Kittye Delle Robbins-Herring

Lily of the Nile: A Novel of Cleopatra's Daughter

mandy — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 20:00:00 +0000

Lily of the Nile is a treat for lovers of colorful historical fiction. An intriguing reconstruction of the ancient cult of the goddess Isis, the book is set in the last years of the first century B.C. in Alexandria and imperial Rome. The novel is told from the viewpoint of Cleopatra Selene, one of the children of Mark Antony and the most famous Cleopatra of all, the celebrated Queen of Egypt. Princess Selene is only ten years old when her parents commit suicide rather than fall into the hands of a victorious Octavian. Taken captive by the Romans, Selene must use all her intelligence and diplomatic skills to survive.

Stephanie Dray, a Smith College graduate and a specialist in Middle Eastern studies, evokes very well the smells, sounds, sights, and feelings of the classical world. Though she bases much of her writing on documentary evidence, she does not try to be impartial: a prefatory note to the reader announces that she has “unabashedly adopted the slant most favorable to Egypt, Selene, her family, or to the Isiac faith.” The view of Rome and Romans is thus largely unflattering.

Upon meeting the Emperor Octavian for the first time, the heroine is impressed by the “wintry ruthlessness” of his gaze. Growing up part hostage, part political pawn in the imperial household, Selene's life allows Dray to contrast Roman and Egyptian ideals of proper gender roles for women and to “explore ancient sexual morality.” The presence of temples to Isis in Rome itself is key to the story, for Selene is regarded by her co-religionists as a new incarnation of Isis, and thus possesses an influence that Octavian wishes to use for his own purposes.

The culture wars between Roman and Egyptian values are set in the frame of the prophetic expectations that preceded the birth of Jesus and the beginnings of Christianity. In the author's note at the end of the book, Dray advances the thesis that the religion of Isis influenced early Christians and prepared the way for present-day spirituality.

Selene's successful pursuit of political power and religious freedom is meant to inspire the young women of today to pursue their own dreams. The book includes a six-page Readers Guide that poses discussion questions on the story, the history, and the cultural implications of the novel. Lily of the Nile would be a thought-provoking choice for a girls' book club or a women's studies class, and I encourage anyone with an interest in history or religion to pick this one up.

Written by: Kittye Delle Robbins-Herring, April 4th 2011

The Monster Within: The Hidden Side of Motherhood

mandy — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 08:00:00 +0000

By Barbara Almond

University of California Press

Psychiatrist, mother, and grandmother Barbara Almond's provocative new study makes a valuable contribution to the ongoing debate about what she terms “the dark side of motherhood.” The negative feelings a mother inevitably has toward her child, however loving she may be, and the painful conflicts these feelings can engender, is a topic still too often taboo in American culture.

In The Monster Within, Almond asserts, “Today's expectations for good mothering have become so hard to live with, the standards so draconian, that maternal ambivalence has increased and at the same time become more unacceptable to society as a whole.” This increasing idealization of mothering has provoked both a revolt by some contemporary mothers against these ideals and a shocked fascination on the part of the American public with the most spectacular cases of bad mothering, in which women abuse or even kill their children. Andrea Yates, the Texas woman who in 2001 drowned all five of her young children, is one of the murderous mothers whose situation Almond analyzes in her presentation of the wide spectrum of “maternal ambivalent feelings, thoughts, and behaviors,” from normal jitters to psychotic states.

In The Monster Within Almond uses two main kinds of evidence: clinical examples and case histories from her own and her colleagues' practices and discussions of selected literary works that she calls “case stories,” which range from the tragedy Medea by Euripides to Rosemary's Baby to Toni Morrison's Beloved. Those fictional accounts illustrate many of the same themes Almond finds in her therapeutic work, and they enable her to expand and deepen her examination of the mother-child bond. She also draws on articles in professional reviews, as well as newspapers and popular magazines, and on pioneering feminist critiques by Nancy Chodorov, Adrienne Rich, and others from the 1960s and '70s.

Almond's principal objective is to demonstrate the ubiquity and the multiple facets of maternal ambivalence and to suggest healthy ways for mothers and children to cope with their fraught relationship. Along the way, she takes on women's fears of producing monstrous offspring, tales of vampyric babies and mothers, various traumatic events that can disrupt mothering, and mothering across the life cycle, including becoming a grandmother and relating to adult children. The approach throughout is to relieve guilt and shame for negative experiences and to help mothers achieve happy motherhood and a good relation with their children, as well as helping the children themselves.

