language Archives | The ManifestStation

Bad Bitch

January 7, 2024

On Friday afternoons I work at Bluestocking, a used bookstore in Hillcrest, a popular San Diego neighborhood and the center of the LGBT community. Next door is Breakfast Bitch, a relatively new and trendy brunch/lunch destination, people always massed around the entrance waiting for tables. Their schtick, which people seem to love, is that waitstaff call guests bitches, as in “Can I get you bitches something to drink?” Every birthday celebration, and there are many every day, is broadcast with a raucous rendering of the hip hop song “Birthday Bitch.” I hear it, again and again, blasting out their door and into ours—“One time for the birthday bitch, Two times for the birthday bitch, Three times for the birthday bitch…”—and two things happen. One, I start wondering about the reappropriation of the word “bitch.” Two, I bristle. I wince. I should be inured to it by now, but the reverse is true; it makes me increasingly uncomfortable.

From the Old English bicce, female dog, “bitch” is a term of contempt applied to women since the 15^th century. Originally to suggest rampant sexuality, dogs in heat, it morphed into women behaving badly—according to men and more recently to other women as well. Synonyms include floozy, harlot, hussy, slut, tart, tramp, vamp, wench, whore, and more, including witch, hellion, and shrew. A bitch was aggressive and belligerent, controlling and out of control. Threatening. Off the leash.

When the second wave of the women’s movement came hurtling into the sixties, feminists began to reclaim the word, to make the designation a point of pride: a bitch was strong, independent, confident, assertive. Finally speaking up, sticking up for herself. Attorney and activist Jo Freeman published the Bitch Manifesto in 1968, saying that “A Bitch takes shit from no one. You may not like her, but you cannot ignore her.” Bitch magazine launched in 1996, calling itself a “feminist response to pop culture.” A Ms. magazine contributor in 2011 called on women to celebrate their bitchiness, and Gloria Steinem suggested in 2015 that “when somebody calls you a bitch, say thank you.” In a 2008 Saturday Night Live skit, Tina Fey observed that people were calling Hillary Clinton a bitch. “She is,” she said. “And so am I. Bitches get stuff done!”

I bought into the concept that women could be mean and merciless; we could be ruthless leaders like Golda Meir and Margaret Thatcher; we could stand our ground in any situation—we could be bitches. This was equality too. One of the few movie lines I ever memorized is from the adaptation of Stephen King’s Dolores Claiborne. “Sometimes being a bitch is all a woman has to hold on to” was uttered three times, by three different characters, all fending off the patriarchy, grasping at empowerment.

Over the course of the 20^th century, the word’s usage has expanded, flipped sideways and upside down. It’s no surprise that a slur against women would be adopted by men—prisoners, gay men, macho hipsters—as an attack against weak or dependent men, sissies and softies. But in this context, the term ricochets. Rather than unmanageable women, bitches are women (and men) who do others’ bidding. In an episode of House of Cards, Remy, a Black lobbyist, and Jackie, a Congresswoman, are on opposing sides, but he reminds her that they’re both beholden to higher-ups, both someone’s bitch.

Atlantic magazine examined the trend in a 2015 article, “Meet the New Bitch: The curious evolution of a slur.” It noted that Ernest Hemingway applied the word to women, notably Gertrude Stein, who held her own against him, but also to bad editors and Spanish dictators, instances in which a badly behaving man has traditionally been called a son of a bitch. In the TV series Breaking Bad, the character Jesse Pinkman says “bitch” 54 times, sometimes as an insult or in anger, sometimes in camaraderie or as an expression of triumph. Sometimes he pronounces it in two syllables (“bi-atch”), and sometimes it serves as a meaningless filler, the way people use and abuse the word “like.” In hip-hop culture and music it’s been used to denigrate women who step out of line, while Beyonce, Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, and others have rebounded with “bad bitch” songs and memes to champion strong, independent woman, echoes of the 1968 Bitch Manifesto.

And yet. We’re told on many fronts that “bitch” is cool. That women can take pride in owning their inner bitch. But the meaning hasn’t really changed. The word is still used primarily to attack women who threaten the status quo, women in positions of power, as when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was called a “fucking bitch” by a white male colleague on the floor of the House of Representatives. It reeks of sexism, its hatred and misogyny undisguised. Women use it among themselves as an expression of support and sisterhood, but they still use it against each other too. Remember when Barbara Bush referred to Geraldine Ferraro as something that “rhymes with rich,” later insisting that she meant “witch.” I’ve been guilty of it myself. My daughter and I refer to a woman who wronged us, deeply and intentionally, as “the bitch.” Nothing else seems to adequately express our bitterness, but I cringe when I hear myself say it. I’d love to believe we can reappropriate language and wash it clean of its taint, but the rotten-egg stench clings to it.

