Conyer Clayton's "But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves."
it has to be said right in the beginning: This is a review of one of my close friend’s books. to begin introspecting the works of a dear friend is a hard task, not only because of the bias, but also because of the strange scope imposed upon the reader. I’m writing this review, unpaid on a personal blog to make sure it doesn’t break any hard rules of conduct, but Conyer Clayton’s “But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves.” was a book I simply could not keep quiet about.
I’d say, I personally think there’s a writing of disaster developed as a coping mechanism, and then there’s a writing of disaster developed as divination. However for writing to become a coping mechanism, there needs to first be “Trauma” and for there to be “trauma” there needs to be an end to a violation. but how to write when the violence is ongoing? how to write from within disaster?
there’s an unsaid code of conduct within the world of violence, that the true writing of atrocity considers any explicit description of violence obscene, both as a gesture of respect to the survivors and to those who did not survive. true writing of disaster therefore is proclaimed to be not pivoting around incidents, but as a divination to pierce through the membrane, and perhaps reach for something greater than it could ever grasp with empathy. When Celan began to write in neologisms, there were two years before he’d see the true scope of the genocide.
in a way, empathy can often be stronger than sympathy; which creates the hardest hurdle discussing Clayton’s book: reading the book as a person who is not a Woman, and has never experienced the alienation of womanhood this world. I need to tread carefully here, since the very description and categorization of any literature as emphatically female is too often used as a means to segregate (and worse, sometimes to demean, like two ehm certain ehm famous crticis of Canadian literature who fall victim to this misogyny far too often). I’ll just continue here refraining from any definition of womanhood, with the only self-proclamation that “I am not a woman” and nothing else, since any frame enforced onto such works is an oppressive one, yet the contemporary woman still experiences much violence and hatred in the contemporary world.
here's where Conyer Clayton’s book shines the brightest. I won’t claim to know anything about surrealism, but Clayton’s book is a surrealist exploration of gender violence if I ever saw one, and the use of surrealism as a format serves so perfectly the content of this book. Surrealism, being fiercely avoidant of any exposition, jumps into incidents, and fiercely avoidant of chronology and reason, climbs that the neuron-web of that incident deep into the psyche, where there are truths larger than any chronological language can reach.
the surrealization of such violence creates a veil through which the violence is an imagistic fiction, instead of a chokehold of oppression that can grip as firmly as the “exposition” most survivors will deem “Obscene” in the face of atrocity. the survivor’s mind is in pursuit of power, and whereas a descriptive narrative of assault can chain one back into the incident, the dreamscape, with its vaults of absurdity, doors to other temporalities and its aesthetic gesture towards disaster, creates a structure where the reader can once again regain power.
I read this book 2 days after the overturning of Roe vs Wade, and if there ever was ONE book this year about the experience of living as a woman in contemporary society to learn from, it would be this eloquent, uncompromising, fiercely daring, and frankly breathtaking book.