Issue 32: Safaa Fathy & Anne Waldman

A Vision, Christine?

An allegorical dream in which Christine learns about the history of France, its present problems, and the meaning of her own life. Grab the tools and strike the anvil.

Make a statue of the past, turn the coming fury of the so many voiceless into scenes where the landscape of the rabid, of the mute, of slavery sentinels, of sorrow fade from the eye, fade from the womb of the universe.

Born in the backwoods, next to a gushing fountain of abuse, men fussing over wombs of women, of their Raheem or Rahman, they say it is such a vessel or abode of every evil and vice built around the wall of are you going crazy… brain’s delight echoes the maiden, or the widow screams No never was ever a womb foul nor its vomb seed ever nor the gothic wamba, uprooted from the middle wamme, reaching to the northern skies of the våmm. Scatter the word on the ground of understanding questions.

She. The womblike spur on, burn on, rise above, the rose, Rose on the height of the Parnasse Mount furrowed with the lush laurels, mays of hues and delicious scents of rhetoric , herbs of logic, shades of the arts, greens of wonder and acacias of chords. Time to leave, time to build the alleys and mansions of the wombed city. 

France is coming a long way to this right side, and is a parable itself and for its women, 1400  AD and facing the future post terrorism post migration post Marseillaise. Winged Nike. Tightening up. Everyone is a suspect. And the gates are drawn and women wonder how to hide their modesty. The skin’s exquisite lays of complaints, of sorrowful melodies under the pillows of….

And tolerance for the crude men behind the gifted literary women. Who eat up their novels. And it goes the other way. I would walk away wisely the other way Sarkozy and later Macron will bend over worried like a stubborn kid of prominent bronze. I watched the ascent from Marrakesh the walled part of city on the telly, so magnificent. Outshine, Pizan Outshine. Pizan will not make an arrondissement embarrass the women for whom clothe is spun and held and draped. Not like men would do. No leggings in this castle.

No leggings in this castle, which will debate about the misogynistic Roman of the Rose.

No leggings in Castle Reason she said and also no socks, so speak your laws, Carmentis, your laws of the primitive Castle after sailing the river Tiber. The ABC of Latin flowers, vowels of twittering and consonants of efflorescing skirts of the name to your Ita, objects, and matters that lies in the OUI, OUI, je suis . Sing, song, sing dong, Carmen fare on, fare on, on the furthest sea include mountains and do name Italy.  Minerva veils the characters of woe in fewer words; long narratives shrink to the bone, she features characters of arithmetic consequence and from her Book of Feats you also can draw fresh water and perpetuity.

“An amazing vision came over me as a strange prophetic sign”.

(she said) I learned about their ruses, and learned the opening. What opened? A burqa.

A garment I said, a garment, if you please, a garment of the thousand seas. Let it be wool, let it be burlap, let it be linen , let it be flax, let it be fiber, let it be filament, let it be string, let it be wire, let it be tree, weaving loom spreading a space facing the girl’s face reading that text of the whole pace of hands, finger tips. Wave  to her, she, that has been and would ever be the Virgin of vita brevis whatever that could possibly be. Ars, though, Ars your Excellency, Ars my lady, Ars sir, Ars signora, Ars Saydati, Ars is the tail and fire of chastity.

I learned about France, and France became the epicenter of kissing and familial standing wherein the femmes gathered to get wilderness back. Of every Paris would be in accord. I was a stand in for France, Christine admitted, and one leader did not wish to give anything to France. Or they would have a free climate. But what about us American women? What is our parable? What about the others?

Like a compost, like a solar panel. A solar system. Vision of another planet. And one could walk through the transparent walls of the city. A nomadic calligraphy is my city. Fierceness shrouded in secrecy yet appearing wise and owl, Oh Minerva take the yoke, plough the field, sow the grain, harvest the reaping, under the rain scythe that moisson growing from the city of woe, our city that has given us walls and taken our homes, the city of then, the city that loathed the womb and sleuthed the apparition. We protect the mill and the grain, the worm in its own silk, the sun in its furthest wing, metaphysics of the phusis thing in its nomos of heresy, for yes we are the heretics of the ancient citadel, of the outraged race against apocalypse.     

