In reflection of Women’s History Month, our writers share musings about the women and music that influenced their lives.
Zain — Anne and Elizabeth
Anne is twenty years older than me. I met her when I was eighteen, not too long after I arrived in New York City. I was trying to get away from home. It was a scary time because I lied to my parents and told them that I had a job lined up in the city. Fortunately, Anne turned that into a reality. Before total desolation, I found a room in Brooklyn and I was working at a big box store in Long Island. My commute was around two hours long by train, and I showed up at 6 AM each morning with soft, red eyes. “What are you reading?” Anne always asked me. I normally walked in with a paperback gripped in my hand. It was usually an experimental French novel from the sixties or seventies. She was the only person who cared.
I was an odd, aloof person in those days. It was supposed to be an isolating time. A bookish, skinny brown kid from a podunk midwestern suburb spends half his adult life underground on the subway. Maybe it’s because my two daily destinations were so miserable, but I was starting to look pretty aimless. When Anne and I first talked, she asked me where I could see myself in five years’ time. It’s because she interviewed me for a job. I cackled and answered with a shrug. “I don’t know how to predict the future.” It was the worst possible answer. I have no idea how I landed the gig.
Day by day, Anne and I started to bond over our doldrums. Work sucked eggs. To lighten the mood, she would ask me about my family. Her ears perked up at my stories about Karachi. She found it amusing when I spoke in Urdu. “It’s so sing-songy!” Then she would tell me about her family. Her father was born in Baghdad and her mom came of age in postwar Germany. As a child, Anne’s mom used to play on the rubble left over from the bombings and would often pick up skulls and speak to them like dolls.
My favorite thing about Anne is that she is a lapsed goth. I mean, an original. Her arms are covered in tattoos of flowers, candles, and spiderwebs. As a teenager in the eighties, she saw bands like The Cure and The Smiths in their prime. On the weekends, Anne was my only friend. She took me on drives around Long Island and Queens and showed me the old goth clubs she used to frequent. All of them had shuttered in the 21st century. They were salons, pawn shops, or accounting firms by the time I came across them. I often think that Anne’s mom’s macabre childhood inspired her daughter to appreciate the darker realms of existence, and maybe even find a sense of beauty and comfort there. Otherwise, there would be no beauty or comfort anywhere.
I wonder if that’s why Anne took a liking to me, a regular depressive. She often invited me to her house, which was an old Victorian-type structure, and along with her husband, we would watch The Mighty Boosh. Jamie was a surrealist photographer and from time to time he used me to model in his sinister tableaux.
When I was eighteen, I abandoned my childhood and my home and by some oddball grace, I was given the difficult joy of adulthood. Anne and I would drive from cemetery to cemetery around Brooklyn and Queens where she introduced me to bands like New Order and The Cocteau Twins. We would sit against two-hundred-year-old tombs and talk about our pasts. She fondly shared stories about getting high and making out with women. When she worked at the Knitting Factory, she told Thurston Moore to basically fuck off. I haven’t been able to listen to Sonic Youth since. Sometimes, under the skies painted gray by the melancholy Atlantic, she would make plans to get out of dodge. She dreamed of growing up. She dreamed of owning a cafe. Maybe a hot yoga studio. Mostly, she wanted to live in a lake house. When we ran out of dreams, she would share her headphones and play Heaven or Las Vegas. Every time I listen to Elizabeth Fraser’s indiscernible, oh-so-ethereal voice, I soften up and quietly reminisce of those chilly evenings long gone along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. It makes me happy because Anne now lives in a lake house somewhere upstate. She knows how to predict the future.
Ali – Dalia and Dido
When my mother passed away, I was seven years old. Developmentally, my mother represented a lifeline being severed, and for years I felt the weight of cosmic abandonment. Sometimes, I catch myself staring into the abyss, deep within my grief and drowning out my current reality, suspended, half in time, with only a blank feeling of emptiness within. For years, I would sink into that depth, my inner child believing it was my fault that my mother left. My mind and my conception of selfhood developed around losing her.
