Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Witch in Flight

2023; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 136; Issue: 539 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/15351882.136.539.01

1535-1882

Kay Turner,

Plant and Fungal Interactions Research

being president of the american folklore society (AFS) yields gifts galore, especially the opportunity to collaborate with the Board, staff, and membership to bring our Society forward into the future. I thank all of you for electing me to the honor and privilege of serving the American Folklore Society. Additionally, I thank you for two special perks: the Presidential Suite and its 2 years’ worth of hotel swank, and the Presidential Address, a chance this evening to share certain concerns in a test flight of some material that I hope will add pages to my current book and performance project What a Witch! Said not like a 10-year-old dissing her girlfriend, “what a witch,” but like a woman feeling her power: “What a Witch!”—I dedicate this presentation to folklore feminists everywhere.1Continuing where we left off last year at Miami's 2016 Women's Section Croning Ceremony, I invite the coven of the feminist killjoys and their friends to convene once again.2 Tonight, I'll hook a ride with the witch in flight to prove the depth of folklore's delights for me as a feminist lesbian queer woman who entered graduate school at the University of Texas in Austin over 40 years ago, in August 1977. It's been a great journey—and now there's one more trip to take. I'll board my broom, and like Bette Midler playing the lead witch in the movie Hocus Pocus, who commands her sisters with such pride and satisfaction, I, too, command of all you: “Let's ride.”I began my presidency 3 years ago with an urgent desire to reinvest in our discipline's core understanding of folk narrative. Perhaps more than any other aspect of our nearly 200-year-old discipline, the collection, study, and analysis of narrative arts, storytelling, and storytellers have been the central gift of folklore to the humanities and to the world. Our deep commitment to and expertise in stories, unfolding and unfinished in their variations through time, inspire me to continue in the vein of so many colleagues who have preceded and the many who will go ahead in doing one of the things folklore does best: telling the story of traditional stories.I'd be surprised if folklorists around the hemisphere had not taken note—whether dismayed or delighted—that today everyone's a storyteller and that the act of storytelling is increasingly being commodified. Caught up in the delirium driven by the current hegemony of the “me” story promoted across a dizzying array of web platforms including Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, as well as in popular live performance projects such as StoryCorps and The Moth, we live in a world of limitless access to the performance of reductive personal stories, each competing for dominance in the feedback frenzy of “likes” and “hearts.” Then it's over: the very category for “Story” on Facebook and Instagram ensures disposability of your post within 24 hours.Doth the woman protest too much? Of course! But here's our solution. Folklore's corrective to the current glut of throwaway first-person narration engages us in recommitting to the explanatory and interpretive power of the third-person folk narrative, performed in its many distinct genres and cultural variations, repeated and revised over generations. Ours is the very important disciplinary charge—specific to folkloristics—of revealing the significance of collectively owned narratives, the ones that give us the shareable world envisioned millennia ago in Aristotle's Poetics. The ones that allow the willing suspension of disbelief to stimulate imaginative identifications and attachments. Malik Gaines, following Arjun Appadurai (1996:7), argues that “works of the imagination create a collective platform from which to project notions of ‘resistance, irony, selectivity, and in general, agency’” (Gaines 2017:17). Old stories and their variants constitute one such platform, allowing tellers to take the same old plot or tale type and make it useful over and over again by working it, making it say something new to us, not only by giving answers but more often by raising questions—stories as “equipment for living” or “good to think,” perhaps even better to feel.3I chase old stories that raise questions about the status of women, questions about desire and gender, about feeling queer and being queer. It's no wonder my career trajectory led me to the traditional witch figure, whose stories make a mess of sex and gender, exposing their socially constructed, binary-driven hegemonies, yet serving also as a source for recognizing potential alternatives. If my previous forays into the witchy worlds of the Grimms’ “Frau Trude,” ATU 334 (Turner 2012) and “Frau Holle,” ATU 480 (Turner 2015) prove anything, it is that the witch knew queer before queer was gay, or gay