Highlights from this issue...

History lessons
In Afghanistan's decades of confrontation with modernity, women have always been the focus of conflict.

By Christine Noelle-Karimi

AFGHANISTAN IS A HARSH COUNTRY that has seen nothing but the bitterness of war and poverty during the past twenty years and more. Yet it leaves a lasting impact on all those who have had a chance to go there.

My acquaintance with Afghanistan goes back to happier days in the 1970s. At first as a tourist, I stumbled into a country with a tremendously rich culture. I was an onlooker, fascinated by the self-contained, proud bearing of women and men alike, the ethnic mix and the variety of physical features and modes of dress. With the communist revolution of 1978 and the unfolding civil war, I witnessed this beautiful country disintegrate. The Soviet occupation during the 1980s closed Afghanistan to all westerners except a few daring journalists, and I turned my attention to the refugee camps that sprang up along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

As a tourist, I had fit more appropriately into the male, public domain of tea houses, hotels and the bazaar. In the refugee camps a new world opened up to me. I was not a spectator any more, but had the privilege of working together with men and women to provide a service almost non-existent in the camps: basic and higher education for boys and girls. After the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 the NGO I work for was able to shift some of its activities into Afghanistan. But as the war continued and wave upon wave of refugees arrived, our work in the refugee camps also had to continue.

Living conditions in the camps were cramped and placed stringent restrictions on women's scope of movement. It was here that the chadari or burqa became a powerful marker of male authority over women's bodies.

In the West, the burqa has become a symbol of the deprivations and oppressions women in Afghanistan have had to bear. Impeding both vision and movement, this sack-like garment represents the restrictions placed on women in all walks of life. It has fueled the Western debate over gender segregation as a human rights violation and has given substance to demands that women fleeing from policies like those of the Taliban be granted political asylum.

For all its merits, this debate has proven to be curiously limited and entirely removed from actual circumstances in Afghanistan. It has also, unfortunately, lent itself to the political justification of Western military involvement in Afghanistan. Since the takeover of the Northern Alliance in Kabul, it has become evident that the removal of the Taliban has done little to change the lot of women. Even before September 11th scattered bits of information called the Western focus on the burqa as the sole indication of the status of women into question.

Veiling takes different forms and meanings in different social and regional contexts. The word burqa is of Pakistani rather than Afghan origin, and has acquired a life of its own in recent media coverage. Known in Afghanistan as chadari, this garment originally was a town fashion. It was formerly worn by middle-class women, to signalize that they did not have to work with their hands. It also served as a sign of distinction for those women whose husbands had secured government employment. For rural women busy in the fields, a head scarf (chadar) draped over an embroidered cap was more practical, and they reserved the chadari for visits to town.

As the war tore at the social fabric, the chadari/burqa acquired a new meaning. In the anonymous and tense setting of the refugee camps in Pakistan, it became the most common form of veiling for women of all backgrounds. The Taliban, many of whom were a product of the Pakistani camp environment, conceived of it as the only proper form of veiling. From a socially approved custom it became a political statement imposed from above.

In the past, the debate about veiling had revolved around the Koranic injunctions concerning decency of dress; now the chadari/burqa came to symbolize Taliban control over society, especially in the towns. In the rural areas, by contrast, it was not so much an issue. Many traditionally clad women continued to work the fields. In 1997, a survey conducted among 120 women in eastern Afghanistan revealed that the new dress code had little bearing on their daily lives. The women even expressed a certain amount of appreciation for the Taliban who, unlike the previous regime of warlords, guaranteed them a degree of safety.1 This view of attitudes in rural Afghanistan is corroborated by a study that Physicians for Human Rights published last year. On the basis of 200,000 women interviewed, it concluded that educated urban women had borne the brunt of Taliban restrictions. In the countryside, by contrast, little had changed for women, as they traditionally had little or no access to education, not to mention public or professional positions.2

This is not to say that the Taliban were "not so bad" after all. They were clearly one of the most repressive regimes the Afghans have been exposed to in their recent history. At the same time, certain political continuities stand out. I would argue that current events in Afghanistan can only be properly understood if we widen our perspective beyond the simplistic equation of veiling and backwardness.

In a similar vein, the popular identification of Taliban rule with a return to medieval times or even the Stone Age obscures the fact that they are in many ways a very modern political phenomenon. The Taliban and the Islamic backlash they represent form part of a larger ideological conflict over modernity in Afghanistan. This conflict is carried out against the backdrop of existing political conventions and conceptions; what unites all parties involved is a continuing debate about women and women's bodies and how they are manipulated for political purposes.

THE TALIBAN REGIME is often contrasted with the 1970s and 1980s, a time when urban women took an active part in public life and gained access to positions in the fields of health care, education and administration. Yet subsequent developments revealed how thin the veneer of progress was: it was not the result of sustained social movements but rather a by-product of government endeavors to project visions of a progressive nation. Women's status was addressed in fits and starts, and their advancement was a direct function of the government's ability to impose its will.

The stability of pre-war Afghanistan was safeguarded to a great extent by the authority of the royal house, whose different branches ruled the country with the help of small administrative elites for 150 years. The first sustained attempt at reforms is associated with the reign of Amir Amanullah Khan in the 1920s. As part of his endeavor to free Afghanistan from the yoke of backwardness, the Amir focused on the introduction of Western education and the advancement of women's rights. His wife Soraya, daughter of the famous reformer and publisher Mahmud Tarzi, gave public speeches on women's issues and founded two girls' schools in Kabul. While most of Amanullah Khan's policies were shrugged off as urban eccentricities, his plans to interfere with marriage customs and to impose a new fashion of veiling triggered a rebellion in November 1928. The Amir was forced to leave the country and all reforms affecting women were abandoned for the next thirty years.

In August 1959 Prime Minister Muhammad Daoud officially ended seclusion for women and abolished veiling. Having secured the backing of lawyers versed in Islamic and Western law, he chose the national celebration of independence to make a public statement. The wives and daughters of the highest government functionaries were ordered to show themselves unveiled to the stunned public, thus signaling the dawn of a new era. Daoud ensured the success of the new measure by ruthlessly suppressing the opposition of the clergy. He also made the removal of the veil voluntary and turned the law into an offer, which was enthusiastically taken up by the urban elite.3 Five years later both men and women gained the right to vote for the first time in Afghanistan's history.

These reforms mostly affected the capital. The urban way of life, its fashions and the professional opportunities offered to women, were far removed from the traditional rural setting in which the vast majority of the Afghan population lived. To the villagers, Kabul represented an alien world that called their tribal values into question, and they avoided the changes emanating from it. For most of the twentieth century there was little contact between the central government and the periphery.

With the Marxist coup d'état of 1978 this uneasy relationship developed into open conflict. In order to gain a popular base for their alleged revolution, urban party members crossed the divide between city and countryside and attempted to impose well-intentioned but poorly conceived reforms upon the rural population. To their utter surprise, the supposed beneficiaries of the enforced redistribution of land and literacy campaigns for women were the first to resist communist rule openly. With the Soviet occupation in December 1979, Kabul became an island of stability and progress entirely dependent on Soviet support. In the countryside, the scorched-earth tactics of the Soviet army drove millions of villagers to flee to Pakistan, creating the largest refugee population on earth.

