MY QUESTION TO KAYLEIGH:
WHAT IS UNDERNEATH YOUR SKIN?
Kayleigh responded with the following spoken word piece:
“My skin. The barrier between what you can see and what you can’t see. You can see the spots and scars, the freckles that cover my face and arms, the veins that tease you with a glimpse of what is on the other side. You can’t see, the blood that flows through the entirety of my body, my lungs expanding on every inhale. You can’t see the eyes that have penetrated the barrier, the words that have seeped through and stayed stuck under the surface for years. You see the end result. Not the before, not the process during. But the after.”
An aspect of Kayleigh’s response which I particularly find thought-provoking, is her metamorphosis between the imagery of her body storing physical interior anatomy with the imagery of her body storing life experiences. Just as a witness of Kayleigh’s body would not wish to comprehend the “blood”, “lungs” and “veins” within, Kayleigh recognises that a witness would likewise not wish to comprehend her stored experiences (“words” and “eyes”) within. Therefore, just as the leaking of Kayleigh’s inner anatomy would be abject, as would the leaking of her stored experiences.
In Rina Arya’s book, ‘Abjection and Representation’, she describes the effect of disgust, a leaking body has on a public eye:
“Social conventions dictate that we are generally privy only tothe external and outer bodies of other people in our dealings with them. This ‘public’ aspect of the body . . . concerns what is on the outside, while what lies inside the envelope of skin is veiled from the public gaze. In fact, it is not wide of the mark to say that we are encouraged to think of body-image as consisting of only the external. When we do conceive of the body in terms of inner and outer, the insides of the body are not meant to be shared with others. The distrust of the body we harbour also applies to rituals of care; we mop up after our leaky insides but prefer not to dwell on them.” (Arya, 2014: 86)
Whilst Arya refers here to the physical anatomy of the inside and outside body, her allegorical description of skin as an “envelope” alludes to messages written inside the body. Whilst, as humans in this society, we attempt to “mop up” the unsightly tears, mucous and blood which leak from our bodies, I also feel that we attempt to “mop up” the unsightly (or rather, socially unaccepted) messages which leak from our bodies.
