Voices: Creative Non Fiction Shows Us A World

 

About 40 years ago, things started to change. A movement began. It was not as if its adherents started something new. Not at all. The fact is the movement has been around as long as people had. In fact, one of the greatest early pieces of writing, Plato's Symposium, is the perfect example. If you are not familiar with this dialogue, it is not surprising. It is almost never taught. It is too volatile a topic. The topic is love. But not just any love.

Here is how it is described in wikipedia:

Love is examined in a sequence of speeches by men attending a symposium, or drinking party. Each man must deliver an encomium, a speech in praise of Love (Eros). The party takes place at the house of the tragedian Agathon in Athens. Socrates in his speech asserts that the highest purpose of love is to become a philosopher or, literally, a lover of wisdom. The dialogue has been used as a source by social historians seeking to throw light on life in ancient Athens, in particular upon sexual behavior, and the symposium as an institution.

Reading these words, it does not seem at all that this text would be controversial. But what the words hide, of course, is the love that dare not speak its name. The fact is the symposium is about homosexual love. Each of the speakers takes up the topic and tries to give it the praise it deserves. In Ancient Greece, it was simply a given that men of means had a homosexual lover. There was no stigma. In fact, it would be a stigma not to do so. So it is no surprise that this text has not been taught in schools. 

And yet, in what is a wonderful irony, the very term, platonic love, that so many these days encourage people too engage in, stems from this very dialogue. In other words, those who get up in front of crowds and tell people that the only form of acceptable love prior to marriage is Platonic love,  do not know, perhaps (clearly, the actions of some of the most demonstrative adherents to this principle in public may have been winking in irony in private) that the love that Aristophanes and others defines as Platonic love is homosexual love, pure and simple.

But the movement I am actually talking about right now, has nothing to do with this. The movement I am foregrounding at this moment has a name that could not be spoken not all that long ago. It is called creative nonfiction. 40 years ago, people who applied many of the techniques of fiction to essays that were nonfiction were excoriated. The were called to task for trying to undermine the very principles of writing and facts. They were ripped to shreds by the conservative writers who called such a movement subversive and anti-rational. 

Now, however, things have changed. Creative nonfiction is now offered at many of the top universities in the US. Its principle of using details, dialogues, and all sorts of things the writer knows might not be "true" to facts is accepted practice. Why? Because once it became clear that history and politics and much else was often written by the victors, the idea of objective reporting began to be questioned. I am of two minds about this (and much else to honest). Much of today's political discourse does not know it, but it is creative nonfiction. It picks and chooses some details and mashes them together and calls this accurate. It invents things that are simply not true. It has forced political discourse into a fictional structure. On both sides,. Or I should say all sides. And we have lost a great deal sine this seem snow to be the only available option to newsrooms that face an economic bottom line rather tan a moral imperative.

So I think there is room for creative nonfiction at the table, but it should not be the only guest. Traditional prose written traditionally as objective assessment also deserves a spot too.It is sad, however, that many who take creative non fiction t0 task for its inaccuracies do not do the same for much of what is called accurate reporting. 

What follows is a creative nonfiction essay that serves two purposes. It represents prose that has come out of the closet. It revels in its fictional structure and details. Yet it is nonfiction. It tells the story of a young woman discovering her sexuality and then her her sexual attraction to her own gender. It is honest, and courageous, and something very few of us have the talent to do. I am grateful that she has allowed me to share this with you.  

Note: the essay that follows contains graphic language. If this would offend you, then please do not read it.
But as  anyone who studies rhetoric knows, what I have just said is the verbal equivalent to holding a red cape in front of a bull. I imagine my warning will entice many readers to forge ahead just to see how graphic it is. But if this happens, and you are offended I hope  you will not critique me on the grounds of putting words out that some students across the world (and others too)  could read this and be shocked. I hope this essay, like others I have posted on this site, will generate very different responses. If this is so, I hope the focus will be not on the content. You already know what this is; instead I hope the comments will focus on the way the writer has chosen to tell her story.

