I am understanding a little bit more my preoccupation with domesticity and how this finds its way into the poetry or poetic projects.
Some things:
In my family, gender roles are not traditionally delineated. I have taken this with me into my education, into my careers, into my home life.
I am interested in preserving some amount of privacy for my home life. In fact, I will guard this privacy pretty ferociously. I was having a really wonderful and deep phone conversation with another Pinay author yesterday, and one thing she and I fervently agreed upon was how people (readers, audience, students) feel entitled to your personal space.
It's wonderful when they are polite about it, when they ask, "Hey, can we ask you a question?" It's much more wonderful when it's wholly about the work, when they ask, "Can we ask you a question? In your book, when you wrote [fill in the blank], why did you write that? Did you mean this? Or did you mean that? Because this is what we are thinking...."
Unfortunately, not everyone is polite (I wonder if their mothers raised them right). People can be invasive and inappropriate. Gender compounds this.
Fact is, my stat counter tells me there are a lot more people who read this blog that I do not know personally than I ever anticipated would read this blog. There are a lot more lurkers than readers who leave comments and actually want to have a conversation with me. Sometimes it's students who are reading Poeta en San Francisco, and that's cool. I keep thinking that when I was an undergrad, it would have been amazing to be able to have some kind of access to the thoughts of authors whose works I was reading, especially authors whose works ended up really leaving deep impressions upon me. If Silko had a blog, if Anzaldúa had a blog, circa 1992. Imagine that!
Many other blog visitors are other poets, writers, or community folks who actually are interested in my thoughts on my current projects, reading, food, film, political tirades, etc., and that's cool too.
I am comfortable with publicly maintaining some kind of cultural and professional focus. I am not comfortable with divulging much personal detail. I know it is generally public knowledge that I am married to Oscar Bermeo, that he is a poet and an editor, that we live in Oakland. I am comfortable with relating our poetic, cinematic, culinary, and even our horticultural and hiking adventures.
But there are a lot of things that will never belong on this blog.
I realize that women/wives are expected to operate primarily if not solely within the province of the domestic.
I realize that women/wives are expected to completely embody their domestic situations, and to have their public selves restricted to their domestic roles.
That women/wives must accept the domestic and public map of the world as having absolute and non-negotiable borders.
That women/wives who transgress this map's borders suffer social consequences.
And that more often than not, it's other women/wives who dole out these consequences.
How's that for irony?
But that is not the way my mother raised me.
* * *
So on conventions of domesticity then, and gender expectations, societal impositions. And I am back at Harryette Mullen's Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T, and I actually kind of love that these have become my poetic models for exploring domesticity.
Have you ever read books that you wish you had written? For me, it's these two books, but then again I also realize were it not for these two books of Mullen's, I wouldn't have them and her as role models for working out this problem I have with gender and domesticity. I have a social problem with gender and domesticity, I do not know whether it can be neatly resolved, and I would prefer not to have to get into psychoanalysis mode about this. If it's at all possible.
Related, ironically, to private and domestic is the body, the womanbody and its status as globalization's and consumerism's body object. I think this is why Mullen's books read as pornographic and obscene to me, that she really renders the womanbody as mute/dumb mannequin, pink dress-up doll of Barbie proportions, or a Styrofoam tray of raw meat and blood, or a neatly packaged dozen eggs, or a box of feminine hygiene products. Mind you, this is not a complaint or criticism of the work, but in praise of her work.
One of my social problems with gender and domesticity is not only our consent, but that we are complicit in maintaining and reinforcing their current and ongoing social status(es).
I could keep going, but I realize I am going overlong and I am ranting. So I will stop here.
