It is a language always on the verge of silence and often on the verge of song. It is the language stories are told in. It is the language spoken by all children and most women, and so I call it the mother tongue, for we learn it from our mothers and speak it to our kids. I’m trying to use it here in public where it isn’t appropriate, not suited to the occasion, but I want to speak it to you because we are women and I can’t say what I want to say about women in the language of capital M Man. If I try to be objective I will say, “This is higher and that is lower,” I’ll make a commencement speech about being successful in the battle of life, I’ll lie to you; and I don’t want to.
Early this spring I met a musician, the composer Pauline Oliveros, a beautiful woman like a grey rock in a streambed; and to a group of us, women, who were beginning to quarrel over theories in abstract, objective language—and I with my splendid Eastern-women’s-college training in the father tongue was in the thick of the fight and going for the kill—to us, Pauline, who is sparing with words, said after clearing her throat, “Offer your experience as your truth.” There was a short silence. When we started talking again, we didn’t talk objectively, and we didn’t fight. We went back to feeling our way into ideas, using the whole intellect not half of it, talking with one another, which involves listening. We tried to offer our experience to one another. Not claiming something: offering something.
How, after all, can one experience deny, negate, disprove, another experience? Even if I’ve had a lot more of it, your experience is your truth. How can one being prove another being wrong? Even if you’re a lot younger and smarter than me, my being is my truth. I can offer it; you don’t have to take it. People can’t contradict each other, only words can: words separated from experience for use as weapons, words that make the wound, the split between subject and object, exposing and exploiting the object but disguising and defending the subject.
People crave objectivity because to be subjective is to be embodied, to be a body, vulnerable, violable. Men especially aren’t used to that; they’re trained not to offer but to attack. It’s often easier for women to trust one another, to try to speak our experience in our own language, the language we talk to each other in, the mother tongue; so we empower one another.
But you and I have learned to use the mother tongue only at home or safe among friends, and many men learn not to speak it at all. They’re taught that there’s no safe place for them. From adolescence on, they talk a kind of degraded version of the father tongue with each other—sports scores, job technicalities, sex technicalities, and TV politics. At home, to women and children talking mother tongue, they respond with a grunt and turn on the ball game. They have let themselves be silenced, and dimly they know it, and so resent speakers of the mother tongue; women babble, gabble all the time…. Can’t listen to that stuff.
Our schools and colleges, institutions of the patriarchy, generally teach us to listen to people in power, men or women speaking the father tongue; and so they teach us not to listen to the mother tongue, to what the powerless say, poor men, women, children: not to hear that as valid discourse.
I am trying to unlearn these lessons, along with other lessons I was taught by my society, particularly lessons concerning the minds, work, works, and being of women. I am a slow unlearner. But I love my unteachers—the feminist thinkers and writers and talkers and poets and artists and singers and critics and friends, from Wollstonecraft and Woolf through the furies and glories of the seventies and eighties—I celebrate here and now the women who for two centuries have worked for our freedom, the unteachers, the unmasters, the unconquerors, the unwarriors, women who have at risk and at high cost offered their experience as truth. “Let us NOT praise famous women!” Virginia Woolf scribbled in a margin when she was writing Three Guineas, and she’s right, but still I have to praise these women and thank them for setting me free in my old age to learn my own language.
The third language, my native tongue, which I will never know though I’ve spent my life learning it: I’ll say some words now in this language. First a name, just a person’s name, you’ve heard it before. Sojourner Truth. That name is a language in itself. But Sojourner Truth spoke the unlearned language; about a hundred years ago, talking it in a public place, she said, “I have been forty years a slave and forty years free and would be here forty years more to have equal rights for all.” Along at the end of her talk she said, “I wanted to tell you a mite about Woman’s Rights, and so I came out and said so. I am sittin’ among you to watch; and every once and awhile I will come out and tell you what time of night it is.” She said, “Now I will do a little singing. I have not heard any singing since I came here.”1
Singing is one of the names of the language we never learn, and here for Sojourner Truth is a little singing. It was written by Joy Harjo of the Creek people and is called “The Blanket Around Her.”2
maybe it is her birth
which she holds close to herself
or her death
which is just as inseparable
and the white wind
that encircles her is a part
just as
the blue sky
hanging in turquoise from her neck
oh woman
remember who you are
woman
it is the whole earth
So what am I talking about with this “unlearned language”—poetry, literature? Yes, but it can be speeches and science, any use of language when it is spoken, written, read, heard as art, the way dancing is the body moving as art. In Sojourner Truth’s words you hear the coming together, the marriage of the public discourse and the private experience, making a power, a beautiful thing, the true discourse of reason. This is a wedding and welding back together of the alienated consciousness that I’ve been calling the father tongue and the undifferentiated engagement that I’ve been calling the mother tongue. This is their baby, this baby talk, the language you can spend your life trying to learn.
