The Women We Carry
I have women — writers mostly, but some musicians — whose memories (or “neveries,” those dreams or fantasies transformed into memories; those things that never really happened, but feel so real you’re convinced they did) I carry around with me. Memories of the conversations we’ve had, the letters we’ve exchanged. (I have proof of unilateral communication; my messy notes to them are archived in my journals.) They are my friends, my sisters, my cheerleaders (and I theirs) even if they died well before I was born. I write songs and stories about them, name my guitars after them, see their reflections when I look in the mirror (sometimes).
When I think about and write it out like this, I guess it’s pretty creepy.
But after reading Kate Zambreno’s Heroines, I realize it’s not unique. Kate’s got her pockets full with women, too. “Minus a community,” she writes, “I invented one.” Continuing on, quoting Hélène Cixous, “I entered into alliances with my paper soulmates.” Zambreno's soulmates, the madwomen of modernism: Zelda Fitzgerald, Vivienne Eliot, Jane Bowles, Jean Rhys. Zambreno carries them around long after their husbands dropped them.
The Women We Use
For these women were only useful as long as their lives were clay to be molded by their husbands' hands into Great Works: The Waste Land, Tender Is the Night, The Sheltering Sky. Literature, and the men behind it, refused to love them when they were no longer young and beautiful. Zelda, shipped off to the sanitarium and strapped to her bed, unable to escape as the building burned around her. Vivienne, waiting for Eliot outside of his speaking engagements, begging him to come home, begging him to acknowledge her.
These women wanted to be artists themselves—writers, dancers—but the theory of the time was too much intellectual stimulation set them off; their illnesses were begotten from “deviating from one's natural sex role,” Zambreno writes. That is, the men were to do the important work, the women had to sit there and look pretty. Even Virginia Woolf, the one modernist female writer to not get get lost in her husband's shadow, was, on doctor's orders, limited to writing for one or two hours per day. (But she could garden for four.)
The Women We Become (Heroines)
Ultimately, Zambreno's Heroines is a call to arms with the pen as our sword. Reading about how these madwomen before us were so silenced, she implores those of us with creative impulses—all of us—to write unabashedly in our journals, in blogs and Tumblrs, on Twitter, in literary magazines put out by small presses. “The decision to write the private in public,” she writes, “is a political one. It is a counterattack against censorship. To tell our narratives, the truth of our experiences. To write our flawed, messy selves. To fight against the desire to be erased…The imporant thing now is to write…To not hold back…To not be stopped.”
No one will legitimize us or chronicle our lives and the truths that have for so long been ignored or dismissed better than we can. Even if we don't consider ourselves to be writers. Even if we think we lead boring lives not worth being archived. We must fight against our own disappearance from history by finding our voices and using them. “We must,” Zambreno writes, “be our own heroines.”
This article appears in Jan 29 – Feb 4, 2015.