My Novel

by Sianne Ngai

Sianne Ngai currently lives in the Boston area. She attended Brown, now she attends Harvard. This book is something between poetry and prose.

Chapter 1
Protagonist

I signed the forms, mailed them, and became credible. Here,
among the dendrites. Several witnesses were able to describe
what I was wearing. But the light did not assure the connection
of neurons in a continuous fabric, even with two seeds in the same
plant. Sex was "weak property." Not a memory, but a dotted line
between cells, persuaded me to declare my visibility at the border.

The building I stay in, for example, invents its eastern face and western
face for the grammatical trees which surround it. My lamp deterritorizes
by forming an image, a tracing of a window, but the window
reterritorializes on that image. It could be said that the lamp imitates the
window. It has a side facing the molecular.

Many birds imitate the songs of other species. But imitation may not be
the best concept for these phenomena. Female birds, which do not
normally sing, start singing when they are administered male sex hormones,
and they will sing the song of the species on which they have become
imprinted. The song signals from a distance all members of its species
that the territory has found a name.