i am learning to swim.*
*i made the decision not to use capital letters in this writing — capital letters emphasize, guide the attention, make important, capital letters are powerful. this is not an essay about language, but i still feel that i do not want to make these distinction between the importance of words. capitalization would need a careful review, a paying attention and conscious and knowledgable decisions about what is capitalized.
photo by Louisa Esch
in the deep waters my ancestors flooded the world with, i am learning to dive. deep down to the secretive misdeeds, washed away, submerged and covered up by those who told history. i am learning to dive into myself, slowly, drop by drop, stopping to drink the impure waters i was drinking as long as i can remember. uncover what parts of me have been permeated, uncover what i unwillingly hold onto. like a stone in a riverbed, slowly, slowly, the dirt washes out. am i able to become clean of my own history, my whiteness, my westernness? will my body become water? will i learn to float?
the beginning of my research was marked by these words. looking back at them now, i can only astoundingly notice how incredibly inconsistent and paradoxical my words, my thoughts, my thinking was, possibly still is. the text’s purity, impurity and separation (1) by the argentinian feminist philosopher maria lugones made the innocence of the word ‘pure’ crumble instantly and with it some of my naivety using it.
the dirt washes out. am i able to become clean of my own history, my whiteness, my westernness?
lugones states, by referring to mary douglas’ purity and danger: “[…] impurity, dirt, is what is “out of place” relative to some order. what is impure is anomalous and ambiguous because it is out of place.”(2) it creeps up to me that the waters i have been drinking my whole life are not only artificially cleaned through sewage treatment plants, but are also phenomenologically constructed as pure. pure as desirable, washing clean becomes a necessity, a ridding yourself from that which is impure, dirty, soiled — what those who told history framed as impure. history is nothing i can wash clean from, and especially not through washing out, a process of split-separating myself from what i so naively called dirt. thoughts are shifting and what i called dirt stops being the poisonous traces of the lover of purities* histories. dirt, the impure, becomes what i will want to hold onto.
in her writings, lugones speaks through the imagery of ‘split-separation’ as clean separating the egg yolk from the white and ‘curdle separation’ as the failing integration of egg yolk and oil when attempting to create mayonnaise.(3) the lover of purity thinks in split-separation, in clean cuts, in fragments whose interferences are trimmed off and neglected to easily categorise. in the eyes of the lover of purity, ambiguity does not exist, everyone and everything is categorisable, splittable, definable and reducible. this allows the lover of purity to exercise control through the creation of a fictitious vantage point from which he**, the pure, is not only defining the categories but also renders those who are multiple are rendered transparent and powerless as their ambiguity would reveal the paradox of the lover of purity’s imaginary constructs:
*lover of purity is a wording that maria lugones gives to those that split-seperate phenomenologically and ontologically, categorise and think in fragmentations. according to her, this immensely reductionist and fictitious mode of thought and encountering the world allowed for exploitation and oppression of those who do not fit into the frameworks of the lover of purity. See ibid.**maria lugones is using he as a pronoun to speak about the lover of purity. knowing, that this mode of thought is not purely excersized by humans using the pronouns he/him, i will take over the use of he consciously, to emphasize the roots of the lover of purities constructs in white male partriarchy.“if women, the poor, the coloured, the queer, the ones with cultures (whose cultures are denied and rendered invisible as they are seen as our mark) are deemed unfit for the public, it is because we are tainted by need, emotion, the body. […] we become sides of fictitious dichotomies. to the extent that we are ambiguous — non-dichotomous — we threaten the fiction and can be rendered unfit only by decrying ambiguity as nonexistent” (4)
while the unified subject, the lover of purity, is governed by reason, the curdled own emotion, sensuality and reason at their interplay. exactly this interrelation and interference is what makes the impure unable to accept and inhabit the vantage point of purity:
“a subject who in its multiplicity perceives, understands its worlds as multiple sensuously, passionately as well as rationally without the splitting separation between sense/emotion/reason lacks the unidimensionality and the simplicity required to occupy the privileged vantage point.” (5)
it becomes clear that purity does not describe a possible condition and characteristic but is a tool of power, constructed on the brittle foundations of fragmentation and unification, lifting reason on an imaginary pedestal while rendering ambiguity, emotion, multiplicity and the body invisible.
