All too human

This is the story of a baby; a child and an adult. It is the story of how I came to posthumanism, as the process of theorizing becomes linked to self-recovery - theory as liberatory practice, as bell hooks would say. It is the story told by Joe Bousquet: ‘My wound existed before me: I was born to embody it.’ And how we must live to own our stories, continually experimenting with the creativity that comes from them.

Not all of us can say, with any degree of certainty, that we have always been human, or that we are only that... (Braidotti, 2013)

To be born ‘different’ comes with the language of deficit. Of deformity, disability, and many other words that indicate a departure from the normed index of humanity; the white, Western male, able and rational in mind and body. Our Vitruvian model of perfection, symmetrically cast by Da Vinci and inscribed into our social and educational systems over centuries still persists despite the language of inclusion which only ever invites those ‘othered’ to a table already set. For myself, to be less than human manifested itself through a rare condition in which skull bones fuse together too early in the womb. It was thought at first that I had Down’s Syndrome (and was thus not deemed fully human either) - either way, it appeared unlikely that I would ever be a ‘normal’ child or even make it through those linear Piaget-style ages and stages to adulthood. It was to my eternal good luck that I was born into the care of one of the country’s best neurosurgeons, who ‘just happened’ to be based in Southampton, in that time, at that moment. He diagnosed my condition and set me on a two-year journey through serious restructuring operations and plastic surgery. The doctor’s template for my skull was – strange though it seems – a grapefruit, which he used as a guide for the reshaping. Not so much human as citrus fruit. We are always entangled with the material world; and I might write here about non-human assemblages – but sometimes, you just have to laugh.

I also think of the Japanese art of Kintsugi; the process of mending broken pottery with gold.

There’s a crack in everything – that’s how the light gets in. Leonard Cohen

I have spent my whole life denying and hiding not only the physical scars but the emotional fallout, shame and trauma (I did once share a piece of biographical writing in a blogging group, but was put off by the reaction of a colleague who told me off for over-sharing). There have been odd moments of exposure; the challenge of providing a baby photo for a work competition (I don’t have any); being questioned about scars by hairdressers or a first boyfriend; the inquisitiveness of children and teasing at school. I spent most of my primary years being bullied in one way or another about the shape of my face; so much so that it was a relief to turn plump at puberty and have the focus shifted to something differently but more acceptably shameful. But denial is tiring, and I'm a bit long in the tooth for games of hide and seek. 

If you put shame in a Petri dish, it needs three things to grow exponentially: secrecy, silence and judgment. If you put the same amount of shame in a Petri dish and douse it with empathy, it can't survive. Brene Brown.

Writing these words now has been helped by theory. Affirmative ethics – the process of transforming pain to knowledge – has taught me that we have to extract meaning from our situation in order to gain reason and understanding of the world. If I am honest, I have spent too long denying myself that journey in order to spare the pain of others. My mum in particular suffered the shame of a disabled child in an era when feelings weren’t talked about. It wasn’t possible to say that your dreamed for child was imperfect and that you blamed yourself; was it all that standing by the bus stop in heavy traffic? Lead poisoning feels better than a faulty gene, although one frustration is that we will never truly know what caused it.

At the first Posthuman Summer School I attended in 2015, I heard Ryk Dolphijn talk of 'the wound that was there before us', drawing on Haruki Murakami’s novel ‘Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage’:

‘Wounds cannot heal. Life has taught us in many ways that sickness does not exclude health and vice versa. There are always a thousand tiny sicknesses and a thousand tiny heaths, at work, at the same time. Wounds transform, mould into other wounds, merge into bigger ones or shred into pieces. But they will always matter’.

Posthumanism has taught me that it matters; and that in my process of becoming (more-than) human I needed to recast difference and refuse to accept mine or otherwise-cast human bodies as abnormal. In doing so, together, we can ‘...strike generative alliances, starting with the composition of a transversal, materially embedded and differential ‘we’. (Braidotti, 2019, p.147). And this requires us to be vulnerable.

Language is important, and it has always been a barrier in my case. The technical word used for my condition – which is not disabling – is deformity. De- as negation, deprivation, removal, separation. I will not use the word deformed to describe myself, and yet nothing else has ever been found in its place. If I had a choice, I would perhaps choose ‘reformed’, ‘reconstructed’ or ‘reimagined’.

But perhaps the word I have always been looking for, and finally found, is posthuman.