Month: July 2006

(I had better search results with the first one.)

She was a fourteenth-century mystic who wrote The Book of Margery Kempe.

Following the birth of her first child, Margery fell ill and feared for her life. After a failed confession that resulted in a bout of self-described “madness,” Margery Kempe had a vision that called her to leave aside the “vanities” of this world. Having for many weeks railed against her family, and friends, Kempe reports that she saw a vision of Jesus Christ at her bedside, asking her “Daughter, why have you forsaken me, and I never forsook you?” From that point forward, Kempe undertook two failed domestic businesses–a brewery and a grain mill–both common home-based businesses for medieval women.

Though she had tried to be more devout after her vision, she was tempted by sexual pleasures and social jealousy for some years. Eventually turning away from what she interpreted as the effect of worldly pride in her vocational choices, Kempe dedicated herself completely to the spiritual calling that she felt her earlier vision required. Striving to live a life of commitment to God, Kempe negotiated a chaste marriage with her husband, and began to make pilgrimages around Europe to Holy sites – including Rome, Jerusalem, and Santiago de Compostela. The stories surrounding these travels are what eventually comprised much of her Book, although a final section includes a series of prayers. The spiritual focus of her Book is the mystical conversations she conducts with Christ for more than forty years.

From 1413 to 1420, Margery also visited important sites and people in England, including Philip Repyngdon the Bishop of Lincoln, Henry Chichele the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Julian of Norwich. Her thoughts concerning these trips and her revelatory experiences make up much of her book, but a key focus is also her persecution by civil and religious leaders. The last section of her book deals with a journey in the 1430s to Norway and the Holy Roman Empire. Two different scribes did the writing for Margery, under her strict supervision.

She was also accused of heresy:

Kempe was tried several times for such illegal acts as allegedly reading scripture, teaching and preaching on scripture and faith in public, and wearing white clothes (interpreted as hypocrisy on the part of a married woman). She proved her orthodoxy in each case, but came dangerously close to heterodoxy in her challenging responses to clerical authorities. Had Kempe’s book been fully extant prior to the Reformation, it would likely have been destroyed. The fact that it was lost until 1934 is undoubtedly the only reason it is available to us today.

Here’s a more detailed review of her book, and an excerpt detailing her experience of childbirth.

Sheerly Avni reviewed Adrienne Martini’s book, Hillbilly Gothic, in the Chronicle. I’m curious:

“My family has a grand tradition. After a woman gives birth, she goes mad.” So opens journalist, mother and intermittently insane memoirist Adrienne Martini’s “Hillbilly Gothic.” It is a promising opening line for a book that is also a worthy endeavor. Part family history, part confessional, part Sedaris-style comedy routine in which Martini uses her mental instability as material, the book tries to do something necessary: dispel the cloud of shame still hanging over mental illness, postpartum depression and psychosis in particular.

While postpartum depression and psychosis always deserve more airtime, I get the sense that Martini is trying to dispel a more general phenomenon as well: the cloud of shame hanging over mothers who are not maternal. She’s writing for mothers who require care and support themselves, and for mothers whose bonds with their children are complicated. That is, all mothers. Martini is to the myth of motherhood as Gerald Ensley is to the myth of the able body. All mothers are exhausted, lonely, isolated, sick, miserable, and in pain sometimes. All mothers feel burdened, angry, uncharitable, bored, and downright hateful. All mothers, being human, feel a kind of love towards their children that does not match the inhuman ideal personified by the perfect mother. Martini–lucky her–is stuck at the intersection of an erroneously vaunted condition and an erroneously stigmatized one, but the poor fit of her personality and circumstances and that standard is universal.

Apparently, it’s kind of a twee book:

That essay is a delightful read, episodic and witty, but its breezy newsprint tone wears thin stretched over 221 pages. Jocularity as a defense against pain only works if you are very, very funny, a Sedaris, a Burroughs, a Woody Allen. Martini is none of these, and too often, her jokes fall painfully flat: Fourteenth century madwoman Marjorie Kempe was “one enchilada short of a combo plate.” The word doula sounds like “something you’d order in a Greek restaurant,” and, of course, body image wit flows long: “Like cellulite,” she tells us, “dreams come easily.” Occasionally, she scores (“I can’t be crazy,” she tells one of the doctors, in one of the book’s best asides, “I’ve read ‘Infinite Jest’!”), but for the most part, one feels less like an entertained reader than a beleaguered psychiatrist, begging a defensive patient to stop wisecracking and get to the story.

