It’s a sweltering August day in South Dakota, about 100 miles east of
Rapid City. The calendar says it’s 2002, but we are outside of time now, moving
slowly when at all.
My girlfriend and I—it is too soon to call her my partner, the love
of my life (though I want already to call her these things)—broke down two days
ago on Interstate 90 near the exit for Okaton. We were told at the gas station
we schlepped to, which served as a grocery and general store for the locals and
a rock shop for tourists, that the population of Okaton, South Dakota, was
exactly 13. No more, no less. By the time the tow truck came for us, we had met
every one of the residents.
Now we’re in Murdo. The Super 8 is full because of Sturgis so we’re
staying at a no-name place without air conditioning for $18.00 a night. The man
at the desk is creepy in the most predictable way and encourages us to use the
pool, which he can see clearly through the grimy, half-drawn curtain. Instead,
we watch Seinfeld reruns and walk to
Domino’s for pizza. Angie’s car is with a Murdo mechanic and will be, it turns
out, for the next 72 hours. Every morning we traipse back to the body shop to
remind this mechanic that we are waiting, that we aren’t from around here, that
this wasn’t part of our plan.
I snag one of Angie’s books from her bag. I give up and let my thighs
fuse with the vinyl on the waiting room chair. I’ve never heard of Jeanette
Winterson until today—this sweltering August day in Murdo, South Dakota—but ten
years from now I will talk about her at my dissertation defense in Louisville,
Kentucky. My partner, the love of my life, will be perched in a softly
upholstered chair, listening. She will smile because, among so many others, Winterson
is one of the gifts she gave me.
1.
I have become
aware that the chosen sexual difference of one writer is, in itself, thought
sufficient to bind her in semiotic sisterhood with any other writer, also
lesbian, dead or alive.
I paused on the word chosen. I begged to differ with this notion of
difference. Love had chosen me, I
reasoned. Wasn’t this how we always spoke of love? I was caught off guard. I was swept away. Love happened to me, like
a wondrous, violent change in the weather. I
never saw it coming.
I wanted to write back to the writer, saying I didn’t choose a woman
instead of a man. I didn’t choose a lesbian identity over a heterosexual one. Or did I? It was 2002. I had never been with
a woman before, and yet I found myself head
over heels, falling. Winterson goaded me with her word, needled me with the
precision of her phrase: chosen sexual
difference. Her voice was so strong I could feel her breath blowing from the
margins of the page, her fingerprints like secret footnotes left for me to
dust:
Maybe you
happened to Love, she countered. Maybe
you happened to Lesbian Identity.
Don’t follow
your heart, Winterson warned me. Lead
with it.
Of course, once you claim your life, once you name your love, new
challenges are certain to arise.
2.
I am a writer
who happens to love women. I am not a lesbian who happens to write.
In 2002, reveling in my love of poetry, reveling in my love of
Angie—we were poets who met in a graduate writing program—I had not imagined
yet the ways these loves would intersect and tangle. Yes, there would be love
poems, and the love poems would reflect a pronoun shift. But beyond the page, I
would call myself a writer, as I always had. I would call myself a lesbian, as
I never had—but as I knew I would, thereafter.
Winterson’s distinction puzzled me. Could I not be a writer who loved
women and a lesbian who wrote? Was
this not another way of saying, Six of
one, half a dozen of the other?
How naïve I was to imagine the question would never come up! How
naïve I was to believe my answer could be neutral, apolitical. When I dated
men, no one ever asked me to make such a distinction: “Are you a writer who
happens to love men, or a heterosexual who happens to write?”
And because this question is never posed to the heterosexual writer,
she does not have to assign priority to one identity over the other. She does
not have to choose if she is more “straight” than “literary,” or name the
degree to which her heterosexuality informs her writing.
Winterson was a weather vane. She did not direct the wind, but she indicated
the way the wind was blowing. Could I say I
am a lesbian who writes, and a writer who is a lesbian? Yes, but one phrase
would always precede the other. Could I say I
am a lesbian, and I am a writer? Yes, but one phrase would always precede
the other.
I would have to choose again. I would have to own my choice. I chose
a version of Winterson’s line: I am a
writer who loves women. This was true. I eliminated the “happens to.” My
love was non-negotiable, and particular, I felt, to Angie. But in time, I would
claim a corollary to this statement, too: I
am a writer who loves women, and I am
also a lesbian writer.
3.
The Queer world
has colluded in the misreading of art as sexuality. Art is difference, but not
necessarily sexual difference, and while to be outside of the mainstream of
imposed choice is likely to make someone more conscious, it does not
automatically make that someone an artist.
