Vanishing Monuments by John Elizabeth Stintzi

Vanishing Monuments by John Elizabeth Stintzi

Arsenal Pulp, April 2020

I took in the gorgeous prose in small sips over the course of two months. John Elizabeth Stintzi is a nonbinary author who uses a fragmentary, surreal style. It's a rewarding story about memory and coming to terms with a difficult parent-child relationship. I felt like I was deep inside the reality of the central character, a nonbinary person, which may explain why I felt like this book was altering my brain. 

Alani (Al/Annie/Allie/Alice/Sofia/etc) and their mother emigrated to Canada from Germany when Alani was small. Their mother is a photographer and one day Alani asks, "What is it a camera does?"

         "They sort of take time, and they hold it still. So it is easier to look at."

         I squirm at the words I know and do not know, because Mother switched to English after Ilsa died and I am still trying to catch up.

         "What is the word 'time' mean?"

         "Zeit," Mother says. Her voice is not her voice. She has been recast, borrowing the inflections of some voice in my head. The smile floats above her head, like the blank spots in the eye after the flash has pierced them. Her smile is looming everywhere I look.

         "Zeit, time, is a sort of river of moments you float down. And I do. Everyone does."

This novel grapples in an impressive way with moments, memory and time. How it feels to experience them. As an adult, Alani is a visiting professor of photography in Minneapolis. They have a nonbinary student, Ess, who is working on a project described thusly:

         "These open spaces and small towns in America are not often thought of as being black or queer. They are where the white and the cis and the straight are assumed to flourish. And they do. They are crabgrass in the spaces. They overtake. But if you stop and look at the soil, you see they are not the only weeds that grow."

That passage reminded me of another wonderful novel about feeling like a misfit in an academic life in the midwest: Real Life by Brandon Taylor. 

As a teen, Alani's best friend is Tom, whose mother Del...

         ...was in a vicious cycle of falling into new men and then falling out of them into drinking. She was either too hopeful to give Tom the time of day, or she was too drunk to see him. We both loved our mothers so much, if only because we could not reach them or do anything to help them.

There are so many passages that I flagged as I was reading this, a sign of how much I love the language and the ideas. Here are a few about nonbinary reality for Alani:

         I couldn't look at myself half of those days. I wanted the many-ness of me gone. I was everything, but I wanted to be one simple fucking thing. I was sick of manoeuvring between. I never felt welcome in my body, except for the moments when I did, and by then I didn't even want to be.

_____

         The cat is yowling as I dress myself loose. I look at myself in the bathroom mirror across the hall and hate it, go back into the bedroom and put my hair up and bind myself up prairie flat. I kiss the light lipstick I'd thought was right onto the corner of my fist, bend down to my luggage for the packer. Even now I can feel wrong a few times before I even start a day.

_____

         I hated thinking about my body, hated acknowledging that it wasn't as malleable as I wanted it to be. I felt like I could never fully make a home in it, like I would always be trapped there. It was a classic teenage condition to have, only it was compounded for me by my gender trouble. I could never have the man's body or the woman's body I wanted. That hasn't changed, but I've realized over time that feeling like a prisoner in your body is what being human feels like.

Alani is fond of their copy of Ovid's Metamorphoses, which is one of the few things they take with them on their return to Winnipeg to deal with their mother's imminent death.

         The book is wrapped in my first real binder, whose elastics have been so stretched by time and use that it no longer keeps anything flat. It has long since lost its transformative powers but is tight with nostalgia.

The home where they grew up in Winnipeg is probably the most ominous house I've encountered in literature since Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger. During minor repairs prior to listing the house for sale, they can feel the house getting furious. More:

         The house can hear me even when I don't say it. Silence is the language this place knows best.

_____

        I walk south, streaming down sidewalks toward the river, and don't look back at the house. I do not need to look. I know that the house is following me.

At a vigil for an Indigenous youth found dead in the river in Winnipeg:

         I think about the rivers I grew up near and all the stories of their hunger, of the people who joined their flow, by their own choice or by another's hand, stories that happened again and again, with different names and dates and bodies. Stories that could almost be cliches if they weren't about real breathing people dying, stories that slowly prod a deep-tissue bruise you develop even if you never knew any of the people who died. Most of them vulnerable people, most of them Indigenous people, like this boy, many of them murdered.

         I walk, reaching out. I let my old city's grief, a segment of my old city's grief, flow over me.

