Sunday, April 20, 2008

My Body Is Crying Blood

This brief piece is dedicated to magical realist writers Arundhati Roy, Toni Morrison and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It is also an artistic statement of a small life drawing.

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Each day I try to revel in all live bodies’ unending miracles. Yet still I don’t know how to shape a language that would tell my open-mouthed awe for the nerve links, the tiny electric intertwining of my ideas, sentiments and my entire cell structure, my corporeal self.

Others have successfully shown their worship of our bodies in activism, in spiritual practice, in art, and in joyful and generous living. These manifold expressions sustain me when I feel well and when I am ill.

And so it is with a mixture of worry and admiration — for my own body — that just after March 19th (start of the sixth year of the US occupation of Iraq) and April 15th (war tax deadline), I woke up to find my body crying blood.

I have secretly been awaiting this physical manifestation of my intensifying sorrow, and it has at last arrived.

As choreographer Martha Graham said, “The body reveals what words cannot.”

Diane Wittner is an artist, teacher, and director of Chesapeake Citizens. Read other articles by Diane, or visit Diane's website.


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