“The workshop is full of remnants of her, you don’t leave her”: Depictions of Female Labor in Factory Girls and Excess—The Factory
review and cento by Allison Pitinii Davis
Factory Girls, published by Action Books in 2019, compiles translated poems from Takako Arai’s Japanese collections Soul Dance (2007), Beds and Looms (2013), and uncollected poems. The new volume is translated by Jeffrey Angles, Jen Crawford, Carol Hayes, Rina Kikuchi, You Nakai, and Sawako Nakayasu. Excess—The Factory is a 2018 edition of Leslie Kaplan’s 1982 French original, translated by Julie Carr and Jennifer Pap and published by Commune Editions. Both collections focus on female factory workers, and the poems explore intersections of gender and class.
The authors’ biographies provide historical context about the respective factories. Takako Arai’s poetry was inspired by the weaving factory that her father managed in Kiryū, Japan, a region historically renowned for its textiles. While the factory is still open, globalization has resulted in collapse of much of Kiryū’s traditional textile industry, and in result, as editor Jeffrey Angles explains, “the experiences of the factory workers in her writing have much in common with inhabitants of other post-industrial cities that have seen better days but continue to tough it out, such as the American Rust Belt cities of Detroit and Youngstown….Arai uses her poetry to keep the memory of the women workers she saw during her youth alive, even as the factories where they once worked are quickly turning into vacant lots.” Excess translators Carr and Pap note that in France in the 1960s, Leslie Kaplan was a member of the Union of Marxist-Leninist Communist Youth, which believed in “Mao’s notion that it was essential for revolutionary intellectuals to work alongside the proletariat. Kaplan and others who called themselves ‘établis’ took jobs in factories with the intention of identifying and joining radicalized workers in revolution.” Even after France’s 1968 student- and worker-led protests, Kaplan returned to work in the factory for two years and, ten years later, wrote about her experiences. These biographies of Arai and Kaplan are central to their poetry—they establish their relationship to the labor they document and frame the personal and political motivations driving the work.
Factory Girls
Arai’s collection is divided into three sections. The section I’ll focus on, In the Factory, depicts a deindustrialized Kiryū haunted by its former workers. In “When the Moon Rises,” “the spools of thread run by themselves” each night in a factory that has been closed for a decade. Its former workers can never escape their labor:
An old lady who spun thread
For forty-four years here
Still licks her finger and twists
Even on her deathbed
She cannot escape the gesture
That must be true in the netherworld too
Since threads are so infinitely thin
Gestures sink into the bodies
Of those who manipulate the machines.
The workers’ bodies become sites of industrial preservation—ghosts of economic collapse. In “Wheels,” the speaker and her sister are warned by a female snake that “a fire is coming.” The speaker reveals that the snake is “one of the factory girls three generations ago” who died after being spurned by a lover. The narrative distance between the sisters and the worker reminds us that even if the speaker—like Arai—didn’t grow up working in the factory, just living near it imbued her youth with its culture. Other poems in the section are narrated by workers in the factory. The speaker in “Beds and Looms” is a factory phone operator. As she runs out to the workers to let them know when they receive calls, she observes the cradles holding their babies. This poem establishes that many of the workers are also mothers and that the relationship between their labor and gender is complex and interdependent. The speaker describes the factory as being full of “Baby beds and power looms, / Baby beds plus power looms, baby beds as power looms” and the scent of the factory as “Machine oil, hair oil, and breast milk.” The poem describes how managers connect a worker’s skill to her virility: “To finish weaving a bright red robe for a priest / You need good hands, good eyes, a good mind, a good vagina / It won’t work is she doesn’t, if she’s not a woman among woman.”
Arai’s exploration of gender and labor continues throughout the section, and the bodies of the workers are often the battlegrounds where class and gender issues meet. In the factory girls’ lodgings, “The weaving girls made themselves up to look nice / Put the makeup on thick, like girls who trade their affections for cash” (“Nylon Scarf”). In surreal interpretations of factory-floor violence, the women’s bodies continue to serve as the site of the drama: fingers lost at machines turn into cicadas (“Green Wings”) and workers imagine swallowing silkworms so their entire bodies become incessant factories (“Colored Glass”). In the final poem in the section, “Shadows,” the workers are gone. Instead, a speaker from the post-industrial present reflects back on what is salvageable from the factories and the laborers’ lives: “I can’t let this place be turned into a vacant lot /… / At least until I pick through the refuse / And save at least one suitcase’s worth of pure junk.” These lines suggest the speaker’s complicated relationship to the factories and her motivation to preserve them in verse—all that is to be saved is refuse and junk, yet for the speaker, these women’s experiences and hardships are worth conserving. She preserves the memory of what their bodies endured in the body of the text.
