-T.M Semrad
New York journalist, Cynthia Carr writes from a place of personal history. In her recent book, Fire in the Belly, The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz, Carr builds upon nights roaming the East Village streets during the 1980s. In 1984, she joined the Village Voice staff as a columnist and arts reporter. Other books include Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, a Haunted Town and the Hidden History of White America, and On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century. Carr read from her work Fire in the Belly as part of the California Institute of the Arts Visiting Writers Series on September 25, 2014. David Wojnarowicz, was an East Village mixed media artist whose work includes installations, performance, collage and paintings that dealt with among other things AIDS. He died from AIDS in 1992. T.M. Semrad is an Associate Editor with Black Clock and an MFA Writing candidate at CalArts.
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In Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz, Cynthia Carr’s journalist’s training stands out. Her lived experience in the East Village as arts reporter for the Village Voice is there in the wings, but she allows her subject center stage. While the text feels deeply personal, it never veers from biography to autobiography. The text is populated with colleagues, peers, friends she shares with its subject, East Village mixed media artist David Wojnarowicz. As you immerse yourself in the book’s intricately researched details, you feel her forming attachments to each new person she meets along the way so that the reading becomes an emotional journey.
In writing about Wojnarowicz, Carr chronicles family violence, the violence of government inaction in response to AIDS, the violence of politically motivated attacks, violence steeped in homophobia, in fear of the alien. Yet, she does not make Wojnarowicz a victim. Or a hero. He is culpable in his own destruction but not demonized. Wojnarowicz is afraid of the alien within. There is a tension between the man scared of personal rejection, the biographical myth maker and the artist more and more engaged in truth telling, in making the alien visible. This is the power in the work of Wojnarowicz and in his biography. Carr makes the alien visible, so much so that by the books end, as she takes you into a life ravaged by AIDS, you are checking the obituaries with her, with the community, to see who died of AIDS yesterday. She re-inscribes their names, their years of age, their death from AIDS. She surrounds this information with whitespace, with silence.
Carr writes of being warned against the task of writing a Wojnarowicz biography. The stories surrounding him appear to multiply in their contradictions into an impenetrable mythology. She’s not dismayed. She’s methodical. You get the sense she contacted every person who had a relationship with Wojnarowicz, discovers other relationships, contacts them. Persists in developing these contacts, developing her own relationships with the sources. For each narrative, she cites the source. When she divulges her inability to reach Wojnarowicz mother, you feel this is the only viewpoint missing though every other family members’ memory of the mother is presented. When memories contradict each other, Carr presents each contradiction one following the other. She allows them to stand next to each other, to reveal their differences so that the differences cease to be a contradiction and instead confirm the trauma they document.
Carr’s careful reportage is enhanced by her life in the empty store fronts transformed into performance spaces and galleries in the East Village. She tells us she is part of this same community, she shares this with Wojnarowicz. It is this sense of belonging, of being where she is meant to be that leads her to theVillage Voice to report on the East Village art scene. It will also lead her to David, to his bedside as he dies from AIDS, and to his story. Like Carr’s, Wojnarowicz’s life, as she writes it, appears to be one of chance, or possibly they are both moved by an unseen hand. Neither attends school to obtain their career or moves to the East Village for it or even really chooses it. Their life’s work appears to choose them. They immerse themselves in it, studying every aspect, learning their craft for its own sake. For both, their life is their work and their work is their life. There is no balance. It is personal. It is also political.
Carr documents Wojnarowicz’s shattered family. Then she moves on, moving chronologically from birth to death, but the shattered family isn’t left behind. Carr writes its influence on Wojnarowicz’s work and on his relationships. She makes the connections. She begins and doesn’t begin with Wojnarowicz’s birth. She begins chapter one in September, 1954, the month of his birth, but she precedes this with “The Truth: An Introduction,” which begins on the last day of November, 2010, the eve of World AIDS Day. In 2010, Wojnarowicz is dead and his art, a film, is ordered removed from the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibit, “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture.” Carr will not return directly to the attacks from the political right on Wojnarowicz and his work, until their proper chronological place in the text, attacks which alter or remove his work from the public’s view. Though, like the effects of his childhood and deeply entwined with both experiences, she will trace Wojnarowicz’s attempts to make visible that which is hidden, that which we choose not to confront, the truth we refuse to see.
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As I read Fire in the Belly, I found myself wanting to talk to my husband. It brought up that which is newly visible to me, made me question my discomfort at difference as it relates to desire. I had often found myself at the edges of an art community, rarely within its midst, and rarely within a community whose art made visible gender as a construction until recently. My husband and I talked about our experience of AIDS. He tried to remember the people he knew or knew that knew somebody who died of AIDS, the truth nobody wanted to see. My husband, like Carr and Wojnarowicz, lived and worked “Downtown” in Manhattan though we were both more than a decade younger than Wojnarowicz.
He told me, “I was there in the late 80s, early 90s. I worked in bars and restaurants. A lot of the guys were gay. We hung out together. I knew of one guy that died, but we didn’t talk about it. We never talked about it. I never thought about it until just now.”
I tried to remember. I was in Los Angeles. I was in the art scene, the film world via relationships, a bystander. AIDS must have been there too, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t until I read Fire in the Belly that I attended to the obituaries. I tried to remember how many years back, just a few. I tried to find a record from a friend about her nephew, a friend, somebody I danced with, somebody who held my hand while I vomited island blue alcohol. He was found dead in his room. She didn’t know how long it had been before they found him. His AIDS drugs had stopped working, so he stopped taking them. He was depressed. He didn’t go to the doctor.
Johnathan Parra died of AIDS on February 23, 2012, at the age of 44 .
Carr writes, “He (Wojnarowicz) saw it (his work) as a way to speak his truth, a way to challenge or at least to illuminate what many accept as given.” And this is what Carr does beautifully, personally, politically in Fire in the Belly.
