An interview with Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is one of my favorite writers/activists/people, and has been for a long time. I first encountered her work in 2005, as I was working toward my undergraduate degree in Women's and Gender Studies. (If you need to make a joke about WGS being a "useless major," please pause to make it here, TO YOURSELF, if you absolutely have to for some reason.)
The first book of hers that I read was That's Revolting! Queer Strategies For Resisting Assimilation, and my fandom snowballed from there. Since the publication of her first novel, Pulling Taffy, Mattilda's prolific output -- which includes anthologies, memoirs, and novels -- has upended the queer literary landscape in the best possible way.
I am grateful that she took time out of her schedule to answer my weird (and in some cases HEAVILY OBSERVATIONAL) questions about her latest memoir, Touching the Art. In the book, Mattilda examines her relationship with her late grandmother, abstract artist Gladys Goldstein; along the way, she asks crucial questions about family, belonging, trauma, gentrification, and the role of art in society. Like all of Mattilda's books, it's amazing and you should read it.
I want to note that I have added some punctuation to the following text for clarity.
Content note: This interview contains mentions of child sexual abuse (CSA).
What inspired you to write this memoir?
In a way, I think this book started when I went to spend time in my grandmother’s house after she died. Gladys was an abstract painter, and her studio was in her home, and when I went into her studio as a child, this was the place where I could imagine a creative life because I was living it with her. When I was a child, she nourished everything that made me different -- my femininity, sensitivity, creativity, introspection, softness --and spending time in her house after she died, with her art and all of its ingredients, in that same studio upstairs, in her garden, with her mineral collection and clothing, the whole house a conduit for dreaming, that’s what I felt. And I realized then how much it would have meant to me for her to engage with me as an artist.
But this was something that she refused. Once my work became unapologetically queer, and political, starting when I was 19, 20, 21, everything became vulgar to her, that was the word she used. “Why are you wasting your talent,” she would say, over and over. For decades. So after she died, I knew she would never engage with my work, right?
This is the genesis of the book. This paradox. When I was a child, she nurtured everything that made me different, and queer. But once I came into my own everything became vulgar. The book circles around this paradox, this abandonment, this inspiration, all of it at once.
One of the parts of the book that struck me the most was the exchange between your father and Gladys, when he said he wanted to be a writer, and her response was, “Then you support yourself.” I’m still wondering if that was hubris on her part, or her thinking that she had the right to be the only artist in the family. You write, “I see Gladys’ cruelty, but I also see it as a dare.” Would you mind expanding on that a little more?
So I started the book by touching Gladys’s art, right? Literally touching her handmade paperwork and collages and paintings to feel what would come through. And some of this is about the art, of course, and seeing her make the art. But -- very fast -- my father comes into the narrative. My father, who sexually abused me. Who was Gladys’s only child. And I don’t want him there, because I want to feel the sense of wonder about Gladys’s art, the way I felt as a child, I want to stay in that feeling.
But, of course, he has to be there because he is the link between us. How else would we have met? And I always write toward what surprises me, and one of those things is how I feel [a] kind of empathy for him, the person who has damaged me more than anyone, and who never was accountable, even though he was a psychiatrist who had every tool available, and I gave him every opportunity.
But still I feel this empathy for him as a kid, or in this moment, which, now that I think about it, he was probably 19, 20, 21 then, right? And here Gladys wanted to control him. He wanted to pursue a creative life, and she wouldn’t let him. She wanted him to achieve for her, to move up in the world, to become a doctor, she wanted that status. But what would have happened if she had supported his desire to become a writer, or if he had refused her control?
I was also struck by the anecdote where your grandmothers were SO SHOCKED by an outfit you wore to a dinner, and then you connect it to your parents using the phrase, “Are you just trying to be provocative?” when they argued. This brought something up for me: what is art, if not provocative at times? (I think this is more of an observation, sorry.)
The way that you portray Gladys in this book is so complex, and I was wondering what the process was like for you as you wrote about her — her talent and encouragement of your art, but also her cruelty. At one point, your mother says that Gladys “wasn’t a good person.” What are some of the difficult parts — and not as difficult parts — of writing about someone who was so important to you, but who was very flawed?
I think that when I was writing about Gladys, I felt so close, like I wanted to call her up and ask her things. I still do, I still feel that way now, thinking about the writing process, or thinking about the book, or sometimes when I see the light at a particular time of day, or whenever, but of course she was already dead. She had been dead for seven years by the time I started writing this book. So I couldn’t ask her anything.
