Trojan Horses in the Desert
Julia Balén
Any work with a new form operates like a war machine, because its design and its goal is to pulverize the old forms and formal conventions. It is always produced in hostile territory. And the stranger it appears, nonconforming, unassimilable, the longer it will take for the Trojan Horse to be accepted. Eventually it is adopted, and, even if slowly, it will eventually work like a mine. It will sap and blast out the ground where it was planted. (“The Trojan Horse” in The Straight Mind, 69)
Brilliant deep pink almost purple flowers crowned the small eagle claw cactus growing out of the solid rock wall of a small canyon where we walked. Monique Wittig’s fingers stroked the waxy petals extending from the nest of thorns—admiring the way the plant was working an imperceptible fissure in the rock to make its home. Our walks were full of such detailed explorations and Wittig’s were very particular eyes through which to explore landscapes of all sorts—material and imagined. We explored a great variety in our time together.
THE CANYON THE RED ROCK THE EAGLE CLAW CACTUS THE RADIAL SPINES THE AXILS THE TUBERCULES THE CREVICES THE FLOWERS THE PERICARP THE PISTIL THE STILE THE STAMEN THE STIGMA THE PETALS THE OVARY THE ANTHER THE PEBBLES THE FILAMENT THE CENTRAL SPINES THE FAULTS
A near-native of Tucson, I spent a great deal of my youth in the surrounding mountains and canyons. I have hiked almost every canyon and stood atop many of the mountain peaks in the area at one time or another: gotten lost and found my way again; shimmied up, around, and over any number of rock faces; spent many nights sleeping under a sky so starry that astronomers (including those from the Vatican) fight for the rights to mountaintops in the area; eyed bears, big horn sheep, and mountain lions; played with tarantulas; caught snakes, and even had a pet coral snake for a short while. These are environs whose beauty and dangers mark my flesh and shape my sensibilities.
Catherine Legrand can’t write. One presses on the paper with the black pencil. One makes letters that stick out on both sides beyond the two lines one is supposed to write inside of, they stick out and above and below, they touch the other lines, they are not straight. (adapted translation of The Opoponax 24)
Higher education requires a different order of climbing skills for which I was not well prepared. As an honors student in high school I had been encouraged to apply to universities broadly and was accepted into, among others, Stanford with scholarships, though not enough to pay the full costs. With no one to help me imagine how to dare make such an economic leap of faith, I did what most working-class kids with such opportunities do—I took the scholarships that my home university offered thereby breaking one of the first rules about climbing in academic environs—elitism matters. After two years of holding down two part-time minimum wage jobs alongside a fulltime academic schedule in an environment that increasingly left me disillusioned for reasons I was not yet able to fully articulate, I dropped out. It would be six years before I returned with enough social analysis from much self-educating and the activist work under my belt to deal with the middle class assumptions of the institution, though it would be years before I grasped their depth or the degree to which my own working class social training left me ill-prepared to navigate this terrain.
By the early 1990s I was a “non-traditional” graduate student who had finally accepted the possibility that I might become a professor some day—certainly not a place I had ever imagined myself. Once again, I applied to graduate school because several of my professors urged me to do so, and though they certainly encouraged me to apply broadly, as a working-class lesbian mother without a clear sense of a future as an academic or what applying elsewhere might mean for that future, I applied only at my home institution thinking that I could at least bring in money as a TA—doing work I enjoyed immensely—if I didn’t find a “real” job. Throughout my graduate degree programs, I spent every summer except the last two looking for that “real” job but could never find one for which I could imagine developing a passion comparable to that I found myself developing around what has since become my work—scholarship and teaching.
Now, after years of teaching and advising underrepresented students, I recognize what a challenge I must have posed for my faculty advisors. Those who chose to mentor me had their hands full as I both needed and resisted mentoring—believing that I should not need it, feeling shame that I did. A number of intrepid professors over time stepped up to the challenge. I have no doubt there were times each of them wondered exactly what they had gotten themselves into. I remain eternally grateful for their patience and wisdom. What became clear over time was the degree to which all of them were finding their own place as they were also attempting to guide those coming up behind them.
