* Losing Language, Losing Knowledge

By: Susan Hawthorne

PICTURE: Goddess of Smiss, Gotland. Image taken from the wonderful Suppressed Histories Archives Facebook page.

•

This talk was prepared for a session at the 2011 Brisbane Writers Festival. It forms the basis of what I talked about in that session.

Session description: Of the 7,000 languages in the world today, 50% are likely to disappear in our lifetime. Preserving and appreciating cultural and linguistic diversity is among the central challenges of our times.

The river sings, bubbling

words into speech

from speech comes lyric poetry

sung by young women

in the service of Sappho

sister to Saraswati

who wrote her world

into existence, memory

inscribed on stone, on palm leaf

and she carried fire

underwater, underground

where she flows invisibly

more sacred than the things

that can be seen

lapis -> halapis -> salapis ->sarapis ->

sarapphis -> sarappha -> sappha  -> psappha

sarappha -> sarapfa -> sarapva -> sarapwa ->

sarahapwa-> saraswa -> saraswati -> savoir (The Butterfly Effect p. 171)

I wrote this poem after hearing about the River Sarasvati, a mythical underground river in India that is known by the name of the goddess of language. It seems an apt metaphor for the loss of language and the loss of memory which surrounds us. In this poem, I have imagined a connection between the precious stone lapis, the lyric poems of Sappho, the goddess of knowledge and language, Sarasvati and the French word for knowledge, savoir.

One of the elements rarely discussed when there is public speech about languages is the role that women play in language acquisition and maintenance. While there are exceptions, by and large it is women who are the first teachers of language. They sing, they burble with their babies, they interact with toddlers with encouragement and as they get older by correcting or by displaying correct usage.

In recent years there has been a greater recognition of women as the social glue, as the keepers of knowledge, as the maintainers of traditions. In Indigenous societies this is often accompanied by knowledge of plants and medicinal usage, in ‘modern’ societies it is the passing down of family histories, of stories that span several generations, of songs sung by grandmothers, aunts and mothers.

In spite of this reluctant recognition, there is little public acclamation. In part this is due to our economic system which simply does not recognise work done in the domestic sphere (compare the budgets of home remedies with medicine; of history with genealogy; of classical music with traditional songs).

In 1969, I enrolled in a PhD in Philosophy on the structure of belief systems in ancient societies. Unfortunately, I only lasted a year mostly due to my inability to explain what it was I wanted to write. This project, however, took me to studying Ancient Greek and by a rather circuitous route almost 30 years later, to studying Sanskrit. While I did not go on to complete the research, it has nevertheless informed much of what I have done since (so instead of one PhD, I have a novel, a very different PhD in Political Science and several collections of poetry).

In my novel, The Falling Woman, I wrote:

Each carries within her the seed of future generations, and in her mind the seed of future actions, future realities, dreams that will burst into flower. The germination of a thought may mean the creation of a whole new world, or the loss of an old one.

Each is a creatrix in her own right. (The Falling Woman p. 64)

This novel takes the reader on a journey to the centre: an external geographical centre as well as an internal centre, exploring the mythic in the everyday.

In Sanskrit there is the word Prakṛti. It combines all the following: MW 654.1: in mythology Prakṛtī is a goddess; the original producer of the material world; in grammar it is the elementary form of the word: the root. It also means cause, original source, nature, model, matter, matrix, seed.

And in keeping with the connection between matter, matrix, mother, German Mutter, and perhaps mutter and mud in English and German, Prākṛt means low, vulgar, unrefined, original and any provincial or vernacular dialect cognate with Sanskrit. Prākṛt is the language spoken by women and ‘inferior characters’.

If, as linguist and novelist, Suzette Haden Elgin argues, language structures the way we see the world, it is likely that the speakers of Sanskrit (men of the upper caste, Brahmins) and speakers of Prākṛt (women and lower castes) saw the world rather differently. Interestingly, while Prākṛt has to do with creation and matter, Sanskrit (from the word saṃskṛta) is constructed, perfected, highly ornamented, finished, cooked, refined. Looks like the women are in the linguistic kitchen!

