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Yes, I am a destroyer
112 pages, Proof PDF
Published September 1, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 22, 2021
The reason I wanted to write about this book is because of my long conviction that the literary European literary formation is the fabric of the dominant culture that weighs down on me. It is the culture that has controlled our intellectual landscape for the last 500 years. It is like the mental gas we aspire. It cannot often be seen, its class nature cannot be seen, but it controls the lingua franca of our abstracted thinking. It chokes that which is not part of it. Cuts off from the grain of the oral in spite of Barthes manoeuvres. I had a slogan for this feeling of mental enclosure once - The Mind Cage. This was my intuition as a young working-class thinker but later Foucault gave me some more literary confirmation with his talk about an overarching episteme.
I was drawn the title of Mattar’s book as an attempt to break out from this mind cage, to escape from this bourgeois literary coffin. To destroy the conventions of what is Novel, to destroy literary realism with its reassuring flow that does not actually relate to the discontinuous flow of our common experience. The literary establishment provides the co-ordinates of an ‘educated’ mental landscape and it is not easy to dismantle them in a civilised manner; in a tidy way; with a rational analysis.
In this review I wanted to join in with her and attempt to N-joy her approach to language and use it, in a small way, to describe some aspects of my reading experience. I will intersperse this with quotations from her writing.
Mattar is from a middle class Palestinian and Jordanian family. The subaltern writer is still a servant at the table… in winter. There is an abundance of fear. Fear, she suggests, that has to be befriended.
Time passing is measured by observing how much bruises have healed.
To not slip into literary conventions, to not get sucked into that vortex, it is necessary to start from a consideration of something more elemental, the writers organs. Or is there here a slippage into the middle class denial of the body? But this book drags the literary reader out into a visceral world.
We need to chip away at cliche and monotony. Ask some radical questions. Avoid the patterned expectations of how we should behave, and THINK. Get away from a life pre-determined for us by capital and boxed in by literary conventions.
The text is recursive and unable to be read mindlessly. It brings our attention out to what is being written on the page - upbraids lazy reading habits - takes words on trips. Sleight of plan - Blood on the boundary. Abruptions.
Habits of mind and cultural patterns sweep us along regardless. But still, as Mattar states, ‘routine is crucial’.
We can use satire to laugh at our normal anxieties. We can break the flow. Obey the organs. Disregard our sentence. Not follow the commandments.
I relate the text to thinking in artistic mode - it’s how I improvise …. perhaps I too can write like this? But fear says you might not understand what I wrote. But we have to agree to be able to question ourselves and our modes of communicating. To make a space where we can listen without interruption or incessant judgement.
I loved the metal bucket, the divine pail. Like a portal to some more basic past - ‘farmy’. It speaks to me of an unmediated access to our pre-literary history.
I am shouldered by her resurgent surreality. Wracked by her narrative crunching. Sometimes my attention falls down cracks but I can relate, from my own art practice, to the heightened attention Matar pays to daily routines. Words are at play freed from a servility to canonic literatures, enslaved to story lines, lifelines, song lines.
The readers thought ramelles all over as we read - digressing from the text and regressing to childhood. Our reading minds are elastic. Many thoughtful and never before uttered phrases tumble into the world. Every letter and mark is considered. Our minds are held in bodily fluids and sustained by them and we should remember that as we read and write. The pages of this book are practically stained with bodily fluids. ('ramelles' is a word used by my Grandma Daisy from Nottingham, meaning to go this away and that away.)
There’s some droll reportage that is followed by a tongue-in-cheek consumerist fantasy.
At times I am reminded of Brion Gysin and distant echoes of that man who wrote Ulysses that I read so long ago. Sometimes also of Deborah Levy.
As a working class artist I relate to the anguish of this section. Not only of organs, the writing goes to the microcellular level of struggle that adds up to things like… friendship - Yes! wow!
Truisms, aphorisms and snatches of wisdom. A collage of truth material. I am reminded of Proust’s acceptance of contradictory states of feeling.
Some passages are shocking or sharply satirical like the orgy and the advice column. Others are poetic like the chapter on ‘the beloved’.
Our compliance is described in a cold tone that disrupts it. Revealing the dense anger that we hold inside us. At the same time we can still appreciate the companionship afforded by Literature. As Rancière realised way back, its alien lifescape can be food for thinking that is quite independent from its writer and a launch pad for dreams that are entirely our own.
Conclusion
It wakes me want to write. It gives me a vision of a writing practice that I never felt I could enter, but this makes me feel I can. It is strange but strangely accessible. It asks us to question our existence but from a close reading of that existence - from washing our teeth to dreaming of revenge. I can relate to her words like a disciplined drawing practice. With subject matters ranging from observations of our routine practices to a study of insects.
