dual citizenship—or, perhaps, to those for whom home is two places, neither tidily reconcilable with the other—Daughters of Empire speaks poignantly to the longing for connection between past and present, mother and daughter, literary inspiration, and career frustration.

The author here teases us with the possibility of a conventional narrative of exile: what will happen when a woman who spent most of her formative years in the United States becomes pregnant and has a child while being cast aside by a prospective employer and emotionally abandoned by a narcissistic and controlling husband? Will she find in this land of her birth and ancestry an escape from the soul-deadening labor of fixed-term teaching in American institutions, and instead find joy in teaching Larkin and Plath and Heaney and Hughes to students who understand and appreciate the value of being taught by a working poet? Will she find in the geography of her own imagination the spiritual bond to the Brontë sisters that she seeks?

Our relationship to place is similarly discontinuous, and home, whatever that means, is an ongoing negotiation. Satterfield’s narrator is unstuck in time, just as she is unstuck geographically, so we get poetically rich spots of memory: “I stand on Charlotte Brontë’s front steps, thinking I’m going to be sick,” she tells us on the first page—either a vertiginous reaction to this confrontation with her nineteenth-century literary forbearer, or perhaps a bit of first-trimester nausea. And then suddenly it’s several years earlier, and she’s a different sort of exile, not quite fitting in to this group of students or that literary community brought together in American college towns. And then she’s a punk, a Johnny Rotten, but with much more ambivalent feelings towards Queen and country.

And then she’s in Corby, a “piss hole in the dead heart of England” where she was born, traveling with her mother through a reconstruction of her own ancestry and her mother’s shared dual sense of place. But then, heartbreakingly, she’s starving emotionally and perhaps physically as a mother estranged from her husband, whose Fulbright Exchange, in the mid-1990s, was in part responsible for this year in England which serves as a potent but unstable center of this narrative.

Because of the evocative power of her memory and the clarity of her language, she draws the reader willingly into this vortex. And yet, she resists closure. Does she find career fulfillment? Can she bridge the imaginative/historical gaps and construct a satisfactory home? Can she free herself from this dreadful relationship? The memoir asks instead that we participate in her desires, in her lyrical remembrance, in her evocative moments that shuttle back and forth through time, woven together by her search for identity, for her discovery of home.

Written by: Rick Taylor, April 27th 2010

From Rage to Courage: Answers to Readers' Letters

admin — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Alice Miller

W.W. Norton

Alice Miller alleges that "most people (ninety-five percent of the world population) were beaten as children." You might think these are some pretty hefty charges: so did I. This book, in my opinion, does not seem to have any purpose besides encouraging readers to read Miller's other works, and also for blaming bad parenting as the root of every societal illness.

Perhaps I would have better appreciated From Rage to Courage had I been familiar with Miller's research, or if the book provided any empirical data supporting her claims. Instead, I was inundated by Miller's recommendation that readers acknowledge the childhood abuse they suffered, even if they didn't remember it happening. This book encourages everyone to delve into their psyche to try and find some hints of abuse.

I am skeptical of Miller's proposition that ninety-five percent of the world's adults suffered childhood abuse, but what really struck me as odd in this book is the claim that victims must embrace rage and shun forgiveness to cure themselves. I believe that anger can be a very liberating emotion, and I agree with Miller that victims of abuse should acknowledge the perpetrator's role in hurting them. However, I do not think a lack of forgiveness and a permanent angry state is even remotely healthy. My experience with anger leads me to believe that when a victim holds on to grievances, she is the one punished—not the abuser. Anger leads to bitterness, and both poison a person from the inside out. Forgiveness is not something that excuses the person in the wrong: it is a means for the victim to make peace with their past and go on to live their lives without dwelling on their pain.

According to From Rage to Courage, abuse victims need to dwell on this pain in order to "free" themselves. Without an explanation as to how this is accomplished, however, the book just sounds like an exhortation to permanent resentment, without any means to get to the next step of recovery. Perhaps Miller outlines this in her other works, but as a book considered in its own right, this one doesn't stand up.

Make no mistake: child abuse is horrifying, and probably occurs much more than is reported due to the helpless nature of its victims. I fully support awareness of this issue, as there is no doubt that child abuse affects people negatively all their lives. Alice Miller's collection of her own letters just seems a bit melodramatic to affect any change, and her goal seems more to increase her book sales than to offer solutions.

Written by: Sam Williams, March 20th 2010

For the Love Of Animals: The Rise of the Animal Protection Movement

admin — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 17:01:00 +0000

By Kathryn Shevelow

Henry Holt

Most people seem to agree that on some level, animal abuse is wrong. Whether this judgment is applied equally across species, however, is another matter. One hardly has to look further for modern examples of animal rights cognitive dissonance than the public outcry against Michael Vick’s dogfighting ring. Overwhelmingly, the people most outraged are those who also continue to support factory farm systems that abuse cattle, sheep, pigs, poultry, and countless other animals in the name of convenient clothing, beauty products, and meals.

Regardless of how you justify these contradictions—whether or not you participate in the paradox—a book like Kathryn Shevelow’s For the Love of Animals puts the history behind animal rights into perspective. Using her training as a historian, Shevelow begins in seventeenth century England and teases out the nuances of the last few centuries of animal abuse and animal activism. While you may learn a lot of trivia—that, for instance, the word “vivisection” was first recognized in the 1707 Oxford English Dictionary—the content is by no means trivial.

