Have you ever seen a dead human body? Some day, we will all become one.
What will your body look like when you are dead? How will it feel?
Real dead bodies are all around us. Everyone we know dies. Everyone. That face we see in the mirror, the hand we hold in the movies, the coworker we beat or who beats us for a promotion, the person serving your coffee as you read this – we will all die. Our bodies will lie still and the energy systems of chemical bonds, electricity, gravity, heat, motion and momentum will no longer constitute themselves together as a person bearing our name. It will all dissipate into other forms which themselves will be no more or less noble until they too give way to forms that follow.
Hiding from dead bodies is basically a luxury item (and a privileged one, at that).
Whether or not someone actually sees a corpse depends largely upon the society that person lives in.
In a society where people have no health care or hospitals, people die out in the open a lot more. On the side of the road, in their home, waiting for a bus, in a store, out in the woods. Poorer countries are often ravaged by war and brutality, which create corpses en masse.
All in a day’s work.
In affluent societies, we take great efforts to keep dying and dead bodies in the hospitals, away from public exposure. If someone dies out in public, an emergency vehicle comes immediately to remove the body. Any mess is cleaned up right away, leaving no trace or indication that someone – a person came to that place and died. In our anonymous societies it is very difficult to leave any trace that we ever existed at all and our death is no exception.
Any bystanders who witness a public death in such societies are encouraged to move along, forget that we saw anything and pretend as if it never happened. But we do not forget death.
There are no zombies.
The dead do not come back to life, seeking brains and bearing the disease of death. For the most part, we humans do not like to think about ourselves as a lifeless mass of rotting cells. People talk about an afterlife, ad nauseam but rare indeed is the conversation about our decomposing tissue, skin and bones.
But, we do have a fascination for death. We read about it in the news, watch movies about it, romanticizing death by telling tales of loving vampires and fearful zombies. Death registers in our minds and we do not soon forget it. Whether one witnesses the wholesale slaughter of massacres, famine, starvation, cruelty and malicious death or the occasional glimpse of a home death or accident on the side of a road – we carry that experience of death with us through our lives.
In our deepest unconsciousness, we know of death. We don’t tend to look it right in the eye – unless we are forced to. In our affluent societies, we romanticize it, fear it, cry about it, parade it as tool to manipulate others and sometimes even fuck it. In the poor cultures where death is everywhere, we walk in it, play in it, eat, drink and work knee-deep in death, all the live long day.
Life with death.
My own experiences in encountering the dead have ranged from the curious to the clinical. My father’s mother died in our house. My 8 y/o sister found her lying on the hallway floor one morning. I found a dead body once in a motel room. A woman had committed suicide after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. She took pills and died on the bathroom floor. Her skin was blue-green. I dissected cadavers while in medical training. I have assisted in an autopsy of an MP who crashed his car into a brick wall. The pathologist showed us how to find the injuries and determine the cause of death. His heart had been crushed when his chest hit the steering wheel.
A friend of mine told me of another kind of death story – one that is much more traditional. When his father died, the family chose to wash and prepare his body for burial. They are not a religious family, but they looked to a traditional means for honoring, accepting and embracing a death.
They went to the funeral home with a clean set of his clothing. The family then took to cleaning and dressing the body of this family member. He described an experience of reverence, love, care, appreciation and bonding. There they were, a whole family working away on the last moments that any of them would have him. They shared laughter, tears, silence and conversation in the tasks of preparing this person for burial. The funeral director told them that it was one of the most special things he had ever been part of and thanked them for choosing his funeral home for this event.
Oh, about that afterlife…
You may believe in an afterlife. I don’t know if there is such a thing. If I could earn money for my daughter’s college fund, I’d lay heavy cash against it though. No one living knows and that’s just the way it is for now.
One thing I will comment on is how human fear tends to drive behavior. We humans talk about the afterlife right and left. The religion business is marketed around the idea. But it strikes me as not just odd that people freely discuss the afterlife while simultaneously avoiding the topic of our own death. Go ahead, sit someone down and ask them about the afterlife. Ask them what they will look like and what they will be doing. See how long you can stretch the conversation. Stop after one hour. Then, ask them about their own death. Ask the same questions. Send me an email if you make it past 10 minutes.
What does that say about our relationship to death? I cannot say for certain that this behavior is delusional and fearful – but the resemblance is uncanny.
So, what is available to us all if we look at death, accept it, understand it and allow ourselves to knowingly be identified by it? Our human form and the lives we live are precious and special because of death. We are beautiful in all our varieties of individuality and culture. Each human being is amazing and living against all the odds of disease and hardship that make life so very fragile. Birth, life and death are the sum total of our human experience.
Why not look at the dead forms of each of us as a last chance to appreciate the fading remains of a brilliant corner of the universe? The eyes that once beamed. The lips that once uttered the words of that will only issue from one person in this entire universe. The heart that began in a mother’s womb and ran its race until the final day. The muscles, sinew and bone that carried this mass of flesh as far as they could conspire to go.
What is so frightful about that?
The world’s best looking corpse for 86 consecutive years. Only the Cubs have been this dead for longer.
P.S. This is Arvan’s weekly post. For some reason the author name isn’t showing, so I thought of making the distinction.
