Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer > Books: 2022‎ (193)

I wanted to take the pram to his place, throw it at his door, and punch him five punches in the face, for the five years I wasted my youth in waiting. My mum warned me before I left for the USSR. She told me that five is a fateful number. Her first beau couldn’t wait for five years either. He went to fight in the South, and took up with a young army guide at some point. He left the army and came back to the village with two sons, the baby in his arms, the toddler standing by. My mum jumped on him and punched him five punches in the face, then broke down crying inconsolably. The uncomprehending boys also cried; they deafened the village. The whole village came to see what was happening. On the sixth day the boys fell asleep, and my mum stopped crying and left the village. She warned me, but I didn’t heed her warning. She also told me that if I wanted to defeat the fateful number five, I must come back in the fourth year and get engaged ………… All night long I dreamed that I jumped on Thụy and punched him five punches in the face, over and over. Somehow I ended up punching the journalist girl. She shrieked in laughter.

You have to follow the vectors, follow where the words dry and riderless lead. I also see now what you mean by the 'special interests and their ten

You have to follow the vectors, follow where the words dry and riderless lead. I also see now what you mean by the 'special interests and their tendency to loom large, freezing out everything else. Here is the jumper I have put on backwards, here is the shopping list I left at home, lacking all importance. And here is the Bach fugue I am playing silently on the table-top, here is the gleaming eye of a cat on a fence I have had to stop and study: you have to follow where the fugue subject leads, leap into the well of the cat's eye, there is in that moment nothing else. The train is not free to leave the tracks and randomly cross the terrain. Is this determinism then. No, it is freely chosen. There is no terrain, only the track. And is there movement, really, have I not always been there, been here. De Selby [my note – from Flann O’Brien’s “The Third Policeman] would travel by entering a wardrobe and thinking of his destination, then emerge to a sense of uncomprehending rage on not finding himself there. But it works, I have done it. I cross the mountain landscape and notice a church and, entering, find a stained-glass window and passing through it find myself in a mountain landscape where I notice a church and, entering, find a stained-glass window, not this again, I am moving from one side of the glass to the other, turning madly on the spot, what figure of speech am I looking for now. These are not symptoms; these are figures of speech. So what are you suggesting I do, doctor. I call you doctor, but you are also the addressee, the reader, moving forwards and back through the text at your leisure. In this sense you are, have become, as much me as I am. Thank you for reading. How do you feel it's going? Now turn the page.

I have stated that I am not religious, but find my response to the window crystallising into a standoff between light and dark. It is a dull autumn day, and amid so much encircling gloom I have discovered a window of light. It seems crucially important, therefore, and for this moment at least possible, that I pass through the window to whatever lies beyond. And so I do, imaginatively at least. The effects of this resolution have continued to unfold down well beyond that moment, while also leading me to the failure recorded in my opening sentence. How this came about will form the burden of the notes that follow. .

No plans have been made for the disposal of my papers, or the retrieval of this report from aged laptop or print-outs stuffed down the back of a filing cabinet. As I have written about the village and life here, there is I suspect a subcurrent of distance, assuming as I have worked that I am talking to a reader far from here and now, and whose remoteness will form our paradoxical point of connection. I even imagine them as the final portal through whom this tale might pass, onwards, outwards and free of its author at last. But I see now I am more likely to be turned back on myself in a posthumous silence, my papers neglected, dispersed, destroyed. So perhaps it is best to proceed on that assumption, that the portal may be less portal than frame, and what it frames less a way through than a fated dead-end. Sacrilegious thought. One elegant solution to the pain of this realisation would be to have my papers buried with me, for perusal at my leisure. I write in the present tense. In which tense are your reading me? Your doing so at all means which of the above-sketched outcomes, I wonder. Reach out a hand. What do you touch? Whose face is that in the dark? How close are the walls? Don't answer that. Or not yet. Now turn the page

My name is Fatima
Fatima Daas.
I was an accidental pregnancy, born by caesarean.
I share a nam

My name is Fatima
Fatima Daas.
I was an accidental pregnancy, born by caesarean.
I share a name with a symbolic figure in Islam.
A name that must be honoured.
A name that mustn't be soiled.

My name is Fatima Daas.
I’m Muslim, therefore I’m afraid:
That God doesn’t love me.
That He doesn’t love me the way I love Him.
That He’ll abandon me.
Of not being the person I’m “supposed” to be.
Of questioning what God has commanded me to do. Of being left to my own devices.
Of waking up in the middle of the night, terrified.

