confession

Confession
Lin Dinh

Perhaps I’m a cruel artist. I always depict
In great details, lovingly, all the defects
On the faces and bodies of my models.
I use my eyes and brushes to thread
The jagged gaps of their stiff smiles. I pamper
Each pimple, hump, massage each incrustation.

I cajole my models into poses that are awkward,
Dangerous, unhygienic, sometimes mortifying.
I don’t care to paint smooth, poreless skin but collect
All manners of rashes and eruptions. Inspired,
I’ve forced a hundred bodies—impossibly old,
Extremely young—onto appalling heaps,

Democratically naked, viscous with sweat, spit and etc.,
Just so I could render the human condition
Most accurately and movingly.

Lin Dinh’s poem “Confession” can be understood as a celebration of the inherent queerness as well as shame of humanity. Theorist Michael Warner suggests that a central struggle of society is the attempt to ‘dignify’ sex; I expand this tenet by suggesting that Dinh praises the inherent shame of the entire human experience. By “depict[ing]…lovingly, all the defects” of his models, Dinh rejects the common practice of pinning shame on the marginalized (Warner, p.32) and instead embraces it in an effort to empower his ‘subjects’. In “test[ing] the limits of shame” (Warner, p.34), Dinh’s exposure of the “jagged gaps” and “stiff smiles” (5) of humanity challenges the obligation to be “tidy, normal, [or] uniform” and create what one could characterize as a queer space, that does not need to be “authorized by the government” (Warner, p.35). Indeed this very rejection of the repression of shame can be regarded as a force that “cuts against every form of hierarchy you could bring into the room” (Warner, p.35). In this sense, Dinh’s appreciation of the extreme (“impossibly old/Extremely young” (11-12), is in fact a creation of a queer space that lives outside the realm of heteronormative institutions and hierarchies. Acceptance of shame then, can be said to reverse the entire of meaning of shame in the first place – if it is no longer silenced, then it is no longer ‘shameful’.
In addition, I suggest that this piece represents an example of the Foucault-coined ‘confession’. Like the theory behind the notion of ‘confession’ suggests, Dinh’s poem expresses a particular queerness in a liberating form, although it is the very oppressors and institutions themselves that perpetuate the confession in the first place (Foucault, p.60). In other words, the queerness of the piece, the attention to “incrustation” (6) and “sweat” and “spit” (13) is only a confession because of the foundational silencing of these seemingly ‘disgusting’ human aspects. To consolidate the idea that this poem is a production of power and of institutional pressure to confess deviance, with the concept of the piece as a creation of queer space, it can be claimed that it is confession itself that opens up the possibility of queer space. Indeed, a queer space in which shame cannot exist (because there is no silencing) and paradoxically, neither does confession.

In celebrating what has been framed as the ‘abject’ by heteronormative oppressors, Dinh transcends disgust and shame entirely. Without a shame with which to silence, confession becomes irrelevant – it is no longer necessary to struggle endlessly to capture ambiguity in identity in the limited language we have. Indeed, the queer space that I have begun conceptualizing is one in which “my girlfriend” does not need to be preempted with “by the way, I’m gay”. If ‘passing’ as straight results in an erasure of identity – assumption, then, ensues the minimalization of multiplicity, and of possibility. Refusing to confess a facet of identity challenges the integral, historical silencing of abnormality and deviance. In terms of solutions, I suggest that as Dinh does, we encourage artistic expressions whether visual or literal of queer. These representations and narratives not only provide life through the creation of voice, but in fact produce alcoves of queer space, where safety is