Points of View/5
Had the Saints who wrote the Gospels been women, how would they have portrayed the first night of the Christian era?
Saint Joseph, the Holy women would have written, was in a foul mood, the only one with a long face in that stable where the baby Jesus shone in his manger. Everybody else was smiling: the Virgin Mary, the little angels, the shepherds, the sheep, the oxen, the donkey, the kings who had come from the East, and the star that had led them to Bethlehem. Everybody smiled except for sullen Saint Joseph, who grumbled, “I wanted a girl.”
Points of View/6
If Eve had written Genesis, what would she have said about the first night of human love?
Eve would have begun by making it clear that she was not born from anyone’s rib, nor did she know any serpents, nor did she offer anyone apples, and God never told her that giving birth would hurt or that your husband would tell you what to do. All those stories were just lies Adam told the press.
Like Indians and blacks, women, though inferior, are a threat. “Better a man’s spite than a woman’s kindness,” warns Ecclesiasticus. And Odysseus knew enough to avoid the songs of mermaids meant to entice men from their course. There is no cultural tradition that does not justify the masculine monopoly on weapons and words, nor is there a popular tradition that fails to perpetuate disdain for women or to denounce them as a danger. Proverbs transmitted from generation to generation teach that women and lies were born the same day and that a woman’s word isn’t worth a pin. The peasant mythology of Latin America is filled with ghosts of women seeking vengeance as fearsome spirits, “evil lights” that lie in wait for travelers at night. In vigil and in sleep, men betray their terror that females may invade the forbidden territories of pleasure and power, and thus it has been from time immemorial.
It’s not for nothing that witch-hunts went after women, and not only during the Inquisition. Spasms and moans, maybe orgasms — even worse, multiple orgasms — these were the evidence of a woman bewitched. Only possession by the Devil could explain so much forbidden fire, which by fire was punished: God commanded that female sinners burning with passion be burned alive. Envy and terror of female pleasure are nothing new. A myth common to many cultures over the ages and across the world is that of the vagina dentata, the woman’s sex like a mouth filled with teeth, the insatiable piranha that feeds on male flesh. And in the world today there are twenty million women whose clitorises have been mutilated.
No woman is free from suspicion. In boleros they’re all ungrateful; in tangos, they’re all whores (except for mama). In the countries of the South, one woman out of every three married women is routinely beaten for what she has done or could do. “We are asleep,” says a woman worker in Montevideo’s barrio Casavalle. “Some prince gives you a kiss and puts you to sleep. When you awake, the prince is beating you up.” Another: “I’ve got my mother’s fear, and my mother had my grandmother’s.” Men confirm their right of ownership over women with their fists, just as men and women do over children.
And rapes, aren’t they also rites to enforce that right? Rapists don’t seek pleasure, nor do they find it. Rape brands a mark of ownership on the victim’s buttocks, the most brutal expression of the phallic power of the arrow, the spade, the rifle, the cannon, the missile, or any other erection. In the United States a woman is raped every six minutes, in Mexico every nine minutes. A Mexican woman says: “There is no difference between being raped and being hit by a truck, except that after rape men ask if you liked it.”
Statistics track only those rapes that get reported, which in Latin America are always many fewer than occur. Most rape victims remain silent out of fear. Many girls, raped in their homes, end up on the streets, which they work as cheap bodies. Some of them, like all street kids, make their homes on the pavement. Fourteen-year-old Lélia, raised by the grace of God on the streets of Rio de Janeiro, says, “Everybody steals. I steal and people steal from me.” When Lélia sells her body, they pay her little or they pay her with blows. And when she steals, the police steal what she stole and her body as well. Angélica, thrown onto the streets of Mexico City at sixteen, says: “I told my mother that my brother had abused me, and she kicked me out of the house. Now I live with a guy and I’m pregnant. He says he’ll support me if I have a boy. If I have a girl, he doesn’t say.”
“In today’s world, being born female is a risk,” says the director of UNICEF. In 1995 in Beijing, the international women’s conference noted that women today earn one-third what men earn for equal work. Of every ten poor people, seven are women, and barely one woman in a hundred owns property. Minus a wing, humanity flies crooked. For every ten legislators, there is, on average, one woman, and in some parliaments there are none. Women are acknowledged as useful at home, in factories, or in offices and even as necessary in bed or in the kitchen, but public spaces are virtually monopolized by men born with the urge to have power and make war. That a woman, Carol Bellamy, heads UNICEF is unusual. The United Nations preaches equality but doesn’t practice it: at the highest levels of this, the highest international organization, men occupy eight out of every ten positions.
The Despised Mother
Black Africa’s works of art, the fruits of collective creation by nobody and everybody, are rarely exhibited on an equal footing with those of artists considered worthy of the name. The booty of colonial pillage can sometimes be found in a few museums and art galleries or in private collections in Europe and the United States, but its “natural” place is in the anthropology museum. Reduced to handicrafts or folklore, African art is dealt with only as one of several customs of exotic peoples.
The centers of so-called civilization, accustomed as they are to acting as creditors for the rest of the world, have no great interest in acknowledging their debts. Yet anyone who has eyes to see and admire might wonder what would have happened to twentieth-century art without the black contribution? Without the African mother from whom they nursed, would the most famous paintings and sculptures of our times have been possible? On page after page in a revealing book published by New York’s Museum of Modern Art, William Rubin and other experts document the debt that the art we call art owes to the art of peoples we call “primitive.”