Author: Iskra Dzundeva (Class of 2010)

 

One of the most defining motifs found within Part II of Toni Morrison’s Beloved is the recurring pattern of voice. Notably, Morrison relies on voice to reinforce the impact of Beloved’s presence, as this character that functions as a foil carries with It a burdensome weight from the past of all African Americans. Cleverly, Morrison distinguishes the menacing voices of the past with those of the present through distinguishing between the power, motive and multitude of the voices; all to portray the (Sethe’s) past’s slow overtake of the (Sethe’s) present.

Namely, in Part II of Morrison’s Beloved, the author enables the women of I24 to develop their voices individually as juxtaposed to their collective voice of the past. Initially, we are introduced to this distinction through Stamp Paid’s account which begins Part II with the assertion “I24 was loud”, clearly emphasizing the importance of sound and voice within this segment of Beloved. As Stamp Paid approaches I24 the narration allows the readers to hear the voices through Stamp Paid’s observations.

"What he heard, as he moved toward the porch, he didn’t understand. Out on Bluestone Road he thought he heard a conflagration of hasty voices—loud, urgent, all speaking at once so he could not make out what they were talking about or to whom. The speech wasn’t nonsensical, exactly, nor was it tongues. But something was wrong with the order of the words and he couldn’t describe or cipher it to save his life. All he could make out was the word “mine”. The rest of it stayed outside his mind’s reach. Yet he went on through. When he got to the steps, the voices drained suddenly to less than a whisper. It gave his pause. They had become an occasional mutter—like the interior sounds a woman makes when she believes she is alone and unobserved at her work.” (p.203)

This passage of narration disclosing Stamp Paid’s thoughts emanates the power and multitude of the voices which hover around I24. Clearly, Stamp Paid’s observations establish a distinction between the voices within I24 and the voices outside through the focal point “It gave his pause”. This point differentiates the voices in I24’s yard from those within the house, distinguishing those within as the “interior sounds of a woman”, harmless, while portraying those on the outside as “nonsensical”, “a conflagration of hastiness”, and most importantly incomprehensible. Significantly, the reference to the “conflagration of hasty voices” yields a connotation that can be traced back to the narration’s reference to “a hot thing”. Accordingly, the multitude of these voices is driven with anger, with fire, as “the hot thing” from the past has not yet cooled off. Nonetheless, as these voices become a whisper, the voices within do not even come close to resembling the cacophony on the outside, with “all the voices speaking at once”; rather, the voices inside are euphonic and peaceful. Namely, this distinction among the plurality of the voices outside and singularly defined entity of the voices within reveals the notion that there is a clash of voices that hovers about I24, preventing Stamp from entering the house itself as the voices’ motives are “out of his mind’s reach.”

Nonetheless, as Stamp Paid is unable to enter I24, he comes upon a revelation that illuminates the nature of the voices that seem to haunt I24.

“This time, although he couldn’t cipher gut one word, he believed he knew who spoke them. The people of the broken necks, of fire-cooked blood and black girls who had lost their ribbons. What a roaring.”(p.213)

Notably, through Stamp Paid’s intuitive dissemination of the voices’ origin, the narrator discloses the truth that yields the voices’ collective drive. Although the voices’ words are unfamiliar to Stamp Paid and overwhelm him with their cacophonous mesh, something within him—perhaps his African American descent itself—enables him to recognize the multifaceted and heavy “roaring” of his ancestors. Accordingly, the narration within this segment reveals the voices of the “people with the broken necks”, “black girls who had lost their ribbons” and others so as to epitomize the ominous lamentation of those whose voices were never heard during their lives, remaining in limbo, hovering over the present of I24, preventing the women of I24 (Sethe and Denver) from enjoying the freedom of their present.

“Mixed in with the voices surrounding the house, recognizable but undecipherable to Stamp Paid, were the thoughts of the women of I24, unspeakable thoughts, unspoken” (p.235)

As the voices on the outside dominate the voices within, preventing Stamp Paid from redeeming himself and entering I24, the voices on the inside which are truly the thoughts of the women of I24, remain unspoken. Significantly, in Part II’s subsequent chapters we hear each character’s voice individually as Sethe, Denver, and Beloved, respectively, each get a chance to reveal their thoughts. Notably, all three voices are distinct and thus do not resemble a cacophony. Even so, concluding this chapter, the narrative does develop into an ominous cacophony as all three voices clash, respond to each other, and slowly become one. Strikingly so, however, the voice that overbears the others by the end of Part II is that of Beloved, whose repetitive assertion of claim “you are mine” signifies her claim of Sethe’s voice. Namely, this shows that Beloved, carrying the voices of the past, has finally come to overwhelm and usurp the voices of the present, preventing any potential for a future from ever occurring.

