Culturally and Somatically Multiple
Yara Rodrigues Fowler, Stubborn Archivist
Little, Brown, 368pp, £14.99, ISBN 9780708899076
reviewed by Will Forrester
In a recent interview with Northern Review, the poet Sophie Collins discussed women writers being compared in reviews to their characters:
She also talked about literary representations of trauma:
Yara Rodrigues Fowler’s debut novel, Stubborn Archivist – a timely, artful, career-launching book about a young Brazilian-British woman growing up in South London – contends complexly with these ideas. Rodrigues Fowler’s biography might be asymptotic to her unnamed protagonist’s, but proceeding from the principle that shared experience becomes fiction when placed in ‘literary prose’ is, I think, a vital one. Except Stubborn Archivist isn’t literary prose; it’s typographically conscious prose-poetry, where absences and traces are as loaded as inscriptions. And this relates to Collins’s second point – in more divergent ways – speaking to the trauma that pervades the book.
This is something else from which reviews seem to shy away: that Stubborn Archivist is a book that contends, throughout, with sexual assault and its traumatic effects. There is a particularly powerful passage (two, in fact) in which the protagonist attends her body and its parts in a bathtub (always with the proximal ‘this’). It ends:
Those closing lines, including the incongruous preposition, speak to the form of the novel – its text a body of constituent prose and poetry parts; its erratic punctuation not ‘experimental’, but rather very meticulous. The body – specifically the woman’s body – is significant across the book’s themes (growing up, food, IBS, trauma, class, identity). Stubborn Archivist is visceral in the truest sense: jarring moments like ‘the thing about dressing like this and having a face like this is that no one thinks you are the source of the gas on the tube’ are a virtue. Memories – as they relate to places and people – are found in sounds and smells and all other forms of sensory snatches. We aren’t really sure who the eponymous ‘stubborn archivist’ is, but, at times, it seems to be the feminine body at large.
There is another wonderfully obstinate aspect to the book: its refusal to translate or demarcate Portuguese and English, or English and Portuguese. This is an increasingly prevalent gambit in Latin American literature – and one that is surmountable for the monolingual in an era of ‘digital epistemologies’ and Google Translate. In Rodrigues Fowler’s text, however, the decision is more than just perfunctory: it is a resistance to assimilation, and the concomitant hierarchy it presumes; it is a testament to bilingual life – culturally and somatically multiple, not just linguistically. There is a brief, rich moment in which the protagonist notes that ‘she would be a grown woman before she realised that [Panettone] was not an everyday food or an originally Brazilian dessert and that it was not traditional to eat it soaked in milk’. This reflects a wider, childlike uncertainty about which language domestic words in the book come from. (I grew up not knowing that ξαπλώστρες and πυρασ η μιττα were not English words, but Greek for ‘sun lounger’ and a messy half-translation meaning ‘fire mitts’ or ‘oven gloves’; I remember the mortification when children told me otherwise).
But whilst, throughout the book, the Portuguese and English indeed ‘bleed like clothes in the wash’, there is also a more precise framework in which they operate: they are tied to the way experience changes in different geographies. So when the protagonist’s Brazilian mother, Isadora, and English father, Richard, are moving house in London,
And then, at the book’s close, in Brazil:
These words weigh heavy with the politics and experience of place – but also with food, again vis-à-vis the relationships between body and language. As Stubborn Archivist moves across geographies, generations and individuals, the ways in which language is tied to occurrence (swearing in emotional atavism, uttering diminutive names at family gatherings, bespeaking bodily events) is revealed as more than straightforwardly hybrid. It reminds of an excellent passage in a Guardian article from Ash Sarkar: ‘When you’re a second- or third-generation migrant, your ties to your heritage can feel a little precarious. You’re a foreigner here, you’re a tourist back in your ancestral land, and home is the magpie nest you construct of the bits of culture you’re able to hold close’. The reference to ‘bits’, I think, is of particular import to Stubborn Archivist.
Notwithstanding all of Rodrigues Fowler’s formal and linguistic complexity, the writing runs the risk of seeming overly young (of being, to quote the protagonist’s aunt, ‘infantile, too childish’). Perspectives are often child’s-eye, and unpunctuated adjectives accrue (‘her sweaty sheets childhood bed’; ‘every single part of his white paper no face face, cheek and ears and teeth and mouth and mouth’; ‘long and shiny biscuit yellow hair’). But, because this tone is defined against the themes of trauma and linguistic dualism, and because of its unerring self-awareness, it comes off deftly.
