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Overview
An imaginative, erotic rethinking of Bhopal’s disaster—and perhaps our own
On the night of December 2, in the midst of the Reaganomic era, an explosion at an American-owned factory in Bhopal, India, released untold amounts of toxic gas on uncounted numbers of people, creating a human and environmental disaster of insurmountable proportions. Known as the Bhopal disaster, it once dominated international headlines, and is now barely remembered.
Yet Bhopal remains emblematic of all the many quickly forgotten disasters that followed, and of the permanent state of globalized disaster in which we now dwell. What does it mean when corporations instead of states control not only the means to create environmental disasters, but also the tools to bury them? How does one revolt against these unelected entities? How do our most private desires get shaped by this stateless horror? Jennifer Natalya Fink’s Bhopal Dance is an epic and epochal tale of such a horror and its buried consequences.
At the center of the novel is Cordelia, an owlish woman with a ménage of lovers, who leads a revolutionary Canadian political movement catalyzed by the Bhopal disaster, only to end up imprisoned with just a toilet to talk to. Who she hallucinates is her father. Who is her father. Who is the State. Who may be her mother. Or her twin/lover. Cordelia is a remarkable bird in her own right, and ‘owlishness’ is a feathery conceit deployed in both the book’s form and content, a way of exploring queer possibilities for altering the terms of one’s imprisonment. For setting corporatized corporeality alight. Ablaze. Pets and punk rock, dentists and dyslexia, Shakespeare and salsa: they all dance together here.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781573668750 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 03/06/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 176 |
| File size: | 980 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
PETTING ZOO
I HATE ALL PETS. And even more their owners. Scooping poop, talking ootsie-wootsie, fawning and foofing over hoofs and teeth that would, will, should devour said owner the moment she dies. You pets: you're pashas, scamming evolution. Hey, look what I got: free eats, free shelter, free noncopulatary affection. Why, you'd trade it all for three hots and a cot. Not even hots: dry food, wet food, Beggin' Strips, premasticated and eons removed from blood from veins from glorious hunt. Willing woolly prisoners.
You pets are fools, but you "owners" are worse:
Hi! I'm incapable of love.
Hi! I can only respond to those who cannot speak.
Hi! I need to own — literally own! That's their word for it, not mine —
And you know how I feel about ownership, personal prepositions. Mine, yours.
So possessive, so owny.
All of it — the puppy-training courses more rigorous than Oxford, the fur-lined pet beds and doggy daycare, and oh yeah, feline past-life regression therapy: all a grand and tacky lie, a claim far beyond mere anthropomorphizing, beyond projection, beyond even the first-world privilege of dogs who can't breathe properly through their overbred noses eating better than three fourths of the human world, yes, even beyond some drifting humanism lapping into the lurv of them animals: the unspoken, unspeakable claim: this is my child.
Ian had a dog, his childhood buddy, a willing foil. Caren of course had cats, a brother-sister pair, many-toed, incestuous, named Jean-Paul and Simone. Well, you know what Adorno said about pets and fascism. "Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen." Pardon my French. Yup, it's the dreaded Hitler analogy. No right life in the wrong life. Translate: no good Nazis. Now, you know you lose automatically if you invoke the big "H": Hitler. Hierarchy. Harvard. I could never figure out a way to comment (tactfully of course) on their pet love, Ian "hey budding" his bitch (named Bitch), the resistance to public goopiness masking a world of private effusions. I caught him mideffusion once when he didn't hear me come in, hey Bitchywitchy arwent you my tookie-wookie bitchmobile. Whereas Caren was one big furball of catlove, oh Veal, oh my dearest chop, oh Squealie Vealie, tempered with maternal reprimands: Veal Q. Chop, how dare you pee on the carpet! Mummy is MOST disappointed, all of it in a slightly East Ontario-via-North Québec clip. And I would look away, embarrassed: For her? For Veal? Bitch?
Your pet hates you, is (worse) indifferent to you, is absolutely not your flesh, your blood, your best fucking friend. You are its next meal. You are inert. You smell bad. At best you are a food delivery system, a sort of limp dildo facilitating its pleasure. Mmmrowoof. Pet away, Ian, Caren.
