Language can empower and connect Jzl Jmz to her body but also separate her from it. In one poem in her collection Local Woman, Jmz describes her female body as both belonging to her and an entity outside of her:
Some people choose / to see the ugliness, the disarray. What if this could
be the forever I first designed to excavate? … / in the river valley, my
sentience becomes an evasive species. My / mouth makes lesser predators
nervous. Everywhere I go I begin to haunt it.
(“Local Woman Believes There Is an Order to Our Days” 61)
Jmz’s “sentience becomes an evasive species” where she, not entirely consanguine with her female body, does not exist but haunts a space. While she studies herself in “the mirror she appears as / I graze her stomach this angle / faith is enough glass barrier / between maybe material & / most of me can be happy / being cellophane sex siren” (“Obligation #21(TRANSPARENCY)” 23).
Jmz refers to her reflection as “she.” “She” is the canvas the map is drawn on (“I graze her stomach this angle”). Earlier in the collection, she differentiates between “she” and “my body”: “My body does forgiving things. She does laborious things /… My body was born in the shadow of a man. /… She takes preemptive care. / so she can open herself freely again” (“Local Woman Does Woman Things” 11–12). The two, in this moment, are distinct beings (“maybe material & most of me”) separated by a “glass barrier”; yet, they care for one another, extend intimacy to one another.
Jmz reacts to a system of power that designates rights based on a certain definition of gender, of being. Language is a tool used by those in power to produce what Michel Foucault calls “docile bodies”. This refers to a body “that can be made; out of a formless clay, an inapt body, the machine” that is capable of being “manipulated, shaped and trained” (Discipline and Punish, 135–6). Language can be imposed on us, and we can be compelled to perform language even if it harms us, as long as it supports the power formation of the state.
Jmz’s mirror discourse seems to reflect this kind of control. She indicates, however, in that her body, her identity must disturb the framework of control: “She does become a tool. She wrenches herself / …. / My body does / what She needs / & names it necessary” (“Local Woman Does Woman Things” 12). The identity, not the state, not the government or discourse emanating from the government, controls the body. The emergent identity, the map appearing as it is drawn, controls her body. As a result, her poems begin to take greater manipulation of the text as the collection progresses.
