SINISTER WISDOM '20

SINISTER WISDOM 20

Editors and publishers: Miche lle Cliff and Adrienne Rich
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Cover: "Spiral #2, " graphite pencil drawing by Laurie Poklop.
Photograph by Be th Karbe.
Printed by Iowa City Women's Press, Iowa City, Iowa
ISSN: 0196-1853

Founding editors: Ha rrie t Desmoin es a nd Ca th e rine Nic holson
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SINISTER WISDOM

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Contents
The Silver Window
Vision:Bundle
two poems by Chrystos
A Restricted Country, narrative by Joan Nestle
A Spoiled Identity, theory by Martha Courtot
August 284:30 a.m. , journal entry by zan a
The Friend ...
Women at the Creek
two poems by Virginia de Araujo
My Life Inside Out, narrative by Ruth Herstein
Buddies, narrative by Donna Allegra
For C.V., a poem by Jean Sirius=====
We Were Fired, theory by Judith McDaniel
Learning To Fish: Live Bait
We Are Not Always. , .
two poems by Melanie Perish
four paintings by Sudie Rakusin
From the State Hospital, poems by Mary Morandeath car ride
Mother, as I thought I knew you
two poems by Angela Wilson

2

4
10
16
17

19
2,4

29
30

44

47
51

57

BOOK REVIEWS
Melanie Kaye on Michiyo Cornell and Elise Young
Linda C. Powell on June Jordan's Civil Wars
Bernice Mennis on Bones and Kim
Susan Wood-Thompson on Lesbian Writer
Cheryl Clarke on Some of Us Are Brave

76
80

RESPONSES

100

59
69

89

Barbara Smith and Sidney Spinster on Separatism;
Susan Griffin, Margaret Cruikshank
Announcements
Notes on Contributors

107
109

ChrystosThe Silver Window
for J0 Carrillo

tells me I'm a thick & simple woman
whose hands have washed many plates, cups, bowls
says my hair is a long dark sweep knotted in a past I don't singeyes deep as the earth I turn over for squash & peas
my face a map of disease survived my skin has followed the sun
to a rainy place where a blue heron nests silently
the silver window tells a story of who I am whenothers look
you could easily see that I fold the clothes & sweep the floor
for a livinga face of the plains my family crossed
one that echoes wild rice, elk, .traded cornfrom the place of light
The silver window covers my memories like snow
melted in a day
They say I dance behinda silver window could say sobut I'll tell you
this morning
I rosefrom dreams
a slow moving lake deep with fish
many birds in the grasses
this morning
the silver window was blankwith my beauty
this morning I camewith the sunburning off mist
I sang all the way to the bottom

2

Vision: Bundle
for Barbara Cameron
within/mystery wrapped in torn deer hide
we cannot speak of
the sacred
our mother is what they want to strip: pull out her bones
fuel their air conditioners
unconditioned air is the one
we breathe
speaks to us
tongues of stars, wind, times to plant, the times to besilentthey have a machine for everythingeven thisone soul looking for a song that we might dreama smooth place where we might dance together without
separation
the button pushes them
we live trapped in places we can' t dig out of or movewalls hold the old voices
want to be taken down & aired, go to a new place
no one speaks our languages
my father is ashamed of
my mother won 't think
we've dead relatives & friends with no common burial placescatteredthey say we are vanishingleaves of autumn
red dust that is raked away
so the snow can fall flat
they have our bundles split open in museums
our dresses & shirts at auctions
our language on tapes
our dances on film
the only part they can' t steal
is what we know
5-21 -81 (written for her birthday on the 22nd)3

Joan Nestle

A Restricted Country
When the plane landed on the blazing tar strip, I knew Arizona
was a new world. My mother and brother stared with me out at themountain-fringed field of blue. The Nestles three on their first vacation together had crossed the Mississippi and entered the shining
new land of the American west. The desert day air hit us with its
startling clarity; this was not the intimate heat of New York, theheat that penetrated flesh and transformed itself into our sweat
and earned our curses. We walked through it, like the others, andstood waiting for the station wagon to pick us up. I should have
known from the skeptical look on my mother's face that we were infor trouble, but I chalked up her skepticism to the fact that she had
never traveled further west than New Jersey. My brother's new job
at American Airlines had made this trip possible; the company compensated for its low wages by offering its employees special cutrate vacation packages and many of his fellow-workers had recommended this one-week stay at the Shining Star Guest Ranch as thebest bargain. Since the moment he had told us of the possibility to
the time we were standing in front of the Tucson airport, I could
not believe that the trip was really going to happen. I had dreamed
horses all my sixteen years, played wild stallion in the Bronx vacantlots that were my childhood fields, had read every book about wild
horses, mustangs, rangy colts that I could find, and through all the
splintering agonies of my family I had galloped on plains that weresmooth and never-ending. For my brother, who had seldom ~enwith my mother and me, this was both a reunion and an offering.
After years of turmoil, mistakes, and rage, he was giving us the
spoils of his manhood. He lay this vacation at the feet of our fatherless family as if it were a long-awaited homecoming gift. For mymother it was a simple thing, her week's vacation from the office,her first trip in over twenty years.
We finally spotted the deep purple station wagon that bore theranch 's name and hurried to it. A large man in a cowboy hat asked if
we were the Nestle family, looked at us intently and then fell silent
as he loaded our suitcases into the wagon. We rode through the out-4

skirts of Tucson and continued into the desert. The man never said
another word to us and feeling the strangeness of the desert, we too
fell silent. Cacti rose around us, twisted strong creatures that, likethe untouching heat, seemed only to tolerate the temporary intrusion of roads and people into their world. I felt the desert clumps oftufted grass under my feet , I was already moving with my horse 's
haunches; for now it was only a sheet of glass that separated mefrom Annie Oakley. Dusk came suddenly and the heat fled.
We pulled into the ranch and another man poked his head into
the front window and stared at the three of us. "Do you want fish ormeat for dinner" were his only words. My mother answered that it
made no difference, meat would be fine. Everything was still in theblue-black night as we were shown our rooms and then led to thedining room. The room was long, low-roofed with heavy beams; afireplace glowed at one end. All the other guests were seated at thesame table, ladling out huge portions of food from communal platters. We were seated at the long last table, a far distance from theothers, near the large stone fireplace. As our places were being set,
I noticed the waitress place a small white card near each of ourplates. I picked up mine and read, "because this guest ranch is run
like a family, we are restricted to members of the Gentile faith
only." I could not envision the chain of events that our arrival had
set in motion. The man who peered in at us must have realized that
we were Jewish, rushed in to tell his boss, who pulled out the appropriate cards to be served with our dinner. My brother and I sat
stunned, my mother said we would talk to the manager after
dinner. As I tried to eat, the voices of the other guests caught in mythroat. I had grown up with the language of the garment district, I
knew the word goy, but this was my introduction to Gentiles. We
can't stay here, my mother said. My brother kept saying he wassorry, he didn't know. How could his co-workers recommend thisplace, how could American Airlines have a working agreementwith such a place. But this rational questioning was simply words.
When we finished, my mother asked to speak to the manager. She
and my brother were led to his office. I stayed outside in what
seemed to be a reading room. I paced the room, looking at thebooks lining the wall. Finally I found what I knew had to be there: afinely bound volume of Mein Kampf For one moment, it wasn't
1956 but another time, a time of flaming torches and forced
marches. It wasn't just my Jewishness that I learned at thatmoment; it was also the stunning reality of exclusion unto death; it

5was the history lesson of those judged not to be human and I knew
our number was legion and so were our dyings.
Huddled in the privacy of our room, my mother and brother told
me what the manager had said. Since it was off-season, he was willing to compromise. If we told no one we were Jewish, if we left andentered through the back door, and if we ate our meals by ourselves, we could stay. We looked at each other. Here was an offerto the Nestles to pass as Gentiles. To eat and walk in shame.
We waited until the morning to tell the manager our decision. I
stayed in our room while my mother and brother went in for breakfast. In a strange twist of feeling, my anger had turned to shyness. I
thought of the priest I had noticed sitting at the table the night
before and I could not bear the thought of making him see we were
human, I could not bear the challenge to his geniality that wewould represent. After breakfast, the three of us entered the
manager's office to tell him we would not stay under his conditions.
I stared at the man as my mother spoke for us, looking for his embarrassment, waiting for the moment when he would say this was
all a joke. His answer was that he was sure we would not want tostay someplace we were not wanted but there was a Jewish duderanch several miles away and perhaps the owners would consider
allowing us to stay there for the same price. He made the call forus, saying, "by mistake some of your people came here.» The voiceon the other end agreed to take us. Once again we were ushered
into the station wagon and driven to a parking lot in downtown
Tucson. We sat on the curb waiting for the new station wagon topick us up. The men walking by wore big brown belts with turquoise stones embedded in the leather, pointed boots, and widebrimmed hats. The sun shone with that same impersonal heat andthe shimmering mountains were still waiting for us in the distance.
2

When the station wagon pulled into our new destination, wewere greeted by a small circle of elderly guests who welcomed us
with hugs and low-voiced comments to my mother about "thekinder.» After the novelty of our sad mistake wore off, the three ofus were left to our own devices. As the youngest person at theranch, I was indulged in my unladylike ways. Riding clothes werelent to me, and my desire to smell as much like a horse as possible
was humorously accepted. My brother spent his time playing tennis
and dating a young woman who cleaned the rooms. As soon as it
6

grew dark, they would take off for the nearest town. My mother,
however, had a harder time in our Jewish haven. All the otherguests were retired wealthy married couples who moved with easein this sunlit world. While they were sympathe tic to my mother, awoman alone raising two kids, they were also embarrassed by her.
She dressed wrong and did not know how to enjoy he rself.
My mother was a dedicated gin and poker player and shortl yafter our arrival she tried to join the nightly card game; but here,
under the Arizona sun, the stakes had multiplied beyond her
resources. I watched her as she approached the table of cigarsmoking men; she sat for one round, growing smaller in he r seat
while the pile of chips grew bigger and bigger in the center of thetable. She was a working-class gambler who played with her week'ssalary while these men played with their retired riches, and her
seventh avenue bravado could not cover he r cards. For the firsttime in my life, I saw my mother defeated by the people she said
she despised. She could not fight the combination of a strange country, high fashion , pity, money, and physical exaltation.
One afternoon I saw a crowd of guests gesturing and laughing at
something in the center of the riding ring. I pushed through andsaw it was my mother. Dressed in her checked polyester suit, she
sat on top of a large brown gelding attempting to move it. She
rocked back and forth in the saddle as if she was on a rocking horseor making love, while voices called out to her, "Come on Regina,
kick him; you can do it. " The intimate spectacle of my mother's
awkwardness, the one-sided laughter, and the desperate look on
her face pushed me back from the railing. These people were mypeople; they had been kind to me. But something terrible wasgoing on here. We were Jewish but we were different.
One afternoon towards the end of our stay I went in search of mymother. I looked by the pool, in the lounge, and everywhere e lse
the other guests habitually gathered but I could not find her. I wandered to the far end of the ranch and saw her in the distance. She
was sitting on a child's swing, trailing one leg in the dust. A smallround woman whose belly bulged in her too tight, too cheap pants.
Her head was lowered and the air shimmered around her as if
loneliness had turned to heat. Where was seventh avenue, thecoffee shops, the crowded subways, the city which covered heraloneness because she had work to do there. Arizona was not for
Regina Nestle ; not this resort with its well-married athletic ladies.
While I scrambled over this new brown earth, my mothe r sat in thedesert, a silent exile.
7

3
Bill, th e tired aging cowboy who ran the corral, was my date forthe evening. Elliot was with Mary, a woman in her twenties who
worked at the ranch. We had been to see a movie and were now
parked behind the ranch house. Bill kissed me as we twisted
around in the front seat. His bony hand pushed into my crotch
while his tongue opened my mouth. I pushed his hand away, sure ofwhat I wanted and of what I did not. I did not want his fingers inme, but I did want to hold his long tired body in my arms, I did want
to see his cheek against my breast. My brother and Mary gave up
their squirming in the back seat and left the two of us alone. Billwas respectful. One word from me was enough to get him to stop
his attempts at penetration. "Lay in my arms," I told him. He
slipped his long legs through the open window at one end of thefront seat and leaned back into my arms. His lips pulled at my nipples. We sat that way for a long time as the Arizona sky got darker
and darker. Right before he fell asleep, he said, "best thing that has
happened to me in twenty years." I knew this had not very much to
do with me, but a lot to do with my sixteen-year-old breasts. I sat
there holding him for what seemed like hours, afraid to move because I did not want to wake him, when suddenly he jerked in his
sleep and knocked into the steering wheel, setting off the horn.
The desert air was split by its harsh alarm and I knew my idyll wascoming to an end. One by one, the lights came on in the guest cottages. My brother was the first to reach the car, his pajamas shining
white in the moonlight. "I'm alright, I'm alright," I whispered as I
maneuvered my body away from Bill's. I wanted to escape before
the other guests came pouring out to save Bill from having to explain what we were doing. He would be held responsible for breaking the boundaries between guests and workers, between young
girls and old men, and I would never be able to convince them that
I knew exactly what I was dOing, that tenderness was my joy thatnight, that I danced in the moonlight knowing my body could be ahome in the freezing desert air.
4
I spent most of my time around the horses, following Bill aroundon his daily chores. He eventually gave me his chaps to wear because I was constantly riding into the choya plants and ending up
with their needles sticking into my thighs. My horse for the week
was not the sleek stallion I had dreamed of, but a fat wide-backed

8white horse that was safe. Ruby and I were always on the tail end of
the rides but I did not care ; the Bronx streets had disappeared andI could bend over and talk to my steed while I stroked her powerfulneck.
Each day we rode up into the mountains, the same mountains
that had looked so distant from the airport. Opr party was usually
Elliot and myself, and Bill and Elizabeth. Elizabeth was a small
muscular woman in her fifties whose husband was dying of Parkinson's disease. She had made my riding possible by lending me a pairof boots. Each morning, her husband, a large burly man who
walked in tiny trembling steps, would stand in the doorway of theircottage and slowly raise his hand to wave goodbye. Elizabeth loved
him deeply; and each morning I saw the grief on her face. She
would ride her horse like a demon far up into the mountains, leaving the rest of us behind. As the week passed, I slowly realized that
she and Bill were lovers. I saw the tenderness between them as if itwere an invisible rope that kept them both from falling off the
rocky hills. Like two aging warriors, both grey and lean, they
fought off sadness with sharp, quick actions. We would ride up into
the mountain clefts, find a grassy spot to stretch out in the afternoon sun, and silently be glad for each other's company. I neverspoke or intruded on their moments together. I just watched andlearned from their sad tough erotic connection all I could bearabout illness and love and sexuality. On the way home, stumbling
down the stony trails, I would ride as close as I could to these twosilent adults.
It was our last ride together and we had come down the mountains on a different path. We found a dirt road, smooth enough forcars, and I started to see real estate signs announcing that this area
was the most restricted community in Arizona. I pushed my horsecloser to Elizabeth and Bill and asked, "What does restricted
mean?" "No Jews allowed," Elizabeth answered. I looked aroundagain in wonder at this land we were moving through. The distanthills had become known and I loved this earth so different from myown. I silently rode beside my two older friends, wanting to be protected by their gentle toughness, and not understanding how the
beauty of the land could be owned by ugliness. It was all so mixed
up for me, the discovery of a new land, a new night sky, the classloneliness of my mother, my growing sexuality, the essential joy ofriding my horse, and the threatening punishing connection between
property, privilege, and hatred.

9

A Spoiled Identity
Martha Courtot

The main body of this speech was delivered at Sonoma State University, Sonoma
County, California, at a lecture sponsored by Ruth Mahaney of the Women's Studies
Department.
I would like to give credit to Judith Freespirit and Vivian Mayer {AIde ba ron) for
tpeir early courage and work on the subject of fat oppression.
My own work on the subject has also benefited from the work I've done with
Cynthia Riggs and Hannah Banahn. The many supportive conversations we have
had have become an integral part of my work. They will always have my gratitude
for their spirit and courage in the face of so much opposing us all.

I wish that you could see me as I truly am. Instead, when you lookat me what you see instead of the me that I am is a catalog of assumptions about fat women which manages to erase me from thesituation. This is the experience of living with a spoiled identity.
Have I let myself go? Am I lazy and stupid? Do I sit at home allday eating chocolates and hating myself? Am I not smart enough tounderstand what good nutrition is? Am I a compulsive eater, out ofcontrol, not able to stop myself from gorging on food? All of theseassumptions come directly from your head to surround the real
person I am. And because I know these assumptions are there, or
think that I know, I surround you with my own assumptions.
You will never be trustworthy! You are stupid for believing a cultural propaganda about fat women which is full of such obvious lies.
You cannot allow yourself to be sexually attracted to fat womenand so I will not risk my own vulnerability and open myself to youin this way. There is something cruel about you; you will always besomething less than human to me, since to be human implies a consciousness of other people's pain - some understanding of the oppressions other people suffer from.
Thus you and I are both confronted by false personas as we lookat each other. And all of this happens very quickly in the first few
moments we see each other. It may be what we have to give eachother could be important: but we will never know this.

10

It is not possible to unspoil this identity. If our sense of self could
come only from within, then those among us who are strong could
possibly work on affirming our beauty and strength and this would
be enough. But human beings are social animals and from infancy
on our identities are formed and grow from an interplay between
the kernel of consciousness which is ourselves and the cacophonyof contradictions which is the outer social world. So that by thetime we are adults who we are is so layered by who the world says
we are that we cannot escape from their judgments which now live
inside us.
And these judgments are perilous to our integrity. It would be somuch easier if I could direct my anger only at you-at your insensitivities and cruelties, which are many. But the~e cruelties now in
adulthood have taken their place within me and when they speak
to me it sounds like my own voice speaking, telling me how unworthy I am. It tells me not to risk when risk is the only thing I can do tosurvive. It tells me over and over again that I am fat and ugly, fat
and ugly, fat and ugly - lazy, stupid, greedy, devouring: that I eat
too much, take up too much space, that I do not deserve love.
At the end of this chain of hatred lies a monster in wait, ready tokill all that is self-loving in me. And the enemy within has so muchmaterial from the outside to batter me with! (Fat women in this culture are battered women.) And somewhere always in me is thekernel of pure self, which is loving to myself, which appreciates thestrength and joy in my body, which tells me I do indeed deserve mypresence on this earth, which reminds me this chain of hatred isforged with vicious lies, enemy lies, life-destroying ... And so there
is a constant war within.
While the outside war rages. And it is a war in which I am almost
alone against the world. Experiment. Pretend you are a fat woman
and watch television for a day. Count how many messages there arewhich tell you that you are ugly and must change. Listen to how
many remarks your friends make about "being too fat" and diets
they are on and having to lose weight when they are already thinner than you will ever be. Look through magazines for a positive
image of a fat woman. Then imagine what it is like to be a fat
woman walking down the street, at the mercy of everyone who has
been given permission from this society to hate and despise her.
What would you do when they called you names? Are you surprisedthen that fat women often do stay at home, do not get the exercise
they need, do sometimes eat for comfort? Are you surprised? How11

would you feel if you saw a bumper sticker which said "Save thewhales - Harpoon fat chicks"?
Every day radical fat women are exposed to "radical" literature
which pictures the fat capitalist devouring the thin "peasants." Ave ry romantic image, but false . My mothers as many generations
back as I have photographs of them have been fat , and we have allof us been poor. Not one banker among us hillbilly women. This
myopic stereotyping is another example of the racist and classist
bias which continues to dominate, whether it is the country clubs of
the rich or the coffeehouses of the lesbian community.
If I let myself accept what the world, what you, say about me, I
at least am able to reduce the conflict in my life. If I can act stupid
and lazy, eat compulsively, disbelieve there is any sexuality in me,then I can conform to the world's view and I can live a life that is
not contradictory to your view of me. I can be the jolly fat womanthat you expect. I will make a great friend to you, because I will
have no expectations of any return. You can take and take from me
and I will never show you my anger. Instead I will turn my anger
against my self: in the darkest parts of the night my rage and yourignorance will join to destroy me.
A different strategy in this war is to face the rage that is in me:rage at you for making me something I'm not, rage at myself forbeing a fat woman and thus vulnerable to all the cruelties this society has to offer "the other. " I can give you my anger over and overagain - I can refuse to accept what you say and think about me. I
can explore my own insides and learn the truth about myself. Although this is a more satisfying and enriching life than selfabnegation, it is a life of constant conflict, anger, and dis-ease.
A third solution is to patiently devote my life to changing yourattitudes. Giving lectures to classes of young women where perhaps
all but one will walk away thinking "I will never let myself go likethat" ... doing performances in which all the risks are taken by me,
the performer, while the audience sits in the dark hoarding its
secret prejudices ... writing essays and letters to editors of offending newspapers, trying to correct your assumptions ... and all of
this could take a lifetime of work and only my own life will havebeen used up - the work will still be there, to be done by otherstrong, surviving fat women. Meanwhile I am a poet who needs tobe doing my own work of poetry which I insist is important, and I
am a mother who needs to be mothering my daughters and I am alesbian who needs to be loving women and doing other political

