Monday, June 1, 2009

Question 1: Describe your birth (in 500 words or less)

J’Lyn Chapman

It began with the beginning of my body. I do not know this part but am certain of it. The ghost was there, crying with every cell splitting. The body happens exponentially. An eye can only see one image at a time. It is questionable if the eye can see movement. The eye can see changes in the body but not movement. Cognitive dissonance connects changes. We call this animation. Our love for one another is connected to movement. All my love for you, friends, began with the beginning of my body, and the ghost was crying in the matrix. I could not hear in the beginning. I do not remember learning sound. What is a word for sound equivalent to sight? I have sound. I have hearing. I am not deaf. But the ability to hear is the least of all the senses if The World is what you’re after, and it also has no brief noun. I am certain the ghost was here to be heard. I am not dreaming about the true ghost! My mother could hear my heart but could not see me. I began before technology began. Then I came out, and the doctor said, it’s a girl. And my mother gave me a strange name she had determined and practiced pronouncing.


Richard Froude

Birth:

I am trying to think about mass the same way I think about movement. Whenever this happens, I rely on instinct over patterns we learnt at the hospital. I think we stayed longer than the others, visiting hours, quite kindly, adapted. I could, after all, collapse the question with a phonecall but I have agreed to maintain this consistent narrative weight.

Later, in school, I learned the appropriate names. I learned how to recognize and how they could be rhymed. Estella, you’ve lost 83 pounds. This separation, a rendezvous, a closeness to earth: it could be a story about aeroplanes or sentences or newspaper clippings but it isn’t. The answer is a blizzard, uncommon to the area at the time.


Bhanu Kapil

Breech. Under a lebanese cedar. In the maternity wing of Hillingdon Hospital. A white house. Delivered by "Dr. Whitehouse." The nurses said: "Ooh, maybe she'll go to America when she grown up." Was born with blue eyes. The first Indian baby to be born on that ward. The nurses begged to hold me, as I was unbearably pretty and a radical change from all the regular white babies. My mother begged the nurses to let me sleep with her the night-time through. They said yes, enchanted by the whole situation.





(Submit responses to question 2 - Tell me about your death - to redroverinterview [at] gmail [dot] com.)

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