Being-With, Being Known: Critical Fictions by Hannah Godfrey

Critical Fictions by Hannah Godfrey. ARP Books. Image courtesy of the author.

By Jaz Papadopoulos

“Learning changes when relational context changes.”

  • Leanne Betasamosake Simpson[1]

“[W]e could not hear a melody as melody if our immediate appreciation of the note before our ears was not accompanied by our ‘memory’ of the note just before and an expectation of the note to follow.”

  • Eva Hoffman[2]

 

Between the covers of Critical Fictions, the latest collection from poet, storyteller, and art writer Hannah Godfrey, a pulse beats: a lineage and testament of queer intimacies is alive.

The five artists discussed within its pages––Derek Dunlop, Kristin Nelson, Hagere Selam shimby Zegeye-Gebrehiwot, AO Roberts, and Logan MacDonald––Godfrey knows on personal levels. Winnipeg is a mid-sized Prairie city, full of artists and social atmospheres in which to meet them; it would be difficult not to. I have also met most of the artists in question. We’ve shared dance floors, studio visits, and the occasional diasporic lineage-seeking trip back to the home country. Herein lies the crux of the text: where formal fields of discussion and analysis traditionally prioritize distance, objectivity, and supposed lack-of-relationship, Critical Fictions knows that we must “hold things to understand them, not as a means of tactile analysis, but…as a means of being-with.”[3]

At her Winnipeg book launch, Godfrey was asked about her choice to write about the work of artists she knows. (The text goes so far as to name one of the artists as chosen family.)

Somewhat bashfully, Godfrey shared that she considers this book a “book of love,” a text about artists and artworks to whom she feels affectionately and intimately connected. Godfrey’s assertion––the right to write about those she loves rather than see it as a conflict of interest––is a transgressive act prioritizing proximity and intimate knowledge over normative analysis. This is especially poignant in a queer context: we know so little about our queer ancestors, our history, and our culture; it becomes imperative to share the queer stories that we do know well.

Beyond relationships themselves, Godfrey introduces readers to the codes of queer history and art, while role modeling curiosity and the process of meaning-making. Godfrey’s book intimately and responsibly documents queer bodies of work, ensuring they are not lost to time, spatial distance (physical artworks that only exist in specific places, if also the internet), and the erasure of hegemonic narratives. 

RELATIONSHIPS, KNOWING, AND UNDERSTANDING

Intimacy need not be complicated. It can simply be the act of knowing: pink is Derek Dunlop’s favourite colour; he rubbed this part of the painting with his fingers. Such simplicity gives a sense of purity and an ability to see things as they truly are.

Dunlop is an artist making prints and installations, many of which the book discusses in relation to queerness, cruising, and the outdoors. One piece in particular, an installation titled Garden, is composed of “found objects and mud taken from the banks of the Assiniboine River in Winnipeg.”[4]

Knowing this river is key to understanding this piece. I have walked its banks innumerable times, in all seasons, save for when it’s flooded its paths. Godfrey, a Winnipeg resident for nearly a decade, has also developed a familiarity with the river, going so far as to audio-record river walks to play on her former community radio show, MonkeySparrow. Without knowing this river, one might see metal, cement, and rocks when looking at Garden. With more proximity, one would know that this river is a site for gay cruising and is one of the flows that brought colonial expansion into the Prairies. Downtown, it connects with the Red River, a site often dredged for Missing and Murdered Indigenous women.

Neither understanding is truer. Just as we come to know a friend better over time, so too we can better understand art by learning more about it. It’s not that you can’t or don’t know the art, but that you can always know it more.

Intimacy allows a depth of understanding. It assigns meaning to the codes embedded in queer culture and artwork alike. Godfrey’s use of association shows how one can labour to make meaning. It doesn’t try to be exclusionary, but it does not hide from the simple fact that closeness leads to understanding.

CODES AND UNDERSTANDING

Codes: an in-group language composed of symbols that communicate information, often in layered ways that require the navigation of many possible meanings.

Godfrey is aware of how her own units of meaning––words––are also encoded symbols and wields them with both precision and generosity. Just as Godfrey supports the reader in learning some of the codes in art and queer art, she makes clear the sheer quantity of choices that (can) go into creating artwork.

