Elfriede Jelinek Photo by J. D. Sloan

The challenging writings of Elfriede Jelinek
An Austrian feminist wins the Nobel prize in literature

By Bettina Brandt

THIS YEAR'S NOBEL LAUREATE in literature, Elfriede Jelinek, is a highly controversial author in her home country, where she is condemned for her relentlessly critical stance toward Austria's postwar politics and the mentality of its people. Praising the "extraordinary linguistic zeal," of her prose that "reveals the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power," the Swedish Academy lauded the radical feminist who, in response, declared that the unexpected literary honor should not be understood as a "flower in Austria's buttonhole."

Writing in a powerful, imagistic, shocking voice, Elfriede Jelinek is a polemicist in the style of compatriots like Karl Krauss and Thomas Bernhard, and like the latter has been called an anti-patriotic, pornographic writer. A member of the Austrian Communist party from 1974 to 1991, Jelinek has tirelessly demonstrated how the realms of economy, sexuality, and racism form a brutal patriarchal whole. She voices her brand of politics not only in her novels, plays, and essays but also from her website, ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/elfriede/, which is, unfortunately for English speakers, in German only. On the site, which has had almost 250,000 hits, Jelinek has published widely on contemporary issues in Austrian politics and society, including articles on racist police violence and diatribes against the ultra-rightist politician Jörg Haider and his so-called Freedom Party. When Haider's party joined the government a couple of years ago, she forbade performances of her plays in Austria in protest.

Though Jelinek had received numerous prestigious German and Austrian literary awards in recent years, the German-speaking literary establishment was shocked and caught by surprise to learn that such a controversial political writer had been awarded the highest international literary prize. In Die Zeit, a highbrow German weekly with a largely academic intellectual audience, a journalist bemoaned what he characterized as the moralistic high tone and hysterical finger-pointing in Jelinek's work. He mockingly labeled her "a grand regional writer" and equated the bestowing of this year's Nobel on the Austrian feminist writer to awarding "a hamster in a treadmill with the most important prize for long-distance running." Despite the fact that several of Jelinek's works have been translated into more than two dozen languages, including Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Chinese, Japanese, Turkish, Korean, Hebrew, and, of course, English, the anglophone academic and literary worlds, by and large, remain completely unfamiliar with her and her work.

Born in a small southern Austrian village in 1946, but raised in Vienna, Jelinek is the daughter of a Czech Jewish father and a Catholic Austrian mother. Her background underlines the multi-ethnicity of the vanished Hapsburg empire. Her father, who survived the Third Reich working as a chemist in a strategically important industry, died in a mental institution in 1968. Her mother tried to make Jelinek into a musical wunderkind. While still in school, she took organ and piano lessons at the Vienna Conservatory. In college she studied art history and theater at the University of Vienna. Around that time, at age 21, Jelinek suffered a mental breakdown and started to write. Shifting her emphasis from organ and piano playing to writing, Jelinek explains, meant turning away from her extremely restrictive mother. She credits her father, who loved to argue and debate, for her fascination with the self-conscious use of the manipulative power of the spoken and written word.

IN HER FIRST NOVELS, Jelinek criticized capitalism and consumer society. Over the next decade, she took on patriarchal society. More recently, Jelinek has focused on the fascist past and anti-Semitic present of Austria and Germany. Increasingly, she turns to the theater, which she sees as politically more effective than the novel. Working in and renewing the tradition of Bertoldt Brecht's epic theater, Jelinek avoids portraying "real" men and women. Instead, she creates flat characters, stereotypes, linguistic surfaces--"billboards," as she once called them. Functioning only as amplifiers of words, they cease to exist when they stop talking. Jelinek creates and produces her plays in Germany, so the Austrian public discovers them only after a considerable delay.

The novel Die Klaviespielerin (which came out in German in 1983) is perhaps Jelinek's best-known and surely her most autobiographically inspired work. Published in English as The Piano Teacher in 1988, it marks the author's international breakthrough. This clever but disturbing novel portrays the torturous relationship between Erika, a piano teacher, and her overbearing, controlling mother. At the same time, the novel tells about the ultimately unsuccessful sadomasochistic relationship between Erika and one of her male music students. The film version of the novel, directed by Michael Haneke and starring Isabelle Huppert, won three major prizes at the Cannes Film Festival in 2001.

Lust is another infamous Jelinek novel. Marketed as "women's pornography" by the author and her German publisher, its publication was eagerly anticipated by both feminist and traditional readers of pornography. It sold more than 150,000 copies and remained on German bestseller lists for weeks, though in the end, few probably read it. Despite the marketing, Lust is not a text about women's sexual fantasies; rather it is an exasperating short novel that describes the voracious sexual drive of a company director and equates his violent lust with capitalistic greed. In an interview, Jelinek rejected all accusations of pornographic sadism, arguing that sexuality, as it develops in the conventional frame of a heterosexual marriage, with its unequal relations of ownership, is by definition an act of violence by the man against the woman. Because she analyzes while at the same time reproduces violent pornographic representations, Jelinek has posed a challenge to German feminists in their debates over pornography.

Hoping to set off a broad, overdue discussion about Austria's participation in National Socialism, in 1984 Jelinek wrote Burgtheater, a play named after Vienna's most renowned theater venue. It traces the history of two of the Burgtheater's rising stars of the 1930s, Paula Wessely and Karl Hörbiger, who by the end of the decade became symbols of the Nazi cultural industry. Wessely, Jelinek claims on her website, was the best-paid actress in that system. Denouncing the political irresponsibility of the much admired Viennese couple, Jelinek also harshly criticizes the Austrian theater-going public that, before, during, and even after World War II, turned Wessely and Hörbiger into the darlings of the Burgtheater.

With the rise of the extreme right in the Austria of the 1990s, Jelinek became the subject of a widespread defamation campaign; enormous billboards that were distributed all over the country read in large letters: "Do you love Jelinek or do you love Art and Culture?" Perhaps the Swedish Academy answered the question. Jelinek is the first Austrian writer to be honored by the Swedish Academy and only the tenth woman to receive the Nobel prize.

Elfriede Jelinek in English
The Piano Teacher. Translated from the German by Joachim Neugroschel. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988. (Translation of Die Klavierspielerin)
Wonderful, Wonderful Times. Translated from the German by Michael Hulse. London: Serpent's Tail, 1990 (Translation of Die Ausgesperrten)
Lust. Translated from the German by Michael Hulse. London: Serpent's Tail, 1992 (Translation of Lust)
Women as Lovers. Translated from the German by Martin Chalmers. London: Serpent's Tail, 1994 (Translation of Die Liebhaberinnen)

How we think
The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain by Alice Weaver Flaherty. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004, 307 pp., $24.00 hardcover, $13.00 paper.
An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain by Diane Ackerman. New York: Scribner, 2004, 320 pp., $25.00 hardcover.

Reviewed by Peg Aloi

TO PEOPLE WHO DO what is sometimes called "honest work"--say, growing vegetables or cutting hair or putting up drywall-- the work of the writer looks suspiciously sweatless, if not downright lazy. Writers have the dubious distinction of being able to work while appearing to do absolutely nothing. Putting pen to paper or fingertips to keyboard (or voice to voice-recognition software) has to happen eventually. But the process of creation, of planning, solving problems, making decisions, and receiving inspiration may be done without moving a muscle, although some writers may walk, drink coffee or knit to get the cogs turning. These two books offer profound insights into the marriage of thoughts and words, process and product, with which writers are intimately familiar. Diane Ackerman's prose is learned and lush, and her adventures among aromatherapists, musicians, and ornithologists provide intriguing frameworks for discussing the brain's workings. Alice W. Flaherty, a neurologist, is more methodical and less prone to poetic expression, but her writing is nevertheless engaging and accessible. Both writers draw upon their personal experiences to moor their theories and ideas, helping readers navigate through their dense studies with occasionally prosaic and often surprisingly gender-specific discussions of post-partum disorders, menstrual mood swings, and hormonal discrepancies.

Flaherty's interest in the connections between writing and brain function began when she experienced periods of hypergraphia, or a compulsion to write, during two periods of post-partum depression. She gave birth to premature twin sons who died and, a year later, to twin daughters who survived; both experiences catalyzed in her an intense desire to write, and Flaherty later researched the phenomenon in both medical and literary contexts. Hypergraphia turns out to be closely connected to temporal lobe afflictions commonly seen in people suffering from epilepsy, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. Referring to the lives and work of writers as diverse as Lord Byron, John Keats, Edgar Allan Poe, Gustave Flaubert, Mark Twain, William Wordsworth, and Sylvia Plath, all of whom are believed to have suffered to some degree from at least one of the aforementioned conditions, Flaherty offers the opinions and findings of many biographers and medical experts on the impact of various brain disorders upon creative output. She acknowledges that the phenomenon of hypergraphia is less frequently documented in female than in male writers, but it's not clear if this is because hypergraphia occurs less frequently in women or because women's writing and its attendant difficulties have been nearly invisible until recent years.

Writer's block, the converse of hypergraphia, which Flaherty also investigates, is less easily traced to specific brain disorders and, Flaherty argues, is usually attributable in whole or in part to emotional and personal sources having to do with motivation, fear, trauma, loneliness, or performance anxiety. Nevertheless she examines the many physiological possibilities that can contribute to this frustrating and potentially career-crippling condition. In one fascinating example, Flaherty describes the effect of menstrual rhythms in the poetry of Plath, whose recently published, unexpurgated journals show that "her poetry's content and style… fluctuated dramatically with her menstrual periods." The "Ariel" poems, Flaherty says, clearly show a preoccupation with menstrual and reproductive imagery: "Their themes of barrenness, fertility, misery, bleeding and relief are overseen by the image of an inspiring but indifferent moon goddess." Flaherty points to a telling line in the poem "Poppies in July": "If I could bleed, or sleep!" Flaherty notes that women suffering from bipolar disorder, as some scholars believe Plath did, often suffer from severe premenstrual syndrome; she also notes with careful neutrality that Plath's suicide occurred during a pre-menstrual period.

Writers who occasionally suffer from writer's block may find Flaherty's exploration of hypergraphia somewhat anxiety-producing. But if this is the case, her chapters on writer's block are downright comforting; not only because she capably examines its many causes but also because she puts forth intriguing solutions, while at no time turning her intelligent and serious work into a self-help book. Midnight Disease is appealing precisely because Flaherty tempers her medical expertise with insights derived from her own curiosity and experiences as a writer. Not since reading the work of Oliver Sacks have I come across a book by a medical scholar that is so eminently readable and personally useful. My own experiences with writer's block are not inconsiderable; The Midnight Disease (a term first attributed to Edgar Allen Poe, who used it to describe the impulse that causes writing) has offered me some invigorating ideas for confronting my struggle with it. The book is a skillful study from an author whose mining of anecdotal and scientific evidence and literary and medical scholarship are as fluid, memorable, and thought-provoking as any great novel.

READING THE ESSAYS AND BOOKS of Diane Ackerman can often feel like reading an autobiographical novel. If you're like me, and occasionally find yourself drawn to reading a book while you've got a dozen writing projects on the burner (see "writer's block" above), you might have a niggling little voice in your head that says you're being "good" when you read nonfiction and "naughty" when you're reading fiction. Ackerman's nonfiction work, however, is so rich with metaphor and sensual description (she's written several volumes of poetry as well) that I confess to feeling guiltily pleasured by the time I've finished. In her previous books, A Natural History of the Senses and A Natural History of Love, Ackerman's experiences of the sensual world and her forays into idiosyncratic studies of science, art, psychology, and literature are crafted into mosaic-like texts, organized as much according to publishing logic as to her own personal mode of inspiration. Of her muse, Ackerman has said in Senses, it is "male, has the radiant silvery complexion of the moon, and never speaks to me directly."

