C4 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.THURSDAY, JUNE 9 , 2022
Abdel Nasser to power. Warner
tells us that the sight of her fa-
ther’s bookstore as a blackened
ruin is practically her earliest
memory. At this point she brings
her “unreliable memoir” to a
close: She is all of 5, and her sister
Laura has just been born.
Besides evoking the vanished
pomps of yesterday, “Esmond and
Ilia” periodically enlarges its per-
spective to include chapters about
Victorian adventurers in the Mid-
dle East, a half-forgotten chan-
teuse named Hildegarde, and
even the proper use of the Arabic
word “malesh,” the verbal equiva-
lent of a fatalistic shrug of the
shoulders. Above all, Warner is
never sentimental about her par-
ents, though she clearly loves her
anxiously snobbish father, just as
she deeply sympathizes with her
sensitive, novel-reading mother.BY CHRIS KELLYAbout halfway through her
Tuesday night show, Ravyn Lenae
set the mood for “M.I.A.,” an
Afrobeat-kissed jam about seiz-
ing the day and escaping to Mi-
ami.
“It’s getting hot, it’s getting
sticky,” said the Chicago-bred,
Los Angeles-based singer-song-
writer.
She was probably imagining
the song’s subtropical setting, but
she might have been describing
the surprisingly humid confines
of D.C.’s City Winery, where a
sold-out crowd had gathered
amid the venue’s hardwood
floors, brick walls and amber
glow.
But even though the indoors
were warmer than the June night
outside, the hot temperature was
a fitting clime for an artist whose
sensual songs conjure feelings of
body heat and slick skin. And for
a fan base that has been waiting
years to hear and see Lenae in the
flesh, what’s a little sweat among
friends?
Lenae is touring in support of
her long-awaited debut album,
“Hypnos.” The 23-year-old
emerged in the mid-2010s, self-
releasing her first EP as a teen
and collaborating with fellow
Chicago upstarts like Noname
and Mick Jenkins. In 2018 — just
in time for Valentine’s Day — she
released “Crush,” a pristine col-
lection of glistening, lovesick
funk produced by fellow R&B
wunderkind Steve Lacy.
“Crush” was a 17-minute-long
promise of what was to come, but
it would be more than four years
before the public would hear newmusic from Lenae. On Tuesday
night, Lenae’s return was worth
the wait: Judging by the raptur-
ous response to her every vocal
run and flourish, her fans’ appe-
tite has been growing unabated
for all this time.
With a wispy tone that evoked
memories of Minnie Riperton,
Janet Jackson and Aaliyah, Lenae
was a mix of swagger and grace as
she delivered heart-heavy songs
about friends, lovers and those
between.
In an age of digital magic,
there’s often some question of
whether a singer who sounds
angelic on record will fly high or
crash to earth in concert.
Throughout the night, Lenae was
the rare example of an artist
whose voice is even more stagger-
ing in front of an audience, her
notes ringing through clear andtrue, no matter how high the
register or ambitious the vocal
acrobatics. On “Closer (Ode 2 U),”
her “ohs” and “ahs” ascended and
descended like a spiral staircase;
on songs such as “Where I’m
From” and encore “Sticky,” her
voice morphed into a birdsong.
Lenae’s four-piece backing
band brought the organic funk of
her songs to life, whether chim-
ing in with fingerpicked guitar,
slithering bass-lines, synth
squeals or four-on-the-floor
beats. But too often, the foursome
overpowered Lenae’s delicate vo-
cals.
Amid the swelter, she needed
all the airspace she could get, but
that didn’t seem to bother the
crowd. On “Xtasy,” Lenae sang,
“Turn the heat, can you keep up?”
With every cheer and cry, the
audience proved they could.MUSIC REVIEW
Long-awaited Ravyn Lenae brings the heat to City Winery
JEAN PHILIPPE JOSEPH/CREATIVE DIRECTION A ND STYLING BY JEANIE ANNAN-LEWIN
R&B singer-songwriter Ravyn Lenae, 23, is touring in support of
her debut album, “Hypnos.” Her wispy tone started gaining a
following in the mid-2010s when she released her first EP as a teen.Right now we don’t know
what the Supreme Court
decision will say or how states
will react to it. Might some
prohibit driving across state
lines for an abortion, or attempt
to ban medication abortions?
In the pre- Roe era, some
women learned to fashion at-
home abortion devices out of
Mason jars, and a recent article
in the Atlantic describes a
collective of women now
learning to do it once again.
When the lines are drawn,
people who believe in a woman’s
right to choose (even if the
Supreme Court no longer does)
will have to decide what lines
they are willing to cross. Would
you find it morally acceptable to
put abortion pills in the mail?
What about driving someone
across the state border where
medical abortions are available?
I highly recommend “The
Janes,” but with a few caveats.
As a historical documentary, it’s
uplifting, frankly, to watch a
bunch of gutsy women reach for
a plan when it would have been
easier to reach for a Valium and
a bottle of gin. But as a template
for what could come next, it’s
terrifying. Nobody should want
that. Nobody should have to find
out whether they’re willing to do
what the Janes did back when
the cost of an abortion was
extraordinary and women were
always the ones to have to pay it.documentary really gets
interesting, not because it’s a
riveting spy caper but because it
poses a moral question: When is
the wrong thing the right thing?
What are the criteria you
personally use to decide that you
know better than lawmakers?
And if you believe you do, do
you simply protest the law, or do
you actually go ahead and do the
thing the government has
forbidden you from doing?
“There was a philosophical
need,” one Jane rationalizes in
the documentary, “to disrespect
a law that would disrespect
women.”that this documentary was made
before the Supreme Court’s anti-
Roe draft opinion leaked, and
that it premiered afterward. If
abortion is the law of the land,
then we can interpret the Jane
Collective’s story as a relic, a
women’s liberation story of a
bygone time. But if abortion
becomes illegal again in some
parts of the country, then what
we’re watching becomes a story
about activists who were
criminals then and would be
criminals now. By celebrating
the Janes, we’d be technically
celebrating a crime.
That’s where theabortion?
Many of the Janes had met
each other via antiwar activism
but found that movement to be
overly “macho,” populated by
gonzo men who were
uninterested in female
perspectives. So they branched
off to create a social movement
of their own: a feminist utopia
born of dystopian
circumstances. They arranged
free child care for their patients.
There was sometimes a pork
roast in the oven so that
everyone would have something
for lunch.
It seems meaningful to meof just how much solving
reproductive health issues has
always relied on informal,
unsanctioned networks based
on the understanding that
menstruation blood or breast
milk or afterbirth don’t go away
just because polite society
ignores them.
On camera, the husband of
one Jane marvels that he’d
simply never given abortion a
second thought. The policeman
who arrested the Janes remarks,
surprised, that the patient he
intercepted 50 years ago was
wearing a nice suit. What did he
expect? A scarlet “A” forLysol. The local hospital had a
ward dedicated to treating
septic abortions.
The collective’s protocols
sound like something from a spy
novel: After leaving a message
on the Janes’ answering service,
patients were instructed to meet
at one Jane’s donated apartment
(“the front”), then ferried by
another Jane to a different
donated apartment (“the place”),
where the actual procedure was
performed. A doctor assisted in
the early days, then another
man stepped in (he had no
medical background but had
learned abortion techniques
from a physician). Finally, some
of the Janes — schoolteachers,
graduate students, mothers —
learned how to just do it
themselves.
In 1972, several Janes were
arrested when a caller tipped off
the police: A relative was
scheduled to have an abortion,
which the caller found immoral.
While the Janes awaited trial,
the Supreme Court ruled on Roe
v. Wade and made their whole
case moot. Abortions no longer
needed getaway cars, and
helping someone get one was no
longer illegal.
Watching “The Janes” — and
please, someone make a Netflix
series of this story starring
Beanie Feldstein — is a reminder
HESSE FROM C1
MONICA HESSE
Watching ‘The Janes’ is uplifting, until you realize history could repeat itself
HBO
HBO’s new documentary about the Janes, seen above in 1972, w as made before the Supreme Court’s anti- Roe draft opinion leaked.cheek. “I will never know,” writes
Warner, “how many po to effect.”
For by her late 20s, Ilia knew that
her husband wasn’t really her
type at all.
By then, however, the family’s
Cairo years had reached their
blazing finale: On Jan. 26, 1952,
“almost every British business
and most other foreign interests,
especially French, were set on
fire.” The flames of revolution
would eventually send King
Farouk into exile and bring GamalNot that Ilia couldn’t be uncon-
sciously cruel. She once told a
plump teenage Marina that “Plain
girls are much more likely to be
happy.”
Needless to say, “Esmond and
Ilia” lacks a fairy-tale ending —
after all, it’s about real life — but it
is nonetheless wondrously enter-
taining, an ideal book for a long,
hot summer.Michael Dirda reviews books for
Style every Thursday.tain this grand lifestyle. At least,
he doesn’t in England. However,
using his charm and Eton connec-
tions, he persuades W.H. Smith
and Company, Booksellers, to
open an outlet in Cairo, a city he
knew well from his war service. As
the manager of this cultural out-
post of empire, Esmond is soon
hobnobbing with the upper crust
of King Farouk’s Egypt, playing
golf at the Gezira Sporting Club
and sipping pink gins at Shep-
heard’s Hotel. Well-to-do Cairo in
the late 1940s practically defined
urbane sophistication — everyone
spoke French, everyone smoked:
“Nobody seemed to mind
smoking then — the scent of the
cigarettes delicious, the gestures
involved elegant, the parapherna-
lia fascinating and sophisticated
— while the cigarette boxes, to
which the cigarettes were trans-
ferred, were monogrammed,
cedar-lined and silver.”
In this worldly, decadent at-
mosphere, the young and beauti-
ful Mrs. Warner immediately at-
tracted myriad admirers. Normal-
ly, flirtation simply added spice to
social interaction, but some of
Ilia’s “soupirants” — French for
one who sighs for a beloved —
aimed for more than a kiss on theWhile serving in Italy, the bespec-
tacled Maj. Warner — already
balding in his mid-30s — fell in
love with the utterly penniless
21-year-old Emilia Terzulli, who
then spoke almost no English.
They married and Ilia, as she was
known, found herself quickly
learning the ways of a highly tra-
ditional upper-class English fam-
ily.
As almost the first order of
business, Esmond takes his bride
to be fitted for handmade brown
leather brogues from the celebrat-
ed Peal & Company. As Warner
writes, this shoe announced Ilia’s
“life to come in the English coun-
tryside, her formal enrollment in
the world of the squirearchy ...
The brogues would walk her safe-
ly on turf and moorland and
through woodland and along riv-
erbanks where the trout twinked
to the surface for water boatmen
and flies, and take her striding
across winter fields where the
pheasants whirred up, a flurry of
gorgeous feathers against the un-
relenting grey; the brogues would
plant her on — they would trans-
plant her to — British soil.”
Still, there is one teeny little
problem: Esmond really doesn’t
possess the wherewithal to main-her father typically encountered
as a 1930s Oxford undergraduate.
They were invariably the sisters of
his college chums.
“Sisters appeared when you
went away for the weekend dur-
ing term to stay with a friend at
his family’s, they carried golf
clubs and ciggies, drove quickly
and tossed their gear — tennis
rackets in severe presses with
wing nuts and screws at the cor-
ners, long cartons stamped with
dressmakers’ crests in azure and
gold, in which the ballgown and
the stole and the cocktail dress
were lying between sheets of tis-
sue waiting to leap out and enfold
their mistress with encrusted ruf-
fles, slippery rustling stuff, while
the little strong box for Mummy’s
tiara which she was lending for
the night, so sweet of her, was
thrown on the back seat as well.
Then off, off down the lanes to the
country house.”
At first, “Esmond and Ilia”
could be a fairy-tale romance.
The son of Pelham “Plum” War-
ner, dubbed the “Grand Old Man
of cricket,” Esmond was living a
feckless Brideshead-style life
when World War II broke out.
BOOK WORLD FROM C1
Memories, money and love are fleeting in Marina Warner’s ‘Esmond and Ilia’
W ARNER FAMILY
Maj. Esmond Warner, who met
his future wife during the war.HARLIP
Ilia with an embroidered “W”
for her new surname.ESMOND AND
ILIA
An Unreliable
Memoir
By Marina Warner
New York Review
Books. 432 pp.
Paperback,
$19.95S0114 6X 3
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