In the anthology Women
Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence, readers learn just how many
forms of resistance to female-specific violence there are.
The answer is: so many that I wrote a damn critical thesis
just to tell you how great this anthology is (i.e., settle in for a
long-but-worth-it read). Also, four BL authors have work in this collection,
and it’s incredibly cool to have published talented writers who also happen to
be compassionate and engaged. Congrats on your continued greatness, Grace Bauer
(#23), Mary Stone
Dockery (#21), July Westhale (#19), and Sarah A. Chavez (also #19).
I realized writing this piece is in itself a form of
resistance. To speak at length and in unabashed praise of a collection of
poetry written in mouthy backlash to the cultural norms of domestic violence,
rape, childhood abuse, verbal harassment and assault on city streets, etc., is
to stand with women as they refuse to stand for it anymore. It is to give
thoughtful treatment to a problem that is largely being ignored by our
lawmakers and our justice system, which is an attempt to extend the work these
poets and this editor undertook in participating in the anthology. It is to
defy anyone to suggest that these poems aren’t literary because they often sound
colloquial, or to dismiss them as therapeutic or confessional or any of those
other supposed “critical” terms that condescend to the kind of writing I and
others call real talk. We can do that in
poetry. Not only is it allowed, but resistance is poetry’s legacy.
*
In her critical introduction, editor Dr. Laura Madeline
Wiseman claims that, “poetics, and specifically, poetry of resistance … [allow]
poets to use multiple strategies to challenge the powers that endorse gender
violence” (xvi) — further, to “rupture the cultural meanings” (xvii) of it.
Such strategies include “breaking silences,” “raising consciousness” (via
“poetry of witness”), “disrupting narratives,” “sassing language,” and the use
of “strategic anger.”
Behold a generous and judiciously edited collection of
quality poetry by women in conversation with the dynamics of abusers and the
abused, and as they endeavor to “use poetry as the platform of power to make
life better for all” (xxiii) and “encourage readers to act” (xxiv).
The sheer range of resistance taking place in this collection
defies an easy breakdown into specific categories; most of the poems, in fact,
resist being cataloged under a singular type of resistance — an extension of
the idea of differential consciousness. Wiseman calls on scholar Chela
Sandoval’s Methodology of the Oppressed
in her use of the concept of differential consciousness: namely, that
“fractured identities are not a new phenomenon experienced only in a postmodern
world, but rather the continual and historical experiences of those who are oppressed”
(xv). In one poem, a speaker might be both timid and vengeful, healed and
haunted, proud and ashamed. In so doing, she resists being easily classified as
a victim, and therefore holds the power to change our idea of what constitutes
a victim.
And if we can change victims into survivors and helpers of
future generations, perhaps we can change abusers into non-abusers. It’s a
least a step, right?
First, there is no ignoring the presence of female warriors
Judy Grahn and Alicia Ostriker, or poetry heavyweights Ellen Bass, Joy Castro,
Jane Satterfield, Megan Gannon, Evie Shockley, Judith Vollmer, and Maureen
Seaton (and so many more). When the most visible and revered in our field lend
their words and consciousness to a worthy cause, even as many of them have done
their entire careers, the potential to reach even wider audience increases.
Grahn’s contributor statement says that “every year she reads parts of ‘women
are tired of the ways men bleed’ for ‘Guardianas de la Vida’ in the mission
district of SF” (p. 215). In the part she offers up in WWR, we learn that
During the Vietnam Warand during the Iraq War,in the u.s. more housewives and girlfriends,more brides and mothersdied at the hands of angry husbands and boyfriendsthan u.s. soldiers died in the Vietnam War or inthe Iraq War (p. 70)
“Marriage, for many women,” Grahn writes, “is a kind of
war.” Casting brides-to-be as soldiers preparing to enter the domestic fray,
she wonders if women say, at their bridal showers, “I might not come back from
this,” wonders why we don’t honor fallen housewives with “a white cross in
front of the house” (p. 71). Grahn is raising consciousness by showing us how
traditional social narratives favor and revere the safety and work of men; she
disrupts that narrative by instead showing reverence for the safety and work of
women.
Hadara Bar-Nadav’s haunting poems employ repetition to dig
into our memories (“My Wife in All Things,” p. 19), as does Gannon’s “Attic
Spell” (p. 64), which turns words on their sides as another way of disrupting
narrative. A poem called “Tragedies” (p. 55), by Becky Faber, illustrates how
social structures enable misogyny through that narrative of marriage as a
private matter, rather than a community interest. But, simply, marriage units are
entities of community units. Further, the disturbance of the marriage’s
violence is simultaneously witnessed by a group of random citizens who are
socially pressured to treat marriages as separate and private: When a man
dragged his wife by her hair across a room, “everyone turned away” (p. 55). The
speaker’s recollection of the incident in Faber’s poem un-silences the crowd
who did not intervene or call the police by making us a smarter and more
compassionate, responsible, and action-oriented crowd.
