Rich’s Essential Essays

Abstract

A poet in 1997 refuses to accept a National Medal for the Arts and writes an open letter to President Clinton to explain why. She cares, she explains, about “the relationship of art to justice;” she names a dozen of the many webs of injustice in her society by a government in which both major political parties “display a crude affinity for the interests of corporate power, while deserting the majority of the people, especially the most vulnerable”; she prefers not to accept a gift from a government that is, in fact, hostile to the arts. In 1991 in the extraordinary collage-poem “Atlas of the Difficult World,” she had stated, “A patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country / as she wrestles for her own soul.” But by that time, Adrienne Rich had been refining her moves as a wrestler in and with language for decades.For half a century, Adrienne Rich was a major American poet and our premier radical, feminist, Jewish thinker. She was adored and hated. To me, she seems a prophet, treading a path like those of the biblical prophets, speaking truth to power. It is odd to realize that she has been gone for over half a decade. Her Essential Essays are as exciting to me now as they were when they first came out, or came on, starting in the 1960s and 70s, bearing their cargo of intellect, rage, and hope, illuminated by the poet’s exactitude of feeling and language. My generation was living through the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the Drug Wars, the war on poverty, the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X, riots in the cities, and the rise of the religious Right. This was also the period of the Civil Rights movement, “Second Wave” Feminism, the beginning of the Gay Rights movement, the start of environmentalism, the birth of rock and roll. As Plato says, “When the music changes, the walls of the city tremble.” Wealth and power were pressing down upon the poor and powerless; the poor and powerless were resisting, striking back, often through the medium of the arts. As Americans, we are still being torn apart by these ongoing struggles.Then and now, as a feminist Jewish poet and seeker, I respond to Rich’s prose with ardent assent, streaked at times with equally ardent dissent. She is still that provocative, radical “thinking woman” who recognized, with horror and anger, that everything in our society conspires to make a thinking woman sit down and shut up. I still experience the awe I felt as an insecure young wife, mother, and teacher, watching this woman barely ten years older than I, resolutely and eloquently probing the tight connection between dysfunction in society and her own divided self. In one of her most famous early poems, “Diving into the Wreck,” the poet descends to “the deep element” to investigate what she calls “the wreck and not the story of the wreck, / The thing itself and not the myth . . . to see the damage that was done / and the treasures that prevail.” The metaphor here is a brilliant successor to T. S. Eliot’s metaphor of society and self as “The Waste Land.” Rich implies that the history of civilization, American history, the poet’s family history, her personal life, her psyche—all these intricately nested phenomena—can be understood as a “wreck.” A woman who could evoke the history of malaise in our society, along with the suppressions stored in our individual and collective subconscious, by using the simple metaphor of a submerged wreck, was the kind of poet I thought I might want to become.Rich’s essays, like her poetry, were indeed essential reading for my generation of feminists, suckled on Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, but wanting to be more than mad housewives. Each new work of hers removed blindfolds, and opened vistas. Sometimes they poured salt in wounds. Her writing was making us want to heal, not hide, our woundedness. Her early essay “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision” was a wake-up call to the woman writer, to learn “how our language has trapped as well as liberated us, how the very act of naming has been till now a male prerogative”; we needed, she said, to re-examine the writing of the patriarchal past “to break its hold over us.” The essay “Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson” broke the hold of depictions of Dickinson as Belle of Amherst, half-cracked recluse, writing merely to compensate for a broken heart. (These painfully condescending stereotypes are still with us, incidentally; cf. the 2017 film A Quiet Passion.) Rich sees Dickinson as powerful, relentless, a volcano of language and emotion erupting against all odds in her Puritan-dominated culture. “It is always what is under pressure in us, especially under pressure of concealment—that explodes in poetry,” Rich wrote. After her definitive commentary on the neglected poem “My Life had stood—a loaded Gun,” critics could never read Emily Dickinson the same way again. Tutored by Rich, I share with every new set of poetry workshop students my mantra: “Kill the censor. Write what you’re afraid to write.”The 1982 essay “Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity” moves into issues of race and class. It begins as an autobiography. Rich’s mother was a genteel WASP, her father an “assimilated” Jewish intellectual, physician, and gentleman for whom overt Jewishness was to be avoided and East European Jews were, in a sense, trayf. The essay ends by locating anti-Semitism within a more broadly racist society, while recognizing that victims of oppression can themselves become oppressors. To be a Jew was, for Rich, to be a divided being. As a well-off white girl, she was a privileged participant in an unjust society. As a Jew, she was an outsider, but this condition led to identification with other outsiders. She had to take her stand, she wrote, among the powerless. Influenced by James Baldwin, she stated what still unfortunately needs stating, “that racism was poisonous to white as well as destructive to Black people.” She wrote, “The history that really concerned me [was] the history of the dispossessed.” Belatedly, she came to recognize that Jewish traditions, religious and secular, “included a hatred of oppression and an imperative to pursue justice and care for the stranger.”And what of Israel/Palestine? Israel is not her topic in this essay, but the settlements were already expanding, and the Sabra and Shatila massacre took place in the same year as this piece of acute self-examination. In later years Rich became a notable critic of the Occupation. During the Al Aqsa Intifada, she wrote that a military occupation “is the continuation of war by any means possible: humiliations, detentions without charges, searches and seizures, demolition of homes, destruction of harvests . . . force that can destroy but cannot build.”Back in 1976, Rich’s book Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution spoke most forcefully to my own situation: barely coping as a scholar, teacher, poet, and mother of three young ones. Rich made it abundantly clear that patriarchal society is utterly hypocritical in its treatment of motherhood and mothers, building cages where it pretends to honor, stacking the deck against women’s finances, freedoms, and physical bodies. I was struck by an anecdote encapsulating what mothers are for in a patriarchal society—to give birth to sons who will kill and be killed for their country. Rich tells of mentioning to a French woman that she had three sons. “Madame,” replied the woman, “vous travailler pour l’armée,” which translates to: Madam, you’re working for the army. My own son had been born a few days after we invaded Cambodia and shot the students at Kent State University. My obstetrician (who had given me drugs I didn’t want) had handed me the baby saying, “Listen to this one yell. He’ll be a soldier.”Each of these works touched a nerve—or opened a window—for me personally. I think they will do the same for anyone who reads them. Rich, as a self-examining human being insistent on probing the truths of her and our lives, and the structures of our society as still ruled by white men and masculinist ideology, is someone you just can’t turn away from. She is too serious, too smart, and too honest. Like Walt Whitman, Muriel Rukeyser, James Baldwin, and (recently) Claudia Rankine, each of whom along with poetry or fiction composes critical essays grappling with self and society, she is an American prophet.I argued with some of her ideas, (a Jew, in my view, is someone who argues). The essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” was, for me, a bomb exploding right on my corner. Her impassioned arraignment of male law, custom and power over women’s bodies was brilliant. But was I, a straight woman, merely brainwashed? Her case for lesbianism (it is not a “defense”) made me feel condescended to, disrespected, as a woman in a long and largely pleasurable marriage. Her conviction that heterosexuality is not natural but culturally imposed on women seemed to ignore the whole of the animal kingdom to which we as mammals belong. Her rejection of the possibility that heterosexual love is something natural for women seemed to me dead wrong. I was a little jealous of lesbian love, and drawn to the intellectual and emotional energy of my lesbian students and friends, but this essay was as if “the lesbian continuum” must now itself be compulsory. I felt the shadow of political correctness creeping up. Her treatment of motherhood also seemed to me somehow unbalanced; the sheer, grueling, sometimes maddening, burden experienced by mothers, and their perpetual sense of guilt—she got that right. The failure of society to support the health and well-being of the women responsible for birthing and nurturing our nation’s young— Rich was quite rightly infuriated by that. But where in her analysis was the experience of maternal joy? The pride? Were Rich’s sons nothing but burdens to her? Was her deep love of them only a handicap? And her Jewishness—how is it that in this essay she seems incurious about Jewish texts and Jewish traditions, not to mention the God Jews profess to worship? The God other Jewish feminists such as Judith Plaskow find in need of repair? In my own wrestling with tradition, I didn’t really want to “break the hold” of past literature; I wanted a transformed future to grow out of it.The questions and criticisms I had back then return to me as I read now—and the experience of this is, as I said, exciting. Rich makes me read attentively. She makes me examine my own thoughts and my own emotions. I like that in a writer. Disagreement can be as stimulating as agreement is reinforcing, if the writer is good enough. If the essays excite me more now than when I first encountered them, it is that hindsight shows me how profoundly indebted to them my own work has been over the years.Rich’s experience of Judaism is not mine. Hers was upper-middle class Southern, entangled in social shame; mine was working-class, socialist, idealist. My parents, deep-rooted atheists ignorant of the Bible as well as of Jewish custom and ritual, had no awareness that their ideals derived ultimately (and intimately) from the Hebrew prophets. You could draw a straight line from Isaiah shouting “Feed the hungry, clothe the naked” and “love the stranger” to my mom and dad, but they didn’t know it. Perhaps this was true of Rich’s parents as well; she remarks that her mother never went to church, nor her father to temple. Yet her constant pursuit of justice has an unmistakably Jewish cast that is instantly recognizable— and threatening to power, threatening to every status quo. But the most precious gift of Rich’s wrestling with Judaism to me is her passionate acceptance of the condition of outsider as “thinking woman.” Like many writers, I feel myself to be deeply lonely. A misfit. A clumsy outsider looking at other people’s lighted windows. With Rich at my elbow, I don’t mind so much. I can see my loneliness as liberating. I can be like Dickinson inviting her niece into her bedroom-workspace, pretending to lock the door, saying “Matty: here’s freedom.” Or like Rich herself, I can struggle to deal with my own contradictions.More than perhaps anything else in her writing, Rich’s chapter on mother-daughter alienation in Of Woman Born, reprinted in this volume, transformed my life. My relationship with my mother had been tortured for decades. I had thought my anger at her was purely personal—anger at her narcissism, her neediness, her clinging to me, her fits of screaming that she was not loved enough. Reading Rich arguing that daughters’ rejection of mothers is built into our culture—that I was trained to despise my mother, was a revelation. If this was true, I could try to untrain myself. I could stop laughing at the stereotype of the “Jewish mother.” I could try to stop blaming my mother for making me an outsider. I could uncover the compassion beneath my anger and the love beneath that. I knew this would take decades and it did. At the same time, I was able to see that the feminism of my entire generation suffered from the absence of love for our mothers—our mothers’ minds and bodies. We blamed our mothers for our insufficiencies. We were armored against their passion for us. We liked to quote Virginia Woolf, “we think back through our mothers, if we are women,” but we didn’t mean that literally.Here is where my quest as a Jew comes in. My feminist wrestling with Jewish texts and traditions, in the form of midrash, poetry, and personal essay, led me inexorably to the conviction that the being we in the West call “God the Father” swallowed (repressed, denied, rejected, made to disappear, and appropriated the powers of) the goddesses of Middle Eastern prehistory. But in kabbalah, the tradition of Jewish mysticism, I discovered the Shekhinah. Originally an abstraction signifying “dwelling” and denoting God’s Presence, the gender of the word morphed over centuries into a persona—a female figure signifying God’s Presence among us, God’s estranged other self, a Divine Female whom Jewish mystics today may name “She Who Dwells Within,” as feminist rabbi Lynn Gottleib suggests. Why not recognize that we desperately need such a figure? Some congregations, especially within the Jewish Renewal movement, do invoke the Shekhinah. As the Reconstructionist scholar and therapist Barbara Breitman puts it, “God is coming through the women this time.” But she is not a living presence for most Jews. Most Jews, in fact, have never heard of her. To extend my metaphor, I believe that the Divine Female is alive in the belly of the beast, like the grandmother inside the wolf in the old tale—that God the Father is metaphorically pregnant with God the Mother and that men and women can be midwives and help her be born into the world again. This is part of what tikkun olam means to me. I take the metaphor of the midwife from an Adrienne Rich poem, “The Mirror in Which Two Are Seen as One,”your mother dead and you unbornyour two hands grasping your headdrawing it down against the blade of lifeyour nerves the nerves of a midwifelearning her tradeIn the course of writing a book of poems ultimately published as the volcano sequence, I found myself invoking the repressed Shekhinah as mute, amnesiac, exiled, and needing to be discovered/recovered in the form of our actual imperfect mothers. Can we stop rejecting them? Can we stop turning our backs? Can we face them and see in them the Divine Female who comes down to us through the ages, along a hidden tunnel of female flesh? Men and women can share in this recovery, which has only just begun. It turns out that Rich’s chapter on mothers and daughters in Of Woman Born was, for me, a key unlocking a sacred space. I see in retrospect that Adrienne Rich, utterly secular though she was, became, for me, a muse leading me to a vista that was personal, political, and spiritual—even theological.Other readers reading Rich’s essays today will find themselves dealing with their own demons, their own issues. Her diagnoses of the illnesses from which our world suffers remain accurate. But throughout her essays she has stressed the need for social and personal transformation as two facets of the same struggle. The Will to Change was the title of her second book; she kept that will alive to the age of eighty-three. With so many threads to the web of her thought, one’s response can travel in a multitude of directions. What I find myself noticing as perhaps the overarching fact of her writing on whatever topic is that she is fearlessly personal. However much research she has done, she is never “academic.” She never pretends to be an impersonal “objective” authority. She lets us know how her thinking arises from the circumstances of her life, thereby alerting us to this undeniable fact in our own lives. In her prose as in her poetry, Rich makes the personal and the political inseparable. We therefore trust her, even where we disagree. She has been an influence on American poetry and on American thinking about gender, race, art, human psychology, and politics. I have tried to follow her example of honesty in my own writing. And the need continues. Rich’s 1971 indictment of “the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society” speaks precisely to our present condition in America and the world. The essay “Arts of the Possible” in 1997 calls us “a nation in . . . extreme pain.” What we do about that is up to us.