— The Editors

The Collector of Treasures

The Collector of Treasures

The Collector of Treasures has clever arms to hold you. The frozen chamber reeks of mice. At the witching hour, the Collector dons a fur-trimmed cloak. The Collector of Treasures drinks a tisane. The night is long, the Collector’s labor hard. The universe will not lie still.

FIGURE OF A COLT WITH A MAN’S FACE

FIGURE OF A WINGED MONSTER

You are inferior as a Coloured.

FIGURE OF A MONSTROUS PIG, BORN IN METZ IN LORRAINE

PICTURE OF A TRITON AND A SIREN, SEEN ON THE NILE

London, a Tube station, the year 197_. A strange Englishman grasps my father by the shoulders. He kisses my father on both cheeks. The Englishman is ecstatic. “Ah, are you Abyssinian? What a magnificent species!”

FIGURE OF A CHILD, PART DOG

TWO FIGURES, ONE OF A FURRY GIRL, AND THE OTHER OF A CHILD THAT WAS BLACK BECAUSE OF THE IMAGINATION OF THEIR PARENTS

They maintained their attractive character throughout, and under the trying conditions of the Yorkshire climate behaved in a most creditable manner.

The Collector shakes the universe and makes it lie down flat. The universe cries out like an injured child.

FIGURE OF A CHILD WHO HAD A LIVE SNAKE IN ITS BACK

FIGURE OF THE HORNED OR HOODED MONSTER

Ambroise Paré was a French barber surgeon born in 1510. He pioneered new techniques in battlefield medicine. He was especially good with wounds, which he treated in the old Roman way, using oil of roses, egg white, and turpentine. He was also a great collector. His book Des monstres et prodiges is an illustrated compendium of the monsters of his time. His goal, explains his translator, was to discover, through the accumulation of data, why the normal has failed to occur.

FIGURE OF A GIRL HAVING TWO HEADS

I think Ambroise Paré would have liked me. I am pretty good at French. I think I would have impressed him. “Why has the normal failed to occur?” is, after all, a question that has preoccupied me since childhood. I think Ambroise Paré would have served me one of his tisanes while I behaved in a most creditable manner. I think he would have asked me to have a seat on his little table. I think he would have done something awful to me with tongs.

According to the logic of collection, the monster always belongs to others.

FIGURE OF A VERY MONSTROUS ANIMAL THAT IS BORN IN AFRICA

I am afraid Ambroise Paré would have liked this book.

In the realm of language, the opposite of a monster is a catalogue.

Nameless

Nameless

In the fields of Soinoe she went slaughtering flowers. She said she could take me with her. I said yes. I explained that this is what monsters say to themselves in the mirror: yes. yes.

It’s very tender outside right now.

White fog filled the valley. She explained that it was a river of floating seeds. The seeds have been waiting to sprout for five hundred years. Several white birches stood among them, and the ruins of a little building, perhaps a shrine.

There are absolute places where time stops. Nothing is good about them. You can’t breathe. Against them we raise a defiant reverence for the body.

Hold your breath, she whispered. The night was blue and perfectly still. I realized that we were passing through a bad place. The fortune, the heavy good fortune of passing through. In a lighted window a child in goggles was giving a lecture from a podium made of crates.

When we had reached the other side I told her a story:

“Everyone was drunk. They were trying to figure out if I was métisse or chabine. Métisse is dark-skinned with European features, chabine is light-skinned with African features. Trees sighed in the night behind the bar.”

Such detailed racial cartography. Sometimes, I told her, the storms were so violent, you would have thought the whole island would sink under water.

She took me to see her favorite spot, a wall the color of artichokes. Wherever she went she glistened like fire and snow.

Holy holy holy is the Lord who preserves entire the conflicting element of my being.

And the vivid lake. And the pink butterflies of the horizon. The hills that smelled of apples and milk. The chill beneath the stone portico. The bridge. The train in the night like a necklace of tourmalines.

THIS IS MY NAME:

She had written those words and her name on the artichoke-colored wall, many years ago, when she was afraid to travel. She used to be so afraid, she could hardly stand to leave the house. A few petals dotted her flanks, bright as human blood. “Don’t you want to know what they decided to call me,” I asked, “métisse or chabine?” “No,” she laughed. In the evening she took me to meet the train. I wore net gloves to disguise my bandaged hands.

Her breathing lit up the whole street.

