"Mother and sex and death and breath and water": A Conversation with Amie Souza Reilly

Human/Animal: A Bestiary in Essays uses the story of your menacing neighbors and the bestiary format as structures that enable you to explore ideas about violence, racism, misogyny, sexual assault, and many more. You also use the act of viewing and the treatment of animals as modes of examining the aforementioned issues.

At one point in the text, you describe wanting to stitch the two books you’re reading together. The title of your book contains a slash that both stitches together and separates human and animal. With its combination of bestiary form, cultural criticism, memoir, text and image, this book combines various kinds of writing, inviting readers to stretch their minds accordingly. What were you aiming for with this form and which writers have served as touchstones along the way?

I love this observation about the title! There’s a version of this manuscript somewhere on my hard drive titled Humanimal as one word because I wanted to erase the line completely and force an overlapping. I thought having “an” carrying the weight of both words might work to further blur the boundary, the singular indefinite article used for two words. However, this was only clear to me visually. Also the pronunciation was way too difficult; it wasn’t obvious which syllable to emphasize and I couldn’t say it out loud without it getting all stuck in my mouth. I also tried for a while to call it Animal Human in an attempt to flip that binary opposition and maybe rethink the implication that using human first implies human>animal, which is kind of exactly the opposite of what I’m thinking. But that title felt mythological, like a descriptor used for a centaur or a mermaid, and that didn’t feel right either.

These messy thoughts on title variations I think spill over into your actual question here about the intent of this hybrid form, which is much harder to answer. This mix of forms is in large part how I think through things I don’t understand. Also, moving within ideas, memories, and images inside a narrative forces a slowing down. I’m always fascinated and surprised at how the same idea or image or word can be altered just by changing whatever it is I’m using to try and puzzle something out. Like, if I am trying to think through a piece of art, I might remember a movie or a piece of literary criticism or a different image or memory, and every time I hold something new up to that piece of art, I understand both in a new way. My hope is that all the different kinds of writing come together and maybe recontextualize each other like that.

The list of writers I turned to—turn to—over and over, those who do this kind of work in ways I aspire to, is very long. But I have to say for this project Kate Zambreno, Claudia Rankine, Danielle Dutton, Elena Passarello, Eula Biss, and Jenny Boully are probably the writers I reached for the most.

I’m curious about influences in a book like this that has so many layers and textures. I’ve asked about reading, but what were you watching and/or listening to while you wrote this?

Obviously a ton of horror movies. I also rewatched the Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster a few times, which is such a dark, and absolutely fantastic movie that digs into human connections and animals in a deeply strange way. And the movie Pig with Nicholas Cage, which almost became part of one of these essays, since so much of that movie is about masculinity, loneliness, and violence.

When I actually sit down to write, though, I need quiet, absolute silence. But if I were to suggest an album as a soundtrack for this project, it would be Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters. Not just because it is also about bullying, assault, and oppression, but the way she uses found items as percussion feels like what I want to have happening here, in this narrative where other texts run beneath and through the overarching story.

What advice do you have for those interested in writing a book like this? What practices or rituals allowed you to write it?

My rituals look a lot like procrastinating. I have a very bad habit of starting at the beginning of my document every day rather than from where I left off the day before. I take tons of notes but never in the same place, so spend a lot of time looking for them. I also tend write a sentence or two and then need a break, which is also not great. The bulk of this manuscript was written under deadline, though, and I found it really helpful to have that date on my calendar as a way to reign myself in. I don’t know if I would have ever finished otherwise, since there was always, and still is, so much I want to think through or other books and shows that make me think, WAIT! That’s what I want to think more about.

One practice I do recommend is having a side project going while working on a primary project. I think exploring other ideas keeps things fresh, allows for a new ways to consider knotty problems. Last summer, while finishing Human/Animal, I took a class with the brilliant Dorothy Chan and wrote a sonnet crown, which was really hard for me, a non-poet, but having this other very different, very fun draft open kept me from getting tired of myself.

You drew the animals in this book yourself. What’s your history as an artist? How were you interested in playing with text and image in this work?

I was always a visual artist and took studio classes when I was really young. I’ve dipped in an out of it ever since. I love thinking about the relationship between image and text, the way both visual art and language use space, how we use lines to draw, but call the linked words we write lines, too.

In Human/Animal I wanted to play with text and image to control tension in a different way. We often learn to read via picture books, and putting both image and text on a page can create a symbiosis. But in graphic novels, the relationship is more complicated, sometimes contradictory and sometimes expansive (or both at the same time). I am no good with panels but do miss the illustrations of children’s books and there’s something comforting, I think, about encountering drawings in a book for adults.

Why do you/we use all the metaphors? It’s a question your book asks–all the pictures, definitions, other quotes, examples from art, books, etc. You write, “I can’t get to the truest story of the neighbors without aligning them, or what happened, with something else, something not-them.”

