(This is a reaction paper for our Foundations in Women’s Studies Class on Rebecca Solnit’s Men Explain Things To Me)
Rebecca Solnit knows the ways of interruption. Be it when men explain things to her, and on the other extreme, having read of news that a woman’s journey home interrupted by a gang rape. If there is one unifying theme in her collection of sharp, eye-opening essays is that Solnit knows that a woman’s ways of navigation is pockmarked not with milestones but with potholes, distractions, detours, and chasms. Milestones are a bonus, and not a given.
There is something dangerous about women and their mobility. Girls are yelled at not to run for they might scratch themselves and render them undesirable for a mate in the future. In many fairy tales, the damsel in distress is always waiting. A sex worker is called a streetwalker, as if walking on the streets devalues a woman. But who dictates these values anyway? And all these values do is just impinge on movement much less actual progress.
Solnit mentions Virginia Woolf on the quest for imagination, and, yes, hope, with walking. For imagination to thrive, it has to transcend. Well, no wonder one way to break up a person’s will is solitary confinement. Woolf and Solnit asks the reader, asks women to take a walk and let the strangeness and the stranger inform experience. I recall Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway in which this book hedges on a woman walking and having streams of consciousness overlap with her steps. Though walking is a linear experience, Mrs Dalloway’s internal journeys take her across time and borders. These reveries connect her life to the sociopolitical structure prevailing at that time. I take note on the woman on the go, or even woman just even walking from the lens of art history. When women are foisted as subjects on canvases in western art, these women are objects to be gazed upon, displayed, or in many cases, splayed, sprawled in various stages of undress, her nakedness disallows her to move outside beyond the confines of her space: which is for the male’s desirous gaze.
The woman sprawled is a trope not just in the visual arts but also in cartography as well as history. Among the earliest sculptures of the anthropomorphization of “nation” is that of a Roman soldier atop a writhing woman labelled as Britannia. Woman, as representation of land, sometimes wild land that needs to be pacified. Woman as landscape that needs to be conquered, penetrated by a “civilization” depicted by men and their spears. This has been the script for colonizers across the centuries, this is why in Solnit’s book, my favorite part is the one about Dominique Strauss Khan being bracketed as a metaphor for colonial power and his rapacious entitled sense of invading other people’s spaces, literally interrupting a woman of color’s work with his aghast performance of phallic revelation like a spear (I suspect a tiny flaccid one) brandishing it to a woman who (I also suspect he assumed will be quiet given his stature compared to hers). How Solnit implicated Strauss Khan’s IMF role to the global south as his wanton disregard for decency and relied on the woman (representing the global south, and intersect racial colorification issues as well) as a silenced victim spoke to me in volumes. I cam from a country who has been subject to the wiles of the IMF and that a huge chunk of our budget goes to debt servicing sacrificing education and health care is in a way silencing us, interrupting us, explaining to us that this is for the good of the country. Debt saddles us immobile, unable to move to explore creativity and innovation, instead we have trained generations of Filipinos to seek economic refuge and financial stability in the service sectors abroad, supplying manpower to hospitals, nannies to the thousands of families – this implicates that the point of university education or higher education is to get a degree to become a desired export labor product. Ironically, with the immobility brought by poverty and debts from the IMF, it has rendered generations of Filipinos mobile abroad but mostly in job sectors unwanted by the West. If Virginia Woolf espoused that a woman must have “A Room of One’s Own” to realize her potential, then Filipinos and the global south must have financial health unburdened by debts for us to realize our own potential as well.
Furthermore, it is not just a “room of one’s own,” but a path of one’s own. Solnit has written also mentioned that she has written Wanderlust: A History of Walking. This reminds me of some readings I encountered before that one aspect of the emergence of “modern” art is through these artists that walked the city. The flaneur has been cast as a idle wanderer, and yet, the flaneur, in art history, has recorded the lives of the other and translated these into images onto canvases that usually depict the lives of the rich and powerful and their possessions. It was upon the act of walking that the others are revealed. It was upon walking that “modern” notions on class, identity, cast itself upon society to have more lenses to look through them to understand and seek out the fissures that need to be rectified.
Though Solnit opens her book on how a man of certain power “talked down” on her and made her into an “ingénue” ergo an infantlization, a gateway for a perceived powerful being (ie. Men) to explain things to you. If you are rendered an infant, then you are assumed to be incapable of independent movement, ergo you are hampered. As infant, one is seen as having somebody know what is good for you. Furthermore, the hampering of movement is not just what is good for you, one part of her book posits that women all across the world have to contend at a daily basis on the issues of safety. How can one have journeys across introspection which offer revelations, when you are trying to go home without getting gang raped?