The Woman With Two Vaginas

Cultura IV
Paola Kador, Paula Lazarte, Stephania Pagnanini y Rosana Torres.
The Woman With Two Vaginas
The woman with two vaginas tried her best

to hide them from her husband. It was difficult
because her vaginas weren't in the usual place
but in the palms of her hands. To distract her husband,

she tickled his penis with her nipple,
or she took him into her backside.
She had traveled far, from a place she preferred

not to talk about, and her husband assumed
she learned her sexual practices there. He was happy
until he discovered his wife

pissing through her fingers, as though she were trying
to cup running water. He wished
that he didn't know what he then knew --

that his sexy young wife was also a ghost.
This was no time for sentimental lust --
a ghost can only bring loneliness to a snow hut.

So he strapped his wife into his kayak
and deposited her on an ice-floe far from home.
He told her to go back to the Land of the Dead,

but she was trapped like a moving shadow
that was neither here nor there. Some say
they still hear her sobbing: "My husband

will not have me! My husband will not have me!"
But she has no way of knowing how he misses her
twin vaginas, how he tries his best to

hide it from his new wife -- yet the village is small,
the gossip as fast as wind during a storm.
It's said he makes his new wife slap his face

to feel the warm tingle of her fingers,
that he then cries out into her barren palms.
------------
It consists of poetic adaptations of Eskimo (especially Inuit) myths.
The same sort of process happened with The Woman with Two Vaginas. I was working on a series of
poems about fairy tales, traditional fairy tales, which actually did turn into a chapbook called How the
Sky Fell, and in doing that I ran out of fairy tales that I could remember completely. So I was looking
at a book by Angela Carter called Fairy Tales Around the World and in it I found the Inuit tales. I
thought, “Wow, this is so weird! I just have to write one or two,” and the more I researched, the more
I uncovered, and then I was just in it for a year. I mean, I just couldn’t stop.
The Woman with Two Vaginas are reshapings of myth or reinterpretations of fairy tales.
DD: I think at some point I just overdosed on telling my own stories. My first book Smile!
and my third book Girl Soldier, both of which were full of first person narratives, were
actually written consecutively. Though The Woman with Two Vaginas was my second
published book, it was really written after Girl Soldier. I just happened to find a publisher
for it more quickly. So, in essence, I had written two books of personal poems before I
shot off into the land of myth, fairy tales, and pop culture icons such as Barbie and later
Olive Oyl, with Maureen. I think that pop culture and myth were ways to simultaneously
get out of myself and into big themes--feminism, class issues, domestic violence, body
image, and such. I wanted to write about gender politics without necessarily retelling my
[own] story. I also wanted to use social satire to avoid, I hope, didacticism. Actually, I
say this now, looking back, but I'm not sure how aware I was of all this at the time. But I
do consciously remember saying to myself, "Enough with the ˜I” poems already.
(Esto es de una entrevista que le hicieron. Habría que encontrar eso en el poema=
In “The Woman with Two Vaginas” Duhamel puts her own take on the Intuit tale “Arnatsiq” by
making this story into rhythmical, three line stanzas. She effectively tells us much in very few
words: “He was happy/ until he discovered his wife/ pissing through her fingers,” and “It’s said
he makes his new wife slap his face,/ to feel the warm tingle of her fingers,’ that he then cries
out into her barren palms.” Palms, fingers – these are the only words that let us know the
location of the woman’s “two vaginas.” The man in the poem is unhappy about his first wife, but
Duhamel evokes sympathy for him from the tender last line (he cries out into her barren palms)
https://www.julesnyquist.com/articles/article/4391010/73193.htm
OPTION 1:
Its script was compiled from versions of an Inuit legend told by
eight elders. We meet two brothers, Amaqjuaq (Pakkak
Innukshuk), known as the Strong One, and Atanarjuat (Natar
Ungalaaq), known as the Fast Runner. They are part of a small
group of Inuit including the unpleasant Oki (Peter-Henry
Arnatsiaq), whose father is the leader of the group. There is a
romantic problem. Oki has been promised Atuat (Sylvia Ivalu),
but she and Atanarjuat are in love. Just like in Shakespeare. In the
most astonishing fight scene I can recall, Atanarjuat challenges
Oki, and they fight in the way of their people: They stand face to
face, while one solemnly hits the other, there is a pause, and the
hit is returned, one blow after another, until one or the other falls.
Atanarjuat wins, but it is not so simple. He is happy with Atuat,
but eventually takes another wife, Puja (Lucy Tulugarjuk), who is
pouty and spoiled and put on earth to cause trouble. During one
long night of the midnight sun, she is caught secretly making love
to Amaqjuaq, and banished from the family. It is, we gather,
difficult to get away with adultery when everybody lives in the
same tent.
Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner

Set in the ancient past, the film retells an Inuit legend passed down through centuries of oral
tradition. It revolves around the title character, whose marriage with his two wives earns him the
animosity of the son of the band leader, who kills Atanarjuat's brother and forces Atanarjuat to flee
by foot.
What first drew me to the Inuit tales that the poems in The Woman with Two Vaginas
were the celebratory ways in which female genitalia become part of a story plot.
Sermerssuaq, a strong legendary Inuit woman, has a purple clitoris that grows so big
when she is excited that a "hare's pelt can barely cover it." Blubber Girl brings her dead
love back to life by rubbing a blubber facsimile of him against her magical vulva.
Women also bond together in various ways to overcome obstacles, including vicious
husbands who are not tolerated. "Two Woman Who Found Their Freedom" are wives
of the same abusive husband who run away to live together, happily, in the belly of a
whale.
Sermerssuaq: Había una vez una mujer inuit llamada Sermerssuaq que tenía
tanta fuerza que era capaz de levantar un kayak con la punta de tres dedos o
de matar una foca con solo unos golpecitos de sus puños. Ningún hombre
podía ganar a Sermerssuaq en un pulso; cuando los derrotaba solía decir:
¿Dónde os habíais metido cuando se repartieron los testículos? A veces
Sermerssuaq mostraba su clítoris muy orgullosa, tan grande era que la piel de
un zorro no llegaba a cubrirlo del todo. ¡?¡?¡?
OPTION 2:
Sedna is the Inuit goddess of the sea. According to most versions of the legend Sedna
was once a beautiful mortal woman who became the ruler of Adlivun (the Inuit
underworld at the bottom of the sea) after her father threw her out of his kayak into the
ocean. Sedna's fingers, which her father had to cut off to keep her from clinging to the
side of the boat, are often said to have turned into the first sea mammals. The other
details of Sedna's story are told differently in different Inuit/Eskimo communities--
sometimes she provoked her father's rage by attacking him or violating cultural taboos,
while other times her father was selfishly trying to save his own life by sacrificing Sedna.
http://www.native-languages.org/inuitstory2.htm

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Cultura IV

Paola Kador, Paula Lazarte, Stephania Pagnanini y Rosana Torres.

The woman with two vaginas tried her best

but in the palms of her hands. To distract her husband,

She had traveled far, from a place she preferred

until he discovered his wife

that he didn't know what he then knew --

a ghost can only bring loneliness to a snow hut.

He told her to go back to the Land of the Dead,

they still hear her sobbing: "My husband

twin vaginas, how he tries his best to

It's said he makes his new wife slap his face

Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner

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