Accordingly, as the outside voices’ cacophonous victory signifies Beloved’s claim power, her multifarious voices shift to a singular voice of Sethe’s past that exposes the nature of Beloved’s motive. As Beloved starts to softly hum one of Sethe’s original songs that the mother created to lull her children to sleep, Sethe recognizes her song and realizes that Beloved is one of her own. Notably, as Beloved’s voice prevails from this moment on, Sethe’s voice is lost. The song is the trigger that evokes the past, overwhelming Sethe with guilt and a desire to please Beloved, to please the voices of the past through giving up her present, and her future—Denver.

“When she left the house she neither saw the prints nor heard the voices that ringed I24 like a noose (p.215)”. Unaware of the ominous past that is about to take over her life and enslave her to the yore, in Part II of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Sethe slowly succumbs to Beloved, as cleverly revealed through Toni Morrison’s swift portrayal of the powerfully frail voices that Beloved embodies.

As an educator at an international school located in a pre-dominantly South-Slavic cultural milieu, I see myself crossing several contact zones (sometimes more than one, simultaneously). While there is a dangerous sense of enjoyment that comes with this sort of ‘educational ventriloquism’, on the behalf of said practitioner, I cannot but help and wonder about its long-term effects. Exacted through the medium of the English language, students are encouraged to live out in what seems like an academic safe-haven: as they are continuously reminded of dominant social paradigms (gender, race and ethnicity, to name a few), and their operational value within ‘an imagined international community’, the language identity of their discourse becomes foreign, un-Balkan, yet also un-English. They seem to remain as dwellers of a cushioned ‘non-place’, a contact zone within a larger contact area, for the duration of their studies, and even beyond.

Thus, I am interested in getting some insight on the following aspects –

1.By attempting a ‘territory of culture’ through their respective academic missions and objectives, do international schools in the Balkans contribute to a (re)creation of a ‘pseudo nation-state’ scenario?

2.Even so, could their products (students) legitimately question the unspoken acceptance and affirmation of culturally determined roles, imposed on (Balkan) individuality by various mechanisms of compliance (governmental decisions, communal practices, tradition and gossip)?

3.Yet, when all is said and done, who is to implement a newly designed language mythos: individuals or institutions?

supplement (n.) ‘an addition designed to complete’ (OED)

Heretofore, I had not thought much about supplements. Not the kind you add to your diet, to make you stronger, or at least give out the illusion of staggering health. And certainly not those you find in the appendix sections of laws, regulations, or dire theory. The ones I did not quite take into account are the life-defining submissions asked of those applying for undergraduate admission. Yes, exactly those: the blurbs, the character-bound inserts, the hellish summaries of one’s thoughts and preferences. You see, I had always enjoyed reading them, and of course correcting the grammar, the syntax, administering comments in the margins (that seductive click under the Insert button). Unlike the ‘main essay’, supplements are fast-paced, and clarity is of essence, both on the part of the writer and the intended audience. Hence, I did find them enlivening, committing time and energy to plodding my proof-reader way through them. But with this comes a degree of cockiness; like my students, after careful re-reads and past midnight submissions, I would crave this sense of supremacy, as if I am the very first one to have noticed the shaded coordination of that lengthy line, and the only one to know the difference.

This past December, I had the chance to read and comment on almost 200 plus such submissions. In previous years, numbers have indeed been higher, but somehow, at least in terms of supplements, this ‘submission cycle’ has presented itself in a whole new light. For one, all of the submissions were written by female students, something I had not experienced in previous years. (yes, boys are applying, but it seems this year not to schools requiring supplements, which in turn could provide a topic for a follow-up discussion). Also, all of them were written after an advising session: namely, all of the students had come to see me, and discuss at length their ideas, before they hit the electronic white page. And all had interesting things to say.

