An Untamed State by Roxane Gay

An Untamed State (2014) seems like a simple novel. The scenes are short, the language neat and supple, the cast and settings leanly described. It tells the story of Mireille Jameson, an American immigration lawyer of Haitian descent, who visits her parents’ Port au Prince mansion for a holiday. She is snatched from her car, kidnapped by a gang and held for nearly a fortnight while her father refuses to pay the ransom. During that fortnight she is gang raped, tortured, starved and tormented in countless ways both physical and psychological. When she is finally released, she must rejoin her family is what is now “the after”, the world of “the living”.

The descriptions of what Mireille is subjected to are unsparing and steady. While the perpetrators exult in the pain and horror of their own actions, the author does not. The true violence of the novel, a violence matched by its artistic sophistication and psychological depth, collects slowly and holistically around the details Roxane Gay gives of Mireille’s life before and afterwards. 

At the beginning of An Untamed State Mireille Jameson is, as she freely says, living out a “fairytale” of triumphantly conventional sexuality, race and class. Married to a handsome, sexy white man, she has taken his surname as her own, is bringing up their son and has nursed his ageing mother through cancer. Mireille’s own mother is a submissive whose chief pleasure and only role is supporting her husband. One generation on, despite her own career Mireille is also a female submissive, a Mrs Mansname devoted to her male partner and male child, unquestioningly caring for her own mother-in-law because that is what a good girl does to help her husband’s family. Mireille worships her father.

In terms of race Mireille is a black American success story with an adorably on-trend mixed race son. She is the well-educated, high-achieving daughter of immigrants from large families, who both survived painfully hardscrabble existences on the edges of the American working world, marginalised, underestimated and discriminated against. Mireille’s father’s great pride is that he has returned to Haiti to establish a lucrative building firm which makes him a wealthy and powerful man. As an immigration lawyer, Mireille does not serve individual men but goes one further and supports The Man – the capitalist American Dream in all its glory, assisting people of all colours and nations, who “build all their hopes on the promise of living in this country.”

Mireille and her husband Michael live a charmed existence “drunk on the happiness of too much money” in Miami. Gay has fun describing their painfully self-conscious dinner parties with friends, “some of whom we like and many of whom we hated”, eating food from recipes in Gourmet and Bon Appétit magazines and enjoying “pretentious but interesting conversation.” But even in these early scenes of the novel, the paradise-like “before” bathed in the glow of a Miami sunset, Gay hints at the loneliness of being second-generation in a society where classic, crass American ignorance and American arrogance combine to make Mireille unplaceable, “not from the slums or the countryside”. The Haiti known to America is a place of natural disasters, male violence, political corruption and tragic inequality. Mireille rails against this stereotype, until she is kidnapped by it. 

An Untamed State is excellent on place and on the precarious safety of home. A stable and secure sense of home is perilously achieved and cautiously maintained for Americans and Haitians alike. Mireille and Michael have taken their dual income lifestyle and carefully carved a winners’ tale out of the vastness, variety and rabid competitiveness of contemporary America. They live insulated behind high walls, their yards perpetually watered by sprinklers, their only child cared for by a Latina nanny. Their America is a far cry from that of Michael’s parents’ complacent white rural existence or Mireille’s parents’ early urban struggle. Equally, the family’s trips to Haiti do not constitute the easiest of homecomings. Mireille’s father has attained wealth, not been born to it, and he guards it zealously, with pride and arrogance as well as skill and self-control. On the other side of his own high walls, security gates and long driveway is staggering poverty; Mireille’s pleasure in her parents’ country is a source of disgust to Michael, who cannot forget its inequalities. Michael, for his part, behaves boorishly with his in-laws and patronisingly with poor locals, uncomprehending, unworldly and out of his depth in both scenarios. Michael’s unease at the inequality he sees, which Mireille and her family are in denial about, is vindicated by Mireille’s kidnapping and by the wound-up, wounded fury of the men who abuse her. Despite the men’s own extortion and profligacy and their abusive domination of the impoverished streets and people around them, they are obsessed and chagrined by the visible, exceptional wealth of men like Mireille’s father. 

The novel demonstrates that a person’s idea of home is never wholly safe, being dictated by emotional rather than physical factors. After the kidnapping, Mireille loses her sense of Haiti as being home, not because of the perpetrators’ actions but because of her own father’s callousness. With the death of her love for him comes the death of her love for his house, his city, his country. The culmination of Mireille’s experiences and reactions is externalised and expressed in a powerful compound image: that of an earthquake in Haiti. The body of the land has been “split open” just as Mireille has been and the general populace is “hungry, hungering”, just as  Mireille is described as being in the aftermath of the kidnapping. Mireille’s psychological and physical collapse, her family’s emotional collapse and her country’s literal collapse are all conflated into one definitive and catastrophic end of an era and identity, until “I saw no part of myself in the country I once called home.”

An Untamed State offers reality, not retribution, not natural justice, not a final balancing-out of karma. Survival, recovery and the inane language of ‘moving on’ and ‘making peace’ are exchanged for emotional honesty and graphic psychological, not physical, detail. The second half of the novel tolls with Mireille’s assertions of being dead, chained, leashed or caged, of being imprisoned in an underworld. It examines the time ‘afterwards’ without the irritations of romanticism and with its own dark ironies. It might take exceptional strength to survive what Mireille has, but survival doesn’t feel like any kind of triumph in comparison with what has been taken from her. Despite everything that has happened to her, she still lives in a conventional patriarchy in which she is required to be “calm” and “rational”, not “garish” in her anger; she is still required to behave like a good girl who has family duties and must perform as a wife and mother. Despite everything that has happened to her, in the immediate aftermath Michael’s ‘really nice egalitarian kind of guy’ act takes about three days to crumble and reveal a self-absorbed, self-pitying man who resents having to be selflessly considerate to his raped wife and thinks that he himself is the real victim, to whom something bad has been done.

I am not a survivor of kidnapping, torture or gang rape – this is what I did survive and it was subtler and more perverse than the ordeal Gay describes – but some of the trauma effects that Mireille undergoes are recognisable. There is the physical nausea, the crawling skin, the changed appearance, the feeling of being dirty, the sensation of life splitting into Before and After. There is the sizzling, implacable rage and impotence and confusion. There is the craven fear that dogs you night and day. There is the total and utter soul-scraping horror and humiliation and soul-theft that makes a joke of everything you achieve afterwards. An Untamed State shows how literal descriptions of sexual violation and mental and physical torture cannot get close to demonstrating what it does deep inside, how this kind of abuse destroys something which is so fundamental, so privately held and so necessary to the wholeness and dignity of the soul that its loss is a type of murder. There is an astounding scene just a few pages from the end of An Untamed State which reveals the falseness of recovery and self-reclamation, when a victim is so powerfully triggered that the years of the aftermath are instantly undone: “I remembered everything he did to me. The memories filled my body at once, threatened to spread through me like a malignancy, destroying everything I had done to become closer to alive again.” 

An Untamed State is brilliant at revealing the many layers of patriarchy which oppress women (sometimes subtly, sometimes openly and traumatically) by infiltrating every layer of society. Michael’s early courtship of Mireille involves him intruding frattishly on her personal space, cocky and full of sexual entitlement. Their first sexual encounter is crude, a laddish Hollywood director’s idea of an exciting scene. In his assumption of Mireille’s accessibility to him, Michael is not very different from her kidnappers. Then there is the shocking ease with which Mireille’s father allows her to be kept and tortured for days while he upholds some principle about refusing to capitulate to the kidnappers; his idea of himself is more important to him than the real existence of his daughter as a human being. There is the bullying of doctors who want to force Mireille to be examined after her kidnapping. 

