We live as two lesbians
Verena Stefan
I remember how the word LESBIAN entered my life, and stayed. It was in a dream and the word took the English language as carrier. My mother tongue is German.
February 11, 1981, I am in a huge building where many women have gathered for a meeting. It has the atmosphere of a feminist conference as was the case in many of my dreams during the 70s and the 80s. A black naked woman is walking down the hallway before me. She has cropped blonde dyed hair. I move up beside her and ask, in English: How do you live?
We live as two lesbians, she replies turning her head briefly towards me while continuing on her way and entering a bathroom. I remain in the door looking at her as she brushes herself, her back turned to me. Light is pouring in through a large window. She now has white skin and my body shape.
Darkness and night share the capacity for creating the world from inside out. Messengers appear who leave us with messages or an image that will then claim its place in daily reality.
Before I came to live in Montreal in 1998 I did not speak English on a daily basis, only occasionally during an international conference, and even that was not the case every year. I read a lot in English, though.
To emerging German-speaking feminists and lesbians of the 70s the English language had a quality of freedom. It seemed to belong to a liberation movement, to be international. Most of all it was not fraught with Nazi language nor with the law of the Fathers. It offered itself to carefree use, buoying high on the first wave of women-loving enthusiasm, brimming over with books and songs.
It took the freedom of a foreign language to insert the word lesbian into myself. Through that dream English took on the quality of a mother tongue, a tongue speaking gut language to me. The German word is lesbisch. The English word seemed softer to the lips, the ear, seemed easier to say out loud then.
It was only much later that I made a connection to the underlying reality from which the dream had drawn the image of two lesbians.
Back in 1974 I had been travelling in the U.S.A for three months visiting feminist and Lesbian groups, conferences, festivals, women centers, bookstores, publishers, galleries, museums, self- health clinics, mostly on the West Coast, and briefly in NYC. Everything was overwhelmingly new, never seen before, only heard of. Germany's first women's bookstore didn't open until 1975—the same for its first women's press. So almost everything I encountered consisted of new images. Everywhere I went the brand new vinyl Lavender Jane Loves Women was playing. Things happened in a haze.
One day I was on the road with two very young lesbians (I was already 27) in an old black Ford pick- up truck. We were wearing shorts or overalls and T-shirts abandoning ourselves to summer winds and heat that wafted through the open car windows. In Germany we didn't have pickup trucks and women wore shorts only on camping sites if at all. After every hill we climbed leisurely in that black old Ford we had to wait and pour cold water in the cooler before rolling downhill, singing and cheering "The Woman of your Life is You."
There was a Grand Piano under the Mammoth Redwood trees. A black naked woman sat in front of it playing and singing.
That image took place at a West Coast women's music festival, somewhere north of San Francisco. I can't recall exactly where, somewhere among Redwood trees. During breaks we saw the black singer in passionate embraces with a white naked woman. They were holding each other releasing cascades of cooing laughter and sighs. The sight had a touch of something unreal, an image from a secret garden, but at the same time it was more down-to-earth than anything ever seen before, one piece of the puzzle with which we rearranged reality.
A whiff of dope lingered over our heads. Everybody seemed to be letting themselves go with exuberance and pleasure. The air was sated with desire and freedom.
I don't think that such images will ever go extinct. The images I have seen, stored in my mind, and the dream images I draw from continue to live. However they have become almost private again. Like the city maps dotted with the meeting places I and my generation have known, they continue to exist in our memory only: Imaginary Homelands.
Due to my immigration to Canada in 1998 and language barriers (both in French and English), I have lived through long periods without collective meetings, without belonging to a political or cultural lesbian group. At times I feel like I'm a private thinker again, a carrier of an internal lesbian archive with stored iconographies that do not exist any longer on public walls, in installations, in galleries, in International Feminist Book Fairs (remember those?), not even in one single Lesbian reading a year.
