Matrices
Susan Hawthorne
Matrix 1. Language
Language makes us. But we too can remake language, and ourselves. If we listen, imagine, invent.
Let us experiment with some sentences.
I live in a lesbian world.
Lesbians are my universe.
All history is the history of lesbians.
Such statements have a certain ring and may be true for some lesbians in some times. But many readers will balk at these sentences in ways that they simply do not when men (usually white, heterosexual and of at least middling wealth; also usually physically mobile men) write and speak sentences in which men are the world, the universe and all of history. 1
Note that I stated that such utterances may be true for some lesbians. I take for granted that non-lesbians will have difficulty with these sentences. In this way I have already found one of the limits of the word lesbian. It is not considered to have universal appeal by both lesbians and non-lesbians.
The earliest known form of the word "lesbian" means simply resident of Lesbos. If you go to Lesbos today and think it has any special meaning the residents of Lesbos will deny it. They pronounce it, however, with the modern Demotic pronunciation lesvian.2 Of course, the most famous resident of Lesbos was Sappho or Psappha who lived there around 600 BCE, and words deriving from Psappha and from Lesbos constitute the major forms from which many European language words for "lesbian" derive. Most of these words began to enter European languages in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
We might ask ourselves what has the concept lesbian meant in different societies? Monster. Heretic. Witch. Mad. Abnormal. Unnatural. Criminal. Impossible. Ludicrous. Sometimes eccentric. Very occasionally, special. These have been the real meanings. And it is these meanings that have really defined the lives of lesbians. These meanings have made certain destinies more likely for lesbians.
The process of reinvention must be continuous. The threat of extinction is real. It occurs in sanctified and legitimated violence against lesbians. Meanwhile, the symbolic annihilation of lesbians goes on in everyday conversation as well as in the silences between.
As feminists, as lesbians, as people on the margins have always known, language is organic. It grows out of experience of the world.
Language sculpts memory. It creates markers like places on a map. It creates a geography of the mind and of one's own life. Like the ancients who created the art of memory - a series of rooms, a narrative architecture - language provides us with the possibility of storytelling. And even if we use the same words our words are frequently misunderstood or distorted because our semantic substratum is incomprehensible. An example I have used in my own work is the word "cow". In mainstream language it means the female of several large species: bovines, whales and elephants. Gertrude Stein used the word "cow" in Lifting Belly, and so I have taken this and used it as code for lesbian. Mary Daly's redefining of the word "hag" in Gyn/Ecology (1978) and later in the Wickedary (1987) means that it too can be used positively. There are constant redefinings going on in language, some are not what we would want, and George Orwell in his novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, created Newspeak, a language with an ever-diminishing vocabulary. 3
Storytelling through song or poetry is the oldest form of literature. From indigenous storytelling which reaches back tens of thousands of years - through to the Homeric Hymns of Greece, the Vedas and Puranasof India,4 the ancient literatures of China, Sumeria, the Maya and many more - rhythm, melody and language are overlaid to create art.5
If we want to change the social context, language is an important place to start. Part of this involves delving into the profundity of language, excavating the depths, interpreting the resonances of words and relationships across and through languages. A great deal of work has been done in this area. Feminists have done their fair share, sometimes humorously, sometimes in great seriousness.6
The codes of those people who have been considered outcasts also have much to teach us. Punishment for linguistic transgression is not unusual, but the need to communicate is intensified. The use of the word "lesbian," as noted at the beginning of this essay, incurs punishment.7 Words which in the dominant discourse have one meaning, carry different meanings in the marginal or forbidden discourse. A variety of words has been developed as code for lesbian, the latest of which is the arid, "same-sex attracted woman."8
Power is at the centre of marginal codes, but depending on circumstances these codes might never break through the barriers to become common parlance. Lesbian discourse is one of these. Has there ever been a society in which lesbian parlance has been the dominant code? We don't know. For when a lesbian achieves something good, she is unlikely to be recorded as a lesbian. Take the example of opera singer, Joan Hammond, well known to Australian audiences, hardly known even in the lesbian community for her sexuality. By contrast, Tracy Wiggington, also know as the lesbian vampire who murdered a man, is known almost solely for being a lesbian.9 For when a lesbian does something bad, only her lesbian identity is invoked. Mostly she is simply forgotten. Lesbians are ignored on family trees. The maiden aunt "without issue," I know this from my own family tree.10 This has important political implications for lesbian activists and theorists. For unlike teenagers, lesbian language is unlikely to become the dominant discourse, so the invention and re-invention must go on.
As Monique Wittig has argued, lesbians are not a part of the discourse of women, a discourse in which women are tied to men.11 But perhaps there is an earlier scenario.12 Perhaps there was a time when women did not rely on masculine discourse for their existence. Perhaps it was men who sought the company of women for their culture and their storytelling.
"There was a time when you were not a slave, remember that. You walked alone, full of laughter, you bathed bare bellied. You say you have lost all recollection of it, remember! You say there are not words to describe it; you say it does not exist. But remember! Make an effort to remember! or failing that, invent."13
All of this is speculation, but speculation and imagination are absolutely central to thought and the creation of knowledge. It is about the same level of speculation as suggesting human beings are not the only intelligent life form; or arguing for parallel universes (a multiverse); or positing a big bang as the origin of the universe.
