Humiliation

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  But when Hitler came to power a few years later, All Quiet on the Western Front was one of the first “degenerate” books the Nazis burned in the public square in front of Humboldt University in Berlin.[10] Apparently awareness of the devastating effects of war on soldiers’ minds would have constituted a threat to the Nazis’ plunge into another round of insanity. Denial of the consequences of trauma can wreak havoc with the social fabric of society. The refusal to face the damage caused by the war and the intolerance of “weakness” played an important role in the rise of fascism and militarism around the world in the 1930s. The extortionate war reparations of the Treaty of Versailles further humiliated an already disgraced Germany. German society, in turn, dealt ruthlessly with its own traumatized war veterans, who were treated as inferior creatures. This cascade of humiliations of the powerless set the stage for the ultimate debasement of human rights under the Nazi regime: the moral justification for the strong to vanquish the inferior—the rationale for the ensuing war. The New Face of TraumaThe outbreak of World War II prompted Charles Samuel Myers and the American psychiatrist Abram Kardiner to publish the accounts of their work with World War I soldiers and veterans. Shell Shock in France 1914–1918 (1940)[11] and The Traumatic Neuroses of War (1941)[12] served as the principal guides for psychiatrists who were treating soldiers in the new conflict who had “war neuroses.” The U.S. war effort was prodigious, and the advances in frontline psychiatry reflected that commitment. Again, YouTube offers a direct window on the past: Hollywood director John Huston’s documentary Let There Be Light (1946) shows the predominant treatment for war neuroses at that time: hypnosis.[13] In Huston’s film, made while he was serving in the Army Signal Corps, the doctors are still patriarchal and the patients are still terrified young men. But they manifest their trauma differently: While the World War I soldiers flail, have facial tics, and collapse with paralyzed bodies, the following generation talks and cringes. Their bodies still keep the score: Their stomachs are upset, their hearts race, and they are overwhelmed by panic. But the trauma did not just affect their bodies. The trance state induced by hypnosis allowed them to find words for the things they had been too afraid to remember: their terror, their survivor’s guilt, and their conflicting loyalties. It also struck me that these soldiers seemed to keep a much tighter lid on their anger and hostility than the younger veterans I’d worked with. Culture shapes the expression of traumatic stress.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  youre frend Lydia Guzman Why make it harder, Lydia? Because it was her fault I was there. I would spare her nothing. My mother’s reply was more practical. She ordered me to call Children’s Services every day and yell my head off until they changed my placement. Her writing was big and dark and emphatic. I could feel her rage, I warmed myself by it. I needed her strength, her fire. “Don’t you let them forget about you,” she said. But this was not about being forgotten. This was about being in a file cabinet with my name on it and they closed the door. I was a corpse with a tag on my toe. AS I HAD NO MONEY , I panhandled in the liquor store parking lot and the supermarket, asking men for change so I could call social services. Men always took pity on me. A couple of times, I could have turned a trick. They were nice men who smelled good, men from offices who looked like they’d have been good for a fifty. But I didn’t want to start. I knew how it would play. I’d just buy a bunch of food and then be hungry again and also a whore. When you started thinking it was easy, you were forgetting what it cost. AMELIA FOUND OUT I’d been asking for a new placement. I cringed on the uncomfortable wooden-edged sofa in the sitting room as she paced back and forth, ranting, her hands cutting the air. “How dare you tell such outrageous lies about my house! I treat you like my own daughter, and this is how you repay me? With these lies?” The whites of her eyes showed all around the black irises, and spittle accumulated in the corners of her thin lips. “You don’t like my house? I send you to Mac. See how well you eat there. You’re lucky I allow you to sit at the table with the other girls, with that hideous face. In Argentina you would not be allowed to walk through the front door.” My face. I felt my scars throb along my jaw. “What do you know about a noble home? Just a common piece of street garbage. Mother in prison. You know, you stink like garbage. When you come into a room, the girls hold their breath. You soil my home. Your presence insults me. I don’t want to look at you.” She turned away, pointed to the polished stairway. “Go to your room and stay there.” I stood but hesitated. “What about dinner?” She turned on her patent leather heel, and laughed. “Maybe tomorrow.” I lay on my bed in the beautiful bedroom smelling of cedar, my stomach clawing inside me like a cat in a sack. During the day, all I wanted to do was sleep, but at night, images of my days returned like a slide show. Did I really smell? Was I garbage, hideous?

