Revolution Making
Oct 31st, 2008 by admin
I’m a mess right now, and Jeyoani knows I am and, amazing friend and daughter that she is, she told me to go read Dorothy Allison, whose writing I so dearly love and more and more every year, I swear, and I did go read, and here is some of what I read, and I think if it doesn’t make you cry, maybe you aren’t a feminist, or maybe you are, but you aren’t the kind of feminist I can relate to right now, and the woods seem to be full of ‘em for me these days. Thanks, Jeyoani. xo
What was the first feminist book you read? Not Our Bodies, Ourselves or The Feminist Mystique. No, take me back. All the way back. Take me back to the trashy books you read. Take me back to the stuff that you read and that you wanted to be. I’m 54 years old. To quote “Sex and the City,” I’m abso-fuckin’-lutely tired. I read theory. I read to train my language and to sharpen my mind. But I write fiction. I write fiction for a specific, deliberate, reasonable, old lesbian purpose. The world I love is not on the page. The world I understand is not reflected on the page. What made me a feminist were occasional glimpses of my real life on the page.
I … know that that voice saying “They owe me” is the most dangerous bone in my body. It is a part of me that I have to resist. It is a bone I cannot stand on, feel or shape. Instead, I owe you, my feminist sisters.
…Things change, things stay the same, things are always in turmoil for people like us. Think back to the first book that gave you the notion that you could change your world. Whether you define your world as George Bush’s world or your neighborhood or your family or your ex-girlfriends and the new ones you’re looking at, I guarantee the book that you picked up that “empowered” you and gave you a sense of authority in the world was almost surely a feminist text. A narrative of revolution. A piece of someone’s soul in which they spread their legs, took a strong stand and stubbornly shared with you how they had changed their own life or endured their own life or made new the life they had been handed.
I do not necessarily believe that someone can make it all make sense. I am, in fact, in love with the feminist ideal of “get used to being uncomfortable, you’ll learn something.” That is what I need, want, ache for, and I believe absolutely in the future of feminism.
I do not construct feminism as an ethical or moralistic system. When I talk about justice, I am talking about institutions that have ground me and my kind, right down to rock so far back that they owe me. They owe me as a working-class girl. They owe me as a queer girl. They owe me as a raped child. They owe me as a writer who had to raise money and who couldn’t write for years because she had to raise money. Yet, I also know that that voice saying “They owe me” is the most dangerous bone in my body. It is a part of me that I have to resist. It is a bone I cannot stand on, feel or shape. Instead, I owe you, my feminist sisters.
I guarantee the book that you picked up that “empowered” you and gave you a sense of authority in the world was almost surely a feminist text. A narrative of revolution. A piece of someone’s soul in which they spread their legs, took a strong stand and stubbornly shared with you how they had changed their own life or endured their own life or made new the life they had been handed.
Last week, because the river rose and we got cut off, we all watched TV. And it made me think, what the fuck is it gonna look like when they make the movie of our life? Let me be clear about what I envision as the future of feminism. When they come around to make the movie of your life, when someone comes around to write the biography of you, as that feminist icon or that revolutionary, world-changing activist you are about to become, for God’s sake, make it more than anything small or pretty or over-romanticized. Make it as revolutionary as this tradition in which we speak has been. Make it so dangerous that people will be scared and unnerved when they read it. Take risks. Make illegitimate children. Get lots of lovers. Try some stuff! Make some difference. Without that courage, without that outside agitation, there will be no future of feminism. There will be no change in this country.
We can talk a lot about mother-daughter transgression and generational resentment for a good couple a million decades, but I came to feminism as a lover. Feminism for me was a love affair. I came to feminism as an escaped Baptist. Feminism for me was a religious conversion experience. I came to feminism as a hurt, desperate, denied child, and I would’ve killed for the feminist mama who would take me in her arms and make it all make sense. And I’ve been running after her ass ever since.
Beautiful writing. I am envious of women who can write like this. Pour their souls onto the page, make you want to cry, make you want to hug other women and hold them tight.
I really wish that I could meet you one day Heart. You are an inspiration and a guiding light. I’d love to tell you in person just how special you are, just how wonderful you are. It hurts me very much to hear that you are going through messed up times right now. I hope you are healing. I am grateful that you have a supportive daughter. I am sending you love and hugs through the internet.
