QUEERIES: My Love for Eli Clare’s Exile and Pride and Why You Should Go Ahead and Read It, Okay?

I haven’t connected to any other class’s readings as I have connected with Eli Clare’s Exile & Pride. I’m trying to figure out why, and I still don’t rightly know, but I needed to share.

It seems obvious to say, “Well, I like the subject matter,” but really. I do. And it is all very different but so intrinsically connected, that I feel bad that I ever doubted the meshing of these worlds into one book. The environment, queerness, and disability (to narrow it down to a main triad) are all sides of the same coin. The environment–the one he have created and the one that has always been–often dictates disability. Disability provokes a queer understanding of identity. Being queer in different environments–rural and urban–is like being a polar bear or a house cat,  a bird or a lost lizard in a sewer. The criticism that Clare invokes when talking about these topics is also critical of race and ethnicity and of privilege and gender. Who was the first to claim land as an inexhaustible resource? Who dictates the gender and sexual norms? Who creates the urban space that perpetuates disability? Clare touches on all of these linked together identities and sites, and it feels so right. I learned so much from Clare’s writing, but I also picked up his sense of criticism; that calm, assertive, compassionate voice that questions why and kicks out with fervor. Clare’s criticism is beatifically formed and so god damn smart, but it’s not the only thing that keeps me in the book.

I am also attracted to Clare’s prose. The way he can take me to a forest in Oregon and make me breathe moist, moss air and hear that unfailing forest ring of calm. He takes me to his environment, rural or urban, and I am lost in the familiar sensation of being an unknown in the unknown. But I also know that small town connectivity—that phenomenon that cushions our falls, unless we are too far out of the community scope of understanding, because when I was young and queer I stayed inside with my interracial parents and looked through windows at leering familiar eyes. Clare has a certain mastery that I idolize; the ability to mystify the known and reify the unknown, but all the while pushing me in a liminal, abstracted space of simple sensation and awe. I don’t feel any closer or any farther from the unknown and known, but I feel as if the new perspective I have gained through Clare is more beautiful and steeped in thought than I have ever felt.

It’s not just the subject matter, nor is it the prose, though I connect with both and admire them on so many levels. I also appreciate the way Clare answers questions queerly. I can’t attribute that particular insight to myself, as I was talking with a friend about it and they were the one that gave it air, but I cannot think of a better way to talk about Clare’s questions and answers. Take the chapter, “Freaks and Queers,” which so effortlessly flows like word association from one word full of meaning and history and covered in fingerprints to the next. He begins with handicapped, disabled, cripples, gimp, and freak. Where cripple both “makes me flinch” and is an audacious “word of pride” (83), and freak has a history to unravel; it is “another story. Unlike queer and crip, it has not been widely embraced in my communities… it takes queer and cripple one step too far; it doesn’t feel good or liberating” (84-85). Clare’s question is that Shakespearean adage, “What’s in a name?” and he unravels these names so easily and flowing and forthright, with a mix of both the academic and the personal and the poetry. The chapter is predominated by a history of the questionable exploitation and questionable agency of freaks in the early late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

“Portrait of Eli” by Riva Lehrer from the series, “Circle Stories”: This portrait is all over Eli Clare’s website and I love it so much, and I needed to share it with people. I’m fairly certain I could write an essay on this portrait and still not be content with how much I love it.

The chapter picks up on the way freak has been handled both by the people that claim it and those that throw it at others, and Clare shows us the complicated history of words that should not be divorced from modern meanings. The conclusion circles back to Clare’s original conversation on the diversity of words, meaning, and identity. Clare wraps the essay up without a simplification of his argument, but with the continuation of his own conflicting feelings surrounding the word “freak”. The historical trappings of the word are complicated, and the way it applies to people in similar identity categories as Clare—the queers and the crips—is also complicated. There’s nothing cut and dry about words, because they have meaning and history and personal value, and they are complex, just like identities.

I love Clare’s writing, the introspection, and the conflict. I love the meticulous, but abundant words that describe life for Clare, and I admire his critiques. I can’t recommend Exile and Pride highly enough for those studying the environment, queer, or disability studies, and if you’re not studying those things, it’s fine, because the book is not solely about those things either. Clare’s focus is on identity and the ever-conflicting politics that surround ourselves. I can’t rightly pick the one aspect of Exile and Pride that I loved the most, because there are so many aspects that are beautiful in their own rights. So just pick up the book, give it a whorl, and maybe learn something or question something or find yourself in a forest or a street.