January 2018 – patricia a. matthew

Lucille Clifton, Memory, and Remembering: A Reflection

The Network for Responsible Policy invited me to join a panel to talk about “gender.” Their goal is to bring experts together to talk to their community about politics, policy, and culture. Last night’s event was co-sponsored by the League of Women Voters. I was the only humanities person on the panel, so I decided to talk about poetry. And since this was a panel on gender, and I will take any excuse to discuss Lucille Clifton, I did. She always gives me a spot of hope. After the talk, audience members wanted to read my prepared comments so here they are…

Remembering, Memory, and Intersectional Feminism in the Long Age of Trump:

The African-American poet Lucille Clifton has a very short poem titled “why some people be mad at me sometimes.” Here it is:

they ask me to remember
but they want me to remember
their memories
and i keep on remembering
mine

Clifton is the favored poet of almost every black feminist thinker I know. She captures our triumphs, challenges, and bodies. In one of her poems called “wishes for sons,” she imagines a world where a man finds himself in a strange city, with an unexpected period, a single tampon, and no idea where to find a convenience store. She writes about the material precarity of black women in poem’s like “miss Rosie, and she celebrates our bodies in poems like “homage to my hips” with the line, “these hips are big hips/they need space to move around in.” And my favorite line “they don’t fit into little/petty places.” For so many, her poem “won’t you celebrate with me” is an invitation and an anthem. I teach nineteenth-century British literature, but I still share it with students all the time. Here it is:

won’t you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.

It’s a lovely poem, unflinching, clear, and celebratory. Clifton is like that, but I’ve been thinking a lot about this short poem, “why some people be mad at me sometimes” as we wrestle with memories, memory making, making history and whose history matters when. I’ve been thinking about what it means to remember and how memory has a particular valence in this current moment. This is a moment when men are forced to remember past encounters from a different position, and when politicians conveniently forget what the president said a day after they heard it.

This memory tug of war is not new, and sometimes it feels rather benign—the little-known fact about a memorial moment we take for granted. These are usually reminders of why we have Labor Day or why Memorial Day is in May. Sometimes, however, the push to shape memory feels more radical.

Every year, for example, when we remember Martin Luther King, Jr., someone steps forward to remind us that the King most people remember today is different than the King who was vilified, demonized, hounded, and unpopular during his lifetime, particularly in the 1960s when he started organizing for integrated housing in the north and was publicly opposed to the Vietnam War. Someone always asks us to remember which of the senators still serving today voted against making his birthday a federal holiday. And whenever anyone associated with the FBI tries to honor his memory (this year it was James Comey), someone else pops up and reminds the FBI of the letter sent to King encouraging him to kill himself. The pushback is to point out that celebrating one thing (King) does not erase a troubling past. This might seem self-righteous or pedantic (maybe those are the same thing) or like some empty exercise, but what we remember and what we choose to forget or not record is a political act.

The speaker in the Clifton poem explains what “they” want (without describing who that might be) and explains why they “be mad”– Here’s the poem again:

they ask me to remember
but they want me to remember
their memories
and i keep on remembering
mine

It’s worth noting here the declarative tone at the end “and I keep on remembering mine.” The speaker doesn’t try—just does. And it makes folks angry. It’s easy to imagine how that push back expresses itself. It comes in different forms. Sometimes it is incredibly simple “why don’t we have white history month” (and then someone explains how many basic facts about black history are missing from the curriculum and then a black person, usually me, jokes that we only get 28 days so everyone should just relax). Sometime it masks itself by pretending that the act of remembering is neutral “and is labeled politically correct” or, in the humanities, especially in the field of literary study it gets dismissed as “identity politics.” We say this one someone asks why we canonize some authors (almost all white, mostly male) and ignore others. I’m a specialist in nineteenth-century literature, specifically the history of the novel. I’m interested in the novels and novelists we don’t read (you can think of them as Jane Austen’s forgotten literary sisters). I do this work, in part, because I want to help people remember the cultural past as it looked to the many instead of to the few. It means reading novels we’ve forgotten and spotlighting cultural conversations many don’t know exist. For example, did you know that when Austen was writing the debate to end England’s participation in the slave trade was actually fashionable? In fact, it’s one of the first public causes middle and upper class middle women organized themselves around. That kind of remembering ruffles some feathers, but it doesn’t invite the kind of outrage that is sparked when other memories and histories are brought to the forefront.

In other words, the tension between the “they” and “I” shifts depending on where we are in the hierarchy.