In other words, it this an effective essay?

 If someone submitted this to a college or university should it automatically preclude them from being admitted?

 If so, then why?  I would very much like people to address this question or to say why they think it is effective at showing us,and by us I mean anyone, no just hose who share her sexual preference, why it is an effective piece of writing.

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''On or about December 1910 human character changed,'' Virginia Woolf 

 

I was 10 and a half years old when My Vagina started crawling. She was an adventurer, My Vagina. At the time when she started worming around, she couldn’t even style her own hair… because she had none. She was (without her consent) caressed for the first time when I was 11; and pleasurably moaned, as I played “Ride me! I am a horse!” with the next-door neighbor, a year later. She had plan for none of this to happen, but once she learned to speak, she admitted to me in secrecy that she had enjoyed it all.

My Vagina and I, together, officially entered the heterosexual market the day I decided to shave the 4 flimsy hairs my armpit had being hiding for quite a long time. While at first they were an indicator of my newfound “womanhood” (and so a source of pride), they had become a boy repellent. And although they were almost invisible to the eye, they were still there—they had to go! Along with my underarm hair went My Vagina’s self-esteem. Poor Vagina decided she was ugly, smelly, too sensitive, and inappropriately invitin­g; so, she decided to quit the initiative and hide between my legs, waiting for something or someone to pamper her in concealment.  But she stopped waiting-- and instead buried her desires-- that sunny day in the pool when she suddenly drowned in the redness of her own blood. Her colors were beautiful, but she had being told they were not the type of colors you play with, or even look at. “And if a man shall lie with a woman having her sickness, and shall uncover her nakedness; he hath discovered her fountain, and she hath uncovered the fountain of her blood: and both of them shall be cut off from among their people.” Leviticus 20:18. Yes. It was the Word of the Lord! The image of a white male God had said: "Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow.” Hence, after being caught red-handed (and despite sharing the shades of a scarlet rose) she aimed for whiteness­. Don’t judge her though; I aimed for whiteness too. Don’t we all?

 Fortunately, I did not have to aim too high. For me, whiteness had being a “gift” of genetics conferred by the small concentration of melanin my skin carried. Privileged by nature, I learned that whiteness was not just a physical attribute; whiteness was a verb…and, perhaps most importantly, an asset. Doing/being white demanded an unusual (mind the redundancy) demand of respect. Because of my color, or lack thereof, I could walk around without being called “cholo,” “llama,” or “india.” I could pride myself on the fact that I could speak English and that my native language was not “Quechua,” “Aymara,” (or any other Amerindian language) but proper Spanish.  Because, even in a country where 60% of the population is indigenous, excessive melanin is the enemy, not the standard. My whiteness depicted my lifestyle of commodity: I could afford private education, a non-white maid, and a car. And even if I couldn’t afford any of it, my whiteness still demanded adoration. Not even the President, Evo Morales, held such natural status, for his skin-color belonged to the darker side of the spectrum. Truth is, though, that my achromatic pigmentation impeccably covered a reality of indigenous ancestry I had managed to deny. To myself and others, I was comparable to an American: light-skinned, green-eyed, and blonde. Fact is, me being white in Bolivia was, quite literally, a cultural illusion. (Imagine my surprise when The United States of America decided I was not white. I had been redefined! I suddenly belonged to an underprivileged minority…and, although my  pigmentation stayed the same, my Whiteness –and its privilege-- was gone).

Yet, my status in Bolivia was later downgraded by my sexually deviant ways. It happened once My Vagina was resurrected from its time of quiescence and realized she found love and satisfaction in the curves of other women.  An “illegitimate” love replaced home for an empty house, best friends for bashers, and self-love for self-pity. Mortals dug into my psyche in search of repair, and then watched me contemplate suicide. They were no help, because I needed none (something they did not seem to understand). I was ill not because I thought pussy tasted better, but because they had expropriated my identity from its only owner, confiscated and redistributed the only things I could have claimed to be my own—my body and feelings—for public use. 

