I Have Chosen to Stay and Fight (12 page)

Through war and famine, daughters kidnapped by soldiers and put into service as "comfort women" (sexual slaves who would be kept in tents to satisfy the troops, which doesn't sound all that comfortable) through the years in refugee camps, lost pages of history, stories so painful they have been deleted from the family archives, tales that I can't seem to extract from anyone in my family, secrets kept so long, padlocks of shame rusted and useless, the keys no longer able to pry them open: All they remember is her, and they grasp my fingers, my oddly tiny dinky pinkies, and see that she has returned. She is still here. To protect them. Hold them. Love them. Her raucous laughter fills their ears, and they hold my hands long and hard, and sometimes tears come, which I do not or cannot ever understand.

I wasn't there, but I have this biological legacy to live up to her legend, to carry on her work, of compassion, protection, defiance and laughter, since she isn't here to do it herself. To grow my hair and not
be afraid of my village's judgment and ridicule, of my "ugliness," hugeness, my inability to conform, my indelicate manner, my loud and resounding laugh, my passion and unfailing and infallible strength, my need to wear pants, figuratively as well as literally. That my hands are small makes no difference. I have the power of the whole world in them.

courtney love

I
do want to be a good feminist. I really do. But I worry about the state of the female nation. For instance: Courtney Love. Everything she does raises the stakes on the celebrity-death pools, and brings out all the people who "love to hate" her.

This is unfair. I was speaking to another feminist, whose opinion I hold in high regard, and she admitted, quite casually, that she hated Courtney Love. When pressed for a reason why, she stammered, not realizing that she might be taken to task for her own misogyny. She couldn't come up with anything acceptable, only "I just love to hate her." But why? Courtney Love is an incredible artist who has endured public derision and scorn for well over a decade. What man could survive that? Yet in any real way, the feminist majority has yet to come to her defense. No one has come forward with the simple question "Why is it that I am hating another woman with such ease?"

I admit, I have always had a real soft spot for Courtney Love. Perhaps it is my own wonder at the nature of rock, how it attracts shape-shifters and gift-grifters, how it manages to eat its young, generation after generation. Maybe it is an appetite for destruction, my Guns N' Roses nature, how I will always have a side to me that is a rough downhill run, the kind where you start and can't stop and pretty soon you're exceeding your own speed limit, and there is no end to it but an utterly bitter scalding by concrete. Courtney Love has been running downhill for over a decade, and there are many hurdles in her path. I suspect she is the Keith Richards of my generation, the one who will beat the odds and win every watercooler wager as the bottle-blonde-with-dark-roots dark horse simply by staying alive. But the Rolling Stone spokes-addict for kidney dialysis never had to contend with misogyny, which Love has had to bear unrelentingly, without the support of the feminist community at all.

I want to know why this hatred is casual and unquestioned. Her behavior is too embarrassing and unpredictable for any dot-org to get behind—I understand that. She is the eternal Underdog that never trumps Overeat. But Courtney Love has made significant contributions to the mythology of the rock star, and changed the standards for women in rock. However, her work as a musician is rarely, if ever, brought up when speaking about her. It is always about the drug arrests, the lack of grace in her social interactions, the possibility that she might have killed her husband—a theory supported by many, including her own father, the author of two books on the subject.

In fact, there was a whole movie made—Nick Broomfield's astonishingly inventive
Kurt and Courtney
—attempting to prove/disprove her guilt and/or complicity in her husband's suicide and/or murder. It's an illuminating work because it reveals the extent of the intense distrust for women that exists in society. What Broomfield's documentary shows is the doom left in the wake of a woman who defies all definition of a widow: a rocker, a starlet, an icon and a mother. She manages to be all these things anyway and then some. Underneath all the circumstantial evidence and theory presented by Broomfield, what is undeniable is that the documentary is proof that the world abhors women, and this hatred is as natural as Mother Nature herself. When given a choice, we are going to assume guilt over innocence, evil over good, when it comes to the ladies. Always. Without exception. Every time. The thesis statement, broken down to the barest essentials, is that chicks suck, and everyone says, "Ho!!!!!"

No one ever talks about the cool brilliance of Courtney Love's latest record. They speak about her with the distance and superiority of the eternal judge, the tsk-tsk of the outside observer, who coolly and impassively watches the events of everything unfold from afar, always detached, always removed.

