Review: Whipping Girl by Julia Serano (Sandra Alland)

Whipping Girl by Julia Serano
(Seal Press)

Review by Sandra Alland

There are only a few people in each generation who truly stand out as philosophers and forward thinkers, who command attention for their intelligence, bravery and ability to communicate. Activist, feminist, performance poet, lesbian and biologist Julia Serano is one such person. Her book Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity is this decade's must-read.

Not since bell hooks has someone so turned feminism on its head and located the heart of sexism in such a revelatory way. Serano's main ideas are simple but revolutionary — that the prejudice thrown at trans women is more often transmisogyny than transphobia, and that the failure to embrace trans women, effeminate men and/or gender-conforming (as opposed to genderqueer) trans folk demonstrates a fear and undervaluing of femininity and the female.

New ideas require new words. Luckily, Serano's language is accessible, and she repeats definitions throughout each chapter. Perhaps the two most important terms she focuses on are subconscious sex and cissexual. These terms help explain the prejudice behind trans exclusion and gender entitlement (when someone believes their gender is superior to, and more natural than, others).

According to the Oakland-based Serano, our subconscious sex is hardwired to our sense of self, independent of either appearance or socialization. Serano describes being a male-to-female transsexual as, "My brain expects my body to be female." She says subconscious sex and conscious (physical) sex combine to form gender identity — and for the overwhelming majority of us, the two are the same. Such people are cissexual, as their sex/gender is aligned. Transsexuals are not in concordance, and experience gender dissonance if not allowed to bring the two together.

Transsexual is to cissexual as queer is to straight, as female is to male, feminine to masculine, person of colour to white, poor to rich. The prejudice you experience for being on the "wrong side" of any combination of these binaries varies in nature, but is similar in pain: Some people are treated as more valid than others. Serano's particular angle on this is that feminine trans women face several kinds of sexism and that feminine males also experience misogyny.

Whipping Girl has a huge range: Serano gets personal, scientific, historical, theoretical, artistic and philosophical. Her writing style fluctuates smoothly between monologue and essay as she expertly dissects sexism and cissexism in psychiatry, the medical establishment, feminism, the media, the academy, pop culture and in gay, lesbian and queer movements. Her persuasive arguments (and occasional funny moments) expose the many people and institutions that privilege the masculine over the feminine — often more so than the male over the female.

Serano successfully debunks or criticizes Germaine Greer, Bernice Hausman, Diane DiMassa, Betty Frieden, A Mighty Wind, The Crying Game, Trans America, the New York Times, gender essentialists, social constructionists, the sometimes subversion-obsessed trans/genderqueer movement and the Michigan Womyn's Festival.

The last example is of particular importance to women's and dyke communities — women need to understand that privileging "womyn-born-womyn" or those who have "experienced a girlhood" is transmisogynist and cissexist, especially when many events that exclude trans women because of supposed "male energy" allow trans men and butches.

Serano suggests that the way to ensure equality for people of all genders is to "put the feminine back into feminism." She eloquently states her belief that we must learn to value the feminine, in all its manifestations, before anything can truly improve. She also asks us to form alliances (instead of communities where everyone thinks the same) and to challenge all forms of gender entitlement, whether from heterosexuals, queers, genderqueers, men, women, trans people and/or cissexuals. Whipping Girl is a life-changing read because it offers healthy alternatives to the current fragmentation of our communities, and because Julia Serano may be the smartest person alive. 

(Review originally appeared in Xtra! August 16, 2007.)

Sandra Alland is a Scottish-Canadian writer, artist and performer. She lives in Edinburgh, where she collaborates with the intermedia fusion group, Zorras.

www.blissfultimes.ca 

Blissful Times (BookThug, Toronto, 2007)
Here's To Wang (Forest Publications, Edinburgh, 2009)

Pitch interests: poetry, short stories, novels, graphic novels, zines, poetry recordings and intermedia projects, sound poetry recordings, artist interviews, queer theory, feminist theory, crip theory, trans theory, class theory, anti-racist theory, memoirs

Contact: sandra [at] blissfultimes [dot] ca

Review: Wish I Was Here by Jackie Kay (Sandra Alland)

Wish I Was Here by Jackie Kay
(Picador)

Review by Sandra Alland

Jackie Kay made her mark in 1991 with The Adoption Papers, an autobiographical poetry collection about being a black girl adopted by a white Scottish couple. Since then, she has published three more books of poetry, the award-winning novel, Trumpet, and several books for children. But it's her collections of short stories, including the new-to-paperback Wish I Was Here, that truly establishes her as a force of nature.