THIS OVERVIEW UNDERSCORES the limits of modernity in Afghanistan. Changes were initiated by the ruling elite and implemented autocratically. In great measure, the debate over modernity focused on externals. Marking the boundary between the inner (female) and outer (male) worlds, veiling served as an emotionally laden symbol for all parties involved. The reformers rejected it as the ultimate expression of backwardness. The Islamist groups which emerged in the 1970s, in contrast, focused on it as a symbol of female modesty, which by extension stood for the integrity of the entire social order. Reformers and traditionalists were locked into the same set of concepts, which proved to be remarkably stable throughout the twentieth century. The issues addressed by Amanullah Khan, the icon of progress, and the Taliban, the embodiment of religiously motivated oppression, were very similar. While arguing from opposite ends, both sides focused on veiling and the right of girls and women to acquire education and employment in the public domain.

While the push towards modernity found its outward expression in the rejection of veiling, it coincided with a larger venture--the opening up of the closed circuit of rural society to state control. German sociologist Renate Kreil notes that it comes as no surprise that Amanullah Khan and the communists both devoted much energy to implementing new marriage laws. Officially, these reforms were intended to free society from irrational and wasteful customs, such as the bride money usually paid as part of arranged marriages. But the ultimate goal was to transcend the role of the extended family as the basic unit of social reference. Declaring weddings to be a personal affair between bride and bridegroom, the government attempted to break into local relations of exchange and to take over functions that had traditionally belonged in the domain of the kinship group.4

At first sight, the Taliban endeavor to implement the utopia of a pure Islamic state derived from an imagined tradition may hardly seem like a very modern enterprise. Yet the methods they resorted to were not unlike those employed by previous "progressive" regimes. Like their communist predecessors, the Taliban meddled with local marriage practices, purportedly aiming at the eradication of un-Islamic customs. More importantly, they deliberately used the debate over women and their proper place in society to galvanize the support of a generation of young men raised in war.

Their propaganda served to penetrate those realms of society which had previously been entirely beyond the reach of government. The Taliban proclaimed and enacted their concept of social order on behalf of Afghan society, brutally punishing all perceived deviations. Men were deprived of their former prerogative of deciding how their women were to dress and how far they could venture from home. Punishment was no longer meted out by the head of the family but the infamous vice squads. This entailed a loss of honor for the men, who, no longer able to protect their wives, were forced to watch helplessly as they were beaten in public.

For all their appeals to overarching Islamic tradition, the Taliban are very much a product of their own environment. The decrees they issued in quick succession reflect simplistic religious notions that must have been soaked up either during basic religious training in the countryside or in the fanaticized atmosphere of refugee camps. The draconian measures instituted in Kabul seem like a futile attempt to solve the complexities of urban life by imposing rules and regulations appropriate for the village setting. For example, the order that women may only leave the house accompanied by a close male relative (mahram) would seem perfectly natural within the closely-knit kinship structures and uncertain safety of the countryside. In the city, however, the limits of Taliban ideology soon became woefully clear: instead of being afforded real protection, countless women had to turn to begging or prostitution to make a living.

IT IS SIGNIFICANT that the Taliban pronouncements about women and the burqa have been taken up in the Western media at face value. Separated from its original context, this garment assumes entirely negative associations and serves to reinforce Western notions of superiority over the "other" Islamic world. What troubles me is that Afghan women remain faceless and voiceless in this process. They are not only disenfranchised in their own environment but also subject to our pity. I think there is a larger story to be told, and it is about time we learn to listen.

Despite the removal of the Taliban the situation of the overwhelming majority of women in Afghanistan remains precarious. The current political constellations carry little promise for peace. The revival of the warlords evokes memories of their reign of terror, which engulfed the country after the fall of the communists in 1992 and prepared the way for the Taliban takeover of Kabul in 1996. Even if peace returns to Afghanistan some day, it will take generations to allow the wounds of the incessant war and its ever-changing front lines to heal. At every stage of the war, women have been raped, abducted and murdered. All parties involved are guilty of these transgressions, including the Northern Alliance, which has swept into power thanks to US support and holds key positions in the interim administration.

Most Afghans still find themselves in the grip of grinding poverty. The ecological equilibrium has been upset by the prevailing drought which is about to enter its fourth year, combined with immense population growth. Afghanistan has one of the highest birth rates in the world. The accompanying high rates of maternal mortality (15,000 die every year) and the fact that 25 percent of the children die before the age of five are further indications of glaring underdevelopment. Little aid has reached the drought-stricken countryside yet.

In this environment of scarcity, even seven-year-old girls are turned into a final investment by their desperate parents, who marry them off in exchange for bride money. In former times the sum collected served as "symbolic capital" within the village setting;5 now this money merely serves to stave off starvation for a few more weeks. Urban women are not much better off. Unable to provide for their children, many have turned them over to orphanages to secure their survival. Countless children have died of starvation and cold.

The pressure exercised by Western countries to include a quota of women in all levels of the new government only provides a partial answer to the problems in Afghanistan. Quotas would primarily benefit the urban elite and ignore the needs of the overwhelming majority of women, only three percent of whom have had the chance to attend school. As long as the attitudes of those in charge do not change, the only effect of quotas will be that women are appointed to please Western sponsors. The difficulties Sima Samar, second in charge in the interim administration, is currently battling are a case in point. Unlike her male colleagues, she has no links to powerful political groups in neighboring countries. Her ability to make her influence felt is hampered by lack of funds and by insinuations that she is not a "true" Muslim.

But all the problems should not diminish the fact that a number of women are now contributing to the political process, notably two members of the 21-member commission in charge of preparing the loya jirga, or grand assembly: Mahbuba Hoquqmal is a law professor and Soraya Parlika is one of those courageous women who operated home schools for girls under the Taliban.

A graver problem is that the political culture in Afghanistan has not changed. Recent events suggest that those in charge still believe in imposing progress from above. There are reports that the minister of health, "General" Suhaila Siddiqi, attempted to demonstrate the abandonment of the politics of the Taliban by exerting pressure on female hospital staff to abandon the burqa, ignoring the fact that the women concerned did not feel safe to do so. At the same time, there are indications that participation from below is not really welcome. The spontaneous women's demonstrations which erupted after the fall of the Taliban were quickly dispersed. The fledgling press, including a weekly women's magazine entitled Ayina-i Zan (Women's Mirror), is operating under the watchful eyes of a censorship office.

But there are rays of hope. All over Afghanistan girls are entering schools. The region of Andkhoi on the northwestern edge of the country is a telling illustration of the prevailing mood. Despite immense economic hardships the focus of the population of 80,000 is on schooling for their children. The NGO I work for has been able to reopen a girls' high school with one thousand students, which had been closed by the Taliban. The high school staff of thirty experienced women teachers, who had continued their work in home schools, have taken up their regular positions again. Another six thousand girls in Andkhoi have signed up for education. The potential for change is there, but it will need time and much support to grow. If anything gives me hope for the future, it is the bravery and resilience of the Afghan women.

