5
The Body of Identity
The body offers deep truths all its own. Different truths, truths of difference.
—STEPHEN KUUSISTO AND RALPH JAMES SAVARESE
I have a disability, one that others aren’t always able to see. Recently I mentioned this disability to a new friend. She leaned toward me and said, in a half-whisper, “Well, don’t worry, I would never have been able to tell.”
I realized this person felt she was being kind. But there are painful assumptions loaded into this comment, one that I’ve heard versions of many times before: my diagnosis is one that I should want to keep hidden. I should feel reassured and flattered that it doesn’t “show.” What about those times when I cannot hide? How should I feel about myself had she noticed?
I began, in response, to explain to this person why she may not have found my disability obvious in that context. Then I stopped and changed the subject. More dialogue would have made her uncomfortable and probably elicited more comments on how well I “manage.” Like so many disabled people, I made the choice to drop sharing a fact of my identity and divorce myself from a key part of who I am. The choice to stay quiet is a choice I’ve made before, and not one I’m especially proud of. But like so many people who exist outside the mainstream in their bodies, their minds, their loves, their identities, I need to ration my emotional energy. This won’t be the last such conversation.
As much as writing may put us deep within our own psyches, we are still embodied beings in the world. For some of us, our experience within the world can put us in the “different” category—it can be fraught. This happens though differences are socially constructed, may be based on biased standards of normalcy, and related to negotiating a social sphere that may care little for accessibility and inclusion. I can’t speak for anyone else, but writing my disability—taking readers to a place that may be new to them, yet loaded with assumptions—can feel overwhelming. As writer Nancy Mairs puts it, “Some realities do not obey the dictates of language.”
As writers, perhaps at least partly memoirists, if we deal with biased social assumptions about our identities, we deal with them in our work as in life. What do we tell? When is telling painful? How much empathy and understanding can we expect from our audience?
—SUZANNE
As we saw in Chapter 1, “The Body of Memory,” we can often locate our personal, autobiographical material in our experiences of the body. As you continue to practice how to focus on sensory images as a way to remember and translate experiences to the page, you may also find yourself drawn to write about bigger issues of identity that bodily memories can evoke. When you’re exploring such territory—one that can have implications far beyond the personal—you might experience a sense of vulnerability as you grapple with finding the right voice, form, and structure for conveying your authentic experience.
Racial Identity
Race is an area of writing that may be especially difficult to approach, but it’s also a subject that is more necessary than ever. We need to try to understand one another’s lived experiences as fully as we can. One way some writers have approached exploring racial identity is through the body, which creates a visceral experience for both writer and reader.
For example, in his memoir Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates begins by bringing his black body front and center into the narrative. Written as a letter to his son, Coates opens the memoir with this line: “Last Sunday the host of a popular news show asked me what it meant to lose my body.” He goes on to describe the cultural, political, and social context in which he is writing this letter to his son, who is fifteen:
I am writing you because this was the year you saw Eric Garner choked to death for selling cigarettes; because you know now that Renisha McBride was shot for seeking help, that John Crawford was shot down for browsing in a department store. And you have seen men in uniform drive by and murder Tamir Rice, a twelve-year-old child whom they were oath-bound to protect. . . . And you know now, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body.
By containing this work as a letter to his son, Coates’s voice can be, by turns, intimate, adamant, and sorrowful. He uses specific examples from his own life and the life of black people at large to get across what it means to live in a black body during his family’s lifetime.
In a special issue devoted to race, the online journal Brevity sought work that could describe—in brief, vivid essays—the authors’ lived experiences in racially diverse bodies. The guest editors, Joy Castro and Ira Sukrungruang, interviewed each other to create a craft essay that described their own interest and experience with how racial identity plays out in literature, and in creative nonfiction in particular. Sukrungruang writes:
In literature, race wasn’t about color alone. It wasn’t about difference. In literature, race is made complicated. Race is seen through a myriad of views. Played out not only through violence and hate and injustice, but love and understanding and empathy.
One of the writers featured in this issue, Danielle Geller, writes about her Navajo identity, and the complications that arise by being both seen and unseen as a Native American. In her essay “Blood; Quantum,” Geller details all the various ways she has been identified by both strangers and family alike. She writes:
But once, as I sat in the empty hallway of my middle school, an older man stopped in front of me and said: Are you Native American? I’d bet anything you are. When I said yes, he just smiled and moved on. . . . And once, when I told the Mexican man on the bus that I was not Latina but Native American, he asked me to what degree, and when I said half, he said: Good. That means the blood isn’t too thick. But once, when I came home with a barbell through my tongue and a ring through my nose, my white grandmother said, in disgust, “It must be the Indian in you,” which was always cheerlessly funny to me because I never felt Indian at all.
