Exile and Pride

“How do we construct and reconstruct self-love in the face of the corrosive dehumanization and abusiveness oppression inflicts?”

Morales poses a question that her own work and Clare’s work seek to answer. The ideas of pride and witness are important to answering this question, and Clare will dive into them with depth.

“Skin of our bodies and skin of the world. This is how to understand the land as well as the flesh. To be unsingular, fractured and whole, grieving and proud, in universal solidarity and difficult alliance, never to allow urgency or burning injury to keep us from demanding the whole, intricate, inclusive story.”

The image of skin and reaching beneath the skin is crucial to Exile and Pride and especially to the final essay. In associating skin with both the human body and the Earth itself, Morales positions humanity as continuous with its environment (paradoxically, as skin itself would seem to constitute a barrier). This lays the groundwork for the collection’s exploration of The Impact of Environmental Degradation on Marginalized Communities. Morales also mentions the importance of crafting an “inclusive” story, which speaks to the theme of The Intersections of Disability, Gender, and Sexuality, as all of those identities are essential to forming an inclusive world.

“I mean the hay pastures, trees, rocks, beaches, abandoned lots, kitchen tables, and sunflowers out back that have held and sustained us. I mean how we have fled from and yearned toward home. In the end, I mean a deeply honest multi-issue politics that will make home possible.”

The description of Oregon is detailed in its imagery, which encompasses both natural and human-made environments and elements. Using anaphora, the repetition of an introductory word or phrase, Clare transitions from a description of home as a physical place to a broader idea of what home means and what home could mean with the right political outlook.

“I want my gendered story to be one of many stories that defy, bend, smash the gender binary.”

The gender binary is a concept that Clare writes against. Though he does not use “genderqueer” as his identity in the original 1999 edition of the text, the idea of existing outside the traditional man/woman binary is heavily present. Here, Clare also speaks explicitly about how he envisions personal narrative working to further social justice.

“Rather, these stories rely upon the perception that disability and achievement contradict each other and that any disabled person who overcomes this contradiction is heroic.”

The ideas of pity and charity are important to Clare’s disability politics. Clare argues that the idea of “overcoming” is extremely detrimental to the community, as it is a form of ableism that pushes people with disabilities to adhere to able-bodied norms.

“Rather home starts here in my body, in all that lies imbedded beneath my skin.”

Clare often uses the image of skin in conjunction with reaching toward his most inner self. The body is Clare’s home, and the truth of his home lies deeper than the exterior of his appearance.

“They mark the jagged edge between self-hatred and pride, the chasm between how the dominant culture views marginalized peoples and how we view ourselves, the razor between finding home, finding our bodies, and living in exile, living on the metaphoric mountain.”

Clare connects The Concepts of Exile and Belonging, the body as home, and the mountain as the symbol of overcoming. This blending of themes and images stylistically reflects the intersectionality of his narratives.

“Living now on the edge of corn country, I am the writer who wants to make sense.”

Clare’s use of rhetorical questions throughout the text demonstrates what he here describes as the desire to “make sense.” He is not necessarily soliciting answers but trying to construct some sort of understanding of the complexities, contradictions, and nuances of disability and LGBTQIA+ studies. 

“I have filled my house with photographs, maps, stones, shells, sand dollars, fir cones, and wood to remind me of the landscape I still call home, a landscape that includes the sights, sounds, and smells of logging and commercial fishing.”

The imagery of the items in Clare’s house illustrates his connection to home even in his period of exile. He has pieces of his past with him, though he cannot return to or fully recreate that past.

“My loss of home, my exile, is about class.” 

Clare connects class to exile, demonstrating the role of classism and class inequality in his identity formation. He cannot return to a place where he cannot find and maintain gainful employment.

“These problems are the connective tissue that brings the words queer, class, and exile together.”

The intersection of Clare’s rural and LGBTQIA+ identities informs his exile. He leaves Port Orford because he cannot live his authentic life or find financial success, leading to his continuing exile. Clare’s choice of “connective tissue” as a metaphor for this intersectionality reflects the work’s ongoing interest in the body as a way of thinking about connection and disconnection.

“They are not brutes by virtue of being loggers. Or if they are, then so am I, so is Jim, and so are the journalists who write about the bumper stickers they find on loggers’ pickups. Do these journalists ever look for bumper stickers on logging executives’ sedans?”

Clare complicates the typical environmentalist view of loggers as intentional butchers of trees, illustrating that everyone in lumber communities is complicit in the environmental destruction. He encourages activists to target the executives and corporations that make the most money off environmental degradation.

