I wrote this for a college writing course and decided to share it. I have intertwined three essay/short stories written by women, with excerpts from a body of writing called Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power by Audre Lorde. Lorde is talking to the characters in the stories as if they are real. The advice and admiration she gives them are powerful and compassionate. It is something, as women, we would all like to hear. The short stories do not have a lot of detail, but the women she talks to are all seeking the same thing...their female power. Lorde was alive from 1934 to 1992, and in that time wrote some of the most liberating works of literature for and about women of her time...enjoy.
Audry Lorde's Words of Wisdom
Audre Lorde’s words to the narrator of The Little Coochie Snorcher That Could, written as one of the Vagina Monologue skits...I am in awe of you for coming out of the past in one piece. What had happened to you was profoundly cruel and something that no little girl should have to endure.You had a mother so out of touch with her own physical desires and erotic power that she shamed you for your desire to explore yours. Your mother could not give love and therefore you did not receive love. Being five is a time to enjoy getting to know your body, exploring sensations and having the freedom to express your pleasure. Instead, you were frightened by your vagina, tried to plug it up thinking it would fill with water from the bath or putting a band aid on it or three pairs of underwear to keep it sealed away. What cruel words would make a little girl only five feel this way about a sacred, special and amazing part of who she is? It is a credit to a child’s imagination what they will think up either in a dreamscape or a nightmare about who they are and what their bodies will do. You were raised to fear yes within yourself, your deepest cravings. (Lorde, pg.539)
You were harmed not only with words from your mother, but by a male child at the age of seven. He punched you in your vagina and you couldn’t pee. This was painful and frightening, and you weren’t held nor protected from this cruel act. You were blamed for it having happened in the first place. The most degrading horror put upon a child happened to you. The rape you suffered at the hands of your father’s best friend, when you were finally admiring your body in new under clothes given to you by your father’s girlfriend. You were testing the waters, possibly venturing out to be proud of the way you look and feel pretty. You were robbed of that moment by the brutal invasion and bloody finish of someone who was trusted and then you were again punished by not seeing your father for seven years. There is no wonder to me that you shut the door on discovering the powerful erotica deep inside you. “As women, we have come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and irrational knowledge. We have been warned against it all our lives by the male world, which values this depth of feeling enough to keep women around in order to exercise it in the service of men…” (Lorde, pg. 537) My dear, you have been kept down not through verbal cues from the male society, but violent acts perpetrated against you. If this were not bad enough, your own mother started this hatred you now have for your body and for the power you hold inside of it.
By thirteen, your vagina was a bad place and a bad luck zone…a freeway between your legs that you wanted to take as far away from you as possible. A place you were no longer going to look at as a part of you. I say, if you refuse to be conscious of what you are feeling at any time no matter how comfortable that may seem, is to deny a large part of the experience and to allow yourself to be reduced to the pornographic, the abused, and the absurd. (Lorde, pg540) Your protection is exactly this…to disallow a consciousness of your deep erotic self.
However, you began to change this at the age of sixteen. A twenty-four year old woman seduced you and gave you your first sexual experience that wasn’t cruel and punishing. And I say, better than a man. Would a man show you how to pleasure yourself in all the ways possible? Would he show you the beautiful and powerful feminine side of yourself? Most likely not. Would you have even noticed him or let him? She gave you the freedom to enjoy your ‘coochie snorcher’ or as I like to call it…your vagina. “...but his erotic charge is not easily shared by women who continue to operate under an exclusively European-American male tradition.” (Lorde pg 540) You were trapped behind your wall of safety you built. However, you unlocked your chastity belt of pain and guilt, shame and torture and laid it aside to courageously try a new experience that brought about love for yourself and your vagina. Bravo to you! I hope in the future you believe in this joy and deep sensual feeling and know you deserve it.
You said she was your surprising, unexpected and politically incorrect salvation. (Vagina Monologue) I wonder if there was another way you would have begun to love your vagina. Perhaps, perhaps not…but you’re on your way to acknowledging the power within, the creative source, the self-affirming side and your strong femaleness. You are on your way to making your erotic self the whole of your being. Remember your power within…you have a strong erotic feminine power; don’t forget it.
My advice to Tome Hayashi, the wife and mother in the story Seventeen Syllables, is to continue to allow Ume Hanzono, your alter ego, to come out. Since your whole life has revolved around your family, I know you have a lot of fear around expressing your creativity and your erotic passion. Do you know what that is, your erotic power? You discovered it when you began to write and dream up your haikus. When you went the extra mile to get published! You tapped into a resource within you that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling. You were in it when you write, and you are in it when you are in intense discussions about it with others. You attract people to you that desire to discuss your passion. This is the wonder of the erotic…how you lose yourself in it so much, that time and place cease to exist.