There have been times in my life when words have escaped me. An epileptic seizure can take away the world, the words, one's sense of self. At these times, however, thought and knowledge of some kind persists. As I have searched for words with my tongue, for ways to shape and form the words, although they did not always come, I knew that they existed. I could see the world around me. I could take in the human presence. But I could not name it. Intelligence is not dependent on language. Observation and interpretation still go on. Muteness, wordlessness simply prevents me from sharing my world with another, prevents me from passing on my internal experience so that another person can understand it, albeit in an abridged form. 14
Dreams are what, in ancient Greek, are called the metaxu - μεταζν - a word that I keep returning to in my writing. The metaxu is the "in between." It is the space or the material between two people which creates the possibility of communication.15 It is the cytoplasm, the air, the water, the wall between two prisoners as Simone Weil suggests.16 It can have a material or immaterial form. For the reader of Braille it is the raised points on a page or on the door to a lift.
Story too is a kind of metaxu. It is told by the teller of the story and heard by the listener, but the story itself is what links the two people, and perhaps transforms them. The story is the thread that is spun out and grasped between the minds of the teller and the listeners. It becomes a shared experience. It is no accident that we refer to the weaving of story. With warp and weft come interlocking experiences, matrices of meaning.
The metaxu is conceived of as a point on a continuum, a bridge between things or people that are separated, or between irreconcilable qualities. The metaxuis the attempt to say something meaningful, to speak the unspeakable.
The metaxu is a concept linked to connectivity, to the feminist principle of inseparability, to the personal is political. The importance of this principle cannot be overstated; the metaxuis an integral part of both the instance of separation and of reconnection.
A language example of the metaxu also comes from ancient Greek. The Greek verb has not just two voices - one active and one passive - but also a third which is called the middle voice. The middle voice represents a way of speaking which allows integration between subject and object, a kind of self-reflexivity that is active and engaging. The interesting thing about this middle voice in Greek is that it occurs more commonly with so-called "primitive" verbs.17 The question arises, therefore, whether it reflects a different linguistic relationship between people at an earlier time. Does it suggest less separation? Does it suggest a more self-reflexive and interdependent way of looking at the world? Does it suggest a more engaged existence? One which engages interactively with the world?
The middle voice of lesbians - these are the metaxu - the ways in which we communicate that promote social connection, that create social glue. The connection renders the possibility of communication among those who are culturally invisible but wish for visibility among themselves (e.g. through the use of codes), that in turn creates another invisibility because only those inside the coded world will understand.18 Storytellers and writers attempting to depict marginal cultures face this paradox. A lesbian writer faces it when she wants to place her culture, her language, her code, her experience as an image of universality. Those inhabiting the dominant discourse can never really regard the work as universal, for the universal is only ever applied to the dominant. So the writer writing from an unrecognized particularity - whatever it is - must render that particularity in its fullness, create from it its own centre and, like pebbles in a pond, ripple out as far and as wide as possible. But in doing so she will be accused of didacticism and dogmatism - simply whispering the word lesbian can do this.
In order to change the culture, the way in which language is used must change. Could we, for instance, imagine a language in which interaction is not hierarchical? A language whose core purpose is interaction rather than dominance? A language which generates and builds but does not seek to destroy others? I am not suggesting a language which seeks conformity, indeed I am seeking to resist the imposed conformity of contemporary global languages. I'm thinking of the concepts suggested by Suzette Haden Elgin in her novel Native Tongue. An example she uses is "wohosheni: a word meaning the opposite of alienation; to feel joined to, part of someone or something without reservations or barriers" (Haden Elgin 2000: 304). Alienation is what many lesbians experience on a day-to-day basis and when we come together in groups we sometimes feel wohosheni.
Lesbians are not women, writes Monique Wittig in 1980,19 shocking her audience. What she means is that lesbians do not participate in the social economy of woman-being.20 One can go to the roots of language to expose this. Old English sing wifmon pl wifmen is wife + man, while in Chinese the word f ù used for woman or married women is made up of n ü (woman) and zhou (broom). This in turn is interpreted as woman being the helper of man. Most lesbians do not put themselves into this role in their lives and in their sexual and emotional relationships. That lesbians are not women is shocking for it means that lesbians fall outside the parameters of power that form the heterosexual view of the world, a view that not only endorses women's marginal status but also ensures that it remains that way.
Matrix 2. Relationship
Relationship is central to human society. It is as central as ecology is to the survival of the planet. Relationship is a kind of human ecology. It is based on a web of connections between people. Connections that are composed of care and responsibility, passion and love, playfulness and joy —also of betrayal and distrust, hatred and indifference, routine and despair.
The trick in any society is to maximize the first list and minimize the second. But whatever the outcome, a lack of connection, a lack of relationship is worse than a bad relationship.
I am not suggesting that all community is positive. I grew up in a rural area where everyone knew everyone else. There is great value in this and it replicates more closely how human communities have lived through thousands of generations. It creates networks of support. It creates a sense of continuity and history. It makes possible the development of what is called community spirit.
But it can also be stifling. It can be especially difficult for those who are different. To be an out lesbian or to speak out about epilepsy in such a community is difficult (unless the community itself is different and prides itself on the celebration of difference).
Relationship is affected by our surroundings and whether connectivity is enhanced or reduced by those surroundings. Love too is a bit like this. Love is about connection. Telling stories is an important part of falling in love. Language is an important vehicle for love. Any language. The language of music or touch is as important as the language of words. By means of language, meaning is transferred, is passed between people. Intellectual, cultural and emotional meaning.