Wish I Was Here is a thematic work, which at first made me wary, especially because the theme is love. But Kay's writing doesn't falter beneath the weight of such a potentially clichéd subject. She delves into heartbreak, jealousy and notions of fidelity from varied, and sometimes astounding, perspectives.

"What Is Left Behind" is a first-person narrative about a woman cheating on her husband with another woman. Rather than simply describe the lovers' interactions, Kay chronicles the love affair through descriptions of all the motel rooms the women have shared. "Room 99. Room 491. Room 22. Come in. Room, Room, Room. Oh Room. Oh God. Please. Oh my Room 55. Room with a broken curtain rail. Oh, please. Room with the vulgar wallpaper. Don't stop."

Kay skillfully moves her stories from hot to hilarious to lump-in-your-throat sad. The key to her storytelling is voice. You hear her characters clearly in your head, whether it's a young Eastern European lesbian confessing her sins to a stranger on a train, two older Scottish bears who'd risk anything for each other, or a straight Irish workman who's obsessed with his mother. Kay's grip on the personality of speech is electrifying.

She doesn't shy away from experimentation, either. Kay writes in first-, second- and third-person, and as both men and women. Sometimes she switches voice (and language) within one story. In "What Ever," Kay combines four birds with two narrative perspectives to describe the stages of an old woman's life. The section "Robin" is a monologue entirely in Scots English, a language Kay returns to throughout the collection.

"You Go When You Can No Longer Stay" and "Pruning" contemplate the little cruelties of lost love. Both are tales of lesbians whose lovers are having affairs. Kay painfully illustrates the denial we often embrace, the ways we lose ourselves in relationships and the extremes we go to in order not to be alone. And yet there is always a spark of humour and glow of hope, like when the woman in "Pruning" destroys her lover's underwear and says to the reader, "It is addictive, by the way, cutting up thongs."

Wish I Was Here moves back and forth between this kind of realism and Kay's own brand of magic realism. In the comical "Not the Queen," a Glaswegian woman is cursed with the exact same face as Queen Elizabeth II and grows tired of being mistaken for her. In the oddly moving "My Daughter the Fox," the narrator literally gives birth to a fox, and debates whether to let her run wild when she grows up.

Jackie Kay's stories are ruthlessly honest and unapologetically imaginative. There's no other writer like her. 

(Review originally appeared in Xtra! August 30, 2007.)

Sandra Alland is a Scottish-Canadian writer, artist and performer. She lives in Edinburgh, where she collaborates with the intermedia fusion group, Zorras.

www.blissfultimes.ca 

Blissful Times (BookThug, Toronto, 2007)
Here's To Wang (Forest Publications, Edinburgh, 2009)

Pitch interests: poetry, short stories, novels, graphic novels, zines, poetry recordings and intermedia projects, sound poetry recordings, artist interviews, queer theory, feminist theory, crip theory, trans theory, class theory, anti-racist theory, memoirs

Contact: sandra [at] blissfultimes [dot] ca

Review: Mothers and Sons by Colm Tóibín (Sandra Alland)

Mothers and Sons by Colm Tóibín
(McClelland and Stewart)

Review by Sandra Alland 

Instead of taking the chair across from me for our interview, Colm Tóibín sidles up next to me on the bench and drapes his arm across the cushion behind my head. When he starts to whisper conspiratorially in his Irish lilt, I feel I'm meeting an old friend.

Tóibín, winner of the IMPAC Prize and shortlisted for the Man Booker, carries with him a strong sense of the familiar, both physically and in his work. Surprisingly, this sense reaches beyond his native Ireland — even when writing about Argentina or the Spanish Pyrenees, Tóibín convinces you he's right at home.

In his recent collection, Mothers And Sons, Tóibín sets eight stories in Ireland and one in a small Spanish village. Unlike many writers, he doesn't generally evoke place by describing landscape or city streets. He prefers houses, and this is perhaps the key to some of his authenticity.

"The houses are probably without exception all real," he says. "It's hard enough making up a character, but Jesus, making up a house?"

Tóibín's house obsession may be great for his writing, but it's not so good for his wallet.

