what is said is
a poetic and oblique re/presentation of disabled women in a Canadian shelter
Nancy Viva Davis Halifax, Assistant Professor, School of Health Policy and Management, York University
prolegomenon
It is [our] belief that feminism, as a political programme as well as a pedagogic one, needs to use different forms of writing in different times and places. Writing is strategic; it has effects.
-Ahmed
There remain subjects, whose very appearance troubles the solidity of dominant Western discourses. Living outside of normative structures of able-citizenship their bodies, even as surplus, provide content for academic and neoliberal discourse. Within the cultural imaginary they are exhibited as excessive and out of place: abject, disfigured, criminal, mad (Liggett).
In order to gather these subjects so that we might further trouble the apparent solidity of Western epistemologies I engage a generative and reflexive practice, and affect. Theoretical, performative and lyrical strategies lean into moments from this inquiry. I have spent months working with persons who do not have the place of privilege and comfort of home – instead they are insecurely housed, they abide in a shelter along a post-industrial stretch of Dundas Street West in Toronto, a stretch currently characterized by numerous empty storefronts and small family businesses. The women live with disability, and in extreme poverty. This inquiry encompasses three years of offering media, and teaching and learning with women in a neighbourhood shelter. The heart of the work is positioned within the domestic arts practices that these women have learned from their mothers, aunts, and sisters. In the spirit of feminist practices, I came to understand knitting, crocheting, beading and other traditional women’s practices as community building. Using the arts in this way draws upon the principles of community arts research and social justice, the work is transformative. The use of poetry in the project and as a means of knowledge translation brings an additional resistive force – it resists the closure of affect within contemporary institutions. This work will not sit still, it demands language and thought and flesh – it tears into me until I “think something other” (Foucault 455).
Thinking something other, making knowledge different and different knowledge suggests that I cannot create a tidy text that maps easily onto usual ways of sense making (Lather). It is possible that thinking something other becomes writing something other and other writing. A bodywriting split open. The writing is a trace, traces ghosted dialogues that remain as faint echoes. The language I find is used “to direct our attention to something in our world experience, to show us something” (Hass 5). Agitated, it limps toward the quietest of bodies. Sunlight streams through blinds onto dust.
“What is said is not as important as the unsaid, which the said brings to mind.”
- Davey 4
I use this quote by Nick Davey to organize this something other, to find its language from that which is both given and found. There are risks present; speaking the unsaid brings it to be said, to language. There are reasons, rationales, for silence. I may fail. The rational casts a shadow upon the unsaid, which rocks back and forth. The potential of failure is instructive – I re-member my writing table, cold fingers around a hot cup of tea, cold toes stuffed into extra pairs of socks, hooked around the stretcher. Shaking and anxious, I am not stable. The language that finds its way from body does not turn back. Leaves. Bodythought quivers. This tongue is not adept, not deft enough to curl around lip, touch tooth, drip wet word. The finger refuses to tap tap tap. What is said is not as important as the unsaid, which the said brings to mind.
Almost immediately the question arises: What are the moral consequences of abandoning the subjects of our perception? Leaving them unsaid, not speaking them when they are brought to mind? Language tumbles forward and down, until descent becomes ascent. Every said with its congregation of the unsaid. A mission that longs for a choir
expressed in stumbles and dives.
what is said is
“Well, they are spoiled.”
Return to the place of memory
Around a table
Spoiled suggests a flaw, a disfigurement even something ruined. Tainted. Rotting. It’s the way the word spills through architecture of mouth, vault of arch, cant of tooth. Not as indulgence, favouring.
Become monstrous. Plastic bags and knapsack, all of the odds of a life create a shadow, a misshape in the dark. A misperception, an unspoken.
Strip her
Remove her clothing,
Toss her belongings onto the sidewalk
For plunder
Split her open
Until she divides against herself withering
not as important as.
These bodies (not as important as) inhabit institutions. Woven together. All of the bodies: the wanted and unwanted, the said and unsaid. Huddled together. Cockroaches, counselors, cleaners, bedbugs, chaplains, mice, lice, men who spray, cooks, women, maintenance crews…
And yet. These bodies, grown from seed,
Conceived along terrestial longitude
Speak from east to west
Their waiting shapes shimmer
In the form of sand grains
in pulsebeats
in the name of
Holy, holy, holy
The shelter, the one trapped on that corner is a Salvation Army shelter for women. In 1878 the Salvation Army was founded upon the Christian Mission, which William Booth had started in 1865 in Britain. Four years later the army marched into Canada.
Daughters, mothers and sisters loiter on early morning sidewalks.
One, seated with cigarette, slippers and housecoat
Rests her foot upon her belongings
As if the whole world were her home
One, seated with cigarette, slippers and housecoat
Last night she slept with William Booth
As if the whole world were his home
His long beard tangles her hair
Last night she slept with William Booth,
One in hope and doctrine, one in charity
His long beard tangles her hair
Him singing
One in hope and doctrine, one in charity
Holy soldier of Christ
Him singing
While resurrection men hurry to death
As if the whole world were their home.
the unsaid
What is not said as we encounter the world remains within as gesture, as potential, as memory. There are pulls on our perception, sometimes so minute that we pass without greeting. Yet the impress
Below flesh
Lingers
Invocations bring a small breeze.
Forget that thoughts
Once trapped by weight of bone
Take flight through fingertips and pinions
Across sea and heaven
My book presses into wood’s grain
Searching for sound
Something left over,
A crumb of language.
