FREE ESSAY ON ADRIENNE RICH

ADRIENNE RICH

What I know, I know through making poems 
Passion, Politics and the
Body in the Poetry of Adrienne Rich
Liz Yorke, Nottingham Trent University, England
This paper is largely extracted from my book Adrienne Rich, which is to be published by
Sage in October this year...What I have tried to do for the paper is to track one thread
explored by the book, which I feel runs through the whole span of Rich's thought, a
thread which links desire, passion, and the body - to politics, to activism, and to the
writing of poetry. 
Writing poetry, above all, involves a willingness to let the unconscious speak - a
willingness to listen within for the whispers that tell of what we know, even though what
we know may be unacceptable to us and, sometimes, because we may not want to hear, the
whispers may be virtually inaudible. But to write poetry is to listen and watch for
significant images, to make audible the inner whisperings, to reach deeper inward for
those subtle intuitions, sensings,
images, which can be released from the unconscious mind through the creativity of
writing. In this way, a writer may come to know her deeper self, below the surface of the
words. Poetry can be a means to access suppressed recognitions, a way to explore
difficult understandings which might otherwise be buffeted out of consciousness through
the fear-laden processes of repression - through avoidance, denial, forgetting. 
She identifies here the impulse to politics and protest as emerging from our unconscious
desires, a kind of knowing arising within the body which impels us towards action to get
our needs met. When the poem reminds us of our unmet needs it activates our drives, our
libido - towards what we long for -whether that is individual, social, communal or
global. Rich offers here a basic premise of her thought, that we need to listen within
for this language of the body, this way of knowing,. Indeed, our lives depend on such
ways of knowing: 'our skin is alive with signals; our lives and our deaths are
inseparable from the release or blockage of our thinking bodies'.(1) 
In the sixties Richworked hard to create a poetry and a language which would reach out to
others, which would allow hera means to release her own passion into language, and so to
forge an activist will for radical change: 
The will to change begins in the body not in the mind 
My politics is in my body, accruing and expanding with every 
act of resistance and each of my failures
Locked in the closet at 4 years old I beat the wall with my body 
that act is in me still(2) 
Rich engages directly with the struggle to release herself from a colonising language,
the
'so-called common language', - a patriarchal language that utters the old script over and
over', an abstracting, dualistic language that splits mind from body and tames and
disembodies both poetry and passion -a language that violates the integrity and meanings
of its speakers, delegitimates its underprivileged users and disintegrates identity and
coherence - whether of individuals, groups, races or whole cultures - 
the scream 
of an illegitimate voice 
It has ceased to hear itself, therefore
it asks itself 
How do I exist? 
The transformation of such silences into language and action becomes an underlying theme
which becomes more and more compelling, and her poetry gives voice to a deep hungry
longing for 'moving' words, rather than words which fail to recognise, understand or
articulate the meanings of 'illegitimate users 
Let me have this dust,
these pale clouds dourly lingering, these words 
moving with ferocious accuracy 
like the blind child's fingers 
or the new-born infant's mouth 
violent with hunger 
(Meditations for a Savage Child) 
Only the embodied word speaks from these depths of primal desire and what she actively
apprehends through her senses - a relative, context bound ever-changing truth - is
freshly
called into being each moment. From the 'wildness' of the unblocked, impassioned,
embodied word a new perspective may be created, different emphases may be given value,
new figures may spring into focus and so the ground shifts. 