OutSourcing Dusty Bodies
Existing as a Dusty Third Worldling while being a Lady is a strange enough predicament on its own –whether it’s under Western or Oriental eyes — anyone who identifies as a Lady in this part of the world will tell you so. Before you can get your words out, she’ll tell you how unfair her life is simply because there is no Y-chromosome in her body, she will meet your stare and agree that it was too essentialist of her to fixate on that Y-chromosome but won’t let you make her feel guilty as she firmly asserts, “This is how things are here” and when you start to talk about enough trans*people in the world get discriminated over a few socially ‘unfit’ or ‘mismatched’ genes, she’ll observe wryly that it’s the System and Patriarchy that makes her so and this cold, scientific speech and facts aren’t her preferred mode of communication or discourse anyway; then she’ll go on to say how trans* bodies are policed in her community and you’ll squirm in your seat, wondering why did you ever challenge the notion that being a Dusty Third Worldling is a hard position to occupy as she points out systematically the many viscerally real forces that oppress her while now you feel guilty for pitying her even as she talks which she sees right away and starts enumerating other factors that lead you deeper in the existential quagmire this conversation has long become and you further alarm yourself by thinking if she wants some donation money out of you as you try to keep your face expressionless. Meanwhile, the ‘economically-challenged’ Dusty Lady she employs sweeps the floor beneath your feet as the two of you further dis-sect the post of the post-colonial.
Leaving creative flippancy aside, many discussions and discourses coming out and around the Third World tend to not engage with the Subaltern — who knew the Third World had its own systems to squash and oppress? — they simply talk about this bottom tier as it were. Words keep floating by, and till people from the Subaltern are addressed by someone stepping in from caste or class privilege, the Subaltern is kept mute — raise your hand if you think this is too imperial to be true — and when the Subaltern does speak, these words are too exotic, even for its Dusty counterparts. So then this detongued bottom shelf is appropriated and fixed in as many ways as possible, quite akin to a laboratory animal positioned to be experimented on. One example of this Subaltern-animal is the burgeoning female surrogacy industry in India, where we speak of the people who give out away their Wombs as helpless, agency-less creatures who don’t understand the ‘importance’ or ‘boon’ that motherhood is as she ‘pawns’ her uterus away. Not only is this image of the benevolent Third World Woman perpetuated in urban and privileged echelons of India, but quite predictably in the West as well, with an even more sinister motive. When the image of the Dusty Goddess-Mother is created for Western audiences, it creates quite ostensibly a loophole that allows people to see it as a part of our chemical make-up, where we exist to serve you and just as easily over-writes the slavery it really is, leaving the Westerner free of guilt and ready to consume bodies, like microwaveable dinners. It comes as no surprise that Indian wombs come cheap for rent, as medical tourism is quick to remind us; too quick even. While I am not at all against surrogate mothers or people who choose to have babies through IVF, I am skeptical to what extent this transaction is consensual or non-exploitative for Dusty Ladies.
Thanks to India’s lax laws when it comes to adoption and surrogacy, we’re the perfect location for OutSourcing Bodies, both in reality and in metaphor; both locally and globally. One thing that irks this LadyBrain to no extent is how many people completely dismiss surrogacy as potential exploitation by saying “It’s paid for, like a womb-service if you will. Besides it’s not like the mother is made to do 16 hours of backbreaking labour each day” as if exploitation or exploitative spaces exist only if menial labour is factored in. As a Lady who has never given birth, I cannot possibly know what are the emotions associated with birth or the attachment a mother develops for her child, I do know however arguing that “the skin tone of the child will be different from that of the mother, so she wouldn’t feel very attached to this child” is too simplistic and an effort to erase Dusty Ladies off of the scale of sentient, autonomous graph. Such myths also obscure other forms of reproductive labour, such as contracted breastfeeding — like Mahashveta Devi’s text ‘Breast Giver‘ beautifully shows — and bonded child-rearing. More often than not, the Lady offering her mammary glands or other parts of her body associated with reproduction is of a lower caste background — somehow here we aren’t too concerned with casteism in such instances — and a backward socio-economic background; giving people with means a ‘Mother’ to purchase and use. Like Devi says, contracted motherhood isn’t as simple as an exchange of money as capitalism would have us believe, she even goes as far as to say, ‘Is a Mother so cheaply made?/Not just by dropping a babe!” bringing to our notice how the label of ‘mother’ can mean a plethora of violent meanings. Even mothers of ‘normal’ households are aware that they’re womb-machines, like Gehna of Balika Vadhu contests in one of TeeVee’s most popular shows, she even walks out on her husband and child initially keeping up with the implied transaction but she’s (predictably) brought back due to insistence of a large horde of fans. As Dusty Ladies, we know how important our wombs are in society and in determining our value as ‘useful resources’, which is precisely why Indian surrogate mothers are said to be ‘more compassionate‘ as we know how skin-deep the stigma of being barren goes.
In instances as hued as these, a traditional Marxist analysis of exploitation of labour doesn’t do as Marx never really accounted for the transaction of wombs or other reproductive services, certainly never thought about Dusty Reproductive labour. For instance, many surrogate mothers give up to some extent, domestic space and work post the first trimester and the Dude of the house resumes the domestic responsibility for a while. So, who is being exploited in the case, the domestic worker who doesn’t get paid or the person renting out her reproductive service? It’s important to see Dusty politics from our perspective and more importantly from the point of view of the Subaltern — I am after all a privileged lady class and castewise — to see how far OutSourcing reconciles the notion of ‘profit’ or even ‘just compensation’ back to people who need it the most. The Breast Giver’s milk is Dusty, she squats in the muddy soil while stepping in (un)knowingly in the shoes of the Earth Goddess, and to validate such a specific position we use tools and methods of analysis that were designed to leave her out of the bargain? Explain to me once again, how this isn’t exploitation; I admit, I’d love to see you at least try.
Posted by Jaded on December 9, 2010
http://jaded16.wordpress.com/2010/12/09/outsourcing-dusty-bodies/