Shawn “The Puru” is a New York based artist, theatre-maker and educator who started The People’s Own Organic Power Project (www.thepooproject.org) in April 2010 to generate public conversations about our often private business, and encourage people to re-examine their relationship to the bodily function that “dare not speak its name”. Shawn and The PooP Project team break through thick walls of euphemism, utilizing public performances and art exhibitions, educational workshops, advocacy and community projects to create “poop positive” space. Their work promotes critical conversations about sustainable sanitation for the person, planet and world community. It’s “a social movement pushing for change from the bottom up”!
Currently Shawn is reworking his solo show Eat $h*t: How Our Waste Can Save the World for a run in the Edinburgh International Fringe Festival this August. He is also working with a nurse practitioner on a series of workshops to help both doctors and patients care for their entire body–including their “naughtiest” bits.
ME: I run a small arts and education organization called The Poop Project.
HOTTIE: Um…did you just say what I think you said?
ME: I sure did. We raise awareness around the 42% of the world living without access to toilets. The diarrheal disease that results kills 4,000 children every day in the developing world. Meanwhile, we’re pooping into our drinking water and using an enormous amount of energy and chemicals to get the poop back out of the water. We measure our value by how much we consume, yet call the nutrient-rich fertilizer that comes back out of us a “waste”— and most of us are too ashamed to admit we even do it. The Poop Project pushes past the potty talk taboo to address these challenges head-on.
HOTTIE: Wow. Huh! I guess I never thought about that.
ME: There you go. You’ll never poop the same way again.
HOTTIE: I guess not. So…how’d you get into, um, poop?
ME: About four years ago, I read The History of Shit by Dominique Laporte and it opened my eyes. The story of poop is really a history of privacy, how we define the body, urban infrastructure, and so much more. I kept reading and researching and…here we are today!
That much is true, though it’s not the whole truth. There’s another side to my story, one I normally save for the second or third date. But for you, dear pooper, I’ll come out of the water closet.
When I was younger, I suffered a condition called encopresis. It’s sometimes called “withholding” or “soiling,” and that’s basically what it was — I would hold in my poop as long as I could, get very constipated, lose control and eventually soil my underwear (note the earthly connection in that term). Encopresis mostly strikes children during potty training or just after, but can also happen in adults. On rare occasions, it happens unconsciously due to a lack of feeling in the rectum. Most of the time, however, the constipation is self-imposed; sufferers might be scared of the toilet or find the feeling of pooping to be unpleasant. It can also be a manifestation of seemingly-unrelated issues of power or control in their life.
I dealt with encopresis on and off from the age of 7 until I was 14 in an endless cycle of shame. From what I can piece together based on my meager, young memories, I had a really big poop, clogged the toilet, and that was gross for everyone in my house—especially my dad, who made his displeasure known as he plunged the toilet. Not wishing for this to happen again, I held it in, attempting to defeat this evil monster inside of me. But holding it in only meant the poop got bigger. What I couldn’t hold back would wind up in my underpants, which I’d shamefully hide under the bed. Then when I finally went to the toilet in earnest, I’d strain to push out an enormous turd that would clog the toilet, thus starting the cycle all over again.
The flush toilet proliferated in the Victorian era, when society was determined, as Freud said, to “insofar as possible deny this inconvenient trace of the earth.” Just flush, forget, and reenter the conversation as if nothing had happened. Clogging the toilet meant that, as smart, funny or talented as I might be, I was rejected from the social order. As I grew older, I began to understand how the body worked and realized that pooping regularly would prevent clogs. But I restricted myself to pooping only at very specific times and places.
When I was 14 I did an exchange program in Spain, and lived in the house of a wonderful woman named Maria Teresa. Afraid of being rejected in my host-mother’s home, I restrained myself for two weeks—to the point where I could barely eat. When I finally let myself go, of course I clogged the toilet with the mother of massive turds. What could I do? I had to bring my shame to Maria Teresa. But instead of chastising me, she was kind and understanding. She said, “This is why you’ve had those terrible tummy aches! We’ll just pour some water on it, break it up, and flush it down. That’s one enormous caca!”
That night, I realized that poop is power. When we acknowledge the honest (and sometimes gross) reality of what it means to have a body, we liberate ourselves from shame and become empowered to take care of our needs. I slowly started using bathrooms outside my own home. Soon I was pooping at school, in shopping malls, even at friends’ houses!
I always knew that there was more to the story—more than what my personal experience could show. When I was 18 and studying theatre in Russia, I said I would write a show about poop at the age of 28. Reading Laporte’s slim book led me on a journey that revealed how the shame I felt as a child was embedded in our architecture, toilet design, even our language. Anyone in Western society is inculcated with these ideas just by growing up.
But not for long. poop exists when we let it exist, when we write about it, talk about it, make art about it. poop is power! It’s a revolution from the bottom up.
Read Shawn’s follow up article: Why We Fear Poop
Find out more about Shawn and the Poop Project.
Categories: fecal microbiota transplant
Tags: shawn shafner, the poop project
Leave a Reply