from Report from the Smith Society Vol. 1 No. 1
Dear friend,
How long have we been talking about exile? You assigned yourself an essay. You assigned me an essay. You assigned your students on two continents an essay. You met an entertainment lawyer in café on a layover in Helsinki, and you assigned that lawyer an essay. Write an essay on exile, you told us. Write yours on Snow White, you told me. Well. You’re not wrong.
That is, we’re talking about our friend Jessica Smith’s How to Know the Flowers, whose forward tells us her book “borrows its title from 19th and early 20th-century nature guides (such as How to Know the Wildflowers, 1895) written and illustrated by women who were amateur naturalists, not employed as scientists but highly trained and skilled in observation, art, and writing.” Consider Frances Theodora Parson’s How to Know the Wildflowers, with its Audubon-style illustrations. Prized for its beauty and utility, the title remained popular well into the twentieth century, and like others of its ilk, offers hidden historical value. It provides us with rare evidence of how a middle-class white woman such as Parsons, widowed after a flu epidemic, might’ve coped with her private grief, her sudden loss of occupation. Rather than the maudlin portrait of a Victorian widow, career over before it’s begun, retiring into the background, we’re offered the highly visible work of a woman who found new purpose in the wilderness. Beyond that, the guide validates relationships women might’ve, might now cultivate with living organisms that don’t require our sacrifice or service. Chicory, tansy, Queen Anne’s lace hardly need the tending orchids or a delphinium do. They neither root in, nor drain our bodies. For a woman whose primary responsibilities were domestic and reproductive labor, it would’ve been a blessing—and a challenge!—to sit long and lone enough to sketch a wild violet, to spend time enough with coneflower that variations in scent, color, and use revealed themselves.
Dear friend, there are plenty of reasons to get to know the flowers or the bees or the songbirds or the mushrooms. Curiosity, earthling decency, hunger. Loneliness, boredom, a stifled mind nagging at its bridle. Most compelling may be: to affect a change. Haven’t we often wanted to change our circumstances, and, finding we could not, resolved to change ourselves?
I teach myself new things
to get to a new self separate from you
and from the pain
of
grief
To know the flowers, you have to learn the flowers, and to learn, you have to sit still. In 2017, Jessica’s speaker finds herself exiled from the still, stable center of her own life. From her own steady self. From the landscape that’s more her familiar than even the buildings in which she taught, from the plants and animals that were as much her family as the students and colleagues. A promising career cut short, a home erased. Like a flu epidemic in a nation without universal healthcare or income, the epidemic known as rape culture indiscriminately destroys the lives of women, while capitalist culture revels in its monarchical fantasies.
Widows
and orphans vibes, Snow White vibes. Here’s what happens. 1. The queen notices
that men objectify the speaker:
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx to
try to figure out xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
because I am full-breasted xxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxx with a
low-neckline to work xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxx
2.
The speaker makes clear to the queen that she finds this objectification
threatening:
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx about
not picking up snakes xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
to cut ties with people xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxx to
being raped at work xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxx
3.
Instead of providing a “safe, stress / free space at work,” the evil queen and
her retinue fire the speaker:
17 April 2017
in the end
she
took the side of my abuser
Whether knocked out of wedlock by misfortune or unjustly ruined by malice, women cannot be exiled from the community without the complicity of other women. Snow White’s account reminds us that, in fact, women themselves often enforce the exile. We tend to read the wicked queen as jealous, but we might also imagine her actions reflect her dedication to the patriarchal monarchy. Who’s the fairest of them all? Who is the loveliest to behold, but also, who is the most just? When you exile a threat to the community, aren’t you indeed the good guy? So, the queen identifies the woman who triggers men’s vulnerability, and, to preserve her kingdom, exiles this full-breasted trouble maker.
In most versions of Snow White, the wicked queen orders a servant to execute the girl. When the beguiling child begs for her life, the servant can't bring himself to spill her blood. Does he know she’s been unjustly villainized? Probably not. Historically, all girls are punishments waiting to be incurred. Her life is in danger because other people can’t deal with looking at her. But the servant’s not a brute, and he can’t marshal himself around women he finds attractive. He can’t kill her. He can, however, bring himself to leave her for dead. He imagines wild animals will tear her apart. He’s okay with the blood on their paws.
Over and over, Smith’s speaker observes that her abusers “forbade me from the land.” When you’re fired from your job, no one puts a sword to your throat. Just to your income, your healthcare, your child’s wellbeing, your territory, your sense of self. This is particularly pungent in a culture that equates one’s job with one’s identity and one’s busyness with one’s value. Exile isn’t murder, isn’t quite manslaughter, but it’s deadly. It’s our way of keeping our hands clean when our institutions are dirty:
migraine after the
dreams
aura
slipping fog wake
drugs disoriented
as if in a new home
explain
to myself why
I
am not there
exiled
from my kingdom
the
refrain: estranged
from my family
I did right by you
you did not do right by me
or even try
The
grieving self isn’t the self you can send right out on the job market (or back
to civilization in Snow’s case, back to matrimony in Parson’s). How to Know
the Flowers’s speaker eddies in migraines and night walks. She can neither
move fast enough to escape exile,
[…]when
there is no newness
dismiss my reality not enough motion
to
move forward
a boat waiting for wind
on the moon
nor
can she still herself enough
week of migraines
weak
impatient
suffering heart
and mind
to redraft her resume. She must mourn, and mourning takes time.
