Roy Kiyooka (1926-1944)

Canadian artist also discovered at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Chris Cran (1949-)

Discovered at Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

Marianne Werefkin (1860-1938)

Couldn't choose... they are all so good. 

Tilly Lawless, Nothing But My Body

Tilly Lawless's feminist novel Nothing But My Body is about many things: sex and sexuality, class, race, immigration, gender, colonialism, climate change, addiction, mental health, physical health and bodily risk, femininity and masculinity, love, relationships, heartbreak, infatuation, friendship, motherhood. Like her narrator, Lawless is a queer Sydney-based sex worker and shields little from her reader, explicitly chronicling "Maddy's" (we don't learn the narrator's real name and are only given her work name) days at work, a variety of clients with different stories, bodies and treatment of her and her body. 

Nothing But My Body's narrator challenges middle-class assumptions  about intent, desire, money as well as intelligence, as "Maddy" surprises clients with her knowledge of history (and her degree) and discussions during sex on things like GDP or medical tests and precautions. Lawless is not one for easy answers and that is because easy answers are not true or real - she pushes back against people's urge to neatly classify things as one thing but not another (such as the different shapes and forms of queerness or the inconsistent and impure workings of pleasure) bred from the impulse to facilitate their own more comfortable digesting and understanding of that which they cannot make sense of or which scares or threatens their stability or sense of self. 

This book is at once so unfamiliar to me, both personally and geographically—the Australian landscapes, animals and wildfires entirely unavailable to me in my own experience, and not readily accessible in my imagination—and yet is incredibly relatable and tender. "Maddy's" sense of humanity and compassion for the people she encounters is felt throughout and she considers the hardships or experiences of her friends, other sex workers (and how their circumstances differ from her own, for example as an immigrant or older woman), and some of her clients, such as a man who spent years at a detention centre seeking asylum. Through her capacity for love and her ultimate resolve to live, even in the face of climate change, coronavirus, and personal sorrow, "Maddy", who wants to become a mother, finds cause for hope, again and again. 

Michael Pederson, Boy Friends

What an absolute treat to see Michael Pederson read from his beautiful non-fiction book Boy Friends alongside the brilliant Hollie McNish reading poems at Storysmith this week. I adored Boy Friends - it is an incredibly tender, hilarious and deeply human book about how Pederson dealt with the enormity of grieving the loss of his dear friend and artistic collaborator, Scott Hutchison, whose music I have adored for years. Pederson is generous with his reader, who is there with him at times, sitting at the table enjoying wine and a delicious meal with chatter and closeness of beloved friends or with a murky mind, mourning that which has incomprehensibly become gone. 

Pederson's approach to writing about grieving is largely to write about joy. He also digests the absolute loss of Hutchison this in part by revisiting male friendships of his past that, for one reason or another, are lost or no longer part of the fabric of his current life but have shaped him in a crucial way. Breaking the taboo of male intimacy and love between friends, Boy Friends offers a new proposal for male love that is compelling, full and liberating that it makes you wonder why men have wasted so much time not telling each other I love you.

 

Subversive Iranian Documentary at The Cube

Subversive Iranian Documentary at The Cube was a fantastic evening, screening four Iranian experimental (yet largely government commissioned) documentary films from the 1960s, that subtly subvert expectation and/or their brief in order to critique national ideology as set by the establishment, which sought to bring the masses along with them in their narrative of an illustrious and proud history backed by set of fixed moral values. 

The event was curated and presented by Ehsan Khoshbakht, who restored these important films in Bologna—some of which were screened in their fully restored format for the first time this evening—and eloquently provided background to the films, their makers and the history of experimental filmmaking in Iran. The evening was especially poignant in light of the recent death of a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, after being arrested in Tehran by the morality police for allegedly violating laws on hijab covering. 

The first two films, commissioned by the Iranian government, were The Hills of Marlik (1963) and The Crown Jewels of Iran (1965) directed by self-taught Ebrahim Golestan, who has spent more than the last four decades living in the UK and whose 100th birthday is upcoming next month. Commissioned by the Shah, The Crown Jewels of Iran was largely censored, so that the increasingly critical and sardonic voiceover was removed during public screenings, with only a couple of uncontroversial and contextual sentences retained. 

