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Janice Greenwood

Criticism

Madness and Misogyny

There is a a peculiar kind of “madness” in literature and art that seems inherintly female. There’s Ophelia in Hamlet, and Edna Pontellier in The Awakening (more on these two later). Researchers now understand that mental illness may or may not arise in a particular individual for a host of reasons. There’s a genetic component to developing mental illness and also environmental factors, or stressors, that can trigger mental illness (if you want to read more, refer to volume 115, number 8, of the journal of Environmental Health Perspectives for a full article on the subject). The writers explain that mental illnesses “increasingly fall into the realm of environmental health.” A person’s environment: from traumatic experiences, to the food they eat, to the drugs they use, can influence mental health. But environment can be construed far wider than all that, the researchers write. And in light of recent stories about women suffering from mental health crises, I’ve come to wonder whether a culture of misogyny could also be considered an environmental trigger for mental illness. Trauma and environmental stressors like poverty and abuse can make a person more susceptible to mental illness. In identical twins, if one twin develops schizophrenia, the chances of the other twin also developing the disease are 50%. According to Environmental Health Perspectives, people with schizophrenic relatives in their immediate family are at a tenfold risk of developing the disorder. Researchers note that this indicates that the development of schizophrenia may be genetically determined, but just as important, it also suggests that the onset of schizophrenia is also environmentally shaped. Growing up, these facts gave me great concern. I have relatives who have been diagnosed with schizophrenia. Given the variety of environmental stressors that can potentially trigger mental illness, I wonder why I have been resillient, why I didn’t succumb to the most serious symptoms of depression, psychosis, and mania that plague my family once or twice a generation.

My uncle was diagnosed with schizophrenia before I was born. He was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and major depressive disorder by the time I was ten years old. I remember his clozapine tremors, his medicated stupors, his regular psychotic breaks that involved shattered windows, panic attacks in the mall, and days when he wouldn’t get out of bed.  My mother had some form of untreated, but more functional version of whatever my uncle had. She worked as an operator at a time when you could still push 0 on your phone and talk to a real human. She was excellent at a job that required her to have all the city’s emergency agency numbers memorized, but she also believed that the government was wire-tapping our phone, and that terrorists had strung up invisible wires throughout New York City. She was convinced that my brothers and I would be kidnapped if we were left alone for even a moment, and so I spent most of my childhood locked up at home. My father was a Vietnam Veteran and suffered from undiagnosed PTSD. He’d get triggered, and fly off the rails, throwing things, screaming, breaking dishes, slamming doors, and threatening to leave and never come back. In the worst of his paranoia, he carried a baseball bat wherever he went—even if it was just to throw out the trash or take my brothers and me to the park.

Throughout my youth, I always worried about the monster lying dormant in my genes. The kind of mental illness suffered by members of my family divorced them from reality, from themselves, and transformed them into different people. Growing up, it was like knowing that I had the gene for early-onset dementia, and living always with the lurking risk that one day I’d start forgetting things, forgetting myself.

To make matters worse, when you grow up with mental illness, you grow up with trauma, because mental illness is a destabalizing force. My mother did some “crazy” things to me, but some of the most disturbing things were the ones with misogynistic undercurrents.

In recent months I have wondered whether misogyny could be an environmental factor that can trigger mental illness.

People who got to know my mother called her “mad.” People who knew my uncle called him “mad.” People who knew my dad called him scary crazy. I knew enough about inheritance as a child to figure that I was probably crazy myself.

Given my family, and the embarrassing things I often endured as a result of living with sick people, by the time I was a teenager, I’d given up. I embraced “crazy.” Crazy bitch was my own personal brand, my own label. I knew I couldn’t avoid it, so I might as well embrace it.

Literature is populated by an entire nation of “crazy” and “mad” women. There’s Ophelia, who goes “mad” in the middle of Hamlet. Ophelia is often depicted as one of Shakespeare’s archetypal “crazy” women, but I don’t see her as so crazy now. She was less a woman suffering from psychosis than a woman manipulated and led astray by the men around her. She listened to her brother and father, and they ruined her relationship with the love of her life. She trusted Hamlet, and he betrayed her. Laertes tells her to be chaste, while he goes off and has sex with everything that moves, and Ophelia is quick to comment on the double standard.

“I shall the effect of this good lesson keep,

As watchman to my heart. But, good my brother,

Do not, as some ungracious pastors do,

Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven;

Whiles, like a puff’d and reckless libertine,

Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads,

And recks not his own rede.”

William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Ophelia is a woman put in an impossible position. She loses the love of her life if she listens to her family, and she’s a whore who loses her family if she doesn’t listen. Can you blame her for wanting a way out?

As a teenager, I read the entire cannon of mad young women. Sylvia Plath was my poetic muse who gave me great comfort, Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen was my bible, and Mary Karr’s memoirs (Lit, being my favorite) corroborated the narrative that successful female writers were all “mad” in some way; I might as well embrace it and join the “crazy” fold. I was introduced to Virginia Woolf through the biographical fact that she had killed herself. I read a “Room of One’s Own” through that tragic lens. She would have her room in the end; it would be a coffin.

In high school, for AP English, we read The Awakening, and by the end, I couldn’t help but think that Edna Pontellier made the only logical choice available to her. There was no way out of her situation but to swim out to sea to die. Emily Dickinson avoided suicide, but she was a recluse. Toni Morrison wrote about ghosts.

Mad Mary. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood.

Women who put themselves out there, who dare to make art, or literature, or poetry, or anything for that matter, are always a little crazy, aren’t they? How else could one deal with the forces of sexism, misogyny, and outright theft by more established men and institutions? You have to be a little nuts to keep trying. When your voice is small, you’ll need a lot of amplification to get credit for the work you’re doing. A young female artist will have to resign herself to working in the shadows for years, often fighting powerful forces that will either ignore her good ideas, or worse, steal them.

Perhaps we need to take this difficulty seriously as a real environmental stressor.

In recent years, we’ve heard of the concept of “amplification.” Amplification is a strategy that women in the Obama White House used to help each other get credit for good ideas, and to ensure that their good ideas were heard. Vox reports that if a woman made a good point in a meeting, or presented a good idea, the other women in the room would repeat it, and credit the source. This ensured that the idea wasn’t later appropriated by the men in the room, or worse, ignored. This was the Obama White House. I don’t see Obama as a particularly misogynistic guy. We’re just so used to ignoring women that we don’t consciously hear their ideas. We’re so used to undervaluing women’s input that when they come up with a good new idea we think we’ve thought it up ourselves.

I recently watched a documentary about the life and art of Yayoi Kusama, called Kusama: Infinity, which is currently streaming on Hulu. It’s a marvelous documentary. The film highlights the real struggle that female creators face, not only from the outright sexism in their respective fields, but also the constant threat of the outright theft of their ideas.

Kusama’s story is far more tragic than most. While Kusama always seemed to have a predisposition to divergent thinking (she experienced delusions in childhood), it wasn’t until her ideas were stolen repeatedly that she became suicidal. Schizophrenia tends to develop later in life, so I don’t think Kusama experienced mental illness as such as a child. I truly believe that something happened to her that changed her brain.

Misogyny happened to her, possibly racism too.

Throughout the documentary we learn about how Kusama would put on an installation, and then have that same idea replicated by a better-established man, who would then get all the credit, money, and fame. The documentary makes a strong case for Kusama’s genius—and is a strong indictment on the men and institutions who blatantly took her ideas.

In 1962, Kusama showed Accumulation No. 1, a chair covered in soft penile protrusions (imagine a bunch of socks sewn onto a chair). It’s a simple concept, but entirely original, and wholly quirky. A few months later, in the same gallery, Claes Oldenberg put up a show featuring his “soft” sculptures; he had been working with paper before this. People commented on how “interesting” it was that he chose to take up sewing, a feminine medium. Interesting indeed. His shift to soft sculpture was seen as revolutionary, but of course he got the idea from Kusama. He became an international celebrity, and Kusama continued to languish in relative obscurity.

Kusama kept trying. She covered a gallery with a thousand boats in wallpaper, in an installation piece called Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show at the Gertrude Stein Gallery. After failing once, she took her concept a step further. Kusama didn’t just cover a boat in soft protrusions, she covered the whole gallery wall with the image of her idea. Was Kusama using the idea of amplification to claim ownership of her concept? Surely, no one would try to steal it, right? That would be crazy. Andy Warhol came to the show and saw it. He liked it. Warhol would go on to wallpaper a room at the Leo Castelli Gallery in cows.

The final straw was when Kusama created an installation called Infinity Mirror Room (Phalli’s Field) in March 1965. Here, Kusama took the idea of covering furniture and mundane objects in soft protrusions and amplified this concept to encompass the entire room. But she knew that the room wouldn’t be enough. It’s never enough. So she installed mirrors and amplified the room to infinity.