It is not surprising that the author would eventually turn her interest to the workings of the human brain, since she has always demonstrated such fascination with her experiences of creativity and her thought processes. About a third of this book consists of sometimes playful examination of the complex workings of the brain, based on contemporary scientific case studies and experiments, as well as a number of historical examples. It's always great fun to read Ackerman's erudite, lively writing, and she is at her best when she is sorting out intricate layers of meaning, conjecture, and possibility, mellifluously melding references to science and art in the same sentence, as she does here:

The brain toils seamlessly, above and below the pond scum of awareness, integrating millions of messages, calculations, appraisals, updates--coming from the round body's imagined corners, as John Donne might say, and from its own mirrored hive, its own bees of the invisible. To its named owner, it speaks in streams of consciousness, image, and back talk. (p. 29)

This passage comes immediately after she analyzes her own sensation of hunger and her choice of a snack to assuage it (an apple, walnuts, and dark chocolate). Ackerman frequently describes personal encounters with family, friends, lovers, colleagues, and strangers (not to mention animals and plants, and most often, herself) to illustrate her points. Here she considers her own hyper-curious, sensual worldview as compared to a group of her writing students

whose work was surprisingly jaded and featureless. Where was the texture of life, I wondered, the feel of being alive on this particular planet? Didn't it strike them as astonishing that they shared the planet with goldfinches and heliarc welders and dung beetles and blood brothers and shiitake mushrooms? Where was their fascination with the world pressing indelibly on what they wrote? (pp. 48-49)

Ackerman then describes an exercise in which she asks the class to look out of an open window and "choose one sensory event that seemed eloquent" to them; obviously she thinks these students capable of the same sort of ecstatic observation that she herself is. Ackerman believes deeply in the possibilities of the human mind and relates this often: "We can't enchant the world, which makes its own magic; but we can enchant ourselves by paying deep attention." She again calls upon personal experience to explain what she means by enchantment, saying

my life had been changing, I'd been near death several times, and the simple details of being had become precious. But I also relished life's sensory festival, and the depot where nature and human nature meet. Everything that happens to us--from choosing the day's shoes to warfare--shines at that crossroads. (p. 49)

Some may find Ackerman's anecdotal, reflective approach self-indulgent or narcissistic. I do think this current book is more self-aggrandizing than her previous ones, because she frequently describes ways in which she believes her own brain is unique (her synesthesia, for example, a phenomenon in which the senses merge, giving one the perceived ability to smell colors or see music), and these anecdotes are often the point of departure for her discussion of a more general subject. Consider her moving account of a serious accident and near-death experience that she had on an expedition to a small Japanese island to see a rare breed of albatross. Her guides were strong, experienced mountain climbers. Ackerman admits she was not prepared for the physical demands of the journey to the cliffs where the albatrosses lived. She fell, breaking several ribs and suffering severe inflammation. She did not find out the nature of her injuries until days later, however, and went through a harrowing period of pain, fever, and loneliness on a remote outpost.

A noise outside. Animal? Human? Trying to call out, I again discovered I couldn't inflate my chest enough to shout. Pain was a tight suit of armor. A backlit figure appeared in the doorway. Was it real? Hallucination? What was the Japanese word for help? (p. 180)

In her delirium, Ackerman swears she saw angels:

Cold became a heavy ingot inside me. When I opened my eyes I saw an angel fluttering in the doorway, haloed in light. She metamorphosed into a beautiful white albatross with long wings and a yellow head. Again she became the angel, floating leglessly into the barracks, then she vanished in darkness, reappearing beside me. Just as suddenly she disappeared. Time passed like a well I had fallen into without hitting bottom. (p. 181)

The lens through which Ackerman sees her world (for it is a Diane Ackerman world, we just live in it) is colored by her areas of expertise: biology, anthropology, poetry, perfumery, and the more pedestrian arts of gardening and sex. Religion and politics find their way in, too. Because she is a poet, it seems appropriate that she often waxes poetic, even when discussing highly technical subjects, including the complex functions of our brains. Ackerman relishes the mystery even as she attempts to unravel it. Flaherty, in contrast, is a scientist first and a writer second. Both books eloquently explore that elusive, automatic act of thinking that most of us perform without, well, thinking about it.

Less cool, more light
Cool Men and the Second Sex by Susan Fraiman. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003, 212 pp., $24.50 paper.

Reviewed by Meryl Altman

MANY OF US HAVE WONDERED why, after 30 years of feminist critique, the casual disparagement of women is still tolerated sheepishly or with defiant "edge," even among otherwise progressive people. Susan Fraiman's outspoken, invigorating book looks at this question through the work of a trio of influential filmmakers, a handful of queer theorists (some of them women), and three major figures in literary and cultural studies: Andrew Ross, Henry Louis Gates, and the late Edward Said. The figures she discusses are "cool" in more ways than one. They are media celebrities and "academostars." They present themselves, with some justice, as leftists, as politically savvy, as fellow-travelers to feminism. And finally they are "cool in their style of maleness." "Coolness," says Fraiman, is "epitomized by the modern adolescent boy in his anxious, self-conscious and theatricalized will to separate from his mother….a picture of flamboyant unconventionality coexists with highly conventional views of gender--is, indeed, articulated through them." Race and class have their part to play as well, often through "an appeal to African-American and working-class men as embodiments of an authentic, renegade masculinity."

Cool Men and the Second Sex is a much needed, timely "speakout" book. Fraiman sets up what she means by "cool" through a reading of film, beginning with Quentin Tarantino's signature use of violence and his commitment to what she calls "narrative as adrenaline shot"--"the lurch from the daily to the deadly, from closeness to separation…from feminizing intimacy to heroic alienation." But her analysis really gets going when she shows how scholars and cultural critics have drawn on similar emotional schemas in edgy ways that run at cross purposes to their politics.

The emotional heart of this argument is in her chapter "Andrew Ross: The Romance of the Bad Boy":

As perhaps the "coolest" of my cool scholars, Ross demonstrates my thesis particularly well: though ambivalence toward feminism would seem to be at odds with hipness in a political sense, in terms of reigning cultural narratives about men and mothers, masculinity and femininity, a degree of antifeminism may actually be intrinsic to hipness, a significant part of what constitutes it as such. (p. 56)

Fraiman has if anything understated the adolescent self-indulgence of Ross, whose meteoric rise and imperviousness to embarrassment leave me mystified. It's not just the "laddishness," as the English call it, it's the absence of anything else. Ross's first book, grandiosely titled The Failure of Modernism, advanced a nearly impenetrable but sweeping theory about the 20th century ("Modernism saw…") based on a reading of only three poets, all men. It is a measure of feminism's lack of impact on the academic mainstream, as well as a comment on the absence of meaningful peer review in literary studies, that this was considered not only defensible but praiseworthy. When Ross does turn to women, you wish he hadn't, as in "This Bridge Called My Pussy," his contribution to Madonnarama (an anthology of scholarly responses to Madonna's book Sex), in which he mocks feminist debates about sexuality. He "turns again and again to popular youth cultures for political leverage and inspiration," says Fraiman. But chiming in with the celebration of black women's butts does not make one less white, and simply to assert one's solidarity with youth cultures does not make one younger.

Ross' pose is particularly disturbing because the project of left cultural studies was not simply to study culture but to change it. Ross emphasizes his Scot identity and bolsters his connection to "gangsta rap" and his slaps at the black middle class by reference to the faith-based gangs of his youth. But he never declares what he believes or takes a position clearly for or against anything he's discussing. His arguments run fast both ways; his apparent goal is to be the only one left standing at the end of the essay, smugly crossing his arms. The result is a discourse highly flavored by politics but in no sense engaged. This sort of "cool" supersophisticated put-down of everything can leave feminism looking embarrassingly over-earnest. Fraiman makes these points more politely than I have, but her careful analysis is damning.

It is a relief to turn from Ross's border skirmishing to the magisterial summations of Edward Said, who believed in something and was willing and able to say what it was. Still, Fraiman is right to see "a contradiction between fresh racial paradigms and rotten gender ones" in Said's chapter on Jane Austen's Mansfield Park in Culture and Imperialism. The world of the novel is underwritten materially and symbolically by the Antiguan slave trade; but Said's patronizing characterization of "cheerfully colonial…feminine nearsightedness" is possible only because he fails to consider two decades of feminist work about Austen or even to provide a close reading of her book. It's an inescapable thought that Fanny's problems simply don't interest him, are too trivial to hold his attention. In fact, he begins to seem like Austen's Sir Thomas, a brilliant man too preoccupied with world empire to attend to domestic matters. What Said shows so brilliantly about Joseph Conrad--that Conrad can't hear the complex, resistant voice of the Other--is true of Said himself but only when it comes to women. Culture and Imperialism's attack on Camus, for example, is devastatingly incisive; the section on Austen, perfunctory and misleading. Said's analysis of third-world nationalisms might have been strengthened if he had considered the complex ways such nationalisms mobilize women's bodies and deploy women's images--in the creation of "tradition" for example. Perhaps he would have come to see these intersections differently in time, if he had lived.

WHAT IS MOST PROVOCATIVE and most likely to be (as Fraiman puts it) "disconcerting" about her project is that she rarely goes after soft targets. At first I wondered why, when there is so much overt misogyny about, she would choose to criticize Henry Louis Gates, who has done more than almost anyone to get and keep black women writers in print and who attends to and praises the work of women scholars. But Fraiman presupposes a progressive academic community within which thoughtful objections may be made and heard. Her approach is a kind of disappointed love.

My rereading shows me she's right that women writers "remain a spectral, hypothetical presence" in Gates's early work, and that he mutes the feminism of Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker even as he praises them. Figures in Black and The Signifying Monkey brilliantly demonstrate that black writing should be read in sophisticated ways, as complex texts, not patronized as simple sociological or historical documents. But when Gates turns to Phillis Wheatley and Harriet Wilson, Fraiman shows, he unconsciously repeats that patronizing gesture (much as Said does with Austen). Fraiman is right to ask, about the oral tradition Gates finds central to black culture, "Who exactly finds sense and pleasure in reciting (or refuting) lines like 'I fucked your mama/ Till she went blind/ Her breath smells bad, / But she sure can grind'?"; and to note that Gates' claim that the folkloric trickster Esu-Elegbara is in some way an androgynous figure "despite his remarkable penis feats" is unconvincing.

Fraiman also criticizes Gates for having turned away from inclusive paradigms to focus, recently, on the crisis of black manhood. To my mind, this could be a whole lot worse. For instance, in Gates' introduction to Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, he suggests that there is something about being black and male that is more than the sum of those two qualities, but he never hands out easy generalizations. The variety of men he profiles in the book, from Louis Farrakhan to Bill T. Jones, defy generalization in any case. It's a subtle, informative book--yet we're left with 13 leaders of the race and potential role models who are all men, and that's a problem.

I continue to find Gates honest, serious, and committed, where Ross just seems narcissistic and oily. Gates may want to see the tradition he traces as more inclusive and less divided than it in fact is, so when he encounters some gender trouble, he detours around it. But this leaves blank spaces in his picture of African American culture, and because of his enormous and well-deserved influence, this is important to say.

Fraiman's explanations of why progressive male critics fall into these traps didn't quite convince me. Is Said trying to "remasculinize the colonial male"; is Gates compensating for his identification with his mother; is Ross repudiating the influence of the feminist film criticism "mothers" with whom he studied? I don't think we have to get that psychological. Each was seeking to leverage his cool outsider credibility with solid gold, insider credentials (Princeton, Yale); and this is, more or less, how "making it" has always been done.

IN FRAIMAN'S FINAL CHAPTER she joins scholars like Biddy Martin and Julie Abraham who have worried that the shift from "lesbian" to "queer" theory made possible an erasure of women, either through a focus on gender as fluid rather than stable or through the idealization of a fixed and familiar masculinity. Her disagreement with Judith Halberstam's Female Masculinity is especially cogent. It is hard to prefer Halberstam's project of making "masculinity safer for women and girls" to the older feminist ideal of making the whole range of activities and pleasures (now arbitrarily gendered) open to all--particularly since the lure of male power in masculinity remains underanalyzed in Halberstam's book. Studies of men and masculinity are very much foregrounded at present, and women's studies is working hard to learn from and incorporate them, as is only right. But we are not all that far from the days when "men's studies" was, well, the whole damn curriculum, so claims about "non-hegemonic masculinities" and assertions that masculinity can be rescued from its place in the structures of domination and subordination need to be scrutinized for awareness of who actually has power.

