Unknown Speaker 00:00 Good, standard and cold for this panel I will introduce Nina Alexander just before we get a bit of tape and it just was around Pepsi said who you were or what your affiliation was or indeed something about the kind of work you're doing. You're doing research Unknown Speaker 00:35 on brain to silver, English in women's studies at Dartmouth College I'm here because I'm working on a project that has to do with the passage to India I'm interested in language and race and colonial trying to prepare the study of India My name is Celeste. I'm currently working on better also Poland I'm looking for ways to better environment My name is comes to the Unknown Speaker 01:45 economy manager and there's concentration development Unknown Speaker 01:49 economic and adult literacy, Incorporated. And I'm working really well. I'm Sonia Maximus. I normally teach in an alternative school, setting problems for high school students, and presently on sabbatical. I'm just studying as much as I can. I'm assuming you'd like all these ladies to pick up their voices and sound like grown women? Oh Unknown Speaker 02:30 yeah, I'm Jean Fagan. Yellin at Pace University here in New York and I'm here because I'm trying to do some work on black and white women in the 19th century in this country, their efforts to make connections and their awareness of the racism that separate. Hi, is this not okay? Unknown Speaker 03:53 Personal and literary resistance to racism and colonialism. Our two speakers are Mina Alexander of Fordham University, who will be talking about the right to sell Rohini Naidu and Gloria Hall at the University of Delaware, who will be speaking about the work of Ellis Dunbar Nelson, the speakers will address us we will take a brief time perhaps 10 minutes at the outside because of our schedule for you to ask questions directly of the person who has just presented a paper and then at the end hopefully we can have the kinds of integrative discussion that that you came looking for. I will say all the jest I had planned for another time because we started late. meno Unknown Speaker 04:43 Can I stand up because I'm back I can Unknown Speaker 04:46 be as comfortable as you can get. Unknown Speaker 04:51 So I apologize. I'm sorry. I just wanted to say that I'll be talking about the Sarojini Naidu, who is, she's dead now and Indian poet, a woman writer, who was also the first president of the National Congress. And she was both a writer and a political leader. And what fascinates me in her life and in her writing is a kind of Cliff between the political figure and the personal voice in the text that she writes. And yet, it is not just as simple as a disjunction. There are very powerful connections between one and the other, which I think intersect in the kind of feminism that she was, she was really she gave herself up to, so I'll just speak apologies because this is something I'm working on. It's not fully formed and forged and so on, but I will put it forward. The topic is romanticism as anti colonialism. Sarojini Naidu was born in 1879 in Hyderabad, which is a princely state in British India. And she died in 1949, in a liberated India, so her life was, you know, spanned these two different phases of Indian history. Um, she was very closely allied with Gandhi. And really was perhaps the foremost woman supporter in Gandhi's satyagraha movement. She was also one of the very few people who was not afraid to poke fun at Gandhi. Those of you who know contemporary India know that Gandhi is almost a saint, it's almost impossible to say anything about him, unless it's veiled in certain kinds of hypocrisy, however, solution, it was very, very outspoken, she was extremely close to gravity. She's also very outspoken in her image of him. And there's more of this piece, which I love in one of her late writings, which she describes her first meeting with Gandhi. And this is a 9014 in London. And Gandhi has come to London from South Africa, where he's been working for the Indian indentured labourers. This is where he started his his work, his nonviolent movement, and Naidu goes to London and she sees him and she described him as a little man with a shaven head, sitting on the floor on a black prison blanket and eating a messy mu squash tomatoes and olive oil out of a wooden prison ball. Look on these food fads were well known. And she stopped laughing. As soon as she sees him. She thinks it's so hilarious. And Gandhi says, Oh, yes, you must be Mrs. NIDA, who else would laugh at me see, she was already reasonably well known as a political figure who had this very powerful sense of humor. I quote, I think this first meeting is very important because it gives us the precision of detail and the vividness of physical outline and description that was very important in seduction, like his political career. In other words, all the kinds of political activities she worked she was involved in, even at the height of her fame had to do with concrete projects that you try to talk about and formulate, and these concrete projects were related to what she called her feminism. In fact, she visited New York in the late 20s. And the New York Times had a big banner which says Indian feminist arrives Madame Naidu so but what I would really like to explore in time is the way in which feminism is part of her anti colonialism is powerfully rooted in the image of India as maternal. And we'll get to that the notion of colonization as a rape of the mother, which works in the very powerful mythic strains in Indian cultural history. Now, if the topic is the political woman, I would like to start first by talking a little bit about Sarojini Naidu as a quiet because that is how she first came into the public eye in India. She wrote in English, which was the language of colonization, and it wasn't England writing in English that she first became a public figure. And what I would like to do now is talk a little bit about her first book and how it appeared in the world how it was presented. Her first book of poetry was called the Golden threshold. The Golden threshold is the title of the book of poetry. It is also the name of the house in which you live. I know this house very well because I taught there for many years because it was part of the University of Hyderabad. The threshold the golden threshold appeared in 1905. In London, with arthritis space impending by JP he was the father of William Butler Yeats Unknown Speaker 09:52 and Sarojini Naidu in this in this picture in this etching that appears in the front of this book is 17 years old. And this is how Arthur Simmons, who is another famous English man of letters, presents her now I want you to sort of think about this phenomenon. This young woman who is from a part of a colonized world India, being presented as this beautiful, beautiful mystic creature from the east by two famous English gentleman. And how this conjunction and this depiction of her as a woman plays into the dominant images of women in the poetry of Simmons as a frozen white figure, in other words, the female image from the colonized world in conjunction with the static, fixed imprisoned image of the woman that was rampant, if one can use the powerful word for such a feat movement as the poetry of the decadence now in this frontispiece this this picture at the front, we see a young woman's seated in an upright though not stiff posture. Now I'm describing this picture. Her face is graved and composed her hair is tied back, her hands are clasped above her chest. And there was a sort of gravity and also sort of innocence I think to the face as it comes out. Um, and when you lay this book open, you see under the title page, the point name and then with an introduction by author Simmons. Now, author Simmons in his long introduction, describes Sarojini solution is eyes in great detail. He starts off by talking about the silk that she wears her clinging dresses of Eastern Slavic, how long black hair, the agony of sensation that is found in her writing. And then he ends up by saying, It's extraordinary the emphasis is placed on her eyes, it keeps saying you could fall into these pools these eyes know the image. It's this is important because in her early poetry, you find her going back to India, and describing women behind Partha panda is the veil of that Muslim women which you will find her describing women in parliament using very much the same language at Simmons used to describe her. So, you will find that this particular point addiction is taken back to India from England by Sarojini Naidu and used in her own self formation or deformation as a writer. And this is a fascinating phenomenon, which has to do with colonialism and cultural interchange. How does Raj and I do come to learn English. She was born into a very eccentric family father was a famous chemist. And at the age of nine, he shot up his daughter in a closet. This young girl she talks about this. Simmons talks about this in his introduction, she was imprisoned because she refused to speak English. And the father locked her up in the room was the first punishment she had known. And she says that she came out of the room fuming with rage, but she learned English. And from that day, she refused to talk to her parents in anything but English. Her mother would talk to her in Hindustani, she says, but she would reply only in English, so that English becomes for her the language of a severing, in terms of the personal familial bond, and yet at the same time, it becomes the language of a reconstitution of the self in terms of the national movement. Because all her speeches, all her public speeches when she opposes the British were in English, and she was very well