Lesbians, radical feminist lesbians, are one of the few groups to claim that they choose their marginality. Gay men often claim genes. Those of us affected by disability21 or chronic illness claim genes, environment or accidental circumstances. Culture and the accident of birth are key to racial and class oppression. Fear and political repression cause flight from one's own homeland. The lesbian claims what Nicole Brossard has called the "force of attraction."22 This strange attraction is like a force of physics, it creates wild weathers and storms of chaos on the edge of the world--a phenomenon known as the butterfly effect, as I have written in my poem "Strange tractors":
It's an ancient method of
ploughing- more ancient even than
boustrophedon- two cattle retracing
their steps in parallel lines
No, here there's not a
straight line to be seen anywhere- chaos
in the shape of two vulval wings-
the butterfly effect23
Committing oneself to living out a passion for other women is a momentous decision. It involves imagination because few of us have models for such a life. Imagination drives that passion which can in turn become a passion for political community, for a creative existence, for a life marked by marginality. As Nicole Brossard writes in The Aerial Letter:
"One has the imagination of one's century, one's culture, one's generation, one's particular social class, one's decade, and the imagination of what one reads, but above all one has the imagination of one's body and of the sex who inhabits it."24
Neither tolerance nor acceptance involves a recognition of the richness of lesbian culture; neither includes the acknowledgement of passion, joy, defiance that is so much a part of so many lesbian lives.
It is like walking out on a tight wire over a yawning abyss and not being able to see the other side. Life as a lesbian can be dangerous.
As Nicole Brossard claims, "A lesbian who does not reinvent the world is a lesbian in the process of disappearing."25 Not only will she disappear, but the culture of lesbians disappears from time to time throughout history because of repression, fear, lack of opportunity. And as no group other than some lesbians seeks to claim it as their history, the stories that keep history alive disappear.26 It is as Jovette Marchessault suggests, the "Tomb of the Unknown Lesbian."27 But this is a tomb that is never celebrated. No one comes to stand in silence before it. It is not only the tomb of the unknown lesbian, it is a tomb with no place dedicated to it for burial.
The lesbian has no nationality. I do not mean she has no cultural background, no nation with which she feels some sympathy, perhaps even a kind of loyalty. But for the lesbian committed to lesbian culture, to living in and creating lesbian culture, nationalism is not an easy option. This also means that the lesbian is not easily settled. Indeed, she is more likely to unsettle those around her. Although she might find a place to be, a place she calls home, it might not be home to any other lesbian. Lesbian Nation is an imagined nowhere: atopia; it does not exist; "there is no there there," as Gertrude Stein so famously said.28 There is, therefore, no institutional form for lesbian patriotism;, indeed the word patriotism clangs with a loud dissonance when set beside the word lesbian. "Like oil and water / lesbianlife and patriotism don't mix."29
For the lesbian, in order for there to be relationship, she must find at least one other like her. In order for there to be lesbian community, she must find many others like her. Not all social conditions are suited to this. If they are not, then she must be able, at the very least, to imagine the possibility of other lesbians.
What must she imagine? That she herself can be loved. This is a difficult enough task for most people to proceed no further. But more. She must imagine that the love of her and her love of another can survive, or at least be worth the effort, in spite of all the sanctions against them. Sanctions which range from simple disapproval to torture and execution. 30 (Is it any accident that with the decreasing sanctions against lesbian existence, the numbers of lesbians in existence, and further, the number of lesbians prepared to publicly claim their lesbian identity [among others] has increased hugely in the last thirty years across the world? Nevertheless, the only country in the world to have constitutional legislation that protects lesbians just as it protects others [legally speaking] is South Africa.)
While the need for an imaginative leap is perhaps slightly reduced in some countries, this is hardly the case in a host of other countries where exile and death remain the penalties.31
The lesbian, in order to fully enter the world of lesbian existence, must imagine a world full of lesbian symbols, codes, words and depictions. I don't mean the world that exoticizes and eroticizes lesbians for men's erotic excitement. I mean a world where the lesbian is in the world and moving through and affecting the world. This is a dynamic view of lesbian history and culture. It includes Sappho, but does not start and stop with Sappho. It includes all the lesbians who have lived somehow in mostly adverse situations throughout history. Some of them we know about. Most we don't. It includes the lesbians whose names we don't yet know because they are developing and creating new events, new works of art, new politics to take out into the world.
The lesbian world, like the lacunae of Monique Wittig,32 is wide open, boundless and open-ended. We cannot see the other side and we can see only parts of what lie behind us. Sappho noticed this. As she writes in one of her fragments, "some day, in some future time, someone will remember me" (Sappho, Fragment 147).33 Inhabiting the lesbian world involves a huge task of synthesis, of weaving together the strands, of creating a matrix from the warp and weft of lesbian existence. It requires that we reinvent not only the world-- but ourselves and others with it. Or, as Monique Wittig writes, 'If ultimately we are denied a new social order, which therefore can exist only in words, I will find it in myself' (Wittig 1992: 45). We must make stories of our lives, invent and fabricate as all humans do. As I write in Cow——after providing an alternative to the story of Sappho leaping off a cliff for heartbreak over a man:
but these are fables
we all know
that such a story
cannot be true
is it any less believable
than tales of dragons
or wars
or magic
or love?
who says that we should be
the only people on earth
without stories?
Language makes us. But we too can remake language, and ourselves. If we listen, imagine, invent.
Let us experiment with some sentences.
I live in a lesbian world.
Lesbians are my universe.
All history is the history of lesbians.
