to be at once - Kourtney Nham

by Kourtney Nham

she1 asks how one survives in a body so aestheticized that it both forecloses and invites injury.

so I excavate, open wide to find myself in a bookstore at thirteen where I was first taught to trace what it means to be at once on display and imperceptible, flesh and thing, porcelain body and animate machine, in the place of where a person should be.

gouge deeper to unbury myself at fifteen, seventeen, twenty, studying iterations of the same lesson. he2 says accessory, says uncomplicated, says “symbol of the rape of third world nations” I master the prescriptive art of transforming dread and rage into polite smiles and safe maneuvers. perhaps it was in those moments or somewhere between where I began to map a history across oceans and borders, spanning wars and occupation, over the creation of a specter that looks like me, my mother, my grandmothers, all at the same time.

she asks how one survives, but we’re demanding something beyond survival, beyond an archaeology of battleground bodies. no excavation can unearth what is yet to be constructed, and I am tired of clinging onto my personhood like someone is trying to rip me out of it. so we are trying to hold one another instead, gentle but firm, and maybe we are practicing what it really means to be at once seen and safe.