Where Did You Come From/How Did You Arrive: An Unfinished Essay in Poems
By Dmitra Gideon
…for there is no girl we are not always already making into a woman
from the moment she is born…
- Lidia Yuknavitch, The Small Backs of Children
I have forgotten what it was like to be a girl born of a woman. I know I must have been, must have come from between her legs – before that, from inside her, from a place I now hold hollow and inverted, as if vacuumed out like the daughter who was not a daughter. Maybe when they kill our daughters they kill the fact of our mothers. Once my womb was my mother’s womb and once I loved her, my mother. Once she was a woman. Once I was safe inside her. I do not remember. I have tried to write this loss many times.
In 2011:
I am born constantly into my own womb. My sister selves drag behind. We take a breath of fume and plunge. We mess and bend to tickle down the tunnel. In one push of circling roll, we seek the bottom of our meaning.
Something crept between my legs to draw out the string of pearls that was a woman. It pierced an ache into the flesh below my belly button. Soft folds rolled through the dark. My pelvis arched and the place where my curve was held spilled onto cold plastic. I am no longer pleasurable soft but stiff postured wood.
You cease to be the daughter of a woman. Become a father-daughter. Almost as soon as you learn to breathe air instead of mother, he is inside you. Your body a body that belongs to men. Your mind formed and erased by them. When you play house, you are always the father. The mother is irrelevant. The mother’s hands are black holes.
In 2013:
I wonder what I want to say.
I do not know what I want to say.
I do not know whose mouth that is.
I want to die.
My eyes do not know what to say.
They did not see.
They could not taste whose mouth it was.
They want to die.
There is no such thing as an Earth Mother.
There is only a Father.
I cannot tell whose mouth that is.
I want to die.
There is only a Father.
Who sets the earth on fire.
Who sets your breasts on fire.
The body wants to die.
I do not how many there were, can’t number the bodies that have waged war against mine. I do know the difference between the taste of my brother and that of my father. I know that sometimes they came by twos. That I was an endless resource. That, because of the shape of my body, no space is safe.
In 2014:
My daughter knows the truth
she knows that some people lie
and some do not
and yet she is safe
when she is sleeping
in her green bed
in her green pajamas
my daughter knows that she can breathe
and sigh
and snore
and this does not mean a man will hurt her
I do not have a daughter
therefore I have kept her safe.
My daughter knows the truth
she knows that some people lie
and some do not
and yet she is safe
when she is sleeping
in her green bed
in her green pajamas
my daughter knows that she can breathe
and sigh
and snore
and this does not mean a man will hurt her
I will never have a daughter
therefore I have kept her safe.
Among the !Kung people of southern African deserts, a woman about to give birth walks a few hundred yards from the camp and gives birth alone. The sociologist Nancy Howell wrote, “The custom that women should or can give birth alone gives the mother the unquestioned right to control infanticide. At the scene of the birth, usually before the baby is named and certainly before bringing the baby back to the village, it is the mother’s responsibility to examine the baby carefully. If it is deformed, it is the mother’s duty to smother it… infanticide is part of the mother’s prerogatives and responsibility.”
The Greeks co-opted the birth story, allowed Athena to spring from Zeus. The woman who exists within the man, the woman the man has formed, the woman he wants her to be. It is something they cannot replicate, the giving of life, so they steal it from us instead.
In 2015:
Twice I Made My Mother Cry
The first time I was a fish
swallowed by the very first woman,
whose thighs were made of water
and wide as mountains.
I sat in her gut, and in the gut
of each woman after, flapping,
throbbing impatience against their wombs,
pressing down on their wide and watered
thighs. Each one put her hand on her belly,
cooed gently, Not Yet.
Until my mother sweated and screamed,
pushed me out, pulled red threads of memory
to wrap around my throat so I
would not forget the women I had been.
My gills pulsed. I gasped for breath.
She said I made her a redwood.
The second time, we sat on the couch
and I told her the truth about my father,
showed her where he had sunk in the knife,
ripped me open gills to thighs. Gutted me.
I showed her how the flesh
never quite goes back the same way.
My scalp still peels away from my eyebrows.
My gut still spills out onto the floorboards.
I showed her how I could unravel
my skin, step out, unwind
the thread from my throat, the red
now coated by a man's sweat,
the mark of womanhood long gone
from its memory. I told her,
I have never stopped gasping for breath.