In her novel, Native Tongue, Suzette Haden Elgin creates a non-patriarchal language in which the experiences of women are reflected in language. Here is one of her words:

radíidin: non-holiday, a time allegedly a holiday but actually so much a burden because of the work and preparations that it is a dreaded occasion; especially when there are too many guests and none of them help. [think Christmas]

With my latest book Cow, I wanted to enter the mythic zone and the best way for me to do so was to write from the perspective of an animal, as so many mythic stories are. I have a character Queenie: she is a woman, she is a cow. Like Prakṛti, she creates the world, think of the Milky Way, she carries language and knowledge in her dilly bag (the word queen in English comes from Sanskrit gau, to Greek gune, to Norse kvinna, to English queen). I chose Queenie and cows as my vehicle for this book because the cow is the default among bovines, on the one hand she is worshipped, on the other she is meat, she is a herbivore and brings much to the community. In many societies the cow holds a special place (she may be a bovine, a whale, a dugong, a camel or an elephant). She produces milk, which is magically transformed into curd or butter or cheese; she produces dung for building, making fires or improving soil quality, her hide is used for garments or shelter. It’s not surprising that rock art in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa and North America includes many images of cows.

Teachers of Sanskrit tell you that learning language is like the four feet of the cow: the first is the teacher, the second foot is the student; the third are fellow students, and the fourth is time. So whether it is Sanskrit or Prākrit, Gaelic or English, Djiru or Yaggera the learning of language is what makes it possible for us to live in social units.

 

what the linguist says about Queenie

she was dancing over India

and out fell the languages

thousands of them written

in hundreds of alphabets

a dancer and linguist

Queenie steps out the letters

in the sands of Phoenicia

aleph alpha alif ox and cow

travelling east and west

her hooves have split

the letters morph through

Tocharian and Gandhari

Prakrit Sanskrit Tamil and Pali

there are many trade routes

many tales in the passage

of these letters finding the

edge of sound and shape

she traces vowels in the cave

of her mouth the consonants

travel from larynx to lips

she teaches them the sound of the universe (Cow, p. 79)

 

(The letters Hebrew aleph, Greek alpha and Arabic alif are all derived from the Phoenician word for ox or cow.)

And if we ignore the speakers of other languages, or half the speakers of the dominant language, we are losing a great deal. Linguistic and cultural diversity are as important as biodiversity. We know that when biodiversity is reduced an ecosystem goes out of balance. Likewise, linguistic and cultural diversity are essential in maintaining the knowledge of many generations of peoples. Sadly, in a period in Europe referred to as the Renaissance, millions of women died, burnt at the stake as witches. These women carried the old knowledge, particularly targeted were those who understood the medicinal use of plants, or who carried on old traditions of rituals that had become a threat to the church. It shares a great deal with colonisation which involves rooting out language use, disconnecting people from their land and the seasonal round of responsibilities.

It is heartening to hear how learning language through song is a useful way of learning one’s culture as Borooloola descendant, Shellie Morris recently discovered working in her grandmother’s language with Borooloola songwoman Amy Friday (Andrew Bock, New chapter for ancient songbook, Age, 29 August)

In the globalised world of the 21^st century it involves microcolonialism in the form of the Human Genome Diversity Project, or the bioprospecting (really biopiracy) of plants and Indigenous knowledge. I see it in my own community of far north Queensland where attempts have been made to recolonise the rainforest and use the cassowary as an excuse for that. We need a world in which multiversity (knowledge that draws on diverse cultures) is respected in which so-called development is not used as yet another means of displacing people from their homes, from the places where they have lived for many generations.

I argue in my book, Wild Politics, for a society in which we have, as Murri thinker and artist Lilla Watson said back in 1984, a 40,000-year plan. She said that for Aboriginal people the future extends as far forward as the past and that means at least a 40,000-year plan.

