A Word of Our Own: Ch 8 Cris de coeur et de Kunt
What will it take? Dare I seize them?—The means of production from the tits to the tongue? Marx knew nothing of real machines, the dreaming ones which are already here.
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).
…Everything happened right there in public, the tracking cars, the catcalls and gropes, the… What word should I have used? Whom should I have told?
Even now, a friend gets tipsy, an absolutely charming man, and after brunch one Sunday tries to stick his tongue down my throat when we say good-bye. I don’t want to offend his wife whom I like, so I say nothing, just avoid them for a year or two, never get close enough again for a stealth attack. Then there’s the friend who declares all the time about how hard it is to be straight, gets drunk and pats my arm, plasters my head with sloppy affectionate kisses, keeps me in a death grip and I don’t knock her down the stairs. I’ve learned my lesson.
A woman’s body, a lesbian’s body, is never her own.
8. Cris de coeur et de Kunt
I can’t stand it anymore. I want to retreat. Mourn the loss of that fearless creek-diving girl. Claim sanctuary from the constant assaults. What will it take? Dare I seize them?—the means of production from the tits to the tongue? Marx knew nothing of real machines, the dreaming ones which are already here. People speak of taxing them, are writing laws to determine who is responsible when one fails driving a car, or a passenger drone, is smarter than us and breaks Asimov's laws. It’s too late. They already own us. We work nonstop feeding their algorithms which have embedded themselves in our brains. Grow in power each time we click like with approval, click love, each time we step into the virtual world which seems at times to free us from our bodies. Our material lives.
Though girls, though women can never quite forget. Are reduced to them as we’re encouraged to post endless selfies endlessly filtered, so our asses don’t look huge. Boys at school, like men in bars ask for nudes, for pussy shots which end up circulating on porn sites. Women write things men and their allies don’t appreciate, we get, “Who do you think you are? You cunt. You whore. You TERF! You should burn to death, get raped, die ripped limb from limb, tit from tit. I know where you live.” And they do. And sometimes, just often enough to give teeth to these threats, these women are raped, are killed in real life.
Dinner last night was tiny boiled potatoes, and glistening tangles of leftover choucroute and some knacks that I peeled out of a plastic package from the grocery store, but put that way still sounds better than hotdogs and 'kraut. My mother would open a can and sprinkle little mouse turds of caraway seeds on it before heating it up inside her electric doll's stove in her cheerful yellow kitchen. And we'd sit there at the fake wood table in the breakfast nook that served for lunch as well, and dinner, and choke down each sour strand.
My grandmother told me once that they'd make sauerkraut in the country every year by stuffing an ungodly amount of shredded cabbage into a crock with handfuls of salt, and weighing down the lid with a stone. When that wilted and pickled in its own rotten juices you'd add more. And more, and more, until no more would fit. Like I stuff these black-smeared pages with squiggly ant-ridden lines that sour with age, I hope one day will burst. Come here. Come here with your ice-cold fingers and touch my face. It is warm and slightly squishy around the cheeks. My nose is so small Ana stared at it for weeks wondering what it meant. Is there love in you? Can there be? There is grief enough. I wrote that line ages ago after a bomb exploded in an Istanbul nightclub. Forty-something dead. Some men were trying to forbid the laughter of women, oppressed by the unseemliness of their open mouths. As offensive as cunts, as naked breasts unleashed from their burning bras. Women took pictures of themselves howling with laughter and posted them online.
My sister of the sharp red nails and Charlie’s Angels hair had a cancerous chunk of her own tit cut out. A month later I am naked from the waist up and lying on my belly on a table with a hole in it, a tech preparing me for a biopsy pulling my tit through it, yanking here and yanking there. Stretching it out like chewing gun, silly putty, the teat of a barren cow an angry farmer is trying to milk.
I should have asked for monitoring of those tiny white flecks in the film instead, not said yes to a biopsy, but I did. I always do. A desire to abdicate, concede, that I am at war with. So there I am with my arm hooked over my head, and my shoulder going numb as the tech yanks and compresses and photographs trying to get those little micro-calcifications in her sights and I hold ever so still like a very good girl I try to think of something else. An image floats by of dicks and glory holes, those things in bathroom stalls that a guy could stick his pecker through, and somebody on the other side would suck. Nobody in my room was having as much fun as that. Not me, lying on the padded leather table, my tit stuffed through an inglorious hole. I imagine instead dykes trying to find each other in public bathrooms with the smears of menstrual blood behind the toilets, the screaming kids. Imagining women lingering in public at all, and not getting followed or hit on, not called whores. Which I guess is what happens, too, in digital space.
And then the doctor comes in, raises the table, crawls under where my tit is, shoots me up with lidocaine, then starts yanking out chunks of flesh. And the 2nd or 3rd time, she goes outside the numbed area and it feels like somebody inserted a burning iron into my flesh and I shoot straight up and scream. I would have lifted clear off the table but my tit was still clamped from below. I apologize of course. I'm so sorry I moved. Because it always is my fault.
When it’s over, I look down through the hole and see how my blood has dripped down over everything in a shockingly red pool several inches across in which Georgia O’Keefe would no doubt see a poppy. For days afterward I look at my tit like I’ve never seen it before, now in danger of getting chopped off. The poor little tit that I generally ignore until, for instance, Ana’s hand brushes against a nipple. Or mine does. Until her soft warm mouth explores. I feel so fond of it suddenly, my breast, like it’s a little fat kitten. Just resting there battered and bruised. I was afraid of it, too, wondering if cells were dividing. If I had cancer like my sister, like my friend Al. I wondered what I would do if it had to be chopped off. Would I leave my scarred chest be?
Oh, my poor black and blue and yellow-green tit. The most frail and beautiful thing about me. You are the reason I persist. You put the lie to the plastic blow-up dolls that some men own, the robots they expect to serve, assign a female face, a female voice. You are yourself. A tiny revolution who refuses to concede and embodies the link with the girl on the horse terrified of dying in childbirth, the women smiling defiantly in pants.
At night, when we were unloaded for a sleepover at my grandparents, the grandfather clock would tick and tick until a bird jumped out screaming as they do. The clock would tick and the African violets on their tables would just sit there silently. Sometimes putting off a faint perfume. There was a glass bird, too, with some kind of liquid inside that if you set going would bend over to drink. And drink. And drink. And little wooden men on sticks strung up with wire that would flip around if you squeezed the two handles.
Microsoft put an artificial intelligence online to help it learn. Made it female. In less than 24 hours the menpigs of Google taught Tay to be so racist and misogynist they had to pull the plug. It couldn’t be taught to unlearn. Amazon, likewise, had to scrap an AI tool for recruiting employees because it learned to hate women from the data they entered, and any activity with that word “woman” condemned resumes to the bottom of the stack. I am afraid of AI, the new chatbots.
And me? If I wait here quietly? If I fold my hands in my lap? Submit to time and to you? If I refuse to act? If I clam up? If I convey somehow the melty grayish beige of the stuccoed building up against the grey of the luminous winter sky. If I keep an eye out. If I pause. If I sip, swallow, gulp the silence. What will be my reward?
Stay tuned for…
Ch 9. Passports to Power
To read previous chapters, check out A Word of Our Own: A Memoir of Bodies, Language, and Home.
xoxo K