The Fifth Wound by Aurora Mattia | Review + Analysis by Salem Void
Purchase The Fifth Wound via Nightboat Books
Everyone who decides to read this has been given a gift. I finished reading many months ago, but it’s important to me that I represent the intensity of the feelings it left me with accurately, so here I am now, with the thoughts and feelings still just as fresh as the moment my eyes rested on the last page. The Fifth Wound is a text that perfectly articulates why I will always love to hurt, and why at the end of it all, I know we are here to hurt each other, in all the worst and most divine ways. An infinite undiscovered iceberg of the self we must chip at, incessantly, painfully. The gift of such sensations. Aurora Mattia’s words made me remember the rare moments in my life where I felt like a woman and I loved it. Her tales made me ache to find the place in my atmosphere where I might access those memories without dissociating the me that exists now from the woman I loved being then. I think of how much fear it fires in me, and how much the desire overwhelms it, still. I am always thinking gender thoughts, introspecting while I move throughout the world but what excites and overwhelms me about what Aurora presents, is how pure the desire feels. As a very openly and vocal transmasculine person, it often feels taboo, dirty, and inaccessible for me to associate feelings of joy and desire with femininity and womanhood, but those feelings are all taken and rinsed in waters so honest through the words she brought to me (and all of us), that I don’t feel too afraid anymore. I feel overwhelming desire to reconnect to the things I have been told I should be afraid of.
Aurora begins by beckoning the reader to promise not to fall in love with her. It might sound bold and presumptuous at first, but what follows is prose that separates blood from bone in such intimately visceral ways, that you, like me, might become convinced that the writer knows you much more intimately than they could possibly truly know. An energy that permeates throughout the novel and never ends, something so intense and light, all at once. The Fifth Wound feels like a cree to look beyond her siren song. Be patient with her prose, it demands it. It also demands persistence and urgency, with run on sentences and long footnotes full of passion, access to beyond what that intensity might mean, stories that layer over one another in flawless transition. Aurora paints images of memories past in vivid detail that make me burn to see it all through her eyes, and to comb through the recesses of my mind to find the colors I may have forgotten.
I want to say so often that this book is fundamental trans, gender, transgender, transsexual text – but that feels like a very flat summation of what The Fifth Wound does, and can do for a reader. It’s a weaving of myth, fantasy and reality that is nothing short of otherworldly, while maintaining a palpable mortality. Transition, love and sex, trans love and sex as genuine mythos, as written scripture, as history written by our hearts with our blood and breath and bodies. Her stories are never just one story, and I never felt a passive observer in them. I became the devil on her shoulder, the pen on the pages, a subway seat, the notes app in her iphone, the angel Ezekiel himself. Her words force me to contend with the idea that the things that happen to us, the cosmic and undefinable, all mean something, and that it all matters. To wonder why my love courses through me in the ways it does, why I compare it in my own mythos to sludge and plague. Pain and pleasures, folding into myths and mysteries.
The way that Aurora speaks of beauty penetrates the deepest parts of my fear centers as she interrogates what it means to be beautiful, what we gain and what we lose when we become beautiful. There is so much pain, and a just, vile amount of self awareness. There is so much willingness to admit the things others know about themselves but opt to lock away like ancient secrets. It is such fearless writing. From the moment Aurora begins to lead me into her tale of being visited by Saint Catherine of Sienna, I began to glow, and the intensity of that light did not cease, but shifted in color from soft pinks and purples to deep reds and blues.
She says, “whatever my genitals are, they were once a wound.” and that sentence alone is some of the most beautiful prose I have ever consumed in my life. It’s the truth for me, as an intersex person who was surgically “corrected”, whatever I have now, it was once a wound. That has healed, and split, and filled and split again. Violence is a language that Aurora understands fluently, and that speech intwines with the languages of prayer and memory to weave something truly magical. The waves of love, pleasure, of scent and sight, of fear and rejection, wash over me so aggressively that it makes me lovesick for the version of me that felt my love like hunger. She says that writing this book was a way to survive, and you can feel that in every page. She reminds me that attempting to outrun the pain will prolong it. She reminds me that I see us all as constellations in a vast galactic system, tangles together, planets and comets and moons, space dust in between. That love is often patience, that solitude is not a punishment for all. I relate heavily to Ezekiel in the sense that I am simply not very present day to day on an extremely consistent basis socially, or interpersonally. Aurora says “Paradise is nowhere” but to me, paradise is that mystery, the unknown, and the freedom to find what lies in between. I have hurt people with my desire for absolute freedom, for patience when my words are few and my presence is rare. I don’t feel proud of it. I feel angry that so much life and freedom was taken from me that I feel the fear down to my marrow of stagnancy, that I have accepted my own mortality so deeply that I want it to be a feature of me that is loved and admired, that I am only ever showing up in times where there is truly nothing else I would rather do, that all my thoughts and truth is in that moment, that I am ever present, that I am there there there. Im a fairy, like Aurora and Ezekiel. Paradise is nowhere, I exist in the wind, I love you from here, from there, from everywhere. Aurora frequently vanishes from heaving a presence online, without a word, without a trace, without a hint of when she might be back – The Fifth Wound is a visceral, intimate, reflective display of the parts of the mirage we don’t get to see, and an honoring of the parts that we do, a beckoning to let it go without claw marks.
-“Whatever my genitals are, they were once a wound.”
-“I am a blurry object.”
I am here, and I am gone. Love me and let me fly, watch the wounds split and fill and heal and split again. I have given up so many things in the pursuit of a satisfied mystery. To know it all, and to have it all, is to leave nothing left to learn. Aurora Mattia is an absolute fairy in every essence of the word. She created a portrait of the world with her words, and her wounds, that will stick with me forever. This is a book that reminded me, as fantastic writing usually does, that there are always new ways to put words together. There is always a new way to tell a tale, to weave a story, to construct a fantasy, to detail the viscera. I am grateful for The Fifth Wound and for the existence of people with such clarity of complexity like Aurora Mattia, Silicone Angel.
5/5 stars.