by JOANNA BANASIK
There is something very liberating in imagining Margarita as a witch flying on a broom above a night-time Moscow. She is naked and covered in glitter which makes her able to fly, the wind against her bare skin, the lights and shapes of square-like socialist buildings of Moscow below her. There is something very cathartic about that scene in Bulgakov’s ‘Master and Margarita’ and it really is one of my favourite ones in literature all-time, and always makes me conscious and proud of my Eastern Europeanness. Before Margarita becomes a witch, she writes a letter saying ‘because of the failures and misfortunes that have fallen upon me, I became a witch’ which she leaves at her bedside table. The world has disappointed Margarita, reality left her heart-broken and the clever woman decides to quit her reality and engage with the forces of darkness to try and rescue her lover. She is free and able to look beyond the reality of the socialist, corrupt Moscow. I am in no place, not being a literature student, to analyse the novel, all that I can say is that I consider it one of the best ones ever written. Perhaps somewhat difficult to understand in the West, but appealing to the soul of every Slav (in the same way that Dostoyevsky does).
Back to Margarita and witchcraft. It is, no doubt, very liberating to become a witch. Feminists, for one, are often described as such, albeit more often by their critics, then by themselves. The cover photo of Mike Buchanan’s (the founder of the Justice for Men and Boys party) ‘Feminism. The Ugly Truth’ is so very telling with regard to that. Similarly, a famous Polish feminist from my country has once said: ‘[In Poland] it is a well-knows fact that only witchcraft was, and is, as harmful as feminism’. That anti-feminists should portray women and feminists as witches buys into a long sustained in the Western (and other) cultures binary between men and women where the woman represents the body (as opposed to the soul), nature (as opposed to culture), land, space etc. And so, from Eve who represented the body and its temptations in the Bible, through Margarita flying above Moscow to today’s feminists, or rather witches. If we embraced the witchcraft that is thrown in our faces, would we become difference feminists? Kathrine MacKinnon is the biggest authority advocating difference feminism. She argues for a female jurisprudence, a female state and gender-specific rights. I find her arguments very convincing. Women are already a ‘particular’ group of humans. Gender specific violence is not recognised as violence per se, torture is declared torture only when it is political and male whereas the same psychological and physical mistreatment of women by men is not seen as torture, war is only war when it is between men. The male biases and perception are inscribed into our state structure and legislation. MacKinnon argues, gender violence is discrimination based on sexual violence. She fought to make sexual crimes classified as genocide in war-torn areas. In her argument for a female-only jurisprudence, women are a ‘particular’ group, half of the society, but yet discriminated against in the light of law. External circumstances and discrimination are consciousness-raising, women should fight on behalf of their identity. Like Margarita, because of the failures that have fallen upon us, we should all becomes witches. On the other hand, there is the deconstruction perspective, on which Butler is a representative. She argues for the linguistic and cultural deconstruction of gender. If gender is a construction reinforced through our daily routines and actions, gender-specific legislation reinforces those categories, excluding those who do not fit in them. As appealing and interesting as the post-structural perspective is, sometimes, I do want to be a witch, to feel liberated in virtue of being a woman, to argue for a female jurisprudence, greater female representation, to be Margarita.