By the time he was twelve, he had long lost his innocence. Girls like her didn’t have the chance to remain innocent for long: from the south, poor, from broken families. And the violence, the violence. More than living, one learned to survive: “Getting older was like falling down a hole,” he wrote. Growing up among birds of prey can turn you into another, or it can leave a wound so deep that it builds an impenetrable wall. He did neither one nor the other. He chose to survive. Talk. Write. With dirty words, because it was brutality that he had known; but free, fierce, vigorous words, the kind that harbor a kind of hope. Redeeming words.
Her name was Dorothy Allison and she was born on April 11, 1949 in Greenville, in southern and impoverished South Carolina. He died last Wednesday at the age of 75. Her mother had her when she was 15; a young single woman who tried to raise her on her meager salary as a waitress and cook. In the family, women were the majority, women who did not fit the stereotype of the maternal lady or the cruel stepmother. They were good and fierce at the same time; their only option to get ahead in a hostile environment. Her stepfather began abusing her when she was five years old. At twelve, he dared to tell a relative, who passed it on to his mother. She supported her and left her husband, but he promised her that he would change and they were all together again.
And the man changed, yes: he changed sexual violence for physical violence. From raping her to beating her. Five more years of violence. He had also infected her with a disease that left her sterile; It seemed to her that she had avoided a teenage pregnancy because of that. With such experiences, the trauma could have turned her off forever; But, like many creators, he found in letters and art a vehicle to channel rage. It all started with school, where he found the solace he was missing at home. In a country as unequal as the United States, she is an example that public policies work: she was able to study at university thanks to a scholarship.
She graduated in Anthropology and completed postgraduate studies in that same field, while working as a cleaner, kitchen helper, nanny, and telephone assistant for rape victims, among other jobs. Although they may seem like the type of youth occupation that later lacks significance in one’s professional career, they allowed him to learn first-hand about other victims, other marginalized segments of the population. All this, together with the study, fueled her feminist consciousness, which bore fruit, already in her university years, in active participation in the then incipient movement for gender equality.
For a few years he distanced himself from his family (“Family is family, but not even love can stop people from tearing each other apart”). She lived between Florida, Washington and New York, and she was not alone: she became prominent among the women who raised their voices for their rights. She collaborated with numerous magazines and edited a feminist newspaper. More than narrative, she contributed essays and poems that emphasized topics such as uprooting, inequalities due to gender, class and ethnicity, and institutional violence against women and the LGTBI+ community. At puberty she recognized herself as a lesbian, and from the beginning she wrote openly about her love for women. Among them, among those friends with whom she shared experiences and opinions, she was reborn.
We know all this because she told it herself in her first novel, Bastard (1992), a best-seller in his country with which he was part of the quintet of finalists for the National Book Award. This work, which he published after a book of poetry and another of stories, marked his leap to the general public and the international market, and led to the homonymous adaptation to the small screen directed by Anjelica Huston. This autobiographically inspired story narrates the first 13 years of a girl, called Ruth in fiction, marked from birth as a “bastard” for being the daughter of a single mother in that sordid south of the 1950s.
Both the novel and the television film, released in 1996 with the title Carolina’s bastard, They caused a stir in the most conservative sector for unequivocally exposing the sexual abuse of which he was a victim. The author admits influences from writers such as Flannery O’Connor, another great narrator of the brutality, misery and helplessness of that land; and Toni Morrison, a great reference for otherness who had already broken the incest taboo with blue eyes (1970). Also of the sociopolitical commitment of James Baldwin, whom he quotes in the epigraph of Bastard: “People pay for their actions, and even more so, for what they allow themselves to become. And they pay for it in a very simple way: through the lives they lead.”