12

work. This "fat work" is exhausting to me, draining of some of mybest energies, devouring parts of my life that are important to me. I
can't escape from the resenting thought that I shouldn't have to be
doing it: especially when you are a lesbian, I can't understand why
you haven't made the crucial connections in regards to the oppression of fat women. My thought is that this is your work as much as it
is mine. And I am needing for you to begin to do your share.
There is no doubt in my mind that this culture wants me, as a fat
woman, dead. Whether this early death comes from the stress of oppression, economic exile, the steady harassment from a crazed culture, the toll of learning from an early age a terminal self-hatred, orwhether it comes through the physical toll that diets, operations,and other abusive treatments that fat women are expected and encouraged to undergo (often by their best friends), the results
remain as deadly.
Every day as a fat woman the hard core of self-respect and love
which I have had to make for myself, insist on for myself, agains~
the grain of the culture, against what almost all other women were
saying to me, comes under assault. I really am fine as a fat woman. I
am often beautiful. Unless I develop a wasting disease (as my grandmother did) I will never be thin. It has taken me many years toaccept this about myself. I will not postpone my life any longer, notfor anyone's standard of beauty. There are so many of us, it profits
none of us to have to battle our own communities for the right toexist.
All of my life I have had the opportunity to acquire the skills of
the oppressed, as a working-class fat woman. Learning how tolisten, keen intuition, paranoia, becoming conscious: I have notbeen able to live as so many have, sleepwalking through others'
lives. I learned early what damage words could do, and what an intensely powerful tool exclusion is. I learned this from the outside,and this knowledge informs every act of my life. I ask you now tolearn this, to listen to my experience, and to change.
Women are bombarded with lies about ourselves from birth
onward. It is not surprising that so many of us believe the lies. But
for lesbians whose lives are already on the edge of fugitive , wecannot afford to encourage these lies in ourselves or in other
women. Only the truth will save us. Not one of us can afford to feel
good about ourselves because we are white, or thin, or middle-class,or young, or "able-bodied," or any of the other "safe" categories
which are supposed to make women acceptable. Because when we

13

build our acceptance of self on such flimsy accidents of time andplace, we are building cages for our sisters and hammering shut thelocks. And we have sealed our own doom in a patriarchal consciousness which is deadening.
Those of us with "spoiled identities" are gifted with the role ofthe outsider. So I come here today as the outsider to tell you this:listen. pay attention. your mirrors are lying to you. and you, acting
as a mirror to myself and other fat women, are lying to us; your fearof the "other," your fear of me, the fat woman, the Medusa, is turning your own life and future possibilities to stone. And you aredoing real damage to lives without number.
Fight anti-fat propaganda. Fight it for your fat friends and foryourself. Learn the truth about women's lives. Learn how to recognize dangerous propaganda, even when it comes from women you
trust. Break through the lies in yourself now, for all of our sakes.
And take this work with you, to make a world that will be possible
for all of us to live in, as self-affirming and beautiful women.
Finally, see me as I truly am.
USEFUL INFORMA TION:

1. "Health" is one of the major bludgeons used against fat women. Isn't itreally unhealthy to be fat? No, it is not more unhealthy to be fat. Many
health problems that seem to be specific to fat people are actually causedby stress from oppression and constant dieting.
2. The medical approach to ·obesity" becomes increasingly more technological and dangerous. Operations such as the Jejunoilial Shunt (which
reduces the small intestine from twenty to two feet in order to cut nutrient
absorption) endanger the lives of fat people, leaving them weakened, open
to serious illness, and mutilated. Some women would rather accept thismutilation than live their life as a fat woman.
3. Dieting for fat women is an especially painful and ironic process. Whenthe body receives the message that it is being given less food to nourish
itself, it very efficiently organizes itself so that it requires less food. Whenthe dieter attempts to return to a more normal eating pattern she discovers
she now will eat less food to put on the same amount of weight. Each dietrepeats this process, so that fat women who have dieted most of their lives
can eat only very small amounts of food before gaining weight.
4. Many women identify themselves as being compulsive eaters. Some ofthese are fat women and some of them are non-fat women. Until we develop
attitudes in this culture which accept eating as a natural need and enjoyment of life, rather than as an activity which women must go to great pains

14

to deny themselves, many women will relate to food in a compulsive
manner. Some fat women have discovered that what they once identified ascompulsive eating went away when they stopped compulsive dieting. Somefat women identify themselves as compulsive eaters because they believe
what everyone is telling them about themselves: in this anti-fat culture
which links the fat person to food, any food the fat person eats is seen as
being a sin against herself and society and is identified as compulsive eating.
For anyone to assume they know what a woman's eating patterns are by her
weight is both foolish and oppressive.
5. Amphetamines, which are the major drugs of choice in relation tolosing weight, are extremely addictive, require painful withdrawal (sometimes leading to psychosis), and are destructive to the general well-being of
the person. Drugs sold over the counter without a prescription have recently been found to have serious side-effects, such as hallucinations.
6. It is probably true that many fat women do not get the exercise theirbodies need. This is not because fat women as a group are any more sluggish
and inactive by nature than their non-fat sisters , but rather the social risks
which are required by fat women often do not seem worth the effort.
7. Studies have shown the success rates of diets over a five-year period tobe between 2 to 3%. With those odds, would you risk your life and health?
8. Feminists agree that a woman should have control of her own body.
Until fat women are able to accept and love their own bodies, no woman
will really have the right to her own, because so much of the imprisonmentof north american women has taken place in her mind.
9. My own surmise about fat and class is that there is a close correlation
between fat and working-class and poor women. Certainly the standard offemale beauty in north america is that of the white young anglo-saxon.
Women of other racial groups and ethnic groups cannot achieve this "standard." In one study of New York women, by Stunkard, it was found that"obesity" was six times more common among women of the "lower social
class" than of women of the upper social class. In this study, 30% of lowerclass women were fat, 16% of middle-class women were fat, and 5% of
upper-class women were fat. "Obesity" is also highly associated with ethnic
origin.
10. There is a clear pattern of discrimination in the economic sphereagainst fat women. The Commission on Human Relations for the state of
Maryland performed ·an extensive study of purported discrimination andhas documented the results. Since there is evidence that being fat is related
to one's racial or class origins, this is one more way the system acts to grind
down the poor.

15

zana

aug 28 4:30 a.m.

bundled in bedclothes but drinking the rest of the root beer & ice
you brought - sweet & brown like you. the stars are very bright,orion grazing the eastern hill. you have just left because i needed
more bed; i couldn't ask you that, but kicked & tugged & moaned
almost as if i were alone, hating you for being here, confused by the
big warm hand creeping to comfort me ... i couldn't refuse its love.
but still the night's confusion: dreams of not being able to sleep, of
being burned by candles, of asking arl to leave my bed - these
speckled the hours of waking stiff and aching, never warm enough.
now with you gone - your offer, cause i could never ask, justwrithe - i wake fully to write. to escape for half an hour that dark
world where thought twists so and cannot be smoothed, where iwould punish you for sharing my bed and beam my pain half acrossthe continent waking my brother with "look, see, this is what isuffer" ... and this is not really what i mean when i tell the universethat i would like to share my pain. awake, i shake the anger for
remorse - zana, the anger's valid too, you just need to shout, notwhine it. a hard lesson, maybe easier in the day and not when darkwaters close over everything i've learned and nearly drown mystruggles. i still cry out against the wave, though. don't tell me once
again that i'm a survivor; i know that, but in the hours before dawn
it is small consolation.

16

Virginia de Araujo

The Friend . ..
· . . who willingly tastes thirstthat pulp of oranges & grapes can' t assuage,
who drinks in the dry cup companionshipwhile the empty pipes sing out tin winds,
the water tank's at sludge, the water trucks
can' t climb the hill, the pump's dumb,the bees sit in the sink, the beans
slump, & the long grass burns,· . . who takes hunger, who calls a feast
to make hunger palatable, & consumes
celery threads, chard stems, avocado skins,
who makes the larder's barrenness a grace& says, On this grace I feed, I wilt
in spirit if I eat flesh, let the hogs,
the rabbits live, the cows browse,
the eggs hatch out chicks & peck seeds,· . . who has an innate beauty & strength,
walls of the mind to raise & sustain
a roof, rotted, who has grit
to fill the termite lace at the house's cellar-line,
whose arms lift & tent
this A-frame, & whose breath mists
in mild airs door lintels & window sills,
the ridges at the eaves,· .. who being free lives with me, this house,
who lies on this couch of mold, this heart, this bleak space,this age that needs her hopes, her new
hardihood to repair itself, to take inlike caulk to the interstices of time,
who comes to bless, as sweet rain comesto fields to make all right again,
to rescue, to confront in me my summer death,17may deep breathe, for who has done
so much, who has taken willingly
to heart hunger & thirst, who has madeold structures sound, & given place
power to become what place was & returns to be,shall have her turn to finally receive
such comforts as her own seasons swing, her spring recedes,
shall in turn have the same sustenance, the same greed.

Women at the Creek
They haven't dredged it-not this Spring
They'd promised to-the other years they did
making a swimming-hole where the black dog
named Blue took her lige off and entered in& showed the other dogs what Summer is.
I'd have gone in myself & so would you
if either of us had been alone or if
the trails home hadn't been so rough & steep
the ruts so cruel, the dust like silt
the corridors through the thorns so tall in beesor if there'd been no chance the boys with bikes
would come burning down the cliff-face to the stream-none of the boys' affair what women doin their nakedness, what pleasures they use
their hips & thighs made water-free-or if
at any time between us we'd dared meetourselves as dryads, half-sunken half-perceived
in the pool the men had dredged, or if I'd beenreadier to see your sadness in repose, or you
to face me in my own bulk of dreams.

- Virginia de Araujo

18

Ruth Herstein

My Life Inside Out

When I was born I came into the world a little old lady, wetting
my diapers for attention I did not get. To this day I will still try to
get attention in negative ways. My nerves were like sharp razor
blades. I was born near Holy Cross Cemetery. I was terrified of itby night, but daylight was another matter. It had beautiful chestnut
trees, grass - it seemed more like a park. There were military
funerals there, and the sound of gunfire was very impressive. There
were Italian funerals with a band playing and women crying. There
were statues and the sound of the stonecutters at work.
My first impression of my early childhood was far from pleasant.
My mother's brother had come to visit, we were in my father's
store when I said something. My father kicked me. Enraged, I left
the store, not before I peed on the floor. The next day, my brotherhit my sister, my sister started to cry, hearing my sister cry set me
crying, which woke my father from his noon nap, and he camedownstairs and gave me something to cry for . This still happens in
the world today.
Little Mary Griner and I sat on the curb making up dirty stories
about each other - using all the metaphors Freud did. I enjoyed
the stories I made up about Mary, but not vice versa.
I was in the country and wrote my sister, asking her to send me apair of knickers. She did, with a fly front. I believe she knew exactly
what she was doing, because she always wanted me to walk on theoutside. I went to school and my principal entered with reportcards in her hand. She called my name. I stood up: mannish haircut,
fly-front knickers. She called my name four times before becoming
aware I was the person she was calling.
She told me to go home and tell my mother to put a dress on me. I
said my mother was in bed and might not be up for a couple of19months. I had one green dress I went to school in, about that time.
My ego was shattered. Teacher asked me if I wore my only dress. I
replied with no hesitation : "No, many, all the same, six of them. "I was left back in lAo I remember a tall girl called Charlotte, whoused to scratch me till I bled. She had been in lA with my sister,
who was seven years older than 1. Being put back is the same ashaving the word stupid stamped on one's forehead. I used to sign
my mother's name to report cards. After the first grade I became
an avid reader.
Our kitchen was a huge room, it had a small bathroom. I thoughtof the bathroom as my prison - very high walls. The kitchen had
an upright piano with hundreds of pieces of popular sheet music on
top of it. I used to stick coins between the keys. My father chopped
it up with an axe to get the money out of the piano. My mother had
a huge galvanized washtub. My father threw it out ; he did not want
to see her work so hard, probably the only thing he ever threw out,
but she bought another one.
I would sit on a large chair with my feet on the rungs, trying tohold my breath long enough to stop breathing - but it did notwork.
I used to pray for months at a time for a younger brother, but noprayers were answered. I heard that God was a jealous God, and I
prayed with the stipulation that whichever God he was, if he would
give me a bicycle I would follow him. No bicycle.
I was what was known in those days as a tomboy. I told my friend
Clifford O'Day that he may be thinking I was Ruth, but really I wasa Prince. It was not difficult to convince him, because I was alreadyconvinced.
I was an avid marble player. The boys and I had cleared the snow
away one evening and we were busy playing. A woman wasshocked when someone called me by my name.
I used to go swimming in Sea Gate with some boy who used tocall me feller. I would wear a heavy sweater over my suit andthrow it on the sand, then run in the water. But how long could one
get away with it?
I remember one day being on a swing in Sea Gate. There wereyoung men and women calling up asking if I were a boy or girl. I felt
terribly humiliated. There was a horribly humiliating occasion on a
subway train. A young man and woman were asking me questions
that were markedly sexual. I wanted to die. I could never accept

20

my body and its physical functions. I once heard my father tell mysister he did not need her body in the store, just her mind. I tried tovisualize her mind going in the store without he r body.
My father was a short tyrant, he could not take his wrath out onanyone besides his children. I would be punished for any infractionof his law. To this day if I say no to anyone I think I am going to get
the axe. There has been very little tende rness or caring in my life,
and if shown any I just fall apart. It is the human quality that most
touches me. I have seen animals able to give it to their young, andother than their own.
I sought this quality from my famil y, they were unable to give it.
I would attempt to make a family of other people, other than myfamily. I would try to get it from people who, like my family , wereincapable of giving it.
I want to tell you about Miss Goldstein. I remember he r grey
spats and raccoon coat. I would come into the school yard on Boys
Day and try to get her attention by my negative me thods. Oh, dearMiss Goldstein, how impressed I was by your grey spats! Then
there was the gym teacher with beautiful eyes . . .
There was a florist in my neighborhood with hothouses and themost beautiful flowers. It was near the cemetery, quite deserted.
Mary's brother Johnny told me he would get me a bunch of flow ers
if I would touch it. I came home at five years of age with a la rge
bunch of flowers. I lived with my sin, and was somewhat relieved
when I heard Johnny died, hoping he took my sin with him. Thinking until my fortieth year that I was a prostitute, I finally let go of
my sin.
My mother suffered with melancholia, she would stay in bed
months at a time, exclaiming she wanted to die. There was no way I
could outdo my mother. I was the youngest, stuck with the care of
my mother.
My father jumped up and down with rage at an innocent remarkof mine. I consider everyone in my family crazy. One does not haveto be a psychiatrist to come to that conclusion.
I am nineteen and discover the Village. It felt like huge magnets
coming up from sidewalks. I would pass a bar and get intoxicatedjust by passing it. I passed a young woman dressed in a very masculine fashion. I followed her into a gay night club. Two women
danced to the accompaniment of "Violets, Who Will Buy My Vio21

lets." I was thrilled watching them. Music, dancing, women paradise. It did not take too long to discover this was not the Garden ofEden.
My s'ster-in-Iaw practically held my hand while I signed my way
into the army - to be precise the Women's Army Corps.
I waited patiently while the psychiatrist paced up and down.
When he asked me what author I liked, it was Millen Brand, whowrote The Outward Room, about a young woman escaping from amental hospital. I really should have said True Story Magazine.
We had a very nice Captain who went overseas. She looked verymuch like me. She called: "Goodbye, Brooklyn." I was shocked that
she remembered me.
I went into the office and asked to go overseas. It was really myreason for joining. The WAC Captain said: "You have nice eyes." Ithought I should say the same, but could not manage it. We went toa dance. The men stood on one side of the room, the women on theother. The WAC Captain came in and danced with the men. I got
drunk, crying I should never have joined the service. I remember
other WACs were very comforting. I felt they understood.
One day I was on the lawn with Luz, we were wrestling. She told
me to meet her in the coal shed. I did not feel inclined to.
We were called out for airplane identification about six o'clock inthe morning. It was in a long dark barracks. Luz sat next to me. She
took my hand and put it in her pocket; Luz had cut the pockets outof her pants. I thought, Good Lord, if I get kicked out of the army
for doing something I don't want to do, it will be awful.
We all were shipped to New Guinea, seventeen days on a ship, nofresh water to drink or wash with . .. and Luz.
If we went off the base, we had to be in the company of a soldierwith a gun. This always struck me as being most peculiar.
There was nothing to do in the night except go to the movies ormake love with the opposite sex.
One night while we were sitting on blankets in the sand, I moved
closer to two young women. They gave me such a withering glance,
I quickly moved away, crestfallen.
There were two young women from the Red Cross. I thought
they might be gay, and immediately fell in love with one. At night I
fantasized getting a jeep and going to her. At that point I would not
vouch for my sanity. I did not know how to drive, nor knew where
she was, or whether I would be as welcome as a snake.

22

I was paralyzed with fear of getting discharged from the WACs. I
managed to get fired from every inconsequential job I ever had.
One more blow to my ego would be shattering.
I was very depressed. Some WACs introduced me to a soldier he was a comedian, I was also. I had a rash commonly known asjungle rot. He was nice, very understanding. He visited me in thehospital, and was not put off by jungle rot.
We would sit outdoors and watch movies, with me scratching shamelessly. He knew he could not rid me of my depression.
I met an Australian soldier I liked, he never made a pass. We
played ping pong, while other WACs were having blanket parties. I
was playing with the idea of marrying him, and maybe I could gostraight and live in Australia. Dream on.
They were sending me home on account of the jungle rot. A deep
depression ensued, to be going back to the Hell I left. The environment I lived in made me a candidate for a psychiatrist, and that iswhere I wound up. Being a survivor, I'm still around, cracking
jokes, writing poems, and this is my first narrative.

23

Donna Allegra

BuddiesCorey leaning against my locker - no pants to protect me now,
just thighs glistening cold cream and the tee-shirt damp from theshower. New wetness creeps in under my arms, dribbles between
my breasts and throbs anew from the heart atop my thighs. I dodge
her look and let a haze drift in to film my eyes.
"What for?"
She insists with questions. She means to say: I don't want you togo.
"I need to find something out. For me.""You don't have to hang with them. Let's get something to eat
and then go home - your place." Her smile - African sweet with astop-off in Jamaica for mangoes and banana - knows honeycatches more flies than vinegar.
"Cmon Boo. This is silly. "Almost persuaded, I remain stubborn. She's right. No need toseek answers in a bar when Life is handing me the next question.
I'd like to pass on this dance. Corey blocking an exit frames theopen door if I can find the courage to take on the step.
I consider wrestling across her to my clothes and circling aroundmy nakedness. Nothing new to that play - and it'd prop me with apose, contain my hands, mask what my eyes might tell before I'mready with words. We're touchy -feely friends , not sissy-girl style,but buddy-type hands-on. I want to break the tension and shift us toanother plane. Too much danger plays in this arena. The truth I
hold captive must live for her too, but if Corey turns to salt, who
can ever again slake my tears?
Other people manage to talk to each other, to deliberately
weave out shared tapestries. How to make a change in our pattern?
It'd be so simple to put out: I want you and if I can't have you, I'll
find someone else - and it's going to be a woman.
24

I throw up a lie, still draped in a fear without textures I can touchand then reason through to undisguised acts.
"You my ace, right? But tonight I'm hanging with the girls - thatis, if you let me get even halfway dressed."
She doesn't let up for any play. This ground is so shaky, I just
don't know my way around. Usually she takes the bully stancewhen it's clear we're both agreed. I dug how she handled the dealings to make us always a pair. Our friends still say, "You can't have
one without the other."
We don't speak about caring - it's just there, unmentionable.
Like when I took that fall today. From street ball, I'm pretty muchused to going for myself, but Corey's taught me there's also glory insharing. I'd sent her the pass when my left foot unhinged a greatshow of team work. She threw the ball away, leaving her fast-breaklay-up, helped me down court and cradled me from the others. I
couldn't forbid the tears, protesting to the high heavens against theinjustice of another sprain. When I got up from nothing too much
more than strained pride - I'd tripped over my own two feet she kissed my forehead with everyone watching.
I want to hold her for real - not just on the occasion of accidents
or horseplay. I want to touch from an upfront connection that's
clearcut and not disguised, yet I hold back, afraid to speak words
that ask plainly.
And now, she doesn't budge from her track - no sign that she
scouts the path that'd let us both run free . I know my May-born
bull, but something else shifts inside that she's not telling. I stay inhiding, too; tease with the truth, careful not to land too close.
"Hey, I always come back to you."No reply: doubt marks the bad girl of Brooklyn. I search her eyeson this round, allowing space for her move. Two of my fingers trace
her lips, a necklace line, then surprise me at the buttons on her
shirt.
Her kiss surprises me much more. Life becomes right in small
pieces that fit themselves together when I can't manage the moves.
Clean tastes live in her mouth - they're fresh and warm as I explore the new land she's opened to me.
"BJ. This is just about you and me. I'm not that way, but I . .. ""Barbara Jean - you ready girl?"
I buckle against the interruption. We take it in and move apart25

carefully. Corey hands me the pants, has buttoned up when Sharon
reaches our aisle. I still shudder inside.
"So what's the word, girly? ""I'm, uh, not . .. ""We're coming. BJ has to finish dressing. How far away's thisbar?"
"All right Corey! I was really hoping you'd break down andcome. It'sjust through the park and down two blocks."
Walking through the park, the group of us fill the air with laughter and unconquered spirit. Finals are over. May green looks likefull-grown summer. I hang quiet by Corey; Sharon, Jess, and Kathargue about the game we lost to City.
"I don't care what you say, bitch. I was beautiful. My magnificent
left hand worked wonders.""I'm not saying you didn't look good, girlfriend. I'm saying we lostthe game because so many of us had such good-looking moments.
Posing all alone. Leaving the team behind. You know what I'm
saying? "I half-listen. They stop to light up some herb. I don't smoke, but
Sharon always passes to me. Corey motions for me to shotgun andwhile she holds the belt loops at my waist, I wonder what theothers think about what we are to each other.
If anyone calls Sharon, Jess, or Kath gay, they'll shake your handand say thank-you, just like if you point out they're Black. I'm notthat bold. I've started talking about maybe being bi, but that's just a
cover from people jumping too hard on my head.
They finish up the joint as we near the west edge of the park.
Corey's leaning on my shoulder, counting stars. I nudge her tobrace up for trouble heading our way: the hustler coming towards
us looks totally off the wall. The other guys had just called out theirwares and let us pass on through when no one was buying, but thisfe lla isn't picking up on vibes. He's giving the once-over like we're
supposed to drop everything and pay homage to him.
"Young ladies. Hold up a minute there, y'all. I got something forya."
For such a puny-looking guy, he sure was bold about latching
onto Corey's arm. In all fairness, I suppose, he couldn't know she
wasn't a friendly type who'd welcome strange men she didn't invite
onto he r bodily parts. Corey's oIl,.e of those baby-sweetfaced children, but she is still a strong-looking heifer. Muscles show up loudand clear when she wears a coat and flaming gold plums twinkled
26

from her arms and shoulders under the tee shirt she wore now. The
build alone would measure off most people's distance, and her
mouth has killed a lot of bricks.
"Get the fuck off me before I kick your motherfucking teeth in,fool.""Oh wow, you a big tough bionic woman - but you ain't no man
yet, baby. Lookee here, y'all . . . ""You better chill out, dude.""I got something right here to make you change up off that bulldagger shit, momma."
I'm almost glad it turned out the dude could run. Corey laid him
flat on his butt and I'd moved in behind to jump hard on his case.
She suffers from a temperamental nature and I've often had tomake up for slack in her thought tone, but my girl is swift behindfeeling. As far as the guy was concerned, it wasn't him personally,
so I really would've felt bad getting my shit off on his ass for all thedudes who felt they had the right to just impose themselves when
they scope on a woman without a man. This one had instinctive
good sense about high-tailing it out to the fountain right quick. He
probably didn't even notice the bunch of us readying to get down.
"I'll say one thing for you Corey; with you around, nobody has toworry about being insulted.".
"Yeah, with me and my temper, you will be respected. Or else
dead."
Inside the bar, touches we'd ordinarily give lie stilled and left
behind. No arm cradles my neck, no playful hand rests in my backpocket, no lap pulls me to sit down. She leans against a wall, herbody cut off from me, no more to circle the fond a~d sweet trails offire up my back now that we're in this place where women do
touch openly and speak desire out loud. Struck suddenly shy, bothof us have turned strangers to each other. Yet these women look
like us, as if we'd all been dropped from trees of the same dense
forest.
The fast records have played out and some women choose one
another for the slow ones. I think how nice it'd be to hold her, torock on Smokey's "Ooh, baby, baby." I want to so bad, what makes
it so hard to ask? There's nothing I could lose: stepping on new landyields more ground for the two of us to cover.
"Dance?"Her look begs off and would forbid, but I coax, then insist. She
27

consents with a frown unsure and not far from shame, but she
comes along. We don't stop after Smokey, continue into the Stylistics' "La la means I love you."
I guide her around my center like a lullabye, kiss her forehead as
earlier she'd reached out for me. I find her neck, her cheek. Her
mouth is mine to open and I dip in, searching. I don't care who seesus. This is my dance and I don't let her pull away. I hold the woman
I've asked, keeping her close. I hold to the one who's been in mycorner, who goes where I lead, and yes, I've doubted, but now I
know: who'll stand by me and stay.

