Book Review: “Ahndraya Parlato: Who is Changed and Who is Dead”
By Odette England | August 5, 2021
Published in July 2021 by MACK
Hardcover, 20 x 25.2cm, 136 pages
The cover is creepy, it looks like Voldemort, H. says. Creepy things live under that dark blanket. She mock-shudders and opens the book. That’s an egg splatter. It’s pretty. And that’s blue ice-cream with star sprinkles, can we buy some?
SPOILER: There is no Santa, Easter bunny, or tooth fairy. Even if they existed at some point, they’d be dead by now. I want to tell H. but decide not to. Actually, it’s moot; I know she knows. She knows I know. She goes along with it because “I like believing in something I’ve never seen, mom.” I fear H. will become a photographer. Worse, she might enjoy it.
They look like the flowers I pick for you, except these ones are dying. How do you know that? I ask. H. turns back a page. It says spoiler they die, see? Her eyes narrow. Well that’s dumb. Every flower you pick dies.
Who is changed and who is dead. In capital letters, blue. Wishy washy wish-upon-a-star blue. Made with one of those kids’ plastic stencils. Who is changed by death? Who is the Who here? Wait, there’s no question mark. Death knows no punctuation.
This page is kinda boring because it just says who is changed and who is dead. Everyone dies, that’s life. H. shrugs. Oh, there’s text in this book. Then she frowns. Is this part of my summer reading packet?
Part I
I don’t pretend not to understand the desire to go out together. Oh Ahndraya, how did you know?
Things I worried about before becoming a mother:
· My fat ass
· My parents dying
· Plane crashes
· Recycling
· Is there wine in the cupboard, fridge, basement, anywhere in the house?
Things I worry about since becoming a mother:
· Driving over a bridge, any bridge. H. is in the back of the car. The bridge collapses, we plunge into the water. I forget everything I’ve read about what-to-do-when-your-car-plunges-into-the-water. We drown
· Kidnappings
· Muggings
· School shootings
· Getting hit by a bus, car, train, stray bolt of lightning
· Not waking up
· Decapitation
· Every electrical device in her room catching fire; me not smelling the smoke
· Bullying
· Rape
· Undetected allergies that stop her breathing
· Is that blood / redder than yesterday / normal?
· Who or what is normal?
A cave! I want to explore it. I bet there’s a bat in there. H. strokes the page. Ooh, this paper is soft.
Ceci n'est pas une grotte. This is not a cave. It could be, but it feels more metaphoric. If I had to choose a photograph to represent Jesus’ tomb, this would be a contender. I notice the flattened dry grass around the entrance but am more intrigued by the small human-shaped rock to the left. The one that looks like part of a Henri Moore sculpture, the humble beginnings of a crouching Mary and her veil. She’s lulling me with cold breath. Come, my dear; death loves you and I love you and that’s the way it should be…
H. is tracing her finger around Iris’ sleeping body as if mentally mapping a coffin. That’s a very blurry foot, it looks like a deformed sausage. And that one arm is very tan, that’s weird. How did she get sunburned lying in bed?
The holy babe. I want to face-plant myself into Iris’ tummy. I miss blowing raspberries and seeing spit bubbles; all that drooly fun. Those days are gone.
There’s a butt in the other horse’s face. I bet the other horse doesn’t like that.
This may be the saddest image in the book, or the most deceptive. Mama horse and daughter foal standing next to each other, end to end, in a large open field. A second foal lies motionless in the grass behind her mama. Sleeping or deceased? I may have the genders mixed up, and the story. I grew up on a farm but know shit about horses. It’s a car crash photograph; morbid curiosity keeps me rubbernecking.
“STOP – I’M A MOM!” I’ve thought about using this exact phrase. In reality, it’s probably as bad as leaning on the horn and giving that asshole the bird for cutting me off while lane-swapping on the I-95. That asshole who will grab the gun from the passenger seat and shoot me.
It’s a big tree that’s fallen into the ocean. It’s drowning. That branch on the left is attacking the book. Why would it do that? Do branches hold grudges?
I imagine Ahndraya lying in a hammock or blanket; Ava and Iris lie either side of her. Nuzzling, pointing to each other’s freckles while Ahndraya wonders Why My Kids Can’t Sit Still. A page turn reveals all. Or not; the light is different, the shadows are longer, darker, deeper… My mind drifts to ‘er’ in context of nouns and adjectives. ‘Er’ is the most common ending.
It’s an old sheet, mom, with rocks on it. I’d lie on it if the rocks weren’t there. Oh, the rocks are geodes! Or little cakes.
Hidden mother photographs fascinate me. I can’t decide if the fabric is velvety or crisp.
Ooh, an ecstatic blue waterfall! How are waterfalls ecstatic? I ask H. Not ecstatic, aes-the-tic, you need to get your hearing checked, mom. I don’t even know what ecstatic means.
A mother-fall and her child-fall. How much falls out of us when we become mothers? Outpourings of love and marvel, grief and fear. How and where to fill ourselves back up; there’s no gas station for moms. Later, I learn that the glossy pages are photograms of Ahndraya’s mother’s ashes. I am haunted.
It looks like a lumen print. Is it? I think it’s corn making a sad face. This book is sad. Can I get a cookie? H. returns wiping crumbs from her mouth. Red and red and even more red. And a floating vase filled with flowers. That red means the world is going to end.
Twoness lives throughout the book. One-two-buckle-my-shoe, it was your favorite rhyme I tell H. If bad things come in threes, what comes in twos? This twin rainbow painting sends my inner pinwheel into a spinning wheel of death.
It’s a broken rainbow because there’s no green or yellow. Woah, Ava’s naked! And she has a six-pack, look mom, look! She’s picking the flowers, trying to make sure the world doesn’t end. She’s wearing magic beads, so maybe she’s helping the flowers come back to life. Or she could be Evil Flower Girl. Look at all those vases on that girl’s back. It looks uncomfortable. Why would someone annoy Ava with pottery? That seems mean.
Balancing acts and clay, apt visual metaphors for motherhood. Are they empty, those vessels tight-roping their way along Ava’s spine? One for the great grandmother, one for the mom, one for the Iris who lives down the lane…
Ahndraya’s book points me to Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women. It’s about sex and desire, topic mothers have little time for. “There’s only one of me, not three.” Do other mothers quote this to the void as often as I do?
Is this a picture inside the cave again? Oh, never mind, it’s a piece of moldy meatloaf or someone’s dinner up close, with raisins that look like bird poop.
I’m looking inside my body. My walls are caving in on my carcass. I’m not the pristine petals of the flowers on the page that follows. I’m slapdash pickings thrust into an old jam jar, my bits drooping over the edges. Burned bits, scarred bits, bits tinged with melancholy. I am a Vanitas with no time for vanity. The watermelon rind, that’s me, my seeds sucked and spat.
More flowers and rock, bor-ing. Ooh…some sort of red food, it looks bad. There are bugs on the watermelon. You could wash them off under the tap. Another splatter and a bum! Bums are squishy. H. gets up from the sofa, pulls down her pants and bends over. Is my bum squishier than her bum, mom? Without waiting for me to answer or even pulling up her pants, H. plops back down. That splatter is diarrhea from eating that bad fruit.
A line drawing of a headless female child. With a random floating foot. I too have an over-stuffed box of unnerving drawings that some pervert would love. I add that to my to-do list, buy a bigger shredder.
Where’s the person missing a foot? That foot needs a friend. I will be your friend, Miss Foot.
The photograph tells me we are home. But the light is different, the season has changed. The creek-bed overflows and with it, an uprooting. We are rocks, we are islands.
Don’t sing mom, you’re embarrassing me.
A Pause Between Parts
Home truths: Your kids are smarter than you think. You overthink the wrong things; under-think the right things. And few people are going to care about how many times you sub the words ‘think’ or ‘thing’ for whatever-it-is that your fogged mom-brain can’t access.
Dying is an excuse for not getting out of bed. Motherhood is a mother-fucker. Two colorful sayings my paternal grandmother was fond of. I don’t verbalize these reminiscences. I’m starting to feel anxious; close-to-the-bone anxious, repetitive-dreams-of-nakedness-in-public anxious. I’d rather be caught peeing behind a bush. That last bit comes out loud.
I’ve done that, remember mom? You called it a bush wee! Can we do it again?
Part II
THAT – H. taps her index finger on the facing page – is one of those tall plants we see on our walks. It’s falling apart. This one looks like evil tentacles wearing guacamole made from ivy. Can you eat ivy? Maybe they’re baby pistachios. How do nuts have babies?
All I can think of is my maternal grandmother’s hair, dry and crackling like the static of a trucker’s radio. Wrong this woman and she’ll prick and wound you.
Before the surgeon performs my emergency C-section, the theater nurse tells Brett he’ll cut extra low so that the overgrowth will hide the scar. I don’t remember this, of course. We take turns to examine said scar month after month. The bastard lied.
Soapweed Yucca. In the photograph, its flowering head sits high above the water line. I don’t talk to H. about flowers as symbols of female genitalia or erotic blooms or gardens as allegories for life. Art school will deal with that and tie a neat and unnecessary gender ribbon around it.
I wish I could shrink myself and climb into that picture. Imagine living in a photograph. How would you get me out if I got stuck in there? I couldn’t live on milkweed.
Earlier this year I mailed a milkweed pod to a former photography student in Illinois. He took the seeds for a walk to a nearby pond. Upon a finding a beaver (or was it a water rat?) frolicking in the water, he blew them from hand to air and watched them dissipate. Do wishes from milkweed carry the same weight as birthday candle wishes? I’d never considered wishes as more or less likely to come true since they always seem so improbable, period.
Somebody ate the piece of moldy meatloaf. Would moldy meatloaf kill you? I’m not sure about that ring of stones. The splatters are starting to annoy me.
