MARTINA NAVRÁTILOVÁ
Consider briefly, if you will, the history of leftness: it is marred with prejudice, superstition, and downright cruelty. The Latin word is sinister: and that, in its other meaning, tells the whole story. Left-handed people are viewed with suspicion, as though there is something willfully wrong with them; and left-handed children have often been forced traumatically, to write with their right hands. To spill salt is considered unlucky, and a pinch of it must be thrown over the left shoulder, to appease the dangerous gods of sinistrality. Left-wing sympathizers are openly maligned by the mindless right — though it is only fair to add that the reverse is also true. There is, in addition, an opposite history, of rightness; right-handed people take it for granted that their way of doing things is the right way: the Latin word is dexter, and to be born with dexterity is, by implication, to possess a valuable trait. The buried conflict between right and left surfaces in many spheres of life, among them sports. In the ring, for example, right-handed boxers hate to go up against a southpaw: their whole technique is fashioned to deal with similarly right-handed opponents; having to deal with a left-handed opponent strikes them as somehow faintly unjust, or at least unsporting, likewise, in golf, so near-complete is the generality of right-handedness that left-handed players have difficulty finding left-handed clubs or teachers responsive to their needs.
Consider, then, the case of Martina Navrátilová, the left-handed tennis-player. She was born and early trained in Czechoslovakia, where there was a long tradition of excellence in tennis. There was also, between the two world wars, a solid tradition of parliamentary democracy, with an enlightened constitution and left-of-centre leanings. This was superseded, in l948, by a Communist coup: its methods and attitudes, ostensibly of the left but actually of the extreme right, were hardly distinguishable from those of Nazism; in reaction, conscientious citizens either supported genuinely leftist dissidents or else, if they could, escaped to a kind of freedom in the West. Among the escapers was Navrátilová, who settled in the United States, in due course becoming an American citizen. By this time, she was a young adult, and her talent was fully formed.
There is, in certain quarters of the United States, a tradition of respectable intolerance that falls far short of the redneck bigotry indigenous to, but not confined to, the racist South. This milder palette of prejudice colours the views of an under-educated middle class that votes Republican, attends Protestant churches, is uncomfortable with Jews or immigrants, opposes legalized abortion or equal rights for women, and wraps itself in the flag. One of its minor tendencies is an unthinking jingoism in sport: only American winners are loved; foreigners who defeat Americans are given only a grudging, muted respect — or, if they happen to have a less than sunny disposition, are actively disliked.
During the first years of her refugee career, Navrátilová was not embraced by American fans or, at least, not by that part of the American public which resented any erosion of American dominance, especially if it involved victory in the U.S. Open. She spoke with a funny accent, she held views that grated in a culture where “liberal” has become a dirty word, she was unashamedly lesbian, and arguably her left-handed technique was unfairly disconcerting to more “normal” right-handed players. It was quite a long time before her manifestly superior skills and her many championships made a lasting dint in the veiled hostility she had had to endure. That gradual change in the public response, it must be said, was accompanied by, and assisted by, a gradual maturing of her own personality. When first arrived in North America, she was still often awkward and not always gracious. As time went by, the rough edges were smoothed out and people began to see in her a warmer human being: to be sure, she did not fit into any conventional mould; but since hers was, in a way, an example of the great American success story, she was finally accepted as someone who had the right to insist on being her own person, who could actually be liked. After she retired from competition, with an almost record number of championships, she won universal acclaim. And when, in her mid-forties, she made a triumphant comeback as a doubles player, the stands were openly supportive of her every move: she represented the fond American dream of eternal youth, the dream that lures the unathletic into faddish diets and face-lifts; and another side of her came attractively into view, a quirky self-deprecating sense of humour, wittily expressed. To Middle America, she can probably never become a national heroine. But at least her life, in time, has achieved a decent vindication.
Vindication is not always the reward of women, or men, who have been denied due recognition, or even vilified, by the establishment. In Germany during the nineteen-twenties, the artist Käthe Kollwitz produced work mordantly critical of the culture of greed and cynicism. This did not endear her to the moneyed elites. But she was well respected in circles where compassion for the oppressed was still active. However, since her stance was openly leftist, she was black-listed by the Nazis who took power in the nineteen-thirties. And only after the war was she publicly rehabilitated and given her proper due, both as an artist and as someone of political integrity.
In 1968, the Russian poet, Natalia Gorbanevskaya, joined a small group of brave citizens who mounted a demonstration in Red Square, denouncing the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia, which sought, with temporary success, to suppress the reform movement there. For this impertinence, she was convicted of anti-state subversion, and was sentenced to confinement in a hospital for the criminally insane. In due course, she was released. But no real vindication was hers until much later, when Communism collapsed and access to the former Soviet archives validated her protest.
During the last years of the twentieth century, religious fundamentalism became a potent political force. In the United States, it nourished right-wing attitudes during election campaigns, to the grave detriment of intelligent discourse. And in the Middle East, it installed regimes that brutally curtailed civic freedoms in general, and particularly demeaned women. In Afghanistan, Iran, and Iraq, especially, women’s lives were reduced to a shuttered subservience: they were forbidden education, barred from professional careers, denied freedom of attire or public movement, and made wholly subject to male domination. Occasionally, a woman would find the courage, and the means, to speak up. She would then be punished, of course, and in almost all cases silenced. One such, but not silenced, was Shirin Ebadi, Iran’s first ever female judge. In 1979, after the Islamic revolution, she was forced to leave the judiciary, in the crackdown on women in public life. Undeterred, she took on the role of activist, preaching democratic ideals in the face of clerical tyranny, and espousing the cause of children’s rights. Her opposition to the regime led eventually to her arrest, and to a fifteen-month suspended sentence; in addition, she was forbidden to practise law. Despite this, she remained stubbornly resistant, and gave much help to political dissidents. This reinforced the regime’s hostility and placed her in unrelenting personal danger. Probably that would have cost her at least her freedom, and quite possibly her life, except that growing international support of her perhaps made the clerics hesitate to hand out condign punishment. Her vindication, though not necessarily a guarantee of her personal safety, came in 2003, when she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
These three women embody an idea of freedom that transcends any violence inflicted on it: freedom of conscience, insistence on the sovereignty of the person, unbudging faith. It seems fitting, therefore, that a poem about such freedom, about freedom persevered in despite either the bullying of a tyrant or the tyranny of the mob, should be dedicated to Martina Navrátilová.
