TRANSITORY EDEN

EXCERPT

(…)

Do you feel it?

Fear does not need

a name to exist, and

the body—it learns long

before the mind takes form.

Caught somewhere between resistance and surrender, she stiffens. Her skin, paler than the rice spread out in the sun to dry, begins to rage at her, howling with the force of a thousand tempests.

There is a world within her skin.

It has always been that way.

People do not talk much about skin in polite company, at least not where anyone can hear. Yet, skin—this organ so evident, so unavoidably present—has a peculiar way of speaking without needing permission. It tells of climates endured, of the food savored, and of hours beneath suns that rose and fell in different lands. It is an involuntary messenger that carries its wearer’s history silently, but never invisibly. It yokes its bearer to an old load, revealing a bit of who one is yet all that one can never become. Indeed, it is as much a map of one’s existence as any chronicle etched with deliberate markings, betraying one’s narrative before the lips can form a single sentence.

“There were times when the market was silent,” she recalls.

“Times when the streets emptied, and the world burned.”

(…)

___________________________________

The work is included in the 19th edition of the interdisciplinary journal Tvergastein, “in which we challenge the notion of ‘the body’ : a physical condition for our existence as we know it and an often-overlooked part of everyday life. Through an exploration of the many bodies that constitute life on this planet—whether that’s a human body, a more-than-human body, or a body politic—we hope to uncover only a fraction of the ways our bodies are subject to material and conceptual disruption. We are especially concerned with the social grounds from which ideas about the body and bodily practices are produced. As we witness the constant brutalization of bodies around the world, we ask both ourselves and our readers to critically examine how the body can serve as a site of pain, exploitation, and domination but also of pleasure, care, and resistance. We offer this issue as a space to illuminate these ideas, and as an interdisciplinary journal of the environment, development, and culture, we editors are delighted to present a diverse collection of submissions that expand Tvergastein’s academic and literary scope.”