Dedication
This issue dedicated to the memory of Monique Wittig. Wittig was born in 1935 and died January 2003. She was a pioneer in feminist literature. Some of her well known texts include: Les Guérillères, The Lesbian Body, Across the Acheron, and The Straight Mind and Other Essays. The theme of this issue is “the body” and was, in part, inspired by Wittig and the effect she has had on us.
Editorial
Why Trivia: Voices of Feminism? Why now? It’s exactly 22 years since the fall of 1982 when Trivia: A Journal of Ideas first came out. That was a time of conservative retrenchment in the U.S. Reagan was riding a wave of popularity that would soon sweep him into a second term in office and the religious right was beginning to make itself felt as a political presence. At the same time, in part thanks to readily available federal and state grant monies for alternative publications, relatively low printing costs, and thousands of independent bookstores, the country was also home to a highly politicized counter-culture Trivia was one of several dozen radical feminist magazines already in existence or about to spring up, among them Sinister Wisdom, Conditions, off our backs, Heresies, Ikon, Lesbian Ethics and Woman of Power. Uncompromising feminist voices could be heard not just in journals like these but on the radio, in films, and occasionally even on TV and in the mainstream press. And all across the country a wealth of women's bookstores, presses, performance spaces, art galleries, conferences, book fairs and music festivals testified to a vibrant feminist culture, one that was becoming increasingly diverse along lines of color, class and fashion preferences.
Obviously, Trivia: Voices of Feminism is being born into a very different world. We have put this first issue together in the shadow of the US elections. Literally so: our one face-to-face meeting as editors took place in October in an apartment in a house in Saratoga Springs on which the landlord had nailed a big BUSH/CHENEY sign. Since the election—and as I write this it has been just over a month—I along with most women I know in the US (I’ve lived in Montreal since 1990) exist in an ongoing state of disbelief and dread. We are all bracing ourselves for the worst: not just a rollback of many of our own hardwon rights and a steep rise in poverty, but a renewed assault on the 36 million other species we share this earth with, along with the earth itself. Not just the mounting casualties in Iraq , but the escalating threat of massive attacks on human life around the world due in large part to the policies of this administration. In the face of such prospects, what purpose could possibly be served by the reappearance of a radical feminist rag? On the day of Bush’s “re-election,” I found out the Women’s Review of Books, which was born two years after Trivia and has held out valiantly ever since, was about to fold, in part because its subscription base has shrunk. Some would argue interest in feminism has dwindled as well. Our bookstores have disappeared, in part due to lack of clientele, and almost all the institutions that sustained that flourishing womens’ culture of the 70’s and 80’s are gone. Of the radical womens’ publications that sprouted in those years only off our backs and Sinister Wisdom are still publishing. If it seems to be getting a lot harder to believe that radical voices matter, maybe that’s because today they are so rarely heard. “Suddenly men were everywhere, reminding us how the lives of everyone alive today are held in their hands. Not just heads of state, generals, press secretaries, but also the white anchormen in their suits and ties controlling our minds at home. No women’s voices to be heard anywhere, not on TV, not in the streets, certainly not in the halls of government.” I wrote these words in my very last editorial for Trivia; the occasion was the launching of Bush senior’s Gulf War. How much more depressingly a propos they are now in these post-election weeks as everyone hunkers down for another four years of US sabre-rattling and Christian fundamentalism. “It’s in your head you hear them always the droning cicadas of patriarchy.” I stumbled upon Louky Bersianik’s “Maladie d’Amour” (“Lovesick”) on the internet three weeks after the election. I dropped everything I was doing to translate it. It was the first piece of writing I’d read in those weeks that spoke directly to my broken heart: “The chirring noise of the males which the females imitate. . which thrusts its noisy presence between you and whatever you love, which mades you lovesick. . .” In those weeks no encounter or conversation with any of the beings in my life—not even my cat—produced a sliver of joy or lightness. And I was unable to so much as look at my own writing. I had felt this way before, in the period after 9/11. The droning cicadas of patriarchy had never seemed louder than in those weeks and months. I remember at that time wondering how my voice, or any feminist voice, could possibly matter. And then I read Robin Morgan’s series of stirring, visionary reports from Ground Zero, “Ghosts and Echoes.” I read Starhawk’s accounts from around the world of the protest actions of the Global Justice Movement, all of them inspired by ancient Goddess wisdom. I began rereading Morgan’s decade-old book The Demon Lover: the Sexuality of Terrorism. And the old knowing, and along with it, the light, began to flood back in. “Only in the feminist press,” I continued in that 1991 editorial (at the time there still was a feminist press) “did I find rage commensurate with the atrocities being flashed before us on the TV screen every day, complex and passionate analysis that went to the root of the problem and so was able to make the most vital connections. There is no other way of seeing the world, I realized all over again, that goes down so deep and spreads out so far.” Today, as post- 9/11 horrors continue to mount, these words ring truer than ever. For there is also no other way of seeing the world that can adequately address the plague that is threatening our planet—which itself goes down so deep and spreads out so far. “Viriocracy,” Harriet Ellenberger calls it, in her report in this issue, borrowing the term from Michèle Causse. “Patriarchy is way too tame a word to describe what’s been going