I had only just begun to use the word “lesbian.” It did not sit
easily on my tongue: too soft to roll, too hard to bite. A dactyl—like scorpion or glycerin. I was partial to anapests.
Now here was the word “Queer,” and I had to consider also whether I
would claim this word. Was I “Queer” with a capital “Q,” a lower-case “q”? Queer. Rhymes with clear, but isn’t. An antonym, in fact: ambiguous, opaque.
In the essay, Winterson did not identify herself as queer, though she
did identify herself as lesbian. Were all lesbians queer by default? I didn’t
know. As a lesbian, I would come to understand that my “chosen sexual
difference” placed me “outside of the mainstream of imposed choice.” I had
loosened the noose of tradition, convention. I had chosen something that was
not imposed, and as a consequence, I had violated certain expectations. I had
crossed over, presumably, into the Queer world.
Did this fact of my queerness make me more conscious? Conscious of what? I wondered. Then, I
thought of us, dusty, blear-eyed, and vulnerable, sharing a chair in the
gas-station-qua-rock-shop in Okaton. I wanted to put my hand in her hand. I
wanted to link arms, pulling her close to me in love and companionship. If
Angie had been Andrew, I would have lain my head on her shoulder without a
second thought. Instead, I hesitated, hands in my own lap, back straight as a
pin or a board. It wasn’t safe to touch in public. I was conscious for the
first time of a privilege I had lost. And this is the way of privilege: Without
losing it, I never would have noticed it was there.
Did this fact of my new, my shifting consciousness make me an artist?
Was anyone ever automatically an
artist? Life was work, and art was work, but they were not the same work, even
when they turned metaphor for each other. This I understood. And when the wind
changes course, of course—when a slight breeze gives way to a strong breeze
gives way to a gale—who doesn’t have to become a different kind of sailor?
Different, not
necessarily artful, Winterson would
say.
But surely someone, somewhere, learned to raise a graceful sail.
4.
Let me put it
another way: if I am in love with Peggy and I am a composer I can express that
love in an ensemble or a symphony. If I am in love with Peggy and I am a
painter, I need not paint her portrait, I am free to express my passion in
splendid harmonies of colour and line. If I am a writer, I will have to be
careful, I must not fall into the trap of believing that my passion, of itself,
is art.
The car is fixed, and Angie is driving west toward the long, luminous
horizon. Somewhere in the distance, we pass the presidents, their faces set in
stone. It was work to make them, but was it art? Surely passion must have
guided Gutzon Borglum to raise his chisel to the Black Hills. As a sculptor, he
was free to express his passion in the carving of rock, the construction of
monument. His work, his art, gave way to human likeness.
I have only words to shape the raw material of my life. This strikes
me now like a hammer’s blow. We have been studying for our comprehensive exams.
Poems crowd the front seat and litter the back. Basil Bunting exhorts from the
dash—Pens are too light./ Take a chisel
to write.
I carve out this first poem for Angie. (It is life. Is it art? After
all, a monumental moment does not, automatically,
a monument make.)
Anemone[i]
Anemone[i]
At first kiss I
discovered you were small,
the curled creature
of your mouth flickering,
fluttering—a waning
candle flame, a falling curtain.
I touched with
trepidation, the way I once touched
the pink sea
anemone at a seaside aquarium. It recoiled
first, silky
fingers fisted with sudden fear. But slowly,
as I nudged them,
assuring each antenna that I meant no harm
but only to touch—to
feel—the strange flower unfolded
its arms and seemed
to reach out for me.
That’s how it was
that night in your bedroom, on the
sofa in your
studio, waking up to find my head propped
against your
shoulder, and you had been running my hair
through your teeth
like pearls.
Take the bed, you said, your hands clenched
tight,
your belly threaded
through and knotted still with the same
desire that binds
my tongue to one stiff silence.
I cannot move. My
breath unravels: strained, vaporous,
thick. Motionless,
we contemplate the kiss in the darkness
and before it
happens, before we are even sure it will happen,
the kiss begins to
live.
You uncoil your
fingers, curious to trace the contours of my face.
Now there is no
doubt.
My mouth begins to
tremble as my hands once did—the plaintive
pinkness—the
something-small-and-vulnerable—
my mouth begins to
water at the miracle of contact, your body
locked so long
under glass, smudged up with sticky fingers
and circumstance—no
way to reach you.
Hands first—
I suck the knuckles
dry and still am thirsty—mouth beckoning,
lips like vines,
tendrils, lovely tentacles—
Clasp
me, tighter, entrust me with your air.
I have passed
through the soft center of you, and there is no
turning back.
