S K I N
An Experiment in Auto Ethnographic Video
Caroline Künzle
Written Component
Master’s Thesis Project
M.A in Media Studies
Concordia University
August 22, 2001
I spent some time consulting fortune-tellers, hoping to get some kind of map of where I’m heading, looking for answers to the question, where am I going? I spent some time doing auto-ethnography, trying to map out where I’ve been, looking for the answer to that question, where do I come from? And ever since I tried to mix it up and do both at once, I’ve been hoping that what I discovered will help me deal with where and what I am right now.
P U T T I N G T H E A U T O I N E T H N O G R A P H Y
My project is an experiment in auto-ethnography, and an exploration of how the documentary video format can serve as a tool of self-discovery for the filmmaker. I set out to make a documentary video about how and why people seek to understand themselves by consulting “fortune-tellers” and other types of healers, guides or “intuitives,” as they are called in the esoteric world. The project became auto ethnographic when I decided to cast myself as the principal character, as the “fortune-seeker,” in order to foreground my personal investment in the subject matter. In doing so, I abandoned the problematic position of the disinterested researcher, who gazes at her subjects through the camera lens in order to study and understand them with supposed objectivity. Auto ethnography is a term used to describe the recent trend in much ethnographic research, to concern oneself with the ethnographer’s own position, in relation to her subjects and to her experience investigating them. As Norman Denzin writes, while auto ethnography has traditionally been defined as “the cultural study of one’s own people,” more recently, it has been defined as “a turning of the ethnographic gaze inward on the self (auto), while maintaining the outward gaze of ethnography, looking at the larger context wherein self experiences occur.”1
One film I watched, in the initial phase of the project, was The Kitchen Goddess, Donna Davies’ NFB documentary about fortune-tellers. I was interested in Davies’ film because its description mentioned Davies’ family connection to the trade (her cousin is a well-known psychic) and I was curious to see in what ways or to what degree the director might foreground her personal investment in her subject matter. While I appreciated and identified with her celebration of folk wisdom, women-centered ways, and nature’s rhythms, what I ultimately found was a fairly conventional narrative made up of talking head interviews intercut with shots of spiders webs and rivers flowing. In my opinion, Davies did not really break any new ground on the subject matter of fortune-telling, but provided a springboard for discussion, by showing conversations with a wide variety of people who claim psychic gifts. Davies gave these fortune-tellers a place to speak about their beliefs and practices, but the same space was not provided for the fortune-seekers or consultants, which might have provided further insight into this phenomenon. Though I was most interested in Davies’ personal investment in her subject matter, this was only very superficially represented with re-enactments of her childhood memories of chanting spells with her girlfriends. Overall, Davies made a celebratory, uncritical film about a subject which obviously interests her, but to my disappointment, whatever passion or emotional investment she feels towards her subject, was kept under wraps, and Davies herself remains largely invisible. The “auto” is missing in this example of documentary ethnography. Ultimately, I suppose this film served as an example of the kind of documentary I was not interested in making.
E T H N O G R A P H Y A S I F P E O P L E C A R E D
Contrary to Davies’ film, it is this decision to turn the ethnographic and documentary gaze inward, which has guided my project. I set out to explore how the documentary form itself can also become a medium of self-analysis and self-understanding. I began the project by asking myself, how much does and can the documentary-maker’s choice and treatment of subject matter reveal about herself? I can now tell you with some authority that the answer is – a lot – but always ultimately depending on how much the documentary maker wants to see. And the final product, the completed video, can be thought of as the answer to another question: How much does the film maker want to reveal? For fore-grounding one’s own subject position is an act of disclosure, of bringing the personal into the public sphere, an act which is still suspect and uncomfortable for some, especially in the academic context, where the mind prevails over the heart. My auto ethnographic approach was inspired and guided by ideas I discovered in Carolyn Ellis and Arthur Bochner’s book, Composing Ethnography: Alternative Forms of Qualitative Writing as well in H.L Goodall Jr.’s book New Ethnography. These writers inspired me with their emphasis on the importance of foregrounding the personal, the emotional, the intimate in one’s research. According to Ellis and Bochner, the goals of ethnography should be to trying to deepen and enlarge our sense of human community and to accomplish this goal, ethnographers cannot stand above and outside what they study. Ellis writes that this kind of new ethnography appeals to her because she wanted to be a storyteller, someone who used narrative strategies to transport readers into experiences and make them feel as well as think, which is why we need to see the kind of ethnography we do, not so much as representation but as communication. “Language sits in for life. We use words. We write. We take our audience into account. We worry about how our readers will interpret what we write, what they may think, and how they will feel.”
Goodall echoes this sentiment by describing his kind of ethnography as “creative narratives shaped out of a writer’s personal experiences within a culture and addressed to academic and public audiences.” He describes the new ethnography as trying to take a form that “rhetorically enables intimacy in the study of culture. The new ethnographers want readers to take what we say personally. We want to make a differences in their lives.” I especially like Goodall’s description of the new ethnographer taking an attitude of “love rather than domination and control” towards his audience.6 What I understand from this is that like Ellis and Bochner, Goodall is expressing the need for all research and writing or other forms of representation to be communicative, open, and humble in its declarations. That the act of putting one’s person in one’s ethnographic work, is a way to foreground one’s humanity, and acknowledge that we are part of the same larger community as the people we are studying – or rather, learning from.
T H I S T H I N G C A L L E D C U L T U R E
If ethnography is the study of a culture, and auto-ethnography, the study of one’s own culture, then part of my task, in this project, has been to try and discover what this culture is, in which I have grown up, what these cultural forces are that have shaped me. I find the task easier when I conceptualize “culture” not as a noun but rather as a verb, an active, living, growing, changing force, some kind of organic process, like the one driving the invisible bacterial cultures that form wherever there is life. I can think of myself as a seed that was planted at a moment in time. The shape I have grown into, the kind of tree or flower I have become, feels in a state of constant conflict and negotiation, between its essential nature and the external forces that shaped and continue to affect its growth. This question of my nature preoccupies me. Is it even possible to identify and distinguish between the inner forces and the external ones that make us who and how we are? My interest in intuition and my inner spiritual life was prompted by a need to believe that I am more than the sum of random cultural forces. I was searching for some kind of essence of the living thing that is me, which can grow its own way, against the cultural currents.
In cultural terms, I am a stellar example of the fruits of globalization. If I truly were a tree, under the earth, my roots would stretch all across the globe. I am the child of a Catholic Swiss German father and a half Catholic and French, half Jewish and Tunisian mother. My parents met in London, England, immigrated together to Berkeley, California, but as fate would have it, settled in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. But what real importance do these facts hold for the seed that was planted and raised to become the Caroline Suzanne Alice Künzle with an “umlaut” on the ü, who eventually transplanted herself to the city of Montreal, where pluro-ethnicity is almost an unremarkable pre-requisite for its inhabitants?
