“Nine Months,” “Cryptic Crossword LV,” “Her / Him / Our / Their / Us / Them / They Body,” and “Jaws Was on TV on a Saturday Morning”
Editors' Choice Picks
We are delighted to present this week’s selections from the Brain Mill Press Poetry Month Contest, Break Poetry Open, by talented poets Raymond Luczak, Holly Painter, henry 7. reneau, jr., and Mercury Marvin Sunderland.
We hope you’ll enjoy these editors’ picks as much as we did.
Nine Months
Raymond Luczak
mom still wonders how i lost my hearing she mentions having a miscarriage in april 65 & being surprised to find herself pregnant again in june 65 dr santini said id be born in january 66 instead i arrived in november 65 fully formed not a preemie i go home two days later
not long after my sister carole takes to reading out loud from a book she is learning how to read to me as i am trapped in my crib i have apparently cocked my ears to her voice laboriously decoding words
then mom changes her story she remembers having the miscarriage in march 65 it fell out of her while she sat on the toilet at 16 i constantly wondered if that was indeed possible a body expelling her own fetus
a heatwave in july 66 i turn pink & hot but everybody is hot anyway mom wonders maybe somethings seriously wrong at the hospital i am found to have double pneumonia & a high fever i look close to dying so a priest is called in i survive my last rites of death but my hearing doesnt
then mom changes details again she says she had a d&c done in february 65 when she felt her fetus wasnt growing it wasnt even two centimeters long no idea whether it was a boy or girl i no longer am sure what to believe
after i come back from the hospital carole reads to me again this time i bob my head around she doesnt realize ive lost most of my hearing no one has either she gets frustrated with me & gives up
by the time i turn 2 & a half mom asks her doctor why i havent begun talking he says maybe hes deaf she comes home & tells dad to stand me up & turn me so i can face the wall up in the tub since he was washing me i don’t respond to my name
research indicates a twin in the womb could miscarry leaving behind its other half in the 60s technology hadnt existed to detect such a tiny baby thats why moms pregnant test results in june 65 had so surprised everyone
up & down oak street where i once roamed the trees are mostly gone but the shadow of my other half still runs a mean yellow stripe right through the road of my life the mystery of never knowing him
Raymond Luczak is the author and editor of 22 books, including Flannelwood (Red Hen Press) and Lovejets: Queer Male Poets on 200 Years of Walt Whitman (Squares & Rebels). He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His online presence includes: raymondluczak.com, facebook.com/raymondsbooks, and twitter.com/deafwoof.
Cryptic Crossword LV
Holly Painter
Holly Painter lives with her wife and son in Vermont, where she teaches writing and literature at the University of Vermont. Her first full-length book of poetry, Excerpts from a Natural History, was published by Titus Books in Auckland, New Zealand, in 2015. Her poetry, fiction, and essays have also been published in literary journals and anthologies in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, China, Singapore, and the UK.
Her/Him/Our/Their/Us/Them/They Body
henry 7. reneau, jr.
henry 7. reneau, jr. writes words of conflagration to awaken the world ablaze, an inferno of free verse illuminated by his affinity for disobedience, like a chambered bullet that commits a felony every day, an immolation that blazes from his heart, phoenix-fluxed red & gold, exploding through change is gonna come to implement the fire next time. He is the author of the poetry collection, freedomland blues (Transcendent Zero Press) and the e-chapbook, physiography of the fittest (Kind of a Hurricane Press), now available from their respective publishers. Additionally, he has self-published a chapbook entitled 13hirteen Levels of Resistance, and his collection, The Book Of Blue(s) : Tryin’ To Make A Dollar Outta’ Fifteen Cents, was a finalist for the 2018 Digging Press Chapbook Series. His work has also been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
Jaws Was on TV on a Saturday Morning
Mercury Marvin Sunderland
Mercury Marvin Sunderland is a gay Greek/Roman Wiccan autistic transgender man who uses he/him pronouns. He’s from Seattle. He currently attends The Evergreen State College, and his dream is to become the most banned author in human history.
Mercury is a 2013, 2014, 2015 winner of ACT Theater’s Young Playwright’s Program, a 2015, 2016 selected playwright for ACT Theater’s 14:48 HS, a 2016 winner of the Jack Straw Young Writer’s Program, a 2016 selected participant for the Seattle Talent Show hosted by Rainier Beach High School, and was hired as a paid representative of Youth Speaks Seattle in 2016. In 2017 alone, he was selected for and won the 2017 Youth Speaks Seattle Grand Slam, and went off as one of the top five youth slam poets representing Seattle at Brave New Voices 2017, an international slam poetry tournament treated as America’s national tournament, and was selected to perform slam poetry alongside former Seattle mayor candidate Nikkita Oliver at the University of Washington. In 2018 his illustrations were selected for While Supplies Last, an art show hosted by Anthony White, a Cornish College of the Arts graduate. In 2019 he received his first literary journal acceptance from Fearsome Critters Literary Magazine Volume Two, his second from the February 2019 issue of Marathon Literary Review, his third and fourth from Across & Through Literary Magazine, and his fifth from The Dollhouse Literary Magazine.
BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month
For this year’s National Poetry Month, Brain Mill Press & Voices want to add to your #TBR pile, sing siren songs of unsung heroes, and signal boost living poets we should be reading more. By the end of the month, we hope you will have acquired 30+ new books of poetry and that they continue to multiply in the darkness of your library. Explore new voices & new forms — re-read some old favorites — play if you liked this poet, you’ll like… the old-fashioned way, algorithm-free — just poetry lovers talking to poetry lovers, as the Universe intended. Happy #NaPoMo2019 from Brain Mill Press.