IS IT A NORM THAT WE HAVE TO WRITE EVERYTHING DIGITALLY ANOTHER PROBLEM I HAVE, I DON’T WANT

IS IT A NORM THAT WE HAVE TO WRITE EVERYTHING DIGITALLY ANOTHER PROBLEM I HAVE, I DON’T WANT THAT THIS MASTERARBEIT WILL COME OUT FROM THIS COMPUTER. WRITING SOMETHING INTO THE COMPUTER IS SOMETHING ELSE THAN WRITING IT ON PAPER. IT COULD BE TWO DIFFERENT WORKS. I THINK DIFFERENTLY WHEN WRITING WITH PEN, WHEN I NEED TO FORM IDEA, WHOLE PAGE FIRST. POSSIBILITY TO DELETE SOMETHING WILL LEAVE TRACES. I CANNOT MOVE WHOLE PARAGRAPHS HERE AND THERE. MY EYES SEES PAPER, TABLE, PENCILS, CORRECTOR, BOOKS, WALL, VIEW FROM WINDOW, MAREK. I AM USING FIBER MARKER PEN FROM LIDL, THEY ARE FOR 1.49 EUR FOR SET WITH 10 COLORS.

As the rebuilding began, all scores settled, so it's said that our cutting off of taste has

As the rebuilding began, all scores settled, so it's said that our cutting off of taste has some part in what is lost, but that this is necessary. For the manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively were not there to hold onto when things took place.
Acknowledged by all who live is that there is a plan to this, in earth's experience, but that we are quite mere in it. The best we can do is do our best to put objects in houses. Then look at them. Then remember. Then see ourselves in it all.
Culture begins in the history we rebuild.
History begins in the Museum rebuilt.

At the beginning, I've been told people like him were sought out, given fat payments. Those who could remember the objects, and partial fragments of the catalogue, from the old Museum. They were then, once in, teased and tortured into a pool of facts and memories that could be trusted. And when that appeared too lean, others were sought. Others who hadn't been so badly harmed, who could help recreate a history culture, to explicitly connect those two things. To bring back to life the unforeseen, unknown, unintelligible, almost unthinkable, into a massive throbbing establishment. One so amazing to witness that no visitor could get to asking whether it was genuine. The pasts reanimated before they were forever forgotten. Thought up by these obviously important people, who in their renovations, after a time, when the eye became lax, allowed new interpretations of their history.

This had always been hunting country, a land of men descended from men who came from other men who had been born here from time immemorial. No one

This had always been hunting country, a land of men descended from men who came from other men who had been born here from time immemorial. No one knew who had laid the first stone. A thousand legends were told, and these found their way into children's fables and the afternoon chatter of women's sewing circles, but none were compelling enough to last. For me it had always been a poor man's land.

I am grateful to fate for three gifts: to have been born a woman, from the working class and an oppressed nation. And the turbid azure of being three times a rebel.

That's when I realised it was all a game of chess. A game with too many checkmates for one board, and maybe too many pawns, with an enraged queen aiming to topple a king that fate had already forgiven and probably sent to purgatory.

The necessity of this perpetual forgetting, the hiding of the past beneath the successive layers

The necessity of this perpetual forgetting, the hiding of the past beneath the successive layers of the unchanging present, drained him, though the light that burned away memory and desire helped too, helped him forget his memories of the old world in service of hers, the faint hope that humanity could live on slowly dying within him when he looked into the empty eyes of every wailing infant that emerged from his sister's uterus. In the nights when he was able to avoid her company, he was bold enough to think about the university, and the same agony overcame him. The abandoned citadels of his dreams; an old library in the mountains through whose limitless corridors he was sure he'd once walked--where had these things gone? The fire that had purified the earth had taken them too, though there had been no evil in them, only beauty; and although his sister maintained that the disaster had been a purge, their uncle could not be so certain when faced with the pitiful mess of the survivors, who it could not be argued otherwise lived in a kind of torpid sin, a lethargy and lust that corroded any claim to a higher moral purpose, the necessity of survival, or the particular worthiness of their species, and so over time he had come to see them as simply forgotten. The departed gods had left their ask incomplete; they had neglected to wipe away these last remnants of their great error, and in the vacuum of their intention these things had bred and clung on to a meagre existence in a world more inhospitable than ever simply because "nature hatech emptiness." And meanwhile the city loomed behind them like a great stone disgrace, and the silent forest slunk into their dreams and rooted away at their minds.

