Saturation Project

by Christine Hume

Literary Nonfiction. "The genre-defying genius of Saturation Project brings memoir and essay to the land of myth. Here, the wildness of what we experience, that which cannot be controlled but controls nonetheless, finds expression through etherealizing and visceral saturations of the body: a feral, humming, windswept girlhood mapped with uncharted brilliance."—Claudia Rankine

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays

192 pages, Paperback

First published February 11, 2021

Reviews

[Sarah Cavar · Rating 5 out of 5]

This powerful sequence performs fracture in several different ways: interlinking cross-cultural myth, technoscientific observation, and historical reckoning with theories borne of lived experience. Hume offers a fascinating countertext to the supposed “objectivity” and even more so, “distance” we are told to bring to discussions of magnetism, sonics, weather, wind. Hume understands the bodymind instead as a weathervane of its own, a powerful observer of the stories nonhuman forces have always shared.

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

How to approach girlhood. A wild girlhood. A life that began in the woods, and maybe Christine Hume feels as though she were raised in the woods. And she wonders at the choices she makes raising her own daughter in light of that. Should Saturation Project. If Hume was forced to relate to the woods or see herself as something raised by wild animals, is she commenting on that return-to-the-land kind of movement? Maybe she dreamed she was raised by bears. And this registers in how she approaches civilized life. And this is a lyric investigation of separation. What she believes she was separated from. Why she might feel alienated from the present.

And girlhood proves a productive mystery to think through. The first section focuses a great deal on the mythological figure of Atalanta. Confusing the story. But also acknowledging that myths are confused stories by nature. Like she sees her own story in a confusing light. Like the objectification of women is confusing, and yet there is something at its center that keeps feeding into its durability and development. Think of women’s objectification as a lens for seeing the world. Or think of humming as a lens. Or the wind. Think of what it means to use a lens for seeing the world. Does this kind of focus distort what the world could be? Does it elaborate reality? Is there one of the lenses that should be places in a primary position, where the other lenses serve to complicate how a reader might consider that primary lens?

Women’s objectification as the opener would seem to occupy that state. The variety of girls coming in and out of the story—girls abandoned, girls that could be the true tale basis for “Little Red Riding Hood,” creates a continual multiplication that inflects on the writer’s life many times. Reflecting a way that a girl might absorb these stories, and the attitudes towards these wild girls, so she would then understand herself. There is apparently a very long mythological history associated with this figure, including a role among the Argonauts. But Hume’s book is more interested in what this figure might mean to a more contemporary history. How would the 20th Century act if people found a girl in the woods? If they believed she had been raised by bears? How could the existence of that narrative fit with the poet’s personal narrative of self?

Perhaps the longer arc, though, is not only thinking of women’s objectification as something that affects her, but also something that will affect her daughter. The full loop traveled by the book, from the writer’s girlhood to having a girl of her own, and being a significant crafter of the daughter’s girlhood, this, for me, is the book’s challenge. When the book shifts to the hum, the humming voice, the role of a hum, it makes sense. At least in that way patriarchy and cultural forces feel like presences that aren’t easily located. So while Hume would hum as a girl, she denies knowing why she’d done it. And it makes sense. How is someone supposed to know their child-motives. And if you think you know them, perhaps you’re just romanticizing your own past. How does that fit with mothering a daughter?

[Nicholas Crawford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lovely, riveting writing that is worth returning to. Aphoristic with a connection to Blanchot that shows. It really got me excited. The last work in the collection does flag halfway through, though.

[womp womp oemp oemp · Rating 4 out of 5]

fabric full of fibers of myth and personal and fiction woven with a golden hand— the imagery startles.

One year later: I just thought of it again ! This book crossed my mind. How wonderful