#female pain
“If a wound is where interior becomes exterior, here is a woman who is almost entirely wound—an exposed column of nerve and blood and muscle. Her body is utterly exposed and also severed from itself—losing shreds of flesh, losing its lips. After the mute call, we get this confession: ‘It pains me to record this, / I am not a melodramatic person.’ This closing motion performs a simultaneous announcement and disavowal of pain: This hurts; I hate saying that. It describes how the act of admitting one wound creates another one: it pains me to record this. And yet, the poet must record, because the wounded self can’t express anything audible: Calling mutely through lipless mouth.
What feels most resonant here, to me, isn’t just the speaker’s willingness to grant pain such a drastic shape—nerve and blood—but to confess her shame at this vessel, its blood and gore, its bluntness. I think of the bulb of my skinned knee, badge of my heartbreak, and how I loved the clarity of what it spoke but felt utterly pained by how much I loved it. I am not a melodramatic person. I’ve never wanted to be one, either.”
Leslie Jamison, The Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain
The pain of women turns them into kittens and rabbits and sunsets and sordid red satin goddesses, pales them and bloodies them and starves them, delivers them to death camps and sends locks of their hair to the stars. Men put them on trains and under them. Violence turns them celestial. Age turns them old. We can’t look away. We can’t stop imagining new ways for them to hurt.- Leslie Jamison, from “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain”
