Sinister Wisdom, A Journal for the Lesbian Imagination in the Arts and Politics
53 Summer/Fall 1994, Old Lesbians/Dyke
Reviewed by Annette Hug.
Sinister Wisdom, a journal from California that produces treasures for lesbians not only in the United States, has come up with a new issue written and edited by old lesbians/ dykes. It is a pleasure to read the short stories, reflections and poems. Being 24 years of age I felt encouraged, inspired and joyful about the possible perspective of living a long life as a lesbian.
A number of texts look back to the decades of struggle that old lesbians went through. Del Martin and Phillis Lyon write,
"Lesbians of our generation who have survived to old age have lived through the McCarthyism of the '50s, purges of homosexuals from the US. State Department and the armed services, police raids of Gay bars and private parties, release of names and addresses of those arrested to newspapers and employers."
A good number of life-stories recount homophobia, insecurity, hiding and then coming out with the women's movement in the '70s and '80s. But we also learn about heterosexual marriages and then radical changes women underwent in their fifties to seventies. We read stories of young lesbians in a time long passed. Stories of young women and girls creating, imagining their lesbian world with no lesbian movement to look to for inspiration and support.
Pat Pomerlau wrote the enchanting short story 'Amelia Earhart Didn't Cook', a description of the world of the girl Patsy through her own eyes. The girl's favorite place is up the fig tree at the back of the house and she shares this place with her two favorite friends: Amelia Earhart, the fascinating woman who one day disappeared in an airplane but who comes back secretly to visit her little friend in the fig tree, "Amelia Earhart wore trousers, cut her hair short and had a man helper, and she wasn't his wife."
Her other favorite guest was Eleonor Roosevelt herself, even if Eleanor was despised by Patsy's family and neighbourhood for her alleged control over her husband. Patsy writes, "It was just another reason why FDR wasn't a good president. That Eleanor!... When the local people were upset with Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath and they piled up copies of the book and torched them, [my] Grandmother Dick, who read only the headlines in
the papers, thought it was another of FDR's crazy programs inspired by Eleanor. She threw down the paper. 'Buck!' she yelled at my father. 'Look at this! There will be no raisins this year! They're burning the grapes!' That Eleanor!" Grandmother Dick and the family would not have liked to know that Eleonor was a frequent visitor to their fig tree saying to Patsy, "Let me tell you, though you may not think so just now, everything will be all right. You needn't think about husbands and babies and trying to figure out when peas should go on the stove if they are to finish at the same time the fish does..."
African American writer Grear Greene focuses on the central issue of family and acceptance. in one's own ethnic community. In 'Friends of Dorothy' she describes how burial ceremonies can maintain the invisibility of old lesbians or bow they can become expressions of a community living respect for lesbians and for old women. She describes a funeral of a friend,
"Lots of wailing and crying about the loss of the family in general, very little said about the woman as a viable, loving person with an intimate personal life - a life far above the heavy emphasis the family chose to place on the woman having been a good daughter and a hard worker No one acknowledged that the woman was also a lesbian in a fifteen-year relationship with a loving companion and friend - a woman, incidentally, not invited to attend the funeral."
There had to be another ceremony, a memorial service where the dead woman could be remembered as a friend, a lover, a member of the lesbian community.
This text is also about struggling for a self-defined role in the family. For the author, that meant shedding off the family-assigned role of a 'single' professional and therefore financial milking-cow for any family member in need of money. Liberating herself from this burdening role and the implied feeling that this role is the only way to be accepted in her family was a painful struggle,
"The mark of oppression lies heavy on my shoulders: homophobia on one side and racism on the other At age sixty, I am mastering walking the middle line and have tempered my mettle to deal with the oppression on both sides of me."
Short but important are the texts by Joan Corbin, Kate Rosenblatt and Rosemary Hathaway celebrating the sexuality of old lesbians. They defy the strongly entrenched stereotype of the sexless postmenopausal woman and give joyful expression to the pleasures of old womens' bodies in sensual union.