A woman stands up in congress and tells an inconvenient history that she wants on the record, parliamentary rules are put in force, and she is silenced (at least in one arena). In this case, a woman stands up to men who want to silence her. And that old phrase, “well behaved women rarely make history” is akin to the political act of remembering what one wants that Clifton refers to in the poem. That’s one kind of push and pull—between women and patriarchy.

The tension can shift when it’s black women (or latinx women or Asian-american women, or Muslim women) who want a different history than white women. Then they, then we, are reminded that we are all sisters and told that we are threatening and angry if we don’t comply. These differences, these memories might be considered minor by some (we’re stronger together fighting the same fight), but that approach can obscure some harsh economic truths. Every year, for example, we remember the wage gap and women’s organizations show what it means that women make 78 cents to every man’s dollar by explaining that, in actually, women start working for free in October. But that’s only for white women. Black women start working for free in August*. Hispanic women start working for free in July. Those months matters, that wage gap matters, and money shapes memories:

• Single black and Hispanic women have a median wealth of $100 and $120 respectively; the median for single white women is $41,500.

• While white women in the prime working years of ages 36-49 have a median wealth of $42,600, the median wealth for women of color is $5.

• Nearly half of all single black and Hispanic women have zero or negative wealth.

Here’s another fact from the study (called Lifting as We Climb: Women of Color, Wealth and America’s Future).
I think the stakes are clearer, but here’s how that translates to the place where so many memories are made and: When it comes to home ownership, one of the major markers of financial stability and cultural maturity, here are the numbers about home ownership:

• 57% of single white women

• 33% of single black women

• 28% of single Hispanic women

Of course you can make memories without home ownership, but those memories feel different in the face of economic precarity.
Here are those lines from Clifton again:

they ask me to remember
but they want me to remember
their memories
and i keep on remembering
mine
In this instance, let’s make the “they” in the poem those who record our history in real time, journalists, writers, pundits, and bloggers. Think of the language we use when we want to point out that something significant has happened. We say “this is unprecedented.” Inevitably, in the age of Google, someone, usually on Twitter says, “well, actually this happened before.” “They” just don’t remember or, probably, never new in the first place. This happened in the #MeToo moment if you remember. Alyssa Milano used the hashtag MeToo and because of who she is (beautiful, famous, heterosexual, and white), she was credited with “founding” it. That was in 2017, but Tarana Burke started that hashtag in 2006 and because of who she is and, more precisely, who she isn’t, it didn’t get the attention it should have. In fact, even when news outlets picked up on this fact, Burke was still a sidenote in the history. Time magazine names the women of the “me too” movement (the silence breakers they called them) their person of the year and left Burke off the cover. (I’ll note here that Alyssa Milano Milano was very quick to honor what Burke had done and wasn’t on the cover), and this is how the TIME story begins:
“Movie stars are supposedly nothing like you and me. They’re svelte, glamorous, self-possessed. They wear dresses we can’t afford and live in houses we can only dream of. Yet it turns out that—in the most painful and personal ways—movie stars are more like you and me than we ever knew.” Now, you could argue that this is news BECAUSE we pay more attention to famous and infamous people than your everyday woman or your everyday man. And that would make sense. As Rebecca Traister points out, it’s depressing to note but the attention to sexual harassment is as much because we pay attention to the powerful, rich, and famous as it is about what too many people, most of whom are women, have to endure.

But here’s where it’s important to pay attention to Tarana Burke. Partly it’s respect for the person who got there first. It’s no small thing to coin a phrase, to put it in the atmosphere. Partly it’s because too often the contributions of everyday people who actually are pushing change forward is erased. It’s important for young people (girls, boys, and others who may not identify with a specific gender) to know that one needn’t look like Gwenyth Paltrow to make change. All of that is important but just on a practical matter it’s important to remember the memory that puts Burke at the start. She started working for social justice in this particular area in 2006. I’m imagining that she has a wealth of hard-earned lessons that would benefit everyone.

There’s a hashtag that always makes me chuckle, even though I think it’s not widely circulated, #ListenToBlackWomen. That might come off as arrogant, and I worry that it makes black women seem supernatural, but it makes sense because all too often it’s black women and women of color who have to learn to:
Make do with less
Develop strategies to succeed around oppressive structures
Build community to thrive
Develop the muscle of caring for everyone around them

That old adage that necessity is the mother of invention means that those who have less (like black women and women of color often) have to be creative and inventive. They have to be strategic. Their memories, what they remember, shouldn’t only matter to them but to everyone. We can actually be stronger together but only if we have a shared sense of what we all remember.

