Disquieting: Essays on Silence

By Cynthia Cruz

How do our bodies speak for us when words don?t suffice? How can we make ourselves understood when what we have to say is inarticulable?

In Disquieting, Cynthia Cruz tarries with others who have provided examples of how to ?turn away,? or reject the ideologies of contemporary Neoliberal culture. These essays inhabit connections between silence, refusal, anorexia, mental illness, and Neoliberalism. Cruz also explores the experience of being working-class and poor in contemporary culture, and how those who are silenced often turn to forms of disquietude that value open-endedness, complexity, and difficulty.

Disquieting: Essays on Silence draws on philosophy, theory, art, film, and literature to offer alternative ways of being in this world and possibilities for building a new one.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bookhug Press
• Release date: May 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781771664769

Book preview

1.pngTitle page: Disquieting: Essays on Silence, by Cynthia Cruz. Published by Book*hug Pres, Toronto, Essais No. 8

FIRST

EDITION

Copyright © 2019 by Cynthia Cruz

ALL

RIGHTS

RESERVED

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Book*hug Press acknowledges the land on which it operates. For thousands of years it has been the traditional land of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and most recently, the Mississaugas of the Credit River. Today, this meeting place is still the home to many Indigenous people from across Turtle Island, and we are grateful to have the opportunity to work on this land.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Disquieting : essays on silence / Cynthia Cruz.

Names: Cruz, Cynthia, author.

Series: Essais (Toronto, Ont.) ; no. 8.

Description: Series statement: Essais ; no. 8

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190091355 | Canadiana (ebook)

2019009138X

|

ISBN

9781771664356 (softcover) |

ISBN

9781771664769 (

HTML

)

|

ISBN

9781771664370 (

PDF

) |

ISBN

9781771664387 (Kindle)

Subjects:

LCGFT

: Essays.

Classification:

LCC

PS

3603.R893 D57 2019 |

DDC

814/.6—dc23

Contents

Introduction: The Smallest Gesture Has a Story

Melancholia and the End of the Future

Asylum

Infinite Metabolism

All Bodies Are Classed

Gender, Anorexia, and a Call to Being

Anorexia and the Phenomenology of the Invisible

The Afterlife of Trauma

Acknowledgments

Endnotes

Essais Series

Assimilation is sometimes the most effective kind of assassination.

—Mark Fisher¹

Introduction

The Smallest Gesture Has a Story²

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A siege. In the skies day and night were fighter jets and Black Hawk helicopters. The days were punctuated by the arrival of tanks, voices threatening through loudspeakers. As soon as the tanks arrived at the town’s periphery, everyone began shutting down their shops, closing their windows, returning to their homes, and locking the doors.

In 2002, as a volunteer, I stayed in an orphanage in Tulkarem, Palestine, during the Israeli siege.

I didn’t sleep much in those months.

What I recall most from that summer is the faces of the children. Their parents had been killed in the war and now these children lived with the sisters in the small building that housed the orphanage.

They were young — including a little toddler who crawled along the floor. They were stunted; one pulled himself across the floor as a toddler would, although he was a child of five or six.

One boy, whose face I will never forget, didn’t speak at all. He walked through the halls of the orphanage, mouth open as if in a perpetual scream, but never making a sound, his face frozen into a mask of horror. I imagined this is what his face looked like when he saw what he saw that he now could not find the words to articulate. Another child was in a constant state of anguish — screaming and weeping, her body making noises but without any words.

Frozen in shock, these children were fixed in a moment that had passed them by, a moment that had left its mark not only on their psyche but also on their bodies, their faces.

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How silence manifests in the body, in the face and the mouth, and in the work of the artist — and how this silence is also, often, a form of resistance: these are my main interests here. I’m also deeply compelled by the idea of failure as resistance, as a decision to not engage in the world.

The question that has haunted me for years — perhaps for my entire life, or at least since I became anorexic at the age of eleven — is: How does one speak when one is weighed down with the incomprehensibility of the world?

When I am in the midst of an anorectic relapse, I’m unable to articulate that experience. It’s only when I’m outside of it, when I have space between the experience and where I am, that I can do so.

Hannah Arendt suggested that in order to see and therefore discern a situation clearly, you have to step away from it. This thinking is counterintuitive, but it makes sense in context. Say, for instance, I’m at the scene of a violent act. In the moment of witnessing the act, I am not clear-headed. I need to step away in order to take what I’ve witnessed and place it into my mind. Only then can I examine the incident free from the emotions that occur in the moment of shock. Time both obscures and clarifies, but it is often necessary in order to see a situation in its full complexity.

