Black Milk - Elif Shafak [85]
One woman writer who jeered at the egos and ambitions looming in the world of art and culture was the legendary Dorothy Parker. Five feet tall and slight, her physical presence may not have been overwhelming, but the words that poured forth from her pen still astonish and amuse readers today. In her capacity as the “most renowned lady wit in America,” the sharp-tongued critic for Vanity Fair and The New Yorker wrote about a wide range of topics without hiding her claws. She was the most taciturn member of the famous Algonquin Round Table and yet she remains the most renowned of them all.
Having a special knack for loving the wrong kind of men, ever-impossible men, she suffered from several unhappy affairs, depressions, miscarriages and an abortion. But perhaps none of her relationships left a deeper mark on her life than her on-again, off-again marriage to the actor and playwright Alan Campbell. Like two planets orbiting around the same path but never really meeting, they tired each other out endlessly—until the day in 1963 when Campbell committed suicide. Parker herself survived several suicide attempts throughout the years—each episode, perhaps, worsening her addiction to alcohol.
As a fierce advocate of gender equality and civil rights, Parker was critical of the dominant social roles of her era. In her poems, short stories and essays, she questioned all sorts of clichés and taboos. One of her earlier poems summarizes her take on life.
If I abstain from fun and such,
I’ll probably amount to much;
But I shall stay the way I am,
Because I do not give a damn.
Her close friendships with Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman have been a favorite topic among literary historians. Years later, when asked if there was ever any competition between the two women writers, Hellman replied, “Never.” Theirs was a dependent relationship, of which she claimed, “I think between men and women there should be dependency, even between friends. . . . Independent natures aren’t worried about dependency.” In the paranoia of the early 1950s, it didn’t take long for them to make their way onto the famous Hollywood blacklist. Not that they cared much. They were creative and self-destructive; they were members of a generation that drank, quarreled, argued and laughed abundantly; and they died either too early or too depressed.
Parker was not a great fan of romantic love, domestic life or motherhood. When she spotted a mother who fussed over her child in public, she didn’t waste any opportunity to pass judgment on the scene. To her, motherhood seemed like some kind of entrapment and perpetual unhappiness. Her mind was corrosive, her mood volatile, her sarcasm legendary and her dark eyes brimful of mischief—almost up until the moment that she died of a heart attack at the age of seventy-three, alone in a hotel room.
If ever there was a voice in the world of literature throbbing with rage, compassion, justice and love—all at the same time, all with the same vigor—it was Audre Lorde’s. She was a soul with many talents and multiple roles: poet, writer, black, woman, lesbian, activist, cancer survivor, educator and mother of two children. Early on she had changed her name from Audrey to Audre not only because she liked the symmetry with her last name but also because she simply could. She loved re-creating herself again and again, remolding her heart and her destiny, like two pieces of soft dough. In a ceremony held before her death she was given yet another name, Gamba Adisa—“Warrior: She Who Makes Her Meaning Lucid.”
At times, she was her own mother, and at times, her own daughter. She saw herself as a link in an endless chain, as part of a “continuum of women.” Bridging differences across the boundaries, challenging racism, sexism and homophobia, Lorde encouraged what she saw as “the transformation of silence into language.” Through words we understood ourselves and each other, and brought out the inner wisdom that existed in each and every one of us.