Why is this okay? If you are a feminist or not, I don't think it is acceptable to hate a woman in the media unless you have a well-worked-out explanation as to why, have examined all your own prejudices and can convince me that you are not just another fascist follower of fashion. I don't care if that is a sexist notion; it forces the burden of guilt on the jury's shoulders. Individually, we must be
called upon to prove our suspicion, to put our feelings into words. If you are going to triple her bail, that is the least we can do for her.

martha stewart

I
'm not a homemaker by any stretch of the imagination. If there are panty hose on the floor in the living room, that is where they are supposed to be. If the DVD library has the wrong disc in each case, it's like that for a reason. It's my own personal Dewey decimal system. I like having food plates out for several days in a row, and they
do
belong on the nightstand. They help me to go to sleep. And vermin are adorable!

I'm not a Martha fan. I know that I am weird and possess the most bizarre taste in decor; my interiors should reflect my interior, and mine do. The very thought of a rolling pin makes my carpal tunnel ache and pop. I do have a craft-oriented side, but it is driven by iron-on-patch pajamas and customized stripper thongs, nothing too challenging.

Yet, I cannot believe the injustice that Martha Stewart has faced. Just because I don't embrace pastels, especially that light mint/sage that she loves so much, it doesn't mean that I would turn my back on her. I don't understand anything about the world of big business—strategic planning, mission statements, financing: this is for people who wear suits or suntan panty hose, who sit in fluorescent light all
day, who have in-boxes and office affairs. I have never worked in an office, so I don't know anything about it. But I do know that Martha Stewart never did anything worse than what her male counterparts do on a daily basis.

It seems to me that America inherently hates it when women are wildly successful, and there is a built-in punishment that comes along with that kind of wealth. I can't follow a recipe for shit, but I can spot misogyny from miles away. Why do we hate women who beat all the odds and come out on top? Why are books written to "expose" their financial "deviance," as well as their "ambitchiness"?

Martha Stewart was promoting the idea of perfection, wherever you could have it. It was about that notion of perfecting something, and then it becoming yours. This was the American Dream as it could be made accessible to American women. You could empower yourself through action, and that is probably the danger that Martha Stewart represents. She is the authority on independence, and that is what we don't want from our mothers or for our daughters.

You can't wear a burqa or tie raffia properly. You need freedom and a wide table if you want to make your own marshmallows or liquid soap from scratch (I have no idea why anyone would want to make anything from scratch, but that's beside the point). The thought that putting Martha away for a time was some kind of blow to the misogynist family structure is dangerous.

The real point is that America doesn't like women who are powerful and successful and not nice about it. She went to jail for being a bitch. I'm glad I wasn't on trial, because I would be serving consecu
tive life sentences. I would be throwing my last meal of fried chicken and Pepsi at the guards before being escorted by the chaplain to my lethal injection. I would refuse to take the governor's call.

Big deal. She wasn't a nice lady. Personality faults should not be worth a jail sentence. Even after she got out of jail, they made her wear one of those cuffs around her leg, like she was Suge Knight. Her magazine
Living
might be so boring that it would make you
not
want to go on living, but I don't think Martha is capable of popping a cap in anyone's ass.

I never want to have ecru chenille slipcovers or homemade beeswax candles scented with lavender from my own garden, but I do believe the unceremonious denial of Martha Stewart's freedom should make us seriously question our own.

all hail tha queen

I
remember when I first met Queen Latifah. It was in San Francisco at a huge benefit for AIDS awareness in the early '90s. She was walking out of the green room, and her bodyguard, a large, imposing man, straight-armed me to get out of the Queen's way, and then she saw me, recognized me immediately and embraced me warmly. "Oh, I have been wanting to meet you, gurrrl—you are funny! How you doin'? My name is Dana." I was shaking, and couldn't even muster up the courage to say anything. I just stood there and gaped. She smiled
at me warmly, and went on stage. She was there with the cast of
Living Single
, and showing much love to a worshipful crowd.