I count the word “bitch” 35 times in this essay. An early-draft reader suggested substituting “the B word” or “the 5-letter noun,” but sometimes repetitiveness is necessary to hammer home a point. It was the frequent and irritating reprise of the birthday song at the restaurant next to the bookstore and my gut-level response to it that finally exposed my ambivalence, cemented my antipathy.

A former boyfriend once, decades ago, called me a bitch during an argument. It was the first time anyone had ever done that, and there was nothing ambiguous about his meaning. I was outraged. “How dare you?” I said, or “Don’t you ever call me that.” Or I may have called him a bastard, equally inappropriate and, when taken literally, also an insult to women, like “son of a bitch.” But wait—I was finally standing up to him, which was why we were arguing in the first place. There was a long period when I rehashed the incident and our subsequent breakup, wished I’d countered with a smartass response: “You say that like it’s a bad thing!” But I was offended then, and I’d be just as offended today.

Alice Lowe writes about life, language, food and family. Her essays have been widely published, including this past year in Big City Lit, Borrowed Solace, FEED, Drunk Monkeys, Midway, Eat Darling Eat, Eclectica, Fauxmoir, Idle Ink, Superpresent, and Dorothy Parker’s Ashes. Her work has been cited twice in Best American Essays and nominated for Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net. Alice has authored essays and reviews on Virginia Woolf’s life and work and is a regular contributor at Blogging Woolf. She lives in San Diego, California, and posts at www.aliceloweblogs.wordpress.com.

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Guest Posts, Beauty Hunting, Current Events

A Eulogy for Comets

June 22, 2021

by Natalie Torentinos

Three years ago, I was lying on abandoned elementary school bleachers staring at the sun. My sweaty skin burned against the unyielding metal, but I didn’t care.

It was August in South Carolina. My three friends and I rode our bikes for nearly 10 miles along narrow roads with no sidewalks and little shade to the path of totality because we couldn’t find any hotel rooms in Charleston. My whole body ached from peddling, hand signaling, and sitting on an uncomfortable saddle. But this was all to experience a cloudless afternoon fall instantaneously into darkness and eerie quiet for a few precious moments.

What did past generations think of these events, I thought, without any warning?

This irregularity of light and shadow left me feeling envious of anyone underneath clear skies for the great conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. A series of internet searches left me feeling sentimental for events I never knew happened or would never live long enough to see.

The astronomy community once dubbed Comet ISON a famous “sun-grazer,” or comet which flies just under 870,000 miles from the Sun. This comet spent most of its life from just beyond Pluto until a few million years ago, when it was gently nudged from its home by the gravity of a moving star. ISON entered our inner solar system with all the hopes of scientists resting on its frozen and rocky surface.

Scientists hoped ISON might survive its dalliance with our sun and be a spectacular sight in the night sky, visible to the naked eye. But it was not meant to be. As it passed our yellow star, ISON dissolved into nothing but dust and vapor.

“Born 4.5 Billion BC, Fragmented Nov 28, 2013”, reads an ISON-observing blog. “Survived by approximately several trillion siblings.”

The astrophysicist observing ISON commented that its disintegration was “a process of heartbreak.”

When I think back to how I felt watching the solar eclipse, I could understand the attachment and anticipation for an object flying more than 800,000 miles away, but ISON’s tribute was made all the more poignant by marrying the language of emotion and science.

I feel the constant struggle between emotion and the adherence to guidelines dictated by science. Seeing friends and family these days is, perhaps, a journey too close to the sun, but our basic human needs are not so different from the forces of gravity. No one wants to stargaze alone on a cold winter night.

Pandemics and celestial events, both cyclical in nature and harbingers of doom, connect distant generations. The last time Jupiter and Saturn were ever this close, a plague began in northern Europe belonging to a cycle of epidemics often referred to as the “Second Pandemic,” which started with the Black Death and kept recurring at regular intervals over decades. People were ordered to stay indoors for one month after the death or infection of someone in a household. As we communicated and entertained ourselves mostly from our homes, I wondered how past generations managed seclusion and feelings of loneliness. How can we comprehend periods of history when letters would be the only source of comfort, if they could read and write at all, and when modern medicine could not prescribe an effective treatment or vaccine in such short order?

Despite our modern comforts, we have become all too familiar with the process of heartbreak, but the pain hasn’t been fully realized, maybe because we know this isn’t over yet. Maybe it’s because we’re not accustomed to collective mourning. Maybe we are afraid to acknowledge our own deviations from the prescribed path of limited human interaction.

My friend’s brother wanted to surprise their parents with a holiday visit. He self-quarantined for two weeks and then drove cross-country nonstop for almost 30 hours, sleeping in his car and never staying in a hotel, only to develop flu-like symptoms upon arriving at their family’s home. All subsequent COVID tests came back negative, but the effect was crippling just the same. My friend, who had initially rejoiced at the idea of finally being reunited, could only cry in the driveway before daring to see him. They saw each other on Christmas through zoom.

