Beth Martin Birky
Goshen College
Mennonite/s Writing in the U.S.
October 25, 1997
When I gave Ervin Beck a tentative title for this paper back in April, I
knew that body was at the heart of what I wanted to say about my experience
reading the poetry of Julia Kasdorf, Jean Janzen, and Juanita Brunk. But
now, the title makes me a little uncomfortable. As a feminist critic and
teacher of Women's Studies courses like Women in Literature, I have
learned much from French feminist exploration of female body and language.
I've been inspired by Hélène Cixous' declaration in "The
Laugh of the Medusa": "Woman must write her self: must write about
women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away
as violently as from their bodies" (334). In the context of literary
criticism, a title that offers to explore "Women," "Body,"
and "Poetry" seems very fitting.
But as a Mennonite woman, I would hardly dream of talking in public about
"Women, " "Body," and anything. When I think
of Mennonite women and body, I think of my Mom's story about not being able
to teach Bible school in the early 1950s because the bishop found out she
used curlers in her hair (the bishop never bothered to discover that she
only curled her thin, straight hair so it would better conform to the shape
of the modest roll at the base of her neck). Her perceived transgressions
of the accepted female body became a reason to silence her. Although I experience
more freedom in the church and in society than my mother did, I still live
with the legacy of what Di Brandt has referred to as a "tradition which
has designated [women] as subordinate, silent, and sexually other"
(38), a history that has placed many restrictions on the voicing of life
in a woman's body. Why then would I ever talk with a room full of people,
many of them Mennonite, about "Mennonite Women," "Body,"
and "Poetry"?
It is precisely because of this history, that I want to speak today about my own experience reading these texts as a Mennonite woman. These Mennonite women poets write the female body; their poems create a space for the female body; and my reading of their poems has been a time of experiencing my own body as well. We've talked quite a bit this weekend about the position of the writer in relationship to community and text. I'd like to talk from the position of the reader and reflect on how I've experienced the texts of Brunk, Kasdorf, and Janzen, and what these poets have given me. I do not claim to be what Susan Suleiman would call the "ideal reader" of Mennonite women's poetry, nor do I claim that my reading is shared by what Stanley Fish would call my "interpretive community." I only describe here today the discoveries I have made in the private conversations between poet and reader, discoveries which center around the intimate realities of life as a female body. I intentionally say as a female body, not in or with a female body, because these poets write their lives as women who experience, explore, and give voice to a self that is both mind and body.
In the reading of Mennonite women's poetry I have encountered an incarnation in language of each woman's physical and emotional experience. Janzen captures this incarnation well in her poem, "Overflow":
Our stories are too big
for our bodies. Our first heartbeat
is spill-over, and we are born
in a rush of water and cries.
With our whole body we lift
our first vowels to the air
a stream, pressing
from a place we do not know.
Incarnation: the word becomes flesh, but also the flesh becomes word in voice and in poetry. And in the textual bodies of Mennonite women's poetry, I have felt the truth and grace of incarnation, of the powerful spirit in body that makes up the self. As intimate, lyric expressions of feeling in the first person, these poems offer the distilled intensity of experience, the fusion of image and thought that captures the way mind and spirit are bound to physical reality. The two cannot be separated. By forging this experience of body in language, each woman has given me language for my own self-understanding.
Cixous explains that poetry offers a form of rebellion and a mode of discovery
for women: "By writing her self, woman will return to the body which
has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the
uncanny stranger on display. . . Write your self." Cixous urges, "Your
body must be heard." By writing, women will gain what Cixous calls
"access to her native strength; it will give her back her goods, her
pleasures, her organs, her immense bodily territories which have been kept
under seal;" In her 1992 essay "Bringing Home the Work,"
Kasdorf claims that the "work of poetry requires that the writer gain
deep access to her emotional life and write to make sense of it." When
a writer finds that emotional life inextricably linked to body, the two
coalesce for the reader as well.
Because of a history of patriarchal oppression and repression that doesn't
require summary here, women's poetry has often given voice to women's bodily
reality as an act of defiance rather than discovery. In her recent collection
of essays, titled Dancing Naked, Di Brandt suggests that "new
Mennonite writing exists as a . . . violation of the authority of God and
the Bible and the father" (36). And this resistance is evident in Mennonite
women's poetry. For example, Brunk and Kasdorf has poems that break the
silence about sexual violation. In Brunk's "Immaculate Conception,
1969" and two of Kasdorf's poems that she read Thursday evening, "The
Interesting Thing" and "Flu," we find the recurring image
of the cramming, driving, stabbing male tongue. The phallic tongue, the
forced penetration, the imposed assumptions about women's bodies, all are
resisted through these accounts of violation. Women's poetry does create
space for the struggle and trauma of women's bodies.
