Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch's ​knot body

Reviewed by Erica McKeen

(Metatron Press, 2020)

Perhaps few authors would describe writing their books out of desperation, but perhaps more should: if writing is an attempt to voice new ideas, to frame words around the as-yet unknown, to communicate that which has resisted or been barred from the  realms of the spoken and cliché, then perhaps the true, volcanic breaking of this silence and pulling out of new words  is always somewhat rebellious, somewhat experimental, and stems  from a place of need, of last-ditch impulse—of desperation.
 
“I am desperate for a larger vocabulary to talk about my pain,” Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch writes in their book, knot body (Metatron Press, 2020). This desperation—a desperation for a new or better vocabulary—haunts the book, sidling up behind every word El Bechelany-Lynch selects to communicate their suffering. knot body, therefore, functions as a refutation of silence. It acknowledges that invisible, internal illness can only be made visible through words and story. It is a speaking back against the unspeakable infinities of chronic pain.
 
And it is cleverly (not to mention poetically) done. The format of the book is its first alluring aspect. Calling attention to the various available structures of creative writing and using each of them in turn, knot body not only expresses in its form the unconventionality of its narrative, but also suggests that no one genre can encapsulate the experience recorded in its pages. El Bechelany-Lynch’s blend of epistolary memoir and poetic musing is not a one-size-fits-all account. Chronic pain, fibromyalgia chronic pain, queer fibromyalgia chronic pain, Arab queer fibromyalgia chronic pain is not the experience of many Canadians, so it cannot be expressed through normative literary structures. This lyrical fusion of love letter, personal essay, and experimental poetry succeeds in capturing El Bechelany-Lynch’s particular intersectional experience in a way that more traditional literary forms could not. This is not to say that knot body is so unique as to be unrelatable—El Bechelany-Lynch’s story, with its pain and joys, its frustrations and triumphs, speaks for anyone who does not fit neatly into a system, and especially a medical system, that provides only one overly simplistic and reductive mould.
 
Throughout the book, El Bechelany-Lynch struggles with this mould, attempting to produce a suitable narrative that will allow them to fit inside it and receive vindication from medical professionals. Without affirmation—without professional diagnosis—their illness can, as El Bechelany-Lynch writes, feel removed from reality, disintegrating into make-believe:

Fibromyalgia often feels like a fabrication: we try to paint pictures of our pain, we excavate metaphors and obscure concepts to describe what we experience—the pin pricks, the stabbing jolts, or we gesticulate with our hands, mirroring the movements of jellyfish through the water, a pain going in and out.

El Bechelany-Lynch investigates the importance of diagnosis and description, this wording into being, straddling the boundary between the medical and social models of disability. The healthcare system in Canada is frequently flawed and reductive, lacking complexity and inclusivity, but it is also an essential avenue of validation, giving shape and reality to otherwise inexplicable pain. Science in this instance is, as El Bechelany-Lynch writes, the “new immovable frontier,” taking the place of religion in society. Science fuels a medical system that, with obsessive, singular routes to normalcy, health, and wholeness—the Almighty Cure—decides with the available, measurable data, and does so quickly (here we encounter the dark underside of efficiency), whether a person is hurting. Words are world-building, and receiving a diagnosis for one’s condition not only opens doors to a world of possible medication and medical care, but it also opens doors to societal understanding and accommodation. knot body tight-rope balances along the borderline between clothing pain in appropriate language, and thereby affording it structure and existence, and laying bare the reality that pain can never be fully expressed through language, that verbal description will always fail as pain reaches beyond the limits of the written.
 
There is, however, something to be said for the art and specificity of the written word. El Bechelany-Lynch’s writing is gentle and delicate, pensive and patient, exemplifying in literary practice the kind of care they wish to receive on a doctor’s examination table, not to mention in the company of the “friends, lovers, and in-betweens” reading their book. An affecting concern filters through their words, an anxiety that they might misrepresent their or another’s experience, that they might narrate incorrectly, or, at worst, overlook. After all, El Bechelany-Lynch knows the power of language and all it can create, how purposeful we must be with our words. Even more so they know the brutal, suffocating power of silence—how easily (how efficiently like science) it can erase. 

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Erica McKeen is a writer, organizer, and teacher. She recieved her MA in English Literature from Western University. Originally from London, Ontario, she is a Poetry London board member, assistant editor at The Temz Review, and co-organizer of LOMP: reading series. Her work has appeared in Canthius, Minola Review, The Quilliad, and elsewhere. She currently lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.