The cocky dude who always gets what he wants, the withholding father whose ego and pride are worth more than his daughter’s safety, the sadistic torturer with a knife, the arrogant doctor with no human empathy, the self-pitying rapist who sees himself as a seducer: they all abuse, control, betray or exploit women. Mireille herself is not exempt from the misogyny of the society in which she has been brought up. In the half-light of the novel’s happyish ending she reveals that she and Michael have used a surrogate to have another child; the casual rental and targeted use of another woman’s body is presented without irony as a good solution for an upwardly mobile couple absorbed in their own suffering.

An Untamed State is a novel about Haiti which is a novel about everywhere; a novel about inequality and poverty in one place which is about angry men’s violence in all places; a novel about one family which is a novel about every patriarch who ever lived, from the 1st century to the 21st; a novel about one fortnight of male sexual violence which is about every instance of that endemic abuse which happens all day, every day, everywhere in the world, regardless of the wealth or language or religion or colour or class of the perpetrators. It is for this reason that the book is so powerful in its dedication to “women, the world over.”

Jamaica Inn by Daphne du Maurier

Jamaica Inn was written in 1935 but set in the very early 19th century in Cornwall, between Bodmin and Launceston. The novel is at once a tribute to the impressive local landscape and an atavistic psychodrama steeped in murder, paranoia and sexual threat. The most intense action occurs between the closing year’s shortest day – or, more pertinently, its longest night – and the New Year, with the majority of scenes happening in darkness.

Jamaica Inn’s protagonist Mary Yellan has left her lifelong home, a farm in Helford, following the death of her mother. The landscape of her childhood, where she capably did “the work of a man” after the death of her father when she was six, is presented in softened, heightened terms as a Paradise of “shining waters”, “green hills” and “gentle rain.” Mary feels as though she’s been cast out of Eden and there is a sense of irrevocability and mutual rejection in her departure: “her back turned for ever.” 

It is clear to the reader, although not to the grief-stricken Mary, that the idealisation of Helford is misplaced; she let go of the farm not because of a fated decline that “there was no name for” but because of rising prices, falling stock and sickness among the animals. Nonetheless, she has lost everything: her mother (to whom she was a proxy husband for seventeen years), her home, her work and livelihood, her independence and her social position. 

Despite the bereavement which has brought her to Jamaica Inn, Mary’s inner nature is fundamentally heroic and unafraid. She enjoys a physical prowess which renders her “ alive in every nerve” and is described as “gallant” not just by the author but even her enemies within the novel. Mary carries with her an almost patriarchal pride in her family’s achievements: “the name of Yellan was known and respected in the town.” She says blithely, early on, “I’ve never known anything but this life by the river, and I don’t want to.” Her arrival at the isolated Jamaica Inn, which lies “murky dim in the darkness” and is owned by her Aunt Patience and Patience’s husband Joss Merlyn, is the next stage in her journey from heaven to hell, childhood to adulthood, happy ignorance to tortured knowledge. 

Du Maurier excels at stewing an atmosphere of pagan ritualism, fated Classical tragedy, fairytale-like mystery, mythic inevitability and Hollywood horror. The inn is described with Gothic relish as being steeped in suffering and death. Zombie-like, it is “like a live thing” but has a “cold, dead atmosphere”, it is “a house of the dead” where even the clock ticks “like a dying man who cannot catch his breath”. The house “reeked of evil” and is “rotten, rotten” “like a tomb” where “the very walls…smelt of guilt and deceit”. Outside, the wind shudders “like a man in pain”, the wooden sign looks like a hanging man and creaks “like an animal in pain”. The deathly atmosphere is so strong that it affects even newcomers: Mary sleeps “like a dead thing” on her first night at Jamaica Inn.

These intimations of pain and death – which are also concrete clues as to what the denizens of the inn have been doing – extend to and are fed by the surrounding moors. While Helford represented physical and emotional comfort, Mary has arrived at a “county of stones…and stunted broom”, “marshland and granite”, where the wind sounds like “a sob and a cry” and arises “from the stones themselves”, as though the very land is tormented and weeping. The landscape works against its inhabitants, with its perilous marshes, blinding fogs and rain that is “lashing, pitiless” rather than gentle, as in Helford. This is “alien” territory for Mary emotionally, morally and sociologically. The wind is described as “a chorus from the dead” and this is both metaphorically and literally true: there are murdered bodies buried on the moor and secrets buried in the locals’ souls, always pushing to come to light. 

It is at Jamaica Inn that Mary learns fear for the first time. Having never thought about how her sex makes her vulnerable, she is warned that it’s “no place for a girl”. Penniless and dependent, she goes from being a respected member of a village community to being an isolated, powerless outcast subject to constant terrorisation by local men. The strongest principle keeping her at the inn is a feeling of protectiveness over her aunt, once she has witnessed Uncle Joss’s brutish behaviour: “Mary would rather lie herself into hell than let her aunt suffer”. 

Mary’s dealings with Uncle Joss are charged with his violence and her fear and loathing, yet edged with a half-acknowledged mutual desire. This ambivalence is expressed through du Maurier’s dazzled description of him. Like the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood, who consumes grown women and tempts young girls, he is powerful yet cunning, “lean and hungry”, “a beast that walked by night”. A wolf’s smile and his are said to be “one and the same”. 

Uncle Joss’s volatility is tied to the secrets he is repressing. He is the kingpin of a network of “wreckers” who lure ships off-course using a “false light”, cause them to be smashed against the coastal rocks, murder any survivors and steal the cargo. Joss is clever enough to organise the network and cold-blooded enough to murder with his bare hands, store the bodies and loot at the inn and hold his nerve despite the suspicion of the local squire. After murdering a crony who threatens to expose him, the next day he “behaved like a perfectly sober normal man”. 

The abuses which Mary witnesses do not seem credible “in the cold light of day” and she is cowed by the (correct) certainty that she will not be believed. She learns that if you are a woman without any power, there is no particular link between being virtuous, knowing the truth, bringing it to light, being believed and gaining justice, a realisation which leads to an overwhelming loss of faith in “humanity… God… myself”. She fantasises about the physical freedom she would have as a man, when she would be able to challenge and fight her uncle in open combat, “and then away on a horse….with Aunt Patience riding pillion.” Instead, as a woman, she has “no weapons” and is nothing more than “a petticoat and a shawl.” Jamaica Inn rots away at her, just as it has done to Aunt Patience, and the two women now “shared a secret that must never be spoken.” 

Mary’s loss of religious faith has, in fact, been a while coming. As her mother was dying, Mary prayed for her health, noting bitterly that “for answer came sickness, and poverty, and death”. As a result, she thinks bleakly, “she would offer no prayer to God this Christmas.” The bitterness is compounded by Mary finding herself in an environment which du Maurier repeatedly describes as being abandoned by God, absent of God or ruled either by an archaic force or by the Devil himself. Her final collapse of faith occurs after a shipwreck she witnesses on Christmas Eve, when decent people are indoors celebrating Christ’s birth. The events of that night are not just immoral and illegal but because of their timing have an occult sacrilegious dimension, of mocking and profaning God. 