You became someone else; Ume Hanzono. You allowed yourself this other life cocooned in the mundane. A fearless, driven part of yourself, a pseudo name to allow you to strip yourself of your façade of Tome Hayashi, the appeasing wife and mother who kept house, cooked, washed and picked tomatoes out in the sweltering fields and boxed them. (Yamoto, pg299-300)
Ume, you have a responsibility to stay. I do not ask for perfection, nor to do something that causes paralyzing fear. Perfection is the worst form of self hate to bestow upon yourself. No Tome, I want you to continue to elicit your erotic self from deep inside you. “This internal requirement toward excellence which we learn from the erotic must not be misconstrued as demanding the impossible from ourselves nor from others. (Lorde, pg537) You, Ume have tasted your “internal sense of satisfaction”(Lorde, pg537) and will want to aspire to it again and again, I promise.
Tome, you owe it to your daughter, Rosie, to be content, to stand up for yourself. Do you know Rosie respects you for being your authentic self? When you say you’re sorry for behavior that needs no apology, because you live with a man who is threatened of his loss of dominance, your daughter loses a piece of her and her sense of feminine power. She also loses a little respect for you each time and feels hatred for both you and her father. She feels this when you, her mother begs, and for her father denying you.( Yamamoto, 301) Again, I am not asking for perfection. I’m asking you to keep your eyes open and begin with baby steps to be true to your heart.
Rosie is angry and subjected to the type of dysfunction that will distance her from you. It is already happening with her father. When you asked Rosie to promise never to marry, because of your past of an arranged marriage and a first love gone wrong; did you ever think of the impact it had on her? Who’s to say her first love will go wrong? She may engage her erotic power and balance her life with love of another and love of herself. Allow her the chance and give her the support to do that. “The aim of each thing we do is to make our lives and the lives of our children richer and more possible.” (Lorde,pg537) Be good to yourself Tome and Ume, may you both seek deep within you to find and hold tight, your erotic power.
Hello, Panna, to you, the character of A Wife's Story, I want to say that I see very clearly your struggle between your Indian culture and the American culture you’ve grown to know and love.
The courage it took to leave your country and culture behind to finish your education was enough. However you went on to absorb and love the American way and embrace it as your own. You began to see what it was like to truly experience your authentic self, and with it your erotic woman under the surface.
When you had that moment with Imre on Broadway, when he started to dance, I think you wanted to also. Shyness is just another way to deny our erotic power to flower and grow. “For our erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing.” (Lorde pg537) It did, however, come out in the hug you gave Imre. You did it even when you thought he wanted you to let go. That was your passion coming out and it surpassed your fear of what anyone thought, including Imre. Another moment, simple yet poignant, was when you were not ‘unhappy’ when you had to take the responsibility for the tickets and the money when your husband was in town. The circumstances allowed you to bridge the gap between your old world and the new one. Equality seeped through and you enjoyed the view, no matter how unfamiliar it was. You walked a step ahead instead of a step behind…this was your time now and part of you wanted to seize it.
Then your superficial erotica pushed through and again you became the inferior female. You started to question your erotic power and your ingrained sense of inferiority about your sex made you feel suspect of its existence. (Lorde, pg536) This is where the surface you, rose up and wanted, no needed to deny your erotic depth… the fear came over you and you started to give in to the side that said, “you need to go home, you have had your freedom and this is it.” Your husband has had the last word and as always, you have lived with it that way. And this is where we go in the moment of fear. “…when we live away from those erotic guides from within ourselves, then our lives are limited by external and alien forms, and we conform to the needs of a structure that is not based on human need, let alone an individual’s.” (Lorde, pg539)
Alas, you did come to America seeking your PhD in special education. You set up a place to live, you maneuvered your way around one of the biggest and busiest cities in the United States. You have adapted to the way of life here and have thrived. This is not something a woman not in touch with her erotic power would do. The erotic is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. I believe once joy is experienced, there is no going back to the surface erotic and the mundane. This is the scariest choice we have to make. I believe your desire, deep down, will guide you to what it is you dream for. It may even be a path you have not thought of at all. This is the exciting part of listening to your erotic self.
Let me remind you of something you did for you and for your husband that you would not have done prior to all the challenges you faced and accomplished. “In the mirror that hangs on the bathroom door, I watch my naked body turn, the breasts, the thighs glow. The body’s beauty amazes. I stand there shameless, in ways he has never seen me.”(Mukherjee pg553) You stood there in a way you have never seen yourself…that is your freedom. Once you know the extent to which you are capable of feeling, that sense of satisfaction and completion, you can then observe which of your various life endeavors brings you closest to that fullness. (Lorde, pg537) You are such a strong and powerful woman on so many levels, I wouldn’t be surprised if you could stitch together both worlds in perfect harmony and become much more than the woman you ever could ever imagine.
Excerpts taken from the book: The Longman Anthology of Women’s Literature
By Mary K. DeShazer.
Short stories and essays by:
Lorde, Audrey- Uses of the Erotica: The Erotic Power
Yamamoto, Hisaye- Seventeen Syllables
Mukheree, Bharati- A Wife’s Story
Excerpts also from:
The Vagina Monologues- The Little Coochie Snorcher That Could
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