When you buy a package of seeds, do you check the label to see where they’re from before you plant them? If I had known that the mint seeds I purchased at the Marché St. Jacques, were originally packaged in England, subsequently sent some time at Mr. Fothergill’s Seed’s in Edmonton, Alberta (what a coincidence!), before finding their way into the pots on my Montreal balcony — if I had known this information — would it have helped me help them grow? Know how often to water them? How much sunlight they need? Or was it rather the nostalgic image of fresh mint tea, sweetened with honey, as I had tasted it on my search-for-my-roots-trip to Tunisia, more important, since it created the impulse to plant them and help them thrive? Or is the most important thing for you to understand that I wanted to participate in the creation of some life form to pull myself out of a rather depressed post-modern, urban existential state of angst? That seeing a few small green stems emerge from the dirt around them inspired me to begin to write? Are the facts – the places, dates and times – of our origins more important, more valuable, more useful, than the stories, the myths, the metaphors that we make up about ourselves? Which will better help us live and grow, right here, right now, wherever that may be? Isnft the ultimate purpose of story-telling, of shaping narratives out of our lives, to inspire us in ways that help us to live?
I like to play with the image of this seed, blown around by the winds of globalization, because it seems like an appropriate one to help me grapple with this question of origins and destinies and the human need to trace them. “Where are you from?” is of course, one of the first questions someone asks, when they are interested in your story. And when you are young, as I am, another commonly asked question is “where are you going?” In other words, what are you going to do with this life you were given? Perhaps, attempting to answer with another question, “how and why does it all matter?” is what transforms a simple autobiographical account into auto-ethnography. For here you are not only concerned with telling your story, but conscious of the context, the social, and political structures in which you to tell it.
And as I struggle to tell my story, within the institutional structure of an M.A., I can’t help but wonder if in this constant need to contextualize, this post-modern impulse to avoid grand narratives, by being ever-so careful to foreground the very specific subject-position from which we say what we think and know, if this process does not somehow diminish the potential for a story to acquire the mythic qualities that give it its potential for healing, for feeling whole? Catherine Russell writes, in her book, Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video, “autobiography becomes ethnographic at the point where the film- or videomaker understands his or her personal history to be implicated in larger social formations and historical processes.” She suggests “the subject in history is rendered destabilized and incoherent, a site of discursive pressures and articulations.” Is Russell perhaps suggesting that while the video-maker may understand that her personal history is a part of larger structures and processes, this understanding of all the different social forces at play may not necessarily help or empower her, that this awareness may in fact impede an ability to articulate one’s perspective from some kind of stable and coherent position? Is it even possible to have perspective, when one’s position is always shifting? Russell suggests that perhaps what many of the new personal and auto ethnographic films about “fragmented and hybrid identities” do express is a kind of “politics of location” or “embodied knowledge.” I would like to further discuss this notion of “embodied knowledge” and how it is conceptually related to intuition, in a later section in this paper.
What I understand from Russell’s writing is that auto ethnographic works are an attempt to articulate the state of living with an awareness of the social, political and historical forces at play in shaping your identity. In other words, how does knowledge and awareness of all of these categories and socially constructed identities, of the immensity and complexity of how you got to be where you are today, how does it help you live with what and where you are today? If they are imposed categories of identity, are even they accurate descriptions of what you are? Or more useful for me, is the question, are they helpful, useful descriptions for the subject they describe?
Social identities are always ascribed to us by another, as when the ethnographer studies a people and classifies them into categories, representing them according to his personal logic. Postmodern and postcolonial theories have problematized many of these ethnographic or anthropological categories.7 Perhaps the new auto ethnographic projects take it a step further, by speaking for the bodies that fit into the existing categories, but are intersection sites of several. As Russell puts it, “one’s body and one’s historical moment may be the joint site of experience and identity yet they don’t necessarily add up to ethnicity as an anthropological category.” The auto ethnographic voice is the voice of one who as a result of not comfortably fitting into any categories, plays with these categories and perhaps invents new ones, new words or images to call her own. As Russell writes: “auto ethnography is a vehicle and a strategy for challenging imposed forms of identity and exploring the discursive possibilities of inauthentic subjectivities.”
Because several categories or narratives intersect, it is more difficult to package them, re-present them. The form they often take, is described by Russell as an “essayist impulse [incorporating] the “I” of the writer [or film maker] into a commentary of the world that makes no grand scientific or totalizing claim but is uncertain, tentative, and speculative.” In my own project, I tried to adopt a strategy of, what James Clifford calls “self-fashioning,” in which the ethnographer comes to represent himself as a fiction.
Here is where a second film I watched proved useful as an example of such “speculative self-fashioning.” I found it uncanny how closely b.h. yael’s auto-ethnographic video Fresh Blood echoed the issues I was working through. I identified and drew parallels between her cultural baggage – (Polish and Iraquian Jew) and mine (Swiss, French and Tunisian Jew), both of us being Canadians with a blend of European, and Sephardic Jewish body politics to sort through. The cultural connections between the Middle East and North Africa came through in the symbolism she used – both Biblical images, such as a baptism, and feet being washed in a basin, as well the hand of Fatima (a symbol meant to protect against the evil eye which seems to have been appropriated by Jews, Christians and Muslims alike). Her emphasis on the body as a site of self-knowledge resonated for me, from the beginning, with images, for example, of her grimacing face, accompanied by narration such as “I’ve scrutinized this face all my life,” “close set eyes, never to be trusted.” In particular, her belly-dancing imagery struck a deep chord with me, as I also regained contact with a hidden aspect of my cultural corporal heritage through this dance. Her fore grounding of corporeal activities – dressing, dancing, eating, learning to speak a family tongue (in her case Hebrew) – as a way to access her cultural baggage echoed the idea of embodied knowledge that I have been working with. Yael tries on a traditional veil in her film, asking herself, “as I wear it, I wonder if I’ve put on more than I know?” As I began to learn the body language of the belly-dance, as a way to access my North African heritage, I became conscious also that I was in-corporating a very old knowledge – the age old knowledge of the pelvis, which Yael refers to when she describes Iraqui culture as being “too sensual” and when she cites Andreas Husseyn’s idea of “giving birth through dancing.”
Later in the film, when referring to the Hebrew tongue, yael comments “that language like memory is in my body.” Again, here she echoes issues of corporal memory, this time located in the tongue, and citing Paul Ceylan suggests that “language was not lost but remained” in her body, to be retrieved. Her discussion of memory having two parts: “remembering and forgetting” is useful as it leads me to examine who is doing the remembering and forgetting, in the case of my cultural history? My mother chose to identify herself as French and Catholic, married a Swiss and Catholic man and moved to a predominantly white and Christian North American city, thereby distancing herself from her Jewish –Tunisian heritage, and in consequence, (and perhaps quite unintentionally – who am I to understand my secretive mother’s motives?) making it less accessible to her children. When Yael suggests that the dominant culture is the dream-making culture, that “the strongly remembered past may turn into mythic memory” she brings up the implications that these choices have. The history-making, myth-making passed down from one generation to another is the result of a series of subjective choices on the part of those who are left to tell the story. Yael’s father asserts “it is for the child to come to the parent” for her story. But if the story is not told, if it is withheld, it is in danger of being forgotten. I felt I could not go to my mother – in part because she seems not to want to remember the pain of her past, and in part perhaps because the vision she seems to have retained is too negative for me to accept. Something in me (my curiosity, my desire for self-knowledge, and yes, perhaps my own Jewish corporeal memory) incited me to make a kind of pilgrimage to my mother’s homeland of Tunisia to see what I could discover for myself.
This trip was not intended to be a part of my research, and I did not have the resources, at the time, to adequately document the experience in order to give it an important place in my video project. Although the insights I acquired from the trip inform my writing and my video, more in depth analysis of this experience will no doubt form another project. Suffice it to say that this first trip created a more concrete bond between myself and the country of Tunisia, helping me see in which ways the cultural values of this old country are impregnated in me. I am “Tunisian” or “North African” or “Mediterranean,” for example, in the way I express myself and relate with others openly, warmly, and physically, in a way which I now recognize as being “religious,” in its original sense – the word “eligion” being derived from the latin “ligare” meaning “to connect.” Simultaneously, the trip confirmed for me how much of a “Canadian” I am, how much my attitudes and values concerning sex and gender roles come from the new world, where it is normal for a woman to feel free and safe to travel by herself, to have her own money, to expect equal treatment and not to worry that she is showing too much skin. As it was a short trip, I did not have the time to shed my Canadian tourist garb and immerse myself in the world of Tunisian women, where I might have acquired more than a superficial understanding of a country which appears to be in great transition, especially as concerns the status of women. I saw both women covered in the traditional veil and those dressed like Westerners. I was told that women have legal equality (in contrast to other predominantly Muslim countries) but I also observed that only men peopled the streets at night. And what stayed with me most, was the gaze of these men, who saw me as a sexual fantasy – a wealthy, white, sexually liberated woman – but an inaccessible, untouchable one. Confronted by both my sameness and my difference, this experience added a new layer to my understanding of my multiple identities.
Yael comments how, in her own questioning of her identity, at first, “each new identity excluded another.” Belonging to several ethnic communities can feel like this, it can also feel like not really belonging to any completely. This can be a lonely state of being but it can be a liberating one too, because it makes you conscious that which ever community you choose to identify with is just that – a choice. When yael asks “How should I dance and to which music I should dance?” she echoes the same doubt I had concerning my desire to identify with Jews, with Tunisians. I asked myself, can the tradition of belly-dancing “belong” to me? This longing, this desire, to be-long, is a desire for a community that will claim you, for a community whose gaze will help shape your identity, and whose way of living you can adopt as your own. In a most fundamental sense, it is the human desire for a stable context or framework of meaning to guide onefs choices.
But while we multi-ethnics may have more communities to claim “belonging to,” if we so choose, in deep and subtle physical ways, it is rather these communities which claim us. Sara Ahmed states that “geven in the act of decontextualising the body, by stripping it of its clothing and adornment, even naked, the body is “still marked by its disciplinary history, by its habitual practices of movement, by the corporeal commitments it has undertaken in day-to-day life. It is in no sense a natural body, for it is as culturally, racially, sexually, possibly even as class distinctive, as it would be if it were clothed.” What she is articulating is this notion of embodied identity, that the very way we move, gesture, speak, and dance is expressive of our cultural make-up, whether we are conscious of it or not. For a hybrid invisible minority, such as myself, this idea is especially useful to understand why I always felt apart from dominant culture, in the smallest, subtlest ways, without being able to put my finger on what made my difference. Being multiethnic and not belonging to any larger ethnic community which might have mirrored those “corporeal commitments,” thereby showing me that they were cultural ones, I just grew up feeling slightly apart and spending my energy pleasing and passing, searching for the approving gaze.
I A L W A Y S F E E L L I K E S O M E B O D Y’ S W A T C H I N G M E
Why this deep need for approving eyes? Why was I drawn to these strangers, these seers who held my hand and told me the great things they saw of me? What power is held in the gaze of others? Video seemed like the perfect medium to explore the power of the gaze, and how it functions to shape our identities or self-images. In her book, Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video, Catherine Russell writes that in this type of auto ethnographic work, there are three levels at which the video maker can inscribe herself: in the voice-over, in the origin of the gaze and as body image. The film then takes on at least three voices – the voice of the speaker, the voice of the seer and the voice of the seen. By casting myself as the main character, the fortune-seeker of this documentary, I reversed the ethnographic gaze in two ways: I turned the gaze of the camera on myself, asking two different people – a woman and a man, to act as my camera people, and secondly, I invited my subjects – the clairvoyants – to “see” me and tell me. For there is a central conflict at play in this story, between a desire to be told my fortune and to tell it myself, between a desire for the approving gaze of others and a desire to know and see myself clearly. To find an accurate self-image, which does not depend exclusively on the gaze of a mother, a father, a lover, a fortune-teller or a camera person, if that is possible. And most importantly, to love this image, to love what I see of myself.
Perhaps one cannot form a self-image without the gaze of others, but there are all kinds of gazes – disapproving, admiring, and disinterested ones and I have always been hyper aware of the gaze of others: too self- conscious, too concerned with the image I am projecting, and too unhappy with the way I think I look. I believe I am not alone in feeling this way. Interestingly, the process of being filmed and watching the footage, helped me learn to find myself more attractive, as did the photo sessions I undertook. Watching the video footage, and looking at the photographs was different from looking in a mirror, because I saw myself through the eyes of the videographers, not my own. This led me to question why it was that I had always felt so unattractive, and in particular, about the olive colour of my skin and the dark circles around my eyes – traits that come from my Jewish-Tunisian side of the family.
A book integral in helping me understand the dynamics behind the power of the gaze, is Nancy Friday’s Our Looks, Our Lives: Sex, Beauty, Power, and the Need to Be Seen. She writes about the powerful gaze between mother and child, and that the fact that in most families, the mother is the primary caregiver, the one who washes us, changes our diapers, has most intimate contact with our body may have a very important impact on our self-image and in particular our feelings about our body and sexuality, because inevitably, her feelings about her own are transmitted. This idea is especially important in how it pertains to women, as we have been taught to hate and fear our own bodies for centuries. Is it any wonder, then, that as in my case, a mother might unconsciously pass this age-old tradition onto her daughter? As Friday writes, the first gaze that encounters you is most often a female gaze – that of the mother. But what if you have a beautiful mother who feels herself to be unattractive? And from whom you have inherited your olive skin, and the dark circles around your eyes? Traits which she, unconsciously, makes you feel self-conscious about, by telling you to ensure you wear bright colors, and lipstick, to avoid looking drab, to compensate for the darkness around your eyes. Is it any wonder that you go through life feeling ugly, carrying on the family tradition, so to speak? Is it strange that I somehow feel slightly less “white” (the standard ideal of beauty) than my fair-skinned sister who takes more after my Swiss father? Friday’s ideas about how powerfully the maternal gaze can shape our feelings of self-worth — not only in terms of looks but also in terms of projected expectations of who our mother would like us to be — were very useful for me to understand my own constant feelings of inadequacy. While I may take after my mother physically, I have never behaved like the so very proper young lady she wished me to be – although believe me, I spent some years trying. What daughter does not seek the approval of her mother, her first female role model? Friday writes: “We are born with a look as unique as the print of our thumb. The look comes from within and is a part of our growing into our special identity. It is why the penetrating, parental gaze is so reassuring. To be seen instead as someone else’s projection of what they would like us to be is deeply unsettling because it is not us. To be ignored is to feel invisible: Where will the next meal come from if she doesn’t take me in? How will I be safe if she sees me as the child she dreamed of and planned for, but not as the person I am, good and bad, me? Friday is writing about the thoughts and feelings she imagines must go through a very young child’s head. In reading her book, I recognized myself, recognized the fearsome power of a mother and understood that I had gotten my tendency to hide my true self, from fear of rejection, in an attempt to create a more acceptable, more appreciated image for my mother.