In my first book Häutungen (1975) Shedding (1978) the main character claims at the end: Der Mensch meines Lebens bin ich. The mensch of my life is me. Mensch is German for human being, an umbrella term for both sexes. Unfortunately it translated into: The Woman of my life is me. That is not what I meant.
After many years as a rabid separatist another need took over in my life: to be present, visible, audible in society at large; in brief, to be generally human.
But what exactly does that mean? Did two decades of forming and participating in German- speaking Lesbian community create enough solid ground to walk differently in heterosexual contexts?
I remember how the word LESBIAN entered my life, and stayed. It was in a dream and the word took the English language as carrier. My mother tongue is German.
February 11, 1981, I am in a huge building where many women have gathered for a meeting. It has the atmosphere of a feminist conference as was the case in many of my dreams during the 70s and the 80s. A black naked woman is walking down the hallway before me. She has cropped blonde dyed hair. I move up beside her and ask, in English: How do you live?
We live as two lesbians, she replies turning her head briefly towards me while continuing on her way and entering a bathroom. I remain in the door looking at her as she brushes herself, her back turned to me. Light is pouring in through a large window. She now has white skin and my body shape.
Darkness and night share the capacity for creating the world from inside out. Messengers appear who leave us with messages or an image that will then claim its place in daily reality.
Before I came to live in Montreal in 1998 I did not speak English on a daily basis, only occasionally during an international conference, and even that was not the case every year. I read a lot in English, though.
To emerging German-speaking feminists and lesbians of the 70s the English language had a quality of freedom. It seemed to belong to a liberation movement, to be international. Most of all it was not fraught with Nazi language nor with the law of the Fathers. It offered itself to carefree use, buoying high on the first wave of women-loving enthusiasm, brimming over with books and songs.
It took the freedom of a foreign language to insert the word lesbian into myself. Through that dream English took on the quality of a mother tongue, a tongue speaking gut language to me. The German word is lesbisch. The English word seemed softer to the lips, the ear, seemed easier to say out loud then.
It was only much later that I made a connection to the underlying reality from which the dream had drawn the image of two lesbians.
Back in 1974 I had been travelling in the U.S.A for three months visiting feminist and Lesbian groups, conferences, festivals, women centers, bookstores, publishers, galleries, museums, self- health clinics, mostly on the West Coast, and briefly in NYC. Everything was overwhelmingly new, never seen before, only heard of. Germany's first women's bookstore didn't open until 1975—the same for its first women's press. So almost everything I encountered consisted of new images. Everywhere I went the brand new vinyl Lavender Jane Loves Women was playing. Things happened in a haze.
One day I was on the road with two very young lesbians (I was already 27) in an old black Ford pick- up truck. We were wearing shorts or overalls and T-shirts abandoning ourselves to summer winds and heat that wafted through the open car windows. In Germany we didn't have pickup trucks and women wore shorts only on camping sites if at all. After every hill we climbed leisurely in that black old Ford we had to wait and pour cold water in the cooler before rolling downhill, singing and cheering "The Woman of your Life is You."
There was a Grand Piano under the Mammoth Redwood trees. A black naked woman sat in front of it playing and singing.
That image took place at a West Coast women's music festival, somewhere north of San Francisco. I can't recall exactly where, somewhere among Redwood trees. During breaks we saw the black singer in passionate embraces with a white naked woman. They were holding each other releasing cascades of cooing laughter and sighs. The sight had a touch of something unreal, an image from a secret garden, but at the same time it was more down-to-earth than anything ever seen before, one piece of the puzzle with which we rearranged reality.
A whiff of dope lingered over our heads. Everybody seemed to be letting themselves go with exuberance and pleasure. The air was sated with desire and freedom.
I don't think that such images will ever go extinct. The images I have seen, stored in my mind, and the dream images I draw from continue to live. However they have become almost private again. Like the city maps dotted with the meeting places I and my generation have known, they continue to exist in our memory only: Imaginary Homelands.
