Women, language & experience

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Hello, you're listening to The Arts and Ideas podcast with me, Shahidah Barri.

Happy International Women's Day on Sunday.

That annual date in the calendar when we pay special attention to women's voices.

And the question of how women might want to sound,

how they express themselves, whether that's in the form of speech,

song, poetry or complaint,

and how they are heard or not is the subject of our programme today.

Those were also some of the concerns of the French feminist philosopher,

Elaine Seaksu, whose novel of 1977 angst has just been newly translated into English.

And we'll be thinking about her too.

Well, let's meet our guests first and hear them.

I like to aspire to a radio voice that is clear and low and assured,

rather than bunged up and madly scrambling as I currently am.

But I wonder how they would describe their voices,

whether that's in an actual or figurative sense.

And how do they use their voices?

Lauren Elkin, I'm looking at you,

translator of French literature, writer of art history,

and a singer in a format life as you describe in your brilliant.

For the coming book about women's voices,

how do you describe your voice?

And is there a particularly meaningful way that you use it?

That's such an amazing question.

You know, I would have to say that my voice is trained.

You know, this is not the voice that I necessarily had when I was growing up

as a kid on Long Island in New York.

But it's a voice that was formed out of spending years in the theatre

and years, you know, training with a, you know,

series of professional voice coaches to develop a voice that was kind of,

you know, as Malif Lewis is possible, supported by the diaphragm

that, you know, I've worked as a lecturer in universities for years,

you know, after being in the theatre.

So it's a voice that has learned to sort of sustain itself

and talk for long periods of time without getting tired.

And it's a voice that's moved across countries from America to France to Britain.

So it's definitely a voice that I think betrays the fact that it's been

lots of different places and spoken to lots of different kinds of people.

You are actually a bit difficult to locate, sometimes I think, in your accent.

You do have a Malifulous trained voice.

Does that mean your untrained voices wild and strangling?

Ah, it's a good question.

I don't even remember what it was or how it might have been if I hadn't gone down this route.

But there's this great quote that Anne Carson writes in the poet.

Yeah, in Glass I already in God, she says, every voice,

oh no, every sound we make is a bit of autobiography.

Wow, I love that.

Yeah, I mean, that's our whole programme, I think, maybe, I don't know.

Sarah Ahmad, you're a feminist scholar and activist,

and your new book is about the art and activism of complaining.

We can hear your voice down the line from near-witstable tonight.

But how do you describe your voice?

And how do you use it, do you think?

I would think of my voice as a feminist friend.

A feminist friend.

For me is the voice that I feel joy.

The one who is willing to name the problem.

And whenever you see our problems,

your often heard is interrupting other people,

their polite conversation by bringing up sexism or racism or transphobia.

So I think my voice might be a little bit annoying.

We're loud, abrasive, but it speaks with a desire for change.

I'm encouraging you all annoying, loud, abrasive voice tonight.

I like interruption, so more of them today,

so far you haven't been annoying, loud, or abrasive at all.

I mean, Ashley Percival-Bawley, a former soldier,

and now, military historian,

those two things sound like they have two quite different voices attached to them.

Yes, I think so, and I have to say, I think now I'm in my most authentic voice,

because I think in the military there's kind of a level of performativity as a woman

to belong, to conduct drill, you have to say it in a very specific way.

If you're high pitched, you're seen as less credible,

so I had to sort of drop my voice and roll it to almost sound like I had a little bit more control

over the body of soldiers I was drilling.

So now I get to kind of leave that behind,

and I'm using my authentic voice in a different way to look at the past.

So I'm a bit of a paradox, so I think a bit like Laura and I

it's very autobiographical, I'm shaped by that military experience,

and it informs my research.

But now I can use my authentic voice to kind of communicate those ideas

and examine these sort of wonderful histories.

Well, I wonder if that's something we might interrogate a little bit later,

what an authentic voice is.

Is it the voice you're born with?

Is it the voice that you are at home in the shower?

Well, let's find out in a moment.

And finally, Percival, not finally.

Mary Wesley, medieval historian, what about you?

What kind of voice do you have? How do you use it?

Well, I think it modulates, I think that's the wonderful thing about a voice.

If I'm reading to my children, it's a completely different register

to if I'm lecturing or heaven forbid,

if I'm speaking middle English or old English,

when I have zero credibility, it sounds absurd.

Is there a particular middle English speaker that you channel in those moments?

Well, it's kind of all reconstructed, really.

So that's the kind of great thing is that academics are all kind of copying each other.

But we're kind of guessing how things sounded from rhyme.

But I have a good friend who teaches in Germany,

and when she reads old English, it has this lovely kind of German ring to it.

So everyone adds a little bit of colour and flavour from there.

But in my experience, I'm leaving room in this programme for some middle English.

People we need it, absolutely.

And finally, poet Karen McCarthy Wolfen, your new work is an epic poem called Unsafe.

I'm wondering if your poetic voice is different to your ordinary voice in some way?

Well, actually, one of the worst things you can think about as a poet is going on stage and having

poet more. I love how you're gesticulating.

Yes, you know, and it's like, oh, but yeah, and and all of this.

And there's a sort of certain affectation to it.

But I think my voice, in a lot of ways, is a London voice.

And that's always been a really strong part of my identity as a Londoner.

And it's funny because my sister, the other day, said to me,

yeah, you know, Mum had like,

Elecution lessons when she went to the grammar school at Dame Alice Owens,

because we're from a very working class family on my mum's side.

