In Other Words (RLE Feminist Theory)

Writing as a Feminist

Gail Chester, Sigrid Nielsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136189517
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This is a book for all women writers, professional, amateur or aspiring, in which forty women talk about writing and the part it plays in their lives. Self-discovery, work, personal liberation, communication, hope for change – all these motives inspire these short and direct personal statements.

The contributors come from very different backgrounds: some, like Sara Maitland, Rosemary Manning, Anna Livia, Suniti Namjoshi, are well known. Others are unpublished. In Other Words will provide practical support and encouragement for any woman who writes.

PART ONE WHAT WOMEN WRITE

Imaginary ape or The one-eyed monkey answers questions

Suniti Namjoshi

The one-eyed monkey was perched on a pedestal. Two or three people were gathered about. She wondered briefly if they would settle after all for something short of total enlightenment. A simple and partial explanation perhaps? She assumed her most unassuming expression. A very young woman was glaring at her. Sooner or later the questions would start. The monkey waited.

At last the young woman blurted, ‘Why do you write?’ Well, it could have been worse. They could have required a considered solution to the unemployment problem, a precise gradation of the six best writers, a judicious comment on the latest atrocity in the latest headlines. She had once considered confessing publicly that she never read the papers and that she knew almost nothing about pretty well everything; but had been advised against it. Such a remark might be misconstrued. She had decided to keep quiet. But the intense young woman was still glaring. The one-eyed monkey essayed a smile. What was the duration of a smile she mused. How long could it delay answering a question?

The one-eyed monkey smiled again. ‘Why do you write?’ she asked. A question in return was sometimes useful.

‘Oh, I'm not a writer!’ The young woman sounded quite startled. But then she hesitated. ‘Well, I mean, I do write a little. Poems and such. And I haven't shown them to anyone. I – I write in order to know what I think. I guess it's just self-expression.’ She was now glaring at the stony ground in a perplexed fashion.

The one-eyed monkey was about to inquire why the young woman hadn't shown her poems, but it occurred to her that the young woman might thrust them at her. ‘You're an egoist’, she scolded herself silently, but she didn't ask.

‘But isn't art supposed to be relevant?’ This was a young man, who might or might not be connected with the young woman. Did they get on? A question had been asked. Relevant, relevant…. Did the ‘r’ roll, did the ‘I’ lilt? Was something relevant to something else? Oh yes, art – was it relevant? ‘Poetry makes nothing happen.’ Was that the wrong answer? Was it incorrect these days to quote Auden? If it was the wrong answer, her image would suffer; if her image suffered, her books wouldn't sell and that was relevant. She decided she had to say that art was relevant. But the young man hadn't waited for an answer. ‘What I mean is’, he was saying, ‘that I think people matter. And I am a feminist, so I think women are people. And what I think is that poetry that's just an exercise in aestheticism is pure self-indulgence. It ought to be banned. What I mean is that you ought to be saying something specific to someone, to the people, so that there can be progress and change and revolution. You ought to be writing for and to and from the people. In short, what do you have to say to the ordinary man? To someone like me for instance?’ He paused for a moment. ‘I don't understand why you insist on writing about monkeys and cows and all sorts of animals. They are not people.’ He concluded with a final and ferocious frown.

The one-eyed monkey wanted to frown back. But being rude to people wasn't good policy. And if she said to the young man that she had absolutely nothing to say to him, except that she wished he'd go away, he wouldn't buy her books. But perhaps that needn't matter so much if someone else would?

‘The fable’, she began soothingly, ‘is an ancient and respected form.’ Should she throw in a word about its being Indian? It would work like a trigger. They'd draw themselves up and immediately assume a liberal stance. Revolting idea. ‘Well, yes, as I was saying’, she began again, ‘I use the form of the fable because….’ But she didn't know why she wrote fables. If only she could find a plausible explanation.

Her third questioner came to the rescue. ‘That is precisely the area I wished to discuss.’ She appeared to be a middle-aged academic, probably on sabbatical. The one-eyed monkey alerted herself. Academic attention was almost certainly a good thing. ‘Now, don't be facetious. Be civil at all costs, even solemn’, she told herself urgently. But the middle-aged academic had rounded on the young man. ‘Art’, she informed him, ‘is anthropocentric. Literature is written by human beings and read by human beings. So that even a tale about ape-men has human meaning.’ The young man didn't say anything. He was thinking about a tribe of heroic ape-men; he liked the idea.

