Brought to You by the Letter M

[bcholmes]

I've always been rather fond of this French phrase, used in some writings about Vodou: Les Morts, Les Mystères, et Le Marassa. The ancestors (who've passed on), the spirits (the Lwa), and the sacred twins (Vodou has many symbols relating to reflections or twins; sometimes the spirit world is imagined on the other side of the mirror). Mostly, I think I like the alliteration. There's something about it that appeals to the part of me that loves words.

But while I'm talking about M-words, I wanted to talk about a few that mean a lot to me. The first word comes from my kanzo ceremony in Haiti. While I was there, a picture hung on a wall beside me. The picture was a chromolithograph of St. Claire of Assisi. The image represented my Met Tet -- the Vodou spirit who watches out for my well-being.

Weirdly, on my more recent trip to Haiti, I spent a day in Kenscoff, and while I was there, a young man started talking to me in Kreyòl. I didn't understand what he said, so I just said, "Bonjou" and waved at him. As I was walking away, I noticed that he had a picture of St. Claire on his necklace. A moment later my friend Laure told me, "he said that he thinks he knows you." I smiled, and wondered. It was one of those little coincidences that made me think.

St. Claire is, in many ways, hugely coincidental for me. I mean, some people know that the 'C' in my name stands for Claire. My father's name was Clair. I grew up in Sarnia, on the bank of the St. Clair river, which drains into Lake St. Clair.

My mind gravitates toward coincidences, loving to imagine patterns that might be found there. It's possibly why I'm a conspiracy nut, among other things.

But ever since I first saw the chromolithograph, I've wondered: what is that thing that she's holding? Turns out it's called a monstrance. "A receptacle in which the host is held," according to dictionary.com. From Middle English. Monstrare. To show. Or portent. See monster.

Neat coincidence: monster is a word that means a lot to me, mostly because of an excellent essay by Susan Stryker called "My Words To Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix -- Performing Transgender Rage". In that essay, Stryker suggests that perhaps it is time for trans people to reclaim the word monster, as 'queer' and 'dyke' and 'slut' have been reclaimed.

Stryker quotes Peter Brooks: "whatever else a monster might be, it 'may also be that which eludes gender definition.'" Mary Daly links the monster to trans people in her paper, "Boundary Violation and the Frankenstein Phenomenon." Trans people are monsters. Monstrous by society's reckoning.

The monster is an artificial thing. A constructed creature. And that we are. But also, the word monster comes from a Latin word, monstrum, meaning "divine portent". And it's that part that I find very interersting. Stryker writes:

It came to refer to living things of anomalous shape or structure, or to fabulous creatures like the sphinx who were composed of strikingly incongruous parts, because the ancients considered the appearance of such beings to be a sign of some impending supernatural event. Monsters, like angels, functioned as messengers and heralds of the extraordinary. They served to announce impending revelation, saying, in effect, "Pay attention; something of profound importance is happening."

I've told a number of my friends, most of whom don't Get It, that I consider trans-ness to be a spiritual experience. My spiritual identity is hugely, intricately linked to my trans identity. And it amuses and pleases me that the word, monster, has these relationships to divinity and trans-ness. I am a monster, happy to challenge people's sense of natural. And I am like the monstrance, containing the host.

The general perception of monstrousness is a pretty superficial one. An article I read, recently, put it rather succinctly. Talking about the 2003 film, Monster, about the life of "lesbian serial killer" Aileen Wuornos, the article talked about how most people fixated on the rather banal fact that super-beauty Charlize Theron made herself ugly for the role:

Charlize [Theron] not only had her face altered like Nicole [Kidman in The Hours], she also had imperfect teeth installed and appeared with very bad early 80s hair -- and put on weight. With this, we learn that Theron is not just a pretty face and a leggy blonde, and the fact that we know she really doesn't look like Lee heightens her status as a great beauty and performer -- she is now a star willing to transform herself for the right role. Make no mistake, the back story of Charlize, an attractive heterosexual woman who willing endures a transformation into the ugly, deranged, and "dykey" Lee [Aileen Wuornos] has aided the marketing of the film. She is such a stunner that it took hours of makeup to make her appear otherwise! (Her transformation is featured on the film's official web site.)

And it seems like, for most people, that's what monsters are about. Ugly people. Ugly appearances. Ugly lives. We no longer view the monster as saying "Pay attention: something of profound importance is happening."

What appeals to me about monstrous identity is its tendency to point out problems in society. It's easy to say that Aileen Wuornos was a "lesbian" and a "prostitute" and a "serial killer". There's something even vaguely exotic and titillating about it. And it makes for much better lunchroom conversation to talk about how Charlize Theron made herself ugly than to talk about what role Aileen Wuornos' life played in her eventual end. Think about this paragraph, from the same article:

But during the shooting of [director Nick] Broomfield's follow-up [documentary], Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer, Lee [Aileen Wuornos] is resistant to this search for explanations. Her story has changed. She now insists that she killed simply to rob. She wants forgiveness. She doesn't want her past revealed because as Broomfield theorizes, this may delay her death through some humanitarian appeal, and she just wants the State to hurry up and murder her. [...]. Lee refuses any sympathetic pathologizing on her behalf. What is a concerned social scientist/cultural theorist to do?

