The Oxford English Dictionary defines a border as “the line separating two countries, administrative divisions or areas”. However, borders have come to mean different things to different people; for some, they offer protection; to others, they separate. For a border to be relevant, it needs to be viewed as legitimate by all parties involved – some borders are agreed and negotiated, others are imposed.
Vanesa Kisuule’s powerful poem Take Up Space is a celebration of women, particularly those of colour, and an ode to what it means to be female in the 21st century. Kisuule grapples with themes of oppression, the duplicitous role of women in society, and the corrosive impact of the patriarchy.
‘Owning your space’ can be interpreted in many different metaphorical ways, but it is also interesting to examine this concept in its literal sense. Having one’s own space is often deemed to be empowering, but can be limiting if one is not respected outside this space. Women in ancient Greece and Rome were largely confined to the domestic sphere in terms of both power and in day to day life. This has a particular impact on the stories of Psyche and Medea.
All too many of us have been finding that mental health can be volatile and fragile during isolation, which makes the discovery that ‘hysteria’ was once treated by enforcing isolation and inertia all the more surprising—sinister, even. Particularly in the late 18th century, a perceived epidemic of this hysteria fascinated and terrorized Western society. It is important to note that while medics did document ‘male hysteria’ and further ‘madness’ in men, hysteria was powerfully linked to the idea of femininity. The word itself derives from hystera—the ancient Greek term for womb or uterus. It is also worth noting the relationship between hysteria and spectacle. As well as the more benign narratives that center around a fictionalized hysteric, real life institutions like bedlam were popular to visit, bearing the same gristly enticement to voyeurism as a public hanging. In fact, the verisimilitude of hysterical characters has often come from semi-autobiography. This is visible among works by Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, and Susanna Kaysen, but most famously in the unnamed protagonist of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, whose anonymity further conflates her with the writer, Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a 2006 post-apocalyptic novel. It follows the journey of a father and son who travel along a road in hopes to find a safer place and escape from an area of scarcity and cannibals. McCarthy never says what causes this apocalypse, what causes the world to lead people to be so desperate for survival they have to eat other humans, but many theories on what could have caused it have been presented.