So grew up in London. My granddad was a Cockney, so as my nan.

And this that I'm speaking in now is sort of a version of my family voice,

but toned down a bit.

And then my dad was from Jamaica, part of the Windrush generation.

And I used to listen a lot to Patoire at home, but I couldn't speak it.

So I actually have a voice in my head that I can't really speak,

which I think is really interesting.

And I can write it as well.

And then there's also phone voice.

Phone voice.

Oh, yes.

I was wondering, you know, that kind of thing,

where you're sounding a little bit posher.

Well, for me, it would be like that.

So it's very chameleonous.

I really want to hear your voice, man.

I want to get your voice on your phone immediately,

to hear what that sounds like.

We've had a lot of A's,

affectation, you said earlier, actually,

autobiography from Lauren,

authenticity we had to,

or affectation, you said Karen,

and affectation, you said Ash.

I'm going to throw in another one, which is angst.

I want us to start our conversation

with a healthy dose of feminist philosophy,

and angst is this new novel

by the French Algerian writer, Elaine Seuxue,

and that's just been translated into English by Sophie Lewis.

Lauren, I thought we might ask you,

who is Elaine Seuxue, and why should we be careful?

What's important about her for us?

I think Seuxue is just one of the most important French writers

of the second half of the 20th century,

into the 21st century.

She's born in Iran in Algeria in 1937,

so I guess she must be, I mean, almost 90,

if I'm doing my math, right?

She's fascinating as someone who is stereotypically

thought of as a French feminist,

in the sense that her father was French,

and moved to Algeria,

and her mother was German Jewish.

So she grew up in Algeria speaking French

and German, and a bit of Arabic, I believe,

and then she studied English literature for her PhD.

So she's this amazing kind of polyglot,

and anything but like Fonkelfeld says,

you know, she's not like this,

like person writing from the center of Frenchness.

And so she has written, I mean,

she continues to add to her amazing sort of catalog

of feminist interventions,

just these amazing kind of poetic fictions

that are very challenging,

angst as an example of that.

It's sort of difficult to get your bearings,

who's talking, who we're hearing, what's happening,

who are these people.

But she's probably best known for her 1975 essay,

The Laugh of the Medusa,

which is how I came to her, of course,

as a young graduate student,

and which has been very important to me

in my own writing,

the last couple of nonfiction books I've done.

And actually, we should say that your,

the opening epigraph to your book is

from the raft of the Medusa.

A few lines from Sexy, why did you choose that?

Do you want, do you mind reading it?

Because you have it up there.

Yeah, I mean, I love this book, so I can read this to you.

In women's speech, as in their writing,

that element which never stops resonating,

which wants to be permeated by it,

profoundly and imperceptibly touched by it

retains the power of moving us.

That element is the song.

So I love the kind of value that she places on the song

and on singing in this essay.

And so that was sort of what I was speaking back to,

the fact that our voices are,

as we've just been establishing around the table,

are trained and taught and formed

to communicate a certain idea about ourselves.

But then, as you, so I was deeply pointed out,

when I was talking about my own training,

you were like, what about that wild voice that's untamed?

That's what Sexy wants the women who are reading her essay

to sort of tap into to their inner wild women

who have sort of sanded off the edges of their voices

or their self-presentation in order to get along in the world.

And she reads the song, or she hears song

as this kind of something excessive in the voice,

something that can't be tame,

something that sort of speaks our embodiment and our desire

and everything about us that overflows.

And so that was what I really connected with in that essay.

You talk about her very inspiringly, I think.

I think she is one of those writers who feels very bracing.

Sorry, she's also known, Sexy's also known for having,

being a very eminent academic,

and she established the first Centre for Women's Studies

at a European University in Paris back in 1974.

And you too have variously worked at institutes for gender studies

and centres for feminist research.

Is Sexy still a relevant figure in those spaces, do you think?

Oh, without any question.

I mean, I haven't been in the Women's Studies

environment for quite a long time

because I left the university at 10 years ago.

But yes, her writing on the body

has probably a really significant feminist turn

to thinking through the body.

How can we actually understand our knowledge,

our wisdom as coming from,

and intimate relationship to our body cells?

And I think she was one of the writers

that really changed how we think about writing.

So it wasn't simply a means to end,

but it became part of what you were actually doing,

you're communicating differently,

allowing the body to speak differently.

And that actually picks up some themes around complaint,

because complaint can be a formal process.

But it can also be the ways we express our dissatisfaction

in the situation.

And a lot of the people that I spoke to

about their experiences of complaint

used poetry,

used very poetic language

to describe what it was like to do that work.

And I think a one person,

Viola is her name, who described her complaint

as a little bird scratching away at something.

It is a very evocative description

of what it's like to try and create room for yourself

by complaining because you don't have what you need.

Well, I wonder if we might think of feminist

theories as sort of just work being done by academics.

But really, I think now in gender studies

we're trying to think a little bit

about how we create feminist knowledge

by just the work of trying to create space for ourselves

wherever we are.

I wonder if you might ask the poet in the room about this,

because it seeks you famously wrote

and said of women,

write yourself, your body must be heard,

which is something that might be interpreted

in multiple ways.

But I wonder if it might make sense to you

as a poet who is thinking about the body

and writing of the body.

I was actually slightly stuck on complaint.

Yeah, go for it.

Go for it.

I mean, in that I was thinking there are some poetic forms

that are actually inherent to complaint

or complaint sits within those forms.

So one form that came to mind is called a land day,

which is an Afghan women's form very specifically.