known. In fact, she was celebrated for eloquence in English, and she was called the parrot Kokila by Gandhi, which is sort of translate very roughly is the Indian cuckoo or Nightingale. Unknown Speaker 14:05 Um, it is not insignificant the language of colonization, English was acquired by the young girl via the closed room, the forerunner of the countless closed room she was to inhabit in the 20s and 30s as a follower of Gandhi, and as an activist in the national movement, nor is it insignificant that she chose that very language to speak to both her parents and both mother and father at once severed from her through a deliberate choice of English, the language both of punishment and of accomplishment, and at the same time, carried over with her into a world splintered when reconstituted in the intensity of private struggle, that her private struggle with ultimately empowering is scarcely to be doubted her incessant activity in the nationalist movement to celebrate the eloquence in English in the interest both of women and India, that great female Earth party Tomato, all this is part of Indian history. Now, I want to just put up this picture. mental picture as it was no chalk doesn't matter, language as a bridge as a colonial bridge for the miracle at the same problem at Fordham, there's no choice if you have India somewhere here, and you have England somewhere here, and the primary relation is a relation of colonization you have a willingness Selaginella I'm very bad at drawing pictures, but somehow it helps me think you have a woman learning English, which is language of accomplishment at the time, going off to England and being presented to the world as Mr. Creature from the East who writes English so beautiful. But we also know how she learned English that it was for her a language of several words, but also perhaps of empowerment there is this paradox involved in her use of English. Now the next thing I want to look at briefly, is the topics she chooses to write about, in English in the English that she learned. The diction of English poetry that she learned was the diction of Arthur Simmons and the turn of the century, like Dowson. And take back to Indiana, what happens is she writes a number of points. This is an early 20s, about women about Indian women. And the plans are quite extraordinary because, for instance, in a poem called the powder machine, which is the woman behind part of them, she describes the life of these women as a revolt and I quote, a revolving dream of language and sequestered ease. And another line in the same point she talks about clothing, as colored in mourning missed shot over gold and Amethyst. There are a number of points like this women are presented in very flat distanced, very beautiful, very mellifluous, but extremely unreal. Are we so far from the female images of thimons? Or Dowson, who celebrate the deathly stasis in which the woman must be fixed? And I then quote, which I will abbreviate a point by Siemens called moto B desert. I mean, the title tells you what it's all about. We talks about a white girl this time, it's a white girl, since that Simmons, her flesh as Lily is grown beneath a frozen moon. Now, the irony it seems to me that of what happens is rationality which is a fact of our historical reality, and I speak as an Indian woman, is that she should learn from Stemmons or Dowson carry the addiction back to India, making up in her poetry images of exhausted women hermetically sealed in a passive world, a double colonization that the interchange of cultures provided at its worst, if you wish that you had a poem called sati. Sati is Unknown Speaker 18:16 the traditional self immolation of a woman on the pyre of her husband. And in this poem called Sati, which is in her first volume, the golden threshold. She talks of her husband as the man of her life by the way, the she is not necessarily the one point but there is a female voice as in all her points, talking. And this I want to quote one stanza from it just to talk a little bit about the kinds of self destruction the voice embraces, at this early part of Nigel's career. I quote, life of my life deaths bitter sword has renter's like a broken word, rent of Twain who are but one shall the flesh survive when the soul is gone? Self and other are united as substance and since in a word Nam mutilated and the language of dualism, flesh and soul rises up to buttress the division of gender. The woman likened in this truck not unfamiliar to readers of English romantic poetry, however, submerged its form there, to the flesh in all its weakness and mortality, and the mail to the powerful soul the immortal spirit. The question asked by the woman is rhetorical, there is no question of her survival once the man is dead. In other words, she will immolate herself to maintain her honor once he is dead. Um, this whole issue of sub t is very complicated because elsewhere in a political speeches Naidu says she invokes the Public and Indian says we should be prepared to do so. The in the face of the British. So there is a very complicated problem here that on the one hand it is the female self immolation, that leads to destruction in certain lyric points that the other hand she can use, you can dig into this to provide a very precarious kind of empowerment politically. And that is a whole issue, which I think is very interesting. I would like to now to turn to this whole issue of a mother myth of a mother in India because this is something very powerful in a night is writing. At the same time as the golden threshold, this book of poems with these images of Oh, very sorrowful, very suffocating women appeared, Naidu left her home more and more, she was married, she had four children by the time she was 25. And she started going out this the very early years, the Nationals movement, she started going out and making political speeches. And I think of how the threshold, which is also the literal threshold, but has opened outwards. It doesn't just seal her in as it did in the book, it opened outwards, permitting the wife and mother an exit into the political world. So there you see this woman taking all her complex emotions out into the political world. Emotions, in fact, that would again very powerful symbolic significance in the nationalist movement. She attended several very important nationalist conferences, and the earliest was when she was 24. And she gave a speech on true brotherhood. Of course, later, her language evolved, which permitted her own self to enter into the liberation she craved our country. In other words, you didn't talk about brotherhood, but you talked about human beings or women's liberation. It's really interesting. At this conference, she met very, some very famous Indian women. Political what is the word practical transformers people involved in political change? She read out a poem which I think as a poem is perhaps not particularly interesting, but historically is very powerful, called all to India. And in order to India, India becomes a mother who is slumbering. And these are the lines mother or mother wherefore does not sleep arise an answer for that children think? So this is the first point in which he taps the notion of the maternity of the earth, of the interior. And it's a poem of great idealization, where you have an ideal pause the Vedic pause that the mother must awaken from and move into an idealized future of liberation. However, the movement out of this fettered darkness, as she calls it, the mother is very interesting. Because right throughout the theme of the mother, for Naidu, it's fascinating and it's really a problem. The theme of the mother is empowering, is liberating. But the theme of the daughter in sexual congress with a male lover is one that frightens the psyche. So that you have passion when it's sexually related, imprisoning the woman right into her later poetry, whereas the theme of the mother seems to open the daughter out of a bondage. So the sentiment here is far from the closing and closure of poems about Beloved Women. Here it's imprisoned daughter turning from the bondage of passion calling forth a sleeping mother. The image of India is mother struck a deep vein in the culture, the images of Punia pumi or blessed Earth and the Pardot The motto of Mother India were linked together both for Naidu and her audience. The mother was sacred, potent and terrible to her foes when awoken and it was later point when she invokes Kali or Durga, the goddess of destruction as a mother calling upon her mother awake again. Just a very brief aside on Please don't make Unknown Speaker 24:09 categories time protected you so tell me Unknown Speaker 24:12 tell me roughly when I should stop saying you Unknown Speaker 24:15 have it. Unknown Speaker 24:17 Okay. I'm just one aside. Someone will catch up on the thin who is a member of the Bangor renaissance in the early 19th century in India, went to England and wrote a great piece about India is the bride waiting for England the bridegroom to come. He wanted to unify India and England. In the US female England is male. The bride waiting for the bride. Six years later, the female image changes from one of the bride Dekton jewels to that of the raped woman and I want to call diction is very literary very early 19th century. So you have to bear with that. But just think of what he's saying. And the first piece he talks about, beloved India dressed in her jewelry waiting for the bridegroom, and in 1883 This is what he says. And I say the artifice of diction opens up the genuine pain of a land violated. Behold a sweet angel of ease. This is SketchUp to understand you have to forgive him he speaks like this into his beauty. The very