Old Writing/process work

An open letter to my Mother:                                                                                                  10-11-08

Dear Mama,

I’ve been reading this zine “On the Road to Healing: A Booklet for Men Against Sexism”, as I do with all of the zines that I receive before submitting them to the zine library.  The zine contains a number of articles, creative writing pieces, and testimonials from men confronting their sexism, and there is a transcript of a conversation had between three men who are engaged in a self-reflexive re-education process for themselves and other men who are involved in the struggle against hierarchy based on socialized gender particularly within the “punk” or “anarchist” community.  One of these men has a moment where he’s very earnestly describing his feelings of remorse for his behavior towards his mother and his sister while he was growing up, continuously challenging their feelings with a logical argument, and generally de-valuing the voice of his mother because it wasn’t a male voice.  

It made me think of how critical I used to be of your part in our arguments, and how I always used to try to take on a male voice to defy you and defeat you, to argue my way out of something that made me adolescently indignant; like not getting to go to Toquet Hall with my friends late at night, when I hadn’t been to school that day or had arrived late or hadn’t done my homework in a week.   It wasn’t the content of the verbal altercations we got into that was unusual, I think it was typical adolescent fare, but it was the way in which I engaged with you that seems rather grotesque to me now in hindsight.  I guess that I was intuitively aware of how little power feminine discourse has in the political sphere, so within the private sphere I tried to replicate masculine discourse (on my end) to manipulate the outcome of our arguments, using the tools that I saw being advantageously used by male students and teachers against me in the classroom.  I’m so sorry for bringing the oppressive language of the patriarchy home, and acting as an adversary instead of an ally!

When that didn’t work, I would switch up my tactics, trying to appeal to you using the whiny circumstance of “exploration” and my “lack of social life” using language I knew we had in common.  I was a female chauvinist pig! Fuck!

And it wasn’t always my perceived lack of confidence in your speech or your approach with arguing me that I would take issue with and decide to despise, but I also used to make fun of a phenomenon that you exhibited symptoms of, and that I now notice in myself as well, that we can trace back to grandpa Max, and of course, foreign language acquisition.   Dogberryism.  Malapropisms.  Malapropisms are extremely endearing (and a sign of an active and creative mind) if you’re feeling tender, they are a good jabbing point if you’re not.  How hypocritical of me to jab.  I’m so sorry!

Love you very very much, Lily Sage