This post is part of Marc H. Ellis’s “Exile and the Prophetic” feature for Mondoweiss. To read the entire series visit the archive page.
Shulamith Firestone’s life was a one-off, time-bound, epic. She was an early radical feminist, who saw women as a caste and demanded they seize the means of reproduction.
Firestone suffered from schizophrenia and spent most of her life alienated from the movement she energized. In the beginning Firestone’s life was up and down. As the years progressed her life fragmented. She became unrecognizable to others, and to herself.
Firestone was Jewish and Orthodox in her upbringing. Her home was riddled with accusations, guilt and violence. Firestone’s actions as an adult didn’t fall far from the family tree. Nonetheless, she was a pioneer. Her life is worth considering in feminist circles and beyond.
Firestone lived exile and the prophetic to the hilt. Then she went over the edge.
Firestone’s life is as much about those who seek to seize the prophetic mantle by exorcising the very prophetic they seek to disparage. For those who are just beginning to carve out their place in the exile and prophetic sun, Firestone is likewise important.
Without the prophetic there is no meaning in history. Because of this wager on the possibility of meaning in history – a wager with high stakes – the prophetic lives and dies on the margins. Sanity is at stake.
In some circles it has become fashionable to understand the prophetic as a patriarchal holdover and, indeed, Firestone was often accused of embracing patriarchal patterns. Such thinking is pedestrian.
To see the goal of life as ending exile – again seeing exile as a patriarchal notion only – is to engage inutopian thought without trajectory. Such thinking is also pedestrian.
Where does such thought lead us anyway except back to exile and the prophetic?
True, Firestone’s prophetic exile was final and debilitating. Yet exile isn’t always and everywhere madness. Like the prophetic, exile lives on the margins. Exile’s margins are filled with desolation. The challenge of exile is remain on the other side of desolation. It isn’t easy.
Exile and the prophetic have many limitations – I wouldn’t wish it on anyone – but swimming against the tide has it costs. This will always be the case.
Those active on the Jewish/Palestinian front should stand up and take notice. Our battlefield is strewn with mangled bodies, hearts and minds. At times, it feels like the accounts of Civil War Gettysburg I’ve read. Right after the battle was ‘won’ visitors to Gettysburg found bodies everywhere. The wounded of both sides envied the dead.
Susan Faludi writes of Firestone’s life and death in the current issue of the New Yorker [“Death of a Revolutionary”]. She begins in haunting tones:
When Shulamith Firestone’s body was found late last August, in her studio apartment on the fifth floor of a tenement walkup on East Tenth Street, she had been dead for some days. She was sixty-seven, and she had battled schizophrenia for decades, surviving on public assistance. There was no food in the apartment, and one theory is that Firestone starved, though no autopsy was conducted, by preference of her Orthodox Jewish family. Such a solitary demise would have been unimaginable to anyone who knew Firestone in the late nineteen-sixties, when she was at the epicenter of the radical-feminist movement, surrounded by some of the same women who, a month after her death, gathered in St. Mark’s Church In-the-Bowery, to pay their respects.
In Firestone’s memorial service, Kate Millett, another pioneering feminist, read from one of Firestone’s books. Firestone writes of herself in the third person:
She could not read. She could not write. . . . She sometimes recognized on the faces of others joy and ambition and other emotions she could recall having had once, long ago. But her life was ruined, and she had no salvage plan.
Faludi comments:
Clearly, something terrible had happened to Firestone, but it was not her despair alone that led Millett to choose this passage. When she finished reading, she said, ‘I think we should remember Shulie, because we are in the same place now.’ It was hard to say which moment the mourners were there to mark: the passing of Firestone or that of a whole generation of feminists who had been unable to thrive in the world they had done so much to create.
Faludi also quotes Jo Freeman, a feminist writer and activist who worked with Firestone: ‘When I think back on Shulie’s contribution to the movement, I think of her as a shooting star. She flashed brightly across the midnight sky, and then she disappeared.’
Firestone is fascinating and, as I say, a cautionary read – on Jewish life, the Jewish prophetic, the prophetic around the world and on the harshness of exile and the damage it often causes.
No renewal or ideological movement will end exile and the prophetic. The challenge is what we make of it. Historically, we know it is from this place that the deepest and most anguished thought about the human condition emerges.
Unfortunately, to think and write exile and the prophetic you have to live it. Or you can write about it first from a distance because somehow you know it’s your fate. Then you land there with a thud. You experience what you have written. You begin to write again – from scratch.
Shooting stars disappear. Shooting stars don’t thrive in the world they help illumine. Regardless, the light of the shooting star, even its disappearance, are essential to the arc of our humanity.
You have to love the prophets and the ones who seek to displace them – even as the body count rises. Sure there’s ambition and deceit. Exile and the prophetic have its own corruption.
There doesn’t seem to be any other way to deal with the havoc that the powers inflict on us except to play it out. The turmoil is within all of us. It has to come out to be real.
Can exile and the prophetic be banished? No way. As long as conscience is around, exile and the prophetic will remain.
Lessons learned? Shooting stars disappear. Never to be found again.
Until another shooting star appears.
Which it will.
Even in remembrance.