SUSAN AIKEN INGEBORG KOHN ANNETTE KOLODNY MONIQUE WITTIG
Annette Kolodny, who had been hired as the first woman Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, took me on as her Research Assistant in part to get me away from a difficult RA situation. I had learned to deal with the outright sexism of the men alongside whom I had worked on construction sites, but was still learning to read the less obvious but career-wise more dangerous middle-class versions. The training I received as Kolodny’s RA researching the current status of women for the Arizona Board of Regents’ Commission on the Status of Women was sobering to say the least, but prepared me for my future in ways few other exercises could have. For one who had little training in the arcane power structures of academe, this served as a primer in the power dynamics and negotiations as well as the profound classism, hetero/sexism, racism, etc. of academe.
It was in my role as Kolodny’s RA that I was assigned to assist Monique Wittig in settling in to the Tucson environs. Having held a number of positions across the country at institutions including Duke and Berkeley, Wittig had lived in a great variety of landscapes including the French countryside and Paris, lush southern hills and the brutal cold of Buffalo, Pacific redwood country and San Francisco before settling into Tucson and the University of Arizona’s French Department, though, as I came to understand more deeply, none were as fantastic as the landscapes of Wittig’s unrivaled imagination.
They say that at the point they have reached they must examine the principle that has guided them. They say it is not for them to exhaust their strength in symbols. They say henceforward what they are is not subject to compromise. They say they must now stop exulting the vulva. They say that they must break the last bond that binds them to a dead culture. They say that any symbol that exalts the fragmented body is transient, must disappear. Thus it was formerly. The integrity of their body their first principle, they advanced marching together into another world. (adapted translation of Les Guérillères 72)
I was already familiar with Wittig’s writing. By the time we met I was working on my dissertation, which among other things, looks at The Lesbian Body as an example of how we might reimagine embodied subjectivity. Having discovered a privileging of the heteronormative male child’s point of view in a preponderance of cultural theories influenced by Freud that were commonly required readings for U.S. graduate students at the time, I found Wittig’s work a powerful antidote to such hetero-family-based narratives. It universalizes a materialist lesbian point of view that creatively engages the challenges, paradoxes, and limitations inherent in envisioning the world differently and acting to bring that vision into being. Unlike so many at the time who in varying ways valorized or essentialized difference, Wittig’s work insists on fighting for a class marked “women” while simultaneously working to destroy the category itself. Wittig’s corpus lays bare the nature of categorizing as a process of all forms of oppression in language and literature as well as discourses of politics, economics, history, etc. by both arguing for and enacting a stripping down and reforming of the material of language to make new forms, new ways of being legible.
It is the attempted universalization of the [minoritized] point of view that turns or does not turn a literary work into a war machine. (The Straight Mind 76)
Perhaps Wittig’s most powerful Trojan Horse salvo is the oft-cited claim that “lesbians are not women.” To understand such a claim—radical even by today’s standards—one has to completely let go of the categories as they are commonly understood. Doing so dislodges “lesbian” and “women” as they are commonly used in heteronormative systems of thought—women as a naturalized category and lesbian as a sexualized category—to introduce a materialist lesbian perspective. Such a re-visioning enables us to see that “woman” has political, social, and economic meaning only in relationship to “man” and that naturalizing these categories institutionalizes the power of one category over the other to produce “the straight mind.” Wittig’s claim works to annul binary gender categorizing and make way for new, more equitable possibilities for being for everyone by exposing the constructedness of gender categories. Despite mis-readings and misappropriations by many theorists, this claim is slowly becoming less odd, more easily comprehensible as gendering possibilities proliferate in common practice.
([Manastabal:] Using your language one might say [we came here] through compassion. But as you know, that’s a word which has lost all its meaning. You must see for yourself how it is.) (Across the Acheron 19)
In my assignment as local guide, I gladly made myself available to help where and when I could, not wanting to impose, but leaving as much space as I could for supporting this transition. Wittig graciously accepted, inviting me to inspect the casita that became home. We considered desert garden possibilities and discussed best places to find all manner of things for this new space. My “assignment” quickly blossomed into a rich friendship built on long desert walks and many dinners—sometimes out at restaurants, sometimes deliciously simple fare that we prepared together. Slices of ripe tomatoes and creamy mozzarella drizzled with basil and olive oil and accompanied by slices of baguette was a favorite after our walks.
