Hilda Raz: Odd, Splendid, and Fearlessly Maternal

Abstract

Hilda Raz:Odd, Splendid, and Fearlessly Maternal Alicia Ostriker (bio) Sometimes I think she is the mother of us all, so widely does she spread her wings. As mother of Prairie Schooner, over the decades she has caused me, among many other poets, to appreciate her attention, her care, her creation of a poetry community to which we could feel we belong. I remember her boldness in doing a special issue of Jewish American writing before Jews became visible on the map of American poetry. She knew we existed! And so we knew it too. We knew it the way a child discovers itself through returning the mother's gaze. Then I remember how Divine Honors, the book of poems dealing with her breast cancer, her mastectomy, her wounded recovery, is also filled with babies and children. How could it be otherwise? The final poem of that book, titled "Ecstasies," gives us, near its close, the ecstasy of how "sometimes time folds . . . and my robe opens / to fire on a rounding belly." Is this the fire of a hearth or the sun, warming the pregnancy, or is it an imagination of death, a killing fire? Sometimes it is so hard to tell, to tell birth from death, but that poem's final stanza is of the utmost calm. Yes to birth, yes to death, yes to the basin in the garden that is the figure of pregnancy: Where I am nowevery ecstasy dissolvesback into the pool,the lap of waves,the filled basin. Then came, of course, the call to create Living On the Margins: Hilda's call, the call she received to do this for others, to do what was needed, to become the mother of a book of essays on breast cancer by women writers. What did the title mean? " 'Clean margins' around a compromised site may indicate successful treatment for cancer." she writes in her introduction. But also: women who have lost a breast to surgery "live on the margins of communities. . . . Why is an experience so common and transformative so notably absent in contemporary literature?" Why not write about it, why not write past the "fracture of expectations," past the fear [End Page 32] and pain, past the socially constructed shame, past the taboo? Why not make art of it? Raz quotes Linda Carriston: The job of the writer is . . . to present one world to another world, to present one life to another life, a hidden life to one who would, by and large, prefer not to know it. That which is hidden is hidden for a reason. To reveal it is to make someone uncomfortable—or responsible, let's say. . . . Horace's injunction that art must both teach and delight then becomes the task of the writer and the key to revealing what has been hidden, seducing the reluctant knower with the pleasure, the intellectual thrill, the "terrible beauty" of the unwanted lesson: into knowing. Part of the knowing, Raz insists, is discovering that "language can save us from isolation," and that the true telling of our personal crises will "demonstrate the ways art intersects with life and document the place of public policy—poverty, racism, pollution, chemical overflow, war—in private lives." When she called me and asked me to write an essay for this book, I resisted. I had already published a suite of twelve poems about my own mastectomy. I told her that I had said everything I needed to say. "No you haven't," she replied. It turned out that she was right. Tucked in a forgotten notebook were the notes I had taken during the whole difficult arc of the process from first mammogram, through biopsy, through decision-making (lumpectomy versus mastectomy), the encounters with a range of admirable and less-admirable doctors, my husband and children, the surgery, the recovery, and what was happening in the world during this period: the run-up to the Gulf War and the war itself. Though I don't believe in writing as therapy, the essay was in fact fun to write. I learned, writing it, more than I knew I knew. Reading all the other essays in Living On the...