By Christine Chan
“Entanglement [theory] helps us see beyond the narrow anthropocentric view of the
world and helps us … understand the symbiotic ways in which we are related with other species.”
“Becoming Bees”
The first day I entered our spring garden this year, I heard the whole cherry tree hum, an unsteady, mechanical noise like an old engine breaking down. As I drew closer, I saw narrow-waisted bees darkening every blossom. The whole indigo sky seemed to break open and shiver. I stood and watched as long as I could bear it — the constant plucking and wiggling made my skin feel touched by tiny, invisible limbs.
The next week, when I entered the backyard again, the small bees had been replaced by much bigger ones, broader, louder, fuzzier. Bees the size of my thumb.
The thumb. I often use my hand as a way to describe the size of things; for example, I will say a grapefruit is the size of my fist, or that maple leaves, hand-sized, draped themselves across my windshield. But even more than that, I use my thumb as a unit of measure. And when I say that these bees were thumb-sized, I mean that they were two inches long and nearly an inch wide. My thumb was my first love, my first doll, my sister.
I have associated the taste of my thumb with warmth and security since before I can remember. I can’t recall when the thumb sucking started, but I know my mother successfully extinguished it by about the first grade. I remember the warm glow, the buzz I got when my thumb entered my mouth. The experience was even better if I curled up – I imagined myself to be a turtle secure in her shell. My thumb made me slobber, my chin dripping with saliva wetting my neck, but I was in bliss.
It was self-soothing at its peak. I sucked when I watched cartoons, when I crouched in the backseat of my father’s blue Mercedes on the way to the cider mill, the beach, or the woods, where the family would hike for hours, until my blisters burst, and my knees collapsed. Until my little brother couldn’t stop crying, the snot running down the front of his shirt, into the dust and leaves.
I sucked at the playground, I sucked when I walked the mile to kindergarten and first grade. I sucked myself to sleep at night, and I stopped sucking only to eat breakfast.
By the time I was five, I was fixing my own breakfast each morning – hauling out the enormous box of Lucky Charms from the upper cupboard, lofting it onto the kitchen table, getting the battered plastic bowl from the lower shelves, and plucking the spoon from the drawer. Finally, I dragged the carton of milk from the refrigerator and poured, using both hands, into the bowl. One of my early signs of autism was the ritual I performed next – after the cereal had soaked for a minute, I carefully pulled out each “marshmallow” flavored star, heart, and moon, and placed them on a paper napkin next to the bowl. I saved them for the end — to be eaten all at once. I still cannot explain why.
. . .
Let me contrast my childhood thumb with the then fingers of my mother. My thumb was soft, pale, friendly, near or already in, my mouth. My mother’s fingers were tanned, muscular, bitter, with red, shining, sharp fingernails. One of my earliest nightmares involved her vicious index finger with its knife-like nail chasing me down the stairs to the basement, as I urged on my flying mattress — my pajamas in tatters, shredded by the massive, darting finger.
This dream was an obvious representation of how I felt about my mother and her futile attempts to stop my thumb-sucking. She would yell, slap, forbid, and threaten. She tried coating my thumb with a foul-liquid – it seemed then to be poison, but I got used to the taste. She tried wrapping my thumb in gauze, in Band-Aids. I sucked everything, every texture, every taste, and when her efforts escalated, I just switched thumbs.
Our struggle got so extreme that, for a while, I lost the ability to grasp anything with my hands, since both thumbs were wrapped so heavily, they became useless.
I can’t remember when my mother finally won. I do remember feeling naked, helpless, for a long time after I stopped.
. . .
It was January second of 2021, and I was in the parking lot of the Old Bridge, New Jersey Walmart, wearing just a tee-shirt and jeans, since the weather was in the 60’s. It was the warmest winter since I moved to the east coast in 1987.
I am a worrier – and as I walked our blind pitbull that morning past the trees in the tiny park opposite our house, my teeth began to worry my lower lip. I saw the magnolia starting to bud, little green bumps like spreading pimples, and the maples and cherry trees showed light, fuzzy growths along their branches. As the dog dawdled and snorted, I worried that the trees were going to experience another freeze, another heavy snow, and that they would die. The summer before had been so hot (breaking all previous records) that many of the evergreens, cedars and pines, turned reddish, dropped all their spines, and turned dead, desiccated husks. Not just in this one-acre park, either. Evergreen bushes I planted when we first bought the house became rusted skeletons; the problem was visible all up and down our street, our county, our state.