Because, as I discovered through this project, it is especially my identity as a woman which this questioning of the gaze brings to the foreground for me. As Friday writes, we live in visual times, “the Age of the Empty Package,” as she calls it, where the power of the image surrounds and shapes us all. And those images are still predominantly representative of the male gaze, which has a hold over most women, despite our best efforts to dispel it. As Friday writes, a woman learns at a very young age, that for her, power is still be most easily obtained through her “looks.” I am fascinated by the question of what it means to live in a female body, in a visual culture, where the dominant aesthetic is still principally male. Just before I sat down to write this, I checked my e-mail to find that I had been sent yet more unsolicited pornography: “free teen slutfest,” “web’s youngest women,” “barely legal,” “blair bitch project,” “thousands of sex slaves await you,” “the hottest amateur girls are fucking and sucking” my computer screams at me. Too much information, I whisper back. If I think about the issue of pornography rationally, I find I have nothing against it, per se. But the way I feel about it – the way it makes me react emotionally, is another matter. I can’t help but compare my body to those male fantasies depicted. And I can’t help but wonder why so many men can’t seem to get enough of these images, and how they shape the gaze men throw my way.
The first male gaze I encountered, in my father, was also a critical one – but in this case, luckily, not so much in terms of my physical appearance. His gaze pushed me to perform, accomplish, seek success in the outside world, (great!) but – through a lack of praise and positive feedback — never to feel that I had been good enough (not so great). So I became a young woman who long felt neither attractive nor good enough at what I did. It was not parental love that I lacked — there was a lot of it – but just a more accepting, less critical, less demanding gaze.
But if we shape our self-image in relation to other people’s gaze, then my parent’s eyes are only the beginning of my story. These are the eyes that shaped the “where I come from” of me, the eyes that each saw from their perspective — from the cultural and social norms that they had lived to see. Understanding the initial shaping of my identity or self-image – and particular my body image — has meant discovering for myself where my parents came from – in particular, my mother, whose cultural baggage was less known to me. But then there are the eyes of the culture I have grown up in – the North American gaze of my peers.
That dominant cultural gaze changed slightly when I moved across the country from Edmonton to Montréal. There is nothing like changing contexts for getting a fresh perspective on oneself. The multiculturalism of Montréal felt immediately comfortable to me, however I was surprised by how strange and awkward I felt speaking to Quebecois despite the fact that my mother tongue was French. Then, in time, as I adapted to the linguistic nuances of Quebecois French, I was surprised to discover how much more at home I felt. Although I still express myself better and with more sophistication in English, among francophones, I feel surrounded by more equally physically expressive people – in the degree of gesture and vocal intonation which accompanies verbal communication. I also often joke that you can always tell a francophone party from an anglophone one here because there are more people dancing at the French parties. This small detail points to what I perceive as a higher level of sensuality and comfort of the body.
This point is significant because I believe it demonstrates how much more sexually-liberated Québec society is than the one I grew up in English Canada (bearing in mind that Alberta is one of the most conservative provinces, often referred to as part of the Mid-Western Bible Belt). I believe this has to do with the “révolution tranquille” of the 1960s in which the Québecois people revolted against the pervasive influence of the Catholic church. One of the consequences of this historical moment, as it pertains to my project, is what I perceive as a greater lack of shame regarding the body, and sexual behaviour and an ensuing freedom from traditional gender roles. Immersing myself in a culture where women are both strong and sexy, and where a stronger sense of “matriarchy” pervades (coming from the Latin influence, which perhaps my mother shed somewhat to conform to her new environment ) also helped me to see, how I had been encoded with not only my parent’s old world values but by the subtle sexual repression of English Canada – where Judeo-Christian values still pervade more strongly than we are perhaps aware of, as these values are eroding more subtly with the passage of time, rather than having been deliberately and actively torn off.
On a second and less immediately conscious level, the Québecois gaze was explored through my choice of camera people, but it was primarily the gendered gaze that I was preoccupied with. I asked both one close girl friend, as well as my boyfriend at the time, to help me in the project, by filming and taking pictures of me. The choice to use close friends was initially a decision based on simple economics. Working with no budget, I asked people who would work out of love. I then became interested in how a female and male gaze – behind the camera – might differ, when asked to film and photograph my body. Both camera people were asked to photograph different parts of my body – for the tarot card concept I wanted to include in the video – and I participated in a private photo session with each, on separate occasions. While I gained numerous insights from this experiment, the most glaring difference I saw from the resulting photographs, was that the female photographer’s photos, in my opinion, captured the sensuality I was hoping for, while the photos shot by the male photographer (and yes, my lover, at the time) were explicitly sexual, when in fact, the woman had been asked to take fun, sexy photos of me, and the man had been asked to take photos for the video and told explicitly that I did not wish them to be overtly sexual. Now this was no scientific experiment; I am speaking of two specific individuals, each with their own personal aesthetic. But the experience provoked in me, a further questioning on the power of the gaze. We speak of being objectified by a camera’s gaze, suggesting somehow that the gaze holds a power over us that takes away our subject-position. But does this still hold when we ask to be photographed? And exactly what determines that we feel that we have been objectified? What exactly in a picture makes us a sex object rather than subject? Does it simply come down to a matter of subjective individual perception, based not only on the relationship between photographer and photographee but the relationship the photographee has to her body?
G O D, S E X & T H E B O D Y
Reflection on the power of the gaze and the varying cultural perspectives informing the many eyes that look upon me, helped me understand that – to my surprise — my relationship to my body is marked with the influence of patriarchal religion and its legacy of fear and shame regarding the body, particularly the female one. My interest in the tales, myths and images of astrology and tarot, my desire to have an old witch-like lady hold my hand and tell me what she sees in it, all stem from the same need to be given different images, different possibilities of what I could become. Different ones than what I was offered by my parents, by television, by dominant culture in general. The esoteric world of divination offered me liberating ideas like making my own destiny, creating my own identity, freeing myself of the external forces that shaped me. I think I was searching for the tools to make this transformation. For whatever reasons (the movement of the planets, maybe?) my heart and soul had begun aching for this kind of magic we sometimes call inspiration. I hadn’t found it in the usual places, so I tried reading certain astrology columns, learning numerology, drawing tarot cards and consulting psychics.
Now, if my cultural-make-up was less complicated, if I lived in a more homogenous world, my spiritual hunger might have been appeased by the Bible, the Torah or the Koran. I was brought up Catholic and I grew up in Alberta – part of the Bible belt of North America, but somehow knowing that all of the living relatives on my mother’s side were Jewish, and knowing and loving all kinds of people from diverse ethnic communities made it clear to me at a young age that whatever faith I possessed could not be contained by one religion. How could I believe in a God that loved only part of my family, my community? I, however, never stopped believing in some greater force and the need to find a non-exclusionary language for my faith is what attracted me to the kind of new age spirituality embodied by fortune-teller types. As Nevill Drury writes in his book, Exploring the Labyrinth: Making Sense of the New Spirituality, the growing presence of new age spirituality represents a desire “to recognize the spiritual dimensions that unite us – rather than be preoccupied with forces that divide us from one another.”
