Encoding/decoding white

I despise white,

it bloats me, exposing every flaw. White whispers of purity, of virginity, of the Virgin. It reminds me of hospitals and doctors’ lab coats. It takes me back to milk bottles made of glass and my aversion to their smell, to the dreadful dress I was forced to wear for my first holy Communion, to Nannu’s old Škoda. My mother also detested white, and every summer, my younger brother and I helped my father paint the walls of our childhood home in a shade that was almost white, but not quite. Papa would choose a warm colour like beige, ivory, cream or alabaster... white, he would add, is cold, your mother doesn’t like it and we don’t want to live in an ice box. I remember helping scrub paint drops off the floor, puzzled as to why my father was so adamant about a warm house when our summers blistered with temperatures soaring up to 40 degrees Celsius.

White is a ‘privilege’,

writes Leanne Ellul in her latest collection, Bjuda[1] (translated as Whiteness by Albert Gatt). ‘There simply is no other way for you to say that we are those who / did not arrive on boats, on ships, on rafts sunk in the deeps.’ This ‘white privilege’ that she is not proud of makes her wish to be a different kind of white – not a human shade of white but the silver-white of stars; or else she yearns to put herself in the group of those ‘discomfited in the vacuity of white’, seeking no salvation for she knows that ‘no salvation shall ever be our cure’. This very sea that others experience by boat and the privileged poet does not, is the same ‘sea of white’, the same ‘boiling august sea’ that she wants to be submerged in so that her deepest wounds will be covered in salt and eventually become ‘a crystal white’.

This book of white, whitish, whiteness, white(less)ness,

at first made me think of its white as some kind of void or silence. In his book On Poetry,[2] Glyn Maxwell refers to two materials that poets work with: ‘one’s black and one’s white’, which he further describes as ‘sound and silence’. However, although Ellul believes that white could be ‘the universal gag’ and hence capable of silencing everything and everyone, white does not represent silence for her in this collection. ‘Silence was never my cup of tea,’ she writes, and indeed, an anger clangs throughout this book, and a compelling, almost orchestrated chaos. White is not void or emptiness; it is not that which is left unsaid or that which cannot be said. Rather, white is space. Not Robert Rauschenberg’s blank canvas triptych. Not ‘between-the-lines’ space. Not absence. But a safe space – ‘a garden in may sunshine’ – a space where the poet feels comfortable narrating herself: unjudged, uninhibited. In this whiteness, I experience the most raucous of poems.[3] It is through this obsession with white, this torrent of words, this tapestry of sound, and a loud, clanging voice that the poet reveals herself, inside out.

Photo by Giola Cassar

Bjuda is an account of woman,

or woman narrating her body, commencing with ‘the fine foetal skin’ on the day she was born, and ending with white(less)ness on her death bed, or the hope ‘that after death there is no other life / not even the expanse of white they see or / the blinding flash of light make any sense –.’ This is a fragmented, non-linear journey, stripped of almost all capital letters and punctuation marks because,

1) this is how the poet liberates herself from grammatical and syntactic rules;

2) there are already a lot of scars on her body; why should she scar the lines and stanzas on paper too?

Ellul defies the very concept of a traditional bound book, dedicating a loose sheet of white paper to each poem, granting me complete freedom in how I choose to read them. I follow the white. Hand in hand with the poet, I wander in and out of each poem, uncovering ‘the diaphragm of days’ and embarking on a journey through the poet’s story as a woman, starting at the precise moment of entering the world and continuing until the day she chooses to take herself out of it.

Bjuda is a cuneiform inscription,

surviving mainly on a woman’s body. This poet thinks of her body as a ‘burden we are bound to carry’ and of pain shaped like ‘torsion’. She doesn’t want to be loved but demands that her body be ‘deflowered’.

This is a ‘pilgrimage towards the core’; it takes me to the first time the poet saw white, baring ‘five big teeth’, then the second time when she was just eight and full of innocent desires, then the third time when white saw her, and ‘undressed’ her, and ‘became the dank air of unease’.

This is a journey of personal wounds:

every wound in my body I’ve named a different name
every wound happened once upon a time and not another
obvious as these words strung in cast out sentences

even the same wound will have a different name sometimes
like the asphyxia that assails us every evening
that mottle on our right foot that keeps spreading
the frenzy that besets us with every sunrise

keep mouthing these atrophied words and you might give them form

every wound in my body I’ve named a different name
like a suppuration festering until I feel the pain within[4]

These wounds are deep and don’t heal easily. Wounds left by men who came into the poet’s life and left her with a ‘dismembered body’. Try to erase them, and you won’t succeed. Neither does she, even when she attempts to ‘Tipp-Ex’ them out, for ultimately ‘nothing whited out is ever forgotten’.

