Women and Art – Feminism and Religion

Two Poems by Darlene O’Dell

Quiet, Piggy

Though the slur also concerns chickens
and eggs and which came first—
did the master create the puppet
or the puppet the master?

suppose, for instance, one posits
an argument for compassion—
the bare minimum, as in let’s not
disappear people and torture families

a few crumbs under the table
hardly enough for a dog and a widow—
let’s not torment the targeted
and call it Jesus

How I Have Been Influenced by Poet Ellen Bass by Charlotte Donlon

“When You Return” by Ellen Bass

Fallen leaves will climb back into trees.
Shards of the shattered vase will rise
and reassemble on the table.
Plastic raincoats will refold
into their flat envelopes. The egg,
bald yolk and its transparent halo,
slide back in the thin, calcium shell.
Curses will pour back into mouths,
letters un-write themselves, words
siphoned up into the pen. My gray hair
will darken and become the feathers
of a black swan. Bullets will snap
back into their chambers, the powder
tamped tight in brass casings. Borders
will disappear from maps. Rust
revert to oxygen and time. The fire
return to the log, the log to the tree,
the white root curled up
in the un-split seed. Birdsong will fly
into the lark’s lungs, answers
become questions again.
When you return, sweaters will unravel
and wool grow on the sheep.
Rock will go home to mountain, gold
to vein. Wine crushed into the grape,
oil pressed into the olive. Silk reeled in
to the spider’s belly. Night moths
tucked close into cocoons, ink drained
from the indigo tattoo. Diamonds
will be returned to coal, coal
to rotting ferns, rain to clouds, light
to stars sucked back and back
into one timeless point, the way it was
before the world was born,
that fresh, that whole, nothing
broken, nothing torn apart.

This poem appears in Ellen Bass’s book “Like a Beggar” published by Copper Canyon Press in 2014 For more information on Ellen Bass and her poetry go to her website https://www.ellenbass.com/ Poem posted here under “fair use” guidance.

While warming up beside an enormous stone fireplace with a dozen other writing workshop participants in western North Carolina, I listened to an instructor read the poem “When You Return” by Ellen Bass. I had come to the retreat wrung out from church trauma and the ache of not knowing where I fit in anymore. As the flames crackled and spit, the reader spoke words that singed the edges of longings I hadn’t yet noticed—longings for crooked paths to be made straight, for broken things to be made whole. I was crying by the time he recited the last few lines— “the way it was / before the world was born, / that fresh, that whole, nothing / broken, nothing torn apart.” The tears surprised me; a snowmelt after years of frozen longing that finally began to thaw.

Spiritual Direction for Writers by Charlotte Donlon

I fell in love with poetry when I began graduate school for my MFA in creative writing. Looking back at the poems I was reading and writing ten years ago, I can connect the dots among my relationship with poetry, my faith, and my rejection of the patriarchy.

Most poems felt like prayers to me back then; they still do. I often say the word “poem” when I mean to say “prayer” and “prayer” when I’m trying to say “poem.” Half the time I don’t even notice that I’ve misspoken because the words and what they represent are so tightly woven together. If I don’t sense much of a personal connection to the themes of a poem I’m reading, I view it as I view a psalm that doesn’t feel especially resonant at the moment–I know that somewhere someone will feel seen and known by the words, and I am in some sense reading on their behalf, as I hope that on my harder days, people are reading and praying on mine. I trust the collective, the mystery, the power of words to connect souls and minds across time and space.

Putting myself in the way of poetry became a spiritual practice while I was struggling to find my place in the conservative evangelical denomination my husband and I had been members of for almost 20 years. We had engaged in conversations about women in the church, racial healing, mercy and justice—topics that we viewed as intimately connected to what it means to be a Christian in our everyday lives. We pushed for change. We led small groups without shying away from difficult conversations. We brought in speakers and coordinated film nights. We tried so hard to make our local church something it wasn’t–something it would never be.

Mabel McKay (1907-1993): “Dreamer” and Master Basket Weaver of the Northern California Pomo Indians, part 2 by Theresa Dintino

part 1 was posted yesterday

The last sucking doctor of the Pomo

Mabel healed people with songs that spirit sang through her. Eventually, she was taught to suck. Into a sucking basket she had woven, she spat out what she had sucked out of her client. People came from all over for her healing and she traveled far to heal others. She needed singers and translators to help her when she worked. Many people came to witness.

When Mabel was raised, traditional healing was beginning to go out of fashion and even be suspect. But Mabel’s work was widely sought after by the local indigenous population from all the various tribes who worked on the farms and lived on the reservations in the area of Northern California.

Sarris describes her extracting a salamander-like creature from a woman’s eye, gallons and gallons of water from a man’s chest and an evil spirit from another.

Mabel McKay (1907-1993): “Dreamer” and Master Basket Weaver of the Northern California Pomo Indians, part 1 by Theresa Dintino

Moderator’s Note: This piece is in co-operation with The Nasty Women Writers Project, a site dedicated to highlighting and amplifying the voices and visions of powerful women. The site was founded by sisters Theresa and Maria Dintino. To quote Theresa, “by doing this work we are expanding our own writer’s web for nourishment and support.” This was originally posted on their site on July 23rd, 2024. You can see more of their posts here.

It’s hard to know what might have happened to Mabel McKay if her grandmother Sarah had not made it a point to care for and protect her. Sarah recognized her as a Dreamer, one who is owned by spirit.

Mabel’s great-grandfather, Sarah’s father, had been a medicine man descended from those before him. Sarah’s brother, Richard, had started the Dream religion “after the white people had taken everything but their souls to Dream”(Sarris 8). Sarah recognized the signs in her granddaughter but worried there was no one left to teach her.

One of the signs Mabel was a Dreamer is how she talked in her sleep at night as a girl, out loud speaking her Dreams. Spirit talked to her in her waking hours as well. She was a strange child and there was a lot of worry around her.

Soul-Fully Scripting Flesh: Poetic Justice & Joy by Margot Van Sluytman

Ours is a city of abundant tattoo shops. Places, I was to learn, where art and heart are rife. Places in which rich conversations occur. Conversations that linger long after the ink has begun to settle.

Wending my way to find the place to begin the process of scripting my skin, I spoke with a young man. His back was bent as he focussed on his animal friend and for a short while, before approaching him with my questions, I read the ink that covered his arms and legs. So many designs, descriptors, expressive strokes of thought and meaning known only to him. Hieroglyphs wherein his voice, his many selves, were revealed, yet hidden unless conversation were struck and desire to speak forthcoming. Wherefrom grew his choices?

I decided to cross the street and to ask him the meaning of some of his tattoos, the ones that spoke most vocally to me. As I moved closer, I spotted the script on his wrist. Script among an array of the colours and images. That script struck me. A fragment from The Tempest. Caliban’s words.

Be not afeard; the isle is full of
noises,
Sounds and sweet airs that give
delight and hurt not.

She Changes Everything She Touches: A Reflection on Love and Loss, part 2 by Sara Wright

part 1 was posted last week, you can read it here.

How much I like clipping by hand. Surprised by this realization I feel satisfaction rising. I was bored by this task as a child. I am delighted to meet a bevy of fat nubbly toads who appear out of the overgrown ground covers and in between sun warmed stones. Both child and ‘old woman’ feel happy that none will get mowed down by a polluting gas guzzling machine. The Peace of this Land that we belong to steals over us. Less is more. I’ll tackle the patch of bracken later, or maybe not until tomorrow. In this weather accomplishing one simple chore a day is enough.

Well not quite. I am creating a serpentine path of fieldstone that stretches from my front door to meet the path that climbs the hill. My original intention was to have someone ‘more professional’ do the work, but they were too busy so here I am, an almost eighty-one-year-old woman, creating a mosaic out of cracked stone! ‘I am the artist’ I say, as I carry a few more irregular rocks down from the huge pile sitting in front of the garage eyeing the mosaic for the perfect fit. Illumination strikes when wind hits the stones. Blowing seeds, withered crabapple bits, pine needles and leaves into the cracks I see what is happening. Small plants like violets, creeping charlie, ground ivy, and catmint will find niches in the soil that is being created before my eyes. Mosses will follow in the shade. Ah, Nature is going to help me craft a unique and imaginative fieldstone floor. Each time it rains the stones flatten out becoming more stable. That same feeling of satisfaction steals over me again. Vaguely I think that I may be doing something else besides laying stones in an artistic way and trusting that Nature will fill in the cracks, but I am not clear just what this might be. All I know is that it doesn’t matter how long this project takes. Process has taken precedence. This much feels just right.

