For Pleshette
Kas Saghafi
philoSOPHIA, Volume 7, Number 1, Winter 2017, pp. 133-136 (Article)
Published by State University of New York Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/phi.2017.0010
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/660564
Access provided by University Libraries of the University of Memphis (10 Jun 2017 06:34 GMT)
For Pleshette
Kas Saghafi
P.
P. That’s what I called her.
P. That’s what I said day and night. I called her name. And I have been calling
her name ever since.
I am here before you today to say a few words in Pleshette’s honor. For me,
it is indecent to talk about her rather than to speak to her. However, if I
did have to speak about her, as much as it would pain me to do so in her
absence, I would want to say a few words about her name (her first name
and last name). Her name, its spelling, its pronunciation, its composition
and its etymology, its violation of orthographic rules (the capital D, the
small e and the capital A with no space between them) was always a topic of
conversation and queries wherever she went. She and her family pronounced
her name this way: Pleshette DeArmitt. Her first name was given to her
by her father, a great admirer of the actress Suzanne Pleshette. Her father,
whose apparently French Huguenot ancestors had somehow made their way
to central Pennsylvania, the second oldest state of the United States, believed
that he was giving his daughter a French name, whereas it turns out that
Suzanne Pleshette had an Eastern European Jewish background and the
name was to have been a variation of a name in Hebrew. This past year my
fateful travels led me to her home state of Pennsylvania, allowing me to
discover information that Pleshette never had and was always in search of.
133
P. The P that she wanted in the spelling of our child Seraphine’s name rather
than an f. The very name that I saw for the first time in the byline of an article
in Le Monde during the year that the two of us were in Paris on a fellowship.
An article written by Sérafine (avec an f), believe it or not, Bedarrida. I swear.
I have the cutout of the article somewhere.
P. The letter that our daughter’s middle name begins with. Pari. A name
Pleshette chose. A Persian word meaning “fairy” adopted into the English
language but spelled and pronounced differently. Pari sounds like the French
pronunciation of the city her mother loved. It is also the word that the philosopher Pascal made famous: pari de Pascal, or Pascal’s wager, the wager that it’s
worthwhile to believe even in the absence of proof, the wager that without
hesitation one has to make, the wager that as a forty-year-old woman, despite
what the doctors suggested, P made to have a child.
P for “like two peas in a pod.” That’s how people described us. We were so
incredibly close that more than half of my being has been lost.
P is for “Plush,” “Pippy,” “Poopskaya,” and numerous other P-names that I
called her over the years. I used to joke that they belonged to an open chain of
“nonsynonymous substitutions.”
When I summoned enough strength to speak at her memorial service right
after she so unexpectedly, so suddenly, left me, I foreswore making any personal
statements in front of my colleagues, some of whom were present. I didn’t say a
word about how long I had been with her, about having known her for twentyeight years, about being married to her for twenty-five years, about having
attended the same universities with her as an undergraduate and a graduate
student, about having held three consecutive academic positions at the same
institutions with her. This was because I was continuing to keep private what
a conservative academy worried about—the fusion of identities of academic
couples, especially when starting out. It was only much later in our life together
that we took the plunge to partake in collaborative work, something we had
always wanted to do. This was what we had been doing, in a way, all along,
but especially toward the end, working on a book project and meeting daily to
translate an almightily daunting text.
P for “path,” the very unpopular path that we decided to take as a young couple,
a decision that we mutually made, to say no to, and leave, our families, and to
pursue what must have seemed like a crazy plan.
134 philoSophia
P for Pittsburgh. That’s where she was from. But you never wanted to mention
that. She hated Pittsburgh with all her might.
P for “pond,” the other side of the pond, where judgment has been passed
on our relationship after P’s departure, using the stupid language of “being
enmeshed,” “insufficiently independent,” and “too intertwined.” Apparently, we
are okay with theoretically dismantling the subject, but culturally and socially
we still hold on to the autonomous, independent, self-sufficient ipse.
P. How to say something about P, the love of my life, my best friend?
How to say it anywhere but especially in a country and within a culture where
baring one’s soul is viewed with suspicion, where outward expressions and
public displays of emotion are not only uncommon but the sole preserve of
Americans? I have a very delicate tightrope to walk, somewhere between
discreetly saying enough about her yet not saying too much.
At an event like this, it would be wise to briefly tell heart-warming stories,
reminisce about charming personality traits, and recount anecdotes adopting
a light-hearted approach. I am not able to do that. To be absolutely selfcontained would be to betray my relationship with and love for Pleshette. So,
at the risk of appearing too emotional or demonstrative, too Persian even, the
Persian who compared to the brave Greek man was accused by the Greeks of
being effeminate (and as we know, it was the feminine that bore the pathos
of mourning—this issue, of course, is not too irrelevant to this week’s topic
of “Difference and Gender”), I have not been able to pretend to be stoic and
sober about an occurrence that will have wounded me forever —after all, that’s
what trauma is.
I will try to spare you clichés and platitudes, and I will certainly not do
what is often done about women—to extol their virtues as a mother. Even
though Pleshette was a great mother, totally devoted to our daughter, to
the daughter she always wanted, she was also a great academic (thinker,
writer, teacher, administrator, mentor) who wholeheartedly believed that to
be a good mother to her daughter she also had to be a role model for her,
showing her the difficulty of the balance between life and work. She was
effervescence and exuberance itself; she was vibrant, full of good humor
and practical wisdom. She combined incisive psychological insight with a
mind as sharp as a laser. She could never bring herself to respect the law of
the father, and could be at times irreverent, but she always had a lightness
about her. Her concern was always for the other. I never ceased to marvel
For Pleshette 135
with amazement how she put everyone at ease by her natural warmth, often
by placing her hand on their shoulder.
How to say something to P, my love? P—I never got to say goodbye to you, to
hold you, to kiss you, to touch your porcelain skin. You were brutally taken
away from me. . . .
P, whose light illuminated, guided, and gave direction to my life, was from
elsewhere.
Pleshette was a meteor. Like a kind of rainbow that appears in the air, a meteor
that becomes luminous upon entry into the earth’s atmosphere, but only very
briefly, and whose life, like life itself, will have been too short.1
We got to see only a glimmer of what P was capable of. As she told me not too
long ago, she could sense that she was getting better and better in her work and
wanted to write and write and write. I always knew her potential and made a
point of telling her how smart she was.
If only her life had been easier.
She had hardly started.
—University of Memphis
Note
1. These remarks were presented preceding Ewa Ziarek’s keynote paper on the first
day of the 2016 London Graduate School Summer Academy on June 27. I am very
grateful to the organizers of the Summer Academy, professors Tina Chanter and
Simon Morgan Wortham, for inaugurating this Pleshette DeArmitt Memorial
Lecture. The allusions to phrases or notions from Derrida’s work may be familiar
to some. I plan to write a book entitled Meteor, dedicated to Pleshette.
136 philoSophia