The sunlight seeps soft through the womblike redness of my closed eyelids as I ease into consciousness.
Can I actually feel the crackling dislocations from my elbows to my fingertips, or is it simply familiarity, the recognition that the slabs of meat at the ends of my arms must somehow still belong to me, even if I can’t control them right now? I blink languorously, eyelids plinking together. How can I be more tired waking up than I was before I fell asleep?
I say the names of the bones to myself in a chanted catechism as I will myself to sit up. Lunate, scaphoid, triquetral. My tongue tap dances along the backs of my teeth and I wriggle against the pillow without using my hands. Capitate, pisiform, hamate. Once steady, I interlace my fingers, stabilize my left hand with my right, then pull and twist simultaneously. The movement is rote memory. Lightning bolt bright explosions implode within my hand every single goddamn time. There is a machine-gun chatter of bone against bone and I don’t realize I’m grinding my jaw and holding my breath with the hurt until I have to unclench and inhale. The sound of re-location echoes in my room — all of Oakland must be able hear it — before I switch, bracing right hand against left this time. I pull, twist, and my nerves scream in protest as the blood flows back into my hand. Each pale finger bursts into bright crimson bloom, tributaries abruptly flooded with color and the feeling that inevitably follows. There is an electric tingle like brushing wet skin against a light socket as I pop my thumbs back into place, then encircle my wrists and watch my ulna and radius forcibly realign. My elbows follow suit obediently, eventually, and I am grateful they don’t require more coaxing.
There is an electric tingle like brushing wet skin against a light socket as I pop my thumbs back into place, then encircle my wrists and watch my ulna and radius forcibly realign.
Breathe.
Once my hands are back together, I plant them on the sheets and twist my torso. Each vertebrae jumps back into place, an answering cacophony to the call of my hands. It feels like stacking books on a shelf until their spines are carefully aligned with the edge.
Eventually, slowly, surely, I sit up fully. I slip my fingertips beneath my scapula and crunch my ribs back in place. I roll my head in tiny circles until my neck no longer creaks. My ankles pop like bubble wrap and if there weren’t two screws in my left foot, anchoring my toes in place, they might add rifle-shot cracks to the discordant symphony of my skeleton. I swing my legs over the edge of the bed and shuffle into my slippers.
I keep the pain pills in the second drawer on the left-hand side of the bathroom sink, through the bedroom door and down the hall on the right. If they sat on my bedside table, right there beside me, within easy reach (once my hands were realigned), I might never make it off the mattress. The rattle of round pills against child-proof plastic is sweet harmony, a chorus of angels whispering against the seashell curve of my ear. They fall into the palm of my hand, sweet manna from heaven, and dissolve bitterly, beautifully beneath my tongue.
One of my earliest memories is as a toddler in the hospital, and the razorblade burn as they snaked a catheter up into me to help empty my bladder.
The pain of that urinary tract infection looks like bright, white, focused light and the weight of my Mama holding me as I screamed. The hospital is not an uncommon setting for my childhood memories, because there are so many other surgeries: a broken collarbone, stitches striped up my forehead in a scar that makes me self-conscious as a teenager, eye surgery after being declared legally blind. Scars remain in the places where my memory has evaporated like pools of rubbing alcohol. I am too young to have so many injuries, and the doctors label my mother negligent while the nurses cluck their tongues when she brings me in yet again. She is not a reckless parent; I am simply sick and undiagnosed. I will remain that way for decades.
Scars remain in the places where my memory has evaporated like pools of rubbing alcohol.
I grow older, and the hospitals are replaced by memories of rooms full of fellow elementary school students lined up in neat rows as we stood, backs against the walls, to be tested for scoliosis. I knew that my bones were curved, sinuous and slippery, because the doctors had already told us. I welcomed the escape from the tedium of our regular classroom routine and thought little more of a test that told me nothing new. It didn’t hurt yet — not more than anything else I’d been through, anyways — so I didn’t have to worry.
I grow older still, and my middle school years are defined by the hissing suck of the refrigerator’s rubber seal as I slip the protective plastic case containing the glass vial of human growth hormone and its syringe inside the artificial chill. Sleepovers meant an inescapable conversation with someone’s mom to explain why I was bringing needles over to spend the night. Sometimes I would sneak into the bathroom to inject the drug into my stomach or my hips; sometimes my friends watched the process, rapt and only slightly disgusted. The endocrinologist asked me questions about my absent period that made me squirm. His queries made me compare myself to friends who had already begun puberty, as if the flat line of my chest and tiny stature weren’t already stark reminder of how far behind my body lagged. Eventually, I refused to see him again, missing out on adding inches to my stature as the hormonal help ended.
In high school, I arch my back against the hard metal of the chair attached to the desks, feeling the deep ache in the curve of my spine. Some days I’d skip homeroom and drive my emerald minivan across the bridge until I found an expansive parking lot where I could sleep in the backseat without being noticed. Cool breezes fluttered in from the cracked back windows but none of it made the hurt go away. When I talk to a doctor about feeling so low, I don’t mention the pain — no one has connected any of the points into a cohesive constellation yet. He points out the pin on my lapel, a round button proclaiming my love of The Cure, and asks me if I take a lot of MDMA, listening to a band like that. I laugh in his face and never come back.
When I talk to a doctor about feeling so low, I don’t mention the pain — no one has connected any of the points into a cohesive constellation yet.
In college, the shame of calling out of work yet again burns bright. I wonder if the heavy plastic trays of food I hoist onto my shoulders were the reason why my whole body sometimes protested so vehemently I couldn’t even get out of bed. I feverishly save my tips, cycling through every brand of mattress topper available, but none seem to help. I email my professors to tell them I am unable to move from my pillows, much less sit up straight behind the wheel of a car, which means there’s no way I can drive to campus for class. Sometimes I drag myself to the doctor and beg for any kind of answer. Instead, they recommend I see a chiropractor and write me a note that excuses me from class.
