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Hera restoring her own virginity over and over, for example. Or Dionysus gestating inside Zeus’s thigh.
But I would take those stories over tales of princesses getting saved by mediocre princes any day of the week.
I mean even the all-powerful slayer of the Titans, the wonderful god with his magical lightning bolt—Zeus himself—was often depicted as a hen-pecked husband who was afraid of his wife Hera.
As one of my students might say:We stan a powerful queen.
For the record, I wasnotallowed to say that. I tried once. Thelooksmy class gave me. I still get nightmares about it.
Hence trying to find a new way to offer them the information since trying to use their vernacular was off-limits.
I was working on my father’s advice when I called him the other night, upset about how often I found students’ attention waning, more interested in social media than what I had to say.
“Lead with scandal, Charlie. And if everything else fails, everyone loves sex and violence.”
I had to believe he was right. And because a good chunk of my class was female, I was working on an angle where I taught stories about how women from the myths were wronged in the stories written by men.
Medusa, who was supposedly punished for her own rape.
Circe, who was sent to live alone on an island because of her sorcery.
Danae, who was locked in a tower by her father who heard a prophesy that her son would kill him one day. Not only was she locked away, but then she was relentlessly stalked by Zeus who impregnated her against her will, producing the son who would, eventually, grow to fulfill that original prophesy anyway.
There were many retellings of the classics lately, ones that explored the lives of these women, giving them the stories they’d been denied from their own perspectives.
I was hoping to not only get my students interested in the stories themselves, but also the books retelling those stories.
I just had to find a way to do that.
Hence my long nights at the library surrounded by more books than I probably needed.
“Char, girl, do you ever sleep?” Imka, one of the librarians—a tall, slender woman, with rich, dark skin, and long, micro-twisted hair—asked as she walked past with her cart.
Imka was born and spent a large chunk of her childhood in Ghana before her parents moved to the States for work. Under her subdued blue blazer, she had on a bright yellow, burnt orange, and royal blue blouse in a traditional African print.
She’d given me a scarf with an almost identical print for Christmas my first year in college, a few months after first finding me cuddled in a corner of the library, crying my eyes out with a small stack of books cradled to my chest.
In my defense, I’d been only fifteen when I’d started college, and so wholly unprepared for being out on my own, surrounded by everyone much older and more experienced than I was.
“Oh, come on, girl, you have to stop that,” she’d said, clicking her tongue. “If for no other reason than you’re going to give those books water damage.”
That had done it.
Gotten a seemingly impossible laugh out of me.
And ever since that day, Imka had been a sort of big sister figure in my life. All through the years that I’d studied, and then when I’d started working at the university as well.
“I am having trouble… relating my love of the myths to the kids,” I admitted, sighing hard.
“Perhaps because you never got to be a kid yourself,” Imka suggested, shrugging her shoulders.
Imka had told me countless stories of her own childhood that was filled with running around outside and playing games with other kids her own age.
I, well, I’d never really had that for myself.
I couldn’t tell you if that was because I’d just been born a sort of older soul, or if I’d been raised to be more mature than others. Either way, the result was the same. I had never been able to relate to other children.
Which only served to perpetuate the cycle of me spending all my time with my father and his scholarly friends, making me less and less like the other kids my age.
