Four Julys ago, a few hundred feet from the Puget Sound, while I was still raw and aching over a rupture in one of my maternal relationships, I sat on the wooden floor of an old chapel while Bhanu Kapil led a guided meditation.
Driftwood on the beach at Fort Worden in Port Townsend, Washington. In the distance, a sailboat is illuminated by an orange setting sun.
First, she asked us to close our eyes and imagine a net. When we saw a clear image of it, we were supposed to allow something to occupy the net. The object that appeared would be a representation of what we most needed on our journey, as well as the universe’s gift to us. I waited for something to appear, but nothing did. Eventually, my mind drifted to the feeling of free-fall I’d been experiencing in the weeks and months leading up to that moment, and I realized the net itself was what I needed.
Something to keep me from falling into the abyss. Something to help me feel held.
Next, Bhanu instructed us to imagine we were sitting alongside a river, in the middle of a charnal ground.
“Tell me what you know about dismemberment,” she said.
I wasn’t sure what a charnal ground was, so when I closed my eyes, I envisioned charred ground. Amongst the burned-out coals, I noticed three glowing-red chunks. I didn’t need to get close to them to know they were the three biggest pieces of my heart.
She asked us another question:
Who was it that made your mother suffer?
While I was meditating on the glowing embers of my heart, wondering if I would ever find a way to piece its fragments back together, a woman with an Irish accent walked through the front door of the chapel. Bhanu padded across the floor and explained in a quiet, smooth voice, that we were in the middle of a meditation. I could feel the woman pausing to watch us before she turned to go, and in that moment of hesitation, Bhanu gave the woman the opportunity to contemplate the same question she asked us:
Who was it that made your mother suffer?
She told us we’d be leaving the chapel to walk through a small forested labyrinth next, and as we rolled onto our knees and pressed ourselves skyward, she told us we should conjure the energy of someone to bring with us on our journey, and also that as we left the chapel, we should throw something—anything that wasn’t serving us—in the bin.
After the session outside was over, I skipped dinner to write this:
I am in the jungle now, but I’ve forgotten the question. What was the question? Was there a question? There was an answer—the answer was “Nothing, no one.” The answer was “Nothing, no one,” but what was the question?
I am in the jungle now, and all I can think about is what I just threw away. Did I really throw it away? Was the bin large enough for that need to justify myself? The need to explain why I am not difficult and too much and not enough and incomplete? I put it in the bin and now I am enough. But I’ve forgotten the question. There was a question, wasn’t there? Am I enough now? That wasn’t the question.
I am in the jungle now, and the world is shifting under my weight. The pine cones crack like too-stiff knees and I take careful steps as though I, too, am arthritic. What was the question? Was I supposed to bring someone with me? I come to another threshold and the jungle disappears. “No, no, turn back,” I say. I have to find the question.
I am in the jungle again now, and I see the shimmering threads of a spider web stretched between rigid green leaves like those of a magnolia tree. Magnolias remind me of Louisiana, where I was born, where their sultry scent saturates the hot, wet air. I feel Carolynne’s joy radiating from the space beside me. Her smile warms my face. “Wouldja look at that?” she says with a sigh. Soft breezes blow through and the spider hanging in her web rides them like waves. Carolynne nudges me towards the other side of the bush and I forget I’ve forgotten the question.
We are in the jungle now, on the other side of the bush, and I see another web, another spider. The sun is hitting all the strands and her home looks like a dryer sheet—mottled with transparent and opaque specks. Carolynne pushes me closer. What was the question? The spider says: “The one thing you need to know about me is that my father left when I was six. All I ever wanted was a family.” I close my eyes—this is the only way I’ve been able to see Eleanor lately. Instead of the woman with veiny hands and a slightly stooped back, I see a little girl with curly red hair and coke-bottle glasses. I remember the question: Who was it that made my mother suffer?
Which one?
I am next to the river, and there are shards of bone and dark ash all around me. I exhale and the air from my lungs rekindles, turns red, three coals. I lean closer. The red chunks are throbbing in sync with the pounding in my eardrums. I touch my hand to my chest and the coals feel comforted. I look closer. The blazing, beating chunks are flesh. Are mine. Let me tell you what I know about dismemberment: When you become her child, your mother takes your heart in her hands and, if she can, vows to protect it. That’s why, if and when your heart is ripped away from her, she holds on tight. So tight that some of it—chunks of red flesh or gooey pink residue—get left behind.
I have three mothers. They all held tight.
We are in the jungle now, and they whisper through the leaves that there is a third spider, a third mother. I see her hiding under the brown velvet shade. She is darker than the others. Brooding. People tell me I will never understand life until I create a new human myself, and this makes me angry, makes me hear another iteration of “you are not enough.” But I threw that in the bin. I am one month from the age she was when she and her husband conceived me in their minds and in her womb, and I think I am beginning to understand the question.
We are in the jungle now, and a smaller spider, a white one, is traveling between the leaves, unspooling a thread. The first spider taught her to be joyful. The second spider taught her to be gentle. The third spider taught her to sew a story. She is learning a new stitch.
A year ago, having not seen Bhanu in the three years since she led that meditation, I walked from my apartment in London—the place from which Bhanu departed years before to immigrate to the place from which I emigrated years later—to see her perform “an installation, performance, poetry reading or ritual called How to Wash a Heart” at the Institute of Contemporary Art.
I first caught sight of her at the entrance. She stood just inside the doorway, holding a bowl full of pink ice cubes, which she placed, without explanation or comment, into the cupped hands of everyone who passed over the threshold. The heat of our hands melted the ice, which dripped pink droplets onto the floor. On the stage, Bhanu produced an intact ice heart, which, over the course of the event, she maimed. When the house lights re-illuminated the space, what remained was a bowl full of mostly-melted heart-juice, which she carried out to the Mall and dumped in the road leading to Buckingham Palace, “the asshole of empire.”
Bhanu Kapil standing in the middle of the Mall, spitting rose petals atop a puddle of melting hot pink ice cubes.
A few weeks ago, I saw Bhanu again—this time through a screen, while she read from her new book, which shares a name with our most recent encounter. In the time since I last saw her, I’d begun to approach my experience of adoption from new angles. A news article about a little boy who was taken from his home country by a couple who paraded him in front of their followers, collecting gold stars for their selflessness, until he didn’t fit their idea of a son and they decided to “rehome” him, led me to an online community of adoptees. I’ve never felt like I fit in with other adoptees because I’ve always known the main characters in my story—I don’t have the same mountains to climb in terms of searching for my biological family and not having access to my original birth certificate. What I found through this community was that feeling isolated and out of place is itself common among adoptees. People spoke of adoption as having some of the same symptoms of other forms of displacement after incurring the primal wound of being separated from their biological mothers—the pressure to assimilate; the requirement of gratefulness at having been rescued and taken into the new home, coupled with the threat of losing “home” if, by choice or by nature, the adoptee didn’t live according to the script or within the parameters of the adoptive parents; the indelible stain of otherness.
A thumbnail of Bhanu Kapil lighting a candle at the beginning of her reading of “How to Wash a Heart,” alongside the Zoom nameplate for Will Harris.
Bhanu read alongside Will Harris, whose essay Mixed-Race Superman, probed another sort of not-fitting -in-ness—that of being mixed race in a society which is constantly looking for ways to categorize everyone and everything. Interwoven with his own experiences, he wrote about Keanu Reeves and President Obama, noting a difference between them was that Keanu Reeves can shape-shift and is often seen as enigmatic, while Obama, like Harris, can’t choose how to be seen. An identity is placed on them before they open their mouths. He also said when he emphasizes one part of himself, he feels like he is “erasing the other.”
“I feel too few and too many.”
-Will Harris
As a white American-Canadian living in the UK on an Ancestry Visa, I’m aware my immigrant experience is more privileged than most. When people ask me where I’m from, it’s usually from a place of curiosity, rather than derision or xenophobia, and it is only ever based on my accent—never my skin color. I am also never told, and it is never insinuated, I don’t belong in the country in which I was born. Still, these ideas of being too few and too many, of not belonging anywhere, of feeling the precariousness of having one’s security conditioned on compliance, are baked into my being.
I was only able to find a way to move here when I let go of my attempts to make the parents who raised me forget I came from someone else (my visa is through my Scottish biological maternal grandmother, and was obtained through a familial cooperative endeavor completely separate from my adoptive parents). When I’m asked whether I have siblings, I hesitate, because either true answer (yes, I have two biological brothers, and no, because I grew up as an only child within my adoptive family) feels unable to contain the whole truth of my being. When I’m asked where my parents live, I can give an easy answer and say they live in Tanzania/Florida (referring to the parents who raised me), or I can list where each of my three moms live, which will require me to spin out a story most people don’t want to hear when they’re making small talk.
It wasn’t until I heard Bhanu reading the poems—set within a home in which a citizen host (with an adopted child the host/mother calls an “Asian Refugee”) has taken in an immigrant guest with “a precarious visa situation” and proceeded to attempt to micro-manage the guest to fit her desires while projecting a saintly image of herself to her friends—that my mind flashed back to the blocks of ice-heart and the chunks of my throbbing heart-embers.
At the end of the reading, the moderator asked Bhanu and Will if they had any advice for the audience. Bhanu repeated the instruction that brings me back to my fragmented heart:
Tell me what you know about dismemberment.
After the reading, I went to the kitchen to make dinner and realized the beets from that week’s vegetable delivery needed to be eaten. As I chopped them, my hands took on the tinge of Bhanu’s blocks of ice.
While I was cooking, a friend posted a story about a time she tried to donate her hair and it returned to her several months later in an envelope, with the explanation it needed to be in a ponytail, not a braid, to be accepted. This story made me think about how when I was a little girl and asked for a short haircut, I was told I needed to keep my hair long, because my dad liked long hair. I remembered how exhilarated I felt, a few weeks before the meditation with Bhanu, when I disregarded the advice and preferences of the men around me and asked a stranger to chop my hair to my chin.
I thought about the definition of dismemberment:
noun: dismemberment; plural noun: dismemberments
the action of cutting off a person's or animal's limbs.
"graphic pictures of torture and dismemberment"
the action of partitioning or dividing up a territory or organization.
"the dissolution and dismemberment of the British empire"
What I know about it is that my heart has been in pieces for as long as I can remember, and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to sew them back together.
What I know about it is that nothing I have experienced has been more painful than being excised from a family.
What I know about it is that sometimes, when you’re the one holding the knife, dismemberment can be freeing.
What I know about it is this:
It’s exhausting to be a guest
In somebody else’s house
Forever.
Even though the host invites
The guest to say
Whatever it is they want to say,
The guest knows that host logic
Is variable.
Prick me.
And I will cut off the energy
To your life.-Bhanu Kapil
This has become much longer than I anticipated, perhaps because I don’t know how to end this. A few years ago, someone told me, when I said I wasn’t sure how one person could have a place within three disconnected family trees, that perhaps I was my own root, or a new sort of tree, grafted together from different types. I’ve ruminated over what that might mean for a long time.
Like Harris, I am “perpetually confused.” I feel alone in my particular experience, but reminders that others are also forging their identities “in the confusing space between” gives me the comforting feeling of community. I don’t think I’ll ever fit my identity into any group or essay or place, but I do think I’m starting to know myself in spite of myself. I am learning “to embody contradiction,” rather than carve out the parts which don’t fit.