There is a certain complacency in all those old white men who all shookUp language through my life; like Burroughs, Joyce, Kerouac (in Old Angel Midnight) and even way back to Whitman’s often cratchety verses in Leaves of Grass. But what Mattar brings to this is a refreshing engagement with our current reality that perhaps only those who are profoundly displaced can bring. A clarity born of a struggle that those guys could only dimly perceive from their place in the belly the patriarchy.
“Benjamin was convinced that the official Marxism of his day had lost its revolutionary potential: it had hardened into a lifeless and unreflective doctrine that conceived of progress as something inevitable, as if utopia were to be born from the steady advance of technology alone. The future would unfold out of the present smoothly and without interruption, making revolution into little more than the final, harmonious chord of human history. This, Benjamin felt, was gravely mistaken. Historical materialism could retain its critical power only if it resisted the consoling dogma of historical progress. History had to be conceived not as a continuum but as broken into pieces, every instant holding the potential for a radical beginning.“ Peter E. Gordon
https://www.newstatesman.com/internat...
I was drawn the title of Mattar’s book as an attempt to break out from this mind cage, to escape from this bourgeois literary coffin. To destroy the conventions of what is Novel, to destroy literary realism with its reassuring flow that does not actually relate to the discontinuous flow of our common experience. The literary establishment provides the co-ordinates of an ‘educated’ mental landscape and it is not easy to dismantle them in a civilised manner; in a tidy way; with a rational analysis.
In this review I wanted to join in with her and attempt to N-joy her approach to language and use it, in a small way, to describe some aspects of my reading experience. I will intersperse this with quotations from her writing.
Mattar is from a middle class Palestinian and Jordanian family. The subaltern writer is still a servant at the table… in winter. There is an abundance of fear. Fear, she suggests, that has to be befriended.
“I am an adult, all the forms tell me so. I am lucky I have my fear to guide me – and whether or not fear is or isn't a belief, is the concern of the psychologists and philosophers – and I am not interested in the theories of either.” p.12
Time passing is measured by observing how much bruises have healed.
“I achieved full control of the functioning of my bladder, bowels, tear ducts, and other various, dripping glands. My organs performed their work. Even as a foetus I was a well aligned ascetic.” p.17
To not slip into literary conventions, to not get sucked into that vortex, it is necessary to start from a consideration of something more elemental, the writers organs. Or is there here a slippage into the middle class denial of the body? But this book drags the literary reader out into a visceral world.
“Around my neck was hung a key to a house that does not exist in a place that does not exist but still is teaming with people. It thudded against our chest exposing its lost hollow.” p.19
“How to remember without mawkishness. Both rubble and the words to name it are rubble.” p.19
We need to chip away at cliche and monotony. Ask some radical questions. Avoid the patterned expectations of how we should behave, and THINK. Get away from a life pre-determined for us by capital and boxed in by literary conventions.
“What is the birth certificate that is also obituary? …
“I knew that having a home and homelessness were conditions of each other, not yet resolved in this world but oh! to have somewhere to rest our sensational bodies. …
“What false leap would empathy allow? What will we decorate with? What will become our symbols? What will we see when we look out of habit forever over our shoulder?” p.20
The text is recursive and unable to be read mindlessly. It brings our attention out to what is being written on the page - upbraids lazy reading habits - takes words on trips. Sleight of plan - Blood on the boundary. Abruptions.
Habits of mind and cultural patterns sweep us along regardless. But still, as Mattar states, ‘routine is crucial’.
“I groan on the first day of the week and smile on the last. I join in with the superstitions – mushroom, mushroom, mushroom.” p.23
We can use satire to laugh at our normal anxieties. We can break the flow. Obey the organs. Disregard our sentence. Not follow the commandments.
“It is the noticing of these things – some lithe attention paid – it is the recognition of that attention and its unflinching return that ambles towards tenderness.” p.28
I relate the text to thinking in artistic mode - it’s how I improvise …. perhaps I too can write like this? But fear says you might not understand what I wrote. But we have to agree to be able to question ourselves and our modes of communicating. To make a space where we can listen without interruption or incessant judgement.
“What is a home that is also a trap? Is it witty or efficient? Vengeful or necessary? My tongue tears and blisters.” p.29
I loved the metal bucket, the divine pail. Like a portal to some more basic past - ‘farmy’. It speaks to me of an unmediated access to our pre-literary history.
I am shouldered by her resurgent surreality. Wracked by her narrative crunching. Sometimes my attention falls down cracks but I can relate, from my own art practice, to the heightened attention Matar pays to daily routines. Words are at play freed from a servility to canonic literatures, enslaved to story lines, lifelines, song lines.
The readers thought ramelles all over as we read - digressing from the text and regressing to childhood. Our reading minds are elastic. Many thoughtful and never before uttered phrases tumble into the world. Every letter and mark is considered. Our minds are held in bodily fluids and sustained by them and we should remember that as we read and write. The pages of this book are practically stained with bodily fluids. ('ramelles' is a word used by my Grandma Daisy from Nottingham, meaning to go this away and that away.)
