Me & Emily D.

Another reading response for my World Lit. class.

1129

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —

            ~Emily Dickinson

I came across a “Bait/Rebait” argument published in 1982 by the National Council of Teachers of English. The statement debated was: “It is dishonest of English Teachers to ignore the homosexuality of literary figures whose works they teach” The con opinion is barely worth addressing as it quotes a letter to Ann Landers as defense and opens with the argument that “…we know that homosexuality is disapproved of by the majority of taxpayers who support the school.”  The pro opinion written by Richard Follett is based on the premise that “A taboo about the lesbian/gay identity of an author is as imbalanced as a neurotic focus on that single issue…Surrendering to deception so we will not be thought different from others negates the pursuit of truth embedded in teaching literature. The writers who have produced the literature we teach deserve to have the truth shared about their lives. We have no other moral option but to side with the truth openly” (Follett and Larson). That truth, however, even in 2016, “must dazzle gradually.”

In 1982, I was finishing my undergraduate degree, heading into a teaching career, and was about to finally come out of the closet. My first partner was an English teacher who introduced me to a canon of lesbian literature starting with Radclyffe Hall’s classic The Well of Loneliness. She, of course, did not offer this canon to her high school students anymore than she discussed Walt Whitman’s homosexual orientation in relation to his poetry or I discussed AIDS in my health classes. AlthoughThe Well of Loneliness, written in 1928, did not reflect my internal landscape (aka Butch/Femme paradigm or sexual invert), here was a character in a book who felt what I felt, experienced societal and familial rejection for those feelings just as I did. For the first time in my reading life I heard MY heart beat and break on the page. I found my people not only in the characters, but the author and her associates. I found MY history, MY culture, MY place, MY voice.

The LGBT voice is frequently silenced, particularly in the public schools. The political, literary, artistic, and social contributions of LGBT persons are often excluded, distorted, or censored from school texts/curriculum. This gap in history sends the message that the LGBT story is one of inferiority – it doesn’t count in the national narrative, leading LGBT youth to conclude they don't matter. Identity is formed from a shared narrative, a common history. Keeping this subject matter out of textbooks and discussions offends the dignity of LGBT children. Oregon school districts have made strides in the formation of Gay Straight Alliances and anti-discrimination practices. However, nationally, 64% of LGBT youth still feel unsafe at school due to sexual orientation or gender identity. Many report that the school made no effort to respond effectively to harassment.

While national acceptance of LGBT-identified people is on the rise, a study by The Human Rights Campaign reported 92% of LGBT youth still hear negative slurs about them at school, on the Internet, or from their peers. Additionally, 73% of LGBT youth say they are more honest online than in the real world - suggesting a need to remain anonymous in pursuit of self-expression. In an article in the Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, author Henri Cole (Middle Earth) was asked what elements of his gay identity might contribute to his unique literary voice. He responded, “I think my love of simile is connected to homosexuality. Nothing is ever exactly itself, like me” (Hennessy). When I read that, I thought immediately of Emily D.’s line, “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant.” How many years did I circumloquaciously circumnavigate the truth of my identity, my voice? How fearful was I of the brightness of that voice, that truth?

Was Miss Emily gay? Her orientation will forever be a mystery to us all, but there is no question she had a Sapphic relationship with her neighbor and sister-in-law Susan Huntington. In 1998 I fell upon a collection of her letters and poems to Susan in a book titled Open Me Carefully. The work is classic Emily with its dashes and unconventional capitalization. It’s also filled with universal wisdom, social context of her day, and passion. Where would I be today if this poem was included in my English class along with all the other love poems of the traditional canon?

Sweet Sue,

There is
no first, or last,
in Forever —
It is Centre, there,
all the time —
To believe — is enough,
and the right of
supposing —
Take back that 
"Bee" and "Buttercup" —
I have no Field
for them, though
       for the Woman
whom I prefer,
Here is Festival —
When my Hands
are Cut, Her
fingers will be 
found inside —
Our beautiful Neigh-
bor "moved" in May —
It leaves an
Unimportance.
Take the Key to 
the Lily, now, and
I will lock the Rose — (Hart and Smith 130)

Works Cited

Follett, Richard J. and Larson, Rayna. “Bait/Rebait: It is Dishonest of English Teachers to Ignore the Homosexuality of Lierary Figures Who Works They Teach.” The English Journal Vol. 71. No. 4 (Apr., 1982): 18-21. Jstor. Web. 27 June 2016.

Hart, Ellen Louise and Smith, Martha Nell. (ed.) Open Me Carefully. Massachusettes: Paris Press, 1998. Print.

Hennessy, Christopher. “Ten Ways of Looking at Gay Poetry.” The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide12:5 (2005): 10. GenderWatch. Web. 26 June 2016.

