Poetry, Personal Interest/Blog, Academic Writing (English and French)
POETRY
The Summer You Turned Eighteen
We found ourselves in a place where the crickets go all day without stopping once their leggy insistence, that jubilant hum. The sun came down easy on our bodies and we wrote letters to our parents back home out of a sense of duty. They were so small and far away, but we cared for them still. We sang the same song all day, Aud Lang Syne with words I made up because we had forgotten them all, laying there on the park bench, in the grass, by the water throwing light, near the broken fountain, in the miraculous greenhouse. Later, I fed you green olives which we bought by the pound and held shining in our hands. At night we found three sweet peppers arranged in a row on the concrete steps leading up to a public statue and you wanted to hold them, take them home. That night I fed you cool water and placed them beside you while you slept, the peppers nestled red, yellow, and orange by the curve of your back. Outside, the crickets sounded like some small eternity and I listened while you slept, and I matched your breath, and I held your hair, and I sang to you over and over again
Night Life
In your favorite dreams you watch as the things you’ve built shimmer and crumble— you are eating grapes as Rome burns, you are Ajax and the sheep are dead. These dreams come often and they sustain you.
Often you are lost at sea and stranded by a shipwreck of your own doing, all that lusty steering with your eyes closed takes its toll. You push others off the raft and open your mouth to catch the salted wind. You wake trembling and smiling, light crawling over you from an open window.
When you find yourself Medea in her cave, as you sometimes do, you haul your children up under your arms and watch the cool light glint off the knife strapped to your ankle. Your hands become hot and you pray to be quick—even you have your limits. This dream stays with you for days.
When you cannot sleep you walk to the edge of the road and watch for deer. You relish their mournful calm, that animal peace. You steal their solace and put it work like confession. If the deer do not come there is nothing to do. You need them and how they soothe you. You will not sleep that night.
You will instead walk up and down the lines of the road waiting for light and sound to come and with them clarity.
You try in this time to repent for the dreams, for the taste of grapes which you cling to even now, even as you feign remorse, even with the deer watching you from inside the woods, refusing to come to you, refusing to give up their gifts, or even to look you in the eye.
BLOG POST Written for publication HerCampus as personal interest piece
It happened quietly. It happened without fanfare, without ceremony, almost without conscious thought. Just one day, it was there. My secret style Instagram.
I wouldn’t call it an out-of-body experience, but I wouldn’t be surprised if my spirit left my corporeal being when I created it. Before this secret account came into being, I would hide my style selfies in my camera roll or just send them to my dad. But if my Instagrammed photo of an empty bag of Cheetos could get forty likes and bring joy to countless fans, why should my razor sharp fashion sense have no platform? Didn’t these style shots deserve the same lukewarm adoration of friends, family, and strangers that my other pictures enjoyed? And out of these semi-repressed musings came, miraculously, On Her College Flow.
@onhercollege flow began simply. The first picture was shot in a mirror on the eve of my first big night out at college. Public reception was ambivalent. My Junior Advisor commented: “I like da room selfie” and my high school friend Kiera said: “What is this”. I refused to explain myself to anyone who questioned me, and quietly followed my sister and some old friends. I let the others flock to me, drawn in by morbid curiosity.
I stuck with the mirror motif for a while, proud to feature my favorite campus bathrooms.
I didn’t tell any of my new college friends about it. I didn’t want them to think I was that kind of girl. Sure, I grew up in a small New York suburb but I worked subversivelywithin the systemok. I did theater and wrote poetry and most definitely called myself a feminist. I found myself justifying the existence of On Her College Flow and the validity of each post. I made efforts to ensure they wouldn’t read as “basic”, or god forbid, look like I took myself too seriously.
However, in real life I had no problem being bold about my picture taking. I staring down strangers and classmates while I held a pose, waiting for my phone’s built in timer. Teachers, townies, electricians, and churchgoers have all borne witness to several shameless acts of curated self-presentation.
There was this interesting tension between my feminist rhetoric (self-appreciation can exist separate from the male gaze! genuine self-expression can contain conflict! traditional manifestations of femininity can be subversive!) and my inherent shame. My pictures became imbued with this conflict: my fashion and my fledgling notions of self were colliding.