A space not yet tidied away
Remembers that once upon a time
It wrote something beautiful
Like laughter, or the sound of rain
In a room where we wear suitcoats
There is a confession
The only place where there was room
Was where we wore suitcoats
Not so different from the buck or two a night hotels
The room sighs
No purrs like a full-bellied cat
Under this roof
Let another decide if you are
Too comfortable
Yellow crocuses
Decorate
My broken gray
Horizon thoughts
Unloaded and the truck on Sorauren backs up
Smarties™ pour onto wet pavement
She’s got issues
They told me
She doesn’t live here anymore
She had to leave because of
Problems. Issues.
But the unsaid remains.
Forever and ever.
Black stretch pants, grey hair, blue eyeshadow, plastic bags.
Blurred makeup. Accompanied. She reveals the unsaid.
Her body’s thorns prick
The chaplain
The chaplain
Brings in 30 hats, flowers, feathers, glitter, glue, balloons
To decorate, to wear while watching the Royal Wedding
Five thirty a.m. the television turns from black to faery
The pageantry draws women from their rooms
Some still in pyjamas wear their majesty
Declaring something old, something borrowed
Is nothing new.
She stares at the women
Drowning under the weight of ivory silk, and white lace.
Under the goodness of her chosen intent.
An enormous truth hid behind bosoms
Of salvation
Flowers hang over the entrance to this sacred
Garden where wine demonstrates that before
It was Water
It was grape.
And later, in its waiting, will be blood.
Crimson stained taste of
Mildew, pepper, tobacco, cedar
The common soldiers in this sad and glorious building
The chaplain with her newly shorn head, a second daughter
With a rivalrous past and short nails
Smiles at her women, her lost souls.
At night she dreams of pregnancy and rebirth
Leviathan in Lake Ontario
Ninety one sublime women in her choir
On the precipice of orange earth
From their mouths blue frogs with
Fine crocheted lace wings grumble
While she trembles at this monstrous revival
Strung cross stream and sky
Awakes to a chorus
Our sisters, who art now dead
Perished by tinned tuna, powdered milk
By the charity of gamblers and donation boxes at liquour stores
And the forgetful who build glass staircases instead of homes and gardens
May you forever haunt the cowards who legislate your poverty.
One of the women called by round copper
Forgets her beauty curses her age
The certainty of rotting teeth and heart
Troubles sealed with truth and reason
Roses climb a frame of coat hangers
Still in their winter woolens
Their goal to bloom
The realm of the unsaid is imagination
There we mind our gaudy, brazen, shameless strutting disgrace.
which the said brings to mind
“Bring to mind.” Mind suggests that we are bringing to cognition. To a place where what is something other can become thought. Mind as well suggests memory, remember, remembrance, and even love. As well as care – to be mindful. We move toward the expression of love where the said begins to love the unsaid even in its unspeaking. The unsaid compels remembrance. We move from mind as a place of cognition, to mind as caring, as heartfelt. And return to a minding that is caustic.
Hidden in the folds of mind, shame creeps, framing me as it imagines us, as mirrors one to the other. The derelict and the citizen. The silver’d surface consigns my thinking to a room wherein the brought to mind takes the form of a grey-haired elderly woman, her polyester pants sagging as she pokes at them trying to rearrange them, herself. Her coat hangs slackly around her shoulders, both sadly turned down. Words grind the glass of her:
she doesn’t belong here how did she get in how did she
get in where did she come from how did she she’s been asked
to leave leave
“Behind the feeling of shame stands not the fear of hatred, but the fear of contempt which, on an even deeper level of the unconscious, spells fear of abandonment, the death by emotional starvation (Piers G. 29).
This passage written 50 or more years ago predicts a sad knowledge. What is brought to mind by this unsaid are the edges of words; the fear of not being loveable enough, easily discarded outside the bounds of – I like the word, humankind; it contests turning from, fleeing excess, escaping disgust, hiding from contagion.
Human kind.
Blessed.
A graying woman
Call her grasshopper
Blamed by girls for a hunger
She cannot organize
Devises goals to escape the worst
Months Blessed is she
Who lives in this old travel lodge
Surveil her mumbling the streets are better
Blessed is she
Who cares for mouse and flower
Dual screen monitors
Divided into 16 frames
32 views at a time.
switch to another set of cameras,
and again the women, frozen, enhanced, captured.
Blessed is she
Who knits knee warmers
Sews insoles from patterned cloth
Makes covers for every ironing board
Performs domesticity on all five floors
While planning her escape
Blessed are the poor for
They take from the rich that which the rich no longer need
Their worn clothes, broken appliances, and dusty knick knacks
Blessed are the women
Who know a dozen ways to cook fiddleheads
The technique for long tail casting on
The perfumed orange of mango and squash
Blessed are these women who
Dream of oxtail soup, and bitter greens.
Acknowledgements:
To members of the Red Wagon Collective including Kim Jackson, Liz Forsberg, all the women of Evangeline, past and present. And to all those who live in poverty under disabling structures and policies. This paper was performed in a somewhat different version at the Canadian Disability Studies Association Conference, May 2011 in Fredericton, NB. I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments and the editor, Jay Dolmage for their assistance in strengthening this manuscript. Responses from audiences who listened to parts of this work in Bournemouth, UK, and Cool hand of a girl, Toronto are also appreciated
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