My so-far review of Skin by Dorothy Allison

I just started reading Skin by Dorothy Allison. I so vocally loved and was so deeply touched by reading Bastard Out of Carolina this summer that a friend put Skin in my hands and really I am loving it already. I'm only one essay in but the bravery with which she calls out the complexity of the relationships people have with their cultural, sexual, and soci-economic places in society is thus far brilliant, astounding, and miraculously approachable.

I know it is intrinsically hopeless to compare feelings and situations of oppression however it is important for me to state that while I identify the with the feelings of non-entitlement and the feeling of "what if they found out I'm not really supposed to be here?" in academic and activist circles I recognize that my experiences growing up were nowhere near as violent and/or pronouncedly financially underprivileged. The feelings of pride in and love for family and the discontinuity with any cultural story/myth provided have thus far been beautifully expressed in Allison's words. I am very grateful for the bifurcation about the cultural stories surrounding the poor that she so articulately unmasks. If you are poor those in higher position only have two lenses to access your life: 1) you are squalid and deserving of both your hardships and the contempt in their eyes 2) You are honorable, hardworking and intrinsically good (in some cases willingly bearing the oppression seen as necessary to our cultural/financial infrastructure). You are either a silent, noble martyr or essentially a criminal.

When I look back at my past I definitely see myself operating under this paradigm. In the past I have felt like an imposter when I said I was a poet/writer. I wasn't published and certainly didn't feel initially included into or invited into writing communities (I remember a poster they had up at one point making a joke about homelessness). My legitimacy as a writer was dependent on the views of others (like the morality of the noble poor). I came to the social space of writing waiting for contempt and ready to be ashamed. I let the fact that I made mistakes and didn't always do the "right" thing make me feel undeserving of scholarships and grants which I shied away from applying for. I felt like I didn't have a language to talk about my family in academia, except in that characitured way.

After a few years of complaining to friends in conversations or classes about social justice that there was or seemed to be nothing written and really no vocabulary to even talk about classism (which funnily enough google crome refuses to recognize as a real word...) the way we talk about or write about other forms of oppression I feel deeply refreshed and affirmed by Allison's writing an perspective.

I am excited to read more and would highly recommend this book to anybody who has felt illegitimate in a community they chose and didn't know or maybe suspected why.