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~ finiJTIOR WifDOm 27 FALL 1984
Editor and publisher: Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz
Office manager and consultant: Fauna Yarrow
Contributing editors: Gloria Anzaldua, Beth Brant, Irena Klepfisz
Consultant: Bernice Mennis
Typesetting and layout: Edith Morang and Helga Manning
Volunteer workers: Sherrill Brittain, Mitzi Lichtman, Chrissy Haines,
Nancy Button, Rosine Auberting, Sadhbh Neilan,
Karla Meyer, Cheryl Smith , Harriet Mosher, andJohn DeMaria
Tryna Hope, reader for the Womyn's Braille Press
ISSN: 0196-1853
Cover, drawing by Sharon Fernleaf
SINISTER WISDOM , founded 1976
Former Editors and publishers: Harriet Ellenberger (aka Desmoines)
and Catherine Nicholson (1976-81)
Michelle Cliff and Adrienne Rich (1981 -83)
Michaele Uccella (1983-84)
Copyright 1984 Sinister Wisdom. All rights reserved to individual artists and authors.
Subscription Rate: 1 year ; 4 issues
Individual. $\'4 Out of U.S., 516 (U.S. dollars) Institutional 526
Hardship, 56 Sustaining 535 and up
Free on request to women in prison and mental institutions

SINISTER WISDOM P.O. Box 1023 Rockland, Maine 04841
Sinister Wisdom joins the lesbian and gay communities of Maine to mourn and protest
the murder in Bangor of Charles Howard. Charley, a 23-year-old faggot, was "allegedly"
beaten by three male teenagers from "good" homes, thrown off a bridge to fall twenty feet
into a stream as he yelled, "I can't swim." He drowned.
We grieve for his life, a sweet life according to those who knew him; and we determine tofight sexist violence and queer-hatred. A coalition has formed the Lesbian/Gay/Straight
Alliance which can be contacted at P.O. Box 1805, Bangor, Maine 04401.

Contents
Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz. Notes for a Magazine

3

Poetry
5
9
10
11
17
18,43
19
29
32
33
34
36
75
76
79
84
86

Leslea Newman • from Adjustments: IIShifting Piles, VII4:SS,
VIliS: 00, VIII Ode to the Secretaries of America
Christian McEwen • The Toad Faced Child
Achy Obejas • Rock That Cuts
Lisa Simon. The Photograph is Dark Around My Mother's Face,
Safekeeping
Anne Rickertsen • Branding
Randi Schalet • The Oldest Daughter, Judah Maccabee's Wife
Audrey Ewart • She Did Not Answer
Beatrix Gates • Natural Enemies
Lu Melander • The Movie That Evening
Marilyn Kallet • Blaming the Victim
Irena KJepfisz • I cannot swim
Annemarie Poulin • The Daily N ews
Pat M. Kuras. S'il Vous Plait
Roz Calvert. White Trash Girl
Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz. former friend
Melanie Perish • Nectarines
Minnie Bruce Pratt. #3slWe Say We Love Each Other, #37lNight
Gives Us the Next Day, #38lYour Hand Opening Me

Narratives
14
39
62
66
80

Mirtha Quintanales • "Maybe You 're Wrong, Papi "Etel Adnan • from Sitt Marie Rose, a novel
zana • the place of our crossing
Jyl Felman. Crisis
Gloria Anzaldua • Ms. Right, My True Love, My Soul Mate

Essay
20

. Pegasis Touch • Stories My Body Tells

Drama45 Annette Kennedy. two scenes from The Ladies of the USS Stanton

Interview\

54

Katharyn Machan Aal interviews Judy Grahn on Women 's Poetry
Readings (Part II)

Reviews
92

SDiane Bogus. All of Our Art for Our Sake:
For Nights Like This One by Becky Birtha,
Cuentos: Stories by Latinas, ed. by Gomez, Moraga, & RomoCarmona,
Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. by Barbara Smith,
The Woman Who Owned the Shadows by Paula Gunn Allen.
Jill Drew. Recognition of the Tribal Mind: Sitt Marie Roseby Etel Adnan
Bat HaMa'avak .The Law of Return by Alice Bloch

107
112

Art
Sharon Fernleaf • drawing, "Daddy, That Hurts"
28
42,116 Katie Seiden • sculpture, Lot's Wife, Ahnighito I
Navy Dykes, photographs, courtesy Annette Kennedy
44
52
Sharron Demarest and Sandra DeSando • Marble Mumbles
Fauna Yarrow • drawing
78
91
Elisabeth Griggs • photograph
117
120

Contributors' Notes
Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz. Editor's Statement about To Go To Berbir,

124

Announcements

Sinister Wisdom 26

2Notes for a Magazine
In these past few months, Sinister Wisdom has gone through some changes.
Michaele Uccella, having contributed immense energy to the initial transition between
Montague, Massachusetts, and Rockland, Maine, and having co-edited SW 25 and 26,
has left Sw. Fauna Yarrow, artist and political activist, has joined Sw, working about
20 hours a week as office manager; the new orderliness of the SW apparatus owes
much to her competence and quick intellect. Gloria AnzaldUa, Beth Brant, and Irena
Klepfisz, all editors and writers in their own right, are now contributing editors for
Sw, meaning they channel talent towards the magazine, solicit work, offer advice, etc.
Bernice Mennis, a teacher and friend, is a consultant, offering advice and editing skills,
and participating in political dialogue. The lesbian community in and around Rockland
has pitched in to help put out SW, and I want to express my gratitude for their varied
assistance, from stuffing envelopes to dragging me away from the office to go swimming; for ballasting SW during this transition.

• • •For the past year, SW has been operating without any grants or subsidies. We arefunctioning entirely on revenues from subscriptions, sales, contributions, and loans.
The only paid SW worker is the office manager. Also during this year we have expanded our work to include distributing women's books - Irena Klepfisz's Keeper of
Accounts, Etel Adnan's Sitt Marie Rose, and Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz's We Speak In
Code - and have published our first title, A Gathering of Spirit: Writing and Art by
North American Indian Women , edited by Beth Brant, an expanded edition of SW
22/23. We need and intend to achieve economic self-sufficiency. For this we need you.
Subscribe. Give SW as a gift. Tell your friends to subscribe, your librarian andbookstore to order Sw, your teachers to use SW in the classroom. And of course contributions are very welcome.

• • •A Jewish women's issue of SW, will appear in April/May 1985 (SW 29/30), co-edited
by Irena Klepfisz and Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz. We had intended to complete an anthology in book form, but have found our work slowed down by our respective jobs
and the distance between our homes (450 miles). By presenting the work as a double
issue of SW, we can publish what we have collected without further delay, and allow
the anthology itself to gather more material (we are still looking at work by Jewish
women outside of the U.S.). The focus of the issue iSJewish women 's identity and experience.

• • •
3

The poster contest which we announced in SW 25 elicited a few entries, fine work,some of which appears in this issue, but nothing 8uitable for a poster. We're still looking for drawings or photographs suitable for black & white reproduction to make a
Sinister Wisdom poster and maybe t-shirts too. Artist will receive royalties fromsales.

• • •Several pieces of writing have been submitted to SW which prompt the following
remarks:
Sinister Wisdom will not print writing or art which-whatever the ar.tist's intent-humiliates, dehumanizes, or puts down women-or
men-on the basis of race, class, culture, ethnicity, ability, appearance,
sexuality . .. because they are dark and fat or thin and blond, because
their breasts are large or small, because they lack money or formal
education, because they eat fast food, because they watch TV or don 't
live in NY or the Bay Area, because they have bad skin or bad teeth or"bad" grammar. Such art damages.

This doesn't mean we won't print work that treats these subjects, or even treats
them with humor. But there's a difference between contemptuous ridicule andhumor.
Which is not to say it's always clear-what seems funny to me may seem cruel toothers. And displacing prejudice, opening to difference, takes time and lots ofstumbling. Any artist who cares about the use and misuse of images and words isbound to grope around, inevitably creating some things which will, in 5 or 10
years, make any of us hit the roof-or cringe.
At SW we're willing to question our. decisions as well as your images; to talkabout the delicate balance between political responsibility (which we do not think
is a dirty word) and creative freedom.
The impulse to rebellion is the breath of intellectual and creative life. At the sametime, the impulse toward accountability is the pulse of political change. We want
SW to exist on this dialectic, this crosscurrent (actually we want everything to exist
on this crosscurrent, but we only have control over SW). We don't see the lack ofutter certainty, of iron-clad principles, as a reason to operate without any principles
at all. And we reject the notion that there are only 2 possible stances: a conformist
political correctedness vs. prejudice-banal or brutal-persisting unchallenged in
the name of artistic freedom.
We also recognize, in the absence of absolutes, our own fallibility. We will
publish things that hurt somebody. Write us when we do. We will reject work outof fear, ignorance, failure to grasp what matters. Write us about this as well.

Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz
4

LesIea Newman
from Adjustments

I

Shifting Piles
I place a pile of credits to my left
and a pile of debits to my right.
After I type the numbers from the debits
onto the credits
I pile the debits on top of the credits.
Then I pull the carbons from the credits
and separate the copies into piles.
I interfile the piles
and bring them over to the files
where I file the piles and pull the files
making a new file of piles.
Then I make files
for the pile that had no files
and put them into a new file pile.
I take the new file pile down the aisle
over to the table where Mabel
makes labels for April to staple.
I take the new labeled stapled file pileback down the aisle over to the file
to be interfiled with the pile of filed files.
After I file April's piles
I get new debits from Debby
and new credits from Kerry.
I carry Kerry's credits and Debby's debitsback to my deskand place a pile of credits to my left
and a pile of debits to my right.
After I type the numbers from the debits
onto the credits
it's exactly 10:00
and we have exactly fifteen minutes
to go down to the cafeteria
and drink coffee
or go out into the parking lot
and scream.
5

VI
4:55
We shut off our typewriters
put our pencils into our pencil holders
screw the tops onto our jars of liquid paperand glance at the clock
we place our unused envelopes
into our top left hand drawers
and our sheets of carbon paper
into our top right hand drawers
and glance at the clock
we lift our pocketbooks onto our laps
freshen our lipstick
pat our hairand glance at the clock
we straighten out' our tangled rubberbands
check to see our typewriters are shut off
and glance at the clock
we inspect our fingernails
notice where the polish has chipped off
and glance at the clock
we uncross our legs
and glance at the clock
we smooth our skirts
and glance at the clock

VII
5:00
Bye
GoodbyeGoodnight
Have a nice night
You tooTake care
Have a good night
Good night
Good night6

VIII
Ode to the Secretaries of America
The Secretaries of America are spreading out
everywhere-with their orange silk rosesin thin white vases on their desks
next to pictures of their children or grandchildren
smiling at them through oval frames
next to jars of yellow and white liquid paper
lined up like nail polishnext to ceramic coffee mugs that say
WORLD'S GREATEST MOTHER or HAVE A NICE DAY
next to pencil holders made from orange juice canscovered with construction paper
covered with sparkles
with their sugar free chewing gum
tucked away in their pocketbooks
tucked away in their bottom left hand drawers
with their light blue cardigans
draped over the back of their swivel chairs
with their headphones onlistening to their bosses whispering
instructions into their ears
like some obscene phone callerOh Secretaries of America
I hear you following me out into the parking lot
your high heels clicking on the pavement
your car keys dangling from your fingers
I see you walking through Waldbaums
with shopping lists in your hands
or waiting to buy white fish at the deli counterI hear you calling home on company timeto tell your teenage sons to take the roast beef out
and put it on low in the toaster ovenI see you at Elaine Powers Figure Salon
bending at the waist
I hear you in diners munching on cottage cheese and carrot sticks
comparing the calorie ·content of pink and white grapefruit
I see you trying on skirts and slacks in Orbachs or Macys
looking over your shoulder at your behinds sighing in the mirror7

Oh Secretaries of America listen to me!
Take off your girdles and relax.
Stop wearing that lipstick-it's made of pig fat, it's not even kosher!
And don't you know you don't have to make the coffee?
Oh Secretaries of America
get up off your chairs
and take a walk in the sunor go home and smoke dopewith your teenage sons and daughtersand then pig out on carob brownies and M and M's
Oh Secretaries of America
we love you just as you arewith your thick ankles and untweezed eyebrowswith your soft bellies and flabby thighs
we were born out of your bodies!
We nursed at your breasts or wanted towe crawled into your lap
and let you rock us to sleep
we came to you crying with our scraped knees
and let you kiss it all better
Oh Secretaries of America
come crawl into my lap
tell me about your day
let me massage the back of your neckyour aching shoulders your tired feet
let me give you a goodnight kissbefore I tuck you in and shut the light
Oh Secretaries of Americatake tomorrow off
it's on me
take next week off
take next month off
Oh Secretaries of America
just take off8Christian McEwen

The Toad Faced ChildThe moon is moneyin the empty sky.
"Have it," says the childthe toad faced child.
He wants my trinkets
all my little things.
He has the right, he tells me.
He insists.
And when I try to run
he follows me.
He scrapes my soil away
to make a house.
He squats upon my landin his great boots.
He pees in it.
He makes a thin mud.
And in the mud
he plants some wretched leaves
torn from my flowering vine.
He gets his trumpet
and makes a loud noise.
"1 am the king," he says.
"1 am the emperor.""1 am, I am," he says
and multiplies.
His arms are everywhere.
I smell his breath.
"You know too many songs," he says.
"1 want your songs."
He sucks at mewith all his thousand mouths.
9

Achy Obejas

Rock That Cuts
let your mother wear her wedding ringon the jobon the town
walking home alone in the dark
dragging just a little tired tired
from the cold dirty
yawning unevents of her day
the ring is like a lantern
or insurance
let her wear the gem to match the gemof her smile curving curving
resting on the ledges of her lips
on the doorstep on thesteel belted rice and beans padded
frame that pushes on
pushes on
pushing shadows ever larger
from her shrinking stature
your father's absence
does not negate the truth
she is still doing dishes
working nights
picking shards of life
up off the floor
let her wear the rock that cutson her finger
in her eye
to say noto the drunks and slobs
undeserving of her beauty
to tell the white master there's
a strong tight wall of brown muscle
flexing love like a ringaround your handsome handsome
mother10

· Lisa Simon

The Photograph Is Dark
Around My Mother's Face
I walk toward the road,
mailboxes ahead of me
so dark I cannot see them,and picture my mother's
creamy colored face,
her laugh, a wild
laugh, mouth red.
She holds pinking
shears in her handand in tonight's breeze,
I smell her lipstick, her warm
breath blowing
my fresh-cut bangs.
It's not the scentof blossoms but orange-red
lipstick, pollen,a current of air.

I want a letter, the secrets
she never told me,
her thoughts on my world
as it spirals. I spot
as a dancer spots spinningon one foot,kicking dust with the other.
Her death is my pointof focus, like the door of thismetal box, as black
as the pavement and the grass.
It creaks a warningwhen I lower' it and pass
my hand through the opening.
11I brace my feet,cock my elbow,
ready for the snake
coiled inside to strike,the spider in its web to biteas my fingers
grope, my nails scratch.

In one of her straw baskets
I find the smell from her pillow
in a china jar.
Tonight I spread
its milky lotion
under my ears and on
my tightened throat
where the gap inside is closing,and dream she wraps me
in a long slow sigh,her chest a goose down swell.

12Lisa Simon

Safekeeping
These books belonged to my motherbefore she died, that is when
she was still aliveand placed between
the pages money forsafekeeping and the market.
Grocery lists written
in her hand and ads
she tore from magazines forbutterfly chairs, a crepemaker,
show the place
she left off reading.
I've saved these scraps
as if she'd leftme jewelry,
but what to do withrandom memories,
her ways of no intent?
She never learned to swim,
rubbed the Buddha pendanthung around her neck, sometimes
slept in her clothes.
All are markers in a placeso safe I might forget,
flowers once pressed
flat between paperback
pages stained yellow, purple.

13

Mirtha Quintanales"Maybe You're Wrong, Papi""Tu debes de haber sido corista en otra vida, Carolina. Por Dios tu no puedes
salir del bano con toda la ropa puesta?" I It was a daily struggle. After taking hermorning shower, Mami would leave the bathroom naked, with only a towel wrapped around her small but full, round body. Calmly, she would walk into the adjacenfbedroom, leaving the door open behind her. Papi's thunderous voice would inevitably meet her. It was the signal for the beginning of the domestic morning
ritual. "Don't you have any shame? Con niiios chiquitos y todo ... " There were
doors to my parents' bedroom, but they were virtually nonfunctional. I don't recall
them ever being closed. That, plus the year-round heat that forced us to keep ourscreenless windows open, made any attempt at marital privacy useless.
Father's angry words were like a summons. I would drop whatever I was doing
and hurry to the bedroom. Would watch Father's face redden and swell up as hestomped around the room, nervously straightening the knicknacks on top of the
dressers, lighting and relighting his large Havana cigar. Mother would seldom interrupt her routine. She would drop the towel on the floor, sit at the end of theframeless double-bed, slip into a small and very tight crotchless girdle (she rarely
wore panties under it), lay back on the bed and slowly pull it all the way up to her
waist. Then she would sit up again and carefully roll up her stockings, one at atime, fastening them with the hooks that dangled from the girdle. I would placemyself squarely in front of her and watch her. Shamelessly.
On good days, Mother would not even look up at Father. She'd hum a few notesof the Parisian can-can or of any striptease tune that came to her mind. Caught offguard, Papi would burst out laughing, loosening up, growing gentle almost instantly. Relief. On those occasions, I was free to leave them and return to my room to get
ready for school. Now on bad days, when Mother said nothing or instead decided
to 'take-on' Father, there was nothing for me to do but stay. There was no point to
my trying to slip away. Papi's eyes would inevitably rivet on me, holding me inplace. "Tu no te das cuenta que Ie estas dando un mal ejemplo a esta niiia?2 Can't
you see you're setting a bad example for this girl?" He would address her, but fix
his glance on me. This act never escaped Mami. "Dejala tranquila, Bernardo. Let
her be." But it was no use. I was not merely an audience, I was also a suspect on
trial and Father was the judge. Guiltyl Guilty by association. Little eight-year-old
Teresa already a whore in-the-making. I had 'to listen to this: a reprimand and awarning. Father made Mother and I interchangeable or worse, one and the same being inexplicably occupying two different bodies at once. Her crime was my crime.
14

I'd often rebel at the unfairness of it. !Ya Papi, stop! I would scream at him but.
ultimately, it was Mother's role in the game that I resented. If she'd cover herself
up, he'd shut up and leave us both alone. Wasn't I careful to be modest at all times?
I would carryall my clothes to the bathroom and emerge only when I was fully
dressed-down to my socks and shoes. And didn't I make sure I wore underwear
under my pajamas even in the worst heat? And Father didn:t know this, but every
time I went to play at Conchita's or Cristina's house I would make sure not toremove my clothes until the last minute before we'd get into the shower to get rid ofsweat and grime. He should have been proud of me.

••••••••
Conchita thought I was weird. She would often push me into her bedroom, closethe doors, remove her t-shirt, play shorts, and panties, and dance a slow dance until
she had my un divided attention. "Vamos, chica, quit ate la ropa,3 we're going totake a shower soon, so what's your problem?" How could I explain Father to her?
One afternoon Conchita's brother caught us. Undoubtedly attracted by the noisein the bedroom he got a ladder from the storage room, placed it flush against one of
the bedroom doors, pushed in the small window above it and looked down on us.
"1 see what you're doing girls! Conchita, I'm going to tell Father" ... I was terrified. "Please don't tell, please don't tell," I repeated to myself, refraining fromscreaming at him, from fanning his ten-year-old mischief. I did not want to encourage him further by showing any sign of fear. I was ever so glad that I had only
been watching. Well-touching a little, maybe. But how could he know that?
Things just don't look like what they really are from a few feet off the ground andviewed from a small opening.
Now Conchita was stark naked. Tha t presented a problem. What would we do? I
whispered to her ,"Let's deny the whole thing, Conchita. If he tells your dad, we'll
just insist he's lying, trying to make trouble for us." But covering up the incident
seemed futile-even as I ardently proposed it as the solution. I was sure that even in
his wildest imagination this boy could not have come up with such a remarkable
story. Clearly we were doomed.
If Conchita was as worried as I was, she didn't show it. "Go ahead, you
twirp-go tell! See if we care!" I thought, that's it! IFwe're cool and collected about
it he won't think it worth his while to give us a hard time. Wasn't his main purpose
just to make us squirm? I prayed quietly that the whole incident would be forgotten
by early evening when Conchita's father would come home and drive me back to
my house.
Conchita picked up her panties from the floor, put them on, opened the bedroom
doors and grabbed me by the hand. "Come on, time to take a shower, Teresa." Letting go of her hand, I followed her down the hall to the bathroom, walking silently
past her grinning brother, trying desperately to hide my shame.
15

"Oye Papi, tu sabes que? Hey Dad, you know what?" I froze-suddenly
wishing to be invisible, or better yet, dead. The traffic light changed and Conchita's
father made a right turn. "What's up,Pedrito? What's the problem?" The creep told
him the whole story. I waited for an explosion. Maybe we'll have an accident and
go to the hospital and then none of this will matter for a while. I closed my eyes andheld my breath waiting for the worst.
"What were you doing spying on the girls, kid?" Huh? I was stunned. Somewhat
relieved by this fortuitous turn of events, I began to mumble something to Conchita's father. "We didn't do anything, Mr. Gomez .. .we were just playing." Conchita's father momentarily turned around and looked at me squarely in the eyes, asmile forming in the corner of his mouth. He clearly did not believe me. But why
then wasn't he angry? Father would have been absolutely furious.
The lie sat heavy on my chest. I had been caught lying. Concho,4 now he's goingto think I lie all the time. I felt thoroughly humiliated. "You are too young to be so
worried about things, Teresa . . ." The gentleness in his voice interrupted my selfdeprecation. I found myself beginning to breathe freely again, tears rolling slowly
down my face. Still, I was puzzled. Why wasn't this man upset? Weren't Conchita
and I doing something wrong and shameful?
In bed that night, I reviewed the whole incident in my mind, brought Papi's image into focus, put it on the stand: "What do you have to say to this, Papi?" I knew
I wouldn't really confront him, not now anyway. But resoluteness arose in mychest. "There seems to be more than one truth about this business, Daddy. And I
am going to figure it all out. Starting now."
Translation"You must have been a chorus girl in another life, Carolina. My God, can't you leave the bathroom
with all your clothes on?"I

2

"Don't you realize that you're setting a bad example fo r this gir l?"

3"Come on gir l, take your clothes off.", HDarn."

I'u.aAL. LIVINGCOMING- OLlT

EVENTS

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POETR.YPROSE." CfNN!CTIONS

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OORTllERN lESBIANS (COLlECTIVE)
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VaG ) Z916

Anne Rickertsen

Branding
When a pocket of frothing calvesbolted past marna,
daddy clamped his knees
to his sweat-slick horse. The c,alves'clean break brought him
back to marna, dragging his furious
accusation through the stiff
pasture grass. . .
whore.
From his eyes the word
burst; a white
streak, from his mouth. A white
streak that tore to marna,that seemed to raise yeasty welts, tocurdle her bones underneath.
I, eleven,maybe,
sucked my breathand held strays to the herd,
my skin frosted and my own
bones hollowed out.
Whore.
That word curled
up with the smell of burning
hair and crackling hide.
Every Sunday
dinner plates of roast beef
stearn our cheeks, and thisSunday the hot, filmy clouds
pulse like calves' breath.
Like the slow motion
heaving of calves' breathand horses' flanks
and tall, silver grasses.
The word rises iIi my nostrils
with the baked, salty
scent of fermented cow piss.
17

Randi Schalet

The Oldest Daughter
stands outside the bathroom door.
Her two sisters huddle in the far cornerof their room, close to the window
in case they need to jump
like they were taught by the firemen
who came to school.
She hears her sister cry and hisses,
stay inside, lock the door.
She hears her mother, you 're trying to kill methen her father answers, whore.
She phones the police and shouts,
I've called the police, mommy.
When the catch on the door is released,
she cleans up the pills on the bathroom floor
white pills her mother takes for migraines, the bruises
on her legs, the curse. Thenshe sees the hole in the wall
the size of her father's fist.
She chips away at the edges of the hole.
Each morning she breaks off
a little chunk of the wallthen sands the edges with her palm
making the hole rounder, smoothertwice as large.
When the plasterer arrives,
she stands outside the bathroom door
following his movements
watching him nail plywood, then smooth plasterover the hollow wall
until the wall is perfectly smooth.
18

Audrey Ewart

She Did Not Answer

But Mama, he did
He came in at night, Mama
You were at work
The night was hot, Mama
too hot for covers
The door opened
and he came in
He ran one finger
round and rounddown there
It was too scary, Mama
Make him go away

19

Pegasis Touch

Stories My Body Tells
Incest happens in all segments of society, not just in poor or socially isolated families. My family, forexample, is middle class. My mother's of English background and was trained as a teacher. My father is
Irish Catholic and worked as an engineer. I was raised in a suburb of an Eastern City, with a younger
sister and brother.