28

Jean Sirius

Fore.V.
Thirteen white hairs over your left eyebrow.
We are watching for your mother's streak,for time to bring a blaze of frost
across your hair.
I plan to see it spread
all through that fierce and curling mass.
We wait. I see us on a front porch,knitting and mending, reading the novels
our friends have written.
When you tire, you can lie
for as long as you like with your headin my lap. I'll read all the good bits
aloud to you. You'll tell me justexactly what you think. And thenyou'll fall asleep with my left hand
tangled in your white hair,
my dear.

0 1981 by Jean Sirius

29

We Were Fired:Lesbian Experiences in Academe
written by Judith McDaniel from accounts byJeffner Allen, Judith Barrington, Peg Cruikshank,
Lois Helmbold, Melanie Kaye, Judith McDaniel,
and Julie Murphy.
with special thanks to Maureen Brady and to each of the lovers/ special
fri ends of fired lesbians, with whom we shared our stress and pain,
without whom we would have more seriously doubted our sanity andself-worth.
dedicated to all lesbians who have been fired for who they are,especially to those women who cannot yet write their stories for
publication

At the opening session of the annual National Women's Studies
Association convention held in June 1981 at Storrs, Connecticut, I
announced a meeting of a "Fired Lesbians Caucus." There wassome astonishment from the audience, some laughter, and scatteredapplause. Ten women came to the first caucus meeting. We sat in acircle and began to tell one another our stories ... all painful stories, angering and wounding tales of betrayal, of the loss of our jobs,
our incomes, our careers, our senses of self-esteem and competence.
And we began to feel better. We began to know, each of us, that wewere not crazy. We began to hear, some of us for the first time inmonths and months, a confirmation of our own reality. "Two thingsin particular struck me from our meetings in Connecticut," wrote
one caucus member, "how we all needed to acknowledge to ourselves the reason we got fired was because we are dykes, and how
we all told each other that we are good teachers." We sat in thatroom in a circle and we cried; we heard the hesitance and loss ineach other's voices when we could barely speak to tell our stories;
we heard the sarcasm and self-irony that is the humor of survivors;
and we confirmed one another's anger. At the end of several hours,
I knew that every woman in that room was an excellent teacher, apowerful, strong, influencing pel-sonality in the classroom and in
the department. I felt, for the first time in months, that - in an academic setting - I was in the presence of my peers.

30

We found during our conversations that many of us experienced
similar phenomena. We were drawing conclusions from these similarities that seemed to have significant political impact for lesbian/feminist analysis. After several meetings, just before the conference
ended, we committed ourselves to writing about our experience ofbeing fired. This article is an attempt to begin some of that work.
Seven of us have written individual accounts from which I am drawing this article. Some of us need the protection of anonymity andtherefore I have not specified which statement came from which
participant in this project. Italicized quotations are from the personal accounts of fired lesbians, unless otherwise indicated. Someof us will be writing complete accounts of our own experience inacademe for the special issue on Women and Education in off ourbacks.
The seven women who have chosen to write for this article comefrom diverse teaching situations. We taught at private, state, or religious colleges and universities. One of us was in college administration, while the rest of us taught philosophy, history, literature, andinterdisc~plinary women's studies. Some of us have Ph.D.s, someare working on them. Some of us were full-time employees, somepart-time. But generally, this account is drawn from very similar
perspectives. We ~re all professionally educated women between
the .ages of twenty-five and forty . We are all white. We are all selfdefined and politically active lesbians. We all feel we were fired at least in part - because of our lesbianism, but several of us feelthat other factors also influenced our firing, including anti-Semitism
and classism.

She Was NOT FIRED[She] was NOT FIRED. Her contract with the University was what iscalled a fixed-term appointment. It was clearly spelled out in the contract which she signed with the University that her term of appointment was for the academic year 1980-1 only. [Her] persistence inclaiming that she was fired reflects her desire to distort the facts forher own purposes.
(women's studies program administrator)
I didn't get a class for the fall. I call it fired. They don't have to say

that, because part-time temporaries have no rights to future semesters. I found out I got fired by calling them; they didn 't tell me. It was
the last day of the semester, so no possibility for organizing anybody.
I had taught here for eleven years.
They have never acknowledged the issue of my lesbianism, or my31politics. I can go to the National Women's Studies Association conference, and say I got fired for being a dyke and for my politics, but that
isn't the way it is seen here.
It is clear to me that I was denied tenure because I was a lesbian. It isalso clear to me that no one who voted to deny me tenure thought slhe
was "discriminating" against me as a lesbian, but that each thoughtslhe was making "a difficult decision about the quality and direction"of my work.

"Am I now an 'official' fired lesbian?" asked one caucus member,
after being "strongly suspected" of cheating on her Ph.D. exams(not accused of cheating, a charge against which she could havedefended herself) , harassed by professors who would not turn inher grades, harassed by a department of "scholars" who would not
sit on her dissertation committee, and deprived of one of the twocourses she teaches for her income. Sure. You've been fired. Or
none of us has.
In fact, the only member of our caucus who was fired - in the
traditional sense of that word - was the administrator. "Get out of
the office," she was told, "before the end of the day. " Workers innearby offices helped her carty her books, papers, and plants tothe car before the dean changed the locks on her office door, as hehad threatened to do. The rest of us were "denied tenure," "notreappointed," or our contracts "expired." Others with more "seniority" - or clout - were given our courses. One woman taught an
extremely successful course on "Heterosexism and the Oppressionof Women." When she reapplied to teach it the following year, she
was told that they were re-opening the hiring because she was nota qualified applicant for the job. The woman whose "fixed-term appointment" was allegedly for the "academic year 1980-1 only" hadtaught for three years at the same institution and was led to expect
a regular full-time contract in the following year. "You weren't
fired," the department secretary told one of us, "you were denied
tenure. It's not like if they fired me." Yes ... and no.
Teachers frequently have more control over their working conditions than other university employees. And if they attain tenure,their job security is enhanced in a way that other workers canseldom count on, even with the support of a union. A professor witha one-year contract has job security for that year; she probably
could not be told to leave her office by the end of the day as the administrator was told. While acknowledging this level of privilege,
we insist nonetheless that we have been denied our right to work.

32

Thus we must examine the realization each of us experienced:
that we were not meant to think of ourselves as fired. What are theperceived differences between being fired from an administrative
position, or a secretarial position, and being fired as a professor,
whatever that action is called? Why would anyone, whatever
his/her connection to the incident being described, perceive that inclaiming to have been fired (instead of not reinstated) a woman
desired "to distort the facts for her own purpose"? What can wegain by so "distorting" the facts? Why would they de ny us ourfiring?
I Began To Struggle Against Feeling Crazy
Mostly my situation has been marked by silence. When I was hired I
was told that tenure would be a "mere formality. " I would only haveto tum in a vitae, after teaching one more year, and there would benothing to it, a "mere formality." After the year had passed, I went to
one meeting about my tenure and then received a letter saying thatthe faculty had unanimously turned me down. They didn't talk to me
much before the meeting, and they don't talk to me much now. In
fact, some will not speak to me at all. Now, almost a year later, university appeals committees meet, and still no one tells me anything
about what is being done to me.
My friend C. came to my office today. 1She had been denied reappointment in another department.] She chatted in the hall with P. ,who was on the committee that denied me tenure. When I walked out,
P. even said hello to me. I told C. as we were leaving, "Well, that's thefirst time she 's spoken to me today," and C. said, "Oh, that's normal.
My department alw!lYs speaks to me when I'm with someone else. "And since the explanations they kept handing me were so flimsy , I
kept arguing and asking. I was told by the coordinator that peo ple
from the east need to learn how they do things here [in the southwest]; that I might belong fine in other Women's Studies programs,
but not this one. Now I have not lived in the east for fifte en years; but
I am a Jew from Brooklyn and I certainly act like one. I mentioned
this, and that lower-class Jews tend to come from the east. She said I
was being ridiculous.

I think most of us have encountered silence or evasion about our
firing because of others' fear of us. If the contract just expires, if weare victims of a budget cut, no one is to blame, no one will be required to say why we are fired. It is the self-protection of those inpower. If they have made no decision, they cannot be shown tohave been wrong. If we challenge their evasions, they can call us"ridiculous." And so some of us were smothered in silence, muffled33

in a blanket of denial. No, that was not how it was. No, you do notexist, are not important enough for us to have to deal with. You are
not there. The denial - of our firing and sometimes of our very existence - can be frightening. Each of us who experienced it felt theedge of that "craziness" and had to check our own sense of reality
with friends we could still trust. While we could understand - attimes - the impulses of those who avoided or denied us, could understand their discomfort or lack of awareness or understanding,being ignored in this way is so painful, we cannot forgive it.
A woman in my department who voted against my tenure avoided

me for days after the decision, closing her office door, moving quickly
down the halls. Finally I walked into her office to see if shell still existed. She told me I was paranoid, she had not been avoiding me. Thenshe said, I didn't think you 'd want to see me. I didn't. But I had to.

Equally devastating was the other tactic used against us, sometimes in conjunction with silence. When we were told why we werenot "good enough," why our work was "unsatisfactory," we could
seldom connect these reasons to our own reality. In these accountsof supervisors, administrators, chairpersons, and "peers," good
became bad, energy became hostility or aggression, openness wasdivisive.
The department claims that I am doing propaganda in the classroom.
It seems they consider Simone de Beauvoir "propaganda" whentaught in a contemporary human thought course . ... The department
fa culty say a f ew things to me. They say I am schizophrenic because I
do not "remember" doing propaganda in the classroom. I say I havenot done propaganda in the classroom.
It also drove me craz y that my attackers were never upfront about

the real reasons for trashing me.

For All Those Who Are Excluded for Some Difference
Not one woman in the Fired Lesbian Caucus was told 'she wasfired for being different : for her sexual preference, or for being
working class or Jewish, or for being too political. The ways inwhich we each came to understand our firing were so subtle that
often our own perceptions were challenged by everyone around us.
"I hope that we are all liberals here," said a chairman, when confronted with the political and sexual preference identification of
one lesbian. They were. No one ever denied her right to whateversexual identification she chose; it was just that, well, as one colleague write, "I feel that even after years in the same department I
34

don't actually know [her] well. ... She seems to wish mostly toignore this ordinary collegial activity. "Ordinary collegial activity means fitting in , be ing the same as
everyone else. For those of us who are different, or who have affirmed difference, ordinary collegial ac tivity becomes an e normous
roadblock to success. As lesbians, we cannot take an "ordinary"spouse to department functions, we cannot engage in "ordinary"
office gossip and intrigues. Frequently our interes t in our own disciplines is in no way "ordinary." Difference, that quality of the extraordinary, is two-edged. Both of the following state ments weremade about the same tenure candidate.

[She] h(]£ a heightened sympathy for all those who are excluded forsome "difference " - be it physical impairment, sex, race or class andconstantly reminds us through her own example and commitment of
the great plurality and diversity that 'is the strength of society . ... I t is[she] who so frequently functions to make me me(]£ure my own
capacity and to readjust and widen my lens whatever the literature
or issue.
(untenured departm ent member)

She is around campus very little, and seems to participate only in activities directly related to her special interests. This m eans that sheshows no interest in most of her colleagues or in the work they do,
and h(]£ no inclination to share her interests with most of us. Her allegiances seem unduly narrow, her absorption in her own individual
projects a little excessive.
(tenured department member)

I believe that each of the observers was looking at th e same "material," that is, the lesbian's function as outsider in a heterosexual community. In one instance, the observer is open to allowing a widened
lens which includes the existence of those who are "different." In
the other statement, the observer is clearly threatened by that difference, feels diminished that the lesbian "has no interes t" in sharing with him; her interests are special, narrow, and excessive. His
are normal and ought to be of concern to her.
I suspect that I unconsciously communicated to the dull young men
placed over me my total indifference to them, which they may haveinterpreted (]£ hostility. I W(]£ actually quite friendly to the straight
men and the gay men who liked me, but the dullards assumed I was
anti-male. They began saying I "couldn 't get along with men. " Assoon as this albatross was hung around my neck, I was judged incompetent and expendable. A worker who cannot get along with men
is a failure. Someday, I hope personnel files will tell whi.ch workers
cannot get along with lesbians.

35

The necessity of "getting along with men" - however that is perceived - is especially and poignantly felt in academic women's
studies programs. Since the inception of women's studies, lesbians
have been active in shaping and nurturing these programs. Many ofus have been able to make a commitment to our work, our students,and our colleagues in women's studies programs that we were notwilling to make in traditional areas or disciplines. However, as university enrollment has faltered, as federal money for student loans
and for university programs has diminished, we have watched afundamental conflict in philosophy become a major split withinsome of our women's studies programs. Some would have us minimize our difference, find ways to become more "pleasing" to theinstitution, attempt to pass as "like them." Others believe we mustbuild on our difference: create coalitions with other outsiders, integrate feminist political work in the community with feminist political study in the university.
The coordinator wanted us all to become more pleasing to the Institution.
You criticized a former women's studies teacher for not lOvi\ing ladylike enough to please the dean. A hippie anthropologist who wore longskirts, ethnic clothes and no bra didn't make it with the dean. I bet
you just loved my dyke garb. I didn't even wear my most butch
clothes to school.

The women's studies programs from which caucus members
were fired invariably had chosen the path of assimilation. Difference does exist. By failing to acknowledge difference, failing tobuild on the uniqueness of each woman's whole identity, I believethese programs are making themselves weaker, not making themselves more able to survive. And as a result of the denial of difference , women's studies in academe has on occasion become not only viciously homophobic - but misogynist, racist, classist,and anti-Semitic.
This program had also refused several times to hire Paula Gunn
Allen, a renowned poet with three or four books, a native of this area
and of the Laguna Pueblo, author of an essay on Native American literature which immediately became a classic in the field ("The Sacred
Hoop"), all kinds of honors, a Ph.D., etc., etc. Paula is also an open lesbian and believes that her politics, spirituality, and dykiness were thedecisive factors.
Your anti-Semitism came out when you put obstacles in the way of a36

jewish women 's class. You rejected a Black tenured PhD. to teach Sex
and Race, when preferred university policy is to hire from within.
She was a Black Ph.D. who called you "pink women. " Your academic
standards are useful to you only when they are the most convenientexcuse.
My "style" bothered her.
Whenever someone undeniably different from other workers/members/participants is excluded/not hired/etc. , the question of bias
arises; be it sexism, heterosexism, racism , anti-Semitism, class ism,etc. To our understanding [she] was the only Jewish teacher in the
program . .. and the only instructor in the department who was completely open about being a lesbian. So her termination leads us to ask
some questions about homophobia and anti-Semitism.
(Jewish Women 's Support Group)

Questions about homophobia, anti-Semitism, racism, and classism
are not welcome in these programs, sometimes less welcome thanin the "liberal" male universities where small differences can be
tolerated against the whole fabric of normalcy and stability. But
another problem presents itself to the lesbian in the more "traditional" programs and disciplines. When her work is not exactly inline with the mainstream of her discipline, it becomes invisible,
unacceptable, or unprofessional.

Extremely Unprofessional Behavior
A dissertation done by one of my students was said by the chairman
to "shake all of his values. " When he said that, I was even more convinced that the student's dissertation was a success.
Always when I read her I feel that she has not done justice to her
natural intelligence, that she has been violated by her ideas.

Academic "standards" of quality and excellence are absolute. Allegedly, we all know what they are and we all strive to achieve
them. Discourse consists of determining where any individual may
have fallen short of "perfection." No one person or institution created these "standards," no one is responsible for them. We are all responsible to them. A male professor who has taught twe ntiethcentury American literature for thirty years without mentioning asingle woman writer has not violated these "standards. " A fe male
professor who chooses to focus her teaching and writing on women
authors is in violation of them. Many of us have found tha t these"standards" mean our best strengths are never considered, that our"weaknesses" are far more important.

37

The department decided to make my teaching of creative writing thesignificant reason why I should not be kept. Several members of thecommittee visited my class. None came to more than two workshops,
none came to a meeting of the entire creative writing class where I do
critical vocabulary, literary structure, etc. ; none came to my advanced poetry class. Generally, student evaluations of the courses
were excellent - much better than just good or adequate - but theyfound the one or two by students who were dissatisfied to justify
their opinion.
My students' evaluations of me . . . were very positive. When I mentioned this fact at a later meeting, the judgement of those students
was minimized - how would they know? (Then why ask?)

For women's studies programs, achieving these "standards" becomes a painful and difficult problem. Most feminists understandthat they are male standards, skewed, biased, unfair, and unobjective. Nevertheless, some would have women's studies try and measure up.
I despise the practice of describing human beings "objectively" by
reducing them to a set of concrete attributes - degrees held, numberof publications, numerical descriptions of teaching effectiveness.
Epistemologically, I believe that we know much more when we allow
ourselves to perceive subjectively, intuitively, holistically. Yet, whenit comes to policy, I am reluctant to argue the latter position.
(women's studies coordinator)[She] implies that academic legitimacy is a dirty word. On the contrani, it is high time that Feminist scholarship be given the academic
respect and legitimacy that it deserves.
(women's studies program administrator)

Under these "standards," academic respectability will never be"given" to women's studies; and women's studies will never be able
to earn legitimacy under "standards" which define themselves inmale terms. Knowing this, nonetheless, some women's studies administrators find themselves unable to argue in favor of a' feminist
approach that would eliminate hierarchy, open the institution to
the community, find legitimacy in experience and knowledge
rather than in pieces of paper certifying credentials which mayor
may not exist. To so argue would then require that women's studies
build its strength on difference rather than assimilation. It would
require that women's studies consider itself "the outsider" alongwith the lesbian, rather than ca~ting out lesbians in a futile attempt
to assimilate. Lesbians have often expected such support, and wehave often been disappointed and betrayed in our expectation.
38

When we have tried to create circumstances which we re supportive to our own existence, we have been accused of unprofessional
behavior.
Mary Jane Lupton has described one of the key components of "professionalism" as the distance that is required between teachers andstudents, and in this respect I certainly violated the required code of
behavior. ... My commitment [is] to developing a f eminist teachingstyle that would decrease this distance, in an attempt to give students
more power over their learning situation.
These instructors have impeded the work of the Program at all levels.
They have lobbied students to their position and have attempted toinfluence members of the women 's community to turn against therest of the Program . . . I must go on record expressing my convictionthat the actions of the Instructors demonstrate extremely unprofessional behavior.
(women's studies program administrator)

If academic "standards" are absolute, if an individual does notmeet them, even if that is a conscious political choice - or especially if that is a conscious choice - she is to blame for her own "failure." And in the eyes of those who have chosen to try and meetthese "standards," we who have not are attacking them, impeding
their work, and - ultimately - some of us have been accused not
only of unprofessional behavior, but of disloyalty. The institution
demands absolute loyalty on every point, every deviation creates
vulnerability for us.
I thought, "A Jesuit school can't do this to me - I'm one of theirown. ,. A good girl, who had always obeyed, with a phD. from Loyola,but a feminist and a dyke. I had not really been one of their own formany years, but I needed to cling to that shred of respectability, atleast for a moment.