colors of Heaven seem to have been woven, the fair east in russet mantle cloud, the orange Shakespeare, allies prostrate a bleeding prisoner and then this very moving pathway says the rivers that flow westward and rivers that flow eastward are crimson with the Asiatic gore. Yes with the blessed best blood of Oriental light, and he develops his image of the land no longer is bride waiting, but as a woman raped que Shipton The thing was one of the founders have been called Renaissance. Now, just a few words about Nigel's feminism. If Geschichten just send tragic realization provide a momentary backdrop to Nigeria's growing feminism. She herself through the catharsis provided her point by her poetry moves forward, so that by 1906, when she was only 27, just two years after a volume of poetry appeared. She speaks arguing that there is a direct connection a causal connection between the deprivation Indian women suffer in terms of the Civil Rights and the success of the British colonizers. The language is fierce and direct. The contrast with the sub the poem quoted earlier could not be more forceful. There, the woman invoked a man as her soul. Here the woman has a human soul and with it, an inalienable birthright. And I will quote, the passage. This was a speech in Calcutta in 1906. And the contrast with the poetry that was written just three years early is quite extraordinary. But also the links were very powerful. She says, does one man dare to deprive another of his birthright to God pure air that nourishes his body? How then shall a man dare to deprive the soul of its immortal immemorial inheritance of liberty and life, and yet, my friends man has so dead in the case of Indian women, that is why you men of India are today what you are, because your fathers in depriving your mothers of that immemorial birthright have robbed you, their sons of your just inheritance. Therefore, I charge you restored your women the ancient rites. I'm more and more as Nigeria's political career continued, and it grew it she was constantly traveling under very difficult conditions through India. The cause of nationalism became wedded very powerfully to the cause of female emancipation. Yet at the same time, she was writing this point to have great pain, her language, the diction of a pointed matching and power and yet, there is a symbolic transformation it seems to me that occurs between poetry and a political speeches. Unknown Speaker 28:39 In turning from the female realms so powerful, painfully portrayed in her poetry, a woman cleft from the sources of her own life shut off from the vivifying commonality of the world. Now, I do throw up procedure of symbolic transformation, was able to turn that very image into a source of power for the public realm. empowerment through female pain is visible in many of her speeches, but deprivation suffered in their lives by the women around her even by her own self figured forth as the necessary grounds for change. So the first step in any greater change had to be the restoration of women's rights. And very often, she would quote in her both in poetry and in her speeches, instances from the lives of mythic Indian women and you know, one is always brought up with the stock of images of great women who sort of half historical half mythic, in other words, the land is sacred. So they lived their way, way back in the past, and you're taught to emulate these women. There's a little poem that Naidu has, which I find very moving lots of my friends who read poetry, they don't like it. It makes me weak, but I will quote it. It's Mr. Sheehan. She has many flower points. Many, many she's a great gardener as well. And this is the point. Mr. Trump's poignant, subtle and bitter perfume. Exquisite, luminous, passionate bloom your leaves into woven of fragrance and fire or Savitri sorrow and slippers desire. The output is longing Tommy Auntie's fears and sweetest shock controllers, metrical tears, and a footnote follows given by the point or still have his footnotes are interesting because she's addressing her point to an audience that speaks English and the audience that speaks English is both British in England, the colonizing powers, and that elite of India that speaks English that has acquired it through colonization. And the footnote says, These are the immortal women of Sanskrit legend and song whose poignant sorrows still break our hearts and inspire our lives. Two minutes about theta. Theta was who was Sita Sita was the wife of King Rama, who is the hero of the Ramayana, the great epic. And the crucial the pivotal episode of The Ramayana is When Sita who is very pure and virtue was also capable of producing sons this is important to virtue is abducted from India and taken off to Lanka, Sri Lanka, but Ramona Domina is the king of Sri Lanka. He's very evil, he falls in love with sleep and he tries to entice her. He doesn't want to forsake tries to entice her to fall in love with him, or she refuses. Meanwhile, Rama whose honor is at stake, mobilizes a great army goes and rescue sleep and brings me back once, after a suitable length of time in the palace, super falls pregnant, she becomes pregnant. And Rama at once feels that his honor has been violated. It's not clear. He thinks it might be that the Father is done and presumably the time is subtle enough to commit this. So what does he do? He throws her out of the house. And what's fascinating is that drama is a god is frail, but it's frailty is an honor. I mean, it is his duty that he should throw such a woman out of his house even though she is virtuous and loves him dearly. So there's no condemnation of his action here. Sita goes off to the woods and she gets bushes taken care of by Sage and she gives birth to twin sons, who are the spitting image of Rama. It's interesting also the son that these are male children as opposed to female children. Rama comes back sees the sun there was a kind of interplay there, which I won't go into. He wants to embrace Sita to take her back and now comes a very controversial part of that Amana. Before he takes you back, he wants to wants you to undergo the test by fire. And this is the 10th Book of the Ramayana, which is very controversial. Now, what is this test by fire if she's virtuous? She will survive. And if she's not, it'll be visible. Now, Steve, is so she does not she's already so humiliated that she does not want to undergo this test by fire. And this is one of the most moving parts of that amount of the autonomic under Sita refuses and what does she do she calls upon her mother and a mother is literally the Earth. Unknown Speaker 33:33 See that was not born out of a human boom hub. Father, King Janica found her when he was plowing the fields. She cries up to her mother earth and the earth, blitz open and takes her I read the story that's her making sure when I think about it, because it's so powerful. And this, by the way, is a part of that a minor that is not taught to everybody. I mean, it's considered because the other ending is that she goes back and embraces them and goes off on lipstick. Now Naidu knew the tale of Sita cruelly wronged and like other women before and after him, this will really be my concluding point, too, took it to heart and the political speech of 1917. She used it to very great force. The women, the women, indentured laborers, taken from India, to South Africa, and other parts of the world, including Fiji, were often taken this through intimidation that were kidnapped, and then used for purposes of prostitution. And the fate of some of these women became known. And for many years, Gandhi and someone called CF Andrews and social media were trying to get the British, who obviously had no governmental powers of India to stop this policy of sending indentured laborers because this was something that the British set up and perpetuated. And I'm one and there was It took a great deal of effort, including medical reports that were brought in from Fiji to change this a lot of political tussle and now to travel from village to village trying to mobilize the port against indentured labor, using the image of Sita so cruelly wrong to bring her tail home to her supporters. In her political retelling of the myth SEPA humiliation, Sita now being Indian woman herself, is assuaged only through radical means. The figure of Rama the godly husband who has wronged her is alighted. And the British rulers very sadly, take his place. And I quote from a speech of 1917 this is subtle Janine later, I raised my voice not only for the men, but for the women, especially for the women whose proudest memory is that Sita would not just stand the challenge to her honor, but called upon the Mother Earth to adventure. And she calls out if the speech continues, she says, I feel the dishonor offered to me in the dishonor to my thick. So you have here this very powerful conjunction between the mythic image of the daughter and mother and the daughter rolled, used for political purposes. I mean, there is a literal fact these women are being taken out of India for purposes of prostitution. But there's also the symbolic and mythic ground that she's able to tap in and interesting that she uses all of this through English, which is the language of colonization, that she learned. One very small last point. In her very last volume of poems, called the broken wing. Naidu has a very passionate theories of love point within within when she was 38, a lot of speculation about what happens there. And in these poems, she has a very powerful eroticism working, where she talks of herself as kissing a man of evil of sexually taking him over. Nobody knows where this poetry comes from. That was a lost volume of poetry. She