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| Queen Bee by Lea Bradovich |
Out of all of the required readings, "About the Human Hymen (Disambiguation)" was probably my favorite. You see, I suffered from endometriosis as well for over 20 years. If not for the stars aligning just right (I'm only slightly facetious), I might be dead because of it.
I've written poems and started "books" writing about my experiences, but haven't yet followed through with any of them. Perhaps it's because I hadn't yet found the right form in which to tell my story. I'm struck as I type while gazing at the image of ice in a coke-filled glass how much that image looks to me like a cervix. It's grayscale, since I printed everything off, but the sheen and the curve, the claustrophobic spheroids just look like the female anatomy to me.
What strikes me about this piece is the detached voice of it. Oh how I can relate to that. Chronic illness, chronic pain necessitate a detachment. If you can't detach, how will you ever survive? How will you get out of bed and make yourself dry toast and weak tea? How will you drag yourself to your chemistry test, mid-term, final that are spaced exactly four weeks apart and that JUST HAPPEN to coincide with your very regular, excruciatingly painful menses? How will you face your parents when you agree that yes, perhaps you're not cut out for science, math, medicine after all when of all people, you have the most empathy of any of your peers? Again I digress.
One single act that a human dares to perform on another - one decision made in another's "best interest" without consulting that other can have devastating, far-reaching effects. Emma Bolden captures that quite well by using devices of memory, time, and scientific fact. I am interested in how she puts aside the personal shame that I sometimes feel when I start to write about my very personal, very intimate struggles. But hers (and I would argue mine) is a voice that needs to be given space. There are women suffering in silence and they need to understand that there is a sisterhood and that there is no shame — neither in their disease nor in their diseased bodies. This is a very unique way of bringing attention to many issues facing young women — the orphan<disease>ness of endometriosis, the importance/necessity of body autonomy even (especially!) in the young, and the role of medicine and society in the feeling of other-ness created by chronic disease.
Someone else also said they found the voice in Bolden's piece detached, but I did not. For most of the essay she was a victim, acted on and not the agent of her own experience, and the voice I heard did not sound detached from that experience of powerlessness--in fact, it sounded to me emergent from, forged by that experience. As she moves from complete powerlessness to agency (by starting to question what is being done to her by doing her own research, etc.), the voice reflects her growing agency until that triumphant assertion at the end, "I am angry, angry." To me it is not that the voice is detached but more that it is forging itself in the course of the essay, growing in confidence, strength, and volume. Both this piece and "Binary" do employ a bit of irony, and I suppose that is a distancing device. But by the end, both voices are vulnerable, direct, naked of irony.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Rebecca. I also found it interesting to think of Emma's voice as detached. In fact, I found it quite close and rather intimate.
DeleteThis is a great discussion. Leslie, I am now really interested to see what you mean by detached. I wonder if you mean her writing style? It's so pared down and economical. Verses a lush, over-flowing repetative kind of tone? Maybe it's tone....to me the tone is very direct with the goal of truth-telling whether that be emotional and factual (ie what happened)?
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DeleteBy detached, I suppose I mean that she treats her experience very factually. She uses a fairly formal tone, even as the essay progresses.
ReplyDelete"During the first and second laparoscopic surgeries, my surgeon tore my hymen membrane, which he then repaired with small sutures in a procedure known as a hymenorrhaphy."
She withholds most emotion, but when she lets us see it, it too is stated very matter-of-factly.
"I felt very cold and afraid and so I looked up at the ceiling and its lights, too. . . I was just standing, in a moment of impossible quiet, until panic keened in my ears."
Perhaps my reading is over-informed by my own (similar) experience. Perhaps I'm hearing my own voice at 24 discussing sterility and adoption with the boyfriend I hoped to one day wed. (I didn't.)
Perhaps as I read this, I see in Emma a sympathetic face -- one that won't screw up in disgust when I describe my dyspareunia, vulvodynia, and vulvovestibulitis. One who knows the difference between adhesions and endometriomas, fibroids and adenomyosis, who can discuss the scientific merits of the retrograde menstruation theory versus the Müllerianosis theory. Who knows the difference between PCOS and PID and why they are not but can mimic endo.
If that is indeed the case, it's a textbook example of how the reader informs the reading.