But they can do this to us, a realization each of us has encounteredin the past year. They can and they will. The havoc wrought to our
self-esteem is considerable, whatever the circumstances of being
fired, of being found unsuitable, not good enough. But significantly,
most of us were either fired by women who represented the "standards," or women were involved in our firing. For us, this createdan incredibly painful dilemma.

Loyalty and Betrayal: "Listen to this, you bitches"
But it was not coming directly from the men. It was coming from awoman I had befriended the previous year.

39Everyone involved was a woman who was committed, she said, tof eminism. You can imagine the cynicism I am obliged to battle as aresult of all this.
Finally, the other token woman of the department volunteered toread my abstract. She brought her two-year-old son to share myoffice appointment with us. After learning from her that she regards
racism as biologically based, and doesn't think "women" are social
types, I had her removed from my committee. She has since createdproblems for me about that action.
There has never been a tenured woman in the department, but there
is another woman in the department, more "junior" in standing thanme. . . . She makes gossip and rumor against me and against the students who study with me.
When I recited my history of involvement with the women's movement on this campus, she said, no, she didn 't know. Didn't know? It'sin my resume.
. .. and I hear
my friend's voice, voice I have loved for years
with great reluctance and personal sorrow
no evidence of significant achievement
I remain interested
but not fulfilling
the promise
diminishedgreat reluctance. .. and I would choose this confusion
for here is a betrayal to last a lifetime.
Day after day, I wished I could be fighting this battle against theDean, or the Vice-President, or some other man, whose motives
would be clear to me, and at whom I could clearly direct my fury andoutrage. From them I would not expect anything better.

The concept of sisterhood, when vaguely expressed or poorly
defined, would make feminism seem almost easy: We are all sisters,
the enemy is out there. We know who he is and what his motives
are. We know who we can count on for support in our struggle. It
never was that simple for any of us, but there was a simple expectation: that women would understand our struggle even when theywould not join it. When women professed to have joined, called
themselves "feminists," and then showed by their actions that they
were doing men's work in a man's profession, we were confused.
Were we wrong? Had some important analysis slipped by us?
Something these women knew that we had missed? If they were
wrong-and we instinctively knew they were, even when we ques-40tioned ourselves-how could we challe nge them without bringing
down around all of our heads the small edifice we had been building? For each of us believes our work in women's studies is important.
We found no easy solutions to this proble m. That we are fir ed
testifies to our inability to find the suitable answers, and to the intransigence of those who have found their way into small bits of patriarchal power. What we are struggling for in the dialogue among
ourselves is confirmation of the difficulty of what we have experienced and an affirmation of our right to our anger. For we arevery angry. Some of us have bee n told our anger is "wrong," somehave been told that our anger is itself the proble m, but each of us
knows that in our anger we have a key to that which oppresses us.
Only when we fully express that anger can we heal.
I don 't want to look at it, don't want to remember how bewildered
and hurt I f elt, how enraged, how I dreamt about it; the telling-off
fantasies, the showing-up fantasies, again and again . . .. I don 't wantto think again how I was humiliated and how I am afraid even now
women won 't believe my story, will think I was really a poor teacher;afraid that the women who fired me will be in a position to defin ewhat really happened.
Word came to me through the women's studies group that my anger
made me unsympathetic as a victim and they found it difficult to support me while I was so angry.
Then you said, at least five or six times, that you had always sensed
hostility from me. Not hostility, but anger. Hostility dismisses me andmy reality. Anger.
I would veer wildly from fury, as she attacked me for what I considered my strongest assets, to acute misery, as I understood her position

as a victim herself.
Sometimes I think of getting back at them . . . . I am furious that th ey
are using their power to limit what I can say and to take away fromme my means of economic support.
I want to nail their hides to the wall.

I'm writing a novel entitled A Fatal Case of Tenure. The opening lineis: "When I plunged the knife into his heart, I became completely sanefor the first time in years. " The main character is a dyke professor
who occasionally cross-dresses: a shadowy figure in tweeds withleather elbow patches and a briar pipe wanders the halls, striking
terror in the hearts of heterosexuals.

41

The letter I never mailed: Listen to this, you bitches.

We have found different ways of expressing and directing ouranger. Some of us have appealed within the university and havecases pending. Some of us have fought and lost. Some of us chose
not to fight this time, but to withdraw and redirect our energies.
None of us has yet won reinstatement. But the struggle for confrontation and understanding has been important to all of us. One
woman - who chose to confront within the university - charged
the women's studies department with homophobia and antiSemitism.
As I recall the first step of the grievance procedure, my spirits lift. It
was a mee ting between me, the coordinator, and the affirmative
action officer. And since we could bring witnesses, I did : several dyke
friends, aJew, an Irish woman, a Native Alaskan, who all testified on
my behalf; read the statement of the Jewish Women 's Group and letters from supporters, including students; were completely uncompromising and supportive. I do recommend fighting on every level:
there is nothing to lose.

We Were Fired
We were fired. To deny that we were is to deny our anger and toaccept that we were "dismissed" for some minor flaw which we
could correct if we would only try. What happened to us did not
happen because our publications were weak, or in the wrong field,
not because our students were unenthusiastic or our classes did not
fill. We were not even fired for not being ordinary colleagues. We
were fired for what we are, for what we say, for the work that we
insist on doing, for the vision we hold of ourselves as political
women.
In the last few years we have felt the hostility in the air thicken,
become palpable, as conservative and reactionary views are reinforced and rewarded at every level of political, social, and economic existence. Those who once were afraid of being openly sexist,
chauvinist, racist, etc., are now flaunting conservative, elitist, exclusionary views. "I'd debate that with you in front of the entire faculty, and I'd win," boasted one man when confronted by a female colleague about his sexist use of language. Sexism, like homophobia, isonce again his prerogative. It is this climate that has made ourfiring possible, even likely. Soon they may say why we are being
fired.

42

What we must remember in order to survive is that we cannotchange our dress, or speech, or the focus of our academic interests
in order to become acceptable. Hiding our anger will not save us. If
we cannot be who we are and be acceptable, that is a political reality we must recognize and consider in every act of our day-to-day existence.

READ & SUBSCRIBE TO

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43

Melanie Perish

Learning To Fish: Live Bait
You hand me a night crawler
from the bait box pull your own
long and active from the pellets
of moist soil.
I watch you
stick the hook-point into the worm
inch it 'round the bottom barb.
You ignore
the flailing head the squirming tail the gut oozethat muddies your fingers.
Kids catch these at night you tell me.
After a rain with a bright moon they takeflashlights flash the ditchbank and grab.
You have to be fast with your hands
and pail.
The worms are quick too
wriggle right backinto the wet dirt when the light hits them.
Street lights hit me. I ducked back into
shadow of poles squat signals in the railroad yard.
The yard boss never caught me
his daughter went
to a different school
His flashlight hung from his belt
the nightstick too he wore it
carried the storm lamp
He grabbed old bo's asleep kids
shinnying up hiding running

I wassmall and a gir I
so I was fasta quick mouth
I lied to save pokey Sasha
in the yard
I swiped coalfrom open box cars
He called us allnight crawlers.

44You bait them my father railed. You give themexcuse to call us hunkies gypsies thieves to say
your people lazy no work. Someday they breakyour head break laws in new country breakmy heart.
My mother used the coal I stole
to cook soup burned it in the heater stovenear the room where we all slept.
I begin
You finish baiting your hook.
with mine stop to remember some species
struggle alone.
I expect blood gut trickle
the muscled twist of live bait.
I'd fight too
to keep from dying.

45

Melanie Perish

We Are Not Always
We are not always the wise woman,the stanch healer, the constant midwife,
the one who culls the herbs
into the magic poultice.
We are not always mother and daughter,the strong hands, the nipple's sweetness,
the arms that rock and rockand give when need demands it.
We are not always earth and water
nor two sheaves of wheat
nor shells wet with repetitious waves,the salt rim fresh on the thin smooth lip.
Sometimes we are the spinsters
who turn the wheel, but do not spin,
the mother's nag, the daughter's wanton anger.
Sometimes you are the runaway river,
the river that threatens my field;
I am the wave that hurls its crest
like rocks
against your clapboard beach house.
Like atoms
we move,owning weight, mass, momentum.
We are not always anything but ourselves.

46

"All Lesbian Mime Troupe on Tour: Samantha,"
1977,18" x 12", oilpainting by Sudie Rakusin

47

"Persephone, n
1978,24" x 12", oilpainting by Sudie Rakusin

48

"Demeter,"
1978, 24" x 12", oilpainting by Sudie Rakusin

49

"All Lesbian Mime Troupe on Tour: Natalie,"
1977, 18" x 12", oilpainting by Sudie Rakusin

50

Mary Moran

From the State Hospitalpatient: bearing pains or trials
calmly or without complaint

screen: a shield for
secretevil practices
remembering
the sacramental
confessional screen.. . forgive me father
for I have sinned . . .
what sins?
no matterpenancethe matter
punishment
the mattersacred as a sign
as a symbolof his spiritual reality
she became his
sacrificial beast
objected to holy,
religious, cursed rites

51

her flesh smelled of burnings
her bones spoke of beatings

sheets wrappedround and roundsheets wrapped
frontround her breasts
arms and legs
sheets wound back around her chair
her tongue
rappingteeth
proclaimed
this egyptian queen
was not ready to diepatient: steadfast
despit,e
oppositiondifficulty
adversity52

tied at her ankles
tied at her wrists
and across her belly
tied down
to the bed
bed... bedlam......... lambneedleneedlenumb
a drop of blood
escapedfrom the punctureof her right buttock
the last of her
reality
wiped away
by a cotton padsoaked in alcohol
andtossed in the trash53

patient: one
who
is
acted
upon

madwomanher tongue grew
fat and heavy
until
she could speak no more

she rubbed the sidesof her forehead
in a private ritual
trying to remember
who she had been
andwhat she had done
her temples burned
remembering the shock
treatments54

patient: forebear
under
provocation
or strain

duringcommunity meetings
knitting needles
beat out
dayroomchatter: knit one, perl two

razed arms
bloodletting
scars
trail up to her elbows
tattoo lightning energy
metamorph/sisters
becomecompanion serpents
ready
ready to strike back55

psychiatrick # 1
he comes from his fear
trying to capture her power
he calls it psychotherapy

she comes from the east
at the dawn of springfrom mountain peaks
to windy beaches· .. curing his dis/easeby treating he r spirit

she is air deva

psychiatrick #2
he comes from his inadequacy she comes from the south
trying to burn out her powerat the noon of summer
he calls it electroshock therapy from desert to volcano
through flame and blood· .. curing his dis/easeby treating her spirit
she is fire deva

psychiatrick #3
he comes from his jealousy
trying to cut out her power
he calls it psychosurgery

she comes from the west
at the twilight of autumn
through springs & streams
through lakes & wells· .. curing his dis/easeby treating her spirit

she is wa ter deva

psychiatrick #4
he comes from his ignorance
trying to restrain her power
he calls it drug therapy

she comes from the northat the midnight of winterthrough caves and fields-through rocks and stones· .. curing his dis/easeby treating her spirit

she is earth deva
-MaryMoran

56

Angela Wilson

death car ride
In the hotel halls of Zimbabwe
the floors are covered with black women's
tears
and who hears them fall
who hears the sound ricochetfrom the floor?
We have signs that deathcomes as the best reprieve
from a killing life.
I say that in Zimbabwe the womenpulled from the streetspulled from the streets of Soweto
are taken to Zimbabwe.
on the death car ride.
The hotel walls know the soundof white fingers
sucking at lifein ebon skins.
In two days time there is little
left but scooped out shells.
It is said that women returningfrom thisweekend spree of white men
I say
It is said:
after the last alabaster penis
leaves the brown thighs
the stolen women return homeon the round trip journeyof the death car ride.

57

The night bears witnessthat the gutted forms
tear rough-hewn screams
from their lips
and the night bears witness andthe night echoes ricochetsof indigo tears.

Mother, as I thought I knew you

Flame orange hair withblack roots. Your coppered
flesh richness
made in neon,a moving pulse of color.
What you did not know
who could say?
There were no
seams to your style.
Even your walk
set the pace of change.
- A ngela Wilson

58

"if i speak too plainly.

"

Melanie Kaye
A review of Lesbian Lyrics by Michiyo Cornell and Medusa 's Hair
by Elise Young. Lesbian Lyrics (1981), order from Michiyo Cornell,
76 George St., Burlington, VT 0540L $3.00 postpaid. 22 pp. Medusa's Hair (1980) , order from Mountainwind Products, Box 92, Middlefield, MA 01243. Also available from Diaspora Distribution.
$4.00 postpaid.

Lesbian Lyrics. I love the title, the picture of Michiyo Cornell on
the cover, grinning, indisputably dykey. Commitment to women mothers, daughters, third world sisters - animates this collection;
but these poems are also about violation by men, betrayal by
women, insufficient protection for children, and race-hate fromwhites. Michiyo Cornell's voice is brave, sometimes rageful, often
deceptively calm as she speaks bitterness enough to break theheart. She is also one of several Japanese-American feminist poets
to emerge in the last few years from "invisibility." 0
The book opens with the poet standing at her Japanese mother's
grave, grieving; trying to explain her choice to love women. She
looks across the generations, back and forth :A teenage girl asked me
Why I became a Lesbian
I said I fell in love
With a woman
And that woman
Is myself, mother, mostly myself.
("Mother")(Imagine hearing this when you were a teenager.) Mother-love,self-love and lesbian love reverberate through these poems, as
does an intense optimism born of purpose: to fortify women andchildren with hard-won wisdom, so that pain is at least used.
At the same time, the poet writes to her daughter:·See "Invisibility Is an Unnatural Disaster : Refl ections of an Asian American
Woman: by Mitsuye Yamada, in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings b y Radical
Women of Color, eds., Cherrfe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua (Persephone Press,
1981).

59

I want to keep pain from you,
But you defy me:
Trying to stand,
Falling/hurting.
One day, you will walk.
("Mayumi Sue»)

The mother knows, some of the pain must be lived through; only inthis way is autonomy assured. The theme of wanting/not being able
to protect children appears in many guises: in "Stella,» the poetdepicts a child custody court decision made in accordance with patriarchal privilege; in "Speaking Bitterness" - but this poem
should be quoted in full:
I tremble
On the shorelines of terror,
BelievingThat someday
Someone will decide
They do not wish
To hear me
Speak of the need for change.
I will be dead.
Then, my daughte r,
Who will love you?

In China before liberation, to "speak bitterness" was to tell, withappropriate anger, the story of your oppression, an essential step incoming to consciousness. In China today (or at least seven years
ago, when I visited), old people still speak bitterness about theirpast, in order to educate the children. Michiyo Cornell evokes thiscontext of revolution and parenting. In speaking truth - which is
bitter - Michiyo Cornell opens possibilities for the self, for her
daughter, for change; yet paradoxically (as is always true of revolutionary activity) she risks her life doing it. For the mother who
knows her child's safety and nurture depend entirely on her, thisrisk acquires a special poignancy; for the child's future world also
depends partly on the mother's willingness to risk.
Similarly, in "Poetry Class/UMass/Amherst," Michiyo Cornell
writes of the danger of speaking "too plainly, too clearly." In addition to being afraid that she'll be attacked for telling truths, shealso - like most of us who write, especially about our own experience - is afraid of being mocked. Yet she never, in these poems,
considers not speaking.
If her own words are risky, other people's words can be feeble or
cruel, as in:60

A Word to the Wise
I should have listened
To my girlfriends,
But I didn't understandWhy I should not
Walk them home.
Not until I saw the spray-painted,
Tarred hill behind the medical center"Jap and Tony, Jap and Eddie,
Jap and . . . just about
Every boy in our class.
It wasn't so hardTo figure out Jap was me.
There was no one else
Japanese
In our class.
»I step back from the slightly ironic tone with which the poet has
survived this experience and see the little girl reading the graffiti.
the shame. the girlfriends who tried to protect and could not. theJapanese girl humiliated by white boys.
"it's that intimate, / sexism / racism," she writes in "Vow," one ofthe poems in which rage is expressed openly. Speaking to white
women, she accuses them of hypocrisy, of clinging to the cultural
baggage of racism. Specifically she calls for a redefinition of"white":. . . in private
you speak of whiteas the color of purity/strength.
the ku klux klan
wears white.
white is the Asian colorof mourning.
tome,
it means terror and death.

Any people piecing together a tradition amidst a welter of images
from the dominant culture must redefine the key names; a hardlook at color has been central to the work of many third world
women writers, Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, Andrea
Callaan, Audre Lorde, Cherrle Moraga,O just to name a few.
°1 am thinking, in this order, of The Woman Warrior; The Bluest Eye; "Brownness,"in This Bridge Called My Back; many of the poems in The Black Uni corn; and the
preface and passim in This Bridge (in fact, Bridge is a min e, here as elsewh ere) .

61

Michiyo Cornell places herself firmly in this tradition. Moreover,
she warns white women
if you betray me again,
my rage and grief
will know no end
and you will be i swear it on my mother's grave you will be dead by my hand.

We remember her mother's grave; this oath goes back generationsof Japanese women, and there is no more time to absorb failure .
She gives warning, depicts clearly an earned impatience; and theedge at which white women teeter, in danger of irrevocably destroying the possibility of trust with women of color. The hopefulnote is that in Michiyo Cornell's world, solidarity among women ispossible; now white women have to nurture this trust.
It's that intimate, sexism/racism. She writes of the white father
who tried to rape her; graphically of the family friend who didrape her, and of her father's words which the poet says
I will never to my dying day
Forget,"Y ou have to understandHe's my drinking buddy."("John")I'll never forget these words either.
In "John," a direct statement of what happened is the poem. In"Vigil" too, written for the (then) six Black women murdered in
Boston: "Their crime: / They were women, / They were Black."
Along with Michiyo Cornell's work I've been reading Carolyn Forche's excruciatingly vivid report on EI Salvador in which among
other things she mentions the problem of metaphor in dealing withhorror and cites Neruda: "the blood of the children / flowed out
onto the streets / like ... like the blood of the children."O Here no
attempt at metaphor: just horror, straight. They were women, they
were Black. He's my drinking buddy.
In the specifics of the poet's experience archetypes of women's
experience are revealed: in the poems, "My Rape," "My Abortion";
as if, everyone has her rape, and this is mine; everyone has her
abortion, and this is mine. These two poems set the scene for the· Ca rol yn Forche, "EI Salvador: An Aide Memoire," in the American Poetry Review,
vol. 10, no. 4, Jul y- August 1981 , pp. 3-8.

62

fantasy violence in "The Rapist," and 1 think it is many women's
fantasy too (I know it's mine): beginning with searing rage, Michiyo
Cornell describes in detail tying down the rapist and castrating him("Your white face will go whiter" setting her revenge apart fromcastration-as-terrorism against Black southern men) ; rhythmically,
inexorably the poem builds to a compelling complexity: she tells
the rapist, then - castrated You will know
The price of raping a woman
And your manhood may begin or die.
("The Rapist")

The possibility of manhood for the rapist exists only after he can nolonger be "a man."O Michiyo Cornell is the first feminist 1 know tolook past an imagined castration to what it might mean.
For women there is hope in these poems, that we will build trustwith each other this side of death. For me, a Jewish woman, these
poems are also a deep sharing, a window into the poet's consciousness: useful, informative, heartening, memorable, artfully simple.
There are more stories in this poet and if she were sitting across thetable from me, I'd be asking, so then what happened? what was itlike? tell me more. MORE. 1 have no .d oubt that Michiyo Cornell
will tell more. 1 am especially interested in her experience as amixed-race child of Asian-American parentage, an experience
which Michiyo Cornell's knife-life vision and clear brave voice cando much to articulate. t Meanwhile the poems she has written in
Lesbian Lyrics continue to resonate in my brain.

• • •Michiyo Cornell writes of the risks of speaking "too plainly."
Elise Young, a Jewish lesbian whose language is far more elaborate
than the spare utterances of Lesbian Lyrics, nevertheless confronts
similar issues of poetic taboo (which are never "just" literary issues) :·Reminds me of Andrea Dworkin's de mand for non·phallic sexuality in Woman
Hating.

t Beginning with the Second World War, many Asian wome n have raised children
fathered by American men; especially Japanese, Korean, Vietnam ese, and Thai
women ; women in all those places whe re the Am erican military has waged war in
the usual fashion with th e usual integral ra pe and sexual exploitation , as well as per·sonal and/or marital relationships between Asian women and Am e rican men, overseas and in the U.S. The experience of these children, man y of whom are now adoles·
cents and adults, has ye t to be explored.

63

There are those who will cringe
to see the word "Jew"in a poem.
("From Yanovitch to Young")

Both these poets recognize that what they say will sometimes
have to be said against a poetic tradition which includes emblemsof Christ and assumes white is pure; but excludes women, lesbians,
Japanese, Jews. We have to invent a poetry in which we can speak.
Jew. Even saying our names breaks rules.
The poems in Medusa's Hair: Poetry of Lesbian Re-Envisioning
are about kinship, twinship, poems for her family women, womenof the Jewish tribe, the lesbian tribe. The book opens on a characteristically gutsy note; "Awakening" tangles whiteness, racism, andsexuality for the white (Jewish) girl child:Pe rfectly white
She must be:
Still, fleetingan even purer mountain of snow in the Alps,
she must be cold to the touch, hot in her
acquiescence.
There and not there.
She must arise and walk to the doorof her fantasies of Black peoples(lies that were told to her, lies that she invented)
and she must pound
down the door that does not open
and she must
pound down the door that does not open.

