on being possessed

by lauren samblanet

in one poem, i wrote :

i want to write the story of the body

in one poem, i wrote :

i don’t know when i became a thinking thing

to write the story of the body is to write a story that is in heat, that is grotesque, that is sexy, that oozes, that drips. and amidst all that dripping, all that mess, what if the only way to inhabit ourselves sexually or, rather, to let our sexuality inhabit ourselves fully, is to let ourselves be possessed?

sometimes thinking overtakes the actual act of writing, i mean the tactility of writing: how it feels when my fingers fly across the keyboard, how it feels to press ink onto paper, how it feels to let go of my mind and trust that my body can lead, can find language through touch.

sex once felt like a pleasurable but dissociative possession: like i wasn’t fully there. but now sex feels like complete embodiment; i remain possessed, but thrice-possessed:

by kink,
by the present moment,
by my body & its holy sexuality

writing often feels like a more typical, demonic possession. in the first draft, i’m just vomiting like regan, the possessed child in the exorcist, spewing out pea soup, laughing at how delightful it feels to expel something internal & private, but also part of me feels tucked away in myself, at the mercy of some other force.

and where is my body when i write like this?

it’s less about the pleasure of the tactility of writing and more about the pleasure of the psychic release—of letting myself write on the page what i’ve been holding within, of letting language unfold as parts of my inner life reveal themselves to the page and to me.

i watch usama alshaibi’s profane and it reminds me of the letters of mina harker and like a dog and the exorcist and also something completely new to me. all of these explore female sexuality as society has long seen it—as a type of demonic, monstrous possession—something dangerous, outside the self, something destructive that must be excised.

if, in so much media, female sexuality is a possession, then it must be true that not giving into exorcism is a form of resistance and therefore, letting my sexuality possess me is a form of reclamation & agency. more so, writing about my sexuality and sexual possession must be an even deeper path to reclamation & agency.

but i begin to ponder the differences in possessions. how there’s not just one type of possession, but many, and how some possessions are forced while some are chosen, some offer us more agency and some lock us away within ourselves to rot while something else takes over.

how do we notice the difference? and if we’ve become so possessed that we’re locked away in ourselves, which type of exorcisms help us and which cause us to become possessed by some other type of demon even if they remove the original demon at the same time?

writing is a type of possession that can horrify others. what is more at odds with capitalism than any creative act? with the structure of this world? when we let creativity take hold, who knows what will expel from the recesses of our minds? when we let creativity take hold, we contradict dominant, “normative” ideology and rules about how to see the world, how to behave in the world, how to share our experiences of being alive.

confessional writing, then, is the ultimate possession because of its need to share something so intensely that we are willing to expose our shadow selves, our private lives, the private lives of those we are intimate with. does female sexuality or female confessional writing scare men more? which do they more long to excise?

if we must be possessed to find reclamation & agency, how do we discern what we should be possessed by? what’s the difference between possession and being possessed? what’s the difference between inhabiting our sexuality and letting our sexuality inhabit us?

remember the scene in the exorcist when regan, possessed by the devil, fucks herself with a crucifix while she says “let jesus fuck you”, then pushes her mother’s face to her pussy and says “lick me”? it strikes me how regan is arriving at puberty and sexual awakening—she’s 12, she’s probably aware of sexuality and opening to it more and more. it becomes easy to link her possession to that awakening—it becomes easy to view the exorcism as a desire to rinse her of her sexuality which is vulgar and messy and at odds with societal norms of sexuality. is the metaphor really this easy? is it really a metaphor when regan grows more and more sickly, her body deteriorating, her head turning around unnaturally, help me being somehow carved into her skin or pushed out of it from the inside?

and yet when i link the exorcist to profane, i want more and more to link the fear of a young girl’s sexual awakening to a violent exorcism. muna, the film’s protagonist, tells us that she experimented with boys as a young girl but that her family thought she was possessed: “there were exorcisms.” then we see footage of an exorcism, followed by a scene where muna kisses her boyfriend intensely and he asks her to stop, saying he just wants to talk, but her appetite is voracious. the placement of these scenes paints the picture that when muna is sexual, she is possessed.

toward the end of the film, ali, the taxi driver who muna and her friend mary have come to know, and an imam come to muna’s house—the tone is sinister. the men are uncomfortable with muna and mary’s, nudity, with how mary is bound. muna and mary are playful, then muna gets angry. i see her getting triggered—imagine her past memories of exorcisms lapping over into the present moment. she kicks the men out. she remains sexual. at the close of the film, muna tells us that she no longer identifies as muslim and that she is the djinn that seemed to be haunting her – implying that she is possessed and that rather than face another exorcism, she chose to be possessed.

