Finding Lost Voices: The first known diary by a woman named Saint Perpetua and why we always have to keep looking for women's stories
A weekly email that brings back the voices of those who have been forgotten or misremembered.
Last summer, I taught a poetry class on Love and Desire in Modern Poetry. We read Brian Teare’s brilliant collection, Doomstead Days, Forrest Gander’s sensuous Knot, C.D. Wright’s haunting ShallCross, and one of the books that changed my life as a writer, the stunning collection, Loose Sugar by Brenda Hillman. Each of the students in the class had a different relationship with poetry. Some were English majors who’d studied poetry in depth in several courses, while others were poets who felt comfortable looking deep inside the poems to see what made them hum. But a few in that class had never spent much time with poetry. When we got to our final book on the syllabus, Gillian Conoley’s stunning collection, Notes from the Passenger, some students new to poetry found this book challenging at first. Sit with it, I told them. Read slowly, and let the poems seep into you. And they did. We all did. And we all left the quarter changed because of a woman from the ancient city of Carthage whom we’d met within its pages.
In the center of Conoley’s book is a long, haunting poem inspired by Saint Perpetua (Vibia Perpetua 182 – 203 CE). Before reading Conoley’s book, I’d never heard of Perpetua. According to Conoley, Perpetua invented the diary in 203 CE in a Roman prison in Carthage while awaiting her execution. Her diary was published after her death as Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicity (Passio sanctarum Perpetuae et Felicitatis). But as Conoley says in her poem, “we were left no original.” Instead, what we are left is conjoined: her accounts and those of her eyewitness, or redactor, thought to be Tertullian. A man who not only preserved Perpetua’s diary entries but also added his own at the end that tells us what happened to her when she was executed. Can you imagine? The first diary by a woman that we have a record of, and I had no idea it existed. Reader, I swiftly went down a rabbit hole to discover everything I could about her!
Perpetua was a young mother who was imprisoned in Carthage because she was a Christian who refused to renounce her faith. Her diary opens with her directly disobeying her father, who pleads with her to save her life. She will not. Not for him. Not for her young child. He manages to bribe the guards, and Perpetua is moved to an agreeable part of the prison, where she is reunited with her infant, whom she is allowed to keep with her for a brief time.
While in prison, Perpetua has a vision. In it, she faces a ladder covered with reptiles, including a dragon at its base. Perpetua can climb the ladder thanks to help from her brother, who died at age seven from cancer. At the top of the ladder, she finds four angels who present her with a shepherd who gives her a piece of cheese shaped like a cake. This exchange clarifies in Perpetua what is in store for her in the coming days. As Conoley describes in her poem, in the voice of Perpetua:
“I received it with folded hands
and understood that it was to be a passion, not an escape,
and ceased to have any hope in this world.” (Notes from the Passenger, 47)
Once Perpetua experiences this vision, she knows she will be martyred. From this point on, the journal switches voices. We get a secondhand account of Perpetua walking into the coliseum and facing first the wild animals and then the gladiators. Of course, Perpetua is claimed by Christianity as a martyr for her actions: for maintaining her faith even when she is faced with a terrible death. But she represents so much more to us as an ancient woman author. Her diary gives us a view of what it was like to be a woman during her era that goes against all of the gendered stereotypes. She was literate (Tertullian doesn’t seem surprised that she has left a written record of her experiences in prison). This means that she was not the only literate woman. It was not unusual for a woman to know how to read and write. We also learn that she thought for herself (she defied her father’s wishes) and she stuck to her beliefs even though she had a child. It is such an essential text for us to know about the history of women’s writing.
Midway through her poem, I love how Conoley stops us at the point of transfer between Perpetua’s account and the second-hand account of Tertullian:
“I don’t want to read further because we know the rest of the words aren’t hers” (50).
My students and I were mesmerized when my class and I read this poem together. Some of the students who had been the most hesitant about reading poetry that quarter were the ones who loved this poem and Conoley’s book the most. A student who studied design dove down the rabbit hole of the font Perpetua (which Conoley also mentions in her poem), which was designed by Eric Gill, who (through his diaries) it was revealed was a sexual predator. They all left knowing about a woman who defied the odds of being remembered. Whose text gave us a window into the world she lived in so long ago. I can’t stop thinking about Conoley’s depiction of Perpetua, nor can I stop thinking about the rest of her collection of poems. (Stay tuned for my interview with her about the book, coming soon).
If you like these posts, you’ll love my biography on Sanora Babb, which is available for pre-order now!
Upcoming Readings
Saturday, April 13, 2-7:30 PM Lit Crawl Sebastopol - 3:30 PM at The Redwood (234 South Main St., Sebastopol)
MFA PROGRAM CREATIVE WRITERS of Dominican University of California: JOAN BARANOW, MARY STEPHENS, ROBERT F. BRADFORD, CATHARINE CLARK-SAYLES, NICHOLE TURNBLOOM, TURNBLOOM IRIS JAMAHL DUNKLE
April 20, 2024, 10:00 AM - SUITE 300A, NEW ORLEANS HEALING CENTER, 2372 ST CLAUDE AVE (New Orleans Poetry Festival) Marcela Sulak, Charlotte Pence , Iris Jamahl Dunkle, Sarah Rose Nordgren, Nicole Callihan and Danielle Pieratti
What a great piece thank you. I fall into the not quite there with poetry group but this sounds fascinating. I’m reading about Religious Reform for Baroque Studies at the moment and learning about the cloistering of nuns in the 16thc, I can’t see it as anything but horrendous but many scholars talk about the poetry produced by nuns in this period.