Author: mascara

Sergius Seeks Bacchus

by Norman Erikson Pasaribu

translated by Tiffany Tsao

Giramondo

ISBN:9781925818109

Reviewed by DMETRI KAKMI

Born to a Muslim father and a Protestant mother, Norman Erikson Pasaribu was raised in Jakarta, Indonesia, but his roots lie in the ethnic Christian Batak community of Sumatra. Though he writes in Indonesian, Pasaribu’s poetry collection Sergius Seeks Bacchus (translated by Tiffany Tsao) is a vehicle for queer voices outside western Anglophone experience, offering a glimpse into a world that is all too real for non-conforming individuals in much of the contemporary world.

As of this writing, in more than seventy countries it is a crime to be gay. In ten it incurs the death penalty, and in no country in the world are LGBTQI people treated equally under the law. Exposure, humiliation, forced medical intervention to affect a ‘cure’, and curtailment of basic freedoms are everyday realities. ISIS tossed gays from minarets, and in Chechnya men and women suspected of homosexual practices are incarcerated in concentration camps. In parts of Indonesia, homosexuality is illegal under Sharia Law and punishable by flogging. 

This in effect is the shadow under which Pasaribu writes—the kind of world western urban gays might believe was left behind in the 1970s, with the rise of gay liberation. And although the poet writes about Indonesia, his references are recognisable and relatable because they are drawn largely from a western pop culture ethos that pulls in television, magazines, social media, as well as the Judea-Christian tradition. Even Dante Alighieri gets a look-in with poems such as “Inferno”. “Purgatorio”, “Paradiso”, and “La Vita Nuova”, representing the symbolic journey of ascent and renewal that is at the heart of the book.

From the outset, however, Pasaribu evokes the spirits of Sergius and Bacchus, two early Christian martyrs who, like Saint Sebastian, have been absorbed into the global male queer sensibility. Mixing defiance and submission, all three are part victim, part rebel, true believers who suffer for their convictions; and, therefore, transcend oppression and persecution. As seen in the eponymous poem, death is not final but a doorway to redemption.

Snake-like, you shed your short-lived skin
and commence/continue your quest. Now the light from on high

passes through you. You’re luminous. Meanwhile, out west
in decrepit Rome sits Galerius, oblivious his end is nigh.

You seek your beloved — he appeared to you in your cell,
his body glowing silver as he whispered, Endure,

for I will always watch over you. With him you will rise
up to heaven and wonder at how familiar

it all feels. Hand in hand, you two will stroll the streets,
introducing one another to everyone you meet.

(p.5)

Far from saying homosexuals are better of dead, Pasaribu disavows doctrinaire notions of martyrdom in favour of an earthly paradise in which same-sex couples walk hand-in-hand without fear. His lines are metaphor for a lapsed Christian who follows in the footsteps of gay club anthems like ‘Go West’ by the Village People (later covered by The Pet Shop Boys) and ‘In the Evening’ by Sheryl Lee Ralph.

An admission. As an atheist who has lived most of his life in Australia, I had trouble getting my head around the notion that gay people continue to hide in the 21st century, especially to appease religious dictates. It seemed retrograde, like reading a book about homosexuality from the 1950s. But such is Pasaribu’s sleight of hand that he quickly popped my insular bubble to remind me what life would be like if I still lived in Turkey, where I was born. Indeed, most of my Turkish gay friends seek shelter in the closet or sham marriage.

The most revealing poem in this regard is ‘On a Pair of Young Men in the Underground Car Park at fX Sudirman Mall’. Here two young men sit in a Toyota Rush ‘parked in the corner of level P3,/stealing a little time and space for themselves,’ and poignantly ‘exchanging kisses wide-eyed — keeping watch as one/for security guards or janitors’ that might interrupt their stolen moments. 

Two things stand out in this cornerstone poem. First, the poem recalls the tone set by C. P Cavafy, the Greek godfather of all queer clandestine confessionals. Second, the secretive location, (simultaneously public and private), brings to mind early Christians worshipping in catacombs beneath Rome streets, awaiting their turn to rise and take over. 

Literally and metaphorically driven underground by unorthodox desires, Pasaribu’s primary stance is seeking; his is a restless questing as his cast of characters search for a shared history that is textually present but remains elusively out of reach. And because the queer body politic walks a fine line between visibility and invisibility, acceptance and rejection, it could be said that this collections is about absence in presence, and presence in absence. 

Despite advances in some parts of the world, the homosexual is still contested territory. Both present and absent in society, the homosexual is made painfully visible and inextricably invisible through obsessive, circular, discourse that seeks to simultaneously comprehend and to exclude. This contradiction is central to Pasaribu’s poems. Caught in the crossfire are men and women who continue to assert the validity of their lives against a tyrannical ideology.