May I only rest here in my vision to France. Summoned by relatives Le Fèvre. A sou for ancestors. But heart from the women who were building in their minds the transgendered walls of a city. We are the weather of our existence as we summon all the women in Texas to lean on the planet of this later catastrophe.  Outrage, outage, shudder, a chill.

 (she said) I was already mid-way through the journey of my Dantean pilgrimage when one day at eventide I found myself on the long road and desirous of shelter. On the long way to Matrimonialness, slander the slandering men.  And learned about the ruses. Of phenomenal worldliness.  And how it was advisable to hide money from the minted men.  Their time Machine explodes.  The Forcing of the End. Hide our sex from the men. Hide the science from the men. Stand up in the Field of Letters where our city is growing in a flat, free, fertile land, where freshness flows, excavate and dig, carry away this load of earth, throw those misshapen stones of regret and spite, evil mind of the slanderous men, dabble in literature and delight in the science of the space, of the Marches of Tuscany, of the fields of Damascus, of  the banks of the Nile, of the forests of the Amazon, of the Mississippi plains endowing the heath, the moors, the avenues, the alleys and suburbs of la différence sexuelle and others of the Problemata and Categories of change.

The excursion to Mars to gather Paleolithic microbes. Not yet, don’t speak of it, the science keep from the men.

I learned about matins, lauds and salat and mantra. I sang my head off and the metaphor of the rhizome would join us here, exhausted and I wanted my utopia to sing and charge with fervor its dream. I reserved my mind contemplating a new wall to be built around this our women citadel. This dream of life when we can get away encircled again like the caracole within a walled city. It is an archive of all the women who make the world super great again.

Come in, come in. The plowwomen, the journeywomen. Come in, come in, the excised goddesses, come in the buried alive girls Maw’oudat , come in the deflowered in the open bleeding brides, come in the murdered loving woman, come in the widowed in black, come in the raped Un-Virgined, come in the yearning forced and compelled, come in the eager and passionate reader of views and destinies, come in the witches of the almighty, come in the endless tears, come in the broken hearts, come in the maddened girls, come in the haunting hysteria come in the grieving Divinity and the Soprano of the soul. The galloping vision expects them to lead and manifest an indomitable ornery energy that sustains life, is a parable in poetry, expects them to lead.

And they do. Come in, come in.  Enter avocats and sorcerers, bricklayers, soothsayers, the furniture that holds future machines.

Step toward an ecology of mind in another Accord.

Step toward the granulated ire of Iran.

Land on iron Mars.

Land on Mercury of metal and retreat.

Land on the realm of the weak and retrieve the power of the limb.

Land on the planet of cruelty, deliver its roundness of the malicious sting.

And land on a planet where my basket holds just musky firmaments.

And won’t impose an order on language.

Ethics of warring communitas. Wavers in the gel. Dithers in the widening trench, which emptied earth Christine has carried on her shoulders in great loads. Throw in the heavy stones of our City. Take your pen, sit upright to write and outline the traits of the place that is sheltering the we that claims to be.

Thrown together this parable tonight, been with women all day long

adjudicating false testimony of males.

Hope Rectitude will discuss horrors of rape.  And  martyrdom of  holy women.

BURNED, TORTURED, BEATEN.  Mercy, Madam Mercy will become clear.

Rectitude disgruntled because born daughters are dismayed and even harrowed.  Rectitude says ‘My dear friend, you can be sure that women who are chaste and lead a moral existence would find no pleasure in being raped.’ Christine has said it angers and upsets me when men claim that women want to be raped. Men of misery, men of plight, men of lechery, men of shame, rape stinks your bosom, your city, your land, your airs and rains filth on the fields of your foul food.

Lucretia’s rape brought down the kingdom of Rome. Lo and behold men declare this to be due to woman’s innate weakness. Rectitude says No. Nasty sons fight vicious brawls, fathers in destitution turn their back, how insatiable they are. Our sorrowful pass through thick and thin.

Nero dissected his mother to see her womb.  Bathing in lewd lechery, watched inferno rage through the city just as all these rulers who dance in their towers watching inferno raging through land and forest. Not to name one, they all have one name, Nero. 

How may I ever be a brilliant military strategist like Joan of Arc.

Become our citizen whose praises should be sung to the sky.

In my vision, reason not the need.  But still you need her in city’s reasoning.

Remember Rectitude which is straight up in the architecture of mind. As you build

your poem.

