"What I know, I know through making poems" Passion, Politics and the
Body in the Poetry of Adrienne Rich Liz Yorke, Nottingham Trent University,
England This paper is largely extracted from my book Adrienne Rich, which is to
be published by Sage in October this year...What I have tried to do for the
paper is to track one thread explored by the book, which I feel runs through the
whole span of Rich's thought, a thread which links desire, passion, and the body
- to politics, to activism, and to the writing of poetry. Writing poetry, above
all, involves a willingness to let the unconscious speak - a willingness to
listen within for the whispers that tell of what we know, even though what we
know may be unacceptable to us and, sometimes, because we may not want to hear,
the whispers may be virtually inaudible. But to write poetry is to listen and
watch for significant images, to make audible the inner whisperings, to reach
deeper inward for those subtle intuitions, sensings, images, which can be
released from the unconscious mind through the creativity of writing. In this
way, a writer may come to know her deeper self, below the surface of the words.
Poetry can be a means to access suppressed recognitions, a way to explore
difficult understandings which might otherwise be buffeted out of consciousness
through the fear-laden processes of repression - through avoidance, denial,
forgetting. She identifies here the impulse to politics and protest as emerging
from our unconscious desires, a kind of knowing arising within the body which
impels us towards action to get our needs met. When the poem reminds us of our
unmet needs it activates our drives, our libido - towards what we long for
-whether that is individual, social, communal or global. Rich offers here a
basic premise of her thought, that we need to listen within for this language of
the body, this way of knowing,. Indeed, our lives depend on such ways of
knowing: 'our skin is alive with signals; our lives and our deaths are
inseparable from the release or blockage of our thinking bodies'.(1) In the
sixties Richworked hard to create a poetry and a language which would reach out
to others, which would allow hera means to release her own passion into
language, and so to forge an activist will for radical change: The will to
change begins in the body not in the mind My politics is in my body, accruing
and expanding with every act of resistance and each of my failures Locked in the
closet at 4 years old I beat the wall with my body that act is in me still(2)
Rich engages directly with the struggle to release herself from a colonising
language, the 'so-called common language', - a patriarchal language that utters
the old script over and over', an abstracting, dualistic language that splits
mind from body and tames and disembodies both poetry and passion -a language
that violates the integrity and meanings of its speakers, delegitimates its
underprivileged users and disintegrates identity and coherence - whether of
individuals, groups, races or whole cultures - the scream of an illegitimate
voice It has ceased to hear itself, therefore it asks itself How do I exist? The
transformation of such silences into language and action becomes an underlying
theme which becomes more and more compelling, and her poetry gives voice to a
deep hungry longing for 'moving' words, rather than words which fail to
recognise, understand or articulate the meanings of 'illegitimate users Let me
have this dust, these pale clouds dourly lingering, these words moving with
ferocious accuracy like the blind child's fingers or the new-born infant's mouth
violent with hunger (Meditations for a Savage Child) Only the embodied word
speaks from these depths of primal desire and what she actively apprehends
through her senses - a relative, context bound ever-changing truth - is freshly
called into being each moment. From the 'wildness' of the unblocked,
impassioned, embodied word a new perspective may be created, different emphases
may be given value, new figures may spring into focus and so the ground shifts.
By the seventies, a commitment to articulating women's experience will provide
feminists with the material ground for political organisation. The refusal to
limit political perspectives to those produced within a male-defined culture
brings a new focus on women's bodily specificity: Women's' lives and experiences
are different to men's, and so women's' specific, body-based
experiential-perceptual fields will also be different. The task for feminism
became one of 'hearing' women into speech; of returning to the writings of women
in history to explore their biologically grounded experience so as to organise
politically. In Of Woman Born, we find Rich pointing to the female body as a
crucial resource for an expanding consciousness: of women's oppression female
biology....has far more radical implications than we have yet come to
appreciate. Patriarchal thought has limited female biology to its own narrow
specifications. The feminist vision has recoiled from female biology for these
reasons; it will, I believe, come to view our physicality as a resource, rather
than a destiny. In order to live a fully human life we require not only control
of our bodies (though control is a prerequisite); we must touch the unity and
resonance of our physicality, our bond with the natural order, the corporeal
ground of our intelligence.(3) This stance was to call forth a chorus of
critical condemnation. Elaine Showalter, in her important essay 'Feminist
Criticism in the Wilderness', was to see Rich's emphasis on 'confession' and the
body as 'cruelly prescriptive. She comments: 'there is a sense in which the
exhibition of bloody wounds becomes an initiation ritual quite separate and
disconnected from critical insight.'(4) Back to the body: essentialism and the
political task Many saw Rich's strategy as biologistic and essentialist, and
therefore unhelpful to the cause - but how far is writing which explores female
specificity to be condemned? To Hester Eisenstein, 'the view of woman as a
eternal "essence" represented a retreat from the fundamentally
liberating concept of woman as agent, actor, and subject, rather than
object'.(5) And yet, as Diana Fuss has suggested, 'essentialism can be deployed
effectively in the service of both idealist and materialist, progressive and
reactionary , mythologising and resistive discourses.'(6) The conceptualisation
of our own bodies is not some kind of fixed absolute, but rather, is a construct
that is being continually reformulated, and whose meanings may, for well or ill,
be culturally engendered. The female body is of course always already mediated
in and through language. How we understand our bodies is continually being
shaped within the psychical and social meanings circulating in culture, just as
our view of ourselves is constructed in relation to specific temporal and
geographic contexts. We all may internalise disparaging and harassing myths and
messages to our continuing distress. However, 'the body' as such is far from
being a conception, 'beyond the reaches of historical change, immutable and
consequently outside the field of political intervention.'(7) To take such a
view is itself ultimately reductive and deterministic in that it refuses the
very possibility of political intervention. In Braidotti's words: 'a feminist
woman theoretician who is interested in thinking about sexual differences and
the feminine today cannot afford not to be essentialist.' Neither can women
afford to disembody sexual difference in any project concerned with female
subjectivity. As the 'threshold of subjectivity' and 'the point of intersection,
as the interface between the biological and the social', the body is the site or
location for the construction of the subject in relation to other subjects.(8)
Rich was initially drawn to the body of woman to formulate her strategic
response to misogyny with what Braidotti was later to call 'the positive project
of turning difference into a strength, of affirming its positivity'.(9) but was
later to withdraw from this trajectory of her thought. I think she could have
trusted the intelligence of her earlier political instincts. - But lets explore
this charge of essentialism more deeply: In Of Woman Born, Rich is clearly not
suggesting that women are born to be mothers or that our biology is our destiny
- far from it. Being a good mother is most emphatically not a natural,
biologically determined given - Rich is at pains to stress that 'We learn, often
through painful self-discipline and self-cauterization those qualities which are
supposed to be "innate" in us: patience, self-sacrifice, the
willingness to repeat endlessly the small, routine chores of socialising a human
being'.(10) In no sense is any biologically essentialist assumption made that
women possess in their natures the qualities of nurturant caring. In Rich's
thought, as we have seen, it is a quality learned only with difficulty, often at
the cost of a serious loss of self:, especially the self of the writer: As she
points out: '..it can be dangerously simplistic to fix upon
"nurturance" as a special strength of women, which need only be
released into the larger society to create a new human order.(11) Biology has
not endowed women with an essential femininity, there is no biologically given
essence that determines that the mother will be a nurturant caregiver, or be
virtuous and loving towards her children. To present Rich's arguments, as Janet
Sayers did in her book, Biological Politics, as grounded in 'the celebration of
female biology and of the essential femininity to which it supposedly gives
rise', is to seriously misread her work.(12) Rich's arguments, rather, imply
that the maternal body, as she sees it, is lived: it is bound up in its
specificity with the realms of the social and the political and is a crucial
site of struggle in which psychoanalytic, sexual, technological, economic,
medical, legal, and other cultural institutions contest for power. Sayers
addresses her own failure to give due recognition to the importance of
psychoanalytic theory in her later book Sexual Contradictions (1986), yet
continues to condemn Rich (as she does Irigaray) for the sin of essentialism
and, in so doing, compounds the slippages of her position. Rich is again
criticised for 'affirming a particular cultural representation and image of
femininity...of woman as a plenitude of sexuality' - which seems to me to miss
the point on a grand scale.(13) Sayers reductively dismisses Rich's breadth,
complexity and multidimensionality, in focusing on a fragment of a much larger
statement when she states categorically that 'women's supposed
"complicated, pain-enduring, multipleasured physicality" hardly seems
a very hopeful basis on which to build resistance to their social
subordination...' (14) Well no, it wouldn't be, if that were actually what Rich
was proposing. I turn to a fragment from Integrity, from A Wild Patience to
illustrate something of the complexity to be found in the poetry This extract is
from 'Integrity', collected in A Wild Patience: Anger and tenderness: my selves.
And now I can believe they breathe in me as angels, not polarities. Anger and
tenderness: the spider's genius to spin and weave in the same action from her
own body, anywhere - even from a broken web.(15) In my book I argue how Rich
moves beyond dualism in her poetry - an argument I cannot go into - but here
'Experience' can be both private and public, personal and political - anger and
tenderness, despite being contradictory emotions, need not be mutually exclusive
terms. A tension-filled conflict may live and breathe in a woman's body as
different aspects of her experiencing, yet it is integral to the processes and
struggles of being female. Just as the image of the spider spinning and weaving
simultaneously suggests the indivisibility of these polar opposites, so too
culture and nature, subjectivity and objectivity, social and psychological, body
and mind, are inter-implicated with each other - in Rich's non-dichotomous
understanding of the mind / body. These few lines point to a radically
subversive process. Identifying herself and other women who fall short of the
nurturing ideal woman - Rich transgressively restores to language that which had
been silenced and delegitimated within a patriarchal culture and tradition. Her
culturally unacceptable anger becomes acknowledged and empathically recognised,
rather than condemned. To profoundly accept her own split 'selves' (and those of
other women) is to validate and to transform her sensory experiencing, her
self-esteem, her sense of her own power, the meaning of her existence. Women
have long been engaged in a vigilant and exacting process of bringing to
critical awareness the contradictions, ambiguities and impositions of our
diverse experience so as to reach a realm where such incoherences can become
rendered conscious and intelligible within language so that they may be thought.
This invitation to transform thinking, I would argue, constitutes a very
different project to that envisaged by Sayers. From being framed within
essentialist injunctions that insist that woman's nature is to nurture, women
may now move from a position of disempowerment and self-castigation towards a
greater sense of integrity - a discursive shift has occurred that significantly
permits new identifications to be made, different positions to be taken up, new
inner and outer perspectives to be considered, and thus a new future may become
conceivable, other potentials may be rendered possible. I want to leave the
seventies behind and pick up my argument around the body in a later chapter of
the book - during the eighties Rich begins to see the 'core of revolutionary
process' as 'the long struggle against lofty and privileged abstraction', and
urges a close focus on materiality, on geographical location and voice. (16) the
need to locate the historical and social moment - the context, the precise
location in time and space, the 'geography' of a particular statement - the
'When, where, and under what conditions has the statement been true?'.(17) She
brings us back to 'the geography closest in - the body' and in so doing, Rich
works out her strategy to bring feminist theory 'back down to earth again'.(18)
Theory - the seeing of patterns, showing the forest as well as the trees -
theory can be a dew that rises from the earth and collects in the rain cloud and
returns to earth over and over. But if it doesn't smell of the earth, it isn't
good for the earth.(19) In putting her case for a focus on material bodily
difference, Rich subtly returns to Lacan's hardly earthy formula for
understanding sexual difference, in theorising her politics of location. She
expands on her earlier attempts to counter the dominance of the phallus through
an emphasis on the sexual specificities of the female, but now highlights race
as equally important in the construction of identity.(20) Possessing Black or
white skin colour assigns 'my body' to a particular social status and position
within the specific cultural hierarchy (North American) operating in a specific
locality (Baltimore). Just as in Lacan, this designation begins in infancy: Even
to begin with my body I have to say that from the outset that body had more than
one identity. When I was carried out of the hospital into the world, I was
viewed and treated as female, but also viewed and treated as white - by both
Black and white people. I was located by color and sex as surely as a Black
child was located by color and sex - though the implications of white identity
were mystified by the presumption that white people are the center of the
universe. To locate myself in my body means more than understanding what it has
meant to me to have a vulva and clitoris and uterus and breasts. It means
recognising this white skin, the places it has taken me, the places it has not
let me go(21) However, not like Lacan, this is accessibly written, Rich's
language always refusing the temptation to soar skywards into elevated
theoretical abstraction. In this passage, with its silent, unreferenced echo of
Lacanian theory, possessing whiteness and possessing the phallus are directly
comparable in the sense that they have been designated a superior position at
the centre of the regulatory practices of North American culture. And so, though
it is necessary, it is not enough for feminist theory merely to recognise and
affirm the specificities of the femaleness of the body as a countering strategy
- skin colour, racial background, cultural and other locational differences all
matter, in that they function to differentiate one body from another and to
organise diverse bodies towards serving the powerful imperatives of
heterosexism, imperialism, post-colonialism, and white male dominance in
whatever form it manifests itself. In the course of my book, I try to identify
the complexity of these poetic and political strategies in action - the
interweaving of that 'geography closest in', the history - with the emerging
'truths' of dreams, desires, sexualities and subjectivities. For her, it is as
important to examine the individual dream life as it is to address the politics,
for even the dreamlife is situated within and emerges out of unconscious
experience which, of course, also has a history. Inescapably personal but also
political, dreams are bound to their historical moment of production. Being
endlessly subject to re-interpretation, they are themselves an interpretation.
Rich calls here for the necessity to be vigilant, to be aware that limits,
boundaries, borders - whether to feminist theory, to politics, to poetry or to
dream - can operate even at this deepest image-making level of the psyche: When
my dreams showed signs of becoming politically correct no unruly images escaping
beyond borders when walking in the street I found my themes cut out for me knew
what I would not report for fear of enemies' usage then I began to wonder. (22)
Accountability, responsibility - asking these profound questions - 'What is
missing here? how am I using this? - becomes part of the creative process'.(23)
I agree with Rich when she claims that 'poetry can break open locked chambers of
possibility, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire'. (24) If desire
itself becomes boundaried within the systems and coercions of corporate
capitalism, our power to imagine becomes stultified. If the poet's 'themes' are
delimited through the fear of 'enemies' usage', and even her role as witness
inhibited through fear of comebacks, then the vital role of the revolutionary
writer to know words, to use words, to rely on words to imagine and to convey
the necessity to create a just, humane society, may be undermined. As Rich
suggests A poem can't free us from the struggle for existence, but it can
uncover desires and appetites buried under the accumulating emergencies of our
lives, the fabricated wants and needs we have had urged on us, have accepted as
our own. It's not a philosophical or psychological blueprint; it's an instrument
for embodied experience. But we seek that experience or recognise it when it is
offered to us, because it reminds us in some way of our need. After that
rearousal of desire, the task of acting on that truth, or making love, or
meeting other needs, is ours.(25) 'The wick of desire' always projects itself
towards a possible future - and, in this revolutionary art 'is an alchemy
through which waste, greed, brutality, frozen indifference, "blind
sorrow" and anger are transmuted into some drenching recognition of the
what if? - the possible.'(26) However, the knowledge that comes from out of our
embodied experience is, in Rich's work, inextricable from the languages in which
it is spoken, thought, imaged, dreamed. It is a theme which recurs and recurs
throughout Rich's work to date - our concrete needs, the passionate urgency of
our desires, the intensity of women's diverse struggles - these are identified
and identifiable, just as our differences can be identified and are identifiable
as continually in process and are always to be held up to question. Taking
nothing for granted, maintaining a continual vigilance against taking anything
presumed to be 'true' at its face value, Rich constantly questions the premises
of her own thought, working critically with the language she uses. If 'language
is the site of history's enactment', then it is also for Rich the site for
questioning that history of experience; for evaluating the impositions and
alienations that are the outcome of domination; for plumbing the depths and
analysing the complexities of what constitutes identity. Throughout these four
decades, Rich has found herself interpreting and re-interpreting the
contradictory social realities of our lives always critically conscious of the
workings of power - not only 'possessive, exploitative power' but also 'the
power to engender, to create, to bring forth fuller life'. (27) These are large
aims, befitting the work of this major feminist theorist and revolutionary poet.