bloodli(n)es: Carnivalizing Narratives of Illness: Breathing Bakhtinian Life into the Compromised and/or Dying Body

Abstract

The following presents and discusses an excerpt from a work of creative non-fiction — a 90 page long poem titled bloodli(n)es. bloodli(n)es explores the evolving experiences, tensions, and suspensions of living with a degenerative and incurable disease. The poet confronts her diagnosis, her prognosis, a variety of physiological complications and related indignities, while being confronted with an inhospitable medical discourse. She struggles to come to ‘new terms;’ with her tumultuous past, her challenging present, and her uncertain future as well as with the new discursive, linguistic and physical terms being thrust upon her. Among the pressing questions the text raises is, why and how does this woman write; about her past, her disease, and her dying? What does her writing accomplish? How does she seek to write herself out: of an over-determined father-daughter history; a seemingly dead-end story; a textual tradition; the elevated poetics of sentimentality and transcendental notions that so often characterize stories of illness and death; and an overwhelmingly positivistic medical discourse, which increasingly threatens to over-define and over-write her?

A series of paintings expressing tensions arising at various points in the text accompanies this work. These are titled: (1) father/daughter dis-eases I; (2) silences suspended; (3) bloodli(n)es; (4) seeing red; (5) father/daughter dis-eases II; and (6) art-eries.