Things are bleak, I know. I have a lot of mixed feelings about how we are making memories, how quickly we are moving, especially around MeToo. I think these are difficult and confusing times, but I’m also hopeful because I see a multiplicity of voices in this particular movement. Intersectional feminism means that we don’t limit our focus. When Kimberely Crenshaw coined the term it was about how analyzing and discussing how oppression often intersects, creating unique and varied experiences of discrimination. In other words, it’s not just being a woman that matters—one’s class, sexual orientation, and physical abilities should matter too. I’m seeing intersectionality in the movement after #MeToo blew up. Those svelte, famous, beautiful, rich women bonded together to focus their energy on helping invisible workers—women in service industries who can’t hashtag their way to justice. That movement is evolving with everyone’s memories there to shape it. There’s always going to be a gap between the “they” and the “I” of Clifton’s poem, but it doesn’t have to mean there’s no progress.

I guess it’s the hope I hang my heart on—that honoring memories is the first step towards meaningful change.

*There are different rhetorical moves to show this gap. The months I noted in the talk were in Tweets a few years ago. Here is one source for that data.

The Cat Tweeted Back

I’m not interested in cruises.

One of my versions of hell is being stuck with 4,000 people listening to muzak versions of Adele (or just Adele, if I’m being honest). The buffet culture doesn’t interest me, and being near large bodies of water gives me an oddly unmoored feeling, one of physical and emotional dizziness. I also love the time between Christmas and the new semester. I have since grad school when I discovered that it’s a good time to get a lot of work done. I have a whole stay-in-the-house winter wardrobe that’s quite lovely and nicely coordinated. So cruises. No. Cruises during winter break. No, no, no. The thing is I adore my father, and as we have grieved the loss of my mother these last months I could see that going on cruises not only makes him happy but also actually changes him physically. He walks more and more briskly when he returns from one, he smiles more. He wears the Batman shirt I bought him (and my mom and myself) one Christmas. So he asked me to go with him on a cruise. And I said yes.

Here’s the thing. We didn’t think it would actually happen.

We both set a lot of rules for it. We could only go when I was not teaching. He likes to go in April (when I am teaching). He would only go some other time of year if the cruise was to the Panama Canal. He knew it would never happen because of things like weather and schedules and when boats actually go to the Panama Canal. I was secretly relieved. To say yes something I didn’t particularly want to do and then to not have to do it. WINNING!

I went on a cruise.

During what would normally be my winter break, I packed up summer clothes, formal evening wear, and a really good pair of flip flops and got on a boat the size of Staten Island. Thankfully, Bill Matthew travels in style. He promised me a life of ease with very few decisions to make. “You won’t have to make you bed” (it’s sweet how he thinks I do that at home). “You can send your laundry out” (oh yeah). “You won’t have to cook or wash dishes” (sold!). “They’ll make eggs just the way you like” (that’s harder than you’d think). And, finally, “the juice is really freshly squeezed.” We had a spacious suite with a balcony large enough for deck chairs and a table for two. We could bypass most lines, and, most important to me, we could eat in dining rooms with table service the way god intended.

My dad understands what my writing work means to me. Whereas well-meaning friends kind of cringed when I said I was taking work with me on vacation, he understood. He even told me the best place to have a quiet breakfast, so I could write in the mornings. So I did. I also opted out of spending a small fortune for very slow, spotty internet and disconnected from social media.

My brain really, really needed that kind of break.

Listen, I respect people who take social media breaks. I get that. That’s not me. I enjoy the companionship of the chatter in the background as I write. I use Twitter breaks as my treat for a good work session, and tweeting helps me from killing people in the real world. A day or so each week I take a breather, but I rarely feel the need to take an actual break.

But, after such a busy fall where I talked more some weeks than I do all year, and where I found myself with the enviable but daunting challenge of talking to multiple editors and publishers about what I want to write next, I found myself being way too performative on Twitter, too aware that people were paying attention to me. I know that for some people that’s the whole point—to make a splash, be a presence, have a brand. I may or may not have those things, but to the degree that I do, they are a byproduct of my time on social media, not the goal.

I read once how Colson Whitehead thinks about Twitter: “I had a cat, the cat died, and now the stuff I used to say to the cat all day, I tweet.” I liked analogy so much that I too tweeted like I was talking to Whitehead’s dead cat.

