Stupid LIttle Octopus Girl
April 18, 2021 7:49 AM   Subscribe

Bakamonotako Like all stupid little girls who believe they can best become themselves by becoming unlike themselves, she eventually came to miss her lost limbs. At times, fully tattooed people feel so about their lost original skin. But B’s sense of regret ran deeper.

Brenda Shaughnessy is the author of "The Octopus Museum"
posted by mecran01 (34 comments total) 12 users marked this as a favorite
 
I love her poetry. Thanks for posting this!
posted by Morpeth at 8:04 AM on April 18, 2021 [1 favorite]


That is gorgeous and affecting. Thank you.
posted by umbú at 8:27 AM on April 18, 2021


, the limbs she cast off with her mind wrapped around her and bound her, keeping her from any feeling. The phantom tentacles were strong, adult-sized ghosts and angry about losing their body.

Embittered and maddened, Bakamonotako consulted a wise starfish about her future. The starfish said, ‘You must find the other half of yourself, of your deepest and most private feeling,
Starfish is already lying. The other half of herself (the phantom tentacles) have already found her.
and you might have to double yourself to do it.’
The starfish asked Bakamonotako for twice her usual fee for this advice and the stupid little octopus girl paid half in sand dollars and half in sand dollars she hoped to collect in the future.
Then the starfish scams her.

If this was an Aesop's fable, I guess the moral of this story is something like, "Do all necessary due diligence before body modification or selecting an advisor."

But instead I have empathy for Octopus girl trapped in a dead end job collecting sand dollars, trying to reconcile with her phantom tentacles.
posted by otherchaz at 8:46 AM on April 18, 2021 [4 favorites]


Well, this filled me with rage. What an awful piece of writing.
posted by dobbs at 9:10 AM on April 18, 2021 [9 favorites]


IMO the moral of the story would be closer to do not deny or suppress integral parts of yourself lest you someday find yourself living a diminished existence from the prison of a fractured ontology. To my way of thinking visioning this poem as being a cautionary tale about tattoos or body modification misses the point - it is pretty clearly a parable, not literal. (Octopus are not currently able to literally choose to have their limbs fall off or get tattoos) But I imagine if you perceived it as literal it would bother you.
posted by jcworth at 9:10 AM on April 18, 2021 [10 favorites]


This sounds like anti-trans propaganda masquerading as a badly-written parable. Like, don't let your stupid little kid transition, yo, they won't be able to have proper sexual relations when they grow up. Ugh.
posted by heatherlogan at 9:35 AM on April 18, 2021 [22 favorites]


I'm reading this in a very similar way to @heatherlogan. It tracks especially strong as an anti-trans parable. I'm not sure how old this story is; I couldn't find anything reference to it outside this author's writings. If it truly is quite old, then I imagine it's original moral is meant to instill conformity and tradition as a virtue, and to avoid bold changes that deviate from the norm. It's deeply conservative at heart, right down to the repeated characterization of the protagonist as "stupid" and "little".
posted by neuracnu at 9:50 AM on April 18, 2021 [5 favorites]


heatherlogan: "This sounds like anti-trans propaganda masquerading as a badly-written parable. Like, don't let your stupid little kid transition, yo, they won't be able to have proper sexual relations when they grow up. Ugh."

So I just had a little self-reckoning. My reaction was "Huh? No, you must be primed to find offense if you read it that way. It's clearly about... oh, wait. Oh, geez, it really does pretty plainly say that, doesn't it?"

So... I'm sorry and thank-you. I don't know if the author intended that at all, but it's a pretty big blind spot not to see it being interpreted like that. A blind spot I share, apparently.
posted by team lowkey at 9:56 AM on April 18, 2021 [10 favorites]


Yeah this just makes me feel defensive of little girls. Who are you calling stupid, stupid.
It also kind of reminds me of The Little Mermaid in that she lives under the sea, she wants to be more human-like, there is a sea witch who she owes a debt to.

I just bristle at it's presenting something as a universal truth, that everyone who wants to make a change obviously deeply regrets it & they were stupid to even try. That's really not a universal truth & it can hurt people to present it like one.
posted by bleep at 9:58 AM on April 18, 2021 [5 favorites]


Yeahhh, +1 trans voice saying I'm very leery of it based just on the snippet posted. I truly loathe kids books where the horse dreams of being a unicorn and everyone tells it to just be a stupid horse, and surprise! The story ends with the horse being happy it's a horse, because everyone said and dreams above your station or out of the mainstream are bad and if we cut off the story when everyone is smiling we don't have to deal with the creeping existential dread of something is terribly wrong with this 'horse's life.
posted by Jacen at 9:59 AM on April 18, 2021 [11 favorites]


Bakamonotako translates roughly into ‘The Stupid Little Octopus Girl’. She’s a character in an old Japanese folk tale.

