Feminist Literature
Part II: Poetry and Essays
Table of Contents
1. Sylvia Plath “Daddy”
2. Anne Sexton “Housewife” “Her Kind”
“Consorting with Angels”
3. Adrienne Rich “Power”
4. Maya Angelou “Phenomenal Woman”
5. Audre Lorde
“Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference” from Sister Outsider
“A Woman Speak”
“Black Mother Woman”
6. Joy Harjo
“The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor”
1. Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)
Poet and novelist Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932, in Boston, Massachusetts. Sylvia Plath was a gifted and troubled poet, known for the confessional style of her work. Her interest in writing emerged at an early age, and she started out by keeping a journal. After publishing a number of works, Plath won a scholarship to Smith College in 1950. While she was a student, Sylvia Plath spent time in New York City during the summer of 1953 working for Mademoiselle magazine as a guest editor. Soon after, Plath tried to kill herself by taking sleeping pills. She eventually recovered, having received treatment during a stay in a mental health facility. Plath returned to Smith and finished her degree in 1955. A Fulbright Fellowship brought Sylvia Plath to Cambridge University in England. While studying at the university’s Newnham College, she met the poet Ted Hughes. The two married in 1956 and had a stormy relationship. In 1957, Plath spent time in Massachusetts to study with poet Robert Lowell and met fellow poet and student Ann Sexton. A poet on the rise, Sylvia Plath had her first collection of poetry, The Colossus, published in England in 1960. That same year, she gave birth to her first child, a daughter named Freida. Two years later, Plath and Hughes welcomed a second child, a son named Nicholas. Unfortunately, the couple’s marriage was failing apart.
After Hughes left her for another woman in 1962, Sylvia Plath fell into a deep depression.
Struggling with her mental illness, she wrote The Bell Jar (1963), her only novel, which was based on her life and deals with one young woman’s mental breakdown. Plath published the novel under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. She also created the poems that would make up the
collection Ariel (1965), which was released after her death. Sylvia Plath committed suicide on February 11, 1963. Intensely autobiographical, Plath’s poems explore her own mental anguish, her troubled marriage to fellow poet Ted Hughes, her unresolved conflicts with her parents, and her own vision of herself. On the World Socialist Web site, Margaret Rees observed, “Whether Plath wrote about nature, or about the social restrictions on individuals, she stripped away the polite veneer. She let her writing express elemental forces and primeval fears. In doing so, she laid bare the contradictions that tore apart appearance and hinted at some of the tensions hovering just beneath the surface of the American way of life in the post war period.”
Daddy
You do not do, you do not do Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot For thirty years, poor and white, Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before I had time—— Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, Ghastly statue with one gray toe Big as a Frisco seal
And a head in the freakish Atlantic Where it pours bean green over blue In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you. Ach, du.
In the German tongue, in the Polish town Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common. My Polack friend
Says there are a dozen or two. So I never could tell where you Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you. The tongue stuck in my jaw.
It stuck in a barb wire snare. Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you. And the language obscene
An engine, an engine Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.
The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.
I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo. And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue. Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You——
Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through. Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you.
You stand at the blackboard, daddy, In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who
Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you. At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.
But they pulled me out of the sack, And they stuck me together with glue. And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look
And a love of the rack and the screw. And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I’m finally through.
The black telephone’s off at the root, The voices just can’t worm through.
If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two—— The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year, Seven years, if you want to know. Daddy, you can lie back now.
There’s a stake in your fat black heart And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you. They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.
