Forward by Robin Morgan

Irene Vilar had fifteen abortions in fifteen years. These pages chart her course to discover why—a search that defies stereotypes we were certain we had long relinquished.

First, it should be noted that Vilar can write (unfortunately not a given in authors these days). Consequently, this memoir reads as hauntingly as an Isabelle Allende novel—but here the Latin American genre of magical realism is brutally true. These pages expose intricate, intimate nuances of female suffering, survival, and self-reclamation in complex terms that, as Vilar notes, won’t fit on a bumper sticker.

Second, Vilar is a pro-choice feminist who for years refused to write this book from understandable fear that she might be misunderstood and, worse, that her story might compromise women’s reproductive right to choose. She even wrote an earlier, self-censoring memoir, The Ladies’ Gallery, wherein the “horror script I lived out with the man I loved and became pregnant by multiple times…is absent.”

Third, Vilar is a Latina, a Puerto Rican American, and therein lies a tale of colonialism compounding sexism. As she writes, “Latin America holds some of the world’s most stringent abortion laws, yet it still has the world’s highest rate of abortions…many repeat abortions. It becomes unsustainable to identify at any level with the ‘pro-life’ movement when it fundamentally calls for the United States to regress to Latin America’s horrific abortion and women mortality figures and bluntly ignores Western Europe’s impressive low abortion statistics.”

Vilar’s story unfurls against densely layered backdrops: patriarchy in the home and the state, racism, colonialism and neo-colonialism, and a “tradition” of secrecy about sexual abuse of girls by male relatives.

It begins with a larger-than-life grandmother, forced to sell herself for rent at age seventeen, leaving Puerto Rico to seek survival in New York’s sweatshop factories. Her fierce commitment to the Puerto Rican Nationalist movement culminated in 1954, when she raced up the U.S. Capitol’s steps with a gun and a national flag in her purse. This woman, Lolita Lebrón—famous or infamous, depending on political perspective—served twenty-seven years in prison for “attempting to overthrow the government of the United States.” Decades later, still militant at age eighty-four, she was imprisoned yet again for protesting the U.S. Navy’s presence in Vieques. Lebrón was a heroic figure, but her chosen sacrifice also required “public mythmaking” that cost her family—especially the women—dearly.

Lebrón’s daughter grew up with a sexually abusive uncle and sought refuge in marriage at age fifteen, forging for herself “pleasure in making a show of servility.” She became a Valium addict who attempted suicide—finally succeeding at it by throwing herself out of a moving car when her daughter, Irene, our author, was only eight. Meanwhile, Vilar’s father was addicted to alcohol and gambling, and two of her three brothers were heroin addicts, one dying of an overdose. It’s mildly miraculous that Irene Vilar is vertical at all.

Context is crucial. She writes, “I can’t think about my mother and most Puerto Rican women without thinking about ‘choice’ ... [a word that] invokes free will based on individual freedom, obscuring the interplay between social constraints and human activity… [R]ampant poverty in Puerto Rico, created by American domination, was obscured through blaming population growth…[with] U.S. social scientists and anthropologists assigning fertility and reproduction as the source of…the Puerto Rican ‘problem.’ For liberals, the relentlessly fertile Puerto Rican mother was victimized by endless children and they longed to rescue her from her own ignorance and macho men, such as my dad, who proved virility through her suffering maternity. For conservatives, she was a dangerous fecundity that had to be halted.”

Vilar is tragically accurate. From 1955 to 1969, Puerto Rico was a U.S. government laboratory testing female contraceptives, in particular high-dosage pills with hazardous side effects that included sterility. I remember demonstrating with other young feminist activists against the use of Puerto Rican women as contraceptive “guinea pigs.” That was in 1968, when women in Puerto Rico were more than ten times likely to be sterilized than were women in the U.S. By 1974, 37 percent of Puerto Rican women of childbearing age had been permanently sterilized. By 1980, Puerto Rico had the highest per-capita rate of sterilization on the planet.

