Francis Cooke
Articulations by Henrietta Bollinger (Tender Press, 2023), 131pp, $28
I first encountered Henrietta Bollinger through their poetry sometime around 2016 or 2017. At that stage, they had been publishing and performing for a significant time as a poet, playwright and columnist. Those first poems I read were small crucibles of observed detail about the way Bollinger saw and interacted with the world (and were seen and interacted with by those around them in return). In ‘In and Out of Taxis’ (Mimicry, 2017), they construct their verse solely out of fragments of statements from taxi drivers—frequently conflicting (‘It is nice that you live with your parents / amazing you live alone’), sometimes repetitive (‘Your wheelchair is so heavy / different / interesting’), including comforting affirmations (‘You are smart / brave / good’) and clumsy, unhelpful assertions (‘Jesus / Stem cell research will change your life’). In ‘Girl, a Word’ (Starling, 2017), the poet tries to find the right words to convey their feelings to a lover through snatches of their own thoughts and words: ‘Girl—/ There are so many things I could fail to say eloquently. / Like Girl—/ You come from “one of those nights”, / you are a moment that went right / you are an act of love.’
Articulations, Bollinger’s first collection of essays, embodies the same strength for constructing a telling of their life out of moments of recollection and observation, and the author’s search for the language with which to best convey this life in all its warmth and complications. It opens, appropriately, with the person who has been with Bollinger since birth, their twin. ‘Zwillingschwester, māhanga. In every language I have ever tried to learn, one of the first words I ask for is twin,’ Bollinger writes. Reaching back to the beginning of language, they recall their twin’s own discovery of language: ‘My sister used to categorise things in the world in pairs—by colour, size, or type of object—and hold these twins she’d found up to our parents for their approbation. Same, she’d tell them. Same.’
Bollinger often plays with language and doubles, including in the title of their collection. As they set out in the book’s opening essay, Articulations can be read as the act or process of forming a thought and as the physical movement of a joint. They turn to its opposite, inarticulation, and recall a moment, on their own in Germany, having a stranger explain their own disability to them (‘Sie hat die Kinderlähmung’), and their difficulty both identifying the exact meaning of the word the stranger is using (either polio, or a catch-all for childhood disability), and to explain to them that they are wrong in a language the writer is still developing. ‘This is just the body I brought with me,’ the younger Bollinger thinks, ‘I don’t know how to talk about it.’
One of the purposes at the heart of Articulations is finding exactly how to talk about disability and living in a world that frequently fails to understand and accommodate it. At the outset, Bollinger, making their own choice in which language to use and which to set aside, tells the reader that they don’t find it necessary to name their disability within the text. ‘Most disability memoirs I’ve read, even ones I’ve found earth-shattering, start with the story of diagnosis, or at least with an understanding of the narrator’s body/self as somehow deficient.’ Instead, wherever Bollinger’s diagnosis or particular details of it occur in the text they are redacted, unneeded words deliberately removed from the book’s vocabulary. Recalling being asked, this time in English rather than German, to name their disability, Bollinger writes that ‘what they are really asking hangs in the air between us. There is an expectation that I will explain myself.’
Rather than through the language of medical diagnosis, Bollinger chooses to explain themselves through the stories they tell about their life and those around them. In ‘Ink’, they describe the process of arranging with their flatmates to get their first tattoo. The essay details their life living together in a house where all members of the flat are disabled, as the tattoo artist makes a house visit. ‘Disabled people’s spontaneity usually has to be planned three days in advance,’ Bollinger observes as one flatmate makes an unexpected late-evening run for additional gloves. ‘It was Josh’s idea to come to us. This creative thinking, and the way Stace talked about him, predisposed me to trust him completely. The studio where he was working as a visiting artist didn’t have wheelchair access.’ Once the drawing is complete, and the tattoo still healing, the author marvels at the process: ‘I will gaze down at the lines on my arm with big eyes, still slightly disbelieving and in love. In love with the lines and with my skin, in awe of my body caring for itself.’
