A Confluence of Conferences
I have given a lot of papers recently, hence the first part of this blog post.
The further I get in my academia journey, the more I have come to realise that there is a sort of "conference season" - I never seem to see any Calls for Papers for conferences happening in the first half of the academic year, and then they all seem to converge one after another after another. Maybe I'm just not looking at the right times, but it seems to me that conferences are like buses, you wait ages for one, and then loads come all at once.
This has definitely been the case for me in July which, despite it only being halfway through the month, has seen me give not one, not two, but THREE talks. Of course, due to the minor issue of a global pandemic, all of these events have taken place via Zoom, and so I have presented these papers in smart shirts and lounge-pants (the very definition of smart-casual attire).
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| Not pictured: pyjama bottoms |
But I'll tell you something: on Zoom or in person, I bloody love a conference. Yes, Zoom isn't the best for facilitating spontaneous networking, and I do kinda miss the bad wine and stale food, but I really enjoy telling people about my research, and usually a very obscure facet of it at that, and listening to other people talk about their research in turn. Sometimes the papers are from someone you know, a friend or colleague, and you get to hear more details or a weird tangential aspect of their work, and some papers are from complete strangers, whose work either intersects with yours in new and exciting ways or is something so completely new and different that you wouldn't have thought of it in a thousand years.
So, in this respect at least, July has been good. The first conference of the month was the University of Glasgow's College of Arts Postgraduate conference, and the topic was Afterlives. I gave a paper on interrogating ghosts, but I'm not going to give you any more details, because I think it will make a good spooky October post. Not many of the delegates took the theme so literally though, and there were papers on every kind of metaphorical afterlife, from life after trauma, to modern receptions of historical art and literature, to theorising the (post-)Anthropocene.
Then I gave a talk to the lovely Transatlantic Literary Women group as part of their weekly #TeaWithTLW series that happens on Zoom and which, frankly, tends to be the highlight of my week. I spoke to them about my chapter 'Antigone's Afterlives' and, in particular, on Kamila Shamsie's novel Home Fire, a retelling in which Sophocles' Antigone is adapted to narrate modern discourses on diaspora, statelessness, citizenship, and Islam(ophobia). I got such good feedback and questions from the TLW gang about the paper, the article I'm working on based on it, the chapter, and my thesis more broadly. It really helped me to work through some of the theoretical issues I've been having with the work, and some great support and tips on some academia-related drama. Honestly, I love that community.
This brings us nicely onto the conference that has taken up most of this week: The world's inaugural 'Reading #Instapoetry' conference. As well as delivering a paper (more on that soon!) and engaging with papers on a topic that is really in the theoretical avant garde, I also got to do something that I've only ever done once before - run the social media for an academic event. On @ReadingInstapoetry I got to live tweet the sessions, breakout rooms, and Q&A; read and share real-time responses to the discussions being had; and to connect the delegates to help simulate the networking that happens at real-world conferences.
Well, without further ado, continue reading for my paper that opened the Reading Instapoetry conference, and that received really nice reviews and feedback from my fellow attendees.
Contemporary Women's Adaptations of Greek Myth: #Instapoetry Edition
Nikita Gill is an instapoet with 579,000 followers, whose main source of inspiration is Greek myths, and in particular goddesses. My PhD research is on feminist adaptations of Greek myths, and Gill very much presents herself online as an author who adapts myths with messages of womanhood and feminism, although in this paper I will argue that these are quite vague and shallow messages of female empowerment and life lessons.
I want to show you three Gill poems that I consider very typical of her style: ‘Artemis Girl’, ‘Persephone Girl’, and ‘Athena Girl’.
The first thing we can see is that these poems in content, like the titles, are quite similar. They each present a kind of everywoman who is seemingly standing alone and is the figure of empowerment. Each of them also only displays the most basic premise understanding of the goddesses in question.
