Writing Through the Body

At a reading a few months ago, one of my professors was introducing the visiting writer, Bhanu Kapil. I was distracted by a flash of pink from Bhanu's chair. She was ripping the petals off a pale pink rose and cramming them into her mouth, chewing, then spitting them out. She then sank off the chair, crawled towards the podium and rose up from behind it like a sea monster breaching the waves. There were some giggles, but I thought back to the Q&A we'd had with her a few hours ago.


Bhanu Kapil researches through the body. She went through a phase where she did performance art to feed into her writing. She once lay on a table in a red silk sack, while her audience stood outside, the sound of a knife being sharpened echoing from a hidden speaker system. If my memory is correct, that research helped her write about women's bodies often being viewed as pieces of meat.


Researching (and writing) through the body is different from writing about the body (equally valuable; here's a prompt I wrote). When you write about the body, the act of writing is still centered. When you write through the body, writing springs from the body, centering the body instead. Now, this doesn't exactly jive with Descartes' philosophy of "I think, therefore I am," and one that's implicitly gaining increasing popularity as we move from an economy and lifestyle geared around physical labor to one that's geared around mental and intellectual labor, but it can be a source of tremendous creative energy. Given the right topic, in fact, writing through the body can be much more productive than plain old writing.


So, since we here at Floodmark are all about inspiration and endless surprise, give this a try and you might find yourself, well, surprised.

1. Find the right topic. It would be difficult (though not impossible) to write about, say, the color blue through the body. But it's easier to start with a topic that has something to do with the body–sport, sex, race, gender, illness, even gardening.
2. On your own, and without the necessary equipment or partners for your topic, perform an action (or actions) associated with or representative of your topic. Take note of how your body moves and feels, your reactions, your embarrassment, the relation of your body to others while doing this activity. Do this as often or as much as you need to, until you have a store of bodily knowledge.
3. Now, write. But don't forget about what you just did. Make your writing mimic the movement or rhythm or size or shape of your body. Use what you just learned about embarrassment, hitches in movement, sweat, effort. Make the body central in your work.

Read more of Rukmini's work on Floodmark.

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