Fabulas Feminae by
Susan Bee and Johanna Drucker
(Litmus Press, Brooklyn, 2015)
In the limited
popular stereotype of feminism, playfulness (or the result of play) falls far
outside the reach of the term. Susan Bee and Johanna Drucker’s Fabulas Feminae engages in deep and
inviting feminist play. This slim but
sense-rich volume combines collage with feminist biography in which the text
itself is raw material. Where Bee synthesizes whole images from scraps and
swatches and swirls of color, Drucker applies Natural Language Processor (NLP)
software to a series of factual texts about twenty-five extraordinary women,
both those recognized by patriarchal histories and notions of importance
(Elizabeth I) and not (Billie Holiday, Lucille Ball). The result is a
collection of new texts powerfully reframing the question of factuality itself.
Who decides what gets presented as truth about a woman’s story? Who decides how
that truth should look? And who determines the rules for setting down a
“narrative” of someone’s life?
I keep using
scare-quotes around the word “narrative” because this book offers a practical
critique of linear, authoritative (encyclopedic?) modes of biographical
presentation. Drucker’s texts are composed through a move of serious play: running
normative biographical text through a computer program called Hapex Legomenon,
which analyzes and processes a given block of language to produce a new text
resulting from the application of various programmed actions upon the
original.
Use of a NLP program
for text generation is very much in keeping with the overall ethos of feminist
re-imagining and re-imaging in Fabulas
Feminae. Hapex produces a text that’s difficult to square with patriarchal capitalist
use of language—like the business-oriented onboard dictionary and grammar-check
in Microsoft Word—because it cannot be “useful” in a reductive, endlessly
cut-n-paste mode of knowledge consumption. Biographies like Wikipedia entries (or dossier
items) can be used to compartmentalize individuals, to demographically dismiss
them, ensuring that the most superficial and easily repeated “facts” come to
define or stand in for the person. This is what happens in data mining, where
for authoritarian or commercial purposes we are reduced to our spending habits
and/or our political utterances and associations. Data and personal history
become weapons in the hands of violent authority and its philosophical
infrastructure. By adopting, adapting and applying algorithmic processes for
feminist use, Drucker offers an antidote to such practice, perhaps even an
immunization within a viral shell. These are not the master’s tools any more!
Here’s an example.
The standard biographical meat of Billie Holiday’s life always emphasizes
Holiday’s “faults” and disadvantages, positioning her as a tragic genius whose
inability to transcend her past ultimately meant her downfall. Such tellings
fetishize the horror that real people live through—geniuses or not—and place
the blame on individuals for so-called failures and weaknesses that are beyond
individual control. Don’t get me wrong; Holiday’s life had real horrors, and
she lived through situations of appalling violence, transforming that violence
into art through her own algorithm. These are facts. But Drucker’s algorithmic
use of those facts does not serve salacious interests:
Stormy sang relationships personal
romances destructive married already drink picked up opium. […] Released new
challenges. No license in cabarets and clubs only concert halls and a sold-out
Carnegie not long after (np).
This is a poem of strength, not
failure. This is a compact, complex rendering of a complex person’s story.
There is no shaming, overt or covert. Language, shaken up here and refreshed,
provides a bigger space for Holiday than mainstream biography can.
Holiday
This
space-making is also done quite literally in Susan Bee’s collages, with
Holiday’s serving as a great example. In this work we see multiple photos of Holiday herself at her
most powerful—singing with her signature open-throated stance, head thrown
back—a figure of action, putting healing truth out into the universe. In the
largest photo she sings a rose, with the flower emerging from her throat almost
as if it were a cornet or sax, showing that she worked on her voice as other
artists would work on perfecting a different instrument, but that she remained
independent from use of an external object to make her art. She is surrounded
by images that imply a connection to myth and legend—a dapper-looking, smiling
Black man, possibly dancing, graced with a halo, and a few frog musicians,
including a “frog prince” with a crown and a large drum. Holiday’s band is
something from a fairy tale, reminding us of her own legendary, mythic status.
But
there’s a danger in living completely in a fantasy, as we are reminded by
another central figure in this page. Look at the face of the winged girl. Her
glorious butterfly wings and her golden flower hair accent do nothing to
alleviate the pain on her features—fear, sorrow, anxiety, all the emotional
results of an unsafe childhood. Despite her wings she is grounded, and so are
we, forced to keep in mind that Holiday had a life that most people would be
unable to endure (at both extremes, the good and the bad), and that escape into
fantasy was never much of an option.
Perhaps there’s a warning here not to let the legend obscure the facts
of her journey and therefore conclude that her power wasn’t real, or within
human grasp.
Elizabeth I
The
same empowering remix yields deep results even with a figure legitimized by
patriarchal histories, Elizabeth I, “[w]hose name has become an era a heart a
head a queen” (np). But rather than producing a text that reinforces the values held by such
histories, the Hapex program renders the more familiar tale of the Virgin Queen
into a poetic adventure of intrigue, spies, political savvy and self-determination.
Power is cast in terms of resistance to social norms and expectations:
Expected to continue the closest
brush with marriage the Tudor line never. Capable and distinguished she
refused. Produce no heir despite courtships many Raleigh, Dudley, princes,
realms, but Dudley above all childhood friend (np).
Though the text gives no real space
to analysis of the role Elizabeth I played in establishing the imperialist
expansion of English interests, that’s likely because the source from which it
derives also had limited focus in that area. Beyond “revisionist history,” Fabulas Feminae recasts its multiple
protagonists into active subjects and presents elements of their lives that
even those alienated by normative historical renderings can recognize from
their own lives. Reclaiming history for those it excludes, and showing how we
too might establish our own historical parameters and tools, Bee and Drucker
invite us to definitely try this at home. In fact, we’re invited by implication
to pass this gift on to future generations. The playful text and image combo is
a very child-friendly, child-engaging object, and I can easily picture a little
one picking up the book, becoming enthralled by the images (and text, if
reading is part of the moment), and wanting to make some too. Though this is
not a book “for” kids, it’s a book kids can certainly claim and treasure as
their own. I like to think of this happening generation after generation—creating
future history.
*****
Hybrid artist/poet Jay
Besemer is the author of many poetic artifacts including Chelate, Telephone (both
from Brooklyn Arts Press), A New Territory Sought (Moria), Aster
to Daylily (Damask Press), and Object with Man’s Face (Rain
Taxi Ohm Editions). He is a contributor to the groundbreaking
anthology Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics. His
performances and video poems have been featured in various festivals and
series, including Meekling Press’ TALKS Series, Chicago Calling Arts Festival,
Red Rover Series {readings that play with reading}, and Absinthe & Zygote.
Jay also contributes performance texts, poems, and critical essays to numerous
publications including Jacket2, Nerve Lantern: Axon of Performance Literature,
PANK, Petra, Barzakh, The Collagist, Rain Taxi Review of Books, The VOLTA, and
the CCM organs ENTROPY and ENCLAVE. He is a contributing editor with The
Operating System, and founder of the Intermittent Series in Chicago.
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