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"Nobody
will give you freedom, you have to take it."
-Meret Oppenheim
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Duckbill
(about 1 1/2ft. long) |
"Far
from contradicting, diluting, or diverting or revolutionary
attitude toward life, surrealism strengthens it. It nourishes
an impatient strength within us, endlessly reinforcing the
massive army of refusals."
Suzanne Césaire
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Rhinoceros
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Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1998
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All
My Names Know Your Leap
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Mimi
Parent, drawing, 1984.
Courtesy of the artist.
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ALL MY NAMES KNOW YOUR LEAP:
SURREALIST WOMEN & THEIR CHALLENGE
Exerpts from the Introduction to Surrealist Women
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"Knock hard. Life is deaf." Mimi Parent
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Although
the first women of surrealism have been almost entirely overlooked
in the historical and critical literature, clearly they were a
bold, imaginative, and in many other ways a remarkable lot. Even
before surrealism's first Manifesto appeared in Paris in 1924,
women were active in the movement, and they have been expanding
and illuminating its universe ever since. In all the arts and
major genres of writing, women helped develop surrealism's radical
poetic/critical outlook, and thus helped make it what it was and
is. To ignore their contributions is to ignore some of the best
of surrealism.
This
book seeks to bring to light as much as possible the quality,
range, diversity and vitality of women participants in the international
Surrealist Movement. Although the contributions of women have
been acknowledged and in some cases celebrated within the movement
itself, they are hardly known outside it. In the U.S., the few
books devoted to the topic of women and surrealism are narrowly
concerned with a dozen or so "stars"mostly painters and
photographers whose work has finally, and most often posthumously,
attained some standing in the art market. As a result, women surrealists
whose principal vehicle of expression is the written word have
been especially neglected. This neglect, in turn, has maintained
old stereotypes and other misapprehensions of the surrealist project.
Generalizations about surrealism based entirely on painters are
bound to be misleading, because surrealism never has been primarily
a movement of painters. Indeed, if the evidence of surrealism's
numerous women poets and thinkers has been suppressed, how could
the prevailing conceptions of surrealism be anything but false?
I
hope that this gathering of poems, automatic texts, dreams, tales,
theoretical articles, declarations, polemics, games and responses
to inquiries will help correct this distortion by revealing some
of the many ways in which women have enriched surrealism as a
ferment of ideas, an imaginative stimulus, a liberating critical
force, and a practical inspiration to poetic, moral and political
insurgency.
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Unlike
most twentieth-century cultural and political currents, the surrealist
movement has always opposed overt as well as de facto segregation
along racial, ethnic or gender lines. From the very first issue
of La Révolution surréaliste, writings by
women appeared alongside those of their male comrades. Works by
women artists were regularly included in surrealist exhibitions.
As one perceptive commentator (Robert Short) has pointed out,
"No comparable movement outside specifically feminist organizations
has had such a high proportion of active women participants."
Moreover,
until very recently, most of the literature on women surrealists
was written by other surrealists, male and female. If these women
remain little known to the larger reading public it is because
critics and scholars have been shirking their responsibilities.
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* * *
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The
fact is, apart from the rare anthologies issued by the surrealists
themselves, women have almost always been left out. Well over
two-thirds of the women included here have never been represented
in any anthology; many of these writings have never been reprinted
since their original publication. In all but a few of the hundreds
of works on surrealism in English, women surrealists are barely
even mentioned. The exclusion of women from the existing
compilations warrants indeed, compels, if only for the sake of
historical accuracyan attempt to restore balance by emphasizing
what so many others have denied.
It
is essential, moreover, that the recovery of surrealism's lost
voices not do violence to the ideas and inspirations that motivated
them. Unfortunately, the few books that do acknowledge, to some
extent, women's activity in surrealism, tend to be less than scrupulous
in their accounts of surrealism as a body of thought and an organized
movement. My intention in putting together this mass of heretofore
inaccessible material has not been to project fashionable new
theories, much less to subject the recent literature on surrealism
to a detailed critique, but simply to try to learn what the many
women involved in surrealism have had to say for themselves.
What
is different about this anthology is that here, for the first
time, an unprecedentedly large number of surrealist women are
allowed to speak in their own voices, and in a specifically
surrealist contextwhich is, after all, the context they
freely chose for themselves. This anthology is thus the opposite
of isolationist, for its guiding purpose is rather one of reintegration.
By making these writings available at last, I hope to make it
impossibleor at least inexcusablefor students of surrealism
to continue to ignore them. I want first of all to call attention
to an impressive number of important surrealist writers who for
various reasons have not received the attention they deserve.
