>>[WOMAN WAILING]: On the Problem of Representing Trauma as a Brown Woman Within the Institution of Poetry

Liao Yiwu: How do you manage to wail and howl over a stranger?

Li Changgeng: I entered the mourning profession at age twelve… Having a basic foundation enables a performer to improvise with ease, and to produce an earth shattering effect. Our wailing sounds more authentic than that of the children and relatives of of the deceased.

—“The Professional Mourner,” The Paris Review, June 2005

*

MOURNER FOR HIRE | FEEL BETTER INC.

1. FACT (observational): I have seen books of poetry in hospices, places of worship, hospital waiting rooms. I have seen poetry printed in brush-stroke fonts on maudlin stock photography hanging above half-a-million-dollar life-support systems. I have seen poetry decals on my students’ Macbooks, which announce to the world that their life is not about to collapse on them like their accumulated student debt, their unsafe lives in their rape-enabling campus, their wageless futures. I have seen poetry framed and propped in rooms decorated with images of cherubs excreting into gardens. These are the kinds of rooms where people are waiting for better news, where they are waiting for waiting itself to feel better.
2. There are four moments in the life of an average American when they will almost certainly encounter poetry: during an SAT subject exam, after a breakup, at a wedding, and at a funeral. Poetry is often ascribed a default palliative purpose—recalling the Latin verb palliare, ‘to cloak.’^[1] As a genre, it is first asked to do the work of healing (for the individual) and then the work of rehabilitating language and the voice (for society) back to its normative functioning outside/in the wake of a crisis. Poetry is the after-dinner mint offered after a trauma buffet.
3. Rehabilitation—the returning of language to the service of normative functioning, in the service of the status quo through the management of affect and emotional life of readers/audience members and in the name of “healing.” Who heals, from what, and to what end? Who benefits from such healing? And who else benefits? And who else?
4. This can look like an audience member being assured that they are not alone in their suffering; this can look like a white audience member feeling reassured that they are a good white audience member; this can look like a white feminist caring that they don’t want to “be that white feminist, but am I that white feminist when I am being meta about being that white feminist right now?” feel better. Etc, etc. 

{Reader, how are you feeling right now?}

5. Rehabilitation often obscures both the labor undertaken by the poet who writes about trauma and the markets that are entered through the exchange of poetry as a good and a service. The rehabilitative purpose of most poetry is second only to its primary role as an instrument of moral instruction. It instructs the reader towards an ostensibly better life, hence its predominant role in weddings ceremonies, condolence cards, graduation ceremonies. Like the eulogy and the wedding toast, it is, unfortunately, most often consumed as a threshold genre, printed on a pamphlet and in very small quantities.
6. FACT (statistical/experiential): I am, more often than not, curated, reviewed, edited, cited, quoted, and engaged by white people. To wit: I recently published a book called Kith. It is a book that witnesses and documents various forms of postcolonial trauma etched into the Indian diaspora, told through (sometimes) autobiographical frames. When I give readings from this book, or present materials at talks, I often field two kinds of responses afterward: One is gratitude: “thank you for doing the hard work that helps me understand/feel/know/empathize.” The other is concern: “How and why did you take this on? That must have been devastating!” These responses are often related, and they position my emotional labor next to its purported utility. Gratitude, often from white readers, emerges from a presumed recognition of the work I’ve done to “give voice” (to those presumed to be “voiceless”) and to help them (white readers) understand or connect with my “kith”—a community (Indian-Americans, Tamilians) that has heretofore just sort of floundered in their imaginations in a kind of murky “brown” category, dressed in full, melancholic regalia (or, alternatively, blinged out in some Bollywood fantasy).

