A Love Supreme: How I Was Taught To Fight Like A Girl

[Guest guest]

[An irreverent but affectionate blog entry by Melissa Soalt, at the

Huffington Post, May 10, 2007.]

 

How do you thank a mother when that mother is a country? Mother India

isn't really my country -- my own roots can be traced to Russia and

Eastern Europe -- but I was there, a guest on her soil. In 1975, when

I was nineteen, I traversed her midlands, climbed her hilly rugged

bosom, and descended into her bowels. I ogled her erotic sculptures

(Mother India's a canoodler!) and thrilled to her voluptuous goddess

culture. I even swam in the Ganges alongside pilgrims and cattle --

so I can attest: Mother India really is the land of Holy Shit.

 

She is also the Primordial Womb of the world. For thousands of years,

Indians have worshipped the Great Womb, an aspect if not icon of the

Mother Goddess herself: domed monuments and vulva shaped statues

adorn public spaces. At nineteen, India's formidable girl power

appealed to my budding feminist ideals; a vulva here, a vulva there,

and with a cabal of goddesses, as fierce in their sexuality as their

ability to restore cosmic order and save the world from doom, I

mean ... what's not to love?

 

Sure, Mother India has plenty of faults -- immense poverty, sickness,

child labor, festering inequities from an antiquated caste system, to

name a few -- but spiritually speaking she's a wise and zaftig momma.

Her divinity is all-inclusive; her wisdom is as good as it gets --

girl, you are already many! You are not, as Amy Bloom once wrote, one

note on a flute. More like a sonata with every conceivable

permutation. It's hard to dismiss or escape India's mind-blowing mix:

everywhere you turn, the numinous and the primal, squalor and

splendor, the smells and sounds of Genesis and Rot share the tiniest

of spaces, entwining like lovers in a great cosmic fuck.

 

So what better place for learning how to give a good blow -- that's

blow as in strike -- than my beloved Mother India?

 

I was on a densely packed train. I knew " it' was coming -- his hands

I mean. (I'd been traveling through strict patriarchal cultures where

even the thought that women owned their bodies and had a right to do

so wasn't a blip on the screen; taking and groping were deemed

privileges of men -- the proof was invisibly inked on my body like

telltale DNA -- so I'd learn to smell intent.)

 

When a man posing as helpful Mr. Rogers wouldn't take No for an

answer -- he'd helped me with my knapsack, then stuck too close and

tried to help himself to me -- that was it, I went off: I slammed him

in the head; I bashed him about the face and neck and shook him like

a rag doll. Then I did the unthinkable: I cracked his offending hand

hard as I could. I nailed that sucker. Little bones crunched

and " gave " beneath the fury of my fist. I watched him deflate like a

punctured balloon, stunned by the power emanating from this hippie

turned Beast Girl -- and frankly so was I.

 

A home-run grin peered through my fury. It wasn't that I enjoyed

hurting him -- well, maybe just a little -- but that I had issued his

terror, not the other way around; that my body, which I'd spent my

entire girlhood hating, was an instrument of power.

 

The lights went on.

 

Call it cellular memory or the magic of Mother India but when I

struck back, time and space swung its doors wide open, or so it felt,

and I went swirling back through evolution deposited into the skin of

much earlier predecessor: Neander Babe, I call her. She had thick

gnarly legs and a tribal chic 'do. I remember feeling as if I'd

slipped into that genetic pool, merging with prehistory, as if I'd

landed in a time that predated domestication and vaginal deodorants,

the hum of civility. Before our own discordant madness was pruned

back by fear and by fear's debilitating offspring: internalized

restraint.

 

In my loopier moments, I imagine that had it been Paris instead of

India, I might have poisoned my mauler with a savage bon-bon, or

sicked my poofy Bichon Frise on him, or stabbed him with a barrette --

something pointy and au courant. In reality, years later on an

Italian train, when a pot-bellied pig of a man stuck his hand down my

shirt and grabbed my breast, I slapped him across the face, flashing

him my best Sophia Loren look of indignation. It was very dramatic;

people came running, there was a lot of gesturing and noise. It was,

in a word, Italian.

 

But this was India, where life is far more elemental, closer to the

bone and all things mystical are in plain sight, so the fact that my

experience was on the supernatural side, that I tapped into powers

far more ancient than myself, or that the spirit of Kali, a " divine

destructress " with avenging limbs, had gotten under my skin or played

a hand in my uprising, should come as no surprise.

 

While writing this I learned something new. Kali, who is typically

portrayed as bloodthirsty -- feared and revered for her battle-girl

persona -- is also a symbol of women's empowerment, described as a

perfect model of female balance: powerful, active and assertive --

never pointlessly destructive. And what exactly are her legacies? She

returns women to " three virtues " historically denied women in most

cultures: Strength (moral and physical); intellect and knowledge; and

sexual sovereignty.

 

So maybe that's what hit home on my maiden voyage.

 

Here's my loving shout out to Mother India and her fetching femmes

fatales -- girls, keep the force alive.

 

SOURCE: The Huffington Post

URL: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/melissa-soalt/