"The Body is a Bloody Battlefield": Jackie Kay and the Body in Flux — Page 2:
6 The legacies of these damaging, mythical stereotypes have been pernicious and enduring, and the black woman's perceived hypersexuality continues to be used as a dominant image in various forms of representation. The link between sexuality and ill-health, although now perhaps less explicit, nonetheless remains a subtle undertone in the many depictions of her as an exotic, predatory or deviant force. But, as well as having been constructed as the carrier and sufferer of disease, black women have paradoxically received a documented lack of care and prejudice from those in the health services. Writing in the 1980s Beverley Bryan et. al. highlight the imbalance of power in the doctor/patient relationship and claim that this is perhaps most intensely felt by black women. They state that: "[W]hen a Black woman enters a doctor's surgery, there is another dimension to this experience, particularly if the doctor is a white, middle-class man, as he usually is" (Bryan 102). They also point out that it is they (black women) who are most vulnerable to ill-health (both mental and physical) because of the social conditions that many inhabit which are influenced by a combination of race, class and gender (Bryan 90).
7 Although written many years later than Bryan's account, much of Kay's work seems to be entering this debate by suggesting that the problematic association between black women and health issues has not gone away. For example in "Where It Hurts," the protagonist recounts how, during a visit to the doctor, she recognizes the prejudice in his eyes: "[H]e looks at me as if I were a germ, a sudden outbreak" Off Colour (10-12). The patient, clearly cognisant of the fact that the doctor believes in the mythical association of blackness and disease, replies with more than a touch of irony: I come from a long line of sufferers.
We lived with live-in disease-ridden beasts.
We caught rabies, had babies, passed madness down.
We clenched our crossed teeth. (10)
Despite her brave attempts to overcome his racist gaze through a lightness of tone, the deleterious consequences of inhabiting a body that is so stigmatized is made explicit in the lines:
The sick headache tightening the screws. Zigzags.
My moods swing. My sinuses scream. I look like a hag,
There's not a pain I haven't had. (12)
This shows how the protagonist's body, racially coded and marked by a medical gaze that has constructed her as "a germ," has resulted in the sensation of real physical pain. That there might be a causal link between this type of prejudice and ill health is confirmed by The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain: The Parekh Report, a document outlining Britain's attitudes towards racial diversity published in 2000. It suggests that: "[R]acism […] and the stress of living in a hostile society - directly harms health" (Runnymede Trust 178, emphasis added). Pamela Ashurst and Zaida Hall concur with this notion, stating: "[H]ealth is that state of equilibrium that we enjoy when we thrive in the context in which we live. Illness, or dis-ease, represents a deviation from that healthy equilibrium" (9). The idea being proposed here is that individuals who perceive themselves or are perceived by others as socially "acceptable," are more likely to be healthy, whereas those who find their identity is sometimes "unacceptable," (due to skin colour in "Where It Hurts"), will be more prone to disease and sickness. This is certainly borne out in the poem above, where there is a clear psychosomatic connection between the protagonist's ill health and the experience of racism.
8 Her only method of negotiating the doctor's damaging constructive gaze, which is emblematic of a wider belief system, is to separate mind and body in an attempt to be liberated from pain, both physical and mental. The protagonist's longing for disembodiment is indicated by her wish: "If I could have a day, an ordinary day, / away from the worry - the body - I would be happy" (10). The price of this freedom, however, results in becoming alienated from herself, illustrated by the fact that she loses command of her mental and physical faculties: "It's got that bad I've started to swear, / I've begun to think in obscenities, I can't stop - cunt. (11). The consequent tension between the controllable and the uncontrollable elements of her corporeality leads to confusion, as she asks: "How did I get like this? So far away from myself." (11). The powerlessness felt by black women in the face of mythical representations of blackness and disease is thus suggested here. And although the protagonist is "[S]ick to death of being sick," she knows there can be no real freedom when "[T]he body is a bloody battlefield" (9).
9 The consequence of inhabiting a body that is ostracized because of racist beliefs is further suggested in the short poem "Somebody Else" (Off Colour). The first three lines state:
If I was not myself, I would be somebody else.
But actually I am somebody else.
I have been somebody else all my life. (27)
The duality proposed here indicates that subjectivity is not necessarily unitary or stable and there is the possibility of both a self and a non-self existing simultaneously. James Olney concurs with this in his ideas about human memory, stating that because it (memory) is disjointed and often incomplete, one could argue that "selfhood is not continuous; for it brings up one self here and another self there" (24). Commenting on the above poem in an interview, Kay admits that for her this feeling of embodying a duality of selves comes from having been adopted. She says, "[W]hen you are adopted you always have this possibility of having been somebody else […] I think lots of people (adopted or not) have a sense of this other self that they could have been" (Dyer 59). I would add to this the idea that being black in a predominantly white (racist) society also can cause this splitting of the self. And for the subject in "Somebody Else," this has resulted in an existential uncertainty whereby she has become distanced from her "self." As well as interpreting this poem as a textualisation of the dualities inherent in being adopted, it could also be usefully read as a text connecting black femininity with the discourse of racism.
10 The disembodied self and loss of identity that can be experienced as a result of illness have clear symmetries with the self under attack from racism, as both can produce similar responses. Bryan Turner states, "we often experience embodiment as alienation … when we have cancer or gout […] The importance of embodiment for our sense of the self is threatened by disease" (7). Similarly, Robert Dingwall states, "disturbances affecting the body […] present immediate and important problems for the interpretive scheme being employed by the individual in any situation." As a result, he states that "[T]he automatic expectation of a stable and predictable relationship between a person and his body cannot be sustained" (98). Indeed, in material terms, the body does literally become "other" in some cases. For example, immunologists have noted that in cases of cancer, healthy cells are replaced by "alien" or unhealthy ones, resulting in the body gradually becoming "non-you" (see Babiker and Arnold). In the case of cells that cause viral or bacterial infections, these are potentially immortal, and can survive even after the host body has died. Germ cells too can truly be considered "non-you" as they are the only part of the body generally considered to be non-somatic:
The mortal part is the body in the narrower sense - the 'soma' - which alone is subject to natural death. The germ-cells, on the other hand, are potentially immortal, in so far as they are able, under certain favourable conditions, to develop into a new individual, or in other words, to surround themselves with a new soma. (Weismann qtd. in Freud 252)
Illness then, in the same way as racism and prejudice, can cause a feeling of "somebody-else-ness," an identity crisis if you like, that can destabilize the relationship between the known and the unknown self. Bodily displacement engendered because of feelings of unbelonging perpetrated by a society that alienates and stigmatizes can mean, as Kay describes in "Somebody Else," that "people mistake you / you mistake yourself" (Off Colour 27).