A Dyke A Broad #69
Notes on writing, lesbians, James Baldwin, Céline Sciamma, and birds.
Hello from Paris!
Instead of studying verb tenses for my imminent French test —ie the single largest obstacle to depositing my request for citizenship—I’ve been revising a sure-to-not-be best-selling book about that neglected creature, the brown-haired, ten-toed, slothful Kentucky lesbian which also works as a century of women’s history as told through the lives of my grandmother, my mother, and me.
Why am I revising when I should be studying? Because the only way I get really disagreeable writing done is by using it to ignore something that is even worse. I hammered out the most painful parts of Eating Fire while I was taking care of a relative dying of cancer, because the failure and infighting of the Lesbian Avengers was nothing compared to that. I did the current draft of my equally painful book in progress while European hospitals overflowed with Covid patients and we were locked down during the first wave.
As for A Word of Our Own, my new thing, it deals with ideas about gender and sex that I’m pretty sure will be the last nail in my social coffin, not to mention activating the gender-police trolls in cancelling droves. Given that we’re past our Covid peak—again—the only thing I’m worried about more at the moment is the possibility I will end up in immigration limbo.
After all, we moved here. This is not our usual apartment swap with one foot in Paris another in New York. There is no plan B. We only live in France now. I could keep extending my visa, but governments change, and immigration policies with them. So if I want any kind of security, I really need to become a citizen. That’s a big deal. A bigger deal emotionally than the mountain of paperwork it requires.
At least all that related anxiety puts the possibility of trolls in perspective, and means that this is the perfect time to revise my book.
To help, I’m re-reading a collection of James Baldwin essays, Nobody Knows My Name (1961), about the first period of his life abroad before he returned to the U.S. and then left again. That early stint shaped his writing, allowed him both to be himself and to discover himself: “to my astonishment, to be as American as any Texas G.I.”
In America, the color of my skin had stood between myself and me; in Europe, that barrier was down. Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction, but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch. It turned out that the question of who I was was not solved because I had removed myself from the social forces which menaced me—anyway, these forces had become interior, and I had dragged them across the ocean with me. The question of who I was had at last become a personal question, and the answer was to be found in me.
…
Even the most incorrigible maverick has to be born somewhere. He may leave the group that produced him—he may be forced to—but nothing will efface his origins, the marks of which he carries with him everywhere. I think it is important to know this and even find it a matter for rejoicing, as the strongest people do, regardless of their station.
I think that trip allowed him to develop into one of America’s great writers, to lay claim to a country whether it wanted him or not, and to speak with authority about it.
I also noticed— for the first time— how Baldwin uses “he” a lot. And the word man. He continually interrogates race and what that means. But not sex. In fact, he uses he so often in the first few chapters that I feel quite sure that when he writes he or man he is not thinking at all about any shes. It raises a question I’ve been considering for a while about the difference between the identities (qualities? aspects? of ourselves) that we explore, and those we assume. Raising more questions about the difference between being something versus identifying as it.
When it comes to being a dyke, I’ve always preferred the phrase sexual orientation (passively being something) over sexual identity (which is active) because I liked girls long before I knew there were other people like me, long before I admitted, saw, recognized (active) that I might have something in common with them. It was hard to accept because of the stigma of the word. Lesbian, that disgusting ugly thing.
Still, I was one, regardless of how I felt about the word or even saw myself. A tree doesn’t have to know it’s a tree to be one. Consent of the subject is not required for meaning, though sometimes waiting for it (from humans) is an act of kindness. When I finally came out, my siblings said they already knew.
Other times, of course, refusing to use the right words for the right things makes you complicit in a lie.
Maybe that’s the horns of the dilemma I’m impaled on, trying to figure out the most troublesome section of my book. Truth and kindness are sometimes worlds apart. Especially when it comes to words like dyke. And if I can’t find a way to square the circle, I’m screwed.
This week I read
Maybe because I’m thinking about gender and identity and women, I was so fucking happy to find Elif Batuman's New Yorker piece on Céline Sciamma’s Quest for a New, Feminist Grammar of Cinema. It’s really perceptive, and far more lively than a lot of New Yorker articles. You should read the whole thing, but here are some choice morsels.
The quiet radicalism of “Portrait,” which showed how easily a romantic film could dispense with many seemingly indispensable mainstays—conflict, a musical score, men—merged with a twenty-first-century political moment.
…
The “female gaze,” a term often invoked by and about Sciamma, is an analogue of the “male gaze,” popularized in the nineteen-seventies to describe the implied perspective of Hollywood movies—the way they encouraged a viewer to see women as desirable objects, often fragmented into legs, bosoms, and other nonautonomous morsels. For Sciamma, the female gaze operates on a cinematographic level, for example in the central sex scene in “Portrait.” Héloïse and Marianne are both in the frame, they seem unconcerned by their own nudity, the camera is stationary—not roving around their bodies—and there isn’t any editing. The goal is to share their intimacy—not to lurk around ogling it, or to collect varied perspectives on it.
…
When I saw “Portrait,” it felt like an answer to questions I’d been thinking about for years. In 2016, when I was thirty-eight, I met my partner, who is a woman. It was my first nonheterosexual relationship, and it resulted in a series of changes to my views not just of gender but also of genre (a word that, in French, conveniently covers both). For the first time, I realized the extent to which my ideas about womanly comportment—about the visual and auditory effects you were supposed to produce when you were, say, having sex, or driving a car, or writing a novel—came from movies. Such behavior, which had felt appropriate and legible in the presence of a real or an imagined man, now felt fake and insane.
Random News
Don’t tease me. It’s probably the only way I can break my addiction which I really hate. Meta threatens to shut down Facebook and Instagram in Europe over data transfer issues
Interesting thoughts here about city planning, but an idiotic title. Are playgrounds a form of incarceration? No, no they’re not. Seriously Guardian.
The Guardian redeems themselves though by posting this video shot by a bird. Kleptomaniac New Zealand parrot steals GoPro, films airborne escape
Sarah Ditum’s review of Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis Conclusion? Both refreshing and annoying.
Random tweets
That’s it for this week. I can’t believe I wrote my whole 69th newsletter and didn’t make any sex jokes at all. Sorry. Though I did have a lot about animals.
Disgruntledly yours,
Long time reader, first time commenter. Keep working on the hard part of your book. You will crack it. When I get to that place, put the mess of words in the front of my mouth and try to tease out the truth with my mouth, so I can spit out the rest.
Something like that. We need to read your book, and only you can write it.