Women in Dark Times (4 page)

‘What was it like to photograph Marilyn?’ I waved him off and went on my way. But the question would not be denied. What was it like to photograph her? It was like watching a print come up in the developer. The latent image was there – it needed just her time and temperature controls to bring it into being. It was a stroboscopic display, and all the photographer had to do was to stop time at any given instant and Marilyn would bring forth a new image.
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As if an icon were to put not just herself but also the process of her own construction as an image under a magnifying glass (stroboscopic refers to creating movement out of a set of still images). Thus Monroe turned overexposure – the most photographed woman in the world – into part of her art. To this extent, those who suggest she was wholly subject to that image, and controlled by it, could not be farther from the truth. ‘She could call the shots, dictate the pace,’ wrote Arnold, ‘be in total control.’
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This is not, however, control as it is most commonly understood. Their intimate collaboration involved something different. ‘It might have been easier to set a specific situation, to tell her what to do, to move her through it quickly, click-click and finish. This would have been efficient, but would have had pre-set results.’
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‘It was,’ Arnold continues, ‘the unpredictable in herself that she used.’
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None of the women I discuss in this book falls into the trap of responding to the worst of their lives with a counter-affirmation of power. They have other and better ideas. Luxemburg is famous for her critique of the authority of party and state (a ‘night-watchman state’ as she put it with reference to post-revolutionary Russia).
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Instead she yearned –
Sehnsucht
or ‘yearning’ was one of her favourite German words – for another type of energy, like that of the mass strike, which she described as flowing like a broad billow, splitting into multifarious streams, bubbling forth and then disappearing beneath the earth (she was never more poetic than in her accounts of this other form of power). Monroe, too, felt herself moving between two different realms. Her unpublished letters and journals show a woman using her privacy to scavenge beneath the veneer of reason. This is just one of many extracts which show Monroe not just confronting the dark side of herself but lifting that struggle to another type of insight: ‘fear/wonderment/the wondering of something – ask it questions – the unbelievableness of the actuality if it happened/or the pleading and promising of anything – reasoning – which is more conventional.’
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Pleading and promising are forms of bad faith. They ask and offer too much. Like Monroe in her photo sessions, life is unpredictable (far more than the content of any role, it was her performance in which Monroe placed her faith). No amount of conventional reasoning will withstand what is unbelievable or unexpected about the world. Ask questions, or we might say keep an open mind.

This is not an easy realm to enter. It can break you apart. ‘I feel,’ Monroe wrote, ‘as though it’s all happening to someone right next to me. I’m close. I can feel it, I can hear it, but it isn’t really me.’
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For Luxemburg, life ‘was not inside me, not here where I am, but somewhere far off . . . off beyond the rooftops’.
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At moments like these the resonances between the women are uncanny. You do not find yourself – or simply another self – when you enter these regions of the mind. For Salomon, the only way to survive the suicides in her family was to people her inner world with the dead by becoming each and every one. She had to multiply herself, making room for all those who – according to a rather different way of thinking – could be said to have most utterly betrayed her. She had to remember on their behalf. In this she could not be further from the forms of amnesia that would scar Europe after both of its wars: thus Tony Judt writes of the pall of forgetfulness that descends over Europe after 1945, the ease with which Europe cast the dead ‘ “others” of its past far out of mind’,
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a forgetting which he sees as preparing the ground for the ethnic hatreds, the sectarian violence, the hostility to immigrants to follow.

Entering this domain is also, therefore, a type of accountability. Not one of these women deludes themselves that violence simply belongs to somebody or somewhere else. On this Monroe is unequivocal. ‘Everyone has violence in them,’ she states baldly in her personal notes of 1955. ‘I am violent.’
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The critique of reason or the logos, as it is sometimes called, brings with it no false presumption of innocence. As Angela Carter writes in the introduction to her short story collection
Wayward Girls and Wicked Women
, we find it very hard as women ever to blame ourselves.
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In this book, you will hear much praise for women, but nowhere will you find the idea, entertained by some feminisms, that women are simply nicer than men. These are women who exist – who know that they exist – on more than one plane, whose rage against the iniquities of the world meshes with their own darkest hours. ‘Why,’ Luxemburg writes to her young lover, Kostya Zetkin, in 1907, as she wanders the streets of London, ‘am I plunging again into dangers and frightening new situations in which I am sure to be lost?’
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‘Somewhere in the depths an indistinct desire is coming to light, a desire to plunge into this whirlpool.’
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For me this is the creative paradox they offer. Their indictment of injustice requires no internal whitewash of their minds. They are – as women often are, I would argue – the only partly self-declared psychoanalysts of their moment and of themselves. Their reckoning with the unconscious is an inherent part of, rather than an obstacle to, their acutest vision.

*

Such leeway is not of course always possible. There are acts of cruelty towards women which wipe out – seem at least partly aimed at wiping out – all freedom of mental life. Incest would be one of them, described by psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas as crashing so brutally into a child’s world that any former ability she may have possessed to mentally roam, find her own way inside her thoughts, is instantly lost.
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Being rounded up and crammed into a railcar with thousands, one of whom is a grandfather who, since his wife’s – your grandmother’s – suicide, has been pestering you to share his bed, might be another. Thus Salomon narrates the Nazi deportation of German nationals in France in May 1940 as reducing them, reducing her under such personal as well as collective assault, to a condition of ‘bare life’.
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In this, she anticipates by many years philosopher Georgio Agamben, who makes this exact phrase the representative term for twentieth-century horror, while adding to it her own feminist gloss: ‘I would rather have ten more nights like this than a single one alone with him.’
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As Felstiner points out, Salomon’s painted version of the German deportation order changes the original wording to make it refer to German
women
nationals – ‘ressortissant
es
allemand
es
’ – as she picks up the implication for women that had not yet been explicitly stated.
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Along with roughly nine thousand women between June and July 1940, Salomon was transported to Gurs, France’s largest and most desolate concentration camp, home predominantly to women (a later Nazi announcement spelt out the gender).
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Hannah Arendt was interned there at the same time. Gurs: ‘One stupid syllable,’ Louis Aragon wrote later, ‘like a sob that gets stuck in the throat.’
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An inmate remembered the buses pulling to a stop from high speed ‘to prevent the women from jumping out’.
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Gurs, as much as Auschwitz, is the vanishing point of Salomon’s story. Although, remarkably given the conditions, she paints herself sketching in the railcar,
Life? or Theatre?
contains no mention and not a single painted image of Gurs.

