Commentary on Jae Nichelle’s “Friends with Benefits” by Ivana Onubogu

Jae Nichelle's "Friends with Benefits"

By Ivana Onubogu

Jae Nichelle’s “Friends with Benefits” plays with the titular connotation of a sexually anchored relationship in order to parse through her personal relationship to anxiety. While invoking language of possession and domination to animate her anxiety to listeners, Nichelle also probes at the permeability of the interior/exterior binarism. Most salient to this point, Nichelle describes coming into relation with her anxiety as simultaneously being a “weight on [her] shoulders” and “the only relationship that [she] can count on.”

Nichelle’s spoken word accentuates the harm of all relationships, pointing to the possibility of locating merit in fraught relationships while still underlining her bodily response to maintaining this relationship. Indeed, for Nichelle, her anxiety is inescapable, ‘crushing,’ and yet so committed a friend that she is able to locate stability in the “irrational.” Her work suggests that there may be benefits to the uncomfortable and that sites of rehabilitation, of healing are necessarily threaded through one’s experiences.

Related:
• AALCI 2020