Due to my immigration to Canada in 1998 and language barriers (both in French and English), I have lived through long periods without collective meetings, without belonging to a political or cultural lesbian group. At times I feel like I'm a private thinker again, a carrier of an internal lesbian archive with stored iconographies that do not exist any longer on public walls, in installations, in galleries, in International Feminist Book Fairs (remember those?), not even in one single Lesbian reading a year.
In my first book Häutungen (1975) Shedding (1978) the main character claims at the end: Der Mensch meines Lebens bin ich. The mensch of my life is me. Mensch is German for human being, an umbrella term for both sexes. Unfortunately it translated into: The Woman of my life is me. That is not what I meant.
After many years as a rabid separatist another need took over in my life: to be present, visible, audible in society at large; in brief, to be generally human.
But what exactly does that mean? Did two decades of forming and participating in German- speaking Lesbian community create enough solid ground to walk differently in heterosexual contexts?
At a women writers' conference of German-speaking and Japanese writers in Tokyo - organised in 1990 by the Goethe Institute - I vanished into a mental and emotional void within the first forty-eight hours. The absence of names from my writing life and frame of reference was chilling. A long list of names from Virginia Woolf to Monique Wittig, including German names like Christa Reinig, remained mute. The atmosphere was clearly uninviting; it was out of the question for me to introduce names that counted for me. Being without a voice, without resonance, in any given situation means being alienated, deconstructed. It happens in no time.
I had a list of phone numbers of US American lesbians living in Tokyo as I would be attending an International Lesbian conference after the writers' meeting. So I called one of them and said: I simply have to meet a lesbian, it is too alienating to keep going on for three more days. Would you mind having coffee with me somewhere?
She had to travel two hours by subway to meet me, and that's what she did. Though we were not at all from the same lesbian homelands and had not much in common we sat down for an hour or so for some small talk, and I feel grateful to her to this day. There was immediate relief, and I felt restored in no time.
Such moments have made me think repeatedly about the many- faceted concept of exile. It embraces different narratives of interior and exterior displacement. I may feel like an exiled writer in a group of non-writers, like an exiled lesbian in a group of non-lesbians, like an exiled German-speaking person in a group of non-German-speaking people only. I may feel at home in a writer's group though there is no other lesbian around. At times I feel at home in a lesbian group, even if I am the only writer; at other times I feel utterly forlorn if surrounded by Lesbians who have never read a word by Virginia Woolf.
I feel quite generally human sitting down for supper one night with my lover and a heterosexual couple who offered to host us. I am going to do a reading in the hosting woman's German class in an East Coast college the next day. The moment they open the door worlds clash in split seconds. It is not because she sports a pale pink twin set with a chain of pearls, discreet make up, discreet perm, discreetly tight slacks, nylons, elegant slippers, and her husband greets us in a designer sweater, and ironed designer jeans, nor because we still have cat hair from home on our shirts and pants. They are polite, friendly people who welcome us with a copious meal. It isn't either because there is clearly an economic gap in life style.
I get the feeling that while they go on talking about their new house, their eclectic selection of art and design, their grown-up children, their grand children, their pension plan they are simultaneously blocking us out. They ask some questions about our professional lives, too, and about the small Toyota Echo we drive. Their faces remain impassive when one of us says "we" or "our apartment" or "the 1988 Montreal International Feminist book fair." There is no genuine curiosity, no active listening on their part into our lives. If I didn't care and were to babble along guilelessly (unimaginable, absurd), I would bump against rubber walls, or concrete.
After two hours or so my back is aching and I feel brain dead. Why on earth did I think I could be generally human? Old terms float to the surface: strangers in Patriarchy, exiles in Heterror society. Didn't I think that period was over?
We live as two lesbians must have run across my forehead like an ad in Times Square.
From a close straight friend, I know how her husband commented on me and my lover (at the time after we had paid them a visit, confessing he had not felt at ease as usual. He felt almost overlooked, he said. His wife got an unfamiliar amount of attention and was addressed more often than he was used to by other visiting couples. We didn't flirt, he said, and he felt bored. Clearly intellectuals, he concluded. We were just intellectuals.