Fraiman concludes with a fine re-reading of Leslie Feinberg's transgender memoir Stone Butch Blues in terms of the main character's "butch maternity." I can't quite go along with her idea that we should respond to the "new masculinism" by revaluing or resexualizing the maternal body, however. It's tricky to say this, because of course hostility to the maternal has been damaging to all women, but I think the problem is broader: the disparagement not only of maternity but of older women generally, including within feminism. We need more good historical and textual analyses of lesbian culture, like Linda Garber's Lesbian Poetics, as part of the "sustained political and analytical multitasking," "close, unironic engagement with the world," and "political outrage and agency for women" that Fraiman calls for in her conclusion.

In Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, Gates writes: "We live in an age of irony--an age when passionate intensity is hard to find outside of a freshman dining hall, and even the mediocre lack all conviction…. Sometimes the relentless ironicism of contemporary culture feels like a vaccination against earnestness, which is the sort of precaution you take when you've been--in a phrase of Baldwin's--betrayed by too much hoping." Though she doesn't say so, Susan Fraiman's book resonates with this diagnosis and calls for a return to hope, for less "cool" and more light. She ought to get a hearing, both from feminists and across the left--always provided that that inclusive place, intellectual civil society, where the discussion could be held without defensiveness or posturing, really does exist.

The Bougainville Rebellion
…as Mothers of the Land: the Birth of the Bougainville Women for Peace and Freedom edited by Josephine Tankunani Sirivi and Marilyn Taleo Havini. Canberra, ACT, Australia: Pandanus Books, 2004, 190 pp., paper.

Reviewed by Kerryn Higgs

Map from …as Mothers of the Land.

BOUGAINVILLEANS MAY WELL BE the only people on earth who have successfully forced a transnational mining operation off their land. Bougainville Copper Limited (BCL) abandoned the Panguna copper mine early in 1989 and has not returned. BCL was a subsidiary of the British-Australian mining giant Conzinc Rio, now known as Rio Tinto. …as Mothers of the Land is a remarkable collection of stories told by the women of Bougainville about their lives during the ten-year conflict that erupted over the closure of the mine and the part they played in pioneering a path to peace.

Ecologically and geographically, Bougainville is part of the tropical Solomon Island chain. The Melanesian people of the Solomons are culturally homogeneous and distinct from the varied peoples of Papua New Guinea, some 650 miles to the west. The islanders' society is matrilineal; women are the custodians of the land and, as such, have a traditional role in decision-making at the highest levels. Life is based on subsistence agriculture, fishing, and cocoa growing. The introduction says that "since first contact, colonial appropriation of large tracts of land for European plantations and the Asian domination of towns for commerce was widely resented." In the words of the landowners of Kieta:

Land is our life. Land is our physical life--food and subsistence. Land is our social life; it is our marriage; it is status; it is security; it is politics; in fact it is our only world. When you… take our land, you cut away the very heart of our existence. (p. xix)

In colonial history, national lines were usually drawn to suit the colonial powers, who often ignored ethnic boundaries and the wishes of indigenous peoples. When the British divided the Solomons between themselves and Germany at the beginning of the 20th century, Bougainville was annexed to German New Guinea. The post-war settlement of 1919 retained Bougainville as part of New Guinea under Australian "trusteeship," despite its links of culture and kinship with the people of the Solomons.

Intermittent objections, requests to the United Nations for a return to the Solomons, and declarations of independence all proved fruitless. Just before Papua New Guinea became a sovereign state in 1975, Bougainvilleans, who numbered less than 200,000, again tried to secede. By this time, BCL had been mining at Panguna in central Bougainville for six years. No environmental impact assessment had been carried out. The Australian government had forcibly evicted the traditional landowners from the mine site, as well as from adjacent areas where a workforce imported from Papua New Guinea set up villages and gardens, soon encroaching further on the land. With nearly half its foreign exchange due to flow from the copper mine, Papua New Guinea suppressed the 1975 rebellion. Some autonomy was granted to Bougainville, but this involved neither control over the mine nor a share in its profits.

Once the mine was established, we are told in the introduction,

displaced Bougainvilleans found themselves dependent on the mining company… Resettled in hot fibro boxes on the edge of mountain ridges, they had to overlook the largest manmade hole in the southern hemisphere--what was once their land. Beaches along Bougainville's east coast were taken from other clans to establish port facilities…and resorts… Pristine rivers along the west coast were used as dumping channels for the tailings…depriving thousands of people of clean safe water. The [Jaba River] valley became a moonscape of slush and exposed bedrock… (p. xviii)

A former employee there, Ona founded the Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA) and launched a campaign of disruption and sabotage, culminating in an attack on the mine's electricity supply. When he blew up the power pylons, production stopped. By May 1989, the mine was closed down. Papua New Guinea struck back, first with riot police, then the army (equipped by Australia with four US-made Iroquois helicopters), yet the BRA held its own.

Map from …as Mothers of the Land.

In mid-1990, Papua New Guinea withdrew its forces, as well as all services, and imposed a total blockade, expecting Bougainville to capitulate. Instead, the BRA, supported by politicians from the former provincial government, declared independence as the Bougainville Interim Government. Over the subsequent seven years, Papua New Guinea armed militias of young Bougainvillean men from the North, inciting a civil war; launched intermittent invasions; occupied coastal areas; plotted to hire mercenaries when Australia declined military support in 1996; and maintained the blockade--not even medicine or a telephone connection was allowed.

The stories told by the editors of …as Mothers of the Land, Josephine Sirivi and Marilyn Havini, form the central narrative thread of the collection, though accounts by nine other women round out the book. Josephine was 22 years old and engaged to Sam Kauona, a young officer of the Papua New Guinea Defence Force (PNGDF), when the BRA blew up the power line to the mine. Papua New Guinea sent in extra riot squads that intensified removal of villagers into "care centres" in Arawa, the coastal town that served the mine. Villages were often burned--1600 dwellings were destroyed over the next year. Sam came under suspicion from the PNGDF after he attended a meeting of rebels.

Sam was from central Bougainville and connected to the people there. When he discovered he was on an army hit list, he defected to the BRA and became its trainer and military chief. Josephine, married to him by then--and pregnant--lay low in her village south of Arawa, then moved further south to a Catholic mission. But the raids and killings kept spreading. She heard of priests brutally beaten when they tried to visit their parishioners in Arawa. Her friend Marcelline had a son who was picked up by the PNGDF; she found him, shot dead, in the morgue. Then, in July 1989, a mother and her 14-year-old daughter who were friends of Josephine's family were killed, mutilated, and their bodies desecrated. Josephine fled to a hideout in the mountains built by her family, a preparation made by many who were connected to the rebels or unwilling to live under curfew in the "care centres."

Australian-born, Marilyn married Moses Havini, a Bougainvillean, in 1971 and moved to Bougainville's Buka region. "My new adoptive Buka family," she writes, "had welcomed me into their hearts to such a degree that I melded with the clan… I had found acceptance as a 'mama'… earning respect by raising many children besides my own in the 20 years I had spent in the paradise that is… Bougainville." The Havinis, who were living in Arawa at that time, stayed on through 1989, as the violence escalated. At the start of 1990, with Moses threatened by chaotic rebel elements as well as the PNGDF, they accepted the Australian government's offer of entry for Moses and flew to Sydney. Just before the blockade was imposed, the rebels contacted Moses in Sydney and asked him to represent the rebel government to the outside world.

The first two parts of the book tell tragic and heroic stories of life during the war--focusing on the difficulties of life on the run in the mountains of central Bougainville and the courage and commitment that maintained the community.

The Bougainvilleans endured immense hardships in the mountains. There were brutal assaults--villages burned and strafed, family members killed, maimed, and raped--and the ever-present fear of helicopter attack. The mountain climate was colder than the people were used to, and their clothing was inadequate. Gardens took longer to grow and hunger was endemic. When people had to escape through the jungle, their beds in makeshift camps were soaked by the tropical rain. Childbirth was a deadly risk and illness a disaster, especially for children and the old; malaria and tuberculosis could not be treated without Western medicines. Josephine's first daughter was born in the jungle, without medical aid.

However gruelling these experiences, the tenacity and resilience of the Bougainvilleans enabled them to survive. Though many died, they revived their pre-contact traditions and combined these skills with the knowledge some had gained through Western education. Traditional agricultural knowledge was rediscovered and the old staple foods grown again. Gardens were established, distant from the hideouts and small in scale for safety's sake. The women--always the gardeners--walked miles to tend them and hauled bags of produce home in the evening. Josephine tells the story of accidentally harvesting too much one day and carrying bags as big as herself for hours into the night, over a mountain range, until she fell headfirst down a steep slope and, injured, had to crawl the rest of the way.

Older men taught trapping and hunting to the boys. Traditional healers, who had been sidelined as "witchdoctors" and "quacks" in recent history, shared their knowledge of plants and remedies and resumed practicing skills such as bone-setting. People worked out dozens of ingenious technologies, harvesting sea-salt, making soap, and inventing a fuel from coconut oil suitable for trucks and generators. Men set up small water-power projects, which brought the first electricity to remote parts of Bougainville. Solar-powered mobile radio transmitters kept the rebel leaders in touch with their people, the refugees in the Solomons, and the world beyond.

Bougainville is a strongly Christian society, and the women's organizations owed much to the support and inspiration of Catholic, United, Adventist, and Pentecostal churches. One organization, under the leadership of Adventist Ruby Mirinka, who had been the principal of the Arawa Nursing School before the war, established dozens of health clinics, community schools, and even a jungle nursing school behind the blockade--as well as launching a travelling health show teaching nutrition, sanitation, and the causes, symptoms, and prevention of diseases. Ruby's people ran the blockade with pens, books, and other aid sent by Australian trade unions and nongovernmental organizations and were involved in the training of radio operators, hydro engineers, and a dentist.

THE THIRD PART OF THE BOOK traces the unfolding of the peace process. In 1997, after numerous talks had failed, the New Zealand government offered to host new negotiations. Thirteen women were among 70 delegates sent to the first meeting at the Burnham army camp.

Bougainvilleans from opposing sides had agreed that they needed to meet together and unite before negotiating with Papua New Guinea, though how they reached this felicitous decision is not explained. The rebels flew to Burnham in the same plane as delegates allied with Papua New Guinea.

Marilyn, one of the 13 women, came in from Sydney and was part of the advance party that met the arrivals from Bougainville. By chance, the BRA and rebel government leaders had boarded earlier and were seated at the back, so delegates from the Papua New Guinea-backed government and the militias emerged first. Enemies perhaps, but many were from Buka and some were from Marilyn's adoptive Buka clan. In such a small population, ties of family and friendship still counted, despite everything--and in this moment finally cut across years of

[W]e embraced them coming through the gates. We could not let them walk past us and so we were drawn into the terminal clutching our loved ones… By the time… [our own] delegates found their way into the terminal, we were moving across the 'divide' to embrace or shake hands with everyone we knew… Then the New Zealand hospitality took over with welcome speeches and an amazing hot breakfast [of]… island-style cooked taro and sweet potato. (p. 134)

That first Burnham meeting led to a truce and, over the next year or so, a ceasefire was achieved; eventually the PNGDF left Bougainville. For Josephine, the pivotal factor at Burnham was the presence of the women. She describes a spontaneous sense of solidarity emerging among them as they poured out their harrowing experiences and their feelings about the war. After Burnham, she founded the Bougainville Women for Peace and Freedom, which fostered reconciliation between the warring parties and between perpetrators of brutality and the aggrieved relatives of their victims.

THIS BOOK IS NOT A HISTORY in the conventional sense. It reads more like myth or fable--unbearable suffering and brutality are resolved through a miracle of reconciliation and hope. The mosaic of accounts is non-linear. I had to rely on the Internet to create a functional timeline of events; although some maps are provided, many places are not marked, and further research was necessary to grasp the spatial dimensions of the rebel effort, the territory they held, the civilian hideouts, and the routes across the blockade.

In addition, there is little explanation of the genesis of divisions between Bouganvilleans--what, for example, induced men to join the militias? Marilyn mentions a broad division between North and South, but does not elaborate. We are also told that the conflict spread outwards from Panguna in the southern half of the country. I could only guess that the land and lives of people living in Buka where the militias originated--100 miles north of Panguna--were not much disrupted by the copper mine. It's also clear that local men served in the PNGDF and that, unlike Sam, some did not defect, perhaps because the army was their livelihood, perhaps because their clans were not affected by the mine.

