A Word of Our Own: Ch 16 A Smoldering Bush
"So why was it easier for me to empathize with tortured male Iraqis than think the phrase, “we women”? Why did it take so long to understand the connection with “we dykes”?
Welcome to A Word of Our Own: A Memoir of Bodies, Language, and Home—Meditations on my homo female life (in-progress since 2017, the book, not my life).
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16. In Which the Bush Burns, But Not Yet For Me
When the U.S. bombed Afghanistan, bombed Iraq, I went out into the streets to protest, imagining what that really meant. The we of the soldiers. The we of our victims. The lights in all those eyes, just like mine, extinguished. How humans are only truly human in the singular, considered one by one by one in the flesh. Soon, a girl from Kentucky like me would force male Muslim prisoners in Abu Ghraib to strip themselves naked and form themselves into a pyramid, while she stood staring at them with her polluting female eyes and giving an obscene thumbs up. It’s like they weren’t even human. Like she wasn’t. Staring at photos of their frail, naked, dirty, shivering male bodies, I wondered how she could do that. How could I? I’d wonder at the contradiction that we were only human apart, only human together. I waited for Americans to take to the street to protest our torture-loving government, but nobody did, even me, I just wrote about it.
This was not a popular opinion. Not my fault, cried everyone on the left. It’s theirs. It’s them. Those evil Republicans. As if we all didn’t benefit from the United States’ position in the world, from our great wealth which, after visiting Cuba, slapped me in the face every time I stepped into the abundance of even the shittiest supermarket in New York. Every time I stepped onto a sidewalk no matter how cracked it was as cars zipped by with their tanks brimming over like cups.
The bomber and the bombed and the bomb itself, why was it easier for me to empathize with tortured male Iraqis than think the phrase, “we women”? Why did it take so long to understand the connection with “we dykes”?
In 2005 we swapped our East Village apartment for a place in Paris where I was as American as anybody, and there in the midst of the Iraq war, people assigned meaning to that, knowing who and what I was as soon as I opened my mouth. I rarely did. We walked for hours every day, trying to digest what the world had become. The cobblestones felt more solid than me. The Seine even in its liquidity, flowing under le Pont Mirabeau and reminding us—of something.
In the spring of 2006, Ana and I published our last edition of The Gully. We went back home, returned. Soon, I began writing for Gay City News in New York. In 2007, it was time for another French presidential election. Ségolène Royal was the first serious female candidate since women could vote in France—which had only been since 1944. She felt very distant, that articulate, pretty, brown-headed woman with high heels, a passel of kids, and a long, effective career in the Socialist Party. Still, all my dyke friends (and their moms) were on board, so I joined them, once, at the Gare d’Austerlitz, or maybe it was the Gare de Lyon, trying to hand flyers to people dragging suitcases, or chewing quick sandwiches before they caught their trains.
Pretty soon we’d notice that when you’d stretch out your hand with the paper showing Ségo’s smiling female face, most of the people of color took it willing, while the white, middle-aged men would recoil in disgust or pause in their breathless trajectory to crumple it up, curse her, curse you, promise to vote for the extreme right, anti-immigrant, anti-homo, anti-woman, send-you-back-to-the-dark-ages perennial candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen.
Even some of the older white women with their tasteful make-up and carefully coiffed hair would shudder dramatically as they turned away from the pamphlet as if you were offering them an amuse bouche of steaming dog doo. When my friend Marie made an unofficial flyer saying, "Quit listening to the machos, a better minimum wage is Royal,” a young woman volunteer lost her shit, ranting and raving that Marie was setting back the campaign with that word "macho" which called attention to the fact Ségolène was a woman. As if those men calling Ségo a "filthy whore" hadn't already caught on. Or whatshisname, the man who’d been the Socialist Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, who openly declared he’d never vote for la candidate, the female candidate.
One night, out for a drink with a friend, Marie got literally thrown out of a gay male bar because they didn’t want some shrill dyke clogging the place up. And when she literally hit the street, her wrist shattered in a million places like her dyke heart. Like the hopes of so many women in France when that little shrimp of a right-wing man, Nicolas Sarkozy, won, along with Male Power.
That was one flame. The next was what happened when Hillary Clinton tossed her pastel hat into the presidential ring in 2008. By then we were living in a tiny sublet on Saint Germain’s rue Visconti where one of our windows gave us a glimpse of the trees in a private garden called the Bois de Visconti where Nathalie Clifford Barney used to lived for decades after she got kicked out of her place in Neuilly for scandalizing her neighbors. Once, Mata Hari rode into her garden as Lady Godiva, naked on a white horse. The last drop came when she rehearsed a play based on Sappho’s life, which her landlord declared, “Followed nature too closely.” And kicked her out.
I spent a lot of time thinking about her. A lot of time thinking about Hillary Clinton whom I used to watch on the enormous and squat TV we had in the corner of our New York bedroom when she campaigned for the Senate eight years before. Clinton had frosted blond hair lacquered into place, wore discrete makeup, ugly dowdy blazers and skirts, pantsuits. At community meetings, the locals would ask a left field question about cows or something, and her broad white face would light up as she answered—at length. She enjoyed the back and forth, and thinking about how things worked and what would make them better. Like the electrician that walks into your house, pulls open the fuse box, sees the tangled lines, and lights up, “Wow, let me at it.”
