Les Guerilleres (7 page)

Look at him, this cripple, who hides his calves as best he can. Look at his timid springless gait. In his cities it is easy to do him violence. You lie in wait for him at a street-corner one night. He thinks you are beckoning to him. You profit by this to take him by surprise, he hasn't even the reflex to cry out. Ambushed in his towns you chase him, you lay hands on him, you capture him, you surprise him shouting with all your might.

The women say that they could not eat hare veal or fowl, they say that they could not eat animals, but man, yes, they may. He says to them throwing his head back with pride, poor wretches of women, if you eat him who will go to work in the fields, who will produce food consumer goods, who will make the aeroplanes, who will pilot them, who will provide the spermatozoa, who will write the books, who in fact will govern? Then the women laugh, baring their teeth to the fullest extent.

He begins to cry. And they say no, they could not eat the lion dog puma lamb giraffe mouse ladybird blackbird rabbit-stew. They say, look at this cripple who hides his calves as best he can. They say that he is ideal quarry. They say they must eat to live. He persists in saying that man is devoid of fangs claws trunk legs for running. He persists in saying, why attack such a defenceless creature?

They say that most of the men are lying down. They are not all dead. They sleep. The women say of themselves that they leap like young horses on the banks of the Eurotas. Stamping the ground, they speed their movements. They shake their hair like the bacchantes who love to agitate their thyrsi. They say, quickly now, fasten your floating hair with a bandeau and stamp the ground. Stamp it like a doe, beat out the rhythm needed for the dance, homage to warlike Minerva, the warrior, bravest of the goddesses. Begin the dance. Step forward lightly, move in a circle, hold each other by the hand, let everyone observe the rhythm of the dance. Spring forward lightly. The ring of dancers must revolve so that their glance lights everywhere. They say, It is a great error to imagine that I, a woman, would speak violence against men. But we must, as something quite new, begin the round dance stamping the feet in time against the ground. They say, rise slowly twice clapping your hands. Stamp the ground in time, O women. Now turn to the other side. Let the foot move in rhythm.

The women make warlike gestures, approaching and retreating, dancing with their hands and feet. Some hold bamboo poles sorghum stems wooden batons the long ones representing lances and great halberds, the short ones double-edged swords or ordinary sabres. Dispersing by gates and paths they jostle each other impetuously. Their violence is extreme. They crash into each other with bravura. No one can restrain them. Each time these exercises take place several dozen of them are needed so that they may play together thus.

They stand on the ramparts, faces covered with a shining powder. They can be seen all round the town, singing together a kind of mourning song. The male besiegers are near the walls, indecisive. Then the women, at a signal, uttering a terrible cry, suddenly rip off the upper part of their garments, uncovering their naked gleaming breasts. The men, the enemy, begin to discuss what they unanimously regard as a gesture of submission. They send ambassadors to treat for the gates to be opened. Three of their number fall struck down by stones as soon as they are within range. The entire army hurls itself against the walls, with battering-rams flame-throwers guns scaling-ladders. A great tumult rises. The besiegers utter cries of rage. The women, modulating their voices into a stridency that distresses the ear, withstand the siege, one by one, with arrows stones burning pitch, not quitting their positions except to bring aid to someone or to replace a dead woman. Within, long processions come and go, some bringing pitch, others water to extinguish the fires. The combatants are visible above the wall, singing without pause, their mouths wide open over white teeth. Their cheeks still glow in their blackened faces. Some laugh out loud and manifest their aggressiveness by thrusting their bare breasts forward brutally.

The women say, the men have kept you at a distance, they have supported you, they have put you on a pedestal, constructed with an essential difference. They say, men in their way have adored you like a goddess or else burned you at their stakes or else relegated you to their service in their back-yards. They say, so doing they have always in their speech dragged you in the dirt. They say, in speaking they have possessed violated taken subdued humiliated you to their hearts' content. They say, oddly enough what they have exalted in their words as an essential difference is a biological variation. They say, they have described you as they described the races they called inferior. They say, yes, these are the same domineering oppressors, the same masters who have said that negroes and women do not have a heart spleen liver in the same place as their own, that difference of sex difference of colour signify inferiority, their own right to domination and appropriation. They say, yes, these are the same domineering oppressors who have written of negroes and women that they are universally cheats hypocrites tricksters liars shallow greedy faint-hearted, that their thinking is intuitive and illogical, that nature is what speaks most loudly in them, et cetera. They say, yes, these are the same domineering oppressors who sleep crouched over their money-bags to protect their wealth and who tremble with fear when night comes.

OEDIPA PERNETTA MERCY

GERMAINE DAPHNE CYNTHIA

SHIRLEY NIOBE HARRIET

ROXANA CAROLINE HULDA

DAISY PRAHOMIRA MANYE

FLORENCE SHADTAR ASTA

The women are on their cavorting continually rearing horses. They proceed without orders to meet the enemy army. They have painted their faces and legs in bright colours. The cries they utter are so terrifying that many of their adversaries drop their weapons, running straight before them stopping their ears. The women are on the ridges that command the pass. In this strategic position which is all to their advantage they draw their bows and fire thousands of arrows. Then the army breaks ranks.

The men all begin to run in the greatest confusion, some go towards the exit from the pass, others try to retrace their steps. They jostle and collide with each other as they flee, they stumble over the bodies of the dead and wounded. Orders are no longer heard. Cries of despair panic shrieks of pain are heard. Many throw down their swords that hamper them in flight. Some climb on the hills making signs of surrender, they are soon slaughtered. When the bottom of the valley has become a charnel-house the women brandish their bows above their heads, they utter shouts of victory, they chant a song of death in which these words are heard, Vulture with the bald head/brother of the dead/vulture perform your office/with the corpses I offer you/receive also this vow/never shall my arrow be planted in your eyes.

