Book Review

I saw my first shrink at twelve,
my second at fifteen,
my third at eighteen
my fourth at nineteen
and my first neurologist at twenty.

The first shrink said manic depressive and wished me well.
The second shrink said I was a problem and threatened to lock me up.
The third said bipolar and gave me antidepressant.
the fourth call me schizoaffective and gave me anti psychotics.
The neurologist said, Hmmm

Readers who pick up Lisa Gill's Caput Nili and read the above lines have to think to themselves, "This sounds like performance poetry." They would be right. Although she saves it to the "Acknowledgements" section at the end, Gill explains that the poems in this book poured out two years after the main events they describe and appeared first, not in book form but as a one woman show in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

For the show, artist Kris Mills prepared four pedestal busts to appear on stage: Freud, Sanger, neurologist Martin Teicher and John Hanning Speke, who discovered the source of the Nile. After the show when it was suggested that the performance be turned into a book, photographic images of these busts served to visually frame out the four main divisions of the book. For each section, Gill wrote an essay to correspond to the poetic contents of that section and asked Mills to provide artwork for the book. All this is to say that Caput Nili: How I Won the War and Lost My Taste for Oranges (West End Press, 2011) is not a typical single author poetry book either in conception or finished form.

As Gill explains, at the beginning of the book the phrase "Caput Nili" originally meant the search for the source of the Nile but eventually came to denote any discovery of significance. In a sense, both meanings apply to Gill's book because the book itself describes her lengthy search for the source of multiple sclerosis (and for the discovery itself of what was causing her so many problems).

The poem sequence around which the book is built begins not just in medias res but at its narrative climax.

In 2003 I threatened to hold up the MRI clinic.

I went to the ER and told them
my legs had been numb for five weeks.
They told me to eat mandarin oranges.

Each poem in the sequence is numbered in a way that reminds one of a Diagnostics and Statistical Manual entry - or perhaps a Biblical reference. The second poem in the book, for example is 1:2. It begins, "You want to know where the shotgun came from?"

Like the tributaries of a Nile itself that seem to loop back on each other, the language of Gill's poem repeats itself in different context but moves towards one end, the sections and individual numbered poems interrupted by rivulets from other streams that feed into them. From the initial poem of the first section, Gill goes on to descriptions of the assaults she has endured at the hands of men:

When I have insomnia, I can't count how many times
I've been followed or stalked or felt up or groped
or slapped or flashed or propositioned or catcalled
or had a gun pulled on me . . . no, I can count that.

One way to picture Caput Nili is as a classical symphony consisting of four movements. The first movement introduces the major themes and the motifs that will be appearing through the entire work. It is subtitled, "an exploration of violence in adult life" and, as previously mentioned, after the initial opening, it centers on the abuse the speaker of the poem has suffered. In movement two, "White Coat Cavortions: a look at mental illness and medical institutions," the first poem recapitulates in theme and variation fashion the books opening poem. Poem 2.1 begins:

I threatened to hold up the MRI clinic.

It then introduces the new material: the speaker's various psychological diagnoses, her history of medications, the progressions of doctors. Within this material she loops back to the physical symptoms that brought her into the ER in the first place and her demand to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital knowing that they would also have to give her an MRI.

Unlike the traditional scherzo of third movements, however, Caput Nili's third section is its most dynamic. It too, begins with lines that reiterate the opening themes "I threatened to hold up the MRI clinic/Self preservation is instinct," and, as the title "Connecting the Polka Dots" suggests, moves on to new discoveries. She discovers not only that she has multiple sclerosis, the physical source of the physical symptoms she was feeling, but that there was a physical connection between the trauma she had suffered from early abuse and the physical structure of her brain.

I read until I was shaking.
Then I read some more.

Research shows that if I were a boy,
neglect could interrupt the development
of the corpus callous.

Reseach shows that for girls
the skin is sexual abuse.

Get it?

The MRI is a crime scene photo.
It's proof
It's an unfathomable interruption.

it's a confirmation
I tried to disbelieve:
something happened.

For Gill this is the source of the Nile. It was not the epiphany she wanted, but it was the epiphany she got. It also leads to the fourth movement, "How to Live with It."

One of the appealing things about Caput Nili is the way in which Gill uses language on a micro level to build up to her macro level themes. Though the book is essentially the account of one woman's experiences, a line that Gill works like a ritornello is "violence is systemic."

Silence makes it swell. Speech makes it abate
a bit. Language offer the possibility of putting things

in their places: forefront, backburner.

You have to deal with trauma before you can
let it go the way of the past.

You have to hold culture accountable.

Because violence is cultural and learned, something can be done about it. No one who has not slept through the last 100 years can not know that violence has been endemic to American history and continues to be an integral part of contemporary life. This is true not only of war or against those perceived as different, but as Gill illustrates, against women as well. While admitting that she is still not a 911 number, Gill does maintain at the end of the book that as a writer she has an obligation to use her skills not just as an individual cathartic but to educate, to try to expose violent attitudes and cultural complacency for what they are. It is also an interesting poetic stance that straddles the divide between poets who see themselves as part of a disabilities poetics movement and those who eschew such association for fear that it compromises their image as a poet who puts her art first.

Paralleling sexual violence is the violence done by attitudes of the medical establishment. This is a drum beaten often by writers with disabilities and disability rights groups but one that is still little heard but the reality is that when it comes disability, in many ways the violence is just as systemic if much softer sounding for its paternalism. Gill's medical odyssey may be a bit more Rabelaisian than most but it is rare to find a person with multiple sclerosis whose original diagnosis was MS and, as Gill suggests, in the case of individuals with prior psychological or psychiatric diagnoses, it may even dismissed as having no physical basis. The poet's repetition of "They gave me mandarin oranges" and "So you're a prude" lend a texture to Caput Nili that mounts to a main theme.

As mentioned above, one of the intriguing things about Caput Nili is its transition from performance poetry to visual poetry. This is particularly significant in the context of disability poetics, which continues seeking to contribute new forms of expression to poetry in general. Performance poetry, still in relative infancy and being developed by performance artists with disabilities like Petra Kuppers and Nathan Say is gaining momentum as a venue for reaching new audiences, so Gill's one woman show was a natural first stop for her. Gill, however, is an experienced poet who know how flat some exciting oral poetry falls when merely translated like a court transcript on to the page. By the corralling of a variety of visual forms, she has also saved her work from looking like the traditional narrative poem, frequently shunned as passé by contemporary writers, while still telling her story. The narrative essays included in addition to providing bulk and visual texture to the book do in fact contribute substance by providing a larger context within which to put the poem's story as well as details not contained in the poem. Mills' artwork, which hijacks and parodies famous paintings, sets the tongue-in-cheek (or more accurately, sticking out of the tongue) tone that compliments Gill's poetic style.

Caput Nili: How I Won the War and Lost My Taste for Oranges is a book with the potential for many different audiences and a welcome addition to disability literature. Though not difficult to read quickly, it holds up under a number of rereadings and could be as equally valuable to the high school reader as to a well-read adult. Perhaps the only disappointing feature of the book is that it does not include a CD to hear how it sounds as a heard poem in Gill's own voice – but perhaps that is something for the future.