This time, she’ll finally get credit for her idea, right? You can’t amplify something more than infinity, after all.

The piece was revolutionary and stunningly beautiful.

In October of that same year Lucas Samaras “originated” the “Mirrored Room” at the Pace Gallery. He became famous.

This is when Kusama became suicidal. She was later institutionalized.

Lucas Samaras ended up in my high school art history book, representing contemporary conceptual art. Where was Kusama? Institutionalized. Crazy. Mad.

Who wouldn’t be?

Women who tell the truth, who challenge authority, who take risks are easily labelled crazy and mad. If they are crazy, they shouldn’t be believed, shouldn’t be taken seriously. A sick society will pathologize normal behavior as a means of control.

The normal response to an insane society will be crazy behavior. It’s the insane response of a sick society to pathologize normal behavior.

In a recent piece about Sinead O’Connor and her new book, Rememberings, the critic Rachel Hass writes in the New York Times: “Crazy is a word that does some dirty cultural work. It is a flip way of referencing mental illness, yes. But it’s also a slippery label that has little to do with how a person’s brain works and everything to do with how she is culturally received. Calling someone crazy is the ultimate silencing technique. It robs a person of her very subjectivity.”

Our culture appears to be in a place where it is re-assessing its propensity to throw crazy women in the proverbial “mad house.” Today, there isn’t a mad house, but there’s cancellation and conservatorship. There’s a movement to free Britney Spears from the conservatorship that stole her life and control over her career (I’ve written about this in my article on Compliant Women in Contemporary Writing). Now, it seems, we’re ready to look at Sinead O’Connor through new eyes, ready to re-assess her “insanity,” for tearing up that picture of the pope, just as we are now willing to re-think whether Britney Spears was so crazy, after all for shaving her head and getting pissed at the paparazzi. O’Connor explains that she shaved her head in response to music executives telling her she should look pretty. I’ve always believed that Spears’ move to shave her own head came from a similar place. But we’ll never know until Spears is allowed to speak.

I’ll always be one crazy bitch. I embrace my family’s mental illness as a shared struggle, and as a hidden superpower. Non-consensus views of reality can be incredibly creative and beautiful. They can lead to new ways of seeing. They can’t be easily imitated.

Non-normative thinking is my heritage, it is my culture.

In traditional or indigenous societies, the non-normative in the group became healers, hermits, shaman, or poets, often seen as being in touch with other realms, celebrated for their vision, for their difference. In our culture, they are medicated to stupor, or locked away, or vilified, or infantilized under court ordered patriarchy. Take a walk through Chinatown here in Hawai’i and you’ll see what I mean.

I believe I’ve passed the critical window during which environmental triggers could awaken the mental illness genes that I know lie dormant in my DNA. I wonder why I have am been so resistant. Did my creative writing and art-making as a teen make my mind flexible and resistant, like doing mental yoga? Since I was a young child, I’ve always been incredibly active. As a fifth grader I asked my dad to take me to the high school track so I could train for a six-minute mile. In sports I’ve always been a bridesmaid, never the bride–showing some promise, but never having the guidance or stamina to take my abilities too far. But I’ve kept moving all along. Did that stop me from developing schizophrenia?

Am I just lucky? I’ll never know.

I hereby diagnose myself with the human condition.

When environmental stressors get me down, I get to work. Last April (2020), as the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the world and put everyone in a dormant state, I started a book review blog in Hawai’i in the middle of a pandemic, at a time when no one was really reviewing books in Hawai’i in an in-depth manner. It was a crazed response to a world gone mad. If all I could do was sit at home and read, I might as well make something of it. In most places, there are enough critics. But in Hawai’i, I saw a need.

But critics are like roaches. Light a fire and more come out of the woodwork. There’s a lot of noise out there. This writing thing can sometimes feel like a shout out into the wilderness.

Some days I want to shave my head, but like Kusama, I keep writing.

Hold that one up to an infinity mirror, boys.

Really. Please do. When you’re a mirror, another mirror just makes you boundless.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

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Writing Workshop

Emily Dickinson’s Writing Advice

It wasn’t until college that I realized that my words often conveyed more than I said, that my poems could betray me with meanings deeper and darker than I intended. I’d turned in a poem to an undergraduate poetry workshop and my professor dissected it in front of the class. The poem was titled “O” and it was about my mother being a telephone operator in the days when you could still talk to a person when you hit the 0 button on your phone. He explained that the poem wasn’t really about my mother. It was about the literary howl, and the enduring torment of other voices. I don’t have the poem anymore. I wish I did. It doesn’t matter. The poem, even in its disappearance, taught me a deeper lesson. Emily Dickinson’s best writing advice is this: “Tell the truth but tell it slant.” The youthful poet I was then took cold comfort in Emily Dickinson’s writing advice. After all, the slant only counts if you intended it.

The whole situation instilled in me a kind of terror and thrill in what I could write without even knowing it, what I could say. I wanted to have full control of my meaning, full control of my words. If a poet is a little like a mason, I realized I didn’t know my own bricks, didn’t always know the arrangement I was making. I wanted to harness every meaning, and write only exactly what I wanted to say. Little did I know that to harness meaning in that manner is really the province of the gods; in the hands of mortals, to try to hold the meaning of your writing too close has the potential to kill prose and poetry both on the spot. Emily Dickinson was less concerned with her poetry being misconstrued as a self-declaration. In fact, she saved herself from all that trouble by writing, “When I state myself as a representative of the verse, it does not mean me, but a supposed person.”

Emily Dickinson’s writing advice comes from her letters. The hungry poet looking for guidance needs to fish her gems out of the immense sea of her epistolary craft.

Modern poets and writers are not so modest. For every good writer out there, there are two books on craft. There are some good ones. There’s Mary Karr on the Art of Memoir and Stephen King On Writing and Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird. These are all good sources, especially if you plan to write a bestselling anything. But some of my favorite writing advice comes from the letters of Emily Dickinson, who seems constitutionally incapable of writing anything straightforwardly. Dickinson wasn’t interested in selling her work. Her work was eminently different, so strange as to require the time machine of her bedroom drawer to shuttle her writing into the future where it would find a more receptive and sympathetic audience.

Some of the typical pieces of advice, like “write what you know” and “write what you want to read” are well enough and good and can be found readily on the internet, but they won’t change your life as a writer. If you write what you want to read, you might just find yourself imitating what’s already out there—a great exercise when getting started, but ultimately not the path of the mature writer. And while writing what you know is important, sometimes writing is an act of discovery. In fact, writing that began from a place of my unknowing was always best in the end.

Beneath the Iceberg. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood. Original Art.
Beneath the Iceberg. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood.

What is Emily Dickinson’s best writing advice? Here are my favorites:

  1. Don’t over embellish your writing. Dickinson explains: “…flowers of speech; they both make and tell deliberate falsehoods; avoid them as the snake and turn aside from the rattle-snake, and I don’t think you will be harmed.” Dickinson wrote a great deal about the devil in metaphor. She was a good puritan, and didn’t like her writing embellished. She’s right, though. Simple is best.
  2. What you don’t say is just as important as what you do say. Dickinson explained that, “My business is circumference.” And “It is strange that the most intangible thing is the most adhesive.” What haunted me about the poem my professor dissected all those years ago was also what made the poem best. The best writers let the unconscious spill out, recognize what they’re doing somewhere along the way, and then lightly hone it and refine it.
  3. Seek out and accept criticism. Some of Emily Dickinson’s most important letters are the ones where she writes to the editor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Higginson was a respected editor and abolitionist, and leader of the first Black regiment of the U.S. army. She chose well. She asks Higginson for honest feedback, explaining, “Men do not call the surgeon to commend the bone, but to set it, sir, and fracture within is more critical.”  She doesn’t want him to go easy on her. Choose editors like Higginson—kind, but tough.
  4. Set high standards for your poetry. Emily Dickinson defined poetry like this: “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”
  5. Be true to yourself in your writing, and don’t sell out. Dickinson writes: “Do not defraud these, for gold may be bought, and purple may be bought, but the sale of the spirit never did occur.” The writing of poetry is the record of the soul, and to sell out in this realm is the deepest of crimes against poetry and against oneself.
  6. Be humble. Dickinson explains, “How little the scribe thinks of the value of his line—how many eager eyes will search its every meaning…”
  7. Pay attention to your digressions. They often bring your best material. Dickinson got this advice from the birds. “I think the bluebirds do their work exactly like me. They dart around just so, with little dodging feet, and look so agitated. I really feel for them, they seem to be so tired.”
  8. “Tell the truth but tell it slant.” Perhaps my fears were unfounded. In the best of writers, a re-reading often unearths new truths and new meaning. Maybe a writer doesn’t always need to know everything she’s saying as she’s saying it. A writer must be brave to trust the unconscious, to trust the process, to trust that what will be unsaid and said, will both be good and kind.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

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Criticism, Writing Workshop

Mr. Rogers’s $20 Million Dollar Poem

In 1969, the Senate was poised to slash funding for public television. It’s a story we see often in the arts. Arts organizations struggle to find funding and often face existential threat when their funding is cut. These organizations are at the mercy of government budgets, the whims of private donors, and the generosity of private individuals who support their mission. In response to the threats of budget cuts for public television in 1969, Senate hearings were held, and Mr. Rogers spoke before a senate subcommittee to request the full $20 million in funding for public television.