I didn't remember anything about the incest until March last year, when, in the
middle of the night, I began to get back pieces of memories of physical feelings that
terrified me. For over a month I slept only 1 to 1V2 hours a night because of this. At
that time I was able just barely to hold onto the fragments of these feelings, not to
put them together or make sense out of them.
Now I need to say what happens to me when I talk about the incest. It makes
me feel sick to my stomach, and if I go on enough, I get stomach cramps, sometimes
so I can hardly walk, and then diarrhea, which can last several days. I often shakeand feel very cold, or else various parts of my body feel hot, and they can vibrate.
So can the room. Sometimes my ears ring. Once I got so tense at talking so much, I
felt unable to move at all. It took me 2 hours to get up and leave, and I only did itby telling each muscle separately to move.
I often feel it's my talking and thinking about the incest that makes it real; thatit's not real if I don't do these things. In other words, forgetting about it meant it
never really happened. In fact a lot of my first year of remembering has been astruggle over the reality of these very painful memories.
Another thing that can happen when others are talking about incest is my getting upset-hurt or angry-because "that's my father you're talking about." No
matter what he did, I still care about him. I even still love him, though I often wish
I didn't because that would be easier.
Next I want to talk about other people's reactions to my talking, even very
generally, about what happened to me, the incest, and the process of remembering
it. Usually I feel horror, disgust, and a whole lot of fear coming to me from them,and it does seem to be directed toward me, rather than toward the incest itself. I
feel people going far away from me in their feelings, if not physically. In fact many
people I thought were my friends no longer want anything to do with me since I've
become involved in this process of recovering my past.
Yes, I know very well it's because of how scarey it is, and time-consuming.
And, yes, this process is likely to change your life quite drastically. It's certainly
done those things to me. Then, too, I know we have all buried some of our most2.0

painful past experiences, and for many women these are likely to be sexual experiences as a child or teen-ager, most of them with a male close to or even inside
your family.
Finally to get down to what actually' happened to me: I had sexual experienceswith my father from at least age 3 until I was almost 11. Since I'm now 40 years old,
I forgot about these for some 29 years. The first thing I remember is Daddy masturbating my younger sister and rrie with a washcloth while giving us a bath. This was
a completely pleasant experience for me, and it happened regularly. I also
remember a tickling game where he eventually put his finger in my vagina, which I
didn't like. When I asked him to stop, he'd always say "in a minute". His keeping
on a while served to increase my tolerance for this experience. I certainly liked his
touching. In fact I liked it a lot, and it seemed there were other things I simply had
to accept as inevitably going along with the wanted touching.
I don't remember ever being close to Mother. She always seemed angry withme no matter how hard I tried to please her, and she spanked me often. I didn't feel
comfortable being hugged or even touched by her because she felt so stiff and hard,really unyielding. Daddy, on the other hand, held and touched me "just right", ourbodies softening and melting into each other. He even masturbated me "just right" .
If only he'd stopped at that, when I asked him to. He was really tuned in to me
emotionally and physically, and that felt wonderful. I know the incest began withhis genuinely loving sensitivity and warmth toward me.
From the beginning I sensed Mother was both defeated and quite powerless,while Daddy was spontaneous and feeling, as well as powerful. He was less beaten
down by the world, and therefore clearly much more alive. And he used his
superior power against Mother. In fact I always felt I had more power than she did,perhaps because in many ways Daddy seemed to prefer me to her. I can see how
extremely frustrating it was for Mother to be continually confronted by a small girlwho felt this way, especially when it was her job and duty as a mother to love,nourish, and teach me. How could she teach me when I didn't respect her?
When I was about 5 something happened that really frightened me. This is thefirst memory I managed to recover, and it's still the most terrifying. I'm lying on
my back on the living room floor, and Daddy's tickling me, but he's lying on myhips and rubbing himself against my thigh. His weight starts to hurt, and I ask him
to get off. He says "in a little while" and goes on a bit. He turns away, then comesback with his pants unzipped and his penis out. The erect penis jutting out of his fly
looks gigantic and monstrous to me. In fact this is a picture of my own well-loved
father turning into a nightmarish monster before my eyes.
Then he puts his penis in my mouth, and I have trouble breathing and start tochoke. I feel I'm being killed, so I close my mouth, of course biting him. He grabs
my throat and chokes me to make me open my mouth and let go of him. I see red,then black, and finally vomit, releasing him. He's angry and runs out of the room. I
lie there completely gone, floating up by the ceiling looking down at that small
21

child's body lying still, covered with vomit. This is the start of a way I dealt withwhat happened to me, namely by leaving my body and going very far away. Thatway I could see what was happening but I didn't have to feel it as much because it
wasn't happening to me.
After a while Daddy came back and was very nice to me. He picked me up andwashed me off, put me in his lap and held and stroked me, saying, "It's all right.
Nothing bad's going to happen," and things like that. I feel this pattern contributed
a lot to my forgetting about the incest for so long. I simply couldn't maintain in myconsciousness two such different images of my father, so I wiped out the bad scarey
one and kept only the good comforting one, since I needed that so much.
The things he said to me seem at least as important as what he did. For instance, he always told me I liked what he did no matter what I said or did to contradict this. Sometimes he'd get me turned on by touching my genitals and thenstop and say he was done now. He'd ask if I wanted to stop, and I'd tell the truth,
no. Then he'd act real reluctant, like he was only doing it to please me, which miide
me feel I was "badder" than him because he wanted to stop and I didn't.
Daddy used my enjoyment of a small part of the incest to tell me over and overagain how I really wanted all of it. I know I still haven't finished sorting out thetremendous confusion involved in this continual mixing up of my pleasure with his,and especially of what felt good to me and things that felt downright painful. A lot
happened at night after I'd already gone to sleep, and afterwards he'd often holdand comfort me, saying I'd had a bad dream.
My father had intercourse with me over a period of years. I don't know how
old I was when it began. I just remember waking up, or somehow coming back to
consciousness, knowing something that felt important had happened to my bodyand I didn't know what it was. Then I tried to figure it out. Something had been inside me "down there" , but what could it be? It was shaped like a piece of broom
handle, but softer and not so long. Mostly I felt indifferent to this at first. I didn'tlike it, but it also didn't hurt very much either.
Then there seems to be a time when I began to realize there was a moral judgment against what Daddy and I were doing, so I started to feel guilty about it andtried to get him to stop. However, there seemed to be no way for me to make himstop as long as I enjoyed part of it, namely the touching..No matter how much I
struggled and fought, said no and turned away, he took it as just some kind of teasing game, and went right on, saying, "Oh, come on, you know you really like it."And his words were somewhat effective because I had to admit there was indeed
one part I definitely did like, the sexual touching. So I felt betrayed by my own
body and began to hate her (my body).
At the same time I started wondering how much Daddy really loved me. Of
course he always said' he did, but he absolutely refused to believe me when I told
him I didn't like something he was doing to me, or even that it hurt. In fact he often
laughed when I said these things. This made me doubt my own feelings and percep-

22

tions, since as kids we all need to believe our parents. We know we should do what
they say and learn from them. Also I knew he truly loved me, and I could not makesense out of my Daddy doing something extremely unpleasant or hurting me unless
it was for some very good reason. At least I don't recall him ever telling me it wasfor my own good. No, what he always said was that I was only teasing or joking
when I said I didn't want to do something.
At last I came to realize Daddy would go on doing those things to me no matter
what I felt, said, or did; it seemed to me he'd continue even on my dead body, since
he went on so many times on a body I'd long ago left in order not to feel as muchwhat was happening to me. This realization of my complete powerlessness,
especially at the hands of someone I loved and trusted and who said he loved me,
made me want to die. I got into hurting my body in order both to learn to feel less,
especially pain, and to get on the outside some of the hurt I felt inside.
When I was between 5 and 8 an incident occurred involving Mother, too. I was
sleeping in bed with her because Daddy was away travelling on his job, somethingthat happened fairly frequently. He came home unexpectedly in the middle of thenight and was very angry. He might have been drinking. He and Mother had anargument about sex, and he ended up raping her. She fought and yelled, especiallyabout me being there, but it didn't make him stop. It might even have turned him
on. Naturally, I pretended to be asleep. He knew I wasn't and said "You're next"
to me.
When he finished with her, she was both hurt and exhausted. He turned to me
and began touching my nipples and then my genitals in a very rough way that
seemed like torture to me. He grabbed onto me quite hard and pulled, twisted, andpinched. It hurt a whole lot, but there were also some strong flashes of pleasure.
This time I remained passive throughout, and said and did nothing. I also tried unsuccessfully to feel nothing, too. This is my most confusing memory and the one ofwhich I'm most ashamed. When he was done Mother carried me into my own bed
and held and stroked me. She defended Daddy by saying he didn't mean to hurt me
and that he couldn't help himself. Also, he's really a good man.
I have another memory that's the most painful. It's obviously only a fragment,
beginning with me already being very frightened by something that's happened.
I'm curled up with my knees pulled up to protect my stomach and my head downwith my hands and arms over it. I'm rocking and moaning. Daddy first crouches
over me without leaning, which feels warm and good, sheltered and protected even.
Then he begins to force his penis into my anus. It feels like being rammed repeatedly from behind. He holds my shoulders so I can't move away from him. This
memory disappears into so much pain I am so far unwilling to go into it any
further.
In the late spring when I was lOV2, I had my appendix out. Despite all comforting, shaming, and threats, I cried continuously the whole 5 days I was in thehospital. I was terrified I was going to die because a boy in my 5th grade class had
23died earlier that year after having his appendix out. It really surprised me to realize
how much I didn't want to die, since I'd spent a lot of time wishing I would.
Somehow it seemed that in order just to live, that is to want to live rather than towant to die, I had to stop my father from doing those things to me. But of course I
had no idea how I could do this. Nevertheless I knew I just had to do it.
After I went home I was very scared whenever Daddy came into my room. Of
course at first he was quite nice to me and didn't try anything. Then he started with
his usual line, "I'll just touch you a little to make you feel good, and I'll stop
whenever you tell me to." I didn't believe him, but, also as usual, I didn't feel I had
the power to prevent him. He began very soft and gently, asking if this hurt or that
hurt. "No." Naturally, after a while he was leaning on me putting his penis in, andit did hurt, quite a lot more than normally. All of a sudden I realized I was once
more back in this position I'd said I never wanted to be in again.
I knew I had to do something or it would just keep happening to me forever, it
seemed, so I raised my legs up and back, and kicked him hard. He looked so surprised and said in this hurt, indignant tone, "Hey, you're hurting me," that he really got to me. I remembered how very many times I'd said those exact words to him
and got back "just a minute", and my anger took over. I really fought Daddy
without reservation or bothering to be afraid of hurting him. In fact I truly wanted
to hurt him, and I tried to and succeeded, at least in part.
This time I felt I'd made him angry, and it seemed rather more like rape thanjust sex when after simply dodging most of my fury , he systematically held me
down, worked his penis into my vagina, and went at it. I see that whenever I caused him pain, whether by biting his penis in fear when I was 5, or by expressing myanger at 10, he got angry. But after he'd come he still took the trouble to turn me on
by touching me. It was so frustrating and infuriating that he was able to force me toexperience sexual pleasure when I also felt angry and hopelessly defeated at thesame time. It made me hate feeling at all.
After he knew he'd succeeded in making me feel turned on, he told me I should
kiss his penis because that's where my pleasure really came from. I just wanted to
get rid of him and be left alone, so I began to comply, though I was disgusted by his
penis, let alone putting my lips on it. When I actually felt him with my lips, I
couldn't stand it and threw my head back then forward , with my lips drawn backand my teeth open. I clamped them shut underneath, on his soft, hairy, smelly
balls. I still feel some satisfaction at hearing his outrageous scream and quickly
aborted jerk away, as I'd locked my jaws firmly closed. He hit at my face and headwith his fists, but I was oblivious because this wasn't a conscious decision I'd madeto act. Instead it came from somewhere deep inside me as a last desperate measure
to try to protect myself. He ended up moaning, sobbing,' and begging me to let go.
Just as I had been gone from my body when we had sex, so I was also absent on thisoccasion. Neither his orders nor appeals could move me to release him. There wassimply no consciousness left in my body to be either ordered or appealed to.
24

Next I see a shiny black wing tip oxford swinging from the left into the back of
my neck, and a dark sock and part of a navy trouser leg with it. The blow shocked
me into unlocking my teeth. I'm not sure I ever saw who kicked me, but I suspect
an uncle who lived near us. I lose this memory here, perhaps because I lost consciousness. Again I don't know for sure. But during the course of my remembering,a certain point on the back of my neck has become very sensitive, even to the touchof a pillow. I truly wonder what possible conversation could have ensued between
Daddy and my uncle over the most peculiar position my uncle inadvertently
witnessed him in with me.
I felt really bad about myself because of how much I'd wanted to hurt Daddy
and that I'd actually tried to do it, had in fact done it. In my mind that made me
worse than him, because I knew he didn't really think what he was doing hurt me,
whereas I knew I was hurting him, and that's exactly what I wanted to do.
But my finally fighting back without reservation was a big step in getting myfather to stop molesting me, which was essential for my own survival. He came to
me only once more, months later, saying I used to really love him and like what hedid. He asked to try just one more time to see if I didn't still like it after all. I knew
what he said was true and felt if he could still make me like any part of what hedid, I remained in his power. It seemed I had to let him try one more time in order
to see whether I'd finally succeeded in my struggle not to feel anything. Again he
was slow and gentle, asking how this and that felt, but it was completely clear to us
both that I was not turned on by anything he did. So I won the struggle, and hedidn't bother me again. But of course I also gave up something very important,namely my own natural connection with my body, her feelings, in fact, my own
feelings.
Daddy was able totally to ignore and discount whatever negative feelings I expressed, whether by saying no, screaming and crying, or by turning away and evenstruggling and 'fighting to protect myself. Yet I still don't see him as violent, butrather as having an incredibly arrogant belief in the rightness of his view that I really liked all of the incest because I liked being masturbated. It wouldn't work to lie
and say I didn't enjoy anything, because I knew he was tuned in enough to me toknow when I felt pleasure. Logically, then, he must also have been tuned in enoughto realize when I didn't feel pleasure. In fact this is proven by him stopping the incest when I finally succeeded in not feeling any pleasure. He neither tried to convince me I did, nor approached me sexually again. His being unable to make me
feel pleasure clearly ended the game for him, just as I'd felt sure it would.
How could he totally discount my pain and yet be so sensitive to my feelings ofpleasure? It must be because my pleasure was very much in his self interest in continuing the incest. Nevertheless I don't recall him repeating the acts that gave me
absolutely no pleasure, namely oral and anal intercourse. I also think the mostpainful part of what he usually did was emotional rather than physical.
It is surely a subtle and refined kind of torture to have your own body's plea-25

sant sensations made a justification for someone to do repeatedly to you many different acts that you feel range from unpleasant to downright screamingly painful.
To come to orgasm crying out "NO NO NO NO" with each shudder of your body
appears to me an ultimate kind of betrayal.
A very important result of the intensity, both good and bad, of this incestuous
relationship with my father is my seeing myself as crazy. Perhaps this can be moreaccurately described .as a blurring of boundaries. When I feel things strongly,
especially bad feelings, if I see or hear others expressing something similar, I feelthey've taken on my feelings and are expressing them for me. When I'm vibrating, I
tend to experience the vibrations as coming from the room and floor.
When I'm feeling things this intensely, it's hard for physical sensations to getthrough into my awareness. Usually I become conscious of a discomfort or pain
completely nonspecifically. Then I have to go through a checklist of possibilities todetermine, first of all, if its cause is inside me rather than outside, such as noise. At
least when I ask my body if this is what she needs, I do get definite answers. I ask
about cold, heat, hunger, thirst, need to pee, getting sick, need to change positions.
I've also developed a routine for panicked freak out, which goes like this. I say"ORIENT" to myself very loudly, and then open my eyes to take in where I am,
touching the surrounding furniture, rug, ground, etc., remembering what place thisis. It is often helpful to find out what time it is and therefore about how long I've
been "out of it". Sometimes I review the sequence of events, thoughts, and feelings
that got me freaked out and invariably find it very logical. This is dangerous, since
it tends to lead me right back into the same freak out. Then I order myself to"STOP", and usually get up and do something, which inevitably helps.
I don't judge all, or even most of these experiences as bad, but I certainly dohave to be carful about when and where I allow myself to go into them, and withwhom. And of course I can't always control this. Sometimes I'm only aware of it
when I'm already well into it.
The main long-lasting negative effect I recognize from the incest is my deep
feeling that I myself am bad in some very basic sense. I feel this regardless of how
much I try or how hard I work to do useful and worthwhile things. There are times
when what I really want is for someone to say to me over and over again, for days
and weeks, maybe even longer, you are good. And, yes, I am working at'doing thatfor myself with affirmations.
Another important effect is my continually doubting my own feelings and intuitions, having always to justify and prove them even to myself. I also have a very
real fear of being vulnerable, especially with another person, and this relates directly to close relationships and love.
I am working at healing myself by trying to be as conscious as I can of how mybody feels, since I've spaced this out quite completely for some 35 years. And when
I'm aware of a physical sensation, respecting it and acting on it. Changing positions
more often when lying or sitting, for example, instead of working on increasing my26

endurance of discomfort. I'm trying to be more gentle with my physical self.
I've been working on being my own mother, which is certainly what I feel I
want, comforting myself, even stroking myself and telling myself I'm good and thelike, just as I've done for my daughter for the 10 years I've had her. I can really get
into feeling both sides of this, the giving and the receiving, and it does seem to help,
once I get past thinking how foolish it appears.
I've realized I don't want to be around men and am making efforts to change
my life so as much as possible I don't have to. Especially I don't want to be touchedby men. At this time I'm not going to judge that feeling as good or bad, but rightnow I want to honor it. So I've left the man I've lived with for 11 years, and we aresharing the care of our daughter year by year.
Quiet is extremely important to me, and having some long periods of time withno interruptions, so I moved into a little 15-foot hexagon house up a mountain withno telephone, TV, radio, or stereo. Being outdoors is very positive for me, and asmall house keeps me less separate from the weather and the outside environment.
I slept outside in a tent last year until November in the B.C. Interior and took a
5-day hike alone the last week of October. Despite a lot of rain I loved it and made44 miles with a heavy pack. For once I felt I belonged on this earth, that she couldbe (and sometimes is) a good connection for me. The moon and stars are even more
important for me than the sun, and I've stayed or waked up many times to sing andchant to them. My daughter loves to do this with me.
I try to do exercises and run every day, and meditate. I fast one day a week andhave stopped eating meat. I have 2 things I wear for protection. One is a copper
bracelet I made after seeing it in a meditation. Sometimes I lie naked on the groundfacing a certain way into the sun with my arms and legs out-stretched. Last year I
swam in the river where I lived in B.C. in mid-March, when there was still snow on
the ground. I always spoke to the waterfall I ran past on a dirt logging road every
morning. With my arms out I asked her to lend me her grace and power, and forother things I need.
Yes, I acknowledge the uniqueness and seeming craziness of a lot of this, and I
certainly don't expect anyone else to do what I'm doing. But it feels extremely important for me in this second half of my life to honor as many of my newly emerging desires as I can, even when I don't understand them or know exactly either
where they come from, or to where they're leading me.
I know for sure that a minimum personal requirement for me is belonging to anincest survivors' support group, which is why I left B.C. and came to Oregon. I
spent 2Vz months travelling around Vancouver, Oregon, northern California, andwestern Montana asking questions about groups and programs around incest,.and I
learned a great deal. I was very fortunate to be able to join in a survivors' group in
Eugene, Oregon. There I had the experience of talking about what happened to me
and having it draw the other group members closer to me because they felt what I
said helped them. This was in strong contrast to what usually occurred when I said
27

anything where I lived in B.C., which always seemed to drive people away fromme because of their own disgust and fear.
I have a long-range goal of setting up a healing centre in the country where
women can come, with our children if necessary. We can live there for varying
lengths of time and go crazy in order to heal ourselves, as I feel I had to do and am
still in the process of doing. There would be a community in many different stagesof healing ourselves, using all kinds of varied methods and newly createdtechniques, many devised by our own community, both alone and together.

28

Beatrix Gates

Natural Enemies
Thanksgiving, a family gathers
to eat together. It is country,
by the sea-room enoughto run outside after the meal,
the air sharp, breath short,
hot, white as the moments held inside.
We shake hands around the room,
the extras stand, look downat my ruffled hair which never stays
but runs like loose shiny filmaround the room. My cousins come downstairs. I am told they have been waiting
all day to see me. The eldest catches
me with his first glance, my hair switches
across my eyes.
His bulk fills the stairs, his hands
flash in front of him, come down the railing.
His hands take my hands, fling me out into the room,a hearty laugh. This is what they will call darling.
I must hold on to these hands. The room whirls
around me. I am spinning away into the air.
It is the beginningof the anaesthesia. This is supposed to bewhat I love. Let me down I am
praying with my separated hands.
Let me down to the ground.
His mother laughs and tells the room
how well we get along, and over twelve years between them.
He is their size but I do not think
he is a grownup. His hands take my face, touch
my bones, How beautiful you will be. I pray with separated
eyes for ugliness, for not seeing, for not looking
in the same direction-anything not to see as he does.

29

His largest hand covers my head, my blonde hair thins underit. His smallest, fastest hand runs between my legs.
I fold up and wing my way awaywishing my blonde hair feathered gray and brown,
my body the speed of a bird.
I move to the light, my pale yellow
changing afternoon on the bed of his room.
My legs feel like fists as I make my way
down the stairs, the pulse between my legs
splits between beats, glass shards of his fingernails
in my vaginal hall. They are having anotherround of drinks. I grab my jacket and run
outside to the younger ones whose guns I easily pickup, the death of imagination and say nothing
really happened.
The tablecloth hems us loosely in,skirts our knees. There are my cousins, the hated
pale, blonde dogs and the missing,middle brother who has run away.
This I understand as I face my own
family, scattered, salt and pepper, along the white skirtof linen. I have been told which chair has been stolen
from which relative's house but I like the new paint on them,feel myself in the bright, new shell of hiding, sink
into the colors, the rugs, the paintings. I know how
to get away, steal myself from my own body and slipout to the Jight. My family is not there. Not one of themstays with mt. I laugh out loud. They call itjoining in. We are having a feast
II

If the boys make funof me, I will be a monkey
and my lightness will take meto the smallest, high tip of the tree.
Here I have feet like hands and hands like feetI can pull my own images out of the air
and drop theirs like bombs to the ground. I am lighter
than air. The ground is fear to me. From up here, I'm justa shade on the shadow of a tree.
30

When I am down, my legs are pinned.
I roar inside, a lionesswith no claws. It is years later,
this image, the others who have accompanied me
begin their animal walk. I must speak with them
before we are told we are natural enemies.
I will start with you, mother. I have seen you as bird
and lioness, too. Bird of prey, eagle, peacockand battered, winged creature-the weight of your un met
grace heavy in your broken, boned wings. Then angry,
you enter as cat, your huge paws ripping the grass
as you skim the dry ground. There is dust and the yellow
rush of power, ears back, you have stopped listening~d attack. You want me to run beside you.
You are an animal who would kill-I have seen your ironanger, flawless in the heat. There were never any marks,
so it became a question of belief. Trust was a filthy word
to you. A lioness will eat her own legs,
so the cats can nurse. This is the kind of nurturing
you roared at me. Necessity is ugly, raw and true.
Now Elizabeth, it is you, mourning dove, I've always
felt closest to you. One day you stood,
the next you flew.
You are a seed I caught on the wind accidentally.
She told me finally, you did have an older
sister, after days and weeks of unconscious pestering.
I asked and asked for one not knowing you had already comeand gone.
A tender cat appears, a mother you knew and I must,
too, to see her. She lifts you by your loose-skinned
neck, your heavy head, shoulders you and carries the cloud
blue eyes to a soft place among the rocks, the other graves
come real. She knew you would be coming here and asked onlythat you not be marked, you who were always marked, yourlife called impossible beyond the age of six. Enormous headand downy light brown curls, I heard you whispered, I heard you
from' the first, your loyalty as you traveled, always
beside her, hand in hand, a clear signal pressed,~~j/"palm to palm, I love you.

-V'

31

Lu Melander

The Movie That Evening *I left when they bled the pig
and grabbed out its entrails
while it lay screaming.
"It was showing us life," my friend said later.

"But I'm not a human chauvinist," I told her.
"They were hungry.""Not the actors."(The now forgotten
Goddess sign,
swine,
her forces torn from her
while she still breathes)
I walked home from the movie
down the dark streets,
my police whistle in my teeth
in case my own screammight not be loud enough.

"The Tree of the Wooden Clogs

32

Marilyn Kallet

Blaming the Victim"Why do you wear your hair long
if you don't want to be dragged
around by it?"(tenured fac ulty member)

My colleague drags me alongby my hair, in his dreams
I am faceless.
Or, like a surrealist slide
I have nipples for eyes.
That's how I got hired.
The elders tattooed their erotic
fantasies on my skin,on my curriculum vita.
Paranoia? Back to the lecture:
For the rest of her life she accepts
bearing other people's dreams.
She facilitates the intrusionof the marvelous into man's existence.
Red and blue needles are used."
We women become marvelous mice
gnawing on ourselvesin the corner of the room.
No one stands up to shout;no one shoots; my voice is softand small.
Still he thinks I'm biting him
when I question,
Why all the images of female mutilation?
The woman next to me shifts
to the theme of seascapes.
I am in a bad dream.
If I stop the car,a gang will pull over.
No matter what falls out of my luggage,
I must keep going.
1/33

Irena Klep{iszI cannot swim
I cannot swim but my parents
say the land is less safe. And
the first day the water was smooth
like slate I could walk on.
It was a deception.
The sky greyed darkened
then grew bright as if it understood
our mood. I watched the land sinkand disappear. The boat was firm.
I sat holding onto my father's leg.
I was not sick like the others.
The sky was bright then grew
grey and dark. The days were
the same the water the sameand everyone's eyes the ·same.
We looked like a family but
we were all strangers. Nothing
but water and sky and the boat.
The world never existed I said.
I could not remember land norhouses nor trees and I knew
I had not been born herethat once there had been another place.
And I said to my parents:
there are no more lands
and no more peoples. We are strange
creatures and mu'st grow gills.
And my parents laughed as I cupped
my hands around my ears and thechildren laughed and did the same
their bony fingers flapping.
And the water looked gentle
ready to receive us.
34And one day we saw them and I
saw we were not alone and there
were others. Not sea creatures
but like us. I remembered.
And they boarded us and seized
the young girls like me and formeda circle. And they were on us
when the leader shouted: Make
sounds of joy! And my parents eyes
sealed like wrinkled walnuts.
And they changed places and new ones
were on us. And someone ordered:
Make sounds of joy I My parents moved
their lips like fishes their mouths
filled with silence. And it happened
again and again to me till I stopped
remembering it.
The blood clotted between the boards
and darkened though the women splashedthe sea on it. The smell stayed.
I said to my parents: I will grow gills
and tried to leap out into the water.
But my father held my wrists his fingers
iron nails piercing my bones. And he said:
you cannot swim.
The ocean was bleak and jagged
like an unsealed mountain daring
to be conquered. At dusk someone
spotted the land but I did not lookat it and watched my shadow below
on the rippled darkening bottom.
I thought about those who waitedon the shore. They were shouting
sharp not kind pointing at an empty
horizon. Wood splintered wood justfor one moment and then they pushed
us back. My mother pressed my headagainst her breast. The day was ending.
It was almost dark.

35

Annemarie Poulin

The Daily NewsIn the dream
I am stealing down a dark stairwell
stretching my eyes to clutch lightthere is none.
I grow hypersensorial prongsthat feel evil
feasting below.
I am not prepared for confrontation
though drawn to it.
I reach the final stepand awaken.

In the morning paper
I read rape.
Woman Raped in Suburb . . .Arms Hacked Off. . .
Thrown into Ditch. . .
Facts in cold-pressed ink
smudged by thumbprints at the breakfast table.
Details in black and whitesmeared by coffee spattered on the page.

Through an qpen window, the early sun
lights upon my hand.
My fingertips trace the veins
following the swollen branches like braille.
College Girl Dead ... Nipple Ripped Off...
Breasts Shredded Down to Ribcage ... By Human Teeth.. .
I trace, retrace.
80 Year Old... Raped on Main Street. .. At Noon . ..
By 14 Year Old Boy . ..
36

I close my eyes and rest
my head on the kitchen wall.
Again it is 1968.
Revolution.
Riot in the streets.
Nights cringe in the aftermath
while residents recamp.
Fires smoulder everywhere.
The air is muggy and without current,
heavy with the smell of incineration.
Back in Victorian Days
Mass. Ave. was an opulent promenade.
Ladies strolled with parasols
swirling pastels in the light air.
But tonight it is 1968
the elegant townhouses stink,of rot and bad dope, the stoops
teem with boys, knives and drugs
talkin White Machine, talkin smack, talkinfuck talk.

And I am seventeen
on a summer jaunt
soon I'll take a bus back home
but tonight I sit nonchalanton the steps of a decaying brownstone.
My panhandling partner and I
talking Black Power, talking pot, talking sex talk.
We have no connections here
in this cartoon slumwith its cartoon violence.
Across the street, smoke lingers
like a brooding ghost
charred tenements smoulder
looming like skeletons
above the nightnoise.
Quickly I catch
two shadowsstealthy, then bolting- toward us .. .
37

Swift straight-edged razors, ebony-hafted switchblades
an abandoned anteroom
where I watch for three hours
on my back from a crack beneath the door
two cops on a far cornerrock back and forth on their heels and toes.

Back and forth
while I am burning and I burnwith an acid rage that wills me to walkand to pull another bloodied body to the street
my own screams jolting me at every step
my own blood hot
relentless rushing from me.
I hear someone yelling, "Jesus! Jesus Christ!"
and find myself in an ambulancewith a girl muttering about her pimp
some bone splintered through her flesh
and see from the ambulance window
a woman
who walks like my motherthree hundred miles away . . .

I open my eyes.
It is now.
The sun's nimble strands
dance orange in this white roomchanging my veins to shafts of colour as
I trace, retrace.
Vietnamese Boatwoman Raped bi 45 Men Pirating Ship. . .
Thrown into Sea for Dead . . .Swlms Several Miles to Shore . . .
to stand firmly
to tell her story
to go on.

38

Etel Adnanfrom Sitt Marie Rose, a noveltranslated from the French by Georgina KleegeThis is the story of a woman abducted by militiamen during the Civil War in
Lebanon and executed. Editor's note: The passage excerpted comes early in the novel, as
war breaks out. For background and discussion, see Jill Drew's review of Sitt Marie Rosein this issue.

On the thirteenth of April 1975 Hatred erupts. .. . Several hundredyears of frustration re-emerge to be expressed anew. . .. Many factions
participate in the general terrorism, but the principal protagonists remain the Christian right and the Palestinian refugee-militants, that theformer seems to want to eliminate entirely.

