Remembered Bodies
My mother died, just shy of 100, a few weeks before COVID-19 touched here. She lived through sixty years of marriage to a man whose beauty she had no words for. If she ever found them, or when she found them, she kept the words to herself. I see her sometimes, upright in a box of sun that our living room’s skylight throws on the floor. Elbows raised, she wiggles her fingers through grains of light and looks at her hands as the things that have threshed them. Her sister spent too much of her life in a plot to control the men who escaped her, though their flight gratified her, a kind of freedom from the shroud that desire for them had become, a fabric she needed their help to break out of. This virus got her a month ago, at 95, muting nearly every life around her in the nursing home she no longer had the words to identify.
In a bureaucratic mishap that workers deemed essential are prone to, in overtaxed despair at what they can’t unsee — authorities later tell us — my aunt was put in a body bag and ferried to Hart Island, stacked in a grave full of the ones not yet claimed by those who loved them. There, in the 1980s, at the onset of another viral scourge, thousands of my same-sex-loving-kind were tubed in plastic pouches and buried in separate graves by inmates from Rikers Island. Paid 50 cents an hour for that toil, inmates stood in jumpsuits saving them from pathways to transmission that awaited a future more ably ready to understand how those pathways worked.
I tell my 45 students at New York University none of this.
I don’t want my stories to cover theirs.
We reconvene via Zoom, in the paradox of a remoteness that the camera brings up close. I affirm: there’s nothing in our work that necessitates you should delete yourselves from what we do, so try to write about how what I’m going to show you speaks to where you now are. I’m in a dwarfed square to the right of Adrienne Rich, soon to read her poem, “What Kind of Times Are These,” filmed by NPR in 1995. At the first sound, that first image, her past spills into our collective present.
She’s looking at “two stands of trees” grouped around a hill whose grass grows upward, at “the old revolutionary road” that tumbles into shadow and at “a meeting-house” forsaken by “the persecuted” who vanished “into those shadows.” The poem hitches itself to a repeated “dread,” an awed fear at how adroit America has been, since the time of its invasive fathers, at disappearing those whom it had no long-lived use for.
I’m thinking, if we looked close enough, with her, would we see the brown bodies that got in the way, hacked down for the concept that earth exists to be owned and disappears into that ownership? Would we pick out the wavering faces of those who, in 1991, when this poem came to Rich, were under-cared-for and heated up by the HIV that, fanning out to a general population sure of its own immunity, its straightness, its disaffection for needles, broke the promise of a right to safety always impervious to infection? What we do to and on the land, Rich suggests, some of us do to many. Coupling trees watch all of it, while their under and overstories link the life below with the life above, until human hands ax them into air.
Esperanza’s in her bedroom. Polaroids of herself over time, from the small ages to the bigger ones, climb up the wall behind her, in rows. She writes in Zoom’s chat window, as her colleagues do, but in her case, she’s wondering what these photos forget. They omit any indication that she’s her family’s first born American girl, that her El Salvadoran mother braved the trek to Queens pregnant and alone: Esperanza’s father had been carved up by tattooed arms he couldn’t dodge, and they left him to leak out in a ditch from which his body would never be retrieved. The photos don’t picture her mother’s Temporary Protected Status or all the time that Esperanza stands, staring with her mother at plexiglass in immigration services, only to be told to come back next week, when the English she’ll translate might allow her mother not yet to be disappeared. They don’t image how her mother returns to sterilizing floors and surfaces in supermarkets, open to the virus that can disappear her.
Toniah, listening to Esperanza, says she’s in her Baltimore home with a Nigerian mother who’s already rubbed her away. Even with Paris Is Burning posters above her bed, with Toniah’s girlfriend who cooked up a simmer among the sheets when the last lockdown clamped shut, her mother praises the everyday miracle of a simple friendship that her God refuses another name for.
Justin, outside Santa Monica, writes that he’s in a place he doesn’t have words to put to. The virus landed on his elderly father, his mother collapses into tears, he’s the parent of a father-child who wheezes in the middle of disappearing, and Justin admits he can’t know the incantation that will summon his father back. But a shared screen shows him the words he thought he couldn’t say.
Francesca’s typing at her desk in Atlanta: I’m a Black trans girl from the south. English has been a prison for me. I’ve never been asked to show up in it. Its formulas for expression going wonky just as you think you’ve applied them on the right occasions. Professors so needy to get their own words gifted back to them. Reading these voices, I let mine go. And the page makes room for me that I can see.
I devote our last moments to reading aloud Richard Siken’s 2005 poem, “Scheherazade.” We talk, my students and I, about the Middle Eastern origins of the name that titles Siken’s poem, how this is the way in which 19th-century German translators turned the Middle Persian sounds that stood for her. She married a king who beheaded every wife before her, after the marriage bed was mussed and steaming, so he could save himself from their potential for infidelity. But she built a fence of stories around him, and the telling, the taking of that room from night to dawn, kept her breathing.
Siken notches his poem together with three imperatives to “tell me.” Tell me about the dreaming where you, the man I love, and I yank “the bodies out of the lake / and dress them in warm clothes again,” so they can remember what it means to live. Tell me how everything that follows from this, “and love too, will ruin us.” Above all, “tell me we’ll never get used to it.” Siken makes his “it” big enough to carry the dream-resurrected dead and a love daring ruination because that love must be the counter of habit, unfeelingly replayed. My students hear every word as a farewell in the face of horrors that remain with us. Yet Juno insists: getting used to it is her target. What she’s used to, she controls. She allies that claim with the island off Connecticut where she and her parents live, in a house that doesn’t waggle, always there, supported. But islands are intimate with water that sucks away at them and that keeps them floating.
I look at an almost two-year-old Instagram post by queer performer and trans activist, Justin Vivian Bond. It’s a shot from early 1991, when The New York Times reported that our country’s AIDS-dead had reached 100,000. Unlike the paper’s coverage of an identical number of Americans killed by the coronavirus, The Times “didn’t bother writing their own story,” opting instead to run one from the Associated Press: ”on page 18. Below the fold. No pictures. No names.” Bond mourns the ample differences here, and there’s the right type of acid in that mourning. Remembered bodies reflect what any culture decides to see. The elided ones were never there. Or they were there to be deleted.
Dreaming, I wonder, if we collected all the hair self-cut and snipped at over 2020’s long-locked months, would that talismanic collection return us to the period before this virus descended? Would the dead spring up, reassembled into a life we’d recognize?
* * *
No reset button exists for suffering. If we had recourse to that button, it wouldn’t gather the viral-levelled so they might stand again. It wouldn’t revive George Floyd or Breonna Taylor or those others who accompany them in deserving the wholeness they were denied. Our kind will never equal the machines we fabricate, the reset buttons we build, because we predate every one of them. If we could go back, none of the disappeared bodies would be returned to us, because what caused their disappearances would remain unconfronted or rightly acknowledged by those in power and by those who say yes to that power—nothing would be altered. This desire to reset can only be the wrong longing.
Behind each word I’m writing now, at three in the morning of a too warm, variant-filled December, not a single car wheeling down the road, I hear the last lines of “Leaflets,” which Rich published in 1969: I’m thinking how we can use what we have / to invent what we need. And all my body’s forces of animation try to tell me, still, that the task to need better ought to be our common business.