The fact that they happen to be women helps explain why they have
been ignored outside the movement, just as it also affects what
surrealism has meant to them. I try to show not only what they
took from surrealism but also what they gave to it; how they used
it for their own purposes, developed it, played with it, strengthened
it, endowing it with a universality it could not have attained
without them.
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The
achievements of surrealism's women writers, and the challenges
they pose, were and are important, not only for the Surrealist
Movement, but for all genuine seekers of knowledge, inspiration
and a better world. It is striking how contemporary so many of
these writings arehow much they anticipate present-day radical
and cultural preoccupations, how often texts written thirty, forty
or sixty-five years ago seem to go beyond the limits of current
debates. Nancy Cunard, for example, unlike many who consider themselves
anti-racists today, fearlessly acknowledged the revolutionary
implications of the critique of "whiteness"; far from
being merely academic or aesthetic, her passion for African art
and African American jazz was inseparable from her practical support
to the world movement for Black Liberation. Similarly, the "gender-bending"
texts in these pages convey the message that true sexual freedom
cannot be attained in a society mired in what Marx called the
"fetishism of commodities." And it is impossible to
overlook the radical ecological sensibility that runs through
this book like a pack of wolves. Ecological concerns engaged the
surrealist movement as a whole almost from the start; in surrealism,
the adjective wild has always been a term of the highest
prestige. But it is primarily the women in surrealism who stressed
these matters, and they who deserve credit for making the ecological
critique an integral part of the surrealist project.
Nature,
wildlife, wilderness are constant, compelling themes in the work
of surrealist women. Redefinition of the relation between humankind
and other animals, solidarity with endangered species, a non-exploitative
regard for the planet we live on: These are some of the dreams
whose realization they call for. In their poetry and other writings,
as well as in the plastic arts, dance and film, we see the natural
world in myriad new lights. Time and again in the texts that follow,
surrealist women voice the latent yearnings of a planet on the
verge of disaster. Agar, Carrington, Césaire, Johnson,
Mitrani, Low, Oppenheim, Rahon, Senard and many others are not
only manifest forerunners of deep ecology and ecofeminism, but
could even be considered exponents of these currents, decades
before either had a name. As surrealists, of course, they avoided
the "New Age" techno-mysticism and other ideological fadsnot
to mention racismthat mars so much mainstream feminist and
ecological literature today. What is most important is that these
women found that surrealism itself embraces feminist as well as
ecological concerns. Always implicit in surrealist thought, a
radical ecological awareness is increasingly explicit in movement
publications after 1945.
Meret Oppenheim identified the key methodological principle here
when she pointed out in 1955 that works produced via psychic automatism
"will always remain alive and will always be revolutionary . .
. because they are in organic liaison with Nature." This is the
very basis of surrealism as a revolutionary community: the unity
of theory and practice at the highest point of tension of individual
and collective creation.
Such
a conception of life and the world, defined by audacity and readiness
for change, is the opposite of all the dominant ideologies of
our time. In these pages you will find no "postmodern" complacency,
no apology for human misery, no blasé hopelessness in the face
of cataclysm, no confidence in lesser evils, no scorn for utopia,
no cynicism. All here is urgency and expectation, and the conviction
that a poetics of revolt is the only way that mightjust
mightlead us all to something at least a little closer to
earthly paradise.
By
emphasizing the ecological dimension of revolutionary social transformation,
women surrealists gave the surrealist notion of a non-repressive
civilization a far more concrete actuality than it had before.
Not only did they perceive the links between the emancipation
of women, of the working class, of all humankind and of Naturethey
also comprehended that all these emancipations are in reality
but one. "Here at last," wrote Suzanne Césaire in 1941,
referring to the domain of the Marvelous, "the world of nature
and things makes direct contact with the human being who is again
in the fullest sense spontaneous and natural. Here at last is
the true communion and the true knowledge, chance mastered and
recognized, the mystery now a friend, and helpful." In the heat
of such inspirations, poetic insight points the way to a life
worth living. Suzanne Césaire and other women in the movement
deserve a large share of the credit for surrealism's becoming
in effect a new universal, in the Hegelian sense: a realizable
global vision of marvelous freedom for all.
The
women's movement has never demanded too much; too often, alas,
it has settled for much too little, too late. In no society on
Earth are women fully equal; there is not one in which any of
us, woman or man, is truly free. Many of the early surrealist
sloganssuch as "Open the Prisons!" and "Disband the Army!"seem
to me to be just what the women's movement needs today. And beyond
all slogans, isn't it obvious that nothing less than our wildest
dreams will enable women to rise from the depressing military-industrial
depths of the current political impasse?
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Chicago,
January 1997
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