azimuths[Avignon Press; 2015]

 One may find it quite difficult to deny the alluring extent of a community by choice even if, eventually or historically, most of these communities by choice ended up in complete failure. But Azimuths initiates a plunge right in the middle of such a loosely-knit community that is usually built by individuals who find comfort in living as the residents of a margin of some sort although they might also be planning to escape it as soon as they find out how. The itching desire to live outside top-down hierarchies and the leaders such pecking orders breed is also an incentive for individuals to live in communities by choice. And to some extent, this is also the case with the 5 female characters living in the Raceway Trailer Park in the Mojave Desert, as they are all contemplating one form of sidestepping or another. To start, there is Hattie Peach looking for a mother who, somewhere between a fondness for Emma Goldman and a marriage with a man obsessed with tracking down and documenting the chains of human oppression but without breaking them, stopped being there for her many years ago. Going all out to recreate the presence of her mother by writing heartbreaking letters in that mother’s name and addressing them to her father, Hattie seems committed to moving forward with her life despite the drowsiness that lurks all around and within her own skin.

And then there is the veiled Kinni Shin who survived the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and who still bids on recovering an identity that goes beyond self-awareness, beyond the consuming guilt of being one of the chosen ones, one of the people who actually managed to get out of there alive. Caught in an intricate daily routine of wrapping her face with a black veil that belonged to her killed mother (a routine somehow reminiscent of a more diluted, self-inversed form of Shibari), Kinni hands over a variety of delicacy, vulnerability and strength, all contained to a point where the character might come across as being almost inhumane. It’s the kind of “inhumanity” that may easily challenge you if you are among the readers who want to identify with a character instead of just recognizing familiar traits; the kind of “inhumanity” that doesn’t allow you to wholeheartedly say Look! That’s me in here! but acts more as a catalyst for mirroring or even questioning your own assumptions. Actually, Kinni comes pretty close to being a legitimate epitome of Azimuths in that she refuses to deliver any straightforward nuances. It’s as if she continuously plays with you but according to rules that elude any kind of scenario you might feel tempted to write on her behalf. But despite her outlandish demeanor, it’s hard not to feel her assiduity in constraining her body, in using clothing as a bondage and delimitation from a family that lives the American dream to the fullest, to the very point where they all have their eyelids surgically-corrected to erase any trace of Asian origins. And there are also considerable moments when you can actually get a sense of her asexual figure emerging from the pages of the book as a sort of pop-up card but without the fun.

There is only an instant of illumination and then Kinni’s face is gone, turned away quickly retreating into darkness, but in that instant Lani knows what she has seen. A pale face. A face that lives apart from Kinni, and has nothing to do with her, separated from the rest of her body, protected from the elements. A face which has never responded to human voice or touch and exists without expression, a void of smooth flesh, flickering in the dim light just inches from her own face.

Meanwhile and possibly in another trailer, subterranean cavity or any kind of space that can reproduce her habitual confinement, Melody Hallow is still nursing almost any child she can obtain for this practice. With her, vague hints of sexuality enter the arid scene only to become more evident and eyebrow-raising once she breastfeeds a blind boy already in his teens. Given Melody’s status as an orphan herself, fear of abandonment might come rushing in your head as you read but that would mean to simply dismiss a far more complex figure. And it’s only towards the end of the book that you may realize what Melody might stand for, amidst occasional encounters with the rest of the people living in the trailer park and her own continuous inquire into unconditioned affection. Her reactions to everything that involves her are somehow delayed as if the events themselves are wrapping her but without affecting any part of her. Unabashedly and deliciously raw, Melody continues to exist, to orbit around other people but without straying from her own course. It’s as if she knows exactly what she is after but chooses not to share this awareness with anyone around her.

I thought it would be interesting to trace the dynamics of how people took something as man-made and fabricated as the structure of a race and the need to win, that competitive challenge – whatever you want to call it – and somehow implant these urges into an animal. Horses don’t race in the wild. They run in herds. They don’t compete with time, we gave them that need. How, though. That’s what I wanted to know.

Asymmetrically, Lana Fabrile creates her own minimal spaces by using a camera and photo subjects as main coordinates; she confronts her own longing for getting away with still life captured in its finest details; she engages in feverish lovemaking on bedrocks only to reach orgasms later and by herself, afraid of being witnessed in the very moment of climax. A fleeting figure who is sometimes on the verge of dissolving completely in the rocky scenery she is so enthralled with, Lana emerges from her sexual encounter with the blind teenage boy (now gradually recovering from his blindness and numbness) cloaked with a new sense of intimacy of the most gracious kind, the kind that is less likely to be washed away as time goes by. She stops searching for inhumane perfection; she relinquishes on magnifying everything to the point where it becomes a distorted reflection that suppresses any desire to move forward with her life or love no one but herself. Instead, she settles for framing small sequences as they come, sequences that feel as if they were relics left behind, in the same way the fossilized whale and her unborn cub are still grounded in the desert dunes from time unmemorable.

I don’t feel bad about what I do. It’s fine. We’re all consenting adults. It’s not like I go around using people, and they all know what they’re getting into with me. I mean I don’t stand there and promise them love and duty and death do us part and all that crap. I’m not going to sprout curlers for anyone. I mean I would if they asked me to, just for that particular day. I’d bring them a beer, or change the T.V. station or fuck them one more time, but just for that day. Never for more than one day. One day is enough for anyone.    

Invariably lurching between love and hate for her husband Zachary, Oxena Turnbill, a former professional photographer, seems to be almost too well-groomed for a hostile setting that probably doesn’t miss a single chance to fill any of your holes with sand. She tries to get through domestic bliss on a daily basis but without too much success, aware as she is of all her husband’s flaws. So she is already planning an escape of her own when she witnesses and also helps her husband to capture a majestic California condor laden with an egg. A place to let this condor go will soon become their perfect excuse to go away together with no intention of ever coming back to the trailer park but still linked by the secrets they all have shared there e.g. a horse burial they all had to take part in, a childbirth endorsed only by a chilling cave, a particle accelerator and its operators whose existence is completely concealed except for their endeavors to go beyond the indifference that seems almost encoded in the human genome and grasp the original intimacy with themselves, with each other and with what they identify as their universe.

All 5 female characters have a strong will of their own and refuse to be defined or confined only in or by the terms of the other. They resist outside regulations (coming from other characters in the book or from the reader herself/himself) when it comes to their freedom of movement and action and this is hardly a coincidence. Infusing first-person narratives with omniscient points of view, folding and unfolding without any centralizing figure and empowering each character to take his/her own place on the stage but only for a very specific moment and definitely not for good, Azimuths tries and, up to a point, it also succeeds in reproducing the leaderless dynamic (or its initial intention at least) so many individuals have tried but also failed to generate when entering communities by choice. But this novel is anything but a textbook for communal living as it delivers no solutions in the same manner it delivers no pre-packaged meanings either. Instead, it keeps your attention alert as its characters are anything but easy to foretell even if their desire to escape is the detectable filigree for every action and behavior. You just have to bear with them in their efforts to enrich their life with a meaning of their own and overlook the fact that the universe is indifferent to us all. In fact, the whole novel comes as the incomplete sum of angular measurements against maternal figures, breaking away scenarios, secrecy, personal chronicles, confinement and changes but without succumbing to individual psychological analysis altogether as possible reasoning is already in its pages and there is actually no need to let your own imagination loose when it comes to it. Every now and then, Azimuths may also strike you as a construct of bodily warmth projected against sterile and dry environments only to exude even stronger by contrast.

 


 
 
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