The affirming message of these poems and stories is repeated in several accounts of women describing the joy of old age as they experience it Elizabeth Freeman writes,
"Luck, genes, food, exercise and sex have contributed to my good health. For me old age has been the best of times."
Shevy Healy's contribution to the journal is sparkling with energy and drive and driving is what she and her partner Ruth are doing. The two lesbians are cruising in their mobile-home all around the United States. Part of their touring is active organising work for OLOC (Old Lesbians Organising for Change). Healy's account is a rich panorama of lives of old lesbians in the US. The two envoys on the road meet groups, organise discussions, forums, get to know hundreds of women and help wherever they can in setting up a new section of OLOC. They talk about ageism in its many forms and homophobia. Again we read,
"Neither one of us ever dreamed, even in our wildest imaginings, that in our seventies life would be so rich."
Not all old lesbians can afford to buy a mobile-home, or even a place to live. Several writers experience the economic hardship faced by many old lesbians. They don't fit the stereotype of the married woman or widow that underlies social-security systems, and their pensions often leave them living their lives below the poverty line. These texts make me think about old lesbians in
countries where there are no social security networks to speak of, except the family. Where do old lesbians fit in there if they resist - like Grear Greene - living their life in the corset of an old-spinster-stereotype or as a dependent aunt who 'missed her trip', as they say in the Philippines? If they don't fit, how do they survive?
It is impossible to talk about old age and not mention death. Two unfinished letters of Mary Flick who did not survive to see her work appear in this issue of Sinister Wisdom, give a factual account of the stages of a long struggle with cancer. And yet, this chronology of operations, recoveries and new testings expresses the pain and the courage of a woman smuggling for life. Reading the text I felt the paper behind the print was becoming alive to tell me a story that did not fit into the limited space of words.
In 'A Day in the Life of One Old Dyke', France Lorraine describes how she is living with death everyday and living life to its fullest. She is working as a massage volunteer at Coming Home Hospice where she cares for dying people, often decades younger than herself. She writes,
"Living thirty or forty years beyond what some of the young people will ever know makes me more appreciative of whatever years I have left. I want to give something back to them, even if it is just love. Or simply loving touch."
Walking home after a day of caring for people dying of AIDS, France Lorraine is
"in a familiar altered state, floating about an inch above the sidewalk, drained but exhilarated, seeing everything around me in brilliant color, hearing sounds, but in a calm, serene place inside myself This doesn't happen every time I leave the hospice, maybe one m four, but when it does I am all loose limbs and rippling muscles, feeling totally relaxed and inexplicably elated."
Sinister Wisdom 53, Summer/ Fall 1994, Old Lesbians/ Dykes, from Sinister Wisdom, Inc., PO Box 3252, Berkeley CA 94703, U.S.A.
Annette Hug has recently completed her masters degree in Women and Development at the University of the Philippines. Annette is a member of the Manila based feminist group KALAYAAN and represents it on the women's committee of the Freedom from Debt Coalition. She is also a facilitator in feminist theories for KALAYAAN's non-formal education project called the Feminist Foundation, she is from Switzerland.
The Metamorphosis of Baubo Myths of Woman's Sexual Energy
by Winifred Milius Lubell, Vanderbilt University Press, Nashville, Tennessee, 37235, 1994.
Reviewed By Luz Martinez
Moon Blood Ritual' a ceremony of women squatting over land allowing their menstrual blood to flow in order to bring life to the harvest, is one of the book's 74 black and white drawings. Several are original pieces by the author and others are her drawings of ancient art depicting the magic of the vulva.
The Metamorphosis of Baubo is a complex historical journey through time when women's sexuality was worshiped and revered.
30,000 year old clay figurines of female images with the vulva exposed have been found by archaeologists. This Stone Age art spans continents from Siberia to Spain. These forms continued to show-up in carvings, drawings and architecture up to the Middle Ages, indications are that the vulva was always seen as a symbol of worship.
In the Stone Age, the vulva was magical. A woman bled in sync with the lunar calendar.
