A Dyke A Broad #63
On Christmas, cooking, censorship, and my role model, Cuban poet Georgina Herrera.
Hello from Paris!
Remember that ankle I sprained nine months ago? Well, I did it again. I was on my way to a friend’s house and looking up at a church, when I stepped onto the edge of the curb, and like a runner on a starting block was propelled forward, not to victory, but onto a delightful stretch of rock hard concrete.
In a Christmas miracle, though, I did not crack my woolgathering head, or screw up the knee I landed on. Likewise, the hand I caught myself with did not break, sprain or even land in poop. I just turned my ankle, and after sitting on the ground for several minutes getting stared at by the neighbors, and cursing my fate, I stood up gingerly, and continued limping on my way. See? Miracle.
I did, however, revise my culinary plans. After finishing my errand, I hobbled over to Picard, the local frozen food place, and got puff pastry hors d’oeuvres, some fish, and a fancy chocolate hazelnut dessert, all of which we washed down with a bubbly Burgundy crémant, and a lot of Netflix including the sweet Swedish Dancing Queens, about a girl who ends up passing (briefly) as a boy so she can dance at a drag club. Then Don't Look Up, the new Meryl Streep, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence thing that NBC News called a “A light-hearted look at the end of the world”, though “Scathing satire” seems more accurate.
It was interesting, not cooking for a holiday, and just shoving stuff in the oven, none of it traditional for me. Hell, the dessert I got wasn’t even a bûche, one of those jelly rolls masquerading as a Yule log. And there were a ton of those available. I just liked the other cake better.
I wonder if it’s a good thing. You may have noticed that I have a weird relationship to cooking. Part of me likes it. I picked up some skills working as a prep cook in a shitty restaurant in Yellowstone National Park one summer, and there’s pleasure in exercising them (and eating the results). It helps, too, that even after being together for almost three decades (!) The Girl still finds it astounding that I can take a bunch of literally raw ingredients and transform them into food.
Of course, cooking is fraught, too. It’s work. And it’s so fucking gendered. I never saw my grandfather cook a thing, or even get a dish of margarine out of the fridge. My father only burnt burgers on the grill, seasoned well with lighter fluid. And because it’s been women’s work, cooking often evokes my mother or grandmother, especially when I make foods I grew up with. During the holidays, preparing traditional food feels both like an act of love, a hat tip, especially to my grandmother who worked so hard, but also a big fuck-you to my mother, to the region I came from. See, anybody at all can make this shit, even the dyke you sent off into exile and didn’t welcome in your house for years. I can claim it whether you like it or not.
I can even make other people’s traditional food. I had a Bengali roommate that taught me to make a few “Indian” dishes. And Ana’s brother says my Cuban black beans are better than their mom’s. Probably because she came to cooking late, and I’m much more patient, at least sometimes. I spend a long time making the sofrito, a sauté of bell pepper and onion and garlic, which is the basis of a lot of Cuban food. Get that right, you’re golden. Though I didn’t dare do it until the first time we came to France, and had to hunt far and wide for black beans, finally finding them in an “exotic” African shop where I also found peanut butter. And okra. I hadn’t eaten any since my grandmother fried some up for me, chopped in rounds and lightly breaded in cornmeal with lots of salt and black pepper.
But because I didn’t make anything traditional this year, she wasn’t at my table. Or my mother either. Or past selves. There were no threads at all connecting me to Kentucky, or New York, little tying me to the vast traditions of France, except the idea of feasting itself. It was weird. Left me feeling strangely light. I kind of liked it. It also reminded me of that Elizabeth Bishop poem.
One Art
The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster. —Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident the art of losing’s not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
Plus
Last week, Cuban poet Georgina Herrera died of Covid in Havana.
She was one of my few role models. Probably you’ve never heard of her, but she was a remarkable poet, and an even more remarkable person. She was a friend of Ana’s from the literary project El Puente, and I was lucky enough to meet her on Ana’s one and only trip back to the island.
What I remember most was her story of how she dealt with censorship. Telling us about how, when she started writing for radio, the censors informed her that she had to submit her ideas to them. She refused, and told them she was happy for them to censor anything she produced—once it was done. But before that, she had to be free to do what she wanted.
I knew how brave that was, to tell them such a thing. And that’s when the lightbulb went off. That the real power of censors is not crossing out lines in books or deleting scenes from films, but crawling inside your head, constraining your ideas when they are just beginning to take shape. Because if you agree to that, pretty soon you’ll do it to yourself, anticipating their reaction. In short, you become them, are your own censor, and fearfully navigate an increasingly narrow strait until there’s nothing of you left.
Georgina risked doing work that no one would ever see or hear, but inside her head she was free. The freest person in Cuba. Freer in many ways than me.
Here’s a nice interview in English.
We also lost Joan Didion.
She’s very meme-able, and I used to think about this quote a lot.
I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.
– Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)
Lately, this is the one that’s on my mind.
I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.”
– UC Riverside commencement address (1975).
In her own words: 23 of the best quotes.
There’s also an interesting interview with a posthumous Andy Warhol in Interview Magazine.
A few last words on the holidays…
Megan Phelps-Roper on Christmas (and also Canada Day and Thanksgiving).
I came to see these periodic celebrations not as a denial of all that’s wrong in the world or in our lives, but as a reminder of the beauty we hope to preserve in them—a choice to build on good things, which is both more difficult and more worthwhile than the choice to tear down and root out.
A PSA I forgot to share last week…
The clitoris has 8,000 nerve endings (and nine other things we learned from a new artwork)
That’s it for this week.
Disgruntledly yours,