I want to tell you next about my favorite sweater. I loved them all: they were my children. They smelled like children. It's okay for things to take time; we'll get back to sex and pets and revolution. Eventually. But like all mothers, I harbored a favorite — turquoise, tight, thin light wool. A Protestant Jesus, who loved my particular self. Her red hair clung to it. I could hardly look. I couldn't see, I wouldn't stop. Staring.
I need help, I thought. This is ... crazy. Sick. A, what do they call it? Fetish. I pronounced it the French Canadian way, the way Caren did. Fetîsh. And filed it among my other admissions deep in some sullen drawer.
Sullen, let's follow that word. You know definition 1: Gloomy, bad tempered.
But this sullen was closer to definition 2: Especially of water: slow moving, "rivers in sullen flood."
Love that tension between the manic rush of flood and the dogged bad temper of the river. Time stopped even as it is propelled. Forward?
Prey rustles, oblivious; owl freezes. Everything still and then — and so I waited below your crate of folded sweaters. Sullen.
Caren had seven cats, one of which, she'd discovered in a past-life regression, had been a German industrialist before the First World War. We renamed him Karl (né Thumper).
Karl was a castrated tabby, but he certainly performed his ablutions with a pre-war German industrialist's passion. I had a German watch, a silver Breitling from my father's conquest. I renamed it Karl. Caren was renaming and past-life regressing everything that month: cats and people and scarves. Soon Ian followed suit. But he had bigger fish to fry than ball-less tabbies. Let's call us the Equality Avengers. No — let's call us the Purple Russians. In a past life, we were all White Russians. In a past life, I didn't love your sweaters. Not even the turquoise one.
Bhopal
How do you pronounce it? Bho-PALL? BO-Paul? Bo-Pal? As inevitable as our love triangle was our need to blow something up. Anything? Not too overly symbolic, said Ian when the Pentagon was proposed. But it's historical, Caren parried. And spiritual. (She probably had a past life regressed for it already.) Needs to be doable, I reminded them, ever the practical owl.
Ian writes a song:
Union Carbide Don't tan my hide You're a petrochemical menace Far worse than Dennis
(explosion sound)
Afterward:
I felt feathers in new places.
I went to a ballet class for the first time in five years and did perfect triple pirouettes en pointe. My feet itched.
CHAPTER 2BHOPAL TIME
YOU WAKE WITH THE CRYING FEELING and you to try to shake it, you shake your head wet doggy-like as if that would help, as if anything would help, you woke too early, right before five, and now it's ten, and now you're too sad to speak, to eat, to do anything except — is this wallowing? You're too depressed to think. To speak, to wallow. There's no content: just the crying feeling. Swallow. Ian sees you crumpled there in your purple shirt, his shirt actually that you've colonized, and he pets your head, you make a pet sound, mew mewl, then you slide into him knowing/hoping soon he'll be in you.
Ian said, "I'm a man out of time," and boy did he like the way that sounded. Out of time: not behind or ahead but beyond, above, torn from. A floating quality. He said it aloud, a clove cigarette newly lit doing the opposite of dangle, mouth so pink.
Yeah, a man out of time. He could picture it: everyone in time, in their apartments and houses, cleaning the yard, making breakfast, making love. Doing the dishes. Doing work. Doing The Man's bidding. And there he was, apart from the torpor, arms folded, clove cigarette poised. Apart. Still. Perfect. Well, he couldn't say that last part, but he knew it. Would this be a good topic for the next meeting? For the girls, and Sam? Hard to say. If he was a man out of time, what were they? Or should he stick with what he'd planned: the sleeping power of the poor and ... the time of revolution! That's it: link his own out-of-timeness to the revolutionary moment, which only he could see because only he was out of time. He dragged deep on the cigarette, exhaled a pumpkin pie's worth of clove. That'll be the first line: personal, simple, true. I'm a man out of time.
He scratched his arm. So hairy he was beneath his waffle weaves, so beasty. A rugged man out of time.
She awakens in panic. In time. She smells herself before awake. Blood and sweat: frozen terror. Her eyes sealed shut, refusing to open. Cordelia, darling.
"Wake up." He is snuggling against her, suffocating her back. His hand, his hard-on, his breath. She sputters awake, meeting the panic, pushing him off, in the bathroom barfing it all out, and yes now her eyes are fully and absolutely opened. Where is my father? Where is day?