She bled and would not die and if she stopped bleeding for 10 consecutive lunar months, a new life sprang forth from the magical vulva. Paleolithic man was in awe of her powers. Women were so closely linked to the almighty heavens, the heavens which could bring rain, ice, sunlight, thunder and lightning were aligned with woman! No wonder early man realized that the female was sacred.
Baubo has been called many things and has been associated with good, evil, mythical and comical aspects of woman but she is always powerful. The name Baubo or Iambe, the author explains, comes from Greek mythology and means a comforter of sorrow, in Egyptian mythology it is Baubo/Isis, and she is a nurturer. The author uses the name Baubo/Iambe because it best captures the powers of her sexual energy. Regardless of what Baubo is called and where she appears, she is always a symbol of women's transformative and creative powers.
Baubo was a servant in the mythological story of Demeter. The daughter of Demeter, Persephone, is abducted and raped by Hades (the brother of Zeus). The goddess Demeter is so disuaught that she abandons Mt. Olympus, and sets out to search for her. She lives among humans hoping to learn something of her daughter's whereabouts. Disguised as an old poor woman, she is hired by a wealthy family to take care of their infant son. A servant girl known as lambe is part of this household and takes it upon herself to cheer up this old woman. She eventually accomplishes this by lifting her skirts and dancing for the goddess. The goddess is so charmed by her that even after she finds her daughter and returns to Mt. Olympus, she takes lambe with her and lambe becomes a priestess.
The author, according to the book cover is a noted graphic artist who has developed a strong interest in history, mythology and the imagery of the ancient world. Author or illustrator of more than thirty books, her work has been exhibited in the National Museum of Women in the Arts and in many other galleries throughout the U.S. Her lifetime interest in Sappho led her to an intensive self-study of classical Greek and ultimately to the subject of this book.
The author concludes the book with mythical and current stories of women using Baubo's gesture of 'lifting of the skirts' and exposing her vulva in actuality or symbolically. For example, one of the versions of the Hittite tale of 2000 B.C., is of Kamprupsepa, a goddess of healing and magic who mixes honey and menstrual blood as a way to heal Inara the daughter of an old storm goddess who runs away after a stormy fight with her husband. Her husband retaliates by creating havoc on the land and refuses to reverse the curse until she returns. She is brought back to her mother by a bee who has used her sting to bring her back. In this story Kamprupsepa and Baubo share the role of healer through sexual energy.
The Egyptian myth of Hathor 2300 B.C., has two versions, one where the goddess Hathor, who after a quarrel with her father leaves and returns after being told of the great sadness her absence has caused her father and the land. Her coming back home brings balance and harmony.
The second version, is that Hathor's father who is involved in a political power struggle is emotionally wounded by a comment of a lesser god. He is so devastated by the comment that he cannot function. Hathor then bears her nakedness to her father which causes him to laugh and gain equilibrium in his outlook.
A current story is of the Kalinga women in the Philippines who used Baubo's gesture to military men to protect their homeland.
According to the story in the book, the Kalinga people, who live in the mountain area of northern Luzon, tried through various actions to protect their ancestral home land from the electric company who wanted to use these lands as the location for large hydroelectric dams. It seemed that the dams could not be stopped. One day the women formed flanks around the battalion of military men guarding the site. Dressed only in skirts, on cue they took off their skirts and used the heavy material as weapons to thrash the men, some even wound the cloth around their necks. The men dazed and embarrassed did not know what to do. The women knew and played on the cultural taboo that the Kalinga men are not allowed to lay eyes or hands on women. The men (soldiers) could not fight back, "there would be no honor in fighting unarmed naked women". While these women took enormous risks in doing this action they knew that it was an act that could prove effective. Until this day no dams have been built The author's analysis is that the Kalinga women "constituted a formidable mass of concentrated sexual power and a reversal of conventional female behavior."
