says, in
a sparsely populated, rural portion of the world, in an economically poor and
spiritually depressed late 1950s New Mexico desert town near the hellish border of West
Texas. (Another Mother Tongue 4)
Her college years as one of a group of lesbians included looking out for herself and
her friends in a "wasteland of human relationships and social rigidity."
Typically, Grahn relates this mutual protection system to women as an underclass:
We stood watch for each other as lovers do in jail. We admired each other’s (forbidden
to women) courage. We knew about cunnilingus, though only the boldest among us practiced
it. We knew about the Mound of Venus. We knew about tribadism and about butch and femme.
We admired each other’s (forbidden to women) sexual appetites. We knew that Gay was our
generic name, that people who were not Gay were "straight" and that many of them
called us "queer" with unfathomable hatred and fear. . . . (5)
The ideological violence Grahn underwent extended, of course, far beyond the confines
of small town and college life. The following passage from Another Mother Tongue (1984),
her history of gay culture, describes her despair after her "less-than-honorable
discharge" from the Air Force for lesbianism:
Discharged into a poor area of Washington, D.C., with $80 and utter demoralization, I
worked as a bar maid serving hard liquor to dying winos. I did not believe there was any
farther to go on the bottom of society than where I was. But as I found the company of
other Gay ex-service people who also had the state fall on their heads, living in an area
mixed with people at the bottom of Washington’s perpetual ghetto of Blacks and whites and
a scattering of Asians, I found that despair has no bottom; it can multiply itself
indefinitely, inside the mind and outside. (169)
Grahn’ s link with the "perpetual ghetto" of underground urban life is a
salient feature of her work. Her 1987 The Queen of Swords draws on her experience
as a barmaid. In the epic poem, Grahn transforms the experience into a myth of rebirth,
basing the revision on a 5,000 year-old Sumerian story. In the Sumerian myth, Inanna,
queen of heaven and earth, descends to the underworld to strengthen her powers. Grahn’s
version renames Inanna as Helen, the archetypal figure of beauty, and sets the scene of
her symbolic death and rebirth in a lesbian bar. In this modern underworld Helen confronts
Ereshkigal, the bar owner and "queen" of the underworld scene.
As her description of life as a barmaid in the "poor area of Washington,
D.C." indicates, the urban underclass included the Black population. The poet was
involved politically with the early movement of Blacks for their civil rights, and her
continued commitment has been evident throughout her career. According to Grahn in The
Highest Apple, Audre Lorde has been an influence in her work since 1971. In 1976
Olivia Records produced Where Would I Be Without You: The Poetry of Pat Parker
and Judy Grahn (Another Mother Tongue 191). Published a year later, Grahn’s
collection, Confrontations With the Devil in the Form of Love, was inspired
by Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The
Rainbow is Enuf.
Grahn knew the violence that prejudice does to the psyche and was familiar also with
actual physical violence based on hatred of her Butch appearance.
[. . . .]
Grahn’s concern for women is not a theoretical "feminine" and she does not
use the term feminine often in her work. As a metaphor, her "overlapping
islands" is more theoretical than her pragmatic approach to art and her
positive-image approach to feminine absence. Like Cesar’s "ship in space, "
Grahn’s "overlapping islands" represent the paradoxical combination of feminine
masquerade and "phallic" integrity that is the lacquered surface. The idea is
demonstrable by visualizing the overlapping islands as Lingis’ "continuity of
convexities and concavities" and of Irigaray’s constantly touching lips.
[. . . .]
[T]he occupants of Grahn’s overlapping island(s) are not subjected to the reflection of
themselves as the exterior and mad. "other."
[. . . .]
Speaking of her youthful butch orientation Grahn says what many lesbians and lesbian
theorists have continually reiterated:
[O]ur point was not to be men; our point was to be butch and get away with it. We
always kept something back: a high-pitched voice, a slant of the head, or a limpness of
hand gestures, something that was clearly labeled female. I believe our statement was
"Here is another way of being a woman," not "Here is a woman trying to be
taken for a man." (Another Mother Tongue 31)
Further, in her introduction to Confrontations with the Devil in the Form of Love
Grahn pointedly connects the graphics of The Work of a Common Woman with her
writing as an exchanged look between women. She says,
The graphics throughout this book are by two women [Karen Sjoholm and Wendy Cadden]
whose primary concern has also been in reshaping the images we have of women, what our
strengths are, when seen through our own eyes. (134) (emphasis added)
Grahn’ s view of women through "our own eyes" presumes and creates likeness,
doubleness, and assimilation. Given these, the non-linear features of her writing are
significant. Grahn’s work must be considered aslant (at least) of heterosexual dichotomies
and preconceived sotry lines. Her symbolic mastery, that is, her razor-sharp wit and pen,
allow her to cross . . . into unbordered, queer regions unknown to the single-minded.