stopped writing poetry of that and became more and more a political figure. Now, there's something very interesting that happens, she thinks she describes herself in this point 1938 as an outlaw spirit, she's outlawed because she fulfilled through sexual passion. And she images herself as being thrown down out of God's mystic garden, whereas the male lover is ensconced in the garden. So the passion that was produced and enclosed, and I'm really elated out of her life, and those earlier plants now becomes reconstituted as outlawed. And this notion of outlawed of being outside the law. And this is in terms of very traditional Indian upbringing works its veins as it were, into her political arguments. So that if you're fighting for nationalism, and you are just, you are outlawed. And in this powerful conjunction, which is also a tragic conjunction, I think in terms of her life as a point of political figure, we see something of the complexity of NATO's situation. Thank you. Unknown Speaker 38:25 I'm going to present Lauria home teaches at the University of Delaware in a place I happen to know is pronounced new Ark. Would you like to? I think we should not have the question. Yes. Proceed. Okay. Unknown Speaker 38:48 I'm going to bring things a little closer to home here. Speaking about black American woman, writer, poet, activist in a whole myriad of other things, named Alice Dunbar Nelson. My title here is sight deceiving. The strategies of Alice Dunbar Nelson. Unknown Speaker 39:10 Most people know her, who've heard of her at all know her as being a woman who was married to Paul Laurence Dunbar who was America's first famous black American writer. And but she herself was so important and did so many things in our own right until sometimes I like to turn it around and say yeah, he was married to her as opposed to her being married to him. Her dates are kind of constantly there. She was born in 1875 and died in 1935. She published volumes of short stories. She published volumes of platform speeches for delivery. She wrote a lot of poetry, which was well known and anthologized during the Harlem in Renaissance, and before, she was active in a variety of women's movements, she fought for suffrage. And she was also very active in the black Woman's Club movements of the early 20th century. She just did a lot of things. She was a teacher, she, she just was very active on a variety of fronts. And some of this I knew about her. But as I started to work, more and more with her, she became an even more fascinating figure. And one of the things that caused me to see a lot of the behind the scenes things about her that I had not known before, was unearthing a diary, which she kept between 1921. Well, she kept it in 1921, then again, from 1926, to 1931. And in this document of many of the things that you would never have suspected about her by looking, you know, came out, which gave much more insight into what we already knew about her as a writer and a public figure. So it's increasing amounts of information, but also further revelations about her complexity, and her importance. Now, one of the things I was often struck by was the contrast the dichotomy between her outward appearance and her behavior, and the reality behind it, and how other people's poor our superficial vision, let us call it sometimes aided her, and aided the various strategies of resistance, which she consciously and unconsciously chose. And these are strategies that helped her to resist all of the kinds of ravages which came at her for being a black woman trying to be a writer at the time that she was she was doing so now you take even a small thing, like her continuing to use Paul Laurence Dunbar his name, we look at her and you say you did all these things, while you still you know, going around carrying him around with you. Even that shows her kind of awareness that for the people who would be looking at her, it was hard for them to keep into their heads that more than one black person could do something at a time, more than one black person could be thing. So it's like okay, that too, you know, that's, that's a kind of touchstone for you. So I'll remind you of it. And it also indicates that, as a black woman, she knew that she needed all of the kinds of help that she could get in terms of achieving what she wanted to achieve in the world and be known and recognized for it. Now from her birth in New Orleans in 1875. It was a struggle first of all, for her to overcome all of the fought all of the forces, which decreed that black people remain ignorant, uneducated, unlettered, uncultured, and that made of most black women at the time, servants and slaves and speaking that literally and metaphorically, now she was able to graduate from college in New Orleans. She later did graduate work at Cornell and University of Pennsylvania and education in English. And in the process of doing that she produced work, which won critical praise from highly respected, stodgy scholars and publication in scholarly journals. And she accomplished many things of refinement in the areas of refinement and culture. She took art, piano and cello lessons, she did lace work. She was a very cosmopolitan, sophisticated, widely read, cultured woman, she frequented the theater. I mean, she knew all of the things that everybody's supposed to know if you're a cultured person, and so on. And she did this at a time when black writers, especially black women, writers, were anomalous, and she was able to become a writer. You know, and and SSA did it at a time when there were not that many black woman writers and published her first book at an early age to she was only 20. And when she published her first collection, which was a little mishmash of short stories, and poetry. Now, all of this that I'm saying about the kind of person she was educationally and her refinements and attainments carried over into her appearance, and I think it's interesting that we have to talk about what people look like. Now, here we see some of the ways that her front as I'll call it, plus other people's are poor and stereotypical vision helped her to resist some of the personal ravages of racism. When she was young, she was a rather slim woman, but throughout her life, she was tall, almost six feet tall. She was fair of complexion, she had light skin. There were people who looked at her and said, Well, maybe She's kind of Spanish or something. But she was fair enough so that some people looked at her and could mistake her for White. She loved clothes, beautiful clothes, things, she had a flair for dressing. She she had a fear for what a flair for what taste, you know, really looked like she had auburn hair, which sometimes appeared more red than at other times and, and she was just a very stately, graceful, imposing prepubescent woman toward the end of her life, she put on more weight. And there are times in her diary, when she talks about this to to solid flesh, everybody read Shakespeare. Unknown Speaker 45:42 And you're wanting to get it off. But even that did nothing but add to her statue with this, and you know, the command that her physical presence head. Okay, so when you looked at her, you saw all of this the matter of physical appearance, hair, skin color, dress, and bearing, as I said, she could pass the white, and she did occasionally. She was what people call when they look at the phenomenon of black people doing this, at the beginning of the 20th century, and occasional Pastor, I mean, she didn't change her life so that everybody thought she was white, but simply by allowing other people to credit the visible evidence of their own eyes, you know, she would go into places where she couldn't go, I mean, she would, it allowed her to sit in a nice restaurant and eat it allowed her to go into a theater without being relegated up to the second like gallery. And I had, for instance, one time when she was away at a conference in the south, to slip away from the conference, and go into a bath house and rent a bathing suit and take a little dip to relieve the tedium of this of this conference that had been going on too long and into dollar fashion. Okay, so things like that. And in her diary, she tells various of these kinds of anecdotes, she talks about one time I traveling on the train past the point in southern Delaware, where things became segregated, and Jim Crow and, and what you did in that case was removed, I think they moved forward, right up toward the engine as opposed to moving back. Okay. So at the point, when the black passengers were supposed to move forward, she got up to do that. And there was also in that car, a young white man, she called him a fresh white youth, who got real upset at seeing what he thought was this white lady get ready to move forward, you know, at the Jim Crockett section, and she just laughed about this, because there were also other black passengers in the car, who knew her and knew that, yes, she was doing what what the law says that she should should do. But as I said, on other occasions, when nobody knew her, she just simply kept her mouth shut, and did what what she wanted to do. Now, this is a rather mild form of resistance, but at the bottom, and when you look at it deeply, it reveals the absurdity of racial segregation, and the paranoid attention given to keep black people in their place at that time. Now, behind her aristocratic bearing was also the reality of a rather shoestring existence. And this was one of the big dichotomies. And it says a lot about class. And, you know, what do we look at to determine whether or not we're going to call somebody this class or that class in 1927. In March, she writes in her diary about having to go