Portfolio including 3 entries about life writing (the body; moving across genera

Portfolio including 3 entries about life writing (the body; moving across generation and a life in object)
“Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write yourself. Your body must be heard.” (Hélène Cixous, from The Laugh of the Medusa)

My body was returned to me spread-eagled, disjointed, redone, draped in mourning on this white winter’s day. Frantz Fanon, ‘The Fact of Blackness’, from Black Skin, White Masks

Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin? (Donna Haraway, A Manifesto for Cyborgs)

There is no nature, only the effects of nature: denaturalization or naturalization. (Jacques Derrida, Donner le Temps)

“Illness is the night side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. (Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor)

“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am, ” Sylvia Plath, from The Bell Jar

CW: bodies, illness, body image
Week 8: Writing the Body

This week we are going to think about how we can write about our bodies – how they work, how they exist in society, culture and politics, how they connect us to the world and others, and what happens when they stop working, or when others refuse, objectify or commit violence against them.

Bodies – especially our own – can be difficult to write about. It’s pretty hard to get any meaningful distance! They are also awkward – they fail us, they embarrass us, they sometimes escape our control. They are political, they are historical, they are sites of power and violence. Writing about bodies can allow you to write about history, politics, family, selfhood, illness, gender, sexuality, architecture and street planning…anything! They can be a gateway to thinking about how we exist in the world, and the issues that we physically and mentally come into contact with along the way.

However, bodies can also act as a barrier to writing and the creation of the persona ‘I’. Sharing our bodies in writing – creating a body of words – can feel like a raw and vulnerable act, and it’s not for everyone. It can also be very tricky to find a form or style that manages to transcend the immediate, the personal and the physical. Every writer has their own strategies to give form and order to what can otherwise feel too close. Maggie O’Farrell, for instance, has used chapters and formal headings to categorise traumatic experiences, which then in turn allows them to take on a narrative and a sense of purpose. For my part, I find it easier to write about my body when it is in conversation with someone else’s, whether that’s another family member, or a historical figure, or another poet. That point of comparison allows me to step away from myself and find some context and meaning. What might your strategies be?

Essential Reading

Ione Gamble – Poor Little Sick Girls
Susan Sontag, extract from Illness as Metaphor
Torrey Peters – Detransition, Baby

Further reading

Luke Turner, Putting Men in the Frame, Images of New Masculinity (Guardian article, available via reading list)

Creative task

As many of the articles on the reading list explore, often we do not think about our bodies until they fail us, or until others perceive or disable them on our behalf. Other people’s gazes or comments can ‘Other’ and define us (as Fanon describes in the quote above), buildings and city layouts can disable us, illness and vulnerability can alter our sense of self.
After completing the reading, I would like you to write a paragraph about a time either:
When your body has failed you
When an external force (a person, a law, a place, an event etc) has defined/othered your body
When you have had to renegotiate your relationship with your body

Week 5: Moving across gen(re)ations
 
Reading

Yaa Gyasi – Homegoing
Lemn Sissay, My Name is Why (e-book)
The Adoption Papers Jackie Kay
Salman Rushdie – Midnights Children (the first 20 pages)

Info

This week we’ll be looking at life writing that actively crosses back and forth between generations and genres. First with the ‘found’, document-based memoir of adoption and care from Lemn Sissay, then with Jackie Kay’s ground-breaking play-poem, The Adoption Papers and Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, fictionalising stories from the archives that have been lost, or passed along.

In the case of Kay, her adoption, parentage, heritage and identity. What can be gained from reading Kay’s story across genres. In My Name is Why, we see how including documents and ‘found’ material might enrich a text. Sissay lets his own adoption records speak for themselves in amongst his writing, and indeed records his immediate responses to these documents as he finds them. What material might you include in a piece?

Kay’s, Sissay’s and Gyasi together also reminds us that autobiography is always, inevitably, a collective act – we depend on the testimonies, documents and stories of others to fill in the gaps in our own knowledge of ourselves. And this dependence and plurality can present all sorts of ethical and representational problems. What happens if you don’t have access to your own story and history? Do you entirely own your own story? What obligation do you have to the other versions of you and your key events

Week Two: The material gaze – a life in objects

Shaping memoir via the use of objects allows us to give a material reality to our memories and experiences. They give a shape to thought, enabling us to contain an idea and make the abstract into a concrete.

This week we’ll be looking at different approaches and forms of doing this, and how it can provide a compelling way of writing about family, relationships, identity, and history.

We’ll also be discussing how objects can allow us to shift focus in our writing, enabling us to zoom in and embrace detail or else offer a wide-angle shot on a life in context. To see what I mean, look out for this technique in the work of all three writers – the most obvious example of this shifting zoom is perhaps ‘Ambergris’, but they all have it.

Essential Reading

Amy Liptoft, ‘Ambergris’, in Caught by the River
Vahni Capildeo, ‘Investigation of Past Shoes’, Measures of Expatriation
Fatima Farheen Mirza, ‘Boxing’; Granta

Things to think about

While reading these three very different pieces, think about how each writer uses their chosen object (or objects). How do they describe them (i.e. physical details, history, origins)? How do they use the objects to show (rather than tell?) the reader something about themselves? How do they place meaning in these objects despite us having no relationship to them? How does each piece move between the ‘zoom’ and ‘wide-angle’ perspective?

Task

Talisman, artefact, treasure, trinket

In class we will be talking about perspectives in life writing; about the importance of including a mixture of focused and wide-angle shots. When applied to objects, a focussed shot might be a detailed, unwavering description of an object or thing and a direct exploration of your relationship to it/ how it makes you feel. A wide-angle shot of an object might be a more general description of its history, its context in relation to other objects or things, its provenance or life cycle. Think about how the chosen reading does this.

Before class, I would like you to have a go at some close focus writing.

Choose an object that is meaningful to you in some way. It might mark a particular event in your life, or have been kept since childhood, accompanying you as you grew up. It might be something passed down through your family, a souvenir, or even something that you choose to keep hidden. It might be the treasured item that listed in the original persona Q&A. Or, on the other hand, it might be something seemingly every day and insignificant like a coffee cup – an object that you feel might allow you a way in to writing about an issue close to your heart. Tip: when choosing, think about its appearance and provenance. Can it tell a good story?
Have a go at free-writing about your chosen object, describing it minute, painstaking detail. Don’t talk about its history or provide any context. Just paint a linguistic picture of it. 200-500 words.
If you can, take a picture of your chosen object or thing (or bring it in!) and bring it to class along with your piece of free writing.
In class we will be developing these descriptions, as well as thinking more about ways of offering the ‘wide-angle’ shot.

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