我們ＷＯＭＡＮ By 林其螢

Contents:

Origin/ Victim/ Persecutor/ Love

Creation Insight

Many people consider literature as a vague and unrealistic way of thinking, yet I think literature is a reflection of life.

Those feminist texts mirrored my personal experience. Therefore, I chose to visualize the texts and write about my mirrored self.

Tool: Photoshop, AI

Tint:554150 6aab90

The first time I recognized: I am a woman.

We should not be Adam’s ribs. We are not.

We are the natural and essential vibes, just as the arteries of the world.

Agnes Varda talked about whether she was a feminist director in an interview. She said, “In this rampant age of feminism, I did not film the movies for declaring feminism. My movies are all about women, and that is because I am a woman. I am a woman and I understand women. That’s why I made the movies.”

The reason I made this portfolio is that I had been so deeply affected by Agnes Varda. Instead of merely disclosing the harshness and pain that many women experienced, I tried to tell true stories. The stories were sometimes so agonizing to tell, yet they were so distinctly precious for me. That was why I made this portfolio.

As time changes, how people interact around the world becomes different. However, it is undeniable that people still hurt each other when they love. In a society that gender equality has been gradually disseminated among the public, stories of being a physical woman still differ from other stories. I truly appreciate the stories of women.

Realities and stories are fettering to an inseparable braid, which is US.

Origin

To be honest, I don’t know why I always wear like I’m going to a funereal.

In oriental society, black is inauspicious. Women should be in red. For my parents, tradition is like a holy book, which is always true and respectful. They threw this book at my childhood, adolescence, and life. In the fragments I selected from Daddy, I feel those seemingly different yet similar repressions.

Selected text: Sylvia Plath< Daddy >

Color: 2d2c54　　f49d6e　　96465c

To be honest, I don’t know why I always wear like I’m going to a funereal. I know that he didn’t like it, but I still wore that black sweater often, which was given by my neighbor. He wanted to show me: he was GOD. God was something that took you to heaven when you were obedient, and that took you to hell when you were not.

So, my sweater had been thrown away.

“God is my Father.”

Until now, I still remember that day. I hold my fist and wanted to kill him. My tears were bursting with anger. I didn’t wish him dead. I wanted his love. I want to kill that GOD deep-rooted in him.

Sometimes I wanted to go back and tell them. I didn’t like that they decided my new clothing should be pink without asking me. Tell them that they looked black in my eyes. Tell them that every time they scolded me, I would be broken into pieces silently. They made me feel like I was too young to understand their selfish kindness. I didn’t know how to dress, what to study, and how to grow like a teenage girl. The only thing I knew was that the schoolwork and my parents were those glass pieces in my nightmare. Once I disobeyed, they would stuff the glass pieces into my throat without a reason, and then they left with the words: “It’s for your good! You should live up to your parents' expectations!”

I woke up. Those glass pieces were still clinging to my face. Tears hurt my eyes, and my tears were all black.

“ You saved me.”

Giving birth had been considered the most important mission in a woman’s life. “Mother’s virtue depends on her child.” This slang was a nightmare to all women, including my mother. I believed that every woman had to endure enormous pressure, either before or after pregnancy. Some chose to neglect, some ducked out, and some left. In The Yellow Wallpaper, I felt women’s pain and their male partner’s negligence.

Selected text: Charlotte Perkins＜　The Yellow Wallpaper　＞

Color: 4a7b9d ccbf68 54577c

“You saved me.”

My mother kept saying it for 20 years.

That was a time when I was too little to remember, Mother was stepping on the new grass carpet in our house, staring into the glittering but impermeable night in Taipei. She was pregnant with my brother and was holding my hand.

She intended to jump. Her throat was full of sorrow. Innumerable sorrow flowing in her blood, needles on the bottom of her foot. She tottered in her life.

Perhaps, Perhaps it was the care a mother could not get rid of. She said, “I looked at you for a while, and felt your brother kicking me. Maybe it was the moment I decided to live. You saved my life.”

My mother kept saying the same words and tried to persuade me: We were inseparable lives. As the old Chinese saying goes, “The flesh and blood are inseparable.”

Those feelings beyond memories—the insensible birth and inseparable death—were also torturing me. We were bound together. The fact was those women not so far away from me still bound their foot. Men neglected the deformed bones and the badly mutilated heart. Generation after generation, we abused each other, hoping we were alike: give birth and you will have a new life. Ah, you saved me.

We were going to live painfully together. The family was like this: no one would be abandoned, we were inseparable.

I cannot say/ I cannot stand.

