excerpts from small white monkeys: on self-expression, self-help and shame (bookworks, 2017)
Soon after the assault I had managed to shut down an entire
part of my brain while I was unconsciously at work, establishing
the conditions in which it would one day be safe to reconnect
with my thoughts about the event. This is not to say that I had
managed to induce a willful amnesia, only that I could bump
an elbow on the corner of the memory without the least
emotional or physical reaction. When thoughts of the attack
and my attacker surfaced, which for a long time happened
rarely, I would calmly pick up my oar and poke their unresisting
bodies back into the canal’s depths. I would resume life.
After the thaw, however, such thoughts became unyielding
and intrusive. Repressing intrusive thoughts unleashes a series
of physical effects (thirst, dizziness, inability to focus) that are
in many ways worse than running through the thoughts themselves.
I would worry about seeing my attacker on the street
at the most implausible moments. How would I react? Would
I be cordial, pretend nothing had happened (as he has)? Or
pretend that something did happen, but that that something
was consensual (as he has)? I tried to convince myself that
nothing had happened.
When my shame and trauma were at their searing,
obliterative peak, my attacker would be a peripheral figure
in almost every one of my dreams, where I would move past
him without addressing him.
To look at me during this time you likely wouldn’t have picked
up on anything. When you go through something like this you
appear unchanged on the surface, but behind the skin of your
face brews a nasty illness, like mercury poisoning. What can
I compare the feeling of this period to?…
When I was an infant we moved abroad. Every summer
we would drive through Calais to visit my maternal grandparents
in the other country. I get car sick to this day, but it was at its
most horrendous when I was small. We couldn’t drive
twenty minutes without me going pale, closing my eyes and
requesting a stop, so during these very long journeys the nausea
was something unbearable—I felt that it would never end. An
acute and interminable nausea, then. And somewhere between
the meetings and the deadlines and the social arrangements
there would usually be a lay-by where I could at least stop and
be sick, with some degree of privacy, before having to gather
myself and move forward again.
I had to get up but I felt heavy, as though there had been a
change in gravity or the make-up of my blood had somehow
rearranged itself in such a way that the pull on my body now
figured differently within the existing system. I kept falling
asleep. In the final play of the Oresteia, Aeschylus’s trilogy of
Greek tragedies, the Erinyes—chthonic female deities of
vengeance—become strangely sluggish and sleepy, and their
mission to bolster Clytemnestra’s desire to avenge her
daughter’s death falls by the wayside. On an Apulian red-figure
bell-krater (an ancient black and red vase) housed in the
Louvre, Clytemnestra’s shade or ghost (as she manifests in the
underworld) can be seen trying to rouse the somnolent Erinyes
without any luck; the latter are draped over one another with
their eyes closed, fully-clothed, as though they had had too
much to drink at a party. Their characteristic ferocity has been
deactivated, though it’s not really clear how or why. Or when.
My own sense, at a certain point, was one of having been
incrementally plied with a cumulatively fatal poison. I wanted
an antidote.
I made it my business to read, to learn, and in this way
to integrate the experience and resultant trauma into my life.
But reading, as most people are aware, exacerbates motion
sickness. This is because your eyes take in the sight of the book
before you (as well as the interior of the vehicle in your peripheral
vision) and communicate the message to your brain that
you are still, while your body—sensing velocity, all the minor
calibrations—states the opposite. I knew this too, of course,
and so I resolved to begin gently.
§
Shame is experienced, in a corporeal sense, as a sudden and
comprehensive discomfort. Flushed with shame, we cannot
excuse our own behaviour, we cannot excuse our bodies quickly
enough. Because we cannot excuse our bodies quickly enough,
we look away and down, bringing our hands to our faces for
scant cover. Because our hands provide scant cover, we feel
our skin fizz with the unwanted exposure, with newly barbed
blood. Shame is everywhere and all at once, and it is most acute
when we feel that we are unable to displace any element of its
cause onto another.
Shame is paradoxical: a desire for self-negation—a complete
abnegation of the ego—that makes itself felt in every
nerve, every brain cell and synapse that signals, paradoxically,
the presence of a self. In this way, shame can be fatal. Some of
my most-loved writers and artists, including Simone Weil and
Freda Downie, effectively starved themselves to death in the
name of such self-abnegation. And there are others who came
close, Virginia Woolf and Adrian Piper among them. They are
the ones about whom I have the most competing thoughts,
making my enjoyment of their work equivocal—this is not
to their detriment.