After college, as a bonafide adult, I revisit my childhood spent in the emergency room. One night, I check myself in after two weeks of hitching gasps on dislocated ribs. I beg the intake nurse to help me slide them back into place, long enough so I can take a deep breath. Breathing feels like sucking oxygen through a blocked straw. Instead, two nurses and a doctor corner me. They proffer pamphlets that explain the link between narcotics and addiction; they encourage me to get myself clean. I tell them I don’t want narcotics, but they’re convinced they have me figured out. On the way out, one finally touches me and exclaims in surprise when he feels my rib cage shift. I sob painfully in the car as I drive home.
The diagnoses that came first were the ones that are always applied to young humans with uteruses who complain of inexplicable pain.
My medical record fills with words like conversion disorder, and hysteria, and hypochondria. Someone as young as me shouldn’t — realistically couldn’t — possibly hurt this much. The doctors can’t see my pain, which means they can’t measure it, either; obviously it must not actually exist at all. A primary care doctor finally refers me to a neurologist so he can wash his hands clean of me, and this doctor grants me the gift of a word that seems to fit: hypermobility. He shrugs, tells me there’s nothing else he can do for me. He doesn’t realize the benediction he has offered in the form of a diagnosis.
Someone as young as me shouldn’t — realistically couldn’t — possibly hurt this much. The doctors can’t see my pain, which means they can’t measure it, either; obviously it must not actually exist at all.
The salt of my tears cut channels through the foundation I patted on my cheeks to cover up the deep, dark half-moons of exhaustion beneath my eyes. I frantically search for more information in my ear, scrolling with one subluxed finger through pages describing collagen disorders. I see myself reflected in the words, each sentence strung together like pearls I could drape around myself to describe the mystery of my hurt. It is like that perfect, tiny moment of ecstasy when a word you couldn’t think of for days finally pops into your head unbidden. My heartbeat rings out like a hammer against steel, my bones reinforced with the titanium resolution of an almost-answer. I am suddenly dogged enough to fight harder, brighter, bolder for that which I now know to be true about myself and about my body. I am not quite there, but I am close.
I see myself reflected in the words, each sentence strung together like pearls I could drape around myself to describe the mystery of my hurt.
I am twenty-six years old and sitting in the bright primary colors of the pediatric ward in a hospital basement with no reception when a young geneticist with olive skin approaches. He wears a crisp white coat and I am distracted by the flickering sparkle of a tiny diamond in his earlobe as he diagnoses me, finally and conclusively, with hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (hEDS), a collagen disorder that can cause severe implications across the entire body and every system therein. He gives me a reason for my UTIs as a toddler, my eye surgery, the broken bones and random joint dislocations, the pituitary growth hormone deficiency, the unrelenting pain.
Along with the diagnosis comes the reality of my existence, combined with a slew of co-morbidities: dysautonomia, Complex Regional Pain Syndrome, facet joint disease, endometriosis, fibroids, dysphagia. There is a fatal flaw in my DNA and no cure for any of it; there is barely medical recognition, much less functional literature approaching a fix. The hEDS comes with an inescapable promise of more surgeries, and unavoidable complications from those surgeries, too. My jaw dislocates and stays out for 16 weeks before I am wheeled into the cool brightness of an operating room. My big toe dislocates and is eventually forced back into place with two screws. We ablate my nerves with radiofrequencies to try and deaden the sensation of pain and inject lidocaine into my muscles to try and prevent their uncontrollable spasms.
There is a fatal flaw in my DNA and no cure for any of it; there is barely medical recognition, much less functional literature approaching a fix.
A golf-ball sized cyst encroaches onto my right ovary and a fibroid invades my fallopian tube. A surgeon removes my reproductive organs, accidentally perforating the thin and friable tissue of my damaged uterus during the procedure. Every time a surgeon operates on my body, I ask them to take pictures of the places inside me that are broken. I clutch the images of my snarled insides to my heart as if they were pages ripped from a holy book. After years of being told it was all in my head, concrete proof of my pain’s existence is precious and perfect and makes me cry.
I become someone who is hyper-aware of my existence as a human with a body in constant rebellion. My body may be myself, but it is not my own.
My diagnosis is new when a well-meaning, nondisabled friend tells me that I’m going to “think myself into a wheelchair” if I keep talking about eventually needing one, and I can’t stop imagining her face as I look my doctor in the eye and tell him I’m not leaving his office until he refers me to a specialist to be fitted for one.
I’ve been asking to see a specialist now for months, unable to visit art museums or see concerts without my hips and knees and ankles dislocating, or my eyes blurring with the grainy darkness of near-syncope. Even the stout wooden handle of my cane, adopted as near-permanent after foot surgery, cannot keep me upright. He tells me that he is concerned I will become “too reliant” on the wheelchair, but he finally stops arguing when he sees the resolute set of my jaw that day.
Six months later, I am gripping the handrims of my new wheelchair. My cheeks already hurt from the uncontrollable grin spread across my face, but I cannot stop smiling. Even in the small space of the specialist’s office, I zip from corner to corner and back again, learning to maneuver my body in its new vehicle. I gave up long distance running long ago, after finally accepting that my ankles would never stop dislocating with each slamming step on concrete or treadmill, but have craved the endorphin rush of a runner’s high ever since. The speed and sure agility of my wheelchair provide the surety of that high.
Even in the small space of the specialist’s office, I zip from corner to corner and back again, learning to maneuver my body in its new vehicle.
