You can go to our
Newsletters
.
Or search for a word here:
'I dreamed Again That I was Drowning'
by Annette Kolodny
4 a.m., May 9, 1978
The water is cold. My clothes cling to me in layers, weighing
me down. Every part of my body is chilled and none of my exertions
warm me. Around me the water is dark and choppy, but there is
still
light-it seems to be early evening. I am trying desperately to swim
towards the shore, but a current keeps me in place. Exhausted, I
tread water, trying at least to stay afloat. I cannot keep this up
much longer.
Then I see a woman coming along the footpath.
For a time, she doesn't see me even though I am shouting and
waiving my arms, thrusting my body out of the water to catch her
attention. Then she does see me, her face momentarily registers
concern. I am trying to shout that there is a life preserver further
along the walkway--a white inner tube with a long rope attached. If
she comes down to the water's edge, she can throw it close to me.
She seems to understand. she looks around, she sees the thing lying
on the grass up ahead.
But she hesitates and does not go toward it. Instead, she
shouts back to me, explaining that if she came any closer to the
water, the waves would spray her dress.
1 p.m., May 9, 1978
I slept till noon again today, and still feel exhausted. Last
night I dreamed again that I was drowning
It is now almost three years since I filed a discrimination
complaint against the University of New Hampshire. I charged the
school with sex discrimination and anti-semitism. The Department
of English had twice denied me promotion to associate rank,
eventually promoted me, and subsequently voted not to tenure me.
When the New Hampshire Commission for Human Rights found
probable cause in my favor, the University refused to attend
settlement hearings or to address any of my grievances. The school
again refused to come to the bargaining table when, thirteen
months later, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission made
similar findings. This last year I have employed legal counsel, filed
suit in federal court, and am in the throes of preparing for trial. My
lawyers say it will be a landmark case.
Something else has happened this last year: both the women
junior to me in the tenure track have been tenured, and one woman
brought in as a full professor subsequent to my initial
discrimination complaint has also been tenured. One by one, they
are
turning into people I no longer recognize. Sheila, my closest friend
and confidante when she was still an assistant professor, now says
she can't be seen talking to me, on campus or anywhere. 'It hurts my
credibility' she explains. Amanda arrived last year from a small
college in the midwest where she already held the full professor
rank. We had mutual friends from graduate school. From the first
week, Amanda told everyone--department colleagues and others--
that the denial of my tenure was 'a clear case of discrimination.'
She was sure I'd win. But this year Amanda was given tenure at
New
Hampshire, and she's now begun blaming it all on my style. 'It's
your
style, Annette.' she keeps saying to me, although she never explains
what she means.
Like Sheila, Jennifer is the other junior woman who has just
been tenured. A week after she learned the good news, she told me
she believes people get what they deserve. More recently, she has
begun to ask why I don't leave. 'You've done all you can here,
there's
nothing more to be done on this campus. So why don't you just go
someplace else!' She seems to think it would be easy, as if the
lawsuit and the denial of tenure have not marked me, as though the
department has not told prospective employers that I'm 'abrasive,'
the new code word for feminist.
Now that these women are tenured, I have asked them to
speak
up for me and for women's issues at department meetings; I have
asked them to tell my lawyers if there are breaches of professional
procedure in the votes on my various appeals; I have asked them to
support me in every way they can. But it's been three years now,
and
I am becoming a burden to them. 'You expect too much,' Jennifer
tells me. 'Don't ask people for anything,' advises Amanda, 'let them
do
what they can do on their own and understand if they feel they can't
do anything.' 'I've got to back off where your concerned,' Sheila tells
me again and again. 'It jeopardizes my standing in the department.'
The drowning dreams began this year. Always, it is Sheila or
Jennifer or Amanda, who will not get her hems wet, who cannot be
late for an appointment.
I am, of course, the truth too awful to allow. Each woman
wants to believe that her tenure and promotion were earned,
deserved--not the result of my lawsuit and the department's
attempt to prepare itself for trial. And, to be sure, each woman did
merit her tenure and promotion, as did many women and the first
Jew ever reviewed for promotion to associate rank in the
department's entire history. Before me, no woman and no member
of
any ethnic minority group had gotten even that far. But if my
women
colleagues acknowledge that the department made a mistake in my
case, how can they rest comfortably with the department's decision
in their own? Adamant, Sheila and Jennifer keep insisting 'they
hires Amanda McKinney. She does feminist criticism. And they
tenured us. So how can you say the department discriminates?
They
hired Amanda McKinney!' The refrain bludgeons. They have ganged
up
on me.
May, 1987
Sheila, Jennifer, and Amanda believed they thought they could
avoid taking sides; they thought they could avoid getting their hems
wet. In their view, they were not actively doing anything to harm
me; they were simply 'not getting involved.' What they never
understood--but I always will--is that their supposed neutrality
gave
the men in the department tacit permission to continue refusing me
promotion and tenure. The women's silence encouraged the men's
recalcitrance. The neutrality of Sheila, Jennifer, Amanda, in other
words, was itself a position. It is a position that leaves all women
isolated from one another, vulnerable to drowning.
I realize as I write these words that the rage I felt ten years
ago is still anger. Perhaps it is not as sharp, certainly not the
constant companion it was then. But it is there, a familiar
vibration, and one I think I've earned a right to. The common
wisdom, of course, is that we must let go of our anger, forget our
pain, lest they eat away inside and turn us bitter. My trusted
friends
do not give such advice. They know what is really being asked of us
by such so-called 'wisdom': that we forget our history. When we can
no longer call up the feelings, after all, the events of our past are
dead to us, without meaning or motivation. I want my past to
remain
vital to me because I need to keep learning its lessons.
The question leads, ineluctable, to an examination of the
corrosive professionalization of identity within patriarchal
institutions that constrains women from bonding with one another.
So long as I remain within academe, this is something I must strive
to understand and overcome. To do that, I must hold firm to my
memories-- the pain and the anger both-- and cherish the challenge
they engender. Bitterness, I suspect, comes from trying to bury
what will not die. Bitterness is the attempt at repressing anger,
refusing contradiction. The woman I see in the mirror is not bitter.
She knows that to embrace one's anger is to return from exile from
one's self.
Copyright 1987 by Annette Kolodny: All rights reserved. First
published in Woman's Writing in Exhile, eds. Mary Lynn Broe and
Angela Ingram. (University of North Carolina Press, 1989), pages
170-78. Excerpted and Printed by Permission of the Author.
-wage@wage.org-