Maps of Women's Goings and Stayings - Brossura

Mazali, Rela

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0804732930 ISBN 13: 9780804732932

Casa editrice: Stanford Univ Pr, 2002

Riassunto

This book writes itself off the guide map of familiar literary forms and melts down conceptual barriers, offering a new kind of reading and thinking experience as it tells the life and travel stories of fascinating women and examines women’s physical mobility in a culture of gendered, postcolonial space that restricts their movement. Straddling the divide between fiction and scholarship, it combines fictional narrative, contemplation, theoretical thinking, scholarly discussion, and interviews. The book examines and crosses boundaries on various ontological levels—between genders, languages, historical epochs, and literary genres—as it questions reality, identity, knowledge, culture, truth, and mind.

While openly confronting the author’s location in Israel, the book looks at women’s ability to take themselves from place to place, viewing space and spatial freedom as deeply gendered in modern Western cultures. From this perspective, “home” is imagined as a protective holding space for one gender, and girls are systematically deskilled for spatial competence. The author tells of women whose lives embody a powerful project of travel, realizing exceptional degrees of independence, and also tells of women who refrain from driving, a major contemporary tool of autonomous movement.

The book imagines a movement-nurturing space that subverts the confining construct of home. From this nonexistent yet tangibly welcoming home space, the “glass corridors” of home—analogous to the “glass ceiling” of professional life—can be brought into full view and denaturalized. This cannot be accomplished, however, without a compelling, painful look at the patriarchal, colonial, and militarized structures underpinning all Western travel, women’s emancipatory journeys included—a look influenced by the still-colonial structure of the author’s Israeli placement.

Su questo libro

Dalla quarta di copertina

This book writes itself off the guide map of familiar literary forms and melts down conceptual barriers, offering a new kind of reading and thinking experience as it tells the life and travel stories of fascinating women and examines women’s physical mobility in a culture of gendered, postcolonial space that restricts their movement. Straddling the divide between fiction and scholarship, it combines fictional narrative, contemplation, theoretical thinking, scholarly discussion, and interviews. The book examines and crosses boundaries on various ontological levels—between genders, languages, historical epochs, and literary genres—as it questions reality, identity, knowledge, culture, truth, and mind.
While openly confronting the author’s location in Israel, the book looks at women’s ability to take themselves from place to place, viewing space and spatial freedom as deeply gendered in modern Western cultures. From this perspective, “home” is imagined as a protective holding space for one gender, and girls are systematically deskilled for spatial competence. The author tells of women whose lives embody a powerful project of travel, realizing exceptional degrees of independence, and also tells of women who refrain from driving, a major contemporary tool of autonomous movement.
The book imagines a movement-nurturing space that subverts the confining construct of home. From this nonexistent yet tangibly welcoming home space, the “glass corridors” of home—analogous to the “glass ceiling” of professional life—can be brought into full view and denaturalized. This cannot be accomplished, however, without a compelling, painful look at the patriarchal, colonial, and militarized structures underpinning all Western travel, women’s emancipatory journeys included—a look influenced by the still-colonial structure of the author’s Israeli placement.

Dal risvolto di copertina interno

This book writes itself off the guide map of familiar literary forms and melts down conceptual barriers, offering a new kind of reading and thinking experience as it tells the life and travel stories of fascinating women and examines women s physical mobility in a culture of gendered, postcolonial space that restricts their movement. Straddling the divide between fiction and scholarship, it combines fictional narrative, contemplation, theoretical thinking, scholarly discussion, and interviews. The book examines and crosses boundaries on various ontological levels between genders, languages, historical epochs, and literary genres as it questions reality, identity, knowledge, culture, truth, and mind.
While openly confronting the author s location in Israel, the book looks at women s ability to take themselves from place to place, viewing space and spatial freedom as deeply gendered in modern Western cultures. From this perspective, home is imagined as a protective holding space for one gender, and girls are systematically deskilled for spatial competence. The author tells of women whose lives embody a powerful project of travel, realizing exceptional degrees of independence, and also tells of women who refrain from driving, a major contemporary tool of autonomous movement.
The book imagines a movement-nurturing space that subverts the confining construct of home. From this nonexistent yet tangibly welcoming home space, the glass corridors of home analogous to the glass ceiling of professional life can be brought into full view and denaturalized. This cannot be accomplished, however, without a compelling, painful look at the patriarchal, colonial, and militarized structures underpinning all Western travel, women s emancipatory journeys included a look influenced by the still-colonial structure of the author s Israeli placement.

