Hello from Paris!
Holidays, the gloom of winter, not to mention a pandemic, don’t bring out the best in me. After this I may take a little break from the newsletter. On the other hand, who knows?
Trigger Warning: Extra disgruntled.
How to Make Black-Eyed Peas
So, we did it, threw water out the window on the stroke of midnight, as 2020 became 2021. For all the good it did us. Or does us. Or will. And New Year’s Day I made a stir-fry version of hoppin’ john with leftover bulgur wheat and black-eyed peas (for luck), and slivers of kale (for money), plus bits of chorizo and garlic and a dried chipotle pepper (because they taste good). In short, we covered all the superstitious bases yet again. Mostly to avoid that niggling feeling in the back of the brain of something forgotten, something potentially dangerous left undone.
Superstitious. I couldn’t remember the word. Had to google black cats and 13 for the word to pop up. Is it dementia like my parents? Stress? Too many transatlantic and linguistic moves? Does it matter? At twenty, I could tell you every sin my mother committed against me since the day I turned twelve and spent the day weeping, after which things were almost permanently screwed.
I’ve been having gaps for a few years now. Not just gaps, huge blank grey foggy landscapes like you see in sci-fi movies before the screaming starts. Like that time I was back in Kentucky and had drinks with four or five women from my university, and they told the most amazing stories. Do you remember this? And do you remember that? Laughing their heads off the whole time, while I stretched my mouth out in an echoing, but lying, smile, because I was freaked out that I didn’t actually remember a thing. Not the car that caught fire(!). Not the mugging on my doorstep(!).
Since then, those memories have returned, or maybe it is just their story versions that have taken root. Perhaps that is how memories are renewed, through these conversations that take place over cocktails, or holiday meals. During reunions. That’s how we preserve and transmit what we know. Yeah, maybe that’s why I’ve forgotten. No ten-year parties. Or family Thanksgivings.
Sometimes it bugs me, how I forget. Though sometimes, I’m glad. There are so many ways to tell my story. A Kentucky girl that ended up in New York, in Paris. How romantic. No one’s interested in the violence, even me, of remembering what it cost, cutting things off at the roots like an amputation. No one wants to know that when I make black-eyed peas like my grandmother did, it comes back. I want to puke.
Yeah, I remember her stirring a giant disgusting pot with greasy hamhocks in some relative’s house in the country. In the summertime there, it was idyllic, we would get lost in the corn. Downstairs in the cellar, there were rows upon rows of pickles and preserves. And I could tell that story. Sure I could. Even write a schmaltzy, delusional, nostalgic cookbook that I could actually sell complete with family photos.
But then I remember, too, my grandmother telling me how happy she was to leave the farm. How happy when she got her tubes tied because she’d seen so many women die in bloody beds after… how many kids, six? eight? And how the man would go and replace his woman with another, who would take care of the kids, breed new ones. Change diapers while tending the garden and washing and cleaning and cooking and getting beat if they burned the biscuits or tried to flee. Yeah, my grandmother was always so happy just to go to the cupboard and grab a can of something, cut open a plastic package of hotdogs and boil them up. What a miracle to go to the grocery store. (Fuck slow food.)
I remember, too, how my mother tried to shove me back in that kitchen, when she declared, at my coming out, that she “didn’t want to hear from me until I was the (straight) girl that God wanted me to be.” Better give up that nonsense and find myself a man. No matter that she hated all that herself, and used to tell us what a mistake it was, having us kids. The epitaph of her glorious marriage? At least he didn’t hit me. And I remember how, when we all left, she bought herself a microwave for frozen pizzas. And didn’t even bother with the canned green beans she fed us, the Hamburger Helper.
So yeah, every year, something painful happens when I stir them peas. Season them. Remember, at least briefly, the women who cooked them. The exhaustion often overshadowing the love, the resentment souring the joy, death eclipsing life, and the work, my god, the women’s work without end. And the price I paid to escape it. Amen, amen.
Abortion Finally Legal In Argentina
[With post-email additions] This video gives you a great sense of the enormous crowds of women present to celebrate the decision. The countries of Latin America and the Caribbean have some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the world. It is only legal in Uruguay, Cuba, Guyana and now Argentina—if they can get health care workers to actually do it.
In El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic, it is completely banned, no exceptions. In El Salvador even women who have had a miscarriages are in jail, suspected of abortion. Lots of women die every year from illegal abortions. Most of the deaths are among poor women who don’t have the resources to travel for a legal abortion done in a medical setting, and are afraid to seek help when their backstreet abortion goes wrong.
Fuck everyone who denies the sexed body and its consequences, especially if they pretend to support economic justice.
That’s all for a bit.
Happy New Year, and WEAR A FUCKING MASK.
Disgruntledly yours,
Shelly Von Nogsvell