LOVER

Trauma narratives/punk rock

An excerpt from "Heart Berries" Terese Marie Mailhot's Afterword interview with Joan Naviyuk Kane

Q: I asked about why you wrote the book and you said, "One reason is there is so much criticism about the sentimentality of writing about trauma. Writing about it is irrefutably art but also does the work of saying something. Women (survivors sic) should be able to say this and say it however we want. There's so much pushback about how a child abuse narrative can't be art." Can you say more?

TMM: I know the book isn't simply an abuse narrative, but then it is. I was abused, and brilliant women are abused, often, and we write about it. People seem so resistant to let women write about these experiences, and they sometimes resent when the narrative sounds familiar. It's almost funny because, yeah - there's nothing new about what they do to us. We can write about it in new ways, but what value are we placing on newness? Familiarity is boring, but these fucking people - they keep hurting us in the same ways. It's putting the onus on us to tell it differently, spare people melodrama, explicative language, image, and make it new. I think, well, fuck that. I'll say how it happened to me, and by doing that maybe it can become new. I took the voice out of my head that said writing about abuse is too much, that people will think it's sentimental, or pulling at someone's pathos, unwilling to be art. By resisting the pushback, I was able to write more fully and, at times, less artfully about what happened. 

I remember my first creative writing professor in nonfiction asked his class not to write about abortions or car wrecks. I thought, You're going to know about my abortion in detail (if only ther had been a car crash that same day). I dont think there's anything wrong with exploring familiar themes in the human experience. When the individual gets up and tells her story, there's going to be a detail so real and vivid it places you there and you identify. I belive in the author's right to tell any story, and the closer it comes to a singular truth, the more art they render in the telling.

Q: Can you speak to the competing impulses of memoir being therapeutic at the expense of being imaginative or provocative/hurtful/critical?

TMM: Cathartic or therapeutic, those words are sometimes used to relate a feeling, like a sign of relief or release, but therapy is fucking hard. My therapists don't pity me, not the good ones; they made me strip myself of pandering, manipulations, presentation - they wanted the truth more desperately than I did, and then they wanted me to speak it - live it every moment. I feel like writing is that way. Writing can be hard therapy. You write, and then read it, revise your work to be cleaner, sharper, better, and then, when you have the best version of yourself (not rhetorically, but you've come close to playing the music you hear in your head_ - you give it time and re-read it - you go back to work - it seems endless. Nothing is ever communicated fully. The way being healed is never real unless every moment of every day you remind yourself of your progress and remind yourself not to go back, or hurt someone, or do the wrong thing - it's not healing unless you keep moving and you're never done. The work of "never done": therapy and writing.

 (It's no accident that the critique of "we've heard this before/it's too sentimental/it's too personal" is never leveled at the zillions of white men writing their zillion stories of their suburban repression,"generational family drama", addictions/divorces/affairs with students and etcetera? zzzzz The critique is leveled at women because women aren't supposed to be talking, or writing, period. This is the cultural, social REALITY of institutionalized sexism. And not only are women supposed to never talk, but women of color are supposed to not even have the thought to talk, and trans/lgbtq people are supposed to not even have the hope to think to talk. Aren't you bored with the stories of white men yet? You want to know how we survive, there's nothing more compelling, decolonize your library, decolonize your mind 

 

SURVIVES/how

When you feel the impossible

breathing down your neck

you're on the right track. Don't 

stop, the physics of moving create the energy

that will keep you alive. Life is fierce. There is space

 

beyond trauma, a place

not quite fully imagined. There is no map, no path,

only pathlessness. Mystery is

a wild freedom, a way to 

stitch the body to the soul again, outside of

the dogma of patriarchy, which tells us

to live without telling

the truth of how we got here.

No path in or out.

What is lost is lost. Do not remove

 

the people who do these things  

from the community - force them

in close, so their faces

touch my face, where I'm safe 

and they must inhale the width and breadth

of their violence. Set them loose

 

into the crazy range of mountains where bears

rule, where they must learn

to recognize the berry from the poison

or die, how to make fire with a stick 

and a ribbon, how 

to dig and dig with their hands

under hot red suns

to find a trickle of water

they yearn to drink, only

 

they can't drink until they carry

water to the crones roosting in the tops

of dark raggedy pines, in cups

fashioned out of bark and mud

that cracks their palms and soles. They will be

deeply compelled. Forgiveness

 

isn't binary, we can't honor our complexity

within the systems that produce 

the people who would do these things. You belong

 

to a ferocious pack now, on the edge of earth, flowing 

over spiky canyons, scrub and thistle, flowing through

cities like fog, we cannot be contained. We clean wounds

with stones, we hunt and cook on our own. Nobody

 

in this world

is free - some of us are healing. Maybe healing

isn't about forgiveness, maybe

there are too many questions for it to be so simple, such as how

do we define justice and ultimately

love? Build your healing outdoors

 

where you can stoke raging fires - beyond

linear thinking - be open

to the possibility

that liberation depends

on our ability to examine the essential

dynamics of power. Are we able

 

to dismantle power? Be fearless. Perhaps

there is no justice for survivors in 

this world, perhaps

we make a new world. My rapist will never

pay for his crimes. There is

no evening the score, there is no

lost and found. There is courage, though,

 

and open space to create

the beginning

of being fully seen. It's born

in the darkest hour, it emerges

in conversation with another. Like this. You

 

will make your way, I will find it

glorious - 

 

Adele/Machines/Field      

photograph ©EUnderwood 2017

 

Speak Truth To Power

#metoo

SAY HER NAME

MARIELLE FRANCO

Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw (who laid out the theory of INTERSECTIONALITY in the 80's) writes that you can find an anti-racist practice and a feminist practice, but you hardly ever find them in action together. Anti-racist and feminist politics created constituencies by imagining and acting for an essential “type,” the dominant image of a raced person being a man and a gendered person being White.

