Leave Metaphors at the Door

At the Hay Festival Querétaro last year, Deborah Levy spoke about avoiding the term “autofiction” when describing her work. “I don’t believe in genre,” she said. “I think that is just for a commercial thing.” I thought of the comment while reading Therese Estacion’s powerful Jelly, Baby. To call these meditations a collection of essays is perhaps evidence of the challenge of trying to wedge art into commercial spaces. Fusing poetry, memoir, travel writing, and cultural history, Estacion’s project is more expansive. If you come to it expecting just essays, you will be in for a surprise.

Jelly, Baby is not a before-and-after story. It is not a narrative with upward, linear motion. Works of fiction and memoir usually have an arc that depicts change and a sense of progress for the events and characters. But here, Estacion sits with her anger, her bitterness, and her “messianic rage.” Thank goodness! Social media — and media more generally — is a place where the messy middle is often skimmed over to get to the neat ending. The after is supposed to be inspirational; it is supposed to be hopeful, especially in tales about illness and recovery. Yet the complex middle is where this volume lives. “I am no hero,” Estacion reminds us. “I cannot expect things to work out.”

In 2016, Estacion was diagnosed with an incredibly rare bacterial infection, which put her in a coma for seven days. She survived, but the medication that saved her life also caused necrosis in her extremities. She required amputation of both legs below the knees as well as of parts of her hands, and the removal of her uterus. While she does not write about the specifics of this experience in Jelly, Baby, lines like “How do I live in a body that can never be separated from grief?” and “I can no longer collude with the moon” shine with a painful beauty, like sorrow that gets polished with wear.

One of the text’s most moving through lines is established near the beginning, when Estacion goes to a literary event and reads a book by two poets who explore “prosthesis, artificial limbs, and prosthetic legs as metaphors.” This doesn’t make sense to her, conceptually or literally: “My visceral experience of prosthesis isn’t art.” The set of limbs she attaches to her own are not metaphorical. They are a daily thing, banal at best, and often regarded with hatred and resentment. “My prosthetics are just objects to me and require the same type of maintenance and regard as a broken tail light,” she writes. “When I take them off at night before bed, I lean them next to my night table. Then, nothing.”

At times she addresses her prosthetics directly. She describes how she cleans dust and hair from the silicone before she puts them on in the morning and notes the wrinkled, sweaty skin around her scars at the end of a long day. Often the process of writing about something gives it an inherent sense of value, but there is no valorization or idealization here. Estacion moves between humour, levity, pain, and matter-of-factness. In one line, which is given a whole page, she says simply, “Legs, meet legs.”

Although she describes her prosthetics as “a machine that portals me from one moment to another,” Estacion thanks her prosthetists, Winfried and Alex, in the acknowledgements “for giving my inanimate objects life.” There is a tender quiet to this gesture. Her “bionic parts” might be only objects most of the time, but they were made by people with skill and care.

In a section called “Exploring the Aswang Complex,” Estacion turns to a shape-shifting, malevolent creature from Filipino folklore as a kind of reclamation. She recalls a trip to the Philippines in 2018 — her first time back to “the islands of my origin” since her amputations. “I was different,” she writes. “Scarred and halved.” The aswang is known as a baby eater, which Estacion considers alongside the fact that she no longer has a uterus and cannot carry a child. Anger courses through her: “I hate my friends and family for getting pregnant,” she writes. “But most of all, I hate all the times I’ve held their babies and knew I had to give them back.” The aswang offers catharsis and a sense of liberation. It gives her “permission to feel my rage and hate.”

As I read Estacion’s work, I kept thinking about her reaction to the book of poems that used prosthetics as metaphors. Estacion debates with herself about whether she should contact those poets or the editors or the publishers and let them know that “they’ve made an error.” Ultimately, she decides against it. “What would this call for accountability actually achieve?” she asks. Would she receive an authentic apology? She doubts it: “Poets lie all the time.”

This line stayed with me. A metaphor is a type of lie, even if it can feel as if it’s angling toward a deeper truth — one that isn’t possible to achieve with direct speech. When a poet tells me that poets lie all the time, I read with this warning in mind. But the emotions and moments that Estacion explores carry the weight and vulnerability of honesty.

If there is a glimmer of hope or progress to be found in Jelly, Baby, it is in the possibility of moving beyond the body and the grief and trauma it holds. “Today, I walked around and around and only thought about the weather,” Estacion writes in the final section. “Sometimes, I forget.”

Sometimes forgetting is the most hopeful thing one can imagine.