Bodily Expectations, Reproduction and The Birth of Max Mueller.
Okay. If this was the way it was going to be, then it better be worth it. This kid better be as formidable as the pain. This kid had better come out of the womb speaking quantum physics, or be telekinetic, or have white hair and purple eyes, or be able to levitate, or have a blue aura, or be the new messiah, or be clutching gold in his little fists, or at least speak like the dolphins speak.
-From The Birth of Max Mueller – September 25, 1971 by Cookie Mueller.
For most of my life I’ve associated childbirth with early morning phone calls and the warm antiseptic smell of the small NHS ward where everybody I share blood with was born. Women in my family historically give birth quickly and dramatically to little purple babies shocked into silence by the speed of their entry into the world. Until recently child rearing had existed in a slippery and ectoplasmic universe parallel to my own, but a few years ago something changed. My friends started breeding, my outwardly heteronormative relationship slid into its fourth year, and then its fifth, and the age at which my mother gave birth to me started to recede not-unnoticed into the distant past. I’ve reached an age at which it is acceptable for my reproductive organs to become the centerpiece of any conversation. Something about the keenness of family and strangers alike to suddenly discuss my sex life, stripping my body back to its reproductive capacity, turns my spine to kindling. Reduced to pure functionality, sex becomes clinical and sappy, backed into some strange corner between lilacs and bleach. Despite all of this, as time passes I find myself searching for representations of the body as a fertile site outside of the pressures of capitalist conformity and reproduction.
(Image taken from My Birth by Carmen Winant)
The opaque curtain that shrouds the bodily realities of childbirth bears an uncanny resemblance to the hushed and euphemistic language that we use to mask death. The machinations of both are closeted away or blurred slightly before the presentation of the final product: a baby or a box of ashes, after which we are expected to accept our new realities and move seamlessly forward. I recently came into possession of Carmen Winant’s My Birth, published in 2018 the book features a collection of analogue archival images of Winant’s own mother home-birthing her children that interweave seamlessly between other, anonymous women. The shapes of their bodies heave and flow together from labour to delivery, enduring the same process in all of its gore and glory. The fervency with which I have been consuming and returning to the images of swollen breasts and babies crowning, their heads a web of blood and greasy vernix, can only be matched by my teenage obsession with googling school-fabled images of a dead Marilyn Monroe. I am gripped by the otherness of bodies that have all the same parts as mine but are contorted or distorted far beyond anything my soft and feeble flesh could possibly withstand. In the short text that features between the portraits, Winant writes that ‘childbirth has not successfully been contained or described by means of secondary description. Like every good subject it fails me. How do you speak a language that has no words?’ Although the identities of the women portrayed are flattened by history and time, they are unified by their participation in the journey of bearing children. My Birth creates a visceral visual blueprint for a language that exists only in the shared depths of the body, a wordless and ancient intimacy that no matter how hard we try to comprehend, cannot be adequately translated into anything as tangible as words.
One spring a few years ago I shared a house with my friend and her newborn. I watched in awe as she fed this tiny milky-eyed thing until it became a fat and boisterous toddler. I was fascinated by the whole process, how it was simultaneously so ordinary and so extraordinary, so human and yet so animal. How could anyone undergo the gore of being tugged and torn apart and live to tell the tale? One of my favorite birth stories is Cookie’s Mueller’s candid account of the birth of her son, in ‘The Birth of Max Mueller – September 25, 1971’ from her collection Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, published by the Semiotext(e) Native Agents series in 1990. Mueller writes of the experience, ‘I was undergoing internal gut ripping tubal wringing, organ stretching, muscle pummeling, bone cracking. I was the grand martyr. Prometheus knew no pain like this. Lamaze had lied.’ Cookie’s recollection of abject pain and suffering might cast a dark and dramatic shadow over the gentle intimacy in My Birth but both give voice to a side of childbirth that exists behind the wall of pink and powder-blue stuffed animals, soft blankets and congratulations. Not yet a mother myself, and unsure if I ever will be, I take a strange comfort in these truthful yet brutal representations of the production of real human life. Blood, sex, fear and disorder, as difficult as they can be to stomach, are part of a vast and tender bodily language that I can understand.
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Burning House Books news:
I will be bringing Burning House Books to my favourite queer book festival, Strange Perfume again this year. It's on at the South London Gallery in Camberwell and will be open on Friday 14th June (6-10pm) and Saturday 15th June (11am-6pm)
My Birth by Carmen Winant, published by SPBH Editions, 2018 is available to buy here and Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black by Cookie Mueller is finally back after a long hiatus and is available here.
Loads of new stock coming throughout June so keep up to date by following Burning House Books on Instagram.