Astride Ivaska (1926-)

by Zinta Aistars

As with most of us, and, I suspect, in most any language, my first introduction to Latvian poetry was metered and rhymed, tightly reined in, an orderly clomping and marching of verses that moved like soldiers across the page. In Latvian school, which we children of the émigré community attended on Saturdays while our enviable American peers watched cartoons on television, or played ball in the park, or simply slept in, we instead learned to recite classic Latvian poetry. Our teachers drilled the metered lines into our brains, ta-TUM-ta-tum, ta-TUM-ta-da-dum, and we would memorize sometimes pages of these lyrical poems. It was a practice not only in learning literary form, but in rote memorization, and not the least in self-discipline. Many of the poems were testament to the war experience, with lines about the blood spilled in war, the love of one’s country, and the sacrifice made for freedom which we had nonetheless lost.

In those dusky rooms of the school on Saturday mornings, none of us felt particularly free. Super heroes in animated form with capes sweeping the breeze behind them on a television screen seemed much more enticing. But we memorized, and we discussed, and we recited. Poem after poem after poem.

Years later, I had a delayed appreciation for that kind of literary discipline. It was, after all, a world of super heroes. Only the heroes in those poems that spoke of the experience of loving one’s home and losing it, or dying for it, did not bounce back up from the ground for the next cartoon installment. Theirs was the mortal blood that nourished the soil to grow new seed and new life for future generations.

Some of that life took hold outside of Soviet-occupied Latvia. While we children of refugees were learning the old classics, a new generation of poetry was taking shape. It, too, spoke of the love of country, of freedom, and the hunger to survive. Such was the poetry of Astride Hartmane Ivaska, born in the capital city of Riga in 1926, a young woman when the Soviet army marched across the Latvian border. She was of the same generation as my parents and her experience was similar. When I had reached the age that she had been during World War II, I discovered Ivaska’s poetry, and it was nothing like what I had learned in school … and yet it was.

I received a book of Ivaska’s poetry as a gift, and I paged through it with growing wonderment. This was no army of words. There was no orderly marching here. These words danced and swam across the page, they whispered, they sang, they hummed, they wept. A line might stand alone, like a lost muse, only to recover itself in a droplet of syllables further down the page. Sometimes they rhymed, but mostly these words echoed and played off each other. And while this poet, too, wrote of heroes, and blood that was shed, and the ache of losing one’s childhood home to wonder if one would ever be allowed to see it again… it was in a manner that spoke more directly to my own heart. This was the poetry of exile. It contained the longing of a life thrown upon an unknown shore, even as it spoke of new love found, and renewed joy in living.

No pelniem
un no izdedziem
lidz dziesmai
esam celusies.
Un tomer dziedot
pelnu garsa
mute neizzud
ne mums, ne tiem,

kas saklausa mus taluma.

*
From the ashes
and from the burnt debris
to song
we have risen.
The taste of ashes
does not leave the mouth
not for us, nor for them

who listen to us from a distance.

(From “Memais laiks,” Gaisma Ievainoja by Astride Ivaska, Daugava, 1982)

I was struck, as one is, who falls in love at first read. In reading whatever I could find about Ivaska, I learned that she had lost her father during the war. He had been a general in the Latvian army during WWII, and no more had been heard from or about him after he had been captured by the Soviets. (In later years, I learned Ivaska had learned of her father’s fate only after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and Latvia regained her freedom. He had been taken to Moscow in 1941, where he was executed.)

Ivaska wrote often about her father, and her connection with him, what she referred to as her “only mirror” in an essay of her memories, now a broken mirror. He had a kind of mythic form to her, as most fathers do to their daughters. She recalls his quiet strength, and he seems to take on the stance of all lost Latvian soldiers: a man who fights perhaps a hopeless battle, yet with utmost courage and devotion to the cause of what is right. He is a soldier in an army that is the David against the Goliath of the Red Army. Only this battle is not to be won.

As most Latvian refugees, Ivaska (then Hartmane) escaped to camps for “displaced persons” in Germany, where they awaited visas to whatever free land would take them. As did most of her peers, she continued her disrupted education in Germany, while she waited, studying languages. In 1949, she married Estonian poet, Ivar Ivask, and later that year immigrated to the United States, first to Minnesota, then taking up residence in Norman, Oklahoma in 1967, where she taught Russian, German and French at the University of Oklahoma. Ivaska remained there until the death of her husband, then answered an old call to cross the ocean once again to live in Europe—for a time in Ireland, then returning again to the place of her birth, Riga, Latvia, where she lives today.