And it was sung.

So I was thinking about song and the voice.

But it's a complaint that is sung

and it sounds very beautiful.

And land day, an approximation of what that means,

you know, the translation from Pashtun is a small venomous snake.

And it's 22 syllables and so these two lines

and then a small venomous snake rises perhaps from the courtyard.

So it began, you know,

if you think of that central courtyard.

And it began in the fields.

It was a folkloric poetic form.

And in Afghan culture, you know, the idea

that sort of singing was somehow licentious

meant that it was very sort of secret and anonymous.

And I think it's really interesting to me

that the form developed its anonymity

actually made it stronger because women were willing

and in fact, very keen to...

I mean, it's also a form of this.

So it was...

As this, yeah.

It was women might write them about husbands

that had left to go to war or separation.

But it was also around, say, sort of sex

and being dissatisfied because they were secret

and they were almost gossipy

so they would tell them to their friends.

We're talking about a form that seems specific to women.

And sex who has this particular terminal

or doesn't she?

Lecture, famineine, which means the right...

Women's writing.

Women's writing.

It's hard to translate, but...

Yeah, but I'm interested in this idea

that maybe you can speak to this Mary is that

is there a form that lends itself particularly to women

in the medieval period?

Is there a particular mode of articulation

that is feminine or off-women?

Could you say that?

I think that's quite hard to say because, unfortunately,

not enough survives of female authored works for middle ages.

But certainly we have a lot of mystical writing by women.

But I think one of the things that's really interesting

about female writers of the middle ages

is the way in which they're engaging

in this kind of patriarchal discourse

and they are finding these kind of interesting strategies

to authorise and validate their right to speak and to write.

What kind of strategies are they deploying here?

Well, for example, Julian of Norwich

who wrote the first work in English

that we know was definitely written by a woman.

And she wrote two versions of her text.

One was a short text which she wrote around 1373.

And in it she says she sort of defends her right

to write as a woman and she uses this thing

called the humility topos which is very sort of standard

in the middle ages that you say that you aren't a good writer

and you shouldn't be writing.

But it's often a whiff of action.

It's a very very clear answer.

Yeah, exactly.

And she says that she's ignorant and weak and she's a woman.

But she says, should I not tell you about the goodness of God?

She's writing this revelatory text.

What's interesting is that then she revised this work

over the course of about 20 years

when she became an anchoress

and she was enclosed permanently inside a cell

to live this life of prayer and contemplation.

And in that process of revision

she removed all references to her gender

and this passage was also removed.

So she kind of de-gendered the text

and her female authorial persona disappeared.

And we're not quite sure why she did that

was that because she wanted to appeal to a broad audience

or she felt that she lacked legitimacy

as a woman writing.

These are all good questions.

I think we want to find out answers to it.

Why are women deploying strategies

in order to find authority to speak?

What are they using their voices for?

I'm actually you're listening to this.

I'm wondering whether you think,

what do you think of this idea

that there is a distinctively female voice?

Or there isn't?

I think there is.

And I think more especially as a phenomenon

makes it far more marked.

I think it polarises voices.

Do you mean in like war poetry or writing about...

I think how women speak about themselves

or through oral history.

I think through poetry as well.

I think I did work on First World War poetry

and there's a wonderful book called The Virago

Book of Women's War Poetry

and verse I think it's called

said it by Catherine Riley.

And I just I happen to come across this book

while doing my masters.

And it blew my mind

because they're these beautiful, profound,

tragic, shattering poems.

And there was bits of jingoistic elements in there as well.

But these poems were from nurses on the front line.

They were from VADs, from ambulance drivers,

from Russian women on the front line.

And I'd never heard of them.

And I'd grown up with Sassoon and Owen

and Rupert Brooks.

And it just made me think of this kind of privileging

of one voice over another.

I think that what Mary was saying

about this kind of degenering of the voice

was that to gain credibility was that

so people would read the work.

Ultimately she could communicate those ideas.

But what sort of profound about these women

from the First World War and the women I'm studying now

are from the Second World War

where I'm listening to their oral history.

They lend a broader view of war

and yet they aren't canon

because it's known as combat narcissism.

So it's when the idea of those

who've experienced direct combat

possess the authentic knowledge of all.

So it's the organizing logic that ranks voices.

So this book on these amazing poems,

I mean, there's even a poem there

that is called Doctia de Coromess

with a question mark.

And it's a direct conversation

with Wilfred Owen's Doctia de Coromess.

And so it's this privileging of one voice over the other.

So I think it's really interesting

to have an example of that de-gendering.

And then there's also an example

where that women are understanding

of constructing their wartime experiences through verse

and in my PhD research through being able to tell their stories.

You've talked about constructing their stories.

But you've also, this is the second time

you've used that word, authentic.

And I'm interested in this.

Do we think that there is an authentic voice

that a person, a woman might have

from which is, for whatever reason, concealed

or obstructed is there,

such a thing as an authentic voice?

All right, I'm looking.

Well, could I come in just to clarify something

about Ecrithio Feminine

and then to speak to this?

I think there's, this is my reading of it,

someone else might disagree,

but I think that there's a kind of contradiction

inherent in the laugh of the Medusa essay,

which is that on one hand,

she's talking about Ecrithio Feminine

as literally feminine writing,

but not saying that it's something

that women specifically do.

So her key examples are also James Joyce

and Jean-Gernet, as well as,

she says Collette and Marguerite Urasse.

So it's not necessarily something

that only women can do.