Again, I do not wish to be misunderstood; over the years, I have read and commented on an amazing stack of supplementary short essays, but never quite like this bunch. Whilst correcting the usual (grammar, syntax, paragraph annotation), I came across voices of smart and brave young women, voices I had not heard, at least not that clearly, in all of their previous written work for English class or the School Newspaper. I must admit, I got hooked; I awaited each electronic submission with such reverie that when all were completed I felt a bit emptied; as if I had to say goodbye to a friend, one who would not come calling again. At least not for a while.

I read about/they wrote of: Moments when their femininity was challenged; moments of pain and irreparable spirit-sore; moments of laughter and happiness; moments of learning, moments of engaging, with others, with themselves, with their heroes and villains, literary and otherwise. In all of the paragraphs, I could hear them, my brave students, but this time they were not just a school of talented kids, but a league of mighty discourse creators, unashamed, and unafraid to be present, to speak, to amend and reflect. I just hope that the intended audience reads, with clarity and focus. If they don’t, the loss will be theirs.

(A few days ago, a former student of mine asked me if she could interview me for a class project she was completing. Namely, she sent me a list of questions pertaining to two aspects of my life: as a teacher and a scholar. Her questions were thoughtful and provoking. It took me awhile to commit to some answers, but eventually I did.)

I come from a family that encouraged learning. Socially speaking, one can even say that I have an intellectual pedigree, since both my parents and all four of my grandparents hold several university degrees. Books, languages, a free exchange of ideas, logical argumentations were always a part of our dinners and Sunday lunches. Thus, going to uni and obtaining a degree, was never an issue; it was the norm. However, I never felt pressured into choosing a field that my parents would ‘approve’ of. The choice was left to me.

Yet it did not come easily; it took me a great while to figure out that I was to carve for myself a life in teaching. I had always liked working with adolescents, getting them excited about the literary arts, teaching them the value of a written discourse. Today, by vocation I am an AP-level instructor and examiner in English Literature and Composition. However, my interests have taken me to counseling and academic advising, student activism and networking. Of late, I have completed and defended my Doctoral Degree in Theatre Studies, something else that has sustained my academic interests and thoughts.

Sceptics would say - June, July, August, thus alluding to the misguided belief that breaks and (paid) vacations come as the assumed benefits of teaching. Personally speaking, what I enjoy greatly about the process is the process itself: namely, I get to help a young mind become an adult; the responsibility is enormous, the reward exceptional. If along the way, a student of mine continues to read, think, act, ethically, in the world around them, then the benefit is trice: for him/her, for our community, for the greater public.

Yet, if I were to single out any moments of inconsistency or difficulty, then I’d have to say: bureaucratic paperwork, standardized testing, limited time and resources. More so than before, a good teacher has to practice the art of listening, open dialogue exchange, and patience. Without these three finely tuned traits, there cannot be a learning environment, one where all stakeholders – teacher and students alike – feel supported and encouraged.

I have never subscribed to the ‘what if’ philosophy, but if I had to choose something that may play out otherwise, I think in my early years of teaching I was too ambitious of an instructor: my lesson plans were somewhat unreal in terms of the 45 minute class time. I would pack them with a plethora of activities, thinking that I should shower student with all sorts of tricks so that they are never bored or passive. With time, I learnt to think and plan in smaller chunks, something I have come to realize due to practice and practice.

Yes, my beloved maternal grandmother was a teacher. For almost 30 plus years she taught at the State University, holding the fort at the department of Literary Theory. She was a life force, and someone whose teaching shoes I do not think I can ever fill.

Privately funded schools seem to understand the concept of funding in a diametrically different way than public facilities do. Namely, we look for resources that might allow our students to connect, viscerally, at all times with their peers around the world: whether it is an investment in cutting edge technology, or all-expenses-paid-for prestigious summer study-abroad programs, or hosting big events such as Model European Parliament or Math Counts. Our colleagues at public schools are plagued by the need to have a clean classroom space, useable furniture, more specialized instructors, better and less costly textbooks, a student nurse, a paid counselor. In the long run, we do desire the same thing: greater freedom of access to means, monetary, that would allow us to be better practitioners in our distinct professions. As far as distinct experiences go, I am the person I am today due to having spent the last decade as a teacher. I am calmer, happier, more engaged, socially alive, all because the bulk of my day is spent with those who listen, learn and question.

