THE VOICE OF SILENCE

“Silence like a cancer grows.” – Simon & Garfunkel

Singed is a tiny monument of literary hybridity. Its title is a pun involving burning (sinjed) and a voice (singed).

It is polymorphous and polyphonic. By turns, an incantation, an inventory, an archive binge, a fictionalized memoir, and a meditation on music and literature (including the pop, high, and low of both). Less a hybrid (implying a melding of only two things), Singed can be seen as a chimera and a rhizomatic desiring-machine. It smashes taxonomic categories and genre forms. The book – one hastens to attach the word “novel” to it – actively attempts to mold an interpretive framework by sifting through the ashes.

It is another form of touring the ruins.

Returning to taxonomy and interpretation, the multiform Singed could be seen as the center of a three-circle Venn diagram. Its simultaneity rests in the nestled interior of collisions. Cascella inhabits a literary conjunction. The first is the capacious, encyclopedic, word-excess of such writers as Rabelais, Joyce, Pynchon, and the American poets like Campbell McGrath and Albert Goldbarth. It is a celebratory, Falstaffian, much-too-muchness of words.

Alternately, her work is about silence, impotence, and negation. One can recall the works of Samuel Beckett, Emil Cioran, and Paul Celan.

The third is the strangled screams of Antonin Artaud. (“All writing is pigshit.”)

“Sings and sounds through a burning

“Singed, sung, sing, singed

“Spun

“Is this a-burning is this song a song I can’t quite recall?

“Was the song ever there.”

One of the joys of reading Singed is Cascella’s illumination of lesser-known authors (to me, at least). These include:

Marlene van Niekerk, author of The Swan Whisperer.

Fleur Jaeggy, author of The Water Statues (not yet translated into English at the time of publication [2017], but translated by New Directions in 2021).

Gert Jonke, author of Awakening To the Great Sleep War.

Cascella expresses the paradoxical challenge of the inability to speak: “There is no such thing as my voice. But this discomfortable writing. But the unease of not being able to swim at large in one’s cultural references when writing is another language, and yet: to make the unease a motor for fractured waves of understanding.” These lines start the chapter entitled “Handcuffed to a barrel of nothing, trancelating.” It is a fascinating pun. The word translate implies decoding and encoding language. One from another. Linear. An active decryption. While one translates from one language to another, one enters into a trance. The very opposite of the utilitarian connotations of translation. The trance state is not one bounded by rationality. Here lies fluidity and a certain amniotic comfort. Just sit back and listen to The Orb and be swept away from all life’s troubles. But Cascella’s passage is (intentionally) troubling. “Discomfortable writing.”

In other sections of the book, she examines writers who underwent bouts of religious ecstasy. The spiritual being closely tied to the physical. She writes about her muteness in a similar fashion:

“My intermittent loss of voice was a needed pause. A response to a harsher type of silence, the silence of exclusions and omissions. The song, singed, made me speechless, and nailed me to hearing through a fake yet present past, to hearing into a time before me.”

This self-imposed silence has become a motor that animates the blank page, converting a nothingness into a vibrant literary artifact.

Taken together, Singed, Avant Desire, and the Baudelaire Fractal become a collective portrait of radical female voices. Radiant, ferocious, and confounding in their subject matter and presentation, they expose what lay beyond the shores of the conventional and predictable.