How might you focus on and articulate your own experience of race? In our Anthology, you will find several examples of how writers employ various formal techniques to contain stories of racial identity. In “Math 1619,” for example, Gwendolyn Wallace couches her experience in the form of a math test to get across how it feels to be a marginalized black student. (This technique is called a “hermit crab” essay: borrowing another form to tell your story. See Chapter 9, “Innovative Forms: The Wide Variety of Creative Nonfiction,” for a discussion of hermit crab essays.)
Also in our Anthology: Ira Sukrungruang’s “Because, the Ferguson Verdict” uses the trigger of recent news headlines to create a collage that lists his own experiences of racial injustice and discrimination. In “The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee,” Paisley Rekdal imagines herself into the experience of her mother as a young woman who experienced societal constraints because of her race. Look to these essays—and others from our suggested reading list at the end of this chapter—to glean ideas about how to find a way into this subject for yourself.
(See also Chapter 2, “Writing the Family,” for ideas on how to explore cultural identity, which can be closely linked to racial identity.)
Gender and Sexual Identity
For many writers, the subject of gender and/or sexual identity has become central to much of their autobiographical writing. Our collective knowledge and terminology around gender identity keeps deepening, expanding, and becoming more complex the more such diverse personal stories gain attention. And no one approach is deemed “correct.” Some writers will start in childhood, seeking insight. In Ryan Van Meter’s essay “First” (see Anthology), an early childhood recollection shows a crucial turning point in his awareness of his sexuality. In his memoir Firebird, poet and nonfiction writer Mark Doty also remembers a childhood marked by family tension and a growing awareness of his sexual orientation.
Some writers will begin closer to their adult experiences of gender and sexuality. For example, in Barrie Jean Borich’s memoir My Lesbian Husband: Landscapes of a Marriage, she explores how language cannot fully express the nuances of her spousal relationship. First published in 1999, before gay marriage was made legal in the United States, Borich’s book examines the lexicon and rituals of marriage as they might apply to her and her partner of many years, Linnea. “Are we married?” she asks throughout the chapter titled “When I Call Her My Husband,” and the two women cannot come up with a satisfactory response. In an intimately rendered scene, we are allowed to witness their interchange, and also the larger societal issues that press into their intimacy:
Linnea rolls over, shooing away the cat, resting her belly alongside my hip as her chin nuzzles my shoulder. “I think you’re my wife,” she says.
I laugh and squeeze in closer, turn so I can kiss the soft exposed flesh below her ear. She is completely serious and not serious at all, in that queer way we learn to roll with a language we are at once completely a part of and completely excluded from.
This interchange leads to the heart of this chapter and of the book as a whole. The word “wife” does not fit Linnea the way it does Barrie, and so she ventures to call Linnea “husband,” appropriating this term for their own use:
When I call Linnea my husband I mean that she’s a woman who has to lead when we slow dance, who is compelled to try to dip and twirl me, no matter that I have rarely been able to relax on a dance floor since I stopped drinking. She leads me between the black walls of a gay bar, our faces streaked with neon and silver disco light, to air so dark Linnea’s black leather belt and both pairs of our black boots seem to vanish, leaving parts of us afloat in the heavy smell of booze and cigarettes.
As we’ve seen with memoirs centered on any kind of topic, the best writing will use scene and sensory details to fully engage readers and let us into their singular experience. Notice how Borich allows us into this representative moment in time, using intricate details to get across the depth of their intimacy.
Kate Carroll de Gutes also provides this vivid glimpse into her identity in the essay “Sir, Ma’am, Sir: Gender Fragments.” In a series of vignettes put together as a collage, de Gutes shows us how she has often been defined by gender nonconformity. It begins:
I was 9 the first time I was mistaken for a boy. I stood in the candy aisle of Long’s Drugs store, trying to decide between a Big Hunk, a Charleston Chew, or Milk Duds. It was winter, I know that much, and I wore a blue quilted coat with a white faux fur-trimmed hood. I hated that hood, but my mother was adamant about girly clothes. She didn’t want me mistaken for a boy.