But I myself do not connect to Mennonite women's poetry only as acts of
transgression against the patriarchal tradition; I experience these poems
as an act of embodiment, an act of growing into fuller understanding of
my body. These poems do not just rage against the silence; they whisper
new discoveries and sing possibilities. In a collection of essays titled
Carnal Acts, Nancy Mairs says that a woman writer's gift to other
women is to "tell the truth about her body. . . and its passions"
and "giv[e] tongue to her own delight and desire" ("Carnal
Acts" 60). In telling the truth about their bodies and the intimate
connection of body and self, these three Mennonite women poets have explored
their delight and articulated their desires as women.
A poem that captures well my experience with the way Mennonite women poets
create space for the body is Juanita Brunk's poem "On this Earth,"
from her 1996 collection of poetry Brief Landing on the Earth's Surface:
To love my own, my body,
to know without saying, legs, you are good legs,
and feet and stomach and arms, good, and the spaces
under my arms, and the brown pigments
splashed across my back like tea leaves.
To love my body the way
I sometimes love a stranger's: a woman
on the subway, tired, holding her two bags,
a child slumped against her like another sack
as the train stops and starts and the child says something
so quietly no one else can hear it,
but she leans down, and whispers back,
and the child curls closer. I would love my body
the way a mother can love her child, or the way
a child will love anyone
who gives it a home on this earth, a place
without which it would be nothing, a dry branch
at the window of a lit room.
In this poem, I find several important themes: first, an intimate and private,
yet very ordinary account of a woman's body; second, a nurturing and enlightening
relationship to other women's bodies; and third, an acknowledgment of unity
of body and identity that resists society's classification of the female
body as "other," as an object to be worshipped or reviled.
The first feature I observe in Brunk's "On this Earth" is the
startling normalcy of the description of a woman's body of so much poetry.
Gone are the flowing hair, longing eyes, sensuously round mouths. Instead
we have feet, stomach, arms, and even underarms, and "the brown pigments/
splashed across my back like tea leaves" (5-6).
In a similar way, Kasdorf's poem "Knees" explores the childlike
intimacy with her body that is altered with society's expectations of her
mature woman's body:
Every spring I split a knee.
Mom said, you'll never be a majorette
with knees like that. Sit still.
I squirmed, picked scabs,
everyday at least, peeled the crust
to see if it was clean and pink
underneath. Or watched it bleed
slowly, like a bloom opening
then the thick red petal
sliding down my shin until
it was stopped by a finger or tongue.
Now knees seldom bleed.
They just work
under hose or jeans,
and I laugh at men who look.
Knees, just gristle on bone,
and there are scars on these.
Knees as objects for men to ogle cause the speaker to laugh. Her knees are
really just "gristle on bone" (16), and they still carry scars
of an earlier intimacy, of "peel[ing] the crust" to explore the
relationship of the physical surface to the interior reality. The speaker
conveys a sense of pleasing curiosity ("to see if it was clean and
pink/ underneath. Or watched it bleed/slowly, like a bloom opening")
as well as a sense of loss ("Now knees seldom bleed"). The bleeding
scarred knees give way to the menstrual blood that marks womanhood, that
also marks a shift from the normalcy of body to the absurd roles a woman's
body must sometimes play.
The second element I find is a sense of connection to other women's bodies,
a connection of solidarity and sympathy. I don't find the competition, the
measuring self and other women against a standard size 8. In Brunk's poem,
the speaker actually loves another woman's body. In her snapshot of a child
slumping against mother, accepting unquestioned comfort provided by her
body, we are given a glimpse of the way body can connect to self love. The
metaphors offered for a relationship between body and self are a mother's
unconscious giving of love or a child's blind acceptance of love, a curling
closer of the self to the body.
In Kasdorf's "Ladies Night at the Turkish and Russian Baths" we
get a sense of woman's body in community, with a tension between isolation
and communion. As the speaker descends into the steam room, she says,
. . . an old woman looks up;
slender gourds hang off the cage of her ribs,
and when she wrings the pink cloth on her crotch,
I see a bun, bald as a girl's, and think crone,
ashamed. She runs weary eyes down my form,
then closes them. (8-13)
But one woman's assessment of another dissolves in the steam bath,
. . . in the hot cave where women drape
between streaming spigots. Some murmur,
most are silent, except when one
grabs a bucket and dumps it onto her chest
with a groan. Our eyes meet and we grin,
grateful to show and view the real shapes
of ourselves: so many different breasts
and hips that get smoothed over by clothes,
none of us looking like we're supposed to! (26-34)
Later, she lies on a cot, stretched out by a "stunning young woman" who "cries silently,/ tears sliding like sweat into her turban./ Whatever her reason, I feel bound to that/ sadness" (40-43). To love other women's bodies is to share their pain and to discover their power and the power within our own bodies.
