Nay Saysourinho - Who is human? Who is bot? Who is animal? Is someone “real” if their life is a spectacle? Saysourinho explores this through the life of a woman treated as an animal of spectacle because of her androgen levels

 

Nay Saysourinho, The Capture of Krao Farini,

Ugly Duckling Presse, 2023

The Capture of Krao Farini is part Turing test, part circus flyer. Written in the imagined voice of Krao Farini, a real sideshow performer brought to the United States at the turn of the 20th century, the book dissolves the line between algorithm and spectacle to reveal the ultimate consolation prize – to be acclaimed as human enough.

The Capture of Krao Farini hit me so hard. It is two things at once; first it is a lyrical, tender tribute to the wondrous and exploited, Krao Farini but it is also a clear-eyed and unflinching autopsy of the cruelty and mega-entitlement of colonialism and the invented “authority” that it gave her “father” to “purchase” Krao's human body and soul. The “I am not a robot” sections are incredibly nimble and powerful. Nay’s writing is spellbinding. - Neko Case

Everything is poetry in Nay Saysourinho's hybrid visual-lyric story The Capture of Krao Farini—everything—reCaptcha codes, internal monologues, the constellations of Braille and Lao script. Each literal and figurative image, every symbol or script, is infused with an intelligence and tenderness that Saysourinho voices in Farini herself—qualities that make her vulnerable to those who would consume and profit from the colonization of her mind and body. "Inhale the spectacle of my skin: deep-fried amoebas of popcorn and donuts, frankfurters and fresh clams." The language is hearty and aromatic, a cornucopia or buffet, and one whose ingredients highlight historical and present-day systems of oppression—languages, technologies, hierarchical relationships, conceptions of race and disability and culture—and exposes the way that to be an extraordinary woman—polyphonic, lyrical, philosophical, imagistic—is also to be treated as a spectacle. This book asks what does it take to be an animal? Who does it take? - Keith S. Wilson

“Nay Saysourinho’s The Capture of Krao Farini is an interactive performance of decolonial imagination. This story smells and spits, sounds and licks; it translates, and it refuses to translate; it names and negates; it captures, holds captive, and captivates. What we are left with is the stench of desire and decay: “In this carnival you will learn that you want funnel cake and that your morphology was spared by God.” Saysourinho is a translator of the elsewhere, the otherwise—a metabolizer of the monstrous. This text—threaded with ink and eyelashes, perfumed with stale fruit and bread—is itself errant, errored, and the author bends towards this deviance: “I live. That is good enough for me. - Claire Foster

Nay Saysourinho’s The Capture of Krao Farini is a glitch in an otherwise unflinching system, a ruptured vein in history’s violent, long arm. Subverting spectacle and the white, colonial gaze, Saysourinho brilliant book dares to stare back, to take back, to hold accountable all that preserves categories and cages. This is a rare voice. This is a fugitive place. Embedded in this book is a fearless threat whispered through steel bars: “You may stare as much as you like, but sooner or later you all pay for this.” No, no, I haven’t come to see Krao Farini. I’ve come to witness the reckoning. - Jessica Q. Stark

Can a text act as a Turing test if it cannot hear my response? Can it tell if the reader is human or bot? Introduced in 1950, Alan Turing’s “Imitation Game” asked, “Can machines think?” Turing’s experiments with artificial computer intelligence evolved into today’s tests that determine whether a computer user is a human or a bot. Turing’s question lingered as I read Nay Saysourinho’s The Capture of Krao Farini, published by Ugly Duckling Presse. Billed as “part Turing test, part circus flyer,” Saysourinho’s debut chapbook narrates the imagined inner world of a woman known as Krao Farini, a late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sideshow performer often called “The Missing Link” for her hypertrichosis (the medical term for excessive facial and body hair growth) and supposed hypermobility and lanky limbs that made her appear, according to Wikipedia, “apelike.” Born in Laos, Krao was captured, sold, exhibited, and toured in Europe as proof of Darwinian evolution before she was brought to the United States as a circus performer at the turn of the twentieth century, where Saysourinho’s text begins.

