Lacanian theory, possessing whiteness and possessing the phallus are directly
comparable in the sense that they have been designated a superior position at
the centre of the regulatory practices of North American culture. And so, though
it is necessary, it is not enough for feminist theory merely to recognise and
affirm the specificities of the femaleness of the body as a countering strategy
- skin colour, racial background, cultural and other locational differences all
matter, in that they function to differentiate one body from another and to
organise diverse bodies towards serving the powerful imperatives of
heterosexism, imperialism, post-colonialism, and white male dominance in
whatever form it manifests itself. In the course of my book, I try to identify
the complexity of these poetic and political strategies in action – the
interweaving of that ‘geography closest in’, the history – with the emerging
‘truths’ of dreams, desires, sexualities and subjectivities. For her, it is as
important to examine the individual dream life as it is to address the politics,
for even the dreamlife is situated within and emerges out of unconscious
experience which, of course, also has a history. Inescapably personal but also
political, dreams are bound to their historical moment of production. Being
endlessly subject to re-interpretation, they are themselves an interpretation.
Rich calls here for the necessity to be vigilant, to be aware that limits,
boundaries, borders – whether to feminist theory, to politics, to poetry or to
dream – can operate even at this deepest image-making level of the psyche: When
my dreams showed signs of becoming politically correct no unruly images escaping
beyond borders when walking in the street I found my themes cut out for me knew
what I would not report for fear of enemies’ usage then I began to wonder. (22)
Accountability, responsibility – asking these profound questions – ‘What is
missing here? how am I using this? – becomes part of the creative process’.(23)
I agree with Rich when she claims that ‘poetry can break open locked chambers of
possibility, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire’. (24) If desire
itself becomes boundaried within the systems and coercions of corporate
capitalism, our power to imagine becomes stultified. If the poet’s ‘themes’ are
delimited through the fear of ‘enemies’ usage’, and even her role as witness
inhibited through fear of comebacks, then the vital role of the revolutionary
writer to know words, to use words, to rely on words to imagine and to convey
the necessity to create a just, humane society, may be undermined. As Rich
suggests A poem can’t free us from the struggle for existence, but it can
uncover desires and appetites buried under the accumulating emergencies of our
lives, the fabricated wants and needs we have had urged on us, have accepted as
our own. It’s not a philosophical or psychological blueprint; it’s an instrument
for embodied experience. But we seek that experience or recognise it when it is
offered to us, because it reminds us in some way of our need. After that
rearousal of desire, the task of acting on that truth, or making love, or
meeting other needs, is ours.(25) ‘The wick of desire’ always projects itself
towards a possible future – and, in this revolutionary art ‘is an alchemy
through which waste, greed, brutality, frozen indifference, "blind
sorrow" and anger are transmuted into some drenching recognition of the
what if? – the possible.’(26) However, the knowledge that comes from out of our
embodied experience is, in Rich’s work, inextricable from the languages in which
it is spoken, thought, imaged, dreamed. It is a theme which recurs and recurs
throughout Rich’s work to date – our concrete needs, the passionate urgency of
our desires, the intensity of women’s diverse struggles – these are identified
and identifiable, just as our differences can be identified and are identifiable
as continually in process and are always to be held up to question. Taking
nothing for granted, maintaining a continual vigilance against taking anything
presumed to be ‘true’ at its face value, Rich constantly questions the premises
of her own thought, working critically with the language she uses. If ‘language
is the site of history’s enactment’, then it is also for Rich the site for
questioning that history of experience; for evaluating the impositions and
alienations that are the outcome of domination; for plumbing the depths and
analysing the complexities of what constitutes identity. Throughout these four
decades, Rich has found herself interpreting and re-interpreting the
contradictory social realities of our lives always critically conscious of the
workings of power – not only ‘possessive, exploitative power’ but also ‘the
power to engender, to create, to bring forth fuller life’. (27) These are large
aims, befitting the work of this major feminist theorist and revolutionary poet.