These subsurface parts

This week's Liminal features a guest post from my friend and multimedia artist Michiko Theurer about community, clunkiness, and how seemingly disparate parts of self can find ways to connect.

Michi adrift in the sea of rocks

Yesterday my friend Michi was sitting beside me at chemotherapy, reading to me from a book of short stories. We met last summer at the Craigardan artists’ residency in the Adirondacks, and she flew all the way from Boulder, Colorado to stay with us this week. Her presence is a gift. Her conversations, her joy in the smallest of things, her desire to help. Michi is a multimedia artist, violinist, a community cultivator, a painter, a dog-lover, tea fanatic, a lover of the outdoors, and much more. Recently she sent me two different sound quilts, one she made alone, and one she crafted with sounds recorded by our fellow Craigardan artists, sounds of the Adirondacks: the birds, the buzz of insects, the rumble of thunder, the hiss of rain. It transported me immediately to my little cabin there.

“I need to come up with a Substack idea for tomorrow, I said in the hospital. Want to write a guest column?”

“I don’t know what I would write about for Liminal,” she said—and then went on to describe a perfect Liminal column. So she stayed up writing last night while I dozed off the initial shocks of chemo.

Thus I will leave off here and allow Michi to share a bit of her own Liminal self:

Jennifer is sitting on the hospital bed that’s not quite raised enough to feel like a proper chair, port connected to IV machine, and I’m trying not to be too solicitous but also not to miss obvious needs. I haven’t been to a chemo session before. She mentions her to-be-written Substack post in a stoic voice that makes me think about how un-fun sitting at a laptop sounds after getting pumped full of strategic poison, and I want immediately to say oh let me do that for you! but I hesitate. I’m not a writer; I’m not Jennifer; what would Jennifer’s readers want to hear from me? In tune as always, Jennifer mentions our dear mutual friend and fellow Craigardan alumna, Jessica Mendoza, and how meaningful her guest post was— about her experience “Being Black, Mexican, and Both.” Jennifer asks if I have had any experiences that resonated with that.

Instantly, yes. I tell her a story: A couple years ago, I was taking a facilitation workshop with a social justice organization, and for one activity they asked us to split into separate race-based groups, caucuses, to help us process certain things in supportive community. The idea was to have a space where we could all let our guards down: White folks could help one another attend to the complex and often unnoticed cargo that comes with growing up and being understood as White, while people of the global majority (i.e., everyone else) could speak freely within a supportive group of people who shared embodied experiences of race-based traumas. The facilitators proposed two groups: one for White and one for for BIPOC identities, and told us that if we were unsure of which group to choose that we should choose whichever one would feel most supportive to us.

(A brief aside: For anyone unfamiliar with the acronym, BIPOC stands for “Black, Indigenous, people of color,” and it’s used especially in the U.S. as a way to note the distinct colonial violences perpetuated against Black and Indigenous people, within and alongside a larger category of “people of color.” Here’s a slightly dated but still useful discussion of the term on Vox. It’s an incredibly useful tool, this acronym, especially because large categories have a tendency to swallow up the most vulnerable individuals within them. And like any tool, it also struggles with some tasks.)

As a biracial woman of Japanese and German ancestry, I panicked when the moderators asked us to choose one of the two categories (White, BIPOC). I worried about joining the BIPOC group: would my presence as a mostly White-passing person trigger the others? But then I thought of joining the White caucus and I felt a part of myself collapse and shrink.

I decided to ask the moderators if there might be a way to have a third group, for anyone who felt racially in-between. There weren’t a huge number of participants total, but I suspected that at least one other person, someone who had shared some of her experiences as a Latina woman who presented as White, might also find it helpful.

I ended up being the only participant who joined the in-between group (they labeled it “multi-racial”). One of the three moderators, a Black biracial woman, generously joined me to lead the “caucus.” Our conversation was light, and I left it feeling intensely alone.

When I shared this with Jennifer, she was angry on my behalf. She also mused about how she didn’t feel herself seeking out the community of other white people in particular. I thought about the private room we happened to be in that day, the way it enabled us to talk freely but also prevented the casual contact with other people undergoing chemo that was afforded by the other, multi-person chemo area where she was often assigned. I thought about Jess’s description of the privilege that White people are given “to be individuals,” and how this privilege is embedded in the values that shape everything from businesses and universities to French universal healthcare systems. “They are not part of an interwoven collective they must answer for; they are singular,” Jess writes. “Of course, this comes with its own issues: Many White people are disconnected from the wrongs of their own people, and, consequently, do not grapple with what it may mean to be a part of a connected community.”

I am deeply grateful for the experience I had at the facilitator workshop, in part because it touched the parts of myself that I doubted (my maternal inheritances of Japanese culture, filtered through my grandparents’ assimilatory response to their internment by the Canadian government during World War II), and affirmed for me that these subsurface parts were real. I’m also grateful because the experience taught me that the parts of me that step confidently into White-dominated spaces could serve as advocates for the parts of me that shrink and diminish in the same light. If you’ve gotten this far and are still interested, you’re welcome to read more about that experience in my multimedia dissertation here – there are a couple poems and some installation art thrown in for good measure. (Technically it’s a musicology dissertation, but my hope is that that’s fairly non-obvious when you read it.) But what I wanted to share here, in this generous, de-categorizing, Liminal space, is what it felt like to tell Jennifer about this experience while we were sitting in the hospital room waiting for the nurse to come administer her chemotherapy.

How sparks of aloneness separated from my story and connected with this other liminal space of IVs and ice hats.

The way the strip of fluorescent lights and the plastic chairs made my body constrict, the way a sip of green tea from a paper cup handed to Jennifer by a nurse and then by Jennifer to me warmed and expanded my body again.

How it felt to pass people in the halls who were each deep in their own experiences, chemo and cancer and life and death all present and mixed in with the pipe-cleaner candy canes hanging from the ceiling panels and the woman in scrubs carefully drawing Christmas baubles on the window across the courtyard. How it all just looked like life from the outside. How (I catch myself) there is no outside.

When Jennifer’s chemo drip started, she was handed a big blue helmet and mitts and slippers made of actual, awful, ice packs, an hour-long layer of searing cold to try to stave off more permanent nerve damage. The mitts made turning pages impossible, so as companion for the day I took on her husband’s usual role of reading aloud to pass the time. I felt inadequate. I wanted to stay present with her, and at the same time whenever my eyes shifted up from the book I lost my place and took us both out of the story. Writing this post feels similar: why is my attention on a personal experience from a couple years ago when I’m here to be with my friend Jennifer now? I waver and struggle and fail to hold the obvious answer, that the story is what the moment needs.

The hospital didn’t feel like a liminal space, at least not in a misty sort of in-between way: the doctor spoke loudly and rapidly in her too-small office, the floors and lights were hard. But of course liminal spaces aren’t (only) misty; they’re loud and they’re clunky or they’re small and isolated or they’re full of freezing cold undignified hats. And maybe what I’m looking for is this: that clunky words, uncomfortable moments, even if they don’t feel like the right ones, even if they feel like ice, are also sometimes exactly the ones you need to connect, if you happen to be with a brilliant friend with a journalist’s knack for asking the right question and making space for whatever follows.