I performed Adrienne Rich’s poem, “For the Record” in a theatre class in college. The poem is a statement on the atrocities of WWI. It ends in a statement:

“and ask whose signature/is stamped on the orders, traced/in the corner of the building plans/Ask where the illiterate, big-bellied/women were, the/drunks and crazies,/the ones you fear most of all: ask where you were.”

Ask Where You Were

As we look at beginnings — and beginning again and again — my desire to ask that question of myself guided me to read Rich’s essay, “Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity.” This essay explores identity and consciousness, passing and self-hate, motherhood and feminism, gender and sexual orientation. She writes about being part of a cultural reckoning for genocide, war, and racial violence during the mid-20th century. There is a timeliness to those questions on the precipice of all that is.

A daughter of the South with a Gentile mother and Jewish father, Rich frames this essay as sense-making of her cultural roots. She describes feeling split at the root all her life.

“Sometimes I feel I have seen too long from too many disconnected angles: white, Jewish, anti-Semite, racist, anti-racist, once-married, lesbian, middle-class, feminist, exmatriate Southerner, split at the root: that I will never bring them whole. … Yet if we wait for the undamaged to make our connections for us; we can’t wait to speak until we are wholly clear and righteous. There is no purity, and, in our lifetimes, no end to this process.”

Living split at the root — between identities and truths, birth and death, illness and health, darkness and light, root and bud — is my rhythm. We are laid bare — our nerves and hearts exposed — right now. We are in our sanctuaries and courthouses and statehouses and the streets. Who are we as people, as a world? Who are we as people accountable for the past, living in the present, and responsible for future generations? How do we even begin to turn ourselves, our community, and our world, round right?

Beginning and Accountability

At the end of the essay, Rich explains:

“It’s a moving into accountability, enlarging the range of accountability. I know that in the rest of my life, the next half-century or so, every aspect of my identity will have to be engaged . . . The women trying, as part of her resistance, to clean up her act.”

Beginnings always begin. Ready or not. It feels honest and clear and right at this time of beginnings, when yesterday and today and tomorrow collide at a rapid pace and I can’t see through the smoke of the explosion to clean up my act. Becoming as whole as humanly possible and building a whole world is the point of cleaning up my act. Cleaning up my act — not in a judgmental-separate-harmful way, but rather a oneness-interconnected-powerful way — is the heart of resistance. We are all split at the root. Making sense of split identities. Asking ourselves about the as if, the I am, and the not yet. Rooting beginnings in the soil of past, present, and future.