to a pawn shop in downtown Wilmington in a poor section, and pawn her rings and her earrings. And for them, she only gets $25, which she wasn't pleased with, but she took it because she needed the money to pay her water bill. Okay. Unknown Speaker 49:13 Then, in the very next paragraph, she turns around and tells you about giving a speech at the Philadelphia professional women's club, which is, which was a club, as she tells you, in parentheses, of wives of professional men, okay, but they were professional women's club, okay. And at that, at that gathering, I'm sure that she was dressed to look like what she would sometimes call a certified chick. And she was comporting herself. Likewise. Now, none of those women I'm sure those wives of professional men who were there had no idea that they were just that they were socializing with and had just been addressed by a woman who had Only the day earlier that day, gone down to a pawn shop to haka rings and earrings to pay her water bill. And when you think about it, there was really no reason for them to know that, because one of the ways that Dunbar Nelson protected herself and her psyche, you know, was by being able to look, the way she looked talk the way she talked and address them in the way that she could, even though that was very different from the private, you know, and in a reality of the situation. And I'm not going to say a whole lot about this. But there are many things in that diary, which show you that same kind of dichotomy. One of the passages I love is when she is upstairs in her drawing room library, pouring chocolate out of this chocolate pot that she had just managed to scrape up the money to buy at a department store named Snellen birds and talking to an integrate interracial group of club lays white and black about some enterprise and being very hoity toity, then in the middle of all of this, come in some of her friends that she calls rough Nikki. So what she does is stow them away in the kitchen, you know, downstairs until she can finish being an auditory upstairs and then go downstairs with our friends and play cards and have high ball. Okay, so, you know, it's just the kind of juggling, you know, that went on that was part of her strategy for for making it in the world. Now, there's also something else other than of individual style predilection going on when we look at her genteel bearing, and that's what I call it. Now, black women have Dunbar Nelson's era, and particularly of her type, were always aware of the need for them to be living refutations of the racist stereotypes and slurs about black women. And I don't need to go into all of that. And so you have then the phenomena of like women could conducting themselves in an Ultra Refined a sexual manner. Because, you know, you look at me behaving like this and you can't say I'm a slob and you can't say all of those things. So they were really aware of just sort of being living refuse to walk and talk and refutations of that kind of racist thinking. But fortunately, Dunbar Nelson managed to oppose the oppressiveness of this. And she was courageous and smart enough to keep in touch with herself and be herself. She liked to party she liked to dance. She liked to let her hair down. And she was also able this reminds me what you were saying about the last volume of her poetry as she was able to express her sensuousness and her sensuality. And I would just like to read one little part out of the diary, which I think does a marvelous job of showing you what the reality was behind the facade, you know, on this point, this occurs in 1930, when she is on a two week vacation at a little resort for black people right outside Washington DC called Highland in Highland Beach, Virginia, which is still around. Some of us know, yes, she loved the sea, you know, and she loved swimming. And so in her, her being there, coincided with her with one of her birthdays. And so I'll just kind of read you pieces of these passages. On Friday, July 19. My birthday, the 54th. And my pin is on the blink. Does one have to record thoughts, the water, luxurious, for luxurious, lovely, lapping, caressing, loving my bare body when I get way out and slip my bathing suit down and no one can see me naked. Yesterday like the ocean breakers foaming over me day before yesterday when I had the touch of son from crabbing too long in the creek and so waited until evening and Amazeen a friend of hers a woman and I went in Sunset Glow and the moon made a shimmering path and we went out and swam back to the sunset. But the water I came here for weeks I dreamed of it here it is no convenience to great for the love of it. Even these hot days when it was calm as a millpond and non to clean. I could wait. Lovely, luxurious, voluptuous water. And then a little later she talks about her last day there which is July 27. She says my last day Unknown Speaker 54:53 and then she talks about swimming in a midnight plank in dystonia. Great that nothing class going over so It moved out. Anytime I could wave talking and arrive and catch information on the beach is like First imagine the twilight of a dark night at sea. And she talks again about the Velveteen that hearing at the time from swimming far out, we slip off our baby. And then finally, she faced the glorious muck draws to a close the lesser connected with my mother, the cookie based refunding tactic is a good example of a red herring, she managed to stay in touch with her own staff. And he also managed to stay in touch with and enjoy particularity, one of the things I can say is that, you know, like, she was a woman who had romantic and romantic relationships with women. And when you think about the black woman, she kind of she was really figuring out how to put all of that off. And those those women were like her most of them, well, now you're educated on an American education, which meant that, you know, they knew each other magnet, you know, many different sources, you know, which would have kept them from fully expecting your campaign. So I'm trying to see if you can, you can make it through what you felt, but what's really going on. Now I'm gonna talk about what would be considered more credible Unknown Speaker 56:10 based strategies, or resistance. But Dunbar Nelson was also an activist who struggled in the world. You know, one of the things we're supposed to be talking about at this conference is how it is that women have come together Unknown Speaker 56:26 organization around the world. She was a member of the EPA, I work with that. And one of the big things Unknown Speaker 56:37 is being accused of making a resume like that, and use your own story. And if you're just kind of going on in the get go, because you're going to find it really interesting people like getting around when you're in ACP, no matter when I could kind of be moaning, the fact that it arrived with an accent. And then I guess and sort of jumped up in somebody's face, why don't we think about something we can do, I wonder what would happen if we began to talk to the cabinet to kind of get together. I'm going to try to make an attack talking together and you have an idea. You know, topic, a boring guy supporting editorials, kind of move up and having another situation like that, that would cause them to be ready to application. Maybe hang him after kind of indicating that he wouldn't give me all of the people who would talk. Unknown Speaker 57:26 Let's talk about the kind of activity that can happen. Most often that women who were less advantaged and she had one other thing before she was applying and the only three things that was Unknown Speaker 57:45 for them. And that was a way that she did the sort of coalition work that she did. The club movement, of course, got really started in 1896 with the National Association of colored women. And these were women who worked first on a local level. And then they confederated in regional and national groups. And they were black women of all nine it to combat stereotypes, negative ones about themselves, and to materially and spiritually aid in the overall betterment of the white race. Dunbar Nelson worked with and held offices in the Federation of colored women's clubs, you know, the Delaware were a branch of it. And she engaged in very time consuming activities like attending local executive and membership meetings, cooperating with other club women from around the country to do many things, and they organize themselves to work in areas like housing, education, civil rights, women's suffrage, travel accommodations, held cultural affairs and so forth. Now working with other Delaware women, one of the finest and most lasting things number Nelson did was to help found the Marshall twin girls Industrial School, which was right outside the city of Wilmington where she lived, which was a home for either delinquent girls, or else girls who had no other homes, you know, kind of homeless and delinquent girls. So the women of the of the club, they're the you know, the state Federation got together and raise the money, petitioned the state legislature and build something, you know, for black black girls and young women that would not have been there without that kind of commitment. So most of her activists, you know, combating of racism was centered around helping black women and throughout you can just see this and many, many areas of her of her life. Now, she also worked with white women and I'm thinking about what Jeanne Yellen was saying about her interest. This is a of the 19th century, this, most of her work occurred in the 20s 1920s and 30s, a lot of integration work, but also a little bit earlier. And what she often found herself doing, as a black woman