Although I wonder if some of this breeziness is because of the fear of stigma. Martini could be attempting to make her case with humor because she’s afraid to make people think that there but for the grace of God goes another Andrea Yates. You can see Avni using a little of the same phrasing to introduce the crazy mommy’s memoir and the topic of unpleasant pregnancy. It sounds interesting all the same, and a breezy newsprint tone is probably just the thing for a Vicodin trance.

Courtesy of The Gimp Parade, an article about a Temporarily-Able-Bodied Person who became Temporarily Disabled:

One year ago today I collapsed on a golf course with a back injury. Not to get too technical, but things went absolutely cattywampus in my spine and shut down the nerves to my legs.

For two weeks I had to sleep sitting up. For a month I had to use a walker to go anywhere, including the bathroom. I was out of work for five weeks. I spent four months shuttling among doctors and chiropractors and neurologists.

In November I had surgery. I spent another couple of months barely able to walk. Today I still have numbness in one foot. The surgeon said it may be more than a year before I’m back to normal – if I’m ever back to normal.

I had an even briefer experience like this when I wrenched my left knee really badly out of its vector. It’s fine now, albeit utterly useless for running. It gave me a really severe limp for a few months, though, one which was exacerbated by my refusal to ease up on the injured joint. My knee buckled without warning. I had a few job interviews in the city right after the injury happened, and I had to negotiate escalators, elevators, stairs, and the subway.

People were vicious. I don’t mean careless. They shoved me up and down steps, shouldered me out of the way, and stepped on me. They seemed much ruder than ever before. Even in situations where I wasn’t moving more slowly, I was getting beaten up. I remember thinking, Hello! Noticeable limp, here! What the hell is wrong with you people? Can’t you see that I’m injured? Eventually, I realized that most of them probably could tell. That was probably why they were so peremptory. I know that there are people out there who were raised right, but I don’t think visible disability makes people kinder. I think it makes them impatient and rude, and sometimes even less inclined to help. The problem isn’t only obliviousness. Sometimes it’s simple hatred.

Gerald Ensley comes to a similar conclusion, and gives proper credit for his continued mobility and independence to the law that mandated accomodation:

There were times as I shuffled along with my walker that I couldn’t have climbed a sidewalk if not for a curb cut-in or entered a building if not for an automatic door. A temporary handicapped-parking pass let me park close to the front of drugstores and grocery stores. Had I parked any farther away, I couldn’t have made it to the store and back.

While I was injured we drove to Wisconsin, and on that trip I took my first showers in weeks – because every hotel had a bar on the shower wall that let me hold myself upright while the water cascaded on me.

Tekanji put up a post on Alas off of Blogging While Black. Rachel S said this in comments:

sly civilian said, “I don’t know nearly enough about this important subject, and i consider your blogging to be my sole source of information.”

Excellent point. Which is why these sorts of backhanded compliments are not really compliments….it is very similar to the example I used in the interracial families post, when people say oh your child is so beautiful. They may mean it sincerely, but there is this sort of nagging suspicion that are really saying something that belies their true feelings.

Over at Houdini Didn’t Have These Hips (no link to the specific post, sorry) Sarahlynn talked about a similar phenomenon. Strangers were always coming up to her and Ellie and gushing over how lovely and beautiful and cute and adorable Ellie was. They placed special emphasis on beautiful, beautiful child. It made Sarahlynn a little uncomfortable. Ellie is beautiful, and total strangers flatter cute little babies all the time, but Saralynn wondered if some of the attention had something to do with Ellie having Downs syndrome. Were these well-meaning people covering for pity, or discomfort of their own? Were they compensating for whatever prejudice they felt the vulnerable little baby might suffer from, then or later? Were they trying to make Sarahlynn feel better? Did they think she might be unhappy with her daughter? Were they trying to prove something about Ellie or themselves? Would they trip up and turn the compliment into an insult when they made it clear that they didn’t consider Ellie quite as good as all the other cute little babies out there? Was their attention akin to this kind of attention?

I think that for me, the trouble that comes through most clearly is the idea of approval. The pat on the head. What pauper of love and selfhood does Ellie or the child of an interracial couple have to be in order to need reassurance that of course she can still be adorable, just like a normal–I mean, just like any other baby? What do Downs syndrome and mixed-race identity become when they have to be smothered in blandishments? Why is it important that outsiders be so pleased with you? What real equality is that flattery a subsitute for?

While I understand the good-faith intent behind the thank-yous, it does seem to be missing the point of nubian’s subjectivity. As she says, she isn’t here for white people to learn from–in fact, most of her blog-about-blogging entries IIRC have been not about how to get white people to listen to her, but about how to build durable, vital online communities with other women of color. Sort of like the debate over troll-inclusive feminist spaces: what are we here to discuss, and what is the best way to facilitate worthwhile conversation?