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The fiction is forever with us

The fiction that
most women have both husbands and
money is forever
with us

— Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born, p. 247
Edited to be “read like Shange”

“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 on the reasons they are dying.”

— Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider, p. 119

 

Although Rich repeatedly speaks out against “the fiction” that privileged women represent an experience universal to all women (247), her essay contrasts with Ntozake Shange’s semi-autobiographical style in a significant way. Just as she grapples with both her womanhood and Blackness, Shange also confronts the privilege granted English speakers and American nationals like herself. However, Rich’s essay focuses on the oppression of women by men and women (but mostly by men), without granting the same deep interrogation to her own whiteness and the role of white women in perpetrating racist oppression.

Rich sympathetically engages with the burdensome expectations her mother faces as a white woman in the U.S. South to be “pure” like a “gardenia” (220). However, Rich does not necessarily explore how the white fragility granted more readily to women than men can be a privilege. Likewise, to convey an image of her mother, Rich, like her father, references the Botticelli Venus and Helen of Troy (219). These (often ahistorically whitewashed) Greek and Roman references dip into a cultural cache of sympathy for white beauty and innocence rooted in colonialism.

If oppression happens to women who do not look like Diane Kruger, it is not clear that their struggles take on equal importance in Rich’s essay. Her scattered references to women of color and women living outside of Europe and the U.S. are not framed in terms of solidarity, struggle, and family like in Shange’s poem Bocas — “i have a daughter/ mozambique / i have a son/ angola” (Daughter’s Geography, 21). Instead, she presents them as passive victims of backwards regimes, such as the blanket statement that Chinese foot-binding is an “affliction” and a “mutilat[ion]” (243).

 

The hubris, as Gayatri Spivak has put it, that “white men [need to] save brown women from brown men” has been used by colonial governments and continues to be used by neocolonial governments as a justification for violent intervention and conquest (see, for instance, the U.S. invasion in Afghanistan), as Dorothy Ko, Lila Abu-Lughod and Saba Mahmood have pointed out. In her reflection on sati in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak suggests that it is very suspect when women wish to fight for women’s rights in a society they do not come from without making a lifetime commitment to becoming fluent in the epistemologies, languages, and histories of that society.

 

Quoting the Upanishads and ancient Egyptian hymns out of context without understanding the original or explaining who did the translating and why, leads to a loss of opportunity to truly appreciate the dimensions of women’s struggles and everyday experiences in these societies (226). As Spivak points out in “The Politics of Translation,” “if we were thinking of translating […] Emily Dickinson, the standard for the translator could not be ‘anyone who can conduct a conversation in the language of the original (in this case English)’” (188).

 

Rich’s detour to Atwood’s novel about a white woman who, as white women do, finds herself by “going back to nature” in a Rousseau-esque, George-Catlin-esque appropriation of the culture, skills, knowledge systems, and survival strategies of the Creek nation in Canada is particularly troubling because she does not bring up white women’s role in genocide and land theft from First Nations; nor does she acknowledge the violence of the anthropological technology of the “Indian photographs” (240-241). For a useful critique, see contemporary artist Kent Monkman’s work (he has Scots-Irish and Creek ancestry).

Moreover, Rich’s quotes from ancient India, ancient Egypt, ancient China, and ancient Greece are all actually about a tiny elite of rich women, and should not be taken to represent all women in that time period. Rich mourns that women have been historically saddled with the difficulties of raising children and being full-time “homemakers” (236). She describes the specter of “women going mad ‘for want of something to do’” (229). In contrast, Shange is far more concerned with the history of Black American women, who have always had to fight for the right to mother their children and make time to do so amidst enormous work demands.

This history is rooted in from the separation of mothers from children under American white supremacist slavery, a system in which women were an equal or majority proportion of field laborers outdoors, in addition to maintaining food and households in their communities and kinship networks. The experiences of women who worked in white women’s households trouble the distinctions between home and workplace. Aside from the feeling of being trapped in the legal institution of marriage, enslaved women were struggling to have their family relations and marriages, as well as their rights as mothers, be legally and socially recognized and respected at all; and to this day Black American women struggle to live peacefully with their partners without racist government intervention tearing them apart, for instance through police brutality and mass incarceration.