working with white women was focused on real interests, she says, so that we don't all go away singing hymns and saying all this right with the world, you know, which is a role that black women have played, you know, in movements for a long, long time. Now, when we analyze her as a writer, we also see a similar kind of dichotomy, a similar kind of split. You have, on the one hand, her feeling, the definition, fulfilling the definition of a correct conventional female lyric poet, okay. And that was her her predominant reputation, and the poem, her poems, her short stories, tend to be what you call bell letters, you know, they're they're fine literature. For example, Her best known poem, the one that you see, anthologized, over and over again, is called violence. She too liked flowers. And violence were some of her favorites. And it's a poem in which she talks about, it's a love poem, in which he talks about violence, being in her mind as something you buy in a florist shop, and that she had forgotten, as she says, I had forgot the wild shikon that spring beneath your feet. In wistful April days, when lovers mate, and she goes on to talk about I had forgot, while white field and clear brown streams, the perfect loveliness that God has made, wild, Violet shy, and Heaven mountain dream. And the point in this column is that this new love of hers, whom I found out was somebody who shouldn't have been what Unknown Speaker 1:02:11 had made her, you know, get in touch, you know, with that kind of natural beauty represented for her by violence, because it's a flower she loved. So that's the kind of thing you see in her literature, first sight. But the other side of her writing is a very hard hidden, outspoken journalism. And interesting when you think about it, because most people consider journalism a more masculine form in the first place. Okay. They're in her journalistic writings. She is, is topical, and she is, is radical. And throughout her life, she wrote a lot of newspaper columns, a lot of articles, a lot of reviews. And I think that, you know, when we really come to finally evaluate and reevaluate her, the most lasting things that she did will probably be this diary. And her journalism and, and her journalism. But of course, that's, that's, that's sad, in a way, because journalism is the most ephemeral of forms. And so, you know, what does it say that about people whose reputation would rest on them. However, in this journalistic work of hers, you can see her saying all of these kinds of radical activist things that you don't see in any other place. And with this work, too, it's very often related to her consciousness and her commitment to improving the lot of black women against both racism and sexism. A good example of that, and I brought this editorial is an editorial that she wrote in a newspaper in October of 1928. It occurred while the presidential campaign was going on, when Hoover and Smith were running for, run it to me had been in the country at that very moment. Yeah. Okay. So what happened is that Hoover had gone down to Mississippi, to this little town called mound bio, and the very racist governor of Mississippi, a guy who was named Theodore Bilbo started circulating a story. And he said, Well, I didn't start the story. I'm just repeating what I heard. He said, But I heard I heard that while he was down here in Mississippi, who would dance wouldn't would have been a black woman who would dance with a black woman? All right, so after after Bill both said this, then, there was a man named George Ackerson, who managed Hoover's Hoover's campaign who has heard this and got all up in arms and issued statements and, and he said that, Unknown Speaker 1:05:08 that that statement by the governor was unqualified ly false. And he characterized it further as, quote, the most indecent and unworthy statement in the whole of a bitter campaign. All right now, Dunbar Nelson was sharp enough to see all that was going on here. She's entitled this this editorial, the ultimate insult, and she writes very heavily. Ironically, she says, the ultimate insult has been given to presidential candidate Hoover, he has been accused of calling upon and dancing with a colored woman, exclamation point. And as she gives you the sort of history and the background of it, and then she says again, and the tone that you don't see anywhere else in our work, she says, We do not believe that Mr. Hoover called on the colored lady nor that he dance with her. He does not look like a dancing man. There is no particular reason for his socializing with a mountain bear by by your eyes. And the thought is enough to provoke the reasonableness of anyone with a grain of humor. left to itself, it would have died the natural death of all jokes. But myth Mr. Ackerson exalted to a crime of lace a majesty to a breaking of the deck along to the sin against the Holy Ghost. And in so doing, he hurls the violence insults in the face of every new girl in the United States. And she goes on, she really gets rhetorical there. And she says, but every woman of color, feels her soul flame into a white heat of insulted rage at the characterization by Mr. Addison as an indecent and unworthy statement. Okay, so this is the kind of thing you know, that you find in other other writing. And as I said, ultimately, though, I think it is her diary, which does the most to undeceive. Us, you know, about who and what Alice Dunbar Nelson was, and that I think, as a document, it's about private document, which she used for both sedition and survival, which is a way of describing all of the various techniques, personal, you know, political, and as a writer that helped her to resist, you know, racism and to survive as a very intact psychically woman. Unknown Speaker 1:07:35 Well, we will have some discussion, you might want to stand up briefly, you might want to cough and you've been repressing one. But I want to say a thank you just in case we pick up in a strange way, at the end of the session, you are listening to two remarkable women who are teachers, who are writers about literature and explorers in a very strange way, I really can understand how you just can't stop because for paper I presented a week ago, I read the paper to my class, and they said what I knew, they said, You're gonna have to cut half of that down to 20 minutes. And it's painful, because it is so exciting, the work that you two were doing, and we are doing, and I think that among the differences in our approach to this literature, is not merely that you are women and scholars and minority women, but that you are poets. I think it makes a difference in the way you look at and understand the difficulties of production from women writers. Discussion, find Oh, that's a long Unknown Speaker 1:09:04 Okay, yeah, she adds who here? Where did I find the diary? I talked about that a little bit in an essay. That's an all the women are white. All the blacks are men, but some of us are brave talking about planning all of this. But that whole story just goes telling you part of the work that's involved in resurrecting, you know, writers, particularly women of color who are writers, I just happen to have been teaching a class and was teaching poetry about Polish Dunbar, a student of mine came up she says, Oh, I know somebody who has a lot of stuff about Dunbar and about Alessandra Nelson. He was married to a woman he was married to, and that's it. Oh, really. And you know that that was the spark of it. And eventually I met the woman who had all this stuff, who was the niece of Alice Dunbar Nelson, who was an elderly black woman who lived in this car Ah, and just had underneath her beds and you know, kind of shoved around and, you know, just scrapbooks, unpublished manuscripts, you know, just photographs, clippings, just everything that was right there in her house. And so I got to know her, and just started to gradually see what she had there. And was and through that, you know, was able to really read and start to do more work on how are you going to publish this? Yeah, I'm glad. I'm glad to ask. I'm really glad you as the diary had, I had a hard time finding a published report, which when I look back at it, it just that says something to about the difficulty for, for this work, and, you know, women of color and publication, but luckily enough, Norton has accepted this manuscript, and it is going to come out in late fall, and I'm calling it Give us each day, the diary of Alice Dunbar now. So you'll be able, hopefully to get a copy of it and read it. It's, it's fascinating. Unknown Speaker 1:11:10 Yes, I'm Jean Fagan, yellow, and I am just enchanted by everything I've heard, I wish you both would go on for a lot longer. And maybe what I'm going to ask will get you to do that. But I'm really in terms of what I'm trying to figure out in my head. particularly interested because as as Gloria mentioned, I'm working earlier in the 19th century, and yet, I'm working with women in America. And it seems that some things don't change a lot. And the issue of racism does not change a lot. And the issue of sexism, I think does not change a lot and the problems that women confront, we're almost confronting perhaps the same kinds of ways. But that's, in a sense, what made the Venus discussion so interesting. I have a question. What I find in the 19th century is that the women who I'm able to identify as becoming most radicalized, start with a visual image, you talk about the frontispiece. of the poet as a, as a young. Almost, perhaps, the image that fits into British masculine colonial consciousness as what it represented representative of a colony should be beautiful, passive, very conventional figure in that