“An Untamed State” speaks to Haiti as country, especially as that contrasts with the U.S. The most powerful motifs of the novel are weaved into the passage above, exhibiting a simplicity that masks the weight the novel carries from the very title itself. I imagine he is proud of his work, these standing monuments of his resolve. My father’s buildings stood strong while the rest of the country fell. My parents survived and for that I was grateful, in spite of myself. The tents are still there, providing no shelter. There was an earthquake….It was a new sorrow, a fresh break in an already broken place. I will slip An Untamed State beside Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy because at their cores these works are about what Mireille (again at the end of the novel and after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti) proclaims: I am prone to placing books on my bookshelves in ways that honor how I feel about those books.
My experience with the novel confirms my initial attraction to Gay’s gifts, but the novel presents a paradox: The story is so brutal, it is nearly unreadable, unbearable, and the story is so brutal, I never wanted to put the book down until I reached the last word.
That first story struck me with Gay’s use of voice, genre manipulation, and tone I was lost much of the story until the end, which pays off brilliantly. My entry point to Gay’s writing was “There is No ‘E’ in Zombi Which Means There Can Be No You Or We.” The story reached out from the computer screen and demanded that I find more by Gay to read so I ordered An Untamed State the same day after exploring Gay’s web site. 344).Īn Untamed State: Of Mind, Body, and Nation through a personal hell experienced by Mireille who personifies some deeply ugly Truths: when poverty and privilege intersect, violence occurs when males and females intersect, violence occurs in both dynamics, as Mireille concludes, “Girl children are not safe in a world where there are men” (p. In Gay’s novel, readers find a parallel to Atwood’s dualities as Gay confronts both Haiti and the U.S. In fact, in many of Atwood’s poems and stories, the context for the exploration of dualism and borders subtly shifts back and forth from the personal or the interpersonal to the national (Hutcheon 1988). As Rosemary Sullivan writes in her biography of Atwood, within Canada “national identity and gender were both predicated on second-class status” (Sullivan 1998: 128). and woman/man-as Classen and Howes explain:įrom Atwood’s perspective, Canada has traditionally occupied, and internalized, the position of the female in relation to the dominant, male land to the south (Atwood 1982: 389), and so the figure of the female is well suited to represent the Canadian character. And in both dualities, Atwood writes about the intersections, Canada/U.S. When Atwood writes about women, she is also writing about men. When Margaret Atwood writes about Canada, she is also writing about the U.S. Toward the final pages of Roxane Gay‘s An Untamed State, the primary narrator, Mireille, admits about her response to the earthquake in Haiti in the wake of her own personal horror of being kidnapped and repeatedly raped and tortured over thirteen days of captivity: “We sent money instead and it was then I felt like a true American” (p.