Bearing witness is a major theme in this anthology. Speaking
out, taking political action, and opening homes to battered friends and
co-workers are just several ways that we can bear productive witness to women whose lives are demeaned and endangered
by a global gender-imbalanced power structure. An early poem in the collection
is Lucy Adkins’ “Grandma Ellen Tells It Like It Was,” a sparse rendering of how
marriage so often trapped previous generations of women into abuser/victim
dynamics. The speaker addresses a universal “you,” making the past tense “was”
of the title almost sarcastic because, though contemporary women have a “Crisis
Line” and “Friendship Home,” the abuse that drives us to those rescue resources
still happens in the supposed “pretty picture” of many homes. Adkins taps into
our nostalgia with a grandmother story, then lures us to a sideways commentary
on the perpetuation of gender violence, where women still “knead [their] rage /
into a hard round ball” they keep “tight inside” (p. 5).
Ellen Bass’ poem “Bearing Witness” takes society to task for
negligence: “We weep at tragedy, a baby / sailing through windshield like a
cabbage … but we draw the line at the sadistic.” But “God is the kicked child,”
she reminds us (p. 20). Kristy Bowen’s poem “No Girls Were Harmed in the Making
of This Poem” seeks to create a space (on the page, the prose poem is a near
geometrically perfect rectangle) within which to contain all the gender
violence she’s witnessed, only to lament in her second poem on the adjacent
page, “I can’t keep dead girls out of these poems” (p. 31). Another prose poem
by Mary Stone Dockery draws a character sketch of a woman “After the Rape,” as
she kills a bee “before it entered [her] skin” (p. 49) – the way she couldn’t with
her rapist.
Other poems bear witness not only to gender violence itself,
but to pervasive institutional misogyny through the observed responses of
larger social groups to the violence. In Sarah A. Chavez’ “When Dana Was About
to Be Raped,” the speaker is a teacher discussing a literary scene with a class
that agrees “in unison” that a woman should’ve fought harder to fend off her
rapist. The speaker is stunned at her female students’ victim-blaming, as well
as their own ignorance of their vulnerability – “how female [they] really are” – to males who decide to assert their
dominance: “Yeah, I’d just kick him / in
the groin and run!” (p. 43). Another teacher explains “Why I Dread Teaching
The Sun Also Rises” in Wendy Barker’s
poem: “I know how it feels when someone in a group, even in a family, / goes
berserk like a maddened bull” (p. 17). The speaker in Lisa Lewis’ poem “The
Accident” is also triggered into recalling a personal experience with gender
violence after witnessing another instance of it. By layering “public” accounts
of abuse over “private” experiences, these poets are resisting the dichotomy of
witness and “victim” to demonstrate the oneness of all women – as a show of
support, as a way to fuel collective change, and as a means to publicize, rather
than perpetuate the privatization of, gender-specific abuse.
Support for victims is an incredibly productive means of
resistance because it counters hate with love and empathy. It’s also a kind of
earthy-spiritual and communal-female response to gender violence. In Alison
Luterman’s “Another Vigil at San Quentin,” a crowd gathers to protest fighting
evil with evil. As they stand with candles and chants, we learn the sentenced
man’s crime was raping and viciously murdering a 10-year-old girl. “Say that part.
And then how, / to express our horror / at the ravage of our daughters, / we’ll
carefully poison him.” She continues: “I don’t have words / for what I’m doing
here,” though we can imagine she hopes that the karmic energy of compassion
will be stronger than the hate that bore its need (p. 16). Therese Halschied’s
“Song as Solution” tells the story of the women of rural South Africa’s success
in shaming an abusive man through singing openly of his sins, “how rage felled
the moonlit evening” (p. 73). Khadijah Queen channels collective consciousness
when her speaker reaches her breaking point in an abusive marriage: “I unlocked
my chorus of archetypal women from their chains. They / rubbed their raw wrists
with aloe and set to work” (p. 149). Grace Bauer’s “Common Law” is a litany of
excuses for staying involved with an abuser – “common” not because women are
universally prone to masochism or stupidity, but because unchecked
institutional and domestic misogyny have stacked the odds against abused women
having adequate support and autonomous means of escape/separation. Bauer’s
lines are a bible of no. Such poems present a peaceable, self-preserving
resistance.
For others, breaking silence and raising consciousness isn’t
enough; here, the poems turn explicit, daring us to continue looking away.