So in that sense, we can think of it

as disruptive writing or anti-patriarchal writing.

But she's also talking in that essay about women

and saying, women, write yourselves,

write your bodies, and she is specifically talking to women.

So it seems like she wants to have it both ways.

I'm not saying that there's a way that women write,

but also women, write, you should write.

Your voice is yours, you should use it.

So I think Siksu would probably say

to your question about authenticity,

that there is a way, and this is actually another epigraph

in further on in the book,

where I think she says something like,

we must kill the false woman

that is keeping the real one from breathing,

that there's this false self that we present to the world

because we think that's how we have to get along,

a bit like Ash, you were saying,

you'd like drill voice,

because that's how you have to get through it.

But there's another woman,

I don't know if it's necessarily more authentic,

but it's certainly one that feels more immediate,

that we need to sort of allow to breathe.

There are a few people in this room nodding along to that.

Sorry you were nodding.

Yes, yes, no, I think it's really interesting to think about

how hard it can be to sustain your voice

when the world that you're in

makes it hard to speak,

or the people who are receiving what you say don't hear you.

And I did this research on complaint,

talking to people who've made complaints.

So one of the things I really remember people saying to me

is I thought when I made a complaint

that it would be about having a voice,

speaking of voice,

writing myself into the world in some way,

but actually the process that you go through

can often make you feel quite alienated

from your body and your voice.

You have to adopt the institution's language.

And I think a one person who's saying,

I'm making this complaint,

I have to tell the story over and over again

to all these different people,

none of whom are speaking to each other.

So this complaint,

which is supposedly about something that's happened to me,

it ends up making my voice quieter.

So I think it's partly about what kind of voice we have,

but it's also about what kind of world receives us,

how are we heard,

and sometimes the need to get through to communicate something

can actually feel like having your voice taken away.

And I think there's nothing very difficult about that

so I want to capture it.

At one point in your book,

you say that a complaint is a retelling of a story

that needs to be got rid of.

Tell me more about that.

Well, I think I'm trying to differentiate

between the complaint that you have

and the one that you make.

And for many people when they're in a workplace environment

and international women's day is about working women,

it is about fighting for riots and equality in the workplace.

So you sort of,

they're the way in which you have to keep telling the story

of your complaint to somebody

who's appointed to receive it by the institution

and say your complaint's about sexual harassment

or then the people who are receiving that complaint

part of the institution

in which that harassment happened.

And that can feel like you have to keep getting the story

out and sometimes you get it out

and the door's closed because it's confidential

and it can feel like your complaint just disappears

into the air and maybe that person is nodding

and then it feels like your complaint goes nowhere.

And so you have to go back and you have to make it again.

And there's this compulsion to repeat.

You're the one who's repeating yourself,

but really you're making the same complaint

because the same thing keeps happening.

And it's not being covered.

The work of complaint is to get that complaint out there

so that it's no longer what you carry down,

wave down as weight,

but something that enters the world

and has a life of its own.

You're writing about something enormously different,

difficult, I think,

experiences of sexual harassment,

assault, misogyny, racism.

And you handle it very carefully, I think, in the book,

in one of the very subtle things

and pointed things you do is that you use the term

complainer rather than complainant.

And I thought that was important.

What, why do you do that?

Well, I think the word complainant sounds legalistic

and I think the word complainer,

it's very, it's full of negativity and feeling.

And that's often what it feels like to make a complaint.

It's a very much emotional work

and I think the way in which sometimes

certain complaints when you make them,

the attention isn't on what you're saying, but on you.

So it's as if you complained because you're a complainer.

Like the negativity comes from you as some sort of

quality of your character.

And there's a way, which I think,

when we're speaking complaints,

that that attention doesn't get put in the right place.

It gets put on the person

and that makes you the location of the problem.

So you expose a problem

and then you're treated as the problem.

And I think that dynamic is very familiar

to a lot of us, the ways in which then

we end up stuck in organisations

and a lot of people don't make complaints

because they fear they'll be heard as a complainer.

Other words, in other words, a trouble maker.

Yeah, you described yourself earlier

as a feminist killjoy.

And I sort of want to sit with the,

as you do with the negativity for a moment,

I think that's what you do.

You stay with the negativity

and your book asks us to attend to very serious complaints.

But smaller complaints by women

can also be dismissed.

As you said, that term complainer,

you know, women who complain, who moan or nag.

I think inevitably of,

I think of the former Prime Minister, David Cameron,

memorably telling a female MP to calm down

during a parliamentary debate.

And I remember just,

you know, the,

that's a few faces in this room.

People remember that moment.

I'm wondering if we're talking about

a wider culture in which women are

derided for being negative or for speaking up

and why, why that is.

I mean, what did Karen, you were looking at me,

maybe you were thinking,

is this, is this something you know, is this?

I was just thinking about the word shrill, actually,

and how there are these specific words

that really only apply to women men

don't get called shrill.

And this idea that we're not listened to

so when we need to raise the voice,

and we might do that in different ways,

but there's always this danger

that we could be shrill or hysterical,

and this idea of the complainer

becoming the complaint itself.

And I really love that idea.

And then also just,

I mean, I feel like I've gone through,

I don't know, but my name is Karen.

I wasn't.

And is it the elephant in the room?

Is everyone going, is she going to mention it?

The fact that her name was Karen.

I wish I'd explained for people who don't know.

Oh, yeah.

Karen has become a curious term, hasn't it,

in modern conversation for white women,

weaponising complaint.

It's a very peculiar,

how do you feel about it as a Karen?

