Hot Desk Extract: In the Dorm
As part of the Wheeler Centre’s Hot Desk Fellowship programme, Fury has been working on a gothic suite of narrative poetry, the pearls around their necks. The suite will tell the story of a girl’s experience of bullying at an all-girls high school. Here Fury discusses the context of the project and shares an extract from the work.
From Mary Shelley exploring science and birth in Frankenstein to Irena Dubrovna’s dangerous sexuality in Cat People, women have always had a strong presence in the gothic. Perhaps this is because repressed things rise in the gothic imagination; they come back stronger, twisted and angry.
My suite of narrative poetry, the pearls around their necks, is an exploration of an all-woman space, something that’s largely absent in the gothic, which generally prefers to examine the pressurising patriarchal forces on women. Women are often overlooked as perpetrators of violence against other women because usually their violence is not physical. The marks it leaves are on the psyche and this makes this violence abstract; theoretical for everyone who isn’t directly involved.
These experiences play tricks on the mind, like seeing a shape in a shadow from the corner of the eye. This, more than anywhere else, is where the gothic lives.
Below is an excerpt from early on in the piece. The excerpt draws out themes of uncanniness, mother-daughter likeness, identity, tradition, propriety and expectation.
in the dorm
there are bodies in the basement
of Gardenia House
Rose says
laid out on stone slabs
with ivory white linen cloths over them
it is late
lights out have been called
all the other girls are already asleep
young girls, your age, my age
okay i don’t get it
the bodies
are us, or will be
this chilled me like
ice-water on unsuspecting
teeth
so Sarita doesn’t have a body in the crypt
because?
because her mother didn’t go to the school
okay.
i’m listening.
it happens when your mother gives you
her pearls
when what will happen
well
they say once you wear the pearls
you start sleepwalking
the deans would have a field day
at girls wandering the halls at night
oh my god, how dense are you
the deans are all old girls
what are you saying
the sleepwalking is part of it
it’s your body
it knows something you don’t
it draws you down
and it opens
what opens
the crypt
this is stupid
this is tradition. it’s heritage, it’s our inheritance
okay so what happens when i’m in the crypt
there on one of the slabs
will be the body of your mother
when she was your age
and for the first time since then
her body will stir
are you kidding me
she will slowly strip you naked
lie you down under the linen cloth
then she will come up
and take your place at school
my breathing quivered in my chest
that is fucking ridiculous
well Jessica
said she’d seen them
well that makes it believable
you are such a bitch
jess told me her great grandmother
was Anastasia Nikolaevna
well
it made me wonder about
why my mother pushed so hard
for me to come here
the branches rapped on the window
because she was angry, because her mother tricked her into it
because now it was her time
i thought about the urgency in my mother’s voice
before i went into the admissions exam
how vice-like her grip
on my arm before our interview
how she greeted the Head of Admissions
like old friends
whatever
sounds like bullshit to me.
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