For years, it had been easier to suspend myself between that depth and what lies beyond it, never truly allowing myself to get past the shallow waters and deeper than I had ever gone in the depths of that grief, in fear of that pain overpowering me. Yet as I step into my adulthood with every passing year, I imagine a parallel to what my mother was like at my age, and as I carry my love for her through the years of my life, I find myself reconnecting with her and slowly accepting the ways of access to her I can reach. I like listening to the music she listened to and imagining her finding reflections of her life in the music. Quite vividly, Dido’s ‘Life for Rent’ album lulled in the background of my last days with my mother, and as I listen to that album now, I think about the experiences her and I share expressed in that album, and she transforms from an angel star that shot brightly and quickly in the sky of my experiences, to a human who had her dreams and fears and faced the humility we all share as human beings: death.
She lives on through my eyes, like heirlooms passed down to me, a constant reminder of her presence in my life, so that every time someone finds beauty in them, I think of her, and the gifts she has given me. The warmth of her hand and the pulse of life that sustained it, the tone of her voice and the rhythms of her laughter, the safety of her embrace, a safety I long for every day, a presence reminding me it will be okay. I look for these traits in myself and I fill in the void of self-hatred, and I replace it with love, both extremes tied to her loss. I cherish the idea that every day I move through my life, I carry part of her within me, in more than memory, but in my existence in this body, one she helped nurture and create in hers. She is gone and will never return, but I in turn choose to live my life in celebration of her involvement in creating it. Someday it will be our turn to let go of our bodies and return to Mother Earth once again, and when that day comes, Dalia will be with me, gently guiding me through the veil of life and back into infinite love once again.
Grace – Three Girls in Paris & California by Joni Mitchell
Nearly two years ago, I had the great pleasure of joining my two friends in the beautiful and romantic city of Paris. We spent a week and a half being guided around Paris by my friend’s mother, a Frenchwoman unfortunately trapped in the United States. But she gave us the greatest gift: a week to explore every nook and cranny in the cobblestone paths of twenty arrondissements. We wasted no time making magical moments in the city’s Latin Quarter, and we couldn’t quite rationalize how fortunate we were. Every walk along La Seine felt like a scene in a movie, every cafe au lait felt like the last cup of coffee in our lives, and every metro ride on Line 4 back to our quaint apartment felt like coming home. Between the three of us girls, we could muster a sentence worth of French, but we felt an odd connection to the sites we saw and the people we met. Three teenage girls from Orange County, California somehow walking the same streets as Claude Monet or lounging at the same boulangerie as Salvador Dalí. The idea was so absurd — how could our underdeveloped minds be allowed to see so much beauty, history, and life? Every moment felt like a dreamscape; like a scene in a French New Wave coming-of-age film. We were running around the Louvre, devouring crepes on curbs overlooking the Eiffel Tower, or spilling coffee in legendary establishments like Shakespeare and Company. It was just three girls together in a city with beauty we could barely comprehend. And I remember those moments with the three of us as a positively isolating period, where any knowledge about the rest of the world was out of my mind, and I paid no attention to the news or my commitments that awaited me on the other side of the Atlantic.
On a random day that June, we had all bought notebooks from an artisan shopowner somewhere in the 9th arrondissement. With our pen and new paper, we found a perfectly carved bench in one of the city’s lavish parks and began journaling the trip, the people we met, and the dread of going back home and starting college in only a few months. We lived in our fantasy world for a half hour on that bench until I made the choice of looking at my phone. There was a notification from CNN and some other news outlets: “Roe v. Wade Overturned.” I remember gasping a little and my friends looking up at me. When I told them the news, we all just sat silently in disbelief. At that moment, we remembered that we were not three girls skipping around Paris. We were three, young American girls, who would be going home to a country filled with so much uncertainty and devaluation of our lives and choices. We heard the news before most of our friends and family in California woke up; it was such an unusual feeling to be so aware of the fate and reactions of the women we loved back home.
