Leslie Jamison’s chapter “Morphology of THE HIT” in her book The Empathy Exams is a great example of the format working for the essay and how to navigate areas of memory that are skewed from traumatic events. The term “morphology” has two separate meanings- a biological one, and a linguistic one. The biology definition states, “the branch of biology that deals with the form of living organisms, and with relationships between their structures.” Meanwhile, the linguistic version states, “the study of the forms of words.” In this essay, it appears that Leslie is taking the biology definition as she does not say “Morphology of hit” but rather puts in all caps, “THE HIT,” and then goes into the different functions of THE HIT. I believe this is on purpose because as Leslie discusses her memory of being hit and then mugged, the entirety of the story appears to take on a separate organism that she is trying to dissect and understand. In each section of the essay, she has them numbered in Roman Numerals with titles that serve to be the “functions.”
Once the essay starts, however, its formatting begins to collapse on Jamison. When handling a traumatic event, often one of the brain’s coping mechanisms is to disassociate. By doing so, the person does not feel that the experience happened to them, but to someone that they observed. Because of disassociating, the event can often feel foreign and though it may still cause trauma to the person, the memory becomes shaky and hard to remember in order. Jamison shows this example of trauma affecting a person by purposefully messing up the numerical order of the functions at times. For example, on page 70-75 Jamison’s numbers begin to go out of sync with functions, even stating on 72 for function “III The Interdiction Is Violated” stating in the first sentence, “Now we’re out of order and we’ve hardly begun.” She then tries to continue on with the essay, but the sections are now out of order, which is causing her to loose composure as that was her only way of maintaining this memory and keeping things in order. On page 74 she reveals to the reader how deeply THE HIT affected her:
He asked me questions about what the guy looked like and I answered them badly. “he had eyebrows,” I may have said-did I say? I was waiting for adjectives to offer themselves up. But none came. The sketch on the computer screen looked nothing like the man.
While she was punched in the nose and mugged by a man, she does not remember the man, what he looked like, or giving the description of her perpetrator. She only knows that the image that the policeman drew was not what he looked like. By giving the readers this insight, Jamison is tying it back to the title of the book, The Empathy Exams. Empathy is often linked to the expression, “putting yourself in someone else’s shoes.” By creating this essay, though little is described about the man who hit her, there is enough detail that talks about how women are told not to go out at night alone, how the pain felt when her nose was hit, and how it affected her afterwards, and the embarrassment women face when a physical appearance becomes blemished because beauty is skin deep according magazines and social media.
It is not THE HIT that the essay is about, it’s about the scars that are still not healed after the face has healed, it is the culture that girls are taught at a young age to never walk alone in dark areas because of the society we live in, it is about wanting to talk about the trauma that has been experienced, but not wanting to have that be the only thing you talk about to a loved one. An important section of her letting the reader know that she wants empathy for her situation is stated on page 76, “I wanted a man to fall in love with me so he could get angry about how I’d gotten hit. I wasn’t supposed to want this. I wanted it anyway.” She did not want a man to fall in love with her, she wants the people she is closest to that now her deeply to empathize with her and to feel anger towards that experience so that she could feel justified in her own anger.