But also I wouldn’t have known that I needed to write this book if she were still alive. Because I wouldn’t have realized that I missed her.
So, there’s that sense of closeness in the writing, which is both a gift, because it brings me there, it brings the reader there--into all these sensations, all of the possibilities and contradictions--but it is also always fraught. Especially when I was reading the letters that she wrote to me after I confronted my father about sexually abusing me. Where she was saying that I was harming him. And I had completely forgotten this. I mean, I remembered that she did not support me, but to read these words, in the moment, right after I confronted him when I was 21, all of this damage, oh my this wrecked me. Maybe it still wrecks me.
You quote from a letter Gladys wrote to you—“Gender should not be a problem—don’t make it one.” The fascinating thing is that gender is VERY present in art, and in your narrative; specifically, the fact that Gladys didn’t identify with other women artists, and felt that her work should be compared to artists who were men was a sticking point for me. And then she told you, a queer person, a genderqueer trans femme, that gender is not a problem! I’m kind of amazed at the brazenness but also not, since she disavowed your queerness as an adult by saying that it made your writing “vulgar.” What was your response to that opinion of hers (if you had one)?
Yes, Gladys, like most of the women of her generation, internalized the misogyny of the world around her, and specifically the misogyny of the art world in the 1950s [and] ‘60s, and she believed that the only great artists were men. That was very typical of almost every woman artist of that time period, they only compared themselves to men because men were the real artists. And I think that one of the things that made me so vulgar to her was that I named these connections in my work, that of course my queerness, my femininity, my faggotry, my flamboyance, whether walking down the street or getting fucked in a park or just the everyday runway of survival, all this was vulgar to her, it was a threat.
The most surprising thing about this letter, to me, is that I saved it, right? That I didn’t just rip it to shreds, and throw it away. But this was a time in my life when I didn’t want to forget anything. Because I had forgotten so much about my childhood, because I had to block out the sexual abuse, because otherwise I couldn’t have survived. And so once I remembered, when I was 19, that’s when I saved everything. I kept these letters in a file cabinet for almost 30 years, right? Not with any particular project in mind. But then suddenly when I needed them, I had them. And that felt like a gift.
I loved how you weaved the history of Baltimore’s gentrification—and white flight—into the narrative. Can you talk about your research process for those sections of the book?
Yes, at a certain point, I realized I had to move to Baltimore to continue to work on this book. All of my work is place-based, and usually I’m writing about the places where I lived, or the places where I have lived, but I had never lived in Baltimore. So I moved there temporarily in 2018, for about eight months, as part of working on Touching the Art. And one of the first things I noticed was how blatantly artists are used as tools of gentrification. And this happens everywhere, but in Baltimore it’s very top-down, like a neighborhood becomes an “Arts District,” and then boom there’s $20 million to renovate a theater while the rest of the neighborhood remains in collapse. And I thought about this way of touching the art, where artists are tools of gentrification, displacement, real estate speculation. But it comes under the guise of culture. I mean there is culture that is created too. But there is a cost. And this ties into decades of racist disinvestment, where Black neighborhoods in particular have been redlined, where decades of white flight have removed the resources from the neighborhood and you see that legacy today.
Gladys grew up in one of these neighborhoods, right on the legal dividing line between white and Black in a rigidly segregated city. This was in the 1920s. And so part of the research was figuring out where she grew up, because she never told me, when I asked if she went back to that neighborhood she just said you can’t. And I knew that meant that it had become a Black neighborhood, and that her racism and the segregated mentality of Baltimore, the fears about crime that are central to the mindset of white flight that she was a part of, this meant she couldn’t go back.
So, in the book, I go back. This is a neighborhood that has been destroyed by disinvestment, where half the buildings are boarded up or have burned down, that legacy is palpable today, right now. And to understand this legacy, after I left Baltimore I started by looking at the history of Jewish assimilation in Baltimore, the legacy of white flight, the history of redlining and disinvestment, segregation, all of this, and some of my research was reading book after book, listening to a 40 part public radio series, but also thinking about very specific people. Like when I realized that Billie Holiday was almost an exact contemporary of Gladys’s, and she grew up in Baltimore, until she was 13 or 14, and so I read seven books about Billie Holiday, and in her memoir she is scathing about racism in Baltimore, and she has this line where she says “A whorehouse was about the only place where black and white folks could meet in any natural way.” And that’s it. That’s when I really got it.
And to come back to something you said earlier, yes, I agree that all art, if it really means something, is provocative. It provokes something in us that we don’t expect. And I think that is the point.
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