[Editors’ Note: Learn about how the “Nine Poets Speak” series came to be in place here.]
Author’s note: This photo is a screen shot of the Lavender Meance protest. In the photo (l to r) are Judy Reif, Fran Winant, and Martha Shelley at the Second Congress to Unite Women in New York, 1970. Photo credit Diana Davies / NY Public Library.
physicists speak of red shift I say that the purple shift2 is more important it is when a woman falls in love for the first time with another woman and the whole world turns purple3 today I say is a purple day
in her hands the purple aubergine they kiss under a wall of purple flowers wisteria clumped like grapes ripe with liquid a single touch is enough to make it weep
the purple shift afflicts many of us at different stages of our lives there are stories of girls sent away to boarding schools there they are meant to remain pure some of these girls have turned into wolves4 inhabiting the night baying to the moon5 with desire satisfying their infinite appetites6 some have been corrupted by the very ones paid to protect them7 many a girl has longed to unravel the skeins of her teacher’s passion8
an army of lovers9 shall never be defeated we chant as an entire generation converts we become the lavender menace the mauve peril the lesbian plague10 she and I walk the inner city streets holding hands kissing in broad daylight11 I wear a clamour of badges12 at night in those same streets passing youths hurl eggs at us13
we play pool billiards and snooker14 in seedy bars until the early hours of the morning the self-defence classes15 we have taken give us the confidence to kick at the stalkers and hunters16 who roam the streets and gaming houses
we congregate in bars17 inhabiting an underworld18 dressed to kill to woo to impress but Ereshkigal19 is no longer alone not only has her sister Inanna joined the pack20 but many have turned feral as in earlier ages we became nuns
in packs they roar through the streets on their Hondas their Kawasakis their Harley Davidsons and their Ducatis21 where there’s smoke there’s fire and dykes on bikes make plenty of both to sing at the top of their lungs22 to dance as close as they can
cars too thrill us an antique Morris Minor an FJ Holden or an urban-crawling Chevrolet some of us have diesel-driven road-trains23 or pick-up trucks we name our cars we develop relationships24 with them and the women who ride with us
harpies sirens birds of prey lesbians are accused of carrion deeds birdlike some fly donning a leather pilot’s cap a windproof jacket thick with lambskin flying breeches and boots a licence to carry others or fly solo around the world25
in spite of sanctions we have always lived to the full wildly outrageously we’ve been feared for our independence our direct speech because we ride horseback but not side-saddle
four make a table for cards poker gin rummy 500 euchre whist solo and bridge they play in smoke-filled rooms each seeking her own queen a pack of women26 each with her own magic pack of cards
the names we are called are as varied as our ways of living lesbian27 sapphist dyke tommy girl witch companion lover shrew amazon wolf girl virago man-hater redstocking bluestocking friend partner
© Susan Hawthorne, 2005, The Butterfly Effect. Melbourne: Spinifex Press.
https://www.spinifexpress.com.au/shop/p/9781876756567
FOOTNOTES:
1 empurpled. Great News! We have made it into the language, writes astro-physicist, Meryl Waugh: from the 3rd (latest) edition of The Australian Concise Oxford Dictionary (1997): "empurple" v.tr/ 1. to make purple or red 2. to make angry.
2 purple shift. Red shift and blue shift describe the respective move away from or towards the observer. In measuring the speed and direction of the motion of stars wavelengths are distorted: a shift to the longer red wavelength indicates movement away from the observer; a shift to the shorter blue indicates movement towards the observer. Purple shift describes the movement of an emotion into a different dimension. Neither towards nor away, the shift represents an emotional leap of faith into another realm, away from patriarchy, and certainly out of this world. What Suniti Namjoshi calls an “unfamiliar realm”.
