Girls Against God

regurgitated it as cud, but they never swallow. Gum controls the mouth, stops it from speaking out of turn, but keeps it active, sensual. The gum is a reminder of life, a reminder of what the pulse, the tongue and the teeth really desire. The sound doesn’t stop; like a beat it’s always there; it becomes the sound of eternity. It, if anything, is God.
I curse the voice, the gum and the whole mouth, at home in my Southern witch’s den. The school and the Christians try their best to control the mouth: through compulsory recitals of the Lord’s Prayer, psalms (1989–92) and speaking in tongues, bans on swearing, and worried conversations about the faithless, hell and the devil (1996–99). My whole upbringing condenses into one question: How do you pray without faith?
The only thing I value in my mouth is spit. Hatred spits, scorns, and finally becomes bulimic. Something happens in my throat: a spiritual retching. Throughout my childhood I feel like I’m being sick without the nausea. As if that’s how I talk and sing. I sense it in my dreams, walking to school, on the school bus. Under my desk every morning, like a glowing malpaís, is an oozing pool of black biblical sick.
At home, hidden behind black velvet curtains, I’m saved by the blasphemous material on my computer. I rush through Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs and Bataille’s Story of the Eye, on the uncensored and unfinished ’90s internet, and behind them I see my face mirrored on the computer screen. I scroll through eye and egg fetishes and voyeuristic fantasies, and in my own head I rename Bataille’s novella Story of the Throat, a translation I lick and gnaw until I can feel something other than God’s retching in my own throat. To do this, my throat has to become blasphemous. From my first year in primary school I spit out every school word contemptuously: When we sing psalms I harmonise off-key, adding evil resonances with my voice. The devil is always angry, and I’m always angry, I’m told, and that’s why I allow myself to sing off-key. The devil and I are always a quartertone over or a semitone under, I think, and I rub myself against the rituals, swallow them, polish them with spit and regurgitate them. But when I use my voice for blasphemy, I do it with pleasure. The malpaís oozes in ornate patterns. Look at me, I’m gushing, it doesn’t stop, but continues to drip down my desk, to the floor and down the drains in locker rooms, down to the underworld that supports us.
For the longest time I’m unable to understand what that feeling is. I can only feel it: the retching, the fear, the pleasure, and the overflowing. It’s only years after I’ve left the witch’s den and the classroom malpaís in exchange for a secular university in the capital, and long after I’ve repressed the feeling of God stuck in my throat, that I find the porn classic Deep Throat on an illegal peer-to-peer network, an awful low-resolution video. The file is so compressed, and all the moving genitals are so pixelated, that the film is practically censored and no longer fulfils its purpose. But it works for me. Early in the film the main character goes to see her doctor to ask why she can’t orgasm. The doctor identifies the problem easily: her clit is actually in her throat. He is of course immediately willing to demonstrate how the issue could be solved. This part is less exciting to me. My kink is the idea that the throat is a site for happiness, as in the Art Garfunkel interview where he talks about the moment he realised that he could sing and calls it ‘a feeling of happiness brought on by something that happened in my throat.’ Linda Lovelace and Art Garfunkel, from kink to kink, blasphemy and happiness, it’s all the same to me. Happiness is the throat that regurgitates God, as we clear that passage before we talk or sing, so that the throat can discover itself. In the throat’s ecstasy, in the eroticism of the throat, the throat’s hands are stretched out into the world. Out of the mouth gushes and?
I’m on my way home from practice with my first band in 1998. It’s nearly summer and the sun scorches my black clothes and black hair. Black velvet sticks to arms, thighs and back as I dash through fields and housing estates and churchyards, past churches and parish centres with their crosses flying high and windows peering at me. When the wind blows through my clothes, I feel it’s the Christian monuments sort of screaming at me. They know I’m the spawn of Satan. I’m a lonely black stain on the paper, one that isn’t even allowed to battle the Jesus soldiers as a knight. With my band-practice confidence I curse them all.
From the top of a small hill, behind a few beeches and a thin white cross that wavers in the wind, comes the sound of voices. Each gust of wind ushers them toward me, and when the wind changes direction I almost can’t hear them, until another word or phrase hits me in the face once more. The song is a psalm with lots of verses. Each phrase is stretched, the tones sustained, just as psalms are always sung, and within these sustained tones old women’s voices quiver into each other. Each individual voice quivers, too, the way hats, tablecloths and the white cross quiver in an open-air church service. Deep inside these old women’s throats their vocal cords vibrate against each other, body rubs against body, woodwork creaks against woodwork. Antiquated psalms, antiquated words, antiquated bodies, fossils united.
During this period in my life I scorn the vibrato. The Jesus girls have taught me that there’s something