{Reader, don’t worry, this isn’t about you.}

7. FACT (confessional): I worry, all the time, that my work participates in the maintenance of whiteness’s comfort with itself—a comfort which easily assimilates the processes of learning and understanding “cultures” constructed to sustain and affirm its hegemonic position. I worry that I work, through the defaults of my historical and social positions, in Feel Good Incorporated without my consent. Because I participate within discourses and fields which have worked, overtime, to exclude women of color, I worry all the time that I’m going to write, forever and until I die, for the enlightenment, comfort, and spiritual rehabilitation of white people. Worse: That I will write and perform, for as long as I live, about the death of my kind, for white people who will survive. Put another way, I worry, like Prageeta Sharma has, that my lexicon and my body are bound up in “cheap signaling.”^[2] Put yet another way (& to draw on Dawn Lundy Martin’s phrasing), I worry about populating a grave of “bodies that are unaware of their utilitarian bluntness in the symbolic order of race.” ^[3] I experience this worry as a fear: a fear of permanently orphaning of my future-self at the stoop of Poetry, capital P.
8. So I write to adopt myself. I write by first considering the role of the hired mourner, into which I arrive as a historical product. People “like me,”^[4] which includes best selling poet Rupi Kaur, are expected to carry out, as part of a “lifestyle” of engaging trauma, a purpose and role naturalized into our presentation (“a given”). This expectation places us in a particular performative role in relation to those for whom this grief is useful only as a second hand commodity—vintage, thrifted, on consignment and purchased for a certain fashioning.

{Reader, I apologize for making you uncomfortable.
I was paid to do this. Are you OK?}

CUE: [WOMAN WAILING] | PERFORMING AMBIVALENCE

9. As a person who writes (within a tenure granting system) about pain, trauma, and impersonal suffering, ambivalence is the only embodied feeling of which I am certain.
10. In my personal life (whatever that is) ambivalence is a naturalized symptom of imposter syndrome. This is a syndrome that has been coded into my practice through my erstwhile status as “Resident Alien,” my current status as “Naturalized American,” and my pending status as “Perpetually Suspect” under USCIS/Homeland Security’s newest committee for denaturalization (Operation Second Look/Operation Janus). Geopolitical uncertainty has a way of unnerving, teetering the body’s center of gravity. The whole world tilts this way and that at the sight of a slip of paper or a smudged rubber stamp. It takes very little for people like me to be undone from a place.
11. Ambivalence is a productive and necessary affect for those who work in the uncertain terrain of no man’s land as documentarians of trauma, as poets working with difficult history, as poets with certain bodies open to dark decoding, open for business. This ambivalence is central to my work as a hired mourner. Ambivalence is food on the table, a baby sleeping in the crib, enough money to run the heat in April.
12. Within the institution of USAmerican poetics, my non-speech Closed Caption often reads >>[WOMAN WAILING]. The context in which I read/ am read is never cleansed of blood. I am always also doing forensic work in the spaces of the living. In other words, the role of hired mourner, thusly captioned, is a leitmotif in my racial and gendered presentation—it is encoded in the identity markers I receive here, like a visa, like a way of moving through this land.^[5]
13. Thus: If who I am mourning and who I am mourning for matters, then, so does the question of who has hired me to do the mourning and why I will need to witness pain and grief—to what end?

{OK, are you taking notes? OK. Ready?}

PAIN | A LUMP OF PURE SOUND

14. Virginia Woolf, who knew something about pain, observed that “English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver or the headache.” In her supple, sensitive essay on living with illness and chronic pain, Woolf observed that whereas even schoolchildren have access to the Romantic poets to help express how they feel towards a crush, full-grown adults fail to find the language necessary to describe their physical pain at the doctor’s office— the language, notes Woolf, “at once runs dry.” The depletion is immediate. Because “there is nothing ready made for him. He is forced to coin words himself.” Comparing the event of finding the right language to smithery or pottery, Woolf shows us the sick, pained person “tak[es] his pain in one hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other...to crush them together so that a brand new word in the end drops out.” Finding language for pain is alchemical, primitive, difficult. It is an act that combines violence and creation. The verbal response to physical trauma, wounding, pain, was, for Woolf, a linguistically innovative act. It takes something out of us— and it depletes the experience of which we speak. We fall supine and we bend backward with sheer effort. Finding the words floors us.
15. Woolf’s observations transcend the experience of personal pain and seem to apply to those who witness pain, as well. Consider what you do when you see a horrifying incident: you gasp, you wrap your mouth with your hands, you turn away. Our very first reaction as witnesses is self-effacement; we hide our faces, thin out our own presence, in an effort to muffle a scream or to stem a sharp intake of air. It is as if this instinctive bandaging of the voyeur’s face, this spontaneous creation of a mask, performs a hurried, off-kilter empathy mirroring the victim’s physical pain. When in great pain, a person imagines that her body has turned away and against her, that her body is masked or somehow alien. There is a feeling that the body and the agent are in conflict with one another; or that one is estranged from the other. Pain produces a split subject. Pain initiates a fissure within the subject to make them appear as “not oneself.” It alienates the suffering person both from the self and from society. Elaine Scarry has described the phenomenon of double alienation as constitutive of the suffering subject:

[P]ain is in part a profound sensory rendering of “against,” [but] it is also a rendering of the “something” that is against, a something at once internal and external. Even when there is an actual weapon present, the sufferer may be dominated by a sense of internal agency: it has often been observed that when a knife or a nail or pin enters the body, one feels not the knife, nail or pin but one’s own body, one’s own body hurting one.

The greater the pain, the more insistent the wedge, the more split the subject. We are easily logged; easily dislodged. Pain accomplishes this by exhausting expressive language of its abilities. Whereas the moderate pain of an arthritic knee or a small cut “monopolizes language,” through complaining or endlessly describing the wound, extreme pain, both physical and psychical, decimates our ability to verbally project ourselves. Whereas an ache makes you loquacious, lets you obsess over a scab or complain to random strangers, extreme pain excommunicates you from the world. It utterly deprives you of language.

{Dear Reader, Are you OK? I want to endear myself to you,
but I have already failed at this by moving swiftly away from autobiography.
I feel I should apologize for how you may be feeling about me, right now.}

16. Fifty years after Woolf’s astute observation that verbally expressing pain requires innovation (to which we have curbed or blocked access), the psychologist/neuroscientist duo Patrick Wall and Ronald Melzack developed the most accurate model of physical pain to date, the Gate theory of pain. They also discovered that the language we use to represent extraordinary pain depends on the language already offered to us. We typically fail to innovate while in pain, and rely, instead, on pre-established sets of vocabulary and tropes of representation. We know better how to speak of pain through pre-established sets of language because pain depletes, even exhausts, the language we have access to within ourselves.
17. When you go into a doctor’s office and see a vocabulary list describing different noxious and painful sensations, you’re likely looking at a McGill questionnaire (1971), developed by Melzac and another collaborator, which helps you describe your pain in everyday communicative language. On their own, words like “burning” or “throbbing” may not describe much and thus may not help a diagnosis. However, when used in a list of descriptors— “flickering, “quivering,” “pulsing,” “throbbing”— they could potentially describe the temporal dimension of the patient’s pain symptoms through differentiation. We are no longer foreigners; we assimilate linguistically to describing pain. When language is offered to us, we gratefully accept it when we are in pain—whether this is pain borne of physical wounding or psychic grief.
18. I include poetry in the category of language proffered while we are in pain. Poetry might offer, for many (if not most), a way of managing the exhaustion of language in the events of personal crisis that span the gamut of physical and psychic pain. Like the pre-selected language of the McGill questionnaire, poetry offers a fairly stable series of tropes and methods, reified over time, that assist with pain and trauma management.

{Are you alright? Still here? Thank you.
Feeling OK? We can get a drink after this.}

SOCIALIZING PAIN | #SELFCARE ROUTINES

19. Pain is fundamentally anti-social. Some of the earliest scientific and personal documents describing bodily pain in the late middle ages observe what we now take for granted—that pain makes us fall to pieces. Philosophers have suggested that pain’s formative capacity revolves around the deformation of a painless subject. Augustine described it as “a sensation of our own decay”; Alexander of Hales as a “rupture in continuity”; Avicenna as the “sensing of a contrary thing.” Artaud described pain as that which “intensifies and deepens, multiplies its resources and means of access at every level of sensibility.” Pain pluralizes the access to the subject until it “eliminate[s] all that is ‘not itself’” ( as Scarry notes). In all these descriptions, pain is likened to an entity— a dybbuk barbed onto your bones— that disallows commiseration between ego and identity. Pain is an entity that stalls you from answering to your own name. Scarry explains: “pain comes unsharably into our midst as at once that which cannot be denied and that which cannot be confirmed.”
20. And yet. Please allow me to cite one of the most shared, retweeted, circulated, copied, borrowed, reprinted pieces of evidence of such “unsharable” pain:
    