1. Heike Bill, "Country without a State--Does it Really Make a Difference for the Women?" in Afghanistan--Country without a State?, edited by Christine Noelle-Karimi, Conrad Schetter and Reinhard Schlagintweit (Frankfurt: IKO, 2002).
2. Sonia Shah, "Unveiling the Taliban: Dress Codes Are Not the Issue," www.institute-for-afghan-studies.org, August 1, 2001.
3. Louis Dupree, Afghanistan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 530-533.
4. Renate Kreile, "Zan, zar, zamin--Frauen, Gold und Land: Geschlechterpolitik und Staatsbildung in Afghanistan," Leviathan, Vol. 3 (1997), pp. 398-406.
5. Kreile, p. 401.

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Lives on the line
Sleeping with Cats: A Memoir by Marge Piercy. New York: William Morrow, 2002, 345 pp., $25.95 hardcover.
Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant by Andrea Dworkin. New York: Basic Books, 2001, 198 pp., $24.00 hardcover.

Reviewed by Meryl Altman

JUXTAPOSING THESE BOOKS illustrates two ways to work as a feminist activist writer: Andrea Dworkin the impassioned and lacerating orator, all fire and drama; Marge Piercy the thoughtful sifter, joining no faction and settling no scores, yet capable of wielding as sharp a verbal knife as anyone and directing it unerringly at the heart of the problem. Both of these feminist militant writers, now in their sixties, could have chosen the title "memoirs of a survivor"--except that Piercy does not dwell on the trials she has seen and suffered, and Dworkin writes as though her survival was still continually in doubt.

Andrea Dworkin. Photo by John Cavanagh.

Andrea Dworkin still spells Amerika with a K--which makes more sense to me now than it would have six months ago--and in every paragraph she writes or speaks she seems to be walking on razorblades, only an inch from annihilation, from the ground zero of the sex war, about to be silenced, about to be shot. Dworkin has always cared less for the drawing of fine intellectual distinctions ("academic horseshit") than for arousing the reader's empathy for the brutalized, even when this requires brutalizing the reader.

Like much of her work, Heartbreak passionately denounces Dworkin's enemies, both some personal political nemeses and her class enemies--rapists, pornographers, pimps and their supporters and sympathizers inside and outside feminism. The book begins as a speech for the defense--"I have been asked, politely and not so politely, why I am myself"--but it soon turns into a speech for the prosecution. Nearly every page reads like a peroration; story after story pits a beleaguered but indomitable Andrea against the forces of sexual violence, racism, gynophobia, feminine self-deception, anti-Semitism, beginning in the sixth grade, through Bennington, an abusive marriage, the sex trade, the sexism of the New Left, the anti-pornography crusade of the 1980s. She never quite loses; she never quite wins; she goes on writing.

No other human being appears in this book as anything but a brief Brechtian type of evil or good, and those who seek personal details and revelations will be disappointed. Heartbreak seems to be the answer to Jill Johnston's old question: How would it feel to be the heroine of your own life? While unwearying self-righteous melodrama may not be to everyone's taste, the writing is often vivid and the testimony will be valuable, particularly to those who already share Dworkin's political positions. And when she tells us that a woman who speaks angry truths to power takes tremendous risks, she's still absolutely right, more than ever.

MARGE PIERCY IS NO TAME PUSSYCAT either. Unforgettable poems like "Barbie Doll" and "For Strong Women" still draw blood; "The Grand Coolie Damn," her 1969 exposé of sexism, the abuse of sexual trust and general male power-tripping in the anti-war movement and the male Left, is still definitive. Piercy was the one who said it wasn't good enough for women to keep making the coffee and running the mimeo machines while the men were off on power trips about theory and leadership. There are no mimeo machines any more, of course, and the term "power trip" sounds as quaint as "groovy," and yet... I expect women who could not define the term "mimeograph" to save their young lives are still emailing it to each other. Vida asked hard questions about what happens to the revolutionaries when the revolution doesn't come; Woman on the Edge of Time blew open the casual abusiveness of the mental health professions and The High Cost of Living did the same for the academy.

Take these lines about her mother from "the good old days at home sweet home":

How did you become a feminist
interviewers always ask
as if to say, when did this

rare virus attack your brain?
...I think it was Tuesday
when she ironed my father's shorts.

But like the great realist novelist she is, Piercy always lets us see enough of the other people in her stories that we remember another point of view is possible. Near the beginning of Sleeping with Cats, she says wryly, "I have tried to make myself look good, but I am aware that sometimes my honesty and my attachment to what happened prevent me from presenting myself as the blameless heroine." All memoir writers flirt with narcissism, but only some of them drown.

There are painful, often terrible stories in Sleeping With Cats. The prostitute high-school friend who died of a heroin overdose, the life-threatening self-induced illegal abortion, the anti-Semitism of her Detroit ghetto grade-school days that turned Piercy into a street fighter. The impatient father slamming the car door on her hand, the casual family violence of poverty, the wrench away from class and family as she crossed into a college where status was measured in cashmere sweaters. The first "what was I thinking?" marriage to a French particle physicist who disliked poetry and feared sex; the beatings and gassings at demonstrations; the faction fights of the New Left in the 1960s that destroyed the dream of a beloved community changing the world; more recently, struggles with painful and dangerous eye operations and the threat of blindness. While the memoir begins and ends with a lyrical evocation of what seems an idyllic domestic life in the present--cats, gardens, the ocean, a wonderful loving husband, more cats--it can never be taken for granted. (I thought of Jane Kenyon's words: "It could be/ otherwise.")

Piercy just tells us what happened in the bad years, as though they were bad enough without embellishment or framing. That's how people like us lived, then: like one's grandmother shrugging, "that's how it happened, don't stare at me like that." History speaks for itself. With a matter-of-fact good humor, and through the layers of seemingly irrelevant detail that serve as guarantors of realism, she communicates the texture of the everyday--and, somehow, makes herself a reliable narrator, a voice we can trust.

BOTH PIERCY AND DWORKIN face a technical problem as they turn to memoir after having mined emotional and actual autobiography in previous work. The risk is that, as with Doris Lessing, the autobiographical retelling will fall flat alongside the brilliant transformations of the earlier art. (One almost feels in Lessing's case that this happens on purpose, since she sometimes seems to write autobiography more from a grumpy impulse to spoil the ground for future biographers than out of genuine enthusiasm for the form.) Dworkin solves this problem formally by giving us a series of quick disconnected vignettes, almost a slide show, rather than a sustained narrative. This succeeds from a dramatic point of view, but the result feels like a series of sketches around the edges of a story we are already supposed to know by heart. Readers who don't may find it puzzling. As in Greek tragedy, much of the real action occurs offstage; if you want to know where her parents came from or what the cops actually did to her in the House of Detention, or if you just need an overall chronological grasp, you have to turn to a piece on her website which remains otherwise unpublished (why?), or to her fiction, or to the early organizing talks collected as Our Blood, where I feel she has used autobiographical material most powerfully.

Piercy too has written so powerfully and honestly about her life that it is hard to see how she could go back over the same ground without disappointing us. In speaking of her turbulent relation to her mother, for instance, how could she go beyond "Crescent Moon Like a Canoe"?

    Don't do it, they'll kill
you, you're bad, you said, slapping me down
hard but always you whispered, I could have!
Only rebellion flashed like lightning.