         The first time I did this was back in 2007, when the westbound lane of the I-35W bridge collapsed into the Mississippi river at rush hour, killing 13 and wounding over 100 more. When people gathered there for a similar vigil, drenched in bug spray instead of cold rainwater, I reached out to the hurt in my adopted city. I wanted to feel present in the reality of the moment with them, with each of them, and hurt alongside them, to try and understand, while knowing it is always impossible to fully embody someone else's hurt. But I tried to imagine it.

The title of the book comes from a piece of art, the Monument against Fascism: 

         a twelve-metre-tall, one metre-wide aluminum column clad in a thin layer of lead that was installed in Hamburg-Harburg, Germany, in 1986. The point of the monument was to let people inscribe their names with metal styluses tethered nearby, and pledge themselves against fascism. Once the section of the monument within reach was filled up, the column would be lowered farther into the ground, so as to offer a fresh canvas.

         Eros said the monument was already halfway gone. "The point is that the monument won't be there forever. Once it's gone -- vanished -- the people will be responsible for keeping up its memory."

John Elizabeth Stintzi's prose is so striking that the rest of this review will be devoted to favourite passages. 

         Sometimes you hit a patch of rogue memories so cluttered you fall over, memories stacking into drifts where they shouldn't be, memories that you didn't curate into the palace, but they rise up from between the seams of the floorboards.

_____

         The darkness of the darkroom stares back into me. There is the wind, cascading across my throat, cradling it like a voice, like a noose.

_____

         There are so many numbers on this little sheet of paper I want to call.

         Life on a quiet, sunny morning in Winnipeg in May is an emergency situation.

_____

        "It's a rare and horrible thing, Sofia, when the world becomes exactly what you think it is."

_____

         It's shocking how an unknown thing can suddenly pop up fully formed in brilliant sharpness on our horizon. How a dead, inert thing can simply saunter in and manipulate history with its old injuries.

_____

        I tell her I've been busy and ask how Mother is.

        "Oh, she's about the same," she says.     

The thought of Mother being the same seems like worsening. A static level of hell never feels the same day after day -- you lose your resilience to it.

_____

        We always feel dread when we hear people tell the stories of their first loves, because we know how they end: misunderstanding and massacre, or at the very least, some sort of metamorphosis. A sort of metaphysical Rubicon crossing.

_____

        Everything was thick with a reminiscence of home, yet I pretended it was pure freedom. I pretended that I'd escaped it, that I'd moved past that life, even though in leaving it I'd only ensured the permanence of its hold on me. It was a sort of preservation of it. I was just pushing it along with me, up the hill.

_____

        For the entirety of that call, I covered my eyes with my free hand in the pitch-black dark -- to isolate the senses, maybe, or because I didn't believe that we were talking, not after so long. Her voice tremored into my ear, unlocking doors, closing windows. The many stagnant pieces of me began to move again like tectonics. I reactivated.

_____

        I felt like I owed it to the world to be miserable, and I wanted to feel pain every morning, wanted pain to absolve me of all my guilt. A would that must forever stay open.

_____

        I thought about how something occasionally singeing the fringes of one life must be an inferno in others. The nearness and farness of human suffering. How quiet it can be.

_____

        When the monument vanishes, what still stands? Is it the things the world has decided should be upheld, should be visible? the big heroes and the villains, the moments of affection and the moments of shameful betrayal -- the extremes?

_____

        When the monument vanishes, we ourselves are tasked with keeping up the struggle. We're left with the impression of the monument's absence, with remembering what we want and need to remember. In pulling away from something, in obscuring its easy presence, you get a sense of what the thing really is to you. You get a more full view of it.

_____

        Most monuments, eventually, make their memories stuffy. They make you think that there is only one version of something that you should remember. They make you think the past is clean and over.

Monuments to bad men are toppling in real life as I write this. It's time to think about the past differently. It's time to reevaluate our personal memory associations. It's time to envision a new future.

Giller chances: HIGH - This is the kind of novel that builds empathy and feeds the soul.

This post is part of a series. I'm on the Shadow Giller jury this year, so I'm reading as many qualifying Canadian titles as possible in order to come up with my own longlist prediction before the official one that will be announced on September 8, 2020. To see my other reviews that are a part of this project, click on the Shadow Giller tag. Also, please visit our Shadowing the Best of CanLit website to see what the rest of the Shadow Giller jury are up to. Thanks for visiting my blog.