The inaccessibility of the world serves as a sobering reminder of my limitations, however. It is not moving through the world on wheels that slows me down; I am faster, spry and more lithesome perched in my seat than I have been for years on my feet. No, it is the world itself. It is the sidewalks without curb cuts, the doors without automatic openers, the bathroom stalls too small to fit my chair inside, the entrances with stairs and the ramps around back (if they exist at all). I go to the store and can’t navigate between the too-small aisles; I go to the movies and dislocate my neck in the accessible seating (after asking nondisabled people to move); I go to restaurants and stare at the wood of the bar as my friends tower on high-top tables above me.
I see the same inaccessibility reflected in the ableism of the sneering faces of people who tell me that requesting accessibility is asking for extra privileges, who illegally park in accessible spots and curse at me when I ask them to move, who laugh in my face and tell me my life isn’t worth living because I am diseased, disabled, and therefore somehow lesser, despite brokering a tentative peace with my unpredictable existence.
After the bitter, blissful pill melts beneath my tongue, my entire body is suffused with a gentle tamping down of the loud static screaming of nerves on fire and bones dislocated from the mere act of dreaming.
I step into the shower and turn away from the water, letting it run down my back until the bee sting prickling from my winged scapula dulls to a quiet roar.
I towel off, careful to dry my scarred left foot with only a featherlight patting of the towel, turning my face in the mirror to see the red scar that climbs up my jaw and into my hairline. So much of my body feels alien to me, like the swathes of skin that remain perpetually numb post-surgery, or a foot so painful that even a sheet resting on it is unbearable agony. My body, my diagnosis, means I am an intrepid adventurer exploring an undiscovered planet, with little warnings as to what local flora and fauna might hurt me — or how, but I am learning.
My body, my diagnosis, means I am an intrepid adventurer exploring an undiscovered planet, with little warnings as to what local flora and fauna might hurt me — or how, but I am learning.
I wing my eyeliner out from my eyes and darken my blonde eyelashes with mascara. I outline my lips in vibrant crimson, carefully tracing the jagged contours of my upper lip and the u-shaped curve swipe of my lower. I work carefully until I am fiercely plumed in war paint and warning signs, because makeup is one of the few ways I know to seize control of my mercurial meatcage. I pull on clothes and despite the siren-song calling of my bed, begging for my return, I head out into the world prepared to fight: the pain from my body; against a world demanding my erasure for the sin of not fitting in; and for accessibility, deserved, promised, but not yet guaranteed. I slip an extra pain pill into my purse and face the world, where every act of my existence becomes an act of resistance by simple virtue of being in my meatcage.
You Have a Body features personal essays on the the ways we reconcile our physical forms with our identities. This series explores how our bodies sometimes disagree with us, how the world sometimes disagrees with our bodies, and how we attempt to accept that dissonance.
I understand and appreciate the amount of work and love and labor you have put into raising us.
You and dad came to this country as newlywed young professionals, and together you were always fighting as a team.
You were twenty-one and scared and fought your way through the racist, sexist, classist, homophobic spaces of the west coast, carving a nurturing space for yourself and our family.
You are the lioness, protecting her cubs from each element that is threatening.
You and dad are the first to take on the offender when something fucked up happens to one of us, and I love you for that.
Your words are like tiny swords, each one cutting slightly and swiftly, but deeply.
What I would like for you to understand, though, is how deeply you wound me.
Every time I come home, you comment on my body. I have struggled with my body image issues since I was ten years old.
It doesn’t help me that you were the charismatic 100-lb, 5’4” beloved beauty queen of your community.
Or that even now, after having three grown children, and two grandchildren, you don’t look a day over thirty, thanks to daily applications of Oil of Olay and vitamin E.
But my body? My body is a road map of stretch marks, and I shrink and grow depending on stress, work load, my thyroid acting up, the time of the year.
Every time I come home, I am subjected to your close readings of my body.
Oh, beta, you would be so beautiful if only your belly were flat.
Oh, beta, don’t wear short skirts around the house. Nice girls don’t show their legs to anyone but their husbands.
Oh, beta, why are you single? All of your cousins are married. Your younger brothers are engaged. If you lost thirty pounds, you would find a nice boy.
MOM! You have no idea what my life has been like. I have internalized your words to the point where I wake up thinking about my midsection.
Your voice haunts me. I go to bed wondering when the weight training will start affecting change properly.
The last time I was in fantastic shape, I killed myself every day. I swam and played tennis and danced and ran five miles a day. I broke my body over and over.
I fucked up my back during a period of weight training. My body hasn’t been the same since.
I don’t drink soda, I don’t eat desserts, I don’t eat red meat, I don’t eat white flour, I don’t eat or drink any dairy, I don’t eat fried foods. I cook for myself every day, and I am doing what I need to do in order to survive.
You want to know what my pain is like? This bodily transformation I have undertaken has resulted in a pinched nerve, and a bulging disc, and nearly constant sciatica with shooting spirals of pain running from my lower back down my leg and ankles.
I could barely sleep, much less walk. I have done everything that you and dad said. Education above everything, no? Two BAs, two MAs. I finished a PhD.
All of this financed by myself, through grants and fellowships, based on my merits. And I am not yet thirty.
Graduate school has broken me in so many ways, and constantly being around blonde-haired, blue-eyed, slender, pale, privileged, entitled pieces of flesh does not help my body issues. You try living in X for five years, one of the ghostliest cities on earth.
You try teaching undergraduate students from the wealthiest feeder schools in X, who have never been in the presence of a woman of color who holds power over them.
