Selby Wynn Schwartz’s After Sappho (2022, Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, 288 pages) was longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. While it was surprising to find it not making it to the shortlist, it is and will be remembered as an extraordinary novel that celebrates women, calls out the erasure or rejection of their literary produce by male-dominated literary circles, and traces the historical figures who wrote on women loving women.
The novel is structured in the form of vignettes invoking whatever fragments of poetry by the Greek poet Sappho survive. In her lifetime, she wrote about female love and desire. In fact, the word "lesbian" is derived from her hometown, the island of Lesbos. But besides Sappho, the book also intricately weaves the life stories and works of one of the first openly lesbian writers, poets, feminists, and novelists who defied the norms. A few names include Lina Poletti, Rina Faccio, Virginia Woolf, and Sibilla Aleramo.
These women read Sappho before becoming one themselves. These women took inspiration from her works, changed their names, and helped upturn the order of society both literally and literary. These women did more than merely exist.
The following samples of text from the book demonstrate how the author articulates how these women achieved the above. First, “often that was the first thing we did when we were changing: we would find a sister and stay with her, taking breakfast in our room.” Second, “novels, whispers, unsigned poems, general education, shared sleeping compartments: no sooner were girls reading in bed than they were reading in bed together.”
Further, writing about the feminist icon Anna Kuliscioff, the author writes, “Hardly had she arrived in Switzerland in search of a clandestine printing press when the police swarmed in, asking pointed questions about her revolutionary belief that women ought not to be held as property.” Which is to say that additionally, After Sappho is also a critique of erstwhile laws and regulations that restricted women, and took away their freedom and rights to ensure that they remain lesser humans in a setting that thrived on their exclusion, their labour.
While the book as a whole is an excellent piece of literature, some portions of the book are particularly awe-inspiring and signal the change feminist writings have observed. Here’s an example: “A poet is always living in kletic time, whatever her century. She is calling out, she is waiting. She lies down in the shade of the future and drowses among its roots. Her case is the genitive of remembering.”
And this one, which is at the heart of this novel’s politics — identity, “When the novelist asked her name, Rina said it was Sibilla, like the Sibyl of Delphi. A new name was like a blank notebook; Rina could write herself into it. With a folio of fresh pages, she could write herself into becoming Sibilla, enigmatic and sibilant.” But one must ask why a need for overwriting what they were born with arose. The novel answers it something like this: “In 1902, Sibilla Aleramo wrote an article called What We Want. What did we want? To begin with, we wanted what half the population had got just by being born, and then we wanted to change how it had got that way.”
Since forever women have been rendered powerless by men with controlling nature and by deeply misogynistic and problematic writers in literature. The author particularly highlights how celebrated men in literature were the opposite of what they were, what they wrote about, or seemingly understood about women. If the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen hadn’t met Laura Kieler, he wouldn’t be able to steal and convert her life into the famous play A Doll’s House. Or consider this advice that Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke gave to a twenty-six-year-old female poet: “[C]ontent yourself with small drams of inspiration, do not expect greatness to come upon you.”
These are just examples of the multiple ways in which women’s very beings were vitiated and the only verb they could be associated with was “marry”. They were nothing but means for procreation, as is the case with many parts of the world even today. This novel, therefore, is an attempt to replace this verb with “act” — an act of documenting the many queer histories that many wouldn’t be privy to and rewriting several accounts that were coloured to hide the “shame” that identifying as nonnormative invites. It is a response to what literature has largely been: an enterprise of the powerful, as only they get to tell the story.
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