I wanted to take you with me, you don't
remember.

Sleeping with Cats is worth reading simply for the language, for the occasional one-line zingers that like her best poems stay in the mind long afterwards. Of her parents: "I grew up in the trenches of their war." Of visits to her father's family: "We were always being observed to see if we would do something Jewish like crucify someone in the backyard." Of high school: "a time of pervasive, massive boredom, boredom as thick as peanut butter, as bland as vegetable shortening... My daydreams, the stories I told myself, were like knitting I carried with me and took up at any odd moment." Of the decision to agree with her second husband's desire for an open marriage: "I thought, when you get a second cat, you don't stop loving the first. Why shouldn't it be that way with people?"

Neither of these writers falls into the trap of writing a "recovery narrative." Dworkin is unreconstructed in every way and proud of it; Piercy describes herself as having changed in a general way, become more capable of putting her own writing, and herself, first. "Feminism had given me a spine," she writes of the period when her second marriage was exploding, and "I was no longer the earth mother... everyone's mama." But, to steal Robin Morgan's phrase, she "disowns none of her transformations." She fully conveys the heady excitement of New York in 1968--"like a medieval fair... intense friendships, intense sex, intense politics, intense pleasures, intense terrors." Self-righteousness and score-settling are almost entirely absent: "I hated the factionalism, but I did not hate the people." And when she turns to feminism, she does not tell tales out of school; she seems concerned to keep the peace and preserve the possibility of coalition, rather than to take personal credit. There are many things (specific and general) about the early feminist movement I still want to know, and she could have been more informative or analytical. But I do prefer this approach to the wrangling about exactly who invented which slogan exactly when that has begun to surface elsewhere.

Similarly, Piercy describes the period when she and her second husband chose to "live differently" and yet stay together as a series of politically rational, emotionally sustainable commitments, rather than some crazy youthful phase. "We believed in honesty... We believed we were making a new world in every way, on every level. Nothing could be taken for granted." She ends this section with "To Have Without Holding," the familiar poem about "love with the hands wide open," which conveys better than prose can that difficult dream of building something together, choosing to love differently but (as Rich put it) with all one's intelligence, not with the cunning of the dependent slave who needs the master but with some idea about knowledge, self-knowledge and knowledge of the other. What would a world that truly recognized the idea that most people love and want more than one person, that trying to own other human beings is not the most ethical move imaginable, be like? People trusting each other that much. Well, it was a fine dream in its way, though the world has moved on.

FINALLY, IT IS MY DUTY as a reviewer to say that the title of the memoir is not coy or sly; Piercy does in fact give a very great deal of space to the animals that have shared her life and her various beds from girlhood ("I was an alley child, and my cats were alley cats") to her present menagerie--five at the beginning of the book, four by the end. Cats often understood and comforted and were there for her when humans weren't, and she gives each one full and individual credit. As a woman writing memoir by means of cat life she is far from unique; in fact I was intrigued to learn from the flyleaf that there is even a Library of Congress category called "women cat owners--united states--biography." (This is the number three subject heading given to Piercy's book; number four is "cats--anecdotes." I'm afraid this is not wholly unfair.)

Writing well and seriously about cats is almost as hard as writing well about sex: there's such a tradition of trite and sentimental associations to overcome; so many existing examples are cutesy, or smug, or self-righteously moralizing, or all three at once. Piercy never falls into the worst excesses of Sarton with her "fur person" and her "dear pussies." Still, whether readers who prefer dogs, or tropical fish, will be fully fascinated by the exploits and idiosyncrasies of the various Burmese, Siamese, korats and regular old lovable strays, is a question I am not well-positioned to answer.

I'll admit there are things about Piercy's life and opinions I wanted to know more than I want to know which cat sits where and why. But somehow building the narrative around the cats has helped her avoid any of the more annoying reductive master narratives that are certainly available to frame her life -- from "promiscuity" to true love, from politics to domesticity, up from poverty to the American Dream. Cat stories give the book a lumpier and a different shape, less like a story of willful progress and conversion, more like actual messy life. Perhaps it makes ethical sense to treat one's cats like people, provided one does not treat the people in one's life like pets. Or perhaps cat ownership provides a useful model of independent relatedness--you're necessary to them, but they don't let you get too full of yourself about it. "The love of a cat is unconditional, but it is always subject to negotiation."

What then, to return to my starting place, can we learn about political survival from this finally tranquil portrait of a life in balance? That resistance, like sex, is a part of life, not apart, or instead of. That living in a constant state of emergency is not good for one's body or one's writing. That the ability to live alone is essential, but loneliness is not required, not morally superior. That it's not shameful or selfish to be personally happy, to eat well, enjoy sex, enjoy life. "I don't admire despair," Piercy has written elsewhere. Is this our old adversary, the retreat into the individual solution? I don't think so. Unlike Dworkin, Piercy presents her life, not as the solution to a problem ("I did it, so can you") but simply as a life. She isn't asking us to do anything, one way or the other. She's asking us to remember.

Dworkin asks far more, asks more than most people can give. Elements of a possible feminist intellectual creed in a dangerous time: I will speak truth to power, where I can... and when I have figured out what the truth is. I will not pretend things are simpler than I know they are. I will not pretend to any impressionable person that I understand better than I actually do or am any better informed than I am. It must be possible: some non-terrorized form of mindfulness and some way of breaking through fear and inertia that does not require the constant white heat of irrational rage. But to see with both the red light of anger and the white light of truth you might have to look at both simultaneously--and squint.

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Photograph of a tight-lacer, c. 1895. From The Corset.

Straight and narrow
The Corset: A Cultural History by Valerie Steele. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001, 202 pp., $39.95 hardcover.

Reviewed by Suzanne E. Kammlott

THE LURE OF THE CORSET is both glorious and notorious. It is the object of flowery verse and painterly strokes, scorned in medical journals and subjected to the perversities of pornography. Now, wriggling into this controversial container of femininity comes The Corset: A Cultural History by fashion historian Valerie Steele. Bolstered by a host of experts in the arts and sciences, Steele attempts to separate fact from fiction, in effect unlacing the pretty lies that surround this famed, framing garment. Tracing the history of the waist cincher from courtly dames through foppish dandies, industrial wenches, proper ladies and modern working gals to haute couture catwalkers, Steele deftly removes the stays of unsubstantiated notions, old wives' tales and just plain wild rumors to get down to the flesh of the matter: why has the corset remained the ultimate vehicle of fashionable femininity? Steele takes us behind the scenes into bourgeois dressing rooms, debutante bashes, brothels, even doctor's offices in search of an answer.

Corset, c. 1866, measuring 32-18-25 inches, from the collection of the Museum of the City of New York. From The Corset.

A coffee-table book on the cultural history of the corset by an internationally recognized fashion expert should be, well, very pretty. It is: from the cover, featuring a sublime pearl-gray and rosy copper-bodiced evening dress à la Christian Lacroix to page after page of text-supported glossy illustrations gleaned from art history, whimsical advertising, satirical sartorial cartoons and finally, en vogue fashion layouts, The Corset is at once couture eye candy and intellectually enlightening. What does it mean, this collection of steel, brocade, stays and strings? Steele quotes liberally from philosophers, writers, artists, queens and courtesans to uphold her argument that the corset is as complex as the lacing it uses. Stripped of erotic illusion and the arguments of finger-wagging hygienists and antifeminists, the corset, Steele concludes, has reappeared because--and some folks aren't going to like this--women have wanted to be noticed by men.