     

21. Popular/market-legible poetry that claims to represent trauma (“pain”) also claims to socialize pain by verbalizing the experience of pain^[6]. The function of the genre in these instances, as my undergrads would name it, is “to relate.” Most poetry that is tagged with the terms abuse, trauma, loss, or healing works through transparent modes of representation—a kind of belated naturalism, a blended realism and confessionalism, in the tonal and syntactic registers of self-help discourse. Such poetry is often understood to be 1) a consequence of trauma and 2) a solution to that trauma. Its function is a kind of marketable sublimation. As evinced in the poem above and statement below, by Indian-Canadian poet Rupi Kaur, the relationship between trauma and literary art is represented as causal:

Everytime something bad happens, I always respond to it with art. So going through that [abusive relationship] and ending that [I] responded with going to my first ever open mic night. Starting to do this thing on a regular basis and I remember there’s other things that happened after that and every time things went wrong, I would just do something else. Like, then I started a blog and something else went wrong...then I started my Instagram, and then other things went wrong and life became so bad that I was like, forget about it, I’m just going to publish this goddamn book.^[7]

22. Kaur’s poetry offers a glossy and torqued vision of pretty but damaged life as both an exception to otherwise normative functioning and as utterly quotidian. It is poetry which treats trauma as a generalized individual’s ache, a thing that can be represented, resolved, and consumed as part of an effortless and customized #SelfCare routine, which places the consumer at the heart of a moral #selfcareconsumption campaign. Or, in Kaur’s words: “I don’t want someone to read my poetry and think: what does that mean?” Indeed, that is quite clear. An easy to understand loquaciousness is part of the aesthetic of poetry as a rehabilitative and palliative solution. It works as a balm because it is about everything and everyone: As one of the poems reads, in its entirety: “the way they leave you tells you everything^[8].” Which is to say, it is about nothing and no one in particular.

And what is the solution that Poetry offers, in this case? Getting over the trauma of historical suppression of brown women— a history that Kaur’s statements and interviews, if not her poems, are no doubt in conversation with— looks a lot like being rich while brown. As she imagines it on the eve of her 24th birthday:

[We’re] going to go to the bougiest place where there’s no people of colour. We’re just going to sit down looking so fly and have a really expensive dinner...We’re going to be sitting down and negotiating with multimillionaires because we as brown women can and should.

We can and we should. Race and gender can and should be deployed in the service of class-aspiration. The prescriptive ethos is absolutely in cahoots with positive psychology’s human resource management, which calls for you to be a better you— more bling to prove that abuse, trauma, and loss can’t keep you down. The 22kt triumph looks like Kaur gesturing to the rings on her hand:

 “This one I got when Milk and Honey reached number one on The New York Times list,” she says, indicating an emerald on her left middle finger. “I got this one in Oakland, and then this one I got when I finished writing the manuscript, and then this one was for selling over a million books. And then this one I got after I got all these and was like, oh, I’m just allowed to buy them now for no reason at all.” ^[9]

Indeed, it would seem that the revolution in identity politics will make sure that the cat-wing and the highlight are on point, just like the deployment of your mother’s broken English, or a sister’s heartbreak. On point. Kaur’s poetry treats pain as a social resource and poetry as capital—a moment to bond over, similar to a revolutionary dinner at a bougie restaurant as a big fuck you, a loquacious complaint, an easy breezy beautiful experience that circulates in a particularly feminized economy and through the recuperation of a person’s capitalist agency. The oh so indiscreet charms of this very poetic bourgeoisie.

