The body politic
Author Roxane Gay
Roxane Gay writes fiction with visceral physicality. The sensations of being grabbed, pulled, breathed on, thrown to the ground, or sat too close to are at the forefront of her prose. In “La Negra Blanca,” a short story in her 2017 collection Difficult Women (Grove Press), about an exotic dancer named Sarah — called “Sierra” at work — and one of her customers, William Livingston III, Gay does not hedge the details of Sarah’s occupation, nor of William’s inner life. The story’s point of view moves between them, highlighting the inherent power imbalances in the relationship. During a lap dance, William pulls Sierra against him and climaxes. “When Sierra tries to stand, he holds her tight. She tries to pry his fingers loose, but he is stronger. She glares at the bouncer watching the scene, throws her hands up. The bouncer shrugs, continues to watch. William always tips generously so the bouncer won’t intervene when William breaks club rules, which he does, regularly. Sierra gives the bouncer the finger, her slow angry burn spreading,” Gay writes. It is perhaps the mildest of multiple sexual assaults in the 15-page story.
Sex, rape, the vagaries of the body, and bodily autonomy are frequent themes for Gay, an associate professor of English at Purdue University who is probably best known for her essay collection Bad Feminist (2014) and Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (HarperCollins, 2017). She has a steady online presence as a cultural critic and public intellectual, having written opinion pieces for The New York Times and many other publications. She is also a stunning and forceful voice in literary fiction. She reads from her work and is joined in conversation by Tressie McMillan Cottom on Wednesday, March 14, at the Lensic Performing Arts Center as part of the Lannan Foundation Readings & Conversations series. Cottom is an assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University and author of Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy (The New Press, 2017).
Gay’s first book, Ayiti (2011), is a searing, poetic collection of short stories about the Haitian diaspora experience. Gay, who grew up in Nebraska and attended high school at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, is the daughter of Haitian immigrants. Her debut novel, An Untamed State (2014), explores race, sexual violence, power, class, and familial bonds via the ordeal of Mireille Duval Jameson, a Haitian-American woman who is kidnapped for ransom. Using short, musical sentences, Gay rarely strays from the immediacy of the moment, engaging every sense — including spine-tingling fear — that is available to her.
“Two men slammed the butts of their rifles against the car windows. Their bodies glowed with anger. The glass cracked, fractures spreading. Michael and I pulled apart, waited tensely, and then the windshield broke, the sound loud and echoing. … Michael and I reached for Christophe at the same time. The baby was still smiling but his lips quivered, his eyes wide. My hands could not quite reach him,” she writes in the scene of the kidnapping. “I was lifted up and out of our car and thrown onto the street. The skin covering my face stung.”
If Gay seems preoccupied with sex and violence, she does not differ in this from many other writers, whether in the literary world or in Hollywood, where such themes have always been popular regardless of the reasons why. Now sexual harassment, abuse, and assault of women are making real-life news headlines like no other time in American history, thanks to the #MeToo movement — and Gay comes to her subject matter from raw personal experience, which she writes about in Hunger. When she was twelve, a boy she considered her friend led her to an isolated location and orchestrated her gang rape by other boys their age. This traumatic event led her to start gaining weight as a defense mechanism against future attacks as well as a way to hide from herself and her family, in whom she did not confide at the time. Gay is a tall woman and has weighed as much as 577 pounds — the point at which she considered and ultimately rejected the idea of weight-loss surgery. Hunger, for her, is about living in her body and existing in a world that does not accept her size; Hunger is also about living in a body that is a cage for her trauma, how she got there, and whether or not she accepts herself.
Sex, rape, the vagaries of the body, and bodily autonomy are frequent themes for Roxane Gay.
Of the #MeToo movement, Gay said that it started with issues of workplace harassment. “I see it as a very inclusive movement, meant to include all women and men who have experienced sexual harassment or sexual violence. For people who were violated as children, those conversations have been taking place so we aren’t being left behind. We’re watching as the conversation broadens. And we’re sharing our stories too because more and more, our stories are being heard. I hope that the more we talk about how pervasive sexual violence is, the more we work toward a justice system that adequately addresses sexual violence and a culture that believes women who have suffered.”
For as much as Gay reveals in Hunger, she also holds back, attempting to guard herself in ways she does not guard the characters she creates in her fiction. “I don’t know how to talk about rape and sexual violence when it comes to my own story,” she writes. “It is easier to say ‘Something terrible happened.’ Something terrible happened. That something terrible broke me. I wish I could leave it at that, but this is a memoir of my body, so I need to tell you what happened to my body. I was young and I took my body for granted and then I learned about the terrible things that could happen to a girl body and everything changed.” She writes of her need for strong boundaries, both emotional and physical. She is not a hugger, and does not like to be touched by strangers, even though, she said, “When I tell strangers that I am not a hugger, some take this as a challenge, like they can hug me into submission, like they can will my aversion to hugs away by the strength of their arms.”
Memoir, which has exploded in popularity in recent decades, is often seen as a form in which the writer flays open the self for the benefit of an audience. Given Gay’s preference for personal privacy, did she have any inner conflict about writing Hunger? “I suspect that people tell their personal stories, not so much as confession but, instead to be seen and heard, to be reminded that they are not alone,” she said. “I don’t wrestle with the ethos of memoir because whenever I write from the personal, I make sure to outline, for myself, my boundaries and then I stick to them. People think they know a lot about me, but they only know what I choose for them to know.”