Beth Martin Birky
Goshen College
Mennonite/s Writing in the U.S.
October 25, 1997

When Flesh becomes Word:

Creating Space for the Female Body

in Mennonite Women's Poetry


And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, . . . full of grace and truth. John 1:14.


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:



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,

 

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.


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.


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Works Cited


For further questions or comments, contact me at bethmb@goshen.edu

Last updated 12/5/97