On bodies

[kaberett]

THE CINNAMON PEELER

If I were a cinnamon peeler
I would ride your bed
and leave the yellow bark dust
on your pillow.

Your breasts and shoulders would reek
you could never walk through markets
without the profession of my fingers
floating over you. The blind would
stumble certain of whom they approached
though you might bathe
under rain gutters, monsoon.

Here on the upper thigh
at this smooth pasture
neighbor to your hair
or the crease
that cuts your back. This ankle.
You will be known among strangers
as the cinnamon peeler's wife.

I could hardly glance at you
before marriage
never touch you
-- your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.
I buried my hands
in saffron, disguised them
over smoking tar,
helped the honey gatherers...

When we swam once
I touched you in water
and our bodies remained free,
you could hold me and be blind of smell.
You climbed the bank and said

    this is how you touch other women 
the grasscutter's wife, the lime burner's daughter.
And you searched your arms
for the missing perfume.

        and knew 

    what good is it 
to be the lime burner's daughter
left with no trace
as if not spoken to in an act of love
as if wounded without the pleasure of scar.


You touched
your belly to my hands
in the dry air and said
I am the cinnamon
peeler's wife. Smell me.

  --Michael Ondaatje

In much of my own work this year (seek & ye shall find; [a scribble]; writing my wrongs) I play with the idea of the body as palimpsest: of our histories being written on our skins, metaphorically but also literally (laughter and frown lines, and of course scars, for those of us who have laid our bodies on altars of surgical steel). But it's not just that: it's about struggling with being queer, and genderqueer, and making that legible: the idea of "legible" identities, of being correctly "read". And it's the assumptions that other people make about my queer disabled body (and my queer disabled self) and my capabilities, and how oppressive that can be and can feel.

But more than that, for me it is about coming to terms and, yes, my word for the year, reclamation. Through the constraints of poetical forms I explore (at least in theory!) the constraints of my body: I've not yet written the sonnet about the pillars of my ribcage, but it is mulling, gently.

But it's not just about constraint, about strictures: my words have also been about body-as-poetry, poetry-as-body, encircling and enfolding and making safe. Among others, I think that I am here drawing on Ani DiFranco: your bones will be my bedframe and your flesh will be my pillow. And then, of course, there is Neruda, who is close to my heart because he makes bodies into the Earth into poems.

So: one of the things that poetry helps me with, helps me relate to, is my changing body and my changing relationship to it and why scent is so important to me; and poetry helps me better understand the bodies of others, and the embodiment of others.

And it all circles back, over and over, to my feeling that our histories are (being) written on our bodies, and simultaneously we write them in poetry, and both are cryptic and both are layered, and there is the tension between the action of the world on our selves and of our selves on the world; of the concept of the death of the author and how it applies to spinning our own lives into narratives, and weaving ourselves into the stories of others, and how we are seen by others. (And the shifts of perspective, of course: in Ovid's Heroides, in Carol Ann Duffy's The World's Wife, who take people whose value was in part determined by their bodies and give them voice, make them into something else.)

As you've probably gathered by now, one of my absolute favourite things about poetry is resonance - how we can communicate via the echoes of poems we love in poems that are new to us (and this is going to be the subject of my next post for you). It makes space for us to talk: and so. If you are comfortable, I would love for you to tell me about your experiences and your favourites, and -- in advance, I thank you, because I am keenly aware of how intimate a request this is.

Comments

[raze]

Oh, wow. This was a lovely poem, thank you for sharing. I have definite thoughts on the body and the relationship thereto, but need some time to organize it.

[kaberett]

I would be absolutely delighted to read them, as and when they bubble over into text.

TW: self harm, eating disorders, body/gender dysphoria

[raze]

Okay, let's try this.

I often do not perceive my body as part of the same machine as my mind. My body is more or less an old clunker that gets its passenger, my mind, from point A to point B, with the sort of love-hate relationship a person has with an unreliable vehicle they've owned for years and would take to the junkyard in a heartbeat if they could afford better.

My body isn't "right," and it never has been. For as long as I can remember, I have had a very poor sense of my size, my relation to my surroundings when moving through space, my weight, and even my appearance. There are times when basic tasks like walking are compromised by the disparity between the body I have and the body I feel. I have a difficult time assessing myself relative to other people and things; my mind believes that I am bigger than I am despite being 5'1" and very petite with very little change in my size since high school.

The fact that the my body does not feel right results in a dysphoria that is compounded by my physical and mental health, as well as my gender identity. I am genderqueer in a manner strongly masculine-leaning, but any attempts to express my gender physically are thwarted by an inherently feminine body. I can work out until the cows come home; it only makes me spindly and wiry, never bulky. I can wear mens' clothing, but the closest I'll come to being gendered correctly is the occasional child mistaking me for a teenaged boy. But I do no consider myself a boy because I am not a child, which is almost as upsetting as being identified as female. I find it as belittling as people who refer to me as "cute" or who call me "sweetie" due to my small and youthful appearance.

It doesn't stop there. I can not look in the mirror and accurately assess my body. I associate curves with femininity and think I have more than I do despite an adult weight that is well below average for my size; for many years, in a combination of skewed body image and intention to harm myself, I starved and exercised myself relentlessly in an attempt to whittle away anything that might give me the look of a woman: breasts, hips. The irony was that it only made me look smaller and more frail, creating a sort of tail-chasing body hate spiral.

Anxiety and obsession also made me a self-mutilator to the effect of significant, widespread scarring on my thighs, breasts, genitals, and arms. I don't have the option of pretending I am mentally well; if I wear anything but long sleeves and long pants, my past (and occasional present) is extremely plain. I can not have a lover without them seeing and acknowledging the damage to my body.

Finally, my physical health is declining, and I am needing to adjust to a body that I loathe both the appearance and functionality of. I am an active person; I need to be an active person, but neurological dysfunction, chronic pain, and other complications sometimes make a body I already deem weak for its tiny stature a further hindrance to me. My response is to put it through the ringer while I still can; many people refuse to believe that I am as sick as I am because I still do so much. They can't comprehend that it is at the cost of going to sleep every night with no possible position to be comfortable in, being persistently exhausted and run ragged.

So, on this one level, I afford my body one tiny inkling of respect: I'm impressed that it has survived me so far. I am torn between marveling at its ability to be inhabited by something so hostile to it, and wanting to frantically pound the "eject" button. Because of this, reading about other people and how they do and don't respect their bodies, how they relate to their bodies, always fascinates me.

Re: TW: self harm, eating disorders, body/gender dysphoria

[kaberett]

This is amazing and raw and honest and... close to a lot of the ways I feel about my own body, on the days when I am less at peace with it. So -- thank you.