Another friend lost her job this past year, and since her parents are both doctors in their 70s, she resolved to not see them until all were vaccinated. She was prepared to spend Christmas ordering takeout and binge-watching Orange is the New Black, but one of her neighbors, also single and recently unemployed, made her a dinner of brined herb chicken. They ate the meal separately in their apartments, apart yet perfectly aligned.

I attended a small gathering of family friends on Christmas Eve. Each person ate at their own table spaced at least six feet apart. After the meal, the hosts directed us to the living room, and while seated six feet apart from one another and wearing masks, we listened to Christmas carols on a 1920s Victrola phonograph record player. I heard those reedy voices singing to us in that living room, these voices of nameless and faceless people who likely lived through the 1918 pandemic, as if they were traveling across decades to comfort us in a time of uncertainty.

Christmas caroling and nativity plays were cancelled during the pandemic of 1918, but people continued to gather. One difference between now and then, however, is that while viruses were too small to be seen by any available microscope, we can now see detailed images of their structures. One news article pointed out that COVID-19 looked “otherworldly, a death star floating in deep space, with curious stars glimmering in the distance.”

It seems that microscopes, like telescopes, can see into deep space and instill a sense of wonder – and fear.

The collapse of Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Telescope seemed an apt representation for a growing weariness of science. The 305-metre wide dish assessed asteroids and observed spinning stars for more than 50 years. An astronomer likened the loss to “losing an elderly relative,” as it persevered through the pitfalls of life – budget cuts, natural disasters, and periods of neglect. A student who saw the telescope through a research program said it hurt to talk about the observatory in past tense.

While navigating the varying emotions we’re all experiencing – whether due to losing one’s health, job, or sense of safety – it can be difficult to contemplate how we transition from present to past tense. Will there come a time when I sit a young child on my knee and start a story with, “back in the COVID days”?

I long to toss out the mask hanging from my car’s rearview mirror, but even when that day comes, these invisible death stars will linger in the air. Science may indicate that an acceptable level of immunity has been reached, but what will our emotions dictate? I suspect the same forces compelling us to gather now will compel us to look upon large crowds and cramped spaces with suspicion in the future.

Will we confront our changed psyches as the pandemic’s long-term effects cast an ever-growing shadow?

We are not so different from the universe, one that is both ever-changing and predictable. A pandemic will happen again; we will praise scientists, and we will ignore science-driven restrictions placed on us. We will take for granted the comforts past generations suffered without. We will find ways to assuage our grief.

Three years from now, the next total solar eclipse will cross the United States. When the moon and sun cross paths again, I will ask my friends to gather together so we can watch and wonder – about the past, the future, and all the worlds we cannot see.

Natalie Torentinos is a lobbyist for a medical society in Washington, D.C., but earlier in her career worked as a reporter for several weekly and daily newspapers in Texas and Pennsylvania. She holds a bachelor’s in history and journalism from the University of Delaware and a master’s in political management from the George Washington University.

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If you’ve had the opportunity to take a class from Janice Lee (we highly recommend her class at Corporeal Writing) then you understand why we are excited about her forthcoming book, Imagine a Death. Her work is, frankly, groundbreaking both in terms of form and content. If you aren’t familiar with Janice, check her out. A description of Imagine a Death. from her website:

A depiction of the cycles of abuse and trauma in a prolonged end-time, Imagine a Death examines the ways in which our pasts envelop us, the ways in which we justify horrible things in the name of survival, all of the horrible and beautiful things we are capable of when we are hurt and broken, and the animal (and plant) companions that ground us.

Join us in preordering her book now, and if you take a class with her, let her know we sent you. Preorder a copy today at Bookshop.org or Amazon.

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Guest Posts, love

Midrash on Love and Language

February 14, 2019

After Grace Paley

By Adina Giannelli

midrash (noun: ancient Judaic commentary or rabbinic interpretation, exposition, investigation)

She had a tendency to ask questions: to seek validation or comfort through others and their words. To inquire: should I do this thing or that? She liked reflecting on others’ insights. By reflecting she meant contemplating; by insights she meant thoughts and feelings, how they varied, how they mapped onto one another, upon her. And then, after gathering points of view, by which she meant perspectives, she liked deciding on her own. By on her own, she meant independently, which is to say, in the strength of her solitude—as she had always done. As she had always been.

When and where she asked questions, those around her volleyed questions back. These boiled down lately to how do you know this is it? She loved these questions even when they failed to reflect her, which they usually did.

Because she loved language, she knew that to reduce her love to language was to flatten it, to poison it. And much was poisoned already. So she answered insufficiently, in watered down words: she wanted to declaim, but lacked the lexicon to match her feelings’ depth. Instead, she said what people said about love: he feels like home to me; and when you know, you know; and—in a strange and borrowed idiom—she knew like the back of her hand. By hand she meant the part of her body she used to write words and lift children, to knead the pain from where it settled in his, drifting over warm skin like a nightly prayer.

Are you sure? Kelli asked, and she said yes.