on for the last 5000 years,” she writes. Indeed. In one of her reports from the protest actions of 2002, Starhawk wrote, with reference to the fearlessness of the suicide bombers, “How much trickier it is to become fearless while seeking life. And yet that is what I believe we are called to do.” Though there is no feminist press to speak of today, lately I’ve been hearing quite a few such fearless voices out in the public domain. These voices—mostly all of them women’s—remind me that the root of the word courage is “heart.” There is the great Australian anti-nuclear activist Helen Caldicott, who has been touring the US trying to raise awareness of the danger to the planet posed by the Bush administration. In a documentary made about the tour, she is seen shouting out at each stop, “These men all belong in jail! Either that or in a mental ward.” When asked by her own staff to tone it down for fear she’ll alienate her audience, she explodes: “Tone it down! Do you realize that what is at stake is all of creation?” In Canada there is MP Carolyn Parrish who has repeatedly referred to Bush as “dangerous” and “warlike” and dared to publicly characterize the architects of the missile defense shield plan as “a coalition of idiots.” Who was finally booted out of the Liberal Party by the Prime Minister after she ground her heel into a George Bush doll on a television comedy show. Right here in Quebec we have the great actress and raconteuse Pol Pelletier, whose one-woman show in November traced the tragic arc of the human species from Homo Sapiens to Homo Demens, and reminded us how relentlessly that history has been based on the erasure of female accomplishment. At the end of the performance, Pelletier mourned the fourteen young women engineering students who were gunned down in 1989 by a man who hated feminists, and raged at the way this event, like so many other crimes against women, has been muted and buried in the years since. On the night I attended, she received four standing ovations. And now there are the passionate voices of the writers in this first issue of Trivia: Voices of Feminism. Voices of rage. Grief. Outrage. Where else, I have to ask myself again, is there to be found emotion —and urgency—commensurate with the atrocities of our time? This past October I attended The Global Women’s Gathering in the Catskills: a meeting of western women leaders with indigenous women elders from around the world. For four days the native women, almost all of them healers, shared their stories, their wisdom and their prayers. On the second day, elders from Central and South America stood up one after another to say that according to the prophecies of their people, this was a time in which women would lead the nations. In another time and place, these statements might have brought out the jeering cynic in me. Yet the part of my mind that had been listening in awe all day to these women, and the western women who had come to meet with them, took them in as deep and irrefutable truth. Reading the writers in this issue, I find myself doing so all over again. For we must not underestimate the power of our grief, our rage, our outrage. As Sara Wright suggests, this is a time in which we are all being called upon to bear witness, with all the presence we can muster, to violations and desecrations both around the globe and in our own back yards that have reached new heights of insanity. Our embodied presence alone is powerful, and healing. In a breakout session at the Global Women’s Gathering on “Oppression: The Damage and the Healing,” Alice Walker, one of the western women in attendance, reminded us that “to be woman is to be magic.” If this is so, no doubt it’s because throughout history we have been so conversant with the magic around us. With this in mind, Walker urged us all to “petition the natural world” in our pursuit of justice, to enlist all the powers of creation—trees, plants, animals, the earth herself, and all four elements—in our struggle to wrest this world back from those who have fashioned it in their own image of greed and fragmentation. This first issue of Trivia: Voices of Feminism is dedicated to Monique Wittig, whose sudden death in 2003 meant the loss of one of our literary geniuses and most radical voices. May this reborn Trivia be guided by her example: her fierce feminist vision, her linguistic daring, and her lesbian soul. In the spirit of her guérillères, who, “the integrity of the body their first principle, advance marching together into another world,” may we all keep courage in these difficult times. Trivia: A Journal of Ideas was launched in Western Massachusetts . That fact mattered 22 years ago. In this age of virtual reality, geographic bases are not so easy to identify, and maybe not so important. Yet it matters to us that Trivia: Voices of Feminism in terms of its identity and its base be seen not as a US publication but a North American venue, a forum for women on both sides of the border. We also hope that Trivia: VoF will do a better job of embracing the realities of women of color and truly marginalized women than her foresister did. 22 is a mystical number. In numerological terms, it’s the number of the master builder. Trivia: a Journal of Ideas appeared 22 times. Now, 22 years since that fall of 1982 when Trivia first came out, it seems a most propitious moment to launch her twenty-first century sister. Lise Weil We Carry On Two years ago I came alive reading women’s words – powerful, inspiring words spiraling within my body, telling stories of reality and imagination. I explored feminists from the '70s and '80s whose words possessed a we will not stop writing until the subjugation of women has ended energy, women writers from Quebec who inspired me to write my own words, my own story. And I read a bagful of old Trivia issues I borrowed from Lise Weil one summer day in 2003. “We desire a world which will simultaneously express and encourage the real-ization of our fullest potential as intelligent and creative beings,” Anne Dellenbaugh wrote in the very first Trivia back in '82. When I read women writers from the '70s and '80s, women writers from Quebec and writers from those old Trivia issues, I felt their passion. They were writing to create a world where they could exist as themSelves – as whole