by Ace Harvest
Walking to the Whitney makes me feel like a real New Yorker. The West Village is quieter than the East Side, boys holding hands and brownstones unfolding to the Hudson River as my white sneakers pad up the steps to the museum entrance. The security guard kindly tells me I need to finish my coffee before heading inside; I practically chug it rather than throwing it away, because 3:00 p.m. is an early Sunday for a college freshman. As I head into the elevator, now empty-handed, I choose a floor at random. I let it take me where it takes me.
The doors separate on the seventh floor, and I’m suddenly glad I don’t have the drink. It would have fallen from my hands—a realization that feels as dramatic as it is true, staring up at the projection dead-center against the white wall ahead of me.
My assignment is to find a piece that speaks to me. I didn’t expect it to be the first one I saw; but walking slowly from the elevator, breath running from my chest, I know I need to write about this. I sit down to steady myself—though the longer I look, the less steady I become.
Antepartum by Mary Kelly, 1973: a Super 8 mm film, unassuming in its simplicity— loop of one minute and thirty seconds, black and white and grainy and colossal—displaying a close-up of the artist’s stomach, swollen in pregnancy. She’s naked, but the shot is so close that you almost forget to notice her bare legs and the soft shadow of her breasts. The balloon of her belly dominates the frame, a dark line stretching down the center. There is a slight movement, but it is impossible to miss at this scale: the baby shifts inside of her and she caresses her womb in response, a first conversation between mother and child. As her stomach rises and falls, I find myself unable to distinguish between the artist’s breathing and the baby’s motion. Panic crawls up my throat as I realize the artist’s lack of ownership over her own body: a lack of control that feels beyond coping with. To move without meaning to—to have something living within you that pushes, pulls, and presses from the inside out. I’m overwhelmed with thoughts of parasites and demonic possession.
It shocks me. I’ve always romanticized pregnancy, dreaming of picket fences, children laughing, and building a life out of it all. I’ve always known that I wanted to be a mom, but staring up at the unadulterated truth of this condition—the sacrifice not simply of your life, or your freedom, but of your very being—I feel crushed by the weight of it. My imaginary picket fences suddenly look like cages. Yet as uncomfortable as it is to watch my fantasy of the future fall apart all at once, I can’t stop looking. The artist breathes, her baby tumbles, and I sit still, trying to stomach it.
The fear in my chest is not new. It’s a feeling I recognize, one that I’ve danced with for years but have only just begun to understand. The pervasiveness of gender-based violence has made me well-acquainted with a lack of ownership over my body: Roe falls, Heard is witch-hunted, I am raped. I am shown on every level that this body I inhabit is not mine. And now, in the echo of this reckoning, I suddenly cannot watch this baby control this woman without mourning her autonomy. I cannot perceive pregnancy as anything else except proof that the female body was not made—on a cosmic, existential level—for the woman inside of it, but is instead offered as a sacrifice. There are far more graphic depictions of this truth: rape scenes that sicken us, pornography that celebrates violence against women, and real-world #MeToo accounts that illustrate its constancy. But Kelly doesn’t offer this truth explicitly; her power lies in her subtlety.
Teju Cole, in his essay “A True Picture of Black Skin” writes of American photographer Roy DeCarava’s Civil Rights Era photographs, and how an abstracted view can lend itself to create a “forceful but less illustrative” photograph. Rather than directly depicting marches or violence, “[DeCarava’s] work was . . . an exploration of just how much could be seen in the shadowed parts of a photograph, or how much could be imagined into those shadows” (Cole). One such photograph, “Mississippi Freedom Marcher, Washington, D.C., 1963,” shows a “young woman whose face is at once relaxed and intense” (Cole). The shot—similarly to Antepartum—plays with an image’s intentional curtailment, as DeCarava zooms tightly on the subject’s face so as to obscure her surroundings. As described by Cole, “we only see half of one other person’s face . . . indistinct in the foreground . . . and . . . the barest suggestion of two other bodies,” despite the photo’s title affirming that she is, in fact, within a large crowd. The lighting of the photo creates a “feeling of modulated darkness”; while entirely clear, the subject’s “beautiful features . . . are underlit somehow” (Cole). It is due to this obscuring, not in spite of it, that the image holds its power.
Cole argues it is possible to convey more by showing less, leaning into the photo’s darkness as something worth exploring and imagining possibilities within. In Kelly’s film, the close-up framing and the soft, grainy feel of the image also spark a shadowed imagination. Through zooming in so closely and demonstrating intense detail, the artist is abstracted and all framing detail is lost. Though this piece is a video of the artist’s naked body—the most intimate, physical representation of one’s identity—her identity is intentionally obscured, inspiring the imagination of the viewer. Similar to how DeCarava asks you to consider what is in his photographs’ shadows, Kelly asks you to consider what lies just out of frame. The result of this consideration, at least for me, is an ability to impose the identity of any woman—perhaps every woman—onto Kelly’s film. And the grief innate to motherhood, or perhaps simply to the female body, floods the room so completely that I can’t believe I’m the only person drowning in it.