A third theme concerns the way identity can be linked to body rather than
alienated from it: "To love my own, my body," as Brunk's speaker
says. The dichotomy between body and soul is pervasive in Western thought
and results, observes Nancy Mairs, in an attitude and language that separate
identity from body. Mairs notes that we even speak of our body as something
separate: you say, for example, "I have a body . . .; you don't
say, I am a body" (84). But the relationship between body and
self is complex. We understand our experiences and express ourselves through
language, language that is not possible without body, as Janzen's poem "Overflow"
reveals. Instead of exploring that connection, Mairs says, we tend to "widen
the rift between the self and the body" and "treat our bodies
as subordinates, inferior in moral status." We resort to the same kind
of dualism that Hildi Froese-Tiessen critiqued in her essay Friday morning
or the binary oppositions that Jessica Lapp suggested this morning are broken
down in Janet Kauffman's novel Collaborators.
In this context, we often feel the need to extend control of the self over
the body, a move that can result in self-loathing. "In fact,"
Mairs says, "we treat our bodies with very much the same distance and
ambivalence women have traditionally received from men in our culture. Sometimes
this treatment is benevolent, even respectful, but all too often it is tainted
by outright sadism" (84). Mairs describes the current obsession with
body building regimens designed to beat bodies into shape, an attitude toward
exercise that surpasses the concern for healthy living. Mairs says, "Bodies
get treated like wayward women who have to be shown who's boss, even if
it means slapping them around a little" (85).
In the opening line of "On this Earth," Brunk directly confronts
this pattern of female self-loathing that is so linked to body loathing
with the speaker's assertions of body love. The verb "love" is
repeated in each of the three sentences that constitute this poem. The body,
she says, is "a home on this earth, a place/ without which it would
be nothing" (17-18). The self in body is not negotiable, even though
the quality of the relationship between is.
Kasdorf writes about this tension between body and self in "Ghosts,"
where the speaker becomes a disembodied spirit:
In stories brought back from brief deaths,
patients hover above frantic doctors,
hoping they will not find a way to pull
the ghosts back into wracked bodies.
One of those ghosts slipped out
when I was a child and a man caressed
the cleft in my panties. In all memories
I see the scene from three feet away.
Later, the ghost sat in a back seat
admiring my boyfriend's face
as it shifted in a kiss,
his hand drifting across a shoulder
to a breast. Even in marriage, the ghost
taunts from above the bed: Is it good?
Walking home late from the train,
I clutch keys between my knuckles.
(Why don't I think it would help me to scream?)
Instead the ghost foresees it all from above,
and I rage against the vulnerable socket
I cannot gouge out of this body.
To keep the ghost in place, I lift weights,
strain against that good force binding me to earth. Mine, I instruct
my brain, my strong arms, my fists,
my sweat, the ache of myself in my calves.
And I straddle my love like a bench,
pressing hard so my thighs bulge up
into all their beautiful shapes.
I take the sun like a lover, lie naked
under its radiant gaze, finally safe,
like when a young man faces me on the train
and begins to sketch my crossed legs.
Can I take the touch of his eyes
tracing an ankle, moving up my black tights
from five feet away?
"Ghosts" explores the way sexual violation in childhood results
in the forced detachment of self from body. Even in the speaker's adolescent
making out with a boyfriend, she does not even claim her own body, referring
only to "a shoulder," "a breast." As an adult, her "rage
against the vulnerable socket" (19), the physical core of her female
body, is evidence of her self-hatred. Her straining "against that good
force binding me to earth" resonates with Brunk's title "On this
earth." The determined declaration of "Mine, I instruct/ my brain"
(23-25) mirrors the plea of Brunk's speaker, "To love my own, my body/
to know without saying" (1-2). Even with a physically strong body,
"thighs" that "bulge up/ into all their beautiful shapes,"
the speaker does not feel secure. Although she "take[s] the sun like
a lover," safe under the sun's "radiant gaze," her self-confidence
dissolves into a question, "Can I take the touch of his eyes"
(33). With her disembodied self, her ghost, the speaker resists the fear
of violation and the fear of her own physical vulnerability by controlling
and condemning her body.
The emotional pain in "Ghosts" leaves me with the same sadness
that haunts Brunk's "On this Earth." Even as Brunk's poem reinforces
my own need to love my body, the speaker emphasizes the conditional quality
of this love, the focus on the future, not the present, a recognition that
this type of body love doesn't yet exist. The poem's first two lines open
with the infinitives "To love" and "to know": "To
love my own, my body,/ to know without saying, legs, you are good legs,"
(1-2). The statements represent a hope of what she might do. She later repeats
"To love" but we glimpse that the love is only occasional: "To
love my body the way/ I sometimes love a stranger's" (7-8). And the
beginning of the final sentence in the poem, the speaker states only, "I
would love my body" (14). We feel a longing for a relationship to body
that can't be known "without saying, legs, you are good legs"
(2).