The Monster Within is a well-researched, well-written treatment of ambivalence, both its positive and its negative effects. I regret, however, that the text does not deal with the latest phenomenon of Mommy Bloggers, though I do not know how much new material Almond would have found there that is relevant to her concerns. Certainly many contemporary women are breaking their silence and dramatically confronting the issues she raises.

Mothers, prospective mothers, grown children, and anyone interested in the state of mothering at the present day will find much food for thought in this book. Interested readers would also be well advised to supplement The Monster Within with writings from the Journal of the Association for Research in Mothering, a publication devoted to exploring mothering from various radical perspectives through multidisciplinary approaches and creative writings. Almond's critique of the limiting expectations and flawed social constructions of mothering continues in a new journal from the same editors published by the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement.

Written by: Kittye Delle Robbins-Herring, January 2nd 2011

Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism Between Women in Caribbean Literature

farhana — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 12:00:00 +0000

By Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley

Duke University Press

Tinsley’s fascinating study of “women loving women” examines their colonial and postcolonial experiences in Dutch, French, and English-speaking areas of the Caribbean. This volume, in the Perverse Modernities series by Duke University Press, takes its title from the writing of Trinidad-born poet-novelist Dionne Brand, whose cane-cutter character Elizete uses the phrase “thiefing sugar” to describe her feelings for another woman, Verlia. The metaphor refers to the time when slaves could be whipped for selling sugar from the plantations for any reason; it embodies both transgression and forbidden pleasure. Tinsley points out that using the term is “stealing language itself” to evoke a “transformative desire” to change the status of women and challenge the injustices of society.

Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism Between Women in Caribbean Literature incorporates black, queer, and feminist theory into its analysis. It draws on literature, history, geography, anthropology, economics, and linguistics to paint a colorful, multilayered portrait of Caribbean women. Texts from Suriname, Jamaica, Haiti, Martinique, and Trinidad (along with occasional references to Cuba, Grenada, Aruba, the Bahamas, and elsewhere in the region) are used to explore the history of sexuality and the complications of Creole traditions. Tinsley begins with love songs sung by black working-class women to their female lovers, along with accounts of birthday parties and erotic dances and religious ceremonies, as well as messages exchanged in the symbolic language of flowers, to show the intricacies of gender identities in the West Indies.

In succeeding chapters she turns to Luminous Isle, an autobiographical novel by the white Jamaican woman writer Eliot Bliss, then to the erotic poems written in the 1920s by Haitian poet Ida Faubert, Mayotte Capécia’s novel I Am a Martinican Woman, Jamaican writer Michelle Cliff’s novel, No Telephone to Heaven, and, finally, Dionne Brand’s poetry collection No Language Is Neutral, in order to trace “their poetics of decolonization” and to point out how these texts suggest reconfiguring gender history to acknowledge the strength and beauty of Afro-Caribbean woman-identified women. Tinsley’s brilliant, sensitive explications, her frequent references to artworks from the area, and her descriptions of lush landscapes make reading her work a delight and a surprise.

However, I do wish that she had studied more than one Hispanic writer, Fidel Castro’s niece Mariela Castro Espín. But I understand that bringing in a substantial number of texts in Spanish would have enlarged her project’s boundaries to perhaps unmanageable proportions. Several references to U.S. interventions in Grenada also left me wanting more information on the effects of North American activities in the region. I hope that Tinsley herself or one of her readers will expand on the groundbreaking work she has done in this book. I highly recommend it to a cosmopolitan audience.

Written by: Kittye Delle Robbins-Herring, December 3rd 2010

Maid as Muse: How Servants Changed Emily Dickinson's Life and Language

admin — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Aífe Murray

University of New Hampshire Press

The popular image of Emily Dickinson is that of an almost ghostly woman in white, secluding herself in an upstairs bedroom alone, but Maid as Muse's innovative approach shows her frequently in the kitchen. There, she is found stirring puddings, baking her famous gingerbread, and living on familiar terms with the household help. She shared her dreams and gossiped with her favorite maid, the Irish-born Margaret Maher, who Dickinson referred to as her dear Maggie.