•

An obscure story of Iraqis invited to a political discussion by the Christian militia
sparks new fighting. It is already the third reprise of combat and it seems like theinfernal circle will never cease turning.
From my terrace, I see the young couple who live downstairs making love on
their verandah in the middle of the afternoon. Recent events must have stunned
them. They never would have been so innocent normally. Maybe they're trying toovercome their anxiety. For me, time is dead. Action is fragmented into sections sothat no one has an exact image of the whole process. The imagination of those holed
up at horne cannot travel even as far as the nearest bombings. It too halts before thepolice barricades.
My spine is like a twisted, stunted, fallen tree, disappearing in the sun. Attentively, I go through the morning paper. On its reduced pages, are presented regularly,
little paragraphs after little paragraphs, the atrocities of the day. The air is full ofcycles of terror which succeed each other with unbelievable speed. Crime's diversity bursts into broad daylight. When the adversary camp, the Palestinians or theLeft, strikes a blow, the reprisal is immediate: they fire on the Moslem
neighborhoods or on the camps, or else they arbitrarily arrest Syrian workers, on
the street if possible or in the building sites, and massacre them. Then these aretaken to the morgue in packages of twenty or thirty. When they beat up one byhimself, they leave him on the street to be quickly removed, so that no epidemic

39

will start up in these little streets which are less and less spared from shooting.
Saturation and panic begin to make themselves felt. Phone calls between friends
become shorter and more frequent. In the street younger and younger militia men
make their appearance. They employ children for their suppleness. They crawl
under the line of fire and gather up abandoned arms in the adversary camp. They
also learn to love the Party and how to die.
The hospitals are full. As soon as there is a calm that lasts for more than an hour,
one ventures out to a hospital to visit the wounded. There are many amputees. The
cases without hope wait in the hall.
My eyes are like plants that open during the day and close at night. I begin towish that two rockets would pass through my head leaving me intact. . .that's what
it means. Everything becomes primitive. The cells remember the solar pulses of
their first days, back when they were still sleeping, back in the prehuman stage.
Everything that has been learned seems to become blurred. Bodies, too, erupt likehatred, like lemons squeezed to the point of bursting.
The radio announced that due to public pressure there is once again a new
government. Still, no one dares to venture into the street. The explosions havediminished. The intervals of silence are trying, though, because the wait for the
next event becomes unbearable. In a way, the explosions provided a necessary
release. One can't tell anymore.
Wednesday morning, after a relatively quiet night, people tentatively go out. An
odor of hot decay grabs at the throat. It's the second of July and the sun strikes hard
and allover. The sun wearies those who have been hiding inside. The trash cansform mountains on which the children of this parkless and gardenless city' play,both rich and poor. The trash cans have replaced people on the streets. They are
numerous, viscous, and omnipresent. It's hot and windy. Many stores are gutted or
destroyed. Powdered glass is the only thing that seems clean in this filth; it glitterson the asphalt of the streets.
At the Cafe Express a few people talk. A.N. tells me that the Arabs, also, don't
understand hatred of the enemy. They only hate among themselves. They are stillin that primitive stage where only family quarrels interest them, intimate battles,
fratricide. They are only preoccupied with themselves. That's how he explains thefierceness of this civil fight which isn't even a war.
Street after street I cross the city. Beirut is humiliated. She suffered the defeat;she's the one who lost. She's like a dog with her tail between her legs. She washeedless to the point of folly. She gathered the manners and customs, the flaws andvengeance, the guilt and debauchery of the whole world into her own belly. Now
she has thrown it all up, and that vomit fills all her spaces. In the Christianquarters, fierce and puritanical, arrogance flies its flag at half mast. The expressions
on faces are hard. The young people with their khaki clothes, those who carryrifles, those who ride in jeeps without license plates, those who still have hoods,
those who display revolutionary folklore without realizing the contradiction, those40

who spit on every car that passes, those who sell the Phalangist newspaper, all ofthem wear faces of false victory.
The Moslem quarters are more disordered, more colorful. The trash cans here arebigger and more evident. There is less bravado in the eyes and more sorrowful
resignation. There is no panic left except for a crease around the mouth. The remains of barricades are more apparent, more improvised, and a certain nonchalance leaves its impact on gestures, faces, and the atmosphere.
More westernized and efficient in war as in everything, the Christian quarters
have a sort of austerity which links them to certain " pieds-noirs" neighborhoods inNice and Marseille, or to little towns in Sicily and Greece. The Moslem enclaves
still retain the disorder of the Orient which is still the last good in these essentiallybastard countries which have no precise culture except for the one that developed
from a pell-mell of values in a state of disintegration. You would have to seek out
someone squatting in a corner, someone not yet fanaticized by the tornado in orderto touch some semblance of humanity, which, like a compass, still marks themagnetic North of the human species.
But who actually lost besides the inhabitants of this city and a few animals people
forgot to feed or were also killed under the rain of bullets? Horses burned in theirstables at the Hippodrome. This city is like a great suffering being, too mad, too
overcharged, broken now, gutted, and raped like those girls raped by thirty or forty
militia men, and are now mad and in asylums because their families, Mediterranean to the end, would rather hide than cure. . . but how does one cure thememory? The city, like those girls, was raped. Here, passing me now is a Mercedes
taxi, burned out and towed by another. Its black paint is charred like human flesh.
It's like a human being on four instead of two legs, being dragged to the hospital, orto the morgue. It resembles all that has been.

41

Lot 's Wife

Katie Seiden
42Randi Schalet

Judah Macabee's Wife
Who can retell the things that befell us, who can count them?
-from a Chanukah song

Judah's wife is thirsty and tired.
She's been awake since Judah woke
to lead a surprise attack.
How many will come back?
How many to be tended?
The day is rising like parched thunder.
Sarah is crying
and she picks her up.
Judah hasn't touched hersince he joined his father's army.
What if the Hasmoneans lose this battle? Judah says
he'd rather die than see the temple ruined.
She pumps the milk from her other breast into a bottle.
Aaron is too big to nurse
but she won't let him go hungry.
Somewhere soldiers' are marching back to camp.
Sarah sucks her swollen nipple,
the monotonous pulling comforts them both.

43

Navy Dykes* * *photographs courtesy Annette Kennedy

44Annette Kennedy
Two Scenes from The Ladies of the USS Stanton

A Play in One Act
Characters:
Seaman Ida Rae Walters

Thirty-one year old, black woman.

Seaman Mary Jo Masterson

Twenty-four year old, white woman.

Petty Officer 2nd Class
Susan MacGregor

Twenty-two year old, white woman.

MotherBlack woman, mid-forties.

Charles Brinker:

Civilian attorney, white, late
fifties to early sixties.

The set for "The Ladies of the USS Stanton " is the minimum necessary tocreate an ambiance well-suited to the play. It is imperative that the set neither
detract nor interfere with the action or the narrative of the play. The role ofthe set, as well as that of the other elements of staging, is merely to support theaction and narrative rather than to elaborate upon them.
The set for the play is a triptych-shaped backdrop, battleship gray in color.
The only props used are six barstools with red vinyl seats, three broomsticks
cut off to about four feet in length and several rags. The barstools can be easily rearranged for each tableau and provide seating for the five characters, allof whom are on stage throughout the duration of the play.
The lighting is stark and limited to various red and white hues.
The three sailors wear women 's dress uniforms. Brinker and Mother are
dressed in accordance with their roles.

* * *Brinker: .... But, I ask you to look at these young ladies. Could you possibly tellme in good faith that these ladies are members of that abhorrent species known
as "the homosexual"? I think not. Folks, we all know what a dyke is. We've all
been to bus stations and pool ha1.ls and seen those tough, hard-bitten, would-be
men lurking about the public restrooms, preying upon wholesome, American
womanhood. I don't think that even the most shortsighted or narrow-minded
among you could possibly mistake these young ladies for loathsome followers of
the Sapphist cult.
Ladies, you're not homosexuals. Now, are you?
45

(Brinker withdraws and sits down. The sailors arrange their stools in such a way
as to create a rectangular area in the center of the stage, representing an imaginary pool table.)(Throughout the scene the women are playing an imaginary game of pool. the only props they use are the cut-off broomsticks which represent cues. They mime
the gestures involved in playing pool.)("I Will Survive " plays softly in the background.)(Rae and Susan are playing. Mary Jo is watching and waiting to play. She nervously twirls the broomstick in her hand.)Mary Jo (impatiently): Whose shot is it anyway? I wish you two would hurry up.
I want to play.
Rae: Just hold your horses. You'll get your chance. It's my shot and I want to get it
right (walks around the table, eyeing the various possible shots).
Mary Jo: You best get it right. That snot-nose kid's whipping your ass.
Rae: The game ain't ov'va yet. Don't never call the game till it's ov'va.
(leans over to shoot, shoots with great concentration, then sighs andstraightens up). It's 'bout time I got one in. I don't know why I'm playing so

bad today.
Mary Jo: I ain't never seen you play good, Rae (chuckles).
(Susan banks a ball into the corner pocket.)(Rae gives her a slight bow and a nod of approval.)(Susan quickly shoots again and misses.)Rae (leaning over the table, concentrating on a shot): That's okay, Mary Jo. I
ain't gotta worry about whipping your ass. Navy's gonna do it for me (stands
up, deciding to look for another angle).

Mary Jo: Maybe. Maybe not. They gotta catch me first.
Susan (glibly): What do you mean "catch" you? They already caught you.
Anyway, don't be stupid, Masterson. It's your third investigation. Nobody
makes it through three times.
Mary Jo: Since when have you known so much? Did your big brass daddy tell you
all about it? I made it through before. I'll make it through again. 'Sides which,they won't get rid of me. I'm too good at my job.
Rae: Shhiit, there ain't nobody who's that good. The kid's right, Mary Jo. Threetimes is a charm. Ain't nobody makes it through three times.
(She shoots and misses.)

Susan: What are you doing? Trying to give me a break? You set me up perfectly.
Rae: Might as well give you a break, seeing as how nobody else's getting any.
46

Mary Jo: She don't need any, big brass daddy and all. She already got all of her
breaks, Blew ' em all, too,(Susan, flustered, shoots hurriedly and misses.)

Rae: Can't you never layoff nobody?
Mary Jo: Nope, Why in the hell should I? Nobody ever lays off me,
Susan (lecturing) : Mary Jo, if you didn't shoot off your mouth all the time and justminded your own business you would be a lot better off,Rae (looking up from her position bent over the table): Yeah, and so would we,Mary Jo (defensively): There you go again, blaming me for everything, I didn't
make you queer,
Susan (inspired by her own lecturing): Yeah, but if you hadn't said that stuff toCarter, the Lieutenant wouldn't have found out and we wouldn't all be in thismess,(Rae shoots and misses, She is upset and swears under her breath,)

Mary Jo: You think you're so goddamn smart, MacGregorl Well, let me tell you
something, A couple of months back, there was a bunch of girls who found out
about you and were gonna turn you in just 'cause you're such a stuck-up
asswipe, But I saved your ass and talked them out of it.
Susan (visibly taken aback, but then defensive): I can't help being smarter than allof those hillbillies,(She confidently takes a shot which she blunders badly.)

Mary Jo: I ain't never seen no hillbilly make such a piss-poor shot (laughs
loudly),Rae (surveying the table): Well, I'll tell you, I've learned two things since I've
been in this Navy - how to play pool and how to keep my head low,
Mary Jo (mockingly): Is that so, Seaman Walters? Seems to me you ain't learned
either one very good,
Susan (smugly): At least not how to play pool.
(Rae stands hitting the cue against the palm of her hand, her head cocked tothe side,)

Mary Jo (ignoring Rae's anger): Maybe you kept your head low, but not your tail.
Caught riding a wave with your tail up in the air,(She laughs hysterically, The other two are silent.)(Rae shoots, the force of the motion revealing her anger,)

Susan (admonishingly): You shouldn't let your temper interfere with your game(turns her attention pointedly to the table),

Mary Jo: A little hot-headed, huh, Walters?

•

47

Rae (growling): You piss me off, girl.
Susan: Come on you two. You're being childish.
Mary Jo (to Rae): Well, I don't like your face !oo much either (jumps around, herpool cue waving wildly in her hand). (Goadingly): You want to fight? You
want to fight? Huh, huh?
Rae: You're so goddamn dumb, Masterson. You don't even know who yourfriends are. I don't want to fight with you.
Mary Jo: What's the matter with you? You afraid you're gonna lose? Afraid I'm
gonna whip your ass?
Rae (quietly with resignation): Ain't you I'm worried about, Mary Jo. The
Navy's gonna whip all of our asses.
(Rae and Susan return to their Board-room positions. Ma ry Jo is left sitting
alone in center stage)

Mary Jo: Gaddamn, son of a bitch! I can't believe this is happening again. I wasjust beginning to think that my luck was taking a turn for the better. And there
I was, all ready to go to spy school, gonna get to find out all the secret stuff
about the Russians. But, hell no, here I sit in the middle of another Discharge
Board.
It ain't like I'm the only one. There ain't nothing but queers in this Navy. All
those fagotty doctors and brass running around. Do they ever do anything tothem? Hell, no! It's always the little grunts like me. All that stuff you hear about
the Navy being full of queers, well, it's all true and then some. Hell, if'they got
rid of all of us this Navy would go to pot.
Hmm, pot, now that's an idea. How long's it been since I had some goodsmoke and did some heavy-duty partying? 'Bout as long as it's been since I' hada good lay. Shhiit, I'd even settle for a bad lay .
.I just know it was that fucking Lieutenant who turned me in. If I ever see her
again, I'm gonna break every bone in that bitch's body. Acting all buddy-buddy
and telling me I didn't have anything to worry about. Rae sure had her figured.
What do I mean "Rae"? Rae don't know nothing about nothing. It's chickenshits like that always causing problems for everybody else. 'Sides which, all her
laying-low and ass-covering ain't done her no good. Here she is, been in eight
years and busted back to Seaman ' cause she decked some guy for calling her anigger. Ain't as though it was a lie or nothing. I hate this fucking Navy! I hope
they do kick me out. They won't let nobody just be themselves. You can't be anigger or a dyke or nothing.
Brinker (breaking in): Jesus H. Christ! What are you ladies trying to do? Hold on aminute, folks. Don't jump to any conclusions. Let me find out what in the hellis going on before you start making any judgments.
What do you ladies think you're doing, saying all that crap?
Mary Jo: But, you told us to answer the questions honestly.
48

Brinker: I had no idea in hell that you would say things like that. You've reallyendangered your chances of winning this Board. I can't believe that you could
be so stupid.
Mary Jo: But, you said ...
Brinker: I didn't tell you to hang yourselves. (To the audience): Wait a minute,folks. The ladies got a little confused. I'm sure this can be cleared up. You do
understand, don't you?
Ladies, let's try another question. Have you ever stated that you are ahomosexual? Now, for God's sake get it right this time.

* * *(Rae and Susan pick up broomsticks and mime sweeping half-heartedly.)Susan: Where's Mary Jo, skipping out on work again?
Rae: Not this time. The Lieutenant called her into her office.
Susan: It must be something serious. Do you know what she did?
Rae: It's serious, all right. Didn't you hear about what happened between her andCarter?
Susan: No, what happened?
Rae: Oh, here she comes now.
(Enter Mary fa ,)Is the Lieutenant going to turn you in, Mary Jo?
Mary Jo: Hell, no, she ain't gonna turn me in. She's real cool. She ain't gonna do
nothing to me.
Rae: You mean to tell me she's gonna let you off, no hassles?
Mary Jo: Hell, yeah, we just sat in her office and bull-shitted. We even talked about
going out to the bars together. She's family, you know?
Susan: She's family? But, she's an officer.
Mary Jo: MacGregor, you don't know nothing. You think just 'cause somebody's
got shoulderboards that means they aren't as queer as a three dollar bill.
Susan: Maybe. But, what was it that happened between you and Carter?
Rae: You best be careful, Mary Jo, and cover your ass. You gotta watch what you
say, girl. Shit always rolls downhill and we're at the bottom of that hill.
Mary Jo: I ain't worried about the Lieutenant messing with me.
Rae: I'd be willing to bet that we ain 't seen the end of this yet. You don't know
what'll happen when the Lieutenant starts feeling a little heat coming downfrom above.
Susan (exasperated): Would someone please tell me what happened?
49

Mary Jo: You mean you didn't hear? I thought everybody knew. Well, let me tellyou. Yesterday, I was in ironing my blouse, you know (mimes ironing). And
along comes Carter and just plops her skirt right down on the ironing board ndstarts in ironing (mimes Carter stomping in and throwing her skirt on theironing board).

Rae: Did she say anything?
Mary Jo: Naw, she didn't say nothing. But, I says to her, "Hey, what're you doing?
I was here first." She just kind of looked at me funny and then says all snootylike (mimics Carter's tone): "Look, I got to be on duty in ten minutes." And I
said, "Yeah, well, so do I, so just move on off till I'm done."Rae (leaning on her broomstick): Sounds like Carter, all right. Always thinking
she should get some special privilege.
Mary J0 (hands on hips): Yeah, well get a load of this. So then she says to me(mimics Carter's tone): "You know you're very selfish, Masterson. " And I
says, "Yep, that's right. Now, move!" Well, she doesn't move and just keeps onironing (mimes ironing with false levity). So I start pushing on her with myshoulder (mimes pushing with her shoulder) and say, "Hey, you better moveby yourself or I'm gonna move you."
Susan (with disdain): Did you start another fight?
Mary Jo: No, not me. She's the one who wouldn't move.
Susan: So what happened?
Mary Jo: You won't believe this. Carter just turns to me and says,"Masterson, I know you're a lez. So just keep your goddamn, queer hands offof me!"
Rae: Shhiitl
Susan: Did you deny it?
Mary Jo: Hell, nol I says to her, "I wouldn't touch your ugly ass if you paid me to."Rae (laughing): I bet that shut her up.
Mary Jo: Not quite. So then she says, "I'm sick of all you queers being in the Navy.
'Specially the ones like you, Mary Jo, who flaunt it all the time." Well, thatpissed me off real good and I stared the bitch right in the eye and said, "Damnright I'm queer! I'm gay and proud of it!"
Brinker (breaking in): That does it! I've been pushed too far. I refuse to let you
humiliate me like this.
You know, I didn't have to take on this case. I did it out of the goodness of
my heart. My reputation is such that I can pick and choose my cases. But, I
overlooked the fact that being associated with a case like this can ruin alawyer's career. I'm interested in social issues and I'll stick my neck out for50them. And what's more, I'm a gambler. I go for the long shot every time. And
believe me, you ladies were a real long shot. .
But apparently, it wasn't enough for you ladies that you had the full weight ofsocial opinion against you. Believe me, I was ready to defend you with every
trick in the book, but you wouldn't defend yourselves. And I'll be damned if
I'll defend someone who won't defend himself. You acted like a bunch of goddam lambs being led to the slaughter.
Do you even know what the Navy's regulations are? Let me read them to you.
This is taken from SECNAV INSTRUCTION 1900.9D.
"Homosexuality is incompatible with military service. The presence in the
military environment of persons who engage in homosexual conduct or who, by
their statements, demonstrate a propensity to engage in homosexual conduct,
seriously impairs the accomplishment of the military mission by adversely affecting the ability of the Navy and Marine Corps to maintain discipline, goodorder and morale, to insure the integrity of the system of rank and command, tofacilitate assignment and worldwide deployment of service members who frequently must live and work under close conditions affording minimal privacy,
to recruit and retain members of the naval service, to maintain the public acceptability of service in the Navy and Marine Corps and to prevent breaches of
security. Such persons shall normally be separated from the naval service in accordance with this instruction."
The following are bases for administrative separation:"(I) The member has engaged in, attempted to engage in, or solicited anotherto engage in a homosexual act or acts . .. (2) The member has stated that he or
she is a homosexual or bisexual . .. (3) The member has married or attempted tomarry a person known to be of the same biological sex (as evidenced by the external anatomy of the persons involved) .. ."There. Are you satisfied? Is that what you wanted? You didn't even haveenough pride or sense of self-preservation to defend yourselves. You wouldn't
even omit any of the gory details. Since you all want to be such god dam martyrs, you might as well read the Board's disposition. Here, Mary Jo, you're thering-leader. You read it.
(He hands the disposition to Mary Jo who takes it cautiously.)

Mary Jo (reading slowly): This Administrative Discharge Board has concluded its deliberations. By a vote of all to none, we find that Seaman Ida Rae
Walters, Seaman Mary Jo Masterson and Petty Officer 2nd Class Susan
MacGregor have stated that they are homosexuals and that they have engaged
in homosexual acts. By a vote of all to none, we recommend that Seaman Ida
Rae Walters, Seaman Mary Jo Masterson and Petty Officer 2nd Class Susan
MacGregor be discharged from the naval service by reason of.homosexuality.

* * *
51

DEMAREST IDE SANDO"Marble Mumbles was the first book we made together. I am pictured struggling
to speak. At the time, I was very aware of being unable to answer queries for street
directions. I would be stunned for minutes after the people walked 00 . It happened
with men and women. I felt exposed, as if these strangers were going to uncover a
deep secret. Why was I unable to speak? All words vacated my head-·they did notexit my mouth. was it because it is not a women's place to speak, did I feelthreatened as a lesbian?" - - DeSando52

VOL. . 1.J NO. Z
53

Katharyn Machan Aal interviews Judy Grahn

on
Women's Poetry Readings: History and Performance (Part II)(Part I appeared in SW 25)
August 6, 1982, at The Women's Writing Workshops, Ithaca College(transcribed by K.M.A ., edited by J.O. and Sinister Wisdom)*

KMA:Do you feel any different when you read your work than when you readsomebody else's work?
JG: Well, it's much harder to read someone else's work, I find, because to do thework you have to get inside of it. Getting inside someone else's work I havealways found more difficult than getting inside my own. On the other hand,someone else's work, because it's not the core, can be a way to set yourself
up for your own poems by reading it at the beginning. Or reading somethingthat sets the reading up better than anything of your own. Pat Parker said thatwhen she came East she would start every reading with "A History of Lesbianism," for instance, which I wrote, because it would set everyone up.
They would be all prepared then for whatever she was going to do. And I've
done that at times with people's poems. I used to begin with a couple of Susan
Griffin's poems that sort of set the tone and also made it very clear that it
wasn't only lesbian content that we were now going to listen to, in spite of thefact that people were advertising me as Edward the Dyke or something. In
fact, often I would do that on purpose. I would immediately begin with apoem about being a mother, that was definitely not a lesbian poem. Of
course, there are plenty of lesbians who are mothers, but that wasn't thestereotype. So I would try to break the stereotype, is what I'm saying. Just
reading the poetry of different kinds of women helps to break thosestereotypes, too. It also lets everybody know that a writer's work is to be used, that it doesn't belong exclusively to one group of people or another.
KMA:Let me ask you again about-if you can describe for me what it's like to give areading?
JG: Well, let me see. First off, it takes days to prepare. To think about thereading. I always think about that I'm going to do the reading-I always know
when and where it is-and I try to imagine who's going to go. And then I
think about what it is that I would like to read, what-what feels good forme to read and then what I think I ought to read [laughter]. And I try tobalance those. For instance, it is always a lot of fun to read brand-new things,
but it is also often a disaster to read brand-new things, because they haven't
settled in. They're unvarnished when you first say them. And the cadencesthat you think are going to work sometimes don't work at all. If I haven't
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practiced very much with something, I may not know how to follow themood change from the last poem to a brand-new one, and I may read it in atone of voice that is completely off from it-be sarcastic with something thatis very tender, or be flat with something that should be really lively-because
I haven't practiced what it feels like out loud. So I try to practice reading
before I get on a stage. I can remember once practicing Confrontations
with the Devil in the Form of Love and I was completely involved inreading them when I looked down at my feet and my two cats were sitting at
my feet staring up at my face, listening. I thought that was hilariously funny
and a little embarassing, and so I walked into another room and started overagain, doing it again. And I looked down and my two cats were sitting downat my feet staring up at my face, so I just went ahead and read the poems tothem, because obviously they wanted to hear them because they were new[laughter]. Something about the rhythms or the tone of voice or something
they found very curious and appealing. Another thing that happens before areading is-especially right before the reading-is a tremendous gathering ofenergy happens. This translates as stage fright, but it's not fright, it's notabout fear. It's about preparing for that much energy, preparing to put out
that much energy. It seems to gather inside me or inside anyone who performs. Beforehand. It comes in, six hours to a half hour before the performance, and floods through. And it has no place to go so it just moils aroundinside of me and I used to look so nervous people would be astonished,because they translated it as stage fright. I thought it was stage fright, too, butthat isn't what it is. But I would look frightened to death. I would look paleand nervous and I was very distracted and I would pace around and not beable to answer questions, be all ready to run, to leave, anything that would
get me moving, till the moment that I hit the stage. And then it would allgather and have a place to go and go right out to the audience. And that's avery specific reading state. I now understand that energy, that psychicenergy, that's being gathered to pour out to the audience through the words.
But at that time I thought it was fright. I first had to encounter it very often
because I was doing so many readings. I do about forty readings a year,
usually.
KMA:And what happens-you've got the energy going out, it's channeled-what
happens at that point?
JG: Well, when I am up there, the first few minutes I feel with my body what's
happening with the audience. And I don't know how to describe this, justthat I feel how they are. Most audiences are bowl-shaped, and it feels as
though you are leaning into a bowl shape, very receptive. However, one audience I once read to-it was a Left audience and I went and read A Woman
Is Talking to Death, and I went dressed in a pink sweater and a nice pairof slacks, so I looked as though I'd just come from a job or something. They55

were dressed in khaki army jackets and they wanted to hear Castro's speech,a lot of them, in Spanish, even though a lot of them couldn't even understandSpanish, but they were rhetoric-bound people to a large degree, and they
were homophobic to a large degree, and they were anti-woman to a large
degree. About a third of the audience had come to hear me read A Woman
Is Talking to Death and they wanted to hear that poem and they were going to make sure they did get to hear that poem. And so it was an extremely
tense audience, because it was mixed. And it was very big, very large. And
that audience was the reverse of a bowl shape. I could feel a wall that I had towork my words through. I could feel it just as clearly and plainly as if thewall had been visibly there and I were touching it. I could feel this wall ofresistance that I had to try to get my words through. So I was working awayon that, and behind me was a big stage set, a wall, and the entire wall fell onme during the performance [laughter]. It didn't hurt me; it just startled me.
And they came and put it back up and I was-I would have quit at that time.
But fortunately there was a Black actor from the Mime Troupe who was very
interested in what I was saying and so he kept saying, "Let the sister talk,"
you know, urging me to go on. And so I did. I finished it. And at the end
there was a mixed-very mixed reaction. My enthusiasts were ringing
cowbells and so on, and the other side was getting up to argue about how longit had taken me to read it. Being very hostile and stuff. The reason I
remember that reading is because that's what told me for certain that therest of the time I was speaking into a bowl shape, because I could feel what
happened when that wasn't true. I could trust the feeling because I had acomparison. So I could feel how receptive most audiences are for a performer. I once met someone who had had a stroke and for a year after she got
out of the hospital she could see people's auras. She went to a rock concert
and she said that the aura that the audience put out was this gold light thatfilled the whole top of the auditorium in shimmering waves and she couldn't
even listen to the music she was so completely entranced at looking at thisaura of energy that an audience puts out. When I first read, especially when I
read the really heavy things, like A Woman Is Talking to Death, but also
other ones, too, for one thing I would read more vehemently than most poetsand not necessarily as long, not as ponderously. I would pace it differently, I
would pace it more like musicians pace things. And a lot of times the audience would want me to go on. They would want me to read for two and ahalf hours. But if I didn't think they really did , I would read for twenty
minutes, and that way they wouldn't get tired of the poetry. Because I thinkthat poetry readings have tended to be too long and paced wrong. But
sometimes I would come away from the reading completely exhausted, evendepressed. Everyone else would be so happy and joyous and overwhelmed,
and they would have laughed and they would have cried and they would56