“If I must lacquer and mould, crush and bind, I will lacquer and mould, I will crash and bind doubly, and doubly again.” p.33
“I relish even the traces of faecal bacteria in the desert, I want to feel insides.” p.35
There’s some droll reportage that is followed by a tongue-in-cheek consumerist fantasy.
“One admires my shoes, which are new, though belong to the person I work for, who has not yet noticed their disappearance – I cannot wait until she does.” p.38
At times I am reminded of Brion Gysin and distant echoes of that man who wrote Ulysses that I read so long ago. Sometimes also of Deborah Levy.
“Though my questions were acute, stacking to make many knife-edged crystals aptly multiplying the light, when they saw I was alone they turned on me. I began to seek terror. Its consistency was holy.” p.43
“Each pore a sinkhole and as sudden. I learn my place is only witness.” p.44
As a working class artist I relate to the anguish of this section. Not only of organs, the writing goes to the microcellular level of struggle that adds up to things like… friendship - Yes! wow!
Truisms, aphorisms and snatches of wisdom. A collage of truth material. I am reminded of Proust’s acceptance of contradictory states of feeling.
“When they go, I am relieved. I look in the mirror and watch the face change back into what it is. When they go, I am devastated. I look in the mirror and watch the face change back into what it is.” p.49
Some passages are shocking or sharply satirical like the orgy and the advice column. Others are poetic like the chapter on ‘the beloved’.
“Every speech act is the single suitcase for filling in an emergency.” p.67
Our compliance is described in a cold tone that disrupts it. Revealing the dense anger that we hold inside us. At the same time we can still appreciate the companionship afforded by Literature. As Rancière realised way back, its alien lifescape can be food for thinking that is quite independent from its writer and a launch pad for dreams that are entirely our own.
Conclusion
It wakes me want to write. It gives me a vision of a writing practice that I never felt I could enter, but this makes me feel I can. It is strange but strangely accessible. It asks us to question our existence but from a close reading of that existence - from washing our teeth to dreaming of revenge. I can relate to her words like a disciplined drawing practice. With subject matters ranging from observations of our routine practices to a study of insects.
There is a certain complacency in all those old white men who all shookUp language through my life; like Burroughs, Joyce, Kerouac (in Old Angel Midnight) and even way back to Whitman’s often cratchety verses in Leaves of Grass. But what Mattar brings to this is a refreshing engagement with our current reality that perhaps only those who are profoundly displaced can bring. A clarity born of a struggle that those guys could only dimly perceive from their place in the belly the patriarchy.
“That tree in their garden is still older than the place I am from. I still know their genealogy better than I know my own. I still know even the names of their houses, dogs, horses, wives, ex-wives, cousins, schools, companies, medications and hereditary diseases.” p.81
“Benjamin was convinced that the official Marxism of his day had lost its revolutionary potential: it had hardened into a lifeless and unreflective doctrine that conceived of progress as something inevitable, as if utopia were to be born from the steady advance of technology alone. The future would unfold out of the present smoothly and without interruption, making revolution into little more than the final, harmonious chord of human history. This, Benjamin felt, was gravely mistaken. Historical materialism could retain its critical power only if it resisted the consoling dogma of historical progress. History had to be conceived not as a continuum but as broken into pieces, every instant holding the potential for a radical beginning.“ Peter E. Gordon
https://www.newstatesman.com/internat...
June 3, 2022
Gorgeously written. Precariously between free prose and poetry; never quite so abstract as to be merely beautiful, never so explicit as to be entirely clear what's being conferred. Possibly sits as a vector of aphorisms as much as a work of narrative.
April 18, 2022
Novella/prose poetry about a woman of indeterminate age describing how utterly inhuman she must be in order to conform to ideas of humanity, femininity and the like. Occasional flourishes of criminality and self-destruction, hints at intense trauma, enormous miserable streak, pretty exhausting but gripping enough not to put down while it was hurting me. I'm sure plenty of folks would find it cathartic - Mattar's Palestinian background and her heavy research into ideas of personhood, justice and existence under the hells of capitalism and white supremacist imperialism definitely helped shape the desperation of her "flayed" protagonist.
May 4, 2023
I am not really sure what happened. The first quarter seemed to be so enjoyable, I even took out my little pencil and underlined some pretty things, but then it turned into the sort of prose I despise. It was vulgar and crass but for no good reason, and things just started to sound stupid. I hate when a woman talks about her cunt and vomiting. Words were used more to surprise you than to say anything, and that's something I hate. It was a little like the first things I used to write when I was younger. You haven't the means to say something profound and so you dance around the topic with inflammatory language. Don't get me wrong, I don't consider myself offended, just wildly unentertained.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews