Unknown Speaker  00:05
Okay, in some, then what I want to say is that despite the many negative ways in which female resistors and revolutionaries act and Greek drama, it seems to me that the female revolt and Greek drama recognizes a series of social contradictions in Greek society, and recognizes that those social contradictions are, in part predicated on a suppression of women, and their interests and identities. Women, power and positive revolt may be based on deception very often, but it's also based on female powers over fertility, and on their mediating role in culture.

Unknown Speaker  00:51
Women's revolt becomes a kind of model of salvation in a world which fails to conform over and over again, to the rationality that men expect from it. And this is what Greek tragedy so often demonstrates.

Unknown Speaker  01:14
We have about 2526 or 27 minutes to talk with you and talk among ourselves about the literature of traditional new forms of women's communal resistance. And if you have common questions, and both Helene and I may maybe respond to, or specific questions and what we've shared, feel free at this point. And remembering the announcement that was made

Unknown Speaker  01:42
you about how you see your role as you how you see the role of African values as forming an inspirational background or feeding into some of these tenants of thinking that land here. And if you think that men and women or black men and women interpret African values differently.

Unknown Speaker  02:10
And the question is how I see African values in forming the tenants of black woman's cultural custodians, and do black men and women interpret those values. Similarly, similar and different. I've been to Africa several times, but have not used any kind of transition from Africa, to the black experience of Afro American United States. In my work, I primarily do from 1619 forward. And several people have asked me that since I've finished my dissertation, if I was going to go back into work in that area, and I've chosen deliberately at this point in my life not to because there's just so much everything I'm doing is so pioneering and has not been done before that you just uncut and touch ground. And that's why I have not crossed the Atlantic.

Unknown Speaker  03:01
Example The role of

Unknown Speaker  03:05
the African traditions that

Unknown Speaker  03:07
following Marshalls character encountered in the Caribbean and and the role of that, and as part of her search was anticipated or NetEase. Input credible? Or what would you like talks about going back to a Caribbean time in a in a much more much less literal way?

Unknown Speaker  03:25
Actually, that.

Unknown Speaker  03:27
And the reason I'm asking the question is that I teach a course on the Caribbean. And with my students, we've been sort of looking at the role of African condition in the Caribbean. And one of the things that I'm puzzling over is that sometimes both in my experience working in Jamaica and and things that I've read, it's part of this thing that sort of polarization is created where men are seeing Peter Wilson does this most explicitly. Men are seen as more involved with African guys and women are seen as the more sort of traditional Christians. But I feel that it's just the that the African values are coming out in a different way in the book I mentioned. I think that it's very clear that the spirit, the spiritual inspiration, and she's drawn from that.

Unknown Speaker  04:28
Well, I get intimidated by my field and my guild that you don't talk outside to Guild and so therefore, being a newcomer on the block, I just clearly stated what this is my scope, but I agree that what else Walker talks about in terms of Africa was, is I read that was identical to my experience and my assessment of what's happening there multinational corporations and colonialism and under development, but in order to talk professionally about it, then people will asked me all about this African stuff and it's much more of a feeling personal experiential perception than do I have the citations for it? And so that's why I take it literally when he said that so I respond. I would like to say something about the difference in the way that why I use black women's literature and not black men's literature is that black women's literature is much more insolent and circle and his movement to talk about the insularity of the black community and black men, right, that the trend is to talk move much more vertically, the black community and dealing with the white world. And barber Christian talks about this in the book, black women novelists where then they get destroyed by a beaten down by the white where and then they come back to the community black women write about the community, the interpersonal relationships, life within a community, not oblivious, or numb to the impact of the outer world, but it's much more a bill jar kind of effect that drops down and what the life was in under that bell jar. But I don't cross the Atlantic. And maybe when I get a little more comfortable, and seasoned and wiser than I'll speak with a lot more authority.

Unknown Speaker  06:13
Figures speakers concerning the ideas of goddesses, I was struck by what the slowly said that the one part of Greek society that was open to women where they were empowered, was in their religion. And the the ideas of goddesses were prevalent in that society. And it seems that when that was lost, you have this great expanse of literature where there is no mention of women as empowering figures at all. And of course, an Alice Walker, she comes to the idea that God is she changes her God to another finger, a woman figure, and also do you like you're a professor of divinity?

Unknown Speaker  06:59
And you've been saved in the traditions of a patriarchal idea of religion? And that's it sort of I'm just throwing out an area, rather than a question. I see a great deal of connection between the two. Roger Stone.