His adversary is Senator Pastore, the archetype of a politician: skeptical, impatient, and angry. What Mr. Rogers does next is remarkable.

As Mr. Rogers explains what the program is about, he tells Mr. Pastore that Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood tries to help children cope with “the inner drama of childhood” which include themes like sibling rivalry and anger. Mr. Pastore is curious. He interrupts Mr. Rogers to ask him how long the program lasts, and says he wants to watch it.

Mr. Rogers uses his poetic and rhetorical gifts to show Mr. Pastore exactly what his show is about, and by extension, to show Mr. Pastore the real work being done on public television.

Art has the power to heal and the power to help improve our mental health. Mr. Rogers explains that his television show strives to “make it clear that feelings are mentionable and manageable.” Mr. Rogers continues to explain that by doing this work “we will have done a great service for mental health.”

Mr. Pastore is a man who is not in touch with his inner child, and it’s thrilling to watch Mr. Rogers tap into the child hidden within even the most curmudgeon of curmudgeons.

Mr. Rogers describes his puppet work. He describes commercial television’s propensity to glorify violence, and his desire to create a safe space where children can address their anger and frustrations in healthier ways.

Mr. Pastore says he has goosebumps, but this isn’t what gets Mr. Rogers the money.

Mr. Rogers gets the money by reciting a poem for Mr. Pastore. Sure, he calls it a song. But Rogers doesn’t sing. He recites.

The power of poetry, especially poetry spoken out loud, is its ability to tackle some of the most difficult subjects of human life from an indirect angle. Why say something indirect when you could say it directly? Emily Dickinson herself wrote, “Tell the truth, but tell it slant. Success in Circuit lies.” But why?

Some things are so unspeakable or difficult that they cannot be said outright. Some types of criticism cannot be uttered without distancing the speaker from the audience. Some types of anger expressed can damage relationships rather than heal them. Anger, so often expressed, especially in political settings, can be counterproductive in producing desired change.

And Mr. Rogers is angry. He’s angry that the government will take away money from public television, threating his show and the only space children have where they don’t have to watch cartoon characters hitting each other with sticks. Mr. Rogers is angry, angry at a society that values violence over mental health, violence over kindness and compassion. He’s angry at a culture that pours money into the inane and superficial, while leaving the depth of emotion unspoken and undervalued.

Unnamed Bird. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood.

His anger is an anger anyone who has worked in the arts feels regularly. It’s the anger of knowing the importance and the value of what you’re doing, and also knowing that it’s not valued by society. Poetry has value. I know this because when I was a little girl, I found poetry and it saved me. And not in a stupid way.

It gave me a place to put my anger, grief, sadness, and desperation. I truly believe I’d be dead or in need of deep support without it. I know that poetry saves the government money if only in saved mental health support I’d otherwise need, and the increased productivity I bring as a taxpaying and functioning citizen.

So yes. When I see poetry underfunded, or the arts underfunded in general, I get angry. I see deep foolishness in a government willing to spend billions on medical services, Medicaid, and prisons, but not willing to invest in preventative care through the arts. Because poetry and art is preventative care. It is.

But Mr. Rogers is a true poet (and wiser than me), understanding that he’ll need to address his own anger indirectly, and address Mr. Pastore’s callousness indirectly as well. Rogers has the wisdom to know that poetry offers the kindest vehicle for correction—for both himself and Mr. Pastore.

And so, Mr. Rogers speaks directly to the skeptical Senator’s inner child, and the moments that follow are truly some of the most moving moments in contemporary and modern poetic recitation.

The poem goes like this:

What do you do with the mad that you feel

When you feel so mad you could bite,

When the whole wide world seems oh so wrong

And nothing you do seems very right?
What do you do?

Do you punch a bag,

do you pound some clay or some dough

do you round up friends for a game of tag

or see how fast you go?

It’s great to be able to stop

when you’ve planned a thing that’s wrong

and be able to do something else instead

And think this song:

I can stop when I want to

can stop when I wish

can stop, stop, stop anytime

and what a good thing to feel like this

and know that the feeling is really mine

know that there’s something deep inside

that helps us become what we can

for a girl can be someday a lady

and a boy can be someday a man.

And Mr. Pastore, doesn’t say much. He’s clearly moved. He smiles, for once. “Looks like you’ve just earned yourself the $20 million dollars.”

This is the real power of poetry. If only we had more Mr. Rogers and more people like Mr. Pastore, willing to be moved.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

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Hawai'i

Bishop Museum’s Graffiti (POW! WOW! at the Bishop)

POW! WOW! the international street art festival, celebrates 10 years with a stunning installation at the Bishop Museum’s Castle Memorial Building (the show is on view from May 15 to September 19). Bishop Museum’s decision to feature street art in its galleries puts the museum on the global map, and on the cutting edge of embracing a new genre of art. Establishment critics, curators, and museums are finally taking street art more seriously. The few museums that have curated street art shows have found overwhelming positive public reception. According to Artnet, Banksy’s retrospective at the Bristol museum drew 300,000 visitors in just a 12-week timeframe, making it one of the most popular shows at the time. LA MOCA’s show “Art in the Streets” “broke attendance records” according to Artnet. And at the Bishop Museum, POW! WOW! saw a sold out opening night with lines going out into the parking lot.

While serious critics continue to hesitate in taking street art seriously (Jerry Saltz, and Vulture, I’m looking at you), Artnet reports that the street artist, KAWS just made $14.7 million on a piece. And while I don’t want to equate sales for quality, there’s an uncomfortable transformation happening in the street art world, one that more readily lends itself to the museum, to galleries, and to commerce. I think we’ve moved far past street art’s illicit origins. Street artists are now designers, often producing work for major real estate corporations, businesses, and even cities. While the work remains free to observe and photograph, the art isn’t necessarily free to make, and is no longer divorced from the art world’s ethos of consumerism, sales, museum prestige, marketing, and moneymaking. Street art can turn an industrial district into a city’s most sought-after real estate literally overnight. And while commerce and street art have become strange bedfellows, the roots of street art, as free art, performed illegally, under the cover of night, has become the province of graffiti-makers, while the more design-heavy murals of popular street artists have become quite mainstream in the art world. Whether this work is fine art is another question entirely, but it certainly fits in the spectrum of art-making, and fits easily into curatorial spaces that now embrace everything from fashion to furniture.

I attended the opening of POW! WOW! on Saturday with my partner who has painted murals for POW! WOW! and whose piece is on exhibit among the dozens of others on display in the show. So please put my conflict of interest aside when I tell you that, of course Sergio Garzon’s palate knife wax painting of R2-D2 is the best in the room. R2-D2 seems to glow like a deity in a reliquary, but sits fragile in its delicate medium. If the piece were put outside in Honolulu’s summer sun, it would melt away like a plastic toy thrown in a landfill, or boil to nothing like a coral reef bleaching in the summer sea. It’s a commentary on climate change, plastic waste, and also a commentary on the difficulty of producing technically demanding and academic artwork in an artistic climate that favors design and populistic imagery.

Graffiti art has its origins in illicit activity, and it’s only right that this writing be a little illicit as well. So that’s my bias. Here’s my spray can, criticism and journalism . What are you gonna do?

I write about POW! WOW! because in Hawai’i everyone knows everyone by some degree removed, and so it’s fairly difficult to approach anything without some disclosed or undisclosed conflict of interest. It’s the challenge and joy of living on an island where everyone and everything is truly connected, and where people happen to live richly varied lives. Your doctor might very well surf your break in the morning, your friend from life drawing may also moonlight as a Sunday meditation instructor at the Korean Buddhist Temple, and, if you were here 8 years ago, your friend from acro-yoga might happen to be Edward Snowden’s girlfriend. It’s literally a small world when you live on an island with a circumference of 112 miles.