Such statements have a certain ring and may be true for some lesbians in some times. But many readers will balk at these sentences in ways that they simply do not when men (usually white, heterosexual and of at least middling wealth; also usually physically mobile men) write and speak sentences in which men are the world, the universe and all of history. 1
Note that I stated that such utterances may be true for some lesbians. I take for granted that non-lesbians will have difficulty with these sentences. In this way I have already found one of the limits of the word lesbian. It is not considered to have universal appeal by both lesbians and non-lesbians.
The earliest known form of the word "lesbian" means simply resident of Lesbos. If you go to Lesbos today and think it has any special meaning the residents of Lesbos will deny it. They pronounce it, however, with the modern Demotic pronunciation lesvian.2 Of course, the most famous resident of Lesbos was Sappho or Psappha who lived there around 600 BCE, and words deriving from Psappha and from Lesbos constitute the major forms from which many European language words for "lesbian" derive. Most of these words began to enter European languages in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
We might ask ourselves what has the concept lesbian meant in different societies? Monster. Heretic. Witch. Mad. Abnormal. Unnatural. Criminal. Impossible. Ludicrous. Sometimes eccentric. Very occasionally, special. These have been the real meanings. And it is these meanings that have really defined the lives of lesbians. These meanings have made certain destinies more likely for lesbians.
The process of reinvention must be continuous. The threat of extinction is real. It occurs in sanctified and legitimated violence against lesbians. Meanwhile, the symbolic annihilation of lesbians goes on in everyday conversation as well as in the silences between.
As feminists, as lesbians, as people on the margins have always known, language is organic. It grows out of experience of the world.
Language sculpts memory. It creates markers like places on a map. It creates a geography of the mind and of one's own life. Like the ancients who created the art of memory - a series of rooms, a narrative architecture - language provides us with the possibility of storytelling. And even if we use the same words our words are frequently misunderstood or distorted because our semantic substratum is incomprehensible. An example I have used in my own work is the word "cow". In mainstream language it means the female of several large species: bovines, whales and elephants. Gertrude Stein used the word "cow" in Lifting Belly, and so I have taken this and used it as code for lesbian. Mary Daly's redefining of the word "hag" in Gyn/Ecology (1978) and later in the Wickedary (1987) means that it too can be used positively. There are constant redefinings going on in language, some are not what we would want, and George Orwell in his novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, created Newspeak, a language with an ever-diminishing vocabulary. 3
Storytelling through song or poetry is the oldest form of literature. From indigenous storytelling which reaches back tens of thousands of years - through to the Homeric Hymns of Greece, the Vedas and Puranasof India,4 the ancient literatures of China, Sumeria, the Maya and many more - rhythm, melody and language are overlaid to create art.5
If we want to change the social context, language is an important place to start. Part of this involves delving into the profundity of language, excavating the depths, interpreting the resonances of words and relationships across and through languages. A great deal of work has been done in this area. Feminists have done their fair share, sometimes humorously, sometimes in great seriousness.6
The codes of those people who have been considered outcasts also have much to teach us. Punishment for linguistic transgression is not unusual, but the need to communicate is intensified. The use of the word "lesbian," as noted at the beginning of this essay, incurs punishment.7 Words which in the dominant discourse have one meaning, carry different meanings in the marginal or forbidden discourse. A variety of words has been developed as code for lesbian, the latest of which is the arid, "same-sex attracted woman."8
Power is at the centre of marginal codes, but depending on circumstances these codes might never break through the barriers to become common parlance. Lesbian discourse is one of these. Has there ever been a society in which lesbian parlance has been the dominant code? We don't know. For when a lesbian achieves something good, she is unlikely to be recorded as a lesbian. Take the example of opera singer, Joan Hammond, well known to Australian audiences, hardly known even in the lesbian community for her sexuality. By contrast, Tracy Wiggington, also know as the lesbian vampire who murdered a man, is known almost solely for being a lesbian.9 For when a lesbian does something bad, only her lesbian identity is invoked. Mostly she is simply forgotten. Lesbians are ignored on family trees. The maiden aunt "without issue," I know this from my own family tree.10 This has important political implications for lesbian activists and theorists. For unlike teenagers, lesbian language is unlikely to become the dominant discourse, so the invention and re-invention must go on.
As Monique Wittig has argued, lesbians are not a part of the discourse of women, a discourse in which women are tied to men.11 But perhaps there is an earlier scenario.12 Perhaps there was a time when women did not rely on masculine discourse for their existence. Perhaps it was men who sought the company of women for their culture and their storytelling.
"There was a time when you were not a slave, remember that. You walked alone, full of laughter, you bathed bare bellied. You say you have lost all recollection of it, remember! You say there are not words to describe it; you say it does not exist. But remember! Make an effort to remember! or failing that, invent."13
All of this is speculation, but speculation and imagination are absolutely central to thought and the creation of knowledge. It is about the same level of speculation as suggesting human beings are not the only intelligent life form; or arguing for parallel universes (a multiverse); or positing a big bang as the origin of the universe.
There have been times in my life when words have escaped me. An epileptic seizure can take away the world, the words, one's sense of self. At these times, however, thought and knowledge of some kind persists. As I have searched for words with my tongue, for ways to shape and form the words, although they did not always come, I knew that they existed. I could see the world around me. I could take in the human presence. But I could not name it. Intelligence is not dependent on language. Observation and interpretation still go on. Muteness, wordlessness simply prevents me from sharing my world with another, prevents me from passing on my internal experience so that another person can understand it, albeit in an abridged form. 14
Dreams are what, in ancient Greek, are called the metaxu - μεταζν - a word that I keep returning to in my writing. The metaxu is the "in between." It is the space or the material between two people which creates the possibility of communication.15 It is the cytoplasm, the air, the water, the wall between two prisoners as Simone Weil suggests.16 It can have a material or immaterial form. For the reader of Braille it is the raised points on a page or on the door to a lift.
