Caroline Halliday

Bare feet keep you safe Caroline Halliday

Bare feet keep you safe is a sensuous uncanny journey twisting back and forth... blue boat drifting on the water, the river in flood, the churning water through the factory turbines; Bluebeard's locked rooms, ... these symbolic images will stay with you. In Bare feet keep you safe the central characters are the girl and the river, though her best friend and her lovers accompany her at times on the journey, and the river is lost and found again. Fairytale, fantasy, memoire, journal, poem; Bare feet keep you safe is about the internal isolation of growing up a woman, (Simone de Beauvoir: 'you are not born a woman, you become one'), and the work of an artist and poet to become La femme intégrale (Nicole Brossard). The book explores childhood in the 50's; teenager, young lesbian and then wife in the 60's, becoming a feminist and a lesbian in the 70's, and a lesbian mother in the 80's. Bare feet keep you safe evokes the grass in the park, and the river bed weeds, where the child walks with barefoot freedom. This is a rich tale for the present, for the third wave of feminism, opening out the struggle women have been through to knit their many selves together and reach the present... With her, the reader becomes she, her, you and I. A book to meander in, savour words and thoughts. If you have enjoyed Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage, or Jenny Erpenbeck's Visitation, this will be a book for you. 'trust me water and light trust me touch and sensation know it is exactly this..