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Literary Review
Surviving cages
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No fiery statements now. Instead, she lets her life speak for itself. C.K. MEENA meets Kate Millett.
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KATE MILLET was wearing a sari for the first time in her life. The mustard cotton sari with batik and zari border was a present from a local admirer. Kate's host had tucked the hem into her black trousers and draped the pallu over her black T-shirt. A pair of well-worn brown shoes completed the ensemble. She sat on a stone seat, puffing a Marlboro, posing next to the installation she'd completed the previous evening called "The American Dream Goes To Pot", and said, "I must show you the kameezes I bought in Bombay. There's a purple one... "
The ageing feminist writer was soaking in India. She was in Bangalore mid-March as the guest of filmmaker and environmentalist Smita Shah who'd been shooting footage on her for the past four years. Practically every evening she would be visited by her readers, by her admirers who included members of local feminist groups, and by those who were plain curious. Almost everyone saw her as "the author of Sexual Politics". That 543-page Ph.D. thesis-turned-bestseller published in 1970 is what she is most remembered for, although she went on to writer several other books including her autobiography, Flying (1974), here elegiac Sita (1977), and The Loony-Bin Trip (1990), which describes her incarceration in mental institutions after a nervous breakdown.
Millett's first book, Sexual Politics, written when she was an unknown sculptor and activist, hit the crest of the second wave of feminism in the United States (the first was the suffragette movement in the early part ofr the 20th Century). It was the year of the first nationwide strike by women in the U.S. for equal rights. It was also the year that Germaine Greer's brilliant Female Eunuch was published. True, Millett didn't occupy the upper echelons that Greer shared with feminists such as Betty Friedan, whose 1963 classic The Feminine Mystique set women's lib on course, or Gloria Steinem, who gained celebrity status as co-founder of Ms Magazine. True, she didn't go on to propound radical new theories as did her peers. In the 1980s Friedan rethought her views on the family in The Second Stage, and Greer spurred much consternation by endorsing celibacy and natural contraception practised in non-western cultures in Sex and Destiny. Millett's only major political works after her best-selling one were The Prostitution Papers (1973), in defence of prostitutes' rights, and The Politics of Cruelty (1994), on state terrorism and torture as a means of controlling citizens.
"The Mao Tse Tung of women's liberation", as Time magazine once called her, is 68 now, and it shows. Life has treated her harshly. A few years after she won instant fame, her reputation began to fade, especially after she admitted to being a lesbian, and she soon dropped out of public view. The two occasions when she was "busted into a nuthouse" would break her life in pieces. Perhaps her Bangalore listeners weren't fully aware of the turbulent personal history of this mother of the feminist movement. If they expected her to repeat past statements such as "Patriarchy's chief institution is the family", or answer questions about the feminist movement today, or air her views on U.S. hegemony, they were disappointed. No rhetoric escaped her lips. She simply talked — rambled, rather in a stream-of-consciousness style. It was an uninterrupted performance, of spoken thoughts woven with casual comments through which her life and her views would automatically emerge. "The personal is the political", remember?
She adopted the same method during this interview — or chat, rather. Leaning forward to extract yet another Marlboro from the pack on the table, she spoke in her low, raspy voice about her two-and-half-year-old grandniece Emily, who had wanted to ride in the car with Kate all the way to her Women's art Colony Farm in Poughkeepsie, New York State. "I told her it was two hours away and she was ready to come with me. Then I told here there was no baby seat in the car. You know, it's illegal to drive with a child in a car without a baby seat. I can get arrested for it. I explained it to her and she understood."
"I'm Irish," was a phrase she frequently and proudly used, almost as many times as her wry asides on mental asylums. She spoke of her Irish grandmother Ellen Murray, "a famine child" who was packed off on a ship to America to marry a much older man, Patrick Henry. "She brought him a cow as dowry. He was named after the great Patrick Henry, you know?" This was the firebrand Irish revolutionary of the 1700s. She imitated him in an orator's voice... " `Give me life or give me liberty.' He didn't give her liberty and she gave him death. She went back to Ireland. She left Patrick Henry. He owned seven farms and a granary by then. She gave him two children who weren't his own!"
She talked of her French ancestors who swam 30 miles down the turgid Mississippi river from Canada to St. Paul, Minnesota. She went to a French convent school run by nuns of the order of St. Joseph's. "They brought in a priest to talk to us about religion. He warned us of dangers of homoerotic love, and here we were, buried in homoerotic love! There were all these affairs going on."
She showed photos she'd taken of her farm — a colony for writers and visual artists, which she bought with the $30,000 she made from Sexual Politics. "That's Gabriel, the cook's cat. Gaby, she calls him sometimes. She talks baby talk to him, which I find nauseating. He's an adult, you know, a grown cat, and she infantilises him. But he knows it's her way of showing she loves him." The farm has a pond with shocking pink lustrife flowers growing wild beside it, and snapping turtles that could bite your toes right off. "The deer are impossible to catch on film." Her immediate plan is to have a long driveway lined with birch trees.
Displaying pictures of her home in New York City, she said, "It's a loft." She's been living there for 40 years, in a historic building that used to be one of the city's worst brothels where many prostitutes had committed suicide. There are no walls or partitions in this 23-by-100-feet space. "It has three fireplaces and I like watching them all when I sit on the toilet." For one who calls herself a "psychiatric survivor", walls must seem pretty suffocating.
Confinement of any sort doesn't go down well with a woman who has sought liberation all her life — both physical and mental liberation. A recurring theme in most of her art is the cage. And it is art that has helped heal Kate Millett, helped set her free.
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