Composing a Life

a rejection of the body and its pleasures, but beyond that, it is one more version of the notion that no man (and certainly no woman) can serve two masters. The two presidents who preceded Johnnetta were black men with wives and families. By the time they were appointed, having a wife to act as official hostess was almost a precondition for the job.
    But women often do serve many masters. One of the most famous works in Arabic literature is the ode of Imru’u 1-Qays, a poem that I have loved since I first learned Arabic and began to dip into the ancient poetry. A traditional Arabic ode begins with a passage of nostalgic recollection of past felicity and romance as the poet contemplates the signs of an almost-obliterated encampment in the desert, and then uses a description of travel by horse or camel to move to the main business of the ode, which is generally political, praising a particular tribal group or leader. The manly man recapitulates the masculine theme of separation from the domestic scene and initiation into the world of men, the transition from comfortable closeness to women in childhood to an adult male world. Here again is the model of strength to achieve drawn from singleness of purpose, the metaphor of a journey used to describe life.
    In later periods, when the early odes were imitated ad nauseam by literate court poets for whom the desert encampment was as much a literary device as the sylvan scenes and shepherdesses of eighteenth-century literature, these sequences became highly conventional. But Imru’u 1-Qays composed and recited his lines before the form was fully fixed; in them he moves from an invocation of the deserted encampment to a series of romantic reminiscences. In the poem, he seduces a woman who is pregnant by describing to her other adventures, including one with a mother distracted during lovemaking by the cry—or perhaps only the sleeping murmur—of a young child in the same tent. “When he cried from behind her, she turned away to him with a half, and under me half of her was not turned” (Imru’u 1-Qays, line 17).
    Not a familiar erotic image in Western literature (neither is seduction during pregnancy); but the problem of lovemaking disrupted by a baby crying, even when the baby is in a separate room as we prefer in our culture, is a familiar one, as is the mixture of arousal and jealousy during nursing. Husbands may respond to fatherhood as a situation of rivalry, especially if their wives were full-time homemakers before becoming mothers, or they may respond with a warmth and commitment that embraces mother and child in a single picture. But it is the mother who has to divide her attention between father and child and between different children, the breast baby and the knee baby. She is the one who must unravel an arithmetic in which the addition of a second child need not subtract from the love available to the first. The problem is a familiar one, even for full-time home-makers, but it is especially painful for women who are working out new combinations.
    Ellen has to sort out her priorities between childcare and professional work in a context where her pleasure is also complicated by sibling rivalry perhaps exacerbated by her multiple tasks, perhaps muted by the presence of other caretakers. “Danny really knows how to get to me,” she said. “The other night, for instance, I’m putting Sarah to sleep, and he walks in and says, Tut Sarah down and hold me.’ Then he had a temper tantrum. He’s always very clear about what he wants. Finally I got furious at him. I was wrecked.”
    This quality of dividedness has always been part of women’s role, long before we were trying to divide ourselves between a law office or a business and the home. The artificial sequencing of the day’s schedule often makes the problem seem like an issue of time, but really it lies deeper. I reread the line from Imru’u 1-Qays, and I can feel twenty years of divided attention in a painful twist and pull in my back, a confusion in the senses. Childhood rivalries are common enough, and Ellen’s training is probably an advantage in balancing the needs of her two children. Having them is clearly a delight to her and an enrichment of her life, but she is still pulled in different directions.
    “I don’t think I have ever fully and completely dealt with all these double and triple and quadruple roles,” Johnnetta mused. “I don’t think I know very many people who have. Most of the