culture and the dominant culture and the repressive culture. Okay. Well, what I find is that these 19th century women I'm working with take an image that to our eyes, looks like the image of a passive woman, which is the image of the of the female supplicant, slave in chains, she's kneeling, she's changed, she's nude, half, half nude. And it's a very beautiful image. But it's not an image that any of us would want to see ourselves related, with, particularly, or as embodying who we are. These women seem to take this image and use it as a revolutionary tool. And I mean, revolutionary, they turn their heads around, and they see themselves as in chained and enslaved, and they see themselves as having iron on their wrists, and they then see themselves as breaking their own shackles and is rising up. And the language they use is that kind of language, then when that which is the kind of idea perhaps, that you were talking about when you say she takes the cultural myth, the myth deepen the culture, but the mother and the daughter and so on, and she uses that in terms of her own experience, and she also suggests that this is the condition of her country. And she uses that as revolutionary metaphor and a political metaphor as well. Okay. But then what I find happens is that the image these women have used sort of as an image of self liberation is then reabsorbed in the dominant culture as a tool against the women and becomes institutionalized as a form of repression. I'm, I don't want to extrapolate too much they take what happens is the women the women use this image of themselves as in shade. Both black women are literally and chained. And some black women are literally not in chained. But see, this is imaged in their situation, and white women who are not in chained. See, this is imaging their situation and they say, we may seem free, free black women say this free white woman says, but we are in fact, in the same situation as our sisters in chains. We're gonna break our chains, they're gonna break their chains, we're all going to break the chains. And so they use the language and then they come out with all kinds of freedom images and rising up images and things like this. Then, the dominant culture which is white male racist culture takes that image of a woman in chains as an acceptable image in the culture and says, Oh, look at these in chained women. But actually, even though they are, their flesh is in chain, spiritually, they are superior to us. And so their reward is in heaven. And so they turn it into an image of passivity. I'm just curious, because you're working with deep cultural imagery, and with a poet who transforms that, and you're working with cultural imagery, where a poet uses the images available to her, I take it lyric poetry, talking about flowers, and she, she uses it to do what she really need to do. But she's sort of presenting herself perhaps if I'm understanding you, in a way that the culture can perhaps accept her as Ellis Dunbar Nelson. So maybe she can Unknown Speaker 1:16:05 get an editor's eye with that name, though she uses her name, as well as his name. So she's very sure she's got every chance that she's got to do it. It's just a question of women and cultural images that fascinates me, please Unknown Speaker 1:16:24 I think are interesting and really not resolved. I think I started with a frontispiece because there was a way in which her physical appearance, her outward appearance, was immensely important to the white, upper middle class audience in England. And if she was a ethereal and beautiful and also mystic and of the East, she would fit into the kinds of ideology that supported late romanticism, but also, she would then not disturb the images of women, you know, European or white women, which were also similarly of a different color, but I mean, also pale and white, and so on, so forth, and morbid in some way. Um, what is what I see is a very painful issue for NIDA herself is that when she goes back, and she describes Indian women in these terms, she takes it very, very deeply to heart. Because it seems to be the certain things that language permits you to do. And certain things you cannot do within a certain diction. And what it permitted her to do or voice, images of pain and passion unrequited, which were also part of the culture that she was brought up in, not just of Britain, but of the India that that she was formed. And I think that, that image of the woman loving and love with changes a little bit later on, but unable to permit her passion, an outward entry into the world exists right through her poetry. And in contrast to that, it seems to me you have the other female presence, which is maternal, and empowering and passionate. But not it is, the link is only made in her political activity in her political speeches, but not in her poetry. In her poetry, there's the enclosure of Persian and passionate, outlawed at the end. But in her poetry, the most powerful poetry is not that which relates to motherhood, she was a mother. But she's always the daughter who loves and cannot fulfill her love in the poetry. Whereas in her political speeches, she talks as a woman about the Earth as mother. And the political diction is different from the poetic diction. And I. I mean, I see the two coexisting. And I see the passages from one to the other. And I think it's the complexity of the life. I mean, I don't I don't have the sort of answer to it. And it's the latter that has to do with the breaking of the chains, not the former. In other words, it's the mother that who breaks the chains and the daughters rise and the sons rise, but not the lover. Glory was Unknown Speaker 1:19:21 what you said, made me think it's two things and that is how when you look at the history of black women and white women in this country intertwined, how that whole situation you described is yet another instance and we can trace you know, the, in many areas of how this the phenomena of white women politically contemplating black women's situation was a vehicle and a spark towards their own liberation, you know, as as women, and it was real interesting. When you kind of went through the scenario of how that a woman in chains image was then taken by white males, to say, well, they're really free how in order for them to do that they had to wipe out black women, and to think about white women, because they couldn't say, Oh, they're talking about themselves and changed, but they really are free because like women, really we're not, you know, they literally change. Unknown Speaker 1:20:23 The Uncle Tom switch, is what they do. They they do the switch that says, it's true that they're in change. But they're really freer than we are, because they are spiritually free. They did that for everybody. Yeah. But it's what happens is that black women vanish, because they vanish because they become a metaphor, instead of having an identity. So So you're absolutely, I think right about that there really aren't any black women, there is only this metaphor, which we know as black women, and therefore all women are women. No women are black, which is the reverse of that title, in a sense, and which is equally devastating situation in terms of the politics or anything else. Unknown Speaker 1:21:17 Unfortunate interruption, but I neglected to announce at the beginning of the hour that we are being recorded for broadcast. And anyone who does not Well, that's us signed a release, but anyone who does not wish to hear his voice should not speak. Anyone corrected. Unknown Speaker 1:21:48 Question about how common the Wraith imagery was, in Indian literature at that time, where the country has been great. And whether it was used by men and women. That's one part of it. The only thing I was wondering is whether that kind of split between the public and the private had anything to do with the situation of women in India emerging out occurred at that time, and what their relationship to the men and the movement were? I mean, was that part of the problem of the public private split? Unknown Speaker 1:22:21 Maybe I'll start with the second one, which was about women, you know, further is just the term used for Muslim women behind parda. You know, but women in India, the majority of Hindu, there is a Muslim community, there are Christians. So perhaps I could rephrase it and say, perhaps not part of that, but some closure, staying at home sort of thing. The idea of going out into the public and speaking, what is, I think quite extraordinary about Gandhi and the National, you know, the sort of satyagraha movement in India, is that enormous numbers of women came out of their homes and participated publicly. And I think it was the genius of Gandhi, who often said to certainly Naidu of course, you're the only one who doesn't miss the woman in me. I am a woman inside me it's very interesting issue of androgyny. In Indian culture. You see, I think in in certainly in American culture, the split of genders is much more powerful. Whereas in India culturally, there's a very powerful notion of androgyny, that it is possible, because there are female images of empowerment as in the goddesses. And also Gandhi very often speaks for himself as a mother, which would I think, sound very weird if an American man says, you know, I mean, you would think it was one, but he was able to do that. Now, I think that the way in which it's a very difficult question, but I think that something was tapped at the time of Gandhi, you know, the early Earth, the national movement, that permitted women to come out and it seems to me this coming out of the home, involves a kind of symbolic redefinition of what the home was because the earth if the