The form, too, feels purposeful rather than needlessly overwrought: beyond citing personal trauma, the unpunctuated rendering of dialogue, the shifting person-perspectives, the multiple temporal frames and the prose-poetry texture all seem inflected by their relation to contemporary Latin American writing – particularly Latin American women’s writing. It’s worth noting the communal sense of the book’s narration – the interleaved stories of four women (the protagonist, her mother Isadora, her aunt Ana Paula, and her grandmother Cecília), and their generationally differing relationships to Brazil and its politics. One particularly affecting thread is that of older generations cajoling the protagonist to want to live in the matrilineal motherland: ‘but if you and your parents lived here you would have an empregada’.
Of course, it’s easy to read Stubborn Archivist as responsive to Bolsonaro and Brexit. But – besides the book’s writing predating the Brazilian elections – its gaze on such politics is more complex and longview than straightforwardly critical. An exchange between the protagonist and Ana Paula in 2015 is demonstrative: the protagonist talks about pitching to her TV company ‘a story about police brutality in Brazil’; Ana Paula says, ‘you should pitch them something about corruption’; they talk about polling in Brazil and the UK, with Ana Paula maintain that ‘the UK is different’; Ana Paula finishes:
If the book has a point about the translatability of language, it has one about the translatability of politics, too.
Turning through all these themes and moments, it’s impossible to turn away from the book’s attention to the body. To circle back to Collins’s interview, Rodrigues Fowler shows that naming trauma is powerful, but more than singular; that language is not always a simple reality; that processing is not always about verbalising. She writes a relationship to body of both disturbance and love, and to language of both fecundity and complexity. And, in doing so, she writes a milestone novel.
‘Writers of course write about events that they have experienced, in one way or another, but the very fact of putting those experiences into literary prose immediately converts them into fiction. This is something I really believe but see everywhere challenged.’
She also talked about literary representations of trauma:
‘Naming oneself and one’s (traumatic) experiences can also feel very powerful, because language is reality, and so verbalising previously unsaid things allows us to fully believe and begin processing them. This can of course be very painful, too.’
Yara Rodrigues Fowler’s debut novel, Stubborn Archivist – a timely, artful, career-launching book about a young Brazilian-British woman growing up in South London – contends complexly with these ideas. Rodrigues Fowler’s biography might be asymptotic to her unnamed protagonist’s, but proceeding from the principle that shared experience becomes fiction when placed in ‘literary prose’ is, I think, a vital one. Except Stubborn Archivist isn’t literary prose; it’s typographically conscious prose-poetry, where absences and traces are as loaded as inscriptions. And this relates to Collins’s second point – in more divergent ways – speaking to the trauma that pervades the book.
This is something else from which reviews seem to shy away: that Stubborn Archivist is a book that contends, throughout, with sexual assault and its traumatic effects. There is a particularly powerful passage (two, in fact) in which the protagonist attends her body and its parts in a bathtub (always with the proximal ‘this’). It ends:
‘She still had long days when she thought
look at this broken body
look at this broken up body’
Those closing lines, including the incongruous preposition, speak to the form of the novel – its text a body of constituent prose and poetry parts; its erratic punctuation not ‘experimental’, but rather very meticulous. The body – specifically the woman’s body – is significant across the book’s themes (growing up, food, IBS, trauma, class, identity). Stubborn Archivist is visceral in the truest sense: jarring moments like ‘the thing about dressing like this and having a face like this is that no one thinks you are the source of the gas on the tube’ are a virtue. Memories – as they relate to places and people – are found in sounds and smells and all other forms of sensory snatches. We aren’t really sure who the eponymous ‘stubborn archivist’ is, but, at times, it seems to be the feminine body at large.