Ah yes, the forces that divide us – what greater division can I feel, as a woman, but the one between the sexes. It was also always impossible for me to accept a God who is represented as a kind of father figure, who only chooses his sons to speak for him. This narrative was suspect to me from a very young age. I remember drawing a picture of a bright shining light to represent God and sensing my Sunday school teacher’s surprise that I had not drawn a big bearded man, like the other kids. (Not interested in Father or Son, or Virgin Mary, I guess I was going for the more androgynous Holy Spirit) Catholicism lost its charm early on, for me. I suppose the reason I was attracted to “new spirituality” as a framework to express my faith, was the presence of powerful feminine images – in the tarot cards, and of course in the mediums who are predominantly women. This brings us back to the new spirituality’s emphasis on intuition – a mode of thinking which has been traditionally attributed to women.
G E T T I N G I N T O I N T U I T I O N
For the seed of this project was planted three years ago when I began to ponder the notion of intuition. I became interested I those moments of moments of ir-rational knowledge, those “gut feelings” or instinctive insights that we all experience, but cannot justify with logic, reasoning or empirical evidence and that we have difficulty articulating. It is precisely this quality of intuition being “unarticulated” or “extra-discursive” knowledge that I encountered in my intitial survey of literature. As Margaret Blanchard writes: “as both concept and phenomenon, intuition is alluded to by all kinds of people with an intriguing lack of coherence and consistency.” (1989: 757) My search for a deeper understanding of intuition has included reading a wide variety of both scholarly and popular texts, as the subject is not only vaguely defined but also alluded to in very different contexts, ranging from the field of epistemology to that of self-help literature.
Intuition can be distinguished from reason, as a way of knowing which does not involve consciously and rationally processing information acquired from external sources, but rather following an idea which manifests itself, without seemingly having a source. Either it is knowledge, which we have always inherently possessed or it is the manifestation of information, which we have absorbed from our environment and processed unconsciously. Intuition is often referred to as being intrinsically related to the body, as the expressions “gut feeling”or “follow your nose” illustrate.
From my literature survey, I concluded that the notion of intuition is discussed in at least three different ways: It is conceptualized as the flash of inspiration that comes to an artist or scientist, suddenly illuminating, making sense of or shaping weeks of methodical work and research. (Oliveros, 1984) Intuition is also discussed in detail in books on spirituality and self-actualization in terms of being the “inner voice” or “higher self” that guides our everyday choices and actions. (Gawain, 1998) And finally, a highly developed intuition is referred to as synonymous with a sixth sense or the psychic ability to “read” people and their lives – past, present and future.
While I believe these three conceptualizations of intuition are somehow intrinsically related, what is most interesting to me is the fact that intuition is discussed as functioning in these very different contexts, as a state of consciousness that can be achieved with practice. Whether it is in the act of regularizing one’s artistic practice, or creating a kind of ritual in order to leave oneself open to moments of inspiration, whether it is through some form of meditation, or whether it is simply through a conscious and active attempt to get to know oneself better, all authors suggest that further developing one’s intuition can only be beneficial to one’s work and life.
It is these kinds of discussions that engaged me the most precisely because they described intuition in terms of how it can function, rather than simply defining it as an abstract concept. I am interested in how intuition can function practically in our lives and it is also for this reason that my primary choice of research method has been to conduct interviews, and to engage in the act of making a film, and trying to document flashes of inspiration – in the form of images — rather than restricting myself to the more analytical method of reviewing, analyzing and writing based on a literature review. While the written form by no means excludes the intuitive process, I was interested in exploring the “unarticulated” nature of intuition by becoming an ethnographer who tried to immerse herself in this mode as a way of life and as it pertains to the creative process of making a video. Pauline Oliveros discusses intuition as an artistic practice, as pertains to women composers, in her book, Software for People. She describes intuition or inspiration as “tap[ping] the artist at unguarded moments” or “arriv[ing] spontaneously in relation to a special emotional tone and during restful or non-working activity.” But she also asks, as I asked myself, if one can “bring about [the] necessary conditions for encouraging intuition voluntarily?” What I believe this question poses is a search for a way to combine or synthesize two modes of creativity. According to Oliveros, there is “active, purposive creativity, resulting from cognitive thought, deliberate acting upon or willful shaping of material, and (2) receptive creativity, during which the artist is like a channel through which material flows and seems to shape itself.” She also mentions that culturally, this kind of “receptive creativity” has been labeled as a “feminine” way of working, because “traditionally, men are encouraged in self-determining, purposive activity, while women are encouraged to be receptive and dependent.”
Until embarking on this project, I was accustomed to working in the first more active, more analytical mode and I desired to explore the receptive, intuitive mode. What I discovered is that this way of working is a huge act of faith – faith in oneself and one’s own insights, and faith in that mystical, magical thing we call the creative process. Developping that faith was a huge part of this project for me. I say this because, when I began to work on this project, I was in rough shape. Besides coping with my skin problems, I had been dumped by the man I considered the love of my life, as well as by the circle of women whom I thought of as my close friends in Montreal. In short, the whole new family I had made, in my new city rejected me. These two blows to my heart were followed by a third – literal –blow to my head, in which, while crossing the street, I was hit by a cyclist, resulting in a blood clot in my brain. Although I was lucky to recover physically (save a few scars), emotionally, I was a mess. The blow to my head provoked a deep depression, for which, once again, I did not find adequate help to combat. Whatever confidence I had ever had inside myself was gone. I knew that the only way to rebuild it was to do something for myself– anything. So I decided to try using a therapeutic methodology for this M.A. project — hoping the research would help me and subsequently others, by providing an example of how accessing onefs intuition can be healing.
In retrospect, I found it uncanny, that I had begun an intellectual, analytical inquiry into the notion of intuition but that it took a real, emotional need – created by my life circumstances – for me to wholistically (that is both intellectually and emotionally) understand the importance of intuition. It was no longer mere intellectual curiosity which lead me to pore over every book I could find on the subject of things of the spirit, but a real hunger, an emotional, and spiritual hunger for ideas that would help lift me out of the darkest place I had ever been. I read every self-help book I could get my hands on, to read over and over again how important it is to trust one’s gut feelings, to remember one’s dreams, to stay in touch with one’s feelings, and most importantly, to believe in oneself – until little by little, I started to again.
All of my past creative projects had been carried out using the first approach. But now, filled with nothing but self-doubt, and a real need for self-knowledge, I approached my project with a real, “come what may attitude,” putting my faith in this idea of being a channel for something greater than myself. The result was a really exciting ride, a choose-your-own-adventure of self-discovery. I did not construct a plan, I did not draw a storyboard, I did not write a narrative, or even an outline for my project. Since I was prone to doubt the relevance or value of any ideas I came up with, I decided the only solution was to eliminate my internal censor completely, and give myself permission to embrace every idea or image that popped into my mind. Reading my self-help books, I followed their advice: hoping to rediscover or remember a lost part of myself, I collected old pictures and super 8 footage of myself as a child. I also began to try and remember dreams I had had when I was very young. Little by little ideas trickled in, and I began to film them, forbidding myself to question how they would fit together to make a cohesive film.