But what if the person at the centre of the violence doesn’t have the luxury of stepping away? What if they aren’t able to achieve the time and distance necessary to examine it? What if they continue to live that violence? How then do they speak?

And what of those utterly weighed down with the world — those not born into middle-class legacies, for instance, or those who suffer under the immense weight of the world’s incomprehensibility as well as their own daily experiences of incomprehensibilities (waiting for hours in a city clinic; interviewing twice a year for food-stamp eligibility; facing mounting medical bills; unable to afford basic staples such as good food, new clothes, glasses, hearing aids, bus fare). What of them? This oppressive weight added to experiences of trauma on top of trauma makes for a kind of inability to speak — a speechlessness often driven into the body as illness or alternative forms of speech, such as stuttering, learning disabilities, eating disorders, drug addiction, and other forms of language that work into and through the body. Chronic trauma — the recurring everyday experiences of daily incomprehensibilities — and the various ways these experiences inform and mark the mind and the body: this is the germ of my question and the seed of my inquiry for this book.

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Much of my thinking about listening to others, about listening to myself when the body speaks through silence and other forms of unconventional language, has been informed by the writing and thinking of Fernand Deligny, the French social worker, educator, filmmaker, and writer. Deligny worked with autistic children at Monoblet, a settlement he founded in 1967 in the Cévennes region of France. Moving away from institutions and their systemic rules and calcified definitions, Deligny created a space for children labelled autistic to live and thrive. At Monoblet, rather than attempting to heal or change the children, Deligny worked to create a place that allowed for their ways of being, their ways of knowing and moving through time and space.

Deligny did what no one else would do: he turned toward the children and listened to them. Not to translate their experiences for them so others could better understand the children; not to teach them how to behave as if they were not autistic; and not to teach them how to translate their experiences into a language the world would understand. Deligny didn’t aim to cure or change the children in his care but to learn from and with them. What is most profound about Deligny’s position is his surrender of power — he let go of the belief that he somehow knew better than the children. I would argue that the main reason Deligny created Monoblet was simply to provide a place where these children could exist without always being talked at and taught to — a place where they could simply be. Deligny provided a refuge in each of the word’s senses: a shelter or protection from danger or distress, a hiding place, a place to flee back to.

Though Deligny does not suggest that autistic children are resisting or dissenting, his work suggests that dissent might take place in the act of withdrawing from the world and creating spaces in which people can move in whatever ways they can or they desire. And it suggests the possibility of turning away from the hives of power and listening, instead toward those who have something else to say — however they wish to say it.

What I learn from Deligny is a particular form of empathy — the vital act of accompanying people in their silence and of perhaps hearing them in their silence, too. Deligny’s ideas and practice, his presence, appear throughout this book. Even when he does not appear, he informs my ideas and queries. He is a constant guide.

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Talking about Deligny’s empathy, his ability to listen to a different type of language, makes me think of Tina Campt’s brilliant text Listening to Images, in which she argues for a different kind of listening for the African diaspora. In particular, Campt describes a moment after her mother’s funeral when her father, surrounded by his children, begins to hum. As if what he’s experiencing — the profound loss and grief — is simply not translatable in words. What he wished to relay could only be communicated through non-verbal means. A less nuanced reading might interpret his humming as celebratory, or as a form of dissociation.

Describing photographs in the Ernest Dyche Collection, commissioned portraits of Birmingham, U.K.’s Afro-­Caribbean, South Asian, and Irish migrant community of the late 1940s to the early 1980s, Campt pulls apart the context (the image we see when we look at the black-and-white photographs, the frame, the middle-class suit the sitter is wearing) and the lower frequencies of affect found in, for instance, the sitters’ faces: the exhaustion or the sorrow; the way the eyes belie resistance to the situation in which the sitters find themselves — the oppressive system and narrow spaces they, as immigrants, inhabit.

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When I stayed with the orphans in Palestine, I knew the facts on the ground. I was from Manhattan, an American, and so I saw the situation in context (the town was under siege; the children were the siege’s victims). Still, I was shocked. As the child of a German mother whose own mother was alive during the Holocaust, I grew up in the shadow of their knowledge. From a very young age, I was acutely aware of the ways silence manifested in the German culture, the ways the culture withheld and conformed. I saw how so-called ordinary people will conform and silence themselves when their material welfare is at risk and/or the threat of social ostracization comes into play. It horrified me.

