III) captivation

“Women are born with pain built in. It's our physical destiny—We carry it within ourselves throughout our lives”18

18 Waller-Bridge, Fleabag, 311.

Misbehaving Bodies is the closest I’ve been to feeling like I saw Her struggle in 19 the mainstream.

Pancreatic Cancer, I guess I always assumed it was about that. Terminal illness was the only context I could house my art and my grief, it was the only tangibility. Spence’s portion of the show explores familiar specifics: images of her own decaying body, angry world spiting text, and self severance. Seemingly hard to look at verisimilitude. It was honest, I was not scared, but the hesitation of my peers is palpable.

Jo Spence and Hannah Wilke, that’s basically it when talking about making Cancer art. Autobiographical. I can offer no reason as to why these are the two artists I can name in the mainstream. I splay images of my mother in chemo across my desk. Cirrhosis, skeletal, catatonic at points. My tutor asks why I want to expose the public to such shocking images.

Shocking? Is the truth shocking? Maybe it’s not for the public, just proof that horrible things happen. The public needs to see that, I think. Death to blind optimism and fuck Cancer, too.

I discover here that I am not trying to communicate a cancer story. It’s always in the background. It is my context but not my story to tell.

After the show I quietly escape to the bookshop because I need to be alone. There are only so many times a classmate can tell me, ‘how relevant this show is to my practice’. I became part of the show.

A book with the aggressive title Motherless Daughters 20 might as well have slapped me in the face. I truly cannot escape. I go to it, but not before I decide I have the audacity. Without even skimming I purchase the book. I shove it in my bag before I have to explain it to anyone. Is this a self help book? I ponder this on the bus home. The back says “cover image courtesy of Shutterstock”. Really…

19

Misbehaving Bodies, a show at the Wellcome Collection in 2019, was described as a ‘heartbreaking experience’. I saw no heartbreak, only reality. Artist Oreet Ashery plays a movie about her father’s loss of motor function, she dresses up as him in healthy glory. Photographer Jo Spence shows the chronology of her breast cancer diagnosis. There are images of medical procedures juxtaposed with angry but satirical messages to western medicine. I question who this show was really for.

20

Hope Edelman, Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss (London, Yellow Kite, 2018). The first edition was written in 1994 which is the year of my birth. There’s no connection here but I can pretend all I want. I read an article in the New York Times claiming that Millennials will see the earliest cases of parental death in generations. I can’t find it to prove it, oops.

I’m a fat ugly American cunt who’s mom died when she was twenty two. 21

That’s my version of Anna Quindlen’s self introduction after I read her article in that book with the bad cover. The beginning is stolen from a homeless woman’s shouted opinion of me the day I moved to London. “Unlike an adult who experiences parent loss with a relatively intact personality, a girl who loses her mother during childhood or adolescence co-opts the loss into her emerging personality, where it becomes a dominant, defining, characteristic of her identity.” 22 I suppose this is the reason I don’t introduce myself to my neighbors.

I leap from my outside world into what I lovingly refer to as my shoebox. Attached to the ugliest rooftop garden on the block is the ugliest flat in probably all of Brixton. Plop! onto the bed from the window. The whole room shakes as I land. I try not to take it as an insult.

I bought myself a birthday gift despite my lack of care for the passing of time. I, like my sister, buy it way in advance for no discernible reason. An ancient looking 'athome darkroom kit’ is hardly a glitzy twenty sixth birthday present. The chemicals sit in their beakers as days go by, all unmarked because who cares. I was lazy before the mother death so I can’t blame that one on grief.

Dev Stop Fix

They’re covered with cling film because I’m not an animal. The only thing that makes this kit 'at home’ is that it has no real rules. The film comes out fine without them. I let another passing thought that tells me that this is not my home flee. I haven’t really tried to find home since She passed. Zambreno confesses, “Mother is our point of origin. And when she is gone we are homeless.”23 Three capable cities perfect for new lives and nothing sticks. I find nine other references before dinner of women who call themselves orphans after their mother died.

I ask myself if I am being triggered by a box filled with photo chemicals and the answer is yes.

21 Edelman, Motherless Daughters, xx-xi.

22 Edelman, Motherless Daughters, xxvi.

23 Zambreno, Book of Mutter, 41.

Madonna’s mother died when she was five years old. They share a name.24

Sylvia Rivera said a piece of her died with Marsha P. Johnson. It was also the reason she became an activist again. She pleads, “Well Marsha, we tried” to the Hudson. 25

Debbie Reynolds dies one day after daughter Carrier Fisher. Granddaughter Billie Lourd was only twenty-four.

Paris Jackson was eleven when father Michael died. I watched his funeral on TV.

Kanye West’s public attitude changes after mother Donda’s death, he’s running for president for fuck’s sake.

Mindy Kaling losses her mother to Pancreatic Cancer, too.

Louis Tomlinson loses his mother and sister five days apart. He has a child the next year.

Lee Alexander McQueen notes three important women in his life. He takes his own after the loss of his mother, the last of the three.

Ann Patchett loses her ‘native language’ with the loss of her ‘best friend’ Lucy Grealy. We all know what that means. 26

Andy Warhol lives with his mother his entire life, yet is absent at her funeral. His last painting at the Factory is made in her honor.

Kathe Kollwitz experiences the death of all her siblings, and her son. She dedicates her printing career to it.

24 Rupaul’s Drag Race, Season 12/Episode 7. “Madonna: The Rusical” Netflix. 61:00. April 10th, 2020.

25 The Life and Death of Marsha P Johnson. David France. Los Angeles, 2017.

26

Ann Pachett, Truth and Beauty (London, Fourth Estate, 2004) 257. “Whenever I saw her, I felt like I had been living in another country, doing moderately well in another language, and then she showed up speaking English and suddenly I could speak with all the complexity and nuance that I hadn't realized was gone. With Lucy I was a native speaker— She convinced me she would live no matter what… that was my mistake”

Yoko Ono calls death of John Lennon the ‘worst of everything.’ She considered herself cursed. 27

Carrington shoots herself two months after the death of Lytton Strachey.

Patti Smith dedicates whole publications and songs to her late Robert Mapplethorpe. 28

A whole country mourns over the loss of Princess Diana every single year since the nineties.

The world erupts at the death of George Floyd, drudging up hundreds of other deaths with him.

I don’t know what any of this means but there is a connection. There has to be.

27 She founds Yoko Ono’s Spirit Foundation in his memory.

28 Patti Smith, Just Kids (New York, HarperCollins, 2010).