Yet, however fuzzy and puzzling the facts sometimes are, the purpose of this book is to preserve the personal stories of the women who participated, and these are emotionally powerful and inspiring. Marilyn's piece about the breakthrough at the first Burnham meeting still makes me cry, and the long term impact of Bougainville's courageous women was ground-breaking.

Bougainville Women for Peace and Freedom maintains its vision of a future without mining and without dependence on multinational corporations, encouraging the old barter system and self-determining local economies, caring for land and water in the context of sustainable agriculture, and pressing for the constitutional recognition of women's customary leadership roles in community and politics.

Ironically, it was a bloody civil war that restored to women their precolonial status and power. This stirring book tells how.

Postscript: At the end of 2004, UN peace monitors are due to withdraw. Free and democratic elections for an autonomous provincial government were supposed to have been held before they left; this is now thought to be unlikely, but a firm date is expected by then. A referendum on independence will not be held for another ten years. The Panguna copper mine remains closed. Bougainvilleans generally support full independence, but most have accepted autonomy as the next step.

The life and the myth
Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde by Alexis De Veaux. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004, 512 pp., $29.95 hardcover.
Conversations with Audre Lorde edited by Joan Wylie Hall. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2004, 199 pp., $20.00 paper.

Reviewed by Rebecca Johnson

Cover, Cables to rage. From Warrior Poet.

HER POEMS WERE A REVELATION. I was 23, closeted, black Catholic, and desperate to understand my feelings and their meaning for my life. The fiction and poetry of black women were my lifeline, but I had never experienced anything like Audre Lorde's The Black Unicorn (1978). I read "A Litany for Survival" to the older black women with whom I organized. I wanted to discuss the meaning of "Walking Our Boundaries" with closeted and confused white nuns. I shared "Sister Outsider" with the mentally ill homeless women living in community with us. Erotic, startlingly political, lyrically complex, essentially African, unabashedly queer, these poems honored a previously unrevealed way of life.

I felt I had found a path to my own voice and way in the world. I became a devoted reader of the works of Audre Lorde, finally meeting her at the I Am Your Sister Conference, a celebration of Lorde's life, in Boston in 1990. I came out, loved and love women, and view my activism as the quintessential demonstration of that love. It was with great eagerness that I looked forward to the publication of Lorde's biography, Warrior Poet. I read Alexis De Veaux's opening pages, the first sentences in the introduction to Warrior Poet: "Audre Lorde lived two lives. As this biography proposes, in her first life the three themes of escape, freedom and self-actualization were crucial determinants." She goes on, "Crucial to understanding Lorde's two lives was coming to terms with how to write her biography." I stopped. What is this dance the author is performing, and why does it feel so distant, so cautious, so sad?

I love biography. I believe it requires the greatest skill to portray a life, to open it to public scrutiny while allowing for the inherent unknowability of any human being. I expect a biographer to reveal a certain entanglement and engagement with her subject, some obvious demonstration of strong emotion, like the opening sentences of Wrapped In Rainbows, Valerie Boyd's biography of Zora Neale Hurston: "There was never quite enough for Zora Neale Hurston in the world she grew up in, so she made up whatever she needed… young Zora lacked no material comforts. … But Zora had other needs. She needed to know for instance, what the end of the world was like." The best biography is a work of love--not uncritical idol worship, not shallow hagiography, but love demonstrated by the rendering of a life in all its complexity, ambiguity, and uncertainty.

Was the task of explicating Audre's life merely an academic exercise? Would the whole book be one long, post-modern cliché?

It turns out that De Veaux's first act of love and sisterhood was for us readers, giving us a kind of foreshadowing that would lower our expectations, dampen any tendency to idol worship, call upon us to open up to the possibility not only of Lorde's wonderfulness but also of her sometimes intensely flawed ordinariness. In the middle of an introduction buttressed by concerns about structuring identity, historical record, triangulated constructs, and discursive interpretations was the essence of the author's dilemma.

And how to write of an Audre Lorde who was brilliant, intimidating, visionary: a woman who was creatively ambitious; financially generous toward other women writers, though she was often barely solvent herself; competitive with respect to her peers; sexually aggressive; vulnerable to any real or perceived racial slight…. How to write of her rage and oftentime violent temper; to present her as real rather than as monstrous. (pp. xii-xiii)

In fact, De Veaux's first frustrating (and frustrated?) sentences can in no way prepare us for the contradictions of Lorde's life.

Promoting Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, at the Second Women in Print Conference, Washington, DC, 1981. Left to right: Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde, Cherríe Moraga, and Hattie Gosset. From Warrior Poet.

Many of us believed that Zami: A New Spelling of My Name was the defining expression of Lorde's personal history. She herself referred to it as "bio-mythography." De Veaux eschews myth. Yet it was the myth that attracted me and others to Lorde. I go to many meetings with young progressive activists and, inevitably, male or female, they refer to Lorde. She is larger than life for them. But De Veaux seeks clarity of vision; she undertakes the compassionate untangling of a woman navigating a critical historical moment. To accomplish this, De Veaux distances herself somewhat from her subject.

De Veaux helps us to answer this question: Was Lorde a pioneer, crossing barriers of race, ideology, genders, sexual orientations, family structures? Was she an icon of intentional self-definition, self-created from her multiple experiences in this capitalist, racist society? Or was she someone much more ordinary, more like you and me, who discovered the courage to look outside of the narrow boundaries imposed on her by life and by her own choices? Lorde wanted us to see only the former. De Veaux wants us to meet and learn to love the latter.

Warrior Poet is a study of how oppression shapes a life, and how, with no role models, one woman resisted and overcame racism, colorism and internalized color prejudice, nationalist superiority, homophobia, and her own sense of being unloved and unlovable to become the poetic voice and role model for several generations. How Lorde struggled her way out of these oppressions--or didn't--makes Warrior Poet sometimes painful reading.

I read Warrior Poet side by side with Conversations with Audre Lorde, a compilation of interviews. Lorde's tendency toward mythmaking generates some dissonance between the life De Veaux describes and the one Lorde presents in her own words in Conversations. Conversations is the public Audre Lorde of Black Unicorn and Sister/Outsider. It occasionally hints at the petulant, I-am-underrecognized-as-the-artist Lorde, but mostly we receive a full dose of her making her own myth. Warrior Poet, for the first time, reveals the private Lorde--the one who sought out of jealousy to keep her literary agent from taking on June Jordan as a client. Who identifies herself with "all those 'feisty, incorrigible, beautiful Black women' who insist on standing up and saying 'I am,'" but who in fact had little schooling in what it meant to be part of an Afro-Caribbean or African American community. As a child, Lorde felt, on several levels, unloved by her mother, not least because she was awkward, dark skinned (by her family's standards), and extremely nearsighted. Her mother did not allow her to socialize with African American children in the Harlem neighborhood where she lived. She attended all-white private elementary schools. By her own telling there was no one to reflect back to her the dignity and beauty of the African diaspora, no one to encourage her to strive for the good of her people: Indeed, she didn't know many Caribbean people, except for her mother's sisters in New York City.

In group social theory there is a paradigm called Johari's Window. Our self-awareness can be described as a window with four panes: things I know about myself and things others know about me, called the Arena or Open Area; things I don't know but others do know, called the Blind Spot; things I know but others don't know, called the Hidden Area; and finally, things that neither I nor others know, called the Unknown Area. When I read in De Veaux about Lorde's complex relationships with black lesbian activists, black lesbian writers, white men, her father, her lovers, her children, her therapists, her sisters, white women--just about anyone in her private life--I felt jarred by the ways the panes of Lorde's window kept shifting, expanding, and contracting--revealing and disappointing. I became aware of my own "open window" and of how much I needed--and still need--Lorde to be the perfect revolutionary black woman, the perfect sister/outsider, as an anchor for my own identity as an activist in the world.

HERE IS AN EXAMPLE of a little thing that I found disturbing in De Veaux's book. First I want to invoke Rita Dove. She writes odes to the existence of the Maple Valley Branch Library in Akron, Ohio. She learned to read there. She was nurtured by black women librarians into her writer's life. Early in Warrior Poet, De Veaux describes how Lorde learned to read at the Countee Cullen Library, the segregated, colored library in Harlem. Later, after Lorde graduated from high school, she met Ida Cullen, Countee Cullen's widow. Lorde was an admirer of Cullen's poetry. She was invited to attend writer's workshops at the Harlem Writer's Guild, the organization that worked to uphold the glorious literary legacy of Harlem. So the reader gets the sense that Lorde was aware of, and perhaps valued, African American culture, even if as a child her color-struck parents would not allow her to associate or even go to school with black children. Yet Lorde says in Conversations that all her poetic role models were white men. While she appreciates the social significance of black poets' accomplishments, she implies that black male writers like Cullen were collaborators in the oppression of women. The reader can feel her love of Byron, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Hopkins but not the continuity between that colored lady librarian who taught her to read and the black poets who made her career possible.

De Veaux says clearly that Lorde valued and cultivated a "persona as mother figure, as authority" and in some ways used that image to maintain the outsider status that was so crucial to her self-definition. This outsider status was the result of her attempt to make meaning of all the ways she did not fit in, all the places in her life where she had no one to show her the way. In Conversations she says, "I have always been the outsider because I defined it as survival." Her struggle to claim a life, to survive all the external and internalized oppression, is what gave us her poetry and her essays--"Master's Tools" and Black Unicorn and Cancer Journals and Zami. Lorde took great risks in writing such essays as "Master's Tools." How ironic it is that the academic feminists who were once insulted by her arrogance now embrace her ideas as centerpieces for theories of difference, social change, and revolutionary progress.

De Veaux explains the context for Lorde's achievements; yet, puzzlingly, her book ends in 1986. This is where Conversations is useful. It provides a chronology of Lorde's life and interviews from 1975 through 1990 on a range of issues: poetry and its writing, teaching, coming to identify as an internationalist and a woman of color, and Lorde's struggle with the cancer that took her life. Lorde was active in the world--traveling, writing, publishing, and receiving such honors as the I Am Your Sister conference and being named the poet laureate of New York state--practically until the moment of her death in November 1993.

These two books call us to embrace all of life--our own and that of our heroes--even when it is confusing or embarrassing. In that e

AIDS: A crime against women
Moving Mountains: The Race to Treat Global AIDS by Anne-christine d'Adesky. New York: Verso, 2004, 487 pp., $30.00 hardcover.

Reviewed by Karen Kahn

I WAS SHOCKED OUT OF COMPLACENCY recently when I encountered a stunning figure in my morning newspaper. The average lifespan in some African countries is spiraling down so rapidly as a result of HIV infection that it is predicted to be no more than 35 years in the near future. Though I had known that AIDS is spreading rapidly in many parts of the world, bringing with it increased poverty, despair, and death, I had not stopped to consider the devastating toll of this disease on entire populations. AIDS has become the bubonic plague of the 21st century.

Since 1981, 20 million people have died of AIDS worldwide. Today, over 40 million people are infected with HIV; of these, the World Health Organization predicts 6 million will die in the next two years, if they are not provided with antiretroviral treatment. For Anne-christine d'Adesky, this is a crime against humanity. In her new book, Moving Mountains, she argues forcefully that "AIDS [is] not just a medical or public health issue, but fundamentally a social and political one." Though treatment could be made available to the 6 million people who need it today, d'Adesky contends, we do not have the political will. It takes only one quick look at the resources going to the "global war on terror" versus worldwide AIDS prevention and treatment to confirm that d'Adesky's righteous anger is justified.

Moving Mountains is a challenging book--intellectually and emotionally. D'Adesky pushes her readers to embrace their responsibility for this human tragedy and join the struggle to make treatment accessible around the world--and she grounds her argument in detailed field reports from the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, and Russia. Her interest is in the

myriad challenges--political, social, medical, technical, cultural--to delivering therapy, and to issues related to disease control and the capacity of nations to mobilize their civil societies and health sectors to deliver accelerated access to AIDS medicines. (p. 9)

These are complex issues. For readers unfamiliar with the technical aspects of AIDS treatment, global trade agreements and their impact on the manufacturing and distribution of inexpensive generic drugs, and the international agencies involved in delivering prevention and treatment programs, it may take some fortitude to keep going. But there is much to learn here, making the effort worthwhile.