The outcome? There is no reason to shrug something off because “it just doesn’t make sense” or you “just don’t get it.” Take AO Roberts’ Say It Ain’t So: a series of prints where, at first glance, four words are printed on a darkly painted background. In fact, the text is hollow, “nodding at the porousness of language and context,”[5] and the “paint” is actually lampblack: smoke captured by the page, seemingly in motion around and within the outlined bodies of the words. Each set of words is from a particular era in human history––all different eras, but all pre-Industrial religious ones. Recognizing these different components as intentional communication choices leads to a much broader meaning than simply seeing four unusual words on darkly printed paper.

Finally, Godfrey supports readers in their own efforts to both perceive art and interpret her wordage. For example, she writes “The partialness (incompleteness) of Dunlop’s depictions speaks to the partialness (bias) of information and dissemination.”[6] By connecting the two distinct concepts of incompleteness and bias through a shared spelling––partialness––Godfrey offers one mode of recognizing artistic meaning through a sort of linguistic/conceptual repetition. Similarly, she identifies motifs of bondage to refer to a sexual practice, a form of kinship, and indebtedness.

In this way, discussing art––especially within the specificity of queer art––almost becomes the work of translation. Anne Carson’s translation of Catullus prompts the question, “There are so many words associated with each one; how does anything ever get translated or settled upon?”[7]

FOOTNOTES, PHOTOS, AND PARENTHETICALS

Critical Fictions’ abundant footnotes and absence of photos further assert the value of lineage and reciprocity.

The footnotes––averaging over 50 per essay––highlight both lineage and context as important modes of understanding. Though Western culture’s art writing prioritizes the individual (and the intellect of the individual), other more collectivist cultures prioritize stating where you and your family are from, from where you learned ideas, and who your mentors and teachers are. Choosing to use footnotes, rather than a less visible Endnotes section, lays it all on the table: there are citations for quotes, but also extra contextual information, tangential references, and statements of gratitude to those who directed Godfrey’s thinking and writing.

The effusiveness of Godfrey’s citation points to her valuation of lineage and interconnected webs of knowledge and offers readers a path forward should they wish to continue exploring one of the topics discussed in the book.

Often, art writing is accompanied by photos––visual aids so the reader may see what is being described in the text. Critical Fictions offers no such concession. Relationships take effort and reciprocity. The piles of words thought, written, and ordered over 219 pages show Godfrey’s efforts: years of viewing, pondering, discussing, researching. The act of opening an internet browser and searching for the works and exhibitions described is the reader’s (optional) task. To understand something is to work to understand it; you will only be led so far without reciprocity. True, I did not look up each piece discussed, but I did search for each artist’s website and exhibit––all were easily found online, Zegeye-Gebrehiwot’s yaya/ayat the only one behind a paywall, and a modest one at that ($3).

This itself seems a light-handed approach to coding and withholding, demanding reciprocity. All the information is available but is not quite placed in your palms. To understand, you too must do some seeking.

Another way to interpret the lack of images might be a resistance to the impulse to mistake images for the Truth. In her section about Logan MacDonald, Godfrey quotes Daniel Francis in his discussion of the use of photography as a colonial mode of knowledge-creation: “The image-makers returned from Indian Country with their images and displayed them as actual representations of the way Indians really were.”[8] Where images assert an objective representation of photo-as-thing, a relational approach to seeking and understanding engenders a much more nuanced and subjective perspective. [9]

It must be said eventually, and here seems as fair a place as any: the structure of this book is unusual. It is composed of five sections, each concerned with a particular artist, each bisected into two smaller sections: an essay, and “Fictions.” In the Fictions, Godfrey responds to each artists’ work through creative writing: poems and short stories.

One story, “Found object (fur stretcher, elastic bands)” imagines the scene that led to the creation of Dunlop’s Device for speaking to the dead, (fur stretcher, elastic bands, 2016). Godfrey weaves together themes identified and discussed in her essay––wilderness, haunting, cruising, erotics, backtracking, colour––and builds a rather beautiful basket in which to hold the sculpture––28 coloured elastic bands tightly wrapped around a wooden fur stretcher, evoking cock rings, a door, a tombstone.

“Homage to Hannah Arendt” (within Kristin Nelson’s section) is an experimental poetry piece made entirely of punctuation. Where many would leave such a work to “speak for itself”––without regard for its (il)legibility in the eyes of a viewer––Godfrey kindly leaves a footnote explaining the piece’s meaning. In this way, she props the door open behind her, letting the reader peek through and understand. Through this generous guidance, Godfrey leaves her readers more and more ready to understand a future experimental encounter.

