Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: patriarchy

  • how tis.

    The courage… to get through life without this sense of home, without this refuge, whilst surviving a world which exploits our mothering kindness and assaults us for our femininity, is untold. But many many many women of my acquaintance will know exactly what I mean. I crave this home. Built with somebody who will not require that I mother and coach and be patient with him, that I endure his unkindness while he waits to work out whether he wants to grow. The difficulty, the sheer plain flat out arduous difficulty, of making our way through the years without this comfort, this kindness and safety, this home.

    I don’t have any children and have nearly no family. I have never had a man who was as kind to me as I was to him. I have been transferring my energy to men, all my life, since I looked after my dear daffy immature dad when I was six. Men you don’t even know we are giants who walk among you, we are so secret in our courage and our eternal resilience and good favour, we are a lot of the time unsupported and alone, we are bold.

    Respect women. Believe women. Support women. Listen to women.


    .

    “Happiness doesn’t lie in conspicuous consumption and the relentless amassing of useless crap. Happiness lies in the person sitting beside you and your ability to talk to them. Happiness is clear-headed human interaction and empathy. Happiness is home. And home is not a house — home is a mythological concept. It is a state of mind. A place of communion and unconditional love. It is where, when you cross its threshold, you finally feel at peace.” ~ Dennis Lehane

  • walloped

    I went to have my hearing tested. This became necessary because a man had walloped me across the face: a man I loved. Needless to say, no man has ever hit me before and I’m damned if any man will again.

    Needless to say, I no longer love him.

    It was my fault as well. Not the blow, which remains inexcusable. The overheated situation in which it came. He had told me, all of a sudden over our omelettes at my place one summer morning, he thought he was falling in love with someone else. I refused to discuss it, threw him out within ten minutes, wouldn’t take his calls. So he went out on the fuck.

    The girl he’d found was married already yet carried condoms in her wallet. She was the kind of girl who rings a guy she likes very early in the morning to say, Hey. I just noticed I’m actually right in your street. I bought an extra coffee by mistake. What you haven’t had breakfast yet? Shall I drop round?

    Within three weeks it had run its course and she had dwindled to an obligation he still felt he should commit: he wanted to ferry her to drug therapy to make sure she would go; he felt if he cut her off, she might hurt herself. All that dreary jazz. He and I began to talk, gingerly. I was outraged and so hurt. One day we met on the riverbank and each brought a beer. We talked searchingly. Then he made a remark about her which I won’t repeat. It stung me to the bone: about her beauty. I threw my empty bottle at his feet and stalked away. He threw his empty bottle at me.

    Oh, we were unadmirable. Toiling in our longterm pain and both of us tipped by this turn in events into our oldest, most dysfunctional patterns. Fear of abandonment. Fear of violence. We argued that night, having followed each other down the street to his house, shouting like sailors, and then I stormed out and went tramping down the street with my hands stuffed in my pockets, muttering with rage. I fell in with a beautiful, soulful gay guy who was walking ahead of me. He said, Are you ok. I said, I’m not. Something horrible has happened and I feel furious and hurt. We started talking as we walked on and he went into a late-night shop and bought a two-euro bottle of vodka and we sat in the doorway of a Lebanese restaurant on the main road after they had closed and smoked a joint, my first ganja in five years, and drank our vodka. We went to an infamous dance club and talked and danced. Then I went back round my betrayer’s house, stoked up on alcohol and rage. I let someone let me in at the street door and jogged up the stairs and terrified him by pounding on his inner, apartment door. He opened it and I barged in. Where is she? I know she’s here.

    He was saying, She’s not here, Cathoel, I told you. I’m not seeing her anymore. But I wouldn’t listen, I couldn’t hear. I stalked about his tiny one room apartment spewing out my rage and pain. He was saying, You have to go, you can’t just come shoving your way into my private space. We can talk tomorrow. But I wouldn’t go. I wanted to make him as angry as I was. And I succeeded. He took my by the hair and tried to drag me towards the door. “You have to go!” This was more or less what I had wanted: vindication, proof, a release of the intoxicating vigour we all know, the most dangerous drug, that which fuels every mass shooting: righteous indignation. Oh, how dare he touch me. Oh, how he was a man.

