“Split at the Root”: Adrienne Rich and (Religious) Identity
April 3, 2012
By Ryan Harper
About a year ago, while I was napping in my hotel room in between sessions at a conference for Baptist scholars of religion, I dreamed I was walking across a plowed field. Out of the black soil grew a single yellow flower. Taken with the flower’s beauty, I went to pick it, when a woman stopped me. “That flower will begin to wither the moment you pluck it,” she said. “If you must take it with you, pull it by the roots and take some of the native soil with you. Your hands will be dirty. You will need to provide your own pot, but you will preserve its beauty a little while longer.” To this day, I remember the woman’s words exactly—partly because I thought it was a pretty cool dream (especially for a napping Baptist), mostly because the woman was Adrienne Rich.
With her recent death, newspapers and journals are blossoming with tributes to Adrienne Rich. They are noting that she inspired generations of women, writers and non-writers alike. They are noting her contributions to LGBT communities. These accounts are correct.
Less named is Rich’s profound sense of religiosity. By a number of criteria, she was not a religious poet or a religious person. Those who believe religious identity reduces to unqualified assent to the right doctrines, possession of the right genes, or endorsement of the right state will find little religious in Rich’s life and work. But Rich has something to offer any person who wrestles with a tradition, and all of its tangled roots and branches, in the hopes of achieving an identity.
A “Non-Jewish Jew”
The daughter of a Jewish father and a gentile mother, born almost astraddle the Mason-Dixon Line, Rich engaged in border negotiations from the outset. According to Jewish law, she was not a Jew; according to Nazi definitions, she would have been Jewish enough for Auschwitz. She was baptized Episcopalian and attended one of this genteel denomination’s Baltimore congregations for a while in her youth. She described her father, a Southern-born professor in the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, as an “assimilated Jew.” He was barely what some would call a “cultural Jew.” In her late adolescence and into her college years, she became sensitive to the subterranean presences and conspicuous absences of Jewishness in the home of her upbringing. She realized her Jewishness would always be at once a choice and a kind of irresistible inheritance.
http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/culture/5852/%22split_at_the_root%22%3A_adrienne_rich_and_(religious)_identity/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrienne_Rich
Adrienne Rich, May 16, 1929 – March 27, 2012. circa 1980.
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