Quilt: A Collection of Prose

done.

Contents

Alice Walker wrote that she is glad she was born a woman and black in this age. I guess she is glad she is American, too, and from the Southern states. The richness of the female heritage in terms of strength, endurance and various forms of oppression is undeniable today. It has arrived at the frontal lobe of the civilisation’s brain—it cannot be denied and ignored by the intelligentsia anywhere. The day and age has many thousands of women writers, and that phenomenon is absolutely essential for humankind’s sense of self.

Most writing women are no longer burdened by a dozen children, backbreaking work in factories, fields and kitchens, financial dependency and the legal definition of being a chattel. We’re the softpalmed women, lumped with the historical task of recording. We are saying. A monster is lifting its many heads. In waking it may seem frightening, aggressive, justifiably angry but as it gets the hearing it requires, fear of the female could lessen as it is understood. It would be foolish to think the mysterious female has not been feared, considered monstrous, dangerous, blasphemous, obscene, etc. The feminine energy in being largely dormant has increased its force. The women writers are actually the compromisers. Being aware of the power of the unsung we are prepared to explain in male Language the small parts of it we comprehend. It is silly to murder the messengers, the precursors, those with white cotton flying from their banners.

Sadly, of course, we have not been greeted with banquets and enthusiastic receptions. They have glanced at the tatty edges of our messages and discarded them. They have been blind to the originality, closed their ears with their fists and dismissed the harangues as nuisances. Most women writers have a very hard time even achieving publication. The more honest and original, the more difficult. The tough in character, the noble warriors and the intellectual giants have made it through the massed ranks of conservatism and masculine selfprotective measures, usually with assistance from women in the publication game. Thus we know to some extent the magnitude of this monster—the writing-women phenomenon of our time. But even those individuals with heroic attributes have tales to tell, scars to show and clear memories of the times they nearly went under.

We have it so much easier than our mothers, grandmothers and those women who used to write in the harsher ages of man’s dominance. They put up with things under which our own tender neurotic souls would crack. Fortunately, we don’t have to face those trials. Our trials are more insidious. They attempt to tear us from ourselves, to attack us with reason, realities and ‘protesteth-too-much’ style of excuses. We are asked in kindest tones with many words over a free coffee or meal, not to be so difficult, to try to reach the common taste. Our manuscripts may have received the highest praise from a leader in the literary field, and yet that will still be accompanied by a ‘but’: but it’s probably too emotional, but there are not enough signposts to the plot, but you’re not well enough known to sell, especially such unusual work, but…

At a reading, our manuscripts may have brought tears to the eyes of a hundred women. We have to take encouragement from this small public and turn it into inner courage. For the woman writer doesn’t need encouragement as such. She has been at her desk a million hours without encouragement.

The pressure to go on may come from the female energy which has been under-expressed for so many centuries. The sense of being driven to write is not interpreted by women writers as the destiny of genius. No contemporary woman that I know of has ever claimed this peculiar fate. She would become an object of ridicule by the simple fact that there are so many of us around, and anyway it doesn’t feel right. Yet men have claimed this all the time, especially at the heights of their civilisation. Even now as well, I suspect. No, the sense of having to write, even though we are told the market is not ready, is more a feeling of cultural burden. An awareness that half, maybe most, of the truth wasn’t being told by traditional fiction, that the way of these stories with their ejaculatory climaxes was unsatisfactory, that she, the individual, knew she could do better, struck a whole generation with synchronatic accuracy.

A good number of this particular generation could have been the first women in their families to have gained entrance into tertiary educational institutions. Becoming a writer is a fairly classical way of reconciling working-class backgrounds with middle-class educations.

With their insights into their parents’ lifestyles and problems, they were not as likely to accept the full academic trip as were their middle and upper-class counterparts. Things to write about—insights—may also have been fired by an incomprehensible guilt as they smashed the dearly held values of their folks and the pretensions of academic standards with the common sense and plain brain power they were born with.

The recent wealth of the culture has come from this mob of women all over the world, and yet there lingers in the tail of the dying patriarchal civilisation sufficient sting for us to feel righteously sore.

The rising heap of disappointments and disregard becomes assimilated into one’s self-awareness as a kind of tired scepticism. It is experienced as a personal rather than political thing, women writers often being too busy to organise into effective power blocks to much alter the publishing game. Some women have organised feminist publishing co-operatives and collectives. I commend the feminist co-operative of Sybylla Press for caring to do my first book, for trusting the value of the work. Sybylla, while being such a small concern, believes in women’s work enough to take risks the bigger publishers are afraid of

Notwithstanding all this, my mind and energies are rarely preoccupied with the problems of becoming known and the economics of print, paper and production. Writing in terms of financial expenditure, is not an expensive artform. One can continue to do it with negligible funds. The main capital needed is made of commitment and time and mental energy. Pushing the imagination to the point of exhaustion, and then the application of craft in translating something amorphous into language is an employment which makes others fairly impossible.