Well, I'll also say that I am not a white woman,

I'm a woman of colour.

And so, I remember being in this park one time

at the sort of height of it,

and sort of arrived at this picnic,

and then I was like,

oh, hey everyone, my name's Karen,

and then, in fact,

all these white middle-class people looked at me like,

oh, awful.

And I was like, yeah, I was going to call the police,

but I can't see any black people.

As a joke, obviously.

And, yeah, it was kind of intense.

And this idea that perhaps I might never be able

to complain about anything again,

which was also awful.

I mean, that's kind of joky,

but I think that there were many strands to that.

Well, I think it's very interesting

that there isn't a male equivalent of a Karen,

it seems to me,

that is a particular,

a derogatory in lots of ways,

I think, temple woman,

a particular kind, however,

unpleasant their behaviour might be.

I think it is interesting in that way.

I'm wondering if there were,

if there were medieval women

who were up against similar constraints, Mary,

were there women who were worried about being complainers,

who were complainers?

What were our medieval sisters up to?

There's a wonderful French writer called Christine de Pisan,

who wrote a book called The Book of the City of Ladies,

and she wrote it in response to the Ramon de la Rose,

which was this incredibly popular medieval French poem,

but she thought it was incredibly sexist,

and so she decided to create this poem

that would be a kind of catalogue of stories of women

from Scripture and mythology

who were noble and wonderful

and women who we should admire.

And what's really wonderful in this poem is she describes,

she creates this kind of imaginary city,

and she says that her words are the bricks

that are used to build this city,

to protect women from attack.

And it's really wonderful because it feels like

she's using the form as this kind of protective armor,

and she's engaging in this very lively way

with the literary debates.

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It's 2009 and we're in the German mountains.

Amanda straps himself into a car on the world's

most dangerous racetrack.

He whispers to himself.

It's time to put my balls on the dashboard.

As he starts the engine.

In 15 minutes, he's in an ambulance on conscious.

In 15 years, he's a billionaire.

This is Total Wolf, Formula One's most powerful team boss,

and the breakout star of Drive to Survive.

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How Total Wolf Made His Billions.

Listen wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

Of her day.

Yeah, what's actually going to come in?

Yeah, I love this idea of kind of building a fortress.

My soldier brain kicked in there a little bit.

But it reminded me of certain words

that we used to use for writing soldiers reports.

And I noticed throughout my career

that certain words would be sort of attached

to women soldiers in particular positions and not to men.

So a male soldier might be written as assertive.

And a female soldier at the same time would be bossy.

So that there would be sort of a native connotations.

Whereas I think if a woman is assertive

and quite transactional in the military,

it's not taken very well.

And this idea of using discourse,

I mean, I see a lot in my current research

with these special operations executive

and the women operatives,

not just the field agents,

but the secretaries and the administration staff.

They lack a discourse almost to be able to construct

their experiences of espionage.

They sort of borrow from the readily available men's discourse

of James Bond and Born.

And all the wonderful spy films that I love and I enjoy.

So the way they talk about their wartime experience

and how they construct them is very interesting to listen to.

And they sort of have this kind of quality of obliviousness.

And I think that's really interesting

because we're sort of saying where's the authentic voice?

So do we have an authentic voice?

Whereas I feel that these women,

to be able to tell their story,

they have to adopt a level of obliviousness

where their wartime service.

And this wasn't all women, some of them were very, very fiery,

which I love.

But quite a lot of these oral histories,

it's a passive voice.

It was done to them.

That their wartime service happened to them.

And they lack the sort of assertiveness

that I see in some of the oral histories

of my male operatives.

And I always find that very, very interesting.

So I almost feel like it's on a bit of a spectrum.

There's a bit of a paradox sometimes with women's voice.

Sometimes you've got women who complain,

which is really powerful, the Me Too movement.

Pearl Withington, my one of my favorite SOE operatives,

complained because she wasn't awarded a military cross

because they said, oh, but she didn't do anything military.

And she said, hang on a second.

I was far from my stengum from the hip against German patrols

with the marquee.

And she wrote a letter, and she's using her words.

What was I doing?

Pearl Withington.

And she writes a letter saying, no, I'm not having this civil honor.

And I quote, she says, there was nothing

civil in what I did.

And she wanted a military honor because she felt like she deserved that.

And that was a gendering of her wartime experience.

I like that we've gone from carons to Christine's of Pazan

and Pearl Withington's.

I like that move.

And the spectrum, maybe.

And we were sitting with the negative feminist kill

joy space that you describe Sara.

But your book is also about art, the art of complaining

and the activism of complaining.

And I wondered if we could attend to the art bit for a moment.

What do you mean by the art of complaining?

Well, I was really amazed, actually,

when I was listening to people talk about complaints

because people were sharing really hard stories of really hard

experiences.

And one of the things that came up for me

was just how creative people are.

So maybe they don't get anywhere with their complaint.

Maybe their complaint ends up buried.

One student said, hers went to the complaint graveyard.

You can imagine the haunting.

And so people would find other ways

to express their complaints.

So one person, Zaya Bockenstein, wrote to me

about how she turned her complaints into songs.

These were complaints about racism in museums.

And then she would sing them, she said,

with a monotonousness that captured the feeling

and the frustration of not being heard.

So you can take the experience of not getting anywhere

into the chance to make your complaint in another way.

People performed their complaints in meetings

in assemblies.

I heard of complaints turned into prayers

or complaints put on placards and taken out

onto marches to demand for a free Palestine

or demand for an end to Transphobia.