These students look like Barbie and Ken. I cannot compete with them. I won’t compete with them. The worst part about your words is that you say them with genuine love and concern. You don’t have a malicious bone in your body.
You will tell me these things while we are taking a walk or while you are putting coconut oil into my hair. We can talk about everything under the sun, but when I react to your words with anger and offense, you claim to not intend to hurt me. You say that as my mother, you have every right to say the things you do.
I disagree. I call these microaggressions. Your biggest concern is for my wellbeing, but you seem to believe that I am starved for companionship.
You are haunting me. Your words echo inside my mind, constantly.
I don’t know if it is because there are three weddings happening at the moment in our enormous, multigenerational desi family.
I don’t know if it because you yourself are haunted by your mother’s words.
I’ve seen what Nani says to you. I’ve seen the pain that etches itself on your features.
I’m the oldest grandchild and the only single one, and I am a disappointment in spite of my many achievements.
I wish you wouldn’t bring this stuff up anymore. I don’t quite know how to tell you all of this and have you actually hear me. Crying doesn’t help. Threats to you that I won’t come home to visit don’t help. I’m tired of taking it and it is affecting my wellbeing. I wish you could hear what I am saying. I wish you would stop. I love you more than anything on earth and I wish you could love me the way I do you.
You Have a Body features personal essays on the the ways we reconcile our physical forms with our identities. This series explores how our bodies sometimes disagree with us, how the world sometimes disagrees with our bodies, and how we attempt to accept that dissonance.
Fluffy. It was the one word that came to me as I watched myself on screen for the first time while sitting in my second-grade classroom.
The week prior, my homeroom teacher, Mrs. Koda, had filmed each student in her class present our book reports to the class. The theme was biography, and being filmed was a special first-time treat for all of us. Now, one week later, our class was gathered in the school’s media room, paper cups of popcorn in hand, to watch the video of class presentations. It was a treat for all of us to see ourselves on screen, but I was especially excited: a bit of an attention-seeker by nature, I had put together a makeshift costume for my presentation, on Madame Curie, and decided to present as the Nobel Prize winner speaking about her own accomplishments. I couldn’t wait to see my white lab coat, large round plastic frames, and the bright pink lipstick I snuck from my mother’s dresser slathered on my lips. (In case you’re wondering, no, Madame Curie was not known for her taste in bold lip colors. I had swiped the lipstick off my mother’s dresser the morning of the presentation and had yet to learn that bright Barbie pink is not and will never be my color.)
Nonetheless, about twelve or so presentations in, my teacher’s off-screen voice finally announced my name, and I looked eagerly at the screen, the fluttering excitement in my stomach freezing up quickly in shock. The girl who walked in front of the camera looked nothing like me— though she wore my costume, glasses, lab coat, horrendous lipstick and all. Though she responded to my name and presented the book report I had prepared, she wasn’t— couldn’t be me. Dark-skinned and shiny, this girl seemed to take up more space in the frame than each of the classmates who presented before her. She was what I could only describe as “fluffy,” from the cheeks, the neck, the arms and hands poking out from each sleeve of the stark white lab coat, which in itself seemed to function to conceal something larger in size than what was needed by my classmates.
The girl who walked in front of the camera looked nothing like me— though she wore my costume, glasses, lab coat, horrendous lipstick and all. Though she responded to my name and presented the book report I had prepared, she wasn’t— couldn’t be me.
I remember feeling a hot flush wash over me a few minutes into the presentation, coupled with the queasy feeling that I did not like what was happening and wanted it to stop. Towards the end of her presentation, I silently willed this large, dark girl to stop talking and just walk off camera. What almost made the situation worse was that no one seemed to catch on to the horror of it all. From the classmates who applauded at the end of my presentation like they had the others, to my teacher who loudly praised my self-confidence and creative costume, not one other person seemed to notice how strange this person was, that she wasn’t— couldn’t be me. It was as if that monstrosity was just who I was, the person who sat in my seat, who my classmates interacted with every day.
This experience marked the first time I can remember that I began to split myself away from my image.
“She” was “me,” a me who I kept at a distance, a me who became perpetually disappointing. “I” was the real me, the voice inside who found “her” intolerable. At eight years old, I had learned early to do what so many women rely on to survive in our world: to make an enemy of the “she” I met every day in the mirror, who smiled back at me in the photographs of my friends’ binders in high school, and dorm room walls in college.
At eight years old, I had learned early to do what so many women rely on to survive in our world: to make an enemy of the “she” I met every day in the mirror.
“I,” the critic, the judge, the police officer, would decide that, on a given day, my cheeks were too big, my makeup wasn’t right, I looked like a child, I was shaped like a whale, I came off as awkward, didn’t fit in— the list goes on. And I would walk through the world in a body that I could not— would not— fully own, reinforcing this chasm as I grew older.
As someone who loves to write, I began making a habit of filling the pages of my journals with caustic entries I would revisit years later in horror. I’d call myself names, scribble long paragraphs about my workouts and my food logs and my weigh-ins, peppering them with reminders to toughen up and work for the body and face I wanted. I saved simple joys in life to enjoy after the day I’d finally will my body into submission. I started up cleanse after cleanse, fad diet after fad diet, living my life like a kind of balloon bouncing between the high of a few pounds lost to the crushing lows when I’d yet again hit a point when I couldn’t make cabbage soup, lemon and cayenne pepper, or grapes and milk last longer than a few days. Then I’d blame myself: I simply lacked self-control. I didn’t want it bad enough. You gotta do what you gotta do, tough it out, get with the program.
