In this review of Jackie Wang's Alien Daughters Walk into the Sun: An Almanac of Extreme Girlhood (Semiotext(e)) 2023), Maria Sledmere takes many detours, twists and turns. From Björk to Charlie the Unicorn, Sledmere explores growing up in the digital age, navigating emotions and embracing the inner alien, guided all the while by Wang's transformative poetics.
How to claim an alien daughterhood. At school, we were often taught to write English essays in response to questions like How is the protagonist alienated from their world? How does the poem evoke a sense of alienation? I first learned alienation as an (e)(a)ffect; then as an identity. We studied political systems and I learned the word ‘alien’ could also be applied (in a dehumanising way) to someone who is not a resident, who lacks citizenship. I learned a lot about the world from the formal use of that word. Alien legal status, alien experience, alien person. All these ways of being othered. They used to say terrestrial television, then it was aerial, satellite and cable. I watched a tv show where this character gets pregnant and we learn that she’s going to give birth to an alien. As in, extra-terrestrial. I learned of an alien streak to femininity. That it could be a kind of wild seed inside you. When I was a kid I told my mother that I was from Mars and when I turned fifteen, the aliens would come for me. A claim that still haunts her even now I’m double the age of when they were supposed to take me. Yeah, touch my toes, still on Earth. Then I learned that 'men are from Mars' and 'women are from Venus' which was pretty confusing. This was all before Elon Musk started getting his hands on Mars. I think in the nineties, space travel was kind of quotidian. At school, I always chose the alienation questions for essays. I guess none of them were about space, but almost always about America.
This might explain my total intrigue and thrill at the publication of Jackie Wang's Alien Daughters Walk into the Sun: An Almanac of Extreme Girlhood (2023). Finally there was this book. The great book of being a girl-alien (not just in America). A road trip, essay collection, spelunking of angst and desire. A kind of organising tome for the turn of many turbulent years, growing older on all these fault lines of class, race, gender, sexuality, community. A document of golden age lit-crit from a blogosphere I still long for. Having read Wang’s writing for a while now, I’ve learned the pleasure of alien affinities. It is one of literature’s great miracles that your brain can attune to frequencies of people you’ve never met, who have lived very different lives, whose linguistic ventures electrify and enchant. Reading Alien Daughters, I experience many jolts of recognition. Not so much from the details, the life events depicted, as from the structure of their articulation. It is a work of divine anamnesis, through which readers might connect to their adolescence, their wandering days, their dreaming.
Wang is a card-carrying member of Hélène Cixous’ School of Dreams. To be a student of the School of Dreams is to devote one’s life to ‘vast detour’, as Cixous puts it in Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing (1993). You may expect such an ethic of detour in this review. Alien Daughters documents a young Wang’s trials and tribulations on the road, in higher education, in punk houses, libraries and on the internet. Referring to all the ways institutions ‘will all try to drag your ass back to earth, to sedate your delirium’, Wang writes: ‘Ask yourself, Do you like the way it means so much? And if your answer is yes, politely refuse their offerings of anchors and maps’. In Alien Daughters, we are running, stumbling, flying. Choose your own desire path.
With many entries set in the early 2010s, the book captures something living and archival about the way we used to speak online. While the effect is evocative, dreamlike, the recall is material — media-specific. I was too old for Rookie mag and too young for Livejournal. Myspace, Blogspot and Tumblr were my teen communities. What unites these platforms is an epistolary function: the noticeboard, the reblog, the act of posting. The blog is a curatorial form for encountering artworks, poems, photography, fiction, internet detritus of speech, confessions. And we used to be so tender about it. Blogging was a project of affirmation, ongoingness. ‘Take care’, signs off one entry. More specifically, Wang has suggested this project, as an essay collection, was also loosely written for young women of colour who wanted to write. '[F]or me', she writes in the collection's titular essay, 'the woman of colour's system of reality [...] has something to do with feeling that you are without a world, that the world was not made for you'. What the book does is address that possibility, not so much as an act of solitary world-building but a writing towards the commoning idea of 'withness'. I write this 'with you', utters the speaker of this presentation-essay (delivered at Off the Road conference, 2013), drawing on the second person: 'you will dream of a space expansive enough to hold every part of you'. Alien Daughters is a prolific workbook of what that dreaming might look like, how to pursue its multiple trajectories. The chronological ordering is surely a play on the bildungsroman, except in lieu of artificial narrative distance and reflective coherence we happily get that immediate voice, figuring itself out across time, with others (dead/alive, real/imagined).