This approach to artwork––casting a wide net of associations and seeing what stays––is replicated in Godfrey’s fictions. It shows how creation begets creation, and though a piece of art has its own background, references, theoretical underpinnings, and meanings, there is an entirely other world of production made by simply creating something so that others may digest it and be spurred to their own thoughts and creativities. One way to perceive art is to seek to conceptually understand it; another is to be spurred into creativity.               

FIN

Make no mistake, this book is rigorous. I learned enough to sprout a prosaic collection of queer art history, no doubt. And yet, as is Godfrey’s style, it is a discourse given amongst friends, shoulder-warming on a couch surrounded by books. It is a reminder of what rigor can look like in queerness, before such political efforts were moved behind the doors of academia, hoarded by button ups and thick rims. It is the table before us, full of snacks, this one from an uncle’s olive trees in the Peloponnese, that one a recipe passed down from a beloved past friend, this bottle inherited from a lover long gone who we may still taste on our lips. The stories that live on in the quiet places, between kin.

[1] Leanne Betasamosake Simposon, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 165, quoted in Hannah Godfrey, Critical Fictions (Winnipeg: ARP Books, 2023), 196.

[2] Eva Hoffman, Time (New York: Picador, 2009), 65, quoted in Critical Fictions, 79.

[3] Critical Fictions, 203. A concept shared in reference to Logan MacDonald’s artist talk.

[4] Ibid, 37-8.

[5] Ibid, 154.

[6] Ibid, 21.         

[7] Ibid, 58.

[8] Daniel Francis, The Imaginary Indian: The Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1992), quoted in Critical Fictions, 205.

[9] Similar arguments against photos-as-truth are made by Orientalist theorist Edward Said.

Outdoor School Edited by Diane Borsato and Amish Morrell

Outdoor School: Contemporary Environmental Art Edited by Amish Morrell and Diane Borsato cover image. Photo courtesy of Douglas and McIntyre.

By Ashley Culver

In the past year or so due to the ongoing covid pandemic many of us, myself included, have found pleasure in being in nature[1]; yet, social distancing has meant this is often a solo activity. While Outdoor School: Contemporary Environmental Art was likely not written to address our current lack of collective engagement within nature, it does just that by gathering a multitude of artists, farmers, writers, facilitators, collaborators, and thinkers. Outdoor School offers dialogue around ways to be outside together and connect with the natural environment. This book is edited by Diane Borsato, a visual artist with a relational, interventionist and performance practice, and Amish Morrell, an editor, curator, and writer. It is a collection of 150 photographs and fifteen contributions including a foreword by Ann MacDonald, director and curator of the Doris McCarthy Gallery, along with Alana Bartol, Jacqueline Bell, Diane Borsato, Bill Burns, Carolina Caycedo, Jen Delos Reyes, Sameer Farooq, FASTWÜRMS, Jeneen Frei Njootli, Ayumi Goto, Maggie Groat, Karen Houle, Hannah Jickling and Reed H. Reed, Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, Rita McKeough, Peter Morin, Amish Morrell, Public Studio, Genevieve Robertson, Jamie Ross, Aislinn Thomas, Vibrant Matter, Georgiana Uhlyarik, Jay White, Tania Willard, Terri-Lynn Williams-Davidson, and D’Arcy Wilson. With all of these voices meeting within the pages of Outdoor School, the book offers a complex conversation of art and nature.

Ayumi Goto, Rinrigaku, 2016. Photo: Yuula Benivolski.
Ayumi Goto Artist and organizer Ayumi Goto’s project focused on the idea of “passing through” the land as temporary occupants, and the responsibility that this entails. She ran the areas around the University of Toronto Scarborough campus for three days as a practice that aimed to honour and become better acquainted with traditional Indigenous territories and passages. Goto posits that running is a means of “passing through” and a practice by which we can develop a more respectful relationship with the land beneath our feet. The public was invited to join the artist as she ran each day, beginning at the Doris McCarthy Gallery. Scarborough, Ontario, 2016. Photo courtesy of Douglas and McIntyre.