If we are to take on this idea seriously, and I believe we must, then we need all kinds of layers of sustainability:

•          we need a world inspired by biodiversity not profit – therefore a no-growth economy, or as Wade puts it in his book: instead of economic models that are projections and arrows, they should be circles (Wayfinders p. 217)

•          in order for this to happen, languages must not only survive but thrive (and I do not mean that the languages should then be colonised and prospected for answers)

•          in order for languages to thrive, cultural knowledge – what Queenie carries around in her dilly bag – needs to be respected. The multilayered world of poetry with its cross resonances and metaphors and conceptual forms is based on linguistic knowledge and understanding of the world from inside the culture

•          along with poetry comes the mythic world, the world of ritual, dance, music, art and memory

•          with memory comes understanding of the ecology of place, of sustainable living in an environment

•          for those who can’t trust their memories, we need bibliodiversity, books that are to publishing what biodiversity is to ecology; we need the stories of those who have not been heard; that means feminists, Indigenous people, any group who has been outcast

•          we need an alternative to a world which is corporatised, homogenised and privatised

•          we need a world in which women are not subjected to pornography, prostitution and violence (the poorest of the world’s poor are women and poor – including Indigenous – women are the most likely to suffer these shameful exploitations). If the body is an ecology then none of them is ecologically sound

•          our public voices need to be heard: listen to what the women have to say, listen to the unheard or those who have been prevented from speaking their language, their world, but beware the pretenders

•          we are living in a world on the brink of environmental catastrophe

In 2006, I sat through Category-5 Cyclone Larry and again this year through Category-5 Cyclone Yasi. Previously, cyclones of this size have been around 20 years apart. I wrote this poem after finding the word yugantameghaha in the dictionary: meghaha means clouds, anta: the end and yuga: an epoch: a gathering of clouds at the end of an epoch, and there is a reference in here to the moth in the Bhagavad Gita which flies into the flame.

 

Yugantameghaha

At the end of every cosmic cycle

at the end of a generation―yuganta-

meghaha―clouds congregate

gathering souls for the next yuga

cloud breath, soul mist

rasping winds, rattling bones

here come the galloping horses

humans astride their flanks

here come the thundering clouds

breaking the world apart

the Hercules moth climbs every building

rising upwards through 110 floors

scaling the earth to find the moon

that light in the sky through which

he might escape earth’s pull

and melt into the inferno of light. (p. 67 Earth’s Breath)

 

As I said at the beginning, for the last 30 years, I have been looking for ways to tell the story of the power of ancient knowledge systems. It has taken me to languages and to places I never imagined I would go to. Much of it lies right here, in knowledge of our selves, in our knowledge of the people and places who give us meaning.

* Prompted to post this, thanks to an extraordinary July 2012 National Geographic piece entitled 'Vanishing Languages', by Russ Rymer that expands on the question "What is lost when a language goes silent?"

Writer-performer Merlinda Bobis catches up with Filipino-Canadian artists.
Photo by Christine Balmes

It is magic when the river flows: when it springs from some startling depth or height that, by chance, you’ve tapped into; when it surges into the imaginary, which turns tidal through your flesh and bones; when it sneaks into other bodies to form new tributaries of kinship, in lived stories.

This is how I experienced my recent performance of River, River, my one-woman play adaptation of Fish-Hair Woman, at the University of Toronto’s international workshop on ‘Violence in a Far Country: Women Scholars of Colour Theorize Terror’ (18-19 May 2012). I have done performances of this play at various venues, but this show was special. Jet-lagged and all, I gave my paper in the morning and, in the afternoon, rehearsed in the theatre for the first time. Mapped out light and sound with the Romanian-Canadian technical director Teo and the stage manager Mandy, whose family hails from Trinidad. Both amazing, given such a tight schedule. Then a very quick rehearsal. We did all these in less than three hours. By 5:00 pm, the show was on! The tightest schedule that I’ve ever experienced. I was terrified I wouldn’t be able to deliver. But magic: the river flowed.