The urgency accumulates ; though the door does not in this volume
cave in, Elise Young is courageous in acknowledging that the door
exists; and in beginning the work of breaking it down (work Michiyo
Cornell, among others, asks of white women): to dissect and recreate meanings of dark and light. 0
Elise Young does not, like Michiyo Cornell, evoke a sense of unprotectedness; her language reveals rather an amplitude; sometimes, suffocation. In many of these poems she wanders throughimages of illness, decay, choking, before reaching, typically, a triumphant end. In "From Yanovitch to Young," invoking the legacyof her Jewish family women, she equips herself to assert:·Cathe rin e Risingflame Moirai's poem "Taking Back My Night" bea rs mention here
as an esp eciall y moving study of images of dark and light; in Sinister Wisdom 17(198l ).

64

· .. I ... daughter of a descendant who nolonger dares to know; who, where, and why?
Who tells our Jewish names as though it werea lie, misremembered and unheld; and no-one willknow how to spell it, you'll be bette r off with
Young than Yanovitch; who would have me called"son of' - I, who go back proudly
further even than the Russian Steppes
but ever knowing each step of the way that
I have nothing of which to be ashamed.

The rhythm and cadence of these poems are nothing to beashamed of either.
The poem's title speaks directly to the experience of the (atleast) American Jew. Mine: from Kantrowitz to Kaye. I want every
Jewish woman to write her "from P- - - to P- - ," "fromC - - - to C-- "; talk about renaming! As Jews we don't evenknow how to find our "real names"O and if we, as many feminists
have done, take names unmarked by patriarchy - Blossom, Mariechild, River - then in this dominant christian culture, we lose theJewish from our names. At least names like Young, Kaye are code toother Jews.
The poems about Jewish experience and antisemitism weighheavily in this collection, by volume and, for me, by impact. The
Jewish lesbian, like any lesbian of the non-dominant people, finds
herself caught, in love with and for women, needy of the lesbiancommunity as a double outsider; but often she feels betrayed:
I wonder why my friends
who think that it is "understandable"
why some learned to hate Jews who
have money, do not know that hating
people of wealthis not the sameas hating people who are Jewish.
("From Yanovitch to Young")

I wonder too why people, including committed lesbian feminists, so
readily focus on Jews with money, denying the long history ofJewish poverty and labor struggles.
I value in Elise Young's poetry that she gives freely of her experience so that no one (of good will) can generalize inappropriately.
°Traditionally, Jews didn 't use patronyms (last names, carried through the male),
but were distinguished in common sense ways, by nicknames, occupation, address,or spouse. Jews were forced to take patronyms throughout most of Europe during
the nine teenth cen tury.

65

When she writes, for example, in "A Litany of Jewish Exorcism,"
I am sick no-one notices
as when I crept out of the upper class wasp enclave for debutantes
hunched in the back seat of the car the pit of my stomach
crusted with anxiety.
Fear of being late Fear of being told I am different
too tall too unhappy too afraid too clumsy
too questioning not questioning enoughshe speaks clearly from the perspective of the well-to-do Jewish girl raised to assimilate. When she admits, a few lines later,
painfully
and so I have a needto endthe Jewish
problem/cut it out of my body/let it out/let it go

she underscores the history of this need; for the positive side ofgrowing up in a ghetto among your own people is that assimilation
is not an issue: who you are is normal.
Her dream of capture and terror, on the other hand, might bemine: it is the Jewish dream, money or no money.
I dreamt that I was with a group ofJewish people. Many were disappearing
not coming back - and those of us who were left began to worry
that
it was the Nazis getting them. I remember standing in a huge hallin front of some large windows and realizing I had to leave andtryingto persuade the others to escape with me ...
("A Litany ... ")I have been quoting from "A Litany of Jewish Exorcism," thefinal poem in the volume and the most ambitious, long, and complex. The poem begins "Jew / Jew/JewIJew/ the Jew / theJewish/ Problem." Those who cringe to see the word "Jew" in apoem are in trouble here; not only had they better get done cringing, but they will have to acknowledge that their attitude leads
straight to concepts like "the Jewish Problem." Historical incidences of antisemitism, experience, stereotypes of Jews all interweave with scenes of classic Jewish "paranoia" (in quotes because
the gentiles are after us). Images of decay-feve~-mucous mingle
with images of lust connected to class- and race-hate (here, antisemitism: Jew as scapegoat as ever). The wariness of the Jew in agentile world rings exhaustingly true:66

Always on the defensive. Always having to protect
what could not protect me.

Yet she is determined to join with, not separate from:We have met in the graveyard.
We have met in the ditch. We have met on the podium.
We have met on the stool.
The Jewish problem is a consequence of being anything otherthan white christian male heterosexual.

The poem concludes with the poet as one of a coven of lesbians
who purge the synagogue and smash "[the] shrunken idols." Like
Michiyo Cornell, Elise Young looks to women for her unity. (Unlike
Michiyo Cornell, her rage at race-hate has not yet reached thebreaking point.)
In another poem, Elise Young suggests that lesbians can nameourselves a people. She entices us with our own name:... the word Jew and yours German
inscribed somewhere inside a place made uninhabitable by men
for you or I to dwell in, the hell of millions of slaughtered andLesbian blood dripping where we do not hide
our legs open and heatpouring through our veins windland shakes the flowers whispering
windland shakes the flowers whispering
Lesbian, Lesbians name yourselves
windland shakes the flowers
whispering
Lesbian("On Re-Naming")

In this passage, she jOins the Holocaust, menstruation, and women's
passion for each other, envisioning a pathetic fallacy where thewhole landscape speaks the once-taboo word. I love the flamboyance ofJewish dykes.
But Elise Young does not pretend away the doors which will not
open. If she has not yet pounded them down, she reveals her needto do so: authentic, prompted not by guilt but by intense connectedness:
Unleash one anger in me and you unleash them all.
("A Litany ... ")This connectedness, at its most intimate, is love for another
woman's "willingness not to die for me / but to survive" ("The First
Separation"). Ever since Sylvia Plath died for nothing, women67

poets have needed to value survival. Ever since the camps, Japanese lesbians and Jewish lesbians had better know there are too
many people after our lives for us to give them over easy. These aresurvivors' poems.
AFTERNOTE
I want to acknowl edge Michaele Uccella's sk illful probing and editing; pushing me,
as usual , one leve l deeper and clearer.
ffi
ffi
ffi
Writing th ese two reviews toge th er, I've been struck by th e difference in my responses tr, th ese poets , differences which have eve rything to do with common/alienculture. With Elise Young's work , I pe rceive the shadows, smells, and ec hoes behind
her words. I trust my intuitive lea ps. I could talk at length about a numbe r of issues
she raises . (To keep myse lf from doing so I will he re mention "Some otes on Jewish
Leshian Identity: whi ch appea red in Nice Jewish Girls: A L esbian Anthology, from
Perse phone Press in May 1982, in which I do talk about th ese issues at length.)With Michi yo Cornell's poe ms, I reac t as a woman, feminist, lesb ian , gua rdian of
women and gi rls, writer about violence aga inst women . My response is not shallow
or single-fa ce ted. But turning ha ck and forth between th ese poets I'm aware of what
I must he missing. I don 't know th e shadows and sounds be hind Michiyo Cornell'swords, I don 't have th e information , th e cu ltural context. I have had to confront myignorance of Japanese-Ame ri can culture; and to draw on what I do know: conve rsations over a period of yea rs with my friend Jan Mihara in Portland, Oregon ; Mitsuye
Yamada's Camp Notes and Oth er Poems, as well as th e work in This Bridge Called
My Back by he r, by Barbara oda, and other Asian-American wom en. Completingth ese rev iews leaves me with a developing inte res t in Japanese- and Asian-Americar
cultures, as if I've made a fri end and want to know better who she is.

G~~e~BestinFeminist Jomnalism
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68

"The Intimate Faceof Universal Struggle"
Linda C. Powell
A review of Civil Wars by June Jordan, Beacon Press, 1981. 188 pp.
$12.95.

"If you want to know how somebody feels or thinks, ask him," isthe opening line of "On Listening: A Good Way to Hear." Fortunately for us, June Jordan has never waited to be asked ; she has
been checking with herself for years, and Civil Wars is the result.
In this collection Jordan speaks powerfully as subject, in the first
person, for herself about her life.
Twenty-two essays, speeches, book excerpts, and diary entries
hurtle us non-stop through sixteen years of this black woman/poet/activist's life, and simultaneously, through her intense struggle todevelop as a feeling human being. Along the way there is a riveting
short course in Black History.
Reviewing Civil Wars is very much Hke "reviewing" my own life.
Jordan and I have covered a lot of the same terrain. We've
reviewed the same books, attended the same conferences, andbeen moved by the same historical/hysterical events. Like Jordan, I
am a black woman torn by the simultaneous yet seeming contradictory demands of making change, or at least, making a difference. I,
too, love women and men (although not, like Jordan, "as well as") . I
also live with the question of making sense of what I most love music - in a world where poverty and deprivation are not only therule but the order of the day. It is unclear how this familiarity ultimately affects a book review. But it is clear that I recognized manyof my own conflicts and resolutions in Civil Wars. Those feelings
guided me to what is right - and what is very wrong - in this book.
Civil Wars takes me back to basics: The personal truly is political.
For many of us this phrase allows the entirety of our lives, the significance of home, family, and relationships. It acknowledges theinner, and the intrapersonal, and yie lds a more integrated "world"view. What Jordan charts in Civil Wars is the other side of that
equation: The political, "out there" is also very personal. Anger isanger, love is love. Jordan challenges us from the position that, for69the whole person, the ability to feel so fiercely about liberation in
Angola or the destructive education of black children flows fromthe same sources as the love for our child, or companion, or a poem.
In response to the plaintive question asked by so many of us,"Where do T end and where does 'the world' begin?" Jordan
retorts: "Decide for yourself, and choose any stance but victim."
The essays are divided into three groups, with introductory notes
for each to establish context and clarity. With "One Way of Beginning This Book" Jordan plunges us into the world of a twentyfour-year old mother in an increasingly unstable interracial marriage, who binges on art, architecture, and the whole world whenever she can arrange care for her young son. The early essays
reveal the raw sources of Jordan's power: access to her feelings andthe use of politics to structure her vision.
In the next seven selections we are propelled further into theouter world. The voice that so remarkably captured the "nearby"
events of emotional growth and personal turmoil grows increasingly
articulate about "faraway" ideas and events like free speech, themeaning and purpose of education, and the struggle for liberation
in Southern Africa.
In the final section, the core elements of woman, writer, and activist begin to mesh. She clarifies abstracts like "friendship," "community," and "power ," and reveals their concrete reality. By thelast page, the message for this reader is clear. The wheel of identity
and wholeness does not have to be endlessly rediscovered. We are
not totally alone. There are guides, like June Jordan, who havefound a way and will share their notes.
Jordan is a lover of words. She uses them as caresses or slaps, andher phrases often provoke sighs and curses. Even the older pieces
in this collection still read well. This is due, in part, to the fact thatmost are exceptionally well written. It is also because the issues arestill quite demanding: South Africa is still not free, black children
are still destroyed by substandard education, and a woman stillcannot walk alone safely.
I had my special favorites. In fact, one of the nicest parts of thiscollection is meeting so many old favorites from various publications in one place.
I remembe r coming casually unprepared to "Against the Wall,"in an issue of Seven Days, and being moved to tears. In eleven shortparagraphs, Jordan traces the ; imilarity of situation of the black
woman poet taking a walk in Manhattan and the entire First World.
70

On this night, "the distinctions escape me." She asks,
What is the difference between demanding that I carry "a pass," a certificate of permission to stand on my feet, and terrorist curfews imposed upon my movements because I am a female?

She concludes with a powerful manifesto:
And the moon is full, everywhere, tonight: Southern Africa will
become a haven, a situation of supreme safety for the multitudes now
suffering rape. And here, in Manhattan, the streets will become arefuge, an agreeable alternative to the house of this particular Black
woman, and for women generally, and do you know why I say thatwith so much calm? ...
Because all of us who are comparatively powerless, because we havedecided that if you interfere, if you seek to intrude, if you undertaketo terrorize and to subjugate and to stifle even one more moment ofthese, our only lives, we will take yours, or die, trying.
It's 12:30 A.M. and now I am going out, by myself, to put this in the
mailbox, three blocks away. And, listen : I am not afraid.

Things That I Do in the Dark, Jordan's 1977 collection of selected
poems, was reviewed by only one black literary journal and nofeminist periodicals. Jordan wrote "Thinking About My Poetry" in
response to an imagined query about her creative work process.
This last concept of my work re mains' the governing criterion, as I
write these thoughts, tonight: to be accurate about myself, and toforce my mind into a constantly expanding apprehension of my political and moral situation.

Jordan's rigorous personal standards are no more or less demanding than those she sets for others. In "Angola: A Victory and a Promise" she succeeds at what many artists attempt and few achieve.
She mixes a movingly written essay with a history of the struggle ofthe people of Angola and comments on the poet's role in revolution- and closed this article in First World magazine with a list of organizations doing Southern Africa support work. Jordan is not being
presumptuous or pushy: you do want to get involved when you
finish!
I was propelled through Civil Wars by my feelings. I cried,laughed, and finally, I was consumed by/with a quiet rage. There issomething very wrong in the last section. On at least three occasions, Jordan throws up sexuality and sexual preference, and eachtime, she ducks.
"Where Is the Love?" is Jordan's presentation as participant and71moderator of a 1978 panel, "Feminism and the Black Woman
Writer. " I was in the audie nce at Howard Unive rsity that day. Hercomme nts are as disturbing today as they were four years ago. Shesays in the introduction of this speech, "In any case, I do not believethat fe minism is a matte r, first or last, of sexuality. " If Jordan means
to say that fe minist politics do not flow from lesbianism (read:hatred of men) then she is absolutely correct. Fe minism is an articulate response to sexism - an ideology that defines women as diffe re nt/less than men. But sexism shapes, defines, and limits
women's sexuality, just as it impacts on relationships, the workplace, health care, e tc. So pe rhaps fe minism is not "a matter of'sexuality, but sexuality is most certainly in need of feminist analysis.
She continues:
The session was going to be hot. Evidently, feminism was beingtranslated into lesbianism, into some thing interchangeable with les bianism and the taboo on fe minism within the Black intellectual community had long been exceeded in its orthodox severity only by thetaboo on the subject of the lesbian. I say within the intellectual black
community because, minus such terms as f eminist or lesbian, the phenomena of self-directed Black women or the phenomena of Black
women loving other women have hardly been uncommon, let alone
unbelievable events to Black people not privy to theoretical strife
about correct and incorrect Black experience.

Of course there have always been Black women who loved
women. Any behavior can be grudgingly accommodated as long as
it remains "personal," furtive, and totally isolated. It is precisely the
moment that behavior is made part of a whole set of issues, themoment that the connections are wired that behavior takes on amuch large r significance. Contrary to Jordan's presumption, selfde termined black lesbian women who connect their personal
choice of lifestyle to the political facts of life - capitalism, racism,sexism, and he te rosexism - are not commonplace, welcomed, or
safe.
In her rush to "defend" fe minism from translation to lesbianism,
Jordan misses a crucial juncture. The issue is not sex, but (hetero)sex
ism. Likewise, the problem is not women loving women, or lesbianism, or being se lf-directed. It is how these behaviors are perceived
and punished in the world. Who you sleep with or the color of yourskin shouldn't matte r, but they both damn well do. The constantquestion becomes, how to react in the face of the world's hatred,
how to make change. Sexuality is the only area where Jordan seems
to suggest that silence and victimization are better.
72

"Declaration of an Independence IWould Just as Soon Not Have"contains a potentially more dangerous misunderstanding. Thisessay ,examines the dilemma of a black woman with an international
analysis who wants and needs to do activist political work.
One of the final paragraphs says:
And if women loving other women and/or women in love withwomen will be part and parcel of the manifest revolution we want towin, does that mean that we should condone lecherous, exploitative,
shallow, acting-out and pathological behavior by women who termthemselves lesbians - in much the same way that we, Black people,
once voluntarily called ourselves niggas out of a convoluted mood of
defiance, a mood that proved to be heavily pene trated by unconscious, continuing self-hatred?

I have read this passage tens of times.
Is that how Jordan describes the behavior of "women who termthemselves lesbians"? Is she equating lesbian as a word/description/identity with one of the most hated of racist epithets? Is she
suggesting that lesbians are simply "defiant" and "acting out of selfhatred"? What would a woman who prefers women call herself? In
a heterosexist/homophobic culture, Jordan's alternative sounds likethe closet to me.
Our job is not to deny the connections between feminism and lesbianism, but to build and clarify them. That political analysis andclarification is the only way to silence the discussion of the "Black
woman writer's bedroom activities" that Jordan so deplores.
These are not my standards for consistency. In "Thinking About
My Poetry," Jordan says,
What, I sometimes wonder, am I trying to do, exactly? I think I am
trying to keep myself free, that I am trying to become responsive andresponsible to every aspect of my human being, , .

In "Notes of a Barnard Dropout" she self-describes:
I am somebody seeking to make, or to create, revolutionary connections between the full identity of my love, of what hurts me, or fills
me with nausea, and the way things are: what we are forced to learn,
to "master," what we are trained to ignore, what we are bribed into
accepting, what we are rewarded for doing or not doing . ..

Seeing and making connections are Jordan's tasks for herself. She
can perceive the ties that bind Crown Heights, Brooklyn, andSouthern Africa's struggle for liberation, and powerfully articulatethem so that others can see them. Why does she refuse to even attempt to build the "revolutionary connections" between female73

sexuality and th e existe nce of PlayboylHustler magazines? Jordan
does not have to make these connections in her own intimate life;
pe rhaps for her, sexuality and its expression is the simpler matter of"civil rights. " But why does she continue to make totally invisible
the black women for whom sexuality exists as part of a constellationof power issues, choices, and possibilities?
Jordan works so much magic in Civil Wars, why harp on this one
point? First, because this book's impact on my feelings tells a lot
about it. From the beginning, I promised more of a book "reaction"
than a review, with its assumption of "objectivity." Jordan's attitude
toward sexuality got to me like nothing else. She echoes the societal
message that what is most my own does not deserve attention. I felt
as though a family member had slammed a door in my face, orslapped me very sharply. Can we as black women/feminists afford
that?
Secondly, feminism means something very specific to me. It is a
way of seeing and being in the world that commits me to making
connections. Jordan's comment, "My life seems to be an increasing
revelation of the intimate face of universal struggle," is the clearest
description I've ever read describing feminist process. Given ourshared assumptions involved in being a feminist becoming a humanbeing, Jordan's denial of sexuality as a central political question isan unsoluble contradiction for me.
Finally, Civil Wars will command a considerable audience within
the intellectual black community. Once again, the issue of
sexuality/sexual preference has been relegated to a never-neverland outside the necessary purview of radical black politics. Jordan
has missed or thrown away a valuable opportunity to support, if notagree with, black people who want to talk about lifestyle andsexual preference within a context of sexism/feminism/sex roles.
Once again, we've been called "out of line."
Simply, it is a very important book with a very serious flaw. Without hesitation I can recommend Civil Wars to white feminist
friends who want to know more about being black in America: they
are familiar with this "waffling" around the issue of sexuality. I am
far more conflicted about my black friends interested in feminism.
They would need to know that many feminists draw political connections to their sexuality.
The intensity of my reaction must also be related to heightened
expectations: Jordan swims out so very far that I begin to hope
she'll make the other side and find "the answer ... " And if there is74any overall message in Civil Wars, it is that no answer, in e ithe r a
global political sense, or an internal, intrapersonal sense, is valid
unless it emerges from a well-examined life. She says in th e fin al
essay:Neither race nor gender provides the fin al de finitions of jeopardy or
re fuge. The final risk or final safety lies within each one of us attuned
to the messy and intricate and unending challe nge of selfdetermination. I believe the ultimate power of all the people rests
upon the individual ability to trust and to respect the authority of thetruth of whatever it is that each of us feels, each of us means. On what
basis should what authority exceed the authority of this truth ?

So while there may not be an "answer," there is commitme nt, that
constant checking out of our insides, what Jordan calls faith. Readthis book thoughtfully, prepare to ge t angry, and start your own
civil wars.

FAT ISSUES: Writings that affect.all women. An anthology of stories
and articles about the hatred of fat in
our society and how it is directed
toward women_ We need personal
stories, political writings, photographs,
and drawings that speak to theexperience of fat hatred in our society.
For more information pick up one of
our flye'rs, or write us and we will send
you one . Fat Issues Book, c/o Iowa
City Women's Press, 529 S. Gilbert St.,
Iowa City, IA 52240

75

"To This Precise Humanity"
Bernice Mennis

A review of Bones and Kim by Lynn Strongin. Published in 1980
by Spinsters, Ink, R.D.l , Argyle, N.Y. 12809. 116 pp. $5.50
I was very moved by Lynn Strongin 's Bones and Kim, but it is adifficult book to read and an even more difficult book to write
about. There is no clear plot ; no distinct action takes place. Kim,
the central character and dominating consciousness (sometimes
speaking in the first person, sometimes spoken about in the third
person) , is a thirty-five-year-old college teacher living in theSouthwest with Norah, her lover, in a "marriage" of one year. On
sabbatical to write a thesis on "Religion in Three Women Poets,"
Kim has the time/space to allow her mind to open to her past to people, events, words, feelings - and be self-conscious of her
present. The novel is about her journey into her past and present.
It is Kim's sensitive exploration of her mind's intricate landscape.
The route to the past is not direct. It's full of repeated scenes,
refrains, images, people occurring again and again with slight variations, resonating echoes. (Kim says that she has an "ecclesiastical sense of time.") Past and present float together - as they do,always, in our lives, both confusing and connecting. In writing to
her mother, Bones, Kim says: "My mind, Bones, is not linear but
contrapuntal, I hear several voices at once" (p. 21). Bones andKim is contrapuntal, a music of many voices - subtle and perceptive layers of feeling and thought, juxtaposed without transitions
or connections; a language of poetry and nuance, a language of"knowledge in the breast," not the mind; of "roundness without
an edge," not clear lines ; of "light cast backward from the hermit
crab," not direct light. The result is a complexly woven, powerfulwork which often brings the reader into a deep water of understanding and feeling, but which can also leave her stranded on the
shore and/or drowning with little to grab on to.