I admit to feeling a high level of FOMO (fear of missing out) when flipping through the large publication for the first time. The cover image shows dozens of artists and mathematicians in bathing suits venturing into a glacier-fed river surrounded by evergreen trees – everyone including plants and humans bathed in golden sunlight. Another image near the beginning shows Diane Borsato and Amish Morrell holding hands with a young boy facing a gallery full of mushroom foray participants outfitted in rubber boots, and waterproof jackets, some holding red Tim Hortons coffee cups and wicker baskets.[2] Another of people congregating around two glowing points: a beach fire and LED light. The circles of faces lit by warm and blue glow respectively are engulfed by darkness with a couple stars and whiffs of clouds visible in the sky above the outline of treetops[3]. Further in on page 86, there is an image of about a dozen people sitting cross-legged on pebbly ground. There are charts of flowers and mushrooms as well as guidebooks, water bottles, and backpacks strewn in-between their knees. My knee-jerk FOMO stems from having missed out on the specific exhibitions, residencies, outings, walks and such described in Outdoor School or even more so from the lack of togetherness these days. These gatherings are a long way from anything I have experienced this year. I live in Toronto, where many of the contributors also reside, and Toronto residents experienced the longest lockdown in North America[4] this year – the same year Outdoor School was published.

Deirdre Fraser-Gudrunas/Vibrant Matter, Plant Identification Workshop, Scarborough ON. 2016. PHOTO: Natalie Logan.
In this workshop, artist-forager Deirdre Fraser-Gudrunas/Vibrant Matter led sensorial and experiential field identification in the University of Toronto Scarborough campus woods and invited participants to contribute to a subjective field guide. Scarborough, Ontario, 2016. Photo courtesy of Douglas and McIntyre.

It’s easy to feel some FOMO when reading Outdoor School; yet, when read with the same tone of curiosity, attentiveness, and openness the book takes and the artists included bring to their work, it is the opposite of the sensation of lacking. It points to possibilities. It is a guidebook for new ways of being in relation to each other and nature. As Borsato said, “We were looking for projects that reimagine our relationship to the outdoors, to nature and the land, that are rooted in performance and site-specificity. And also to teaching and learning.”[5]

My interactions with or into nature are much less spectacular than the ones highlighted in Outdoor School.  The insights shared in Outdoor School can be applied to our solitary activities at home and in our neighbourhoods. For instance, I can ponder Karen Houle’s ‘Farm as Ethics’[6] as I tend to my balcony garden of herbs: rosemary, two variations of mint, sage, and oregano that didn’t last the entire summer. I can think of the ‘Slow Walkers of Whycocomagh’[7] when I walk the railpath in the west end of Toronto. I can recall Terri-Lynn Williams-Davidson with Public Studio’s words in ‘The Earth’s Covenant’[8] when I speak to my mother, who lives on the West Coast, on the phone about the recent floods or what are now referred to as atmospheric rivers.[9]

Scarborough Mycological Foray, 2016. Photo: Natalie Logan. Photo courtesy of Douglas and McIntyre.

Even without partaking in any outdoorsy activities, I can contemplate Morrell’s land acknowledgment and consider my residence here. In ‘We Always Begin with an Acknowledgement of the Land’ Morrell recognizes “the Mississaugas of the Credit and the Anishinaabe, the Haudenosaunee and the Huron-Wendat, and the land agreements, like the Dish with One Spoon treaty.”[10]  However, he goes further than simply speaking their names by exploring how one connects to place and community as well as some of the problematic aspects of outdoor culture and education. This is not a land acknowledgement spoken out of obligation but thoughtful practice.

By shifting from feeling left out to joining in through participating in this new iteration of Outdoor School in the form of a book by reading, I find a new understanding of my relationship to the earth. In a period where many of us are seeking solace in nature, Outdoor School encourages us to consider our presence and the practices we have. Gathering almost thirty artists, the book activates the conversation of art and nature and how we fit into it.

[1] “Nature walks helping many relieve anxiety during COVID-19,” CBC, January 31, 2021, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/prince-edward-island/pei-nature-conservatory-1.5895421.

[2] Diane Borsato and Amish Morrell (with Feliz Morrell), “Mushroom Foray,” in Outdoor School Contemporary Environmental Art, ed. Amish Morrell and Diane Borsato (Madeira Park: Douglas and McIntyre Ltd., 2021), Page 16.

[3] BUSH Gallery with Lisa Myers, Akwesasne Women Singers, imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, “Beach(fire) Blanket Bingo Biennial,” in Outdoor School Contemporary Environmental Art, ed. Amish Morrell and Diane Borsato (Madeira Park: Douglas and McIntyre Ltd., 2021), Page 32.