It is often said that literary style is an expression of oneself, of the confluence between what is lived and what is read. Dorothy Allison’s, with clear and emphatic language, has that courage in the face of life and a look that is as reflective as it is intimate, as firm as it is compassionate. Because in the pages of Bastard There is also room for faith, reconciliation, amazement, kindness, and love. In the network of friends and family who support each other, a paradigm of sisterhood even if they did not know the word sisterhood. And in other practices that he discovers in his training, such as training, with which he regains confidence in his body, or music, with which he experiences a redemptive catharsis that reveals the sublimating power and indomitable beauty of art (“The Music was a river that tried to purify me. […] Singing helped me not cry. Singing helped me move forward. I released the evil that had possessed me through music and movement.
In 2022, thirty years after its publication, the Errata Naturae publishing house rescued it with a new translation by Regina López Muñoz, who was also in charge of a short book published this same year, Two or three things that I am clear about (1995). This text arises from a theatrical monologue in which the narrator links the stories of the women in her family. Multiple ways of experiencing passion, disappointment, motherhood, sexuality, humiliation, violence; but also of courage, generosity, friendship, affection. A kind of #MeToo before #MeToo that some director should bring to the Spanish stage.
Dorothy Allison wrote more poetry, novels and essays, earning distinctions for her works and for her entire career. The most important, however, remains Bastard. A fundamental aspect of his literature, which is less known here, is his attention to sexuality, to the body. She was aware of the lack of a critical and literary corpus that addressed them from a feminist approach. She helped alleviate it with texts that she called, without being ashamed, smut (obscenities). Talking about sex, masturbation, desire, narrating it without shame, is a way of reflecting on it, on what we like and what we don’t, what is admissible and what is not. And to remove the shame that covers it.
He was also aware of the lack of education on the subject, that certain identities were made invisible, and the abuse and stigma that derive from that ignorance. For this reason, in 1981 she co-founded the Lesbian Sex Mafia with Jo Arnone, a support group for women of the LGTBI+ collective where information is provided about BDSM erotic practices and female sexual desire is defended in a social and political key. The association, based in New York, is still active and was the first in the country to look after this group and claim their rights, as they had already done with rape victims.
Life continued its course, the wounds stopped burning and he regained contact with his family. He married and enjoyed more than thirty years with his wife, Alix Layman, who died in 2022. They had a son. As she herself said, at first it was difficult for her to manage that her partner wanted to be a mother, to get pregnant, which she could not do. Dorothy wanted to write and “make a revolution,” and, like many pioneering feminists, found those activities incompatible with motherhood. But they had the child and from that moment on he drank the winds for him. Of course, without losing sight of the sacrifices that being a mother entailed and the difficulty, coming from where she came from, of raising a boy to become an attentive, sensitive and empathetic man.
Dorothy Allison died on November 6 at her home in Guerneville, California, at the age of 75, from cancer. His loss has not caused much media noise, despite the progressive recognition he garnered over the years. For the LGTBI+ collective in particular, it is a key reference for never having hidden its identity, for its fight against grievances and for demonstrating, in short, that one can get out of the darkest hole to live coherently with oneself, betting for the community and promoting, through words and peaceful action, a more just and inclusive society.
Speaking in the first person about the abuse, female sexual desire, discrimination and poverty of the old south, in addition to demanding an education with a gender perspective, prove their daring in a context that, although it was beginning to open to sexual liberation and the emancipation of women, still had a long way to go. In her awareness of the need to promote a safer sexuality, in confidence and without fear or shame, she was pioneer, revolutionary and uncomfortable: “I didn’t care what people thought of my character. The reputation for having a bad temper was not necessarily a drawback. “Sometimes it was useful.”
She came out of hell to build a life in accordance with her principles and give the best of herself to others. From her survival story, she leaves us a priceless lesson: “A woman only felt alone when she was not happy with herself.” She overcame guilt, shame, pain, anger. Without getting down, without ever lowering your voice; an annoying voice for some, because it expressed what they refused to look at; a clear, dirty and implacable voice that even today makes us stronger and freer. Thanks, bastard girl.
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