Story too is a kind of metaxu. It is told by the teller of the story and heard by the listener, but the story itself is what links the two people, and perhaps transforms them. The story is the thread that is spun out and grasped between the minds of the teller and the listeners. It becomes a shared experience. It is no accident that we refer to the weaving of story. With warp and weft come interlocking experiences, matrices of meaning.
The metaxu is conceived of as a point on a continuum, a bridge between things or people that are separated, or between irreconcilable qualities. The metaxuis the attempt to say something meaningful, to speak the unspeakable.
The metaxu is a concept linked to connectivity, to the feminist principle of inseparability, to the personal is political. The importance of this principle cannot be overstated; the metaxuis an integral part of both the instance of separation and of reconnection.
A language example of the metaxu also comes from ancient Greek. The Greek verb has not just two voices - one active and one passive - but also a third which is called the middle voice. The middle voice represents a way of speaking which allows integration between subject and object, a kind of self-reflexivity that is active and engaging. The interesting thing about this middle voice in Greek is that it occurs more commonly with so-called "primitive" verbs.17 The question arises, therefore, whether it reflects a different linguistic relationship between people at an earlier time. Does it suggest less separation? Does it suggest a more self-reflexive and interdependent way of looking at the world? Does it suggest a more engaged existence? One which engages interactively with the world?
The middle voice of lesbians - these are the metaxu - the ways in which we communicate that promote social connection, that create social glue. The connection renders the possibility of communication among those who are culturally invisible but wish for visibility among themselves (e.g. through the use of codes), that in turn creates another invisibility because only those inside the coded world will understand.18 Storytellers and writers attempting to depict marginal cultures face this paradox. A lesbian writer faces it when she wants to place her culture, her language, her code, her experience as an image of universality. Those inhabiting the dominant discourse can never really regard the work as universal, for the universal is only ever applied to the dominant. So the writer writing from an unrecognized particularity - whatever it is - must render that particularity in its fullness, create from it its own centre and, like pebbles in a pond, ripple out as far and as wide as possible. But in doing so she will be accused of didacticism and dogmatism - simply whispering the word lesbian can do this.
In order to change the culture, the way in which language is used must change. Could we, for instance, imagine a language in which interaction is not hierarchical? A language whose core purpose is interaction rather than dominance? A language which generates and builds but does not seek to destroy others? I am not suggesting a language which seeks conformity, indeed I am seeking to resist the imposed conformity of contemporary global languages. I'm thinking of the concepts suggested by Suzette Haden Elgin in her novel Native Tongue. An example she uses is "wohosheni: a word meaning the opposite of alienation; to feel joined to, part of someone or something without reservations or barriers" (Haden Elgin 2000: 304). Alienation is what many lesbians experience on a day-to-day basis and when we come together in groups we sometimes feel wohosheni.
Lesbians are not women, writes Monique Wittig in 1980,19 shocking her audience. What she means is that lesbians do not participate in the social economy of woman-being.20 One can go to the roots of language to expose this. Old English sing wifmon pl wifmen is wife + man, while in Chinese the word f ù used for woman or married women is made up of n ü (woman) and zhou (broom). This in turn is interpreted as woman being the helper of man. Most lesbians do not put themselves into this role in their lives and in their sexual and emotional relationships. That lesbians are not women is shocking for it means that lesbians fall outside the parameters of power that form the heterosexual view of the world, a view that not only endorses women's marginal status but also ensures that it remains that way.
Matrix 2. Relationship
Relationship is central to human society. It is as central as ecology is to the survival of the planet. Relationship is a kind of human ecology. It is based on a web of connections between people. Connections that are composed of care and responsibility, passion and love, playfulness and joy —also of betrayal and distrust, hatred and indifference, routine and despair.
The trick in any society is to maximize the first list and minimize the second. But whatever the outcome, a lack of connection, a lack of relationship is worse than a bad relationship.
I am not suggesting that all community is positive. I grew up in a rural area where everyone knew everyone else. There is great value in this and it replicates more closely how human communities have lived through thousands of generations. It creates networks of support. It creates a sense of continuity and history. It makes possible the development of what is called community spirit.
But it can also be stifling. It can be especially difficult for those who are different. To be an out lesbian or to speak out about epilepsy in such a community is difficult (unless the community itself is different and prides itself on the celebration of difference).
Relationship is affected by our surroundings and whether connectivity is enhanced or reduced by those surroundings. Love too is a bit like this. Love is about connection. Telling stories is an important part of falling in love. Language is an important vehicle for love. Any language. The language of music or touch is as important as the language of words. By means of language, meaning is transferred, is passed between people. Intellectual, cultural and emotional meaning.
