other, fought with each other, made love to each other.
We became.
Kent, Hallie, and I—along with such stalwarts as Sally Gearhart, Merlin Stone, Barbara Hammer, and Charlene Spretnak—gravitated toward the facet of the movement called “women’s spirituality,” critiquing world religions that positioned females as foot-washers to Great Men and God, instead reaching into prehistory to create/recreate the rites of female-based sacredness, ancient goddess cults, witchcraft, and pagan herbal medicines. As French visionary Monique Wittig counseled us: “If you cannot remember, invent.”
And—ladies, get a grip—who could not have experienced instant enlightenment by that first glimpse of a woman in an—oh my Goddess!—all-women rock band, twanging the Man’s Machine: an electric guitar?
Suzanne Shanbaum, 1970s, then of the Berkeley Women’s Music Collective—with electric guitar. Photo credit and courtesy of Irene Young.
SUSAN GRIFFIN: THE ARDENT INTELLECTUAL
(1943–)
We are women. We rise from the wave. We are gazelle and doe, elephant and whale, lilies and roses and peach, we are air, we are flame, we are oyster and pearl, we are girls. We are woman and nature.
—S.G., WOMAN AND NATURE: THE ROARING INSIDE HER, 1978
Susan Griffin is a poet, philosopher, playwright, scriptwriter, and champion of The Sensual. Due to a marvelous ability to drape events in irony and comedic insight, she is also a veritable hoot to be around. Early on her writing was associated with a feminist-invented theme: literature springing from everyday female experience such as being a single mother, subjects that were not considered by male critics to be worthy of the paper they were scrawled upon. But when her play Voices: A Play for Women was shown on PBS in 1975, she won an Emmy Award. Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her came next, in 1978. This was a pioneering prose poem that instigated a feminist interpretation of the relationship of woman and the natural world to patriarchal society; its underlying theme—the connection of female oppression with the exploitation of nature—had not been thought about or discussed before.
It is through this work that Susan became known for the style that she would spend decades developing. She is the mistress of uncommon juxtaposition, reminding us anew that the nature of the human mind is to integrate, to bind together facets and phenomena into the Whole that they in fact make up. Her facile imagination allows her to leap beyond the limits of cause-and-effect logic and reflect how people do in fact experience, think, and make sense of things: as oneiric unfolding.
Each of Susan’s subsequent works deepened this approach. In Pornography and Silence: Culture’s Revenge against Nature, she applied Western culture’s identification of woman with nature, coupled with its urge to dominate both, to pornographic literature and imagery. After the 1990 publication of A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War, she invented the term “social autobiography” to describe the approach taken in this volume, as well as in two subsequent books also combining memoir with history; the expression has since become an accepted category of literature. The next volumes in the trilogy are What Her Body Thought, an account of her experience with illness and poverty, and in the wake of 9/11 and the U.S. government’s rescinding of civil rights, Wrestling with the Angel of Democracy, exploring the psychological qualities necessary to sustain democracy.
During this time she wrote a collection of essays called The Eros of Everyday Life and The Book of the Courtesans. She also published two volumes of poetry, Unremembered Country and Bending Home; the script for Berkeley in the Sixties, a theatrical piece written in poetry called Thicket, and a play to be set to music called Canto about massacres in El Salvador.
Susan is a striking woman, her posture presenting both a compassionate sensibility and a sense of purpose. Her blonde (now white) hair often boasts a simple cut with straight bangs, and she possesses a talent for putting together attire that reflects, in her own words, “an understated androgynous style with sudden flares of eccentricity”—like all black covering her body, set off by glasses with brilliant red rims.
She has used this same panache to create a home reflecting her artistic sensibility and love of imagination, filled with mementos of the very themes she has explored in her writing. In the living room a photograph of Sarah Bernhardt performing Camille sits on a bookshelf. Native American art, paintings by her adoptive father Morton Dimondstein, and works by friends adorn the ochre walls. Hand-painted plates from Italy are displayed on a primitive-style cabinet, Moroccan tiles embellish the fireplace, and the French doors invite one to step onto a courtyard shaded by an orange tree.
Most of all, I remember the kitchens in her houses on Hawthorne Terrace and Keeler Avenue. Magical places, these—emanating warmth with their pottery crafted in the 1800s and market baskets bursting with tomatoes and lemons. A heavy wooden table covered by a cloth from the Basque countryside defines the dining area. During a luncheon date, one might imagine that one is in Provence or the American Southwest. Or another century.
To Susan, her house is an art form no different from a poem.
Robert Bly, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and Griffin, whose poetry appears together in Love is Like the Lion’s Tooth: An Anthology of Love Poems, 1984. Courtesy of Susan Griffin.
I came to know Susan during the high holy days of the feminist movement. What a time we had, rising up as we did in some gloriously inexplicable way, first in our kitchens, classrooms, and communes with consciousness-raising groups, then erupting into Take-Back-the-Night marches, entry into fields like government, law, medicine, art, construction, fishing, and law enforcement; gynecological self-exams, styles of dress not handed down from fashion designers but all our own; with woman-identified books, magazines, radio shows, films, record albums; and through the union lesbians were forging with the emerging gay men’s movement.
It’s hard to recall exactly how we met. Her house on Cedar Street had become a hub for women who were coming into their own through the movement, and there activists/artists/writers like Adrienne Rich, Alice Walker, Michelle Cliff, Audre Lord, and Grace Paley passed through for tea, wine, and always good conversation. When I went there, Susan became a model for me; I had never seen someone my age who owned so many books! Plus she had a room of her own: a tiny writing studio framed in windowpanes adorned by the leaves on the neighbors’ trees. Then there was the time in 1977 when Chrysalis magazine—out of the L.A. branch of the movement—published a chapter of her forthcoming book, Woman and Nature. The read was mind-blowing enough to cause a gal to forget all timidity and call someone up.
However it happened that we met, in the years after our first outing—a walk in Berkeley’s Tilden Park—we became friends with an affinity so synergistic that we might encounter each other at an anti-nuclear fundraiser or in a Northside café and slip into a laughter that rippled on until our jaws ached.
This bundle of humor, soul, brainpower, and drive began life in Los Angeles in 1943. Her mother Sally Williamson’s idea of cooking was often a TV dinner. An alcoholic, twice a week she would cart seven-year-old Susan to bars—mother to go on a bender, daughter to play the pinball machines, sleep on the Naugahyde banquettes, or wait alone and scared in the car. When Sally was drinking at home late into the night, she would sometimes drag her daughter out of bed to level verbal attacks at her.
Susan attributes her familiarity with human dysfunction to this experience, to the constant moving from one family member to the next that resulted from her mother’s personal chaos, as well as to the fate of being born just as World War II and the Holocaust were casting their psychic shadows over humanity. She went to live with her father, Walden Griffin, a fireman at the North Hollywood Station. When she was younger he had taken her trout