My ex-girlfriend, who I still believe is mad at me for breaking up with her, after fifteen or so years, my shit is that tight—for real, tho'—was obsessed with the Queen, and made me a mixed tape with the single "U.N.I.T.Y," and to this day when I hear that song's bittersweet hook, a war cry for all girls who want the respect that is due to them, that they have had enough of the gender war, the male bonding that left them cold and alone in an already hostile world, I am brought to my knees in reverie. She truly is the Queen, but not just in name; her undeniable power and grace can come only from a true royalty that only God can bestow, a Queen from the true kingdom. There is no one that even comes close to her in terms of talent, charisma, beauty—who cares about the breast reduction and the weight loss, which could be construed by some as a self-betrayal of her original spirit, the natural largesse of her being? She had some back problems, so get over it. I don't have to assume a feminist stance in judging what one might do with one's own body, and when it comes to the Queen nobody and nothing can knock her off her throne.

I got a big chest of drawers myself, and am not really a bra wearer because I am a member of SAG and AFTRA, if you know what I'm sayin', and one day in Victoria's Secret—where I will never go again, by the way, and was only there because I was bored at the airport with a long-ass layover—I was talking to my man on my cell, having a half fight because of missing each other and neither wanting to admit it, and the saleswoman was holding up a support bra and pointing at it
wildly, desperately trying to do something about the fact that my breasts were not as jacked up as she thought they should be, so she needed to give me some of that titty sign language, like "The only way you gonna keep that man of yours is if you shove that shit up to your chin!!!"—all frantic and crazed like she was about to shout "UNDERWIRE!!!!!" in a crowded movie theater. I didn't need that from her and promptly left the store while still on the phone. Bras don't make me feel good. They hurt my back, and I could care less about where my breasts are as long they are still on my body. I'm not going jogging anywhere, nor do I have a set of lingerie that matches because who has the time to wash that shit separately or put anything in a fishnet bag before you do—and, I'm sorry, I just don't care that much about gravity. Mind your own chest. For some reason, my lack of support for support makes people really nervous. I think that there is something about bralessness that is too free, too overtly sexual, too bawdy, too loose, so that it makes people stammer and stare. It isn't my intention to be any of these things, nor do I care if that's what people think I'm doing. I'm not a dancer with a bony seat and no balcony, not one of those boyish girls who can "get away" with not wearing a bra because they're not guilty of fleshy "excess," and I'm neither ashamed nor judgmental about the aforementioned excess, considering it less an excess and more an extravagance of nature, something to be celebrated rather than hidden. My lawless, braless ways are rather outlaw.

But I'm here to talk about the Queen. Her reduction simply does not make her less of an icon in my eyes. The sequence in
Chicago
thrills me, forces me to play and replay it several times a day on my computer, the amber-beaded dress fringes out into an ecstatic aura, casting her in a beautiful golden light. Ostrich feathers and jeweled headdresses were made for that shit, and Bessie Smith is reborn better and more bad-ass beautiful than ever. She made that film truly brilliant, and it became my guiltiest cinematic pleasure of the year, since I just can't seem to get enough of the Queen, or that adorable shapeshifter, Renée Zellweger.

My favorite Queen Latifah performance has to be her gritty tour de force as hard-core gangsta bankrobber-ladykiller in the exhilarating early '90s noir
Set It Off
. The Queen goes down in a blaze of glory rivaled only by Al Pacino's momentous bullet-ridden farewell in
Scarface
. I'm not sure why
Set It Off
doesn't have the same cult following in the hip-hop community as Brian De Palma's epic of a Cuban immigrant with balls of steel and a strangely ethical manner of doing business as a high-stakes drug dealer. First of all, the people in
Scarface
are all in brownface. The performances are brilliant, but, then again, everybody looks really orange. Even if there are a few real Latinos sprinkled in the mix, they fade into the background, chop and get chopped up with chain saws in the first act, wear fly hats and tight, hot angel white pants that look good when they're running and don't have any lines. And the film is about race! I get the heroic thug that Tony Montana is, and am madly in love with him, because he is a gangsta through and through. He believes in himself, and he isn't held back by race (even though it's just self-tanner, but Pacino is a dope actor so he can do anything, really), nor does he believe that his class
is something that is going to be difficult to overcome. Like the Queen, he is the true King, anointed not by white society but by his own focus, pride, love, genius, bravery, and some bizarre familial dysfunction that is at once terrifically sad, in his rejection by his mother, and his creepy obsession with his sister. Rappers spend major bank on memorabilia from the film, and there are numerous mentions in legendary rap songs, like when Biggie says, "Don't get high on your own supply."