Unknown Speaker  07:18
You want to restate the question? Okay. I'll try to

Unknown Speaker  07:23
try to restate the question. In general, what what we would like opened up for discussion, I guess, is the what kind of role in the sense of empowering that women had an ancient world and black women now relate to the question of the gender of deity. But that'd be fair. I think I think I think for Greek women and made an enormous amount of difference, it's very clear if you look at women's corpse, historically speaking, and this also shows up in tragedy by you know, what goddess says women are interested in the women related to female goddesses. Those female goddesses lived in, in a pantheon that was patriarchal. And in fact, that question is very directly addressed in something like the Homeric hymn to the meter, which I highly recommend to anyone to read, because it deals with a female goddesses coming to terms with the fact that she's living in a patriarchal universe. But that the text of that story, it's the Demeter Persephone story. It's a story about what happens to the mother whose daughter is taken away in marriage without her permission, and the feelings of separation and loss, and her revolt, to get the daughter back, which she succeeds in doing, in fact, for two thirds of the time, from the god of the underworld, typical has been represented as the god of death. This text, for example, explores that question, and it was that story, the Demeter Persephone story that was the central texts for all for all all female cults. So it's very clear that the central relationship in all female all female female cults was the mother daughter relationship and the exploration of the mother daughter uniting and creating bonds which allow them to sort of survive marriage separation and all the other problems of patriarchy. So it's not, I think, I think, plural gods were extraordinarily important in the ancient world and very empowering for ancient women insofar as they had any power at all. I could pursue that further I mean, goddesses like Athena, for example, who are in androgynous and that they're female goddesses who are born for men because Athena was born from Susan's head. He had the wisdom to swallow her mother whose name means intelligence meatus so that he could control metus his offspring and so Athena is born from Seuss's head and sees yourself as the child of the mind of the father. But even She has a kind of consciousness which sort of mediates between female consciousness and male consciousness. And you see that power, both, let's say in the end of escolas, or stay at where Athena is able to mediate between the Arrhenius or the Furies who represent the women's side and Apollo who had totally blind and can only view the male side of the question. The resolution of that play brings in some way a kind of, not very satisfactory, perhaps solution to those two different sets of consciousness about the world. So even even androgynous status, recognizes there are two sets of perspectives and tries to bring them in some kind of alignment. I think Lysistrata as a stand in for Athena, and the role of Priestess is doing the same kind of thing. So I think female goddess was were very, very important and absolutely central to the way that women imagine it their lives.

Unknown Speaker  10:55
Don't see, I was walking in The Color Purple, making God Goddess. I see what she's doing. I liberate the ethics we call, debunking disentangling and masking the patriarchy, of patriarchal understandings of God. Most feminist theologians and ethicist do use the color purple now as a theological texts, because of that God chapter. And I use in my lesson canon have now canonized didn't open up the Scripture, it is scripture, but because but the God that, that is so well depicted in The Color Purple, is one that is Shogun, see the describing it is, she'll tell sila, she's got to get man off her eyeball, you know. And so therefore, is that is definitely not a male god, but it's a goddess in all nature's is God that harms. And if you be still you can hear it and a God that loves what we adore and admires the things we like and when she says but we don't find God in church, we go to church to celebrate the God we found us in ourselves. So it's it's, it's a real deep kind of spirituality that we all have got within us. And we call that a Mongo D and that we all create an image of God. And therefore, every every human being is a human being with the touch of God in them. And so therefore, the spirituality is finding that God is in us, and celebrating that God with all other human beings, and with nature, because he doesn't make that separation there. And that's why she says, God really gets pissed off. When we walk by the color purple, we don't notice it. And, and I think that that's key, because a friend of mine, who's a botanist says that the most common color of wildflowers is purple. And if we get so busy with life, and so busy moving and being and all the other things that happen to us that we don't even notice purple, then we're missing out on God and we lose our spirituality. So the kind of God that I was walking depicts, is a spirit spiritual God. And it still says it's not a he or she is an IT God, who loves what we love, and wants us to be happy.

Unknown Speaker  13:03
As I look through these eight points that you gave yourself, the black woman's powerful story of revolution. One thing that becomes very obvious to me is the centrality of your sense of community. You know, you said at one point that we need solidarity and I wonder if how's the is there a possibility for solidarity outside community. And by community, I don't mean here, deep personal friendships or relationships, but his sense of sharing a vision and sharing the Praxis the constructive path towards that vision. And I say that in view of the resist the temptations of the mass of the status quo, there's one thing which I see very different than the eyebrow society is a lot of individualism. And I see both in my own Hispanic culture and in the black culture, much more recessive community or the need for survival.

Unknown Speaker  14:09
And I wonder if you would comment on that.

