In terms of feminist history in the United States, Grahn was anomalous as a working-class lesbian who identified with the African American movement of the 1960s. Her acknowledgment of diversity among women and her reaching for a metaphor by which to garner this diversity as a collectivity undermined the male/female oppositional metaphor on which heterosexuality (and separatism) is founded. In her attempt to see a commonality between the lesbian and the heterosexual woman she proposed a mutuality among women, as well as a space that theoretically enabled a return of the )lesbian) monster's gaze (cf. Williams, "When the Woman Looks" passim).
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Using the palindrome as a template we may expect to find Grahn's work bordering on the queer, unassimilable and indefinable world of the "feminine."
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My reading of Grahn is centered in her concept of "the common woman," a figure that, like the vampire, encompasses the queer feminine as aporia and the "phallic" woman's self- reflected gaze at the monstrous "other," her double. The term lesbian as metaphor for this "crossing" of Woman as sign and the woman as creator, is based in lesbian theory, which recently has focused on a destabilized or provisional identity for political purposes, removed from a destructive or simply "tired" binary paradigm.
Like Irigaray's two lips touching as "metaphor for metonymy," lesbian is a metaphor for the touching, crossing, and assimilation of doubles, even across national boundaries, and within an ongoing women's discourse. The "new mestiza" is thus an important metaphor, for the knowing lesbian "exile," whose home is in linguistic "space" rather than geographical space
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Of those of Grahn's books of poetry less germane for this study than The Common Woman are She Who and Confrontations with the Devil in the Form of Love. All of these works are reprinted in The Work of a Common Woman. The Queen of Swords and The Queen of Wands are brilliant epics and the poetry is rich and moving. For my limited purposes, however, each of these works is dealt with only in terms of the archetypal figures that Grahn portrays. In particular, these figures are "crossing" figures. Helen, the mythic icon of feminine beauty, crosses into the underworld of Ereshkigal, the terrible queen of swords, in, order to effect the wisdom of rebirth.
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Grahn's irony also plays on the misperception of el lector inimigo. She uses humor as a lacquered surface, that is, "openly" as sarcasm, jokes, irony, and puns. Her lexicon includes words from working class, gay, and Black cultures, recognizable to an audience of "metaphorically feminine" readers. Of her technique she says,
Of course sometimes high humor is involved in maintaining . . . secrecy. Gay people of all social strata develop intricate codes and language inflections that operate within ordinary-sounding language patterns to convey information that members of the Gay culture can understand. The idea is that hidden things may be least noticed when contained in what is most obvious. (Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds 24)
Grahn's characteristic deadpan humor reflects the gap between her knowledge, based on the reality of being a talented, daring lesbian in the 1950s and 1960s, and popular images of femininity and familial perfection. As a "baby butch" Grahn was early sensitized to the consequences of surpassing heterosexual gender codes. She did not enjoy the benefits of middle-class cushioning or a cosmopolitan environment. She was reared, she says, in
a sparsely populated, rural portion of the world, in an economically poor and spiritually depressed late 1950s New Mexico desert town near the hellish border of West Texas. (Another Mother Tongue 4)
Her college years as one of a group of lesbians included looking out for herself and her friends in a "wasteland of human relationships and social rigidity." Typically, Grahn relates this mutual protection system to women as an underclass:
We stood watch for each other as lovers do in jail. We admired each other's (forbidden to women) courage. We knew about cunnilingus, though only the boldest among us practiced it. We knew about the Mound of Venus. We knew about tribadism and about butch and femme. We admired each other's (forbidden to women) sexual appetites. We knew that Gay was our generic name, that people who were not Gay were "straight" and that many of them called us "queer" with unfathomable hatred and fear. . . . (5)
The ideological violence Grahn underwent extended, of course, far beyond the confines of small town and college life. The following passage from Another Mother Tongue (1984), her history of gay culture, describes her despair after her "less-than-honorable discharge" from the Air Force for lesbianism:
Discharged into a poor area of Washington, D.C., with $80 and utter demoralization, I worked as a bar maid serving hard liquor to dying winos. I did not believe there was any farther to go on the bottom of society than where I was. But as I found the company of other Gay ex-service people who also had the state fall on their heads, living in an area mixed with people at the bottom of Washington's perpetual ghetto of Blacks and whites and a scattering of Asians, I found that despair has no bottom; it can multiply itself indefinitely, inside the mind and outside. (169)
Grahn' s link with the "perpetual ghetto" of underground urban life is a salient feature of her work. Her 1987 The Queen of Swords draws on her experience as a barmaid. In the epic poem, Grahn transforms the experience into a myth of rebirth, basing the revision on a 5,000 year-old Sumerian story. In the Sumerian myth, Inanna, queen of heaven and earth, descends to the underworld to strengthen her powers. Grahn's version renames Inanna as Helen, the archetypal figure of beauty, and sets the scene of her symbolic death and rebirth in a lesbian bar. In this modern underworld Helen confronts Ereshkigal, the bar owner and "queen" of the underworld scene.
