Paola Ferrante's What to Wear When Surviving a Lion Attack

Reviewed by Manahil Bandukwala

(Mansfield Press, 2019)

Paola Ferrante’s debut collection What to Wear When Surviving a Lion Attack holds nothing back as it goes through the violence of living in a patriarchy. From folktales to literature to horror, Ferrante crafts vivid poems that dig into discomforting histories that bleed into the present.
 
Heavy with symbolism, an early poem in the collection, “Wedding Day, Circa my Mother,” draws a comparison between a bird and a bride. Legacies of bridehood and motherhood share the colour white: “But in white she was beloved, whether white / was wedding dress or sheet or shroud.” Wife, mother, corpse: these are the expectations, the roles to fulfill, that Ferrante breaks down in the book.
 
The poem ends, “A wife is not a bird; she does not fly / upstairs. She settles / down, becomes / a black hole, / collapsing in / on herself.” With these lines, Ferrante provides a disclaimer to the ways in which she will connect histories and geographies of violence and patriarchy in the poems. She uses analogies and metaphors to express the difficult legacies of trauma, but she also affirms that violence is not a metaphor.  These two lines of thought persist in the duality present across many poems in the collection. Whether or not you come into this book with a visualization of what duality means, Ferrante’s poems will leave you with a broader understanding of the  multiplicity of violence, of dangers, and of traumatic legacies.
 
Ferrante starts the poem “Doppelganger” with these gripping lines: “It took me a long time to live / with my cunt like / Frankenstein’s monster, the one / no one remembers / by name.” There is a hilarity in the play on contemporary misconceptions that Frankenstein is the monster rather than the doctor, and this is juxtaposed with the cruelty enacted against the monster by the doctor, including stripping it of its identity. Situated in the legacy of Mary Shelley, who had to negotiate her own success against that of her husband’s, “Doppelganger” adds in the violence of sidelining women’s successes and foregrounding men’s.
 
“As Told During a Routine Police Investigation” delves into the story of One Thousand and One Nights, a collection of folktales whose narrative arc depends on the instability and anger of King Shahryar. The poem draws a connection between the mother storyteller and Shahrazad. Ferrante writes, “Girls turned to dogs, then bitches, whipped, / when forty or thirty-three thieves stole / one thousand days and nights.” Women transformed and time stolen through violence threads together centuries and spatial distance. Ferrante excavates the domestic abuse behind Shahrazad’s stories and brings it to the forefront.
 
Another fictional character Ferrante enters is Gertrude from Hamlet in the poem, “When Reading Hamlet in my Thirties I Answered for Gertrude.” “Let’s not pretend / it’s not a question of to be / or to beget,” she writes, twisting Hamlet’s famous soliloquy to talk about the tension between abortion and the pressures to procreate. Using a collective “we,” Ferrante draws on a lineage of dangerous methods to induce abortion because the alternative, rearing a child, means giving up a sense of agency. The pain of the procedure comes through in the lines, “all tears and blood and milk, / no honey,” disrupting the stigma of selfishness that surrounds abortion as the speaker chooses the physical pain of abortion.
 
In addition to articulating the abuse meted out against real and fictional women, Ferrante also explores violence and pursuit as it appears in animals. In “The Mere Exposure Effect, or How to Make Men Like You,” she writes the transformative journey of an octopus after relentless stalking from a lionfish:

A floundering octopus can’t watch her own back
when navigating minefields – lionfish
who ambush using elongated fins to corner
the thing that needs. Top predators who squeeze
also explode
 
invading territory that never once belonged to them.
It’s well known lionfish pursue without warnings

In the story of the octopus and the lionfish, the octopus faces dangers in front and behind, and must choose which one to watch. This parallels the multiple threats from the known and the unknown that follow daily life. Out of necessity, the octopus chooses to focus on the dangers in its line of sight, but this leaves it vulnerable to the lionfish’s pursuit. Ferrante ends the poem with a bitter resolution: “This is how octopus becomes lionfish, / invasive species invades / you, a bomb / will lose / its shell.” The geographic tale of this poem explains the continuous loops of violence and how they are perpetuated. The poem speaks to the literature and folktales Ferrante explores, as the patterns in those stories recur throughout the book.
 
Dual dangers come up again in “The Accident.” Ferrante writes, “If eggs are thrown / at your window do not start / the wipers or spray / water. The milk / will block your view / of the killer who could be / in the back seat.” Caution and safety are futile as no measures you take can actually protect you from predators. Had the octopus been wary of the pursuit of the lionfish, she would not have been able to carefully navigate through the minefield. The predator is not in pursuit; the predator has already entered your space. This chilling realization emerges from poems throughout the collection.
 
“To understand recursion, you must understand / recursion,” Ferrante writes in “On Exiting the Loop.” The poem reads recursively, as lines that should have conclusions repeat the beginnings of previous lines. All attempts to exit the loop end in recursion, and you find yourself back in the middle. Ferrante does not give this poem an end, instead leaving it open: “she knows the definition / of doing the same thing over again expecting / differently you’d understand / recursion, eventually / you must.” Without punctuation, the impulse is to fill in the unsaid space with the phrase, “understand recursion.” By walking a reader through the maze of being stuck in an infinite loop, Ferrante is able to convey why and how cycles persist. She lifts the blame from the person stuck in the cycle and displays an empathy for the near-impossibility of getting out. A poem has to end, or so the understanding of poetry goes, but this one does not.
 
In “Impossible Split, or What to Wear When Surviving a Lion Attack,” Ferrante presents a dual story. One story is of the speaker dressing in red, from lipstick to shoes to nails to voice, and finding themselves in an infinite loop of dancing. The other story is of a dancing gazelle and a lion. In an arresting line, Ferrante writes, “A lion does not know how / gazelles play dead.” A predator does not know what its victim does to survive. The first story takes the place of the internal state of the gazelle while it appears dead to the lion. Adopting its red attire from its mother in a hint towards the generational passage of trauma, the gazelle cannot stop dancing despite desperately wanting to.
 
This collection takes up a difficult mantle as it pieces together patriarchal violence across histories and geographies. It is a collection that feels familiar in its rhetoric yet new with the way Ferrante spins together characters and figures that seem separate. If poetry has the ability to change us, What to Wear When Surviving a Lion Attack will leave you a different, hopefully more empathetic person. 

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Manahil Bandukwala is a Pakistani writer and artist currently based in Mississauga. She is co-lead of Reth aur Reghistan, a visual-literary exploration of Pakistani folklore that she is carrying out alongside her sister, Nimra. See more at sculpturalstorytelling.com. Her work has appeared in CV2, The Malahat Review, PRISM, and other places.