3 the whole world turns purple. “Morgan (E.M. Forster) says he’s worked it out and spends 3 hours on food, 6 on sleep, 4 on work, 2 on love. Lytton (Strachey) says 10 on love. I say the whole day on love. I say it’s seeing things through a purple shade. But you've never been in love they say.” Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West, 18 February, 1927. In Louise De Salvo and Mitchell A Leaska (eds.) 1985. The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf. p. 204. The history of the association of purple with homosexuality is a long one and attested to by Judy Grahn’s first chapter in her history of gay and lesbian metaphor, Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds (1984). A poem by Anonymous entitled, “A Woman’s Song: To Her Indifferent Lover” written in Latin in the eleventh century includes these lines: “Ver purpuratum exiit / ornatos suos unduit: / aspegit terram floribus, / ligna silvarum frondibus.” Gillian Spragg has translated this poem and the verse reads: “Spring, like a queen in purple comes, / puts on her gems: / with leaves and boughs / they sing their joy for hours.” Although poems celebrating nature are common throughout the history of poetry, and that purple is not unusual in contexts such as this, it remains interesting that it is a lesbian-authored poem which here picks up on these images. H.D. in her imagist poetry of the twentieth century will pick on many of these elements in her work which resonates with allusion to Classical culture. In particular, her poem, “Hyacinth” alludes to the ability of this flower to withstand the cold, to be a precursor to spring, even while the icy winds prevail. See H.D. 1983. Collected Poems: 1912-1944. pp. 201-206. Further, the poem by Anonymous is reminiscent of some of Sappho’s work. The complete original and translation can be found on the Babel Building Site, an interactive poetry site at <http://www.spinifexpress.com.au>
4 wolves. The Wolf Girls at Vassar were a group of girls at Vassar women’s college who cavorted at night dressed in wolf skins. They were perhaps acting out Djuna Barnes’ depiction of lesbian sexuality in Nightwood. Cristina Biaggi writes of her last year in 1959: “Gail [Ellen Dunlap] got these two wolf skins from her father, so we decided to wear them - tied over the shoulder, like Hercules - everyone else was wearing Bermuda shorts - and we went out and howled. We howled in the morning and we howled at night.” Two years later the story had escalated, and Lucy Cross, writing of 1961, remarks: “some friends told me about the Wolf Girl - somebody who put on a wolf skin and went howling around the Circle in the full moon. That’s for me, I thought. There’s room for me.” See Anne Mackay (Ed.) 1993. Wolf Girls at Vassar. p. 17. Vassar has also been recorded in a poem by Rita Mae Brown entitled “A Song for Winds and My Vassar Women”. Rita Mae Brown. 1974. The Hand that Cradles the Rock. p. 50.
5 bay to the moon. “I want to howl at the moon / celebrate her offerings Tomiye Ishida. “Tsuki ga Deta”, in C. Allyson Lee and Makeda Silvera (Eds.) 1995. Pearls of Passion. Crowell, also an alumna of Vassar, writes of another group of women in 1960: “Rumor had it that they danced under the moon in bedsheets and that they were lesbians.” See Wolf Girls at Vassar. p. 57.
6 infinite appetites. A reference to Baudelaire’s poem “Femmes Damnées: Delphine et Hippolyte”: “Loin des peuples vivants, errantes condamnées,/A travers les deserts courez commes les loups;/ Faites votre destin, âmes désordonnées,/ Et fuyez l’infini que vous portez en vous!” Charles Baudelaire. 1857/1989. The Flowers of Evil. p. 370.
7 protect them. Novelist Christine Crow cites Baudelaire’s poem in her Miss X or the Wolf Woman (1990). The novel explores at length lesbian passion, repression, and the relationship between a headmistress and one of her star pupils.
8 teacher’s passion. It’s not unusual for girls to fall for their women teachers, those strong-minded, independent women, nor for those women teachers to have passions for one another. Dorothy Ross, Headmistress of Melbourne Girls Grammar from 1939-1955 had a long relationship with Mary Davis, Headmistress of the Junior School, and later of St Catherine’s, another girls’ school nearby. Miss Ross was the model for many of her students. My mother was a student at the school during her tenure and her admiration for Dorothy Ross never dimmed. See Barbara Falk, with Cecile Trioli. 2000. D.J. Dorothy Jean Ross 1891-1982.
9 an army of lovers. A reference to Sappho, a variation on this line appears in a collection of poems written by Rita Mae Brown prior to 1971. The poem, “Sappho’s Reply” reads: “My voice rings down through thousands of years / to coil around your body and give you strength, / You who have wept in direct sunlight, / who have hungered for invisible chains, / Tremble to the cadence of my legacy: / An army of lovers shall not fail.” Rita Mae Brown. The Hand that Cradles the Rock. p. 77. I remember chanting, “an army of lovers shall never be defeated” in demonstrations of the 1970s and early 1980s.
10 the mauve peril the lesbian plague. These terms are used by Monique Wittig in Across the Acheron (1987). Monique Wittig died in early 2004 leaving behind an extraordinary legacy of lesbian-centred writing. As Carolyn Gage writes in an obituary finding Wittig’s work was like unearthing “a lesbian-feminist equivalent to the Bible, or the Koran, or the Bhagavad Gita.” Off Our Backs (2004).
11 broad daylight. Our behaviour in the 1970s was a precursor to the “kiss ins” which were staged a decade later when “Queer” emerged.
12 badges. The badges we wore were many and various. Some in my collection read: LESBIANS IGNITE. HOW DARE YOU PRESUME I’M HETEROSEXUAL. RADICALESBIANS. LESBIANS ARE EVERYWHERE.
13 eggs. An interesting subliminal message is conveyed in the use of these missiles against lesbians.
14 pool billiards snooker. It is a badge of honour for lesbians to be able to play these games with flair. They have long been, and still are, an important element of lesbian culture.