“Part of the answer lies inside capitalism, that economic system we’ve been brainwashed to accept as inevitable, a system that insists upon profit as the supreme value.”

Clare brings in his socialist stance when discussing the destruction of the natural environment. He explains that capitalism’s emphasis on profit leads to the devaluing of nature and the environment. His description of capitalist indoctrination also draws an implicit parallel between the propaganda Clare encountered in Port Orford and the propaganda targeting society at large; this encourages readers to empathize with rural and working-class communities.

“In the eyes of many rubes, particularly white and/or nondisabled folks, the freak show probably was one big melting pot of difference and otherness. At the same time, the differences among the various groups of people who worked as freaks remain important to understanding the freak show in its entirety.”

Clare discusses the similarities and differences among freak show performers, including those who were disabled and those who were people of color. Using the term “melting pot” to describe such shows, Clare harkens ironically to American ideals of equality; given the oppression and discrimination marginalized groups have faced and continue to face, these ideals clearly fall short.

“This collision of histories leads me to think about the act of witnessing. Are there kinds of freakdom—public stripping, the unabashed staring on street comers, the exhibition of nondisabled people of color kidnapped to the United States, the display of cognitively disabled people as non-human—that we need to bear witness to rather than incorporate into our pride? How does witness differ from pride? What do they share in common?”

The dichotomy between pride and witness is integral to the “freaks and queers” essay. Pride pushes toward self-love, while witness focuses on understanding and mourning the pain of the past. Clare yearns to find pride in his disabled identity, but there is much of history he still must bear witness to.

“How are our sexual desires expressed and represented? What are the differences between wanted and unwanted sexual gaze? When does that gaze define our sexualities for us, many times in degrading and humiliating ways? And when does that gaze help us create ourselves as sexual beings?”

These questions about sex and sexuality are important in the context of objectification, especially of people with disabilities. Clare explains that some people with disabilities almost yearn for sexual objectification, as they are often not perceived as sexual beings or as having sexual desires.

“Taken side by side, the images of Ed and Ellen ask questions about social change and assimilation, invisibility and representation, stereotypes and self-images, self-determination and sexuality.”

Like much of Exile and Pride, Clare’s exploration of images in “reading across the grain” culminates in questions rather than answers. In this case, the image of Ed sitting mid-conversation says something different than the Playboy images of Ellen posed carefully and sexually, but Clare suggests that both push back against stereotypes surrounding disability.

“Or possibly with the memory of how my body felt swimming in the river, chinook fingerlings nibbling at my toes. There are a million ways to start, but how do I reach beneath the skin?”

Reaching beneath the skin appears again as an image. Clare begins these lines with a description full of sensory details before moving into the question of finding a way to dive deeper to become more vulnerable on the page.

“I watched from the other side of a stone wall, a wall that was part self-preservation, part bones and blood of aloneness, part the impossible assumptions I could not shape my body around.”

Clare cannot shape his body around the ideals of femininity, as he does not feel feminine. His relationship to femininity is further shaped by the abuse he endures and the experience of living with his cerebral palsy, both of which impact his body. The image of “aloneness” as having “bones and blood” evokes the alienation Clare feels within and from his own body.

“Only here did I have a sense of body. Those stones warm in my pockets, I knew them to be the steadiest, only untouched parts of myself. I wanted to be a hermit, to live alone with my stones and trees, neither a boy nor a girl.”

Though he would not begin using the label until years after Exile and Pride’s publication, Clare here illustrates his genderqueer identity. The connection of the stones to bodily safety further illustrates his connection to and love for nature and his dissociation from his body during moments of trauma.

“What better way to maintain a power structure—white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, a binary and rigid gender system—than to drill the lessons of who is dominant and who is subordinate into the bodies of children.”

Clare explains how child abuse, like the abuse he suffered, reaffirms problematic societal power structures. He learned what it was to be a girl under the abuse of his father, learning who held power and who did not.

“More than once I wished to amputate my right arm so it wouldn’t shake. My shame was that bald.”

Clare is particularly vulnerable in these sentences. The short, punchy second sentence drives home the shame he felt and hints at the implicit shame he feels about having been ashamed of his cerebral palsy.

“I turn my pockets and heart inside out, set the stones—quartz, obsidian, shale, agate, scoria, granite—along the scoured top of the wall I once lived behind, the wall I still use for refuge.”

Clare can still use the stones for comfort during moments of trauma or trauma remembrance, but he is now more connected to his body. He no longer needs to dissociate or hide from who he truly is, which reflects the growth and change in his identity.