Feminist

I’m an immigrant because I’m a feminist. But more about this later.

            Let me start from the beginning: growing up with censorship, in socialist Romania. In practice, it meant that you could always say something wrong in front of the wrong people and then… then there would repercussions, as threatening as they were mysterious, at least for us kids. It also meant that we grew up with very little television; instead we had books, which were supposed to be fun, except that the books were strictly censored. State-owned printing presses endlessly churned out the works of the “classics”, nineteenth-century novelists, mostly French and Russian (good luck trying to learn something about sex from those!), the greats of Romanian literature, socialist realist novels—with a good communist and a traitor and a girl that the communist got at the end (they held hands)—and the discourses of Nicolae Ceausescu, our prolific dictator.

            Somehow, in the mishmash of books that my father brought home every three months or so (he had a friend who worked in a bookstore; she selected the books for him from whatever was available) I found one day a copy of Christa Wolf’s Cassandra. Being from socialist Germany, Christa Wolf—who passed away in 2011—had probably been deemed safe enough to be translated. Cassandra: Four Essays and a Novel (1984) is a re-telling of the story of the Trojan war from a feminist perspective. Cassandra, high priestess in her native Troy, and one of King Priamus’s many daughters, had, according to the Illyad, Aeneid and a few Greek tragedies, predicted the fall of Troy; prior to that, she had been cursed by Apollo that no one believe her prophecies. Christa Wolf tells the story from the perspective of Cassandra—a woman seer who refuses the illusions those around her hold dear.

            I loved the book. I may have read it ten times while in college. I loved Cassandra—that’s how I wanted to be, regardless of the fact that she ended up alone and a slave in Christa Wolf’s version. Wolf recreated Cassandra as a model for the female / feminist intellectual, someone who is unable to relinquish her understanding, her vision, when it becomes uncomfortable to those around her.

            As an added bonus, the book introduced me to what for me at that time was a new form of literary creation if you wish, a feminist retelling of one of the founding epics of Western literature. What they were teaching us then in school was to read, read as much as possible, memorize and perhaps interpret with small audacities. That one could re-write, change perspective, reorganize the hierarchy of characters, do all that to a venerable tradition and then simply tell the same story again, but how different! seemed at once an enormous task and also very liberating.

            I know of few feminist rewritings as powerful as Wolf’s Cassandra. There are many books I’d love to see retold with the same compelling vision. Among them, probably the first would be Nabokov’s Lolita.

            But more about this later.