HIV infection may be the most important issue facing feminists today. As Stephen Lewis, UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, told Ms. magazine this fall, HIV "has targeted women with a raging, Darwinian ferocity." Gender inequality leaves women vulnerable to sexual transmission from husbands who abuse them or hide their HIV status. Often men refuse to use condoms, but in many circumstances, the family's desire for children simply outweighs other considerations. In war-torn areas of Africa, rape by soldiers is commonplace, leaving women stigmatized, pregnant, and ill.

Today, half of all HIV infections are among women--in Africa, the rate is 58 percent. Among 15 to 24 year olds, 75 percent of those infected are female. In Uganda, d'Adesky notes, girls aged 15 to 19 are four to six times more likely to be infected than boys of the same age. Many of these girls are infected by older men who use them for sexual pleasure.

These high rates of infection among girls and women have accelerated promotion of AZT and nevirapine to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV. Such treatment programs have been highly successful but often do not include treatment for the mothers themselves. D'Adesky found women in Uganda "furious and desperate" about the lack of treatment for themselves, their husbands, and other members of their communities. Rather than succumbing to despair, however, they were organizing. If HIV infection has any up side at all, d'Adesky saw it here:

I realized that a positive offshoot of the AIDS crisis in Africa is the global attention it focuses on women's issues, which is helping African women to fight against long-standing legal, political, social and cultural inequities. (p.143)

Still, many Ugandan women fear revealing their HIV-status, as they may be beaten by husbands, kicked out of their homes, and abandoned. Domestic abuse is common in Uganda, where male privilege is deeply ingrained. A 2001 survey revealed that 40 percent of the women respondents had experienced domestic abuse; some women were beaten for refusing sex, and others were forced into sex as a marital obligation. As one activist with Women's Treatment Action Group (WTAG) noted:

The husbands are a real problem.... Many husbands have two wives, and sometimes these wives do not even talk to each other about HIV, even if one of them is HIV-positive. They cannot afford to tell their husbands. That is the reality we are going to have to confront. (p.152)

Uganda has been touted by the Bush administration as one of the great success stories for HIV prevention. Using an approach called ABC--abstinence, betrothal, and condoms--Uganda has reduced its seroprevalence rate from 30 percent two decades ago to less than ten percent today. However, suggesting that the decrease in transmission may be the result of high mortality rates, d'Adesky worries that, in a culture in which male privilege leaves women few options, the ABCs may be doing more harm than good. In Uganda, many married women have followed these rules, abstaining from sex before marriage, only to find themselves infected by unfaithful husbands. With little power in their relationships, these women cannot negotiate condom use to protect themselves.

Nor does the emphasis on abstinence and betrothal help marginalized communities of sex workers, drug users, or men who have sex with men. As the Bush administration pushes its conservative agenda, HIV continues to spread through these stigmatized but common activities. As AIDS activists in the US warned in the early '80s, "Silence = Death." The refusal to acknowledge the realities of nonmarital sex and intravenous drug use and to provide easy access to condoms and clean needles continues to leave countries vulnerable to widespread infection.

IN THE LAST DECADE, the face of AIDS in the West has changed dramatically. Today, the great majority of the 1.6 million people living with HIV have access to antiretroviral treatment; HIV has become a disease to be managed, rather than a death sentence. In the developing world, however, only seven percent of those in need of treatment--400,000 people--have access to effective drug therapies. D'Adesky acknowledges that providing treatment to all who need it is a tremendous challenge, but she contends it is one that the world community can meet. She is encouraged by the World Health Organization's commitment to its "3x5 plan" to provide treatment to 3 million people by 2005. Though politics and bureaucracy have slowed the process, WHO is providing important leadership in helping poor countries to acquire medications at prices they can afford.

The United States has not been an ally in that effort. The Bush administration, while widely publicizing its $15 billion commitment to stopping the spread of AIDS, has blocked the most important strategy for saving lives. Allying itself with the world's major pharmaceutical companies, the administration has used worldwide trade agreements to limit the ability of poor countries to import cheap generic drugs. According to d'Adesky, the cost of treating HIV-infected patients today could be as low as 38 cents per day. The struggle for worldwide access to antiretrovirals once again reveals the big lie about the high cost of medical care--these drugs are not nearly as expensive to manufacture and market as the pharmaceutical companies insist.

Making these drugs available to developing countries is not the only challenge in the battle against AIDS. Some claim that treatment protocols are too complex for poor, illiterate people to follow; d'Adesky insists that they are simply looking for excuses to do nothing. Her field reports demonstrate that even in the poorest communities in the world, treatment works. Widespread use of generics combined with prevention education have brought a runaway epidemic in Brazil under control in just six years. In rural Haiti, Dr. Paul Farmer's Partners in Health organization is saving lives through a community mobilization model that "views patients as equal allies in this effort."

Farmer's team relies on Directly Observed Therapy (DOT), a somewhat controversial treatment protocol that has often been used in prisons, mental health institutions, and drug clinics to ensure that the patients take their medicines. Partners in Health has adapted DOT as a public health strategy by training members of the community to provide the support patients need to comply with difficult treatment protocols:

In Cange, [Haiti,] the ones giving out pills and supervising patient behavior... are not doctors, but peers and community members who go to patients' homes....[These] community health workers are called "accompagnateurs"--those who accompany. They don't just hand over pills; they listen, they talk, they help individuals and their families cope with a range of daily, personal needs. (pp. 107-108)

Farmer's success with DOT provides hope for communities around the world. But other challenges remain. In many developing countries, the public health infrastructure is practically nonexistent. Lack of food and clean water undermines efforts to fight both HIV and the many opportunistic infections that attack those with compromised immune systems.

An optimist, d'Adesky sees these challenges as opportunities. As countries take on the fight against AIDS, of necessity they are building up public health systems and addressing long-standing health issues such as tuberculosis, the number-one killer of HIV-infected individuals in poor countries. In Africa, AIDS has focused greater attention on a host of long-standing, complex problems, including warfare, widespread famine, lack of access to clean water, and gender inequality. Addressing the AIDS crisis will necessitate finding solutions for these threats to health and stability.

Moving Mountains is densely packed with information and infused with the author's deep commitment to AIDS activism; the book, however, suffers from some unfortunate flaws. As a compilation of previously published essays, the flow of information and argument is disjointed and sometimes difficult to follow. I wished for a single chapter explaining the manufacture and marketing of generic drugs and the impact of world trade agreements, since this information was so central to many of d'Adesky's most powerful political arguments. I was also disheartened by the poor editing that left the text littered with contradictory facts and figures that may have been the result of error--or simply of the essays having been written during different years. The author, along with her editors at Verso, unfortunately failed to turn this thought-provoking collection of essays into the kind of coherent and incisive treatise that might have engaged a broader audience in addressing one of the greatest challenges we face as a global community.

Women of the Right
Evangelical Christian Women: War Stories in the Gender Battles by Julie Ingersoll. New York: New York University Press, 2003, 181 pp., $18.00 paper.
Home-Grown Hate: Gender and Organized Racism edited by Abby L. Ferber. New York: Routledge, 2004, 290 pp., $26.95 paper.

Reviewed by Esther Kaplan

JERRY FALWELL, PAT ROBERTSON, and other leaders of the evangelical Christian right often characterize their attacks on women's equality as a return to "traditional values." They see themselves as the defenders of a biblically ordained social order built around family (with, in its ideal form, a bread-winning husband and a child-rearing wife) and church (which, like the family, should be stewarded by a man). But the submission of women is actually quite a recent development in American evangelical culture. Throughout the 1800s, and well into the 1920s, evangelical Christian women frequently served as pastors, missionaries, and traveling prosyletizers. Women, like men, received calls from God to serve, and their leadership within evangelism fueled the moralistic drives for temperance, abolition, and women's suffrage that were an essential part of feminism's first wave.

It wasn't until after World War II, when the broader culture was championing Rosie the Riveter's return home, that evangelicals adopted their current anti-feminist stance, a process that reached its height with the rise of the Christian right during the 1980s and '90s and its takeover of entire evangelical denominations. It was only six years ago that the 16-million-member Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution calling for women's submission, and only four years ago that the Convention voted to ban women as pastors.

In her book Evangelical Christian Women, religious studies scholar Julie Ingersoll documents the tremendous amount of force it took to shove women out to the margins, and the many ways in which evangelical women have been leading an insurgency against this for the past 30 years.

Supporting the disempowerment of women didn't have to become the movement's test of allegiance, Ingersoll argues, and women within the movement may be able to unseat it yet. Gender issues are "not…even the most important ones," R. Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, tells Ingersoll at one point,

they are just the clear dividers in our time. Thirty years from now there will probably be different ones. Thirty years ago no one would have guessed that these would become so important. (p. 58)

After all, at one time, evangelicals' most pitched public battle was defending biblical literalism from the onslaught of Darwin--not women from the seductions of feminism.

But gender issues have become dominant, as illustrated by Ingersoll's fascinating chapter on recent disputes at Southern Baptist Theological. In the mid-1990s, after the takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention by conservatives, Mohler was brought in to head up its seminary, where he introduced a series of new litmus tests into the job interview process. Once the seminary's faith tests centered on biblical inerrancy, but Mohler added a series of questions about the candidates' views on abortion, homosexuality, and women's ordination. Even candidates who agreed on every point, but who accepted women's ordination, were blocked from being hired. The seminary's dean of the School of Social Work, despairing that her school would lose accreditation because these strictures would prevent her from hiring enough tenured faculty, went public with her concerns and was forced out. The School of Social Work was soon shuttered. Mohler, who had at one time supported women's ordination himself (he claims, cagily, to have changed his mind "through biblical study"), enforced the new party line at great cost, proving that he was willing to lose a respected school at his institution rather than bend on this gender-based line in the sand. Tensions were so intense at the school, according to Ingersoll's sources, that faculty members were openly weeping at one meeting with the president, and one professor left the room to vomit.

Elsewhere, Ingersoll documents women pastors being barred from conducting rituals, such as baptisms, at male-led churches and prohibited from attending pastoral retreats. She interviews women seminary students who are accused of being apostates merely for asking such questions in class as "Why is God father and not mother," many of whom end up quitting the seminary or taking antidepressants to weather the oppressive atmosphere. The result is that at schools affiliated with the Christian College Coalition, only 19 percent of senior positions are filled by women.

As Ingersoll documents, evangelical women have responded to this escalating gender oppression with small acts of rebellion--one Sunday school superintendent whose new pastor tried to fire her for insubordination marshaled the support of her congregation, who fired the pastor instead--as well as a few sustained organizational responses. The most prominent of these is an organization called Christians for Biblical Equality, which doesn't identify itself as linked to second wave feminism, but rather, according to Ingersoll, as the "rightful heir to the nineteenth-century women's rights movement." These so-called "biblical feminists" believe in equal opportunity for women, insisting, in particular, that church leadership should be open to women and that the ideal marriage is characterized by mutual submission, not a one-way submission of wife to husband. But they root these beliefs in a close reading of the Bible, sharing as they do the view of other fundamentalists, in the words of one participant, "that the Scripture is the whole counsel of God." This creates some interesting dilemmas.

Biblical feminists spend an inordinate amount of energy proving to their community that they do not threaten the conservative evangelical worldview. From the first, Christians for Biblical Equality sought out endorsements from prominent male evangelists to validate their views, and the group took strong positions against homosexuality, abortion, and sex outside of marriage that alienated many of its own members. It's clear from Ingersoll's research that there are two tendencies within biblical feminism, which will be very familiar to anyone who has studied feminism in other realms: one strand is merely accommodationist, seeking only to lift the glass ceiling; the other has the potential to offer a profound challenge to the dualisms at the heart of conservative evangelical thought. The Christian right now dominates the Republican Party apparatus--playing a decisive role on 44 state party committees--and holds tremendous sway over the current administration in Washington. Ingersoll makes a convincing case that this movement's commitment to gender inequality has become a first principle--one that underlies its stances against abortion, gay marriage, contraception, and sex education, which have gone far to shape national policy in recent years. The feminist resistance she documents, if able to assert itself, could have profound consequences not only for evangelical women but for the rest of us as well, by opening the door for a detente in our current culture wars.

