Blue Eyes and Lost Daughters

Nevertheless She Persisted,  recycled denim and clothing labels

By Michèle Fandel Bonner

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Oceans

I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths,
against a great thing.
                    And nothing
happens! Nothing…Silence…Waves…

    –Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,
and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?

–Juan Ramon Jimenez
Translated by Robert Bly

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During a sojourn in the central desert of Australia a few years ago, a good friend had an unexpected conversation with an aboriginal elder.

“Ah, he said.” You are from North America. That’s where you have the Jesus songline.”

While songlines are the sacred domain of the aboriginal people, the ease with which that elder linked the soil of a different landscape with a conceptual construct struck me deeply. In Australia, these “dreaming tracks” are part of an extensive system of other knowing, heritage and connection. Life revolves around the partnership between a human and a particular songline. Aboriginal people regard all land as sacred, so the songs must be continually sung to keep the land “alive.”

I have come to hold this idea as more than just a metaphor or a poetic frame for considering consciousness and connection. Creativity—the portal to that which does not yet exist—has been a primary concern for most of my lifetime as an artist. But even with the abundance of scientific and neurological efforts to map, parse and identify this human capacity, it is still a wide open field full of of mystery, wonder and astonishment.

Our stories of creativity can resemble the experience of encountering a songline or be like that of Jimenez’s poem, striking against a “great thing” that does not yet register. (“Nothing … Silence … Waves…”) But as Jimenez suggests, transformations can happen that our cognition needs time to grasp.

Sometimes the next projects are obvious and above ground. Many brilliant creatives find a subsequent “excavation site” adjacent to their current work. That’s a familiar format, but it doesn’t preclude free soloing in search of the unexpected, the nonlinear, the profoundly personal. Then there are other circumstances when the work coming forward, personally or collectively, has a timeline ripening on its own terms.

Playwright Lydia Diamond went to college knowing she was not being given access to the canon of African American literature in her classes. She decided to go in search on her own. “When I read The Bluest Eye [by Toni Morrison], I still had a strange response. The themes were too close to me or too painful. I deluded myself into thinking it was because it was beyond me. The writing was piercing, and it was easier to tell myself, ‘I don’t understand.’”

With time Morrison’s extraordinary book moved through her. “There is pain in the novel—the structure has hurt us, and the way in which it has made us hurt ourselves,” Diamond writes. “Often enough we African Americans don’t get the opportunity to say, ‘This is the source of my dysfunction, and its not all my fault.’”

Years later Diamond was asked to adapt Morrison’s novel into a play for Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. This opportunity came at a particularly seminal time in her life.

In her statement, Why I Had to Adapt The Bluest Eye, Diamond writes:

Frieda and Claudia, towards the end of the novel, talk about a newborn boy; they talk about the little circles of “O” in his hair. I was reading about this little brown baby that these characters were praying would survive, and I was holding my own little boy, and the text was just heartbreaking. My little baby had circles of “O” in his hair too. And right then I realized that I was adapting The Bluest Eye for Baylor, my son, and it was the most empowering and frightening and wonderful thing.

While The Bluest Eye exists powerfully in so many different dimensions—African American culture, race, class, gender, family, violence, literary voice—there was a moment when Diamond had her own sense of hitting up against something down deep. She encountered the immensity of that novel through her pivotal experience of motherhood, a creative origin story that is deeply personal and authentically grounded.

Like Diamond finding a personal footing in adapting Morrison’s novel, Maggie Gyllenhaal also entered into an adaption of another woman’s novel: Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter. Her response to the book was instantaneous.

Like The Bluest Eye, Ferrante’s novel is a complex and multilayered book. (Ferrante herself said that writing it was a venture into “dangerous waters without a life preserver.”) It is a fiercely told female story, offered without overlays of cultural expectations or myths. Like Morrison’s book, it is not easy to read.

In her editorial in the Guardian in 2018, Maggie Gyllenhaal is filming one of my books. It’s her story to tell now, Ferrante outlined her reasons for giving Gyllenhaal the rights to her book. (This excerpt is long, but its message is so essential.)

It’s important for me – for her, for all women – that her work be hers and turn out well. Mine already exists, with its strengths and defects. In the great warehouse of the arts, set up mainly by men, women have for a relatively short time been seeking the means and opportunities to give a form of their own to what they have learned from life. So I don’t want to say: you have to stay inside the cage that I constructed. We’ve been inside the male cage for too long – and now that that cage is collapsing, a woman artist has to be absolutely autonomous. Her search shouldn’t encounter obstacles, especially when it’s inspired by the work, by the thought, of other women.