So there's a way in which there was all

of this creativity of expression that the experience

of coming up against those institutional walls

doesn't lead people to stop.

It just makes them find another way

to get their complaint through and to get it out.

You write in the book, there can be an art

to how we express our complaints.

There can be art in where we express them.

Take, for example, the guerrilla girls.

I mean, they're one of your first touch points

so I'm a little bit more about that.

Yeah, were they an exhibition

called the Complaints Department

that take gallery immediately

where they would invite people to come in

and make complaints during office hours?

And then they also had this large table

when people were invited to come

and write their complaints down.

And then they put all those complaints up

to create a complaint wall.

And this complaint wall is covered

by all these posters, they're really, really colorful.

It's a very beautiful and vibrant wall of complaint.

And it's a beauty and a vibrancy

that comes from a recognition of struggle,

not because of the absence of struggle.

And that's a very, very powerful technique

and they took their complaints departments

all over the world.

So sometimes we need to give people

alternative platforms

so that they can bring their complaints to that platform

and also put their complaints

on the same wall as other people

because then you get a real sense

of the collectivity of complaint.

It's not just one learning little complaint,

you're with others

and there's something by powerful about that collectivity.

Lauren, I know you've thought about the guerrilla girls.

I was going to ask you about them.

Yeah, I was thinking about the guerrilla girls.

And I love the example that Sara gave

with this complaint wall.

It's so amazing.

But I'm thinking, because my thinking is shifted

from art and art monsters to now

thinking about music and vocal break,

I'm really thinking about someone like Kathleen Hannah

who would get up on stage

and talk about the complaint as like a song form.

Like I think bikini kill is really elevated that

to a total punk art form.

She was oftentimes singing

as a lead singer of bikini kill

about sexual assault and sexism

and the girls that she looked up to

and like there's one song that's like double dare.

Like one of the lyrics that I was just thinking

has gone from my mind.

But I was thinking of her in connection

at the intersection of Karen

what you were saying about shrillness

and Sara about the complaint.

That it really is this kind of gesture of space taking

for Kathleen Hannah to get up on stage

and just like wail in this very kind of like

sing-songy little girl voice, you know,

dare you to do what you will, you know.

You have what she said, you get so emotional baby.

Like that's the lyrics, sorry.

I don't know if I'm allowed to read these lyrics

without paying a lot of money.

But yeah, just this kind of like me

and then the importance of the bikini kill show, right?

She's saying, you know, make room in the concert hall

for girls to be there at the front.

She said, girls to the front, boys in the room get back.

Go to the back of the room and make space

for the girls to come to the front

and like lash out and sing together

and see how what a bass guitar works

and just kind of be part a visceral part

of that kind of herring.

Which is what we found free thinking tonight

girls to the front, right?

Herringing.

I think when we think about fiction or song or art,

what happens to women who complain?

I was, I was thinking of Tracy Evin, actually,

because she has a retrospective at

take more than in London right now

and for decades,

and when I was a teenager she was regarded,

I think distastefully as an exhibitionist

or just too much.

And then there were lots of women like me who loved her

and felt almost elicited about how much we loved her.

But now the tagline, literally the tagline for her show

is step into the tender confessional world

of Tracy Evin and it seems to me something

has shifted in the way that we think about

those kinds of women.

Do you think, am I right?

Can you think of examples in fiction,

art, song of women who complain on what happens to them?

Do they get retrospectives in the take more than 30 years

later?

I think there's a level of whether you are part of

an environment that allows space for that complaint,

because the military is not an institution

that kind of gives space to that,

especially for women.

So I think there's a level of invisibility there

and I think that's the challenge of being

a military historian and being particularly interested

in women's experiences as well.

Has that environment changed?

Is it changing?

I think it's changing and I have to say

I think it's because there's a very slow culture change

that is occurring and it is driven, in my opinion,

by women that I'm very fortunate to work

with Dr. Hannah West, Professor Nazi Teber.

They're running a research study at the moment

that I'm very privileged to be a part of

where they're using voice and song sound

to see if they can create a tool to help women

understand their storied wartime experiences.

So there's this idea that can we create a tool

where sound and a woman's voice,

where it's given space to communicate, to construct,

to kind of, like Lauren said, be shrill,

step into that power.

Can that give a veteran, a female veteran,

a woman veteran, 40% of women veterans

don't identify as veterans by the way?

But can that type of tool, that methodological tool,

give that space for women to complain?

Because there's lots of complaints,

obviously been in the news quite a lot about

the British army, sexual harassment,

women being part of a culture that is particularly challenging

and it was difficult and I,

and with hope I say it is changing,

but I think it's because of these pioneering,

such studies where there's this kind of recognition

of struggle, I think I can't remember who sort of mentioned

that recognition of struggle.

There's a recognition now, there's an acknowledgement

that war is a universal experience,

but how you experience it is very gendered in that way.

You're listening to Free Thinking with me,

Shahidabari, and my guest on BBC Radio 4.

We're also available as the Arts and Idols podcast

on BBC Sounds.

We're marking International Women's Day,

which is on Sunday, but every weekday

is International Women's Day.

If you're listening to Women's Hour on BBC Radio 4,

my new to Friday at 10am.

We also have a great trove of Free Thinking episodes

you might like on our webpage

and especially curated playlist titled Women of the World.

Karen, the confessional poetry of women

might also have been called complaint poetry,

I was thinking, I was thinking,

but William Wordsworth is every bit

as confessional as Sylvia Plath,

but I wonder if there's a difference in the way

that we regard women who write

from personal experience and men,

or do you think?