This day breaks blue and cold and unforgiving and you and I are together in it. If I lose you, I will always be alone. She, I, thought that.
But events took precedence. That's how Ian thought of it later, afterward. You can have the most perfect talk prepared: man out of time, revolutionary moment, etc. etc. etc., everything pitch-perfect, a clean pink shirt to boot, and then whoosh, events occur to show you hey, you are in and out of time at the same time, man. Bhopal.
Disaster. A feeling more than a thing. I mean, what is a disaster? An event, a blot, an erasure. The opposite of detail. Epochal. A thing out of time.
The news came early. A disaster, chemicals, plant. December 2–3, 1984.
Q: Wait — 2, or 3? How can it have two dates?
A: It began in the night, bled into the next day. A silent bleed. A new word: Bhopal. A place no one had heard of. A place that became a disaster. A blot. Dark matter. Dozens of people, hundreds of people, thousands. Maybe more. The number kept changing. Gas, explosion, almost the bomb, not the bomb, maybe worse than the bomb? A place in India, not Bombay or Calcutta or anywhere that showed up in articles about poverty or Gandhi. Bhopal: The "h" is silent.
Of course it's an American company, of course it has a squalid Midwestern name like Union Carbide. Ian unsurprises it, makes it known, common, (almost) predicted and predictable. Of course. I mean, they're headquartered in Connecticut.
CHAPTER 3[GAP OF THIRTY YEARS]
CHAPTER 4CORDELIA IN PRISON
TAKE TOILETS.
You don't spend your day thinking about the loo, now do you? That's because you don't share a bedroom with your bathroom. Try spending the night the day the cold night after in an eight-by-eight with a toilet.
Mine talks, but that doesn't do anything for the smell. Jerome (that's his Christian name, for the lion-bitten saint) talks and stinks more than any appliance I've ever met. He has only two topics: heat and ass.
Heat
Because as you may know, porcelain is cold-blooded, so he is sensitive to the slightest fluctuation of temperature in our dank little cell. Our cell: I think of it as an organism. A smelly amoeba. Single-celled, inimitable. It's all the same squalor to me, freeze or fry, but Jerome loathes cold, and stops right up when it hits 45 degrees Fahrenheit or lower. Fahrenheit: we're in America, alrighty. Well, 45 isn't really cold; it's not even the freezing point. But Jerome won't budge: he needs 46+ or else no dice, no flush.
Ass
Because, well, because he's a toilet. A toilet whose seat crawls at the touch of flesh.
"Not all flesh," Jerome corrects. "Just ass flesh. I fancy elbows."
Elbows? On a toilet seat? At first I thought it odd that a toilet would dig elbows, but Jerome enlightened me:
"Actually, we all fancy elbows. People assume because we're toilets that we like ass, that ass is our nature, our destiny. Well, to hell with all you asses."
Fat ass fat ass. I'm ignoring Jerome.
Jerome, are you listening?
If you were, you might ask me how I got here.
How did I get here? Great question, Jerome. That one deserves at least two flushes. Were you to inquire further as to why I have stayed (note that formal syntax), I would bequeath you a third flush; maybe — be still, my parsimonious heart! — a fourth. Bequeath, bequest.
"Bequest": an odd word. It implies death. A vanished donor.
But it began with a bequest.
No, not request. Bequest.
I lied. Not about the sticking; about everything starting with the bequest. It began before that, with a decoration. Many of the 'mates choose to decorate their Jeromes, with pink lace doilies, teenage rock stars, photos of their favorite daughters. It's all down the toilet now! (It's a private joke between Jerome and me.) The real reason for the advanced interior design of the toilet is that nothing is allowed on the walls in here. Strictly forbidden. So it's our only chance for display, for those wonderful performances of identity for which the human species is so renowned.
But I prefer an empty canvas, white on white, a masterpiece of Zen minimalism. And so does Jerome.
Sometimes I wonder what Aunt Veal's Jerome would display. (Yes, we named Caren's cat for her; their fur was a similar orange.) A picture of her guru, Le Pierre, the famous shot with the cigar hanging out of his petite lips à la Groucho Marx? Or just a donut of quotes? Or most Vealish of all, nothing but a quote of her own, unattributed. What would it be?
"The imprisoned are the freest: They no longer fear the bar."