The closest way to get to something I can’t seem to understand is to associate it with something I do. I think we do this all the time. I just watched a short reel on Instagram where a little girl described a painting as “broccoli behind a wall” and then her curator mother described the painting in relation to its place within a rapidly changing society, the gray wall cutting across the front of the tree her daughter saw as broccoli emblematic of rising industry. But then the camera focuses just on the painting and both things become true, or neither of them do, and maybe the painter just painted what he saw, the wall just a wall in front of a tree extra full and leaning in the wind.

I read the book as having three separate registers: the story of your family and the brothers, the other texts and ideas that you use—as you say, as ways of approaching this experience metaphorically—and another story that emerges almost through negative space of all the things that happen to women that lead to the brothers’ behavior having a certain effect on you. You write, “I can tell you about all the times men hurt me and never did it happen in a dark alley. Never did I grab a man by the ears and knee him in the groin while screaming FIRE, never did I press my bitten fingernails into his eyes.” How did you want the sort of secret understory of (women-identifying) life to come through in this story? What did you want to say about it?

It feels ubiquitous. All the warnings when I was young. And all the ways those warnings came true, though never in the way I was told they could happen. We are taught about stranger danger, but rarely told how to handle leering uncles. We are told to be nice, be polite, be helpful, but when I was eight a man pulled up to our bus stop and asked my sister and me for directions. When I got close enough to tell him, I realized he wasn’t wearing any pants. I don’t know what I want to say, just that I see it, see us, and want better. I think about that bus stop man all the time and it happened more than thirty-five years ago. I imagine he never really thought about us again after that day. That’s a lot of brain space for a stranger to take up. What else could I have done if I weren’t remembering that guy?

It was so striking to read about your taking a horror movie class at Fordham since I took that very same class with the unforgettable Moshe Gold. I remember he would cart in the readings on a trolley and we would all stay late to watch extra movies into the night. How does the language of horror movies help you get closer to your subject matter here? I don’t just mean the tale of the brothers. I’m also referring to the other story that emerges beneath it about the wonders, yes, but also the horrors of being a woman/mother out there—in a world where a colleague of yours taped a cow to your door while you were breastfeeding, and there are clues strewn about the book about the ways men have harmed you in the past.

How cool would it have been if we’d been in the same class?!? That course really stuck with me, all those very late nights—I was commuting back home to Connecticut, to this house, those neighbors—and the Moshe-led late-night movie sessions were a strange comfort. Horror movies felt real, that low hum of danger present from the opening credits, the characters who deny their intuition that “something isn’t right.” At the time, I wouldn’t have described our neighbor situation as like living in a horror movie, but I didn’t not feel that way either. Now that I’m thinking about it, I wonder how much of the connection or attraction to horror movies then and in this book was the extremeness, the obviousness of the danger when what was happening at home was less obvious.

I also think that horror movies get us to think about our physicality. They capture, visually, our visceral, immediate reactions to threats. And as a woman, this mirrors the general heightened awareness I have in any place where men are, that potential for violence that is real but often treated as paranoia. And that cow sign on the door back when I was breastfeeding was something I laughed at, too, which is just another physical reaction, intuitive and protective.

I spent a lot of time, back in the Fordham days and while writing Human/Animal trying to make sense of it all, and felt so inside my thoughts that I didn’t stop to realize how physically trying all of that was—my stomach always in a knot, always feeling ready to run, adrenaline surging all the time. Watching a horror movie is an adrenaline rush about people whose adrenaline is rushing. For ninety minutes, we’re all bodies.

Maybe that’s what connects horror movies to the maternal experience, too? That bodily connection? I remember watching Alien in that class and talking about the maternal imagination, so I know these aren’t my thoughts, but that experience of moving from one person to two is so alienating and indescribable, the horror film gets as close as anything can to that feeling.

From the beginning of the book, we see that this bestiary and exploration of animals will lead back to violence and the experience of being a woman and a mother: “Each animal, when reconsidered in verb form, defines an act of violence, labor, or motherhood.” Why do you think the way we use animals conceptually/linguistically leads us again and again to aggression, work, and the maternal? How does this resonate (or not) with your own experience of being a woman and mother?

I think it always goes back to patriarchal, white supremacist power, over and over in different ways. There’s no end to how that culture tries to maintain dominance over all that is not them. The control over and displacement of all that is not the straight, white, able-bodied, Christian man is embedded in our language, so of course the language applied to animals (also frequently and historically dominated by white men) is tangled within that grasp. And when I think again of that cow sign on the door, that was a choice my coworkers made—not just to call attention to what I was doing in there, but to point out that I wasn’t working, even though I was often balancing a laptop on a box, holding the pumping equipment with one hand while typing with the other. But if that’s all they wanted to do, they could have just drawn human breasts. (Though, oddly, that drawing would have been offensive enough for HR to step in.) A cow implies they no longer saw me as a woman, but akin to the same (female) animal who is often mistreated and milked excessively so humans can consume what is expressed.

