Marguerite was helping a new student with her belt when, under a recent set of seminar photos, she saw a news clipping taped to the mirror by the door. The title, underlined in red, distracted her. The girl’s name was Samantha. Butterfly tattoos covered her forearms. Her belt wouldn’t wrap twice around her waist. “They must have given you a child’s belt,” she said. “We’ll have to settle for once-around.” She was trying to remember the tail end of the rainy afternoon when she had emptied Fr. Thornby’s whiskey in a blind flurry of writing. Samatha’s belt resisted Marguerite’s efforts. She scanned the article to the bottom. The letter to the editor was signed M. Guerite. Samantha’s butterflies swarmed through her body and flapped in bowels. Had she?
Samatha looked down at the knot, which was anything but flat. “Thanks,” she said, turning to check it in the mirror. “I’m going to try to do it on my own. Do you mind staying in case I fail?”
Marguerite wanted to leave, but she also needed to read. “Maybe try wetting the fabric,” she said. Her mind was travelling backwards but remained blank. What had she written?
Samatha untied her belt, and, while tiny muscles tensed at the base of the hairs on her arms, she began to read her own words in print:
An Argument Against Brotherhood
You with your knees still aching from being hammered into the grime, back broken in birthing, voice silenced for hoping, hands flailed for reaching, mind thrashed for thinking and dreaming and wanting. You know your anger is just. You don’t want any more children crying over another bloodied body stabbed by a violent husband, fired by a toxic boss, strangled by an angry lover. You no longer want to remain silent, suffering, forever unrecognized.
You want your ire to take form, to find language. You want it to leave deep tracks, to trace a path for all women to end their infinite, invisible, powerless plight.
This is for you, and for all for whom being englobed under one gender-partial word is no longer acceptable, a word so old-fashioned that it has become synonymous with misogyny and decadence and an enfilade of other elitist practices through history. Fraternity is indeed an anachronism that reveals the morals of the times when it felt solid and honest.
That time is over.
Fraternity and its crotch-grabbing brotherhood is not worthy of women, girls and an entire polyvalent spectrum of being—the sensitivities and power of menstruation, birthing, breastfeeding and beyond. Change is necessary to stop the amalgam of the solitary male gender standing over and above the others: the upright phallus can only tower for a time before wilting into spent and wrinkled uselessness.
Liberty and equality, yes. Fraternity, no.
We are not brothers, we are not interested in initiation into any fellowship or club with its saunas and cigar-rooms; we are not asking to wear ties, but to be untied from their phallic drives and frustrations. We have our own difficulties—that of earning less while working more, of being seen, only, as curves and pussies—exploitable, serviceable, mothers, mistresses, maids, minders; never, or rarely, as whole humans, capable and competent equals.
France’s motto must be modified—translated into the present. The world does not need more phallocratic thrusts for missiles and monies and massacres; it needs entente, humility, and, yes, humanity.
A complicated word, humanity—for humans are capable of both the best and the most egregious. Still “equality, liberty and humanity” will be more actual and more unifying, a far better reminder of our shared weaknesses and our potential grandeur, than fraternity.
The right word for a righter world, for those who want all humanity to move forward humanly.
M.Guerite
Fragment n° 57 from a novel in progress about Sister Marguerite, a faithless nun. Working title: Noguru.