Yeah.

That's definitely come up.

I remember with my first collection,

An Avery of Small Birds,

where I wrote about the experience of my son dying

during the birth.

And I remember one reviewer saying,

this is so autobiographical,

it can't be considered poetry.

And I was like, that's very strange way to think of it.

And I think that there is definitely a raft

of different sort of ideas or rules

or perceptions in terms of what happens

when women write about their lives

in a way that is intimate, true, or authentic,

possibly domestic quotidian.

I'm very interested in the quotidian actually

in that sense of thinking about big macro-political events,

but we don't go to a special booth to do that.

We tend to do it while we're walking down the road

or doing the washing up or taking the dog for a walk,

or feeding the cat, that kind of thing.

So this idea that those two things can't coexist

and that there's a hierarchy of thought that takes place.

I mean, for me as well, the body,

thinking back to that question around the body,

that idea that poetry isn't a place

where we also want feeling

and that feeling is just as strong

in terms of how we create knowledge

as thought in some ways,

but it's the combination of the two things

and then creating and calibrating the balance in the work.

That's what I'm really interested in

and formally I'm interested in that as well.

Well, let's talk about that.

This is taking us to your new poem.

It's a long poem called Unsafe and it's described

as a disenchanted walk through the afterlife

of colonialism across London and LA.

And you're going to give us a reading for it very kindly,

but perhaps you could just sell us a little about it

before that.

Well, I'm going to read a section, just a very small section.

There's a long section in the book around trees

and what trees mean to us

and what being in forests might mean to us

and what that means ecologically

and it's quite split up

and the main part of the poem

is in a form called as we hit Sue

because I was thinking about this, you know,

sort of what, you know,

how do I express myself poetically

in this distinctly female way?

And what I realized about myself as a writer

is that I often express myself and my identity

through the forms that I use.

And I use this form called as we hit Sue

which is a 10th century Japanese form

that originated in the pillow book by Saishunagan

and it was revolutionary at the time that book

because she wrote it in colloquial of Japanese

or Japanese of the sort of phonetic characters

which was used predominantly by women

and Chinese characters were used by men

and for official matters and matters of law

and that kind of thing.

And so as we hit Sue actually took off

as a distinctly women's form after that book

and it was so popular that men started to write

as we hit Sue's but anonymously

because they didn't sort of think

that they were sort of fancy enough

but it's what I love about it is

that you have this sense of patchwork

and juxtaposition and silence

and different things.

I'm logging to you.

I'm logging to you.

Good.

Okay, so I'll just read a little bit of this.

Last night Ed and I went for a walk in the dark

with a moon round to the clearing.

Last night Ed and I went for a walk.

It was dark.

There was moonlight.

He knew his way in the dark

along and off the path.

I slip my arm around the rough barked

slender waist of a young oak

so compatible and surprisingly warm.

My fingers trace adolescent names

scarred into the trunk a wonky heart.

A tree is a complex being

that has relationships with soil and air

and Jack reminds me Mycelia

as well as other trees roots and branches

and insects with teeth.

When thirsty a tree emits a noise high and fast

audible to humankind when slowed down a thousand times

a tree must deal with many teeth.

A tree is a mass of tentacles

and a sea of leaves.

Are you wearing a long com?

The woman with the long head, Alsacean, asks.

Everyone has a dog.

There are no women walking in the woods without a dog.

All the walkers are women.

Don't you have a dog?

This is how you learn to stay alive.

Sunlight streaming through branches.

All young girls must remain alert

in the holly thicket.

The princess from Frozen is deflated

on a punctured balloon.

Other debris includes a red and white remnant

of crime scene tape.

Thank you, continues.

When you start that reading it,

that walk in the woods sounds almost romantic

slipping the arms around the tree.

But then it morphs into something darker and dangerous.

And something I think sadly familiar to lots of women

who walk at night alone, I think.

You're tapping into something, threatening?

Well, I think maybe because I grew up in the city.

But I wrote that on an island in Seattle

at a women's writing retreat.

And it was really amazing.

And everyone was so excited to be there.

And we had these little log cabins

and we'd go back to them at night.

And I was terrified because I was like,

oh my God, I'm alone in the woods.

And I realized it was sort of like a teenage hangover

from watching all these...

Screamers, horror screamers, and he's in the house

and the stalker and all of those kind of narratives

that really paved our consciousness in a way that

we don't even really know.

And it's obviously the big threat to women's safety

is not walking in the woods.

That's actually really quite good for us.

We've realized walking in the woods,

the danger is at home, in our homes, usually with partners.

That's where the most dangerous place for women is.

Well, one of them.

And so it doesn't sort of, it's not really based on logic.

But I was really interested in this idea

that I started with this sort of very bucolic thought.

And they are really beautiful places.

But also this idea that, what am I noticing there?

It's a walking poem too, I mean, that is a tradition

to the poet walking and talking at the same time.

And one of your reference points is the late romantic poet,

John Claire, who is a benevolent president, I think.

Why is he here?

He said, because I was thinking a lot about enclosure,

I wrote the book in between LA and London.

I was living in LA for a bit.

And I just felt you can't really go to LA

without thinking about the huge, disparateed wealth

and access to space and environment,

and good environments, and housing,

and all of those things, which obviously

is something that affects women even more,

you know, even more disparate level than the men.

And black people, more than white people.

