Angela Merkel - she is not usually photographed smiling
Friends,
I am told via face-book and a couple of blogs today is World Poetry Day. The poems chosen are usually of the soothing kind, or descriptively, neutrally seasonal. I differ once again and offer a powerful essay by Mary Beard, Women in Power, in which she uses the hideous pictorial treatment meted out to Hillary Clinton, and the more typical treatment meted out to Angela Merkel (who came on a diplomatic visit to the US this week), to reveal how there is no template, no image the world accepts which is both appropriate for women and someone exercising power.
From the LRB, 39:5 (March 2017): Women in Power
This treatment of women is ancient and the way it is gotten away with is by erasure and telling stories that show a complete lack of imagination of what the woman at the center of the story might experience. So many stories utterly cavalier with women's lives: In Winter's Tale it's just fine that Hermione lives a sort of living death for 16 years is typical.
Another classicist, the poet, Ann Stanford (one of her great books of poetry, is titled Holding our Own), has a searing "Andromeda" that rectifies this and may stand for how women across the globe are endangered today, from refuges to women outside the US on whom drones may be dropped just like this (and their children), and women on US college campuses:
I am terrified
marooned on a rock with a gale
freshening and the waves already
spatter me with spindrift.
What could my father be thinking of!
Listening to a two-faced oracle,
chaining me like a dog in this gnashing water.
It is low tide now – high tide will be the end of me.
I will either drown struggling against water
or be caught here by the monster from the sea
the claws searing me along the bone
the teeth quick cutting through flesh and nerve.
It is grim being a sacrifice.
The garlands, the watching crowds, cannot make me heroic.
My legs tremble and fire streaks across my brain
the roots of my hair are daggers.
If this were a story there would be a hero
to swim through the impossible waves, a sword at his belt.
He would cast off my chains, kill the monster,
take me
out of this country mad with fear and riddles.
But all I am sure of is the explosion of waves,
my mother crying from the shore, the seething
wings
of a large invisible bird circling the rock,
and the head of the monster coming up over the horizon.
Ann Redpath (1895-1965, Scots woman painter) Still Life with Orange Chair
I have had the luck to have been born in 1946 in NYC, to have had decent parents, gone to college basically for free, and met a good kind loving and intelligent husband who made enough money for us to live, and left with a widow's annuity. This is one of the fates women understandably yearn for when they see it romanticized in books and movies. I like quiet pictures.
Miss Drake