Ahndraya’s six-page meditation on earthenware provokes years of bible school and undergrad readings about female desire in Victorian literature to flood back. Women tasked with borrowing empty vessels from neighbors; the turning of water into wine; anointing, phallo-centric society, passive receptacle theory.
The mugs look sad, mom. Why are there so many mugs? Is this mug-topia? That’s a real place, right? Now the mugs are trying to eat each other. The mugs are cannibals. Another splatter, the evil red is back. I have bigger boobies than her.
I can’t stop thinking about stacking cups. The last image is a family portrait, where mom’s head is upside down. And then I turn the page, turn up the temperature until the flesh burns. Poor Iris has seen too much, felt too much.
The Evil Girl came back and turned the fruit moldy, and little Snow White is sad because she can’t eat the apples and lie down on her pink blanket and die in peace.
Who or what or where we call home is so tangled with change and death, the kind of knots H. ties into her sneakers that no fork can pry apart. With this zoomed out image, the cave becomes woman. She is oozing out of every pore, growing hair around her lips and below her nose. This cave is a mother’s face. We’re backing off, moving away from closeness. Moving out of, away from home.
Are they dolphins on sticks?
I know little about the giant white and blue bird of paradise, other than they will die without adequate sunlight. Whoever is holding the branch has pink nail polish and my guess is they are right-handed. By chance, a plaster cast of a right hand, semi-cupped, lying alone on a bed, is the next image. Please ma’am, I want some more, it says. We always want more.
More dead flowers. H. is becoming bored. I point out that the thistle is set in dirty water, which doesn’t matter since thistles can survive nuclear disaster. H. is distracted by the sunlit sequins creating a kaleidoscope on Iris’ legs. They’re so pretty. I want to go back in time to when that photo was taken and play with Iris. Do you think we can be friends?
Going back in photographic time sounds like a wish worth wishing until I give serious thought to the consequences.
Ahndraya’s self-portrait may be my favorite photograph in the book. A mother looking down at all the balls she must juggle and then pick up for herself, over and again, for there are no ball girls or ball boys to retrieve them. She is the sun around which all the lumpy planets and misshapen stars orbit and shimmer. But one day, as well she knows, she will become little more than a silhouette, a nebulous memory encircled by time’s creases. In short: a photograph.
Iris is stuck behind a piece of blue glass. Why doesn’t she move her hand out the way? Then she’d be free of the blue world she sees.
Sometimes H. says things that are so insightful I want to cry. I know her intelligence comes from her father.
Someone is controlling that hand. Two naked girls wrestling. A waterfall of breast milk. Do you still make milk, mom?
It’s a curious type of touch in this photograph, not a grip or a grasp or a clench; more tentative than that. Like checking for a pulse, or the start of a palm-reading. I’m afraid of the tarot. I already have photographs of greater than, lesser than secrets.
Blue orchids are good luck, mom. You should buy some. We could use some around here. I don’t like this photo, it’s a ghost baby with a knife. A ninja ghost baby. When babies die, do they turn into seed-pod wishes. That would be nice. I could blow baby away. You’re not having another baby are you, mom? I like it with you and me and Daddy.
Anemones are beautiful. They grow back year after year providing you take care of them, even when they aren’t in bloom. The white ones symbolize sincerity; the purple ones, protection from evil. They are also often used at funerals. In the photograph, Iris’ eyes – the color of which I don’t know - are replaced by the anemones’ dark centers.
Iris has marks on her leg and a piece of blue fluff or string on her arm. That’s cool, she looks realer that way. I can’t deal with any more splats. Oh, that’s a Star Wars light sword in a secret garden. Can I watch Star Wars when I’m twelve?
I tell H. it’s a fluorescent tube. Brett wanders upstairs and, having overhead my comment, tells us the three most important factors when choosing a fluorescent tube. H. does one of those oversized fake yawns which makes me yawn for real.
H. studies the final image in the book for the longest of times, so long I start to slow blink like a cat.
Is that – Pandora’s Box? I ask if she knows the story of Pandora’s Box. It’s where little girls who are evil or cast spells or do that bad curse stuff go to die. But the lid is already open, I say. H. doesn’t respond until much later, when I’m tucking her into bed. She’s looking at the glow-in-the-dark stickers of stars, moons, fish, hearts, and wolves I spent a ridiculous amount of time curating onto the ceiling.
I think Ava and Iris let all the hope out of that box, H. says.
***
Odette England and Hepburn England, her eleven-year-old daughter, sit on the sofa with Ahndraya Parlato’s latest photobook Who is Changed and Who is Dead (MACK, 2021). In it, Ahndraya uses the life-altering events of her mother’s suicide and the birth of her children as the framework for exploring motherhood. Odette and Hepburn spend several afternoons turning the pages back and forth. This book review is a transcript of all that was said (and unsaid). Sometimes they get Ava and Iris’ names mixed up in the photographs, an apt metaphor for what it means to assume anything from the flat lives of others.
Who is Changed and Who is Dead is available from MACK.
All images by Ahndraya Parlato, from Who is Changed and Who is Dead (MACK, 2021). Courtesy the artist and MACK.