Barrelhouse Reviews: Screwball, by Anne Kawala
Review by Allison Casey
Canarium Books / April, 2018 / 160 pp
Anne Kawala’s text Screwball (translated by Kit Schluter) is a strange and difficult one. It resists genre, falling somewhere between poetry and short fiction, book and found multimedia. It even resists language, in some ways—a text translated to English from French, with interludes of French, German, and nonsense. Further, the characters that exist inside the narrative all use some form of sign language, both official and more pidgin versions, creating a lack of spoken language notable throughout the entirety of the text.
The narrative arc is somewhat simple: a woman (known only as the huntress-gatheress) sets out from Qaanaaq, Greenland to Xin Ping, China with an infant, a child, and a dog (never named, aside from the dog) to see her love. When the volcanic island of Jan Mayen explodes, though, she and her three travel companions are set adrift. They wash ashore in Managua, Nicaragua and are separated. We remain adrift, however, as the text abruptly stops being about that narrative (in the middle of a sentence!). It jerks headlong into the freewheeling poetic middle section of the book before eventually returning to the story.
In the first few pages, it feels like the story is taking time to coalesce, like small organisms slowly multiplying and joining up. Disparate lines that feel closer to poetry gather and grow in density until, finally, the pages are filled from margin to margin with prose fiction—no paragraph breaks, no dialogue. We get the straight story of the huntress-gatheress, the infant, the child, and the dog—but we get only that. Dropped in the middle of the story, like the protagonist in the middle of the Greenlandic tundra, we are given no accompanying information or exposition. Why are they here? Where are they from? Where are they going? Why have they packed so extensively? Who are they in relation to one another? Immediately, we must trust in our guide, in Kawala, following her as the child follows the hunter-gatheress.
The generic or unnamed nature of the text allows the reader to fully enter and immerse themselves in narrative. Aside from the curious “hummer™” that the protagonist drives, almost everything is generic and sparsely detailed. None of the main characters are given a name. They are simply the huntress-gatheress, the child or tot, the infant or baby. With no name, the huntress-gatheress easily becomes an avatar for the reader. This occurs even more easily when the subject disappears from the structure of the sentence, allowing the identity of the protagonist to become blended or even entirely effaced (“Goes back to the hummer™, knocks, back door, on the window, soft sound, gloved, the child lifts his head, come join me…” “Looks at the buildings through the foliage of trees. Sighs. Concentrates. Chooses intuitively.”). At times this lack of direct subject mimics the implication of a second person point of view. Is it the huntress-gatheress we are following, trekking through the ice, or is it ourselves?
…searching for meaning and association, even for the next word, as lines break down and words disperse across the page...
Regardless of the subtextual implication, the reader moves into the role of the huntress-gatheress in the text itself, searching for meaning and association, even for the next word, as lines break down and words disperse across the page. This adds to the difficulty of the text, demanding careful attention of the reader: rereading, parsing lines—not for a deeper or hidden sense of the text, but even just the first meaning of the words that Kawala has laid out.
The text and diction have a gendered nature, which is part of the larger project of Screwball. The very title of the character, huntress-gatheress, calls attention to the gender of the protagonist. “Huntress-gatheress” transitions the more familiar, expected term (hunter-gatherer) into the feminine case. This move insists that the reader consider the character’s gender, consider her as a woman. Kawala later makes a parallel to Athena, stating “in every culture, tradition…has the huntress be a virgin.”
In an interview with Laura Wetherington for Full Stop last summer, Kawala said that she’s “very upset...because as women we are ascribed this position of being female, yet when we empower ourselves we just get put back in the female category.” Later in that interview, Kawala noted that she “wants patriarchal society to die.” The text doesn’t expose that so much, though. While the female protagonist is extremely strong and adept and able, she is isolated throughout the text. When she finally encounters a society, it lies outside the bounds of the normative (patriarchal or capitalistic) society of Nicaragua, on the outskirts of the city.
In the appendix, the “Notebook” implied via spare footnotes to be the property of the huntress-gatheress, Kawala devolves into rambling, semi-academic flights of fancy about gender, society, etc. which more directly engage with the feminist project Kawala described. She trips through several philosophies on gender and sex: early division of labor based on the sexes contributing to current gender roles; the human need to categorize; the archaic belief that, rather than “women alone possess[ing] the principle of life,” men ejaculated a fully-formed, miniscule “homunculus”; Freud’s famous penis envy. This culminates in a stream-of-consciousness musing on the ways in which male and female aesthetics overlap—beginning with an interesting analysis of the French word for chisel (ciseau)—a decidedly masuline, phallic image, and its plural, ciseaux, which translates to “scissor”—an image which Kawala goes on to render feminine (mostly from the implication of sewing, a female-coded act).
Floating above the passage where Kawala declares that huntresses are always virgins, notably bolded and unitalicized, are the words “ungendered warrior.” This is not, however, Kawala’s huntress-gatheress. The character is, at once, a warrior and a woman. Her lack of virginity has not corrupted her, as Athena would have thought in ancient Greece. She is female, powerfully so, as demonstrated in the care with which she tends to her motherhood. When the infant is found dead, the protagonists mourns prominently: “Face contorted -- eyes, mouth closed, cries without tears. Sees the baby, its smiles, crying, silences. It’s movements, suckling, games, sleep. It’s birth. Her pregnancy…The baby dead. The kid missing. Her, further still from what she wanted to join again.” She is female, and she is a warrior. She does not need to be “ungendered” in order to take on traits and behaviors more traditionally seen as “masculine.”
At one point, the huntress-gatheress tells the child with her: “Instincts, you know, they don’t learn themselves.” The motif of instincts, of mimetic learning, of memory comes through in both the more stable narrative passages and also the less linked, more poetic areas. Additionally, it finds a place in the more theoretical musings of the book’s appendix, where gender is assigned as something learned and signaled by society, not an inherent quality—Kawala references with direct quotation an article published on Raw Story by Eric Dolan, the headline of which declares: “Study debunks notion that men and women are psychologically distinct.”
Overall, I believe Kawala’s main concern is to address language and communication. She draws attention to the ways in which power and oppression are tied up in language. Visiting a school for “deaf-mute orphans,” the child recognizes that the students “invented a language, detourning the constraints imposed on them.” Later, one of the students tells him that the teachers don’t like them to use their own sign language because “They’re afraid of the language we speak, they don’t understand it…they can’t know exactly what’s going on between us.” There’s a clear connection, here, between surveillance and language, power and language. At this point, too, the child is attempting to leave the school in order to go back to the huntress-gatheress, back to their small family group existing in something like isolation. In the poetic passages that follow the narrative interlude, Kawala writes: “No authority can decide / the proper language / proper usage of language.”
Yet this is, in effect, precisely what Kawala does throughout her text. She interrupts words with commas, or other words (“Explana,quest,ions”), splices full spaces into the exaggerated caesurae of another passages. She places graphics with no caption or attribution, slips into different languages with no translation so that the words and languages blend together, impose on one another. I got the sense, at times, that I ought to be looking, rather than reading. The tapestry of language is the message, not the meaning of individual words or sentences. Kawala reroutes and hijacks an expected or understood language and makes it work just for her. She, not any other authority, decides what proper language is, what the proper usage is. And, in passing the text on to us, allows us to use it as we see fit.
Allison Casey is a current MFA Creative Writing candidate at Rutgers University—Camden. A New Jersey native, Allison received her BA in English and Certificate in Creative Writing from Rutgers University—New Brunswick. While her first and second loves are her cat and coffee respectively, poetry comes in at a close third. Her work has been published in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Moonchild Magazine, and Occulum Journal.