Illipsis

{…} 

This piece is about a new concept and term for chronic illness. The Illipsis, I - L - L - I - P - S - I - S, is a term Natalie Joelle coined, during the project. You’ll hear Natalie Joelle’s poem which explains the term in language and imagery and then you’ll hear my personal response to it.

For this audio piece I think it’s helpful to hold the typographical shorthand of the Illipsis in your mind: two angled brackets with three dots, three full stops between them. A final note, is you’ll hear the term ‘crip’ and ‘crip time’. Crip is a term re-claimed in culture to disrupt our understandings of disability and so-called ‘normalcy’. 

Natalie Joelle: {…} Illipsis

Self portrait in punctuation: two angled bracket-defended ears around a brackish tide of a rest.

Three beads weighting an apportioned overblanket, underfurled.

A typographical illipsis. 

An illipsis isn’t a gap, it’s its own way of taking up space.

An illipsis is an ellipsis of the sick as hiatus.

This pause is not pregnant, not expecting.

We can stop expecting. 

An illipsis blankets crip time sensorial. 

An illipsis covers to resist a slick cripplease.

An illipsis remains elliptical and beckons with it’s brackets.

How would it be to let an illipsis gather us here?

Raquel: Something I love about this term is the sense of physicality of the brackets - which makes it feels like a really safe space to me. A space that resists and pushes against codes of normalcy that are harmful to everyone, but especially to chronically ill people. 

I appreciate the idea of resisting the ‘slick crip-please’, this habit to be like a good disabled person or a graceful or useful disabled person, which often means we don’t honor our needs and we make ourselves more ill. And it’s ‘slick’, because it’s such a well-worn habit, you know? 

I also appreciate Natalie Joelle naming that the pause is not pregnant, like we’re not expecting, we can stop expecting and it feels like such a relief - to be relieved of the pressure of getting better. ‘cause it can feel like a pressure, and something you are just massively failing at. When you’re not, you’re not failing, you’re just ill. 

I love how the term and the spacetime of the term ‘beckons’ and ‘brackets’ and is ‘sensorial’. It reminds me of something else Natalie Joelle said in the workshops which was “we have the right to our own temporality”.

Outro: 

The concept of the illipsis is by Natalie Joelle. And you heard the voices of Natalie Joelle and Raquel Meseguer Zafe.