[4] Robin Levinson-King, “Toronto lockdown – one of the world’s longest?,” BBC, May 24, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57079577.

[5] Diane Borsato and Amish Morrell, “Artist Spotlight: Contemporary art goes outdoors,” AGO Insider, May 26, 2021, https://ago.ca/agoinsider/contemporary-art-goes-outdoors.

[6] Karen Houle, “Farm as Ethics,” in Outdoor School Contemporary Environmental Art, ed. Amish Morrell and Diane Borsato (Madeira Park: Douglas and McIntyre Ltd., 2021), Page 88-99.

[7] Aislinn Thomas, “Slow Walker of Whycocomagh and Mountains Used to Be Ugl,” in Outdoor School Contemporary Environmental Art, ed. Amish Morrell and Diane Borsato (Madeira Park: Douglas and McIntyre Ltd., 2021), Page 120-123.

[8] Terri-Lynn Williams-Davidson with Public Studio, “The Rights of Nature,” in Outdoor School Contemporary Environmental Art, ed. Amish Morrell and Diane Borsato (Madeira Park: Douglas and McIntyre Ltd., 2021), Page 166-169.

[9] “What are atmospheric rivers, and how are they affecting the B.C. floods?,” CBC radio, November 18, 2021, https://www.cbc.ca/radio/whatonearth/what-are-atmospheric-rivers-and-how-are-they-affecting-the-b-c-floods-1.6253763.

[10] Amish Morrell, “We Always Begin with an Acknowledgement of the Land,” in Outdoor School Contemporary Environmental Art, ed. Amish Morrell and Diane Borsato (Madeira Park: Douglas and McIntyre Ltd., 2021), Page 19.

Of Colour by Katherine Agyemaa Agard

Of Colour by Katherine Agyemaa Agard

Essay Press, 2020

Of Colour by Katherine Agyemaa Agard. Essay Press, 2020.

By Margaryta Golovchenko

In the second half of the untitled introductory section to Of Colour, Katherine Agyemaa Agard asks, “What colour am I?” By way of an answer, she then offers the reader a photograph of herself, pairing it with a column titled “Proportional Palette” that shows the colours found in said image. Since 29.4% of the photo’s surface area is identified as Sapphire (Blue), Agyemaa Agard concludes: “I think that I am blue.”[1] It is easy to instantly jump to Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and to the colour’s broad spectrum of affects, as Agyemaa Agard states herself in the References section when she lists the books people would mention “[w]ithout fail when [she] talked about [her] project.”[2]

Of Colour is an artbook memoir that straddles the line between essay and poetry. In an interview for the University of Washington-Bothell, Agyemaa Agard also uses the term “speculative non-fiction” to discuss the work, as it “allows me to reflect on basic truths and speculate on various matters related to them. It’s important to retain that freedom when I write.”[3] Of Colour is a living document rather than a static and fixed text that similarly treats colour as a container for the self to step into when language fails to convey and to soothe.

While the exploration of colour’s optics and affects, its artistic and material side, in the work of ‘colour writers’ like Nelson is present to an extent in Of Colour, the term “colour” takes on a multivalent function within the book. For Agyemaa Agard, colour serves as an entry point into locating the self within artistic and cultural traditions, of thinking about racialized bodies, and beginning to theorize personal and familial trauma. In the beginning of the second section, “Surface,” Agyemaa Agard’s photographic documentation of Trinidad is coupled with a questioning of the “colored signs” that line the road of identity, of asking yourself “who am I?” Later, this question of identity is expanded to the way identity is still used as an obstacle to keep out people from countries seen as undesirable in the hierarchical eyes of Western countries like the United States, limiting their mobility as well as work and study opportunities. The legacy of the historical, colonial binaries of colour are shown to persist to this day, a system that, by virtue of being upheld, continues to engage in anti-Blackness. Agyemaa Agard’s role in this is that of an interlocutor, “a colorman, mixing colors for others,”[4] one who sorts through lived and inherited experiences as if through vials of pigments on a shelf to show how they intermingle and work together, of the way they work together when they are laid down on the page like paint on a canvas.