Ellul maps objects, memories and moments to create scenes of white from her life which she then transforms into a new form of poetry and a new discourse on the women’s body. The various configurations of white and the continuous search for new words and images help her define her body – and by extension, any woman’s body – in a way no Maltese poet, female or male, has ever done before. In a Catholic society like the tiny island of Mediterranean Malta where Leanne and I were both raised, white marks important rituals and life stages such as christening, first holy Communion and your wedding day. But Ellul’s white resides in moments at once unmarked and unremarked, moments that no one seems to cherish and no one wants to recount.

Photo by Giola Cassar

In conversation with other poets,

all but one of whom are male, Ellul engages with Pietru Caxaro, Dun Karm Psaila, Doreen Micallef, Daniel Massa, Immanuel Mifsud and Norbert Bugeja. Poets have always responded to their predecessors and contemporaries through their writing. Ellul is no exception. She dialogues with these six poets and is at times supportive, determined and empathetic, at other times direct, assertive and challenging. Ellul adopts a confrontational tone, for instance, when addressing an idealised image of woman in the work of our national poet, Dun Karm Psaila – white, pure and virginal. In contrast, her persona is depicted scrubbing ‘the usuals / off the tables / where the stories lurk’. These stories are the everyday tales, ‘of those who bow their heads to concur and contend / of bleach bubbling in the depths of a wound / of hands lavishing cobalt on the skin’. She remains content, finding that ‘no commonplace will sadden’ her ‘save for a man who wants and writes her into a poem’ which she may or may not want.

In her dialogue with Doreen Micallef, Ellul adopts a contemplative, sombre and almost envious tone. Micallef’s elegy for her father describes him as a silent man who ‘rode the gales that raged by night’ and crossed the universe for her. It looks as though no man has ever done that for Ellul, no man has ever been silent, nor crossed the night, ‘let alone a universe’. Thus, she writes an elegy for all the men who did not die but have ‘left [her] pained’ and broken.

Ellul’s white is cut from a different linguistic fabric and the beauty of these conversations lies in the unique understanding and portrayal of it. Though it may sometimes appear strange and perplexing, it is within this very strangeness and defamiliarisation that I find myself grasping a deeper sense of her emotions, experiences and defiance. Her work boldly challenges traditional Maltese narratives, inviting me to ‘places’ nobody has ever taken me, and yet feel like I’ve already been.

I have always detested white for many reasons,

yet losing myself in the different whites of Ellul is what I loved most. In this collection of poetry, white is anything but silent, and for that I am grateful. Women on our small island have been silenced for centuries, excluded from school syllabi and denied platforms to write and express themselves. For far too long, and even nowadays, women have been written by men – save for a few female voices like Mary Meylak, Doreen Micallef, Rena Balzan, Lillian Sciberras, Marlene Saliba, Maria Grech Ganado, Simone Inguanez, Simone Galea, Nadia Mifsud, Claudia Gauci, Rita Saliba, Loranne Vella, Elizabeth Grech and Lara Calleja. So let the white speak loud and clear for all of us to fathom.

White is the colour, or lack of it, Ellul chooses to define her: her body, her memory, her loves and sorrows, her anger and joys; it is her hair dye and her grandma’s white roots, her insomniac nights, fifteen kinds of milk, chickpeas and beans, bubbles rising from beneath the skin and her first day on earth; it is a privilege she shuns, a parataxis of venerations (not associated with saints), it is cream or dance, scars and stitches, leukonychia and jasmine, the distance between her and all the men that left; it is cotton wool and rice, salt, lilies or formica tops, snow or ice, wounds and muslin cloths, one pill or twenty-eight; it is the day she was deflowered and the day she will remove herself from this world.

White is all of the above and more. And only after all is said and done will white be silence.

[1] Bjuda is a collection of poetry by Leanne Ellul, translated by Albert Gatt, with artistic photography by Giola Cassar and music by Kenneth Sacco. It was published by Aġenzija Żgħażagħ in 2022.

[2] On Poetry by Glyn Maxwell, Oberon Books, 2012.

[3] These poems are linked to musical pieces and photography, which is to say, every moment of silence is imbued with an abundance of sound of some sort.

[4] This poem is entitled: the atrophy of wounds or until I feel the pain within.