POW! WOW! is an international festival, but it has the feel of a tight-knit community. Founded by Jasper Wong, who told Hawai’i Public Radio that he put the cost of the first festival on his credit card back in 2010, the festival is an example of what can happen when people come together and lift one another up; when established artists work alongside lesser-known names, and when a community takes a chance on art. Today the festival is one of the most anticipated events in Hawaii’s arts scene (and is currently heavily backed by corporate sponsors), but it wasn’t an easy sell back in 2010. I can only imagine how difficult it must have been to convince local business owners that they should let the kids who did the illegal throw-ups in the industrial areas turn the sides of their stores into mural canvases. It worked out. But the success and logic of things that work only looks right in hindsight.

Cities and communities have found a value in the illicit artists who used to do their work under the cover of night. These artists have now become professional designers, revitalizing industrial areas and transforming them into trendy arts districts. POW! WOW! travels the world bringing mural artists to Israel, Korea, Long Beach, San Jose, and more. I saw a similar movement in my hometown of Miami, where the Wynwood neighborhood underwent a slow transformation from the untouchable warehouse district of my childhood (where you were most likely to be stabbed), to a culturally rich outdoor gallery of murals nestled between bars, clubs, coffee shops, million dollar condos, and stores selling Prada and Coach. I look at Kaka’ako today, and see a neighborhood undergoing a similar transformation, and Jasper Wong’s POW! WOW! is no small part of the increase in property values, influx of local business, and increased tourist traffic. He should get a medal from the state of Hawai’i.

The very artists who would have been thrown in jail for writing their names on the walls, now create art that often raises property values and revitalizes communities. The best street artists often make a living by selling prints, through their own private commissions (think big real estate and business), and through social media, which connects these artists to collectors. Cities, property owners, and businesses will often pay these artists good money to revitalize their neighborhoods, buildings, and businesses—seeing a real value in what this art can do. 

Amid all the glamor of a gala museum event at the Bishop Museum, complete with timed wristbands, food trucks, sound systems, and museum officials lingering about, it’s easy to forget that street art has its origins in graffiti. This is where the Bishop Museum’s curated show truly shines.

The first thing you see when you enter the Castle Memorial Building is a colossal woman, covered in graffiti, being pulled up to the sky, painted directly onto an immense column. The work is a collaboration between Kamea Hadar (one of the founders of POW! WOW!) and Hula, who is known internationally for painting murals in places where the sea level will rise and cover them up. I believe Hadar is one of Honolulu’s best street artists. Throughout the city, his portraits of indigenous women and men stand as tall as the buildings themselves. These youthful faces reflect contemporary Hawai’i and its energy, but they ripple with deeper power that comes from a rich past. A father and son embrace, surrounded by kalo, a sacred plant here; a regal woman, two-stories tall, stares out at the highway cars that rush past her like a swiftly moving river, her head crowned with a lei Po’o (flower crown lei). She looks almost like she could be a diety.

In the Bishop Museum, the main entryway has been transformed into a mock Chinatown street scene, complete with bodega, newspaper stand, noodle shop, and bathroom. Everything is covered in graffiti, and the tags would be recognizable to those in the know in Honolulu’s street art scene. The work of the late street artist Beak was prominent in the room, a moving tribute. In the bodega, a woman stood behind the cash register, bored, surfing Instagram, perfectly in character. She assured us that nothing was for sale, though I wanted to buy the POW! WOW! book on display at the counter. An arcade machine turned out to feature a game designed specifically for the exhibition. It was styled like an early 90s Nintendo gem, featuring graffiti artists tagging city walls.

The POW! WOW! exhibit is intelligently executed, and feels a little like a Banksy installation I went to see back in 2008 in New York City, where the artist set up a mock pet shop in the middle of Greenwich Village. Chicken McNuggets pecked around at feed like real chicks, and fish sticks swam around in a fish tank.

There was even a bathroom installation. The tagged bathroom was not quite dirty and smelly enough to be convincing, but I liked the gesture. Walls of the museum had been turned into large-scale murals by some of the most popular artists from POW! WOW!’s 10 years. The rest of the museum read like a traditional gallery, where artists got a chance to display their work in more traditional canvas, paper, and frame. Sometimes the work translated well to this format, sometimes not so much.

It had been 14 months since my partner had been to any social event. We’d mostly been locked away since the pandemic started. It was impossible to forget that we’re still living through a global pandemic, as we shuffled past the masked faces in the crowd. The exhibition was timed. We had about 45 minutes in the gallery for the sake of everyone’s safety. It wasn’t quite enough time, but I’m not complaining. Just being in a real museum was a relief.

YOU HAVE THE REST OF YOUR LIFE TO FIGURE OUT THE CONSEQUENCES BUT RIGHT NOW IS NOT THE TIME by Edwin Ushiro is the piece I would buy if it were for sale and if I could afford it. It’s a relatively large piece, about 50 inches long, and it depicts children jumping into a river in the depths of the forest. It’s not entirely clear whether the children are disappearing or whether the forest is. One boy seems to fall out of the sky (reminding me a little of “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” by Peter Bruegel the Elder, a painting memorialized in a W.H. Auden poem), other children slip away into the rocks. Looking at the piece is a little like looking at the cell of an animated film (and Ushiro’s influences include Japanese anime), but there’s also something uncanny about the scene. Figures seem to appear where they don’t belong. Life is happening here, but ghosts are happening too.

The loudspeaker told us we had to leave. We walked toward the party on the lawn and then away from it, a little overwhelmed by all the people. Tucked to the side of the action was a little green house surrounded by native Hawaiian plants, and Hawaiian canoe plants. The house was empty, and probably would have been a meeting room or place for schoolchildren to gather in pre-pandemic times. Two chairs sat empty on the patio and my partner and I took the invitation to sit. We watched the crowd mull about on the lawn, pretended the house was ours, and that the people in the lawn were our guests. Music drifted over the crowd.

This was everything we wanted. A little house with a patio on a hill. A breadfruit tree. Plants. Friends laughing nearby. An art community. It was ours, for a moment.

We talked about the meaning of graffiti. When I visited St. Peter’s church in Rome, I was allowed to go beneath it, to the catacombs (the story of how I managed to talk my way down there is too long to tell here), to see the original shrine to St. Peter. The original shrine, the original church, was once just a wall—a wall covered in initials and names–graffiti. The pilgrims came, and tagged the prayer wall. Down below St. Peter’s church in Rome is a wall covered in ancient graffiti left by the first Christian pilgrims. Below the wall lie the bones of St. Peter, and above it, St. Peter’s baldachin by Bernini, Michelangelo on the duomo above, and the grand architecture of the basilica itself.

Always, always, since the beginning of time, we have witnessed the ancient human need to be seen. The urge to write your name on something, even if it isn’t yours, goes deep in the human psyche. We all want to be remembered. “The Friends of Khufu Gang” is another piece of graffiti left by the workers of the pyramids of Giza in the king’s burial chamber. The living would not see it, but the dead certainly would.

Banyan. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood. Original Art.
Banyan. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood.

We wandered further away from the crowd, away from the music and pomp, toward the highway, where a large banyan stood. It was as wide as an apartment building. It might have been several trees that had somehow been colonized by one, fused uncomfortably together to form a single entity. We wandered into its labyrinth of roots and hanging vines, touched its columns of branches that had dropped down to earth from the sky, fused with the ground. The place smelled of stale beer and piss. The setting sun shone through the branches like gold leaf. The cars hummed by on the H1, a machine river, relentless. Coca-Cola cans from the 90s littered the ground, crushed Blue Ribbon beers, a box of stale rice, swarming with ants. And then, the tree itself, its branches completely covered, tattooed really, with graffiti. Lover’s names, hearts, names covered in scar tissue, names crawling up the banyan’s columns, names oozing sap, names ambered in piss, names, names, names on an ancient tree covered in graffiti in the employee parking lot of the Bishop Museum.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

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Criticism

Compliant Women in Contemporary Writing

Our culture supports compliant women, or at the very least, it supports compliance in the very systems that oppress, discourage, and disempower. And when women stop being compliant, the price they pay is often their very lives.

Look at the case of Britney Spears, and her often discussed conservatorship. We all want to “free Britney” now, but I remember with how much giddy joy the media took her down all those years ago. (And we all know there can’t be a takedown without willing consumers of that takedown.) And why? Because she got angry at a paparazzo invading her personal space and then decided to shave her head?

I remember one iconic image from the time, where Britney sits in the barber’s chair, gleefully shaving her head. There were many images of Spears from that time, and in all of them she looks pretty miserable, but in the pictures we have of her shaving her head, I noticed something. Britney was happy. Truly happy.