I also did not actively seek my interview subjects. They seemed to appear out of nowhere. My workplace, it seemed, was crawling with mediums. And while I visited Montreal’s Psychic Fair on numerous occasions to get readings (some of which are used in the video soundtrack), and interviewed two acquaintances, it was really the people I met by chance who provided me with the most insight and who are represented in my video: 1) Mercedes, the only psychic to really give me the straight goods on myself and whose interview is at the heart of the video. 2) Brigitte – a massage therapist who specializes in what she calls “intuitive” massage, whose touch and insight played a very large role in helping me make the connections between skin, intuition and sexuality. (3) Finally, there was the so-called “shaman,” a man who preyed on the combination of my adventurous spirit yet severe lack of confidence and bamboozled me into sleeping with him, on the pretext that he could help my “energy.” This experience was re-enacted and filmed, as part of my video. I guess I really took my “ethnographic” research seriously. My life and my project were becoming one, perhaps too much so. But as I had outlined in my proposal, I was more interested in learning about intuition as an active practice, in other words, by trying to live it rather than simply read about it.
In consequence of this working method, I amassed a huge amount of very diverse audio and visual material: a mélange of video-taped interviews, and dramatic re-enactments of both lived (real) and dreamed (surreal) experiences, audio recordings of palm-readings, photographs of myself now and as a child, and archival Super 8 footage. The act of recording my experiences, and rediscovering past images of myself was very empowering. Watching myself on video was extremely insightful. I learned to get used to – and even like the way I looked. I discovered I had two separate personalities, depending on what language I spoke – a confident and obnoxious one in English, a more soft-spoken and timid one n French. I saw that I tend to be long-winded when explaining myself, but also very expressive and very funny. In short, I began to develop a more well-rounded and positive image of myself.
But how to package this all into a coherent video? As I mentioned, while amassing material, I did not allow myself to think about how it was all going to fit together, in the editing process. I was attracted to Russell’s idea of the “filmmaker as collagist and editor” through which she “writes an identity in temporal structures.” Once again, I was confronted with how difficult it can be to “write” or “edit” one’s own identity, to choose which images will remain to represent you and what you lived during a passage of time. How uncomfortable it can be to confront the juxtaposition between an imagined ideal image of yourself and the reality of what the footage reveals. And most significantly, I was surprised to discover how much of my doubt and insecurity in making editing choices, was coming from a deep fear to commit to my own version of myself, to complete my “self-fashioning.” It took some more time and reflection before I was able to fully understand this fear enough to dispel it.
SKIN – SIN – KIN
“When a woman enters into the work of healing her body and speaking her truth, she must break through the collective field of fear and pain that is all around us and has been for the past five thousand years of dominator society. It is a field filled with the fear of rape, of beating, of abandonment.”
“Our memories are stored up in our bodies. We carry our personal history in the tissue that our consciousness co-creates.”
“I want to awaken that still, small, wise, intuitive voice in all of us, that voice of our own body that we have been forced to ignore through our culture’s illness, misinformation, and dysfunction.”
“There is a language older by far and deeper than words. It is the language of bodies, of body on body, wind on snow, rain on trees, wave on stone. It is the language of dream, gesture, symbol, memory. We have forgotten this language. We do not even remember that it exists.”
If the medium is the message
what is the message the medium (fortune-teller) embodies?
what messages are the clients seeking?
what messages do the fortune-seekers embody themselves?
If the fortune-teller is the medium, who is the sender?
What is at the heart of this project, is the process through which I came to question the cultural baggage I carry, and to feel its impact. For during the course of my research, I experienced physical and mental health problems, that while difficult to live through, ultimately provided me with tremendous insight. It is this journey of mapping the body that I would like to discuss in this section. It is also a journey which I find difficult to tell, in an academic context, because of its intimate nature, and because it is a narrative of feeling, of emotion and sensation, of the messy activities of my body and yes, of that nebulous thing — intuition. I am afraid of being too confessional, too anecdotal, and most of all, too self-indulgent. I am afraid that the conclusions I have come to are irrational, and therefore not appropriate to this context. But despite all these fears, here I go anyway.
My project’s focus on fortune-tellers, as examples of “intuitives,” expanded to encompass healers in the esoteric field of alternative medicine, due to health problems that I began to experience during my period of research. I developed an extreme case of excema, a skin condition whose main symptoms are extremely dry and itchy skin. I have had a mild, controlled case of excema since childhood, but in the fall of 1998, the dryness and itchiness spread across most of my body and began to cause great pain and discomfort, as well as obviously provoking questions about the cause of these symptoms.
While I initially consulted doctors and dermatologists about my skin condition, I quickly became frustrated by the fact that their medical care consisted of handing me prescriptions for cortisone cream. This quick fix solution could only temporarily heal the symptoms – red, itchy sores – but could not attend to the source of the problem, which persisted and grew unbearable. I therefore began to investigate all kinds of alternative medicinal practices – homeopathy, naturopathy, meditation (tai chi), acupuncture and massage. These last two methods proved to be the most effective, as both practitioners, used a more holistic approach, which involved questioning me about all environmental, social, emotional aspects of my life. The acupuncturist helped me trace the initial explosion of excema to the morning after the first night I spent with my boyfriend at the time — a fact I had not forgotten but tried to push to the furthest corners of my mind, due to its strangeness and to the fear of what it might suggest. Who wants to face evidence of an inexplicable “allergic” reaction to someone they are passionately in love with?
What I would like to foreground here, as concerns my project, and its central investigation of intuition, are the issues of knowledge and authority, which this experience brought up for me. It took a professional medical practitioner, albeit a marginal, non-traditional, non-Western one. (The acupuncturist was from China and had been trained there) to help me see, what I already deep down suspected, but did not trust myself to acknowledge, ie, to know as the truth – namely that my sexual relationship with this man was causing me deep, internal stress. While it is normal to need the help of a professional to treat health problems, after months of consulting various health practitioners – i.e. external figures possessing specialized information and authority — I was confronted by a confirmation of my own initial gut feeling.
