I spent much of 2018 pregnant and developed a serious craving for brined foods and horror films. By then, the nightmare of the Trump administration was in full swing, and some of us felt like we were running deep in the forest while others were doing the chasing with the axe. Everywhere, there were shoddy wooden sheds that we kept running into because we’d forgotten how the story goes, or we hadn’t forgotten at all but didn’t have a choice except to seek refuge among rusted hooks and pitchforks. My craving was for vampire films (an old favorite), but also for werewolves (The Howling I–III) and more oddball and folkloric varieties (Rawhead Rex). I didn’t know if it was good for me or the baby, but I sipped on olive brine late at night when I was awakened by waves of nausea. I didn’t know if the horror films were good for us either, but they felt oddly satisfying and seemed to relieve me of other anxieties. Both the brine and the horror films appealed to my animal body, with its increasingly dominant desires and aversions.
I could hardly help responding directly to these pains and pleasures.
This article appears in Issue 25 of Alta Journal.
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When my daughter was born, my daily routine became dictated by the gravitational pull of hormones and the management of bodily secretions. Blood, breast milk, urine, poop. A slush of oxytocin and other chemicals that worked to strengthen the bond between two bodies now separate yet inseparable. Except the intolerable reality that bodies such as ours were separable had become painfully evident. Babies were being pulled from their mothers as families were separated and sent to their respective cages in different corners of the country. The administration’s institutional violence against immigrants was escalating to treacherous heights.
On one of those long days and nights of nursing, I watched a documentary on the life and possible murder of trans activist Marsha P. Johnson. For the first time, I saw and heard Sylvia Rivera’s scathing speech at the 1973 Pride March in New York, as I held the baby against my chest. Someone shouted “Shut the fuck up!” when Sylvia grabbed hold of the microphone. Her voice climbed to a scream as she addressed a stunned and visibly uncomfortable audience. “Y’all better quiet down! I’ve been trying to get up here all day for your gay brothers and your sisters in jail that write me every motherfucking week and ask for your help and you all don’t do a damn thing for them.”
Her voice pulled on every nerve in my body like strings on an instrument. “I have been beaten, I have had my nose broken, I have been thrown in jail, I have lost my job, I have lost my apartment for gay liberation,” she went on. I could feel her voice pull tightly through my body. I could feel the milk ducts in my breasts swell and spill through my shirt. With my free hand—notebook forever within reach—I wrote a poem, “Breastmilk for Sylvia: An Ode.” Inextricable were the currents from breast milk to ink, from emotion and body to words. Somewhere downstream when the current waned, ideas formed like traces of moss or mineral.
I collect these traces into writings such as this.
History is marked by all manner of floods, droughts, diseases, earthquakes, fires. Also, by riots, atomic bombs, genocides, polar meltings, glacial destructions, oil spills, nuclear overflows. Cities sinking, cities crumbling. Scientists have measured a noticeable shift in the earth’s axis. It’s hard not to feel dizzy. All our legs are wobbling. Writing doesn’t correct anything. (Does it?) Damages done, all reparations are in order. But writing does help me find the current that from a very young age led me to myself. As a child, I discovered a clear and steady sense of who I was that I’ve only ever lost when I was distant from writing. Language brings me back and carries me through my life and all I love, in milk, in blood, in water, through a river onto a rock, through a window into the air, a balloon adrift.•
City Lights Books EAT THE MOUTH THAT FEEDS YOU, BY CARRIBEAN FRAGOZA