I am primarily a writer-performer. While I venture into scholarly discussions on creative production, I have doubts about calling myself ‘a scholar’. Thus, the impressive line-up of scholars and the spectacular theorising in the workshop awed and intimidated me. I gave a paper (‘“Weeping is Singing”: After Militarism’) on the politics, aesthetics, and ethics of the production of both the play and the novel. But I always felt that my ‘real paper’ is the show (and the novel): the body makes its own argument. And as it enacts the horrors of war and its consequent mourning, this ‘argumentative body’ is always desiring, affirmative. Affirming itself, the dead, and the living bodies in the audience also affirming this story from a far country, and ‘weeping-singing’ with me.

The river flowed in our remembering together: my story was completed because others listened. We made new water tributaries, new wellsprings of story together. Indeed storytelling is not lonely.

And the flow does not stop; there are ripples. The overwhelmingly moving responses of the audience after the show, including the wonderful thank-you emails that I received now that I’m back in Australia remind me this is why I tell a story with the body. As one of the scholars wrote, the powerful performance brought them ‘to a different integrity space’. And humbly, I respond: I simply brought you to the river.

 

 

By: Susan Hawthorne

Let's be up front about the title of this piece. You get to decide whether I am whinging or making justifiable arguments about discrimination. You get to decide if highlighting silence, indifference or sidelining is reasonable to discuss in public. Some of you will already have decided that I am a whinger. I hope some will applaud the attempt to make known what usually is not spoken about.

Spinifex Press is a feminist press, that means that we have specialist knowledge about the international women's movement, the histories of women in many places, that we have opinions and have carried out research on subjects where the experiences of women have important social, political and even creative ramifications.

Feminism is a huge subject area and feminist writers and thinkers have much to say about this area. Feminist thinking can be applied to almost any area of knowledge. From time to time the media decides to run some kind of commentary on feminism. They ask this social commentator or that political commentator for their views. You would think that we would be rushed off our feet answering such questions from the media about what is important to half the world. But we are not. In fact, the media almost never talks to us or to the many authors published by Spinifex about the subject of feminism. In recent years a number of writers festivals have had panels to discuss whether feminism is still relevant (the wrong question in my view). Again, you would expect that Spinifex Press would be an important place to source writers who are well versed in discussing feminism. So far, we have never been asked to suggest a writer to speak on such a panel in spite of the fact that we publish more feminists per square inch than any other Australian publisher. Occasionally our international writers are invited to participate, but Australian feminists like Diane Bell, Sheila Jeffreys, Bronwyn Winter or Betty McLellan are not on the festival circuit. Let alone Renate Klein or myself.

In the last couple of years a group of brave women writers have come forward to highlight the asymmetry of awards given to women writers. Out of that has come much discussion about the Stella Prize. There have been fruitful discussions about the poor levels of reviewing of books by women, and it is having some effect on the level of awareness in the media of these issues. You would think, given our specialty, that the media would ask Spinifex Press whether these statistics were reflected in our experience of publishing women writers over the last 21 years. To date, we have not been asked that question, we have not been asked for our opinion in an area in which we have obvious expertise. This is so even though we participate in blogs, online discussions, Facebook and twitter commentary.

The issue of gay marriage has become mainstream in the last twelve months. Spinifex Press probably publishes more lesbian writers than any other publishing house in Australia. You would think that the media who are often caught short-footed in this area would come knocking to ask for comments from some of our out writers (many writers in the mainstream as well as those published by presses like ours still keep the lid on their sexuality to avoid being pigeon holed). To date, no festival organiser or journalist has asked us this question.

Ecofeminism is an area in which Spinifex has considerable expertise. What is often forgotten is that like human rights, women have always been at the forefront of discussions on ecology. Think of Rachel Carson, Donella Meadows, Maria Mies, Helen Caldicott, Vandana Shiva. Feminism and ecology go together. However, there remains great ignorance among many in the media who want to keep feminism out of ecology. But ecology would not exist as a discipline without feminist thinkers.

