Marvels of Things Created and Miraculous Aspects of Things Existing<\/em> describes a tribe of \u2018Hyena People\u2019, stating that if one of this tribe should be hidden in a crowd of 100, a hyena alone could sniff them out and devour them. They walk amongst us. They eat their own.<\/span><\/p>\nA great collector of therianthropic lore was Charles Hoy Fort, the well-known researcher into \u2018anomalous phenomena\u2019. In his final book,\u00a0Wild Talents\u00a0<\/i>(1932), Fort writes about the belief that under certain emotional conditions, such as grief or rage, a man might turn into a hyena. Literally. My friend, editor and mentor Roddy Lumsden had a lifelong interest in all things Fortean. It was something that united us.\u00a0\u00a0By strange coincidence, I was rereading bits of\u00a0Wild Talents<\/i>\u00a0in the week before he died, and thinking about the hyena as an avatar for certain kinds of desire or emotional experience. The news of Roddy\u2019s death was a shock to my system \u2013 one shock in a long series of shocks \u2013 and it triggered something in me where, following a period of loss and turbulence, I\u2019d reached a state in which animal transformation felt plausible to me, where I felt just mad enough and feral enough to turn into a hyena myself.<\/p>\n
Mourning, I suppose, is a process or set of processes whereby all the raw, regressive anarchy of grief is absorbed back into articulate narrative language. It\u2019s a process of mediation and assimilation through which the individual is able to communicate their experience of grief, first to their family and friends, then to their wider community, and on, to society at large. We have many rituals aimed at producing rational, linear trajectories of grief \u2013 the obituary, the wake, the funeral, the eulogy, the elegy \u2013 and all these discourses \u2013 therapeutic, clinical, and literary \u2013 that attempt to move you towards a kind of recuperation; that want to socially situate your grief.\u00a0\u00a0All of which is helpful and necessary, but I think there are kinds of grief, and that there are certainly grieved-for subjects, not accommodated by those trajectories or rituals of mourning.<\/p>\n
There are those society doesn\u2019t account as grievable,\u00a0<\/i>and there are some kinds of grief society doesn\u2019t want. How to mourn\u00a0those<\/i>subjects? And what to do with an experience of loss that is so disturbing and persistent that it can\u2019t be adequately reclaimed by language?<\/p>\n
I began to search for a word or phrase to describe what I\u2019m trying to do with my poetry, for the feelings and experiences I\u2019m attempting to make space for. When talking about Hyena! I started to speak tentatively about a work of \u2018queer mourning\u2019, about poetry as a making space for the troubling strangeness that grief initiates in us. I tend to think of grief as a queering of the real, as a making strange of the world and the self to the self and the world. The character of Hyena! emerged because the accumulative effects of grief were a kind of therianthropy for me.<\/p>\n
The hyenas of legend and lore were strange, fluctuant, threatening beings. There were moments, experiencing grief, when my own body felt strange and dangerous to me. I was changing my body in ways both involuntary and conscious: I couldn\u2019t eat, I couldn\u2019t sleep, I shaved my head. The magnitude of my feelings both provoked and demanded these changes, a remaking and remapping at the physical level. I am not the first woman to feel this way. To find, at times of great loss or stress, all her \u2018normal\u2019 bodily functions suspended, caught in arrest or revolt. The body behaving in this way is threatening to others too, wayward and ungovernable: the body that cannot bear to be touched, the body that must be touched, full of intense and compulsive desires, the body that shrinks or expands into \u2018ugliness\u2019, the body whose period stops, the body whose gums bleed; the body that resists any attempt at erotic instrumentalisation. The body that will not be managed. At our most abject we are often at our most revolutionary.<\/p>\n
In 1957 the artist and occult practitioner Marjorie Cameron painted\u00a0The Vampyre<\/i>,\u00a0\u00a0also known as\u00a0The Beast.\u00a0<\/i>It features a central female figure on all fours against a black background, experiencing some form of therianthropic transformation. The figure, anorexic and deformed, twists between the human and the animal, the fragile and the grotesque. It excites both sympathy and repulsion. It has a hyena-like mane of red hair. Cameron, as she preferred to be known, made this picture during a long period of mourning for her husband Jack Parsons. It is as eloquent as any art I\u2019ve ever seen in describing that sense of alienation, awkwardness and loathing with and inside of yourself, a queering of your own shape and substance.<\/p>\n
The queer, I think, is an identity or mode of being that is imperfectly held within language; it is an identity that cuts across and partakes of multiple categories of vexed belonging. The hyena is a cat and a dog, an animal, man, and a spirit; the hyena is male, then female at will. This is something I connect to my sexuality, of course, but also to culture and to class identity, to the feeling that has persisted all of my life of being, simultaneously \u2018both\u2019 and \u2018neither; to finding no perfect expression of solidarity, no true \u2018home\u2019 in any one territory or lexical field. Grief does this also, it destabilises you, it upsets and scatters your points of reference. To talk about death, or to talk about sexuality, we frequently resort to endlessly abstract and multiplying euphemisms; to cipher and slang and code. Language itself becomes strange as the known world tilts on its\u00a0y<\/i>\u00a0axis.<\/p>\n