This is a far cry from the enormous privilege of the “pattern” of “close” and “long-lasting” bonds between mothers and daughters in intimate domestic spheres that Rich attributes as “characteristic of the period” of “the 1760s to the 1880s” (233). She does not address the experiences of millions of enslaved women, thus implying that there is something un-“characteristic” about their struggles. Here she loses an opportunity to interrogate her own white privilege as a woman who identifies with the boredom of the household and child care, but free of work demands due to perceived purity and fragility.

On 225, Rich suggests that institutional motherhood incompatible with wage-earning (or more generally, outside-the-house-working) motherhood: “Institutional motherhood makes no provision for the wage-earning mother.” As proof she draws on the constraints given white women and elite women historically. This contrasts with Shange’s work, which is deeply focused on the tangles between women’s unpaid labor as exploitation and their labors of love, and which is invested in contributing to the restoration and new creation of destroyed kinship networks.

 

Through the lens of Shange’s work, it may be worth asking whether institutional motherhood is, for most women, anything but incompatible with being mother-workers who are expected to maintain households, provide sexual labors, and replenish the labor force by raising children, all unpaid, at the same time as working outside the house, for the maintenance of other families’ households, and/or in paid work.

For instance, as Dorothy Ko has pointed out in Cinderella’s Sisters, most ancient Chinese women were peasants who did not undergo foot-binding, in large part because they had to be able to work. Part of what made foot-binding a status symbol was that it meant the woman with “delicate,” “small” feet had servants with “ugly,” “big” feet who waited on her and did her housework for her. In the institution of slavery, as Saidiya Hartman has pointed out, the doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem conscripted enslaved women’s wombs as factories to reproduce an unpaid labor force.

 

For most women today, it remains true that we are expected to raise healthy children and bring pregnancies to term while at the same time working around the clock. What would it look like if Rich’s analysis explored the ways in which institutional motherhood is built around the working mother, with rare exemptions for a small elite who thus have a deep personal stake in maintaining patriarchy, racism, and class oppression?

Post #1 — One Bloodstream, Two Inheritances

“I am talking here about a kind of strength which can only be one woman’s gift to another, 

the bloodstream of our inheritance. 

Until a strong line 

of love, 

confirmation, 

and example 

stretches from mother to daughter, 

from woman to woman across the generations, 

women will still be wandering in the wilderness.” (246)

 

My arrangement of the lines forces the reader to meditate on the importance of intergenerational love, confirmation, and example paved by a unified line of women throughout time. The breath also shifts the reader’s attention to the power of this intergenerational mothering line being a strong one — which is what spoke to me about the passage as a whole. 

 

In my case, I’ve received the gift Rich describes here twofold. Of Woman Born helped me understand why, throughout most of my life, I’ve considered having two moms to be a superpower. The inherited gift of strength, passed down to me from both of my parents, has allowed me to become my own hero. My mothers, both born in the 1950’s, gifted me this strength after decades of struggling with the “institutionalized heterosexuality” (218) identified by Rich, coping with the reality of starting a unified life as religious queer women. My mothers both follow the paths of the “unmothered” (243) as described by Rich, having lived most of their lives without their own mothers. This path is one of pain turned fortitude, throughout their motherless process of coming out and building their own family, after the birth of my sibling in 1994. Thus, they carry with them both hardship and immense courage which stretches proudly from mother(s) to daughter. My line of generational inheritance may not be as refined as Rich describes, but it’s just as unified and just as strong. This line comes from both of my mothers, and it’s for me to pass on to my daughters and their daughters. 

 

My mothers treat their title as “mother,” fittingly, like most queens treat their crowns. If ever I refer to one of my parents by their name instead of “mom” or “mommy,” I know I’ll be met with the same do you know how hard I worked to become your mother? that I know all too well, and have grown to love. The labor being described here is not that of pregnancy, suggested by Rich, but the labor of facing intolerance. This is a way in which Rich and I divert. In my poetic rewrite of the quote, the breath and spacing I chose pair bloodstream and inheritance, placing them in an unexpected juxtaposition; my inheritance has little to do with my bloodstream but it’s still strong. I disagree with the notion that “probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies.” (225) Much of what runs through my inherited bloodstream is unknown; anonymous donor #138 may have given me wide brown eyes, but it was my mothers who taught me to see. They taught me to love through the greatest process of confirmation and example – greater than I could have imagined.

an impossible knot

My mother, pregnant with me in El Salto, a waterfall in Azua, Dominican Republic.