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Being co-opted into the long, authoritative tradition created by men should not be the cost of making art. The stakes are higher: women have to contribute to an artistic genealogy of our own that stands up – in terms of intelligence, refinement, skill, richness of invention, emotional density – to the male tradition. In other words, we need to emphasize the force of our works – a force that is increasingly asserting itself, and profoundly modifying the sensibility of even the best men.

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There is nothing wrong with a man wanting to make a film from my books: in fact, it is a positive sign. But in that case, I would tend not to be acquiescent. Even if he had a strongly defined vision of his own, I would ask him to respect my view, to adhere to my world, to enter the cage of my story without trying to drag it into his. It will do him more good, perhaps, than me.

Gyllenhaal’s film is astounding, and it exemplifies much of the vision Ferrante outlined for this project in her Guardian statement. The method in which the story is adapted—a difficult transition from the interior dialogue that is the book—is frontal, intimate, honest, complex. This is a different kind of story telling, spoken from a place that is not familiar. So much we have been trained to expect in a film about a woman is not being offered, replaced instead with taut strappings on a provisional armature because, well, that’s what our lives are. Provisional.

In discussing her filmmaking process with Steven Colbert at the Montclair Film Festival in October, Gyllenhall used terms to describe the filmmaking process that will not align easily in an industry skewed male for so long. What matters most for Gyllenhaal in making a film? Everyone feeling loved and seen. Permitting each person to bring their best and offer it up. For Gyllenhall in her first directorial project, the operative metaphor for directing was the familiar: as a mother or parent, making sure everyone has what they need.

A friend who is conversant with the ruthless bottom line of the film making business told me she found Gyllenhaal’s description of her collaborative process too soft edged and hard to believe. But as Ferrante wrote, “being co-opted into the long, authoritative tradition created by men should not be the cost of making art.” Based on results, Gyllenhaal came up with something different, and she pulled it off. (Out on the film festival circuit, their squad was as good as the “Love Train, Join hands!”)

In a more serious moment, Gyllenhaal also talked about the need to be brave, to go down to the darkest place to find that little sprout of life. “Pushing that away leads to a kind of deadness,” she said.
Not surprisingly, the established old guard film world isn’t eager to get on board with these unfamiliar methods of filmmaking and storytelling. Many are of the other gender of course. (The New Yorker’s Richard Brody was particularly imperious, claiming Gyllenhall’s film was a “reduction of a literary source to the framework of a plot…there is no Elena Ferrante of filmmaking.”)

You are on the wrong songline, sir.

Giving women the space to be “absolutely autonomous”–as Ferrante knows is essential—is of course no guarantee for a project’s success. “Women have to contribute to an artistic genealogy of our own that stands up – in terms of intelligence, refinement, skill, richness of invention, emotional density – to the male tradition.” Like the slow burn of the Bluest Eye through Diamond’s consciousness, some things take time to get there and to get better.

The Huntington is currently featuring a production of Diamond’s The Bluest Eye at the Calderwood Pavilion in Boston. Directed by Awoye Timpo with engaged performances by Hadar Busia-Singleton, Brittany Laurelle and Alexandra King, the play blends traditional tableau vivant storytelling with a starkly modern, minimal set. Staged in the round, we are seated around a circular platform-cum-altar as this modern day myth of violence and injustice inexorably unfolds. This tragedy is writ in small letters, through the lives of young girls, with an outcome still so common in our lives that we still don’t have the means to properly grasp its horrifying and persistent outcome.

The Bluest Eye deserves mastery in every telling, but saying doesn’t make it so. The performance I attended had difficulty holding the throughline tension so important in the arc of this inexorably tragic story. The ability to tighten and adjust the tension of a performance is one of the great advantages of live theatre, and I hope that limpness can be modulated. Life is provisional after all, and so are our projects. That is particularly true during a pandemic.

Being given the space to miss the mark—all part of that absolute autonomy that is so necessary–is also an essential part of how new ways will come into form. New songlines. New strikings down deep. New ways of telling stories that are right there, under our noses, without cages or constraints. In the words of Gyllenhaal, “the great gift Ferrante gave me was her anonymous, cosmic, feminine vote of support.”

And that is something we can give right now.