The issue I have with these poems is not that they don't engage deeply enough with mythological scholarship - I am absolutely not about gatekeeping myths, and I spend a lot of time trying to break down the ivory tower of Classics. I think that if you enjoy myths and you want to write about them, do it. You don’t need formal educational background in Classics - I certainly don’t have one!
As Gill herself has said ‘this is MYTHOLOGY, not HISTORY. Learn the difference before you go guns blazing into someone’s retelling. We are going to be seeing a lot more retellings from now on from women and I for one couldn’t not be HAPPIER. It’s high time women tell women’s stories.’
(I cannot wait for these promised retellings of Greek myth from women, I hope they happen soon. Maybe I'll read some or something.)
So my issue with these ‘Girl’ poems is more that they don’t engage deeply enough with, well, anything. All of these poems get the hashtags #myth #mythpoem and #feminism, but I am forced to ask what #feminist message Gill is promoting here. All three of these poems have ‘Girl’ in the title and repeat female pronouns throughout, showing that they are for the everywoman - aren’t we all sister goddesses together, yet standing alone. They are so vague in their attributes that they could relate to literally anyone, but they each depict a lone woman, appealing to individuality - it’s relatable to girls, but only to you, specifically, Girl.
Stylistically, these poems actually stand out on Gill’s instagram page. The instapoetry aesthetic is typically minimalist: black typeface on a white background. But these poems aren’t trying to imitate a typewriter. Oddly enough, I think they are trying to imitate a book page - the font is Times, and the background is that sort of greyish white, and it almost looks like you can see the lines of writing on the other side of the page. Almost like a physical book is as vintage, retro, and outdated to the instapoet as a typewriter is to every computer user.
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| Source: @Nikita_Gill Instagram |
And yet Nikita Gill has achieved that same dream as Rupi Kaur and others: From instapoet to published poet.
This led me to thinking: maybe its the shortness of the instapoetry form that doesn't lend much depth to Gill’s poetry in terms of form, feminism, or myth. Maybe print would lead to a more in-depth mythic adaptation or some actual feminist discourse, more than “I am goddess: hear me roar!”
And, to a certain extent, in her anthology Great Goddesses: Life Lessons from Myths and Monsters, Nikita Gill does actually make some points. In her poem ‘Pallas and Athena’, she writes of Athena:
‘She shunned Gods and men alike,so they rumoured her chaste,but perhaps their dismissal was in haste.Her desires lay elsewhere, you see.A girl just like her, but born of the sea.’ (p.128, l.4-8)
In myth, Athena accidentally killed her best friend Pallas when they were sparring, and then took her name as a moniker, hence Pallas Athene/a, in Pallas’ honour. Gill has actually taken the story and added a perspective to it, she has reimagined Athena as a lesbian goddess who accidentally killed her lover, and who was labelled ‘chaste’ by men who couldn't fathom why she didn’t desire them.
This is actually quite a common internet trope, more so with Artemis who was supposedly a goddess of virginity but was often surrounded by a veritable harem of women, and was celebrated by a cult of young women who would get naked together in the woods. So we’re seeing online these virgin goddesses being reimagined and re-appropriated as lesbian icons.
More interesting to me than lesbian Athena in Great Goddesses, though, is ‘Athena, After’ (p.127). Nikita Gill has a series of poems in the anthology that theorise on the afterlives of these goddesses, on how they are remembered. She does this in a few different ways, the two most interesting of which are when she considers 1) when people refer to these goddesses and 2) how the goddesses reconcile with no longer being worshipped.
In the poem ‘Athena, After’, Gill espouses Athena’s importance in helping contemporary ‘little girls […] become warriors too’, and I think it’s pretty clear that this isn’t supposed to be a horrifying image of children in wartime but rather another vague notion of empowerment. At the end of the poem, Athena lives on in libraries and librarians, suggesting that little girls must take up arms in the form of books for intellectual warfare.