76

It's not that Strongin does not deal with very concrete, powerful realities. Kim is a Jewish child during Hitler's war. She grows
up in a South where she sees "black men digging tr enches, balls
chained to their ankles," where she sings Christmas songs tosomeone else's god. She is "poor white trash," feeling the chainsof poverty restricting her life, denying her access. After an unhappy marriage her parents divorce. She moves from the South to theNorth and back again, always in strange environments. At twelve
she is struck down with polio, "brought home not to walk again,"
The frozen, stark photographs and refrains of the past are
repeated again and again, nightmares of Kim's waking mind:
A child stood shivering on a railway platform in the South during
the War, the Hitler War. Outside Miami Beach, 1943. It was two
o'clock in the morning. She was five years old and wore a patch over
one eye to cut her double vision. (p.9)
The palm trees drip, thick ugly leather fronds. We're locked out of
our hotel room, our gifts - puny as the pil e is - a re locked
inside. (p. 37)
Railroad ties. A child stood walking, making connections with her
past. The hospital, Monday nights they'd be wheeled, fl at on
stretchers to old Gene Autry movies in the huge vat of a hospital auditorium, like a vat for boiling. The flatness of their posture mirrored the cardboard dimension of smiling D ale Evans . .. (p. 70)
I place you in a narrow cot, the linen so stiff it cuts yo ur fl esh.
Beside your cot on your bedstand of zinc stands the shiny aluminum
toothbrush cup in its kidney pan. It's early morning, so earl y thatit's night. ... You're twelve and have just been through a disease
that left you paralyzed from the waist down . Your back's stiff as aniron washboard . ... In approximately three minutes the morning
matron will come and call the rollcall of the fifty children in theward. You know the last name rollcall by heart and repea t thenames under yo ur breath as the nurse calls them .... For you a re in
the last cubicle of the ward. Your cubiclemate died. (p.99)

A child forever waiting for her father's return from war; a Jew
in a Christian society; a twelve-year-old in a cubicle in a statehospital - Strongin (and Kim) explore the "hole which begins toinvade our lives when we're too much alone" (p. 35). That isolation finds echoes in other forms , in other people. So Kim thinks of
Rella, her grandmother from Roumania, wrenched from herhome in New York City to a hospital in a strange and alien Arizonato live (and die) ; of Stacey, the Latin teacher, senile in an old age
home, unable to speak a sentence of her beloved Latin; ofHannah, Kim's first lover, "small like a medieval man ," clothed in77

a stiff la yer of protec tion, at age forty-eight allowing love toenter ; of seventy-year-old Carey, Kim 's neighbor upstairs, living
a lon e, widowed, needy and possessive yet strong and independent; of Bones, le ft by he r husband with two children, her art
he ld within he r for years, "trying to live down the temper she wasborn with. " War, pove rty, divorce, racism, anti-Semitism, sickness, ag ing are th e threads of the warp. The threads of the woof
are the aloneness, exclusion , paralysis (literal and figurative) ,fear , pa in , and rage. And, finally, later, understanding, compassion , and love. Strongin do es not analyze the material or emotional rea lities. She carefully weaves the web, touches the boundaries
a nd surfaces, showing patte rns of shade and color.
For me, the power of the novel lay in the images and words ofthe past, woven together into a haunting, moving chorus of picture and sound; in the sensitive consciousness recording the present and seeing clearly th e complexity of life; in the language ofpoe try tha t connects the past and the present; in the wisdom andtruth that e me rg e. The problems are that sometimes Kim's consciousness, formed and deepened by isolation and pain, loses perspective and seems stuck in a solipsism which Strongin, as theauthor, cannot see. Some of the juxtapositions of scenes andwords are complex and confusing, and block rather than further
insight. The added layers of a Civil War Journal, whose words
are interspersed in the text, seem like extra baggage. Kim's embroidery of a Maine lighthouse scene, started at the beginning of
the work and finished at the end, seems too self-conscious as anenvelope structure. The rage and violence stemming from illness,frustration , powerlessness, are mentioned often but neither explored nor really conveyed. At times I want the novel to do what
it does not claim to do, and be what it is not - I want more analysis, more direct, linear thought, more penetration and exploration of emotional realities. And sometimes I feel the lack of a real
structure or organization; Bones and Kim sometimes reads more
like a journal than a novel.
The novel is, however, ultimately satisfying to me. There are
beginning threads-words, people, themes, scenes-that after being painfully twisted are finally unraveled and brought to rest. The
child, Kim, waiting for the father who never really returns, becomes the adult awaiting Norah's homecoming. It's an old refrainwith a new ending: "A child stood shivering on a railway platform .
. . . For the first time it struck her: she will be here, by me, all78

winter" (p. 89). And, later, "I know my love will come" (p. 95).
The pain of illness, having closed her off in a "hermetic" existence, now allows love in: "The text for a long time in my life has
been illness. Now it's green" (p. 108). Kim's violence and anger towards Bones turns to love, understanding, identification, and acceptance: "These evenings, while she contemplated what musthave been the avalanching solitude of those years on Bones, shefeels uplifted, as a bird started to sing: 'survival.' They survived
it: no worse, no better than state hospital at twelve" (p. 79). To
her grandmother, Kim wrote: "Bless you for bringing Bones into
the world. As she is ruthless with herself, so she is with others. It
takes half a lifetime for a daughter to comprehend a mother's
bravery" (p. 95).
"Memory has been a tunnel which sucked me backward, andthere I saw the light at the end" (p. 114). Acceptance and love ofBones is part of Kim's larger acceptance of her pain, her paralysis,
her self. Addie, Kim's doctor, is the teacher. "Tough, resilient,but offering no softness that was compromise with truth" (p. 109),
Addie, for whom "work is love made practical," teaches Kim tosee and accept realities which cannot be changed: "You can't,
Kimberly, push the sick child. You can't whip the trees into
blooming, you can't shove the river. Yet you, Kimmie, have been
trying. All these years" (p. 108). "Take trips up the mountain.
Only come in after for treatment" (p. 62). "Of pain ... that's thenature of the beast."
At the end of the novel Kim learns that she has "outwitted . ..
surgery again." But she has learned, even more, an acceptance ofthe pain which allows her to move on:
We cry out against the physician. But growing up comes when werealize there's only so much she or he can do. She too becomes ill,
sinks, sickens, succumbs, dies, hears her own small death, her own ,coming in the night. And despite the longing in all of us for Immaculate Conception, away from the turmoil and limitation those particular two humans confer, we must trace our way back to this precise
humanity. Goodnight, Addie: I'm carrying this letter upstairs. I
raise a candle for its light, rather than raise a hand in anger.
(pp. 115-16)

Bones and Kim moved me. I thank Strongin for its light.

79What Can Be Sustained
Susan Wood-Thompson
A review of Lesbian Writer: Collected Work of Claudia Scott by
Claudia Scott, edited by Frances Hanckel and Susan Windle. Published in 1981 by Naiad Press, P.O. Box 10543, Tallahassee, Florida
32302. 114 pp. $4.50.
Claudia Scott writes about questions that are familiar to any lesbian: how to be part of a family with values different from one's
own, how to join - or keep separate - lesbianism and public life,
how to sustain the value of successive homes and friendships inother towns, and how to create the life one wants out of the materials at hand. Scott presents these questions in the kinds of poems
that lesbian journals characteristically carry: poems with autobiographical, narrative, dramatic, and political emphases. She answers them most completely, however, in a different kind of poem,
in which resolutions appear primarily on the level of such nonhuman images as stones, waves, and seasons.
First the questions. In "Not Moving" the speaker tells her motherof the strength she has found in their ancestors' lives. The motherrejects, as different from her own, values that are not groundedsolely in a husband. The speaker goes further, explaining her own
individual life, and meeting the same reaction:
I blurt out words I came to shareof haVing reconciled my life, fashioned
my place, arrived at a destination
it seems I have not arrived
a woman 's place is not given, and a journey
without perfect peace is merely
wandering and wasted time

(p.4)

The title, "Not Moving," describes the mother's refusal to enlarge
her viewpoint to accommodate her daughter's experience. A
number of the poems about parental family members, and the80

book's one short story, urgently conve y the author's need for uncoercive closeness. In the story, "Ge t Up, It's Snowing Foxes," th e
rigid daily enforcement of family ties is "the cult of an ancie nt, stifling, unproductive, hollow religion" (p. 87) that leaves th e daughte r
with a frustrated rage for creating her life solely on he r own terms.
Although scenes of the lesbian community have, more ofte n thannot, the warmest, easiest atmosphere in the book, individual relationships remind me of those in the family , with conflicting needs
to be both close and apart. These distance problems show in concern over staying, moving, returning, lOSing, sustaining. In "All Post
Cards Eagerly Accepted" the speaker's friend brings up the question about maintaining closeness over distance :"Again our letters answering each other'squestions have crossed in the mail.
If we can just sustain such eagerness
you haven't been gone long"a year, two years
in the context of expecting we will notagain live near each other, no, not long
and what can be sustained?
what has the resonance to carry
to be shared in separated lives?
(p.32)and the author tells us
what I want to sustain
is her perspective, her long viewof me, my life, what I have been
what! have expected to be
and thereby her prerogative
her earned right and ability
as an old friend to call me onwhat I am doing(p.33)

Accurate, honest images, then, are what we can give each other,what we need each other for. One poem in particular, "Triptych:
For a Good Woman Poet: makes some of Scott's values and conflicts as a poet explicit. The central problem is that a prominent
poet whose work is very important to Scott does not come out as alesbian, but rather writes "in personal/but never private terms,"
which is to say about her life, but in an unrevealing way. In someways this poet, Elizabeth Bishop, even disassociates herself fromher own viewpoint in her work. Giving poetry readings, she is non-81

assertive in appearance and manner-aIl in all, she inhabits the
men's poetry world which has heaped honors on her, but she has apparently done this in contradiction to and at the expense of thewoman-identification she may feel privately.
At readings she seems ill at easeshe mumbles, does not phrase,
does not present her poems, in fact,reads as though they were completely
unfamiliar and quite separate
from this rather frumpy woman
inexplicably, unwittingly on stageThat skill has also been acquired
over sixty years of being a good woman
properly dissociating her perceptionsof her general experience from her self
Her poems are accessible
refreshingly devoid of private fears
obsessions, fantasies , qUirks
She does not obtrude
She writes wellis accepted, poet among poets
woman among men(pp.55-56)

Scott has not chosen this route, and knows that she will probably
forfeit the kind of public accessibility Elizabeth Bishop's work has
enjoyed.
Scott objects to Bishop's
holding up that image
to a younger woman poetas a way to be accepted
taken seriously as a poet, readan image that is not at all like me
To be recognized by women
there are other expectations
about content, pOint of viewand then what-the supportof women doesn't make the same waves
and I have no proof it ever will
(pp.56-57)

Although the poem ends with Scott's claim that she respects
Bishop's diversity, in this matter she is still struggling to do so, if I
judge by the fact that the poem's strongest imagery comes in pro-82

testing Bishop's choice. Scott is calling Bishop on her lack of integrity, particularly in the face of the need younger lesbian poe ts havefor images of strong lesbian poets. This is one of the book's many
poems that take seriously our responsibility to each other and toourselves.
Lesbian Writer as a whole brings up questions about what lesbian
poetry is. As a poet I am aware of exactly when 1 decided to write
solely with and about women, and of the decision that followed tosubmit to lesbian journals only. Together these choices had a big
effect on my poetry, because 1 usually write with a sense of explaining my viewpoint to someone. Who that someone is influences the
direction of the explanation. In the years covered by Scott's book, 1
find her writing all kinds of poems: those that speak to a lesbian
audience (for example, "Patterns: Variations," "Names," "Two
Women at the Luxembourg") and those that address a more generalgroup or even, in their lack of lesbian content, a non lesbian audience (for example, "Picasso finally is dead," "Grass," "For Thomas
Eakins"). The former poems - which I appreciate most - are insome instances explicitly lesbian and in others identifiably so only
because they appear in proximity to the explicit ones. The spectrum
includes, for example, a poem in which a woman is clearly attracted
to and becomes sexually involved with another woman ("Towards
an Absence of Mirrors"), and at least two poems about womentrying to help each other find their own strength ("Though Ourselves Inside Remain as Stones" and "All Post Cards Eagerly Accepted"), along with poems about integrity in art ("Triptych" and"it was the sky, the grey") and those about the difficulty of understanding one's own life ("The Merits and Limitations of Euclidean
Geometry or Going Home" and "I have sent you all away"). Other
poems seem veiled in that they describe situations I take to be lesbian, but Scott avoids pronouns and other identifying words. Theseare poems that in a nonlesbian journal 1 would assume describe
heterosexual encounters, unless 1 already know the poet to be alesbian.
As I read Lesbian Writer I find myself wondering if other poets
besides me write with a sense of audience outside themselves. 1
wonder if the distinctions I've made in my writing years are ones
that a writer with Scott's political range would find artificiallynarrow; if there is a distinction in her work between times when lesbian community was most present to her, and other times when asense of general "personhood" overrode a sense of lesbianism.

83Though Scott protests thi~ aspect of Bishop's work, the choice ofBishop as mentor indicates at least an ability to respond deeply topoetry in which "personhood" is the greater - in fact the obliterating - consideration. o
The questions of where a lesbian wants to publish and what poets
she can learn from are complex. The implication of this book's title
does not allow for the ambivalence of political approaches in the
poetry. As Scott wrote in "Triptych," "To be recognized by women/ there are expectations / about content, point of view .... " Towhat extent do we as lesbian poets want to control our subject
matter and our approaches to it, and if we do want such control,
what are the best ways of achieving it? And what do we do withthose poems that fall outside the limits we have chosen? Our answers to these questions may change, may be changing in lesbian
poetry as a whole right now. The larger question is that of what wewant our poetry to be, and is enmeshed with the question of what
we want our lives to be.
Lesbian Writer has, toward the end, fourteen pages of "Notes for
Poems, 1978-79," most of which face directly the complexities andimplications of those responsibilities toward ourselves. In "Working
on My House," fixing the house up is clearly a metaphor for fixing
one's life up in the face of urgent questions about what can be sustained:
how did the builders of cathedrals
go on dressing stones
year after year
according to a plan two generations old
and knowing the tower would be only
half done when they died(p. 100)

The fullest resolution to the kinds of conflict described in LesbianWriter generally comes in non-human images of boundary less diffusion, translucence, or in opposing forces - such as stillness andmotion - working together. "The' Waves" introduces a question inhuman terms:
where do I and this life stand face
to face? how will I know when,
as a wave hangs, hangs and suddenly
breaks, it comes to be mine(p.110)·rve never believed that a general sense of personhood is possible ; I think people
who think th ey believe in it really believe in white heterosex uality. But, to me
Scott's poems sound as if she believed in it, and Bishop's do too.

84

Scott finds a resolution in focusing on her own "image in amemory," combining it with the motion of waves "lucid thin green"rushing hard along the sand, and bringing them to this final realization:and this moment of my lifethat is my life keeps passing
passing as the waves passon the sand a grain of sandback and forthback and forth(p . Ill)

The depiction of the ocean as a large, stable entity whose characteris to be ceaselessly in motion (along with poems about stones risingout of the ground, eroding and returning to it, and the seasons'effect on a garden) emphasizes a view of life as cyclical. These massive actions, along with the particular motions - leaving, returning,staying, finding oneself about to do something, having just completed something - give a freshness to the commonplace observationthat women experience life cyclically.
The same force of resolution exists for Scott in thin, translucent
things. Fine afternoon rain, stained-glass windows provide some ofher most beautiful imagery:
It was the thirteenth century
the apogee of brilliantly stained glass
And yet at Lincoln, Canterbury, Yorkthey were also creating grisaillegrey and green-grey windows
I read now that brightly stained glassmust have been in short supply, expensive,
limited by the austere Cistercians, or
too dark in these dark English skies
It couldn't of course have had anything
to do with what they saw

the grey sky
filled with water
the diffuse grey lightgreen through the waterand bright after
it was the grey sky("it was the sky," p. 79)

These monochromatic windows are my favorite image, replicating
for me the whole book's tone of concentration, its modulation of afew major themes and images.

85

If, as the number of Scott's poems that can serve as metaphorsfor writing poetry suggests, imagery is the level that fascinated her
the most, it is worth examining further. One of my favorite aspectsof her imagery is its reaching outside traditional assumptions about
writing by women. More textural imagery exists here than in mostpoetry, and the textures frequently feel rough like stone, or hard
like glass, and are often found outdoors. Images for the poet andher close relationships are architectural, mechanical, geometrical,
geological, planetary - and reflect familiarity with those realms.
Emotionally exhausted, she is "a ball and socket joint / habitually
underoiled" (p. 108) ; sleepless, she is a worn tooth "in the second
hand gear of the clock" (p. 35) ; strength between lovers has comefrom a process like that of "magma cooling, molded / to an igneouscore" (p. 20) .
In every aspect of Scott's poems I hear a tone of deliberateness, a
conscious honing of her options with language. She tries a number
of approaches to imagery, sound, diction, syntax, sequence of
events, and what she calls "focus / and perspective as part of themeaning" (p. 31). She seems to explore many ideas about poetry,
discovering what she does best in a way that, had she written
longer, might have remained characteristic or might have turned
into a more nearly exclusive development of her greatest strengths.
At this point, however, I find some poems labored, the meticulousness or technical virtuosity constituting a poem's central passion(for example, "The Merits and Limitations of Euclidean Geometry,""In an Absence of Mirrors," and "How Do You Think Poets Should
Behave in Bars? ").
My favorite of Scott's technical achievements is her sense of
temporal perspective. Many of her poems gain interest from theirtiming in relation to the event described: the first moments of arriving, after vacation, at an empty house; the moments during which
Orpheus rationalizes, just preparatory to turning to look at - andthereby lose - Eurydice. This approach gives the tension of bothboundary experience and the anxiety felt when we do not witness
the final resolution. I know Orpheus is going to turn, but since I do
not get to see him doing it, I am still on a precipice. One of myfavorite poems benefits from the way both spatial and temporalboundary settings match emotional brink:
WATCHING A WOMAN DECIDE
she is sitting by the lake
in March between the lake86and early rush hour traffic
joggers and dog watchersb etween her and me
she is sitting
thinking by the lake now
after crying out the story
drinking and forgetting and remembering
the story in a fury , in tears
runnjng the details over, overpounrung at the simple sentencethat is all it takes to tellwhat happened is clear
and incomprehensible
both of us are sitting by the lake
between the traffic and the lakewith passing strangers between us
if she walks toward the water
what will I do
(p.42)The tone of this poem and a number of others in the book is one ofemotional courage at a testing point.
Leaving matters of style behind, I want to end by responding toFrances Hanckel and Susan Windle's editing of Lesbian Writer.
They completed it within a year and a half of Claudia Scott's suicide, and HanckeI's "Introduction" gives her impression of the factors leading up to the death. "Notes for Poems: 1978-79," which
Windle introduced with biographical facts and arranged, include
among them the last such notes Scott made, which describe her
feeling that she can no longer sustain life. The suicide of a young
woman poet (Scott was thirty-one) can be a riveting awarenesswhen we consider that woman's life. It is difficult not to view her
work solely through her death - a practice that has prompted agreat deal of sentimental, sensational writing about the poetry ofother women who have taken their own lives. It is difficult to reada poet's work as it was written, by a living person - and not as if itwere written after she had made the choice to die. But it is essentialthat we do so, for two reasons. First, that iswhen it was written, andwe wrench its meaning if we read otherwise. Second, to make suicide the great exception is simply to divorce it from all otherhuman action in a way that can only be motivated by the reader'sneed to feel safe, to feel that she lives in a different world where
suicide is as much an impossibility for her as it was an "inevitability"
for the poet in question. In this process we objectify women who

87kill themselves. And in so doing we take the poet and the poetry
less seriously - we do not let ourselves feel fully the currents ofambiguity in their lives, the hard-won value of their insights, thecommitment that they have had toward the less severe resolutions
they have also achieved. To make the suicide woman and her deathlife-size is our job in a book like this, and one the editors help us
with. We can, thereby, give the joyous poems that report fulfillments, and those in which the process of writing furthers the poet's
developing consciousness the same weight as those most expressing
need. The book gives us many points in the poet's emotional and'perceptual cycles, the flux created out of the sustained values ofher writing life.

MENAD
a wome n's 1itc ra rv
journal
THEORY CRITICISM FICTION
REVIEWS ANALYSISMULTI-MEDIA VISUAL ARTS
#2
#3
#4
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Black, Brave, and Woman, Too
Cheryl Clarke
A review of All the Women Are White, All the Blacks are Men, But
Some o/Us Are Brave, edited by Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott,and Barbara Smith. Published by The Feminist Press, Box 334, Old
Westbury, N.Y. 11568.401 pp. $8.95 .
. . . This is a situation in which those of us who research minority
and/or women writers are familiar with - having to rescue th ese figures from some comfortable, circumscribed shadow and place the min their own light. (Hull, G. , "Researching Alice Dunbar-Nelson: A
Personal and Literary Perspective,· Some of Us A re Brave, p. 192.)

