'You Said Sappho's A She!'

I read Sappho the way some people read horoscopes: for comfort, reflection, and confirmation. When I teach her poems to community college students in New York City, I have no intention of challenging their sexual identities, yet that is often what happens.

Most students do not, sensibly enough, carefully read biographical notes or introductions to the books they're assigned. They do what I would suggest they do (if they asked me), which is to jump right into the material. I ask the first-year composition students to read the entire, all-too-short volume of Mary Barnard's Sappho: A New Translation over the weekend and write a journal of responses and impressions. I don't tell them ahead of time anything about Sappho. What biographical information, what cultural information, what background does any adult need to understand this poem?

 

He is a god in my eyes --
the man who is allowed
to sit beside you--he
who listens intimately
to the sweet murmur of
your voice, the enticing
laughter that makes my own
heart beat fast. If I meet
you suddenly, I can't
speak -- my tongue is broken;
a thin flame runs under
my skin; seeing nothing,
hearing only my own ears
drumming, I drip with sweat;
trembling shakes my body
and I turn paler than
dry grass. At such times
death isn't far from me

 

The Nature of Passionate Love
In spite of the fragmentary state of most of Sappho's poetry, my students have no trouble seeing her grand subject: the nature of passionate love.

Usually as I read aloud to them "Prayer to Aphrodite," a broken-hearted lover's plea for divine intervention, I explain, sotto voce, the mythological references (Aphrodite, for one, "Persuasion'" for another) and uncommon phrases ("Dapple- throned"; "cow my heart"):

 

Dapple-throned Aphrodite
eternal daughter of God,
snare-knitter! Don't, I beg you,
cow my heart with grief! Come,
as once when you heard my far --
off cry and, listening, stepped
from your father's house to your
gold car, to yoke the pair whose
beautiful thick-feathered wings
oaring down mid-air from heaven
carried you to light swiftly
on dark earth; then, blissful one,
smiling your immortal smile
you asked, What ailed me now that
made me call you again? What
was it that my distracted
heart most wanted? "Whom has
Persuasion to bring round now
"to your love? Who, Sappho, is
unfair to you? For, let her
run, she will soon run after;
"if she won't accept gifts, she
will one day give them; and if
she won't love you -- she soon will
"love, although unwillingly...."
If ever -- come now! Relieve
this intolerable pain!
What my heart most hopes will
happen, make happen; you your -
self join forces on my side!

Invariably, by the end of the discussion of the latter poem, I refer to Sappho as "she." For instance, ''Notice how Aphrodite asks what it is that made her call again."

A keen and intelligent student named Maria laughs and raises her hand. '"Excuse me, professor, you just accidentally said Sappho was a she! You said, like about how the goddess says she's calling her -- Aphrodite -- again."

 

"I did say something like that," I agree.

"Sappho's not a she," continues Maria.

But there is rumbling from her classmates.

Vaughn says, "She is a she."

"She's not a she," says Maria. "How can Sappho be a she?"

"She just is -- just as you are," I say.

Maria, who has already documented her identification with and appreciation of Sappho's poems in her journal that is sitting on my desk, says, after a blinking, hurt pause, "That's disgusting!"

"What is?" I ask.

"If my ... no, if a woman, any woman, wrote that about me ... about wanting me ... "

"You wouldn't like it," I suggest.

"No."

"Okay, okay, but look. It's not about you getting a love poem from a woman."

"No, I know that. But I cannot accept it being by a woman about wanting a woman."

"But if you, as you seem to have done, thought it was written by a man, it'd be okay?"

"No -- it depends."

"Maybe," chips in Karima, who until now had hardly made her presence felt in classroom discussions, "it depends on which woman wrote it about you. What you got against someone praying they could have you?"

 

Maria is furious now, seeming to feel set upon. She turns on Karima: "You'd want your best friend to be wanting to have sex with you? -- No!"

But Karima takes a moment to consider this. "Well, if that's what she felt ... "

"That's right," says David, another usually reticent student, "it's what she feel. You not obligated to love them back -- whoever they are, whatever they sex is."

Maria panics. "It's not that! I just mean, whoever writes a love poem to someone of the same sex ... is disgusting -- I think!"

Though no one in this class has come out, though no one has claimed any special enlightenment, we all seem appalled by our star student.

"My friend, not my best friend but an associate," says Karima, "she's lesbian now, but it's no big deal."

'The Women Are More Tolerant Than the Men'
This sets the conversation going seemingly ever farther from Sappho and into the realm of the sexual identity of friends and our response to their homosexuality.

Here the women are more tolerant than the men.

"Professor Bob, if my friend gay," says Lonel, a Haitian native, "he not my friend no more. I pity him, but he not my friend."

Now Shawana, who is chronically absent but who likes to take up space and attention whenever she is in class, almost rises from her chair. "Just 'cause your friend comes out gay don't mean he want you. It ain't like every man who ain't -- excuse me, isn't -- gay is gonna want me neither."

The students laugh, but Lonel says, "My friends are not gay."

