Selma Kay Matter’s prose debut pleads for more care and community
Published: Thursday, Sep 26th 2024, 11:10
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In her prose debut "Muscles of Plastic", Selma Kay Matter searches for words and descriptions for exhaustion, eating disorders, pain and transition. Just a few days before the book launch in Berlin, Matter's play "Grelle Tage" also premiered at Schauspielhaus Bochum.
The literary industry is still new to Selma Kay Matter. The theater, on the other hand, is "a place whose working methods, mechanisms and conventions I now know very well. Theater is what I have learned," says Matter to the Keystone-SDA news agency.
Matter, born in Zurich in 1998, studied scenic writing at the Berlin University of the Arts and has already written four plays, either as a duo with Marie Lucienne Verse or alone. The play "Grelle Tage" ("Bright Days") juxtaposes the melting of the permafrost in Siberia with the drying up of a lake in Brandenburg and sends the 13-year-old character Jo on a road trip with a 13,000-year-old, tattered dog to save the Matterhorn.
The play was written in 2022 and has since won the Hans Gratzer Prize and a Nestroy. It premiered in Vienna at the beginning of 2023. But after the first awards and initial performances at major theaters such as the Berliner Ensemble, Matter fell ill.
Language for "incommunicable pain"
In the pain-ridden, hopeless time during the illness, reading and writing helped Matter: "I made notes. My situation raised completely new questions: Is there anything outside the pain? And how can we overcome the loneliness that comes with pain that cannot be communicated?" Matter found answers in theoretical texts by Sara Ahmed, Elaine Scarry and Alison Kafer, which helped her to understand and categorize her own experience.
Matter now weaves this theory into "Muscles of Plastic". Formally based on an English-language literary non-fiction tradition of chronic illness memoirs and trans novels, Matter searches essayistically for a language for "incommunicable pain" and for all those situations where excessive demands, ignorance and prejudice prevent us from speaking in our non-disabled, heteronormative majority society.
When bodies do not function "normally"
In six autofictional essays or in a story in six chapters, Matter outlines moments when bodies do not function "normally": What it means on an individual level to be in need of care, to be constantly forced to reveal one's most intimate diagnoses or to explain one's gender identity. How long friends, family or romantic relationships show empathy and understanding. But also about health insurance procedures, what the lack of recognition costs and which care and access needs are constantly structurally ignored.
"I tried to write the text that I myself was missing," says Matter and dedicates the book to all those who need it. Every page tells of perseverance, but also of simultaneously giving up and longing for complete understanding and being seen. This requires not least a linguistic sensitization, which Matter also tells with a glossary in the appendix, but also with numerous concrete snapshots: For example, the ego remembers how valuable it was that the American half-sister Abby once asked, "wanna share?", and what a difference language makes here: "In English, when you ask, 'Wanna share?", it literally means whether someone wants to tell you about something, but it is always also an offer to share the burden of what they have experienced with the other person listening," explains one of the many footnotes.
Multi-layered, clever, tender
As a reader, you can look over the ego's shoulders as it goes through its own learning process in search of a "magical self-evidence" and "disability justice": "When I dream of disability justice, I dream that nobody has to like doing care; that the anger that care providers sometimes feel because they are exhausted by the lack of state care structures is no longer taboo. That these negative emotions are given space, because the frustration is not directed at those in need of care, but at the anonymous and unaddressable circumstances."
The ego interweaves the individual experience with literary and theoretical texts in a multi-layered way, highlighting structural problems - without ever losing the humor, self-criticism or hope for a "cure". The latter, the ego assumes, lies "somewhere between anger and community, between care and politicization, between perseverance and giving in, but not giving up". Justice as a social practice and collective responsibility, and not as an individual problem that is always associated with the fear of being too much work. In view of the constantly self-optimizing individualism of our society, the "plastic muscles" are an important "flaw in the system"; a multi-layered, clever and tender plea for more care and community*.
*This text by Philine Erni, Keystone-SDA, was realized with the help of the Gottlieb and Hans Vogt Foundation.
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