I was really drawn to the passage about Mala dealing with the light at 10am. She has a ritual of eating the bird-pepper sauce to keep her from remembering or perhaps reliving painful memories. This connection between the physical and the mental as well as past and present interested me in this passage. After eating as much as she can Tyler tells us “her flesh had come undone. But every tingling blister and eruption in her mouth and lips was a welcome sign that she had survived” (Mootoo, 134). There is a strong connection here between pain and life. The pain was a “welcome sign” that life was still going on (Mootoo, 134) as though without pain, there is no life. This reminded me a lot of Eve Sedgwick talking about surviving versus living and trying to connect that with pain and perhaps trauma. Mala has lived through a lot of bodily and mental pain, yet her coping mechanism is also pain, to undo her flesh. To add to these complications Mala punishes herself by eating things. “Her mouth and lips” and the most damaged and are perhaps, what she has struggled with most (Mootoo, 134). We can agree that language is incredibly important and that speech (what people say or don’t say) is also meaningful (very Foucault yes). Then why does Mala add pain to speech, something she seems to be keenly aware of and the hurt of silence. I’m not sure what I’m trying to articulate yet, I just think there is something in the connections of pain and life. Queer, using Sedgwick’s non-normative and self-identified definition, young people can have a lot of suffering and pain in their lives. Does it become synonymous with living? Or is there a broader obsession with pain (“Why is the measure of love loss?”)? Do we think of this scene as self-harm or coping? Where do we draw the line between using your body and harming it? And do we believe that there can be life without pain? Or does pain mean we have survived?
I read this article over the summer and it really spoke the to tension between pain and womanhood. If anyone else is curious how pain and self-harm are social influenced this is pretty interesting.
http://www.vqronline.org/essays-articles/2014/04/grand-unified-theory-female-pain