An audience member collapsed at a book reading at McNally
Jackson* the other night.
The promoting writer was the wise, steadfast storyteller
Jeanette Winterson. She was reading from her latest, a memoir revisiting issues
central to the seminal semi-autobiographical Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (Pandora Press, 1985) when an
elderly (please insert: the most respectful euphemism for of a certain age)
woman lost consciousness, falling from her chair with a thud. Seconds later a nearby
listener hollered, “Call 911!”
No one taught me to be crass. I’ve come by it naturally and
embraced it. I’m generally tactless but empathetic and good in a crisis. In
this case, phone off, bike helmet in hand, stretching my congenitally impaired
hearing trying to understand Winterson from the rail of the stairs separating
the packed downstairs reading area from the horrible shop patrons and the troll
steaming milk in the café, thereby obstructing the paramedic’s path to the patient,
when I saw someone dialing, I fled.
If it’s possible to wish the afflicted party health while
thanking her by livening, with her emergency, a rote genre of event typically
formulaic enough to convince even the most idealistic attendees that creativity
is dead in literature, that’s what I’d like to express.
Why go? Winterson tells great stories, she will not inure
labels, she’s a writer, it’s who she is not what she does, she’s read more
books than I have and she answers questions (click here to hear Winterson on WNYC's Leonard Lopate Show) the way she
writes book and film reviews, sincerely and expansively. Also, Winterson
largely operates in a historical narrative sensitive to sex and gender. It’s a
pleasure to hear someone speak intelligently and not stridently through this
filter – especially with all the recent coverage of offensive election year
legislation and posturing. It’s an analgesic for a tradition I defend
without embracing.
Winterson’s public is like Ani Difranco’s, dressed up in
their best manners queuing to hear Gloria Steinem give a talk on Betty Friedan,
and her story of surviving fundamentalism, finding freedom in books and in
bedding what her attracted her heart, regardless of at times severe social constraints,
is important to a lot of people.
When the woman dropped out of her chair at the reading I
imagined her an idealized example of “the problem that has no name.” She
regretted having been conservative through Women’s Lib, married young to a kind
man she didn’t respond to physically, the situation all the more loathsome for
it’s outward agreeableness, she read Oranges
in 85’ which set her on a path to self-acknowledgement and peace in the final
third of her life, coming to close the book, to meet her literary hero, seated
next to the woman she’d married two years ago in Vermont, smiling, her heart
lost it’s strength.
Or, she was just a lady with fine literary taste.
Regardless of the verity of this theatrically invented life,
I’m a direct beneficiary and product of big and little “f” feminism(s). Even if
I typically choose not to understand the world in agreeing terms, my story can
be told that way: grandmothers employed outside the home, mother steeped in
second wave ideology who became a white collar rock star, a breadwinner, and
raised her two children singing to jazzy tunes in the key of “I can do whatever
I want.” I thank my mother, grandmothers and everyone who struggled under
harsher conditions than I by proxy, in person if the chance presents itself,
and continue to live as untouched by social identity politics as possible:
gender-sexual, racial, ethnic, national, or any other variety.
As much as these categories do to help us define and discuss
ourselves, consenting that they’re crucial to some, and that many great minds
have processed through these traditions, to me, they feel like cages we build
to constrain ourselves.
In the short time she held the room at MJ, Winterson said
something I’ve read previously in her writing: “books are homes we enter.” It’s
a relatable metaphor for anyone who’s braved the day’s banalities for the reward
of a good book and a comfortable chair. Stories contain us; we live in them,
learn, laugh and cry. As I child I made my home in fiction and nonfiction with
little distinction. I was Thomas Jefferson and Anne Hutchinson, Harriet Tubman
and W.E.B. Dubois and Ernest Hemingway and Zora Neale Hurston. None of my grade school classmates stopped me from playing Alexander the Great during recess
after an ancient history lesson or fighting imagined monsters as the Red Ranger** if I was wearing a red shirt and called it first. Being sexually
female, phenotypically light-skinned and ethnically Jewish on my father’s side
have had very little bearing on my sense of personhood.
I’m not a pioneer in this and I’m not alone. Many
Millennials I know well enough to speak for have similar stories and feel less
bound by stringent identity matrices than in times past. We just, are. Economic
hard times aside, is it extreme hubris or socially insensitive to posit that we
feel, some of us, like we were born free?
Not everyone recognizes our disenthrallment, there’s
fighting still to be done and unfortunately this freedom isn’t an infinite
dimension of contemporary life (I could never have been a world class gymnast, nor
could my brother, we’re too big and too slow) but I do believe sincerely that we’re
living in a time when the idea of gender specific ownership of character
traits, job titles, and social status has been annihilated by empirical evidence.
The same goes for sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, nationality and
religious background. Counter-stereotypes are historically documented and daily,
perhaps hourly, reinforced. This American story of more and more of us living
out the lofty language of our formative documents has been lived before, to
different degrees throughout human history.
Identities are both arbitrary, though traceable, in groups
and ephemeral, if relevant, in individuals. None of it holds up to any rigorous
examination – rational or scientific. Work done by the likes of Spencer Wells on The Genographic Project shows that almost all of our most important identity markers, like
race, are largely invisible in our genes. If I call myself a feminist, if I call myself black it’s
important to look at what scale: region or time period, we’re looking at.