It therefore seems logical that this study should move from my ‘stars’, as I call them, to a situation in which the balance between a woman’s freedom and her oppression seems to tip irremediably towards the worst. So-called crimes of ‘honour’ pitch women against one of the most deadly manifestations of patriarchal law: men killing women at the merest hint that a woman’s sexuality might be under her own, or rather out of the man’s, control (the point is that the distinction is not clear). For that reason, one feminism argues that there should be no such concept. These acts are simply part of a continuum of male violence against women. Why, for example, do the police in Britain tend to be uninterested in domestic violence unless the idea of ‘honour’ – meaning that the crime can be pointed to the Muslim community – is involved? This too has the deepest links with the history already told here. When Tony Judt talks of post-war Europe casting its dead ‘others’ out of mind, he is suggesting that such amnesia prepared the ground for today’s hatred for Muslim others, who arrive on the continent like ghosts, trailing the detritus of a past history of which they cannot be aware. After 1945, an eerie ‘stability’ settled on the land which can at least partly be attributed to the accomplishments of Stalin and Hitler, who ‘blasted flat the demographic heath upon which the foundations of a new and less complicated continent were then laid’.
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In Germany today, honour crimes are used to stigmatise the whole community of Turkish immigrants, which also serves as another way to erase the past (Muslims not Germans are concealing a hidden world of unspeakable crimes). Feminism has to be especially alert when an apparent drive on behalf of women’s lives is doing covert service for racism, injustice or the brute manipulation of Western power. The 2003 invasion of Iraq, ostensibly to save women from the Taliban, would merely be the most glaring example. ‘The most important question,’ asks Eman Ibrahim, cited by Fadia Faqir in her article on honour crime in Jordan, ‘is why the West and the Western media are launching holy campaigns to defend the oppressed outside their own countries.’
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As we will see, honour crimes are not restricted to the Muslim community, nor can they be attributed to Islam (there is no justification for honour killing in the Qur’an). Anyone who has sat through
The Duchess of Malfi
will have witnessed a sister strangled on the order of her brother because her sexual freedom, above all the sons conceived within her secret marriage after the death of her first husband, threatens his sacred primogeniture (another attack on women’s capacity to give birth to a scandalously uncertain future). Wherever it occurs, honour killing has the dubious privilege of revealing how women, simply by dint of being women, can lay waste to a sexual order which, provided they obey the rules, they are considered to hold in their power. Such order is of course a delusion, but in our times it seems to be policed all the more furiously as communities, migrating across national borders, find themselves confronted by the different ways in which cultures organise sexual life. The fact that the incidence of honour-based violence is so prevalent in migrant European communities, who have left their country of origin, is another reason why such crimes cannot be seen as the relic of alien cultures in some pure, primitive state. Not for the first time, the burden falls on women to subdue the irregularities of the modern world, a world to which her own nature as a sexual being is also seen as posing the greatest threat (women as the scapegoats of modernity). These women, we could say, fall through the gap of a glaring contradiction. A father in Istanbul who murdered his daughter, interviewed by the campaigning Turkish woman journalist Ayse Onal, describes how he had taught her that she ‘carried the family’s honour in her body’ but ‘the girl had never understood that being a girl was a shameful thing’.
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As if the ancient stereotypes of Madonna and whore had been raised in intensity and then jammed up against each other. Between honour and shame, a woman in this predicament has not a second to catch her breath.

It is then all the more remarkable to watch those women who defy this logic even at the cost of their lives. Women who know perhaps more than any what they risk in the act of public speech. In the realm of honour killing, for a woman to speak out is a matter of life and death. It is one of the bleakest facts about these crimes that they can be precipitated by gossip with no relation to the truth. Another illustration of the lethal powers of language, here we pass from a world of secrets and lies into one where words are a form of violent enactment, where there is no space between crime and punishment, even when there has been no crime (too many words, instead of, as in the case of unspoken secrets, not enough). When Fadime Sahindal, a Swedish-Kurdish woman killed by her father in 2002 at the age of twenty-two, appeared on Swedish television with her non-Kurdish lover in 1998, or addressed a seminar on violence against women at the Swedish Parliament in November 2001, she knew that in the eyes of her family she was compounding her offence. But she spoke out nonetheless, partly in the vain hope that doing so would somehow protect her, but also because she believed herself to be speaking for the silent, invisible women of her community whose stories needed to be told. In this, feminism, although most likely she herself would not define it in these terms, also has a long pedigree. Somewhere it is as if she believed that by going public – bringing things to the surface instead of letting them circulate in gossip and innuendo – the power of a woman’s language might work back in the opposite direction from the whispered slurs and manage to redeem the deadly word on the street. She was both wrong and right. Her words did not save her, but as she herself put it, ‘I gave voice, I lent face.’
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