{Dear Reader, I am worried that you think I am picking on Kaur.
I assure you—I am. Yes, we can still get that drink.}

THE HIRED MOURNER | FOXY PROXY

23. Kaur belongs to the long and difficult history of brown women and men whose careers have been preoccupied with the rescue, recuperation, and rehabilitation of hegemonically comfortable souls. The marketing of pain (as a good) and its management (as a service) is a fact of how poetry circulates, and this has most recently been made transparent in Rupi Kaur’s role within the institution, through her lucid and highly publicized ventriloquy of the grammar of capital. “Poetry now appeals to a very wide audience of young people who didn’t think poetry was cool before. Now it’s the coolest thing,”^[10] she says in a Guardian interview, affirming that branding is central to how poetry about pain and trauma is consumed, like any other good. And, in her case, this is the “cool” of poetry that has arrived in a newly open market for trauma narratives from women of South Asian descent: “There was no market for poetry about trauma, abuse, loss, love and healing through the lens of a Punjabi-Sikh immigrant woman.” In a culture of total death and perpetual grief, there is always a market for folks who model the legible way to grieve interpersonal trauma and to rehabilitate the grieving (or the aggrieved) back to their ideal roles as consumers, employees, partners, children. In this market, Kaur may well be the most visible hired mourner of our time.

{I, too, earn a living writing about trauma, grief, and pain.
As I am doing right now, with this essay. Dear Reader, thank you.}

24. Professional mourners exist around the world as proxies in the act of witnessing grief. The carpedieras of Brazil, the crying women of the Philippines, the Rudaalis of India, and the moirologists of Greece and China. They show up during the dark times, with the florists, the caterers, and the dry-cleaners, and they do the work of mourning when the rest of us are taking care of the paperwork of death. A “proxy” is a document or a person who stands in on behalf of someone or something—as a surrogate. To have the authority of “proxy” is to have the legally (or culturally) recognized ability to speak, write, act, and express on behalf of another. This unavailable testifier or mourner is a literal position in funerals and wakes. As one moirologist, a hired mourner, from Sichuan, China, puts it:           

Of course we recognize that the family of the deceased are lead actors. But often, when they’re overcome with sadness, their bodies begin to weaken. Before long, all the lead actors have to exit the stage. At this time, we, the supporting actors, enter refreshed and warmed up for the role. Frankly, the hired mourners are the ones who can stick it out to the very end.

A hired mourner’s obligation is thus not towards authenticity, but towards the performed amplification and purposeful propagation of the cultural functions of mourning. At its most neutral, professional mourning is a ceremonial and pragmatic role.

25. Within the practice of poetry, the hired mourner is an entity who earns a livelihood offering an interpretation of grief caused by death, devastation, disaster (as historical formations in the present). She works in the register of the voice. Her mouth is as open/shut as a grave. She offers dramatization, representation, commentary on death. She transcribes the voice of a grieving community (a community aggrieved). She carries the grieving body further through the amplification and strategic displacement of the voice. The hired mourner has a dovetailed understanding of the economy of pain (that a poem about grief, like any poem, is a system of exchange encoded in embodied cultural capital) and the economics of pain (that a published poem can function as objectified cultural capital). The political relation to this given, prescribed role—whether that of resistance or acquiescence or productive ambivalence—is demonstrated in how this dovetailing is acknowledged and articulated.
26. I offer this job description with an awareness that hired mourners also have a contrasting role as functionaries for “moving on” from death, as agents who assist the living (those who will survive on the other end of the necropolitical axis) in psychic “thriving,” with all the HR pro-corporate implications of that word. Kaur, for example, has stated, explicitly, that “whether you have everything or whether you have nothing, there’s hardships, I think, in everybody’s lives… and the power that you need and the answers that you need are already in you.” She offered this in an interview with Lewis Howes, the author of The Millionaire Morning, a book which helps readers understand the “morning mindset, habits, and routines of millionaires.” Kaur’s prescription for the management of personal suffering here abstains from political and materialist critique, but the real danger is that her poetics exempts any organization, nation, state or demographic of their role in producing or perpetuating trauma: It is a poetics that holds no one accountable, least of all the ones “who have everything.”

