The Quiet Before, page 15
The trial took place on July 7, without Natasha. As a rule, mental patients were not allowed to be present in court proceedings. The prosecution used Forsel, the man Natasha had met in Estonia, to prove that she was at least spreading the Chronicle. Copies of the journal had also been confiscated from her exiled friends Litvinov and Bogoraz (Natasha had visited them in Siberia that fall). This particular issue, the prosecution argued, could be traced back to Natasha’s typewriter—it had been grabbed during the search, and they could now match the keystrokes. And finally there was her own account of being forcibly confined in the beginning of 1968, called “Free Health Service,” which had been smuggled to the West and broadcast over shortwave radio. This evidence, together with the testimony of the KGB agent who had been accidentally cut during the search, was enough for the prosecution to declare that she had “systematically prepared and circulated slanderous concoctions defaming the Soviet political system.”
Natasha’s mother was allowed to speak from the stand. Weepy and exhausted, she made a plea: “If my daughter has committed a crime, sentence her to any punishment, even the most severe, but do not place an absolutely healthy person in a psychiatric hospital.” The defense lawyer’s only argument—echoing the one heard in the case against Nnamdi Azikiwe—was that the Chronicle was entirely anonymous. No proof had been given that Natasha or anyone else had anything to do with creating or spreading the journal. It had no address, no masthead or bylines. Even if some issues of the Chronicle seemed to come from Natasha’s typewriter, that was still not proof that she herself had typed it. The circle of people using that machine had never been established.
The court took no time to come to its judgment. It found her guilty, but of “unsound mind.” She would be placed in a “psychiatric hospital of special type for compulsory treatment.” The period of time was left undefined.
In the months that followed, while Natasha awaited her transfer, she was placed in the hospital wing of Butyrka prison. “I’ll try to say briefly what’s most important,” she wrote in a letter to her mother in November. “I think that all I did was right and justified, but it is terrible to feel that you and the children have to pay for the right things I did. The weight that has fallen on you—that weight I have felt fully only in prison….I miss the children terribly. Do they remember me?”
It was in early January that she sat chained to a seat on a train chugging its way through a barren, snowy landscape. Natasha knew where she was going, knew too much in fact about the prison for the mentally ill set up under Stalin, five hundred miles east of Moscow on a bend in the Volga River. Only a year before, in Issue No. 10 of the Chronicle, she had compiled a report on the Special Psychiatric Hospital in Kazan. She enumerated its horrors in a sparse style, exactly as they were conveyed to her by former inmates: “If the patients commit offences—refuse to take medicine, quarrel with the doctors, or fight, they are strapped into their beds for three days, sometimes more. With this form of punishment, the elementary rules of hygiene are ignored: the patients are not allowed to go to the lavatory, and bedpans are not provided.” She also knew the general layout of the psychiatric hospital, what would be expected of her and the other patient-prisoners during their three-and-a-half-hour workdays (sew aprons and sheets), and even the name of the antipsychotic medication the doctors would soon force her to take.
Natasha remembered the words of a poem she had written for her friend Yuri Galanskov, who had been similarly locked up in a psychiatric ward in 1966 and drugged: “In the madhouse / Wring your hands, / Press your pale forehead against the wall / Like a face into a snowdrift.” Now it would be her face, pressed and vanishing.
The Chronicle, though, continued. There was a new editor, and there would be another and another after that until the early 1980s, when a fierce crackdown finally killed the journal. And yet the dissidents’ relentless focus on glasnost—what Lyudmila Alexeyeva called a “process of justice or governance, being conducted in the open”—would within a couple years become the signature policy of a new Soviet premier, an effort at transparency he felt he had no choice but to implement. It would soon undercut the totalitarian state and ultimately cause it to implode. The journal, which for so long had funneled and concentrated the dissidents’ efforts, was the vessel for this process. In language crisp and unadorned, its insistence on truth had made it harder and harder to accept lies. The fate of the Chronicle’s founder was treated no less clinically. In Issue No. 18, an item among others: “On 9 January 1971 Natalya Gorbanevskaya was transferred from Butyrka Prison to the Special Psychiatric Hospital on Sechenov Street in Kazan (postal address: building 148, block 6, postbox UE, Kazan-82), where a course of treatment with Haloperidol has been prescribed for her.”
Chapter 6
CONTROL
Washington, 1992
THE HOMEMADE MAGAZINE—xeroxed, folded, and bound with staples—was called Jigsaw, and it was no ordinary publication. So said its creator. It was an anti-publication: “JIGSAW IS NOT A CONSUMER PRODUCT. It is not a product at all. It is more of a process. A method. I’m starting to see that process is the key. read on. feel free to respond to anything that I’ve written or submit something you think is appropriate. Especially if you are a woman and/or want to write about that whole aspect of things.”
Hardly punctuated, crowded with typewritten words and looping cursive and scattered, pasted-in images—of Chrissie Hynde fingering her electric guitar, of wide-eyed Bette Davis brandishing a gun in Dead Ringer—Jigsaw was a direct line into the mind of an outsider girl, a punk girl, pushed out of mainstream culture and creating a new one: “I want to be able to talk with my own words in my own way…to express real sentiment. But it’s so hard to even have a conversation…a real conversation that actually deals with conflict. Everything seems so manufactured, so oppressive.”
This was not just a public airing of teen angst. Tobi Vail, who began creating Jigsaw in her bedroom in 1989 with scissors and a glue stick, was a drummer in an all-girl punk band in Olympia, Washington. The promise of punk—and her subsequent disillusionment—had brought her to this point. In its early years, in the 1970s, in the days of the Ramones and the Sex Pistols, punk was about freedom, anti-authoritarianism, and laying waste to societal norms, and plenty of women on the scene felt empowered by it as well. But the music and the culture by the late 1980s had gone hardcore and hyper-masculine, all shaved heads and leather jackets. The quintessential punk venue was the mosh pit, a mass of sweating, heaving bodies slamming against each other. A writer, venturing into the pit for The New York Times in the early 1990s, like an anthropologist sneaking up on an Amazon tribe, described a scene of great violence in which everyone seemed to be trying, he wrote, “to kill one another.”
Young women were shoved to the edges, literally, relegated to the role of “coat hangers,” as they were sometimes called, standing around holding their moshing boyfriends’ leather jackets. Tobi hated this. And she wasn’t alone. Chainsaw, another zine by an alienated punk girl, lamented how far the culture had drifted from its origins, “from the GEEKS who decided or realized (or something) to ‘turn the tables’ so to speak, and take control of their (our) lives and form a Real underground.”
And so her zine was a way to re-create an underground. An alternative to the alternative. The mosh pit wasn’t the only problem. Tobi felt as if she were standing on the edge of society itself and all its conceptions about femininity, the unspoken rules for how a woman ought to look, how a woman ought to be. Every time she came across big hair and shoulder pads on the glossy cover of Cosmo or Vogue, she felt the burden of societal expectation. Not only was the pathway through girlhood constraining—a maze with many ways in yet only one way out—but the problems that did concern girls, the secrets they whispered to each other in their bedrooms, about eating disorders and rape and sexual identity, had zero outlet.
Zines had existed since the 1930s, when science fiction nerds shared their obsessive fandom with each other through homemade booklets of their own short stories and reviews. But in the 1970s and into the 1980s, it was the punk scene that made full use of this DIY form, perfect for a subculture that screamed about wanting nothing to do with capitalism. The attraction of the zine in the past was what turned Tobi on to it as well: the ability to create your own medium, to produce, and not just be limited to what you could buy on a magazine rack. For samizdat, too, it was crucial to control your means of production (and distribution)—in the dissidents’ case to evade censorship and repression. Here the control gave the girls a chance to talk back by creating their own thing.
But first Tobi needed to hear some echoes. Zines always sought out other zines. And to that end she included in her second issue of Jigsaw a list of the few other self-published titles being written by girls, like Bitch and Incite, along with their addresses, and a letters section with reader responses to inspire others. By her third issue she was more explicit: “I am making a fanzine not to entertain or distract or exclude or because I don’t have anything better to do but because if I didn’t write these things no one else would either.”
* * *
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IN EARLY 1990, the second issue of Jigsaw fell into the hands of a couple of young women who also felt the need for a place to put their anger and let it grow.
Molly Neuman and Allison Wolfe, freshmen at the University of Oregon, picked up a copy of the zine at an Olympia show that featured Nirvana, whose skinny, besweatered front man, Kurt Cobain, was Tobi’s then boyfriend. They saw in Jigsaw a reflection of their own frustrations not just with punk but also with the feminism they had inherited, the hand-me-down 1970s dream of their mothers, which was supposed to be the answer to all their problems. They were overwhelmed by Jigsaw. Its very existence, its heart-pouring, earnest tone, seemed to offer an answer to a question they couldn’t even really articulate yet. They wrote to Tobi, who responded right away. “It’s really inspiring to find out there are actually people in the world who are thinking about the same sort of things I am,” Tobi wrote. “Sometimes I feel kind of ISOLATED I guess.” She suggested that they trade tapes of bands they liked or that Molly review “some stuff” for Jigsaw. And then closed with a P.S. that listed other girl zines.
For Allison, in particular, feminism felt stale. Her mother, who had come out as a lesbian after a divorce, worked as a nurse and had opened up the first women’s health clinic in Olympia. Her home was often targeted by antiabortion activists, who sent death threats and would throw rocks at their windows. For her mother, feminism was a lifestyle—Joan Baez’s album Diamonds & Rust was on the record player, a long row of books about women’s bodies and self-discovery sat on their shelves—but the incense-thick air of feminist bookstores had little relevance or interest for Allison. It felt fusty. In the women’s studies classes she took that first year of college, she’d get annoyed when professors would correct her use of the word “girl” (“we say ‘women,’ ” they would tell her) because it pointed to a feminist orthodoxy that didn’t reflect her life as a girl.
Molly was more intense and internal, bottling up what Allison, a nonstop talker, let explode. She had grown up in Washington, D.C., in a family in which politics was always present, her father part of the communications shop at the Democratic National Committee. Just before moving to the West Coast, she had become interested in race and, as only a recent high school graduate could, believed she had an epiphany watching Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. That summer she delved into the writings of the Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver.
The two met during their first week in the dorms when Allison overheard Molly on the hall’s pay phone loudly breaking up with someone, screaming, “But…I love you!” They became fast friends, Molly soon cutting her bangs short like Allison’s. They felt lucky to have found each other: two politically aware eccentrics who didn’t fit in among the school’s dominant hippieish aesthetic. They were both tough, emotive girls, looking to create their own style.
As soon as they read the second issue of Jigsaw, they started to get “that feeling in their heart,” as they later described it, and they created their own zine: Girl Germs. They spent much of the fall of 1990 putting it together, interviewing bands like the all-female Portland grunge group Calamity Jane, and scouring yard sales for Barbie coloring books, Girl Scout guides, and old anatomy textbooks that they could cut and paste. Even though they went to school in Eugene, they spent more and more time in Olympia, where Allison had grown up. Home to the funky Evergreen State College, it was an island where punk seemed truer to its source. There were dozens of grassroots art galleries; music shows happened in people’s basements and in alleyways. It was easier for anyone to pick up a guitar and play—even a girl. You could catch a show there by the rare punk bands led by women, like the Lunachicks, Babes in Toyland, L7, and Frightwig. Every coffee shop seemed to have at least one flyer with a female drummer advertising her skills.
Around this time, Kathleen Hanna also picked up a copy of Jigsaw and wrote to Tobi to tell her how much it meant to her. “I felt like we are/were trying to do similar type things and I felt validated. I know what it’s like to have a girl tell me that she doesn’t think it really means anything that she’s a girl.” Kathleen was a little infamous in Olympia. She was a student at Evergreen, lead singer in a band, Viva Knievel, and a poet known for her confrontational spoken word at the Capitol Theater, prose poems she then compiled into her own zine, Fuck Me Blind, using a pseudonym, Maggie Fingers. She had recently stood in front of a crowd at a party, stared hard at the men, and screamed, “I know what you did! I know what you did!” over and over again. People also whispered about how she worked as a stripper to make money. But what mattered to her most and what informed her evolving art was her internship at a domestic violence shelter, SafePlace, doing crisis counseling and giving talks on rape and sexual assault to teenage girls. She was moved by the small groups of survivors she would organize, the way they talked and listened to each other, the support they could give one another once they achieved some intimacy and privacy.