We learn this tongue first, like the mother tongue, just by hearing it or reading it; and even in our overcrowded, underfunded public high schools they still teach A Tale of Two Cities and Uncle Tom’s Cabin; and in college you can take four solid years of literature, and even creative writing courses. But. It is all taught as if it were a dialect of the father tongue.
Literature takes shape and life in the body, in the womb of the mother tongue: always: and the Fathers of Culture get anxious about paternity. They start talking about legitimacy. They steal the baby. They ensure by every means that the artist, the writer, is male. This involves intellectual abortion by centuries of women artists, infanticide of works by women writers, and a whole medical corps of sterilizing critics working to purify the Canon, to reduce the subject matter and style of literature to something Ernest Hemingway could have understood.
But this is our native tongue, this is our language they’re stealing: we can read it and we can write it, and what we bring to it is what it needs, the woman’s tongue, that earth and savor, that relatedness, which speaks dark in the mother tongue but clear as sunlight in women’s poetry, and in our novels and stories, our letters, our journals, our speeches. If Sojourner Truth, forty years a slave, knew she had the right to speak that speech, how about you? Will you let yourself be silenced? Will you listen to what men tell you, or will you listen to what women are saying? I say the Canon has been spiked, and while the Eliots speak only to the Lowells and the Lowells speak only to God, Denise Levertov comes stepping westward quietly, speaking to us.3
There is no savor
more sweet, more salt
than to be glad to be
what, woman,
and who, myself,
I am, a shadow
that grows longer as the sun
moves, drawn out
on a thread of wonder.
If I bear burdens
they begin to be remembered
as gifts, goods, a basket
of bread that hurt
s
my shoulders but closes me
in fragrance. I can
eat as I go.
As I’ve been using the word “truth” in the sense of “trying hard not to lie,” so I use the words “literature,” “art,” in the sense of “living well, living with skill, grace, energy”—like carrying a basket of bread and smelling it and eating as you go. I don’t mean only certain special products made by specially gifted people living in specially privileged garrets, studios, and ivory towers—“High” Art; I mean also all the low arts, the ones men don’t want. For instance, the art of making order where people live. In our culture this activity is not considered an art, it is not even considered work. “Do you work?”—and she, having stopped mopping the kitchen and picked up the baby to come answer the door, says, “No, I don’t work.” People who make order where people live are by doing so stigmatized as unfit for “higher” pursuits; so women mostly do it, and among women, poor, uneducated, or old women more often than rich, educated, and young ones. Even so, many people want very much to keep house but can’t, because they’re poor and haven’t got a house to keep, or the time and money it takes, or even the experience of ever having seen a decent house, a clean room, except on TV. Most men are prevented from housework by intense cultural bias; many women actually hire another woman to do it for them because they’re scared of getting trapped in it, ending up like the woman they hire, or like that woman we all know who’s been pushed so far over by cultural bias that she can’t stand up, and crawls around the house scrubbing and waxing and spraying germ killer on the kids. But even on her kneebones, where you and I will never join her, even she has been practicing as best she knows how a great, ancient, complex, and necessary art. That our society devalues it is evidence of the barbarity, the aesthetic and ethical bankruptcy, of our society.
As housekeeping is an art, so is cooking and all it involves—it involves, after all, agriculture, hunting, herding…. So is the making of clothing and all it involves…. And so on; you see how I want to revalue the word “art” so that when I come back as I do now to talking about words it is in the context of the great arts of living, of the woman carrying the basket of bread, bearing gifts, goods. Art not as some ejaculative act of ego but as a way, a skillful and powerful way of being in the world. I come back to words because words are my way of being in the world, but meaning by language as art a matter infinitely larger than the so-called High forms. Here is a poem that tries to translate six words by Hélène Cixous, who wrote The Laugh of the Medusa; she said, “Je suis là où ça parle,” and I squeezed those six words like a lovely lemon and got out all the juice I could, plus a drop of Oregon vodka.
I’m there where
it’s talking
Where that speaks I
am in that talking place
Where
that says
my being is
Where
my being there
is speaking
I am
And so
Laughing
in a stone ear
The stone ear that won’t listen, won’t hear us, and blames us for its being stone…. Women can babble and chatter like monkeys in the wilderness, but the farms and orchards and gardens of language, the wheatfields of art—men have claimed these, fenced them off: No Trespassing, it’s a man’s world, they say. And I say,
oh woman
remember who you are
woman
it is the whole earth
We are told, in words and not in words, we are told by their deafness, by their stone ears, that our experience, the life experience of women, is not valuable to men—therefore not valuable to society, to humanity. We are valued by men only as an element of their experience, as things experienced; anything we may say, anything we may do, is recognized only if said or done in their service.
