Last time I spoke to you, I promised that we’d get back to Alison Bechdel and Grenada. Unfortunately all I've managed to find out about Grenada is that it's famous for nutmeg and I can't make an assembly out of that – if any of you have family from Grenada who can tell you something about what looks like a lovely island and a wonderful country then please email me with facts or stories and I'll come back to it. For today, this leaves me with Alison Bechdel who you will remember is a cartoonist and so I can recommend to you her cartoons, but really I keep coming back to that test of hers – you remember, a film has to have two women who have a conversation about something that isn’t a man, and last time, apart from a very fleeting mention of Juliet, Alison Bechdel was the only woman in the assembly. I’m determined to do better this time, so I’m setting out on an Odyssey (an idea I would spend longer on, but Odysseus was a man and I can’t afford to get diverted before I’ve started), an Odyssey to see how many women I can link to each other in the space of a 15 minute assembly whilst also saying something I hope you’ll find interesting about them, and about life more generally. Let’s set out for Ithaka.
I’m starting with Ella Fitzgerald for no reason other than her amazing voice. She was born in 1917, on April 25th (which film fans among you will know is the perfect date because it’s not too hot and not too cold, all you need is a light jacket), in Virginia, on the east coast of the US. Her parents never married and she was taken by her mother and step father to live in New York. At the age of 15 her mother died in a car accident and her life got a bit messy. She started skipping school (don’t do this), her grades suffered (as you’d expect), she worked as a lookout for a brothel (don’t do that) and worked for the mafia in an illegal gambling ring (definitely don’t do that). She ended up being placed in a correctional facility for delinquent girls, which I don’t think was as nice as it sounds. Somehow she came out the far end of this experience – the lesson there, I think, is that it’s never too late to start making good decisions. She became a performer, a singer and toured the country with her band. She had an incredible voice and had a huge influence on jazz, particularly in skat singing where she imitated the horn section using nonsense syllables. Ella said “It’s not where you came from, it’s where you’re going that counts” and where I’m going is 1955 when Marylin Monroe used her influence to get her a booking at the famous West Hollywood nightclub, the Mocambo (something that segregation made difficult). I’m leaving Ella there, but I’m not hopping over to Marylin Monroe, but Bonnie Greer who turned this story into a play in 2005.
Bonnie Greer was born in 1948 in the west side of Chicago (I don’t know how well you know Chicago, but the West Side is the Brixton of the city: it’s been a gateway for immigrants and a place where poor, often African American, citizens can live, away from the richer neighbourhoods and central business district). She set out to be a lawyer, but was discouraged by a professor who didn’t think women should have a career in law and so switched to the theatre. In 1986 she escaped what she has described as the “shadow of death” in the Aids epidemic in New York and came to the UK where she has lived ever since. In her memoir, A Parallel Life, she writes about the experience of being a black American woman and speaks of a gap that was created by the transatlantic slave-trade. She says “That gap is the matrix of the Saudade – the Longing, I think, that all Africans in the West have, that is at the root of the blues and jazz and soul and rap.” That would take me back to Ella, the Queen of Jazz, really nicely, but I want to go on, not back, and so we discover that as well as being a playwright, and writer, Bonnie Greer is a novelist, critic and broadcaster. She is also an actor and played Joan of Arc in a play performed in Paris.
And so Joan of Arc, born 1412, approximately, in northeastern France. She believed that she had been sent by the archangel Michael to save France from English domination. Honestly, that’s the least mad part of her story which would entirely fail the Bechdel test except that after meeting the Dauphin (the King of France’s son), she was sent to his mother-in-law in order to be physically examined to check that she hadn’t had sex with the devil. We have no record of what they said to each other, but since Joan had recently taken up wearing men’s clothes and went on from passing this exam (I really think it’s best we don’t ask) to be fitted for a suit of plate mail, I think we can imagine that they had a conversation about good tailoring and the difficulty of getting jerkins to fit. She then went to Orleans where the French were defending the city from an English siege and becoming demoralised, dispirited. She filled them with enthusiasm, renewed their willingness to fight and the English swiftly left. Joan encouraged the French leadership to take an active approach to ejecting the invaders from the Loire valley and retaking the city of Reims where the Dauphin was crowned. Unfortunately for Joan, the next two battles went against her and in the third she was captured by the Burgundians who handed her over to the English who tried her for blasphemy on the grounds of her choice of trousers and burnt her at the stake. It didn’t help them much – they managed to spin the war out for another 20 years, but eventually lost, convincingly, to the French.
