thanks goes to carolyn gage for allowing me to reblog her wonderfully written piece on monique wittig's literary works, which i believe have revolutionary potential.
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Copyright 2003 Carolyn Gage
Originally published in off our backs, vol. xxxiv, Washington, DC.
Monique Wittig: In
Memoriam
I began writing and researching lesbian literature in the
early 1980’s. As a playwright, I was not just looking for my history, but I was
searching for different paradigms and new/old archetypes from a culture that
had been buried or appropriated. The so-called “classic” dramas were male
narratives, obsessed with possession and overthrow, especially of father
figures. The women were obstacles, rewards, or objects of exchange in the
bloody transactions between men. This was not a template I could customize by
the mere switching of pronouns.
And, of course, the so-called universal archetypes of this
drama were happy housewives, glorying in their upwardly mobile marriages, or
depressing martyrs and victims. The spunky women, like the mid-life, cast-off
wife Medea, go mad with jealousy and murder their own children. The women
excluded from male hierarchies waste their lives in futile gestures, like
Antigone. The captive, raped, colonized survivor, like Cassandra, is doomed to
a post-traumatic scenario of recounting her tale of atrocity to a population
who will not or cannot believe her. And so on…
This was my “heritage” as a Western playwright. Obviously, I
could not tell a lesbian story with these colonial archetypes or dominance
paradigms. Nor did I want to write superficial lesbian sit-coms, or endless
parodies or critiques of patriarchal drama for a rising elite of post-modern,
faux feminists to consume. It is, of course, impossible to ignore this toxic
theatre legacy, but rather than batter at the gates of this boys’ club in vain
attempts to gain entry, I wanted to look back and down on it from the
perspective of a fully-realized, lesbian-centered narrative.
Where would I turn for my narrative histories? Where was the
lesbian-feminist equivalent of the Bible,
or the Koran, or the Bhagavad Gita? Where was my Iliad, my Odyssey? Who would be my Homer?
And this is when I discovered the writings of Monique
Wittig. I found them among the used paperbacks in a women’s bookstore in
Portland, Oregon. The Lesbian Body. The
Guérilières. The Opoponax. Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary. Wittig
was generating archetypes and paradigms. She was writing about ancient
matriarchal cultures that, paradoxically, were contemporaneous with ours. She
was reclaiming goddesses, students of Sappho, the Vietnamese Trung sisters of
40 AD. She was not just going back in archeological time, but she was also
going back in archetypal time by re-membering lesbian childhood from the eyes
of the child in The Opoponax,
bringing back the magical thinking of children, where the mythical beast of
resistance, the opoponax, is congruent with the intense, wonder-filled
discoveries of the developing mind.
I am the opoponax. You must not provoke
him all the time the way you do. If you have trouble combing your hair in the
morning you mustn't be surprised. He is everywhere. He is in your hair. He is
under your pillow when you go to sleep. Tonight he will make you itch all over
so badly that you won't be able to go to sleep. When dawn comes behind the
window tomorrow morning you will be able to see the opoponax sitting on the
window sill. I am the opoponax.
Wittig was writing about the fluid social configurations of
women not bounded by heteropatriarchal obsessions with virginity and paternity.
She was writing about the volcanic fury that formerly enslaved women direct
toward each other and toward themselves:
Six of the women are none too many to
hold her. Her mouth is open. Inarticulate words and cries are heard. She stamps
the ground with her feet. She twists her arms to free them from the grip, she
shakes her head in every direction. At a given moment she lets herself fall to
the ground, she strikes the ground with her arms, she rolls about shrieking. Her
mouth seizes the earth and spits it out. Her gums bleed. Words like death blood
blood burn death war war war are heard. Then she tears her garments and bangs
her head on the ground until she falls silent, done for. Four of the women
carry her, singing, Behind my eyelids/ the dream has not reached my soul/
whether I sleep or wake/ there is no rest.
She was writing an eroticism that did not privilege the
genitals, one that asked us to envision lesbian sexuality in radical new ways:
The kaleidoscope game consists of
inserting a handful of yellow blue pink mauve orange green violet flies beneath
someone’s eyelids, m/ine for instance. They are really tiny flies minute insects,
their peculiarity lies in the bizarre intensity of their colours. You place
them between m/y eyelid and m/y eyeball despite m/y protestations and laughter.
She was also celebrating women’s capacity for savagery.
The women say they have learned to rely
on their own strength. They say they are aware of the force of their unity. They
say, let those who call for a new language first learn violence. They say, let
those who want to change the world first seize all the rifles. They say that
they are starting from zero. They say that a new world is beginning.
Wittig reclaimed and venerated the intricacies of the vulva
in the “feminaries” that were distributed among the girls of in her tribe of
women warriors:
The women say the feminary amuses the
little girls. For instance three kinds of labia minora are mentioned there. The
dwarf labia are triangular. Side by side, they form two narrow folds. They are
almost invisible because the labia majora cover them. The moderate-sized labia
minora resemble the flower of a lily. They are half-moon shaped or triangular. They
can be seen in their entirety taut supple seething. The large labia spread out
resemble a butterfly's wings. They are tall triangular or rectangular, very
prominent.
Then, consistent with her commitment to anarchy, she has the
feminaries destroyed:
The women say that it may be that the
feminaries have fulfilled their function. They say they have no means of
knowing. They say that thoroughly indoctrinated as they are with ancient texts
no longer to hand, these seem to them outdated. All they can do to avoid being
encumbered with useless knowledge is to heap them up in the squares and set
fire to them. That would be an excuse for celebrations.
Wittig is clear that patriarchal languages is a language of
ownership, and that women must resist it:
The women say, the language you speak
poisons your glottis tongue palate lips. They say, the language you speak is
made up of words that are killing you. They say, the language you speak is made
up of signs that rightly speaking designate what men have appropriated. Whatever
they have not laid hands on, whatever they have not pounced on like many-eyed
birds of prey, does not appear in the language you speak
The women say, I refuse henceforward to
speak this language, I refuse to mumble after them the words lack of penis lack
of money lack of insignia lack of name. I refuse to pronounce the names of
possession and non-possession. They say, If I take over the world, let it be to
dispossess myself of it immediately, let it be to forge new links between
myself and the world.
Wittig worked with some of the classical goddesses and
myths, envisioning her lover at a gathering with Artemis, Aphrodite, Ishtar,
Persephone, and host of other female deities. She retold the story of Orpheus
and Eurydice, with a female protagonist descending into hell to bring back her
reluctant, self-loathing lover, who begs her at every step to abandon her to
her misery. She offers a paean to Sappho, describing a violet rain that
irradiates the naked body of her beloved. In Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary, co-written with Sande
Zeig, she not only reclaims all kinds of goddesses and mythical figures, but
describes various ages (“Steam Age,” “the Concrete Age”), characterizing the
present era as “the Glorious Age,” thereby attempting to perpetuate and
memorialize a myth of her own making:
For almost two millenniums lesbians had
been represented with glories around their heads. This was mistaken for a sign
of sanctity and was not yet recognized as a form of energy. When the companion
lovers appeared to one another in their brilliance and were able to stand the
sight, they caught and used this energy that they immediately called
“glorious.” From which comes the “Glorious Age.”
Wittig was, single-handedly, generating ancestral memories
and cultural prototypes. She was, as she said, “Starting with zero.” And she
did more than imagine a past and a future for lesbians. She realized them—that is, made them real—and
then reported back to us from the center of that new reality. She was an
anarchistic pioneer, smashing through men’s civilizations to reveal a primitive
wildness and promise that have always existed in possibility.
The obligatory and
all-but-overtly sneering obituaries for Wittig in the mainstream press do not
do her justice. They desiccate and desecrate her work in their attempts to get
at it, but it remains inaccessible to outsiders. The succulence of Wittig’s
writing is in the juice—which like the vaginal secretions she names “cyprine”–
is distinctly lesbian.
The greatest tribute we can offer to this visionary
foremother of lesbian-feminism is to take her writings to heart. And she has
left us an injunction for this dazzling lesbian revolution that fluttered with
such bizarre intensity behind her eyelids… Listen:
There was a time when you were not a
slave, remember that. You walked alone, full of laughter, you bathed
bare-bellied. You say you have lost all recollection of it, remember… You say
there are no words to describe this time, you say it does not exist. But
remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent.
