Through Blood, Across the Scream:

Constructing a Body (Meta)Narrative Under Dictatorship





Suggested Readings and Viewings

E. Luminata by Diamela Eltit

Margins and Institutions by Nelly Richard

Repasos Curated by the Hemispheric Institute at NYU: http://www.hemisphericinstitute.org/cuaderno/repasos/index.html

If you are interested in either the book or the articles I read let me know. I am willing to share and or email what I can.

Peace,

Ebony (loving her own skin) Golden

A poem for diamela eltit's wounds


Look closely as the blood lets

As the rips sing a truth

A trauma a voyage




Look closely as the body becomes mist

Escapes it skin entertains dry veins


Look (first the arms like white angels)

At me (like a fleshy mary)

Then (like a dam unleashed)




A river of blood running home

Barefoot




What do you see the torture of this life

The noose stitched by my own hands more




What do you see my crow eyes squawking

Scratching a hymn into corporeal tapestry

Through Blood, Across the Scream:

Constructing a Body (Meta)Narrative Under Dictatorship




How can embodied meta-narratives critique artistic space in the aftermath dictatorship? What are the signs, symbols, inscriptions, markings, glyphs that transmit this genre-less space of violence and terror, trauma? How can the body pull itself from the margins to the center to redefine and recreate language under and outside of an oppressive regime? What are the practices? What are the actions? Where are the breaks, rips, fissures, ruptures, eruptions, gaps? What can the body reveal that an alien language can not? What can the body atone that the voice can not? How can the body reveal what language reaches for, but is cut from, a language that is high-jacked by the state for the purposes of (re)institutionalizing the body? What are the poetics of disillusion, disorientation? How is the body phonemic, phonetic, and whole language without words?




The idea of the "real" resounds throughout "Margins and Institutions". It seems that a dialectical tension exists between the body and language which conflates and complicates notions of the "real" as explored by Nell Richards. Davila and Foss offer that in the wake of the coup, language is left in a state of "intelligibility" which inspires artists to circumvent and rewire language in order "to seek alternative ways to recover the meaning of that history which had been replaced by the Grand History of the Victors". But where does this recovery begin?


I pose, alongside Richards, that language as an embodied practice, is an action that first must be articulated in the body. In the experiences of the body. In the "reality" of the body. Early in "Ellipsis and Metaphor" Richards shares, "The political and administrative control of expression through restriction imposed on language and its socio-cultural structures, was simply an expedient by which the regime could keep the production of meaning under surveillance". Which is to say that language, and I maintain a language that articulates a political platform or ideology of the oppressed or marginalized, serves as a marker by which the government oversees a particular group's movements and ideas. Clearly, in an oppressive society, language catalogs the discontent of the masses, and possibly serves as a vehicle by which the masses galvanize power to overthrow the state.




But language in the hands of the oppressor grafts a violent text on the bodies of Chilean people forced into silence by the state. Interestingly, Richards explicates the violence of language in the sphere of the art scene as a means of highlighting the academic appropriation born out of a quasi-multi-cultural aesthetic which displaces the political and social relevance of historically and culturally specific art. However, just as language is originally conjured in the body, we must consider the revolutionary implications of an artistic critique that is conjured by the artist who creates it. As artists create their works, we should consider the critical ideologies that are integral to their production. The language which describes, which analyzes this process should begin in the textured nuances that extend past the body during the artistic process.




Perhaps, we can speak about this process of body and creation in terms of birth. The creative process could be seen as the nine-month period from conception to birth, and the new-born serves as the referent, the metaphor if you will. Richards describes metaphor as a tool of deception. She writes, "Metaphor is one such privileged device, which prolongs the communicative process thanks to zones of opacity it sets up in the recognition of references; it increases the buoyancy of meaning so that it remains erratic and thus eludes the restricted reading imposed on it by censorship". While this quote unsettles my aforementioned birth metaphor, it reveals how metaphor muddies the spaces of cognition for those engaging with an artistic project, as spectators. So what the body knows and chooses to act out could totally destabilize popular notions of the "real" or "reality". Incorporating metaphor into artistic practice, I imagine, is like casting in intricate network of connective tissue out to multiple layers of society simultaneously.




But these ideas of the project, the critique, and the metaphor speak again to the referent, the thing we as spectators see and judge, analyze, attempt to make sense of. But this is a different language, different from the language that is glyphed onto the body like a burn, a scar. What language is produced when the body is both the creator and the referent for artistic projects?




The body is away of historicizing artistic projects. The body is elemental, it is the organic stuff, the background story; as well as the workshop, the gallery, the exhibit. The body reaches across temporal-spatial frontiers to speak an experience unique to its corporal existence. The markings, the scars, the burns, tell the individual traumatic narratives that words ache to find. Perhaps, each person needs her own language, because universal language may not actualize one's own project, it is utterly useless.




So I am left with thinking about how the body constructs a meta-narrative, a radical discourse, which reaches past itself into society's fibrous spaces to reverberate revolutionary ideologies, both individual and communal. What are performances of a "body rhetoric" doing as practiced by Eltit or Leppe? I am interested in thinking about how this self-inflicted trauma reintroduces violence back into the society. I am also interested in thinking about how these visual narratives become etched into the psyches of spectators. We should consider the short and long term effects, the social implications. It is important to consider how sacrifice, scarification, burning as a means of constructing a narrative impact the community. I am also interested in thinking about the role of pain in rewiring language. What can a scream or a slice do that a stanza or a manifesto can not?