Notes Towards an Androgynous Theatre
Notes Towards an Androgynous Theatre
(This was one of my very first publications. I came across it going through some trunks in the basement, and I thought, it actually still stands up!)
First published in Fireweed, A Feminist Quarterly
Summer, 1980
So far, all political theatre has made one of two appeals to its audiences:
- Stop feeling, think! (Brecht et al.)
- Stop thinking, feel! (Living Theatre, et al.)
One day, in Grade Seven, I came home from school and there was nobody home. There wasn’t anything particularly unusual about that. I got something to eat from the fridge, and then went into the bathroom, lost in my thoughts. I was in the middle of peeing when I cam to and saw my mother’s bloodstained nightgown in the bathtub.
Someone, I don’t know who, had thought to soak that nightgown. You can’t get bloodstains out otherwise. No one thought to tell me that something had happened to my mother.
The next time I saw her head was covered with soft baby’s hair, where it had grown back. She didn’t recognize me. She was talking a lot, but none of it made sense. I thought I heard her say she wished they had let her die.
It was a stroke. An artery had burst in her brain. She had been thinking about going back to school and getting into medical school. When she had gone to university as a young woman, before she met my father, and against the wishes of her father, she had majored in philosophy. She got perfect scores on all her logic exams. Instead, she raised three children.
My father told me she was the first person in Vancouver to have “polar bear” surgery, which saved her life. In this type of surgery, the patient’s body temperature is lowered to near freezing. This slows down the metabolism and allows the surgeons to operate on her brain. He told me these details with the same enthusiasm he had—has—for all scientific discoveries.
A friend of my mother’s came and cooked for us while we learned about my mother’s new, bizarre, brain-damaged behaviour. This woman came up to me and put her arms around me. I wanted to be comforted, but I could smell her perspiration. I broke away, went up to my room. I wanted none of the world of women, that terrible conspiracy of tears and intimacy, of blood and nylon nightgowns, of the sickening sweet smell of hand creams and lotions covering up the humiliating smells of the body.
Surely it was better to be part of a world which found the idea of eight hours of surgery in ice water an interesting prospect from the point of view of science?
For a long, long time after that I was unable to make any conscious choices.
I am almost always lopsided, always renouncing one side or the other. “Female” language is so undisciplined, so irritatingly vague? Give me the precision of definitions, the elegance of science. “Male” language is so arid, so hard-edged, obdurate, obscurantist! Give me the warmth of ambiguities, the fecundity of a profligate nature, blood gushing out in a rush of words.
I go back and forth, around and around…
Schuster is four months pregnant, and she was walking up and down her living room holding my four-month-old daughter. She was telling me about the four-year-old son of friends of theirs who is a kind of geographical prodigy. He knows the names of dozens of countries in the world, their capital cities and their principal rivers. He knows the names of the three African countries bordering Lake Victoria.
He prefers atlases to nursery books. On a map of Canada Schuster showed him he pointed to the area marked “N.W.T.” and said, that’s the Yukon. No, she said, it’s the Northwest Territories. It’s a misprint, he said. And he was right.
All the way to Toronto on the train, he studied the atlas and learned as many facts as he could about the city. He could not be persuaded by his parents to look out the window.
Each time Schuster walked past me I looked at the baby and secretly reveled in the sight of the four dear dimples on the back of each of her little hands.
And I was thinking, there are no words to describe childbirth. Reality crashing through the plate glass window of language.
I love the winter light the best; it gives such subtle beauty to the bare trees. Through the window I watch the white afternoon sky outline a tangle of brown branches, nature’s random patterns, all the delicate lines confused but connected.
Like fish we swim though our lives. Something catches our flesh, we see we are not free. We flop on the shore, and we discover a language which describes our experience, a language we believe will make us free. Marxism, Feminism. The ruling class. The profit motive. Male chauvinism. The hook is still in our side, but the pain is anaesthetized by the instruments of theory. The anaesethetic becomes addictive. Meanwhile, here we are high and dry on the shore; we can’t get back to the sea. We have trouble talking to the fish that are still in there. Why should they envy us? The air is clear here, sure enough. But it is so very hard to breathe.