Advertisement, c. 1890. From The Corset.

Striking a tone that is neither misogynistic-shrill nor fashion-essay fawning, Steele begins by examining the first real corsets, which were used more to ensure courtly deportment than to torture hapless ladies-in-waiting. Starting in the 1500s, both men and women were subjected to constrictive dress to indicate their upstanding qualities and their God-given ability to rule, whether in fashion or war. For European Renaissance nobility, the body politic was held up by the, one could say, esprit de corps. Steele notes that orthopedic metal corsets dating from that time were not popular fashions but doctor-prescribed devices for correcting spinal deformities. Their misinterpretation as keepers of virtue and imprisoners of damsels belongs to the same realm as the mythical chastity belt.

As the corset continued to capture and shape waists between the sixteenth and mid-eighteenth centuries, its sexual (think eager laces going through virginal eyelets) and even phallic connotations (think stiff) played well among writers and artists. In Europe in the early 1700s, we see the rise of paintings depicting la toilette galante, by artists such as Jean-Francois Detroy in France and John Collet in England. Paintings of young women being helped into their corsets while male admirers idly sat by and watched were immensely popular with the European bourgeoisie, who had begun to ape their social superiors in wearing the once regal girdle. Eventually, the genre degenerated from innocent dressing tableaux to revealing depictions of sordid dalliances: an amusing 1840s lithograph by Paul Gavarni, for example, shows a befuddled French man perplexed that the knot he tied in his wife's corset in the morning is now quite different at day's end; his lady simply stares into space, no doubt hoping her laces will not betray her.

Poster, c. 1904.From The Corset.

STEELE MOVES THROUGH THE HISTORY of the corset both chronologically and iconographically. The nineteenth century marks the high point of the corset. Through mass production and mass marketing, everyone from society matron to scullery maid could now don the whalebone bodice. Steele uses lots of period advertisements, trade cards and posters to illustrate her points: corsets, coming under fire from health experts and dress reformers alike, began to be marketed as more comfortable, more forgiving, but still as essentially indispensable.

While the early 1800s saw the short-lived trend of male corsets spearheaded by those fops of fashion, the dandies, the primary consumers of corsets continued to be women. Young girls who attempted to buck the trend were reined in by mothers and grandmothers who reminded them, not too subtly, that narrow waists were the only way to gain men's affection. Steele argues that because marriage was a girl's only means to economic security, going without a corset was tantamount to accepting a life of poverty, ill repute or even prostitution. To be sans corset was deemed slovenly and slutty.

Advertisement. From The Corset.

By the mid 1800s, doctors began stepping up their campaign against tight lacing, citing a myriad of health problems--even death--caused by corsets. But Steele and the various medical and forensic experts she cites agree that nineteenth-century doctors' anxiety over female anatomy and their willingness to link a host of evils to the corset says more about their prejudices than it does about the supposedly deleterious effects of lacing. The culprits behind the recorded maladies were insufficient nutrition, repeated pregnancies, poor working conditions and other personal and social ills. Perhaps some silly young things laced themselves into early graves, but such extreme behavior was the exception, not the rule.

Another fiction that Steele disputes is the pervasiveness of fetishistic tight lacing associated with stern, stunning s/m mistresses. Mid- to late-nineteenth-century magazines such as the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine and the Family Herald of England began to cater to curiosity about this strange sexually charged practice. What dress scholars like Doris Langley Moore have discovered is that the letters in these periodicals, purporting to be from readers about their true experiences at the hands of cinched mädchen, are actually no more real than, say, Penthouse "Forum" letters--no Austrian tight-lacing boarding schools with methodically documented waist-training notes actually existed. It's a fantasy that dies hard. Then and now, it sold subscriptions.

Advertisement for Formfit corset, 1949. From The Corset.

BY THE BEGINNING of the twentieth century, neither social reformers nor doctors had put a noticeable dent in corset consumerism. Concern for women's health produced the sport corset, but whalebones and steel spring stays remained, for the most part, firmly in place. What did rustle the old guard's bustle was a growing population of young women who were more economically and socially free than ever before. They had some money in their pockets, and the fashion and entertainment world knew it. Suddenly, a new wave of leaner, longer corsets was in. New fabrics and new techniques helped cater to the boyish figures that appeared on the Jazz Age scene.

Madonna wearing a corset by Jean-Paul Gaultier. From The Corset.

By the 1960s, corsets and their effects on the body had become internalized, Steele contends, in the forms of exercise and diet. Same old body map, just a different route to get there. It was not until the 1970s that iconoclastic designers such as Vivienne Westwood trotted the corset out into the open again. Suddenly, it symbolized female strength and an anti-establishment aesthetic to a young generation that grew up unaware of the afflictions created by the self-imposed prison of bombast and wire. When pop singers like Madonna prowled the stage in Jean Paul Gaultier full-length corsets complete with exaggerated conical breast cups reminiscent of fifties-style brassieres, it seemed as if the corset had come full circle, employed again as a means of establishing power: once suited to the crown and upper class, it now became a cinch for big (show) business grrls and sexual groundbreakers.

AChristian Lacroix couture evening dress with corset. 1998. From The Corset.

Steele takes us on a tour of the mysteries of the corset, dispelling myths, shedding light on furtive fantasies, unlacing the antifeminist, misogynistic interpretations so closely bound up with this enduring garment. And though she reiterates that women were and are its chief proponents and purveyors--prisoners of their own vanity at times--one question lingers: why has the corset been so popular? Is it merely part of the quest for feminine beauty--a willingness to be pressed into oppression? Or is it something more primal, more sublime?

Here, another "F" word comes to mind--no, not fashion, which is inarguably Steele's forte, but rather fertility. The ties that bind men and women in their reproductive urges manifest themselves in the shape of the corset: its nipped waist, rounded hips, virginal, unplowed form are inviting to both sexes. Its exaggerated, hourglass outline loudly tolls mating time. Maybe we haven't heard the last word on the corset. Steele's book parts the curtain to even further speculations on its long-lasting and bewitching power. Perhaps the next step is to let biologists have a crack at decoding it.

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Pigments of the imagination
The Passion of Artemisia by Susan Vreeland. New York: Viking, 2002, 320 pp., $24.95 hardcover.
Mary Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper by Harriet Scott Chessman. New York: Seven Stories Press/The Permanent Press, 2001, 164 pp., $24.00 hardcover.

Reviewed by Diana Postlethwaite

FOR ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI AND MARY CASSATT, art is a bloody business. At the trial of her rapist, Artemisia is tortured with the "sybille," an implement that mutilates the hands, and undergoes a public gynecological exam in order to "prove" she is telling the truth. The young artist begins her painting of the Biblical Judith decapitating Holofernes. "I squeezed out more blood, feeling pleasure in the pain, and let it fall below his head, mixed vermilion and madder to match the red.... Like the blood soaking my sleeve in court. Or the blood I had tried to staunch after the first rape."