Grief changes how we see and say, everything gets magnified, sensitised, brought into weirder, sharper focus. It changes what it is possible to think and to know; the words in which and through which we apprehend reality. In this state communication becomes complicated, the way we interact and understand one another changes. This relational uncannying is something I\u2019ve always thought of as being part and parcel of the queer: the need to find new names, a new language in which we can speak our strange truths back to one another.<\/p>\n
Hyenas have a language, or they have a kind of complex anti-language comprised of \u2018giggles\u2019, whoops, howls, and groans. These sounds have a kinship to those produced at the disruptive hiccuping core of human trauma; to the collapse of articulate speech that occurs when our rhetorical resources are utterly exhausted. It is not so much that trauma silences its sufferers, but that it begins in them a compulsive and repetitive need to speak: to gab and garble, jibber and slur, to laugh and cry, to be discursive and sullen in turns, and yet to come to the end of their invention without ever reaching or naming the\u00a0thing<\/i>\u00a0they are trying to describe. It is not the case that trauma is or must remain \u2018unspoken\u2019, rather that any attempt at intelligent representation fails at, or is failed\u00a0by<\/i>, the limits of language. This is the difference between\u00a0articulate<\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0eloquent.\u00a0<\/i>When words won\u2019t do, we recruit gesture, the body, guttural non-verbal noises.<\/p>\n
The hyena\u2019s laugh is repeatedly miscast and mischaracterised in folklore and contemporary culture alike as demonic, hysterical, or mocking. So too are the sounds of grief and trauma misunderstood. Women\u2019s grief especially. I began to see \u2013 or at least to imagine \u2013 a thread of connection between the hyena\u2019s laugh and the practice of the caoin, which exists in popular consciousness as a species of pagan noise-making. This misrepresentation was fostered by religious and occupying authorities in Ireland, who frequently demonised its practitioners as animalistic, immoral, or crazed, when in reality the caoin belongs to a highly complex and specific verse tradition, one with its own rich set of tropes, its own particular aesthetic disposition. Historically, criticisms of the caoin performed a kind of Janus-faced manoeuvre in which it was simultaneously despised for being heathen and wild, and destained as \u2018immoral\u2019, because it ritualised \u2013 and sometimes monetised \u2013 the process of grieving. The caoin was too unrestrained and artless to be quite proper, while at the same time too formalised to be authentic or sincere. For the women who practised the caoin there was no way to win, and because the caoin was embodied to such a high degree, condemnation of the form also attached to those who performed it. It wasn\u2019t simply that the tradition of the caoin was in some way disorderly or \u2018bad\u2019, but that these qualities were also the signal moral attributes of the women who participated in it.<\/p>\n
Hyenas are misunderstood animals. I don\u2019t suppose there is a woman alive who wouldn\u2019t feel some sense of kinship with their abjection and vilification, but it must be felt most deeply by the women who are \u2018other\u2019 even in the otherness of being a woman, women who are told they are mad, or perverse, or profane, for the ways they desire and the ways they grieve, women who are made to feel like animals.\u00a0\u00a0Witch belief is alive and well in many parts of the world, where rumours of animal transformation still attend accusations of witchcraft. The witch has her familiars: the bat, the owl, the toad and the hyena. And the witch takes on some of their properties, she sheds her own skin and becomes a beast. Not a \u2018useful\u2019 beast either, a thing that cannot be harnessed, a thing that cannot be used for food or fuel, a thing that refuses rational control, that belongs to and in its own frightening magical world.<\/p>\n
Magic, Silvia Frederici tells us, was a huge stumbling block to the rationalisation of the work process. It functioned as a kind of refusal of work, it was a form of insubordination and grass-roots resistance. The world \u2013 and women \u2013 had to be forcibly disenchanted before it \u2013 and they \u2013 could be dominated. Women\u2019s claim to magical power undermined state authority; it gave the poor and powerless hope that they could manipulate and control the natural environment, and by extension subvert the social order.\u00a0\u00a0So magic must be demonised, must be persecuted out of existence. If Hyena! is a witch then the poem is a spell. It is that scene of hope whose ambition is to overcome the horrible logic of death and the impossible demand to \u2018heal\u2019 from loss, to be made \u2018useful\u2019 again.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n
In the Emerald City<\/strong><\/p>\nmy friend is face-down, consulting her
\nhangover like a map. or else she is dead.