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  Why was I expected, in exchange for a scholarship that covered the expenses of my studies, to abandon my dream that seemed to me still, at that time, to be so profound, so definitive? I understood nevertheless the terms of our agreement: if I wanted to become anything worthwhile, I would often have to walk along that silent passage. If I chose that path, I would have to accept... or cheat. Because I was being allowed to enter high school, I already thought I had won the battle. But I was beginning to find out, too, that the struggle had only just begun. PART TWO Alexandre Mordekhai Benillouche ~ 1. THE CITY ~ My name is Benillouche, Alexandre Mordekhai. How galling the smiles of my classmates! In our alley, and at the Alliance School, I hadn’t known how ridiculous, how revealing, my name could be. But at the French lycée I became aware of this at once. From then on, the mere sound of my own name humiliated me and made my pulse beat faster. Alexandre: brassy, glorious, a name given to me by my parents in recognition of the wonderful West and because it seemed to them to express their idea of Europe. My schoolmates sneered and blared “Alexandre” like a trumpet blast: Alexan-ndre! With all my strength, I then hated them and my name. I hated them, but I believed they were right, and I was furious with my parents for having chosen this stupid name for me. Mordekhai (colloquially, I was called Mridakh) signified my share in the Jewish tradition. It had been the formidable name of a glorious Maccabee and also of my grandfather, a feeble old man who never forgot the terrors of the ghetto. Call yourself Peter or John, and by simply changing your clothes you can change your apparent status in society. But in this country, Mridakh is as obstinately revealing as if one shouted out: “I’m a Jew!” More precisely: “My home is in the ghetto,” “my legal status is native African,” “I come from an Oriental background,” “I’m poor.” But I had learned to reject these four classifications. It would be easy to reproach me for this, and I have not failed to blame myself. But how is it possible not to be ashamed of one’s condition when one has experienced scorn, mockery, or sympathy for it since childhood? I had learned to interpret smiles, to understand whispers, to read the thoughts of others in their eyes, to reconstruct the reasoning behind a casual phrase or a chance word.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  The women of our house had already been living a good week in joyous anticipation of a mystery that made them forget all their dissensions. They tried to remain solemn about it, but were too excited to be able to conceal their wild childish happiness. Actually, they were busy organizing a dance, with Negro musicians and the sacrifice of a live white cock, for the purpose of exorcizing and saving Aunt Maissa. The poor woman really needed saving. Her brothers had married her off to an old man of sixty who had the reputation of being very rich. The marriage brokers had affirmed that he owned several houses. When they had been questioned, the ignorant tenants of these houses had confirmed the ownership. But the clever old rascal, in spite of his curled up mustache, his upright posture, and the great care he devoted to his dress, was only the rent-collector for an estate-management corporation. His twenty-year-old bride didn’t even obtain the standard of living that might have compensated her, by flattering her feminine vanity, for the essential element of marriage that was lacking, and helped her forget its absence. Still, her brothers had managed to marry off a girl who had no dowry, though this is the nightmare of families like ours. It turned out, nevertheless, to be a bad deal: she became hysterical and, having soon exhausted her husband, bounced back on her brothers, a pauper with two sick children. A sharp word, a mere question as to her right to hang her laundry across the roof terrace, were enough to make Aunt Maissa swoon away, collapsing on the ground and foaming at the mouth while her arms and legs beat the air like those of a sick mare. When she came to, she uttered frightful screams that made all the children weep with fear. Her attacks were becoming more and more frequent, and Maissa was now falling in the stairway too, rolling down whole flights of stairs. It was often whispered that she needed a husband, and a young man this time. But this cure required such a huge financial sacrifice that her brothers felt it would not be appropriate: a widowed mother of two children should devote herself to their upbringing. Besides, no man would be ready to assume such responsibilities. During the shameless family discussions held around the table in the first-floor flat, the poor woman tried to conceal her embarrassment and her hopes beneath an appearance of modest indifference that was eloquently betrayed by her feverish glances and her uneasy hands. Men were always right when it came to money matters. The women, however, fell back on a more mysterious and less expensive explanation of her predicament: Aunt Maissa was possessed of spirits.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  One Saturday evening in August, after tennis and pizza, she invited him to stay over at her apartment. She described feeling “uptight and unreal” as soon as they were alone together. She remembered asking him to go slow but had very little sense of what had happened after that. After a few glasses of wine and a rerun of Law & Order, they apparently fell asleep together on top of her bed. At around two in the morning, Michael turned over in his sleep. When Marilyn felt his body touch hers, she exploded—pounding him with her fists, scratching and biting, screaming, “You bastard, you bastard!” Michael, startled awake, grabbed his belongings and fled. After he left, Marilyn sat on her bed for hours, stunned by what had happened. She felt deeply humiliated and hated herself for what she had done, and now she’d come to me for help in dealing with her terror of men and her inexplicable rage attacks. My work with veterans had prepared me to listen to painful stories like Marilyn’s without trying to jump in immediately to fix the problem. Therapy often starts with some inexplicable behavior: attacking a boyfriend in the middle of the night, feeling terrified when somebody looks you in the eye, finding yourself covered with blood after cutting yourself with a piece of glass, or deliberately vomiting up every meal. It takes time and patience to allow the reality behind such symptoms to reveal itself. Terror and NumbnessAs we talked, Marilyn told me that Michael was the first man she’d taken home in more than five years, but this was not the first time she’d lost control when a man spent the night with her. She repeated that she always felt uptight and spaced out when she was alone with a man, and there had been other times when she’d “come to” in her apartment, cowering in a corner, unable to remember clearly what had happened. Marilyn also said she felt as if she was just “going through the motions” of having a life. Except for when she was at the club playing tennis or at work in the operating room, she usually felt numb. A few years earlier she’d found that she could relieve her numbness by scratching herself with a razor blade, but she had become frightened when she found that she was cutting herself more and more deeply, and more and more often, to get relief. She had tried alcohol, too, but that reminded her of her dad and his out-of-control drinking, which made her feel disgusted with herself. So, instead, she played tennis fanatically, whenever she could. That made her feel alive.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  I saw this well one evening. As we had returned too late from work to eat by daylight, we had retired to our tents to sit around the lamps. I had left the scouts to join one of the other groups. We had started eating when one of the workers had such a violent fit of vomiting that he had no time to leave our little circle of light. The others noisily protested and insulted him. He got up with difficulty, went over to the second pole, and leaned against it; there, with his hands in the air and his head hanging, he went on throwing up spasmodically. Finally, he tottered to the door and, no sooner had he passed it than he doubled up, hugged his stomach, and fell howling to the ground, clawing at the earth in his pain. In the half-light on the parched grass, he was like a big animal struggling in the grip of an unknown disease. How could one relieve such an attack of appendicitis in a work-camp? Maddened by the pain, the sick man had become a child again and was calling his mother. I knelt beside him and tried to touch his stomach, but he pushed me away so brutally that I got up, disconcerted by his violent refusal. All the workers left their tents and stood helplessly around him. At last the camp tailor, an elderly man who had been forgotten here in spite of his large family, took him gently on his knees and nursed him like a child. The patient calmed down and I stood there, useless and humiliated, watching what I could not do myself, I mean take one of them in my arms and nurse and comfort him. Soon the others recovered their spirits and decided to cover his stomach with hot ashes and oil, believing that he must be suffering from intestinal trouble. I came out of my dream and protested, trying to explain that what he needed was ice and that they might kill him by treating appendicitis with heat. They would not believe me and insisted on the virtues of their traditional remedy which they had already applied, they said, most successfully. Too energetically, I answered that they had always been wrong, which angered them so that they decided to take no more notice of me. The moment was too grave for their usual show of superficial politeness toward me. I gave up the argument and went back to the tent where the scouts, their curiosity satisfied, had now settled down again. They spared me their irony, but their faces were eloquent and, as the sick man could no longer be heard and was no doubt soothed, they tried to while away the evening with part singing.

