My Body Keeps Your Secrets: Dispatches on Shame and Reclamation

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I thought about taking those questions out, but then I do think that sometimes it’s important to think through things publicly that you don’t have answers to. When I wrote the note, I was in the middle of a period of (literal) isolation having tested positive for Covid. I slept most of the time, ate pizza, watched a trashy film, then slept again. But once I started feeling a little better, my mind entered its own struggle. I always thought that by ignoring my assault I could erase itIt was such an “aha!” moment for me – or series of moments. Because I had said nothing about my rape for ten years. It’s not like I read The Body Keeps the Score and was immediately like, “That’s me”. It was a series of different moments leading up to the realisation that, “Oh, this thing affected me”, even though I was determined not to let it affect me. That’s what I think is so interesting about this is that we are taught, especially as women and people of marginalised genders, that the best way to demonstrate courage is to try to overcome things and not let them affect us. It’s really valorised; I certainly valorised it myself. For the first time in my life, I understood fully how much time and energy I had spent fighting my own pain. And I saw clearly what I had to do now. I had to let the pain in.

Freya Bennett for Ramona Magazine, 9 September 2021: My Body Keeps Your Secrets: Interview with Lucia Osborne-Crowley We have been taught that we will stop hating ourselves, stop being shamed, if we just change ourselves. But it doesn't work like that. It the kind of shame that comes from a society again and again that your not enough, that you are unworthy. It is the kind of shame that passed down by traumatized mothers. The kind of shame handed to us by acts of violence and sexual entitlement. It is the kind of shame that gets under our skin through racist and sexist remarks in hallways and in knowing the next character assassination is always around the corner.https://www.smh.com.au/culture/books/the-most-anticipated-books-of-2021-20201226-p56q8d.html -- Melanie Kembrey * The Sydney Morning Herald * This book brilliantly interrogates our relationship to our bodies but also to those around us, inhabiting each daily, hourly, minute-by-minute contradiction that having a body, and so being alive, entails. A testament to the power of externalising our own stories so as to understand them through others’ eyes, demonstrating how inextricably connected each of us ultimately is. Her writing is beautiful, unflinching and clear and, most importantly, it renders shame visible – a material thing that, having been sewn into the body, can also be cast off.’ I have seen the expression on men’s faces so many times. That feeling like they know, on some level, that they have mistreated you. That they shouldn’t have ghosted you. They know they should feel bad about this, but they don’t. It’s like they knew they were supposed to feel guilty, but they also didn’t care”.

My Body Keeps Your Secrets is engrossing, fierce and shows the writer’s intellect and talent, but as the journalistic follow-up to a straight memoir is less rigorous than expected. But there is no doubting that Osborne-Crowley is playing an important role in raising the profile of marginalised experiences of gender inequality, and for that fact alone, this book is worthy of a read. I think if you use straight dialogue, more of a Q&A, you are sacrificing some of the tools that you can use to really hold people in the story. I wanted these people to feel like characters as much as interview subjects. I think it’s really hard to do well, but I wanted at least to try.

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Shame is one of the huge topics of this book, and I wanted to talk about the shame that is shared by “women and non-binary people all over the world”. We are all susceptible to shame, so why is shame different for people of marginalised genders? It’s another thing that straight journalism is quite bad at. People don’t ask these questions in journalism because, traditionally, journalists like to be authoritative: I’m reporting this story, so I know what I’m doing. I think it’s interesting to be able to say that I don’t necessarily know the answers. Ultimately, I think, the best thing to do as a journalist is to be honest – about your own vulnerabilities and your own fears. More and more often, I tell the people that I’m interviewing exactly what I’m worried about and what I know and don’t know. No one is neutral and it’s a problem to pretend that you are. You broach the topic of the ethical position of the journalist: the question of how much scope there is to intervene, or reveal your proximity to your subject. “Am I just here to observe,” you ask, “to render this problem into something concrete without intervening in this moment. Is that all journalism can do? Is it enough?” Do you have answers to these questions, or is it important that they remain open? Even though we all experience shame in the same way, there are people whom society shames more than others. One of the shame researchers I rely on a lot says that shame comes, in part, from being cast out from society: it’s about rejection or alienation. I think that’s why shame is so structural: it’s the group saying, “Here’s what we want you to be, and you have failed.” So society says: “We want gender to be binary and if you don’t fall into those categories, then we will shame you for it.” It’s the same with society telling you what your body is supposed to look like and how thin you’re supposed to be. Trauma, as described in Morton’s book, can be caused by many things including racism, family, bullying, accidents, and grief, but in society today it is more commonly associated with violence or abuse. As discussed in both books, no trauma should be compared to another and the aftereffects of trauma can vary from person to person regardless of how ‘serious’ the legal system or society might deem the catalytic experience or experiences.

I am determined to let myself feel whatever I need to feel, be that pain or joy. And I want to feel joy. I do want to live. My Body Keeps Your Secrets: Interview with Lucia Osborne-Crowley -- Freya Bennett * Ramona Magazine * Yes, and I think for anyone else who’s struggling to articulate or to talk to other people about these kinds of experiences, those other writers are invitations to further reading – they’re very much portals into this community and these conversations. What you were saying about language being both a prison and a freedom made me think about the paradox around bodies and trauma. I think the book is really eloquent on the subject of the body as a prison: it’s “the body we are forced to keep, the body we have to continue living in through every nightmare.” But thenThe Body Keeps the Score makes you aware of how much our body offers us the chance to heal. I was wondering what your thoughts are on that?The voices of women, trans and non-binary people around the world, and the author’s own deeply moving testimony, cohere into an immersive polyphonic memoir that tells the story of the young person’s body in 2021. In this boldly argued and widely researched work about reclaiming our bodies from shame, Osborne-Crowley establishes her credentials as a key intersectional feminist thinker of her generation.