The questions this experience has brought up for me are what cultural forces kept me from trusting my instinct? Why, for three years (the length of my on-again, off-again relationship with the man in question) did I have so much difficulty listening to – and hearing — what my body was telling me? My search to find a medical practitioner or healer to help me, also made me see how each individual, to whom we ascribe authority, and in whom we invest our trust, brings their own cultural baggage into the business of figuring out my body. As an example, the Quebecois massage therapist was much more non-judgemental and open-minded, than the Chinese acupuncturist when we discussed my sexual relationship, due to the kinds of personal experiences and values that each woman was respectively carrying. But perhaps, because in contrast to my experiences with conventional medical practitioners my sessions with both Yip and Brigitte delved into the personal, the emotional, as connected to the physical, it was somehow easier to process the feedback they gave me, taking and leaving what appealed to me, recognizing their biases,
This in contrast to the conventional medical practice and discourse I experienced which maintained a hierarchical feel, in which cultural values about the body were inscribed in a scientific, medical language which positioned my body – a patient’s body — as an object to be studied from a place of superior knowledge, and which discouraged the notion that I, the “object” or “patient” might actively participate in the healing process. My body symptoms were gazed at as phenomena to be studied, analyzed and corrected, through complex and specialized means, not available or accessible to a non-professional. As Sara Ahmed writes in, Animated Borders: Skin, Colour and Tanning, “within the clinical encounter, the skin is always seen and read. The skin measures the truth of the subject in terms of its health or well-being. It is the doctor who sees and reads, demanding to tell the difference. “The skin has already been seen and has already spoken (in a language that is impenetrable to the one who is, so to speak, inside the skin.” It was this kind of hierarchical gaze which I encountered when searching answers through conventional medical channels, that pushed me towards the more esoteric methods. However, having said that, the growing alternative health field is by no means free of the same kind of hierarchization or gate-keeping of knowledge about the body. I learned that there are good and bad healers in all circles. But I was attracted to those who healed by suggesting that I was an active agent in the process, who treated me like I might have some of my own answers about what was ailing me. In other words, those who empowered me by seeing me as someone with authority and knowledge of my own body, those who helped me understand that having a “psychosomatic” illness did not mean that my problem was “all in my head,” but rather how much the mind and body are interrelated and that what I thought and felt might have impact on my health.
In the end, however, since no one – neither traditional nor alternative – whom I consulted was able to help me heal completely, the healing journey was taken very much alone. Having exhausted all external sources of help, I was finally obliged to learn to listen to my body’s voice myself, to become much more in touch with my emotions, and to recognize how much these two are interconnected.
This brings me back to my original research questions, concerning my interest in intuition and fortune-tellers. In my research proposal, I wrote that implicit in the fortune-telling act is a belief that there is information inscribed on people’s bodies (such as in the lines of their hand) and in the physical world (such as in the arrangement of the stars and the planets). It was this idea that our own bodies, and the environment around us communicate information to us, that fascinated me. But despite my intellectual curiosity about this notion, it took direct personal, physical evidence – in the form of health problems – for me to come to form a deep conviction that our own bodies are a communicative medium or technology. As Christiane Northrup writes in Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom, “Our bodies contain information that is beyond our intellectual mind’s capacity to understand. We are much more than we think we are.” She suggests that intuition is a kind of embodied wisdom, that “the voice of intuition, the feminine voice, [is] the voice that speaks from our bodies.” The medium’s message, then, is perhaps that to find out who we are, to access our intuition, we need simply pay more attention to our body, to learn its language, to care for it more deeply, beyond the surface of the skin.
Ah yes – skin – now we come to the title and central metaphor of my project, which besides literally referring to the health problems I experienced, seems to best encompass the issues my auto ethnographic project brought up for me. In Animated Borders: Skin, Colour and Tanning, Sara Ahmed articulates why writing about and through the body is increasingly becoming used as a strategy by feminist writers to attack Western rationalism. She writes that the body can be perceived of as “a sign of the materiality of being-in-the world.” By foregrounding this physical, material state of “being-in-the-world,” women writers are critiquing the Cartesian notion that “the subject gains its identity and distinction from the exclusion of the material, that is, divisible realm of bodily experience.” This strategy, according to Ahmed, encompasses a second component. Each body is also a site “marked by social division and antagonism,” in the ways in which it has been “determined and differentiated in terms of gender, sexuality, and also race and class.” Seen in this way, Ahmed suggests that there is no such thing as a “natural or indeed real body, that the body is always clothed or inscribed within particular cultural formations.” That perhaps, trying to distinguish between one’s “social skin” – one’s socially-constructed identity, in the sense of what others ascribe to you, or what you choose to project — and a “natural skin,” a biological identity – in the sense of “just the biological facts” — I have olive skin, I have a vagina — is a game of falling into a false binary, because these physical, biological attributes have been inscribed with cultural categories through language: I am “white,” not “olive,” not “brown”, not “yellow” not “black.” I am a “woman,” not a “man.” But if the social skin you have been taught to ascribe to yourself is of the dominant culture (white, European, Christian), it makes it tricky to understand why you feel different from this culture. Why somehow, the social skin ascribed to you, doesn’t quite fit.
My project has felt, for me, something like a stripping down to my bare bones, to try to understand the pain I felt, in order to feel well and whole again, or as we say in French, “d’être bien dans sa peau.” As I sought understanding about my skin condition, as I tried to understand what my skin might be trying to communicate, I also began to meditate on what the skin represents, on a metaphorical level. Our skin envelops us, protects us, it is the interface or medium through which we have a first direct contact with the world. Our skin touches, it feels, it also breathes. Its appearance communicates or reflects our general level of health and well-being. And of course, skin colour is also inscribed as a marker of race.
Ahmed conceptualizes skin as a border that is unstable due to its permeability. The skin also represents “an aspect of the body’s wholeness and oneness with and of itself.” Skin is a border that can be crossed and penetrated. As she writes, “the skin marks and polices the difference between inside and outside. It is a boundary which guarantees a separation. Like the body-politic, its task is to ward off the danger of the foreigner, to keep out the other, to protect the self from the unruliness of others.” Its task is also, at one and the same time, to keep in: to prevent the inside from becoming outside and to prevent the self from becoming other. The skin, then, is the body’s own private police force.” Ahmed’s metaphor of the skin as a police force is a rather masculine image. The skin does not control in the active, and potentially repressive or violent way a police force could. It protects more like an alarm or surveillance system, sounding off alarms when a foreign or enemy element enters it. It remains up to the individual to learn to read and recognize these signals of alarm, and track down and dispel the intruder. I find Ahmed’s metaphor of the skin as a border to be a very useful one, however, especially to conceptualize sexual relations as a kind of crossing over into another person’s country, and all the culture embodied there. In Fresh Blood, Yael asked herself if she wasn’t putting on more than she knew as she tried on a veil. Are we not also crossing into the whole world of a person when we cross their skin border? Are we perhaps coming into contact with more than we know?
The skin border is crossed not only in sexual relations but also in the fetal stage, where we begin our lives, inside our mother. The relationship between an unborn child and its mother – the experience of dwelling inside someone and depending completely on their body for our well-being must be the most intimate and powerful connection we can experience with any human being. But is such a mysterious connection, experienced before we are fully cognizant. I can only imagine that our bodies carry deep memories of this time. And I can only speculate that I must have really enjoyed it — enjoyed being transported, fed, and even sung to all in the warmth of a dark, wet womb. And I am pretty sure I found being born completely traumatic. Who would want to leave that dark, safe place?
Yes, I am a momma’s girl. I was well taken care of by that woman I call Maman. Perhaps too well, as I discovered once I got to Montreal and realized how much I had to learn about taking care of myself. I found myself looking to be taken care of in all the wrong places, by all the wrong people. I wanted so much to be taken care of, I stayed with an abusive man for three months, putting up with his insults just for the familiar feeling of someone enveloping my skin. And just when I thought I had freed myself from one trap, I fell into another one, staying too long with the man who made me itch until I bled, because despite all that pain, the sex was so good. What is this power that sex holds over us? And what do our desires reveal when we follow them? And is there not a connection between the first kind of touch, the first skin contact we ever experienced – through our mothers – and the touch we seek from a lover? Don’t we all sometimes, want to feel like someone’ s “baby?” But isn’t this always a dangerous place to return to? A place where we risk returning to a state of dependency? I believe this is perhaps why a mother can instill so much fear in us. And why it has been so difficult for me to learn to let go of the parts of her that are in me.