I remember thinking, “maybe this is the first real decision she’s ever made in her life.” Look closely at her face. This is not a deranged woman. This is a woman finally accessing her free will. She’s saying “fuck you” to everyone and loving it. Saying “fuck you” to standards of appearance, “fuck you” to the people in charge of her image, “fuck you” to the photographers, and to the superficial machinery that made her famous.

And what did that act of free will cost her? She lost her kids, her autonomy, her ability to guide her own career. In her Instagram videos, she looks overmedicated.

In several books I’ve read recently, I’ve encountered women wrestling with the consequences of their own compliance. The trauma is deep. While I believe our cultural narratives are changing, the consequences of women being raised to be compliant permeate our culture in very insidious ways, and I believe our culture of compliance continues to shape us.

In her book, Girlhood, Melissa Febos writes about women complying to have sex, because they fear the alternative to saying no is rape. Roxanne Gay, in Bad Feminist, writes about a boy she knew in middle school with whom she had a complicated relationship that escalated to him raping her. He would “tell me what he wanted to do to me. He wasn’t asking permission. I was not an unwilling participant. I was not a willing participant….I wanted him to love me.”

Gay explains that this kind of compliance is the ultimate struggle every “good girl” faces. “Being good is the best way to be bad.” She writes “as an adult, I don’t understand how I allowed him to treat me like that. I don’t understand how he could be so terrible. I don’t understand how desperately I sacrificed myself. I was young.”

In Girlhood, Febos interviews women who have consented to have sex they did not want, more acts of compliance. The fact that the women seldom speak about these experiences is itself a commentary on the ways in which compliance infects us, hidden beneath the surface. Gay also writes, “It never crossed my mind to say no or that I should say no, that I could say no.”

Oprah Winfrey writes about trauma and its role in compliance in her newest book “What Happened to You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing.” I’ve reviewed the book in this blog, but here I want to talk about the role that trauma plays in compliance. Winfrey writes about her personal traumas and notes: “For the next forty years, that pattern of conditioned compliance—the result of deeply rooted trauma—would define every relationship, interaction, and decision in my life.”

While I think that conditioned compliance can be connected to trauma, I don’t think Oprah completely gets it right. Conditioned compliance is something hardwired into women from the moment we learn how to walk and speak. We are taught to put other people’s wishes ahead of our own. When a girl is old enough to have sex, or rather, old enough to be pressured into having sex, she will have often been so trained in compliance that she’ll readily put a boy’s wishes and desires above her own.

Compliance. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood. Original Art.
Compliance. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood.

Our lives are shaped by what we believe we deserve.

When I was in high school, I thought I deserved nothing. When a boy I’d known most of my life asked me to do things with him in his truck, I complied. The next day in school, he acted like nothing happened. He wouldn’t hold my hand. My little girl-self wanted so badly to be loved that I accepted this arrangement. It made me miserable. I thought myself incapable of feeling pleasure. I told no one, not even my best friend.

We never had sex. We did everything else. It doesn’t matter. I was still nothing to him when we passed in the hallways. I accepted this. I felt terrible. I wanted to die. I thought I was crazy for feeling this way. I thought I was broken.

Then, the boy made a move on my best friend. When she called me to tell me, I drove to the mall alone. I climbed the stairs to the top of the parking garage, and I thought about jumping. I’m so grateful I didn’t jump.

When we talk about women and compliance, we need to talk about how our culture treats women who are not compliant. We need to think about how we treated Britney Spears all those years ago, right when she was finally showing the slightest degree of autonomy. We need to talk about the unspoken lesson the consequences of her actions taught so many little girls—lessons about whom their bodies belonged to, lessons about personal freedom. Britney Spears shaved her head and she was called crazy. I don’t think she was crazy. I think she was breaking free, and the great irony is that her attempt at being free was precisely the thing that led to her further imprisonment.

I think about other situations where women’s compliance may have played a role in their downfall. What about Monica Lewinsky, and the role that compliance may have played in her story with Bill Clinton? And then there’s Katherine Heigl who got cancelled because she didn’t want to play a role anymore. How many men decide they want to move on from a role and get that kind of crap?

I don’t think we’re talking about compliance enough, and the unspoken traumas it creates. Compliance is embedded in some of our culture’s sickest institutions. I think about Christian fundamentalism (with its requirements that adherents comply entirely with the church’s religious doctrines), the prison industrial system (which fosters obedience and not autonomy), our educational systems and the cultures they foster (where girls are sent home because their skirts are too short and where children are educated within systems of rigid rules and standardized tests), and the systems of compliance embedded in family systems. The kind of upbringing most girls receive, even in the best of circumstances in our culture, is not without its traumas.

Oprah writes: “When you’ve been groomed to be compliant, confrontation in any form is uncomfortable because you were never taught you have the right to say no; in fact, you were taught you can’t say no.”

People who are taught that they can’t say no also learn to ignore the alarm signals their bodies are sending them. Their ability to distinguish between danger and safety gets distorted. I think about that boy in high school, all my alarm bells ringing, and I complied anyway. How many times as a girl had I been taught to behave, to sit down, to cross my legs, and give hugs when asked. Could I have been any other way? Is it surprising at all that I complied?

Oprah writes, in “What Happened to You:” “Now when I begin to feel overwhelmed, I pull back. I have learned to say no.”

Perhaps the most radically feminist thing we can do right now, is to say “no” and say it often. And when compliant women get shit for “going bad,” we can speak truth to power, defend them, and hold their detractors accountable.

If you are in distress or are having suicidal thoughts, you are not alone. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is available 24/7 to help. Call 1-800-273-8255.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

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Criticism, Hawai'i

Fishing in O’ahu or, More Appropriately, Jonathan Gold and the Prawn

When I moved to O’ahu I got it into my mind that maybe I’d learn to go spearfishing. There was something intrinsically beautiful to me about the idea of catching my own dinner, of literally putting food on the table. But now I’m not so sure. Fishing in O’ahu, for me at least, may remain only an idea. Each of us has our own boundaries regarding the eating of animals. For Jonathan Gold, eating a live prawn was too much. For me, I’m not so sure I should be eating animals at all, at least if I can’t bring myself to kill them myself.

Before I talk about how I got it into my mind to go fishing in O’ahu, I think it is important to note how my heart and body are constitutionally incapable of killing any living thing. I let my condo get infested with roaches before I finally relented and bought the good poison. (The good poison was so good that I put it into every gap in my kitchen counter, and didn’t expect it to work. Then, I went surfing for a couple of hours, and returned to a house covered in hundreds of roach carcasses. It was disgusting, and terrifying. I still don’t know what they put in that poison and I don’t want to know.

I (generally) never kill insects, even the annoying ones, like mosquitos. Despite this, I am not a vegetarian. I am full of contradictions. Mostly, if I go too long without protein, I become a very angry person and I don’t like being angry. If you don’t believe me, ask my ex-husband about being around me when we were vegan and traveling through Scotland. It wasn’t pretty. I distinctly recall storming away from a plate of vegetarian baked beans in some castle that had been turned into a hostel. Then again, I was starving, so I could have the memory all wrong.

In an attempt to save face and preserve my ability to claim myself a rational person, I decided that if I was going to eat fish, I might as well try to learn how to properly go fishing. I live in O’ahu, where the fishing is good (at least I imagine it to be). That’s how I found myself fishing in O’ahu with a friend.

More specifically, we had gone fishing in Kaneohe. The shallow bay is gorgeous, surrounded by the amphitheater of the Ko’olau Range. The turquoise blue water is so shallow and sandy on the bottom you can wade in waist deep water several miles out at sea. It’s a heartbreakingly beautiful place—a place where, I tell myself, I wouldn’t mind dying if I were a fish. My friend showed me how to cast and so I cast. He scanned the water for flashes of light, for birds.

For a long time, nothing happened. I kept casting and then snorkeled a bit, my heart calmed by the rhythm of the sea.

I was a young child when I saw a fish die for the first time.

My parents had driven my brothers and me to the Flamingo Visitor Center in Everglades National Park to see the sunset. Flamingo is located on the true tip of the Florida peninsula, the very bottom of the state. It is probably the closest place to Miami from which you can see the sunset (Miami, being on the east coast of the state, is only blessed with sunrises). With stiff legs from the long drive, we arrived at the visitor’s center. My parents took my hand and walked me to the sea wall. I must have been about five or six years old. That’s when I saw the fisherman pull the fish from the sea.

At first the fish didn’t appear to fight, and didn’t look much alive at all. The fisherman pulled the hook out of its mouth and dropped the fish onto the sidewalk, not far where my parents and I were sitting. That’s when it began thrashing around on the ground, clearly struggling.

“What’s happening to that fish?” I asked, alarmed, not really needing an answer from my parents to understand that the fish was suffering.

It continued to suffer, thrashing in the ache of its body, its gills opening and closing frantically like two gasping lips, unable to extract oxygen from the foreign element. What shocked my little girl brain the most was the way the fish leapt off the ground, using its strong tail fin to propel itself upward. It seemed to be fighting to find water.

“What is happening to that fish?” I pleaded, more panicked now.

My dad explained to me that the fish was dying, though I didn’t need an explanation. The animal was clearly dying.

That’s when I understood. The fish needed to be returned to the water. I also understood in that moment that all the fish we purchased at Long John Silvers and ate had also suffered a similar fate.

I ran to the fish and screamed at the man, told him to throw the fish back into the water. I cried, watching the fish’s frantic struggle grow weaker. The man did nothing. My father had to pick me up and carry me away.

That was the first time that I understood, viscerally, that animals we ate did not want to be eaten. At dinner that night, my mom handed me a bowl of shrimp. I asked my father if the shrimp had died, too. They had died. Up to that day, shrimp had been my favorite food. Now, I saw each one as a living thing that had suffered the same fate as that fish. I refused to eat anything that night. Though I didn’t become a vegetarian, I stopped eating shrimp, and still only rarely eat what used to be my favorite childhood food.

Coelacanth. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood. Original Art.
Coelacanth. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood.

I have read a few pieces of writing in my life that have viscerally moved me (I think of American Psycho, and most online comments responding to anything written by a feminist writer), but no writing has turned my stomach quite like Jonathan Gold’s essay about eating a live prawn. The essay is mostly a boring takedown of a bad Korean restaurant. At first, Gold distracts himself from the bad food, by watching the prawns swimming around in a tank near his table. Later, when he realizes that everyone at the restaurant seems to be eating prawns, he decides to order the clear specialty. The waiter proceeds to dip “a hand into the tank, rippling the still, clear water until some of the prawns sprang up to nip at his fingers. He plucked the liveliest specimens from the water and brought them back to his station, where he quickly removed most of their shells.”

He goes on, “It was one of the most unsettling experiences I ever had in a restaurant, preparing to bite into a living creature as it glared back at me, antennae whipping in wild circles, legs churning, body contorting as if to power the spinnerets that had been so rudely ripped from its torso, less at that moment a foodstuff than a creature that clearly didn’t want to be eaten.”

While wading in the shallow bay, something finally bit. My friend had seen it from his boat, a silver flash in the water, and after casting a few times, he felt the line go taut. A few minutes later, he pulled the fish from the water.

Like the fish from my childhood, it thrashed around in his hands, the body pure muscle, pure power. My friend is a good man, not one to allow a creature to suffer. He pulled out his fishing knife, put the fish down on the bottom of his boat, took a deep breath, hesitated for a moment, looked into its eyes, and then stabbed the fish right between them.

Surrounded by the mountains, the water as bright as blue ice, I reasoned that it wasn’t the worst place to die.

I crawled back into the boat and cried for the fish, the beautiful strong fish, all muscle and bone and eye, and life.

When I moved to O’ahu, I dreamed that maybe I’d learn how to spearfish and catch my own dinner. Now, I’m less sure about my ability. It’s a beautiful idea, but some things are better left dreams. Beauty in imagination can often turn ugly in practice. Think of every love affair ever had. Paolo and Francesca’s plight in Dante’s Inferno comes to mind.

So, I go foraging in the woods, pull breadfruit off trees, gather guavas. Maybe I’ll learn which ferns are edible. I try to keep a tomato plant in my lanai. The first one died, but the second one is doing okay, for now.

Jonathan Gold ate the prawn. “I bit into the animal, devouring all of its sweetness in one mouthful, and I felt the rush of life pass from its body into mine, the sudden relaxation of its feelers, the blankness I swear I could see overtaking its eyes. It was weird and primal and breathtakingly good, and I don’t want to do it again.”

I watched my friend kill the fish. I don’t know if I want to see another fish die.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

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Criticism

“I Hate Myself:” Some Notes on Self-Hatred, Solitude, Surfing, and Girlhood

“I hate myself,” might have been the most frequently-written sentence in my prolific journals as a teen (I filled dozens of binders with my tortured teen prose; forcing anyone to read it today could probably be considered legitimate torture in some jurisdictions). If I think back to my own youth, the most common sentiment that rises up above all the others is self-hatred. The standards to which girls hold themselves is harsh and impossible and self-hatred is the only logical conclusion to setting impossible standards for oneself. And so, I am a woman recovering from my girlhood. One of girlhood’s defining characteristics is self-hatred, and I find myself on a daily basis working to undo the narrative damage I did to myself (and also experienced at the hands of others) as a girl.

I’m not doing a good job at undoing that damage. I sat down before the blank page of this essay and the first thing I thought to write is the first thing I’ve always thought to write as long as I’ve been alive. “I hate myself.” Where do I go from there?

I know am still recovering from the stories I told myself about who I was, the stories I continue to tell myself about who I am–that I need to be everything to everyone, that I need to perform my responsibilities perfectly without failure and with a straight face, that I need to avoid being too emotional, but be an emotional receptacle for everyone who suffers, and that I need to look good while doing it all.

I think about my latest surfing project. I’m trying to cross-step and then hang ten at the nose of my surfboard. This surfing trick might possibly be the perfect metaphor for what it means to be a girl. As in, this particular surf trick asks you to do something physically demanding and nearly impossible while also making the whole thing look effortless. That is, the trick requires you to paddle with enough speed to maneuver your surfboard into the most critical part of the wave (while not appearing to put in effort), then, with perfect balance, to cross one foot over the other, while still surfing and keeping the board in the most critical position of the wave, as you walk to the front, all while making sure the board doesn’t slide out from under you (a feeling which is a little like walking a tightrope, while also surfing). It doesn’t count if you don’t look beautiful and stable while doing it. It doesn’t count if you look like you’re losing your balance. It doesn’t count if you look like it takes any effort. If this isn’t a metaphor of what it means to be a woman or girl navigating modern day culture, then I don’t know what is. It’s not surprising that cross-stepping and hanging ten is considered a girl’s surf trick in most surfing circles. Leave the “raw power” to the boys, and the effortless grace to the women… but I digress.

Girls are taught to doubt their own narrative. As a woman recovering from my girlhood, I spend a great deal of time and effort on my own narrative. Perhaps this is why I became a writer. I find myself constantly revising the story I tell about myself. For so long my own story was predicated upon a tale of my own defectiveness. Now my story comes from power, but because I have so few frameworks for this story, I find the writing slow, the narrative difficult, and the power slippery at best. Melissa Febos’s Girlhood, is an illuminating collection of essays that offers a better framework, almost a self-help book for women recovering from girlhood. I’m not sure if I can do all she asks.

Febos writes: “The true telling of our stories often requires the annihilation of other stories…”

I no longer collaborate with the limited framework society provided me, the fantasies powerful men and boys projected upon my body and my desires, and the stories told to me by my mother and other women of what a girl should be. By this, I mean that I try not to be a “good girl.” By this I mean I rock the boat. I am recovering from the collective cultural delusion that defined me.

When I was a girl, I told my mother I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. She said that meant I wanted to be a prostitute. I don’t understand what kind of mental gymnastics got her to that conclusion. The internal workings of my mother’s mind remains a mystery to me to this day. She has suffered from mental illness my whole life. And while I can partially blame her mental illness for her conclusions, I also blame the patriarchy.

And so, when Febos says that certain stories need to be annihilated, I wonder if it’s really annihilation that’s required, but rather a rigorous reframing of all that self-hatred we’ve swallowed and consumed. What purpose does self-hatred serve? Does it serve a protective quality? Is self-denial easier than the denial of others? I’m not fully sure. Febos writes, “We are all unreliable narrators of our own motives.”

Where does self-hatred come from? If, as Melissa Febos notes, “the self becomes a collaboration with other people” we can likely draw the conclusion that much of the self-hatred girls experience comes from outside them. They experience it in their families, the peer groups, in early sexual encounters, and in messages they receive from the media. Girls compare themselves to other girls, and often the comparisons are based on external appearance.

But self-hatred doesn’t come from appearance alone. Girls hold each other to impossible standards of decorum and emotional availability. I think of a recent falling out I had with a close female friend I’ve known most of my life (I’ll leave out details here), but sometimes the cruelest criticism is the true criticism delivered in the meanest way possible.

