10 8.4.
Gone are
the days of
proffering ‘It’s
a girl’ cigars in
sex- segregated
waiting rooms;
the gender
reveal is now
a baby shower
with stunts.Illustration by R. O. Blechmanoutfi ts and decorate rooms, to imagine
bonding rituals, to project your own inse-
curities and unfulfi lled longings. It’s a sur-
prise party designed to eliminate surprises,
to set expectations and assumptions and
boundaries, to create a kind of reductive
certainty where there was once nothing
but uncertainty. By its very nature, it sets
everybody up to fail.
For that failure to end in a fl aming vehi-
cle shouldn’t be funny, but judging by the
comments on the video, it clearly is. The
appeal of the gender- reveal disaster video
is rooted in contempt: It’s a schadenfreude
delivery system, comeuppance porn for a
new kind of social overreach. Each video
originates as a homespun production,
documenting a moment of great signifi -
cance to a handful of people. Great care
and elaborate planning, obsessive pomp
and circumstance, have been devoted to
announcing the very fi rst thing most par-
ents know for certain about the child they
expect and all the cultural baggage that
child will be burdened with. And when it
all goes wrong, it exposes a surprisingly
intimate moment of cognitive dissonance
and uncertainty — the very kind of anxi-
ety and lack of control that gender- reveal
stunts are designed to dispel.
It’s like that saying about how to make
God laugh: Just tell him your plans. Anyone
who has noticed that the world does not
divide, neatly and comfortably, into guns
and glitter, touchdowns and tutus, will
know that this whole ritual is set up, like a
Jenga tower, for the fall. A good car-on-fi re
video is cathartic in that it cuts straight to
the dramatic reversal, without having to
wait 10 or 20 years to watch all the colored
smoke dissipate and reveal messy human
individuals, full of surprises and contra-
dictions, in the place of ossifi ed symbols
of masculinity and femininity. A gender-
reveal disaster plays the whole thing out in
under a minute, with all the thrilling neat-
ness of a 1970s disaster movie, in which a
particular kind of overconfi dence is inevi-
tably punished by God, or by physics.
Come to think of it, these could be the
disaster movies of our time. All the right
components are there: human folly, hubris,
typecasting, fl ames. When you click hap-
pily on the latest gender- reveal failure, you
watch for the satisfaction of seeing certain-
ty upended — not majestically, on the big
screen, over the course of three hours, in
Sensurround, but on the small one, with a
cast of a dozen, in one calamitous instant.
Rita Dove is a Pulitzer Prize winner and a former poet laureate of the United States. She edited ‘‘Th e Penguin
Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry,’’ and her ‘‘Collected Poems: 1974-2004’’ was published in- Duriel E. Harris is a poet, performer and sound artist. She is the author of three poetry collections, most
recently ‘‘No Dictionary of a Living Tongue,’’ published by Nightboat in 2017.
In this, my fi nal column after more than a year of weekly choices from current American
book publications, I’d like to circle back to a poem that snagg ed my attention in the early
days of my appointment and refuses to let go. It stands as a preface to Duriel E. Harris’s
remarkable book ‘‘No Dictionary of a Living Tongue,’’ and as an incantation should not
be read as much as entered. Details materialize along a space-time continuum that feels
intensely familiar yet disquietingly inexplicable. Despite the opening disclaimer, we fi nd
ourselves following the bread-crumb trail of dream logic, each moment folding into the
next, as vivid and inscrutable as the nested fi gurines in a Matryoshka doll. Where does
reality end and the dream begin? And if reality is the only perilous constant, have we
been dreaming all along?Screenland
Poem Selected by Rita Dove‘Before this dream’
By Duriel E. HarrisBefore this dream there is a blue dress,
a tangle of trees, and the distance between voices.There is routine sorting of like things:
bank statements, unopened letters, photographs
turned inward from the damp.
There are cows in clusters, truck stops, cinder
block churches, scattered tractors,
and fi elds cleared and fl ooded.Before this dream there is a scored tablet.
A ream of paper.
A child’s face swollen from abscess shining like
a good beat down.And there is another dream; in it a building juts
forth like a missile.
It is a windowless octagon sided in cork. I am
strapped to it.