5.
Art must resist
autobiography if it hopes to cross boundaries of class, culture….and…sexuality.
Literature is not a lecture delivered to a special interest group, it is a
force that unites its audience.
I underlined the first four words, forgetting the book was not mine. Confessional poetry? I asked the margin.
Confessional poetry? I asked
Winterson.
What about Sharon Olds and Adrienne Rich? What about Lucille Clifton
and Sandra Cisneros? The writers I loved most were writing themselves. Their
art did not resist autobiography:
Olds: I’m trying to say what happened to us/in the lost past.
Rich: I am an instrument in the shape/of a woman
Clifton: i am accused of tending to the past
Cisneros: I am the woman of myth and bullshit./(True. I authored some of it.)
Their art did not resist autobiography. Or did it?
Perhaps autobiography did not mean what I once assumed. Self-life-writing. Three words strung together
like pearls? No, they were more like marks on a ledger, notches on a tree. You were once this tall, and then this tall,
and then taller still. Perhaps autobiography was the collection of
artifacts. Memoir was the translation of memory into art, experience into art,
life into art.
Rich (again): I am an instrument in the shape/of a woman
trying to translate pulsations/into images
Put another way: Memoir was the translation of pulsation into image.
Imagery, like an exponent, raised the individual story to a higher
power. Lifted it up. Glory! Hallelujah!
Imagery was a force that united the audience.
6.
Art succeeds
where polemic fails.
My mother is unhappy with me already. This change in my life will not
change that pre-existing condition. My soap box is too small to stand on. The
batteries for my microphone have long ago expired. I would like to go to
Speaker’s Corner and announce myself newly lesbian, newly queer. I would like
to join a parade of chanting voices, “We’re here, We’re queer, Get used to it!”
But that would be polemic, wouldn’t it? Not art?
I have failed at heterosexuality, according to my mother. There are
doctors who could fix me—mechanics for the mind. There are body shops designed to
reorient the hormones, recover the lost good heart. She thinks I am resisting
my destiny as wife and mother, my true Christian autobiography. She winces when
she looks at me now. Her eyes warn, Making
art out of life will not make your mother proud.
My Mother, On Learning I Love A Woman
At first, silence,
and then a thud of breath as if
her throat has slid
through the chute of her lungs
and landed,
heavy—like a stone—like a sword
lodged suddenly
inside it.
This explains
why you don’t wear make-up, she sighs.
A snap—a pulsing
panic pulled back and lightly
camouflaged as
fear: What will I tell my friends?!
How can I tell
my friends?! I can never tell my friends!!
Finally, fatigued
and determined: No one must know.
I give her
permission to lie—privilege she takes
as right.
I promise her
nothing has changed except the second
chromosome of the
body resting next to me.
She asks, not wanting the answer: I suppose you have
to sleep in the
same bed?
<<No, in
sleeping bags, Mom, cocooned in separate couches
still wrapped in
our swaddling clothes.>>
I could have said
it, but I didn’t.
No tolerance for
the Absurd.
My mother’s voice,
all tissue paper and cellophane,
turns tearful,
liquid in its pain: where did we go wrong?
She craves an
answer I cannot give—
the answer to
absolve her for my sin.
Perhaps would settle
now for “This is just a phase,”
another lunar
cycle. Surely what waxes
must also wane.
I want to tell her
not to forgive me, plead through
the twisted wires
that she will not waste her prayers.
We raised you
with God’s laws,
she says.
No, no, no her heart thumping through the
phone.
You raised me to
love, I say.
You told me to
be happy.
<<But she
didn’t mean this way, didn’t mean this way,
Dear God,
she didn’t mean this way.>>
I watch out the window, sigh.
Already prayers are
streaming up the sky.
7.
Men do not feel
comfortable looking at the world through eyes that are not male. […] It would
be a pity if lesbians and gay men retreated into the same kind of cultural
separatism. We learn early how to live in two worlds; our own and that of the
dominant model, why not learn how to live in multiple worlds? The strange
prismatic worlds that art offers?
This is a paradox: the longing for separateness in the midst of isolation.
Art speaks the language of paradox better than any person. I want to speak paradox.
I want to speak image.
But for the moment, I will read only the words of others who are like
me. I hunker down in my cozy snow globe of cultural separatism. For the moment,
even bad art by a lesbian is better than good art by a straight woman. For the
moment, mediocre art by a gay man is more necessary than exceptional art by a
straight man.