After his first novel, The South, he bought a home in the Pyrenees, right next to where the novel was set — a place he returns to in the final story of Mothers And Sons.

"The amount of emotion I've put into evoking a place, I absolutely can't lose it," he says.

He bought the Spanish house for a song, but apparently there's now another house in his favourite locale of County Wexford, and Ireland is far from cheap. "I'm not going to set novels anywhere new," he jokes. "I couldn't afford it."

Using spare and scrupulous prose, Tóibín conveys information in an almost clinical way. You'd be as hard-pressed to find a flowery sentence in this book as you would a neat ending. Even his dialogue is so clear and clean that he rarely requires words such as "she said."

While in some hands this technique could make for cold and inaccessible writing, Tóibín manages to evoke huge amounts of emotion. There is such physical and psychological distance between people in these pages, yet readers are infused with the pain of each character's unfulfilled dreams. This happens equally in "A Song," a nine-page story set in Ireland, and "A Long Winter," an 83-page story set in the Pyrenees.

"I wonder if it's about northern countries," Tóibín says. "where connections between people, between families, can be very fierce.... Love comes fiercely. But they're not used to hugging each other, kissing each other. Things are withheld. People are withdrawn, stubborn. Everybody knows something that's surrounded with silence."

This is true of all the stories in Mothers And Sons, but perhaps most distilled in "A Song." When discussing this story, Tóibín talks of the extreme bitterness of family breakups in Ireland, where divorce was not legal until the 1990s. The plot is simple, but the tension high: Noel, a 28-year-old musician, stumbles upon a folk performance by his estranged mother. They've had no contact for 19 years; his father returned her letters unopened. Suddenly faced with an opportunity for reconciliation, Noel is paralyzed.

"If I was a really good writer," Tóibín laughs, "I would have him go up to her and say the right thing, anything, and then the next part would be, 'The next day they had lunch together.'"

Withholding that conclusion is precisely what makes Tóibín excellent. It's the sense of longing, of the impossibility of knowing your own family, that draws readers into novels such as Blackwater Lightship and The Story Of The Night.

Difficult parent/child interactions are a strong focus in Tóibín's novels, but he had written four stories in this collection before he noticed the commonality. It was only when he became stuck with a story about a widow, and found a way out through introducing her son's point of view, that he chose the book's title. Thanks to this organic process, the theme never feels forced.

"There's a very elemental relationship," he says, discussing the recurring parent/child theme. "Anyone who's been through illness and the death of a parent... I've never read about it properly. I've never imagined it properly. It isn't ordinary, it isn't about missing somebody. The cells in your body are actually doing something, having an emotion of their own."

"Three Friends" opens with Fergus studying his dead mother in the funeral parlour. Tóibín's description of how death robs the body of personality is unparalleled in its poetry. The sense of the unknowable parent that permeates the book is made larger and terribly permanent in those moments near the coffin. There's also a quiet, visceral logic when Fergus goes to a rave and seeks solace through sex with his friend, Mick.

Tóibín views being a gay man of the pre-adoption rights generation as another cause for his parental focus. "Maybe if you're a gay son you can see it more clearly. It's different than when you have nine children of your own and you end up writing about your children. There's greater intensity in how you imagine it, remember it."

Although he says elements of certain stories are "true," he adds that, "they're not exactly autobiographical, in the sense that I never managed to get my mother into a book. Because she was really more interesting than any of the characters I've ever managed to present. She had a great way of talking and she was very funny, very independent."

Tóibín may not feel he has fully captured his mother, but parts of the woman he describes to me certainly emerge throughout the book. Tóibín is rarely satisfied with his writing, and constant self-critiquing accounts for his high level of accomplishment. He once wanted to be a poet, but considers himself incapable of mastering that form. Arguably, his understanding of poetry is what makes his prose so rich.

After five novels, five nonfiction books and one play, this is Tóibín's first collection of short fiction. He remains unconvinced of his talent.

"When I started to write, I wrote short stories, but they were really no good," he confesses. "I stopped writing completely. I thought that whatever magic wand you need to make short stories, I don't have it. I'm still not sure I do."

Apparently he has more magic than he thinks. He seems to have forgotten he wrote one of the stories in this collection in 1979, the year his mother died, when he was only 24, meanwhile, Mothers And Sons continues to garner international acclaim.