Earth is seen as maternal, then stepping out, if not really stepping out, is not a violation. I mean, we're not talking about symbolism, which is very difficult, but it works in our lives all the time. And I think I'm related to this is a fascinating speech that NIDA gave in 25 when she became president of the Indian National Congress, which is a very visible position. She said she said, what I really want to propose is a small domestic program. That's how she defined her aim of getting the British to Quit India. Domestic program. This is the word she uses is setting my mother's house in order so that my mother will be the sole, I don't have the exact phrase somewhere, but she will be, she will be the provider and the householder in her own home. Now, I think that this image worked very powerfully the domestic home and the earth as maternal and as home, and so that the sons who wanted to be free should ally themselves with women's rights. Did you see the I just want to add a little epilogue to this. I think that has been lost in some ways. I mean, I think that in many ways, people, women are not having to fight from scratch again, as it were, for all kinds of rights, which are life and death issues. Something of that possibility, see, one doesn't have these right forever. I mean, just because something happened, it doesn't remain this sort of tragedy of history. But I think simple, it's something happened in terms of symbolism of liberation, that was very powerful. And yet a lot also with left behind. I mean, I think that I'm not answering very well, but I lost it. Unknown Speaker 1:26:11 I just want to add a little other aspects. Also, I think what you said is really describes it, also the fact that Gandhi was able to use the symbolism, that the British put the Indian male into, as a weakling, he used that as a strength, and that is what was the connecting cord, you know, that you have that self suffering aspect. And you can transform it into suffering for and that the woman was the embodiment of the self suffering and the best person to, you know, and that that had occurred, which would normalize, apart from the fact that the number of educated families who had this colonial education had this kind of eccentricity, which you talked about that the women were able to get the few women were able to procure that education, and were most visible. And I guess they had to have that motherhood chord with the larger number of women in order that those women move out of the house. Unknown Speaker 1:27:20 Yeah, I think that's a very important point. The whole issue is it just something very peculiar about Gandhi, it was an incredibly empowering through suffering through giving up through fasting to the body to King, but also sexuality is an enormous problem. It has to be given up at the same time, which is why her poetry, it seems to me is this passion that cannot be voiced, etc. The other fascinating thing in terms of what Gloria was saying, and maybe there's some connection here, when she was young, she was incredibly beautiful and slender, and she also loved, delighted and colorful Saudis. And you know, this and that. So when she, as she grew older, she became more and more enormous. And she ultimately was about 250 pounds. And this was at the height of her political power and her presence. There was this incredible transmission very, very slender, but almost painfully slender and beautiful woman to this fury, very large. I mean, if you look at the photographs, it was sitting next to Gandhi, and no, do you notice this time? I mean, Gandhi was very, she's not. I mean, it's, I mean, I think the public what site does, I mean, that is very interesting. What it is that you need to be in order to step into an inimical world or to do a certain kind of work and for women, I think the body is very fraught, can be used both by self but also by by the world and I think I think we're growing fatter and fatter is very important here. I mean, I don't know quite how to deal with it. But one of the things suggests to me and I Unknown Speaker 1:28:59 light up across her at the same moment, is the parallel between Nigel and Phyllis Wheatley. I immediately thought of your remarks and I do is speaking to Phyllis Wheatley, his use of colonial language in a way that seemed more appropriate than any of the silly surface things I've heard that that make her small. And I immediately found myself thinking and of course, unlike the later generations of blacks, Phyllis Wheatley learned her English in a locked room. By the later generations of of sleds, we were transforming the language and the language we were beginning to teach our children with a different language but Phyllis Wheatley, it says as a child at about that age, learns it in a locked room. learns the literary language is very absorbent of it, indeed goes off to England is presented cool. And I think that you would have something interesting to bring to reading her work. Having done this work with Nigel, I did not imagine at the beginning that I would have such a sort Unknown Speaker 1:30:32 oh, I want to leave people free for questions. But Phyllis Wheatley is the mother of Afro American poetry, the second a woman in America to publish a book of poetry indeed, and in the first black woman to publish a book of poetry significantly before there was the United States. Unknown Speaker 1:30:55 Thank you. I just have a very brief question. In your view, is Naidu strongest writing, as a poet or as a political writer and speaker? Or do you want to make the kind of split that Gloria is making because Gloria is about to show us I think, analysis done by Nelson, we had no hint of, and then to argue that this is the Atlas done by Nelson, which is really exciting. And I'm wondering if you see, notice poetry as perhaps not as strong as her political statement, or you don't want to make maybe I Unknown Speaker 1:31:40 don't want to save that because I think that will be playing into the kinds of divisions we are. I mean, I think that would destroy what what is the complexity of the female life? Because I think that is the kind of division that people normally look at her with, say, oh, that poetry is so unimportant. But she does read political figure. Nobody reads very few people read her poetry. I mean, friends of mine who read poetry with me sort of my generation saying, Look at NIDA. But I think she's something very powerful there. So I don't want you famous, you see, as an orator as a political figure, her birthday celebrated throughout India. Obviously, I don't really know, Unknown Speaker 1:32:22 their reputation, they have their public reputations for different reasons. Unknown Speaker 1:32:31 I mean, even if they say that there is a split, because she stopped writing poetry at a certain age, and I think it was because of passions could not get voiced in that language anymore. It was too destructive, and more emotion becomes visible politically. So there's a big curious kind of underground you know, Unknown Speaker 1:32:53 How available are her writings, Unknown Speaker 1:32:56 Columbia bookshops, but they're not there was a first books were all published behind them. And in London, dad's in need, I think did a thing in United States. They're reprinted in India for speeches are hard to get hold over Unknown Speaker 1:33:13 that because when you're going through the poetry is available, but not the Unknown Speaker 1:33:17 political Well, the political if you look through the Congress records and stuff, it's possible to reconstruct material. It's all there. She also wrote newspapers and you know, but it's hard and always Unknown Speaker 1:33:31 been a more effective political leader you know, in the massive Unknown Speaker 1:33:40 but the other thing is what is her mother tongue she was a Bengali. from Bengal born in Hyderabad, which represented speaking Urdu but not Bengali, the OTS depiction speaker mother tongue. So you see, it's very complicated, this linguistic image Unknown Speaker 1:33:59 isn't that amazing? Despite having an auto background, she didn't utilize Hindi as a political, Unknown Speaker 1:34:07 she used to quote auto and Persian in his speeches, but she was speaking English with Unknown Speaker 1:34:12 its, I mean, her national image is amazing considering she used English, which really was understood basically by quite a small population. Yeah. Unknown Speaker 1:34:24 That's true. It's very strange, but, but for me, the reverberations of that are of a woman struggling to come to terms with a world that is very difficult. I mean, I think that she was doing several different kinds of resistance at the same time. I haven't quite sort of worked it out. But I think this use of language was one of them. It was not capitulation in a very complicated way in terms of tradition also, so it's, I can't expand thinking out loud Unknown Speaker 1:35:00 is talking about some of the passages in the journal that diaries, like Alice Dunbar Nelson's constitute, I think sort of healing rediscoveries, I made a note for the black children I call them just because I'm older of the late 60s who believed that that gentility was real in some cases, and will often hurt because they believed it was real. It says though, because the journalist diaries were missing because women writing fiction, were few and writing in male modes. I do think a generation grew up not understanding the cultural bilingualism of most black people or our ability to be very clean and to have a good time at home. It is 1215 we started late, but it is approaching time to lunch. I think it might be appropriate to do the microphone and let you those of you who wish to move along, move along and so forth.