I recently worked with a student who was writing a novel which is partially set on Tumblr in the early-mid 2010s. We had these great conversations discussing how to get the voice right. We agreed that the posts would have a strong performative voice that was nevertheless sincere. And they would sign off with something gestural and hospitable to their audience. Wang does this in one of her many chapters, which originally appeared as Tumblr posts:
Good night my little lonesome doves. May you dream of getting a sensual back rub from Björk…and eating a tunnel through a candy mountain (so you won’t have to walk uphill). We live the Good Life.
The image I’d like to chew on is that candy mountain. Sure, there are ‘The Big Rock Candy Mountains’ and all the paradise they conjure in Harry McClintock’s 1928 recording. A song that will stay in your head forever. There’s also my favourite episode of Charlie the Unicorn, a 2005 animated comedy short film which follows (Wiki description) ‘a lethargic and pessimistic unicorn’ called Charlie. I love that grouchy unicorn and yes I spent a fair bit of time on Newgrounds.com as a child. In the episode, the unicorns go to Candy Mountain. I think there may have been two episodes where this happens. Anyway, the surreal imagery and squealing expressionism is right on the money for how the internet felt sixteen years ago. When I see ‘16 years ago’ on a YouTube comment, I feel like I’ve stumbled upon the event horizon of my life which is a world-swallowing digital portal of awe — everything, everything, nothing, nothing, wow, what. To add further to history, I’ve since read that Charlie the Unicorn came out of the author’s dispossession in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and a birthday gesture for his mother who requested a unicorn cartoon and paid for the computer to make it. This knowledge is a pure gift. I love Wang's collaged imaginaries which produce these detours. They remind me that the internet is partially a form of collective dreaming. It elucidates wholesome folktales, memetic loops and what Bernard Stiegler calls ‘traumatypes’: repressed memory retentions which tend to manifest ‘by default in symptoms and fantasies’. Who else has felt like a jaded unicorn, or spent long glazed hours zoning out to YouTube cartoons? The feeling of shared experience the internet produces is one of the closest sensations of sublimity produced by the twenty-first century.
This relationship between memory, dream and the internet is central to Alien Daughters. What does it mean to grow up on the internet? Whose histories did you share? What experiences did you partake of? In the chapter ‘I Tripped, We Laughed. Let Me In! Brain Damage’, Wang writes vividly of media and memory through the language of cinematic editing:
When you edit footage in Final Cut Pro you fill the holes and empty spaces with SLUGS. I think about that, about stuffing slugs in the holes in my brain, slimy and silent stand-ins for missing memories, the places where there should be RECALL but instead there is just NOTHING.
Wang makes of amnesia a kind of creaturely presence, so that the supplementary logic of the slug is also a writerly one — the slugline, the slug trail as a silvery scripture of the invisible, the nothing-as-such. Sluggish aporia. The image of stuffing slugs in your brain is a grotesque one, but its trace residue is a kind of pest-writing. Slugs are pests. They traverse boundaries and even death-traps set out for them. All that excess writing — born of mania, isolation and boredom — might be the slugline of so many short references, identifiable data, search engine detritus. We might question whether the writing is dangerous because of its affinity to the slug-supplement (a pest, after all, must have some negative effect on humans). This passage is a microcosm of what much of the book does as a whole: presents a striking, slightly surreal image which activates if not memory then an awareness of memory’s architecture. Sentences of insistent thinking. Elsewhere in the ‘Brain Damage’ chapter: ‘I WANT A TABULATED MIND’. There’s also a childlike quality. All the coagulating ‘s’ alliteration — slimy/silent/stand-in/stuffing/slugs — the gross desire for a slimy consciousness. Sibilance. Slugs move in rhythmic, muscular contractions. I wonder if we might learn to coexist with them, the way we must coexist with the holes in our memory. The feeling is an alien, squirmy one. Rhythmic, muscular contractions of diary-writing. Do I write to remember, or write to forget? This is why we reach for image and song.