It has taken me a good while to write about my fascination, perhaps even unabashed zeal for Tony Kushner’s ‘Angels in America’. Those who know me – friends, family, students, present and past – can attest to the trajectory and nuances of this great love. They can even give a better, if not clearer account, of how this epic of a play has lived alongside my private and professional lives, respectively, feeding me from within. Yes, they can even share an anecdote or two, of a Angelized conversation, of a non-stop lecture-rant with indistinguishable markings on the board (green and white included). Yet, all love stories, especially those conceived in the theatre, need a first-person recount, of how it began, what proceeded to happen afterwards, and if a happy ending is upon it.

On that note –

In light of a preface: I am fully aware of the voluminous prose produced insofar on the ins and outs, critical significance and sheer representational value of Kushner’s epic storm. This is not one such account. It is, in lack of a better term, a re-membrance of how one reader has lived in an Angel-ful world.

I was 24 years old when the play chanced upon me. I had heard its title mentioned a few times, by other thespians, always in connection with its landmark status in the now revitalized American theatre. Yet, when I now think about it, I was not that willing to look it up. Perhaps another Kushner play, the one with the mesmerizing title had done it in: you see, I was not that taken by ‘A Bright Room Called Day’. I got the Brechtian principles, appreciated the allegory, dug the effort. But was simply not sold on the whole idea: it read put-on. It seemed rushed; I felt trapped by its artifice. Then, I attended a graduate seminar, one of those you wish to erase from memory altogether, that listed ‘Angels’ on its syllabus. Went to the university library, bought the complete epic, sat in my favorite chair and started reading. Wow. Oh, wow.

Re-read it three times, over. And then again. What dawned, as the early dawn woke me to my daily obligations, has persisted ever since: If I had only one play to teach, disseminate, stage, reflect on, ponder over, defend, share, it would be this one. Over the years, I have had the chance to teach it, see it staged, reflect on its myriad notions, within and without academic discourse, ponder over its parallel scenes, defend its zeitgeist status, and share it with all that would listen.

Form-wise, ‘Angels’ invites the reader to a structure that is both formidable and inviting. A sort of lucid unison of the Performance Group’s environmental theatre and all that Elizabethan stage-practices have to offer: faith, space, multiplicity of personality, illness as a metaphor, morality queered, hope.

Character-wise, ‘Angels’ welcomes the reader to a cast that is both flawed and exuberant. A family of personages like no other: of a different blood and for a new millennium.

Plot-wise, ‘Angels’… go and read it.

In the past few months, I saw several facebook notes discussing their respective authors' favorite books, concerts, films, etc. So, I thought, why not try it myself. I am compiling the first list: let's call it important theatre texts. Important for my own frame of mind and love of dramatic layerings. The second list will record those theatre productions (adaptations) that altered, for the better (always for the better) my love of the stage. There is no order in the listing; I am writing the titles down as memory of the first read comes to mind.

Angels in America: The Complete Epic by Tony Kushner

Medea by Euripides

The Dying Gaul by Craig Lucas

M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang

Hamlet by William Shakespeare

Swimming to Cambodia and Gray's Anatomy by Spalding Gray

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and Joe Turner's Come and Gone by August Wilson

Trifles by Susan Glaspell

The Zoo Story by Edward Albee

Barbelo, o psima i deci by Biljana Srbljanovic

Phaedra's Love by Sara Kane

The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh

The Birthday Party and The Caretaker by Harold Pinter

All My Sons and A View from the Bridge by Arthur Miller

Hi-Fi by Goran Stefanovski

Slovenski Kovceg by Venko Andonovski

The Sure Thing by David Ives

As You Like It by William Shakespeare

Huddersfield and Banat by Ugljesa Sajtinac

Art by Yasmina Reza

A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry

Skakavci by Biljana Srbljanovic

The Cherry Orchad by Anton Checkov

Oleanna by David Mamet

The following is a list of meaningful theatre moments, some might even call them ground-breaking; all pertaining my own life as a spectator. They come in memory-order:

Blize (Closer), JDP, directed by Alisa Stojanovic

Mala Ljubav za Mene, ili Sta Plashi Vinsenta Prajsa, Atelje 212, directed by Nenad Gvozdenovic

Leda, Atelje 212, directed by Dejan Mijac

Victor, Victoria, Marquis Theatre, Broadway, directed by Blake Edwards

Beauty and the Beast, The Palace Theatre, Broadway, directed by Julie Taymor

Two Tracks and Text Me, West Yorkshire Playhouse, directed by Joe Williams

Porucnikot od Inishmor (The Lieutenant of Inishmore), Dramski Teatar Skopje, directed by Zoja Buzalkova

