Gunjan Pant Pande
…
Her Body & Other Parties: Carmen Maria Machado
In this feminist collection there’s this:
Then the hazy buzz of summer saunters in, and the air screeches and hums. Cicada-killing wasps catch the weakest and stab them motionless, hauling the weight of their bodies and their glass wings up and up and somewhere else. Fireflies drunkenly dazzle the dark… (P-54)
And this too:
I have breasts that heave out of my dresses in a way that seems innocent and perverted at the same time, I am a good girl, from a good family. (P-3)
No surprise then that book lovers can’t rigidly slot award-winning young author Carmen Maria Machado’s debut short story collection Her Body & Other Parties. These eight surreal tales of transgressions and twists in the lives of its textured characters are “part caustic, part comic; part fact, part fiction; part visceral, part voracious; part punk rock, part classical,” as one reader put it.
A glimpse of the paradigm-breaking genre about to unfold is obvious in the first few pages when the author quotes poet Elizabeth Hewer’s haunting words:
“God should have made girls lethal when he made monsters of men.”
The daring narrative that follows throbs with originality as stories within stories traces the gender-bending lives of women, their sexuality, the violence they experience, transformations they self-inflict and demons they shadowbox. The pace is such that the reader can at no point claim to have caught up with the cult genre. Similarly, the interpretation of this psychological fiction is also left to the reader, who may discern hints of the mystery of Shirley Jackson, the anguish of Mariana Enriquez and even to some extent the dystopian world of Margaret Atwood in this very original collection of myth and magic realism.
I believe in a world where impossible things happen, Where love can outstrip brutality, can neutralize it, as though it never was, or transform it into something new and more beautiful. Where love can outdo nature. (P-56)
Talking about her work in an interview, Carmen Maria Machado, underlined her experiences with her body “as a queer woman, as a fat woman, as a woman of colour, as a woman who either wanted to or has had sex, as a woman, period.”
She went on to point out categorically that when it comes to navigating sex and sexuality, “we’re all marinating in a toxic societal stew of some sort,” comprising slut-shaming, homophobia, transphobia, body shaming and food shaming. “Our culture hates bodies.” Take for example the last story in Machado’s book, Difficult at Parties, about a woman binge-watching pornography as a coping mechanism to sexual assault or Inventory about a woman’s erotic experiences with lovers both male and female.
DISROBED: A disoriented, naked, pregnant woman is discovered wandering around Midtown. She is arrested for indecent exposure. (P-67)
The author goes on to share that if you’re a woman, a queer person, a person of colour, a non-cisgender person, a non-able-bodied person, etc., “writing is inherently a form of activism because you’re staking a claim in a world that is not meant for you.”
Scoffing is the first mistake a woman can make.
Pride is the second mistake.
And it turns out, being right is the third, and worst, mistake. (P-9/10)
However, due to the fearless eroticism, the exploration of queer desire and the experimental nature of her writings, this gothic literature was in fact also listed among banned books. Commenting on this kind of stigma and stereotyping, a publishing house made a fierce case of the overwhelming need to have LGBTQ+ books for youngsters so that they “feel seen, heard, valid, accepted and loved. It increases their feeling of belonging and self-worth and helps them feel more connected to their community.”
Machando’s rich satire fulfils this need, though some readers may find its uncomfortable ghosts and doppelgangers difficult to comprehend. All stories may not work for all. The effort, however, continues to pierce rigid veneers to lay bare the extraordinary that lies buried deep within tales of female existence. So much so that some stories “crawl under your skin” as the layers unfold, touching and terrifying the reader with their lingering imagery.
Especially Heinous
UNCIVILIZED: They find the boy in Central Park, looking like no one has ever loved him. “His body was crawling with ants,” Stabler said, “Ants,” Two days later, thy arrested his teacher, who as it turned out had loved him just fine. (P-66)
Brutal. Brave. Bare!
Thematically, there’s something dark yet stunning in every story, and as you turn pages the femme emerges as a piercing portrayal on the storyteller’s creative landscape in the guise of a student, wife, unnamed narrator, lesbian lover, mother, adolescent or cop.
LEGACY: Over breakfast, Stabler’s daughter asks him about Benson’s family. Stabler says that Benson doesn’t have a family. “You always say that family is a man’s one true wealth,” says Stabler’s daughter. Stabler thinks about this. “It’s true,” he says. “But Benson is not a man.” (P-70)
In another interview on the controversial subject, Machado talked about how “non-realism can be a way to insist on something different for women.” Her memorable pieces intertwine just that bit of non-realism with stark reality prodding the reader to do a re-think.
Like Tennessee Williams famously remarked once: “What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains.”