Charlie the Unicorn was made on Final Cut Pro. I wonder what slugs you’d find in there, like superfluous punctuation left in a script. Sumptuous, ecstatic rush of what the fuck. The cartoon describes Candy Mountain, with exuberant yawp, as ‘the land of sweets and joy, and joyness’. The suffix ‘ness’ adds a quality of joy to joy itself like a lacquer of language as such is just so Charlie, just so childish, too much, I love it. More unicorn than unicorn. So also kind of alien. By which I here mean weird. Elsewhere in the book, Wang describes her attempt to find the right identifying category: ‘I think I was too awkward, ethnic looking, and weird growing up to be a Plath girl, even though I was teeming with emotions. I was more of an Alien Girl. A little Björk or Yoko Ono’. She adds that ‘[n]obody is more emotionally excessive and operative than Björk’. Anyone who dreamed of throwing cutlery off a mountaintop has blossomed into their very own hyperballad at some point in their life, even to secure that one big elusive sea-kiss of screaming ME. What the tenuous singularity of self is in this or that moment blooms in the book’s errant discoveries. '[M]y alien', writes Wang in 'Aliens as a Form of Life: Imagining the Avant-Garde', 'is more of what's possible–it is a shapeshifter, impossibly large, and yet as small as the period at the end of this sentence––>.' Alien Daughters documents the epistolary undergrowth of such a hyperobject, burgeoning as it does from relation of many kinds. Is it literary or concerning existence? So much of Wang’s writing, one feels, is not on the page (even when the page itself is teeming with writing). We know there is always more. This for me is the pleasure and mystery: the aureate promise of ceaseless writing. You could build a whole mountain out of that, then eat your way through it. One need not apologise for excess.
I love that also. Wang writes: ‘[t]he thing about performative emotional excess is, it’s not fake’. This is where we get towards a manifesto for extreme girlhood. She writes in the conclusion to a blog post ‘Channelling the Alien Plath Girl: Emotional Drag/Porn/Excess’:
By exaggerating this type of direct articulation of emotion, we can explore the emotional worlds that are denied to us when we pass into our twenties and beyond. We exaggerate it to the point of absurdity, and we may do this to cover up the act that we are still these overfeeling and fucked-up human beings; we have these little pimply and confused teenagers inside of us yelling and demanding a voice, but we hush that voice—we have coworkers and editors and readers who are always eyeing us, looking for the places where the seams of the adult bodysuits are coming undone.
This image of the disintegrating seams of the ‘adult bodysuits’ arrested me because it recalls the conclusion to Jonathan Glazer’s cinematic adaptation of Under the Skin (2013), where the bodysuit of Scarlett Johansson’s human skin is torn away, revealing a featureless darkness. What happens then? A man, her rapist, sets her body on fire. He discovers she is not human and so burns her alive. If he can’t consume her, the flames will. The film is an intensified portrayal of literal alienation (Johansson’s character is an extra-terrestrial, assuming human form). I cried and cried when I first saw Under the Skin because the excessive nothingness of that void felt so real, the end of a world we'll never know. Wang’s image of the bodysuit goes further than the metaphor of ‘masking’ that is often wielded in talking about self-presentation and neurodivergence. It’s not just a face you put on, but a whole embodied skin-world. Every nervous gesture risks being unstitched with suspicion. And the shocking difference between that screaming, pimply teenager and the outward poise of adulthood can tear a person apart. Where do I write from? Oscillations of void and plenum.
