On an epithelial level, the scar is simply a mark, a regenerated piece of tissue, a healed lesion that conventionally follows the infliction of an incision or a burn, either intentional or not. Of this trace however, we almost instantly find that it does not suffice to regard it as a mere peculiarity of the dermis, as what is crucial to this fibrous section of tissue is the meta- cutaneous, its metonymic relationship to a particular event or action. This is the primary trait of any scar: that it signifies beyond the skin, beyond the biological palimpsest that it has produced. We are, at first, tempted to associate it with the traumatic, with the remnants of suffering that make of it a relic of pain, both physical and cognitive, an agonizing recollection of consumed passions and jagged embraces, flaming within our psyche and manifest with the illuminated perspex sculptures of Isaac Lythgoe. Yet, is it not a scar that also reminds one of birth, of being removed from the womb for, which our mothers bear a caesarean section or we, a snipping away of the umbilical cord? Can the postpartum depression alluded to by Srijon Chowdhury’s distracted mother-infant dyad not foreshadow a latter maternal joy, an expulsion of postnatal morbidity?

Text by Smaranda Ciubotaru