dark wheat and red poppies
my journey to women's spirituality
I grew up in a sicilian/american* neighborhood in Kansas City, Missouri, where women yelled at each other across the porches, kids turned on the water hydrant to splash in the summer, and I was inside reading. On Saturdays I would walk two miles to the public library, taking out as many books as I could carry home. When I was ten I read Sigrid Undset's Kirsten Lavramsdatter and Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Books and school were where I lived. Although my mother saw to it that we went to catholic instruction, it did not take. When I was thirteen, during a neighborhood novena (I remember the sausage sandwiches), my mother marched me up to the local irish priest and had me repeat to him the question I'd asked her (something about catholic doctrine). He fixed me with beady eyes and said that for forty years he'd offered easter mass to his dead mother -- this year he would offer it for me. This seemed like a heavy handed way to keep errants from heresy (later I learned that dominant religions and governments kill heretics). I went my own way, reading books in the locked library cases when I was in college, reading Gandhi on nonviolence, sharing poetry in the commune that employees created in a war time factory that manufactured quartz crystals. At the end of the war, at a catholic youth organization that welcomed servicemen, I met an a.w.o.l. jewish soldier. We married and came west to the University of California at Berkeley. While he studied for a doctorate in physics, and we lived communally with other students at Albany Village, I secured the A.B. and M.A. We had three sons along the way to my own doctorate in history in 1964. A fateful year. I turned in my dissertation (a history of behaviorism) which turned out to be an eye-opener for how deeply racism was entrenched in the history of protestant theology and the social sciences in the United States. So that I was primed to be a red hot radical when the african/american civil rights movement ignited and the Free Speech Movement at UCB (where I was a Lecturer in American Studies in 1964) exploded. Most of my honors students were arrested on the issue of free speech, an issue I realized later that was closer to freedom of spiritual beliefs. An article I wrote in 1965, "The Unkempt Prophets of Berkeley," I realize now, was not only about submerged beliefs of my students coming to the surfacebut my own. In 1967 I was an assistant professor of history at San Francisco State, while in Berkeley, where we live, I helped to found the Peace and Freedom Party opposing racism and imperialism. His first day in office, Hayakawa fired me (and two other professors) for supporting students striking against institutionalized racism in the U.S. and the war in Vietnam. In 1969, I went to Italy in search of my grandmothers, where I found the italian feminist movement. This seemed like wine. (There is no revolution without women's liberation. There is no women's liberation without revolution.) Going back and forth to Italy, I wrote Liberazione della donna. Feminism in Italy (Wesleyan University Press, 1986, American Book Award of the Before Columbus Foundation l987, 1988). After Liberazione was completed, I found I hadn't answered the question that drew me to italian feminists (Why do these women seem so grounded?) and embarked on the next book, whose first title was dark wheat and red poppies. This became Black madonnas. Feminism, Religion, and Politics in Italy (Northeastern University Press, 1993, Palomar Editrice in Italy, 1997, Premio Internazionale di Saggistica Salvatore Valitutti, 1998, iUniverse reprint edition, 2000). Black Madonnas was a way station on a life journey that has led to dark mother. african origins and godmothers (iUniverse, 2002, Mediterranea Media, 2002, 2002 Enheduanna Award for Excellence in Women Centered Literature). The journey led me to teaching in the Women's Spirituality program of the California Institute of Integral Studies, to an ongoing research project looking into subaltern phoenician/canaanites, to guiding study tours in Sicily, Spain, Tunis, et al. And to a projected anthology with my students, She is Everywhere! My journey has often seemed like a labyrinth in a dark wood. One of the way signs in the labyrinth has been ethnic identity, but some of my italian/american male colleagues consider my interest in the dark mother and african origins to be outside the italian/american canon. Women's spirituality has led me deep into the maze. My students writing doctoral dissertations try to find central themes in a morass of data. I haven't yet found the central themes of my journey. Do know that one of them has to do with what somebody said of methat I had an obsession about racism. Yet racism isn't quite the word. Sexism isn't either. I do know I have a revulsion against any person, nation, institution, that considers other people lower, inferior, dismissable -- or, killable. Women's spiritualty may not be an eternal light, but there are those moments of sensing a cradling universe. . . and being in a field of dark wheat and red poppies. Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum
Berkeley, California
September 27, 2002
*I like to decapitalize. 2002 lucia Birnbaum. reprinted from an earlier article in Common Ground Magazine. |
