Doris Lessing - The Cleft

The coming of the Monsters not only shocked the first females out of their long dream, but nearly ended it. They had to stop fighting each other, because not every young mother hated the Monsters enough to destroy them. There was a churning and wallowing and upheaving of emotions, and that nearly did for them, in a kind of civil war.

I am writing this, feeling some of those ancient long-ago emotions. I note that Maire in her account said ‘we’ and ‘us’ identifying with the first Clefts, just as I cannot help identifying with the very first males. It is sickening to read the fragment that tells of the little Monsters. Even now, to read how the old ones ordered the young to cut off the ‘tubes and lumps’ of the babes, which of course killed them, and how they exulted – even now, it is painful. I shall spare you, I shall not reproduce the fragment. After all they, the females, decided not to include it in their official story, the one they taught to their Memories. Why then do we have this fragment? We have to deduce that there was a minority opinion, which did not approve of the truth being suppressed – the revolting, sickening truth. Someone, or a group, kept the fragment, and someone, or several, taught words to a Memory. A long time passed, while this sickening little tale was told, ‘mouth to ear’, our name for our oral histories, to generation after generation, and it was never incorporated into the main story. And then?

And then there was a point when all the verbal preserved tales were written down, in an ancient language which only recently has been deciphered. The seditious damaging addendum to the official story was always written separately, and that is why the earlier decipherers believed it to be a fraud, something written by males to discredit the whole female sex. But there is something too raw and bleeding about the account of the cruelties to be a fake. There are details that I don’t think it would have been easy to fake.

And who is this historian? I am a scribe and researcher, known for my interest in the unusual, the out of the way. My name for this book is ‘Transit’. What my real name is I shall keep dark. This parcel or packet of scrolls containing the story of the Clefts and the Monsters has been on the back shelves of libraries, or languishing in scholars’ shelves, for a long time. A good many people have read the story and no one has been unmoved by it. There have been copies made, for that kind of person who sees everything as pornography.

Shameful history preserved on ancient shards is by no means the only dangerous information kept locked up.

This is the place for an explanation. All this locking up and smoothing over and the suppression of the truth took place when it was agreed all hostilities were over and we were One – one Race, or People. With so much unhappy history in our memories, and much of it preserved in the Official Memories, it was agreed – this formulation always signals the smoothing over of disagreement – that as much of the inflammatory material as could be got together must be put in a safe place, and made inaccessible to anyone but the trusted custodians.

Of whom I am – I was – one. And this is the next part of the explanation. Why am I in a position to tell you about this material? It is because I have preserved, guarded and watched over it now for a long time.

I am establishing my credentials here, right at the beginning of my story. What I am about to relate may be – must be – speculative, but it is solidly based on fact. I have put right at the beginning fragments of what has been locked up, to give a flavour of the material I have had to work with. You may say that the account is not consistent. But we are talking about events so long ago, no one now can say how long. And this has an interesting aspect. It is a record of an interrogation by one of us – that is, the males (or Monsters, to make use of a still current joke) – of a She, or Cleft. This is in itself enough to make one stop and wonder. No doubt at all that the interrogator is in a position of power, and that locates the event late in our long history. But it was preserved by the method used by the females, the memorising of a history, an account, preserved in the memories of the Memory, and passed on down to the succeeding generations of Memories. So we are talking about very early events indeed, when we look at a later preserved, but still very early, tale which has little in common with what is taught our children as the truth. Which is, of course, that we males were first in the story and in some remarkable way brought forth the females. We are the senior, they our creation. Interesting indeed when you look at the anatomies, male and female. How, in our official story, is it explained that males have no apparatus for bringing forth and nurturing? It is not explained. We have attractive and hazy fables, created at the same time as the great Locking Up – and, I am afraid, often destroying – of documents.

But you cannot destroy what is preserved in people’s minds. The method used by the females, the careful repetition, word by word, and then the handing down to the next generation, every word compared and checked, by a method of parallel Lines of Memories, is a very efficient preserver of history. For as long as the checking and comparing continues. You would be surprised at the mass of material in our – I jokingly called them prisons. Yes, this, I am afraid, is the joke used by us official warders of the forbidden truth. Nearly all of it came from the female Memories, though, when we began to use the same process, from our Memories too. Though, officially, they took the process from us. Absurd. It is the sheer absurdity of our official version that has become such a heavy burden on us, the historians.

No one has undertaken the task of studying the material as a serious record, and then attempting to make a coherent history. Myths and legends are more the province of the Greeks, and this could be presented as a legend, but no Greek has taken on the task. That is probably because this is not a legend, but some kind of factual story. Our own history does not go back so very far, does it? And it too bursts forth out of myth, with Aeneas, and the flames from burning Troy illuminating our earliest time, just as they do the Greeks’.

Perhaps it has been felt that an account of our beginnings that makes females the first and founding stock is unacceptable. In Rome now, a sect – the Christians – insist that the first female was brought forth from the body of a male. Very suspect stuff, I think. Some male invented that – the exact opposite of the truth.

I have always found it entertaining that females are worshipped as goddesses, while in ordinary life they are kept secondary and thought inferior. Perhaps this tendency of mine to scepticism has made me able to take on the task of telling the tale of our real origins which, as you will see, does have elements of legend. Those eagles, for instance, the persecutors of the first females, the saviours of the first males. Well, we in Rome cannot criticise a tendency to make a fetish of eagles – even if ours are so much smaller than the great eagles of the Clefts and the Monsters.

We are the Eagles, the Eagle, the Children of the Eagle. The Eagles bore us on their wings, they bear us on their breath, they are the wings of the wind, the Great Eagle watches us, he knows us, he is our Father, he hates our enemies, he fights for us against the Clefts.

Note by Historian: This is the dancing song of the Very First Men, and it may be heard even now, its origins long forgotten, sung in remote places. The Eagle people continue the strongest clan, the rulers. Even now anyone killing an eagle must be punished: once they were immediately put to death.