Every chapter has a postscript: a title word and a short poem. The 'title word' is related to the content, message or significance of the section, while the short poem is related to the meaning of one or both parts of the word. In some instances, we changed the word, in others we changed the poem and rewrote it from scratch to match the word, in others again we were inspired to change both, in Mou's words, 'improving on the original. "This word has been left behind compared to the others we've already worked on,' she would say. And off we would go, brainstorming and throwing things in the air.

I am Ada
Fruit of the short marriage between
Annabella Milbanke & Lord Byron

An odd coupling of
mathematics & poetry
Moderation & extravagance
Discipline

I am Ada
Fruit of the short marriage between
Annabella Milbanke & Lord Byron

An odd coupling of
mathematics & poetry
Moderation & extravagance
Discipline & desire
Science & romanticism

This metaphor of weaving is newer to me because I started working with textiles after I wrote Marble, but it’s similar to the way I would talk about the network and braiding text. Weaving of course has some of the same qualities, by being two systems of threads interlaced. In Marble we have Anne-Marie Carl Nielsen and Marble, and in Thread Ripper we have a contemporary weaver and Ada Lovelace, each pair of figures is interwoven in a way. 
Etymologically, textile and text both stem from texere, it has the same root. It is important to say that weaving is older than text; we were weaving before writing was invented. When writing was invented, people would think of it like word-weaving. It makes a lot of sense to me to think of a text as a woven structure, it takes strands from many places, yarn is dyed in many places and colours, and can form a pattern or a motif. There can be a rhythm or repetition, something that comes again and again, often in new ways. 

With Thread Ripper I designed the book so that on the left side is one strand and on the right side is a different one. So, you read one strand and then the other, you alternate back and forth. The reader is the one who is weaving together these two strands; in a way the book functions just like a loom. We are going to have it in the same way in the English book, because it’s so integrated in the reading of it. Although it does make it look like a strange novel on the page, it makes sense when you read it.”

We [second generation immigrants] make sculptures, direct films, write plays, novels, memoirs and poems about not having a home, of trying to find a home, of being between two types of home, what is home, of how we all feel ugly.of the mixed relationships we enter with white people, losing our language from a culture we had a tenuous hold of in the first place, we tell the story of being acted upon, we speak from the position of the victim.

For an algorithm not built by us, for a platform not designed for us to attract a cultural system which excludes us, do we commit further harm by performing our Otherness--by Othering ourselves for likes, for reshares and approval, to gain a following, to build a fanbase? What are the effects of this alienation, do we even care? Is the need for fervent fans a deeper expression of the fear of being anonymous because we know in an uproar there is protection. We do not want to disappear inside a nameless mass if Something Bad Were To Happen. If we remain part of the masses, we know we will suffer the double injustice of institutional neglect by the police or the justice system compounded by the original crime- like with our murder (Stephen Lawrence, Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry but also too many others) or a history-making miscarriage of justice (the Post Office scandal), the threat of deportation from the Home Office (the Windrush scandal) or stripped citizenship (Shamima Begum) for making a terrible mistake when you were a child. Are the cravings for a fanbase an expression of how politically powerless we really feel? Or is it something else entirely? Though we insist we are Socialist and Marxist in our ideals, is social media and our pursuit for fame within this structure not the purest expression of individualistic, Thatcherite neocolonial politics where we transform into scripted individual brands, launching ourselves like start-up companies while masquerading as being 'in service to our 'communities'.

The easiest route to build a following is to penetrate culture and the fastest way to do this is to tell them the story they want to hear -the one about our assimilation to whiteness or the abhorrence, or failure of this assimilation so white people with the keys to the castle can gasp and shake their heads and say, I never knew it was this bad, it's insert year| for God's sake, and then will lower the drawbridge to let us in? We know succumbing to this will secure us the status we seek. It is how we can have a 'name', we can sit on the panels and talk about diversity, come up with earnest solutions inside historic buildings in front of a rapt echo-chambered public which will never amount to anything except feeling good about ourselves for how terrible we feel at the state of the world, it becomes the workshops we run, the books we write when we yell, we know what Britain really is and you don't, buy my book to find out the Truth. A fanbase is how we will get the advances, how we secure the invitations to prestigious awards, headline one of the smaller tents at the bigger literary festivals or one day maybe we will even get to cosplay at being a gatekeeper by becoming one of the judges of a well-regarded prize. We think explaining ourselves or justifying our existence isn't too heavy a price to pay to gain entry through those gilded gates where liberal artsy white people will tokenise us as a symbol of their ideological progress - they can think they are so exotic for being into your work, aren't they so edgy, so underground or else most likely they will tip-toe around us, deferential but still exclusionary, it's not such a high price for admittance to the cultural establishment, we reason.

