Joshua's response, “L. Bloom: Surfacing”

[joshua]

#620

Lynn Bloom’s “Surfacing” presents simultaneously public and private spaces, women’s locker rooms at university swimming pools, community recreation centers, etc., places in which a collective sense of informal togetherness can be cultivated between women who are otherwise strangers to one another. The women Bloom recounts enjoy a profound and somewhat paradoxical intimacy in this space, profound given its depth and paradoxical considering how little they know each other outside of the context of the space. Bloom paints a portrait of communal, democratic acceptance of difference and otherness and even renders the women’s shower as a quasi-religious, baptismal place of spiritual ablution; the water moves and removes: “The spraying water bestowed innocence, washing away makeup, hairdos, neutralizing skin colors.”

I was lulled by the rhythms of Bloom’s rendering of this women’s world, so different from the testosterone-fueled, aggressive milieu of even the most fraternally jovial and jocular men’s locker rooms I’ve encountered. Bloom presents an almost utopian portrait of supportive sisterhood, celebrating differently-abled, racial, and corporeal diversity. There is in Bloom’s narrative an intimation that women’s changing rooms are healing spaces.

All the more shocking to me, then, to suddenly encounter the narrative intrusion of arbitrary violence: Bloom’s description of her attack in the women’s locker room of a Swedish hostel. Male violence and aggression randomly invade the safety of the normally safe, supportive, healing area. I admire Bloom’s subsequent courageous refusal to refuse to give in to fear, to continue to identify herself within a community of supportive women, to attempt to work through her apprehensions in the wake of the traumatic attack. For me, once the soothing ebb and flow of Bloom’s prose is broken suddenly with the story of her terrifying attack, I was no longer convinced by the rhythms of her narrative in the same way when she promptly returns to her “healing place” narrative, and I’m not entirely sure Bloom herself is convinced, valiant effort of will notwithstanding, of her own rhetoric either. Perhaps she still needs to further process and contemplate the implications and consequences of her dreadful traumatic encounter.

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