[. . . .]
Grahn’ s courageous "factual" language mimicking the violence endemic to the
underclass is an ongoing tradition in the United States among contemporary lesbian
writers.
From her "phallic" stance as a lesbian, separatist, and feminist, Grahn
enters the queer feminine realm by theorizing a commonality with all women. From this
position Grahn enables the reader’s "entranced response to the monster" (Case
10) by creating a "lesbian relationship between self and other" (Zimmerman,
"Lesbians Like This and That" 4).
from Maciunas, Billie. "Crossing Boundaries–Lesbian as Metaphor/Lesbian Poetry in
Brazil and the United States." Diss. U of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1995.
Copyright ? 1995 by Billie Maciunas.
John Philip Chapin
Part of what I’ve done in this chapter is to argue that Judy Grahn’s writing uses
language in new ways to alter our possibilities for conceiving of the world. Her tools are
part of a system of language that at present embodies detrimental social, cultural, and
political relations; while recognizing language’s complicity in oppression, she suggests
that it can be used differently to provoke a rethinking and a reunderstanding of these
social relations. For Grahn, as for other contemporary feminist and lesbian feminist
poets, changing the language changes reality. In this appendix, I’d like to address some
of the lesbian-feminist and poststructuralist theoretical work that underlies Grahn’s
political project.
Grahn in/as Context
Judy Grahn’s work with language to transform our understanding accords with a broader
context of feminist and lesbian feminist movements that seek to challenge social and
cultural reality, to redefine power relations to accommodate and value women. Some lesbian
feminist writers try to reach beyond the "fundamental oppressiveness" inherent
in our patriarchally structured world: Mary Carruthers argues that writers such as
Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Judy Grahn, and Olga Broumas create poetry that
does not arise directly from nor concern itself primarily with a response to men. Its
energy springs rather from the perception that women together and in themselves have a
power which is transformative, but that in order to recover their power women need to move
psychically and through metaphor to a place beyond the well-traveled routes of patriarchy
and all its institutions, especially its linguistic and rhetorical ones (Carruthers 294).
By examining themselves in relation to men, many women trap themselves within a
binaristic linguistic structure, ultimately perpetuating the potential for oppression.
When man/woman or heterosexual/homosexual or rich/poor remain the only ways to describe
people, the dominant culture retains powerful means for regulating reality and insuring
power relations that are fundamentally the same. Within this system, marginalized people
can only hope for what Elizabeth Meese calls a "reversal where relations of power are
exchanged;" this exchange is only valuable for "the lesbian whose personal stake/investment
rests in the domination of men, and not particularly in the liberation of ‘women’ and
‘men"’ (Meese 6). Meese implicitly aligns herself with Grahn and other lesbian
feminist writers in her attempt to write beyond the dominant mode of discourse, to change
the universal and not merely the personal. She locates her work in relation to that of,
among others, Monique Wittig and Jacques Derrida; Derrida describes transformational
language as being beyond grammar, as "a choreographic text with polysexual
signatures," pluralized labels and meanings that expand linguistic categories beyond
difference (understood both sexually and as "otherness" in general) to encompass
a continuum of meaning (Meese 11/Derrida "Choreographies" 76). Derrida
would argue, I think, that much of the language in literature and poetry throughout
history has been "transformative"—he describes literature elsewhere as
"an institution that tends to overflow the institution" ("This
Strange" 36), implying that literature is by definition pluralizing. But here he
seems to be concerned with the relationship between language and sexuality; as I’ve argued
above, Grahn’s vision is overtly polysexual (see the discussion of Ernesta’s future at the
end of the novel), and she implies that it is her language that makes this vision
possible. Grahn is engaged, like Meese and Derrida, in pluralizing language, in disrupting
its stability in order to open it up to unlimited possibilities for understanding.
Derrida, again quoted by Meese, envisions the possibilities of nondiscriminating language
in terms of sexuality:
. . . what if we were to approach here . . . the area of a relationship to the other
where the code of sexual marks would no longer be discriminating? The relationship would
not be a-sexual, far from it, but would be sexual otherwise: beyond the binary difference
that governs the decorum of all codes, beyond the opposition feminine/masculine, beyond
bi-sexuality a