The purpose of art is washing the daily dust off our souls. Pablo Picasso
ON IDENTITY …
‘Identity is a never completed process of becoming…’
Stuart Hall
On April 4th this year I turned seventy seven. Discovering that the number 77 is one of the ‘angel numbers’, a coming together of the 7s that signifies spiritual awakening, inner wisdom and a time for personal transformation I decided it should be something to celebrate. Which I did.
Since then I’ve been wondering what the notion of personal transformation might mean for someone nearing the end of their eighth decade. And reflecting on what what I might want, or more importantly need, to transform if I was to become the better version of me all the self help books, and even academic journals, are suggesting I try to become.
A few weeks after my birthday I found myself being asked to complete a diversity monitoring chart at an Improbable Theatre Devoted and Disgruntled gathering. Confidently putting my sticker at the top of the age chart (no-one superseded me over the three days) I noticed how much more hesitant I became when I arrived at the question ‘What is your Job?’
In the end I plumped for ‘writer, activist and carer’. After all these are the roles that take up most of my days these days. If not necessarily in that order.
Later in the day, a young woman in a group I’d joined about art and illness questioned whether she could still identify herself as an actor when her present disability meant she was no longer offered any roles. We told her she should absolutely go on describing herself as an actor if that was how she still saw herself. And that that was what mattered.
On my way home, I began to wonder whether we’d been too encouraging. Despite all our commitment to diversity and inclusion in the arts we still persist in identifying people by the paid work they do or who their parents were or the jobs they had.
Waiting for a check-up at the breast clinic the next day and being reminded how our physical conditions – in my case former mastectomy patient – overrides anything personal in these contexts, I found myself thinking again about the young actor’s concerns. One of the forms I had to complete before seeing the consultant asked me to put down how many children I had. I paused anxiously before I wrote down ‘two’. Was that the right answer? Did I need to qualify it by stating that one of my sons was dead? Am I still a mother of two? If our lives are changed irreparably by illness or loss are we still the same self? Who or what defines that self ? I found myself returning to the definition of identity Stuart Hall offers us that I had referenced in my PhD:
‘I came to understand that identity is not a set of fixed attributes, the unchanging essence of the inner self, but a constantly shifting process of positioning. We tend to think of identity as taking us back to our roots, the part of us which remains essentially the same across time. In fact, identity is always a never-completed process of becoming – a process of shifting identifications, rather than a singular, complete, finished state of being.’‘
I wondered whether Hall was right. Is our identity, our sense of self, something that will always be in a state of flux? Is it in fact a constant process of repositioning ourselves, shifting our identifications in response to the people around us, the groups we find ourselves belonging to – or no longer belonging to? Do those roots which connect us back to the parts of us that remain essentially the same across time have any part to play? Do those things that still feel so deeply part of me such as coming from two working-class, migrant families, one Irish, the other Polish/Lithuanian, growing up on a council estate in Leeds in the 50s, being educated as a Catholic or becoming a teenager in the ’60s count for nothing? Are the experiences that resulted from those specifics, such as encountering feminism, discovering the pill, getting engaged with the anti-war movement not integral to who I am? Is the fact that I still see myself as a working-class Yorkshire woman even though I’ve lived in London for over fifty years simply a defiant need to cling on to something that no longer matters?
I know Hall is not suggesting that. No one is clearer than he is about the intersecting ways in which our class, gender, ethnicity, dis/ability impact our understanding of where we belong in the hierachy. What I think he is reminding us is that none of this need be fixed. Otherwise why engage in the struggle to bring about social justice and a less unequal and repressive world?
In the past years I have learned through necessity how my own sense of identity has shifted and transformed. Some of those re-positionings have been inevitable, like accepting the impacts of ageing, including the ensuing invisibility as a woman, and the resulting changes in physical abilities. Others have been unexpectedly cruel. Finding myself belonging to the group ‘mothers who have lost a child’ – Arabic is the only language that has a word for it, thakla, ثكلى – and then becoming a carer for a partner with a rare degenerative brain disease have ensured my sense of who I am has be radically re-wrought in the past few years.
Re-visiting and reframing my website has been a response to all this. While my work-self remains, I retain a certain amount of pride in what I’ve done and still do, it reflects my recognition that it is now intended as some form of legacy, and a space to share my thoughts and my writing. This Blog is therefore deliberately no longer about any jobs I do but an attempt to see what I’m looking at, face what I fear and find myself in the life I am living.
Of course it’s scary. But maybe the portends for turning seventy-seven were right? This is a time for personal transformation. And for finding ways to welcome, or at least come to some understanding with, ‘the never-completed process of becoming’ that is offering me a new sense of who I am.
Postscript
A few days before my birthday my eldest son, Luke, and I both agreed that we wanted to begin sitting down and reading books again rather than listening to them on our headphones. It felt prescient then that, on my birthday, so many of my friends brought me books as gifts.
As I looked through the small pile that had accumulated on the coffee table I asked myself what their choices might tell people about others’ perceptions of me. And to consider what I might learn about myself from them. The books were – Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, Jill Burke’s How to be a Renaissance Woman’, Kristin Hannah’s The Women, Han Kang’s We Do Not Part, Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me and a collection of conversations between John Berger and Susan Sontag To Tell a Story. Stories about a long marriage and loss, female creativity, resilience and enduring friendship, a robust feminist riposte to mansplaining and a shared grappling with ideas about the art of writing from two of the best. I decided I quite liked the ‘me’ they reflected.
Since then I’ve found myself dipping in and out of these very different books. How to be a Renaissance Woman has become my bedside table reading, constantly awed by the mirror it holds up to our own society’s view of how women should look and behave. And if Berger and Sontag have become my daunting go tos each time I think I might write something, Solnit is there to remind me how effective the patriarchal culture can be in making women lose faith in our own capacity. In the same way she feels each book she has published has given her more faith in holding her space and being listened to I recognise the difference having Dr. in front of my name has made to the way I am listened to. Not that I am writing or saying anything very different to what I have always written or said but somehow the words seem to land with more weight. A young friend proudly texted me the other day to tell me she had been at a graduation ceremony at a London University college when she suddenly heard Dr Chrissie Tiller being quoted. She said she couldn’t quite recall the exact words shared but was certain collaboration, collectivity and diversity were among them. I decided I would take that.