At Walmart, I had forgotten to bring my bags to carry my groceries again, so I had to buy another plastic/cotton hybrid bag for a dollar, an obnoxious blue that smelled of stale cleaning fluid (I was sadly aware of being part of the problem of excess trash, of plastic usage). Out in the parking lot, as I was sweating and trying to untangle my wrist from the bag handles and open my car door, I saw a bee on the corner of my shopping cart. The bee was small, dull, and moved slowly, then it was suddenly on my hand. I didn’t move. The bees are waking up, I told myself. The bees are waking up too early, there will be no flowers for them, and therefore, no pollen, no honey, and they will die. My friends tell me I tend to catastrophize, but in that moment, I could not see a future without bees. I set the bee gently back on the metal rim of the shopping cart and drove away.
. . .
To understand, at least partially, how bees relate to women, we must examine how bees are perceived (embodied) in this, our 21st century. The author of the article, “Becoming Bees”, discusses colony collapse disorder, and explores how to change our relationship with bees so that we no longer view ourselves as separate and above them (or any animal). More specifically, the author suggests that we should no longer look at bees as things that can provide for us, but as creatures whose fate is intertwined with our own. The leap between this idea and the feminist philosophy that prioritizes the lack of a solid, cohesive self is not really that big; if women’s selfhood is just a performance, then, perhaps, that self can be dissolved and reformed, not into something solid and heavy, but more into a net that encompasses others, and other species.
I am trying to say something like this: bees are thumbs are nipples. Or this: honey is rare, sweet, and a mother.
. . .
As I remember, my first encounter with a bee was when I sat on bumblebee on the blue plastic seat of my family’s swing set in the backyard and wailed my throat sore. I was four or five, and the swing set on our lawn in the big backyard of our cookie-cutter suburban house in upstate New York was new and unsteady. But it glittered and shone. After the swing set had fallen over a few times mid-swing, my father finally found a way to secure it to the earth, so it only bobbed from side to side in use. I had a tendency then, as I did for at least twenty years afterwards, to scream loudly, deep in my chest and with moments of pure hysteria, when I was hurt, either physically or emotionally. This sobbing scream could go on for hours or until I was so exhausted I couldn’t breathe. At that point, I often slept.
. . .
This time, my dad scooped me up in his arms, carried me into the house, and laid me face first on the couch. He pulled down my pants and underwear and fastened his mouth to my buttock, where the stinger was. The pain did not get better, but I somehow became fixated on the idea that he had saved me. On the idea that this was how you saved a child, and it involved removing her pants.
My father also removed my pants and underwear when he beat me and left deep plum-colored bruises all over my bottom, and sometimes, up my back. He complained how it hurt his hand to hit me. He laughed about it hurting him more than it hurt me. Sometimes, I was so stiff and sore after a beating that I could barely walk or sit. Each time I felt the ache I told myself, this is because you are bad.
Once my father beat me because I wouldn’t pose correctly for a photo. Sometimes my mother would start crying, begging my father to stop when he hit me, and sometimes she would join him. Often, she would threaten to tell my father to hit me when he arrived home from work, because she felt she couldn’t hit me hard enough, even though she used a plastic hairbrush or a wooden spoon.
. . .
I was fifteen the next time I was stung in front of my father. My family and I were hiking in rolling hills near Palo Alto in California, in June, and the air was heavy even in the shade. I was wearing jean shorts and layered tank tops. My father had given me my own Leica camera the year before, and I was putting it through its paces, getting shots of the sky, the dead leaves on the path, and the live oak trees, with their prickly, spoon-shaped leaves highlighted against the baby blue above.
One of the trunks seemed blurry and busy. As I got closer, I watched through my lens and discovered a hive. I slowly moved to within three feet, and the bees did not seem to notice me. They did, however, notice the click of my camera, and attacked on my third shot. (This can be seen as how the attempt to objectify and represent “the other” can badly backfire.) At first, I didn’t know what was happening, but then I felt their tiny feet on my arms.
And then the stinging started, and I was running back to my parents, down the path, about a hundred yards away. I shrieked and waved my arms, and then felt the bees underneath my tank top, so I peeled it off as I ran. I stopped by my family and yelled, “bees” holding my right arm up, where the swelling was just beginning. My dad drew close and puckered over my arm, as if to suck, as he did that time many years ago.
I put my hand on his face and pushed him away. Later, he said he thought I was running and shrieking because I had gone crazy. I often wondered what crazy really meant to my father, as he often shut me down, insulted me, called me crazy, when I tried to comment on what happened in the bedroom, when I was sleeping in there with my parents.
. . .
I was entangled with my parents, but only when they wanted me, only when it was convenient for them. Otherwise, I was an annoying insect. But this was not the kind of entanglement “Becoming Bees” discusses. It was more like the brute force Plath imagines in her poem, “The Arrival of the Bee Box. “
. . .
I have loved Sylvia Plath ever since college, for both useful and useless reasons. The stupid reasons: she wanted to die, I wanted to die. She was out of control emotionally, subject to fits and screaming, as was I. The gang of disillusioned boys that I hung out with saw the movie version of the Bell Jar from 1976 and said that her character was me. Perfectly me – especially when the actress playing Sylvia was waiting to hear news about an award, sitting at her desk in a classroom, scribbling a dark box darker and darker with her pen, and then, as her name was called, rose up with a pasted-on grin.
I felt a kinship with her, and I was complimented by what the boys said. I saw the whole of her poem “Daddy” knifed into a bathroom stall my sophomore year, and memorized it. Especially the line about the boot. I was a misunderstood, abused and put-upon genius (I told myself), as was she.
. . .
Plath was born on October 27th, 1932, just about three years and three weeks before my mother. In photos from the fifties, long before I was born, both Plath and my mom have the same bangs, wear the same prim, white-collared shirts under soft cardigans, and have the same foolish, eager-to-please grins.
But as Plath gets older, her smile changes, becomes challenging or absent, and is sometimes replaced by a threatening stare. As my mother aged, her smile became larger, more desperate, and her eyes more guarded, fearful. My mother and Sylvia both went to college and majored in English. My mother was the first in her family to ever go to college, but Sylvia’s family had prized education for generations. Her father was a professor; my mother’s father eight generations a farmer.
. . .
Plath also differs from my mother in that, in some of her poetry, she shows a true entanglement, a sharing of selfhood, with the bees. In “Wintering”, one of Plath’s later bee poems, she writes of the bees need to hibernate during the cold months:
“This is the time of hanging on for the bees–
… The cold sets in.//
…The bees are all women,
Maids and the long royal lady.//
They have got rid of the men,
The blunt, clumsy stumblers, the boors.
Winter is for women–/
…Her body a bulb in the cold and too dumb to think.”
Here, we see the existence of women and bees overlapping – the bees “are all” women, and the women are sharing the space of the bees, that same underground basement. Unlike the narrator in “The Arrival of the Bee Box”, this speaker is not proud of her power over the bees; she is among them, sharing that same “coffin for a midget” she described in the earlier poem. This is not to say that Plath redeems herself with this poem or becomes any less racist. However, it might go to show that Plath, also, had moments when she became entangled with bees, in the sense that, she “understood the symbiotic ways in which we are related with other species” (“Becoming Bees…”). I can also interpret Plath’s insight as showing how many villains are also sometimes kind, or, that it is useless to consider another human (including my parents) as either completely bad or completely good.
. . .
In the Candyman script (2020) that I taught my literature students five years ago, bees are enmeshed with city and its neighborhoods, and associated with the monster, and more specifically, the monster’s violence. In one scene, the main character, Anthony, lies wounded and dying, and is swarmed by bees, so much so that his features are obscured – he appears to have a “bee mask”. After they swarm, the bees dissipate, and Anthony is gone. It is as if they absorbed him.
In “Becoming Animals,” Deleuze and Guattari discuss the transformation of human to animal as requiring a letting go of identity, of the individual self. They write: “A becoming-animal involves a pack, a band, a population… in short, a multiplicity…What we are saying is that every animal is fundamentally a band, a pack. That it has pack mode, rather than [individual] characteristics…”
Anthony, the person, becomes Candyman, the bee/human monster, by losing his individuality, by surrendering his clear, solid, human, and isolated self. His surrender is the only thing that allows him to transcend the stereotypes and powerlessness forced on him by white society.
This excerpt is from the shooting, not final, script: (Candyman Script 2020)
“EXT. PURCELL’S. NIGHT
The swarm floods out the back door of the shop. The cops
panic, as it envelops Anthony.
SMITH/JONES
Ahhhhhhhh!
The bees begin to disperse. Anthony’s body is gone.”
Anthony has entered the bees, and they have entered him. He is now a hybrid creature – able to exact justice for the African American men murdered by the police, and vengeance against our racist society. In fact, as Candyman, the bees’ sting is so vicious, he is able to kill all the police threatening his girlfriend. But he only appears to save her when she calls his (new) name three times while looking in a mirror.