2. Anne Sexton (1928-1974)
Anne Sexton was born in Newton, Massachusetts and raised in Weston. The daughter of a successful businessman, Sexton’s childhood was materially comfortable but not happy. Her relationships with her parents were difficult, perhaps even abusive. Sexton’s closest confidante was her maiden great-aunt. She attended boarding school and after graduation enrolled in Garland Junior College for one year. Sexton later described Garland as a “finishing” school. At age 19, she married Alfred “Kayo” Sexton II. While Kayo was serving in Korea, Anne became a fashion model. In 1953, she gave birth to her first child and in 1955, her second. Sexton suffered from post-partum depression, and after the birth of her first daughter she suffered her first breakdown and was admitted to a neuropsychiatric hospital. Other institutionalizations followed. Sexton struggled with depression for the remainder of her life. She committed suicide at age 46. In treatment, her therapist encouraged her to write and in 1957 Sexton joined writing groups in Boston that eventually led her to friendships and relationships with the poets Maxine Kumin, Robert Lowell, George Starbuck, and Sylvia Plath. As Sexton told Beatrice Berg, her writing began, in fact, as therapy: “My analyst told me to write between our sessions about what I was feeling and thinking and dreaming.” Her analyst, impressed by her work, encouraged her to keep writing, and then, she told Berg, she saw (on television) “I. A. Richards [a poet and literary critic] describing the form of a sonnet and I thought maybe I could do that. Oh, I was turned on. I wrote two or three a day for about a year.” Eventually, Sexton’s poems about her psychiatric struggles were gathered in her first book, To Bedlam and Part Way
Back (1960), which recounts the experiences “of madness and near-madness, of the pathetic, well- meaning, necessarily tentative and perilous attempts at cure, and of the patient’s slow coming back into the human associations and responsibilities which the old, previous self still demands.”
Housewife
Some women marry houses.
It’s another kind of skin; it has a heart, a mouth, a liver and bowel movements. The walls are permanent and pink.
See how she sits on her knees all day, faithfully washing herself down.
Men enter by force, drawn back like Jonah into their fleshy mothers.
A woman is her mother. That’s the main thing.
Her Kind
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I have gone out, a possessed witch, haunting the black air, braver at night; dreaming evil, I have done my hitch over the plain houses, light by light: lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind. A woman like that is not a woman, quite. I have been her kind. |
I have found the warm caves in the woods, filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves, closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves: whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood. I have been her kind.
I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by, learning the last bright routes, survivor where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind. A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.
Consorting with Angels
I was tired of being a woman, tired of the spoons and the post, tired of my mouth and my breasts,
tired of the cosmetics and the silks. There were still men who sat at my table, circled around the bowl I offered up.
The bowl was filled with purple grapes and the flies hovered in for the scent
and even my father came with his white bone. But I was tired of the gender things.
Last night I had a dream and I said to it...
‘You are the answer.
You will outlive my husband and my father.’ In that dream there was a city made of chains where Joan was put to death in man’s clothes and the nature of the angels went unexplained, no two made in the same species,
one with a nose, one with an ear in its hand, one chewing a star and recording its orbit, each one like a poem obeying itself, performing God’s functions,
a people apart.
‘You are the answer,’ I said, and entered,
lying down on the gates of the city.
Then the chains were fastened around me
and I lost my common gender and my final aspect.
Adam was on the left of me and Eve was on the right of me,
both thoroughly inconsistent with the world of reason.
We wove our arms together and rode under the sun.
I was not a woman anymore, not one thing or the other.
O daughters of Jerusalem,
the king has brought me into his chamber. I am black and I am beautiful.
I’ve been opened and undressed. I have no arms or legs.
I’m all one skin like a fish. I’m no more a woman than Christ was a man.
3. Adrienne Rich (1929-2012)
Adrienne Rich was born in 1929 in Baltimore, Maryland. Her father was a renowned pathologist and professor at Johns Hopkins; her mother was a former concert pianist. Rich’s upbringing was dominated by the intellectual ambitions her father had for her, and Rich excelled at academics, gaining her degree from Radcliffe University. In 1953 she married Alfred Conrad, an economics professor at Harvard. She had three children with him, but their relationship began to fray in the 1960s as Rich became politically aware—she later stated that “the experience of motherhood was eventually to radicalize me.” Rich’s work of the 1960s and ‘70s begins to show the signs of that radicalization.
