“‘I Sang for You, Not for Posterity’: Survival Writing in an Era of Creative Violence

The avant-garde and Modernism are most readily associated with forms of ‘creative violence’ that reflected a resolve to startle and disturb the public. It was not enough to set the imagination free; the objective was first and foremost to challenge ‘unfreedom’: to challenge all forms of orthodoxy and tyranny, and to provoke the timidity of readers and the politeness of audiences. This paper focuses on forms of experimental women’s writing that I am calling ‘survival writing’, characterized by an oppositional focus on the collective and community. During the outbreak of WWII many women of the Left Bank: lesbians, unmarried and unattached women, stayed in Paris. Their survival depended more upon the community they had founded there than an isolated existence outside the war zone. Writing and living in a Sapphic tradition, these writers valued ‘the remnant’ or ‘ruin’ as that which “has resisted destruction; it persists as that which remains” (Carr par 22). Similarly, Erica Hunt notes that she and other experimental Black women poets are unwilling to sacrifice ‘intimacy and cooperation […] as the price of entry’ into the public sphere of art and readerships. The Black Arts Movement was “radically opposed to any concept of the artist that alienates [them] from [their] community” (Neal 62). Consequently, a high value was placed on accessibility in writing by BAM poets though this was frequently and problematically conflated with simplicity (Shockely 197). In the same vein, the confusion of authorship that occurs in the active co-creative role of translator-poets particularly on work in minoritized languages has led to these works of communal production often being left out of consideration for an avant-garde canon. The acephalous and polygynous qualities of Quebecoise writing is most emblematic of an overlooked vanguard in this regard. These choices fly in the face of the ‘personal ballyhoo’ that for journalist Margaret Anderson characterized male modernism and the male avant-garde tradition. This paper will discuss the omission of experimental and avant-garde writing by marginalized women whose lives and communities were the most radically creative act.