m ove against him as i f you could m ove through him, he’s the
ocean, yo u ’re the tide, and it’s still cunt, he says cunt. H e’s
indelibly in you and you don’t want redemption so much as
you want him and still it’s cunt. It’s w hat’s true; Andrea’s the
lie. It’s a lie we got to tell, Jane and Judith and Ellen and
whom ever. It’s our most desperate lie. M y mother named me
Andrea. It means manhood or courage. It means not-cunt. She
specifically said: not-cunt. This one ain’t cunt, she declared,
after blood spilled and there was the pain o f labor so intense
that God couldn’t live through it and w ouldn’t which is w hy
all the pain’s with us and still she brought herself to a point o f
concentration and she said: not-cunt. This one’s someone, she
probably had in mind; a wish; a hope; let her, let her,
something. Something. Let her something. D on ’t, not with
this one. Just let this one through. Just don’t do it to this one.
She wrote: not-cunt, a fiction, and it failed, and the failure
defeated her and turned her cold to me, because before I was
even ten some man had wrote “ this one’s cunt, ” he took his
fingers and he wrote it down on me and inside me, his fingers
carved it in me with a pain that stayed half buried and there
wasn’t words I had for what he did, he wrote I was cunt, this
sweet little one who was what’s called a child but a female one
which changes it all. M y mama showed that fiction was
delusion, hallucination, it was a long, deranged lie designed to
last past your own lifetime. The man, on the other hand, was a
pragmatist, a maker o f reality, a shaper o f history, an
orchestrator o f events. He used life, not paper, bodies, not ink.
The Nazis, o f course, synthesized the two: bodies and ink.
Y ou can’t even say it would solve the problem to have
numbers on us, inked on. Numbers is as singular as names
unless we are all zero, 0, we could all be 0; Pauline Reage
already suggested it, o f course, but she’s a demagogue and a
utopian, a kind o f Stalinist o f female equality, she wants us all
equal on the bottom o f anything that’s mean enough to be on
top; it has a certain documentary quality. Unlike Reage, my
mother just made it up, and her fiction was a lie, almost
without precedent, not recognized as original or great, a
voyage o f imagination; it was just a fucking lie. I don’t want to
tell lies, not for moral reasons but it’s m y idea o f pride, you
name it, I can take it. I was born in a city where the walls were
falling down; I didn’t see many solid walls. The streets were
right next to you it seemed because you could always hear the
buzz, the hum, the call, as if drums were beckoning you to the
tribal dance; you could see the freedom. Inside was small and
constrained with rules designed to make you some kind o f
trained cockroach and outside was forever, a path straight to
the heart o f the world; there were no limits, it spread out in