In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed writes
that, in shame, one attempts to retreat into the self that is nonetheless
understood to be bad, meaning that, in such circumstances,
the subject may feel that they quite literally have nowhere to
turn: “In shame, I feel myself to be bad, and hence to expel the
badness, I have to expel myself from myself (prolonged experiences
of shame, unsurprisingly, can bring subjects perilously
close to suicide).” On reading these words, I thought for the first
time in a long time about Jacintha Saldanha, the nurse who, in
2012, was working at King Edward VII’s Hospital, Westminster,
in the ward to which Kate Middleton had been admitted for intense
morning sickness. Three days after appearing to fall for a prank
called in via Australian public radio that gained the show’s
presenters access to confidential medical information pertaining
to Middleton, Saldanha hung herself in her nurse’s quarters,
believing her actions to have put a colleague’s job in jeopardy.
She had no prior history of depression or ill mental health.
In the literature on shame I expected there to be competing
definitions. In reality, most of the texts were tautological, both
as a group and in and of themselves. Like just about everything
else, the Ancient Greeks were credited with the advent of
shame. As well as being deemed a “negative affect” (along with
anger, fear and anxiety), shame was frequently grouped in with
other ostensibly sinful affects, such as pride or envy. Pains were
often taken by the scholars and students of shame to distinguish
it from its neighbour, guilt. Wisdom proffers a distinction between
shame and guilt that posits the latter as a uniquely private and
inwardly felt emotion, and the former as dependent on external
public judgement, or anticipation thereof. In Pride, Shame and
Guilt, Gabriele Taylor writes that “shame requires an audience”
which effectively “constitutes an honour-group”: “often quoted
are the heroes in Homer’s Iliad. They form an honour-group:
they expect certain types of behaviour of themselves and
others, and judge themselves and others accordingly.”
Shame is thus broadly conceived of as deriving from
a perceived discrepancy between a projected standard of how
we believe we ought to be—how we could have been—and
how we see ourselves as being in actuality. Shame might therefore
be conceived of as an act of imagination—an affective state
that requires the use of our imaginative capacities in the first
instance in order for us to generate an idealised self-image.
I had already begun to refer to the shame I was experiencing
in the aftermath of the unfreezing as “renewable shame”
—an internalised emotion, distinct from guilt, generated and
perpetuated by the council of the self (an in-house honourgroup,
if you like). And because my shame, though bolstered
by an imaginary cast, was largely internal, it eventually
succeeded thoughts of the attack itself in becoming the very
thing that I was attempting to conceal—from myself and
others. I came across Sandra Lee Bartky’s Femininity and
Domination and her rebuke of Sartre’s popular adage “Nobody
can be vulgar all alone.” “Sartre’s discussion of shame is highly
abbreviated,” writes Bartky, because it evades the ways in
which self can become other within the self, can be judged
as though from the outside by the self and/or multiple, competing
selves:
Once an actual Other has revealed my object-character
to me, I can become an object for myself; I can come to
see myself as I might be seen by another, caught in the
shameful act. Hence, I can succeed in being vulgar all
alone: In such a situation, the Other before whom I am
ashamed is only—myself.
I felt Bartky’s text looking right at me, so much so that I had
to look away.
In The Psychology of Shame, Gershen Kaufman writes that
“intense shame is a sickness within the self, a disease of the
spirit.” I kept checking my face in the evil light of the bathroom
mirror for signs that might betray me.
§
FAILED ATTEMPT(S) WITH FEELING WORDS…
…WHILE REFLECTING ON (DIS)INTEGRATION
Black
Green
Thirsty
Volcanic
§
…WHILE WRITING
Nobody
Needed
Nervous
Nurturing
§
…BEFORE HEADING TO A DINNER PARTY
Futuristic, &
Feudal
§
Not long ago I met a friend—another poet—for dinner. Among
the things we discussed was a recent academic job interview
in which she had been surprised to encounter, as a member of
the panel (otherwise made up of literary specialists), a notable
professor of witchcraft—the friend’s work, creative and critical,
frequently engages with the subject. She told me that one of
the trickiest parts of the interview had been when this professor,
who had a copy of her most recent publication in his hands,
had asked her to define the term “witch.” At that point in our conver-
sation we must have become somehow distracted, because I found
myself sending the same friend a message online a few days
later, telling her that I had been wondering about the definition,
frustrated by the fact that I hadn’t asked her for it while we
were together. She wrote back quickly: “I define a witch as
someone who uses language to make tangible changes in
the material world.”
Christine de Pizan, France’s (and possibly Europe’s)
first paid female writer, is said to have been driven to write
by a similar understanding—that is, by her perception of
books—things made of language—as not only aesthetic
objects but powerful catalysts for material change. After
her husband’s death in 1387, de Pizan, who had previously
written poems for her own solace and enjoyment, took up
professional writing in order to look after herself and her
children. The resultant texts comprised mainly moral and
political tracts designed for the various dukes and monarchs
who had commissioned them. Today, these manuscripts, which
include Livre de la paix or The Book of Peace (composed for the
Duke of Guyenne, son of Charles VI), are frequently invoked as
early examples of self-help.