The repressed truth about Joss and his friends’ activities is tormentingly present yet strenuously denied. “I can’t even admit them to myself,” says Aunt Patience. Mary is warned that her hair “would go grey” if she knew the details. And yet it’s the only thing the locals can talk about. The carriage driver who takes Mary to the inn on the first night says “queer tales” give the Inn a “bad name” and nobody speaks up because “they’re afraid.” The inn reeks of death because it is literally used to store dead bodies, and also because it has soaked up the existential pain of the murderers who frequent it. There’s a locked and barred room downstairs, used for bodies and contraband: the perfect both-literal-and-symbolic du Maurier image of a secret which exists openly. 

Uncle Joss’s crimes cast a shadow on his own soul and he himself casts a shadow on others; his shadow is described as being suffocatingly huge, reaching up to the ceiling or across the floor. Later, du Maurier expands the imagery of shadows to include not just the idea of repressed secrets looming large but also the constant possibility of sexual assault: both the shadows on the inn wall and those on the surrounding moors are described as resembling stretching fingers. Joss is haunted by his crimes and in a drunken bout of self-pity describes the men and women he has killed appearing to him “like live things in the darkness” – once again, like zombies. 

Joss Merlyn is tellingly named, after the mythical Arthurian wizard, yet the spell he casts is of black rather than benign magic. When Mary first encounters him, he pulls her “roughly” inside, jeering at her, running his fingers over her face and threatening her implicitly and explicitly with rape and beating, as he does throughout the novel. Mary is repulsed yet can’t help noticing his “exquisite” hands and the “long dark lashes [that] swept his cheek”. Like all the men in the novel except the local squire, Joss manhandles Mary, twisting her arm behind her back “until she cried out in pain” and warning, “that’s like a foretaste of punishment, and you know what to expect.” She is forced into loathing silence and avoidance through the fear of male violence and the absence of escape, painfully aware that for the first time in her life, she is isolated and unprotected and all it will take for him to kill her is to press her neck “lightly with finger and thumb.” 

Uncle Joss’s abusiveness, and that of his friends, has reduced Mary’s once-vivacious Aunt Patience to a wreck. Joss’s domination is so extreme that there is no space to breathe, move or think when he is present. Aunt Patience and Mary are diminished and caught “like mice in a trap”, “like a bird in a net”. Du Maurier writes expertly about the subtle, long-term effects of domestic abuse. In Aunt Patience we see someone whose inner will and powers of concentration have been destroyed because of fear. She is “like whimpering dog trained into obedience” and later “like a shivering dog tethered to its master”. Patience is so afraid of Joss that she lives in “perpetual high anxiety and alert”, “trained by constant cruelty to implicit obedience”. The novel expertly describes the mental and physical consequences of years of intimidation: the victim is left “trailing like a ghost”, “haggard, desperate”, “nervy, shattered”, “strained, haunted”.

Male violence against women is not confined to the four walls of the inn but is normalised amongst Uncle Joss’s cronies. Joss tells Mary that she should be grateful he did not rape her the night she arrived or encourage his friends to gang rape her, and that the only reason they haven’t is out of deference to him, because they believe he has brought her to the inn to abuse for himself. When one of his accomplices does in fact attempt to rape Mary during the pivotal event of the novel – the shipwreck on the night between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, which Mary is forced to witness – du Maurier writes brilliantly about the aftermath of a sexual attack. She describes trauma, inner psychological destruction, defilement and dissociation: Mary feels that “the body lying on the bed did not belong to her” and “she had no wish to live.” She is triggered by flashbacks, shrinking back when Aunt Patience leans over her. When she sees the rapist again she cannot bear to look at him, feeling “nausea and disgust”. Later still, she can’t bring herself to describe what he has done, except to say he “attacked” her.

Uncle Joss and his cronies are described in the language of uncanny transformation and the supernatural. The “people of the moors” are “furtive” and “no more than shadows” as if they have bled out of the darkness itself and are not part of the human race but a separate category of sub-creature: “tramps, vagrants, poachers, thieves”, “shapeless and distorted”, slithering like “dregs” from “every hole and corner”, insubstantial and yet hellishly malign. They shift smuggled goods in the yard in “some weird pattern in a nightmare fantasy” as if hypnotised, moving “in a strange funeral procession” an image which is formed realistically by the deaths the men have brought about. When they torment a simple-minded local man, their “ugly, screaming laughter” resounds like “a tortured thing”. Even the men’s joy is a kind of pain; even when they are mirthful their sin makes itself known. 

Although the action within the novel is intensely compressed, spanning barely a month, it carries behind it the inexorable build-up, not of years, but of epochs. The moors are represented as untouched by Christian morality, which is relatively recent: they are “no godly place”. Rather, they are ruled by a much more ancient principle: “the old gods slept undisturbed” on them. While the activities of the men at the inn infect the land, the land’s “old magic” could be said to have influenced them in the first place. The events in the book are “only a repetition of what had been before, long ago in time”, things which are “best buried deep” and have their origin “in far-off buried and forgotten things.” In the absence of a Christian god, the moors are governed either by an arcane pantheon of ancient deities or, as many of the locals claim, by the Devil himself. The stones ridging the moors resemble pagan altars, while one landmark is described as bursting out of the earth like a devil’s hand. It is as though the malevolent landscape induces men to violence, absorbs the trauma of that violence (and subsequently contains buried “things of evil, rotting”) and then exudes it again, to induce a new generation to commit yet more violence. 

This epic context is in stark contrast to the brightly coloured, modestly-scaled living memory of Helford which Mary has left behind, where the doctor who treated her mother was the same man who delivered her of Mary twenty-three years before. The darkness described repeatedly in the novel is at once literal, moral (describing murder, corruption and death) and emotional (alluding to grief, guilt and depression). The trees, sky, heather, shrubs, hills, water and sky are all separately described as black at various times. 

The novel’s most impressive feat is to take the atmosphere of the uncanny, of midnight terrors and strangely transformed creatures, and concentrate them into a single character who is apparently integrated into the normal day-to-day social fabric of the locality. Francis Davey is the vicar at nearby Altarnun, a “freak of nature” albino with white skin, eyes and hair, who befriends Mary. As with the werewolf Uncle Joss, the shadowy night-creatures who are his cronies and the zombie-like figures of the murdered sailors who haunt them, du Maurier’s descriptions of Francis Davey evoke vampires, spectres and angels; strange pale visitors to whom normal rules of behaviour and appearance do not apply. Davey appears and disappears from the text, nothing more than “two white eyes and a voice in the darkness”, manifesting usually at night and usually on the road, a saviour materialising just when Mary needs him. His “transparent gaze” comes from eyes like “glass”, as if he is a transfigured character in a Hans Christian Andersen story. Like a fairytale trickster he admits multiple times that he “speaks in riddles”. Mary begins to see Davey’s home, which is “like something in an old tale”, in idealised terms. The vicar’s house comes to represent everything she left behind and longs for: “peace and shelter”, “logic and wisdom”. The house is “strangely peaceful”, “peaceful and still”, offering “security and a forgetting of trouble.”

