everybody's mother

A few days ago, during a meeting of a reading group of which I am a recent member, we discussed at length how feminine poetry cannot all too often escape gender stereotypes and essentialisms, even when it purports to subvert or undermine them. This set me thinking if part of the problem might not have to do with a certain middle-class sentimentality or self-pity which afflicts so many women poets - well, women in general... - and translates itself into an absolute lack of sense of humour concerning the eternal and daily struggles of female experience.

Yet, on second thoughts, I realised how unfair I was being, by focusing only on the humourless types and forgetting those 'thieves of language', as Alicia Ostriker calls them, that enter the mythmaking machine - the characters, stories and legends which have informed and preserved our meaning for 'male' and 'female', 'father' and 'mother', 'daughter' and 'mother', etc., throughout the ages - and dismantle it from within, with a savage and, at the same time, tender humour.
The Scottish poet Liz Lochhead is for me one of the foremost examples of this feminine - and feminist - writing that, by not taking itself too seriously, is always spot on and wittily exposes all those gender stereotypes and essentialisms we still unwittingly endorse despite ourselves. Frankensteins, beauties and beasts, hags and maidens, spinsters and furies, Snowhites, Cinderellas and Grimm sisters, Ariadnes and Minotaurs populate her poems, throwing into complete disarray what we have been taught to expect from recognisable gender codes.

Here is a favourite one, about the scariest, most haunting code of all:

Of course
everybody's mother always and
so on...

Always never
loved you enough
or too smothering much.

Of course you were the Only One, your
mother
a machine
that shat out siblings, listen

everybody's mother
was the original Frigid-
aire Icequeen clunking out
the hardstuff in nuggets, mirror-
slivers and ice-splinters that'd stick
in your heart.

Absolutely everybody's mother
was artistic when she was young.

Everybody's mother
was a perfumed presence with pearls, remote
white shoulders when she
bent over in her ball dress
to kiss you in your crib.

Everybody's mother slept with the butcher
for sausages to stuff you with.

Everybody's mother
mythologised herself. You got mixed up
between dragon's teeth and blackmarket stockings.

Naturally
she failed to give you
Positive Feelings
about your own sorry
sprouting body (it was a bloody shame)

but she did
sit up all night sewing sequins
on your carnival costume

so you would have a good time

and she spat
on the corner of her hanky and scraped
at your mouth with sour lace until you squirmed

so you would look smart

And where
was your father all this time?
Away
at the war, or in his office, or any-
way conspicuous for his
Absence, so

what if your mother did
float around above you
big as a barrage balloon
blocking out the light?

Nobody's mother can't not never do nothing right.


(Liz Lochhead, from Dreaming Frankenstein & Collected Poems.)

*Image source: 'Venus in the Bath' by Ingebjorg Smith (taken from Northings - Highlands & Islands Arts Journal).