Beside One's Self: Homelessness Felt and Lived

CONCLUSION

130 C O N C L U S I O N Remaking Homelessness Let the atrocious images haunt us. —Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others “I won’t look while I’m doing this,” she said, “as I’ll bias myself.” Her face became distant as she focused her seeing self through the hands that palpated my belly. What could she have seen anyway? There was yet opaque skin that I’d stared at often enough myself. I imagined the small boy who lay there and his wonder at the handprints moving across the domed ceiling above him. Here was another of those silent conversations between bodies—three of them. My body was a witness to a long discussion between my boy and the midwife. I willed myself to be patient. What did he say? What new things could she know of him, of me, that I didn’t know myself? I got the peculiar sense that I was eavesdropping, a sudden sense of my boy who talked to the midwife, my boy who even now, with his own tiny body encased in mine, moved in separate ways to me as he always would. I wondered in what ways the presence of this little spirit had changed my writing over the past six months. Revisiting the work on trauma in chapter 2 I had been particularly conscious of him pressing lightly into the desk edge. The boy would feel the fieldwork too, surely, feel my body both flinching from and moving out to meet with homeless others, feel again those other bodies moving through mine in the night, as I walked, as I wrote. Did he make me see the fieldwork and my own writing differently? Conclusion | 131 What vision of homelessness felt and lived did my strangely doubled body now give rise to? I certainly found myself dwelling more on what would drive the sexual and physical assault of a child, on what could possibly enable such violent confusion of the body boundaries that vulnerability seemed only to make clearer and more defensible. I also wondered if an unborn child could feel homeless, or, unaware yet of what expanses lay on the outside, could only feel tied to place in a way it never would be again. And yet not every child was condemned to fight for the emplacement it lost in birth, only some, too many though, would again and again feel the tyranny of being cut free, of being loosened into a world where no other life-stays would emerge. Most centrally though, my pregnancy made more obvious to me what had been the case all along. It was exactly transactions of feeling between bodies that I was interested in. I was a midwife. I was trying to give felt articulation to other lives, palpating for the lived, setting aside temporarily the vision offered by science and medicine for a form of bodily communication , for a sense of the body felt and lived. Further, I was, perhaps most of all, midwife to my own body rather than to those of others. My writing , my boy brought home to me, was the struggle to surface all of those bodies whose corporeal inclusion in the process of research had changed my way of seeing and being in the world. Specifically, my writing was the struggle to give just and proper place to the emotional and corporeal experiences of those homeless people taking part in my research, to those somatic experiences that had haunted because they had not been let go, because full sense had not yet been made of them. In this book, my aim has been to make better sense of somatic experience —my own and others’—and to chart the process through which I have sought to remake homelessness as felt and lived. My aim has been to move from simply feeling to communicating feeling. I have moved from the gut feeling that my past projects were not done with to more concretely reflecting on such feeling as an analytical opening. I have also moved from an implicit engagement with homelessness felt and lived to finally more clearly name—via an exploration of displacement—some of the feelings at the core of homelessness and how these are negotiated, managed, and survived. 132 | Beside One’s Self I still, however, do not imagine this conclusion as the end point of such movements, and though the...