THE ARGUMENTS OF ABBY FERBER and the other contributors to Home-Grown Hate are far less persuasive. Ferber introduces the collection by asserting not only that "women's bodies and control over reproduction are central to white supremacy," but that "we cannot understand this social movement without examining it through a gendered lens." While it's easy to agree that a gender analysis would add to our understanding of any social formation, the writers here fail to make a convincing case that gender ideology has strong explanatory power when it comes to white supremacists in the United States.

We certainly learn of some retrograde gender models within American white supremacist movements. Betty A. Dobratz and Stephanie L. Shanks-Meile, in their essay based on interviews with husband-wife pairs from various white power organizations, bring us a thoughtful portrait of Linda Storm, a national socialist who strongly embraces the view that her primary role is to bear and raise children--what another contributor calls "racist mothering"--and elsewhere we meet an older woman who helps girls mature into racist activists, playing the role of nurturer for the movement. But the cumulative effect of these essays is to lay out a variety of gender ideologies and practices within racist movements. Some leaders argue for gender inequality based on a literal reading of the Bible, while others argue that such inequalities are "natural consequences of the evolutionary process." Still others, according to contributor Randy Blazak, echo tenets of ecofeminism in their essentialist views of women's role in reproduction. In contrast to Linda Storm, we read that neo-Nazi Erica Chase conspired to bomb Jewish and African American landmarks and that a 12-year-old girl wrote a militant poem for the newsletter White Sisters that reads, "White and proud/That's what I am/Storming the streets/Getting rid of the trash." While some movement leaders frown on women working outside of the home, the Klan has hired women in top staff positions and was one of the first national organizations to endorse women's suffrage. One essay argues that women play an important role in movement recruitment; another that women often serve as the catalyst for men to escape. As Kathleen Blee, the author of three books on women in hate movements, points out in her essay, "Women and Organized Racism," "[w]omen's activities in organized racism differ considerably across groups." The women Blee interviewed spend their time "photocopying literature, making flyers, distributing propaganda, spraying racist graffiti on buildings and highways, writing to current and potential racist activists, promoting and managing white power bands" and on and on, a list that mirrors the range of activities a woman in any social change organization would likely engage in--albeit toward very different ends. All of this is interesting--often stereotype-busting--information, but it does little to bolster Ferber's basic argument.

In fact, some of these movements' most typically sexist positions are actually, on closer examination, anchored in race. The feminist movement is evil because it is controlled by Jews. Abortions are wrong for white women because white procreation is paramount, but for people of color it should be encouraged. Women should do their own housekeeping and home-school their children not so much to comply with traditional gender roles, but to keep "mud people" (black and brown people) out of the home and to keep children safe from the polluting influence of integrated public schools.

The essays present delightful evidence that men are recruited to white supremacist movements at least in part because membership resolves some crisis of masculinity, as illustrated by a cartoon parodying the old Charles Atlas ads in the back of comic books, this one titled "The Aryan that Made a Man out of Mac." It closes with the girlfriend of the former wimp, now pumped up and covered in swastika tattoos, saying, "Oh, Mac! You are a skinhead after all!" But in the end, the traditional explanation for the growth of these movements during the 1980s, which merits only passing mention in this volume, is far more convincing: More than 11 million American workers lost their jobs due to plant closings and layoffs during the early 1980s, and hundreds of thousands of small family farms were sold off during that decade's farm crisis. Right wing hate groups were at the ready, blaming Jewish bankers, Mexican immigrant workers, and African American welfare mothers for the fate of the newly dispossessed. As we approach the fourth year of a jobless recovery, at a time when brutal anti-immigrant policies are being justified by the war on terror, this book, for all its textured portraits of white supremacist gender relations, seems oddly oblivious to these other, quite powerful social forces. Linda Storm's husband Michael, a national socialist leader, tells his interviewers at one point, "We view all of life, history, everything, from a racial perspective." Why not believe him?

The myth of balance
Competing Devotions: Career and Family among Women Executives by Mary Blair-Loy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003, 269 pp., $39.95 hardcover.
The Time Divide: Work, Family and Gender Inequality by Jerry A. Jacobs and Kathleen Gerson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004, 259 pp., $45.00 hardcover.

Reviewed by Ruth Milkman

We've all seen her, on television or in print if not in person: the talented female professional with impeccable credentials who ditched it all to become a stay-at-home mom or to work part time. At first I thought this retro, post-feminist woman was a media invention, but then I began to encounter her in my daily life--among the mothers who do volunteer work at my son's school, sitting next to me on airplanes, and even among the daughters of my older friends. No statistics are available, but clearly lots of women like these can be found among today's flourishing moneyed classes, and doubtless there are others who would join them if they could afford it.

While some popular commentators sneer at those of us who were so foolish as to think it could have been different, others offer wry if sympathetic humor (Lily Tomlin's "If I had known what it would be like to have it all… I might have settled for less!" is my own favorite). But this newly emergent phenomenon has not gotten much serious attention in the vast scholarly literature on work and family that has accumulated over recent years. Mary Blair-Loy's insightful book, Competing Devotions, helps to fill that gap.

Blair-Loy initially trained her sociological gaze on women financial executives, curious about how gender might manifest itself in a context where traditional forms of inequality between men and women were supposedly absent. Rather than look for typical or "representative" women workers, as many others have done, she adopted "the strategy of the extreme case." The elite population of female corporate executives, cultivated under hothouse conditions in the nation's top business and professional schools, barely existed a generation ago, but now it is larger than ever--if not quite as large as one might expect 40 years after the rebirth of feminism. These women are totally committed to their careers; as they told Blair-Loy, they simply adore their work, and they routinely used superlatives like "euphoria" and "thrilling" to describe their feelings about it.

It's not that sexism has been eradicated from the corporate suite. Blair-Loy came across several cases of sexual harassment as well as horror stories like the one about a woman who found a rotten fish in her desk drawer after returning from a vacation. But despite all that, these female pioneers are intensely aware of their privileged status and thoroughly treasure their hard-won positions at the top of the occupational heap.

As she began to interview these "career-committed" women (a daunting task in itself given their formidable schedules), Blair-Loy was struck by the fact that almost none of them had children. The few mothers described themselves as anomalous. They were largely absentee parents who hired nannies (sometimes on multiple shifts) to provide care and generally embraced the traditional male model of 24-7 commitment to their work.

As her research continued, Blair-Loy heard story after story about other women--by definition not in her original sample--whose initial career trajectories were similar to the executives' but who had abandoned their positions midstream when they became mothers. She ultimately decided to expand her inquiry to include these corporate dropouts, and discovered that they were just as devoted to their children as the executive women were to their careers. Moreover, most of them were extremely critical of their sisters who remained in the corporate world; indeed, they tended to castigate full-time employed mothers generally. Yet these "family-committed" women were well aware of what they had given up, presenting themselves as having chosen "an almost ascetic life path of transcending self-centeredness for the sake of others' well-being."

Blair-Loy's comparison of the two groups is an imaginative and beautifully constructed study that bristles with insight. It is not an optimistic account, however. Rather than serving up the standard menu of neat public policy fixes to achieve work-family "balance," Competing Devotions explains why even such long overdue reforms as paid family leave legislation and the proliferation of "family friendly" corporate benefits are not likely to do much to resolve the work-family conundrum without a far more fundamental set of social changes. Both corporate elite careers and motherhood, Blair-Loy argues, have deep moral and cultural underpinnings. Both are governed by what she calls "schemas of devotion" that demand total commitment to one's "calling," whether it be to the corporation or the child(ren).

THESE MORALLY LADEN SCHEMAS are so powerful that they often trump economic rationality. As many commentators have noted, businesses would save considerably on turnover costs if they found ways to retain highly trained, skilled female executives by accommodating their family commitments. But as Blair-Loy observes, even though such an approach would be consistent with the logic of profit maximization, its implicit threat to the corporate devotion schema makes it simply unthinkable.

Along similar lines, in a brilliant stroke, Blair-Loy points out the contradiction her data present to Nobel Prize-winning economist Gary Becker's often-cited argument that the gender division of labor at home is economically rational, because families lose less income when women leave the labor market to parent than when men do. Many of Blair-Loy's family-committed interviewees had jobs paying double or triple the level of their husband's salaries, yet in every case it was they, rather than their husbands, who gave up their careers to become the primary parent. Unlike the corporate devotion schema, which is at least theoretically available to women if they are willing to minimize their involvement in parenting, the family devotion schema effectively excludes men.

Many of the "family-committed" women in Blair-Loy's sample turned out to be deeply discontented, confessing (sometimes in tears) that they found child-rearing monotonous and dull. Yet these women professed even more loyalty to the schema of family devotion than those in the sample who found genuine fulfillment in maternity, precisely because of their sense of self-sacrifice. "They can regard themselves as even more faithful mothers, because they have transcended their own personal unhappiness to serve their children," Blair-Loy observes.

Ironically, the same is true of the "mavericks" among Blair-Loy's interviewees, those few women who have found ways to combine "part-time" (i.e., 40-hour-a-week) corporate careers with mothering. They are totally dedicated to their work and at the same time never miss a school play. They leave the office promptly at 6 PM but are back at their desks from 9 to midnight while their children sleep. These women are "double heretics," whose dual allegiances threaten both schemas of devotion (and in the corporate world this "choice," when permitted at all, nearly always comes at the price of future advancement). Yet at the same time the intense commitment of these women to both schemas of devotion helps to reinforce the tenacious grip of the schemas themselves. In some respects they are even more devoted to their jobs than their coworkers, constantly keeping their noses to the proverbial grindstone and forgoing occasions for socializing, for example. Yet simultaneously, by voluntarily "taking on more domestic work and by affirming mothers' unique cultural mandate… they demonstrate the resilience and resonance of the family devotion schema."

The cultural discourse that these elite women invoked often struck Blair-Loy as unreflective and clichéd.

Career-committed group respondents listed "personal objectives" and glowed about being "challenged by new opportunities at work." Family-committed group members discussed having to "cut overhead" when they stopped working. They referred to their children as "happy little campers" thriving on "TLC." (pp. 214-215)

After initially wondering if her interviews weren't probing deeply enough, Blair-Loy "finally decided that many respondents actually understood the world in these terms."

If their self-understandings are drawn from the most common cultural denominator, it is still the case that the women Blair-Loy studied are atypical--as she is perfectly aware. Most obviously, they are enormously wealthy: The career-committed women earn huge salaries themselves, and the family-committed ones typically are married to very high-earning men. So what about the rest of us?

THIS IS PRECISELY THE FOCUS of The Time Divide, another major contribution to the sociological scholarship on work and family, in which Jerry Jacobs and Kathleen Gerson provide a critical review of the vast literature on time use, as well as their own detailed data analysis. They adjudicate between competing accounts of this subject, some of which argue that Americans are overworked (indeed, average working hours are longer in the US than in other advanced capitalist societies), and others that suggest that leisure time is more abundant today than it was a few decades ago.

Jacobs and Gerson argue that this debate obscures the gender and class divisions that are central to the process of time allocation. The overall increase in (paid) working hours, they note, mainly reflects the fact that women's involvement in the workforce has increased in recent years. And the apparent increase in "leisure" is largely a product of women spending less time doing housework rather than of any decline in hours devoted to paid work by either men or women. At the same time, parents (of both genders) are spending more time with their children than in the past.

Jacobs and Gerson highlight sharp class differences in time-use practices and preferences. The professionals and managers who get the lion's share of attention in public discussion--of whom Blair-Loy's subjects are the ultimate exemplars--are indeed facing severe time pressures; but this problem is uncommon among less affluent workers, many of whom would like to work more hours but cannot find jobs that offer that opportunity. Workers classified as "exempt" from the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act--a law the Bush administration recently sought to eviscerate--work long hours of unpaid overtime, while economic restructuring has left the nonexempt majority working fewer hours than many would prefer. Jacobs and Gerson show that "the average length of the workweek has remained largely unchanged since 1970 [but that] variation around the average has increased." They also distinguish between parents and non-parents, demonstrating that both women and men with young children in most cases would prefer to spend fewer hours working outside the home than they currently do--contrary to Arlie Hochschild's influential claim in The Time Bind (2000) that parents increasingly see work as a refuge from the tempestuous world of home.