have gotten mad; they would have felt tender, they would have got turned on;
and I would have nothing. I would be a dishrag. I would be depressed; Iwould not like anyone; I would wish I had stayed home; I would wonder
why I was doing this; I would be hungry, no one wouid take care of me, and I
would feel sorry for myself. So I knew that I was doing something wrong. I
didn't feel that my depression should be happening, because there was somuch energy in the room, why didn't I have any of it? And I can't explain
what I did to stop whatever the leak was. I must have had a psychic leak, ofgiving too much away. I only know that I decided not to give too much ofmyself away. And I don't know what physical things I went through tochange it, but it almost never happens anymore. Almost always I come out of
the reading if anything more energized than I went in, even if it's a long one. I
feel more calm and more at ease with the world and more happy and more
pleased with myself after the reading than before. Whether anyone is praising
me or not. Just because of the way I do it. That's ideal. If I can do it and that
happens, then that's ideal.
KMA:How does this tie in-You mentioned the woman who'd seen the golden
auraJG: I knew from what she was saying that audiences generate energy. There's noreason for the performer not to get some of that back. If the performer
doesn't, then he or she is giving himself or herself away utterly, and that's
wrong. There should be a circuit that closes. I guess that's what I'm saying.
That the words and the performance itself generate energy out of thissubstance of everyone's belief in it and the energy they put out from being
provoked by it, the aesthetic qualities of it, and so on. And that energy should
include the performer, should be an envelope that everybody is in so thateverybody has access to it and it should never wear a performer out. I don't
mean not be tired-it's tiring, it's exhausting work, I swear I lose weight
when I do it [laughter]. But it should also help your spirits. You should feel
good by the end of the evening.
KMA:I notice that you like to read in more than one set.
JG: I like to rest people's ears and rest my own voice, posture, and sensibilities.
And also, if something isn't going well, if I've hit on some tone of voice that's
wrong or my concentration is bad, sometimes a little break will help me
gather together what it is I'm doing. Or maybe I've saved the really good stuff
for the second set or something. And I can rally a reading that's kind offoundering a little bit. But also it just helps people. Sometimes they want tocomment on what's happened or they want to chat with somebody who's sitting next to them and they don't have a chance to do that. So making a breaklets that happen, lets them respond, lets them move around and not feel socramped and so restless, so tempted to cough and feel they're not allowed. I
think it's a good tactic. If you do it too much, though-if you do it at the57

wrong times-it's a wrong tactic. If people have to wait-and I think it's abad thing to make people wait for very long, especially if they don't havemuch to say to each other and they really did come for the reading andthey're a tired audience, or at times people are right off work or something
and they don't want to wait an hour for you. And I've seen readings where
the organizers were very careless about that and they start the reading too late
and they take too many breaks and people feel as though they're being
cheated for all their attention. So there's a lot of timing that goes into a good
performance. Timing and taking your work seriously. That's the other thingthat I noticed about poets because poets were always apologizing for existing,for writing,for not writing Beethoven or for not writing Beatles' songs or-I
don't know what they were apologizing for but they were eternally-"Iknow this is only a poetry reading .... " When I hear those words I want to
get up and make a speech.
KMA:What would you say?
JG: Well, I would say that some of the most provocative and important material
going is in poetry, and anyone who apologizes for poetry is a fool. Or not apoet. If you have to apologize for your work, why are you delivering it? Why
don't you take it home and work on it until it's good? [laughter]
KMA:Well, that's of course one of the main questions in my study, because there doseem to be writers who say-and I've had this said to me-"I'm a writer; I'm
not a performer." And someone else told me that people go to poetry readings
not to understand the poetry but to see the person in the flesh and blood, rub
elbows with the poet. But [they say] you can't go to expect to understand thepoetry when you hear it because it's meant for the page.
JG: Well, they're wrong. They're really selling something short that has had
tremendous impact and not just among women but whole strata of this society
gets huge numbers of their ideas from poetry. And very often, you know, thepower is not recognized. By the time the power-points of a society arerecognized, they're usually on the wane and it's something else that is really
being influential.
KMA:Um-hmm. That's fascinating to think of [laughter].Last year on the written
questionnaire that I sent you, one of the questions was why do you perform
your work, why do you give poetry readings. And your answer to me was "1
was born to it. " [laughter] I wonder if you would care to elaborate at thispoint on that question?
JG: Why do I give readings of my work. Well, I just know that I was doing thatkind of thing at an early age and I was talking and singing and being enter. taining at a very early age. I remember my mother telling me how entertaining I was to her. Just by" my speech. And my father is also like that. He's avery witty man. He's droll and he's philosophical and he's full of stories andhe's full of philosophy, and he just runs on and on about it. So my head was
58

full of what you can do with words and what you can do with language andhow you can influence other people. I remember reading library books to mymother to entertain her. I just can't imagine not having become a poet andnot having become a performing poet. I can't imagine not having done it.
KMA:This is going back a little bit, I guess, to the history, but how did you first get
the idea? When did you know that poetry readings existed? Do you recall thefirst person you heard read?
JG: It seems to me that at the-in the poetry contests that I used to enter, in mysmall town, that the poets would get up and read their work. Whoever had
won the contest. Because I remember losing a contest once and hearing thepoet read-the prize winner read his work and being thoroughly disgustedwith his work [laughter].
KMA:This was-How old were you?
JG: At that time I was sixteen. I was first entered into the contest when I was
fourteen. My teachers said I should enter the high school contest even though
I was very young, in the ninth grade, and I entered it and won second place,competing against seniors. And the second year I entered and won first place,when I was fifteen. And the third year I entered and was surreptitiously
thrown out of the contest on the grounds that I must have plagiarized the. poem and that sixteen-year-olds simply didn't think that way. It was aphilosophical poem about the irrigation canal and all the different forms oflife that were in the irrigation canal !I.nd what the meaning of that was. And
the difference between the bottom of the canal and the reflection of trees andleaves that was on the top of the canal. It was a very good poem. And I went
to the contest in a-just a state of horror and self-depression and self-loathing,of not understanding and being angry and feeling I must have done something
wrong and what on earth could it have been. And then I heard the first prize
poem read, and it was an imitation Edgar Allen Poe suicide poem [laughter]and it was loathsome [laughter].
KMA:This was in what town?
JG: In Las Cruces, New Mexico. Southern New Mexico. And also I entered aspeech contest and what I did for that was more like a story than a speech,
and it was thrown out of the contest for being too much like a story and notenough like a speech. My speech was wonderful. It was very entertaining andit was funny and it was all about democracy, and it was excluded from thecontest on the grounds that it was a minute and a half too long and wasn't
really a speech. I now realize that the content of what I was saying must havereally frightened them, because almost always when people's form or lengthof time is criticized it's because of the content and not because of the form.
But at that time, what it taught me, besides not to trust contests, not to trust
judges and judgments, was that it was going to be very hard for me to crossforms but that I really did want to because I was willing to lose a contest
59

over it. Of writing in a form that was said to be another form [laughter].
Writing a speech that is a story. There's nothing in the world that says that aspeech can't be a story.
KMA:Except the rules sheets of these contests.
JG: Then later I became a medical secretary and I heard that there were coffee
shops where beatniks read their poetry. I think I may even have gotten up
my nerve and tried to go to one, but as a working girl I would be going out of
my class to do that, because it was a middle class thing to go to beatnik bars
and not a working class thing. · And I probably was just utterly terrified by
the vulgarity of the language and the beards and funny clothes and the jazz,and the fact that everybody seemed so confident and nobody was wearing awhite nurse's uniform. That was when I was about twenty-three, twenty-four.
I didn't feel able to break into that particular underground. Though I had notrouble breaking into the-being a part of the gay underground, which also
wore funny clothes and it did funny, crazy things and was very aggressive,
but that was a different-that was very working class.
KMA:This was in California?
JG: No, this was in Washington, D.C.
KMA:Oh! Uh-huh.
JG: SO, I can't tell you when I heard readings. I saw plays. I saw Jean Genet's
The Blacks. If that isn't poetry I don't know what is. It's very poetic. I was
tremendously influenced by two things. One was Archibald MacLeish's play,
J.B., which I had on a record. And it was done by a poet-I was very impressed that it was done by a poet-I was very interested in anything thatpoets did that was real in the world, that was performable in the world. And
I was very, very fortunate to go to a beautiful-I think it's
Episcopalian-cathedral in Washington, D.C. and hear a performance of The
War Requiem by Benjamin Britten, which is based on the poetry of Wilfred
Owen in World War I-"Move him, move him into the sun." Do you know
his poem?
KMA:Yeah. I'm-Yeah.
JG: They're just completely devastating anti-war poems. Where the dead speak to
the dead afterwards. So uncompromising. He wrote them just before he waskilled in the war. Well, Britten set them to music calling for an orchestra, an
ensemble, a chorus, and some solos, and they sang the poems. Most of theaudience was Washington's upper crust intelligentsia, and they didn't show
any emotion at all that I could see, but I was just almost howling. I was crying
and I was so moved by it and by the beauty of it and by what the words were•ed. note: In New York City beatnik coffeehouses were frequented by working class people (as well as
middle class people). SW

60

saying. In learning about music I was paying attention to what the words andthe music were doing together. I was fascinated by opera, and I still am. I still
think that the greatest art is to write an opera,because you have then to control the stage and music and words in a plot, in a story line, and history. The
earliest opera, for instance, uses words in a different way. It's almost like a
spoken chorale. When the hero is lost in the forest and it's snowing, thechorus shivers: vuh-vuh-vuh-vuh-vuh- vuh-like: that [laughter]. It's a very
homey, folkish and poetic opera by Henry Purcell. I paid a lot of attention to
medieval songs too, trying to understand art, and the forms of it. I didn't pay
any attention to modern poetry and I don't know why. A friend of mine finally asked me why I didn't. But I didn't. I avoided it. I read them. I read
Gregory Corso and Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg. But I never became a fan or agroupie of their work, particularly. Just to admire it and see what theY 'were
doing and go on to what was next. I did become very enamored of RobertCreeley's work, for awhile, back in New Mexico. And I took a writing classfrom William Eastlake, a novelist. And at that time I was trying to think about
plays, the spoken word in plays. And not too long after that I was staying on
the campus of Antioch College and I wrote a play that is basically a poem.
That gives instructions as to how to act out a particular play. And that was
put on by the art department at Antioch College.
KMA:When was that?
JG: '67? Uh, probably '68. That was probably '68.
KMA:I don't want to tire you anymore. This is getting exhausting for you. Is there
anything else-?
JG: I'm very, very hopeful that the work I am producing now- The Queen of
Wands , and then to follow The Queen of Swords, The Queen ofHearts, and The Queen of Diamonds-that they will be performable. I
just have my fingers crossed that they be-please-performable, so that I can
see them and hear them on stage. They're lyric and narrative poems. They
have very tight metaphorical structure, a broad philosophical basis, and they
are definitely meant for the stage as well as the page, which is where I thinkpoetry belongs. It belongs everywhere, but I think that it really comes alive
most thoroughly when it's performable. I like to aim for writing poetry thatworks very well on the page so that people don't have to hear it in order tounderstand it. A lot of oral poetry doesn't work that way. It's only good forbeing read out loud, and that's the other extreme. So I try to aim for somemiddle ground where it works perfectly well in a book and works perfectly
well on the stage. So that it can just be maximally used, maximallyassimilated, and maximally turned into all the other things it can be turned
into.
VI

•••
,.,
61

zana

the place of our crossing
fiorella. little flower; soft fur. you've come to say goodbye, walking the barewood floor of my empty cabin, jumping into my lap. it's been a long while since wespent so much time together as we have these last few days.
you were to be half my cat, in the beginning.. .i'd almost forgotten that. for me
and naomi both it was love at first sight when you straggled out of the bushes, aneglected kitten. together we held you, our fingertips touching in your fur.
when the tom jumped you and you nearly died, i was the one who cleaned thewound with peroxide and dressed it with honey and torn sheeting; naomi held you
still against the terrible pain. 0 fiorella, her curly head was bent so close to mine
and i loved all three of us being like that.
you reminded me of meggy. i thought i'd never have cats again after having tofind a home for her, after my knees got so bad i couldn't get around to feed her,after my cat allergy got past the ignoring point and i couldn't breathe with her in
my bed.
naomi fed you. we shared the costs of food and vet; you slept in naomi's bed andcame over to my porch for love from me.
she came too, bringing her notebook and her cigarettes. that porch was such anequalizer-she could smoke and you could be petted without my lungs closing up.
sitting, i was a match for her-we took turns reading poems, and fine-honed our
visions with each other's advice.
those were sweet days, that summer, when noon lengthened into afternoon andthe notebooks drifted to one side and we talked of past loves and lovers. always, itturned to that. i came to be sure of myself, surer than i'd been in years, but i wasn't
sure about her. if she was really ready.
in ' the fall, it broke. . .the rains had started, and in black boots, striding like a
cossack, i took the hill to her cabin. stood there, my legs giving way a little, as she
opened the door in surprise and let me in out of the drizzle, into the stale, heavy
tobacco air. because something was in the wind and i knew it, between naomi and a
new womon on the land. i had to know what, had to stop it if i could, had to say,naomi don't you know i've been loving you a long time.
when i left her, you ran out the door too, and i hoped you'd come to my porchand console me in your warm fur, but you only dashed distracted into the woods.
it was some nine months later that naomi and i were weighing out the food orderin the main house kitchen, just us, and she said after we had worked in silenceawhile, "dara, do you still have . . .romantic feelings ... about me?"i guess she'd sensed it cross my mind; honestly that was the first time it had in

62

awhile, and just a quick crossing at that. because we were there by ourselves in thequiet kitchen, both bare breasted and both still alone in our lives.
but i looked up as she stood there asking; she seemed now harshly worn; aging as
malnourished hill wimin age. the past months had been as hard on her as on me.
both of us trying to work out the strenuous mechanics of living with so many
wimin, so many different values and understandings; the constant lack of money,
the fears and mistrustings carried over in each of us from learning life in that world
out there. and on top of it/ naomi and i had each slept alone for years, neither of us
quite knowing why.
something stirred in me for her, but if it had ever been desire, it was not now;
and any romantic notions had been ground down relentlessly by her daily tightcheer. i looked at her across the table, her bare breasts, her sagging shoulders, herface as familiar to me as myoid wood stove, and i answered her question, "no."after that, i was angry a long time. because she had breathed such a sigh of relief.
and a lot of the bitterness came back: bitterness that she was so damn afraid i/d bedependent on her, emotionally dependent just because i was physically dependent;
bitterness that both of us kept loving people who couldn't love us back. bitterness,and searing pain, because her fear of my loving made it seem like such a monstrous
thing.
but again that summer i felt love for her. after the "no," after the anger and thebitterness, reawakened the kinship, the longing for someone who spoke thelanguage of a similar life, a similar life work, a similar vision. not that she hadsought to build a wimin/s land collective, as i had; but once she ended up here she
became a bulwark and i knew it was a dream she had not let herself dream. i lay inthe dark at night lonely for her in the midst of so many wimin i felt separate from.
few, men or wimin, had ever struck straight to my core like naomi.
and she was so lonely too that once in awhile there would come a flash, an opening. she always knew she could get something from me if she needed it. she knew
the "no" wasn/t really all. . .and so when her mother died it was me she came to/sometimes, gushing out just enough to relieve herself and then dashing off. i sat inher wake, spent and hollow, wanting to really share, not just be a dumping groundfor her embarrassed pain.
she was the one who drove me up north to the big specialist-that was the kind ofgiving she could do-and consoled me afterward in her awkward, touch-shy way.
and, on the drive home, out came all her fears about losing the skimpy little job she
had, about being so alone in the world with no family left now, shoving the doctor's
verdict to the back of my thoughts, i counseled her with a silver tongue, glad for achance to be strong. as the trees sped by i rattled on, impressed by my own wisdomand disgusted with my smugness. i only wanted to take her in my arms.
funny-you, fiorella, changed so much as she changed. i knew you as skittish, notwanting to be touched unless you chose it. after the night of the black boots you

63came less and less to my door, until weeks would go by when i only saw you at a
distance.
when naomi moved into the main house, yOlJ calmed out. the kids and visitorsand everybody petted you and you sat still for it. i hoped the same for naomi-that
it would be good for her to eat with other people, to have someone around. at firstmaybe it was, but she always sat a little apart, smiling vaguely. at winter's end she
moved back to the cabin on the hill. life streamed by around her as if she were astone.
i kept a distance from her by then, too many times meshing my spirit with hers
only to feel that silent strand of barbed wire.
the months of shared meals may have slowed her weight loss, but didn't stop it.
when i could bear to really look at her, to let in for a moment who she was, it shookmy bones.
i have a picture i took of her the first year, down in the garden, looking up withwarm, surprised eyes. no longer the size 18 of philadelphia, but still plump. pleasingly. on her wrist the silver bracelet of her mother's, impractical for country
chores, but she wore it all the time despite the angry poems she wrote about her
mother. after the death, oddly, she stopped wearing it.
the last time i saw naomi she wore bandages on her wrists. i sat next to her on her
cabin steps, an arm around the bony hunched shoulders that trembled in springwind. we played with you, fiorella, as we used to-that was easy, safe-and shewould drift in and out of where i was to places i couldn't follow. all my brilliant
counseling was worth nothing now: even if there were any jobs anywhere, no one
was going to hire a dyke who thought her food was being poisoned and who looked
like some pale, wilting leaf. who was i to tell her how not to be lonely, how not togo crazy. so we just sat there and she rolled a cigarette with her shaky, stained
fingers, and i watched how the sun patterned the pine boughs beyond her head.
fiorella, your mama went to the state hospital. for all our new-society idealism,
none of us knew how to help her heal. you went around questioning, not reallylooking for her but wondering what to do. someone else fed you, and more often
now you would come to my porch for love. i wrote naomi a short, unemotional,
newsy note-you were doing fine but missing her, the cauliflowers were heading
up. i had nothing else left to give her.
the last i heard she was released, zombied out on their drugs, gone south
somewhere with no forwarding address. she left her car and books here for
whoever wanted them. she didn't leave word what to do with you and so you continue to be everyone's cat and no one's. .. but it is not so new for you to take care ofyourself.
you are still a small cat but there is a strength in you. your fur no longer carries
the musty smells of tobacco and marijuana; you are more your own now like awoman newly widowed after a smothering marriage. you are more my kind of cat

64now, but i am not able to take care of you, and i am leaving, so i am leaving withoutyou.
i wonder what naomi would think if she knew i was going? it was my dream,
after all-i came into this thing with such strong envisioning. i leave still believing it
could be done-only not here, not among wimin so different, so haphazardly andnewly come together.
so here we are, fiorella, you and me sitting here with the bare echoing boards
underneath our feet. maybe we'll meet again and maybe not-and i guess you know
as much about naomi 's path as i do.
i'm glad you came to say goodbye.
",#I"e,.,,""'.'" ""c·,-,·,·c···"""""",#¢"",,'. ,,.,#,~·.!

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Jyl Felman

CrisisEdith Rebecca Greenblatt had been in severe psychic pain for weeks. She did notwant to see anyone, not even Hilda Schwartz, her part-time lover. Edith did notknow where the pain had come from. She wondered if the pain was Jewish pain,
and then decided it had to be real, because last week she had unplugged her phone.
She had finally cut herself off from the goyim; but the~ Schwartzie couldn't get
through either.
Wednesday night after plugging her phone back in, Edith picked up the receiver
and asked for help. She called Alice Blakely, a name she had picked from a random
list of local therapists in the yellow pages. There had been nine women listed as
professional therapists, but only Alice Blakely had had an opening. Edith swallowed hard before telling her new therapist that she was a writer and a lesbian. She had
coughed and couldn't get the words out when she tried to tell her new therapist that
she was a Jew. An appointment was set for 9:15, Friday morning. Edith hoped she
could wait that long. When she put the receiver down, she unplugged her phone.
Friday morning, she drove slowly. How was she going to explain her condition toa total stranger? Edith wanted to be specific. I'm in crisis, seemed a good place tostart. Turning onto Wild Knoll Drive, she counted the houses. One, two, it was thethird blue house on the left. A huge German Shepherd came leaping out from theside of the house, waiting to pounce on Edith as soon as she opened the door. It was
definitely insensitive to have a barking dog leaping out at your clients.
As soon as she turned the motor off, the dog was still. The least Alice could havedone was warn her. She got out of the car without taking her eyes off the animal

and continued staring at him until ·she reached the side of the house. Nothing happened. Edith opened the door and sat quickly down on the couch. She was in a
waiting room.
The dog had slowed her down; it was already ten after nine. Edith liked to arrive
early. She needed the extra few minutes to think about what she was going to say.
'I've been depressed for a long time, ' sounded 'better than 'I'm in crisis. ' After all
she didn't have any real proof except that she had unplugged her phone. She didn't
know what was wrong with her, but her relationship with Schwartzie was absolutely not the issue. If there was one thing Edith Rebecca Greenblatt knew about
herself, it was that she loved loving Jewish women. Even that didn't sound right.
On the table next to the cou.ch she noticed several diplomas in cheap black
frames. They were stacked one on top of the other like the magazines in her
dentist's office. Edith had never seen diplomas displayed that way. She picked up
the top one. ALICE BLAKELY IS HEREBY AWARDED A MASTER OF SCIENCES

66

DEGREE IN SOCIAL WORK. Social Work . Alice had said nothing about social
working over the phone. Edith pictured herself talking to someone who went into
people's homes looking for poverty and child abuse. She could almost hear the
woman's soft knock on the inner city door, her arms full of Shop & Save groceries.
Edith knew she needed a therapist, n9t a saint.
She continued reading, THE TOWN OF CONWAY, NEW HAMPSHIRE,
HEREBY AWARDS ALICE BLAKELY A CITATION IN EXCELLENCE IN HER
FIELD. SHE IS AN EXEMPLARY CITIZEN. This woman did not seem to be what
Edith had in mind. She needed more than a good Samaritan to get her out of crisis.
She needed a strict disciplinarian. Somebody compassionate, smart, but not too
nice. Edith hated nice women.
The last degree confused her the most. The document testified that Alice Blakely
had completed a course in T.A. So she was no longer a social worker, she was a
Transactional Analyst. Edith noticed that she had only completed the course lastyear. Edith did not feel like being a guinea pig. She was afraid of experiments. The
rats always ended up dead or with cancer.
The door in the waiting room opened. A very white woman with greying blondhair walked in. A WASP, Edith choked. She should have known better. After all,how many Jewish therapists were there in Conway? How many Jews were there in
New Hampshire? Edith Rebecca Greenblatt had not adequately prepared herself fortalking to a gentile. On the phone these things never registered. She could never tell
how white someone was over the phone. Edith knew she was capable of talking to
all kinds. But always in the past, she had needed time. Her last therapist had notbeen a Jew, Edith reminded herself; she had been an Italian.
Alice Blakely held her gentile hand directly in front of Edith's.waist, waiting for
Edith's Jewish hand so they could shake together. Edith swallowed; she liked thatthe woman was clearly middle-aged. She had wanted to talk to an older woman.
She shook Alice's hand with vigor. She wanted to let Alice know that she was totally committed to working with her.
"You must be Edith. I'm Alice Blakely. I hope you weren't waiting long.""Hello." Edith was not going to mention that Alice's dog had accosted her. She
did not want her new therapist to think she was afraid of animals.
"Come in. Sit down." She followed Alice into her office. She liked the shape ofher body, not fat , just round and curvy. She did not feel fat next to this woman.
That was good because Edith hated to be heavier than her therapist. Edith's Italian
therapist had been bone thin; they had spent weeks talking about compulsive
eating. Finally Edith had learned to like her own body. Today she did not want totalk about eating. Alice Blakely's plump little body reminded Edith of her big
sitting-up pillow which had always been a tremendous comfort to her.
"I can't sit too close to you. I'm just getting over a cold," Alice said pushing her
chair what seemed to be yards away from Edith. Maybe Alice didn't want to sit
close to her clients because she was afraid of catching depression. It seemed more

67

WASPY than anything else. When the Jews had a cold they all sat around blowing
each other's noses. In fact, Edith had seen her parents share the same square whitehandkerchief. But this was not the first time a WASP had had a cold and refused tosit next to her. Edith knew how to respond. She pushed her chair as far away from
Alice's as possible, trying to show that she was sympathetic to the situation.
Once both women were seated, Edith looked around the room. It was more like aden or a playroom for kids than a counseling room. A huge playpen filled with stuffed animals was off to the left side of the sitting area. There was a blackboard on aneasel near the couch. Colored chalk was in the tray with the erasers. Edith tried
hard to get the feel of the room. But she was unable to get one single sensation.
Alice sat up, blowing her nose. In a minute her kleenex would be neatly returned tothat place directly beneath her watchband where women-with-colds
tucked their hankies.
Alice sniffed. Edith looked for a cross around her neck. None. Good. She
wouldn't be distracted. There was nothing worse than talking to a woman with asilver cross around her neck. Edith could never concentrate whenever she saw
Christian jewelry. She always felt as though she were being converted.
''I'm depressed. I think I'm in crisis." Edith looked at Alice who was nodding
her head with only her neck. Edith wondered if this was Alice's listening pose. The
Jews listened with their whole bodies. They pushed their chairs in closer the moreinteresting the story became. They folded and unfolded their hands. Alice Blakely
listened more with her head. Her entire body remained motionless. She looked as
though she was sleeping with her eyes open.
"I feel self-destructive." Alice blinked. "It's nothing to worry about. I'm used to
the feeling by now. I can usually recognize it before I do anything drastic." Alice's
mouth had opened several times and then closed immediately. Edith wasn't sure if
she was gasping for breath or trying to interrupt with a good therapeutic question.
"That's not what I really want to talk about. I just wanted to give you somebackground. I've been unhappy for days. I can't seem to shake it. " Edith had
started talking with her hands.
"Could we get back to the self-destruction?" Alice was taking notes. Edith
watched her underline the word self-destruct. She smiled to herself; it felt good tobe taken seriously. She also liked talking about depression. It was one topic she
knew a lot about.
"I've always thought if I was going to kill myself, I'd take rat poisoning. I
remember learning in Hebrew School that the Jews of Warsaw carried cyanide
tablets in small silver chains around their necks. When they couldn't defend
themselves any longer they went down below the city to the sewers and swallowed
the poison in private. They didn't want the Czar's army taking credit for their
deaths. I want to die the same way.""You're Jewish?" Alice said the word Jewish very loud. Edith sensed she didn't
say the word often.

