On the Quiet Genius of Female Knowledge: A Tirade Within a Book Review

I read A Border Passage: From Cairo to America – A Woman’s Journey by Leila Ahmed while trying to build a reading list of narratives about migration. I learned so much while teaching a course in Ethnic Studies on Gender and Migration that I thought I’d like to teach a literature course on the subject. I think a Contemporary Literature class could easily focus on migration. Globalization certainly has lead the pressing need for families to migrate in order to work and survive – but I’m still working on that list. Ahmed’s book, I should say finally, is excellent. This memoir tells the story of a girl from an upper-middle class family in Egypt, who through the course of her education and the rise of Arab nationalism, comes to terms with her own identity and learns to define herself on her own terms.

Hybrid or multifaceted identity are important in this book, and in most discussions related to migration. Often migrant populations, and I would say women and people of color in general, are in constant negotiation between the way dominant culture wants to define them and the way they see themselves. Ahmed puts it: “I am not here to betray. I just do not want to live any longer with a lie about who I am. I don’t want any longer to live with lies and manipulations, I can’t stand to be caught up like this forever in other people’s inventions, imputations, false constructions of who I am – what I think, believe, feel, or ought to think or believe or feel” (255).

That she describes saying this out loud to herself while waiting at a traffic light is significant, and of course if anyone had heard her they would dismiss her as crazy. If I were using this book in the critical intro to my dissertation, I would say that this is another way women express their identity that gets dismissed by the dominant culture. More specifically, it’s an expression of anger and exasperation that really really scares male culture, and therefore gets marginalized and tossed into the crazy pile. But there’s knowledge there…it just took writing it down and publishing it in a book for it to be heard in a “legitimate” way, which is also what Ahmed’s memoir is about. The music of the reed in Sufi poetry Ahmed says, “is the metaphor for our human condition, haunted as we so often are by a vague sense of longing and of nostalgia, but nostalgia for we know not quite what” (5). It’s eternal, but yet it fades immediately and comes back as vague memory. Because it’s not written down, it’s not treated as “knowledge”. Just like Ursa’s blues in Corregidora, Grace’s quilts in Alias Grace, and Bertha’s Obeah in Wide Sargasso Sea: it’s not art, much less knowledge, because it’s not in the right tradition.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, who wrote Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History, meant to say that “good” women might actually have had some great knowledge to impart, but we would never know this because what they had to say was never published in writing. She points to the exception of Martha Ballard’s diary, which exemplifies the kinds of knowledge women had the opportunity to pass down: generally private, kept out of public view, and regarded as unworthy anyway because it’s just about everyday life. Ahmed’s book made me think about this, and then I got to thinking about how much more difficult it is to get writing published as a female. This is especially true if your work can be categorized as “domestic.” That is, you aren’t rejected because you are female, you are rejected because you write about regular people living their lives, and no editor wants that shit.

The other reason, I’ve been told recently, is that women just aren’t persistent enough about submitting their work to markets. At a recent conference I attended, a keynote speaker talked about the disparity between women and men getting accepted in literary markets. Women are published less often than men, but data gathered also suggested that women were more likely to stop submitting after a certain number of rejections than men were. The assumption was that women, discouraged by rejection, crumpled and gave up their craft, while men continued to pursue publication until they met success. Women simply accepted that their work was no good as the editors seemed to be suggesting. My friends sat next to me with steam coming out of their ears, but I felt sorry for the speaker. His intention was good – to encourage women and bolster our resolve. That the conclusion was totally off-base hadn’t occurred to the poor guy.

Let me set the record straight. While a few women writers may stop believing in their work because the editors at Ploughshares didn’t want it, the vast majority of us know we do good work. In fact, I’d say most of us can write our male colleagues under the table, and we are absolutely confident in that. So why do we stop sending out our work when it hasn’t been published? Why do we stop writing?

Tillie Olsen gave one good answer in her book Silences, which you should all read. To a point, a women’s writing is “censored” by her life. Just like Virginia Woolf said, there are certain elements required to foster a writer’s creativity, of which “a room of her own” is only one. Time is another. A quiet household is another. Energy is another. Money another. Women, unfortunately, have a lot to do. Having a career obviously has excused none of us from doing most of the housework and taking care of family. We get paid with about the same equality as we get published. We do the lion’s share of the work when it comes to maintaining relationships, maintaining appearances, fulfilling the needs of others. At some point we’re dealing with chronic pain or illness – ours or someone else’s. A woman, quite frankly, has to pick her battles. When writing becomes a losing one, we sometimes choose to move on.