<3 <3 <3
Ah Allecto. I meant to include that paragraph and don’t know why I didn’t, but you got it, that’s the one that got me crying! Yeah. I came to feminism as a lover and out of love and for love. I came to it like a love affair. It opened its arms to me when a misogynist, patriarchal church turned its back on me.
Thank you. One of these days, we’ll meet face to face, I know it.
xo
I really love Dorothy Allison.
I have used quotes from “Trash” for some of my visual art, because some of her words have connected with me deeply.
“I begun to dream longingly of my death.”
These words are the part of me that I hide, coz “survivors” are meant strong and always looking forward. I like so many survivors are not that simple, many are living to die. But it is hidden behind the role of looking in control and optimistic.
“Even now, I cannot believe how it was that everything I survived became one more reason to want to die.”
This is behind all my writing, it is like I need to know why I am alive. I do believe in the future, but there something in the words of Dorothy Allison I know, I remember that I live to the full coz I am only here by luck.
I remember.
“though drugs and drinking and stubbornly putting myself in the way of other people’s violence”
I love that Dorothy Allison speak about and for the women that into self-hate with a rage. I know the times where suicide that up too much energy, so instead there is the small deaths of placing yourself in the way of danger.
“I had to imagined the hunger for life was insatiable, endless, unshakable”
And finally she speak of the time when hate eats at your heart, co the pain of existence make it hard to have “love”.
“I matched their innocence, their confidence and their capacity to trust, to love, to be generous against the bitterness, the rage, the pain and the terrible hatred that consumed me.”
That is the place where much of my writings come from.
One of the worst things of surviving multiple sexual violence, is very hard not to have an angry “jealousy” to those who have not had such experiences. This eats me up, coz it is so wrong.
When I read some of Dorothy Allison made me feel I was not mad.
And help to find my compassion and to cry.
I also recommend her poems especially “The Women That Hate Me” and “Upcountry”.
Ah, poignant, profound, painful in a dark-before-the-dawn way. Heart, I hope for your sustenance and passage safely through whatever’s going on … and I hope this for all of us. We’re each courageous, to keep on, to sense what’s coming but not yet materialized, to ache with life’s unfolding.
Last night I saw The Changeling, alone on a movie theater row also including three strangers: “The Women That Hate Me.” When I laughed in a feminist uproarious manner at the male hypocrisy (mocking it) depicted on screen, they tried to shush me. By their silences and exclamations, they had no concern for the horrors unleashed by patriarchy upon the Christine Collins character played well by Angeline Jolie; their concern was instead for the young male scam artist pretending to be her son so he could come to Hollywood in search of an acting career.
I laughed all the harder. One of them leaned several seats over to say, “well, I’ll just get management if you won’t be quiet,” and I laughed all the harder. A member of the movie theater management staff came to the side aisle and watched me for 15 minutes. I laughed (although not quite so hard), but nobody asked me to forfeit my seat. It was surreal. I have no idea how to reach women that male-identified. But I appreciated the movie’s bravery in speaking the truth about mother love, dominant- male disparagement and disdain for women (directed by Clint Eastwood, of all men, who must have gone through a late-life catharsis).
This morning, along a still waterfront while getting exercise, another stranger-woman remarked at the unusually calm beauty and my conversation moved into how it was in some ancient women’s calendars the start of a new year — information that’s generally suppressed — and how changes are coming, with her request ultimately for my reading list on where she might start. Yippee.
All of this to say I’m taking the bitter with the better. It’s a war, not a pink cloud. We’re winning just by being alive enough to laugh when we want.
Dorothy Allison speaks to me, as a daughter of Appalachia, in a way many feminist writers don’t.
By this standard of hers, I would have to say, Laura Ingalls Wilder and Louisa May Alcott’s books and biographies were very inspirational to me at an early age. Both girls labeled “tomboys” and “unladylike” by their families for insisting on being active, involved in the world, and being intelliegent, and somehow managing to resist in subtle ways even though they made some surface concessions to society’s insistence on them keeping their “place”. Remember, it used to be controversial for women to write books at all!