Saturday's Child (68 page)

Sethembile adds a furious coda: “I have four daughters. It angers me that the lady MP says virginity testing and the virgins' parade protect girls. Maybe that was true a hundred years ago. Today it's a lie. The parade is for men's fun. Being known as a virgin does
not
protect a girl—it
endangers
her!
Many
Zulu men believe the superstition that if a man with AIDS sleeps with a virgin, he'll be cured!
So they seek virgins out and rape them
. And this ‘
protects
' my girls?!”

Vuyisile speaks again. “Tell the lady MP to listen to
us
, not the men who say they speak
for
us. I've been trying to rebel my whole life. Then I met these women here. Now I rebel for other women, too. I've started a water project for my village and surrounding villages. Trying to pipe water in, so women don't have to walk six and half kilometers [four miles] twice a day carrying buckets. Ooooh, am I now unpopular with the chiefs, the traditional leaders! We didn't even ask permission to come here,” she says, gesturing at the other rural Zulu women, “because we knew they would want to know why and if we said we were meeting with a woman from far away who writes about women they would never let us come.”

I ask what might happen when they return home. There is silence. Then Vuyisile clears her throat and answers, “Some kind of punishment. A fine, probably—some money, maybe a goat. But we won't be stopped. I want
more
meetings like this! I want the whole
world
to ask us what we think and what we want. I will never again sit on the ground and be silent.”

When we part, with more embraces, tears, laughter, and fists raised high in the air, it is already dark. The women will stay overnight with others in the group and journey back to their villages the next day. I go on to Durban to meet with women from the Advice Desk—co-founded by my friend Judge Navinathem Pillay—women who work to combat the epidemic of rape and battery that's one of apartheid's legacies in South Africa. It isn't until weeks later that I learn what happened when Vuyisile returned to her village. Her house, and the small caravan she'd used as the office of her water project, had been burned to the ground. She herself wasn't hurt, and other rural activist women have already committed themselves to helping her rebuild, but she's lost her few worldly goods.

Nonetheless, Vuyisile has asked one of the AFRA women to write and let me know, not just about the burning, but that it had actually
strengthened
her—that I should write it down for the world to read:

“Even if I have no ground on which to sit, I will still refuse to sit on the ground and be silent.”

Empathy is a profoundly subversive emotion. Once empathy is at work, there's no place to hide. With empathy, you're a refugee in Bosnia, a Tutsi in Rwanda. You don't know where you begin and the suffering of the world ends. (Where empathy
can
backfire is in intimate relationships. I'd ventriloquized myself into Kenneth's needs, desires, and rationales so long that I forgot my own. Later, I would manage to do much the same thing regarding Marilyn. Nevertheless, if I had to choose, I'd err on the side of having too much empathy rather than too little.)

Nor does this have anything to do with fatuous pretensions of self-sacrifice. On the contrary, the rewards of empathy are so great and expansive of the possibilities for the self that it might even be called selfish. For instance, the international Women's Movement has given me a rich cross-cultural nourishment. I've encountered authors too few people ever hear about, like the late Bessie Head, a truly great writer who, had she not been female, black, and Botswanan, might have won the Nobel Prize, and should have. Or Ding Ling, the major Chinese literary figure whose pre-feminist
feminism virtually destroyed her literary career. Or the Algerian Assia Djebar, the Pakistani Ismat Chughtai, the Mexican Rosario Castellanos, the Nigerian Buchi Emecheta, the Filipina Ninotchka Rosca, the Moroccan Fatima Mernissi, the Korean Kang Sok-kyong. Those are a few of the
better
-known ones.

