Postcards
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Here are some samples:
From Japan:
"From my hotel window on Tokyo Bay I watch a lighted Ferris wheel spin slowly in the dark. I wish its little buckets could raise the dead souls of Edo buried under the rubble of World War II, the ash of earthquakes, fires, the garbage of eras. But they can’t.
Strange mission, looking for a woman painter whose name meant “Hey, you!”, who almost never signed her work, was briefly famous, and then disappeared—one hundred and fifty years ago. Another country, another language, another century. Am I mad? Do I think I will see her, walking on the street?"
From Toronto:
"The truth is that my heroine has become lost to history. She made an appearance but now she’s gone. I have consulted the Historical Record, and it has thrown up its
hands. She has disappeared.
The feminists have an explanation for these lapses. They tell us it isn’t women themselves who vanish. It is gender-blinkered historians who “subvert, silence or interpret” women’s actions to the point where they disappear from their own narratives. If the Historical Record can’t fit a woman into an expectation, it goes dumb on her.
So. She fell off the record; she fell off the radar. My scholar-guide thinks it may even be because she fell off the wagon. “Or did something else self-destructive,” he
says, gently."