subconscious struggles
Alicia Ostriker's latest book overflows with powerful images
Archived article from Dec 9, 2002
By Amy Vames
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The other major presence in the poems of "The Volcano Sequence" is God and Judaism. Although she did not have a religious upbringing ("My parents thought religion was a lot of hooey," she says with a smile), Ostriker began to read the Bible while she was in college. She identified with the stories and became fascinated with a God who could be both authoritarian and benevolent. "God, as represented in the Torah, is partly something I can love and partly something I can't love," she says.
She adds that she has never felt angry with God for any personal misfortune, such as a bout with breast cancer. But she does find herself butting her head against the contradictory nature of God. "God is a model for tyrannical rule and a model for male ego," she says. She struggles with a God who, on the one hand, mandates anti-authoritarianism while commanding obedience; a God who is merciful but allows human suffering. As one poem, "Kosovo," reads, "You want us to love that about you/even if you pray that your attribute of mercy/may overcome your attribute of wrath."
Those contradictions, however, do not deter her from her faith. "Part of what ties me to Jewish tradition is that we do argue, we like a good fight. Jews argue with each other and with God," she says. She adds that although Christianity and Islam derive from Judaism, they don't embrace the questioning nature of Judaism. But that aspect of Judaism is liberating for many, Ostriker says. She has taught workshops on midrash — rabbinical commentaries about stories in the Old Testament — and finds that both Jewish and non-Jewish participants greatly enjoy the notion that one can "talk back" to God.
Ostriker particularly identifies with Jacob, who wrestles an angel. "While they are wrestling and no one is winning, the angel says, ‘Let me go, because day is breaking.' Jacob says, ‘I will not let thee go except thou bless me.' That's a line I found so beautiful. It expresses my own intimate wrestling with the Bible, with Jewish tradition."
She also identifies with and pays homage in the book to Bruriah, the only woman whose words and opinions are presented in the Talmud. "I wrote about her as my ancestress, because she is the first recorded woman intellectual in our tradition," Ostriker says. The poem "Bruriah" tells how this strong woman breaks the news to her husband, Rabbi Meir, that their two sons have died. She asks him what he would do if he had borrowed two jewels and the owner wanted them back. When Meir replies he would return them, she shows him the bodies of their sons.
Stories written centuries after the Talmud say Bruriah refuted a statement by her husband that women were "light-minded." According to the tale, "her husband, to prove her wrong, got one of his students to seduce her," Ostriker says. "She resisted, succumbed and then hanged herself. The story seems to represent some kind of need to turn a vocal woman into a sinner and get rid of her."
Another thread running through "The Volcano Sequence" is the cabalistic entity Shekkinah, the subject of several of the book's poems. According to early Jewish mysticism, the Shekkinah represented the feminine aspect of God, which was divided from God at the moment of creation and was said to be yearning for reunion. "In this mythology, the task of human beings is to bring them back to unity, which you help to do each time you perform a great deed," Ostriker says.
The final section of "The Volcano Sequence" returns to Ostriker's remembrances of her mother and musings about the process of writing. She says the poems seemed to impose their own stopping point, for which she was grateful. She acknowledges that many of the poems are ambiguous, for instance, the very last one, titled "Coda." It reads, simply, "I want everyone to understand these lines/say nothing."
"You can read it as saying, ‘This is all nonsense, everything you've just read means nothing,' " she says. "But I also want the reader to understand these lines and to say nothing, not to talk about it. Understand, but don't analyze."
about to sell your house
yard overrun with raspberries
canes across the front walk
I fill two quart containers
with plump red berries
eating as I go
scratches inscribe my arms
I have hired someone to cut it all down
after you leave so this is the last crop
the fruit delightfully tender to the fingers
to the tongue deliciously sweet and tart
you would like me to eat it all
leave nothing for the neighbors
I am your child
you want to do something for me
mother, I am sixty-two
at last able to speak the sentence
I love you — I say it
before getting into the car
some hard traveling
one thing at a time
one foot in front of the other
city to city and every millennium
evacuated to the next
where are you
god
it's a damn long journey
god
been gone so long
why don't you call
can't remember why we separated
was it you who wanted freedom
was it me
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