The community of flatmates, friends and family, and the buffer this community provides in ways great and small against a world so often built without disabled people in mind, runs through the collection. In one particularly sweet moment of parental understanding, Bollinger writes that their mother was the person who first broached the possibility of their sexuality with them, saying of a friend, ‘Are you in love with her? Because that would be okay.’ The teenage Bollinger at first furiously denies the idea, and then a fortnight later messages their mother to say that they were right. Their mother’s reply: ‘We love you. You wanna tell Dad or should I?’ The teenage romance doesn’t eventuate—the object of the author’s affections remaining ‘unreachably, painfully straight’—but Bollinger details their new understanding of themself, with the realisation of this facet of their life also mirrored through watching and listening to the Topp Twins, another doubling, and another way of finding connection and community (music is also threaded through Articulations, from the Topps to Woody Guthrie to Anika Moa, the latter of whom also appears in the book via a reprinted email introducing Bollinger’s re-creation of an encounter with the singer).
Sexuality, and an open, vulnerable exploration of sex and accessibility, occupy a set of essays at the centre of the collection. Bollinger tenderly sketches their relationship with their first girlfriend: ‘She will leave sun and Hawaiian language lessons for a dismal Wellington winter and a somewhat oppressive government job, a black yo-pro handbag with secret rainbow lining, and a “nap” in my student hostel bed.’ Their twin sister also comes out (‘I try to keep equally cool … [and] fail utterly and spectacularly’). In one of the central essays in their collection, Bollinger navigates the process of engaging a sex worker as a part of their sex life (‘A friend with industry experience offers calming words. If you’re nervous, just make out lots, that’s my professional advice’). Contemplating what their sixteen-year-old self (and other disabled teens) needed to hear about sex, they write:
There are major barriers for disabled people who want to pursue sex and relationships. These range from a lack of affirmative education to the inaccessibility of places where people usually meet potential partners, disabled people’s social isolation, and stigma towards disabled people, including assumptions that may come from their own families or the people who support them.
But, Bollinger tells us:
There is another story too. A story we tell less often—maybe because it is more mundane. This is the idea that disabled people can and do have sex—without the help of any support or sex workers. We are straight, queer, alone, together. We are partners, lovers, parents and all the rest. It’s the kind of conversation that happens privately, or is just lived. It’s the mundane story we need to make sure people know is out there too.
As well as the essays outlining moments of connection and tenderness, Bollinger also turns to consider the reason why these explanations of mundane, everyday joys are so important. In ‘A request’, one of the poetic pieces that punctuate the collection, they set out a list of simple requirements that would be so obvious for a non-disabled person (the word ‘able’ echoes throughout the piece) as to not need to be said:
We should be able to miscommunicate
We should be able to have meltdowns or overload and not die
We should be able to be hard to diagnose
We should be able to be hard to understand
We should be able to be inconvenient, hard to help
and not die.
In the following essay, ‘We should be able to be human’, Bollinger expands on these lines, writing about the murder of disabled New Zealanders and the public reaction, or lack of it, to their deaths. Amidst all the evident love Bollinger has for their community and those who support them throughout Articulations, this is also an angry book, and rightfully so:
We are seen as burdens rather than people … People who give something important to their families, friends, and communities by being who they are. The dominance of non-disabled culture in our lives ranges from the passive acceptance of our exclusion, from schools, from work, from being present in our communities, to our active segregation through law and policy.
Bollinger is, alongside (and as a part of) their writing, also a disability rights advocate and activist. Since finishing this book, the most recent piece I read from them was a March 2024 article fighting against the new government’s changes to disability support funding. Articulations is both an act of inclusion (in form as well as content: with their publisher Tender Press, Bollinger has ensured it is available not just in print but as an eBook and audiobook, the latter still a rare format for all but the most high-profile local literary publications), and an act of resistance. Throughout the different glimpses of their life and experience, Bollinger talks directly to the reader, speaking to their pain and anger at the ways in which many choose to look away from the barriers erected to (unwittingly and otherwise) exclude them and their community from living all facets of their lives.
But, in turning the reader’s attention, especially non-disabled readers, to all the different parts of their life—from childhood and family to friendship and support and romance, and then to the small frustrations of everyday exclusions and tragedies of government and systemic policies that limit lives—Bollinger also invites us to see the challenges placed in front of our disabled community and work, in ways large and small, to change them. Articulations ends on another small moment: a wedding invitation that includes a note that the couple are only considering accessible venues. A moment of tenderness, not a cure for the ills of the world at large, but which allows you in, as Bollinger’s own writing does—an act of love.
FRANCIS COOKE is a Wellington writer and co-editor with Louise Wallace, Tate Fountain, Khadro Mohamed and Nina Mingya Powles of Starling journal online.
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