Each poem in this seamless collection opens with the familiar captcha Turing test grid that determines whether a website visitor is human or a bot. Designed to prevent spam website attacks, the printed captcha catches a reader’s thought pattern like a visual koan. Rather than familiar captcha images like streetlights, buses, or motorbikes, the reader is asked to identify something else. The question of “human” is present throughout the text, flipping the narrative to dehumanize Krao’s captors, colonial conquest, and the idea of the circus. The first captcha reads, “Select all the squares with people. If there are none, undress yourself.” Behind the grid is an image of tightrope walker William Leonard Hunt (Farini’s captor and adoptive father) with a young, naked Krao pressing her cheek against his. The allusion to Krao as a prisoner behind the Turing test grid intensifies as the questions with each subsequent poem move further and further from the gridded image. “Select all the squares with names,” above a grid of the profile of a shaved head. There are no names. The next direction reads, “If there are no names, steal one.” Both directives and performance are highlighted throughout the text, citing Krao’s ability to sit still for seventeen hours. Positioned before each poem, the Turing test grids suggest there is no freeing Krao from the algorithmic test or from the spectacle of the colonial circus that brands her as “rescued” rather than taken from her homeland.

Saysourinho’s concise text lyrically voices Krao’s life and death in New York as a sideshow performer for Ringling Brothers and Barnum Bailey Circus. Each prose poem unravels the construction of Krao’s identity, beginning with Hunt, who renamed himself “The Great Farini” before paying to take Krao from explorers who captured her and her family. There is a focus on invention and re-invention through both Krao’s inner voice and the historical facade of circuses. Saysourinho skillfully transmits alternative historical narratives in this collection, weaving moments of Krao’s life with her imagined voice and grounding the reader in Krao’s perspective. The book’s translingual poetics mirror Krao’s own life of fluency in English and German as well as the manipulation of her mother tongue by her captors and language loss.

The narrative of her sideshow life begins with the lie, “Krao he says, we’ll pretend you were missing, and I’ll pretend to find you,” setting the stage both for Saysourinho’s attention to colonial exploitation and Krao’s voice. “The children,” Krao says, “want to hear about monkeys and tigers, but New York is the only forest I know. I turn skyscrapers into ogres and freeways into snakes. I don’t miss the place I come from—you don’t miss a place that lets you go so easily.” Saysourinho explores what it might mean to be trapped, not just in a profession or a country but in a prescribed identity and public eye.

In the collection of a life so brief, exploited, and likely lonely, Saysourinho crafts an inspirational and feminist voice for Krao. In one of the final poems, Krao says:

The carnival is coming to an end. Now is the time to reveal the future. You expect Circe, but for your obol you get Cassandra. You will doubt me, disbelieve me, and laugh me away—but who better than show-women, exiled to the corner of your eye, to read the horizon? We don’t have to lie when we are incredible.

This line returns me to the Turing test. Who is human? Who is bot? Who is animal? Is someone “real” if their life is a spectacle? Saysourinho explores this through the life of a woman treated as an animal of spectacle because of her androgen levels. True hypertrichosis is rare, however, hirsutism (the endocrine disorder causing male hair growth patterns on non-males) affects 10 percent of people born without Y chromosomes, making a “bearded lady” more common than sensational.

The Capture of Krao Farini does what great historical docupoetics can do: lead the reader to learn more about someone’s past while also drawing parallels to modern colonial exploitation. “At the carnival,” Saysourinho writes, “everyone is a prophet.” I see this prophet in the writer’s other work, in which rich folklore meets historical account that alchemizes into cultural criticism so sharp I can’t put words to the effect of her imagination. The only wish I have for this book is that it were longer. According to her website, Saysourinho is working on a novel, an ecological fairy tale set in Southeast Asia, and I can’t wait to read it. - Amy Bobeda

https://www.full-stop.net/2024/02/02/reviews/amy-bobeda/the-capture-of-krao-farini-nay-saysourinho/

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