Both her multilinguistic writing and her spiritual meditations foster mestiza consciousness by breaking down dualities (virgin/whore, supernatural/natural, human/animal, spirit/body) and enable Anzaldúa to cultivate a “tolerance for ambiguity,”38 leading her to proclaim herself reborn as a paradoxical creature:
As a mestiza I have no country, my homeland cast me out; yet all countries are mine because I am every woman’s sister or potential lover. (As a lesbian I have no race, my own people disclaim me; but I am all races because there is the queer of me in all races). I am cultureless because, as a feminist, I challenge the collective cultural/religious male-derived beliefs of Indo-Hispanics and Anglos; yet I am cultured because I am participating in the creation of yet another culture, a new story to explain the world and our participation it, a new value system with images and symbols that connect us to each other and to the planet.39
Echoing Virginia Woolf’s declaration in Three Guineas (1938)—“as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world”40—Anzaldúa claims her place in a trans-Atlantic feminist lineage.
The success of Borderlands/La Frontera reflected a growing awareness among American feminists that the women’s movement had always been an international phenomenon.41 By the mid-eighties, the allure of French feminists—Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Monique Wittig, and Julia Kristeva—prompted translations of theoretical texts that harnessed the psychoanalytic ideas of Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida’s theory of deconstruction to address an issue comparable to the project that engaged Gloria Anzaldúa: affirming the feminine component in what has historically been subordinated, repressed, or made monstrous. Like Anzaldúa, the French feminists reinvented mythological figures (Cixous’ “The Laugh of the Medusa”), envisioned alternatives to systems based on male primacy (Irigaray’s “This Sex Which Is Not One”), celebrated homosexuality (Wittig’s utopian Les Guérillères), and plumbed abject emotional states (Kristeva’s Powers of Horror and Black Sun).42
Through their influence, American feminists began turning to international matters. Robin Morgan produced the 1984 anthology Sisterhood Is Global, to which even Simone de Beauvoir contributed. Determined not “to settle for monoculturalism,” Morgan promoted the Action Alerts of the Sisterhood Is Powerful Institute,43 and at the end of the eighties, she took over the editorship of a newly international Ms. magazine. Feminist multiculturalism in the eighties was extended but also questioned by the scholarship of the postcolonial critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who was born in Calcutta a few years before the partition of India, attended graduate school at Cornell, and became Derrida’s first English translator.
Deeply committed to comparative literature, Spivak nevertheless wondered whether well-meaning Western intellectuals could grasp the situation of third world women. In her 1983 paper “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” 44 she reminded Western intellectuals that the female subaltern—a subjugated person with no public agency—cannot be heard or read. At the same time, she established literacy programs for children in her native India, just as Gloria Anzaldúa turned her attention to bilingual children’s books so she could teach the Chicano/a past. Anzaldúa appreciated Spivak’s contribution to postcolonialism, though like us, she found “Can the Subaltern Speak?” hard going: “it took me a long time to decipher her sentences.” 45
ADRIENNE RICH’S JUDAISM
During the eighties, while Audre Lorde was helping to found feminist support groups in the Caribbean, South Africa, and Cuba, Adrienne Rich took a turn toward identity politics that would eventually lead her to map her own origins as a “split at the root” Southern Jew. “Split at the root”—a line from one of her early poems—is the title she gave to a 1982 essay in which she struggles with the subtle anti-Semitism she had inherited from her Jewish father.46 Arnold Rich, a pathologist at Johns Hopkins, never spoke of his Judaism but was secular, “deist,” and assimilated.47
The Rich family, she tells us in this piece, was proud and private. Helen, Adrienne’s Gentile mother, had been raised in an atmosphere of Southern gentility and tried to bring Adrienne and her sister up in the same way. Were the parents—or just Arnold—deliberately repudiating Judaism? When Adrienne began to question her father about his religion, he told her “measuredly” that he had never “denied” that he was a Jew, but Judaism simply was “not important” to him. Yet (and this was to be crucial to her life) Rich quotes a note to her from one of her father’s Gentile colleagues, who believed that Jews “of this [Southern] background looked down on Eastern European Jews, including Polish Jews and Russian Jews, who generally were not as well educated.”48
Eastern European Jews, recent immigrants, were noisy and vulgar, from this assimilated perspective. Thus, when she went off to Radcliffe, Rich’s mother advised her to respond to forms questioning her religion with the word “Episcopalian.” And in fact, both Adrienne and her sister were baptized and sent to Sunday services as Episcopalians. Nor were the concepts of Judaism and anti-Semitism ever discussed in the household. When at 16 Rich went by herself to see one of the first films depicting the liberation of the Nazi camps, with their stacks of corpses and skeletal survivors, her parents were “not pleased”; she felt “accused of being morbidly curious, . . . sniffing around death for the thrill of it.” But gradually she came to understand that though the word “Jew” and the phrase “anti-Semitism” were “taboo” in the “castle of air” where she grew up, she herself would have met the same fate as the abject victims on the screen: “According to Nazi Logic, my two Jewish grandparents would have made me a Mischling, first degree—nonexempt from the Final Solution.” 49
At Radcliffe, she met Jewish girls who were comfortable with their origins and taught her about Judaism. Yet even there, she was ambivalent toward her roots. In a dress shop, she had a conversation with a refugee who knelt at her feet . . . hemming her skirt. “You Jewish?” the woman asked in a “hurried whisper.” And then “eighteen years of training in assimilation” prompted her to mutter, “No.” “There are betrayals in my life that I have known at the very moment were betrayals: this was one of them,” she comments.50 Yet the betrayal was not so much a betrayal of the immigrant dressmaker, who was just hazarding a guess, as it was of herself, the girl who was trying to come to terms with her heritage but lied about it.
