Speaking the unspeakable
A few years ago, I did a poetry reading as a childhood friend lay dying in the hospital. I had been with him all night and it had felt like sitting in an airplane crossing some large body of water. The static hum of oxygen. Screens displaying his pulse and blood pressure, like a map slowly updating to show the outline of that other continent.
Backstage, as the theater was filling up the evening after, I tried to capture this feeling in a bundle of words. The immensity of what was happening made it seem dishonest to go out there to recite poems form before. Salmon that swam upstream, lovers who exchanged bodies, all the things that I had written about before — it felt like lying.
Afterward, the rain near-suspended in the air as I walked back to the hospital, I wished that I had lied. Why had I not canceled? How could I walk around the foyer of the theater, talking to people, hugging them, taking pride in the emotions I had caused in them? Those encounter had always moved me, that strange sense of opening up when we dare to be vulnerable together, but this time it unnerved me.
A woman in her early twenties had told me that it took courage to transform one’s pain into something beautiful the way I had. But the way she looked at me — the way my performance had made her look at me — was charged with an undercurrent of attraction. Her compliment made me blush, and when I looked up again and met her I, it struck me: I had exploited my friend’s suffering to make myself look better.
There wasn’t anything beautiful about what was happening to his body and his life, and to make it seem that way was obscene. I had taken the image of a person slowly suffocating by having a tumor press up between his lungs and made it lyrical and consumable. I had taken the pain of a loved one and made it into something I could trade for status.
I have kept thinking about this evening this last week, as I’ve read Lucas Bessire’s Behold the Black Caiman. Bessire is a social anthropologist and the book documents a group of Ayoreo, one of the last “uncontacted” tribes, native of the borderland between Bolivia and Argentina. For years, they have been running away from the ever intruding modern world, believing that the trucks and bulldozers they hear through the bush are monsters hunting them. They have crawled in the dikes around the plantations and taught their children to communicate by whistling.
The book begins at the very moment when they give up their attempts to flee. As they step out of the woods and into the camps that the NGOs and missionaries organize, the feeling is a mixture of terror and frustration — the exact feeling I have when a woman walks down into the cellar in a horror movie. Having read several accounts of what happens when tribes “make contact”, I can hear the strings turn dissonant as soon as the Ayoreo unload their bundles on the ground in front of Dejai, the relative of theirs, who contacted them in the woods and who controls the connections with the NGOs. Over the next several years what happens to them is what tends to happen to people that make contact with civilisation: they are consumed by tubercolosis, the women sold of as exotic pleasures, the men drawn in to addictions.
Bessire asks himself, with a note of despair, “What does it mean to write or read yet another ethnographic account of the seeming destruction of yet another small group of South American Indians?” He is well aware of the tastelessness of fetishizing their Otherness and demise, turning it into a product, but what can he do? What happens to their worlds and their bodies cannot be left untold, and if it is to be told it needs to be told in a relatable way, turned into something people want to consume. It must be made beautiful.
For to tell suffering in a way that is true to the experience of the sufferer is to create something so revolting that people will avert their eyes. Real suffering is unspeakable.
I once saw a woman do a poetry reading while sedated by psychiatric drugs and undergoing a total, and possibly irreversible, nervous breakdown. What she said was true — she did not dress up her pain. It wasn’t lyrical, it had no style. Her words were so trembling and raw and ugly that I have repressed absolutely everything she said. She spoke the unspeakable truly. It was like seeing a leg pipe brake and tear through the skin. I had to avert my eyes.
And what happens to the Ayoreo is far worse.
What they experience is psychologically beyond words: one woman has to witness things that literally make her deaf and dumb. Another decides that starving herself to death is the less painful option.
To tell their story so that it can be heard, Bessire needs to hide this appalling reality behind style, behind poetical wit and “telling details”, just like I did when I turned my friends self-suffocation into something moving. The parrots in one camp, writes Bessire, imitate “tubercular coughing”. It is a sublime detail. And the testimonials Bessire records break down into suggestive fragments like extracts from modernist poems:
I do not know what story to tell
I do not know what I will say, I do not know
I do not know my story
We looked for doide roots
We found them near Cucarani
Little birds, in the afternoon
We painted our bodies
We were suicio, dirty, in the afternoon
We painted our bodies with ashes and down
By making their story relatable, Bessire transforms their suffering into a kind of pleasure that can be packaged and sold by publishers — our pleasure. Something that will advance his career. He seems painfully aware of this dilemma, and he tries to get out of it, but he can’t. His language twists and turns like the snakes I once saw my grandfather dig them up midwinter to pour gasoline over their cold, hard bodies, making them writhe in fire.
When I returned to the hospital, his body had already begun cooling. His parents had been sitting next to him, toward the end, talking aimlessly about their lives, so he would hear they were still there. The conversation had turned to dance. Did he ever dance?
After a long while, he had dragged himself up out of his rapidly diminishing world and answered: “Yes.”
A long silence.
“Foxtrot.”
Then he never said anything again.
I kissed his forehead. I kissed his hands. The face, it looked so wide, the mouth had fallen open, the tongue… I looked away. I looked at the clock on the wall. It had a pointer that trembled every time it moved, and I thought: every time a second passes without him.
The clock made me think of an early painting by Picasso, where a doctor sits next to a deceased woman looking at his watch. I turned back toward my friend, this time unafraid of his swollen and drying tongue, my dignity in dealing with this moment shaped by the memory of Picasso’s painting, by his way of looking. My mind was suddenly clear, as if I had been meditating for hours, and I could see my thoughts take shape, pass through me and dissolve. I looked at my friend’s hands and noticed how one of Sally Mann’s photos flickered past my mind — a picture of a rotting corpse.
I tried to look at my friend with the same love that Mann shows when she looks at the people she meets as they are melting into the forest floor outside the forensic research center.
I had never seen him so well.
