-
the four humors
about "moody" women
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perfecta
dare not to compare
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the L wars
and why
This is what language did to us. Here
is the wound, the silence, the wretchedness
of tides and hillsides and stars where
we languish in a grammar of sighs,
in the high-minded search for euphony,
in the midnight rhetoric of poesie.
We cannot sweat here. Our skin is icy.
We cannot breed here. Our wombs are empty.
Help us to escape youth and beauty.
Write us out of the poem. Make us human
in cadences of change and mortal pain
and words we can grow old and die in.
Eavan Boland, from "What Language Did to Us"
Irish poet Eavan Boland writes often of the exact, and the inexact, natures of womanhood. In the poem above, the speaker walks silently, mourning the process of aging—until she comes upon the vision of mermaids, who prevail upon the speaker to release them from the inventions which keep them forever trapped in "youth and beauty."
The invention is language.
Writing, we are reminded, is an approximation of speech, and speech is an approximation of thought. In my culture, indigenous Méxicanos caution us to be impeccable in our word, to rely on truth. "Myth" was never meant to be a synonym for "lie."
In contemporary culture, however, myths are imparted to many of us as fallacies and cautionary tales built on the doubts of shame-laden superstition. We are inculcated with such tales—throughout childhood; in "education"; via the language of words and images of mainstream media; within the rubrics of hegemonic discourses of Judeo-Christianity; through the medico-legal lexicons of Western science, medicine, and law; within the hedged values we come to understand as the argot of both corporate and international politics. Thus it is we have come to unravel the unkind myths posing as lies.
What it is to be "woman," within and against these imposed standards, is an examination explored in these ongoing series.