Why did Adrienne Rich’s parents refuse to attend her wedding to Alfred Conrad in Harvard’s Hillel House? Conrad—né Cohen—was the “wrong” kind of Jew, from an Orthodox Eastern European family. “My father,” she wrote, “saw this marriage as my having fallen prey to the Jewish family, eastern European division.”51 There was a break with her parents that lasted for several years, until they allowed themselves to meet their three Conrad grandsons.
A companion to this essay on familial taboos, the poem “Sources” (which Rich wrote in the same year), is a sometimes angry, sometimes loving meditation on the confusing origins she explores in “Split at the Root.” Tellingly the poem returns, after “sixteen years,” to the Vermont farmhouse near the field where Alfred Conrad shot himself. Brooding on the dwelling’s location in a stony New England town, she notes that she can find “No names of mine,” instead descendants of Puritans or of French Catholic trappers. Yet the house itself, perhaps a symbol of the America in which she feels increasingly uneasy, seems to ask her questions: “From where does your strength come, you Southern Jew? / split at the root, raised in a castle of air?”52 At the heart of the text is an implicit dialogue between the two men whose warring influences shaped her spirit: her austere deistic father and her Eastern European Jewish husband.
“Sources” is full of evocative description—the Vermont countryside and its history, the chronicles of Judaism and the Holocaust, family memories—but two central passages, addressed to the poet’s father and to her husband, are in prose, as if they were almost helplessly expressive plaints torn from her split-at-the-root self. To the father, she writes, “For years I struggled with
you: your categories, your theories, your will, the cruelty that came inextricable from your love. . . . All this in a castle of air, the floating world of the assimilated who know and deny they will always be aliens.”53 But as she works through her anger, she finds a way of reimagining this man who had been to her “the face of patriarchy.”
I saw the power and arrogance of the male as your true watermark; I did not see beneath it the suffering of the Jew, the alien stamp you bore, because you had arranged that it should be invisible to me. It is only now, under a powerful, womanly lens, that I can decipher your suffering[.]54
A “womanly lens”: Rich implies here that because of her own feminist awakening she can finally begin to comprehend the secret suffering that her father had made invisible to her. Her own “consciousness raising” has raised her consciousness of her father’s pain, the “split” in his being.
Where the address to her dead father is both reproachful and regretful, the plainspoken letter to her dead husband is troubled and tender. We quote key passages from it below:
I have resisted this for years, writing to you as if you could hear me. It’s been different with my father: he and I always had . . . a battle between us, it didn’t matter if one of us was alive or dead. But, you, I’ve had a sense of protecting your existence, not using it merely as a theme for poetry or tragic musings. . . .
Yet I cannot finish this without speaking to you, not simply of you. You knew there was more left than food and humor. Even as you said that in 1953 I knew it was a formula you had found, to stand between you and pain. The deep crevices of black pumpernickel under the knife, the sweet butter and red onions we ate on those slices; the lox and cream cheese on fresh onion rolls; . . . these, you said, were the remnants of the culture, along with the fresh challah which turned stale so fast but looked so beautiful.
That’s why I want to speak to you now. To say: no person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone. There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors. (I make up this strange, angry packet for you, threaded with love.) I think you thought there was no such place for you, and perhaps there was none then, and perhaps there is none now; but we will have to make it, we who want an end to the suffering[.]55
While Rich’s memories of her assimilated home are passionate but abstract, she remembers Conrad warmly through imagery of food. The childhood “house on a hill,” detached from reality, fades before the solidity of the Eastern European Jewish practices that Arnold Rich denied. Even after her marriage to Conrad had disintegrated, she associated him with a kind of nurturing that she didn’t get from her genteel parents. What kind of food, after all, was she served in that “castle of air”?
Having mapped the ethnic geography of her childhood and of her marriage, Rich clearly felt ready to undertake a larger project: claiming and naming the landscape of her country and of others, too, in her “Atlas of the Difficult World.” Here she adopted the voice and vision of a feminist Walt Whitman to explore eighties America. As Whitman did, she amassed individual stories, incantatory passages, overviews of different states, all to serve her purpose: “I am bent on fathoming what it means to love my country.”56 She followed this blunt statement with a series of questions and an argumentative conclusion:
The history of this earth and the bones within it?
Soils and cities, promises made and mocked, plowed contours of shame and of hope?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Minerals, traces, rumors I am made from, morsel, minuscule fibre, one woman
like and unlike so many, fooled as to her destiny, the scope of her task?
