Sughra Raza. Celebrate Symbiosis – Spanish Moss/Live Oak. New Orleans, Feb 2015.

Digital photograph.

by Katrin Trüstedt

"Next time Feminism will not be a tragedy, but a comedy"

—Carla Lonzi

Kottbusser Tor, Berlin. On the second floor of one of the large buildings surrounding this place you can currently find yourself in an exhibition by Ariane Müller and Verena Kathrein on comedy and feminism, entitled "Then I would like to make a happy end for once." This seems like an apt title for the end of this year. It has been a particularly intense year in many respects. Among other things, it has been particularly intense in terms of gender relations. There has been wide-spread outing of sexual harassment and sexual violence of all kinds and degrees. There have been various forms of criticism of this outing. There has been backlash. And there have been discussions about the nature and the future of gender relations.

The danger at this point, it seems to me, is that of reaffirming and hypostatizing the very gender categories that have been at the heart of the problem in the first place. The suggestion, for instance, that men, per se, are predators, that it is the very nature of male behavior to be sexually transgressive and aggressive; and that woman are, per se, victims, and dependent – such suggestions are in danger of reproducing the very problem they are addressing.

Acts of sexual harassment including many of those that have been outed in the past couple of months seem to show, on the contrary, that something like masculinity is not a given, but in need of constant performative reestablishment. To come back to something like a "primal scene" of the current developments – the Weinstein case, and in particular one piece of "evidence" that is out there, namely the audio from a wire tap – it seems like the masculinity in question here is in rather desperate need of violent performance with elaborate arrangements. Trying to bully Ambra Battilana Gutierrez into joining him in his hotel room by repeating what a powerful man he is, appears on tape as a pathetic attempt to performatively produce manliness as power. Not only does the repeated claim suggest the lack of what this performance is intent to prove ("I am a powerful man"). It also exposes the very need of this position to be performed, enacted, and reaffirmed by its other. Needing the woman to feed back to him what a powerful, powerful man he really is, he also needs to emphasize how powerless she is by contrast in this situation ("you don't want to ruin your friendship with me for five minutes").

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by Maniza Naqvi

Sue Hubbard's lovingly mapped novel Rainsongs is a gentle gem of quietly shimmering intellect. I read it twice to savor its sense of place. It is rooted in the abstractions of land and memory, the magical thinking of a bereaved woman.

Hubbard's expressive talent is in full display through her descriptions of the south western Irish landscape of Kerry, so that the reader feels a sense of belonging and a resonance with its emotional and social fabric. I read this book the week before the year changed, curled up in bed, tucked in against the winters bone-chilling cold outside, deeply aware that I was savoring a rarity, seeing through words a remote land. Seeing it through the eyes of the main character, Martha Cassidy who, herself not Irish, has returned after a period of decades of absence.

In the end of December 2007 Martha Cassidy is a woman in mourning who returns to her late husband's cottage in search of solace from grief. Rainsongs approaches the peril and remoteness of relief through the certitude of both storm and calm and its attendant pain on the journey towards consolation. Martha is a beautiful, mature-minded, self-assured woman in her fifties, focused on her own inner journey. Yet she is neither weak nor in need of comforting or saving. And perhaps because of her demeanor, is orbited by men who knew her husband and, as in the case of the young poet-musician, Colm Nolan, is the same age as her son.

Driving rain and wind are the song and silence of the inner drama where Rainsongs will take you. That place within yourself of sorrows, solitudes and solaces, the spaces you have been through, the ones you are passing through, the ones you surely will go through. That place is lit up momentarily like a revelation, then gone and, in the novel, searched out metaphorically through the beam of a lighthouse – beckoning, saving, warning – on Skellig island as it sweeps across the darkened sea and landscape on Bolus Head and shines into the room in the cottage where Martha sleeps. Periodically, as if a monitor for a heartbeat.

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by Brooks Riley

by Dwight Furrow

The claim that wine is a living organism is something I hear often from people in the wine world impressed with the capacity of wine to evolve. Writer and sommelier Courtney Cochran writes:

Wine, with its clear ties to the lifecycle of plants, its ability to evolve and change (to grow) and its delicate fragility in the face of danger (TCA, oxygen, light), fairly screams "alive." In today's overly sanitized, automated world, could our wine be more alive – perhaps even more ‘human' – than us?

Wine grapes react in a very sensitive way to the conditions under which they are grown. They are a product of an ecosystem as well as a reflection of that ecosystem with the characteristics of the vineyard, community, winemaker and weather living on in the wine—a storehouse of the past, a series of "memories" that are transmitted to the consumer in the flavors and textures of the wine.

Even after the grapes are harvested and fermented, wine as it ages responds to stimuli, adapts to its environment, and like a child, requires guidance and nurturing to reach its potential, expressing its aesthetic worth through its own "evolutionary" path, influenced but not wholly directed by the winemaker. People in the culture of wine think of it as "living" because wine not only persists but changes and in some cases improves with age. There is a trajectory of maturation that is in some respects similar to the development of living organisms.

The claim that wine is a living thing has also received philosophical endorsement. In philosopher Nichola Perullo's introduction to his edited, online anthology "WineWorld: Tasting, Making, Drinking, Being", he advocates treating wine as a living thing in order to reform tasting practices and gain a deeper understanding of the aesthetics of wine production, especially in light of the fact that wine is ultimately assimilated to our own living tissue. If we take this view on board, wine is best understood not as a commodity but as something with emotional resonance and authenticity, an object we can engage with as emotional beings, not just through analytical tasting.

But is wine really a living thing or is this discourse just making use of a particularly resonant and vibrant metaphor?

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by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

Writing lives in the gut, like the good bacteria and the bad; it carries on an endless flirtation, an infuriating, nagging conversation with the gut’s long-married partner, the psyche. From time to time, it may traverse its underground-cityscape of anxiety, nostalgia, compulsion, its contradictory pull between instinct and fact-checking, its love-hate habits— to ascend through the pathway of the spirit and become actualized. It may show up on the page ripe and bright as a field of mustard, or as a well-fitting dress, an ammunition depot, a seam of eternity, a sufi’s orchard, or, as too often in my case: a colossal, squandered energy.

This piece of writing, I promise you, is neither about the gut-brain axis, nor is it about writing. It is the first of a short series of essays on my views as a feminist. I have always believed and stated repeatedly in interviews that it is enough to deal with this subject in poetry, that so much of my poetry–nearly all of it—assembles the many facets of feminism important to me, that talking about womanhood requires a language that does not exist. The topic is like handling a slab of granite: a paradox of sheer heft and delicacy, better conveyed through poetry— reduced, ignored, exoticized and caricatured as it has been through the ages. We must mold the language first and create our own terms. I changed my mind, however, after mulling over a few significant discussions, the first of which began as a direct question about the women’s movement from a noted Pakistani poet, the feminist legend Kishwar Naheed at my poetry session at Lahore Literary Festival, the second at SOAS, London, with my activist-academic friend Dr. Maria Rashid, and the most recent one with Rafia Zakaria whose writings on the subject I find truly impressive; I have now begun to see the value of articulating, in prose, how I see gender dynamics and how I have fared as a woman of multiple identities.

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