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MAPS OF WOMEN'S GOINGS AND STAYINGS

By RELA MAZALI

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2001 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-3293-2

Contents

FIRST VISIT: The House and the Longing........................................1SECOND VISIT: Janie's Room with Zinnia........................................26THIRD VISIT: StoryTails.......................................................61FOURTH VISIT: The Princess in the Caravan.....................................83FIFTH VISIT: The Princess in the Caravan Too..................................116SIXTH VISIT: The Indian in the Longing........................................158SEVENTH VISIT: The Mountains and the Hills and the Toilet.....................190EIGHTH VISIT: FearLedge.......................................................213NINTH VISIT: Bookmaps and Housebooks..........................................244TENTH VISIT: Balls, Bats and Cars.............................................287ELEVENTH VISIT: The Sea and the Desert........................................312TWELFTH VISIT: Gibraltar......................................................350

Chapter One

FIRST VISIT: THE HOUSE AND THE LONGING

SOME OF US PREFER ALIASES. Many of us feel comfortable with our real names and identities. Almost all of us are actual people, all women, only a few of our stories imagined. We have been gathering over about five years now. On magnetic tape, in yellow spiral notepads, on the circuits and screen of the personal computer that I share with my daughter, most of us never having met and probably never to meet each other, gathering in text. Place us, though, as in a house in a warm climate. It's an inviting house. Used that is for inviting no less than for staying. You're invited too. It has a fruit full, semi-tended garden. It should stay simple, but furnish it with textures and smells that you only begin to guess at from books and movies and magazines. And from old stories you vaguely know of, that evaporate when you reach for the details. Just beyond the edge of the familiar, things unexperienced recollected, anciently retained, ancestral. Strangely known and sensuous.

We are coming as if into the house, each at her chosen times. We could be sitting down for a while somewhere in the cushion color combination, sipping something cool and subtly spiced that the neighbors taught one of us to mix and biting into a gaudy fruit. Or arriving from a long absence to hugs and happy calls of her name. Or newcoming making her place, learning to step over the floorboard just inside the doorway with the irritating creak. "I wish I knew what we were doing," Miriam says. I don't. Wish that is, or know for sure either. I'm content and excited to wait and see and listen. To one of us rising at some point, collecting her loose, light garment, going out for an hour or good. Moving between cooking and sleeping places. Going to nap or swim or to bike to town. Coming back with bread and cooking oil and chick peas and tampons and a new job. Possibly to make enough money for the next stretch of her trip. One or two of us bringing her child for a stay. In fact Hannah's daughter, now grown, has already become one of us in her own right by now.

Gathering and scattering in the pulse of our running, extended exchange, we can stretch out legs, sometimes massaging each others' cracked soles with a light possibly scented local oil, sometimes staying carefully polite and apart. Place us cross legged on the floor or on the rather unique kind of seats used in this faraway part of the world. Slicing and thinking around the kitchen table or raking and clipping and discussing in the yard. Cutting each other's hair with onionsmell singing from the pan with the improvised handle. Each sweeping up her own. Trying our best but not always able not to judge each other. Murmuring into the nights, peaking frequently into loud, shared laughing. Sometimes into anger and estrangement. On occasion stomach pits dropping into fear at mid-morning despite the lucid light.

We are here examining, each in her own way, her ability to move. Physically, geographically. Her chin or arm through air. Her steps across a floor or a continent. Her bike cross country. A car, not necessarily although preferably hers. To propel her self on her own of her own volition. So simple, so basic, so evasive. "Moving the body means life," says Nawal el Sa'adawi, whose account of jumping up and down in prison and moving her legs and arms every single morning there has taught me to exercise every day in my large third-floor bedroom. She is a doctor and a healer and a writer with a good working knowledge of life, and this part is on page 83 of her Memoirs from the Women's Prison, translated into English by Marilyn Booth and published by the Women's Press Limited in 1986. But every place is the women's prison. Free, uninflicted and unrestricted moving which by this sound knowledge is living, has been scaled down for women. Rationed. Limited not by oceans and mountains but minds, by the culture of our containment. We are meeting in this house in comparison. It is a talking house, made that is of and for our talking, which I am prompting and recording and retelling as faithfully as I can. Yours too if you want. To come in. Or at least as much to go out.

It won't confine us. It's walls are moving. Shifted like a pregnancy from secret inner places, imperceptibly growing tissue, life accommodating. Mapping us moving. Tortoise-shared, wherever we go it goes. And some of us have moved her self enormous distances, literally wandered the earth. Some of us intend to. Some of us intended to. Some of us won't or don't dare drive a car. She may still cover a lot of ground driven there by others though. One of us was actually doing the driving when it was her father who was taking her thousands of kilometers away.