• From Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)

  No! said Connie to herself. I'd rather be at Wragby, where I can go about and be still, and not stare at anything or do any performing of any sort. This tourist performance of enjoying oneself is too hopelessly humiliating: it's such a failure. She wanted to go back to Wragby, even to Clifford, even to poor crippled Clifford. He wasn't such a fool as this swarming holidaying lot, anyhow. But in her inner consciousness she was keeping touch with the other man. She mustn't let her connection with him go: oh, she mustn't let it go, or she was lost, lost utterly in this world of riff-raffy expensive people and joy-hogs. Oh, the joy-hogs! Oh "enjoying oneself!" Another modern form of sickness. They left the car in Mestre, in garage, and took the regular steamer over to Venice. It was a lovely summer afternoon, the shallow lagoon rippled, the full sunshine made Venice, turning its back to them across the water, look dim. At the station quay they changed to a gondola, giving the man the address. He was a regular gondolier in a white-and-blue blouse, not very good-looking, not at all impressive. "Yes! The Villa Esmeralda! Yes! I know it! I have been the gondolier for a gentleman there. But a fair distance out!" He seemed a rather childish, impetuous fellow. He rowed with a certain exaggerated impetuosity, through the dark side-canals with the horrible, slimy green walls, the canals that go through the poorer quarters, where the washing hangs high up on ropes, and there is a slight, or strong odour of sewage. But at last he came to one of the open canals with pavement on either side, and looping bridges, that run straight, at right angles to the Grand Canal. The two women sat under the little awning, the man was perched above, behind them. "Are the signorine staying long at the Villa Esmeralda?" he asked, rowing easy, and wiping his perspiring face with a white-and-blue handkerchief. "Some twenty days: we are both married ladies," said Hilda, in her curious hushed voice, that made her Italian sound so foreign. "Ah! Twenty days!" said the man. There was a pause. After which he asked: "Do the signore want a gondolier for the twenty days or so that they will stay at the Villa Esmeralda? Or by the day, or by the week?" Connie and Hilda considered. In Venice, it is always preferable to have one's own gondola, as it is preferable to have one's own car on land. "What is there at the Villa? what boats?" "There is a motor-launch, also a gondola. But--" The _but_ meant: they won't be your property. "How much do you charge?" It was about thirty shillings a day, or ten pounds a week. "Is that the regular price?" asked Hilda. "Less, Signora. The regular price--" The sisters considered. "Well," said Hilda, "come tomorrow morning, and we will arrange it. What is your name?"

