Rac(e)ing Questions III

31      If we consider deliberate self-harm as another kind of language, "translating" psychic pain into bodily inscriptions/mutilations, what are the ramifications if the self-harmer focuses on the tongue as that which is to be injured? In the story "Why Don't You Stop Talking" this is exactly what happens. Above I argued that Thelma's anger, construed as "madness" by others, is an understandable reaction to an environment that is, at times, inhospitable. As well as outwardly directing her rage, however, she also turns her anger inward, believing she is to blame for other's aggressive behaviour. The story culminates in Thelma's conviction that "Every time my tongue gets me into trouble, it will be punished" (50). It is this organ that has, in her view, caused all the trouble. The disturbing image of Thelma slicing her tongue with a razor is accompanied by her knowing that "the pain feels good. The pain feels deserved." (50).

32     Because, as H. G. Morgan states, "the communication or language aspect of deliberate self-harm is of great importance," by making the tongue the focus of Thelma's harmful intentions, creates a stark paradox (123). This has a particular resonance with the regime of slavery, when slave's tongues were sometimes brutally removed as a punishment. By injuring the principal organ of speech, Thelma is decreasing her own ability to speak, at the same time as trying to "speak" through the act of self-harming. However, there is no-one present to "listen," evidenced by her last words in the text: "I wish they could all see me now" (50). The fact that no-one can see the mutilating behaviour which symbolically "speaks" of her unhappiness, as well as the possibility that she will not be able to fully articulate her pain due to a mutilated tongue, is a disturbing metaphorical illustration of the historical silence and silencing of black women.

33      Because of the similarity between physical and mental pain, (The Oxford English Dictionary's definition states pain is both "a strongly unpleasant bodily sensation" as well as "mental suffering and distress," my emphases) the two sensations become conflated in their interchangeability. The blurring of the boundaries between mind and body that characterizes self-harming behaviour thus potentially permits a metaphysical unification. For Thelma, the act of self-mutilation permits her to "translate" the psychic into the somatic, enabling her to mesh mind and body together. Because, according to Elaine Scarry, "to have pain is to have certainty," deliberate self-harm can be seen as a self-affirming behaviour in that it makes the body real and undeniable (7). At the same time, of course, it is overtly self-destructive and needs to be understood as a literal embodiment of "an implicit connotation of something unbearable, unutterable that is communicated in this act" (Babiker and Arnold 1). For Thelma, like Irene above, this is the oppressive "weight" of domestic unhappiness and social prejudice. Because skin is where the nerve endings are situated which relay sensations to the central nervous system, by cutting it she will both stimulate and damage the nerve cells, symbolising her desire to feel and not to feel at the same time.

34      Another way of embodying and inscribing an "unliveable situation" is demonstrated in "Trout Friday" (67-81) which narrates the story of Melanie, a young black travel agent. As the title suggests, the text focuses largely on food and the way that Melanie has organized her life around routines and obsessions. For example, with regard to her teeth, "she makes sure she brushes for the length of time it takes to boil an egg. She has an egg timer in her bathroom" (68). She has also created a dietary regime for herself which involves having the same meals each week: "salmon Monday, prawn Tuesday, cod Wednesday, haddock Thursday and trout Friday." At weekends, "she splashes out and has takeaway: Peking duck with pancakes, lamb with spicy leaves and nan bread, or Kentucky Fried Chicken with large fries" (67).

35      Living alone after the death of her mother, her father having left when she was a young child, and losing her own baby through miscarriage, Melanie is isolated. The progeny of an Irish mother and a Trinidadian father, she had inherited skin colour "that was a mixture of the two" (69). The text demonstrates how this has caused Melanie to doubt her bodily racial identity:

[S]he didn't like it when one of the girls at work called her half-caste because it sounded insulting and she didn't like mixed-race because it made her feel muddled. Certainly not mulatto, it made her think of mules. Definitely not people who said to her, 'You're neither one thing nor the other' because that made her feel left out, belonging to nobody. (69)

As well as "belonging to nobody" in the relational sense, she also belongs to no "body" in the physical (racial) sense. She is between two ethnic identities, a fact that she is reminded of by a stranger who says, "Must be hard for you lot, the blacks don't want you and the whites don't neither" (69, 70). The ensuing racial and familial loneliness has caused her to develop ways of coping with the pain. By such strict control of her daily habits, which are largely centred on diet and liquid intake and therefore could be described as symptomatic of an eating disorder, she can maintain a certain kind of "sanity" in her unhappy life.