this ending is so wildly different from conclusion of the exorcist—muna is possessed and sexual and sexually outside of the norm—regan’s demon has been excised, two men died ridding her of her demon and her memory of her possession is blank. we’re presented with two statements—in one, the demon offers sexual freedom, agency and a type of self-possession, self-knowing and self-alignment—in the other, the demon offers only death, the grotesque and decay while also erasing the memory of sexuality, however vulgar, from regan’s mind. in both films, the men are the harbingers of tamed women— they want to pull the demons out, restore order, stop the oozing, tuck away sexuality.

to say that i’m rooting for regan’s demon feels ridiculous—the escalation of her deterioration is overwhelming—each time we see her, she’s more and more horrifying to behold. then again, i wonder if some feel this way looking at my sexuality which unfolds more and more and which grows further from that which has been declared normative. unlike regan, and more like muna, the more my sexuality unfolds, the more agency and power i feel like i have. and the more i devote myself to kink, the more i feel like myself and the more i feel like the feral animal inside me that i’ve tried to crate for years is finally able to roam free.

i continually choose my possessions—let my body take over, tell all the secrets on the page and publish them, i ooze, my body oozes, we never stop oozing publicly.

but now that i’m possessed, i wonder what possessed me before that caused me to lock my desires and shadow selves away so deeply.

i begin to see how submission and kink are portals to the self, to selfpossession. as someone close to me once said, kink is a way to our core, to what’s most honest about ourselves, so let me tell you about the agency found in submission, in being owned, possessed.

what happens to my mind when when i’m possessed? online, they refer to what happens when you’re sexually submitting, truly submitting, as subspace, but i see it less as space and more as a zone.

have you seen stalker? the film’s wikipedia page : “in the film, a “stalker” is a professional guide to the zone, someone having the ability and desire to cross the border into the dangerous and forbidden place with a specific goal.” yes, i cross into this forbidden place, but it doesn’t have to be dangerous—kink can be so much safer than “vanilla” sex because of its emphasis on consent, care and aftercare. i’m full of desire to cross this border—i want to cross it every day.

what differentiates a zone from a state from space from a possession? am i like regan or muna when i’m sexually possessed? were they also just in a zone? have zones also been misinterpreted as being dangerous and not of the self? or what if i’m misinterpreting all of this? the zone is a state as possession is a state as subspace is a state. can an “altered state” be a possession? is an “altered state” a type of presence or further distance from presence? what if what’s happening to me when i’m feeling such agency and power while also experiencing deep submission, is not a state but rather pure and honest presence? is there a difference between a state and presence? has this type of presence, what i might call an extreme presence, become the ultimate type of possession? it’s so far from how we experience most of our time and the ways we can access this type of extreme presence, this pure embodiment, the honest now, feel so limited in a world that’s been structured to keep us distanced.

our jobs keep us distanced from rest and flow and time. our screens keep us distanced from our bodies, from the tactile, from what’s happening in the room around us while we’re scrolling. our cultural ideology keeps us distanced from the parts of ourselves that are at odds with society’s norms. even counter-ideologies that exist in opposition to dominant cultural ideology can distance us from parts of ourselves—like how i sometimes have rejected the submissive part of myself because i worry it makes me a bad feminist.

we are all experiencing so much distance and restriction, tucking away parts of ourselves and allowing ourselves to be possessed by capitalism and bureaucracy and ideology so we can survive or fit in. in this way, i’m reminded that the self might never be truly mine. some parts of me are so possessed by the world around me that i can’t even see the possession happening, let alone know how to exorcise myself so i can be possessed by what i choose to be possessed by. some parts i exorcise but they become possessed again, slowly over time, morphing me into the abject and monstrous, like regan.

if distance is a type of possession and if the world is built to distance us in these ways, then maybe the zone isn’t a sort of altered state but a rebellion or perhaps not even a rebellion but a homecoming. maybe any state that causes us to get closer to something instead of more distant from it is the only way to self-possession. isn’t, then, being owned as a sub the clearest way back to myself?

in one poem i wrote:

maybe the object of desire is desire.

but what if the object of desire isn’t desire itself but rather the host—the one whose body holds the desire? desire can’t live without a host, much like a demon. and while something outside the host is what’s seemingly longed for, that something outside the host feeds the host, fuels the desire, prolongs the possession. a kind of symbiosis occurs—desire needs the host, the host needs the object of desire, so the desire yearns for the object of desire all the more. and the more we desire, the more we are aware of ourselves as the host—the more we come alive in our bodies, the more we feel the presence of our bodies. desire becomes a zone that delivers us to presence, away from distance and deeper into ourselves.

so isn’t part of returning to myself reliant on my faith, my devotion? the more i devote myself to kink, the more i feed my desire and the more real my body (and myself) become to me.

it strikes me how both films center a character who is having a crisis of faith. in the exorcist, the priest, damien, reveals that he is questioning his faith and worries that he shouldn’t be counseling other priests. muna, in profane, is having her own spiritual crisis—wondering if her sexuality can fit with her faith, wondering if her faith must be lost to have her sexuality or vice versa. but what happens to these characters as they have their crises?

