Ida Marie Hede's Adorable and The History of Shit
Who's the wettest?
And what kind of moisture?
There are four parts in Ida Marie Hede's Adorable, the first is wet, the second and third is old and dying, the fourth is trapped inside a house. These parts do not hold in a conventionally narrated way but slip and slide around leaky B, a woman who is drowning in her own filthy, amniotic existence, her life situated within a module of the family.
B gravitates between her role as mother, daughter and wife, all the while leaking afterbirth and licking shit. Her baby, her husband and herself, singularly named Æ, B and Q, consume and inhale one another's secretions throughout their time spent together in the home. Hede's prose is at its best here uninhibited, entrenched in the domestic, the abject and the olfactory.
B and Q scrape caked shit off her little princess underwear with a spoon. They let cakes fall into the bin from way too high up: brown-yellow kernels fill the air. Shit kernels splatter their faces as if the compacted chunks of poo have been vaporised and transformed into an airborne disease or a malignant perfume.
Adorable belongs to many transgressive feminist writers at work today and contributes generously in return. This reader was reminded of Jenny Hval's deconstructionism in Girls Against God, as well as domestic horrors in Kathryn Davis's dollhouses from Hell: A Novel. But startlingly, Adorable brought to mind another text, Dominique Laporte's provocative The History of Shit. Its thesis of the family arranged around the management of human waste and art literally mired within it, Laporte's heady attack on "clean language" is exemplified in Ida Marie Hede's willingness towards language. So, Laporte writes:
Cleansed, language corresponds to the three requirements of civilisations declared by Fred: cleanliness, order and beauty, a definition, we might add, that has absolutely nothing to say on the subject of use. To cleanse, to order, to beautify... perhaps it is not filth per se that troubles history's gaze but the compulsion towards cleanliness that can locate its pragmatic function only after the fact.
And Ida Marie Hede on this, further disseminates:
Who sent the poo? Just as they're always in the process of producing semen, bodies keep producing shit. If there's a shortage of shit in the world, more is likely to turn up soon elsewhere.
Adorable relishes in this filth, both locating and resisting a woman's identity within the patriarchal tropes she was given.
Publishers Lolli Editions have so far pushed this hybridised writing and English translation, the aesthetics of book design and the market of "experimental" novels. Adorable might be their most fluid, most stomach curdling publication yet but something tells me there is a lot more to come from both publisher and author.