My school, the private catholic institution I attended for 14 years, made public my wish to depart from the story of Adam and Eve when my parents were called to the principal’s office to discuss my inappropriate behavior and its consequences. I am glad I didn’t see my parent’s face when they insinuated “dyke” was what they had created. To my parents, “Dyke” was an alien concept; as foreign as the reason why I was a “dyke” in the first place. Yet to me, “dyke” was a beautiful word.

And I was not the only one who liked the terminology. In 2002, a small group of lesbian feminists decided to make an educational film on sexuality in Bolivia. Actors and spectators were beaten and tear-gassed by police officers in a brutal attempt to regulate morality while proclaiming themselves heroes against perversion. Because in Bolivia, sexuality is for a man and a woman put together by nature; and sex is what he does to her when nobody is looking. So if nature belongs to the heterosexual, and the heterosexual belongs to nature, these women, and I, were synthetic. I wish more people realized how much of our lives is actually synthetic.

Traditions are the type of thing everyone in Bolivia embraces. Like venerating clay statues –with abnormally large penises—when you go inside the silver mines of Potosi, because they represent the Devil-that-governs-the-underworld-and-keeps-you-from-dying (if you don’t talk about God while mining). The Devil also dislikes women; they are not supposed to go inside the mine to work, because they bring bad luck. The women who do work in the mine were granted “special consent” by a Commitee after their husbands got sick, died, or vanished. But the men that work in the mines are “machos.” My country has a bittersweet relationship to “machos,” condemned in discourse but supported in practice. All of this and more, is what we call “Culture”.

My country lives, as many others, in a permanent state of delusion. Women and men are equal, says the law, but those are just words on a piece of paper. In the city, (even in the southern district of La Paz where the progressive “white” crowd enjoys a “less primitive” lifestyle) gender inequality is so customary that we have become immune to it; enraptured by women’s increasing visibility, we overstate progress and undercut the real need of it. So in a way, every time we say, “we have it all now”, our dreams and our reality overlap. Then again, we are immune to many things. Poverty is like that movie you used to cry to when you were young. But now you have watched it so many times it has lost all meaning. And even if you encounter more than eight beggars in a 5-minute walk, you have managed to stand aloof from them. (Often, you hold your breath and speed up…because they smell too bad)

Sometimes My Vagina complains too much. She doesn’t know how her fellow bolivian vaginas feel in the urban peripheries—the high lands that, at 15,000 feet above sea level, are cold, gray, windswept and home to thousands of women. Vagina, I tell her, I know you hate tampons, but at least you have access to them; I know you hate that red shit of yours that clouds up your lips at night, but at least you can rinse yourself with water; I know you are scared of infections, but at least, if you get one, a lady-doctor will make it go away.

There is so much we take for granted.

Vagina, we are lucky.

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  Note: 'On or about December 1910 human character changed,'' Virginia Woolf 

I would argue tat while Woolf engages in a bit of creative nonfiction here, she was essentially correct. WWI loomed and everything was about to change. I would like to say that since then human character changed again. And this time there is a specific date. Again, the traditional description of the epoque changing event from Wikipedia

The Stonewall riots were a series of spontaneous, violent demonstrations by members of the gay community against a police raid that took place in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, at the Stonewall Inn, in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City.

 This past weekend in Charlottesville,  a Pride Day took place in the center of town. It was a celebration instead of a riot. Both before and after the vent took place,  I received more emails in my box than I have for any event or issue that I have ever received. Hundreds of outpourings of support. These words indicate that the sacrifices of those who came out, literally and figuratively back then, paved the way for a celebration that Charottesville has rarely seen. A whole new language of acceptance. Would that this were true of so many other issues facing the country today.