“…perhaps my mother is a conceptual artist…”—Terry Tempest
Williams
The night I planned to attend a fundraiser for feminist
bookstores in Canada and the US at the now defunct Toronto Women’s Bookstore, I
gave up, which is a shame because I wanted to blog about the event. Once I
heard the performer—already half an hour late—would be at least another half
hour late, I walked to a different independent bookstore in frustration. Cheekily, I found
myself drawn to a book there whose theme is the absence of content.
Terry Tempest Williams’ memoir, When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four
Variations on Voice (Sarah Crichton Books, 2012) is the author’s heartfelt
attempt to extract meaning from three shelves’ worth of empty journals
bequeathed to her by her mother. Even more curious is the fact that on her
deathbed, Diane Dixon Tempest made her daughter promise not to read them while
Diane was alive.
At first, I wondered if the empty journals were too simple a
metaphor for the female experience. The day I started reading When Women Were Birds, I
caught the holiday classic, The Sound of Music, on television. My ears perked
up when Rolf—the dashing but dastardly suitor of 16-year-old Liesl—sang,
“Your life, little girl, is an empty page that men will want to write on.” I
stand corrected: the metaphor is indeed apropos.
The premise is introduced immediately, with Diane dying
right away, so the reader doesn’t get a chance to become attached to Diane or
to feel Terry’s loss. It works because on the surface, the book is a tribute to
her mother, but ultimately it is an autobiography, not a biography. Williams
portrays her mother not as a solitary character but as a partner. Their
bond is touching but arguably idealized with memories like her
mother drawing a rose petal bath for Terry at the onset of menstruation.
A feminist memoir, When Women Were Birds is about finding
a voice—as a Morman woman, as a near victim of a male strangler, and as a
former teacher who was almost fired for being an environmentalist.
Art provides a backdrop for her musings, from having a
meaningful conversation while walking along Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty to
contemplating the act of confession in an Italian church with Domenico
Ghirlandaio paintings. Works like Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings and
Kazimir Malevich’s White on White function as a more direct vehicle for
interpretation too. She concludes, “…perhaps my mother is a conceptual artist…”
(p. 60).
The central motif is not art, but birds. As much as the book
is a tribute to Terry’s mother, it is a tribute to ornithology. The characters
in ancient Nushu (translated from Chinese as ‘women’s writing’) she describes,
in which a bird’s head and a woman’s head share the same symbol, make Terry’s
contemporary symbolism seem somehow predestined. In the book, birds take on a
mystical role: Terry meets her husband at a bookstore because of their shared
love of field guides, and she sees a hummingbird—her African friend’s favourite
bird—when she learns of her death. When she quotes Jenny Holzer’s truism, “Myths make reality more intelligible,” it’s fitting.
It is beautifully written: the prose morphs into
poetry and stream of consciousness with confidence. Its design is also
noteworthy. The front and back inside cover feature an image of overlaid
feathers in greyscale, with a mock label at the front that beckons the reader with,
“THIS JOURNAL BELONGS TO ____________________.” Additionally, 12 empty pages
follow the author’s discovery of the enigmatic journals totaling 54, the age at
which her mother died.
With the New Year upon us, I’d like to close by quoting a friend of the author. Stephen Trimble co-published Testimony:
Writers of the West Speak on Behalf of Utah Wilderness, a chapbook designed for
Congress, with Terry. Not knowing Bill Clinton would single it out for its
significance, a member of the press told Trimble that the book was a waste of
time. He responded, “Writing is always an act of faith” (p. 143).
Image: reproduced in 2019 via fair use/dealing. Source: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250024114