As in Snow White, our speaker trades the kingdom’s targeted, immediate threat to her physical safety for the wilderness’s impersonal, generalized threat. Like Snow White whom readers too often misconstrue as naïve, gullible, and impractical, our speaker doesn’t panic. Like Snow, and like Frances Parsons at loose ends between wifelyhoods, our speaker resigns—no—reassigns herself to the wilderness. Instead of cultivating her fear of the unknown, she begins with what can be known. She learns something new to get and sustain a new self.
we
will figure this out
this
one thing
measure
the marigold yellow
against
the untested white
When Snow White capers with the woodland animals and hides out with the dwarves, it’s far more pragmatic than the narrative suggests. In her essay "Whistle While You Dixie," Dodie Bellamy describes Disney’s Snow White turning the dwarves’ crash pad into a home. Alone in the cottage, she enlists raccoons and squirrels to help tidy. “She lackadaisically swishes her witch's broom and sings, ‘whistle ... whistle,’ and transfixed animals writhe and scour.” Bellamy announces what the story works so hard to veil: Snow White is powerful, resourceful, competent.
What readers would advise Smith’s speaker do (fight back! sue!), she’s already doing. True to life, the lawyer fades in and out, Title IX yawns, the nondisclosure agreement muzzles. Should an exiled person manage to invoke any of the kingdom’s justice, should she somehow tunnel back under its walls, none of that will salve her wounds. It’s going to take a long time.
justice
doesn’t come good
doesn’t prevail
just time
Remember, one’s own family ordered the exile. Of course, we exiled can’t tell you this. Or, if we can, you don’t believe us. The kingdom makes sure.
I have said everything to the closed door.
In the meantime, this is what you see:
with Doug I begin to dye
I feel
like death after
first black walnuts all is dying
gathered
on night walks my
relation to the place
Lane chomps them as we go my place my people
An
Instagram full of flowers, watch the color bloom / in Ball glasses / seep
into cotton. Anyone who thinks it
looks pretty, leisurely, a waste of time, hasn’t been in exile. Our speaker,
who feels as though she’s dying, who grieves as though a death, takes up
dyeing. Takes up dying petals and turns them into dyes. Sometimes nothing,
nothing. Sometimes an avocado pit’s pale pink. Sometimes the nothing of pecans.
Sometimes mulberry’s deep, underappreciated pink. Dyeing silk with mulberries.
We spend a moment thinking about silkworms (who feed on mulberry leaves), about
cocoons, about blooming, dying, dyeing, again.
Dear friend, remember 2017? No shortage of friends in exile. Our friend A in Asheville getting nothing in the divorce because there was never a legal marriage, B on the lam from Brooklyn too sick to work and too broke to stay in bed, C in coal country crisis, the alphabet goes on. Jessica in the south, me out west. Danielle wandering the desert, resentful but determined to cultivate a new self who might, if she had to, return less vulnerable to kingdom’s toxic properties. There was a superbloom, a spring of wildflowers so intense and densely packed, they were visible from space. This is how I come to appear in How to Know the Flowers.
In Snow White’s story, no women come to her aid, but we can’t construe the story’s men as its heroes. Snow’s father is absent, the queen’s henchman wishy-washy. The wild animals, anthropomorphized fellas with crushes on the outcast, refrain from eating her, maybe even lend a paw with the chores, and then grant the queen and her poisons safe passage to Snow’s door. The dwarves put the traumatized child to work in exchange for bed and board, and, well, what shall we say about a prince, the living symbol of all kingdom’s hopes, ordering his servants to carry his non-consensual corpse bride about in her glass coffin until one day they drop and accidentally resurrect her?
In real life, exile tends to clarify allegiances. Spoiler alert, the prince will enjoy visiting your shack at the edge of the marsh, feel grand in his slumming, generous as he brings you provisions from town, but he’s not going to understand why you lost faith in the kingdom:
rage
of
knowing nothing will change
grief
cycles through take
the pots fill with flowers
its steps see the colors
a
hundred times a day they become
catalyst in death in boiling water
to convert they give
horror
to beauty essential colors
aesthetic death
Dear friend, if we’re tempted to read these poems in neat, bifurcated columns, the poems will soon teach us otherwise. What’s curative, what’s insult to injury. What’s wise, what’s foolish. It’s a muddle. What mordant will it take to stick your color to the cloth? All you can do is experiment.
How to Know the Flowers allows for all memory’s lacunae, the silences required by settlement, the lack of justice or care, the impediment to self-worth. It speaks through the fog of grief and the muddling effects of pain in real time, which is very, very slow time. It is not just a book of how to know, but a book of what we can know. These things include kingdom’s hypocrisies, the limits of our rights, the self-regenerating powers of patriarchy, the flowers, the colors, the land, the longing to return home even after home betrays you, the teenage deer near the water tower. It is, though, first and foremost a book about how to know the friends from the foes, the roses from the thorns. In its final section, Anna, we’re offered a real hero. The friend who shows up with winter bulbs and newborn kittens, with time and patience, without judgment or naivety. Her kindness doesn’t make up for or correct the harm done by the family who exiled the speaker, but it stands a counterbalance. In exile, we learn who loves us, who values us no matter how kingdom has stamped us:
waiting patiently for the right
conditions Danielle
too
exiled for the
in the wasteland wrong reasons
the women who betray me comforts me from afar
emerge
complain and you are doomed
the women who love me stay silent live
in fear
as if waiting all that time either way
for
the moment bursting
with flowers
a
woman who loves you,
Danielle
Danielle Pafunda is the author of nine full-length books and two chapbooks. Titles include Spite (The Operating System), The Book of Scab (Ricochet Editions), and The Dead Girl Speaks in Unison (Bloof Books). Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, BAX: Best American Experimental Writing, Conjunctions, The Texas Review, and others. She teaches creative writing, literature, and worldbuilding at Rochester Institute of Technology.