Adam Day

The gaze is a central concern of Taylor Byas’ fascinating new poetry collection, Resting Bitch Face. Words like camera, cinematic, Nikon, zoom, watch, examine, reflection, eyed/eyeing, likeness, pan, mirror, look, gaze, lens, &c., run throughout these poems. Byas brings forth one’s awareness and perception of other individuals, other groups, and herself, illustrating the dynamics of socio-political power relations. Further present is the gaze in Lacan’s mirror stage when a child learns they have an external appearance, beginning their entrance into culture and the world, as well as his idea that the gaze is related inherently to the anxious feeling that one is being watched, creating a loss of autonomy upon becoming aware that they are a visible object. Also present is John Berger’s idea that men are placed into the role as the watcher and women are to be looked at.

            Byas begins “Essay on Shuttering,” the second poem in the collection, by pointing out that, “Nothing stills beneath your gaze unless you are a man with power,” going on to discuss her father’s looking, her boyfriend’s camera, described as “a hand-held Medusa,” and the statement that “All little Black girls have been told to change for male company,” and the insistence that “a man will always look,” and “He who holds the camera has the say.” This encounter with the gaze later turns to the idea specifically of the gaze of “white men,” the artists whose work she is encountering in an art museum, where she encounters Girl with a Pearl Earring, who is “forced to meet every gaze.” The white gaze is the assumption that the default reader or observer is coming from a perspective of someone who identifies themselves as white, or that people of color sometimes feel the need to take into account the white reader or observer's reaction.

In the last section of the poem the speaker states: “When I look at myself, now I’m really just straining to see who is on the other side of the glass. I take a selfie and the girl in the picture is not me.” And in the following poem, “Asymmetrical Images/Curvature in Drawing, Especially in the Context of a Bodily Function Which Occurs Below the Belt, Tends to Conjure Thoughts of Mischief,” the speaker, while lying in bed examines her genitalia: “[I] pried myself open in front of a mirror to find the monster I thought I was.” But what she finds is, “Like a flower in its last days, it only said Look at me, look at me now. I will not always be this pretty.” These poems often utilize the oppositional gaze of Black women, a way that a Black person communicates their status, bringing forth a critical consciousness in order to aid with positive identity development in a world whose systems marginalize them and depicts them negatively.

In short, Byas uses the gaze to parody and critique, as in the poem, “Joking About the Pandemic, A Friend Texts The Group Chat “I’ve Unhoed Myself””:

…Urban Dictionary

says a hoe is someone who lets any old color pencil
into their sharpener without considering
the word itself has been sharpened already. 

Oxford says to hoe is to dig (earth) or thin out 
and this is closer to the truth, as men have lost 
all the air in their lungs, have been emptied

beneath me. Let us return to the text message—
“I’ve unhoed myself” they say, meaning they
are the agent of the act, have robbed other men

of their spit.

Who has the power, indeed, as the speaker asserts her agency. Indeed, in the poem, “They call the party the “set” because,” we’re told: “You’ve got the word no pocketed for the cup a man will press to your lips,” and in the following poem, “Nikon COOLPIX S210,”:  ‘In the light, I realized the pictures were / what a boy would make me into with his eyes, /the lens. I still couldn't become myself /once I wanted a camera. Another set of eyes.” All of this with what Byas tells us is the second real lesson a woman learns about her body, a lesson of “colonialization.”

            Part of the looking done in Resting Bitch Face is done in regards to artists like da Vinci, Nan Golden, Gaugin, Picasso, Sally Mann, Magritte, Yves Klein, Eric Gill, a sculptor, letter cutter, typeface designer, and printmaker, and others, the latter of whom sexually abused his adolescent daughters, in addition to having an incestuous relationship with one of his sisters, as well as apparently taking part in bestiality with his pet dog. The poem that wrestles with Gill’s legacy and infamy is “The Ongoing Debate,” and it asks the perennial question: “Well can’t we separate / the abuser from the art?” Byas’ answer is a firm no. Not for a man who did all he did, and who, for example, kept measurements of “various parts of the bodies of his daughters” alongside those of his own penis size. “…the artist / marries his art with his darkness, serves it on a plate / of wood. What are these sketches but a harvest // of your crimes?” the speaker asks.

            The theme of what is and is not appropriate in art continues with Byas’ consideration of Sally Mann’s Goosebumps, a photograph of one of Mann’s adolescent daughters sitting nude on a banister outside, with her back to the viewer. At the time that Immediate Family was first exhibited (which includes Goosebumps) in the early 1990s there was great debate that conflated naturalistic nudes of children, like those captured by Mann, with sexualized/pornographic images. Indeed, a federal prosecutor informed Mann that no fewer than eight pictures she had chosen for the traveling exhibition could subject her to arrest. Byas brings this controversy to light in the epigraph to her poem on the photo, “Made Over.” The speaker of the poem ponders: “The girl is a girl forgetting / her girlness, misremembering the churr // of a boy’s approval, and shouldn’t a mother be proud / of this?” The girl is “Seemingly safe / in her mother’s gaze until she multiplied / under the eyes of men.” Byas is ever aware of the complexities involved in being captured in an image, and of the possibilities of objectification, and is even more aware of at whose hands this objectification takes place.

            Resting Bitch Face puts the reader, as directly as possible, in the shoes of the other; you feel as if you are there as a spectator. In other words, experiences are expressed, but very often the reader cannot be entirely involved in or absorbed by them. But they are still a punch in the gut. This is a smart, troubling, and important book. One of its most powerful aspects is its ability to put you—whatever your race, class, or gender— in the complicated, upsetting, and sometimes sublime situations Byas describes, as you work to dispel whatever privilege of ignorance you might enjoy or whatever wish you might have to look away.