bodies. i can feel the bodies of writing breathing, feel myself alive – feel. these women’s voices lead somewhere, a movement toward possibility, hope, change. deep inside my belly a longing to be part of something greater, a movement – maybe just motion. as if those words were written for my eyes. as if my words, my voice, my Self could be significant too. I was halfway through working on my Master’s degree and began to center my studies around my own ideas, to write about the literature I loved most and to give weight to my own intuitions and instincts – even when they went against what I knew was acceptable in traditional academe. My thoughts, ideas, passions, dreams became something to be expressed rather than denied, became significant and energizing. building friendships with other women i meet at school. talking about our lives, politics, literature – everything. yes, everything. i begin to move into mySelf, a woman body talking writing breathing … dreaming. Trivia: Voices of Feminism began with a dream – literally. I sent Lise an e-mail, summer 2003 not long after I read those old issues, to tell about a dream that we re-started Trivia along with Elizabeth (Waller, whom I had met briefly that same week). I don’t recall the details of that first dream, except Lise’s response: wouldn’t that be something? wouldn’t that be something? me, a catalyst for creating a space for women’s words – radical, strong, powerful, significant, beautiful and inspiring words representing a myriad of voices. me, artist writer poet … editor? awake: this is not something i let myself believe possible. I continued to dream, my dreams increasing in detail throughout the year. From time to time I would share new versions: there would be five of us, “voices of feminism” would be the title, we brainstormed at a cabin (our first “meeting” was a phone conference where Liz and Lise called me from a cabin). And in my dreams the journal is always in hard-copy – something we all dream will someday be possible. t was almost a year after the first dream that my own dreams began to transform into our collective dream. We discovered that an on-line venue would be feasible, and soon after Layla (Holguin-Messner) and Elissa (Jones) joined the collective. dreams are so easy. resting on my pillow, my puppy nearby, drifting off, floating away. no conflict, no outside interference, no doubts – events unfold before morning and the journal, issues, appear. in dream-moments intuition is the only force that exists – guiding, moving, knowing. awake: i distance myself, feel like i’m sure of less. My mind, despite the accuracy of many of my dreams, causes me to doubt my intuitions. And the November 2004 U.S. elections made me wonder if it was even possible to resurrect the passion, energy and power I sensed from feminists from decades ago. What could be the point of creating a journal for radical women’s writing at this time -- when the political climate is so anti-woman, when this election ensured that we would lose more rights to make decisions about our own bodies, when morality is being defined by old white men and their religious propaganda, when silence and censorship is increasing? What could be the point when all these things made me feel so hopeless it weighed down in the pit of my belly? And then I read Louky Bersianik’s poem, her words: “The strident cry of the world in the present state of the world which kills you without killing you … ” knowledge weighing down in my body, killing me without killing me. unable to channel my rage, losing sight along the way, bogged down by every oppression i hear about, feeling powerless hopeless silent. without reading/writing, passively accepting a world killing me without killing me. I need my awareness of what's happening in the world to ground me, to motivate me. But this knowledge is only useful if it leads to action. And writing is a form of action, standing up for our bodies, fighting to exist as ourSelves. In the most beautiful line from one of my favorite Nicole Brossard texts, she writes: … we are always like water and mirror, fire and matrix, like that which conquers even the principle of conquest, that is, what captivates our senses and suggests the poem which makes me say that the chest holds the meaning of the breath we find there, as if each time it were a matter of writing: I carry on. [“The Aerial Letter,” 87, italics mine] the chest holds the meaning of the breath we find there – words i return to, read over and over again to re-energize myself. the reality of our bodies, our experiences, our voices gives rise to movements of women. all movement is important; every voice every book every poem every word written uncensored is liberation – creating spaces of freedom where awake we are able to imagine something more is possible. Our words matter individually and collectively. Women's words inspiring, energizing, reaching out to other women is what Trivia: Voices of Feminism is about. We are creating a space untouched, uncensored, unsilenced by the agenda of the political right. We write because it is a way we can carry on. MeLissa Gabriels |
Archive Issue
Issue 1 • December 2004 Theme: the body Lise Weil and MeLissa Gabriels Editorial Louky Bersianik Lovesick (trans. by Lise Weil) Harriet Ellenberger Guerrilla Girl Ponders the Situation Barbara Mor the secret pornographies of republicans What's Left? Preferably Knot Sara Wright, Communing with Bears Elissa Jones, TRIVIAL LIVES: Division Street Rhonda Patzia After Reading: Les Guéillères Notes on Contributors |
22 years ago there was no such thing as the internet. We are blessed to have access to this technology that permits us to launch TRIVIA around the world without having to pay a printing bill or worry about distributors and bookstores. Our endless thanks to Rebecca Kidder, who donated a hosting service to us.
At the same time, our dream is for TRIVIA to morph back into a print journal before too long. If any of our readers has ideas for how we might gain institutional support to make this possible, we would appreciate hearing from you.
At the same time, our dream is for TRIVIA to morph back into a print journal before too long. If any of our readers has ideas for how we might gain institutional support to make this possible, we would appreciate hearing from you.