Black American women have been objectified in the flesh , in thelanguage, in the literature, and in the body politic for several centuries. Black women know we have shared and shaped the struggle,
development, and triumph of the coerced immigrant, the AfroAmerican. Black women have been on the front line of the war forsurvival in the racist United States. We and our black brothers haveworked together as partners, comrades, allies, and adversaries forthat oft-thwarted goal - black liberation.
The Black Woman. Her loyalty to black people cannot be questioned. In fact, the presumption historically has been made that theblack woman's primary commitment is black liberation. In order
not to seem individualistic, the black woman did not - in action necessarily distinguish her struggle from her people's, though she
might muse publicly and privately, in letters, diaries, poems, on her
double slave lot. The race and the struggle against racism occupied
and preoccupied her. These preoccupations created a myopia.
Race and all it means in the United States is overwhelming andconsuming. One can understand how the black woman might lowprofile her concerns over, for example, capitalism, labor, suffrage
for women, "free love," abortion, international affairs, et. al. The
black woman would say to herself: "Time for all that later. Gotta
triumph over this race thing. After all isn't racism the reason we'repoor, unemployed, can't vote, can't love who we want to love, can't
control our bodies, and are kept out of the international domain? "89And like Sarah Douglass in 1837, the black woman affirm(s)ed, "I
believe they despise us for our color" (Lerner, G., ed., Black
Women in White America: A Documentary History, 1973, p. 362).
Black women cast our lot with black people. What else wasreally out there? The Women's Movement. Feminism. The
women's movement and feminism have figured significantly in the
lives and development of black women from the time of the greatsocial movements of the early nineteenth century. Black women
have a feminist tradition. But black women could not ally withwhite women solely on the basis of gender oppression. Far too
much other contradiction was unresolved, namely, white skin andclass privilege. At least we share the race and ex-slave status withall other black people. Of course, it has been argued that white
women too have been slaves.
We cast our lot with black people. And did our duty. And while
we were busy and productive - "behind the scenes," "in the background," and "being the backbone" - our achievements in politics,
art, education, service, et. a!., were being credited to men or notcredited at all - just taken and used. It is curious how black
women built schools and churches, organized rebellions, hoedfields, ran old age homes, plus kept households, raised children,
worked like beavers all the days of our lives - all in the same day,all in the same lifetime. Yet, any time when attention has been
focused on the contributions of Afro-Americans, it is black men
who are dredged up from obscurity. The traditions black women
have passed on to our daughters and sisters remained anonymous,with few exceptions.
The impetus of feminism, i.e., women interpreting our lives for,by, and about women, has been a rescuing force for the tradition of
black women. However, we have had our invisibility to and betrayal at the hands of the predominantly white women's movement.
When the contributions women have made to American culture arecatalogued, those of black women are strangely omitted. In spite of
the sometimes willful, sometimes unconscious exclusion of black
women from the ritual of acknowledgment, black women are on
the brink of synthesizing the politics of women's liberation and thepolitics of black liberation for our own personal-is-political development, as opposed to making all the sacrifices. All the Women Are
White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave, edited
by Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, is part ofthat synthesis.

90But Some of Us Are Brave, subtitled "Black Women's Studies," isan impressive work: nineteen theoretical, sociological, literary,pedagogical essays; six extensive bibliographic essays ; a listing ofapproximately eighty-nine references in addition to the exte nsive
references, bibliographies, and notes that document and accompany the essays; twenty black women's studies course syllabi; a catalogue of non-print materials on black women; and ele ven black andwhite photographs of black women of all ages, backgrounds,
classes, from as long ago as 1902. The credentials and experiencesof the contributors - all black American women except one white
woman contributor and two white women co-authors - certainly
debunk any myths of "idiocy," "illiteracy," or "vacuousness" (p.
xviii). Brave is a political, pedagogical tool for use by us. A survival
manual for all of us stuck down here in this swamp of western maleletters. Brave attempts to free us from the quicksand - Helga
Crane rescued from the quagmire, revisited, revised, and resuscitated!O
The guiding politics of Brave are black feminist. Its orientation isheavily literary, which is a critical flaw. Though not all the contributors identify themselves or their processes as feminist, without
exception, the writers are black-woman-centered. Brave is not an
apologia. It is an assertion of black women's existence as intellectual, sentient beings. Hull and Smith" both longtime advocates of theliberation of black women writers from the fetters of anonymity,
eloquently and forthrightly introduce us in "The Politics of Black
Women's Studies" to the challenge of black women's studies intheir assertion:. . . Black feminism has made a space for Black women's studies toexist and, through its commitment to all Black women will provide
the basis for its survival ...
. . . Only a feminist, pro-woman perspective that acknowledges thereality of sexual oppression in the lives of black women, as well as the
oppression of race and class, will make Black women's studies thetransformer of consciousness it needs to be. (pp. xx-xxi)

In the last fourteen years of acute political repression, only thoseacademics most loyal to white male patriarchal education, i.e., thePh.D., the tenured, the prolifically published and profusely adoreddilettantes, have been retained in our once radical academic programs, e.g., black studies, women's studies. And black women's°Helga Crane is the protagonist in Nella Larsen's novel, Quicksand (rep rinted in1971 by Collier Books, N.Y.).

91

studies, if it is ever institutionalized, will suffer the same fate, eventhough the editors caution that this trend toward "respectability,"
individualism, "acceptance" is a "trap that Black women's studies
cannot afford to fall into" (p. xxi).
Like the editors, I believe that pedagogy need not only exist in acollege classroom. For black women's studies to be a "transformerof consciousness," it must somehow be consumed by the "supposedly 'ordinary' Black women whose 'unexceptional' actions
enabled us and the race to survive" (p. xxi). I believe that the perpetuity of a radical black women's studies is dependent upon its distance from traditional white and male institutions of high learningand otherwise. In its philosophy and vision, Brave is adaptable tothe struggle of naming ourselves to black women who exist and survive outside the academic colony and who are in need of a "profeminist" and "anti-racist" perspective in their lives.
I would suggest that "Visions and Recommendations" (p. xxxiii),
co-authored by Hull, Scott, and Smith, be amended to read: "ThatBlack women's studies be accountable to black women of all ages."
Were it not for the three photographs of older black women reproduced in the text, one might presume that black women do not live
beyond the age of forty.
The first section of Brave is devoted to "establishing the framework in which black women's studies can most successfully betaught" (p. xxx). Michele Wallace's herstoric article, "A Black Feminist's Search for Sisterhood" (1975) is reprinted here and formallyopens the volume. In her candid style, Wallace broke the silence ofisolated black feminists by proclaiming our existence and our invisibility to one another. She was also the first to address the sexual
politics in the black community from a feminist perspective, especially those politics which proliferated during the late sixties andearly seventies, wherein "the 'new Blackness' was fast becoming
the new slavery for sisters."
Strategically following Wallace's piece is the pivotal contribution
to radical black feminist thought, "A Black Feminist Statement,"
prepared by the Combahee River Collective. Never before has
there been a model of black feminist practice which iridesces all
the factors of oppression and attempts to integrate our struggles
against racism, sexism, class oppression, homophobia, violenceagainst women, imperialism, et. al. The intent of this statement is to
give us a vision of revolution and the implements to effect and sustain a revolution. The piece attempts to synthesize all of black92

women's oppressions, chiefly race, sex, and class, into a dial ectic ofresistance and liberation.
The bibliographic listing by Patricia Bell Scott, "Selected Bibliography on Black Feminism," is comprehensive and educational ,and certainly provides a resource for those who would teach orwant to know about black women's herstorical considerations ofourselves as women. Scott's use of the term "feminist" is proble matic. Many of the works listed are feminist, i.e., written by wome n
who call themselves feminists. Many are not. I believe we must differentiate between black women in history who comment on
women's struggle for "equality" or who can articulate a feminist
line, and black women who postulate that women's liberation will
be effected through the practice of woman-centered politics andthe destruction of male supremacy. The latter are feminists. Thisbibliographic listing does not differentiate between those women
who call themselves feminists and those who talk about women.
Angela Davis, for example, is not a feminist, though she can articulate a feminist line. Inez Smith Reid, for another example, is decidedly anti-feminist. The glaring shortcoming of Joyce Ladner's
work, as a third example, is that she did not adopt a feminist approach to her study of adolescent black women, Tomorrow'8
Tomorrow (1971). Yet, Davis's autobiography is listed as a "black
feminist" work. Reid's and Ladner's works are listed under the
category, "The Contemporary Black Feminist Movement." While
all our contributions are valuable, let us not create the illusion thatany black woman who writes about black women is a feminist.
Novelist Alice Walker opens Section II, "Roadblocks andBridges: Confronting Racism," with the satirical narrative, "OneChild of One's Own: A Meaningful Digression Within the Work(s)- An Excerpt." I must admit to my personal difficulty with "Our
Mother" - Ama Ata Aidoo notwithstanding - the virtuous persona, who goes about in her various bourgeois women's settings tersely calling white feminists to account for their racism and "educatedand successful" black women to account for their anti-feminism.
The piece is zany, nonetheless. At the very end Walker's form
shifts from the narrative to a more expository form . Seeming truly
to have become "Our Mother," the author formally concludes thepiece with a warning to black women:
To the extent that Black women dissociate themselves from thewomen's movement, they abandon their responsibilities to women
throughout the world. This is a serious abdication from and misuse of93

radical Black herstorical tradition: Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth,
Ida B. Wells, and Fannie Lou Hamer would not have liked it. Nor do I.
(p.42)
Patricia Meyer Spacks, Judy Chicago, and Ellen Moers are thensingled out and attacked by Walker, in a series of footnotes, as emblems of racist ignorance of the contributions of black women toart and letters. This digression would have been more meaningful
within the text, especially the criticism of the Sojourner Truth
Plate in Chicago's exhibit, "The Dinner Party" :... The Sojourner Truth Plate is the only one in the collection thatshows - instead of a vagina - a face ....
It occurred to me that perhaps white women feminists, no less thanwhite women generally, cannot imagine Black women have vaginas.
(pp.42-43)
The historical, sociological Section III, "Dispelling the Myths:
Black Women and the Social Sciences," offers three informative
essays on the status of black women in the social sciences. However,Erlene Stetson's essay, "Studying Slavery: Some Literary andPedagogical Considerations on the Black Female Slave," is the bestof this section and one of the best in the collection.
Stetson's elucidatory and lengthy essay on the black slave woman
is a thoughtful, well-written piece. She sets forth the problems ofresearch and pedagogy in this neglected area of study. In her attempt to teach the herstory of the black woman as slave, Stetsonallows her class to become a research body, reconstructing herstory
from scattered sources, raising questions which provoke further inquiry, and tracing the sources of prevalent myths regarding theblack woman's non-womanness (vaginalessness).
Stetson reports nineteen questions raised by her students for further inquiry, the most provocative for me being, "Were monogamous relationships possible between women, between white andBlack women, or only between women and men?" For the sake ofpedagogy, I would like to suggest an additional question for future
black women's studies classes to ponder: What has been the impact
on the psychology of black women of the political sanction of centuries of violence against black women? Within the previously discussed pedagogical framework, Stetson offers an interesting historical perspective on ante-bellum women, black and white. She raises
thoughtful questions about the pedagogical uses of black women's
slave narratives and provides a bibliographic listing of black
women's slave narratives, which will be invaluable to any student94

of black women. However, Stetson does not seriously examine th edifferential brutality le veled against the black slave woman. She
chooses not to be critical of how white women exploited the analo gy between their oppression in marriage and the enslave ment of
blacks.
Beginning Section IV, "Creative Survival: Preserving Body,
Mind, and Spirit," is Beverly Smith's bibliographic essay, "Black
Women's Health: Notes for a Course," which is urgently re levant to
Hull's and Smith's assertion that black women's studies must be connected to black women's lives. I can think of no one issue more critical to our survival than health, which black women have the leastof, like everything else. The bibliographic materials are a mixtureof clinical, but mostly literary references. I regret that the issue of
aging is not raised here, as black women's health problems increase
as we age and there are certain health concerns concomitant withaging. However, the neglect of the issue of black women's aging
throughout this collection is regrettable.
Jacquelyn Grant's essay, "Black Women and the Church," is excellent herstoriography. It is a call to revolutionize the patriarchal
god of Western culture, which black people have adopted, into a"holistic Black theology." And black women in the church must be
catalysts for the transformation of the black church:... If, as I contend, the liberation of Black men and women is inseparablt: then a radical . split cannot be made between racism andsexism. Black women are oppressed by racism and sexism. It is therefore necessary that Black men and women be actively involved incombatting both evils. (p. 148)

At the end, Grant's essay rings with evangelism - and thisalways disturbs me. Perhaps it is my atheism. I have as little patience with a "black theology" as I do with a "feminist theology."
Grant even capitalizes the word "god"! She says, in those opiate
tones:Such a theology will "allow" God through the Holy Spirit to workthrough persons without regard to race, sex, or class. This theology
will exercise its prophe tic function and serve as a "self-tes t" in achurch characterized by the sins of racism, sexism, and other forms of
oppression. (p. 149; italics mine)

Well, now, all I can say is, like the lady in red: "i found god inmyself & i loved her/i loved her fiercely."O°Ntozake Shange, for colored girls who have co nsidered suicide when the rainbow
is enuf{MacmilIan Publishing Co., Inc., New York, 1976), p. 64.

95

Michele Russell's essay, "Slave Codes and Liner Notes," is insightful, skillfully written, and attempts to use the medium of the blues
as a repository of the traditions of poor black women. Of the blues,
Russell says:.. . They are the expression of a particular social process by whichpoor Black women have commented on all the major theoretical,
practical, and political questions facing us and have created a massaudience who listens to what we say in that form [the blues]. (p. 130)

As exponents of the blues form, and thus exponents of poor black
women, Russell chooses five black women singers, whose music reflects the Afro-American's song of freedom: Bessie Smith, Bessie
Jackson, Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Esther Phillips. Of the fiveshe discusses, Bessie Smith and Bessie Jackson were "city" blues
singers, i.e., they sang songs written in the classical, though stylized,
blues mode. Though she was influenced by Bessie Smith and sangblues songs, Billie Holiday was a jazz singer and must be viewed as
one of the heaviest influences in modern jazz. Bessie Smith andBillie Holiday had b~oad appeal to the masses of black women, but
Nina Simone and Esther Phillips did not. Nina Simone experimented
with a broad range of material, blues being one, but appealed to or
was limited to an elite set. Esther Phillips is a singer of the moment,
not of the stature of Smith, Holiday, or Simone. Were it not for
Dinah Washington, Little Esther would not know which note tobend. Also, no analysis of black women singers can depend solely
on the songs they sang, for most had little control over their material. Lastly, no serious black feminist consideration of mainstream
black women singers "of the past fifty years" would omit consideration of Aretha Franklin!

Lesbianism:.. . women must not collude in the oppression of women who havechosen each other, that is, lesbians. (Barbara Smith, p. 51)

In the contributions of Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, Gloria
Hull, and Lorraine Bethel, the issues of lesbianism, homophobia,
and the lesbian aesthetic are addressed. Why is it that, with the exception of comments in Beverly Smith's essay on health, the Combahee River Collective's statement, and Barbara Smith's speech on
racism and women's studies, the issue of lesbianism is relegated to
Section V, "Necessary Bread: Black Women's Literature"?
The fascinating and herstorical literary essays of Barbara Smith

96

("Toward a Black Feminist Criticism"), Lorraine Bethel ('''This Infinity of Conscious Pain': Zora Neale Hurston and the Black Female
Literary Tradition"), and Gloria Hull ("Researching Alice DunbarNelson") rank as the best essays in the book, primarily because they
have integrated the lesbian aesthetic into their study of black
women's literature - unlike Mary Helen Washington° and Michele
Russell, the other two contributors to Section V, who do qot even
include one "politically correct" statement on lesbianism. Hull,
Smith, and Bethel proclaim the woman-identification explicit andimplicit in the works of black women writers and set forth the criteria for black feminist criticism.
Smith is the first critic to examine the works of black women
writers from a lesbian-feminist perspective. In order to accomplish
this, she must necessarily expand the definition of lesbianism
beyond sex. Smith comes to define the lesbian sensibility in black
women's literature as that in which "the central characters arefemale, are positively portrayed and have pivotal relationships
with one another" (p. 164). As she says of Toni Morrison's novel,
Sula:... it works as a lesbian novel not only because of the passionate
friendship between Sula and Nel, but because of Morrison's consistently critical stance toward the heterosexual institutions of malefemale relationships, marriage, and the family. (p. 165)

Yet I do so wish that some of the present-day non-lesbian black
women writers whom we so admire and write about would take therisk of incorporating a conscious lesbian aesthetic in their fiction,
deal directly with sexual love between women, and take it out of
the subliminal realm of imagination. I, frankly, am tired of teasing it
out of their imagery.
Bethel develops a similar argument as Smith in her analysis of
the life and work of Zora Neale Hurston. Bethel views lesbianism,
as it is defined in the previously cited passage from Smith's essay, as
the basis of black feminist criticism:
Black woman identification, the basis of Black feminism and Blackfeminist literary criticism, is most simply the idea of Black womenseeking their own identity and defining themselves through bondingon various levels. (p. 184)

While Bethel and Smith address the lesbian aesthetic in the·Washington has edited two volumes of fiction by black women writers, not one lesbian story or one out lesbian writer among or in the m. This is homophobia by omission.

97

works of non-lesbian writers, Hull writes of her discovery thatwriter, activist, and publisher Alice Dunbar-Nelson's "womanidentification extended to romantic liaisons with at least two of her
friends" (p. 191) . The process of researching Dunbar-Nelson was
not only a process of rescuing her from the shadow of Paul Laurence Dunbar, her first husband, but of rescuing her from the presumption of "genteel bourgeoise" heterosexuality. Were it not for a"Black feminist critical approach" to researching Dunbar-Nelson,
the issue of her lesbianism might have been suppressed or considered a private matter. Hull establishes criteria for black feminist
criticism, which closely parallel the Combahee River Collective's
criteria for black feminist practice and analysis, but the closest Hullcomes to calling for a conscious appreciation and acknowledgmentof lesbianism is "everything about the subject is important for a
total understanding and analysis of her life and work." In spite of its
gentility, this essay demonstrates movingly that one's deepest intellectual commitment is emotional. Just as Hull has rescued DunbarNelson from obscurity, she has resuscitated our black lesbian herstory.
The connection between black women's studies and poor andworking-class women is reflected in Michele Russell's pedagogicalarticle, "Black-Eyed Blues Connections: Teaching Black Women."
The author delineates a holistic teaching strategy for black womenbased upon her teaching experience in a community college in Detroit. This article, in spite of its omission of the issue of lesbianism,
comes closest to addressing the role of black women's studies in the
lives of common black women.
But I ask the question again: Why is lesbianism relegated to therealm of literary criticism? The issue of black lesbianism shouldhave been integrated into every single essay prepared for this collection if we are truly serious about black feminist scholarship andpractice. Lesbianism is not solely an aesthetic nor solely a sexualissue, nor an issue to be treated solely by lesbians. Black lesbianism
is also an issue in the social sciences. There are stereotypes andmyths about black lesbians that need "dispelling." In terms ofpedagogy, black women need to be taught about our lesbianism justas we are taught about our slave history or our composers, writers,
poets, welders. The black church will be a regressive, oppressive
institutiop until it not only corrects its sexism but also its homophobia. Why is there no essay in this collection which bears the word"lesbian" in its title? The bibliographic essays on influential black98

women, nineteenth-century black women poets, black womennovelists, black women playwrights, and black women composers
are fabulous resources - with no references to black lesbians. I ask
all the contributors who accept that a "feminist, pro-woman perspective is necessary to understand fully the experiences of black
women" and who did not address lesbianism: How do you expect tofully understand the experiences of black women?
The issue of black women's sexuality, except as lifestyle and aesthetic, is not treated. If one were to skip over Beverly Smith's"Health" piece and one sentence of Erlene Stetson's piece on slavery, one might assume that black women feminists do not believe
black women have vaginas either.
How can we bring black women's studies to women who are nolonger young? Who are in prison? Who are workers? Who are notof the educated elite? It is impossible for one book to be all things
to all people. Our needs as black women are immense, unexplored,
barely articulated. Brave is a serious piece of work affirming thesurvival and triumph of black women in America. Brave is truly an
act of courage and tenacity - consistent with the tradition of black
women. I welcome Brave as part of the tradition of black women's
contribution to the life, culture, autonomy, and herstory of black
women.

tURtlE (jRanbmoth€R
Books

Mail Order Books
Specializing in Worksby Women of Color
P.O. Box 33964
Detroit, Michigan 48232~,.