Throughout Shevelow’s comprehensive account, early animal activists like Margaret Cavendish and Richard “Humanity Dick” Martin are introduced and colorful scenes of early London marketplaces are depicted. Like many accounts of gradual revolution, much of Shevelow’s narrative takes place in the streets, where animals were bought, sold, and beaten. Along the way, as animal cruelty in public ran parallel to the rise of domesticated pets, animals were recognized in humanistic ways. Animal performers—that is, dancing dogs and drum-beating monkeys—served to remind people that all living beings are less removed from one another than we’d like to believe. Animals were taken to court for crimes, and many were found guilty and executed. Even more bewildering, stories of “monstrous births” emerged in the early 1700s. While the obsession of women giving birth to non-human animals eventually died down, even these notably strange events proved that the relationship between animals and humans was becoming inextricably complicated.

Shevelow details the heinous attractions of not-so-distant times: cockthrowing and cockfighting, bullbaiting and bullrunning, dog and horse racing, ratting, and hunting with hounds. Though it’s tough to be objective, I’d like to assume that even the most outspoken, animal-hating carnivore might be disturbed by Shevelow’s descriptions. She also documents that even centuries ago, several prominent observers of animal-based amusements were deeply disturbed by what they witnessed.

She additionally makes mention of many contemporary issues in animal rights activism and vegetarian practice. Citing the story of Dr. George Cheyne, who restored his once doomed health by removing meat from his diet, Shevelow offers historical evidence that plant-based diets can have notable health benefits. There is also mention of religious beliefs that indicate souls moving between species. If you belong to a faith that believes in reincarnation, for instance, you’re less likely to kill animals, lest you become one in a later lifetime.

The book ends with the successful founding of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) in the mid-nineteenth century. As a history text, this one is thorough and happily ends on a victorious high note.

On the other hand, analysis of contemporary activism and food justice movements only receives a frustratingly short two-page conclusion and lacks a lot of analysis about the current state of animal cruelty in the Western world. Praising the efforts of typical figureheads Michael Pollan, Peter Singer, and PETA’s Ingrid Newkirk, Shevelow seems convinced that consciousness and change has advanced as it should. Maybe that’s why she’s a historian and I’m not. For me, progress can never come quickly enough.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, December 1st 2009

Afraid to Go Home

admin — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 07:50:00 +0000

By Baden Hill

JB & ME Publishing

Afraid to Go Home tells the story of Cathy, a successful career woman who is the head of a large company’s HR Department, but, after two failed marriages, trapped in an abusive relationship with Fred. The book’s subtitle reads: “A novel about domestic violence drawn from the true stories of women who have been tormented at the hands of others.” While the author may have researched domestic violence, Afraid to Go Home paints a picture that misses key points regarding the central dynamics of abusive relationships, and perpetuates victim-blaming stereotypes in its portrayal of the characters.

Cathy Circe (a not-so-subtle reference to the Greek goddess who lured Odysseus’ crew to their destruction) is a rape survivor whose inability to cope with the trauma prevented her from being with her high school sweetheart (and “love of her life”), Chris. She is presented as having been irrevocably damaged by the attack. While it is important to acknowledge sexual violence has life-altering consequences, what comes across in the depiction of her character is the myth that rape survivors are so injured that they cannot relate to men in a healthy way. Cathy is positioned as doomed to enter abusive relationships because she feels she deserves to be hurt, confuses abuse with love, is driven to re-live the trauma by engaging in risky behaviour, and is incapable of recognizing the danger of her situation—beliefs that place the responsibility for violence on those who are the victims of it instead of those are its perpetrators.

Fred is an openly aggressive man who is violent on a daily basis, controlling, and beats and rapes Cathy regularly. Though not initially clear in its victim blaming representation, Fred’s character is one-dimensionally evil, and the reader is given no insight into how the relationship progressed to that point. The poorly explained relationship invites the reader to question Cathy—why does an otherwise smart and successful woman marry and stay with such a monster?—instead of exposing the complicated dynamics of abusive relationships that often involve a subtle and gradual progression of various forms of violence mixed with apologies, loving charm, regret, and promises to never hurt again. Because we’ve never known Fred to be a nice guy, the reader concludes Cathy is so broken that she can’t even recognize, and thus flee from, pure evil.

There are many other similarly problematic characterizations: the overweight secretary who responds to her wedding being called off by sleeping with her boss (who only complies out of pity) and living as a crazy cat lady in a messy house and women repeatedly getting on their knees to reward a guy for doing the right thing.

In Afraid to Go Home’s 415 pages there was enough room to explore the complexities of domestic violence, as well as develop a plot and characters that could shed some light on how perpetrators manage to lure in, manipulate, and control their victims. Instead, the book invites victim blaming and is full of stereotypical female characters. While it is nice the author didn’t give in to the temptation of having Cathy rescued by a prince on a white horse at the end, Afraid to Go Home is one of those books that means well, but actually does more harm than good.

Written by: Annette Przygoda, September 16th 2009