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  “Ah, then wait,” he said hurriedly, “wait, don’t write anything. It’s that... er... Would you mind enlisting under another name?” “But...“ “Of course,” he quickly added, “it’s simply a formality. We are very happy to have you; it’s just to avoid... you know, politics...” he stammered. Out of pity, I helped him. “You don’t want any Jews?” “Oh, not us. You know, we already have lots. They’re good fighters and good comrades at arms. That’s why General Giraud’s men say that the Gaullists are mostly Jews, which isn’t true and does us a great deal of harm; so, for the moment, well...” The demonstration was painful, so he shifted to safer grounds, those of his own enthusiasm. “The important thing is to fight, isn’t it? I mean the pleasure of smashing the Krauts! You know, when we took Bizerte, I wept tears of joy...” He tried to warm himself and us with the memory of his emotions. My face must have been fairly impassive. He shut up. Henry smiled pleasantly, as though he had a great liking for the lieutenant and perfectly understood his difficulties. But I knew his face too well. The poor officer glanced at the register again. “I’m so glad you’re a student. I too was a student, in pharmacy. You must understand, politics has nothing to do with...“ He lied clumsily. He must have known that I too wanted to fight my own war, and not just any war. War is either a personal affair or a swindle. His face lit up, and he seemed to have found an idea: “Look, leave your name and just add ‘Mohammed.’ There is no difficulty for Moslems.” He had spoken alone all the time. “I’m going to think this over,” I said at length. I looked at the register and at my name which was only the fourth: Alexandre Benillouche. As usual, I had forgotten to write Mordekhai. Benillouche could well be a Moslem name, since “Ben” is a prefix common to both Jews and Moslems. But why should the Moslems fight? In any case, I wanted to avoid any misunderstanding. Mordekhai, I was certainly Mordekhai Benillouche. Before leaving, I picked up the pen again and, without looking at the lieutenant, added “Mordekhai” in brackets. Fortunately, Henry was silent about his triumph. For a while, I tried to be calm and to reason. These refusals might well revolt me, but they also gave fresh strength to the arguments of wisdom. I kept telling myself that a medical examination would have exempted me and that my zeal was excessive. Any man who was liable to be conscripted and who happened to have a spot on one of his lungs could permit himself to be rejected with a peaceful conscience. Wasn’t Henry right? Wasn’t my insistence undignified? Had I a right to try to solve the problem individually instead of waiting for a collective decision?

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  We threw ourselves into the scuffles and added to the rhythm of the galloping horses by stamping our feet on the floor; we pulled at the reins with our hero and roared with joy or disappointment. For a few minutes, we all forgot our individual fears and hatreds and became a single unit in the noisy expression of our emotions. We entered the hall slowly, quietly. I was sorry the policeman had not come in with us, because the crowd’s savagery soon revealed itself again. My seat was in the second row and so close to the screen that I would certainly come away with an aching back, a headache, and a stiff neck. The Kursaal, in spite of its majestic name, smelled of wine. But the magic of its silver screen, brightened by a frame of darkness, and the mystery of its little blue lights, even its odor — a special mixture of disinfectant, damp, and human emanations — made me ecstatic. The impatient audience was already overexcited, stamped rhythmically on the floor and began to whistle. But the projecting staff was used to their outbursts and ignored the cries of: “Come on! Let’s go! We want the picture! Give us our money back!” Soon, however, the fickle occupants of the reserved stalls lost interest in shouting and turned their energy on us, the Jews, who sat crowded together. A shower of beans and gourd seeds began to fall on my head. Because humiliation was my daily bread, I believed for a long time that all stories which tell of heroic action resulting from humiliation were either exaggerated or completely false. Our skin was thick and, if we weren’t stung too deeply, we could bear it: we could manage to continue enjoying ourselves, as people can who are pestered by flies. But, that day, the show was delayed and the ingenuity of our tormentors became excessively inventive and went beyond a mere sting. In the gloom, they had the bright idea of striking matches and tossing them over us. Our real fears delighted them and they roared with joy each time they threw a match. Meanwhile, we tried to save ourselves by ducking down in our seats and heard them call: “Kiki! Kiki!” — which is, for them, the nickname of all Jews. Sickened by my own impotence, crushed under the weight of blind and anonymous injustice, I could have burst into tears from disgust and rage. Then, in the impressive semidarkness of the safety lights, I saw Bissor’s square silhouette. Never before had physical strength given me such joy; I stood up and waved to him despite the risk of offering a target for a flaming match.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  We had started eating when one of the workers had such a violent fit of vomiting that he had no time to leave our little circle of light. The others noisily protested and insulted him. He got up with difficulty, went over to the second pole, and leaned against it; there, with his hands in the air and his head hanging, he went on throwing up spasmodically. Finally, he tottered to the door and, no sooner had he passed it than he doubled up, hugged his stomach, and fell howling to the ground, clawing at the earth in his pain. In the half-light on the parched grass, he was like a big animal struggling in the grip of an unknown disease. How could one relieve such an attack of appendicitis in a work-camp? Maddened by the pain, the sick man had become a child again and was calling his mother. I knelt beside him and tried to touch his stomach, but he pushed me away so brutally that I got up, disconcerted by his violent refusal. All the workers left their tents and stood helplessly around him. At last the camp tailor, an elderly man who had been forgotten here in spite of his large family, took him gently on his knees and nursed him like a child. The patient calmed down and I stood there, useless and humiliated, watching what I could not do myself, I mean take one of them in my arms and nurse and comfort him. Soon the others recovered their spirits and decided to cover his stomach with hot ashes and oil, believing that he must be suffering from intestinal trouble. I came out of my dream and protested, trying to explain that what he needed was ice and that they might kill him by treating appendicitis with heat. They would not believe me and insisted on the virtues of their traditional remedy which they had already applied, they said, most successfully. Too energetically, I answered that they had always been wrong, which angered them so that they decided to take no more notice of me. The moment was too grave for their usual show of superficial politeness toward me. I gave up the argument and went back to the tent where the scouts, their curiosity satisfied, had now settled down again. They spared me their irony, but their faces were eloquent and, as the sick man could no longer be heard and was no doubt soothed, they tried to while away the evening with part singing. Gradually the vanity of my presence in the camp dawned on me, as well as an awareness of how simple-minded I had been, so that the decision to escape slowly began to mature. Perhaps the monotony contributed more to this than the constant anxiety and sudden dangers.