In this movie, the mirror surfaces again and again as a grotesque portal to the ignored and misunderstood reality experienced by African Americans. Here, a Black woman uses it to protect her life. If we go back to what “Becoming Bees” said about the Anthropocene and entanglement, we can “read” this version of the Candyman story as demonstrating how the bees’ entanglement with humans can upend a power structure that depends on the repression of both nature and the subaltern for its existence.
. . .
From early medieval England, beekeeping was associated with women in Western culture, and women were able to make their own money and livelihood by tending to bees. A bee-keeping woman from the early 20th century wrote a book about tending bees (Miss Wilson Dressed for Bee-Work Bee-Keeping for Women. Helpful Advice on How They Should Dress for Bee Work), and her audience was primarily women. She wrote for women, and ignored the possibility that men might, also, need help to beekeep.
Unlike other popular women’s advice books from that era, she does not mention romance or appearing more beautiful. There is nothing about pleasing a man or taking care of children. This book is an instructional pamphlet about women who are serious about beekeeping as a career. At one point, Wilson states:
There is no disputing the fact that in bee-keeping men have a decided advantage over women in the matter of dress. It is so much easier for them to dress cool and comfortable, and also easier to protect themselves from stings, than it is for women…But women can do much to make their dress comfortable…Either denim or ticking is good, as far as the wear is concerned, as neither will allow the honey to soak through readily.
This passage (because it deals so straightforwardly with the limits put on women in occupations) seems unusual for a book aimed at women, but also shows how women and bees have been historically associated with each other, and that women have used this association to better themselves and to avoid the confines of a “normal” feminine role.
. . .
I have often thought that incest, rape, and sexual abuse erases the selfhood of the receiver. But lately, I’ve been thinking that it is better not to cling to the idea of an individual, separate self, that it is more felicitous to think that I am many selves AND connected to the many other selves in the world, the natural, the man made, animal, vegetable, human.
But perhaps that idea of a speaking, separate “I” is the problem. My grandmother tried to dominate my father, erase any sense of self, any bodily or emotional pride and joy, and thus, my father as an adult tries to regain that self by increasing the boundaries of himself – I own this and this and this. I made this, I have power over this. I, I, I, I.
. . .
Sylvia Plath has a line from her poem, “Cut,” where she writes, “the blood jet is poetry… I am, I am, I am.” Of all her phrases in all her poems, this is the one that is most frequently made into a tattoo for women to post on social media.
And yet Sylvia was so often trying to escape her “I”. In her poem “Ariel,” she writes about merging into the horse she’s riding, “God’s lioness,/How one we grow,” and then, at the end, states, “And I/ Am the arrow,//The dew that flies/ Suicidal, at one with the drive/ Into the red//Eye, the cauldron of morning.” Here, she seems to be comparing the loss of the self, the connection between herself and the sun, as both joyful and suicidal.
In Plath’s diaries, she speaks about her poetry as if it is part of a race, a competition with other female poets. She is especially preoccupied with surpassing Adrienne Rich, who was one of her contemporaries. But I also think her poetry was a way to assert her self-hood, her individuality, her superiority. “Cut” says over and over, “I am” – not, look at this thing I am a part of, but look how different I am from everything else.
Plath can be like my father, bitter because of her sense of powerlessness, but constantly attempting to assert her power over others. But she is also exposing herself, loosening her power when she gives the “big striptease”. She throws herself into the arms of the reader, so that the act of writing becomes both a strident statement of power and separation, and a need for outside affirmation.
. . .
Why do women write? And who is listening? I write so that other women can know that they are not alone, that we share many of the same experiences, not because we are broken and bad, but because we are born with women’s bodies into a society that fears them. Imagine what would happen if women didn’t have to constantly worry about their appearance and weight. Imagine how powerful women could be if they weren’t obsessing over how others perceived them, about how their bodies won’t obey.
. . .
For many years, I was like Plath in that I feared, hated, and mistrusted other women. And in that I focused solely on men for self-esteem, for attention.
I, the Christine “I”, tried many times to obliterate the self. The self I imagined was the self of shame, of horror, of badness. I was full of shame for having a body and desires, and for trying to fulfill those desires. But fulfillment was elsewhere — the orgasm, the high, those delirious escapes were only momentary. So I tried more and more, but with each addition, I felt more disgust. I felt more degraded. I was an inside-out demon. I made men screw me until I bled, whispering to myself, “I deserve this” — this being going beyond the pleasure to pure self-loathing, to the destruction of my labia, my cervix. I had sex until it hurt to walk. I felt cramps for days afterwards.
