Pop 89: Any ID
By Madonna Hamel
As I plop thirty-plus books onto the circulation desk of the Saskatoon Public Library, I realize I don't have my library card. Because when, in the twelve years of living in Val Marie, did I ever need it? Our village librarians, Betty and Judy, both know who I am, and are sure to alert me whenever a new stack of books arrives. They have even deigned to comment on the nature of my reading material.
So I am relieved that all the city library clerk needs from me before handing over my next week's worth of reading is my Saskatchewan driver's license. (But let's not go there - having already moaned about no longer being able to drive due to my tumour and possible seizures. I can still read, after all.)
Having verified my identity, I'm reminded of a question I was asked on the neurology night ward two months earlier: "How do you identify?"
It was not an official question, and I can't even recall who asked it, but it made me think twice about my own identity, especially as most of the books I've been reading since this whole adventure in brain cancer have been about identity in terms of self-awareness, relationship and consciousness in general.
The questioner meant for me to label myself in terms of gender, I assume.
The first time I encountered the whole s/he identification was when I started teaching teen writing. Why limit yourself to gender? I thought. Why not identify as an artist, a lover of chocolate, a recent arrival from another country, a sister or brother, a soccer fan, a 4-H club member? A cancer survivor? How did identity become restricted to our genitalia?
In my early university days the "definition of Canadian Identity" was the front and centre topic of our cultural conversation. We needed to define ourselves as separate from America - itself a big "melting pot" of cultures and contradictions.
As a student of English North American literature, the dominating theme in Canadian writing was "survival". In American lit it was "redemption".
Back at the neurology ward I decided to go with the Trans option, as in: transcending.
And so I am. I'm transcending everything I think I know about what is happening to me. I'm doing my best to transcend fear and keep curious about what is happening to me. My goal is to see this as an adventure, an expedition, a curiosity, rather than a curse.
Most of us have heard of psychologist Abraham Maslow's "Hierarchy of Needs" - a theory of the basic requirements for humans to live and function in the world, to, as he put it, "self-actualize". Besides food, sleep, shelter and relationship, Maslow added transcendence to the top of his pyramid of needs.
Transcendent experiences are part and parcel of most religions and mystical traditions.
Maslow wrote near the end of his life:
"Ego-transcendence means leaving behind self-consciousness and self-observation, and gratification. Human beings may feel a strong need to become all that they can be, but once this need is met, some continue to feel needs beyond the self, to pursue goals that may in fact have little to do with the self at all, but actually to transcend self."
I'd like to think I am transforming as I write this - transiting between birth and death. That I'm doing my level best to translate languages that once spoke of accomplishments, talents, goals and achievements into a language that speaks of mystery, grace, relinquishment, mercy and re-linking with a divinity I've not always acknowledged but often feel - the kind that "shapes our ends, rough-hew them as we will", as Hamlet said.
My questioner on the ward wants to reassure me: I can "identify as anything." Which reminds me of my little sister's announcement when she was seven. "When I grow up I'm going to be a pony."
Apparently, according to a version of today's identity politics, I can be a pony too. I can also be a unicorn, a toddler or Korean.
There are few people, however, I assume, who wish to identify as a chubby 68-year-old woman with a brain tumour.
As I finish my transaction with the library clerk, retrieve my expired driver's license and gather up my library books, I realize how arbitrary the idea of identity truly is. I imagine myself in transit, my ticket stub in my hand, arriving at the pearly gates, or some equivalent. Will I be asked for my papers, for verification or validation of a life of trials and errors and encounters transpired?
I hope to be able to hang out with other transcending folks, other transcendentalists, maybe even the ones I read in university including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Margaret Fuller.
When I think of it, earning a BA, putting a few letters behind my name, never identified me as having any kind of credibility. How far has a PhD, net worth, fame and fortune gotten anyone once death comes knocking? We're all just slobs on the same bus, just a collective of creatures trying to do the best with what we have at the time.
Over time, we've been defined collectively as: "citizens", "souls" and "consumers." Today the term used to describe the human collective is "users" - a tech word ascribed to a world that can't seem to get ahead of itself fast enough. (Personally, I prefer the words for flocks of birds: a parliament of owls, a mischief of magpies. An exhalation of larks.)
In the end, I assume that we all - including all my heroes and role models - will be happy to be relieved of mortality - of the tyranny of reputation and ego-fulfillment.
And, I suspect, no one waiting at the gate is going to ask me for my ID. Or demand: Why weren't you Magdalene? Why weren't you Hildegard of Bingen? Why weren't you Charles Dickens? Or Joan Didion? They are going to ask me: "Why weren't you you?"