Despite his misgivings, and the fact that writing short fiction is no way to make money, he's determined to stick with the form. There was some pressure to make "A Long Winter" into a novel, or to market it separately as a novella, but he would have none of it.

"I thought, 'Just leave this the way it is,'" he says. "This is the story. Because if you start to think commercially, you'd really be better to get drowned. But also I could get something right, for once in my life, of that length." And he really has. "A Long Winter" is one of the most haunting tales of love and yearning you'll find; it couldn't have succeeded at any other length.

The vastly different voices, points of view and circumstances Mothers And Sons tackles are a testament to the breadth of Tóibín's skill. His next project is a novel — after all something has to pay for those houses — but stories may be where he proves himself a master. 

(Review originally appeared in Xtra! March 15, 2007.)

Sandra Alland is a Scottish-Canadian writer, artist and performer. She lives in Edinburgh, where she collaborates with the intermedia fusion group, Zorras.

www.blissfultimes.ca 

Blissful Times (BookThug, Toronto, 2007)
Here's To Wang (Forest Publications, Edinburgh, 2009)

Pitch interests: poetry, short stories, novels, graphic novels, zines, poetry recordings and intermedia projects, sound poetry recordings, artist interviews, queer theory, feminist theory, crip theory, trans theory, class theory, anti-racist theory, memoirs

Contact: sandra [at] blissfultimes [dot] ca

Review: Art on Black by d’bi.young (Sandra Alland)

Art on Black by d’bi.young 
(Women’s Press)

Review by Sandra Alland 

"I write when I see injustice," says 28-year-old d'bi young. "I also write when I need to celebrate."

In the past five years this powerhouse has performed in and written seven plays, recorded four CDs, produced a film and been on TV's Lord Have Mercy. Now she's launching her first book, Art On Black.

Some of young's poems can be seen as scripts for performance, indeed several were part of her various plays and recordings. Young is as gripping on the page as she is performing; she holds her own as a text-based writer.

"If I can access the story on the page, then that's good. If I can access the story on the stage then that's good," she says. "How each person experiences each of those spaces is dependent on their life experience."

But young questions the primacy given to publishing: "All of a sudden you become an authority on something. Which goes to show that classism is alive and well. I try not to limit how I create. I have to admit though that I like writing aloud and oral tradition is what I prefer."

Much of Art On Black is dub poetry, a political and rhythmic Jamaican form; it's also written in "Jamaica nation language." For those unfamiliar with dub, reading is a good introduction. It's similar to experiencing Irvine Welsh's Scots in Trainspotting: You may need subtitles for the movie, but the book poses no such challenges. Young's writing is often phonetic, giving clear indication of both meaning and pronunciation.

With young (as with Welsh), nonstandard pronunciation, grammar and spelling is neither dialect nor stylistic device, but instead an assertion of language as power.

"In the Jamaican context the use of nation language in dub poetry is a direct resistance to racist, classist, misogynist colonial oppression... it is a revolutionary act and a liberational act. Its use is particularly necessary in creating dialogue around the legitimization and validation of people's hybrid expressions. Imperialism has not disappeared so it remains important that we celebrate the ways in which we resist enslavement by writing in our languages."

Art On Black isn't all dub. There are also succinct and meditative pieces, some almost haiku-like. Young shifts easily from the vernacular to the sublime. She delivers a long narrative grounded in a naturalistic lyric, then flies off into the abstract.

Also notable in a first book of poetry is that young moves beyond the confessional first person to embody other experiences. She has equal grace with truth and fiction, a talent that takes many poets decades to master.

If you're torn between reading or watching young, you can do both for the launch of Art On Black. She'll be performing with her band, dubbin.revolushun.gangstars, as well her mother Anita Stewart and Lillian Allen.

"As a young queer black woman, to know that Lillian Allen came years before talking about similar issues, grounds me in the knowledge that I am a part of a long legacy of resistance and storytelling.

"I grew up watching my mother tell stories. The biggest lesson mom taught me was integrity. No matter how poor, how alienated, how other you are, you always have the choice to act with integrity." 

(Review originally appeared in Xtra! March 2, 2006.)