Sometimes what I wear is reactionary: a deliberate divergence from traditional beauty to convince myself I haven’t bought into some corrupt system. Often what I wear is lazy and purely function. But ideally what I wear is joyful; it doesn’t have to be political, and it doesn’t have to uphold all my beliefs. I can go hyper-femme one day and wear work pants the next. If I get a kick out of showing this fact to electricians, churchgoers or the Internet, it doesn’t render me self obsessed. At the end of the day, I contain multitudes and so does my wardrobe.
ACADEMIC WRITING, ART HISTORY
Female Fluidity: Issues of Multiplicity and Containment in Olympia
My mother used to tell me, “It’s a woman’s prerogative to change her mind”. She was, I think, trying to tell me something about a woman’s right to interior freedom and the necessity of having a mobility of opinion, position, and countenance. To be female has long been associated with a sense of fluidity[1], both in physical form and quality of consciousness. Unsurprisingly, her male counterpart is often linked with unyielding rigidity. The subjects present in Manet’s Olympia each embody a certain female fluidity, a difficulty of categorization that has significantly informed their reception. At the time of their exhibition, they existed largely outside the contemporary discourse that normally served to discuss and dissect them, and subsequent efforts at understanding and classification have been conflicting and frustrating. The figures depicted exist at the center of infinite crossroads, confounding the masculine desire to subsume their multiple identities into a consumable whole. I argue that the unfixed nature of the female consciousness and body is at the center of the viewer’s interaction with the piece, and is vital to a conception Olympia’s and Laure’s roles. In “What Is Female Imagery?”, a group of feminist artists in 1976 come to a tentative consensus that there is such thing as a “female sensibility”, not in the sense than any female bodied or identifying woman must or simply does create a certain kind of unified work, but rather that to exist as a woman is a distinct way to move through the world, and this is often reflected in their art. As Linda Nochlin puts it: “My experience is filtered through a complex interaction between me and the expectations that the world has of me”. The binary framework used in their discussion appears outdated now, and today it would be considered maladroit to march into a Gender Theory course and try to assert any quality or sensibility as inherently “feminine”. And yet, to be perceived as female in 1860, regardless of actual gender identity, was to interact with the world in a fundamentally different way than a male-perceived counterpart. The expectations, opportunities, and possible roles for women all differed significantly from those of men. It is with this understanding of a loosely united “feminine sensibility” that I proceed with my binary discussion of ‘female fluidity’ versus ‘male rigidity’; although gender may well be constructed, society’s larger belief in a gender binary creates a difference of lived reality for those perceived as one sex or the other, and in this sense binary gender becomes a real and vital factor in an individual’s life. The women making claims to a ‘female sensibility’ defined it not in terms of concrete style or distinct trends, but rather spoke of this ‘feminine’ unfixed, fluid quality. Lucy Lippard said of the work: “…it’s vaguer, even more impossible to pin down. There is a lot of sexual imagery in women’s art….But that’s too specific. It’s more interesting to think about fragments, which imply a certain antilogical, antilinear approach also common to many women’s work”. Olympia and Laure are similarly impossible to pin down. Their essence is doubled, refracted—they exist simultaneously as the live models who sat for their likeness and the represented figures they became. With regard to the figure of Olympia, she complicates primarily the distinction between ‘femme honnête’ and ‘fille publique’, neither a respectable woman nor a traditional courtisane. Contemporary critics sought to fix her within the bounds of prostitute, a role that was regarded “anxiously and insistently—as a unity, which existed as an end-stop to a series of differences which constituted