    We began to wrestle. I imagine we woke the neighbours. I couldn’t stop from goading him but when he got goaded I screamed, almost triumphantly, Let go of me, let go, you brute.

    I remember in the delirium and loss of every control of this powerful night the tiny mouthfeel of the satisfying word ‘brute’ fat and meaty in my mouth.

    I said something about his bed, the bed he built for us and had now illegitimately shared. He pushed me onto it. I wouldn’t fall and he pushed me so hard I later found cuts along the sweet inside of the backs of my knees, that private, tender cave whose name I have so long loved to wonder about. Why is there no word in English for the inside of the elbow, the back of the knee? Do other cultures have a better way to love themselves than we do? The cuts took weeks to heal and then I had angry, flame-red welts for months. I flung my hands up in terror. He had gone into the stratosphere at last, this bullied child whose father whistled for him as though he had been a dog, this long-legged stranger chased through the village schoolyard for his sensitivity and height by his entire class all at once. “They hunted me,” he had told me, on one of the few occasions we talked about it. Now he drew his arm back and walloped. He hit me across the face. He hit me! Across the face! The signature that I am me. He hit me so hard a bruise rose up days later and stained me purplish green for several weeks. I wore it with an angry kind of prideful shame. I felt marked: a woman, after all. I was incensed. I got up and grabbed the most precious thing he had: his laptop computer, on which everything he’d made was stashed. I hurled it out the window and it came crashing into the parking lot below. He left me then. Ran outside and began peering over the edge. I locked him out. I was cold with terror. I thought he might kill me. I had that thought. I locked the balcony door behind him and this gave me the time to gather my things and get out of there. The man who had hit me was wringing his hands, he was crying, for his fucking computer, my ears ringing and my head on fire, I left him there and ran away and ran home with my cotton trousers torn across the front as though I had been raped, I saw people looking at me in the dark and then looking away, I was saying to myself, I will never forgive you for hitting me, I can’t believe you hit me, I’ll never forgive that you made me an object of desperate pity to all these strangers, I will never forgive.

    When I was gone the man whose computer I had destroyed had to climb down the scaffolding on the building and knock at a neighbour’s window, and the neighbour let him in, and he had to get a locksmith before he could gain access again to his own apartment, and I suppose he was carrying the smashed computer under his arm, but at the time, I didn’t care. Not that I didn’t care: I felt vindicated, I was glad.

    This was two years ago. We slowly tried to recover, we built on our inimical love, we tried to comfort each other: but it could not work out. That and the baby we had lost and some other griefs had stained us to the marrow so that like a series of transparent microscope slides you could have sliced our love thinly and seen the mark of these traumatic events in every cell.

    Now I had noticed my hearing was fuzzy. I wasn’t sure if this was just the flu. The Berlin flu this autumn that doesn’t go away. It lingers. I noticed because I was dating. I met men in bars and struggled to hear what they were saying. I was always leaning in, forming my hand into a trumpet like some old warhorse chaperone in a turban and lace in a country house in England before the Great War.

    The ear, nose, and throat specialist was Russian. He spoke careful German. I confessed my foul story. “Es tut mir sehr leid für Sie,” he said, courteously: I am very sorry this happened to you. I said, I’m not sure whether the blow might have damaged – my hearing (it was hard to get the words out, hard to let this thought form in my mind) – or whether it might just be age. You know?

    My Russian doctor widened his eyes. Sitting in his white lab coat he said, “But you are young! You are a beautiful young woman!” He drew his stool between my knees and separated them with his own. He leaned in on the pretence of examining me and said, “Sie schwitzen!”

    You’re sweating.

    “Yes,” I said, shrinking back but already questioning myself. This must surely be normal? His assistant behind us gave no sign of dismay when he put himself between my knees. “I rode here on my bike,” I said, helplessly explanatory, almost apologetic: “It’s warm, once you get moving.”

    The Russian doctor took a clean handkerchief from his pocket. He padded it tenderly up and down my neck, behind the ear. Then he returned it to his hidden, inner pocket, carrying my DNA, and leaning in to prod his old-fashioned steel devices into my left ear and then my right, one device after another, while I sat there with my knees parted for him unable to say a word.