THE SUN THE HEAT THE LIGHT THE SHADE THE SUNSET THE COLORS THE DESSICATIONS THE REFLECTIONS THE CHAPPED SKIN THE MONSOONS THE FLASH FLOODS THE WIND THE DUST DEVILS THE TUMBLEWEED THE SAGUARO RIBS THE CHOLLA SKELETONS THE SUNBLEACHED BONES
Tucson’s landscape is a study in contrasts: mountains and valleys, extremes of temperatures (as much as 50˚ difference in a day), sculptural forms against a brilliant sky, its seasons of light and shadows. We explored every kind of rock, bird, critter, and plant we encountered with the kind of detailed exploration that The Lesbian Body performs. Out on our walks, Wittig sorely tested my memory from years of hiking, camping, local botany, herpetology, and geology lessons, tapping me for every tidbit I had to share, often inspiring me to research what I did not yet know. When I explained how the accordion shaping of the saguaro cactus enables it to expand to store water, Wittig dodged thorns to feel the thick waxy outer layer that so many desert plants use to conserve every drop they gather. When one day Wittig experienced how the jumping cactus got its name, I pulled out my comb to dislodge the piece from the offended cuff. We both carried our own combs from then on. We held court with birds in English and French—a “rou-rou” to my “coooo” sung to the Mourning Doves. Our laughter at the world and ourselves bounced off many canyon walls.
THE SANTA CATALINA MOUNTAINS THE SANTA RITA MOUNTAINS THE TUCSON MOUNTAINS THE RINCON MOUNTAINS THE ALLUVIAL FANS THE ARROYOS THE BASINS THE VALLEYS THE CANYONS THE METAMORPHIC ROCK THE IGNEOUS ROCK THE SEDIMENTARY ROCK THE CALICHE
Wittig’s first home in Tucson was one of several ranch-style, red-brick casitas that were probably built in the 1960s for snowbirds. It perched on an embankment over an arroyo at the base of the foothills area. From the back patio it was possible to enjoy both privacy and the city lights, which in the desert twinkle all the more brilliantly due to the dry air. Wittig enticed birds and eventually other animals to the yard, which was generously stocked with a large block of compressed birdseed and water. One of our favorite birds never came to the block, but it often greeted us on our walks—a silky-flycatcher known as the Phainopepla. A shiny black cardinal-shaped bird with a crest and long tail, it produces a complicated array of warbles, wurps, and wheedles all expressed in disjointed phrases that sound almost conversational and to which Wittig often took the opportunity to respond in kind. We enjoyed engaging the noisily territorial cactus wrens in conversation as well. Wittig quickly learned the names and habits of every critter in the area, developing a personal relationship with each individual—including the many javelina (a Sonoran wild pig) enticed to the yard with all manner of leftovers. Javelina, who have no problem chowing down on everything from cactus—thorns and all—to jack-o-lanterns with burning candles, are known for being on the nasty side. Wittig invited them as guests, feeding them despite warnings of the dangers. Fear didn’t curtail such actions. Tell Wittig one shouldn’t or couldn’t do something and, as with me, such edicts were likely to inspire trying.
THE JAVELINA THE CREOSOTE THE PHAINOPEPLA THE SAGAURO THE CACTUS WREN THE GECKO THE PYGMY OWL THE PRAIRIE DOG THE BARREL THE CHOLLA THE COYOTE THE PRICKLY PEAR THE BOBCAT THE JACK RABBIT THE BATS THE HORNED TOAD THE CORAL SNAKE THE SONORAN TOAD THE GILA MONSTER
While the desert definitely has its dangers, the challenges that university politics pose are mostly of human relations in a context of negotiations for power and resources—dynamics that we both were invested in seeing change and that we both worked in ways we were best able to make more equitable for our students, our colleagues, and each other. We regularly spent time in my office when Wittig came in for meetings or to teach classes and examined the university together, its perverse churning out of inequities and our roles in that system with the same sort of deep curiosity though certainly with less relish than that with which we explored our desert home. We strategized about how best to interrupt the dynamics similar to those Wittig so darkly portrays in the parables about power struggles that make up Paris la politique—myopia, pettiness, self-serving two-facedness, and selling out, to name a few—that undermine the best efforts of activists for social justice everywhere, the internalized workings of oppressive regimes, as we faced them in our work and political lives. We considered how best to denaturalize material economies of all kinds that oppress. We discussed at length how to do a better job of reaching and supporting students, of challenging colleagues to more fully engage the values espoused, and to wrest power out of the hands that would, as Audre Lorde so eloquently claimed, “[grind] all of our futures into dust” (139). We fought for each other in the ways we were both able.