When my baby was born, I stepped into the great eternal river of mothers and daughter. I think so often, these days, of my mother, Dorothy, and her mother, Caroline. Ivana, Robin, Dorothy, Caroline: each so different, each so alike. I must ask my mother what her grandmother’s name was. I wonder – what was given, what denied? What was given, what denied.
If you read the original Marx-Engels-Lenin texts, they are full of love and anger. The original passion of the science of socialism in its infancy as been reduced to a set of empty formulations, and male-defined polemics, a hollow language. No heart, no sexuality—and therefore, no mind.
That phrase we loved so much, that we always summoned with such conviction, to make the whole world rich with sense, that was father to me, and faith; and more than faith, knowledge; and more than knowledge, liberation: THE SCIENCE OF SOCIALISM!
Faded and tattered scraps on the side of the road. A gleam in the sun here or there—but it’s only a bit of gold or silver chocolate bar wrapper or cigarette box foil. If once this language was a whole cloth tightly woven, colours true, bright—that is no more.
It’s an unavoidable fact. There must have been a time when she held me and cared for me and loved me, watched me sleeping with the same tenderness I feel now for my own sweet child.
Once I studied masks in a clown workshop. At first our false masks, our prepared faces, were loosened. For a while I could see the social face projected on other people’s faces, hanging in front of their real face, sometimes just the real eyes flashing through. But as the exercises turned us inward, this face evaporated. We were naked. This was called neutral mask. Then began the exploration, the search, the inner journey. Masks became revelations, externalizations of that which was hidden, of the soul, of whatever you call that essence which is the uniqueness of each and every person.
How beautiful and fabulous was that array of shapes and colours!
That’s just how it is with language. Either it drops a curtain between me and the world, or it draws the curtain back. It can conceal or reveal, like or tell the truth. The truth is only this: what we didn’t know before.
It doesn’t matter what others see when they look at me. It only matters what I see when I look at the world. When that becomes practice as well as theory, then all the arias and all the colours of the rainbow will be mind for the asking.
Do I really care about politics at all any more? Have I, as some no doubt are saying, sold out? Am I really an artist? Real artists seem to worry about death a lot. Make art to protest against mortality. I’m not particularly obsessed with death. At least, not with the death of the body. But I am haunted by spiritual death, by thwarted creativity, by atrophied potential, mine and others, by those limitations which are the produce of poverty, class society, racism, sexism. I write to defy the death-in-life that walks beside exploitation and oppression.
Some days I am just so full of music I could – Sing?
Because she was denied the need to be rational, scientific, logical, her brain exploded. Because he denied himself the need to be emotional, his heart atrophied.
I can say: Sexist, class-divided capitalism damages all of us. Or I can say: There is blood on the moon. And neither will give the whole picture. I want to find images that will be charged with meaning and sentiment, that will ask a question and elicit a feeling at the same time. The language of art and the language of politics are insufficient without one another. They must both be subsumed in the charged image, the image that appeal to the thoughts and emotions, to the whole person, not to the lopsidedness.
When I was five, I went on a trip to the States with my parents. We stayed in a hotel with elevators, red carpets in the hall and a cute elevator boy I flirted with. They couldn’t find a babysitter one night (how well I know the feeling now), so they just decided to take me with them, out drinking and dancing. How I loved that! I sat on a big soft black leather chair and watched them move onto the dance floor, flowing through the music and the sounds of glasses and laughter and the coloured lights. Then I couldn’t see them—I was lost! They had left me! Something was happening on the dance floor, and I couldn’t see what it was. Everyone started moving off the floor, standing around the edges, watching. Then I saw, in the middle, dancing alone to the orchestra, my mother and father. They danced so beautifully together, all the other dancers had moved away to give them centre stage. A vision of grace, of movement. And I sat there, feeling I might just die with the beauty and joy of it. The music swooped and flew and circled, then slowly drifted down and into a suspended moment of silence as the dancers grew still. Then everyone in the whole nightclub broke into applause, dancers and drinkers alike. The members of the orchestra put down their instruments and clapped for my parents.
Now that was theatre.