Disowning your own body when it does not answer the standards of the critic means abandoning it; I learned this many years later. Internally, and with the desperation that came with envisioning the golden number, 125, less as a goal and more of a saving grace, “I” did the work of disowning “her,” that confident, creative, dark, “fluffy” girl on screen. I began a relationship with myself in which I found a home (albeit an uncomfortable home) in living a segmented life. It was as if I had grown accustomed to an existence akin to the image of a person looking into a shattered mirror to see many versions of herself reflected back. And as I grew older I began to realize that the shattering was no longer a phenomenon relegated only to my body issues that went without consequence. The shattering had established itself as a pattern in my life, reverberating in so many other places in which I managed multiple selves, with multiple different feelings about a given concern or issue: my relationship with my family, my status as a first-generation American, the conflicted feelings I had about myself as a woman, the qualities I had and wanted to have, the kind of people I looked up to, the feeling of never knowing what I wanted. The question here is not about the shattering itself, but more about my inability to see it as something that was anything other than normal.
I began a relationship with myself in which I found a home (albeit an uncomfortable home) in living a segmented life.
Many years later, natural curiosity would lead me to explore concepts such as W. E. B. Du Bois’ theme of double consciousness, Homi Bhabha’s theory on hybrid identities, and Uma Narayan’s words on epistemic privilege, all of which had used theory and philosophy to discuss different aspects of multiple selves, or shattering, as they affected different groups in our history. I began to see the shattering as a consequence of my positioning in the world: woman, South Asian, first generation, Muslim, chubby (my vocabulary has become a little more refined since second grade).
I went to college, where I didn’t try very hard, to work, which made me feel like a prisoner, and to grad school, where I tried so hard I burnt myself out.
I looked for myself in everything I read in this stage, found answers that broke my heart, learned for the first time to have compassion for the many people I have been, for the many people around me who may not be exactly like me but in whose struggles and positioning I felt feelings akin to the nostalgia, anger, hope, resilience, and sadness that were so central to my experience. The voice inside aligned itself with this shift, and I started to force it, literally force it, at least in the beginning, to praise the body it had abused without hesitation for so many years. I started, in my decision making and through my actions, to apologize to it, to show it the love and compassion it had craved for so long. At the same time, I started to see the power of the voice in matching the voices of others who, too, began to rightfully see their positioning, or perhaps their own shattering of different forms, as the outcome of a world that was not merciful to them.
I looked for myself in everything I read in this stage, found answers that broke my heart, learned for the first time to have compassion for the many people I have been.
Mad Men is the only show I have ever watched the way I read novels, revisiting dialogue, tearing apart characters and searching for hidden motivations for their decisions and interactions. Sally, one of the main characters, is the daughter of the protagonist, Don Draper. “I’m so many people,” she once said, sighing, still a young girl in the process of internalizing or numbing herself against all of that which would continue to be unfair, to dehumanize. That line, from this character, has stayed with me. I am, and have been, so many people.
In my late twenties, I began to retreat into myself. Wary of fighting, of working against, I moved back home and began to work from home as well, the very childhood home in which I first learned to live as many people. I haven’t gone out much the past few years, haven’t socialized the way I would have expected myself to. I, always desperate for adventure and discovery, somehow found myself becoming a homebody. In my quietude, in the repetitious nature of a predictable life, I began to stitch up the tears that had come to represent the many parts of me.
Some may call this state depression.
I certainly had undergone my share of depressive feelings while in this space: What am I doing, why can’t I seem to even want to go back out there? What is going on with me, why does being here feel so right? At the same time, I felt a sort of reunification with myself, the feeling that the different parts of me were meeting each other, joyously, after a long separation. Can some depression be like that, like answering the calls of many voices asking to be with one another again? I am connected to that second-grader today, I find different dialogue for her confrontation with her on-screen image, and I have done the work of making myself whole again, in a world that is better for it.
You Have a Body features personal essays on the the ways we reconcile our physical forms with our identities. This series explores how our bodies sometimes disagree with us, how the world sometimes disagrees with our bodies, and how we attempt to accept that dissonance.
At eight years old, I sat in church while the pastor informed the congregation that a wife’s body did not belong to her, that marriage meant that her husband owned her sexuality.
I doubt this was the first time I had heard this sermon, but it juts out in my memory. I sat stiffly in the pew, every inch of my skin hurting. It isn’t fair, I couldn’t say. I don’t want that, were forbidden words. The future I was being offered was the present: my body belonged to men now, and it would belong to men in the future.
I was raised to love a God that asked me for everything. My life, my body, my wants, my desires, my goals, my dreams, everything a person could possibly call theirs, God wanted all. The language of my Evangelical faith was, Less of me, more of Jesus, and, Not my will, but God’s. You surrendered to God, you died to self, you released all control and let God define you. And it was God that said that I would grow up to marry a man and give my body to my husband.
I was raised to love a God that asked me for everything. My life, my body, my wants, my desires, my goals, my dreams, everything a person could possibly call theirs, God wanted all.
There was no raging against this. As much as it hurt, as sick as I felt listening to those words, it was a sickness akin to grief: an acknowledgement, a resignation. This was the truth, commanded by God himself, and no small child had any power to change it.
I could only relinquish myself. This was the one line in the sand: obey God or rebel. One led to contentment, happiness, fulfillment. The other pain, destruction, and hell. All that was required of me as a child, the only thing I needed to learn was how to obey better. Obey the Lord. Obey my parents. Obey authority. And one day, my future husband. There was nothing else.
The sexual abuse took my body before I understood I had one. It was part of my formation of consciousness, how I categorized the world. What houses looked like houses where children were being hurt? What men looked like men who loved their daughters too much? Why did so many girls look like they deserved to be spared when I certainly didn’t? I made these assessments with the casualness of familiarity. By the time my parents were separated, and it was my second oldest brother leading me off to the bedroom, I had no sense that I could say no. It simply was. I’d trained myself into empty boredom. Bodies tune out consistent stimulus. I dissolved into nothing.