Contrasting strongly with the earthy, talkative, highly physical characterisation of all the other figures in the novel, Davey seems immaterial. He is described as having been overseas, but his past is not fleshed out. His black coat and hat do not indicate anything about him, his speech is unnatural and he is the one character whom it is difficult for the reader to imagine. His presence leaves no trace on the vicarage house he inhabits – there are no religious pictures on the walls and no papers on the desk. Despite being a vicar, he never mentions God. He repeats “I am the vicar at Altarnun” and talks about himself in the third person, as if to convince himself of the truthfulness of the statement, but also to exult in his power and trust within the community. An altar nun is simply a nun who serves at the altar in a church service; but when linked to Davey it contains connotations of sacrifice and connects him not to the altar of the church but to the altar-like black stones on the moors.

Francis Davey is literally and symbolically the “false light” of the novel, leading Mary towards destruction. This duplicity is hinted at strongly: du Maurier describes his face as being “a white mask” four times. Even his smile brings images of pain rather than relief and joy, cutting into his face “like a wound”. Mary finds a caricature he has done, of himself preaching at the pulpit as a wolf – both a fairytale character and a predator, just like her uncle – with his parishioners drawn as sheep, obedient and easily deceived. Mary feels the picture to be not just cruel, arrogant and hypocritical but “blasphemous”, against God, in keeping with all the covert activities in the novel. It is then that she realises that Davey is one of ‘them’, the “people of the moors”, and not any kind of friend.

One of the ironies of the novel, and part of its critique of male abuse, is that despite his intellectual pretensions, Francis Davey is no less a violent, sexually harassing, abusive man than Joss Merlyn and the wreckers. He repeatedly touches Mary, putting his hand on her knee and his arm around her shoulders, urging her to change out of her wet clothes and sit naked under a blanket. His ‘friendliness’ is sexualised and patronising; he reminds Mary that he has heard confession many times and knows the “dreams of women” better than she does. Indeed, his abuse is all the more chilling because it is comes with an overlay of whispering intimacy and superiority, leaving her feeling “like a fool” and “just another woman who [has] cheapened herself.” He violently abducts Mary, gagging and tying her exactly as Joss’s wreckers did. Like a true sadist, he tells her that “your revolt and your disgust please me” and he is “pleased to have touched you on the raw”. Just like the wreckers, Davey threatens to “spoil” her “youth and beauty” and murder her, leaving her “face down.” That is not an empty threat, and Davey’s violence comes with its own traitorous, slinking sadism: he murders alone, by creeping up on people and stabbing them in the back. 

Du Maurier is highly skilled at blurring the line between realism and the ghastly fantastic and leaving open the possibility that Davey is indeed some creature who has existed since prehistory and embodies an ancient dynamic of sadism and sacrifice. He claims, like a vampire or a ghost, to “live in the past…in the beginning of time [when] old gods walked the hills”, describing himself as “a freak in time”. He says he has “looked into the past” and “understand[s] something of the night” as though he has lived for a hundred years and either doesn’t sleep or sleeps during the day and walks at night. He describes himself as “an outcast” who is excluded by, exempt from and indeed superior to everyday morality and religious “dogma”. In dismissing Jesus as “a mere puppet thing” he demonstrates his own sense of being both above God and older than the Common Era. He wishes to express a “grudge against the age” by returning to “an old pagan barbarism” so, spouting nonsense about the Druids, he abducts Mary and makes for the moors, where the harsh conditions quickly make his fantasies look ridiculous. His death – arms outflung on one of the altar-stones – exposes his delusion. In his mind, he has been martyred; in reality he is being shot for murder and abduction.

A final theme running through Jamaica Inn is one of love and sexual desire, which provoke feelings in Mary which are strong and unashamed, yet conflicted. She is painfully aware of the close similarities between Jem Merlyn, the horse-thief she desires, and his brother, her Uncle Joss, the man she hates, and she rues “the weakness of her flesh”. Jem is a thinner, younger, stronger, healthier version of Joss; both are demonstrative, earthy, blunt and talkative. Mary’s desire for and aversion against both men occasionally blur: when she first meets Jem he reminds her of Uncle Joss “throughout the conversation”; when she looks at her uncle the curve of his mouth is “painfully familiar”. Du Maurier is brilliant on the humiliating irrationality of physical desire, where incriminating impulses are “never acknowledged to the sturdy day.”

For Mary, love is more complicated than sexual desire and comes with greater risks. It renders women “fallen and degraded”, “weakened in mind and body”. It upsets her equilibrium, “devastates reason” and turns a woman into a “babbling child” whose “privacy of mind” is undermined. Mary fears the loss of self-mastery that comes with love. Being in love is not described in joyful terms but those of “pain”, “anguish”, “sickness”, of threat to her strong sense of self. She is perturbed by liking Joss Merlyn by instinct, despite her opinion of him: “He stood for everything she feared and hated and despised; but she knew she could love him.” She judges herself harshly, describing herself in the same terms that she has derisively used to describe Aunt Patience’s submissiveness with Joss: “She ranged herself on his side, she defended him…without reason and against her sane judgement.” 

A psychoanalytic reading of the novel might conclude that Mary has linked female love with women’s destruction after witnessing her own mother’s death. Her mother “belonged in body and mind” to her father and had no second husband in the 17 years after his death. Mary’s dying mother links her own demise explicitly to her husband’s death, saying that the doctor is being called “seventeen years too late.” Mary carries from this experience the belief that love is so strong it commits the women in her family for life, but leads to their actual or psychological death; she sees this too in the case of her mother’s sister, Aunt Patience. She vows that “I don’t want to love like a woman or feel like a woman” because women’s loving intensity and good faith lead to “pain…suffering…misery.” 

Throughout the novel, Mary rages at the way women are patronised, exploited, objectified and abused by men. But she also has an aversion to womanhood itself, describing women as “frail things made of straw”. Love is a rigged game in which masochistic women demean themselves to serve abusive men. Mary loathes what Uncle Joss has done to Aunt Patience, but there is also a great deal of distaste in the way Aunt Patience is viewed by Mary. Patience is “useless” in a crisis, acting like a “dummy”, compared repeatedly either with dogs or children and described as ineffective, repetitive, clingy and pathetic. Even though the perpetrators of all the abuse in the book are men, not women, Mary still manages to blame the victim, wondering, “Why were women such fools, so short-sighted and unwise?” 

Even the squire’s wife, a minor character who aids Mary with the gallant words, “I am willing to help you in any way you think best”, has her talk described as “prattle” three times. In her one other appearance in the novel the woman is the butt of a man’s joke, being duped by Jem into re-buying a horse he has stolen from her, her confidence made to look foolish by the trick he plays on her.

A helpful woman character is mocked, while a man’s open misogyny is not just excused but rewarded. Sexy Jem Merlyn says that women “make for trouble and confusion”, that “senseless or conscious, women are pretty much the same” and “there’s two things women ought to do by instinct, and cooking’s one of ‘em.” He is surprised, because he’s never thought about it, when Mary asks him to consider how much his mother must have suffered as the daughter, wife and mother of abusive men. Jem is playful, beautiful and wild and so, like all women who make excuses for men’s hatred of them, Mary “had not the heart to be angry with him.” When she visits his hovel for the first time, she immediately puts on an apron, scrubs the place, finds a tablecloth, makes lunch and serves it to him. 