Lost Ones, Vanishing Point, Glasgow, directed by Matthew Lenton

Don Zuan (Don Juan), Dramski Teatar Skopje, directed by Aleksandar Popovski

Tesla Electric Company, Pandur Teatar, directed by Tomas Pandur

M Palermu, Sud Costa Occidentale, directed by Emma Dante Marmalade,

Teatar Ulicata, directed by Stefan Moskov

Mala Trilogija Smrti, BDP, directed by Nebojsha Bradic

Site Lica na Petre M. Andreevski, Dramski Teatar Skopje, directed by Vlado Cvetanovski

Sclavi, Farm in the Cave, group direction

Don Krsto, JDP, directed by Vida Ognjenovic

Plastelin, Atelje 212, directed by Nikola Zavishic

Ejmin Pogled (Amy's View), Atelje 212, directed by Ljiljana Todorovic

Shine, JDP, directed by Slobodan Unkovski

Nebeski Odred, JDP, directed by Marko Manojlovic

Kjef, BDP, directed by Egon Savin

In the wake of multicultural and democratic notions of the self as an interrelated part of society’s life, once innocent morphemes, such as : nation, nationhood, nationalism, nationalist, evoke horrific images of quasi-totalitarian voices, people, movements, governments, whose main concern is to elevate the ‘one, true self’ above ‘other, less meaningful ones.’ Why is this the unfaltering first reaction? There are a number of possible reasons. First of all, if we examine the nineteenth century as ‘the era of nationalist ideas’, we will learn of these notions as of vibrant impulses for the better understanding of cultural values, later on to be shamelessly employed by colonial empires for the creation of an even greater pool of material wealth at the expansion of the acculturation and assimilation of ‘other, less meaningful;’ (primitive) cultures. Of, if we draw the curtains of the recently departed great century of human process, we will encounter similar practices: with the rise of ‘new empires’, the ‘old colonial practices and techniques’ are once again exerted upon the once ‘heathen nations of the world’ in the creation of the latter’s market economy, thus helping it shape a compatible system of governance (one that would soothe the interests of the ‘one, true self’).

And yet, each time I think of these words, not as a linguist (to a linguist words are free of the guilt imposed upon them as a result of the (mis)interpretation of their meanings), but as a 21st century human, I am saddened rather than angered by them. Since sadness is a category of subjective representation, I will try to ‘utilize’ my laments by looking at a few readings.

In my pre-graduate school pastoral existence, any/all knowledge I possessed of Native American nations was filtered through the perspective of a dominant, mainstream culture and its products. ‘Dances with Wolves’, ‘The Indian in the Cupboard’, ‘Pocahontas’, ‘The Last of the Mohicans’, ‘Vinetu’ (the collected works of the German novelist, Carl May, centered around an Indian Warrior and his ‘white brother’, Oldshaterhand, and their joint plight in the great wilderness of man and beast). [I had also seen the critically acclaimed ‘Smoke Signals’, a comedy by Sherman Alexie about two young Native Americans and their opposing views on tradition and present-day life on/off an Indian Reservation. ]

I’d be lying if I said that the dreamy presence of Daniel Day-Lewis, in the role of Hawkeye left me void of impressions; however, these and like images (raised by the physical appeal of an actor-persona) cannot and should not be the criteria for accumulating knowledge and impressions about a certain culture’s beliefs, values, traditions, life. Let’s consider the work of writer/activist/scholar, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, in particular her work towards ‘Anti-Indianism in Modern America: A Voice from Tatekeya’s Earth’. Cook-Lynn’s voice is something to be reckoned with. Known for her stern, uncompromising view of Native American Studies Scholarship, she is right when pointing out to the importance of ‘pay[ing] more attention to Third World scholarship and policies that we have done in the past.’ Studying one’s one history and tradition in isolation only produces additional ethnocentric theories of the self and the nation it belongs to, something that no self-respecting scientist of the past creating in the present should engage into. It is through the use of the comparison-contrast method that a society, a tribe, a nation, may emerge as nationally liberated and tribally autonomous, able to tell its children who they were/are. These cultures are not moribund cultures whose study Cook-Lynn tries to fight off, to dismiss as one of the constraining mechanisms of anthropology (Cook-Lynn’s labeling of interdisciplinary programs as ‘weak entities’ should be taken as the result of a long struggle that NAS, as an academic discipline, has undergone, and still endures, for its autonomous status); they are very much alive and demanding as the long-standing Native American civilizations are. They are present on every continent in the world, and they are of many colors, if we are to go by the race-color association. Yet it seems that oftentimes, to conduct field research is to engage oneself in impractical costly meddling that will not always guarantee the academic scholar the desired tenure, thus we resort to the ‘help’ of already established historical and anthropological canons.