This inviting talking house of ours may well be the one, or near the one, at Caux on the mountain above Montreux. The one, that is, that June kept for Count Bernard du Plessis van Maesdyck and his parents in 1957 and '58. She cleaned it and helped rebuild it and did the cooking and the washing between trips to Tunisia and southern Italy with Bernard, who finally took along a gun for self defense, when he made a second run to India in the camping van. All this was before she happened onto what was in the closet, which we will certainly have cleaned out and aired by now if this is the house we are gathering in, when June still thought she could bring her son and daughter there to live with her. She stopped planning on that after she'd seen what was in the closet. How could she bring her children into that? A typist, retired by the time we've started our talking, once a Shakespearean scholar and performer, delegate to the United Nations and the World Health Organization concerning the rights of mental patients, seventy-three when I first met her, a Quaker (lately non-Christian) since age twenty-nine, mother of four children of four fathers, living on her own in Geneva, June says, "I thought, but that's the house I've been drawing all these years. It's a three-hundred year old chalet which was sliding down the ravine and he rebuilt it when his Dutch family were trapped in the war in Holland there." She's referring to the second world war. And to the Count du Plessis van Maesdyck. "He was working on the house and getting food for his family because their income was blocked from Indonesia and so on. It was above Montreux. Montreux is near Lausanne, you know, in Switzerland, at the end of the lake. And I saw a slide of this house and since I was a tiny little girl and also in ... waiting for ... in telephone booths or something ... I always draw the same house on a certain hill with white flowers sticking up from the mountain and the sun coming. I sort of fiddle with that. Well this was exactly it. So I thought, `well my goodness, what's this?'

"This man was giving a showing of slides of Mount Athos and India. He brought these slides with him on the New Amsterdam boat because his father was head or director of the company. And he'd shown them on the boat and he'd been showing them all over the United States at universities and so on.

"I saw this marvelous slide of an Indian woman with her sari flowing back and the sunrise obviously just touching her. I turned around, looked at this man and he had the face of a ..." She didn't say of a what. And I admit I didn't make a point of asking. "What he needed desperately was someone to arrange for him to give the showing of his slides, 'cause he was living off of this really, while travelling in America. And someone had said that I could do this for him very helpfully you see. So I actually went to bed, wrote twenty-eight letters to people I knew at different universities and so on and he made a very good living in the West Coast of the United States like this." I understand her literally. That is, that bed was where she wrote the letters. I can picture the crumpled sheets and a growing pile of pages in a careful well formed script that she took care not to crumple before she folded them and addressed the envelops. It goes without saying, her saying I mean, that she didn't ask a percentage of this very good living she helped him make.

"I was by that time absolutely determined to get to India and China. To get to India to meet Ghandians and then since Richard Nixon wasn't doing much about it, I was going into China to make friends and influence people, you see. As an individual and eventually take my children. But I had to get there first, I hadn't a single penny. So I asked him when he was going next and he said, `Well, this winter.' I said, `Do you mind if I come with you?' He said, `Well that should be all right.' And my poor little daughter was in the car. And she said, 'But Mother, India's so far away!' And I said very soberly, I remember, I said, 'Well honey, you know I have to go to India. And anyway, I can always fly home in two days.'" As it turned out it took ten years. That is, to meet her daughter again. "She was ten years old." June says, "She knew all this Ghandi business and all, I mean she had to live through quite a lot of it.

"It's a very exciting thing," she's saying later, "Some of my grandchildren have got it too. The excitement of ... the feeling of responsibility. And it keeps us so involved and busy, you see, that there's no way you can get old or go through adolescence in a funny way or anything else. It's a very thrilling thing. It must be at least as thrilling as war, I should suppose, and it's in many cases as dangerous. I had the feeling that this was what I was meant to do, see." June's deep brief laugh is very slightly self-deprecating, apologetic. She is speaking English with a vaguely southern apparently Northern California accent. "Getting out to find the cause-now you'll really laugh-cause and cure of human violence. I really wanted to be with Ghandians and study non-violence as best I could. And then go on in and teach Shakespeare and whatnot in China. So I asked him if I could go and he said, `well all right.'"

This was soon after Divorce when she says, "Mother and Daddy were not paying my way back to university. I knew that I couldn't continue working in this ten cent store and the whole thing was too much for me. I sold everything I had. First of all I had somebody come in and look at what I had. Just furniture and my big radio and the car ... no, my husband had the car. We didn't even have a house anymore. We didn't ... I didn't really have anything. And when Mother saw how little this man was going to give me for all these things, after my daughter was supposed to choose what she wanted to keep, she said well she would buy it all. And believe it or not it was some incredible small sum and I had enough to pay for the boat going across and he said that living with his parents and with him I would more than earn my keep by taking care of the old people, doing the washing and all the rest of it. "She is talking very fast and getting a little hoarse. We stop and drink peach juice for one or two quiet minutes. She's sitting on the bed with her back against the wall. She needs to put her feet up for awhile-they tend to get swollen in the middle eastern heat. I'm in a wicker chair and the little tape recorder is between us near the edge of the bed.