Jacobs and Gerson's careful, definitive analysis will be an indispensable reference in this field for many years to come. They conclude with a list of public policy prescriptions for such measures as paid parental leave, government provision for child care, and legislative reductions in standard working hours. As a chapter in the book (co-authored with Janet Gornick) reviewing cross-national data makes plain, these are hardly utopian suggestions but rather policies that most of the advanced capitalist world has already adopted. Yet after reading Blair-Loy, one cannot help thinking that even such basic reforms--which in any case have poor prospects of success in the US at present--would do little to undermine the hegemonic cultural assumptions, the "schemas of devotion," that continue to define both work and family in an America where the corporation is king.

Marilynne Robinson Photo by David Herwalt

Iowa meditations
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004, 247 pp., $23.00 hardcover.

Reviewed by Valerie Miner

MARILYNNE ROBINSON'S LONG-AWAITED second novel, written in epistolary form, is an imaginary memoir by John Ames, a Congregationalist minister of meager means and massive faith. Twenty-three years after the publication of her popular Housekeeping, Robinson resumes her psychological and spiritual exploration of survival in the face of family abandonment.

Gilead, the absorbing confessions of a pious man, transcends religion to address common secular struggles about maintaining hope and holding fast to an ethical course. At a time when so many politicians aggressively flaunt religiosity in strategic sound bites, it is refreshing to read an honest account of moral and spiritual quandaries. The Reverend Ames is a good person, not a saint. And it is his fallibility, humility, and humor--even more than his generous heart and dedicated labor--that make him appealing. Gilead is remarkable for its sensual evocation of place and keen appreciation for history as well as for its candid, often gripping, examination of conscience.

It is 1956 and the 76-year-old Ames suffers from a fatal heart condition. He lives his last days mindfully, tending to his rural Iowa congregation, visiting an ailing friend and, most importantly, composing a family record to be given to his young boy when he reaches adulthood. By writing in the second person, Robinson intimately implicates her audience; it is as if the story is addressed to "you my readers" as well as to "you my son."

Ames' measured--occasionally aphoristic--language is notable for its clarity and plain beauty. Here he introduces his son to the family:

My mother's father was a preacher and my father's father was, too, and his father before him, and before that, nobody knows….That life was second nature to them, just as it is to me. They were fine people, but if there was one thing I should have learned from them and did not learn, it was to control my temper. (p. 6)

"Gilead" is an intriguing name for a modest, weather-worn Iowa town. Geography is not the allusion here, for this place is nothing like its namesake, the fertile, mountainous region northeast of the Dead Sea. Rather Robinson is referencing etymology and scripture. "Gilead" is rooted in the Hebrew for "firm, hard, tough," an apt metaphor for Ames' character. Gilead is also where David seeks refuge from his mutinous son Absalom. In an ironic twist on biblical power-grabbing, John Ames has the family inheritance thrust upon him. His brother Edward renounces Christianity. His preacher father fails to return from a trip to Florida, leaving young Ames with the duties of his parish for the rest of his life.

This nonlinear novel takes its structure from the circumlocutory ramblings of an old man; sometimes Ames is recalling the family's arduous migration from Maine to Kansas to Iowa; sometimes he is worrying about next Sunday's sermon; sometimes he is mourning his first wife and daughter; sometimes he revels in the joys of his present domestic fortune. For the most part, this naturalistic voice succeeds; but occasionally Gilead is burdened by the self-consciousness and narrowness endemic to such a personal enterprise.

Still Robinson's book is enlivened by moments of stirring conflict and suspense. As a 12-year-old, Ames accompanies his father on a wearisome journey to Kansas in search of Grandfather Ames' grave. The boy learns about his grandfather's passionate abolitionism and his Civil War military service. He also discovers the painful estrangement between his grandfather and his pacifist father, a rift that never healed. After much adversity, young Ames and his father locate the gravesite.

There the boy looks up to see the setting sun crossing with a rising moon.

We just stood there until the sun was down and the moon was up. They seemed to float on the horizon for quite a long time, I suppose because they were both so bright you couldn't get a clear look at them. (pp. 14-15)

Ames' talent for wonder, his appreciation of the grandeur or tranquility in mundane experiences, beckons readers to look longer and deeper and more closely at the ordinary moment.

Currently, Ames' major preoccupation is his failing health and that of his lifelong friend, the Reverend Robert Boughton, now the neighboring Presbyterian minister. Will the two old men last through the spring? The summer? Meanwhile, tensions escalate when Boughton's son and Ames' godson, Jack Boughton, arrives in town. The prodigal's return pleases old Boughton and inexplicably aggravates Ames. Why is the younger man making such frequent visits to Ames' home and church? The godson becomes a kind of menacing alter ego, perhaps a treacherous Absalom. Ames grows anxious that Jack is waiting for his death to lay claim to Ames' young wife Lila and their beloved son.

MARRIAGE AND FATHERHOOD have been startling miracles in Ames' later life. Indeed, Lila arrives like an apparition; as she sits at the back of church that first Sunday, Ames' words turn to ashes on his tongue.

I remember when she lifted her dear face to me to be baptized--lifted it into the winter morning light, new-snow light--and I thought, She is neither old nor young, and I was somehow amazed by her and I could barely bring myself to touch the water to her brow because she looked a good deal more than beautiful. Sadness was a great part of it, it was. (p. 93)

Addressing his son, Ames continues, "So she has grown younger over the years, and that was because of you."

Before this second marriage at age 67, Ames spends a good many years oscillating between hollow loneliness and serene solitude. Now this blessed little family adds tender joy to his careful, final passage. These days he reads a lot; makes pastoral visits; plans to vote for Eisenhower (if he lives long enough); enjoys the glories of spring and summer and the rising cold. He experiments suspiciously with the new-fangled gift from his congregation--a television set. And of course he endures the routines of church business.

I spent this morning in a meeting with the trustees. It was pleasant. They respectfully ignored a few suggestions I made about repairs to the building. I'm pretty sure they'll build a new church once I'm gone. I don't mean this unkindly--they don't want to cause me grief, so they're waiting to do what they want to do, and that's good of them. (p. 110)

Robinson knows pastoral work first hand, as an active member and former deacon in her Congregationalist community. During the years since Housekeeping, she has addressed moral issues in church and as a public intellectual, writing two major nonfiction books. In Mother Country, she investigates the environmental damage caused by the Sellafield nuclear plant in Britain. The Death of Adam is a collection of philosophical essays addressing such thinkers as Sigmund Freud, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, William Holmes McGuffie, and John Calvin, the forefather of Congregationalism. At her own congregation, she is still called upon to preach. As she tells Carin Besser in an online New Yorker interview on www.newyorker.com, "I have enjoyed the problem of exploring the sermon as a form. It is a deeply instructive experience, a very interesting way to think. And the situation is interesting--to stand in a pulpit does focus the mind, or it should."

Throughout Gilead, John Ames uses his chronicle to help himself focus on the unforeseen rewards as well as the vexing trials of his long life. He often digresses with explorations of past deeds or insights into theological questions. When he finally grasps the tormented motivation for Jack's recurrent visits, he understands that the younger man is not a stalker but a pilgrim. Ames gently offers spiritual guidance to his suffering godson: "[D]octrine is not belief, it is only one way of talking about belief." At another point Ames remarks,

I think there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave--that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm. (p. 246)

Ames embraces his destiny on this stark land where circumstance has often strained his faith.

I love the prairie! So often I have seen the dawn come and the light flood over the land and everything turn radiant at once… Here on the prairie there is nothing to distract attention from the evening and the morning, nothing on the horizon to abbreviate or to delay. Mountains would seem an impertinence from that point of view…. This whole town does look like whatever hope becomes it after it begins to weary a little, then weary a little more…. I think sometimes of going into the ground here as a last wild gesture of love--I too will smolder away the time until the great and general incandescence. (pp. 246-247)

At one point, Ames compares writing to praying. Marilynne Robinson's literary epistle is intricately threaded with supplication and atonement and epiphany and thanksgiving. Her novel traces the evolution of one man's compassion, challenging secular and religious readers alike through Ames' meditation and testimony.

Biography of an autobiographer
Harriet Jacobs: A Life by Jean Fagan Yellin. New York: BasicCivitas Books, 2004, 394 pp., $27.50 hardcover.

Reviewed by Joycelyn K. Moody

FITTINGLY, the Project on the History of Black Writing marked its 20th anniversary on October 1, 2004, with a lecture by Jean Fagan Yellin, author of Harriet Jacobs: A Life. Throughout her lecture, "Tracking a Slave," Yellin was passionate and persuasive; everyone in the University of Kansas (KU) auditorium was enraptured as she described how she researched and wrote her biography of Harriet Jacobs who, alone among the millions of enslaved black women, left a life-record of her own making, penned before the Civil War. Yellin's 1987 edition of Jacobs' incomparable antebellum autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself (1861), has been translated into many languages, including French, German, and Japanese.

Harriet Jacobs in 1894. From Harriet Jacobs: A Life.

Yellin first became fascinated with Jacobs while working on her doctoral dissertation, published as The Intricate Knot: Black Figures in American Literature, 1776-1863 (1972). Then in 1981, in a groundbreaking article in American Literature, Yellin cited a newly discovered cache of letters that Jacobs sent in 1852 and 1853 to Amy Post, a white, Quaker anti-slavery and suffrage activist with whom she briefly lived when she arrived in Rochester in the late 1840s. Yellin established that although the narrator of Incidents is called Linda Brent, Jacobs herself was a historical rather than a fictional figure, and Incidents is not a novel by its famous editor, Lydia Maria Child--a "fact" that had been robustly asserted by the influential US social historian John Blassingame. It is Jacobs' own autobiography. Yellin says that she had always doubted that Child wrote Incidents: Child was too conscientious an abolitionist to risk the fate suffered by her friend John Greenleaf Whittier, who created a scandal in 1838, when the details of a "slave narrative" he wrote were challenged by slavers as unverifiable and thus inauthentic. Whittier's gaffe had hurt the abolitionist effort, and Child would not have cast similar suspicion on the story of a formerly enslaved woman she had come to admire.

Harriet Jacobs is divided into three parts, each bearing the particular moniker by which Jacobs was known during that period of her life. As the pubescent "Hatty" of Part 1, Jacobs served as nursemaid and domestic in two prominent households in Edenton, North Carolina--her birthplace and the site of most of Incidents. In the first household she outwits a lascivious owner, James Norcom Sr.--the Dr. Flint of Incidents--by seducing his neighbor, Samuel Sawyer. After bearing two children by Sawyer, Jacobs further "escapes" Norcom by hiding for nearly seven years in her grandmother's household, under the eaves in a garret nine feet long, seven feet wide, and three feet high. In this attic-tomb, Jacobs used a tiny gimlet to carve out a "loophole of retreat" within her hideout; from this vantage point, she could sew, read, and most importantly, watch her son and daughter at play in the yard.

Yellin searched out the origins of Jacobs' pipe dream of salvation from bondage via the single, personable, aristocratic Sawyer. Such romantic fantasy was the stuff of Hollywood, but Jacobs had lived before there was a Hollywood, Yellin mused. Painstaking research into Jacobs' fantasy life revealed that her wild hope had been based on the "conjugal" experiences of an enslaved concubine cum freed mother, Rose Cabarrus, another Edenton neighbor. Onto the gentlemanly Sawyer, Jacobs pinned her hopes of stopping Norcom's ravages. Incidents divulges virtually nothing of her intimacy with her intellectually lightweight lover--only that her scheme failed. For Sawyer not only never freed their children, but in New York years later, he worked Louisa Matilda, his adolescent daughter by Harriet, as "nanny" to her half siblings by his white wife. Eventually, Sawyer sold his "mulatto" offspring to Jacobs' family. Jacobs' virulent insistence that she was not saleable chattel--that no human being is--proved bitterly insufficient to secure her own freedom: She had escaped bondage in North Carolina via sailboat in 1842 only to be sold from slavery in New York in 1852. Cornelia G. Willis, her employer at the time, purchased Jacobs' freedom to save her from imminent threat of capture under the Fugitive Slave Act.

Whereas Part 1 explores Jacobs' "Private Dreams of Freedom and a Home" as the slave girl Hatty, in Part 2 Yellin explores Jacobs' "Public Dreams of Freedom and a Home," as the anti-slavery activist "Linda [Brent]," who migrated to the Northern cities of New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Rochester. The third section of the book is narrated by the venerable, albeit never married "Mrs. Jacobs."