Once the dramatic events of the book are exhausted, Mary Yellan is still trapped within a patriarchal society. The (male) authorities hustle her away with nice-talking, paternalistic kindness, as if she is “a nuisance and a delay, like every woman and every child after a tragedy.” If she were man, even if penniless she would be free to “go on a ship somewhere” or walk off to find her fortune, with a “heart and soul at liberty.” As a woman, she is once again in need of protection.

In the final lines of the novel Mary grapples with a dilemma: to return to Helford or go off with Jem. In keeping with the post-lapsarian theme of the book, a return to the innocence and security of the past is impossible. Yet so is going with Jem as an equal. “If you were a man I’d ask you to come with me,” he says in his typically direct way. But she is “only a woman” – and his teasing of Mary is ‘only’ a ‘playful’ version of Joss’s tormenting of Aunt Patience. 

Mary joins Jem, in a last-minute happy ending, with a fatalistic and martyr-like pledging of her entire self which reminds the reader chillingly of Aunt Patience’s complete possession by Uncle Joss: “I want to …I must; because now and for ever more this is where I belong to be.” They ride off together, turning their backs against the violence of Jaimaica Inn and Jem’s childhood. One wonders if they have been liberated from the past or if the locals’ repeated assertion that “there’s never been a Merlyn yet that came to any good” will be vindicated and the family’s and region’s dark history will repeat itself yet again.

This is a much extended version of my essay for the British Library's Discovering Literature: 20th Century archive. View the original here.

Novelist Kishwar Desai's Sea of Innocence: women, India, safety, secrets and violence in paradise

I wanted to support The Sea of Innocence, the Costa-winning novelist Kishwar Desai's latest book, which will be published by Simon & Schuster on 30th May in hardback at £12.99. The text below is from the press release - but I love Desai's novels for their brilliant combination of urgent topicality, taut plotting, strong style and an unforgettably clever, funny and resourceful heroine.

Kishwar Desai sprang onto the literary scene in 2010 with Witness The Night, which introduced the characters of the tough, cool social-worker-cum-detective heroine Simran Singh, who was investigating a murder case and tackling the issue of female infanticide. This powerful debut went on to win a Costa and was also longlisted for The DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, The Man Asian Literary Prize and The Impac Award.

Desai’s second novel, Origins of Love, saw Simran travel between Delhi and London in a story involving the exploitative, largely unregulated and hugely profitable international surrogacy industry. It
received rave reviews and helped spark a global debate - which I wrote about in this New Humanist piece.

In her third novel, The Sea of Innocence, Desai’s heroine Simran is holidaying in Goa with her daughter when she is sent a video of a blonde teenager alone with a group of Indian men. The teenager is missing and Simran knows she must act, and fast, in order to save her. Everyone seems to know what has happened to her, but no-one will talk. Soon Simran herself is targeted to force her into silence and her Goan paradise becomes a living nightmare.

Like all Desai’s novels, The Sea of Innocence is a gripping detective story, but it is also the exploration of a serious social problem. In 2011, 21 British Nationals died in Goa and the book reflects on the infamous case of Scarlett Keeling, who was raped and murdered there 5 years ago, and the recent gang rape in Delhi. Desai looks at the role of women in India. She explores how, in the age of globalization, such issues affect all of us.

Kishwar Desai is an author, broadcaster and journalist who splits her time between Delhi, Goa and London. She will be in the UK around publication and will be available for interviews and to write features.

NOTES:

• For further information contact Hannah Corbett; Hannah.corbett@simonandschuster.co.uk
• ...or Gina Rozner at Giant Rooster PR: Gina@giantroosterpr.co.uk

He thinks you’re scum but he fancies you, you’re humiliated but you fancy him: the Darcy dilemma in Pride and Prejudice

Mr Darcy is the ultimate punisher. Icily condescending or outright brusque, he is eloquent only when putting others down. Noticed immediately as “fine, tall... handsome… noble,”  at a dance, it becomes obvious that he is not just lean but mean too. Within the elegantly proportioned space of one Austenian sentence after his arrival, “his manners gave a disgust which turned the tide of his popularity.”

For all his apparent loftiness Darcy has been perfectly happy in the company of his class peers but mental inferiors: Bingley the nice but dim best friend, braying Mr Hurst and the mean, shallow Bingley sisters.

When he meets his intellectual equal, Elizabeth Bennet, the cruel machinery of the novel means that it is she who is constantly humbled and humiliated, not him. Darcy’s scathing presumptions about the Bennets are almost completely correct. His one mistake is to underestimate Jane’s feelings for Bingley. But his assessment of Mrs Bennet’s vulgarity and avarice, his lack of surprise at not one but two sisters’ susceptibility to Wickham’s wiles and his assumption of Mr Bennet’s uselessness are proven right. Lizzy must face the wretched truth of all this; the worst Darcy must do is admit that he fancies someone whose family are inferior in both class and etiquette, apologise to Bingley for not mentioning that Jane was in town and wonder whether he should have told people about Wickham’s true nature.

Darcy’s manner changes somewhat after he is told off by Lizzy following his proposal. But his wealth and power protect him from any greater catharsis and weight the narrative entirely in his favour. That is not to say, however, that any reader with a drop of lifeblood in her would fail to be moved by one of the sexiest and most perfect moments in literature, when the two bump into each other at Pemberley: “Their eyes instantly met, and the cheeks of each were overspread with the deepest blush. He absolutely started, and for a moment seemed immovable from surprise.”

But we know what happens immediately after that: Lydia’s ridiculous and perilous Wickham fling, which embarrasses everyone but herself and her mother in its crudeness. Darcy is the one who makes everything right; Lizzy gets no heroic moment. At the end of the book the Bennets are even less worthy of Darcy than they were at the start, for now he has the moral advantage as well as the monetary one. Nothing Lizzy can do in private will ever repay what he has done in rescuing the family from public humiliation.

The message of Pride and Prejudice is not that love conquers all but that a rich man can buy his way out of any pickle, that tricksters like Wickham always land on their feet and that women are nothing more than collateral in the dealings of worldly men. Such is the genius of Austen that long after the novel is over, one wonders whether Lizzy goes on to teach Darcy the power of laughter or whether he spends his life freezing her out over the breakfast table.

This article was originally commissioned by Intelligent Life magazine to celebrate the upcoming  200th publication anniversary of Pride and Prejudice in 2013.

Even the rich suffer: Swimming Home by Deborah Levy

It’s wonderful watching the toxic posh get their comeuppance. Deborah Levy’s novel Swimming Home was shortlisted for the 2012 Booker Prize and is a masterwork of precision malice, a poisoned cocktail of high bourgeoisie, low motives, brittle manners and mean assumptions.

Swimming Home takes a series of cultural clichés and class, sex and national stereotypes and leaves them to fester in the summer sun until all the toxic matter oozes out. Nobody deserves this literary karma more than Levy’s cast of characters: an arrogant and sleazy poet, a desperately gauche pubescent daughter in a clangingly symbolic cherry print bikini, a bickering couple who own a boho antiques shop and a passive aggressive war reporter who’s traumatised from witnessing other people’s suffering. And there is no more apt place for them to confront their own and each other’s whiny demons than the kind of shabby chic villa you find littering the hills of Tuscany and the groves of Provence, full of braying British foodies.   