Toni Cade Bambara: How to Care for Oneself While Healing The All (American Woman Writer 1939-1995), part 2 by Theresa Dintino

Part 1 was posted yesterday

The mud mothers, ancestors, began to make themselves visible to her when she was a girl, in the movie theater, on one of the walls in a cave like indentation, “with enormous teeth painting themselves with long hair brushes, painting pictures on the walls of the cave”( SE 254), at church, and in her attic. “In the attic they came in the mirror once. Ten or more women with mud hair, storing yams in gourds and pebbles in cracked calabash. And tucking babies in hairy hides. They came like a Polaroid. Stepping out of the mouth of the cave, they tried to climb out of the speckled glass, talk to her, tell her what must be done all over again, all over again, all over again. But she hung an old velvet drape over the mirror and smothered them. They were not going to run her off her own place, Not the attic “(SE 255). In church and at the theater she avoided looking at them.

For Velma and for Bambara, it is the spiritual roots of her ancestors and ancestry from Africa that come calling, the mud mothers. In Velma’s town there are mentors and guides and Aunties and godmothers, all levels of support and care available in claiming her gifts that Velma has left behind, rejected. Yet, when the book ends she will return to this, she has agreed to take up the mantle in order to be well.

For African Americans in particular, Bambara believes reconnecting with the ancestors—the ancestors that their ancestors were taken from— is part of the healing wanting to happen. That this was left out of the civil rights movement. That honoring ancestors is part of this lineage and that the ancestors are there and waiting. That slavery often disrupted this connection but it is there, the ancestors are there, for the reconnection if one is willing.

Toni Cade Bambara: How to Care for Oneself While Healing The All (American Woman Writer 1939-1995), part 1 by Theresa Dintino

Moderator’s Note: This piece is in co-operation with The Nasty Women Writers Project, a site dedicated to highlighting and amplifying the voices and visions of powerful women. The site was founded by sisters Theresa and Maria Dintino. To quote Theresa, “by doing this work we are expanding our own writer’s web for nourishment and support.” This was originally posted on their site on August 11th, 2020. You can see more of their posts here.

While reading adrienne maree brown’s Pleasure Activism for #NastyWomenWriters, I was stopped in my tracks by the praise coming forward in that book for black feminist, writer, activist, film maker and mentor Toni Cade Bambara (1939-1995).

brown writes:

“Toni Cade Bambara, author of The Salt Eaters, the one to tell us writing was a tool for the revolution, that our task was to make revolution irresistible. Bambara is a main stream in the lineage of pleasure activism, not just because of what she put on the page and into words, but also because of the ways she wove community, the way she supported other writers and organizers, the way she engaged in healing work” (45).

In the chapter “The Sweetness of Salt,” author and activist Alexis Pauline Gumbs, archivist and scholar of Bambara’s work, writes about five women who have been instrumental in her life and work: “scholar Farah Jasmine Griffin, filmmaker and activist Aishah Shahidah Simmons, artist and abolitionist Kai Lumumba Barrow, healer and organizer Cara Page, and editor and intellectual activist Cheryll Y. Greene”(46), who were all personally influenced, mentored, “sistered” and “mothered” by Bambara. It was these women’s recounting of their experiences with Bambara that caused me to go find her for myself.

May Alcott Nieriker (1840-1879): Little Woman, Big Ambition, part 2 by Maria Dintino

Part 1 was posted yesterday

May clearly defines her audience,

“For I am supposing our particular artist to be no gay tourist doing Europe according to guide-books, with perhaps few lessons, here and there, taken only for the name of having been a pupil of some distinguished master, but a thoroughly earnest worker, a lady, and poor, like so many of the profession, wishing to make the most of all opportunities, and the little bag of gold last as long as possible”(6).

In her book, she covers three art hubs, London, Paris, and Rome, providing information on means of travel, places to stay, artists to study with, galleries and museums to frequent, scenic sites for sketching and painting, and even stores to buy art supplies and clothing. A more useful document, I cannot imagine! Julia Dabbs concurs with this assessment in her article Empowering American Women Artists: The Travel Writings of May Alcott Nieriker:

“Then as now, it is difficult to imagine a reader not being inspired by May’s words of encouragement, her practical advice, and her passion for art.”