There is not one who is unaware of what takes place here, which has no name as yet, let them seek it if they are determined to do so . . . (The Lesbian Body 15).
During the twelve years Wittig called Tucson home, we passionately discussed everything: the environment, the heat, local flora and fauna, food, health, world affairs, university politics, feminism, lesbianism, theories of all sorts, languages, literature, love, and death. Early in our friendship Wittig listened compassionately as my relationship at the time slowly came to an end, wondering gently if I had not grown “too butch” for my partner while encouraging me to explore a greater independence. We argued perhaps most pointedly over whether it was possible for motherhood to be radical. As one who did motherhood differently in many ways, especially for the 70s—unmarried, queerly lesbian, independently—I still believe that raising progressive children is important work, but Wittig’s horror at my descriptions of pleasure in being pregnant and nursing was palpable. While Wittig very much liked my son—saw hope in gentle young men like him who proudly wore to threads his DYKE GENES t-shirt (in fact, called him lesbian)—we agreed to disagree about whether motherhood was inevitably oppressive.
At no time in our twelve years of friendship did I find Wittig to be anything other than fully intentional in thoughts and actions with a mind like few others—both highly critical and more compassionate than any other I have known. Even when thinking most abstractly Wittig would never lose sight of the material realities, gently pulling an interlocutor back from the seductions of the abstract so prevalent in the world of theory. Categorically refusing categories except as self-defined strategic locations—including lesbian—Wittig refused to accept the rules by which others play the games that keep us oppressed. Like the desert, Wittig was and remains in writing a study in contrasts—capacious enough of heart and mind to hold paradox. Wittig’s Trojan Horse strategy is a practice of mind and heart as well as language that works like the brilliant waxy flower crowning a thorny plant whose roots are capable of cracking a rock wall.
THE IGNEOUS ROCK THE FACIES THE LIMESTONE THE COPPER THE QUARTZITE THE CALICHE THE GNEISS THE SLATE THE OBSIDIAN THE SCHIST THE GARNET THE OLIVINE THE AMPHIBOLE THE PYROXENE THE MICA THE FELDSPAR THE CALCITE THE FOSSILS THE SAND THE SHALE THE OPOPONAX
NOTE: While I have made use of the current English translations, I have adapted them where appropriate to address the issues with translation that Wittig articulates in “The Mark of Gender.” For The Opoponax the pronoun “she” has been replaced with “one” to match the “on” of the original. For Les Guérillères the phrase “the women” has been changed to “they” or “their” which, though still inadequate to creating the effect “elles” does in the French, is more in keeping with the spirit of universalizing the lesbian point of view than “the women” does.
Sources
Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider. Berkeley: Crossing Press, 1984, 2007. Print.
Wittig, Monique. Across the Acheron. London: Peter Owen, 1987. Print.
---. Les Guérillères. Boston: Beacon Press, 1985. Print.
---. The Lesbian Body. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986. Print.
---. The Opoponax, Plainfield Vermont: Daughter’s Inc., 1976. Print.
---. The Straight Mind and Other Essays. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992. Print.
Any work with a new form operates like a war machine, because its design and its goal is to pulverize the old forms and formal conventions. It is always produced in hostile territory. And the stranger it appears, nonconforming, unassimilable, the longer it will take for the Trojan Horse to be accepted. Eventually it is adopted, and, even if slowly, it will eventually work like a mine. It will sap and blast out the ground where it was planted. (“The Trojan Horse” in The Straight Mind, 69)
Brilliant deep pink almost purple flowers crowned the small eagle claw cactus growing out of the solid rock wall of a small canyon where we walked. Monique Wittig’s fingers stroked the waxy petals extending from the nest of thorns—admiring the way the plant was working an imperceptible fissure in the rock to make its home. Our walks were full of such detailed explorations and Wittig’s were very particular eyes through which to explore landscapes of all sorts—material and imagined. We explored a great variety in our time together.