Moving her family to New York in 1966, Rich’s collections from this period include Necessities of Life (1966), Leaflets (1969), and The Will to Change (1971), all of which feature looser lines and radical political content. Rich was one of America’s foremost public intellectuals. Widely read and hugely influential, Rich’s career spanned seven decades and has hewed closely to the story of post- war American poetry itself. Her earliest work, including A Change of World (1951) which won the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Award, was formally exact and decorous, while her work of the late 1960s and 70s became increasingly radical in both its free-verse form and feminist and political content. Rich’s work has explored issues of identity, sexuality and politics; her formally ambitious poetics have reflected her continued search for social justice, her role in the anti-war movement, and her radical feminism. Utilizing speech cadences, enjambment and irregular line and stanza lengths, Rich’s open forms have sought to include ostensibly “non-poetic” language into poetry.
Power
Living in the earth-depositis of our history
Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate
Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil
She died a famous woman denying her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power
4. Maya Angelou (1928–2014)
An acclaimed American poet, storyteller, activist, and autobiographer, Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri. Angelou had a broad career as a singer, dancer, actress, composer, and Hollywood’s first female black director, but became most famous as a writer, editor, essayist, playwright, and poet. As a civil rights activist, Angelou worked for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. She was also an educator and served as the Reynolds professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University. By 1975, wrote Carol E. Neubauer in Southern Women Writers: The New Generation, Angelou was recognized “as a spokesperson for… all people who are committed to raising the moral standards of living in the United States.” She served on two presidential committees, for Gerald Ford in 1975 and for Jimmy Carter in 1977. In 2000, Angelou was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Bill Clinton. In 2010, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the U.S., by President Barack Obama. Angelou was awarded over 50 honorary degrees before her death. Angelou’s most famous work, I Know Why the Caged Bird
Sings (1969), deals with her early years in Long Beach, St. Louis and Stamps, Arkansas, where she lived with her brother and paternal grandmother. In one of its most evocative (and controversial) moments, Angelou describes how she was first cuddled then raped by her mother ’s boyfriend when she was just seven years old. When the man was murdered by her uncles for his crime, Angelou felt responsible, and stopped talking. Angelou remained mute for five years, but developed a love for language.
Phenomenal Woman
Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.
I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size But when I start to tell them,
They think I’m telling lies. I say,
It’s in the reach of my arms, The span of my hips,
The stride of my step, The curl of my lips.
I’m a woman Phenomenally. Phenomenal woman, That’s me.
I walk into a room
Just as cool as you please, And to a man,
The fellows stand or
Fall down on their knees. Then they swarm around me, A hive of honey bees.
I say,
It’s the fire in my eyes, And the flash of my teeth, The swing in my waist, And the joy in my feet.
I’m a woman Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman, That’s me.
Men themselves have wondered What they see in me.
They try so much But they can’t touch My inner mystery.
When I try to show them, They say they still can’t see. I say,
It’s in the arch of my back, The sun of my smile,
The ride of my breasts, The grace of my style. I’m a woman Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman, That’s me.
Now you understand
Just why my head’s not bowed.
I don’t shout or jump about Or have to talk real loud.
When you see me passing, It ought to make you proud. I say,
It’s in the click of my heels, The bend of my hair,
the palm of my hand, The need for my care. ‘Cause I’m a woman Phenomenally.
Phenomenal woman, That’s me.
5. Audre Lorde (1934-1992)
A self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” Audre Lorde dedicated both her life and her creative talent to confronting and addressing injustices of racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia. Lorde was born in New York City to West Indian immigrant parents. She attended Catholic school and published her first poem in Seventeen magazine while still in high school. Of her poetic beginnings Lorde commented in Black Women Writers: “I used to speak in poetry. I would read poems, and I would memorize them. People would say, well what do you think, Audre. What happened to you yesterday? And I would recite a poem and somewhere in that poem would be a line or a feeling I would be sharing. In other words, I literally communicated through poetry. And when I couldn’t find the poems to express the things I was feeling, that’s what started me writing poetry, and that was when I was twelve or thirteen.” Lorde earned her BA from Hunter College and MLS from Columbia University. She was a librarian in the New York public schools throughout the 1960s. She had two children with her husband, Edward Rollins, a white, gay man, before they divorced in 1970. In 1972, Lorde met her long-time partner, Frances Clayton. She also began teaching as poet-in- residence at Tougaloo College. Her experiences with teaching and pedagogy—as well as her place as a Black, queer woman in white academia—went on to inform her life and work. Indeed, Lorde’s contributions to feminist theory, critical race studies, and queer theory intertwine her personal experiences with broader political aims. Lorde articulated early on the intersections of race, class, and gender in canonical essays such as “The Master’s Tools Will Not Dismantle the Master’s House.”
“Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference”
Paper delivered at the Copeland Colloquium, Amerst College, April 1980 Reproduced in Sister Outsider, Crossing Press, California, 1984
Much of Western European history conditions us to see human differences in simplistic opposition to each other: dominant/subordinate, good/bad, up/down, superior/inferior. In a society where the good is defined in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, there must always be some group of people who, through systematized oppression, can be made to feel surplus, to occupy the place of the dehumanized inferior.
Within this society, that group is made up of Black and Third World people, working-class people, older people, and women.
As a forty-nine-year-old Black lesbian feminist socialist mother of two, including one boy, and a member of an interracial couple, I usually find myself a part of some group defined as other, deviant, inferior, or just plain wrong. Traditionally, in american society, it is the members of oppressed, objectified groups who are expected to stretch out and bridge the gap between the actualities of our lives and the consciousness of our oppressor. For in order
to survive, those of us for whom oppression is as American as apple pie have always had to be watchers, to become familiar with the language and manners of the oppressor, even sometimes adopting them for some illusion of protection. Whenever the need for some pretense of communication arises, those who profit from our oppression call upon us to share our knowledge with them. In other words, it is the responsibility of the oppressed to teach the oppressors their mistakes. I am responsible for educating teachers who dismiss my children’s culture in school. Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are expected to educate the heterosexual world. The oppressors maintain their position and evade responsibility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future.
Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people. As members of such an economy, we have all been programmed to respond to the human differences between us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference in one of three ways: ignore it, and if that is not possible, copy it if we think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate. But we have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals. As a result, those differences have been misnamed and misused in the service of separation and confusion.
Certainly there are very real differences between us of race, age, and sex. But it is not those differences between us that are separating us. It is rather our refusal to recognize those differences, and to examine the distortions which result from our misnaming them and their effects upon human behavior and expectation.
Racism, the belief in the inherent superiority of one race over all others and thereby the right to dominance. Sexism, the belief in the inherent superiority of one sex over the other and thereby the right to dominance. Ageism. Heterosexism. Elitism. Classism.
It is a lifetime pursuit for each one of us to extract these distortions from our living at the same time as we recognize, reclaim, and define those differences upon which they are imposed. For we have all been raised in a society where those distortions were endemic within our living. Too often, we pour the energy needed for recognizing and exploring difference into pretending those differences are insurmountable barriers, or that they do not exist at all. This results in a voluntary isolation, or false and treacherous connections. Either way, we do not develop tools for using human difference as a springboard for creative change within our lives. We speak not of human difference, but of human deviance.
Somewhere, on the edge of consciousness, there is what I call a mythical norm, which each one of us within our hearts knows “that is not me.” In America, this norm is usually defined as white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian, and financially secure. It
is with this mythical norm that the trappings of power reside within this society. Those of us who stand outside that power often identify one way in which we are different, and we assume that to be the primary cause of all oppression, forgetting other distortions around difference, some of which we ourselves may be practising. By and large within the women’s movement today, white women focus upon their oppression as women and ignore differences of race, sexual preference, class, and age. There is a pretense to a homogeneity of experience covered by the word sisterhood that does not in fact exist.
Unacknowledged class differences rob women of each others’ energy and creative insight. Recently a women’s magazine collective made the decision for one issue to print only prose, saying poetry was a less “rigorous” or “serious” art form. Yet even the form our creativity takes is often a class issue. Of all the art forms, poetry is the most economical. It
is the one which is the most secret, which requires the least physical labor, the least material, and the one which can be done between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps of surplus paper. Over the last few years, writing a novel on tight finances, I came to appreciate the enormous differences in the material demands between poetry and prose. As we reclaim our literature, poetry has been the major voice of poor, working class, and Colored women. A room of one’s own may be a necessity for writing prose, but so are
reams of paper, a typewriter, and plenty of time. The actual requirements to produce the visual arts also help determine, along class lines, whose art is whose. In this day of inflated prices for material, who are our sculptors, our painters, our photographers? When we speak of a broadly based women’s culture, we need to be aware of the effect of class and economic differences on the supplies available for producing art.