{& what do you have, dear Reader? And what will you have to drink?}

27. Being a hired mourner (within the practice & institution of poetry) can look a lot like being a professional apologist for alienation and atomized individualism, and this is part and parcel of the tradition in which brown poets (like brown gurus and handsome brown CNN reporter-neurosurgeons) operate.^[11] It is a melancholic (pre)occupation. As I’ve argued elsewhere, my kith have served the sensual, spiritual, and aesthetic comfort of white audiences since the mid-1800s, especially during times of economic crisis, by being key props within American strains of neo-Orientalism. From Emerson calling his wife “mine Asia” to philosophical rationalizations of Oriental Primitivism, to history originating in a mysterious East (ex oriente lux).
28. Even while Thoreau, Whitman, and Emerson were consuming an Indian mysticism to rehabilitate and comfort the industrializing, alienated, bereft white American “soul,” American missionaries were conquering souls of brown folk—those “naked niggers [of Calcutta], members of a race...all such miserable, fawning, cringing, slavish cowards, especially when flogged” (Missionary Minstrum on the people of Calcutta, now Kolkata[12]). Add to this the pleasures of the Nautch girls; the peddling of Indian trinkets at the Jersey shore in the mid-1800s; the effusion of mystical cross-cultural, high-capital exchange of The Beatles; the gritty heroism of Patrick Swayze in City of Joy; and the banal inclusivity of The Big Bang Theory or Quantico and the general jai ho of the Indian geist; and you’ll notice the trend in the interior décor we’ve provided for the American consumer’s soul from the 19th C. onwards. Thus, I find that the role of performing an embodied racial-linguistic-national critique within the institution of poetry, has to at least begin with the refusal to be Poetry’s Deepak Chopra.

{Dear Reader, I feel like you’re feeling something about me
now and I don’t know what to do about this.
I want you to feel OK that I am still talking about this.
Are you OK? What was I saying?}

29. Knowing how to perform one’s refusal might begin with an understanding of the difference between the willing and the willful hired mourner.

a.  When one is brown, being a hired mourner could look like a highly stylized, willing embodiment of the pose that conflates the mourner and the mourned. In this pose, the willing mourner is also the victim, also the grieving, also the traumatized, also the dead or dying. The willing embodiment often confuses the work of the voice with the work of confession or conveyance. They may perform absolute identification and projection with the victim/survivor dyad.

b.  When one is brown, being a hired mourner could look like a willful  embodiment of mourning. I borrow “willful ness” here from Sara Ahmed’s notion of willful ness as a “failure to comply with those whose authority is a given” under circumstances where the acts of moving on and forgetting pain are the preferred deliverables for the “culture industry,” a realm in which much poetry continues to have tenure for its soporific, palliative, and courtly functions^[13]. This willful  occupation does not confuse the mourner and the mourned. This willful  occupation fundamentally disobeys the institution’s encouragement that we profit from this confusion.

30. In Sichuan, a suona peals out a plaintive note and a group of hired mourners begin to beat their chest and wail on behalf of the deceased’s family. When this happens, there is no doubt about whose pain, trauma, and suffering is being represented. The hired mourners wear a uniform. They do not resemble the deceased or the bereaved. Their suffering is strategically unreal and artificial—authentically performed. The performance is necessarily split from their own experience of their client’s emotions. This splitting or separation lets them do their job.

