widow shows her poetry and science, philosophy and myths from all over the world. She teaches her how religion and science each rely on a violent faith between creation and destruction. She shows her how the history of art carries with it the same duality. She shows her the body—Christ’s body endlessly crucified, bodies in war and sacrifice, the never-ending bodies of women, bodies in pleasure or pain or sleep or death,bodies in rapture, tortured bodies, bodies in prayer, bodies in the static pose of a portrait. The widow tells the girl, “Do not listen to what any society tells you about the body—the body is the metaphor for all experience. A woman’s body more than any other. Like language, its beautiful but weaker sister. Look at this poem. This painting. Look at these photographs. The body doesn’t lie.”
The widow weaves the importance of expression and representation into the smallest details of an ordinary life. She milks the goat and steals the chickens’ eggs while telling stories of archetypal animals. She lights the fire and cleans the dishes while reciting poetry of love or war. She walks miles to the nearest village and brings back underground writings and photos, the same as milk and bread and sugar and coffee and ink and paper, making sure to detail the seriousness of these suppressed objects. She is careful to explain to the girl how it is that human expression is the highest value in life, but so too is death, in this place and time they find themselves inhabiting. The girl takes in everything, rarely speaking, her listening and watching a kind of devouring.
One day the girl is taking a bath and calls out. The widow comes into the tiny bathroom and the water surrounding the girl’s legs is clouded with crimson. She slaps the girl in the face and smiles and kisses her on the cheeks. She says, “May you bloom.” The girl doesn’t flinch. The widow tells her, “This is the first language of your body. It is the word ne . When you bleed each month, as when the moon comes and goes in its journey, you leave the world of men. You enter the body of all women,who are connected to all of nature.” The girl asks, “Why is it the word ne ?” The widow responds, “When you bleed, this word is more powerful than any word you could ever speak. It is a blood word. It binds you to animals and trees and the moon and the sun. Where men take blood in the world in hunting and war, women give blood. It is the word ne because it closes the room of a woman’s body to men.” The widow places her hands into the water and says, “Good. You are alive. You and I are alive.”
The girl’s mind floats.
This is not her first bleeding.
Her first bleeding came at age seven, after her fourth rape, four years before her family exploded before her eyes. She had been buying paper. Her mother was across the street at the post. She could still see her mother even as her own body was yanked by a soldier and dragged behind a wall. Her mother searched and searched, nearly losing her mind, until a soldier marched her mother out of town at gunpoint. Having been left for dead in an alley, she lay there for an entire day, into dusk’s falling, thinking, Death is a gift sometimes. Almost sacred. Like a door to something beautiful and profound.
But she did not die. And so it was that on that day, shivering in the alley, her hand moved instinctively to her rose of being and there was blood. Of course there was blood; but this blood was not the blood of soldiers’ forced entrances, dried and day old and smelling of what goes wrong in men. Triggered early, this blood moved through her like a warm river. New and wet and dark and smelling lightly of metal. Reminding her of steeltraps. Of animals. In this way, when what she probably needed was warmth, food, water, and more than anything else in the world, the tenderness of a woman, the quiet hush and caress of her mother, she reached down and found only her own small being, red and
The widow weaves the importance of expression and representation into the smallest details of an ordinary life. She milks the goat and steals the chickens’ eggs while telling stories of archetypal animals. She lights the fire and cleans the dishes while reciting poetry of love or war. She walks miles to the nearest village and brings back underground writings and photos, the same as milk and bread and sugar and coffee and ink and paper, making sure to detail the seriousness of these suppressed objects. She is careful to explain to the girl how it is that human expression is the highest value in life, but so too is death, in this place and time they find themselves inhabiting. The girl takes in everything, rarely speaking, her listening and watching a kind of devouring.
One day the girl is taking a bath and calls out. The widow comes into the tiny bathroom and the water surrounding the girl’s legs is clouded with crimson. She slaps the girl in the face and smiles and kisses her on the cheeks. She says, “May you bloom.” The girl doesn’t flinch. The widow tells her, “This is the first language of your body. It is the word ne . When you bleed each month, as when the moon comes and goes in its journey, you leave the world of men. You enter the body of all women,who are connected to all of nature.” The girl asks, “Why is it the word ne ?” The widow responds, “When you bleed, this word is more powerful than any word you could ever speak. It is a blood word. It binds you to animals and trees and the moon and the sun. Where men take blood in the world in hunting and war, women give blood. It is the word ne because it closes the room of a woman’s body to men.” The widow places her hands into the water and says, “Good. You are alive. You and I are alive.”
The girl’s mind floats.
This is not her first bleeding.
Her first bleeding came at age seven, after her fourth rape, four years before her family exploded before her eyes. She had been buying paper. Her mother was across the street at the post. She could still see her mother even as her own body was yanked by a soldier and dragged behind a wall. Her mother searched and searched, nearly losing her mind, until a soldier marched her mother out of town at gunpoint. Having been left for dead in an alley, she lay there for an entire day, into dusk’s falling, thinking, Death is a gift sometimes. Almost sacred. Like a door to something beautiful and profound.
But she did not die. And so it was that on that day, shivering in the alley, her hand moved instinctively to her rose of being and there was blood. Of course there was blood; but this blood was not the blood of soldiers’ forced entrances, dried and day old and smelling of what goes wrong in men. Triggered early, this blood moved through her like a warm river. New and wet and dark and smelling lightly of metal. Reminding her of steeltraps. Of animals. In this way, when what she probably needed was warmth, food, water, and more than anything else in the world, the tenderness of a woman, the quiet hush and caress of her mother, she reached down and found only her own small being, red and
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