Shanta Lee is an artist, and writer across genres with two full length poetry collections, GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA: Dreamin of Mama While Trying to Speak Woman in Woke Tongues (Diode Editions) and Black Metamorphoses (Etruscan Press, 2023).
“The Breasts, The Spork, & The Butterfly Woman” appears in the Spring 2022 issue of Carve.
When girls begin to develop breasts, we often experience a disorienting shift—though we are still children, other people (men and women, both) interpret our developing bodies as a public message. There’s a push-and-pull between the privacy of the girl-child’s inner world and the public message that “adult people” receive (and often blame the girl for). How did you manage this tension between private and public in writing memories of girlhood?
The public and private within my memory is very challenging, especially in terms of thinking of one of many edicts within my home of not airing dirty laundry. These moments/memories are private because they have to do with such intimate parts of my actual, physical body in ways that are still very present in how I am engaged. And by that, I mean the “I” as a person and the physicality of my “I” in the way that I still remember the first time I had to navigate the dance of eyeballs between my breasts and my face each time it happens within a current moment.
How does one publicly convey as a writer or even begin to think about what this means on a conscious level? Honestly, I think it involved spending some time within the “cellar hole” as I like to call it. Excavating and walking through the door of whatever I found, going back to re-live and actually “be” in that age again, in the moment.
In this piece, which is a part of a memoir, I wanted to ensconce the reader in my internal experiences while also placing the reader within my world. I thought a lot about what I call the micro: me, myself, my body, these experiences, within a macro: the household, the community, the world around me. Deciding on structure had a lot to do with this though I did not begin with the structure in mind. I always say that there were many midwives in creating this work and adding to my thinking/conception of the larger work. Sue William Silverman, one of my former advisors, often talked about navigating these terrains through the voice of innocence and the voice of experience.
Also, given that I began writing in my journal around the age of 12 and my poetry started as a private utterance as a teenager, I wonder to what extent this influences my ability to keep a tension between the interior and public within narrative in a certain way.
Throughout the essay, objects—like the children—feel, but do not speak. The children are seen and not heard; the couch is tired; the television is lonely. The adult-people pierce the ears and heart of the girl-child, but the child herself remains “silent-scared.” How did this kinship between silent, unheard children and silent, neglected objects arise for you in the writing process?
I keep returning to my love and kingship with abandoned places, a relationship I developed as an adult in my thirties (basically, when I should have been old enough to know better not to go into forbidden places!) There is something powerful about a place—whether it is land or an actual abandoned structure—that was once so loved, cared for, and tended to that then is left, neglected, etc. I’d not written that chapter yet when I started diving deeper into abandoned places and maybe, in some way, the idea of the neglected or silent things remained present during the writing.
One of the things I never try to do is say, “I am going to write X about Y and I am going to do it this way.” In other words, I am not formulaic in the process of putting this together, though I had to adapt a different mindset each time I approached working on this. Early on, before I knew this was a book, I made a life timeline with all of the things I remembered—all of my teachers from elementary school, key moments in my life, etc.—with details. This happened around the same time that a prompt within Suzanne Kingsbury’s Gateless Gate Writers weekly gatherings that launched me into writing one chapter about how I got a black eye as a little girl on my first day in kindergarten. I believe that prompt was about engaging in using a child’s voice. I recall a number of people in the room encouraging me to keep going with this while also commenting on the detail of the memory. So for years, it was a matter of doing a download onto the page in different manifestations. In some cases, there would just be a burst of writing about a scene, I kept going as if to trick myself not to see this as the bigger thing. I didn’t say, “Okay, I have to plot out what the next chapter will be” nor did I try to fit my writing into the container of it needing to be geared towards the larger work of the memoir.
At some point when I was several chapters in—maybe about a dozen or so—I wanted to map some of the themes and what emerged. When I had a fuller whole, I used PowerPoint slides to color code how each of the chapters functioned while also paying attention to the things that emerged like the dance between the seen and unseen, different levels of secrecy, the thin veil between the adult world and the world of the children, hierarchy and power.
Through the various re-writes of this specific chapter, it was key for me to think about how a body, my body, so challenged between being seen and heard, also co-existed with the other things that might’ve felt that tension.
This relationship between you as a writer and you as the girl-child is really fascinating. Your child-self was not permitted to speak, and so adult-writer you takes up this long overdue injustice and fills page after page with words. It made me wonder how you saw yourself (or selves) in this essay; did you become an adult-person? Or has your work as a writer and poet allowed you to remain in-between child and adult, at least when it comes to writing on the page?
Funny enough, I see myself walking between child and adult in many ways in life which also lends itself to my ability to do so on the page. One example of this is from a trip I took to the U.S. Virgin Islands for the first time in 2010. After that trip, I recall exclaiming to a friend repeatedly as I showed her pictures, “The water is really blue, I thought that was just on television.” There are a range of other stories like that where I have this odd combination of a genuine child-like sense of the girl I once was while also feeling like I have the wisdom of an old soul (on certain days). There is also a way that I bring things to a page like imagination and play from my actual life. I will always be the child at heart as much as I am the goofball as much as I am the wise woman.