was queer. Seething with the unsettled debts of transgressive or unrecognized feelings and desires, witch stories disturb and often dismantle comfortably institutionalized ideas about convention, order, and control—control of women.Because witches are fundamentally characterized by their defiant failure to fit, they are woman always, but they are un-woman too—undisciplined, unnerving, unnatural. Thankfully, they are not normal; rather, they enjoy a transgressive jouissance—an ontological joy of difference from the heteronormative standard: the married, childbearing, second-class woman and second sex female owned by God's decree and husband's law. Witches revel in their contrary aspirations: they live apart; they eat children; they help young girls achieve a sense of their own personhood and agency; they are lesbian in their refusal to accept Oedipus as the father of all wanton desires. I could go on. And I will. Unnatural and abnormal, she dwells on the other side of the binary slash; also anomalous, ambivalent, liminal, magical, and shapeshifting, sitting at the crossroads of life and death on a throne of decaying garbage, she makes a claim for living beyond dualistic restrictions. Witches bitch the binary. Do they break it? Sometimes I think they do . . . Here, as likely you've already discerned and tweeted from the audience (Dom, I see you posting), I am interested once again in affirming the potential for bringing folk narrative interpretation closer to feminist and queer strategies for telling, reading, listening, and knowing. I uphold that a genuine connection exists between folklore and queerlore by underscoring the effectiveness of feminist and queer methods and theories to enhance our ability to read traditional stories in the twenty-first century. Importantly, the reverse also proves true: foundational folk narrative resources—from story collections to historic-geographic methods, from tale type and motif indexes to structural analysis—all these assets should be found on gender and literature syllabi universities-wide. I'm preaching to the coven here, I know, but it bears remembering: folkloristics alone in the humanities provides the evidence and the tools, too often under-utilized, even unrecognized in related fields, for demonstrating the social and artistic effectiveness of telling the same old story twice or 1,000 times and interpreting it differently over time and in different contexts. Let me count the ways I have successfully introduced the motif and tale type indexes to trans and gender queer students and artists seeking foundational support for their scholarship and works.In my own practice, those tools are effectively deployed for story interpretation opened up by the feminist and lesbian reading revolution of the 1980s and 1990s. In particular, under the umbrella of “reader response” theory, Bonnie Zimmerman's “perverse reading” (1993) invited the willful lesbian interpretation of literature against the grain of heteronormative convention. Once those doors of perception opened, there was no going back. Queer theory then added Eve Sedgwick's methods for what she termed “reparative reading” that consider “the many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture—even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them” (2003:150–1). Further, Tammy Clewell says that in reparative reading, Sedgwick finds an impulse “that seeks to move away from minimizing pain and toward maximizing pleasure . . . toward what Foucault calls ‘care of the self’” (Clewell 2017:59).4 Let's extract some sustenance, shall we? Let's feed off some big questions about socially spurned, politically burned witches—the kind of questions a queer feminist folklorist asks.Why do witches fly? Where do they go? How does it feel to fly? What can be learned from the witch in flight? Why should we care? For me, these questions combine like glyphs on an endgame Rosetta Stone. And to approach deciphering them gestures toward another, greater question, one we all must ask: Why folklore?We'll leave that last anxiety-producing question aside for now to concentrate on the witch quandary. In the Western imagination, helped initially by the threatening pornographic visual culture of witches promoted in the engravings, woodcuts, and drawings of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century artists, such as Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) and Hans Baldung (1484–1545), our popular stereotype of the broom-straddling witch overrides (pun intended) her much older avian associations. Broom-flying witches hardly exist before they are shown in print after 1450, when Gutenberg's invention of the printing press allowed for widespread dissemination of their provocative deviant image. One of the earliest and best-known at the time is a tiny hand-painted illumination of two sorceresses, one on a broom, the other on a stick, depicted in the marginalia of Martin Le Franc's allegorical poem on the nature of woman, Le Champion des Dames, published in limited