Issue 45: Spring 2019

Lost Sisters: I Become a Delight to My Enemies

I Become a Delight to My Enemies Sara Peters Penguin Random House Canada 2019, 144 pp., $21.00

Sara Peters’ I Become a Delight to My Enemies is a clever, genre-blending work that portrays a complex and deeply affective picture of feminism and femininity. A largely character-driven work, the individual poems and works of short prose are threaded together by stories of trauma, abuse, lost sisters, and political and personal confusion. The collection is structured around feminine relationships, which are both contrary to and complicit with systems of tyranny.

I Become a Delight to My Enemies is one of the first books to be published by Strange Light, an imprint for experimental, boundary-pushing writing from Penguin Random House Canada. This is Sara Peters’ second book. Her first, 1996, was published by House of Anansi Press. Hailing from Antigonish, Nova Scotia and now located in Toronto, Peters has an impressive resume that includes an MFA from Boston University and a stint as a Stegner fellow at Stanford. This book heralds Strange Light as a new and exciting home for experimental work—those of us with a bent for blurred genre lines can look to this imprint for good stuff in the future.

Peters’ book is set in an unnamed Town. The Town is an ominous and controlling place ruled by the Chancellor, who runs a Handmaid’s Tale-style prison called the Farmhouse. As the reader learns about the setting and its players, her sympathies are pushed and pulled. The threats posed by the Chancellor and the Farmhouse are invisible and ubiquitous; like so many systems of power, they are hated yet tolerated. The women of the Town work hard to find joy and to remember pain.

In the poem “I Know You are You, and Real”, the speaker goes swimming with a stranger whose physical peculiarities map onto the squalid landscape and ultimately reveal a sense of deep loss in the speaker:

One year after my sister is dragged to the Farmhouse I place an ad in the newspaper that says Let’s Go Swimming The woman I meet at the edge of the lake is perhaps three times my age and so thin I laugh as I imagine her scanty dinners A bowl of brown rice A single steamed green vegetable The simmered stem of some ascetic flower … The lake is so silty and fetid It feels like when I was a child And forced to use my sister’s old bathwater After she had been lifted out and towelled dry Now What wouldn’t I give to swim in my sister’s dirt? There is nothing There’s nothing I would not give.

We learn nothing about the sister’s fate but can infer that being taken to the Farmhouse is a fatal ending of some kind. The speaker of the poem delivers this knowledge of the Farmhouse through her brevity. It is known to be a place where women are taken, from which they do not return, or return changed. The institutions of tyranny like the Farmhouse are always present; within this setting complex and difficult female relationships are revealed. The speaker holds a small grudge against her sister for having the cleaner bathwater—a water image that resembles the common younger-sibling gripe of receiving hand-me-downs, or of living in the shadow of an older sibling. Water images, as we will see, are important to this collection. But in this case, the swim in the lake and the memory of the speaker’s sister’s dirty bathwater give a painful look into the longing the speaker feels. Will she ever see her sister again? We don’t know, and perhaps neither does the speaker. Her love for her sister is what breaks through the surface after her swim. The woman she swims with sparks the speaker’s memories by showcasing her own dirtiness—the difference that brings ridicule from the speaker also forms a connection to her memories. The reader knows that the speaker’s longing is familial, a nice feminist counterpoint to the romance trope of lost or unrequited lovers.

The institutions of tyranny like the Farmhouse are always present; within this setting complex and difficult female relationships are revealed.