lugones beautifully examines the art of curdling — a refutation, resisting the logic of purity from within, threatening its fictitious dichotomies — as an act of resistance in the further parts of her writing. i want to stay with the notion she creates around the non-existent body, ambiguity, emotion and the unruly place they occupy within the logic of purity. emotions are dangerous for the logic of purity, the love for the fragmented, split-separated, unified as they uncover its inherent multiplicity.
“the incoherence is dispelled through separation, his own from himself. as he covets, possesses, destroys, pleases himself, he disowns his own urges and deeds. […] after he ignores the fundamental and unfound presupposition of unity, all further ignoring becomes easier. he shuns impurity, ambiguity, multiplicity as they threaten his own fiction.” (6)
the lover of purities body is separated from his mind, the mind, the reason, the rational is what counts. his body is left behind, seen as an individual, as ‘autark’ (german, meaning seperated or detached from the surrounding, non-porous) from its surrounding, as non-intertwined in material relations.
i am taking a shower and i start thinking about the water which is running down my skin in a running stream, the water coming from the dripping tap in our kitchen. purity continues to crumble — do i also mistakenly see this water as clean?
in her essay hydrofeminism: or, on becoming a body of water astrida neimanis, writer and professor of culture and gender studies, introduces water as a counter-figuration.* she gives a material to what i already know as trans-corporeality, which is not a mystical, spiritual, phenomenological or experimental sense that ‘everything is connected’; [but] a radical rethinking of ontologies and epistemologies […]”**, which not only ontologically but also materially disproves in the roots any attempts of categorisation, fragmentation, reduction: “to rethink embodiment as watery stirs up considerable trouble for dominant western and humanist understandings of embodiment, where bodies are figured as discrete and coherent individual subjects, and as fundamentally autonomous.” bodies get wet, and the traditional western understanding of the body as a human body, as a separated entity that starts to leak. the water keeps flowing and so does her theory not stop at the human body but carries us further into entanglement, staying with the trouble — the necessity of enduring discomfort, opacity and uncanniness in order to be able to develop a sense of kinship with the world we inhabit and all its unique naturecultures, multi-species dwelling, and situatedness***. “bodies need water, but water also needs a body. water is always sometime, someplace, somewhere. […] [w]ater must travel across only partially permeable membranes. […] we take the world in, selectively, and send it flooding back out again.”
* following neimanis as well as donna haraway and rosi braidotti, i will use the word figuration instead of speaking about concepts: “i suggest we might understand figurations as embodied concepts. donna haraway (2007: 4–5) calls them ‘material-semiotic’ knots, referring to their conceptual power, but also to their worldliness. similarly, rosi braidotti (2011: 10) refers to figurations as ‘living maps’ that acknowledge ‘concretely situated historical positions’ (90). figurations are keys for imagining and living otherwise, but unlike a concept unfettered by the world we actually live in or as, figurations are importantly grounded in our material reality […]” (astrida neimanis, hydrofeminism: or, on becoming a body of water. in henriette gunkel, chrysanthi nigianni and fanny söderbäck, undutiful daughters: mobilizing future concepts, bodies and subjectivities in feminist thought and practice. new york: palgrave macmillan, 2012. page 5)**stacy alaimo, trans-corporeality. in: rosi braidotti, & maria hlavajova, posthuman glossary. (london: bloomsbury academic, an imprint of bloomsbury publishing plc, 2018), page 437*** ‘situatedness’ is another thick concept by donna haraway that for me nurtured to see research as a messy practice, moving in the liminal tension of subjectivity and objectivity. one aspect of ‘situatedness’, that i find especially important for this text is to acknowledge that our bodies are a means of knowledge production. (see donna haraway, situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspectives. in: ann arbor, feminist studies: vol 14, no. 3. michigan: michigan publishing, fall 1988.)the waves begin to swell again and i learn to float.