In a multicultural society like Australia you would expect there to be commentary on women's experience. And if you thought about a feminist perspective on these issues, you would find plenty of expertise at Spinifex from writers with diverse backgrounds. You would find Indigenous writers, writers from Asia, Africa, the Middle East and many other places. For commentary on the political changes taking place in the Arab world, you would find several of our anthologies packed with information as well as books by writers like Nawal el Saadawi and Evelyne Accad.

We, of course, wish that the issue of violence against women would go away. But it continues to grab headlines. The increasing sexualisation of girls and women has garnered a lot of comment; sexual slavery, prostitution, pornography and rape of women in war as well as violence against women in the home are regular subjects in the media. Spinifex has been responsible for a significant number of books in this area and we have dozens of authors who could make comment, could speak at conferences and festivals and yet few are ever asked to do so, or when they are, they are frequently expected to be targets of hostile interlocutors. It is unusual that a group who is subjected to violence should also be expected to be apologists for the perpetrators of that violence, but women who speak out against men's violence against women are frequently expected to defend men. The vilification of women should be as important as the vilification of people based on race, ethnicity, religion, class or caste, sexuality, disability or any other form of oppression. Hate speech based on a person's sex is just as hateful as all the other forms of hate speech I have listed. But pornography is strangely exempted as a form of hate speech. And those who speak out about it in these terms are called prudes and whingers.

The publishing industry has gone through massive changes in the last decade, and none more so than the advent of eBooks and digital publishing. Spinifex Press began creating eBooks in 2006. While we have often been asked to participate in industry forums on this subject, the media and most festivals have not asked for input or commentary from us. It's hard to say whether this is because we are feminist publishers and therefore would not know anything (although we were innovators in the field in the 1990s also) or whether there is the assumption that we would only know about feminist issues (but why are we well qualified activist publishers not asked to comment on feminism either?).

You can see that I am caught in a whirlwind and cannot get out no matter whether I shout or remain silent, no matter whether I put forward a critique or try to make jokes and be good humoured about it, or whether I whinge.

That's all very well, say the doubters, but perhaps these books are badly written or didactic, perhaps they are poorly argued or rushed to print with lots of editorial problems, perhaps the designs are sloppy or the book covers unappealing. If any of these were issues, you would read about it in reviews. While it's not possible for every book or every writer to win awards, many Spinifex authors have won awards for their books, state awards, national awards and international awards. Some books have been named in best-of-the-year lists, some authors have been recognised for their work. Spinifex Press has won awards, as have the publishers. On matters editorial, it is something we pride ourselves on and we have been known to spend several years on getting a book right. Our book covers are frequently remarked upon. Internationally, we have numerous translations, including Betty McLellan's Help, I'm living with a man boy in 17 languages. Other books have been translated into Spanish, German, Korean, Chinese and Turkish. I ask, given all this, should you be able to hear our writers at festivals or read features on them in the media?

Don’t get me wrong, we are more than grateful to those festival organisers and media who do support us, as well as to readers who buy books and writers who have stuck with us over the years.

There are many others areas Spinifex authors have written about. Here is a beginning list: war, terrorism, economics, water, health, creative writing, poetry, autobiography, GM foods, holocaust, trauma, sanity and madness, peace, literature, the politics of knowledge, globalisation, climate change, lesbian culture and history, mythology, religion, Indigenous knowledges, abortion, cyberfeminism, ecofeminism, reproductive technologies, menopause, international relations, violence against women, international feminist movements, intimate relationships, exile, masculinity, revolution, history, prehistory, politics, ecology, animals, colonisation, biodiversity, trade unions, education, children, theatre, circus, art, photography, humour, feminism.