And wherever this poet went, I followed her steps through her poetry and her poetic prose. That first book I had read of her work, Solis Silos (“A Step in the Woods,” 1973), was a step that had led me to try my own hand at Latvian poetry. Shortly after, I had the privilege of meeting Ivaska at a workshop for writing Latvian poetry, and when, by end of seminar, I shyly handed her some of my work, she astounded me by taking me, then the ripe age of 17, seriously. The workshop was over, but Ivaska took my manuscript home with her to Oklahoma, sending it back to me a few weeks later with careful and honest notes in the margins. Discard this, rework that, and the golden glimmer on a page here and there of praise. The note with the manuscript encouraged me to submit my manuscript to a Latvian publisher called Celinieks in Ann Arbor, Michigan—with her recommendation. My first book of Latvian poetry, Mala Kausa (“In an Earthen Mug”) was accepted for publication when I was 19 years old. My lifelong love affair with poetry, in any language, took root in those days, and I have Ivaska to thank.

The Bakery Lady

by Grace Andreacchi

The writer’s life is, essentially and not incidentally, a lonely one. You shut yourself up in a room, ignore the tempting sunshine, unplug the phone, and even refuse to come to the door when you’re ‘working’. You keep unsociable hours, skip meals, refuse invitations all in pursuit of the grand illusion. A consent to the absurd proposition that the reality inside your head is, for the duration, more important than the ‘real world’ is the sine qua non. All of this can get to be a bit much.

For a while I lived in an apartment on the Anzengruberstraße in Berlin, directly over a bakery. There were many advantages to living over a bakery. The bakery lady was everything a bakery lady should be, she was round and smiling, pink-cheeked and maternal. When I stopped in towards the end of the afternoon for my daily Brötchen she’d often insist on giving me two of three for the price of one. ‘You need to eat more,’ she’d say, shaking her head. ‘Too thin!’ Germany was ahead of the curve in the world obesity epidemic (this was the mid-nineties), and my naturally slim frame was rare enough to be considered exotic. In my lonely pursuit of the chimera it was enormously comforting to have this bakery lady looking out for me.

On those nights when I’d lost all track of time and lingered, bent over the page (we still wrote on paper in those far-off days) till the wee small hours, when that hour arrived when the world seems not so much asleep as dead and the over-active imagination begins to fear – there is nobody else on the planet left alive, I’m the only one… at that terrible hour when the blood freezes, ghosts walk, and fear eats the soul, at that very hour the bakery lady and her husband would arrive downstairs. I’d hear them clanking about as they opened the shop to begin another day of mixing and kneading and baking the bread, rolls and cake for the hungry hearts and stomachs of the neighbourhood. So I’m not the only one left after all, I’d think. The bakery lady is here. And with a sigh I’d lay down my pen and crawl into bed, drifting off to sleep to the elemental odour of baking bread. If you ever have the chance to live over a bakery, jump at it.

Copyright © 2008 Grace Andreacchi Hadas

Grace Andreacchi was born and raised in New York City but has lived on the far side of the great ocean for many years - sometimes in Paris, sometimes Berlin, and nowadays in London. Works include the novels Give my Heart Ease, which received the New American Writing Award, and Music for Glass Orchestra, and the play Vegetable Medley (New York and Boston). Stories and poetry appear in both on-line and print journals.Her work can be viewed at http://graceandreacchi.com.

Defining Women: Empowerment and Change in America

by Shana Thornton Morris

Poetry capable of inspiring change not only communicates the slick and tender pulse of a surface wound, it connects to the universal nerve of tremors and feelings, connecting wires, vessels, and shifting cells. Poets are transmitters of the human condition. They initiate and inspire change to transcend their time, their poems added to anthologies and their lines recited by literary scholars and avid readers. Some poets are popular during their lifetimes, like Phoebe and Alice Cary, while others like Emily Dickinson guarded a hidden, folded genius, breathing a quiet verse that grew in universal popularity helping to establish the root of American poetry after her death.