Mary Cassatt chooses a subject closer to home: her beloved older sister Lydia, who is dying slowly and painfully of a chronic illness. In each impressionist portrait of Lydia, Mary places a splash of red: a sash, a row of leaves, a pair of gloves. "And is it the blood of illness, then, or of life? Or... both, all rolled together in a terrifying and luscious stream?" Lydia wonders, gazing upon her reflected self. In both of these novels, connections between life and art are intimate and visceral.

Historical novels by women writers, about women artists who take as their subjects women, suggest the intricate layering of Chinese boxes: portraits in words (by Susan Vreeland and Harriet Chessman) of famous artists (Artemisia Gentileschi, Mary Cassatt) who created portraits in paint of women both notorious (Judith, Mary Magdalene, Cleopatra) and ordinary (Mary's quiet sister Lydia).

The feminist subtexts of each novel will strike the 21st-century reader as familiar to the point of cliché: in Artemisia, The Struggle of the Woman Artist in a Patriarchal Society; in Lydia, The Voiceless Forgotten Woman, Overlooked by History. Each of these pictures within pictures is also a portrait of the contemporary novelist, as women's lives in Renaissance Italy or Victorian America are refracted through modern sensibilities.

Harriet Chessman prefaces Lydia Cassatt by noting that "I have thought, imagined, and dreamt my way into her world." Both novels fuse fact with fancy: real names, dates, places and events mix with conjectures about the passions behind the paint. But their narrative strategies diverge significantly. Artemisia weaves together the biographical record with the imagined inner life of a famous artist, telling the tale from Artemisia's perspective. Lydia Cassatt takes as its voice not the well-known artist. but the little-known woman who posed for many of Mary Cassatt's paintings. Of the two novels, Lydia Cassatt is the more successfully achieved. While Vreeland's grand historical figures remain flat and lifeless, Chessman burnishes the simple moments of ordinary life with an elegant meditation on art and flesh.

THE SHORTCOMINGS OF THE PASSION OF ARTEMISIA will come as a double disappointment, both to enthusiastic fans of Vreeland's popular novel about a fictional Vermeer painting, The Girl in Hyacinth Blue (Penguin, 2000) and to those with an interest in the life of artist Artemisia Gentileschi, considered by many the most important woman painter of early modern Europe.

Susan Vreeland. Photo by Donna Padowitzt.

Vreeland's prefatory Note and Acknowledgments make no mention of the fact that Artemisia hasn't wanted for fictionalized versions of her tale. An English translation by Liz Heron of the French historical novel by Alexandra Lapierre was published in 2000 by Grove Press. In 1998, director Agnes Merlet's steamy French film Artemisia raised the hackles of feminist critics, inaccurately morphing its heroine's historical rape by her artist father's colleague Agostino Tassi into a sexual awakening, and suggesting that this coupling was a source of Artemisia's artistic creativity. (Interested readers will want to know about art historian Mary Garrard's Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art, a compendious 1989 study which made available in English for the first time the full, and unpleasantly fascinating, transcript of Artemisia's notorious rape trial, as well as her surviving letters.)

But this is fiction, so why expect a bibliography? Vreeland surely must be held accountable, though, for her leaden language and paint-by-numbers evocations of seventeenth-century Italy. The best historical novels provide us with a magical feeling of time-travel; reading the cookbook prose of The Passion of Artemisia, I merely felt the impulse to snack. ("I sprinkled raw broad beans with olive oil and laid out pecorino cheese and bell pepper"; "waiters served the antipasti of anchovies in olive oil and lemon, and fried zucchini flowers.... We ate the prima portata, a savory pork pie with onions, dates, almonds, and saffron.")

Artemisia's attempts at historicized diction are marred by sentences jarringly out of tune on a Renaissance tongue. Husband Pietro builds a "baby-minder" for their daughter Palmira; to Artemisia "it meant that he thought I could be a painter and a mother"; years later, a surly teenaged Palmira "sigh[s] loudly," announcing defiantly to her careerist mom: "I want to be really married. To a man, not a job."

My Cringe Award for unfortunate prose, however, must go to the scene in which our heroine pleasures herself sexually with her prized possession, a paintbrush that once belonged to the great Michaelangelo himself: "excruciating and titillating, il divino's own hand on this brush, down my neck, closing my eyes to candlelight... lowering the cotton of my shift, stroking softly in a big circle one and then the other... a rhythm lifting me, a wave about to crash...."

Vreeland describes Artemisia's portrait of Mary Magdalene as "ironic, contradictory, and ambiguous." Would that this fictional Artemisia reflected such qualities. There's little dramatic conflict here, because the challenges in Artemisia's life are largely superficial, external: the male chauvinist pigs of seventeenth-century Italy. This Artemisia is a great artist, knows she's a great artist, and the heck with the men who try to put her down. "I paint out of honor and pride and rapture and grief and doubt and love and yearning," she snaps at Cardinal Borghese's disdainful secretary. The critical adage is trite, but true: show, don't tell.

The Passion of Artemisia generates its richest drama out of the relationship between Artemisia and the artist-father who betrays her by continuing to work with the man who raped her. True to the history books, Artemisia travels to England at the end of her father's life, where he's painting decoration for the Queen's House at Greenwich. Somewhat paradoxically, given its Proto-Feminist Against the Patriarchy spin, the novel ends with a sentimental reconciliation: "I am my father's daughter." The reader suspects our heroine must have completed some family therapy: "I finally understood that what he had wanted was not just forgiveness for him, but healing for me."

Lydia Reading the Morning Paper. From Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper.

AMONG WOMEN ARTISTS REDUX, the Mary Cassatt industry renders Artemisia fever puny by comparison. Harriet Chessman concludes her novel with a brief note of indebtedness to Cassatt scholars. But the reader of Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper has little need to quibble about historical sources. The facts in this slender novel are relatively few: five paintings by Mary Cassatt (nicely reproduced and interleaved with the novel), each taking as its subject her sister Lydia; five sets of dates between 1878 and 1881. We learn a bit about the Cassatt clan's life in New England and Paris, and a bit more about Mary's relationship, artistic and romantic, with Impressionist painter Edgar Degas. But history is the occasion for this novel, not its substance.

In a recent interview with Molly Sackler of the American Booksellers' Association, Chessman explained that she'd failed to fulfill her book contract with Stanford University Press for a scholarly study of Cassatt. Instead of researching her way analytically into Cassatt's images, she's chosen to "dream" her way into their meanings.

Lydia Cassatt opens with the words: "Could you model for me tomorrow, Lyd?" The subject of the novel is the imagined thoughts and feelings of a quiet, bookish, unmarried, upper-middle-class sister and daughter, as she is posing for Mary Cassatt--and dying from Bright's Disease. The novel explores the numinous spaces of art and illness. Both are transformative. "To pose, after all, is to agree to a form of enchantment"; "illness has an "edge of grace.... all things shine with clarity and value."

Both Chessman's novel and Cassatt's paintings tell stories. Chessman writes the story of Lydia's journey towards death, her "impressions" of her world through the things she remembers and the things she sees. Lydia creates her own stories about each of her sister's five paintings of her.

The novel is constructed around a fascinating premise: what if the subject and the critic were one and the same? In contrast to Vreeland, awkwardly burdened by the historical record, Chessman has defined her subject in such a way that she is free simply to imagine. What did Lydia Cassatt think and feel during the final years of her life? How might the subject of a painting interpret these interpretations of herself? "Something about this woman, half-suggested in oil, makes me bend toward her," Lydia muses as she looks at her sister's canvas. "Who is this? I ask myself, for I can't think it's me, and yet I know, with exquisite pleasure, that it is."

"Woman Reading" opens the series of paintings/chapters. Lydia loves to read, and the books Chessman places in her hands are pitch-perfect in establishing this richly-imagined character. Lydia begins with Madame Bovary and Persuasion: passion and propriety, regrets and reclamations (the latter novel, appropriately, written as Jane Austen herself was dying). This 41-year-old spinster, who to all appearances has lived without love, devours the Sonnets from the Portuguese and remembers her long-ago suitor Thomas Houghton, who died in the Civil War.

But like Persuasion's Anne Elliot, Lydia Cassatt is given the chance to awaken dormant emotions. As the novel progresses, she forms a potent, if unspoken, bond with her sister's lover Degas. "Naked, this look between us, unhinged. Edgar seems to listen to what I can't say, how I wish to live, to enter the arbor, to swim into the kiss, to break my pose and walk into my own life."

In the final chapter of the book, Mary paints "Lydia Seated at an Embroidery Frame" while Degas reads aloud Tennyson's "Lady of Shalott." It's a poem about a woman at her loom, who looks down upon Camelot and falls in love with shining Lancelot, a man she can never have. "Tennyson's words, in Degas' voice and accent, seem to break off bits of color, the rhymes sweeping the colors into arcs, as strong as nets." It is not as would-be artist, but as a rich critical sensibility, responding to her sister's art, that Lydia Cassatt most claims our interest and admiration.

Woman and Child Driving. From Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper.

In one sense, Chessman's novel follows a familiar feminist trope: the voiceless, forgotten woman is given self-expression. In contrast to her boldly independent younger sister, timid Lydia's vivid internal monologues suggest that she, too, has the sensibility of an artist: "light changes the color of the floors to a shiny wheat, touching the corner of the marble mantelpiece and turning it from dark gray to silvery blue." A needlecrafted pillow-case must suffice for her art: "I can picture Elsie tracing the green stems and the buttery flowers.... Remember me.... Don't allow me to be forgotten."

Lydia Cassatt is not forgotten. She lives forever, in Mary Cassatt's luscious, vibrant paintings. Dying painfully, Chessman's Lydia understands that art necessarily tells a fictional story; that she is not, ultimately, the woman inside the frame: "May's painting.... will offer a memory of me, for the world to claim. And I see something else: she pictures me as a woman who has had her wishes fulfilled.... I yearn to be like this, to have the grace of such satisfaction." This Grecian urn simultaneously freezes time and reminds us of its relentless melt. The technique of the impressionist artist further embodies that paradox: "Even this image of utter satisfaction must show its own artifice, its fragility, its readiness to dissolve into paint, the raggedness of desire."

It's clear why Harriet Chessman didn't need to write her academic study of Mary Cassatt. Using Lydia's voice, she can satisfyingly merge her critical sensibilities with the "exquisite pleasure" she takes in Cassatt's artistry: "She has her own world now, a quiet and enchanted place, small and pleasant.... Sickness holds no place there. All is rose and white and cream, the gorgeous and simple here and now, the shimmering surface of things."

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Uphill all the way
Until Death Do Us Part: My Struggle to Reclaim Colombia by Ingrid Betancourt, translated by Steven Rendall. New York: HarperCollins/Ecco Press, 2002, 228 pp., $24.95 hardcover.

Reviewed by Margaret Randall

UNTIL DEATH DO US PART opens with a chilling scene. It is December 1996, and Ingrid Betancourt, a member of Colombia's House of Representatives, is in her office, holding back-to-back appointments in the last days before the legislative session ends and vacation begins. Betancourt's secretary pokes her head into the office and asks if she has a few moments for someone who has appeared unexpectedly and insists on a meeting. Betancourt looks at her watch. "All right, tell him I'll see him immediately after this person, but for no more than half an hour. That's all the time I have."

The unexpected visitor doesn't need half an hour. Moments are enough for him to make his coldly polite but completely serious death threat. Then he vanishes. Neither Betancourt's astonished secretary nor anyone else knows who he is or how he got into the building.

This is not the first death threat Betancourt has received, but it's the first that includes her eleven- and seven-year-old children. She considers where to go for help: the presidency? the security forces? the police? Most likely, all are involved in the scheme to silence her. She rushes from her office, finds her car and driver, calls the man who will soon be her second husband, then picks up her children at school. By the following morning the four are on a plane for Auckland, New Zealand, where her former husband, the father of her children, has agreed to take them for as long as necessary. Betancourt flies home again to continue her campaign against corruption and terror.

There will be more death threats (including a letter with a photograph of a child's dismembered body) and several close calls. As I write this review on March 1st, National Public Radio has just concluded a briefing on the current crisis in Colombia. Among other items in today's news: senator and presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt has been kidnapped by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). She is one of five elected officials who were abducted on February 23rd in an effort to influence the outcome of a very complex war, one that has taken the lives of 40,000 Colombians in the last decade alone.

The forces engaged in this war are powerful and, in some cases, covert. There are the rebels, probably 50,000 strong, who have been fighting for four decades and control large segments of Colombia's territory. Their social programs are much less well known than some of their dramatic (occasionally disastrous) exploits. There are the drug lords who hold immense power, despite the fact that some of their key figures have been killed and others are doing business from inside prisons that resemble country clubs. There is the Andrés Pastrana government, weakened by corruption and broadly believed to be controlled by the drug lords. And there is the United States, waging one prong of its war on terrorism though still claiming its involvement is limited to the war against drugs. It seems clear to me that given President Bush's geopolitical policies, US involvement in Colombia will only intensify.

Ingrid Betancourt's capture throws a different light on her book. More than an interesting political memoir, it now becomes a piece in a larger puzzle: a document that may help us understand a bit more about this Latin American country that has long been on its way towards becoming another Vietnam.

INGRID BETANCOURT WAS BORN IN 1961 into Colombia's stunningly privileged elite. Her father was ambassador to UNESCO, her mother a long-time political activist. Each of her parents embraced the politics of one of Colombia's mainstream political parties, the Liberals and Conservatives (as traditional and ultimately as difficult to differentiate from one another as our own Republicans and Democrats). Each of them, however, deviated from the mold, asked questions and worked for a better, more honest political system. In Paris Betancourt attended the fashionable Institut de l'Assomption and later earned a doctorate at the Ecole des Sciences Politiques, France's premier school for political science. She also married a French diplomat, with whom she had her two children.

Travel between Europe and Latin America was natural and easy. The Betancourt dinner table frequently hosted the stars among both continents' intellectuals, artists and statespeople. Pablo Neruda exchanged poetry with the pre-teen Ingrid, Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez was a family friend, and most of the men who had been, or were soon to become, Colombia's presidents were family friends or acquaintances.