My mother cried. Stood up.
Moved on.
It is called a del-em. Invented by pro-choice activists – by women – in 1971. Also known as a menstrual extraction kit. It consists of a Mason jar, a one-way valve, and two lines of plastic tubing – one that leads to a cannula, a medical straw that removes fluids, and another that leads to a syringe without a needle. The cannula is inserted into the uterus through the undilated cervix. A syringe with a one-way bypass valve prevents air from entering the uterus, which can be fatal. It creates the suction necessary to evacuate the interior of the uterus. The contents of the uterus collect in the airtight jar, ready for disposal. The materials for a del-em are easy to obtain, and the device itself is simple to construct. Networks of women around the world have trained each other to perform early-stage abortions this way.
There are other uses.
In 2016:
It was in a kitchen
my baby died
I don’t go much in kitchens
keep them empty
I eat mostly brain matter
from the day’s fatigued concrete
I shuffle mostly away from the fridge
I keep the door shut
I keep the cold in my sweat
in memory
I never sweat anymore
Some things will be hidden
there will be a slapping sound in my
thigh like fish losing breath on the floor of a man’s
ship and I will tell you
I also fought my way out of a man
his ribs were a forest and I picked through climbed
pulled them apart like
separating myself from myself I
coughed up bone
I tore apart the chest
I emerged encased in his thin layers
I emerged without gender
without sound
Now I curl and slap the soles of my feet
I rock on the ground
I pull my heart through my ribcage
and eat
It tastes like you and I want to tell you why
they always make us scream for them
In 2011, Michael Joe Adkins repeatedly raped his eleven-year-old daughter. When she got pregnant, Amanda Adkins, the child’s stepmother, took her to an abortion clinic. Fifteen days later, she took the child to a doctor and told him she was experiencing symptoms of a miscarriage. The doctor then put the child under anesthesia and performed a dilation and curettage, a procedure designed to clear uterine tissues after a miscarriage, not knowing the child had undergone the same procedure two weeks before. Twice turned inside out. Twice emptied.
I keep telling and re-telling the same story – the loss of the mother, the loss of the child, the loss of daughterhood, the baby who did not exist. How many times do we recount our losses before we can rest? How many forms must this story take before I am done?
But it’s not the whole story. The world is not divided into men and women. When my father brought me downstairs to the landlady, she lifted her dress and crouched over me as I licked. She watched us on the couch. Later, she scrubbed me in the sink, showed me the microwave, told me she’d put me in if I spoke. I believed her. I’d seen her beat her grandchildren, and I was small enough to fit.
And none of that is the whole story either. Because I was also a girl-child who ran through fields, jumped in ponds with my shoes on, built forts and buried treasures, danced on beaches, climbed trees, climbed rocks, jumped off cliffs, swam behind waterfalls, laughed. Laughed until I was only laughter, until my body was made of it, until my body was the same as my sister’s body. Our hair intertwined. Laughed and laughed and laughed. Danced and danced and danced and danced.
I don’t yet have a poem for that.
Notes
“Where did you come from/how did you arrive” is taken from the twelve questions in Bhanu Kapil’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, Kelsey St. Press, 2001.
Quote from Nancy Howell: Diamond, Jared. The World Until Yesterday. Penguin, 2012.
Presser, Leslie. “Inside the Secret Network Providing Home Abortions Across the U.S.”
The Guardian, 27 August 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/
27/inside-the-secret-network-providing-home-abortions-across-the-us.
Johnson, Curtis. “Incest, Sexual Assault Added to Abortion Case.” The Herald-Dispatch,
13 March 2014. https://www.herald-dispatch.com/news/recent_news/incest-
sexual-assault-added-to-abortion-case/article_52c33df2-ae4d-53d5-a195-
6d35e10c9ab4.html.
Dmitra Gideon (they/them) is a writer, educator, and activist living in Pittsburgh, PA. A graduate of the Chatham University MFA Program, Dmitra teaches literary arts at Pittsburgh Creative Performing Arts School and facilitates writing workshops for Words Without Walls and Write Pittsburgh, among others. Their interests include sex work decriminalization, foster care abolition, children's rights, and transformative environmental justice. Their work has appeared in PANK Magazine, Pink Panther Magazine, The Fourth River Literary Journal, and is upcoming in Cold Mountain Review.