Whose Body is This Anyway?

This is as much skin as I’ll show on the interwebs.

No full frontal nudity? NO FULL FRONTAL NUDITY.

«Той, где на монетах –

Молодость моя,

Той России – нету.

Как и той меня».

[Марина Цветаева, «Страна»]

“That one, where on the coins –

my youth remains,

that Russia – is no more.

Like she I was before.”

[Marina Tsvetaeva, “Country”]

My cousin sometimes chronicles her thoughts in a blog called Jag tänker nog för mycket [I Probably Think Too Much]; it occurs to me sometimes that it would be a suitable title for this transcription of my own thoughts. Also I probably think too much. Yesterday Mrs S expressed a wish to read the novel which I wrote during my first years in Russia and worked especially intensively on while in Siberia – Russian Dogs – and after she read and even elaborated on some of the more prominent ideas from Moonlight, Hide My Shadow, I did not hesitate to share also this work of fiction with her. As I have lived many years abroad now, almost all of what I have written in Swedish over the years has never been read by anyone and I haven’t had anyone with whom I may discuss ideas expressed in my native tongue for a long time. Yesterday I decided to first pick one version of Russian Dogs to send to Mrs S – since I wrote it for several years it exists in no less than six versions in the original Swedish [the version of it which was published in Russian in 2009, Во всех комнатах твоих (In All Your Rooms), is very much a different novel] – I eventually settled on version number three [which I think was the one I sent to the publisher in the summer of 2006 but I’m not sure anymore] and decided to read the whole thing through before sending it to her. I’m lucky to have the time and the privacy and the freedom to spend six hours at night reading alone and undisturbed if I feel like it [while Critical Companion is writing and reading her own fictional creations next to me, but we never talk about what we’re doing – it is sort of a silent agreement that we write for ourselves and not for each other]. Yesterday I explained to Mrs S about the troubles I’m having at narrating my Russian experiences in the form of an anti-memoir; I boldy declared that my diaries, notebooks, poetry as well as blog entries from the time period are useless as reference material to these six years lived in Russia. The diaries are narrow in perspective and disordered in chronology [I only write by hand when I travel and this does not happen regularly]; the notebooks function mainly to harbor sketches and plans for future novels, short stories, and articles; the poetry might as well be about some other girl in a completely different country at any given point in human history; and the blog belongs to a post-modern genre designated to be consumed immediately by an omnipresent audience. The one reliable source I have for what I thought and saw and felt about Russia when I was there is the novels I wrote then. Nowhere in my personal inscriptions can I find such articulated, poetical, and even beautiful representations of my Siberian experience as in Russian Dogs; nowhere else am I so excited and thrilled and unconditionally fascinated by the place I’m living in and the language I’m using to write about it. What struck me the most about Russian Dogs while re-reading it yesterday [something I probably would not have done if Mrs S hadn’t entered my life as ‘designated reader’] was how it is first and foremost a love affair with language – it is written as if the author had suddenly discovered she has a language of her own and wants to try it from every angle, stretch it to its outmost limits, and see how well it can encapsulate in every word she knows [but sometimes doesn’t know how to use properly] this chaotic and unstructured lived experience. I don’t think I’ve ever been as absolutely absorbed in the pure beauty and endless possibilities of the Swedish language as I was when I wrote Russian Dogs; I don’t know if I ever will be again. Perhaps it appears strange that a novel I thought at the time to be about loving Siberia should turn out six years later to be a novel about loving Swedish, but I guess that sometimes we simply don’t know what we’re really writing when we write it. Speaking from the privileged position of myself six years later, I can say that I this kind of unadultered passion for one’s native tongue isn’t easily acquired – I still retain much of it, albeit employ it now in a more sensible fashion and with a rather mature tone – it requires exile to a foreign country for it to be nurtured. Language doesn’t come alive in this way when it is used also for everyday purposes; only a language which nobody else around you understands can become this frivolous and this spectacular [or sound to you as if it were when you have only yourself to talk to]. I don’t think I would have had so many murders in my novel if I were to re-write it today; one ambigious death scene is probably enough for one narrative. You don’t have to have five of them – but I guess I didn’t know that at twenty. Just like I didn’t know that you can only play so much with your own personal language until it becomes unintelligible to other speakers.

I told Mrs S that I had imagined myself being a kind of academic Carrie from Sex and the City in writing articles for my hometown’s biggest paper; she replied that this had also been a fantasy of hers at one point in time. “But Carrie doesn’t think about death,” she concluded. When you contemplate death from time to time you exclude yourself from the light genre of writing about handsome men and cute shoes. I said that I had imagined writing my book about my years in Russia like Blondinbella [a blog I’m sort of not ashamed to be following] is writing her second book and blogging about ‘writing one chapter here and one chapter there’ and tada – a finished product! “But Blondinbella doesn’t think about death,” Mrs S commented and once again she was of course right.

