When You Look at Me I Hope You See the Horse Inside
Maya Uppal
Maya Uppal is a writer and editor with SPAM Press. They co-facilitate the Seeds of Resistance project, an Anti-Imperialist group for young people. They work across London and Glasgow.
Image: Auction photo of a 1960s painted tin plate rocking horse, by Mobo Toys.
My sister's first horse was a photorealistic doll. A chocolate brown pony-in-miniature, with blue eyes, that looked just like her. This was a pattern in our collection, there was always a tension surrounding real looking toys.
We held our onlookers to a standard that made sense to kid-brains.
Expecting the realness we felt around the fake image to be mirrored by the adults in our lives. It should have been just as likely for them to look through the bedroom door and see both a girl and a horse. The toy horse was a true-horse to a child’s mind, which to our minds, comprised the real world.
to a child
Sight = Truth
Sight = Truth
The first true-horse I ever saw was through the window at the red light.
Wherever we went my sister had the doll in her hand, she would brush it until it was balding. Plastic hairs torn from the mane wrapped together over the back seat of my dad’s car, during the drive from the North to the Middle. Factory punched holes left behind their mark in its neck, unplugged pores unable to scab.
I always got sick on these journeys; around four or five twisty roads were enough to feel overcome. Every journey I sat in frantic anticipation of the sighting. We’d pull up into the empty village and I’d look through the window into the horse's eyes.
Stop at the light for too long and you learn to keep your eyes fixed on the first image. The closest horse was always the Best Horse, dressed up in the window, long necked and beautiful. Stare for too long and you begin to notice the bodies hidden behind the first, they heaped the dismembered ponies at the back of the shop. Have you ever considered that a dismembered horse is just four parts you’ve yet to put together again?
My horse was always in the making.
Once you’ve seen the legs waiting to be attached, you start to build your own with a hot running fever. I want the yellow maned head on the grey speckled body! I want the strawberry blonde body, with the black mane but with green eyes! We never got what we asked for. We got the horse's head on a stick. We put our child-bodies on top, that’s how we ended up inside the horse-body. It was a dream to own the whole figure of a horse. The true-horse.
to a child
Truth = Choice
Truth = Choice
My sister’s false-horse reinforced its fakeness in its choice of a body.
Too tiny to be ridden. Hobby heads were similarly tricky, too much of a stick to properly mount like we’d seen the girls in her films do. We had to see the true-horse as a choice to be made. This was my first lesson in the act of choosing a body. And if the body can ride or stiffen or become, what is to stop the transformation of it?
I know that the imagined horse is not an alive thing. My sister didn’t get a true-horse. So we created them. The horse-body I saw could be carved out of the frame of my bike. My own body could be placed upon the bike-body to ride the horse-body. We often played body-switching when we were alone, enthralled by the fact that we could temporarily transform.
Here, my mother interrupts this text
and begins my story over, in her own childhood.
and begins my story over, in her own childhood.
At five she was promised a pony, and like most little girls she believed she would get one. When the day came to move from the city to a country town she guessed her dreams of riding horses were coming true. At eleven, the countryside had become a dull trap she kept scraping the edges of. She put aside the thought of the true-horse she half hoped could still appear, until she met Vicky and, as kids often do, they threw themselves into love.
My mother and Vicky dedicated their lives to the menial tasks, of brushing hair, of petting, of palming up sugar cubes into one another's mouths. They became a singular girl, at one with the false-horse. An animal-human exchange of short glances unsure if this was a first crush or misplaced longing transposed onto the human-body of each girl. In the garden, which had become a stable-world of frozen potential, My mother’s high fantasy horse was stuck on hind legs, always almost about to jump between her fence and Vicky’s.
At what point does an imagined body hit its limit in the child’s experience of the physical world? Is it when adults impose a political image upon the child-body, a differentiation between fantasy and reality that does not exist in the child’s mind? For my mother she was at once a girl, a girl-horse, a girl-with-Vicky, a girl-and-Vicky a girl-girl and a horse-girl.
Child bodies
and Horse bodies
are at each other's mercy in this text.
Each body has a function, each one searches for a dissociation from the others. Children learn to body-switch before we’re told this is an impossible act. As a child to have bodily autonomy I first had to question how it felt and how it looked. I had to imagine a different body and create a kinship with this other-body. I had to translate myself into adult language which is un-creative and un-interested in the interiority of body-feelings. Or in the way a body can feel like a machine. Or in the way a body can fail to function as predicted.
Some time after my own childhood I found a mechanical rocking horse in a charity shop and bought it for my nephew. This horse-body wasn’t a horse at all but a motorbike. In this new identification of horse and bike they became one inseparable figure. When my nephew climbed onto the top of the seat, he joined them, pushed up and down on the stirrup-handles to propel the horse-bike body forward, and let his child-body become a horse-bike-object like mine.