New York, NY: Persea Books, 2020. 115 pages. $24.95.
As the title of Molly McCully Brown’s debut collection of essays reveals, Places I’ve Taken My Body is a book about the sharp dividing line between the self and the body—the body a thing to be carted along, like a handbag or a suitcase. Here the mind-body problem becomes a confrontation between what Brown calls her “damaged brain” and a body receiving constant, perplexing commands to “contract, contract, contract.” Cerebral palsy, she writes, renders her “brain damaged” and her body “spastic, off-balance, and largely dependent on a wheelchair.” While every human being must encounter the mind-body problem, the narrator’s separation between her physical and mental properties becomes even more pronounced in daily life, a painful effort to control and endure her limbs’ movements. “Somewhere along the way,” Brown writes, “I got cleaved down the middle. There was my damaged body, and then there was the rest of me, desperately trying to hold that body together.”
Places I’ve Taken My Body demonstrates that the narrator’s challenges with mobility do not inevitably lead to stories rooted in only one geography. In fact, the essays are set in a wide variety of locations, including a small town in rural Virginia, Bologna, and London. In 2017, Brown published her first collection of poems, The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, which received a great deal of attention in the press and brought her significant critical praise. The success of this first book lies at the heart of Places I’ve Taken My Body; Brown’s poetry led to important professional opportunities, including the chance for her to travel, teach, and research in other parts of the world, all of which eventually resulted in the writing of these very essays.
In a craft essay that is also titled “The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded,” Brown documents how she came to write her book of poems, describing the research she undertook and how that archival work altered the way she understood her experiences of disability. “The more I learned, the less important and extraordinary my own individual pain seemed.” Brown’s book of poems examines the facility’s horrific treatment of Virginians with disabilities, including forced sterilizations of patients. Brown writes in the opening poem,
And, by some accident of luck or grace,
some window less than half a century wide,
it is my backyard but not what happened
to my body—
Later, she repeats this idea in her essay, when she describes visiting the old cemetery for the first time where patients of the Colony were once buried. “I felt time and space collapse: sixty-five years ago, born in my hometown, I might have lived and died in the Colony, been buried in that field.” Brown’s poems are haunted by the ghosts of the Colony, her story receding into the background so that the histories of the patients can “take center stage.”
The essays in Places I’ve Taken My Body return Brown to the narrative spotlight, so that she can explore topics such as her sexual desire, the fatigue of having to explain her body to others, her occasional longing to “blend in, pass” in public spaces as able-bodied, and the “impressive magic trick” she performs to make the people in her life forget about her disability. In “Bent Body, Lamb,” the narrator analyzes her messy relationship with religion and god. After another churchgoer asks why she doesn’t kneel during communion, she questions herself: “Is it absurd to adhere to a religion whose most central rituals my body won’t let me perform?” While we often think of faith as an action that occurs within the heart and mind, Brown’s question reminds readers that belief may demand a physical performance, too. Yet, even as Brown struggles with the parables from the New Testament, in which “Jesus healed the crippled and the lame,” even as she wonders what resurrection means for her “bruised, broken, wreck of a form,” she also provocatively admits that she has dreamed of a miraculous healing ever since she was a small child.
Early in the book, Brown discusses her terrible sense of direction. She comes to the conclusion that her perpetual disorientation in the landscape is an asset as a writer, allowing her to live “in a state of endless discovery.” So much of Places I’ve Taken My Body illustrates how discombobulation may be resolved on the page, a place where a reader certainly never feels lost, Brown an exceptionally gifted, skillful guide. In Bologna, at the Anatomical Theater of the Archiginnasio, the narrator learns that “[i]n Italian, the verb ‘to skin’ is spellare.” What follows is a powerful meditation on the way a body may be transformed as much by the incisive blade of language as by the scalpel of a medical doctor. Spellare, we are told, can be used to say both “I skin my knee” and “I shed my skin,” the verb both literal and metaphorical in its application—the act of writing offering a clear path between the body and the mind.