The wealth of information Ms. Lubell possesses on the images of Baubo is impressive, the book is well researched and has an extensive bibliography. The difficulty was being able to keep up with her. She had me scrambling to history and mythology books in order to run after her as we traversed 30,000 years through countries that now have different names. But the extra effort was worth it. The book left me enlightened and with a feeling of empowerment While modem patriarchal societies have turned women's bodies and sexuality into a commodity, cause for moral debates, objectification, reproductive machines, testing ground, and receptors of violence, Baubo reminds us that our sexual energy is powerful and triumphant regardless of lime and culture.
Reviewed by Luz Maria Martinez, of Isis International-Manila. Luz, a Latina has made Manila her permanent home.
Just A Sister Away: A Womanist Vision of Women's Relationships in the Bible
by Renita J. Weems, LuraMedia, San Diego, California 1988.
Reviewed by Kathleen Maltzahn
"To my mother, Carrie Baker Weems (1932 - 1984), who, in light of her sorrows, I now know needed a sister more than a daughter".
Like an new inscription etched on an old tomb, so begins Renita J. Weems Just A Sister Away. Her dedication reads like a re-understanding of one woman distanced from another by the closeness of love, by the surging of the same blood in their veins that so often leads us to search for perfection in our mothers and then have to condemn them for their failings. In the same way, this "womanist vision of women's relationships in the bible" is an effort to wipe away the cloudiness years of hearing about biblical women has created, and start to see Hagar and Sarah, Naomi and Ruth, Martha and Mary, Miriam and the host of recorded and retold women of the bible not as either perfect midwives of the faith, nor wayward mothers who have forgotten their children, but indeed as sisters.
The book ends with the story of another mother, through a letter from the anonymous "Lot's wife" to her two daughters, the daughters she lost when she turned around for one last glimpse of her home town Sodom before it was consumed by sulfur and fire. I remember the story from interminable school assemblies, and the words are familiar so many years later: "But Lot's wife, behind him, looked back, and she became a pillar of salt". I remember wondering then why she was condemned and her disobedience recorded for ever after when anyone would have done the same thing.
Why do angels and the Lord ask such impossible things, make such unreasonable demands? Why do they deny people's humanity, ask them to run away from their homes and llieir histories without so much as rooking back? As an adult I add further questions. Why are women punished for one act of humanity while men are spared despite lifetimes of violence and foolishness? Lot offered his daughters to be raped when the men of Sodom sought to rape the angels, he jested and lingered when he was ordered to leave, and still the Lord was merciful and even listened to him when he bargained with the Lord to flee to a nearby town rather than the far hills. His wife on the other hand was destroyed for a sin I still can't fathom.
Renita Weem's knows these questions, and into these frozen words of my schooldays assemblies, massages a story that redeems the woman without demanding that the text also be redeemed. She adds fluidity to the pillar of salt, and allows the salty sweat and tears of a peu^ified woman to flow. Between her inscription to her mother and the final story of a mother who the bible says failed, she breathes life into biblical women who have been deified and denied, but rarely allowed simply to talk.
It is here I think that the strength of Just a Sister Away lies. Weems does not need that the women of the bible be perfect, nor that the bible itself be a gentle or a good book. She takes the violence of the texts and demands that the women's voices be heard over it. She names this violence and calls it to account for silencing women's voices, taking women's lives. She points out the daring and determination of women, while at the same time refusing to believe that just because they are women they should be excused, elevated, exonerated, regardless of their decisions. She refuses to exist in a world of victims and oppressors, violated and inviolate. Instead she names oppression for what it is, but does not romanticize the oppressed. If we look at her re-telling story of Sarah and Hagar, Weems neither condemns nor glosses over the participation of both women in oppression and powerlessness, but she states very clearly each woman's collusion in her own trap.
After describing very clearly Hagar's intolerable situation, she says that at the moments that mattered, Hagar was unable to define and thus save herself. After outlining the social pressures on Sarah, she states that it was Sarah who could have made all the difference for Hagar. Neither woman was a total victim of circumstances: their being women is not enough reason for us to close our eyes to their weakness. But having said that, Weems returns to what for me is often the key in biblical stories: in the end, whatever we say about the women, these are not in fact their stories. It is Abraham's story, the fulfillment of God's promise to provide him with heirs, and the women are simply God's imperfect instruments.