White Silence is Violence

I have been silent on this blog in part because I've been writing papers for two graduate English literature classes. Below is a reading response to Doris Lessing’s The Old Chief Mshlanga

excerpt from Salt. 

          by Nayyirah Waheed

if we
wanted
to.
people of color
could
burn the world down.
for what
we
have experienced.
are experiencing.
but
we don’t.

— how stunningly beautiful that our sacred respect for the earth is deeper than our rage. 

I “was a member of the white minority pitted against a black majority that was abominably treated and still is,” Doris Lessing wrote of herself in relationship to the racial injustice she witnessed in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) for the 24 years she lived there (Lessing 716). From 1925-1949 Lessing was in the center of social/political conflict resulting from the infiltration of white British settlers onto tribal land. The Land Apportionment Act of 1930, which divided the territory into Native (unaliented) and European (alienated) areas, set the scene for her story, The Old Chief Mshlanga. The story begins with a detached third person black and white point of view. On the land is a “white farm” with a msasa tree “notable for the vivid colorings (pink through copper) of its spring foliage and for the fragrance of its white flowers” a “pale willowed river, a pale gleaming castle,” and “a white child, opening its eyes curiously on a sun-suffused landscape” (718). This Caucasian landscape is contrasted with the “amorphous black mass” of other that “instilled a consciousness of danger, of something unpleasant, that made it easy to laugh out loud, crudely…there is a certain kind of laughter that is fear, afraid of itself” (719).

With this trigger-finger black and white tension in place, Lessing pulls the reader in with a brilliant shift to first-person point-of-view. Bam, we are the white girl walking through corn fields, conscious of the ploughed soil beneath our feet, “the great red clods…like a choppy red sea” (720). The hierarchy of white over black is established and the foreshadowing of bloodshed red on the land is further enforced when we meet Chief Mshlanga “his hair grizzled white, a dark red blanket slung over his shoulders like a cloak” (720).

This story, set in 1925 Rhodesia, was published in 1951 available to an American audience, “a generation radicalized by the civil rights movement of the 1950s” (Behrent). The story still speaks to the “color wars” raging in the United States today in 2016. I read my longing “to let both black and white people meet gently, with tolerance for each other’s differences” (Lessing 721). Until 2012, in my small relatively white landscape of Portland, OR, I thought, like Doris Lessing, that this gentle meeting of races “seemed quite easy” (721). But then there was Trayvon Martin and “Black Lives Matter” and “White Silence is Violence.” Tolerance was never enough and this story is an old, old story. As writer Anne Lamott said in a recent Facebook post, “Life has always been this scary here, and we have always been as vulnerable as kittens. Plagues and Visigoths, snakes and schizophrenia; Cain is still killing Abel and nature means that everyone dies. I hate this. It's too horrible for words.”

I learned as a white dance major in college taking my first African dance class that there was “a slow intimate dance of landscape and men, a very old dance, whose steps I could not learn” (Lessing 721).  I could only imitate and hopefully not appropriate; I could fill my body with respect and awe and wonder for a culture in a land I would never truly know. Yet today, in Portland, OR, I read “it is my country as well as the black man’s country,” yet unlike Lessing I’m wondering if there really is “plenty of room for all of us, without elbowing each other off the pavements and roads” (721). Tolerance is not enough. Inclusion is not enough. Yesterday, I thought the ideal was pluralism: beyond inclusion to an embrace of our differences so that those differences blend and swirl and spin in a cosmic reverse centrifuge creating a “stunningly beautiful” rainbow Earth.

Today, I’m not so sure. I know that “Silence =Death!” But what do I, a white woman who has never even stepped on any African soil, have a right to say or write today? I am not afraid to speak, I feel compelled to write something because "white silence is violence" and I am a pacifist. But what value do my words have in this narrative? I have experienced discrimination, a loss of civil rights, but my experience is not the black experience and I refuse to co-opt the black narrative. So what, if anything, am I allowed to say today? 

Allowables
-Nikki Giovanni

I killed a spider
Not a murderous brown recluse
Nor even a black widow
And if the truth were told this
Was only a small
Sort of papery spider
Who should have run
When I picked up the book
But she didn't
And she scared me
And I smashed her

I don't think
I'm allowed

To kill something

Because I am

Frightened

Works Cited:

Behrent, Megan. “A Golden Writer.” Socialist Worker 5 Dec. 2013. Web. 17 July 2016.

Lessing, Doris. The Old Chief Mshlanga. S. Akbari, W. Denecke, V. Dharwadker, B. Fuchs, C. Levine, P. Lewis, M. Puchner, E. Wilson (Eds.), The Norton Anthology of World Literature. (Vol. F 3^rd ed. pp. 716-726) New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company. 2012.