\nin a city like this is the pleasing secret
\npicked clean, the microclimate quick to
\ntears. tell me who you are<\/em>. i’m all
\nthe darkness draining from an eye. go
\non, do the dead in different voices. do
\nthe our father<\/em> and the gratia plena<\/em>. do
\ndaddy issues<\/em>. do the girl crush<\/em>. do
\nthe predatory lesbian<\/em>. i’m a glacier
\ncalving in a warm tumbler full of bells.
\nin the emerald city, an insect phrase,
\nclosed against colour. how do you like<\/em>
\n me now<\/em>? would roundly slut my ethic
\nskin. the carnal hairpin noir<\/em> of witches.
\nby which i mean \u2013 not that you asked \u2013
\nthey like you better dead, pressed to
\ntheir own piqued kink, gassed or slit
\nor bombed out<\/em> of their ovaries on
\npills, a row of gracious cabbages. eskar
\nof an old wound, how they hate. dames,
\nthey want you good and doomed, and all
\nyour limpid oeuvries debauched in
\nscalloped cotton. three women
\nin a room is a coven by default.
\nthree poets in a room is fucking
\nriot. oh, those amatory zealots,
\nsevered heads in a bowling bag.
\nlisten, to cut it in the emerald city,
\nyou’ve got to be tough, feet planted
\nfirmly apart and screaming: come at<\/em>
\n me, bro!<\/em> with a fidgety vigour, all
\nomnicompetent female badass. my friend
\nsays we shall never make it. pain is
\na convex blues strained through lyric’s
\nsyrupy extremes \u2013 edel, idyll, idol: weiss,
\nweiss, weiss! \u2013 my contrarian austerity
\nwill never be enough. failure of medicine
\nand strict machine<\/em>. i have come to
\nfragrance under ailment, a way of being
\nwrong at which the dog sniffs, the nose,
\nirked in its turn with dying. i am old,
\nand my face is a sprawling proposal.
\nwhat are the symptoms?<\/em> a circular rash
\nlike the bite of a wolf. fever’s dull urging.
\nexhaustion, turning, is a wire dreidel.
\nthe enigma of ordeal, my gravel kingdoms
\nregained. but oh, we are so remorselessly
\nalive. season of doleful cirrus, spindrift,
\nloosestrife’s louche anathema. in the emerald
\ncity they pull us up as weeds. herbicide
\nand baling wire. haul me over the burning
\ncoals of grim contention. by the roots
\nof my hair, by the picking of my thumbs,
\nby the screaming of my leukocytes. anaemia’s
\nfatigue. the diminished marrow sings.
\nmy friend, the neon crown she tilts to
\nrakish emblem. we were found wanton
\nat the animal fair. all the great old men
\nwere there: sleekly dulapped in a staring
\nmatch with a stubbs cow. stuffed
\nand mounted. or antic, ripping wipers
\noff a ford cortina, gripping bent aerials
\nwith their ugly prehensile iambs. listen,
\nthe emerald city is full of zoos. vindictive
\nwith sin. abattoirs: the punch-drunk
\npatiency of bovine, pedestrians, walking
\npensions, students. in the emerald city
\nthey ask to see your identity papers. tell<\/em>
\n us who you are<\/em>. we too have turned
\nto compost on the pillow, turned the pillow
\ninto compost, run through your dreams
\nlike a raptor on stilts, like a swan in
\ndrag, a diseased mouth enriched on
\nits own emetic enormity, gorged
\nagainst grace. we know what they say
\nabout us, a kind of do not resuscitate
\ndaymare. ’cause they want you to be
\na luminous dummy, all hankering
\nexploits and an intermittent signal. oh,
\nemerald city, fuck you. girl with
\npromiscuous ditches for eyes, fraggle
\nwith nettles, her lines will harden
\ninto symmetry. some cloistered furtive
\nscrew, and the hopeless promptings
\nof a serious man grown thin in holding
\nback a laugh, fat in holding in a yawn.