The academic now turned on the young woman. ‘The difference between mere self-expression and literary expression has to do with distancing. The latter is distanced, the former is not. The one-eyed monkey is not merely a protagonist, but – as in this instance, for example – almost a narrator, indeed even a persona – if we stretch the term slightly. The question you should have been considering is the exact relationship between the one-eyed monkey’ – she nodded at the monkey perched on her pediment – ‘and the one-eyed monkey in quotation marks, so to speak.’

The one-eyed monkey felt dazed. She had begun to invent a story about a one-eyed monkey who once had a sister who was also one-eyed, or perhaps a friend…. She pulled herself together. The academic was addressing her directly.

The device of the one-eyed monkey is in the tradition of the alien observer, the man from another planet, the traveller from Persia or, in reverse, the visitor to Utopia. All that is perfectly obvious. What is, perhaps, more distinctive, is your choice of a monkey. It follows that there must be a play, albeit implicit, on the verb, “to ape”. In other words, you are aping the tradition as a means perhaps of attempting to mock it. The essential stance is hardly humanist. It lacks authority. And this connects in turn with another feature I have examined carefully. Your monkey is one-eyed. I was misled at first by my research into mythology. Was there a connection with the god, Shiva, or possibly with Hanuman? But though Shiva has a third eye, having three eyes is hardly the same thing as having only one. And as for the monkey god, there is absolutely no evidence that in the matter of eyes he was in any way abnormal. Moreover, your monkey is female. As I pondered the point the symbolism of the “one eye” suddenly became clear. It is an admission surely that the vision is limited. It explains satisfactorily the narrowness of perspective.’ The academic paused. She beamed at the others, ‘Now, if you like, you may ask your questions.’

But the one-eyed monkey had been feeling more and more unhappy. By now she was acutely uncomfortable and cross. She decided to get in a few statements first. She addressed the young woman, ‘As you said, I write because I want to know exactly what I think.’ Then she turned to the young man, The exercise of pure aestheticism gives me pleasure.’ And then she growled at the academic, ‘As for you, why don't you write your own stories? The one-eyed monkey is a one-eyed monkey. And I don't know why I write about her.’

‘But you haven't explained anything’, her questioners protested.

‘Why should I?’ cried the monkey.

‘Because you've set yourself up as a writer’, they said. ‘You ought to be able to explain yourself.’

‘But I can't explain’, replied the monkey, ‘all I can do is excuse myself.’ And with that, she scrambled down the pillar and quickly made off.

Meanwhile the itinerant academic pulled out a notebook. ‘Pillar and pilloried’, she jotted down rapidly, ‘probably some sort of hidden significance.’

Poetry – who cares?

Chris Cherry

On a beautiful summer's day when I could be lying in the park soaking up the sun, or at the beach; walking in the woods or talking with friends; on a beautiful summer's day when I don't have anything special to do or anywhere special to be, I choose to write about poetry.

The old conflicts start up again. ‘What do you want to do that for? Pretentious, self-indulgent, anti-social, useless … why don't you go out and do something instead …?’

Caught between desire and censorship, unable to relax and unable to work, I droop, shuffle down to the park, half-heartedly scrawl a few inarticulate sentences, return for coffee and sandwiches, flick through the pages of a book, gather myself again for this act of commitment called writing.

I write because I have to; because I want to; because I love to.

I knew I wanted to be a writer at the age of 7. Amidst constant family rows – my father's wrath, my mother's tears – I was expected to be quiet, uninitiating and dutiful. I escaped from these unpalatable messages into fantasy adventures full of people, action, and excitement. These I both acted out in play and wrote down when I had to be inside and amuse myself.

Once I got to secondary school my teachers discouraged my long stories. My ‘education’ sacrificed imagination and creativity to facts, rules, and accuracy. In this dualistic world of good or bad, right or wrong, success or failure, there was no room for risk, discovery, or self expression. No one sought or wanted my opinions, feelings, experiences, or my dreams. A straight road led through this desert of boredom and passivity to university and back to school as a teacher.

Having barricaded myself behind my school-books to avoid the worst violations to my person that my home environment represented, at 22 I made the sanest choice then available to me and got married, taking a copy of the just published The Female Eunuch with me on my honeymoon. Three years later I joined my first women's group, demanded a room of my own and started writing a novel. Three years after that I left my husband, moved into the country, and lived a year of solitude, getting to know myself for the first time.

During this year, poetry started to flow – suddenly and delightfully. And it seemed then that the poems wrote themselves, that there was an unending store of thoughts, feelings, images, ideas, just waiting to be released and expressed – in a lunch hour, at the launderette, driving my car and especially during the long, lonely winter nights, words and images poured through me onto paper, speaking more than I consciously knew. High on poetry, I fell under her spell.