Image-1-1

Then the cat tweeted back.

It was cool and interesting at first, and then a bit unnerving, and then somewhere around November it started distracting me. I was too self-conscious on Twitter, felt I was trying too hard, and was seeking something (I’ve not bothered thinking how to name it) that messed with my brain’s writing rhythms.

I’ve come to know my brain works quite well, how it works at different times of day, what it really needs to produce, the importance of leaving it alone, trusting it to do its job while I do other things. I’ve compared it to a toddler—not just to be funny but because I can tell that sometimes “writer’s block” is really my brain wanting something it can’t articulate. I joked on Twitter about a frustrating morning where every medium I normally use to write (pencil and legal pad, lap top, large sticky notes) didn’t work until I figured out that this brain of my mine simply wanted a blank piece of paper. As soon as I gave it one, it got to work giving me new topics and questions for the abolitionist book. I had to draw my way to a new vision for the book. These days it works spatially and orally rather than through prose. That’s weird for me, but I’m going with it.

And it works best when it feels like no one is actually paying attention to it. That’s the thing I didn’t really understand before this break. When the cat talked back, I developed a sense of an “audience” and ideas about expectations (real or imagined, I don’t know). I started fretting about who might be reading my writing. I convinced myself no one was reading the blog, most people ignore my tweets, and that I was in a little corner just doing my thing, even with evidence that this is not quite true.

Especially about Twitter.

I am a pretty performative person, and social media rewards that. Plus I’ve been excited and felt honor bound to broadcast every little thing about Written/Unwritten because the contributors deserve attention and praise. They trusted me with their stories, put up with my revision requests, held tight to what they wanted to say and HOW they wanted to say it when I lost track of their agency, and when I was afraid the book would feel passé, one of them would invariably drop a note telling me to keep at it. I have gotten so much attention and praise because of the book, and it has given me a platform to say things to people who have the power to change how institutions work, but my chatter about it is more about making sure it does work for everyone, that it is useful, that the contributors’ time was well spent.

Beyond that goal, Twitter and my blogging are really just for me, for my own amusement and reflection. For me and an imaginary cat. I’ve been happy to do it in front of people (and I obviously want people to see what’s going on in my head and to read), but I found myself thinking too much about what other people might want to see and read. Was I saying something “new” and did it all really matter? My brain didn’t like that one bit, and writing that should have come easily wasn’t.

Worse, I couldn’t tell what was SUPPOSED to be hard (planning a new book), so I decided to disconnect bit by bit. I disconnected just enough to remember the real reason I blog is so that I don’t talk my friends to death, to think through how I am feeling about all kinds of things including my writing, and to keep my writing brain limber during reading and research phases. And I disconnected just enough to remember that Twitter only works for me to the degree that it keeps me company during the day.

It was a good break. Being in the middle of the ocean helped a lot. I worked on a few short things I’ll be sending out soon, I reread McPhee’s Draft No 4. I bought copies for Tressie and me and read it quickly in October, but reading it again, I’m reminded a bit of this post I wrote about how much I liked the the structure of The Skies Belongs to Me. I daydreamed about my Frankenstein class. I wrote in the mornings like I like to do. Very nice people brought me eggs cooked properly.

Don’t fret, dear reader/cat, I did plenty of nothing. I read trashy novels and realized that everything I know about regency culture I learned from narratives that include a lot of bosoms heaving above corsets and other throbbing bits. I read a very respectable novel I’m happy not to have a single opinion about. I spent more than an hour dressing for dinner every single night, twice in dresses I’ll happily put back in garment bags. I had massages (more than one). After trying to convince my dad I was hearing dinosaurs in Panama, we worked out a which crisis James Bond would solve while we went through the Panama Canal, and then, I kid you not, sat down to dinner with a man who looked so much like Gold Finger that I hummed the theme song at my dad all evening. I saw dolphins in the wild and flying fish. God bless this cruise for serving a proper tea every afternoon. I spent a lot of time on the balcony by myself, staring at the water and dealing with feeling unmoored.

I returned to a lot of emails including queries about what I want to write next. That feels good. In the midst of what I now recognize is a transition to a different relationship to what I write and for whom, kind and wise people have been helping see what’s possible. I’m feeling very lucky and grateful these days. Publishers and editors want to read what I have to say. What a great way to enter 2018.

So I’m back and am going to keep writing, blogging, and Tweeting like the cat isn’t actually paying attention to me.