the feminine”. Although her nudity and pose placed her within the framework of paintings dedicated to les filles publiques, her body is unorthodox: her gaze too penetrating, her hand too flexed. She shifts between varied signs of what she could be and how she should be received, and contemporary critics as well as modern viewers seem bested by desires to “…discover in the image a preordained constellation of signifiers which keeps her sexuality in place”. Much of the painting’s style and iconography, however, prevent this strict classification. The smudged corner of the mouth, the vagueness of her right breast, the fluid nature of the boundary between the two women, and the yonic imagery found at the nebulous site of their intersection all lend to the painting’s formal fluidity. Olympia is two-faced: seen either as stark white features against a dark background, or, if her subtle hair is noticed, her face becomes softer, framed by a more classical profusion of auburn. Even as we watch her, she shifts beneath our gaze. Although T.J. Clark fails to consider issues of race—a central failure that betrays his white, western framework of thought, one which he is unable to escape or even identify— his conclusions on the essential nature of the painting’s non-conforming representations apply to Olympia’s maid as aptly as they do to her white counterpart. Women have had, throughout time, a marginal role in society, one that is categorized by multiplicity: the need to be virginal, to be desirable, to function as a mother and a wife, to be revered and condemned for the expression or possession of any sexuality. To be a black woman is have an identity compounded even further by multiplicity. With regard specifically to Manet’s time, to be a black Parisienne woman in the late 19th century was to be free and yet indelibly linked to slavery. Black female bodies were objects of desire, hatred, curiosity, and supreme markers of the Other; to live as a black woman was to embody a host of symbols and signifiers, to exist as the nexus of infinite associations. Olympia’s maid inhabits the site of all these connected associations, and in doing so she renders impossible any static reading of her body and role. Her existence as a black woman shown in a painting with a white woman conjures a rich history of possible symbols and meanings, and as Clark notes, “…the more particular signifiers and signifieds are detected, the more perplexing and unstable the totality of signs becomes”. The figures in Olympia disturb fixed roles, they make fluid and uncertain what is supposed to be contained and defined, and in this way they are irrevocably linked to the female position of fluidity and the masculine desire for rigidity and control. Clark attempts to fix the figures fully within a white framework, and Gilman attempts to categorize the figure of the black female as wholly contained by the sexualized image of the Hottentot Venus. Grigsby makes her case for her own understanding of Laure’s conflicted position, but concludes with a nod to the unknowable, uncontainable nature of the work: “Such are the illusions of art”. In much the same way that contemporary critics sough to situate the painting and figures within an established discourse, criticism continues to try and stabilize the essentially shifting and fluid nature of Olympia’s subjects. They are, however, essentially unstable: they inhabit the site of coexisting and conflicting roles and associations. They shift imperceptibly between all of their possibilities. I once asked an orthodox Jewish woman who made her living as a sex educator and therapist how she contained the conflicts inherent in her life. She replied, “I don’t. I live at the center of all of my contradictions. It is the only way I can live”.
ACADEMIC WRITING, FRENCH