i begin to think with waves. i remember lying down on the atlantic's surface, making myself comfortable, feeling the waves washing around my body, gently lifting me up and down. i begin to think of a criticism i often received for my projects: you are too vague.
especially in my practice, ambiguity used to be, sometimes still is my refuge, hidden under a cover of vagueness. vagueness, which is coming from the french word vague, meaning “empty, vacant, wild, uncultivated, wandering (13c.)” from the latin word vagus meaning “strolling, wandering, rambling, […] uncertain”. (7) something moving, never resting, so also not possible to be captured, somewhere beyond the defined, not willing to surrender. the word wild sticks and i open the posthuman glossary. the other day i stumbled over an entry by jack halberstam, scholar of gender studies, fragments stayed with me.
“gaga feminism
[…] queer anarchism […] disorderly behaviour […] the erratic, the untamed, the savage. when referring to nature, the wild tends to mean unaltered by human contact […]
i am thinking about a very specific human contact. reductive, exploitive, the lover of purity. it continues.
[…] wild, in a modern sense, has been used to signify that which lies outside of civilisation or modernity […] created a world order where every form of disturbance is quickly folded back into quiet; every ripple is quickly smoothed over; every instance of eruption has been tamped down and turned into new evidence of the rightness of the status quo.
waves seem to have no chance. what halberstam describes here comes with a similar portion of deceitfulness, sleaziness and obvious neglection and secretive cruelty as the lover of purity. rendering each other tangible, this relation makes me shiver.
[…] my use of this word, a word laden with meaning, saturated with sense drawn from colonial and ecological context […]” (8)
the last fragment uncovers the endless cruelty that hides behind calling someone or something wild and placing the word pure in dichotomy. humans referred to as wild became slaves, were exterminated, were treated as a mere commodity.
i am thinking about the zong! (9) written down by nourbse philips, told to her by setaey adamu boateng. the poem, scattered over book-length pages, takes me back to the 18th century. november 29th of 1781 marks the beginning: during a passage of the slave ship zong from west africa to jamaica, 130 slaves were drowned in the sea by the ship owners. the owners benefited from the massacre as they were given insurance money, by contract issued for every slave that would not survive the journey. (10)
for those thrown into the sea, waves were deadly.
the poem consists of letters, fragments of words. reading this poem, i can feel the silence that was imposed, the fragments hint to the inability yet necessity to speak about this massacre. “zong! becomes an anti-narrative lament, […] haunting the space of forgetting and mourning the forgotten.” (11)
i continue to think about waves, wild waves. waves that were a home once. their wild land was taken as property and became lands of exploitation.
“Before the white man arrived, the first inhabitants of patagonia, lived in communion with the cosmos. […] they traveled by water. they lived submerged in water. they ate what the water supplied. […] they were water nomads. […] they traveled from island to island. each family kept a fire burning in the middle of their canoe. there were five groups: the kawésqar, the selk’nam, the aoniken, the hausch, and the yamana.” (12)
the documentary el botón de nácar is filmed and told from the perspective of the chilean film maker patricio guzmán. he draws an arch from the water on what we call earth to the origins of this same water in the cosmos. he, similar to astrida neimanis, sees water as a connecting element. while neimanis stays mostly in the present with her books, guzmán lets the water take him backwards in time. he tells the histories of his country and how the indigenous groups living in southern patagonia were stolen their lands, how the sea they were living on, living with was subdued to regulations that would not allow their canoes on the water anymore. the people were called wild and died of diseases that the pure, the civilisation brought them.