Murray uses a wide range of documents, including maps, advertisements, letters, photographs, and oral history interviews with descendants of the Dickinson's domestic staff to recreate the material and intellectual milieu in which the poet wrote her celebrated works. Murray demonstrates that the quantity and quality of Emily's writing output—in letters and poems—varies with the presence and absence of reliable servants in the household. Only when there are competent people to help with the heavy load of housework that a nineteenth-century homestead requires is Emily able to find the time, the energy, and, most significant, the concentration to write at her best.

Furthermore, Murray shows that the servants' vernacular speech—often quite different from the staid Yankee rhythms of the poet's family and neighbors—influenced Emily's compositions. The poet herself quotes sayings in her letters by the Irish immigrant Mrs. Mack, for example, and notes how differently her maids pronounce certain English words. Emily's famous slant rhymes and staccato lines of poetry also have startling parallels to the reported conversations and personal letters of her staff.

Murray traces the contributions of Black, American Indian, and British-born servants to the life and work of Emily Dickinson. She points out the places where Emily revealed the prejudices of her times, the classism and racism, yet she also acknowledges how Emily managed to rise above those prejudices and see poor people and other outcasts as sympathetic human beings. This is an enormously rich book, impossible to summarize briefly, well worth exploring, not only by the many fans of Emily Dickinson's poetry, but anyone interested in cultural history and the development of American society.

Written by: Kittye Delle Robbins-Herring, June 21st 2010

I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem

admin — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 16:04:00 +0000

By Maryse Condé

University of Virginia Press

This fascinating novel, which won France's Grand Prix Littéraire de la Femme, offers readers a vivid re-imagining of the life of a historical figure mentioned only briefly in the transcripts of the seventeenth-century Salem witch trials: a slave woman of Caribbean origins, accused of practicing voodoo. Angela Davis, in her foreword to the current edition, asserts the importance of “the retelling of a history that is as much mine as it is hers,” a story of great significance to Black women who are “Tituba's cultural kin.” The first person narrative gives Tituba an opportunity to recount her life as she sees it, to overcome the silence imposed on her by official histories of the period. Maryse Condé, herself born in Guadeloupe, begins by evoking the beauties and horrors of the West Indies—of Barbados in particular—where Tituba is born to an Ashanti woman “as lithe and purple as the sugarcane flower,” who had been raped by a British sailor. Little Tituba flourishes at first in her island home, but her mother comes into conflict with their master and is hanged for striking a white man. At the age of seven, Tituba is taken in by old Mama Yaya and raised in the traditional healing ways inherited from African ancestors. The growing girl learns to respect everything in nature, to make the proper prayers and sacrifices, to devise “potions whose powers I strengthened with incantations,” and to communicate with the spirits, including her deceased mother.

The idyll in the wilderness ends abruptly when the adolescent Tituba falls in love with a merry rascal, a slave named John Indian. She soon moves to the capital, Bridgetown to be with him. John Indian jokingly calls her a witch, because of her special magical gifts, but others suspect her of commerce with the devil even though, as she protests, “Before setting foot inside this house I didn't know who Satan was!” In an interview published in the afterword to the present edition, Maryse Condé describes Tituba as “doing only good to her community” through her relations with “the invisible forces,” and therefore not a witch in the bad connotations of the term, but the bigoted people with whom she comes in contact—especially after she is sold along with John Indian to a Puritan minister, Samuel Parris—do not see her in a positive light.

One of the themes of the book is the unlikely (and, unfortunately, often temporary) alliances that can form between persons divided by race, class, or religion. When Parris moves with his household to Boston, a strong friendship develops between Tituba and Elizabeth Parris, the minister's wife, as well as with her child Betsey, It is one of the ironies of the novel that Tituba's efforts to amuse and aid the girls in her charge at Salem Village arouse the villagers' fears and turn them against her. The Caribbean folktales she tells about sorcerers and vampires titillate everyone and feed their fears of damnation and demonic possession. When Betsey tells her cousin Abigail about the secret magic rites Tituba has used to protect the frail little girl, the situation gets out of control. Condé locates the ultimate source of the hysteria that sweeps through the village as a combination of the repression of healthy sensual pleasures along with the accumulation of small-town jealousies and resentments among the populace, together with unacknowledged guilt at the mistreatment of Blacks and American Indians by the white settlers. The village girls accuse many local figures of magically tormenting them.

Arrested and interrogated in 1692, Tituba at first protests her innocence: she has done no wrong, has not hurt any of the afflicted children. Her husband John Indian advises her to play along with her accusers, to tell them what they want to hear. He even pretends to be possessed, himself. In a controversial sequence criticized by many reviewers, the novel's heroine encounters a character called Hester in prison, clearly based on the wholly fictional heroine of The Scarlet Letter. Certain historians have condemned this intrusion of Romantic literature into a historical novel, yet Condé in her interview defends it on two different grounds: a) that her work “is the opposite of a historical novel,” that her Tituba is an invented “female hero, ... a mock-epic character,” and b) that as a novelist, she felt “there was a link between Tituba and Nathaniel Hawthorne,” persons inhabiting the same region at times not too far apart for comparison. The conversation between the two prisoners gives Condé a chance to explore the social constraints on women and the difficult relations between men and women. Ann Armstrong Scarboro's afterword asserts that here Condé “parodies modern feminist discourse,” but it seems to me that Condé gets to play both sides against the middle in these passages by intermixing humorous and serious notes and leaving it up to the reader to decide how to interpret them.

While Tituba's testimony at trial is quoted from actual transcripts, the additional context Condé provides suggests that the accused woman is merely mouthing words that others are saying, going along with other people's superstitions. As a confessed witch she is sentenced to jail but escapes the death penalty. Thus she survives, while many of the people condemned for witchcraft are executed. The historical note to this edition of the novel states that in 1693 the slave Tituba was sold to pay her prison fees and the price of her chains. It is unclear what happened thereafter to the historical woman, but Condé chooses to have her Tituba purchased by Benjamin Cohen d'Azevedo, a Portuguese Jewish merchant whose wife had died. Benjamin and Tituba slowly become friends and eventually lovers. After a terrible house fire set by Puritan persecutors in which Benjamin's children are killed, he frees her and buys a ship passage back to Barbados for her. There she becomes involved with a group of maroons—wild Blacks who seem to be working towards freedom for the plantation slaves—but even there she finds betrayal and a revolt that fails. She is finally hanged by the British authorities. The epilogue finds the spirit of Tituba still active in the island, heroine of a popular song going about encouraging the slaves to fight for liberty.

I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem is a work I highly recommend to people interested in African-American and Caribbean literature, colonialism and post-colonialism, post-modernism and feminism, as well as to any reader interested in a colorful adventure tale. The additional scholarly materials provided in this edition make this book helpful even to readers familiar with the original French text.

Written by: Kittye Delle Robbins-Herring, June 20th 2010

Everyday Nationalism: Women of the Hindu Right in India

admin — Sun, 09 May 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Kalyani Devaki Menon

University of Pennsylvania Press

Everyday Nationalism, a publication in "The Ethnography of Political Violence" series, offers readers a provocative and sometimes disturbing look at Hindu nationalist organizations and the role of Indian women in representing the nationalist movement. Kalyani Devaki Menon conducted her principal fieldwork in and around Delhi from January 1999 to January 2000, acting as a participant observer; interviewing women activists; visiting schools and training camps associated with the movement; and taking part in women's education classes, meetings, rallies, and protest marches. She reports that “gender and sexuality were pivotal to the narratives of self and 'other' produced by the women” she worked with, and that women played a crucial role in building the broad-based support for the movement that brought the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) into power from 1998 to 2004.

The nationalist movement in India remains powerful, drawing thousands of women and men to accept a sociopolitical vision that is “xenophobic, exclusionary, and tremendously violent,” a view of India that sees Muslims and Christians as invaders, defilers both of Hindu women and the sacred soil itself, the body of the goddess Bharat Mata (Mother India). Hindu nationalists assert the need for “violent reclamations of Hindu masculinity” and for vengeance on outsiders who have violated the honor of Hindu women. Menon asserts, "This gendered construction of history, that perpetuates the logic of revenge, is widely promulgated to young female recruits, and remains central to mobilizing support for the politics and actions of the movement today." She makes clear to readers that she disagrees with this policy, yet she does not comment directly on the horrible irony of a politic that encourages Hindu youth to rape Muslim women and Christian nuns as payback for the sexual assaults said to have been enacted on Hindu women now and in the past.

The image of women as vulnerable victims is somewhat offset within the movement's various organizations by efforts to strengthen and toughen girls and women. Camp sessions include military drill, endurance training, yoga, and rough physical games. Women are taught to overcome their fears and to defend themselves. One woman activist said, “Girls today want to be free. We ask them, do you want to be free or strong?” Hindu nationalists criticize the desire to be free like Western or feminist women, claiming Indian women should be strong in order to serve the Hindu state, but still subservient to their husbands and male leaders. In Hindu societies, women are traditionally seen as “mothers, wives, and caretakers of their families.” Nationalists consider the whole Hindu nation to be an extended family, and in this context, women find reasons for civic activism: they become, in a sense, mothers of the nation.

Most Indian women marry, and many Hindu women nationalists are married, but many activists in the movement are either female renouncers; religious sadhvis, who give up worldly attachments but remain political; or pracharikas, unmarried celibate female volunteers who devote all their energies to the movement. A number of other women activists are widows or separated from their husbands. In a sense, the political organizations to which they belong become their families. Women find a favorite role model in a historical figure, Queen Jijabai, mother of the Hindu king Shivaji in the seventeenth century. Male historians concentrate on Shivaji himself, but the women nationalists portray Jijabai as an “enlightened mother” who played a key role in the nation's destiny by inculcating Hindu values in her son.

Menon's witness is compelling because she acts as intermediary between the people she studies and her readers, who need to understand what's going on in the crucial Indian subcontinent. Just as she translates Hindi texts into English, she explains many customs and beliefs that may be unfamiliar to non-Hindus. I found her presentation enormously helpful and would recommend _Everyday Nationalism _to anyone interested in religious movements, rightist politics, or both.

Written by: Kittye Delle Robbins-Herring, May 9th 2010

India Exposed: The Subcontinent A-Z

admin — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 01:00:00 +0000

By Clive Limpkin

Abbeville Press

The dust jacket of the enigmatic picture book India Exposed displays row upon row of bright blue Kali figures prepared for a festival. Nude goddesses sticking out their intense pink tongues, each statue garlanded with human heads (all male, as far as I can tell), dwarf the lone craftsman at work among them. The powerful image summons up the mystique of India: outsized, crowded, frenetic, sensual, and yet somehow austere.

Throughout the colorful pictures and text, photojournalist Limpkin stresses the paradoxes of what he calls an "anarchistic madhouse" of a country rich and poor, scholarly and illiterate, traditional and modern. He offers us fascinating glimpses of a civilization that poses more questions than answers. In photo essays of one or two pages—though occasionally more—he traverses the alphabet from Army to Zebu. This approach leads to surprising juxtapositions; we learn on one page that anger at high prices for onions spurred Indira Ghandi's rise to political power, and on the next we find out that the Central Narcotics Bureau licenses farmers to grow opium poppies.

Larger topics tend to overflow these essays and recur under different headings. Feminist readers interested in the status of women, for example, will find insights clustered under themes such as Corruption & Crime—human trafficking and prostitution; Families—a sister tenderly feeds a small sibling and a grandmother combs her grandson's hair; Sex Discrimination—"sex-selective infanticide," education, employment, and domestic treatment; and Weddings—elaborate ceremonies that contrast horribly with "the grotesque practice of bride burnings" that still occur, despite its being illegal. Despite the bitter taste of such customs, don't overlook, the photos under the rubric of Color, such as "a female work gang" carrying loads of mud on their heads—each one clad in pink, orange, green, blue, or yellow—in a "glorious, impulsive addiction to color...that lightens their lives and ours." _India Exposed_ is a gold mine of images and information, not to be missed.

Written by: Kittye Delle Robbins-Herring, December 12th 2009

The Hindus: An Alternative History

admin — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 23:32:00 +0000

By Wendy Doniger

Penguin Press

Wendy Doniger, currently the most outstanding American scholar of Hinduism, serves us a feast of tasty historical events and interpretative myths in this rich curry of a book, covering social and cultural developments in the Indian subcontinent from prehistoric times to the modern day. It is an “alternative history” in that it concentrates on the interactions between the religious texts and rituals created mainly by those whom Gurcharan Das calls “Dead Male Brahmins” and the alternative peoples Doniger finds so significant in the evolution of the multiform Hindu tradition, such as lower-castes, women, Buddhists, Muslims.

Doniger’s themes include violence versus nonviolence towards humans and animals, tensions between the worldly “householder life” and ascetic renunciation, the desire to obtain a good rebirth on earth and the desire to avoid rebirth altogether. She emphasizes the Hindu sense of time, the feeling that things that happened in the past are the source of things happening now, that the past comes to fruition in the present, and the value of oral traditions in preserving variant voices in society. She maintains the importance of the history of ideas and the stories that express those ideas: “For we are what we imagine, as much as what we do.” Tales of animals are especially vital in Hindu mythology, and she recounts many different stories in which animals such as horses, cows, tigers, monkeys, dogs and an occasional cat play key roles. Gods even become incarnate as animals and are associated with particular animals, such as Shiva with his bull, Nandi.

Another important focus of Doniger’s work is the representation of the female gender, whether in animals or women, goddesses or ogresses. From the ancient myth of the doomsday mare in the depths of the sea, , to the rise of popular worship of the dark goddess Kali, the female in Hindu mythology is dangerous and must be controlled and propitiated. Doniger argues that there is “an inverse correlation between the powers of goddesses or supernatural women in texts and natural women on the ground.” The female divinities of India can be divided into goddesses of the breast, peaceful wives and mothers, and goddesses of the tooth, unmarried, independent of male control, often killers. Doniger finds that the situation in India, in general, destroys “the pious hope of goddess feminists” that the worship of goddesses is a good thing for women. The powers attributed to goddesses have not encouraged men to grant to women, or women to seize from men, greater political and economic powers. Indeed, the shakti or creative power seen as inherent in women leads men to try harder to control women, to silence them, except for those rebel women who defy convention and allow themselves to be possessed by the spirit of the fierce goddesses.

Doniger devotes considerable attention to the development of the custom of suttee, or burning wives on the funeral pyres of their husbands, along with other abuses such as female infanticide and the dowry murders of daughters-in-law still occurring in modern India. She notes that some eyewitnesses give evidence of widows who seemed willing to go to the pyre and others of widows forced to sacrifice themselves, adding that the voice we most want to hear is missing: “the voice of the woman in the fire.” We can never hear the testimony of the women who wanted to die and did, whether for pragmatic or religious reasons. The ritual itself arises from the mythology linking women and fire in the cycle of marriage, death, and rebirth.

The final chapters of this impressive study analyze the political and religious activities of Mahatma Gandhi, the efforts to reform or repeal the caste system, the migration of Hindus and Hinduism to England and America, and the political and religious controversies in present-day India. The Hindu goddesses continue to evolve: in Kerala in 2008 the goddess Bhagavati paid a ceremonial visit to her “twin sister,” the Virgin Mary, at a near-by church. Meanwhile the women painters of Mithila, who traditionally made wall and floor paintings in their homes for marriages and other domestic rituals, have begun to make and sell similar paintings on paper to art collectors in India and around the world. In spite of conflicts, the rich diversity of the Hindu culture is moving forward to a promising future.

Written by: Kittye Delle Robbins-Herring, June 23rd 2009

Findings: Essays on the Natural and Unnatural World

admin — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 19:11:00 +0000

By Kathleen Jamie

Graywolf Press

Jamie writes with sobriety, sensitivity and grace about the natural world and our human place within it. Her book is sparsely illustrated with delicate black-and-white photographs that picture many of her topics. She chronicles visits to places ranging from her own backyard to the Orkney Islands to Edinburgh and beyond, with a marked preference for those wilder spots where the human imprint may still be seen, but nature prevails.

In the Central Highlands she explores a glen scattered with “abandoned shielings,” small stone huts used by villagers for thousands of years as summer homes while they pastured their cattle on the fresh upland grass, and she reflects on a by-gone way of life. “Up here they made milk, butter and cheese, and it was women’s work. What a loss that seems now: a time when women were guaranteed a place in the wider landscape, our own place in the hills.” Living on and with the land is important to her; she pays attention to the seasons, the birds and fish, the trees and other plants, going about in all kinds of weather, walking, biking or sailing. At times she is with her children or friends; often she is alone. Always she strives to be alert, to catch that moment of revelation, “to glance up from my own everyday business, to see the osprey or the peregrine going about hers.”

The book opens with a chapter called “Darkness and Light” about the winter solstice, magical scenes of the half light of northern Scotland, her own desire “to enter into the dark for the love of its textures and wild intimacy,” and her pilgrimage to Maes Howe, a Neolithic stone cairn built with a long passageway arranged so that each evening, for a few days around the solstice, a ray from the setting midwinter sun shines through to light the chambered vault, like a promise, like a kiss. Nearly a dozen chapters later Jamie’s book closes with a joyous dolphin sighting off the coast of Tobermory, a celebration of life. Along the way she helps us see the value and vulnerability of an ancient, yet ever new, world now threatened by contemporary technology and human carelessness.

Buy this book, read it, scribble down lines you want to share with others, talk about them, reflect on them, enjoy a renewed connection with nature as well as a heightened awareness of our need to protect it.

Written by: Kittye Delle Robbins-Herring, July 28th 2007

Captain of the Sleepers

admin — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 23:12:00 +0000

By Marya Montero, Edith Grossman

Picador

Captain of the Sleepers is a tropical story of secrets and conflicts: familial, sexual, social, political, all intricately tangled up together in the Caribbean islands. It proceeds along parallel timelines, unfolding in the present day and in the 1940s and '50s, switching narrators at times, evoking disturbing events in which North American expatriates, tourists and Marines play key roles. It tells of love, death and a failed revolution.

The novel begins starkly: "I'm in the last place on earth I'd like to be. Waiting for the last person in this life I thought I'd ever see again." The narrator Andrés has come to St. Croix to meet a man he calls the "Captain of the Sleepers," an old friend and enemy from childhood. The two men are at odds over an incident that occurred some fifty years ago. There's a secret something that Andrés saw or did not see or seemed to see, that the Captain admits, but does not admit: "It never happened. . . . Not in the way you imagine.” The Captain, J.T. Bunker, is the son of a man who engineered the U.S. takeover of the Virgin Islands. His father later returned to Maine, but the Captain stayed, eking out a living by flying cargo and passengers around the region, including the small Puerto Rican island of Vieques where he got to know Andrés. Some of his passengers were actually corpses, being ferried home to be buried; bodies that the small boy's parents described to him as merely "sleepers."

The history of the islands will be unfamiliar, perhaps confusing, to many North American readers, but also fascinating. Montero's lyrical prose, full of colors, sounds and smells, brings the reader into close contact with the exotic setting. When the U.S. Navy begins to expropriate land on Vieques for a bombing range, the scene moves from the camp at Montesanto, where displaced women "who'd just given birth died like flies," to the hundreds of American paratroopers practicing their jumps on the beaches to the distressing waves of dead fish, mutilated sharks, even a smashed sea turtle, that wash up on the sands from naval maneuvers offshore.

Amid all the commotion, the novel centers on Andrés and his mother Estela, an enigmatic beauty who says little and never tells her own story in her own words. Readers must try to piece together the fragments other characters contribute, in order to understand Estela's complicated relationships with her son, her husband, her women friends and family, Bunker and Roberto, the doomed leader of a group of Puerto Rican nationalists. Montero’s use of male narrators preserves Estela’s mystery, which is perhaps the author’s goal, but, as a woman reading about a woman in a book by a woman, I felt more than a little cheated of a chance to know Estela from her own perspective. The book is nevertheless intriguing, whether you read it for pleasure on the beach this summer or as an introduction to postcolonial studies when you head back to school this fall.

Written by: Kittye Delle Robbins-Herring, June 26th 2007

Elusive Equality: Gender, Citizenship, and the Limits of Democracy in Czechoslovakia, 1918-1950

admin — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 13:07:00 +0000

By Melissa Feinberg

University of Pittsburgh Press

Melissa Feinberg’s must-read new book, Elusive Equality, chronicles in rich and sometimes dramatic detail the fascinating, though frequently distressing, events that marked Czech feminists’ struggle to implement the radical ideas of equality on which the Czechoslovak Republic was founded after the end of World War I. Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, the first president of the new Republic, was a much-venerated utopian idealist who had studied John Stuart Mill with his American-born wife-to-be Charlotte Garrigue, whose last name he added to his own when they married. She translated The Subjection of Women into Czech and was a member of the influential Czech Women’s Club that brought together in Prague elite professional women such as educators, medical doctors, actresses and writers. Early Czech women’s groups tended to see Czech men as allies in the fight for political and national rights. Feinberg points out that a female candidate was elected to a provincial assembly even before woman suffrage was achieved in the state: “Czech men voted for a woman at the very time that Britain’s militant suffragettes were being brutalized and imprisoned.” Masaryk himself insisted that any true democracy must be based on recognition of the equality of all individuals.