It becomes impossible for me not to think of my own mother, and of myself in her womb. My mother talked of my movement within her as a touch of the sublime; once, when she was on bedrest and nearly ready to burst, she said my little hand ran across the interior of her stomach, letting her see my five tiny fingers reshape the contour of her skin. She was breathless in her explanation, stricken by the beauty of it even years later. She spoke of birth like it was holy, thinking of herself as a divine creator, and my sister and me as precious masterpieces. She did not speak of the bedrest in anything but passing. She did not mention that I incapacitated her for months, that I spilled her blood on her sheets, or that I could have killed her. She did not mention all that I took from her, blinded by all that she insisted I gave. Rage billows in my chest as I keep staring at this natural state—the basic reality of where we all come from—and keep thinking it’s unnatural to regard this level of sacrifice as normal. It cannot be normal that my body bleeds every month to prepare to give itself away. It cannot be normal that this lack of ownership is primal and predetermined; except it is. I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t know what to do with the belief that my body can be taken from me (or perhaps that it has never been mine to begin with) and the ontological guilt that comes with knowing that my mother gave up her body to make room for my existence. What am I if not a leech—with parasitism integral to my creation? What would a baby be within me, if not the same? I feel like both a thief and a victim by the nature of my very being.
I look back to the artist’s hands: how they respond so gently to the movements of the baby—the epitome of a mother’s touch. I wonder how she manages to lay her hands upon the thing that made her a host and choose to love it anyway, how she makes the sacrifice feel holy. I wonder how my own mother did the same. I wonder if I will ever be able to do so myself, or if this too—like all the other violences that have made a home inside of me—will feel like an invasion.
Once, back in my Catholic high school, our campus minister gave a lecture against abortion. He, in all his manhood, speaking to an auditorium full of teenage girls, likened us to Christ: “Think of Jesus at the last supper,” he had said, “‘This is my body, which will be given up for you.’” I remember placing a hand on my stomach at fourteen in the same way I do now, uneasily, and trying to curb a gripe with God that then felt inexplicable and now feels overwhelming. A core tenet of Catholicism is the romanticizing of sacrifice: Catholics live to die, making heroes of martyrs. I begin to wonder if that’s all motherhood—perhaps all womanhood—really is: martyrdom, sacrifice disguised as a compromise, killing parts of yourself to make room for something else. I think of how my mother—the actress, the artist—martyred herself for me, how she once whispered the confession that she never would have left Los Angeles if she had not gotten married. I think of how she died in a place she hated, how Philadelphia always felt like a trap, how she was an artist before she was a mother, and how her art died before she did—and I can’t help but feel like a murderer. And now, as her daughter, living in New York City after losing her, attending one of the top art schools on the planet and digging my nails into this newfound freedom with white-knuckled conviction, I’ve not only stolen her body but her dreams. The guilt of it makes my own stomach turn with the artist’s stomach as it pushes, pulls, and presses without end.
The anger in my chest, at first unruly and misdirected, finds its way toward God, then myself, and then God again. I have no good answer as to why this is the way things have to be. I only have fury at how they are, and no one tangible to blame. A love for sacrifice has grown inside of me since Sunday school, and for the first time, staring up at precisely what that sacrifice means, I don’t want it. I don’t want to live like Mary did—a woman painted as perfect for her willingness to be reduced to her womb, to all that she could make instead of all she could be, sinless in her submission. I don’t want to die like Jesus did, bleeding out selflessly and without reproach. I don’t want to die like my mother did, on a bed of unfinished dreams, wanting and alone.
Slowly I come to realize that perhaps the only way to save myself from this inherited disembodiment is to refuse it. Teju Cole invokes French philosopher Édouard Glissant’s concept of opacity, which can defend the “obscurity and inscrutability of Caribbean blacks and other marginalized peoples” (Cole). As Cole explains, “Glissant defined [opacity] as a right to not have to be understood on others’ terms, a right to be misunderstood if need be.” Mary Kelly’s Antepartum also seems to illustrate this principle. It is only in opacity’s “gentle refusal,” this acknowledgement of “another…deeper way” to understand one’s being—even if that understanding is misaligned with what is accepted—that I find my body and myself in union (Cole). In the face of society or biology, God or the man who catcalled me this morning, the unwelcome visitors who have called me ‘bitch’ or ‘meat’ or any other variation of ‘object’ as they entered me, or the hollowness they left behind—the belief that I am the sole owner of my body must live within me as an inarguable truth. This body I inhabit may never have been intended as mine, but I will fight every day to make it mine: to understand my being on my own terms and to reclaim—or perhaps, more accurately, claim for the very first time—my body as a self-owned entity.
People say that your body never comes back after a baby, but I wonder if it’s really about vanity, or if a greater loss than beauty prevails. If your body is gone, where do you go?
Works Cited
Cole, Teju. “A True Picture of Black Skin.” The New York Times, 19 Feb. 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/magazine/a-true-picture-of-black-skin.html.
Kelly, Mary. Antepartum. 1973. The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.