The Carving Is What You Say It Is: The Futility of Classification
by Carla E. Dash
When people ask what I write, I struggle to answer. “Fantasy” evokes elves, magic, and fairies. “Horror” calls forth images of gruesome murders and gristly deaths. “Speculative fiction” induces polite bafflement that I attempt to allay through bumbling explanations that both sell my writing short and insufficiently describe it.
The problem is I abhor labels. A category is an oversimplification, an imprecision, a lie. For instance, mammals engage in viviparity, birthing live young, but so do most shark species. However, a shark is a fish, not a mammal. Platypuses lay eggs; they sport bills and webbed feet like ducks, but they are mammals, not birds. Botanists assert that a fruit is the seed-bearing ovary of a plant, and that a vegetable is the other parts, like stems or leaves. Yet people commonly classify seed-filled tomatoes and cucumbers as vegetables. A banana is a fruit with no seeds. Bats fly, but they are mammals, not birds. Penguins cannot fly, and they are birds. Viruses copy themselves, adapt, and evolve, but they are nonliving. Coral anchors in place, like a tree, but it is an animal. Venus fly traps consume insects for nutrients, but they are plants, not animals. At birth, we sort babies, on sight, into categories—of race, of sex—despite the physical and genetic evidence that such dichotomies are imaginary.
During adolescence, that horrid period when we all strive to cleave ourselves from the lump of social clay from whence we emerged, hew the shape of ourselves and ascertain how our form differs from that of others, people—friends, acquaintances, and total strangers strolling past in the mall—frequently asked me, “What are you?” And when I answered, leaving aside the dehumanizing word what and skipping past how it was none of their business, “Black and White,” as if I could split myself down the middle, separate the components of my cells, disentangle the Black parts of an arm from the White, they reacted with anger and denial. “No, you’re not,” they said. “You’re Hispanic. You’re Middle Eastern. You’re Italian. Puerto Rican. Why are you lying? Are you ashamed?”
It happens sometimes still, long after my teenage years. Is there any point then in carving a self to present to the world? Of digging the sharp point of the blade into my flesh, standing in the sloughed off shavings and declaring what I have created? Can self-definition ever prevail against external perception?
Later, a coworker would ask periodically, “Why don’t you wear heels? Would you like to borrow some?” She gifted me a trash bag full of her old cast offs once, and I accepted the bulky mass, not knowing how to courteously decline. What else would she have desired for me to borrow? A dress? Rouge? Sparkling earrings that dangled from my heavy lobes to brush against my bare trapezius? I wonder what she would make of me now with my low-buzzed undercut and boys’ shorts hanging down to my knees. Why did my refusal to contort myself into a gendered box vex her so?
This imperative to patrol the boundaries of categories, to trim the branches growing beyond the fence, to nudge people back into the lanes we’ve drawn, reveals the farce of sorting, of labeling. Categorization is not real, is not possible, is just futile play at ordering a world that revels in chaos. Fruits do not exist, nor do vegetables, animals, plants, races, sexes, or genders. Only life exists, in its wild and varied glory. All else, we have invented.
So what do I write? I write about people who grieve and struggle, who isolate themselves and attempt to connect. They are flawed and anxious and afraid of death. I write about mothers of monstrous children, grasping for reasons to hold back their righteous revenge. I write about Death as a worryingly thoughtful roommate cohabitating with a bereaved fiancée. I write about video game characters yearning for freewill. I write about the annihilation of the universe. Interpret how you will. Death of the author. The carving is what you say it is. As for me, I feel no compulsion to label it.
Carla E. Dash lives in Braintree, MA with her husband, children, and cats. She teaches middle schoolers, procrastinates via video games and anime, and occasionally buckles down and writes.
This essay is part of Dash’s blog tour for the collection Monsters and Other Tales of Humanity, available from Meerkat Press. Meerkat Press is also holding a raffle for a gift card at the publisher’s store.