Elinor, who sits in the front row, says, "Most every man I know -- gay or straight -- is a dog." She looks over her right then her left shoulder, surveying her classmates, and then nods at me. I wonder if she includes me in the dogdom. When she flounces into the classroom (usually late), her dark eyes severe, her chin out, a sneer on her face, hoots following her in through the open door, a few of the guys in class freeze like pointers.

 

"All right," says Wayne. "We are dogs -- I'll accept what the lady said. I'll even go so far to say that if I was gay (and I said if 'cause I'm not), I'd hit on my friends. I would."

The guys in the class laugh and yell.

I laugh, too, but ask, "But if they weren't interested?"

"Who? My friends? I'd sweet-talk 'em just the way they sweet-talk women now."

"But if they still weren't interested?"

"If they weren't ... you know, I'll bet one or two of them would ... but they'd whup me if they knew I said that. But, okay, if they wasn't interested, hey, I'd still be their friends if they'd let me. Everybody needs friends, from both sexes. There's women, though ... now let me say this right ... there's women I know who didn't want that kind of relationship with me. But I could handle it,"

"So what about Sappho's poems?"

''They was right on. And I knew she was a woman, too."

"How?"

"You're putting me on the spot today, professor."

"Wait, what about you, Mr. Bob?" says Elinor. "What if your best friend wrote love poems about you?"

"I'd tell her we tried that, it didn't work, it's too late, and I'm married."

"Her? Your best friend's a girl?"

"Yeah, an ex-girlfriend."

"Your wife is tolerant, then," says Shuwana.

"No," says Elinor, "then that don't count. We're talking about same and same today. So your best friend of the male persuasion -- what if it was him?"

For a second I truly thought about that. "I'd be very surprised."

"And?"

"And ... I don't know, flattered?"

"No!" calls out Lonel. "Not flattered, professor."

"Well, it'd be flattering, I suppose, to have anybody feel so much for me."

"But ... but,". says Lonel, worried for my sexual identity, "you would tell him no -- no, no, no!"

"Yeah," I say, "I'll bet I probably would."

"Not for sure?" asks Shuwana.

"I don't know. How do you know what you're going to do before the situation happens?"

"I know what I'd do," says Anton.

"What?"

"I'd kill him."

"No sympathy?"

"Nah."

"Why?"

"Because ... "

"Because," says Elinor, "you a homophobe."

Anton, who regularly leers at Elinor, is sorely confused for a moment. "I ain't no homo-nothing."

"You ignorant, that's all," says Elinor. "Homophobe means you don't like gay people."

"That's me."

"All right," says Shuwana, "you don't have to brag about being stupid."

Anton, without a sound but with his mouth, curses her.

"All right, all right," I say. "What if we get back to Sappho?"

"Can do," says Shuwana.

 

I read aloud "I Have Not Had One Word from Her."

 

Frankly I wish I were dead.
When she left, she wept
a great deal; she said to
me, "This parting must be
endured, Sappho. I go unwillingly."
I said, "Go, and be happy
but remember (you know
well) whom you leave shackled by love
"If you forget me, think
of our gifts to Aphrodite
and all the loveliness that we shared
all the violet tiaras,
braided rosebuds, dill and
crocus twined around your young neck
"myrrh poured on your head
and on soft mats girls with
all that they most wished for beside them
"while no voices chanted
choruses without ours,
no woodlot bloomed in spring without song ... ".

I ask, "So is Sappho ... Can I pose it this way without throwing us off again? Is Sappho describing love in a way that is distinctly homosexual?"

"Love is love," announces Honoree. Her background is Haitian, but she was born and grew up in Brooklyn. "Okay?"

"Okay," I agree.

"Love is love," continues Honoree. "Whether you hot for a man or for a woman, you love. I know people got differences downstairs, but when that love, that goddess Sappho begs to -- Aphro-what?"

"Aphrodite."

"Yeah, she get to you with her sweetness and her fire. But then, when it's over? It's over! You be torn up! You torn up so bad! And they ... they don't love you no more, and -- " Her voice catches, and, I swear, her eyes filled with tears, and her classmates and I seem to gulp with pity. " -- your heart is broke."

There is a long pause. I bow my head and stare at the stanza:

 

"If you forget me, think
of our gifts to Aphrodite
and all the loveliness that we shared"

We seem to be in church and Honoree is our minister.

She breaks the two-second silence. "People want to define you by who you love, not by what you feel."

"It's like," says Wayne, "love changes you -- it does! But it's not because it's for a man or a woman. I fall in love with bad women all the time. Why should I do that if I'm a sensible man? If I could fall in love with whoever I wanted, why couldn't I fall in love with the nice girl my mother likes from her church?"

"Wait, wait! Excuse me," says Shuwana. "If love just come down on you and possess you, then why gay people get so much grief from everybody?"

Suddenly no one has any idea why.

And so we go on, ending class reading and discussing a few of Sappho's lighter, more fragmentary pieces. It seems we all are finally thinking about the same thing -- the shocking yet desired assault of Aphrodite on our lives.

Bob Blaisdell is an assistant professor of English at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, N.Y.