Unknown Speaker  14:12
I don't know how to restate your question out of solidarity and community, as in resistance to the status quo. I think the best example of and in answering that question would be in The Color Purple, when the whole that whole family structure extended family all are trying to figure out how to get Sophia out of jail. And they put their minds together to say, what are we going to do and Mary Agnes was at that point called squeak, decides that she will go because she has white blood in her at some point to talk to the sheriff and to negotiate for Sophia to get out of jail. The solidarity is the willingness to stand, knowing that we all in this together the whole that whole family, all those people, whether they were blood relatives or not, you knew that it was there more responsibility to try to get Sofia free. And to do to go to any length by any means necessary to do that. And not at any point in the novel that we see after squeek has been raped by the law enforcement agent, does she go back and say, Look what I've done for you. It's just a given, you know, that kind of solidarity, when they decide Seeley and Suge and Squeak, decide they're leaving. It's like, well, what are we gonna do with the children. So if you say, I'll take care of, you know, you go on, I'll take, I'll stay here and take care of it. It's that kind of, it's a lack of possessiveness, and it's the lack of individuality that I must, I can only do this apart from everybody else, but we're all in it together. And I don't know where that comes from. I don't know. If the more one is pressed down, we know that none of us can escape it or, but it's it is there in oppressed communities. And it gets distorted. I mean, like people do call rank on each other and everything, but it's prevalent, and it's a good quality when it's there, and healthy and this lady has been turned

Unknown Speaker  16:13
on. I wonder if you could explain further. What you meant about young men and like, ancient Greek society growing up with women, that their poetry and drama reflects their ability villains, because it would seem to me that when a male grows up in a society that shows a woman's powerless, it just reinforces his status. As you know, we accept that it seems even in our own society, from position of women.

Unknown Speaker  16:59
Okay, the quest the question, concerns pursuing further the comment that I made about male writers, projecting onto Greek drama, psychosexual conflicts that they had about women, and therefore women and drama being represented as terrifying and powerful, and ambivalent, and dangerous and powerful forces. We actually, I mean, Slater's theory is really based on very thin evidence, and it's actually largely derived from literature. And we wish that we actually knew more about Greek child rearing practices, and what family life was actually like, however, something like Xenophon, so economic is, does give us a very specific statement that the ideal for upperclassmen, at least, was to spend as little time in the household as possible. And that is, the ideal for a woman was essentially to be what he calls the queen bee. That is to have her own sphere in which the govern, and if she doesn't, well, then thank God, the man has man has to spend as little time as possible there. Now, what we also do know, and this is certainly a fact is that, up until age seven, a Greek male child would spend his time largely at home, in the sphere of the mother, and probably see relatively little of his father, less and less as you go up the scale in terms of class. And then at age seven, the boy would suddenly move very radically into a world which was largely a world of men. And insulators view is essentially has to do with the powerful psychological influence than a mother, living under the repressive circumstances that a Greek woman had to live would have had to her son. That is that you would have had a very powerful effect on him for two reasons. One is that he was the person on whom she could take out her anger. Okay, to is he was the person through whom she could live out her ambitions. I mean, I, a mother of a Greek son had the hope, at least in her old age of getting whatever powers that is an authority she had through him, clearly not through her husband. Okay, and his argument is that essentially, this ambivalent mother figure would have such a powerful effect on the sort of formation of the psychological consciousness do you have to buy a Freudian theory, for example, in order to buy this theory that this explains why you would have so many sort of terrifying we powerful women greed, drama, even though in fact, women in Real Life couldn't do any of the things that they're represented as doing in Greek drama. I myself think that there might be something to this theory, but I think it's totally inadequate to explain the sort of whole range and variety of forms that female and resistance and revolt takes Greek drama. In other words, I think I think, if you buy anything to do with the Freudian view of, you know, male development, leaving out the Freudian view of female development, which is highly contested at this point, I think, you know, it has some value as an explanation on a certain level, but it simply does not, you know, help us that much to read any specific text, or the way a specific female character is characterized in a specific situation. So, I guess I buy it up to a certain point, and I don't know if that explains it well enough. But you might look at something like Portnoy's Complaint in a 20th century terms where, again, precisely that kind of mother figure is represented as having an enormous ly powerful psychological effect on the male writer much more than the father figure, even though in fact that the mother herself was not socially empowered in any, you know, political terms. So that maybe that would be an example that would help you to understand the point that he's making.

Unknown Speaker  21:08
Is this a conflict here that I've looked at myself? When, if you need affirmation, to know that you're lying? How do you find

Unknown Speaker  21:20
your own personal?