THE CANYON THE RED ROCK THE EAGLE CLAW CACTUS THE RADIAL SPINES THE AXILS THE TUBERCULES THE CREVICES THE FLOWERS THE PERICARP THE PISTIL THE STILE THE STAMEN THE STIGMA THE PETALS THE OVARY THE ANTHER THE PEBBLES THE FILAMENT THE CENTRAL SPINES THE FAULTS
A near-native of Tucson, I spent a great deal of my youth in the surrounding mountains and canyons. I have hiked almost every canyon and stood atop many of the mountain peaks in the area at one time or another: gotten lost and found my way again; shimmied up, around, and over any number of rock faces; spent many nights sleeping under a sky so starry that astronomers (including those from the Vatican) fight for the rights to mountaintops in the area; eyed bears, big horn sheep, and mountain lions; played with tarantulas; caught snakes, and even had a pet coral snake for a short while. These are environs whose beauty and dangers mark my flesh and shape my sensibilities.
Catherine Legrand can’t write. One presses on the paper with the black pencil. One makes letters that stick out on both sides beyond the two lines one is supposed to write inside of, they stick out and above and below, they touch the other lines, they are not straight. (adapted translation of The Opoponax 24)
Higher education requires a different order of climbing skills for which I was not well prepared. As an honors student in high school I had been encouraged to apply to universities broadly and was accepted into, among others, Stanford with scholarships, though not enough to pay the full costs. With no one to help me imagine how to dare make such an economic leap of faith, I did what most working-class kids with such opportunities do—I took the scholarships that my home university offered thereby breaking one of the first rules about climbing in academic environs—elitism matters. After two years of holding down two part-time minimum wage jobs alongside a fulltime academic schedule in an environment that increasingly left me disillusioned for reasons I was not yet able to fully articulate, I dropped out. It would be six years before I returned with enough social analysis from much self-educating and the activist work under my belt to deal with the middle class assumptions of the institution, though it would be years before I grasped their depth or the degree to which my own working class social training left me ill-prepared to navigate this terrain.
By the early 1990s I was a “non-traditional” graduate student who had finally accepted the possibility that I might become a professor some day—certainly not a place I had ever imagined myself. Once again, I applied to graduate school because several of my professors urged me to do so, and though they certainly encouraged me to apply broadly, as a working-class lesbian mother without a clear sense of a future as an academic or what applying elsewhere might mean for that future, I applied only at my home institution thinking that I could at least bring in money as a TA—doing work I enjoyed immensely—if I didn’t find a “real” job. Throughout my graduate degree programs, I spent every summer except the last two looking for that “real” job but could never find one for which I could imagine developing a passion comparable to that I found myself developing around what has since become my work—scholarship and teaching.
Now, after years of teaching and advising underrepresented students, I recognize what a challenge I must have posed for my faculty advisors. Those who chose to mentor me had their hands full as I both needed and resisted mentoring—believing that I should not need it, feeling shame that I did. A number of intrepid professors over time stepped up to the challenge. I have no doubt there were times each of them wondered exactly what they had gotten themselves into. I remain eternally grateful for their patience and wisdom. What became clear over time was the degree to which all of them were finding their own place as they were also attempting to guide those coming up behind them.
SUSAN AIKEN INGEBORG KOHN ANNETTE KOLODNY MONIQUE WITTIG
Annette Kolodny, who had been hired as the first woman Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, took me on as her Research Assistant in part to get me away from a difficult RA situation. I had learned to deal with the outright sexism of the men alongside whom I had worked on construction sites, but was still learning to read the less obvious but career-wise more dangerous middle-class versions. The training I received as Kolodny’s RA researching the current status of women for the Arizona Board of Regents’ Commission on the Status of Women was sobering to say the least, but prepared me for my future in ways few other exercises could have. For one who had little training in the arcane power structures of academe, this served as a primer in the power dynamics and negotiations as well as the profound classism, hetero/sexism, racism, etc. of academe.