Perhaps the ‘sad girl’ archetype, with its extreme articulations in feminist horror or radical languor (everything from Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (2007) to Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)) is indeed what Wang calls an ‘emotional drag’. Its forms are excessive and divisive. In the collection, Wang critiques the cultural, heteronormative dominance of whiteness in this archetype (which we see in everyone from Sylvia Plath to Lana Del Rey), and offers a reparative lineage of her own, from Bhanu Kapil to 'Feng Sun Chen, Joohyun Kim, Vicky Lim, Oki Sogumi, and Christine Hou' – 'literary kindred spirits'. Her sad girl is less a singular being than a diverse garden of possibility (part of this book was written while studying with famed literary gardener, Jamaica Kincaid). Performing sorrow's extremities, we make of ourselves sultry edible flowers for real, for a while. Discussing nasturtium flowers amidst dreams of a corpse and crescending emotions, Wang asks: ‘But why would anyone want to destroy anything so beautiful?’. In Three Steps, Cixous says ‘everything ends with flowers [..] it’s not an accident’. This floral ending is for Kafka, Lispector, Genet. Flowers are paper scraps for writing, an ‘economical’ ‘“style” of dying’. They are for Cixous ‘not signs of death, they are alive’ and in death’s ‘extremity’ they invite ‘vegetal’ relation, as in Kang’s novel, where the alienated protagonist has illustrious flowers painted all over her body. Once again: we read the text as skin’s surface; it is alive with flowers. Externalities of alien feeling and being. ‘This blog’, writes Wang, brilliantly, ‘was once the inevitable byproduct of one thinking girl’s life’.
Are flowers conduits of a feminine style? In a recent interview, Wang speaks of the play between the structural, political economy work in her critical survey of the US justice, prisons and policing systems, Carceral Capitalism (2018), and ‘a kind of feminine writing’ which enters her lyric persona elsewhere — notably in Alien Daughters and her debut poetry collection, The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void (2021). The last sentence in Alien Daughters comes from a gloss on Sergei Parakanov’s Ukrainian magical realist film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965). She is also talking about a call from a friend, relaying a dream about death. She writes: ‘I want to say that every dream is a little death…a visit to the liminal space, where it is always raining silver in the forest’. There is something so precise here. It is not a ‘floral thought’ in the sense of purple prose. Yet it is tinted with enchanted weathering, baroque forest silver. The ecotone where dream meets waking life, this ‘liminal space’. To taste the time-blip of the dream is to have syncope, that ‘little death’ interlude of consciousness. Poetry’s sugar high. Then: 'My School? The School of Exhaustion' (Wang).
Wang’s elliptical style, which swerves between prose and poetry, allows for these blips in reading – be they pleasurable or spent. It is a discursive and curious style: jagged, fragile, errant, allusive, intrepid. It is a sideways and queer growth in plural. Flammable. Sometimes the prose illuminates or burns with desire and confession. Wang relays her love for music, poetry, travel (this is partly a roadbook in the spirit of Bhanu Kapil’s Incubation: a space for monsters (2006)), friendship, crushes. She is unabashedly scholarly. Thinking aloud. She pulls us into the worlds of New Narrative, critical theory, poetry and queer fan-zines — of Glasgow, Baltimore, Nova Scotia, Harvard, Santa Cruz, Kunming, the San Francisco Bay Area — forming lines of flight between different movements, locales and generations. She shows us that all these worlds and their qualities have their own colour and mutually colouring effect. Or perhaps it is more about temperature than colour: the way we can be turned onto something or someone; the way they might go cold on us. In a sort of McLuhanesque manner, I start to feel out the different temperatures of the genres, metaphors and media that appear in the book. Hot media, according to Marshall McLuhan, has sensory richness, densities of information; cool media are more lo-fi, with space to fill in. Hot media include print and movies. Cool media include speech, television, cartoons. There’s your Charlie the Unicorn.
I guess a blog post is hot media because it’s full of information, but then again there’s definitely a speech-like space for dialogue and interpretation with the reader/audience. Sometimes Wang uses the distance technology of the second-person, which performs an evocative monologue of time spent elsewhere: ‘You don’t want the bus ride to end. When it’s your stop time pauses as you approach the exit and you come face to face with the night’. The ‘you’ is a girl-jewel, a crystallised haecceity of the yes that said I, the I that said yes. Less than the cinematic visuals implied, it is a monologue of affective, tactile transmission. That was us on the bus, it seems to say. i-I. We were small once and still inside us. It’s also about friendship as poetics: ‘We were walking around dreaming’. Text. Journaling itself. What it means to carry you along with me, youthfully.
