This morning my head is full of this
and this
and this
Last night I fell asleep burning to
write about Kathleen Hanna, but then my son woke me up at 1.44am and
6am needing help because he has a dicky tummy and was exploding with
diarrhoea, and now I'm looking at the eight-project to-do list and
wondering if I should bother.
This morning my best friend from
teenage years, the girl who stood on stage with me in an upstairs
room in Camden and read out poetry by Sylvia Plath while I clanged
around with a guitar (we only did it once), sent me an email
confessing that she feels ordinary, vanilla. “Having kids knocked
the stuffing out of me,” she writes. The line rattles in my heart
like a pebble.
Last night we saw The Punk Singer
together. It reminded me of every time I've thought about starting a
band and weaselled out. Of every time I've shut up and let someone
else tell me what to do rather than standing my ground. Of wanting to
start a magazine and looking for permission, which is slightly more
than but also the same as looking for money, instead of just slapping
one together with a stick of glue and a stapler. The constant nagging
thought in my head: I'm not doing enough, I'm not loud enough, I'm
not strong enough to remake the world.
But that's not what it's about.
There's a brilliant line in The Punk
Singer, where Hanna talks about making the first Julie Ruin record,
alone, in her bedroom, quietly rebuilding herself after the fallout
of Bikini Kill. I won't paraphrase it; here's her making the same
point in an interview in 2013:
I needed to get used to the sound of my
own voice, and I think that’s what makes a girl’s bedroom
special. You can make whatever you want when you’re alone in your
room. The thing that’s interesting to me about the mention of it in
the film and the way it was structured is that there are all these
different girls' bedrooms and all these girls are making their stuff,
and then they’re throwing it away, and how can we connect these
bedrooms? We’ve seen today that we can connect these bedrooms
through the Internet. That’s one of the positive things happening.
Around the time that interview was
published, I threw away most of my teenage years and 20s: it was all
just so much clutter. Not the fanzines, though. I kept those.
(I talk a lot at the moment about wanting to connect the disparate conversations happening in theatre, about finding ways to share ideas, the responsibility I feel to join the dots. How writing might do that, a magazine might do that. The itch to make another fanzine is strong.)
Truth is, when my best friend and I
went to see Bikini Kill, I guess when they toured in 1993, I was
disappointed: they were a racket, and aggressive, and the whole thing
was so confrontational I couldn't connect to it. The anger terrified
me. And there was a lot about their construction of feminism I didn't
understand. Why push boys to the back, instead of fighting for a
space where girls and boys could stand-dance-sing side by side? I have a letter
from another riot grrrl, older than me, explaining that one with
gentle patience; I remember reading it and feeling like an idiot.
I'm berating myself again.
Watching The Punk Singer, I recognised
the extent to which Kathleen Hanna raised the stick against which I
have measured most of my life. Riot grrrl changed me. It gave me
feminism, politics, a way of looking at the world. I knew I wanted to
make stuff when it happened (writing, art, music, I didn't know, but
something), and it told me to just get started. It told me to think hard
about what I was saying. And something else it told me, which even now I keep
needing to remind myself: if, by saying something truthful, something
vulnerable, you can connect with one other person and make them feel
less weird, less stupid, less alone, that is enough.
Like all feminists, I have moments of
feeling unutterably depressed by apparently how little has changed
for the positive in the 20 years since I encountered it. From the
micro – girls are still pushed out of the front at gigs – to the
macro, which is just about everything. When I started reading Susan
Faludi's Backlash last year, a book I bought some 20 years ago, I was
astonished: she's writing about the virulent media, cultural and
political backlash against feminism in the 1980s, but all the
newspaper articles she quotes, all the instances she gives of films
and speeches and stupid attitudes, could have dated from any time
since.
But the systems we struggle against are
strong, and we can't give up, I can't give up. There's another
brilliant line in The Punk Singer where Hanna talks about starting Le
Tigre with Johanna Fateman, the two of them sharing all the shit
they'd experienced, and deciding they wanted their new band to be
celebratory, to focus on the stuff that made them happy. By the time
I got home I had Diane di Prima shouting in my ears: ALL POWER TO
JOY, WHICH WILL REMAKE THE WORLD. Anger is vital. But so is joy.
Having kids knocked the stuffing out of
me, too. I still feel I have to ask for permission to work, not just
from the family, from myself. Every day is a fight against spurious
expectations, guilt, convention. If dismantling the patriarchy starts
at home, I'm failing. I don't need anyone to tread me down: I do it
to myself. As for the kids, every time one of them espouses
conformist gender cliches, a bit of my soul breaks. But it's not just
about me teaching (nagging) them to be different: it's about letting
them find the culture that will give them the tools to make
themselves different. If they find something even half as inspiring,
challenging, electrifying as riot grrrl, I'll be happy.
This morning, over breakfast, I played
them Le Tigre, and we talked about What's Yr Take on Cassavetes?, and
my son said he's not a misobogutist because that would mean he hates
me and his sister. So, you know, that's a start.
