A Word of Our Own: Ch 9 Passports to Power
Sometimes, when I scurry past, I lift my head and look at them, the men. I see the melancholy beauty of their eyes. The false bravado of the slouching form. The loneliness of a weatherbeaten face...
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).
…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?
9. Passports to Power
But if I don’t. If I say it, imprinted as I am with fear, just how much comes down to dicks. Cunts and dicks and dicks and cunts. And tits. Who has them and who doesn’t. These things that shouldn’t mean anything, but do. Then what? What revenge will you take? I’m tired of pretending they are neutral bits of flesh. And that our bodies themselves cast shadows only as large or as small as we are. And sure, a dick ain’t nothing but an appendage, like skin ain’t nothing but a sack our bones rest in. They are quirks of biology, and don’t say anything about us at all. But… two things can be true at once. That, like skin color, dicks and cunts mean nothing. But they also mean everything, and resonate with all the force of history, every moment of our embodied lives, and only the privileged or deluded deny it.
Dicks, in particular, are not just blobs of flesh for pissing and pleasure, a delivery system for human pollen like the stamen of a plant. Everywhere I can think of, they are passports to freedom and power, to public space. In the working class neighborhood where I now live in East Paris, only men hang around the metro exit after dusk, only males at the café on the corner after a certain hour. Even during the day, women are scarce, as if dicks were a requirement, a passport of safe passage. Women like me can only scurry through. Usually with our hands full. Though here the men aren’t actively hostile. To Ana and me, anyway. It was worse that year we lived in St. Germain. A white middle-aged man on a motorcycle knocked us off the sidewalks and then called us whores, dykes, foreigners when we complained. Another white gentleman on the subway platform shoved Ana and kicked her for no reason, then ran away.
I’ve just been to the pharmacy. Over there’s a Polish lady with her shopping, there a Tunisian woman with an infant and two toddlers hurrying home to make lunch. Later on, it will be a Senegalese woman with bags of plantains or okra, dried fish, a young white hipster with her frozen dinners. Women always in motion. And even then in any neighborhood in any city are expected to cede way. Alter their trajectory. Let men, like a metaphor, pass. Sometimes the dykes I know play pedestrian chicken, stand their ground on the sidewalk. Men always crash into them in surprise, and anger. Always. Unless the dykes are large. Most of us are not.
Fifteen minutes away, near Place de la Réunion, there is a basketball court and small concrete soccer field. I have never seen one girl there among the dozens, the hundreds of teenaged boys laughing and playing and having fun. Across the street there is a tea shop where only men gather, drinking the hot, sweet brew inside or clogging the narrow sidewalk with or without a cigarette. Sometimes they are old. And sometimes young. You have to pass between them like a gauntlet if you don’t cross the street. Women usually do. Both the women in their headscarfs. And the bourgie bohemian chicks with their bare heads and high heels, as constrained to reveal as the others are to hide. I take a breath and make myself walk between them. I don’t like to be reluctant. I don’t like to be afraid.
Down the block more men slouch in front of a different cafe, remind me of the church deacons from my childhood who hung out at the parking lot entrance before the service, smoking and shooting the breeze in their Sunday suits and crew cuts, patting my head, giving me mints to go away, join the women inside making coffee, putting out cups.
Now I am part of the sea of women rushing down the sidewalk. Who never stop for a cigarette, or just to loiter. Never pause unless their job is the street. Traffic cop, stall holder in the market, prostitute. Sometimes, when I scurry past, I lift my head and look at them, the men. I see the melancholy beauty of their eyes. The false bravado of the slouching form. The loneliness of that weatherbeaten face exhaling smoke which reminds me of my uncle Earl. And I feel sorry for them, these men. Who have nothing but their cafés and each other, trapped in their roles as I am in mine.
But then I pass a message on the street. Wheat-pasted pages on a crumbling wall. “UN VIOL EN FRANCE TOUTES LES 6 MN.” A rape in France every 6 minutes. And I remember who the rapist is. Who the raped person is. I hear my sulky uncle demanding, “When are you girls gonna put on a skirt? Shouldn’t you have a boyfriend by now? Be married?”