Lesbians, radical feminist lesbians, are one of the few groups to claim that they choose their marginality. Gay men often claim genes. Those of us affected by disability21 or chronic illness claim genes, environment or accidental circumstances. Culture and the accident of birth are key to racial and class oppression. Fear and political repression cause flight from one's own homeland. The lesbian claims what Nicole Brossard has called the "force of attraction."22 This strange attraction is like a force of physics, it creates wild weathers and storms of chaos on the edge of the world--a phenomenon known as the butterfly effect, as I have written in my poem "Strange tractors":
It's an ancient method of
ploughing- more ancient even than
boustrophedon- two cattle retracing
their steps in parallel lines
No, here there's not a
straight line to be seen anywhere- chaos
in the shape of two vulval wings-
the butterfly effect23
Committing oneself to living out a passion for other women is a momentous decision. It involves imagination because few of us have models for such a life. Imagination drives that passion which can in turn become a passion for political community, for a creative existence, for a life marked by marginality. As Nicole Brossard writes in The Aerial Letter:
"One has the imagination of one's century, one's culture, one's generation, one's particular social class, one's decade, and the imagination of what one reads, but above all one has the imagination of one's body and of the sex who inhabits it."24
Neither tolerance nor acceptance involves a recognition of the richness of lesbian culture; neither includes the acknowledgement of passion, joy, defiance that is so much a part of so many lesbian lives.
It is like walking out on a tight wire over a yawning abyss and not being able to see the other side. Life as a lesbian can be dangerous.
As Nicole Brossard claims, "A lesbian who does not reinvent the world is a lesbian in the process of disappearing."25 Not only will she disappear, but the culture of lesbians disappears from time to time throughout history because of repression, fear, lack of opportunity. And as no group other than some lesbians seeks to claim it as their history, the stories that keep history alive disappear.26 It is as Jovette Marchessault suggests, the "Tomb of the Unknown Lesbian."27 But this is a tomb that is never celebrated. No one comes to stand in silence before it. It is not only the tomb of the unknown lesbian, it is a tomb with no place dedicated to it for burial.
The lesbian has no nationality. I do not mean she has no cultural background, no nation with which she feels some sympathy, perhaps even a kind of loyalty. But for the lesbian committed to lesbian culture, to living in and creating lesbian culture, nationalism is not an easy option. This also means that the lesbian is not easily settled. Indeed, she is more likely to unsettle those around her. Although she might find a place to be, a place she calls home, it might not be home to any other lesbian. Lesbian Nation is an imagined nowhere: atopia; it does not exist; "there is no there there," as Gertrude Stein so famously said.28 There is, therefore, no institutional form for lesbian patriotism;, indeed the word patriotism clangs with a loud dissonance when set beside the word lesbian. "Like oil and water / lesbianlife and patriotism don't mix."29
For the lesbian, in order for there to be relationship, she must find at least one other like her. In order for there to be lesbian community, she must find many others like her. Not all social conditions are suited to this. If they are not, then she must be able, at the very least, to imagine the possibility of other lesbians.
What must she imagine? That she herself can be loved. This is a difficult enough task for most people to proceed no further. But more. She must imagine that the love of her and her love of another can survive, or at least be worth the effort, in spite of all the sanctions against them. Sanctions which range from simple disapproval to torture and execution. 30 (Is it any accident that with the decreasing sanctions against lesbian existence, the numbers of lesbians in existence, and further, the number of lesbians prepared to publicly claim their lesbian identity [among others] has increased hugely in the last thirty years across the world? Nevertheless, the only country in the world to have constitutional legislation that protects lesbians just as it protects others [legally speaking] is South Africa.)
While the need for an imaginative leap is perhaps slightly reduced in some countries, this is hardly the case in a host of other countries where exile and death remain the penalties.31
The lesbian, in order to fully enter the world of lesbian existence, must imagine a world full of lesbian symbols, codes, words and depictions. I don't mean the world that exoticizes and eroticizes lesbians for men's erotic excitement. I mean a world where the lesbian is in the world and moving through and affecting the world. This is a dynamic view of lesbian history and culture. It includes Sappho, but does not start and stop with Sappho. It includes all the lesbians who have lived somehow in mostly adverse situations throughout history. Some of them we know about. Most we don't. It includes the lesbians whose names we don't yet know because they are developing and creating new events, new works of art, new politics to take out into the world.
The lesbian world, like the lacunae of Monique Wittig,32 is wide open, boundless and open-ended. We cannot see the other side and we can see only parts of what lie behind us. Sappho noticed this. As she writes in one of her fragments, "some day, in some future time, someone will remember me" (Sappho, Fragment 147).33 Inhabiting the lesbian world involves a huge task of synthesis, of weaving together the strands, of creating a matrix from the warp and weft of lesbian existence. It requires that we reinvent not only the world-- but ourselves and others with it. Or, as Monique Wittig writes, 'If ultimately we are denied a new social order, which therefore can exist only in words, I will find it in myself' (Wittig 1992: 45). We must make stories of our lives, invent and fabricate as all humans do. As I write in Cow——after providing an alternative to the story of Sappho leaping off a cliff for heartbreak over a man:
but these are fables
we all know
that such a story
cannot be true
is it any less believable
than tales of dragons
or wars
or magic
or love?
who says that we should be
the only people on earth
without stories?
Working Notes
I began this essay in January 2003, just after I heard that Monique Wittig had died. There were no obituaries in Australia, but when a week later Maurice Gibb of the Bee Gees died, the news media was filled with stories about him. I wrote the first draft with frenetic speed and have returned to the essay from time to time to add, to revise, to refine my thoughts. I have seen the lack of obituaries for lesbians and feminists again and again - the women who have contributed so much to changing the world since the 1960s - and of course so many before them.