It is through colour that Agyemaa Agard also documents the fraught understanding of race and colour within her own family, the importance placed on her lighter skin and, “the whole mess” when she stated “I’m [B]lack, betraying the family.”[5] In the first section, “Interior,” Agyemaa Agard includes her three milk paintings (2014) as a material manifestation of this questioning, each of the three square canvases that bring to mind handmade bars of soap representing Agyemaa Agard and her two siblings. The association with soap feels fitting, given that the connection between milk and bathing resurfaces only a few pages later in the form of a recipe for a milk bath meant “for a cooling head.”[6] Where some artists make art based on their experiences or as a way of processing knowledge inherited from family or culture, Of Colour is a demonstration of Agyemaa Agard’s immersive practice. It does not come from a place of obsession so much as a space of emotional intensity where “anxiety is urgency.”[7]

Visuals, both literal and the kind constructed from snippets of memory and oral history, are one of the primary modes of communication for Agyemaa Agard. Screenshots of email correspondences and website pages, photographs of Trinidad and Tobago, collages created out of pages from historical texts and documents on the slave trade and European colonization — these are some of the images that populate the pages of the book, yet they do not exist to merely illustrate Agyemaa Agard’s text. Instead, these images form a separate thorough line that runs through Of Colour as an additional layer of inquiry into autoethnography.

One of the most interesting uses of visuals in Of Colour are little snippets of textures scattered throughout the book. A note in the reference section tells the reader that these are textures of various surfaces from Trinidad that were taken by the author and artist using a handheld book scanner. The effect of these scraps of colour ranging in size and shape is one of unmediated, almost sobering, sort of looking, the kind where nothing stands between the individual and the world other than those few seconds before they reach out their hand to grab it. Whereas later in the book Agyemaa Agard takes two such textured surfaces and expands them to the size of a painting reproduction, pairing them with computer-generated alt-text as well as her own affect-based caption, the smaller scans function more as fragments of the peripheries gravitating to the centre, becoming one with the text in the form of a new whole. Similarly, Agyemaa Agard states that she “learned to see [herself] by seeing how other people read [her] […] learned to write [herself] against the language of those gazes.”[8] The reader reads Agyemaa Agard through this rich combination of text and image, which in turn prevents the flat simplification of character that would otherwise be tempting to partake in if the work were strictly fictional or even biographical.

Of Colour is a new addition to the growing genre of autotheoretical texts as Agyemaa Agard manifests one of the primary features of the form: the refusal to conform to white colonial expectations of what a text looks or sounds like. It is also not a text that exists to be at the service of the reader. Rather, Of Colour is a testament to narrative’s plasticity, the way experiences and stories are braided together into a thick thread that is constantly being worked on. “I must tell you that this grandmother — as are all characters including myself — is an amalgam of all my mother’s stretching back,” Agyemaa Agard says at one point in the section “Surface.” “Fictional and true all at once, a monstrous creation meant to allow for both plausible denial and recognition.”[9] The reader is a spectator witnessing the unfolding of Agyemaa Agard’s practice, in which colour is a catalyst rather than an entry point, and where, like on a canvas, words participate in an ongoing stratification of the self.  

[1] Katherine Agyemaa Agard, Of Colour. Essay Press, 2020. p. 4

[2] Of Colour, p. 198

[3] Stephanie Segura and N.L. Sweeney. Interview with Katherine Agyemaa Agard, 2020. University of Washington. https://www.uwb.edu/mfa/publications/essay-press-book-contest/katherine-agyemaa-agard

[4] Of Colour, p. 100

[5] Of Colour, p. 147

[6] Of Colour,p. 32

[7] Of Colour, p. 64

[8] Of Colour, p. x

[9] Of Colour, p. 56

Jess MacCormack’s SHAME SHAME, Go Away Illustrates the Invisible

Jess MacCormack, SHAME SHAME, Go Away, 2020. Photo courtesy of the artist. ID: A colourful book resting closed on a wooden table, its front cover facing up. The book’s title reads “Shame Shame Go Away” in hand-painted letters with the author’s name, Jess MacCormack, neatly painted below. The title is written on the back of a blue hand with bright red fingernails painted in watercolor. The backdrop of the cover is a juicy pink and a few leafy plants grow out from the edges of the cover. Half of a skull peers out from the spine of the book and a rainbow shoots across it to the opposite corner of the book. 

By Rebecca Casalino

Trigger and Content Warning: trauma, sexual assault, police violence, and mentions of medical procedures and suicide.