edition in 1451 (Zika 2007:63–4). But long before brooms, cooking sticks, and giant spindles were mounted lasciviously in nocturnal flights to meet-ups with the devil, witches worldwide flew with wings.5In the beginning was the witch, and the witch was a woman, but not only a woman. She was part bird. Take Lilith. Biblically referred to only once in Isaiah 34:14–15 in a list of creatures exiled to the desert, the King James Bible aligns her with the “screech owl,” alluding to night flights in search of prey. My old King James reads “yea, there shall the night hag alight, and find for herself a resting place” (Isa. 34:14). This scant mention gave rise to numerous apocryphal stories assigning Lilith as the first wife of Adam, a “mistake” made by God. Though he created both from the same earth, she was not given equal rights or dominion. Angered, she refused to submit to Adam and flew away. Or, she was exiled by God and flew away to the Red Sea, or flew away and returned in vengeful attacks on Adam, Eve, and their progeny. Underscore or hashtag “she flew away.” She had wings, and when the patriarchal going got rough, she angrily fluttered off. Lilith's sisters include the Greek Furies and Sirens, hybrid bird-woman figures, both desirous and headstrong.6Not as old but old enough, the Russian fairy-tale character Baba Yaga retains bird-like qualities too. She lives in a house on chicken leg stilts and famously loves flying about in a mortar, using the pestle for a rudder and a broom to sweep her tracks. Dubravka Ugrešić links her origins to early Slavic and Russian tales and images conflating birds and women, including hens and magpies (2009:301–11).Remaining for the most part earthbound themselves, the Grimms’ fairy-tale witches still associate with birds and engage in magical avian transformations. The witch in “Jorinda and Joringle” (ATU 405) deserves special mention. A bit of an avian-a-holic who can turn herself into a night owl, she captured over 7,000 innocent young ladies and turned them into birds caged in her castle. In a local Russian legend, recounted by Ugrešić, witches about to be burned in Moscow by Ivan the Terrible turn into magpies and fly away (Ugrešić 2009:306). Folklorist Barbara Rieti's study of Newfoundland witch lore recounts a fisherman's boat being pursued by a crow. Having no luck getting a fish, he shoots and wounds the crow that he believes is a witch out to curse him. Later, he sees an old woman walking near the shore with her arm in a sling (Rieti 2012:1).These are but a few examples suggesting that in stories widespread over time, avian-female hybridity affords witches an essential means of flight. Part of the answer to why witches fly is because they possess the physical instrument—bird wings—to do so. But, of course, there's more. The very early association of women and birds poses ontological as well as utilitarian questions concerning the need for, or desirability of, flight. The figure of the winged witch captivates; her many stories reveal a complex, contradictory, and for me, a strangely consoling nature.I turn now to one such story I first read decades ago. From house to house, I have carted among my most precious possessions the beaten up, spine-broken book in which it appears because that same book is also my folklore touchstone. Américo Paredes published his edited collection Folktales of Mexico in 1970, one in the popular University of Chicago Press series “Folktales of the World,” edited by Richard Dorson. This was back in the day of incentivized folktale collections being published when widespread popular interest in traditional narratives followed on the heels of the 1960s folk song revival.I ordered the book as background reading for a yearlong excursion to Mexico in 1974—the life-changing journey that later brought me to folklore studies. I didn't know who Dr. Paredes was, but the book's back cover described him as a University of Texas professor who directed the Center for Intercultural Studies in Folklore and Oral History. To this day, I can see myself reading that little bio and coming to a halt on the word “folklore.” That light that has gone bright for many of us, turned bright for me: “FOLKLORE,” I said aloud to myself, “maybe that's what I'm interested in.” It seems fitting to return to Dr. Paredes’ influence on me. Mexico's influence. Mexican American women's influence. That's where I started, and it's a great pleasure to round the bend of a full circle with you this evening by paying some dedicated attention to Paredes’ anthologized story called “The Witch Wife” (1970:27).Sourced by Paredes as a localized legend or caso (belief tale), the story is widespread in Greater Mexico, he says. The version Paredes published was originally collected by Jacob Pimentel S. in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas, on September 24, 1954. It was told to him by Efrain A. Paniagua, a 35-year-old schoolteacher, and subsequently published in an article “Creencias” ([1955:159]; see note in References Cited entry