Here is a little secret. Whenever I feel down, demoralised, there is a medieval painting that I like to look at. It is the image of an extraordinary woman of letters. The writer, poet, intellectual and one of the earliest women’s rights advocates, Christine de Pizan.
I like everything about this painting. I treasure how her desk is covered with olive green fabric, the tapestry on the walls, the stained glass in the windows, the patterns on the tiles covering the floor, glowing like miniature suns... I cherish that her dress is in the colour of lapis lazuli and I love the way she holds her pen and her notebook close to her heart while her dog stands sentinel by her side. But I especially like how she has managed to remove herself from the noise and chaos of the outside world, retreating into a space of books and literature.
Every writer will envy the tranquil creativity that permeates this painting.
It is our very definition of paradise.
Born in 1364 in Venice, Pizan wrote mainly in her adoptive tongue, French. An avid reader of philosophy, literature and ancient history. A sharp-eyed observant of her times and a careful listener of the words of balladeers and troubadours. She produced extensively across various disciplines, her talent culminating in The Book of the City of Ladies and The Book of the Three Virtues. Through her fiction she challenged misogyny, sexism and discrimination and inequality at a time when it was almost unthinkable to do so! Today she is hailed as Europe’s first female author to earn a living by actively doing what she loved best: writing.
Time slows down when I stare at this particular painting.
If I lean forward, I can hear her voice as she murmurs to herself:
“I do not consider my deeds or my knowledge to be a great thing. The only fact is — and I can say this honestly — that I love learning and a solitary life.”
But then I imagine her, lifting her head as though in response to some sudden, strange sound. I watch her as she slowly stands up and pulls herself to her full height. After the briefest hesitation, she drops her pen, closes her notebook, and turns her face this way.
She looks straight back at me. She is now staring at us, viewing her inquisitive viewers. A hint of a smile plays at the corners of her lips. She seems amused.
What does she see, I wonder.
As though moving through water, Christine de Pizan starts to walk towards us. It only takes her a few steps. In the blink of an eye, she leaves the painting that has been her home for over six hundred years, and just like that, she enters our world to meet us in this moment in time.
I try to avert my eyes. I don’t want her to ask me any questions. But of course, she does. She has a most curious, agile mind, after all. She wants to know which year it is and she wants to find out whether things have improved considerably and the values that she bravely upheld have all been neatly and securely reached and achieved. Gender equality? Women’s rights? A more egalitarian and peaceful world where no one is mistreated as ‘the Other’?
This is a woman who had the guts to say to the rich and the powerful:
“Things you possess in too great abundance belong to the poor and not to you.”
So she puts forth a volley of questions about the well-being of humanity and the quality of our civilisation. Have we made a lot of progress? Is this new world order intellectually, morally and ethically superior to the one that she has lived through in the Middle Ages?
Sure, I can tell her about computers and AI, space travels and advances in medicine, the ideals of the Enlightenment and the principles of democracy.
Sure, there is a lot we can be rightly proud of today. And yet….
What I cannot tell her is we are living in the Age of Angst. An existential unease that runs so deep that it seeps into the smallest cavities of our social and individual lives. Some people are skilful at hiding their worries, suppressing their emotions. Others, like me, fail terribly.
What I cannot tell her is how this week, here in the UK, in the run up to the elections, it has emerged that several candidates from a populist nationalist party have been spreading openly racist, homophobic and xenophobic remarks about Black and Brown communities, about immigrants, exiles and refugees, calling them, calling us, ‘scum”, ‘savages”, “invaders”….
What I cannot tell her is climate destruction and ecological collapse and drying rivers, ongoing wars and violence against civilians and immense human suffering, increasing political instability and inequalities, our ignorance of the risks and dangers posed by Artificial Intelligence, our arrogant assumption that we are ‘superior’ to all other beings, consumers of nature…
How do you even begin to explain this Age of Angst to someone who has just zoomed into our world from the medieval times?
I hear myself whisper:
‘Please, go back to your painting. It just seems nicer and calmer in there.’
Surprisingly, Christine de Pizan, this wilful and determined woman, listens to me. As she is about to step back into her canvas, however, she half turns and says something worth sharing and celebrating:
“Though sad at heart, always sing joyfully.”
Wow, what a beautiful and powerful story, told in such an interesting way. You have opened my eyes to this painting and to the life of Christine de Pizan in a new way. Thank you. 💜🧡💙
Elif, your magical use of words is exactly what i needed to read this Sunday morning in California. You speak for so many of us. Thank you