May I also ask you about your poem “Woman”?

I’ll begin by saying I don’t think that there is a writing particular to women. Neither do I think that woman’s nature is radically different from man’s nature, or that our essential styles of writing are so radically different from men’s. What I do really doesn’t differ radically from what my male poet friends do, in the sense that human nature, common to all of us, is what lies at the heart of our poetry. A poem isn’t marked by a masculine or feminine voice or style. There is nothing specifically feminine about my poetry. But in this particular poem, I chose to speak in a distinctly female voice. The woman speaker here says:

For a long time, it was actually written in the French constitution that women were not the equals of men. I had first-hand knowledge of this legal inequality. For example, the first time I wanted to open a bank account, I had all the necessary documents with me, and I had money to deposit, of course. When I got to the bank, they told me I was missing one thing: my husband’s written permission. I had a job, just as he did, I earned money, just as he did, but I could not open a bank account without my husband’s consent. I revisit this in the poem, and look at that male discourse, that rhetorical male discourse which created this inequality. It is a discourse in decline, a resolute discourse which is not that of poetry. Poetic discourse is not masculine. It is different. But I understand masculine discourse, because to undertake my studies and to be a university professor, naturally, you have to participate in it. But I think it’s not the only possible discourse for discussing poetry critically. Consequently, I use this discourse in writing books of literary criticism, but I seek other things, alternative discourses. This is the reason I wrote the poem. Anyway, I never thought that there are characteristics particular to women’s writing, nor that there are characteristics particular to men’s writing. If men and women have entirely different ways of speaking, then how could my husband and I communicate enough to marry each other (laughing)?

“Cry” is another one of your poems which intrigues me.

(Reading the poem aloud):

There is something that I’m still not sure of, that I have not resolved in my mind. It is the question of why I was born. I know why I will die. I am a system of atoms that will dissolve into the rest of the atoms. But I do not know why I was born, and that’s what this poem is about. The birds whose songs we hear, the roots we see along the ground, the crabs that die and leave only their shells — they don’t ask why they were born. There is a divide between life in general and we who think, and being among those who think, I ask for an explanation. And only death can give me this explanation. It wasn’t childhood difficulties, it wasn’t my mother herself, it was that the maternal breast is made out of something horrible. That explains the beginning of the poem. Then, towards the end of the poem, well, in my life, I am a housewife, I am a lover, I am a scholar, but I am other things as well, and it seemed that in these I resemble a person who sings, except I didn’t know what my song resembles. It isn’t speech, because speaking is different than music or poetry. Is it a prayer? No, because I have no religious belief. It must simply be an orison for the serenity in life.