Dear Reader:
During my (visual) silence these past few months, I’ve been taking mental notes on the body. I’m taking them for an essay I’m going to write when I get the time. In the meantime, I am slowly writing them down and plan to send them to you over the next week. Expect disjuncture. Read between the lines for yourself.
Mental Notes I’ve Been Taking on the Body: Writing vs. Speaking
1. [1] I have decided that part of the reason why I am so ‘loud’ in my writing is because people can’t see or hear me. I don’t like to look at people while they look at me. Sometimes I get distracted trying to think about what they see and can’t think so much about what I want to say. I start thinking about how I look or how it looks to say a certain thing. I think about how it looks to say a certain thing when I’m writing, but there’s a time lag. I don’t have to worry about what it looks like to write something as I’m writing it (unless I’m in a chatroom), so the writing just flows. When I’m speaking, I am conscious of the inability to go back and edit what I’ve said. I try to edit midsentence or simply miss the moments when what I have to say would be most relevant to the conversation at hand.
I’m not as comfortable with people hearing me speak as I am with them reading my words unless they’re hearing me say something I’ve already composed. This has something to do with the way I assimilated into Southern US American culture as a child, with a softness in my voice that sometimes undercuts the points I make and sometimes underscores them. I get distracted by how I sound or how I ought to sound or what the tone I take will mean to my listener.
Now, I’m not sure how to say what this has to do with the body. What I’ve just written seems to be about how sound and vision work in ways that aren’t wholly dependent on the presence or absence of my body. But what provoked me to write it has something to do with the presence or absence of my body at a scene. If what you look at as you get what I’m ‘saying’ is not me but my words, then I can at least feel that what you are judging is not my body (which is far too often invoked as a symbol of irrationality), but rather, my logic (which is tight).
This is ultimately a question of control. [2] I try not to think of the fact that my body is invoked in my writing or the fact that my voice can be imagined or the fact that when what I have to say is undermined by the trope of irrational blacks and women and black women it is because ignorant people are going to respond to the idea that my body comes with limited brain power whether my body is physically there or not.
Still thinking about peace,
Mendi Lewis Obadike