Blog

The purpose of art is washing the daily dust off our souls.  Pablo Picasso

ON IDENTITY AND A SENSE OF WHO I AM
‘Identity is a never completed process of becoming…’
Stuart Hall

On April 4^th this year I turned 77. 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.

A few weeks after my birthday I found myself being asked to complete a diversity monitoring chart at a Devoted and Disgruntled gathering for theatre workers. Confidently putting my sticker at the top of the age chart (no-one superseded me over the three days) I noticed how much more hesitant I became when I arrived at the question ‘What is your Job?’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. Even 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 the jobs they had.

Waiting for a check-up at the breast clinic the next day, and being reminded how our condition – in my case former mastectomy patient – always overrides the personal in these contexts, I found myself thinking again about self, the nature of identity and who or what defines us. Inevitably I found myself turning, as I often do when faced by questions like this, to Stuart Hall, and revisiting a quote 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 began to wonder whether Hall was right. Is our identity, our sense of self, something that is always in a state of fluctuation and change? Is it 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 no part to play? Do those things that still feel so deeply part of me like 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 50 years simply clinging 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 relationships to dominant powers and our sense of where we belong in the hierachy. What I think he is reminding us is that none of this is fixed. Otherwise why would we engage in the struggle to bring about social justice and a less unequal and repressive world?

Probably more than ever in the past few years I have realised how much our sense of identity transforms in response to our shifting identifications and in particular to the groups we find ourselves belonging to. Or no longer belong to. Some of those repositionings 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 unexpected and 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 had to be radically re-wrought in the past few years.

Re-visiting and reframing my website has partly 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 almost certainly reflects more of my conflicting desire for legacy. The Blog is therefore deliberately no longer about what ‘Job I do’ but more about the thinking about life I find myself doing these days.

Maybe the portends for turning 77 were right and this is a time for personal transformation. And for finding ways to welcome ‘the never-completed process of becoming’ who I am.

Postscript

As I looked through the small pile that had accumulated on the coffee table I asked myself what their choices might tell people about their perceptions of me. And 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 conversation between John Berger and Susan Sontag To Tell a Story. Stories about a long marriage and loss, female creativity, resilience and enduring friendship, a firm feminist riposte to mansplaining and a shared grappling with ideas about the art on 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 abilities. 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 have realised the difference having Dr. in front of my name has made to the way I feel 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’s 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. It felt enough.

The first flowers of a rose called ‘At Peace’ that I bought because of its name. A small memorial to Jamie.

‘Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it …’
Joan Didion

Joan Didion’s response to the grief of losing her husband of forty years The Year of Magical Thinking is the one book from my small birthday library I have now read all the way through. The privileged, even rarefied, life which Didion and her husband John Dunne enjoyed which she chronicles so elegantly can make it a complex and sometimes difficult read. Yet as she begins to write with such precision about John’s death, wondering constantly if it could have been prevented, whether anything the medics, the doctors, she herself did in response to his heart attack could have produced different outcomes it is impossible not to be drawn in by the rawness of her grief and her attempts to have some form of control. When she shares the detailed autopsy report which she receives almost a year later, having written down an old address in the urgency of needing to respond at the hospital, it is a final reassurance. He is gone and there is nothing she could have done to prevent it.

I recognise so many of the feelings she shares of not being able to believe someone has gone from our lives. Of wanting to believe it might somehow all be reversible. The endless attempts at magical thinking. If only I had done this … said that. If only I had remembered to think about warning of the dangers of swimming in the sea as well as needing to be careful travelling around Mexico City. The ‘fast’ and cruel ways in which ‘life changes in an instant’. A phone-call in the middle of the night. A silent scream. Mother Courage Loses a Son. Like Didion I feel the need to turn to the literature. Not for the medical knowledge she is often seeking, there is no explanation for an accident of nature, but to find that writer, or writers, who will have captured everything I am feeling but more eloquently, more poetically, in ways that might make sense of my emotions. Or more possibly to find a way to share with those who have not known, and may never know, the grief beyond grief that losing a child can bring. Even now it is as if sharing Didion’s words are the impulse that has given me permission to speak of my own grief.

Not only for the loss of my son, but the understanding that, as she speaks about the death of the man who has been her partner in life for over forty years, it is often as if she is describing the anticipatory grief I am coming to know. The slow, scary shifting of the land beneath our feet that losing someone to a degenerative brain disease involves. And the understanding that, as we mourn the loss of the person that was are also mourning ‘for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer.’

I have hardly begun Blue Nights – the book that opens on July 26, 2010, which should have been the seventh wedding anniversary of her daughter Quintana and instead marks almost five years since her death. When I went to pick it up at the bookshop where I had ordered it the lovely young man at the counter said ‘Looks like you’re going to have a gruelling read.’ I went home feeling terribly guilty that I’d snapped back at him, ‘She lost a child and I did too’. Anger. Guilt. Shame.