I had no sense that I could say no. It simply was. I’d trained myself into empty boredom. Bodies tune out consistent stimulus. I dissolved into nothing.
I was handcrafted by God to be a girl. It was my mother’s prayer. In the terror of an abusive husband and the chaos of two sons, she wanted the innocence of a girl, the quiet calm of a daughter, whole and set apart from the trauma of abuse. So God created me for her. I was an infant so beautifully still, so sweetly quiet, my mother could forget she was holding me in her arms. An answer to prayer.
But I was also girl; my mother put on me the predilections of what she saw as feminine traits. My emotions were suspect, held up to scrutiny to determine whether they were true or had hidden motivations. Spoiled, prone to dramatics, feigning illness and weakness. A cunning child, willingly provoking her brother to violence for the sheer delight of getting him in trouble. My anger was an intentional cruelty I inflicted on my family, my tears manipulative attempts to avoid punishment. When my mother reflected on my childhood, it was with the assurance of her parenting skills; I was bad, but she had made me better. I was lazy, rebellious, manipulative, and she taught me obedience.
I was not a teenager, my mother pointed out with pride. Teenager meant self-exploration, independence, rebellion—all things that contradicted the relinquishing of self. The only lesson on defying that God taught was how wrong it was to defy God. So why not skip all that? Why not jump ahead to the right conclusion and avoid the misery?
For once my mother was proud of me. I received praise from her when I scorned my childhood self and called her a spoiled brat. Who else but someone who loved truth, whose thinking wasn’t clouded with self-interest, would be willing to acknowledge how wicked they had once been? I was wise now, someone who cared about logic before emotion. I disconnected so deeply from any felt experience that I insisted to myself that I was not hungry if I had just eaten, I was not tired if I’d slept through the night; these were facts. The body—the flesh, as our Christian faith called it, in all its carnality, only wanted to trick us, and I was not going to be tricked.
I disconnected so deeply from any felt experience that I insisted to myself that I was not hungry if I had just eaten, I was not tired if I’d slept through the night.
I had to rearrange my feelings to match what I was supposed to feel. The only trauma I was allowed was “a girl without her father,” and everything I experienced was assigned to it. Any other problem was merely physical. I was inexplicably sick a lot: headaches, stomachaches, allergies, and a chronic case of PMS my mother insisted could plague me all month long.
It is easy to feel afraid and call it being cold. Sadness simply becomes exhaustion. The wish for death a Christian’s desire to go home to heaven. It’s not that I was entirely unaware that begging God to kill me had no spiritual motivation. But when I slipped up, when I admitted to myself what I really felt, I had to go back to the process of making my emotions line up correctly.
I was a girl. I wanted a boyfriend. There was no question. It was easy to be this way, to logically reverse emotions. What did I feel toward boys? Attraction. What was attraction? What I felt toward boys. There was no conscious effort on my part, no confusion or doubts. It didn’t matter that I hated these things. They were so. They were determined by God and I had no fight in me.
It is easy to feel afraid and call it being cold. Sadness simply becomes exhaustion. The wish for death a Christian’s desire to go home to heaven.
I was solidly an adult before I could finally tell others about the sexual abuse. I worried that my mother was right; I was manipulative. Because to talk about the abuse was to intentionally recall the trauma, to bring to mind the kinds of chronic pains our bodies let us forget about. I didn’t have to do this, so didn’t it, by definition, mean I was playing the victim? It felt less like I was tearing down the walls to find the fresh, real, spontaneous self underneath. I was making myself climb back into my body and teaching myself how to map those feelings into emotional expressions.
Abuse survivors are often handed a narrative that says: there is no such thing as the complete destruction of the human soul. No matter who hurts you, no matter how broken you might be, you can’t help who you are, the reality of you. There is always a before to get back to, a version of yourself that exists untraumatized that you merely need to find. If any part of you is still affected by the trauma, then you have not arrived at your real self.
What did I feel toward boys? Attraction. What was attraction? What I felt toward boys… It didn’t matter that I hated these things. They were so.
What of me was unaffected by the abuse? What self existed prior to it? No one cared if the trauma was what caused me to say, I am straight, I am a girl. No one asked me if I should separate myself into pieces to determine their uninfluenced truth.
I couldn’t tell you who I was, only what I wanted. When I said, I’m attracted to women, it’s because the idea sounded so good. I wanted to be; it was the first time I imagined love as good. Was that the abuse talking? Someone who runs into the arms of women to avoid their trauma with men?
When I said, I am non-binary, I did so because it felt right. It meant I could conceive of my body as a home, something I could change and transform into a livable space. Does it make too much traumatic sense, the chronically dissociated survivor, calling themselves non-binary? What proof can I offer anyone that this is my unchangeable soul?
When I said, I am non-binary, I did so because it felt right. It meant I could conceive of my body as a home, something I could change and transform into a livable space.
None. But I’m more inside my skin than I ever was before. I have dimension, solidity, a sharper sense of my skin. What more is there to owning your body other than finding what makes it easier to live in? I’d accepted for so long narratives that said that easier was cheating, that healing meant forcing yourself into what made you miserable or afraid because it was good for you, that who you are was somehow different than who you want to be. And yet I cannot deny how much easier it is for me to look in the mirror now and say, I am me.
I looked at God and said, I am mine. I take back everything. No more surrender, no more less of me, no more resignation to who I’m supposed to be, whether I like it or not. Obedience taught me how to surrender myself and rebellion is my refusal. There is nothing more rebellious than the word no. No, I did not deserve the abuse, no, I am not my mother’s daughter, no, I will not marry a man, no, I belong to me.