Angie and I rent our first apartment together in Bellingham,
Washington. Our living room window overlooks the bay, our bathroom window the
city lights. I have never loved anyone more, of this I am certain. But there
are those who would not wish us happily,
who would only wish us never, after. They
begin to reveal themselves slowly, terribly. A certain before is lost to us now,
and it will not be recovered from this storm. I write highly polemical messages
and float them in a bottle out to sea.
In our Master’s program, we take a translation exam. I half-imagined
I would turn over the page and find this imperative: Translate your life into art. Translate this lecture, this polemic into
art. It would have been easier, and harder, both. (Paradox, again.)
I want to live in the “strange, prismatic world” of art. I want to
write in the “strange, prismatic world” of art. I want to believe Pearl Buck
when she tells me, There is an alchemy in
sorrow. It can be transmuted into wisdom.
But as much as I want to be wise, first, I must mourn. As much as I
want to be an artist, first, I must be a separatist. Like Augustine, with a
twist: Make me gracious-patient-artful, God—but
not yet.
Lesbian is a dactyl. Happiness is a dactyl, too, depending on
your pronunciation.
We are pleased
to inform you that you have passed the translation exam and are now advanced to
thesis candidacy.
8.
Complexity leads
to perplexity. I do not know my place. There is a clash between what I feel and
what I had expected to feel. My logical self fails me, and no matter how I try
to pace it out, there is still something left over that will not be accounted
for.
By the time we move to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, we have been asked
the straightest questions, which are also the queerest questions. (Paradox,
again.)
Which one of you
is the man? (clarifies) I know
you’re not literally men, but who wears the pants?
We look down. We are both wearing
jeans. We look up.
How are you guys doing? (blushes) I hope you don’t find the term offensive. Do you? Oh, God!
We stare ahead, unblinking.
We don’t understand the question.
Aren’t you
worried about the afterlife? (wringing her hands like a dishrag)
We shake our heads. Angie says,
“No.” I say, “I tend to worry more about this life.”
So, in bed, do
you just mostly…snuggle? (pacing, afraid to meet our eyes)
We shake our heads. Angie says, “No.” I
say, “Being a lesbian isn’t the same as having a pajama party.”
Were you ever heterosexual?
(sliding
on her gloves) I’m just curious.
Angie peruses
out-of-date magazines in the waiting room. My stocking feet are pressed into the stirrups. “That depends what
you mean by heterosexual,” I say.
With the sex, I
mean—how do you—how do you know when it’s over?
Angie doesn’t
dignify this question with an answer. I say, “I think this question says more about your sex life than my answer could say
about mine.”
But what I find far worse than any question, however silly or
stereotypical, is the silence that has been known to descend when we enter a
room. Sometimes we are swimming in that pool after all, back at the no-name place
in Murdo, South Dakota, and everyone is watching through the grimy, half-drawn
curtain—its white eyelets of suspicion, discomfort, fear.
I try to find the words for us, but nomenclature is complex, and
“complexity leads to perplexity.”
In Pittsburgh, when I called Angie my girlfriend, people thought I
meant a female chum to watch Oprah with,
to power-walk with, to mani-peti with and double with on dates with men.
In Pittsburgh, when I called Angie my partner, people thought I meant
we ran a business together. They asked us what we did. They didn’t mean in bed
this time. They wanted to know our line of work.
In Pittsburgh, when I called Angie my lover, it was too intimate to
say in public.
In Pittsburgh, when I called Angie my beloved, it was too intimate
for other people to hear in public.
There is no equivalent for spouse, you see, for husband and wife and
their gendered symmetry. There is no equivalent for the reverence those words
command. Or if there is, I haven’t found it yet.
In Pittsburgh, when I called Angie my life-partner—to address
complexity, to intercept perplexity—the words were often changed, thirty-party:
This is Julie’s friend, Angie. This
is Julie’s roommate, Angie. Our story revised to read easier from
someone else’s script.
I want the questions back, you see. I would rather address the
arrogance or the cluelessness or the just-plain-curious. Even the most
demeaning inquiry would be better than this silence to me.
The hardest question yet: Why
do you think people like you exist?
I could see I was only a category to
him: the fruit instead of the strawberry. Maybe even fruit was too specific. I was as general as food, as broad as
sustenance. Heterosexuals were entitled to their complexity. I was not. My
worth suspect, my contribution to humanity queerly unclear.
Existence is the given, you see. A better question would be—How shall we live with each other since all
of us, regardless of who we are “like” and who we are “unlike,” seem to be,
indisputably, here?
9.
How can I know
what I feel? When a writer asks herself that question she will have to find the
words to answer it, even if the answer is another question. The writer will
have to make her words into a true equivalent of her heart. If she cannot, if
she can only hazard at the heart, arbitrarily, temporarily, she may be a
psychologist but she will not be a poet.