for Paredes [1970]).The tale is brief. I'll give it to you whole: “The Witch Wife”They say that in the Náhuatl-speaking district of San Cristóbal de Las Casas there lived a man and his wife. The woman was a witch and she was deceiving her husband. It was her custom to say some magic words that made the flesh drop from her bones, leaving nothing but the skeleton. Then she would sprout wings, and the skeleton would go out flying through the air. In this shape she would go out every night and frighten people out at late hours.When her husband found out she was deceiving him and that her skeleton went out every night, he decided to punish her. One night he lay awake in bed, pretending he was asleep. He heard noises as his wife got out of bed and went out into the street. He got up too and followed her.Hiding in the shadows he saw how the flesh dropped from his wife's bones and how wings sprouted from her skeleton. Then he saw her fly away, making a noise like bones falling apart. When he got over his fright, he went where the flesh was, and he chopped it up into bits with his machete. Then he sprinkled salt over it so it would die. Then he went back and hid in a corner and waited for the skeleton to return.When this took place the skeleton stood before the flesh and said the words to make it come back in place. But the flesh did not obey because it was dead. The despairing skeleton flew away. Many are the people who see this being flying through the air at night, and they say it announces somebody's death.In 18 rigorously condensed and dramatic sentences, the tale strings together a number of witch motifs found in Stith Thompson's Motif- Index of Folk Literature (1955–1958), including G242, Witch flies through the air; G249.6, Witch followed by husband; G250.1, Man discovers his wife is a witch; and G229.1.1, Witch who is out of skin is prevented from reentering it when person salts or peppers skin. In the same collection, Paredes also gives us tales of dancing witches with chicken's feet (1970:25–6) and of a witch mother-in-law who takes the form of a black hen (1970:26–7). Our witch wife tale links with others, such as “The Brothers Who Married Witches” found in Thomas A. Green's Greenwood Library of American Folktales (2006:341). The witch wife's story is also one of the greater corpus of night hag and old hag tales, some of which feature women who get out of their skin.7 My own limited field-based collecting of witch tales—I hope to do more in post-AFS Presidential years—centers on Brooklyn-Guyanese stories of “Ol’ Higue” (Old Hag), a baby-snatcher who flies into your house as a ball of fire, and the Dominican “La Ciguapa,” whose ankle-length black hair is not long enough to cover her backward facing feet.I turn now to Don Américo's “Witch Wife” with the purpose of working a single tale to explore multiple possibilities for answering the question of witch flight. I draw from the folkloristic lineage of Vladimir Propp (1958), Claude Lévi-Strauss (1955, 1963), and Alan Dundes (1971), whose structural approaches to story analysis I continue to rely upon. Our tale strings together motifs that, in turn, are hung on oppositions and equivalences strongly associated with symbolic sex/gender and life/death issues. Most obvious are opposite pairs: male/female; man/woman; husband/wife; wife/witch; day/night; home/street; skin/bones; dropping flesh/sprouting wings; joy/despair; salt/magic words; deception/truth; interior/exterior; earth/sky; and, of course, life/death complicated by another pair, woman/being, not binary but metaphysical opposites. For the tale suggests a deeper ontological question: How can a woman be? Strong contrasts create a palpable tension; the tale invests heavily in dyadic constraints, but as critic Dan Chiasson says of poetry, so we can say of tales such as this one: “As with any art of imposed constraint, we look for the moments when the constraints are defied” (2017:68). Elegant binary aesthetics position this tale's potential for diverse interpretations, including one that illuminates a particular aspect of feminist defiance.Though Paredes notes it is told by a man to a man, I read it and hear “The Witch Wife” as a story of great interest for women. One line of feminist analysis might simply throw it into the patriarchal dustbin of cautionary stories aimed at curbing women's appetite for deceit. For me, though, the central advantage of this story is its detailed portrayal of a witch woman who flies for her own reasons. Our folkloristic interest in vernacular performatives combines with my feminist and queer theory leanings to suggest that flight proves a powerful antidote to the female body weighted by the determinations of men.Our Mrs. nightly gets out of the skin that defines her as a woman owned by a man in marriage. By day, let's assume, she performs her wifely duties—cooks, cleans, submits, and rarely leaves the house. Certainly, she's not seen walking alone on the streets that in small Mexican towns concertedly are the domain of men. Only