With the exception of de Pizan’s output, the first instructive
texts were made by and for men—they are known as “mirrors
for princes.” “Mirrors” were essentially instruction manuals
for patriarchs and were usually composed at the accession of
a new king, when a young and inexperienced ruler was about
to come to power. The best known European mirror is probably
Machiavelli’s Il Principe or The Prince, published in the early
sixteenth century. (In modern psychology, Machiavellianism is
one of the so-called “dark triad” personality traits and is characterised
by a duplicitous interpersonal style, a cynical disregard
for morality and a focus, above all, on personal gain.) As prototypes
for self-help guides, mirrors were thus largely designed
to help men master the exertion of their powers over others.
The actual term “self-help” originated centuries later,
with Scottish author Samuel Smiles’s 1859 book of that name,
itself a manual on successful business and social norms in the
Victorian era. Later, as we’re all aware, the genre becomes
distinctly feminised (and concomitantly discredited), having
significantly altered in its content. In line with the mirrors for
princes tradition and Smiles’s eponymous text, contemporary
self-help books aimed at male buyers still impart mainly
business advice and, though they are classified as self-help,
do not characterise the genre as such in the public imagination.
Those aimed at women, however, which concern for the most
part relationships and mental health, dominate popular representations.
In American films and sitcoms, anxious women in their
thirties drift into the self-help sections of book shops. They
browse the volumes on display there with curiosity, but are
usually too ashamed to buy. Sometimes a calamity ensues as
the protagonist is intercepted in the shameful act by a friend
or potential love interest. Often the calamity is somehow
meaningful, leading to delayed plotlines and realisations later
on in the narrative arc.
The highest selling self-help books, including Men Are
from Mars, Women Are from Venus, You Can Heal Your Life
and The Secret, all offer models for living and/or allude to
the existence of an obscurely defined cure-all. Both formulas
present readers with the possibility of a future moment of
self-actualisation that the books themselves do not possess
the means to ensure.
Sara Ahmed has written that happiness is merely
a “promise” tendered “for having the right associations.” In
self-help texts, men are encouraged to uncover money and
women are too, though the latter are offered additional
bromides in a spectrum of hues, “secrets” that encourage the
reader to defer any genuine act of self-reflection, propelling
her, rather, towards capitalist participation (via “positive
thinking”) and the assembling of a nuclear family (through the
instilment of gender essentialist values). The answers are within
you, intone the books, while effectively indicating the opposite.
Excluded from dominant perceptions of the self-help
genre are alternative strands of feminist and queer publications
that began to surface in volume in the 1970s and ’80s. These
texts offered practical advice on matters of mental and physical
health, and health care and legal systems, as well as
perspectives and psychological insights that might establish
in their readers a long-term sense of bodily and mental
autonomy. Sheila Ernst and Lucy Goodison’s In Our Own
Hands, published in 1981, was written specifically in order
to provide women with the tools to establish their own therapy
groups, espousing an approach that was lambasted in the mainstream
media of the time as unnecessary and self-indulgent.
From the book’s introduction:
One of the keystones of the new and stronger women’s
liberation movement which re-emerged in the radical
upsurge of the late sixties was the small, informal
consciousness-raising group. Here women met to
talk and learned that what had previously seemed
an individual problem was, in fact, a common problem
shared by many. We learned that these experiences
were the product not of individual failure but of
the contradictory demands society makes on all
women.…Women involved in the movement were
generally happier, more confidently active, braver
and more angry.
In adopting this format alongside other therapeutic approaches,
including those “developed by men” (“as feminists, we approach
them critically”), Ernst and Goodison write that they and other
women have “become better able to deal with contradictory
desires: between wanting to be active and independent and
wanting to be cared for; wanting to be intimate with others but
not wanting to be swallowed up.” Therapy, they assert, can help
us to understand “the resources we have within ourselves,”
enabling us to “more actively give and receive love.”
“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,”
writes Simone Weil in Gravity and Grace. I once typed out the
following words to a friend: “I take your book recommendations
seriously because I love you.”
§
WOMEN BEGIN TO MEET EACH OTHER IN PRIVATE
they talk about the powerful myths
Susanna
Susanna
Susanna
Susanna
Susanna
the excitement and the closeness
two women
wolf and chick
massive contradictions between the absolute need for self-determination
and the guilt for wanting it
§
AFFIRMATION
I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name.[1]
§
AFFIRMATION
I am smaller, uglier, more powerful than before.[2]
§
Notes:
[1] June Jordan, “Poem About My Rights.”
[2] Penelope Mortimer, The Pumpkin Eater, text altered.