As we move toward creating a society within which we can each flourish, ageism is another distortion of relationship which interferes without vision. By ignoring the past, we are encouraged to repeat its mistakes. The “generation gap” is an important social tool for any repressive society. If the younger members of a community view the older members as contemptible or suspect or excess, they will never be able to join hands and examine the living memories of the community, nor ask the all important question, “Why?” This gives rise to a historical amnesia that keeps us working to invent the wheel every time we have to go to the store for bread.
We find ourselves having to repeat and relearn the same old lessons over and over that our mothers did because we do not pass on what we have learned, or because we are unable to listen. For instance, how many times has this all been said before? For another, who would have believed that once again our daughters are allowing their bodies to be hampered and purgatoried by girdles and high heels and hobble skirts?
Ignoring the differences of race between women and the implications of those differences presents the most serious threat to the mobilization of women’s joint power.
As white women ignore their built-in privilege of whiteness and define woman in terms of their own experience alone, then women of Color become “other,” the outsider whose experience and tradition is too “alien” to comprehend. An example of this is the signal absence of the experience of women of Color as a resource for women’s studies courses. The literature of women of Color is seldom included in women’s literature courses and almost never in other literature courses, nor in women’s studies as a whole. All too often, the excuse given is that the literatures of women of Color can only be taught by Colored women, or that they are too difficult to understand, or that classes cannot “get into” them because they come out of experiences that are “too different.” I have heard this argument presented by white women of otherwise quite clear intelligence, women who seem to have no trouble at all teaching and reviewing work that comes out of the vastly different experiences of Shakespeare, Moliere, Dostoyefsky, and Aristophanes. Surely there must be some other explanation.
This is a very complex question, but I believe one of the reasons white women have such difficulty reading Black women’s work is because of their reluctance to see Black women as women and different from themselves. To examine Black women’s literature effectively requires that we be seen as whole people in our actual complexities — as individuals, as women, as human — rather than as one of those problematic but familiar stereotypes provided in this society in place of genunine images of Black women. And I believe this holds true for the literatures of other women of Color who are not Black.
The literatures of all women of Color recreate the textures of our lives, and many white women are heavily invested in ignoring the real differences. For as long as any difference between us means one of us must be inferior, then the recognition of any difference must be fraught with guilt. To allow women of Color to step out of stereotypes is too guilt provoking, for it threatens the complacency of those women who view oppression only in terms of sex.
Refusing to recognize difference makes it impossible to see the different problems and pitfalls facing us as women.
Thus, in a patriarchal power system where whiteskin privilege is a major prop, the entrapments used to neutralize Black women and white women are not the same. For example, it is easy for Black women to be used by the power structure against Black men, not because they are men, but because they are Black. Therefore, for Black women, it is necessary at all times to separate the needs of the oppressor from our own legitimate conflicts within our communities. This same problem does not exist for white women.
Black women and men have shared racist oppression and still share it, although in different ways. Out of that shared oppression we have developed joint defenses and joint vulnerabilities to each other that are not duplicated in the white community, with the
exception of the relationship between Jewish women and Jewish men.
On the other hand, white women face the pitfall of being seduced into joining the oppressor under the pretense of sharing power. This possibility does not exist in the same way for women of Color. The tokenism that is sometimes extended to us is not an invitation to join power; our racial “otherness” is a visible reality that makes that quite clear. For white women there is a wider range of pretended choices and rewards for identifying with patriarchal power and its tools.
Today, with the defeat of ERA, the tightening economy, and increased conservatism, it is easier once again for white women to believe the dangerous fantasy that if you are good enough, pretty enough, sweet enough, quiet enough, teach the children to behave, hate the right people, and marry the right men, then you will be allowed to co-exist with patriarchy in relative peace, at least until a man needs your job or the neighborhood rapist happens along. And true, unless one lives and loves in the trenches it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.