Vilar’s mother was sixteen when she first gave birth, in January 1956, followed that October by a six-month preemie. She used a controversial birth-control pill, but in 1961, after another birth, the public hospital refused care if she didn’t consent to tubal ligation. Eight years later, her tubes became untied and Irene was conceived. When a doctor recommended a hysterectomy, this woman was sent home with no reproductive system and no hormonal treatment—at age thirty-three. Vilar sums up the result: “What growing up poor and an orphan, the daughter of a woman imprisoned in the U.S., and the wife for twenty-three years of a man unable to value her could not do, the U.S. mass sterilization program and its racist population control ideologies did… .[My] mother came undone while I watched.”

Watching, the child learned multiple, conflicting lessons, becoming more confused once denial set in with familial familiarity. Even decades later, Lebrón railed at her granddaughter’s desire to write the truth: “[M]y family is the nation of Puerto Rico to which I have given my life, and you listen well, anyone who threatens the nation is the enemy… saying Tatita did not die in a car accident but killed herself… You publish that book and the movement won’t forgive you… I am the Movement!”

So what happened to that bright, eight-year-old little girl who watched her mother lose her mind and then, deliberately, her life?

Determined to rise above grief, yet clinging to her inheritance— the disease to please—she earned straight A’s in seven schools in seven years and entered college at fifteen. So far, she had changed the trajectory of tragedy via her intellect, not her body. But the past catches up to that intelligent, passionate, young woman trying to negotiate between deprivation and education, false liberties and real freedom. And patriarchy whispers to that hungry intellect that there is only one way to feed it.

She can never herself become the brilliant, Great Woman she longs to be. She must find a Great Man, a Pygmalion, a Svengali, a lover-tutor-father figure to whom she can surrender herself, through whom she can bloom. At age sixteen, Irene found her Great Man, age fifty. During her decade in his thrall she endured multiple abortions and suicide attempts, and hospitalization in a mental ward.

Ah yes, the Great Man.

These days, the feminist prophecy “We are becoming the men we wanted to marry” is actually true. But until quite recently, educated, intellectual, otherwise strong young woman—especially though not exclusively artists and writers—were particular prey for Great Men. We went nervously but willingly; so accustomed were we to superimposing ghosts of ourselves into the generic He’s, Him’s, and Mankinds; so reconciled to seeking anything resembling our alternate realities between the lines of theirs—for their reality was almost always one in which female human beings were absent, offstage, and one- or two-dimensional. Worse, we stuck it out, validating the very lies we’d been taught about “inherent female masochism.” We rejected identifying with other women (even many lesbians did so: Gertrude Stein, Elizabeth Bishop), because only men were fully human, only men possessed the agency to act on life. Each of us desperate to be the “exceptional” woman in her Great Man’s judgmental eyes strained for power, for voice itself, through him.

When we had served his purpose—adoring student, muse, mate, mommy, sex toy, breadwinner (so he could work at his art), harpy (if we rebelled)—he destroyed us. Some women—Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton among them—gave him the convenience of their suicide. Some of us managed to escape. I was one such woman— but it took me twenty years to break free. So I don’t dismiss Vilar’s predicament lightly.

Her Great Man was one of her teachers, a professor of Latin American Literature and Theory who boasted friendships with such Other Great Men as Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Manuel Puig, and Octavio Paz (that list alone could serve as a warning to spirited women). An Argentinean Jew, atheist philosopher, survivor of a generation jailed and murdered under dictatorship, he was a rebel. Vilar’s rebellion, not permitted to her directly, could be manifest via him.

He positioned their relationship as her salvation, on his terms— a permanent audition. He told her his lovers never lasted more than five years, that family kills desire, that he’d fought to stay fatherless, that previous companions couldn’t bear the price of a life in freedom. He told her mature, less pliable women were riddled with worries and wounds. Amazingly, he admitted flat out, “I need an unformed woman, unfinished, with not too many wounds. That’s why I like young women.”

The sole rebellion Irene Vilar could manage was to “forget” to take her birth control pills (redolent anyway of cultural and family humiliation)—and get pregnant. With each pregnancy she defied him. But to keep the lifeline he represented, it was then imperative to become unpregnant. So was the cycle established.

Meanwhile, she devoured writing by men he prescribed. Cortázar, Fuentes, Fernández, Bertrand Russel, Martin Buber, and especially theologian Paul Tillich, whom she read when pregnant the first time. Tillich’s influence runs through her book, in her quest for what he termed “the courage to be.”

