When Women Were Birds
When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice (2012) by Terry Tempest Williams is both moving and masterful in its craft. This just-over-two-hundred-page memoir is a small book that fits easily in a purse or a large pocket. It is one designed to be taken along when you leave the house. When Women Were Birds weaves Williams’s personal and family histories with that of the land on which she came of age. As any fan of Williams will expect, this slender volume includes many a powerful metaphor, startling anecdote, and compelling social-justice perspective. It is a book about womanhood and voice; it demands to be adored, or so I found it.
Williams famously sieves life down to pithy insight, piercing image, haunting metaphor. In few words, she powerfully defines the human experience and our duty to steward and honor that which has come before us: both land, family, and tradition. Thus, it is fitting that When Women Were Birds revolves around the collection of Williams’s mother’s journals, which Terry Tempest Williams inherited at the age of fifty-four upon her mother’s death. One should note: There are fifty-four sections of this small book (as suggested by the subtitle), marked out with unassuming Roman numerals; one for every year Williams’s life when her mother dies, no doubt. The first line of variation II astounds the reader to attention. It comes after several intentionally blank pages. Williams writes: “I do not know why my mother bought journal after journal, year after year, and never wrote in them and passed them on to me” (15). This is an image that me; the silence left by so many women since time immemorial. And yet, the starkly blank pages, full of all the things her mother never wrote, truly were a gift; they spurred Williams to write and write and write.
This is a book that, on nearly every page, I marked a passage, dog-eared the bottom of the page, inserted a sticky. When Women Were Birds abounds with the profound. Terry Tempest Williams is a master of voice: succinct, cutting, joyful, reverent, and yes, that word again, haunting. As one would hope to find in a book with “Voice” in the subtitle, When Women Were Birds plays with technique as she unpacks grief, love, loss, becoming, and her own process as a writer particularly in relation to her famous creative nonfiction, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (1991). Dare I say, it is a book that is impossible to pick up without finding some passage worthy of copying out, posting on a wall, in a journal, as a reminder to one’s future self. At least, that was my experience with both my first and second reads of this book.
Terry Tempest Williams’s writing is also unapologetically political, in that personal-is-political sort of way. This book is a memoir about Williams’s experience on losing her mother and grandmother, and then reckoning with her mother’s many, many blank journals. Thus, themes of motherhood, womanhood, birth, and death abound; so too, abortion, sexuality, love, and grief. Terry Tempest Williams, whose professional career has been a winding path, most recently leading to a multi-year residence at Harvard’s Divinity School, has made her mark not only as a writer, but also as an activist: she embraces both words on a page and direct action in the world. When Women Were Birds is an extension of her activism, her eco-feminist activism that contributed to things like the federal protections of Bear’s Ears as a National Monument in her native Southern Utah. When Women Were Birds reflects Williams’s pro-choice, pro-woman, pro-earth stances. When Women Were Birds hovers over nexus points of voice and action. Williams recounts involvement in the Green Belt Movement under the guidance of Wangari Maathail, among others. She also describes learning to bird as a child with her grandmother and be in the wild as a young woman; her own coming of age, her own becoming, leading to her desire to put words on page, give voice to experience. Just as her words consistently pierce their target, there is a determined fierceness to Williams’s activism, to be sure; one that I find absorbing.
But Williams, like her prose, resists being confined to an oversimplification of category. Born and raised in rural Castle Valley of the iconic red rock landscape in eastern Utah. Williams is the daughter of Mormon settlers. Her blank-journal-bequeathing mother was a good Mormon woman; her grandmother, Mimi, too. So much of her way of being in the world is infused with this truth. While Terry Tempest Williams is not a practicing Latter Day Saint (LDS); I imagine she might describe herself as culturally Mormon. And this honoring what has come before her regardless of her inner faith, speaks volumes to me. My life owes greatly to the staunchly Protestant background of my childhood that punctuated the lives of all my forebears back to the days, I would guess, of the Protestant Reformation, even as I — like Williams — follow my unique compass, make my own map. I am saddened to see people flee the ideological framework of childhood and their family culture, refuse to recognize its import to their very existence and refuse to honor it; even if it is a framework they choose to transform, sometimes beyond the point of recognition. So often we humans burn things to the ground and fail to see the ashes on which they build anew. Williams does not make this folly.