When the primary subjects of anti-racist politics are men, and those of feminism are White women, the particular needs of women of color to be free from both racism and sexism are ignored at best and compounded at worst, often with life and death consequences. As a result, anti-discrimination law brings relief to only some victims. When we’re trying to get relief for women experiencing, say, police violence, the remedies are weak because they’ve all been designed with someone else in mind.

In domestic violence policy and practice, for example, second-wave feminists insisted that violence affects all women equally, to prevent domestic abuse from being dismissed as a minority problem. “All women” were actually White, middle class women; policies created to address domestic violence assumed access to services that poor women of color did not have. Some battered women’s shelters required residents to participate in group therapy sessions, but monolingual Spanish-speaking immigrant women could not comply. The 1986 Marriage Fraud Amendment required immigrants to be married for two full years before applying for permanent residency. That rule created a barrier to reporting abuse and accessing resources – caught between the threat of violence and the threat of deportation, many immigrant women chose the violence. These policies and practices were created without an intersectional analysis.

Crenshaw’s recent work in starting the #SayHerName campaign expresses her critique of anti-racist strategy that isn’t also feminist. The campaign elevates the stories of women killed by police and seeks recourse in their cases, which receive far less attention than the killings of men. Andrea Ritchie’s book Invisible No More tells dozens of stories of Black women and other women of color being raped, beaten and killed by police. She names, among many others, Sandra Anton, Rosann Miller, and Alecia Thomas, whose situations mirrored those of Rodney King, Eric Garner and Freddie Gray, but whose names are unknown to most people. A truly intersectional analysis would identify the mechanisms that enable abuse and target those for change. Considering the intersection of race, gender and disability, for example, Ritchie calls for policies that do not involve police in addressing mental health breakdowns, but rely instead on community-based crisis interventions.

This methodology will inherently deconstruct sexist/racist hierarchies that presume that only "professionals" (ie white academics) can solve the problems of a community. When in fact, nobody knows better than the community how to help the community. You can't give power - that's an assumption rooted in privilege - but you can actively dismantle systems of institutionalized sexism and racism that prevent people from embodying the power they already have. How this begins in real time is by actively listening, which sounds easy but is extremely specialized and rare, as it requires a humility that few can truly practice.

EAU

To be intersectional (and also effective), then, we have to consider how a problem plays out differently for different people, raising the likelihood that we will come up with remedies that actually solve the problem for all.

The qualities and skills that matter most for intersectional leadership are curiosity, listening, openness and creativity. By asking questions, we can look at a problem not just through the lens of our own experience, but also those of others whose identities might make them vulnerable to harm. Find out who is experiencing the problem you want to solve, seek them out (or respond when they seek you out), listen to them deeply, share your truth and apply that new understanding to your strategy. The standard isn’t how intersectional is your identity, but how intersectional is your analysis. Regardless of identity, the analytic tools are always available to help us work with each other to solve problems for everyone.

RINKU SEN

 

Splitting hairs

"Is drawing dead?" What people mean when they pose a question of such an academic nature is: is _________ still relevant, is it still charged with potency in the current world/landscape? I'm of the mindset that fundamental acts such as drawing and painting are alive/meaningful so long as they are being done. But then I would say that - 

You can also answer the question by answering another question: what gives something meaning? I believe meaning is a construct and purely subjective, and it's up to the individual to decide what makes _______ meaningful to them.

The world at large, independent of action, just a thing existing, does not pass judgement on the meaning or lack thereof of anything: we do. I do. This hairbrush means nothing to me, now that my hair's completely fallen out. That lipstick, on the other hand, is vital for my survival and therefore: meaningful. Or maybe that hairbrush means more to me now than ever, given its symbolism of a time when I had hair. But if this is a question of simulacra/simulacrum I'm in the camp that believes that a symbol of a thing is as alive as the thing it symbolizes. I believe that camp has a fire in the pit and coffee on the picnic table. 

Isn't there something inherently strange about questioning the aliveness of a verb? By definition, it is an action, hence it lives. Or is it that with every drawing I make I'm a wizard! Activating the inanimate, bringing back the dead! If this is true than drawing is alive so long as I am.

I think the question itself reflects the core insecurities of living in a wild and wooly universe that we cannot control.

We try to convince ourselves that we are more meaningful than anyone could actually conceive.

If someone's going to question the "aliveness" or "meaning" of a thing they should start at the beginning and just wonder for a while whether or not they are actually dead or alive, or can ever really be.

In the meantime, I'll be drawing like there's no tomorrow. Because is there - 

#simulacra #simulacrum #baudrillard #hyperreal #deadoralive #drawing #answerthequestion