The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant

by Andrea Dworkin

  found was heaven on earth: the bluest sky; water in bands of

  turquoise, lavender, aqua, and silver; rocks so old they had

  whole histories writ en on the underside of their rough edges;

  opium poppies a foot high and blood red; a primitive harbor;

  caves in which people lived; peasants who came down from

  the mountains to the city for political speeches - there would

  be a whole family in a wooden cart pulled by a mule with an

  old man walking the mule; there was light the color of bright

  yellow and bright white melted together, and it never went

  away; even at night, somehow through the dark, the light

  would manifest, an unmistakable presence, and in the darkest

  part of night you could see the tiniest pebble resting by

  your foot. This was an island on which old women in black

  cooked on Bunsen burners, olive trees were wealth, and

  there was a universal politics of noli me tangere with a

  lineage from 400 years of Turkish occupation through Nazi

  occupation; the people were fierce and proud and sometimes

  terribly sad.

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  Heartbreak

  The place changed for me one day. It was Easter. I was with

  an English friend and a Greek lover. The streets began fil ing

  up with gangs of men carrying lit torches. They seemed a

  little KKK-ish. Their intentions did not seem friendly. My

  Greek lover explained that the gangs were looking for Jews,

  the kil ers of Christ. That would be me. My companions and

  I hid behind a pil ar of a church. I don’t think there were other

  Jews on the island, because this search for Christ’s kil ers had

  gone on year after year, even before the Turkish occupation. I

  wondered if the gang of men would kil me. I thought they

  would. I was afraid, but the worst of it was that I was afraid

  my Greek lover would give me up - here she is, the Jew. I was

  the faithless one, because this question was in my heart and

  mind. I wondered what would happen if the torches found us,

  saw us and took us. I wondered if he’d stand up for me then.

  I wondered how the people I’d been living with could turn

  into a malignant crowd, a hate crowd. If there were no other

  Jews on the island, it was because they had been killed or had

  fled. (Tourist season had not yet begun. )

  The next day teenaged boys dove into the Aegean Sea to

  look for a jeweled cross blessed by the Orthodox priest and

  thrown by him into the water; one boy found it and emerged

  like an elegant whale from the water, cross raised above his

  head as high as he could hold it. The sun and the cross merged

  into an astonishing brightness, the natural and the man-made

  making the boy into some kind of religious prince. It was

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  Easter

  beautiful and savage, and I could see myself bleeding out the

  day before, a corpse on cold stone.

  71

  Knossos

  I didn’t know anything about anthropology or the reconstruction of the ancient Cretan palace of Knossos by the English archeologist Sir Arthur Evans. I didn’t know it was the labyrinth of Daedalus or the palace of King Minos, the Minotaur symbolizing generations of sacralized bulls. I had no idea of

  the claims that would be made for it later by feminists: the

  bull was the sacred animal of Goddess religions and cults, the

  symbol of the Great Goddess. One of the great icons of

  modern feminism originates in Crete - the labyris, the double

  ax. Both the bull and the labyris signified the Goddess religion,

  and Knossos was a holy site. From 3, 700 years before Christ

  to 2, 000 years before Christ, Crete was the zenith of civilization, a Goddess-worshiping civilization.

  Originally I saw it from the opposite side of the road. A

  friend and I went to have a picnic in the country north of

  Heraklion; we had wine and a Greek soft cheese that I particularly favored; we were in love and trouble and so talked in our own pidgin tongue made up of Greek, English, and French.

  I found myself going out there alone and finding refuge in the

  intriguing building across the road, Knossos. I found the

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  Knossos

  throne room especially lovely and intimate. I would take a

  book, sit on the throne, and read, every now and then thinking about what it must have been like to live in this small and intimate room. The rest of the palace that had been restored

  was closed, and as soon as I heard the first busload of tourists

  sometime in late April I never went back. But for a while it

  was mine. I felt at home there, something I rarely feel anywhere. Once I was inside, it was as familiar as my own skin. I loved the stone from which everything, including the throne,

  was made. I loved the shape of the room and the throne itself.

  I loved the colors, as I remember them now mostly red and

  blue but very pure, the true colors painted on stone. I don’t

  think it is possible to go back to a place that has such a grip

  on one’s heart; or I can’t. When I die, though, I’m going back,

  as ash, dust unto dust - not to the stone walls or throne of

  Knossos but to a high hill overlooking Heraklion. I belong to

  the place even if the place does not belong to me.

