place

Place

As the results of the online Merriam-Webster dictionary shows, the word ‘place’ has 12 different interpretations, and I believe there could be more than 120 kinds of meaning of the word depending on different people’s own perception. ‘Place’ is also a word mentioned many times by the writer and it’s even the title of part I of the book. So, what is the connotation of ‘place’ in this book, exile and pride?

 

One of the simplest definitions of ‘place’ on Merriam-Webster is: a building, part of a building, or area that is used for shelter¹. In my opinion, ‘Place’ partly means home to Eli. Throughout the first part of the book, place, Eli has been writing about the memories of the Siskiyou National Forest, a place where he didn’t leave until 17- year-old. He also said that he lives in a queer potluck in Ann Arbor. As he depicted, the forest is a place from where he is exiled and the queer potluck is a place where people share passion, imagination and value (Exile and Prade, P32). However, although dyke community gave him a sense of belonging, in his inner soul, he still hungers for his hometown, the forests and the rivers where he grew up. In fact, he mention in the passage that Elk River is “a river of his poems”(Exile and Pride, P19) and he decorated his home in Michigan with lots of things that reminds him of his home in the forest near the river. Besides all the pleasant experience in the Forest, there’re also painful memories in Eli’s childhood, the unfair treatment he received at school because of his expression barriers caused by disability and the horrible experience of sexual abuse by his father. For Eli, the forest is a place both in his nightmares and his sweet childhood memories, a place where he is eager but also afraid to go back to and Eli’s home exists more in his body, his heart, his memory than in the real world. The place of home he defined is a place that contained certain pleasant memories and serenity where he can totally immerse himself in and open his heart to.

 

Instead of home, the word ‘place’ can also be interpreted as environment. The title of the chapters are all starting with ‘clearcut’ and the writer depicted a scene of forest and logging trucks at the very beginning of the passage which obviously shows that the environmental problem is something the writer concerned about. The first chapter also described the government and capitalism deceiving people by telling them the resources are renewable and endless as long as the clearcuts are “diligently replanted” and “salmons carefully maintained” 50 years ago(Exile and Pride, P22). Nevertheless, with huge amount of trees being cut down for profit and forests destroyed, now the environmentalists and public are blaming the destruction of forest and natural habitat on loggers. The writer both felt painful for the destructed environment and sympathy for the loggers that she used to live close to in childhood. When walking in a clearcut forest, the writer said he was no longer looking at it as an outsider but “as someone who grew up in this graveyard, seeing with both my childhood loyalties, seeing through a lens of tension and contradiction.”(Exile and Pride, P28) Standing at an ambivalent position witnessing more truth hidden under the phenomenon, Eli can’t just simply condemn the loggers, he want something more than a temporal remission, he calls for an thorough reform to rescue the forest, the environment.

 

Digging a little deeper, the word ‘place’ is also defined as: a distinct condition, position, or state of mind². Furthermore, ‘place’ can act as a verb: to put something or someone in a particular place, position, condition or situation³. The word ‘place’ may also be related to the way Eli identify his position, his place in the society. In first part of the book, Eli defined himself as an “urban transplanted, mixed-class, dyke activist in an urban, mostly middle-class, queer community”(Exile and Pride, P46), given his complicate background and experience. Although his family was thought to became the first and only middle-class family in the place they live with all the struggles his parents overcome to climb the class ladder, when Eli went outside to the larger world, when he went to New York, he found there is still gaps between he and the middle-class, so he just put himself in the place of a kind of mixed-class. Moreover, in the second part of the book, bodies, Eli narrated his story of identifying his true sexuality. Always questioning himself whether he is truly a girl, a female, Eli has always been confused by his physical sexuality until he discovered his inner desire of masculine. As a result, he chose to place himself as a man in the society. He didn’t surrender himself because of the oppression from the so-called ‘norm’ majority, instead, he was brave enough to identify and pursue the true self.

 

Among the many different meanings of ‘place’, I think the denotation of the word ‘place’ in the book, exile and pride, can be the place defined as home, the environment seen through the lens of contradiction and the place in which Eli put himself in society.