68

"Yes, I am a Jew. I like being a Jew. That has nothing to do with why I'm here."
Every time Edith said Jew her voice got louder and louder. She wished Alice's cold
would get worse so Alice would have to push her chair farther away.
"Why is it you want to kill yourself, Edith?" Good. She was being addressed by
name.
"I'm a writer. I write fiction, short stories, only I haven't written for months. I
need you to help me do my work. I want to write." Alice was still writing furiously
into her notebook.
"I've got to tell you what I'm thinking. I don't want to upset you or anything."
Alice's neck shook her head; she put her pencil down. "It's okay that you're not alesbian. I can handle that a whole lot better than the fact that you're not a Jew. I
mean you are a woman. " Edith was quiet for a few seconds. "Just what is your experience with Feminism? You ARE a FEMINIST aren't you?" Edith was almost
screaming.
"Of course I am for equal rights and equal pay." Alice whispered. Her left hand
was tucking her kleenex further under her watchband. "I do have a daughter you
know.""What does that mean?" Edith had not come here to discuss politics. She hardly
knew how they had got onto women. Edith just wanted to talk. She could seeherself sitting in front of her unplugged phone, watching the receiver, hoping thephone would ring anyway. She had to tell Alice about staring at her unplugged
phone; about not letting any more goyim in.
"Well, it means that I support the liberation of women, for my daughter's sake,her future :' Alice coughed. "Do you always interview your therapist?" She glanced
at her notes. "Now what were you saying?""JUDAISM." Edith bit her tongue so she wouldn't say anything else. She thought
she was going to cry. Maybe she should apologize to Alice. But Alice was still looking at her notes. Edith couldn't seem to get her complete attention.
"I think I'm pretty upset about all this. What do you think?""What's this?""I forget that New England doesn't have a whole lot of Jews ... there's mostly gentiles. Every time I. .. ""Mostly what?" Edith watched Alice write herself a note in the margin of .her
notebook. Maybe she was reminding herself to look up more about the Jews.
"I'd like to get back to my depression. I don't want this Jewish thing to come between us. I'm used to being around gentiles." Edith was going to offer to spell gentile for Alice.
"Do you know much about Transactional Analysis?" Alice had jumped up andwas standing next to the blackboard. She had the blue chalk in her hand. Edith had
no idea why they were looking at the blackboard. She had not finished explaining
her suffering. "In T.A. we divide the psyche into three parts." Alice was beaming.
This was something she knew about. Edith stared at the three blue circles Alice69

drew on the board. Inside each circle she put a different letter of the alphabet. The
first circle had a "e" then there was a '.'p" and an "A". Alice's head kept turningfrom the blackboard to Edith. She was making eye contact. "We in T,A. see thehuman being as though he were in constant struggle between the parent, adult, andchild in himself." Who was this we? And was this divided psyche a Jewish or
goyisha psyche? Edith had divided her own psyche quite a bit differently than theT.A, people, She wondered if she should interrupt. "The parent constantly corrects
us. The parent constantly says SHOULD! We are most unhappy when the parent
takes over. We feel forced to behave in ways we don't want to." That sounded likethe Jew in her. Edith was always telling herself that she should give more money toIsrael and eat less bacon and ham. "The adult on the other hand ... " Alice seemed
far away. Perhaps she had forgotten Edith was there, asking for help, "The adultmakes responsible choices based on his wants, needs and responsibilities withinsociety at large." Edith recognized that her adult-self was the lesbian in her. The
most adult decision she had ever made was to come out of the closet. "And thechild always cries whenever he doesn't get his way, or whenever he feels totally
misunderstood, "Alice wasn't exactly an artist. Her drawing was all stick figures, but obviously she
had perfected her technique while in training, Edith was trying to figure out her
child-self. Maybe the writer. , .she was always crying because she couldn't write.
That was one of the things she had wanted to talk about. Alice had returned to her
seat. "Did that help you?" She looked pleased. She had not blown her nose once
throughout the entire performance.
"WeIC to tell you the truth, I could have gotten the same idea if you had stayed inyour seat." Alice nodded, appreciating her client's honesty. "But it was helpful. I
can see the child in me takes over a lot." Her own neck was stiff watching Alice's
head go up and down , She seemed to agree with whatever Edith had to say.
Evidently honesty was highly valued among the T.A, people. Edith wanted toscream; why didn't Alice Blakely tell her to be quiet and listen, Somebody had tobe willing to tell Edith that she didn't know everything,"I think your problem is with the child in you." Immediately Edith sat up, anddecided not to scream. "In T,A. we try to isolate that part of the psyche which issuffering the most."" Do you think you could stop saying in T.A. we.. , I mean I'm just not sure who
is talking to me, I like to think you can make your own conclusions about my life,"
Edith wondered if she'd gone too far; she felt the child in her was taking over.
"I'm not sure what you mean, but I can see you are in pain.""It's not that I don't like you, I do. And I don't want to tell you how to run thissession, but couldn't you just stop saying that phrase, in T,A. we? I stop listening assoon as you say those words." Edith tried to smile at her new therapist, but Alicewas staring hard at her client as if she was trying to make her disappear,70

"You see, I was right. The child in you is most unhappy. I'm sorry if my method
offends you." Edith wanted to pick Alice Blakely's round little body up off its gentile seat and shake it up and down until the woman yelled at Edith to shut up. Alicejust sat there staring hard and cold at her. She was absolutely the most unreachable
human being Edith had ever met in her entire life. Edith felt herself withdrawing.
In fact she wanted to get up and run out to her car, but she was afraid the German
Shepherd would get her. Edith decided to be a good client. She put her hands
together and then placed them directly into her lap.
"I want to write my stories, can you help me?"
"Do your parents know you're a lesbian?""What?""Your parents, your mother ... ""Oh no, of course not." Edith had decided long ago never to tell her parents
unless they asked first. Jews tended to see all things they didn't understand as
tragic. And Edith somehow knew that having a grandmother who survived
Auschwitz and having a lesbian in the same family were incompatible if yourparents were Jews.
"What I think I am really upset about is my writing." Edith said it louder, "I'm
blocked.""It seems to me your mother would want to know that you have found someone . . .""I do not want to tell my parents. They wouldn't understand. Besides, I like coming home for Rosh Hashanah and the Seder.""Seder?""Passover. ""Oh, yes, that's like our last supper, isn't it? About the child in you, Edith you
seem so unhappy. Worse now than when you came in. It just seemed to makesense, that if your mother knew about you and a .. .""Schwartzie.""Schwartzie, you would be a lot happier. Do you enjoy yourself much?" Alice
had stopped taking notes.
"Actually, I can't remember the last time I was really happy. It seems to me I
have always been sad." Edith wanted to curl up in a little ball. She hated reminding
herself how unhappy she was. There had never been anyone who could help her.
She wanted to ask Alice if she understood about her parents, but that didn't seem tobe the issue anymore.
"Can you remember specifics?""There's not a whole lot to tell. I just seem to be unhappy all the time. I don't
know why.""It is clear. You do not enjoy yourself. ""Yes." Edith already knew that.
"Do you think being a Jew has made you unable to have fun?""What does being Jewish have to do with not being able to write my stories?"
71

"In T.A. we like to go back to the beginning, you know Genesis. We feel it's important to understand our roots.""I already understand where I come from. This is absolutely not helping me."
"I'm sorry you feel that way. I think you are resisting. I have seen this kind ofreaction before. Your kind always think you're right." Alice was determined tocounsel Edith.
"I'd like you to get in this playpen." Alice was schlepping the thing over toEdith's chair. "I want you to get inside and play with the animals."
Edith had never done anything like this before. She decided to go along with
Alice. Nothing could make her feel worse than she felt now. Besides, it would makea great story, no matter what happened. Maybe Alice did know what she was doing; maybe Edith would be happier after she got inside the playpen. She got up
from her chair and lifted her right leg up so high she almost fell over the top bar.
Jumping off the ground slightly, she was able to put her foot evenly down on thepegboard floor. One more jump and she was inside waiting for her next set of instructions.
"Good girl. How do you feel?" Alice was clearly happy. Everything was back theway the T.A. people said it should be.
Edith tried to get comfortable. The bottom of the playpen was hard. She could see
why children never stayed inside for long. She was uncomfortable herself. But forthe sake of becoming a happy person, or at least a good story, she would try tocooperate.
"Pick up your favorite animal and talk to it. Tell it everything you always wanted
to say as a child, but kept buried inside yourself instead. We in T.A. do this all thetime. We call it reconnecting." Alice was almost singing. She had a lovely little
shiksa voice. Edith could just see Alice dressed in a purple choir robe, singing
about Jesus Christ and smiling one big grin. Edith wanted to ask her to stop saying
the T.A. slogan, but it didn't seem worth the effort. Instead she looked around forher favorite animal. As a child she had played nonstop with a small tan fox. "I really don't have a favorite, Alice. None of these is my kind.""Can't you just pick one? I like the giraffe myself. Try the giraffe. Go on pick it
up, Edith.""Alright." The giraffe 'was cute. His head was about six inches from his body.
That reminded Edith of herself. Lots of times she felt like her Jewish body and her
Jewish mind were miles apart. Edith liked the brown spots on the giraffe. "This
isn't working." She put down the stuffed giraffe and looked for Alice's face throughthe bars.
"What do you mean, this isn't working? Of course it is." Alice was taking notes.
"I'm not happy. I don't feel anything.""You're not supposed to feel or think. You're supposed to talk to that giraffe so I
can observe you. Now start TALKING." Alice didn't even look up from her
notebook; she was too busy writing. Edith could almost feel the word RESISTING
72

coming out of her pencil as she wrote. Edith felt ridiculous. What was a twenty-six
year old Jewish lesbian doing on the floor of her goyisha therapist's playpen? Edith
stood up; she dragged her right leg ov~r the top bar.
"What are you doing?" Alice had finall y looked up from her notebook. She walked over to Edith. "Don't you understand, you have to stay in there. It's for yourown good." Alice tried to push Edith back inside. She had her hands on Edith's
shoulders. Edith was sure Alice wasn't very strong. Edith counted to three. She collected her strength. She sucked in all the air she could and then heaved straight up.
Alice fell back. For a moment both women were completely still. Edith felt herself
taking over the session, but that was not what she wanted at all . She didn 't knowwhat to do with herself. Alice walked slowly back towards the playpen; she
straightened her hair. Edith could feel her thinking. If Alice tried to touch her
again, Edith knew she would jump up and lash out at the woman. Edith had been
listening for too long. She was exhausted. All she wanted was to be held, to have
her head massaged gently so she could sleep. Alice wasn 't going to let her sleep.
Edith saw it in her eyes. Alice's hands were on top of the playpen. She leaned over,bending her head inside the cage. She put her face as close to Edith's as she
possibly could without touching her. In a very loud voice she said, "GET OUT.
You are obviously resisting treatment so get out." Alice took her head out of theplaypen and looked at her watch.
Edith couldn't talk. She didn't know if she was supposed to get out of Alice's
house or just get out of her playpen. She couldn't believe she had almost tried tobeat up her therapist. She didn 't think she could ever tell anyone. Who would
believe her?
"We have to end now. We've already gone over our time limit. I am going to ask
you to do one more thing - not for me - for yourself, Edith. It's up to you ofcourse.""Yes?" Edith hated favors.
"I want you to be depressed for fifteen minutes every day until your next appointment. I want you to sit in your room, or wherever you get depressed the best.
Keep telling yourself how horrible you feel , think about being Jewish, and then see
if you can cry a little. Write it all down and we'll talk about it. " Edith nodded.
"I hope I have helped you. Your kind of depression is quite severe. Why don't
you come again Monday?"That was only three days away. It seemed too soon. Edith wasn 't sure that she
ever wanted to see this W0.man again. "Yes, that's great." Why was she agreeing tocome back? Why couldn't she say no? "What time?""Three o'clock.""Okay." Edith stood up.
"Do you want a hug?" Edith didn't believe what she just heard. She turned
towards the door. Alice stood in front of her with her arms stretched out, ready toembrace Edith with the whole of her Christian body. Edith thought maybe this was73

a trick, and that if she hugged Alice back - her therapist was really going to try andhit her or force her back into the playpen. Edith stared hard at Alice. She waswrong. The end here where Alice gets to offer her client a hug, was her favorite
part. That's what she must be known for. HUGGY ALICE BLAKELY. No matter
how the session went, she always hopped up in the end, waiting to take her client
into her breast. Edith shuddered. That was one breast she could live without.
"No thank you.""Oh, I should have known, you're not the hugging type. I can see it now." Alicelooked relieved. She had reunited her arms with the rest of her body. She had probably never hugged a Jewish lesbian before and didn't know exactly what to do.
They shook hands instead.
On her way to the car, Edith told herself to plug her phone back in as soon as she
got home. First she would call Alice Blakely and cancel their Monday appointment.
Then she'd call Schwartzie and tell her The Depression was beginning to lift.
Maybe next week they could drive into Boston for blintzes .

•••LABVRIS, a bi-annual feminist arts journal
invites submissions of poetry, fiction.
and essays on women writers
and artists.
Please include S.A.S.E.
Sample copy of Labyrisavailable for 3.00.
Subscriptions: $5.00/year.
All correspondence to:
LABYRIS PRESS
P.O. Box 16102
Lansing. MI 48933

o $8 Regular

0 $12 Supporting

Make checks payable to :Reproductive Rights National Network. 17 Murray Street
New York, New York 10007

74

0 $_ _ Sustaining

Name _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __Address _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __Clty _ _ _ State' _ _ _ Zip _ _•Pat M. Kuras

S'll Vaus Plait
She wears a pastel-colored pantsuit,miscast among the denim-slacked, flannel-shirted crowd.
She left the make-up off; still on the vanity at home.
But she clings to the huge brown leather bag,
as if she may withdraw into it, pullingthe zipper shut over her head.
First night in the bar andshe smiles timid, hopefully, atthe flurry of bodies that
nonchalantly buzz around her.
No one sees or cares.
She is a misfit, as
her sexual longings have always told her.
(Even here, she does not belong.)
Soon she will slither from the stool and,like a dissolving pool, evaporate
through the door andfade into mist.
Return is unlikely.

from The Pinball Player
75

Roz Calvert

White Trash GirlWhite trash girlain't you scared of me
like I'm scared of you?
Afraid we gonna blow our covergonna name each othergonna wind up back where wejust bust outta - flippin' burgers,
pluckin' turkeys - and waitin'
Ain't I afraid you're gonnalook too close, remember me,
and see . . .there ain't nobank account, resume, insurance planno plan at all
and still 1'm walkin' round soft,
soft on the edge of the carpet

Ain't it funny
Do you recall?
Hillbilly, hick, greaser girl. My folks called yours,
That trash up the hill
And your folks called mine,That trash down the road

Powdered milk face girlI seen you
gettin' offa the greyhound bus
back then, the same day I did
But I was surethat you and me
was goin' different places76Red-fox eyed girlI seen you too, at the parties
and po-lit-ical affairs
over-admirin' your own new shoes
goin' for the beerwhen they start to talkabout root canal and school vacations

Ain't it funny
Do you recall?
Hillbilly, hick, linthead girlWhen yer mama gave mine
her Friday tips
for my sister to go
to the doctor
and nobody told
nobody's papa

White trash girlain't you scared of me
like I'm scared of you?
Afraid we gonna rock the boat
if we start to talkabout pov-er-ty
and corn meal mushin the middleof the fem-in-ist
rev-o-lu-shun?

Shun, shun
you never been my lover
Shun, shunnever ate nobread nor beans, together
Shun shamenever killed no pain, together

77White trash girldo you ever thinkyou gonna choke
down that coun-try
silence?

Shun shamecall my name
Hillbilly, hick, greaser girlHillbilly, hick, linthead girlMy mama said false prideThat ain't no pride at all
Shun shamecall my name
Hillbilly, hick
White trash girl.

78

Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz

former friend
as if
my ass in plaid slacks is backing the door
open mt arms clutching pizza withsalami to go large while youpause then sip white wine & eat
saladfrom a glass plate as if
sweaty in green & blue arnel ispill wine everyone sees on thecream carpet while youin lilac silk smile
telling me not to worry it will
dry in no time as if
behind the counter with aching legs i'm
doodling
on a sales pad while youa run in your stocking but
each hair in place enter
the dressing room to put on new
stockings you paid me 99¢ plus
tax for just to finish the day orwhen we hug i crack your bones orwhen i cry groping for something
your eyes get hard on the street
you say "hi" but i talk
too loud next door am too
close clinging as if
grabbing your sleeveof natural fibers
in muted tones
1981·84
79

Gloria Anzaldua

Ms. Right, My True Love, My Soul MateI go to the place where I can be alone,where no one will bother me, where I do most of my rituals: the bathroom. I'm sitting on the john smoking a cigarette and picking buggers out of my nose. Tan, tan,someone's fist is banging on the door. "1 don't want to buy any. Come back tomorrow.""Open the door, Loka," my roomie yells
out. "There's a woman here to see you and I need to use the potty before I go out. ""Can't I even take a shit in peace? It's myturn in the bathroom," I call out, pushing the door open with my foot. "Why is it so
hard for you to stick to your schedule-you shit in the morning and I shit at night. ""What can I do for an ingrown toenail?" I
ask a woman I've never clapped eyes on before. She's dressed in black wet-looking
shirt and pants and she's made herself at home on the edge of my bathtub.
"Put turpentine around the nail," she tells
me, flicking back a wing of black hair that's fallen over her right eye. She pinches
her nose and averts her face. "Yuck," she says. "Do you want tea or something.
The kitchen 's that a way," I say.
"Or something," she says. "Look, ruca, I
came for the suitcase Juan left with you.""What suitcase? Oh, that one. It's been
here for years. " I flush the toilet and pull up my shorts. I look under the bed, in theclosets, in the cabinets under the kitchen counter. "Hey, I know where it is." It's
under my desk, I've been using it as a footstool. Such a drag being short. I can't
type with my feet dangling, it brings the blood down from my brain into my toes.""Ay, ruca, maybe that's why you have an
ingrown toenail," she tells me, a smirk on her face.
I wrinkle my nose at her then pull out thesuitcase and toss it onto the bed. I open it before she can stop me. An odor of dank
herbs fills the room. "Que feo apesta, whew. What did you and Juan put in here?" I
say picking up one of the burlap packets and holding it arms length between thumband forefinger.
"Hierbas, mama," she says.
"Oyes, tu, you can take this brujeria out ofhere right now. I don't truck with no witchy magic."

80

"It was a Houston -based operation," shesaid. "We pushed each bag for a couple of hundred. To rich gringos, mostly. Of
course, it costs more than that now that the chota's got a scent of it."
"I'm not surprised," I tell her. "They cansmell this stuff all the way to Mexico City. Do you snort it or eat it or what?""You make cigarettes and smoke themthrough your cunt. Or you can put it in orange juice or make tea with it. Give it fiveminutes and you'll see whatever you most desire right in front of you. Yeah, ruca, I
know it's hard to believe but you really get what you want. You wanna try it. ""1 don't know. Do you remember 'The
Monkey's Paw'? Well, it's a short story about these two old people who have losttheir only son. His body got mangled in some machinery. They make their wish
and then there's a knock on the door and they know it's the son or what's left ofhim," I tell her.
"Ey, come on, raza. Would I kid you abouta thing like this? There must be something you've always wanted and waited for.
Truth is I don't like to owe no one no favors. One bag for you and we're even. "We take off for the open kitchen. "What is
it you 've been wanting most for a long time?" she asks me as she lights a longbrown cigarette.
"My one and only, of course. Ms. Right,
my true love, my soul mate. I've been wanting and waiting for her all my life. "She looked at me as if I were demented.
"Waiting?" she scoffed putting her boot on
the chair and leaning her elbow on the raised knee. "Well, not no more. This little
bag of hierbas will end your waiting. Right now. Ten minutes at the outside.""You mean she's just around the corner, or
coming to knock on my door?""Yeah, ruca, she's in every corner. You'llsee."
I dump one of the packets into the boilingwater. Then being the hospitable mexican that I am I bring down two cups.
"No, no, yo no quiero. You have to drink
the whole packet or else it won't work," she says as she paces back and forth , thesound of those black boots that come up to her knees is loud enough to raise thedead. "Look, I gotta go. I just want to see you down the stuff then I'll split. In ten
minutes I can be half way down to Mexico. Andale, mujer, apurate."

I emptied the little bag in the boiling waterand set about stirring the mixture. I've never liked waiting so when she turned herhead to look out the window I dumped 'one of the bags I had pocketed when she
hadn't been looking. To be on the safe side I dumped in a third. $600 worth of the
stuff should have some sort of effect on me. But you've guessed it, I'm a sceptic.
81

Waiting and "the one and only" came together. Who'd ever heard of "the one andonly" coming without waiting?
So Ms. Skeptic stands there staring at the
woman's long slender fingers holding the long brown cigarette and trying to thinkof withering things to say to her when the five minutes are up. But it was like she
said it would be. The thing I most desired in the whole wide world was standing
there before me and she looked even better than before. What a beauty, the thicklashes, the lips like shiny plums, nipples pushing against the black shirt. Luscious.
"My soul mate," I cried, lunging myself at her. She pushed me away, grabbed aflyswatter and started swinging it at me.
"Don't you know me?" I asked. I was.
shocked. Hadn't we been soul mates dozens of lifetimes? Imagine, not remembering your lover of eons full of embraces. La cagada no -se acordaba de mi. Somepeople can be so fickle. "Please," I say, hating the whining in my voice. "Just let
me touch you." If I touched her she'd come to her senses. One kiss would wake hersoul. And she too would see her "one and only" standing before her. If that doesn't
work I'll force the tea down her throat, the bitchl I knew exactly how to do it. The
way was described perfectly in the last murder mystery I'd read.
"Please, I feel dizzy. What did you put inthat tea?" I said putting my hands up to my face, my 'body swaying back and forthlike a cobra's.
"Now, don't faint on me, woman. No one
that's done tea's ever gotten sick." She half drags me to the bed and tips me over. I
topple and land on one end of the suitcase. A cloud of dust rises making my eyes
and mouth water. As she tries to pull the suitcase from under me I reach up andpull her down.
The jury buzzed with unease when I first
told them the story. "How many times do I have to tell you?" I yelled at the prosecutor. "I only meant to kiss her." A woman, then a man and another and anotherscream things at me.
"Order, order in my court," thunders thejudge, his gavel making holes in the wood top. "One more peep out of any of you
and I'll have you out on your ear. ""Something made me do it. I lost it. I
wasn't myself. She was my 'one and only,' my soul mate. Don't you understand,I'd been waiting for her all my life. We'd finally found each other. She was so
stupid she didn't even know who I was.","You ate herl " the persecuting attorneysaid. "Aren't you happy. You have her at last, all of her." I stood there head bowed, a smile beginning to pull up the edges of my mouth. Like they say, you are what
you eat. Sucking on her red red heart, on eyes smoother than grapes, nibbling
fingers and toes more tender than chicken wings, chewing hair crisp as lettuce. I'deaten every inch of her. It took me a while, but finally I'd performed a total merger.

82

She was now flesh of my flesh - every lover's dream. My soul mate could never
never leave me, I thought to myself, fingering the amulet around my neck. People
think it's a rabbit's foot, but it's her big toe. It's dried up now. The prison guards
let me keep it when I told them I needed it to ward off ingrown nails. They also letme bring my favorite pillow. Guess what it's stuffed with. At first I feared they'dhear the dry rustling of the burlap packets or get a whiff of the dank smell. I'm soglad prisons haven't gone cooed.

ruca is short for pachuca; hierbas is herbs; Andale, mujer, apurate means "come on,
woman, hurry up"; brujeria is witchcraft; chota is a cop; La cagada no se acordaba demi means "the shit head didn't remember me."• • • • • • • • • • • • •The Women's Review

of Books

AN INDEPENDENT MONTHLY REVIEW • providing
information and informed opinion on new books by andabOlit women • presenting a feminist perspective on current
writing.
IN-DEPTH REVIEW OF • feminist writing on all subjects •books in every area of women's studies • women's autobiography, fiction and pol'lry
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City _ _ _ _ _ ___ __ State _ _ _ _ ZI p _ _ _ __Mail your check or money order to Dept.(llZ) Women's Review ofBooks, Wellesley College Center for Research on Women,
Wellesley, MA 02181.

83

Melanie Perish

Nectarines"I remember loving you first when
I saw you eating that nectarine.
1/

The soulin the sweet flesh
we wanted first, yes
the sheer juice
Iilf one anotherthat would taste of colors
the skin promised:
red of fall leaves or bloodor the blush of us, yellowthat betrayed our
caution; I called it
vulnerable
but we both knew.
Todayreaching for a nectarine
from 'our kitchen basket
I know we are morethan hungers; we nourish
in small bitesin the round
quiet that beckoned
like the soft but muscled flesh
you saw me eat.
After a year
I biteand linger, wat~hthe last pulp pullfrom ridges and dipsin the hard pit.
84

Half-cracked I pry it
open with fingers
that sign my loveon your cheek; half-cracked
I work the wood pit
apart with handsthat clench in reflex
when I wonder
should I
be alone?
Insidethe soft seed's
brown, the burnish ofthighs or belief; inside
the seed isoval not perfectvaried as trust
ready to be planted.

85

Minnie Bruce Pratt#35 We Say We Love Each OtherYou say: The trouble is: we don't understandeach other.

Your sounds have fascinated mefrom the first, the way you laugh in your throat
like a saxophone. But last time the radio played
reedy brass, low sexy, I started crying(last time, in the car alone , Duke Street,the aroma of tobacco curing, invisible smoke
in my mouth, small jazz being played in a roomin a distant city.)
Lately I understand this:I want your voice, mysterious music of your body,yet our words, gestures are from different
languages.
If we are sitting on the couch, eatingoranges, sweet acid, like lovemaking,and the phonerings in another room: you answer, your murmur,
my stomach vibrates, a deep drum flutter at your sound:
you come back, I do not ask Who was it?
to me, intrusion, a push into your room:
to you, removal, uncaring of closeness:then we are sitting on the couch, abrupt
separate. The bitter orange rinds sit
in a neat pile on the round dish before us.
I am sitting in a place made for me
by women, generations, Scot, Irish, sitting
on a little bit of land, holding on,
survival on an island, isolation, a closed mouthin their own kitchen, self-containment.

86You are sitting in a place made for you
by women, generations, Jews in Spain, Holland,
Russia, the Pale, Poland, Roumania, America,
the pogroms, no bit of land safe, none
to be owned as home, survival by asking, asking,knowing where every one was, enemy, family.
Later if we talk about this moment, we observe,
abstract: even as I write, I make it distant:
but we are sitting on the couch: separate, not abstract:
history speaks like a voice through our bodies:
how often we do not know that it is this.
we do not understand:fascination with what
we have not known: what we love: your handgripping my chin, jaw, drawing me to you
for a kiss: my interest in something in my hands,
veins in my palm, in a yellow gingko leaf,
my look up/ the sudden kiss I give you:what we fight bitterly: voices scraping against
demanding, selfish.
Where is the future we spoke of,between us/ stronger by difference?
We are sitting on the couch,trying to understand each other: signs,
gestures, giving words, pointing to an object,what do you mean, translation, renaming, exasperation,
repeating, frustration, anger:
lists, paperwith words, paper with pictures, poems, photographs,
pointing, asking what did you mean?
The other says
she loves: how believe when her words, gestures
are not the ones that speak love to you?
We sit on the couch. You rub my feet. I watch
your mouth. We say again that we love each other.
for Joan, my lover
1/8/8387

Minnie Bruce Pratt#37 Night Gives Us the Next Day
Tonight it is raining ice, no thunder, no lightning, just the cold rain hissing in the leaves.
Things are growing a skin of ice. Come close.
Warm my skin with the palm of your hand. I don't want
us brittle cold with pain. I want to dance
the flamingo with you, hot pink, and kiss.
The night weather is changeable as us: a kissof ice, then thunder, now melting rain, light
tongues whispering in the air: will we dance?
will we fight? You tell me of a lover who leaves
you: you won't leave me. But I've felt your wantchange, shut tight against me, felt your heart close.
And me? Yes, I'm one afraid to be close.
I've said so. Have I said I'm afraid to lose one kissof yours? I've known how I'd love if I let myself want.
This is what I want: to be with you in slant light,
shifting weather, morning, evening, forever : neither leaves
the other: so unlikely. But will you save a dance?
and we could do the duck, the raccoon, the fish : dance
thighs pressed against cunts: absolutely too close
for public. But not for the bar: The Other Side leaves
the lights down low: we could do more than kiss,oh yes, we could practice who leads, how a light
hand, a supple back, lead wherever they want:to the car, to make out, make love, drive if we want,midnight to the coast, hear the rain 's uneven dancein the marshes at dawn by Pamlico Sound: lightno fire, but watch in the grey, huddled close,
for flocks of islands, the wintering ducks: kissat the clap of their wings: thunder, and night leaves:88leaves us together, not waked from a dream: leaves
us the next day, the days after. Say that's what you want.
There's still 15th Street, where we managed to kissin a grey drift of tear gas: we've yet to dance
there: or the streets where women must pull blankets close,
sleep on islands of steam, to live through to light.
Tonight rain in the street leaves cold hope that the women will dance.
But we've worked more than change in the weather by stubborn want. Close
your arms around me, kiss me. We'll tell secrets on the world until light.

for Joana sestina for Valentine's Day
2/8/8389

Minnie Bruce Pratt#38 Your Hand Opening Me
Flat on our backs on the floor, boards hard as packed clay:
how I/ve wanted to make love with you outside, your ass
sunk into a curve of dirt, my fingers sunk in you
up to the palm and knuckles: your hips, my feetthrashing the leaves like some unkno\;Vn animal justout of sight in the bushes.
Not tonight, we are quiet,iii
behind a door, away from the cold, the other women:
quiet, your hand opening, opening me, to the widthof light made by one candle, opening my thighs
clenched against night, an eye pressed up to the window,
someone who might look at my secret:
how I need
your hand moving in me, unpredictable hot fingers:
how my throat opens, my mouth' closes on sounds,
high, stretched, squeals as the swifts fallin the chimney, jostled from their night roosts, thumping
behind the bricks: like my heels on the floor.
.
Sometimes
I/m afraid: when we make love or I write like this:my need for you: that you/Ulook at me from the outside,through the blank windows and think how ridiculous: a woman
with face opened to a throat, words nothing but
squeal and thump.
I have been afraid: you have held me,
tonight your right arm between me and the harsh dusty floor,
your left hand pressing me open, praising my secrets:

you have loved me: so I can come to you again
like this: my need for you naked as me,flat on my back, thighs open, against the boards.
for Joan , for summer solstice
to begin the poems again after my move
6/19/8390

Elisabeth Griggs

91

SDiane Bogus

All of Our Art for Our Sake
For Nights Like This One, by Becky Birtha. 1983. Frog in the Well. 430 Oakdale

Road. East Palo Alto, CA 94303. $4.75
Cuentos: Stories by Latinas, edited by A. Gomez, C. Moraga, and M. RomoCarmona. 1983. Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, P.O. Box 2753, Rockefeller
Station, N.Y., N.Y. 10185. $7.95
Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, edited by Barbara Smith. 1983. Kitchen

Table Press. $10.95
The Woman Who Owned the Shadows, by Paula Gunn Allen. 1983. Spinsters,
Ink. 803 DeRaro Street, San Francisco, CA 94107. $8.95

Now me- , like the truth. , figured if' ever wrote any stories, they'd be true stories, things
that happened to me, the real stuff of life, Dot all that airy invention.
-Rosario Morales, '" Never Told My Children Stories."