"The dead. Always the dead. And their hats and umbrellas."
Jerome enjoyed that one when I read it aloud to him; gave a little gurgle.
Or my personal favorite:
"Every representation unintentionally exceeds its intent. And every representation contains a hole, a lack, a failure: incompletion."
This is of course the problem those minimalist painters struggled with, with their brave empty white canvases that always implied a representation, were representations, and hence created an aureole of lack and excess all the more powerful for the absence of imagery. But my Jerome is a perfect representation. Devoid of excess, lacking lack. Because he fails to promise the cheap thrills of conjuring.
Prison so empty and full. Bloated with itself. Drowning in its own juices. The entrance floods you with invisible bread. Your mouth pictures a brick oven full of golden loaves, just out of sight. It's a tad too yeasty to be pleasant. Then there is the sign in the rec room, a gray affair that's a cross between an elementary school library and, well, a prison rec room.
The sign, like all the signs here, is printed in that font that screams 1950s typewriter: blocky small letters, too close together. Haircuts are given monthly. Inmates are to sign up HERE (why all caps?) two weeks in advance. Haircuts must take no more than twenty minutes. Inmates who request special attention from the hairdresser will be reprimanded and may lose haircutting privileges altogether. Hairdressers found indulging special requests (I imagine the sordid possibilities: a blow job for a Jheri curl? Well, that's trading up, sister!) will no longer be hired by Concordance Penitentiary.
It would seem that I digress, when I was all set to tell you about this crucial bequest. Prison is a palace of digressions. Get used to it, sweetheart babydoll.
Music for Nailpainting
Caren,
I was playing The Roches and painting my nails periwinkle, such a Crayola color, and of course thinking of yours, drying aquamarine on our fire escape. Sometimes I'm there again, in our cozy commie shoebox where you decreed since property is theft, nobody was allowed their own bed. No owning. So every night we'd switch; there was only one proper bed in the windowless little room where you'd placed pictures of your parents and rigged a little fist-size TV. In the big room there was some sort of futon contraption that no one ever bothered to unfold. All our furniture was dumpster derived. So nobody owned anything. For a provincial minister's daughter, what could be more thrilling than not owning your own bed in Toronto?
The highlight of the apartment was the fire escape, tangled in Christmas lights and King Street's streetcar sounds. Gong and horn, rumble and clank: It sounded like the streetcar was roaring out of the Christmas lights, the best possible soundtrack to fire-escaped me. I would write out there, my terrible writing for which I used an actual purple pen, as I watched you in the kitchen, you with your half-shaven head and green-blue eyes. Some cat, intent on turning us into a band of strays. For breakfast I made eggs with curry powder, which you pronounced delicious. You would only cook rice pudding, would make a new batch each day, steal a few bites, then leave the rest in an uncovered dish in the fridge. By the end of the week there'd be seven. Each Sunday we'd throw them all out. Otherwise it was macrobiotic lite: tempeh stir-fired with tamari, brown rice, which nobody really liked, steamed cabbage bought on the cheap from Chinatown with toasted sesame oil. I ate a lot of secret slices. Dollar pizza on the sly.
I was thrilled by the drugstores, so many drugstores in a single block. So much stuff crammed on each shelf! Capitalism: the freedom to choose between a dozen identical brands of toothpaste, I'd scoff when I'd successfully cajoled you for once to join me in my drugstore deliquescence, melting into all these options, aspirins tricked out with cough suppressant, decongestant, O my multiple medicant joy! And I'd read Now, Toronto's attempt at an alt rag, searching for that other Toronto, full of my people, my tribe, more yous. I didn't know how to be friends with anyone else. Just you.
But the communist bed situation was bumming me out. You'd insisted that you and Camus, the guy you'd picked up in your "Radical Latin American History" class at the university who was an uptown druggie who we immediately inverted to Sumac because man he spread, rashed himself all over our apartment, should get first dibs on the full-size bed. We'd had a cavalcade of lovers and hair dye passing through the hallway bathroom, but this was too much. Sumac's pants, roach clips, crumpled-up potato chip bags — he pretty much lived on chips; no attempts at brown rice and seaweed for sweet Sumac — well, they pretty much took over.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Bhopal Dance"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Jennifer Natalya Fink.
Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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