Swimming Home is set in a Mediterranean village of international crapsters, pretentious bohemians, uptight Eurochic and hateful and hate-filled locals. All are provincial and parochial clichés and the general plot of the novel is a cliché too: a group of frenemies renting a holiday home, whose dynamics are disrupted by the arrival of a beautiful young woman of mysterious motive. Anyone who’s watched Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty or Ozon’s Swimming Pool will recognise this set-up instantly. And anyone who’s been to a place like that, on a holiday like that, with people like that, will know that clichés are sometimes true.

Levy is brilliant at taking this much-used template and examining its self-conscious constructions and falsities. All of the older characters are quite deliberately enacting roles, both as individuals and as parts of the group. Privately, they chafe against these fake and thin identities, wondering how they have become trapped inside them. They are appalled at how their past, immense but unspeakable, has ossified around them. Publicly, they express their discomfort through vicious power-plays, mental battles, verbal barbs over the dinner table, insults disguised as jokes, egotistical bluster and brittle, small, symbolic acts of unwillingness or resistance.

This collection of unlikeables and insufferables thoroughly deserves to be drawn into some summertime mind-games. Enter Kitty Finch, who is also at the villa due to an apparent mix-up in rental dates. Kitty is every poor-little-lost-girl cliché you can think of: skinny, sexy, tough-but-vulnerable, dim yet scheming, crackers, manipulative, deceitful, hot but demonic. Even her name is revoltingly, self-consciously fake and minor: a little scratchy cat and a flighty little bird. Through her, the reader can see every damaged ingénue of page and screen, yet in Levy’s expert hands this interloper is shot through with terrible fragility and a sinister edge. Kitty Finch is a good old-fashioned man-worshipper, a grovelling groupie and a coquette who pretends not to be.

I won’t reveal how the poison plays out once everyone’s in place. That would blunt the cold sharp steel of Levy’s story and undercut the effect of its beautiful language. There is one more thing to point out, and it shows Levy’s brilliance at finding a false idea and stabbing it: the trope of a beautiful young woman arriving to disrupt the social and sexual dynamics of a bunch of villa-renting olive-eaters with her untrammelled foxy moxy voodoo lady-mojo is itself a literary delusion. In reality, gamine young women do not have any sexual power, do not wield decisive influence in psychological games, do not and cannot manipulate other people and do not have events centring around them. They are, instead, treated as bimbos and objects: leered at, harassed, exploited, groomed, pimped, used, abused, raped, objectified and then passed off as teases, liars, hysterics, attention-seekers or mad when they speak up. Beauty and sexiness in very young women seem powerful but are not; instead of being wily minxes, these girls are disempowered, isolated and insecure. They have no power to compel, and are victims. Levy smartly, lightly layers all of these images into her construction of Kitty, whose grovelling submissiveness towards the poet is matched only by his sleazy, pathetic susceptibility.

All these nasty people get exactly what they deserve and Levy delivers them to their fates in frozen, perfect, precise prose. Swimming Home is a brilliant novel about awful people; an absorbing narrative about the self-absorbed, whose pain never loses its tinge of pretension.

Swimming Home by Deborah Levy is published by And Other Stories, a small and brilliant press producing gorgeous contemporary books by some of the world most gifted thinkers. And Other Stories, if you're reading this, I would love to make some gorgeous volume with you.

Reflecting badly on horror: Dolly by Susan Hill

Spoiler alert: contains plot hints.

Does anyone do it better than Susan Hill? Give her a remote house, a graveyard, an attic with an iron-framed bed, some bad weather, circling birds and a childless mother or a motherless child and she’ll give you three hundred pages of expert ghastliness. Dead or ghostlike children, live or lifelike dolls, mirrors that reveal a true face, unjustly buried things trying to get out, unfairly banished things trying to get in, cots and rocking chairs that rock themselves, dead people who’ve lost something returning to look for it… we know what world we’re in.

Hill’s versatility as a literary novelist is well-known but there is a special, chilly pocket of appreciation reserved for her ghost stories The Man in the Picture, The Small Hand, The Mist in the Mirror and perhaps the most famous of all, The Woman in Black, which is onstage and onscreen as well as on the page.

Here’s an indiscreet anecdote from a namedropping writer colleague: “I’m friends with Susan Hill. If you’re worried about money, get a play on. The Woman in Black’s been showing for ever and Susan was telling me it makes so much money she doesn’t know what to do with it.”

Dolly is a long short story, beautifully presented as a black and green pocket hardback by Profile books. It performs the same clever Halloween trick as Hill’s other works, taking all the staples of historic horror and ghost genres and delivering something that is completely predictable, symmetrical and seemingly obvious. Yet it is Hill’s storytelling skill itself that makes these stories seem like they’ve been around forever and are part of some deep national dread.  

Here’s a comment from another colleague, a brilliant writer to whom I was praising Dolly but wondering why we need an old house and no Net for a proper horror story: 
“We need to strip away the modern for true horror because technology isn’t frightening,” she said.

“A literary editor once said to me, ‘No-one wants to read about people texting,’” I said.

“Well – screens might be frightening, people climbing out of them or going into them.”

“Like that Japanese film, The Ring.” 

“But what’s really frightening is people.”

“Or things behaving like people, or bad people pretending to be good people and getting away with it. Or wearing a mask in full view. Have you read the Freud essay, The Truth of Masks? It’s about how disguises are real. We choose the disguise that we think hides us, but we subconsciously choose the thing that reveals our true face.”

“…Or people pretending to be people you know. I once received a lovely letter from a young reader – I write for children – and she told me one of her most horrible dreams. She told me there was someone in her room, and she thought it was her mother. It looked like her mother. And she got close to it and suddenly it said, ‘I’m not your mother.’ And then, the girl wrote, ‘She took me to her cold dark nest.’ Isn’t that the phrase? ‘Cold dark nest.’ She was a writer’s daughter of course, her mother’s a writer, it starts so young.”

In Dolly, two children go to stay at an old house inhabited by a sullen housekeeper and a well-meaning but distant aunt. One child is a diffident and uninteresting little boy, who narrates the story as a grown-up. The other is a fiery, spoilt, unhappy girl whose flighty, frivolous (etc) mother has abandoned her. This girl, Leonora, wants a doll for her birthday. She doesn’t get the one she wants, expresses her rage in a jarringly ugly and ungrateful manner, and then…. There are no thrills or spills with Dolly, merely a momentary act of crude brattishness which is quickly forgotten by the young perpetrator but punished cruelly for decades afterwards by …well… and revealed with implacable, predictable (but no less affecting) calmness.

Dolly is about consequences, about the real monster not being the person or thing you thought it was, about the punishment being much greater than the crime and unfairly and disproportionately affecting many more people than just the perpetrator. It’s about the suffering of innocents and sometimes their revenge. The suffering comes out in twos: there are the two original children, each of whom has a daughter, and there are not one but two dolls, and there may be two or more perpetrators, and two of them might be the dolls – or maybe the dolls are merely reflecting the malice of Fate or the bitterness and pique of a grown adult who’s been hurt – or maybe it’s a very hard lesson that little girls shouldn’t misbehave….