I feel bored to think of all the moments in which we were the first lesbians to sit down at somebody's dinner table. It happens. And with it the stiffness and the silencing happen again.
"How do you live?" Was the question in my dream, not: "Who are you or what is your identity?"
It happens on my part, too.
I remember entering one of Berlin's old Lesbian bars for the first time in the 70s with my freshly established women's group. I couldn't help staring at the older couples in suits and dresses. We were bashing them in low voices. A complete ingénue. I didn't know anything about butch-femme dress codes and would not have known how to open a conversation with them.
I also remember walking down a Munich street in the 80s with a Jewish lesbian feminist friend who was about to move to Israel. We discussed aspects of the blocked Jewish-German dialogue. I never know what questions to ask, I said to her.
You can't behave normally with the Other, she replied, because the Other doesn't seem normal to you.
"How do you live?" is the question nobody asks. It would put everybody in a common place. There is a fundamental lack of human practice in being in touch with, in conversing with the Other. This often leads to awkward and heterosexist situations as well as racist or anti-Semitic ones. I cannot possibly know how it is to be black or Jewish in this society. All I can do is to admit it and do my best to practice communication.
The closest I ever came to being generally human was during my immigration procedure to Quebec, and Canada. First there was a more genderfree linguistic experience due to the structure of the English language. In English I was just another landed immigrant, neither man nor woman. That I was a Lesbian and a feminist didn't play a role. It played a role, though, on the privileging side, that I have white skin.
In the Quebec questionnaire you have to name a person, be it a relative, a spouse, a lover (or an organization) who will take care of you should you experience moments of falling apart in the course of the immigration experience. This actually happened to me. For more than a year I was a Nobody, not as a woman, not as a lesbian, simply as a human being.
After those decades of feminist debating, fighting against preconceived identities and muted female voices in the world, after having carefully formed a solid Lesbian I, identity fell apart again. The question of the I, even the female I, in the world seemed irrelevant as long as the immigrant-non-I was taking over, deconstructing it completely. At the bottom layer I anticipated relief. It was just a human experience. For once I did not fall into the category Other with a capital O.
To get back to the questionnaire, you get a certain amount of points for each question. Like any other immigrant I got points for putting down my lover's name and address. I got points for a same- sex relationship. Nothing special, just naming my spouse. Business as usual.
And then there are actually those moments where a common miracle takes place.
It gets very quiet in the mountains at night. For a whole week I am alone with my mother in a small hotel. She is seventy-two, I am thirty-four. One evening I show her Adrienne Rich's: The Dream of a Common Language and the first draft of the German translation I am working on with my lover at the time. My mother has great admiration for the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, which is why I give her the poem about Paula Becker and sculptor Clara Westhoff to read. She leafs through the English and the German poems for a while, then puts them on the table, sighing: "my English is not good enough to read them."
I had a list of phone numbers of US American lesbians living in Tokyo as I would be attending an International Lesbian conference after the writers' meeting. So I called one of them and said: I simply have to meet a lesbian, it is too alienating to keep going on for three more days. Would you mind having coffee with me somewhere?
She had to travel two hours by subway to meet me, and that's what she did. Though we were not at all from the same lesbian homelands and had not much in common we sat down for an hour or so for some small talk, and I feel grateful to her to this day. There was immediate relief, and I felt restored in no time.
Such moments have made me think repeatedly about the many- faceted concept of exile. It embraces different narratives of interior and exterior displacement. I may feel like an exiled writer in a group of non-writers, like an exiled lesbian in a group of non-lesbians, like an exiled German-speaking person in a group of non-German-speaking people only. I may feel at home in a writer's group though there is no other lesbian around. At times I feel at home in a lesbian group, even if I am the only writer; at other times I feel utterly forlorn if surrounded by Lesbians who have never read a word by Virginia Woolf.