Today, in one cosmopolitan city, fem is fem to some and not to others,
brown is black or white depending on whom you ask. Neither are self-definitions
constant. Through time, one person might be gay, straight, gay again, Caribbean,
feminist, Christian, Muslim or Californian.
Having recently spent time reading and talking to some
bright young females, I’m thinking maybe the recapitulation theory, ontogeny
recapitulates phylogeny, disproven for embryonic development, should be re-examined
in the theater of personal identity and self-realization. Perhaps I feel free
because I’ve done my time. I’ve been fortunate enough to have read Simone de
Beauvoir, raged with the Riot Girl movement, delivered more tirades, and
occasionally punches, than I’ve cared to defending rights and safety, mine and
others.
High School sophomore, fashion pundit and blogger Tavi Gevinson
who, apart from reminding me that if I ever thought I was cool I was certainly
delusional, in one of the first posts on her site rookiemag.com, for and by teenage girls, launched last fall, First Encounters With the Male Gaze uses the tools of gender-specific thinking to remain strong
and confident in a post-puberty world. Talking to a thirteen year-old cousin
over Christmas, a very impressive person by any criteria, better at math and
more worldly than most of my brother’s friends ten years her senior, I learned
she had a lot to say about girls being talkative, emotional, and concerned
about clothing. Etching out differences between the sexes seemed to be a
crucial part of her growing understanding of the world as well. Will these
youngsters come to feel the strengths of these labels and registers obliterated
over time as I have? It will be interesting to discover. I wish only that they
feel comfortable with their understandings of themselves and help others to do
the same. I bet they do.
Yes, there’s still fighting to be done. Pulitzer Prize winning journalists and genius power spouses Nicholas Kristoph and Sheryl WuDunn’s Half the Sky highlights underreported areas of superlative injustice by telling individual stories and providing actionable advice, shaking lax westerners out of our atrocity fatigue, and encouraging us to contribute however we’re able.
Hanging onto traditions not out of a protracted sense of indebtedness
or because it feels comfortable, but to understand and be understood, to be
watchful for regression, and change what needs changing feels right to me. I
appreciate that we have the languages to inspire action in places of conflict
and suffering and I respect those for whom these traditions are crucially
important. It’s all just a ruddy bore sometimes. I try not to be snide. I’d
sooner laugh at the peg-light displays in Forbidden Planet or the puppetry in E.T..
Visual effects techniques have evolved but those films are definitive, pillars,
proof of our strengths as a species – almost as cool as The Nineteenth Amendment.
After the 911-call went out at the bookstore I went home to
read Winterson instead of listening, she’s prolific, and has happily made much
of her work available online. She’s a writer: literary, imaginative, technical
and emotional, her actions have earned her that label. Labels based on actions
feel right.
When economist Lawrence Summers, former Secretary of the
Treasury and president of Harvard University notoriously commented that the
underrepresentation of women in the sciences at the highest level could be
explained by a “lack of aptitude.” It was a blunder, eventually resulting in a
no-confidence vote in Summers, his resignation from Harvard and the formation
of a task force to investigate women in science led by theoretical physicist,
model-builder and cosmologist Lisa Randall, who, in a 2005 Scientific
American article, published following the Summers snafu, said: "I just want to see a whole bunch more women enter the
field so these issues don't have to come up anymore."
Dr. Randall is a scientist, hesitant to comment as a social
analyst, and she admits in the S.A. piece that the issue is complicated, but the
tacit acknowledgment and plain solution present in this statement perfectly
enthuse and placate, ringing like an anthem for doing. Distinctions are distraction. Seeing someone do what he or
she is meant to do, loves to do, doing it to the best of his or her abilities
is good medicine, transformative, powerful – like hearing Louis Armstrong play
or sing or watching Wayne Gretzky on the ice.
I felt this reading Randall’s Warped Passages and going through article after article on
Winterson’s site the night of the unrealized MJ event. Addressing recent events and the
breakdown she had a couple years ago in this column article Winterson writes:
My Tweetie-pie dream from when I
was going bonkers… There was the yellow canary – and it was definitely me and I
had a nice gilded cage – but it was on wheels with an engine – and me (the bird)
was speeding about in my motorised cage thinking I was free.
As a completely unqualified outside observer, I couldn’t
help thinking that Winterson’s dream and possibly her breakdown were the result
of continuing to analyze the world through a specific socio-cultural (female
empowerment) lens while maintaining an identity founded on the rejection of this
type of codified limitation.
We all have ways of dampening the infinite within us. Our
species seems to be flawed in this way. But if we keep doing and doing our best, if individuals like Kristof, WuDunn,
Randall, Winterson, Gevinson and my mother and teenage cousins
continue to live and work, if we remain open, apply labels to actions and not
appearances, there’s reason to be hopeful. We’ll have more Armstrongs and Gretskys
of all different shapes, sizes, colors and persuasions. Stories of progress and
opportunity will endure through time and expand through space.
* McNally Jackson is a bookstore, café and literary
curatorial space in Soho, New York.
** The Red Ranger is a heroic male teenager from The Mighty
Morphin Power Rangers, a television series that aired in the U.S. beginning in
1993.