At the same time, though, the book also reveals the way you know yourself to cause and carry harm as well as being on the receiving end of it. Human/Animal reminds us that we are all both looker and looked at, harmed and harmer. You write that at times you understand the brothers as embodying “white patriarchal structures” but you also add, “I must not forget that it is in me, too.” This willingness to look at both sides is what gives the book its power. You write, “Don’t forget, I watched them, too. Analyzed their motives and movements. I am both innocent and culpable. Hunted and hunter. Domestic and wild…I want to understand what happened and what happens. To make sense of what they did, and what I did. Who was that woman? I want to give what I felt a name.” Why was it so important to not let yourself off the hook in this way?

This is so difficult, I think, because on the one hand, I do not want to dismiss the very real fact that people do not deserve harm. Victims of violence are not to be blamed. And yet, for me, in this situation with the brothers, I was also doing harm, wishing harm, compliant within larger structures of harm. In Clare Dederer’s book Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, she says something about how art monster men are violent men—rapists, child abusers, sexual assaulters, but female art monsters are often monsters because they don’t want children or give up children or leave their children. So I think about how there seems to be scale, a tolerance for certain behaviors when men do them, and an intolerance and vilification of women behaving outside of others’ expectations, which then puts them in this same category as men doing real violence.

There’s so much focus on the processes of staring and looking in this book. What did you want to say about visual culture and how did that help you tell the story of the brothers?

I think you and I circle around these ideas all the time in our work, right? There’s a part in your book Ways of Looking at a Woman where you write about Dickinson’s “tell all the truth and tell it slant” and how looking at or writing about a trauma head-on doesn’t work because that’s not what trauma feels like, and that hybrid art is a way to think about or through motherhood. I remember reading that and feeling so seen.

Visual culture seems to be increasingly pervasive, and I wonder what it means to look or be looked at when we are endlessly being recorded, constantly recording ourselves. I’ve been thinking lately about how often we are watched and how that has changed the way people act in public. My students say they fear saying the wrong thing in class not because they fear being wrong, but because their mistake could be recorded and shared, their humiliation becomes eternal, meme-able.

Our choice back then to put in a surveillance camera to watch the brothers is something I’m still puzzling over. It felt necessary then, but I’m not sure we would make the same decision now, even though Ring cameras have become ubiquitous, maybe especially in the suburbs. But visual culture has become even more dangerous, weaponized, for example, against students and faculty legally protesting. Though I felt it was imperative we capture our neighbors in the act of invading our space (what violent language we use to describe that act, “capture”), I think I am more opposed to nonconsensual video recording now.

I always like to ask this question, and I know we both teach. What sort of activities/exercises would you like to see a class trying out with this book?

I did a lot of weird exercises and wrote some strange prompts in my classes while trying to puzzle out parts of this project. I am hugely grateful for my students’ patience and willingness to take risks. Here are a few:

· Write, in as many sentences/pages/lists as needed about something you’re curious about or can’t figure out. Then draw a single image that doesn’t immediately represent what you’ve just written about, but rather connects to a theme that is harder to express in words. Put the image somewhere in the text. Do not explain to your readers why it’s there.

· Look up a word (any word! Something you like the sound of, a nickname, a curse word, an adjective you use to describe someone you miss) in the OED online and read through all its iterations and its origin. Write down what most surprises you. Then make your own entry pushing that same word forward to a new meaning. Use that new-old word in an essay so that your readers understand via context the word’s new meaning.

· Write a scene/memory where your main character is wronged. Now think about that scene from the POV of the offender and write the memory/scene again.

I mentioned your wanting to stitch together two books you’re reading at one point. I see you looking for another way of stitching things together ideologically in the slashed title, but this time to undo the hierarchy of human over animal: “What if Magritte’s fish woman, or my sculpture of his fish woman, is instead seen as an undoing of the hierarchy of human animal over nonhuman animal? In a gentler reading, there is a symbiosis. Land and sea, human and animal. The power to run and the ability to live underwater. Mother and sex and death and breath and water.” How, if at all, are you seeking to undo these binaries and simplistic ideas about both humans and animals through this stunning hybrid image, and through Human/Animal in general?

When I started this, I was thinking about the relationship between hunter and hunted, that being stalked by my neighbors made them predators and us their prey. But stalking, when I think about it as it relates to hunting, means following closely but carefully, incognito. My thinking fell apart when I realized the brothers weren’t secretly following us at all, they were being obvious, they wanted us to know they were looking. However, I was secretly watching them. And really, that binary oppositional way of thinking was never going to work; binary thinking is always hierarchical, there’s a power implied in the /, that one is better than the other. And that’s just not productive when thinking through relationships of any kind, between people, or people and place, or people and nonhuman animals. The and allows for expansiveness and connection.