It was in my role as Kolodny’s RA that I was assigned to assist Monique Wittig in settling in to the Tucson environs. Having held a number of positions across the country at institutions including Duke and Berkeley, Wittig had lived in a great variety of landscapes including the French countryside and Paris, lush southern hills and the brutal cold of Buffalo, Pacific redwood country and San Francisco before settling into Tucson and the University of Arizona’s French Department, though, as I came to understand more deeply, none were as fantastic as the landscapes of Wittig’s unrivaled imagination.
They say that at the point they have reached they must examine the principle that has guided them. They say it is not for them to exhaust their strength in symbols. They say henceforward what they are is not subject to compromise. They say they must now stop exulting the vulva. They say that they must break the last bond that binds them to a dead culture. They say that any symbol that exalts the fragmented body is transient, must disappear. Thus it was formerly. The integrity of their body their first principle, they advanced marching together into another world. (adapted translation of Les Guérillères 72)
I was already familiar with Wittig’s writing. By the time we met I was working on my dissertation, which among other things, looks at The Lesbian Body as an example of how we might reimagine embodied subjectivity. Having discovered a privileging of the heteronormative male child’s point of view in a preponderance of cultural theories influenced by Freud that were commonly required readings for U.S. graduate students at the time, I found Wittig’s work a powerful antidote to such hetero-family-based narratives. It universalizes a materialist lesbian point of view that creatively engages the challenges, paradoxes, and limitations inherent in envisioning the world differently and acting to bring that vision into being. Unlike so many at the time who in varying ways valorized or essentialized difference, Wittig’s work insists on fighting for a class marked “women” while simultaneously working to destroy the category itself. Wittig’s corpus lays bare the nature of categorizing as a process of all forms of oppression in language and literature as well as discourses of politics, economics, history, etc. by both arguing for and enacting a stripping down and reforming of the material of language to make new forms, new ways of being legible.
It is the attempted universalization of the [minoritized] point of view that turns or does not turn a literary work into a war machine. (The Straight Mind 76)
Perhaps Wittig’s most powerful Trojan Horse salvo is the oft-cited claim that “lesbians are not women.” To understand such a claim—radical even by today’s standards—one has to completely let go of the categories as they are commonly understood. Doing so dislodges “lesbian” and “women” as they are commonly used in heteronormative systems of thought—women as a naturalized category and lesbian as a sexualized category—to introduce a materialist lesbian perspective. Such a re-visioning enables us to see that “woman” has political, social, and economic meaning only in relationship to “man” and that naturalizing these categories institutionalizes the power of one category over the other to produce “the straight mind.” Wittig’s claim works to annul binary gender categorizing and make way for new, more equitable possibilities for being for everyone by exposing the constructedness of gender categories. Despite mis-readings and misappropriations by many theorists, this claim is slowly becoming less odd, more easily comprehensible as gendering possibilities proliferate in common practice.
([Manastabal:] Using your language one might say [we came here] through compassion. But as you know, that’s a word which has lost all its meaning. You must see for yourself how it is.) (Across the Acheron 19)
In my assignment as local guide, I gladly made myself available to help where and when I could, not wanting to impose, but leaving as much space as I could for supporting this transition. Wittig graciously accepted, inviting me to inspect the casita that became home. We considered desert garden possibilities and discussed best places to find all manner of things for this new space. My “assignment” quickly blossomed into a rich friendship built on long desert walks and many dinners—sometimes out at restaurants, sometimes deliciously simple fare that we prepared together. Slices of ripe tomatoes and creamy mozzarella drizzled with basil and olive oil and accompanied by slices of baguette was a favorite after our walks.
