The following appears online at
Chronicles of a Doctoral Diva http://doctoraldiva.blogspot.com/2007/10/bone-cage.html

Friday, October 12, 2007
The Bone Cage

My friend and colleague, Angie Abdou, read from her new novel at the University last night. It was a wonderful reading and I found myself awake in the wee hours of the morning addicted to the novel. I know, I know, I should be reading for my candidacy exams, or for class, but the story is so fresh and the characters are so emotionally alive, that I couldn’t put it down until my eyelids made the decision for me.

Ultimately, I am reading it for school because it speaks quite nicely to my dissertation research. The athlete’s body constructed by the nation to represent itself…fascinating, really. Especially since the athlete’s body in its finest form has such a short life span – what does that say about the nation that it symbolizes? And afterwards, once the sport career is over, and the athlete becomes a coach, he or she enables rather than performs – how does that apply to national discourse?

Of course, this is me imposing my current mental frame of mine upon Angie’s text. Yet as she said last night, once a book is published, you have very little say on how others interpret it. As a writer, I find that such a scary thought…

Bodies are, however, the dominant trope of our current culture – both literally and metaphorically. We want our bodies to represent who we are (whether it be our actual physique or our body politic) – just like we enjoy self-reflexive texts. Angie noted last night how many athletes have enjoyed her book because finally there is a novel that represents them. Robert Kroetsch, when he was visiting a couple weeks ago, spoke along the same line and said that as a young man he realized there weren’t any novels in which he could place himself. I feel the same way about the novel I’ve been writing – that it is my attempt to represent people and a place that I haven’t found satisfactorily portrayed (if at all).

Hence we shape texts just like we form our bodies to represent ourselves – except that our bodies will one day fail us (and again, that refers to both our literal bodies and our figurative bodies). Texts, however, remain dependable.
~ the Doctoral Diva