As the title suggests, When Women Were Birds, she examines the female experience, specifically the female voice. Her writing echoed themes I savored in Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost In The Throat (2020). In When Women Were Birds, Williams evokes the dying Nushu tradition (a syllabic text based on Chinese, written and learned by women, one she describes as resembling bird prints on the page). Nushu writing is passed from mother to daughter; women write their own language to recount their lived experiences. Alongside her own process of finding voice, Williams recognizes the sisterhood of all women who have done (and do) the same in every moment of humanity, or who choose silence as a voice, blank pages as their story. Voice, particularly female voice, is a complex creature.
I blindly purchased a copy of When Women Were Birds in Kanab, on a road trip family adventure that took us through the magical red rock formations of southern Utah four years ago. It was a book penned by a female author from Utah, so it seemed a good choice. I read it slowly the first time through; one or two “variations” at a time. I loved it from the first and wanted it to just soak in to my soul. Then, in June 2022, I attended the Maclean Festival in Missoula, Montana. Terry Tempest Williams was the keynote speaker. Her passion and her soft-spoken nature inspired me just as much in person as her writing had in When Women Were Birds. As she began, I wanted to write down every other line she spoke. As she continued to talk about public land and sacred space, the festival’s important theme for the year, I let go of documenting and just listened. It was powerful. Just as I had experienced in reading her prose, I laughed and I wiped tears from my cheeks as she spoke. Then, this fall, my own mother called to ask if I had ever read When Women Were Birds. She wanted to buy me a copy if I had not. I laughed at the way certain books resurface again and again in one’s life. I told her that I have a copy and that I love the book. After our conversation, I picked up this little, rough-edged volume again and reread it in a few days. It was just as powerful the second time through. Needless to say, I will continue to do so for many years to come. In case, you, reader, fail to grasp my enthusiasm for this book, I implore you to find a copy and you will discover it’s beauty and power for yourself.
Bibliography:
Williams, Terry Tempest. When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice. Picador: 2012.
A Few Great Passages:
“A mother and daughter are an edge. Edges are ecotones, transitional zones, places of danger or opportunity. House-dwelling tension. When I stand on the edge of the land and sea, I feel this tension, this fluid line transition. High tide. Low tide. It is the sea’s reach and retreat that reminds me we have been human for only a very short time” (18-19).
“We come into this world through women, a woman who is spent, broken open, in awe. No wonder women have been feared and worshipped ever since man first saw the crowning of a human head here, legs spread, a brushstroke of light” (98-99).
“Because what every woman knows each month when she bleeds is, I am not pregnant. Because what every woman understands each time she makes love is, Life could be in the making now. Which is why when a woman allows a man to enter her, it is not just a physical act, but an act of surrendering to this possibility that her life may no longer be hers alone. Because until she bleeds, she will check her womb every day for the stirrings of life. Because until she bleeds, she wonders if her life will be one or two or three. Because until she bleeds, she imagines every possibility from pleasure to pain to birth to death and how she will worry endlessly, until she bleeds” (101-102).
“[H]arboring regrets is making love to the past, and there is no movement here. It’s not the lips of a prince that will save us, but our own lips speaking” (125).
“Mythmaking is the evolutionary enterprise of translating truths” (128).
“The courage to continue before the face of despair is the recognition that in those eyes of darkness we find our own night vision. Women blessed with death-eyes are fearless” (130).
“When it comes to words, rather than using our own voice, authentic and unpracticed, we steal someone else’s to shield our fear. And in my mother’s case, she let me fill in the blanks. This is my inheritance” (168).
“Nature has a voice and it is often brutal without cause. Waves break and sea foam gathers around my ankles. There is a continuum here on the edge of America that I seek” (177-178).
“There is an art to writing, and it is not always disclosure. The act itself can be beautiful, revelatory, and private” (182).
“Myths have a way of bringing what is unconscious to the surface and putting a face on what we cannot see” (205).