But Black women and our children know the fabric of our lives is stitched with violence and with hatred, that there is no rest. We do not deal with it only on the picket lines, or in dark midnight alleys, or in the places where we dare to verbalize our resistance. For us, increasingly, violence weaves through the daily tissues of our living — in the supermarket, in the classroom, in the elevator, in the clinic and the schoolyard, from the plumber, the baker, the saleswoman, the bus driver, the bank teller, the waitress who does not serve us.
Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you, we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs upon the reasons they are dying.
The threat of difference has been no less blinding to people of Color. Those of us who are Black must see that the reality of our lives and our struggle does not make us immune to the errors of ignoring and misnaming difference. Within Black communities where racism is a living reality, differences among us often seem dangerous and suspect. The need for unity is often misnamed as a need for homogeneity, and a Black feminist vision mistaken for betrayal of our common interests as a people. Because of the continuous battle against racial erasure that Black women and Black men share, some Black women still refuse to recognize that we are also oppressed as women, and that sexual hostility against Black women is practiced not only by the white racist society, but implemented within our Black communities as well. It is a disease striking the heart of Black nationhood, and silence will not make it disappear.
Exacerbated by racism and the pressures of powerlessness, violence against Black women and children often becomes a standard within our communities, one by which manliness can
be measured. But these woman-hating acts are rarely discussed as crimes against Black women.
As a group, women of Color are the lowest paid wage earners in america. We are the primary targets of abortion and sterilization abuse, here and abroad. In certain parts of Africa, small girls are still being sewed shut between their legs to keep them docile and for men’s pleasure. This is known as female circumcision, and it is not a cultural affair as the late Jomo Kenyatta insisted, it is a crime against Black women.
Black women’s literature is full of the pain of frequent assault, not only by a racist patriarchy, but also by Black men. Yet the necessity for and history of shared battle have made us, Black women, particularly vulnerable to the false accusation that anti-sexist is anti-Black. Meanwhile, womanhating as a recourse of the powerless is sapping strength from Black communities, and our very lives. Rape is on the increase, reported and unreported, and rape is not aggressive sexuality, it is sexualized aggression. As Kalamu ya Salaam, a Black male writer points out, “As long as male domination exists, rape will exist. Only women revolting and men made conscious of their responsibility to fight sexism can collectively stop rape.”
Differences between ourselves as Black women are also being misnamed and used to separate us from one another. As a Black lesbian feminist comfortable with the many different ingredients of my identity, and a woman committed to racial and sexual freedom from oppression, I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self. But this is a destructive and fragmenting way to live. My fullest concentration of energy is available to me only when I integrate all the parts of who I am, openly, allowing power from particular sources of my living to flow back and forth freely through all my different selves, without the restrictions of externally imposed definition. Only then can I bring myself and my energies as a whole to the service of those struggles which I embrace as part of my living.
A fear of lesbians, or of being accused of being a lesbian, has led many Black women into testifying against themselves. It has led some of us into destructive alliances, and others into despair and isolation. In the white women’s communities, heterosexism is sometimes a result of identifying with the white patriarchy, a rejection of that interdependence between women-identified women which allows the self to be, rather than to be used in the service of men. Sometimes it reflects a die-hard belief in the protective coloration of heterosexual relationships, sometimes a self-hate which all women have to fight against, taught us from birth.
Although elements of these attitudes exist for all women, there are particular resonances of heterosexism and homophobia among Black women. Despite the fact that woman-bonding has a long and honorable history in the African and African american
communities, and despite the knowledge and accomplishments of many strong and creative women-identified Black women in the political, social and cultural fields, heterosexual Black women often tend to ignore or discount the existence and work of Black lesbians. Part of this attitude has come from an understandable terror of Black male attack within the close confines of Black society, where the punishment for any female self-assertion is still to be accused of being a lesbian and therefore unworthy of the attention or support of the scarce Black male. But part of this need to misname and ignore Black lesbians comes from a very real fear that openly women-identified Black women who are no longer dependent upon men for their self-definition may well reorder our whole concept of social relationships.
