The Delicacy and Strength of Lace

admin — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 17:05:00 +0000

By Leslie Marmon Silko, James Wright, Annie Wright

The Delicacy and Strength of Lace is a rare and beautiful collection, illustrating the power of artful expression in a time when communication is, more often than not, abrupt, cursory, and expedient. The book, composed of letters exchanged between Leslie Marmon Silko, a celebrated fiction writer, and James Wright, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, is an "epistolary classic," and it performs the remarkable feat of capturing, in a tangible, material way, the nature of a friendship.

Their correspondence ranges over little more than a year, and in that short time, their relationship sees Silko's divorce, child custody struggles, and professional turmoil, and Wright's own family tragedies, flourishing career, and finally, his illness and death. They write each other at a spirited pace, even while Wright travels through Europe and while Silko bounces across the United States; detailed address lists and itineraries are tucked into their notes about landscapes and heartaches. Their devotion to one another is made all the more extraordinary by the fact that their friendship was initiated and maintained almost exclusively through letters. Its success was due, in part, to their shared facility with language, which allowed them a candor that would have been lost in the hands of less capable writers. The missives are written with such charm and sincerity that they do not feel like mere evidence of friendship, but like the substance of it.

The correspondence begins timidly, with some mutual flattery and formality, but blooms almost immediately into intimate conversation:

"Dear Mrs. Silko," Wright begins, "I trust you won't mind hearing from a stranger... I have finally had the chance to read _Ceremony, and I am moved to tell you how much the book means to me... I am very happy that you are alive and writing books."_

"Dear Mr. Wright," Silko returns, "Your letter came at a time when I needed it most. So many sad things have happened with my marriage and my children—it is good to know that my work means something..."

Silko writes with the ease of a natural storyteller, ambling from anecdotes about her farm to her personal and professional troubles. "Dear Jim," she writes in her second letter, "I just fed the rooster a blackened banana I found in the refrigerator. He has been losing his yellowish collar feathers lately, and I'm afraid it might be that he isn't getting enough to eat. But I suppose it could be his meanness too." Wright volleys with his own observations about writing and teaching. Where Silko writes with tenacity and sadness, Wright's letters are milder but more ominous. "It has been a pleasure to teach and work here in Delaware, but now once again I can feel time closing in on me, and there are still many tasks to be performed and many duties to be met," he writes, a foreshadowing of the cancer diagnosis that will kill him a year later.

The Delicacy and Strength of Lace was first published in 1985, and its reprinting today seems designed to point out that these kinds of epistolary relationships have all but disappeared. One may be tempted to blame email and blogs and Twitter, but to lament the informality of modern communication is miss a greater truth: Silko and Wright's remarkable correspondence was born out of their mutual love for writing. Their letters were crafted with a mixture of skill and affection that has always been rare. The immediacy and volume of modern communication may have diluted the frequency of clear, heartfelt expression, but this collection shows that our appetite for it is undiminished.

Written by: Rebecca Zerzan, December 17th 2009

Women's Movements in Twentieth-Century Taiwan

admin — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 09:36:00 +0000

By Doris Chang

University of Illinois Press

Women's Movements in Twentieth-Century Taiwan by Doris Chang offers a compelling history of the recurrent feminist movement in Taiwan’s imperial and post-war eras. Though Chang’s primary concern is establishing a historical survey of Taiwanese feminism, the book contains an even more valuable—if largely incidental—subtext about the vulnerability of feminism against competing political and cultural movements.

We tend to think of sexism as the final barrier following a millennium of social progress; after centuries spent peeling away layers of barbarism and prejudice, it is a final lingering injustice. We also imagine that, following these other achievements, the realization of women’s rights should be natural and frictionless. Chang shows us that this is exactly wrong.

In fact, feminist thought ebbed and flowed in colonial Taiwan under the Japanese, then under the Chinese, and then again under the autonomous Taiwanese government, always emerging briefly before being shuttered away by competing political and cultural identities. In a time when women were married off as chattel or sold into brothels, advocates for women’s rights were again and again cast as selfish agitators sapping vitality from the political cause du jour.

This is not to say that the violent swaying of Taiwanese politics was in any way frivolous. Taiwan confronted the Sino-Japanese War, World War II, the Chinese civil war, and then decades of martial law under the Kuomintang. Each period sagged under the weight of ethnic and class inequalities, all of which retarded economic growth and democracy. Throughout this turmoil, feminist groups were repeatedly encouraged to ally with cultural movements, political parties, and class-based entities, and then were admonished to abandon their objectives to the greater goals of their partners.

This will sound familiar to progressives who feel themselves pushed to put women’s issues on a back burner. The implication was—and remains—that in times of distress, women should shelve their feminist ideals and divert their attentions to some larger cause. Of course, it is impossible to ask a woman to prioritize her gender identity over her national identity or her class sympathies. Yet Chang shows us that this very tension drowned the advancement of women’s rights at every moment of political reckoning.

The implications of these observations are unclear. Maybe the recent successes of Taiwan’s feminists could only have been realized in the absence of war, imperialism, and censorship. Perhaps it was the eventual triumph of democracy that paved the way for women’s freedom to marry, divorce, work, and study as they choose. But it begs the question: If the feminists of the 1920s had been able to find their voice, would it all have taken so long?

Written by: Rebecca Zerzan, July 10th 2009