Reclaiming the Body After Trauma

While Reading Eli Clare I found a lot of passages particularly striking but one I couldn’t get out of my head comes from The Mountain reading “The body as home, but only if it is understood that bodies are never singular, but rather haunted, strengthened, underscored by countless other bodies. My alcoholic, Libertarian father and his father, the gravedigger, from whom my father learned his violence. I still dream about them sometimes, ugly dreams that leave me panting with fear in the middle of the night. One day I will be done with them. The white, working-class loggers, fishermen, and ranchers I grew up among: Les Smith,John Black, Walt Maya. Their ways of dressing, moving, talking helped shape my sense of self Today when I hear queer activists say the word redneck like a cuss word, I think of those men, backs of their necks turning red in the summertime from long days of work outside, felling trees, pulling fishnets, baling hay.”(Clare, 11).

I love this passage for a lot of reasons. Mostly because of all the different topics Clare touches on within just a couple sentences. In class when we first discussed the concept of ownership of the body, and trauma written on the body, my immediate thought was ownership of the body after sexual violence. When we discussed how one can reclaim the body, my first thought was tattoos. I thought specifically of Medusa tattoos that represent survivors of sexual violence, and semi-colon tattoos that represent suicide attempt survivors. Personally, I have a tattoo of the NEDA symbol which represents my eating disorder recovery. This phenomenon is what my brain jumped to, but tattoos are just one example of physically reclaiming a traumatized body. This type of reclamation of the body is what I believe Clare is talking about when he says “The body as home, but only if it is understood that bodies are never singular, but rather haunted, strengthened, underscored by countless other bodies.”(Clare, 11). I believe this can refer to both physical trauma left on the body, as well as mental trauma that can begin to manifest physically.

Within this same passage Clare also tackles generational trauma saying, “My alcoholic, Libertarian father and his father, the gravedigger, from whom my father learned his violence.”(Clare, 11). Part of what I believe makes Eli Clare such an exceptional writer is his capacity for empathy. Here he is even willing to look at what made his horrible abusive father the way he is. Here, Clare shows that his father learned his violence, he had his own trauma written on his body. However, Clare still writes about his father and the abuse he suffered at his hands in an unflinching way. He does not fall into the trap of believing his father’s abuse is in anyway justified. No of my favorite sayings is it’s an explanation, but not an excuse, which Clare makes very clear here.

Within this same passage Clare brings up class in a very interesting way. He concludes my chosen passage saying, “Today when I hear queer activists say the word redneck like a cuss word, I think of those men, backs of their necks turning red in the summertime from long days of work outside, felling trees, pulling fishnets, baling hay.”(Clare, 11). This made me think of our in class conversation about “passing the buck.” I believe here that Clare is talking about queer people passing the buck not onto other types of queer people, as we discussed in class, but into other social groups. Here, Clare talks about “rednecks” and how the term originally referred to working class men, typically in the American South. Being from the South myself, this is something I’ve discussed a lot with my father, especially prior to and right after the 2024 election. We’ve talked a lot about how Trump seems to have an iron grip on this population, despite Trump representing the opposite values in many ways. Many, but of course not all, working class Southerners, at least that I’ve grown up around, will pass the buck on to queer people, and many other minority groups, when the system fails them. Clare’s writing made me start thinking about how these groups might be constantly passing the buck off to each other. Using “redneck” as a slur, and writing off all working class Southerners may seem productive to some people, but it is its own form of discrimination, namely classism. This is also what I mean when I say Clare has an incredible capacity for empathy.