In Taiwan, there is an indie band called Collage. In an interview, Natsuko, the lead vocalist, talked about her grandmother. She said that the language barrier had led to their estrangement. What she said and Elizabeth Bishop ‘s Sestina reminded me of my grandmother. Her face was vague, but that didn’t mean I didn’t love her. I believe that the grandmothers would return to our lives differently.

Selected text: Elizabeth Bishop <Sestina>

Color: c83e4d 435284

I cannot say/ I cannot stand.

Mother's tongue was gradually forgotten. The cramming and short-answer questions were what was left in history.

I didn’t remember when that was. You smiled at me and did not say anything. I could not remember your voice and could only faintly remember your hair. I could still smell the fragrance from the kitchen, but what you said was blurred.

Mother said you always stood at the end of Xinshu Road, not willing to leave until we got on the bus. The last time I saw you, you were on the bed in a room full of chemical odors. Just as Grandfather, you refused to talk. In my dream, death means loss of contact.

What if I could see you again. “Another night being alone. / Rain dropped endlessly on the street. / Memories were like the undulating sea. / Are you there?”

In my dream, I borrowed Mother’s tongue. I wanted to touch your heart and leave with you at the end of the street. This time, I would tattoo your words on my shoulder, never leaving them behind.

You were unsure if your mother loved you.

I once wrote in a poem: “Since the moment you left me, we were different individuals.” I believe that either the life-bore or the life-bearing was suffered.

Selected text: Sylvia Plath＜Morning Song＞

Color: f4b942 495867

You were unsure if your mother loved you or not. After all, our mouth is too far away from our heart. I knew that kinship didn’t come to real intimacy but more a genetic connection. It was a reciprocal relationship, which was so weak and so much beyond love.

I had a car accident in my junior year. I again cried to death in another morning. The injury was not simply a wound to cover with a bandage, nor could it be taken care of in the emergency room. You heard everyone’s blaming, to the degree that it seemed you just murdered someone. The avalanche of the world made you feel that even crying was shameful.

I didn’t intend to make you worry. I wanted to let you know that I was able to live independently. We could think of, take care of, and understand each other. We could be like friends, but we didn’t have to be bound together.

You didn’t say that. You said you were hurt. You said I never trusted you. You said it seemed that parents are so inconsequential. However, you never knew that I had been struggling with emotional disorders. Stay silent is the best I could do. Language is a knife. I didn’t want to drill holes in your heart.

“I don’t want to work hard anymore. Never.” That was what I wanted to say when I quarreled with you. I never felt you truly loved me. Once I was not who you wanted, you could get rid of me.

Those who hadn’t fallen asleep became stars under the mountains in Hualien. Life may not be satisfactory even we tumbled through the lifelong journey. The weakness of love always made it so hard for us that we were not willing to give up such a relationship.

The Victims

Why was I born with a hole?

Having a romantic relationship in high school was like being in the fog. We never listened and were never understood. Until we grew up, we knew that was a formidable catastrophe. In The Story of An Hour, the woman’s attitude toward her husband’s death was from heaven to hell. Such ups and downs were so similar to my painful enlightenment, which I came to recognize later. We had thought we were in paradise, but we were actually in the inferno.

Selected text: Kate Chopin ＜The Story of An Hour＞

Color: 11dbd5　　522198　　ef7ceb

Why was I born with a hole? The flaw was born; the nail was destined to stab into my sensitive heart.

“Shall a thirteen-year-old teenager have a romantic relationship?” That was the topic in one of the health education classes. My mother felt ridiculous. Why wouldn’t teenagers study and they were thinking of having a relationship? However, adolescence is the most fatuous period. The school romance dramas were filmed; parents and teachers thought that their refusal could impede our amorous adventure; girls increase their advantage in school by utilized those male seniors who were accused of “sexual predators”; boys thought they were undefeatable with the inherent gun......The reality of youth was so hilarious a decade later.

I was bewitched by his gun.

Guns are everywhere in men: brains, fingers, and penis. Those things on them would make me suffer, yet no one told me that. I thought because I was so adorable that he had to use his fingers to tear my pudenda; I thought I was not a virgin because he told me I didn’t bleed; I thought he filled my mouth with his fetid penis was because he loved me.

In the dampness of their mouths, there were malicious bullets. The hilarious adolescence. And those didactic but hypocritical adults skirted around the issues. At last, those men who laughed at me were all gone. They laughed at my hole and my defects, leaving me naked in the ditch, afraid of false sunlight desiccating my heart again.

Losing virginity. You thought you didn’t kill, but my innocuous heart towards the world was dead.