That year I met up with other women writers and we started a group which kept me going for the next five years. Squeezed into odd hours between paid work, friends, emotional traumas, poetry keeps coming back to demand my attention.

I've discovered that there's a difference for me between writing prose and poetry. I can sit down on demand and struggle with prose, arriving at some adequate approximation of what I'd hoped to say. I don't find it easy, it can be lonely, I'm never completely satisfied with what I've written, and it's hard work. But I know I can do it.

But: poetry can't be so forced and disciplined. She comes and goes of her own volition. When she's with me I move into another dimension, feel connected both to my inner world and the world around me. I fill out, I flow, I spark; see significance, patterns, and meaning where before there was none. Words resonate on several different levels of consciousness, bringing past and future into the present. Everything becomes symbol and metaphor. But poetry will only stay around if the conditions are right, and she can disappear as suddenly as she came, returning me to a two-dimensional world, flat and incomplete.

For me poetry is more than words on a page and need not be written down to be experienced. Poetry is connectedness. It is uncovering, knowing and accepting my feelings and inner voices so often drowned by the rush of everyday survival. It is going back to uncover again and again what has been found and lost. It is being with others and allowing the flow of sympathy and antipathy in a mutual present in which I do not seek to pretend to be other than who I am. It is sensing acutely the moods, rhythms, and cycles of nature and being responsive to my own moods, rhythms, and cycles. It is feeling connected to my own loving, living, creative, sexual energy without apology or shame. It is taking the time to look and hear and smell and taste and touch; to bring everyday things into focus and see them as if for the first time, knowing that each flower, tree, cloud, wall, shadow, cup is unique and perfectly itself and at the same time part of a great, universal network of finely balanced correspondences. It is knowing that I am not alone and separate and arbitrary but part of a common humanity whose feelings and experiences are more alike than different beneath surface appearances, the habitual distortions of race, culture, and gender.

Poetry is a form of meditation with its own inward and outward movement, inspiration, and exhalation. If my mind were an iceberg the top ninth would be above water and visible; the rest below water, unseen and unheard. It is from the unseen and unheard that poetry comes bubbling up as words and images. Images can come at any time. I need not always remember them first time. Like dreams, if they're important they'll come back. But if I want to write poetry, I have to learn to value and respect them, welcome them, pay them attention, and be prepared to work on them.

The first stage of the work involves exploring and expanding the original image. This requires an uncensoring mind and a state of total concentration. I have to become the image – the desert, the sea, the mountain, whatever it was that came into my mind – get right inside it, feel my way around it, see it, hear it, smell, and taste it until I know it. I write down any connection that comes to me until I've exhausted the present possibilities. Then I bring the more rational, analytical part of my mind into play to order, shape, and form the material. I weed out what is superfluous, pay attention to the rhythm and music of the words, the pauses and silences, the shape of the poem on the page, juggle the lines until the whole thing dances together complete in itself.

This poem ‘Iceberg’ begins to describe this process:

1

I could draw poetry out of silence

with the patience of a fisherwoman

I have cut my circle in the ice

and wait.

2

I want to find the courage to dive deep

beyond conception,

to hammer diamonds from the glassy wall

such hard at meaning

to make transparent the opaque.

I want to trace with burning fingers

the unique and perfect pattern

of each frost flower

to wear a skin so thin

my blood's heat

will melt the edge of ice

and make the inert flow.

3

I want to write poetry with muscle

– words that can't be pummelled into submission

but swagger seeking across a page.

I want a new vocabulary for living,

a grammar for contradictions

where mind and body rhyme

and my heart's beat

sounds in the sea.

Poetry is a way of knowledge. By giving myself over totally to my inner life in these moments, I make a commitment to myself and, consequently, to all those to whom I am connected. In doing so I risk discovering both my power and my limitations. I take responsibility for who I am and dare to speak who I am. Self-centred, it is not a selfish act; only through knowing and accepting my own pain, joy, desire, despair, fragility, my own human condition, can I know and accept yours. By daring to speak it, I break the conspiracy of silence which keeps us separate. And if you can understand me, through my words, which are never quite right, or adequate, but all I have with which to reach you, we are both a little less alone, a little more connected.

Adrienne Rich de...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: writing as a feminist
• Part One What Women Write
• Part Two Taking Control
• Part Three Writing About Ourselves
• Part Four Support and Communication
• Resources section