I am. Stabilized by Reason. A mirror. And Rectitude’s ruler.

Raison / mirror.

Raison/mirror.

Justice/Compass

Residence in Heaven, Earth, in Hell.

Themutis rescues Moses in the bullrushes, and proves women rescue and nurture martyrs

and leaders and kings and prime misters and stand in the bullrushes until they themselves may rescue real children.

Every woman will have her day and stand in her power. And rescue boys. And the men, as you might expect.  Accruing every day to the world because of beauty. They will have adjuncts and robotics. Send Perseverance to all corners of the multiverse.  Collect rocks, as you woman up your charge.  

The sister Justice puts the finishing touches. She has the measuring tool. She envisions the dark and the obscure, the luminous and the bright. She knows what is wrong and what is right.

Rectitude says the houses of the city have been completed. The City of Ladies and its book.  Plentiful of splendid mansions in wide streets, royal palaces, defense towers to be filled with the Realm of Feminna. No need for Renewal. Generations of women last all times, queens and princesses valiant ladies of great renown, of glimmer of the soul, of the voice of dawn and day, of assembly of sisters to the nightfall and that dusk always would be our friend.

Ladies of past, ladies of present, ladies of future, we have a place, a country beside exile, even a city outside time. A city in all eternity. To dwell inside its walls. For they have occurred across the layers of verses not unique but many and multi. Speculum of knowledge.

Of since when I had arrived here through a potent desire for sleep and taken and received nourishment necessary for human life, I recommended myself to the author of all things myself. My hands. My lens. Many apps. Poetic structure betook me to a bed of troubled rest. Of since when my senses bound by the weight of sleep, this amazing vision part 2 overcame me as a strange, prophetic sign, even though I am hardly Nebuchadnezzar, Scipio or Joseph.  Secrets are not denied to the more unsophisticated.

I have arrived through a potent desire to disappear in the mist, in the air, in the flying murmuration. I have eaten that bread, I have eaten your stone, and my flowers. Then offered my soul to the desert. Too many words had lead me to exile and since I am the daughter of the mist of that night of the City of Ladies, the mental  is the place in which I have always lived and in which I will dwell and remain, aside, aside from predation, aside from vain. I, the simple being in vanishing inhale the secrets and inhabit riddles. The verse that I wrote and the verse in which I dwell, the rockweed in that inn, where the Knight of death plays chess, seeming outlined in the black and white dominion. The gazelle runs across the steppes evaporates in the alleys Plato’s city of Utopia that no poets could rescue.
“I wish to reveal everything to you”. [ Note here a crowned lady, whom Christine’s preface has identified as at once the earth, the human, and the soul of France, appeared and gave Christine a task:

Take this papyrus to the innermost chamber of your mental city to the hidden archive and make the guest list of all the activist women. And remember your origin in this terrible animalia borne plague. Prepare parchment, quick, and ink, and write the words issuing from my breast (she said) for I wish to reveal everything to you. No woman born for a long time would ever surpass me. We need stabilize the coastlines and borders of all Europe. My requests I know are wearying. Don’t tarry.  Live a million years. Scribe in sand, or sky. Who is she?

She is and is too, You. Daughters could be of the same ilk even if you have two sets of teeth, they also belong to the vast realm of angels of the Lord that gave succor to those women deprived of history in our City. Milk poured from the beheaded body of St Catherine and she is my neighbor buried there in Mount Sinai, cure me, and cure us by your sacred oils. Imagine women that cannot be, denied the simple fact of ontology, denied desiring the man or desiring the child, desiring women and the dwelling or desiring the sphere of the planes of being. Ladies who are destitute of the feminine shape, shatter the ugly howl of those men.

Christine in weakness mourned the fact that she neglected to learn enough from her father and her husband while they were alive. She noted: When I was at two fonts of philosophy themselves—those noble fountains so bright and wholesome -I, like a young and headstrong woman, a pampered fool, took not my full of them even though the beautiful water pleased me. Rather just like a simpleton who sees the sun shining and considers not the rain but thinks a blazing coinder  will last forever, I neglected those tidings and thought to recover my loss in physics ad astra per Zeneca.  But France, is bored with lockdowns.