Next came The Night It Rained (1967), commissioned by the Ministry of Arts and Culture, directed by Kamran Shirdel, which told the story, by way of contradictory narratives, of a village boy from Gorgan who may or may not have heroically stopped a train in a heavy rainstorm after a bridge collapsed. The interviewer speaks to several different people with different professional or community roles that are related (some more tangentially than others) to the mysterious event, including journalists, railway operators, the boy's school teacher, neighbours in the village, the police, etc., each of whom have competing convictions. We never learn what actually happened that night and, of course, the point is that the truth is unreachable as no storyteller can be trusted, each bearing motivations deliberate or unconscious, corrupt or naive. Indeed, the film repeatedly cuts to the hands of an elderly women for a split second, as she fingers prayer beads, spluttering "lies, a pack of lies!". 

The final (brilliant) film, The House is Black (1962), is feminist poet Forough Farrokhzad's only film, as she unfortunately tragically died in 1967 at the age of 32 in a car accident. Farrokhzad takes the viewer to a leprosy colony in Iran, and while she does not shy away from showing the disfigured and misshapen bodies of members in the leprosy community, her treatment of these bodies, indeed people, is saturated with care, compassion and humanity. Farrokhzad's portrayal is far from grotesque and exploitative; her narrative is neither ethnographic, voyeuristic or objectifying. Instead, she brings out the unique beauty of the colony inhabitants, their pleasure in playing ball together, dancing and singing, being treated by attentive and hopeful doctors, or learning in school to express themselves. While there is a dark undertone throughout the film—her voiceover poetically positing thoughts on death, God, darkness, blackness—it isn't quite as bleak as one might think. More than anything, The House is Black is a film about extraordinary beauty, unity and tenderness. 

Guadalupe Nettel, Still Born

I have just finished reading Mexican author, Guadalupe Nettel's novel, Still Born, after having heard her speak at a book event at Standford's this week in Bristol. This book blew me away and brought together so many themes I have been thinking about lately, while also expanding on them in ways I hadn't considered: ambiguous motherhood, motherhood and choice, freedom/independence vs motherhood as consuming/oppressive, violence against women and femicide, and the kinds of communities and sisterhood that sprout from collective trauma.  

Nettel's novel interweaves the stories of various kinds of 'motherhood' throwing into question what counts as a 'mother'? Are you a mother if you baby dies? Are you a mother if you are not biologically related to a child? In the talk on Thursday, further questions arose in this regard: are you a mother if you use a surrogate? are you a mother if you are a surrogate? are you a mother if you give your baby up and don't know them as they grow up? 

The novel aptly points out that while there is a word for a person who has lost their spouse (widow/widower) there is no word for a parent who has lost their child and that in language, some things have been not named, perhaps because they feel unnamable. Nettel pointed out that the first thing we do when a baby is born is name them, giving them presence and substance and acknowledging them as a being in the world. What happens then when we experience something without a name so intense and profound that changes us so that we become in some ways defined by that experience? Do we become unacknowledgeable? 

Recognising the cost to women of raising children and the imbalanced impact on the lives of mothers compared to fathers, even the most present and caring ones, Nettel's novel proposes what is, on the one hand, a radical new form of 'mothering' but, on the other, a nod to past practices of raising children: that is, collective or communal motherhood. In this version of parenting, the nuclear family is not revered and is instead a negative siphoning off others from the family unit, where they could be helpful and reduce stress and strain from the mother, allowing her to care for herself better and us be a better parent. Through her characters, Nettel asks: what would it mean to open families to other 'mothers' or women to assist in child rearing in a manner that is not experienced as a threat to the family unit or the mother-child connection or perceived as a reflection of not good enough mothering? What if instead, allowing others (friends, family, neighbours) into your home to help you raise your child is powerful feminist gesture, one of freeing the mother to be both mother and her own person as a result of this bolster or alternative foundation? 

Some other books on ambivalent motherhood I've read recently include: Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder and Chouette by Claire Oshetsky.