Sandra Alland is a Scottish-Canadian writer, artist and performer. She lives in Edinburgh, where she collaborates with the intermedia fusion group, Zorras.

www.blissfultimes.ca 

Blissful Times (BookThug, Toronto, 2007)
Here's To Wang (Forest Publications, Edinburgh, 2009)

Pitch interests: poetry, short stories, novels, graphic novels, zines, poetry recordings and intermedia projects, sound poetry recordings, artist interviews, queer theory, feminist theory, crip theory, trans theory, class theory, anti-racist theory, memoirs

Contact: sandra [at] blissfultimes [dot] ca

Review: The Children of Mary by Marusya Bociurkiw (Sandra Alland)

The Children of Mary by Marusya Bociurkiw
(Inanna Publications)

Review by Sandra Alland

In our personality-obsessed world, it seems unlikely that someone who isn't a superstar could have written one of the year's best books. But Marusya Bociurkiw has done just that with her first novel, The Children Of Mary.

What begins as a typical tale of an immigrant family surviving Canadian hardships quickly becomes a breathtaking map of the long-term effects of trauma. The Children Of Mary is the story of three generations of Ukrainian women. The book has two narrators — Sonya and her grandmother Maria — and alternates time and place, mainly from Winnipeg to Toronto, from 1930 to 2000.

As teens in the '70s, Sonya and her sister Kat join the Children Of Mary, a religious group for Ukrainian and Polish Catholic girls. Kat is obsessed with sacrifice, going as far as to pierce Sonya's hands and feet to make stigmata. After this incident, Kat goes to spend time with her estranged father, and Sonya with her herb-boiling grandmother.

When the girls are reunited, something has inexplicably changed. Kat throws herself into the spirit of the '70s, enjoying sex and drugs, but her teenage life soon spins out of control. Eventually, she stops talking to her family altogether, then disappears. Soon Sonya finds out Kat has died in a car accident. This is where the book truly begins.

Bociurkiw is not as concerned with plot as with the aftermath of plot — with loss and grief and the long fingers of memory that reach into our lives years after a difficult experience. Sonya's life continues, but is constantly infused by the past. Everything that happens as she becomes an adult occurs beneath the shadow and mystery of her sister's life and death.

Although this novel is mainly Sonya's story, her grandmother is also a huge presence. Maria is the voice of tradition and history. From the time she steps off the boat, she struggles to protect her family. Bociurkiw creates all of her characters fully and richly, and is equally convincing in bringing to life a teenager and an old Ukrainian Baba. Her style is both funny and moving, poetic and down-to-earth. She has an exceptional ear for dialogue, expertly capturing the idiosyncrasies of speech.

Bociurkiw also offers us a smorgasbord of Canadian dyke and activist history: female Trotskyists in '70s Winnipeg who believed women's lib was counterrevolutionary; socialist feminists in '80s Toronto who naively idealized a woman-centric world; '90s lesbians who began the obsession with babies and marriage. Bociurkiw takes us through the bars and political scenes of each decade with equal measures of humour, tenderness and critique. There is no nostalgia here, no oversimplification. Bociurkiw weaves issues of class, gender and race into the book in refreshingly complex ways.

Historical novels can be weighed down by the clunky insertion of facts. But Bociurkiw guides us through the racialized forced labour and resulting socialist uprisings of Depression-era Canada with the same ease that she recounts the history of the women's movement. She has such a knack for getting inside of things you'd believe she's been around a lot longer than she has.

The central image of The Children Of Mary is the mythological rusalky, Ukrainian river spirits who steal children. The presence of rivers is constant — the flooding Red in Winnipeg, the many buried rivers of Toronto. Bociurkiw reminds us of the changeability of life and to look beneath the surface of our histories. But she also cautions that there is a time to just let go and let things wash over you.

The Children Of Mary is a masterfully written novel about the search for truth and redemption, the constant process of healing and how bittersweet the journey can be. 

(Review originally appeared in Xtra! December 7, 2006.)

Sandra Alland is a Scottish-Canadian writer, artist and performer. She lives in Edinburgh, where she collaborates with the intermedia fusion group, Zorras.

www.blissfultimes.ca 

Blissful Times (BookThug, Toronto, 2007)
Here's To Wang (Forest Publications, Edinburgh, 2009)

Pitch interests: poetry, short stories, novels, graphic novels, zines, poetry recordings and intermedia projects, sound poetry recordings, artist interviews, queer theory, feminist theory, crip theory, trans theory, class theory, anti-racist theory, memoirs

Contact: sandra [at] blissfultimes [dot] ca