{Are you a willing or a willful mourner,
in/for your community, dear Reader?}

31. Christina Sharpe has asked: “What does it mean to defend the dead? To tend to the Black dead and dying?” I ask this too of poets who take on this claim of tending to the brown dead, the brown beaten, the brown abused—the mathematically improbable numbers of brown lives born into and ending in indenture; the lives famined away; the lives pyred away; the lives colonized away; the lives lynched away (at home and away); the lives detained away; the lives sent away; the lives untouchabled and schedule-casted away; the lives coerced and miscarried away; the lives raped and assaulted away; the lives exiled into disappearance from social discourse. To what morbid relativism of suffering do these lives arrive in the purchased circuits of poetry today? On what stoop do these lives sit and watch us try and speak for them?
32. A poem can be a public act. Any public act of grieving underwrites the value of “a life that matters.” Judith Butler theorizes: The grievability of a someone is an index of the extent to which their disappearance from living will be noticed and mourned by a public. The grievability of a someone is an index of the extent to which their recognizability as living constitutes a community. The willing hired mourner represents a precarious someone’s grievability by relieving the reader of responsibility for that precarity. The willful hired mourner impacts a precarious someone’s grievability by acknowledging their own survival within necropolitical sociality.       

{Dear Reader, the last time you read a brown poet,
what were they making you feel?
How did you move on from that feeling?}

33. “Precariousness implies living socially, that is [acknowledging] the fact that one’s life is always in some sense in the hands of the other” (this is Butler also). This applies to some lives more than others. We have an aesthetic and political responsibility to acknowledge this fact alongside the passive complicities that situate us within our geopolitical privilege as writers, readers, and consumers of poetry. We must ask: How is poetry acknowledging and struggling over the future anteriority of any life? We must ask: To what end is any representation of the suffering of minorized subjects? We must ask: To what end is any representation of “the end”?

{I feel like you could use a latte. I am worried that I’m doing all the talking here. Sorry, what was I saying?}

AMERICAN BEAUTY | HORRORISM

34. Estrangement is the fundamental effect of trauma. It is this foundational problem upon which I have built my imaginative and intellectual world; it is the problem that I cannot solve; it is the problem that therefore requires poetry. I mean “requires” here also in a bureaucratic sense—I write here to live. Poetry is how I found a way to become and remain American. It is a requirement for my livelihood, in no metaphysical manner. The subject matter of my poetry is not coincidental to my legal status. The poetry’s etiology is my biography.
35. Am I, in becoming and remaining an American poet, a willful or willing hired mourner? When people are grateful for my mourning, my work of witnessing pain, what is the currency in which I am being paid for my services?
36. Hired mourners. We write in The Here which thrives, both economically and psychically, in what Vijay Prashad has called a “saturated culture of death,” characterized by a century of (profitable) aggravated assault and murder lead by the American war-machine against Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and others. We write in The Here where the State is the most eager collaborator with global corporations—those beguiling, invisible, protected “merchants of death,” those Yamas for the Others who must die so we can live. We write in The Here that delivers trillions of dollars in humanitarian aid with one hand and wrests thrice that amount from the developing world in debt servicing with the other (“in repatriated profits from Western-based corporations”)^[14]. The Here is abiding horrorism—a term Adriana Cavarero uses to explain the production of vulnerability (under state violence and extermination) as a normative condition. The Here is the living allegory of the Tamil idiom: குழந்தையைக் கிள்ளிவிட்டு தொட்டிலையும் ஆட்டுவான். He who pinches the baby also rocks the cradle. In The Here, trauma is a commodity that moves through the systems of exchange as a lachrymal resource.

{Do our poems truly devastate you, dear Reader?
Was it truly a brutal poem you just read?
Did it truly break your heart? Or are you still enjoying that latte?}

37. Are we willful mourners who document/ write/ witness The Here as an active “failure to comply with those whose authority is a given”? Are we willing mourners who rehabilitate readers to the new, normal horrorism of the present? And how does the answer to this depend on who is reading us, who we are performing for, who we are speaking to?
38. I have offered Kaur in this essay as an example to reckon with—a phenomenon occurring alongside counter-distinctive poets who acknowledge the fundamentally estranging and anti-social, non-symbolizable characteristics of difficulty, historically inflected (sometimes traumatic) experience, divesting its utility from profitability. In this latter group are poets of complex and distended South Asian origins: Bhanu Kapil, Prageeta Sharma, Serena Chopra, Shiv Kotecha, Amarnath Ravva, and others, for whom historical and personal traumas form a tight knot always being methodically parsed and rebraided through a poetics of ambivalence and willful ness. Recognizing how pain is being documented in their work takes more breath than a benevolent sigh.                                       

WALKING THE CORPSE: BECOMING A WILLFUL  HIRED MOURNER

“In the old days there were people who specialized in walking the corpse. They normally traveled in the evenings, two guys at a time. One walked in the front, the other at the back, and they pulled the body to walk along, as fast as wind. They would utter in unison, "Ya, ho, ya, ho." If you looked from a distance you would see that the dead and the living marched to the same step.”

