Author: AVeryStrangeHoard

When talking about non-normative identities there is often a fear and/or curiosity about the unknown. What society makes invisible is generally where the dissonant culture is. For Otoh this curiosity manifests as a desire to see Mala and her garden, to know her story, and to hear his father tell him about it. When he finally does get into her garden he misses Mala completely and finds a tree full of beautiful, expensive birds. “Otoh was astonished that in his own neighborhood, unknown to catchers and gamblers, there existed a tree laden with hundreds of peekoplats. He suddenly felt himself a trespasser, an awkward voyeur” (Mootoo, 155). When Otoh finally sees this wish fulfilled it doesn’t bring him a sense of joy or accomplishment, instead he feels “awkward”, like a “trespasser” (155). He learns that this bountiful tree exists, and that knowledge would be useful to others- “catchers and gamblers”. And he feels like a voyeur, like he’s getting pleasure from seeing something private, usually not seen. Perhaps this is the moment when he begins seeing Mala as more of a person and less of a story character. Because all this time he’s wanted to see into Mala’s life, to know what she doesn’t let others know. However when he does, the enjoyment of that knowledge is mixed with awkwardness, with the added knowledge that he must also protect this secret. As well as the realization that what he demanded from her was personal, was her life not something ‘exciting’ in the adventure story way.

I also think this is interesting for its intersections of capitalism and colonialism. The tree is full of, metaphorically, money. Otoh recognizes the danger of that fact. Just like how his island was taken over and used for its profitability, the birds (and perhaps metaphorically Mala as well) would claimed if people knew about them. Not only does Otoh seem to realize the depth of what he wanted from Mala, but he also sees the complicated and potentially hazardous nature of her existence. Instead of a feeling a deep connection with Mala, Otoh becomes more aware of structures and divides in society.

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

The narrator in Written on the Body tries very hard, but does not always succeed in embodying a queer, abstract, script-less relationship. Throughout the novel we see references to the cliché’s of love and marriage. The narrator mocks this idea of love as prescribed with a set path that can be followed to a happy and blissful end. However, the narrator is not always successful in letting go, or changing the patterns of past relationships. However, the very last line suggests to me that the narrator has finally found a way out of cliché’s at last and into queer time. “I don’t know if this is a happy ending but here we are let loose in open fields” (190). This line implies queer relationships and queer time. If we see the narrators desire through the book for the ‘forever’ relationship as the future that heteronormative time dangles in front of us than this line becomes a shift into queer time. X says “here we are” implying the now, the present-ness, the simply ‘being’ that queer time emphasizes. “The constantly diminishing future creates a new emphasis on the here, the present, the now” (2) says Judith Halberstam about queer time. The words “loose” and “open” also reference a queer time. A place without the structure and deadlines of heteronormativity is the field that the narrator is released into.

However I find the most redemption for the narrator comes from “I don’t know if this is a happy ending”. That is the essential difference between a prescribed heteronormative relationship, and a queer undefined relationship. When we have your two story house in the suburbs with your happy-hetero family and yappy dog, you know it’s your happy ending. The whole point is that when you get to ‘perfect life’ you recognize it; you can look back on all your hard work and say that you made it. However, the narrator does not describe that moment of clarity, of feeling like X got everything X wanted. Instead the narrator lives in the unknown, in the potential of happy ending. In the books last line it denies the reader the ‘and then they lived happily ever after’ and in doing so queers the books. This is not a love story. Nothing about it functions as expected, even the ‘happy ending’.

Much of Jeanette Winterson’s books Written on the Body examines relationships, their structure, and how people in them see and feel. While the narrator-X- is trying to recover from the loss of Louise, X finds it very hard to be rid of thoughts of her: “She flooded me and she has not drained away. I am still wading through her, she beats upon my doors and threatens my innermost safety” (163). Here we see Louise described again through images of water. She is the water. Where at other points in the book water has been used as a positive image, in this passage water seems very violent. Words like “flooded”, “drained”, and “beats” all suggest a certain aggressiveness or power. However these metaphors are complicated because X cannot seem to place where Louise is: sometimes she is inside her, around her, or attacking her. However, in ever iteration of water image Louise is the deciding force, she controls the narrator’s actions. She is the active party, the obstacle, or the enemy. Here we see a theme of active or passive roles for X. The narrator places themselves in the passive or victim role throughout much of interactions with Louise. This seems to contradict the narrators own statements about clichés. Despite saying that clichés are the problem with modern relationships because they dictate roles and confine peoples understanding of love, the narrator cannot stop themselves from playing out cliché and time honored roles. It interests me that the narrator is so consistent in their role of passivity while giving Louise an interesting range of images. Louise doesn’t seems as constrained by these rules as X is; in fact by identifying Louise as water the narrator gives her a full range of emotion and power. As the passage suggests water moves in and out, around, up and down. While X is stuck as a helpless victim of love, Louise is a living and changing force. Perhaps Louise is our protagonist who escapes from the confines of dictated love.

“She opens and shuts like a sea anemone. She’s refilled each day with fresh tides of longing.” (73) is not normally how sex or a sex drive is described in literature. In this passage of Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body, the narrator (who I will refer to as X to avoid the dilemma of gender) describes one of X’s married lovers. Through use of sea imagery and cyclical ideas Winterson brings together the familiar and the new; again reproduces the odd effect of making something infinite yet forever ending. The phrase “opens and shuts” (73) implies repetition. The lover does not open and shut just once. Similarly in the next sentence the narrator explicitly states that she is “refilled each day” (73). Just as X continuously seeks a new lover to be with forever, the lover is always emptied and renewed. This connection between ending and forever seems to be echoed in the images of the sea. Not only is the lover refilled every day but each day it is “fresh tides” (73). The repetitive idea of tides- coming in and out, in and out- is broken by making them “fresh”, enhancing the contradiction of once yet repetitive. With that in mind the passage takes on a new meaning for me. It is not about the sex, or this women, it is about how this women is every women. The narrator hates yet cannot seem to escape…dating- for lack of a better word. “She” becomes a metaphor for all the she’s that repeat in X’s life. Each time X begins a new relationship the lover is refilled.