Go and Come Back

GO AND COME BACK by Joan Abelove

Isabo Gender Norms by Krystal Skwar

Fourteen-year-old Alicia, part of the fictional Isabo culture, narrates her observations on the two "old white ladies" who come to visit her village as cultural anthropologists. (By the way, these two old white ladies are in their twenties. It's just to Alicia, their mannerisms and dress make them seem ancient.) 

Abelove herself lived in the Amazon for two years with people much like the Isabo. Despite this, her attempt to narrate through Alicia positions her as something of an imposter in my eyes. How could she presume to understand how an Amazonian girl thinks? This aside, it is a valiant attempt to shed light on some great points about gender roles. At times Alicia's narration had me laughing out loud and questioning our norms. 

My main takeaway? Isabo culture - which is meant to replicate the Amazonian tribal life Abelove studied in the 1970s - values women more than we do. Interestingly, an Isabo woman shines when traditional female domesticity is placed alongside female sexual independence. 

Who'd a thought that was possible? 

Alicia adopts a baby girl and explains her culture's gender rules to the flabbergasted American anthropologists. “Boys go off and never take care of you” in Isabo culture, so girls are more valuable to their mothers. Therefore, an Isabo woman “might kill a boy baby...but no Isabo had ever killed a girl child.”  Here, we see that in one culture girls are favored, and keeping a child is solely a woman's choice. Though Isabo women marry, the decision to keep a child or not is theirs alone. 

Extreme of the Isabo to kill baby boys, but interesting when we consider that female girls were and still are undervalued in China, to the point that there are recent accounts of baby girls found dead in wells and ditches. Abelove insinutates that morality can be relative, and this message, though tough to swallow, is one the novel clearly tries to bestow upon its readers. 

Alicia notes how strange it is that one of the "old lady" anthropologists thinks that “everything her mother did was not work." Again, it's refreshing to see that female domestic work, during some times and places in history (ok it's fiction, but based on a real people!), did not always represent subjugation and denigration of the female. In the case of the Isabo, female domestic work was valued as much as or more than men's work. 

Go and Come Back also makes sex with many partners seem natural, departing from our culture's engrained discouragement of female promiscuity. Isabo women can have multiple partners because to them sex represents a free exchange. Nothing dirty about sex outside marriage to the Isabo. Pregnant Isabo think “it’s good to have sex with a few men.” (I laughed and raised my eyebrows at that one! Ha.) Older married Isabo women have extramarital affairs, and “there are no secrets" about them. Attitudes about sex are not plauged with fear or guilt. 

Isabo women and men occupy very separate spheres. During most of the day, women are in the company of women and men are in the company of men. During the evening, everyone spends time together in the home or as a community. Somehow this separation creates a culture in which both genders enjoy a freer, more natural, and less fearful expression of their sexuality. 

The American lady anthropologists have a hard time with this at first, but eventually, they seem to admire this way of life in comparison to their own. As New York Times writer Jen Nessel put it, "Go and Come Back provides a nice antidote to the fear that surrounds sex in our culture. It has no steamy scenes of lovemaking, just matter-of-fact conversation and giggling." 

I appreciate this fresh, non-Western discourse on female sexuality and the value of housework. A novel presenting a society in which a woman can occupy a traditional, home-centered space and also be sexually uninhibited is a long time overdue in my mind. I can't honestly think of any others, unless said fictional woman is somehow damned for her behavior, or has to be secretive about it. 

Through her demonstration of the separateness, confidence, and sexual freedom of Isabo women, Abelove underscores something unique: that the written Anglo-centric history of gender is not a finite context from which to extract our ideas about yin and yang. Like Alicia's village, our time and place is just one mere wave in a sea of societies that have existed throughout history.

Works Used

Abelove, Joan. Go and Come Back. New York: Puffin Books, 1998. Print. 

Armstrong, Nancy. “Some Call It Fiction.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd ed. Ed. Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1998. 567-581. Print. 

Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan. “Introduction: Writing the Past” Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd ed. Ed. Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1998. 505-507. Print