Max Ernst, The Word or Woman-Bird (1921)...'Can mothers and daughters ever be united in a sacramental "mother-and-daughterhood" without going back to the womb?', asks Mary Jacobus in First Things, in an interesting essay on memory and feminist nostalgia.
Adrienne Rich responds in a poem full of loss, longing, unsatisfied desire. While I've never been able to identify much with this brand of lesbian feminism that always seems in need for consolation and self-victimization, and by far prefer more raw and combative approaches, the poem does mean a lot to me, for reasons I can't even begin to verbalize - here in particular:
But in fact we were always like this,
rootless, dismembered: knowing it makes the difference.
Birth stripped our birthright from us
so early on
and the whole chorus throbbing at our ears
like midges, told us nothing, nothing
of origins, nothing we needed
to know, nothing that could re-member us.
Adrienne Rich responds in a poem full of loss, longing, unsatisfied desire. While I've never been able to identify much with this brand of lesbian feminism that always seems in need for consolation and self-victimization, and by far prefer more raw and combative approaches, the poem does mean a lot to me, for reasons I can't even begin to verbalize - here in particular:
But in fact we were always like this,
rootless, dismembered: knowing it makes the difference.
Birth stripped our birthright from us
so early on
and the whole chorus throbbing at our ears
like midges, told us nothing, nothing
of origins, nothing we needed
to know, nothing that could re-member us.
Adrienne Rich, from 'Transcendental Étude' in The Dream of a Common Language (New York: Norton, 1978).
Knowing it might make the difference indeed, but nostalgia and regret are all too often a dead end. They change nothing, nothing.
Knowing it might make the difference indeed, but nostalgia and regret are all too often a dead end. They change nothing, nothing.
No comments:
Post a Comment