There is another wonderfully obstinate aspect to the book: its refusal to translate or demarcate Portuguese and English, or English and Portuguese. This is an increasingly prevalent gambit in Latin American literature – and one that is surmountable for the monolingual in an era of ‘digital epistemologies’ and Google Translate. In Rodrigues Fowler’s text, however, the decision is more than just perfunctory: it is a resistance to assimilation, and the concomitant hierarchy it presumes; it is a testament to bilingual life – culturally and somatically multiple, not just linguistically. There is a brief, rich moment in which the protagonist notes that ‘she would be a grown woman before she realised that [Panettone] was not an everyday food or an originally Brazilian dessert and that it was not traditional to eat it soaked in milk’. This reflects a wider, childlike uncertainty about which language domestic words in the book come from. (I grew up not knowing that ξαπλώστρες and πυρασ η μιττα were not English words, but Greek for ‘sun lounger’ and a messy half-translation meaning ‘fire mitts’ or ‘oven gloves’; I remember the mortification when children told me otherwise).
But whilst, throughout the book, the Portuguese and English indeed ‘bleed like clothes in the wash’, there is also a more precise framework in which they operate: they are tied to the way experience changes in different geographies. So when the protagonist’s Brazilian mother, Isadora, and English father, Richard, are moving house in London,
‘Isadora chewed Richard’s house words in her cheeks –
skirting board
mantel piece
banister’
And then, at the book’s close, in Brazil:
‘gurujá
ibirapuera
ipanema
pipoca
maracuja
jabuticaba
cajú
abacaxi’
These words weigh heavy with the politics and experience of place – but also with food, again vis-à-vis the relationships between body and language. As Stubborn Archivist moves across geographies, generations and individuals, the ways in which language is tied to occurrence (swearing in emotional atavism, uttering diminutive names at family gatherings, bespeaking bodily events) is revealed as more than straightforwardly hybrid. It reminds of an excellent passage in a Guardian article from Ash Sarkar: ‘When you’re a second- or third-generation migrant, your ties to your heritage can feel a little precarious. You’re a foreigner here, you’re a tourist back in your ancestral land, and home is the magpie nest you construct of the bits of culture you’re able to hold close’. The reference to ‘bits’, I think, is of particular import to Stubborn Archivist.
Notwithstanding all of Rodrigues Fowler’s formal and linguistic complexity, the writing runs the risk of seeming overly young (of being, to quote the protagonist’s aunt, ‘infantile, too childish’). Perspectives are often child’s-eye, and unpunctuated adjectives accrue (‘her sweaty sheets childhood bed’; ‘every single part of his white paper no face face, cheek and ears and teeth and mouth and mouth’; ‘long and shiny biscuit yellow hair’). But, because this tone is defined against the themes of trauma and linguistic dualism, and because of its unerring self-awareness, it comes off deftly.
The form, too, feels purposeful rather than needlessly overwrought: beyond citing personal trauma, the unpunctuated rendering of dialogue, the shifting person-perspectives, the multiple temporal frames and the prose-poetry texture all seem inflected by their relation to contemporary Latin American writing – particularly Latin American women’s writing. It’s worth noting the communal sense of the book’s narration – the interleaved stories of four women (the protagonist, her mother Isadora, her aunt Ana Paula, and her grandmother Cecília), and their generationally differing relationships to Brazil and its politics. One particularly affecting thread is that of older generations cajoling the protagonist to want to live in the matrilineal motherland: ‘but if you and your parents lived here you would have an empregada’.
Of course, it’s easy to read Stubborn Archivist as responsive to Bolsonaro and Brexit. But – besides the book’s writing predating the Brazilian elections – its gaze on such politics is more complex and longview than straightforwardly critical. An exchange between the protagonist and Ana Paula in 2015 is demonstrative: the protagonist talks about pitching to her TV company ‘a story about police brutality in Brazil’; Ana Paula says, ‘you should pitch them something about corruption’; they talk about polling in Brazil and the UK, with Ana Paula maintain that ‘the UK is different’; Ana Paula finishes:
‘That Brazilian man who was shot in Stockwell when I was living there. Why was that such an outrage? He was much more likely to have been shot if he had stayed in Rio and they wouldn’t have reported on that.’
If the book has a point about the translatability of language, it has one about the translatability of politics, too.
Turning through all these themes and moments, it’s impossible to turn away from the book’s attention to the body. To circle back to Collins’s interview, Rodrigues Fowler shows that naming trauma is powerful, but more than singular; that language is not always a simple reality; that processing is not always about verbalising. She writes a relationship to body of both disturbance and love, and to language of both fecundity and complexity. And, in doing so, she writes a milestone novel.