I can no longer calculate how this process has influenced my own work. But I can give one example of how it has freed me—quite the opposite of the missionary-type assumption that I'm liberating unfortunate women elsewhere. When I was a young poet, in fear of being regarded as “a lady poet,” I stayed far away from flower imagery because that's what nineteenth-century women poets were stereotypically thought to employ. I secretly regretted this proscription of subject matter, because I think there are fascinating aspects to flowers. For one thing, they're a plant's sexual organs (which might make your average florist shop a sort of brothel). For another, horticulture is lavish with metaphor—goodies like the phenomenon called stress-flowering: flowers that normally don't bloom until spring or summer sometimes burst into blossom in the heart of winter
because
of stress. Such gems were, I felt, forbidden subject matter.

Then, some years ago, while traveling in Japan, I learned from the Women's Movement there about an ancient tradition, dating from medieval times, of women who were court poets, bards. We're not just talking about one token Lady Murasaki here. They had many such poets and many levels of bardic accomplishment. As a poet worked her way up through these levels, there were test poems she was assigned to write, on specific subjects. The ultimate test for being recognized as a bard, a fully senior poet, was to write “the peony poem.” What a gift. I was freed by foremothers from an entirely different culture to write
my
peony poem.
¹⁰

Why would any of us ever want to settle for monoculturalism when we can celebrate John Donne and peony poems as well? Why would I not have known that, as de Beauvoir scolded, for me art and politics have no fixed border between them? Illiterate women in the world's villages and slums have known that all along.

Her face is hard and lined. She is poor, not young, not highly educated. She works as a doorkeeper at an old house in a sidestreet in Catania, in Sicily. I was there as part of an Italian book tour with Maria Nadotti, the journalist and author who had done a book-length interview with me.
¹¹
As Maria and I rush to the airport, this woman recognizes us from having seen our TV interview on violence against women. She calls out. We stop. Maria translates rapidly.

“Is it true, really true?” the woman asks, clutching Maria with one hand and me with the other. “Is it true what you say, that women in many places are fighting back, against the violence? Against being beaten?”

“Yes,” we say, sophisticated journalists trying hard to swallow the emotion rising in our throats. “It's true. Women are fighting back. Many, many places. Far beyond Catania and Sicily. All over the world.”

“And one day they will make it stop? The violence, the pain? It will stop? They—we—will make this happen?” Her eyes are shining.

“Yes, yes,” we cry, hugging each other and her. “One day. Women everywhere are trying. We
will
make the violence stop. Yes.”

She nods, blessing us with a radiant, gap-toothed smile.

“That is very good,” she sighs. Then she adds, with quiet dignity, “Because then I am not alone in my fight.”

I dedicated the Italian edition of
The Demon Lover
to this woman, whose name is Adriana Costa, and I've told this story in many countries since that day. Hearing it, women spontaneously call out, answering a Sicilian woman they will never meet, “No, you are
not
alone!”

Yet wherever she stands, singular, she re-creates all possibility. She is indeed the Doorkeeper, who opens the portal and shows the way.

¹
The poem “Famine” with its refrain “This must stop” comes from this period. See
Upstairs in the Garden
.

²
Expanded, this became the essay “The World without De Beauvoir,” in
The Word of a Woman
.

³
A
Transatlantic Love Affair: Letters to Nelson Algren by Simone de Beauvoir
(New Press, 1998).

⁴
Upstairs in the Garden
.

⁵
In the 1970s, when state government officials proposed reestablishing soup kitchens and food pantries, which had not existed since the Great Depression, people were appalled, since such institutions were properly regarded as marks of shame against a society that made people choose between feeding their hunger or retaining their dignity. Now, a mere three decades later, the poverty establishment is a veritable growth industry in New York State and around the country—and its propaganda has been so efficient that the public no longer regards the existence of soup kitchens as shameful.

⁶
Tyranny of Kindness
(Atlantic Monthly Press, 1993).

⁷
In early September 1998, in a highly publicized revival and affirmation of traditional Zulu practice, more than seven thousand young women and girls from different areas of KwaZulu-Natal assembled in Bulwer and underwent public testing of the hymen. A Spring Festival Reed Dance involving a march of two thousand virgins, young women in traditional garb—bare breasts and three-inch-wide bead belts with tiny aprons—also took place before Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini.