Since what is called the ‘pivot to video’ (starting around 2015), when social media platforms began favouring short-form video content, the literary as such has been on the wane in user-generated webspaces. What does it then mean to read blog posts in a book form, in 2024? ‘The form was meant to be broken’, writes Wang. There’s nothing coldly archival about Alien Daughters. It’s a book that warms in your hands. That’s the energy of Wang’s voice, very much alive. It’s like you’re holding a hundred notebooks in one. What I love about Alien Daughters is the self-reflexive generosity of essentially telling everything. Even if that is an impossible project, it’s a worthy one. We experience the detritus and texture of consciousness not so much in the state of extremity as in the lyrical distance required to dissect or yield to that extremity as a conduit for generative, mutable, analytic feeling. We write to incubate the terrifying, gorgeous outside. We write to caress our glitches.
What does it mean to love your inner alien? To dream them as a lifelong labour of love.
Somewhere in the book, Wang asks: ‘Am I still in the dream? No, this is the hyperdream’, referencing Beverly Bie Brahic’s English translation of Hélène Cixous’ novel Hyperrêve (2006). Much of Cixous’ novel is concerned with the narrator’s painstaking care for her elderly mother, who is suffering from a chronic skin condition. So, reading along, we apply a soft tonic to prose; so we skim and daub its weeping. In Tactile Poetics: Touch and Contemporary Writing (2015), Sarah Jackson has written of how ‘the text itself can be read as a skin’, and as such this ‘literary tact’ is ‘haunt[ed]’ by ‘interruption and withdrawal’. Three layers then: Jackson, Cixous, Wang. Mothering and daughtering. Why do I make these connections? Is it perhaps my going beyond, my hyperactive tendency to seek other surfaces, to tend towards and so touch? To eat the flower, or be eaten as one? The insistent hyperdream that births into writing is where we might start all over again in Alien Daughters. Sentences giving birth to selves. Extreme girlhood: repetition compulsion, emotional drag, textual skin (recognition), shedding, grief, variables, words as seeds. The filiation of loss felt in grandmothers, ancestors, lovers, friends. Beginnings and endings.
Wang writes of how we dream of the dead as a kind of text. I take this to feel, if not mean, that the dead live impossibly in what we ‘read’ of the world. Inside/outside, hot/cold, words trace them all:
The question of how to begin is not a question of what you have to
say but where the
dream places you.
I could stack inventories of what this book is about, reproducing the catalogue function of lists which Alien Daughters also sometimes plays with. The list could be a post-internet modality. I remember posting endless lists and quizzes on Myspace (it is a very Freudian curse that my university now uses a Course Management System called Myplace, and so I continue to post there each day, a letter apart from adolescence, slipping up when I tell my students log onto Myspace). They were strictly ‘for nothing’. Perhaps for attention. I made lists of what I ate, what I was listening to, what I fantasised, what secret answers I would give to intrusive questions, who I had kissed. I don’t remember details. There was that website, like a whisper, ask me anything. I am placed in the dream of them. Ghosts with questions. Still to continue. Its something like their emotional structure that flickers. I remember I remember I remember / Brainardian jewellery of recovery.
Many passages of the book pull us into the flush of dream: ‘In the dream the echo solders the heart to the instance of word and soon the whole will pronounce the fade of standing on the train platform, thinking the voice transmitted directly to mind’. There is a timeless wondering to Wang’s hauntological speech acts, akin to the voiceover in a Chris Marker movie. The sense of text as lost in time. Timeless because so much to stress it, like an insomnia. There is some aporia to consider, the impossibility of origins. I would read Wang writing about anything and luckily there’s so much more for free. The way she turns attention to encounters, memories, influences, texts with the surge of dream is both heady with intellectualism and the irresistible curiosity of that shine and pang from childhood. Here she is describing a medley of Björk videos: ‘Together the videos for these songs are a feminine epic. In pieces’. What better way to describe this book? To read it, you will turn over many cosmic reveries, personal histories and traumas. In doing so, you might just find yourself metamorphosing at the side of the road. Love will come pick you up. All of you are welcome.
Order Alien Daughters Walk into the Sun here.
~
Text by: Maria Sledmere
Published: 8/10/24
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