Buffalo Girl
Buffalo Girl by Jessica Q. Stark draws on various renderings of Little Red Riding Hood to indicate how the manipulation and fetishization of girls in children’s stories reflects but also helps devise a reality full of each “stranger’s violence.” Multiple “catalog[s]” of hurt that the adult speaker makes under such conditions derive from colonial, racial, and gendered histories of Vietnamese women. The book records different damages to what the hood is meant to protect—the head: “a fist plainly to my temple,” “my head bashed into the car dashboard,” and “metal // hit my temple.”
The folktale is adapted distinctly in ten poems premised on the familiar outline: a girl sent by her mother through a “Dark forest along / narrow path” (Huan Chih-chun), “but on the way / her heart desired” (Christian Schneller), and “a wolf talked so politely, he made her forget” (Thomas Nelson & Sons) until he pretends to be the girl or her grandmother. The series asks what myths become so internalized that their anxieties and promises come true; whether in stories translated from French or German, the girl is watched and wanted, accused of not being watchful enough, of being too wantful.
Stark remakes the fable visually as well, erasing parts of its illustrations, and her mother’s photographs, and filling gaps with images from an arboretum—bloom and verdancy that tempted the girl in the woods. The liberatory potential of questioning the camera is clear in “Impact Sport,” which opens: “By age 15 I was a hungry, red wolf.” While working at a crafts store, the speaker “learned the cameras were decoys,” and “it was all over: stickers, hot-glue guns / a bounty of excessive scissors I never used.” A sequence of poems titled “Kleptomania,” and dated by year, narrates these evasions of cameras and payments. In “Kleptomania, 2023,” the speaker’s sister “still worries about the photographs / taken in the grocery store breakroom” two decades earlier, by a man whose “eyes scanned / my mother’s body and told her she was / lucky—that we were all very lucky girls.” With new images and inventive texts, Buffalo Girl counters the ever-terrorizing gazes and the wolves behind them, including the self.