There’s this idea that consciousness is attached to one’s experience of the body. And I think self-consciousness is rooted to the navel
A still from Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag
As I navigate the cusp of the Gregorian calendar year’s end I am following, closely, the immediate fate of my navel. I have always cherished the word, Omphalos, the notion of a central site from which power emanates. Since the Ancient Greeks, attempts have been made to locate the earth’s navel. I place the word within the universe of another word, ‘umbilical’. I have been obsessed with seeking the umbilical in nature, and I discover it delightfully nestled within moong dal, for example, as it surfaces after I have left it to sprout for a day or two, or when I sow mustard seeds in a pot, or when I’m harvesting apples and take great care to ensure the stem is preserved with each pluck, because the fruit’s shelf left is dependent on this arboreal remnant.
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Beyond the botanical, I have been seeking the umbilical within feminist discourse through citation and by tracing systems of legacy. I love to keep altering the expanse of my feminist ancestral lineages as I expose myself to more diverse and radical systems of thought and belief, and I enjoy how my world expands. I think of the umbilical as a form of rootedness. When I look at my navel, which has always been well-liked, I don’t see void or absence, but I glimpse, invisibly, at that which links me to my mother. I am reminded that I come from her, that my first site of dwelling was within her body.
The word umbilical also reminds me of the triangulation between maternal womb, foetus, and placenta, and all the subversive configurations the female body makes in order to accommodate an embryo, become host to it without treating it as alien object…the suppression of the immune system as a gesture of invitation, an allowance that is made for the generation and the gestation of new life. Sometimes I wish more intellectual and creative energies were focussed on such life-sustaining physiological gestures rather than patriarchy’s aggressive death march. It has historically been the role of male patriarchs to call for war, to kill, to destroy life, and through the centuries, it has been women who have mourned, who have grieved the senseless loss of their children, who have performed the labour of re-peopling the world.
I was struck by a piece of dialogue in the marvellous second season of Fleabag, in which the character played by the show’s creator, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, has a cocktail conversation with a woman who has recently been awarded for her acumen as a business woman. Over Martinis, the fifty-something businesswoman articulates a thought she’d had some days ago. She says, “Women are born with pain built in… it’s our physical destiny. Period pains, sore boobs, childbirth, you know. We carry it within ourselves throughout our lives. Men don’t. They have to seek it out. They invent these gods and demons and things just so they can feel guilt about things, which is something we do very well on our own. And then they create wars, so they can feel things and touch each other, and when there aren’t any wars they can play rugby. And we have it all going in here, inside…”
If we look beyond the essentialist nature of what she’s saying and replace the word ‘woman’ with female bodies, so as not to conflate sex with gender, I think there’s something vital to this piece of casual conversation, something inherently wise that is best embodied in the word umbilical and also in the word jouissance.
It has to do with the idea of consciousness being so deeply attached to one’s experience of the body, and pain as a form of information and intelligence. When you grow up being made constantly aware that your body is different, and if female or trans or queer is essentially a deviation from the norm, which is cis-heterosexual male, then you receive the world at a very cellular level. From the onset of puberty, for instance, I became conscious of my body’s weaknesses and its strengths, and admitting to myself that I felt frequently defeated by my uterus and its regular shedding was part of my experience of living.
Historically speaking, female was considered the weaker sex because of this shedding, which was considered impure, while men were allegedly stronger because they didn’t undergo this physiological process. In so much of Western philosophy one reads about the schism between the body and the mind, and the centrality of mind as the seat of ideas. Women were kept outside the realms of discourse because their lives were deemed too rooted to the body and to emotion. In much of Indian philosophy, too, you have this notion of the body as a kind of host or a shell, something that is base and that must be left behind in order to find nirvana.
When I think of the word umbilical, I imagine all the bodies whose self-consciousness is somehow rooted to the navel, to the maternal, or to the opposite of the patriarchal. I don’t think of the cutting of the umbilical cord at birth as a severance so much as an act of completion, when the foetus has derived all it could from the maternal body, from the placenta, and is now ready to attempt a kind of singular, though still dependent, existence.
Any moment now my navel will turn itself outwards to accommodate that which has been nesting inside me for the last 31 weeks. This is how I will remember the end of 2021.
Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D’Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.
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