Bored with lock down, tired of such Oh la la las, of its Zut and its on se calme, on se calme, shout here the south out there, obstruct their vocal cords with Neonicotinoided dead bees, its rapist minsters of interiorities and pour the sand of its ménage à trois cherished by the nearest of the minsters to the rapist of them. Hail France. Vive la France. Vive la République une et indivisible.

I hit my head against the wall, the city collapsed for a moment, a false moment.

Maybe this would be later rescinded.  A famous moment when

you re-consider master narrative.

If I had such clarity in my bonnet now in my flaneur mind I would take another look.

And Magdalen arrived in the nick of time.  And all was blessed in contradiction.

The souls will retake the bodies on the leveled surface of all things where madness before receding will prevail, where the newly born of their own bone will exult after bewailing. The stars become dust then they flock and congregate above the Unvirgened Virgins of our city.

AW/Feb 27/2020, full moon

SF - red; AW - black 

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Christine de Pizan is born in Venice in 1364. The daughter of the astrologer Charles V.  She is a poet, historian, and a moralist. Christine de Pizan is said to be "the first woman author" of the French literature. Le Livre de la cité des Dames is one of her major works. The powerful allegorical proposal of the city that De Pizan constructs was motivated by the reading of the misogynistic and cynical satire of Roman de la Rose where the author laments being born a woman (in a chapter named La Vieille “The old woman”).

In her book, three Goddesses console De Pizan for being born a woman. Reason, Rectitude and Justice. With their help, Christine de Pizan will build an invincible city where women will be the sovereigns of their destiny, the saviors of their own being of the past hence of times to come. The beautiful edifices of the city are made by those women of the past, warriors, artists and scholars, lovers and saints!

In this city, Christine de Pizan discusses rape, gender equality, women's access to knowledge... The book of this city enthused both Anne Waldman and myself to use our ink and reach for the hospitable metaphor of the city. Its ingenuity compelled us to delve within the alleys of the city, insert or throw a seed here and there, plant a sprout, throw a brick or even simply emit a howl to resonate along with the women of the past whispers, raise our voices to resound against the figurative walls of De Pizan space.

We, as Anne says, are two wacky philosophers who accidentally found themselves  meandering in it, we the feminist flaneurs have entered the Le Livre de la Cité des Dames perhaps to glean a bit of the inaugural splendor of a city built also for us. We the women of the ferocious sixth massive extinction, of the Covid Pandemic, between Boulder and Paris, we have found refuge in De Pizan 15th century city made of ink.

Safaa Fathy was born in Egypt. She is a poet, essay writer and filmmaker. She had her PhD form the Sorbonne University and has been director of programme at the Collège International de Philosophie, Paris. Her plays Terror and Ordeal were prefaced by Jacques Derrida, with whom she signed a book, Tourner les mots (partly translated into English by Max Cavitch, University of Pennsylvania). Her book of poetry Revolution Goes Through Walls (SplitLevel Texts) was first published in Egypt, then in France, and in Brazil. Safaa Fathy’s experimental book of poems entitled Al Haschische is published by Pamenar Press (London, directed by Ghazal Mosadeq2023). Where not to be Born, 2024 is published by Litumus Press NY. Safaa Fathy’s Name to the Sea, a film poem structured within a still frame, is being published along with the text in seven languages (Vanilla planifolia, Mexico City). Safaa Fathy has been writing a novel in English for the past five years. www.safaafathy.org 

Anne Waldman is the author most recently of Rues du Monde, English and French (Apic Press, Algeria 2024), Bard, Kinetic (Coffee House 2023), a memoir with poetry, essays, interviews, Para Ser Estrella a Medianoche, English and Spanish (Arrebato Libros, Madrid 2021) and co-editor with Emma Gomis of New Weathers: Poetics from the Naropa Archive (Nightboat 2022). Forthcoming Mesopotopia, Penguin 2025. And Activist Scissors, Staircase Books, Boston, 2025. Waldman has published over 70 books of poetry, including the 1,000 page feminist epic: The Iovis Trilogy: Colors The Mechanism of Concealment which won the PEN Center Literary Award for Poetry. She was awarded the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for Lifetime Achievement in 2015. Waldman is one of the founders and a former Director of The Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church In-the-Bowery and a founder of the Kerouac School at Naropa University in Boulder, CO where she is the Artistic Director of the annual Summer Writing Program. annewaldman.org naropa.edu

Copyright © 2024 by Safaa Fathy & Anne Waldman, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author