If we were to draft an "issues" list, one which would prioritize the matters mostneeding our written attention, the state of our literature as art would probably not
be raised for consideration;1 but it is an issue which I, as an artist seeking expression, feel duty-bound to raise. For, as far as I can tell, we have achieved Great
Voice; that is, we have produced a critical mass of literature that attests to our commitment to change our world. The outpouring of this voice suggests a truth about
our united efforts: the publication of For Nights Like This One, a collection ofshort stories for and about loving women; Cuentos, a first anthology of Latina
stories, autobiographical and fictional; Home Girls, a Black feminist essay, poetry,
and fiction anthology; and, The Woman Who Owned the Shadows, a nontraditional narrative about the struggles of a Native American to reclaim her personal power, is a mighty accomplishment, especially since the works are by Third
World women and have come out of our feminist publishing companies. Since weare the great audience, common and specialized, which receives these books, weshould recognize that we have already achieved much with our writings, and thatwhatever has been written and spoken in the past has broken ground for these important books to come forth.
In this review, I hope to point out the reach for higher truths in the works named
above because often, I think, as the Morales character quoted at the opening
believes, we have no use for "airy invention," What sometimes is disparaged as"romantic escapist fiction" is thought less viable, less meaningful than expository
discourse. But there is much to learn from and appreciate in all of our written art.
92

Understandably, our battles for personal expression, communal unity, sharedideology-inside and outside the lesbian feminist community-have been and are so
hard fought that when a work does not focus on the demons of patriarchy,
homophobia, racism, and other societal evils, we may think the author is avoiding
unpleasant truths of reality. Hence, to admit the value of fiction and poetry for no
purpose political marks both the writer and the appreciator as someone avoiding
the challenges (escaping) our common fight. Such a tacit condemnation is unfair toour creators, and to those of us who read widely (in every genre) and engage actively in the dialogue and thinking going on about our plight as lesbian/feminists. So,
I'd like to make a few notes on the merits of fiction and poetry, in particular, as I
discuss the works under consideration. I hope to show that we are committed to abroad literature that denies no search for truth but which affirms the Truth that weare a victorious, strong, intelligent, indestructible mass of consciousness.

II

A fictional or poetical work can be as politically charged, as sharply focussed as
any prose essay. A writer may choose a creative genre to escape the heavy onus ofproving or bullet-proofing a critical position; to offer a broader, if not fairer, portraitof the dynamics of our lives. This way her art is not forced to align itself with current political ideologies; for example, the notion that the personal is always
political.
The short story, as it appears in these four works, allows moments of reflection.
Among its other uses, it houses analogy, enabling the writer to play on the contrasts
between what we term real and what we imagine may be true. The short story
shapes the stuff of experience in a way that only memory· can. It aligns scenes andsayings from those moments of interface that have been unclear until they arereconstructed in our memories-sometimes through pain. Only by recalling
memories can we begin to see what happened, or more aptly, what seemed to have
happened. Because the short story can deal only with a well-defined life occurrence, it is, by its brevity more than any other characteristic, not the novel-whichallows a longer detailing of causality and character development.
Yet the short story can do as much as the novel when compressed and honed. In
Cuentos, Rocky Gamez ("Dona Marciana Garda") and Helen Marla Viramontes("Snapshots") handle intense psychological focus on the mental anguish of a single
woman character as skillfully in the space of a few pages as Paula Gunn Allen
handles the broader interpretation of a like female in The Woman Who Owned the
Shadows. In Home Girls, the short story is utilized as a thematic divider, serving
the four units of the primarily expository mode like an accent mark. Birtha's For
Nights Like This One treats the circumstances of human interaction in a series ofstories meant to weld together the varying concerns of couples and individual
93women, a kind of thematic sequence akin to the aims of a sQnnet sequence. All inall, these works isolate experience and create vivid units of portraiture morefamiliar and, often, closer to the dynamics of our lives than a multitude of singlesubject, didactic essays. Thus, to value true life stories over "airy invention," as I
suspect many feminists do-because of our determination to document the facts
about our lives and the lives of women who wrote before us-is as moot a position
as preferring guns to cannons. Both-equally explosive-serve our lives in that they
allow us to share our lives with each other; they allow us to see the complexities,
the illusions, the ironies of living human, of living feminist, of living lesbian,Jewish, Latina, Indian, Black or Anglo in our various societies.
Similarly with poetry. The poem is not a fact; it is an instrument of cult,uralpreservation, the first art, along with cave painting. It is the art we used in ancientsong and ritual, and it has always come from experience and vision. When it ismost imagistic, it is dream-like; when it is most graphic, it is tight utterance. It has
as many subjects as it has modes of expression, and with both subject and modes of
expression as its divine beacons, the poem crystalizes insight in provocative andsignificant ways. I cannot say that all my poetry is "heretical" in its assault uponthat which limits our lives as lesbians and feminists (as Lorde says poetry must be
in order to grant us again our ancient power as women) , nor is all the poetry I love.
A great deal of our poetry gives imaginative free-play to rhyme and rhythm without
comrniting itself to socio-political ideology. For me this is fine; I am willing to readand accept any of the creative forays of lesbian/feminist poets.
Home Girls is the only book under discussion which includes much poetry, andin Home Girls the poetry is marked by thematic focus. Gloria Hull's "Poem (toAudre Lorde), ', for example, witnessing the significance of Lorde's pronouncement-"your silence will not protect you" -set the ideological thrust of theanthology, insisting that "our labor is more important than our silence." And thus
Hull's poem ends.
No writing by women today can free us from introspection, reflection, contemplation; we and the writer-women we read are searching for some truths-signs,
perhaps-that we are not alone in what we understand about our existence. We cannot escape that seeking, and hence, we are allowed no escape. In our writings, both
expository and creative, we need to strive to break silence, and we need to seek
break-throughs. We need to seek, both within the work, and within ourselves, thepoint where we extend the limits of what we accept as an expression of truth. For
only in this way can we extend the parameters of our art. Likewise, we mustn't
restrict our artists to what's already accepted as proper subjects or modes of
discourse. Should we limit our explorations within any genre, we'll never find out
what we do not yet know about ourselves; we'll never break-through. All of ourwriting represents the cross-cultural interface of life itself, but how we look at what
we read, and what we allow to speak about our lives, will shape our future as
literate and literary women.
94

III

All that said, the first thing to notice when you open the thirteen stories of For
Nights Like This One is how Becky Birtha focusses on relationships, the subject
matter that links one story to the next in the collection. Because forming and maintaining relationships is at the core of human experience, Birtha's focus is in tune
with the flow of the temporal universe we inhabit. In this collection of short stories,
she strives to illustrate the need for understanding and communication between
people. She examines the nature of love and the nature of living: very high reaches
for art.
Frequently using the position of third person narration to gain distance (onlythree stories use "I" or the first person as narrators) , Birtha's stories present
glimpses of the changing patterns of human interaction much like the change inside
a kaleidoscope. The search for love, the acquiring of it, the means to keep it, thepain of losing it are all themes that receive her attention by turns. And though
Becky Birtha's subtitle makes the broad claim that the stories are of "loving
women," not every story tells the tale of loving women or even illustrates the ways
women love each other. Three of them, without doubt, make just the opposite
point: "Safe-Keeping," about a man and a woman, both initially heterosexual, whofind in later life that they are gay; "Marisa," a first-person account by a heterosexual woman who is mystified by a lesbian woman; and "Next Saturday," perhaps
the most heartbreaking of the stories, about a lesbian piano instructor who, out of
timidity, allows a lesbian protege to fall to dissipation when she had but to reachout and love the student. Birtha recognizes the negatives of life, and, in these andother stories, she seeks to put them into the context of human exchange.
"A Sense of Loss" and the title story, "For Nights Like This One, " attempt thisby exploring levels of emotional experience. Grief, in the first story; desire in thelatter. Birtha's exploration depicts how emotional need is expressed and experienced by two Black women: Liz, in a monogamous inter-racial love unit; Covey, wholives alone but wants and needs a companion very badly. Death and loneliness are
the sometimes unpleasant aspects of life with which Birtha grapples subtly. No
over-riding profundity attends her craftswomanship, yet she makes plain that it is
not easy to be a Black woman who loves a white one: Liz attends the funeral of her
grandmother alone because she wants to spare Mandy some random stab racism:"Who is that white girl with Elizabeth?" On the other hand, Birtha makes clear that
Covey's stored fantasies of an imaginary lover, "Syke, " cannot satisfy Covey's longing soul because hers is a dilemma not of racism but of personal struggle, the unfulfilled desire for companionship. Though the solutions to both of these stories are
too pat, rounded off to the nearest optimistic denominator-Liz goes home to the"woman who loved, who understood her," to unburden the grief she could not express even among kin; and Covey finds a lover-, the stories do address the95negatives of life, the stuff that is often more "real" than the experience of joy andloving.
Some will label both stories "romantic escapist fiction," but humanity, freedom,
sharing, communication, honesty,. fair play, trusting, loving are the values illustrated by Becky Birtha's art, and her vision is not off-center; for none of us
would deny them place in our lives.
Perhaps the great achievement of the collection is "A Monogamy Story," for it
presents the personal as political without sacrificing creativity to polemics. The
story features two women who must grapple with the nature of their monogamous
relationship; Emily, a writer, attends a conference where the pros and cons of themonogamous relationship between women is debated. Meanwhile, Sima, at homealone during their first separation, worries over the possibility that Emily will be
tempted by another woman while away. Emily is tempted, and she is very caught
up in the dialogue of the conference; but, because of Birtha's penchant for "happy
endings," Emily comes home, wiser, and surer about the "rightness" of her choiceof both life-style and lover.
Understand, too, that Birtha has a fine eye for detail, a decipherable knack formatching narrative perspective to character revelation and disclosure. A doll in"Babies" says a great deal about Lurie's useless heterosexual socialization; dancing
in "The Woman Who Loved Dancing" reveals the tensions that can divide lovers
whose interests are incompatible. Overall, the themes of loving and relationships
are woven into every story of the book, and to read for these alone is to get in touchwith what we desire most to make "real" in our lives as beings on this planet andas lesbianlfeminists in community with one another.
While the stories and narratives that make up the Cuentos anthology are as deftly
written as those in the Birtha collection, most, as individual entities, are less optimistic in their portrayals of the lives of Latinas, perhaps because the lives they
depict are so fraught with suffering. Even though the stated purpose of the collection is "to capture some essential expression-without censors- that could be called'Latina'and'Latina-identified.' .. [toJ empower Latinas," the note of defeat sounds
in even the most victorious stories-for example, Clcera Fernandes de Oliveira's"We Women Suffer More Than Men," which traces the escapades of a woman whochooses to live' estranged from her husband while testing the waters of other relationships.
Moreover, there is no mistaking the signs of struggle between art and reality in
Cuentos. The revealing preference of Rosario Morales' character for "the real stuffof life" over "airy invention" is sounded again by Alma Gomez in the introduction:"This is my life on paper. No getting out of it." The collection clearly attempts to
depict a true picture of the past and present lives of Latinas; for in this way the bicultural reader at whom the collection is aimed can read "una literatura that
testifies to [theirJ lives, provides acknowledgement of who [theyJ are: an exiled people, a migrant people, mujeres en lucha."296With obvious intention, the lines of distinction between fiction and non-fiction
are blurred in this collection. Divided by section numbers, "Uno," "Dos," "Tres,"there is no notation designating which of the cuentos are narrative essays, i.e., "truestories" recorded after having been passed down through generations de boca en
boca,3 and which are imaginative fiction derived from the speculative, contemplative wanderings of their creators. Nevertheless, the achievement of Cuentos,
and hence of the Latina community, is that this "first generation" of Latina writers
is able at this time to break the great silences and taboos of their living. They havefreed themselves to "mention the unmentionable"; but some of what they mention
is painful to read, painful to see-so adept are the writers at drawing scene and circumstance. It seems incumbent upon the writers to make their cuentos bear
witness, and every witness that I have ever known was sworn to the truth.
It is this great theme that pervades Cuentos, and the very first story, "La confesian," written by Gloria Liberman-in Spanish-is about just that-truth-and towhat lengths some will go to distort or stifle it. I love the craftswomanship of thisstory, denying the full horror of the focal woman's plight until very near the end of
the acutely intense dramatic stream of consciousness; refusing a clear understanding of what the woman's .circumstance is. This is a very sophisticated device meant
to underline the confusion of the woman by translating that confusion to us,
creating a tension usually associated with the horror or detective genre. Margarita,a near schizophrenic, is introduced via these stream-of-consciousness words: "Today they gave me some beautiful margaritas [daisies]." One suspects that the story
will feature an older woman stuck away in a retirement home whose children comefrom time to time to bring flowers of guilt. There is a misleading simplicity to theselines. All too soon we discover that, like the flowers she tends because they are drying up, this woman is a political prisoner drying up in a sanitarium where she had
been shuttled. In some revolution, at some past time almost too painful for her torecall, her brother was killed and she witnessed it. Instead of killing her, thegovernment cut out her tongue and virtually buried her identity. She sits in afavorite spot, ignoring the calls of the attendants, and meditates on the condition ofher life. Others surround her-all zombie-like, afraid, but she isn't. Her real nameis Alejandra but she cannot tell any6ne. She has even come to behave well, receiving for her cooperation the name of the flowers she finds so much peace in smellingand seeing in the courtyard of the sanitarium. Liberman's slow development anddisclosure of these facts of the narrative, coupled with the symbolic weight of themargaritas, make this story the best in the collection. It will take a bi-lingual reader
to translate the Spanish; my reading was slow and painstaking, but the story was
worth the purchase of that new Spanish-English dictionary that I had been putting
off..

' Special thanks to my Miami University colleague, Tammy Allen, for her assistance with translations.

97

I cannot begin to review the wealth of expression and craft to be found in
Cuentos, but a brief overview of some of the other stories and their subject matteris certainly in order. "The March," by Lake Sagaris, is another painful tale, theheart-breaking story of the murder of one mother's child by soldiers. The dreamsequence, third person narration is fraught with urgency, the urgency of the mother
who awakens fearing her child has been injured. The irony in this story is that thismother's awakening is to the shock of reality. The day before she had seen her
child gunned down in the street. Like three others in the collection-Alma Gomez'"EI sueno perdido" ("The Lost Dream"), Cherrie Moraga's "Pesadilla"("Nightmare") and Helen Viramontes' "Snapshots , ~ this story treats the themes ofterror, repression, and disenfranchisement with psychological insight and sensitivity. Gomez' story uses present tense narration to elicit reader identification with ayoung woman recalling the story of an incident at the welfare offices. Moraga andViramontes use omniscient narrators who pan the lives of the two focal characterslike a camera. These stories photograph the disquietude 'and discontent of women's
souls in a very palpable ambience of empathy and rage.
Some stories written completely in Spanish, some written completely in English,
and most written in both, are meant to integrate and "visually reflect the bi-culturalexperience" of the Latinas who are "Ia mezcla," la mestiza (the rich mixture of across-bred class of women) regardless of each woman's blood, whether Indio,
Africano, or European. The editors say that t~e issues of bilingualism andbiculturalism are crucial, so the "entire book is meant to stretch la imaginacion-help the reader become accustomed to seeing two languages in a book. " And
one does quickly become familiar with "Spanglish" and "tex-mex," as it appears insuch stories as Rocky Gamez "Dona Marciana Garda," a tale about a mid-wife
whose presence in the Mexican community is threatened by modernicity and illhealth, relentlessly ironic, ending with the good Dona dead of a sun stroke and theunredressed belief that she may have been accused of causing a still-birth: shenever knew that the child was born healthy. "Papi y el Otro ("Father and the
Other") and "Como el cristal al romperse" ("Like the Breaking of Fine Glass") are
written principally in Spanish, and I do not believe that either could be executedwith equal force in English. Both, focussing on people who have been driven to thebreaking point by economic and cultural inequities, are written by Luz Selenia
Vasquez, a mistress of character study.
Principally a cultural panorama, the stories occasionally deal with feminist issues
and lesbian life-style, offering undeniable assertions about the nature of oppression
and resulting psychological damage. Such are Rocky Gamez' excerpts from thesatirical "Gloria Stories," and Moraga's "Pesadilla," a look at lesbian terrors
imaginary and fatally real.
But if there is one author who is sensitive to vibrations of a higher order, it isRoberta Fernandez. She tells the tale of "Amanda," a seemingly benevolent witchseamstress who makes a fantastic cape for Roberta. The cape is a thing of beauty

98and significance, and the story is about the author's remorse when the cape is lost
during her travels years later. Likewise, Fernandez' "Zulema" weaves elements ofthe supernatural into the story of an aunt who insists from the grave that the stories
she has always recalled of their Latina past are the true versions. "Zulema"reiterates another of the reaches of Latina art which is noted in the introduction:[Cuentos] "elaborates on and recreates the richness and comp~exity of being Latina
in the U. S., the Carribean, or Latin America. [It] is only one version of the manystories of our lives to be told."
I am not always aware of where "Zulema" is taking place, nor of the nationalityof the characters, but I can verify the "richness and complexity" of which theeditors speak. The work as a whole is art in search of life; art that stands between
visibility and invisibility; art that grants life over annihilation; it is an art made toserve, made to speak because, in the past, silence and misrepresentation have failed
to serve. It is this reach of Latina art that suggests a higher vision than can begenerally found in most of the stories.
Like Cuentos, Home Girls demonstrates a collective commitment to the strugglesof Third World women; however, the focus of Home Girls is Black women. Thisanthology has come into existence, as did Cuentos, to speak for and about our lives
and living past and present. In editor Barbara Smith's words, "what all the women. .. writing in Home Girls have in common is how firmly and how beautifully set
their minds are on freedom." Home Girls revisits the previously publishedwritings of the Black women's issue of Conditions: Five, while introducing new
writing and thought since 1979. Divided into four distinct thematic sections, the anthology uses the short fiction and poetry which appear in it to support the prose
essays of each section.
Barbara Smith's thorough, insightful, and challenging introduction concludes
with the hope that" Home Girls provides a means to know yourself and be known,that between its pages you start to feel at home." That, without doubt, is a warm
and positive reach of the art that lies between the pages; yet, because the anthology
is very broad in scope, there is no adequate way to talk about its achievement as acompilation of feminist visions and positions. However, a note or two on outstanding work within the anthology might serve to highlight its diversity.
The first of the four sections into which the anthology is divided-"TheBlood-Yes, the Blood, "-looks at the blood ties between Third World women,
their families, and each other. It tries to point up issues that arise from differencesin class, color, or nationality as Black women claim their identities. Notable in thisfirst ~ection are the poems, "Debra" by Michelle T. Clinton, "Hester's Song," byToi Dericotte, and "The Black Back-ups," by Donna Kate Rushin. Each poem deals
with relationships and Black culture, and you may measure the level of craft andpoetic subjectivity in Home Girls by Clinton's "Debra," for instance, a free form
monologue that, after the first line, races with assonant language:99

Debra and I are diffe rent. Fundamentally different.
Her life reads like the strong girl of a Black Baptist
family-all rooted in East Oakland.
And mine is the life of a rebellious radical of a color·struck arrogant Catholic family beginning in
the East, now spread across the entire U.S.
I have my therapy and she has her Cadillac.

Aside from contrasting the fundamental cultural roots of the women, Clinton makes
a revealing comparison about where these two women's heads are: the contrast suggests not different values so much as different coping mechanisms.
The strongest piece, however, in the "Blood" section is not poetry, but anarrative-exposition by Michelle Cliff. Entitled, " If I Could Write This in Fire, I
Would Write This in Fire," the exposition underscores the harbinger's heraldry inthe title. Looking at a childhood relationship with a darker-skinned lower-classgirlfriend, and at the racism of Blacks against Blacks in Jamaica, Cliff recalls difficult memories that she never let-when they were realities-destroy her sureknowledge: "1 and Jamaica is who I am." For Cliff, Jamaica is home, and one
always recalls home.
This leads me to the only short fiction in the section, Barbara Smith's "Home," anarrative that pitches a sleepless woman against the night as she sits up thinking
about her family, particularly a deceased aunt whose haunting memory has driven
the narrator from the bed where her lover still sleeps. She knows the women in her
farnily are "literally disappearing from the face of the earth," that they are dying.
In this story, reminiscent of Birtha's "A Sense of Loss," and Moraga's"Pesadilla"-because the focal characters are each suffering disquietude of
spirit-the narrator like the characters Liz and Cecilia, finds that loving doesn't terrify, "loss does." "Home," which eventually sees her resettled into bed with herlover, a bed in a new apartment, ends with an ironic and metaphorical response to
the lover's question: "Where were you?" "Home," the woman answers, reconciledwith loss and anticipating the future with her lover.
Section two, "Artists Without Art Form," a phrase used by Toni Morrison in
Su /a, begins to be to my taste in its examination of our literary artists past and present: two pieces that focus on Angelina Weld Grimke and Toni Cade Bambara,
notably, and two others on the Black lesbian in fiction and in American Literature
contribute to my hope that our literature will continue to include, value, anddiscriminate among the various genres.
Ann Allen Shockley's remarks on the scarcity of short fiction in "The Black
Lesbian in American Literature," are passe, but others of her remarks alignthemselves with the article by Jewelle Gomez, "A Cultural Legacy Denied andDiscovered: Black Lesbians in Fiction by Women": "The shadow of repression has
concealed the Black lesbian in literature in direct proportion to her invisibility In
American society." Shockley's and Gomez' separate discussions trace the portrait100

of the Black lesbian character from her appearance in the work of Maya Angelou to
her recent emergence in Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Shockley ends by calling for "a richer and larger body of literature by and about Black Lesbians."
Gomez, after raking Shockley over the critical coals,4 ends by suggesting the same:"The Black lesbian writer must recreate our home, unadulterated, unsanitized,
specific and not isolated from the generations that have nurtured us. "Renita Weems' brilliant essay, "Artists Without Art Form: A Look at One Black
Woman's World of Unrevered Black Women," discusses the work of Toni
Morrison and says, among other potent things: "Although her first three books takeplace in the Midwest and the fourth in the Caribbean-places I have neverseen-there is something very familiar, very nostalgic about the people I meet on
her pages."
There is no fiction in this section. If there were, it would have to show the struggle of a Black woman writer against that which immediately obstructs her attention
to her art: that real job which she uses to support herself and her art; that child, or
lover or husband who needs attention; those demands, chores and duties that life
imposes daily; and, of course, the fact that her work may not ever see print, acceptance, or earn for hera living. Such a writer must grapple with mainstream
publishers who don't want lesbian writings, and the small press feminist publisher
who may not appreciate the fruits of her creativity. Besides, writing has seemedalways to be the male's province, so who takes a (Black) woman writer seriously?
Who will see a Black woman writer as an artist? These questions, as Barbara Smith
notes, address in a fundamental way the challenge a Black woman faces when shetries to combine her identity as a Black with her identity as an artist. And if Home
Girls has a failing, it is in the omission of essays or stories where an individual
woman writer talks about her craft, or illustrates the trials of a creator. Other thanthe poetry of Angelina Weld Grimke, which Gloria Hull cites in her discussion of
Grimki's personal struggles as a repressed Black lesbian writer, there is no writingon the nature of the creative life, the creative principles of the Black feminist
writer.
The two opening pieces of section three-"Black Lesbians-Who Will Fight For
Our Lives But Us?" (the question is Beverly Smith's)-are as poignant as drama.
Lorde's "Tar Beach"-from Zami-with its haunting recall of the lovely Afrekete, awoman who contributed love and joy, plants and summer nights to the young lesbian experience of the writer, is almost confusing in its deification of the woman:
Kitty, as she becomes more endeared to Lorde, becomes a goddess of herstory. "Tar
Beach" offers a glimpse at life in the 1950's, but it is not the milieu in full dress; it
is an intimation. The beauty and merit of the story lie in Lorde's ability to translate
the pain of an abrupt break-up with the lovely Afrekete into a mature reflection on
the gifts of that love while it lasted. Here, autobiographical fiction allows distanceand reflection that a narrative essay about the experience of breaking-up might notallow because the truth might get in the way, demanding full dress pain. There is a101

sweet pain that troubles this story, but neither writer nor reader can feel bitter
about its presence. That's a real achievement.
Carter's "Cat" tells a classic tale of homophobia and betrayal. Twolovers-Catherine and Sheila-come into adolescent love together. "Cat," a tomboy, slow about giving up the world of boys, marbles, stick ball and the boys'
unselfconscious acceptance; Sheila, a model of dress-wearing socialization, accepts
Cat's friendship as Cat gradually drifts into the structure of womanhood. Caught in
bed together by Sheila's uncle, the two are separated, much like the lovers in 1984,
and interrogated about their behavior at their separate homes: Cat is unresponsive
to her father's outraged entreaties for an explanation. She refuses to tell him what itwas. On trying to seek the safety and silence of her room, Cat's father catches her,swings her about, and the scene ends with his knee on her chest as he bellows:"There will be no bulldaggers in my house!" On the other hand, Sheila, made tothink she can save herself a fate similar to Cat's, lets herself be prodded into sayingthat Cat forced her. The integrity, the shared strength of their budding love is lostin the immediate safety of Sheila's lie. The story closes with a bitter irony: Sheila
loses a friend in Cat, but Cat loses the world of boys, the world of girls, and thepossibility of love in a world full of misunderstanding and homophobia. This is a
priceless piece that needs to be reprinted again and again.
Other fiction, "LeRoy's Birthday," by Raymina Y. Mays, "Miss Esther's Land,"by Barbara Banks, along with poetry by Donna Allegra, Becky Birtha, and Pat
Parker illustrate the theme of the section: Who will fight for our lives but us? And
in Parker's now classic poem, we learn what it will mean if we don't fight:
They will come
They will cometo the cities
and to the land
to your front rooms
and in your closets.
They wiJI comefor the perverts