Weems believes that these women were as human as women today, and so takes the risk of believing that her experience and those of these unfamiliar, strange women of antiquity have some relation, that "despite differences in time, culture, lifestyles, attitudes, biblical women were compelled by the same passions as we love, compassion, hope, jealousy, and fear", that "[a] common thread of scared female experience continues to bind centuries of women." They are not women to be deified nor denounced, simply to be understood, in the hope that by understanding other women we can also see again ourselves and the women in our lives.
In the story of Sarah and Hagar, for example, she talks of reading the story as black women, of the haunting parallels between Hagar, the slavewoman and concubine made to carry a child for another woman's benefit, and stories of black women under slavery who "brutal rape...(was] compounded by punitive beatings by resentful white wives who penalized the raped slavewomen for their husbands' lust and savagery". Following the thread, she talks of the legacy of this violence in black and white women's relationships in the US today, and then re-enters the story of Hagar and Sarah, warning against making the story carry the weight of twentieth century dynamics while at the same time having re-awakened us to the potential strength of the story in making us re-think our roles as slave and mistress, mother and mistress, black and white, maid and madam.
It is at the points where the biblical stories and her own seem to intersect that the book comes alive, and, paradoxically, that I began to question Weems' project. It is by looking at how one woman treats another, she says, that we can get an idea of how she feels about being a woman herself, and so she "wrestles these nine stories from their presumably male narrators" and begins to imagine their lives, presenting the stories not as fact, but as "responsible and realistic testimonies of the ways in which women sometimes perfectly, other times imperfectly, love themselves and one another".
Following each story is a block of questions, designed to heighten the parallels between biblical women and ourselves, and as such, the issues and emotions in each story can be discussed and reflected upon in relation to each woman's life, making the book very "user friendly". Its accessibility is heightened by the clear prose, "the best of the Afro-American oral tradition. with its gift of story-telling and its love of drama" that resonates on each page, and the author's obvious commitment not only to stories of today, but to a faith and spirituality that clearly is nurtured by her biblical scholarship.
But I can't help wondering about Renita J. Weems' mother's sorrow, and the sorrow of a daughter who breathes life into Lot's petrified wife. I can't help wondering about the girlhood of a daughter who takes a sentence thousands of years old, and tells a story of a mother you recognize as your own. or your friend's, or your neighbour's, or as the mother you fear you may one day become. There are times in the narratives when I wish I could clear away the stories of Sarah and Mary, Vashti and Lot's wife, and simply listen to the story of Renita Weems and her sorrowing mother I wonder how she learned to hate her mother and how she learned to forgive her. I wonder how she learned to melt her own pillars of salt.
And as I wonder, I begin to ask, again, if we need the bible to legitimate our own stories. Must we take and re-tell stories written almost invariably by men, in varying degrees of disapproval but almost always lacking understanding, before we can tell our own? Can we only talk if our words resonate with these ancient women? The question is of course a question of our grip on the bible and its grip on us.
While in many instances it seems to me that the healthiest response to the violence of the bible is to tum aside and read another book, the stories of Mary and Jesus, Ruth and Naomi have long since seeped into my mind and memories. On the other hand, when I delve back into these stories 1 am increasingly left with the feeling that centuries of being handled by men have left fingerprints and bruises so firmly embedded in these women's lives that it is almost impossible to extract the women and learn from them in a way that allows a biblical faith that does not serve men. Weems' book doesn't seem to answer these questions, nor indeed ask them. That is perhaps the project of the reader, and whatever one's conclusions are, this book is one more step in letting women talk and be heard.
Kathleen Maltzahn is an Australian co-worker of the United Church of Christ in the Philippines. She is involved with a very new project working with prostituted women in the streets of Quezon City, and sidelines at the Institute of Religion and Culture's women's program, where they explore women and the bible, women in the bible and women's spirituality. She occasionally writes poetry and goes dancing to shake off the nights listening to women recounting men's violence.