Surely this should be bakemono tako: tako is octopus (think takoyaki), and bakemono means "monster", though the meaning is more like the Western concept of the fae (including "fairy animals", but in the uncanny/potentially dangerous sense). Bakemono are often spirit-animals who can masquerade as humans -- the character in this folk-story became a bakemono when she took on the form of a human. (Compare the bakeneko.) There's no "baka" (idiot) in this name at all.
posted by heatherlogan at 10:14 AM on April 18, 2021 [3 favorites]


I read her story on a plaque outside the Little Sea Monster Museum Sculpture Garden. I thought she was a lot like me.

It's an allegorical tale of the author's personal experience.

Good news: octopuses can regrow limbs.
posted by airmail at 10:15 AM on April 18, 2021 [5 favorites]


People are allowed to say what they see in a work of art even if it's not what was intended.
posted by bleep at 10:16 AM on April 18, 2021 [3 favorites]


Me saying I don't see how someone could come to that conclusion is not saying people are not allowed to come to that conclusion. And, yes, I read the poem, obviously. Just because it mentions tattoos doesn't mean it is about tattoos. The author did not make up this story, the author is talking about a japanese folk tale she encountered, as a japanese woman.
posted by FirstMateKate at 10:20 AM on April 18, 2021 [3 favorites]


No I know. I just mean we're all saying what we see, and that's good.
posted by bleep at 10:21 AM on April 18, 2021 [1 favorite]


There's no "baka" (idiot) in this name at all.
posted by heatherlogan at 1:14 PM on April 18 [+] [!]


The woman who wrote this interpretation is Japanese, from Japan. It seems, at the very best, insensitive to try and explain her own language to her.
posted by FirstMateKate at 10:21 AM on April 18, 2021 [4 favorites]


Also: "she let her other four limbs fall into such disuse that they withered and fell away."

This isn't someone joyfully changing her body. This is denial and repression.
posted by airmail at 10:27 AM on April 18, 2021 [4 favorites]


A story does not need to be intentionally or "about" transphobia to have transphobic undertones. Certainly the choice to have her specifically have problems with sex at sexual maturity, due to her giving up limbs, invites some unfortunate comparisons.

I'm not sure what the take away is, other than "capitalism makes slaves of those unfortunate" I guess.
posted by stillnocturnal at 10:27 AM on April 18, 2021 [1 favorite]


Does anyone know if there is actually such a folk tale? Or did she create the parable as a framing device?
posted by team lowkey at 10:28 AM on April 18, 2021 [2 favorites]


Surely this should be bakemono tako

bakamono is in fact a word that means what the author says it does.
posted by teraflop at 10:31 AM on April 18, 2021 [5 favorites]


It's not surprising that any poem that leads with "Stupid little ____ girl" is going to get pushback. It may be a poem from lived experience, but it's hard to read any kind of feminist message other than "it sucks to be a women in this society" out of it.

I mean, it's art, so no one can really say definitively what it's about or whether it's good or bad, but it's very easy to read bad things into it, at the very least.
posted by rikschell at 10:32 AM on April 18, 2021 [5 favorites]


Mod note: Few deleted - please be careful when judging other people's interpretations and be mindful of microaggressions
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 11:05 AM on April 18, 2021 [3 favorites]


Part of being an artist is accepting that your audience will bring their own experiences (and thoughts, and feelings, and baggage) to your art and will interpret it through that lens. I also bounced right out of this story as soon as it started talking about phantom limbs and mouths-as-genitals and so on. To me, as a trans person, it reads as a story about someone regretting, at the very least, body modification, if not actual transition. It feels tragic and sad, not joyful or affirming in any way.

However I'm aware this was written in 2014, with many layers of cultural context I'm not aware of. I can accept that, but I also can't let go of my own context or what I've brought to my experience of the piece.