—“The Professional Mourner,” The Paris Review, June 2005

39. A human scream or rending cry can curdle not just the blood, but also all guarantees of subjective presence. When you hear a scream, something in you unravels. When you watch a heaving, buckling body in grief, your muscles lock, your jaw drops, your movement knots up. It takes effort to approach the scene of grief; it takes dragging your own body to the scream. Whereas poetry remains dependent, at least to some extent, on the sign (the semantic), the voice in performance can carry out simulations of that exasperating and evasive expenditure that relates the sign to the body. It is the sonic event that reminds us of a human that is resoundingly bestial, of the human “caught flush with their animality”; of the human that is not yet corpse (this is Kristeva). It reminds us of the human who can still move and be moved to the site of grief.

{I worry I will not move you, dear Reader.
I have said too much to move you.
I am ambivalent about how I feel about this.}

40. The willful act of mourning, within poetry, sounds a crisis out, ringing the bodily alarm that first gathers and then repels any (symbolic) community around the spectacle of grief. Within many South Asian cultures, people are not invited to funerals. They are informed about them. Willful  mourners do not offer invitations. The performance or composition must take place to sustain community without rendering grief into rehabilitative entertainment or palliative resource. The willful act of mourning acknowledges the screaming scene towards which we once failed to drag our listening body—that scene in history, that scene slowly unfurling in the news, that scene that has you fleeing home or staying in bed, day after day.
41. Poems about bodily or psychic suffering must in some way elaborate a vocal straying, where the poet’s voice jettisons itself in an attempt to untether links between identity and body, skin and bone, a voice and a name, a face and a little box on a census report. Check it Other; check it blank. When we perform as willful hired mourners, when we arrive in The Here, beating our chests and strumming our vocal chords along the streets for all to witness, we wail in the long tradition of the carpedieras of Brazil, the crying women of the Philippines, the Rudaalis of India. We might find ways to wail without sound, with textual markers, with silent mouths open, with ordinary speech.
42. I want to stop shaking hands with folks who say things like “That was amazing. Thank you.” at the end of readings that document grief.
43. We must wail to extend the funeral scene of history into the present. We must assert, as Brecht did, that the audience member is in the theatre, yes, but she is also simultaneously in the world. We must take notes on the heave of the chest and the distortion of the wailer’s facial muscles, the stretched throat and the coiled body, the gaping mouth and the whitened eyes, on the attending turn and horrified recoil of the listener. We must evict our audiences from Feel Good Incorporated. We must inform them of the funeral.                                           
44. The willful hired mourner brings the funeral home. She then brings the home to the public square and the public square to the gallery. The living poetic voice, in translating pain, must take place not in authenticity but in performance. It must lend space to affects that serve something beyond the spectacle, beyond the cathartic, beyond the utilitarian documentary footage of dark bodies ruined so casually by global capital. The willful hired mourner must be willing to strategically draw into the sound-scape the listener’s calibrating ear without offering it recourse. The willful hired mourner must be willing and able to abandon herself on the threatened threshold of her own noise.

{But, dear Reader, who will hire us when we turn willful? Would you?}

45. The willful brown mourner writes in the register of “something—someone—taking distance from the self,” and she “lets that distance resonate” (this is Nancy) in the performance. In this resonating distance, she would document the process by which the wailing, traumatized subject becomes other to her self. The willful mourner poet might document the keen and awful learning of the lesson that will end up saving her: she is not whom and what she mourns. The willful mourner might take that resonating distance and allow it to fly like a spear, backwards into the long history of her mourning body, taking with it everything that will come for her in the future.