AT KU, YELLIN CONFESSED, "I don't know a lot about biography. I went to conventions and workshops [for biographers]…but I'd never written one, and I surely never will again." Just what does enable biography? What does it take to learn another's life in detail intricate enough to reconstruct it? What impels such intimacy and devotion? Yellin explained that she was "hooked" by the desire to move from editing Jacobs' autobiography to writing her biography when she located the records of Jacobs' extensive work in the post-Emancipation freedom and relief movement. She pursued questions about Jacobs' sponsors and was enthralled by the information she found in letters, ledgers, and account books across New England. She discovered dozens of newspaper editorials and letters of protest against the atrocious living conditions of freed refugee slaves that Jacobs wrote during and after Reconstruction and signed with the honorific "Mrs. Jacobs." Yellin's formidable investigations took her to the gold rushes of both California and Australia, as she traced the lives of Jacobs' brother John and son Joseph.

Readers who find redundant the biography of an autobiographer should heed Henry Louis Gates' 1989 Voice Literary Supplement review of Arnold Rampersad's two-volume Life of Langston Hughes (1986)--as well as Rampersad's own Yale Review essays on "Psychology and Afro-American Biography" (1983, 1986). These scholars call for the production of more biographies of black writers and of black people generally. At KU, Yellin humbly attributed the inspiration for her own venture to another scholar of African American autobiography, William L. Andrews, who argued that a biography solidifies an author's canonical status in American belles lettres. Without one, an author remains if not obscure then at least "minor." When a colleague reproved Yellin for expending so much professional energy on someone he dismissed as a "one-book author," Yellin committed herself to carving out for Jacobs the exceptional place in the canon that she knew Jacobs deserved--and rejoined to her colleague, "Yes, but it's an amazing book!"

Autobiography differs from biography in that the former is necessarily an untrustworthy performance, fabricated by a storyteller who cannot be disinterested. Biography analyzes story and storyteller and transcends autobiography by completing its chronological, historical, and discursive gaps; thus, Harriet Jacobs includes 100 pages of notes and a "select bibliography" of over 150 citations. Yellin adds to Jacobs' story by chronicling her life after the time period covered in Incidents, from her manumission at age 39 to her death in 1897 at age 84.

Tellingly, Yellin's biography does not document the friendships Jacobs enjoyed with other black women, freeborn or enslaved. Instead, it portrays a full-tilt activist gravely absorbed in struggles quotidian and colossal for her own freedom and for the corporeal and psychosocial liberation of other black people--first from chattel slavery, then from the vicissitudes and vagaries of sudden self-reliance. Still, Jacobs' intimacy with her daughter Louisa Matilda suggests a black womanly connection that sustained her. The post-Emancipation relief activism of Elizabeth Keckley, "with whom Jacobs must have worked during the war," inspired Jacobs, Yellin suggests--but apparently across a social divide. Keckley, a former slave who had maintained her own sewing business both before and after serving as modiste in the Lincoln White House, belonged to Washington DC's "colored society." Jacobs, in contrast, was always a much humbler social servant.

Highly principled and hardworking, "Mrs. Jacobs" brooked no threat to her discursive authority by scrupulously avoiding personal and private rhetorics after she wrote Incidents. Nonetheless, Yellin demonstrates that Jacobs maintained close professional bonds with a constellation of 19th-century writers, including Child, of course, as well as Jacobs' 40-year friend and confidante Amy Post, Frederick Douglass, Charlotte Forten Grimké, William C. Nell, and William Lloyd Garrison. After painful encounters with Harriet Beecher Stowe and Nathaniel Willis, Jacobs deliberately avoided contact with writers she judged spurious.

At KU, Yellin said of her book, "This is really a woman's story! Women are the actors throughout." But she also names a surprising number of men who helped her in her research. In her introduction to Harriet Jacobs, she describes a poignant incident in which she assumed she was being ignored by a librarian in Edenton because he was a racist who dreaded her efforts to uncover the truth about Jacobs, the writer and anti-slavery activist. Yellin decided he must fear as well Jacobs' biographer, because she was impassioned, Jewish, and female. She turned out to be wrong, and this same librarian led Yellin to her crucial discovery that Jacobs' father was an enslaved carpenter named not Daniel but Elijah. Elijah was married to Harriet's mother, then after her death to a second woman who also bore him children. This discovery highlights the way Jacobs constructed her autobiography, underscoring the exacting care with which she portrayed herself and her family. Jacobs' account of her escape from bondage may be a woman's story about women, but Yellin's journey includes numerous men who helped an extraordinary woman to re-embody another extraordinary woman's life.

Harriet Jacobs includes a now familiar photograph of Jacobs as well as a newly discovered one of her amid students at the school she and her daughter operated for blacks at Alexandria, Virginia. Additional rare photographs in the book's 16-page visual appendix include those of family members (including persons thought to be her children); the Norcoms; various anti-slavery leaders; and the woman who ultimately bought her. Also reproduced in the appendix are examples of the vital, explicatory documents that Yellin discovered.

Yellin concludes her book's acknowledgments by thanking her children and grandchildren for indulging her devotion to "Harriet." She asks, "What will life be like without her?" I suspect she'll never find out. After all, she is professor emeritus at Pace University, where she directs the Harriet Jacobs Papers Project. Undoubtedly, she will produce more Jacobs scholarship yet.

Publishing for the love of it
Small presses are changing the world, one page at a time

By Judith Niemi

IN A TIME WHEN CONGLOMERATES own the old publishing houses, and books that aren't "blockbusters" disappear from bookstore shelves in months or even weeks, when feminist and other independent bookstores are dying off at an alarming rate, small presses seem more critical than ever, and more endangered. Yet a press of one's own is a durable dream and, here in Minnesota, several new presses were born in the last year. "You have to be a little crazy to do this," warns an established small publisher.

Two new presses with political and social missions are Carol Bly and Cynthia Loveland's Bly and Loveland Press and Gail Cerridwen's Word Warriors Press. These women's implicit, in-the-bone feminism informs their work. I talked with them about their plans and dreams, and for perspective also interviewed veterans of the feminist presses Spinsters Ink and Aunt Lute.

Carol Bly says that her press' mix of story, modern brain development theory, and social work insight is "exactly the stuff that most literary presses avoid like the flu." Reviewing Bly's 1996 anthology, Changing the Bully Who Rules the World, writer Mary Pipher called Bly "a one woman army fighting moral drift" because of her several decades of writing short stories and essays, teaching, and public speaking. An early chapbook, Bad Government and Silly Literature, and Changing the Bully, explicitly look at the connections among literature, ethics, and politics. She's not naïve about publishing; early in her career she managed the influential magazine of poetry and politics, The Fifties, then The Sixties and The Seventies. Cynthia Loveland has been a social worker and community activist for 40 years. She wrote two lively pamphlets published by the Minnesota School Social Workers Association, with Carol Bly as literary consultant.

The first book from their press, Three Readings for Republicans and Democrats, arrived late in 2003: a handsome, quirky work of 83 pages. It consists of two essays by Carol Bly, "How Radiation Oncology Nearly Made Me a Republican" and "My Dear Republican Mother," and a co-authored story/case history, "The Savage Stripe: How a Teenage Daughter Changed Her Dad." One common thread is understanding and empathy for the difficulties "privileged perpetrators" face in trying to achieve moral growth and alter the profitable but unscrupulous practices of their corporations. Their second book, Stopping the Gallop to Empire, they call "a first--a respectful book for educated conservatives who find themselves afraid." Says their website, www.blyandloveland.com, "If you've ever been run away with by a 4th rate gelding you know how doomed you feel. But, chances are you can stop him. Same with governments. We can do it." This urgency is another reason to self-publish. It took total immersion in the project to turn the book out in a few months. "Look," says Bly, "if the president can take time away from his family to try to wreck democracy, I can spend some months doing this work."

"We just want to write what we write, and when we want to, on our timing, and not look for permission from anybody," Loveland told a meeting of the Twin Cities chapter of the National Writers Union. She and Bly discussed the "dreadful truths" of publishing and politics and kept the room laughing with tag-team humor. "You lose your sense of humor, you've had it," says Loveland. But what about marketing? The press' target audiences include "the women who sleep with the men who run chemical companies." Yet questioners hoping for hot tips were told, "Oh, we're just learning all that." Probably the attractive, sophisticated cover art is a part of the strategy. Generally, Bly and Loveland are following familiar small publishing routes: many readings and personal contact with local and regional independent bookstores. The chain stores? "We couldn't decide," says Loveland. "We finally approached Barnes and Noble's small press division--we could always say no later. Fortunately, they turned us down." They sell books by mail or phone, but refer Internet buyers to Amazon.com. "That's inconsistent, of course," Loveland admitted, "but everyone told us we should. [Amazon.com has] only sold about three books, though."

WORD WARRIORS is a spunky new press for the creative nonfiction of authors in their late teens and early 20s--it publishes uncensored, edgy memoir by alienated, marginalized young people. Founder, editor, treasurer, and errand-runner Gail Cerridwen works alone in a northern suburb of Minneapolis. She hires young people to create the bold cover artwork and to perform almost every part of the production. With no publishing background, Cerridwen started the company on unemployment checks, credit cards, and "sheer stubbornness, almost desperation" about the needs of the young people she knew from years as an English teacher in alternative high schools. This is another press driven by exuberance and passion for social justice. "Some changes are needed around here," says her website, www.wordwarriorspress.com. "So come on, let's tilt the world on its axis, start thinking and feeling again, confound the pundits, refuse to be good little consumers, take back the nation, recapture our souls."

Cerridwen had already chosen the name Word Warriors when she met Heather Harrison, whose manuscript Yesterday's Warrior became the press' first book. This gritty memoir is unrelenting--bleak, angry, and exasperating. Harrison, by age 14, was an alcoholic and junkie. She had been kicked out of school and bounced in and out of institutions. It's astonishing that she survived to write her book, but she's been sober for seven years and, although this is mentioned only in an afterword, is now a graduate student in clinical psychology. Her story is told in the language and with the obsessive narrative drive of the teenager; there is no context, no foreshadowing of a way out. Painful as this is, the absence of any relief or explanation seems absolutely right. Much of her story is unknown, hidden, unresolved. Harrison writes with authority from the point of view of her young self. Cerridwen's astute editorial decision to encourage this resulted in the raw, honest "kick-ass memoir" that appeals to her young audience.

Cerridwen's next scheduled book is Scott Sundvall's Outlet, "the memoir of a lowly shoe pimp in a mall outlet"; in the spring of 2005 she will publish a collection of essays by Sean Daley, aka the hip-hop artist Slug of the group Atmosphere.

Cerridwen has a tough marketing challenge: controversial books (already banned by some schools) and an audience that typically doesn't read at all. She says, "Several young people have told me, 'This is the first time I ever read a book through from cover to cover.'" Cerridwen points out that some mainstream publishers have started imprints testing out the young adult market for raw, honest books--but it's deadly, she says, to call them young adult or to use any format resembling kids' books. She recently decided to use a regular distributor and a sales rep, but still uses some guerrilla marketing tactics: She's a regular contributor to websites for young people, and she maintains many lively chat groups on her own site.

WHAT LIES AHEAD for small, mission-driven presses like these? Joan Drury, who headed the feminist press Spinsters Ink from 1992 to 2000, shares her experience: Asked whether Spinsters was self-supporting, she admits, "Actually, I guess I supported it about 25 percent. But only because I was trying to get it to be nationally known, nationally respected--that's necessary for a small press to become self-sufficient." Spinsters won a number of awards from mainstream and small press organizations. "Small presses can learn to be mainstream in our marketing and distribution," Drury believes. "What's different is how we choose books--for [their] literary or political value, not asking how they will sell."

"Look, every press is political, says Drury. "Small presses may be explicit about our agendas; mainstream presses support the status quo. Right now, five houses control 80 percent of books published. That's terrifying." Does the work of some small presses become less essential as their subjects are taken up by the mainstream? "That's limited," says Drury. "In the early '90s we had a... sort of Year of the Lesbian in mainstream publishing, but by the late '90s authors were being asked to drop their lesbian characters. I know lesbian authors now writing under pseudonyms.