It feels like I’ve recently witnessed several close calls when we could have radically rethought how we do things. Briefly, it seemed like the pandemic had people rethinking the vast racial and income inequality that makes it simply harder to stay alive for some people. Or, witnessing the murder of George Floyd had people reconsidering the police system that is increasingly militarized, (qualified) immune from justice, and taking funds and resources from things that would actually make neighborhoods safer like mental health care, food security, and schools. Even just last week, we had a brief opportunity to approach AI with more responsibility, but with the decision of OpenAI to include Sam Altman, Larry Summers, and a bunch of other white men on the board, it looks like we’re in for unbridled profiteering with probably terrifying consequences (for more, check out the Notions & Notes from July). It’s disappointing to see so many chances slip past us.
So, I’m finding encouragement in art and communities that challenge the dominant paradigm of patriarchy, profit, and post-colonialism.
Let’s start with bike gangs—famous for machismo and taking themselves too seriously. What could be more inspiring than the bright, patterned, flaunting of femininity that the all-female bike gangs of Marrakech? Hassan Hajjaj’s series document and celebrate this street culture. Definitely follow his work and check out the rest of the series. Yes, these women are serious badasses on bikes, but in their hands, the bike gang is a thing of joy and freedom.
Like the women of Hajjaj’s Marrakech, the Caramel Curves, an all-female motorcycle group from New Orleans documented by Akasha Rabut, is playful and powerful. The photos from both Hajjaj’s and Rabut’s series are beautiful and liberating.
There’s something that comes from the unity of these groups. Sure, there’s safety in numbers when violence against women is far too common. But even more so, the empowerment of carving out a space for yourself in a traditionally male-dominated culture also gives us a window into what the world could look like in the hands of non-white, non-men. The freedom these women achieve is creative and personal as much as it is political. Take a minute to imagine a world run the way these babes run the streets.
Mexico City and Nairobi too, have their own badass female biker gang of its own. But I want to take some time to focus on the Cholitas of Bolivia, women documented by Peruvian-American artist Celia D. Luna. Once a derogatory term for indigenous women, the Cholitas have reclaimed the name as they proudly display their cultural dress, braids, and identity, all while being wrestlers, skaters, and mountaineers. Go read more about Luna’s process of photographing these women and their roles in Bolivia. There’s something so empowering about mastering a difficult skill, about finding strength in that process. Doing so while celebrating femininity and preserving your culture is even more inspiring.
The reason you haven’t been getting any Notions & Notes for the last few months is that I’ve been very busy doing my real job, which is being a writing coach and helping students through the college process. One of my inspiring students wrote her college essay about earning her pilot’s license at a flight school that is too literally a boys’ club.
When I look at myself, there are no assumptions about how I exist in the world. I can be as feminine as I am a capable pilot. The two do not contradict each other. […] Coasting at 6,000 feet in the air has shifted my perspective and taught me there are other ways of envisioning my life and seeing new kinds of beauty you didn’t know were there.
My student’s words echo the wisdom of a piece of writing that continues to influence how I think and see the world, Ursula Le Guin’s short essay, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” Both writers suggest we could envision worlds outside the patriarchal narrative we’ve always existed in. In her essay, LeGuin looks at the hunter-gatherer origins of humanity, acknowledging that narratives of conquest and violence make better stories than those of gathering seeds and grains. However, Le Guin suggests that the carrier bag used for holding the things we gather in the world might be a better early human tool to conceptualize stories with than the spear or whatever other phallic weapon a heroic story uses.
[…]it also grounds me, personally, in human culture in a way I never felt grounded before. So long as culture was explained as originating from and elaborating upon the use of long, hard objects for sticking, bashing, and killing, I never thought that I had, or wanted, any particular share in it.
When I first read this essay, I shared Le Guin’s relief. Now this aligns with how I experience the world. For Le Guin, gathering things in the world and carrying them with us feels like a more honest story, one that reflects lived experience more than the heroism of conquest and violence. Yes, I too have a tendency to gather things because they’re ‘beautiful or useful’ and carry them home with me, “home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred.” This newsletter is basically a carrier bag of ideas and art and other things I’ve found and wanted to hold onto and share with others. The thing about the carrier bag is that it’s nurturing rather than destructive, it receives rather than takes, it is practical, ordinary, rather than glorious.
It is the story that makes the difference. It is the story that hid my humanity from me, the story the mammoth hunters told about bashing, thrusting, raping, killing, about the Hero. […] The trouble is, we've all let ourselves become part of the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it. Hence it is with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject, words of the other story, the untold one, the life story.
