The Poetry of Memoir: Questioning Patriarchs, Questioning Ourselves

"Good as Gold" by the artist Donald Lipski, New Country Club Plaza branch of the Kansas City Public Library, 2006. PHOTO: GWEN E. SPRAGUE

Alicia Ostriker's The Nakedness of the Fathers utilizes various genres: poetry, memoir, storytelling, and commentary to inquire into and confirm the multi-layered nature of identity.

The primary identity addressed in The Nakedness of the Fathers is female Jewish-American but is also and equally socialist, feminist, academic, and above all, humanist. The Nakedness of the Fathers asks that we all question and investigate the cultural mythologies we have accepted about our place and role in our particular "tribe's" understanding of itself. InThe Nakedness of the Fathers, Ostriker's modernistic weaving of cultural myth and personal memoir offers something rarely achieved in books strictly rendered in one or the other form: an intimacy often not found in the retelling of cultural myths, and a sense of historic scope often missing in memoir.

The inclusion of persona poems rendered in the voices of often-marginal biblical women allows for other occasions of intimacy. In such poems we find Rachel "not getting mad, just getting even;" and the handmaid Hagar disgustedly referring to Sarah's husband as "that creepy old man." These poems not only provide moments for the reader to slow down and consider the thoughts of the women interacting with the patriarchs, but also instances of artistic beauty, insuring the book is not weighted down by didacticism.

I admire the unrelenting honesty in Ostriker's The Nakedness of the Fathers. It carries the political leanings of a "feminist/humanist" text -- which rightly demands that I (as a man) examine my attitudes toward women but also challenges women to accept responsibility for the mistreatment of other women. In the section, "Judges, or Disasters of War" the aforementioned Hagar ends with, "But I still wonder/ Why could she not love me/We were women together?" The Nakedness of the Fathers calls us all to check our particular self-hatred. In "Sheba's Proverbs" we are told "A confident man is unafraid of an intelligent woman." This is extremely poignant in a society that often seems to believe that the unexamined life is not only worth living - but preferable.

Finally, in The Nakedness of the Fathers I found myself grappling with a central question concerning justice and fairness: "If justice and fairness are human concepts, then is God innately just and fair, or did we have to educate God as to these ideals?" There are other questions I have collected as well from reading The Nakedness of the Fathers, and because of this, along with its historic scope, it passes the sniff test of a true classic. It is a great achievement.