Self-hatred exists in the family of self-limiting beliefs, and the universe self-limiting beliefs has real-world implications in women’s lives. Self-hatred might begin internally, but its impact is very real. It affects how we feel about ourselves, the jobs we try to get, the salaries we ask for, the dreams we let ourselves dream, the friendship and relationships we have. It affects what we let ourselves try to do. It underlies self-destructive behavior. I have experienced self-hatred’s many flavors. There’s bodily self-hatred, self-hatred of one’s personality, self-abnegating self-hatred with its self-punishments of excessive exercise, cutting, or starvation. There’s self-hatred that leads to dissociation from self and engagement in activities and friendships which do not serve one’s best interests. There’s self-hatred so rampant, its demands of perfection so exact, it leads to the failure to start anything.

I’ve been told that writing can be a cure for self-hatred. The re-framing of one’s story has immense power. But if writing is a cure, then it’s a very slow cure. I’ve been at it for over 20 years now, and I’m still working on my own self-hatred. Perhaps it is easier to see a solution or truth than to enact or live it.

There are other solutions for self-hatred. Therapy is one. Spending time with positive people has also been noted as a possible cure, but given my misanthropic tendencies, I’m more likely to say hi to the sea turtles while surfing than to say hi to the people in the lineup.

Febos offers a unique kind of self-help solution to the self-hatred problem, one that is difficult to do, but perhaps underestimated. She writes about how, for years, she practiced serial monogamy, and was therefore never really alone for any extended period of time. When she tries it for the first time, she finds it revelatory: “My time was suddenly my own, which subtly but completely changed the texture of being. I ran and slept and taught my students and talked for hours on the phone to my friends and family…intimacy … is a closeness to another person that requires closeness with oneself.”

Writing requires a particular kind of solitude. Unlike other creative acts like music, or even art, the writer can’t really do the work in dialogue with other people, in a collective, or at a party (though I’ve tried).

Girls are taught that they shouldn’t be alone. As a girl, I wasn’t allowed out of the house unless I was with friends. The fear of sexual assault or violence is a specter always lurking in the shadows any time a woman ventures out on her own. When I was a child, my mother’s paranoid delusions had her convinced that we lived surrounded by rapists. We lived in some rough neighborhoods in Miami, and given the prevalence of rape in America, she might not have been wrong.

And yet, perhaps the most important lesson of our recovery from girlhood can come from Gloria Steinem’s advice that we go at it alone, that we take to the road, that we spend time with ourselves. It might be less dangerous than we think. Gloria Steinem, in “My Life on the Road,” writes: “…domestic violence in the United States records show that women are most likely to be beaten or killed at home and by men they know. Statistically speaking, home is an even more dangerous place for women than the road.”

To be alone is to confront one’s own self-hatred directly. Febos notes: “It’s a particularly crushing disappointment to realize again that your problem is yourself.”

Self-Hating Medusa. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood. Original Art.
Self-Hating Medusa. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood.

After months of quarantine together, my partner and I are only now venturing out. Being alone in the house again is strange. I feel anxious. I sit with myself and I am not always comfortable. I sit down to write, and think about the times when I was younger, when I hated myself more than I do today. I think about the immense labor that goes into building a life. Febos writes that she divides her days into “modules” or “the set of practices of which I make sure to include two or three in any given day, though my best days include all six: morning journaling, a meeting, exercise, meditation, writing, and meaningful contact with friends.” I think about my own practices to build a meaningful life: morning (sometimes afternoon surfing), meditation, writing, art-making, meaningful contact with friends and family.

But being alone with myself is a new feeling in this almost post-pandemic world.

My partner bikes to his studio in Chinatown and I worry about drivers who don’t look when they make left turns. He tells me of friends he’s meeting, about the people starting to venture out again, and I think about how fragile I am here on this island, how few people I truly know, having only just moved here a few years ago. How grateful I am for the friends I do have. The silence is loud. I write “I hate myself” down. Why? I write this essay. I think about it.

Perhaps the most ready diagnostic to determine whether a woman suffers from self-hatred can be the test of how she feels when she’s alone. If I subject myself to that diagnostic, I see that I have work to do. I’d get started, but I go surfing. I need to work on my cross-step. I can barely hang five. How will I ever hang ten?

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

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Criticism

Book Review: “What Happened to You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing” by Bruce D. Perry and Oprah Winfrey

Nobody picks up a book about trauma because they are feeling well. Ever since I learned that Oprah Winfrey had a new book out, I went back and forth about whether I’d read it. Oprah is, well, Oprah, and I didn’t want to be disappointed. But when I found myself feeling a little down last week, and unable to break out of the funk, I picked up a copy of “What Happened to You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing” by Bruce D. Perry, M.D. and Oprah Winfrey.

I wasn’t disappointed.

Oprah Winfrey’s deepest talent has been to have tough, honest, and empathetic conversations with just about anyone. Oprah can put a stranger before a crowd, even an unsympathetic one, and reveal his or her essential humanity. This is a special and rare talent. In Bruce D. Perry and Oprah Winfrey’s “What Happened to You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing” Oprah puts the trauma therapist on the spot, and guides the conversation in unexpected, and often refreshing, directions.

Brain doctors can sometimes be difficult to follow on their best days, but with Oprah as guide, readers of “What Happened to You?” will find an accessible explanation about what trauma does to the brain. The book focuses particularly on how a traumatic upbringing affects development.

Having read more in-depth books on trauma like “The Body Keeps the Score” and having spent years listening to Josh Korda’s Buddhist lectures on attachment theory and trauma (which you can find in their entirety here), I found “What Happened to You” to be an accessible introduction to trauma theory, but for the most part, at least as far as trauma theory is concerned, the book doesn’t offer anything you can’t learn elsewhere. The most fascinating aspects of the book were the moments when Winfrey and Dr. Perry step aside from therapeutic frameworks, and talk frankly about how simple things, like community, culture, and meaning can have immense healing power.

For example, Dr. Perry notes that in traditional cultures, there were four pillars of traditional healing: (1) connection to a community and to the natural world, (2) rhythmic dance, drumming, and singing, (3) adherence to a set of beliefs or values that brought meaning, and (4) the use of natural hallucinogens and healing plants to bring about healing.

As I kept reading, I couldn’t help but feel a little sad as Dr. Perry and Winfrey kept returning to the idea that full and true healing cannot take place in the absence of a community or in the absence of connection. I live in Hawai’i, and I had only just begun to put down roots, when COVID-19 lockdowns began, but I’ve always struggled with feeling a sense of belonging. I’ve always been awkward, an outsider. I’ve always had close friends, but never really saw myself as part of a community.

As the world went into lockdown, I read about what life had been like in Hawai’i before western contact.

Kanaka Maoli, or people who lived in Hawai’i prior to contact, lived lives rich with the four pillars of traditional healing Dr. Perry describes in “What Happened to You.” Polynesian close-knit farming communities were good stewards of the natural world. This is reflected in the rich community-based farming traditions that sustained families on the islands for generations. It is also reflected in the vibrant natural and mythological framework passed down in the hula and oli, the chants and dances of the people who expressed their connection to nature and its gods through poetry, dance, and singing. The pantheon of gods reflected a deep sense of wonder, awe, and belief in the interconnectedness of all beings. And healing herbs and plants were used in the la’au lapa’au, a holistic form of plant medicine that treated not only the sick body, but also the whole person in relationship to his or her community. In the la’au lapa’au, healing could not take place without relational healing, without fixing the ruptures between people, as well as the ruptures within, as June Gutmanis describes vividly in her stunning book “The Secrets and Practice of Hawaiian Herbal Medicine.”

Modern Hawai’i’s relational poverty is a stark contrast to the ancient Polynesian traditions that people first brought to these islands. Where there were interconnected farming communities that traded ideas and food from the land to the sea, there are now neighborhoods rift apart by homelessness, addiction, abuse, violence, and colonialism. Where there were rhythmic dances based upon ancient chant and deep spiritual traditions, you’ll find a commercialized westernized hula that perhaps only resembles the ancient form in spirit. The true nature of the gods are veiled, though Pele’s name is widely spoken of, especially during eruptions. And the ancient healing power of the community, of the plants, of water, often arrives in veiled metaphor. In Hawai’i, the old wisdom arrives intermittently, like the mountains hiding and reappearing in the mist of Manoa.

Lacking any community center to speak of (especially given the devastation the COVID-19 pandemic had wrought on communal spaces), having felt growing rifts between my closest friends and family members for reasons that are at once predictable and also baffling to me (you can only be too busy for so long), as unsure about my beliefs as ever, and having no real access to hallucinogens nor shamans, I realized I’d have to settle for the accessible items on Dr. Perry’s list: nature and rhythm. I didn’t live far from the sea, and while I wasn’t about to try to start a drum circle of one in Waikiki, I knew that the rhythm of my feet during a long walk could be as healing as dancing, the pace of my gait as metrical as a poem.

When depression settles into my bones, it often settles in slowly, and subtlety. I can go for days without noticing it. But in the past few days, I’ve found myself sleeping in the middle of the day, unable to motivate myself to complete the simplest of tasks, and feeling more and more lost in the haze of my own increasingly narrow inner world. Depression brings the walls in close. I found myself circling the same despondent thoughts like a vulture.

I leashed up my dog, and got to walking.

I wish I could report that the change in my system was instantaneous, but unlike a pill, the effects of rhythmic movement are cumulative and slow. For the first half of the walk my thoughts were no better than Yeats’s sad falcon turning and turning in a widening gyre. I circled the same old arguments over and over. Screw humanity. But the “screw humanity” sentiment falls short when you’re walking through a covid-19 deserted street with no humanity to speak about.

It wasn’t until I reached the sea that a deeper feeling of peace settled inside me. And as I continued my walk, I found my thoughts slowly widening to take in Ka’ena Point. The winter sun had stopped setting over the sea weeks ago, and the sun had now settled in behind the mountains, lighting the clouds above them aflame, mirroring the newly lit flames of the Royal Hawaiian, which had only recently come to life in the past few weeks, thanks to a loosening of pandemic restrictions. Summer would soon be here. And while Waikiki has two seasons: a wet one and a dry one, summer brings its own unique qualities.

Diamond Head from Kewalos. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood. Original Art.
Diamond Head from Kewalos. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood.

Two boys played the ukulele on a park bench, and one playfully sang falsetto. The surf was down, but the report promised a rising swell by the weekend, and the calm water offered a respite for the lifeguards, welcoming the stand-up paddleboarders, wading children, and snorkeling retirees. Young people lounged on hammocks. People read books on the beach. My heart opened. My mind widened. I didn’t feel so isolated. My dog sniffed the palm trees, and guided me to the Barefoot Beach Café where the musicians were playing their Aloha Friday set.

Dr. Perry in “What Happened to You” explains that the medical model for handling trauma, depression, and anxiety relies heavily on psychopharmacology, cognitive behavioral therapies, and that it “greatly undervalues the power of connectedness and rhythm.”

In times of great distress I have been a patient of cognitive behavioral therapies and I have found them helpful, but I have to agree that no amount of “reality testing” of my own thoughts in a notebook can replace a good conversation with a friend, or the rhythmic peace of a surf session when the waves are good, or the variety of natural experiences that this island of O’ahu in its infinite wisdom offers.

Reading also offers a kind of community, though distant.

Some of the most moving parts of “What Happened to You” are when Oprah opens up about her own traumatic upbringing, and about the ways her relationship with her mother has challenged her and shaped her growth throughout her life. She writes about visiting her mother in hospice, being frozen, unable to find the right words. And that’s where Oprah, the master of interview and conversation, opens up a hospice brochure to learn what the right words might be for her to say.

Ultimately Oprah finds her way forward, but the way forward is beautifully unexpected and moved me to tears.

Writers don’t always have the right words. In my personal essays and in my work as a legal content writer, I have always felt like a blind woman feeling her way toward the truth. It is only when I finish a piece of writing, whether it’s about trauma and healing, post-traumatic stress disorder in those who have survived horrific accidents, or the nuances of surviving a divorce, that I can look at the breadcrumbs of words I have written and trace my way back

I’ll never be able to hold a conversation like Oprah, with her real-time wit. But Oprah’s radical vulnerability gives me hope that maybe someday I might become a better letter writer. Because that’s what “What Happened to You” feels like at its best. It feels like reading the curated letters of two smart people, trying to grow, to learn more, and to help others.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

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Criticism

Margaret River Pro 2021: World Surf League Needs to Turn Off YouTube Comments to Prevent Bullying of Female Athletes

On Saturday, I tuned in to watch the first women’s heats of the Margaret River Pro as they were livestreamed on YouTube. I wish I could tell you about how Tatiana Weston-Webb’s committed turns in well overhead surf impressed me, or how thrilling it was to watch the women take critical drops in poorly-groomed and large conditions. Or, how I watched in horror as Stephanie Gilmore paddled diagonally to avoid a bomb cleanup set that gave me flashbacks of what it felt like to be caught inside on a bigger North Shore swell last winter. Instead, as I watched the YouTube livestream, I found myself reading unmoderated comments that flashed down the screen. What I saw infuriated me, disturbed me, and ultimately led me to turn off the livestream altogether. This is not because I don’t enjoy watching women’s surfing. It was because I was appalled at what I saw.

Watching the opening heat of the Margaret River Pro meant enduring a constant trickle of hate speech, sexually harassing language, and commentary that would perhaps only pass in the most male-dominated of sports bars in the most backwater of backwater places in America. While I understand that such hate speech is not uncommon on social media or the internet, I was appalled that the World Surf League would permit these kinds of unmoderated comments to populate their YouTube livestreams. I was horrified that the World Surf League would essentially condone this kind of bullying of their female athletes.

The kind of free-for-all I witnessed is irresponsible at best and a liability to the sponsors at worst. I hardly think Boost Mobile or Corona want to be associated with misogyny, transphobia, and sexually demeaning language. But the fact that the World Surf League won’t turn off their comments on YouTube videos or at least have someone moderate public commentary before it goes live is downright shocking.

YouTube has recently pledged to disable all comments on videos featuring children to protect children from predators. We already know that female athletes are at greater risk of online bullying. See the recent articles on Outside Magazine about social media bullying that professional skier Caroline Gleich experienced, or the bullying experienced by professional rock climber Sasha DiGuilian by another professional climber. In the case of the climbing community, the backlash was fairly swift. But not all sports protect their women athletes from bullying or harassment equally, and it’s disappointing to see that the World Surf League permits the kind of unmoderated hate speech and bullying I witnessed on Saturday to proliferate.

Coastal Flooding. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood. Original Art.
Coastal Flooding. Watercolor. Janice Greenwood.

I believe there are many women who want to watch women’s surfing. I am certainly one of them. But if watching women’s surfing means enduring this kind of bullying and commentary, the World Surf League will find itself hard-pressed to draw a larger female audience. After all, there are reasons why I don’t spend a lot of time on message boards or certain darker neighborhoods of Twitter and Facebook. Like most women, I understand that it’s important to protect my space from certain kinds of hate speech, misogyny, and bullying. I know it exists, but I simply don’t have an infinite reservoir of tolerance for hate. No one does. This is why I block certain people on social media. This is why I turn off the comments on my blog. This is why I don’t spend time on Reddit.

I believe strongly in free speech. If the trolls want to troll away in their little island of hatred in some Twitter or Reddit island, that’s their prerogative. However, when I tune into larger media venues, I expect some degree of moderation, some degree of decorum. You don’t watch professional football and expect to hear unfiltered profanity, and in the same way, when I tuned in to watch women’s surfing, I didn’t expect to encounter a sample platter of the worst misogynistic hate speech of the web.

A woman should be able to crack open a Corona on a Saturday morning to watch women’s surfing without having to endure the kind of hatred, transphobia, and misogyny I saw. When watching women’s surfing means enduring sexually demeaning comments about Tatiana Weston-Webb’s body; when it means seeing a barrage of transphobic hate speech that speaks derogatively to the trans female experience (it’s hard enough for trans athletes to participate in sports); when it means enduring the peanut gallery of men demeaning women’s surfing in general, it’s pretty upsetting.

Women surfers work hard. If a professional commentator said the kind of things about Tatiana Weston-Webb I saw flash down my screen in the comments, he or she would likely be fired. I don’t see why the World Surf League should hold what it permits to flash down its commentary screens to a different standard.

I won’t repeat verbatim here the misogynistic, ableist, and offensive drivel I saw on display while watching the women’s heat on Saturday morning. I’ll only say that in the twenty or so minutes I stomached watching the Margaret River Pro women’s livestream, various trolls had free range to debate which competitor was “hottest” and lament the fact that the women were wearing wetsuits instead of bikinis, while another commentator compared women to dogs, and others commented on trans bodies in a derogatory manner.

I wasn’t alone in my shock. A few women and men tried to combat the trolls, but combatting trolls is like swatting mosquitos. Even if you squash one on your arm, there are always two others biting your foot or your back. One woman expressed shock and disbelief, adding her voice to the mix. Other men rose to the defense of the female surfers. I wanted to do the same, but figured I’d just write this piece instead.

I want to watch women’s surfing so I can marvel at what hard-working women can do in challenging and powerful surf. It is inspiring.

It’s disappointing that I had to endure the worst that the internet has to offer in order to watch it.

UPDATE June 15, 2021: A prior version of this article mentioned major news sites that appeared to disable their comments. Many of these sites continue to permit comments, though policies may vary. This article has been updated to reflect this.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

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