And so I was thinking about all of the precarity

that we experience in the world now,

and the agency that we have as humans, as individuals,

as women, and also about the safety and unsafety

of the black body.

Yes.

And particularly now, if we think about what's

happening in America.

I'm wondering what you're thinking, Laura,

listening to this, because you wrote a book

about the French tradition of the theme of plena,

that all the plenus.

I mean, what are you thinking listening to?

Yeah, no, I'm thinking that when you've become a customer

to living in the city, there's nothing more terrifying

than, like, silent country, anything could happen.

And probably I have seen too many screen films,

like teen screen films when I was a teenager.

But yeah, I mean, it's we're about to publish

the tenure anniversary version of plenus.

And so I'm thinking all over again about safety

and public spaces.

And I think when I published that book,

I was really eager to talk about the positive aspects

of the roles that cities have played for women

in a very empowering way throughout history,

because we were talking so much about street harassment

in 2016 when it first came out.

And now I've just been sitting here

thinking listening to Sara talking about complaint

and how I think that I was trying to present

probably a two positive spin on things,

if that makes any sense.

I was kind of counterbalancing for the fact

that we were complaining so much about street harassment.

I was like, but cities are great places too.

And now, I mean, after the sort of relentless experiences

of the non-safety of public space

in America over the last six months or something.

But maybe we need that dream, that more romantic vision.

I don't know.

I think I'm just the last ten years have been pretty bad.

People's not just women, but you know,

people's safety in public, especially in the country

I was raised in.

Yeah.

And it is this week marks, I think, with Fifth Anniversary

of the murder of Sara everyone as well,

which is just thinking about around my walk here tonight.

I think many women were thinking about her.

I want to come back, Karen, to the reading and the end of it,

and the image of the punctured balloon in the thicket,

which is, in a way, it's sort of pathetic,

isn't it, the deflated princess Elsa from Frozen?

I know that balloon, it's in my house right now,

but in the book there's also another image

of a photo of a decapitated doll.

I think there's something deeply disturbing

about those images, isn't there?

Oh.

About girlhood and the domestic being violated in that way.

I think...

The bandendant.

Yeah.

I mean, I haven't really thought of that sort of doll

quite in that way, but I did find it in the woods.

And it was a bit scary.

So it was kind of part of that whole section of the book.

I think that I was really thinking,

I mean, the actual, the photographs in the book,

I mean, for me, how they operate is,

they're just my phone photos,

but I was really thinking more about how the photograph

and the images become part of the lexicon,

that the phone image,

and so, you know, with the greatest respect to photography,

I decided to include them because I think that they're almost,

the phone is almost part of our body now.

And so if you take a photograph with just your phone,

it feels like it's not there.

It's almost like we're sort of hybrid

with these sort of, you know, the cyborg manifesto.

I'm sort of manipulating our discussion

to get to Princess Elsa from Frozen,

because I also want to give a shout out to Ariel,

Little Mermaid Lauren,

because in your book,

your voice is likened to Ariel,

JD Benson, in fact, singing Song from Little Mermaid,

and you have very mixed feelings about that.

But I wondered if the figure of the Little Mermaid

and the history that the idea that a sort of freedom

might be one at some cost

has been kind of a foundational myth for us

in this discussion's idea that, you know,

there is maybe an acceptable way to speak,

and maybe it comes to higher cost,

and how do we counter that?

I don't know, what do you think?

I think on reflection,

and this is part of what we're doing

in our research study at the moment,

is in trying to find a tool, or create a tool,

to understand women's wartime experiences,

we kind of came to this idea that we were like,

ah, well, where are we now?

Because we're trying to figure out who we are

when we've had to sort of fit in for so long.

I think we might be with Princess Elsa from Frozen,

and this is a someone whose house is currently,

you know, dated with Elsa Merch,

and I want to give that,

our last word to Elsa from Frozen,

because she has a big number called Let It Go,

beloved by five-year-olds around the country in the world,

and it's a huge song, a thrilling song, a song,

just five-year-old.

Belltow, it's a lot of ladies too.

And it's a song about belting out to Let It Go.

I wonder, Lauren, am I going to give the last word to you?

What's your singers verdict on that

as an anthem for women's voices?

No, I think it's fabulous, absolutely let it go.

I mean, I have reservations about, you know,

the particular kind of voice that sort of predominates

that, like, belt, we just have to hear it all the time.

It's like the sound of female emancipation.

But no, I think, absolutely let it go.

Yeah, well, maybe that's what we have to do tonight,

and we're going to have to let our program go.

Thank you so much to our guests, Lauren Elkin,

Mary Wellesley, Karen McCarthy Wolf,

Ashley Percival-Borley, and Sarah Ahmed.

Sarah's book, No, Is Not Alonely Utterance,

and Karen's poem, Unsafe, Are Out Now.

And Lauren's book, Vocal Break,

will be published in May.

Thank you also to my producer, Luke Mulhall,

the optimistic or laughter, my icy Elsa.

And the studio manager, Never Missyrian,

joined Matthew, that style maven here next week,

to talk taste.

It's 2009 and we're in the German mountains,

a man straps himself into a car

on the world's most dangerous racetrack.

He whispers to himself.

It's time to put my balls on the dashboard.

As he starts the engine.

In 15 minutes, he's in an ambulance,

unconscious, in 15 years, he's a billionaire.

This is Total Wolf, Formula One's most powerful team boss,

and the breakout star of Drive to Survive.

This week on Good Bad Billionaire,

how Total Wolf made his billions.

Listen wherever you get your BBC podcasts.