It didn’t take her long to get Ségolèned in the Democratic primaries. She’d win a major state, but it would still be Obama's serious masculine face dominating the home page of The New York Times website. On the op-ed pages, he was forceful, definitive and hopeful, unifying, the most transcendent man ever. Clinton was a shrieking harpy, or nagging wife. Her hips were fat and childbearing and repulsive. Her style was schoolmarmish, whiny, overbearing, or castrating. I’d read the comments following the articles online in the Washington Post or New York Times. Most weren’t moderated at the time, and they’d get taken over by Obamabros. Like Ségo, you didn’t need to think about her politics, you could just take one look at her flesh and know that she was awful, a monster, corrupt, who really needed a good fuck. And only a woman thinking with her vagina would be fool enough to award her a vote.
I wondered if this was what they’d always thought, and hadn’t dared type up, sign their name to, and mail to the newspaper. Or if they were egging each other on, radicalizing each other, there in the virtual swamp which is all Id all the time. No consequences.
I’d get all steamed up and pelt my editor, Paul Schindler, with articles about how horrible and violent Obama’s bros were, how unfair the coverage, journalists sneering at Clinton’s voice and body parts instead of dissecting her politics. One evening, when I was out for a walk with Ana going down Boulevard Saint Germain, we passed this fancy shop of overpriced geegaws and I saw a nutcracker in the window, a Hillary nutcracker, with her vagina jaws ready to chew up some guy’s balls. And I just stood there and gaped at how acceptable it was. Hating her. Hating women. Really despising us in the flesh. Right down to our marrow. As if our souls, our spirits were puny, rotten things, our intellects risible and absurd, our bodies disgusting. I could feel my flesh hanging on me. And wanted to rip it off.
And I considered for a minute digging up a paving stone and heaving it through the window. I could see it in my mind, the glass breaking in slow motion and shards falling all over the nutcracker display and into the street where they glinted under the streetlamp. I could hear the crash and crack and tinkle of it, bothering the fancy patrons at the nearby cafés. And I wondered, too, if would I go to jail or just get deported. Would I be forced to leave this small, welcoming apartment with Nathalie Barney’s sycamores rustling their flat dry leaves outside my window?
Later I’d read that the profiteer selling the Hillary nut-cracker, said himself, he'd never do a version of Obama, somebody might think it was racist. I’d see, too, that the South Park cartoon had hidden nuclear weapons in Clinton's cartoon vagina. Yeah, female hips and voices and cunts were still fair game. Reduce Clinton to her parts. She'll go away. Maybe even vaporize.
That’s when I really started looking around at women again, seeing them, their flesh, how they (we) moved through the world. Accepting that in my female body I was interchangeable with them. My homo-ness and penchant for short hair were just window dressing. It never saved me from anything. And I understood, too, why so many African American, and Latina, and Asian women, even if they were happy to have a black candidate, were weeping when Clinton finally threw in the towel during the primary. So far from the center of power, and with their experience of misogyny amplified by the color of their skin, they couldn’t pretend that the female aspect of their bodies didn’t matter. That’s when I took started to put it together for the millionth time how my female body was always there with me in the street. That flesh I’d set aside. The hips and the cunt. My voice and face. A woman. Though I still didn’t understand exactly how my sex and orientation always converge.
Amnesia is part of the package, the tactic. It keeps us separate, keeps us tame. Feeds our own fear of contagion. We decide that bush wasn’t burning after all. It was a trick of the light. And we must have had a fever when that angel that appeared. There was a moat, a wall, a mountain range, not the flimsiest of differences between me and my own resentful vengeful ineffectual mother. Or Ana’s. When academics and journalists ask her about how she and all her homo friends from the literary project El Puente ended up in Cuba’s work camps or jail, they miss half the story.
Lying in her bed with the ailanthus tree still pressing against the window with its insistent green, she said the story really began when she was 12 or 13, and having knock-down, drag-out fights with her mother, all because she started her period, and was suddenly considered not a child, but a woman. And her mother, goaded on by her father, tried to control where she went, control what she wore, control who she hung out with, what time she came back, make her behave as a young girl should. If not, what would the neighbors think?
Things got so bad her grandmother dragged her to Havana where things were better for a few years. But then the rest of the family came, including Ana’s mother who was informed by a rat of an aunt that Ana had been seen hanging out with boys at all hours, all of them debauched and decadent, and her mom then went around complaining about Ana to everyone in sight from the neighborhood watch to the local cops, and before Ana knew it the State Security forces knocked on her door.
Without her mother, the fight over what it meant to be a girl, Ana might not have ended up being marched through the decrepit and overcrowded Guanabacoa women’s prison between two blank-faced guards with their rifles. After weeks of interrogation wouldn’t have been transferred to a mental hospital where they locked her up, strapped her down, attached electrodes to her head and tried to burn her deviance out of her brain. That’s what you do to girls—even if they had steady boyfriends like Ana did then—you see rebellion growing in them, then you act. It’s why women merely rebelling against the veil in Iran are beaten to death, face the gallows. It’s their refusal to be controlled.
I remember that when my mother got frustrated with me she’d threaten to drag me to a shrink. Like my aunt who was a colorful woman, loud, had unapologetic opinions on things, was made fun of. And got locked up from time to time in mental hospitals where I think she got electroshocked. In the end it was the preacher, not the shrink, for me. I tried to explain that the problem was her, my mom, the “troubled” one. She was the one ranting and raving. She was the one, who after fighting with my incorrigible sister, threatened to run her car into a wall, desperate to escape. But he didn’t believe me. No one did. He just raised his hands to the God of Abraham and Isaac and prayed.
Stay tuned for…
Ch 17…
To read previous chapters, check out A Word of Our Own: A Memoir of Bodies, Language, and Home.
xoxo K
This is one of the best installments yet. I’m really looking forward to reading the whole thing all at once. Your perspective is fresh and wise, women-centered and yet associative with the whole world. In other words, lesbian.
Thank you for writing this. It can’t be easy. It’s so necessary.