I am a fiction writer. Most of my adult working life has been concerned with the questions and operations of this task. And in this job, like Alice Walker, I am glad I am a woman,

The most important thing in fiction-writing is subtlety. Fiction is concerned with truth without telling the truth. And I mean passionately concerned with truth. Great writers of stories will testify to this one way or another in discussing their problems. Because it is a problem. Because coming a close second is the concern of fabrication. The temptation to fabricate more, to nobble truth as it were in this race —race, yes, for it always has an urgency, a suspense, an event-like structure—and fabricate beyond the limits of one’s own known truth is often hard to resist.

Another facet of the problem is not to get the artifice of the two jumbled. To see truth in fabrication’s place, i.e. to use the wit and skills of fabrication on the truth distorts fiction. It is seeing truth as fact or fact as truth. It is the kind of fiction-writing that can be libellous. Much as observation is necessary to the good fiction-writer, recounting facts is no substitute for the truth which is fiction’s chief concern. The stuff of truth is deeper material than the damning details of a recognisable person’s actions and reactions. A satisfying story enlightens us as to some aspect of the general human condition. That is why it can come from any culture and be happily read in translation or can be set in another historical era and still be appreciated as if we knew the geography in it as well as would a native of the story’s place.

So it is the subtlety of this play between truth and fabrication which is the real joy of reading or writing fiction. The writer may well know on whom the story is based. It should go no further. The very need of fabrication demands invention. Within the dynamics of fiction, to fabricate is a force—an artistic force, like the tension of colour in oil painting. It is more than a matter of disguise. Mere disguise is a curtain, a product of deception, not of creativity. To imagine a story is to set out out upon a road that could lead to complete fantasy, and how far you go is how far your known truth will let you, for you cannot make up the truth. You can invent all sorts of possible truths and weird and wonderful beings to people them, but I contend that even that, if it is to be enjoyable and judged as good fiction, is based on a kind of truth, an abstract and philosophical one probably—like the fable.

The art of writing fiction is to play this fine line of tension between your known truth (what you want to say) with the structures and details of invention.

As none of us know all the truth and at best know a small part, it is even an arrogance to say there is such a thing. This is the joy, this is the subtlety, to come upon insight into the human condition as if by surprise, to strike the question mark, or to, within the dark caverns of the meaning-of-it-all, manage a bit of candle-light. So when I say the ‘truth’, I mean something about life that we recognise beyond the details of the fabrication.

When I started to write stories, I had no idea why or what, except that reading or seeing fiction was a way I began to understand things with enjoyment. With a thrill. There has always been a tension for me between the real world and fictional ones. From one I’d learn that, from the other this. People find me peculiar to talk to because I equally value an insight gained from fiction, with fact or analysis from a factual basis. It is simply a queer turn of mind.

Confession From A Ghost-White Albino Skin

Found in a red brick comfort station.

‘I cannot settle down. I am wriggling and wriggling but I do not fit. Tears have dried and my eyes itch. It certainly does not matter what caused the tears. My eyes are itching. I am irritated. I am annoyed by the irritation. I know there is a deeper reason for these things than they ascribe to them. They are all-powerful. They know what I am from the outside—that is what they see. They judge—my defence can be neither the tears nor the irritation. They will cast me out, dismiss me; I do not think (although it is the alternative) that they will ever gaol me but this is exactly what they want. They have gaols finer than cobwebs and stronger than steel. These gaols fit neatly into their wallets and when they reach into their pockets to pay, they deviously bring out the gaol they have woven especially for me. If their arms are around me and gentle as dew, I will have to draw in breath after breath of emotion, explode and tear off the skin and muscle to the bone, and then the bones must be snapped apart. That way they will not gaol me. That way I will be free. But at my trial, at the horrid moment of my defence, the tribunal will say with omnipotence that I have no more right to be free than they who have so many gaols on them their eyes are protected from the itch. I will have to say my eyes are free, and the tears dried leaving the irritation. All this will mean nothing to them. They will continue their ritual with kindness, and the timepieces (hourglasses, egg-timers, metronomes, grandfather clocks, watches, the bubble-handed round official clocks on the walls) will all tick until the courtroom falls to the floor. This is what I wish for—replacement of the courtroom by a paddock of hay or an enchanted forest of cabbage gums. All this is becoming impossible. They will not see that my eyes are sorely tried by a speck. If it would make them see I would willingly make the speck a beam and start it on a flamboyant circular course emblazoned with bright flags stolen from a bullring… (How is