The Throat Is A Metaphor
Notes on abuse, intergenerational trauma, and 'sticking up for oneself'
Hi Readers: This is the 9th issue of my Obsessions newsletter. Iāve gone more than three months without sending you anything because things have been tough from COVID and enforced social isolation to the reality of the protests in Portland. I did find that during the past three months there have been writers and bloggers who did acknowledge the state of white supremacy, and there are those who didnāt, and then there are writers like me who kind of disappeared. I felt like the nature of the panic was complicated by the nature of immediate communication on the internet and the perceived need to make oneself relevant, the nature of shameful realities like white supremacy where folxs have different understandings and different levels of complicity, and the lockdown. I believe that all white people are complicit in white supremacy because itās a structural problem (government gerrymandering, historical housing codes, explicit and implicit discrimination, police brutality, the school to prison pipeline). Just like most folxs donāt sit around wondering why they are in a marriage with one person (part of the reason is because society provides incentives to make that the most socially acceptable option), most white folxs up to recently werenāt sitting around asking, āWhy do the best school districts have so many white kids in 2020?ā What I guess I mean to say is there was a lot of performative panic posts. And that social media has made people in general just more performative. I took two different anti-racism workshops hosted by Michelle C. Johnson online. I rediscovered the work of Sonya Renee Taylor and her new project to Buy Back Black Debt which I highly recommend. And then I read this really interesting post by Adrienne Maree Brown āunthinkable thoughts: call out culture in the age of covid-19.ā Along the way, I wrote this blog post, the 9th issue of Obsessions.
After forcing myself to pick up some healthy food items and some sweet, cold items at New Seasons last week, I was parking my car on a dry hot night near a maple tree when I felt the dryness of my throat creep up on the repetitive question of my mind, āWhy do I often feel like someone is strangling me?ā Tarot readers, witches, and imaginative people alike will ask me, āWell, were you strangled?ā Like a lot of folxs at margins, I think, Well yeah IF you mean metaphorically, many times. I have written about the throat as a metaphor for the voice. I have written meditations on the throat as an access point for pleasure. The artist Elena Passarello wrote an entire essay collection called Let Me Clear my Throat. And I think that both Amy Winehouse and Whitney Houston should have given their vocal chords to science so that we could understand what goes down in that tunnel, what gives us our voices. Well, last night when I started to question why the fuck Iām so obsessed with being strangled by the throat, I realized that my grandmother survived a lake strangling. My whole chest lifted up and down like an aging metal slinky and I sobbed.
My dead grandmother may have been strangled by her abusive partner, my now dead grandfather, in a lake, and because she moved her body out of that lake, people would say she lived. But it never really felt like she lived to me. My grandfather divorced her for a more elegant woman and he took his money with him. She raised four children somehow on a telephone operatorās salary. I donāt think itās coincidental that 4 out of 4 of her daughters married men who would be rich or become rich (before the historical rise of the billionaire class). The truth is patriarchy still controls most of the money; I mean why are social workers with masters degrees paid such shit wages? and why are preschool teachers paid like they are watching frogs in tanks all day? I always feel silly saying patriarchy as if what Iām saying is similar to saying that I can read peopleās auras in an almost scientific way. As if itās not true that three cis men in the U.S. have more wealth than the bottom 50% of people in the United States.
My strangled living grandmother wrote in beautiful calligraphy and had four heterosexual daughters. Four heterosexual daughters in 1960s Miami, and a man who put alligators in her bathtub to see if he could scare her. The heat, the kind of heat that mosquitos swim through while mafia men rent yachts, while she connected phone calls on an AT&T switchboard.
I wonder what my grandmother wanted before she was my strangled grandmother.
I have an older friend who was married to a physically and emotionally abusive man. She is hilarious and so loving and generous with her three kids. She always says to me, āIām just going to be a lesbian and take cruises where I read.ā I usually say something along the lines of, āYou know thatās not what lesbians do, right?ā We both crack up. She has survived stuff that many people wouldnāt survive. And she has been left pretty economically devastated the way my grandmother was.
On a recent episode of This American Life, a man named Jerome Ellis stands in St. Marks church for a poetry event. Each speaker has three minutes, but some may say Jerome breaks the rules. Jerome Ellis is speaking on the stage:
The Brazilian state of Mato Grosso has a law that cell phone companies offer a 50%ā¦
(pause)
50%
(pause)
50%
(pause)
50% discount to
(pause)
their customers with
(pause)
the time and fluidity of speech that is customary with speech impediments.
He wonāt be able to complete his poem in under 3 minutes, and thatās largely the point. He has a stutter caused by a glottal block where his vocal chords get stuck in between. They arenāt touching and they arenāt resting. They are in a state of in between.
The pauses are so dramatic because weāve stopped creating space for them. I think of how I used to teach a meditation class called Radical Listening that was essentially active listening mixed with meditation. The easiest way for me to try and create equity in the room was just to set a timer. When we had an opportunity to share in the room, everyone had equal time. Only, sometimes someone would shyly say eights words and then say, āAnd thatās all Iāve got.ā Which is when Iād have to come back in and say, āWell we will sit with you and the silence.ā That still feels right to me.
The magic with sitting in someoneās silence was that often that person would end up sharing something once they could sit in that silence because we had decided that there time was valuable.
Thanks for reading!,
Renee
And this is what Iāve been reading and watching and listening to:
I Have M.S. This Is What Itās Like To Be Fed By Other People