Sassing language – using “a diction and syntax that is impolite, blunt,
passionate, and sarcastic,” refusing “to take on a disembodied voice” (xxi) –
is a strong reclamation of power. Linda McCarriston’s speaker writes to the
deceased judge who “admonished” her abused mother in court, urged her to “take
the husband back to her bed.” “Tonight,” she orders him, “put on / a body in
the trailer down the road / where your father, when he can’t / get it up, makes
love to your mother / with a rifle” (p. 121).
Certainly, political activism is another way to productively
bear witness to violence against women. Monica Wendel’s “Sexual Assault
Awareness Week” sasses by suggesting that men carry whistles to blow if they’re
“afraid / [they] might rape someone.” She imagines would-be rapists thanking
“the feminist brigade”: “I’m sorry, I’m
in this situation where I think I was trying to rape someone. / Thank God I had
this whistle and you came.” As clever as Wendel’s revision is, we have to
wonder with her, “What if all the time spent on telling us / what to do
differently was spent on telling men, or everyone, not to rape?” (p. 191).
While speaking about what we’ve witnessed is one way of
resisting, what about survivors of domestic violence – how do they best resist
what’s already happened or is happening to them? For some, breaking silence is
the most immediate solace. To tell their stories is a resurrection of
second-wave feminism’s mantra that “the personal is political.” In Rebecca
Morgan Frank’s “Song of the Rattling Pipes,” a young speaker disassociates from
her rape, “as if she were not pinned / beneath another’s weight.” She moves
through the alphabet, “A apocalyptic”
to “Z zinnias” to endure unspeakable
horror. A willingness to talk about the ground zero moment of trauma, without
exploiting, eroticizing, or antagonizing, is to wield a heroic form of
resistance. The women in WWR’s poems enter
into public record more personal testimonies as to the pervasiveness of physical,
verbal, and sexual abuse into every aspect of their lives, long after their own
traumas. In July Westhale’s “Years After the Assault,” a woman remembers every
detail about “not the assault / or the seven days after / when the universe was
made,” but of the averageness of the day that contained it in time, averageness
she can longer trust (p. 193). Jehanne Dubrow’s speaker in “Schiller” obsesses
over “the man with the knife,” until she lives “in a place called knife,” for
“the home [is] no longer home” (p. 51). Jill Khoury’s “Home Security” also
examines the notion of self-protection, of the far-reaching paranoia of being
haunted by a prior assault, through an obsession with her home security system
that, when armed, is no less a trap than the abuser/victim narrative: there is
“no exit from my safety cage,” she says (p. 95).
And then there are the women who claim violent force for
themselves, who believe you can dismantle the master’s house with his tools if
you use those tools to bash in his skull. Two poems by Billie R. Tados are
striking – face-slapping, even – with their insistence on women’s capacity and
justification for violence. Contributions like Maria Luisa Arroyo’s “Violent
Eruptions” explore the role of the rescuer, in the form of a woman providing
sanctuary to another, whose husband then attacked them both. The rescuer shoots
the husband, stops him “like no restraining order ever did” (p. 9). Elliott
Battzedek offers two excerpts of a longer work called Wanting a Gun, mirrors back and forth between the grown woman who
states, “There is nothing in the world I want right now so much as a gun” (p.
22) to the memory of a young girl dismantled in “three easy steps” by a man
with an arsenal, but whose “favorite gun was me” (p. 25). Shevaun Brannigan’s
speaker in “Don’t” graphically exacts revenge in a second narrative, in
indented lines that form a second column of text; in the first, she tells
herself, in litany, “Don’t know” and “Don’t picture” (p. 35). Kerri French’s persona poem assumes the voice
of Frankie Silver, “the first woman to be hanged in North America after
standing trial for the murder of her husband,” who speaks from death row: “Don’t
tell me the monsters / my daughter draws aren’t / sleeping beneath the bed” (p.
59-60). Not only are these women sassing language, they are using strategic
anger to disrupt the victim archetype; if we can see women as the ones wielding
violence, intimidation, and rage – but on the page, not in “real life,” in
vengeance – and we can empathize, even root for them to pull the trigger, then
perhaps we can apply that empathy in a preventative way.
*
The idea of poetry being dangerous … can that even still be
a question? (I mean, for half the world’s population, walking out the door is
dangerous.) The real question is, dangerous to whom? Women Write Resistance – any woman writing resistance – reframes
the notion of danger, gives power back to victims, survivors, witnesses, and
rescuers. They share their experiences from the safe places that support poem-making
and from the trenches, both of which insist
survival, even beauty, is yet possible. And they do it well, in poems
memorable, moving, and crafted, literary.
Women Write
Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2013) is
available to purchase here.
Please do so.
For more information on National Domestic Violence Awareness
Month, visit the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence website here.
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