I cannot write about Solnit's writings; she is so far ahead of me, I learn from her every time I read her works. ( )

The cover was a turn-off for me (almost made me not read the book), but I consider this better than her previous one.

A few excerpts ...

“To be a young woman is to face your annihilation in innumerable ways ….” (p4)

“I was often unaware of what and why I was resisting ….” (p4)

Yes. Let’s not understate the value of having words for what we experience. The words ‘sexism’ and ‘misogyny’ didn’t always exist, so it was hard to identify, let alone talk about, what it was …

“The fight wasn’t just to survive bodily … but to survive as a person possessed of rights, including the right to participation and dignity and a voice.” (p4)

“… back when I was trying not to be that despised thing, a girl, and ….” (p6)

“sometimes at the birth and death of a day, the opal sky is no color we have words for, the gold shading into blue without the intervening green that is halfway between those colors, the fiery warm colors that are not apricot or crimson or god, the light morphing second by second so that the sky is more shades of blue than you can count as it fades from where the sun is to the far side where others color are happening.” (p7)

Best description of a sunset (in San Francisco) I’ve ever read!

“What is rape but an insistence that the spatial rights of a man, and by implication men, extend to the interior of a woman’s body …,” (p77-8)

So well-put.

“Most urban women, you know, live as though in a war zone….” (p98)

Yes. I’ve often said living as a woman in our society is like living in an occupied country. And men have no idea. Most men.

“There are three key things that matter in having a voice: audibility, credibility, and consequence. … Gender violence is made possible by this lack of audibility, credibility, and consequence.” p229, 231 ( )

This is my first Rebecca Solnit, but definitely there will be more! ( )

We often say silenced, which presumes someone attempted to speak, or we say disappeared, which presumes that the person, place, or thing first appeared. But there are so many things that were never murmured, never showed up, were not allowed to enter rather than forced to exit.

This collection of essays relate to the fact and the effect of women’s silence and invisibility -- from the absence of role-modeling and opportunity, to the incidence of insults and threats, rape and murder. I’ve read two of Solnit’s couple-dozen books now; I suspect many of them work this same material AND all of them will be worth reading. I highlighted many passages, here are a few (some of the short ones placed together):

From childhood onward, we were instructed to not do things -- not go here, not work there, not go out at this hour or talk to those people or wear this dress or drink this drink or partake of adventure, independence, solitude; refraining was the only form of safety offered. …

You could be erased a little so that there was less of you, less confidence, less freedom, or your rights could be eroded, your body invaded so that it was less and less yours, you could be rubbed out altogether, and none of those possibilities seemed particularly remote. …

I suppose some women push it down to some corner of their mind, make choices to minimize the reality of the danger so that it becomes an unseen subtraction of who they are and what they can do. … I erased myself as much as possible, because to be was to be a target. … What is armor after all but a cage that moves with you? … We die all the time to avoid being killed. … ( )

Ja, Rebecca Solnit is een radicale feministe, dat bevestigt dit boek nog maar eens, voor zo ver dat nog nodig was. En blijkbaar was dat nog nodig, want waarom schrijft iemand van amper 60 jaar dan een soort memoires? Voelde ze zich genoodzaakt nog eens de achtergrond te schetsen van haar spraakmakend essay ‘Mannen leggen me altijd alles uit’ waarmee ze in 2013 plots wereldwijd bekend werd, en dat mee de basis zou leggen van de #MeToo-beweging?
Solnit schetst uitgebreid hoe ze vanaf haar adolescentie als vanzelf gevoelig werd voor de belaging van vrouwen door mannen toen ze in de grootstad San Francisco kwam wonen. Zelf spreekt ze van een permanente oorlog, en dat is wel even slikken als man, maar als je dan haar overzicht leest van de manier waarop vrouwen door mannen behandeld worden, en wat dat psychologisch met de slachtoffers doet, is het eigenlijk wel gerechtvaardigd. “you depend on men, and what they think of you, learn to constantly check yourself in a mirror to see how you look to men, you perform for them, and this theatrical anxiety forms or deforms or stops altogether what you do and say and sometimes think. You learn to think of what you are in terms of what they want, and addressing their want becomes so ingrained in you that you lose sight of what you want, and sometimes you vanish to yourself in the art of appearing to and for others.”
Prachtig is de manier waarop Solnit aangeeft hoe ze al snel, zoals zoveel andere vrouwen, leerde ‘onzichtbaar te worden’, vandaar de verwijzing in de titel naar haar non-existence. “I became expert at fading and slipping and sneaking away, backing off, squirming out of tight situations, dodging unwanted hugs and kisses and hands, at taking up less and less space on the bus as yet another man spread into my seat, at gradually disengaging, or suddenly absenting myself. At the art of nonexistence, since existence was so perilous.”
Want vooral dat is het mechanisme waar ze de vinger op legt: hoe mannen er telkens weer in slagen vrouwen niet helemaal ernstig te nemen, en dus bijvoorbeeld aan ‘mansplaining’ te doen. Volgens Solnit moeten we dat niet minimaliseren. Het behoort volgens haar tot een spectrum waar aan de uiterste kant ook moord gesitueerd moet worden. Ook dat is even slikken, als man, maar gelijk heeft ze, het stelt de dingen op scherp.
Voor je de indruk krijgt dat Solnit een one-trick pony is: dit boek bevat gelukkig ook veel meer beschouwingen dan alleen over de vrouwelijke conditie. Ik kende haar eerder al van haar ‘Wanderlust’ en ‘Fieldguide’ waarin ze op een frisse manier (letterlijk) alternatieve paden aanreikt om de werkelijkheid te benaderen, alternatief dan ten aanzien van de westerse moderniteit. Ook in deze memoires gaat Solnit daar kort op in. Zo verbindt ze de feministische strijd met die van de Native Americans, en put daaruit ook hoop: “I argued that we had a lot of power, a history of forgotten and undervalued victories, that while somethings were getting worse, the long view – especially if you were nonmale, or nonstraight, or nonwhite – showed some remarkable improvement in our rights and roles, and that the consequences of our acts were not knowable in advance.”.
Niet alles in dit boek is van goud. Naast de misschien iets te eenzijdige focus op het feminisme, bevatten deze herinneringen ook afrekeningen en zelfrechtvaardigingen, zoals bij elke memoires. Gelukkig is er de onovertroffen stijl van Solnit, die als je haar wat gewoon bent, werkelijk betoverend is en je in de ban neemt. Ze heeft daarvoor een schrijf procedé gevonden dat uniek te noemen is, waarbij ze vertrekt van een algemene stelling, om dan via zijwegen andere uitzichten te verkennen en zo tot een diepere beleving van de werkelijkheid te komen: “I believe in the irreducible and in invocation and evocation, and I am fond of sentences less like superhighways than winding paths, with the occasional scenic detour or pause to take in the view, since a footpath can traverse steep and twisting terrain that a paved road cannot. I know that sometimes what gets called digression is pulling in a passenger who fell off the boat.”
Prachtig is ook wat ze over lezen en schrijven neerpent, en over de bijzondere vorm van empathie die lezen met zich meebrengt. Solnit is een schrijfster naar mijn hart! ( )