In college, I majored in psychology. I wanted to understand the human
mind. I was foolish enough to believe this was possible and idealistic enough
to believe it desirable.
When the time came to quantify my interpretations, to correlate
numbers with emotions on the first statistics exam, my spectacular failure as a
social scientist forecasted my life among poems.
That is to say, I have always wanted to make my words into a true
equivalent of my heart. Put another way, I have always wanted to raise a
graceful sail.
I am a writer, and a lesbian, and a lesbian writer, in any order you
prefer. I speak paradox. I speak image. I know now that imagery transcends
identity and that, paradoxically, imagery is what makes writing identity
possible.
Rip Tide[ii]
For Angie
When we took the
rip cord in our delicate hands and yanked the rough yarn
of the rope until
the skin under our skin began to peel and crack and our palms
to blister and burn
with certain, unassailable pain, it was then I understood
that no one could
ever claim to understand me or the predictable patterns
that once comprised
my life./ I knew I was only to them an aberration, that
the red tides of my
mind had moved me forever beyond the realm of the life-
guard, the
lighthouse, the beached schooner with its hollowed heart./ I knew
also that the song
of the sea, which is the song of our bodies rising, and the
song of the brown
pelicans swooping to kelp beds containing their nourishment,
and even the song
of the clam with its eyes shut so tight against the world was
something they had
stopped singing, a lullaby they would never learn./ We
saw everything as
if in the blind rush of falling came a moment of invincible
clarity—the wife I
would not be, the life I would not have—and your heart
opened to me wider
than the throat of the ocean, red and wild as the parachute
that saved us, both
our lives.
10.
The artist is
not divided and she is not for sale. Her clarity of purpose protects her […]
Today is my mother’s birthday.
Once, long ago, I sent her a sheaf of poems. “Anemone,” “Rip Tide,”
and even “My Mother, On Learning I Love a Woman” were among them. She was not
interested in the imagery. To raise the sail of such a life was, to her, the
greatest disgrace.
Once, long ago, I brought to her doorstep my partner, the love of my
life. I explained that we could be not be divided from each other—cast asunder, as the old books say. She
offered me money to recover my lost good heart. I explained that I was not for
sale.
My mother was lonely by accident and isolated on purpose. She did not
see the paradox there. She wanted me to choose tradition over innovation,
convention over honest knowing. She said, “I see how you lesbians are—the way
you make yourselves ugly for each other.” The words scorched her lips and
burned my ears. “No one makes beautiful words out of vulgar acts.” She wanted
me to choose polemic over art.
Instead, I said, “I have to go now.” The wind rattled the old
weathervane that proudly announced our names: THE WADES.
Lead with your
heart, Winterson whispered. The heart has immaculate vision. And so we
drove unwavering into the dark, the life, the art.
I will not say I never looked back. I will not say I never look back.
It is the questions I am looking for, you see. Even the most
demeaning inquiry would be better than this silence to me.
I am still trying to make my words into a true equivalent of my
heart. Love is hard to translate into art. Elegy is harder. The wind comes
periodically in great gusts. I am here with my clear purpose, my queer purpose.
Glory! Hallelujah! I am still trying
to raise a graceful sail.
Grammar[iii]
For my mother
Here, on the Atlantic, sunrise
the reversed syntax of my Seattle youth:
I marvel, still young, at what
it means to have been younger;
to see at last the parent
in parenthesis;
Here, on the Atlantic, sunrise
the reversed syntax of my Seattle youth:
I marvel, still young, at what
it means to have been younger;
to see at last the parent
in parenthesis;
to read—for the
first time—
whole chapters of my life
as an aside.
whole chapters of my life
as an aside.
*
Born in Seattle in 1979, Julie Marie Wade completed a Master of Arts in English at Western Washington University in 2003, a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry at the University of Pittsburgh in 2006, and a PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanities at the University of Louisville in 2012. She is the author of Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures (Colgate University Press, 2010), winner of the Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Memoir, Without: Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2010), selected for the New Women’s Voices Chapbook Series, Small Fires; Essays (Sarabande Books, 2011), selected for the Linda Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature, Postage Due: Poems & Prose Poems (White Pine Press, 2013), winner of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series, and Tremolo: An Essay (Bloom Books, 2013), winner of the Bloom Nonfiction Chapbook Prize. Forthcoming is When I Was Straight: Poems (A Midsummer Night's Press, 2014). Wade is the newest member of the creative writing faculty at Florida International University. She lives with her partner, Angie Griffin, in Dania Beach.