Women like Phillis Wheatley laboriously claimed a place for women’s poetry. Even if their voices only contained a partial truth of their own experiences, as Alice Walker points out in the essay “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens” from her 1984 book with the same title, Walker further shows us that Wheatley represented a learned kitsch that “had held Phillis up to ridicule for more than a century.” A slave in the 18th-century, Phillis Wheatley absorbed language and ironed the statuesque ideal of liberty into her poetry. Her popularity led to her eventual freedom, though she remained sick and poor until the end of her short life. The New York Public Library’s digital Schomburg website reminds us that “Phillis Wheatley became the first African living in the British colonies to have a book published, and the second American woman to have a book of verse published.” Instead of creating an imaginative and prolific change in poetry, Wheatley’s achievements concern the poetic rite of passage that she represents. As Alice Walker writes in her essay, “It is not so much what you (Phillis Wheatley) sang, as that you kept alive, in so many of our ancestors, the notion of song.”

Emily Dickinson, the “Belle of Amherst,” wrote poetry, much of which remained private until her death, during the mid-19th century. Regarded by many as the co-inventor of American poetry¹, Dickinson invested her poetry with metaphysics and a “liquor never brewed” that ferments in the creative imagination. This sentiment and sensibility of Dickinson’s poetry influenced the forthcoming poets of the American literary canon, including William Carlos Williams.² While Dickinson did not initiate or stimulate social change and/or a transformation of poetic form within her lifetime, she communicates the mind’s timeless discovery of wild, divine depths and the mischievous, transcendental verses between human nature and Nature. In the century following Dickinson’s life, her poetic dashes and emphasis through capitalization did agitate the poetic form(lessness). For these reasons and more, 20th-century American writers, scholars, teachers, and students ingested Dickinson’s fascicles with an insatiable appetite.

But popular poetry often did inspire social change in 19th-century America. Abolitionist poetry became popular in the foreshadowing turmoil of Civil War. Best known for her involvement in the women’s suffrage movement, Phoebe Cary captures 19th-century humor concerning the socially accepted notion that unmarried women have a bleak and tragic place within the social hierarchy. However, the reader can sense a serious tone behind the veil of humor that reveals how Cary and other 19th-century women tried to slant the biased perspective that women needed a husband in order to fully experience life. The narrator of Cary’s poems “Shakesperian Readings”, “When Lovely Woman,” and “Lovers” mocks the culturally-prescribed, stereotypical social roles expressed in male-based formal literature.

The exceptionally popular abolitionist, suffragist, and African American poet Frances E. W. Harper (often called “the Bronze Muse”) read her poems during anti-slavery lectures. Harper composes a serious verse that represents the dichotomy of darkness and light, of innocence and war, of past and present. The short rhythm of “Bury Me in a Free Land” allowed people to remember the recitation of freedom’s voice. Frances Harper connects to the global suffrage movement in her poem “Ethiopia” during which the country metaphorically becomes a woman who yanks “(t)he tyrant’s yoke from off her neck” and symbolically frees herself to speak (line 5). Frances Harper gives voice to a universal hope for a future “freed from chains” where “laughing children play” (9, 1).

Written on November 22, 1873, another abolitionist and poet Rose Terry Cooke reminds women to wear “shoes of swiftness” concerning the Suffrage movement in the poem “Justice”.
A prolific and widely-read author, Cooke published poetry and short stories in Harper’s, the Atlantic Monthly, and Scribner’s Monthly. She is a contemporary voice for women in the Suffrage Movement. In “Justice”, written during the Reconstruction years, she reminds women to set their sights on a legal and political balance: “to make for truth a level sway” (11). In the lines, “The fillet of my slavery/I tread beneath my steady feet”, Rose Terry Cooke reacts to the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment which gave African American males the right to vote in 1870, fifty years prior to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment which granted women the right to vote (13-14). Cooke wanted to elevate the status of women without leaning on the platform of men. She longed to see the collective strength of women, as the poem “Justice” reveals.