In this section, Cheryl Clarke analyzes, in a deft essay entitled "The Failure toTransform: Homophobia in the Black Community," the reasons why some in theBlack community see homosexuality as a "disease" to the nationalist idea: "[it]does not birth new warriors for liberation .. . [it is a] threat to our survival as a people and as a nation." The article attempts to clear the community as a whole fromthis indictment, suggesting that homophobia is "the reactionary postures of a few
petit-bourgeois intellectuals and politicos." Clarke continues: "Since no one hasbothered to study the black community's attitudes on homosexuals . .. it is not accurate to attribute homophobia to the mass of black people." But Clarke is not letting anyone off the hook; she is demanding growth of the Black liberation movement: "We will continue to fail to transform ourselves until we reconcile the102unequal distribution of power in our political community accorded on the basis ofgender and sexual choice."
Because the fiction in the "Who Will Fight For Us?" section, consistent with thetheme, is sober and joyless with the exception of the Lorde narrative, section threeof Home Girls makes the need to lighten up apparent, and so, sandwiching thespace between section three and section four are two pages of photographs called"A Home Girls' Album." You must see Audre Lorde as a pudgy nine or ten year
old holding a bundle of flowers nearly as big as she is. Teenage Becky Birtha isshown with her sister and cousins all decked out in Easter wear or maybe Mother's
Day Sunday clothes. Toi Derricotte is shown as a baby with her proud parents
crouched nearby. These photographs and others make a "homey" inclusion. I
would like to have seen some photographs of the individual writers at work, or
together at the editing table.
Section four, "A Hell of a Place to Ferment a Revolution," makes the ironic comment that the women of yesterday who sat gossiping in beauty parlors could havetalked up a revolution. An awesome notion, except the revolution didn't happen;
hence, we have Home Girls, the revolution come by the literary and criticalabilities of the authors.
In this light, Cheryl Clarke's "Women of Summer" tells the tale of two women,escaping South through an underground network of people united against politicaloppression and corruption. Finding that they must work with white people whomthey have to trust, the two characters, "N. " and "J.", give themselves to a "comrade" in the struggle who gets them through patrols. The story challenges readers tothink of themselves as warriors, as intelligent and capable of fighting racist oppression by any means necessary; here, the "necessary" means is terror. The story
relies too heavily on the news report device to keep us informed of the deeds of thewomen's comrades; yet, the device also maintains tension and progression in thestory. I get the feeling that those who object to romantic escapist fiction would not
object to this story of modern terrorist-woman warriors. It's a primer for realities
that may take our dealing in guns and subterfuge. It's a suggestion for those who
never think of taking to the streets. It evokes the challenge of Parker's poem:"Where will you be when they come?"
Shirley O. Steele's "Shoes Are Made For Walking" is yet another fictional inclusion in this section which, like most others, looks at a painful reality. Ronald, thefather of Cere, a grown woman with a child he has fathered, is obsessed with continuing the incestuous relationship begun with Cere when she was a child. It is abrutal story of the male psyche gone berserk. Steele is excellent at assuming themind-set of the Ronald character, for all of his brutality; when he kills Cere in frontof her mother and daughters because he can't have her, we are asked to feel his
despair, but not to forgive him. Excellent characterization, vivid encounter withdeath, incest, and powerlessness-perhaps the effects of Black disenfranchisement.
The titles of some of the prose essays which buttress the above forays into the imaginative realm-"The Combahee River Collective Statement," Linda Powell's103review of Michele Wallace's Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman,
Eleanor johnson's "Reflections on Black Feminist Therapy," Alice Walker's antinuclear "Only Justice Can Stop a Curse"-effectively demonstrate that each woman
must, in the face of these discussions, re-examine her commitment to our mutual
and individual oppressions, to that which would destroy our right to life and ourlives on this planet.
Overall, Home Girls does not disavow the worth of our literature in all of its different forms , utilizing many creative forms to serve the commited purpose of theanthology itself. Yet, we must realize that every woman who is reading our writings
does not necessarily identify with our united struggle. There are those just outside
our ranks who are not political nor will they ever be. For them, our literature issomething to read, but not necessarily a lamp unto their feet. It may seem strangethat such women want a literature that reflects their struggles, and yet, they may
utilize that literature toward ameliorating the conflicts within their immediate lives.
Such women read freely, widely, thoughtfully, but go on with their private struggles as if reading is not fighting. Such a woman is like Ephanie, the main character
in Paula Gunn Allen's The Woman Who Owned the Shadows. Ephanie, Native
American, half blood, characterizes the isolated woman living on the fringe of ourranks. A reader, a journal-keeper (and, hence, a writer of sorts), Ephanie is no
Third World activist, no conference body, member of no coalition. Her imaginary
life validates the point I'm making; for Allen, in the length that a novel allows,details the psychology of such lives as I've been speaking of. Figuratively, Ephanie
is depicted as seeking, as we do literally, to overcome the oppressions of European
acculturation, economic disenfranchisement, female socialization, and a host ofnegative forces that bludgeon our physical and spiritual lives; but she is doing it
without the benefits of a women's community, or the support of Indian community.
A spiritual and ritual bildungsroman, The Woman Who Owned the Shadows
utilizes a third person narrator to trace Ephanie's inner movement from a timorous
uncertainty about her very existence to the moment of acute recall of a time when
she was powerful, able and wholly in charge of her life. For most of the novel, we
must wade through an obfuscation of images and shadows, in much the same way
as Ephanie has to struggle for clarity of mind or memory for a reconnection withreality. She is like an amnesia victim who hovers on the edge of recall and isdesperate to have back the life lost to forgetfulness. Using the devices of parallel
tales, myths, and analogies, notebook and dream excerpts, pages from documents,
Allen helps us to follow Ephanie's progress. From leaving Stephen, a friend of her
youth, who became a kind of enslaver in her adulthood, she escapes; from the confines of the reservation she flees; from the insinuation of spiritual beings who surround her, she runs away; from life she tries to depart-attempting, at one point, tohang herself-and deciding, alinost too late, that she didn't want to die. Through allof this, Ephanie can't quite center on what is underneath her despair and alienation. She thinks that the Catholic church has co-opted her life-and it has, but
knowing that does not free her to regain her power; she thinks that marrying
104

Thomas, a Japanese-American, will ease both his and her pain-it doesn't-heabuses her. She thinks that roaming from Indian encampment to Indian encampment, through women's centers and bars, will give her the answer-it doesn't. Timeand again, the key to her disorientation, lost strength of mind, is not found . Her
frustration becomes ours. Still, for all the books she reads, for all of the feminists
she knows, she cannot disburden herself, find herself, her power.
It is a chore, at times, to stay with Ephanie, to keep reading for the resolution oroutcome of all this frustration she fights nearly alone, but from time to time her
therapist's notes will be offered as evidence of some change within her psyche andwe trust that Ephanie will find herself. Meanwhile, as readers, we are invited into
Indian lore, invited to read myths of woman power and allegories from spirit
worlds unknown. I found that eating an orange can be ritual; that spiders are thecreators and sustainers of the universe. I gained insights into nature and death, andI was allowed to cross into the spirit world where Ephanie's ancestors, hermatrilineal power source, exist. The writing is moving, revealing, enlightening.
Akin to Carlos Castaneda's work, The Woman Who is an invocation to women to
claim their personal power.
If there is a flaw in the novel, it is the seemingly minor event which turns out tobe the cause of Ephanie's overdrawn pain, her mental block: that she took a fall as ayouth trying to meet Stephen's challenge that she swing from a tree limb across asmall chasm is the thing that broke not only her bones, but also her spirit. The
event is recounted almost anticlimatically after Ephanie has roamed here and there,
lost her childhood girlfriend and sweetheart, Elena, lost one of the twin boys bornto her and Thomas, and after she has divorced Thomas; we get what is said to her
therapist:
The confusion, the fugue she had fallen into for days, for a lifetime . . . . She felt them again .
. . the rope searing her hand as she leapt ... the wrenching of her shoulder . . . the loudsnap ... the branch split. She gasped with the power of the memories sweeping through her.... Tomorrow I'll write Stephen. Tell him what I've found. Myself. I've found me after all
this time.

In a way, we wish that it were going to be Elena who Ephanie wants to write andtell of her revival, her self-recovery. After all, Ephanie had always thought that it
was Elena who had caused her to fall by yelling a warning to her just as she took
the leap, but Elena's was the cry of terror when she saw that Ephanie was going tofall. The two of them had been girls together, nearly lovers, as Ephanie recalls, "fullof life and action." Taking Stephen's cunning dare had cost Ephanie her body's
wholeness, her sense of seif-possession and strength, and her friendship with Elena.
It is with remorse that she can see what once was open to the two of them as arrogant girl spirits: "Elena and I were going to do brave things in our lives, and wewere going to do them together."
All this would-be life was lost to this heroine, this woman on the outskirts of ourpolitics. No, she is not real, but there are real lives like hers. Somewhere right now
a woman struggles with her life, struggles even with the knowledge that we are here105and writing for her, about her, to find her strength for herself. In this sense, what
Allen's non-traditional patchwork story does is juxtapose private repressions
against public oppression. She contrasts personal alienation against political disenfranchisement and colonization. The mix is a striking achievement. It is the large
and small of things that operate on our lives, but Ephanie is transcendental. She
overcomes.
We must recognize, then, that it is possible for every individual woman to overcome-with or without our literature. Still, the novel, the short story, our essays,
our poetry must continue to grapple with the large worlds we inhabit: those ofheart, mind, of spirit. Our art must expand to encompass those worlds as Allen's
The Woman Who Owns the Shadows does. At one point, Ephanie's grandmother,a spirit who comes to her, says "There is a fifth world" where spirits live. I believethat is the world we must aspire to as we move toward the twenty-first century.
What we call the Third World is where we begin. The fourth world is the one weare presently creating as we coalesce with others through our literature, throughour conferences, letters, friendships, relationships; but the fifth world is where wewill reign, where our inheritors will live in harmony with others on this planet. At
that time, our literature will have become the prophecies of a time before; ourwritings will be incredulous herstory. We must write towards a vision of the un~et­
tered lesbian life, so the reader of tomorrow will know we knew her existence wasalways unconquerable and inviolable. I ask that we let it all survive; that wewelcome our writing in all its forms, in its myriad of expressions for the posterity of
our nation, and as a nation of literate, writing women.
A final note: the books I have used here to offer this thesis could easily have beenfour others. I recognize that I've made them serve the purpose of this essay. If I
have done them violence or disservicp. by structuring my remarks around the content of their texts, I apologize; but I do not apologize for wanting us to accept all of
our art as a deposit toward future truths.
NOTES
I I'm afraid that I am begging the question a bit. Several major discussions of our literature as art haveseen print in recent years. Ann Allen Shockley's "The Black Lesbian in American Literature" 11979), andAudre Lorde's "Poetry [s Not A Luxury" Ireprinted in Sister Outsider, 1984). to name two examples, do
discuss aspects of our literature; but both focus on specific issues of characterization and creation. Here,[ am looking at our literature as it is represented by the various genres and our response to those genres.
If we were to draft a list of socio-political matters needing our attention, I think the reception of ourcreative writing would occupy a low place because combatting racism, homophobia, world hunger, sexism and the threat of nuclear war, among many pressing fights, would take precedence.
2 Women in Struggle. [ translate only because [ may have non-Spanish readers; but [ am trying to treat
the text as did the editors by using Spanish and English in conjunction with each other.
3 By word of mouth.
, Gomez seems to believe that the women in Shockley's Say Jesus are not religious in the true sense of
the word; at least Myrtle Black, as a minister, seems to have less faith than Celie of Walker's The Color
Purple. But Black is educated and street wise, like a Baldwin character, and hence her faith is temperedby common sense. Celie has only belief to sustain her. It should be clear, then, that I do have a bias for
Shockley's work, and I think Say Jesus is her best novel to date.

106

Jill Drew
Recognition of the Tribal Mind

A review of Sitt Marie Rose, a novel, by Etel Adnan, translated from the Frenchby Georgina Kleege. 1982. The Post-Apollo Press. Distributed by Sinister
Wisdom, PO Box 1023, Rockland, ME 04841. 105 pp. 56.95.

The French novelist Christiane Rochefort has said in an interview that we "mustlook at things from the point of view of oppression and literature... oppression is
the source of my inspiration." Sitt Marie Rose is a novel of the oppression of
women by men, of the poor and disenfranchised by the rich and established, of one
tribe by another. As women, oppression is what confronts us not only in our own
lives but in the lives of the people around us - both here and abroad. It is unfortunately the name of the game and we all play it.
Etel Adnan gives no explanation or introduction to explain the events leading up
to the Civil War in Lebanon. While possibly detracting from the overall style of thenarrative, such a preface might well clarify many of the Middle Eastern andLebanese issues to American readers and, at the same time, might help to explain
the position being taken by our government towards Lebanon itself.
Lebanon was carved by France out of greater Syria, I read recently, in order tomake two weak nations out of one strong one. Death and violence were present in
the country long before 1975, a major source being the Israeli shelling and air raids
which became a way of life for most of the people living in and around the many
Palestinian camps in Lebanon. The general instability of the nation was enhancedby large groups of refugees - Armenians, Kurds, Palestinians and other politicaland economic exiles from the Middle East and Africa who sought asylum there.
As the population balance in the country shifted from Christian majority to
Muslim and predominantly Shi'ite, the Lebanese confessional government became
ineffective in running a nation and therefore concentrated on enforcing a system. As
the numbers of Shi'ites and Palestinians grew, with no corresponding civil orpolitical rights, military and political organizations were formed for the protectionof each group. In 1969 the Cairo Agreement was signed which gave the Palestinians
the right to bear arms for their own protection; at the same time the rightwing
Christians strengthened their own military ranks. The Israeli military, meanwhile,
continued to pursue their policy of reprisal - justified according to some - in thesouth.
107

And these reprisals were as terrible as they were routine. To take only the years 1970·4
and to give by way of example only the more dramatic events: on 3 January 1970, Israelicommandos crossed the border and seized 10 Lebanese soldiers and 11 civilians; following
the ambush of an Israeli school bus on 22 May 1970, when 12 Israelis, 8 of whom werechildren, were killed, Lebanese villages were bombed, 13 villagers were killed and some 32
wounded; following the massacre at Lad Airport [in Tel Aviv[ by three Japanese terrorists
on 30 May 1972, a combined Israeli naval and air force attacked three villages . . .in theSouth and killed 48 villagers and captured some Lebanese officers; after the Munich disaster[in which 11 Israeli Olympic athletes were submachine gunned] by Black September lin1972) Israeli troops occupied parts of Lebanese territory for 36 hours; on 10 April 1973
Israeli commandos boldly infiltrated Beirut and assassinated three Palestinian leaders; after
the suicidal seizure of a school in Maalot 115 May 1974) when 16 Israeli children were
killed, strafing of Lebanese villages killed 50, wounded some 200. In some of these raids, ac·cording to the Washington Post 121 June 1974), sophisticated phosphorus bombs wereused to wreak havoc with the crops; in 1975, an estimate is that 60 reprisal raids were
undertaken - 12 naval bombardments, 12 major air strikes, 15 ground attacks, 20 artillery
bombardments of border villages - all leading to the death of some 150 persons andwounding 400 . . . . The effect of these raids, most of whose victims were innocent villagers,
was to discredit the Lebanese Army and the Government, to alienate many Southernvillagers, especially Shi'ites, to add to the "poverty belt" in Beirut, to strengthen the Left, toencourage many Muslims, tactically if not out of conviction, to increase their identity with
the Palestinians while, among many Maronite Christians, the effect was to deepen the gulf
between the Palestinians and themselves.'

Lebanon began to fall apart. In the north, Tripoli was the scene of rebellion in1969 - a rebellion which has, in varying degrees, continued ever since. In thesouth, Sidon was the scene of civilian demonstrations in 1975 against the government's attempt to monopolize the fishing industry. With the assassnation of Marouf
Saad, the leader of the demonstration, the government lost control of the entire
town. Lebanon became a geography of territories inhabited by fearful tribes.
Such is the background of Etel Adnan's novel.
Sitt Marie Rose is the story of the kidnapping and the execution of an East Beirut
Christian woman by four members of the Kataeb, the Phalange militia. Marie-Rose
has defected to the western side of the city and joined the Palestinian Resistance.
She lives with a physician - a Palestinian. She is caught as she returns, during aceasefire in 1975, to the school for deaf-mute children where she works as director
and teacher, "to pay the teachers," as she explains, "and to find myself among
these children once again."
The novel is divided into sections of time, Time I "A Million Birds," and Time II"Marie-Rose." In "A Million Birds," which takes place before the fighting, wemeet the characters: Mounir, the rich son of a prominent East Beirut family; Fouad,
the perfect hunter and killer; Tony the super-Christian; Pierre the tagalong. Mounir
is showing his short film of a bird-hunting expedition in Syria. The men shoot birds
timed to the music of Pink Floyd. The women sit on the floor of an elegant liv·in groom and watch. Mounir's audience .
• David C. Gordon, Lebanon: The Fragmented Nation .(Stanford: Hoover Institution Press: 1980,
pp. 93.94) The square brackets are editor's notes.

108

"You didn't see anything, really," Mounir says. "I can't tell you what the desert is. You
have to see it. Only, you women, you'll never see it. You have to strike out on your own,
find your own trail with nothing but a map and a compass to really see it. You, you'll never
be able to do that." ... It's true. We women were happy with this little bit of imperfect, colored cinema which gave, for twenty minutes, a kind of additional prestige to these men we
see every day. In this restrictive circle, the magic these males exert is once again reinforced.
Everybody plays at this game.

Mounir also wants to do a film-f'to prove to himself that he can do it"-about
Syrian villagers working in Beirut, from the point of view of the hunters who feelsuperior to the Syrian villagers they romanticize. "We were the first Europeans
they have ever seen," explains Mounir. "Excuse me, I mean Lebanese." But the
Syrian worker in Beirut is not a romantic shot of a remote desert village: the Beirut
workers lead lives of "bent backs and sorrow" - not enough for a film it seems.
Then in April of 1975 the Civil War begins. Lebanon crumbles, the world we saw- of big houses and dilettante ideas - is replaced by one with another reality, themurderous reality of the tribes, of sadistic assault and reprisal, of carcasses dumpedin plastiC bags and left on family doorsteps, of - as the months go by - thePhalangist massacre of the refugees and the poor in Quarantina and the vengeanceof Damour, of the murder of Syrian workers in Dekouaneh - this last still not for
Mounir and his film. "Too violent, too political, " he explains.
Time II "Marie-Rose" takes place in the school for the deaf-mutes in East Beirut.
Marie-Rose has been captured and is brought by Mounir, Fouad, Tony, and Pierre- now all members of the Kataeb - to the classroom. A Maronite priest has beensummoned. The children are there - watching. They are the audience - similar to
Mounir's audience of women - in the drama that follows. The children do not, can
not hear: they are unable to speak. They know Marie-Rose does not like the war.
They do not like the war because they cannot take part in it. They can watch andthey can dance - to the vibrations of music, of guns, of death. We enter into theirworld of vibrations and silence by the doorway of their monologue. We become
part of the terrible dream.
It is here - in Time II - by her use of interior monologue and by her handling ofchronology that Etel Adnan builds the power of the book. Marie-Rose speaks of her
capture:... they took me, a few meters from this school, on this street where everyone always seemed to like me, before the very eyes of the parents of these children who sit before me now,
their eyes open, sending me signs. Nothing moved in the street except my captors.
Everything seemed staged including the short flight of a bee from one tree to another. They
said: "We've got to talk to you." And I understood that, with those words, I was leaving theworld of ordinary speech.

Ordinary speech does not exist then for us either. We leave that world andassume - as part of the dream - the mindset of the assassins. We become thejudge, the executioner, the victim. We too are caught in the trap of Beirut. Mounirtells us:109

I had nothing to do with this abduction. In principle I'm against any procedure that's nottruly military .... We will get our enemies . .. . After three days of intensive bombing,they'll all be taken: imprudent friends living on the other side, enemies, self-proclaimed
neutrals, all of them. It will be clean and definitive. There will be a victor and a vanquished .
. . . I'm their friend .. .but I'm also their section chief. I can't say no to my comrades

And Tony:
I don't understand. She's a Christian and she went over to the Moslem camp. She's
Lebanese and she went over to the Palestinian camp. Where's the problem? We must doaway with her like with every other enemy.

Fouad:
I didn't position artillery on the hills of this city to get myself mixed up in some story about
a woman. I did it to blow up things . ... I say to them, I am absolute order. I am absolute
power. I am absolute efficiency. I've reduced all truths to a formula of life and death.

We move from one mind to another in silence, learning the quality and the quantity of Phalangist thinking. Mounir, as group leader is beset by doubts - just as hehad doubts about his identity in the beginning. Confronted by the presence ofMarie-Rose, his childhood love, he says:
I know her, and knowing is an extraordinarily strong bond. It establishes a kind of magnetic
field between beings or even things, and intensifies and illuminates everything. She's here
before me. She's familiar to me. And yet it's up to me to decide whether she lives or dies.
How can I?

Mounir is very human. But he has been schooled - in the grand catacomb in- ..
verted Christian East Beirut tradition - to adhere to the principles of the Faith, afaith based not on love and mercy and surely never on doubt, but on the Crusades.
It is an education which, Marie-Rose reminds us, reduces everything to the question of St. George and the Dragon. As a school boy, Mounir dressed up as a
Crusader. When Marie-Rose tells him he is ridiculous in that role, that he can never
become one of them, that he is from Lebanon and not from France or England, heasks, "Then what am I going to become?"
As Etel Adnan draws us into an identification with the Phalangist perspective, we
become the power, the group. We get to be Crusaders. Olive drab and sinister blue
have replaced the chainmail: we carry guns instead of swords.
Recall Fouad, however, who has reduced all things to the life and death fotmulawherein there is no room for doubt or love. All the men do this in the end, even
Mounir, who carries out the destiny of his tribe, a destiny defined by destroying thedestiny of others. Marie-Rose provides the problem: the woman acting on her own,
the bird flying alone in the sky, the target for the hunters. As she tells Bouna Lias,the priest, shortly before her death,110

"More than a million Arabs and not one knows how to love! You're only in love withyourselves, you look for your own image in all your attachments, your passion is always
directed back on yourselves ... . the religious authorities, both Moslem and Christian, havetransformed your hearts into deserts, infinitely more arid than the ones we cross on foot inall seasons. I know that the only true love is the love of the Stranger. When you have cut theumbilical cords that bind you together, you will at last become real men, and life among you
will have a meaning."

But Fouad is not interested in love and it is Fouad who solves the problem as hetears her apart: "Me, I know that might makes right, that the wolf doesn't ask the
sheep's permission to eat him. It's his right as the wolf."And it is Bouna Lias, theMaronite Friar, who gives us the final chilling condemnation:"Yes, Lord, thy will be done. I tried to bring back one of Thy own and she resisted. The
cries I hear now are the sign of the punishment Thou has sent from Heaven. These young
men are executing Thy Providence. They leave nothing on the ground but a pile ofdislocated members tliat was a sinner. I can give her neither extreme unction nor benedic·tion. She no longer has a face. She has fallen before Thy Judgment. She is Thy responsibility.
She will no longer be ours. On this earth we defend Thy interests, and those of Thy beloved
Son, so that Thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven, and the keys to the Great Mystery
stay in Thy hands along. Amen."

It is a scene of operatic grandeur, those words of the Inquisition.
It is in this respect that Sitt Marie Rose is a religious book and takes on its
greater significance - far beyond the story of a martyr, the portrayal of the Palestinians or even the workings of the Phalange mind. As Etel Adnan succeeds so wellin bringing us into that mind, we find that the mind set is perhaps part of our own.
None of us has learned to cut umbilical cords so well nor have we learned to
distinguish between faith and action. We desperately need to learn about welcoming strangers and about paying heavy prices.
Sitt Marie Rose is not an optimistic book. But the truth of Lebanon - like thetruth in our own country - has little space for facile optimism. Adnan has written
the truth about oppression and the truth about love. She does not feed us platitudes
about death and victory, that nauseating rhetoric which politicians and the gunghos
hand to us every day. Marie-Rose, at one point, tells us:
Death is never in the plural. Let's not exaggerate its victory. It's total enough. Let's not singabout that victory. There are not millions of deaths. It happens millions of times thatsomeone dies.

It is one of the strongest statements in the book. It makes the stranger a person tobe welcomed: it cancels out the huge numerical figures we read about each day figures which mean nothing - and gives the living, the dying and the dead humanfaces. It is a statement of hope - in the hopelessness of Lebanon - so that whenMarie-Rose asks, about the people of West Beirut; "Will the lights in their eyes be
extinguished one by one?" we will be able to answer, "No."c---.-J.-I

111~

Bat HaMa'avak
The Law of Return: A Review

The Law of Return, by Alice Bloch. 1983. Alyson Publications, Inc., PO Box 2783,
Boston, MA 02208. 249 pp. $7.95.

A Jewish woman, I was brought to Israel in 1974 by the Law of Return. It gave me
the right of immediate citizenship, which at 19V2 I jumped at. I wanted to get myimmigrant-student deferment, study dietetics, serve in the Israel Defense Forces,
marry a pilot, live on a moshav and have five babies.
I have done none of that. The army classified me as handicapped, dietetics in
Hebrew proved too much for me. After a broken engagement and much cheerful andnot so cheerful promiscuity I fell in love with another woman. Returning to the University, I eventually completed an M.A. in English Literature.
Today I make my living as a typist. My first lover (the affair was never consummatedsexually) is back in the United States - I think she is about to be married. Under the
Law of Return, which guarantees citizenship to all Jews, I could not come to Israel today, as I am now; homosexuals, criminals and betrayers of the Jewish People are excluded under various sub-clauses.
Elisheva, the heroine of Alice Bloch's novel, The Law of Return, makes aliya in
1969-literally, "ascends" to live in the punch-drunk, victorious, but still essentiallyinnocent Israel of the post Six Day War years. She has come to settle in her country, todiscover her religious roots, to marry, to have Jewish babies. Though perhaps notmeant to be a female Everyimmigrant, it would be impossible for most women who
have spent any length of time in Israel not to see bits of Elisheva's experience in herown, and vice-versa. Bloch has sent chills down the spines of many of us here who set
out with Elisheva's goals, only to discover ourselves as lesbians and/or feminists after a
few years. A considerable number of us have stayed in Israel, finding support in eachother. But in Elisheva's 1969 Jerusalem, feminism was just an embryo in the minds of ahandful of women. And women-love? I have not yet dared to ask any of my vatika(long-time immigrant) or sabra (native-born) friends.
Bloch's description of settling down in Israel has been tempered only by glossing
over the bureaucracy involved in living here (you don't really want to waste timereading about how long it actually takes to get the paperwork done) . From the clerk's
urging to Hebraize a name to the seduction/rape at the Absorption Center to the
kibbutz and the run-down Jerusalem neighborhood, my head constantly nodded
yesyesyes.
112

Across the street, beside the makolet where Elisheva can buy dairy products and bottled
juices, stands a small Iraqi synagogue. At 5:00 every morning, a friend of the dead man
paces in front of the synagogue, calling "Minyan! Shaharit! Minyan!" He walks as if
already at prayer, his turban swaying across the front of his striped caftan. When nine men
have joined him, they enter the synagogue and chant a Hebrew that sounds like Arabic.
Sometimes a shepherd with his flock, or a man leading a few donkeys, passes by, and thebraying of the animals drow ns out the prayers.
At 6:00 the makolet opens, and the bakery down the street, and the mikva and public
shower at the corner. Now the old women begin to appear, ca rrying baskets, greeting eachother loudly - in Arabic? or in the same Hebrew their husbands use in the synagogue?
Clusters of children run by, shouting and laughing, bookbags strapped to their small backs.
Young men and women dressed for jobs emerge last and walk quickly toward the bus stopat the end of the street. Some are smoking, some cracking sunflower seeds with their teeth ..
all are talking, interrupting, talking, gesturing, giving each other friendly slaps, offering
seeds, offering cigarettes, talking.
(pp. 40·41)

Elisheva's involvement with a benevolent form of orthodox Judaism is an importantpart of her life in Israel. Raised in a strong Gordonian/Labor Zionist background,religion had no attraction for me when I first came to Israel, but many of my fellow
Ulpan (intensive Hebrew classes) students, especially those from assimilated homes,
floated towards it. It provided a hevra, a word usually defined as a group, a gang, aclosely-knit circle of friends. But a hevra is so much more than that, especially foryoung family-less immigrants, building their own life for the first time. The hevra
would get together on Sabbath Eve, light candles, eat, often pray. They would singnewly-learned Hebrew songs and observe obscure holidays and fasts. The groupbecame a family in many ways.
Perhaps the group is a family more than a hevra. Tonight, fo r instance, Elisheva is themother, Milton is the father, and Miria m is the oldest daughter who helps with the cooking
and cleaning. Elisheva sighs. She has traveled thousands of miles, at least in part to separate
fro m her family and find some larger or deeper identity, and now she has fallen into a
pseudo-family here: a group united by blood tie, ritual and habit.
(p. 69)I arrived in Israel before the changes in the abortion law (before even the "liberalized" law was passed), before El-Al stopped flying on Saturdays and Jewish holidays,
before archaeological digs were interfered with, before rocks were thrown at motorists
driving on Ramot road on Saturdays. I came to Israel before the crocheted kippa (skullcap) became a symbol of coercion and worse. Still at times, during the first months in
Israel, I envied others who found sweetness in what I even then saw as anti-feminist,pedantic and tied by ritual.
In Israel, Elisheva's feministllesbian consciousness gradually and realisticallyawakens. It can be seen in her friendships with women that grow both in number andin depth. She forms a close relationship with her neighbor Yardena, a woman of her
113

age already a mother of two children. When Yardena becomes ill after an illegal abortion, it is Elisheva who nurses her. Observing an Arab woman who has spilled cookies
on a bus, Elisheva wonders who has decided for them that they are enemies. The webof women's friendship which is woven by Bloch is all encompassing, mixing class,ethnic background, religion. And as she recognizes the richness of friendship between
women, she finds her relationships with men-including and perhaps especially thepsychiatrist she flees to for help-shallow.
On a vacation in Elat, the two come together. In her room she imagines that Lilit,
Adam's rebellious first wife, has come into her room to seduce her sexually, as well as
to seduce her into violating the Shabbat rest.
Hutz Lilit [Out, Lilit]. Choose me. Hutz Lilit. Choose me. Hutz choose Lilit me. Choose Lilitme hutz. Hutz me Litit choose. Choose choose choose choose(p. 109)

Resisting Lilit, Elisheva allows herself to be seduced the same night by an Israeli
soldier on leave, the son of friends. The encounter ends in an argument on maletenderness and foreplay. Although the major part of the scene was uncomfortably
realistic, the ending seemed over-simplified.
When Elisheva discovers that she is not pregnant, she becomes frantic in her search
to prove herself "normal." She finds her chance in Daniel, an old friend she has remained in contact with, who is just as frightened of his homosexuality as she is of hers.
She will return to America for a year and they will marry. Armed with marriage
license, they will return to be successfully absorbed in Israel.
But before she can leave Israel, Elisheva must see the Galilee again. It is there that
she meets Deborah, a feminist tourist, and among other subjects they discuss the planned marriage.
Elisheva wants to pull her close and say, "No, please don't let me do it. Let's go off together
and swim, always. Please, don 't let me do it." .But she can't say anything, and Deborah
hates her now, and she hates herself too. But what can she do? She wants a normal life,
doesn't she? What else can she do?
(p. 142)

The novel continues in New York, and although my personal interest in the story
waned, Bloch kept me interested as a reader. Her skill in switching from first to third
person narration is instinctive and sound. Still, at times I had the feeling that she
wanted to get Elisheva back to Israel.
Elisheva's engagement is short-lived. Daniel, now more secure in his gay identity,
breaks it off, and Elisheva, venturing ever so slowly into feminism, once again meets
Deborah, and the two become lovers. The love they find is vital and healing. It is alove that allows them to completely find their identities as Jews and as lesbians.

