While thinking of Women’s History Month and what blog post I might write concerning it, I found my thoughts bending toward June Jordan’s “Poem About My Rights.” The poem begins with the speaker expressing the need for a mind-clearing walk, swiftly exposing the immediate dangers therein:
…why I can’t
June Jordan, “Poem About My Rights”
go out without changing my clothes my shoes
my body posture my gender identity my age
my status as a woman alone in the evening
alone on the streets/alone not being the point/
the point being that I can’t do what I want
to do with my own body because I am the wrong
sex the wrong age the wrong skin…
The poem—mentioning Exxon, gender identity, South Africa, the feminine body—discusses history both intimate and global, and the ways misogyny, homophobia, racism, and environmental harm intersect. The fluid stream of consciousness is intentional here—it braids together the strands of people being dominated and crushed. We end the poem with June Jordan’s ferocious and enraged response:
…I can’t tell you who the hell set things up like this
June Jordan, “Poem About My Rights”
but I can tell you that from now on my resistance
my simple and daily and nightly self-determination
may very well cost you your life.
When I think of women’s history, this is what I think of these days, not the joy of it, but the steely anger and resolve of it, the assertion of feminine voice and resistance. Hypervigilance—the trauma response—is stitched into our very being, and this is multiplied for BIPOC women, trans women, and femme-presenting people. In my own fiction, I’ve used the phrase “murderous watchfulness,” a phrase born of both vulnerability and suppressed rage. As a character in Miriam Toews’s excellent Women Talking urges, “We mustn’t play Hot Potato with our pain. Let’s absorb it ourselves, each of us. Let’s inhale it, let’s digest it, let’s process it into fuel.”
The booklist I’ve gathered here is mostly historical fiction, but I’ve included the recent graphic memoirs Ducks and Good Talk, too, as they delve into the complicated conversations involving women in the masculine workplace and women navigating race, parenthood, and gender biases. The novels mentioned here are far-reaching in both genre and location: The Daughter of Doctor Moreau takes us to the mystical Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico; The Mountains Sing powerfully centers women in war-ravaged Vietnam; Women Talking narrates the story of Mennonite women isolated in Bolivia; Sisters in Arms flies us overseas to England, then France, during World War II. Spokane’s own Leyna Krow sets her novel Fire Season right here in our hometown during the Great Fire of 1889, penetrating the colonial West’s misogyny and greed.
In all of these stories you might find that murderous watchfulness unfolding: Women assessing their surroundings for an opportunity to strike, to not only survive but to thrive. The history of women is vast just as women are vast in and of themselves; we are more than our pain and sorrow and continued struggle for autonomy and safety, of course, but I marvel at the ways we have created art from ongoing harm. To cite Toews again, these works are all an example of women absorbing, inhaling, and digesting pain: Witness how we transform it into fuel.
City of Incurable Women by Maud Casey
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The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
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Detransition, Baby: A Novel by Torrey Peters
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Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton
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Fire Season by Leyna Krow
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Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations by Mira Jacob
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Hester by Laurie Lico Albanese
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Honor by Thrity Umrigar
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Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
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The Love Songs of W.E.B Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
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The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell
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The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich
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Peach Blossom Spring by Melissa Fu
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Sisters in Arms: A Novel of the Daring Black Women Who Served During World War II by Kaia Alderson
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Sorrowland: A Novel by Rivers Solomon
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Woman of Light by Kali Fajardo-Anstine
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Women Talking by Miriam Toews
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Yellow Wife by Sadeqa Johnson
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