One citizen like and unlike so many, touched and untouched in passing,
—each of us now a driven grain, a nucleus, a city in crisis
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
A patriot is not a weapon. A patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country57
“An Atlas of the Difficult World” is a grand manifesto, a summary of all Rich’s political passions. She touches on racism (the Black activist-author George Jackson in solitary confinement within Soledad), on homophobia (the murders of lesbians), on American poverty (“here is the Sea of Indifference, glazed with salt . . . These are the suburbs of acquiescence . . . This is the capital of money and dolor”). But she roots this poem too in her own life and love. Her penultimate passage is dedicated to “M.”—Michelle Cliff, the partner with whom she had lived for fifteen years. Here, concluding her tour of America, she praises her lover’s “providing sensate hands, your hands of oak and silk, of blackberry juice and drums.” 58
At the center of the poem, almost unbidden, a memory of Alfred Conrad surfaces. As she catalogs objects in the Vermont house that is crucial to her imaginings, she notes:
Some odd glasses for wine or brandy, from an ignorant, passionate time—we were in our twenties—
with the father of the children who dug for old medicine bottles in the woods,
—afternoons listening to records, reading Karl Shapiro’s Poems of a Jew and Auden’s “In Sickness and in Health” aloud, using the poems to talk to each other
—now it’s twenty years since last I heard that intake
of living breath, as if language were too much to bear,
that voice overcast like klezmer with echoes, uneven, edged, torn, Brooklyn street crowding Harvard Yard
—I’d have known any syllable anywhere.59
The warring influences of Arnold Rich and Alfred Conrad still marked this poem. Arnold may have been defeated, since he doesn’t appear here. But was he? His “faithful drudging child” had grown into a prophetic woman, and the habit of “sedulous” labors in which he instructed her shaped her poetic ambitions.60 As for Alfred Conrad, he was unforgettable, as was the trauma of his suicide. Yet for Rich, Arnold’s assimilated “castle of air” had become a dystopian place, while the house in Vermont—near where Conrad shot himself—seems increasingly to have taken on a fantastic utopian quality, even after she had moved to California with Michelle.
THE INTERSECTIONALITY OF TONI MORRISON
Adrienne Rich was the poet who most vividly addressed the racism and sexism that she saw as contributing to American moral decay at the end of the twentieth century; the novelist who most resolutely tackled the intertwined forces of racism and sexism was Toni Morrison. She did so both in critical prose and in fiction. Two madwomen take central stage in Beloved (1987), a ghost story about the haunted house of American history. Morrison credited the women’s movement for inspiring her thinking. In Sula (1973), she had taken up feminists’ “encouragement of women to support other women,” while in Beloved she focused on a second feminist issue, namely “freedom as ownership of the body.” What if a slave mother asserted her freedom to own her body and to claim her children as her own—“to be, in other words, not a breeder, but a parent?” 61
The opening sentence of Beloved—“124 was spiteful”—sets out to confuse, Morrison has explained. How can numbers be vindictive?62 She wanted to plunge readers into the disorienting repercussions of slavery. The house in question—with its address missing the number 3—is haunted by the missing third child of the once-enslaved mother, Sethe. Beloved moves back in time to tell the story of Sethe’s escape from slavery and her furious determination to save herself and her offspring from being recaptured. As if caught in a revision of the Medea myth, Sethe murdered her baby daughter when the white slave catchers tracked her down; she was shackled before she could kill herself. The present of the novel recounts the venom of that child who as a phantom young woman, identified as “Beloved” by the single word on her gravestone, returns to wreak vengeance on her mother.
Morrison had come across the record of this infanticide when she compiled The Black Book (1974), an anthology of memorabilia from the African American past. The escaped slave Margaret Garner determine
d to kill her children to save them from what she considered a fate worse than death: slavery. Morrison oversaw the book’s publication while she was working as an editor at Random House. The novels following The Bluest Eye received acclaim, but it was Beloved that earned the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. The following year Morrison accepted a chair in the creative writing faculty at Princeton University, where she began to use nonfiction to examine the racism and sexism of her own times.
Beloved asks about slavery: what injuries accrue when human beings are treated as chattel? From the opening epigraph memorializing “Sixty Million and more”—which evokes the six million of the Holocaust—to the end of the novel, Morrison seeks to establish the scope of the suffering as well as its difference from other disasters. Unlike the Holocaust, which sought to exterminate Jews like rodents, the enormously profitable institution of slavery exploited Blacks by trying to turn them into useful animals. Her enslaved characters can breed, but they can no more marry or parent than can horses and cows.
Under the rule of her relatively benevolent owners, Sethe managed to create a sort of quasi-family, but she has no rights over her own body or those of the man she wants to be her husband or the babies she wants to be her children, a fact brought home by the most traumatic injury inflicted on her by whites: her breast milk is stolen and she is raped. Sethe has witnessed Black men reduced to studs and Black children commodified as litters and sold. Beloved’s cast of characters suffer these indignities while their mounting fury fuels their efforts to gain their freedom.
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