In college I wrote my senior thesis on the Lodz Ghetto, exploring how the survivors of this German creation in occupied Poland survived. Later, I studied the Austrians, Swiss, and Germans: Arendt, Benjamin, Marcuse and Adorno, Bachmann, Bernard, Jelinek, Kluge, Warburg, and Brecht. The German writers, artists, and playwrights, philosophers and critical theorists, took this horror and tried to find a pattern in it, attempted to make some sense from it.

I understand the origins of Israel and the need for a place, a secure land where what happened could never happen again. I knew all of this, but I knew nothing that helped me understand what was happening on the ground. The U.S. news speaks of terrorism and security, and it’s within this context that we’re told or, more often, not told of life in Palestine. I read the work of Edward Said and Robert Fisk; it was academic and theoretical. And none of what any of these men wrote about Palestine and Lebanon matched what I was being told in the news.

In the time I spent at the orphanage, I was outside the children’s inescapable situation and inside this gap — this space between what was occurring on the ground and my own perspective. I was able to lift the experience up and place it into my mind, where I could see some of its starknesses and complexities. I could see that the shock of witnessing their parents and/or families murdered had rendered the children mute.

I couldn’t fathom what this would have been or felt like. I did, however, know trauma; I did know what it was like to be rendered mute. These two parallels created an entrance to understanding, but not access to the experience itself. I have no idea what those children saw, felt, and experienced, or how those experiences informed their psyches, their bodies, their minds.

Conventional modes of language or articulation may not be able to express the experiences of these children. They may need a separate language, one that better describes and performs their experiences. Articulation implies a space or threshold of leisure, a space between what you speak of and where you’re currently standing. Screaming, however, is an articulation that doesn’t require this distance. Screaming is perhaps the threshold of language because it punctuates an experience — bombs being dropped or an assassination. A scream occurs at the moment an act occurs or when one witnesses an event that is about to happen. This is the moment the news crews capture — a child in her mother’s arms, victims fleeing the burning building — but then the news crews leave. They have captured the story.

I’m interested in what happens after — after the city has been decimated; the poverty that soon ensues, the bruise of trauma, of long-term starvation, of knowing you have no future — and how these myriad experiences inform and change the body, the psyche, and the mind. I’m writing of the scream stretched into silence in the ongoing duration of suffering. This experience — of multiple traumas and everyday traumas, of poverty, chronic shock, hopelessness — what is its language?

I argue it is the language of speechlessness, of the woman who starves her body to make of that body a language because of her inability to articulate the incomprehensibility of the world. This is an articulation that surpasses linguistic articulation, one made of an excess of language, perhaps. The silent body is further silenced by the incomprehensibility of the world as silence settles in. This silence becomes its own language. This book, too, explores forms of language that emerge from silence in the body.

As Wittgenstein famously wrote, What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.³ When it cannot be spoken, what is passed over is often performed in or by the body. I saw this in the way the orphans’ bodies held on to the moment of their trauma, as if by doing so they could archive that unspeakable loss, that melancholic abyss they had swallowed and been swallowed by.

And by doing so, by their bodies doing so, they become, their bodies become, a kind of living archive as well as a place to hold that memory, that moment of trauma that must remain blacked out. A record of silence. For such an experience, the body is marked by silence through an inability to speak. It stutters; it stammers. It repeats. It stutters. It stammers.

The stutter, the stammer, mimics the space between, the threshold. These repetitions mimic the refusal to conform while at the same time adhering to one’s individual experience. Repetition appears throughout Disquieting as a performative gesture, enacting the affects closely bound within it. Often in my writing, repetition conveys what cannot otherwise be relayed — repetition both within the sentence and throughout the collection makes a mark, creates new pathways. This stuttering performs not-knowing and holds open the space, resisting the reductive binary that results from knowing. This holding of Nothing also reflects Lacan’s idea of Nothing — no thing. In the case of the artists, writers, and thinkers I refer to throughout Disquieting, the nothing they hold in their language of repetition and stuttering remains a possibility for as long as they hold the space for it. By holding this space, they hold open what I consider a possible third space that those who neither conform nor entirely opt out (as in suicide) make for themselves.