When I think about Women’s History Month, I think of all the women in my life who have taught me about joy exploration and soul-searching. The women who sat on La Seine with me for hours talking about the future and our fear of it. I think about the women who came before me – the fear that they had and their ability to overcome it. I think about the women who forged a path, through their hardship, to bring me the rights, knowledge, and experience I take for granted today. With all the beauty that I saw in Paris, sometimes I can only think about the three of us on that bench. It always reminds me of Joni Mitchell’s song, California, and it makes me wonder what she was feeling when she sang: “Sitting in a park in Paris, France / Reading the news and it sure looks bad / They won’t give peace a chance / That was just a dream some of us had.” I wonder if she could ever predict that a couple of decades later, three girls would be sitting in a park in Paris, France, reading the news, and realizing it sure looks bad.
Ella – Put Your Records On
My two favorite things about my childhood home:
1. The instant hot water on tap.
2. The overhead sound system.
Why?
One. I could make hot chocolate or tea the very moment I wanted it.
Two… I could crank the music as loud as I wanted and belt Taylor Swift in the kitchen.
My love for music and the profound role it has come to play in my life is incomplete without the women who shaped it. Every song that has ever brought me solace, joy, and a good dance party is a tribute to my mother and sister. Thank you for loving music as much as I do, for singing in the shower and never failing to back me up for a kitchen dance party.
Thank you for not telling me to shut up during the years I spent screeching Lady Gaga beyond off-tune. Or telling me to shut up (thanks Astrid), to ensure I would keep singing even if it was just to spite you.
When my mom came across the song “Put Your Records On” during my elementary school years and the image of the three little birds who sat on Corinne Bailey Rae’s window, well those three little birds began to stand for us. No matter what chaos took place, the three of us always had our corner of the world – our non-slip red-floored kitchen, the California sunlight, Abba, and each other. If we could dance in our kitchen, even for five minutes, somehow it was all going to be okay.
To this day when I don’t know where else to turn – I know what to do. Let my hair down, and put my records on.
I may not have rhythm. I still can’t sing in tune for the life of me, but I always know something is truly wrong if I’m not singing in the shower. The songs that are etched into my life playlist – are the ones I owe to the sound system that we played them on over, and over, and over again. Ironically enough, I think most of the songs that frequented the circa 2012 dance parties are mostly sung by strong, independent women.
Cue “F*ckin’ Perfect,” “Mr. Know it All,” “Part of Me”, “Love Song” and “The Climb.”
To my mom and sister, my beautiful, strong, and radiantly independent California Girls, you gave me the gift of music. It always brings me back to earth, and back to the two of you. I’ll see you in the kitchen soon.
Candace- “Tears in the Typing Pool” Broadcast
It begins with blue. The sifting of the gaze under a deepening ocean, the glancing back and forth, the comparison of the body. To ponder my relation to femininity is to begin with a mother. Or maybe, a portrait of a mother. Mother posed, mother stretching, mother perpetually fading. No matter where my family was living at the time, my parent’s home always housed a particular self-portrait that my mother painted of herself prior to my birth. The walls of my childhood home were always covered in her drawings and paintings, but this particular figment always struck me as the most significant. It seemed to capture the part of her I could never completely understand, the fragments that remain perpetually blurred. Yet in struggling to comprehend her, I tried to clarify her indistinction through the lens of femininity as a young girl.
My mom always existed in contradiction to every female value I was beginning to learn as a child, and she failed to inhabit that kind of normative motherly affect that I observed in the mothers of my friends. I’m not sure if it was going to catholic school all my life, or growing up in the hyperfeminine worlds of dance and figure skating, but I was socialized with a more traditional perception of femininity from a young age. This enforced perspective often led me to delineate a contradiction between ‘motherliness,’ and my own mother’s ‘lack’ of it. She was transparent about her hatred for pregnancy, wasn’t selfless in a way that denied her own value, never helped me with school projects, and wasn’t overly warm. But she was fiercely creative, an independent thinker, a talented equestrian, lovingly affectionate with those she knew, and the most authentic form of love I’ve ever known. Yet instead of simply accepting her affection as a kid, the nonconformity of her love always confused me, as it failed to embody the convention I’d been taught was emblematic of ‘motherly’ love. In trying to understand her motherliness, I tried to understand her femininity, but I always lost myself in the pondering. So eventually, I just tried to accept her love without letting myself question it.