We can see the germinating seeds of collective strength in the poetry by African American women during the Harlem Renaissance. Georgia Douglas Johnson, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Jessie Redmon Fauset voiced the intimate concerns of African-American women. They and others like Angelina Weld Grimke, Anne Spencer, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson were the first African American women to versify their intimate concerns and more specifically African-American female experiences concerning the social constraints of childbirth, motherhood, relationships with men, and the availability of social roles approximately thirty years prior to the start of the American Civil Rights Movement. In “Black Woman”, Georgia Douglas Johnson’s narrator pleads with an unborn “little child” to “be still” and “(d)on’t knock at my heart” (lines 1, 15, 9). In light of the “monster men/Inhabiting the earth,” the woman does not want to “give…birth” (lines 13-14, 16). In “Black Woman”, the reader hears the fear of a potential mother who lacks the freedom to choose her fate. Johnson communicates the sense of hopeless dread that results from living in the “alien cage” that has captured her culture and gender in “The Heart of a Woman” (6). For Johnson, the future progress of artistic achievement among African-American women depends upon freeing and awakening the heart that “tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars” (7).
In the poem “Dead Fires”, Jessie Redmon Fauset appears to shout about the hopelessness concerning progress. The complacent attitude concerning civil rights causes Fauset to view her time and place in history as a “gray calm” without the passion to agitate change (4).

Gwendolyn Bennett’s “Quatrains” furthers the feeling of physical limitations while revealing the expanse of creative desire: “Brushes and paints are all I have/To speak the music in my soul” (1-2). However, in “Quatrains”, Bennett discovers artistic expressions in common natural elements. She finds it “strange that grass should sing” and that snow offers a “swift surprise” (5, 7). While the momentum of creative and social change for African American women may be “slow” as the snow in Bennett’s poem, the genius of their contributions introduced an inspirational beauty into the poetic literary tradition.

A popular poet beginning in the first quarter of the 20th-century, Marianne Moore received nodding notoriety from many of her literary contemporaries like Hilda Doolittle, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens. In “Poetry”, Marianne Moore emphasizes and appreciates straight-forward language and imagery. Interested in scientific observation, she writes that people need to observe and learn about “the bat/holding on upside down…/…elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll(…)the base-/ball fan, the statistician” in order to fully appreciate each form of life (15-17, 20-21). Poetry requires the same deliberate appreciation. Moore writes “…we/do not admire what/we cannot understand” (13-15). She gives the reader the “raw” quest of discovering poetry as well as the “genuine” truth that is her inner self—a person intensely interested in both animals, as evidenced by her many visits to the Bronx Zoo, and sports, as her loyalty to the Yankees proves. In “The Fish”, her careful, detailed descriptions of “…ink-/besplattered jellyfish, crabs like green/lilies, and submarine/toadstools…” reveal that these forms of life suffer “All/external/marks of abuse…” such as “dynamite grooves, burns, and/hatchet strokes” (22-25, 26-28, 33-34). Published three years after World War I, Moore’s details of suffering in “The Fish” metaphorically reflect the human condition and highlight the destructive beauty of war upon the innocent. Not only does Moore mirror how modern warfare and cultural cruelty harms humankind, but more importantly she reminds us that the waves of change swell from the undercurrents of the past. Through Moore’s thoughtful observations, we see that the life forms under the sea, literally and symbolically beneath the surface, experience suffering as a result of mankind’s experiments and ignorance (i.e. “abuse”). Moore’s poetical attention to detail and direct honesty influenced future women writers like Elizabeth Bishop and Annie Dillard.

A direct description of social duplicity can also be discovered in the first wave of poetry created by Gwendolyn Brooks. In the poem “The Lovers of the Poor”, Gwendolyn Brooks illumines the differences between the white women, whom she titles “The Ladies”, and “The worthy poor” in a Chicago “Slum” (1, 24, 92). Her poem displays the dynamic social gap between the white women who “look,/In horror, behind a substantial citizeness/Whose trains clank out across her swollen heart./Who, arms akimbo, almost fills the door./All tumbling children, quilts dragged to the floor” (56-60). The black mother blends into her landscape of “The soil that stirs./The soil that looks the soil of centuries”, while “the Ladies” are “Keeping their scented bodies in the center/Of the hall as they walk down the hysterical hall,/They allow their lovely skirts to graze no wall,/(…and)Try to avoid inhaling the laden air” (95-97, 100). To Brooks, “The Ladies” are not a part of this Chicago community, even if they live in a city with the same name. She names their city by listing wealthy suburbs, china patterns, clothing designers, and furniture. Published in 1981, “The Boy Died in My Alley” allegorizes a painful scene of universal disconnection, according to Brooks. Every boy involved in tragedy and violence could be “this Boy” who creates a “red floor” on the “alley” (16, 40). As a poet, Brooks represents the subtle difference between seeing and feeling. In her later poetry, she uplifts the vivid, detailed contrasts about race and place and impulsiveness in her poetry. As Kenny Jackson Williams points out in his essay, “Brooks’ Life and Career”, Gwendolyn Brooks chooses to uplift the creative endeavors of people in the Black community through her many workshops and group programs.