By the seventies, a commitment to articulating women's experience will provide feminists
with the material ground for political organisation. The refusal to limit political
perspectives to those produced within a male-defined culture brings a new focus on
women's bodily specificity: Women's' lives and experiences are different to men's, and so
women's' specific, body-based experiential-perceptual fields will also be different. The
task for feminism became one of 'hearing' women into speech; of returning to the writings
of women in history to explore their biologically grounded experience so as to organise
politically. In Of Woman Born, we find Rich pointing to the female body as a crucial
resource for an expanding consciousness: of women's oppression 
female biology....has far more radical implications than we have yet come to
appreciate. Patriarchal thought has limited female biology to its own narrow
specifications. The feminist vision has recoiled from female biology for these
reasons; it will, I believe, come to view our physicality as a resource, rather than
a destiny. In order to live a fully human life we require not only control of our
bodies (though control is a prerequisite); we must touch the unity and resonance
of our physicality, our bond with the natural order, the corporeal ground of our
intelligence.(3) 
This stance was to call forth a chorus of critical condemnation. Elaine Showalter, in her
important essay 'Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness', was to see Rich's emphasis on
'confession' and the body as 'cruelly prescriptive. She comments: 'there is a sense in
which the exhibition of bloody wounds becomes an initiation ritual quite separate and
disconnected from critical insight.'(4) 
Back to the body: essentialism and the political task 
Many saw Rich's strategy as biologistic and essentialist, and therefore unhelpful to the
cause - but how far is writing which explores female specificity to be condemned? To
Hester Eisenstein, 'the view of woman as a eternal essence represented a retreat from the
fundamentally liberating concept of woman as agent, actor, and subject, rather than
object'.(5) And yet, as Diana Fuss has suggested, 'essentialism can be deployed
effectively in the service of both idealist and materialist, progressive and reactionary
, mythologising and resistive discourses.'(6) The conceptualisation of our own bodies is
not some kind of fixed absolute, but rather, is a construct that is being continually
reformulated, and whose meanings may, for well or ill, be culturally engendered. The
female body is of course always already mediated in and through language. How we
understand our bodies is continually being shaped within the psychical and social
meanings
circulating in culture, just as our view of ourselves is constructed in relation to
specific
temporal and geographic contexts. We all may internalise disparaging and harassing myths
and messages to our continuing distress. However, 'the body' as such is far from being a
conception, 'beyond the reaches of historical change, immutable and consequently outside
the field of political intervention.'(7) To take such a view is itself ultimately
reductive and
deterministic in that it refuses the very possibility of political intervention. In
Braidotti's words:
'a feminist woman theoretician who is interested in thinking about sexual differences and
the
feminine today cannot afford not to be essentialist.' Neither can women afford to
disembody
sexual difference in any project concerned with female subjectivity. As the 'threshold
of
subjectivity' and 'the point of intersection, as the interface between the biological and
the
social', the body is the site or location for the construction of the subject in relation
to other
subjects.(8) Rich was initially drawn to the body of woman to formulate her strategic
response
to misogyny with what Braidotti was later to call 'the positive project of turning
difference into
a strength, of affirming its positivity'.(9) but was later to withdraw from this
trajectory of her
thought. I think she could have trusted the intelligence of her earlier political
instincts. - But
lets explore this charge of essentialism more deeply: 
In Of Woman Born, Rich is clearly not suggesting that women are born to be mothers or
that
our biology is our destiny - far from it. Being a good mother is most emphatically not a
natural,
biologically determined given - Rich is at pains to stress that 'We learn, often through
painful
self-discipline and self-cauterization those qualities which are supposed to be innate in
us:
patience, self-sacrifice, the willingness to repeat endlessly the small, routine chores
of
socialising a human being'.(10) In no sense is any biologically essentialist assumption
made
that women possess in their natures the qualities of nurturant caring. In Rich's thought,
as we
have seen, it is a quality learned only with difficulty, often at the cost of a serious
loss of self:,
especially the self of the writer: As she points out: '..it can be dangerously simplistic
to fix
upon nurturance as a special strength of women, which need only be released into the
larger society to create a new human order.(11) Biology has not endowed women with an
essential femininity, there is no biologically given essence that determines that the
mother
will be a nurturant caregiver, or be virtuous and loving towards her children. To present
Rich's
arguments, as Janet Sayers did in her book, Biological Politics, as grounded in 'the
celebration of female biology and of the essential femininity to which it supposedly
gives rise',
is to seriously misread her work.(12) Rich's arguments, rather, imply that the maternal
body, as
she sees it, is lived: it is bound up in its specificity with the realms of the social
and the
political and is a crucial site of struggle in which psychoanalytic, sexual,
technological,
economic, medical, legal, and other cultural institutions contest for power. 
