Seeing the Body by Rachel Eliza Griffiths: Summary and Review
Seeing the Body is a journey through grief, both personal and universal. The collection is broken up into three sections: “mother: mirror: god” documents the slow loss of her mother to heart disease; “daughter: lyric: landscape” is a series of photographs, self-portraits taken on the day of her mother’s death, then taken again on the one-year anniversary; and the third and last section, “good death” explores universal loss for marginalized groups, Black Americans and women specifically. The final section also offers room for processing grief, accepting it as part of life, just as death is.
Blood is mentioned in nearly every poem in the collection. When blood isn’t mentioned outright, rain and other images of liquid flood the pages. In other words, when we’re not explicitly “seeing the body,” we are, as readers, looking at a body of water. In this way, the speaker in these poems is safely able to inspect her grief at a distance. Just as she is grappling with her grief, she is dissociating from the image of death by dwelling on the image of water. Other bodies mentioned in the first section of the book, though not nearly as often as water, include spiders (“Arch of Hysteria, or, The Spider-Mother Becomes a Woman”), birds (“Myth”), snakes (“Cathedral of the Snake & Saint”)—menacing images that allude to death without explicitly naming it. Then, in the center section, the reader becomes the viewer; we get to see the speaker’s body and the writer’s body as one and the same. She is moving in all her photos, a blur of life against a lifeless desert backdrop, the only living thing we can see for the next several pages. In the final section, the bodies mentioned are martyrs of the Black community, victims of white supremacy and testaments of intersectional sexism: Emmett Till (“Color Theory & Praxis (I, II)”), Mike Brown (“Myth”), her own body as victim and survivor (“My Rapes”), and faceless Black bodies bearing the scars of political unrest and generational trauma (“The Whipping Tree”; “Good America, Good Acts”).
This book ripped me open. I read this during the height of quarantine—just after a police officer murdered George Floyd, while I was parenting my niblings who were forcefully taken from my sister’s care, as I examined my own childhood abuse and fears of abandonment. At that time, I came to especially grapple with suffering as a human experience. I had not experienced many of the specific losses Griffith writes about in Seeing the Body, but her poems gave me permission to feel my own grief, the grief I had been hiding from for years. The line in the poem “Name” that says, “Don’t you ever heal me” just absolutely gutted me and had me crying for hours afterward. Griffith’s self-portraits let me sit with the ache of loss without further adding to it. It felt, to me, like meditating, maintaining awareness of your body’s state of being without personally identifying with it.