Black women who once insisted that lesbianism was a white woman’s problem now insist that Black lesbians are a threat to Black nationhood, are consorting with the enemy, are basically un-Black. These accusations, coming from the very women to whom we look for deep and real understanding, have served to keep many Black lesbians in hiding, caught between the racism of white women and the homophobia of their sisters. Often, their work has been ignored, trivialized, or misnamed, as with the work of Angelina Grimke, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Lorraine Hansberry. Yet women- bonded women have always been some part of the power of Black communities, from our unmarried aunts to the amazons of Dahomey.
And it is certainly not Black lesbians who are assaulting women and raping children and grandmothers on the streets of our communities.
Across this country, as in Boston during the spring of 1979 following the unsolved murders of twelve Black women, Black lesbians are spearheading movements against violence against Black women.
What are the particular details within each of our lives that can be scrutinized and altered to help bring about change? How do we redefine difference for all women? It is not our differences which separate women, but our reluctance to recognize those differences and to deal effectively with the distortions which have resulted from the ignoring and misnaming of those differences.
As a tool of social control, women have been encouraged to recognize only one area of human difference as legitimate, those differences which exist between women and men. And we have learned to deal across those differences with the urgency of all oppressed subordinates. All of us have had to learn to live or work or coexist with men, from our fathers on. We have recognized and negotiated these differences, even when this recognition only continued the old dominant/subordinate mode of human relationship; where the oppressed must recognize the masters’ difference in order to survive.
But our future survival is predicated upon our ability to relate within equality. As
women, we must root out internalized patterns of oppression within ourselves if we are to move beyond the most superficial aspects of social change. Now we must recognize differences among women who are our equals, neither inferior nor superior, and devise ways to use each others’ difference to enrich our visions and our joint struggles. The future of our earth may depend upon the ability of all women to identify and develop new definitions of power and new patterns of relating across difference. The old definitions have not served us, nor the earth that supports us. The old patterns, no matter how cleverly rearranged to imitate progress, still condemn us to cosmetically altered repetitions of the same old exchanges, the same old guilt, hatred, recrimination, lamentation, and suspicion.
For we have, built into all of us, old blueprints of expectation and response, old structures of oppression, and these must be altered at the same time as we alter the living conditions which are a result of those structures. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.
As Paulo Freire shows so well in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which knows only the oppressors’ tactics, the oppressors ‘relationships.
Change means growth, and growth can be painful. But we sharpen self- definition by exposing the self in work and struggle together with those whom we define as different from ourselves, although sharing the same goals. For Black and white, old and young, lesbian and heterosexual women alike, this can mean new paths to our survival.
We have chosen each other
and the edge of each others battles the war is the same if we lose someday women’s blood will congeal upon a dead planet if we win
there is no telling
we seek beyond history
for a new and more possible meeting.
A Woman Speaks
Moon marked and touched by sun my magic is unwritten
but when the sea turns back
it will leave my shape behind.
I seek no favor untouched by blood
unrelenting as the curse of love permanent as my errors
or my pride I do not mix
love with pity
nor hate with scorn
and if you would know me look into the entrails of Uranus
where the restless oceans pound.
I do not dwell
within my birth nor my divinities who am ageless and half-grown and still seeking
my sisters
witches in Dahomey
wear me inside their coiled cloths as our mother did
mourning.
I have been woman for a long time beware my smile
I am treacherous with old magic and the noon’s new fury
with all your wide futures promised
I am woman
and not white.
Black Mother Woman
I cannot recall you gentle yet through your heavy love I have become
an image of your once-delicate flesh split with deceitful longings.
When strangers come and compliment me your aged spirit takes a bow
jingling with pride
but once you hid that secret in the center of your fury hanging me
with deep breasts and wiry hair your own split flesh
and long-suffering eyes
buried in myths of little worth.
But I have peeled away your anger down to its core of love
and look mother I Am
a dark temple
where your true spirit rises beautiful
and tough as chestnut
stanchion against nightmares of weakness and if my eyes conceal
a squadron of conflicting rebellions I learned from you
to define myself through your denials.