Light is a thing but lighting is a relationship.

The Doctor

Monsters of Compassion

It became necessary for me to visit a doctor. His office lay behind a great wooden door in a district known as the Swoon. The door was so heavily carved it took me some time to find the handle, turning my head from side to side to peer underneath the planes of light. “I have a cough,” I explained, “and these pink planes of light are following me everywhere.” I waved my hand in the light. The flesh turned red. Through the rays I could see the doctor’s face, immemorial and sad, a carapace much like the carvings on his door.

 “Pity me.” He instructed me to lie down on the carpet. While he brewed his herbs I thought about compassion. Cries on the wind for two hundred years. Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust?

The grotesque confuses categories. One of the ways this can happen is through time compression. Think of a larval creature with fully developed eyes. Imagine youth crushed into age, a misshapen life story. A giant baby, or one that looks like a little old man.

In the eighties there were all those photos of starving Ethiopian children. Long fingers, heads as fragile as blown glass. Usually the grotesque creates a reaction of nausea or prurient attraction but the little-old starving children were supposed to produce compassion. I guess it worked. I always had a feeling of panic when I saw them, they were so close to me. A kind of survivor guilt. Compassion, yes, but revulsion too, and shame like a bridge between them. A feeling like a needle in my eye.

We Are the World. What an awful song. There’s grotesque for you. For some reason, we always cracked up when Willie Nelson came on. My brother could mimic his voice perfectly.

We were very joyful kids, as I recall.

The doctor approached with his bowl, rosy in the light.

“Feed me.” A child is dying. My friend protested against the deaths of Palestinian children. Someone replied: “You wish Israeli children were dying.” “That is monstrous,” she answered him, “a monstrous thing to say.” For a long time I tried to think of a word that could replace “monstrous.” Terrible? Vicious? Cruel? But only “monstrous” really expressed where he had placed himself with his words: outside the wall. By suggesting that she would not feel compassion for a child, that she would desire the death of children, he had become someone for whom we could never feel compassion.

I began to drink from the bowl. A prickling started under my skin. I understood that I was having a reaction.

The monster evokes, in equal measure, both compassion and its opposite.

I understood that I would have to drink it all.

Notes

Capitalized text comes from the list of illustrations in Ambroise Paré, On Monsters and Marvels. 1573. Translated by Janis L. Pallister, University of Chicago Press, 1982.

You are inferior as a Coloured. Bessie Head, A Question of Power. Heinemann, 1974. p. 127.

They maintained … creditable manner. Exhibition Manager’s Report. Great Bradford Exhibition, Bradford, England, 1904. Quoted in Anne Bishop, “Cartwright Memorial Hall and the Great Bradford Exhibition of 1904.” The Bradford Antiquary, third series, vol. 4, 1989, pp. 26–38. The report refers to the inhabitants of the “Somali Village,” the exhibition’s most popular display. About a hundred Somalis lived at the Bradford Exhibition from May until October, giving daily shows of dancing, archery, and spear throwing.

why the normal has failed to occur: Janis Pallister, introduction to Ambroise Paré, Of Monsters and Marvels. 1573. Translated by Janis L. Pallister, University of Chicago Press, 1982, p. xxvi.

Holy holy holy … being. Eliot Weinberger attributes these words to an angel made of snow and fire in An Elemental Thing. New Directions, 2007, p. 167.

Accursed creator! … in disgust? Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. 1818. Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003, p. 144.

The post Excerpt: “Monster Portraits” by Del Samatar and Sofia Samatar appeared first on Weird Fiction Review.

— The Editors

Monster Portraits, by Del Samatar and Sofia Samatar, explores the monster as a symbol of otherness. Through haunting, evocative language and fierce, enigmatic drawings, Monster Portraits examines with sympathy those who transcend boundaries and find themselves outsiders. “Like all monsters, we don’t belong, but our problem is time and not space. We got here too early. We have always had this sense of wrongful, unseemly arrival.”

This examination takes the form of a journey through the land of monsters, “that lasted an indeterminate length of time, which, outwardly, took the shape of five years.” We meet many monsters on this journey: bitter, beautiful, powerful, fierce, fantastic, exploited, misunderstood. We are allowed to see them as they see themselves. We learn what “monstrous” actually means—because there is none more monstrous than someone who would wield the epithet “monster” to banish another.