Unknown Speaker  21:22
If you feel something, if you feel different from everyone else, and you come up with an idea that is truly different? And no one in terms of your Are you wrong?

Unknown Speaker  21:37
I said philosophical question, right? If a tree falls in the flowers, and you don't hear, did it really fall? It For Me, it happens. I think, in terms of the power of love and loving, negative Vani has a line in one of her poems that says, I nothing and you must be less than that to care. When I was in New York, living in New York, I did volunteer work with women on Rikers Island. And the resistance for them to believe that they had any worth was just unbelievable to me. It's like, why are you here? What do you want from us? Because they were so beaten down and their self esteem was so low that it was it was hard for them to believe that I can be there out of fear, just as a human being says to the system. And I think the only way that that believability happens is that somebody can love us, even when we're not worth state about ourselves. We have a song in the church in the black church called Love lifted me I was thinking deep and Sam would love love to me. It's like the only way that I personally have come to believe anything that I believe that I know, to be true, is that there was somebody who believed in me when I couldn't believe in myself, and kept telling me that was gonna be okay. And one day I believed it. One day it sunk in, I was like, oh, that's what they were saying. But it was like, it was not like, I could believe it before I was affirmed in it. And I don't know what was behind that. But I know that if I can let the love in, then I can it can't come from the people I wanted to come from. So I can't say this is believable. Who My mother says it's okay. Because I've been waiting for life, you know, but there are people around me all the time telling me that it's okay, if I will open be open to that, that the love is the if I'll be open to it, that I am somebody if I'll be open to it. But if I lock those people out and just say I only want that affirmation, and I only want to hear from this person at this point in time, then I don't get it. But it is just like what I was walked out about in the cupboard. It's there. The Harmon life is there. That affirmation I need to go forth for today is there if I'm just open to it. But it's human nature not to be open to it. I mean, no human is socialized. It's not a human nature. We're socialized to want that information from the people we think are most powerful. And so it's very hard to get it from a little child on the street who has nothing. He says, you know, like, dogs, have them walk around all groom and, and his wife knows, why don't you smile? It's like, how did he know? But I think that it's there, we're open to it.

Unknown Speaker  24:18
I could just make one comment along those lines in Greek drama. I mean, if you contrast the character of Antigone, for example, who when she finally leaves the stage, I don't know if you remember this thing, she goes through a lot of self doubt, precisely because she hasn't had a single person. We leave the toolkit here who, who backed her up in terms of love her sister tries to do it, but her sister betrayed her so badly in the first scene that she can't really listen to it. And she goes through her death with this enormous sense of isolation, almost, you know, not being able to explain why she did what she did. So she starts falling back on these crazy arguments like, you know, I wouldn't have ever done it except for a brother or something. You know, some attempt to rationalize why she did it because she has no one who can back her up, even though that love is in fact, there, she's got a fiancee killed himself. But she doesn't see that. Compare that to something like Lysistrata and the empowering Ness that she gets from, let's say all the other women who back her up in the strike.

Unknown Speaker  25:20
I just wanted to say something you might want to add to this list that's very important for the persistent woman's relationship to language. And her increasing, because it strikes me that the black woman's voice the black woman's voice right now, it's really much more revolutionary than the black male voice. And it was writers like Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, there's a real effort to kind of claim because a black woman is definitely language, the normal language is still a white male. And there's a real effort to kind of carve out a place in language and come up with a whole new language. And it strikes me as the one that of course, is very angry, but is also very loving. That's what I find in James speeches. Your Eyes Were Watching God, and whole sessions of the color purple and Toni Morrison as well, you know, really aware of the voice. And I think that's an important moment, resistance in everything you've done, because of course, you choose chosen literary authors as examples. But I think that's an option, the use of language and renovation of language is very important. How would that function? So in classical theory, I don't know what woman's relationship to language was.

Unknown Speaker  26:32
Do you want to comment first?

Unknown Speaker  26:34
I think you're right and better repeat what about language as the language in itself has been a mode of resistance? And the, the dilemma is, is there a such thing as Black English, you know, that conversation has gone around and around in English classes and, and in public schools and everywhere else, and there's a privilege for black women writers to capture it in print. And yet black women whose black people who speak it are ridiculed for it, and put down so like, that's the dilemma. And I don't know how to resolve it myself. But it is true that language is a mode of resistance,

Unknown Speaker  27:15
delay and PRI, and real kind of joyousness in the way that these writers are using language. It doesn't seem at all that they feel bad about it.