I feel quite generally human sitting down for supper one night with my lover and a heterosexual couple who offered to host us. I am going to do a reading in the hosting woman's German class in an East Coast college the next day. The moment they open the door worlds clash in split seconds. It is not because she sports a pale pink twin set with a chain of pearls, discreet make up, discreet perm, discreetly tight slacks, nylons, elegant slippers, and her husband greets us in a designer sweater, and ironed designer jeans, nor because we still have cat hair from home on our shirts and pants. They are polite, friendly people who welcome us with a copious meal. It isn't either because there is clearly an economic gap in life style.
I get the feeling that while they go on talking about their new house, their eclectic selection of art and design, their grown-up children, their grand children, their pension plan they are simultaneously blocking us out. They ask some questions about our professional lives, too, and about the small Toyota Echo we drive. Their faces remain impassive when one of us says "we" or "our apartment" or "the 1988 Montreal International Feminist book fair." There is no genuine curiosity, no active listening on their part into our lives. If I didn't care and were to babble along guilelessly (unimaginable, absurd), I would bump against rubber walls, or concrete.
After two hours or so my back is aching and I feel brain dead. Why on earth did I think I could be generally human? Old terms float to the surface: strangers in Patriarchy, exiles in Heterror society. Didn't I think that period was over?
We live as two lesbians must have run across my forehead like an ad in Times Square.
From a close straight friend, I know how her husband commented on me and my lover (at the time after we had paid them a visit, confessing he had not felt at ease as usual. He felt almost overlooked, he said. His wife got an unfamiliar amount of attention and was addressed more often than he was used to by other visiting couples. We didn't flirt, he said, and he felt bored. Clearly intellectuals, he concluded. We were just intellectuals.
I feel bored to think of all the moments in which we were the first lesbians to sit down at somebody's dinner table. It happens. And with it the stiffness and the silencing happen again.
"How do you live?" Was the question in my dream, not: "Who are you or what is your identity?"
It happens on my part, too.
I remember entering one of Berlin's old Lesbian bars for the first time in the 70s with my freshly established women's group. I couldn't help staring at the older couples in suits and dresses. We were bashing them in low voices. A complete ingénue. I didn't know anything about butch-femme dress codes and would not have known how to open a conversation with them.
I also remember walking down a Munich street in the 80s with a Jewish lesbian feminist friend who was about to move to Israel. We discussed aspects of the blocked Jewish-German dialogue. I never know what questions to ask, I said to her.
You can't behave normally with the Other, she replied, because the Other doesn't seem normal to you.
"How do you live?" is the question nobody asks. It would put everybody in a common place. There is a fundamental lack of human practice in being in touch with, in conversing with the Other. This often leads to awkward and heterosexist situations as well as racist or anti-Semitic ones. I cannot possibly know how it is to be black or Jewish in this society. All I can do is to admit it and do my best to practice communication.
The closest I ever came to being generally human was during my immigration procedure to Quebec, and Canada. First there was a more genderfree linguistic experience due to the structure of the English language. In English I was just another landed immigrant, neither man nor woman. That I was a Lesbian and a feminist didn't play a role. It played a role, though, on the privileging side, that I have white skin.
In the Quebec questionnaire you have to name a person, be it a relative, a spouse, a lover (or an organization) who will take care of you should you experience moments of falling apart in the course of the immigration experience. This actually happened to me. For more than a year I was a Nobody, not as a woman, not as a lesbian, simply as a human being.
After those decades of feminist debating, fighting against preconceived identities and muted female voices in the world, after having carefully formed a solid Lesbian I, identity fell apart again. The question of the I, even the female I, in the world seemed irrelevant as long as the immigrant-non-I was taking over, deconstructing it completely. At the bottom layer I anticipated relief. It was just a human experience. For once I did not fall into the category Other with a capital O.
To get back to the questionnaire, you get a certain amount of points for each question. Like any other immigrant I got points for putting down my lover's name and address. I got points for a same- sex relationship. Nothing special, just naming my spouse. Business as usual.
And then there are actually those moments where a common miracle takes place.
