Book Review: Go Ask Ogre: Letters From A Deathrock Cutter, by Jolene Siana - Page 2

The thing I enjoyed most about Siana's letters, though, is their inherent contradiction. She wonders if she'll ever be normal, wishes she could be anyone but who she is, wonders what's wrong with her, hates herself, is a miserable, suicidal, teenaged goth girl who's lonely enough that she's hanging onto a mostly one-sided correspondence with the singer in her favorite band for dear life. She elaborately decorated the pages and envelopes, and sent them off to this fantastic creature, Nivek Ogre, in whom she sensed a kindred spirit, and her letters are full of the real hope that he is listening to her, that he wouldn't judge her, and that just maybe, he might be interested in her; that he might care about her.

Siana’s letters to Ogre are not about him, or what she thinks of him; they are all about her. Despite the fact that she is depressed and wracked with insecurities, Siana invests herself in her emotions, and believes in their essential validity. She has the ego and sense of self to be almost fiercely expressive, and self-righteously certain that her feelings are right and natural, and that they are of interest, and she is right: they are.

Every letter Siana wrote to Ogre is proof of her own elemental strength and creativity, and if writing them saved her, it’s only because of what was in her to begin with—a hunger to know herself, and a will to live truthfully. It’s her absolute surrender to her compulsion to write these letters, along with the unchecked extremity of her acknowledged emotion from which the real force of her letters, and this book, comes. Siana’s unaffected honesty, and the fact that when she had the urge to start writing Ogre letters she did not stifle it, contains the seed of her salvation.

Ogre’s kindness to Siana—as much as he could offer while clearly dealing with a full plate of his own issues—is genuinely moving. The fact that he answered her in the beginning, made a point of seeing her when she came to see his band play, encouraged her to keep writing to him, and never mocked or took advantage of a little girl's painful love is a somewhat incongruously wonderful human credential for a man who spent years of his life charismatically fronting a terrifying aural apocalypse for a living.

One of my favorite moments in the book is when Siana recounts, in a journal entry, the first time she meets Ogre after a performance in Detroit, and is unsure of how to pronounce his name. The name "Nivek Ogre" is a stroke of performative genius, achieved by simply spelling his decidedly anti-dramatic actual first name backwards to become the sharp, blood-spattered, dangerous creature that fronts Skinny Puppy.

Article Author: Jaime Nichols

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