• From The Pillar of Salt (1953)

  One evening, as it was getting dark, Kalla and I were busy, without being unduly hurried, putting the four chairs with which we had been playing at trains back where they belonged. We were tired of traveling around the world, with my sister as the only tourist while I alone drove the engine. Besides, the tiled floor of the yard was cold and our legs were frozen. So we then played at being bakers: we were kneading our painless legs, laughing at their being so strangely numb and threatening to put them in the oven to bake. My mother came out of the dark room and, as the light outside still allowed her to see a bit, set about checking the wick of her lamp. The twilight comes late in our country, but night then falls suddenly, and Mother, as always, was in a hurry. Two discreet knocks were heard, barely touching the wood of the street door. So as to avoid giving me any excuse to go out, I was forbidden ever to open the door. Kalla was more obedient than I and was therefore allowed to open it, which humiliated me, but gave her no particular pleasure. Her large dark eyes and her shoulders apologized to me as she went to open the door. It was Fraji, the son of Choulam: puny, with his scared, wide-open eyes like those of a bat, his sickly hair that grew in greasy tufts on a scalp like a barren moor. “Is your mother at home,” he asked Kalla. Dancing shadows suddenly appeared on the walls that seemed to stare as Fraji’s dark double arose at his feet, crawled from the ground up to the door, and then spread huge across the ceiling. My mother was on her way, holding the lamp at arm’s length before her. She saw the visitor: “Oh, yes, I know what you want. Wait a moment.”

• From Chéri and The Last of Chéri (1920)

  ‘That’s right. Well, my child, you must never play with cold steel. That’s to say, you must never be wounding about a man’s ... a man’s favours, if I may so express it. You were wounding about the gifts, about the favours, I bestow on you.* ‘You ... you talk like a cocotte,’ she gasped. She blushed, and her strength and self-control deserted her. She hated him for remaining cool and collected, for keeping his superiority: its whole secret lay in the carriage of his head, the sureness of his stance, the poise of his arms and shoulders. The hard forefinger once more pressed into Edmee’s shoulder. ‘Excuse me, excuse me ... It’ll probably come as a great surprise when I state that, on the contrary, it’s you who have the mentality of a tart. When it comes to judging such matters, there’s no greater audiority than young Peloux. I’m a connoisseur of “cocottes”, as you call them. I know them inside out. A “cocotte” is a lady who generally manages to receive more than she gives. Do you hear what I say? ’ What she heard above all was that he was now addressing her like a stray acquaintance. ‘Nineteen years old, white skin, hair that smells of vanilla; and then, in bed, closed eyes and limp arms. That’s all very pretty, but is there anything unusual about it? Do you really think it so very unusual? ’ She had started at each word, and each sting had goaded her towards the duel of female versus male. ‘It may be very unusual,’ she said in a steady voice, ‘how could you know? ’ He did not answer, and she hastened to take advantage of a hit. ‘Personally, I saw much handsomer men than you when we were in Italy. The streets were full of them. My nineteen years are worth those of any other girl of my age, just as one good-looking man is as good as the next. Don’t worry, everything can be arranged. Nowadays, marriage is not an important undertaking. Instead of allowing silly scenes to make us bitter He put a stop to what she had to say by an almost pitying shake' of the head. ‘My poor kid, it’s not so simple as that.’ ‘Why not? There’s such a thing as quick divorce, if one’s ready to pay.’ She spoke in the peremptory manner of a runaway schoolgirl,, and it was pathetic. She had pushed back the hair off her forehead, and her anxious, intelligent eyes were made to look all the darker by the soft contours of her cheeks now fringed with hair: the eyes off an unhappy woman, eyes mature and definitive in a still undeveloped face. ‘That wouldn’t help at all,’ Cheri said. ‘Because?’ ‘Because ...’ He leaned forward with his eyelashes tapered into pointed wings, shut his eyes and opened them again as if he had just swallowed a bitter pill. ‘ Because you love me.’

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  I was too old to be allowed out of bed. I was too old even to recognize that if I had been given a bed in the cardiac unit I must have a cardiac problem. “Your cardiac problem isn’t showing up on the monitors,” one nurse kept reporting, accusingly. I tried to process what she was saying. Processing what people were saying was not at that moment my long suit, but this nurse seemed to be suggesting that my “cardiac problem” was not showing up on the monitors because I had deliberately detached the electrodes. I countered. I said that to the best of my knowledge I did not have a cardiac problem. She countered. “Of course you have a cardiac problem,” she said. And then, closing the issue: “Because otherwise you wouldn’t be in the cardiac unit.” I had no answer for that. I tried to pretend I was home. I tried to figure out whether it was day or night: if it was day I had a shot at going home, but in the hospital there was no day or night. Only shifts. Only waiting. Waiting for the IV nurse, waiting for the nurse with the narcotics key, waiting for the transporter. Will someone please take the catheter out . That transfusion was ordered at eleven this evening . “How do you normally get around your apartment,” someone in scrubs kept asking, marveling at what he seemed to consider my entirely unearned mobility, finally providing his own answer: “Walker?” D emoralization occurs in the instant: I have trouble expressing the extent to which two nights of relatively undemanding hospitalization negatively affected me. There had been no surgery. There had been no uncomfortable procedures. There had been no real discomfort at all, other than emotional. Yet I felt myself to be the victim of a gross misunderstanding: I wanted only to go home, get the blood washed out of my hair, stop being treated as an invalid. Instead the very opposite was happening. My own doctor, who was based at Columbia Presbyterian, happened to be in St. Petersburg with his family: he called me at Lenox Hill during an intermission at the Kirov Ballet. He wanted to know what I was doing at Lenox Hill. So, at that point, did I. The doctors on the scene, determined to track down my phantom “cardiac problem,” seemed willing to permanently infantilize me. Even my own friends, dropping by after work, very much in charge, no blood in their hair, sentient adults placing and receiving calls, making arrangements for dinner, bringing me perfect chilled soups that I could not eat because the hospital bed was so angled as to prevent sitting upright, were now talking about the need to get me “someone in the house”: it was increasingly as if I had taken a taxi to Lenox Hill and woken up in Driving Miss Daisy .

