Writing for the Future: On Melissa Febos’ “Body Work”

Melissa Febos | Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative | Catapult | 2022 | 192 Pages

Imagine this. You’re six, and you’re playing in the sand pit arranging piles of grainy earth into neat, abstract pyramids. You’re watching the sand fall gently down the slope of the pyramid, waiting for the falling to stop, when something red, white, and velcro enters your field of vision. Suddenly, you’re blinded and coughing and feeling around in the sand to orient yourself toward something that has been destroyed. 

Ten years later, you’re in a closet staring at the red checks on a boy’s white sneakers. There’s a seven-minute timer ticking, but you’re not sure you’ll be able to breathe against the shoulders of these winter coats for that long. You feel a tug, then pressure, pain, then absence. You hear the sound of a hand jerking a doorknob. Automatically, you smooth the front of your skort.  

You’re twenty-six now. And you’re flinching as you steam milk because milk at 170 degrees burns, and it also reminds you of something. Once you were making your girlfriend a new vase for her bedside at the pottery wheel—you centered the clay, opened it up, pulled up the walls, and collared the neck of the vase—then a guy bumped into your back while he was on his way to the kiln. “My bad.” He smiles at you, while your vase frowns deeply enough for both of you. “It’s okay.” You respond. You decide to start over, but then you decide to leave. In your car, you will stare into the computer generated universe on your dashboard GPS and wonder why existing feels like being kicked, scattered, and erased. 

Melissa Febos’ latest essay collection, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative, examines the intersection of trauma, art-making, and social change. The book is a call to action, a protest song, an organizing principle, and perhaps the only book you need on memoir writing. Its style, subject, and thesis reminds me of the work of Hilma af Klint, an abstract painter who created her work through a process that straddled scientific research and divination. Both Febos and af Klint share the belief that art should be in service of liberation, of creating a more just and equitable society. And for the most part, their strategies to achieve liberation are in harmony.

In Body Work, Febos begins at the body’s center: the navel. In the essay, “In Praise of Navel Gazing”, Febos transforms the intended insult of navel gazing into a rallying cry for young writers. She argues that the resistance to writing about trauma is rooted in misogyny, and “the false binary between the emotional (female) and the male (intellectual), [which intends] to subordinate the former forever.” Fuck that paradigm, obviously. Febos is right that women artists whose work describes the internal world have been systematically excluded from artistic and literary circles. Hilma af Klint was one of them. Despite being the top student in her art school in Sweden and winning a post-baccalaureate residency and scholarship, her work was dismissed by her contemporaries on the grounds that her artistic process of figuring her inner and outer worlds into art was “inappropriate” and her work was unintelligible (only to be imitated later by the likes of Kandinsky, Mondrian, and white-male-artists et al).

If I was bolder, I might get Navel Gazer tattooed over my knuckles, or maybe even in a rainbow arc across my lower back. Hilma af Klint took a different approach to the sexist paradigm of her time. She worked tirelessly, archived her work and her process meticulously, and requested that her paintings only be shown to the world twenty years after her death—and not a minute sooner. In her privacy, she found the ultimate freedom to create, to look inward in order to understand the universe she lived in. 

Af Klint’s first interest was with the universe’s navel: the atom. In her Primordial Chaos series (no. 5 and no. 7 below),she imagines her way into the origin of the universe through the spiral, the tendril, the helix, and the concentric circle. These shapes are a visual metaphor for the kind of writing Febos describes in Body Work.Writing about trauma is about being able to place yourself at the center of your own world, to hold your own story as significant. Through research, reflection, and imagination you can write your way into wider and wider spheres. Eventually, you understand more about the culture that encircles you because you spent time reflecting on your own central story. 

Perhaps that sounds a bit woo-woo, a little too abstract to amount to substantive change, but for queer people, women, and historically marginalized groups, the act of centering one’s own narrative is a radical act. Telling your story can change your world, because it brings awareness to injustices that are hidden from view. A line from Muriel Rukeyser’s poem The Speed of Darkness rings in my mind like a bell: “The universe is made of stories, not atoms.” But how do we reach the circumference from the center? How do we understand our world through making art?

Hilma af Klint knew she could succeed in this project by rendering her philosophies into paintings. She aimed to “discover real insights about our existence on earth in relation to the centre of the universe.” In Body Work, Febos argues we understand our world through The Erotic, a term borrowed from Audre Lorde’s essay, “The Uses of the Erotic.” Febos writes: 

The erotic is a ‘power which rises from our deepest and nonrational knowledge. Once we have experienced it, [Lorde] claims, we must hold the rest of our lives to that higher standard. ‘Our ertoic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives.’

This means when you’re writing your essay about those red checked sneakers you must embrace your own erotic knowledge. You must write and revise into the specificity of your experience until you reach the truth of what’s happened. In revision, you’re learning to erase any trace of the paradigms that made a little boy think it’s okay to kick sand in your face, destroy your art for his pleasure, or access your body for the same reason. In revision, you’re erasing any part of yourself that believed he had those rights, too. In revision, you’re tending to the past, tending to the future, and making what was once invisible, seen.

In the final chapter of Body Work, Febos draws on medieval religious texts, contemporary theories in trauma recovery, and her own experience to figure the process of writing about trauma as a return: an evolution that leads one back to the self. For Febos, the return begins with confession, is followed by a change of heart, somatic integration, and finally a return to the self and to community. Not only can this process be politically meaningful, it can also be a sacred act. She writes, “What I have described is a creative experience, a moment of inspiration, and isn’t it also a spiritual one?”

Hilma af Klint would agree. In her later work, af Klint wanted to see beyond the atom; she wanted to see through it to the divine. Within her Paintings for the Temple, af Klint created the Tree of Knowledge series, a group of eight small watercolors that can be viewed individually, in pairs and trios, or as a complete set of the holy eight. There is an erotic energy flowing through these pieces (No. 5 and No. 7b below), not merely due to certain visual motifs. In the contrasts between black and white, containment and freedom, fluidity and structure, connection and division, af Klint creates a sense of movement and upward growth. Art critic Julia Voss writes these paintings, “generate their own proportions; they might be tiny, like a bacterium in a petri dish, or colossal, like the universal.” Even in Voss’s analogy I see concentric circles, I see the navel, I see the ways in which our stories add up to something much bigger than words on a page.

In their work, Febos and af Klint are thinking in similar terms. They are interested in pursuing a kind of knowledge that is not only factual and reasoned, but rooted in the body and the spirit as much as it is in the imaginative mind. After all, reason only gets us so far. And often the place it leads us in our art practices, in practicing care for ourselves and our communities, is not the place where we need to be, but where we think we need to be. Febos writes us a prescription to treat art-making as holy, a way to commune with ourselves and our faith, and turn that practice into a means for pursuing social justice and change. 

What is truly revolutionary about Melissa Febos’ Body Work and Hilma af Klint’s oeuvre is the dedication to envisioning new futures that sings through their work. These artists teach us that the future is made brighter and better by treating art-as-practice with reverence and open-hearted curiosity. Our work is to see clearly, feel deeply, to write and create truthfully, to keep the channel between ourselves and beyond open. To remind yourself of this work, you scribble two quotes from Febos and af Klint on a Post-It that you’ll keep on your desk. From the introduction of Body Work: “Fuck them. Write your life.” You underline the fuck twice before adding a line from af Klint’s diary: “The world keeps you in fetters; cast them aside.”