  73

  Kazantzakis

  In the early morning I would walk from my balcony near the

  water to the market. I’d buy olives. There had to be dozens

  of different kinds. Of al the food for sale, olives were the

  cheapest, and I’d buy the cheapest of those - about an eighth

  of an ounce - and then I’d find a cafe and order a cof ee. I’d

  keep fil ing the cup with milk, each time changing the ratio of

  cof ee to milk. I’d have the waiter bring more and more milk.

  As long as there was stil some cof ee in the cup I couldn’t be

  refused. This was a rule I made up in my mind, but it seemed

  to hold true. Early on I stole a salt shaker so that I could clean

  my teeth. Salt is abrasive, but it works.

  I had read about the square where I took my coffee in

  Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel Freedom or Death, a book I carried

  with me almost everywhere once I discovered it (and I stil

  have that paperback copy, brown and brittle). A novelist who

  captures the soul of a country or a people writes fiction and

  history and mythology, and Freedom or Death is such a work.

  It is the story of the 1889 revolt of the Cretans against the

  Turks. It is epic and at the same time it is the story of

  Heraklion, Crete’s largest city and where I was living. Inside

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  Kazantzakis

  the epic there are love stories, stories of fraternal affection and

  conflict, sickening details of war and occupation. In the square

  - the square where I was sitting - the Turks would hang rebels,

  the solitary body often more terrifying than any baker’s

  dozen. Only a writer can show that precise thing, bring the

  disfigured humanity of the dead individual into one’s own

  viscera. One forgets the eloquence of the single person who

  wanted freedom and got death. I could always see the body

  hanging.

  In those days political women did a kind of inner translating so that al the heroes, almost always men e
xcept for the occasional valiant female prostitute, were persons, ungendered, and one could aspire to be such a person. The point for the writer and other readers might well be masculinity itself,

  but the political female read in a different pitch - the body

  shaking the trees with its weight, obstructing both wind and

  light, would be more lyrical, with the timbre in Bil ie Holiday’s

  voice. Freedom or Death set the terms for fighting oppression;

  later, feminism brought those terms to a new maturity with

  the idea that one had to be willing to die for freedom, yes, but

  also willing to live for it. Each day over my prolonged cup of

  coffee I would watch the body hanging in the square and

  think about it, why the body was displayed in torment as if

  the torture, the killing continued after death. I would feel the

  fear it created in those who saw it. I would feel the necessity

  of another incursion against the oppressor - to show that he

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  Heartbreak

  had not won, nor had he created a paralyzing fear, nor had he

  stopped one from risking one’s life for freedom.

  I haven’t read Kazantzakis since I lived on Crete in 1965. I

  have never read Zorba the Greek, his most famous novel

  because of the movie made from the book, a movie I saw

  maybe a decade or two later on television. Freedom or death

  was how I felt about segregation back home, the Vietnam

  War, stopping the bomb, writing, making love, going where

  I wanted when I wanted. Freedom or death was how I felt

  about the Nazis, the fascists, the tyrants, the sadists, the cold

  kil ers. Freedom or death was how I felt about the world

  created by the compromisers, the mediocrities, the apathetic.

  Freedom or death encapsulated my philosophy. So I wrote a

  series of poems cal ed (Vietnam) Variations; poems and prose

  poems I collected in a book printed on Crete called Child; a

  novel in a style resembling magical realism called Notes on

  Burning Boyfriend; and poems and dialogues I later handprinted

  using movable type in a book cal ed Morning Hair. The burning boyfriend was Norman Morrison, the pacifist who had set himself on fire to protest the Vietnam War.

  76

  Discipline

  I learned how to write on Crete. I learned to write every day

  I learned to work on a typewriter that I had rented in

  Heraklion. I had thin, light blue paper. I’d carve out hours for

  myself, the same every day, and no mat er what was going on

  in the rest of my writer’s life I used those hours for writing.

  I learned to throw away what was no good. One asks, How

  does a writer write? And one asks, How does a writer live?