a whore—a woman out of bounds—does that. However, the witch wife breaches decorum, takes to the street by cover of night, removes her skin there, and once airborne, leaves “wife” behind to become its binary opposite, “witch.” Yet I would argue that in both manifestations, she remains to herself, importantly, a “woman.” Her transformation is a knowing escape, and if she scares the earthbound as she flies about, all the better. She frightens them into recognition of her power to leave gendered human life behind, to willingly become that other kind of woman: witch.The temporal indeterminacies of folk and fairy tales give us plenty of tether for further speculation. The wife may have been sneaking out for years. That she flew on a regular basis is signaled in the phrase “it was her custom . . . ” to transform herself using magic words. The formulaic recitation also indicates her place within a lineage of witches. After all, where did she learn those magic words?8 In witnessing that performative incantation (a highly effective speech act), we gain momentary entrée into the world of hidden knowledge shared by witches across generations of traditional practice. In a world that silences women and valorizes men's decrees, the power of a linguistic counter-system, given evidence here, allows a woman to slip off the skin owned by patriarchy and rise in the bones that belong to her alone.Now don't get me wrong; our wife may have liked having it both ways—earth by day, sky by night—wouldn't you? And maybe that's her point. She just needs some time in the night sky's darkness where her husband can't find her, and the binary can't bind her. Who knows, maybe she even liked her husband . . . somewhat. Evidently, her deceit was never intended to harm. She just flies around scaring people out late, most likely men who enjoy such received privilege. If only her husband had remained asleep. But his deceit in stalking her, spying on her, leads to his murder of the skin that, touched to his, made their marriage. This husband, who thought he “owned” his wife by owning her flesh, reacts with extreme viciousness—patriarchal overkill—chopping the skin into bits, burning it with salt. The hold of the owner/owned-husband/wife opposition breaks violently by his hand and the machete gripped in it. Emotionally overcome by possessiveness, he punishes her—or thinks he does—by exiling her, killing the skin that defined her for him as a universal wife, subject to all the earthly labors and abuses that women suffer under the thumb of male dominance.The very skin she nightly chose to be rid of. Skin wraps the carnal, mortal body, the sex-identifying body, but loosed from it, our witch skeletally flies into freedom's sky. Who's zoomin’ who? You know, I think she's zoomin’ him. Though this version of the story describes a “despairing skeleton” unable to return to her skin, does she also anguish over not being able to go back to him and the role of wife? I think not. Despair is not an emotion widely associated with witches. The adjective protrudes, playing to assure the husband's sense of victory over his errant wife as he stands hidden in the shadows observing her return to the desecrated skin. A different version—a Kay Stone or Jo Radner version—might as easily describe her this way: “The angry or relieved skeleton flew away.” The story does leave her inactivated as an earthly human. But does she care, really? Remove that one word, she flies free, and he's the loser. Leave it in, and she still flies away, which, in either case, amounts to “bye-bye, hubbie.” Or as in the Lilith story, “bye-bye, Yaweh.”Why do witches fly? Both Lilith and the Witch Wife—many millennia apart—suggest that witches fly in order to fly in the face of men and gods who cannot conceive of women as their equal. The “Witch Wife” told in the era of the pussy-grabbing POTUS seems more relevant than ever.9Perhaps further unpacking the discursive relationship between skin and skeleton will help complicate what seems like such an easy answer. Classic life and death symbols appear to be in competition here. Folk and fairy tales trouble the meaning of a woman's skin by at once making it a sign of her carnality and her transformational capability. Skin circumscribes the real, the mortal body; it is the site of both erotic and traumatic touch, also a surface for realizing disguise and deception. In her nightly abjection of her own skin, the wife flees that which envelops and represents female sexual and maternal function, the very sign of the physical vulnerability, excess, and disorder that men reject in women. When those magic words release her, imagine the pleasure she experiences in leaving behind her diurnal covering and all its associations: what it both conceals and helps reveal—breasts, hips, ass—that make women into objects controlled by men's combined authority and lust.A wife's skin may be all of this, but a witch invests it with liminal, magical energies; it can be “worked” for transformation as the witch in Grimms’ (Zipes 