At once frozen and hokey, underpowered yet overbaked, perverse yet obvious, smooth and inexorable, it’s also horribly satisfying. Yet the underlying (and I am sure, subconscious) politics of the story leave a bad impression. Though narrated by a male character, the story is about the nastiness, pettiness, malice and punishing of females, who are the perpetrators of most of the bad events in the book, but for one very significant act at the beginning; and the victims of this female malice are all very young girls themselves, almost babies. The flighty mother who abandons Leonora, the shrewd housekeeper who diagnoses Leonora on sight as evil – “She had looked into Leonora’s eyes when she had first arrived, and seen the devil there”, Leonora the malicious child herself, the childless aunt who seems kind but may not be, the changing female dolls who cause or mimic the suffering of the little girls and grow ugly in their boxes like “a wizened old woman, a crone” in one case and “no longer a beauty… a pariah” in another. The worst thing that is said of Leonora is that “she is too like her mother” – a bad girl taking after a bad woman – and the insult is delivered by another woman, the aunt, Leonora’s mother’s own sister. We are not only in an Edwardian physical setting but also its psychology: whether real or mannequins, young or old, absent or present, females are sad, mad, bad, petty, shrill, vicious, shrewish, irresponsible, occult, corrupt and corrupting.

If your desire to revel in the nastiness of Woman is satisfied and you want some racial and national stereotypes as a side dish then look no further than the Eastern European city the narrator visits as an adult. The medieval Old Town is in the middle, surrounded by hastily over-developed malls and motorways, the building work halted following a people’s revolution and the exile of the state leader. In the Old Town is… you can finish this sentence for me… a little old toy shop, and in the little old toy shop is a little old toy-restorer… “a very small old man” with an inscrutable manner and “a jeweller’s glass screwed into one eye”, from a Quality Street advert at Christmas, who seems to know exactly what the narrator is looking for.

If the Grimm climate of Eastern European cultural clichés is too chilly for you then let’s go to India – that palace of clichés! - with the narrator and his family, to a region which Hill does not even bother to give a name to, instead sketching it with a series of offhand, inexact, thrown-out and embarrassingly crude and ignorant pejoratives: “heat and humidity…extreme poverty” amongst “women and their children in a remote village, where there were no medical facilities and where clothes and people were washed in the great river that flowed through the area.” Tiny hint: there is no such thing as a remote village on the banks of a great river. If there’s a great river, it’s not a remote village but has the provision for irrigation for centuries of agriculture and therefore crops, food, flora and fauna; a prime position along an established transport route; a longstanding and probably classic trade route and the possibility of (to-be-purified) drinking water. Another hint: If you do not know a country, culture or people well, particularly one that was a former colony and subject to any number of racist clichés and Orientalist justifications, don’t patronise it with uneducated generalisations. Write about something you know and respect instead. Want more, reader? How about “terrible diseases… ravage this beautiful country. Poor sanitation, contaminated water, easy spread of infection…” easy and glib, just like that.

Dolly is a smoothly gut-churning story from one of England’s greatest living writers. From its lonely starting point it soon widens into an exploration of the depth and ineffability of curses. However, it leaves a bitter taste as much for its racial stereotypes and tinge of sexual slander as its sensational storytelling and core of fatalistic horror.

Dolly by Susan Hill is published by ProfileBooks.

Beyond the Wall: Writing a Path Through Palestine

"An unflinching portrait of life in the West Bank in the 21st Century."

Andrew Kelly, The Observer

Updated 25th October 2013

I am delighted to celebrate the publication of my fourth book, Beyond the Wall: Writing A Path Through Palestine (Seagull Books/Chicago University Press), which I discuss in a long interview with For Books' Sake. Read Part One here, read Part Two here and Part Three here. There's also a long interview on TYCI and another, by Julie Tomlin, on Digital Women. Further press mentions, hat-tips and interviews have included The New Statesman, World Literature Today, The Mancunion, The List, Platform 51, La Carpa del Feo, Book Elf, The Boar, film-maker and writer Simon Guerrier's site, New Humanist, Ideas Tap, The Asian Writer, Variety, The Student Journals, Spiked, Newsclick India, Women's Views on News and The Observer.

Beyond the Wall was launched with a panel event at The Mosaic Rooms, entitled Writing A Path Through International Affairs. Journalist Susannah Tarbush has written an excellent report on the event, here. I was joined by Anna Blundy, former Times Moscow correspondent and author of a series of novels about war correspondent Faith Zanetti, inspired by Marie Colvin; poet, economist and novelist Nitasha Kaul, whose debut novel ‘Residue’ was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize and who has written extensively about global economics, Kashmir, India and Bhutan; and Rosie Garthwaite, who began her reporting career straight out of university and the army in Basra, Iraq, and has worked as a reporter and producer for the BBC, Reuters and Al-Jazeera. Her book How to Avoid Being Killed in a Warzone is a survivors’ guide to staying alive in combat territory.

Publishers' blurb as follows:

Beyond the Wall: Writing A Path Through Palestine is a sharp, immediate reportage published by Seagull Books/Chicago University Press on 15th May 2012. It is the latest release in Seagull’s series of short Manifestos for the Twenty-First Century, which tackle current issues in international political affairs. The publisher’s page can be found here and the Amazon UK page, which has a little bit more blurb, is here.

Beyond the Wall: Writing A Path Through Palestine is an unflinching portrait of life in the West Bank in the 21st Century, seen through the eyes of its activists, its ordinary citizens, its children, its population of international aid workers, reporters and foreign visitors. From my first experience of the caprices and cruelties of checkpoint culture upon entering the West Bank to a final confrontation with the army in Silwan I report, reflect upon and analyse multiple aspects of life in an occupied territory. Covering Bethlehem, Hebron, Jerusalem, Ramallah, Nablus and Nazareth, speaking to children in the refugee camps at Balata and degree students in the lecture halls of Birzeit University, I share observations of Palestinians from all walks of life.

Beyond The Wall: Writing A Path Through Palestine is based on my first visit to the West Bank as a reporter in 2011. A short film by Murat Gokmen, summarising the effects of the trip on some of the participants including Anne Chisholm, Ghada Karmi, Ursula Owen and me can be viewed here. I was not a Middle East activist or specialist and went with the intention of reporting exactly what I saw, as it happened. I was both shocked by the behaviour of the military and circumspect about many aspects of Palestinian culture. My final vision balances faith in the vigour of the country's young activists, shock at the perverse effects of military occupation on the mentality of the occupied and the occupiers alike and sorrow at seeing the frustration and anger of the country's youngest citizens.

Excerpt:

It is only now, about halfway into the trip, that I think about the strategy of occupation. How do you subjugate a people? By nihilism, chaos and anarchy in the name of control. You do it by sabotaging their certainty, by toying capriciously with their presumptions, by continually tilting the playing field, moving the goalposts, reversing decisions, twisting definitions, warping parameters. You control where people can and can’t go, then change the rules arbitrarily so that they cannot make plans or have any stable expectations. You give a permit to one person but deny one to another person who’s in exactly the same circumstances, so that people cannot deduce, conjecture or extrapolate based on an individual’s experience. You make them feel that their house is not their home and can be violated, occupied, demolished or taken at any time, so they cannot fully relax even in their own beds. You isolate them and put a wall where their view used to be. You instigate a faux ‘system’ of permits, which is deliberately obscure and can be changed at any time. You shout at them in a language that is not their own and which they do not understand. You monitor them. When they travel you put your hands all over their possessions. You arrest and question anyone for any reason at any time, or threaten to, so they are always in fear of it. You are armed. You intimidate their children. You change the appearance of their cities and ensure that the new, alien elements—the walls, roads, settlements, sides of walkways, gates, tanks, surveillance towers, concrete blocks—are much bigger than them or on higher ground so that they feel diminished and watched. You make everything ugly so that seeing is painful.