THE SUN THE HEAT THE LIGHT THE SHADE THE SUNSET THE COLORS THE DESSICATIONS THE REFLECTIONS THE CHAPPED SKIN THE MONSOONS THE FLASH FLOODS THE WIND THE DUST DEVILS THE TUMBLEWEED THE SAGUARO RIBS THE CHOLLA SKELETONS THE SUNBLEACHED BONES
Tucson’s landscape is a study in contrasts: mountains and valleys, extremes of temperatures (as much as 50˚ difference in a day), sculptural forms against a brilliant sky, its seasons of light and shadows. We explored every kind of rock, bird, critter, and plant we encountered with the kind of detailed exploration that The Lesbian Body performs. Out on our walks, Wittig sorely tested my memory from years of hiking, camping, local botany, herpetology, and geology lessons, tapping me for every tidbit I had to share, often inspiring me to research what I did not yet know. When I explained how the accordion shaping of the saguaro cactus enables it to expand to store water, Wittig dodged thorns to feel the thick waxy outer layer that so many desert plants use to conserve every drop they gather. When one day Wittig experienced how the jumping cactus got its name, I pulled out my comb to dislodge the piece from the offended cuff. We both carried our own combs from then on. We held court with birds in English and French—a “rou-rou” to my “coooo” sung to the Mourning Doves. Our laughter at the world and ourselves bounced off many canyon walls.
THE SANTA CATALINA MOUNTAINS THE SANTA RITA MOUNTAINS THE TUCSON MOUNTAINS THE RINCON MOUNTAINS THE ALLUVIAL FANS THE ARROYOS THE BASINS THE VALLEYS THE CANYONS THE METAMORPHIC ROCK THE IGNEOUS ROCK THE SEDIMENTARY ROCK THE CALICHE
Wittig’s first home in Tucson was one of several ranch-style, red-brick casitas that were probably built in the 1960s for snowbirds. It perched on an embankment over an arroyo at the base of the foothills area. From the back patio it was possible to enjoy both privacy and the city lights, which in the desert twinkle all the more brilliantly due to the dry air. Wittig enticed birds and eventually other animals to the yard, which was generously stocked with a large block of compressed birdseed and water. One of our favorite birds never came to the block, but it often greeted us on our walks—a silky-flycatcher known as the Phainopepla. A shiny black cardinal-shaped bird with a crest and long tail, it produces a complicated array of warbles, wurps, and wheedles all expressed in disjointed phrases that sound almost conversational and to which Wittig often took the opportunity to respond in kind. We enjoyed engaging the noisily territorial cactus wrens in conversation as well. Wittig quickly learned the names and habits of every critter in the area, developing a personal relationship with each individual—including the many javelina (a Sonoran wild pig) enticed to the yard with all manner of leftovers. Javelina, who have no problem chowing down on everything from cactus—thorns and all—to jack-o-lanterns with burning candles, are known for being on the nasty side. Wittig invited them as guests, feeding them despite warnings of the dangers. Fear didn’t curtail such actions. Tell Wittig one shouldn’t or couldn’t do something and, as with me, such edicts were likely to inspire trying.
THE JAVELINA THE CREOSOTE THE PHAINOPEPLA THE SAGAURO THE CACTUS WREN THE GECKO THE PYGMY OWL THE PRAIRIE DOG THE BARREL THE CHOLLA THE COYOTE THE PRICKLY PEAR THE BOBCAT THE JACK RABBIT THE BATS THE HORNED TOAD THE CORAL SNAKE THE SONORAN TOAD THE GILA MONSTER
While the desert definitely has its dangers, the challenges that university politics pose are mostly of human relations in a context of negotiations for power and resources—dynamics that we both were invested in seeing change and that we both worked in ways we were best able to make more equitable for our students, our colleagues, and each other. We regularly spent time in my office when Wittig came in for meetings or to teach classes and examined the university together, its perverse churning out of inequities and our roles in that system with the same sort of deep curiosity though certainly with less relish than that with which we explored our desert home. We strategized about how best to interrupt the dynamics similar to those Wittig so darkly portrays in the parables about power struggles that make up Paris la politique—myopia, pettiness, self-serving two-facedness, and selling out, to name a few—that undermine the best efforts of activists for social justice everywhere, the internalized workings of oppressive regimes, as we faced them in our work and political lives. We considered how best to denaturalize material economies of all kinds that oppress. We discussed at length how to do a better job of reaching and supporting students, of challenging colleagues to more fully engage the values espoused, and to wrest power out of the hands that would, as Audre Lorde so eloquently claimed, “[grind] all of our futures into dust” (139). We fought for each other in the ways we were both able.
There is not one who is unaware of what takes place here, which has no name as yet, let them seek it if they are determined to do so . . . (The Lesbian Body 15).
