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Giovanna Riccio's ​Plastic's Republic

Reviewed by Carla Scarano D'Antonio
Picture
(Guernica Editions, 2019)
Playing with Barbie dolls together with my sister was one of my favourite pastimes when I was a little girl. We had both the original Mattel doll and a cheaper one bought at the market; its plastic was thinner, almost transparent in the legs, and its head was easily removable and interchangeable. The cheaper one had wigs as well and soft feet you could deform with flat shoes. Our Barbies had only a few dresses as my mother was very strict about dolls and, being a teacher, encouraged drawing and didactic games. We kept their stuff in wooden wine boxes my father provided, and to have more clothing options we used scraps of material we wrapped around their thin bodies and sewed up with big stitches. With the help of my mother, we also crocheted bikinis, tops and skirts. Dressing and undressing Barbie dolls gave us a sensual feeling and creating their stories engaged all our mental and physical energies. My sister and I were not playing with a common doll, a girl-baby doll, but with a young woman, our future selves, and this was a serious matter. Later on we had a dollhouse as well, only two rooms, the living room with orange and gold plastic furniture and a bedroom with a light blue double bed. Ken was a later acquisition, and we were not sure what to do with him.
 
My daughter had a large range of Barbie dolls but she soon lost interest in them, and when we adopted my second daughter she preferred them naked, taking a deep pleasure in removing their legs and arms. So we threw the whole lot away.
 
Giovanna Riccio traces Barbie dolls’ controversial history from the beginning in vigorous, ironic prose. Barbie was created by Ruth Handler emulating a Bild Lilli doll brought from Switzerland, then modified and adapted by the designer Jack Ryan. The ‘capital doll’ is therefore a copy of a copy from its origin. It is made of plastic, ‘a force that molds or a material that can be molded.’ The manipulation of her person is set from the introductory poem, ‘Homemade Wine,’ in which the female protagonist is involved in booze and sex that anesthetize her aspirations. Riccio cleverly divides the collection into five sections with a foreword and an afterword that guide the reader in this compelling poetic dissertation that analyses woman’s role in modern society, focusing on this role’s construction, sexual exploitation and manipulation by the dominant male power. This also includes environmental concerns, philosophical meditations, and exposure of the incongruities of ancient and modern myths, revealing the sheer logic of consumerism and profit.
 
The poems explore and develop what the author states in the introductory prose piece at the beginning of each section. They operate in conversation with the reader, aiming to inform and reveal what is behind the scenes in a thought-provoking exploration that spurs a rethinking of female roles and of the whole structure of consumerist society. Everything seems aimed to produce profit, and the poet’s role is not to imitate the images offered by such a society but to expose and dismantle their incongruities and artificial quality. The quotations from Plato’s Republic at the beginning of each section underline the dream-like quality of an existence that relies on shadows and images that make us prisoners of a fake world, a simulated reality, a game that has not ‘to be taken seriously.’
 
Nevertheless, human beings seem to prefer not to look at brutal reality but to ‘flee towards the things [they’re] able to see.’ It seems a contradiction at first, but this reveals a profound need for creating and believing in an imaginary world in order to attain emotional survival. Apparently, ‘humankind cannot bear too much reality,’ as T.S. Eliot says in ‘Burnt Norton,’ but maybe not even ‘too much unreality,’ as Duncan, one of the characters in Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman, claims while misquoting Eliot. We need dreams, storytelling, fiction and simulacra to carry on, but, at the same time, we must be conscious it is made up. The necessity of a more just world emerges in the poems, and this world necessarily involves both more equal gender roles and social justice.
 
Riccio’s lines, broken by frequent punctuation, and her accumulation of rich imagery express this sense of pressure, the anxiety of the imposed feminine role, that is, the Beauty Myth personified by Barbie, to whom no girl or woman can compare:
She pours wine into each primal rite:
beginner’s kiss, debut screw, first orgasm,
gulping red, white and rosé amnesia
to calm what’s under the skin.
 
(From ‘Homemade Wine’)
 
Me. And the dolls of the United States
of America; hollow manufactured mothers
marooned in dollhouses, sham babies
in prams, the con of straight-bodied Ginnies
closing their weighted, sleeping eyes.
 
(From ‘My Barbie’)

As Naomi Wolf claims, it is a ‘political sedative’ to ensure that women focus only on their physical aspect and do not go too far. This re-places them in the consumerist market of clothing, cosmetics and plastic surgery whose only aim is profit. It is social control exercised on women through their bodies, as it was in the past with the imposed roles of wife and mother, and now emphasising the aesthetic side. According to Riccio, Barbie is therefore a plastic trap that, instead of liberating girls and giving them more choices, as Ruth Handler claimed, subtly guides them into prescribed roles. Moreover, ‘plastic is forever,’ as the poet remarks at the end; therefore, intellectual and practical methods need to be implemented to dismantle the Plastic’s Republic that pollutes the imagination with fake images, our bodies with plastic surgery, and the environment with plastic garbage.
 
Riccio’s analysis of the different Barbies released by Mattel from 1959 until today acutely highlights the process of manipulation and transformation the doll underwent. She is a reproduction, ‘her being [a] replication’ of models of the ‘primordial American blonde … /redhead Barbie … /and brunette Barbie,’ all sparkling in their glamorous, sexy outfits. Sexual appeal seems to be the essence of a Barbie doll rather than simple marriage or motherhood (which can be implied, of course); the doll’s emphasis is on the need to be sexy to comply with and satisfy the male-dominant society on both physical and economic levels.
 
Times change and Barbie adapts, multiplying her shapes:

This doll is hair-play as backlash babe – Fashion’s
all-out war on short-haired flappers, pixie-cuts,
Sinead O’Connor’s rockin’ skinhead;
she’s man’s restoration of the Pre-Raphaelite femme.
 