“after centuries of living alongside the water and the stars, the indigenous people saw their world collapse. the chilean government, who supported the colonists, declared that the indians were corrupt, cattle thieves and barbaric. many of them took refuge on dawson island, where the main mission was located. they took away their beliefs, their language, and their canoes. they dressed them in old clothes that were contaminated with the germs of civilization. most of them got sick and died within less than 50 years. the others became prey to those known as "indian hunters". the farmers paid one pound for a man's testicle, one pound for a woman's breast, ten shillings for a child's ear.” (12)
later in chilean history, after salvador allende gave back the land to the natives that had been stolen from them, a coup d’état, financed by the united states lead chile into dictatorship. cruelty, torture, rape, murder came along with it. “dawson island, where hundreds of indigenous people died in the catholic missions, was turned into a concentration camp for salvador allende’s ministers […]. dawson island was also used as a prison and torture house for over 700 of allende’s supporters […] during those violent years, the humboldt current washed up a body […]. people began to suspect that the ocean was a cemetery.” (12)
a rail was bound to their chest, 30kg of metal to make the bodies sink into the ocean together with the immense cruelty they endured before dying. the island, dawson island, which once was a home, became a prison. not only physically but also conceptually, to separate the wild from the lovers of purity. the vague as a dangerous wave, the wild who have been called barbaric, impure, to keep them outside off the lover of purities world constructs.
i am white, german, grew up in higher middle class and had access to all the resources i ever wished for. nonetheless — and although it seems so endlessly meaningless, ridiculous and irrelevant next to the amounts of suppression, pain and cruelty others had and have to endure, i was long blinded by the lover of purities constructs. but/and not without a cost and not without a reason.
i am comfortable with uncertainty. i am comfortable with the undefinable. i love the feeling of suspension, when everything is ticklish, the whole body is present in its conceptual absence, kind of a vaporous state, engaged and flooded with excitement about the abstract, the vague, the ungraspable. the mind is crisp and so endlessly engaged. everything is on hold, waiting for the final sentence giving certainty – waiting and knowing at the same time it is never to arrive.
uncertainty seems to be my refuge, my peaceful haven — to not have to bring work or thoughts to what would feel like an end, to become definite, to not have to be concrete, solid. this not only allows me to silence my inner voices of fear, of expected failure but also allows what i produce to float in this space of indeterminacy, my work wrapped in a puffy protective layer, shielded from criticism that would be much more responsive to what is tangible, defined, concrete.
the search for protection in indeterminacy, this withdrawal, the hiding behind the beauty and elegance of philosophical and poetic qualities, is rooted in a deep-seated fear of mine. a fear of criticism that i immediately feel in my body as soon as it grabs me. a feeling that cuts off my air and leaves me with the unbearable thought of not being capable of what i expect from myself. this is a feeling that is incredibly difficult for me to bear, to live through. so i have learned to avoid it.
this is something i realised when i was undergoing a psychotherapy to understand and learn to navigate the waves of depression that caught me from time to time. mostly they rolled over me when i was faced with a task that was personally important to me, i was extremely passionate about - then i got into the wild waters of dense and abyssal emotions that i couldn't manage, never learned to navigate, so i numbed them. unconsciously. it's not something i could decide, it just happens and left me in a thick, stuffy fog that allowed no escape.
my own emotionality begins to circle with vagueness, with the wild, with impurity, with a porous body freed by water. i especially think about the moments when i struggled, when i had the feeling i am not worth my pain, i am not allowed to show others my fear. i also think about moments where i tamed my joy because i didn’t want to be the stereotype of a giggling girl, so i played cool instead. but mostly, i am thinking about what my reality was for years, what this attempt to split-separate from my own emotions meant for me.
03/02/2019
my feelings are numb, i lost them a while ago. somewhere in the distance, dense fog keeps us apart. the more i try to reach them, to reach myself, the more they disappear. the denser the fog becomes, the deeper i sink into it. disoriented, alone. it keeps me trapped. my body feels like a vessel that expands, filled more and more with the fog that makes it so hard for me to crawl out of it. i am stuck just under the skin. not only have i lost contact with myself, with my emotions, with what i feel, i have also lost contact with the other side of my skin. somewhere between my inside and my outside, kind of nowhere, i feel like an empty shell. despite the emptiness, i am heavy and sink deeper into the fog.
