“Snow White, Aurora, the Princess and the Pea, Juliet alongside Romeo, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Virginia Woolf, Joan Didion, and all the corpses of girls that litter the landscape of our tele-images, do we know where to look? the heroines after they have left the bed that had been prepared for them”, write Jennifer Bélanger and Martine Delvaux, in the poetic essay The elongatedwhich pays homage to the power of horizontal life.
In our social imagination, the reclining woman is reduced to very little: the sleeping beauty, waiting for the hero, the lover, possible because frozen in time and silence, the hysterical, prey to her weakness. , the victims, symbols of the eternal tragedy of femininity.
However, in the extended position from which they exchange the fragments that form their essay, the authors – both suffering from chronic pain – see and claim the thought in action, the creative force and the revolutionary potential which rumble among the the injured, the sore, the insomniacs, the mothers, the dreamers and the survivors.
“We maintain the idea that a person who is confined to his bed is useless, as if productivity were necessarily vertical,” says Martine Delvaux. However, we multiply the roles. I remember the long hours spent next to my daughter waiting for her to fall asleep when she was very small. You can think that I was accompanying her to become a productive and confident human. But it is seen as a waste of time. »
Surrounded by the voices of other women confined to horizontality — Simone Weil, Christine Angot, Lola Lafon, Audre Lorde, Anne Boyer, Annie Ernaux and many others — the two authors reverse the schema of the solar hero, self-made man inherited from Ulysses, whose trajectory, necessarily individual, never deviates from the objective.
” The elongated, it’s the opposite of the romantic hero who has to climb a cliff, explains Jennifer Bélanger, whose doctoral thesis deals with the sick female body. It’s a multiplication of voices, the idea that we must act in community, become social architects to break down the ceiling that stands before us, and that prevents us from seeing the horizon. »
Render the urgency
The essay was born out of a public conversation, held at the OFFTA festival, around pain as it was approached by the American writer Anne Boyer, suffering from very aggressive breast cancer, and the essayist and African-American feminist activist Audre Lorde, who succumbed to the disease.
From this discussion arose the figure of the elongated, omnipresent, but which we refuse to see inhabiting the public space in all its contradictions. “We wanted a form to think about the subject, and so we set ourselves the constraint of the fragment, without capital letters or punctuation, as a reflection of the thought in writing. It forced us to make a sentence that is not one, on the border of the poem, ”says Martine Delvaux.
To their thoughts were integrated, in a rather natural way, excerpts from other writers and thinkers of pain, waiting and suspension, of the symbols and prejudices surrounding the figure of the bedridden throughout history. and proverbs that convey commonplaces around health, efficiency and well-being.
The result is worth reading aloud, as it makes tangible the urgency, the cry too long suppressed, the possibility that exists between two waves of pain, which must be seized and made the most of before he does not escape.
Invisibility
Throughout the pages and the beds, we pass from the male gaze on the one who falls – that of the orientalist painter who represents the odalisque ad nauseam or that of the painter André Brouillet, who in his painting A clinical lesson at the Salpêtrière, paints the hysteric who falls into the arms of Charcot in front of all his medical students — from the point of view of the elongated body. “We wanted to get out of the spectacular to give voice to the reality of these women, to tell the banality of their daily lives and the invisibility to which it is relegated”, specifies Jennifer Bélanger.
We understand that even today, the woman who suffers is not always considered by medicine. In fact, many diseases associated with women are underdiagnosed and poorly treated.
“In the oldest medical manuscripts, female pain appears above all as obstetrical, it is a fatality, a destiny, women give birth to future soldiers by screaming and dying, while the pain of men is wounds, amputation, self-sacrifice, service to the nation, glory, historic defeat or victory, object of admiration,” they write.
“From childbirth to accessories that constrain the body – corsets, girdles, bras or high heels – the feminine is associated with pain, as if it were definitional. It goes without saying that it is not taken seriously by doctors. Studies have shown that if a white man and a white woman come to the doctor with the same symptoms, the man will come out with more painkillers. It’s even worse if you’re a visible minority,” argues Martine Delvaux.
The doctor, of course, identifies with his patient and projects his reality onto him, which can distort his perception. “It has also been shown that a woman who has a heart attack is more likely to be diagnosed by a female doctor, since the symptoms manifest differently. »
The differences in treatment also manifest themselves in the public space. A woman who suffers does not always arouse as much empathy as a man. “In the test Tender Points, Amy Berkowitz recounts an anecdote in which her coworker, with her arm in a cast following an accident, receives a lot of encouragement and signs of empathy. She, since her pain is invisible, only gets silence as an answer,” says Jennifer Bélanger. “Paradoxically, if we talk about our pain, especially in a professional environment, it is always underestimated. Why would I work if I was really sick? adds Martine Delvaux.
The answer is as manifold as the experiences of the stretchers, whose offbeat views, held outside the capitalist system, may well be one of the answers to the immense challenges that await us in the coming years. This is what the writers recall, through the words of Johanna Hedva: “What is the strike force of those who observe the world from such a command post, the capital of the impossible displacement, should we not- he doesn’t remember that making a revolution is also going around in circles”?