    There’s nothing wrong with your hearing, he told me, later in the hallway. I was sitting under a Turkish carpet on a loom which spelled out his name, with the prefix, ‘Dr’, in wool. His assistant had put me in headphones and tested which tones I could hear, and – as they grew louder – how soon. He showed me his chart. “This is normal hearing. And this is you. I think you just have some inflammation from your cold. Actually your hearing is very good.”

    Thank you, I said. I could not wait to get away. The trees outside the surgery window were shifting in a silent wind. The doctor twinkled at me. “A pleasure,” he promised. “And if you need to come back again, for any reason at all – dann zahlen Sie gar nix. Then, you pay nothing whatsoever.” And so I had to thank him again.

  • by force

    In an Italian cafe I saw two eight-year-olds locked in a passionate embrace. I had to blink. What on earth? On closer examination he had her locked, her neck was rigid, he had hold of her head in both his hands.

    Their lips were pressed on each other, hard and still. It was a Holywood endeavour, something they had seen and now copied; not something felt. I felt frozen, as did she. After a long time, perhaps a minute, the girl brought both her hands up and tried to prise him off her face. He lifted his head. She clapped both palms over her mouth to protect herself. But it was no use. He came in again, swooping on her, an unpleasant grin of entitlement souring his face like a sneer. Boys aren’t born with this expression. He kissed her again, if we could really call it a kiss. It was an occupation, a tiny, private siege that shamed her in this sunny public place.

    This is the first hot day in five weeks in Berlin’s climate disordered summer. It has rained and rained and it’s as cloudy as winter, that long grey fleece. Everybody was out. In the garden of the cafe people sat plunging long-handled spoons into gouts of melting ice cream, large men stirred tiny espressos with tiny tin spoons. The girl endured her assault in full view of everyone. So far as I could tell, I was the only one who noticed.

    I sat in an agony of empathic shame. This was the beginning for her and things would get worse. They had for me. I felt my legs tauten into springs and wanted to rush over there, but – to my horror – the thought of this tiny boy’s scorn frightened me and I was unable to protect her and could not even approach them.

    He broke it off just as the mother, mother of one or maybe – horrifying – both came back from the bathroom visit he had opportunistically expanded. The boy got onto his bike and bent his head. He was shorter than her, when she stood up, and her long caramel strands of hair hid her face. I saw the mother say something cheerful and I saw the girl trying to smile. This is what we breed by rearing our boys on porn, our girls on romantic comedies where persistent stalking always pays off and no means please. I paid my bill to the sneering Italian waiter whose courtesy deteriorates the more I am friendly to him and I always forget. Cycling home I thought about the feminist truism that patriarchy wounds men, too, and thought how different these wounds sometimes seem.

  • the boast of Christmas past

    Last year and the year before that and four years ago too we went down on the train to West Germany, to a tiny village lying under the skirts of the old woods. This is where my sweetheart was born. His father was born in the same house and to me the village, the house, the family symbolised most of what I’ve longed for all my life – the continuity and cosiness of grandmother living upstairs and now sleeping in the graveyard, the grooming visits, where we trimmed her candles and scattered flowers for her; the dog racing joyously through unbroken snow; the stacks of firewood and the window dense with flickering lights.

    I felt so welcomed the very first year, when he and I had known each other only six months; his mother was kind and his father jovial yet somehow forbidding and she had saved for me the tree to decorate, “because you are an artist.” I persuaded him to go down there early in the season so we could hang out in his family, since mine is so fraught; and on December 9, 2012, four years ago today, we woke up at the other end of our long train ride and opened the door on a perfect world. Here is what I wrote:

    Waking up in a tiny German village. It has snowed and the snow extends away across the fields. The woods stand shoulder to shoulder up the hill. Opening the door I can hear church bells howling like dogs, everything is beautiful because everything is covered in snow, a white democracy. The phrase forms in my mind and a series of sour images ensues: what is white about a democracy? Everything in Germany is tinctured with its history, the way everything in Australia cries out black stories. Nonetheless this fairytale landscape has a hold of my mind, I feel relaxed and browsing, last night by the candleglow Christmas market I found a bookshop displaying eleven different editions of the tales of the Brothers Grimm in its front window. Tiny sparrows dart at the small wooden house outside pecking at seeds. A fierce wind has sprung up from, apparently, the Arctic Circle and I close the door thankfully. Good morning, winter world.

