Barrelhouse Reviews: Sister Seance, by Aimee Parkinson
KERNPUNKT Press / October 2021 / 214 pages
Photography: wickedness caught in a flash. Some flashes intimate a cocooning of specters, the stuff of horror. Others reveal antebellum trauma, trauma still prodding at you, at me, far after America’s emancipation from slavery. In Sister Séance, a work of historical fiction, the macabre and the political weave through one another, and characters like Viv must find clarity through the frenzy.
Here, flash fiction virtuoso Aimee Parkison returns to the novel form, her first in seven years. The critical jolt of her flash fiction persists through Viv’s role as a photographer of jolting instants. Sister Séance follows Viv and a dramatis personae of family, spiritualists, and the like, whose murky allegiances keep their reader rapt. In dinner party reunions, some chalk up communing with the dead as mere show, while others either resist or goad confrontation. Prior to the first lines, we are treated to the supper’s seating chart. Parkison’s attention to historical detail is lucid. Figures like Henry Ward Beecher, as well as fashionable modes of communication such as daguerreotype and mediumship, appear.
The reader’s distance from the historical setting is neutralized, quite nicely, by the closeness of the prose through which we follow Viv and others. Early on, we familiarize ourselves with prose that emphasizes interiority. Parkison writes: “Disguised in elaborately carved bone masks, a couple tiptoed through Viv’s room. Shaken by their lack of courteous introduction, Viv stared at the bone masks.” Later there is “Whom had she photographed in the grinning bone masks?” In the former example, supporting clauses make character intent plainer. In the latter example, a sentence framed as a question offers Viv’s interior mind. While the narrative stays accessible, whispers and rumors unfurl, whisking readers away toward interpretation. While plot builds conflict, formal elements like doubling—of north and south, of genetic twins, of characters who may or may not be one—do so as well. Sometimes this conceit allegorizes names with degrees of opacity or transparence (Ruby, Clara, Aria, Grace), but always swiftly, and with wonder. Always there is a sense that proper manners veil over hushed secrets. The earthbound and the spectral vie for light. While ghastly scenes are plenty, I find myself more haunted by their afterimage than by their ambush. When a figure “crouched on all fours and crawled, spider-like, escaping through a hole in the roof,” I weighed its element of surprise with my abiding wonder at who this naked woman was that “playfully... held her hair like a veil over her face.”
Parkison darkly reworks the central theme in her oeuvre, women in captivity, through a prism of photos. The novel recalls Walter Benjamin’s notion of an ominous distance at work in photography—in which a time-frozen, photographed body reminds viewers of their own mortality. Parkison’s writing is a literature of witness. At the novel’s heart is a hauntology: photography captures (as well as liberates) a person. Viv grapples with this as she photographs slaves to build evidence of their suffering. Even with this abolitionist goal, photographing slaves partly renders them objects. Sadness too is reduced from a human quality to a mere collection of possessions when Parkison introduces the reader to lachrymotory: “When mourning the loss of loved ones, women like Viv’s mother collected their tears in bottles with special stoppers that allowed the tears to evaporate. When the tears had evaporated, the mourning period would end.” While slavery is nominally abolished in the course of the book, the quantification of life persists. Both the authorial voice and shadowy characters ridicule with a distant cackle this fact that we still “monetize suffering.”
And Parkison’s ultimate charm is luring readers to join in this grand cackle—against absurdity. There, the tenebrous title Sister Séance takes on an air of camaraderie, an invitation to laugh into a shared historical silence. Parkison challenges readers to break the silence on behalf of those who can no longer speak for themselves. It is perhaps one of the spiritualist twins, who, at the end of a séance, best teases such an encounter. She tells her audience: “Open your minds, open your hearts, listen to this thing you call silence. It is full of voices that go unheard.”
Daniel Andrade Amaral studies writing, translation, and theory. His fiction appears in 100 Words of Solitude, an anthology on pandemic isolation. Rumor has it his astral body drifts between red dirt Oklahoma plains, São Paulo nightscapes, and lakefronts north of Boston.