While working on reforming this piece I have been re-inventing myself as a Digital Descartes: I Facebook therefore I Twitter. In doing this, I hope that I can expand my links with lesbians and with non-lesbians, challenging all to begin thinking from different centres. That's what invention is. It's putting your imagination to work, extending yourself, taking yourself into discomfort zones and walking back again with different eyes, different priorities. The moments in my life that have been most rewarding have been those where I have had to step sideways from my assumptions and see the world in a new way. Feminism opened my eyes in my early 20s and I have never recovered! Traditional Aboriginal women in Australia also moved me in my 30s to think and see the world differently. Farida Akhter from Bangladesh turned my head around in my 40s. In 2002, a Ugandan lesbian opened my eyes to her world. Like a warp across the weft of these experiences have come the works of lesbians from many countries, each of whom has expanded my multiverse beyond my wildest imaginings.
While working on reforming this piece I have been re-inventing myself as a Digital Descartes: I Facebook therefore I Twitter. In doing this, I hope that I can expand my links with lesbians and with non-lesbians, challenging all to begin thinking from different centres. That's what invention is. It's putting your imagination to work, extending yourself, taking yourself into discomfort zones and walking back again with different eyes, different priorities. The moments in my life that have been most rewarding have been those where I have had to step sideways from my assumptions and see the world in a new way. Feminism opened my eyes in my early 20s and I have never recovered! Traditional Aboriginal women in Australia also moved me in my 30s to think and see the world differently. Farida Akhter from Bangladesh turned my head around in my 40s. In 2002, a Ugandan lesbian opened my eyes to her world. Like a warp across the weft of these experiences have come the works of lesbians from many countries, each of whom has expanded my multiverse beyond my wildest imaginings.
Notes
- E.g. Fukuyama (1992: xi): liberal democracy may constitute the "end point of mankind's ideological evolution."
- Indeed the inhabitants of Lesbos felt so slighted by the use of the term lesbian in relation to sexual attraction that they went to court to try and get an injunction against this use. The court case failed, but is now up for appeal. "Lesbos islanders dispute gay name" Malcolm Brabant <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7376919.st>.
- I have written about my use of "cow" in Hawthorne (2009: 8-17); Daly. 1978: 15; Daly and Caputi. 1987: 137; Orwell (1949).
- Giti Thadani (1996) and (2004) challenges the historic tradition on India with her translations of the Puranas from Sanskrit as well as her insights into the archaeological record of India.
- I am not arguing for the view that there was once a time when life was perfect for lesbians, a pre-Edenic paradise; or one in which lesbians understood and recognized one another in a pre-Babel universe of mutual understanding. Such theories are deeply conservative and ignore the dynamic and changing nature of society, culture and language. For an allegorical reading of such stories see Suniti Namjoshi'sBuilding Babel (1996).
- Suzette Hadin Elgin in her speculative novel, Native Tongue, invents a language that allows the characters to use concepts outside our standard English practice.
- For more on this see Hawthorne (2007: 125-138).
- See Hawthorne (2003: 235-247).
- I make multiple references to such examples in my long poem, "Unstopped Mouths." See Hawthorne (2005 p. 12, note 13 and p. 12 note 8). These examples are local to Australia. There are many such examples in every nation. The heterosexualisation of the Sappho story is another such example of the minimizing of lesbian achievement.
- As Judy Grahn notes by citing Sappho, "As the sweet apple reddens on the bough-top, on the top of the topmost bough; the apple gatherers have forgotten it - no they have not forgotten it entirely, but they could not reach it." Grahn (1985, p. 131).
- See Wittig (1981/1992: 20).
- While the discourse of women and the discourse of lesbians are not the same - in the sense in which Wittig argues - nevertheless women and lesbians share a great deal in the real world and overlapping systems of discrimination persist, just as they do between women, lesbians and the host of other groups represented by the diversity matrix. For a longer discussion of the diversity matrix see Hawthorne (2002) and Hawthorne (2009).
- Wittig (1972: 95).
- For more of my writings about epilepsy see my poetry collection Bird (1999), my novel The Falling Woman (1992/2003) and two theoretical pieces my essay, "From a Politics of Indifference to a Wild Politics" (1996) and my essay in Trivia on "The Lesbian Aerial Body" (2006). http://www.triviavoices.net/archives/issue6/hawthorne.html.
- For a much longer discussion of the metaxu in Greek, see Hawthorne (1993).
- Weil (1970: 145-147).
- The subject and the self are represented by the middle eg διδακσπ means I teach whereas the middle εδιδξαμην means I learn (Goodwin 1977: 267).
- Judy Grahn's Another Mother Tongue (1984) is a compendious source of codes; also see Hawthorne (2005).
- Wittig, (1992: 32). This essay was first published in 1980 and included in her 1992 collection, The Straight Mind.
- When I use the word lesbian, I mean it to encompass the whole life of the lesbian: her emotional, intellectual, creative, spiritual, moral, political and social being. The lesbian of whom I am thinking is someone who is inspired by other lesbians and who works, when possible, for the well-being of lesbians as a group. For the lesbian with radical politics this is not a particularly difficult task. It does not require her to abandon all other relationships, nor to ditch emotionally sustaining relationships with friends and family who are not lesbians. It does, however, involve examining those relationships and looking to see whether they support or challenge the heterosexual political economy. It does mean taking one's responsibility as a lesbian in a lesbian world seriously. It is not possible to cover the history of the world in one essay. But it should be clear from this essay and by extension from the literature to which I refer that lesbians are not solely a modern or European-only reality.
- There are exceptions in the deaf community and among some disability groups.
- Brossard (1988: 122).
- From Hawthorne (2005: 3).
- Brossard (1988: 82).
- Brossard (1988: 122).