My mother, pregnant with me.

To be a daughter is to be inextricably intertwined with one’s mother, as explained by Adrienne Rich in “Of Woman Born,”. As I read through Rich’s logic of the all too complicated phenomenon that is the mother-daughter relationship, I came to understand my own relationship with my mother. Of course, there is only so much that can be taken from a text written by a woman whose relationship with her mother is not complicated by race or class. But nevertheless, I found myself thinking of the adolescent rage that inhabited my body as I thought of my mother. My mother is a woman born in the Dominican Republic, and having been dispossessed of her own mother as a child, she drew all of her energy into her relationship with her own children. My mother experienced the essential female tragedy, as described by Rich (237) and as a result, she nurtured us and provided a fierce, tender form of love that allowed us, allowed me to unashamedly desire this complete return to the mother. And yet, I experienced a similar distancing from the being that I am unavoidably tied to. 

I used to blame my mother for forcing me to stand in front of a sink and do dishes. She was unaware that the alienation from my brothers and what was expected of me made me believe I was somehow inferior, as if it to say that I was born with the purpose to serve. I hated her as she stood idly while I suffered the consequences of a rigid, patriarchal society that began in the confines of my home. And while I had not been introduced to the concept of feminism until my adolescence, I recognized the pillars of inequality, and saw her as the vessel of it. Yet, I did not understand the plight of motherhood. I did not understand the ways that my mother, too, had fallen victim to a system that rendered her a vehicle for oppression to her own daughter. I look at these images of my mother, pregnant with me, and understand Adrienne Rich as she describes the physical ties that envelop the mother and daughter. I rejected my own desire to return to my mother, but I imagine myself, enveloped in a warm, amniotic fluid that only meant to nourish me. I imagine myself, a mother to a daughter, whose own relationship to her mother is violently disrupted by her death. To make sense of my own plights, I needed to understand my mother’s, and the way she was limited, not only by the harsh expectations of a “male-controlled world,” but her inability to return to her own mother, aside from vignettes stored in her memory. I am still learning from her, of her, about her, and in doing so, I further tie myself to her. Yet, I don’t mind this impossible knot we’re creating.  

 

“My Pen is a Machete”: Transforming English

by Ariel Leachman 1 Comment

it is most clear during

lovemaking

when the separation of everyday life lifts for a while/

when a kiss/ and a stroke/ and enter my lover

i am also a child re-entering my mother. . .

i want to return/ to a womb-state of harmony/ and also to the ancient world

i enter my lover

but it is she in her orgasm who returns

i see her face for a long moment/ the unconscious bliss that an infant carries/

the memory of behind its shut eyes.

then when it is she who makes love to me. . .

the intensity/ is also pushing out

a borning!

she comes in/ and is then identified

with the ecstasy that is born. . .

So i too return to the mystery of my mother/and of the world

as it must have been

when the motherbond was exalted.

 

Going through this exercise of rewriting prose as if it were a poem  required me to thing through the purpose of each word, and its significance within a sentence and its purpose. The use of pauses through punctuation is a process that took many attempts to figure out the impact of the word as a function of the authors message. In my decision to create a poem of emotion with the prose from Rich’s “Of Woman Born”, I chose to also create a structural relationship of the words. Each sentence that Rich creates in her prose is a completion of an idea or a continuation of words that relate to one another. In this week’s reading from Shange in ” My Pen is a Machete, she creates intentional responses of the reader to the words in her poems through the pauses in the form of “/” or breaks in stanzas. While reading the pauses made me focus in on particular words and how they related to her overall message in the poem. When re-writing my prose I created the purposeful meaning and emotion of words that otherwise was not captured in prose form, but became more vivid in the form of poetry.