The Female Creative Geniuses We Will Never Know

I find myself mourning the female creative geniuses I will never know.

It began a few months ago when I was re-reading In Search of Our Mother's Garden, an 1974 essay by Alice Walker in a book by the same title.

She writes:

Did you have a genius of  great-grandmother who died under some ignorant and depraved white overseer's lash?...For these grandmothers and mothers of ours were not Saints, but Artists, driven to numb and bleeding madness by the springs of creativity in them for which there was no release.  They were Creators, who lived lives of spiritual waste, because they were so rich is spirituality- which is the basis of Art-that the strain of enduring their unused and unwanted talent drove them insane.

As a woman and as a Seeker, I have always looked for other women of the past who have crafted  and molded a life of creativity, spirituality and wisdom.

This has been a necessity.

Because the journey of a Seeker can leave you with many bumps, bruises, and detours with guidance and role models, so imagine what the path would look like without any...

But lately, I have found myself in a state of grief (which we know is both deep sadness in addition to anger or outrage)for those women who were never able to share their gifts with the world, with me, and the image that I keep returning to is character of Patsey from the 2013 Academy Award winning Best Film Twelve Years a Slave based on the book by the same name.

In the film, Patsey, played by actress  Lupita Nyong'o, is a 23 year-old black female slave who is the most frequently raped and beaten by the plantation slave owner, Edwin Epps, out of all of the other slaves on his cotton plantation in 1840's Louisiana.

As would be predictable, we never learn Patsey's back story and she of course does not even have a last name, as she is "owned" by the white slave owner Edwin Epps in the same way one might own a cow, horse or shovel.

And yet she fascinates us. Fascinates me.

You want to know what she is thinking, feeling, dreaming about.  You feel her spirit in such an intense way, that to imagine her dying in some unmarked grave feels like the most painful tragedy one could imagine; which of course "she" did.

Millions of "she's" died anonymously, and among them, were thousands of female creative geniuses who we will never know.

Thousands of William Shakespeare's and Michel Angelo's and Ralph Waldo Emerson's who had world-changing gifts inside of them that were never given the opportunity to birth them for the generations to come- the loss of which makes me want to cry.

In the same essay, In Search of Our Mother's Garden, Alice Walker also refers back to Virginia Woolf's great 1929 work A Room of One's Own, in which I believe Virginia Woolf is also mourning all the unnamed, unknown women who also could have been "Shakespeare's Sister" had it not been for the patriarchy and sexism of the day.

Alice Walker then also adds the necessary dimension of race and racism to this same grief.

She writes:

Virginia Woolf wrote further...that 'any woman born with a great gift in the sixteenth century [insert 'eighteenth century,' insert 'black woman,' insert 'born or made a slave'] would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard [insert 'Saint'], feared and mocked at. For it needs little skill and psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by contrary instincts [add 'chains, guns, the lash, the ownership of one's body by someone else, submission to an alien religion'] that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty.'

So who were these creative women geniuses that we, the next generation, will never have the fortune to know?

One can only imagine...