When we are naked, we are unwritten…
We only want to be written.
– Orlando White, Discourse
I cross cobbled streets, enthralled by street art, modern images adorning walls,
utility box covers, traffic signs, there for every passerby, uncontained by museums
and libraries. I begin a treasure hunt, seeking the women who wear a Superman S
on their bare chests, the ones who carry a blaze of red or black hair that escapes
gravity, flows upward toward the sky, the ones who show only the back of their heads,
the ones who look squarely to meet my gaze, each born from artists who hail from
these seven-hundred-year-old streets, whose hands are free to hold paint brush
or thread, palette or rolling pin, scraper or manuscript, clay or caliper. Part commentary,
part dare, they ask us to look right now at our sisters, daughters, mothers, who art
and history ignore. To awaken from the trance of unseeing, to write them into existence.
Geocaching for the modern women, I become hunter. What we cannot touch is illusory:
the past, the moon, the striving, the story I piece together of the unsculpted,
unpainted, untold, the ordinary and female, whose hands, minds, yearning numbed,
palms kneaded grains into coarse bread, calloused fingers stitched thick linen, wove
bedding, the bakers, brewers, barmaids, milkmaids, field workers, wet nurses, mothers,
daughters, their bodies producing, tending, growing, raising, razed by relentless demand,
clothing inadequate to protect from elements, a chemise safeguarding outerwear
from her sweat and body oil but not from coverture, control of body and mind granted
to fathers or husbands, she presumed to possess delicate docility and wits dimmed by nature,
possessing nothing. Barred from decisions, books, guilds, her poetry murmured
under her breath, her sculptures rose from grainy dough, her songs washed into the Arno,
her yearnings unnoticed as those of cats and dogs, animals in the pen.
Language confounds every story I write. When words meet page so much is lost,
misconstrued, misremembered, misappropriated. Yet we must try, mustn’t we?
We will stop hunting down women for any reason, right?
so powerful!
thank you!