What Would Hild Do? -

Novelist Nicola Griffith shares how a Medieval saint, and subject of her new book, helped her deal with discrimination

BY NICOLA GRIFFITH, IMAGES PROVIDED

Menewood is my second novel about Hilda of Whitby, an Early Medieval saint. In my story Hild is young, and neither saintly nor sweet—she could not afford to be. In the Early Medieval, nice girls could not become famous enough to be saints. Nice girls didn’t lead armies, kill kings, or change the course of history. And nice girls definitely didn’t have terrifyingly exhilarating sex.

I first met Hild when I was 22 at Whitby Abbey. I stepped onto the grounds and my world changed. I became obsessed with finding out how such an awe-inspiring place could have been founded by a woman 1400 years ago, a time when women, supposedly, barely counted as human. One day I would tell that story—I just didn’t know it then because I wasn’t yet a writer. I did know Hild had to have been bloody-minded.

Did Hild make me a writer? Maybe. Her story and mine are certainly intertwined: Then, as now, girls got told ‘No’ a lot. They were told, ‘But girls can’t do that!’. And then, as now, nice girls didn’t laugh and say, ‘Watch me’. Something I’ve no doubt Hild had to do, just as I did with US immigration.

Fast forward five years to 1988 when I flew to the US on a tourist visa to attend a 6-week writers’ workshop. I landed at JFK airport—a terrible landing, people screaming, beverage carts busting loose and thundering down the aisle—and walked into air thick and hot as potato soup. At Immigration the officer looked at my crewcut, the labrys hanging in my ear, the red leather jackboots; down at my passport, the photo of my demure 18-year old self with braids and eye liner; back up at me, and said: “What happened?” “I grew up.” I stared at him. He stared back. No one blinked. Then he shrugged, stamped, and waved me through.

It was only later I found out that at the time it was illegal for homosexuals, communists, and HIV+ people to even enter the US. He could—strictly speaking, he should—have denied me entry and sent me straight home. And then I would never have got to the workshop. I would never have met Kelley, and fallen in love. I would never have fought to return. To be allowed to live here on a temporary visa. To be allowed a Green Card to stay here permanently, despite having MS and no job. To be the first out lesbian invited by the State Department to live and work in this country because they deemed it to be in the ‘National Interest’. For my case to make new law and put me on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.

At every step of the way—every time I came through Chicago airport on another tourist visa, and the same uniformed dyke at immigration asked me, straight-faced, ‘Why do you keep coming back, do you have a boyfriend?’ and I said, ‘Why no, officer, for trying to live here and form family while on a tourist visa would be illegal!’ Every time yet another immigration attorney refused my case and said, ‘You have no chance, unless you’re famous’. Every time I wrote a book good enough to win another award so I could become famous. And every time I faced another petty official with the power to come between me and my lady love—I thought, ‘What would Hild do?’ And I imagined the blood-spattered Hild with her savage grin and iron-tipped stave in the hollow of their throat, and I would smile.