A Journey to Wholeness

Aug 25, 2019 Book Review…

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Book: Madwoman
Author: Shara McCallum
Critic: Glenville Ashby, PhD

Shara McCallum’s stark and edgy writings explore the underworld, a place where the conscious and the unconscious self merges; it is a place of knowing, experiencing, and the habitat of the Madwoman – McCallum’s muse and her alter ego.
McCallum unravels and splits, only to become whole. It is a tortuous journey that she recounts, a persnickety task that lays bare a soul teetering on dissolution. But the darkest night of the soul revivifies, enlightens, and reconciles every disparate and warring pieces of thought.

Madwoman is, in reality, a thought-form rooted in the poet’s unconscious. Over the years, it has morphed into an archetype and a permanent denizen of her space. This is hardly an implosive development. She has learnt from it, mending her broken parts. Her reflection is her catharsis. Her spry memories take the form of imagery – “whore” and “abomination” to name a couple; they are representations of an identity shattered by society, our boundless and suffocating superego.
In ‘You,’ McCallum is a woman consumed by neuroses. We feel her dissociation; she is psychically shredded, her candour volcanic. “You bring out the sorriest of Bad Wolves in me. Dropped baskets, loose teeth, lost pathways in me.”
‘Invention’ tells how cleverly she buttresses a frayed ego with flights of fantasy, her mythical indulgence a salve for open wounds – “Even if smoke and mirrors, the beloved remains the rage, Love, how do I go on being your marvelous invention? If I sometimes misplace myself, who really can I blame? The… kiss was my miscalculated invention.”
In ‘Grief,’ she has either stumbled on truth or has assuredly decoded the mystery that is life.
“Have you really not yet learned?
Only in fairytales is disaster averted,” she pens.
‘Madwoman Apocrypha’ is clothed in ontological inquiry:
Q: Who created you?
A: A breach in the self.
Q: What caused the breach:
A: I’d become mistrustful of beauty again, each sound perforating the moment.
Q: How do you measure the distance between the girl you were and the woman you’ve become?
Each question probes deeper into her being.
And her ‘Madwoman in Middle Ages,’ traverses time and cultures.
She writes, “As a girl I knew the world was mutable. A beggar could pass for king.
In a new country I became a woman, mistaking what I’d love for what I lost now I tell myself…every red is not a shade…Now when tea leaves drift through steaming water, sifting into shape, I say: This portends nothing.”
‘Madwoman Exiled’ is brutally haunting. Climatically raw and Freudian, it captures our unconscious drive for self-annihilation.
McCallum is at her expressive best – “Walking from the house of my earliest dreams…
Next town I enter, I will kneel on the steps of the first church I find, plant myself in the path of parishioners who turn from me…Whore of Babylon, Abomination, I will take matted strands to stone, scouring, for all who must see, the scourge he left in me.”
In like vein, she follows with ‘Salome to Madwoman’ – “You too could learn what the wind becomes when it scythes the palms. A storm is an opportunity for all to be given form.”
In ‘Elegy,’ death has long consumed the living. It is a sobering reminder that the ‘event’ is an interpretive concept with divers meanings. In many a case, “death is like an ill-fitted suit that can be worn longer than we’d imagine.”
McCallum’s encomium to death is telling. It is in ‘Death’ that she makes the final stride toward wholeness. In this transformative experience, there is vindication…and victory. This one moment is inextricably weaved into life, no longer a dreaded finality, but a spark to be revered. – “This truth you turn from has been your companion from the start. Oh my sweet, you will remember me, anytime now, despite yourself.”
McCallum masterfully and ever so subtly delves into the incalculability of the human mind. To call her work a psychoanalytic marvel is an understatement. Wryly authentic, she invites us to glean from the recesses of self and its dynamic relationship to time and timelessness. Hers is a poetic treatise steeped in psycho-philosophical and metaphysical enquiry. We are that much closer to understanding McCallum if we define her work for what it truly is.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper)

Feedback: glenvilleashby@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter @glenvilleashby
Madwoman by Shara McCallum
© Shara McCallum 2019
Publishers: Peepal Tree Press, UK
ISBN: 13: 9781845233396
Available at Amazon
Ratings: Highly recommended

 

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