So Mayer is the author of Political Animals: The New Feminist Cinema (IB Tauris, 2015) and of several collections of poetry, most recently jacked a kaddish (Litmus Publishing, 2018), kaolin (Lark Books, 2015), and (O) (Arc, 2015). They are a contributor to Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (edited by Roxane Gay, HarperCollins, 2018) and Spells: 21st Century Occult Poetry (editors Sarah Shin and Rebecca Támas, Ignota, 2018). An excerpt from their essay “Intimate Alienation, or [blank for your response]” can be found here. It appears in the Nov/Dec 2019 issue of the Kenyon Review.
What was your original impetus for writing “Intimate Alienation, or [blank for your response]”?
As with much of my work, the impetus was rage—or transmuting an internally-destructive rage against into a generative rage for, an attempt to hold on to my relationship to language and activism and community at a moment when I felt very isolated and even under threat. I wasn’t sure what language was, or what it was for, and felt—a feeling in which I don’t think I’m alone—that globalised social media and the fascist turn had entrenched a kind of anti-literary activism, or even anti-language. On a smaller scale, but one that was totally political and politicised, I was reworking my relation to language after presenting publicly as non-binary (or my preferred term, gender non-aligned, used with political homage) and thinking anew about the gendering of language (etymology and grammar as well as enunciation) and whether I had a language to speak in, poetically and personally, within such a charged political moment.
Would you be willing to talk a little more about your reading of Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey? You consider the word polytropos (“many-wayed, many-thinged”) and andra, a word that challenged Wilson to decide between the word human or man. Are there other words in this new translation that stuck out to you?
I wish I had the time, the memory, and the fluency, to have read Wilson’s translation alongside the Greek original so I could offer more than a general sense of the translation’s openness to contemporary readers, in particular in thinking through our apprehension of gods and portents, and its thoughtfulness about the rhythms and specificities of Bronze Age life and its skillfulness (particularly shipbuilding and agricultural vocabularies). The livedness of the text—its refusal to be alienated while also looking critically—is perhaps best summed up in Wilson’s discussion, in her introduction, of the word dmoe (female house slave), which she notes is usually translated “as a ‘maid’ or ‘domestic servant’ [which] would imply that she was free” (88). Wilson’s decision to use “slave,” and to use “house girl” and “house boy,” draws attention to the social structures of the poem’s world, and to the implied and pervasive power relations in a way that is often obfuscated. It’s crucial for reading the final books, in which Odysseus (with Athena’s help) assumes the form of a houseless man, and is treated violently by the suitors, but also lives intimately with those who are his own slaves, on whose kindness he has to depend almost entirely. Wilson’s thinking about the translation of the words that mean slave generate a set of awarenesses, first of all about the brutal hierarchies that stratify the Greek worlds of the book (including gendered hierarchies that intersect with class hierarchies, in the punishment of the women slaves) but also about Odysseus as a character and his place in Eurowestern literary heritage, about what he learns (or not) from his time as a man without a home, a many-wayed man—and whether we can learn something different from engaging with that experience.
Can you tell us more about the “refusal of alienation” at the heart of this essay, “the alienation that is colonial English through the intimacy of Anishinaabemowin words mothering the poet, othering the settler reader”? Were you tempted to write or publish this piece in another language, or to find another way to separate your thoughts from the English language (and all its history)?
All the languages that I’ve had the privilege to learn in part are colonial languages, involved in colonial projects in various ways, including Hebrew and Yiddish. I don’t think that it’s possible to simply leave them behind: I have a responsibility to decolonise them, as I’ve benefitted from the privilege of using them. It’s a lovely utopian fantasy that there is a language without that history to which I have respectful access, and it’s useful to think with—or perhaps towards—in science fictional ways, but I also think that right now, unwriting English (as my primary language) is useful, powerful, and also part of a collective project with over a century of decolonial writers who I’ve learned from.
In writing the piece, I tried to include as many languages and voices as possible, particularly of decolonial writers negotiating with, and reinventing, Englishes. Through their refusal to be alienated, their determination to reinvent—to flex—Englishes, I could come around to letting go of my (arrogant) alienation, and participating in a literary activism that starts in the word(s), including taking note of where I was excluded and had to (and wanted to) respect that. The writers and artists I invoke have shown the way of a “refusal of alienation,” a powerful refusal to be excluded, to be pushed out, to be silenced—but also a powerful refusal to simply accept having to speak on the colonizer’s terms. Intimacy is crucial to that: the way that these writers value what is closest to them, and use it to be confident in questioning, in critiquing, systems of dominance that are often insidious and slippery. That pierces me, disrupts my frozen, withheld alienation, and calls me into solidarity.
You begin to talk about this in the essay, but what does literary activism mean to you?
When I initially heard the call for submissions, I think I felt quite confident about what literary activism meant in a broad, established, outward and liberal sense, as someone who worked for English PEN for a number of years across translation and education with the aim of engaging a wide variety of readers and writers in conversation, exchange and complexity. I felt less and less confident about what it meant in relation to my own creative practice, however, and this essay was an opportunity to explore that: not that I was questioning the social and cultural effects of the work that I had done, or trying to foreclose its ramifications beyond end-of-project reporting and even my perceptions (which is what truly excites me), but that there was a disjuncture between what I was teaching, or saying in meetings, or advocating, and how I felt in relation to my own writing—or, by the time I was writing this essay, not-writing. The essay became part of a moment in which I was questioning something quite basic to literary activism, which is feeling that you have the right to access and use language; and, concomitant to that, that you have the right—and responsibility—to investigate language and hold it responsible for itself, particularly at the moments it excludes you.
My most public moment of literary activism came with co-editing (with Sarah Crewe and Marcie Burnhope) the anthology Catechism: Poems for Pussy Riot in 2012, which raised funds for the band’s legal defense team—but what informed us as editors was Pussy Riot’s imprecation to their global supporters to be Pussy Riot in their own situations, rather than just voice support for them: I think that’s something I am reaching towards in the essay, about internalising the everyday practices of activist-ing, informed by thinkers like Grace Lee Boggs (evolution not revolution as a perpetual practice that bridges all distinctions between the personal and political) and adrienne maree brown, whose book Pleasure Activism came out too late to be referenced in the essay, but her writing on creative practice, passionate friendship, consent, and the everyday informs how I am thinking about what comes after this essay.
What project(s) are you working on now, or next?
I think I have at least five writing projects currently running across various forms and media: one is an extended essay on one of the ideas/visions in this essay, to do with Magnus Hirshfeld and queer and trans anti-fascist history and its contemporary applications (for Peninsula); one is a return to one of my first images of what it meant to use language to defy (gendered) language, in a short book on Sally Potter’s adaptation of Orlando (for BFI Film Classics); one is a novel, which looks at what activism is and how to move out of alienation; there’s a book-length poetry project that is about form, bodies, and borders, centring on (a version of) Medusa; online, there’s an ongoing series of essays that I publish via tinyletter called Disturbing Words, which undertakes the project of dismantling English one word at a time (so far I’ve dismantled forty-seven, most recently “trust,” so I have a very long way to go); and finally, there may be (at some point) a TV series that is absolutely about literary activism, and how to dream beyond the revolution . . . But I also have a non-writing project of trying to breathe more, rest more, think more, listen more, be more to avoid the activist burn-out cycle!