The Wikipedia article about Aileen says:

After her first death sentence, Wuornos often said she wanted it all to be over. In 2001 she began fighting to be executed as soon as possible. She petitioned the Florida Supreme Court for the right to fire her legal counsel and stop all appeals, wording her request so as to forestall any objection: "I'm one who seriously hates human life and would kill again." Due to her mental instability, some have argued that she was in no state for them to honor such a request.

I was recently watching a DVD set called The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell. In it, Campbell recounted a story about two police officers, and a suicidal man. They discovered this man about to jump to his death from a great height, and just as one of the officers grabbed him, the man threw himself over the edge.

The officer held on to the man and started to be pulled over the edge. They both would have fallen to their deaths, except that the other officer managed to stop their fall. Afterward, some people asked the one officer, "why didn't you let go? His weight was pulling you over the edge; why didn't you let go and save yourself?"

And the officer replied, "I wouldn't be able to look at myself in the mirror if I'd let him die."

Campbell went on to opine that this story exemplified a profound spiritual experience. He said that he believed that at some level the officer recognized a deep truth: that the suicidal man was really another manifestation of himself, and that feeling was stronger than the animal instinct to survive.

I think that's a powerful story. But how far away from that spiritual experience are the people who put Aileen Wuornos to death?

I think that Wuornos' story is the sort of thing that many postmodernist theorists mean when they talk about introducing crisis. What Judith Butler means when she talks about trouble, or exposing problems. And I think that embracing my own monstrousness is a powerful way to channel that crisis. To say, look, much of this society is broken at the fundament. And the only way we're able to go on is by not looking at the fissures too closely.

Pay attention: something of profound importance is happening.

Here is another anecdote that I find very powerful:

On January 5, 1993, a 22-year-old pre-operative transsexual woman from Seattle, Filisa Vistima, wrote in her journal, "I wish I was anatomically 'normal' so I could go swimming. . . . But no, I'm a mutant, Frankenstein's monster." Two months later Filisa Vistima committed suicide. What drove her to such despair was the exclusion she experienced in Seattle's queer community, some members of which opposed Filisa's participation because of her transsexuality -- even though she identified as and lived as a bisexual woman. The Lesbian Resource Center where she served as a volunteer conducted a survey of its constituency to determine whether it should stop offering services to male-to-female transsexuals. Filisa did the data entry for tabulating the survey results; she didn't have to imagine how people felt about her kind. The Seattle Bisexual Women's Network announced that if it admitted transsexuals the SBWN would no longer be a women's organization. "I'm sure," one member said in reference to the inclusion of bisexual transsexual women, "the boys can take care of themselves." Filisa Vistima was not a boy, and she found it impossible to take care of herself. Even in death she found no support from the community in which she claimed membership. "Why didn't Filisa commit herself for psychiatric care?" asked a columnist in the Seattle Gay News. "Why didn't Filisa demand her civil rights?" In this case, not only did the angry villagers hound their monster to the edge of town, they reproached her for being vulnerable to the torches.

When I read stories like this, I must confess that a whole life of defensive behaviours want to kick in and mediate my reaction. I want to take responsibility, somehow, and find the thing about me that I can change so that groups won't hate people like me. If only, I think, I can figure out how to be less of an eyesore, they won't hate me.

Maybe I can educate better.

Maybe I can blend into the background better. Be less obvious. Take up less space.

But then another part of me realizes what's going on and says, "Now hold on. Being angry about this is a completely valid response. Calling people on their shitty behaviour is totally appropriate."

And this, I think, is a key difference between the monster of the Frankenstein movies and the monster in Shelley's book. In James Whale's classic Frankenstein, the creature is stupid, and dangerous. It wants to be loved, but it inadvertantly murders a little girl. There's tragic pathos, yes, but we still feel like we understand the villagers who find it necessary to destroy the creature. Much has been said of Whale's monster, inspired perhaps by Whale's homosexuality: "Whale's creature externalizes and renders visible the nightmarish loneliness and alienation that the closet can breed."

(An aside: Ian McKellen played James Whale in the movie, Gods and Monsters).

But, like Susan Stryker, I identify with the monster from Shelley's original book: I look at the rejection that people like me experience at the hands of the so-called normal people and I harbour this incredible rage.

Like the monster, the longer I live in these conditions, the more rage I harbor. Rage colors me as it presses in through the pores of my skin, soaking in until it becomes the blood that courses through my beating heart. It is a rage bred by the necessity of existing in external circumstances that work against my survival.

I guess I've been thinking about all of this because of a recent attempt to work through my feelings about the label "mutilation". What I wanted, then, was to deconstruct the word. I imagined telling a story about my friend, who underwent breast reduction surgery because her breasts were causing back pains. At some point in this story, I expected to appeal to a listener's sense of compassion and say, "don't you see how profoundly hurtful it is to call such a thing mutilation? And can't you see how similar that is to the trans situation?"

But now I'm doubting that course of action. Now I find myself thinking that maybe it's better to embrace my mutilation like I am striving to embrace my monstrocity. You want to call me mutilated? Well, you're right. I am mutilated. And monstrous. And I want that to scare you shitless, because now you have no idea of what I'm capable of, and no concept of the type of threat that I pose to the artifacts of society that you love.