The Relevant Strangeness of “The Flat Woman: A Novel” https://ift.tt/5nSDKTr
Exploring a speculative world where women are blamed for the climate crisis, Vanessa Saunders’ The Flat Woman: A Novel is incredibly relevant – especially for anyone like me experiencing a fierce desire to make a positive difference while battling a sense of helplessness.
A professor of practice at Loyola University New Orleans, Saunders’ beautifully crafted novella lays out the realities of how women must navigate an increasingly hostile world where leaders shift blame onto marginalized communities. The story is told through the eyes of an unnamed, female narrator living in a bizarre, sometimes repulsive, world. Here, seagulls frequently fall from the sky and lay rotting on sidewalks, streets, bushes, and beyond. Her life is turned upside down after her mother is arrested and imprisoned as a “gull terrorist.” Left to the care of her inconsistent aunt, the woman grows up only to drop out of college and run off with the only man she has ever dated – an environmental activist turned Elvis impersonator.
POP’S COLA – the male-led corporation that dominates both the economy and government – redirects its own role in climate change by placing the blame on women. In fact, it’s COLA Prison, one entity of the conglomerate, that features “three thick, black lines of ash pour[ing] out the chimneys.” While the government claims that the gull murders are the result of women using “a foreign chemical agent”, the ash from the prison coats everything from the characters’ faces to the streets they walk on.
Despite a lack of evidence, it is the narrator’s (also unnamed) mother who is held accountable for these murders, with claims that she led “a cell of gull terrorists: a group of deranged, disturbed women, bloodthirsty and statistic.”
“This woman, she should suffer. She should suffer like the seagulls were made to suffer, neck snapped into parts, wings shattered, bodies dismembered from the fall.”
Saunders’ book makes clear commentary on a patriarchal society that misplaces blame on women and subjects them to violence, regardless of how little or bizarre the evidence provided is. However, it was the choice to make birds the victims in the novella that I found most compelling.
Across various cultures and throughout history, birds have often been thought of as symbols of wisdom and knowledge. In Russian culture, the Gamayun is a mythological bird with the head of a woman who is known to be aware of everything that occurs in the world. Whether human or animal, hero or god – she knows all. Looking at the birds in Saunders’ novella through this perspective, The Flat Woman became a commentary on the extreme lengths a male-led society will travel to not just silence women – but to hide the atrocities that stem from their behavior as well.
The violence to both women and the world permeates every surface in The Flat Woman. When visiting her mother in COLA prison, the narrator states: “Up close, the woman can see ash smears around Momma’s neck and mouth. Momma grabs a diamond of fence with her ask-soaked fingers.” Horrors seep through every surface as a result of POP’S COLA, with the mother literally coated in the company’s damaging and dangerous behaviors.
With the devastation of the physical world leaving the narrator struggling to control her “leaky boundaries,” she struggles to keep control of her body and the horrors of her surroundings made visible through her skin. After being denied living with her aunt following her mother’s arrest, the narrator, “glances down at her arms. From her wrists to her elbows, her arms are coated in bird feathers. About three feathers thick, ash-stained and slick, they jut out from her skin at odd angles … Against her skin, the gull feathers feel slimy and cold. Their thick, downy coat makes her wrists heavy.”
These “leaking” moments range from goldfish swimming in her stomach to a patch of cow fur on her neck, highlighting how nature and humanity are intricately interwoven.
Offering a critique on how power structures shift blame and avoid addressing the realities of climate change, The Flat Woman treads the line between reality and absurdity. Saunders crafts a world of relevant strangeness that points to a growing contempt for women amidst a dying world, raising the alarm on climate change, male privilege, and surviving in corrupt institutional systems.
Fiction The Flat Woman: A Novel
By Vanessa Saunders
The University of Alabama Press
Published November 12, 2024
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