Scholar and Activist Gerald Vizenor offers a consoling answer to the anthropological and historical approach to the American Indian culture, in his essay, ‘The People Named the Chippewa’. In the part of the essay titled ‘Anthropological and Historical Inventions’ Vizenor consoles his readers by examining a distinction between the traditional tribal people’s view of social customs and that of the scientists who study them: The differences between tribal imagination and social scientific invention are determined in world views: imagination is a state of being, a measure of personal courage; the invention of cultures is a material achievement through objective methodologies. To imagine is to be in the world; to invent the world with academic predictions is to separate human experiences from the world, a secular transcendence and denial of chance and mortalities. The Mashpee people knew who they were, and apparently until 1977, they believed that everyone shared this with them as something undisputed, grounded in the common belief of trust, respect, oral consent. Yet, they are not to be legally called a tribe and a distinct Native American nation.

I am saddened by the necessity to even pose the next question. Why must a people as old as time itself assert the importance of nationhood? Why can’t we understand their identity as ‘a nexus of relations and transactions actively engaging a subject’, as something more fluid, more flexible as opposed to the solidified notion of nationhood? (Clifford, ‘Mashpee’, 344) I suppose it is because the nations of today’s world, young and older, are still to come to terms with the existence of the ‘other selves’, like or unlike then, who may remind them of the disturbing past or the indifferent future, as time moves on and leaves no room for mutual (positive) acculturation. And there is no magic formula solution. Just countless attempts at cultural interchange and learning.

 

Two years following the London and Edinburgh publications of The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, in 1833, The Emancipation Bill was passed in the British House of Lords; in 1834, a law went into effect throughout the British Caribbean that helped establish apprenticeships for ‘free’ black; and in 1838 England abolished slavery in the Caribbean completely. All of these arbitrary dates point to the undisputable fact that Prince’s narrative was more than a popular bedside reading material. It provided the Anti-slavery and Abolitionist Movement of England with the needed instrument to re-instate the visibility of slavery as a demeaning human condition, thus challenging the legal system to act upon its final demise. Namely, the triangular relationship between Prince as the narrator’s oral counterpart, Thomas Pringle, her editor and publisher, and the whole English-reading audience, in London as well as in the West Indies, is weaved in so carefully all throughout the twenty-three page long account of Mary’s life as a slave, making it this all the more painstaking to put the hems aside and look for possible loose threads. And yet there are many such threads, most of which could be fully seen and understood if one looks beyond the confines of the text, especially if one takes a closer look at the testimonies of Mary’s trial and the documents in support of the proslavery propaganda of the times.

Henceforth, I am increasingly interested in the unseen and the unspoken elements in Prince’s text, mostly because I believe that these are the elements which constitute the life of Mary Prince as an enslaved woman, a chain of events that cannot be juxtaposed to or extracted from extensive comparisons to the life of Frederick Douglass as a male slave. Before I take a look at the published criticism, which in turn, exploits further the issue of Prince’s sexual relations to her owners (and to other free white makes), as well as those with her husband, I would like to recall an important reading from my childhood. In the course of my primary school education, our readings in Macedonian literature focused, almost to a fault, on the importance of having and maintaining a national literary heritage. We were thus exposed to the sounds of Macedonian folk songs, Macedonian fables, Macedonian dances, all (in a way) narratives (some written, others mostly oral) testifying to the existence of a Macedonian culture, long before the legal constitution of the Macedonian state. Remembering these seminal works of and by my people, both from the perspective of a time and space disjunction, I recall the emphasis that all of them placed on a woman’s chastity as her highest virtue. Historically, I fully understand the importance of one such human (not simply feminine) characteristic. Since women were the most vulnerable ‘segments’ of the Macedonian nation within the Ottoman Empire, every attempt on the behalf of ‘the weaker sex’ to hold on to her Christian values (and all that implied) was applauded and consequently turned into a narrative. Most of said narratives dealt with brave, victorious women, defeating their masters and securing their freedom, by the power of their moral values, their faith in God as their guide to eternal salvation in heaven. However, the seventh grade reading list cautiously excluded the presence of several powerful female slave narratives, some related by the women themselves (later written down by an educated male friend), and some written by the survivors themselves. What all of these few texts share in common is unstated in the other ‘appropriate’ reading materials on the subject. For one, all of the women survived their enslaved status, some embracing the Islamic faith, thus using their respective relationships to their ‘husbands’ to buy off their freedom, after a number of years. Most stayed on in urban areas since they were not welcomed back by their peasant parents and family. Most were financially independent, and if not at the inception of their lives, but certainly with time, became literate. All of these remarkable qualities, otherwise characteristic of the urban 19th century Balkan male, rendered these women invisible to their peers, making them thus equally inaccessible to present readers. Nonetheless, they are inevitably alive, in the archival documents of trial records, of claims and cases that testify of these women’s existence and their struggle for social credibility.

