Moments of Change

In the pub after a reading, a man comes up to me to tell me how men of his generation (he seems to be in his late twenties/early thirties but I don’t ask) are “fucking lost” and that it’s still “a shock to hear women standing up and speaking.” I say, “Do you mean speaking out about trauma or sexism or…” I trail off and he shakes his head emphatically: “No! Just speaking in general.”

Did I burst out laughing, or thank him for listening? Or did I let the sound of voices and the background music of the pub wash away the space and the expectation of an answer? It was one of those moments where I wondered if I’d heard what I thought I heard, and I forget what I said in response, as if what he said has preserved that moment in time, and that moment only – leaving no escape route, no clever comeback, no defiance, no resistance, no moving on. I circle round the exchange again and again. I keep worrying at it, in the same way you might worry at a loose tooth.

Is this true—that for some men, hearing women speak is still a shock?  Vicki Bertram writes in Gendering Poetry that there is a “traditional view[s] of the poet as a man apart, spokesman for his community” and then asks: “How do women poets create the necessary authority for their own voices within this public context, where there is such entrenched resistance to the acceptance of a female voice as transcending its sex-specificity?”

In Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, bell hooks argues that feminist consciousness-raising is only the first stage in the process of radical transformation and the next stage should be the “confrontation between women and men, the sharing of this new and radical speech: women speaking to men in a liberated voice.” I think again about the shocked man in the pub. I wish we could carry on the conversation now. In another world I would be able to talk to him about shock, which might also be called discomfort, his and now mine.

And what would (could) that conversation have looked like in that noisy pub? Could I have asked the man to think about why it is shocking, just for a woman to speak? Do you mean speaking on stage, or speaking in general? Is it shocking that we are speaking now? But this is too simplistic again. I would have to ask him who he listens to as a man, and who he listened to as a boy, about what happened when his father spoke, and his mother, about whether rage or anger or fear or love lived with him in his childhood, and where they came from, and where they rested. I would have to ask him about his teachers and his lovers and his friends, and whether any of his lovers were also friends, or any of his friends also lovers. I would have to ask about shock, about where he feels it in the body, how it comes out in his voice.

I realise now, I’d have liked to have had that conversation, if the moment hadn’t been frozen, if the music hadn’t been so loud, if the world hadn’t been turning so fast. I would like to talk more to him about bell hooks, and about how what he calls shock, I call discomfort, to tell him that whatever we call it, it can lead to transformation. It could lead to what hooks calls “critical consciousness” which is not just naming and raising awareness of a personal experience of sexism, but “critical understanding of the concrete material that lays the groundwork for that personal experience … and what must be done to transform it.”

***

At a recent event, the host asked me what men can do about sexism, and I fell into the old pattern of offering suggestions, of helping. I said something like “listen to women” and “speak out” if you hear something disturbing, with the caveat that it might not be safe to do so.  Even whilst I was speaking, I felt the energy trickling away from my body and my voice, but I couldn’t understand, in the moment, why this was so. 

A few years ago, I was at the Forward Prizes ceremony, the year Claudia Rankine won for Citizen. It is not an exaggeration to say that evening, those few short minutes hearing her read changed my life. Probably like many white people, I didn’t think of myself as racist—yet it was only in that moment that I thought about my own complicity in the societal structure of racism, how it was unthinking, but how unintentionality didn’t make it any less harmful.  I can still remember the heat rising from my neck and up into my face, how deeply uncomfortable I felt. 

I thought about changing, developing my reading, and how this would affect the way I taught, the way I programmed events. I thought I knew what I had to do. This was foolish of course—being anti-racist is a life’s work, an ongoing journey rather than a destination, and it took time for me to realise that.

***

Having had some time to think about the question the man posed to me after my reading, I think my answer would be to invite any men who read my work and feel uncomfortable (for whatever reason) to sit with their own discomfort. Don’t come up to me after a reading to tell me you feel guilty (yes this has happened) or uncomfortable (yes this has happened) or that I’m bitchy (yes this has happened) or that I’m calling for the annihilation of men (yes this has happened).  Whatever feelings come up—anger, sadness, guilt—sit with them for a while.  Look at your own “groundwork,” your own “concrete materials,” your own “critical consciousness.”  I would not advise asking for help straight away, because this makes a rescuer of me if I respond, and a victim of you.

Is there space in poetry for political activism? Can poetry be an agent of political change? I want to say, of course. I want to say, it doesn’t have to be.

I’ve been transformed by poetry—both as a writer of poetry and as a reader of it, imperceptibly and monumentally, privately and publicly, politically and socially, temporarily and irrevocably, in my perception and my heart, in my feeling and seeing, in my thinking and being. I don’t believe poetry with designs on the reader will ever be transformational, though.  Often, when I write I’m working towards a place of discomfort, which is where poetry sometimes lives, where the root of a “critical consciousness” can be found, and maybe where activism begins.