\nwhen our lips move he slumps, tiredly
\nfarting. women, there is a difference<\/em>
\n between elegance and grace, and you,<\/em>
\n surpassingly slag. and you, spilling over<\/em>
\n with the soft grey fervour of a stranger.<\/em>
\n let me design you a while, until you are<\/em>
\n a ribboned cipher in your own stale works.<\/em>
\nmy friend and i, we will burn the emerald
\ncity to the ground. yes, we fed communion
\nwafers to the cows. we drank their simmering
\nmilk from the teat. shrews now, wasps, or
\npeevishly feline. no. a pit bull bitch. your
\nripped throat a fillet of sweet fondness.
\nyour fingers yet, your prizes too. oh enviable
\nworld we have fucked to sufferance. everything
\neverything, wild green spoils.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
There is a hole<\/strong><\/p>\ninto which i’d wad
\nyour reluctant presence.
\ndog-eared<\/em> now, or foxed<\/em>,
\nthis orphan pose. hang-
\ndog, dog-tired, waspish:<\/em>
\nmetaphor’s plangent
\nbestiary, its animal
\nremainders. call a fig
\na fig, and a trough
\na trough, why not?
\nmanic pixie dream girl
\ntrope at nearly forty’s
\nreally sad<\/em>. a bulbous
\nwreck. depression’s
\ncroneish bent. the tedious
\nhokey-pokey of weight
\nloss, weight gain, weight
\nloss. there will be no
\nsnow angels, indie mix-
\ntape, video spin-off,
\nrespite. this chilly
\nteacup scene wants rid
\nof me, slip into quiet
\nnervosa, mutilation’s
\nclich\u00e9d spite, the lyric’s
\nmawkish dalliance.
\nsometimes i tell myself,
\ni might.<\/em> the tongue
\ntickles its stock
\nof could’ve been<\/em>
\ncontenders’ speeches,
\nlays them on
\na shelf, untried. what
\nis the use? going on,
\nyour own effort closes
\nover you like waves
\nof rolling credits. to
\nstop is to become a pair
\nof floured hands, sensible
\nshoes, a walking condition.
\nthe nodes grow nerves
\ninside of me. i am inside-
\nout, and it hurts, and it hurts.
\nthere is a hole.
\nbigger than the body.
\nseen from the peak
\nthe plateau is a hole.
\nthe eye is a hole
\nbut doesn’t know it.
\na hole is a well
\nthat has outlived
\nits water. i am trying
\nto tell you. that has
\noutlived its village.
\nthat has outlived
\nits haunting, its
\njapanese cinema
\nschoolgirl drowning,
\nits horror stories,
\nfreak accidents.
\njust a hole. there’s
\na hole. which is
\nthe mouth, when you
\nget right down to it.
\nwhich was always
\nthe page. poetry
\nis ted kaczynski
\nin a satin jumpsuit
\nand mary janes.
\nis an amateur terrorist.
\nulrike meinhoff played
\nby natalie portman.
\nis raving weather-
\nreport uselessness.
\npoetry is a hole and i
\ntried to swallow you,
\na light lowered down
\nand i’m sorry now.
\nat the bottom
\nof the hole, more
\nholes, a dynasty
\nof zeroes. the mouth
\nin stroppy colloquy
\nand i’m trashing around
\nlike a shark in a boat.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
I will learn to be more brazen<\/strong><\/p>\nhyena says, rubbing her eyes until her waking
\nrings true. brazen is as brazen slides the gorgeous
\nstain inside the mouth. hyena walks into a room
\nlike a heron in a koi pond. there are your bony,
\nmouldy gods; there are the women, offering up
\ntheir cloudy sighs when stepped on \u2013 puffball
\nfungus all. hyena had a friend, now the friend
\nis retaining water and talking up the dharma
\nof a cupped tit: babies. give her the glass slipper
\nof a contraceptive coil any day. no offence. well,
\nsome offence. well, all the offence you can eat
\nif you must. the doctor told hyena there was
\nnothing they could do. he put his hand up her.
\nhe pulled her about like a ship’s cook peeling
\na potato. hyena wanted the pain to stop \u2013
\nflawed and floored \u2013 just cut the bad bit out.
\nbut no, it’s no can do<\/em>, and what if you want<\/em>
\n kids one day<\/em>, and how does your husband<\/em>
\n feel?<\/em> hyena will learn to say that he is not
\nthe one with a mediaeval jousting tournament
\nin his reproductive crawlspace, so how would
\nshe know, and why would she care, and why
\nshould it make any difference to you? if a baby
\nis a blessing or a miracle, then hyena is a what?
\na blasphemy, a curse. she will learn to be more
\nbrazen. she won’t sit home all day, rake leaves
\nagainst ruin, picking the bone of perfection to
\na witch’s finger. she won’t bite her nails, cast
\nlots for a creosote tea in the shit cafe. she will
\nnot take a swilling stand beside the urns of dingy
\nbrew, and turn her face to the wall in crowds,
\nand people will not say of her that her voice
\nis the murky mirror of her own self-hatred.
