Natalie E. Illum…   is a poet, performer and disability activist. Bring her stumbling to your city.

Tonight I am seeing #roxanegay discuss her memoir Hunger at All Souls Church. It is a powerful book about the body: what is done to it and what we do to it to protect ourselves. To make ourselves feel safe, or loved or worthy, or to begin to discover how to do that, even in our 40s. What privileges certain bodies have, or don’t. The traumas of my disabled body are not the same as the author’s. But I did recognize myself throughout the book as a disabled woman. The situations I put myself in to feel “normal,” what the trauma told me it would take to love me, to tolerate me. I’ve been in that space, and spent years writing poems and essays about it. I’ve said and done things that make those words true. I’ve put my body in ableist situations to prove I could be there, even when it meant dealing with consequences that many people don’t experience. Like Roxane, I’ve scanned rooms for a comfortable chair, for a hand rails or an elevator, or something that doesn’t erase me from the room by having no room for my body. I’ve wanting to be a wallflower. My disability is visible and yet some people will walk right into me. Throughout the book I kept wondering if Roxane noticed any similarities with her experiences and how they overlap with the disabled, many of whom have also been violated and sexually assaulted, and shunned, and shamed, and turn inward on themselves. I was glad to see this page. I wish we could talk about these intersections more. I know we could help each other be seen.  Read the memoir! and learn more here https://www.facebook.com/roxanegay74/  

#Feminism #intersectionality #hungermemoir #hunger #thebodyisnotanapology #nobodyshaming #disabled #disability #writer #365dayswithdisability #dclife