She wanted to tie this spirit to punk. Interviewed in 1990 by an amateur anthropologist of the scene, Kathleen explained her thinking. “I’m really interested in a punk-rock movement /angry-girl movement of sexual abuse survivors,” she said. “And it’s not just angry girls, it’s everyone, because I’ve had so many people come up to me with their stories of sexual abuse, of being beaten up by their parents and stuff. Even if it’s not getting punched, it’s the emotional violence and hierarchy of the family—which is the same hierarchy that puts man over woman, it’s the same fucking shit that is white over black, human over animal, boss over worker.”
Though she was reading a lot of feminist theory, some of the big ideological battles of the 1970s and 1980s—like whether pornography was a form of oppression—didn’t speak to her. She resolved these issues in her own life matter-of-factly. Speaking of stripping, she said, it’s “a job and like all jobs, it fucking sucks. I personally decided to be a sex trade worker ’cause I feel a lot less exploited making $20 an hour for dancing around naked than I do getting paid $4.25 an hour (and being physically, psychically, and sometimes sexually exploited) as a waitress or burger-slinger. Why do certain feminists want to penalize me for choosing an obvious form of exploitation instead of a subtle lower-paying one?”
Kathleen and Tobi had such kismet that they bonded in the ultimate way: by forming a band, one they decided to call Bikini Kill (shades of a 1960s B movie about killer girls in bikinis and Bikini Atoll, site of the nuclear tests in the 1940s and 1950s). They rented rooms across the hall from each other in Olympia and almost immediately began performing while also swapping books by bell hooks and Judith Butler. When Kathleen took the stage to front Bikini Kill (with Tobi on drums, Kathi Wilcox on bass), her appearance—short leopard-print skirt, her hair a black bob against pale skin—was, like everything she did, a well-thought-out act of provocation. “Dare you to do what you want!” she screeched. “Dare you to be who you will!”
Tobi began calling the gathering number of girls producing zines and starting bands that year “Revolution Girl Style Now,” and Molly and Allison felt themselves part of it. Their zine was ready in December, the winter break of their sophomore year, and Molly, home for the holidays, decided to “publish” Girl Germs. In high school she had spent one summer working as an intern for Morris K. Udall, a congressman from Arizona, and used her access to his Capitol Hill office to run off several hundred copies on his Xerox machine. When a storm hit the city that evening, she was snowed in alone in the deserted building, munching on candy bars and potato chips to keep herself awake, copying and stapling all night.
She returned to Oregon at the beginning of 1991, with a few hundred copies of Girl Germs No. 1 in her suitcase, ready to distribute. The zine was everything she and Allison hoped it would be, punk and aware. “My brother who is two and a half got a toy rock’n’roll drum set for Christmas this year,” Molly wrote. “I got a guitar when I turned 18. I had this idea that I might want to be in a band. But nobody told me I could or encouraged me to. There’s a fundamental difference in the way I was socialized and the way my brother is being socialized. He is being given the tools to create. I must seek out those tools.”
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BESIDES OLYMPIA, THERE WAS one other city where punk retained a socially conscious flavor: Molly’s home, Washington, D.C. The capital had experienced renewed vigor as a punk scene ten years after Minor Threat and Bad Brains had turned it into an epicenter of the music. Now a few bands, like Fugazi and Nation of Ulysses, were attempting something blatantly ideological with their songs, offering a further twist on what it meant to be punk, promoting clean living, independence, and anti-consumerism. During their spring break in 1991, Molly and Allison had followed the advice of some friends and made their way to the Embassy, the three-story row house in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood that also doubled as the headquarters for Nation of Ulysses. The place was alive. There was a practice space and a recording studio in the basement. It was there that they grew more confident about the band they had started a few months before, called Bratmobile, and even found another guitarist.
