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Tuesday
A fascinating New Yorker article about “The Unexpected Grief of a Hysterectomy” has brought to mind a couple of Lucille Clifton poems that express similar sentiments. Clifton expresses poetically what Anna Holmes, writer and founder of the feminist website Jezebel, articulates discursively.
Holmes tells the story of how, although facing a serious problem with fibroids, she resisted a hysterectomy, even though that operation made the most sense. Instead, Holmes chose to have the fibroids surgically removed, only to see them return. At that point, a hysterectomy was her only option.
What puzzles Holmes is why she was so attached to her uterus. She has never had children, nor did she have plans to have any. Nevertheless, she concluded that her uterus “felt important to my identity as a woman.”
Logically, this did not make sense to her. “As a feminist,” she writes, “I’m not supposed to attach so much meaning to my reproductive organs—I am more than my uterus, I would probably argue. For another, did this mean I believe that having a uterus makes me a woman? No, I would certainly say. I don’t.”
And yet, there she was, feeling that losing her uterus was a blow to her female identity. In the article she quotes a wise friend who tells her, “Isn’t it often the case that we can’t believe about ourselves what we can believe about others?”
Holmes mentions various ways people have used to say goodbye to their uteruses (uteri?). There was, for instance, advice from a friend:
“Your uterus has been kind of a dick,” she said. “I want you to write a breakup letter to it and then take a bat to the piñata I’m going to buy and say goodbye to it forever.”
And then there are “celebratory and humorous” approaches:
A few weeks ago, I took a brief glance at Amazon’s Web site. In addition to books about hysterectomies, there are at least half a dozen coloring and activity books (“Don’t Ovary-Act” and “See You Later Ovulator”) and journals (“All My Hysterectomy Shit” and “I’m Sorry Your Uterus Tried to Kill You”). There are T-shirts that say, “Peace Out, Cunt” and “Adioso Uteroso.”
It so happens that none of these worked for her. I’m thinking, however, that the poetry of Lucille Clifton, a fellow African American, might prove effective. Here, for instance, is Clifton’s poem about her own hysterectomy:
poem to my uterus
you uterus
you have been patient
as a sock
while i have slippered into you
my dead and living children
now
they want to cut you out
stocking i will not need
where i am going
where am i going
old girl
without you
uterus
my bloody print
my estrogen kitchen
my black bag of desire
where can i go
barefoot
without you
where can you go
without me
This poem may or may not resonate with Holmes since, unlike Clifton, she has not used her uterus to have children. “Barefoot” may allude to the phrase “barefoot and pregnant,” which expresses the belief that childbearing is a woman’s chief role—which Clifton, who saw being a professional poet as no less central to her identity as being a mother, would disagree with. Still, childbearing plays a major role in this poem.
But why I think Holmes would find solace in Clifton is that, motherhood aside, Clifton takes seriously the idea that female biology is important to female identity. Clifton, in fact, broke important ground by making female biology a fit subject for poetry, starting with “homage to my hips” and “what the mirror said” (“somebody need a map to understand you,” the speaker tells herself). She continued on with a number of poems about kidneys, breasts, and menstruation. A poem that might speak particularly powerfully to Holmes is one about menopause.
That’s because Clifton articulates a drama not unlike Holmes’s. For all the problems that Clifton’s unusually heavy periods have caused her, she’s sorry to see them go, just as Holmes is sorry to see her fibroid-infested uterus go. Clifton imagines herself as a grandmother looking back and—well, read the poem for yourself:
to my last period
well, girl, goodbye,
after thirty-eight years.
thirty-eight years and you
never arrived
splendid in your red dress
without trouble for me
somewhere, somehow.
now it is done,
and i feel just like
the grandmothers who,
after the hussy has gone,
sit holding her photograph
and sighing, wasn’t she
beautiful? wasn’t she beautiful?
Holmes, who turned the Biblical hussy Jezebel (so the Bible depicts her) into an in-your-face feminist icon, would probably appreciate the analogy. Shaking your head in fond remembrance without denying all the trouble she brought you is a powerful way to move on to your next stage of life.