I'm frustrated that the site posting it stripped it of that background/foundation in order to throw it out as a "1 minute read" (ugh), but also this reception is a good example of what happens when you're served art without context. It can be a good thing and a bad thing. In this case I think it does a disservice to someone who (from what I've briefly seen) probably didn't intend it to have those connotations, but who should probably have considered how it comes across to people who have had various types of body modification.
posted by fight or flight at 11:07 AM on April 18, 2021 [8 favorites]


Does anyone know if there is actually such a folk tale? Or did she create the parable as a framing device?
I’m pretty sure that Shaughnessy invented this specific tale. In this interview, she says her Bakamonotako was inspired by Japanese folk tales such as Urashima Tarō (the fisherman who rescues a sea princess in the form of a turtle).
posted by mbrubeck at 11:22 AM on April 18, 2021 [2 favorites]


The woman who wrote this interpretation is Japanese, from Japan. It seems, at the very best, insensitive to try and explain her own language to her.
It should probably be noted that Shaughnessy was born in Japan but has lived in the US since childhood and does not speak Japanese:
Shaughnessy, age 28, was born in Okinawa, Japan but spent her childhood in southern California. She says she regrets that she never learned her mother’s native tongue, Japanese: “It’s one reason I pick apart English. I try to beat it up a little.”
(Her poem “Lacquer” is about this language divide.)
posted by mbrubeck at 11:27 AM on April 18, 2021 [7 favorites]


(For what it’s worth, I am also a Japanese American and know some Japanese but am not fluent in it.)
posted by mbrubeck at 11:40 AM on April 18, 2021


Also: "she let her other four limbs fall into such disuse that they withered and fell away."

This isn't someone joyfully changing her body. This is denial and repression.


This is how I initially read it as well. Losing those limbs is not presented as an outcome the protagonists actively seeks, but as something she simply fails to prevent. She's not punished for her actions, but for her passivity.

This is not such an unlikely narrative. Sometimes, when people are ill at ease in their body, when they feel as if there was something wrong with, they rather don't want to think about it at all, they'd rather be brains in vats, so they let their body fall into disuse in some sense or another. And that's sure something that might come back to haunt you at some point.

But I feel that people who come out as trans are really doing the opposite of that. They realize that it's not so much their body that's wrong, but how other people perceive it, and they take action to change that. The octopus girl in that analogy would be the trans girl who suppresses her femininity, sticking with her assigned gender, remaining detached from her body, haunted by her unlived potential.

It might still be a bad analogy - it's never too late to come out after all, you don't have to pay such a ridiculous price - but that's just the message of the starfish, not necessarily the story, and I think the story leaves some room for the takeway that the starfish is full of shit and the chief stupidity of the octopus girl might consist in buying into it.

That said, I can see now how those lines about the tattoos and the sex problems counter my initial reading and make a transphobic reading fairly plausible too.

Having missed those nuances however in my first reading, I read it not so much as a cautionary tale about body modification but rather about body neglect, and in that light, I found it fairly relatable.

There are lots of ways to feel ill at ease in your body apart from gender dysphoria, and lots of ways to neglect it accordingly. When I was a stupid octopus girl, I thought that certain things are just for thin people - like for instance, sports. I certainly do regret that now! Covid lockdowns have made me a fan of regular walks and I found it annoyingly true that getting some light but regular exercise really improves your quality of life. But it does get harder to get fit now that I'm middle-aged and fat. I would probably have to lose some weight before taking up running for instance. But luckily I don't have to take up running, I can go swimming once the public pools open up again/it gets warm enough for the lake, and there's no reason at all why I shouldn't get somewhat more athletic even at my current weight. So suck it, starfish!
posted by sohalt at 11:53 AM on April 18, 2021 [8 favorites]


Years pass.

Starfish (much larger now) consulting with a clownfish: So you're looking for your son. A difficult case, but possible. I will have to triple my regular fee...

Octopus Girl: Starfish! We have unfinished business! (turns to clownfish) This does not concern you. Get out. (Clownfish flees)

Starfish: We do have unfinished business! Your payment is late, you must pay penalties!

Octopus Girl: Phantom Tentacles! Grab Starfish!

Starfish (immobilized): What is happening?

Octopus Girl: I and my new friends are altering the deal.
posted by otherchaz at 12:13 PM on April 18, 2021 [2 favorites]


I'm trans and also felt a little uneasy, but came back here and saw the other comments about context, art, culture, etc so gave it another read.

"Bakamonotako felt she didn’t need all eight of her appendages. Four would do. Two to wash and work and two to walk and wander." So she thinks she only needs to meet her needs: washing, working, moving. Maybe what's missing in her other appendages is fun, play, and joy?

"the limbs she cast off with her mind wrapped around her and bound her, keeping her from any feeling." Because sex is fun and she cast off that part of herself? And now instead of finding her own joy she put it to someone else who told her to keep searching, working, for sand dollars?