When a group of feminist artists in New York began protesting about the number of women artists represented in art galleries, they donned gorilla masks and called themselves Guerilla Girls in part to avoid reprisals from the art establishment and the media. What we see in public fora in Australia is feminism sexed-up, feminism cat-fights, feminism lite. Any attempt to engage seriously with the ideas of feminism, ideas that have changed the lives of millions of women and girls around the world, is met with derision, distortion, exclusion and silence. I say let's have feminism noisy, feminism fun, feminism serious. In short  guerrilla feminism.

 

* Apologies to Shakespeare.

 

Spinifex Press was established by Renate Klein and Susan Hawthorne 21 years ago. Both publishers have PhDs in Women’s Studies and have lived and worked feminism for many decades. They are authors of hundreds articles on feminism as well as dozens of books and have organised local, national and international feminist events.

For more on Guerilla Girls:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerrilla_Girls

http://www.guerrillagirls.com/

 

'It’s a global phenomenon so widespread that a new name has been coined for it: the precariat,’ wrote workplace editor Clay Lucas in The Age, 21 March. Precariat is a term describing the millions of people who finding themselves without job security are forced to take insecure, poorly paid and precarious jobs.

I  came across ‘precariat’ meaning casualised, insecure labour in The Lace Makers of Narsapur by Maria Mies. Author and theorist Mies, claims that economists have invented the word ‘precariat’ because they are reluctant to have us understand the brutality that lurks behind this concept. Politicians proudly report that employment has risen but fail to admit that most of these  jobs have no holiday or sick pay and lack security of tenure.

The Lace Makers of Narsapur was first published in 1982 and is a ground breaking and sensitive study of women at the beginning of globalisation.  Maria Mies examines how the poor  women of Narsapur are used to produce luxury goods for the western market. The rural lace makers are marginalised and responsible for the subsistence of the family and due to the patriarchal norms of society are  unable to compete  with men for the small amount of  paid work that is available. The lace makers combine their work with domestic chores; their piece work is invisible – regarded as housework, even though it’s often the only family income.

Like the lace makers of Narsapur who could not survive without their precarious, low paid work, Australia, once a  country where  permanent jobs were the norm, now leads the way in the casualisation of labour with job seekers forced to move from one short-term contract to the next. In her preface to the 2012 edition of The Lace Makers of Narsapur, Maria Mies asserts that such precarious employment where millions of people lead lives of social and economic uncertainty suits the owners of capital very well. Just as the lace makers did not produce a full lace garment but parts thereof,  workers in the today’s global market produce components for products such as cars, computers or phones for unknown foreign contractors. There is little job security, scarce ability to pay for health insurance, a house, or sick pay- just dependence on the vicissitudes of the international market.

Forty years ago it was thought that by now we’d  be working just 20 hours a week, but as  the author of The Precariat - The New Dangerous Class, Guy Standing says ‘we have experienced the growth of a new and dangerously angry class, the precariat’. This global phenomena consists of people who have lost working – class jobs, and  others such as migrants and the disabled,  along with the educated and frustrated who form much of the  protest movements that spread across Europe and the Middle East last year.

But did it have to be this way? What if there had been a change in the sexual division of labour? In The Lace Makers of Narsapur,  Mies theorised that if men had to share non-wage work equally with women requiring them to spend more time at home and less at the office or factory,  the labour power needed to produce ever more commodities for the capitalist market would shrink.  Under such equal conditions, according to Mies, capitalism could not have developed in the way that it did. Instead, the atomised and disorganised lace makers working for sub-subsistence wages, ‘are now the image of the future for us’.

Guy Standing, is also Professor of Economic Security at the University of Bath in England. He warns politicians  to take note of this rising precariat whose members are suffering from anxiety. Uncertainty  is spreading rapidly throughout society, leading to alienation and despair – in turn feeding  into the growth of the protest movements around the globe, says Standing.

‘The lacemakers show the way,’ writes Mies.  ’The conditions under which they worked never disappeared, as we can see now.’ ‘Their working days are hard and long and so is the working life of these women – from the age of 8 to the age of 70 or 80. The lace-making women virtually never stop working until they die.’ These conditions have returned to the rich countries of the west from where they were exported’, she says.

