"You May Have the Body"
by Hawa Allan
There I was, splayed face-up on my bare mattress. My head, ankles, and forearms poked out of five holes I’d cut into an extra-large, heavy duty garbage bag. I had dragged my bed—usually pinned against the wall—towards the center of the room, and lay there, lights on, waiting for a sign. This was my attempt to create an island of safety from threatened disaster. Not from pathogens this time, but parasites. Bed bugs. My then boyfriend’s place was infested with them.
Upon hearing that news, the long list of mundane items I found in my own apartment—rugs, chairs, sofa, bed—were suddenly foregrounded, no longer props for a setting in which I was the only protagonist. Instead of blurring in my periphery, they were objects of newfound focus I wished I could see with microscopic clarity. They were entire worlds potentially teeming with tiny inhabitants.
Once a domain of hospitality, my apartment had become a site of invasion. But I was still a host. Not the one who welcomed guests, but the one off whom other entities lived. “How can we distinguish between a guest and a parasite?” Jacques Derrida asked in Of Hospitality. His answer to this question is a kind of predetermined right of entry. Given that he was essentially considering the rights of migrants to enter into other countries, Derrida exemplified this as a right of asylum or other legal refuge.
Neither my apartment nor I is a nation, per se, but each has its preconceived borders or “boundaries.” And though I don’t have any written house rules, it seems fairly straightforward that I wouldn’t permit anyone to slip into the crevices of my light fixtures or my bed frame and reemerge while I’m asleep in order to suck my blood. Where the guest is permitted entry, the parasite is lawless. The parasite is “wrong, illegitimate, clandestine, liable to expulsion or arrest.” Therein lies, according to Derrida, the core paradox of hospitality, which is premised upon the ethical ideal of unconditional welcome but only viable if made conditional.
All that said, it is easier to condition entry into your household than into your body. Homes have locks and peepholes drilled into their doors. If someone knocks, we ask who’s there. For the body, it’s true that paradigms of consent govern everything from sexual contact to touching someone’s hair. A person who transgresses physical boundaries can face sharp rebuke or even criminal charges. Yet so much that can ravage the body is imperceptible until it has already entered.
You only know you have bedbugs after you’ve been bitten. A virus is only as apparent as the symptoms that it triggers in your body. There are no conditions and no consent, as parasites and pathogens enter by stealth. They are cat burglars who trip the alarm only once they have already broken inside.
*
In the early stages of the present global pandemic, I asked a scientifically adept acquaintance of mine to explain, in plain English, what a virus actually was. He started to answer, reciting information about proteins, enzymes and RNA. I nodded as he spoke, my mind already wandering back to grade school, when I discovered that I had no interest in how anything—from my body to an automotive machine—actually worked, only that it function as intended.
My mind operates in metaphor. I’ve never had the inclination to dissect anything in order to see what was inside, only to make sense of its relation to other things. My disinterest notwithstanding, I forced myself to look up more information about viruses online. My semantic memory was jogged.
A virus is composed of genes enveloped in a kind of protective coat or bubble that binds to and infiltrates host cells. Once inside, the virus sheds it’s protective layer and uses the cell’s internal mechanism for producing protein to reproduce itself. Once the virus has replicated, perhaps even in the hundreds, it and its clones may escape, often by bursting out of and thereby destroying the host cell. Then the cycle repeats. Though viruses can replicate and evolve, they cannot reproduce without the support of its host. For this reason, among others, a virus is not considered to be a form of life, but only life-like or, as one science journal put it, “on the edge of life.”
Ok, so undead entities that invade and exploit their hosts in order to proliferate. My newfound understanding intact, I wasn’t any less wary.
Before the quarantine, I found myself at a desk in an office building, mulling over a packet of gum and an individual-serving carton of pineapple, strawberry, and orange juice I’d purchased from the small deli in the lobby. I had tucked my hand into my jacket sleeve before opening and closing the door to the office, used my knuckle to both tap the elevator button and my pin number into the device at point-of-sale, then washed my hands three times before returning to my desk.
Yet, sitting there, staring at the juice carton, the paper-wrapped straw, and cardboard-box bearing cinnamon-flavored pellets, I thought of how many other hands must have already touched these items, both inside and outside their coverings. Even if it were possible to use mental magic to make them levitate and unwrap themselves, there was no insulating myself from the touch of “others.” I was at the tail end of a long, global chain of commerce that had been formed by untold hands.
Even so, I had also recently read online about the body’s immune system and its capacity to fight what was foreign. What I could not perceive, and to which I was therefore unable to deny entry, could be fought off by my “antibodies”—a sort of internal alarm system that could determine, engulf, and basically attack what was “not me” in order to eliminate it. Formal explanation aside, I was still left wondering: what would be considered sufficiently threatening to sound my alarm?
I’m always host to a plethora of microorganisms, varieties of mites, and bacteria both “good” and “bad” for which my body is a home. There is plenty that is “not me” that I have not invited for which my body is a tolerant host. Perhaps there is an implicit condition operating within my body, one that tacitly permits entry, not on account of prior invitation or identification, but on the continued maintenance of inner balance. My body is not hostile to what arrives that also allows it to live, allows all of us to exist together.
*
To be clear, I’m not anti-science. I’m just not science-inclined. Zooming incredibly far out, from the perspective of solar systems and galaxies, or zooming very far in, at the level of cells and atoms, makes everything I care about—namely, human interaction at interpersonal and structural levels—disappear.