Their consolation is that if they die, the euphemism ‘martyr’ will conceal the ignominy.

Further launch events related to Palestine, the Middle East, war reporting, international reportage and international affairs include the below. A full and updated list of appearances can be found here. 

• [Friday 4th May, 4.30pm, The Globe Theatre, London. I will be participating in a panel discussion entitled Theatre under Occupation: What Does Shakespeare Have to Say to the Palestinians? following the Ramallah-based Ashtar theatre company's staging of Richard II in Arabic.]
• [Saturday 19th May, 2pm, Watershed, Bristol. I will be in conversation with novelist Selma Dabbagh as part of Bristol's Festival of Ideas, in an event called Palestine Now. Click here for details.]
• [Wednesday 30th May 2012, 7pm, Kuumba Imani Millennium Centre, Liverpool, as part of the city's Writing on the Wall festival. I will be in conversation with novelist Ahdaf Soueif about the Middle East revolutions. Further event details here.]
• [Saturday 9th June, 11.30am, Hay Festival, Hay-on-Wye. I will be interviewing war reporter Janine di Giovanni. Further event details here.]
• [Sunday 10th June, 11.30am, Hay Festival. I will be interviewing Ahdaf Soueif about Cairo and the Arab Spring. Further event details here.]
• [Saturday 7th July 2012, 5.30pm, Southbank Centre, London. I will be chairing a discussion on The Art of War (Reportage), with BBC war reporter Frances Harrison, journalist Oliver Bullough and Caine prize winning writer Michela Wrong. For event details click here.]
• [Monday 9th July 2012, 5.30pm, Bluecoat, Liverpool. I will be giving a solo reading and talk on the effects of the military occupation in Palestine as part of the Liverpool Arabic Arts Festival. For event details click here.]
• [Friday 17th August 2012, 4pm, Edinburgh International Book Festival. I will be chairing a panel discussion on international war reportage with Ed Vulliamy and Janine di Giovanni.]
• [Tuesday 9th October 2012, 5.30pm, SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies), London. I will be curating and chairing a panel event called Palestine Now: Writers Respond as part of the university's autumn series of lectures on the contemporary Middle East. Further details here. My speakers will be Rachel Shabi, Naomi Foyle, Miranda Pennell and Selma Dabbagh.] 

• [Sunday 11th November 2012, 6.30pm, The Map cafe, Kentish Town, London. I will be discussing Palestine with the writer and academic Ghada Karmi.]

• [Friday 16th November and Saturday 17th November 2012. Location and speaker details confidential. I am speaking at a leaders' conference about art, culture, politics and the role of the media amongst Arab Spring states.]  

• [Sunday 18th November 2012, Leighton House, London, 3pm. I will be in conversation with British Palestinian author Selma Dabbagh as part of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea's Nour festival of North African Arts. Event details here.]

• [Friday 7th December 2012, The Watershed, Bristol, 8pm. I will be opening the Bristol Palestine Film Festival and chairing a Q&A with speakers including film directors Ken Loach and Leila Sansour after a screening of the film 5 Broken Cameras. Details here.]

• [Saturday 8th December 2012, The Watershed, Bristol, 6pm. I will be speaking and reading at an event called Writing A Path Through Palestine alongside writers Selma Dabbagh and Guy Mannes-Abbott. Details here.]
   

Savage Messiah by Laura Oldfield Ford

Images by Laura Oldfield Ford, from an upcoming poster campaign. For more details
click here.

Are you ready for a concrete future? Laura Oldfield Ford is a visual artist whose talent was developed at the Slade and the Royal College but whose sensibility is chiselled into fineness by the streets, blocks and derelict spaces of East London. Savage Messiah is the name of her fanzine, a collection of exquisitely worked pen and ink drawings that reveal the rigour of her Fine Art heritage, spiked with political awareness, polemical anger and a born documentarist's passion for people and places. The original fanzine editions were handed out in lots of 20 or 30 at a time but have now been collated in a fat, beautiful, black-paged book published by Verso, whose promo page can be found here. The book features an excellent introductory essay by Mark Fisher and Ford will be speaking at several UK events in the coming weeks.

Ford is as much a fine artist as a streetpunk. Alongside the development her work through fanzines, fliers and flyposters she is shown in traditional gallery spaces and will have a solo exhibition at the Hales Gallery from 25th November 2011 onwards, featuring billboard images of her work. I welcome the scale of a gallery-sized project, as Ford's art deserve grand and close inspection. How ironic it should be that the very yuppies - wealthy young City professionals buying up newbuild penthouses in edgy East London - should hang her work on their exposed brick walls. Given the mainstream acclaim Ford has received and deserves I almost think the 'zine, which is also published online, belittles the industry behind the images. It is clear that each one is the product of many hours' closeted studio work by a creator who has developed her craft with great commitment and discipline. I want to see them up close, on great quality paper, framed, large scale, in the peace of a gallery, with all its institutional endorsement. And I would like to be sent a big one so that I can have it for myself.

Savage Messiah is reportage turned into art of breathtaking precision, political sensitivity and power. On day-long research walks of ten miles or more, Ford covers everything from 'Hipster HQ' - the rapidly-developed and quickly gentrified areas around Dalston, Hackney Wick, Haggerston, Homerton and Shoreditch - to the poor, unhip council blocks which have received no funding or improvement despite endless promises, to the corporation-plundered once-wastelands of the far East London 2012 Olympic site. The chillingly named Olympic Delivery Authority has sealed off this area with a concrete wall surrounding what will be the Athlete's Village, supported by numerous international leisure brands policed by private security firms.

Ford observes, sketches and photographs these areas, which are simultaneously forgotten and earmarked for exploitation, making notes and speaking to residents. The result is not straight reportage or urban landscape recording but reality with the zoom lens sniper eye tuned to the max. The cracks in walls, the scrubby greenery growing between slabs, the broad backs of massed riot police and the sad, scratchy graffiti cut into the page with intense monochrome menace. There is, appropriately, a savagery and sharpness underlying Ford's work, equal parts anger, despair, love and urgency. The images are beautiful and terrible: fantasy figures of fashion brand advertising on hoardings next to blocks of flats with smashed out windows.

I would like to see equal recognition of the complementary element of Savage Messiah: the text. Printed in white Courier font on the inky matte background, Ford composes journalistic essays based on her observation of the sites she visits (her riffs on the gleaming monstrosity of Westfield shopping centre are hilarious), reports on her experiences and relays candid conversations with the many hundreds of residents of the unglossy areas usually ignored by lifestyle mag articles on the coolness of the East End. The stories are sad, funny, tragic and true. They are not reported verbatim but are as honed, edited, balanced and polished as the visuals.

Savage Messiah functions as both a literary and an artistic history of the vast geographical area Ford covers, often starting with a present moment like a property earmarked for demolition or an area blocked against wanderers or trespassers. It then moves back in time to excavate the experiences of locals, uncover previous uses of the site and reveal many different biographical, architectural, social and cultural manifestations across the decades. It is as much a seemingly-spontaneous (but actually highly refined) postwar people's history as a fierce and visually stunning contemporary elegy for an East London that will soon be engulfed in the razzmatazz of the 2012 Olympics - before being abandoned once more.