⁸
These women have courageously been confronting such traditional practices as
lobolo
(bride price, paid by the groom's family to the bride's),
ukuvusa
(in which the family of an “infertile” woman is obliged to provide a “seed-bearer,” usually her younger sister, to conceive a child for her sister's husband),
ukungena
(in which a widow is obliged to marry her deceased husband's brother to procreate an heir for her husband's property), polygyny, primogeniture, corporal punishment of women and children, and virginity testing. See “The Impact of Customary Law, Legislation, and the Constitution on the Status of Black Women in Rural KwaZulu-Natal,” Janine Hicks, LL.B., University of Natal, Durban.

⁹
African National Congress, the majority and ruling party, which has an adversarial political history with Inkatha—in part harkening back to ethnic and tribal differences among the two constituencies.

¹⁰
“Peony,” originally published in
Death Benefits
(Copper Canyon Press, 1981) and collected in
Upstairs in the Garden
.

¹¹
This was published as
Cassandra non abita più qui: Maria Nadotti intervista Robin Morgan
(La Tartaruga, 1996). Maria, who became a dear friend, later translated and edited the Italian edition of
The Demon Lover (Il demone amante
, La Tartaruga, 1998).

EIGHTEEN

Hot Januaries

Leonato: You will never run mad, niece
.

Beatrice: No, not till a hot January
.

—W
ILLIAM
S
HAKESPEARE
,

M
UCH
A
DO
A
BOUT
N
OTHING
, A
CT
I, S
CENE I

Yesterday I read an interview with a deathly serious young man currently considered trendy because he's written a book calling on us all to reject irony. Good god. That's like calling for a rejection of ratiocinative thought. If I were to wake one day into a world devoid of irony, I'd know I was brain-dead or at Oral Roberts University. What would we
do
without irony?

Check out your own daily reliance on it, the foul-weather friend who's there for you when nothing else is. As for me, I'd hardly know where to begin. There's irony in being a writer and a feminist in a world where two-thirds of all illiterates are women. There's irony in writing a prose nonfiction memoir when you've already limned life's starker truths in poetry—and in agreeing to do the former in order to be able to afford to continue doing the latter. There's irony in having resisted writing this memoir and then rambling on so that now, in our penultimate section, we must speed things up to cover sufficient ground or the book will rival the
unabridged
OED
in length. There's irony in being a privileged, educated citizen of a superpower while always barely keeping the wolf from the door. There's irony in becoming a radical activist in part because of wanting to abolish money—and then spending obscene amounts of time over the ensuing decades fundraising.

What I most resent about money is the attention it demands when absent. I've never longed to be wealthy, merely solvent. Solvency is freedom from having to
think
about money, just as health is freedom from having to notice pain. Poverty and illness are both horribly preoccupying and time-consuming. In my case, the trick has been to sustain a living from writing, plus such ancillary patchwork pursuits as journalism, editing, lectures, and the occasional grant. Yet even to attempt this way of earning a livelihood is an enormous luxury. Few people get to survive by doing work they love. So I can't complain, although I manage to find ways to do so, particularly on those occasions when friends remind me that I've been working steadily since age one and a half, which tends to tucker a person out. (I did loll around, a lazy slob except for a baby beauty contest or two, for that entire first year). Somehow, I've pulled it off thus far, and even managed to put a kid through private school and college in the process. But I've succeeded unevenly, slipping back into and out of debt with such regularity that by now it's become a familiar, oddly comforting rhythm.

By the end of the 1980s, this cadence was pretty well established. With
The Demon Lover
in production and Blake at college, I spent much of 1988 on the road, coming and going around the schedule of when the copyedited manuscript was due for reading, or when galleys would need to be proofed. My passport for the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s got so crowded the Passport Bureau issued me extra pages, and I'd had so many inoculations for every bug, everywhere, that when I tried to donate blood for a friend, the blood bank attendants laughed and turned me away.