Why the unilateral cultural memory has decided to leave them conveniently out of the master text’s narrative could be seen as a case of memory screening. To borrow from Freud’s discourse, a ‘screen memory’ is one that substitutes for another memory that is too painful or disturbing to retrieve. So, we examine ‘forgetting’ as an active process of repression, we can see why that which is forgotten or erased from a female slave narrative, or deemed illegible and immoral by the editor/publisher, corresponds to the female slave’s challenge of her master’s right of ownership. I was fortunate to come across an article by Jenny Sharpe, titled ‘Something akin to freedom: the case of Mary Prince’ (A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Spring 1996, Vol. 8), that closely examines ‘through the historical example of Mary Prince, that slave women used their relationship with free men to challenge their masters’ right of ownership.’ Sharpe immediately points out that one such reading of the female slave narrative, moreover of the female slave’s existence and her final liberation, cannot be solely based on a thorough examination of Prince’s History. Therefore, Sharpe includes in her extensive study of the paradigm, the conventional slave testimonies, as a part of the proslavery propaganda documents, as well as court case transcripts. Sharpe is also instrumental in deconstructing the abolitionists’ grasp of the slave narrative as a genre, tracing the literary conventions that they inscribed on the narratives they sponsored, especially looking into their influence on Prince’s life story. (These include: the portrayal of Mary at the beginning of her enslaved life as one of God’s offspring before the Fall, picturing her initial masters as benevolent slaveholders (her mistress), so as to make a clear distinction between inherently cruel men and women, which they were not, and the institution of slavery as a corrupting force, which it definitely was; then, as Mary’s desent into slavery (as if she were not a slave before) emerges, there is the initial description of the brutal enforcement of power and strength, through the graphically represented beating of a female slave, which establishes, in turn, the voice-agency of Mary Prince in the eyes of the reader as a reliable one; since Prince is the embodiment of the victim to be saved rescued from her slumberous agony of an enslaved and heathen existence, there is also the inevitable religious conversion as a turning point in her life, leading her to her freedom, by appealing to both the free black community and the larger white public.)

Furthermore, Sharpe discloses Prince’s sexual relationships with free men as she denounces certain critics’ practice of equating the sexual misconduct practices with her enslaved position. Consequently, Sharpe does not look at Prince and the other female slaves of the narrative as objects of pity; she’d rather use an expression that comes from another female slave narrative, Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. The expression is ‘something akin to freedom’. Sharpe uses it to ‘denote the absence of a proper name for the contradictory status of limited choice under slavery.’ Therefore, through her Freudian model of examining silences as meaning-productive, Sharpe involves a re-reading of Prince’s narrative: ‘instead of being centered on an autobiographical text like the slave narrative, a black female subjectivity cuts across seemingly incompatible documents in which Prince appears, not as a narrative ‘I’, but as ‘the woman Molly’ and ‘she (witness)’. In this respect, I understand Sharpe’s analysis as one inclusive of the contemporary autobiographical reading of the slave narrative, on the helps expand the notion of how we read ‘personal(ized) texts’, how we approach them, what we bring with us as we pass judgments, and what we see in their actors/orators/narrators to be valuable for determining their (and our own) cultural value. And I support it.