(313) 381-3550
Please send $2 for catalog

99

Responses
February 3, 1982
Dear Adrienne,
I'm writing to express my concerns in response to your article,"Notes for a Magazine: What Does Separatism Mean?" which app eared in Sinister Wisdom 18.
I have two major criticisms of the article . The first is that there is
no explicit statement in the article that explains why the debate
over separatism is being conceived of in racial terms. No analyticalrationale is provided which says why pro-separatism is characterized as white and anti-separatism as colored throughout. Even
though readers may have ideas prior to reading the article about
how racial identity affects one's allegiance or non-allegiance toseparatism, by not stating your reasons for exploring separatism inrelationship to race, you do not take responsibility for confronting
the dichotomy your article sets up by implication and create a situation that is ripe for drawing racist conclusions.
My other major criticism is that definitions or theories of separatism are not differentiated from the actual practice of it. Theory
and practice, words and actions are very different things. Although
at the very end of the article you make this crucial and valid point:"I find myself wondering if perhaps the real question at issue is notseparatism itself but how and when and with what kinds of conscious identity it is practiced ... " (p. 90), you do not clearly confront the implications of this question in the article itself. Instead
you begin the article with the suggestion that the reason that
separatists and non-separatists have conflicts with each other isthat they simply do not have an "agreed-on meaning" of what
separatism means and if they only did then it might be possible forthem to "connect" and work together (p. 83). At a later point you
state: " ... the problem of definition is what these notes are abo u t. .. " (p. 89).
The splits between separatists and non-separatists, specificallybetween white Lesbian separatists and women of color, have not
emerged because there is not a common understanding of terms,
but because of how separatism has been practiced in fact. As a nonseparatist woman of color and an activist feminist and Lesbian, my
criticisms of separatism have come from experiencing action or nonaction, from observing how separatists actually have functioned100

politically in the world. I agree that words and beliefs can influence
what we do, but the words are not as significant as the practicethey encourage and inspire. Many women of color, including
myself, who are strong feminists have observed how a Lesbian
separatist stance has led to an isolated, single-issued understanding
and practice of politics, which ignores the range of oppressions thatwomen experience. No amount of developing definitions willchange what Lesbian separatism has come to mean in practice, although altered practice could very well change the connotation of
the term "Lesbian separatist." Beverly Smith's and my dialogue
from This Bridge Called My Back, which also appeared in Sinister
Wisdom 18, and other pieces in This Bridge explore criticisms of
the ideology and practice of separatism in detail. A recent article,"Nidishenl:Sk (sisters)" by Chrystos in Maenad, Winter 1982, perceptively explores the theory and practice of separatism from a Native
American woman's perspective.
An example in "What Does Separatism Mean? " of theory andpractice seriously diverging occurs in the section that describes
Vicki Gabriner's reasons for becoming a separatist. You write:
Separatism as Gabriner uses it does not imply a loss of commitment tothe values Qustice, peace, anti-racism) which had first fired womenlike her into politics. What had become necessary, and what
necessitated separation from the male political movements, was arestating of these issues from a woman-identified pOint of view, as
well as a stating for the first time of issues never before perce ived aspolitical-heterosexuality, women's unpaid work in the home, childbirth, language itself. (p. 84)

Perhaps the intention of separatists originally was to keep antiracist, anti-capitalist, and anti-war issues at the forefront, but it isdocumentable that this usually did not occur. Oppression in a Lesbian separatist context began to be defined solely as Lesbian oppression, white Lesbian at that. Undoubtedly some separatists
maintained their commitment to anti-racist organizing, for example,
but it was most likely difficult to put this commitment into practice
if they were operating solely in an all white women's context, whenmost anti-racist organizing was actually being done in situations
which included men.
There is also the fact that many younger women who have embraced separatism have never been involved in the Civil Rights,
Black Liberation, and anti-war movements and do not have concrete experiences in doing these kinds of political work. Their first101and only movement was the women's movement which has beenfunctionally white. Years after the period when Gabriner " ...
helped to create a lesbian/feminist politics/community in Atlantathat was basically separatist and not organizationally tied to theleft ... " (p. 84), Atlanta's "feminist" community remains almost entirely white and the kinds of coalitions between white women andwomen of color which have happened in other places have notbegun to occur. This division was particularly obvious during theperiod of murders of Black children in Atlanta in 1980-81 when the
majority of white feminists were not involved in the prganizing thatin many cases was being done by Black women. Of course the racial
history of this region must be taken into account, but white Lesbian
separatism certainly played right into the hands of a tradition of
racial segregation.
The lack of an analysis of how racial identity and Lesbian separatism are and are not connected has a specifically disturbing resultin the article. This is the way that a separatist position, chosen on
the basis of sexual identity, and racial separation, imposed as theresult of institutionalized racial segregation, are made to seem similar and to spring from the same impulses, ignoring the history andpolitics of this country and the element of choice.
For example, you cite the early Black women's groups that Toni
Cade Bambara writes about in The Black Woman, published in
1970, and say: "Women of color were forming their own separate
political groups early on, but these were not-to my knowledgedescribed as 'separatist' " (p. 84). The implication of this sentenceis "But they could be considered separatist, even if no one said it."This totally negates the motivations and actual historical circumstances under which these groups were formed. It's unlikely thatthese women decided that their groups would exclude white
women as an ideological stance. They didn't have to. Black women
and white women were having very little to do with each otherthen, just as now. The friendship networks that no doubt madepossible this organizing would naturally be Black and althoughsome of these women might have been nationalists, i.e., racial
separatists, the fact that the society itself is racially segregatedmust have contributed much to the composition of these groups.
Such groups would also not have conceived of themselves or belabeled separatists in the Lesbian sense because they did not view
themselves as a part of the women's movement and would therefore not adopt its terminology, not to mention the fact that the
women in them were probably mostly heterosexual.
102

I want to say here that I am definitely aware that there are some
women of color who now define themselves as separatists in the
Lesbian separatist sense. There are also Third World women, both
Lesbians and non-Lesbians, who are racial separatists and believe
in only associating and working with members of their specificethnic groups. Just as I question the limits of a Lesbian separatist
stance, I also question the limitations of racial separatism, particularly when it perpetuates negative responses to difference. The
real need for autonomous organizing by members of oppressedgroups should in no way lead to a position that encourages bias
against others or prevents principled coalitions from occurring.
Collapsing the realities of racial and sexual politics comes up
again in the article when you discuss Conditions: Five, The Black
Women's Issue and This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color as examples of "separation" by women of color,again implying that they might indeed be thought of as separatist.
You write:
This Bridge Called My Back is intended as a bridge between radical
women of color - a resource for ending fragmentations of many kinds.
When the projected Third World Women's Press [Kitchen Table
Press] comes into being, it too will surely be a tool for forging connections, yet by some definitions it might be described as separatistfrom the struggles of Third World men and women together, from thewhite-American-European feminist movement. (p. 89, my italics)

In the very next paragraph, however, you state that you are" .. .
declining to define the projects and groupings of women of color as
separatist ... " as if the statement in the above paragraph had notjust appeared and would have no impact on how readers would
then be encouraged to think of these projects, whatever disclaimers
follow.
As a co-editor of Conditions: Five and a contributor to This
Bridge Called My Back, I am positive that the impulse for creatingeach of these works was not a separatist one, either racially or sexually. You say about Conditions: Five, "But it was also an act ofmaking the art and thought of radical Black women visible to a newaudience, not only feminist and not only Black" (p. 88). And it
should be added, not only female. The same can be said about theaudience and inclusiveness of This Bridge. Yes, these works weredone primarily to reach Third World women, but there was also
the hope that other people would learn from them too and put
what they had learned into practice by actually fighting racism,sexism, homophobia, and class oppression. The very effectiveness103

of these two publications as tools for organizing lies in their wide
distribution to diverse audiences.
Third World women's continued insistence on coalition politics isthe result of knowing that we don't have the power to turn thisthing around alone, and also that as long as racism, sexism, and class
oppression exist within progressive movements as well as in theworld at large, the chances for our survival are extremely limited.
The theory and practice of separatism and how these relate toracism, anti-racism, and racial identity are very complex issues well
worth analyzing. Having spoken and written about this subject in
the past I thought it was important to raise the criticisms and questions which your article suggested. I hope that my comments areproductive both to you and to Sinister Wisdom's readers.
Sincerely,
Barbara Smith
Dear Editors:
I, and many of my Separatist friends, had a mixed reaction to thearticle "What Does Separatism Mean? " in the last issue of SW. At
first I let out a sigh of relief that, unlike most articles on Separatism
by Lesbians who do not define themselves as such, it was not overtly hostile, or even inaccurate.
But something about it really irritated me. The major problem I
had with it was its falsely neutral tone. I have yet to meet a Lesbian
who is at all political who does not have strong opinions on the subject. Certainly not the author of this article, who has been quoted
elsewhere comparing Separatism to a "spiritual fad," and calling
Separatists "cut off" and politically ineffective.
In any event, no one comes to a conclusion about, or an understanding of, any philosophy/strategy by lining up things thatwimmin who hold that view have said on one side, and what those
who do not have said on the other, and then somehow weighingeach for truth-value. It would be absurd to take quotes fromrandom communists on one hand, and random capitalists on theother, and come to some conclusion about whether communism is aworthwhile vision from that. There are marxist/leninists, anarchocommunists, socialist-feminists . . . each with a unique (but mistaken) analysis of oppression.
Just because the fine details of our analysis may vary slightly witheach different Lesbian, and drastically across the whole movement,104

doesn't mean that we're confused about what we're doing. In fact, I
think it's a good sign that we're all thinking for ourselves enough todisagree . Even though there have been incredibly wrenching, painful episodes b e tween Separatists, compared to communists, we are
relatively unified!
Yes, it's true: Separatists are not perfect. But all of us are courageous, unique and creative. I honor even those Separatists I dislike
and disagree with for these qualities. To say no to men and maleinstitutions, and to give our full love and attention to Lesbians, is immensely difficult, and immeasurably rewarding.
The article feels to me like a challenge to a debate be tween non Separatist Lesbian-Feminists and Lesbian Separatists. But the re is agreat power imbalance in this debate. The moderator, and th eforum itself, is non-Separatist. The forum is ope n to men andstraight wimmin as audience me mbers, and therefore closed to
Separatists who deny access to our writing to the e ne my.
And, I'm sick of Separatists always being called on to explain andjustify our position, anyway. Why are we, in most communities in
the u.s., expected to compromise our Separatist principles andwork on co-ed events and campaigns, by Lesbians who would never
dream of compromising their humanist principles to work on
Lesbian-only or wimmin-only projects?
It's time for non-Separatist Lesbians to start explaining yourselves. What does it mean to not be a Separatist in "our" move ment?
What is your strategy for the defeat of patriarchy over the long
haul? What is the goal of your struggle? Can you honor the choiceof Separatist wimmin of color not to work with men? Is it racist not
to be a Separatist; not to withdraw your support from patriarchy,
not to fight for an anti-racist Lesbian-identified culture? Is theactual practice of non~Separatist Lesbian-Feminism as dynamic andevolving as it sounds in Audre Lorde's or the author's own work, oras conformist and static as the N.O.W. Sexuality Task Force Newsletter? Where and how do "we" make the distinction between
Lesbian-Feminism and namby-pamby liberal humanism?
Sidney Spinster

Dear Editors:
I am writing to you about a serious error or oversight in Joan
Nestle's review of L esbian Poetry. In that r eview she quotes twolines from my poem "Breviary,"105

Do not let them kill me
before you speak to me
Both in my own collection and in Lesbian Poetry (and to my knowledge every place the poem has been printed) after the title of mypoem, the following quotation has been inserted,"Do not let them kill me before you speak to me
Touch me!
Behold me!"Meridel LeSueurfrom "Behold Me! Touch Me!"In other words, those lines which Joan Nestle quoted from mypoem had been originally quoted from a poem by Meridel LeSueur
which I was careful in every publication to credit. I feel particularly
strongly about this correction because Meridel LeSueur is a writerwhose work has never received the recognition it has deserved.
She is one of the most important, deep and beautiful voices in
American literature. Her work records many forgotten and hidden
chapters in the lives of American women, and working women andmen. Moreover, she was one of the first to begin to explore afemale grammar, a language outside patriarchal structure. During
the McCarthy period, her work was blacklisted, and for many
years, nearly disappeared. Now the Feminist Press is issuing ananthology of her work, Ripening. The poem whose lines I echoed in"Breviary" can be found in its entirety in a collection of Meridel
LeSueur's poetry Rites of Ancient Ripening published in 1975
by Vanilla Press in Minneapolis. I recommend her work to yourreaders.
Sincerely,
Susan Griffin
Dear Sinister Wisdom,
In her review of The Lesbian Path in SW 19, Bonnie Zimmermanstates that two contributors are "currently Christian ministers."
Neither woman is now or ever has been a minister. Nancy Krody isan elder in her church; Sue Ebbers was a seminary student forthree years. Their essays, insufficiently hostile to Christianity toplease some reviewers, have been highly valued by women who
write to me about The Lesbian Path.
Margaret Cruikshank106

Announcements
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Azalea: A magazine by Third World Lesbians . Quarterl y. Fic tion, poe tr y, essays,
re views, visuals. Subscriptions: $2 single/$6 yea rl y/$1 0 institutions/ free to womyn inprison. Accepting work from lesbians of color onl y. P.O. Box 200. Coop er Sta., N.Y.,
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the work of Third World women of all racial/cultural heritages, sexu alities, andclasses that will furth er Third World women's personal and political fr eedom.
Resources needed : fin ancial contributions (make checks out to Kitche n Tabl e
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book by Lesbian In cest Survivors. All responses confidential. F or info/questionnaire,
write : Susan Marie, P .O. Box 304, Oakl and, CA 94668 .
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throug h Caliente D el Sol, 22 4A Maynard, Santa F e, N.M. 87501. $5 plus tax and postage.
To the Women Who Wrote Us About The ir Experiences with Violence: In 1979
we published a ques tionnaire in Sinister W isdom and also distributed it around Por tl and, Oregon, as king women to se nd us their stories for a book on wo men and violence. We're still writing th e book ; but we have compil ed an artic le from th ose a mazing le tters, "Surviva l I s an Ac t of Resistance," which has bee n publishe d in Fight
Back: Feminist R esistance to Male V iolence (Cleis Press, 198 1).
Some of you had asked to see what we did with the le tte rs, so you've seen thepiece, but didn't kn ow it would be in Fight Back. So me of you have no idea whatever
happened to your work or ours. And now it's bee n published and reviewed and you
may suddenl y come upon your words. For this we are sorry.

107

We had to leave New Mexico, wh ere we were living, suddenl y; and now find ourselves in Maine for the nex t several months, without our things, including your ad dresses. We want to send each of you at leas t a copy of th e article. We have a few
copies of th e book too, maybe enough for those of you who can't afford to pay for it(it's a great book). Please write to us and tell us your addresses. To say thank you foryour le tters would be inadequate: you'll see. - Melanie Kaye, Michaele Uccella,
P.O. Box 247, Bowdoinham, Me. 04008.
UMOJA: support network for moms (parents) of physically/emotionally handicapped kids. I am looking for contact dyk es to repl y to le tters of distraught parents,
specifically kids of color as well as interracial kids. Send SASE to: Lou Blackdykewomon, no. ]-3, Broad River Terrace Apts. , Columbia, S.c. 29201. Also interested informing 3d world dyke/fe minist network for dykes of color living in the South.
Women's Writer's Center, Inc., Cazenovia, N.Y. Eighth full-y ear program, beginning
Septemher 1982. Full-time Resident Faculty: Olga' Broumas, Rachel deV ries, Jane
Miller, Rita Speicher (on leave) , Mona Void. Visiting Faculty, eac h spending a fullweek on campus: Judy Grahn, Cherrie Moraga, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Susan Sherman,
Barbara Smith. c/o Cazenovia College, Cazenovia, N.Y. 13035.
Works ofS. Diane Bogus: I'm Off to See the Goddamn Wizard, Alright! Black Feminist poe try, $4; Woman in the Moon, $6; Sapphire's Sampler, Poe try/pros e Anthology, $7 paper, $10 hardback. All three available for $12 from: Wim Publications, Box367, College Corner, Ohio 45003.

The Lesbian

I nsider I nsighter Inciter
A Newspaper by and for Lesbians only!
Looking to print Lesbian news, personal stories, analysis,
letters, interviews, announcements, photos, drawings
and much more. Published irregularly.
Subscriptions: $1/single copy; 5-issue sub is $1 for every$1000 earned per year, around the world .
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108

Notes on Contributors
Donna Allegra is twenty-eight, Brooklyn-born and raised. She began writing poetry
in 1976 with the Black lesbian writers' collective, Jemima, and fiction in 1980 under
the influence of writers in the Black lesbian performance group, Naps. Her major
writing is her journal, which began at age fourteen . She has published in Azalea, The
Salsa Soul Gayzette, Essence, Conditions: 5, Fight Back, Lesbian Poetry: An
Anthology.
Virginia de Araujo is a poet and translator of Brazilian poetry (The Minus Sign,
Carlos DrumTTWnd de Andrade, Black Swan Books, 1981). She is currently a lecturer
at San Jose State University.
Cheryl Clarke is taurus, black, lesbian, feminist, poet, critick. She studied literature
at Howard and Rutgers universities, and taught the first black women's studies
course to be offered at Rutgers College in 1973. Her writing appears in: Conditions
V: The Black Women's Issue (Smith and Bethel, Eds., 1979), Conditions VI (1980) ,L esbian Poetry (Bulkin and Larkin, Eds., Persephone Press, 1981), Thi s Bridge
Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (Moraga and Anzaldua, Eds.,
Persephone Press, 1981 ), and Conditions VIII (1982). She is a member of the new
Conditions editorial collec tive. Born and raised in D .C., Clarke has been living andworking in New Jersey since 1969.
Martha Courtot: "I am a fat woman in whom some remnant of self-love survives, inspite of all that the dominant culture and the lesbian culture have done to e liminate
it. Once 1 was a member of Fat Chance, a performance group of fat women who
danced our life truths for audiences in order to teach other women about self-loveand the damage of fat oppression. Nothing would make me happier than to have thisself-love break out in epide mic proportions among fat women. Then I might feel that
I could finally dance again."Chrystos: "These poems were written as gifts for friends, which I consider the finest
use of my ski]]s. I me t Barbara through Gay American Indians (she is the co-founder)& Jo through the book This Bridge Called My Back. My thanks to both of them forthe beauty their friendships give me."Ruth Herstein, born in Brooklyn, N.Y. , fell in love with the Village. Lives alone in
the Village, could not recommend living alone. Me mber of the SAGE writing workshop. We published a book of poems and stories called Sage Writings (Teachers &Writers Collaborative Publications, 84 Fifth Ave., N.Y., N.Y. 10011 , $2 .50).
Melanie Kaye moves a lot. She lives now in Bowdoin, Maine. She is the author of We
Speak in Code: Poems and Other Writings (Motheroot Publications, 1980), and theco-author, with Michaele Uccella, of a book on women, violence, and resistance (excerpts of which appear in Fight Back! Feminist Resistance to Male Violence, Cleis
Press, 1981) .
Judith McDaniel is a fired lesbian who considers herself a "recovering academic"
and a writer.
Bernice Mennis lives in the Adirondacks and teaches at Adirondack Community
College.
Mary Moran is a midwestern artist and writer living in Los Angeles.

109

Joan Nestle is a co-founder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives and the Lesbian Herstory Educational Foundation. She teaches English in the SEEK Program at Queens
College, Flushing, N.Y.
Melanie Perish lives in Panguitch, Utah. She has published a chapbook, Notes of a
Daughter from the Old Country, with Motheroot Publications (214 Dewey St., Pittsburgh, Pa. 15218) . Traveling the Distance, a collection of love poems, is available
from Rising Tide Press, 258 Alphonse St., Rochester, N.Y. 14621. She reviews poetry
and fiction for Motheroot Journal.
Laurie Poklop is 'a former teacher from the Midwest who is now studying art in
Boston, living with Jane in Cambridge and hanging out with Hubrina the Ballerina.
Linda C. Powell is a Black feminist musician and actress living in New York City.
Rise and Fly, her autobiographical exploration of the Black mother/daughter connection, will be published nex t year.
Sudie Rakusin is a thirty-four-year-old Jewish Lesbian painter and potter who lives
in Dale City, Virginia, with her lover, Be th, and her three dogs , Amanda, Selene, andWillow.
Jean Sirius's poem in this issue is taken from her third book, Lesbian Love Poems (anaid to the inarticulate). She lives in NYC with Cara, Isis, and Hecate, doing massage,
reading tarot, and working on a religious tract.
Anmarie Wagstaff is a lesbian living "on the boundary" in Davis, California making trouble, teaching, and going to graduate school.
Angela Wilson lives in New York City and is a black feminist lesbian. Her main
preoccupations include the history of women in urban areas and les bian bar culture(s) .
Susan Wood-Thompson is a lesbian feminist poet living in Washington, D.C. Herbook Crazy Quilt is available from Crossing Press and, for print-handicapped readers, on cassette from Womyn's Braille Press.
zana - "on land in oregon, with a group of other wimin and children, learning to live
together with all our differences, feeling out our path inch by inch when the oldmaps have been burned and it is up to us to create new ones."110Broa dside, a fem inisl review, published 10 times yearly. Subsc ribe by sending
S12.OO I U.S. a nd ove rseas I 10: Broadside Comm unica tions Umited, P.O. Bo,<494,
S tation P, Thronto, On ta rio Ca nada , MSS ZT1Nanle: ......................................................................................................................................... .
Address: .......................................................................................................................................
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111

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Sinister Wisdom records with sorrow th e loss of twopioneers in lesbian and feminist writing and publishing, inthe first quarter of this year:
JUNE ARNOLD
1926-1982
Co-founder (with Parke Bowman) of Daughters, Inc.;author of Applesauce, The Cook and the Carpenter, Sister
Gin.
"Wome n's art is politics, the means to change women's
minds. And the women's presses are not alte rnate, eithe r,
but are th e mainstream .. . of th e revolution."-J.A. , 1975

ELIZABETH FISHER
d. 1982
Founder of A phra, th e first literary magazine of thecontemporary feminist movement ; author of Woman's
Creation: Sexual Evolution and the Shaping of Society.
"W e shall publish what we like and what we respond to,with the idea that we shall be speaking directly to women so
tha t th ey can say 'The re am I' a nd feel stronge r and more
doing ."
-E.F. , 1969

Contributors , Pleas e R ead: Please send all work forconsid eration and all business corr esponde nce to : Siniste r
Wisdom, P .O. Box 660, Am he rst, MA 01004. Please send SASE
for return of work we cannot publish, and a stamped postcard if
you wish your work acknowledged on arriva l. Pleasedouble-space all manuscripts. Arti sts: pl ease se nd xerox orphotos of g raphi c work, not originals.
Subscribers , Please No te: If you move, pl ease notify US as soon
as possibl e. The post office will not forward your magazine. It
wi ll be re turned to us, at our expense, and we will have to bill
you for th e additional postage and handling in remailing.

We originall y announced SW20/21 as a doub le issue. Due to
production and economic problems we are publishing the m as
single issues. Numbe r 21 will contain, among muc h else, poe try
by Paula Gunn Alle n, Lynn Crawford, Patric ia Jones, 1ab
Segrest, Sherry Sylves ter ; Chen'(e Moraga on Figh t Ba ck! andMarion Roth on Th e Bla tant 1mage; art, th eory, res ponses.

SW20
,

3.50