Ben said you love him in a way your old ass has never loved anyone before? and she said yes. Continue Reading…

language, Guest Posts

My Ithaka

March 18, 2018

By Catherine Curan

At age 19 I fell in love forever, with Odysseus, with Yiannis, and most of all with Constantine.

My mother had said college would be a happier place than high school for me, a bookish would-be poet marooned in small-town Long Island, dreaming of a life of the mind. What better place to find it than Princeton University, the pinnacle of the Ivy League and my father’s beloved alma mater? But when I arrived in September 1988, the intellectual paradise I had naively expected shimmered out of reach. I was wait-listed for creative writing workshops. I floundered in philosophy classes I took instead. I drank cheap beer, discovering a drunken hookup culture my mother didn’t know had replaced dating. I was so unhappy, I nearly dropped out.

My parents wanted me to stay. So I did, enrolling sophomore year in a comparative literature class with an appealingly weighty title: Myth, History, and Contemporary Experience in Modern Greek, English, and American Poetry. On the first day, a dozen students crowded around a long table headed by an avuncular professor who opened a book and immediately began lecturing, engrossed in the text.

I can’t recall exactly which poem he read. I like to think it was Cavafy, encouraging Odysseus to keep his beloved lost homeland of Ithaka always in mind, without fearing the monsters or angry gods he might find along the way. “You won’t encounter them / unless you bring them along inside your soul, / unless your soul sets them up in front of you.” The poems we discussed that day, and Professor Edmund Keeley’s unassuming love for them, captivated me. I bought Keeley’s collection of translations, “Voices of Modern Greece”, a slim paperback with a plain cover that gave no hint the verse it contained would crack my life wide open. My passion for these poets—Constantine Cavafy, Yiannis Ritsos, and Odysseus Elytis—would send me on an odyssey thousands of miles from home, leading to a new language, a new home, love, betrayal, loss, and heartbreak. I didn’t know it then, but my personal epic journey began in that classroom with a few lines of Modern Greek poetry.

Both scholarship student and Princeton legacy, I was navigating an uneasy mixture of struggle and privilege. My father had graduated in 1958, but he still bore childhood scars of poverty and loss. I grew up watching him hoard 32-ounce cans of imported Italian plum tomatoes so he would always be able to make sauce, and hearing stories of how he and his five siblings cared for each other after their mother died and their father abandoned them.

I had no interest in my grandfather’s language, Italian, or in German, the language of my grandmother, whose death remained an ever-present tragedy. Greece had always fascinated me, and in Keeley’s class, Modern Greek poetry began to take shape as an appealing island I could explore on my own, apart from my family.

I was in awe of any person with the exalted title “professor”, but Keeley was friendly and supportive, introducing me to Dimitri Gondicas, the Assistant Director of the Program in Hellenic Studies. When I decided to write my junior paper on Cavafy, Gondicas arranged for philosophy professor Alexander Nehamas to advise me. Some of my happiest Princeton memories are of meeting with Nehamas in his office at 1879 Hall to discuss Cavafy. For years afterwards (until it was lost in a move), I kept Nehamas’ translation of my favorite Cavafy poem, “I’ve Brought to Art”, above my desk.

My work with Nehamas showed me the limits of writing about poetry in translation. Gondicas suggested I study Greek in Athens, offering me a scholarship.

I told my mother first. As a teenager, she had wanted to be a flight attendant, and still dreamt of traveling the world. We decided to tell my father I’d won a prestigious scholarship. Only after he congratulated me, glowing with pride, did we mention my trip to Greece.

At last I was sailing closer to a life of the mind (something I had not even tried to define, or realized I could create). A childhood friend traveled with me, and we skylarked around Paros with two handsome brothers from the UK. Then my friends returned home, leaving me in Athens, alone. I had never been farther from home than New Jersey. Athens seemed too intense: loud, hot, bright, and utterly baffling. I knew no one, and the other students in my Greek class were already a tight-knit group from the same American university.

The language I had longed to learn seemed nearly impossible, too. I remember sitting in my apartment, struggling to sound out a new vocabulary word. Greek is notorious for complex multisyllabic words, but I wasn’t going to give up until I got this one. “Soo-ppp, soo-ppp-eh,” I intoned. “Soo ppp eh, rm, ar, ket.” Supermarket. I had just spent ten minutes deciphering an English word in Greek. I gave up and went to buy canned tomatoes for the marinara sauce I was cooking, gesturing to the shopkeeper to make myself understood.

The next day after class I spotted a guy in a Princeton T-shirt, and tapped him on the shoulder. Photis invited me to lunch. He and his father, a Greek-American professor, were so friendly, I forgot to be shy of the man with the exalted title, and his handsome son. I was headed back to Princeton in two weeks, while Photis was spending a year in Greece. Both of us were surprised by how quickly our attraction deepened into love.

No matter that he lived in Athens. It was thrilling to long for him, back in Princeton. It was thrilling to walk to the copy shop late at night and receive a page of curling paper, fresh from the fax machine, containing a love letter he’d just written, 3,000 miles away. No matter that I now associated the language of Constantine, Odysseus, and Yiannis, my trio of perfect poets, with the flesh-and-blood Photis. Our love had survived my return to America, and was strong enough to lure him back for the spring semester.

After I graduated, we spent the summer in Greece. This time he was returning to Princeton, while I stayed in Athens for a year, teaching English and studying Greek so I could finally read Cavafy. Confident in our relationship, Photis suggested we see other people while apart. I didn’t like the idea, but I agreed. What difference would a meaningless fling make?

In November, I met a young Athenian. A professional-studies student and an aspiring composer, he struggled, as I did, to balance duty with creative dreams. Unlike Photis, my Athenian loved Modern Greek poetry, too; the first present he gave me was a copy in Greek of Elytis’ “Diary of an Invisible April”. And so once again I embarked on a romance that could not last. My Athenian was preparing for two years of mandatory service in the Greek Army, while Photis planned to join me in Greece after exams.

By the time my parents visited Athens that spring, I had astonished myself and everyone else by breaking up with Photis. My father had tolerated him, just barely, deriding our transatlantic passion as “puppy love”. In Athens, my parents smiled through a dinner with me and my new love, but I knew they feared losing me to Greece. I was happy with my Athenian, but I hated that I had hurt Photis, and I wondered, if I could abandon him, what other betrayals was I capable of?

That spring, I forgot about Yiannis, Odysseus, and Constantine. I squandered the opportunity to read Cavafy with my undergraduate Greek professor, Richard Burgi, who had retired to Athens. My Athenian’s knowledge of my native language was so much better than mine of his that we rarely spoke Greek to each other, and I did not complete the few translations I started of the poems he’d given me. Shutting out my guilt about Photis and anxieties about the future, I lived in a desperate but exalted present tense. My Athenian would soon be joining the army. My job, and the on-campus housing that came with it, was ending, and so was my time in Greece.

I had no plans for what came next. It did not even occur to me to request another deferral on my student loans, or try to find a new job, so I could stay. I had been away for an entire year, enjoying myself, perhaps too much. It was time to go home.

America had become a foreign country. New York felt unreal, a temporary detour until I could sort out a scholarship for graduate school in England or Greece. I found a job and started repaying my Princeton loans, while my Athenian coped with army life. We had no money for traveling, so long-distance landline calls and hand-written letters sustained us. During our separation, my relationship to the language I had started learning so I could read Modern Greek poetry deepened and changed. It took on the tenor of his voice on my answering machine, the sweet silliness of the pet name we created from one of my funnier grammatical errors. The shaky alpha, beta, gammas from my copybooks the summer I met Photis solidified into the shape my Athenian gave the Greek alphabet when he wrote to me from the army camp.

Over time, the stress and unhappiness on both sides grew too great, and in early 1995, we admitted defeat. Single again for the first time in three years, I discovered that I could not reestablish a purely academic connection to the language of my love for these two men. I quit my

Greek lessons and abandoned my comp-lit career plans. I felt I had failed myself and my mentors. I couldn’t even admit why. Modern Greek had become a lexicon of heartbreak, and I had to leave it behind me.

The man I married is the kindest person I know. Understanding my desire to study Greek in a new way, he found an app for me last fall, and since then I’ve been practicing Greek almost every day. Just this week I’ve been able, for the first time in years, to read a few lines of Cavafy. I’m also discovering, in English and the original Greek, new voices collected in the bilingual anthology “Austerity Measures” published in 2016.

“As you set out for Ithaka, hope your road is a long one, full of adventure, full of discovery,” Cavafy wrote. “Keep Ithaka always in your mind. / Arriving there is what you are destined for. / But do not hurry the journey at all. / Better if it lasts for years, / so you’re old by the time you reach the island, / wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way.”

I won’t have the Modern Greek Studies career I once envisioned, earning the exalted title of professor of comparative literature for myself. I’ll never know what my life would have been like if I had stayed in Greece. But I’ve returned at last to the Modern Greek poets I once loved for their beautiful, dangerous, passionate words. They will always be with me.

Catherine Curan is a fiction writer, independent journalist, and writing teacher based in New York City. Her short stories have appeared in Arts & Letters, Fiction, Many Mountains Moving, Ozone Park Journal, and the SalonZine. In 2011, she won a Freelance Fellowship from Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. for a three-month investigation into residential foreclosures in the New York City area, which was published by the New York Post.

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Guest Posts, memories, Writing & The Body

The Arctic Front

June 26, 2017

By Tiffany Lee Brown

We were reshaping language. Making it fit better. Breaking it into chunks, discrete pieces. That’s what acid does: it lets you see all the infinitesimal pieces of everything, the air’s live molecules, the shivering motion of protons, electrons, neutrons as they fly through their individual atoms. At the same time, it lets you see the big things: the stars, the way the molecules connect all living creatures together, the breathing of trees against darkness.

We were reshaping language not just because it made us laugh, but because it brought new meaning to things, new clarity. And so the fire was no longer the fire. It was the Bright Flickering Orange Thing, as in: I’m freezing, but I can’t move right now. Would one of you feed the Bright Flickering Orange Thing? And someone would put a log—the Severed Guts of a Tall Being With Bark For Skin—into the big wood-burning stove with its open front, our only source of heat in this borrowed house.

All around us, Cold White Stuff muffled the forest and Cold Hard Stuff confounded the roads. It was twelve degrees Fahrenheit outside, in a region accustomed to mild winter days of low clouds and eternal drizzle. Every so often cold air—Arctic air—would come down from Alaska and get socketed in somehow. That’s what we were experiencing: an Arctic front.

Lee observed the Small Furry Clawed Mammals of the house and pointed out their qualities to me and Will. This grey one here, he decided, this grey one is named Steve. Check Steve out. He rules the world! Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Awe & Wonder, Young Voices

It’s (Not) All The Same To Me: On Gender, Language, and Death

March 8, 2017

By Beatriz L. Seelaender

Death is a woman in Portuguese. She is still a skull under a charcoal cloak, holding a list and a scythe, but she is a woman. It is strange, isn’t it, what one can take for granted as fact just by plain language. That Death is a He in English, and wiser and less cruel and sharper, still somewhat unsettles me. There is some sort of slight wrongness in it. No, Death is not a He. My Death is not yours. There must have been some kind of mix-up. My Death is a straight-up gal. When my time comes, she will tell me I did good in life, all things considered, and hug me like a grandmother. Then, she will kindly strangle me into oblivion- because kindness is necessary in death, and it is women that are forgiving and kind, and that is why death should be a woman.

There used to be a comic book- there probably still is, since it wasn’t so long ago that I was a kid- featuring the adventures of Mrs. Death. Despite her not being the main character in the comic- that honour had been given to the character who in English translations is renamed Bug-a-boo-, Mrs. Death did get a lot of solo stories. While I am not quite sure why a children’s comic would invest in dark humour, the stories were personal favourites of mine. One of them features Mrs. Death losing her list of errands (aka people she should kill today) and killing completely random people to make up for it. There was another where she accidentally offed the homonym of the actual man she was supposed to take. On top of it, she had to deal with a staggering amount of typos (we are led to believe that the big guys up there do not really care about Mrs. Death, who has to perform all of their grunt work and isn’t payed enough for it). All in all, they did a good job of having kids learn about death as an inoffensive old lady waiting for retirement. In a lot of ways having this image of death is more comforting than that of an arrogant shadow of a man as it is typically conveyed in English stories. On the other hand, perhaps it undermines the seriousness of the subject. Oh, well, parents should not let their kids learn about death from comics, anyhow.

I can only conceive of Death the man as patronizing: he takes pleasure in toying with people. His blood is icy blue and he probably hates Death the woman for doing better than him at the slaying business. But neither one of them can die, really; it is their greatest tragedy.

It wasn’t until my teens that I came across Death as a He. Because articles are neutral in English I had never really thought about applying gender to things in English. Although perhaps that is a lie- I am not entirely sure. It is possible I just kept on looking at things gendered according to how I knew them in my native language. There was reluctance to admitting that perhaps things in their fundamental nature weren’t as blue and pink as the world- but, then again, neither was the world, and we still see it that way nonetheless.

While we do have an “it” in Portuguese, it is hardly ever used as subject in sentences. We use he or she for everything, dead or alive; or never alive. If we really have to say “it”, we simply use the verb; the subject is assumed as it. We don’t say that it rained; we simply say “rained”. We don’t say it’s weird; we simply say “is weird”.

The rest of the time we refer to things the way Aesop referred to animals- he, the stapler and she, the copy-maker. We also refer to animals that way, as you probably must have guessed by now. And all those its, then, come alive.

See, up until my meeting with Him, Death, it had been very simple to me- a table and a chair and a bed and a house were female-bound. And there were things like school, History and art that were referred to as female, too. At least death is not alone, then, and they are not alone in death; these other words. Word is also preceded by the feminine article, in Portuguese. Forks and mattresses and napkins and hats and the radio and peaches and candy were all male-bound things.

Some of us even got confused at times; I remember once at school when a peak number of students using the wrong article for “lettuce” inspired a gender-bound-articles test, but it didn’t change anything. People were surprised, surely, that lettuce was a She- a couple of weeks later, though, everyone was still using the wrong article for lettuce.

(I don’t know why, though; lettuce is so clearly feminine, being a leaf and all; and leaves being feminine, too) (Leaves and flowers and most fruit) (Except for peaches, but we’ve been over this already) (Now, I wonder why in Brazil all seasons are male but spring) (It cannot be just because of the flowers) (It would be sort of misogynistic, if it were) (In Germany all seasons are male-bound, even spring) (But in German nothing is at it should be)

I want to try out an experiment: I will give you four words and you tell me what your immediate thought as to what their ultimate gender is; ready? Knife, Life, Book, Fox.

It has just occurred to me that I picked “knife” as the first word because of a poem by João Cabral de Melo Neto titled “The School of Knives”. In Portuguese, this word is preceded by the feminine. Most sharp things are- blades and daggers and scythes, too. In the poem de Melo Neto takes this a step further and compares women and knives, in a sort of sensual, femme-fatale way. God, I hate this word; femme-fatale- there is a song by The Velvet Underground under this title, and it is pretty catchy; and I hate myself for enjoying it. Anyway, knives are not necessarily female until some sort of personality and explanation as to why it is female is imposed to it.

In Spanish knives are male-bound. The argument for knives as male could be just as compelling as that for a femme-fatale definition; knives having the potential to be used for gratuitous violence (traditionally male) as easily as they are able to deliver beautiful and entangling performances of precision in clean, lustful cuts: this last one is epitome of the femme- fatale ideal; to destroy and look good doing it. There is also something about gluttony and lust merging together here in the Portuguese embodiment of the knife, especially in de Melo Neto’s poem.

I propose we look at this not as an instance of misogyny, or perhaps as more than an instance of misogyny. I know it is very easy to go the way of saying we need to stop gendering everything- but there are many variables going into this discussion. For one, the qualifier of gender in articles is not promoting gender stereotypes directly or even indirectly- all of them are entirely arbitrary. I don’t think anyone ever thought to themselves- knives are definitely ladies, so let’s use this article when referring to them. The problem came after- it came in the form of explanations as to why things were the gender they were. See, the way gender roles are distributed; one could arguably make a point for something as dull as a desk either as masculine or feminine simply by selecting a specific set of characteristics that matches the stereotypical definition one wishes to defend. That is obviously because like people, things also have characteristics deemed feminine and masculine inside them. All you have to do is choose.

Let’s talk about the Life with a capital L. I think most languages in use of gendered articles (that I know of, obviously) see life as female; the exception being German, in which das Leben marks a neutral noun. Surely you would think this is a sign of female emancipation- the plural in German taking for once the shape of the female pronoun being a step in the right direction as well- but I wonder how much of it is actually a sign of social progress and how much is just, you know, just something random about the German language.

When you take a closer look at it, in fact, it is hard to find direct correlations between the use of gendered articles and intolerance rates in a society. Were that the case, one would expect a country such as Poland, speaking a language which allows one to drop pronouns and exempt of articles, to be the beacon of freedom by now. Moreover, the Norwegian, known for their inclusive social measures and individual liberties, speak a language featuring article qualifiers. I do not intend to make a study out of this, and I am sure there are many more variables involved, but this goes to show problems like this can hardly ever be traced back to one simple, obvious cause.

But this is getting too derivative (you can tell by the excessive use of parenthesis) (not aesthetically pleasing) (are there things unaesthetically pleasing?) (Well, there are pleasant things that aren’t aesthetic and there are aesthetic things that aren’t pleasing) (And then there is the anaesthetic, which makes you numb to painful and beautiful things) (I hope not all beautiful things are painful) (But I don’t have any answers now) (Come back later) (We are experiencing connection problems) (Try turning your brain off and on again).

Oh, there you go. I feel fine, don’t you? Would you like to return to where we were before the whole thing became a mess?

Now, as I was saying, the best we can do with gendered articles is look for clues that could help us fight the feminist crusade, or whatever you want to call it. Instead of ignoring or denying their existence, we should take a look at what sort of symbols they promote, intentionally or not. We think about what cultural differences stand out in a place where death is a woman and a place where death is a man- and the different interpretations of death that may come from it. We ask people who speak in neutral languages to gender things for twenty-four hours, so we can see what role is predominant and, most importantly, what kind of justification is used for the answer. We get Intel on the rationalizations made in the back of our minds, and discover potential new ways to break down gender roles.

In self-indulgent speculation, I am thinking the reason why Life is “female” in so many languages is because life is brought to us by our mothers. Thus life we associate with women and water and fountains of water, because all these things symbolize fertility and birth, and rebirth as well. Goddesses of fertility- Hera and Freya and Isis and Parvati and even the Virgin Mary if you look at Christianism as a religion with multiple focuses of adoration- are generally also associated with symbols such as dawn, death, and abundance, because fertility could also mean a good harvest.

While I do get why some goddesses of life are also patrons of death, it is still strange to look at these concepts together, as dichotomies. Everyone likes the idea of going full circle, but I’ve yet to see someone capable of making one with their hands. Still, it’s a nice idea. Idea; yet another she. I guess it has something to do with the muses. The muses are also inevitably female, because the artists are usually male. As for you, female artists, there isn’t as high a demand for male muses that we feel compelled to change the rules. But I guess men would feel undermined in the role of muses, don’t you think? Well, you’re right, not all men. All men who keep saying not all men, though; those are precisely the men I’m talking about.

You see, there is a deeply rooted notion somewhere in there that an artist must tame his muses. Even if an idea, then, is a she, the framing of ideas will definitely be male. The word book is preceded by the male article in Portuguese; in German it is neutral; it never is a woman. These are only far-fetched conjectures, half joke, half real; but inside every false sentence there must be a little bit of truth. That of men taking credit for women’s ideas, after all; is hardly a new trend.

The discussion gets even more complicated once we introduce animals into it. They are the closest thing to non-human gendering experienced by the English language; just take a look at the Perry Index of Aesop’s Fables. Snakes and foxes are male, storks are female. What is interesting, however, is not the gender imposed- though this time one could question its arbitrariness- but how this translates into people’s mind sets:

All of those animals are female in Portuguese. It is even difficult for me to conceive of an animal as peculiar as a male fox. We don’t even have a male alternative for it. Once we get to snakes, it’s even worse. I recently saw the animated version of The Jungle Book with my little cousin, and I was convinced they had redubbed the old voices, because in my mind that python was a lady python. I can only assume that as a child I found the idea of there being a male snake so outlandish that I blocked it completely.

It’s not like I didn’t know there was a male snake- I just thought them unimportant. They were not allowed to talk for the species. They were not allowed to represent it. Think about what kids think sometimes; the thoughts kids have are a rare, clear perspective of a place you have been in for too long; life.

(They will take some funny things for granted) (And question what you have taken for granted without noticing) (When you play with language you feel like being a child again) (Your brain is a clean slate again) (You are innocent again).

There are other places, you know; outside of the sky; there is even a sky over the living room ceiling.

If someone were to paint clouds on my ceiling on a blue background; if I were to fall into a state of hypnosis, well, I wonder what I’d be. Maybe I shouldn’t wonder. There’s way too much randomness in this world for us not to aimlessly wonder, though. It’s what’s keeping us from crashing onto our false skies.

Author of the novel “De Volta ao Vazio” (in a rough translation, “Emptiness, Revisited”), Seelaender is a student of Literature at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil.

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Guest Posts, Inspiration, Travels

Degree of Latitude

February 5, 2017

By Josephine Ensign

This is a test of your mental state.¹

Where are you right now? (But first: Who are you? What’s the story of your true name?)
What’s the date—day, month, year? (Where did you come from and where are you headed?)
Repeat these three words after me: whale, map, stone. (Don’t question them; they’re important words.)
Spell world backwards. (Now spell world spinning.)
Repeat the phrase: ‘A rolling stone gathers no moss.’ What do you suppose it means? (Be careful of your answer. It can indicate instability.)
Take these stones in your right hand. Roll them slowly in your hand like dice. Drop them on the floor. (Repeat. Gently, rhythmically. Imagine ocean waves lapping the shores of a pebbled beach.)
Write a sentence. (Now write another sentence connected with the first. Repeat.)
Tell me the names of the three items I gave you earlier. (Remember them? Whale, map, stone….)

_________________________________________

Whale.

August 11, 1980. Time: 1720/ Position: 49.39 degrees N, 60.29 degrees W. Sea level. Banc Beauge, Gulf of Saint Lawrence, Canada.

Call me Josephine, although at the time I went by my childhood nickname: BJ. I’ve just turned nineteen and I’m at the helm of the Westward, a 125-foot topsail schooner oceanographic research vessel out of Woods Hole, Cape Cod, Massachusetts. We’re under full sail. I’m steering a course SE toward Lark Harbour, Bay of Islands, Newfoundland. I glance down at the glass globe crystal ball of the compass binnacle in front of me. We’ve been blown off-course by a Force Nine gale lasting two days and nights. Today it’s passed by to the north, leaving us in sight of the desolate flat-lined coast of Labrador. The heavy grey clouds undulate above us, breaking in places to lapis sky. The breeze is stiff and steady, whipping small white-frothed waves against our hull. Continue Reading…

death, Grief, Guest Posts, loss, Miscarriage

Finding My Vocabulary.

January 10, 2015

By Carly Williams.

I’ve learned a new vocabulary.

Dead. Death. Dead baby. Stillbirth. Stillborn. Neonatal death. Miscarriage. Bereaved.

At times I surprise myself at the ease with which death rolls off my tongue.

This fresh plethora of words flows easily from my unsilenced lips, slips calmly from my soured mouth.

For some, my emerging voice rings discordant. I wear, for all to see, the dark grief of random loss. Who wants to look at me, when my son’s death reflects the frailty of all life? Who wants to hear a language they don’t ever want to learn?

Language spirals uselessly around the death of a child or baby. I watch as the eyes of observers dart around, in search of an alternative to my truth. There is no alternative.

My vocabulary is the truth, my truth. Continue Reading…