While the proletariat has disappeared  the precariat is on the rise.

Maria Mies is a German theorist, activist and author. She is Professor Emerita at the University of Applied Sciences (Fachhochschule) in Cologne. She is the author of numerous works of women and globalisation including: Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, The Subsistence Perspective: Beyond the Globalised Economy with Veronica Bennholdt-Thomsen and Ecofeminism with Vandana Shiva.

The Lace Makers of Narsapur  is an important book.  Published by Spinifex Press , it’s due for release in May 2012.

Helen Lobato 

How many of us, I wonder, blame our mothers for our failings or disappointments? Not these two writers, anyway, even though their childhood experiences were disturbingly extreme.

 

I grew up in a family where religion was just one of those things, punishment was by private disapproval, not public shaming or violence, and “do your bit” (for an unspoken general good) was the guiding principle. I am still shocked when I read about families like those in these two books, families controlled by parents with extreme beliefs that are justification for treating people—children—badly.

 

 Winterson and Rendle-Short come from families where religion ruled, in both these cases via their mother. For each as a child there was the danger of being thrown into a turmoil of embarrassment, loyalty and fear at the public behaviour of her mother. (For Winterson, add physical treatment that would have social services at the door today.) That each woman has come to some kind of resolution with her childhood shows in the dedications. Rendle-Short dedicates her book to her deceased mother, Winterson hers to “three mothers: Constance WInterson, Ruth Rendell, Ann S.” with Ann S. being the birth mother she makes contact with towards the end of the book.

 

 It is well-known that Winterson wrote a fictional version of her childhood in Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. Rendle-Short creates a fictional character, Gloria, within Bite Your Tongue to tell the childhood part of her story where the mother, so help us, is on a mission to “purify” the Queensland school curriculum by banning and burning certain books. The adult writer Rendle-Short fossicks among newspaper reports and other records for details of these events and interweaves the fictional and the factual. (“Dr Joy’s Death List” (of books) can be found at the end of Bite Your Tongue.) For Winterson’s adoptive mother, it’s more personal, the child herself appears to be the enemy, being told when her mother is angry with her, “the Devil led us to the wrong crib.”

 

 These two books keep inviting comparisons. Rendle-Short’s actual mother’s first name is—yes, really—Angel. Her character Gloria’s mother is called MotherJoy. Winterson’s mother is always referred to as Mrs WInterson and she is cruel and punishing. Both authors survive their mother, developing emotional muscle on the way.

 The writing, however, is very different. In Why Be Happy there’s a lot of space around the words, much that is not said, and the tone is matter-of-fact while the statements are often passionate, sometimes shocking, especially when the young Jeanette is being grossly mis-treated. Defiance, refusal to see herself as a victim, a small child gouging out a space for herself in the world, is what we are shown. “Books,” she writes, “for me, are a home. Books don’t make a home —they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside.” In the fiction of her childhood, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, she says she tempered the actual events, making them more believable. Goodness. Are there moments of melodrama? Or just the truth? We, her readers, can’t know, but we can feel her conviction that she is not a damaged person, no victim, (though not good at longterm relationships). “I was very often full of rage and despair. I was always lonely. In spite of all that I was and am in love with life.”

 Winterson’s statement “The trouble with a book is that you don’t know what’s in it until too late.” could have been made by Rendle-Short’s mother.

 

While Winterson invokes with spaces around the words, Rendle-Short accretes detail, in words and metaphors that make everything explicit. One example is in the two pages where MotherJoy matches “the parts of the pig’s head in front of her with an imaginary map of the female anatomy” for her daughters. And there are the sheep tongues, the full detail of their preparation and eating expanding the extended metaphor of the book’s title. 

I like it that both of these books include dedications to the mother many of us would condemn for the way they treated their daughters. Both Winterson and Rendle-Short complicate easy judgments and neither has allowed her childhood experiences to define a limited adult identity. And each demonstrates powerfully, albeit in different ways, the power, and revelatory potential of books.