La Vagabonde, de Colette, est un roman qui montre une myriade de conflits idéologiques. Écrit par quelqu’un qui comprenait bien le monde qui l’entourait, le livre démontre toutes les contradictions intrinsèques dans la vie d’une femme au début du vingtième siècle. On devrait être virginale, mais aussi elle devrait satisfaire son mari. On devrait être accomplie dans les yeux de la société, mais elle ne pouvait pas poursuivre des métiers sérieux. Ces conditions créent une séparation entre les vies intérieures des femmes et les images d’eux-mêmes qu’elles doivent communiquer. Renée Néré, l’héroïne du roman, démontre cette tension entre sa vie publique et privée. Sa vie n’est pas simple ; elle parle de quelques facettes franchement, mais aux autres elle cache la vérité. Elle démontre une multiplicité de soi, et elle doit naviguer quels aspects d’elle-même elle veut partager avec le monde extérieur. Je trouve que le rôle du métier de Renée et la fonctionne de l'écriture sont deux bien angles pour analyser cette dichotomie publique et privée. Au théâtre, la séparation entre l’individuel et les spectateurs est concrète et viscéral. L’artiste joue un rôle : il communique une réalité extérieure qui diffère radicalement de sa réalité intérieure. Au même temps, il existe un sens d’intimité entre les deux groupes: les spectateurs peuvent croire qu’ils connaître la vedette qu’ils regardent. Un bon mime, actrice, ou danseuse produit l’impression qu’elle s’expose totalement. Les gens peuvent oublier qu’elle joue un rôle, qu’ils ne la connaissent pas de tout, et ils croient qu’elle est à découvert. Par exemple, considérez la lettre d’un admirateur de Renée : « …votre talent de mime m’invite à croire que vous en possédez d’autres…faites-moi le plaisir de souper ce soir avec moi » (63). Parce que il a vu Renée sur la scène, il pense qu’il connaît la vraie Renée. Il croit qu’il a accès à tous ses « talents », à sa vie privée. Mais il a été captivé par l’illusion de familiarité que Renée a produit. Après elle a lu sa lettre, Renée rejette cette intrusion dans sa vie personnelle, et elle renforce les frontières entre sa vie privée et publique. Dans une démonstration symbolique, elle ferme forcément la porte de son rez-de-chaussée, un lieu intérieur où elle peut contrôler qui peut gagner l’entrée (64). Les collègues de Renée appliquent aussi cette séparation entre les vies personnelles et professionnelles. Renée dit, au sujet du climat social au music-hall: « Le silence qu’ils gardent sur leur vie intime ressemble à un manière polie de vous dire : « Le reste ne vous regarde pas » » (91). Avec ce métier, elle peut choisir ce qu’elle veut partager avec le monde. Elle peut choisir l’information personnelle qu’elle garde et lesquels elle montre. Avant qu’elle devienne danseuse, tous les faits de sa vie étaient en exposition. Comme un couple, Adolphe et Renée étaient très connus dans l’haute société. Elle raconte le discours sur elle et son mari : « Vous ne connaissez pas les Taillandy ? Renée Taillandy a un très joli talent….il est irrésistible ! » (82). Tous les aspects de sa personne sont ouvert aux autres, et les étrangers peuvent la disséquer et jugé. Elle n’a pas la luxé de l’intimité, elle ne peut pas protéger son domaine intérieur contre les yeux extérieur. De plus, la vérité de sa vie privée n’accorde pas de toutes aux expectations des autres. Elle doit construire un fantasme public et souffrir en privé. Néanmoins, à sa nouvelle vie au music-hall, c’était soudainement possible pour Renée de crée un personnage public qui peut protéger sa soi essentielle. Prenez le cas de la danse privée de Renée. Dans cette scène, le distinction entre Renée, la danseuse, et Renée, l’être humain, est troublée. Elle danse dans une maison privée et pas au théâtre, donc elle entre dans un espace domestique pour faire son travail professionnel. Les spectateurs la connaissaient dans une dimension personnelle avant qu’elle devienne leur divertissement. Quand même, dans cette situation difficile Renée garde la contrôle de sa vie intérieure, et de sa perception de soi. Elle prend la position active de le regard : « …je les vois, et je les reconnais ! » (100). Les spectateurs deviennent les objets de son examen, et avec sa description elle direct le regard des lecteurs aussi à eux et ses défauts. On voit la femme pathétique, qui peut-être a couché avec Adolphe, décrit par Renée comme « impitoyable à ses larmes » (101). De cette manière, Renée contrôle ce que les lecteurs voient, même qu’elle contrôle ce que ses spectateurs doivent observer. De plus, Renée crée une mesure de séparation entre la danseuse que ses « faux amis » regardent, et son sens essentiel d’elle-même. Elle emploie des métaphores où elle se compare à « Un beau serpent s’enroule sur le tapis de Perse, une amphore d’Égypte…une bête féline s’élance… » (102). Quand elle danse, elle transforme. Elle implique que les spectateurs ne peuvent pas vraiment la regarder ou la juger parce qu’ils n’ont pas accès à la femme Renée. Ils regardent seulement le fantasme qu’elle fait passer, la réalité qu’elle contrôle. Elle affirme : « Ces gens-la, existent-ils ? Non, non, il n’y a de réel que la danse, la lumière, la liberté, la musique… » (102). Elle a la pouvoir de manipuler son monde extérieur et placer toute la valeur a son monde intérieur, à son sens de pouvoir et liberté. Même que Renée prend contrôle de sa réalité extérieure avec son métier, son écriture fonctionne comme un autre type de réalité elle peut diriger. Ces livres et son écriture sont un lien entre ses mondes intérieurs et extérieurs: avec lesquels elle peut communiquer et partager ses pensées intimes. Mais au même temps, son écriture peut être une manière de rejeter les intrusions et affirmer la valeur de son monde intérieur. Quand elle discute de son livre favori, La Forêt sans oiseaux, elle dit que le public ne le comprend pas. Mais elle ne se préoccupe pas des avis des autres : « Incompréhensible ? pour vous, peut-être » (82). En tout cas, elle écrit pour elle-même. Elle ne veut pas qu’un livre être clair et simple pour tout ce qui a lu. Selon Renée, un livre est un lieu pour réaliser sa propre idée de la beauté, de l’art, et de la réalité. Elle ne doit pas conformer à toutes les règles des autres ; son écriture peut être tout ce qu’elle veut. Au début du roman, Renée raconte toutes les facettes de l’écriture dans sa vie. Elle la décrit comme « la longue rêverie devant la feuille blanche », et cette phrase démontre sa joie d’être créatrice, la reine de la réalité de ses mots (68). D’être écrivaine symbolise la pouvoir de posséder son expérience de la vérité, de diriger sa réalité interne et sa manifestation externe. À la troisième partie, le livre transition à un style presque épistolaire, mais on a aussi les pensées de Renée qui entoure les lettres. Une nouvelle configuration arrive, et les lettres à son amant Maxime deviennent la marque de l’extérieur, et les pensées de Renée deviennent la manifestation de l’intérieur. On assiste à la réalité externe Renée crée pour Maxime dans ses lettres. Comme Renée lutte de comprendre ses émotions, elle utilise l’écriture pour créer distance entre cette bataille interne et les gens externes qui veulent la classifier. Avant qu’elle construit une lettre difficile à Maxime, elle décide : « Que faire ?...Pour aujourd’hui, écrire, brièvement, car l’heure presse, et mentir… » (259). Donc, elle protège ses pensées privées avec une performance de l’écriture, de la même façon qu’elle fait au music-hall. De plus, dans cette lettre « menteuse » elle écrit pour elle-même, et inclure les petits signes de ses pensées réelles. Ces signes peut-être sont « incompréhensibles » pour simple Maxime, mais je crois qu’il donne du plaisir à Renée. Par exemple, à l’une des premières lettres, elle écrit à Maxime « Tu me manques, ma chère chaleur, autant que le soleil » (240), et dans la lettre menteuse, elle se plient de la chaleur: « C’est trop de soleil, trop de lumière à la fois » (259). Elle donne des indices à ses émotions internes, mais elle choisit ce qu’elle démontre à Maxime. Avec son exécution stratégique de son métier, et son utilisation de l'écriture, Renée Néré peut garder l'accès des autres à sa vie privée; elle peut vraiment « gagner sa vie » pour elle-même. Pour une femme qui était subjugué, dévalué, et exploité, le contrôle que Renée affirme sur sa réalité était extraordinairement puissant. Dans sa vie d’une vagabonde, c’est elle qui décide de partager ou protéger ses pensées, et c’est son expérience de réalité qu’elle écrit. Comme lecteurs, nous sommes proches à sa vie très intime, mais elle ne nous donne pas tous. La Vagabonde ne nous donne pas un fin vraiment final : tout est ouvert à l’interprétation. Est-ce que c’est une fin tragique ou héroïque ? Qu’est-ce qu’elle pense aux derniers moments du texte ? Nous ne savons pas les émotions exactes de Renée, on ne sait pas ses plans précis pour l’avenir. De cette façon, elle garde son intimité même de nous, les lecteurs. Elle a le contrôle total de sa propre narrative. On ne peut pas la demande des questions, on ne peut pas donner notre avis ou essaie de la limiter. Et de cette façon, elle est vraiment libre.
ACADEMIC WRITING, ENGLISH Winner of Michael Davitt Bell Prize for Literature
To read Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow is to enter into a world of estrangement, a world where both readers and characters seem to be on the outside of some impenetrable and essential core, some crucial truth which lingers just at the edges of our perception. Artifice and conspiracy dominate; characters are united across boundaries of time, position, and specific intent by a desperate search for something real. Endless avenues to authenticity appear and deflate throughout the novel, and we watch as characters take feeble steps towards whatever they think might deliver them to a sense of the real, to return them to their central, lost humanity Katje Borgesius finds herself at the center of two similar scenarios in which other characters seek the real through elaborate sadomasochistic role-play, where erotic pain is used to facilitate a genuine experience. Both scenes constitute a path to the real that necessitates performance and blurs the line between the genuine and the controlled, and perhaps demonstrates how one can facilitate the other. At the nexus of opposition—pleasure and pain, creation and destruction, choice and submission—these characters find the potential for unity, for a glimpse of truth and entrance into the realm of the real, and the brief return of their human selves which have been so long lost to them. Part two of Gravity’s Rainbow begins the steady collapse of what has hitherto been a beacon of order: The White Visitation. As the bustle and business of the War fade into the narrative background, the organization that thrived on its structure starts to dissolve. Brigadier Earnest Pudding has begun to shirk his responsibilities, showing little care or concern for the program he was once so wholeheartedly dedicated to. As Myron Grunton puts it, “The old man’s funking!” (Pynchon 227). Pointsman devises a scheme to keep Pudding in order, to sustain in him some measure of hope or inspiration, incorporating desires pilfered from Pudding’s dreams and fantasies. In comes Katje, carefully costumed and briefed on her role, to play the part of Domina Nocturna, Brigadier Pudding’s own pseudo-Kabbalist “shining mother”, his Mistress and last love (232). In return for his memories, recollections of “myth, and personal terror”, she delivers to Pudding beatings, twelve strikes of her cane in return for his accepted confession (234). Pudding’s pain, his punishment and his reward, is contingent on this moment of shared communication, a moment of connection. As the blows fall, Pudding feels the veils drop from his world and something of the truth is revealed to him: “bound by nothing but his need for pain, for something real, something pure. They have taken him so far from his simple nerves. They have stuffed paper illusions and military euphemisms between him and this truth, this rare decency, this moment at her scrupulous feet...” (234). They have brought him away from a sense of the essential, and instead filled Pudding’s life and heart with “military euphemisms”, insolation from the truth which this moment of contact and pain so swiftly delivers. Huddled on his knees, taking the waste of another into his own being, he finds a sense of dignity. His world, so bound in a tangled web of conspiracy, power, and shifting control, has kept him from feeling connected to reality, to his fellow human, to his own sense of self. In each strike of Katje/Domina Noctunra’s cane, he is made viscerally aware of another human’s impact on his body and spirit; he confesses to her psychic pain to be cleansed by physical pain, and she delivers the contact that frees his from the “paper illusions” which cloud his life outside this cell. And yet he accesses truth through fantasy, through a performance where the woman he worships is steeped in artifice down to the last, intimate detail. It seems essential to his experience of this “rare decency” that Domina Nocturna exists only in this cell, only in this role as supreme love and supreme pain, and yet as readers we know the depth of Katje’s history; this is for her, theater.... Isn’t it? She has been instructed, at least, by Pointsman or some outside operative on how to act, what to wear, even how to shit. But moans almost escape her as she takes pleasure in watching Pudding’s pain, a current of the real that rips through her performance (234). The narrator imagines her voice mingling with Pudding’s, two joined declarations of genuine pleasure, two testaments to authentic feeling. Does Katje’s authentic pleasure negate the performative aspects of the scenario, making it a more valid experience of the “real”? Or does Pudding’s experience of it as decent truth transcend the scenario’s theatrical bounds? He seems, in fact, to be aware of the controlled dimensions of the situation, musing as he descends through his seven trials: “He wonders if Pointsman hasn’t set these up too. Of course, of course he must...” (231). Even with a dim understanding of the conspiracy at play, even with a clear guess as to his scenario’s author, he accepts his experience within the fantasy as real, surpassing the makeup and the laxatives and the theatrical trappings. The truth they deliver him to is greater than the sum of their constructed parts. What Pudding accesses through performance, however brutal or however repulsive the performance seems, cuts to the core of his tired soul and reminds him of truth, of what it is to be a human in direct, vital contact with another human. (end of sample)