    Then last year, a huge family shindig. I should put ‘family’ in inverted commas because part of the substance of the fight – the potatoes perhaps, if not the meat – was that I was not part of the family, being a newcomer; therefore he had no right to bring me into important family discussions.

    This important family discussion was about money, aren’t they all. Previous family visits had been laidback, shambolic, tilted round long evening board games and wine. Now something was brewing, but I couldn’t work out what. All week we’d been trying to work out why everybody seemed so tense. Then January second I stumbled out of bed and down the dark hallway to find my honey and his father locked in fiery argument.

    I sat down and took my partner’s hand. To be locked inside a fire is grievous indeed. I had never heard this family shouting before, though the father’s a bit of a bully: our very first visit I had called him out on his treatment of his son, when the man whistled for him to bring something; He’s not a dog, I said, and the old man said: Doch. (“Au contraire.”) This visit he had been mocking us for our failure to produce a child; the sister, a thistly blonde, was swollen with her third and we had lost our baby and been unable, thus far, to bring forth a living sibling. The proud grandfather sat with his injured foot up on an ottoman, making my partner’s dog beg for walnuts; his son said, please don’t spoil my dog, it is I who will have to live with him, and the father said: “Well. If I had a grandchild, I would be spoiling the child. But as there is no grandchild…”

    These coarse country people occur in my family as well. Ours also drink too much and hoard things and are suspicious of fresh food. All week we had been walking in on whispered conferences which urgently suspended and then remained hanging in the air, swinging like baubles. Now the underwater fire had burst forth. It was a question of inheritance. They had cooked up an arrangement which seemed to me bitterly unfair as well as financially unwise, and I said so.

    My own family finds me outspoken, too. It inconveniences them to the point of injury. When I flew home for my father’s funeral and suggested, in sentences very tentative and clothed in sticky tact, a less sentimental poem for the ceremony, my brother said flatly, “That’s not open for discussion, Cathoel.” I said, “But – ” and he ranted, “See! this is why I was saying it would be better if you didn’t come back – you’re just this person who comes in and changes everything.”

    “You don’t belong in this family,” he had also said, on another occasion, and when I retailed this story after Dad’s funeral to my friend she said, bracingly, “This is perfectly true, of course. The only difference is, he doesn’t realise that it’s a compliment.”

    “She doesn’t belong in this discussion,” the father said now: “because you two are not properly married.” Well, I told him, wounded and enraged. When your daughter got married – it was on two days’ notice and in the town hall, because they’d worked out at the last minute they would save eight thousand euros in tax by becoming officially a couple – I had to borrow a set of unwashed clothes from the bride, else I’d have had to go along in my overalls. It wasn’t exactly love’s young dream.

    Well, but you have no children, he blustered, so you don’t really belong. And thus silenced me with pain.

    I told him some home truths and he told me to shut up. We had never spoken to each other like this before. I got louder. So did the dad, but I suspect everyone is so used to his roaring and his barked commands that they barely noticed. Afterwards I was accused of having said things that were beyond the reach of my imperfect German vocabulary. I reminded the father that he had told me several times to halt den Schnabel, hold your muzzle. They were so outraged at my insurrection “under my roof, to me, as host! in my Own Home!” that they had no room left over to contemplate what might be due to a guest, a vulnerable guest trying to celebrate their daughter’s umpteenth glowing pregnancy, a person separated from her own family and far from home. When I first saw the daughter, clomping on her sore ankles and complaining about the weight, I had followed her outside and asked that we could hug each other. “I’m so happy for you. It’s just painful for me, kind of, because we tried so hard – but I’m happy for you. I just wanted to give you a hug, you and your belly, and try to get myself used to it.” She embraced me with tears in her eyes. Now all of that was forgotten. I had called the messy patriarch of this outlander tribe a bully, to his face. I had said, inspired by rage and a kind of foaming disgust at his harassment and meanness, Your son – is a real man. He has manhood. I have seen him do terrible things and then hold himself to account. I’ve seen him struggling to learn and to make changes in himself. You should respect him. You should treat him with respect.