When it comes to the actual page, all of my selves are also co-writers while the adult, the writer, says, “It is okay here. You can say and be whoever you want here. It is safe.” In many ways, I owe it to her—the little girl who was not seen and who could not say what she really felt—to go to that page and not hold back or hold my tongue. I am also interested in how to create a certain tension, dialogue, conversation between that little girl and the woman of now and I am not sure quite how that would play out on a page. Though I did see an example in Nathalie Sarraute’s Childhood, in the way that the reader experiences Sarraute interrogating the memory on the page within each chapter.
What are some of the writers whose books, poems, or essays speak to the possibilities and complications of mother-daughter relationships in a way that you find either inspiring or compelling? And what are some of the possibilities for a writer like yourself to “see” the person that, in the past, controlled the seeing in a way that was harmful or cruel?
There are so many but I will name some that have made a big impact in terms of the form and representation of the tensions that exist on emotional and psychological levels en route from girlhood to womanhood. I’ve long admired a collection from 1996, Rita Dove’s Mother Love, for the way that it explores tensions of the question of what does it mean to mother and then let go, using the vehicle of Greek mythology. Dove engaging with myth while making it her own to explore the anatomy of the mother-daughter challenges was very instructive, especially as a poet.
Jamaica Kincaid’s 1978 essay, “Girl,” is brilliant in the way that the essay exemplifies the tug of war between a girl on the cusp of becoming and her mother. What is so great about this piece is the way that the girl attempts to carve out her own path and sense of self through the italicized speech. I’ve long identified with that feeling as the italicized speech is not so much speaking or talking back, but something one says in protest even if it is just internal or under one’s breath. In this example, for me, I have often revisited this in terms of the use of the poly vocal on the page.
Another that I must mention is the way that Rebecca Solnit handles the death of her mother and their strained relationship within her 2013 essay collection The Faraway Nearby. Not only is the overall structure eye-catching and what I describe as the Matryo-Noir, or the concept of the Matryoshka doll as memoir but Solnit uses the chiasmus or ring structure in a way that brings the reader back to the beginning in the working through of many complex issues, especially the relationship with her mother. The possibility here is the way that the page lends itself to mimicking a strained human relationship through structure. It also broke the usual memoir structure which I appreciated.
Also, as a whole genre, the relationship between parent-child, mother-daughter, that has been most informative all of my life has been a range of myths, legends, and fairytales. One of the things I revisited recently through the remake of the 2020 film, Gretel & Hansel, was the way that the witch became a mother figure, a wise woman for Gretel in this retelling encouraging her to engage with her power.
What strikes me, way beyond just mother-daughter relationship, is the way that we engage with each other as human beings and how stories or verse convey these tensions. What is unsaid or unexplored, seen and unseen within the panoply of human intimacy and relationship. One example that I’ve been floored by in terms of the rawness and the way that it goes there—though it is within fiction—are the dark, twisty, adult-fairy tales by Lyudmila Stefanovna Petrushevskaya. The poetry equivalent of the raw and the uncomfortable in terms of the boundaries often crossed, broken, damaged, or the harms caused between humans is the range of poetic work by the poet Ai though her monologues.
This leads to my ongoing inquiry of the idea of how one sees, how one is trained to see, or be seen, in addition to the power between who does the seeing versus who is the seen. Within the context of how I grew up, I’ve often had to revisit and ask the question: If I were a parent trying to raise a child in a certain environment, how would I want to control the ways that their body is seen and being seen?
I came from a two-parent home and my mother was a main strong force. My parents had me at a young age—my mother was 19 and my father was 29, they met just a few years prior—so in thinking of this, I consider that as an extra layer of anxiety that caused the alarm of the mother, my mother, within “The Breasts, the Spork and the Butterfly Woman.” I am not saying she was justified, in fact, there is a way that the extreme policing added another layer of harm during my teenage years that inspired me to create a secret life where I did put myself in danger (despite the authoritarian rule of the home).
And yes, there is an element of cruelty that takes place in a way that I continued to navigate long after this incident. The idea that I made a direct connection between a life event I could not control, puberty, to a certain kind of exposure to danger from an unlikely source—my own mother. I have this trope in one of my poems within my poetry collection, GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA: Dreamin of Mama While Trying to Speak Woman in Woke Tongues, where I talk about the body that betrays throughout a poem about coming of age. For many years I had to work on not adopting and adapting to the cruelty that my mother was showing to my body, so that I would not continue to inflict that upon myself, which is easy to do when one is raised within an an abusive environment.
For me, as an artist, it is about giving the power back to that disempowered girl that I was by shifting gaze. I’ve done this by either posing questions or by attempting to break the fourth wall between audience and narrator into there pieces of prose. The other ways I’ve explored this and other inquiries is through my current mixed media exhibition, Dark Goddess: An Exploration of the Sacred Feminine.