After several of these examples that move through time up to the present day, de Gutes steps back for a longer view: “We see gender because it’s what we are conditioned to see.”
Think about how your own identity has been marked by gender or sexual orientation. How have you named yourself or chosen the pronouns you use? What are the key memories or turning points that show your own evolution or understanding of this aspect of your identity?
Our Bodies of Difference
In the introduction to his anthology Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out, Kenny Fries notes that “throughout history, people with disabilities have been stared at. Now, here in these pages . . . writers with disabilities affirm our lives by putting the world on notice that we are staring back.” Being heard as whole persons, for any group existing on the margins of our culture, is an act of courage and of resistance. The disabled are often objects of the stare not just in public spaces, but in the pages of literature, frequently depicted as objects of pity, cheap inspiration, and literary gawking.
People who are disabled write from a position of having bodies, or minds, of difference. There is, of course, no one disability, and no one aesthetics of disabled authors. Nor is there one correct way of designating disability. Self-naming may be an act of claiming and of recovery. Nancy Mairs, an author who wrote extensively of her experiences with multiple sclerosis, gives us this passage from the essay “On Being a Cripple”:
First, the matter of semantics. I am a cripple. I choose this word to name me. I choose from among several possibilities, the most common of which are “handicapped” and “disabled.” I made the choice a number of years ago, without thinking, unaware of my motives for doing so. Even now, I’m not sure what those motives are. . . . People—crippled or not—wince at the word “cripple,” as they do not at “handicapped” or “disabled.” Perhaps I want them to wince.
While we cannot, and should not, ascribe any one quality to authors because they are disabled, it’s hard to escape the way that those with minds and/or bodies of difference will mostly be defined, as author Kenny Fries puts it, by the “nondisabled gaze.” Nancy Mairs describes how disabled characters are nearly always defined by their disability, rather than appearing as complete persons. The act of “staring back,” or recognizing and reversing that gaze, may be part of these writers’ strategies. Disability as a culture of its own, and disability as a social construct often created by lack of accessibility, may also be part of the projects of disabled authors.
TRY IT
1. What assumptions do others make about you? Write a list of qualities—good, bad, or neutral—people think they see when they see you. How might these qualities be related to race, ethnicity, religion, appearance, who you do or don’t love? Consider, as Suzanne does in the opening of this chapter, times when you might want to correct assumptions, and times when you don’t.
2. Related to the preceding activity, freewrite using the title “Self-Portrait Through the Eyes of _________.” Choose different people in your life, including strangers, to fit into this title. You can continue with the most promising of these freewrites or write an essay sequence.
3. Using the example given from “Between the World and Me” as a model, try writing your experience of identity in the form of a letter to someone you love.
4. Using Ryan Van Meter’s “First” (see Anthology) as a model, can you remember a turning point in your life when you became aware of your sexual orientation or gender identity? Call up a specific memory and recreate it using concrete detail. What themes arise? How could you use this theme for further writing?
5. Think of a personal “territory” you inhabit. Where are you positioned within this territory? What do you see?
(See also the Try Its in Chapter 2, “Writing the Family,” for ways to approach writing your cultural identity. See Chapter 9, “Innovative Forms,” for ideas on ways to use nontraditional forms to contain your story, as Wallace does in “Math 1619.”)
FOR FURTHER READING
In Our Anthology
• “The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee” by Paisley Rekdal
• “The Coroner’s Photographs” by Brent Staples
• “Because, the Ferguson Verdict” by Ira Sukrungruang
• “First” by Ryan Van Meter
• “Math 1619” by Gwendolyn Wallace
Resources Available Online
• “How We See One Another: Our Guest Editors Castro and Sukrungruang in Conversation” at Brevity
• “Blood; Quantum” by Danielle Geller
• “On Being a Cripple” by Nancy Mairs
Print Resources
• My Lesbian Husband: Landscapes of a Marriage by Barrie Jean Borich
• Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us by Kate Bornstein
• Truth Serum: A Memoir by Bernard Cooper
• Firebird: A Memoir by Mark Doty
• “Sir, Ma’am, Sir: Gender Fragments” from Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear by Kate Carroll de Gutes
• Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out, edited by Kenny Fries
• Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir by Deborah A. Miranda
• A Mind Apart: Travels in a Neurodiverse World by S. (Paola) Antonetta
• If You Knew Then What I Know Now by Ryan Van Meter
• Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers, edited by Theresa Warburton and Elissa Washuta