i remembered this writing of mine from february 2019, when i read sara ahmeds words in the cultural politics of emotion.(13) she describes emotions as relations, circulating, created in contact between individuals, groups and “objects”. emotions, rather than describing an emotional state, should be considered “as social and cultural practices”. (14) ahmed extends on that and says that rather then emotions reaching from the inside out (psychological emotionality) or from the outside in (the individuals emotions being created, shaped, influenced by those of a surrounding group), that emotionality “create[s] the very effect of the surfaces and boundaries that allow us to distinguish an inside and outside in the first place […]: the ‘i’ and the ‘we’ are shaped by, and even take the shape of, contact with others.” (15) when i go back through my irregularly filled diaries, reading fragments of the moments during which i probably felt the most, it becomes clear to me that those were the moments i was most aware of my shell, my skin, my surface, my boundaries but unable to move away from it, see anything beyond it in any direction. at the same time this shell is freed, becomes less of a prison through her theories. throughout the year of therapy, my therapist and me mostly tried to understand where i meet the outside, where my own emotions are triggered by words, actions, events and what expectations i unconsciously project on others. one could say, that i had to calibrate my surface and its porosity, becoming aware of its shielding and relational functions and also of its semi-permeability.
my emotional body begins to entangle with my inside, with my outside. i feel relief. when the fog becomes liquid, when the water finds its path, it allows me to think my body as porous, an escape. i can breath again, the fog lifts slowly and leaves me exhausted but sanguine and confident.
i don’t need to be consistence. thinking of my own body as a unified entity dissolves with the tales of purity. it dissolves in the entanglements, the material and ontological relations my body and my emotions are part of. as my body is multiple and porous so are my emotions. my body, my emotionality become aswim with what surrounds me. intimate and so worldly at the same time. water begins to be the fluid that fills my body, our bodies with material history, with emotions, with whatever passes our semi-permeability: “[membranes] choreograph our ways of being in relation: a gravitational threshold, a weather front, a wall of grief, a line on a map, equinox, a winter coat, death.” (16)
water becomes what i share, stays with what is mine, becomes mine for a while. before my consciousness, my body, my emotionality let go of it again.
the waves continue to swell gently, up and down, they become part of me, our difference is a material one but we touch each other deeply. and when the drops of saltwater dry off on my skin, leaving little traces of white salty crusts, part of the wave became me, sinking through my skin. some other parts became air. i breathe in.
“water teaches us that we share many things and that water, the water that literally flows through my body, in some way also flows through yours. but that in those sort of changing morphologies, movements across membranes, transubstantiations, water is also continuously gestating difference. so we are both sharing in an aqueous hydro commons that connects us in really material ways, but that is not to say we are all the same big puddle. we are also very much differentiated through and as and by water as well […] water teaches me, that there is something else, thats called the milieu […] water, it just allows other things to be. [water] that calls other entities and allows them to flourish.” (17)
without creating a split-separation, difference is called into being. a place is created for difference as tension, an in-between but not as a temporary transit, rather as something that arrived in its vagueness, its wildness, its non-fragmentation. what neimanis describes as liminal ecotone comes to mind, as well as what lugones calls mestizaje.
“the liminal ecotone [eco: home; tone: tension] is not only a place of transit, but itself a watery body. in other words, an ecotone has a material fecundity that rejects an ontological separation between “thing” and “transition”, between “body” and “vector”. (18)“and i think of something in the middle of either/or, something impure, something or someone mestizo, as both separated, curdled, and resisting in its curdled state. mestizaje defies control through simultaneously asserting the impure, curled multiple state and rejecting fragmentation into pure parts. in this play of assertion and rejection, the mestiza is unclassifiable, unmanageable. she has no pure parts to be “had”, controlled.” (19)
they do not describe the same — lugones focuses mestizaje on the cultured, women, the queer, the coloured, the emotional. she draws from mexican-americans and the difficulty of living in-between categories and cultures. the in-between is deeply reflected in the liminal neimanis pairs with ecotone and it extends to the places of transition without temporality, where what comes together is a material body itself. the tension becomes inherent, a home. also lugones mestizaje is a concept full of tension, but rather tension that is the place of birth for festive resistance, celebrating the curdled as being visible as threatening to the systems of purity.