During the twelve years Wittig called Tucson home, we passionately discussed everything: the environment, the heat, local flora and fauna, food, health, world affairs, university politics, feminism, lesbianism, theories of all sorts, languages, literature, love, and death. Early in our friendship Wittig listened compassionately as my relationship at the time slowly came to an end, wondering gently if I had not grown “too butch” for my partner while encouraging me to explore a greater independence. We argued perhaps most pointedly over whether it was possible for motherhood to be radical. As one who did motherhood differently in many ways, especially for the 70s—unmarried, queerly lesbian, independently—I still believe that raising progressive children is important work, but Wittig’s horror at my descriptions of pleasure in being pregnant and nursing was palpable. While Wittig very much liked my son—saw hope in gentle young men like him who proudly wore to threads his DYKE GENES t-shirt (in fact, called him lesbian)—we agreed to disagree about whether motherhood was inevitably oppressive.
At no time in our twelve years of friendship did I find Wittig to be anything other than fully intentional in thoughts and actions with a mind like few others—both highly critical and more compassionate than any other I have known. Even when thinking most abstractly Wittig would never lose sight of the material realities, gently pulling an interlocutor back from the seductions of the abstract so prevalent in the world of theory. Categorically refusing categories except as self-defined strategic locations—including lesbian—Wittig refused to accept the rules by which others play the games that keep us oppressed. Like the desert, Wittig was and remains in writing a study in contrasts—capacious enough of heart and mind to hold paradox. Wittig’s Trojan Horse strategy is a practice of mind and heart as well as language that works like the brilliant waxy flower crowning a thorny plant whose roots are capable of cracking a rock wall.
THE IGNEOUS ROCK THE FACIES THE LIMESTONE THE COPPER THE QUARTZITE THE CALICHE THE GNEISS THE SLATE THE OBSIDIAN THE SCHIST THE GARNET THE OLIVINE THE AMPHIBOLE THE PYROXENE THE MICA THE FELDSPAR THE CALCITE THE FOSSILS THE SAND THE SHALE THE OPOPONAX
NOTE: While I have made use of the current English translations, I have adapted them where appropriate to address the issues with translation that Wittig articulates in “The Mark of Gender.” For The Opoponax the pronoun “she” has been replaced with “one” to match the “on” of the original. For Les Guérillères the phrase “the women” has been changed to “they” or “their” which, though still inadequate to creating the effect “elles” does in the French, is more in keeping with the spirit of universalizing the lesbian point of view than “the women” does.
Sources
Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider. Berkeley: Crossing Press, 1984, 2007. Print.
Wittig, Monique. Across the Acheron. London: Peter Owen, 1987. Print.
---. Les Guérillères. Boston: Beacon Press, 1985. Print.
---. The Lesbian Body. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986. Print.
---. The Opoponax, Plainfield Vermont: Daughter’s Inc., 1976. Print.
---. The Straight Mind and Other Essays. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992. Print.
Working notes
The request to write this piece was in many ways an impossible assignment—to remember Wittig, a writer who wanted to be remembered for intellectual and artistic achievements alone, in the desert. In taking this on, I have chosen an autobiographical approach that creatively engages Wittig’s forms, thereby producing a sort of stylized silhouette of Wittig in the desert, while including bits of Wittig’s texts to speak for themselves within a context of how they have marked my life. May this piece inspire others to explore Wittig's work more fully.
About the author
Associate Professor and Faculty Director for the Center for Multicultural Engagement at California State University Channel Islands, Julia Balén has a Ph.D. in Comparative Cultural and Literary Studies with a focus on issues of embodiment and power relations and has published on feminist, lesbian, and queer theory and practice in an anti-racist/classist context. Some representative publications include: “Erotics, Agency, and Social Movement: Communities of Sexuality and Musicality in LGBT Choruses” in The Queer Community: Continuing the Struggle for Social Justice, ed. Richard G. Johnson III, (San Diego, CA: Birkdale Publishers, 2009) and “Practicing What We Teach” in Women’s Studies for the Future: Foundations, Interrogations, Politics, ed. Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Agatha Beins (Rutgers University Press, 2005).
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.