Sayers addresses her own failure to give due recognition to the importance of
psychoanalytic
theory in her later book Sexual Contradictions (1986), yet continues to condemn Rich (as
she
does Irigaray) for the sin of essentialism and, in so doing, compounds the slippages of
her
position. Rich is again criticised for 'affirming a particular cultural representation
and image of
femininity...of woman as a plenitude of sexuality' - which seems to me to miss the point
on a
grand scale.(13) 
Sayers reductively dismisses Rich's breadth, complexity and multidimensionality, in
focusing
on a fragment of a much larger statement when she states categorically that 'women's
supposed complicated, pain-enduring, multipleasured physicality hardly seems a very
hopeful basis on which to build resistance to their social subordination...' (14) 
Well no, it wouldn't be, if that were actually what Rich was proposing. I turn to a
fragment
from Integrity, from A Wild Patience to illustrate something of the complexity to be
found in
the poetry This extract is from 'Integrity', collected in A Wild Patience: 
Anger and tenderness: my selves.
And now I can believe they breathe in me 
as angels, not polarities. 
Anger and tenderness: the spider's genius 
to spin and weave in the same action 
from her own body, anywhere - 
even from a broken web.(15) 
In my book I argue how Rich moves beyond dualism in her poetry - an argument I cannot go
into - but here 'Experience' can be both private and public, personal and political -
anger and
tenderness, despite being contradictory emotions, need not be mutually exclusive terms.
A
tension-filled conflict may live and breathe in a woman's body as different aspects of
her
experiencing, yet it is integral to the processes and struggles of being female. Just as
the
image of the spider spinning and weaving simultaneously suggests the indivisibility of
these
polar opposites, so too culture and nature, subjectivity and objectivity, social and
psychological, body and mind, are inter-implicated with each other - in Rich's
non-dichotomous understanding of the mind / body. These few lines point to a radically
subversive process. Identifying herself and other women who fall short of the nurturing
ideal
woman - Rich transgressively restores to language that which had been silenced and
delegitimated within a patriarchal culture and tradition. Her culturally unacceptable
anger
becomes acknowledged and empathically recognised, rather than condemned. To profoundly
accept her own split 'selves' (and those of other women) is to validate and to transform
her
sensory experiencing, her self-esteem, her sense of her own power, the meaning of her
existence. 
Women have long been engaged in a vigilant and exacting process of bringing to critical
awareness the contradictions, ambiguities and impositions of our diverse experience so as
to
reach a realm where such incoherences can become rendered conscious and intelligible
within language so that they may be thought. This invitation to transform thinking, I
would
argue, constitutes a very different project to that envisaged by Sayers. From being
framed
within essentialist injunctions that insist that woman's nature is to nurture, women may
now
move from a position of disempowerment and self-castigation towards a greater sense of
integrity - a discursive shift has occurred that significantly permits new
identifications to be
made, different positions to be taken up, new inner and outer perspectives to be
considered,
and thus a new future may become conceivable, other potentials may be rendered possible.

I want to leave the seventies behind and pick up my argument around the body in a later
chapter of the book - during the eighties Rich begins to see the 'core of revolutionary
process'
as 'the long struggle against lofty and privileged abstraction', and urges a close focus
on
materiality, on geographical location and voice. (16) the need to locate the historical
and
social moment - the context, the precise location in time and space, the 'geography' of
a
particular statement - the 'When, where, and under what conditions has the statement
been
true?'.(17) She brings us back to 'the geography closest in - the body' and in so doing,
Rich
works out her strategy to bring feminist theory 'back down to earth again'.(18) 
Theory - the seeing of patterns, showing the forest as well as the trees - theory
can be a dew that rises from the earth and collects in the rain cloud and returns
to earth over and over. But if it doesn't smell of the earth, it isn't good for the
earth.(19) 
In putting her case for a focus on material bodily difference, Rich subtly returns to
Lacan's
hardly earthy formula for understanding sexual difference, in theorising her politics of
location. She expands on her earlier attempts to counter the dominance of the phallus
through an emphasis on the sexual specificities of the female, but now highlights race
as
equally important in the construction of identity.(20) Possessing Black or white skin
colour
assigns 'my body' to a particular social status and position within the specific
cultural
hierarchy (North American) operating in a specific locality (Baltimore). Just as in
Lacan, this
designation begins in infancy: 
Even to begin with my body I have to say that from the outset that body had more
than one identity. When I was carried out of the hospital into the world, I was
viewed and treated as female, but also viewed and treated as white - by both
Black and white people. I was located by color and sex as surely as a Black child
was located by color and sex - though the implications of white identity were
mystified by the presumption that white people are the center of the universe. To
locate myself in my body means more than understanding what it has meant to
me to have a vulva and clitoris and uterus and breasts. It means recognising this
white skin, the places it has taken me, the places it has not let me go(21) 
However, not like Lacan, this is accessibly written, Rich's language always refusing the
temptation to soar skywards into elevated theoretical abstraction. In this passage, with
its
silent, unreferenced echo of Lacanian theory, possessing whiteness and possessing the
phallus are directly comparable in the sense that they have been designated a superior
position at the centre of the regulatory practices of North American culture. And so,
though it is
necessary, it is not enough for feminist theory merely to recognise and affirm the
specificities
of the femaleness of the body as a countering strategy - skin colour, racial background,
cultural and other locational differences all matter, in that they function to
differentiate one
body from another and to organise diverse bodies towards serving the powerful imperatives
of
heterosexism, imperialism, post-colonialism, and white male dominance in whatever form
it
manifests itself. 