The Ophidian women the Odonates the Oögones the Odoacres the Olynthians the Oöliths the Omphales the women of Ormur of Orphise the Oriennes have massed and gone over to the attack. The convoys that follow them bring arms victuals clothes. They travel at night, rejoining the armies at daybreak when they withdraw after having given battle. Their most formidable weapon is the ospah. They hold it in position above their heads and rotate it at full speed by twirling the right arm as with a lasso that one spins before one or like the leather thong with bolos attached that one throws round the legs of wild horses to trip them. The ospah is invisible so long as it is not in action. When it is manipulated during battle it materializes as a green circle which crackles and emits odours. Thus the women, making it move at full speed in a given direction, create with the ospah a zone of death. No ray, no shot, no fulguration are seen to emanate from the ospah. The coalescence of the O's is produced by the desperate combatants, full of courage audacious tough and unyielding.

The little girls have laid down their rifles. They advance into the sea and plunge into it, the sweat running down their necks, under their armpits, along their backs. Or else, stretched out in the sun, they talk very loudly. Some, unable to stay still, jump in the sand and jostle each other. One of them, quite naked, with tresses of hair over each shoulder, standing in front of a group, recites at a stretch, Is the finest thing on the dark earth really a group of horsemen whose horses go at a trot or a troop of infantry stamping the ground? Is the finest thing really a squadron of ships side by side? Anactoria Kypris Savé have a bearing a grace a radiant brightness of countenance that are pleasanter to see than all the chariots of the Lydians and their warriors charging in their armour. Then the women applaud.

VINCENTA CLOTILDA NICOLA

SUKAINA XU-HU ANACHORA

OLYMPA DELPHINA LUCRETIA

ROLANDA VIOLA BERNARDA

PHUONG PLANCINE CLORINDA

BAO-SI PULCHERIA AUGUSTA

The women say that men put all their pride in their tail. They mock them, they say that the men would like a long tail but that they would run away whining as soon as they stepped on it. The women guffaw and begin to imitate some ridiculous animal that has difficulty in getting about. When they have a prisoner they strip him and make him run through the streets crying, it is your rod/cane/staff/wand/peg skewer/staff of lead. Sometimes the subject has a fine body broadened at the hips with honeyed skin and muscles not showing. Then they take him by the hand and caress him to make him forget all their bad treatment.

The women say, you are really a slave if ever there was one. Men have made what differentiates them from you the sign of domination and possession. They say, you will never be numerous enough to spit on their phallus, you will never be sufficiently determined to stop speaking their language, to burn their currency their effigies their works of art their symbols. They say, men have foreseen everything, they have christened your revolt in advance a slave revolt, a revolt against nature, they call it revolt when you want to appropriate what is theirs, the phallus. The women say, I refuse henceforward to speak this language, I refuse to mumble after them the words lack of penis lack of money lack of insignia lack of name. I refuse to pronounce the names of possession and non-possession. They say, If I take over the world, let it be to dispossess myself of it immediately, let it be to forge new links between myself and the world.

The women advance side by side in a geometric order of progress. The interval of a few yards that they maintain between them is invisible at a distance. The first rank that advances covers the width of the plain. The tall buildings crumble like card houses at their passage emitting a thick dust over which they march. The second rank of combatants marches some hundred yards behind the first, covering like that one the whole width of the plain. They are followed by another rank at the same distance, by yet another, until one can no longer distinguish their outlines as they blend with the horizon.

As far as eye can see there is no house standing. The combatants carry in both hands a small sphere which has a crateriform part that is directed in front of them at the level of their belts. At every obstacle that presents itself to their progress they project a beam of convergent rays the power of whose impact is signalled by a murky flash, a brief glare, which ensures that any object that may be in the field of the rays is instantly destroyed. They wear garments all of one piece, made of a kind of metal. Their faces, intermittently lit up by the spheres and their rays, resemble great insect heads with antennae and stalked eyes.

The women await their emissaries on their doorsteps, a smile on their lips. They have let down their hair, they have assumed the military costume that leaves the body free in its movements. Within the houses they have poured out the dishwater and scattered the dirty linen. One of them, standing in the middle of the square, rotates slowly on herself arms extended on either side of her body saying, The summer day is brilliant but more brilliant still is the fate of the young girl. Iron plunged into ice is cold but colder still is the lot of the young girl who has given herself in marriage. The young girl in the house of her mother is like seed in fertile ground. The woman under the roof of her husband is like a chained dog. The slave, rarely, tastes the delights of love, the woman never.

RAYMONDA ATALA ENRICA

CALAMITA AMANDA COSIMA

GARANCE REGINA NU-TIAO

GELSOMINA SHOGUN ALICE

OLUMEAI GYPTIS NU-TIAO

BENJAMINA SELENE CURACA

They resuscitate those males who founded their celebrity on the women's downfall, exulting in their slavery whether in their writings in their laws in their actions. For these there are got ready the racks the screw-plates the machines for twisting and grinding. The women stop their ears with wax so as not to hear their discordant cries. When they have soaked them in baths of water mixed with acid, when they have drawn twisted beaten them, they treat their skins according to the usual technique of tanning or else they have them dried in the sun without especial care or else they exhibit them with labels that record the name of their former proprietors or that recall their most striking catch-phrases. It forms a subject of unending humour among them. They continually cast doubt on the attribution of a particular phrase or name to a particular skin that they judge too old for that phrase from the chronological standpoint or on the contrary too recent.