1987) “The Goose Girl at the Spring” (ATU 923, 510B) instructs in telling her young charge, a distressed princess, to go to the spring, take off her ugly skin, used as disguise, and renew her own beautiful skin. “Go do your work,” the witch commands. In our story, by day, the carnal skin symbolically conveys her proscribed female aspect, but at night, it becomes an agent for the witch wife's experience of creative soaring. Her magic words drop her skin to the ground, trading it for wings to power up her skeletal frame. This change occurs with a kind of simultaneity that magically associates skin and wings; by transformation, one is exchanged for the other. If I earlier suggested that skin opposes skeleton, we actually discover they are not truly at odds to endow a very different version of her. Those conventional life and death, skin and skeleton dualities are magically mediated by a third term: she's got wings.A witch on the wing soars above the worldly patriarchal definitions and confinements of woman. Transgressing and transiting restrictive norms, she self-propels into the rare air of her own pleasure; she animates her own freedom and desires. She becomes a model of what I'll call the self-performing woman performing herself. Deborah Kapchan usefully summarizes performance genres delineated according to “subjective stances” by theater director Richard Schechner (Schechner 1969:86–7). Of interest here is “what he calls the self-assertive ‘I’ (what might be referred to as the ego) inher[ing] in the performance of play” (Kapchan 2003:130; emphasis in original). If that self-assertive “I” reads as the exclusive province of the man's ego at play, then flying witches especially gauge the potential for women's self-performance of the self-assertive “I” in symbolic acts that signal their authority, self-control, and self-creation. When I am at self-performing play, I am self-governed, and in the moment, my intuition is heightened and available for inspiration. Could there be a better kind of woman's play—a fully self-directed release from all restriction—than flying around in the unmonitored dark skies of nighttime? “Nighttime is the right time” for playtime.Okay, I know some of you prefer to be asleep. Just know the witch wife is out there doing it for you, doing it for any reader/listener who wants to fly with her. You can stay in bed, get your 8 hours, and still get the benefit of understanding that a witch in flight enacts a command performance and a commanding performative: flying as unmediated liberation, a kind of self-propulsion, energized by equal parts playfulness, alienation, defiance, and desire. Our skeletal self-performing witch in flight defies the gravity/gravitas/grave of patriarchy. She realizes Judith Butler's claim that “there can be no radical politics of change without performative contradiction” (Butler and Spivak 2007:66). The witch commands an impossible performance of flight, with absolutely no basis in “reality,” yet still inspires a potentializing fantasy of agency.We're up in the air now. Let's fly higher, farther with her. In the physical sense that strikes most immediately, we feel her experience of expressive self-pleasure, recognizing it as akin to sexual self-pleasure; after all, she left her husband's bed (his site of gratification). By vacating her marital duty, she provokes his suspicion and ultimately his jealous rage. A convention of psychoanalysis, dream visions of flight indicate sexual anxiety, need, or fulfillment. Certain sixteenth-century German artists, such as the aforementioned Dürer and Baldung, caricatured witches in scenes of blatant sexual activity, imputing wanton lust as the fuel that moved their brooms.10 Their depictions provided a basis for accusation, even as they accurately reflected a sense—a very threatening one to men—that flying sisters could “do it” for themselves. Whether powered by brooms or wings, flight symbolically unburdens witch women from male-dominant, reproductive sex; they flee those patriarchal givens to enjoy transgressive pleasures on the fly. Loosed from her carnal skin, the witch wife performs what seems a notably unnatural disembodied gratification by becoming, no less, a desiring, sensual skeleton—her wings sprout as her bones rattle. She comes as she goes.I'm happy to leave these different but related answers to our question—escape, play, self-performance, and self-pleasure—lingering in the air through which the witch wife flies. Still, I want us to go higher into the atmosphere where this act of flight becomes also a phenomenologically queer act: a self-performing dislocation from the site of patriarchal order and an experience of disengagement from the restraints of binary patterns. No longer oriented to, or located by, those patterns, our witch in flight is everywhere and nowhere, completely out of bounds, not inhabiting or inhabited.In her important work Queer Phenomenology: Orientation, Objects, Others, Sara Ahmed accounts for a kind of queer disorientation, saying it occurs “when