Excess—The Factory
If Arai’s poems seethe with the post-industrial gothic, Kaplan’s poems dismantle factory work—and the language used to describe it—into a postmodern sterility. Kaplan divides her descent into factory life into nine, Dante-esque “circles.” We are led through these circles by a voice, the “you” of the collection. The translators chose the pronoun “you” to replace the French “on” as “the subjective presence that moves throughout the book” because it can refer to the self or a general other, thus offering “the floating subjectivizes of the assemblage of persons made disconnected by the factory system.” “Disconnected” is a key word of the text, describing everything from the relationship of the worker to the factory to the relationship of language to what its signifying. The poems often evoke disconnected “lines,” and they can be read as both assembly lines and the lines of the text: “You are not supported, there is nothing between the lines. // The space folds open. Walls and partitions, corners, cement. Sheet metal, understand. /... / You don’t know, you can’t know” (“Third Circle”). As the “you” descends through the circles while manufacturing rubber parts, cables, crackers, headlights, boxes, and eventually just vague “forms,” there is no plot or progress inside the factory—“Time is outside, in things” (“Circle One”). The hell of Kaplan’s factory is its stagnant isolation and monotony. The voice is always either going to the factory, leaving the factory, or at the factory. The moments that break up the monotony—bleak as they are—represent the stubborn flickers of humanity capable of surviving factory life: the beauty of the nameless women workers surrounding her, coffee-machine breaks, and treks into the dirty city.
The factory’s lack of progress and its atmosphere of disconnection enact Kaplan’s Communist politics. Carr and Pap argue that Kaplan’s disconnected use of language “renders into poetry…the position of the workers in the factory and their isolation from the value they are producing.” In the poems, the workers and their agency drift away from each other in the anti-gravity of factory’s “universe” (“First Circle”). The air of this universe is palpable and oppressive: “The air circulates, identical” (“Sixth Circle”) and “things are gripped, thickness of the air” (“Forth Circle”). The workers’ thoughts grow stagnant in this thickness— “The boxes are easy, you make them with your hands. / Your hands are somewhere else. You think. Thought is sticky” (“Fourth Circle”)— and bodies merge with the pervasive, industrial materiality around them: “You are absorbed, nowhere, floating at the end of the line” (“Fifth Circle”). By the Fifth Circle, the workers internalize this oppressive atmosphere until they feel it everywhere: the café windows grow “weightless” and in a hotel, “The air is free, detached. The wallpaper goes on and on. On the bed, stiff linear effort. No success. There’s never an interior. // The furniture’s not right. You fall asleep without support // Blank awakening, inhuman. No bearings, the factory. You are thrown headlong.” In Arai’s poetry, the women’s bodies cannot stop their work even after the factories are closed, and in Kaplan’s work, the women cannot escape the atmosphere of the factory even outside of its walls. In both collections, the factory is a way of a life: a way of existing in a body, a gender, a language.
Patchwork
The following cento combines lines from both collections to compare their focuses on labor and gender. It highlights themes that both collections depict in similar ways—like makeup and sexuality—as well as the collections’ aesthetic differences: even though Arai’s factory is closed, her surreal, vernacular style results in ghost-workers that seem more alive than the robotic workers flattened by Kaplan’s deconstruction. In presenting the divergent texts beside each other, the cento form challenges monolithic depictions of female labor. As both collections were written by artists who either didn’t work directly in a factory or who worked in factories for ideological reasons, a question living in the margin of this cento is how the language, themes, and aesthetics might further transform if, for example, the cento also incorporated worker-narratives from documentary texts like Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (1974) by Studs Terkel.
Cento is from the Latin for “patchwork garment,” which invites thinking about the production of a poem about women’s industrial production. Selecting and cutting the texts for the poem and then patching them together underscores the constructedness of work—my work, the authors’ work, the translators’ work, and the work of the laborers depicted in the poems. As I cut the seams of the authors’ lines to restitch them, the new, raw edges often exposed their own composition process and intricacies. Kaplan’s “you” grows even more indeterminate as it slips off Arai’s distinct speakers; the women’s bold makeup in both collections becomes a collective need to emphasize selfhood until it’s louder than the factory’s clattering. Combining both assembly and poetry lines, this cento connects these depictions of female labor across language, time, and place.
Note: The lines from Excess—The Factory are in bold, while all other lines come from Factory Girls.
You’re in the workshop with the assembly line.
You’re sitting down. The line is going to start (55)
Phoenixes in pure gold thread
Unfold line
By line (11)
Women arrive in soft blouses. You have eyes, you see their breasts (72)
The women are there, sitting, in their ordinary clothes. They’re very made up, with hair of all colors. You watch them. You see the violent makeup around their damaged eyes, around their open gaze (109)
In the sharp scent of hairspray
The weaving girls made themselves up to look nice
Put the make-up on thick, like girls who trade their affections for cash (13)
The body is underneath. Everything is there, everything (49)
Form itself is emptiness, Emptiness itself is form
Sex itself is emptiness, Emptiness itself is sex (12)
Endlessly space folds and unfolds (40)
Clackity-clack, clackity-clack, clackity-clack, clackity-clack (12)
You are not supported, there is nothing between the lines (40)
Before becoming a cicada, I was a pinky finger
Belonging to Kiyoko, the weaving girl (20)
You are immobile. You circulate between walls of flesh, little blood-rivers (41)
She was working too carelessly
When she caught my base in the beater (20)
Space is divided. It’s terrible.
You are not protected (72)
Factory the factory, first memory (72)
Changed by the machines
A decade has already gone by (1)
You are in the factory, you go on.
You unfold, you advance.
You move your thoughts a little (27)
The eternal silkworm
On its mission forever
Crawling through the labyrinth of my bowels (33)
In the thick air, under the high ceiling, you make boxes, you think.
Thought doesn’t come out, it stays inside.
Nothing is taken apart. You think (55)
But you know
All about the wooden comb the man leaves behind
If you’re a factory girl, that is (19)
Allison Pitinii Davis is the author of Line Study of a Motel Clerk (Baobab, 2017). Her work focuses on labor in northeast Ohio’s Rust Belt.