So it’s worthwhile pausing briefly to examine the alternate reality regarding that particular Great Man, revealed to us with compassionate but uncompromising honesty by his widow, Hannah Tillich, in her book, From Time to Time (Chelsea, MI; Scarborough House, 1973). After his death, she tells us, she “unlocked the drawers.” There was the pornographic letter hidden under his blotter; the revelation of his favorite fantasy of naked women, crucified, being whipped; the discovery of all the photos, affairs, mistresses, sexual secretaries, one-night stands, the abuse of worshipful female students. Hannah Tillich writes, “I was tempted to place between the sacred pages of his highly esteemed lifework these obscene signs of the real life that he had transformed into the gold of abstraction—King Midas of the spirit.” Instead, Hannah Tillich dared write this book alchemizing her own integrity out of “the piece of bleeding, tortured womanhood” she writes she had become.

So dares Vilar—who insists on taking principled responsibility for her own actions, even while contextualizing them: in oneeight-month period, she was “responsible” for an affair, a suicide attempt, three car accidents, two boat collisions, and three abortions. Her weight dropped to ninety-five pounds—at five foot six. “Each time I got my period, I was sad. Each time I discovered I was pregnant, I was aroused and afraid.” But Vilar finally noticed that when she began to write seriously—in those “moments of creativity and validation, I evaded the drama of pregnancy and abortion and ‘remembered’ to take my birth control pills.” My, what a coincidence.

While reading this book, I kept wondering where was the Women’s Movement as a support/sanity making/survival factor in Vilar’s life—as it has been for the past 40 years in so many millions of women’s lives? How did we fail her? We know that there are countries where access to contraception is so drastically limited that women are forced into multiple abortions as a method of birth control, but that was not the case here. Was her addiction so deep or his spell so strong that she avoided the visible, available feminist groups on campus, in the cities and towns where she lived? Or did some feminists, trapped in an ethnocentric myopia of our own as “gringas,” fail to reach out meaningfully so that all the intersecting factors in her suffering, including racism and colonialism, could be addressed?

Vilar did have close women friends, but they seemed unable or unwilling to exert sufficient counterbalance to the Great Man— nor did she always allow them into the full truths about her life. Yet a major shift occurred on reading Simone de Beauvoir’s Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, “which shook me profoundly about the intimate picture of a young woman growing up aground in a suffocating world and striking out on her own with such existential ambition that even a mother’s death becomes a footnote to her story.” At last, Vilar dared admit she “felt cornered, obliged to choose between him and my life.”

Then of course, to keep her, he plied the ultimate twist of the knife. He said she didn’t have to have another abortion the next day. He said he was ready to “give” her a child if that’s what she wanted. Irony begets irony. She found herself shocked to realize she didn’t want his child.

In a 1974 essay, “On Women as a Colonized People” (collected in Morgan, The Word of a Woman: Feminist Dispatches, W.W. Norton), I analyzed how Franz Fanon and Albert Memmi had defined the characteristics of colonization: the oppressed are robbed of culture, history, pride, and their land itself, and are forced (by systemic punishment and reward) to adopt the oppressor’s language, values, even identity. In time, they become alienated from their own values, even their land—which is being mined by the colonizer for its natural resources. The colonized are permitted (forced) to work the land, but not benefiting from what it produces, come to feel oppressed by it. Thus, alienation from their own territory serves to mystify that territory, and enforced identification with colonizing masters provokes eventual shame for themselves and contempt for their land. It follows that the first goal of a colonized people is to reclaim their land. What Fanon and Memmi never grasped was that women per se are a colonized people. Our history, values, voices, and (cross-cultural) culture have been taken from us—manifest in patriarchal seizure of our basic “land.” Our own bodies have been taken from us, mined for their natural resources (sex, children, and labor), and alienated/mystified, whether as stereotypical virgin, whore, or mother. It follows that as women, to reclaim our lives we must reclaim our flesh.

Irene Vilar, multiply colonized, reclaimed her life when she finally brought to term and birthed the woman she is today, after so many decades of a tragedy infinitely worse than all her pregnancy terminations: the aborted self. Those who think the struggle for women’s freedom and power no longer necessary or single-issue simplistic would do well to read this book. We dare not forget that a woman’s right to control her own body includes not just the right to control her womb but also her voice. Irene Vilar has courageously let that voice sing. Listen to it.

Robin Morgan
New York City
March 8, 2009