6. Joy Harjo (1951- )
Joy Harjo was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. She earned her BA from the University of New Mexico and MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Harjo draws on First Nation storytelling and histories, as well as feminist and social justice poetic traditions, and frequently incorporates indigenous myths, symbols, and values into her writing. Her poetry inhabits landscapes—the Southwest, Southeast, but also Alaska and Hawaii—and centers around the need for remembrance and transcendence. She once commented, “I feel strongly that I have a responsibility to all the sources that I am: to all past and future ancestors, to my home country, to all places that I touch down on and that are myself, to all voices, all women, all of my tribe, all people, all earth, and beyond that to all beginnings and endings. In a strange kind of sense [writing] frees me to believe in myself, to be able to speak, to have voice, because I have to; it is my survival.” Her work is often autobiographical, informed by the natural world, and above all preoccupied with survival and the limitations of language. A critically-acclaimed poet, Harjo’s many honors include the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas, the Josephine Miles Poetry Award, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the American Indian Distinguished Achievement in the Arts Award. In 2017 she was awarded the Ruth Lilly Prize in Poetry. In addition to writing poetry, Harjo is a noted teacher, saxophonist, and vocalist. She performed for many years with her band, Poetic Justice, and currently tours with Arrow Dynamics.
The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window
She is the woman hanging from the 13th floor window. Her hands are pressed white against the concrete moulding of the tenement building. She hangs from the 13th floor window in east Chicage, with a swirl of birds over her head. They could
be a halo, or a storm of glass waiting to crush her. She thinks she will be set free.
The woman hanging from the 13th floor window on the east side of Chicago is not alone.
She is a woman of children, of the baby, Carlos, and of Margaret, and of Jimmy who is the oldest. She is her mother’s daughter and her father’s son.
She is several pieces between the two husbands she has had. She is all the women of the apartment
building who stand watching her, watching themselves.
When she was young she ate wild rice on scraped down Plates in warm wood rooms. It was in the farther
North and she was the baby then. They rocked her.
She sees Lake Michigan lapping at the shores of Herself. It is a dizzy hole of water and the rich Live in tall glass houses at the edge of it. In some
Places Lake Michigan speak softly, here, it just sputters And buts itself against the asphalt. She sees
Other buildings just like hers. She sees other Women hanging from many-floored windows Counting their lives in the palms of their hands And in the palms of their children’s hands.
She is the woman hanging from the 13th floor window On the Indian side of town. Her belly is soft from
Her children’s births, her worn levis swing down below Her wait, and then her feet, and then her heart.
She is dangling.
The woman hanging from the 13th floor hears voices. They come to her in the night when the lights have gone dim. Sometimes they are little cats mewing and scratching at the door, sometimes they’re her grandmother’s voice, and sometimes they’re gigantic men of light whispering
to her to get up, to get up, to get up. That’s when she wants to have another child to hold onto in the night, to be able to Fall back into dreams.
And the woman hanging from the 13th floor window hears other voices. Some of them scream out from below
for her to jump, they would push her over. Others cry softly from the sidewalks, pull their children up like flowers and gather
them into their arms. They would help her, like themselves.
But she is the woman hanging from the 13th floor window, and she knows she is hanging by her own fingers, her
own skin, her own thread of indecision.
She thinks of Carlos, of Margaret, of Jimmy. She thinks of her father, and of her mother.
She thinks of all the women she has been, of all the men. She think of the color of her skin, and of Chicago streets, and of waterfalls and pines.
She thinks of moonlight nights, and of cool spring storms. Her mind chatters like neon and northside bars.
She thinks of the 4 a.m. loneliness that have folded Her up like death, discordant, without logical
and beautiful conclusion. Her teeth break off at the edges. She would speak.
The woman hangs from the 13th floor crying for the lost beauty of her own life. She sees the
sun falling west over the grey plane of Chicago. She thinks she remembers listening to her own life break loose, as she falls from the 13th floor window on the east side of Chicago, or as she climbs back up to claim herself again.