Some of a Mennonite woman's alienation from her body is related to the patriarchal
forces in our society and in the Mennonite community, but some of it is
from the ongoing changes experienced in women's bodies. Sometimes our bodies
do feel like strangers, and the changes that take place are frightening.
In "The Gardens of the Body," Janzen writes
I fear my body
crushed or stopped, this fabric scrim
which falls, the way a garden falls,
the way one fleshy pear falls, holding
within it an entire tree, the sucking
roots, the bridal bloom, and the light,
which in Vesalius glowed in a place
he never found. (Snake in the Parsonage 19-26)
The body holds possibilities as a pear holds within it an entire tree. But
with that power comes fear: fear of the potential, fear of the unknown,
the surprise of regular or irregular menstrual cycles, the sexual stirring,
the desire to give life, the fear of infertility, the strangeness of giving
birth, the changes imposed by time. All are a part of a woman's life in
her body.
In exploring the relationship of this unpredictable body to self, some poems
reveal the need to perceive of and experience the uncontrollable qualities
of a woman's body as strength not weakness. In some of the poems, this strength
comes from the ability of our bodies to transcend expected boundaries. In
sex and in pregnancy, birth, and motherhood, women take others into their
bodies and give out from their bodies. In Janzen's poem, "Once In The
Rain," she remembers
how once in a warm autumn rain
you took me naked to the deck,
how as I lay curved in your arms, your dampness
entering all of me,
we dissolved together as if
God had never separated
land and sea,
how we drifted up over the cedar tips
and the slant of the roof
and hovered there, (12-23)
Unlike the hovering ghost of Kasdorf's poem, Janzen's speaker experiences
a separation from body that comes from the extension of oneself to another,
a joining of physical and spiritual that enlarges her. Giving of body or
giving of self can be a powerful merging, where boundaries dissolve into
a sense of wholeness that surpasses the experience of an isolated body,
a separate self.
Janzen's "Curbing the Appetite" offers an interesting exploration
of the boundaries between mother and child, with the unexpected feelings
of separateness and union, estrangement and longing, that accompany giving
birth.
They brought them to me
bound in blankets
like cooked sausages,
the fat cheeks bulging
for kisses, their mouths
rooting for my own skin.
I thought of our mother cat
devouring placentas
and umbilical cords,
licking and licking,
barely able to keep
her sharp teeth out
of the soft, flabby necks
that dark intertwining
of love and possession.
The interesting tension between detachment and possession: babies referred
to as "them" and compared to "sausages," cat's sharp
teeth devouring, forcing detachment that is needed for growth. Yet detachment
is balanced by connection: "cheeks bulging for kisses," "mouths/
rooting for my own skin." The giving of self, the permeation of boundaries
between self and other that these poems create is a sense of welcoming the
other into one's sense of self, not giving or taking, adding or losing.
In their work, these poets find themselves having to say, "legs,
you are good legs," body, you are good. And in some ways, the need
to affirm our bodies out loud is unfortunate, an acknowledgment of years
of social, physical, and more deeply rooted psychological oppression of
women in body and mind. Yet, in the poetry of these Mennonite women, I find
a very feminine incarnation of spirit in flesh, of flesh in word, a space
for the female body that offers me a home on this earth.
*******************
Brandt, Di. Dancing Naked: Narrative Strategies for Writing Across Centuries. Stratford, Ontario: Mercury Press, 1996.
Brunk, Juanita. "On This Earth." Brief Landing on the Earth's Surface. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1996. 25.
Cixous, Hélène. "The Laugh of the Medusa." Feminisms: and Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism. Eds. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1991: 334-348.
Janzen, Jean. "Curbing the Appetite." Three Mennonite Poets. Intercourse: Good Books, 1986.
----------. "The Gardens of the Body." Snake in the Parsonage. Intercourse: Good Books, 1986.
----------. "Once in the Rain." Three Mennonite Poets. Intercourse: Good Books, 1986.
----------. "Overflow." Gospel Herald 14 October 1997.
Kasdorf, Julia. "Bringing Home the Work." Festival Quarterly (Spring 1992).
----------. "Flu." College English.
----------. "Ghosts." West Branch.
----------. "Knees." Sleeping Preacher. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh, 1992: 56.
----------. "Ladies Night at the Turkish and Russian Baths." Cincinnati Poetry Review.
Mairs, Nancy. Carnal Acts. New York: Harper, 1990.
For further questions or comments, contact me at bethmb@goshen.edu
Last updated 12/5/97