One of the first poets to include when discussing the initiation or stimulation of change whether socially, politically, or poetically should be Adrienne Rich. Often, she is labeled a lesbian poet, feminist, political poet, and Jewish poet; however, Rich writes a poetry that emphasizes her individual separateness and that communicates her ability to see the detailed needs of other people. She communicates the intimate mind, the questings of an individual through sexuality, poetry, race, lifestyle, and desire. In the first stanza of “Diving into the Wreck”, Adrienne Rich makes words and phrases describe not only a literal diver, but the poetic process. The poet reads “myths”, observes the details of life and the self with the “loaded…camera” of the eye, and finally carves out the details, raw moments, with “the edge of the knife-blade” that seems well-sharpened given that the poet “checked” it prior to adding “body-armor” along with “absurd flippers” and the “grave and awkward mask” (1-3, 5-7). In the final stanza of the poem, Adrienne Rich and the reader resurface along with the same images from the first stanza. She appears to communicate that an individual’s experiences contain mysteries that are the true poetry. And that in this instance, poetic experience does not contain the purpose of naming the poet just as the sea’s unbiased candor can only be heard in the waves. “Diving into the Wreck” along with other poems like “Yom Kippur 1984″ communicate Adrienne Rich’s search for the time “when we who refuse to be women and men as women and men are chartered,/tell our stories of solitude spent in multitude/in that world as it may be, newborn and haunted…” (84-86). Rich communicates a need to go beyond labels by valuing her personal “solitude.”

The women poets of the late 20th-century seem aware of an artistically transcendent, collective spirit. They use labels to emphasize creative individuality, the personal “I” narrative and feeling. This voice searches for unique similarities and differences, not hackneyed attempts to capture depth. However, their poetry often resists that voice in the process of telling others’ stories.

Sylvia Plath gives us the pain of the world, coupled with her inner turmoil, through her mysterious confessional poetry. However, her poetry does not stop the “I” in order to take up the “we” or “you.” The poem “Lady Lazarus” gives us the closest images to Plath: scenes of theatrical revival and death, a “shriek” and “ash”, the art of dying as a “miracle”, and the loneliness of being a blessed “valuable” (69, 72, 55, 6. She humorously dances with “death” in many of her poems. Plath’s poetry goes beyond the famous confessionals of personal, often violent, disturbances from her past and points to her tragic future.

Much of poetry seeks to heal alienation and cultural malaise by communicating the depths of the human spirit. We hear the lineage of the collective, narrative voice in Audre Lorde’s poem “Coal”. Audre Lorde tried to break down and overcome stereotypes about her race and sexual orientation. She was a black lesbian with parents whose heritage is from Carriacou Island in the Grenadines. She uses the Carriacou word “Zami” as a title for her biomythography and as “a new spelling of…(her) name.” The word “Zami” calls and conjures up a lineage of womens’ voices whose lifestyle of collective support is an expression of love and art. Audre Lorde places emphasis upon the self in every poem and in every genre. She defies poetic and prosaic forms in order to blend them. She challenges her place in every group while giving the group a place with her voice. With Barbara Smith, she began Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press in order to help other women of color. She was a teacher, an activist to help women under apartheid in South Africa, and a stimulant for social change. Like the narrator of the poem “Coal”, Audre Lorde asserts her inner truth. The “I” is the void, the emptiness that is already full when she writes, “I/is the total black, being spoken/from the earth’s inside” (1-3). The earth speaks and claims us all as “I” and releases some of us to “know sun”, to become “young sparrows bursting from shell”, to transform into word “jewels in the open light” (16, 19, 25). Audre Lorde is an earth that gives birth to words, sentences, poems, and stories. She equates the depths and expanse of the earth with tender feelings: “Love is a word, another kind of open” (22). In “Love Poem”, Audre Lorde asks the earth to “(s)peak…and bless…(her) with what is richest” (1). By her descriptions, she makes love to the earth and “swing(s) out over the earth/over and over/again” (18-20). The earth as a metaphorical lover, as a poetic muse, can hold her and offers a density that can contain her desire “over and over again”. While Audre Lorde is known for agitating change by expressing her blackness, her homosexuality, and her feminism, she also creates change by expressing the yearning search for tenderness and love in her poetry and biomythology.