Unknown Speaker  27:26
Well, and in I try to always put my work in terms of the real life context and the literature and dialogue. And it's amazing how a person can get away and be praised for it in writing, and be denied jobs, life, liberty and pursuit of happiness in real life, because they speak that way. And so that's an that's an ethical dilemma for me, and I try to figure it out. It's an ethical dilemma about the work that I try to try to make some balancing out about it. Why is that the case? Is it when a person has arrived at a certain level professionally, they can then resort back to that and it's okay, as long as they don't, they don't have to live that way. Because there's so many ceilings in so many Janie's in my community, and just a short story of when I first started working in Jordan Peterson's work, it was 1972. And I come home from seminary and my mother said, we were sitting around the kitchen and reading distracts on the road, and she was reading out loud, I said, Why isn't this wonderful? This is so beautiful. And she said, Kate, for this, you get a Master's for this. I said, why? She said, Because you can not sit on the front porch and hear people talk like this all the time. And I said, That's right. That's it. That's it, and she's going. But it is that looping of the culture that I'm about because those women who speak that language don't need to know the value or the beauty or the power or that it even is a form of resistance. So yeah.

Unknown Speaker  28:55
This could be a large topic in terms of classical drama. First of all, I think, I think female characters and drama are one of the ways in which they're most wrong. We characterize very often in terms of their revolt is through their extraordinary power over language. Clytemnestra being, you know, an example that maybe a number of you have confronted, I mean, how to master can run rings and round anybody in terms of language. And it's partly because she recognized she can use every level of language, not just rational speech, which she's perfectly capable of using when she wants to, but she can exploit the sort of doubleness of language. And I think in a negative sense, that's represented as relating to women's sort of capacity to live a double life. In fact, the necessity they have to live a double life because they can never act except, you know, as a kind of act of undermining and strategy because they can't, you know, act justifiably in any context. But because of that, there's something about there's some sort of affinity established between female nature and the nature of language and women are seen as having kind of special power over it. And this was, again, a very important feature of women's religious cults insofar as we know something about them, a large part of women's calls had to do with women shouting aggressive and obscene statements in some way, as part of the cult ritual, sort of, presumably both exposing various aspects of sexuality, and expressing a kind of resistance and aggression against their usual role. So when women speak as resistors, in Greek drama, I think that's also with speech that they had, you know, within the confines of their own relationships to each other, and was really seen as a sort of important and positive role in a way of their place in society as a whole. Silence except, except, except within the call context, where they're, you know, justified and quite, in doing quite the opposite and saying anything they want to say, more or less in aggressive terms, and that that was supposed to be very positive part of what they were doing in these fertility cults. So I think all together, the the, the relationship between women language is really, really crucial. And, as I say, it's precisely their power over language, which enables them to. And as I say, it's precisely their power over language, which enables them to, to open up reality to men in a good way, as well as bad way mean to open up the terrifying aspects, but also to open up the things that male political language and so on, closes out. And that's quite explicit.

Unknown Speaker  31:50
possibilities for by saying things will never be said.

Unknown Speaker  31:56
They have just a few more minutes. And there are other questions or comments before we break our last time together this year.

Unknown Speaker  32:08
This is just a comment on what you were saying. We talked about checking out reality. And it's very difficult to go as a minority as a one minority to a group of Anglo feminists, because you have no one to check out reality with. And for me, it's been important that even in situations with other Hispanic women where we might disagree, still, there's the possibility of checking at least little pieces of my understanding I totally crazy, or does this resonate with you? And you know, many times we don't agree completely, but she says, No, I don't agree. But But you're right, you know that. So, for me, the question of survival and solidarity has has come to that point of needing someone against who will help me check out reality we, it's like, constantly, you have to go out of your mind to live in the in the Anglo patriarchal world, and you need someone to help you say, Well, yeah, you know, you, you crazy 90%, but 10%, you're not so crazy. And that has become very, very important. And though, I almost always finish going back on my word, after every meeting that I am, where I'm the only spike, I'll never put myself in the situation again. And then of course, I get invited on again, to train myself to just feel horrible about the whole thing. But I think that's very important. And I appreciate that you brought that up because for me to classical day to day dilemma.

Unknown Speaker  33:55
The thing about somebody being able to say you're 90% crazy, but 10% Or right is part partly that love you or support you even if they don't support your ideas. And that's something that sometimes I have a hard time with my students. My friends, because sometimes people feel like if somebody doesn't agree with them, they hate them. And it's important to create that kind of baseline for people where the idea isn't a property, but it's part of a process and an interaction that they will be supported throughout even if they are

Unknown Speaker  34:36
I can't repeat that. That was wonderful. I would like to thank all of you who've shared and who have been here shared in your presence and in your being and then your comments and your questions and it has just been really good for me and I'm glad to be here with you