I have no idea how many days I spent in this corn-feld. I no longer count the days; just grateful to have survived one day and moved on to the next

I have no idea how many days I spent in this corn-feld. I no longer count the days; just grateful to have survived one day and moved on to the next. It wasn't just an unseasonal rain that caught me off guard, it was also an unseasonal situation. Sadly, this is not only my fate but also the nation's-living day to day. I imagined the nation being robbed of her harvest by unseasonal rain; an unseasonal ideology forcing a crown of thorns on her head; being ruled by an unseasonal leader. Hasn't this nation stood amongst the greatest on earth?-now it is less than the least. Like me, Her people have been dehumanized and joined the realm of dogs: carried along by the whim of the flood. As a twig once fallen into a torrent has no direction of its own, so are the people of this nation. However, we are not to give up.

Words should not be used inappropriately. One has to be discerning about when and how, or if it is wise to use them at all. Words can change men into dogs but they can also restore their humanity. Words can bring about good things, but they can also take them away. Words can simply extinguish the light, but they can also illuminate darkness. They can enrich people's lives, or they can impoverish them. My tongue and lips will be preserved from uttering inappropriate words. I know the power of words from first-hand experience. Words have changed me into a dog, but they have also restored me again, to become human.

I listened to their stories composed of choppy, cut-off, expectorated sentences. They memorized them and regurgitated them in front of the computer

I listened to their stories composed of choppy, cut-off, expectorated sentences. They memorized them and regurgitated them in front of the computer screen. Human rights do not mean the right to escape poverty. In any case, you didn't have the right to utter the word poverty. You needed a more noble reason, one that would justify political asylum. Neither poverty nor avenging nature that had devastated their land could justify their exile, their mad hope for survival. No law allowed them to enter here in this European country if they didn't have political, or even religious reasons, if they didn't demonstrate the serious consequences of persecution. So they had to hide, forget, unlearn the truth and invent another one: the tales of migrating peoples; with broken wings, filthy, stinking feathers; with dreams as sad as the rags on their backs.

In many ways, the poem is deeply resistant to interpretation, and is meant to be. The surface of demonic hysteria and sadomasochism is a pokerfaced mask, concealing a range of provocative ironies. Against the background of the spectacular collapse of ideologies of well-meaning benevolence in the insurrections of 1848, Baudelaire’s poem probes all the weak points of the philanthropic: the egoism in altruism (‘I am such a nice person’); the bad faith of charitable giving as alibi, letting people off the hook of finding real solutions to inequality; the malicious thought that a relation of equality established through the exchange of violence is preferable to the humiliating servitude of supplicant beggardom, the smile, the deference, the politeness, without which the needy rarely accede to the status of deserving.

Life is a monologue. Even when you think you're making conversation, only a stroke of luck allows two monologues to intersect; perhaps taken by sur-prise, they halt in front of each other. In the offices questions and answers intersected but remained isolated. The men stuck to their monologues. The women officers shot question arrows almost automatically, lethargically and without a target. A few rudimentary questions later, the tension would rise among us. The tension sometimes rose so high that, long after having completed an interview, everything trembled deep inside me, throbbed like the engine of an idling car

The offices where the raggedy petitioners came to plead their cases, dragging their feet, holding babies, but usually alone, were located in barren areas, beyond the city limits. Where the wind picked up. The wind picked up and died down and picked up again. Dust flew and spun around. The battlefield flared up. The sound of the RER, its corroded screeching, steel against steel, its crisscrossing rails stretching into the horizon, to even more barren zones, the sun bursting onto the tracks, factories rising up against the white sky.

