FACES

by Melodie Johnson Howe

I went to the Santa Barbara Museum of History Sunday to see the Edward S. Curtis photographs of American Indians. What was extraordinary about this exhibit was not only the intimate portraits of the Indian men, but the portraits of the women. It was the first time I realized that I had not seen that many pictures of Indian women. These photos were taken from the late 1800s to about 1927. They included an array of tribes from the Apache, Hopi, to the Klamath.

The women were built strong. Their skin was as dry and as cracked as the sun baked earth they stood on. Their dark eyes at times taunted the camera, at other times just stared into it as if saying, “Remember me.” A few of the women were shamans. There was a fascinating picture of a female shaman bathing in a river, rubbing her naked body with hemlock to purify her, opening her pores the spirits. I assume rubbing hemlock into your pores doesn’t kill you because she looked as if she’d lived a long life. But then she was a shaman.

If you took a portrait of an older Indian woman and put it next to her male counterpart you would have hard time telling them apart. How alike the sexes were surprised me. Women were the workhorses, the mothers, but they were also the keepers of spirits and had the power to heal.

Later, my friend and I went to Gelson’s Market for a cup off coffee. Still holding these haunting female images in my head I began to look at the faces of the women grocery shoppers. The mothers, the workers, but the keepers of … what? I would say one out of six women had had plastic surgery. Not just a nip and a tuck, they had been done and redone like a room in your house you can’t get right. One woman in particular stays with me. She was, of course thin, her hair blonde, and her face was … well … frightening. She had been so plasticized that she had no human traits. Her lips were puffed and glossed, Her cheekbones (implants) shoved high on her hollow face. Her eyes wide and empty. Eyebrows arched, not in reaction to an occurrence, but because of a good, hard, upward tug of the skin.

Plastic surgery has become a form of female masochism. The dark side of narcissism. How much self-loathing does it take to wipe away your own personal expression, your own human identity, your own female humanity? Is it just a need to look young again? Or is it a need to erase, to leave no trace of the woman you are? The woman in the mirror.

I wrote a short story, “Facing Up,” (nominated for a Barry Award in 2005) in which I dealt with the depth of this kind of female self-loathing and what menace it could lead to.

I think of those female American Indian faces etched in calm strength A few of the photographs were taken in the 1920s when “modern” women were shortening their skirts, bobbing their hair, wrapping their breasts to make themselves appear more boyish. They were turning themselves into “flappers” while the country was stripping the Indian women of their identity, of their personal stories.

I am dismayed at the pampered self- hatred that has become the personal choice of some of today’s modern women. It’s no longer a matter of a new hairdo, or new style of clothing. It‘s a new nose, new lips, new eyes, chin, cheeks, even a new ass. Soon there will be a generation of young men who don’t know what real breasts feel like. I know a woman who had her ass and everything else lifted. The last time I saw her she look burdened, weighed down, with all her new equipment. She was a sad human being.

The photographer, Curtis, asked one of the Indian women why she worked so hard? She said it gave her pleasure. What a lovely choice of words. Pleasure. Are today’s aging women so bereft of pleasure, of purpose, that all they can do, in essence, is mutilate themselves? Why can’t these women find pleasure instead in being a healer? A shaman? A story teller? Where is their calm strength?