The other emblem Pasaribu draws on is the tree—not surprising, given the book’s original title was Like Trees. But Pasaribu had a last minute change of heart, perhaps to align the book with evolving queer narratives; and, more important, to signal that in each of the fifty-nine poems the emphasis is on pairing, bringing people together, whether in love, quest, or Socratic dialogue.

As an animist, I lean more towards trees than to Christian iconography. That is just as well since the tree is a universal archetype that can be found in different traditions around the world. They are symbols of physical and spiritual nourishment, transformation, liberation, and union. Moreover, Jungian psychology sees the tree as a symbol of individuation, bringing together the feminine and masculine principles.

In light of this, it is interesting to follow Pasaribu as he weaves a path between doctrinaire religion and tree-worshipping paganism. This is best seen in “He and the Tree” where an individual stands at the border of civilisation and the natural world, seeking forgiveness from the tree that shelters his car from the sun in the company parking lot. As the tree listens, it remembers his friend who was ‘ripped from the earth for being too close to the foundation’, thus losing a chance to tell his friend ‘how much he loved him’.

If he were here, he would take him to a church. At the altar
they would be joined together before god, who had three branches
— like a tree — and their children would fill the lot, every
single square inch, so that someday everyone who passed
would think a forest had sprung up in the city’s heart.
The man hugged the tree and tree hugged the man.
(p.4)

This poignant, wryly observed poem would have been an ideal way to end the collection. It brings together the book’s main symbolic and ideological positions in an act of compassion and empathy that yields fruit; and that in a way is what Pasaribu hopes to achieve in this slender but weighty tome that both affirms and transcends the classification of queer poetry.
 
 

DMETRI KAKMI is a writer and editor based in Melbourne. For 15 years he worked as a senior editor at Penguin Books. His fictionalised memoir Mother Land was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards in Australia; and is published in England and Turkey. He is the editor of the acclaimed children’s anthology When We Were Young. His new book The Door and other Uncanny Tales will be published in 2020.

Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

by Amanda Montell

Black Inc.

ISBN: 9781760640958

Review by TAMARA LAZAROFF
 
 
Wordslut, as the ironic title suggests, is a book about language, gender and power by debut author, Amanda Montell, an LA-based self-professed linguistics nerd, feminist and also magazine features editor. It’s no surprise, then, that the writing is entertaining and that Montell is able to elucidate in a concise, relatable manner the precise ways in which ‘… people use language to express gender, how gender impacts how a person talks, and how their speech is perceived’ (4). In short, she demonstrates how words are inherently social and political tools. And if anyone has any doubt about this, Montell cites a 2002 legal case in Kansas Supreme Court where the dictionary definition of woman prevented a transgender spouse from inheriting her deceased husband’s estate.

Montell continues to illustrate her arguments by mining history and making use of other case studies in the book’s eleven chapters, which cover topics such as cursing while female, girl talk, how to confuse a catcaller, and the struggle of being a women who speaks in public. She also conducts interviews with leading North American sociolinguists, such as Lal Zimman, Deborah Cameron and Sonja O. Vasvári, Montell’s former NYU professor. The book is certainly well-grounded and well-researched.

In the first chapter, for instance, Montell, reveals the etymology of various English slur words usually reserved for women, which refer most commonly to either desirability, ‘evilness’ or promiscuity. One of these words is ‘slu’t. Apparently, in the Middle Ages ‘slut’ referred, fairly innocuously, to an untidy woman or man (29). But, Montell asks, even if contemporarily meant to offend, why is this slur and so many other slur words so enjoyable to say out loud? Well, studies show that, phonetically, short and plosive sounds and stop consonants, such as b, p, d and t, are human favourites from birth. Thus, reclamation and reappropriation, Montell believes, is key, and is, in fact, what is already happening. Terms like bad bitch – ‘a confident, desirable woman (40-1)’ – and the chicer, Frencher-looking ‘heaux’ instead of ‘ho’ are currently being used as terms of endearment and humorous affection between women, thanks mostly to speakers and creators of African-American Vernacular English.

So, words can and do change in meaning, Montell wants to stress. Sometimes slowly, but also sometimes quickly. To take an example, she asks us to recall the word ‘suffragette’, which, when it was first coined by political opponents, was intended as a smear and referred to the ‘husbandless hag[s] who dared to want to vote’ (42). However, activists immediately ‘stole’ the term for their campaign, and now the label connotes qualities such as courage, honour and strength. If anything, this is Montell’s aim in Wordslut: that women, and indeed any other groups oppressed by language, continue to consciously take language into their own hands in order to verbally, as they say, ‘smash the patriarchy’.