Death distorts representations of life; death disrupts [interrupts?] the process of writing.

Let’s go back to the title of this post and talk more about Blondinbella but now in connection with another famous Swedish female blogger, Kissie [a blog I’m sort of ashamed to be following], and the fascinating representation of the female body on popular blogs in which the female author herself chooses what to publish and what not to publish. Both of these women regularly post pictures of their bodies on their blogs; today I caught myself wondering why they flaunt their naked skin like this. Who is the intended observer of these photographs: who is looking, who is watching, and at whom is this exhibit of female flesh directed? I sometimes wonder if the watcher is supposed to be male; in my opinion, there is nothing attractive about Kissie [who has become famous for starving herself beyond recognition and pairing an emaciated figure with disproportionate fake breasts], but neither Blondinbella could be considered as ‘making herself attractive’ in the eyes of the opposite sex. Last spring – which was when I first came across her blog – I was amazed at finding a young woman so close to my own deprived and dissatisfied generation who eats. “She’s allowed to eat but she’s not allowed to be fat,” my mother commented back then. Thus, the ultimate purpose of these pictures seems not to be to stir sexual desire in men [for neither of these young Swedish pretty girls with long blonde hair use such photographs that men – God, I hope – would find alluring (it suddenly occurs to me that I’m not a man and that I can’t have the last word in this evaluation)] but rather to stir a kind of envy in their female readers. Or to perform in a public space an unhealthy image of the ‘shapable’ female body to which I don’t subrscribe; either way, I have come to the conclusion that I find both of their representations – the starving woman and the eating woman – disturbing. Yet they are both a product as well as a fact of our culture; had there not been readers who wished to see such pictures, these pictures would not be posted. They would not have risen to nation-wide fame had not their self-chosen and self-depicting representaions of themselves found resonance with the consuming masses. But perhaps they also reflect that we as a society [now I’m speaking mainly about Sweden] are still caught up in the problematic process of negotiating what the female body is – whose body is this anyway? The body is perhaps the most heavily loaded gun in the individual’s physiological arsenal: use it unwisely, abuse it, and you will find yourself labeled a rebel. The female body – the tabu to display its most prominent features in public spaces; the suggestive employment of the same features for commercial and artistic purposes – is not an autonomous territory within which every woman can act as she sees fit; rather, the female body is a battle field where political opinions, economic values, and sexual connotations collide.

And this is also the body I have to get up and dress every single morning.

When I was searching for a picture of myself for the new banner of this blog to go with its new title, I consciously opted for a photograph which did not display my body. I have my own disorted, narcissistic, and often troubled view of this body I’ve been ‘blessed with’ which I don’t necessarily want to invite others to partake in; but also I desired a picture of myself where my face resembled me as I see myself – I wanted a face without make-up, a face with lines and pores and marks and shadows, a face with dark circles under the eyes, a face with eyes that looked at something more than they were aware of someone looking at them. But at the same time I wished for this face to still be beautiful – at least to me – or else the brand spanking brave-new-world kind of title for the blog wouldn’t work. [Maybe it didn’t work anyway; I’m much more comfortable with writing as a mad woman than as a beautiful woman – but that could be because mostly I’ve been labeled ‘sexy’ by others and that’s certainly a view of myself and of my body to which I’d rather not subscribe.] For this post, I wanted to select a few photographs of myself where I show some skin – but came to reject almost every picture because I am now at a time in my life where I’m more conscious than ever that people are not only reading this but also looking at me. In my most lofty concepts of myself I am an educated, eloquent and independent woman who sets a healthy example body-wise for the younger generation; I don’t advocate for weightloss and I would never go on a diet in public [the first time I tried to go on a diet I was twelve years old – so trust me when I say that I know how in our culture women are taught at a very young age to take their bodies seriously and view them critically]. Yet I have not emancipated myself from the current social and cultural context; there are days when I wake up and feel like there’s nothing I want more in the world than to loose ‘those pounds’ and finally enjoy ‘the perfect body’. What is this perfect body then, and what would I do with it if I had it? It surely wouldn’t function any better than the body I have now [or, better, the way my body is now] and the question if it’d be more attractive to the opposite sex I’d rather not answer. Taking control of your body and decide that this control will be aimed at content rather than form is almost like being the initiator of your own revolution: you become opposed to the contemporary view of the female body as constantly being adaptable to something or someone else. If you start looking at it as simply ‘my body as it is right now’ and not in terms of everything it isn’t and will never be in the near or distant future you might realize that there are a million other things you could be doing with your body than calculating intake versus output. But maybe these two Swedish female bloggers are doing something of the kind when they choose to exhibit their bodies in public – as they are and as they were – they are in control of the image they circulate. And perhaps in this lies their power: the power to present and the power to withhold.

Maybe I have a similar power over the representation of myself when I decide that a certain amount of my bare skin may be exposed but that the rest is for private live performances only.