Spirometry: For the Winds in Us

Abstract

Spirometers are devices used to measure lung capacity. This capstone is a creative study of what restores our breathing aptitude as a response to the suffocating and alienating consequences of whiteness for people racialized as white. The project is a sequence of lyric essays. The first lyric essay frames whiteness as a condition of exile and examines the cultural and emotional currents that shore it up. I use exile as a frame to emphasize the intensity of the spiritual and cultural alienation that people racialized as white experience. I also contextualize the dis-ease of suicide in my own lineage, and in white men broadly, as a natural consequence of the process of racialization. Suffocation–literally and in the sense of being emotionally stifled–is one of exile’s most pernicious consequences. The remaining essays attend to what makes way for breath amidst this abiding unease. They are gestures to welcome breath back that I call ‘panes.’ A root meaning of the word window is “breath door.” Panes here are thresholds to unencumbered respiration. As I catch my breath, or let it catch me, I notice more deeply the choices that are available to interrupt misery and cycles of violence, to move toward lively responsibility for myself, my histories, this earth and the people around me. The panes tell of my longing to relinquish whiteness and of some ideas toward this renunciation on the planes of language and life