during the actual exorcism in the exorcist, we question if damien will be strong enough in his faith to help regan—especially once the demon begins to speak of damien’s mother. he seems to be slipping further from faith and deeper into guilt and despair. but then the film twists, damien ends up saving regan but only by sacrificing himself. once the demon is inside of him, he manages, through what i can only assume is a final devoted return to his faith, to throw himself out the window—ridding himself and regan of the demon but dying horrifically in the act. here, faith can save us but only through extreme sacrifice—the sacrifice of body and life.

but muna finds a different type of faith in profane. while she tells us at the end of the film that she no longer identifies as muslim, she also tells us it’s none of our business what she identifies as, which could signify a belief, still, a faith, in something. and we watch her continue to be sexual toward the close of the film. i imagine that her faith now lies in her body, in its desires, in her sexuality. she devotes herself more fully to the longings of her body and while she tells us she is the djinn, she actually seems more herself than before.

throughout the film, there are scenes of muna, naked, in a red room. she writes allah with black ink on the walls over and over again. but at the close of the film, first we see this quotation:

I saw my Lord with the eye of my heart.
He said, “Who are you?”
I said, “I am You.”
You are He Who fills all place.
But place does not know where You are.
In my subsistence is my annihilation,
In my annihilation, I remain You.
(Mansur Al-Hallaj)

then we see muna, again in the red room, painting in black ink, but now instead of writing allah, she writes her own name: muna. her faith, her devotion return to herself. as the djinn possesses her, she remains herself, and if we analyze the quotation above, we also see an argument that muna can only remain herself by realizing her holiness, by realizing her own godlike nature—the same nature which exists in all of us.

another image is repeated in profane—we see muna, naked, in nature, surrounded by green, lit in beautiful, near surreal lighting. like the garden of eden. like before nakedness was a sin. but this is the tricky nature of religion— it asks us to separate ourselves from our bodies, to distance ourselves from natural desires. in order to devote ourselves to something “higher”, we sacrifice the holiness of our bodies—we don’t just turn away from our bodies, we shame and condemn them for their natural urges and longings, or in the case of damien, we sacrifice our bodies totally to devote ourselves to a god. but by becoming her djinn, muna is able to return to her body without shame. she returns to the garden. she becomes the garden, god, herself.

if desire is a zone and submission is a zone, writing, too, can become a zone. much like when i sexually submit, writing only becomes a zone if i fully surrender to it, if i arrive in its extreme presence, if i devote myself to it totally.

in like a dog, i wrote:

today, i wiped my period blood on my journal and i was no longer afraid of the present and what i saw in that blood was me and i was not afraid…

when i am most afraid to write, i’m actually most afraid to be present, afraid of what will come out on the page. i know writing can be a possession—writing uses my body as a host, pulling out what lurks beneath the surface and nudging it to vomit outward, onto the page, and once vomited out, i cannot unsee it. sometimes there is a sort of abject delight in this vomiting and sometimes it makes me sick to see what’s been hiding itself from my daily thoughts.

to let myself be possessed is always a choice that requires bravery. i try to build practices that make me safe during the possession of writing, just as sexually, i build practices so i can be possessed more fully while still keeping myself, unlike regan and more like muna, intact. in both writing and sexual submission, part of what keeps me safe is being aware of my body’s experience and my emotional state during the possession. if i cannot access my body or my emotions, then how can i know if i still want to consent to the possession? what a strange turn of phrase—to consent to possession—but it is possible, to choose what possesses us and to remain safe while giving ourselves over fully to that which possesses us.

if i am in tune with my body or my emotions, i can discern my sense of safety. if i can discern my sense of safety, then i know when i want to keep giving myself over to my possession and when i need to pause or stop or be fully excised from it. and if i can tune into my body or emotions when possessed, then i can actually experience my possession—i can feel what it’s like to be possessed—i can remember those sensations and emotions afterward—i can desire the experience again because i was there, in the extreme presence of my possession.

i remember how it feels when my fingers fly across the keyboard, how it feels to press ink onto paper, how it feels to let go of my mind and trust that my body can lead. i remember how my body feels when it surrenders to sexuality, to being sexually possessed. like muna, i let myself be possessed—sexually and by writing—and what i find is myself.

in this way, i become the garden, blooming and holy.

lauren samblanet is a hybrid writer who cross-pollinates with other forms of making & other makers of forms. her book, like a dog, is forthcoming from punctum books. some of her writing has been published in A Shadow Map: An Anthology By Survivors Of Sexual Assault, Fence, Dreginald, Entropy, Bedfellows, The Tiny, Crab Fat Magazine, and aglimpseof. she facilitates workshops through reinventing creative process. you can find more of her work at laurensamblanet.com.