Settler Canadian culture can be summarized in one word: silence. Many difficult topics like mental health, trauma, and gender identity are considered taboo and continue to be policed by social norms and ‘politeness,’ stigmatizing these very real experiences. These cultural aspects are supported and enforced by colonial police forces and medical institutions. These topics become the monsters living under our beds; always there, always hidden just beneath, seen by children and invisible to adults. Jess MacCormack’s book SHAME SHAME, Go Away grabs these monsters by their ankles and pulls them out from under the covers into the light of day. That being said, please take the time to steady yourself before reading this review (and Jess’s book) and make space for your own emotional needs.

Jess MacCormack, SHAME SHAME, Go Away, 2020. Photo courtesy of the artist. ID: White hands holding a book open on a wooden table. These pages have blocks of printed text and painted imagery. A group of three figures in conversation is repeated twice on the left page. In the second iteration, one figure pushes another to the side as they accept a gift. On the right “Empathy” is painted in cursive over a patch of white that covers a grey face with red cheeks and lips. Three little hearts rise above their bald head. A hand reaches down from the top of the page with blood-red nails.
Jess MacCormack, SHAME SHAME, Go Away, 2020. Photo courtesy of the artist. ID: White hands hold the book open on a wooden table. These pages have blocks of printed texts with painted text and imagery surrounding it. A bald head is peaking up from the bottom of the page, their eyes are rimmed with blue and they are holding cursive text that reads “help us” above their head. The opposite page is a grey stylized torso with red pigment accenting nipples, bellybutton, crotch, knees, and elbows. A block of text is in a white circle in the center of the torso.

SHAME SHAME, Go Away is written and illustrated by MacCormack, a Vancouver-based artist, activist and educator invested in queer politics, mental health, embodiment, and decriminalization.  Dedicated to their late friend Mia Rose Cameron, a teenager who died by suicide, SHAME SHAME, Go Away shares MacCormack’s experiences to bring light to the impacts of childhood trauma on people’s mental health and the damaging effects of medical and [in]justice systems.

SHAME SHAME, Go Away begins with the story of a series of police encounters. At age six little Jess presents a hand-written book to the police, MacCormack writes that they were “Eager to please [the cops] with my extensive knowledge.”[1] The small book outlines details of their sexual assault and lists the names of other girls who were abused. A small green puzzle piece, which had been a gift from their abuser, was taped in the book as proof. This is written out in the first two-page spread of SHAME SHAME, Go Away in a stylized hand-written font, rotating in colour across paragraphs. Within this first spread, two floating faces look back at the reader with wide eyes framed by arched brows, their mouth is in a soft grimace as the black watercolour bleeds out to meet a rim of red. Two pools of black pigment make nostrils and thick black lines frame wide blue eyes like clumpy mascara. Fingertips bleed into grey skin and stylized black lines form deep nail beds as two hands reach in to touch the pages. Even with details of the assaults written out as proof, it was not enough to convince the Canadian [in]justice system this man was not some imaginary monster under their bed. MacCormack writes: “He got two months in jail. And when he got out, he stalked us. After a few years, everyone seemed to have forgotten I was abused at all.”[2] He was never charged for crimes against Jess, as they were considered “too young” to know what had really happened and they might be “making things up.” It is no wonder why most people choose to not report their assaults at all.

Jess MacCormack, SHAME SHAME, Go Away, 2020. Photo courtesy of the artist. ID: White hands hold open a book on a wooden table. This spread is mostly illustrated, with some text, and is all hand-painted using watercolour. Blue hands with red knuckles and nails reach up from the bottom edge of the book. Leafy plants grow from their fingertips and along the edge of the pages. Two faces that are blue and red, with horns are crying, are accompanied by a pair of red apples and toothy skulls. Snakes and grey horned figures, with red accenting their eyes, nipples, and crotches. A starry sky is painted in the upper corner. One page reads “triggered”. The other says “i’m not dead i’m hiding.”