Growing up dancing, the violence of gendering was inflicted on me at a young age. For a long time, I conflated my self-worth with my ‘feminine’ capacity, defining my value by my degree of conformity to the Eurocentric ideals of beauty I was being taught. Yet these attempts always left me feeling inadequate, as I think they leave most of us, and I never felt feminine enough. I’d grown up looking in the studio mirror with tight clothing, looking at the width of my thighs, the coarseness of my brows, spending rehearsals observing other girls’ bodies, validating my own sense of inadequacy by my perceived ‘failure’ for femininity. Even through movement, I could never escape my transgression, as I was never a delicate dancer, always more sharp and staccato in expression.
When I entered high school, my school’s lack of a dance team led me to become a cheerleader, as it was the sole extracurricular where my dance background felt beneficial. During this time, the most influential teachers of femininity became my friend group, as I rediscovered my girlhood in Brandy Melville crop tops and stolen push-up bras from friends. For the first two years of high school, I felt comfortable being a girl, but when my family moved into a new apartment during my junior year, cystic acne and disordered eating took hold of my adolescence.
That’s when the inadequacy I’d known as a young girl resurged. But this time, I found a pathway out of my lack. As the suffocation of trying to conform, of being ‘pretty’ became too much, I began to inquire into the roots of my desires for femininity, and it all led me back to that longing to be accepted, all which I’d unconsciously conflated with my potential for being loved.
That’s when the coil unraveled. Much like a needle un-suturing, my present reality began to feel more and more like Broadcast’s Tears in The Typing Pool, where instead of confining myself to a contour, I let myself “succumb to the line,” a linearity in surrender that resisted any enforcement of expression and merely let “the patchwork explain” no matter how much my external world desired for apprehension. In forcing myself to confront the source of my longing for femininity, I became closer to my interior life. As everything began to collapse, my senior year felt more like a fragmentation than suffocation, where by the end of it I could finally breathe. By eighteen, I’d come to terms with the fact that I liked girls, began figure skating again, read and wrote at a frequency I never had before, and began painting. I encountered Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own during the final months of that year, and the bounds of my liberation were forever expanded.
When I left high school, met my girlfriend, and came out to my family, I began to reflect on the metamorphisms of my new relationship with womanhood. During my first semester of community college, I read John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, a book that forced me to process the link between femininity and the self-objectification I’d inflicted on myself as a young girl. After transferring, my entire perception of femininity as a socially constructed ideology, with roots in colonial hegemony only solidified. While I still feel like a ‘girl’ in many ways, whatever that means, I now define my femininity by my dimensionality, and I no longer feel confined by it. I think it’s that dimensionality, that capacity for freedom found when we abandon binary modes of being and knowing that makes Women’s History Month so important for me. It’s a recognition of all the ways notions of femininity have historically, and continue to, reduce and confine female life; further, it’s about dreaming, about recognizing a potential for liberation beyond heteropatriarchal ideology, and seeking to believe it, feel, and enact it. For each other, and for ourselves.
In many ways, my newfound connection to the ambiguity of femininity has allowed me to understand my mother’s self-portrait today. It’s that refusal to be pinned down, to be reduced, that I’ve begun to witness in the painting. That abstraction in articulation that I failed to detect as a young girl because I failed to recognize it in myself. I’ve come to understand her painting as her own act of resistance, and when I stare at the canvas now, the lines are overextended, and the color is in some way more saturated. And maybe it’s that newly recognized freedom in movement, that occlusion of color that defines my relation to femininity today. It’s how I see my mom in the delphiniums when I water them, how I’m beginning to retrieve shards of myself from the outflow as it falls.