A series of poems called “Factory Meat” are sprinkled throughout the collection, describing features of the Town and linking meat with bodies, consumption, and violence:

I was once a woman who drank with men (Many women drink with men) Their ghosts roam fitfully afterwards

Or else they’re found by the Chancellor and taken here, to the Farmhouse This is the birth of tragedy, Of absolute chaos, total darkness, and complete disaster This is the invention of processed meat I will myself someday Be processed meat; I eat too poorly to be fit for anything else Protein bars and very little water, toast with the bad kind of peanut butter

The Farmhouse is where the Chancellor takes women who drink with men. This fact signals the policing of women’s behaviour within the Town. (Men do not get taken to the Farmhouse.) The fact that processed meat comes from the same event that triggers the birth of tragedy, absolute chaos, total darkness, and complete disaster feels kitsch at first glance. Yet the speaker is assessing her own body as something with value as meat. In a classically feminine move toward self-deprecation, she decides that she is not fit for anything else because of the micro-decisions she makes regarding food. The depiction of self-scrutiny over “wrong kind of peanut butter” signals another kind of tyranny, something Naomi Wolf calls the Tyranny of Should—that women should always strive to be better, or different. Women should work out more often, but they should also be gentle on their joints, and they should make time for their family, and they should keep their weight down, etc. There is no upper limit to how one can improve, thus creating endless anxiety over every action or inaction. The speaker’s focus on so-called “wrong” food items marks her own shame, but also highlights a culture that zaps women’s energy by focusing too heavily on small details that call for change.

I Become a Delight to My Enemies registers the domain of the feminine, in part, by repeatedly having women tell the stories of other women. For example, in “The Empathy Exercise”, the speaker begins by telling us “I have not lived variously enough to have my own story, so instead I will tell the story of my mother figure.” In the poem “Happy Mother’s Day!”, a speaker tells the story of her mother by using pseudo-greeting card language. The poem troubles trite notions of what motherly love means:

Thank you Mother For always standing by my side For always having my best interests at heart For always putting my needs First For always putting me First For always Holding My body in front of hers Like a shield

The poem is replete with Mother’s Day platitudes, like “Thank you for always standing by my side” and “for always putting my needs first.” And yet these platitudes are subverted by the final image of a mother who uses her daughter’s body as a shield. This line repositions the preceding poem by suggesting a non-altruistic motivation for always putting the speaker first. Perhaps the archetypal Mother of this poem is so giving as a way of protecting herself? We are not told what the Mother is shielding herself from, but it is enough to understand that she is utilizing this quintessential female role for her own benefit or security.

I Become a Delight to My Enemies registers the domain of the feminine, in part, by repeatedly having women tell the stories of other women.

Water also recurs as a theme, which implies an urge for cleansing, but also links the collection to a deep history of feminism. When the speaker in “The Empathy Exercise” says, “I submit to my mother figure’s various waves,” the reader recalls the history of feminism, historicized as waves, but also the burden of feminist history that can weigh upon young women—perhaps at times another kind of tyranny that begs for submission. Consisting of stories of the Town’s injured women, the collection represents an archive of experiences too often deemed trivial or merely quotidian. Peters’ handling of this subject matter reveals the pivotal nature of these experiences within a political arena. In short, there is no outside of the political.

Attention to the body showcases both themes of transgression and feminism. Bodies are deformed, ill, and reduced by pain, both physical and emotional. The evocative poem “Hooves” dramatizes the plight of a heartbroken person whose journey wears her body down to nubs. It also posits a different kind of body for the speaker—she has hooves instead of feet. This further links human bodies to meat by making the speaker appear as a kind of livestock. Peters goes beyond troubling conventional ideals of beauty to reimagine what a human body can be when this feature appears without explanation.

I Become a Delight to My Enemies insists upon the body as unbeautiful and flawed and makes it a central organizing principle of emotion and intellect. It is a site for female belonging. Bodies and femininity are harsh and crude. In “Teacher”, a sickly and nerdy female teacher is ridiculed by her students. The speaker makes clear that “We wish to control our teacher’s body.” At the same time, an adjacent margin note reads:

I thought myself unique in my frenzied maintenance of my hair and face and body. I secretly believed that no one tried as hard as I did, that no one was so seamlessly man-made. That no one knew how desperate I was.

Peters has an enviable ability to draw sharp, poignant allusions in smart, pithy language. For example, the description of the “man-made” self brings the spectre of male authority to the mind of the reader. Even as women judge and ridicule each other, their interiority is firmly circumscribed by patriarchy. These staccato-like references run non-stop throughout I Become a Delight to My Enemies and work to keep the reader on her toes; we search for a larger meaning but remain immersed in the lived reality of those who are saturated and structured by the Town’s tyranny.