The celebrated feminist leader Františka Plamínková praised "the old Czech virtues of love and democracy" and resistance to "any oppression." She and her colleagues did not make a distinction between supporting women and supporting democracy. Yet, despite their commitment to the ideal of gender equality, and despite the way that prominent male politicians promoted this idea, true equality of the sexes was never achieved in family law, job protection, or the problem of married women’s citizenship during the time of the Czech Republic. Deep-rooted attitudes to marriage and women’s duties prevailed. As one male reformer remarked, "I would not want...to change the civil code, which assigns a husband certain privileges...which we do not want to destroy."

Numerous Czech women, too, supported the old gender system, finding security in the fixed roles of wives and mothers. In the 1930’s a campaign for legalizing abortion aroused a backlash that seems to this reviewer quite similar to anti-ERA feelings in the United States in the 1970s. Politicians desperately trying to preserve the Czech nation in times of wars and economic crises were actually, concludes Feinberg, “in the process of hollowing out democracy itself.” Not even the sacrifices of Plamínková, executed as a resistance leader under the German occupation in 1942, and Milada Horáková, executed as an anti-Communist fighter in 1950, could preserve “the feminist hope for liberation via democracy.”

Plamínková was memorialized in 1947, but only after the fall of the Communist regime in 1989 was Horáková honored as a martyr to the cause of Czech freedom. Few today remember her work for women’s rights or, indeed, the whole history of the Czech feminist movement. Feinberg’s well-told cautionary tale serves as a reminder to readers and reformers everywhere that liberty for women and men is always in question and in danger.

Written by: Kittye Delle Robbins-Herring, March 17th 2007

Glory in a Line: A Life of Foujita

admin — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 20:07:00 +0000

By Phyllis Birnbaum

Faber and Faber Inc.

Readers interested in art, Paris, Tokyo, or multiculturalism in the first half of the twentieth century will enjoy Phyllis Birnbaum’s carefully documented biography of Foujita’s tumultuous life as an aristocratic playboy and fiercely dedicated artist, both acclaimed and vilified for his controversial works. She chronicles Foujita’s five marriages, repeated moves to France from Japan and back again, travels in Latin America and the United States, whimsical moods, political shifts, and mastery of a unique style fusing Western oil painting techniques with Japanese brushwork.

In 1920s France, Foujita painted elegant nudes, scandalizing his Japanese compatriots, and during WWII, in Japan, he created propagandistic war paintings that got him in trouble with almost everybody after the Allied victory -- Japanese, Europeans, and Americans. Even today opinions are divided about works such as Last Stand at Attu, 1943. Sasaki Shigeo compares these paintings unfavorably with Picasso’s Guernica, while the artist’s nephew, Ashihara Eiryo, defends him: “In the same way that Foujita believed that women were merely ‘flesh,’ so a gun or a flower was all the same to Foujita.”

Indeed, even though Foujita’s favorite painting subjects were women and cats, singly or together, his affectionate appreciation for them did not make him respect them. Birnbaum quotes without comment his oft-repeated statement to interviewers: “… women and cats are absolutely the same. If you treat them nicely, they are submissive, but if you don’t, they will turn on you. Just think about it – isn’t a woman just like a cat if you put on some whiskers and a tail?” A feminist analysis of the artist’s complicated ambivalence toward women would have strengthened this biography, but Birnbaum, while a noted biographer of Japanese women and their works, reminds us that she is “not writing the woman’s story this time around.” Her duty to Foujita, she believes, makes it necessary for her to take his point of view in everything.

Still, Birnbaum does an outstanding job of presenting her main thesis, exploring in intriguing detail the artist’s dilemma as a man between two countries and two cultures, and in the process she gives a vivid picture of the international art scene during the World Wars, background vital for understanding many of today’s cultural clashes, misunderstandings, and surprising fusions.

Written by: Kittye Delle Robbins-Herring, February 20th 2007