The other thing about the carrier bag is that, by holding something, it makes it more precious. Thus the carrier bag narratives, too, make precious meaning of ordinary lives. “A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.”
Ultimately, the carrier bag theory of fiction is eco-feminist: instead of the exceptionalism of heroic narratives, the characters are small, temporary pieces of a big, interconnected ecosystem. The human world is the natural world, our stories are pieces of our lives we bring with us and nurture.
Science fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story. In it, as in all fiction, there is room enough to keep even Man where he belongs, in his place in the scheme of things; there is time enough to gather plenty of wild oats and sow them too, and sing to little Oom, and listen to Ool's joke, and watch newts, and still the story isn't over. Still there are seeds to be gathered, and room in the bag of stars.
When I think about the consequences of centering stories of conquest and capture, those of “survival-of-the-fittest” that fuel capitalist ethos, I think of how urgent it is that we rethink the very fabric and structure of the stories. I look at young people, like my student the pilot, and am inspired. My student who is a pilot is an ordinary, teenage girl, but within her story (which I know and you don’t) there’s humor and bravery and perspective and so much value I want to bring with me for the rest of my journey.
Beyond containing ideas that have been rattling around my head and heart ever since I read it, I cannot stress how truly funny and poetic this little essay is. Go read it.
One of the things I miss about being an English teacher is showing people the rules so they can break them. (If you were a student in my class from ‘05-’14, you heard me say this at least once). The rules of a traditional Petrarchan form are an octet with rhyming ABBAABBA followed by a sestet with CDCDCD or CDECDE, a form derived from a series of poems this Italian dude wrote for a woman named Laura. Sonnets are associated as love poems, but Laura did not return Petrarch’s feelings. But these poems left their mark for glamorizing unrequited love and objectifying women as purified ideals. It’s good to know these rules, so you can see how a woman breaks them. In Addonizio’s hands, the sonnet makes love mutual, physical, and flawed. It’s way sexier.
First Poem for You
By Kim Addonizio
I like to touch your tattoos in complete
darkness, when I can’t see them. I’m sure of
where they are, know by heart the neat
lines of lightning pulsing just above
your nipple, can find, as if by instinct, the blue
swirls of water on your shoulder where a serpent
twists, facing a dragon. When I pull you
to me, taking you until we’re spent
and quiet on the sheets, I love to kiss
the pictures in your skin. They’ll last until
you’re seared to ashes; whatever persists
or turns to pain between us, they will still
be there. Such permanence is terrifying.
So I touch them in the dark; but touch them, trying.
Do you know about the Sisters of Pertual Indulgence? They’re a global order of nun drag queens with a long history of social justice activism. They’re actually ordained. They were an important resource for the gay community during the AIDS crisis when public officials and the church ignored the massive loss of life. They’ve continued the pastoral care of ministering to the sick and public health activism during Covid. They take actually take vows. “We see this as a public duty for a lifetime, and [it’s] one that we joyfully accept.” They have a mission of mission “promulgating universal joy and expiating stigmatic guilt.” They have a fantastic sense of humor. (This interview with Sister Boom Boom, who ran for city counsel and was listed on the ballet at Nun of the Above, is absolutely amazing.) They’re fabulous.
So much protest is done in anger. But the Sisters call out the moral hypocrisy of patriarchal institutions with joy, compassion, and actively doing the grunt work of righting the wrongs.
It feels right to end with a poem by Danez Smith, who makes a habit of challenging the dominant paradigm in their poems (“Dinosaurs in the Hood” does this and you should read it because it’s great and also important). For those who haven’t had a lesson on sonnets in a while, the volta is the “turn” or place in the poem when the meaning shifts, expands beyond its subject. You can listen to Smith read “Volta” here.
VOLTA
run me my river
need my stone near the stump
accidental table on which mosses max
on light & what rain comes still.
run me my time
unelectric & unsquared, the green
& pebble endless, the dry must of thirst,
run me my hunt & my gather, the key
in the sky searching for thunder’s hand
the greatest of many mistakes
including the large boat, the lock, the whip, the cotton gin
the pen, the mistake of the first women
who shoulda bashed the first man’s fishy head open.
yes, i’d prefer the wars women woven
maybe then good war would be a thing. some idiot
& hopeful part of me believes that. i think i’d live
a good life if left untouched, uninvented, unboated
somewhere continental where my gods & my devils
have my face. would my terror be more peaceful
in those brown, uninterrupted hands?
like to imagine my own river in that old place
my old blood knew. somewhere near a king
known for her kindness or the peace
of a king near i want dead & can kill.