(From ‘Totally Hair Barbie (1992)’)
 
… So In Style Black dolls whose distinct skin
tones, angular cheekbones
back the same difference: their
lips full-er, hair curli-er, hips broad-er
than Ur-Barbie.
 
(From ‘Mattel’s Dark History (1967-2015)’)

​The Dolls of the World Barbies reveal themselves to be purged, pristine and folkloristic versions of human prototypes, pretending to reflect cultural symbols and instead exploiting every possible idea in order to make money:
15 fresh Kens enlist, fortify the Fashionista
New Crew of 43 trendsetters – diversity
as second skin: black, brown, tawny, fair
& freckled diplomats beg forgiveness for past wrongs,
countenance 14 new faces as cheekbones morph,
noses broaden or narrow, eyes slant and widen;
comb in the long and short of politic hair,
make blue-eyed amends with 18 new iris hues.
 
(From ‘Identity Crisis (2016)’)

‘Human Barbies’ are observed and described by centering on the myth of Narcissus. Unlike the profound physical and emotional involvement of the Narcissus of the ancient Greek myth, who is dramatically doomed to an impossible love, in modern myths everything is more superficial. Celebrities such as Rodrigo Alves and Justine Jedlica, the human Ken dolls, or Valeria Lukyanova, a doll-like Barbie, promote their look and image as living advertisements for cosmetic surgery companies. Their bodies are for sale, ‘defying Mother Nature … [i]n this self-perpetuating wonderland.’ It is a faux world, ‘a chaos of replicas’ that mesmerizes and confounds:
First hike the eyes, trim a jut of chin
implant high cheeks, desquamate your skin
 
now syringe derma-filler, shuttle fat
reshape a slack jaw, elevate the butt
 
rhinoplast a first schnoz for one preferred
upgrade the second for a button-nose third
 
and on, for years Cindy dolls up – refleshes
being Beauty’s chameleon eternally refreshes
 
be a shapeshifter’s archive, a Human Barbie hit
hook women craving change, those resisting it
 
morph as Art’s Madonna, a plastic surgery sage
a Guinness Book record holder, an age-
 
less Aquarian, a truly self-made creature
the dimples I was born with remain my sole original feature.
 
 (From ‘Human Barbie – Matter Over Mind')

Perfection is a play of mirrors, an illusion; it is unnatural, a construction just as it was in Greek statues, a product of the imagination. The Pygmalion myth is evoked, but making it real in the modern world can be dangerous, a bloody matter, as in surgery. It is a profiteering game that invades the everyday world, insisting on our participation. Riccio’s angry, pressing rhythm develops these concepts by listing images and by playing with sounds and words, thus emphasising the necessity of being conscious of the traps hidden behind perfect smiles and Photoshop tricks:
Barbie breasts bar   barbarian nipples
nipples be a no-no
ra-ra-ra   no bra   no brainer
know   no nipples   on breasts
now know   breasts bear no nipples,
know how busty Barbie be   no B-cup cupcake
Barbie bar-hops   big-breasted
In bed or bar nipple   less
Nip nip nipples? yes!   Pin-up Barbie   no less
 
(From ‘Barbie Sounds Out’)

​There are alternatives, of course. In her feminist approach, Riccio refers to authors such as Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Helen Gurley Brown and Kate Millett, and activists such as Angela Davis and Harriet Tubman. They are troublesome, disruptive figures in a mass market that sidelines them and denies radical political involvement. The similar function of the poet seems to be stated in ‘Barbs Poetica’:
And aren’t poets contrary path builders
diverting to the road not taken
drafting freeways to the othered side?
Isn’t progress … transgression?
….
Isn’t every lyricist an underground guerrilla,
a black asterisk starring the blanched page?
Isn’t ink against erasure?
 
(From ’Barbs Poetica’)

Therefore, poetry cannot be imitation, which was banned from Plato’s Republic; its essence is transgression. However, dreaming is part of being human, and the poet seems to suggest that we can accomplish it in a more conscious way. Consuming is unavoidable, but we can invest our money in more just and rewarding causes, skipping pitfalls and beguiling practices.
 
The last poems are dedicated to silicone sex dolls, by their nature multiple and interchangeable. The woman is totally fetishized, reduced to a pure object of pleasure:

She’s like a blow-up, but solid silicone
pliable, flexible with a stainless-steel skeleton,
heavy too – people-heavy. Being loose jointed
she can’t stand but rests sitting
or lying down, like the website says –
the poise and grace of a sleeping woman.
 
(From ‘Larry and Ginger Brooke’)

It is a gap in the market, a need filled by a plastic woman, beyond any ethics: business in a consumerist world that allows no differentiation when money is involved.
 
The final poem relates to the ‘garbage gyre’ caused by plastic, not only in the sense of trash we constantly throw away, but also as a metaphor for our capacity to ‘vomit endless plastic’ (that is, pollute our world and lives with artificial objects). Riccio condenses stimulating concepts in her effective lines, exposing the threatening incongruities of modern society with its shape-shifting roles that only target profit. 


Carla Scarano D’Antonio lives in Surrey with her family. She obtained her Degree of Master of Arts in Creative Writing with Merit at Lancaster University in October 2012. She self-published a poetry pamphlet, A Winding Road, in 2011. She has published her work in various anthologies and magazines, and is currently working on a PhD on Margaret Atwood’s work at the University of Reading. In 2016, she and Keith Lander won first prize in the Dryden Translation Competition with translations of Eugenio Montale’s poems. She writes in English as a second language.
 
Visit her websites:
http://carlascarano.blogspot.com/
http://www.carlascaranod.co.uk/

Send inquiries to thetemzreview[at]gmail[dot]com
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