Then I see another wall, “MONIQUE TUÉE À COUPS DE FUSIL PAR SON MARI 104è FÉMINICIDE.” Monique shot by her husband, the 104th femicide [in France this year]. Even our homes aren’t ours. There is no where to keep our bodies safe. Then I read about a massacre somewhere, Toronto, maybe. And in the press we learn more about the “incels”, those involuntary celibates, than the dead women. Poor things, poor suffering men, troubled men, unwillingly chaste men, pitiful men, poor men, angry men, violent men. Men who had been disappointed. Men who had been rejected. Men who thought they deserved better. Men who were thrilled to see our blood on the streets. Men who thought there should be more. Men, men, men, men, men.
Little to nothing about dead women. The space we occupy is somehow always both excessive and empty.
“I long for the freedom to go out alone: to go, to come, to sit on a bench… to look at the decorated store windows, to enter churches and museums, and to stroll in the old streets in the evening.” That’s what Marie Bashkirtseff wrote in her 1879 diary. Amandine Lucile Aurore Dupin wore the heavy grey suit of a young male student and became Georges Sand. “With these little iron-shod heels, I was solid on the pavement. I flew from one end of Paris to the other. It seemed to me that I could go round the world. And then, my clothes feared nothing.” Not a sign of the male sex, but of male freedom.
Even now, I would like to—fly fearlessly around the city. I go out by myself but the antennas are always activated. Who is that walking behind me with heavy steps? I dress more androgynously, colorlessly when I go out alone. Think of my mother who never ate by herself in a restaurant, and only giggled when I suggested it after her divorce, “Oh, I couldn’t. People would stare.”
And I think, too, of my grandmother, Elma Criswell, Elma Criswell Pierce that girl on the horse in a flour sack dress who never went further than her garden unless it was to go to church. Always handed over her money to her husband. Constrained her body in a girdle and a dress. And told me once when we were looking at a pair of wooden knitting needles that she was so, so happy when she got her tubes tied, after bearing her fourth child at 21. She was just happy to be alive, not one more corpse laying on a bloody bed. Elma Criswell Pierce who encouraged her daughter to get her own tubes tied years later after her third kid, despite her papist husband.
For so long, their histories didn’t seem real. I distanced myself from their weakness, vulnerability, those ugly housecoats, which smelled of failure and submission, had nothing to do with me, couldn’t possibly. I pause in a café for an espresso. It coats my mouth with bitterness. I’m an idiot. Realize with a start, how every aspect of my dyke life was built on that of my mother, my grand- my great grandmother. All those women I scorned. It’s no miracle that I can earn money and keep and spend it. Pay my way with my very own credit card. That I know what numbers and letters mean on the menu. Can wear pants I smooth a crumb from. Sit alone, unaccompanied by a man. Each of those rights that makes my dyke life possible was dearly bought. Elsewhere, women are still fighting for them. The Taliban have banned females in Afghanistan from almost everything, school at any age, working in public. In Iran, young women fighting for the freedom of their sex are beaten, killed, poisoned in their dorm rooms.
Even when laws fall, it’s not enough. We’re up against so much. Sometimes ourselves. I can feel them there, the borders I track which are invisible, but fiercely guarded. Taboos implanted like shock collars. So effective I forget why I always stop at that shrub. That post. Here we can go, and no further. Here it’s safe. Though it never is.
It doesn’t always take, not at first. One weekend we go to the Bagatelle Park. On a path near the rosemary and lavender, we passed an Asian family with the father trying to pin flowers in his baby girl's hat. She was three maybe, and fought him off. She had a little skirt on and that fancy hat. When he let her go, she threw it on the ground, raised her little leg and stomped the rounded crown of it like any country girl would kill a snake.
Ana and I cheered.
Stay tuned for…
Ch 10…
To read previous chapters, check out A Word of Our Own: A Memoir of Bodies, Language, and Home.
xoxo K