I have spent much time thinking about this question, because despite all the answers I have come up with for myself, it is still strange to explain how sexual contact with one specific man provoked an eruption of excema in me. He was not the first man I had slept with, nor the last. My skin put off alarm signals that the relationship was dangerous or unhealthy in some way for me. But as I mentioned, I had been with much worse men — this was maybe not the right man for me, but he was a good one. Why him? Why then?
I came to an understanding of what was under my skin, by re-learning the language of my body, a language that has been dismissed, dispelled or mystified first by religion and now by science. The language of intuition that my witchy, fortune-telling and healing ladies still have to sell. This language I cannot defend with the scholarly citations or analytical logic of the rest of this paper. I can only tell you what I felt, dreamed and remembered and how I put these feelings, dreams and memories together to solve the puzzle I had become.
While I was still suffering from excema – still sleeping with this man– I decided to take belly-dancing lessons. The night after my first class — where we had begun to learn to sway, shake and girate our pelvises – I dreamed of drawing a tarot card from a pack. I turned it over to see an image of my inner thigh. Not long thereafter, I noticed that the excema had spread to this region and as I stared at my thigh, meditating on the possible reasons for this development, I suddenly had a flash of an early, buried childhood memory. I remembered that when I was about three years old, my mother used to spread cold white cream on the excema I had around my sexual parts – whether it was on my bum, my vagina or indeed, my inner thigh, I don’t know. As we would go through this nightly ritual, she would always tell me the same story – a story I loved to hear.
It was the story of M. Seguin’s little goat, whom he kept tied up in his backyard. The mountains were not far away, however, and this little goat would gaze at them and dream of how wonderful it must be to scamper about in them. She begged her master to let her loose, but he refused, explaining that it was too dangerous. Little goats he had before her had made the trip to the mountains, only to be devoured by the wolf who lived there.
The little goat heard his warning but her desire for the mountains only grew. One night, she managed to break free from her chain, and ran off to climb that beautiful mountain. She was so happy, the air was so fresh, the grass so green and delicious. She hopped about enjoying her new found freedom. But then, the wolf appeared and approached her. The little goat was brave. She fought back against his advances. She fought like the devil all night long, telling herself, over and over again, goh, I will fight until I see the morning sun rise over the mountain.h Well, she fought and she fought. She fought the wolf all night long. And slowly, the morning sun did rise and the little goat was there to see it. But just at this moment, she collapsed with exhaustion. The fight had been long and hard. She had no more strength left. As she collapsed to the ground, the wolf jumped on her and devoured her, as he had done before with all the little goats before her.
What a horrible, pessimistic story to tell a small child, you must be saying to yourself. No wonder I have contained this fear inside me, no wonder this fear of my body, of my sexuality. I thought this, when I remembered it and I proceeded to call my mother to question her about it. Yes, she told me, it is a sad story. But it is also a story of resistance. As she uttered that word, “resistance” I made a connection with a dance show with this very title that was playing. It was a show about the Holocaust. And I began to try and understand a little what it must have been like to be a half-Jew, half-Catholic young woman growing up in Arabic Tunisia right after the Second World War.
I believe this fear that my mother unconsciously passed down to me, in the act of story-telling — a fear of freedom, sexual freedom as it came to symbolize for me, is a very legitimate fear – a product of the place and time she comes from. It is the age-old fear of violence and rape that women have always known and carried with them. And in the corner of the world my mother left behind, that violence against women continues to rage. This story, I cannot and do not wish to forget. But was her story really telling me resistance is futile?
I left my master and my safe little backyard of Edmonton for the freedom of the mountain that is Montreal. And after a shaky start, I began to come into my own, and to really feel wonderfully free. It is at this moment that I met and fell deeply in love with the man in question. I thought I had found another little goat with whom to scamper about in the wild. But my skin told me differently, it told me that I was living in conflict with my deepest desires. Just what is it my body feared? Who is the wolf? What enemy was my skin warning me against? If I am the little goat, who loves freedom so much, she is willing to face death for it, I don’t believe my lover was the big bad wolf, cause I’ve met that kind of wolf before, I’ve fought him off and I’ll fight him again. This one, I didn’t want to let go of, this one was too familiar. I believe I fell in love and slept with that familiar, slightly dissaproving, maternalistic and paternalistic, protective gaze I grew up with. I think I wanted to attach myself to another M. or Mme Seguin who would keep me safe and protected in his or her back yard. Safe from what? Safe from myself and what I might become – a strong, free, independent, sexy woman with no strings attached. Freedom is fearsome. And what is scarier than confronting it alone? But when you are brave little goat, you go forward despite that fear – the fear of life, the fear of death, the fear of the unknown. And you tell yourself, seeing at least one beautiful sunrise will make it all worthwhile.
So you see, I have learned the art of telling fortunes. Take a little of the old, a little of the new, mix it all up and give it a hopeful ending. I may not have learned to read my palm lines yet, but I sure got a great story out of just one dream about my thigh and both the fear and courage which was encoded into it years ago by my mother`s touch and the story which accompanied it. Memory and myth is contained in our entire bodies, in our skin, our bones, our blood. Those memories, those feelings we may not even know to speak of, do not disappear, but remain dormant until something, someone awakens them, through something as simple and profound as a look and a touch. Perhaps my mother did transmit some of the pain of her story onto me, through her touch, through her words, through her example. Perhaps my ex-boyfriend managed to awaken this pain with his touch, his words, his actions. Perhaps it was necessary for me to wallow long and deep in it, before choosing finally to leave it behind, shedding it like the excema-ridden skin I used to have.
The skin may be shed, while the story of the big bad wolf remains. But it is only one story. One side of the coin, one card in the deck. Who tells the story and with what intention? And which characters will you choose to identify with? The fortune-tellers have their tales too – of the past, of the future, sometimes of the present. Whose story are you going to buy? What role would you like to play? Through whose eyes do you want to see the world? I’d like to see it through mine. I’d like you to as well.
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Film and Videography
Benning, Sadie. It Wasn’t Love. 1992
Browne, Colin. Father and Son. National Film Board of Canada, 1993
Davies, Donna. The Kitchen Goddess. National Film Board of Canada, 1999.
DesJardins, Denys. Almanach. National Film Board of Canada, 1999.
Friedrich, Su. The Ties That Bind. 1984.
Gingras, Nicole, curator. Speaking Bodies, Gallery 101, 2000.
Green, Lawrence. Reconstruction. Concordia University, 1995.
Hoffman, Phillip, passing through/torn formations, 1988.
Judge, Maureen. Unveiled: The Mother/Daughter Relationship. National Film Board of Canada, 1997.
Khalifa, Kamel, Nadya and the Search for Sharazad. Concordia University, 1999
yael, b.h. Fresh Blood. York University, 1998.