I do think it’s quite funny, though, this idea of Athena ‘helping’ girls become empowered, when many myths show the goddess doing the exact opposite. I am thinking, for instance, of Athena’s treatment of Medusa and Arachne.
In ‘Aphrodite, After’, poor Cupid thinks ‘Everything is artificial in this broken realm’, but Aphrodite is certain that love still exists, and that it’s their job to show that to the mortals:
‘Somewhere, a man and the only man he has ever truly loved are celebrating fifty years together. Somewhere else, a girl falls in love with her best friend and finally kisses her. […]
Love can never die, not completely. There were too many romantics, too many poets, too many places where lovers could meet and kisses could be shared.’ (p.155)
‘Aphrodite, After’ also ends with this cloyingly sweet image of Aphrodite enjoying ‘friendly, warm company. The company of other women.’ (p.159). In fact, maybe it’s me being a cynic, but to me the entire 7-page poem is like a pastiche of these too nice images. Perhaps it’s commentary by Gill on the one-dimensional role of Aphrodite in the Pantheon, however I think it’s more supposed to be this vague notion of how every woman can discover more happiness in their female friendships than in romantic relationships. Thus, you can mine these poems for deeper meanings and resonances of adaptation theories, but I think the superficial analyses are probably closer to the mark.
Gill actually posted an excerpt of ‘Aphrodite, After’ on her instagram, and in the caption she commented on these ‘… After’ poems, saying: ‘One of my favourite parts about Great Goddesses is taking the Greek Pantheon and putting them in our modern day. It sounds wild, but I wanted to know how they would react to a world where people didn’t believe in them the way they used to.’
It strikes me as odd that Gill considers it ‘wild’ to imagine the gods in a world that doesn't believe in them, when that is the entire premise of some of the most famous contemporary adaptations of myths. Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, for example, is all about gods who were brought to America and then left to stagnate as belief in them waned. Thor and Jesus are both dead, and Odin - restyled as Wednesday - is this corrupt, gambling, war-hungry waning god, which sharply contrasts to the peaceful and intelligent Wodin that still survives in Scandinavia.
Gill also has a poem in the anthology called ‘Atlas, in Our Era’ which is one of these ‘… After’ poems that she considers ‘wild’, which I take to mean original and revolutionary. In the poem, a nebula comes to ask Atlas ‘Why do you still hold up the cosmos, Titan? The era of the Gods has passed.’, he replies that he remembers being a gardener and now he considers the entire planet his garden to tend, saying ‘My mother nearly named me Pistis […] It means loyal one.’
It’s difficult for me to consider this a ‘wild’ reinterpretation of Atlas, when it seems to be transported almost wholesale from Jeanette Winterson’s Canongate novel Weight, that is focussed on retelling the myth of Atlas and Heracles, as their myths intersect during Heracles’ 11th labour. Winterson writes that ‘No one told him the old gods had vanished or that the world had changed through a pale saviour on a dark cross.’ (2005: 123), and the thing that disrupts Atlas’ eternity is Laika, the dog that the Russians sent up to space. After adopting the dog, ‘Atlas had a strange thought. Why not put it down?’ (Ibid., 134). He is so enamoured with his little space dog that he puts the cosmos down (on what, I try not to think about), and then he walks away.
Although Gill’s Atlas has the complete opposite ending to Winterson’s, they are both asking the exact same question nearly fifteen years apart: what happened to Atlas, the gardener turned war criminal, after the pantheon ended? Did he know? Did his punishment continue?
Maybe my analysis of Gill’s poetry anthology is biased by my judgement of her instapoetry, as inextricably superficial. I would like to end by reiterating a point I made earlier, that instapoetry, and social media more generally, offers a form that can help to deconstruct the ivory tower of Classical scholarship, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you have to do it as superficially as Nikita Gill does, who uses Greek mythology to offer an undefinable notion of empowerment, such as in the dedication of her anthology:
‘For you,
whose iron
is as valuable
as ichor’
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