Joan of Arc remains a French hero and an example with whom other female leaders are compared. One such is Lakshmibai, the Rani of Jhansi who is called the Joan of Arc of India in a book by Michael White. Lakshmibai was born in 1828 in Varanasi, a city on the Ganges in the southeast of what is now the state of Uttar Pradesh. In 1842 she married the Maharaja of Jhansi, a princely state about five hundred kilometres further west. In 1851 Lakshmibai had a son, but he died and so, in order to make sure there was an heir, her husband adopted a relative as his legal son, named Lakshmibai as the regent and promptly died. Unfortunately for everyone, the British East India Company were lurking nearby and were working under the Doctrine of Lapse which was an excellent law they had written that said that if a prince died without a son then they got to take over. Excellent for them, less excellent for Jhansi because they didn’t think that adopting a relative counted and since it was their law and their courts it didn’t matter what Lakshmibai thought, nor what her husband had wanted. It’s this kind of thing that gives the British Empire a bad name. The Joan of Arc bit came a few years later when there was a rebellion – called the Indian mutiny by the British of the time and the First War of Independence by the Indians of now. There was fighting all along the Ganges valley together with what we would now call war crimes, including Jhansi where the British garrison was slaughtered after surrendering. The British eventually got control of the situation, committed a whole swathe of their own war crimes, and besieged Jhansi which was defended by Lakshmibai and her soldiers. They stormed the city but she escaped with her young adopted son to Gwalior, the last refuge of the rebel army. In the final battle she dressed in uniform and joined the battle in which she was killed. Hugh Rose, a senior British officer on the scene, described her as personable, clever and beautiful and said she was the most dangerous of all Indian leaders. Colonel Malleson wrote a history of the Indian Mutiny and said “Her countrymen will ever remember that she was driven by ill-treatment into rebellion and that she lived and died for her country.”
Those are both men, though, and no use to me, so I turn instead to the Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls by Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo which is a series of books each with stories of 100 women. Lakshmibai gets a section which I accept is a fairly weak link to the others who do, but I was stuck in 19th century India with only British Officers for company so, instead, we’re turning to Lupita Nyong’o who is not only recognised by Favilli and Cavallo, but is also the only person in today’s assembly that I’ve almost met - which is a story that deserves more time than I have today. Lupita was born in 1983 in Mexico City and was raised in Kenya, which is where her parents are from. She went to university at Hampshire College in Massachusetts, and went on to do a masters in acting at Yale (which those of you who have paid attention to the biographies of Lorelei and Rory Gilmore will know is in Connecticut). Her first feature film role was in 12 Years a Slave, for which she won an Oscar, and she has gone on to perform in a variety of films and plays, including the Black Panther films of the MCU. She has also written a children’s book called Sulwe about colorism and ideas of beauty. She said “You can’t rely on how you look to sustain you, what sustains us, what is fundamentally beautiful is compassion.”
I started by setting out for Odysseus’ home in Ithaka and in Cavafy’s poem, Ithaka (which I might have to read in full next time), he says “don’t hurry the journey at all, better if it lasts for years so you’re old by the time you reach the island, wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way.” So what have we gained on our way from Ella Fitzgerald to Lupita Nyong’o? Ella said “It’s not where you came from, it’s where you’re going to that counts,” so I guess the question is where are you going, and the answer to that depends on how hard you’re working, and the crunch point comes in the next two weeks when there aren’t teachers to make you. It’s what you do when nobody’s looking that counts. Bonnie Greer reminds us that nothing is so miserable that we can’t come through it, that one can take inspiration from sadness and injustice without taking anything from the wrongness you’ve come through. I don’t know who needs to be reminded of that, but I know that some of you are finding life tough right now. I hope you can make a commitment to future you, make good decisions now to make things better for them. Joan of Arc and Lakshmibai remind us not to be limited by what society thinks our role is, but to shape our own lives. Lupita Nyong’o tells us not to chase beauty but compassion, to care more about how we make people feel than making ourselves look good, and Alison Bechdel tells us that if the only voices we hear are male, the only stories we hear are about men then we need to switch to a different movie.
This vacation I challenge you to:
1) Make decisions about your time that will take you where you want to go, not keep you where you are or fix you in the role that others expect of you.
2) Make those around you feel better about themselves, show kindness, compassion, do chores, listen.
3) Find and watch a movie that passes the Bechdel test, read a book I've recommended or one that explores some of these ideas more widely, listen to the music of Ella Fitzgerald - do something to expand your cultural horizons.
Footnotes
1. The assembly in which I referred to the Bechdel test and promised more on Grenada was Taken at the Flood.
2. There's a lot more on Cavafy's remarkable poem Ithaka in Look Deeper, See More.
3. Ella Fitzgerald makes a fleeting appearance in both Time and Discretionary Hours, both times singing Summertime.