yonmei

yonmei @ 03:57 pm: Three gifts of words
One reason why I love words so much is that words can, unlike any other form of art or making, be made and kept by the maker, given to others and still remain the maker's, shared with still others by the recipient and still remain the same gift, enhanced by being given.

First, I found (via Feministe's great Sunday tradition of shameless self-promotion), this poem: "Don’t write a poem about rape" by Julie Buffaloe-Yoder, first published by Calyx: A Journal of Art and Literature by Women in summer 1992. I don't want to quote from the poem: I want you, if you can bear it, to go there and read it all. (And thank you, hysperia, for linking to it.)

Here's part of the background of how it came to be written:

During my second year as an undergrad, someone very close to me was raped. It was a horrific experience, complete with guns, knives, and torture, like a scene from a Law & Order SVU episode. She was, needless to say, quite emotionally scarred.

A few years later, I wrote a poem about it and submitted it to a literary journal. I received an unbelievable response from the editor. He took the time to type a six page, single spaced letter in which he ranted about how he would never, ever publish a poem about rape, because he was so tired of hearing women cry and moan about the subject. In his opinion, women who get raped usually “have it coming,” because of the provocative way they dress or act around men. In his words, he was “sick of wenchy women poets who are always bashing men.”

Then there's two excerpts from a recent speech by an author I thought I was familiar with:

"So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life."

I read that, and, knowing who the author was, was dumbstruck: because yes. Suddenly, I want to read her next book.

I stopped and thought about it, and did some other stuff, and then went on to read the rest, thinking that she could not possibly have anything to say that would resonate with me more than what she had already said, but, further down, after she spoke about her work with Amnesty International:

"If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better."

That would be J. K. Rowling, speaking at the Commencement Address to Harvard, June 2008.

Because, yes.