- There "nameless. Most lesbians' lives remain undocumented in the sense that either their names are known to us but their sexuality remains hidden or their sexuality is known to us but their names remain hidden." Hawthorne (2005: 12).
- There Marchessault (1985: 35). In Australia, the most significant military holiday is ANZAC Day at which time in cities and towns around the country people pay their respects to the unknown soldier who has been killed in war. For many years feminists have protested that women killed in wars are not mourned. Jovette Marchessault's phrase, therefore, spoke loudly to me.
- There Stein, Gertrude. 1937. Everybody's Autobiography. Cited in Judy Grahn. 1989. Really Reading Gertrude Stein. Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press. p. 7.
- There From 'Oil and Water' in Hawthorne (2005: p 221).
- There For more on hate crimes perpetrated against lesbians, see Hawthorne (2006).
- There The case for the recognition of lesbian human rights is argued in Hawthorne (2008).
- Wittig (1973: 3; 51 and 105). See also Hawthorne (2005: 106, Note 2).
- Translation by Susan Hawthorne.
References
- Brossard, Nicole. 1988. The Aerial Letter. Toronto: Women's Press.
- Daly, Mary. 1978. Gyn/Ecology: The metaethics of radical feminism. Boston: Beacon Press.
- Mary Daly in cahoots with Jane Caputi. 1987. Webster's First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language. Boston: Beacon Press.
- Elgin, Suzette Hadin. 2000. Native Tongue. New York: The Feminist Press; Melbourne: Spinifex Press.
- Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and The Last Man. London: Penguin Books.
- Goodwin, William W. 1977. A Greek Grammar. London: Macmillan Education.
- Grahn, Judy. 1984. Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds. Boston: Beacon Press.
- Hawthorne, Susan. 1992. The Falling Woman. Spinifex Press, Melbourne.
- -. 1993. Diotima Speaks through the Body. In Engendering Origins: Critical Feminist Essays in Plato and Aristotle, Bat-Ami Bar On (ed), State University of New York Press, Albany.
- -. 1996. "From Theories of Indifference to a Wild Politics." In Diane Bell and Renate Klein (eds.) Radically Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed. Spinifex Press, Melbourne. pp. 483-501.
- -. 1999. Bird and other writings on epilepsy. Spinifex Press, Melbourne.
- -. 2002. Wild Politics: Feminism, Globalisation and Bio/diversity. Spinifex Press, Melbourne.
- -. 2003. "The Depoliticising of Lesbian Culture." Hecate, Vol. 29, No. 2: 235-247.
- -. 2005. The Butterfly Effect. Melbourne: Spinifex Press.
- -. 2006. Ancient Hatred and Its Contemporary Manifestations: The Torture of Lesbians. The Journal of Hate Studies. Vol. 4. 33-58. Online athttp://guweb2.gonzaga.edu/againsthate/Journal4/04AncientHatred.pdf
- -. 2007a. The Aerial Lesbian Bodies: The Politics of Physical Expression. Trivia: Voices of Feminism. Vol. 6. http://www.triviavoices.net/archives/issue6/index.html
- -. 2007b. The Silences Between: Are Lesbians Irrelevant? Journal of International Women's Studies. Women's Bodies, Gender Analysis, and Feminist Politics at the Fórum Social Mundial. Vol 8. No 3 April, pp. 125-138. Online at <http://www.bridgew.edu/SoAS/jiws/April07/Hawthorne1.pdf>
- -. 2008. Do Lesbians have Human Rights? Sinister Wisdom Winter 2008-09, Number 75. pp. 65-81.
- -. 2009a. 'The Diversity Matrix: Relationship and Complexity'. In Ariel Sallah (ed.). 2009. Eco-sufficiency and Global Justice: Women write political ecology. Melbourne: Spinifex Press; London: Pluto Press.
- -. 2009b. "Learning Sanskrit and writing lesbian poetry." Sinister Wisdom, Spring. Number 76.
- Marchessault, Jovette. 1985. Lesbian Triptych. Toronto: Women's Press.
- Namjoshi, Suniti. 1996. Building Babel. Melbourne: Spinifex Press.
- Orwell, George. 1949. Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Secker and Warburg.
- Sappho. Fragment 147. Translation, Susan Hawthorne.
- Thadani, Giti. 1996. Sakhiyani: Lesbian Desire in Ancient and Modern India.London: Cassell.
- Thadani, Giti. 2004. Moebius Trip: Digressions from India's Highways. Melbourne: Spinifex Press.
- Weil, Simone. 1970. Gravity and Grace. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 145-147.
- Wittig, Monique. 1972. The Guérillères. London: Picador.
- Wittig, Monique. 1992. 'The Straight Mind' (1980). In The Straight Mind and Other Essays. Boston: Beacon Press.
- Wittig, Monique. 1992. 'One is Not Born a Woman' (1981) in The Straight Mind and Other Essays. Boston: Beacon Press.
About the author
Susan Hawthorne is a poet and a publisher. She has been active in the radical lesbian feminist movement since 1974. She is the author of five collections of poetry including The Butterfly Effect (2005),Unsettling the Land (with Suzanne Bellamy, 2008) and Earth's Breath (2009). She is currently working on a new collection of poems, Cow, which explores the real and invented histories of lesbians and cows. In her free time she is studying Sanskrit and repolishing her Ancient Greek language skills. She has a poetry blog: http://susanscowblog.blogspot.com/ a political blog: http://www.susanspoliticalblog.blogspot.com/or visit: http://www.spinifexpress.com.au/.
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.