In her comments during the Second Sex Conference in New York on Sept. 29, 1979, (titled “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”) Audre Lorde says, “Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged.” Many might mock her combination of “difference” and “connection” as clever irony, and yet her comments transcend her time and place. A few paragraphs later, she adds, “In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.” American poetry has grown to embrace and encompass multi-cultural writers like Ai, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Leslie Marmon Silko as well as writers interested in other places and races of people like Carolyn Forchè and Carolyne Wright.

In her speech “Notes Towards a Politics of Location” delivered in Utrecht, Holland in June 1984, Adrienne Rich discusses how women can empower not only one another but our future selves: “The movement for change is a changing movement, changing itself, demasculinizing itself, de-Westernizing itself, becoming a critical mass that is saying in so many different voices, languages, gestures, actions: It must change; we ourselves can change it. We who are not the same. We who are many and do not want to be the same” (76-77).

In April 2008, National Poetry Month, as if a month could contain the words and phrases that make women bold, sensual, powerful, tender, intimate, and aware—the list of poetic preservation stretches into the long ago scene—the clothes of Shakespeare’s sister enshrined and rotting, alongside the child slaves’ hand-stitched, shrinking, single dress crafted from feed sacks, the ironed Quaker pleats and draping moth-eaten shawls of New England, the sudden Versace, embellished sari, a tailored dashiki, T-length dress hiked her skirt to a mini and pressed palms into pants, slack knickers, until we reach the intricate nakedness of women’s poetry at the end of the 20th-century. But what measure of women and ourselves has learned the lesson, that Audre Lorde states in her dismantling, during this new century with its different wars and abuses, same hopes and charities, and greater “knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives”³?

Do we truly empower one another as different women after all of this defining? I know that our poetry has and does, and that as women we will continue to push beyond the boundaries of limitation.

Technorati Tags: National Poetry Month, social change, women poets

Sssh! Let the cruelty begin: Wuthering Heights and the Child Abuse of Yesterday and Today

by Nicolette Westfall

I’ll never forget one of the first times I came over to The Gentleman’s house, where he lived with his parents while going through his doctorate program. He told me I couldn’t use the front door because it would disturb his father, who liked to sleep there after work every evening. I think I forgot and rang the front anyway. Later, he also told me to use the washroom on the main floor; otherwise the creaking of the stairs to the one above would wake his father.

I thought it very odd that a 20 year old male would fear his father that much. Afterwards, as I got to know the family, I experienced drunken family meetings that did not include his father—the rest sat around the kitchen table, cursing him for his tyranny. From what I hear, to this day, The Gentleman gives his father verbal abuse in kind, though it does not and will not ever even the score—he is his father’s son.

Had I even taken the time to think about my own childhood, where my mother and her addiction to benzodiazepine also left the household children in a perpetual state of silenced fear, I might have reversed my steps and left The Gentleman’s house, to never return. However, love is blind and the self, well, we are conditioned to destroy it, not protect it.

There were bits of history about The Gentleman that I blocked out, like the fact that he was a cutter, and that he spent whole days locked in his room, away from the world. What events lead to this state of mind certainly sprang from his father’s cruelty. It was akin to my mother’s, in which she inflicted various cruel tools of continuous physical and mental punishment upon me in order to erase the fact that she’d had me at such an early age. I don’t know his father’s reasoning behind the cruel and cold upbringing.

The Gentleman was no less cruel than his own father. Often, I’d ground the offspring to his room for the most trivial thing, just to keep him safely away from The Gentleman. Though he never hit us, his verbal manipulations were so devastating that he left us with barely any self-worth and this odd feeling of walking on egg shells even when he wasn’t in our presence.

When the man of the house kicks the woman, she kicks the child, who kicks the dog. After the end of the relationship with The Gentleman, I couldn’t keep my mouth shut about what went on behind closed doors. Talking to the girlfriends was not only therapeutic; it got them to open up about the frustrations and stressors they also tried to function with. We found that whenever we’d done something like yell at offspring, the best thing to do was call someone in the support system and confess it. Many women, however, don’t like to admit that they aren’t June Cleaver, and so, they struggle on with guilt and fear their only companions.

These memories started to bloom inside my head when I recently reread Emily Bronté’s Wuthering Heights, a story originally published in 1847 under the pen name Ellis Bell. Within it, the cyclical child abuse seems almost absurd—but for the fact that it goes on in all parts of the world even to this day. Grounding my son to his room to protect him from The Cruel Gentleman is not anything new, if Emily’s Nelly has anything to say about it—she puts Hindley Earnshaw’s son, Hareton, in a cupboard to hide him from drunken Hindley.

Heathcliff, another character violently abused by Hindley when he was young, goes on to torture anybody he can get his hands on. Well, as lord and master over the property (which includes male servants, women, and children), he has the legal right to do whatever he wants to them. Near the end of the story, he sees Hareton and Catherine II together and it reminds him of his long dead love, Catherine I, and himself. All the years of bitter hatred and the blood thirsty need for revenge turn into a self-realization moment of fasting until he dies, which leaves them heirs to his properties (which lawfully belonged to them in the first place). Quite the short, happy little ending –not really any compensation in return for reading an entire novel stuffed with abuses and triggers.

Today, the abuser does not need to die in order to stop or prevent cruelty. There are anti-abuse measures, like laws, which attempt to protect people and children from the devastating actions of traumatic domestic abuses. One of the major obstacles to preventing and eradicating abuse, however, is the silence which promotes and guarantees its cyclical nature. Fear of death, for some women, is enough to keep them silent as well. No easy solution can be reached, for each case is difference, but if we as a society can start to publicly talk about our collective experiences, then we will have taken the first step to acknowledging that child abuse is far more common than we are willing to acknowledge.

WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution arrives in New York

by Lee Conell

“Where should I start?” I wondered when I wandered into “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution,” the show currently on display at PS 1.

“WACK!” is international in its scope, and with over 400 works from all over the world, I don’t know if anyone could have given me a compass and pointed me in the right direction. But I’m glad I started in the room I did: The first group of work I saw were Louise Fishman’s “Angry Women” paintings, a series in which the names of female activists and artists are energetically scrawled on individual pieces of paper next to the word “angry.” There’s Angry Gertrude, Angry Jane, Angry Yvonne, and, simmering along with the rest, Angry Louise. My grandmother’s name was Louise, so immediately “WACK!” took on that feeling of personal history, of looking through the most intimate and honest photo album: No fake smiles here.

Fishman’s “Angry Women” series was an important gateway into the show for me, not just because the names softened me to the work, but also because it was so wonderfully startling to see genuine rage at the world. I’m used to demands for equality couched in pleasant language, swaddled in sweetness; after all, being called an “angry feminist” today seems to immediately invalidate any and all of your arguments. “WACK!” shows work that refuses to back away from that rage, and that’s what made the show so refreshing for me (a “third-waver”).

Alongside that rage, “WACK!” demonstrates the exhilaration of speaking to the past and changing history through works like Mary Beth Edelson’s “Some living American women artists” which depicts a black and white xerox of “The Last Supper” in which the apostles’ faces have been replaced by women artists – Georgia O’Keefe is Jesus. Many of the artists in Edelson’s work are also in “WACK!” making “Some living American women artists” an interesting complement to the exhibition itself.

Edelson’s collages, which wink at the past, are very different from Martha Rosler’s “Body Beautiful” or “Body Knows No Pain” series, which is among other things a brutal examination of the media’s portrayal of women. One of the works from the series “Hot House, or Harem” was used as the cover for the exhibition catalog; in it, images of naked women, who look like they could be pulled out of a number of magazines today, crowd the page. Like “Hot House, or Harem” Much of the art in “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution” remains relevant: Senga Nengudi’s twisted pantyhose filled with sand reflect a weight from maintaining the feminine image that is still prevalent, and Margaret Harrison’s twisted superheroes (including “Banana Woman” — enough said) are still perfectly ironic.

The show’s wall text are bare and brief, offering the artist’s name, the work’s title and and little else. Because of this, I never felt lectured at during “WACK!” and it was easy to relate to the work and to place the work in a contemporary context. While some historical background throughout the show would not necessarily take away from this effect the close-lipped wall text makes sense: When the viewer approaches each artwork without a curator whispering its accepted meaning in her ear, the work continues to have space to grow and to generate new meaning. Maybe you’ll see your grandmother, a housewife with six children, staring out at you in “WACK!,” or maybe you’ll see yourself.

Spotlight on Karen Harrington

Part I of a two-part spotlight on author and Her Circle blogger Karen Harrington about her writing passions, motherhood and the universal truths behind this role.

First, what is Janeology about?
A college professor struggles after his wife, Jane, snaps and drowns their toddler son. Soon, he finds himself in a legal battle, defending charges that he failed to protect his son from his fragile wife. His legal team proposes a radical defense: one that focuses away from him and on Jane’s strained childhood and potential inherited predisposition to violence.

What inspired you to write about this subject?
Two things, actually. First, I have a passion for genealogy, mostly because I never knew any of my grandparents. I had their pictures and many of their belongings. All my life, I looked at these objects and thought, “What if these pictures could talk? What was she thinking when this photograph was taken?” So I wanted to write about a character from the perspective of her genealogy to unearth all those traits – gifts, talents, diseases or curses – that can be inherited.

Second, as a new mother, I struggled with post-partum depression for a short-time. This made me wonder how mothers of previous generations handled this issue along with the everyday stresses of caretaking. Now I grant that it might be media influence, but as soon as I had my children, my awareness of grim headlines about maternal filicide were springing up to my left and right. I wrote this book, in part, because it seems to me that this is a recurring issue in American society today. In many ways, Janeology is a cautionary tale about one man achieving an understanding about his wife, despite it being too late to reverse her deeds.

You are a new mother. How did the examination of a mother descending into mental illness impact your writing?
Foremost, I don’t think I could have written it as powerfully if I was not a mother. I began writing it right after my mother died and finished it after the birth of my second child – which has all occurred in the last five years. In unexpected ways, her death shed a lot of insight into her as a person, not just a mother. Anyone who has lost a parent knows this experience from going through their parents’ possessions and letters. So I found myself in that life-altering position where you are standing between two generations - wondering how much of you is from your mother and father; how much of you is inside your own child; and just how much does nurture influence an individual. And because all things inform the writer’s life, my questions soon made their way into the fictionalized story of Jane Nelson.

In writing and researching this book, did you learn anything that surprised you?
It’s important to note that Janeology is not based on any one case. Rather, it’s a compilation of things I’ve read, interpreted and then illustrated into a fictional world. What it did bring into focus for me is this: motherhood is not universally natural and all women do not bond to the mothering role in the same way. Here are some startling facts I learned:

• As of 2007, eleven women were on death row in the United States for killing their children
• According to the American Anthropological Association, more than 200 women kill their children in the United States each year.
Link to American Anthropological Association : http://www.aaanet.org/press/motherskillingchildren.htm
• Reports indicate that 10-20 percent of new mothers experience some sort of depression.
Link to reports: http://www.postpartum.net/mothers-act3.html
• Three to five children a day are killed by their parents.
• Homicide is the leading cause of death for children under four.

There are many mothers who struggle early on in this fog and then emerge extremely maternal. There are those who do not. Society has to quit the idea that motherhood comes natural to ALL women. This personal revelation has led me to become a passionate advocate for programs designed to support women, children and families in need.

To read an excerpt of Janeology, visit www.karenharringtonbooks.com

Come back on April 15 for Part II of our spotlight with Karen where she will share more information on the programs she is following, including the Mother’s Act for Post-Partum mothers and families now being debated in the U.S. Senate and the emergence of crisis nursery centers as a resource for overwhelmed mothers and women.

Anna Brigadere (1861-1933)

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