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  Weeks later, this one fact was still troubling me as much as anything else about the entire sequence of events that night: it was I who said Lenox Hill. I got into a taxi in front of my apartment, which happens to be equidistant from two hospitals, Lenox Hill and New York Cornell, and I said Lenox Hill. Saying Lenox Hill instead of New York Cornell did not demonstrate a developed instinct for self-preservation. Saying Lenox Hill instead of New York Cornell demonstrated only that I was at that moment incapable of taking care of myself. Saying Lenox Hill instead of New York Cornell proved the point humiliatingly made by every nurse and aide and doctor to whom I spoke in the two nights I would eventually spend at Lenox Hill, the first night in the emergency room and the second in a cardiac unit, where a bed happened to be available and where it was erroneously assumed that because I had been given a bed in the cardiac unit I must have a cardiac problem: I was old. I was too old to live alone. I was too old to be allowed out of bed. I was too old even to recognize that if I had been given a bed in the cardiac unit I must have a cardiac problem. “Your cardiac problem isn’t showing up on the monitors,” one nurse kept reporting, accusingly. I tried to process what she was saying. Processing what people were saying was not at that moment my long suit, but this nurse seemed to be suggesting that my “cardiac problem” was not showing up on the monitors because I had deliberately detached the electrodes. I countered. I said that to the best of my knowledge I did not have a cardiac problem. She countered. “Of course you have a cardiac problem,” she said. And then, closing the issue: “Because otherwise you wouldn’t be in the cardiac unit.” I had no answer for that. I tried to pretend I was home. I tried to figure out whether it was day or night: if it was day I had a shot at going home, but in the hospital there was no day or night. Only shifts. Only waiting. Waiting for the IV nurse, waiting for the nurse with the narcotics key, waiting for the transporter. Will someone please take the catheter out. That transfusion was ordered at eleven this evening. “How do you normally get around your apartment,” someone in scrubs kept asking, marveling at what he seemed to consider my entirely unearned mobility, finally providing his own answer: “Walker?”

• From Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (2017)