It gets very quiet in the mountains at night. For a whole week I am alone with my mother in a small hotel. She is seventy-two, I am thirty-four. One evening I show her Adrienne Rich's: The Dream of a Common Language and the first draft of the German translation I am working on with my lover at the time. My mother has great admiration for the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, which is why I give her the poem about Paula Becker and sculptor Clara Westhoff to read. She leafs through the English and the German poems for a while, then puts them on the table, sighing: "my English is not good enough to read them."
She then takes off her glasses looking me straight in the eyes.
Is she a lesbian, too? She asks.
The word leaves her mouth in an everyday matter-of-fact tone. She could be asking: does she like coffee, too? Or: does she like riding a bicycle?
Later I thought a lot about it. How she must have pondered the question for years now to release it so casually. Imagine such a thing. To speak the word Lesbian with a capital L in regard to your daughter without a hue of shame or reproach or disappointment.
Yes, I say. She is a lesbian, too.
Had a third person overheard the conversation, the question would have referred to my mother as well as to myself.
And yet another tiny common miracle:
I am at a hospital desk to have the address of my hospital card changed. The employee asks for the name and telephone number of a person to reach in case of emergency. Lise,
I say, adding her family name and phone number. She continues typing, briefly looking up at me. "Common law?" she asks. It takes me the usual extra second to get the meaning in English, then I nod with glee. Common law, yes. I love that expression. Not Other law, common law.
Is she a lesbian, too? She asks.
The word leaves her mouth in an everyday matter-of-fact tone. She could be asking: does she like coffee, too? Or: does she like riding a bicycle?
Later I thought a lot about it. How she must have pondered the question for years now to release it so casually. Imagine such a thing. To speak the word Lesbian with a capital L in regard to your daughter without a hue of shame or reproach or disappointment.
Yes, I say. She is a lesbian, too.
Had a third person overheard the conversation, the question would have referred to my mother as well as to myself.
And yet another tiny common miracle:
I am at a hospital desk to have the address of my hospital card changed. The employee asks for the name and telephone number of a person to reach in case of emergency. Lise,
I say, adding her family name and phone number. She continues typing, briefly looking up at me. "Common law?" she asks. It takes me the usual extra second to get the meaning in English, then I nod with glee. Common law, yes. I love that expression. Not Other law, common law.
Working notes
Working on this text hit a vein and brought many biting moments of lesbophobia to the surface, more than I've written here.
However, for me the far more interesting topic relates to the question of what images inhabit us as lesbians of different ages, classes, races? Are there specifically lesbian images in dreams, an iconography yet to be explored?
I wish to thank Lise Weil for her editing of this piece.
However, for me the far more interesting topic relates to the question of what images inhabit us as lesbians of different ages, classes, races? Are there specifically lesbian images in dreams, an iconography yet to be explored?
I wish to thank Lise Weil for her editing of this piece.
About the author
Verena Stefan is a Swiss German writer. She left Switzerland in 1968 to live in West-Berlin and elsewhere in Germany for about thirty years before coming to Montreal in 1998.
Her books include Häutungen (1975), (English translation Shedding, Daughters.Inc., 1978), and a new and expanded edition of Shedding and Literally Dreaming (The Feminist Press, New York, 1994). She was a co-translator of The Dream of a Common Language by Adrienne Rich and of Lesbian Peoples. A Dictionary by Monique Wittig and Sande Zeig. Among her recent publications are Doe a deer, published in: Trivia # 4: The Wonderful and the Terrible. September 2006 and Fremdschläfer, (Ammann, Zürich) 2007.
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.
Her books include Häutungen (1975), (English translation Shedding, Daughters.Inc., 1978), and a new and expanded edition of Shedding and Literally Dreaming (The Feminist Press, New York, 1994). She was a co-translator of The Dream of a Common Language by Adrienne Rich and of Lesbian Peoples. A Dictionary by Monique Wittig and Sande Zeig. Among her recent publications are Doe a deer, published in: Trivia # 4: The Wonderful and the Terrible. September 2006 and Fremdschläfer, (Ammann, Zürich) 2007.
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.