    I think we can’t bear when a woman speaks out. When a woman questions things. How dare she, how could she, and who does she think she is. The day after the fight we caught the train home to Berlin. I went up to the father, sitting at the table with his arms folded, and put out my hand. After a moment, he took it. I said, thank you for your hospitality and for having us in your home. The next morning a phone call. And the word, Hausverbot. This means, I forbid you my house. It is kind of a ‘don’t ever darken my door.’ In German, my partner said, very serious. You would give Hausverbot to a repeatedly violent pub guest who started a knife fight and stabbed somebody. Or to someone who’d been stealing in your store.

    The son, of course (they assured him) was welcome. But do not bring that woman under our roof. I spent January dissolved in tears, before distaste began to displace the other pain. You don’t belong in this family. All year long the wound festered. My father died and I went home. I confided how I was dreading this Christmas, worse than all the Christmases before. Afterwards my mother, in a bout of generosity, offered to send us both to Morocco for a holiday to replace the painful season. In an ancient Islamic city we could forget about the festivities we’d not share. We could put aside the sore points like the pregnant sister who didn’t bother giving either of us a gift, and whose kangaroo skin rug we had lingered over for an hour in the ugg boots store, wanting to bring her something luscious and Australian and Scandinavian for her comfy home, stroking every skin to find which was the softest. They are soft like the tender belly fur of a little cat. A day later, when all the piles of gifts had been opened and I was putting mine away, I asked her: hey what did you give me? I can’t seem to find it. Oh, she said – I just never thought of it. This hurt, and I told her so; not that she has to give a gift, but that she didn’t think. Now somehow this long-ago frisson of discomfort has been revived and painted glossy and put in the front window. We, who brought an extravagant gift we could ill afford, are designated materialistic, and grasping. My outspokenness is insufferable. My partner is greedy, because he feels sad and hurt at being all but cut out of his parents’ will. Last week the father, tricked past his pride by the wife who pretended his son had called first, finally rang. “I lift the Hausverbot,” he said, grandly. “You are very welcome and I hope you’ll come to us. But please don’t come to Christmas – your sister and her husband wouldn’t like it.”

  • Mothers Day

    Want to know why I dislike Mothers Day? We were in a cafe, crowded against the wall by a spreading table of one family, all hunched over in their chairs: grandfather, husband, brother, wife, and two small blonde girl children. Mother sat between her two children. Their demand on her attention was constant. “Oh, that’s lovely, now why don’t you draw me a great big house where all those people can live?” The men talked amongst themselves, playing a game of cards.

    Mother was not engaged with the card game, she was busy mothering.

    Lunch arrived. A plate was set down before each adult: big breakfast, steak and chips, eggs benedict, big breakfast. The mother divided her breakfast in three. Clean white plates were set either side of her for the girls and she had to ask the smaller daughter to keep her fingers out of the eggs as she parsed and divided a great mound of bacon. Her enormously fat husband and groovy dad and quiet, spare-spoken brother tucked in. Just as the mother had finished dividing her breakfast the littler girl wanted the toilet. All three females got up and headed out back.

    We had finished our coffees. We got up to go. At the doorway I doubled back. Three men, oblivious, satisfied, stuffing their faces. “Guys,” I said, spreading my hands, striving for humour. “How come Mum is doing all the parenting – even on Mothers Day?”

    They crouched into chuckles. A knowing guffaw from the husband, who looked up and said, “Aw, but…. she had two hours lying in bed this morning, the kids brought her a cuppa tea.” I lit my fury with the fat of his land. He just looked so pleased with himself, so well-fed. His wife had stayed slender and groomed herself, even as she produced offspring for his lineage. “Oho!” I said. “Two whole hours! Out of 365 days! You’re right, you’re not sexist at all. But hey, better watch out she doesn’t get used to that, right.”

    He smirked. He knows the world tilts his way. I put my hand on his plump shoulder. “Take care of your lovely lady, dude.” To no avail, no doubt. I wish I had spoken to the mother instead. I wish I didn’t live in a consuming culture where we can just buy things to make up for all we don’t do, make room for, allow, feed, feel. Mothers Day – like Earth Day – if you’re serious, why not make it every day.