purity washes out. water uncovers the traces left, traces of suffering, of cruelty, of tension, of homes. water gives life, water is hiding, water is deadly, water are the tears wetting my pillow while i am learning to swim.
did i learn to swim?
what did i learn from water, weaved into a thick and unruly net with impurity, wilderness, vagueness, emotionality and embodiment?
not only is water a narrative figuration that weaves together relational emotionality, vapour vagueness, but also does it so on a material and ontological level and constructs my body as porous. what the figuration of mestizaje does for the cultural, historical and emotional multiple, does the figuration of water to think bodies as trans-corporeal. it turns my body into a roaring, thundering assembly of uncertainty and contingency. water weaves us all together and makes my body next to its emotional porosity also phenomenologically and materially porous. thinking waters as impure, allowing it to exist in its impurity, might have been a figure that could have saved us from one or two humanitarian and environmental catastrophes, so i think, and my mind saddens over the bodies — animate and inanimate — that have been and are today victims of the lovers of purity. water might have also been an ontological figure that would have allowed me to live my inconsistencies and wear my emotionality with strength. “plurality proliferates.” (20)
histories are nothing i can wash myself clean from. so do i think and mean those of my country, my continent, my species but also my very own. i begin to question why i feel cleaner when i step out of the shower and i start to think myself as inconsistent, as emotional without the pressure of making sense, without the need to place myself within categories others created, without the pressure to trim off, hide inside what does not want to be squeezed in fragmentations. i begin to dwell in vagueness but not because i need to hide.
Bibliography:
astrida neimanis, bodies of water: posthuman feminist phenomenology. new york: bloomsburry publishing plc, 2017.
astrida neimanis, hydrofeminism: or, on becoming a body of water. in henriette gunkel, chrysanthi nigianni and fanny söderbäck, undutiful daughters: mobilizing future concepts, bodies and subjectivities in feminist thought and practice. new york: palgrave macmillan, 2012.
(16) p. 104
(18) p. 108
(29) p. 98
astrida neimanis, we are all at sea. at: riga biennal, riboca2. [online] [27.02.2021]
(17) minute 27
donna haraway, situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspectives. in: ann arbor, feminist studies: vol 14, no. 3. michigan: michigan publishing, fall 1988.
see donna haraway, staying with the trouble: making kin in the chthulucene. durham: duke university press, 2016.
jack halberstam, gaga feminism. in: braidotti, r., & hlavajova, m, posthuman glossary. london: bloomsbury academic, an imprint of bloomsbury publishing plc, 2018
(8) ibid. p. 170/17
karen barad, on touching — the inhuman that therefore i am. in: differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies 23(3), page 206-233. durham: duke university press, 2012.
maria lugones, purity, impurity and seperation. in: signs. vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 458-479 chicago: the university of chicago press, winter 1994. [online] http://www.jstor.org/stable/3174808 [26.02.2021]
(1) see maria lugones, purity, impurity and separation. in: signs. vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 458-479 chicago: the university of chicago press, winter 1994. [online] http://www.jstor.org/stable/3174808 [26.02.2021]
(2) ibid. p. 468
(3) ibid. p. 458/459
(4) ibid. p. 467
(5) ibid. p. 465
(6) ibid. p. 467
(19) ibid. p. 460
m. nourbse philip and setaey adamu boateng, zong!. toronto: mercury press, 2008.
(9)
(10) see: m. nourbse philip, zong! entry on philips website. n.s, n.l [online] [27.02.2021].
(11) ibid.
patricio guzmán, el botón de nacar. usa: icarus films, 2015.
(12)
sara ahmed, the cultural politics of emotion. edinburgh: edinburgh university press ltd, 2004.
(13)
(14) ibid. page 9
(15) ibid. page 10
stacy alaimo, trans-corporeality. in: rosi braidotti, & maria hlavajova, posthuman glossary. london: bloomsbury academic, an imprint of bloomsbury publishing plc, 2018.
vague (adj.). in etymonline.com. n.d. [online] [27.02.2021]
