In the last three months we’ve also come to intimately know other kinds of monsters—ones that are visible only to us, as individuals, and that have been awakened by a virus that has deranged the world. These monsters reside in us and in our homes. They’ve been there for a long time and we’ve either had no way of expelling them or chose to ignore them as we busied ourselves with the routines and demands that until recently structured how we lived. Now that we’ve been forced to be still, time has thickened, and we’ve had no other choice than to face them. These monsters manifest in the experience of disease by an already ailing body, as depression and addiction, as violent relationships and failing marriages, as shortcomings in our parenting, as inequality that not only leads us to have to share insufficient space with too many others but that also reminds us of our precariousness. They manifest in the anxieties that bloom from unrealized dreams, in the absence of a love we’ve felt unworthy of, in the necessary grief or rage we’ve denied ourselves from feeling, and in our occasional disdain for our own bodies when they’re freed from the cosmetic armatures we shield them with. These monsters are of the most dangerous kind not only because they unmake us, but also because they must be dealt with in deep solitude and in turn often compromise our responsibilities to others.  

This project was conceived while sick with COVID-19 and imagined as a journal entry or visual story. As this virus became more public and the rampage of its monsters evident in all aspects of society, I thought often about the silence of the bodies feeling it and fighting the lesser-known monsters it too had awoken. Through images of works by artists with whom I’ve collaborated with for years and others whom I’ve recently come to know, this project grapples with that silence and those monsters. Alongside these images are excerpts from writings I penned while sick and then during recovery. These texts will appear within the exhibition page episodically. Together I hope they may function as informal narratives that are shaped by wounded bodies and not just about them; as testimonies that challenge the accounts of bodies that are told by medical charts, academic studies, and policy papers while simultaneously erasing them.  

In narrative medicine, the stories of those who are ill are an integral part in determining care and guiding healing. As many of us today work to heal—from disease, trauma, or a collective ailment—here are some stories by Felipe Baeza, Gisela McDaniel, Mark McKnight, Star Montana, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Fay Ray, Eduardo Sarabia, Ken Taylor, Kemang Wa Lehulere, Liat Yossifor, and I to keep that work going.    

I don’t believe that illness is a form of onerous citizenship. Sontag got that part wrong. Citizenship is wedded to some type of acknowledged belonging that is accompanied with presence – you are here, you hold space, you are seen. We don’t see our fellow citizens in illness though. They are myths too often. 

Invisible.

Our bodies are materially changed. My skin turned foggy and yellowish, the bags under my eyes sunk in deep into my face and my face itself started to thin out fast. I wanted to know if other bodies looked like mine. I wanted to know what bodies carrying this virus looked like.

In the news I only found bits of those bodies. Stand-ins. Outlines of translucent corporeal forms surrounding organs that were used to illustrate what this virus did. When photographs came through screens they were of blurred bodies in hospital beds or worse of just parts of those bodies – details meant to protect privacy. I still believe privacy is important and letting those bodies keep their agency even more so. I also know however that erasure is happening. These bodies have been converted into statistics, into headlines, into objects that are being acted upon, violently.

These mostly Brown & Black bodies we are losing need to be seen. The stories that are shared of them can perhaps, like Sontag wrote, make us understand. But photographs of them do something different she argued – they haunt us. We need to be haunted. We deserve to be haunted. Because we keep losing more people and little seems to be done about it—little done by all of us. Sontag said compassion is too unstable of an emotion and that it needs action so that it doesn’t wither. Maybe being haunted will make us feel again, and instigate us to do more and only that way will we earn the compassion we falsely think we know.

Elaine Scarry wrote that when one experiences great pain, one has certitude. When one hears that someone else has great pain, one has doubt she said. Physical pain, which sometimes comes from illness and other times from the emotional burdens we bear, dissolves language. It’s difficult to express to others who haven’t embodied it; for them it will always be a story. Pain is lived in solitude. It’s not just the body aches or burning chest tightness experienced by those who have this illness. There’s also the pain of those who lose someone during this time and can’t be with them in their final moments or even grief properly with others. There’s the pain of those whose abusive relationships have them confined with someone who endangers them. There’s the pain felt by those who can’t provide for their own. All of that pain becomes physical at some point too and when that happens our anxieties become certitudes.