Peters has an enviable ability to draw sharp, poignant allusions in smart, pithy language.

Margin notes such as the one above appear throughout I Become a Delight to My Enemies, signalling an affinity for Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, a water-themed poem known for its formal innovation that tells the story of a marked and burdened man. Coleridge’s poem famously features margin notes that correspond to, or contradict, the content of the poem-proper. “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”’s conceit is that an old man tells the story of his life to of a young man who is about to get married. The old mariner once killed an albatross while at sea, and is now destined to carry the dead bird around his neck. It would be too simplistic to search for an albatross in Peters’ collection, but if we were to extend that allegory, it might be femininity itself, with its outward signs of purported weakness and threatening sexuality, but also the culture of jealousy and competition amongst women.

While Peters’ collection focuses on women, it also shows how they are kept at the margins of their world. This theme brings to mind the work of Lauren Berlant, in particular her book The Female Complaint, in which she argues that women gain access to the political sphere through emotional hardship born out of physical and economic lack. But the access comes through affective participation, rather than authentic political and economic agency. Peters and Berlant alike imagine a feminine public sphere, one where agency can be built and deployed through collective awareness and empathic connection, but where this kind of access is cautiously evaluated:

Being female, we had been taught to wonder when we would break off into factions and assemble against each other. We waited for the lies and betrayals to begin, and when they did not we knew that, in this way, we had defeated the gunman.

Indeed, I Become a Delight to My Enemies worries our preconceptions of good versus evil and instead presents a world where players are both complicit in and resistant to controlling, dictatorial forces. Even acts of transgression become part of the dominant machine.

This theme of co-opted transgression is underscored by the dynamic play of form. Line structure is often deliberately poetic, like in the opening poem “A Chorus of Ghosts” which formally signals line breaks in place of question marks:

Why did this Town exist/ Where was it in time and space/ By what rules was it governed/ How did the Chancellor come to power/ What happened at his Farmhouse/ Why this need for subjugation/ What caused the Town’s collapse/

Later, in the same poem, lines resemble wifi-network names, or hashtags without the hashtag:

atownlikeanyother thistownlikenoother getyourownfuckingwifi icantstandmyselfwhenyoutouchme 13inchessssss gnosticcontacthigh ibecomeadelighttomyenemies

Several poems appear as a list, formatted like a column of a newspaper, with text flowing continuously and ideas separated by line breaks. In “Never Not”, this technique is used as a way of dramatizing frantic worry and suffering:

always fumbling / always fretting / behind on projects / behind on thank-yous / could not follow / could not lead / could not talk … just about but not quite / just forgot the one monolithic thing / kept his secret/ kept in contact /

Structurally, the poem’s layout in a thin column evokes the (male) objectivity of journalism. The line break backslashes suggest scholarly quotations or formally “correct” poetry—both of a piece with male rule making. Thematically, it borrows from the #MeToo movement, Emma’s comic, The Mental Load, and from Bikini Kill’s “No Backrub.”

Readers interested in gnosticism will especially appreciate this collection. The book’s epigraph is taken from the Gospel of Thomas. As the collection progresses, it ends in what seems to be a kind of gnostic climax: dissolution of bodies is rendered as transformation and, perhaps, freedom. This rebirth seems to be a fantasy, a kind of breathing room for catharsis and relief from pain and tyranny. I Become a Delight to My Enemies enacts this transformation and suggests possibilities beyond tyranny—without trivializing, we are given a glimpse of escape.


 

About the author

Julie McIsaac is a writer, artist, maker, and momma. She’s worked in Hamilton, Toronto, Montreal, and New York City. While living in NYC, she hosted several salons in her home and loved bringing together creative people in informal spaces. That’s one of the reasons she started hosting writing workshops in Hamilton. Her first book, Entry Level, was published with Insomniac Press in 2012. She lives in Hamilton, Ontario.