Another area that Montell suggests women can take linguistic action is in describing the act of sex. Disturbingly, as a beginning reference, she cites, British slang lexicographer, Jonathan Green’s collation and study of terms used for male and female genitalia spanning from the 1500s to 2013. (Interestingly, he collected 2,600 word items, more words than were in the first English dictionary.) But more to the point, Green was looking for patterns, and what he found was that the penis has been, over five centuries, most commonly described as some kind of weapon, and the vagina, a passageway, a passive void. Furthermore, terms for intercourse were more often than not a way of saying ‘man hits woman’ (256). Montell sums up: ‘…our languages most potent phrases… paint a picture of women, men and sex from a cisgender dude’s perspective’ and ‘… portray… sex as… violent’ (205) What about instead, offers Montell: ‘We enveloped all night… I sheathed the living daylights out of him… it would be a real head-scratcher’ (257). Alternately, she goes on, could some inspiration be taken from trans folk who self-identify their own genitalia – venis, diclit, click (268) – and their own sexual experience? Overall, this is what Montell thinks is needed:

A discourse of sex as pleasure… acknowledging women as active desiring and sexually assertive subjects, not necessarily centred around the erect penis, will challenge and confront established power structures … a new mythology, one which speaks about mutual exploration, communication, discovery, and pleasuring one another, where penetration is not an end unto itself, but one of the many possibilities for erotic enjoyment.’ (Crawford, Kippax and Waldby in Montell, 268).

In subsequent chapters, Montell takes further inspiration from the linguistic creativity and inventiveness of queer communities. She gives the example of gay men in the Phillipines who have developed a particular, ever-changing lexicon called swardspeak, which ‘combines imaginative wordplay, pop culture references, malapropisms and onomatopoeia’ (242). Then, in the early to mid-twentieth century, there were the British gay men who used a particular vocabulary called Polari, which contained several hundred words and was a ‘mix of London slang, words pronounced backwards, and broken Romani, Yiddish and Italian’ (248). It, like swardspeak, was mainly used to identify speakers as homosexual and also as a protective device, but Polaris was ultimately discarded when homosexuality was legalised in 1967.

Lesbian slang and/or secret codes, on the other hand, writes Montell, are largely unrecorded or absent prior to the 1970s, mostly due to the fact that lesbians were once socially, historically and even linguistically invisible. Unbelievably, the word ‘lesbian’ was not added to the Oxford English Dictionary until 1976, and even then its usage was illustrated with this chilling example sentence:

‘I shall never write real poetry. Women never do, unless they are invalid, or lesbians, or something’ (281).

Nevertheless, second-wave feminists – lesbian or not – were incredibly productive and wrote umpteen feminist new dictionaries, transforming patriarchal speech ‘into a language for and about women’ (275). The most famous, Montell notes, was Mary Daly and Jane Caputi’s Websters’ First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language (1987). It includes revamped definitions such as this:

HAG: A Witch, Fury, Harpy who haunts the Hedges/Boundaries of patriarchy, frightening fools and summoning Weird Wandering Women to the Wild (in Montell, 276).

And then there were those who invented whole new feminist languages, such as the linguist, Suzette Haden Elgin, who coined words to sum up what she thought to be ‘common physical, social, and emotional experiences shared by women, which were otherwise unspoken or would take multiple … sentences… to describe’ (279). One of Elgin’s head-nodding terms is this: radiidin, ‘…which translates to “a non-holiday”, or an occasion generally thought to be a holiday but is actually a burden due to women having to cook, decorate, prepare for so many guests single-handedly’ (279). The entire final chapter of Montell’s book is devoted to these second-wave feminists’ ambitious and expansive linguistic undertakings.

In many senses, Wordslut is a carrying of the torch, a continuation of these earlier feminists’ work. Like her forebears, Montell shows and gives women ‘the knowledge to reclaim the language that for so long has been used against us’ (20). She sees language as the next frontier of gender equality and her book has plenty of suggestions for how to take charge. One, as recent research has indicated, is this: for women in the public eye or in positions of authority, the best approach is, rather than listening to spin doctors and life or voice coaches, simply to be oneself (225). This is advice that Montell certainly takes on herself. Readers will enjoy her shameless humour, the intellectual stimulation, historical detours, current-day relevancy and the way her book deconstructs social norms in many unexpected ways. Ultimately, Wordslut is hopeful. And for those who want more, there is a TV adaptation coming soon.
 
 
 
TAMARA LAZAROFF is a Brisbane-based writer of short fiction and creative nonfiction. She has a particular interest in hidden histories, the migrant experience, feminist and queer themes, oral storytelling traditions and celebratory stories of social interconnectedness.