SHAME SHAME, Go Away feels like the second iteration of MacCormack’s book that they made as a child, in the sense that they are reaching out to explain what has happened to them and to the people they care for. In presenting their personal narratives, readers are freed from the constraints of medicalized terminology and language so often associated with research around mental health, childhood trauma, and sexual assault. MacCormack tells their own story, in their own way, making space to explain, understand, and process dissociative identity disorder (DID) from the perspective of their lived experiences instead of the sweeping terms that doctors, and medical writing present such personal realities. MacCormack lists parts that make up themself in SHAME SHAME, Go Away: an outgoing teenage girl, a protective boy, an anxious six-year-old as well as other parts and fragments to explain their experience of DID to readers. MacCormack makes room for all their parts amongst drawings of human and cat faces painted in greys. On the more monochrome pages spot colour stands out, bleeding red pigment marks mouths and genitals. Blue eyes look back at the reader, the watercolours extending like outstretched fingers. “feel” is written lightly in watercolor, so is “help me.” The DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) has historically been harmful to queer people, women, Black people, Indigenous folks, and communities of colour, yet it remains as the de facto resource for doctors, patients, and loved ones to learn about illnesses. SHAME SHAME, Go Away becomes a tool for preventing further shame by sharing experiential knowledge through creative, affective, and personalized means, instead of universalized (isolating and stigmatizing) medical terminology.

Jess MacCormack, SHAME SHAME, Go Away, 2020. Photo courtesy of the artist. ID: White hands holding a book open on a wooden table. The page on the left is all hand-painted. “they won’t believe us” is written over a starry sky at the top of the page framed by two grey-horned figures. Below is a pair of red-rimmed eyes with tears streaming past a nose and mouth. A grey body with red veins running down its neck and legs lays in a pool of blue water surrounded by grass and leafy plants. Above the figure hovers a toothy skull. On the right page, a horned demon hangs upside down with tears coming out of its horns. A block of printed text is in the center of the page. Beneath the text is a grey skull with two rainbows shooting out of its head on either side. Two blue hands with red nails are on either side of the skull and leafy plants grow from the edge of the page.

Women, trans and non-binary bodies are not welcome within medicine. We come with too many complications, too many differences to cis men for whom these institutions are built for.[3] Our concerns of pregnancy, miscarriage, and abortion are rumours in hallways or secrets wrapped in shame. These realities have a far greater impact on Black and Indigenous folks, as well as communities of colour, within the medical systems on Turtle Island (North America) because of institutional racism. Jess details their experience of being pregnant at twenty, going through the abortion without anesthesia, and the fallouts of the first procedure. MacCormack writes “I’d realized it was a botched procedure when I started hemorrhaging at work. The manager said there was no one to cover me. I couldn’t leave.”[4] I gag on the story with Jess as we try to understand this trauma.

SHAME SHAME, Go Away deals with many forms of trauma. Reading MacCormack’s experience resurrects stories I had buried long ago. Stories of loved ones’ sexual assault and violence I had kept in fear and paranoia. My own stories are made real again with old screenshots and lists of witnesses hidden in my computer. (I remember disclosing to a friend the next day, I was blushing in my naivety, but her face was angry and serious. It wasn’t until years later while listening to #MeToo stories I realized what had happened to me was attempted sexual assault.)[5] These experiences are tattooed on my skin and it surprises me how invisible they are to everyone else. MacCormack knows this powerful invisibility, as they write: “I like how they dust powder on the walls and it makes the prints of his fingers appear. They should brush our bodies.”[6] My bound copy of SHAME SHAME, Go Away is a physical reminder of these hard truths and realities people seem so eager to erase. A skull wraps around the spine of the book, one eye peers at the reader on the cover, a little horned figure dances on its head at the spine and its toothy grin stretches onto the back cover. Sitting on my bookshelf the skull looks back at me tracing invisible lines with its pages, making real what others hope to bury.

This article corresponds with the event that took place on April 25, 2021 in collaboration with the London Ontario Media Arts Association (LOMAA) “Jess MacCormack in Discussion with Rebecca Casalino.” You can grab a copy of SHAME SHAME, Go Away on Jess MacCormack’s website.

[1] Jess MacCormack, SHAME SHAME, Go Away, Hemlock Printers, (Vancouver: 2020).

[2] MacCormack, SHAME SHAME, Go Away.

[3] Roman Mars and Caroline Criado Perez, “Invisible Women,” 99% Invisible, Episode 365, July 23rd 2019, Last Accessed May 17th 2021, https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/invisible-women/.

[4] MacCormack, SHAME SHAME, Go Away.

[5] Even writing this here seems silly but then I walk myself through the whole night and it all becomes very serious.

[6] MacCormack, SHAME SHAME, Go Away.