Coming out of the metro, at an intersection, I was lost. No landmark. Around the square there were shabby reproductions of the same cheap and hideous merchandise. …… . The entire neighborhood was an open-air bazaar, an open garbage bin …. The merchants had spread out their wares everywhere, overflowing onto the sidewalks, into the middle of the street, as if the many shops around the square weren't enough. Clothing, bags, suitcases, shoes, and a pile of shapeless objects ….. It was a ghetto. Another country. The one I had managed to leave behind. It was impossible to believe there was still a luminous city not very far from here. The metro had brought me to the end of the tunnel at the edge of the world into this land of rubbish overrun by outcast jellyfish ………………… . If I could have, I would have turned around, taken the first metro and returned to my own neighborhood, where the smell of good baguettes blended with that of yellowed books placed in boxes in front of shop windows. There on the streets dogs walk with their owners, the café owner jokes with the couple of daily customers, brown-and-green cast-iron tables and chairs lean on the slope of the sidewalk, red-and-white checkered tablecloths flutter in the breeze. I simply wanted to erase my character from this ghetto cartoon.

I purposefully wrote Polluted Sex on bodies, particularly female and queer bodies; because we write with our bodies – unusual animals. I try to depict intimacies of the body in portraying bodies, bodily exposure, nakedness and bodily function ….. @While writing Polluted Sex when people have asked me what I’m writing about I’ve said: “riding”. They usually laugh and say: “writing …?” I responded: “No, riding. It’s called Polluted Sex.” ………….
Over the years, due to disability—I have Systemic Lupus Erythematosus—I am no longer able to type for any length of time without joint and nerve pain and agonising hand cramping and stiffness. …………..
Being forced by my body to stop handwriting, then typing. To stop writing altogether. I took this disagreement with my body badly. I was furious. Furious. Furious. Furious. I may be hampered. I may write forever in obscurity. I have long since made my peace with that. One thing, I will not be, though, is beaten. I will not be beaten. If I was to be forced to write in speech via dictation and voice recording then transcription; all work had to lend itself to performance, to voice. My stories were now essentially hybrid texts. ………………
My work does not exist to be just like someone else’s. My work does not exist to be representational of heteronormative ableist black and white binaries in thinking. Low resolution. Analogue. Prosaic …
I consider text a vehicle for the body

When the day of Yinka’s birth arrived, Mojisola had experienced a miserable 41 weeks. She’d

When the day of Yinka’s birth arrived, Mojisola had experienced a miserable 41 weeks. She’d imagined she’d be relieved to bear down, to surrender to the ripping of her tender passage but just when the midwife ordered that she push, Mojisola, with every intention to do as commanded (at this dark point in the process of birth no other action would be logical), discovered a resistance within her bones that seemed not of this world. Something stronger than her was at work. ‘Push, now!’ the midwife repeated, a touch of panic in her voice. She repeated it three times, louder and louder, until Mojisola once more mastered her bones. Holding her new sticky child, she’d felt ashamed for having possessed this will (greater than her will to mother) to resist, to fight and hold the child in limbo, rather than push it out into motion. And yet it was undeniable. Lying there, the nurse screeching, ‘Push,’ on the sidelines, Mojisola had had brief seconds of hope and ecstasy. She would experience the very same, but in reverse, many years later when she heard of the death of her child, but in that moment on the birthing bed, Mojisola fantasised that she somehow had the ability to reverse time. The fantasy that the child would go unborn, that she could reverse the irreversible and return to a simple existence that had gradually, over the many weeks disappeared.

It has taken Mojisola decades to learn the fault lines in her own thinking. She was not at all on the outskirts of humanity. In her loneliness, lack of confidence, fears and terrors, she was right in the centre, along with everyone else. She had seen wrongly; or it had been a trick of light. Her mother’s fragility and devotion to a God she hoped would save her, save them both; Auntie Modupe’s regrets and earnest but clumsy attempts to repair. Even the mothers at Yinka’s school, impeccably made-up. Mojisola now imagines the make-up, the heels, as part of a suit of armour. Ferociously slender. And even as we lose (such is the design of war), we fight. That’s what she’d been seeing all along, seeing and not knowing what it was she’d been looking at. Not perfection, not people who never faltered, but rather the opposite. And so now, finally, she can include herself. Now she walks in the streets as if she built them with her own hands. Now she stares into faces as if mirrors; she sees herself, her fragility, her ugliness and wonder. She sees her shame and her courage, her capacity for failure but also for magic.