15 self-defence classes. Many lesbians have learnt self-defence, in part, to have the ability to protect themselves (not having a man about to help them!). Lesbians of my acquaintance have excelled in aikido, tae kwondo, judo, karate and ju jitsu.
16 hunters. Monique Wittig and Suniti Namjoshi have both depicted men as hunters in their writings. Across the Acheron, tells of the ritual hunt in which men pursue women in the chapter entitled “Count Zaroff’s Hunt”, pp. 36-39. A metaphor for aggressive sexuality, one can see the hunt in any red light district in the world. Namjoshi depicts her hunters pursuing the wolf and the virgin. Suniti Namjoshi. 1993. St Suniti and the Dragon. p. 86-87.
17 streets. Barbara Hammer in her film Tender Fictions (1995) says she has been attacked in the street, thrown out of a restaurant because, as she says, “I am a visible lesbian.”
bars. There are lots of lesbian books which look at this aspect of lesbian culture. Perhaps the most evocative story of the bar scene in the US is Lesley Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues (1993).
18 underground. See Judy Grahn. 1984. Another Mother Tongue, pp. 28-33. Monique Wittig’s, Across the Acheron is a retelling of a descent to hell, à la Virgil’s descent, set in contemporary San Francisco and led by a woman named Manastabal.
19 Ereshkigal. See Judy Grahn. 1987. The Queen of Swords. Boston: Beacon Press. An outstanding recreation of the mythic tale of a descent to the underworld. In this instance the ancient Sumerian myth of Inanna and Ereshkigal is told in the contemporary setting of the underground lesbian bar.
20 pack. “Ironically groups of nuns or Lesbians are often mistaken for one another today, since we often travel in female packs oblivious to male attention or needs.” Rosemary Curb and Nancy Manahan (Eds.) Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence. p. xx.
21 Hondas their Kawasaki their Harley Davidsons and their Ducatis. The group, Dykes on Bikes, is an informal lesbian institution. In Melbourne and Sydney each year they parade as part of Mardi Gras or Midsumma, roaring their engines in mockery of masculinity, but also as a way of saying, these toys are not just for the boys. With social skills such as having a good eye for pool, or excelling at martial arts, lesbians thumb their noses at prescriptive femininity. Monique Wittig in her allegorical Across the Acheron describes this aspect of lesbian culture: “As I began to shout . . . a string of dikes appeared, naked on their motor cycles, their skin gleaming black or golden, and one after the other they rode over the hill.” p. 18.
22 sing at the top of their lungs. They are of course singing, “Leader of the Pack”. As a young lesbian this song was one of the few pop tunes to speak to me directly in a way that captured my experience.
23 diesel-driven road-trains. Diesel dykes can be found behind the wheel of many means of locomotion. Road-trains ply Australia’s outback, sometimes with as many as five articulated sections.
24 relationships. “Yeah cars are easier to deal with than people. You buy a car and you have it. You don’t need to seduce it or talk to it or admit anything.” Donna Jackson. 1997. “Car Maintenance, Explosives and Love”. p. 68.
25 solo around the world. Amelia Earheart is a pervasive lesbian hero. Photographs of her in lesbian publications usually depict her in her flying gear, standing in front of the aircraft.
26 pack of women. Robyn Archer’s musical theatre takes an ironic view of a pack of women playing cards in a smoke-filled bar. The success of the show is indicated by the range of forms it has taken: it was performed in theatres, and turned into a TV program, and later published as a book. Robyn Archer 1986. Pack of Women.
27 lesbian. An alternative list to this is given by Marchessault. “The angel makers, witches, hysterical women, the bad fucks, old cows, bitches in heat, wild cats, old mares, birds of ill omen, non-virgins, whores, lesbians, unnatural mothers, loose women, crazy ladies, chattering magpies, cock teasers, the depressed and sluts, like those two there, have already been burnt, and they will be hanged on top of that.” Jovette Marchessault. 1985. Lesbian Triptych. p. 87. (Faiseuse d’ange is a Quebec expression denoting women who perform illegal abortions.) The confounding of lesbians with other independent women is a common slippage in masculine discourses of abuse, and lesbian authors recite these words as a means of exorcism. See also: “There are rivers in my hands, my fingers are webbed like a delta. My arms have become wings and I am a witch soaring on magic flying ointment. Others fly near me - Hecate, Circe, Medea, Sappho - and their words burn into my flesh. I am tattooed with the words that killed them: / witch wicce witga vitki wit wisdom wise woman / incantatrix lamia lesbian saga maga malefica / sortilega strix venefica herberia / anispex auguris divinator janutica / ligator mascara phitonissa stregula”. Susan Hawthorne. 1992. The Falling Woman. p. 150.
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