Dona Juanita and the Love of Boys by Gabrielle Everall Review by Kiran Bhat

Dona Juanita and the Love of Boys

by Gabrielle Everall

Review by Kiran Bhat

Dona Juanita and the Love of Boys, written by Gabrielle Everall, attempts to take the narrative of the male gaze and feminize it. This is no easy task. The male gaze has had centuries to millennia to form, and Everall’s response is based largely on the Western perspective (understandably so, given Everall’s country of origin, Australia, and her own cultural background). The verse novella is a mix of page-long reflections and short poems, and then afterwards a collection of poems, which showcase Everall’s playfulness beyond her Dona Juanita conceit. Everall chooses to take certain figures from literary history such as Byron’s Don Juan or Goethe’s Werther (from The Sorrow of Young Werther) and imagine them from a female perspective. The personas Everall imagines are expansive and satirical subversions of the male ego which hold very little back in regards to bravado or bluntness. The titular one is Dona Juanita.

…………………The female Don Juan is my anti-thesis, my thesis. I am part of her dialectic. Her tanned

…………………skin, my white skin. Her blonde hair, my dark hair. Her blue eyes, my hazel eyes. Her

…………………white bikini, my navy-blue full piece…

To imagine Dona Juanita is to imagine everything that Everall feels she cannot be. To be a sun-kissed, skinny beauty, to be the exact picture of the beach babe that Australians find beautiful. Unlike Everall, or any human being for that manner, Dona Juanita is aesthetically flawless, because beauty guarantees attraction from the average. However, “The female Don Juan is no woman. Her opera crescendos as she falls.”

Dona Juanita’s introduction mixes prose and poetry. Everall’s postmodern tendencies are on full display. She takes advantage of parenthesis to subvert contemporary concepts and to build up Don Juanita’s persona. 

…………………the first wave (the big suck)

…………………men are mere particles

…………………seaweed algae

…………………sucked into her overriding nalu

…………………a surfie boy’s career curve

…………………[. . .] 

…………………the third wave (riot grrrl)

…………………this wave’s not dead

The parentheses almost overwrite and rewrite the words that come before and after them, allowing the reader different interpretations—emotive, intuitive, intellective, or otherwise—of the same sentence, with or without the words around them. Everall drops this structure after a few stanzas. The language instead becomes an ode to the wondrous Dona Juanita, and all of the ways she exists as a hyper-valorized woman. Everall’s goal is to take the way that men in literature are praised when they seduce or belittle women and place that power in the hands of a female. “[B]oys are thrown away / like disposable lighters” when Don Juanita deals with them, just as the moment in which a male tries to sleep with her for career advancement, the “claim-name / becomes a taboo / a male moniker Lewinsky.” Whatever historic role in which women have had to turn to men or be abused by men in order to get ahead, Dona Juanita inverts it:

…………………She is the confounding cockatrice

…………………and you’re lucky

…………………she ties your feet together

…………………when she released you

…………………you are still, motionless, stupefied.

Whereas Dona Juanita is powerful and in ultimate control, the Werthergirl (based on Werther from Goethe’s The Sorrow of Young Werther) is lost, desperate, and lonely. She yearns to please an already married man named Lot, subjecting herself to whatever he dares ask her so that she may feel loved. If Lot doesn’t let her kiss him, she “cover[s] his cock with ten hundred kisses.”  Even after Lot goes to his wife, “Lot’s blown-up, airbrushed photo is still on [her] wall.” Unlike Dona Juanita, who represents female strength at its zenith, Werthergirl is tame and powerless. In a similar fashion, the persona Venetia exists only to be labelled by men, never to be understand.

Some of the strongest writing comes from the poetry which comes after the verse novella. The stand-out poem, “I Disobeyed the State” functions as the closest thing to an autobiography one would find in this collection. The portrayals of abuse and sexual violence are extremely vivid, almost flinging the reader to the other side of the room by how raw, direct, and immediate Everall’s words are. Other poems communicate human truths with beauty and hopefulness. As Everall says in her own poem, “She was a Passion Fruit”:

…………………She was traveling — 

…………………not countries, nations and provinces —

…………………but the movement that escape truth in their

…………………motion

…………………the amplifications of multiple excitations

…………………moving accumulating never thinning out

…………………leading her to fits and a prolonged howl

…………………and everything stops.

Life is a web of constant suffering, but it is the artist’s duty to snap the chains and to let one’s voice out. 

Everall’s verse-novella reappropriates the male language towards womanhood from the female perspective hits the right balance between satire and social commentary. In Dona Juanita and the Love of Boys, Everall has concocted a literary talisman, brimming with emotive desperations, mental perambulations, and self-intoxications to learn from, and by giving these emotive tendencies a name and narrative, Everall is taking shards of herself, beautifying them into diamonds, and casting them onto the page so that any reader of this book can find a reflection of themselves.

Kiran Bhat is a global citizen formed in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, to parents from Southern Karnataka, in India. He has currently traveled to over 130 countries, lived in 18 different places, and speaks 12 languages. He is primarily known as the author of we of the forsaken world… (Iguana Books, 2020), but he has authored books in four foreign languages, and has had his writing published in The Kenyon Review, The Brooklyn Rail, The Southern Humanities Review, The Colorado Review, Prairie Schooner, Eclectica, 3:AM Magazine, The Radical Art Review, The Chakkar, Mascara Literary Review, and several other places. His list of homes is vast, but his heart and spirit always remains in Mumbai, somehow. He is currently bumming around Mexico. You can find him on @WeltgeistKiran.

7 September 2021