\nher voice, pared down with an emory board,
\nan anglofile<\/em>. ha-ha-ha. she can almost see
\nherself in red. she is moving with the furies
\nin precise circles, taking slow sardana steps,
\nreaping the corn with the hem of her skirt,
\nusing the wet silk edge as a scythe. her feet
\nwill foment dances, trample grapes. she might.
\nand no longer lie awake, burning with a sullen
\nfervour, eyes on the artext, breathing asbestos.
\na fierce heat will flow through her fingers.
\nwhen she meets a swan maiden she will spit,
\nand there will grow a heart-shaped swimming
\npool. hyena will learn to be more brazen,
\nhave a male voice choir comb her mane
\nuntil it gleams with the posthumous lustre
\nof a victorian daguerreotype: the misty dead
\npropped up in their chairs. oh, she will be
\nflagrant. she will have cupboards full
\nof cordials, the sacristy bursting with candies.
\na real witch. a prairie pyro inflamed by the long
\ndark night. she will tie the orchard to the tail
\nof a kite and let it go. she wants you good
\nand thirsty, ready to make sacrifices, spooked
\nby fire. on the day of her rebirth she will hold
\na bal masque where everyone must come
\ndressed as their own worst fears: the eliot
\nlong list, dying alone, postal voters, etc.
\nhyena will come as the thin white line between
\nsavour and decipher; a mundane chill that will
\nnot suit her coat, her mood. her most fulsome
\ncostume is herself, wrapped in the stealth
\nof strong gauze. listen, you, who pity her,
\nshe wouldn’t be you for all the lithe republics
\nof a country saying. these, her nimble, quickened
\nsounds: exalted thoughts, learning how to swim.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Boon companion<\/strong><\/p>\nthat i have my honeycomb strongholds too,
\nimpossible penetralia. shall i compare you
\nto a milky stoat? my mucus suitor, sifting
\nnear the heart. hair weight weaved in
\nthe throat. shall i compare you to a badger’s
\nbone erection? thin migratory needle,
\nslivering in me. all disfigured favour now.
\ngallicrow<\/em> for fallow fields. flailed lapels,
\na fiction of thread. autumn is a spectrum
\nof disquiet. a finite infamy, pin in
\na bubo. the blister on a lip. you
\nare a straw plateau made meal. the apple’s
\nmalic sting. rodent declensions, softly.
\nwinter’s stingeing appetites are on their
\nway. the mirror is your grail and your
\nbruise. the sun sinks its teeth into
\na broken leg, the plough’s malefic: crock
\nand tuber, seam and sherd, and reliquary
\nyield, all dead things turned up. us too.
\nyou’ve the grinning sickness now, make
\ndirty talk like a smirking toy. canescent
\nspectre of the laurels. farmyard dark
\nof treadles and of cleavers. crack,
\nlike a greased teat in the cold. show me
\na midden and i will skim you the world
\nfrom its watery depths. who are you to
\ntalk of love?<\/em> who fucked the susceptible
\nchestnuts into blight. kingdom
\nof wimping benevolence. you cut
\nup my clothes with lambing’s
\nsix-week shears too late. a v of geese
\nslain in flight. the geas i lay. geist
\nyou rouse to charm school in a pesty
\ndream. but i’ll have my honey-come
\nstrongholds too, my castle keeps, my
\nridding mien. keep your pastoral
\nappeasements. spring runs cold.
\nmy chilling vein.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Fran Lock is a some-time itinerant dog whisperer, the author of numerous chapbooks and seven poetry collections, most recently\u00a0Contains Mild Peril\u00a0<\/em>(Out-Spoken Press, 2019). Her eighth collection Hyena!<\/em> is due from PB Press later this year. Fran has recently gained her Ph.D. at Birkbeck College, University of London, titled. She is an Associate Editor at Culture Matters, and she edits the Soul Food column for Communist Review.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u00a0Hyena! and the work of queer mourning Hyenas get a pretty bad press: in Egypt, during the reign of Ramesses XI, the year 1090 became known as the Year of the Hyenas. It was a year defined by climate disaster \u2013 drought, crop failure \u2013 starvation, and civil unrest. The appellation is both literal and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6319,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"footnotes":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false},"categories":[58,12],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/images-2.jpeg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p42xiC-1CA","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6236"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6236"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6236\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6352,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6236\/revisions\/6352"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6319"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glasfrynproject.org.uk\/w\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}