114

Nothing had prepared us, and yet somehow all history conspired to bring us together: two
Jewish women brimming with love for one another. So sweet was our delight, it seemed toinfuse with meaning the centuries of suffering that had preceded us. "Those who sow intears will reap in joy." We were the harvest; our love was the first fruit, the springing forthof life from the ashes of our people.
(p.230)The phoenix imagery is wonderful: an over-used favorite about the State of Israel,
here the image is given a fresh sense.
We dream of fruitfulness. We dream of planting ourselves down into the soil to spring up
again, fresh and flowing with sap... From the old body, new vines: rockrose, dewberry,
blackberry, brambleberry.
We dream of flourishing from our grave, from the grave of our people.
(p. 231 )Full circle, the two return to Israel as tourists. It is a different Israel from the one
they remember: a right-wing, religiously oriented state, but a state where there exists a
women's center and lesbian pride. It is the Israel I live in today, and work very hard tolove.
In the Likud post-Sabra and Shatila Israel of Spring 1984 (as I revise this it is only
eleven days until the elections), some Jewish and/or Israel-supporting women may
wince at some of the negatives, so accurately and sadly portrayed in the novel. But
struggles for personal or national freedom were never won by running and hiding frompain.

MENOPAUSE , CHANGING ROLES, AND
THE JOB MARKET
ARE JUST SOME OF THE TOPICS
COVERED IN

BROOMSTICK
A NA TIONAL, FEMINIST,READER-PARTICIPATION MAGAZINE
BY, FOR, AND ABOUT
WOMEN OVER FORTY
510 per year in US, S15 in Canada (US funds)
Sampl e copy 52 .00
BROOMSTICK
3543. 18th St.
San Franc isco, CA 94110

115

Ahnighito I

Katie Seiden
116

Contributors' Notes _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __Katharyn Machan Aal's interview with Judy Grahn is part of The Writer as Performer, a study of contemporary poetry and fiction readings. Her most recent published collection is Women : A Pocket Book
(Grass Roots Press, 1983).
Etel Adnan is a poet and a writer well known throughout the Arab World. A painter and a tapestry designer,
her works have been exhibited in the U.S., Europe, and the Arab countries. She lives in California.
Gloria Anzaldua, a Chicana tejana poet and fiction writer, is co-editor of This Bridge Called M y Back:
Writings by Radical Women of Color. Her work, which combines the Chicano, the indigenous, and thelesbian-feminist literary traditions, has appeared in Cuen tos: Stories by Latinas, Conditions 6, 8, and10 and Sinister Wisdom . She teaches at Women's Voices Writing Workshop in Santa Cruz and in the
Adult Degree Program of Vermont College.
SDiane Bogus (pronounced es-di-ann bow-gus) is a doctoral candidate at Miami University in Oxford, OH,
and is continuing to publish and write as often as creatively possible. She is the author of four books ofpoetry, the latest being Sapphire's Sampler, an anthology of poetry, prose, and drama.
Roz Calvert, a rural poet from the Midwest living in New York, is currently accepting contributions for ananthology on lives of poor white women, White /Trash/Women (see announcements).
Sharron Demarest is a sculptor living and working in Brooklyn. She's a member of the Ceres Gallery, a
new feminist gallery in N.Y.
Sandra DeSando is a member of the Heresies collective. Marble Mumbles , one of a series of books
done in collaboration with Sharron Demarest, is available fo r $10 from S. DeSando, 388 Myrtle Ave.,
Brooklyn, NY 11205. She also makes art about sexuality.
Jill Drew was born in 1940 and has been writing since she was eight. She went to Beirut in 1982 to work as
a trauma nurse. The journal she kept during this time- To Go To Berbir-was published as a special booklength issue of SW 26, and her poems appear in S W 25.
Audrey Ewart is a black lesbian who lives in the Bay Area. She struggles with breaking silences and towardclaiming all the facets of her identity.
Jyl Felman taught writing for four years at the University of New Hampshire and created the first Women's
Writing Workshop offered there. Currently she gives workshops on Jewish Invisibility and Anti-Semitism,
practices law, and writes stories about living in exile.
Sharon Fernleaf: I work primarily as an illustrator/artist and single mother in Seattle. I've illustrated Visions, a book of affirmations, with Bette Lamont and Linda Ceryczan (Publish-Her Press) and Mermaid's Secret , poems by Terri Celass (Redswallow Press). My work is included in Fight Back! Feminist
Resistance to Male Violence . In progress: Woman and the Wolf by Bette Lamont; Peon Art-Art
for the Majority, a collection of drawings.
Beatrix Gates is a poet and letterpress printer. As owner/operator of Granite Press-East in Penobscot,
Maine, she designs and prints letterpress books of poetry by women. She has taught poetry workshops at
Hardscrabble Hill in Orland, Maine and recently received an M.F.A. in writing from Sarah Lawrence Col·
lege.
Judy Grahn's history of gay culture, Another Mother Tongue , has just been published by Beacon Press.
The Queen of Wands is her most recent poetry book (Crossing Press) . Her work is widely anthologized.

117

Elisabeth Griggs is a 27-year-old WASP living in New York City.
Bat HaMa' avak is an Amazionist and proud of it. Her name means "Daughter of the Struggle."
Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz has been' writing and speaking on women, violence, and resistance (a book she
hopes to complete this year), on Jewish identity, anti-Semitism, racism, and guilt (an essay on the verge ofcompletion) and on art and politics (a recurring theme which she thinks it's time to return to) . She teaches
writing and women's studies in the Adult Degree Program at Vermont College.
Annette Kennedy: I have lived in San Diego for the past six years and work in the local women's bar. I am
currently working on a collection of short stories in which I am trying to capture the essence of life inSouthern California, focusing particularly on women.
Irena KJepfisz, author of Keeper of Accounts, is completing an article on feminism and office work
which will appear in SW 28. She is experimenting with Yiddish/English poetry for a manuscript mameloshnlmother tongue. A poem from this group appears in Women 's Review of Books (September,1984). She teaches at the summer Women's Voices Writing Workshop at Santa Cruz.
Pat M. Kuras has poetry appearing in New Lesbian Writing (Grey Fox Press, 1984). Her first book of
poetry, from which "S'il Vous Plait" is reprinted, is The Pinball Player (Good Gay Poets, 1982, Box 277,
Astor Sta., Boston, MA 02123 .
Christian McEwen: Born in London, grew up in Scotland. Came to the States in 1979 and lived there forfour years (Berkeley and New York) . Worked in construction and floor refinishing, also as a gardener,
counsellor and teacher of English. Currently back in London, teaching again and writing as much as possible.
Lu Melander: I'm 51 years old, teach with California Poets in the Schools on the Peninsula. Have just finished a 3-act play, The Sirens.
Lesh{a Newman: My work has appeared in Moving Out, Telephone, The World and other magazines;
my first collection of poems.]ust Looking For My Hoes was published by Back Door Press in 1980. I ama 28 year old Jewish Lesbian currently working at a day care center and surviving in Western Massachusetts.
Achy Obejas was born in Havana, Cuba in 1956. She is a poet, playwright, and journalist living in Chicago.
Her poetry has appeared in SW, Beloit Poetry Journal, Beos, Third Woman and others. She is currently editing an issue of Third Woman dedicated to Cuban women writers in the U.S.
Melanie Perish is a writer who moved from the East Coast to the West underestimating the difficulty andthe richness of her choice. Some of this gets documented in her work. Her poems have appeared in Calyx,
Midway Review, Swallow 's Tale as well as other small press magazines. Notes of a Daughter fromthe Old Country (Motherroot Publications) and Traveling the Distance (Rising Tide Press) are two
chapbooks of her work.
Annemarie Poulin was born in Maine to a working-class Franco family. Active since the 60's in the peace
movement and in lesbianlfeminist communities' politics, she has been teaching low-income Franco andrefugee adults for 10 years, and has recently become an educational consultant for these communities in
Vermont.
Minnie Bruce Pratt is a poet, born in Alabama, now living in Washington, D.C. Most recently her work has
appeared, along with essays by Elly Bulkin and Barbara Smith, in Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist
Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism (Long Haul Press). She is the mother of two teen-age sons.
Mirtha Quintanales: Cuban-born anthropologist and writer. Co-editor of Companeras: A Latina Lesbian Anthology, with Juanita Ramos, forthcoming 1985. Co-founder/collective member of the Third World
Women's Archives, NYC. Working on project to make the literature of Spanish-speaking Caribbean women
known in the U.S. Inquiries: c/o The Third World Women's Archives, POB 2652, NY, NY 10009.
Anne Rickertsen: I am a 28-year-old white lesbian poet named Rickets. I grew up on a farm in Nebraska
and am now working a boring shit-job in a hardware store in Mankato, MN, and writing.

118

Randl Schalet: I'm 25, a Jewish lesbian. I live in Somerville with my cat, Europa. I work with developmen·
tally disabled adults.
Katie Selden: "My sculpture deals with struggle, confines, transformation; embattled forms which seek tobreak out of constructions." She has wgn awards from the Five Towns Music and Art Foundation and theHeckscher Museum, and her work has been included in 20 shows.
Lisa Simon lives near Burlington, Vermont where she grew up and works as a helper/educator to troubled
families with young children. Encouraged to write since she was small, she does so now when time and quiet
permit.
Pegasis Touch: I'm almost 42, and I've spent the last 21', years recovering body memories of 7 years ofchildhood incest experiences with my father. I've been traveling and sharing with other incest survivors.
Now I'm living in southern Oregon with my lover, and we are trying to start a wimin's spiritual self·healing
community in the country with other worn on.
Fauna Yarrow is a working class rural duke from Vermont, New Hampshire, and now Maine. She is arecovering alcoholic/addict who is learning to dive from high places and to stay afloat while in over her head.
A peace and social change activist for 15 years. she's now teaching children and adults skills for resolving
conflicts without violence and is co-coordinating a peer-counselling network for sexual abuse survivors. To
keep centered she grows and gathers herbs and does fiber art.
zana: i am a disabled jew, 36 years old, seeking ways we lesbians can get beyond our patriarchal conditioning and create something better. i have just put together my first book of poems and drawings, herb
w011lon , available from new woman press, 2000 king mountain trail, sunny valley, OR 97497.
Correction
In SW 25, an error appeared in Elaine Hall's biographical note; She lives with her lover of ten years, Ardena
Sharkan. Sorry for misprinting Ardena's name.

GODDESSES & AMAZONS ·Keep your personal diary / journal
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119

Editor's Statement a b o u t - - - - - - - - - - - - To Go To Berbir, Sinister Wisdom 26
I first realized I wanted to write something about our last issue of Sinister
Wisdom-#26 , Jill Drew's Beirut journal To Go To Berbir-while looking at a recent New York Times. That day-as on many days like it-there was news of continued fighting in Beirut. The crossing between east and west Beirut had been closed
again. Sunni and Shi'ite Muslim, Christian and Druse leaders were trying to forge
another cease fire. The Israeli army stationed in southern Lebanon (it had withdrawn
from Beirut months earlier) had been attacked again; another death, another reprisal,
another outburst of protest in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. And what I realized was: ifanyone went directly from the journal written in 1982 to that day's Times in 1984, shewould have no idea whatsoever about the connection among these events.
The power of the journal is its immediacy, its passion, its undeniable subjectivity.
The limits of the journal stem from these same qualities. Because it is rooted in the moment, in the siege of Beirut of 1982, the journal isolates Israelis as the lone agents of
Lebanon's destruction, barely mentioning the civil war raging on and off in Lebanon
for the past 10 years, or the earlier devastation by the PLO or the Syrians. This is not
surprising. After all, why should a journal mention historical events which everyone in
Lebanon certainly knew about?
But for readers outside of Lebanon 1982, the journal perhaps creates a distorted picture. In the journal, practically all Arab people are kind, generous, sustained by theirfaith; practically all Israelis are killers or crass materialists. The Israeli peace movement is not mentioned. Jews from outside of Israel who are mentioned are not identified as Jewish-the American nurse Ellen Siegel, for example, who went to Jerusalem
to testify about the Israeli role in the Shatila and Sabra massacres. The Kateeb-thePhalangist militia, primary killers in Sabra and Shatila-is not identified as Christian.
Christian imagery buttresses descriptions of suffering and sacrifice, so that both Christianity and Islam emerge as positive forces; Judaism as a negative force only.
In the brief introduction to the journal, we wrote: ". .. an honest book about ahighly polarized situation like the Middle East is hard to get published .... " This was
one reason why we published Jill Drew's book as a special issue of SW. We wanted it
to get out. It's also true that in a convoluted situation like the Middle East, one point ofview is always part, never the whole picture. It makes sense to accompany such
writing both with historical background to the events of Beirut 1982 and with a summary of what has happened since; not to "justify" the devastation-there is no justification-but to grasp these events as something other than a morality play of evil against
innocence; to grasp the political roots of these events in order to imagine politicalsolution.

My criticism, then, is not of the journal which-even after editing, proofreading, and120

pasting it up-still moves me. Rather I am criticizing the format in which Sinister
Wisdom presented it. We are beginning to receive responses from readers, several ofwhom share this criticism: why no context?
Why did Sinister Wisdom publish the journal in this format? Let me describe myown reasoning around this decision, because I think it will strike familiar chords forany of us trying to act-under pressure-on imperfect knowledge and wisdom.
I am a Jew who has been and continues to be committed to the existence of the stateof Israel. Not too many months before the Israeli invasion, I had begun to study moreclosely the Middle East in reaction to what I experienced as a virulent anti-Zionism(the idea that Jews had no right to a Jewish state) in the women's movement. When
Israeli troops moved into Lebanon, I responded with outrage and condemnation. But
inside I felt so much fear and anger about the anti-Semitism unleashed in the wake of
Lebanon, about the self-righteous focus on Israel as the worst of all possible nations(this, from citizens of the U.S., Germany, Great Britain. .. ), that I did not look sufficiently at what was happening to the Lebanese and Palestinians. An error not ofpolitics, but of a heart closed tight with fear.
Jacobo Timerman cracked this fear open. In The Longest War: Israel in Lebanon,
Timerman described Israeli brutality. Others had written of these things, but I trusted
Timerman precisely because I knew he understood the dangers of anti-Semitism; infact, I had learned a great deal about it from him.' I knew he cared about Jewish survival. I accepted his assertion that silence and pretense are deadly; not speech, not information.
In early 1984, mulling over the manuscript of To Go To Berbir, I felt compelled byits sharp images of weapons against flesh. I wanted to do something to focus attention
on Palestinian suffering. As fighting kept breaking out, as Israeli planes would now andagain strafe civilian targets in the south of Lebanon, I hoped the facts of humandestruction abounding in the journal would stir those who read it to fight against the
U.S. Middle East policy: U.S. intervention in Lebanon and support of the Israeli
invasion.
And as I struggled with the decisions-to print a special issue and get the journal out
fast, to print it without an historical context or updating (we didn't have these andthere wasn't time to solicit them, though we did compile and include a bibliography on
the Middle East" ), to print some passages which seemed to evoke images of Jews as
Christ-killers-I walked an uneasy line between paranoia and self-erasure. Was I unnecessarily fearful for Jews? Was I overlooking real danger to Jews?

• Timerman, an Argentinian newspaper publisher, was imprisoned and tortured by the junta-since deposed-partly for defying censorship regulations, partly for being a Jew and a
Zionist. His narrative of this experience and brilliant analysis of anti-Semitism are found in
Prisoner Without A Nam e, Cell Without A N umber. Upon his release from prison,
Timerman emigrated to Israel.
.. For a copy of the bibliography, send an SASE and one extra stamp.

121

I have come to think that treading this line is a common-as well as painful-ex·
perience for radical Jews. I did not want to let my concern about anti·Semitism· over·whelm my concern for Arab life. I kept arguing with myself:-People were getting killed in Lebanon. Why was I worried about anti·
Semitism?
-But Jews were getting killed because of anti·Semitism-synagogues
were bombed in reaction to the war, Jews were shot at on the street,swastikas abounded, political cartoons showed Jews with guns in the
shape of big (jewish) noses.

-But should fear of vengeance against Jews silence criticism of Israel?
Isn't that reactionary?
-Is publishing the journal progressive? What about Jewish danger?

-But the danger isn't equal. Besides, the journal hardly mentions Jews.
-The journal doesn 't even acknowledge Jewish danger or Jewish
history.

-That's not its subject. Can't a witness close to the victims of this war
have her own space?
-But without history, without context, there 's no possibility ofresolution.

-But is the journal worth reading only if it offers answers?
-But is it fair? Is it accurate?

-But how can a first·person account from inside a war be fair? How do
we piece together "the truth" except with fragments?
And so it went. As I relive this process now, it's obvious to me that there is no final
stopping place, no answer, in politics any more than in life. Any action we take will
likely be imperfect, require correctives, and more action, and more correctives. What
we can't do is get paralyzed or cynical. What we have to do is act as best we can,

• I am using the term "anti·Semitism" as it has been used historically and traditionally, tomean hatred towards Jews-the aiaspora Semites, aliens in every land-even though this istechnically inept, since Arabs are also Semites. Given the different histories of racism
against Jews and Arabs (including the enmity between Jews and Arabs), it makes sense to
speak of "anti·Arab racism," rather than blurring the different people's experiences of pre·judice and brutality,122

acknowledge limits and errors, and move to correct these: "innocent" means only that
nothing got risked.

Sinister Wisdom affirms both the decision to publish To Go To Berbir and thedecision to publish this statement.

• • •Having said this, I can report that many notes arrived from those of you who were
glad we had decided to do this special issue. Some people, however, expressed concernthat one of a handful of lesbian publications was devoting a whole issue to work which
they felt could find publication in other places as lesbian work could not: 112 pages occupied by the Beirut journal does mean 112 pages not occupied by lesbian writing.
We did make that choice. I don't apologize for my share in this decision, but I do
recognize the weight of it. SWs commitment to publish lesbian and feminist creation
has not changed. We welcome your response to the Beirut journal and to this statement.

Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz
8/84

I am deeply indebted for support, ideas, advice andJewish sisterhood to
Irena Klep{isz and Bernice Mennis.

123

Announcements

MATERIALS WANTED: for an anthology of women's writings on body image: journal entries, poems,
prose. Topics of particular interest include fear of fatness, relationship to physical fitness, conflicts with foodor body size, accepting and appreciating our bodies, although all material will be considered. Deadline
February, 1985. Send with SASE to Sandy Handley, P.O. Box 2781 , Santa Cruz, CA 95063.
Anthology on the lives of poor white women-WHITE/TRASH/WOMEN-accepting contributions. Send toeditor Roz Calvert at 170 Ave. C, #4-H, NY, NY 10009
The FIRST SOUTHERN L.E.A.P. (Lesbians for Empowerment, Action, and Politics) will happen Oct. 19-21
on 640 campground acres near Gainesville, Florida. Childcare, interpreting, physical accessibility. Sliding
scale that starts at SO. Contact Jayne-Orr, 148 W. 6th St., Jacksonville, FL 32206 or call Charis Bookstore(404) 524-0304.
The NEW FEMINARY COLLECTIVE- Tiana Arruda, Sim Kallan, Canyon Sam, and Jean Swallow-based
now in San Francisco, offers subscriptions (S 12/year/3 issues), invites submissions with SASE; deadlines,
1111/84 for Winter/Spring issue, 3/1185 for Summer. Feminary, 1945 20th St., San Francisco, CA 94107
The BLACK WOMEN'S ANTI-VIOLENCE PROJECT needs support in the form of volunteer advocacy,financial contributions, as well as hearing from women who have developed or are interested in developing
ethnic-specific anti-violence services. 1515 Webster St., Oakland, CA 94612 (415)465-3890
Tracking Our Way Through Time: A LESBIAN HERSTORY CALENDAR/JOURNAL-260 spiralbound pages of facts/photos/quotes/graphics documenting Lesbian herstory. S10.50 + S1-postage to Sandpiper Books, 1369 Estes, Chicago, IL 60626

LESBIAN MOTHERS ANTHOLOGY/UNA ANTOLOGIA DE MADRES LESBIANAS: (Y las Gruesas son
Colchas/And The Thick Ones Are Comforters) invites ideas, comments, suggestions and submissions;deadline 12/21/84, send originals (for legal purposes) along with 1 copy and SASE. We will protect all confidential information. 1803 Mission St., Box 160, Santa Cruz, CA 95060-5296.
Call to all FEMINIST WOMEN PHOTOGRAPHERS: The Blatant Image is looking for unmounted
black & white photographs no larger than 8 x 10 for 1984-85 edition. Women of color especially invited tocontribute. Send SASE for guidelines, etc., to TBI, 2000 King Mountain Trail, Sunny Valley, OR 97497-9799.
Available issues, 1982/$11, 1983/$12, pre-order 1984/S12 till Nov.
New magazine, WOMAN OF POWER, quarterly of feminism, spirituality, and politics, has published its
first issue. Subscription, S18/year, S131l0w income, S5/single issue. POB 827, Cambridge, MA 02238
Available at 15% discount if you mention SW: A LEGAL GUIDE FOR LESBIAN AND GAY COUPLES,
S14.95 list, from NOLO Press, 950 Parker St., Berkeley, CA 94710
The Century Book Club-a NEW LESBIAN AND GAY BOOK CLUB-has purchased Naiad Press's
Amateur City by Katherine V. Forrest and The Sophie Horowitz Story by Sarah Schulman as the Sept.
and Oct. Main Lesbian Selections. Write CBC, 1556 No. LaBrea, LA, CA 90028
Sinister Wisdom POSTER CONTEST: send designs, drawings, photographs suitable for black & white
reproduction for a Sinister Wisdom poster. Artist will receive royalties from sales of poster and maybe
t-shirt too. Send with SASE (copies, not originals) to SW POB 1023, Rockland, ME 04841. Indicate whether
you also want us to consider the work for publication.

124

Support Our Resistance
WOMEN OF ALL RED NATIONS (WARN) seek moral and financial support for Frances Young, an
American Indian Woman from the Sioux nation in North Dakota, indicted for the first degree murder ofher boyfriend who had violently and repeatedly abused her and her teenage children. The case isscheduled for trial in August and may go through several appeals
Frances Young needs: letters to Paul Richwalsky, Commonwealth Attorney, 514 W. Liberty St.,
Louisville, KY 40202, asking that Young's charge be reduced or dropped, and that the office deal effectively with the problems of violence against women and children instead of punishing a woman who had
no recourse but to defend herself.
donations, tax-deductible, big or little, check or money order payable to the Frances Young Defense
Committee; send to POB 1464, Louisville, KY 40202. An estimated $25,000 is needed. And share the information .
NEW BEDFORD RAPE CRISIS PROJECT seeks support for the WOMAN GANG-RAPED IN
TAVERN last year. Because she chose to prosecute the rapists, chose not to let them get away with it,
she has been persecuted, endured threats on her life, and fmally has been forced to flee her home with
her two children. The RCP has set up a Jane Doe fund to help pay for her relocation. Send donations, requests for information, etc. through the New Bedford Women's Center, 252 Country St., New Bedford,
MA 02740 (info. from Aug-Sept '84 Of( Our Backs).
Gay's The Word, LONDON'S LESBIAN AND GAY COMMUNITY BOOKSHOp, has been raided andall its imported books seized; many new titles are being refused Customs clearance and detained at theports, even though Gay's The Word still has to pay for the books. The charge-of "indecency"-must befought in an expensive and important legal and community fight. For information or to send a donation,
write Defend Gay's The Word Campaign, 38 Mount Pleasant, London WC1X OAP England. Seizedbooks include Common Lives, Lesbian Lives, Judy Grahn led.l True to Life Adventure Stories,
Sinister Wisdom and The Joy of Lesbian Sex. FIGHT CENSORSHIP.
DINAH LIVES! In SW 25 we reported that Dinah-newsletter of the Cincinnati lesbian community-was in danger of folding . A new collective has gathered and the newsletter continues: write
Dinah , LAB, POB 1485, Cincinnati, OH 45201.

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We are proud to publish -A GATHERING OF SPIRIT
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1984. 240 pp. $7.95

Also available from SINISTER WISDOMKEEPER OF ACCOUNTS by Irena KJepfisz
1982. 97 pp. $5.95
One of the great Jewish books of this lifetime by a founding edilor of Conditions magazine,
a leading voice in the lesbian, feminist , and Jewish communities.

SITT MARIE ROSE by Etel Adnan
1978. 105 pp. $6.95
A novel about the civil war in Lebanon by a Lebanese feminist, artist, and filmmaker.
Published by Post-Apollo Press, distributed by Sinister Wisdom.

WE SPEAK IN CODE by Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz
visuals by Paula King, Michelle Goodman, Lee Pickett
1980. 106 pp. $4.75
Poetry & other writings about feminist , lesbian, Jewish experience, about violence andresistance. Published by Motheroot Publications, distributed by Sinister Wisdbm

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