The implication that if we just “lean in,” if we’re persistent, that we can break the glass submission ceiling, is also based on a misconception. A man who submits over and over to the same market, calling editors and e-mailing inquiries and traipsing all over conferences with his cards in hand, eventually gets published perhaps. But a woman’s persistence and aggressiveness will not be received in the same way.  It’s like that in Hollywood, according to Babs, and it’s like that in general. The misbehaving women who do make history also pay a big price most of the time. There’s a realistic fear sometimes that if you jump on top of these editors, they will not only reject your work, but might not even read it next time.

 

Misinterpret phrase. Sell some shit.

That’s okay though. Really. In the end, it’s not such a tragedy that some of us have decided not to be published in a tradition that denies our value over and over. Why do we fall all over ourselves trying to be published in these literary reviews anyway? Are they really so great? In A Border Passage, Ahmed channels Woolf in asking about the University: “What kind of knowledge is it that these men have developed and passed on in those institutions, why are we following in the wake of men’s professions – what are these professions and why should we, following in these men’s footsteps, pursue them?” (192).

I submit that we don’t necessarily lose our voices when we turn around and decide to devote our time instead to teaching, mothering, caretaking, organizing. It’s possible that being published in the higher-order literary magazines is in fact, a failure, because it means you have compromised your own voice in order to join a tradition that may well be killing good writing, not preserving it. Ahmed points to the travesty that male religious leaders have made of the Quran, and maintains that generations of women continue to truly understand that text’s essential themes, and passed that understanding onto their children. “Leaving no written legacy, written only on the body and into the scripts of their lives, this oral and aural tradition of Islam no doubt stretches back through the generations and is as ancient as any written tradition” (127).

That is, when we opt for the art of everyday life, we still impart knowledge, albeit more slowly and quietly than through publishing a book. A clean stovetop, a nicely wrapped birthday present, a cuddle, a backrub, a homemade greeting card, an organized closet: these things don’t get you a name or a job in academia – only a book does. But that doesn’t mean it’s not valuable – that it doesn’t mean something for the future. Our work doesn’t die in some journal or on some page. It moves and changes in perpetuity.

I will end with a metaphor in which I will attempt to illustrate what I mean when I talk about the difference between male creation and female creation:

 A man decides to make a piece of art, so he takes a dump on a sidewalk and walks away. (I’m not saying men’s work is shit, my dear male writer friends. Your work is very good. Mine’s better, but yours is very good.) It’s immediately interpreted as a great piece of art, so several workers come in and figure out how to move it without wrecking it or altering it in any way so they can put it in a museum. A team is assigned to deal with its preservation, to keep it as intact and fragrant as when it was laid, none of which receive credit from the spectators who flock to see the great masterpiece for years. Writers critically analyze the dump. Scholars study it. It remains exactly as it was, until the museum is destroyed in a natural disaster/nuclear holocaust/ zombie apocalypse. And the survivors always remember the great artist and his turd.

A woman decides to make a piece of art, so she grows a veggie garden. Every day she prunes, weeds, stakes, sprays, waters and harvests the garden. She gives the fresh veggies to friends and family or makes sauce with the tomatoes or makes pickles. Sometimes a plant will die or get bugs and she has to replace it or decide to do something else. Animals eat at it, and she has to figure out how to deal with them so she gets help. Sometimes she gets help with the work, and sometimes she just gets advice. Sometimes she starts all over with new and different soil mixes or new and different breeds of veggies, but eventually, something always grows there. Even when she gets too old to do the work, and her husband’s too old, and her kids are too old, and her grandkids are too old, and her great grandkids are too old, something grows there. It gets all weedy and overgrown and tangled. It mutates genetically into all kinds of unrecognizable green stuff. After the natural disaster/nuclear holocaust/zombie apocalypse, bugs live in there. Mutant rabbits live in there. Zombie squirrels feed there. Survivors sometimes feed from it. It gets bigger and wilder and uglier as time immemorial goes on. But no one remembers the woman, and as far as the survivors know, the garden was always there.