AN EXCERPT FROM CERVIX; LATIN DERIVATIVE FOR 'NECK'

When I was told the story of creation, I wondered if maybe the fruit we stole wasn’t an apple at all. For the thing that is in my throat, it is dense and heavy. Too much of both. An apple wouldn’t survive like this.
Passed down from mother to daughter.
Mother
Daughter.
It would have bruised and rotted
turned soft and brown where the pressure had been inflicted
shrunken with age.
Whatever is in my throat, it’s certainly not that.
This is enduring.
Simple seeds couldn’t cause this damage.
It has to have a stone;
The original fruit was one with a stone.
We’d swallowed it whole.

We swallowed it whole and it stuck.

Our anatomy isn’t designed to let something like that be forgotten. Whether it was predestined, or arranged as punishment for that first mistake, our first sin, we’ll never know. Of course, it might just be some sick twist of fate. It might be.
But maybe it was a divine hand,
pushing fingers into ripe flesh
fingers through flesh
pushing
fingers all the way through flesh into stone
heels of those hands forcing the pit into the sides of our throats.
Watching as our oesophagus splintered and the stone sunk in
juices trickling downwards
our stomachs sticky with sin.

Over time that original flesh has been digested away, replaced instead, by ours.
Flesh of the fruit turned flesh of the body.
Our throat. Larynx. Oesophagus. All stretching. All taught. Worn thin by the pit that has made its home there.
Our voice stifled
reduced to a whisper.
Every sentence approved or declined by the history in our throats; suffocation as the only guaranteed heirloom. From mother to daughter.
Palms forcing the pit into our throats
hands in our hair
fingers round our neck
nails digging up skin in chunks
heavenly hands squeezing that stone into place.

And so The Creation occurred: the promised recognition of asphyxiation as intimacy. Nonconsensual and the closest thing we’ll come to being welcomed back by the deities that condemned us. Finding comfort in the suffocation. Of course we do, for so long, it is all we’ve known. Unable to say no
Tighter
Tighter please, I don’t want to breathe.
Take it from me

Our throat and reproductive systems grow together. Around day 15 of embryonic development, two depressions are made; two openings. One becomes the mouth, the other, the urethra. Mirroring each other. The larynx and the cervix structurally almost identical. They grow within the child, the vagus nerve expanding between them. The tip of the tongue to the base of the coccyx. Two ends of one body. Action to one is an action to the other. New mothers are taught sphincter’s law: during childbirth, relax the jaw in order to relax the pelvic floor. Otherwise this connection is largely ignored in western practices. In Traditional Chinese Medicine though, they have a name for it: Plumpit Qi. That lump-like sensation in the throat that water or swallowing doesn’t alleviate. Often accompanied by a “tightness or heaviness in the chest and a feeling of suffocation”. First recorded around 220 AD; it’s described as being caused by emotional suppression: a fear of being seen or heard. A physical manifestation of the trauma sustained at the other end of the vagus nerve.
The womb-voice connection is a codependent one. A two way street. Action to one is action to the other.
Plumpit
Plum-
Pit.
For the fruit we stole
For the stone that's stuck.
All I know is that lump in my throat.
I have seen it in my mother
my sisters
see it pulsing
growing
I could see the same in my grandmother
swollen neck
swollen abdomen.
it was there when she died
seventy years of strain
of fear
seventy years and all those that came before her.
It is not her fault the ancestral scars she was born with;
It was not their fault either.

I have done things to make mine worse. I have been complicit and I have been silent when I should have screamed. I knew what was happening and I knew I was being weak. This is the problem. This believing those hands belonged around my throat. This letting you limit my air in some sick game of power. This asking for those hands to hold my head and squeeze. Squeeze. Push that stone in further, please. This choice of mine that was to keep my mouth shut. This choosing to open it and say anything other than what I believe. This isn’t all you. You have been taught that it is normal. We are all complicit in some way. Though there is certainly fault, and I’m not sure that it lies with me. As a child, all I knew was that lump in my throat. I couldn’t shout. I couldn’t make the sound. I watched everyone around me make noise with ease, mouths wide. Running and screaming. I knew I must be able to do the same, and yet I couldn’t. Laugh. I laugh about it now. The shame I felt. How I’d suck the air into my lungs, chin to the sky and try. Try and nothing worked. A baby bird in the nest, beak open waiting and waiting for mother to come home and feed me. Body shaking and beak wide waiting. I was so guilty. I didn’t have the sound everyone else took for granted.
That guilt lay heavy. I felt my womb twist. Contort.
Shame bubbling inside me, it needed an escape. I wanted it gone. It would rise up my chest, searching for a way out. I wanted it out. Out. It would rise and rise
Before meeting that stone and

nothing.

It would sink back down, absorbed back into the body from which it had grown.

The aetiology of our silence has never been self inflicted.
I wanted to shout
every time I needed to, I wanted to shout.
Instead that thing in my throat grew.
Repression has given that stone whatever nutrition it needed to survive.
A vicious cycle: voices stifled by the stone that fed on silence.

Phoebe Bowen, 21, London/Buckinghamshire - UK ✯ IG: @byphoebebowen ✯ BACK TO ESSAYS: OUROBOROS

“Phoebe Bowen, currently in the final year of BA Fine Art at Goldsmiths University; multidisciplinary artist. Based between South-East London and Buckinghamshire, (England).”