Streams of Consciousness: A Postmodern Tirade on “This Woman’s Work”

Well now I know why I like the song “This Woman’s Work” so much. It’s a remake of an 80’s tune from a British singer named Kate Bush. I heard it while reluctantly watching the John Hughes film “She’s Having a Baby”. As soon as I heard and recognized the opening lines, I rushed to my computer to find its author. After downloading it, I listened a number of times and then suddenly it became clear, as I will attempt to elucidate, that this song hauntingly laments about the longing to be one, while tacitly revealing that we already are.

(WARNING: Proceed with caution, as contents may cause confusion.)

Here is a song about a woman imitating a man trying to empathize with the woman who is giving birth to their child. And Maxwell, covering the song, is imitating a woman imitating a man trying to empathize with the woman who is giving birth to their child. And I, a woman, am identifying with this man imitating a woman imitating a man empathizing with the woman giving birth to their child. Still there?

Of course, conveyed in the film, there is an even deeper meaning, or superficial one as it would be, almost mystical in its ability to capture that indescribable moment when, at the birth of a child, everything, it all makes sense. Childless, I can only romanticize what that might be like. But this much seemed to epitomize my place in the whole mess, what we, so awkwardly term “this generation”, finds itself doing again and again—unable to either eliminate or stop trying to eliminate its boundaries through an enigmatic process of unending self-imitation.

It does nothing to less complicate matters that Maxwell is a black man imitating a white woman. It fits quite nicely in what black-and-white has always been, especially in this country, a two-sided truth that can neither be fused nor separated. No matter how hard black tries to imitate white, or white black, the essence of difference is never eliminated, while, at the same time, also never stripped from one another as it uses itself symbiotically to devise meaning. That is, no one can ever know what white is without knowing what black is, and vice versa. So the pain of difference can never be eliminated even as this pain motivates us to desire its elimination.

The closest any modern cultural icon has ever come to eliminating the cleave between black men and white women without clearly representing one or the other has been Michael Jackson. And we all know the wrath this attempt has ensued. What other ostensibly benign figure has been the subject of such contempt outside of Jesus? I can hear the offended gasps now.

Truthfully, something bothers us about dissolving difference; it’s interpreted as dissolving oneself, ethereally of course, even as attempting to do so seduces us. Who would deny that they all had a crush on RuPaul, who bell hooks once described as a big black man trying to become a little white woman. It was an exciting show, an intercourse that climaxed and pulled out back into this reactionary Dubbya period.

So I give up. I fold. Pushing against the residual manifestations of our desires, in this case the desire to erase otherness necessitating the existence of others, has left me both frustrated and weary, especially now that I realize that an idea can never be demanifested or destroyed, only a withdrawal of our attention to it. Moreover, I digress. In the simplest terms and without the guilt, I like the song “This Woman’s Work” because, another example of life imitating art, imitating art, imitating life, imitating art until we forget where it all began, it reminds us that we are all one…thought. The rest has already been said. I’m satisfied, for now…