Friday
While sexism isn’t the only reason why the immensely talented Elizabeth Warren was forced to suspend her campaign, it was certainly a factor. Interviewed yesterday about the Massachusetts senator, author Connie Shultz quoted a Lucille Clifton aphorism after hearing Warren’s snappy observation on the obstacles women face.
Asked whether her gender ultimately doomed her candidacy, Warren replied,
Gender is the trap question for everyone. If you say, yeah, there was sexism in this race, everyone says, “whiner.” And if you say, no, there was no sexism, about a bazillion women think, “What planet do you live on?”
Schultz said that the reply, and Warren in general, reminded her of Clifton’s powerfully balanced observation,
What they call you is one thing. What you answer to is something else.
In other words, regardless of what other people call you, you can control your own response.
Warren insists on controlling how she responds, which makes her the kind of woman who shows up in many of Clifton’s poems. There we encounter a big-hipped woman who swings those hips freely; a large woman with a “geography of [her] own” who looks in her mirror and imagines her lover as one lucky man; and an abuse survivor who refuses to be a victim. We also meet up with a woman who celebrates menstruation, bulldozes through cancer and kidney failure, and (as Clifton frequently said of herself) afflicts the comfortable and comforts the afflicted.
In her interview last night with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, Warren channeled the Clifton spirit in refusing to be downcast. Here’s a Clifton poem (read my analysis here) to bolster those who feel that, with the withdrawal of the last viable woman in the race, they’ve just witnessed a kind of death. Like Clifton, Warren sees every defeat as just another spur to keep on fighting.
won’t you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in Babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.
Warren had no model in this presidential contest but made it up as she went along. In the process, she created a bridge between earthy reality and starry dreams that future women politicians will cross.