It's almost certainly meant to be vague at fewer than 400 words, and the author probably very carefully picked each one. A transphobic interpretation may never have occurred to her, and I'm glad to have re-read and thought a little more about it.
posted by Is It Over Yet? at 12:26 PM on April 18, 2021 [12 favorites]


Shaughnessy is also queer I believe (or has won some lambda literary awards). This changes nothing about the poem or how one interprets it, but I think does inform my sense of how she, herself, might interpret it. (This is, again, not relevant to one’s own response.)
posted by Going To Maine at 12:46 PM on April 18, 2021 [1 favorite]


I have enough of my own internalized misogyny, I don't really want stories whose goal is to pile on more.
posted by augustimagination at 12:48 PM on April 18, 2021 [1 favorite]


So I just had a little self-reckoning. My reaction was "Huh? No, you must be primed to find offense if you read it that way. It's clearly about... oh, wait. Oh, geez, it really does pretty plainly say that, doesn't it?"

So... I'm sorry and thank-you. I don't know if the author intended that at all, but it's a pretty big blind spot not to see it being interpreted like that. A blind spot I share, apparently.


Kay and Peele, Is This Country Song Racist, is both a hilarious skit and a really good depiction of how it is when you learn to see things in culture that you'd been blind to before.

I haven't finished reading all the comments and will be interested to. I kept looking for the rest of the story, because it's ending was so dismal, and because it was so misogynistic—"stupid little girl" is a belittling term a lot of women and girls have had lobbed at them, sometimes in so many words and sometimes not. I know I have.
posted by Orlop at 3:32 PM on April 18, 2021 [4 favorites]


PM: Is there something that you think you’ve kept with you since childhood that you find appearing for the first time here?

BS: This is an amazing question. In childhood, there were always fragments of stories from my mother about her childhood in post-WWII Okinawa—near-starvation, inadequate clothing, no shoes—that seemed nightmarishly unreal but that really happened to her. I think a lot of this book’s scenes and images of post-apocalyptic deprivation, scarcity, destitution are from those stories. “Bakamonotako” definitely takes its form from Japanese folk tales—Urashima Taro in particular.

From the interview linked above.

From another interview:

I’m interested in the fearless way in which your work reflects upon societal interactions, as a whole. Your poems provide safe harbor for any number of perspectives. “Twenty-Three-Year-Old Self” (Our Andromeda)is an example of this. Itnarrates a young woman’s crush on another woman. Your poem, “Straight’s the New Gay” (Human Dark with Sugar) is an invitation to embrace the non-binary. The poem is liberating and amusing as well. Your work addresses the subject of lesbian love on many levels. The poem, “Why I Stayed, 2000-2001” (So Much Synth), describes an abusive relationship, in which one woman hits another. “I’d never/ take that from a man. A man/would be a criminal/ if he did what you did.” How would you describe the persona of these poems? Who is the poem’s audience? Did you write these poems with a goal in mind?

Brenda Shaughnessy:The thread of lesbian connection and being part of a queer community is definitely present in all my books. I’ve always wanted to posit the lesbian/queer voice as central in my work, in hopes that a lesbian/queer readership might recognize their own songs.


On a first reading I saw the loss of limbs as an allegory for denying something internal and highly personal, and the toll that takes on a person later in life.
posted by mecran01 at 3:50 PM on April 18, 2021 [6 favorites]


I am, sometimes, angry at my stupid little girl self that let parts of herself wither away. In order to become something else entirely, that was still wrong. Because the calculations I did were based on a false math. I try an be compassionate to that little girl even as I am having to double my work to catch up using tools I cannot handle with confidence anymore.

I think race probably plays in more than we are thinking, that it is the impossible calculation of cultural assimilation that children are forced to make. Not being like family but never being like the cultural behemoth anyway, and the ways that insidious compromise makes itself know when you try and be an adult.

Believing the lies culture and society tells us makes us leave the 'extraneous' limbs behind. Fitting in with impossible and unreal imagined selves comes at a cost.

I am not trans. I am a butch cis woman. I spent years wishing away my breasts because all I thought they gave me was unwanted attention alongside the physical results. But now I'm nearly 40, and having the kinds of relationships with other queer folk, I'm glad I didn't get the reduction. I'm glad I didn't modify myself to fit a standard I made up from the even worse standards around me. I tried to be someone else, something else. I didn't choose to remove my breasts but I did let parts of myself wither for lack of use. My queerness, my masculine side, ways of moving and being in the world. I'm rediscovering them now but it is hard. And would be even harder if I tried to use the system, capitalism specifically, to fix it. It is the system that broke me, it would never fix me.

But it is an exercise in having to confront what I did to myself out of ignorance and fear. And it is an endless work.
posted by geek anachronism at 8:36 PM on April 18, 2021 [11 favorites]


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