  More precisely, her failure, indeed her refusal, to inhabit the category of respectable racial womanhood in socially accepted terms exposed her to a mode of institutionalized gender disciplining and discrimination that she came to name “Jane Crow.” Within the context of the intellectual geography and genealogy of the book, I turn to Murray’s time in the early 1940s as a student at Howard University Law School. I consider Howard Law and the stultifying gender politics that Murray encountered there as a significant site in her intellectual formation as a race leader and feminist. It was at Howard, as she encountered the sexism of the all-male Howard Law faculty and student body, that she created the term Jane Crow. I want to suggest that in addition to being an early formulation of intersectional theory, Jane Crow also sought to name a powerful system of gender disciplining within Black intellectual communities. This system, propped up by deep investments in the heteronorms of respectability politics, demanded proper sexual and gender performances from Black women if they desired to be race leaders, and attempted to silence, humiliate, and isolate them when they chose not to comply. Commensurate with the cultural and gender disciplining that she experienced at Howard, it was there, I argue, that Pauli Murray became a race woman. Armed by the end of her tenure at Howard with both medical confirmation of her biological femaleness and intricate knowledge of rampant sexism among race men, Murray turned her attention to seeking legal remedies for segregation and sexism. Her fervent advocacy for women’s equality within the law redirected some of Murray’s internal conflicts over her gender identity to a righteous cause—the cause of women. However, Murray was still sexually attracted to women, and she found little support for openly pursuing her sexual desires within the confines of her work as a race leader. Thus, I argue that at the height of her legal career, unable to resolve her identity conflicts fully through science, she used her legal training and broad historical knowledge to craft a fluid racial identification scheme that supported her liberal vision of a racially integrated society and resolved through sublimation her continued conflicts over what it meant to be a queer Black female race leader. My examination of Pauli Murray’s archival materials, coupled with a close reading of her 1956 autobiography, Proud Shoes: The Story of an American Family, and her posthumously published second autobiography, Song in a Weary Throat, reveal an emerging framework of resistance to both institutional and cultural definitions of race, gender, and sexuality. 4 Like many of her race women forebears, she enacted this resistance by using her two autobiographies as sites for racial theorization, while also employing embodied discourse as a textual strategy that allowed her, both publicly and privately, to contest received discourses within science, history, and the law about the nature of Black female identity and Black female sexuality.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  At which point he came over. At which point, since I was still bleeding, we took a taxi to the emergency room at Lenox Hill Hospital. It was I who said Lenox Hill. Let me repeat: it was I who said Lenox Hill. Weeks later, this one fact was still troubling me as much as anything else about the entire sequence of events that night: it was I who said Lenox Hill. I got into a taxi in front of my apartment, which happens to be equidistant from two hospitals, Lenox Hill and New York Cornell, and I said Lenox Hill. Saying Lenox Hill instead of New York Cornell did not demonstrate a developed instinct for self-preservation. Saying Lenox Hill instead of New York Cornell demonstrated only that I was at that moment incapable of taking care of myself. Saying Lenox Hill instead of New York Cornell proved the point humiliatingly made by every nurse and aide and doctor to whom I spoke in the two nights I would eventually spend at Lenox Hill, the first night in the emergency room and the second in a cardiac unit, where a bed happened to be available and where it was erroneously assumed that because I had been given a bed in the cardiac unit I must have a cardiac problem: I was old. I was too old to live alone. I was too old to be allowed out of bed. I was too old even to recognize that if I had been given a bed in the cardiac unit I must have a cardiac problem. “Your cardiac problem isn’t showing up on the monitors,” one nurse kept reporting, accusingly. I tried to process what she was saying. Processing what people were saying was not at that moment my long suit, but this nurse seemed to be suggesting that my “cardiac problem” was not showing up on the monitors because I had deliberately detached the electrodes. I countered. I said that to the best of my knowledge I did not have a cardiac problem. She countered. “Of course you have a cardiac problem,” she said. And then, closing the issue: “Because otherwise you wouldn’t be in the cardiac unit.” I had no answer for that. I tried to pretend I was home. I tried to figure out whether it was day or night: if it was day I had a shot at going home, but in the hospital there was no day or night. Only shifts. Only waiting. Waiting for the IV nurse, waiting for the nurse with the narcotics key, waiting for the transporter.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  Will someone please take the catheter out. That transfusion was ordered at eleven this evening. “How do you normally get around your apartment,” someone in scrubs kept asking, marveling at what he seemed to consider my entirely unearned mobility, finally providing his own answer: “Walker?” Demoralization occurs in the instant: I have trouble expressing the extent to which two nights of relatively undemanding hospitalization negatively affected me. There had been no surgery. There had been no uncomfortable procedures. There had been no real discomfort at all, other than emotional. Yet I felt myself to be the victim of a gross misunderstanding: I wanted only to go home, get the blood washed out of my hair, stop being treated as an invalid. Instead the very opposite was happening. My own doctor, who was based at Columbia Presbyterian, happened to be in St. Petersburg with his family: he called me at Lenox Hill during an intermission at the Kirov Ballet. He wanted to know what I was doing at Lenox Hill. So, at that point, did I. The doctors on the scene, determined to track down my phantom “cardiac problem,” seemed willing to permanently infantilize me. Even my own friends, dropping by after work, very much in charge, no blood in their hair, sentient adults placing and receiving calls, making arrangements for dinner, bringing me perfect chilled soups that I could not eat because the hospital bed was so angled as to prevent sitting upright, were now talking about the need to get me “someone in the house”: it was increasingly as if I had taken a taxi to Lenox Hill and woken up in Driving Miss Daisy. With effort, I managed to convey this point. I got released from Lenox Hill. My own doctor got back from St. Petersburg. After further days of unproductive cardiac monitoring the cardiac hypothesis was abandoned. An appointment was made with yet another new neurologist, this one at NewYork Cornell. Many tests were scheduled and done. A new MRI, to establish whether or not there had been significant changes. There had not been. A new MRA, to see whether or not there had been any enlargement of the aneurysm visualized on the previous MRAs. There had not been. A new ultrasound, to establish whether or not there had been increased calcification of the carotid artery. There had not been. And, finally, a full-body PET scan, meant to show any abnormalities in the heart, the lungs, the liver, the kidneys, the bones, the brain: in fact anywhere in the body. I repeatedly slid in and out of the PET scanner. Forty minutes passed, then a change of position and another fifteen. I lay motionless on the scanner. It seemed impossible to imagine this coming up clean.

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  Demoralization occurs in the instant: I have trouble expressing the extent to which two nights of relatively undemanding hospitalization negatively affected me. There had been no surgery. There had been no uncomfortable procedures. There had been no real discomfort at all, other than emotional. Yet I felt myself to be the victim of a gross misunderstanding: I wanted only to go home, get the blood washed out of my hair, stop being treated as an invalid. Instead the very opposite was happening. My own doctor, who was based at Columbia Presbyterian, happened to be in St. Petersburg with his family: he called me at Lenox Hill during an intermission at the Kirov Ballet. He wanted to know what I was doing at Lenox Hill. So, at that point, did I. The doctors on the scene, determined to track down my phantom “cardiac problem,” seemed willing to permanently infantilize me. Even my own friends, dropping by after work, very much in charge, no blood in their hair, sentient adults placing and receiving calls, making arrangements for dinner, bringing me perfect chilled soups that I could not eat because the hospital bed was so angled as to prevent sitting upright, were now talking about the need to get me “someone in the house”: it was increasingly as if I had taken a taxi to Lenox Hill and woken up in Driving Miss Daisy. With effort, I managed to convey this point. I got released from Lenox Hill. My own doctor got back from St. Petersburg. After further days of unproductive cardiac monitoring the cardiac hypothesis was abandoned. An appointment was made with yet another new neurologist, this one at NewYork Cornell. Many tests were scheduled and done. A new MRI, to establish whether or not there had been significant changes. There had not been. A new MRA, to see whether or not there had been any enlargement of the aneurysm visualized on the previous MRAs. There had not been. A new ultrasound, to establish whether or not there had been increased calcification of the carotid artery. There had not been. And, finally, a full-body PET scan, meant to show any abnormalities in the heart, the lungs, the liver, the kidneys, the bones, the brain: in fact anywhere in the body. I repeatedly slid in and out of the PET scanner. Forty minutes passed, then a change of position and another fifteen. I lay motionless on the scanner. It seemed impossible to imagine this coming up clean. It would be one more version of the bed in the cardiac unit: a full-body PET scan had been ordered, ergo, as night follows day, there would need to be abnormalities for the full-body PET scan to show. A day later I was given the results. There were, surprisingly, no abnormalities seen in the scan. Everyone agreed on this point. Everyone used the word “surprisingly.” Surprisingly, there were no abnormalities to explain why I felt as frail as I did.