One thing we incontestably do is have babies. So we have babies as the male priests, lawmakers, and doctors tell us to have them, when and where to have them, how often, and how to have them; so that is all under control. But we are not to talk about having babies, because that is not part of the experience of men and so nothing to do with reality, with civilization, and no concern of art. —A rending scream in another room. And Prince Andrey comes in and sees his poor little wife dead bearing his son— Or Levin goes out into his fields and thanks his God for the birth of his son— And we know how Prince Andrey feels and how Levin feels and even how God feels, but we don’t know what happened. Something happened, something was done, which we know nothing about. But what was it? Even in novels by women we are only just beginning to find out what it is that happens in the other room—what women do.
Freud famously said, “What we shall never know is what a woman wants.” Having paused thoughtfully over the syntax of that sentence, in which WE are plural but “a woman” apparently has no plural, no individuality—as we might read that a cow must be milked twice a day or a gerbil is a nice pet—WE might go on then to consider whether WE know anything about, whether WE have ever noticed, whether WE have ever asked a woman what she does—what women do.
Many anthropologists, some historians, and others have indeed been asking one another this question for some years now, with pale and affrighted faces—and they are beginning also to answer it. More power to them. The social sciences show us that speakers of the father tongue are capable of understanding and discussing the doings of the mothers, if they will admit the validity of the mother tongue and listen to what women say
But in society as a whole the patriarchal mythology of what “a woman” does persists almost unexamined, and shapes the lives of women. “What are you going to do when you get out of school?” “Oh, well, just like any other woman, I guess I want a home and family”—and that’s fine, but what is this home and family just like other women’s? Dad at work, mom home, two kids eating apple pie? This family, which our media and now our government declare to be normal and impose as normative, this nuclear family now accounts for seven percent of the arrangements women live in in America. Ninety-three percent of women don’t live that way. They don’t do that. Many wouldn’t if you gave it to them with bells on. Those who want that, who believe it’s their one true destiny—what’s their chance of achieving it? They’re on the road to Heartbreak House.
But the only alternative offered by the patriarchal mythology is that of the Failed Woman—the old maid, the barren woman, the castrating bitch, the frigid wife, the lezzie, the libber, the Unfeminine, so beloved of misogynists both male and female.
Now indeed there are women who want to be female men; their role model is Margaret Thatcher, and they’re ready to dress for success, carry designer briefcases, kill for promotion, and drink the Right Scotch. They want to buy into the man’s world, whatever the cost. And if that’s true desire, not just compulsion born of fear, O.K.; if you can’t lick ’em join ’em. My problem with that is that I can’t see it as a good life even for men, who invented it and make all the rules. There’s power in it, but not the kind of power I respect, not the kind of power that sets anybody free. I hate to see an intelligent woman voluntarily double herself up to get under the bottom line. Talk about crawling! And when she talks, what can she talk but father tongue? If she’s the mouthpiece for the man’s world, what has she got to say for herself?
Some women manage it—they may collude, but they don’t sell out as women; and we know that when they speak for those who, in the man’s world, are the others: women, children, the poor….
But it is dangerous to put on Daddy’s clothes, though not, perhaps, as dangerous as it is to sit on Daddy’s knees.
There’s no way you can offer your experience as your truth if you deny your experience, if you try to be a mythical creature, the dummy woman who sits there on Big Daddy’s lap. Whose voice will come out of her prettily hinged jaw? Who is it says yes all the time? Oh yes, yes, I will. Oh I don’t know, you decide. Oh I can’t do that. Yes hit me, yes rape me, yes sav
e me, oh yes. That is how A Woman talks, the one in What-we-shall-never-know-is-what-A-Woman-wants.
A Woman’s place, need I say, is in the home, plus at her volunteer work or the job where she’s glad to get sixty cents for doing what men get paid a dollar for but that’s because she’s always on pregnancy leave but childcare? No! A Woman is home caring for her children! even if she can’t. Trapped in this well-built trap, A Woman blames her mother for luring her into it, while ensuring that her own daughter never gets out; she recoils from the idea of sisterhood and doesn’t believe women have friends, because it probably means something unnatural, and anyhow, A Woman is afraid of women. She’s a male construct, and she’s afraid women will deconstruct her. She’s afraid of everything, because she can’t change. Thighs forever thin and shining hair and shining teeth and she’s my Mom, too, all seven percent of her. And she never grows old.
Dancing at the Edge of the World Page 17