In the course of my book, I try to identify the complexity of these poetic and political
strategies
in action - the interweaving of that 'geography closest in', the history - with the
emerging
'truths' of dreams, desires, sexualities and subjectivities. For her, it is as important
to examine
the individual dream life as it is to address the politics, for even the dreamlife is
situated
within and emerges out of unconscious experience which, of course, also has a history.
Inescapably personal but also political, dreams are bound to their historical moment of
production. Being endlessly subject to re-interpretation, they are themselves an
interpretation.
Rich calls here for the necessity to be vigilant, to be aware that limits, boundaries,
borders -
whether to feminist theory, to politics, to poetry or to dream - can operate even at this
deepest
image-making level of the psyche: 
When my dreams showed signs 
of becoming 
politically correct 
no unruly images 
escaping beyond borders 
when walking in the street I found my 
themes cut out for me 
knew what I would not report 
for fear of enemies' usage 
then I began to wonder. (22) 
Accountability, responsibility - asking these profound questions - 'What is missing here?
how
am I using this? - becomes part of the creative process'.(23) I agree with Rich when she
claims
that 'poetry can break open locked chambers of possibility, restore numbed zones to
feeling,
recharge desire'. (24) If desire itself becomes boundaried within the systems and
coercions of
corporate capitalism, our power to imagine becomes stultified. If the poet's 'themes'
are
delimited through the fear of 'enemies' usage', and even her role as witness inhibited
through
fear of comebacks, then the vital role of the revolutionary writer to know words, to use
words,
to rely on words to imagine and to convey the necessity to create a just, humane society,
may
be undermined. As Rich suggests 
A poem can't free us from the struggle for existence, but it can uncover desires
and appetites buried under the accumulating emergencies of our lives, the
fabricated wants and needs we have had urged on us, have accepted as our own.
It's not a philosophical or psychological blueprint; it's an instrument for embodied
experience. But we seek that experience or recognise it when it is offered to us,
because it reminds us in some way of our need. After that rearousal of desire, the
task of acting on that truth, or making love, or meeting other needs, is ours.(25) 
'The wick of desire' always projects itself towards a possible future - and, in this
revolutionary
art 'is an alchemy through which waste, greed, brutality, frozen indifference, blind
sorrow
and anger are transmuted into some drenching recognition of the what if? - the
possible.'(26)
However, the knowledge that comes from out of our embodied experience is, in Rich's
work,
inextricable from the languages in which it is spoken, thought, imaged, dreamed. It is a
theme
which recurs and recurs throughout Rich's work to date - our concrete needs, the
passionate
urgency of our desires, the intensity of women's diverse struggles - these are identified
and
identifiable, just as our differences can be identified and are identifiable as
continually in
process and are always to be held up to question. 
Taking nothing for granted, maintaining a continual vigilance against taking anything
presumed to be 'true' at its face value, Rich constantly questions the premises of her
own
thought, working critically with the language she uses. If 'language is the site of
history's
enactment', then it is also for Rich the site for questioning that history of experience;
for
evaluating the impositions and alienations that are the outcome of domination; for
plumbing
the depths and analysing the complexities of what constitutes identity. Throughout these
four
decades, Rich has found herself interpreting and re-interpreting the contradictory
social
realities of our lives always critically conscious of the workings of power - not only
'possessive,
exploitative power' but also 'the power to engender, to create, to bring forth fuller
life'. (27) 
These are large aims, befitting the work of this major feminist theorist and
revolutionary poet.