• From The Selected Works of Audre Lorde

  The thread ran over my ribs and along my spine, tingling and singing, into a basin that was poised between my hips, now pressed against the low kitchen counter before which I stood, pounding spice. And within that basin was a tiding ocean of blood beginning to be made real and available to me for strength and information. The jarring shocks of the velvet-lined pestle, striking the bed of spice, traveled up an invisible pathway along the thread into the center of me, and the harshness of the repeated impacts became increasingly more unbearable. The tidal basin suspended between my hips shuddered at each repetition of the strokes which now felt like assaults. Without my volition my downward thrusts of the pestle grew gentler and gentler until its velvety surface seemed almost to caress the liquefying mash at the bottom of the mortar. The whole rhythm of my movements softened and elongated until, dreamlike, I stood, one hand tightly curved around the carved mortar, steadying it against the middle of my body; while my other hand, around the pestle, rubbed and pressed the moistening spice into readiness with a sweeping circular movement. I hummed tunelessly to myself as I worked in the warm kitchen, thinking with relief about how simple my life had become now that I was a woman. The catalog of dire menstruation warnings from my mother passed out of my head. My body felt strong and full and open, yet captivated by the gentle motions of the pestle, and the rich smells filling the kitchen, and the fullness of the young summer heat. I heard my mother’s key in the lock. She swept into the kitchen briskly, like a ship under full sail. There were tiny beads of sweat over her upper lip, and vertical creases between her brows. “You mean to tell me no meat is ready?” My mother dropped her parcel of tea onto the table, and looking over my shoulder, sucked her teeth loudly in weary disgust. “What do you call yourself doing, now? You have all night to stand up there playing with the food? I go all the way to the store and back already and still you can’t mash up a few pieces of garlic to season some meat? But you know how to do the thing better than this! Why you vex me so?” She took the mortar and pestle out of my hands and started to grind vigorously. And there were still bits of garlic left at the bottom of the bowl. “Now you do, so!” She brought the pestle down inside the bowl of the mortar with dispatch, crushing the last of the garlic. I heard the thump of wood brought down heavily upon wood, and I felt the harsh impact throughout my body, as if something had broken inside of me. Thump, thump, went the pestle, purposefully, up and down in the old familiar way.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Actually in the bed, its wide featureless face absurdly crowned by a panama hat, lay a full-sized human effigy. It was only the rudimentary dummy that schoolboys make to suggest their sleeping forms in the near-darkness of an abandoned dorm, but in the light of a summer afternoon the bunched-up bedding and clothes of which it consisted were revealed as glaringly offensive. Its lolling pillow of a head was meant not to deceive but to warn. Looped around it, and displayed over the bedcover, was an Old Wykehamist tie, ineptly knotted, which made me remember, for a second, how my mother used to stand behind me at the mirror each morning to knot my tie when I was a little boy. Red rose petals were scattered artistically around, and where the heart of the effigy might have been there was a rust-red stain on the white bedspread that did resemble the colour of long-dried blood. I reached for a little bottle on the bedside table: it was vanilla essence. After we’d looked at it for a bit, I let Charles turn, and sit down on the edge of the bed, and then yanked the doll apart, casting its hat on to an armchair and rolling up the tie. ‘You recognise that tie,’ said Charles, with surprising detachment. I smiled. ‘What a pickle, eh?’ And indeed it was the general state of the room, in which a fight had clearly taken place, that had shocked me when I first entered it. The composition on the bed had been in bizarre, attentive contrast to the slewed pictures, toppled knick-knacks and pillaged drawers of the rest of the room. ‘I can’t take another of these melodramas,’ Charles said. Though I was deeply curious, I felt a strong reluctance to ask Charles what had taken place, or to probe the humiliation he had undergone. I helped him to take off his jacket and shoes, and laid him down on the pillow that had recently imitated his head. As if entranced, he was asleep within seconds. 5The first instalment of Charles’s papers was crammed into an old briefcase. Carrying it on the Underground, I felt like a young schoolmaster, taking home a bag bulging with books and essays. It was heavy, as I lolled in the crowded train, holding it by its charred leather handle, which had been strengthened with black insulating tape and was slightly sticky to the touch.