After things fall apart they inevitably have to be put back together. Deconstruction, after all, is not just destruction like Spivak says but also construction. How we get from one to the other is the hard part. The road between those two points reverberates with private disquietudes. That’s where we question all we are; where we start paying attention to all of our shortcomings. That process starts slowly but picks up the pace fast. At first it may just be noticing the changes of our bodies when we look in the mirror – critiquing every imperfection now that we can’t manicure them. Some are desperate for a haircut, others want their skin treatments, some are angry they can’t get a blowout. Those are the little things. The big ones come later. We begin to notice the spaces we are in and wishing that we should’ve made other decisions—maybe picked a different color of paint, hung things on the wall in a different way, chosen a different carpet. More distractions. When we try to get back to “normal”—to the work that defines us—we start questioning other things and then the pace picks up. Did we pick the right career choice? Do we like the people we work with? Do we like the work? How long have we been doing it? What do we have to show for it? Are we good at it? Good enough maybe? 

The questions come faster and faster until they reach the things that matter. Why did we lose touch with that friend we don’t speak to anymore? Is my partner who I really want to be with? Am I just comfortable? Where has all my time gone? To who have I given it? Have those choices been truly mine? The flood of those thoughts only speeds up and we don’t know what to make of them. We say to ourselves that we’re being too hard and then we read some inspirational quote on Instagram and decide that this is just all self-loathing and that we have to stop. That’s one way looking at it. There’s another way too. This painful unmaking of ourselves can be looked at as a practice of love. Judith Butler wrote a small reflection about love for an anthology and what she said has never left me. She said that love was not a state or a feeling but an uneven exchange that was fraught with history, with ghosts, with longings that were legible to those trying to see one another with their faulty visions. Grappling with the doubts we have is difficult and words escape us and sometimes we feel we completely fall apart and dissolve even. That needs to happen if we are to accept love for ourselves as Butler dreams it.  

It’s embarrassing to admit that the profound shame many of us feel is not new, but rather an acknowledgement that throughout our lives, in subtle ways, racism made itself present in us and in those around us and we did nothing.

It slid in and we didn’t even think twice when…..

We’d play rap and our mothers told us to shut down that loud “Black music”; 

When we’d wear baggy pants because those were the vibes and our pops asked us why we wanted to dress like a Black man; 

When our aunts sat around the table lamenting about our cousin who was too dark and that’s why she was never going to find a husband; 

When our parents warned our sisters that they better think about dating a Black man because they’d kick her out; 

Or When we lovingly nicknamed family members Negro, Prieto, or Morenita. 

At some point it became very clear that this was not okay and we did nothing. We thought it was harmless. Who was going to pay attention to our parents or nosy aunts? This is just how they were, but they meant no harm right? Maybe we even tried to bring it up at times and they snapped and told us they were exhausted from work or to not talk back to them in front of people. White people are racists they said, we can’t be. Eventually we lost our patience. 

It’s time we find it. 

I don’t know how to be meaningfully productive yet, but I know the work that needs to happen is not going to happen only on social media and on screens. Most of the people in our community still get their news from problematic Telemundo or Univision. They’re not on Facebook or Instagram. The work we need to do is going to happen at the dinner table, at birthday parties, when the Tias get together to make the tamales at Christmas, at Church. It’s going to happen in Spanish. 

It’s going to be hard work and it’s going to have no end, it needs to become inscribed in all we do and how we live. It’s going to hurt sometimes. We are going to piss a lot of people off, we are going to lose our relationship with some relatives and that’s okay. It may be good actually. What is no longer acceptable in any way is the complicity we’ve told ourselves is harmless.