The Company of Female Writers (Taleb)

Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.   -- Virginia Woolf

Living isn’t courage, knowing that you’re living, that’s courage. -- Clarice Lispector

My neighbors got married in their backyard. Mama and I pressed our faces up to our back window and watched the bride, a petite woman, stand in front of her now-husband. In her white dress she looked like a cloud, unusual among the green, uncut grass of their yard. Her husband was slightly taller with a passive look. There were no family members present. No decorations. Only them, their officiant, and the photographer.

This was not the first wedding that I’d come across that was held in the backyard of someone’s house. Among many other things that have been adapted to the pandemic, weddings have been trimmed to small gatherings. And everything now has the word “zoom” or “virtual” in it. “Virtual” wedding. “Virtual” graduation. For school, kids are now “zoomed out” after eight hours of computer time. At Lakewood Park in Cleveland, I watched high schoolers celebrate the prom they never had and graduating students take pictures in their hats and gowns to mark a turning moment in their young lives.

Going to the lake became part of my routine during the early weeks of the pandemic. I wrote a blog post on Medium about how the pandemic has taught me to let go of what I cannot control. I was unemployed and scared of the future. It was not only uncertainty that I felt the most, but loneliness. It is the most intense I have ever felt it. Even with the phone check-ins with friends, the world seemed to shut down, and all I was left with was my thoughts. I laugh now when I think of my introverted friends who said, with a small shrug of the shoulders, “I don’t know what people are freaking out about. This is how I’ve lived my entire life.”

For me though, in this pandemic time, I really had to face myself now that there were not enough distractions. I buried myself in the company of female writers: Angela Davis, Nikki Giovanni, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Elena Ferrante, Deborah Levy, Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich, Clarice Lispector. With her book in my lap, Lispector whispered to me: It is because I dove into the abyss that I am beginning to love the abyss I am made of.

I appreciated solitude as a woman so much. Because of these female writers, I came to know a woman inside of me that frightens me and intrigues me. She has wild dreams. She demands things and has boundaries. She loves freedom but is so full of desire. I resisted her, I succumbed to her, and out of me came a creativity I’d been suppressing for a long time. I learned that I am not weak. That I can suffer and still make it through the day, alone if I must. This realization has set me free. (A thinking woman sleeps with monsters / that beak which grips her, she becomes, writes Adrienne Rich).

As we watched my neighbors get married in their yard, I thought about every sacrifice people have made in the past few months; every desire and want they could not have; the mental, emotional, and physical strength it took and will take to get through this. People in much worse situations than me have demonstrated resilience. I look at them and think: humans are synonymous with resilience. Reading about women, I think: women are embodiments of resilience.

In these hard moments, the beauty still exists. The bride’s veil still falls perfectly over her bare shoulders. The world presses its ears to her lips. In the backdrop, daylight falls onto its knees and into a sunset.

Nardine Taleb is an Egyptian-American writer and speech therapist based in Cleveland, Ohio. She is Prose Editor of the online literary journal Gordon Square Review, a Brooklyn Poets fellow, and a recipient of multiple writerships. You can find her at the following social media platforms: Twitter: @nardineta / IG: @nardineta / Medium: @nardinetaleb