"I left San Francisco and drove across the continent with him and got on the Holland-America line-New Amsterdam-he was up in first class and I was down in whatever class with two ladies in the same room. And I got over there," to the house at Caux, whose surrounding mountains were thickly populated, June explains, with princesses and dukes and earls, fled to Switzerland for the duration of the war, "and indeed started canning cherries and preparing the meals for his family, doing all kinds of things and was offered two excellent jobs in two very good schools there but I wanted to go to India." Which she never did.

"Women in the former British colonies of the West Indies often live out their lives in quasi-communal domestic units," says Lydia. So you can just as easily fit our house into the Eastern Caribbean islands she's writing about. None of us lives out her life here. Still, this house is clearly related to the women-owned homes on the islands, apparently known as `yards' or 'houseyards'. "The houseyard as a social institution is grounded in the slavery era." Lydia M. Pulsipher is saying in: `He Won't Let She Stretch She Foot': Gender relations in traditional West Indian houseyards. This is her contribution to a book called: Full Circles Geographies of women over the life course, which was edited by Cindi Katz and Janice Monk and published in 1993 by Routledge. Between page 107 and page 110 Lydia gives a description of, "the domestic spaces of slaves and freedmen," which were, "clusters of houses and outbuildings around central activity areas, interspersed with economic plants and animals and inhabited by people linked through kinship and friendship." And often, "two houses will be joined to create more interior space," and, "the yard will contain other structures such as detached kitchens, ovens, tool sheds, animal pens, work benches, showers, privies and laundry facilities; and the entire complex will be arrayed with a variety of useful plants: coconut and fruit trees, vegetables, ornamentals, medicinals."

Visitors at this house-all of us are, in fact-usually take our time to start finding the way around. I take my time to start piecing together a fairly coherent sense, not to say portrait, of whichever woman or women I'm talking to. Or to find out who's staying over at the moment. You can take your time too, to attach names to voices or life-stories or faces. Or to make out the maze of bags and knapsacks and beds, or to check out behind the shed whether someone finally fixed the rake. You might feel lost when you first come in or when you get back from an absence. It won't be like you left it. With all of us moving, it moves too-the house. Whenever it is you're arriving, some of us, inevitably, have already left. And might still be back, which remains to be seen, but in any case have usually left behind some stuff and echoes. And some-recently arrived-haven't had a chance to meet you yet. And those who have actually been here all the time, might not recognize you, not at first. Or you might not recognize them. Trying to place the women you're reading, you place yourself-in bewildering but somehow familiar surroundings. Realizing you're lost is how you realize you're moving. It's acceptable, your bewilderment, your bewilderness. You can accept it. At least for a while. Stay disoriented. You'll find it familiar too-the bewilderment and the house-structured in ingrained ways you'll find you know how to make sense of, almost instinctively. Take your time, you'll find bearings.

Build it, this house as a place made and administered by individual women. None of us come here as standard, officially acknowledged families, like the ones that lived in the houseyard of the Jewish-Yemenite family I married into at twenty-one. Still, in many ways ours could be a lot like that one was, before it got sold off bit by bit. Now torn down, it was just off the Tel-Aviv beach, between the cracking minaret of Hassan Beq Mosque and the sensual overload of the large Carmel Market. My mother-in-law, one of seven sisters and step sisters and one brother, had spent her young adulthood in the first of the five one-room wood structures built for married siblings and their families, around the two-story, two-roomed house owned and occupied by her mother and stepfather, who was the neighborhood iceman and summer watermelon vendor. A wooden chute along the side of the ground floor ice shed, used for sliding out the uncut blocks, served as clandestine slide for the toddler grandsons and maybe at least the boldest of the granddaughters. The married siblings and their children shared several outhouses between them as well as the dirt and tiled yard space which was sub-divided by rows of canned white-jasmine plants, mint, coriander and basil. Cooking with the last, called scent, was unthinkable. Sprigs of it were picked, kept on hand for hours and sniffed, especially by the elderly. The youngest of the children were baby-sat by their still unmarried aunts and older cousins, under Savta's supervision and the threat of punitive confinement in Saba's ice shed, while their mothers washed floors and toilets in richer houses and most of their fathers molded, loaded and laid bricks, outside of the houseyard.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from MAPS OF WOMEN'S GOINGS AND STAYINGSby RELA MAZALI Copyright © 2001 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Stanford Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2002
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0804732930
• ISBN 13: 9780804732932
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 382
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile