Philobiblon

Was chuffed to hear about the group of Paris campaigners against four-wheel-drive vehicles, who call themselves the Deflators (Les Dégonflés). They are going around letting down the tyres of four-wheel-drive vehicles (SUVs), a campaign that has been stepped up since the local authorities wimped out of banning the monsters from the city.

SBS reports: “The group has promised to make a video of its tyre strikes available on the Internet within the next month with the aim of inspiring the same action in other French cities.”

Now I can hear all the complaints now:

1. That must be illegal.
No, according to a report on BBC Radio Five yesterday (not on the web), it isn’t, since no damage is caused. (Legal note: This is the case under French law; it may not be the case elsewhere.)

2 You’re inconveniencing “innocent” people.
Oh no they’re not – these are people behaving in a thoroughly anti-social manner. Society is entitled to extract a penalty from them for that. Teenagers who behave in an anti-social manner are forced to spend their weekends picking up litter; having to pump up your tyres and not being able to get where you wanted to go instantly might provide a good time for a little reflection on your behaviour.

As one blogger puts it: “La guerre du macadam est ouverte.”

In case you still don’t realise how bad they are, from yesterday’s Guardian:

“4x4s are responsible for 43% more greenhouse emissions and 47% more pollution than the average car. You are 27% more likely to die if you are hit by a 4×4 than by an ordinary car. But, bizarrely, you are also 6% more likely to die if you are an occupant of a 4×4, because 4×4 drivers, feeling invulnerable, drive faster.”

More about Paris anti-4×4 campaigns (in French) here. The British campaign, as yet rather more restrained, is here.

Environment

An eBay impulse purchase (very quiet days at work are so expensive), Shakspeare’s [sic] Heroines: Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical & Historical, by Mrs Jameson, author of Sacred and Legendary Art etc, London, George Newnes Ltd, Southampton Street, Strand, 1897.

Surprisingly for what otherwise (paper, typography etc) looks like a cheap edition, it has a stunning embossed leather cover:

And I’m trying to still like Mrs Jameson, despite:

“The intellect of woman bears the same relation to that of man as her physical organisation; it is inferior in power, and different in kind. That certain women have surpassed certain men in bodily strength or intellectual energy does not contradict the general principle found in nature. The essential and invariable distinction appears to me this: in men, the intellectual faculties exist more self-poised and self-directed – more independent of the rest of the character, than we ever find them in women, with whom talent, hoever predominant, is in a much greater degree modified by the sympathies and moral qualities.” (p. 37)

Interesting contrast to yesterday’s early modern version of patriarchy.

Women, History

… and it is a beauty. You might recall mine was a Greek symposium, well this, on Respectful Insolence, is a premium video channel – of a class of something I’ve never seen on the old box.

A play about a 14-year-old from East London who’s just got out of care and back with his dysfunctional family will, you might safely predict, have plenty of shocks, and be staged in a confrontational, in-your-face manner. And that is the case with Afterbirth, which opened tonight at the Arcola Theatre.

The play begins with the graphic description by a group of youths of a video of a fatal rape of a senior citizen on the estate who was being punished for “grassing up” one of its criminal families, then Val, Baz’s shatteringly dysfunctional mother, walks around on stage for several minutes “with her tits out”, as her older son Morris puts it, parading in front of him and a visiting mate. Then there’s full-frontal nudity from the middle-aged paedophile character(at least if you’re sitting in the seats on the left as you enter the theatre – you’ve been warned), as he gets out of bed after a night with Baz, the 14-year-old. (The 16-plus ticket rating is fair enough.)

This first full-length drama by Dave Florez, is, however, considerably cleverer and more thought-out than those “shock-jock” scenes might suggest. They are only softening up the audience for the real earthquakes to come; most of which happen in their minds, rather than graphically on the stage in front of them. Yet the thought, the fear, that they might lingers.

The play begins as Baz (David Judge) returns home, to his glue-sniffing mates and the paedophile Ken (Paul Moriarty), who, it emerges, is the closest thing to a parent-figure or older brother that Baz has ever known. The subtlety of this relationship hints at the complexities to follow, although, for reasons I cannot reveal without giving away too much of the plot, you’re left in no moral doubt about the ultimately thoroughly exploitative and vile nature of the relationship.

Baz then sits down in front of the television with the chain-smoking Val (Clara Salaman), but the closest she can imagine to a motherly gesture is the jerky, uncomfortable offer to take away his drink can. In the background is Baz’s new (half)-brother, Alan, in whom the boy has invested all of his fervent homes for family and stability. (An interesting take on the more usual model of female teen pregnancy.)

We gradually meet more of the thoroughly dysfunctional family: Morris, the football lout, and Madonna, the drug-addicted prostitute sister, who’s trapped in messy sort-of-snout but mostly sexual relationship with a sleazy policeman (Chris Chilton). This is the aspect of the play – with its all-too-Billish cliches, that works least well. But general, Florez is successful in avoiding the obvious council estate plot lines; I was particularly impressed that the social worker who appears at the end is not a figure of fun or loathing, just a man of compassion trapped in a potentially explosive scenario. And we’re not just presented with horrors flat out, some unfold subtly, with the Morris-Val scene, for example, suddenly appearing in a new light after later revelations in the play.

There’s plenty of humour, situational, slapstick and verbal, most of which is built into the plot in a sophisticated matter – there’s little slapstick for the sake of it. (Even the nappy smell jokes, which start to get a little wearing – do in the end have more point to them than might seem possible.)

At the peak is the turning point scene with Karim (Kal Aise), Val’s latest boyfriend and the presumed father of Alan. It starts out roaringly funny, then turns into something deeply dark. As is the play from this point on.

This is a truly fine first play – we can certainly hope to see more of Florez – and a well-staged production by the director Deborah Paige that makes full use of the Arcola’s star-shaped space. David Judge does a fine job of portraying Baz’s real, if desperate, affection for the baby Alan, although is physically less than convincing as a 14-year-old – a tough ask for any adult actor. The production also sees a particularly fine performance from Clara Salaman, who manages to syympathetically play a drunken, drugged-up, hopeless mother without descending into slapstick farce.

It is hard to see this play achieving the “perfect” result for any fringe production in transferring to the West End – the subject matter and a certain rawness militate against it – but it is a production that certainly deserves to be well patronised at the Arcola.

***

For visitors to London, and those who don’t know the area, I should perhaps add that as with most fringe theatre, this isn’t in the best part of town. This doesn’t mean you need to be paranoid, but flashing wads of cash or expensive mobiles on the street would probably not be a good idea. But you can dine well, and astonishingly cheaply by London standards, in the many Turkish restaurants that line Dalston High Street.

Theater,

How a cliche caught on:

“The phrase ‘the weaker vessel’ originated with Willian Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament into English in 1526 and became common usage during the next hundred years or more. Many must have encountered it in the King James version of the Bible … It is hard to think of a single phrase which brings together more aptly the whole Judaeo-Christian tradition of the subjection of women wiith the humoral physiology of the ancients.”

Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500-1800, Anthony Fletcher, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1995, p. 60

As a book it has useful anecdotes, but is otherwise nothing to get excited about.

Women, History

For any woman growing up in, and living in, the Western world, issues of body image, body shape and sexuality can be problematic. For black women, there’s an additional layer of complexity, of danger, of risk of being dangerously misunderstood. In Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture, Janell Hobson explores the centuries of racist exploitation that have produced this state of affairs – most recently brought into focus by the infamous Janet Jackson Superbowl incident – and ways in which black women creative artists have tried to confront it.

At the centre of Hobson’s account is the life, and posthumous treatment of Sara Baartman, a woman who was brought from what is now South Africa to England and France and between 1810 and 1815 exhibited as the “Hottentot Venus” . Particularly exciting (in several senses of that term) to those who paid to see her sometimes unclad body were her supposedly abnormally large buttocks and genitals. After she died, her body was dissected and her brain and genitals preserved, with casts of her body and her skeleton.

Well, you might say, that was a past, barbaric age. Then you learn that it was only in 2002 that these remains were finally returned to South Africa, after a long campaign, and given a proper burial.

And, Hobson, points out, the history of exploitative, demeaning use of black bodies, particularly female bodies, is a continuous one. Even anti-slavery campaigners used sexualised images of flogged and otherwise abused women for their cause, then images of naked black bodies, both male and female, were used by the National Geographic Society (among others) in “anatomical education”, “primitive-style” nudity being acceptable where “civilised” was not, which of course provoked a suppressed erotic reading of these supposedly pedagogic materials.

Hobson says:

“When this colonial historic imagery combines with the more familiar American popular iconography of desexualised, fully clothed mammy images and celebratory imagery of white female beauty, we may be able to more fully comprehend interstices between race and gender that shape our uneasy responses to sexualised visual representations of black women”.

How, she asks:

“Can a black woman hold up a mirror that reveals an alternative image of herself, free from the iconographic history in dominant culture that cast black female bodies as illicit, hypersexed, primitive and obscene?”

As these extracts suggest, Hobson’s writing is intelligent without being buried in that bane of so many otherwise fascinating texts, academic jargon, despite her position in women’s studies. This is a book accessible to virtually any reader, and one that many black women, and their white compatriots, would surely find illuminating in their encounters with cultural conundrums of competing demands for sexual display and “modesty”.

Some, however, might find confrontational the fact that Venus in the Dark contains representations of the very images that it is critiquing, including those of Baartman. Hobson says: “Such images need to be confronted”. I agree. Surely to write about these images without presenting them is only to magnify their power and malevolence.

Where Hobson, perhaps inevitably, is less successful, is in her prescriptions for dealing with the issue. Her chosen arena is in cultural construction, mostly “elite” art, with some popular intrusions. This is not my specialist area, but I do feel she’s overly prescriptive in her readings of artworks, and her classifications of them as “successes” or “failures” in their treatment of the Hottentot Venus image.

Among the artists whose treatment of Baartmen she addresses are the poet Elizabeth Alexander, the writer Toni Morrison, the artists Penny Siopis, Renee Cox, Carla Williams and Willie Bester, and the digital artist Mara Verna, who has a website dramatisation.

In “The ‘batty politics’: towards an aesthetic of the black female body”, Hobson then looks at aspects of popular culture, from the tennis champion Serena Williams, the entertainers Josephine Baker and Grace Jones, the dancers Katherine Dunham and Pearl Primus, and hip hop musicians. Hobson says of Jennifer Lopez:
“Dominant culture later came to celebrate Lopez’s behind as part of a recognition of “exotic” and “hot” Latinas, women perceived as “more sexual” than white women but “less obscene” than black women … what has not changed is the racism and sexism underlying her popularity”. (p. 103)

Hobson’s prescription is that black women “must confront the prevailing imagery of grotesque derrieres and black female hypersexuality to distinguish the myths and lies from our own truths and the ways we wish to represent ourselves.” (p. 112)

Finally, I have to share one account from the book that I found particularly horrifying, and that every woman should know:

The scientific display of Baartman’s fragmented body would further shape other acts committed against black female bodies. This is exemplified specifically in the founding of gynecology, as antebellum physician J. Marion Sims invented the speculum while practising surgical experiments on enslaved black women in Alabama from 1845 to 1849. One named Anarcha would be operated on thirty times without anesthesia.” (p. 48)

This book isn’t perfect, but there’s much in it that anyone who confronts issues of gender and race should know and think about, and that means everyone.

Women, History, Race