As her description of life as a barmaid in the "poor area of Washington, D.C." indicates, the urban underclass included the Black population. The poet was involved politically with the early movement of Blacks for their civil rights, and her continued commitment has been evident throughout her career. According to Grahn in The Highest Apple, Audre Lorde has been an influence in her work since 1971. In 1976 Olivia Records produced Where Would I Be Without You: The Poetry of Pat Parker and Judy Grahn (Another Mother Tongue 191). Published a year later, Grahn's collection, Confrontations With the Devil in the Form of Love, was inspired by Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow is Enuf.
Grahn knew the violence that prejudice does to the psyche and was familiar also with actual physical violence based on hatred of her Butch appearance.
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Grahn's concern for women is not a theoretical "feminine" and she does not use the term feminine often in her work. As a metaphor, her "overlapping islands" is more theoretical than her pragmatic approach to art and her positive-image approach to feminine absence. Like Cesar's "ship in space, " Grahn's "overlapping islands" represent the paradoxical combination of feminine masquerade and "phallic" integrity that is the lacquered surface. The idea is demonstrable by visualizing the overlapping islands as Lingis’ "continuity of convexities and concavities" and of Irigaray's constantly touching lips.
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[T]he occupants of Grahn's overlapping island(s) are not subjected to the reflection of themselves as the exterior and mad. "other."
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Speaking of her youthful butch orientation Grahn says what many lesbians and lesbian theorists have continually reiterated:
[O]ur point was not to be men; our point was to be butch and get away with it. We always kept something back: a high-pitched voice, a slant of the head, or a limpness of hand gestures, something that was clearly labeled female. I believe our statement was "Here is another way of being a woman," not "Here is a woman trying to be taken for a man." (Another Mother Tongue 31)
Further, in her introduction to Confrontations with the Devil in the Form of Love Grahn pointedly connects the graphics of The Work of a Common Woman with her writing as an exchanged look between women. She says,
The graphics throughout this book are by two women [Karen Sjoholm and Wendy Cadden] whose primary concern has also been in reshaping the images we have of women, what our strengths are, when seen through our own eyes. (134) (emphasis added)
Grahn' s view of women through "our own eyes" presumes and creates likeness, doubleness, and assimilation. Given these, the non-linear features of her writing are significant. Grahn's work must be considered aslant (at least) of heterosexual dichotomies and preconceived sotry lines. Her symbolic mastery, that is, her razor-sharp wit and pen, allow her to cross . . . into unbordered, queer regions unknown to the single-minded.
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Grahn' s courageous "factual" language mimicking the violence endemic to the underclass is an ongoing tradition in the United States among contemporary lesbian writers.
From her "phallic" stance as a lesbian, separatist, and feminist, Grahn enters the queer feminine realm by theorizing a commonality with all women. From this position Grahn enables the reader's "entranced response to the monster" (Case 10) by creating a "lesbian relationship between self and other" (Zimmerman, "Lesbians Like This and That" 4).