MOTHERDAUGHTERING: Raising the Unspeakable in Niki Tulk’s O.
Tampa, FL: Driftwood Press, 2022. 94 pages. $14.99.
In O, fables dance: the dangerous pleasures of interspecies lust open up to a surreal and time-shifting landscape of unlanguagable violence. Told with a feather-light touch and near-biblical cadence, Tulk’s collection of interlinked poems underscore questions of trauma and agency across time, place, form, and species. Woven through all this is an ambivalent engagement with the meaning of in(ter)dependence in all its complexities—as a channel of care as well as violence. Above all, O is folklore at its best: magicking the everyday into a new body of meaning—telling truths that the truth cannot yet tell.
A man falls in love with an owl. And thus, “O”—as text and character, creator and creation, human and nonhuman—is born. From the text’s opening pages, Tulk turns mise en scène to character, challenging the binary between the active human character and the passive nonhuman/nonliving object, and raising questions as to what constitutes bodily autonomy in an interconnected world. “The wind lifted the owl’s body. To the vastness, she sang. / The sky beat at her, azurite and cold.” The owl does not merely fly, but is lifted. Outside the body is not void, but vastness. The sky presents itself as a cruel opportunity, bears footprints as the body bears holes (24). These passages, we soon learn, are in fact portents of horrors to come, pointing to a world in which agency is everywhere but in the body, and in which violence doubles when met with disbelief.
After the fairytale mist of part one clears, we enter the heart of the wound. O, main-and meta-character, is at once an owl-woman mother, a human/owl hybrid daughter, a gesture to Hamlet’s Ophelia, and a container for this collective story. In all iterations, O is chameleon and shapeshifter: she develops a fugitive sense of justice while “dressed in dead men’s fingers” (30) and bears the physical and emotional scars of abuse and sexual assault. Yet, frustratingly (and realistically), her loathing for the violent, patriarchal conditions of her existence quite literally cannot be heard; her throat has been “plundered with terrible grief” (71). This reflects the text’s broader approach to disorienting human agency and individuality in the midst of unspeakable trauma: O is numerous and liminal because she cannot speak her truth without fable, fairytale, metaphor, mouth.
Amidst this degradation of autonomy and voice, however, O’s multiplicitous nature indicates alternative possibilities. O is not one person, one body, or one thing. She is survivor as well as creator, daughter as well as mother. As O’s narrative reaches its apex—a contemporary-O is told she is lying about having been sexually assaulted, while a fable-O is beaten by the village children for her wings—an interdependent practice of motherdaughtering paves a path through trauma, not toward recovery but toward ongoing survival. For Tulk, the mother is inevitably-imperfect. As an owl, mother-O is a scavenger, not ameliorating experiences of violence but soaking them in tenderness: she hunts and “lays shews at [the] taloned feet” of her daughter, anticipating her morning hunger (55). Yet at times, “she is behind bark, wrapped in silence”—unable to do the care required of her.
With these themes, O. joins a growing chorus of works investigating motherhood and animality, including Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch (2021) and Claire Ochetsky’s Chouette (2021), in which the hybrid child of a human woman and an owl woman pushes love beyond the limits of human language. In both texts, motherdaughtering is not a zone free of suffering, nor a space in which outside abuse might be “cured.” It is a space, indeed, where individual agency collapses in the face of an interdependent reality facilitating both empowerment and helplessness. Mother-O cannot disrupt the continuous violence enacted upon daughter-O by her rapist or abusive classmates; she cannot carry her daughter, featherbound, into the cleansing water. She can only carry her to a cave of “dank earth,” festooned with “bat droppings” (70). This is not clean, but it must be enough.
As a text, O offers no cleansing neatness. Rather, Tulk compels readers to linger with pain that can be felt, but not thought. She concludes the book with an image of the reunited motherdaughter weeping at the depth of their shared loss, one which summons each O into an open-mouthed chorus of heartbreak. It is here that we as readers are released, a moment in which I felt grief-plundered myself and yet also in possession of a shimmering trinket: the knowledge that collective horror must be met with collective love; that surviving the unspeakable demands that we, however imperfectly, shelter each other.