  At first one imitates. I imitated in those years Lorca, Genet,

  Baldwin, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller. I read both Miller

  and Lawrence Durrel on being a writer in Greece. It seemed

  from them as if words could stream down with the light. I did

  not find that to be the case, and so I thought that perhaps I

  was not a writer. Then one wants to know about the one great

  book: can someone young write only one book and have it be

  great - or was there only one Rimbaud for al eternity and the

  gift is al used up? Then one needs to know if what one wrote

  yesterday and the day before has the aura of greatness so that

  the whole thing, eventually, would be the one great book even

  though that might have to be fol owed by a second great

  book. Then one wants to know if the greatness shows in one’s

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  Heartbreak

  face or manner or being so that people would draw back a little on confronting the bearer of the greatness. Then one wants to know if being a writer is like being Sisyphus or perhaps

  Prometheus. One wants to know if writers are a little band of

  gods created in each generation, cursed or blessed with the

  task of finding themselves - finding that they are writers. One

  wants to know if one wil write something important enough

  to die for; or if fascists wil kil one for what one writes; or if

  one can write prose or poetry so strong that nothing can break

  its back. One wonders if one will be able to stand up to or

  against dictators or police power. One wonders if one has the

  illusion of a vocation or if one has the vocation. One wonders

  about how to be what one wants to be - that genius of a

  writer who takes literature to a new level or that genius of a

  writer who brings humanity forward or that genius of a writer

  who tel s a simple, gorgeous story or that genius of a writer

  who holds hands with Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy or that genius

  of a writer who lets the mute speak, especially the last, letting

  the mute speak. Can one make a sound that the deaf can hear?

  Can one write a narrative visually accessible to the blind? Can

  one write for the dispossessed, the marginalized, the tortured?

  Is there a kind of genius that can make a story as real as a tree

  or an idea as inevitable as taking the next breath? Is there a

  genius who can create morning out of words and can one be

  that genius? The questions are hubristic, but they go to the

  core of the writing project: how to be a god who can create a

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  Discipline

  world in which people actually live - some of the people being

  characters, some of the people being readers.

  79

  The Freighter

  I learned how to listen from my father and from being on the

  freighter. My father could listen to anyone: sit quietly, follow

  what they had to say even if he abhorred it - for instance, the

  racism in some of my family members - and later use it for

  teaching, for pedagogy. Through watching him - his calm, his

  stillness, the sometimes deep disapproval buried under the

  weight of his cheeks, his mouth in a slight but barely perceptible frown - I saw the posture of one strong enough to hear without being overcome with anger or desperation or fear.

  I saw a vital man with a conscience pick his fights, and they

  were always policy fights, in his school as a teacher, as a guidance counselor, in the post of ice where he worked unloading trucks. For instance, in the post of ice where he was relatively

  powerless, he’d work on Christian holidays so that his fellow

  laborers could have those days with their families. I saw

  someone with principles who had no need to cal at ention to

  himself.

  The ocean isn’t real y very different, though it can be more

  flamboyant. It simply is; it doesn’t require one’s at ention;

  there is no arrogance however fierce it can become. I took a

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  The Freighter

  freighter from Heraklion to Savannah to New York City. In

  the two and a half weeks on the ocean, I mainly listened: to

  the narrative of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which I read some of

  every day; to the earth buried miles under the ocean; to the

  astonishing stil ness of the water, potentially so wild and deadly,

  on most nights blanketed by an impenetrable darkness; to the

  things living under and around me; to the crew and captain of

  the ship; to the one family also making the trek, the sullenness

  of the teen, the creativity of a youn
ger child, the brightness of

  the adults’ optimism.

  It seems a false analogy - my father and the ocean - because

  my father was a humble man and the ocean is overwhelming

  until one sees that it simply is what it is. From my father and

  from the ocean, I learned to listen with concentration and poise

  to the women who would talk to me years later: the women

  who had been raped and prostituted; the women who had

  been bat ered; the women who had been incested as children.

  I think that sometimes they spoke to me because they had an

  intuition that the difficulty in saying the words would not be

  in vain; and in this sense my father and the ocean gave me the

  one great tool of my life - an ability to listen so closely that

  I could find meaning in the sounds of suf ering and pain,

  anger and hate, sorrow and grief. I could listen to a barely

  executed whisper and I could listen to the shrill rant. I knew

  never to shut down inside; I learned to defer my own reactions

  and to consider listening an honor and a holy act. I learned

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  Heartbreak

  patience, too, from my father and from that ocean that never

  ends but goes round again circling the earth with no meaning,

  nothing outside itself. One need not go to the moon to see the

  cascading roundness of our globe because the ocean shows

  it and says it; there are a million little sounds, tiny noises,

  the same as in a human heart. Had I never been on the

  freighter I think I would never have learned anything except

  the tangled ways of humans fighting - ego or war. The words

  on Kazantzakis’s grave say, “I hope for nothing, I fear nothing, I am free. ” On the freighter and from my father I learned the final lesson of Crete, and it would stand me in good stead

  years later in fighting for the rights of women, especially

  sexual y abused women: I hope for nothing; I fear nothing; I

  am free.

  82

  Strategy

  After I lived on Crete, I went back to Bennington for two