Monster Portraits comforts the monster, confronts the monstrous. Many of us see ourselves reflected in both. Exiles from the places we used to belong, born into the wrong body or skin or shape, here too soon or perhaps too late, unable to live as we truly are. But we are also monstrous in our ways; we laugh while somewhere else, our brothers and sisters suffer. We feast while elsewhere children starve. We have all been complicit in some way with this world’s cruelty.

In some ways, Monster Portraits reminds me of Leena Krohn’s exquisite Tainaron. Like Tainaron, Monster Portraits is told through the eyes of a narrator traversing the landscape of a foreign yet familiar place. It relays conversations with creatures we might consider strange, yet their uncanniness reflects the beats of our own lives. As in Tainaron, the land of monsters is obviously a physical place, a world that exists parallel to, concurrent with, or just beyond our own—but the geography never quite resolves. To me one of the most enchanting things about Monster Portraits is the names of all these fantastical places, neighborhoods and districts and lands where monsters dwell: Swoon. Soinoe. Fanderlee. Snimron. Crezhlorn. Names that have the faint ring of somewhere you’ve been, but can’t quite recall…

Unlike Tainaron, which is built from neat tidy entries of mellifluous prose, the poetry of Monster Portraits feels sprawling, discursive, meta. It’s a conversation with history, a reckoning with past monstrosities. The text is threaded with quotations from an impressively diverse selection of texts: Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, Google, Arabian Nights. These quotations are cited with an academic’s authorial precision at the back of the book, an ingenious way of placing Monster Portraits within a web of allusions, anchoring it to the weight of the history it bears. I found myself flipping back and forth, reconsidering certain passages based on my new knowledge of the context they carry.

These references accrete around the text, but Sofia Samatar’s writing is powerful and original enough to support their weight. There are sentences so truthful, beautiful, and brutal they took my breath away. “Her heart bore a pair of claws that were useful for nothing, she told me, but scratching at itself.”  “Is there any love, I wondered, with the amazing color and vibrancy of the love between siblings bearing an incommunicable secret?”  “The one who acts remains elsewhere, out of sight, preparing a horror so obscene a monster could not look on it without bleeding.”

Art and words in this book are intimately intertwined, conceived in conjunction with each other, another secret between siblings. Imagery and language are in accord, and feel as if they’ve arrived hand-in-hand, neither one grafted on to the other as illustrated poetry (or poetry inspired by art) often feels. As the book says, “We would travel separately, but on the same ground.”

Del Samatar’s black-and-white drawings are arresting. Most are heavily shaded, with areas of inky blackness that set off an interplay between positive and negative space; everything is always defined in opposition to something else. The work resonates with traditional printmaking, etching, woodcuts; in its contrast that marries crisp lines with intricate design, it also feels inspired by the aesthetics of tattoo art. The visual vernacular connects to artists like H.R. Giger or M.C. Escher—weird, uncanny. There are repeating motifs of filigree, flowers and feather. And as befits these creatures: tooth and claw, carapace and bone.

Scattered throughout the book are also a few tentative sketches, process drawings. These felt equally at home. They brought a sense of movement and transition. Like the text, these works in progress are questioning and raw.

Monster Portraits doesn’t just reveal its process, but revels in it; so the work and the process become one and the same. This meta level tantalized and intrigued me, but left me wanting more. I desired a greater glimpse into the autobiographical aspects, the story anchoring the story. It seemed I was analyzing a sliver of something much deeper, broader, titanic even, buried beneath the surface. I wanted the metaphor to slink away and reveal the real, but it never quite happened.

This isn’t necessarily a criticism. I like a story that leaves me wanting more. This is after all the human condition.

There are moments where the book moves toward the fourth wall, in a threat to break it down. For instance: “At the last minute he told me, ‘We can’t use this one, it’s too real.’” Is the entry I’m reading too real, or is it another entry altogether, excised from this book? “The book I was trying to write…” Is it this book? Or another book, not yet written?

This is a book about monsters, but it is also a book about writing a book. And that second book is a ghost. The first book, the book I’m holding, feels haunted by a shadow version of itself, a second book that exists above or beyond this one, buried in the cracks.

Monster Portraits carries a weighty emotional heft for such a slim volume. It reads easily, but is not easily forgotten. Oblique, enigmatic, often fragmented, yet deeply true; I read this book like skimming a frozen lake, while its claws embedded in my heart.

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