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Outlaw woman

Chris Kraus

It was such a hostile thing for her todo, is how an artist friend described

the recent suicide of another. Andthere you have it: you might think bycutting your wrists or hanging yourselfby a sash from the edge of a loft bedthat you will be finally free of theendless interpretability of youractions, the coded behaviour offemale America in which every moveyou make can only possibly be acalculation of the effect you'll have onothers, a sly cipher in the grandmanipulative project that is the onlylife you'll ever know, but you'll bewrong. Even in death you won't befree.

Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz's new bookchronicles a life spent wholly in thepursuit of freedom. Because she is apolitical person, she doesn't see herown freedom as something that canever wholly be attained while othersaren't free. This is not the drippy kindof altruism that it seems to us, who nolonger see the world in political terms.

As an activist, Ortiz has always beenacutely aware of the structural causesof her own oppression: believing that,until these structures have beenoverturned, no individual can becompletely free. Her book is apowerful reminder of what it might belike to be driven by ideals. Like herlife, the book is an imperfect andfragmented narrative about yearsspent as a "full. time revolutionary" onthe American left and in the women'smovement.

It's an astonishing example of how itmight be possible to misjudge all theparticulars, but still be overarchinglyright. Now in her early 60s, Ortizteaches women's and ethnic studiesat a state university near SanFrancisco. She is rail thin, with a shockof Warhol-white hair dyed pink nearher forehead. She has a middle-ageddaughter, and lives alone with hercats. Her book is called Outlaw

Woman: A Memoir of the War Years,1960-1975.

Unlike Bill Ayers, the author ofanother memoir of leftist activismpublished earlier this year calledFugitive Days, Ortiz has made noeffort to craft a "literary" memoir.

While Ayers waxes contemplativeabout the nature of memory, Ortizmerely remembers and writes downwhat she can. Trained as a historian,Ortiz is free of that impulse thatmakes "memoir such an inherentlystodgy, uninspiring genre: thecompulsion to process the actions ofyouth through the mindset of latemiddle age. She is faithful to heryouth. She never falls into the trap ofthinking time must move towardsgreater consciousness, and the

middle-aged self is somehow wiserthan the youth.

Because Ortiz is so militantlyunreflexive in her memory, shedoesn't ever grapple with the fact thata young American woman definingherself for a decade as a "full-timerevolutionary" now seems totallywhack and absurd. There was thenand there is now, and Ortiz's book isthe most faithful possible rendering of

how it really felt in thinking, then, itmight be possible to change theworld. History is a bunch of jump cuts,her book seems to imply. The thenand the now exist discretely asparallel worlds. The story of then is astory of trauma, but it's a trauma thatgrew too large to contain itself. Formore than a decade, she andthousands of others like her actuallybelieved that America was on thebrink of a political revolution thatwould unfold something like Cuba's (a

country that she visited as a memberof the Venceremos Brigade). Forthem, the century-long tradition of theAmerican left was still very muchalive. This history didn't coalesce intothe kind of future Ortiz passionatelyexpected. But st ill, a very differentfuture did arrive. The culturalfeminism and identity politics that shepromoted as a leader of the women'smovement, but distrusted as anideological leftist, became perhapsthe only tangible legacy of that time.

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There's hardly any self-analysis in thisbook, and this fact itself is fascinating-- because trauma trumps, pre-emptsanalysis every time -- in a traumaticsituation it is the facts rather than the

interpretation that tells all. The onlyanalysis Ortiz and her collaboratorsengaged in during the "war years"was of the ideological kind -- longnights spent hashing out positionpapers on the relationship of feminismto the "revolution," which never didarrive. But still, the memoir chroniclesfifteen years of an outrageouslyambitious, daring and principled life.

Married to a graduate student, andthe mother of an infant daughter whilestudying history in her early 20s, Ortizreads The Second Sex by Simone deBeauvoir, The book confirms hernascent feeling that she'd rather notbe married anymore. "Womanescapes complete dependency to thedegree in which she escapes thefamily." Without much apology orexplanation, Ortiz leaves her child andhusband and moves into a tiny studioapartment with her Pakistaniboyfriend, Omar, who turns out to be

a drug dealer. She data-processes andshoplifts for a living, falls in love withLouis, one of Omar's friends, andfollows him to graduate school atUCLA, where she works on a PhD inLatin American history.

Her life is like this in the book,zigzagging around the way life does,without too much actual continuity.(Most memoirs fail because theyrewrite life as if there was.) But whatdistinguishes Ortiz's life most greatly

from our time is that all its mostepiphanous moments, its joys andtrajectory and turning points, happenin relation to ideas.

On the fast track towards aprofessorship in Latin Americanstudies, an activist in the anti-colonialand apartheid movements; she isvaguely nauseated by the invisibilityof women. Two years later in 1968,stranded in Mexico City while waiting

to leave for Cuba with the boyfriendwho she's married for a visa, she

reads an excerpt from Valerie Solanas'SCUM Manifesto, published in theMexico City newspaper the day afterSolanas shot Warhol. "Could it be thatwomen," Ortiz wondered, "were finally

rising up?" She ditches the boyfriendand heads back to the States.Recalling that two centuries agoBoston had been a base for earlyfeminist movements, she chooses thatcity as a place to join -- or form -- anew women's movement. And shesucceeds.

In Boston, Ortiz began the No MoreFun and Games collective, publishingone of the most influential earlyfeminist journals of that time. There,she became a national feministleader, featured on the cover of Time,before zig-zagging back again to NewLeft politics, teaming up with Homer,an SDS (Students for a DemocraticSociety) leader who was her sometimepartner. The two devised anideological package of revolutionarypolitics with feminism at its core.

By the early 1970s the massiveinfiltration of leftist groups by the

FBI's COINTELPRO and the strategicassassination of key Black Pantherleaders led Ortiz and thousands likeher to believe that the US was on thebrink of civil war. Ortiz and Homerformed a cell in New Orleans,complete with a weapons arsenal andsafe houses, and prepared to blow upgas lines. It was a period ofpermanent hallucination. When theirexplosive program was about to bediscovered, Ortiz went into hiding in atrailer as the girlfriend of an alcoholic

oil-rig worker. Living the life, theyfucked and fought until she couldn'ttake it anymore and fled to Coloradowhere she spent several years ofintermittent hiding. Her daughter, whoshe'd long ago lost custody of, wasten years old.

I read Ortiz's book in one long gulp till3 a.m., then had this dream: ... aboutbeing in Paris, alone, I was walking,lost -- the metro station was

Septembre 4 -- there was an old ladywho thought it was Las Vegas -- the

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escalator kept going down, & I waswith someone, a boy, a "boyfriend," asulky guy who at some point stompedoff because I wanted to writesomething in my notebook. There was

a male therapist I saw, sitting in achair, he kept putting me throughthese changes, i.e. sticking aspeculum up my cunt & I went realsexual & then turned around beingcritical or pensive or wise, a cycle ofmoods & he was critical about this, hewanted to know Who Are You, youcan't really be anyone, he said, if youcan change so quickly.

Confused & messy, ragged, brilliant,Outlaw Woman reminds us that thereis a history even if it does notnecessarily connect to how weexperience and understand thepresent. Her writing is exemplary ofwhat a life committed to ideas mightbe.

Chris Kraus is an art critic and fictionwriter living in Los Angeles.