Chicanes
By Clara Schulmann
Les Fugitives Press, £12.99

“BAD seed” is the literal translation of this book’s original French title, Zizanies. The title refers to troublesome women – disrupters, complainers, women who choose trouble rather than swallowing their anger. 

In Chicanes, French art critic Clara Schulmann gathers numerous excellent artists and thinkers, women all, surrounding herself with their voices as she considers challenges to her own life.

The book is a seed catalogue of sorts; translated from the French and published by Les Fugitives, it brings together ideas and discourses from a wide range of arts: literature, film, painting and sculpture. The author delves into the voices of other women to consider her own fresh losses – a relationship break-up and a much loved job suddenly withdrawn. Commonplace happenings, Schulmann notes, but she uses them to devolve a multiform response in conversation with woman. 

Women’s voices, their capacity to speak out and the register of their effects on the world is at the core of feminism. (Fun fact gleaned from the book: since gaining the vote in 1944, women’s voices in France have deepened.)

The issue of voice goes back to ancient conceptions of identity – what it was to be a man connected to the power of his rhetoric. But this did not pertain to women. Instead, women’s voices were heard as nagging, crying hysterically, irrationally, etc. 

This legacy still undermines women’s status in the public sphere – think of David Cameron’s famous “calm down, dear” retort to a female MP speaking in Parliament. 

In subtle ways Schulmann draws out of the polyphony a sense of women’s experience currently. She uses film scenes, literary interviews, podcasts, poetry excerpts, critical theory and manifestos. 

The voice of Charlotte Bronte sounds alongside bell hooks, Gertrude Stein is nearby to Nathalie Quintane, Lauren Berlant just across from Anne Sexton, Anne Carson close to Joan Fontaine; the wonderful Vivian Gornick and her mourning mother are there, the all-female band Beat and the Pulse singing Austra, and lots more. 

Many artists and writers less common to the British scene are to be found in this book, so it acts as a guide, opening up hitherto unknown work for exploration online.

Chicanes is translated by a number of different writers, among them Lauren Elkin and Natasha Lehrer. In this way, further voices are added to the range.

This is an innovative repurposing of the essay form; a book to return to frequently.