Perhaps this is why I have only one unaided memory from studying biology. When sitting in the classroom, staring at the blackboard bearing the structure of an atom, with a nucleus like the sun around which electrons revolved like planets, I thought about all of the space between these fundamental elements. I wondered why, if everything could be reduced to these seemingly free-floating factors, I didn’t just fall through my chair.
*
I’ve spent a lot of time meditating on the fact that I don’t exist. One reason, according to the teachings I’ve contemplated, is that what I know as “myself” is really a composite of the contributions of countless people, both known and unknown, whose love, compassion, and hard work are the basis for who I am. My parents fed, clothed, and housed me into maturity; it is only due to teachers that I know how to read and count; every item that I own was conceived of and developed by someone else. I know, very utopian.
The essence of this contemplation has become much more concrete during the pandemic, which has forced those under lock-down to acknowledge that their existence is inextricably linked to the army of agricultural workers, grocery store clerks, truck drivers, warehouse stockists, and delivery persons who remain “on the ground,” doing essential work, while the rest of us who are unessential write emails and hold video-conference calls from our kitchen tables.
I am an end user, which is tech-spawned jargon for the ultimate consumer of a finished product. My apartment walls create only the illusion of isolation, as they are ever permeated by the supply (I must buy food, water, toilet paper) and demands (I must work so I can buy food, water, toilet paper) of capitalism. The global economy is an organism on which I feed.
There are other ways in which I don’t exist. Though I believe that my existence is self-evident, obviously apparent in my immediate experience of “myself”—my mind and my body—the fact that there is a distinction being made between that which is possessed (mind and body) and the one who possesses (whoever says “my”), means that “I” am not any of these entities.
(This is apparently the very same dilemma that snapped Eckhart Tolle out of his suicidal depression. One day, lying in despair, he found himself thinking: “I can’t live with myself any longer.” He then puzzled over who the “I” and “myself” were, resulting in his spontaneous awakening into a world-renowned New Age guru.)
“I,” in other words, am merely a concept held together by my own projection of “myself.” “I” only exist insofar as “I” am an invention of my own perception. So, if I’m not just the assemblage of my “mind” and my “body,” or merely molded like clay by my familial, cultural, national, and socioeconomic pressures, then I’m something... different.
If “I” somehow invent “myself,” then perhaps “I” could reinvent “myself” into something other than a barnacle clung to the sinking ship of late capitalism. I could instead reimagine myself as the host by which the global economy is fed. And instead of being ravaged and overcome, “I,” and “we,” could redirect our lifeblood to inventing a more sustainable, mutually enriching, new sovereignty.
*
There can be “no hospitality, in the classic sense, without sovereignty of oneself over one’s home,” writes Derrida, “but since there is also no hospitality without finitude, sovereignty can only be exercised by filtering, choosing, and thus excluding and doing violence.” Whether considering the human body or the body politic, sovereignty is a matter of deciding what should be allowed in and what should be kept out.
Thinking at the anatomical level about the potential scourge of pathogens and parasites has led me to conclude that my physical body is more discerning and intelligent than any so-called “thinking” person, much less any government. If, as Derrida posed, hospitality is inextricable from violence—from the enforcement of conditions on which exclusion (and, by extension, expulsion) are determined—then my body is much more capable at deciding what should be in and what should be out.
Yes, everyone and everything is more or less the same at the cellular level, and yet before racist eyes these elements collapse into an “Asian” who caused the “Chinese virus” and into policies whereby state-sanctioned antibodies known as ICE agents round up and attack undocumented immigrants as if they were dangerous criminals. Man-made laws and levels of perception that determine inclusion and exclusion are tainted, not conditioned—as the case may be for able bodies—on the continued maintenance of some equilibrium, some internal state that can continue, and perhaps thrive, without any actual danger.
Migrants are caged in the name of preserving the public good. Millions are racially profiled and incarcerated in the name of preserving public safety. My body is quarantined in the name of preserving public health.
Public good, public safety, public health... all monikers that imply some paradise beyond our bars where order, welfare, and security supposedly reign—some place I have never seen or lived in.
They all imply that a grand plan is being applied in the name of preserving life, but in fact, refer to a calculus that has already determined how many of us may be tolerably consigned to death. Executive ramblings about lifting the quarantine in order to resuscitate the economy, among other things, make it obvious that the sanctity of each and every human life is not the highest principle guiding the mechanisms of the government, itself a leech on corporate cash flows.
So, insofar as our bodies are fed, clothed, sheltered, and, yes, confined, it begs the question: for what purpose? It is to attend the illusion of a grand buffet at which only two options are effectively presented—actual death or living death.
*
I couldn’t live in fear any longer, so I hired an exterminator to come over to my apartment and investigate. He arrived with a small dog that proceeded to sniff and snort under my furniture and along the perimeter walls. After some time, he handed me a receipt for the ordeal, with a pencil-written note on the bottom: No bed bugs found.
Hawa Allan writes cultural criticism, fiction, and poetry. Her work has appeared, among other places, in The Baffler, the Chicago Tribune, Lapham's Quarterly, and Tricycle magazine, where she is a contributing editor. Insurrection, a weaving of personal narrative and legal history, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton.
