How to Struggle Correctly

Review of Trisha Low’s Socialist Realism (USA: Coffee House Press, 2019)
By Naveen Kaur

My first impression of Trisha Low’s Socialist Realism came from the cover art of the book. A muted red color, with uneven black splotches and a daunting amalgamation of houses, trees, staircases, and many other shapes and spirals, the cover art achieves cohesion while remaining fragmented. This aesthetic style links up with the title itself. For those unfamiliar with artistic movements, Socialist Realism is a type of realism recognized as the official style of the Soviet state between 1932-1988, one that depicts the proletariat and their emancipation. The tension between the artist’s naturalistic style and the political messaging of the state draws Low’s attention early in the book when she sees the art of Kazimir Malevich in the Tate Modern. Initially taken with how his early art was a “simple gesture of refusal” to conform, Low notices that Malevich’s later portraits seem to have dissent quivering beneath their surface—his portrait’s blank faces resisting total realism despite having caved to state pressure to paint propaganda. This sense of depth beneath the surface resonates throughout Low’s Socialist Realism, as she questions what it means to call some place home, to pledge allegiance to a political cause, to adopt and change our systems of thought.

Socialist Realism, in brief, is a book-long essay in which events of Low’s childhood and adulthood bleed into philosophical musings on art, culture, and politics. Low’s narration transports the reader through time and space to different landscapes of Low’s memory, from her house in California to watch Rosemary’s Baby, a 1968 horror film, to a movie theater in New York City to watch Snow White and the Huntsman, a 2012 dark fantasy, to London’s Tate Modern to view Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square, a 1915 avant-garde painting, to Singapore, to watch The Talented Mr Ripley, a 1999 psychological thriller. Low’s non-linear narrative, without chapters or section breaks, resists conventional understandings of narrative growth; an epigraph from an interview of Maurice Pialat in the French film magazine Cahiers du cinema serves as an explanation for her narrative structure: “What I understand by realism goes beyond reality.” Low’s fractured narrative expresses a more realistic mode of remembering and thinking of the past, a refusal of the illusion of self-coherence that is a cultural shorthand for our interior lives and motivations. The reader understands Low’s life through the impressions they are given access to, and this impressionistic style allows Low to interrogate seemingly easy-to-answer questions by repeatedly contextualizing them through various ideas, events, and stories.

Throughout the book, Low recalls the many places she stayed in, many of which were not home, some of which were “not-not home,” an uncomfortable use of double negation that hints at the cross-section beyond syntactical binaries. The idea of belonging to a place is a constant journey, as Low writes: 

Home, what even is it? I’m not sure, but I know I want it—because home is a chronic matter of wanting. Of forcing desire, despite itself, into a shape—one with a beginning, middle, and end. It’s about futurity. “Going home” is necessarily a journey, but it’s also the security of destination. It’s knowing you have a place to rest after all your time wandering, even if you have to trick yourself into believing it exists.

Low frames the concept of home in processual terms (“a chronic matter of wanting”) as opposed to a physical, static one. This undoubtedly has to do with the multiple instances in which Low had to uproot her life, from being born in Singapore, to spending her teenage years in a boarding school in London, to exploring art and poetry in New York City and, finally, to living in California as an artist. By exploring the permutations of home through the nebulous and changeable notion of “destination,” Low approaches the subject of her values and how they are constantly renegotiated. Low strikes a personal note when she describes own leftist politics in relation to her father’s more conservative politics:

I try not to ask about my father’s political leanings. I know he was more radical in his youth, an economist and professor. I know he’s now more fiscally conservative. I think you could call him a libertarian. When he calls me his “idealistic, bleeding-heart daughter,” I mostly ignore him, but I have enough leftist friends who worry about what they call “rightward drift” now that they have kids to know that this concern is real. […] We don’t talk about it because I tell myself he doesn’t like to, but the truth is, I’m afraid to know.

These ideas Low presents, about her progressive politics and her eventual journey to the more “liberal” West, are familiar. Though I can’t speak for all Singaporeans, there is a prevalent notion that the sometimes-stifling conservativeness of Singapore can be escaped by migrating to Western countries. I, and many others, certainly understand that desire for a more “liberal” and “free” future, or at least, the potential of it.