Betancourt, torn between this elegant globetrotting life of luxury and a fierce love for her embattled homeland, made an early and earnest commitment to take back her country from corrupt politicians, all-powerful drug lords and a civil war that had already devastated land and population for more than a quarter century. Early in her childhood her father tells her, "Colombia has given us a great deal. It's thanks to Colombia that you have come to know Europe, that you've gone to the best schools and lived in a cultural luxury no young Colombian will ever experience. Because you've had so many opportunities, you now have a debt to Colombia. Don't forget that."

In her political life, Betancourt has been daring and creative. As a representative and then as a senator, she has worked with grass-roots organizations and individuals in order to get to the bottom of national problems and expose those whose "solutions" only lead to personal gain. In the early 1990s she researched a development plan for Colombia's Pacific coast. It was applauded on paper, then sabotaged by those whose interests would have been affected. Then newly-elected President Ernesto Samper asked her to write a Code of Ethics for his Liberal Party; the document was good for public relations but ultimately ignored.

Betancourt won her first congressional seat in 1990 by, among other things, using the condom--unmentionable in Colombia's conservative society--as a symbol of the need to protect the population from the disease of corruption. Today she is the presidential candidate on the Nueva Colombia party ticket. Although not a front-runner in the polls at the moment of her kidnapping, she has a history of coming from behind and surprising the mainstream political forces.

In Betancourt's book, as well as in more recent interviews with and articles about her, I have tried to find Nueva Colombia's political program. What specific changes does the party propose? I have been unable to find a document, only repeated references to what Betancourt and her followers are against: corporate and governmental corruption, government ties to organized crime, and a tradition of selling out the country's poor and middle classes for personal gain.

Until Death Do Us Part reads like a fast-paced thriller. It is not always well-written; sometimes it reads more as if it had been spoken into a tape recorder, then transcribed and edited--not an unusual work method for someone accustomed to doing rather than writing. But it is an interesting window on recent Colombian history and a dramatic personal memoir.

I read and reread the book, seeking to decipher its contradictions and to determine how class and privilege shape its author's perception of the political battles that have all but destroyed her homeland. I wanted to find out how a deep understanding of national political events can combine with what appears to be a rather naive grasp of international politics (the latter unfortunately sometimes diminishing the former), and how this story fits into the current world situation--in which what is happening in Colombia is so emblematic of post-Cold War US domination.

I understand the powerful and sometimes contradictory forces that shape Betancourt's life. My political commitments also once separated me from my young children; I can empathize with the pain of a mother whose offspring complained that, embroiled as she is in political struggle, she doesn't really know them anymore. Betancourt is at her very best when she describes the terrible contradictions between making the world safe for one's own children and trying to make it safe for all children.

BETANCOURT'S POLITICS ARE about honesty and clarity. She wants to rid her country of the entrenched corruption which has characterized it for so long. She speaks often in this book about returning democracy to Colombia, and makes clear that what she has in mind is the type of democracy enjoyed in the United States. There are some vague references to the paternalistic or imperialistic attitudes of several US administrations, but no apparent consciousness of this country's role in maintaining Colombia's status quo--aligning itself with suspect political forces under the guise of its so-called war against drugs.

The United States' certification of Colombia as a country fighting the drug traffic is important to Colombia's trade relations. Extradition of imprisoned drug kingpins to the United States is an issue that Betancourt addresses intelligently. But she seems to embrace neoliberalism without an analysis of what its US-imposed policies are doing to peoples throughout the developing world. As a legislator, she tours some of the Pacific Rim countries--Japan, Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan--and looks to their abusive manufacturing and trade practices as models.

If Betancourt owes her political involvement to any one person, it is to her mother, and their relationship is sensitively portrayed. She followed her mother, once a member of Colombia's House of Representatives, into politics. Starting out under the auspices of the Liberal Party, she aligns herself with one president after another--only to become disillusioned as she learns of the depth of their political corruption. A woman, with family connections but far less money than the traditional candidates, she has managed to wage campaigns that touch the hearts of her countrymen and women. She works diligently to uncover patronage and graft, fearlessly reveals connections between "upstanding" politicians and their drug-lord cohorts, and is elected and reelected by ever-greater voting majorities.

But as we know from the book's opening chapter as well as from the March 1st news flash, none of Betancourt's victories come without a price. Her phone is tapped, she is followed, threatened and attacked. In 1996 she resorts to a hunger strike on the floor of the Senate in order to push for the establishment of a legitimate commission to investigate Samper's lies. She succeeds in impressing her seriousness upon her constituency, but almost dies and eventually loses this battle, as she has lost so many others.

Ex-president Ernesto Samper sued Betancourt's French publisher; he denied ever having taken money from the Cali drug cartel or having engaged in any of the other criminal activities Betancourt so carefully documents. HarperCollins prints his disclaimer. But Betancourt's documentation seems rigorous. (It is worth noting that during impeachment proceedings against Samper, four potential witnesses were murdered, one woman shot twice in the vagina.)

The account of a secret meeting between Betancourt and leaders of the Cali drug cartel offers an inside portrait of these influential people: murderous monsters who are also family men, in complete control of the country's senior politicians. Although generally opposed to Colombia's guerrilla movement, Betancourt is fairer than most in her assessment of its history. In one of several references she characterizes the M19, a former guerrilla movement, as "the most dedicated to establishing a genuine democracy." Assessing the FARC, the rebel organization that kidnapped her on March 1st, she says "it seems to Colombians that they're not blind monsters but men with ideas and ideals."

It is democracy Betancourt seeks, democracy--as she conceives of it--of the type that exists in the United States. This means elections in which votes are cast freely rather than manipulated or bought (for anything from a party tee-shirt to a political favor or office). This means a press that is not sold out to political interests, that is not afraid to report the news, denounce corruption, name names. This means campaign promises kept and links to the drug cartels exposed and cut. The sort of democracy, in short, that so many of us long for--here in the United States as well as in countries such as Colombia.

Although Betancourt's idea of US politics often seems stereotypical and naive, there is no doubt that the degree of corruption experienced by ordinary citizens in Colombia has reached a breadth and level of terror yet to be felt here. Kidnappings are routine, thousands of ordinary men and women disappear and are held for ransom, and whole industries--special insurance policies against kidnapping, radios that offer weekly communication with kidnapped loved ones--have grown up around the phenomenon. (Bogotá's newspaper El Espectador on March 1st listed 2,459 cases of kidnapped citizens, with more than 700 of these claimed by the Army of National Liberation, a guerrilla organization.)

On the back cover flap of Until Death Do Us Part the author's bio consists of a single sentence: "Ingrid Betancourt lives in Bogotá, Colombia." To the reader of this book, it is a powerful statement. The March 1st news report explains why.

I recommend Until Death Do Us Part as a highly readable memoir by a woman political figure in a country about which we need to know a great deal more than we do. But I would urge readers to pay attention as well to alternative news sources and other books that can provide the global political context necessary for a fuller understanding of Colombia's tragedy.

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• Linda Gardiner lgardiner@wellesley.edu
• The Women's Review of Books
• Wellesley College Center for Research on Women
• Created: April 2nd 1996
• Last Updated: March 19th 2002
• Expires: No expiration