Tippi
Jennifer Martelli That time, when we were abducted by the cab driver in Newark, my friend, the brave Jennifer, prepared to stab this cabbie guy in the neck with a red Bic pen she’d taken from our hotel. I’d retreated into the corner of the back seat, watching Rutgers University go by, watching the trash cans down the alley where he had driven us (far from the Dodge Poetry Festival). I simply floated out of my body[1], circling the cab’s ceiling lamp with the ten dollar fare crumpled in my hand. He brought us to Dodge, where we attended a panel of women poets discussing Rukeyser. They told us not to kill our mothers.[2] Whenever Jennifer and I walk into poetry readings together, people yell: The two Jennifers![3] Doubling, replicating marked our first conversation about the Mitochondrial Eve,[4] our mother, the one ancestor of us all. I thought of paper dolls, joined at the hand, one traced from the template of the other for as long as you think you can go. Jennifer began writing poems in the voices of human trafficking survivors:[5] poem after poem, written, read, put face down on the desk, written, read, put down, until a white column of paper voices rose, a Greek chorus in a tragedy. I said, Jennifer, what is this to you? who are these women? The most obscure tiny blue pipette vein pumped warm blood and saline from one object to the other, from her to her. We asked each other: can we appropriate? whose suffering is sacrosanct? is suffering cruelty injustice grief crime poverty ignorance quantifiable? like scars? And what of objectification? Are we all potential ekphrastic poems? We asked these questions on long rides to poetry festivals, usually while Jennifer drove my car over big bridges, because I was afraid of falling off into the universe.[6] Soon after the movie 50 Shades of Grey came out, we took note that Dakota Johnson was the daughter of Melanie Griffith,[7] who was the daughter of Tippi Hedren. Three generations of women with faces that could launch 1000 ships:[8] Dakota, tied to her dominant’s[9] bed by her long brown braid, examined by a doctor and given vitamins before being whipped into an orgasm so strong it could kill her; Melanie, the doomed Charlotte Haze, mother of the “nymphet” in Lolita, whose aging lips were now pumped plump as Alfred Hitchcock’s belly silhouette;[10] and Tippi, Hitchcock’s obsession, so beautiful, even when attacked by love birds in a phone booth under overcast skies, she had only one or two pecks on her face. Hitchcock urged her to put her first name in single quote marks, as if nestled by his fat fingers. It would make her more mysterious, he said. He wouldn’t let her eat or talk with other actors on the set. Tippi took pity on things without a voice: animals,[11] exotic ones and big cats, and Vietnamese refugees not able to speak our ugly language, indecipherable from German[12] to non-Indo European speakers. The young girls so admired Tippi’s hands and especially her fingernails: conic, enameled and hard enough to make sounds on the side of a teacup to summon ghosts[13] (who, while related to us, can’t speak either). She had the girls trained as manicurists, an art which has been passed down at least two generations, and which, I suppose, marks the birth of a stereotype. Relax, the girl at Nails & Co. would say as she urged my hand down into warm silky water, do you have children? I was so self-conscious I could barely look at her and new to manicures, I had to learn how to soften my hand into another’s hand. [1] It was believed that a witch could “send out” her spirit. This was called “spectral evidence” and was used to convict people in the Salem Witch Trials. Increase Mather (increase matter) addressed this in Cases of Conscience, 1693. Carl Jung wrote in Psychological Types that disassociation is “a natural necessity for consciousness to operate in one faculty unhampered by the demands of its opposite.” [2] Anne Sexton called Muriel Rukeyser (1913-80), “Muriel, mother of us all.” Mitochondrial poet. In (the brave) Jennifer Jean’s poem, “The Two Jennifers,” she writes: “Like I’d choke/on every woman that breathed before//me, force them down.” Love of the mother is love of the self. No? [3] The name “Jennifer” is Welsh, meaning White Wave. Some people think the word/name “Juniper” is derivative. In 1968 Donovan recorded the hit song “Jennifer Juniper,” which my mother would have to turn off immediately when it came on the radio, as I would begin screaming. Luckily, I was named well before “Jennifer” rose to incredible ubiquity. From 1970-1984, it was the single most popular given name in the United States. The only Jennifer when I was born would have been Jennifer Jones (a stage name), who played the nun St. Bernadette in The Song of Bernadette. Many of the Jennifers today spawn from Jenny Hanly (Bo Derek in “10,” who, with her blonde corn row beads clicking as she ran from the beach, beat out Melanie Griffith for the role). [4] Mitochondrial Eve lived between 99,000 and 200,000 years ago in East Africa. Her female contemporaries, excluding her mother, failed to produce a direct unbroken female line to any living person in the present day, and so died out. Mitochondrial Eve’s X’s marched forward like a batallion of WACs. [5] Sexual slavery, forced labor or commericial sexual exploration: there are “dark webs” that can’t be searched on the internet. One site called itself a “motherboard.” It showed a flock of women with coned plague masks; they looked like crows waiting by the side of the road. [6] Fear of crossing bridges is called gephyrophobia (from the Greek gephyro, meaning bridge). Phobias in general are believed to be both genetic/hereditary and rooted in situational traumas. My first panic attack over a bridge was when my mother’s Alzheimer’s was becoming more symptomatic: she had forgotten how to make a bed, how to draw stars and clocks, who I was or who my sisters were. She wanted me to let her out of the car crossing Boston Harbor. [7] Melanie Griffith was 19 when she married Don Johnson (27), Dakota’s father. [8] This line was used in the song “If,” by Bread, which is a sweet love ballad. Ironically, this phrase was used also to describe Helen of Troy, whose abduction by Paris triggered the Trojan War, which lasted 10 years (though some say the war was started with a golden apple tossed at the sandal strapped feet of mortal women and goddesses and ended with a hollow horse birthing Greek soldiers. [9] In BDSM erotic practices, the “dominant,” or top, takes the active/controlling role, while the “submissive” or bottom, the restrained/controlled role. Of course, all BDSM practices are consensual, with safety words, like “love bird” or “bouquet of Bic pens.” In genetics, the dominant gene (brown eyes, green peas, sadness) latex-masks the recessive gene. [10] Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Hitchcock would open the show standing within the template of his silhouette, then move to center stage, totally eclipsing his own shadow. [11] Tippi Hedren founded The Roar Foundation, which is the mother company of The Shambala Foundation, which gives sanctuary to exotic big cats (usually surrendered by people who grow bored or frightened of them, or if properties are seized, as with Michael Jackson’s Neverland). [12] From the Indo-European mother tongue, the West Germanic languages include: German, English, Dutch, Afrikaans, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Faroese. Plath wrote of the German language as being “obscene.” [13] Ghosts are hungry, especially those in Asia, and they have no way to let us know. When they hear forks or knives or chopsticks click against the enamel plates with the apples carved on them or against strong teeth, they huddle around the table, waiting to be handed food from the other side. |
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About the Author:
Jennifer Martelli’s chapbook, Apostrophe, was published in 2011. Most recently, her poetry has appeared in Wherewithal, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and Rogue Agent. Her reviews have appeared in Glint Literary Journal, Arsenic Lobster Literary Journal, and Drunken Boat. She is a recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant in Poetry, a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee and is an associate editor for The Compassion Project. She lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts with her family. Find her online here.
Jennifer Martelli’s chapbook, Apostrophe, was published in 2011. Most recently, her poetry has appeared in Wherewithal, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and Rogue Agent. Her reviews have appeared in Glint Literary Journal, Arsenic Lobster Literary Journal, and Drunken Boat. She is a recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant in Poetry, a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee and is an associate editor for The Compassion Project. She lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts with her family. Find her online here.