In an encounter with her mother later in the book, Low explores the gap between her family’s social standing and her own political leanings, when Low is asked to purchase a twenty-five-thousand-dollar handbag on behalf of her mother. Deeply distraught over the incident, Low describes her resentment: “Against my best efforts, I cry about this short interaction for half an hour.” In saying this, she elucidates an anxiety that many—myself included—can relate to when confronted with the flexibility and multiplicity of our values. To be filial by fulfilling her mother’s desire for an expensive bag would contradict her personal values, that no one should spend that much money on such a frivolous thing. Recognizing that she may come off as self-righteous for portraying her mom negatively, Low calls herself out for her own inability to move past her “Confucian impulse” to respect her parents. She closes her recounting of the incident by saying, “I am becoming rapidly aware that my feelings about my family’s wealth are an embarrassing indulgence.”

Does this self-reflexivity work? One might argue that Low is inducing discomfort in herself so that she may better critique the narratives that she often conforms to. This strategy sometimes leads to interesting insights, such as when Low attends a waterboarding BDSM workshop. Instead of breathing in and kicking and struggling as she is supposed to, Low holds her breath until she feels like passing out. In response, her instructor says to her, “you don’t know how to struggle correctly.” This is a phrase that very much haunts Low for the rest of the book, and Low’s essay returns repeatedly to the discussion of submission and masochism. While BDSM can be recognized by its physical implements and role-playing practices such as bondage, caning, slave play, and chastity, Low is more interested in exploring the exchange of power that occurs during a scene:

Masochism is about passivity. It’s about being forced to reach a limit of physical exhaustion so intense you’re left with absolutely no control over what you’re being subjected to. And ultimately, what’s sexy about masochism is nothing to feel safe about or good about or consensual about. An acknowledgment of how impossible it is to escape the power structures that hold us, the pleasure of masochism is in unconditional letting.

Low seems to place the pleasurable tension of masochism within the acceptance of the fact that one cannot truly be in control of one’s life, even as she acknowledges that masochism is an exchange of power where submission is ultimately consensual, a “letting.” These are interesting ideas, but a stumble occurs when Low’s essay links pleasure to radical politics. After an aborted attempt at cooking duck, Low ends up in front of the TV, watching a documentary titled United in Anger. Focused on an advocacy group called AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) founded by the late Larry Kramer, Low describes how the activists—though disillusioned with the world—continued to fight for their cause. She frames their activism and resistance through the lens of masochism, writing: 

Masochism isn’t a fantasy. It’s not some shallow performance. It’s about acknowledging our lack of choices in the face of power, about recognising our ultimate helplessness. It’s about defying it nonetheless.

Masochism is not being able to struggle correctly. It’s about choosing to do it instead.

However poignant this idea may be, Low’s comparison of AIDs activists fighting for their cause to masochism is somewhat flawed. While both masochists and AIDS activists are knowingly helpless against power, they have very different motivations. Masochists give themselves up to power; the activists fight against it. More significantly, masochists derive pleasure from their submission to power within the framework of consent. That most certainly cannot be true for AIDS activists, who watched their communities get decimated by disease while the government remained indifferent to them. Although both instances involving struggle, Low’s writing is too deft in conflating the two when significant differences between them exist.

What can be said is that Low’s understanding of masochism can be applied to her own sense of powerlessness. In this context, Low’s understanding of masochism matters, because it is freeing to honor the intention to do good in a flawed system, and it also entails a measure of self-forgiveness for existing under systems of oppression. Viewed so, the lesson of how Kazimir Malevich submitted to the Soviet state while also creating faceless portraits in resistance becomes clear. Yes, it is not possible to be perfect, but an imperative still remains to actively negotiate and improve upon one’s actions and values. It is sometimes good to remain uncomfortable.


Naveen Kaur is currently an English Literature undergraduate at Nanyang Technological University. Her interests lie in the literature of the South Asian diaspora(s) in Singapore and Malaysia, Theater of the Absurd, Samuel Beckett and feminist theory.