In the Preface to American Artifacts: Essays in Material Culture, Paul Mellon Professor Emeritus, Jules David Prown, states that even through ‘every work of art is [perceived to be] an artifact… all artifacts are not necessarily art.’ (2000) After a careful dissection of the collection’s essays on various objects and their relationship to American culture (with a capital ‘C’), I couldn’t agree more. What Professor Prown and a handful of his current and former students have rendered a ‘usable past’, would not necessarily be classified under the category of ‘artistic’, or even ‘artFUL’. However, by choosing to examine a number of human-made (or human-modified) things, the graduate school historians have successfully investigated a ‘suggestive rather than complete’ symbiosis between American culture, from its beginnings through the present day, and the objects’ expressiveness of that same culture. Whether the product of this relationship is to be rendered in art-specific terms is up to the analyst’s test and certainly his or her respective knowledge of art.

Out of the thirteen essays collected, I found the one titled ‘Lubrications on a Lava Lamp: Technology, Counterculture, and Containment in the American Sixties’ most accessible. Since I am a child of late sixties and early seventies transatlantic hippies, proud owners of an original Lava Lite® lamp, I was more than excited about the prospects of looking closely into this ‘retro’ gadget’s historical impact. My general impressions of both the essay’s content and its author, Jennifer L. Roberts, coincide with my understanding of the so-called Prownian analysis, a methodological approach forged over time by Professor Prown as best befitting his graduate seminar on material culture. I must admit that I was quite taken by the overall layout of the collection, both structurally and thematically, as well as with the possibility of having one’s work published (in such a format) while still a grad student with long years of scholarly toil ahead. Despite the instrumental introduction to the book’s essays, provided by the second editor, Kenneth Haltman, it seems to me that ‘the theoretical underpinnings’ of the Prownian analysis, disregarding their usefulness in research tactics, have laid too burdensome of a weight on Ms Roberts’ disclosure of the Lava Lamp’s repose in our midst.

What begins as an insightful journey into the world of a sixties’ psychedelic beacon, gets somehow sidetracked into the realm of elusive speculation, layer after layer of evocative language and yet difficult to follow. Putting the schematics for the Prownian analysis aside, Ms Roberts; essay on the possible connections existing between the 1960s American mainstream culture and counterculture, on the one hand, and the lamp’s design as well as its contained meaning, on the other, divides itself in two distinct parts. In the first part of the essay, which if we were to apply the Prownian analysis would account for the description, deduction and related speculation regarding the Lava Lamp’s material being, is a simple, yet instructive way of examining the lamp’s history. I commend Ms Roberts on her mastery in transforming the lamp’s material existence into a verbatim account of it. A truly remarkable spin on the descriptive nature of the English lexicon. But all of the presented discourse’s clarity seems to end after Roberts enquires about the lamp’s position (that is, location) on the continuum between technology and counterculture. As important as this semi-rhetorical question poses to be for Ms Roberts’s interpretative analysis, she takes more than her time to come to a possible answer for it.

I am aware of Professor Prown’s cautionary words in the Preface to the volume, conceding the exploratory nature of the essays; moreover, their polished incompleteness. It is not the incompleteness of the piece that baffles me still but rather the incoherency of thought on behalf of the author that brings us to that incompleteness. Building up support for her claim that ‘although itself a piece of technology, it [the Lava Lamp] does seem to enjoy a certain autonomy from the technological form,’ Ms Roberts takes her readers on an incongruously shifting quest for the lamp’s organic and mechanical meanings. (174, brackets added) Even though most of the parts of her speculative explanation are otherwise well-written passages of researched material (her invocation of the cultural theorist Marshall McLuhan and the linguist Julia Krsteva certainly point to a well-read scholarly mind), they do not amount to a fluidly coherent second part. As the lamp undulates between meanings, so does the writer undulate between too many derivations of an original idea for the Lava Lamp’s cultural interpretation. In other words, the constraints of the Prownian analysis contain the lamp’s ‘double miracle’; that is, instead of bringing it back to life, again, for us the readers, these same constraints prevent us from reading through the writer’s path in the maize of her interpretative analysis.

All things considered, the essay by Ms Roberts is a bold attempt at crossing and forcefully merging (from time to time) the lamp’s sixties appeal with that of today, through the entrapments of technology and the dominant culture’s domestication of the amorphous force of the lamp, rendering it both a containment and a sublimation of the threatening power of the sixties’ counterculture the lamp came to represent.