Like a typical Beautiful Borderline Bitch from Hell (a name male psychiatrists came up with, shortening it to BBBH, so they could hide the meaning from women) I was either better than other women, or I was nothing. I hated men, but I needed them like someone drowning needs air. Conversely, I needed them like a drowning woman needs lead bracelets, a gag in the throat. I needed them to show me I was wanted, that I was worth something. I accepted that all women would automatically hate me, and all men would want to screw me. Screwing meant something akin to love, I told myself. If a man stuck his dick in me, he loved me. Even if he said, clearly, that he did not. Sex meant love. My father taught me that.
. . .
I only existed in relation to a man. My mother taught me that, modeled it for me.
. . .
In 2012, my husband and I had a garden in the backyard of the apartment we rented in Brooklyn. During the sun-beaten summer, I went out to the back in long summer dresses (cooler with nothing underneath), and sat on the cracked concrete slabs that made a loop around the yard.
. . .
I became four again, unafraid of time or my body, picking pebbles out of the dirt and stacking them. I painted the slabs of the walkway and then painted them again, Victorian patterns of flowers and water, abstract geometric shapes in gold. I sat and watched the ants. I moved pill bugs from my palms to the gutters near the walls. I dug up fifty-year-old pennies, and plastic-toy parts from the past. I spoke to the red cardinal and his wife as they flitted up and down the towering blue cedar in the neighbor’s yard, which leaned over into our yard.
. . .
At that time, I did not enjoy the presence of bees or hornets. I ran from them to indoors, or I shot them with liquid poison from a distance. The hornets made a home on the sagging plywood wall between our backyard and the construction site next door. The wall I had festooned with silk fish and ribbons and had painted with gold stars.
One day in early August, I was leaning into the sunflowers in the back of the yard, tapping the thin, wilting petals, when a hornet approached my cheek. I swatted at it. I was swarmed before I could blink. The hornets attacked my arms and flew up my skirt. The stings felt like itchy spots at first. I ran into the house, pulled off the dress and jumped in the shower. I ran the water until it turned cold. The wasps drowned, but the stings swelled into the most intense kind of burn. There is a kind of shattering of self with that sort of pain. I became one with the sensation, obliterated. It was a reminder of the pain I had felt years earlier, but I did not welcome it.
. . .
When I started studying for my dissertation on Plath and became an expert, not only on her written work, but also her life (including clothing, handwriting, sexual habits, etc.), I began to imagine what it would be like to have Plath as a mother. I discounted, of course, what having a suicidal, borderline, angry mother would be like, and instead, dreamed of having a mother who was literate, extremely intelligent, and creative. For many years, I told my friends that Plath was like a mother to me, and even mused, because I was born 13 months after her death, that I might be her reincarnation. Plath’s work was necessary to me as poet because it showed me how to be vicious, sarcastic, and bitter in my poems, and how to do it beautifully. But now I know there are many parts of Plath that are absolutely unacceptable, including her racism, homophobia and misogyny.
. . .
The womb is often thought of as a beehive, and breast milk is often compared to honey. And in many cultures, there are goddesses in control of bees.
Sylvia, sylvia, sylvia – we’re both blonde and self-destructive, both angry and artistic. Men find us gross, scary, and unintelligible. Mother, or other, or self.
. . .
People keep telling me who I am. My different psychiatrists (and there have been many, since my favorite long-term buddy died of Covid) tell me that my main problem is that I’m depressed, that I’m bipolar, that I have ADHD, that I’m anxious.
Men tell me I’m unreasonable, that I should stop writing, that I’m a nymphomaniac, that I’m Sylvia Plath, that I’m crazy, that I’m too needy, that I’m a child, that my books are a waste of ink.
. . .
Women tell me that I’m brilliant, that I’m selfish, that I need to dress better, that I’m a bad employee, that I’m okay, that what I write isn’t poetry, that I’m scary, that I’m a bitch, that my outfit is better than my poetry. That I shouldn’t ask for so much. That I should just go along.
. . .
People are always trying to tell me what and who I am. But I tell myself a better story. I tell myself I am one of many, and we are all multitudes, not one but many. And I don’t just mean that we have several roles to fill. We are different people, different animals, in different situations. The pitbull that loves to lick and protect babies will bite off the face of a babysitter. The math genius will stumble over the bill on a date because of nerves.
I am lucky. I am lucky that I was born white into a rich family and that I had so many opportunities, and so many chances to make up for it when I f**ed up. So many chances to start over.
And I’m a lover. As a new and semi-serious Buddhist, I try to love everything, everything — everyone. Despite them and me. That is my main effort, along with writing, which is one way of loving myself, and extending love to others like me.