It is incremental. I spent so long comfortable with being uncomfortable, so used to contorting myself into obedience. But I am teaching myself to resist, shaping myself so that my body feels distinctly separate from others. I am no longer without form and void. I called myself into existence. And it was good.
You Have a Body features personal essays on the the ways we reconcile our physical forms with our identities. This series explores how our bodies sometimes disagree with us, how the world sometimes disagrees with our bodies, and how we attempt to accept that dissonance.
"The Dark Fantastic" Fills an Imagination Gap in Youth Media
As someone who came of age with the Harry Potter series, it is astounding I barely noticed how few Black characters were in the books.
After all, the focus of the books was on the main characters Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, and Ron Weasley. Although Hermione Granger was a particular favorite, the default white protagonists I had become used to seeing in teen fiction and fantasy caused me to see her as white until a few years ago. In Professor Ebony Elizabeth Thomas’ book The Dark Fantastic, she puts a name to my experience: the imagination gap. Published by NYU Press, the book will be released in May 2019.
Explained in the introduction, the imagination gap is a lack of development in the imagination of youth caused by seeing the same stories and the same default white characters. Thomas further explains that this is the result of the titular dark fantastic cycle, a cycle that is influenced by the role race plays in stories. The dark fantastic cycle involves a Black character embodying spectacle, hesitation, violence, and haunting, often on behalf of a white protagonist. By examining certain instances of the dark fantastic cycle in sci-fi fantasy books and shows aimed at teens, Thomas illustrates how the stories told in mainstream sci-fi fantasy media tend to erase the presence of Black characters, AKA The Dark Other.
The imagination gap is a lack of development in the imagination of youth caused by seeing the same stories and the same default white characters.
In The Dark Fantastic, Thomas chooses to discuss the dark fantastic cycle in four different media and four different Black female characters that have been discussed at large through digital media culture and communities (fandoms). These media consists of Rue from the young adult series The Hunger Games, Gwen from the BBC fantasy television series Merlin, Bonnie from the American teen vampire drama The Vampire Diaries, and Hermione Granger from the Harry Potter book series.
While the critiques of all the media in this book are worth looking into, the ones for young adult literature are especially notable. Starting with Rue from The Hunger Games, Thomas explores how the dark fantastic cycle causes Rue’s innocence as a young Black girl to be transferred to Katniss, the series’s white female heroine. As a book series that initially focuses on children forced to battle each other to the death in a dystopian world, it was chilling to see how Rue is treated due to the dark fantastic cycle.
The dark fantastic cycle involves a Black character embodying spectacle, hesitation, violence, and haunting, often on behalf of a white protagonist.
Through the lens of the dark fantastic cycle, we see how Rue goes from being seen as innocent girl to not being seen at all. By the time Rue’s story enters the haunting phase of the cycle, she is a ghost who is only remembered as a resource for Katniss’s skills and a martyr for District 11. Rue’s dark fantastic cycle is reminiscent of other fictional Black deaths like Nurse Betty from Resident Evil: Extinction and Bill Potts from Doctor Who. Therefore, the chapter on Rue serves as a comprehensive explanation about Black fictional characters whose deaths motivate white protagonists.
In addition to discussing Rue as a character, Thomas also tackles readers and viewers reaction to Rue in her book and movie form, relating the reactions her imagination gap theory and the dark fantastic cycle. By smoothly connecting these concepts to consumers, Thomas expertly demonstrates how an inability to visualize Black characters in sci-fi fantasy settings results in astonishment and outrage, especially from white readers and viewers in fandom. Thomas also does something similar in the chapter discussing Gwen from Merlin, showing how pervasive the imagination gap in a variety of media.
Thomas expertly demonstrates how an inability to visualize Black characters in sci-fi fantasy settings results in astonishment and outrage, especially from white readers and viewers in fandom.
In contrast to the chapter about Rue and The Hunger Games, the chapter on Hermione Granger and Harry Potter is more optimistic. This is due to Thomas’ personal anecdotes about her involvement in the Harry Potter fandom and how her fan fiction about the minor Black character Angelina Johnson relates to interpretations of Hermione Granger as a Black girl. In addition, Thomas explains how racebent interpretations of Hermione Granger are a part of several methods of restorying, i.e., retelling stories.
With restorying, Thomas states that there is an infinite potential for stories due to the different methods involved in creating them. These include changing the location, changing the perspective, changing the mode, collaboration, and changing identity. Changing location moves the setting to another time and place, while changing the perspective lets another character tell their side of the story. Meanwhile, changing the mode consists of going from one medium to another (i.e. from fiction book to comic book), and collaboration involves people working together using digital media. Finally, changing identity can involve making a character perceived white to be Black or a cisgender character genderfluid.
By bridging pop culture, personal experience, and academic study, The Dark Fantastic provides a crucial examination of race and storytelling in sci-fi fantasy media aimed at teens and young adults. Not only does Thomas discuss how Black characters are erased in an inescapable cycle, but she also provides a guide to breaking it. Many have already broken the dark fantastic cycle with new stories, and this book is a good starting point for more.
The Afro YA promotes black young adult authors and YA books with black characters, especially those that influence Pennington, an aspiring YA author who believes that black YA readers need diverse books, creators, and stories so that they don’t have to search for their experiences like she did.
Latonya Pennington is a poet and freelance pop culture critic. Their freelance work can also be found at PRIDE, Wear Your Voice magazine, and Black Sci-fi. As a poet, they have been published in Fiyah Lit magazine, Scribes of Nyota, and Argot magazine among others.
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