After Sappho

by Selby Wynn Schwartz

As one politician said at that time, In Italy, the enslavement of women is the only regime in which men may live happily. He meant that we ourselves were the small gift, pawned for the future of the fatherland.

She devoted her next article to explaining that as long as men were the only ones voting, frankly the proper term was not ‘democracy’ but ‘tyranny’.

In Fragment 19, no line is complete. It is as if every word is swallowed after a breath. In the early part of the poem Sappho writes of waiting: the tension of time before anything happens.

Your Greeks, after all, Sarah said, jabbing her finger into Eva’s shoulder, who do you think they were? Who was Medea, Clytemnestra, Antigone? They were men, ma chère Eva! And Ophelia, and Lady Macbeth, and Desdemona! Centuries of men, filling the stages with themselves, every role at their disposal, wearing gowns or breeches as they pleased. And so now, to be a great actress, you must learn: no more shall we be confined to their cast-offs, to their bits of mothers and maidens and ladies-in-waiting. No, chèrie, we do not stoop to consider the sex of our parts.

Sometimes we wanted to be everything at once. An invert is someone who believes this is possible.